"Weak in Comparison to Dreams... is the most courageous and fascinating debut I have read since Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves." –Full-Stop
For years, Samuel Emmer has monitored bacteria levels in drinking water for the small city of Guelph.
He is content to focus on dangerous life-threatening single-celled organisms as his grasp on his own life recedes—and with it, family and friends. To be sure, it is more than a little surprising when Samuel learns that he has been appointed to the city’s Zoo Feasibility Committee. Even more so, that he is being tasked with interacting not just with animals, but human beings. His assignment: travel to zoos around the world and gather information on the stereotypical behavior of animals in their enclosures—the city of Guelph aspiring commendably, if naively, to a cruelty-free habitat for its animals. It is in Tallinn, Estonia, that the dreams start for Samuel. He is in a vast wooded landscape; there is a fire burning in the distance; and it is coming his way…
Weak in Comparison to Dreams, by the historian and art critic James Elkins, is like no other novel you have ever read, even as certain inspirations, from Sebald to Tokarczuk, are clear. With an astounding breadth of knowledge and playful courage, Weak in Comparison to Dreams reignites our love for the ambitious novel with experimentation that never lacks intention, and whose empathetic scope explores the deepest aspects of our individual humanity.
Canadian man experiences a crisis while visiting a series of international zoos.
“Is there a difference between dreams and waking life?” wonders Samuel Emmer, the narrator of Elkins’ novel, an expert in protozoa who works in water management for the city of Guelph. “In both, things happen slowly while we watch.” It’s an apt description of this mammoth, formally inventive novel which encompasses text, photographs, diagrams, tables, and sheet music. Over the course of the novel—in which Emmer, who's been volunteered for his city's Zoo Feasibility Committee, travels around the world visiting a series of zoos—the presence of these highly regimented, eminently logical documents begins to make sense. Even as the documents offer reassuring certainty, Emmer’s own grasp on the world is slipping away. The opening scene finds him thinking back on his relationship with his now-college-age child. Emmer is feeling unmoored by life both personally and professionally, and thinks, “When you lose your place in the world, you suddenly wake up, as if your normal life had been a dream.” Soon, Emmer’s waking life alternates with a series of unsettling dreams, some of which hearken back to the landscape of his youth. A note from his interns in which they detail their observation of obsessive traits in him—what Emmer terms “some of the same tics and traits as animals or meth addicts”—sends his behavior in more extreme directions, including lying in a professional context and egging on a child pretending to shoot zoo animals. The novel’s final section, which takes on a very different form from what’s come before, puts much of what we’ve read in a new context, and conveys a powerful sense of loss.
A formally inventive yet emotionally engaging work of fiction. - Kirkus
"Every now and again, a book presents a new type of narrative that alters the way we see literature. James Elkins’s WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS… surprises as much as it intrigues."—Kimberly Brooks, artist and author of The New Oil Painting
"Experimental in the best sense of the word…"—Eva Schuermann, author of Seeing as Practice: Philosophical Investigations into the Relation Between Sight and Insight
"WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS is an experimental feast, an illuminated palimpsest, a labour of intellectual love. It will push and pull and ask you ‘just how do you think you read?’"—Maria Fusco, author of History of the Present
"Reveries, dreams, reflections and memories drive this Sebald-inspired narrative through combinations of word and image… Elkins’s novel offers a profoundly provocative exercise in visual thinking."—Hanneke Grootenboer, author of The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking
"Elegantly written and imaginatively intricate as well as subtle in its capacity to induce readers to become involved in the details of a solitary consciousness."—Charles Altieri, author of Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience
"A moving and profound contemplation on images in relation to dreams, memory, and music….an unbelievably rich and haunting story."—Charlotte Klonk, author of Terror: Wenn Bilder zu Waffen werden (Terror: When Images Become Weapons)
"The long life of Samuel Emmer gives all-world art critic James Elkins an epic canvas on which to entertainingly dramatize the ethics of zoos, the music of contemporary composers, and the lives of amoebas, all in twitchy, often hilarious, high-IQ prose. But all you need to know is that J.S. Bach rocks and James Elkins rolls."—James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street
"WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS is unlike any book I have ever read: a fascinating mixture of introspective realism and dreamlike surrealism, of text and image…. Elkins has created a highly original, unique literary work."—Wojciech Drag, author of Collage Literature in the Twenty-First Century
"WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS is an extraordinary arthroscopic view into a man whose life is liquefying, becoming a chrysalis. Deftly drawing on the sciences and the world of visual representation, it is a story full of wit, tragedy and surprise…"—Kate Joyce, author of Metaphysics
"A stunning achievement, framing profound questions of memory, meaning, and moral responsibility within a highly inventive literary structure. Fundamentally, this is a book about being lost."—Jonathan Anderson, coauthor of Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism
"A lucid account of a sleepwalking soul becoming increasingly lost as he wrestles with unresolvable conflicts…"—Johanna Drucker, author of Subjective Meteorology and All The Books I Never Wrote
"Elkins presents a series of nested boxes, knowing full well that none will provide a pat explanation of the self, for it is the quest for understanding itself that is offered for us to contemplate."—Anna Arnar, author of The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé
"Never unequivocally symbolic, the meta-referentiality of the book will thrill readers who admire Nabokov or Pynchon, the bleak atmosphere those who love Kafka, the narrative flow of naturalism those who like Don DeLillo."—Mark Staff Brandl, artist and author of A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art
"WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS tells the moving story of Dr. Samuel Emmer’s life, his concerns about animal welfare, his dreams about fire and the instability of his self. There is a great generosity of imagination in Elkins’s writing…"—flowerville, author of fortlaufen.blogspot.com
"WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS introduces entirely new language games. What first appear as illustrations of zoos turn out to be the labyrinths of our own human behavior, by which we pursue our daily lives and cling to the allegories that make us believe in our own ascendency. Manifold dialogues between pictures and words line the verges of the protagonist’s path, ultimately pointing to the few remains of a life."—Lukas Schmutzer, author of “Between Word and Work: On Marianne Fritz’s Whose Language You Do Not Understand”
"Elkins’s novel breaks down the boundaries between word and image, celebrating the intertwining of text and pictures, inviting readers to engage in a new form of storytelling…"—Si Han, author of A Chinese Word on Image
"In this encyclopedic novel innocent zoo inspections spiral into a bubbling maelstrom of madness, lethargically engulfing kaleidoscopes of scientific lore, sheet music, and photographs of dreams."—Evelina Domnitch, author of Orbihedron
"A mesmerizing synesthetic experience and great intellectual pleasure."—Philipp Weiss, author of Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen
"The constellations traced in the reader’s mind by Elkins’s novel in the course of its exhilaratingly irregular orbit through manifold registers of genre and tone will remain fixed there long after the glare of lesser literary fiction has faded."—Douglas Robertson, translator of The Rest Is Slander: Five Stories by Thomas Bernhard
"Elkins enters the field with an exhilarating, surefooted, and profound book."—Charles Green, artist and author of Peripheral Vision and The Third Hand
"The exceptional achievement of WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS… can only be defined as a new model of the encyclopedic novel."—Jan Baetens, author of My Life to Live
"A fascinating journey… an endless literary feast."—Miguel Ángel Hernández, author of Escape Attempt and Anoxia
Elkins’s Samuel Emmer grew up in natural surroundings in Watkins Glen, New York, the son of a “corrosive mother” about whom Samuel says next to nothing. In one of the novel’s two presents, Samuel is a near-forty part-time professor and scientist testing drinking water for amoebae in Guelph, Ontario in 2019. His wife has gone back to Bratislava, his daughter has gone away to college, and Samuel is going off the rails, even off the trails he has followed in his routines both inside and outside his lab. He is, for example, methodically deconstructing the furniture and electronic devices in his apartment. His supervisor, sensing Samuel’s incipient derangement, sends him—maliciously, neutrally, or charitably—on a series of visits to zoos to check on their handling of animals presenting troubling patterns of repetitive behavior.
Samuel empathizes with the animals and tries to imagine the lives of the zookeepers at the first two sites. But his imagination becomes progressively active and then aggressive. He fantasizes his host in Finland is a cyborg, does an existential analysis of a monkey’s mind in Nashville, talks to a host in the voices of spiders in Salt Lake City, and in Basel indulges in total fabrications, insisting at length that his host see suffering animals within a Freudian psychoanalytic framework, and encouraging the children of visitors to pretend to shoot the animals. Samuel feels he is losing his mind and control—and he is—but he is also coming out of his former isolated routines to make connections with others, both humans and animals.
Think of Samuel as Bellow’s professor Herzog forced to visit problematic zoos rather than retreat from his loss of family to the Berkshires where he writes zany letters. Samuel becomes wackily inventive about his credentials (he has none) and charmingly crazed in his identification with animals: “I used to be safe with my amoebas. Little gluey animals, tiny spots of sick. Now animals demented by despair shuffled across the stage of my imagination.” Elkins pushes Samuel along toward paranoia by including documents about animal compulsive behavior that are sent to him between zoo visits by his intern and by Samuel’s former student whom he calls “Viperine.” The more those documents are supposed to help Samuel recognize his own compulsive behavior, the more he imagines hearing the two “helpers” whispering and plotting behind his back. My spot check of the documents finds some are invented, so perhaps Samuel is right to be suspicious of the senders.
When reports of Samuel’s behavior at the zoos get back to his supervisor, Samuel is offered a leave of absence but chooses to abruptly quit his job, take his pension, and leave Guelph. Here there is a break in time in which Samuel writes a manuscript about his breakdown. Never published and almost forgotten, the five hundred–page manuscript is discovered by Samuel in his basement forty years later when he is moving from his home in a rural area of northern Canada where he has been living alone. In the last hundred pages of Weak in Comparison to Dreams (entitled “Notes”), Samuel reflects back on the manuscript and describes his present life. Ah, the old discovered manuscript trick, a timeworn way to show a character’s change. Not for Elkins. Though superficial features of Samuel’s life are different now, he is psychologically essentially the same, still obsessive-compulsive. Maybe he’s even worse off than in his zoo days, for now he doesn’t recognize his problem, has almost no imagination, and cares little about contact with living creatures. “Notes” may make Weak in Comparison to Dreams look like a recovery narrative, but it’s actually a re-cover-up story. As I said, Elkins has courage, perhaps because he’s not a young guy trying to lift off a career as a novelist.
In both parts of the novel, Elkins himself seems obsessed—with the writing workshop’s mantra “Show don’t tell”—and his way of showing reflects his long interest in photography. In What Photography Is, Elkins suggested it’s “a good time to say goodbye to photographs of people.” When Samuel remembers Watkins Glen, Elkins includes a few photos of nature. Then come many photos of ugly zoo cages and enclosures without animals. Stressed by his visits, Samuel most explicitly reveals his repetition compulsion by describing over and over nightmares of forest fires. For each of these dreams, Elkins provides numerous photographs of fire and burned-over land. The documents Samuel’s helpers send also stimulate visuals included in the text: diagrams of animals’ repetitive pacing, of planetary motion, and of Samuel’s routes around his apartment, all of which have a vague figure-eight or infinity form, perfect for OCD. The only humans pictured in the novel are threatened individuals such as Icarus in a few old woodcuts. An “Envoi” has nine pages of individual animals.
The photographs are all black and white, generally about a half page in size, and not particularly artful. Most of the photographs “illustrate” dreams, which are usually frightening to Samuel and yet praised as a release from his daily life, which he says is “weak in comparison to” dreams. Since the sleeping mind is not yet capable of taking photographs, Samuel hunted around for images that would show what he was experiencing at night. Samuel’s accompanying texts follow along, words telling and interpreting what is “shown.”
The photos are numerous and repetitive but, because of their pedestrian quality, are not particularly affecting. Maybe I’m missing Elkins’s intention, but it seems Samuel’s obsessive inclusion of images in his manuscript is yet another sign of his separation and desperation. The photographs don’t connect him to the world, only to its dull and miniaturized simulacra. Elkins’s photographs don’t create a sense of mystery as those of Sebald, or Catherine Lacey in this year’s Biography of X. Instead, Elkin uses the images to imitate his character’s reductive mania. Although the photographs are not what I would have expected in a novel by Elkins the photography critic, they do again demonstrate his courage, his dedication to a unity of subject, style, and media.
“Notes” also has visual materials, not photos but partial representations of scores by experimental composers that Samuel repeatedly plays for himself in his isolated home. He describes the sounds as discordant, harsh, noisy. I don’t read music, but if Samuel is right then the music-producing visuals in “Notes” have an effect similar to that of the earlier photographs. From composing a manuscript often ugly to the eye, Samuel has “moved on” to collecting and playing music even he admits is ugly to the ear. His location and his medium have changed, but Samuel remains locked (like the animals) into himself, trapped in a fugue-like state, a musical term become a psychological one.
Weak in Comparison to Dreams fortunately has several stylistic registers. Even post-Pynchon, the scientific reports, graphs, and formulas would be considered—though ingenious in invention—ugly in a literary novel. Samuel’s commentaries on his dreams are thankfully not surreal; the style is that of an earnest but mystified scientist who can be quite eloquent:
It became difficult to think. It was hard to keep seeing the world on fire, to keep trying to make sense of the onslaught of images. The fires meant something, they needed to be understood. They were like people waving frantically at me, trying to get me to understand something.
In “Notes,” Samuel, now in his nineties, writes in a rather banal, washed-out late style. The novel’s language is most vivid (and novelistic in the manner of those precursors I mentioned) when Samuel is talking to zookeepers or thinking about their animals. That style is not weak in comparison to the style he uses to describe his forest fires and his life in retreat. Either Samuel or Elkins has not, however, lost all imagination, for near the novel’s end are seven pages about one Asger Gaarn, a Danish composer who compulsively wrote throughout his whole life hundreds of preludes and fugues to memorialize other composers, friends, strangers, even pets. Google could not locate Asger Gaarn, the final symbol of obsession.
Because of “Notes,” which is much about the art of experimental music, Weak in Comparison to Dreams has a self-referential or metafictional implication. Once Elkins decided on repetition compulsion, he seems to have adopted exhaustiveness, the stacking of analogues as important as plotting. Musical scores are piled high in Samuel’s home. Speaking of an animal, Samuel says, “The more it becomes disturbed, the longer its behaviors last.” Writing about Protopopov, Samuel says the music is “compelling, and then after a while, it’s boring. It’s fascinating because it’s so alien.” Weak in Comparison to Dreams doesn’t have the worldly variousness of first novels by Gaddis, Pynchon, and DeLillo, but its repetitive excess makes it more alien, and fascinating. Seen as a whole and from some distance, Weak in Comparison to Dreams does connect to a world wider than Samuel’s mind. Humans are like pacing and punding animals, the planet is burning, artists like those Samuel plays are creating work that may be innovative but without content, the music even further from representing the real than the visuals. Elkins is not one of those artists.
Elkins has said his novel is an outtake from a fifteen-year project that includes four other, apparently finished novels that he has described in extravagant detail on his website which is—no surprise—obsessive. I mentioned House of Leaves earlier. Reading Elkins’s website, I see that his novels resemble Danielewski’s multi-volume Familiar project, which is now unfortunately stalled. I hope Weak in Comparison to Dreams receives enough attention so that his small-press publisher will bring out the remaining volumes that will, it seems, add material about Samuel’s life and introduce other characters.
Samuel is a desperate man. I admit I may be desperate to “recuperate,” as the French say, Elkins’s novel, to give its obsessiveness a useful social function. Or, as someone who has written five novels about the same character, I may be desperate to interest readers in a book that casts a spell by repetition. Or after reviewing hundreds of novels, I may be desperate for one that risks a “splendid failure,” as Faulkner said, to make something new, even if that “new” is about humans’ and other mammals’ resistance to or escape from the new. - Tom LeClair
https://www.full-stop.net/2023/10/09/reviews/tomleclair/weak-in-comparison-to-dreams-james-elkins/
When we first meet Samuel Emmer, the narrator of James Elkins’ ambitious new novel Weak in Comparison to Dreams, he works for the Water Management Department in Guelph, Ontario. It’s 2019 and, as he puts it, “something was going wrong with me.” His family life has fallen apart, his wife has left him, and his boss has put him on the city’s Zoo Feasibility Committee, which is the last thing he wants to do. His role on the Committee is to travel to other zoos and familiarize himself with their most problematic animals, with the hope that the Guelph’s future zoo might be more humane. Guelph’s zoo planners want “no lions that pace endlessly or elephants that twitch and stomp or chimpanzees that pull their own fur out and scratch themself raw.”
As Samuel travels to zoos in the United States and abroad, two things begin to occur. He begins to emotionally feel the pain of the caged animals he is observing, and he is visited by a series of dreams that become more ominous with each episode. Samuel’s descriptions of his dreams are accompanied by sequences of photographs of forests. The first dreams are of innocent looking woods, a pond, a river. In the fourth dream he sees a distant fire, and with each succeeding dream the fire comes closer, more threatening. By the twelfth and final dream he realizes that “after the burning, the landscapes in my dreams were bare. No fires or smoke. I must have burned my life down.”
Elkins, who is Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, had let it be known as early as 2008 that he was working on his first novel. Being something a transparency geek, he created a section on his website called Writing Schedule where he laid out the full plan for his novel-to-be and kept readers up to date with his ongoing progress for Weak in Comparison to Dreams, including charts, graphs, word counts, dramatis personae, a synopsis of chapters, and the number of hours spent on the project. Even if you don’t read the novel (and I encourage you to!), take a look at this unique glimpse into the behind-the-curtains image of a novelist at work. If I am reading his chart correctly, Elkins has spent over 15,000 hours on his novel so far. But Weak in Comparison to Dreams, which was just published by The Unnamed Press, is only the beginning. According to Elkins’ website, it is Book 3 of a projected five-volume novel. Elsewhere on his website he refers to the numerous books that influenced his writing, including the massive novel written in multiple columns by Arno Schmidt, Zettel’s Traum (1970), which was finally translated into English in 2016 as Bottom’s Dream (Dalkey Archive Press) and is 1,496 pages long.
Just flipping through this volume’s 600 pages, it’s easy to see one of the reasons why Elkins’ book is so innovative. Weak in Comparison to Dreams is stuffed with b&w photographs (some which have lines drawn on them), charts, graphs, mathematical equations, line drawings, reproductions of old woodcuts, at least one map, and pages containing sections of musical scores. If you take a peek at his website Writing with Images, you’ll quickly see that Elkins has long been interested in the subject of how text and images interact on the page and on our screens. The variety of images he uses in Weak in Comparison to Dreams is unequaled in the world of fiction to my knowledge. Then again, Elkins is not your average art historian. He seems to have mastered multiple other disciplines as well, including several scientific disciplines, advanced mathematics, and contemporary music. But the theme for which he has harnessed these disciplines is deeply human.
As Samuel continues to visits zoos, he sees what we have all sadly witnessed when we have gone to zoos ourselves—that certain captive animals often make obsessive repetitive movements in their cages. Watching an African blue monkey, he sees that “she was protesting her intolerable existence by trying to stop time. If she did the same thing over and over, each time identically, then time would have to stop. She was refusing to let time pass, she was pretending she lived in a single spontaneous moment.” At first the book reproduces charts that graphically replicate the patterned movements of caged animals.
Later on, we see diagrams that Samuel believes show the mind maps of the animals he has been observing.
Finally, Samuel’s intern Vipesh and her “collaborator” Viperine suggest that Samuel himself has developed many of the same traits as the caged animals he has been observing, and we see charts that plot his movements around his own room.
One of the things that Elkins is suggesting is that all of the systems set up to take care of wild animals in zoos—the zoo professionals, the research scientists, the committees, the responsible politicians—have failed, and that only the empathy of individuals who look without prejudice at the unbearable horror of caged animals in zoos can see the emotional tragedy of what is really happening.
Eventually, Samuel quits his job with the Water Department and seems to be going crazy. He gets into his car and drives north toward the Arctic Circle. In the concluding section, Samuel is now a perilously old man who calls himself Emmer. “I live in a cheaply built house a hundred miles north of Guelph. A couple months ago, I was cleaning out the basement, because Fina Hodges told me it was leaking, and I came across the manuscript that I’d nearly forgotten.”
Every day I sit in my study, looking over the pages. I read about the things I said and saw forty years ago. I mainly fail to care about them, or even remember them.
This morning I am looking out the window, where an untrimmed hedge blocks my view of the uncertain distance. Can you say your life is your own when your childhood has gone so far away into the past that the boy with your name seems like someone else’s child? When you read about your own life and there’s no glow of recognition, no pleasure in revisiting scenes that had been long forgotten? I have added these Notes to explain, possibly to someone, how that feels.
Emmer’s only preoccupation in his old age is playing his piano and exploring music written for the solo piano. Composers “are the characters that fill my days and remind me what to feel.” For pages, Emmer thinks rapturously of twentieth century composers and their scores, as if they were old friends.
I see Alexei Stanchinski’s Three Sketches for Piano, feathery and lyrical, written when he was still hanging on to a normal life, before his father died, before he got hallucinations, before he was found dead by a river, not yet twenty-seven years old. Then Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s Nocturnes for the Vologda River, one of his last compositions using ordinary notes, before he decided to adopt the quarter-tones in between the keys on the piano. . . And in a corner of the study, rolled up in a big cardboard tube, is Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Piano Piece 11, a constellation of notes printed on a single enormous sheet of paper, like a map of some fabulous kingdom.
Elkin’s novel, which might at first look off-putting with its suggestion of complex science, higher math, and impenetrable music scores, turns out to be a novel that is all too human, a tragic story of a man who cannot solve the problems he identifies. It’s a novel about failure, empathy, memory, and loneliness. It’s about finding peace in the arts, in this case in music. And it’s a novel that questions the idea that you can truly recall your past. The reader need not master or even understand the various disciplines that Elkins indulges in. In fact, it’s perhaps better to feel a bit estranged from these faintly awe-inspiring practices.
In his summary of this book, which is found on his website, Elkins hopes that his novel will reignite “our love for the ambitious novel.” While there will be plenty of material for academics and those who wish to look deeper into the structure of this novel to pore over and write about, Weak in Comparison to Dreams was written first and foremost to be read and enjoyed. Elkins writes almost like a non-fiction writer. He’s keenly observant and always seeking the perfect description for difficult concepts and complex events, even when writing about Samuel’s dreams. This gives the book a clarity of purpose and a sense of confidence that makes it often exhilarating to read.
As of December 5, he Unnamed Press was offering a limited edition set that included a signed copy of Elkins’ book and a vinyl recording that features the author reading excerpts and playing original piano variations of sheet music that appear in the novel.
[Full disclosure: I was asked to provide a blurb for the back cover of this book, which I was pleased to do after reading it.] - Terry Pitts
https://sebald.wordpress.com/2023/12/06/james-elkins-ambitious-new-novel/
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