There’s going to be a nonfiction companion volume to go with the novel Five Strange Images. “Notes and Materials” is intended to be read alongside the novel, so the two are in dialogue. It’s something new, I think, in literary fiction: it includes extensive engagements with modern and contemporary literary theory, including citations of over a hundred critics and historians.

This is a partial (unedited) list. The idea is to produce a hybrid work, where readers can move between the novel and the critical piece. I think of this as a kind of symmetry of two literatures: just as the novel will be a richer experience if you read thinking of Bernhard, Ellmann, Stein, Gaddis, and dozens more, so the “Notes and Materials” engages with writers like Genette, Cohn, Richardson, Herman, Banfield, Bewes, and the more of them a reader knows, the farther that conversation can go.

I hope that “Notes and Materials,” read alongside the novel, can combine into a new kind of voice, less consistently immersive (as in fiction), reasoned (as in nonfiction), more unstable, less easy to understand. I can’t predict what kind of reading may result, but to me it responds to the contemporary mode of existence of the novel, which is tied by many threads to assertions about what fiction is, and what the novel has been.

I imagine that the references to literary theories and precedents may seem inappropriate, unnecessary, or distracting as companions to fiction. They may seem to be principally aimed at people who enjoy researching, or perhaps they will appear as gestures of authority—unasked presentations of my academic credentials. To me they are the imaginative, historical, and conceptual world that existed for me as I wrote Five Strange Languages. The conditions of writing fiction in the first third of the 21st century, I think, include dialogues with history. Writing can take place in the closed room of the author’s mind, so that it seems to speak only the languages of feeling, scene, and self. It’s always possible for writers to refuse to listen to the writers who came before them. Clarice Lispector is an example, with her disavowals of all influence. But history always reveals the author’s ties to the past, and Lispector has been read with Kierkegaard, Camus, and Machado de Assis, and she is now read through Hélène Cixous, Anna Klobucka, and Earl Fitz. The growing volume of criticism and history is not an inert archive, but a living reception history, integral and inseparable from our understanding of those works and from the sense of the novel that is given to contemporary writers.

So although it is always possible to write without history in mind, I think it is a form of wilfull blindness to set out to write a novel in the twenty-first century without thinking not only of all the writers who came before, but also of Lukács, Jameson, Mazzoni, and all the critics who continue to shape our sense of what a novel is. Finnegans Wake is no longer a single book. It’s also David Hayman, Adaline Glasheen, Finn Fordham, and dozens more: they cannot be unlinked. The generation of Laurence Sterne, when it was possible to write a radical novel thinking only of Lucian, Horace, Montaigne, Rabelais, Cervantes, Locke, and a half-dozen others, is long gone. We all work with a massive inheritance of literary theory, novel theory, political criticism, poststructural criticism, and new forms of reading (close, distant, surface). It’s no longer possible to compare yourself directly to Cervantes, say, as Sterne did, because “Cervantes” has become a nearly endless literature, including not only theories of the novel, anti-novel, maximalist fiction, and metafiction, but also a name refracted and reimagined by generations of writers. Whatever the novel is today, it rests on this enormous, outlandishly complex mountain of writing, and so it makes less and less sense to write without engaging that history

I only know a few precedents for this project: Henry James’s Prefaces to the New York Edition, and Michael Lentz’s novel Schattenfroh and its nonfiction compantion Innehaben—although in both those cases, the nonfiction claims interpretive authority over the fiction. “Notes and Materials” was written along with the novel, over the same (long) period, so they talk, I hope, to each other.

You can read the introduction and sample pages of “Notes and Materials” on my website—click on “Lots and lots of information” and scroll to the bottom. These are two sample pages.

Absolutely all comments and questions are welcome, and if anyone knows any other interesting precedents, please let me know.

“Notes and Materials” will be published by Unnamed Press when the novel is complete, in a year or two. Meanwhile the next volume of the novel, Stories, Like Illnesses is available for preorder on Unnamed or Amazon.

I am interested in the representation of incomplete minds, and in the incomplete representation of minds. Access to fictional minds can be denied in at least three ways: characters can close off their own thoughts from themselves, either unknowingly, by repressing them, or deliberately, by avoiding them; minds can also be partly closed to the implied reader when the author decides what to tell us and what to withhold; and characters’ minds can be partly closed to the implied author—something that happens whenever we wonder if the author understood their own characters. The mechanisms are complicated. If a character in a novel doesn’t think about a certain event, are they avoiding it, or have they repressed it? Might the event be absent from the character’s thoughts because the author didn’t want to tell us? Or is the author unaware that a reader might expect the character to be thinking about the event?

This series was originally called “Writers who won’t tell us what their characters are thinking,” but that didn’t capture the theme that interests me, because it includes taciturn characters like the ones in Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Carver. Their mystery is only temporary: eventually we understand the murderer’s plans, the detective’s suspicions, the silent hero’s wounded heart. The new title sounds like I might be interested in pathology or injury, but it signals the strangeness I am after: I’m curious about minds, in fiction, that remain partly opaque, redacted, or empty. A less dramatic title might have been Incomplete Minds in Fiction.

Here’s the series:

1. Introduction

2. Books with “black holes” instead of central characters

3. Characters with no motivation

4. Why unusual mental states may not need to be explained

5. Toward a theory of incomplete minds

I’ve been thinking out loud, as it were, and all these posts are open to comments. I’d love to hear about other examples and theories. I’m grateful to and for comments on earlier versions.

Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter) was published in 1970, 56 years ago, and has a substantial critical literature in German, as well as an unusual number of English-language reviews both before and after Handke’s Nobel. This brief note is therefore very unlikely to be original.

[Note: this essay is a kernel of what I’d like to write. After I posted I found Peter Hamm’s early review and a number of other sources. I am keeping this post online as I read the literature because the argument I’d like to make goes against the consensus that the novel is best understood as a matter of language, or language philosophy — as well as against the earlier reception that saw it as more or less existentialist. If, after reading this, you have suggestions for existing scholarship and criticism that develop these points, please let me know.]

Here is a preliminary attempt to parse the various readings of Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (AT). Each of them implies a place for Handke’s book in the history of modern and postmodern writing, but I’ve organized them by themes. I count six, and the last is the one I prefer.

1. Absurdism

Handke’s novel has been compared to Camus’s The Stranger, and in particular, Bloch’s conspicuous absence of reflection on his crime has been said to descend from Camus. In this reading the “normal” hero (as Handke called Bloch, see below) is the product of his world, forced by the inhuman life around him to behave without moral limits.

2. Existentialism

Handke’s novel has been seen as an existentialist text, but I am not persuaded by the connection, because the novel repeatedly notes the way Bloch turns things he sees and hears into words and concepts. By contrast, Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea experiences the things themselves in all their nauseating thickness, and at one point he says “the words… vanished” and only the things remained.1

3. Schizophrenia

Handke acknowledged that the novel mimics types of dissociative behavior. In a letter partly reprinted in the preprint of AT published in Text + Kritik (special issue edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 1969, p. 3; 2nd ed. 1971, 3rd ed. 1976, 4th ed. 1978), Handke mentions Klaus Conrad’s Die beginnende Schizophrenie (review here) but stresses that he does not intend the book as a psychiatric study. It’s hard to know exactly what he means by saying that he has not written a psychoanalytic study (“das ist keine Thesis”) but a story about a “normal” hero (“einen ‘normalen’ Helden”), both because he starts by introducing Conrad’s book, and because book’s title announces its subject as “anxiety” (Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter).

The reading of the book as a study in schizophrenia, dissociation, or other mental dysfunction has been prevalent since the beginning. In the unhelpful words of the New York Times’s 1972 review, Bloch “is crazy and becomes crazier.”

4. Linguistics and semiotics

This is Handke’s own sense of his book, as he presents it in the letter excerpted in Text + Kritik:

The principle was to show how, as a result of an event (a murder), the objects a person perceives become increasingly verbalized and, as the images are verbalized, also turn into commands and prohibitions. [das Prinzip war, zu zeigen, wie sich jemandem die Gegenstände, die er wahrnimmt, in Folge eines Ereignisses (eines Mordes) immer mehr versprachlichen und, indem die Bilder versprachlicht werden, auch zu Geboten und Verboten werden.]

Note the two steps: objects of experience become “verbalized,” and then they “turn into commands and prohibitions.” He doesn’t explain the link between these, but treats them, and the book, as an exercise in understanding the linguistic transformation of the world. He gives an example from Conrad’s book:

The schizophrenic sees a piece of cheese lying under a cheese dome (an image), and drops emerge from this cheese (also an image): but the schizophrenic doesn’t just see images… he immediately sees their translation into language (the cheese is sweating). [He] is prompted to sweat ([he experiences the words as] a norm), meaning he [feels he has to] try harder, concentrate more, work harder.

The schizophrenic thus perceives the objects as allusions to himself, as “wordplays,” metaphorically. That is the principle of the narrative, except that this very process is not applied to a schizophrenic (if such people even exist), but to a “normal” hero, a soccer goalkeeper. This process of viewing objects as norms is not meant to be trivialized as pathological, but rather presented as a common part of life.

[Der Schizophrene nimmt also die Gegenstände als Anspielung auf sich, als ‘Wortspiele’ wahr, metaphorisch. Das ist das Prinzip der Erzählung, nur daß eben dieses Verfahren nicht auf einen Schizophrenen angewendet wird (sofern es überhaupt Schizophrene gibt), sondern auf einen ‘normalen’ Helden, einen Fußballtormann. Dieser Vorgang, Gegenstände als Normen zu sehen, soll eben nicht als krankhaft verharmlost, sondern als lebensüblich vorgestellt werden.]2

It has been noted that Handke adjusts Conrad’s example to make it sound more like a question of linguistics than psychology: he adds the qualifier “he immediately sees their translation into language.”3 Conrad serves here only as a model of linguistic transformation.

The interest in how language enables communication can also be found in Kaspar (1967), and as J. J. White has argued, it is typical of a decade of writers interested in semiotics, influenced by Wittgenstein, Max Bense, Roland Barthes, and others. Handke suggested the term Sprechfolterung (“speech torture”) as an alternative title for Kaspar, and it could fit Bloch’s state as well. The world and language are misfit, and the result is that perception and articulation can be “torture.”

This linguistic or semiotic reading puts Handke’s book more in company with Beckett than Robbe-Grillet or Camus. Bloch’s linguistic and philosophic play in is especially reminiscent of Beckett’s Watt and texts such as Ill Seen Ill Said and How It Is. Both Handke’s and Beckett’s books have been read as explorations of the limits of language, reason, and representation, but if that were the motivation for either book the characters’ self-imposed puzzles would be less bizarre, less mutually unintelligible, and more systematic in their deliberation.

5. Pyschiatry and psychoanalysis

I add these here because Handke hiself cites Conrad’s book as the exemplar for the “model” of Bloch’s thinking. So far I haven’t come across a review that prefers these possibilities as a reading of the book.

6. Representation of incomplete awareness

This is my own interpretation, which I’d like to claim makes the book more complex than the others. This doesn’t mean that more economical explanations like absurdism or language philosophy might not be preferable for some readers. But I think this interpretation has the virtue of making the book more difficult, and therefore more significant.

What matters here is that Bloch cannot feel, has flat affect, and a limited inner life. Murder and the transgression of social norms matter differently here than they do in existential or absurdist readings: they are mainly evidence of Bloch’s mental state, and the point of the novel isn’t social, moral, or existential breakdown but psychic trauma. In the same way, the exploration of signs and language that Handke proposes aren’t untrue, but are simpler and therefore less critically engaging than what happens in the book’s narrative regarding the representation of incomplete awareness.

This fifth approach provides a different literary genealogy for the novel, which I think is closer to the mark than Camus: Robbe-Grillet’s novels of the 1950s and 1960s. There’s evidence of this in the text itself, in passages that rehearse The Voyeur’s exact mise-en-scène of landscape trails, lacunae in time and space, missing children, and bicycles (p. 46–47).

The phrase “flat protagonist” (used most recently Marta Figlerowicz4) is appropriate up to a point: like Robbe-Grillet’s characters, Bloch has a narrow bandwith of attention, and shallow resources of self-understanding. But things aren’t exactly “flat” or even flattened, because he looks and things intensively at what he experiences, and brings whatever linguistic resources he can to bear on what he considers to be puzzles. The question, for me, is: How interesting is the book when it’s understood as a series of demonstrations of the transformation of images (Bilder) into norms and orders (Normen)?

The main reason I don’t follow Handke in his own presentation of his novel for Text + Kritik is the last paragraph of his letter, which describes the mechanical process of transformation from image into language, and then says it isn’t “mechanical” because readers will just follow the story:

At the level of the sentence, a Flaubertian principle is in operation: the progression of the story isn’t determined by what might happen in the next sentence, but by what kind of sentence the next sentence must be on account of the fact that it follows from the first… The story unfolds from there, although of course this isn’t drummed into the reader. One notices it, but if one were to see only the method, the result would be silly experimental writing. [“wenn man nur die Machart immer sähe, wär’s ja alberne experimentalle Literatur”] [Arnold, Text + Kritik, pp. 3–4]

This is the kind of protest that anticipates its legitimate critique. Once a reader sees the kinds of language and perception games Bloch is playing, the effect is mechanical even if it isn’t “silly” (alberne). The text becomes an extended exposition of a single point, just as it would be if the book were to be read as a treatise on contemporary society and the absurdism it engenders.

So I’d prefer not to see the book as a treatise on existentialism, a primer on language philosophy, an instance of a dynamic of schizophrenia, or a demonstration of hollowed-out ethics. I prefer to think we are being shown one attempt after another—both on the implied author’s part and on Bloch’s part—to represent states of incomplete awareness, nominally generated by endless attempts cover a sense of culpability.

Occasionally this sounds like a psychiatric case of selective amnesia:

…he did not remember the feelings as if they were from the past but relived them as happening in the present; he did not remember shame and nausea but only felt ashamed and nauseated now that he remembered without being able to think of the things that had brought on shame and nausea. [pp. 115-16]

Sometimes, too, the incomplete awareness is simply stated (“to Bloch the noise sounded like something forbidden,” p. 44). But mainly Bloch’s inability to navigate his own understanding is revealed in his intricate mind games. Those are the book’s gristle, and show the most authorial labor and resourcefulness. Handke seems to have needed to understand how a mind hides things from itself, and to do so in as many ways as possible.

Since this is a brief note, I’ll give just one example.

The landlady of the hotel where Bloch is staying mentions a lightning rod. Bloch remembers having seen one recently, and he considers this a “repetition” (title of another Handke novel).

Surely that was just another word game? Did it mean that he was safe from harm? Or did it indicate that he should tell the landlady everything? And why were the cookies on the wooden plate fish-shaped? What did they suggest? Should he be ‘mute as a fish’? Was he not permitted to talk? Was that what the cookies on the wooden plate were trying to tell him? It was as if he did not see any of this but read it off a posted list of regulations. [p. 116]

You could say Bloch is nervous or anxious, but only in an unhelpfully generic sense. He is reasoning. He first connects the words “lightning rod” with an actual lightning rod on a different building, showing us he is operating in what Wittgenstein would describe asa different language game. (Not Aristotle’s logic, certainly.) He leaps to another kind of interpretation when he supposes that this “repetition” means he should confess. Then to a third, surrealist sense of significance when he sees the cookies. Each of these leaps takes him further from himself, insulates him from thinking directly about the murder. Nothing like this happens in Robbe-Grillet, where protagonists reason obsessively and consistently within the limits of what they are allowed to notice. Nor is this Meursault’s opaque and empty mind. At the end of the paragraph Bloch leaps again, extracting himself from the situation and imagining himself reading everything off a signboard. A reader of the DSM-IV or DSM-V would say he has derealization or depersonalization disorder: whenever possible he prefers to see himself seeing.

This is just one passage, one attempt on Handke’s part to depict a complex, shifting game of self-deception. In each case we see a little way in, and then the mirror reflections become too confusing. Bloch, too, gives up on his games every page or so and starts over. That, too, is a study in partial awareness.

This is an amazingly complex book, not at all a pure “flat protagonist,” affectless existential hero, or nouveau-roman cipher.

Reasons for writing these essays

My interest is practical. I want to know how to control and present characters with parts of their inner lives missing. I’d like to learn strategies to tell a reader who has decided the character won’t say “whether he thinks about it”—is it the character’s decision of the implied author’s? Who is saying, like Bartleby, I prefer not to think? Is it Bartleby or Melville?

I am going to put some of this to work in Book 4 of the five-volume novel project called Five Strange Languages. In Book 1 (due out in September 2026), Samuel is a conventional character, with a range of emotions. He suffers a series of crises and by Book 4 (due out in 2027) he is close to his goal of removing feeling, introspection, and attachment from his life.

My challenge in that fourth book, called Ghosts Are, is to present a character whose incomplete mind is entirely his choice: it’s not the author who has moved focalization outside of the character’s mind, but the character who has moved his own thoughts around so that some are not being shared, even with himself. It is, I think, a common condition of our uncertain understanding of ourselves.

Your Name Here has received about as comprehensive a reception as any literary or experimental fiction every gets in the U.S. It took an unusual path to that fame: it was posted, unpublished, on DeWitt’s website, and then “discovered” by the editors n+1, who “proudly” published the opening chapter in winter 2008, calling it “an important and complicated work of art.” They didn’t say why, except to praise the anger at society often missed in DeWitt’s Last Samurai, to note that “making a novel from real life is easier said than done,” implying that Your Name Here replicates something of the real that has gone missing from contemporary fiction. The n+1 excerpt was found by Jenny Turner, who wrote the book’s first review in the London Review of Books in September 2008. She opens with a quotation from David Foster Wallace, to the effect that in order to capture “reality” he was “constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting”—a line that DeWitt had posted on her website, with the note that it “says everything I might have wanted to say about life, the universe, postmodernism and Your Name Here.” For both Turner and the n+1 editors, then, the book’s significance has something to do with the necessity of fragmenting narrative in order to represent contemporary experience.

After those two notices, Dalkey Press took on the novel. Will Evans is quoted in a review by Sophia Nguyen as saying “we’re looking for the true freaks of literature,” which doesn’t help illuminate the choice.

There’s a trope that’s repeated in many reviews, the way clichés were traded about Gaddis’s The Recognitions.1 DeWitt’s book, it is said, may be a postmodern masterpiece of sorts, or it may be a jumble of emails, and it’s difficult to decide which. This is curious because reviewers are meant to be the people who make such judgments, and also because that doubt is already loudly proclaimed in the book itself.

Norma Clarke, writing in the TLS, says “the frequent reminders that there is no plot are restful.” We can enjoy the narrators’ awareness that the book is “‘2FC2E’ (‘too fucking complicated to explain’). I did enjoy this book, and it is 2FC2E.” Sophia Nguyen’s review in the Washington Post is agnostic about the book’s coherence or the virtues of its incoherence—she treats it as an interesting case of conteporary publishing. Celia Bell, writing in The Rumpus, says Your Name Here is “a work of genius, or else it’s a rather messy documentation of the author disappearing up her own ass.” In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Josh Billings praises passages of tight writing as in The Last Samurai, but notes “how relentlessly” DeWitt “works in the other direction, pushing the book outward toward diffusion, expansion, even drift.” Yet the history of the novel, he reminds himself, “includes many of what Henry James called ‘baggy monsters’ (Moby-Dick? 2666?).” The New York Times magazine profile by Alexandra Alter puts the puzzle right in the title: “A Work of Genius or a Complete Mess? Even Its Author Can’t Decide.”

Billings is the best of the reviewers I’ve seen on the book’s apparent looseness and the particular nature of the disappointment at the way it ends.

[The book] works, at least for the first two-thirds… Here, the braiding is bold… The structure produces opportunities for tension and momentum, winding around a convergence in which everything feels as if it is just around the corner. And yet the strange thing… is that the longer this suspension continues, the more you begin to feel that this eventual resolution is not being pursued at all but rather actively pushed away, as if the thing being avoided were not confusion, or even boredom, but the disappointment of having to arrive at an ending less brilliant than its glittering components … by the time you get to the last pages, the surprise the book delivers is really that, despite all the apparent chaos and variety of its strands, the larger narrative appears to be working out exactly as its authors planned. The ‘book’ being written by the tabloid journalist and the struggling novelist has failed, which means the actual book turduckened around it has succeeded. The experiment has paid off the way it was supposed to—which is great on an architectural level… but disappointing as a reading experience … despite many vivid moments, Your Name Here never really achieves… alchemy; on the contrary, it remains what it is: a quirky but ultimately untransfigured story.

I’m omitting reviewers who feel the book actually does amount to a heap of emails, and also those, like Turner, who think the book comes together, but don’t note the sort of qualifications Billings makes. (Turner: “Although the book may appear, to begin with, to be plotless,” she says, “it turns out to be tightly organised.”)

The majority consider the book’s degree of coherence to be an undecidable, and perhaps lovable, quality. In that they are really only following the author’s own teasing on the subject. From the very first page DeWitt is playing with her own anxiety about form. This reaches a pitch on p. 475, which opens: “You’re on page 475 and you still have no idea what’s going on.” That leads to a tongue-in-cheek bit of research on Chekhov’s gun, which prompts her to write “In other words, the book is fucked. But wait. It may not be too late”—which in turn prompts her to set out a definition of the MacGuffin, which leads to the remark that “this book is just one macguffin after another,” which leads straight on to a note about “unexposed contents,” a device to provoke curiosity first used in avant-garde films. And so on—so reviewers who note the book’s supposed undecidability are only repeating the author’s own very performative anxieties and orchestrated sarcasms, which is not a secure critical method.

I don’t experience the book’s elusive coherence as a puzzle, because I don’t think it’s as unusual as it’s been said to be. The self-aware anxiety about form fits well into the writing of the last two decades of the 20th century and the first decade of this century (when Your Name Here was written, now almost twenty years ago). The many references to other writers help to triangulate it.

First, the decoys

The back-cover blurb ends by comparing Your Name Here to Calvino’s If on a winter night a traveller, and Nguyen says DeWitt added second-person chapters “as an homage” so Calvino. But in the novel, Calvino’s book is repeatedly criticized. It’s tongue in cheek, because DeWitt takes up the second-person voice, but it’s also serious, especially when she keeps repeating that “you know you’ll never read it again.” She pretends her harping on If on a winter night is a quirk, but it sounds less like one each time it recurs. Later she forgets herself for a moment and says

you’ve always admired Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, a real tour-de-force with 11 first chapters in a wide range of genres. [p. 275]

Calvino is a decoy influence. It seems he was once an inspiration, and she still like Invisible Cities, but it’s just not pertinent or helpful to know she borrowed her second-person address from him.

A dozen pages in the book have strings of authors, like Kafka, “Beckett, Foucault, and Queneau,” “Miller, Mailer, Joyce, Bukowski, Fante, Bataille,” and there are strings of directors and philosophers. None are given any weight. Queneau seems especially lightweight in these lists: I can’t even guess what Queneau she may mean. And citing “Foucault” without any title or concept seems much more like a remnant of undergraduate classes in college than a motive force for the novel.2

Then the real influences

Pynchon is the first lodestar. He’s the third writer mentioned in the book after Robert Fisk and Seymour Hersch (who serve to signal the importance of politics, which gets repeatedly submerged by literature).3 His signature descriptions of oddball characters and situations is mainly on DeWitt’s pages, although Gridneff’s life provides a Pynchonesque flavor throughout. (DeLillo, MacCarthy, Salinger, and Bernhard round out the list—possibly a record for literary citations on an opening page.)

The second guiding light is Hunter S. Thompson, He’s named on the fourth page of the book, and five pages later he’s familiar enough so DeWitt abbreviates him to HT (pp. 10, 13, 14, and cf. p. 596). Thompson is “grossly underrated,” she says, contrasting him to Tom Wolfe. He’s present as an outsider, an adventurer, and a rule breaker, but in terms of the book he’s an aspirational model of how gross disarrangement can miraculously assemble itself into semi-fictionalized brilliance.

Pynchon and Thompson together can account for much of the writing in the book, and also its senses of form. Some characters sketched by Gridneff are on the journalist side of things, and some written by DeWitt are strongly Pynchonesque (pp. 269-70, 377). There are literary set-pieces very close to Pynchon’s in Gravity’s Rainbow (pp. 310 ff.), and even a paean to deceit he might want to steal (pp. 592-93). The perpetual teasing of connections and the false anxiety about them has been Pynchon’s go-to connective device since V, and the high-wire anxiety about publishing deadlines was a typical Thompson move.

A third familiar spirit is Philip K. Dick, who appears on p. 22 when the narrator is worrying, again, about whether the work will cohere.

But you love Philip K. Dick! You love The Man in the High Castle! You love the wise-cracking slime molds! This is great! This is great! [p. 22]

She’s saying, to herself, I love these super-tight, super-crazy plots, it’s just that in the end I don’t love the tight part. In Your Name Here, Dick is an unqualified model for closed form.

There are lesser influences, like Gogol (pp. 371, 383), and some missing names: I expected Mark Leyner to play a role. Brett Easton Ellis shadows several pages. But I think Your Name Here could easily be read using only the names that appear in its pages.

(There’s also an occluded influence in the book, an author whose attraction seems real but is sequestered in quotation marks and abandoned: Thomas Bernhard. Pages 404-7 are largely occupied by extended block quotes which are “amazing” but unassimilated. This is a good example of my own interest in the difficulty of avoiding Bernhard: DeWitt does a good job by jailing him, displaying a couple of views, and moving on.)

And the comparable books

Assuming that Your Name Here isn’t as unique as the reviews make it seem, what are its near neighbors? Charlie Kaufman is another point of reference. He’s mentioned as a precedent in Sophia Nguyen’s review, implying perhaps that DeWitt said said as much, and the last paragraph of the back cover blurb says the book is “reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman’s… Adaptation,” hinting the author may think so.

But there are many other choices. Large and “baggy” novels full of emails, letters, facsimiles, and other documents include Matthew McIntosh’s theMystery.doc (2017), which is 1,600 pages long; Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts (2004), published just two years before DeWitt and Gridneff finished their book; and Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams’s showy S. (2013). I think the most illuminating comparison is to Sergio de la Pava’s Naked Singularity, published in 2008, just a year after DeWitt and Gridneff finished Your Name Here. de la Pava’s book is extremely tight and nowhere near as determinedly metafictional, but it has the sparkling barely controlled myopic hysteria that Your Name Here shares with Pynchon, some Wallace, and lots of Mark Leyner through The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack.

Conclusion

I won’t try to improve on Billings’s description of the book’s strategies of closure, and how shades of self-awareness and irony are meant to stand in for a traditional ending. Your Name Here is worlds away from the genuinely open architeture of B.S. Johnson, Queneau, or Burroughs, just as far as it is from the compulsive closures of Dick or de la Pava. It is a product of its generation—almost a full generation, now, since it was written. What concerns me is how it has flummoxed critics in 2025.

Introduction

Michael Lentz’s thousand-page novel Schattenfroh (roughly: Joyous Darkness, 2018) is now in English (2025). He also wrote a book called Innehaben: Schattenfroh und die Bilder (roughly: Possession: Schattenfroh and the Images, 2020). Innehaben presents itself as a nonfiction guide to the theories and content of Schattenfroh.

This is not a review of Schattenfroh or Innehaben. There are already studies of Innehaben in German academia, and Schattenfroh is getting reviews in both languages.

What I have in mind here is a combined reading of the two books together. I take them as a single document, and I understand the critical challenge to be articulating what the author’s fiction can say to his nonfiction, and vice versa.

Several reviewers have said that Innehaben does not need to be read with Schattenfroh. It’s always a reader’s choice. I can read Woolf, Orwell, or Baldwin without their essays. But those would be partial readings. If we take a writer seriously, it is not optional to read their nonfiction, especially when that nonfiction directly addresses details in the fiction.1

Innehaben is a rare case: it is not a journal or notebook for Schattenfroh. It’s a nonfiction introduction and companion to Schattenfroh, which means, to me, that Schattenfroh is also a fictional introduction and compantion to Innehaben. Lentz proclaims as much: the back cover of Schattenfroh says only “Man nennt es schreiben” (“One calls this writing”). It’s also the first and last line of the book. The back cover of Innehaben says only “Mann nennt es sehen” (“One calls this seeing.”) Innehaben begins with a dicussion of res and verba. So there’s a stronger case to read Lentz’s two books together than there is to read an author’s letters, essays, or notebooks together with their fiction. In theory, this approach should also be compatible with the current popular interest in the fiction/nonfiction boundary—think for example of Catherine Lacey’s Möbius Book.

Still, some German-language reviewers and at least one English-language reviewer have said that Innehaben is optional reading and shouldn’t be taken as the last word in interpretation, both because artists don’t always have a thorough understanding of their work, and because it’s mistaken for an artist to attempt to legislate the meaning of their work. The first of these claims is trivially true, and the second is trivially false. Any artist who has given an interview or made a statement has attempted to supply correct meanings for their work. No artist has a thorough understanding of the meanings of their work, but neither does any critic or historian. (The two books seem to provoke a range of indefensible notions. It’s even been suggested, by a prominent podcaster, that Innehaben might be a joke.2)

There are only a few parallels for authors writing nonfiction companion pieces to their work. Nabokov wrote introductions to his novels for a late edition; Henry James wrote extensive introductions to his novels for the New York edition. Stephen Frug told me about two others: Thomas Mann’s Story of a Novel (1949, translation 1961) about his Dr. Faustus, and Umberto Eco’s Postscript to The Name of the Rose (written in 1983, three years after the book). Texts like these produce a double reading: the author is not simply located in their introduction, but produced by the novel and its introduction together. But I am not sure these parallels are close enough to be helpful: Lentz doesn’t cite them, and his precedents come from another direction.

My investment in this

I’m not writing as an academic or a critic. I have a five-volume novel project, Five Strange Languages—the latest book is here—which is planned to appear along with a nonfiction booklet called Ideas and Materials, which contains themes, theories, and points of reference. I have been writing Ideas and Materials for a number of years alongside the novels, so the two have grown together. For that reason I’ve been looking at the rare examples of authors who write nonfiction essays about their own work. For me it’s a fascinating challenge to write nominally immersive fiction along with conventionally first-person exposition. Each voice alters the other, and it’s often unclear what sense of the implied author results. I read Lentz’s two books with this problem in mind, so everything I say here has an ultimately pragmatic, and even selfish, purpose.

In another sense I am an ideal reader at least for Innehaben. I’m an art historian by profession, originally with a specialty in Renaissance art. Schattenfroh is all about images, and many of the artworks described in Schattenfroh and Innehaben are Northern Renaissance. I’ve also written on ekphrasis, the central subject of Innehaben. I know many of Innehaben’s favorite theorists: Husserl, Gottfried Boehm, Emmanuel Alloa, Inka Mülder-Bach, Ralf Simon. I also recognize many of Schattenfroh’s often elliptical references.

I hope it won’t seem inappropriate to say that because of this background, I can often distinguish between obscurity and obscurantism, on the one hand, and apposite or significant citations, on the other. My points of reference have helped me avoid saying, as some other reviewers have, that Schattenfroh is simply “profound,” without distinguishing bids for poetic profundity from engagements with particular images, ideas, or texts.3 At one point, for example, the narrator introduces a character named Ripa (also called Pari), who

has composed a book of enigmatic pictures or, rather, a picture-puzzle book with allegories that have been handed down, but also partially invented by him. This encyclopedia carves—dissects—God’s revealed world into notional images from A to Z by providing the viewer with visual concepts of images and thus does the viewer’s gaze oscillate between the image composing the riddle and the explanatory text until the notion presented can no longer be thought of without the image. [S 186, O 176]

Readers who know Cesare Ripa will understand part of this. Those who don’t will miss the argument but will presumably be curious about the appearance of an image encyclopedia. But only readers who also know Innehaben will see this as an example of Lentz’s theory of writing and images. This is a common move throughout Schattenfroh: construct fleeting scenes that propose concepts of writing and seeing, but omit the points of reference that would allow them to work in a systematic expository mode. Ultimately, I’ll argue, this strategy is underwritten by the assumption that the continous metamorphoses of characters, viewpoints, scenes, narratives, and symbols have an emotive force equivalent to their conceptual content. At the end of this essay I will append some notes toward a possible review of Schattenfroh, and a couple of lines in praise of its translator, Max Lawton.

Abbreviations

S = Schattenfroh. “S 54, O 44, I 136” means Schattenfroh, English translation p. 54, original German p. 44, Innehaben p. 136. H is Emmanuel Heman, “Zu den Bildern in Michael Lentz’ Schattenfroh: ein Kommentar,” which has color images of many of the artworks. W is Jan Wilm, “Die Hölle - Das Lesen - Der Schatten. Bemerkungen zu ‘Schattenfroh’ von Michael Lentz,” Text + Kritik, special issue on Lentz, April 2019, 22-40.

Disclaimer / invitation

I am taking advantage of the informality of Substack to publish this essay as a sort of work in progress. I have not yet read, for example, the other essays in the book in which Heman’s essay appears, Michael Lentz’ ›Schattenfroh‹ Lektürewege in eine komplexe Prosa-Enzyklopädie, edited by Emmanuel Heman and Ralf Simon (Degruyter, 2021). If readers have favorite reviews, expansions, or corrections, please leave them in the comments.

Writing and seeing

The forty-page introduction in Innehaben mainly follows conventional sources on writing, seeing, image, fantasy, and imagination, placing special emphasis on the mutual dependence of writing and imaging and the transformative power of each.4 Lentz rehearses some of the main arguments about the paragone and ekphrasis, enérgeia and enárgeia, using sources such as Philostratus, Quintilian, Lessing, and Husserl, and a selection of recent European scholarship. The introduction is intended to position Schattenfroh as a radical exemplar of the more transformative functions of ekphrasis, in which words and images interpenetrate.

Both books are sequences of images. In Schattenfroh they are usually unannounced and sometimes difficult to spot, especially because the narrator’s ekphrases quickly corrode them. A reader of Schattenfroh who does not have Innehaben or any reviews to hand will presumably stop short when they encounter a description of a girl in silhouette “driving a hoop across the square with a wooden stick” (S 724, O 725)—the reference is to de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street—but moments like that are overwhelmed by hundreds of others in where the descriptions seem pictorial but the allusions are inscrutable.

Lentz has a special interest in late medieval and Renaissance prints and northern European paintings. There are a couple of crucial exceptions, especially Werner Tübke’s Peasants’ War Panorama (1987), which is introduced in Innehaben as part of the author’s actual family history (I 265, H 348). It only occupies three pages in Innehaben, but Lentz says it appears on over 127 pages of the novel (I 251).5 It is a massive Altdorfer-style historical panorama, with a dizzying mass of figures, appropriate material for a monumental and thronged book.

It’s distinctly odd that Lentz introduces Tübke (1929-2004) and Michael Triegel (b. 1968) as examples of “contemporary art” (“zeitgenössischen Kunst”). Tübke was a belated, historically isolated follower of Altdorfer, Breughel, Dürer, Cranach, and German magic realism (which is distinct from Latin American magic realism). Triegel is a more conventional 21st century academic perceptual painter, who makes monumental religious paintings in a style derived from Dürer, Cranach, and other 15th and 16th century artists. Both belong to marginal movements of conservative perceptual realism that rarely attract the attention of the art world or scholars unless they are controversial (as in Vincent Desiderio or Odd Nerdrum). Triegel has been labeled “surrealist” and Tübke has been associated with magic realism, but those labels are largely an artworld tic, because they overlook both artists’ principal indebtedness to 19th century academic painting. Lentz cites them for their use of iconography and Biblical images, and he says their work is founded on pictorial ideas (“bildliche Vorstellungen zugrunde liegen,” I 19), although they would normally be seen as significantly more text-based than most of modern, postmodern, and contemporary art. He’s serious about this, and about the pairing of these two, who are separated by nearly two generations. “Contemporary” painters like Tübke and Triegel, he says, are reviving the tradition of “narrative ekphrasis” (I 44).

The image repertoire of both books creates what Johann Fischart first called a Geschichtsklitterung, a distortion of history. It’s as if Lentz’s book was written in two different periods: sometime after Beckett, for the epistemology and writing, and sometime between Cranach and the end of 19th c. academies, for the artwork. T.J. Clark once said that Walter Benjamin’s study of the 19th century missed all the light and color of Impressionism. Here it might be said that Lentz (deliberately) misses all the radicalism, aniconism, and anti-narrative interests of visual postmodernism.

Still, what matters for the argument of Innehaben isn’t art historical plausibility but the “catalytic” function of intensely illustrative and narrative imagery such as Tübke’s and Triegel’s when it appears in fragments in the literary text of Schattenfroh. The image, he says,

functions as a hyperbolic space of experience, as if something had been removed from its unstable presence, only to be added back again in the narrative of the image through interpretation and reinterpretation.

Das Bild fungiert als hyperbolischer Erfahrungsraum, als sei seiner instabilen Präsenz etwas entzogen, das ihr deutend-undeutend in der Erzählung des Bildes wieder hinzugefügt würde. [I 46]

This interest in the ontological permeability of image and text, narrator and object, is given in a number of overlapping formulations. The rhythm of Lentz’s restatements of his interests in Innehaben parallels the overlapping scenes in the novel in which the narrator’s body and the book itself melt into new formations. In one sense the forty-page introduction to Innehaben is an academic polemic posed as a justification for narrative practices in the fiction, but in another sense it explores the same metamorphoses of perspective and identity that Lentz pursues, with a similarly kaleidoscopic rhythm, in the novel. Theory and practice are rhetorically and rhythmically parallel, just as the writers of the generation of Tel quel and Semiotexte desired.

At the same time, Schattenfroh continuously relies on passages that approach a classical ekphrasis on the model of Callistratus or Philostratus, as Lentz says midway through Innehaben (I 205). We often find ourselves at the beginning of a tour of an imaginary picture gallery, as in the classical ekphrastic texts, even though that staging seldom remains stable for more than a page. Old-fashioned ekphrasis is continuously exploded and revived.

Schattenfroh (but not Innehaben) is a good example of a long book that can’t be summarized simply because it has too many episodes, characters, and narratives. For the purposes of this essay I’ve chosen just three examples to make my argument about what happens when the two books are read together.6

The painting of St. Louis of Toulouse

This is introduced as a 15th c. painting hung in the narrator’s father’s office (S 54, 437, O 44, 433, I 136).7 We’re told that Louis of Toulouse was taken as a hostage for his father Charles the Lame, which—as we later discover later—parallels the narrator’s imprisonment by his father for stealing the book from this same painting. The book the saint holds is revealed to be Schattenfroh itself, which the narrator is also writing. The narrator, who transforms himself into the saint by force of identification,8 is mocked and imprisoned by his father, which is the opposite of the devoted relationship between Saint Louis and his father. Almost as soon as he’s seen the painting, the narrator accuses the saint of stealing it, and he takes the painting.

The scene in Schattenfroh is typically metamorphic. The narrator knows the story, which makes him jealous of the saint, so he becomes the saint, but he’s surprised to find himself in the saint’s clothing. If the book in the painting is Schattenfroh, and the painting belongs to the narrator’s father, the implication is that his father has stolen his book. These continuous fantasies are the warp and weft of the book: the narrator, Niemand (“No One”), encounters images and quickly transforms them into the unstable shapes of his anxiety, jealousy, shame, and ambition in relation to his father. Images exist to be unraveled and woven into new tapestries, and only a few allegorical and historical meanings are stable enough to persist through the maelstrom of Niemand’s mixed metaphors of metamorphosis.

In Innehaben images work differently. Much of Innehaben is verbatim quotations from the novel. In this passage Lentz interrupts his quotations with this brief paragraph describing the basement where Niemand’s father imprisons him:

The cell division [Zellteilung] of the basement corridor can be understood as poetics in nuce, as autopoietic recursion in the double sense of autofiction and autogenesis of the narrative system, which performs analogical and associative “cell divisions” [Zellteilungen]. [I 140]

It’s common in graduate student papers to find condensed assertions of philosophical and figurative meanings. A reader who doesn’t understand the detailed descriptions of the basement as an analogy of the father’s bureaucracy or the book’s organization would think they were only reading an architectural treatise, more like the Hypnerotomachia poliphili with its classicizing architectural fantasies than the modernist fiction it clearly is. But to call it “autopoetic recursion” is overreach, because that would need to be demonstrated: autopoiesis is self-generating structure, and that isn’t evident in these pages. It’s evident that the description of the basement is “autofiction” even without the prompting of passages like this in Schattenfroh:

assertion, repetition, contagion, repetition of assertion, repetition of contagion, contagioassertion, assertiorepetitiocontagion, repetitiocontagioassertion, contagioassertiorepetition [Behauptungswiederholungsansteckung, Wiederholungsansteckungsbehauptung]. [S 60, O 49]

But it isn’t an “autogenesis of the narative system” because the description of cells doesn’t model the further development of the narrative. And how else would cell divisions represent narrative cells aside from “analogical and associative” correspondence?

As Jan Wilm has argued, Schattenfroh is structured by “cells” (rooms) that occur in different forms. “Spaces of the narrated and remembered world,” he says, “take shape as cell-like structures” (W 24). Lentz’s brief paragraph of theory might be enough to prompt a reader to take a second look at the pages in question, but not enough to persuade the reader that autopoiesis and the other partly incompatible models are present in the text except as passing ideas. I wonder if any reader will be tempted to follow up on all the half-dozen claims of this passage, especially since the prose in Schattenfroh clearly follows a more organic, kaleidoscopic sequence of perspectives and strategies. There’s a mismatch between analysis and fiction that isn’t noticed by the theory that purports to comprehend the practice.

A note on autobiography: Schattenfroh is a massive exercise in the free play of family dynamics, especially between a son and his father. Just after Lentz tells the story of the painting of St. Louis, he says that the voices Niemand hears (mainly orders from his father) contain a reference to another painting that is “very significant” for Schattenfroh: Tübke’s Peasants’ War Panorama. Lentz says he saw the painting in 2014, implying that when Niemand hears his father’s voice say, “In 2014, you’re going to drive to the Elefantenklo in Giessen,” that it’s Lentz’s own father speaking. It’s one of the purposes of Innehaben to provide autobiographical information, and for me it is one of the mismatches between the two books. When an author reveals the truth of something in their fiction, the significance of the information needs to be qualified: it’s not enough just to state it as if the author’s associations with an actual event explain the passage and supersede other interpretations. Lentz could have said, “For me, this has a personal inflection even though it is not evident in the novel,” or, “This is crucial for my own understanding of the novel, but readers may easily sense the immediate transcription of personal experience,” or, “A reader isn’t expected to understand the following pages about Niemand’s father as direct representations of realia, but only this one passage”—some such qualification to situate and anticipate the difference between the effects fiction and autobiography have on reading.

Bosch’s Last Judgment in Vienna

Selected figures at the bottom of the right panel of Bosch’s painting are the subject of a sixty-page trial scene that takes place in Hell (S 202-70, O 192-262, IH 141-60, H 300 ff.). The narrator is on trial under the sign of the fourfold meaning of scripture, which is held by Lucifer, signifying that the church’s highest doctrines are actually instruments of pain. The narrator is repeatedly tortured. The scene in Schattenfroh is Bosch-like not only in its details but in its episodic structure, in which scenes slide suddenly into one another. The narrator picks details carefully but unsystematically, because he’s driven by his unresolved feelings about his family history. Lentz calls the aperçus into individual figures and scenes “still-life-like” and compares them to tesserae.

In Innehaben, the twenty-page description of this portion of the right panel of Bosch’s painting quotes Schattenfroh at length in order to highlight its fidelity to Bosch, mostly without furher commentary or justification. Why mark the accuracy of the fictional description, if the majority of the painting and its context—not to mention the scholarship on it—is not taken into account? In passages like these, reading Schattenfroh and Innehaben together is an odd experience, like taking a myopic tour of iconography with a mid-century scholar like Panofsky or Hekscher, stopping every few lines (in Schattenfroh) to hallucinate like Michaux or Burroughs.

It’s important to Lentz that the paintings and other images evoked in Schattenfroh remain ontologically undecidable, in accord with his fundamental premise, given in Innehaben, of practicing a radical ekphrasis. In Innehaben he says it remains unclear (“Unklar bleibt…”) whether the trial and its setting in a dining hall take place in the narrator’s mind, or if his prison cell is transforming into a great hall (I 140). A page later he notes it is not entirely clear (“nicht ganz klar”) where the narrator met his followers (I 141). A page after that it is not clear (“Unklar bleibt…”) whether the master of ceremonies transforms into Lucifer or was Lucifer from the beginning. These assertions are odd, since a reader who begins with Schattenfroh will already be quite certain these representations are ambiguous. He also repeats versions of his central concern about representation. He says for example

the narrator’s awareness of perception or reality, image, and imagination [Wahrnehmungs- bzw. Wirklichkeitsbewusstsein, Bildbewusstsein, Phantasiebewusstsein] in Schattenfroh are sometimes difficult to distinguish from one another. [I 152]

But this, too—if not in this theoretical formulation—is clear in the fiction.

Both books have an interesting anxiety about their structures. Ambiguity joins with continuous metamorphosis to create the texture of Schattenfroh. Excerpts join with condensed polysyllabic assertions of theory to create the texture of Innehaben. The headers and footnotes in Innehaben create the “mosaic” or “cellular” structure that Schattenfroh floods with its scenes that shift like dreams or hallucinations. The unending trials and tortures of Niemand in Schattenfroh, which often reduce him to nothing or leave him bloodied, impaled, or even beheaded, are the inverse of the confident and even impatient voice in Innehaben, which efficiently disposes theoretical references and rigorously excludes scholarship in philosophy, literary theory, and art history that might interfere with its exegesis.

The maelstrom of scenes and characters in Schattenfroh seldom seems natural or improvised. It seems to take energy to assure the state of continuous metamorphosis, just as it requires discipline to asserting the radicality of those metamorphoses in Innehaben. In his academic bio Lentz conjures “repetition” and “friction” as ways to create the “rotating, drilling movemets” that can speak about loss:

The emptiness, even after the death of a beloved person, can only be overcome through repetition that produces intensity—a repetition that turns in circles, generating friction, drawing both the concrete and the imaginary surroundings into its rotating, drilling movements of images, ideas, memories, words, and sentences.

Die Leere, auch nach dem Tod eines geliebten Menschen, ist nur durch Intensität bewirkende Wiederholung zu überwinden – einer sich im Kreis drehenden, Reibung erzeugenden, die konkrete und die imaginäre Umgebung mit in die Dreh- und Drillbewegungen ziehenden Wiederholung von Bildern, Vorstellungen, Erinnerungen, Wörtern, Sätzen.9

There are also eruptions of the measured discourse of Innehaben in Schattenfroh. This is especially clear in the mini-treatises that are scattered through the book, perhaps most clearly a long text on theology (S 902, O 908). The sixty-page trial scene is interrupted by a two-page essay on words and images (S 219-21, O 210-12, I 150-52). Innehaben quotes it almost in its entirety, calling it a “a media-theoretical and affect-aesthetic paragone-discourse [medientheoretischen und affektästhetischen Paragone-Diskurs] on the difference between words and images in the representation of violence and pain.” Lentz provides the sources for two allusions in the passage but doesn’t comment on the essay itself, implying it is self-explanatory. But it isn’t: it condenses and runs together too many different ideas in the theorization of pain and representation to provide any thesis other than the corrosive effect of pain on the stability of representation.10 This is how theorization has to work in the logic of Schattenfroh, where subjectivity and perspective are under continuous threat. But it’s hard to understand how Lentz hopes it will be received in a book like Innehaben, which observes scholarly protocols of argument and adheres to assumptions about the stability and authority of academic texts anchored with footnotes.

Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter by a Window

In the majority of cases what matters to Lentz is narrative and what Panofsky called iconography and iconology: symbols and signs, gestures, visual stories. His reading order within a given image is idiosyncratic, as Marilyn Lavin might have said, but his interest is denotation and not depiction. Vermeer and a few other less elaborately narrative paintings are exceptions.

The passage opens with a description of light:

There is a light burning in one of the rooms… it is a simultaneously warm and miraculous light, illuminating and, at the same time, making form, color, and itself manifest. [S 358, O 353]

There is more along these lines before we hear about the woman in the painting. In Innehaben, Lentz says this is a “metaphysics of light,” a description of the painting’s “self shining… an entelechy of things” (“ein Selbstscheinen, eine Entelechie der Dinge,” I 420), but these are also clichés about Vermeer’s light, and in retrospect, after it’s clear these pages are about Girl Reading a Letter by a Window, the opening lines are not relevant, because they don’t actually guide what follows. On first reading or without Innehaben, they can only be mystifying, pointing to some unspecified revelation to come. But I can imagine Lentz writing, with a reproduction or the painting in front of him, intending to frame the ekphrasis: a mistake, because these lines can only work that way for people who already know what is about to be described.

In the following pages there are descriptions of details in the painting, especially the woman’s reflection in the window and the patterns in the carpet. Lentz calls these “hyper-precise ekphrases” (“hypergenaue Ekphrasis,” I 209) but they are too phantasmagoric to be legible as ekphrases; they are more like fantasies loosely linked to the painting. He sees the two large folds of the carpet as “tablets” or “gates” but then he goes on to things I can’t see: ten lines of script, a “flower-wreathed grave framed by glyphs and scrolls,” a “square with gates or tunnels… framed by two contiguous longitudinal stripes and two horizontal stripes,” one with “five ovular or circular medallions,” and so on (S 367). These aren’t simply fantasies, but they also aren’t discernible in the painting, bringing a reader back and forth from Innehaben to Schattenfroh to a reproduction of the Vermeer, with little result.11

Innehaben devotes nine pages to the Vermeer (to Schattenfroh’s sixteen pages). Most of the nine are extended quotations, and what is between is telegraphed theory: the painting is an “entelechy of things,” the woman’s reflection refers to “archetypal motives” such as “animal magnetism and spiritualism” and the “materialization of the soul’s auratic fluidium” (“materialisierenden auratischen Fluidum einer Seele”) or shadows that transform into different shapes (I 212). A footnote evokes still more possibilities.12 As in the pages on the Bosch painting and others in Innehaben, these theory passages are not expanded or defended. They function like the prompts or unanswered exercises in science textbooks: questions left for readers to solve.

The sixteen pages in which Vermeer’s painting is more or less present are repeatedly interrupted by flights of what I’d like to call anti-ekphrastic violence, in which the narrator’s eye and mind, apparently unsatisfied with what the image offers, suddenly veers into much more fluid spaces and actions:

Without knowing its contents myself, I imagine a talking doll reading the letter to her several times in a row while she is slowly being killed. The doll is brought into such a rage by the repeated reading that it wants to do away with her. At this point, I destroy the doll… the woman is dead, the doll torn apart, only the letter and the suicide remain, to kill oneself because of a letter… strikes me as so outlandish that my thoughts have turned against the letter, which I, pinned against a small beam, pull out of the window behind me from a cord and onto the grass, where I find a second, longer beam, at the upper end of which I bind it to the crossbeam with the cord, then nail the letter’s top and bottom, left and right to it, and ram it into the earth with a stone. [S 362]

At times it seems Schattenfroh’s principal anger is actually against images and ekphrasis, because when Lentz lets himself go, he goes so far and so fast (and so opaquely and incoherently) that it seems only irritation can account for the writing.13

The parallel self-reflexivity of both books

There are symmetric silences in Innehaben and Schattenfroh. Innehaben acknowledges visual influences and modes of writing and seeing, but it remains silent on the literary precedents of Schattenfroh, just as it remains silent on its allegiance to disciplinary argument in art history and theory. Schattenfroh is nearly silent on the pervasive influence of Beckett, Bernhard, and others (there are no metafictional call-outs to modern and postmodern progenitors to balance the many call-outs to Freud, Hegel, Ripa, and others), just as Innehaben cites, but does not reflect on, its style of aergument and dependence on Husserl, Brosch, Boehm, and others.

I would have loved a self-reflective Schattenfroh that noted and commented on the fact that the opening and closing pages are irresistibly a version or even a parody of the shifting modes of knowing assigned to the narrator in Beckett’s Unnamable,14 or a version that acknowledged and played with the clear pastiches of Thomas Bernhard in passages like one in which Vitruvius is presented as the obsessive author of a maniacal treatise, a “mammoth labor” that “exhausted” him and must have killed him at the age of fifty-seven from “overwork.” (S 346 ff., O 340 ff.) But in passages like those we don’t hear a whisper about Bernhard or Beckett.

I would just as much have loved a self-reflective Innehaben that signaled what its author thought of the protocols of art historical interpretation, the uses of the calm and even scholarly voice, the version of art history that is implied by the curated choices of images, and the limitations or strengths of iconology, phenomenology, and literary criticism. And in Schattenfroh, why not name Beckett, Musil, Mann, Celan, and Bernhard? The book is so open about its metafiction that the book itself is in the book, and intermittenly becomes the narrator, and even reads itself, producing odd echoes.

On the other hand, the two books as they are present a fascinating double consciousness. In their own worlds, each is supremely self-aware. But they are oblivious of, and even immune to, each other. That tension is for me the most interesting thing about reading both together: it paints a much more complex picture (!) of the author than either one alone could have done.15

One last point of comparison. Innehaben makes it seem as if Schattenfroh is structured around a sequence of images. In some senses it is, but many pages, adding to hundreds, are not. But there is a pictorial element to Schattenfroh that is entirely unremarked in Innehaben: the book is interrupted fairly regularly by typographic experiments. These generally last only part of one page. Some take up exactly one page, like an image (S 833), and others go on for a number of pages. A few repeat, but mainly each one is something new—exactly like actual images in texts tend to be. They include vanishing text (at the end of the book), multiple columns, text that shrinks in size (S 721), concrete poetry (S 805), invented scripts, pages of handwriting, graphics from other books (including Tristram Shandy), printed music (S 547 O 545), and various kinds of verse. These are images. Perhaps not by Lentz’s standards of representational narrative painting, but certainly in modernist and postmodern practice. If I count those as images, Schattenfroh is rich in imagery, and Innehaben is poor.

My own interest

Schattenfroh and Innehaben make a very unusual pair in the history of experimental writing. Lentz’s claims about ekphrasis suggest he expected people to read the books together, but as reviewers have noted, the manner of reference in Innehaben tends to patrol the meanings of Schattenfroh. I am aiming, in my own project, at something more open. The literary critics and philosophers mentioned in the nonfiction booklet called Ideas and Materials do not function as academic references but as points of argument: I hope that some of the people I mention—Genette, Strawson, Blanchot, Jameson, Bewes—might eventually find the booklet and see it as an unusual kind of dialogue with their work. Unlike Innehaben, Ideas and Materials also mentions works of fiction. The purpose is to acknowledge the sources of the fiction or—in the case of writers like Bernhard—how I hope to put some distance between my project and theirs.

The academic voice is consistent in Innehaben. Scholars are unquestioned sources and footnotes are markers of disciplinary authority. Ideas and Materials trades that for brief in-text references intended to start conversations between the reader and the critics, historians and writers mentioned in Ideas and Materials. The idea is to be as dialogic as possible, so the nonfiction authorial voice is capacious enough that it can be woven together, in a reader’s experience, with the implied author of the fiction, without collapsing one into the other or implying that personal histories and literary theories, voiced in an academic mode, are keys to understanding the obscurities in the fiction. I would like the implied author of my own combined fiction and nonfiction to be something new, equally present in both the novels and the Ideas and Materials book. Lentz’s two books produce a strong and unresolved contrast: in the fiction, fiction is continuously questioned, but in the nonfiction, truth is not in doubt, and the result is two very different implied authors, who know each other only fitfully. I will have more to say about this subject in other essays, and in the project Five Strange Languages.

Brief sketch for a review of Schattenfroh

And last: if I had set out to write a review of Schattenfroh, I would probably want to focus on the idea of expression implicit in Lentz’s kaleidoscopic sequences, in which projections, images, and identities crowd and flow together in the manner of Tübke’s neo-mannerist panorama. There are assumptions here about what generates meaning: do continuously unsettled metamorphoses express the kinds of subjective and representational instabilities that interest Lentz (from Husserl to the kabbalah, as Innehaben proposes)? Do thousands of opportunities for the narrator to fantasize images and texts comprise a coherent, adequate, or provisionally complete representation of the narrator’s anguish about his father, especially given that his conflicted feelings are given succinctly several times (eg. S 965)? And, in general: are transformations consistently expressive or even challenging when they are effectively unending, when the energy to produce their “friction” is forever running out and being forcibly restored?

Envoi, on the translation

Max Lawton, the translator of Schattenfroh, needs a special review just for his accomplishment. It’s hard to imagine handling the book any better than he has—keeping just enough of the old German, translating fanciful names in footnotes, producing English words every bit as obscure as Lentz’s German (welkin, deleatur, tenacle, rounce, paraphe, arshin!).

Lawton even inserts himself into the book. At one point the narrator is talking about a sixteenth-century German text. He says it will have to be checked for errors, and Lawton adds a parenthesis of his own:

(he says without realizing that these errors have vanished from the English translation) [O 760]

and at another point

(and let’s not start on the subject of the English translation… ) [O 818]

These are Sterne-quality interpellations, entirely in the spirit of the book. It’s as if Lawton is so at ease in his material, in his understanding of both the narrator and the author, that he can join the conversation whenever he likes. That kind of confidence is strong enough to influence my reading of other books: I trust his rendering of Sorokin’s Blue Lard, which I can’t read in the original, simply because I see what he can do here.

13

(What follows is a critical note about how ekphrasis works for a reader of Schattenfroh alone. In the first draft of this essay, this was in the main text. I moved it here because it belongs in a review of Schattenfroh, not in this essay.) The continuous disorientation a reader experiences in Schattenfroh is partly the effect of the way Lentz theorizes ekphrasis, but it is also, I think, a largely passive or even inadvertent effect of the way he writes ekphrasis. If you read Schattenfroh with a high-resolution image of the Bosch in hand, it’s possible to see how he went from one detail to another, looking closely at tiny details and registering them in the text. That process anchors the shifting focus of the narrative in a concrete image. Reading without the image at hand creates an entirely different sense of disorientation. Often the fiction, read without IH or other sources, is much harder to negotiate than the fiction read with an image in hand.

Collages by the writer Ror Wolf (d. 2020) take up nearly thirty pages of IH and nearly fifty pages of S, reaching nearly to the end of the novel (IH 267-94, H 329-30, 365-69, O 505-508, 958-99). They provide several good examples of the difficulty of writing ekphrasis that is as comprehensible to a reader as it is to the writer in the act of writing. One of Wolf’s collages is of a man resembling Bismarck in a bed. The footboard of the bed is collaged with an image of two men. At first glance, it might look as if the footboard is carved or painted in bas-relief, but the collage is easy to comprehend. Lentz’s method is to name whatever details his eye rests on, and then move on, often without providing the extra description that would be necessary to fix the written description in a reader’s mind.

An image is now projected onto the center of the outer side of the footboard… What is to be seen is two yound lads who have stuck their heads into the crooks of their arms, which rest upon a table in such a way that only the backs of their heads can be seen. the heads of both boys lie in the crooks of their left arms, the lad on the left has also laid his bent right arm onto the table… [S 954]

I think this is very difficult to picture without the picture at hand. I have pasted the relevant detail into this footnote so it can be compared after you’ve tried to decipher the passage.

With the image in hand, the description is perfectly clear. The ambiguities in the verbal description are artifacts, by-products, of the process of ekphrastic naming: they aren’t necessary expressive or profound, and they create a steady fog in much of Schattenfroh.

It can be difficult, from a writer’s point of view, to subtract away the stability provided by the image and imagine a reader’s sense of things. In effect, much of Schattenfroh is more difficult to engage with, less visual, more abstract and random, than it would have been for Lentz himself, recording the paintings and prints with reproductions or originals to hand. Reading the Bosch passages with a reproduction of the panel reveals the zig-zag itinerary of the author’s eye and anchors his seeing in a static scene. Reading without the images is a more difficult experience, harder line by line and cumulatively, over a thousand pages. In the ekphrastic theory of Innehaben, that difficulty is part of the book’s philosophic position. In the phenomenological and imaginative experience of readers, it isn’t, because the way that verbal descriptions do not always sufficiently explain figures is itself not recognized or theorized in the text: it is an uncontrolled effect of the writing process. A more interesting solution would have been to acknowledge, in the text, the difference between the clarity provided by the visual models and the unclarity of prose that works by labeling things.

I cannot rate this book. It is too perplexing and far-reaching and hallucinatory to begin to comprehend. It is its own planet with a gravitational pull. I’m pulled in from faraway space, unable to control my own direction. I will think about Attila for decades, and yet, maybe never truly make sense of it…

Another review of Aliocha Coll’s Attila, by Damian Murphy, includes these lines:

I regard this book as a towering masterpiece. While I don't know if it’s possible to completely comprehend it in the conventional sense of the term, the text is woven with threads of implicit meaning which… are felt more than understood. It has an internal consistency which is multiply mirrored to form strange and magnificent symmetries. The prose is so lyrical that, even in the densest sections, I found myself eager to push through.

It’s less common for the publisher and translator to also be at loose ends. Katie Whittemore, the translator, admits her “total confusion as to the nature of the book.” I don’t remember any other translator who goes so far out of her way to say that she doesn’t understand the book she’s translated. “In the first place,” she writes in her introduction, titled “On Translating Coll,” “I barely understand what I’m reading.” She senses “it is not stream of consciousness,” but the “metaphors and images” are “obscure.” Her ordinary way of working is “constantly broken, violently so, by a sense of bewilderment and frustration.” She encounters “beautful images, startling turns of phrase, hints of philosophical and even metaphysical reflections, explosions and purrs.” But she fears she doesn’t “really get it.” In the end she hopes future readers will be “more attuned” to the “work’s complexities” and “appreciate it in ways that elude us.”

I’m not criticizing Whittemore here. (I’m not competent to do so.) A good translation might well result from an intuitive feel as much as from attentiveness to detail. Rather I’m registering how strange it is that the unspecific adulation and awe that characterizes so much of the book’s reception is present even in the book’s English translation.

1. Javier Serena’s book, also called Attila

Serena’s Attila, which shares its title with the original, has been published as a companion volume by Open Letter. It is an attempt to imagine what a life like Coll’s must have been like. (Coll was unrecognized, and died by suicide after completing Attila.) In an author’s note at the end of the book Serena says he was inspired by the “extreme complexity” of Coll’s works, his “complete audacity and honesty,” and his fidelity to “his creative convictions.” Serena’s Attila conjures the writer he calls Alioscha1 using a range of ideas about the genius who lives on the edge of self-destruction and whose life is entirely devoted to art (and love affairs, and voyeurism). Alioscha is a “naïve and imaginative man prone to intense and lasting excitement”; he has “fantastical inclinations,” and plunges into “mythical reveries… abruptly, for no apparent reason”; he is emotionally “fragile,” and “awkward” in society. The descriptions are full of pathos and are sometimes maudlin, as in a set piece about Coll taking out his building’s trash while kids in the neigborhood make fun of him. These are all clichés of romantic literature that can be found in Poe, Balzac, Hoffmann, Nerval, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Stifter. There is nothing modern about the way Serena pictures his tortured genius.

It’s appropriate, then, that Alioscha’s writing is absent from Serena’s book. The narrator is “impressed” by Alioscha’s “erudite quotes” but doesn’t understand his writing at all, and says as much. When Alioscha reads passages out loud, the narrator remarks, “I let him recite as many pages as he pleased, unable to comprehend them.” The only thing we hear about the writing itself is that it was “structured around the patterns in specific Greek myths.”

2. The reviews2

Even though Serena’s Attila is nominally fiction, it conforms to the tendency reviewers have to romanticize the author and evade the text. Marc Nash’s review on Youtube asks “What is this book about? I couldn’t tell you… You have to hold up your hands when you dive into this book, and say, ‘I’m not going to look for meaning, I’m not going to look for coherence.”

Most reviewers praise the book effusively and then either throw up their hands at the possibility of understanding it, or else assume it is best understood as poetry. John Repetti prefers to consider the book as a whole, for what it signifies about the future of literature. In all these ways the book goes largely unread.

A few reviewers, like Noel Thorne here on Substack, reject Attila as “art-fart bullshit”:

It’s the kind of writing where you read a sentence, a paragraph, a page, and have absolutely no idea what the author’s banging on about. Think Finnegans Wake. Ugh.

Coll himself apparently said that Finnegans Wake is a challenge to all writers. I don’t disagree, but as in the case of other writers who have said the same thing, it is difficult to see how Coll thought he was responding.

The most substantive review in English is in The Untranslated, and I find it’s often cited by other reviewers who don’t want to guess about what the book means. The review offers two structural metaphors: Mudéjar architecture and the Sierpinski triangle. As the reviewer no doubt knows, the Sierpinski triangle was suggested by David Foster Wallace to Michael Silverblatt as the model for Infinite Jest. But it’s no more useful in this context: it’s only a way of pointing to an effectively infinite fractal complexity—which is a way of saying that the principles of form in Attila remain unknown.

3. Subtracting the value accorded to erudition

A first step to assessing the book is to set aside praise for the author’s erudition. Whittemore is impressed, for example, by Coll’s vocabulary. “I’m forced to work very slowly,” she says, “looking up more words than ever before as a long-time reader of works in Spanish.”

Erudition in a writer is, I think, a distraction, because it is relative. Readers have been impressed by Richard Powers’s research into science, Cormac MacCarthy’s understanding of physics, Geoffrey Eugenides’s discussions of molecular biology, Robert Musil’s study of mathematics and mechanics, and the wide reading of authors like Leopardi, Canetti, Eco, and Schmidt. But what appears as mysterious mastery to one reader is the day job of another. Learning and erudition are relative. Some writers try to impress readers with their knowledge, like Énard or Nooteboom, but there will always be readers who know the material they showcase, and for them, the gesture won’t work.

Coll uses a wild variety of words from Greek and Latin and from modern science, some of them neologisms and others rare or applied in unusual ways outside their normal uses. Readers have also been awestruck by the range of cultural allusions, in particular to myths like Laocoön.

A helpful way to proceed is to look at the origins and range of uses of each unfamiliar theme or word, see where the author got it, and what breadth or depth of reading might be inferred from the usage. Read about Laocoön, not to see the story, but to see what sources Coll used and where he invented or changed the story. There’s a difference between an unapproachable mastery of mythology—as in Robert Graves, Arnaldo Momigliano, or Theodor Mommsen—and an author’s selective reading. Find the books read by the author, and you find the author.

Coll was an opportunist: he collected narratives and words from classical texts and terms from modern science and mathematics, and used them to create a new and unfamiliar language that would conjure an undefinable time and place—at least that is what he wanted. The result, for me, is a fanciful collection of themes and words from different contexts, jumbled together. Knowing the historical uses of the words makes it impossible to read them as elements of some timeless, ancient, or mythical language: they read as the collection of a twentieth-century writer interested in classics and popular science.

4. Books Coll read

One of the principal influences on Attila is surrealism. It can be helpful to read the book alongside, or after, writers like Éluard, Aragon, Breton, Savinio, and Roussel, because their ways of turning conventional sentences into contradictions or paradoxes, in the name of generating new meaning, illuminates large portions of Coll’s text.

Another modernist influence is painting, in particular cubism and abstraction. Coll is quoted as saying there hadn’t been a Mondrian in literature, so he aspired to fill the role. The way that model shows itself, for me, is in the unexpected geometrization of landscapes and people. “Slowly her incredulous mouth abandoned the square for the circle” is a typical example.

Perhaps the principal stylistic ambition in Attila is a persistent classicizing archaism, which shows as a predilection for awkward, formulaic locutions.

While the two laughed, the goat, as unperturbable as a fig tree, resumed its suppression of the shrub, not deviating one inch from its path.

The simile sounds like classic Greek or Latin pastoral poetry, as in Vergil’s Eclogues or Georgics, or Theocritus. The last clause is a Homeric simile, as in the Iliad, where people do not deviate from their paths, or are unbending, or press directly onward.

The heroic is a tricky voice to sustain. We’ve all been subjected to antiquated translations of the classics, where the translators’ attempts at noble or serious tone end up sounding awkward or pompous—and in popular culture, we’ve all been bemused by mid-century costume dramas (Victor Mature as Demetrius of Syria, as Hannibal, as Samson, and as Ulysses). Occasionally Coll seems to see the humor:

The emissary left the atrium with the same speedy diligence as a piece leaves a checkerboard.

But mostly Attila is as serious as Samson and Delilah. It is full of echoes of classical and other ancient texts. I suspect the battle scenes come from Lucan or Livy, and possibly Statius. Here’s a pastiche of Ecclesiastes:

From head to toe, the sun grows and shrinks, and from side to side the moon waxes and wanes… So that the sun always returns but the moon comes and goes.

Compare Ecclesiastes 1:5-6:

The sun rises and the sun sets, / and hurries back to where it rises. / The wind blows to the south / and turns to the north; / round and round it goes, / ever returning on its course.

I call Coll’s lines a pastiche because they don’t add anything to the original. He dilutes Ecclesiastes by elaborating (“head to toe,” “grows and shrinks”). The idea that the sun returns but the moon comes and goes, is nonsensical. The same unnecessary and distracting ornamentation is present in this passage:

This time Ipsibidimidiata’s tears spilled, not as discrete tears but in a curtain. She cried in silence, her expressive face writing in Quixote’s eyes that she did it out of anguish, reassurance, and lyricism.

“Writing in Quixote’s eyes” is part of Coll’s faux heroicism; the trope of a curtain of tears is in Homer and Callimachus, and I assume many others. The three qualifiers at the end are characteristic steps too far: anguish would be expected in context, and reassurance is plausible and can be imagined, but lyricism wouldn’t be used this way in a classical text, and a grammarian would say it’s a broken parallelism. Did Ipsibidimidiata feel “lyricism” the way she felt anguish? How exactly did she communicate “lyricism”? As it often happens, Coll falls between the stools of classical rhetoric and surrealism.

To explore these issues it’s necessary to do some close readings. The review in The Untranslated has the only close reading I’ve encountered:

The following sentence appears in a passage describing the steppe shrouded in the clouds of dust raised by the horses of the Huns: “El polvo no pudo esconderse en el lubricán ni en el polvo el lobo.” (The dust could not hide in the twilight nor could the wolf in the dust.) Even in such a short and seemingly simple sentence, there is evidence of serious work with the language. Aliocha Coll chooses the rare word lubricán for “twilight”, not only because it has the l and n sounds necessary for the alliterative pattern but also because there is “wolf” hiding in the word, which is derived from the Latin words lupus and canis, i. e. wolf and dog.

This sounds right to me; I can’t judge this judgment of Spanish. Whittemore’s rendering is “The dust could not hide in the gloaming nor the wolf in the dust.” But assuming the reading here is correct, there’s a further issue. What does “The dust could not hide in the twilight nor could the wolf in the dust” mean? Saying that Attila is “just poetry” or is made available for “feeling” and not for sense avoids the hard work of reading it as poetry, or articulating the feelings. In this case the principal purpose seems to be to put alliteration to work in a classical chiasmus, in which case the words themselves are partly for sound and partly for their violent feeling. For me the alliteration and chiasmus are unrewarding, especially because they have no echoes in the lines before or after. Coll wrote one trope, one rhetorical device, one adage or philosopheme, at a time, twisting until he got a high enough quotient of archaism and surrealist surprise.

Pastiche isn’t necessarily bad, and there are passages in which these concretions of different sources, vocabularies, and styles create something new. Here’s part of a report about what scouts find on a battlefield:

Many more scouts who had tracked, seen around all Nature, not legitimized by its concretion but abstracted by its laws, combustible fuel of combustible man and cumbustor of comburent man, implicated in that desouling, in those deposited pieces of the living only chimerically recomposable, in that pyramid of members flat at the base and hyperbolic on the face, with the luminous vertex inside and illuminated from outside, luminous like the wing of a crow that comes gleaming, carbonically illuminated between an obelisk erected and infanticidal and an obelisk inverted and matricidal, one flooded and the other searing and chamberlains of that tight and trans-darkened epigeous of broken weapons and flesh.

It’s a memorable anacoluthon, in the tradition of postwar French surrealist poetry. There’s an admixture of fantasy as in Lovecraft (Mountains of Madness) or Verne, a hint of Poe (“luminous like the wing of a crow”), lots of weird geometry, the usual arcane vocabulary culled from disparate sources (“comburent,” from chemistry; “epigeous,” from botany), and faux philosophy (“not legitimized by its concretion but abstracted by its laws”). Most passages in Attila don’t manage such a mixture.

5. Substance of the book

Then comes the question of the book’s overall position in relation to its subject matter. Attila is a “meditation on history, civilization, and art” (in Whittemore’s words), but what exactly is the content of that meditation?

One of the central concerns of Attila is the contrast between pagan and Roman culture. This is itself a trope in literature. Flaubert was the first to note the interest of the moment between Roman religion and Christianity, where people could, in his view, think freely. Marguerite Yourcenar’s wonderful Memoirs of Hadrian develops Flaubert’s idea. Coll isn’t interested in Stoicism or Epicureanism, but he clearly inherits the idea of the turning point. There’s a set piece in which Quixote (one of the principal characters, quixotically named in order to dislocate him in time) sees a procession in Rome with “the cross looming overhead.” But unlike Ammianus’s Res Gestae, he doesn’t see Christianity as a cult or a threat. Instead Quixote’s response is tangled in surrealist paradox. He thinks,

surprising himself, “what a fundamental symbol of evil, since it does not cardinally associate the empire with pain? Yes, cardinally, possession and suffering?”

This would make more sense if the thought was, “Christianity does not recognize that the Roman Empire controls real suffering,” but the message is distorted by Quixote’s use of the word “evil,” which is not a Roman concept, and by his stress on cardinality, which doesn’t add logical content and may be nothing more than a riff on the slant rhyme with Cardinals.

There are hundreds of passages in Attila that follow the same strategy: begin with a familiar observation and substitute or add words until it becomes partly illegible and therefore putatively more meaningful. This may sound overly critical: but unexpected substitutions and juxtapositions have been cardinal surrealist strategies ever since Lautréamont.

In a crucial scene, Attila describes his intentions in regard to Rome.

We will not occupy this Empire.. What we will do… is to harvest the classical legacy… [and] the Christian promise… To instill in our culture and in Nature those ingredients… We will withdraw to the meadow with… a culture without doctrines… [and abandon] the sumptuous carrion of the Empire.

This isn’t an interesting program. Syntheses of Roman law and culture and Christian belief have been proposed by writers from Origen and Boethius onward, and Attila’s version has no content except for the illogical notion that the result would be “a culture without doctrines.” The same received ideas, schematically and paradoxically distorted, appear in a later section of the book about China. This lack of content is why I wonder whether a plot synopsis, such as the one provided by The Untranslated, is helpful in the end: plot would matter more if this were a philosophical novel, with ideas to contemplate regarding civilizations and cultures. Instead, most of the plot is scaffolding for the many inversions of sense and meaning that Coll seems to have taken to be the faithful response to the challenge of modernist writing in general and Finnegans Wake in particular.

It may be that Attila will “will keep generations of critics busy” as The Untranslated says, but I doubt it.

6. Literary criticism in 2025

I’ve written a lot about criticism in other media (mainly visual art), and I’m a long-time observer of the state of art criticism. I wondered, writing this piece, why it seemed necessary for me to try to say these things about the reception of Attila. Why take the trouble to argue against readers who like the book, for whatever reason? I have two thoughts along those lines.

To argue in the way I have tried to do, it’s necessary to include history in the conversation. Even though I don’t have evidence of what books Coll read or praised, I can guess at them based on his allusions and choices of terms and proper names. Once he is placed in the history of literature, he becomes interesting in a completely different way that does not require mystification. It would be great to have more history here on Substack, as I’ve suggested a couple of times. (Here and a bit here.)

Second, “close reading” has a bad name that it doesn’t deserve. There’s plenty of close reading here on Substack, but it’s mainly among our “neo-romantics” and classicists. In literary criticism close reading is associated with a certain period in the development of literary studies in universities. (As in John Guillory’s book.) It came from an emerging sense of professionalization, and it has been partly left behind by practices like “surface reading” and “distant reading.” But what if “close reading” just means pondering choices of words? And therefore asking questions that can lead into any politics? A more forgiving notion of close reading might help prevent the confusions of critics who think books like Attila are either incomprehensibly brilliant or irredeemably awful.

I read the four volumes as attentively as possible given that I don’t know Russian. That means I didn’t read the Russian facsimile of Pushkin’s poem that is reproduced in vol. 4, and I skipped the few untranslated transliterations. But I read the glosses on alliteration, Nabokov’s systems of transliteration, his 80-page study of Pushkin’s Abyssinian ancestor, and even the quixotic 100-page “Notes on Prosody.”

I did all this because I am interested in what can be done with footnotes in modern and contemporary scholarship and fiction. The footnotes in Pale Fire, written at the same time as Eugene Onegin, are simpler in terms of complexity of reference, trickier in terms of voice. I have posted separately on Pale Fire. There are also footnotes in Nabokov’s entomological publications, which have been collected and reprinted. But the notes in those texts can’t compare with the outlandishly and apparently endlessly compulsive footnotes in his four-volume edition of Eugene Onegin. I learned a lot from them, and eventually adopted some of Nabokov’s ideas in my own novel, which is coming out in five volumes, each with a different kind of footnote.1

That’s background, and I will be posting on footnotes separately, as an installment in this series on experimental page formats in fiction. This post considers several other issues raised by Nabokov’s project, and I’ll draw a general conclusion with the help of Edmund Wilson’s famously irritated review.2 And a final prefatory note: I’m also staying away from the translation debate.3 There’s a lot to be said about this aside from Nabokov’s attempt at literal translation.

1. Is the book boring?

It’s interesting to contemplate what counted as boring for a person willing to spend thousands of hours in libraries and in correspondence (this was well before the internet), assembling 1,200 pages of footnotes. At one point he says “the boredom of reading through the English, German, Polish, etc., translations... was too great even to be contemplated” (vol. 2, p. 102), but he did read the other translations, and he often compares them to his own.

Did he think of his activity as perverse? Possibly, at times. For example, he compiles every mention of the river that runs through Onegin’s estate; it occupies four pages. At the end he notes that Pushkin “took a perverse pleasure, it would seem, in finding various elegant Russian versions” of the ‘eaux-et-forets’ cliché"‘ (vol. 2, p. 203). A line later we’re told “it would be pedantic to list the innumerable examples of this ‘shady wood-murmuring brook’ symbiosis in western European poetry.” Fair enough, but also unbelievable enough, after four pages inventorying Pushkin’s brook, followed by the insinuation that Pushkin was “perverse.” There are a number of other such lists in the commentary; they are seldom dry and therefore boring in the ordinary sense, though of course some are, like the bare list of allusions to winter (vol. 2, p. 473). Overall there are remarkably few typically bibliophilic indulgences, like his complaint that a catalog of arms, issued by the Bulletin of the Public Museums of Milwaukee in 1928, misspells the name of a pistol manufacturer (vol. 3, p. 39).

Edmund Wilson thinks Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin shows “the Nabokov who bores and fatigues by overaccumulation,” which “contrasts with the authentic Nabokov and with the poet he is trying to illuminate.” But are they so different? And is “boring” the right word here? (“Fatiguing,” maybe. Leavened by perversity.) Nabokov also warns himself against becoming “didactic” like some commentators, and he praises those who attend to “professional matters” (vol. 1, p. 48).

Each of these meliorating terms could benefit from closer reading. Boredom, adequacy, didacticism, fatigue, and professionalism are all potentially intriguing. I found the 1,200 pages as interesting and energizing, in their different way, as 1,200 pages of Pale Fire, Lolita, Pnin, and whatever other books would have to be strapped together to comprise an equivalent bulk.

2. Precision

There’s also the trademark precision of his observation, on sharpest display when it comes to flashing lights. Of the “rainbows” cast on snow by the light of horsedrawn coaches (One : XXVII : 9, in Nabokov's numbering of Eugene Onegin) he remarks:

My own fifty-year-old remembrance is not so much of prismatic colors cast upon snowdrifts by the two lateral lanterns of a brougham as of iridescent spicules around blurry street lights coming through its frost-foliated windows and breaking along the rim of the glass. [vol. 2, p. 110]

He is correcting Pushkin: the rainbows don’t form on the snow, you see them through the coaches’ windows; and they aren’t rainbows, they’re “spicules”; and note, Pushkin, that they break up along the rims of the glass—a detail you might have done well to remember, and which would have prompted you to be a bit more accurate.

3. Historiography

Scattered in these 1,200 pages is a wonderful essay on romanticism and neoclassicism, worthy of Arthur Lovejoy. Nabokov is good on passions (vol. 2, p. 256), and the “achromatic detail” of eighteenth-century nature poetry (vol. 2, p. 286), and there is a self-contained essay on the eleven (!) kinds of romanticism Pushkin would have recognized (vol. 3, pp. 32-37).

4. Criticism

Reviewers have noted Nabokov tends to give his opinions about sources, even if they’re not important or well-known authors, and even if Pushkin’s opinion of them may have been quite different. “There are readers,” he says, “who prefer Pushkin’s Scene from Faust (1825) to the whole of Goethe’s Faust, in which they distinguish a queer strain of triviality impairing the pounding of its profundities” (vol. 2, pp. 235-36). Rousseau’s Julie; or, The New Heloise was “total trash,” and his mind was “morbid, intricate, and at the same time rather naïve” (vol. 2, pp. 339-40). Virgil was “overrated,” and his Eclogues are “stale imitations of the idyls of Theocritus” (vol. 2, p. 322). (It’s always a pleasure to agree with Nabokov, just as it’s a surprise to be so politely but abruptly schooled.) He prefers Leibniz to Voltaire (vol. 3, p. 30), and he often calls Chateaubriand a writer “of genius”; he also likes Senancour, and seems consistently irritated by Rousseau.

Not all these are one liners. There is for example a trenchant, even poignant, two-page long assessment of the poet Evgeniy Baratinski. Nabokov thinks he is a case of a poet suspended between minor and major.

His elegies are keyed to the precise point where the languor of the heart and the pang of thought meet in a would-be burst of music; but a remote door seems to shut quietly, the poem ceases to vibrate (though its words may still linger) at the precise moment that we are about to surrender to it. [vol. 2, p. 380]

There’s also a wonderful three-page biography of a critic named Vilgelm Kuechelbeker (vol. 2, pp. 445-48).

It’s fascinating how little Nabokov praises Eugene Onegin: maybe a half-dozen times, but certainly less than the number of times he criticizes passages and entire chapters. Part of the reason is that what Nabokov treasures most is exactly what he cannot ever explain satisfactorily: “the only Russian element of importance” is “Pushkin’s language, undulating and flashing through verse melodies the likes of which had never been known before” (vol. 1, pp. 7-8). This passage is the crucial ending of his brief “Description of the Text,” and it closes with the motto: “there is no delight without the detail”: that’s 1,200 pages of delight here, but none is total, because little is in Russian.

As Wilson says in his review, Nabokov expends a lot of energy thinking about how Pushkin composed his novel in verse; Nabokov often mentions evidence that Pushkin hadn’t made up his mind, at a given point, where he might go. In all this, Nabokov’s concern is the accomplishment of the whole novel, which has coherence, unity, and symmetry: it’s not modern or even romantic way of judging art, so much as a classical one, and it’s culturally anomalous when it’s set alongside the knowing scholarly apparatus and the neighboring ironies of Pale Fire. Judging by classical coherence is of a piece with Nabokov’s admiration for the way Pushkin puts himself into the poem, along with some of his real-life friends (he even has his actual friends entertain his fictional ones), all without breaking the poem’s fabric. But none of this is my subject here. (See, for example, vol. 1, pp. 15-16, 19; and for an “admission,” p. 44.)

A last note on criticism: there are just a few subtle and evanescent moments in which Nabokov acknowledges, implies, or can be read as admitting, that Pushkin is the greater artist. One of the most curious, because it’s indirect, is the notes on the crucial scene in which Onegin kills Lenski in a duel. The first image we get of Lenski falling compares him to a snowball rolling down a slope. Nabokov patiently shows this is a cliché, not invented by Pushkin (vol. 3, p. 52). But then he goes on to say that the list of metaphors that follows (Six : XXXI : 10-14) is an intentional parody of Lenski’s poetic style: this seems improbable, simply because it would be distracting if readers were to think of it. But it makes perverse sense as Nabokov’s sincere attempt to defend his poet against more, and worse, clichés. And then—as if that wasn’t enough—Nabokov claims Pushkin’s final description of Lenski dead, as an empty house (One: XXII : 9) is showing off against Lenski’s poetry! I’d like to read these two pages of commentary in a Bloomian way, as the agon of one writer against another, except that I think Nabokov probably experienced these pages as the most sincere flattery of a superior artist.

5. Vocabulary

Of course his vocabulary is outlandish. Leave it to Nabokov to find an expression for the gesture of swinging one's arms in front, clapping, and then swinging them in back: “to beat goose” (vol. 2, p. 96). Or to tell us that “a rusalka is a female water sprite, a water nymph, a hydriad, a riparian mermaid, and, in the strict sense, differs from the maritime mermaid in having legs” (vol. 2, p. 246). Not only do we get a disquisition on the difference between Russian blini and American pancakes, we’re also told exactly how Russians ate their blini, including the number of bites per sitting (“as many as forty,” vol. 2 p. 299).

Because Pushkin attributes a mild form of foot fetishism to Onegin, Nabokov spends pages schooling us in women’s feet.

The associative sense of the Russian nozhki (conjuring a pair of small, elegant, high-instepped, slender-ankled lady’s feet) is a shade tenderer than the French petits poids; it has not the stodginess of the English “foot,” large or small, or the mawkishness of the German Fuesschen. [vol. 2, p. 115]

He counts the feet, even in the different translations, and jokes that one translator, who counts six feet in one passage, is “entomologically minded” (vol. 2, p. 116).

Wilson’s review is especially harsh on Nabokov’s choice of extremely obscure words. At times, Nabokov anticipates and defends himself in the notes; mainly he says he prefers exactitude to easy reading. But in the notes, where he’s not translating, the same Nabaokovian excesses recur. I stopped several times, for instance, over the notion of a “cataptromantic stanza” (vol. 2, p. 499). But I appreciate precision, and I don’t think it got in the way of the poetry; Nbokov has given me a strong sense of Pushkin, the kind that can’t be obtained if you don’t know what counts, for the translator, as precision.

6. Wilson’s review

The famous review appeared in the New York Review of Books, July 15, 1965. It is as clever as Gore Vidal in its insincere self-deprecation, mingled with genuine friendship. And it is fearless: Wilson corrects Nabokov on his knowledge of his own language. The review has been conflated with the later discussion about Nabokov’s extreme literalism in translation, but that’s not its argument. Midway through, Wilson makes a single devastating point: he says Nabokov didn’t understand the character Onegin:

Mr. Nabokov’s most serious failure, however—to try to get all my negatives out of the way—is one of interpretation. He has missed a fundamental point in the central situation. He finds himself unable to account for Evgeni Onegin’s behavior in first giving offense to Lensky by flirting with Olga at the ball and then, when Lensky challenges him to a duel, instead of managing a reconciliation, not merely accepting the challenge, but deliberately shooting first and to kill. Nabokov says that the latter act is “quite out of character.” He does not seem to be aware that Onegin, among his other qualities, is, in his translator’s favorite one ­syllable adjective, decidedly злой—that is, nasty, méchant.

I think this is right, and it is a masterstroke to place it in the middle of a generally quibbly review. Because I had never read Eugene Onegin before, I was an ideal reader of this passage; when I read the review, I had just finished Nabokov’s four volumes, and suddenly several dozen of his comments fell into place. He just couldn’t see that part of Onegin’s character. Here is an example, from many, of the kind of gloss that shows this lack. Nabokov is commenting on the word “inconsistencies” (One : LX : 6), noting Pushkin closes his first chapter by acknowledging “inconsistencies” in Onegin's character. Nabokov:

Hardly an allusion to chronological flaws; perhaps a reference to Onegin's dual nature--dry and romantic, chilly and ardent, superficial and penetrating. [vol. 2, p. 2154]

This just isn’t quite enough, and Wilson's comment throws it into strong relief. Sadly, Nabokov’s reply, and Wilson’s reply to him, are uncharacteristic, petty, and uninteresting.5 The two squabbled throughout their friendship, and there is a catty passage in the commentary in which Nabokov reproduces a translation of Wilson’s, which he says is “good,” but interlards it with italicized words, which he calls “a few minor inexactitudes” (vol. 2, p. 474).

7. Exile

It’s not the squabbling that makes Wilson’s review so excellent, it’s the balance between scrapping and large-scale assessments, not least his verdict that Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin is of a piece with everything else of Nabokov’s after his exile. It expresses “the situation, comic and pathetic, full of embarrassment and misunderstanding of the exile who cannot return, and one aspect of this is the case of the man who, like Nabokov, is torn between the culture he has left behind and that to which he is trying to adapt himself.” Nabokov sees Pushkin from a distance, and that must be especially painful. It drives—this is the implication—extreme performances of compulsive research. In that way even 1,200 pages of commentary, in all its microscopic kaleidoscopic telescopic excess, is not enough to convey the pathos of perpetual dislocation.

1. The first fifty-five reviews

The reception begins almost immediately with a history of the reception, Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!, an entertaining exposé of conventional thinking and lack of imagination in the first fifty-five reviews of The Recognitions. As Steven Moore points out, only two or three were positive, and one of those was by Herbert Cahoon, editor for the James Joyce Quarterly. The main point of Green’s screed is the reviewers’ laziness, since many didn’t even finish reading the novel. Moore’s essay “The Recognitions, Then and Now” has a good explanation of the initial reviewers’ standoffishness.

The first puzzle in the history of reception is what happened after that, in the next five years, say—did sensible reviews begin to appear? Or was there a hiatus in the reception? A good next step would be to search the secondary literature from 1957 to 1970 or so. Did the corrected edition, which appeared in 1962, get a different reception?

2. The canonization

Then comes the long period from 1970 to 2020, during which The Recognitions was issued in new editions, several with encomia implying or asserting it was already a masterpiece. Michael Orthofer, reviewing Fire the Bastards! wonders about this odd canonization. His only suggestion or wish in regard to Green’s book is

an updating, showing how (and trying to understand why) the critical reception has shifted so towards acceptance and acclaim—see for example The New York Times’s continued revisionism, for example in Tony Tanner’s 1974 re-view (when The Recognitions was re-released as a paperback), calling it “one of the most important American novels written since the last war,” as well as in Cynthia Ozick’s 1985 review of Carpenter's Gothic, in which she called The Recognitions “the most overlooked important work of the last several literary generations.”

Similarly, Mark O’Connell writes in The New Yorker:

Over the last half-century or so, however, the book… has come to be regarded as a foundational postmodern novel. Rick Moody, for instance, called it “one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century,” claiming that he “read it and reread it with the same reverence I reread ‘Moby-Dick’ or ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” In an essay for the magazine in 2002, Jonathan Franzen described it as “the ur-text of postwar fiction,” and acknowledged that he’d named The Corrections, his own third novel, “partly in homage to it.” [February 17, 2012]

Somewhere Leo Steinberg notes the power of critics to alter historical reception. A single essay on Picasso’s relatively neglected Three Dancers, Steinberg says, “left it a masterpiece.” Nothing of the sort seems to have happened to The Recognitions: it seems possible it became a masterpiece by accumulating brief assertions of its importance.

A fuller account of this second puzzle would list the praise given the book in introductions and reviews of the University of Nebraska Press edition (1982), the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition (1993), Atlantic Books (London, 2003), the Dalkey Archive edition (2012) with an introduction by William Gass, and the New York Review Books edition (2020) with an introduction by Tom McCarthy. Jonathan Franzen’s widely-read essay—which for many readers seems to count as the the book’s only reception—came after several earlier attempts to draw attention to the book. Among the candidates for influential reviews are a brief piece by Tony Tanner in the New York Times Books Review, July 14, 1974; Peter William Koenig’s “Recognizing Gaddis’ Recognitions,” Contemporary Literature 16 (1975): 61–72 (on JSTOR); and John Schwarz’s “America’s Greatest Novelist” (Washington Post, 1994). Mysteries remain. Is The Recognitions in print now largely because of one such review? Who was following whose leads? Who suggested to the University of Nebraska Press that they reissue the book?

3. Adam Mars-Jones

This third episode is a matter of just one review, written for the London Review of Books in October 2021. It’s one of the sharpest reviews since Edmund Wilsons’s spat with Nabokov over Eugene Onegin, it’s as withering as some of Gore Vidal’s reviews, and as densely supported with comparative material as any review in an academic journal.

It appears that Mars-Jones’s review was prompted by the acquisition of the rights to The Recognitions and J R by New York Review Books, and the appearance of new editions with introductions by McCarthy and Joy Williams. But Mars-Jones hardly mentions those occasions: he may have been provoked by the praise Williams and McCarthy lavish on Gaddis’s books, but he’s after the novels themselves and not their reception.

I have the full, unedited version, which Mars-Jones sent me, and I only wish the LRB had published it all. He assembles several choruses of complaints: The Recognitions wasn’t siubstantially edited (we know this from an nterview with Steven Moore1), so it’s “all stubborn proliferation and zero pairing away of the inessential.” Gaddis rejects the basic criterion of “relevance in narrative,” and yet despite its length the book is not “structurally ambitious.” There is “no call” for some of the characters and sections. When Gaddis is concise and eloquent, it’s probably “accidental.” He suffers from an “inability to control dynamics… on every scale.” The book is replete with unintentional humor and unintended degrees of cleverness, with “lines that are variously clever, stupid, and clever-clever.” It’s poorer than its many possible precedents (Mars-Jones names a dozen, from Gosse’s Father and Son to Gide’s The Counterfeiters).

These objections build into a nearly Rabelasian crescendo of intestinal metaphors. First Mars-Jones says Gaddis’s style is “turgid,” then that it has “clogged ducts.” Toward the end of the first half of his review, when it’s nearly time to turn to J R, he compares The Recognitions to an intestinal tract with lots of “side chambers” or “pouches,” some of them “inflamed,” which would indicate diverticulosis if they remained “benign”: “but when diverticula become inflamed the diagnosis turns ominous: not just diverticulosis but diverticulitis.”

From this jostling crowd of complaints about Gaddis’s lack of “feeling for his medium” one emerges as the root of the book’s incompetence: the awkward “grammar and cadence” and “nonsensical formulations,” which result in “thousands” of sentences that need to be “read twice for basic information.”

There’s an inability to control dynamics apparent on every scale, from the smaller units on up. Energy leaks out of a sentence like this one, founded on the unpromising notion of a facial expression not visible to anyone in the scene: “He was too excited with pleasure to notice Otto’s face, an anxious expression, but a vacant anxiety, and the more abandoned for being features inured by conscious arrangements where, only now as in sleep, nothing happened.” [609] Considerable effort is required to grasp just how little is being offered here. And have a shot at imagining this posture: “[she stared] at his hands, her own withdrawn to shelter the hollows, heels on bone and the round ends of her fingers appointing that soft declivity which rose above them until her thumbs could not meet across her waist.” [574] Not easy to form a mental picture of this disposition of body parts—it’s as resistant to understanding as the more blatantly cryptic formula that comes later in the same scene, “They stood there with three senses locked in echo of the fourth.” [577]

The London Review of Books has a tendency to do a sort of philological and grammatical tear-down that I associate more with the Times Literary Supplement—the sort where the author’s research or grammar might sink their book regardless of its other qualities. Most recently there’s Tom Crewe’s systematic dismantling of Ocean Vuong, “My Hands in My Face,” a relentless demonstration of Vuong’s technical deficiencies as a writer. The problem in that case is that Crewe doesn’t seem to know, or care, about the tsunami of complaints about Vuong that were already circulating on social media, podcasts, and zines. The consensus was that Vuong’s appeal—whether or not he deserves it—doesn’t come from his writing: it’s more the feeling and the personality that matter. For readers who know some of that, the LRB assault comes across as not only disconnected from contemporary literary culture but inappropriately schoolmarmy.

Mars-Jones’s attack shares some strategies in regard to grammar and form but differs fundamentally in relation to the book’s critical reception. As far as I’ve read—still only a tiny sample of the Gaddis literature—Mars-Jones is almost alone in his complaints. It’s an amazing intervention. Like Steinberg, I wonder if a single review, written with sufficient power and annoyance, can contribute to altering the reception of a book as long undigested as this one.

The posts are:

1. Surrounding text with commentary

2. Adding pull quotes, Judas windows, and jalousies

3. Marginal notes

4. Parallel columns

Along the way I will offer critiques of formatted texts by Danielewski, Butor, Michaux, Schmidt, Fritz, Brooke-Rose, Derrida, Lebensztejn, and others. My interest here doesn’t include pages presented as images, as in concrete poetry and artists’ books, but rather pages where the formatting contributes to the meaning of the narrative. A formatted page, in this understanding, can be put into other fonts: what matters is the relation between the text elements—how they speak to each other and to the history of abnormally formatted texts.

Marginal notes, subject of the previous post, can grow into multiple columns. In the first installment I mentioned an edition of Aristotle that has marginal notes in multiple columns at the sides—a halfway station between separate marginalia and continuous columns of glosses.

In this post I’m limiting myself to two topics: polyglot Bibles, which offer some wonderful models for what parallel columns of text can do; and two contemporary novels that use parallel columns in new ways.

The idea here is to provide material to help writers ponder the possibility of using pages formatted into columns. So I’m not writing as a historian or a critic, but as a shopper. Multiple columns can give a novel a scholarly air, but that does not have to be their main effect: they can also produce unusual orders of reading, prompting readers to read top to bottom, then compare another column, sometimes even across double-page spreads. In older books and manuscripts, parallel columns can explicitly comment on other columns, and in fiction they can be used to separate the narrator’s voice, or the voices of several narrators speaking at the same time.

Polyglot Bibles

A polyglot Psalter (Giustiniani, Genoa, 1516) has columns with titles and ornamental capitals at the head of each. On the right and bottom are scholia.

The Hebrew (left) and Chaldaean Peshitta (right page, center) are glossed in Latin, and the original Vulgate is also given (third column). For contemporary fiction, this sort of arrangement suggests that some columns could run alternate texts (competing or parallel), and other columns could interpret those or provide “translations” into other points of view.

Hebrew, Greek, Samaritan, and Arabic are translated into Latin in paired columns in the Walton Biblia sacra polyglotta (1657).

Arabic is translated into Latin across the page break on the lower halves of the pages in this polyglot Bible (Le Jay, 1629-45). The single-column Arabic on the left, and its pared Latin translation on the right, divide the spread in an unusual way, which could be used to imply that the narrartives at the bottoms of the pages are also working like footnotes.

The Polyglotten Bibel zum praktischen Handgebrauch (1875) has four languages (Tanakh, Septuagint, Vulgate, Lutherbibel). The Latin (right) has inner marginal cross-references. Just below each column are textual variants for each language. Along the bottom, continuously across both pages, arranged by verse, are comments on variant readings (in German). I bought the Old Testament in this edition, in five volumes, so I could see what the reading experience might be like. If this format were to be used in fiction, it could be used to tell the same story four times on a single spread, and the cross-references and footnotes could provide a fifth voice.

The Complutensian polyglot Bible (Old Testament, 1517) has a different format:

Here the Greek Septuagint is at left, followed by the Vulgate, the Hebrew, and marginal notes with Hebrew roots. Below is Aramaic and a Latin translation, with Aramic roots in the margin.

All these Bibles suggest ways of using single spreads as units, something that is routine in poetry but not used in fiction. In addition, the multiple columns offer the opportunity to invite readers to zig-zag back and forth between columns instead of reading in a linear way.

The Complutensian Bible adds another possibility, since it has the Vulgate twice, once interlinear with the Greek:

I have no idea what to do with that as a model for fiction! Note also that every word in the Vulgate is assigned a letter.

Contemporary examples

Here I’ll only mention a couple of examples. Later in this series I’ll have more to say about Arno Schmidt’s practice (very complicated, with lots of potential) and Mark Danielewski’s practice (far simpler than either of the examples I’m about to discuss).

John Trefry’s Massive is parsimonious about peritext, in Genette’s term: it is unpaginated and undated (according to the website, it appeared in 2024), and there’s nothing in the flyleaves or back cover. The pages have a uniform gestalt:

Each page has three columns, and text occurs in blocks of approximately five lines. The key to reading is to note the narrow gap between the columns. At the top, read column 1, then skip to column 3. Continue that way for three lines, then note that the text continues down column 3 (“Wanderings Amidst Several Remote Principalities of the Earth in Four Chapters by the Surgeon & Shpcaptian Lemuel Gulliver”…)

Massive is a book of conceptual poetry, like one of Goldsmith’s in that it’s not intended to be reconstituted into a continuous narative by a single determined reading. It is also concrete poetry, thanks to the alternating left- and right justification and the awkwardly spaced full justification, which create patterns that correspond to units of sense. Columns could be used this way, to direct reading, without giving up the possibility of a reader, and without ceding the page to an image.

Luka Bekavac’s six-volume Croatian novel Urania is one of the most intricately formatted fictional texts. The main narrative is “generated by an advanced technology planting ‘plot kernels’ into an organic medium (i. e. into one of the characters belonging to a different timeline) where they develop into specific neural responses” rendered as text, “and are further classified and linked according to a number of rules and regulations.”1 The output is “raw text” and is on right-facing pages, and a “control channel” of commentary is on the left. Here is a typical page spread. (Since Urania is in Croatian, I’m relying on the author’s descriptions here, from correspondence in July 2025. Here is a link to a book in English.)

The two sides, “control channel” and “raw text,” are elaborately linked. In this screenshot, there is a header visible at the top left:

LOC REF 14/63 | Cyclus B :: SECTOR G… ΠΥΞΙΣ 07 KERNEL 123 LINEARUM 63 GRANULORUM 444±299

Here 14/63 is the location in the matrix,2 “Cyclus B :: SECTOR G” is a chapter from the second volume/book/cycle (B), and belongs to a certain character denoted Sector G; and “ΠΥΞΙΣ 07 KERNEL 123 LINEARUM 63 GRANULORUM 444±299” means

box 07 [the seventh subsection of a given chapter], containing material developed from kernel 123, printed in 63 lines (this is the real number in the raw print on the right hand side), and the exact number of “granulae,” i. e. words, including the approximation for the missing ones, to be reconstructed (444±299).

In a text as carefully organized as this, there would be several plausible ways to read, and Urania is also provided with three tables of contents and differently formatted sections.

Bekavac explains:

Therefore, this is not a true “spread” in the sense that the material on the left and the right is perfectly synchronized; however, since the left/right separation is maintained throughout the box, the reader doesn’t have to flip through the book constantly to find a reference; in a given subsection, you can—for example—look at page 1 of the control channel and page 4 or 6 or 8 of the raw text simultaneously.

… in another novel, “control channel” material could have been presented simply as a series of footnotes or endnotes (and honestly, I think this is the level of "interference" it poses for the reader; many people try to absorb the notes immediately, others read the right hand side all the way through and then return to fill in the gaps). However, it was important to have it constantly “hovering” in the field of vision, at least for its purely typographical value… I wanted the readers to remain aware at all times that this overbearing narrative layer is constantly there, but not necessarily to force anyone to read it word for word. (Nevertheless, I think the control channel alone took at least two years to do; each element was thought through, and occasional “random” elements were again devised according to various set procedures; anyone taking the time to read it would find a lot of additional information there.)

I haven’t tried anything like this level of complexity, but there are parallels. A Short Introduction to Anneliese also (coincidentally!) has three tables of contents, and a model here might be Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, which he provided with an index and several lists full of authorian interventions and inventions. Urania shows that multiple columns of text can work in exceptionally complex ways, creating entirely new combinations of reading, comparison, and correlation. Perhaps this is a future of multiple columns.3

I don’t hope to make this post into a comprehensive resource for multiple columns in modern and postmodern literature, but I’d like to hear from anyone who has examples of interesting texts.

Next in this series: footnotes.

3

As of 2025, Bekavac has one book in English: August after Midnight (2013), translated in 2022 by Ellen Elias-Bursac (Fraktura). It also concerns corrupted communications from a mysterious source. The heart of August After Midnight is a monospace typewriter transcript of a conversation that also works on facing pages. On the left a conversation is carried on between a local speaker and a distant one; the later is given in barely legible form, like this: thxlterisgivnsonbrlyalegbilform. On right-facing pages those garbled passages are typed out, sometimes with striekthroughs and question marks, and there are occasional prompts, questions, and objections from a third voice, which is underlined. It makes for an absorbing reading experience.

The final section of August After Midnight is a faux-scientific paper on the nature of the communication, with header and footnotes.

In general terms, a Bernhard-style rant is a continuous, unappeasable, misanthropic, misguided, obsessional, compulsive, repetitive, inconclusive, and doomed. It is directed either at an unacceptable person, place, profession, or country, or at some inadvisable, impossible, vast, or incomprehensible project or theory. There is a rhythm to Bernhard’s rants, but it’s irregular, with declarations of hatred, hopelessness, disgust, or disparagement coming back and back in waves. The speaker or thinker rarely notices the rest of the world, or the passage of time, so there’s an inbuilt exhaustion or enervation reading the rant or reading about the ranter, because their mental condition—their utter rejection of the unredeemable object or their absolute devotion to the unachievable goal—will not ever stop.

I’m interested in writing obsessive monologues, and I tried a very long one in the novel A Short Introduction to Anneliese. The monologue in that book is 357 pages long. I’ve written a separate post about the problems of writing extended, nearly uninterrupted monologues, as they can be found in Joyce, Bernhard, de Beauvoir, Lucy Ellmann, and Jonathan Buckley.1 This post is about trying to write monologues that do not keep reminding readers of Bernhard.

Three strategies for putting some distance between your writing and Bernhard’s

1. Avoid the duality of the Bernhardian rant

Bernhard’s rants are sometimes focused on particular things: Konrad, in The Lime Works, wants to write a treatise on hearing; Rothamer (in Correction) wants to build a conical house for his sister; Rudolf (in Concrete) is writing on Mendelssohn. But we never hear specifics about those projects. There’s nothing specific about Glenn Gould’s piano playing in The Loser.2 There’s nothing about the architecture of the cone, except assertions about the accuracy of all its measurements, and its placement at the exact geographical center of the Kobernausserwald. All we know about Konrad’s project is that it’s divided into three parts, on the physiology, psychology, and philosophy of hearing, and involves experiments on his wife.

On the other hand, Bernhard’s characters are very specific about all sorts of distractions. Konrad goes on about the state of the lime works, and about feeding and dressing his paralyzed wife. We’re told much more about the attic in the Höller house where Roithamer works than about the conical house he intends to build. In Concrete we’re told all about the Salzburg apartment. The Loser spends time on Wertheimer’s life and suicide, and on topics like the difference between Swiss and Austrian culture.

This duality—myopic focus on objects, problems, and ideas that don’t matter or aren’t helpful, studious avoidance of anything but generalities about what really matters—watermarks Bernhard’s rants. An example of a novel that replicates this is Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins. A retired professor who has recently lost his wife tries to resume his life’s project, a book on Montaigne. The passages on Montaigne are at once distraught and obsessive, and very vague, exactly as in Barnhard:

…my life became immersed in the constant struggle for peace, the peace that was downright essential to conceive a book-length essay on Montaigne, a book illustrating a life lived in isolation and devoid of interruption, but composed by me, a man thronged and attacked and besieged by interruption…

The other pole, unexpected specificity, is provided by his son’s interest in house music and his own newfound obsession with coffee. The double structure of the Bernhardian rant creates two problems here. One is that those two subjects read like reportage and place the novel in early 21st century America in ways that Bernhard’s obsessive details, like Roithamer’s friend’s attic, tend not to. The other is that Bernhard’s rants—the equivalents of Haber’s character’s monologues on Montaigne—are grounded in his utter disdain and revulsion for nearly all cultural production. The professor’s jeremiads in Lesser Ruins read more like histrionic theatrics.

I’m guessing that Haber knows he is close to Bernhard, and that he’s interested in finding other ways of speaking. I am very sympathetic to the problem I am describing here, since I spent a number of years trying to solve it. In this case, the moral might be: avoid the duality of Bernhard’s rants, either by adjusting the general rant about the object of desire, or refocusing the specific rants about ancillary subjects.

2. Add genres

The wonderful translator Adrian Nathan West has been translating and writing about the Swiss author Hermann Burger (1942-1989). The stories collected as Diabelli are an excellent introduction, and West has also translated the Tractatus Logico-suicidalis.

For me, Burger reads as a combination of Kafka (absurdity presented as allegory), Bernhard (the futile, fanatical, doomed people and their monologues), E.T.A. Hoffmann (the magical or supernatural undertones, the fanciful and carnivalesque overtones), and something full of degradation like Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat (model for Der blaue Engel). He has Bernhard’s disdain for nearly everyone. In “Zentgraf in the Mountains: Or the Earthquake in Soglio, A Summary of Damages for the Swiss Siesmological Service,” the narrator muses on the kinds of people who frequent the Alpine resort hotel where he’s working:

…the new arrivals… devoured the richly garnished cordon bleu, which was accompanied with thick-walled glasses of oily Grüner Veltliner… For sale hung aquarelles from Sunday painters, heroic dilettantes who had captured the Bondasca Group [mountains] with the aid of water and the finest pigment cakes from Schmincke-Horadam…

This has all of Bernhard’s ferocity, and against it, as in Bernhard’s Old Masters, sits the narrator’s employer, spurning all of society:

Anatol Zentgraf and I… sat in the corner across from them in the whitewashed hall, the private scholar with his back to the public as always.

To these Bernhardian ingredients Burger adds allegory and surrealist touches, making his reports of disastrous lives sharper and more consistently entertaining than Bernhard. In this story, the “private scholar and private patient” Zentgraf, who spends his last days studying a (fictitious) novel called The Corpse Lessor, by Ingram von Schersmanowsky, turns out to be the epicenter and mystic cause of an earthquake, which the narrator dutifully reports to the Swiss Siesmological Service: a sour parody of the self-importance of a certain kind of “private scholar,” and a surreal and surprisingly technical and bureaucratic frame to the story.

I guess that Bernhard, who disliked many writers that I admire, would also have disliked Burger, because what makes his prose so memorable and quixotic (West prefers “weird”) are the extra ingredients he throws in, like a stew with odd exotic ingredients. For me it lowers the transgressive temperature, but in theory it could also be a way to create monologues that taste different than Bernhard’s.

3. Don’t stop

When I started reading Bernhard, I read Frost, his first book, and wrote this on Goodreads:

The book offers no relief, no pleasure of slowly dawning insight… Reading Frost is like lying in pig slurry, and raising yourself every few minutes to wipe yourself, and then lying back down, then getting up again. It makes Beckett seem prissy and sterile, and it makes nearly every other author look cowardly, because by comparison most authors rush off to nice conclusions.

I didn’t like Bernhard’s books that have endings, like Yes. A dissatisfaction so bottomless shouldn’t have a resolution. His second book, Gargoyles, is perfect in that regard. This is how it struck me in 2007:

It opens with a real Victorian catalog of horrors as a boy follows his father, a country doctor, on a tour of blighted, stunted, and cursed villages. It is relentless to the point of idiocy (on the point of idiocy!) until suddenly, the son and father encounter the local Prince, who proceeds to tell them about problems he's been having hiring a groundskeeper... and he never stops, for the entire remainder of the novel. Stupendously, stupefyingly odd. Could not be stranger.

The Bernhardian rant is like those fungi that take over the brains of ants, wasps, and other insects, and turns them into zombies. The rant is formless, has only an arbitrary beginning (it’s whenever the ranter appears on the page), and never concludes.

In this is the hint of a third strategy. Bernhard wrote only short books, and it’s been noted many times that his books are similar to one another. It’s as if ideally, his entire literary life, including the plays, is one endless rant, interrupted only by the impertinent demands of publishing.

The fourth strategy, therefore, is simple: write a very, very long rant. Don’t stop because novels are usually structured with beginning and endings or capped at 100,000 words. Do what logic implies Bernhard should have, and by doing so you trespass on something fundamental to the Bernhardian rant: for utterly unaccountable reasons, it wants to be faithful to the small book format. (My guess here is that short novels were Bernhard’s lifeline against the eternal perdition of flailing misanthropy.)

I tried to to this in A Short Introduction to Anneliese. Her rant does not observe Bernhard’s consistent avoidance of detail when it comes to the oject of obsession: the book includes a hundred pages of her actual notebooks, in full detail. I also tried to avoid the dualism that avoidance creates by letting Anneliese speak about everything that comes into her head. And the book is also an experiment with transgressing Bernhard’s somewhat inscrutable self-imposed page count limit. I tried to make it the most transgressive monologue in literature—and since any such ambition is bound to fail, I’m sure it does too, but hopefully in interesting ways.

I’d like to hear whether A Short Introduction to Anneliese has at least partly escaped its ultimate model, and how far other people have gotten on this road.

PS, some of the contests were not to spot allusions to specific books or music, but to suggest other texts that have similar images or mood. I got some really fabulous answers, and it’s possible I may be able to use them if I can put small revisions in the paperback. If that happens, I’ll sneak the names of the winners into the novel as thanks.

The book has received some simplistic reviews. Charles Platt said it wasn't as important as Dick's writing, that Dick was often drunk when he was writing, and that he had a sense of humor about it—a reckless summary judgment about a project that occupied its author for eight years until he died.1

But this isn’t a trauma narrative, an autofictional account, or a diary of recovery and healing. Dick doesn’t look back on his brief but transformative experiences from the position he had before those experiences, when he identified as a writer. He looks back at his life before 1974 as partly entirely different than what he had thought it was

Schematically, his subject position could be put this way: the surviving rationalist came to think of his own writing before 1974 as a resource to help him explain his mystical experiences, but the survivor of the revelations came to think of some of his writing before 1974 as prophetic—not as fiction, but as nonfiction accounts of things that Saul himself did not understand.

1. Why the book is not a conversion narrative

Despite the several parallalels, this is not a conventional conversion narrative, like Paul of Tarsus’s or Jakob Boehme’s, where the entire world changes after a brief encounter. It’s a common model. In movies even spies change their identities completely: Exegesis is something different, which was hard for Dick himself to understand.

The idea that Exegesis is a conversion narrative has apparently guided the popular reception, as in Terence Mckenna’s “I Understand Philip K. Dick,” which appeared in the book In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis. It’s not that Mckenna is wrong to say:

What is trying to be expressed is this: The world is not real. Reality is not stranger than you suppose, it is stranger than you can suppose. Time is not what you think it is. Reality is a hologram. Being is a solid state matrix and psychosis is the redemptive process ne plus ultra. The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.

It’s that the book is more conflicted, less consistent, and more interesting than the confident broadcast of doctrine.

2. Sources of complexity

Three things make Exegesis extraordinarily complex. First, the unenlightened cobbler (Jakob Boehme) or persecutor of Christians (Saul of Tarsus) did not disappear after the revelation. The Exegesis is inhabited by the thoughts of the unconverted and the converted, and by the perplexity they generate when they see one another.

The second source of complexity is that Dick did not renounce his previous life or writings, or even simply lose interest in them, as Paul or Augustine did. He saw revelatory truth in some of what he had previously written as fiction. His past became unmanageably difficult to understand. Dick’s persistence in decoding his mystical experiences has precedents, for example, in Boehme, who wrote a number of books to interpret visions he had in 1610 and afterward. (Dick only knew Boehme from an encyclopedia entry, which he read “by mistake”; p. 286.) But Boehme knew what his unenlightened state had been, and it did not haunt him with belated revelations of truth.

For me the third third source of complexity is that the “conversion” didn’t happen all at once as it did to Paul of Tarsus. At various points between 1974 and his death (when Dick was still at work on the Exegesis), novels like A Scanner Darkly went from science fiction to documentation, and the way they did so is not clear in the Exegesis itself.

The result is a book—never intended to appear in this form, as an account for anyone but Dick himself—that is extremely hard to read. I am interested in this because I have been writing about long, complex novels, and also writing a long, complex novel, so for me Exegesis might be a lesson or even a model. More on that at the end.

3. How fiction becomes archive

At one point, Dick says “my writing casts doubt on the fact of... knowing actual reality because our minds have been fucked over.” He doesn’t mean this as a literary critic: he’s being literal, and one consequence is that his ability to understand what counts as fiction has changed. A line later, he says that Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said provides “some evidence” that “the real situation” of people is “prison-like,” while other novels “point to” a “supernatural salvific interventive power.” This is at least a consistent ideation, but then he says The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch “seems to say” that an “evil magician deity is in control of our worlds and heads.” (p. 406). That “seems to say” is uncanny: it might mean the novel’s narrative “could be read as implying” such a deity, or it might mean the novel is evidence of such a deity in the world. A few lines later there’s the one-word sentence “Strange,” and then then there's this:

Does this book A Scanner Darkly, then, seem to say, “Maybe portions of the others are literally real, too?” The author does not now pretend to be writing fiction... [p. 407]

It’s an astounding conflation of fiction with documentation, and of the published fiction author with “the author” of the Exegesis. Much of the published portions of the manuscript proceeds this way. At one point Dick writes that the indications are that his “novels are literally true,” but at the same time, he thinks, they may be more autobiographies than fiction, and in fact they may even be “appeals for help” (p. 412). Readers of Exegesis have stressed the otherworldly nature of Dick’s experiences in 1974, but if I subtract the phenomenology of those revelatory or dissociative moments, his seriousness about his own output, and his investment in understanding its truths, would be strikingly similar to many other authors, from Freud to Proust.

The theology, ontology, and eschatology Dick works out are closely matched to the commonest elements of his novels: a higher power has descended into creation, disguised itself, and then forgotten its own action and its disguise, but left a clue or sign for itself that will remind it, sometimes imperfectly and with consequences, of its origins. Sometimes that plot is repeated, Russian-doll fashion; occasionally the power is alien, sometimes corporate. But the fundamental strategy that puts the plots in motion is the immersion, or appearance, of the hero in a world where he does not belong, where he is shielded, for a time, from his real nature. Weirdly—but what isn't weird here?—Dick never seems to realize the outlines of this story are the Christian story of the incarnation (for example, p. 413).

One of the folders of the manuscript suddenly presents portions of the novel VALIS. Pamela Jackson says the surprise cuts “like a knife.” “Where did this voice come from?” she asks. “The novel gives us... a self-reflection by the author on his own hyperbolic... imagination,” and after some pages Dick regains his voice and continues his exegesis (p. 451). This is doubly odd given that readers of the novel VALIS have remarked on the entanglement of the implied author (Dick) and the principal character (Fat).

On the one hand, fiction intrudes into nonfiction as evidence; on the other hand, autobiography intrudes into fiction as literary device: an amazing mirrored confusion and conflation, exactly the sort of plot device in Dick’s other fictions.

4. The commentators’ problems

This edition of Exegesis has commentary by a very eclectic group of scholars who are identified only by their initials. Among them are a philosopher, a scientist turned cultural critic, and three theologians. (Platt, “The Voices in Philip K. Dick's Head.”)

Simon Critchley keeps Dick at a safe distance, commenting only on his indebtedness to Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and others (eg, notes on pp. 496, 547). Kate Hayles contributes a couple of acute footnotes on Dick’s manner of reasoning, which reminded me of Ermanno Bencivenga’s attempts to reconstruct what counted, for St. Anselm, as logic (see Hayles’s notes on pp. 232, 475), but for the most part her notes propose links between Dick’s ideas and late 20th century science (pp. 673, 683, 694, 708, 710).

The dozen or so scholars who contributed footnotes are on the horns of the dilemma: how fully is it possible to read this book? What professional perspective—psychoanalytic, mystic, philosopher, psychologist, literary critic—can do it justice?

A literary critic might want to draw a parallel between Dick’s ruminations on his earlier writing, and his attempts to incorporate it into his current life, and any number of memoirists and authors of trauma narratives who try to recuperate and reconnect with memories. Proust’s narrator uses some of his early attempts at prose fiction as evidence of his childhood—but that’s a wholly different matter than re-experiencing one’s earlier prose as an “intricate and unconscious precursor” of one's visions. (Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson, “Introduction,” p. xiii.)

Those who are interested in Exegesis for its revelations have to discount Dick’s verdicts about Scanners and other novels. I think it is impossible for anyone who has read Dick's novels as fiction to re-read them as archives of revelation. Even Mckenna sticks to Exegesis and doesn’t try to read Scanners as prophecy.

A psychoanalytic reading would take Exegesis along with the fiction as archives of Dick’s psyche, but that would betray both his originally intended readings of his fictions, and his later intentions in relation to Exegesis, and—to be thorough about my antipsychoanalytic position here—it would betray them in different ways, which it would not be able to articulate.

The closest parallel to Exegesis that I know is Daniel Schreber’s Memoirs of My Mental Illness, in which a skilled judge argues that even though he is psychotic he deserves to be released from his asylum. But even there, the situation is simpler: Schreber was writing an autobiographical document, not a novel, and even though he recognized some of the things he said would not be taken as real by his readers, he drew clear distinctions between his own ideations and public truths, and he was not vexed by indecision over whether or not they might ever be taken that way.

I am interested in this as a problem in reading and writing. What counts as genuinely complex fiction? I’m working on that—here’s a brief note on Substack. Much of this is worked out in the novel A Short Introduction to Anneliese. There Anneliese worries about whether she can keep control of her own writing project, and to help herself she reads a number of long books, and also books that are out of control, among them Exegesis. She reviews Dick’s manuscript, in her own demented way, in the novel, and decides that after a certain number of pages, no matter what the subject, all writers lose control—all sufficiently long books, after a fashion, are insane.

The posts are:

1. Surrounding text with commentary

2. Adding pull quotes, Judas windows, and jalousies

3. Marginal notes

4. Parallel columns

Along the way I will offer critiques of formatted texts by Danielewski, Butor, Michaux, Schmidt, Fritz, Brooke-Rose, Derrida, Lebensztejn, and others. My interest here doesn’t include pages presented as images, as in concrete poetry and artists’ books, but rather pages where the formatting contributes to the meaning of the narrative. A formatted page, in this understanding, can be put into other fonts: what matters is the relation between the text elements—how they speak to each other and to the history of abnormally formatted texts.

The previous post was about notes that are partly in the margins and partly in the body text, so that they hollow out a space for themselves in the body text. This time the subject is notes that are only in the margins: real marginalia. Most of the scholarship, like H.J. Jackson’s Marginalia (2001) is on handwritten marginal notes, but I am concerned with typeset maginal notes because they are part of the book’s initial conception. This sort of marginal note is not paraliterary, in Genette’s term, but intrinsic to the text.

Marginal notes, printed or not, can be dangerous. They can take over their margins, threatening to become as interesting as the main text, as in this book on astronomy.1

Marginal notes in Arabic are called هامشيات ḥamishiyyat, and in Greek (borrowed into Latin) scholia. The Latinate word in English, marginalia, is post-classical, and properly speaking it pertains to an antiquarian, classicizing period in European publishing. The word glosses is borrowed from medieval practices, as in the first post in this series, which discusses glossae, commentaries on classical or Biblical texts. For my purposes a formal definition is enough: marginal notes occupy the margins, or more precisely, they create new margins, tighter ones. Left-justified marginal notes on the left side of the body text create very narrow margins between themselves and the edge of the page or the gutter.

Nominally marginal notes simply explain the body text, but they also accompany, protect, and even confine the body text. Here is a typical example, from the Abbé Bouhours’s La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1687), a book full of beautiful thoughts beautifully arranged. The marginal notes are Latin quotations from the authors who are mentioned in the dialogue, in this case Tacitus. Like all marginal notes, they do more than simply elucidate the main text. In Bouhours’s work they stabilize the free-ranging dialogue (Bouhours’s imagined conversations are one of the predecesors of Diderot’s), shoring it up with classical sources.

This is a later edition of another of Bouhours’s books, Pensées ingénieuses des anciens et des modernes (1758).

It’s a small 12° (duodecimo), and the scattered Latin glosses are suited to the impressionistic collection of thoughts and poems, in this case a passage in Pliny. The current custom of “pull quotes” (discussed in the second of these posts) is an atrophied descendant of marginal glosses like these, because pull quotes don’t add anything that’s not in the body text. They only attract the eye. Marginal notes like these add the crucial classicism Bouhours valued without interrupting the spoken French he practiced.

These examples are benign and harmonious with the author’s intentions, but like footnotes, marginal notes always also advocate and defend. They necessarily present the text as in some way deficient, and propose themselves as definitive. Often, as Evelyn Tribble has shown in Margins and Marignality (1993), marginal notes are aimed not so much at the body text as at other books: they can argue with the reader, and they often participate in intertextual controversies. In the Reformation, for example, glosses in Catholic Bibles armed readers to refute Protestants, and vice versa.

The Douay-Rheims Bible (1582/1635) shows the Biblical text on the left, with verse numbers in the inner margin as in contemporary Bibles and left-justified commentary on the outside margin. On the right page are annotations in a smaller font (endnotes to the chapter in Genesis), with more commentary on the outside margin and italic cross-references in abbreviated form on the inner magin.

It’s typical that commentary on the outer margins has more room, and here it is intended to help Catholics in England argue against Protestants.

Tribble notes that Gayatri Spivak learned of this function of marginal notes sometime before 1989, and noted in an interview that she was “beginning to think of the concept-metaphor of margins more and more in terms of the history of margins: the place for the argument.. the place of interest for assertions rather than a shifting of the center” (p. 103). Bouhours’s classicizing notes are benign, but all marginal notes take positions in defense of a certain idea of the text that is implicitly inadequate or missing, whether they shore up the author’s authority, speak intertextually to other books (as in the Reformation debates), or address the reader’s implicit lack of understanding. They turn a coherent text into one that needs help, that is insufficiently eloquent or even damaged (as in glosses on classical texts like Sappho), dividing the text’s voice into an existing narrative and a voice that doubts, strengthens, or corrects.

There are interesting possibilities here for fiction. The outer margins (the ones that traditionally have more room) could be used for apostrophes aimed directly at readers, perhaps trying to persuade them of some particular interpretation of the main text. They would be outward-facing and metaleptic, rather than inward-facing and supportive.2 The narrator could speak in the margins, commenting on a text in which they are mentioned or in which they are the principal narrator, perhaps from a distance of experience or years.3 A page in a work of fiction that has marginal notes becomes a written document, even if the main text is a mimetic representation of events. That can be an interesting resource: it can bring the reader out of an immersion in the text and into an engagement with the act of writing (When did the narrator compose the book, exactly? When did they annotate it?). In that sense, marginal notes in fiction can be strategy for bringing the narrator closer to the writer, or the writer closer to the author—or conversely, for dividing the narrator into the person who experienced the events and the one who later ponders them.

In terms of typography, marginal notes that are left-justified on the outside margin persisted into the 20th century, I think mainly in French texts. They occur in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, where sparse marginal references balance the personal nature of the book, giving it a more scholarly feel.

Left-justified marginal notes also occur in legal texts, like Edwardo Coke’s Commentary Upon Littleton (I have volumes from 1794), where legal citations on the outside margin serve the same cross-referencing purpose as the Biblical references on the inside margins of the Douay-Rheims Bible:

At the end of the previous post I was wondering what might happen if the body text gets squeezed out by the commentary. Here is a verso from an exceptionally complex Bible at the Bodeleian (thanks to Milovan Novakovic for pointing it out to me). The Biblical text, from Ecclesiasticus, is on the upper right. This is a verso page, and the full spread would show the passages from Ecclesiasticus in the middle, crowded not only by dishevelled ranks and files of columnar commentary and infestations of interlinear commentary, but also swarms of marginal notes.

It’s more an imperiled text than one protected and validated by commentary.

Among modern texts Meena Kandasamy’s Exquisite Cadavers is an extreme case, where the margin is given a third of the page. It’s nearly a double-column page, except that the formatting signals the left comments on the right, and not vice versa. This lack of ambiguity suits Kandaswamy’s purpose of asserting her work as fiction, in response to some reviews of her previous book, which had been understood as a memoir (Holly Williams in The Observer, October 1, 2019). In terms of authorial force, the two columns compete, fiction against political reality.

Another non-normative case is Henri Michaux’s mescaline diary, translated as Miserable Miracle. The italicized marginal notes were apparently written at the time. The justified text is a narrative explanation after the fact—or so it seems at first.

As the book goes on, the marginal notes become too sparse to be memory prompts. One page has only “distancing of a thought,” and, lower down, “echo.” The record of his “interrupted sentences, with syllables, flying off, [and] frayed” (p. 5) effectively stops, and the main text continues as the only record and commentary. It’s an interesting example of a struggle for voice and memory between body text and marginal notes.

In my own project I’m debating using marginal notes, just because they are so strongly metaleptic: who is speaking in the margins? The author? The main character, who is narrated in the fiction but is also the person who wrote the book? Does the voice in the marginal notes doubt everthing in the main text, paragraph by paragraph? Can that be sustained?

The best use of marginal notes that I know in postmodern fiction is Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream, and most of those are thought by the main character, not spoken—but that’s for a later post.

This is still an open question for me. I’d like to hear about other uses of marginal notes in modern and contemporary fiction, and of course unusual uses of printed marginal notes in premodern nonfiction.

I am interested in the representation of incomplete minds, and in the incomplete representation of minds. Access to fictional minds can be denied in at least three ways: characters can close off their own thoughts from themselves, either unknowingly, by repressing them, or deliberately, by avoiding them; minds can also be partly closed to the implied reader when the author decides what to tell us and what to withhold; and characters’ minds can be partly closed to the implied author—something that happens whenever we wonder if the author understood their own characters. The mechanisms are complicated. If a character in a novel doesn’t think about a certain event, are they avoiding it, or have they repressed it? Might the event be absent from the character’s thoughts because the author didn’t want to tell us? Or is the author unaware that a reader might expect the character to be thinking about the event?

This series was originally called “Writers who won’t tell us what their characters are thinking,” but that didn’t capture the theme that interests me, because it includes taciturn characters like the ones in Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Carver. Their mystery is only temporary: eventually we understand the murderer’s plans, the detective’s suspicions, the silent hero’s wounded heart. The new title sounds like I might be interested in pathology or injury, but it signals the strangeness I am after: I’m curious about minds, in fiction, that remain partly opaque, redacted, or empty. A less dramatic title might have been Incomplete Minds in Fiction.

Here’s the series:

1. Introduction

2. Books with "black holes" instead of central characters

3. Characters with no motivation

4. Why unusual mental states may not need to be explained

5. Toward a theory of incomplete minds (this post)

6. Complex mental states masquerading as flat affect

I’ve been thinking out loud, as it were, and all these posts are open to comments. I’d love to hear about other examples and theories. I’m grateful to and for comments on earlier versions.

One of the main outward signs of an incompletely depicted inner life is flat affect. As Alan Horn reminded me, Camus’s The Stranger (1942) is a prototype of many later texts in that regard. Camus shows us again and again that Mearsault lacks conventional emotion and is indifferent to moral codes. From the outset the first-person narration creates the expectation of introspection together with its disappointing or perplexing absence:

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J’ai reçu un télégramme de l’asile : «Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués.» Cela ne veut rien dire. C’était peutêtre hier.

Mearsault never understands why he kills a man, and almost fails to see why he should try to understand. At the end of Part One, he allows himself some words of explanation, which Gérard Genette calls “the knee-jerk example for psychologically-oriented Camus Critics.” There are few such lapses, if that’s the right word for inexplicably intermittent moments of partial self-awareness.1

Other characters with flat affect relish their callousness, like Patrick Bateman in Ellis’s American Psycho. More contemporary examples of taciturn characters (usually men—the phenomenon is strongly gendered, although it need not be) like those played by Daniel Craig, Jason Statham, and many others, turn out to have been scarred into silence by personal loss.2 There’s usally the assumption, or the claim, that something made these people the way they are: parents, society, the end of a marriage, or—in the case of Camus—a meaningless universe that appears to encourage meaningless lives.

I would like to imagine this differently. What if the depiction of an absence of engagement, of apparently missing emotions, of unexpected or unaccountable gaps in the account of the character’s mental life, are in themselves the concern of fiction, so that explanations are unnecessary? In that case writing about characters with incomplete minds would not be a social project, whose aim is to help us understand challenging people or to think about how our world continues to produce them. It also wouldn’t be a philosophic project, designed to persuade readers that we all need to face existential loneliness, or to help readers feel better about lonely lives by telling them the entire universe is a vacuum of meaning. Something else would be the point, as it is in Bresson’s films when people spend so much screen time looking at their shoes.

I’m going to spend most of this essay arguing that it is misguided, distracting, premature, and unnecessary to explain lacunae in characters’ inner lives. Some people are emotionless. Some have limited or untracable inner lives. Different configurations of missing depth are all around us: they are the ordinary condition of befuddled and incompletely understood lives, and it’s only a fiction to pretend that we can prove all our confusions and mental gaps come from misconfigured societies or abusive families.

Beyond the explanatory narratives lies a fascinating writing problem, and a challenge both for the novel and for theories about it. We do have access to Mearsault’s mind in the passages that have thrown lifelines to readers who need him to have thoughts of his own. Mearsault is uncomfortable trying to determine how to respond in certain situations where he knows something’s expected of him: that’s clearly a sort of rudimentary inner life. But his actions are so difficult to understand—most famously, he says he killed a man because the sun got in his eyes, and never seems to understand that there might be more to think about there—that it seems Camus must have hidden some parts of his mind from us. That’s a hard trick to pull off. How, as a writer, do you signal that you’re going to tell us some things, but not others, about your character’s thoughts? The challenge becomes nearly intractable when a reader begins to worry about the author’s own mind, what they’re hiding from themselves, what they think full or normal instrospection might be. If one of Kazuo Ishiguro’s characters declines to examine his thoughts, is the author likely to have a similar reticence? How can the two be distinguished?

When Mearsault’s inner life fails to materialize—when he fails to cry at his mother’s funeral or even to think of her except when he’s prompted, when he fails to realize people disapprove until he’s on trial—the book creates a puzzle: where, exactly, is his inner life? Are we seeing all of it? These are things I would like to be able to understand about Mearsault:

1. He doesn’t say whether or not he thinks about what his actions, or his life, mean. But does he, in fact, have such thoughts?

2. Did Camus think Mearsault had thoughts? What signs might there be that Camus—meaning the implied author of the book, not the person who was often interviewed—pictured his character as something more than a perceiving and acting machine? And what sorts of thoughts would those have been?

3. Did Camus himself have an inner life? This last question might seem ridiculous, because we know a lot about Camus from his other writing. But I mean Camus the implied author. In other words: without looking up anything about Camus, does it seem the author of this book had an inner life? Or was it limited to existential doctrine?

I will suggest a framework, based on Genette’s, that can help readers and writers think about questions like these, but first I want to do my best to argue that fictional characters with incomplete minds are better off unexplained.

Mearsault’s incomplete mind as philosophy

In the last thirty years, popular reception of The Stranger—meaning on sites like Goodreads, Medium, and Substack—has taken the book more or less as the historical author Camus intended, as a forum on existentialism. Mearsault’s moral indifference can be seen as an effect of what Sartre understood as existentialism (the underlying indifference of the universe to human meaning, the “thrownness,” in Heidegger’s word, of our lives) or absurdism (the intolerable gap between the inbuilt human desire for sigificance and the meaninglessness of the universe). Mearsault, the “stranger,” could be either of these.

I agree with Nabokov on the subject of philosophical novels in general: they compel characters to proselytize in a way that is bound to be at odds with what we’re given as their own feelings. This is a problem, I think, with The Stranger: the moments where Camus observes Mearsault’s discomfiture, his attempts to adjust himself to what people want, ring true in a different way than the passages, such as the last few pages, in which Mearsault is a spokesperson for absurdism.

There is also a tradition of reading The Stranger that understands Mearsault as the product of his society. That makes sense of Camus’s historical moment, and links The Stranger to Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human (1948, six years after The Stranger), whose main character Yozo is exhausted by playing roles and falls into an “inhuman” alienation. The tradition of reading The Stranger as a book about the effects of social alienation is ongoing (for example by Germaine Brée, who edited a collection on The Stranger) and it opens the way to a reading of alienation as the result of colonial and postcolonial constructions of identity.

Mearsault’s incomplete mind as social alienation

Most scholarly reception has been directed at Camus’s blindness to the Algerian context. Critiques by Conor Cruise O’Brien, Edward Said, and others have stressed the invisibility of Mearsault’s Arab victim and Algeria in general. (See Alice Kaplan’s book for the reported truth about the Arab victim.)

Yet social context can’t help much with understanding flat affect because it’s also caused by the insulation provided by wealth. This is true especially in Edward St Aubyn’s books. Unchecked privilege is the cause of Patrick Bateman’s behavior in American Psycho, and it’s an interesting exercise to put Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation in the same category.

On other cases blank affect is the result of middle-class suburban life. This happens in some of Tao Lin’s work, and much of Anne Tyler’s. Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is a Japanese example.

The outstanding example of a writer who gives us cynical, disabused, pessimistic characters with low affect is Michel Houellebecq, starting with Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte, 1994). Readers who continue to be shocked or provoked by him are led to recognize their dependence on bourgeois culture, its emptiness, superficiality, and dishonesty.

The history of flat affect as as consequence of social alienation begins well before Camus. Its precedents are usually said to be Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859, the ultimate source for Moshfegh’s book), Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), or Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” (1915). I’d like to suggest a more provocative starting point: Montaigne was also “alienated” from his society, surrounded by people who would not understand the point of his “essais,” always wanting to justify himself by reaching for ancient precedents, understanding his “alienation” as Stoic calm.

Mearsault’s incomplete mind and violence

In fiction and films, heroes and heroines who don’t speak or think much often turn out to be capable of astonishing violence. Mearsault’s blankness and his one-word responses are in line with any number of positive heroes in films, from Bogart to Keanu Reeves (John Wick)—all men who are taciturn, unemotional, deeply scarred, reluctant to act, and slow to anger, because they harbor unspeakable tragedies, devastating betrayals, and irreparable losses.

Brett Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985) demonstrates that emotional numbness and affectless alienation do not need to result in violence, and it suggests that Ellis’s later American Psycho is an unnecessary dramatization of the condition sufficiently expressed in the earlier book. Violence is used in American Psycho to drive home the danger of affectlessness. There are many precedents aside from Camus, including J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973), Bataille’s transgressions and, farther back in history, Sade’s. But it’s also possible to imagine the connection between violence and low affect as an affectation, a popular-culture tic: it’s a relief, for some readers, from the unpleasant contemplation of emotionless narrators. Violence moralizes them, or at least provides some entertaining relief.

Mearsault’s incomplete mind and trauma

I am also uninterested in authors who use trauma to explain lack of affect. A model for emotional numbness understood in this way is Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and I would add Freud’s ideas about the traumatized victims of the First World War in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)—a book I prefer to read, with Harold Bloom, as fiction. An example from the Second World War could be Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

The language of clinical psychology is helpful here. War-related post-traumatic stress disorders are one explanation for low affect and lack of communication in fictional characters. Trauma resulting in depersonalization is evident in books like Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar (1963). Dissociative identity disorder is at work in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), whose central character is initially apathetic, and can’t cry or feel emotion until he starts Fight Club. As in the case of violence, trauma may often be an unneeded element, an explanation, for the fact of flat affect.

Deferring explanations

I’m not arguing against all explanations. A first-person memoir may have as its core purpose the healing that is made possible by explanation. My argument is more general: I think the many different ways of explaining characters with incomplete minds are themselves symptoms of our inescapable anxiety about our minds and how we know and represent them. In that sense, explaining incomplete access to thoughts, apparent absence of emotion, and gaps in self-awareness by appealing to society, family, or politics is like writing fairy stories. What matters—once more, and for the last time, aside from real cases of trauma or neurodivergence— is the minds we’re given, and their genuinely troubling intractability. The rest is popular entertainment.

For a reader or writer, the really interesting issues are about representation. How do I know there’s more to Mearsault? Or even to Camus? As a writer, how do I tell my readers that there might be something more—but the character doesn’t know it? Or there may be something more—but I don’t know it?

I think the best theory about how incomplete linds might be represented is in Narrative Discourse Revisited, where Genette reviews his schema of what he calls “narrative situations.” There are three dimensions:3

1. The narrator’s position

   1. Extradiagetic: the narrator exists outside the fictional world of the book

   2. Intradiegetic: the narrator is in the fictional world

2. The narrator as a character

   1. Heterodiegetic: the narrator isn’t a character in the story

   2. Homodiegetic: the narrator is a character in the story

3. How much access readers are given to the character’s thoughts

   1. Internal focalization: readers see and know only what the character knows

   2. External focalization: readers know only what’s observable from the outside

   3. Zero focalization: the narrator is omniscient, so the reader can know anything

Notice the question mark after L’Etranger. Genette quotes a study by Claude-Edmonde Magny:

The artful filtering Camus sets up consists of presenting a hero who says I reporting to us only what a third person could say about him.

Genette also notes Sartre was the first to say this, in his influential early essay “Explication de L’Etranger” (1943), “which reported and partly justified this anonymous witticism: ‘Kafka written by Hemingway.’” Genette comments that the “technical paradox” is “obviously that of an external focalization in the first person.”

These are fabulous conceptualizations, but notice what they do to Genette’s schema. The Stranger is homodiegetic because the character is in the story. And yet the “external focalization of the first person”—a formula as logically precise as it is psychologically incomprehensible—means that the narrator exists outside the fictional world of the book (“L’Etranger?” is under the header “Extradiagetic.”) He has been expelled from his own story by excluding himself from internal focalization while keeping his first person voice.

The narrative mode of The Stranger, Genette says,

is “objective” on the “psychic” level, in the sense that the hero-narrator does not mention his thoughts (if any). It is not “objective” on the perceptual level, for we cannot say that Mearsault is seen “from the outside,” and… the external world and the other characters appear only insofar as… they enter his field of perception. [p. 123]

He comes to the clumsy formula that The Stranger exhibits “internal focalization with an almost total paralipsis of thoughts.” A paralipsis is a rhetorical figure in the speaker or writer draws our attention to something by not mentioning it. In Genette’s words, Sartre’s formula is that

we see everything through the window pane that is Mearsault’s consciousness, except that “it is so constructed as to be transparent to things and opaque to meanings.”

As Genette knows, none of these formulations is persuasive: Genette’s is awkward, and Sartre’s, as Genette points out, fails to say which side of the pane we’re on: are we inside, looking out at the world, or outside, looking in? The best way to think about it, Genette concludes, is to let the text have its mystery, and just say “Mearsault tells us what he does and describes what he perceives, but he does not say… whether he thinks about it” (p. 124).

Genette is mainly interested in the field of possibilities, and he thinks some combinations (like the ones at the far right column of the table) might be historically unlikely. There are still good open questions here for literary criticism and literary history. “Homodiegetic narrating with external focalization” is hard to maintain, and even in The Stranger there are moments when we hear Mearsault’s thoughts. A rigorous application would mean that an external observer would be “incapable not only of knowing the hero’s thoughts but also of taking on his perceptual field” (p. 125), so there’s a

Maybe The Stranger is strained because it’s an attempt to apply the perspective over the course of a book. After all, “homodiegetic narrating with external focalization” is used all the time in evanescent contexts, for instance in sentences like “I seemed like a jerk” (p. 126). Detective fiction typically presents heroes whose traumas have buried their emotions, but as Genette says, in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler this “behaviorist course… is somewhat strained”—there’s always the moment where the hero’s deepest feelings are revealed (p. 123).4 It’s possible that the interest of The Stranger in this respect is the forced uniformity of the author’s position. Perhaps “homodiegetic narrating with external focalization” is the name of an evanescent attitude, and is in a different category from the structurally stable positions Genette studies.

Genette’s structuralism isn’t always as persuasive as his honesty—his trying out different formulas, his question marks, the blanks in his chart. Still, for writing and understanding incomplete minds, his distinctions are the best I know. The problem remains unsolved in contemporary fiction, despite several generations of critics complaining about authors’ tendency to dip freely into their characters’ minds.

Reasons for writing these essays

My interest is practical. I want to know how to control and present characters with parts of their inner lives missing. I’d like to learn some strategies to tell a reader who has decided the character won’t say “whether he thinks about it”—is it the character’s decision of the implied author’s? Who is saying, like Bartleby, I prefer not to think? Is it Bartleby or Melville?

I am going to put some of this to work in Book 4 of the five-volume novel project called Five Strange Languages.5 In Book 1 (due out 2026/7), Samuel is a conventional character, with a range of emotions. He suffers a series of crises and by Book 4 (due out 2027/8) he is close to his goal of removing feeling, introspection, and attachment from his life.

My challenge in that fourth book, called Ghosts Are, is to present a character whose incomplete mind is entirely his choice: it’s not the author who has moved focalization outside of the character’s mind, but the character who has moved his own thoughts around so that some are not being shared, even with himself. It is, I think, a common condition of our uncertain understanding of ourselves.

I’m interested in what happens in the prefaces, because Brooks provides a pocket literary history from Greek and Latin up to Joyce, in order to situate his own book. It’s unusual for works of fiction to begin with prefaces, and exceedingly rare for authors to be candid about where they think their work fits in literary history. I’ve just finished a first reading of David Jones’s Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing (1952), a book-length poem that was praised by Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, and even Stravinsky. It is a major modernist poem, owing the look of its pages to the Cantos and William Carlos Williams, owing its many footnotes to Pound and The Waste Land, and owing its palimpsestic sense of history (in Jones’s case, Welsh Catholic history) to Joyce—and yet Jones doesn’t mention any of them in his thirty-page preface.

Brooks is the opposite. His prefaces propose a genealogy of linguistically inventive writing in English from Chaucer to Spencer and Finnegans Wake. It’s not scholarly—there’s no reason a fiction writer’s preface should be!—so it won’t persuade literary historians. From a writer’s point of view it’s both foolhardy, since it sets a high bar for the fiction that follows, and also honest, because it reveals the models that served the author. I’m always interested to hear writers describe how they think about the later Joyce, even if the results, for example in Eimear McBride’s essay, are more evasive than persuasive.

Brooks describes Soleyn Fenix as a “philological, science fictional, polylingual” amalgam of his time spent exploring and learning languages in Indonesia and New Guinea and “shipyarding” it all up into a “Finnegans Wake–Faerie Queene–Canterbury Tales type-thing.” For him Modernism, meaning mainly Finnegans Wake, was the end of a long literary tradition. After that, “plasmatic literary style seemed, notwithstanding many experiments in structure and technique in the novel, to undergo an extinction event” (p. ii).

It may seem only a writer can say that experimentation with the plasticity of words ended with Finnegans Wake, and yet there is a scholarly version of that same intuition in books like David Hayman ansd Elliott Anderson’s Wake of the Wake (1978), which assembles a collection of authors said to be influenced by Joyce’s book. The collection is extremely heterogeneous, including Augusto De Campos, Maurice Roche, Hélène Cixous, Philippe Sollers, Christine Brooke-Rose, Beckett, Raymond Federman, John Cage, Gilbert Sorrentino, William Gass, and Arno Schmidt. Cases could be made, separately, for most of these, but no coherent reception history emerges.

Brooks simply says “out there now, is no one following Joyce” (p. ix). Writers might object when he sweeps the table clean:

Really, World—the Silence, in terms of anyone since Joyce, doing anything new, interesting, experimental, challenging, or in any way unusual, with the philological anatomy of English, has been Deafening [p. x].

Or a few pages later:

Does anyone care that although the mid-decades of the twentieth century saw far-ranging restructurings of narrative, in the post-Dickensian, post-Jamesian expanse of the ‘possible novel,’ nothing happened to continue the melting metamorphic dreamwork of James Joyce? Are we serious? Nothing? [p. xvi]

Yet it’s a focused charge: he is interested in authors who rework English vocabulary by tinkering with etymology, language families, and historical linguistics. He could have adduced several dozen such authors (including representations of dialect, as in Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga, or A Clockwork Orange), but as a general point it’s not wrong. Brooks’s own languages include Greek and Latin, Middle English, Javanese, Dutch, and possibly about a dozen more. Toward the end Soleyn Fenix gets very polylingual, with translations usually supplied immediately after each excerpt.

Artists’ histories can be refreshing after academics’ qualifications. “Chaucer dies in 1400: no one is really sure what to do until Edmund Spenser is born in 1552,” he says, and then “no one knew what to do after Paradise Lost” (pp. xv, xviii). There are entertaining pages on the gaps in his history of “plasmatic” writers. Dryden, for example, “confined the polyglot Chaucerian English to filed clarity, the ‘varying pause,’ and ‘full resounding line,’” and, as “Joe Elegant,” Dryden pruned Paradise Lost into The State of Innocence (p. xvii).

Oddly, Brooks’s prefatory history of plasmatic, polylingual English literature doesn’t end where it began, with Finnegans Wake, but with his principal source of linguistic ingenuity, Chaucer. “English got its main lift” from Chaucer, he says, and Soleyn Fenix is still flying on that energy” (p. xix).

I would be glad to know of other works of fiction that offer historical introductions. A very distant, because much longer and older parallel, could be James’s New York Edition prefaces. It seems to me that the fiction author’s nonfiction preface is a rare genre, and within it mentions of literary history are even rarer. In my own project I’m planning a separate booklet with the ideas that went into the novel. I have worked on it from the beginning—that is, twenty years ago—and I think of it as a counterbalance and accompaniment, so that fiction and nonfiction can be read together.

This isn’t a review of the 500-odd pages of Soleyn Fenix. To my eye, paging through it for several days, it looks like there are echoes of Borges (the central plot about a manuscript, the central concern with written language), Chatwin (there’s lots of travel writing here, along with rock climbing, botany, and geology), Lovecraft (there’s a Mountains of Madness feel to the very remote place where the plot leads), and Pynchon (a tremendous manic tangle of motives, people, and places). Personally, and just from skimming, I don’t hear Chaucer, Spenser, or Joyce as much as late 18th and 19th c. English usage, absolutely overspilling with ebullient polylingual Asian- and classically inflected interpolations. But any book that has six straight pages of faux 17th-century epitaphs in Dutch can’t be judged by its cover.

I’d like to offer corrections to two ideas that are common in reviews of The Other Name and the Septology as a whole, then propose a critique of the way the book is written.

Reviewers often call the Septology and its author religious. (See for example Derek Neal’s essay.) Knausgaard said as much years ago, before Fosse began appearing in English. Both the author and the main character are converts to Catholicism, and we read the Lord’s Prayer several times in Latin. (One reviewer said he skips those passages—an amazing lapse of critical responsibility.) I am interested in religion and art as an unresolved theme in modernism and postmodernism, and I am sympathetic to attempts to conjure the failures of language or the way faith can be continuously nearly present. I am currently reading David Jones’s The Anathemata, where English Catholicism dyes every page in the same way as Eliot’s Anglican faith colors the Four Quartets, but in Jones’s case the pages look more like the determined secularism of the Cantos. This is by way of saying it isn’t easy or helpful to criticize what appears to be a very dedicated attempt on Fosse’s part to write a certain kind of faith into a long novel. (This is essentially Knausgaard’s reading.) But it doesn’t help to call on faith to assess the structure and length of the Septology. Ineffability and the inadequacy of art and language are like the cosmic microwave background, nearly evenly distributed everywhere, from the origin of time and space to the present. The negative theology—with echoes of Mark C. Taylor and John Caputo—that suffuses Fosse’s books gives them a sometimes attractive but aestheticized darkness, which makes it tempting to let questions of form recede into a twilit background.

A second problem in the critical reception has to do with the identity of the principal character, Asle. He shares a name and a profession with another character also named Asle. A number of reviewers have called them Doppelgaengers. (The Guardian, November 9, 2019; The Irish Times, January 4, 2020.) They certainly are that, since both are single, have grey hair, and are painters, and alcoholism has been, or is, part of their lives. (I’ll call the main narrator, who earns his living from painting, the older Asle, and the other, who is on the point of dying from his alcoholism, the younger one.)

Toward the beginning, I imagine most readers wonder if they are the same person, but after the older Asle visits the younger one, rescues him from freezing and takes him to a hospital, it may appear that Fosse is up to something else—yet it's curious no reviewers I’ve read say exactly what that might be. The New York Times reviewer thinks all possibilities are open: “the namesake-doppelgänger story line is never definitively established as an extended speculative exercise or an astounding coincidence (or taciturn act of autofiction).” (February 22, 2022.) Definitive resolutions aren’t the stock in trade of 800-page novels, but articulable possibilities can be. For example the sober Asle may actually be misremembering an episode earlier in his own life, when he was rescued (by someone else, now erased from his memory) and taken to the hospital. There are reasons to consider this, which have to do with some disjointed descriptions later in The Other Name.

For example there's a long episode about the older Asle and his sister when they were children. During this there are several pages in which the two children are disturbed by a loud noise. A little later a third child dies, and the noise is forgotten. Later in the novel, the older Asle is alone in his house, in a state of exhaustion, possibly asleep, and a disturbing noise intrudes on his thoughts. It turns out to be a friend's snowplow. That is intended, I think, to let us know that the earlier episode of the children was also dreamt, or hallucinated, by the older Asle.

The problem here is that hints and parallels like this are inconsistently depicted. The book as a whole is loosely written, by which I mean quickly enough, with a sufficiently small number of revisions, so that difficult narrative choices—like the possibility that the entire memory of the children takes place when the older Asle is asleep, rather than driving, as we’re told—become unpersuasive.

I’m not suggesting the book would be better if the Asles were clearly one person, or that there is any single solution, or that the book would be better if there were. It’s the same with Beckett, in the novel trilogy: sometimes, as Brian Richardson has pointed out, the characters suddenly seem to have written Beckett’s other books, and there is no way to make what he calls the “unnatural narrative” back into the usual consistently mimetic one. I mean something different: the Septology is loosely constructed, so there is no discernible difference between ambiguities in the text and in the author’s mind. Some passages work well; others are distractingly incompatible. Fosse has been compared to Proust, because both explore memory in ways that distort chronological time and identity, but Proust is in control of the writing, especially where time is strangely compressed (the age of the narrator, somewhere between child and adult, at the beginning) or narrrative voice is suddenly metaleptic (the famous passage in The Captive in which Albertine might have called the narrator Marcel). Fosse paints with a large brush, sometimes expressively and other times sloppily.

It isn’t sufficient to criticize a book, or a work of art in general, because it is done too quickly, or revised too little, because so many counterexamples can prove that sort of judgment wrong, from Whistler’s suit against Ruskin to writers like César Aira, the Bolaño of 2666, Tao Lin, Jesse Ball, or Mark Leyner. Intuition can be strong magic. There’s a suggestion early on in Septology that is fairly spectacular—that the main character has been permanently damaged by his alcoholism and more or less continuously experiences the hallucination that his younger, alcoholic self lives an hour away and might be rescued. Yet in order for that to be a serious possibility, the constructions of dreams, daydreams, and waking truths would need to be adjusted so they are individually coherent enough to permit readers to doubt each of them in turn, and hold the forms of their depictions in mind—as William Empson would say—as the books progress. As proof of this I offer the fact that no reviewer takes seriously the possibility that there is only one Asle: the reality and temporality we’re given is too consistent, and the characters’ dreams, daydreams, and hallucinations are too safely sequestered in the times they’re exhausted or actually sleeping.

Like his one-time student Knausgaard, Fosse is a relentless repeater of everyday actions and trivial conversation. I marked many passages as anticipations of Knausgaard’s affectless inventorying of everyday life. It may be one of Knausgaard’s achievements to have realized that the mode of relentless reporting is not easily mixed with multiple dramas of life crises, drownings, molestation, and other events that happen in Fosse’s book. I think writers will see places where particular dreams and hallucinations could have been handled more carefully, so that readers could continue to entertain the possibility that the older Asle is sufficiently deeply deranged that he lives his waking life with a specter of his earlier self. That could be done, I think, without damaging the kind of bewildering shifts of identity that come from alcoholism or other derangements of the senses. In The Unnamable, Beckett’s unnamed narrator goes through a half-dozen changes of ontology and personal history, but the moments when readers might doubt Beckett’s control—for example when the narrators take credit for Beckett’s works—are embedded in a larger exploration of identity, which is observed and controlled by the author in several ways. (A good account of this, which reveals the contrast to Fosse, is Richardson’s Unnatural Voices, pp. 95-103).

The loose, improvisatory, lucid-dreaming strategy can work well, and its successes can make it seem that novelists like Nabokov who believe in control, who need elaborate structures, are somehow misguided about what serious fiction can be. Arno Schmidt developed an extensive and idiosyncratic theory about this: he called intuitive writers DPs, his German abbreviation for writer-priests, and accused them of dreaming when they should research, inventing when they should observe, plunging into fantasy when they should work on structure. But the snake bites its tail on every page of his magnum opus Bottom's Dream, because a lack of controlled structure oozes out between the thousands of elaborately planned arguments, plotted over years with the help of 60,000 notecards.

Control and intuition are tremendously difficult concepts. Fosse’s books are exceptionally loose, even by standards of the monologues in The Unnamable or recent long experiments in structurelessness like John Trefry’s Massive or (very differently) Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. Because I am trained as an art historian I tend to think of pictorial analogies. Large-scale gestural abstract paintings can be immersive and compelling, but unconvincing examples fill the storage rooms of museums and galleries. When the artists use dark tones to conjure occluded spiritual meaning, the canvases can become blurred and lugubrious, as in Hughie O’Donoghue’s earlier work or dark pieces by Makoto Fujimura. Some of the enormous gestures in O’Donoghue’s work are brilliant, but the expressiveness of others is blurred.

In the Septology individual passages are compelling, but I don’t trust the whole. It can be wonderful to be lost in a large abstract painting, or a long book of fiction, provided the looseness you experience at any given moment can be correlated with the incompletion or ineffability of the world, and does not seem to be an effect of the author's assumption that intuitive writing will carry the day if only it is felt deeply enough.

In 2013 Marilynne Robinson was the subject of one of the New York Times’s one-page “By the Book” interviews. They asked one of their stock questions: “If you could meet any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?” She answered:

A wonderful writer has given the best of herself or himself in the work. I think many of them are frustrated by the thinness and inadequacy of ordinary spoken language, of ordinary contact even with the people they know best and love best. They turn to writing for this reason. I think many of them are magnanimous in a degree their lives cannot otherwise express. To meet Emily Dickinson or Henry James would be, from their side, to intrude on them, maybe even to make them feel inadequate to expectation. I can’t imagine being a sufficient reason for the disruption. We do have their books. That being said, I would like to meet William James.

As far as I know Robinson is the only author who has answered this way. Everyone else names four or five guests they’d invite to what’s now called their “literary dinner party.” To me, the guest lists sound like recipes for long speeches or awkward silences.

I can image some authors would feel inadequate when faced by their posthumous admirers, but I suspect Robinson was just being polite. Part of what she’s saying here is that the question is wrong because novelists exist, optimally, in their books. Behind that, I think, is another truth: there are reasons for novelists not to be social.

Isolation in the age of social media

Fiction writing has become a gregarious and institutionalized activity. There are almost 20,000 applications each year to the 250 MFA programs in the US, and 15,000 people go to the AWP conference. Kindle Direct Publishing releases over 1,400,000 titles each year. Matt Wilkens, who teaches literature at Notre Dame, estimates 100,000 long-form prose works of fiction are published each year. According to another estimate 50,000 fiction titles are published annually in the US.

The Nonconformist site lists over 100 English-language literary journals, and Wikipedia has a list of about 400 titles. I teach experimental writing in Chicago, and my students and I have assembled a list of over 300 journals that are currently accepting English-language submissions for fiction and poetry: far too many, it seems, for anyone to read. Whatever the totals are, they suggest an enormous field, sustained by uncountable posts, reviews, and paid placements. This is the online energy field where we mainly live. It leads the poet and journalist John Michael Colón to say there’s no “bigger lie” than that every writer writes alone. “Writers not only don’t work alone,” he claims, “they can’t.” He sees a vibrant mobile community of writers talking to writers, with “editors and collaborators” who are “invested in questions of beauty, in histories of forms; in digging up the neglected works that always ought to have been classics… in ruthless mutual critique.” The sheer unmeasurable extent of the contemporary writing and publishing scene enables and foments this kind of gregariousness.

It might seem that in this crush of voices there is no longer room, in imagination or in fact, for a genuinely isolated writer. Yet in this essay I’d like to take Robinson’s side and argue in favor of solitude, both as fact and goal. Not the romantic loneliness of the stereotypical garret, but one that comes from acknowledging the gulf between the actual writing, which as everyone knows is necessarily done on one’s own, and its imagined reception. There is deep isolation hiding in the crowded noises of the internet, and yet, as Robinson says, there are reasons not to meet living authors, and even reasons not to entertain them in your mind.

The professionalization of the online community

Much of the literary world is fixated on success. People give and seek advice, share tips, sum up their problems and solutions. There’s a lot of networking and a fair amount of gossip. People are focused on this season’s most anticipated novel, the highest advance, the latest rumor about longlisting or shortlisting, the book that it seems everyone else has read, the most unexpected ebook breakthrough. It’s also professionalized. The majority of the literary fiction world is focused on novelists who begin in their twenties and thirties, go to MFA programs, write a number of novels, get reviews and maybe write some, tweet about literature, teach or get fellowships, and in general participate in the literary world.

I’m not immune to this. I read writers’ magazines, I go to conferences including the AWP, the MLA, and the SLS (Society for Novel Studies), and I subscribe to the London Review of Books, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Literary Review, The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, White Room, Fiction, Two Lines, Music and Literature, and some others. I try to keep up with the latest fiction. At the same time, I don’t feel I’m part of these conversations. The writers in most of these publications and conferences are nourishing careers or hoping to start them. They are submitting and publishing, gathering followers and readers. The publishers and self-publishers are advertising. The readers are reaching out for community. One of the most common literary posts on social media is the photo of the book someone’s just started, with minimal comment: it’s fishing for connections.

In all this it’s taken for granted that novel writing is a profession or a calling. If you publish a well-received first novel, you’re expected to write another, and ideally to keep coming up with a novel every year or two. This professional habit has produced a lot of poor novels. Even the best novelists are hobbled by the expectation that they continue to produce on a fairly regular schedule. Think of Atwood, Oates, Pynchon, Amis, Self, Proulx, Updike, Rushdie: each has written the kind of book that is clearly a stopgap, a way of assembling a couple hundred pages of marketable prose to keep their career going. It’s inevitable that some books will be major and others won’t quite work. If I compare books written as installments in ongoing careers with those written by writers who thought only of one book, and had no reasonable hopes of a career, the difference is stark. Compare Umberto Eco’s Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna or Ali Smith’s Companion Piece (to take two examples, nearly at random) to Pessoa’s Book of Disquietude or Musil’s Man Without Qualities, and you can see the difference: Musil and Pessoa were not concerned with filling out 200 pages, making something their agent would like, that might fulfill a contract, work well in translation, or garner an invitation to speak or teach.

It’s a different world when the idea of a career and a steady public is not on the table. How many novelists would have changed direction if it weren’t for the necessity of making a living or living up to the expectations of the profession?

Being honest about fame and ambition

I think it’s important to be as honest about fame as possible. Unless you’re in the top fraction of one percent, in a couple of years your work won’t be read at all, and it almost certainly won’t be read in a decade or two, or after you’ve died.

There’s an art project in Norway called the Future Library, which commissions books that cannot be read for 100 years. The books will be printed a century after the manuscripts are deposited in the library. The artist who runs the project, Kate Paterson, solicited the first manuscripts from well-known authors including Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell. The assumption is that in 100 years people will be curious to see their books. I think history teaches otherwise: in 100 years neither Atwood nor Mitchell will be known to anyone except a few historians. In the future the Future Library might be of interest, but only as an early 21st century art project, and the books in the Future Library will not be any more likely to be read than the other 100,000 novels published each and every year.

The attraction of fame, as Lewis Carroll misquoted it, is the “last infirmity of noble minds.” That’s from the preface to his often forgotten novel Sylvie and Bruno, and Carroll is intentionally misquoting J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, who said ambition was the last infirmity. But fame is famously elusive and, like objects in the car’s side mirror, it may appear larger than it actually is.

I’d like to make the case that a serious approach to literature, from a writer’s point of view, depends on trying to think clearly about the fact that almost none of us are or will be famous, that virtually all of us will be forgotten, that social media will not help. Even novels by Booker and Nobel prizewinners are unlikely to be read a couple of decades after their authors have died. If you doubt this, you might consider how many people read the first two decades of Nobel prizewinners, from 1901 to 1921: that’s a bit over a hundred years in the past, which is as far back as the Future Library project imagines its future readers will want to look.

Writing as a way of learning about relationships, memory, and love

It isn’t easy to think about how we’ll all be forgotten, but it has a salutary effect. I can’t agree, for example, with writers who acknowledge that their works will fade from view but say they write for their own pleasure, or for “fun”: it’s only fun if you’re also privately imagining how your work might be read after all. I write novels because serious fiction seems like one of the most challenging things I can think of doing. I want to see what I can do, what I can understand. In the course of writing I have learned a tremendous amount about fiction, about reading, and about myself. I have a better sense of how narrative works, how voice creates meaning, how subtle and complex verb tenses can be. These things improve my writing, I hope, but they also affect how I experience other people, in real life and in books. I am more attentive now to the way a person emerges from the words she speaks, how people think of each other as fictions, how stories change the way we think of people we love, how our deceptive memories shape our lives.

By writing fiction I have discovered some surprising things: for example that describing memories does not necessarily bring them to life. It can be the opposite: in the process of writing fiction I have overwritten some of my own memories. The act of writing has replaced them with something different, and I’ve effectively lost some of my own memories to this project. I’ve also learned why some novelists don’t show their work in progress to the people in their family: it’s not necessarily because they are writing about embarrassing secrets; in my case, at least, it’s because the people I love occupy such a central part of my imagination that if I was to show them what I’m writing, my thoughts about their reaction would crowd out my ability to imagine things on my own. It’s a lesson in how powerful love is.

As Phil Jourdan says in the essay “On Writing Books for Nobody” (Litreactor, March 2017), writing without a thought of publication “is not just a massive act of dissociation.” Rather it’s “a way of reconnecting with disowned aspects of ourselves,” and, I’ll add, of understanding ourselves differently, and possibly better, than we can when we’re distracted by other people’s approval.

How to write for yourself

So here’s one of my morals: write for yourself, to help you understand how narratives work in life. At the same time you don’t need to write alone, and philosophers and literary critics will tell you it’s impossible anyway. There’s always an imaginary other, a “model reader” (to use Umberto Eco’s useful expression) who’s there in the corner of your mind. To write a novel or a poem, they say, you need to have a sense of a reader: your mental picture doesn’t have to be exact or personalized, but no work exists without an imaginary third participant. There’s always you, your work, and the idea of a reader, no matter how abstract. This is why it is never possible to write entirely alone, even though it is possible to write only for yourself.

Yet the model reader is a dangerous creature, because with just the tiniest nod of encouragement it grows into the monster of desire for fame. It’s a matter of keeping the model reader singular and imaginary. (Not multiple, like the panel of the Booker Prize, or professionalized, like an agent.)

When your model reader multiplies or begins to look like that editor who won’t look at your work, anxieties about success leach into the writing, turning it skittish or unstable, giving it a tone that’s not its own, making it untrue to itself. I know this from my own field: when I read the work of other art historians, I learn about Van Gogh or ancient Egypt, but at the same time I hear, in the writing, the historians’ anxiety about how their work will be received in the profession, how it will help their careers, how it will be accepted by famous art historians. The writing is supposed to be about art, but it is really about scholars’ insecurities and hopes. The exact same thing happens in fiction writing: when I read a new novel written by a young or mid-career writer, no matter what story it’s telling, I often hear the author’s concern about their career, about the famous authors or editors they’re writing for, the powerful critics they’re hoping to attract, or the previous novel they’re trying to surpass. The social world of literature is more than a distraction: it is a tidal force that pulls the work out of itself and onto a quaking ground of career insecurity.

My model reader is a person who has read the novelists I admire, and is open to long, complex works, the sort I try to write. I know a few in real life, but what’s more important is that my model reader doesn’t need to be any real person in particular: they’re a potential reader, often present in my imagination while I write. For authors like Joyce, Beckett, and Arno Schmidt, the model reader seems often to have been a conveniently unidentifiable version of themselves.

Writing fiction is an isolating experience. Writing fiction that is long and complex and does not meet market expectations for relevance is exponentially more isolating. “Experimental” literary fiction is produced at a loss for publishers. It seems even the most dedicated “experimental” novelists try to ignore these conditions, ornamenting their lives with social media, working hard on the few options for publicity. All this seems wrong to me.

The model reader helps prevent me from dreaming about amazing editors and agents, vast distribution, back cover endorsements, reviews in the New York Times, excerpts in the Paris Review, prizes, bookstores full of rapt listeners. I am not hoping to read an excerpt of my book onstage at a literary festival. The singular imaginary reader is the only strictly necessary public.

Putting the isolation of the internet into the writing

Mark McGurl says Amazon has become so entangled in publishing that it has changed what literary fiction is. “The influence of Amazon on contemporary literature,” he says, “is more abstract but also more pervasive” than MFA programs. Writers of literary fiction should work with an awareness of their actual social conditions: Substack, Kindle, self-publishing, online reviews, and the hegemony of Amazon should be infused in our work no matter our subject.

This means, in particular, that the peculiar contemporary form of writer’s isolation should also be part of fiction. We aren’t isolated in the ways authors used to be, cut off unless we write letters, alone in our stereotypical garrets. We’re isolated in the way people are now: surrounded every day by hundreds and even thousands of posts and videos advertising successes and praising celebrity. Continuously reading unending streams of reviews, in Bookforum and TikTok, on Goodreads and in Critical Inquiry. Endlessly buffeted by likes, proclamations of connection, and the happiness they provide. Trapped in an anhedonic room, tangled in with what Guy Debord thought of as the spider web of the media spectacle. Isolated in a writing world dense with people. That’s our condition, and we should not try to put it aside when we write. It needs to be present — implicitly, pervasively — in whatever we write.

It is necessary to acknowledge this isolation at the level of the novel itself, and not just on social media. I have spent twenty years of my life writing fiction. My readers are the sum total of the people who wrote endorsements, and about a dozen others whom I know. Meanwhile every day I am exposed to the world of publishers, bloggers, reviewers, bookstore owners, publicists, and agents, who continue to broadcast their many connections. If I do not find a way to express, acknowledge, or embody that isolation in the book itself, no matter what its actual subject might be, I disconnect the fiction from a large part of the feeling that necessarily suffused its making. No “experimental” literary fiction should be written without traces of its author’s isolation. This applies even to Finnegans Wake, whose author was at once the world’s most famous writer and also spectacularly and apparently permanently isolated by his work. Using social media and hoping for publicity and success are not just unrealistic, they occlude the writing’s full expressive potential by dividing the writer into dedicated author and quixotic self-publicist.

That imaginary dinner

So if I could meet any author, dead or alive, who would it be? Stravinsky and Schoenberg lived ten miles from each other in Los Angeles, and never met. And indeed, why should they? After half a lifetime of listening to each other’s music, what would have been worth saying? Faulkner and Hemingway never met, and according to Joseph Urgo, one of the editors of Faulkner and his Contemporaries, they “never seemed even to want to meet.”

If I’ve read an author enough, their work suggests answers to my questions. If I have a simple question an interview or a letter might clear it up. Any deeper or more interesting question will be unanswerable by definition, because fiction is a complete world, and like any person, it makes assumptions, has prejudices, and nourishes blind spots that just won’t be cleared up by talking. You can see your author’s way of thinking, and you know that some questions just won’t register. Why bother to ask Houellebecq what he really thinks of France? Why waste time asking Sally Rooney what she thinks writing is aside from people? The best interviews, like the ones in the Paris Review, are artificial concoctions of many meetings, aimed at helping readers feel they know the author and the way they write. But if the writing’s good, all that is in the books already, and anything else is beside the point.

If I could meet any author, dead or alive, it would be Faltonia Betitia Proba, a woman who lived in Rome in the 4th century. Only one of her poems survives, and it’s a cento, a kind of poem made entirely of quotations from other authors, in this case Virgil. So we do have one thing she wrote, except that we don’t, because she didn’t write a line of her own poem. I’d like to ask her: Do you have anything else to show me?

Yet complexity and length are often intertwined, and it can be hard to prize them apart. My qualifications to speak about this are the usual sieges I’ve conducted on long novels, from Antagony to the Septology, from Szentkuthy to Ellmann, from Cao Xueqin and Journey to the West to fan fiction (the world’s longest fiction!) and Alexis Wright. I have also moderated several international reading groups: one on Finnegans Wake, another on translations of that novel, a third on Arno Schmidt’s Zettel’s Traum (translated as Bottom’s Dream), and a fourth on Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual. (The last two are ongoing, and everyone is welcome.) My interest is in the end very practical: I’ve written a long, complex novel about long, complex novels, so I’ve been reading with an eye to seeing how writers have managed to keep a sense of order in very lengthy projects. More on that at the end.

Complexity in art is not an easy subject. It’s tarnished by its association with privileged, over-educated white male writers, from Joyce and Proust to David Foster Wallace. And it’s ideologically ruined by its association with the Frankfurt School of modernist criticism, according to which serious, ambitious modern art has to be complex. I have a different and simpler idea of complexity. I like to think of it as a property that emerges naturally when a book is long enough. That’s because, as Montaigne knew, and despite our best intentions, thought wanders where it wants, and so do moods and feelings. Any novel that gives itself the space will eventually go off topic. War and Peace has twenty-four philosophical essays in it. The Man without Qualities begins as essays, gets lost, and stays lost.

It helps to distinguish what I’ll call genuine complexity from simple complexity. A highrise building is complex in an uninteresting way: its storeys repeat over and over, and although it may have features like rooftop ornaments or a tuned mass damper, it’s fundamentally a massive iteration. A highrise involves a lot of engineering and specialized skills, and in that sense it isn’t like buildings before the Industrial Revolution, but I’m not happy calling that “complexity” because in the end it’s mechanical.

I’d like to call things like jets, atomic clocks, particle accelerators, and highrise buildings “intricate,” and reserve “complex” for objects that don’t clearly or consistently follow precedents, patterns, or formulas—objects that are in effect unique or unclassifiable. Among buildings, that would be any number of medieval cathedrals, Hindu and Jain temples, and recent one-of-a-kind buildings like the Sagrada Familia. Expensive watches have “complications”: logically speaking, they are mechanisms that refine the control and display of time—but the watches still work as watches. Each bevel and gear plays its part and comforms to engineering and mechanical expectations. Complications are intricate but not complex.

By the same reasoning I don’t count murder mysteries as genuinely complex. They often have elaborate plots, but in the end everything’s tied up. A genuinely complex murder mystery, in this sense, would be Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur, because nothing’s resolved (and nothing may have taken place). Or Georges Perec’s unfinished final novel, 53 Days, which would have contained at least five levels of books-within-books, and would almost certainly not have been a complete, working, logically closed system like Agathe Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Ellery Queen’s Greek Coffin Mystery.

Complexity, in this sense, involves undermining expectations about function and form. Does the watch tell time? Is it even a watch?

A complex novel will undermine a reader’s expectations as it goes. Is this a murder mystery at all? Maybe it’s a memoir, or an autofiction, or a romance… or possibly nothing that’s identifiable. It will keep the reader guessing about form and structure. When does that opening scene in Infinite Jest take place? What kind of thinking—Pietsch’s or Wallace’s—went into the ordering of episodes? The reader will wonder about the author’s control of form. What does it say about Musil’s sense of structure and plot that he has chapters with titles like “Excursion into the Realm of Logic and Morals” or “Explanation and Interruptions of a Normal State of Consciousness”? What kind of structure can we expect of Jon Fosse’s Septology when it has two nearly identical characters with the same name, and others, like Mehrfachgänger (multiple Doppelgängers), waiting in the wings?

So a complex novel is one that keeps you wondering not only about the main characters or the plot, but about the book you’re reading and its author. Part of this has to do with length. Why do they keep going past page 1,000? Does Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling need to be 1,321 pages long? Did Arno Schmidt need to write the equivalent of 6,000 pages about four people taking about Edgar Allan Poe? How did Lucy Ellmann know when she’d told us enough about her character’s thoughts?

But another part, the more important one, has to do with complexity. What does the author think they’re doing? What sort of book do they think they’re writing? Do they imagine their readers can understand everything? Why don’t they settle into a more normal, conventional kind of story—something less complex?

This by way of saying two simple things about complexity:

1. It is something that happens eventually, inevitably, to any book over a certain length. Here I’m only expanding the famous line by Randall Jarrell, “a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it,” which was in turn an echo of Ruskin, whose Fors Clavigera is a model of lack of interest in clear structure.

2. Complexity, in the sense that interests me, means avoiding ordinary form and genre; with the implication that the most truly complex novels do not resemble any earlier novels. Even today there is no consensus about what books in the history of literature precede Finnegans Wake or Zettel’s Traum. When you’re reading a genuinely complex novel, part of your experience is wondering what you’re reading, how it was put together, what justified the author’s choices, and what previous models the author may have had. When you finish it all the guesses you had will be wrong, and the novel will only be like itself, and not like any other.

In A Short Introduction to Anneliese, my own answer to all this, the not-so-slightly demented Anneliese worries about her hundreds of notebooks: is all the work she’s done over the last twenty years actually nonsense? Has she kept control of her massive project, is it readable? She spends a year reading other long books, some fiction—including the world’s longest fan fiction, and several massive books generated by computer—and some nonfiction, such as Aquinas’s Summa theologica and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

Her conclusion is my own: how could it be otherwise, since I also spent twenty years writing A Short Introduction to Anneliese and the novels that go with it, and since (unlike, for example, Ottessa Moshfegh or Peter Kien in Elias Canetti’s in Auto-da-fé) I actually read the books Anneliese talks about. Here’s Anneliese’s conclusion to her unrelaxing year of reading long, complex books:

Or, in a word: in fiction, complexity is insanity. Any novel that gives itself the space will eventually wander away from its own structure, its opening mood, its sense of itself. Once a novel goes over a certain length it risks losing rational control, and for me that is the very strong appeal of long, complex books.

This essay is elaborated from one of the “Four Sour and Stringent Proposals for the Novel,” which appeared in the Athenaeum Review.

This series was originally called “Writers who won’t tell us what their characters are thinking,” but that didn’t capture the theme that interests me, because it includes taciturn characters like the ones in Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Carver. Their mystery is only temporary: eventually we understand the murderer’s plans, the detective’s suspicions, the silent hero’s wounded heart. The new title sounds like I might be interested in pathology or injury, but it signals the strangeness I am after: I’m curious about minds, in fiction, that remain partly opaque, redacted, or empty. A less dramatic title might have been Incomplete Minds in Fiction.

Here’s the series:

1. Introduction (this post)

2. Books with "black holes" instead of central characters

3. Characters with no motivation

4. Why unusual mental states may not need to be explained

5. Toward a theory of incomplete minds

I’ve been thinking out loud, as it were, and these posts are open to comments. I’d love to hear about other examples and theories. I’m grateful to and for comments on earlier versions.

The idea of “showing” actions rather than “telling” about inner states is a favorite in writing workshops, and among poststructuralists from Blanchot to Jameson. Its roots are actually popular and non-French: the principal modernist pioneer of reported speech, with no access to characters’ thoughts, is Hemingway. Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939) is another prewar example. Its opening sentence— “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” — is a manifesto of non-introspective formalism.

The most thorough modern exploration of the excluded inner life is Alain Robbe-Grillet, in particular his four novels from the 1950s. His programmatic approach to writing and penchant for theorizing every move he made, make these early novels useful as models of the limitations of what Genette called “external focalization”—where the narrator doesn’t tell us things that the character thinks, even if the novel is constructed in such a way that both the character and the implied author know everything.

Robbe-Grillet makes clean breaks between thoughts his characters reveal—for example, the detective’s strategies in Les Gommes—and those that remain unwritten. Unclarity on that score creates confusion about authorial control, because it can be hard to distinguish the simple absence of thoughts and the implied author’s decision to omit certain thoughts from the character’s partial self-awareness, and impossible to decide whether some striking omission is deliberate or is just how the author thinks—or how he thinks other people think, or how he thinks other people’s thoughts should be represented… and so forth. When Kazuo Ishiguro’s characters suppress their emotions, they become unreliable narrators, because we can’t be sure what they repress, in the Freudian sense (what they are genuinely unaware of) and what they prefer not to think about, and the same ambiguity goes for our understanding of the implied author: what does he habitually avoid, and what is he incapable of articulating?

It would be surprising if Hemingway had invented something as fundamental as refusing access to inner states. Most fiction writing, in most cultures, has been about what people do and not what they think. This has always been the case in epics, from the Tibetan Epic of King Kesar to the Icelandic sagas. Odysseus, Achilles, Aeneas tell us their feelings at moments of crisis or strategic planning, but except for those episodes we have mainly their actions. Auðr djúpúðga is known as “Aud the Deep-Minded” in Icelandic sagas, not because she spends pages in deep introspection, but because she has insight and strategic skills. We don’t eavesdrop on Aud or Odysseus when they lie in bed awake, pondering their places in life.

In modern fiction a lack of access to inner states can amount to a writer’s declaration of disobedience. It produces a postmodern effect and can spark a sense that affect has been flattened along with access.

Dashiell Hammett

Hemingway’s laconic characters owe something to detective fiction like Hammett and Carver, and to the wider phenomenon of the silent, inscrutable hero (almost always male) who says very little, but turns out to be deeply wounded by loss or injustice. From Humphrey Bogart to Jason Statham, from Joseph Cotton to Vin Diesel, the movies are full of taciturn male characters who are hard to read. Genette makes an acute observation about fictional narratives that focus on the experiences of a single person (the detective, the hero) but refuse to tell us what’s in their minds: he says that it can’t be continued indefinitely. Detective fiction makes a virtue of withholding, because in the end we hear the detective’s theories, the murderer’s motives, and the secret trauma that made the hero into the strong silent type to begin with.

The strategies for deferring disclosure can themselves be interesting. In Hammett’s Red Harvest, the hero’s habit of keeping his cards close to his chest is noted just three pages into the book: “you’re so excessively secretive,” Mrs. Willsson says, “that I can’t help being curious”—of course while keeping lots of secrets of her own. This introduces the theme of strategic silence, and makes a reader wonder: has the character been keeping things from us? Just a few pages later, he hands someone a fake business card, and remarks—to us—“there wasn’t a word of truth in it” (p. 7). The apostrophe is surprising, as if we’re his confidante (he trusts us, as readers, enough to tell us he’s lying) but also not close enough to him to hear the truth. In the book’s first confrontation, an acquaintance guesses what’s beein going on in the town, and the narrator replies, “There seem to be a few things wrong with that guess” (p. 10). We don’t learn until 27 pages later what he thinks those things are. The next day he abruptly changes plans, but we’re treated just like children who can’t be told what adults do: the hero just thinks, “I was half a block from it when something changed my mind” (p. 13).

Part of the pleasure of the book is the variety of ways in which the characters, the narrator, and the implied author keep secrets. The reason none of this engages me is that eventually, the missing thoughts will be filled in. Even the loose ends and mysteries that are typical of detective fiction and film noir (think of “Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown”) are understood to be solvable in the sense that the characters’ motives and rationales are known. I’m not interested in unsolved mysteries: I am interested in unsolved minds.

A simple graph

A way to begin thinking about the more general problem of incomplete fictional minds is to use the metaphor, common in literary theory, of “access”: how much of a character’s mind do we get to see? It’s a way of approaching a slightly but crucially different question: How much is there to see?

At the top is whatever appears as adequate or even unlimited access to a character’s mental states. The examples at the top are a mixed group, and I could have put many of the novels published in the last year in the same place. The default position in first-person and focalized third-person narrative is full access.

In McBride’s The City Changes Its Face, a smaller font size sometimes appears in the narrator’s thoughts; it is reserved for her second thoughts within her thoughts. She silences her own deeper ideas by whispering them, as it were, while she thinks. This produces the sense that we’re not missing anything. Unless there are littler whispers within the whispers, whatever crosses her consciousness is there on the page. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy isn’t her entire mental life, but it is during those minutes. And Lucy Ellmann’s thousand-page monologue isn’t the entirety of its owner’s mind, but it feels like an unabridged inventory of her tics, “the fact that” observations, fantasies, turns of logic, patterns of association, and depths explored and rejected. What counts here is the appearance of unlimited access.

In the middle are examples of authors who try to limit what we know of the character’s thoughts, or what the characters know of their own thoughts. In Solstad’s novel the eponymous character has no clear idea why he has decided to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair (he has no problem walking). Cusk’s novel is the closely drawn negative space around her protagonist’s life.

At the bottom I have put some examples from epic poems and sagas. In epics it is typical—perhaps even definitional—that the heroes are known mainly by their action, and there isn’t consistent access to their thoughts. Unlimited numbers of epics could also be placed here: many more, even, than the romantic and modern novels that could be put at the top. The rarefied area is the middle.

A less simple graph

A curious complication makes this game more interesting. Access to a person’s thoughts doesn’t always align with understanding. The horizontal axis maps that: on the right are characters we are supposed to understand. In the darker region on the left are characters meant to remain mysterious.

It’s a puzzle that some of the most puzzling characters in fiction are also the most loquacious. They talk endlessly, and may even show depths of introspective awareness, and yet we don’t understand them. This corresponds, somewhat, to real life. We usually think that the more we get to know someone, the longer they spend talking, the more we’ll understand them. And yet we know that isn’t always true. I have friends and relatives I’ve known for years whom I just can’t understand.

The great precedent in fiction is the opening part, called “Underground,” in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. The narrator’s tumultuous thoughts are presented as a full, real-time inventory of his thoughts but they don’t yield much clarity. Mid-century modernist fiction is replete with examples: the ranting characters in Thomas Bernhard, whose words can seem astonishingly ineffectual at doing anything except binding them even more tightly, like ropes running around and around their necks and their feet; Michel Butor’s Jacques Revel in Passing Time, whose introspection produces confusion; David Markson’s unnamed character in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, who tells us her thoughts but remains sealed inside her desperate, dissociative frame of mind; Beckett’s protagonists, especially Mahood or Worm in The Unnamable; Camus’s Meursault in The Stranger, who doesn’t seem to understand himself any more than we do, despite the fact that we can listen in on his few thoughts; and William Burroughs’s William Lee in Naked Lunch, who is sometimes in our world and other times definitely not.

There are many in-between cases. Perry Smith, one of the murderers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, is full of reflections on what he’s done, even if they’re undependable and prone to sudden revisions. But the level of introspection is not consistent: sometimes he knows how to think his way to remorse, and other times he’s satisfied with denials. The implied author gives us full access to Perry’s mind, leaving nothing conscious out of the account—except at crucial moments like the murders.

Almost all these books are mid-century novels, so it’s not a coincidence that they share a sense of the limitations, uselessness, or emptiness of introspection, the inadvisability, irrelevance, or impossibility of representing inner states at all, and an appreciation of a strangeness that self-awareness can’t seem to touch.

After mid-century several authors continued to explore these possibilities. I think of Christine Brooke-Rose this way. One of the most loquacious narrators in postwar fiction is Daniel Pagenstecher in Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream. He talks almost continuously for 1,300 pages, and we have access to his opinions and theories on Edgar Allan Poe (subject of the book), natural history, nineteenth-century literature, and young women, but we are not given a sense of anything in his mind beyond his endless inventorying of facts and descriptions. As in Camus’s Mearsault, there’s little empathy and no doubt, and there’s often a sense that the character and the author have teamed up to limit our access.

Down in the corner

In the dark lower-left hand corner I’ve put Robbe-Grillet. In four novels from the 1950s we have a programmatic, nearly perfect and impermeable lack of access to the characters’ thoughts beyond mechanical decision-making. In the book In the Labyrinth, there’s the question about how to walk across town; in The Voyeur, how to walk around on an island; in Les Gommes, how to solve a crime. At the same time, we have exhaustive access to their eyes, and we’re subjected to apparently endless inventories of things they happen to see. The result is extremely strange characters, hulled of thought but acutely attentive. Emotion pours out of their mechanistically described itineraries. In what sense do we understand them? In The Voyeur, Mathias seems to want to evade being caught—but does he, really? In Jealousy, the narrator is so suppressed that we have to infer he is “A”’s husband, and Robbe-Grillet even tries to avoid the first person singular pronoun.

Why pose these questions? And why wonder about the dark corners?

It’s a writing problem, and an open question for the state of the novel. I would like to write a character who is aware, articulate, and thoughtful, but whose mind is largely inaccessible both to readers and to himself, not because of trauma or neurodivergence but because both the character and the author have arranged things that way. This seems to me like an interesting challenge for contemporary fiction in the long shadow of romantic and later psychological fiction, with its interest in depth and interiority, and especially in the wake of Robbe-Grillet, constrained writing, and theorists from Blanchot to Jameson who are tired of authors dipping into their characters’ minds “like mustard pots” as one of my favorite critics says.

This will be the fourth novel in the five-volume project called Five Strange Languages, to be called Ghosts Are. It will be out sometime after 2027. Two of the five volumes are out now.

Meanwhile I’m collecting examples of these problems—either literary critics or novelists—if anyone has suggestions. If you were to play this x-y game, what would your graph look like?

This series continues with three posts on specific books, and a concluding attempt at theorizing these missing mental states.

I’d like to jettison talk about streams of consciousness. Rants and monologues are most interesting when they’re not imagined mainly as windows into the mind or transcriptions of inner life. For example they ruin plots, because nothing much can happen while a character is endlessly talking: they corrode ordinary narrative structure. Long monologues break narrative as well as social decorum: we hear a lot, too much, about just one person, at the expense of other people and the rest of the world. These are strong tools to disrupt normative storytelling.

I’m interested in how it might be possible to write a full-length fiction comprised almost exclusively of just one person’s words, even if that person refuses to listen to other people, even if their monologue has no form or direction or reason to stop. My own solution is A Short Introduction to Anneliese, about which more at the end.

Why monologues and rants are different from streams of consciousness
The reviews of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport tended to make generalized references to the novel’s “single sentence” (it isn’t a sentence) and the narrator’s “stream of consciousness” (it isn’t).2

Grammatically, the narrator’s book-length chain of thoughts is no more a sentence than the one in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones or Mathias Enard’s Zone: it is a paragraphless run-on sentence, clauses linked by commas. Part of the idea is to register what is called “interior monologue”: the presented contents of consciousness, the continuous string of fragments and impressions chosen in the instant by the narrator. In this sense “interior monologue” is related to the more famous expression “stream of consciousness,” coined by William James, which can break with grammar more definitively, producing fragments and anacoluthons and not only run-on successions of parallel clauses.

The reviews also say that with the exception of a dozen brief passages about the life of a mountain lion, all 1,020 pages take place in the narrator’s mind. For me, they don’t: many, and in the end most, take place in the mind of the implied author. Parul Sehgal says the novel’s form “mimics the way our minds move now” (NYT, September 3, 2019). This is because it toggles “between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry.” I do not think the actual author, Lucy Ellmann, wanted her readers to spend much time thinking about how the book was written: there’s nothing metafictional in the text, no references to how the narrator might have written everything down, and strangely not even any references to surfing the internet, even though the narrator was clearly surfing all day long to check things, just as the implied author must have done. I find myself thinking about Lucy Ellmann, the book’s actual author, and also about what the critic Wayne Booth called the “implied author,” the person the narrative allows us to imagine writing the book, even though nothing in the narrative leads me to think I’m supposed to be concerned wuth anything except the narrator’s thoughts. It is, I think, impossible not to imagine the implied author writing the book with tabs open to Wikipedia, Google, the OED, and other sources. Yet the avalanche of information we receive is supposedly all recalled from some unspecified earlier time in the day or the narrator’s life when she was surfing.

If the book were intended to represent a literal stream of consciousness, we’d have to be told she is on her phone or her computer at virtually every moment, looking up things she can use. As it is, we’re supposed to imagine that the narrator has done all that poking around before she began the book, and that she just brings all the words and facts to mind without surfing for inspiration or accuracy. I found that conceit unconvincing and unnecessary: why couldn’t we have been told about the scattered minutes and seconds (collectively, the hours) she spends on her phone or computer? Why are the narrator and the author so coy about describing what it’s like to spend so much time surfing? She’s even reticent about informing us when she watches cable television and listens to the radio (p. 190). It’s intrusive, too, when the narrator “remembers” long lists of facts of the sort that can’t plausibly be recalled so precisely (like “the fact that demoic acid is killing birds and seals in Oxnard, Southern California,” p. 249). Things like that were clearly transcribed from a screen by the actual author and the narrator (pp. 266, 678).

I picture the book being written in one pass, with brief stops made many times a page to look things up, augmented by multiple passes for revision, planned repetition, augmentation, and even contradiction. That entire process is meant to be invisible (we’re meant to think only of the narrator, in real time), but it isn’t, because we are compelled to picture it whenever the narrator’s rhythms of reference refer us back to the implied author who wrote them down. This is, in short, an inadequately self-referential narrative, or, to put it the other way around, a narrative inadequately sealed off from references to the conditions of its production in the name of representing a stream of consciousness.

Still, it’s a memorable thousand pages. A solution to these issues, I think, is to give up the idea that a monologue or rant represents the stream of consciousness. The motive for abandoning the flow of consciousness isn’t to update modernism: it’s to focus on the rant itself, its language, its structure. Then Ducks, Newburyport becomes an exercise in interrupted writing, association, and research, rather than a picture of thinking.

I am aware that there’s a long tradition of arguments against the idea that stream of consciousness represents actual thoughts, including Paul Ricoeur’s emphasis on the construction of narrative and Gérard Genette’s explorations of mediation. Dorrit Cohn and Brian McHale have also argued that stream of consciousness is a literary convention. But all this needs re-emphasizing given the critical reception of Ducks, Newburyport and the implication, in the book, that we’re following the narrator’s thoughts. I would rather read books like Ducks, Newburyport as negotiations between the avowed narrator (who never checks the internet) and the implied author (who always does, and whose consciousness is therefore more fragmented, and interrupted in more interesting ways, than her character’s).

The monologue in Simone de Beauvoir’s “Monologue” talks continuously, except for brief passages where she repeats what people say to her on the phone. When her estranged mother calls her, we get this:

“Was it you who rang me? … It surprised me too but after all on a night like this it could happen you might think of my grief and say to yourself that a mother and daughter can’t be on bad terms all their lives long; above all since I really can’t see what you can possibly blame me for… Don’t shout like that…”

She has hung up. She wants peace.

Two curious things happen here. We get to hear a snippet of Murielle’s mother’s rants, enough to wonder if the mother is the model. And we are momentarily relieved of the necessity of listening to Murielle’s rant, because she omits herself from her transcript. What did she say during those last two ellipses? Those interruptions move the monologue from the character’s mouth and mind to the implied author’s: in that sense monologues are fragile, even though they seem unstoppably strong.

Writing very long rants
This isn’t an easy thing to do. Beckett did, in the novel trilogy and especially The Unnamable. Thomas Bernhard did, and he’s had many imitators. Monologues (like Beckett’s) become rants (like Bernhard’s) when they’re perfused with endless anger, injustice, hopelessness, obsession, irritation, or prejudice. In recent incarnations those virtriolic moods can be tempered, less like Bernhard and more like Beckett. Emily Hall’s The Longcut, for example, has a calmer voice than any of Bernhard’s fictions. (I imagine readers of The Longcut may not see Bernhard in it, but his influence is very broad and often unacknowledged. It’s often useful to ask who first started a given way of writing: the question can lead to unexpected insights into familiar conventions.) But it is not easy to keep up the energy of a demented, irresolvable frame of mind.

Another difficulty with writing apparently endless pages of rant is to figure out what to do with the person who’s being addressed. If it’s a diary or an inner monologue the problem is solved, but at the expense of a hot-house interiority. If the character is speaking, how do they manage to silence their listener? And how long will a reader pay attention if they’re not given any information about the listener’s feelings?

The prince in Bernhard’s Gargoyles silences his listeners by the fact of being a prince, and being expected to speak as long as he wishes. Bernhard breaks up the pages by continuously quoting the prince, and sometimes breaking paragraphs even though nothing has changed and the prince is still speaking:

Jonathan Buckley’s Tell is a good recent example. It’s a series of five interviews with a filmmaker about a man who has disappeared. Once a page, on average, the narrator’s testimony stops, there’s a double-line break, and a notation like “[Indistinct]” or, occasionally, “[Pause].”

Buckley rings the changes on this device: sometimes it seems the recording didn’t pick up everything the witness said, and other times the filmmaker asks a question that’s not recorded. Most of the time Buckley ignores his own device, and so do we as readers.

I think it’s more interesting to try to tell something about the character of the person who’s listening, because then there’s a very strong contrast between the main narrator, about whom we know altogether too much, and the listener, who is only known through very short contributions.

In A Short Introduction to Anneliese, Samuel, the one who’s subjected to the rant, is actually the main character, although he is not yet known to the reader. When he interrupts he usually manages to say something potentially interesting before he’s cut off by Anneliese, whose relentless monologue goes on for pages at a time. The book began as an ordinary give-and-take conversation, but Anneliese took over, and I searched for ways to shrink Samuel’s share. In order to keep him as silent as possible and give Anneliese as much time as I could, I took his speeches and put them in her mouth. She anticipates what he is thinking and corrects him before he’s spoken. Several times she even announces that he doesn’t need to talk because she can explain things so much better that he ever could. (I got this idea from a strange dinner I had with Susan Sontag, who mentioned a book I’d written to a friend of hers, and then wouldn’t let me explain it, because, as she said, she could do so much better a job than I could.)

I think Anneliese’s rant and Samuel’s abbreviated interruptions may be the longest such exchange in fiction. The scraps we learn about Samuel accumulate slowly and never amount to a full portrait.

Rants that are not pleasant
Molly Bloom’s monologue is famously ecstatic, and Ducks, Newburyport is consistently entertaining and plausible in its diversions and quirks. The voice in The Unnamable is curiously detached from its literally existential danger, and therefore hypnotic as well as tedious. Emily Hall’s voice in The Longcut is quizzical and appealing in her indecisions.

In every monologue I know, the narrator is fundamentally sympathetic. That’s arguably a weakness of Ducks, Newburyport, because even after a thousand pages the narrator is only mildly and infrequently either fascinating or annoying, and that comes to seem implausible. Again Bernhard points the way: why not write a rebarbative, incomprehensible, unpleasant monologue, and make it as long as possible? That way the narrator’s hold on us is tenuous, and the reasons why the listener should run away pile up with each new page. It’s an interesting writing challenge: an unattractive voice, plagued by uncontrolled and unappeasable problems, a personality that does not develop or resolve (that’s the rant part), and yet can somehow hold a listener’s attention for a very long time.

What makes this a step beyond Bernhard is simply its length. Bernhard never wrote a long book, and it’s often been noticed that his books can be oddly self-similar. Like some of Bolaño’s, Bernhard’s books can seem to be excerpts from one single lifelong conversation. Bernhard somehow assessed the limits of each rant, even though there’s seldom anything in his plots that would legislate a page limit. that puzzle made me curious what would happen if the short-book limit is transgressed, and the rant continues—as its own logic suggests it should. A Short Introduction to Anneliese is the result.

If anyone has interesting examples of monologues that nearly silence their listeners, or rants that aren’t pleasant and yet continue at length, or any other strategies for extending and exploring the rant, I’d be interested to hear.

So I’m not asking, here, how best to describe mathematics, but how to put some of the actual language of mathematics, meaning the equations, right into the novel. It seems to me anything short of the appearance of real equations is an analogy, a metaphor, a conjuring of mathematics—and as always, I mean any field that is understood by and in equations.

I’m also not concerned with how to add equations to fiction that is already driven by mathematics. That’s a different and in some ways easier task: if the plot’s about mathematics, physics, astrophysics, etc., then the equations can be introduced in liesurely fashion, using a natural language (for example, English) to explain a formal language (like mathematics).

The case that concerns me is more general: I’m interested in literary fiction that’s not necessarily about mathematics or any hard science or engineering, but would sometimes like to use a formal language with numbers, variables, and operators. I’d like to know whether or not words can work alongside equations.

So far I have three ideas about how to use formulas in fiction. I am trying them all in my own project, Five Strange Languages. It’s a five-volume novel, and the examples here are from the one that’s been published and the other four, including the one that’s due out in June.

Most of this project isn’t about mathemtics, and a writer who hasn’t used mathematics or equations might wonder why there should be any mathematics or other formal languages in prose fiction at all. Unless the main character is a scientist or mathematician, why try? For me, equations and formulas can be very expressive, and they seem to attach themselves to many different occasions. In the examples that follow, mathematics is used to help a character calculate how many friends he has, to name the shape that a hyena follows as it paces in its cage, to conjure the complexities of musical compositions, to describe a character’s alienation from her own words, and to help a heartbroken mother understand why she does not love her own family.

Three strategies, then.

1. Ease into equations with images and descriptions.

In Five Strange Languages Samuel is trying to cut down the number of people in his life.

This goes on, with different graphs, and Samuel decides the main point is to get to zero without hurting himself. His friend Catherine writes him a sort of equation in words, even though she doesn’t approve of his idea:

In the novel that’s out, Weak in Comparison to Dreams, she proposes an exponential decay function. Readers see that on the page, and can interpret it with the help of the "equation in words” and her own descriptions.

In Weak in Comparison to Dreams, a woman named Monika is studying the compulsive, repetitive pacing of zoo animals. She observes a hyena that paces in figure eights, and wonders if it’s following an equation. She finds a figure-eight graph called the Devil’s Curve. I give the equation, not expecting that readers will know how to read it, but directing their attention to it, and proposing another curve might fit better:

These equations aren’t quite working as parts of the argument—they’re more like unfamiliar words, where you can sense some of the meaning, but not all of it. The more of this that’s in the book, the more readers will pause to compare, and try to read.

2. Start with formulas readers know.

Another strategy is to start out simple, just like in textbooks. Here Samuel is thinking about a Norwegian composer I’m calling Einar Valen.

I would expect readers to know the second equation, and to recognize the third and fourth as higher-order polynomials. The second is high school algebra, and the third might be taught in advanced algebra. The last one is meant just to look impossible, and the passage continues with unspecified equations—that is, nonsense:

It’s always possible to use mathematics to represent thoughts that the reader can’t understand, as in the example about the composer. Many authors have done that. The modernist Georges Perec borrowed some equations from a mathematicisn friend in order to put some friendly gibberish into his book Life A User’s Manual. Recently I came across a ferocious-looking illegible equation in Helen DeWitt’s “Famous Last Words” (Some Trick, p. 126). It’s a limited strategy just because it’s like inserting passages in foreign languages without translating them—something that’s been done from Rabelais all the way to Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. The more interesting part, I think, is the beginning, in which a reader is shown something more or less familiar, and then led as far as they can go.

Once readers are shown that they can look closely at the math and understand enough to follow, it’s possible to do more. In the second book in the series, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, the title character wonders if she is sane, and she comes up with a demented-sounding theory: she thinks that when she speaks, her words only cound normal—they are infinitesimally close to normal words, but forever different. She invents a theory about this feeling: she calls it the Surd Theory, after irrational numbers (with an echo of “absurd”). Here’s how she explains it:

She goes on like this for another page, trying to convince Samuel that when she uses ordinary language she’s actually saying something entirely different—it’s just that her words are so close to real words that they sound normal. From this point on a reader is meant to think of her words a Doppelgängers for words, on the analogy of these approximations.

3. Write formulas that stand for people, relationships.

The best way I know how to use mathematics is to let the characters try to figure out some ordinary problem in equations instead of words.

In this passage (in the column on the left; another narrative runs on the right) a mother ponders her three children, Alec, Sam, and Tee. She is M = Martha, and D = David her husband. She has a secret: she has only ever really loved her first husband, Nicolas, and their saughter, a₀, both of whom died in a car crash. That’s all you need to know to follow the sequence of her equations which begins this way:

She goes on like this, disconsolate, calculating how little she loves her current family. Samuel, the main character, finds these notes after his mother has died, and realizes how little she loved him.

These are my three main strategies for incorporating mathematics into literary fiction. The narrator can guide readers into mathematics using images (the first strategy), or point to features of equations to encourage readers to try interpreting them (second strategy), or just start thinking using symbols and mathematical operations (the third strategy).

A mathematician might say there’s not much math here. Maybe it’s not worth the trouble, or it’s just tokens. It’s true these examples are limited, but only in the same way that any foreign language would be when it’s presented to people who don’t speak it. I don’t think the abbreviated nature of these strategies is an argument that sentences and equations can’t work together.

So I don’t see a reason not to include equations, and not to try all three of these—and I am curious if anyone can think of others.