Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly - The book is a celebration of the seven deadly vices and shows no counterbalancing interest in the seven cardinal virtues. Even more, it is a celebration of pride, the pride of the ancient aristocracy of evil

Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Diaboliques: Six Tales of Decadence, Trans. by Raymond N. MacKenzie, Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2015.
 




With its six trenchant tales of perverse love, Diaboliques proved so scandalous on its original appearance in 1874 that it was declared a danger to public morality and seized on the grounds of blasphemy and obscenity. More shocking in our day is how little known this masterpiece of French decadent fiction is, despite its singular brilliance and its profound influence on writers from Charles Baudelaire to Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, J. K. Huysmans, and Walter Benjamin. This new, finely calibrated translation—the first in nearly a century—returns Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s signature collection to its rightful place in the ranks of literary fiction that tests the bounds of culture.

Psychologically intense in substance and style, the stories of Diaboliques combine horror, comedy, and irony to explore the affairs and foibles of men and women whose aristocratic world offers neither comfort nor protection from romantic failure or sexual outrage. Conquest and seduction, adultery and revenge, prostitution and murder—all are within Barbey d'Aurevilly ’s purview as he penetrates the darker recesses of the human heart. Raymond N. MacKenzie, whose deft translation captures the complex expression of the original with its unique blend of the literary high and low, also includes an extensive introduction and notes, along with the first-ever translation of Barbey d'Aurevilly’s late story “A Page from History” and the important preface to his novel The Last Mistress.


 "The book is a celebration of the seven deadly vices and shows no counterbalancing interest in the seven cardinal virtues. Even more, it is a celebration of pride, the pride of the ancient aristocracy of evil. Those who have the style to carry off their vices have also the right to do so." -  Robert Irwin

TO READ JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY’S stories is to be swept into the mind of a man with particular obsessions. The six stories in Diaboliques, first published in 1874 and which appears from the University of Minnesota Press in a new translation by Raymond M. MacKenzie, share a rich variety of recurring themes that reveal the scope and intensity of Barbey’s interests. These stories of she-devils (as at least one previous English translation has rendered Barbey’s French title) are littered with references to modern literature, especially Byron; to classical history, and especially Tacitus; to Catholicism; to the French Revolution but even more frequently to the First Empire and the Restoration; to Valognes, the tiny Norman town that was Barbey’s ancestral home; to the chouans, clandestine antirevolutionary guerillas that fought against the Revolution long after the Terror had burned itself out; to nobility (its decline and death); to idleness and the sins it fosters; and, perhaps most importantly, to the arts of conversation and storytelling that, at least as Barbey would have it, reached their peak among the idle nobility that are simultaneously the center of Barbey’s stories and the object of his critique.
Barbey originally wanted to call his book Ricochets de Conversation, implying snatches of overheard talk presented unchanged, complete with gaps, interruptions, and commentary. The style and structure of six tales reflect this intention. Each of the stories in Diaboliques centers on a story told metadiagetically — that is, related by one character in the story to another, often after a lengthy build-up. Barbey orients us to the power of storytelling, to the narrator’s ability to do it skillfully, and to the effect the story has on the audience. The elevation of conversation to art in Diaboliques happens alongside other, similar elevations, both in the stories and in Barbey’s aesthetics generally.
Fashion above all appears in this guise, and academic readers have commented extensively on the relationship between dandyism, of which Barbey was France’s most prominent proponent, and the innovative narrative strategies that Barbey pioneers in the ricochets style[1]. Not only conversation and dress but also fencing, salon hosting, and deception receive the same treatment. Ultimately, Barbey privileges the ephemeral over the concrete, and regrets that we readers cannot have been there to experience the effects of his characters’ narration in real time. This is, of course, paradoxical, since Barbey relates fictional tales and puts his words in the mouths of fictional characters. His literary production cannot exist ephemerally: Diaboliques can only exist as a concrete work of literature.
Yet in this privileging of the ephemeral moment (among which, as MacKenzie notes, Barbey counts what he calls impressions: “A powerful external stimulus that arouses something in one’s personal memory; the result is both an altered, revivified self and an inspiration for the writer”) connects Barbey to the later writers of the fin-de-siècle, to Huysmans and Pater and Wilde — who, when he came to Paris on his honeymoon in 1884 compulsively read only three books: Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and Diaboliques[2] — and further along, connects him to Proust, who wrote approvingly of Barbey in In Search of Lost Time, and who derived at least some of his aesthetic theory from Barbey’s works. Yet Barbey remains only very rarely read in English, perhaps owing to the previous lack of a sufficiently accessible English translation.
By contrast, the contemporary French writers whom English-language readers are likely to read were, to a man — and they are all men — Barbey’s enemies. Flaubert, Zola, and in general the whole schools of French realism and naturalism constituted a literary bloc to which Barbey stood fiercely opposed.
These antipathies were personal, certainly. Barbey feuded with many of the major literary figures of his long career, which spanned four decades, from the 1840s to the 1880s. An inexhaustive list of his enemies includes Flaubert and Zola, but also Sainte-Beuve and Hugo, and, earlier in his career, the female writers derisively referred to as les bas-bleus. Proud, unorthodox, quick to offer an opinion and incredibly prolific, Barbey’s journalistic output contributed not a little to his long list of opponents. Yet his problems with the realists and the naturalists ran deeper than personal antipathy: Barbey disliked realism for what it represented and also for the artistic content of the works themselves.
As one telling example, we might consider Barbey’s response to Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s novel was serialized in 1856, and in 1857 Flaubert was put on trial for, and acquitted of, obscenity. When Madame Bovary appeared in book form later that year, the result was, predictably, a succès de scandale. While critics differed on the literary merits of the novel, Barbey was unequivocal. In his review of Madame Bovary, he wrote:

Mr. Flaubert, himself, has no emotions at all: he has no judgment, at least, no appreciable judgment. He is an incessant and indefatigable narrator, he is an analyst that never troubles himself: he is a describer down the smallest subtleties. But he is deaf and dumb to the impressions of all that he retells. He is indifferent to all that he lovingly and scrupulously describes. If, in Birmingham or Manchester, they forged storytelling or analyzing machines made of good English steel, and they operated all by themselves through unknown dynamic processes, they would function exactly like Mr. Flaubert. You would feel as much life, as much soul, as much human entrails in these machines as in the man of marble that wrote Madame Bovary with a pen made of stone like the knives of savages.[3]

For Barbey, this lack of feeling is the ultimate sin, and Barbey’s justifications for his own titillating, often violent, not infrequently sexually explicit fiction reside here. Barbey presents what he presents, but he does not claim to do so neutrally or nonjudgmentally. He calls Flaubert a moralist but paints him as a moralist who fails to muster any convincing sentiment on behalf of his moral opinions. Barbey, by contrast, explores the most depraved sins in his episodes, but insists that he does so in order to condemn them: “It ought to be clear enough from the title Les Diaboliques that this book has no pretention to be a collection of prayers or an Imitatio Christi . . . For all that, they were written by a Christian moralist, but one who prides himself on accurate observation, no matter how painful, and who believes [. . .] that the powerful painters can paint anything, and that their painting will always be sufficiently moral when it is tragic and creates in the viewer a sense of horror at the things depicted.” Does Barbey only offer his stories for the moral instruction of his readership? It seems unlikely. Certainly, there is a knowing wink in these breathless assertions of artistic license, and without a doubt Barbey relished the contrast between his public persona as a monarchist and staunch Catholic and that of his literary reputation as a something of a glorified smut-peddler.
And the stories in Diaboliques certainly retain their ability to shock and astonish (even today, one can’t help but wonder where on earth Barbey managed to come up with some of the more inventively depraved scenarios he manages to depict.) Yet the collection starts off unremarkably enough. The first story, “The Crimson Curtain,” tells of a clandestine provincial love affair between a young army officer and the daughter of the bourgeois couple with whom he is billeted. The affair takes an unexplained and tragic turn as the girl, Alberte, dies in the young soldier’s arms during orgasm as her parents sleep in their room down the hall. On the advice of his regimental commander the soldier flees the town before his hosts can awaken to discover what has taken place. The soldier, who recounts the story to the narrator many years after the events took place, is reassigned and never manages to find out what became of the situation.
Though “The Crimson Curtain” is relatively tame by the standards of Diaboliques, it establishes many of the tropes and themes that make the book so powerful. The narrator is a man of Parisian society, unknown to us except for his role as the reteller of the tale; the soldier, the Vicomte de Brassard, is introduced at great length as an impressive and remarkable man, and, like so many of the protagonists of the stories, as a dandy whose commitment to dandyism has impeded his professional life even as it has enriched his ability to have an effect on others. Brassard tells the story to the narrator, and tells it to the best of his knowledge, complete with gaps, unsolved mysteries, and dead ends. The narrator asks the reader for a tremendous amount of credulity. He expects us to take at face value his description of Brassard as beautiful, brave in battle, charming with women, and gifted with exquisite conversational abilities; moreover, he asks us to imagine Brassard’s expressions and to understand the meaning of his changes in tone. These elements of conversation, so apparently crucial to Barbey, are not described but merely related; everywhere he violates the well-worn maxim against telling rather than showing. Yet he weaves suspense throughout, manipulating the reader’s curiosity in order to subvert the traditional narrative structure of French 19th-century short fiction, as Susanne Rossbach has argued[4]: whereas most such fiction leads to a surprising climax followed by a dénouement that explains everything, Barbey offers climax but no dénouement, leaving his reader unsettled and pondering, just like his narrators. Barbey, in his original introduction, claims to draw these stories from life, and though they are plainly fictional, they reproduce the feeling of having been told a really juicy piece of gossip or a fantastic anecdote that satisfies completely, even though all the pieces might not fit together.
Of the six stories presented in Diaboliques, “Happiness in Crime” is the most memorable, even if it is neither the most shocking (that would have to be “At a Dinner of Atheists”, whose final scene depicts a pair of lovers assaulting one another with the mummified heart of their deceased child), nor the most narratively complex. “Happiness in Crime” centers on the marriage of Serlon de Savigny, a local nobleman of Valognes, “the last noble town in France”, a hotbed of antirevolutionary, religious, and ultramonarchist sentiment, and Hauteclaire Stassin, the daughter of a retired army officer and fencing instructor who found a vocation giving fencing lessons to the titled men of the town, a position that Hauteclaire inherits. Hauteclaire represents one of the more memorable female characters in a French decadent canon that counts many, and she is unique among the book’s diaboliques in that she does not come to a sad or grisly end. As the story progresses, she is discovered to have disguised herself as a chambermaid in the Savigny household so that she can live in concubinage with Serlon, playing her role perfectly by day and engaging in marathon fencing sessions with him by night. (Torty, the story’s narrator, makes the sexual metaphor more than explicit, even if the phallic implications of female swordsmanship go unmentioned.) At the story’s conclusion, Serlon’s wife is poisoned; she confesses to her doctor, Torty, that she has discovered her husband’s affair with her servant, and she swears him to help conceal the crime, not to protect Serlon but to the save the Savigny name from scandal.
Barbey brilliantly situates this story at the nexus of a century of changes in social and political relationships in France, most of which he opposed. He dramatizes in miniature the supplanting of the nobility and the triumph of the bourgeoisie; the rise of rational positivism and scientific analysis; the replacement of an essentially private legal system with a publicly administered one in which trials and inquiries become sensationalized public affairs; and the real anxieties around changing gender roles combined with the still quite limited possibilities available to a woman like Hauteclaire. Barbey accomplishes this in a story of some 45 pages, and the result is a masterpiece of short fiction: “Happiness in Crime” alone is worth the price of admission.
Yet not all of Barbey’s heroines benefit from so charitable a treatment. While many share Hauteclaire’s positive traits, especially self-possession and the fine-tuned awareness of the minds and thoughts of other characters, they are all too often dismissed as unknowable sphinxes and are killed off with astonishing regularity, while the male protagonists, always just as culpable and often more so, generally get off with only emotional and not physical scars. Barbey has, as Karen L. Humphreys acknowledges[5], a reputation for misogyny, one that goes beyond standard-issue 19th-century paternalism. Yet he profits by comparison to his friend Baudelaire, that other French dandy misogynist, in this: Barbey’s women are always agential. They always have a hand in deciding their fates, even if they must choose from a very limited number of options as compared to the men. Barbey casts these women as entrancing, but he does not ask us to be seduced by them, as so many men are. Barbey’s women act with single-minded purpose: they seize the objects of their desire, they use the men they encounter for their own ends until, in most cases, they meet their tragic deaths. A line spoken by Dr. Torty is instructive: “The Devil teaches women their true natures — or, rather, they teach them to the Devil, if by chance he doesn’t know already.” Diaboliques is not a work of fantastic literature, though much goes unexplained or remains inexplicable, but it takes place within a cosmology in which the Devil may well actually exist, and Satan is mentioned by name at least once in each story. Yet here, as the indomitable materialist Torty observes, women do not learn to sin from Satan, but rather teach him the ways of which they are already the masters.
So even though Barbey presented Diaboliques as morality tales, his claim remains hard to believe. The stories feature sin, treachery, and contemptible behavior, certainly, but the multiple levels of narration make it impossible to pin down a singularly authoritative authorial voice that might pass judgment on the actions taken by the characters, both men and women. Diaboliques is no Evangelical hell house erected to scare its readers straight, because within the text it offers no moral alternative and no promise of salvation. Satan exists, but the jury remains out about God.
But to focus only on the stories themselves without situating Diaboliques in the larger literary-historical context in which it appeared would be to do readers new to Barbey a disservice. Barbey explained away interest in Madame Bovary by asserting that the book’s scandalous trial was responsible for readerly interest, but Barbey himself would benefit from just such a scandalous success when Diaboliques first appeared in 1874. Barbey had the misfortune too of publishing his book during the ultra-prudish 1870s when, in the wake of French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, religious faith and public morality became a core issue for the political right. A popular view held that the humiliating events of the war and the disaster of the Paris Commune were divine punishments sent by God to a French people that had killed their king and turned away from the Catholic Church. Authorities in such an environment had little patience for the frankly lascivious Diaboliques, whatever protests Barbey might make. The public prosecutor’s office seized all the copies of the book that they could find and began an investigation into the work; Barbey was interrogated at length concerning the contents of specific passages from the book. Ultimately, the prosecution declined to try the matter after Barbey mustered every influential connection he had to plead his case for him[6]. The near-trial was apparently so harrowing that Barbey did not print a second edition of the book until 1882, by which point a new government under the reformer Jules Ferry had established freedom of expression as a sacred and inviolable republican value.
These many reversals and contradictions lie at the very heart of Barbey the man and Barbey the writer, and an understanding of these complications only improves the experience of reading his work. Fortunately, MacKenzie has contributed an illuminating introduction as well as an all-important set of translator’s notes, which mainly explain and highlight references and contextual information that even specialist readers might not catch. These notes are occasionally necessary to follow the plot, but more often they draw the reader further into the web of cultural obsessions that Barbey constructed around his book. Finally, MacKenzie includes an appendix, which consists of a short essay called “A Page From History — 1606,” published in the same year as the second edition of Diaboliques, as well as the 1865 preface to Barbey’s 1851 novel The Last Mistress. Both go a long way towards explaining Barbey’s aesthetics and stated rationale for the kind of work he published, and while they feel somewhat anticlimactically appended after the show-stopping final stories of Diaboliques, they are certainly of interest. More than this, though, MacKenzie has accomplished a sorely needed and very readable new translation. Diaboliques was last translated in 1964, and that translation seems virtually unavailable, while the easiest copy to get in English is a recent reprint of a 1926 translation that feels dated. Mackenzie’s updates the language and delivers important annotations while preserving the density and the eloquence of the original.
I like to think that Barbey must have at least appreciated the irony that the supposed defenders of moral order, his natural political allies, went to great lengths to suppress his work while the progressive republicans whose efforts he had always opposed ended up making the distribution of his most successful book possible. Barbey’s conservatism and Catholicism were sincere, no doubt, but he broke from the civil and ecclesiastical authorities too often to be counted among the conventionally devoted. As MacKenzie explains in his introduction: “Baudelaire wrote that ‘d’Aurevilly invites you to receive communion with him like someone else invites you to dinner.’” And a poet and critic from the following generation, Georges Rodenbach, describes Baudelaire and Barbey approaching the altar in Notre Dame as dandies, wondering if it is acceptable to receive communion with hands poised on hips.”
Barbey and Baudelaire appear here as the clear ancestors of Oscar Wilde and as contributors to a kind of masculinity that can only be called queer. Such behavior won Barbey few allies among the traditional conservative bases in France, especially during the Third Republic, while his popularity only grew among young and innovative writers in the 1880s. Through the modern era France has always had a complicated relationship with republicanism, secularism, free expression, and religion, and Barbey’s experience only testifies to the fact that the contemporary debate about the place of religion in French public life stretches back at least to the middle of the 19th century, though the contours have changed in important ways. Barbey’s attacks on bourgeois piety and public virtue constitute exactly kind of expression France has become willing to countenance, though Barbey was at first glance a less-than-likely practitioner. I couldn’t get away with saying we might find in Barbey a writer for our time, but then again, he never set out to be a writer for his own time, either.

¤

[1] See Humphreys and Rossbach, cited below.
[2] During this trip Wilde also discovered Huysmans and his novel A Rebours, which would have a tremendous influence on The Picture of Dorian Gray. Daniel Salvatore Schiffer, interview by Franck Ferrand, Au coeur de l'Histoire, Europe 1, radio broadcast, November 28, 2015.
[3] Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules. “Madame Bovary, par M. Gustave Flaubert.” Le Pays, October 6, 1857. Republished online by the Centre d’études et de recherche éditer/interpréter at the University of Rouen. http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/etudes/madame_bovary/mb_bar.php.
[4] Rossbach, Susanne. “(Un)Veiling the Self and the Story: Dandyism, Desire, and Narrative Duplicity in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 37, no. 3 and 4 (2009): 276-290.
[5] Humphreys, Karen L. “Bas-bleus, filles publiques, and the Literary Marketplace in the Work of Barbey d’Aurevilly.” French Studies, 66, no. 1 (2012). 26-40.
[6] This history comes principally from the Présentation of Diaboliques, edited by Judith Lyon-Caen, in the Quarto collection of the Gallimard edition of Barbey’s Romans (2013). - Dennis M. Hogan

Hirato Renkichi - Once called “the Marinetti of Japan” by David Burliuk, Hirato Renkichi produced a unique brand of Futurism from the late 1910s and early 1920s through poetry, criticism, and guerrilla performance

Hirato Renkichi, Spiral Staircase: Collected Writings, Trans. by Sho Sugita, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016.


Once called “the Marinetti of Japan” by David Burliuk, Hirato Renkichi produced a unique brand of Futurism from the late 1910s and early 1920s through poetry, criticism, and guerrilla performance. Contributing to the earliest productions of Japanese avant-garde poetry, his aggressive experimentation with speed, spatialization, and performability would later influence what became a lively community of Dadaist and Surrealist writers in pre-war Japan.Spiral Staircase is the first definitive volume of Renkichi’s works to appear in English.

Translator Sho Sugita’s ingenious handling of the high-impact, anxiously mutating poetry of Hirato Renkichi—central to the blink-and-it’s-over Japanese Futurist literary movement, dead at 29—brings into sharp focus a momentous, of-the-moment figure little known in the English-speaking world. Hirato’s spring-loaded motto:
Directness is my mores.
My        action.
My        art. (from “Poem of Directness”) —David Grubbs

It's hard to fathom how a poet with such balls could go under the radar for nearly one hundred years. Hirato Renkichi's devotion to poetry puts him in the company of Rimbaud and Mayakovsky, and his work also provides a fascinating view into the flow of experimental forms from west to east in the early twentieth century. Sho Sugita's labor in contextualizing and translating this collection is a real gift to English-language readers.—Lisa Jarnot

Meaningful Union

Look,
The speedy movement of froth,
The smooth falling
     Shifts of the center,
Denture of curves,
(ririri……ri……rin)
Simultaneous metallic roar,
     Echoes.
Meaningful union!
Look,
At this organic union,
This mutuality of comfortable determination!

Hirato Renkichi: Nothing Day / Not Guilty, an Unfinished Novel
Translated by Sho Sugita

Born Kawahata Shoichi on December 9th 1893 in Osaka, Hirato Renkichi attended Sophia University in Tokyo for three years before dropping out and attending Gyosei Gakko to study Italian. He started writing poetry in 1912, first publishing in Banso under the guidance of Kawaji Ryuko. Although he worked at Hochi Shimbun News and Chuo Geijutsu Art Publishing, he suffered from a pulmonary disease, often failing to make ends meet for his family. He passed away on July 20, 1922 in Tokyo, at the age of 29.

Ramsey Scott - these epistolary essays, personal narratives, meditations on avant-garde writers, and unorthodox forays into the “narco-imaginary” attend to the residue of transient impressions that remain, long after the delirium of creative activity subsides

Ramsey Scott, The Narco-Imaginary: Essays Under the Influence, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016.


Written according to its own dictum, “language is the universal inebriant,” these epistolary essays, personal narratives, meditations on avant-garde writers, and unorthodox forays into the “narco-imaginary”—the habits and conventions surrounding literary and cultural representations of drug use—attend to the residue of transient impressions that remain, long after the delirium of creative activity subsides.

With this stellar book, Ramsey Scott catapults into my canon of favorite literary visionaries. He performs political lament in compressed, exquisitely composed sentences, their gnomic austerity buoyed by humor, cynicism, critical edge, and spiky disclosures—his tone smartly poised on the borderline between the raw and the cooked, the elegiac and the confrontational. His heady syntax will thrill any reader hungry for gorgeous complication. Sonorous, libidinous, eloquent, and charmingly digressive, Scott’s the real deal. —Wayne Koestenbaum

In the hermetic and self-policed state that poetics and what passes for “literary criticism” now exist, Ramsey Scott’s lapidary and incendiary prose is more than welcome. While possessed with the necessary wit and clarity of a master satirist, Scott also plumbs the emotional depths of the real with fierce intelligence and lacerating detail. From his brilliant piece on Gilbert Sorrentino depicting the “deeply disturbing reality otherwise known as America, a cadaver whose cancerous organs continue to demand collective denial and repression,” to “Vultures Are Writers By Nature,” a redemptive meditation on childhood during the Reagan years, The Narco-Imaginary signals the arrival of an important new voice.—Ammiel Alcalay

Dear Sergeant Pepper,
For a long time now I’ve been convinced that drugs construct a link to history’s underside. LSD conjures the Sixties; prewar Vienna reclines in cocaine’s powdered foothills. On the cover of the album that bears your name, Edgar Allen Poe, Sonny Liston, Sigmund Freud. I write to you because this album forms, along with co-op peanut butter and carob chips, patterns my dreams make into quilts and fold over childhood’s pillows. I’m writing to you because half-baked concepts define my labor; my pallid inspiration can’t access completion. Experts consider your Lonely Hearts Club Band an unfinished concept album. Visionary excess never completes its projects, but its leavings provide ample room for inebriations others title entertainment. Do the Sixties as a decade match this pattern? All I know today dissolves in water, fits into my medicine cabinet, contours deformities in bone and muscle. The mannequins on your album cover remind me that all knowledge is orthopedic.
Thanks anyway for your well-boiled optimism,




Ramsey Scott teaches at Brooklyn College, CUNY.  His essays, poems, and fiction have appeared in various print and online publications, including the Southwest Review, the Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shampoo, Tarpaulin Sky, Confrontation, and Mirage #4/Period(ical).  The Narco-Imaginary (Essays Under the Influence) is his first book.

Nick Francis Potter - A masculinity cult seeks the advice of their mothers regarding the resurrection of Paul. A headless drifter beset with stray arrows finds a new head and falls into a void

Nick Francis Potter, New Animals, Subito Press, 2016
nickfrancispotter.tumblr.com/


A young pioneer woman wanders into an oilfield guarded by a temporary Goliath who used to date her mother. An aspiring artist/entrepreneur marries a machine filled with birds to himself and his wife. A masculinity cult seeks the advice of their mothers regarding the resurrection of Paul. A headless drifter beset with stray arrows finds a new head and falls into a void. In his debut collection of comics and prose, Nick Francis Potter delivers an absurd and innovative quiver of stories over-spilling with dark humor and wild imagination.


"When I first read Nick Potter's amazing story 'Oops, Isaac,' a few years back, I was impressed—with the daring, the verve, the substance, the invention of this very serious, very funny story. I am delighted to see NEW ANIMALS, Potter's first collection of stories—and cartoons!—is just as daring, inventive, funny, and serious. Watch out, animal world of indie readers, thinkers, cartoonists, philosophers, and comics, you have an extremely impressive new primate among you."—Rebecca Brown

Nick Francis Potter’s New Animals (Subito Press) is a startling book, an unleashing of all-too-human humans and other monsters within wildly conceived spaces. While echoing Ben Marcus’s absurdist eviscerations of the nuclear family, George Saunders’s satirical takedowns of post-industrial society, and Brian Evenson’s bleak mind- and landscapes, Potter’s prose is its own animal.

These often bizarrely humorous, humorously bizarre short fictions—featuring sundry amputations and beheadings, resurrections, sacrificial killings, climbs into and out of holes, and a host of angels and “more than animals” animals—are suffused with an overwhelming sense of impending doom and certain death, with all the uncertainties coming before and presumably after the worst has happened. The book’s innumerable odd juxtapositions, engagingly clunky phrasings, and obsessive inventorying are all in service of several overarching projects, namely, a peculiar dissolving of genre boundaries, an imploding of narrative conventions, and a singular dismantling of fairy tales and fables, and, especially, of biblical stories.

The book’s art, all adroitly drawn by Potter, takes different forms: as chapter heading illustrations, as embedded pictures within other stories, or as standalone panel sequences. While less lexically dense than the other stories, Potter’s comics are certainly as visceral and darkly comical. Gnarled and barbed, the drawings sometimes bring to mind the Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, Potter’s various beasts conjuring an odd evanescence, a similar air of mystery and menace.

In short, New Animals is where the wild things irreally are. - John Madera

"Nick Potter's New Animals is a spectacular beast. With each paragraph, with each panel, Potter hoists open the jaws of the story by its rigid yellow teeth–until you hear the crack." –Lily Hoang

"Quirky, well-drawn absurdities that nonetheless pack an altogether human punch hard enough to send you reeling. An astounding book that absorbs the experiments of the past, and invents the innovations of the future." –Brian Evenson

"A magnificent mash-up is what I thought upon reading (no, not reading as much as absorbing) the graphic stories and storied graphics of Nick Francis Potter's new NEW ANIMALS. There is much to talk about art's organic forms and structures, but this work is organic in spades, whole kitchen sinks of carbon chains. It is and is about decompositions of subject and style that then compose themselves into radiant riots of rot. It goes all wabi-sabi on us. Here, Mr. Poe yins as Dr. Seuss yangs (or the other way around), all the time frying these mashed-up skillets with the deadest of deadpan pans."—Michael Martone

It's been a hot minute since we last chatted with Nick Potter. The former Utah artist and screenprinter has moved around with his awesome wife Erin and their kids to new places, but his artwork continues to thrive in new areas on the other side of the country. Earlier this month, Potter released his debut novel, New Animals, filled with quirky stories and illustrations that capture a non-conforming way of storytelling and artistic expression. Today, we briefly chat with Potter about what he's been up to, his book and what he's got planned down the line. (All pictures provided courtesy of Potter.)

               

• Nick Francis Potter

Gavin: Hey Nick, first off, how have things been since we last chatted?

Nick:My goodness, a lot has happened. It’s been what? Five or six years? Since then, we moved to Providence, Rhode Island for a couple of years while I attended Brown for my MFA. We also had our second son while there. Currently, we are living in Columbia, Mo., where I’m working on finishing up my Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri. It’s been wild and busy and fun and terrifying few years, to be sure.

click to enlarge

• Nick Francis Potter

How have your latest zines and comics been working out lately, and what have you been working on in that area?
Inasmuch as I’ve had time to make them, absolutely. Last year I self-published a few different mini-comics, including the first couple issues of Some Horns, which I’m also serializing online at Hobart. I also put out two self-contained stories, Conrad’s Inevitable Death, and Irregular Limbs. I should mention that none of them would exist without the dedicated help and expertise of my wife, Erin. We ended up taking them to the Toronto Comics Arts Festival and Small Press Expo in Maryland, which was a lot of fun. I’m hoping to make some more soon, but “soon” feels pretty abstract right now.
How did the idea come about for you to write a book?
They idea evolved slowly, I guess. I had been writing for a while before I ever really considered trying to get published. While I have always enjoyed writing, I’ve been pretty self-conscious about the quality, and so it wasn’t until I’d been accepted to Brown’s MFA program that I thought it might be a real possibility. From there, I’ve just been writing compiling a lot of different stories, and after a certain amount of time, I realized I had something resembling a book.

• Nick Francis Potter

 What was the process of creating the stories that are collected in the book?
The process varied widely from story to story. As I think is apparent when you flip through the collection, I ended up experimenting with a lot of different formal techniques while writing, including standard prose, comics, and some stories which contain prose, comics and stand-alone images. Because of that, some of the stories happened quickly, in a kind of burst of creative energy that I finished within a week or two, while others came together over a much longer period of time. “Oops, Isaac,” the longest and most formally ambitious story of the bunch, I began as a monologue I wrote in a playwriting class at the University of Utah, and went through an enormous amount of changes over a period of 10 years before it became what it is now.
What were your thoughts behind the designs for the sketches throughout each story?
Regarding the drawings and comics, I really tried to draw each in a style unique to the story in which they appear. So while I think you can definitely see a similarity in terms of style from one story to the next, I definitely made an effort to stylize the illustrations as a means of reflecting tone and authorship. For instance, the illustrations in “Herbert 2b Makes a Mess of the Locals” are a lot more chaotic and representative of the authorial voice than the drawings in “Paul’s Tomb,” which have a more playful, detached absurdity, consistent with the tone of the third person narrator.

• Nick Francis Potter

The book has a very clever tone, but also feels steeped in dark humor. Was that pre-planned, or simply how the stories played out?
As a collection, no, that wasn’t pre-planned, though I think it’s one of the things that really unifies the collection. I actually have some anxiety about it, because, for a lot of people who know me, it come as something of a surprise, all these really dark and violent stories. I think it’s startled my mom in particular. She’s been reading the book and calling to ask me questions about it—which is amazing, she’s been really supportive and I love her so much for putting effort into my book—but she is really not the kind of person who subscribes to the kind of fiction I’m writing, and I think there’s been this kind of humorous, lovely discomfort in talking together about these uniformly dark, often disturbing stories.
Do you have any plans for a follow-up yet, or mainly watching to see how New Animals does?
I’m working on quite a few different projects right now, perhaps too many. And all of which are presently on the back-burner, as I’m right in the thick of the most demanding part of my Ph.D. program. But hopefully, in the next year or two, I’ll be able to finish a couple of them. Until then I’ll be hunkering down writing academic essays. - Gavin Sheehan                                     




Fictions (and Nonfictions) Online and in Print:
—”Irregular Limbs” forthcoming from Entropy Magazine
—”Look Stop Have Haircut My Hair Maybe” forthcoming from Horse Less Review
—”Irregular Limbs” in NightBlock 6 (comic)
—”Some Horns” forthcoming online from Hobart (comic)
—”Sven Rearranges” in Caketrain 12 (Comic)
—”The Gary Chaos” online at The Collagist (prose)
—”Debbie” in Parcel 8 (prose)
—”Certain Poems” online at Requited (comic)
—”Two Comics” online at Hobart
—”Alvin Dillinger’s Brother” in PANK Magazine 11 (comic)
—”A Tender-hearted Beheading“ forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review 3.4 (comic)
—Diptych for Banango Street issue 7 (drawings)
—”Conrad Dillinger’s Inevitable Death” over at The Rumpus (comic)
—”Knifehandle Sweetheart” online at Hobart (comic)
—”Irregular Limbs” in Ninth Letter, Vol. 11, No. 1 (prose)
—Nine illustrations in Booth 6

—”Winifred, Not A Horse” in Bat City Review (prose)
—”Arto’s Headspace” in Fourteen Hills 20.1 (comic)
—”Oven Scripture” in H_NGM_N #16 (comic)
—Three comics online at Hobart
—”New Animals” in The Chattahoochee Review 33.2-3 (comic)
—”Well-wishing the Weight of Something Kevinly Piecemeal” in Sleepingfish 12 (prose/hybrid)
—”Temporary Goliath Temporarily” in Black Warrior Review 40.1 (prose)
—”Vacationing“ in Devil’s Lake (comic)
—”Underwater Ascension Principles” in Pear Noir! 9 (prose)
—”Josh Henderson is Anne Boleyn” in the Yellow Issue of Fairy Tale Review (prose)
—”Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph?” in The Collagist, issue 37 (prose/comic hybrid)
—”Herbert 2B Makes a Mess of the Locals“ in Sleepingfish XI (prose)
—”Evil! Doctor Zjock Zjockenstein!” in Untoward (prose/hybrid)
—”The Wreath Option” in Caketrain 9 (prose)
—”Homecoming for Pulseless Sunken Wife“ in > kill author 15 (prose)
—”Vacationing” at HTML Giant (prose poem)

Some Reviews:
—Distance Mover by Patrick Kyle at Heavy Feather Review
—The Blast by David Ohle at Heavy Feather Review
—Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball at Heavy Feather Review
—In Pieces by Marion Fayolle at Heavy Feather Review
—Daybreak by Brian Ralph at Big Other
—I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur by Mathias Svalina at Forest Gospel
—The Moors by Ben Marcus at Forest Gospel
—The Revisionist by Miranda Mellis at Forest Gospel
—A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed by J.A. Tyler in The Collagist



Nick Francis Potter is a multimedia artist and writer from Salt Lake City, Utah. His writing and comics have appeared in Ninth Letter, Caketrain, Black Warrior Review, and Sleepingfish, among others. He currently lives in Columbia, MO with his wife and two boys.

François J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible heterogeneity of ‘sound’, navigating between the physical models constructed by psychophysics and refined through recording technologies, and the synthetic production of what is heard

François J. Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, Trans. by Robin Mackay, Urbanomic, 2016.


Preface: The Otographer Peter Szendy      PDF


To the theoretical propensities imprinted on the domain of sound by a rational order, François J. Bonnet opposes a veritable thinking of disorder, a ‘sonorous archipelago’ rather than a ‘theory of sound’. This unprecedented and salutary enterprise outlines a new path for a future ‘acoulogy’.
— Pierre-Yves Macé


Bonnet’s writing, dense, full of unexpected turns and remarks, is intelligent and meticulous.
— Daniel Contarelli

Profoundly intimate yet immediately giving onto distant spaces, both an ‘organ of fear’ and an echo chamber of anticipated pleasures, an uncontrollable flow subject to unconscious selection and augmentation, the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing has meant that sound has rarely received the same philosophical attention as the visual.

In The Order of Sounds, François J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible heterogeneity of ‘sound’, navigating between the physical models constructed by psychophysics and refined through recording technologies, and the synthetic production of what is heard. From primitive vigilance and sonic mythologies to digital sampling and sound installations, he examines the ways in which we make sound speak to us, in an analysis of listening as a plurivocal phenomenon drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Nancy, Adorno, and de Certeau, and experimental pioneers such as Tesla, Bell, and Raudive. Stringent critiques of the ‘soundscape’ and ‘reduced listening’ demonstrate that univocal ontologies of sound are always partial and politicized; for listening is always a selective fetishism, a hallucination of sound filtered by desire and convention, territorialized by discourse and its authorities.

Bonnet proposes neither a disciplined listening that targets sound ‘itself’, nor an ‘ocean of sound’ in which we might lose ourselves, but instead maps out a sonorous archipelago—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped and aggregated by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse.

Martin Paul Eve - Pynchon has been accused of being an anti-rationalist, a postmodern nihilist figure who revels in the collapse of logic. In this book Eve shows that a fruitful showdown between these philosophical figures and Pynchon is now urgently needed to unearth the latent ethics within Pynchon's novels and to counter these wild claims

Martin Paul Eve, Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno, 2014.
www.martineve.com/


Pynchon, Philosophy, Ethics


Thomas Pynchon, perhaps the most important living American author, is famed for his lengthy, complex and erudite fictions. Given these characteristics, an examination of the philosophical dimensions of Pynchon's works is long overdue. In Pynchon and Philosophy, Martin Paul Eve comprehensively and clearly redresses this balance, mapping Pynchon's interactions with the philosophy, ethics and politics of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno, resulting in a fresh approach to these seminal novels.
Pynchon and Philosophy is based on the notion that Pynchon's brand of postmodern literature mocks theoretical frameworks. On these grounds, Pynchon has been accused of being an anti-rationalist, a postmodern nihilist figure who revels in the collapse of logic. In this book Eve shows that a fruitful showdown between these philosophical figures and Pynchon is now urgently needed to unearth the latent ethics within Pynchon's novels and to counter these wild claims.


"Martin Paul Eve's Pynchon and Philosophy is a work of consummate scholarship. Breaking new ground in Pynchon studies, Eve offers an immensely erudite, detailed and in-depth account of the ways in which the ideas of Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno help us to think about his texts. A first-rate book." - David Cowart


How to relate philosophical thought to literary practice? And, conversely, how to illuminate issues presented in narrative literature by having recourse to systems of philosophy? These are the two preeminent questions that Martin Paul Eve asks himself and answers impressively in his recent study Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (2014). They are questions that have been posed often in American Studies and in Pynchon scholarship particularly, due to the notoriously difficult and multifaceted nature of Pynchon’s fiction. In a sense, the trajectory of Pynchon’s career as a novelist goes hand in hand, historically speaking, with the increasing frequency of those questions regarding the precise relationship between philosophy and literature, or theory and practice, being asked within literary studies as a whole and, above all, within the American context. Starting with highly complex and – at times – transnationally set novels like V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966 ), or Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Pynchon’s first major steps as a fiction writer fall into the period where the long reign of New Criticism within literary analysis faded and made room for French theory’s shaking, breaking, and re-assembling the foundations of what it was to read a text. Undoubtedly, this historical coincidence and Pynchon’s magisterially multiplicitous – if infamous and, at times, impenetrable – style of prose is one of the major reasons why his novels are often regarded as the blueprint of what is routinely termed American postmodern fiction.
Yet, it is precisely because Pynchon is so immersed, from the beginning of his career all the way to the most recent novel, Bleeding Edge (2013), in the philosophical discourses, scientific theories (above all the second law of thermodynamics, as evident in the eponymous short story, “Entropy” (1960)), and cultural-political contexts of his time and the many centuries that preceded it, that there is a certain resistance within his novels towards literary criticism’s establishment of the respective correlations or resonances with these contexts and discourses. This verdict holds especially in the case of literary theory and philosophical thought, since “[h]is works […] present an outright aggression towards philosophical theorisation” (1), as Eve notes on the first page. The parallel development of what issued forth in the academic circles of the 1960s and ’70s in the humanities and what eventually was termed “theory,” on the one hand, and, on the other, the onset of Pynchon’s trajectory as a novelist evidences, in Eve’s view, that “any hostility to theory within Pynchon’s novels must be recognized to some degree as an inherent part of the reflexivity exhibited by his works” (2). The task, then, is not to determine how, for instance, Pynchon’s early writings correspond to the emphasis put on the self-referentiality of language by deconstructionists and those who emulated this mode of analysis within the literary and cultural theory departments of the ’80s and onwards. Rather, “[i]t is the nature of this resistance to philosophical readings, in light of Pynchon’s ethical project, that this book addresses” (3); a project that, according to Eve, harbors an “essentialist stance towards human nature” (173).
Indeed, Eve promises “an ethical, politicised reading of Pynchon alongside a demonstration of a nuanced comparative methodology for philosophico-literary intersections” (5), and a fine-grained and careful analysis it is, often in conflict with many presumptions and prejudices concerning Pynchon that have manifested themselves within literary studies. Indeed, this critical stance of Eve’s book towards the main tenets of criticism on Pynchon is a freshly polemic element that should be applauded in the context of philosophically inclined readings of literary fiction in general. However, before we trace the workings of Eve’s “systematic, tripartite analysis of the interactions between the fiction and essays of Thomas Pynchon and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno” (5), there should be a caveat as concerns the only ostensibly outmoded character of the three philosophers under consideration here. In other words, Eve’s usage of the three thinkers should not only be evaluated immanently, in terms of its effectivity as a theoretical framework to re-read Pynchon’s prose, but it should also be considered historically. That is to say, Eve’s “tripartite analysis” should be viewed against the backdrop of the contemporary emergence or partial resurgence of philosophical realism and materialism in contemporary humanities, the so-called “post-postmodernist” mood or condition that has shaped both literary theory and critical practice for almost a decade now. This caveat seems necessary in order to better situate and evaluate a book whose outspokenly philosophical consideration of one of the most complicated authors in American literary history in many ways contributes to those ongoing discussions about said condition, if only implicitly.
As philosopher Crispin Sartwell has recently stated in The New York Times, “a backlash seems to be in progress” after the long period of philosophical anti-realism, and of linguistic, social and cultural constructivism, so that “many [scholars] are now turning to the external features of the world that constitute the content of our experiences and the context of our social practice. Let’s call this phase after postmodernism post-postmodernism […]” (Sartwell). In Do You Feel it Too? The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium, her 2010 study of the American writers Mark Z. Danielewski, Dave Eggers, and David Foster Wallace, literary critic Nicoline Timmer promoted the idea of a literary post-postmodernism, which, in her reading, resonated very well with the theories of cognitive narratology and psychology, in sync with what is today often labelled “cognitive poetics.”
The engagement with basic, often arch-philosophical questions such as what it means to be human, or what any human being’s self-esteem actually is compared to the biological, social, or historical processes that surround it, increasingly evokes materialist answers, if the latter is conceived in a broad sense. This means – in very straightforward terms and at the risk of oversimplification – that while there is a renewed interest in objects and material processes, instead of cultural constructions and significations, what comes with that interest is exactly what Eve tries to get at, namely Pynchon’s narrative depiction of all that “ring[s] true to human existence or the existence that humans should, or could, have” (Eve 158). Put differently, and in the words of the author who wrote the equally encyclopedic fiction Infinite Jest (1996): if contemporary “[f]iction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being” (McCaffery and Wallace), the urge in early twenty-first century critical theory is to examine not exclusively human culture and its meaning-making, but rather all that is external to it, or, better still, all that gives rise to it. This external or constitutive realm includes, for instance, the neurochemistry taking place in the human brain that eventually makes for what the narratologist Monika Fludernik (1996) has termed “experientiality”; or today’s financial markets within the world system and their non-human processes of automation that have most recently spawned “high-frequency trading (HFT)” (465), whose consequences for human society have been analyzed by vanguard theorists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in their article “On Cunning Automata: Financial Acceleration at the Limits of the Dromological” (2014). All of this, then, represents the largely unmentioned and therefore only implicit backdrop to Eve’s study and this historical framework, especially with such (quasi-) movements like speculative realism or new materialism, needs to be considered. This is because questions concerning the relationship between philosophy and literature (and art in general), the link between philosophy and science, and that between mythology and enlightenment are playing a role both in Eve and in the works of the major figures of these new developments within today’s theoretical landscape: Graham Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (2005), Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Extinction and Enlightenment (2007), or Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), to name but a few of the most prominent examples.
After this brief excursus on the historical background of Eve’s assessment of Pynchon and, to a lesser extent, of Pynchon’s work itself at the beginning of the new century, which already includes the three novels - Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013) - we can now turn back to his monograph proper, starting with how he treats the issues raised at the beginning of this review regarding the relationship between philosophy, or theory in general, and the literary text. As he makes clear early on, what needs to be avoided is a straightforward “application” of the theoretical apparatus to the literary artifact , on the one hand, and, on the other, a naïve historicism that would in the worst of cases find (read: imagine) connections that are not really there to be found. Instead, he chooses to take on a critical perspective that consists of the co-implication of both approaches. Eve “suggest[s] the path to be taken must tread the space between these chasms of ‘application’ and ‘historicity’ ” (6). Or, in more detail: “The relationship under discussion here can best be thought of as a cross-cultural pollination wherein historicism, direct reference and shared thematic precepts are allowed to co-exist as equally valid, as long as no single one of these aspects dominates” (6). And this is, in fact, what the book essentially is: a “cross-cultural pollination” between thematically engaged theory brought to bear on the literature that is to be scrutinized, and an erudite and historically informed analysis of those themes delineated in both the specific philosophies of Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Adorno, and Pynchon’s fiction.
What seems crucial here, as Eve mentions time and again, is the plural form of philosophies that should be used as a framework for any given reading of Pynchon; the fact that “no single philosophical standpoint has yet to resonate completely with even one of his novels” (5). In this way, Eve’s “tripartite analysis” takes its cue from Hanjo Berressem’s important book Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text (1993) – surely the most detailed and in-depth consideration of the “ ‘poststructuralist Pynchon’ ” (Berressem 1) via Lacanian, Derridian, and Baudrillardian expositions of subjectivity and textuality. But, whereas Eve dismisses the philosophical alignment of Wittgenstein and Pynchon, he does not particularly focus on Foucault either (who, of Eve’s choice of philosophers, would be the only theorist consonant with Berressem’s trio of thinkers in Pynchon’s Poetics). In fact, it is the Adornian theoretical apparatus that is the dominant one in the book and thus Eve mentions his indebtedness not only to Berressem but also to Samuel Thomas’ 2007 study Pynchon and the Political, “the only piece of sustained Pynchon criticism to engage substantially with the thinkers of the Frankfurt school” (7). Lastly, the notion of an ethico-political Pynchon whose writings can be viewed as critical engagements with right-leaning tendencies (not only) in American society is what Eve adopts from literary critic Jeff Baker in order to proclaim not only a sincere or humanist Pynchon, but also a “critical” one (7).
Pynchon and Philosophy is structured into three parts, aside from the to-the-point conclusion and the introductory chapter on methodology used in the treatment of the subject matter, whose main elements have just been summarized. The three main parts are simply called “On Ludwig Wittgenstein,” “On Michel Foucault,” and “On Theodor W. Adorno,” respectively, and they contain meticulous analyses of Pynchon’s entire novelistic work, as well as discussions of Pynchon’s two essays “Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?” (1984) and “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” (1993).
The first part deals with the allusions to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) in Pynchon’s debut novel V. It includes commentary on the syntactic intricacies of The Crying of Lot 49 and the supposedly ethical kernel of Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland (1990) and Inherent Vice; “ethical” understood not in the sense that Pynchon’s characters – rightly termed “functional puppets” (28) or “linguistic formations” (63) – in these and other novels, are designated as clichéd examples of a postmodern, unfixed subjectivity under late capitalism, but in the sense that the logical-positivist reasoning of “puppets” such as Weissmann (V.)/Blicero (Gravity’s Rainbow) implies a critical stance in Pynchon that, for Eve, recalls Adorno’s famous quip about the barbarism of writing poetry after the Holocaust: “The foremost consideration of Tractarian logic as a precursor to genocidal regimes is to be found in Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of enlightenment: the path from rationality to industrialized killing,” as Eve explains (32). Moreover, in reading Pynchon alongside Wittgenstein’s posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, the primacy of uncertainty and decentralization becomes an ethical rather than a nihilistic proposition. In other words, Eve takes Wittgenstein’s later “relativism” to be structurally akin to Pynchon’s prose in Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland and thus more helpful as a theoretical set-up to get at the ethical dimension in the fiction writer, instead of opting for a dismissal of sincerity in yet another identification of Pynchon as a postmodern relativist à la Derrida or in terms of the Foucault who spoke of the all-encompassing discursive processes and relentless power structures in the social.
Generally, it must be said, however, that the alignment of Wittgenstein with Pynchon mainly presents itself as a negative one in order to better work towards an Adornian stance in Pynchon, via Foucault’s work on enlightenment and the “care of the self,” deployed as an argumentative bridge. As already mentioned, and although Eve carefully argues for the similarity between the logical rhetorics as a stylistic element in Pynchon and the New Wittgensteinianism of the ’80s that he, following Katalin Orbán, calls “over-writing” (47), and what Berressem has called “auto-destruction” (Berressem 244), Wittgenstein is dropped eventually to make room for a fully Adornian Pynchon; and this in spite of the original premise that there cannot possibly be a dominant philosophy that is fully in consonance with Pynchon’s polyvocal lexico-syntactic gymnastics, but only philosophies.
As with the large section on Wittgenstein, Part 2 is concerned both with the early and late Foucault and how the latter’s view towards ethical issues, enlightenment, and agency bear upon “an openness to critical alterity – a very Pynchonian ethic […]” (Eve 123), as represented in the novels. The chief purpose here, apart from leading the argument of the book from a dismissal of Wittgenstein to an affirmation of Adorno as a main philosophical ally, is “to unseat [Max] Weber as the de facto framework for Pynchon’s anti-rationalist critique of modernity and thereby open a space in which Foucault can emerge” (84). Together with other commonly cited progenitors of literary postmodernism, Pynchon has been regarded as a fiction writer who equates all things rationalist and logico-positivist as instrumental in the name of (concepts such as) the state, the nation, linear time and progress. Any logic of rationalization leads to productivity and therefore to progress in the name of something higher than individual human life, in the same way that Protestantism in America feeds into a work ethic suitable for maximally effective capitalism, to use a Weberian phrasing. The Foucault part in Eve’s book, then, is a two-fold heretical move in its substitution of Foucault for Weber and in its partial reformulation of Foucauldian literary analysis itself. It is not a usual reading of Pynchon’s novels – in this case, above all, Mason & Dixon (1994) and, again, Gravity’s Rainbow – and Eve concedes as much when he writes: “ceci n’est pas Foucauldian, or at least, not entirely” (80). It is not a discernment of the discursive and non-discursive fields that get thematized narratively in Pynchon’s texts, but rather a juxtaposition of philosopher/historian and novelist on the issue of what it means to be human. Indeed, what could be said about the entirety of the book, the strength of argument is not merely internal to literary criticism or Pynchon scholarship; Eve’s analyses are also important for reasons of philosophical contextualization, especially in the case of Foucault. For instance, Eve reasons that considering a direct stand-off between Mason & Dixon and Foucault’s early essays on the question “What is Enlightenment?,” “Pynchon outdoes Foucault as the master of anti-teleologies” (100).
Further, Eve relativizes Foucault’s image within critical theory and literary studies as being one of the anti-rationalist thinkers when he mentions “Foucault’s […] prominent assertion that reason cannot be put on trial. As shall be seen, much of the logic supporting this proposition is centered around its implied negation; what would be the virtue of an unreason unchecked?” (101). Although Eve does not mention it, a version of this line of reasoning, which sees a contradictory character in the off-hand rejection of the rational by making use of reasonable arguments when doing so, has recently been repeated in favor of the rationalist tradition in Brassier’s piece “Prometheanism and Its Critics” (2014), where he defines “rationality [as] simply the faculty of generating and being bound by rules” (485). From Brassier’s point of view, this rule-governed process can be described and defended irrespective of its instrumentalization by social and institutional forms of conduct and their organs, such as, for instance, big companies like IG Farben in Gravity’s Rainbow. In Foucault and Pynchon, this is not the case at all. Both affirm that rationality is not just “historically mutable” (486) but that it is deeply ingrained into a culturally and historically specific matrix, from which it is generated in the first place. For Eve, “[i]t is right, therefore, to ask: what is Gravity’s Rainbow if not, to an extent, an exploration of these institutional practices, a re-casting of the familiar narrative of the Second World War’s political aggression and genocide in the shady realm of corporate cartels and fiscalized power-relations?” (103).
Finally, part 3 examines the ethico-political convergence between Pynchon’s middle and late period, and Adorno’s philosophy, as it is expounded in the seminal works Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Negative Dialectics (1966), and Aesthetic Theory (1970). What becomes clear early on in this section, and what has already been suggested in the two preceding parts of the book, is the way in which Eve’s reading of Pynchon points towards the near congruence of Pynchon’s narrative treatment of ethical, political, cultural, and historical questions with the stance of the famous Frankfurt School philosopher in the works just mentioned. The claim is that “Pynchon’s works project a world-view sympathetic to aspects of Adorno’s thought” (129), and it is the purpose of this third part of Eve’s study to examine in what sense this projection unfolds in the novels. It is worth noting that this examination in particular is a very technical portion of the book, theory-laden as it is with the Adornian thicket consisting of difficult philosophemes. Yet, this mention of a strong emphasis on philosophy is not meant critically at all and Eve confronts beforehand and in a competent manner the possible charge that he would dominate the novels’ uniqueness by blurring their specific contours with the screen that is critical theory (129). In his defense, he is certainly right that, like all major fiction within and without America, “[Pynchon’s] texts are more than capable of fighting back” (130).
One of the chief virtues of Eve’s exposition of his argument vis-à-vis the Adorno-Pynchon couple is the concision with which the concepts are explained, compared, and contrasted with the fictional universe in the novels, and particularly in Against the Day, Mason & Dixon, and Inherent Vice. Negative dialects, for example, which is indeed one of the most notoriously nerve-wrecking notions of Adorno’s, is surmised in one single, but impressive sentence: “negative dialectics is the primacy of the object” (131). The thinking subject, the story-telling narrator, or, for that matter, the literary critic, is always confronted with the situation of giving an account of that which is perceived by him or her: the object. It is the contention of Adorno, from Eve’s point of view, that there is always an excess of this object with respect to the perceiving subject, due to the “imperfection of the concept” (131), its inability to hold all that the object is. In other words, the subject’s conceptual powers are inadequate to the object’s totality.
With this definition of negative dialectics and the entailed presumption that this attitude is assumed by the narrator in Pynchon’s narratives – an attitude that promises and demands “to respect the unique, rather than to dominate through identity thinking or exclude through contradiction” (132) – Eve enters the aforementioned debate on realism and new materialism without saying so. This is because the idea of an mentally ungraspable object that disables dialectical unity and conceptual synthesis can be reformulated by using the terminology of Adorno’s arch-enemy – Martin Heidegger – and thus by stating that the object cannot be adequately captured by the concept because the former withdraws from the latter and consequently shows itself only in part. This thesis is precisely what some proponents of speculative realism have proclaimed, chief among them Harman and his enjoining into the post-postmodernist chorus of a “new sincerity”; even though his plea is not for an engagement with the question “what it means to be a fucking human being” (Wallace) but with what it means to be an object in the world.
Perhaps inadvertently, another parallel to Harman’s work is established when in Eve’s discussion of Pynchon scholarship on the author’s ecocritical dimension we read: “could it be that nature is not natural?” (148). In the concluding pages of Guerilla Metaphysics, this question is thus affirmed: “[n]ature is not natural and can never be naturalized, even when human beings are far from the scene” (251). The rift between nature and artifice is an invalid dualism, as thinkers like Bruno Latour and others have realized decades ago, and Eve notes as much (148-9). What is intriguing here is how this argument plays itself out in regard to the question of the enlightenment discussed earlier and the related theme of the Golem made out of clay in Mason & Dixon. For Eve, this theme makes for “a critique of the spheres of nature and the human as purified and discrete” along the lines of Adorno’s rejection of precisely that distinction as a self-destructive act from a human perspective (150). Moreover, the problematization of the enlightenment notion of the world’s “dis-enchantment” – coincidentally the main topic of Brassier’s Nihil Unbound – is found in Adorno (and Horkheimer) in terms of Greek mythology and in Pynchon on occasion of the surfer, doper, and hippie counter-culture in Inherent Vice. Eve achieves this problematization by means of a truly ingenious reformulation of Adorno’s quip that “’[m]yth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ ” (146), when he writes that “[h]ippiedom is already repression and repression reverts to hippiedom” (154); an argument that is related to similar issues in the history and theory of subculture, as noted by Eve later in the book.
However thought-provoking the link between the dialectic of dis- and re-enchantment in Adorno’s critique of modern life and that of Pynchon’s diagnosis of cultural resistance, it is precisely this topic of the reification and intra-repressive tendencies within a subculture such as jazz in the first half of the twentieth century that the consonance between Adornian philosophy and Pynchon’s fictions partially falters and tends towards its opposite, that is, dissonance. Despite the overall convincing threefold structure of Eve’s study of Pynchon from the first acknowledgement and later dismissal of Wittgenstein; to the dethroning of Weber as the prime theorist to dissect the theme of rationalization in the novels and his replacement with a Foucauldian theoretical apparatus; all the way to Adorno as the actual spine of the argument, the anchoring point of an eminently philosophical reading of Pynchon that focuses on the critical, ethical, and political aspects of his novelistic work; it is somewhat puzzling that Adorno’s conservatism in matters of jazz music and his style of writing in particular should be less of an obstacle for Eve’s diagnosis that proclaims a “deep-rooted affinity” (173) between the Frankfurt school thinker and the American writer of many encyclopedic fictions. While he is aware that there are indeed divergences between Pynchon and Adorno, formulations such as the following betray the implicit wish that it should be otherwise: “In terms of jazz critique, Adorno may be wide of the mark. Yet Pynchon retains some of that critique, demonstrating its pre-emptive infection by the wider culture” (168). Conversely, while Pynchon notes the commodification of any form of culture, including jazz, by means of “that special Death the West had invented” (Pynchon 857) – capitalism – it is debatable whether “Pynchon retains some of [Adorno’s] critique” in regard to jazz, or whether he hails jazz for its own critique of that solemn and particularly European culture of which Adorno was himself a part.
Thus, while Eve’s thorough and subtle readings and analyses of Pynchon via Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Adorno make for a highly sophisticated argument for an ethico-politically engaged Pynchon, there are two main drawbacks that need to be mentioned in summary of the present review. First, as the study engages three philosophers vis-à-vis the oeuvre of a contemporary fiction writer whose point of view is characterized from the start as “quasi-materialist” (5), it is regrettable that Eve does not mention earlier important readings of Pynchon with a materialist bent, such as Friedrich Kittler’s essays on V., Gravity’s Rainbow, or Against the Day. Nor does he sufficiently contextualize his own account within the current debate on realism, materialism, and ethics in fiction and philosophy. Second, it seems that the laudably critical distance deployed in the first two parts of his monograph is slackened a bit in the Adorno section, doubtless because “it is upon the work of Adorno that this entire study has, in one way or another, rested,” as Eve readily admits (128). However, if, rather than the respective novels being in need of a single philosophical framework, “it is more accurate to say that the truth content of Pynchon’s artworks requires philosophies” (174), as he paraphrases Adorno in the admirable closing sentence of his monograph, it would have been commendable to keep the same methodologically fruitful distance to the Adornian framework that made for the critical fervor of the rest of the book. Eve’s argument for the “primacy of the object” in Pynchon becomes synonymous with an ethics of “the unique,” and eventually of human essence. Apart from being a new and incisive intervention in the scholarship, Pynchon and Philosophy therefore offers a compelling, if tacit, contribution to current debates in fiction and philosophy from a largely Adornian perspective. What remains to be said is how this perspective would look like if fully explicated with regard to those debates’ subject matter, namely, objects and material processes.

Works Cited

Berressem, Hanjo. Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Print.
Brassier, Ray. “Prometheanism and Its Critics.” #Accelerate. The Accelerationist Reader. Eds. Mackay, Robin and Armen Avanessian. Falmouth/Berlin: Urbanomic/Merve, 2014. 467-487. Print.
Eve, Martin Paul. Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Print.
Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.
McCaffery, Larry, and David Foster Wallace. “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace By Larry McCaffery.” Dalkey Archive Press 1993. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. London: Vintage Books, 2000. Print.
Sartwell, Crispin. “Philosophy Returns to the Real World.” The New York Times. April 13, 2015. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.
Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. “On Cunning Automata: Financial Acceleration at the Limits of the Dromological.” Collapse VIII (2014): 463-506. Print. -

Julius Greve