Jason Schwartz - Consider that the older goblet had been immured, with certain persons, and with a hand bell and a poniard, at a nunnery in Worms

Jason Schwartz, A German Picturesque (Knopf, 1998)

«Haunting in their tone, brilliant in their images—very like fantastic presences moving across glass—the twenty-one fictions in this startling debut collection seem both inexplicably familiar and like no writing we have seen before.
The opening story leads us through a kaleidoscopic series of thoughts and memories around the act of writing a letter. Another, an intricately structured document of documents—household inventories, daily calendars, property deeds, an announcement—suggests the reality overflowing these mundane markers of our lives. Yet another traces the histories of five artifacts, while at the same time slyly assembling five miniature biographical portraits.
Point of view is important: Elements of a house, for example, are seen from the perspective of an adult and of a child. And a wedding unfolds in conflicting word snapshots taken by the bride and groom and other guests, each providing a unique and sometimes disturbing impression.
Phantasmagoric episodes of travel appear in several entries—an encyclopedic vision of a voyage at sea, a family's cross-country railroad trip through a timeless America, or the revealing journey to Spain by two elderly sisters.
An exhilarating experiment in language and form, A German Picturesque is at once a challenge and a great pleasure to read.»

«A German Picturesque, Jason Schwartz’s first book, takes as its central topic the static objectification of what is seen. With many of these stories either devoid of actions and characters or with these elements taking only a secondary role, small things—the curve in a sleeve, a winter scene on a dish, a shining spot on a doorknob—take on a curious power that somehow is equal to that of the grander events these narratives hint at. The narrators themselves, too, are hinted at, partly visible but never quite completely visible.
Behind this stasis a sense of history and of accumulated tradition gathers. In “Staves” for instance, an effigy is discussed in ways that hint at Judas Iscariot. A postage stamp can lead to a submerged discussion of a king. The formal occasions vary as well, the stories sometimes seeming to be based on a museum tour or on where the gaze goes in the gaps of writing a letter at one’s desk or on movement through an architectural space, sometimes almost partly digested descriptions of paintings or landscapes (similar to what Robbe-Grillet does in In the Labyrinth).
While there is some variation in scene and in the occasions each story appropriates for its form, A German Picturesque insists on similar devices and similar narrators from story to story, varying them only slightly, subtly. While most first books of stories tend to be a showcase for an author’s range, Schwartz’s book very deliberately maps an enclosed stylistic space, exhausting all its possibilities. At their best, these are striking pieces, simple yet opaque. An unusual, interesting, and somewhat claustrophobic book, A German Picturesque shows Schwartz operating in a style entirely his own.» - Brian Evenson

«Likely to please the few and puzzle the many, Schwartz debuts with what may be the most impeccably sustained verbal experiment in fiction since, say, Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String (1996). Here are 21 tiny stories that look at life sideways, in whispers, and, most importantly, by indirection. Often, a reader isn't even certain who's being talked about ('He tends to his correspondence. Millicent, for instance, in France. Mother dear'); and just as often, as the prose makes its delicate but indefatigable way forward, this uncertainty clearly doesn't matter. Schwartz's pieces can keep a reader mystified in almost every way who, why, what, where but never in the perfect logic of sentences moving forward one after another: what comes next, comes next, most often brilliantly and sometimes breathtakingly. Frequently the author will dip into history ('The godless florin, which was first issued in 1807'); he will move from Europe ('King Leopold's skull, if we are to believe the story, is buried at the foot of the tower') to America ('Armstrong, Happy Valley, Stink River') and back again. He will allude, over and over, to people, events, places that haven't been introduced as though they have been ('the cellar where the children were starved'; 'this room had been the child's, you know"), and his endings will drop unexpectedly, simply, and perfectly into silence ('The window, of course, is dark' ; 'A bug crawls across the tabletop'). Schwartz's vast but miniaturist genius is for seeing the enormous in the tiny ('The newspaper, atop which the fellow sets a tumbler, reports upon a battle'), the significant in the silent ('(The moon to digress is gone)'), the horror-filled in themute ('the rings, with a silver brooch, had been lost in the mud'), the voicelessly poetic in almost everything. An extraordinary, associative, allusive artist whose stories in scope, skill, innuendo, subtlety are like reading T.S. Eliot in prose.» - Kirkus Reviews

«Most of these 21 experimental short stories revolve around finely descriptive passages of decor and dress... Each depicts antique mementos... and the flickering windows they afford on past events and people... Schwartz's moody, miniaturist tableaux are admittedly precious, but they richly capture the power of historical objects.» - Entertainment Weekly

«By the time you've finished reading Jason Schwartz's A German Picturesque, you will have joined in a family history in which people flash in and out of surroundings that are pictured in few words but in utmost detail. One literally joins this family, for in these vivid, short stories subdivided into even shorter parts, Schwartz speaks directly to the reader...The writing style is definitely effective, but don't count on having gotten all the details straight.» - Associated Press

«An intricate, barely perceptible methodology underpins the surface madness: A careful construct of repeated words, phrases and description lends the book a steady, subtle pulse which belies a guiding inner logic that is entirely its own... Schwartz glides ever onward into the shadow-world of willful obscurity, suspended upon the surface tension of his own cleverness. Those whose idea of a good-time read is a literary Rubik's Cube have a colorful new toy on their hands.» - Detroit Free Press

«Grandly intrepid... In story after story, Schwartz's cool language scrutinizes the world; behind this smooth prose seethe the violence and confusion of many lives, many acts... Schwartz's work contains genuine passion and invention - and an enormous appetite for challenging himself and his audience.» - New York Times Book Review

«Consider that the older goblet had been immured, with certain persons, and with a hand bell and a poniard, at a nunnery in Worms.' OK, now try this: 'Well, the pall in the bother - the gnaw and the mewl, so to speak, in the wool. The terrifying stoop, the color at the windows, an odor. Mercy, how it was stopped (and settled).' You're trying, aren't you, to understand what these quotes refer to, and I'm here to tell you that they do not refer to anything. And to everything. If you let them, and if you have a reasonable image bank in your mind from movies, paintings, plays or music, the nouns will be the bones, the adjectives the cartilage or skin and the verbs will be the organs... I love the story 'Octave.» - Los Angeles Times Book Review

«Schwartz's set of daring experiments within the art of storytelling verge on prose poetry; they're densely compact, pronouncedly rhythmic, highly sonorous - a word-driven journey... The author's stories hold a sensibility from another time, a refined dignity, something portentous and ethereal, like whispers between lovers... Schwartz's writing is for those who love language and a challenge, for readers who are undaunted by imagist renderings of time and space, and especially for those who can set aside their expectations of short story and take a leap of faith into graceful but unfamiliar terrain.» - Central PA

«Schwartz's first book lies somewhere between short stories and poetry. His stories, sometimes only a page in length, investigate such events as a train ride, a visit to a garrison, or a wedding through an impressionistic stream of consciousness. Often, an object will evoke a flow of ideas; for example, the image of a postage stamp leads to an image of slaughter. Words are spare but significant, and they echo long after being read.» - Joshua Cohen

Read the story «The Staves» at: http://benmarcus.com/smallwork/jason-schwartz/



Jason Schwartz, John the Posthumous, OR Books, 2013.

John the Posthumous exists in between fiction and poetry, elegy and history: a kind of novella in objects, it is an anatomy of marriage and adultery, an interlocking set of fictional histories, and the staccato telling of a murder, perhaps two murders. This is a literary album of a pre-Internet world, focused on physical elements — all of which are tools for either violence or sustenance. Knives, old iron gates, antique houses in flames; Biblical citations, blood and a history of the American bed: the unsettling, half-perceived images, and their precise but alien manipulation by a master of the language will stay with readers. Its themes are familiar — violence, betrayal, failure — its depiction of these utterly original and hauntingly beautiful.

"After reading Jason Schwartz, it's difficult to talk about any other writer's originality or unique relation to the language. John the Posthumous is a work of astounding power and distinction, beautifully strange, masterful." —Sam Lipsyte

"[Schwartz] is complete, as genius agonizingly is." —Gordon Lish


"Haunting, original prose by a writer unlike any other on the planet. Jason Schwartz is a master." —Ben Marcus

An explication of Corinthians and its variations in different Bible versions, etymologies of words derived from the names of birds, and a history of the American bed can all be found in Schwartz's second (after A German Picturesque) book. These, along with descriptions of each window in an unnamed narrator's house, census details from a nineteenth-century street and a review of embalming techniques appear in the book, which strings together disassociated images and litanies. In lieu of characters or plot, the book is driven by these images, lists and catalogues of details and citations, contributing to an overall unfulfilling effect. Schwartz's rhythmic sentences suggest loose themes of adultery, violence and death and his confident, distinctive style propels the book forward even without a traditional narrative. An experimental work that reads more like a wandering through the contents of one's mind than a novel, Schwartz's latest will appeal to readers interested in blurring the boundaries between fiction, poetry, and history. - Publishers Weekly

[The image] becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being.
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

What might a deconstructive history of the marriage bed look like from the marginalized perspective of the cuckold, a figure whose terrain is inverted from one of traditional mockery to one of horror and riddling apocrypha? What might blood say if it could speak—not only the blood as it pulses through one’s veins, but also the blood that is let in the act of a murder, the stains it leaves behind on furniture old enough to have supported monarchical bodies? What, then, might an exegesis of blood, lineage, promise, and betrayal entail? What do inhabited and uninhabited spaces have to offer one keen on tracing images back to their origins: what might these interiors and both their real and imagined occupants say to bear witness to a wound laid bare, as raw as history and as ripe as a knife?
And what might a series of these meditations look like as they are continued laterally alongside one another? It would look very well like Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous (OR Books, 2013), a dizzyingly delightful and hypnotically haunting book that resists easy classification, not to mention what painstaking effort it would take to summarize the “plot,” an effort that would be for naught as the narrative threads remain elusive, even as they are dangled right in front of the reader’s face.
Schwartz’s fascination with images is a profoundly rich obsession in this book—even more so than in his first story collection A German Picturesque (Knopf, 1998)—and as a book about scholarship, writing, cuckoldry, adultery, murder, and the search for enlightenment by way of unearthing the subjective meanings of images, it is a project that is deceitful: while Schwartz, or his narrator, if a distinction is to be made, relays information by way of images to his reader, the content of these images is never made explicit in terms of how they signify. Near the start of the book, the narrator wonders what “[t]he parable of the bed” might constitute; later on, he remarks that “parables are not always the same as lies,” often implying there is some relationship between pedagogic fables and outright falsehood, one that links the bed as site of intimacy to violence:

In the history of adultery, women cross all morning, east to west, as in the parable of the gown; a murderer left—in the parlance—for dead… [W]omen cross from this corner to that, in gowns, as in the parable of the copse, where a body is found—broken, in one description; dead, in another… In the history of adultery, men fall on the lawn, and at the gate, one by one, or they kneel, merely, among a woman’s things, as in the parable of the house, where the room faces south, and where the husband finds the wife.

In effect, Schwartz’s text becomes a deceitful act of confession and erasure, a plea for intimacy and audience, and, at the same time, a causal distancing in terms of “truth” as well as the eventual arrival at subjective meaning. As I will explore in some depth later, what John the Posthumous presents the reader with is an open circuit of signification rather than a closed circuit as in more conventional narratives; as such, we are in the realm of endless free-for-all signifiers, images with meanings that are unclear to us (although they appear to be clear to Schwartz’s narrator) even though we are in effect asked to bear witness to a confession that has trauma at its core—indeed, one that has trauma even structuring its utterance. It is also a study in intellectual and emotional paradox: as the narrator leafs through Corinthians after his wife has cheated on him, he finds the following mandate in chapter seven: “It is better to marry than to burn.”

It is fitting that Schwartz titled his book after John I (whom he states is “usually rendered in red”), the first French king to be born into his reign upon his arrival in the world, after which he lived for a mere five days; rumors of the boy’s survival or possible poisoning by his uncle inform the haphazard documents that are extant from this period, such that our knowledge rests firmly on speculative grounds even when faced with all existing facts. The same could be said for John the Posthumous: there is nothing that is concealed from us, apart from the correlative meaning each image-as-signifier signifies, a maddening suppression indeed. “If the morning is cold: begin with the scars at the bottom” is one of many quizzical statements found in the text; and yet, this statement, like all the others, carries with it an internal logic that works for the narrator even if it cannot work for the reader.
In a sense, we are witnessing trauma, its repetition, and its working-through without knowing either the trauma or how it has been laid to rest: “The heart recalls a needle, crooked at one end.” While this can frustrate many readers, that the narrator here starts at the bottom, at the dregs where the most unadulterated meaning exists if he can only unearth it, is crucial to the way this iterative struggle with images, meaning, and how they relate to trauma is what we as readers are called to witness in John the Posthumous.
Schwartz’s style is singular, stark, and uncannily disturbing all at once. As a writer whose voice is so distinct, it feels almost sacrilegious to call another writer to mind; however, Schwartz’s debt to Gordon Lish—with whom he studied, along with Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Sam Michel, Noy Holland, Christine Schutt, and others—is important to consider. While all of the names mentioned above have become sophisticated stylists in their own right, Schwartz appears to have taken more from Lish on both stylistic and theoretical levels. In addition to workshopping their work, Lish’s seminar students were fed heavy doses of poststructuralist thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva. That John the Posthumous gives us the manifest rather than the latent content, the signifier minus a signified, is reminiscent of psychoanalytic paradigms; indeed, Schwartz seems to be textualizing an eventual analytic epiphany in the text from which his readers are excluded just as much as they are asked to witness the spectacle.
As a student of Lish, Schwartz would likely have received some exposure to the thought of Julia Kristeva. Kristeva expands upon Jacques Lacan’s seminal work on the relationship between the signifier and the signified as a relationship that is far from fixed. Instead, the signifier is in a constant state of signification, an endless chain that causes “meaning” to be continuously deferred. Kristeva famously reworked this theoretical concept in her envisioning of a semiotic chora, a prelinguistic realm that functions like the unconscious in Freud’s work and the imaginary in Lacan’s, in that these states exist prior to symbolization and the individual’s introduction to the world of signs; because of this, these realms are all realms of open signification, where signifiers are in constant flux and where the more conscious act of a signifier connoting a sign is irrelevant. What is relevant here is only what the signifier means by itself, but also in a very subjective sense: to the fantasmatic pleasure (or masochistic scene of trauma, via its very repetition) of the subject in a purely subjective manner. And this is exactly the register at which Schwartz’s writing exists, and where the reader must meet him despite this signifying field being one that holds logic only for the “I” of Schwartz’s text.
Moze Halperin’s otherwise very astute reading of John the Posthumous in Full Stop ends by calling the book “a horrifying little MadLib.” In fact, it couldn’t be farther from this, as my attempts to read Schwartz’s project as one of trauma and also one enacted within an open circuit of signification. To be sure, Schwartz’s seemingly illogical flights and diversions contain a logic all their own—even, as maddening as this can be, if this logic is apparent only to the narrator alone. To propose that there is a formulaic, preexisting narrative here, as would be the case with MadLibs, with crucial words and qualifiers removed (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on), also suggests that there is a degree of randomness at work in Schwartz’s prose—i.e., random words chosen to fill in the blanks—and this could not be farther from the truth. By contrast, there is an overarching logic, and that it escapes the reader’s attempt to fathom it does not mean that it isn’t there; rather, each sentence can be read—as David Winters has commented—in terms of Lishian “consecution,” an example of which can be found in Christine Schutt’s anecdote: “Gordon [Lish] pointed out that if you had one good sentence, and you looked at it long and hard and took from it what term was most charged for the next sentence, this was a legitimate way to proceed.”

The seemingly arbitrary movement from interior to exterior scenes (“Now fold back the bedsheet, this way, and you have a handsome old scene”), from piqued emotions to their rather textile connotations (“‘shame’—even if we prefer the simpler notion of folds or creases in a coat” and “[t]he heart decays on a polite white plate”), from canonical to apocryphal books, and from suppression (whether by intellectualization or other means) to eventual breakthrough (“Were she to return”; “the foyer window, from which I once saw my wife embrace a rival of mine”) follows the chaotic structure of trauma, a structure related to unconscious rather than conscious temporality, thereby making it closer to poetic meditations than a more linear narrative with concrete signification.
In his review of John the Posthumous for Electric Literature, Winters has compiled a useful collection of words in the text that are forced to suffer repetition:

the words “wife” and “wives” arise thirty-five times. Also, “adultery” and associated words (“adulterer,” “adulteress,” the Latin “adultera” and, “to use the legal term… adulterium”) make twenty appearances. Correspondingly, “cuckold” and “cuckoldry” (which the narrator notably calls “my proper topic”) occur on ten occasions. “Bed,” “bedsheets,” “bedclothes,” and “bedroom” combine to a total of ninety. So, it’s striking that “knife,” “knives,” and “blade” add up to sixty-seven. “Blood” appears twenty times, “throat” nineteen, and “murder” and “kill” total twenty again. Forty-four instances of “burn,” “burnt,” “burning,” “fire,” and “flame” fan out across the text. Finally, tellingly, there are twenty-one uses of “body,, always appearing alongside such phrases as “in agony,” “oddly marked,” “in distress,” “broken,” and, of course, “burnt.”

Interestingly enough, the word “you”—including “yours”—occurs ninety-five times in the text, making it the word most often repeated: in many of these instances, the narrator is referring to an unspecified other, a times an amalgam of his wife and at other times directly addressing the reader as witness to crime, trauma, and aftermath. Viewing these repeated words and images as “breadcrumbs,” Winters infers that through the compulsion to repeat, Schwartz’s narrator is perpetually revealing while at the same time occluding; while Winters refers to trauma, he mentions it only in passing insofar as these images and the narrator’s obsession with them relate to “the narrative’s aftermath” which is never revealed in the text.
Trauma requires repetition so that the individual can gain mastery over the traumatic material, as in Freud’s famous case of the child playing the game of fort/da in order to deal with the trauma of his mother’s departure and her unknown return; as such, there is also an underlying element of masochism in the working-through of trauma in that it requires the individual to relive the experience over and over again. The images Winters isolates above are Lacanian points de capiton, or anchoring points where a signifier resolves itself in subjective signification; in other words, the meanings of the images are important in terms of how they resolve the trauma for the narrator, something that we observe closely as readers and yet from which we are also distanced or barred, as Lacan would have it, since these are the narrator’s images, his cathexes, and not ours.
Indeed, there is a great deal of trauma in John the Posthumous, but these are scenarios that are relayed by images rather than exegetical or narrative details; the trauma is therefore buried even though its presence is a known factor, it is eclipsed just as it is emphasized. As Schwartz writes: “The object discovered beneath the floorboards … is a separate affair, a ghastlier matter for later on.” And this could be said for whatever catharsis occurs for the narrator as he discovers—without sharing with his readers—what lies beneath the trauma. Schwartz’s repetition begs to be read in terms of trauma: in a book focusing on adultery, murder (real or imagined), and how previously canny domestic scenes can become uncanny once the marriage bed is stained with literal and figurative blood, it is worth recalling that Freud cites the uncanny as a return of the repressed.

So what has been repressed here in the text and by its narrator? Is the trauma of his wife’s infidelity what drives him to pursue vengeance in Biblical and apocryphal source materials, all of which he appears to have on hand beside his writing desk, cuckoldry as “my proper topic”? To be sure, in these more calculated acts of study, even the personal breaks through unexpectedly, only to quickly be occluded: “I am troubled by Susanna, as this was my mother’s name. In my childhood Bible, I now recall, I scratched out the name in three places.” And the narrator goes further in his biblical studies of the consequences of adultery, juxtaposing past sanctioned rituals to his own traumatic experience:

It was once customary to remove—with a table knife or a razor blade—the pages displaying the names of the wives. And for the forsaken—or the bereaved—to spell out the beloved’s name on a white bedsheet, set the bedsheet afire, and then swallow the ashes.

Is this about living through interior and exterior spaces, perhaps ones that were once canny and are now rendered uncanny due to the destruction of intimacy and the fantasmatic lure of violence and bloodshed—rooms whose objects are “emblems of betrayal” and rooms in which “[t]he knife recurs as a figure”? And, above all, is this a book about coming to terms with trauma by repeatedly invoking, with a kind of masochistic persistence, images that are the pivotal points de capiton for the narrator to begin to make sense of his experience and begin to lay it to rest?
Whatever John the Posthumous is, it is a brilliant example of a text with formal and unconscious boundaries between narrator and reader. We leave the book feeling as if we have been made witness to a profound, albeit harrowing, enlightenment of some inexplicable sort. After closing its pages, we can’t help but recall the nightmarishly sublime world from which the narrator has in effect prematurely expelled us: “Pause here, at the door. Present yourself at the window, as she had, and now remove yourself from view.” Remaining with us are phantom traces of images and half-remembered rhythmic phrases as incomplete signifiers, threads that may lead back to memories or scenes we realize we have already forgotten because we have never truly come to know them in the first place.- K. Thomas Kahn

The title of Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous refers to the shortest ever reign of a French monarch — John I — a child who lived a mere five days, possibly poisoned by his usurping uncle. But this paltry elaboration on the book’s title will not demystify its content, for, like many of the half-explained half-histories Schwartz half-takes on as subjects, John I is pure MacGuffin.
Schwartz’s second book (the first being A German Picturesque, a collection of short stories) is not at all an experimental rehashing of the reign of this king, nor does its buried narrative have much to do directly with most of the hideous acts of violence — or birds, or bed types, or biblical references, or houses in Colonial Pennsylvania — that the book rattles off in lieu of story. Rather, this prose-poetry-ish collage of antediluvian gruesomeness and domesticity creates a feeling akin to diving into a Joseph Cornell assemblage — or perhaps a mismanaged Restoration Hardware. Just 30 pages in, you might find yourself thinking, or asking a significant other, “Will one more distressed fetus hide actually make the pages pop? Does this patinated bedpost clash with these pickled chicken’s throats?” The author certainly won’t answer these questions for you — he’ll only address them by continuing his inundation of gore and household objects — charred adulteresses juxtaposed against 1800’s mantelpieces, and the like. But if you’re at all like me, you will finish John and appreciate its power and boldness — its refusal to settle on being merely haunting — its insistence on seeming, itself, a haunted object.
If this is a tale of anything, it’s one of cuckoldry (John the Posthumous’s three sections are “Hornbook,” “Housepost, Male Figure” and “Adulterium”), and ensuing matricide/infanticide — every so often, the narrator will speak in the first person, and through these rare moments, we can infer, with the help of a not-too-generous back-cover description, that he has been cheated on, then, it seems, killed his wife and children, and afterwards, perhaps, become an unreliable historian and written this . . . thing. Despite the titular specificity of the sections, the division of the book into its three parts seems a mere formality — the voice and rhythm are adamantly static, providing little in the way of revelation from chapter to chapter. Just as every description reads as an erroneous passage in a madman’s encyclopedia, the differentiation between chapters reads as another decoy from a deeply hidden story, another false and distorted factoid.
In John, images ceaselessly interrupt the rare fragments of narrative. Then these images, themselves, are hijacked by other images before they can ever become complete:

The orphan swallows a small bird, a finch or a sparrow, even a parakeet, wings clipped, eyes excised—at least as the narrative survives in the upland boroughs and in several Eastern towns. (Bloodbirds, so-called, are said to produce a rueful sound.) A bloody bone is thunder, in one version, and timber and chimney smoke, in another—or a pile of sticks near a river, just before the war. (The treetops seem to shriek.) A rag doll gives way to a stump doll—the face stained red, for the frightened child, or blue, for the dying child—which gives way, in turn, to a toy horse, describing a faltering voice. The rattlebox contains a hook and a blade, and is buried in the margin of the yard.

Through the abstract beauty, blood and rot of this book, the first person surfaces from the heaps of inanimate objects, reminding us that, despite Schwartz’s anonymizing lists of “household accidents,” beds through the ages, and colonial Pennsylvanian architecture, there’s one specific man with one specific (murdered) family at the heart of this book. These moments keep the reader going, and lead us to think we’re wandering toward epiphany (we probably aren’t):

In our house: there are ten windows on the ground floor.
I would prefer to exclude the two in the front room, however, as they are pine-framed, unlike the others, with drapery in an unpleasant shade of blue. I would prefer to exclude, as well, the foyer window, from which I once saw my wife embrace a rival of mine.

Through some of the seeming randomness, there are a few deliberately recurring images, one, in its quietness and simplicity, more disturbing than any of the violent visions with which it’s juxtaposed: a man and wife on different levels of a stairwell. At various points in the book, their positions on the stairwell shift.  The potentiality of this image — given what we assume becomes of man and wife — is tremendously terrifying.
Then, of course, there are the “are-you-joking?” moments (and often, it turns out, Schwartz is kind of joking), as in the three-page section where the narrator abruptly begins describing his recipe for tripe.

Just as I would never expect to hear 4’33” following Ellie Goulding at a club, I wouldn’t recommend reading John the Posthumous following a good day at the beach. I’m sure there is a time and place for this horrifying little Madlib Jason Schwartz has written — I just can’t figure out what it is.  I’m not being hyperbolic in saying that the reason this very review is a week late to be filed is that I could not find an appropriate place to read this book, lest it become tainted by its deft and oh-so-pretty insidiousness. - Moze Halperin

At the start of chapter 5 of Jason Schwartz’s short novel, John the Posthumous, we are told, in a short aside, that the title comes from a Medieval French King, alive for five days. This character is not mentioned elsewhere and any reader looking for an explanation as to why this brief aside should warrant the title of the book will be left frustrated, however this sort of pendent association is par for the course with this pleasingly hypnotic book.

Akin to the disembodied and pseudo - professorial documentaries of Patrick Keiller the text jumps playfully from the ancient and the etymological to the modern and meta-textual with little distinction. As in Keiller’s films, such as Robinson in Space, we are shown around a landscape that exists only on the hinterland between the abstract and the corporeal.  The source or root of a word is treated with as much attention as other story tellers lavish on the origins of their characters.

A pseudo academic text transposed to the prose form, the narrative thrust appears at first glance to be subjugated to the random fancies and interests of the narrator. But as the storytelling progresses it is clear that the story has a unique logic of its own.

Occasionally the outline of what might be called a traditional narrative is briefly glimpsed, or hinted at, poking out behind a phrase or historical reference but the rolling rhythm of the prose quickly washes any obvious interpretations away in the breakers

Intertwined concepts and etymologies rear up: Cuckoldry and the punishments of adulterers, the significance of the marriage bed in different cultures, the body and the corpse,  hornets, beetles  and various insects. The distinction between male and female in the animal kingdom is mirrored elsewhere in descriptions of the role of the wife or daughter as distinct from the men of a household. None of these are definitively related but shadowy connections persist.

Despite the extensive scholarly references however there is an underlying playfulness -  as when the reader is told:

The word adultery derivers from cry – which calls to mind, certainly, the way the blanket folded back – and from alter, rather than  altar, via reave.

Only to be later exheridated of the idea a few pages later:

The word adultery does not, in fact, derive from cry – just as you had suspected – and the town, I will concede, suitably antique, and quiet now, stands in lieu of another town, come what may, these stains – cheerfully small – on the blade of the paring knife.

Throwing out ideas and chains of tangential concepts the text raises plenty of questions but the narrator never tackles these head on, choosing instead to circumlocute. Passing through forgotten byways of human knowledge, the narrator gives advice on the correct etiquette or protocol in dealing with vanished cultural norms.

In places this approaches the style of an old-fashioned almanac, the prose designed to give information in a tone of gentle advice, and throughout the text there is an overpowering sense of traditions and roots.

To treat dropsy, give vinegar and bitters in one-teaspoon doses at night – keeping in mind that the father beset by horrors will favour camphor (two scruples should do) and that squills may inspire needless bleeding.

Certain themes emerge through repetition. Utterly separate descriptions converge with the  recurrence of a common word. For example, the colour red  describes: red words, red circles, red oak, a red stained face, red boards, red dashes, red fields, red arrows, red tables, red steps and of course red blood.

Similarly geographies emerge through a haze of overlapping descriptions. The reader finds themselves situated in Elizabethan London, Quaker Pennsylvania, Colonial New York. Each location dredged up as a peripheral descriptor rather than a setting for some action.

Indeed, there is no real action or plot in the book but rather a series of visceral textures– adultery, blood, knifes are described for their own sake rather than what they might make a  character do. The world as described by Schwarz is not a stage, on which every man must play a part, but rather a steady series of accretions, each contingent and true only in so far as the totality hangs together. - Lochlan Bloom

Conventionally, a review of a novel should offer some sort of synopsis. Such a review might climb to all sorts of interpretive heights, but still, a basic part of its job is to summarise its subject’s plot. At an elementary level, reviews are expected to be about what books are “about.” And this is precisely where Jason Schwartz’s new novel poses a problem. John the Posthumous is impossible to synopsise. Put bluntly, this book will beat any critic’s attempt to boil it down to a summary.

Put bluntly, this book will beat any critic’s attempt to boil it down to a summary.

 But it doesn’t follow from this that the book has no plot. Rather, John the Posthumous reminds us as readers that plots aren’t reducible to what we can describe. Instead, as with crimes or conspiracies, plots can be something we try to discover—with no certainty of success.

In this respect, Schwartz’s writing spins the reading experience into reverse. His prose puts readers in a position where the most rudimentary aspects of reading are no longer givens, but goals. Our literary traditions train us to want certain “returns” from the task of reading. Usually, we’d like novels to leave us with a better understanding of ourselves; a better idea of where we belong in the world. But Schwartz’s work shrinks from the world, like a whirlpool, pulling us down to a depth from which nothing returns to the surface. Or maybe it’s more like a dream—one whose meaning can’t be translated back into waking language. Whatever the metaphor, this sort of writing frustrates some fundamental assumptions about the consolations of fiction. In short, Schwartz is difficult.
John the Posthumous articulates an alien linguistic world, woven together from Biblical quotes, opaque legal cases, and allusions to Winslow Homer’s paintings—not to mention eighteenth-century conduct books, histories of the French monarchy, and the floor-plans of abandoned properties (that’s just to begin with). The book is a baffling accumulation of folklore and apocrypha, convincing fictions and far-fetched facts. To take one example, Schwartz’s narrator cryptically claims that “some Colonial maps display rows of daggers for fenceposts, and rows of cannons for houses.” Later he remarks—apparently at random—that “maps of the body, in early anatomy, display the organs as houses in a town.” Now, imagine a book built wholly out of such statements; a map that collates other maps—of history, culture, and literature—and then madly scrambles their landmarks. This, for instance, is a typical passage:

The parable of the bed—I imagine the Bible contains no such item. What delicate phrases we must, therefore, do without. Tin knives and burnt blankets, a plague gate. Buried nightdresses, whether diseased or in pieces, find considerable favour in chronicles of a more Teutonic sort. While the parable of the gown ends, once again, without evidence of my wife.

So far, so impenetrable—but let’s take a different tack. Threaded throughout these strange declarations, the words “wife” and “wives” arise thirty-five times. Also, “adultery” and associated words (“adulterer”, “adulteress”, the Latin “adultera” and, “to use the legal term… adulterium”) make twenty appearances. Correspondingly, “cuckold” and “cuckoldry” (which the narrator notably calls “my proper topic”) occur on ten occasions. “Bed”, “bedsheets”, “bedclothes” and “bedroom” combine to a total of ninety. So, it’s striking that “knife”, “knives” and “blade” add up to sixty-seven. “Blood” appears twenty times, “throat” nineteen, and “murder” and “kill” total twenty again. Forty-four instances of “burn”, “burnt”, “burning”, “fire” and “flame” fan out across the text.

Forty-four instances of “burn”, “burnt”, “burning”, “fire” and “flame” fan out across the text.

 Finally, tellingly, there are twenty-one uses of “body”, always appearing alongside such phrases as “in agony”, “oddly marked”, “in distress”, “broken”, and, of course, “burnt.”

Now we’re getting somewhere: whether or not Schwartz provides a “plot”, he at least leaves a trail of breadcrumbs; a path through the labyrinth. Schwartz’s assorted facts and falsehoods hint at a hidden “history of adultery”—or, as the narrator later describes it, “a geometry of nuptial detail.” And the pivotal piece of this puzzle—the wife—is unnervingly absent. On one level, then, the book can be read as a killer’s confession—perhaps a coded personal journal, peppered with clues; or a rulebook for a meta-literary murder mystery. But Schwartz isn’t merely playing games. The power of John the Posthumous stems less from the promise of solving a puzzle, more from the emotions evoked when that promise is broken. Ultimately, what the book is “about” can’t be reconstructed into a narrative arc. All that’s left, then, is the trauma of narrative’s aftermath. Not stories, but feelings of fragmentation and loss form the lifeblood of John the Posthumous.
So, whenever Schwartz seems on the verge of revealing a story—or simply a sense of “progression”—he suddenly swerves, reversing away from revelation. And on closer inspection, this sort of reversal structures the book right down to the sentence level. The narrator’s claims nearly always entail either self-contradiction (he describes a scene as “north of the slaughter, or south of it”), equivocation (he calls a character “Edward, or perhaps Edmond”), or painstaking qualification (“or, more precisely” is his favoured formula). At one point he declares, “The word adultery derives from cry,” but then admits that it “does not; just as you had suspected.” In this way, his words recoil back into themselves—offering meaning with one hand; occluding it with the other. What gets left over from this operation—the remainder of Schwartz’s equation—is only an outline, an aura of an untold story.
Schwartz’s extraordinary style is entirely his own.

 Yet no writer’s style comes from nowhere; even the most striking styles are imprinted by influences, or “precursors,” as Harold Bloom puts it. If anyone has played a part in shaping Schwartz’s prose, it would be Gordon Lish—the editor who published Schwartz’s early stories in The Quarterly, and his first book, A German Picturesque, through Knopf in the ‘90s. Lish’s term for the recursive technique sketched out above is “consecution”—a way of writing by “walking backwards,” as some have described it. Through consecution, the narrative progresses by mining what has just been written: each sentence treats the previous one as a store of potential to be unpacked, or subverted. Of course, this is a simplification—the approach encompasses an entire aesthetic philosophy—but suffice to say, there’s a logic to Schwartz’s manipulations of meaning; a method in his madness.

Robert Musil once said that writing should combine “precision and soul.” But Schwartz has perfected his own compound of precision and menace. As his narrator proclaims, “ornament, according to one argument, portends death.” In his collection A German Picturesque, Schwartz had already shown a mastery of minutiae, crafting obsessive descriptions of trinkets—“bracelets”, “scrollwork”, “a Brussels-lace mantilla”—in order to conjure sadness and wonder from their inconsequence. In fact, Schwartz’s authorial gaze is as raptly exacting as Robbe-Grillet’s; Lish himself has described his style as “a totalized form of attention.” And John the Posthumous further intensifies this closeness of focus—only here Schwartz turns his attention to horror. In a sense, every scene is a murder scene; every ornament—“the rod, the shade, the ring”—an “emblem of betrayal.” Alluding to occult codes in old Bibles, the narrator remarks that “Satan appears to the left of every phrase. So goes one old notion.” And this is true of John the Posthumous too; the devil is in the details:

In our family Bible: the flyleaf is inscribed in blue ink, in a narrow hand. From husband to wife—followed by a month, a slash, a year. There is a curious break in the number eight. And a mark of sorts, a smudge—a tiny form in the corner of the page.

Perhaps such vignettes speak to the very spirit of John the Posthumous. The text’s chief achievement is its evocation of vast, expansive emotions—sorrow, dread, religious terror—from the most meagre materials; in Schwartz, each “mark” and “smudge” summons up a whole world. And as readers we lose ourselves in this world, as we would in a labyrinth—only, it is one we can never escape from. The closer we get to a sense of its centre, the more it withdraws; the more intricate its construction becomes. This is the reason why Schwartz’s novel—or better, his devilish stylistic edifice—can’t be reduced to a “story.” Ultimately, it’s less like a book than a fractal; a shape whose complexity never diminishes, all the way down to the smallest scale. Gilles Deleuze detected such qualities in the dense ornamentation of baroque art; a style, as he said, whose “twists and turns and folds unfurl all the way to infinity.” Fractal baroque: an unfurling art that enfolds us in incomprehension, in fear, but also in irreducible beauty. This would be a fitting description of Schwartz’s difficult genius—and of the infinite inner world that his writing inhabits. - David Winters


Uncovering the Uncoverable

3:AM: What are your earliest and most formative memories of stories?
Schwartz: Well, I have no recollection at all, for instance, of the bedtime story, though I’d like to think there was such a thing, at least on occasion, and I can picture, without difficulty, precisely where a parent would have sat in relation to my bed, the angle of light, some of the accoutrements of the room, and so on. I’m not sure they were stories, exactly, but I liked Richard Scarry’s books, I know that, and I suppose this was fairly early—all those collections of animals costumed as humans, moving through a town.
3:AM: When did your writing-inclined side begin to take shape?
Schwartz: High school. I had in mind a very long espionage novel, filled with ludicrous complications, and I managed to stack quite a lot of paper, and to scatter still more around the room. It was a terrific assemblage of garbage. I prepared elaborate charts—as appendices, I guess—to document the plot, every deformity of the story. All the possibilities, as I saw them.
3:AM: The term “experimental” has been attached to your work. Are the “experimental” aspects of texts reducible to the emphasizing of certain techniques over other, more commercially craved or expected techniques? Is the experimental label as reductive as attempting to enforce the frame of fiction or poetry on certain works?
Schwartz: To take the last bit first: yes, poor distinctions across the board. Or you find yourself “in between,” as they say on the backs of books. And yes, “experimental” is a reductive label too, often a useless one. As is “realist,” its supposed opponent, counterpart, what have you. This seems obvious, but sometimes we take sides anyway because it’s good manners, or to amuse ourselves, the way Color War amused us at summer camp. And if so-called experimental work simply pursues a plain description of real things—“reality,” as people used to say—well, what then? I’m happy to call that a particular form of realism, or a matter of style, or style by another name, or, better still, to call it nothing at all. But we also associate prose with office memos and with newspapers and with notes from our grandmothers. You call for the ambulance in prose, at least most of the time. So it could seem to some readers poor form to tamper with it, and—once disfigured—more of an insult than the other arts. There’s plain and there’s plain, after all, and then there’s strange, or the supposedly strange, and this often translates as “experimental,” for better or worse.
3:AM: I’ve read other prose writers express the idea that the fiction writing tradition has not progressed nearly as far as, say, poetry.
Schwartz: Prose fiction seems the more provincial form, for all the obvious reasons. Prose functions as currency of a sort, by day, and then carries—or drags—its so-called transparency everywhere it goes at night. And it always finds amusing ways to mutilate poetry. Your car and your center fielder: “poetry in motion.” The work of a certain novelist: “his poetry of paranoia.” Apparently it’s extraordinary, poetry—unless it’s actual poetry, in which case it’s irrelevant.
3:AM: How soon after publishing A German Picturesque did you begin writing what would become John the Posthumous? How long did it take for the book to come together?
Schwartz: There were a few other things, beforehand and alongside. There was a long story that eventually became something else, and then, in turn, a third thing. Well, not really—that’s not quite it. They are actually three separate items, three pieces, and I visit with them from time to time, and I’ll eventually find a place for them, probably in the next book, or in a burial ground outside town. Something else, about Rosso Fiorentino, I had done a version of in college, and insisted on revisiting. I do this occasionally, for kicks, and in the interest of providing myself a grievous detour. And so, long ago, there was a story called “In Virginia, We Stopped,” and this became, a few years later, a story called “A Grammar,” which appears in A German Picturesque. But to answer your first question: three years, give or take. And the second: I handed it off, once and for all, in January of this year. That’s a long time. There were these excursions, of course, the aforementioned, and some other things—but that’s no consolation.
3:AM: The vocabulary in John the Posthumous and A German Picturesque seems lifted from religious and other historical texts. Have these texts always interested you? How have they come to insert themselves into your fictions?
Schwartz: Well, I know I found the crucifix very troubling when I was young. A person was wearing another person. A person was hanging from another person’s neck. It was puzzling. But religious documents and the like? No. I became interested later on. I wasn’t the slightest bit interested as a kid. Save, maybe, for a phrase here or there, a little stray thing, some odd sound during a holiday service. But even this wasn’t interest, exactly. It all seemed to happen in passing. And my Hebrew was unusually poor. So a retired cantor was hired to recite my Torah portion into a tape recorder. It was upon me, at that point—or so I thought—to mimic his every breath, every crack at the back of the throat, as he made his way from phrase to phrase. I got the gist, at least, and tried to fool the room. And now: I think I just happen to like certain kinds of specialized language, religious or historical or otherwise. Two trains collide and, in railroad parlance, it’s a cornfield meet. I like that. And then I’ll find some diversion in inventing a bit within that idiom.
3:AM: I’m interested in this aspect of the text where you take terms, deform their original meaning, and reform them for your own use. Is this process one of the ways in which your sentences derive their momentum?
Schwartz: I’m not sure I always deform them, necessarily. And often the “history” is entirely made up. And “made up,” I prefer to think, is quite distinct from “make believe,” as in “imagination,” which can be a bit garish. So maybe we gather together some knives, our things for butchering, for surgery, et cetera, and all is well. Your kitchen implements, your catlin knife, and so on. But what about your bed knife, from boyhood? Or the griever’s knife, which seemed to me a reasonable invention, under the circumstances. How else for the poor mortician to force the corpse from the clutches of all those sad mothers and sons?
3:AM: The title of the novel is taken from the nickname of John I of France, a real life king who was, as the novel notes, “alive for five days.” The title “character” persists inside a single sentence. Can you speak about the notion of character in John the Posthumous?
Schwartz: I think your second sentence may answer the third. That said, I do sometimes wonder about one schoolroom view: characterization as a conjurer’s trick, a kind of parlor game, as though credible representation were an end in itself. Well and good, but maybe the actor’s main job is to show heartbreak on his face.
3:AM: The first section of John the Posthumous is called “Hornbook,” and begins the index of objects and conditions—the pattern, if you please—out of which the rest of the book develops. A little research reveals that the original use of the term stems from 1450 as a tool designed to teach children how to read. With a text as strange as John the Posthumous, is it important to teach readers how to read the narrative as it unfolds? Is it important for you to explore the ways in which readers might read anew?
Schwartz: And later on, I’m told, to teach children how to destroy a bed. As for teaching readers: I assume that readers are very smart. Or that the book, in its own way, is pretty simple. So I don’t really think about this in terms of teaching. I try to make something logically and carefully, and if people want to come look at it, that’s great. Attention to the pattern, as you put it, or the patterns within the sections, within each chapter, the book as a whole—this is certainly a way to manage navigation. I just happen to favor format as someone else might favor plot. So you do without the latter, but you have a kind of architecture instead. But then again, I’m a fan of the Kantian table of contents—as an independent art form. And the closing credits are usually the best part of the movie—words on a black screen, set to music.
3:AM: What were the early formations of your relationship with Gordon Lish? How did you come to be in his class in 1989?
Schwartz: I saw The Quarterly, one of the early issues, maybe the first one. I liked it, and I sent in a few things, these little poem-like things, which Gordon took for the magazine. He then invited me into the class. I was a sophomore or junior in college at the time, in New Orleans, so this would have been 1987 or so, 1988. And, right, I took the class in 1989, just after graduation.
3:AM: Some of the pieces that would be collected in A German Picturesque began appearing in The Quarterly in 1992.
Schwartz: 1992, yes, and “Ram Farm” was the first of those pieces. That one and “Ox” and a few of the others were written in 1991. “Killies” was 1992. “Antwerp” and “The Staves” were 1993. I sent these off to Gordon and he ran them in the magazine. Not a crowd favorite, let’s face it, but he took a chance, and I’m grateful for that. He’s been a good friend to me for a long time.
3:AM: Lish would leave Knopf in 1995, but the books he accepted for publication—books by new authors like Ben Marcus, Gary Lutz, Christine Schutt, Victoria Redel, and Ken Sparling—were published after his departure, yours being the last of its “kind” to arrive in 1998. What was your publishing experience like?
Schwartz: Gordon sent the book contract in 1994, but there was no book at that point. I had in hand the aforementioned stories, and some others, but I didn’t complete the book until the fall of 1997. By then, I had a new editor at Knopf. I was always asking for more time—I remember that very well. How about another six months? Once they had the manuscript, things moved along rapidly. The book was in production by the start of the year, and it was out that summer, 1998. And that was that.
3:AM: Writers edited, published, or taught by Lish are almost automatically tossed into the “minimalist” camp, for one reason or another. You noted your dissatisfaction with the term and the movement at a younger age. Were you mindful of this while studying with him? Are you aware of a certain audience reading your work against the backdrop of Lish’s legacy and his relationship with other writers and students?
Schwartz: Sure, and that’s great. Any backdrop is okay by me. As for “minimalism”: no particular quarrel with the term itself, then or now. The application of the term is another matter. But the abundance of realism—this may have made me a little gloomy at the time. Still, it was unfair to gather all those writers under one banner or another—the aforementioned, or “Dirty Realism,” or what have you. Willfully inexact, isn’t it, that sort of labeling? As for Gordon’s class: can’t say for sure at this point, twenty-five years on, but it’s more likely I’d have associated him with particular writers—and with some of the Esquire stories I’d come across as an undergraduate—than with one term or another.
3:AM: I remember reading a reviewer or online commentator refer to A German Picturesque as a series of linked stories, and this has stuck with me. Some stories share similar preoccupations with certain words, phrases, and conditions. I notice, in the new book, similar preoccupations and patterns prevailing. Do you view your work, as a whole, as one continuous narrative?
Schwartz: Not one narrative, exactly. But, sure, an ongoing project of sorts. The parts are in transit: I might revisit this or that, as subject matter, as parlance, as architecture. And sometimes for the better, I hope. I suppose I’m moving rather gradually–perhaps at a glacial pace–around my house.
3:AM: Your work has been described as an “artifact…nearly without antecedent.” Who or what do you see as being—or slightly resembling—your antecedent?
Schwartz: Trollope, obviously.
3:AM: You teach in the MFA program at Florida Atlantic University. Can any bit of your writing instruction be boiled down to what your students might call a Schwartzism? Is there anything you find yourself telling young writers over and over again?
Schwartz: At the moment, I suspect they might define any such sentiment this way: that which to avoid. As in: avoid Schwartz. So let’s boil that down to “avoid.” How did she have it, Diana Vreeland?—”elegance is refusal”? Or “elegance is restraint”? Either way, I might substitute “style” for the first word. As distinct from “Verstopfung”—which wasn’t the title of my course on the Messerschmidt heads.
3:AM: What kind of balance exists in your life between writing and teaching? How has one informed the other?
Schwartz: Hard to say. Depends on the semester, the class, the day of the week. This comes to mind: long ago, in New York, I taught middle school for a year. Rough and tumble sort of place. Lots of mischief, and no textbooks, as these had all been lost or destroyed or thrown out into a courtyard, where—I may be revising the memory slightly—there was a great pile of books, a pile nearly one story high. So it was upon the teacher to scratch out lessons on the blackboard. This was transcription, the transcription of many items, all these chapters from the absent books. And once this had been accomplished, once the blackboard had been covered with words, first thing in the morning, it was upon the teacher to guard the blackboard all day. So what to do when the fistfight breaks out? You know how people gather around. The teacher now fears the press of bodies, and the tendency of bodies to smudge, or even erase, words. Stop the fight or protect the blackboard? This seemed to me, at the time, the central educational dilemma. If you’re lucky, the fracas is close by, and you might arrange things accordingly—one hand here and one hand there, finding yourself in various complicated postures. I never managed that to successful effect. And perhaps all this explains why, in the old country, contortionists were always thought the best schoolteachers. Anyway, Mr. O’Riley’s room has been set afire in the meantime, or Mrs. Wilson has been trampled in the stairwell. The day would pass in that fashion, and then I would go home and write about postage stamps and Judas Iscariot. So—to answer your questions—who knows?  -  Interview by Jason Lucarelli

Jason Schwartz

by J. W. McCormack

Years before I read it, Jason Schwartz’s 1998 collection A German Picturesque (Knopf) captured my imagination. It wasn’t just because I knew Schwartz as a favorite of legendary editor and teacher Gordon Lish, who published Schwartz’s first stories in his magazine The Quarterly, or because the title struck me as provocatively incongruous given that there wasn’t anything obviously Teutonic about Schwartz, whose author note described him as living in Pennsylvania (he has since decamped to Florida). More than anything, it was that it seemed possessed of the power to make anyone who tried to describe its contents sound completely insane. “The nouns will be the bones, the adjectives the cartilage or skin and the verbs will be the organs,” wrote The Los Angeles Times in a typically gnomic review, while Ben Marcus, not obviously insane, described Schwartz as being “unlike any writer on the planet . . . a master.” I was curious, if not outright incredulous: how was it possible for a single writer, a twentieth-century American “master” no less, to depart wholesale from the line of succession and influence that I understood literature—with its various avant-gardes, occasional norms, and buffet plate of styles—to comprise?

Schwartz’s second book, John the Posthumous, new from OR Books, confirms Schwartz as a writer with neither peer nor precedent, except perhaps in certain Puritan textbooks, diagnoses of medieval plagues, and Biblical glossolalia. Broken into three sections—“Hornbook,” “Housepost, Male Figure,” and “Adulterium”—John the Posthumous reads like a story that already befell its characters, disastrously, and what is left is to pore over the rooms, interrogating the objects and words as though they themselves were the guilty parties. Or perhaps these remains are the stories themselves. Riddle me this, for example:

In Matthew, the house is a dead bird or a box of thorns. But parables are not always the same as lies. Your dictionary calls them stories, but these we can see behind the child. All right—let us put it a different way. The man returns in the morning. He stands at the window. The woman departs in the afternoon.

Whereas another book would begin by identifying the child, man, and woman, in John the Posthumous detail and implication take precedence, leaving only lurking impressions of why it might be pertinent to note that “Various medieval diseases were named for the Devil—but then, so were doorframes of an especially peculiar design” or that the titular monarch reigned in France for five days. Etymologies are unpacked, ancient architectures felt out from the inside and sentences cunningly assembled out of oddly tactile consonants to create an utterly unique reading experience that scratches some deep cranial ditch of the unconscious like no work of prose before it.
As you can see from the above, all who read Jason Schwartz succumb to the disease of trying to place a prose style that outpaces all descriptive language not already absorbed into the dead serious and sinister trivia he reserves for old beds (“Bed, in any case, once meant flay, as in a burr mattock or a beggar’s cup”), surgical instruments (“The bone saw would say the boy’s name”), and English canon law, which “allows for mention of a hedgerow, or, in lieu of this, a narrative about a black house.” John the Posthumous is a book that asks its share of questions (“If death is a room, as one conception has it, then where is the family?”) and provokes many more. I emailed back and forth with Jason Schwartz to get some answers. Here, he confirms that his work is no mere whimsical dalliance with language and, finally, tells me what a “hornbook” even is.

J. W. McCormack I want begin by talking a little bit about the evolution of your style. Your work has been singled out for its departure from conventional or straightforward narrative—but maybe it’s simpler just to say that, while most books presume eyesight as the prime sense organ, your work strikes me as specifically tactile. Was this a gradual approach you came to over time or did you set out to challenge the fictional norm? What about your methods changes between A German Picturesque and John the Posthumous?

Jason Schwartz No plan to challenge the norm. Just gradual—at times glacial—movement. I had a few things in mind, a certain image for the page, and I was working toward this. Pretty simple. Hard to say how things have changed. Tricky, all this—like inviting the murderer to perform the autopsy. Going back now to A German Picturesque: most of the pieces in the second section—e.g., “Ram Farm,” “Ox,” “Circus Station”—were from roughly the same moment. “Ram Farm” was really the start of it, in conception if not necessarily execution. Things had begun to shift a bit, for the better—it had something to do with pigs and consonants—at about that point. And then the aim, or one aim, was to avoid an exaggeration of the manner, becoming too fond of this or that. Tactility is one thing, after all, and strangulation another.

JWM When I was reading JtP, I kept feeling like I was reading a real historical novel. Rather than your average story that’s set in the past and sort of clip-arts contemporary psychology/ethics into a barely intelligible past, here we’re reading the histories and handling the devils in a way that makes them feel more imminent and yet accounts for the space between us. How did you wind up with this approach to history? Was there something about this particular, vaguely Puritan era that you felt was relevant to your present?

JS They played a game called townball, by the way, back in those days. I don’t know whether you follow baseball—but this was an early version of baseball: townball. I like the name. And in the nineteenth century—as long as I’m digressing—star players weren’t called stars. They were called artists. And the ballparks were made of wood and seemed to be on fire all the time. Anyway, I had a few subjects appropriate to a certain moment, a period, the era you’re referring to, and I began to talk about one thing and then another—a form of blundering, really. I had the hornbook, for example, and this was sort of up my alley—and I sat with it for a time, reasoning with it, after a fashion. Several bits and pieces found their way into the book. Bundling, on the other hand, grew into a kind of dowager’s hump, with a fretful rasp, and then a little medieval machine, in wool twill, named Mrs. Eaves. We’ll call these misadventures. It’s really a matter of subjects, in the end, especially the kind I might carve up or portion off into classification. Category has a certain beauty.

JWM Speaking of category, I read a fairly de rigueur article from The Guardian, one of those “end of fiction” pieces you see every few years—although this one seemed to be equating “traditional fiction” with “the realist novel.” Is this a mistake? Do you feel like the world needs a different fictive vocabulary than the purely representational one we’ve become accustomed to?

JS Probably and probably, but it’s unlikely that a new vocabulary would manage any better than the current one. And sure, “realism” is a particular system of habits and attitudes—and now the proper noun is traveling through the mountains, by carriage, with several young charges—rather than a map of quivers and stammers. Which is to say: actual human speech. And some examples of “anti-realism” might be better understood as part of an older tradition—the anatomy, say—now on hiatus or in remission.

JWM I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m saying JtP is anti-narrative. On the contrary, there seems to be a very powerful strand of storyline—for lack of a better phrase—that’s absorbed by objects, old books, or language itself. As though, instead of witnessing the death of a daughter firsthand, I’m in the attic rummaging through her library and finding what’s pressed into the pages. Or as you have it, “a handbook, a miscellany, an annual—this implies a romance, does it not?” I actually found it a lot more affecting this way. What kind of responses do you want to trigger—or what kind of sensations do you want to evoke—in your reader? Do you have a sense of an ideal reader? Or will anybody do?

JS No ideal reader in mind. And as to a response: I’ll take yours, above. You’ve put it far better than I ever could.

JWM How embarrassing. Let me ask a simpler question: what is a document?

JS Evidence, in the old sense. Sometimes literature in the best sense. Or maybe just a place to put your phrases. Or it’s someone else’s shopping list, at the bottom of the cart. A document can be a replacement for the body, if you’ve misplaced yours, or a loved one’s—or if you’ve sent it away once and for all. Or it’s simply an ornament on the corpse, taken from station to station, and then up the rungs of the gullet—and now waiting under the portico with the rest of us, distorting the horses. You have the annotated lighthouse and the four-part ledger, and you have the newspaper—now going the way of high-button shoes. It used to arrive as a package in waxed paper, light brown, a cylinder of sorts, fastened too carefully with a piece of string. A smart child would have taken a pair of scissors to it. I did otherwise. The New York Times, broadsheet, already down to six columns by then, but still ample enough to dominate a table. And now we have the parody, narrow and flat, in a blue plastic baggie. Soon they’ll subtract another column or two. And then they’ll simply roll a single column up the driveway, on adding-machine tape. And after that: they’ll pin a single character to your door. That exclamation point means it was a good day, or a very bad one.

JWM And a hornbook?

JS You didn’t have one as a kid? This was a board, usually wooden and plain, but sometimes more elaborate—perhaps silver, this or that, various details, decoration as specified by a particular family. A sheet of paper was affixed to the board and then covered with a layer of horn. It carried lessons for schoolchildren—letters, numbers, the Lord’s Prayer. You might hide yours within the folds of your cloak, if you were so inclined, or you might abandon it to a tree branch. It could be worn, cracked, lost—and discovered again after the thaw. It could double, I’m sure, as a paddle for the naughtier boys. Some had detachable letters, which were edible—and you would try, of course, to avoid the poisoned ones.

JWM Well, how about all these archaic literatures you seem so fond of? From folk superstition to the discrepancies of certain translations of the Bible, you’re flooding the reader with a lot of information. And yet it feels completely natural to me, about what I absorb after a day of surfing the web. And for all that, I never once felt compelled to fact check you or wiki something like “The Murder Act of 1752” or a place like Cuckold’s Point. I was instead transported to a more antique sort of database, like a Museum of Oddities or one of those Heritage museums you find in America where they have paintings of town founders, models of the colony, etc. Do you think our relationship to information—when we feel compelled to seek it out, our capacity to absorb it, our access—has changed fundamentally in the last two decades?

JS Yes, the town founders, the child-sized maps, the replica school bells and cook-stoves. Those places were great. The captions always had a kind of brutal neutrality. As for the last two decades: I’m hardly an expert. But the gizmos have changed, of course, and access and so on—sure. So let’s reminisce about an old tabletop object, heavy and black: the rotary telephone. It was patient and grave. It looked a little like a doctor’s bag. And you could also employ it as a weapon, if need be, should your enemy suddenly appear in the den. Telephone etiquette in those days was about eighty rings, I’d say. And if that didn’t satisfy you, maybe you’d bicycle over and knock on the door for an hour. These were the days of the “verification” and the “emergency breakthrough.” Simply answering the telephone: it was an instant of mystery. And now: well, you know. But the complaint—if complaint it is—is very old. If not for the telegraph, after all, they get away every time, don’t they?—the two of them, whoever they are.

JWM What about the trade-off between an illustrated bestiary of the Middle Ages or a garden calendar and having all this information in huge virtual databases? Is there something about records that’s getting lost in our fever to compile?

JS Compilation has its own charms, I suppose. Count the talismans, or place them in the furnace, or in one of the newer devices—parchment and blown glass—at the palace. Now you’ll remember the roast goose from New Year’s Eve. Or Edith’s heart, beating on the carpet.

JWM Speaking of cuckoldry, you refer to it as “your proper subject” late in John the Posthumous. Looking back over the book, it does appear to be a major, if sometimes subliminal, theme. As anyone who’s ever been at the receiving end of a slush pile knows, people can’t seem to get enough of stories of infidelity. The pre-Marxist French writer Charles Fourier identified it as the origin of commerce. Do you have a sense of there being a small number of “eternal” stories that we return to? Or are there as many tales as there are ways to tell them?

JS I was interested in adultery as subject—not on account of one particular story or another. And sure, betrayal is banal, and that can be part of the attraction. Maybe they aim the queen eastward, or set the hooves atop the village scene, which is already upside down, the final house next to an animal’s open mouth. The man is saying: “I won’t return.” The woman is saying: “He left town this morning, for the country, in his ugliest brown shoes.” Or we fasten the stamp at dead center, where her name and address usually appear. The face of the envelope, or the code thereon, matters more than the letter inside. It’s a simple conversation, over time, in plain sight. And sometimes it’s mediated by the mailbox, just like correspondence checkers. Unless you’re old-fashioned and prefer to use pneumatic tubes.

JWM If I had to describe JtP to a stranger, I might call it a “book of leavings.” What do human beings leave behind? What is permanent and what is temporary? What is it about material, memory, and language that moves you?

JS I guess you can practice a kind of household archaeology. And what if a person were to emerge, well preserved, from some sorrowful compartment? Well, then you’d be in a real fix. Andy Warhol—I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this—would clear all his desktop objects into a carton, seal it, mark the date, and start over. How often I don’t know. Seasonally, let’s say. And I don’t know whether this was intended as an art project, or as a nostalgia project, or whether he was simply defeating clutter in a very reasonable way. But the thrill, maybe, is in aging ordinary objects into interesting things. Whereas the collecting of persons as specimens, in receptacles of every stripe—I hear there’s a rich tradition of this as supposed antidote to loneliness. Which may or may not explain the incident of the secret agent who entombed himself in his own suitcase.

JWM I feel like I’m supposed to ask you about modern fiction and maybe authors that were formative for you, but given JtP’s use of Books of the Bibles and case laws—I was especially pleased to see Galatians—I’m just as interested to hear about antique documents, grammar books, or verses that had an influence on you?

JS Not quite what you had in mind, but the box score seems to me a beautiful form. “Rivers, Randolph, Munson, Jackson”—and so on. Columns and abbreviations. “Thurman Munson, C”—a splendid little configuration. “Biff Pocoroba,” meanwhile, proposed all manner of complication and difficulty. He was likely an invention of the baseball people, something from the commissioner’s office—created as a puzzlement, and present only in miniature, in box scores and in cardboard form. Just another phrase designed for mispronunciation, a little shame contraption for children and men. As distinct from the so-called phantoms, those supposed players from the early days, actually manufactured whole cloth out of typographical errors. The Baseball Encyclopedia tried to excise all these names from its register. Certain players who never existed, in other words, now no longer exist. They occupy an unhappy category all their own. And not exactly in the manner of the early Christians: “I am deader than you.” In any case, it went something like this: “Chambliss, Nettles, Piniella.” Or: “Nettles, Spencer, Dent.” And there was “Fred Stanley” from time to time, until they sent him away.

JWM Do you think of yourself as writing about objects? Histories? Diseases? Names? Or is it the human remains or charge contained in these objects?

JS All of the above, in my paltry way. But to be more precise: a sick cloak—or a plague dress—is more likely to cross my mind than a Scotch egg, say, or a phrenology shop. Or a photograph of Vernon McGarity, war hero, posing with President Truman and a third person—whose hand remains, but who is otherwise cut out of the frame for space. - bombsite.com

Jason Schwartz’s novel John the Posthumous was published last year to wide acclaim, despite—or maybe because of—its challenging, disruptive qualities. With blurbs from Gordon Lish, Ben Marcus, and Sam Lipsyte, John the Posthumous had “cult novel” written all over it from the outset. It was a 2013 highlight for many critics, including K. Thomas Khan, who called it ”a dizzyingly delightful and hypnotically haunting book that resists easy classification,” and David C. Winters, who described it as a “Fractal baroque: an unfurling art that enfolds us in incomprehension, in fear, but also in irreducible beauty.” In my review, I  wrote that John the Posthumous is “strong, strange literature, a terrifying prose-poem that seizes history and folklore, science and myth . . . and distills it to a sustained, engrossing nightmare.”
Schwartz is the author of another book, A German Picturesque (1998). He lives and works in Florida. Schwartz kindly consented to an interview with me via email; his answers here approach the same oblique verbal dexterity that we see in his fiction. Get John the Posthumous from OR Books or your local bookstore.

Biblioklept: Your book John the Posthumous is a challenge to describe, let alone summarize. How do you describe the book to those who haven’t read it?

Jason Schwartz: I lie–it seems the only decent way to proceed.  Why dwell upon unpleasant things?

Biblioklept: In a recent interview with 3:AM Magazine, you said that one of the first things you tried to write—in high school—was “a very long espionage novel.” You mentioned charts and appendices—lots of plots. In the same interview, you also say that you “favor format as someone else might favor plot,” which I think evinces in John the Posthumous and A German Picturesque. I’m curious what experiences—particularly what reading experiences—may have motivated a shift from an initial interest in writing plot-driven genre fiction to the stuff you write now.

JS: I’m sure I was abandoning other things too.  I seem to recall something about a war.  A catalog of imaginary battles, land and air–that would have been a handy enough project for a kid.  Remember Little Wars?  I don’t, but I like the idea of H.G. Wells and company concealed behind end tables, orchestrating cavalry raids.  Unless the tactician was free to explore the drawing room, inspecting positions and so on, enumerating the wounded, admiring an especially fine artillery barrage.  That seems more likely.  But the would-be novel, espionage–I started that on a lark.  I’d found an old Olivetti somewhere in the house–in the attic, I’d like to say, but we didn’t have an attic–and one thing led to another, et cetera, et cetera.  A turn may or may not have occurred at that same moment, give or take, with all those devices, the appendices, the charts and annotated maps, captions for photographs that didn’t exist.  Hard to say, exactly, going back now to the tenth grade.  But they began to overtake the plot, such as it was.  I liked some of the Bond books, and Graham Greene–still do–but I also liked The Encyclopedia of Espionage and that kind of thing, compendiums of jargon, biographies of Bulgarian spies.  So maybe it was more the subject than the genre.

Biblioklept: Do you think about a particular audience when you compose?

JS: A young family, stranded on a mountain pass, killing time until help arrives.  They take turns reading aloud–the text in question having been purchased by mistake and packed by accident, and later discovered in the luggage as potential kindling.  The father shields the first child from those passages displaying traces of grotesquerie.  The mother corrects the second child’s pronunciation or praises his elocution–as the case may be–on the occasion of the most ostentatious phrases.  The third child, meanwhile, has wandered off into the woods.  Ah!–it’s beginning to rain.

Biblioklept: Did John the Posthumous start as something smaller, like the pieces that make up A German Picturesque? Did you have the theme of adultery in mind from the outset?

JS: Yes, it was there from the outset, adultery, running through a number of things–directly and otherwise–and many of these appeared in magazines as individual pieces, beginning in 2003 or so.  The “Corinthians” section, for instance, was once called “Breviary.”  The final section in “Hornbook” was “Notation on Hidden Children.”  Another one in that little series–a section in “Adulterium”–was “Notation on the Principal Graves.”  There were changes in every case–all this happened over a very long period of time, obviously.  “Housepost,” on the other hand, was done more or less at once, mostly in sequence.  I published certain parts of this–“The Mary Casket” is an example–in various combinations, dismantling the house a few different ways.

Biblioklept: Your sentences are precise and concrete, but they also often refuse to give the reader something definite to grip on to. There’s a lot of power—and, I’d argue horror—in this restraint. How much of this technique is attributable to editing? How do you edit your work?

JS: As to the second question: it varies.  No set method.  And as to the first:  I’m not really editing in that direction, no.  I see this more as a simple matter of description.  So–for instance–the schoolmarm in the museum, a wax form, with pins for eyes.  A person of reputation in her hometown, I take it, and–it turns out–a distant relation of mine.  I don’t wish to be flippant–or to sunder a cousin without good reason, here on the spur of the moment–but she seems easy enough to grasp in one’s hands, or at least as easy as any other set of letters.  And she was, she certainly was, when they cut her in two, at the waist, and then into several smaller portions–her coat and purse set off to one side, forgotten there (the former eaten by moths, I’d guess, the remnants used to stuff the dummies on the second floor; the latter left on a shelf and, later on, mistaken for something foreign and important, given its own display)–in order to get her out the door.  She’d have used, by the way, back at the schoolhouse, a razor blade and a ruler, according to a practice now out of fashion.  “Children, let’s remove all your objectionable words and phrases, replacing them with more companionable ones.”  And in the evening, the janitor and janitress would sweep up the scraps, and then use them to write ransom notes.
Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?

JS: Sure.  Including one from my grandparents’ bookcase, I’m ashamed to say.  The book was The Deer Park.  I was three, I believe, or four, or five.  I was not, at the time, a fan of Norman Mailer.  I must have mistaken it for something else–or maybe I had plans for it in the construction of a fort or what have you, some structure already underway, or only in the earliest planning stages, back home, down in the basement, off in a corner reserved for projects of just that sort.  I suppose it could have been the jacket art, an attraction to that, but I can’t recall what was depicted on the cover, or even the colors on display.  It’s unfair to speculate in this way, I know, but–to be on the safe side, and to put the matter out of mind, once and for all–let’s just assume it was a stick-figure deer, in black, on a field of red.  Very much, in other words, the kind of stick figure–and field–I’d have quite disliked as a child.  Anyway, my grandmother gave chase.  She shouted in a language manufactured on the spot, and composed wholly of bedbugs and regret, dozens of variations on these words, accompanied by near-simultaneous translations, bent by the effect of her breathlessness, and taking curious shapes, in formation, at my back and overhead–or so it all seemed to me.  And then?  I was caught, of course. - Interview by Edwin Turner