Andrew Robert Hodgson - Here is a larva, lost in a midsummer night’s Babel; one of Robbe-Grillet’s detective cyphers is wearing a Pnin suit; its name is Andrew; lost in a jaunty text without a contraption; waiting like a background process

Andrew Robert Hodgson, Mnemic Symbols, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019.


‘Here is a larva, lost in a midsummer night’s Babel; one of Robbe-Grillet’s detective cyphers is wearing a Pnin suit; its name is Andrew; lost in a jaunty text without a contraption; waiting like a background process.’ — John Trefry


‘With masterful choreography, Hodgson makes interior complexity dance in Mnemic Symbols. Experience, memory, and narrative are caught in the act of synergism. If you ache for solidity, for a static truth to cleave to, for access to meanings buried deep within then—pinch yourself, baby—you’re alive. This book tells it like it is.’ — Rosie Šnajdr


So what is a mnemic symbol? It’s the trace of a trauma. A kind of parasitic image or word or memory that lingers in the mind. A minor hallucination presented to the ego by itself, to give it something to focus on, hiding the horrors of the id. It’s a recurring symptom. It’s Andrew Hodgson’s latest novel.
Published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Mnemic Symbols dances the same fine line that many of the new publishing house’s best works do in being both unashamedly experimental and rooted in a recognisable, swearing and smoking reality. The action of the novel is fragmentary, a series of mnemic symbols strung together by association, with memories emerging that range from the cringing to the tragic. Just as our reveries are liable to return to our father’s funeral one moment and a terribly awkward encounter with a faraway barmaid the next, so does Hodgson’s narrator reel from moment to moment, sometimes heroic and sometimes confused — sometimes both.
The novel begins and ends with a hiccup. The first of a whole patchwork of intertextual winks and nods; Hodgson invites us to draw comparisons with Proust’s madeleine. Only, where Proust’s reverie is particularly French and particularly sweet, Hodgson’s traumatic spiel is kicked off by a bodily function that is universally embarrassing. In an interview, he has spoken about the hiccup as a legacy of mankind’s aquatic ancestry — a memory buried in the genes, perhaps — but it is also undoubtedly overcoded with a whole range of social presumptions. We think of nerves, of drunkenness, of our own bodies rising against us. Hiccups disrupt language. They are always inappropriate. There is never a good time for them.
The same can be said of many of the narrator’s memories. They emerge in a fractured state, in language that is stuttering, its tone conversational but its content verging on the poetic:

I’ll drive you
Cross the background-contexting shots on a hundred-thousand television sets. No-go. No-go. Get in, in the front drive up through the pedestrianised motorways along the rive-droite. Out west, past Ikea, through Saint-Germain-en-Laye and, you got change for the toll? (82)

Sometimes, as in the above passage, the fragmentation is conveyed in sentence fragments, short little punctures of languages that scatter across paragraphs, showing us a scene in snatches. The language is there to be rushed through at these points, and evokes the restless hurry of crosstown public transport. The metro is a recurrent image, as is the forever-delayed RER.
At other times the language opens up, becoming verbose or, at times, baroque. Thoughts of death bring out the philosopher in our narrator. Death, we are told, is “to writing, an unopened centre. A generative of words and turning of the page, but at odds with the very definition of the document itself, the death remains a hard-iron core” (16). Perhaps death is the great white space upon which these words are printed? Perhaps it is the unconscious trauma that these mnemic symbols desperately shelter, like quivering fig leaves? The writing is sufficiently polysyllabic during these reflections to suggest a barrier. Yet a captivating sunset opens up the narrator’s language too. Spurred on by nature, his descriptions are no longer Foucauldian in their elaboration, but Flaubertian:

It hadn’t been long, not all that long, since I left the harbour when the foghorn shook the counterweights of the windowpanes and all along the street a dull rumble accompanied my steps. In the ascendance, up through the darkened terraces and tenfoots, the sodium-yellow of the streetlamps flickered on, to off, a moment, and on as I passed by. I pictured the freight ships that lay just off, that I had just watched sink into the smudge and blackness (15).

The narrator’s words move through the shifting registers of a memory constructed from a wide variety of experience. Northern English dialect mixes with academic English, evoking the working-class lad made (if only intellectually) good. Meanwhile the rhythms of second-language French, the patter of the ex-pat, is stirred into the mixture too. Under it all, sodium-yellow, lies a Romantic soul.
The mnemic symbols, the memories, that Hodgson strings together, are varied enough to keep us always in transition. A funny moment in which our narrator, presumably drunk, leaps onto a stage announcing “this might not be a bad time to crack out a bit of poetry!” (27), suddenly transitions into a cringeworthy memory: the crowd looking on in barely concealed contempt as the narrator repeats the funny line over and over, sure that the next time he says it must be the one to get a laugh. A search for George Perec’s favourite cafes similarly results in dismissal, our speaker stared down by the current resident, “like I was one in a long line strange people stumbling into his living room asking if he was a café, if he knew someone called George. ‘You know, George Perrick?’” (66). But our narrator is never dissuaded for long, and continues to present to us his moments of failure, his thwarted attempts at connection, and the everyday moments that haunt us just as much as the genuine horrors. The novel, after all, features a terrorist attack, although its telling is such that I leave the reader to discover these pages for themselves.
My favourite moments of the book are the flights of fancy that break through the troubled exterior of our writer-narrator’s mnemic flow. These can be small moments of ludic language, such as the description of pétanque balls: “the cross, the crosshatch or the swoopy lines — which are you?” (79). Or else extended fantasy sequences, like that inspired by the L&L building of the Université de Paris-Bidonville, which, we are told, was designed by an architect while watching a “fucked-out” pile of bodies, post-orgy, back in the 1960s. The modernist monstrosity, we are told, houses the skeleton of its first director who, climbing into a glass office suspended above the building, was subsequently stuck up there; his panopticon becoming his mausoleum. Such fantasies humanise our narrator. They transform the stuttering, self-abasing flow of memories into something closer to a barroom anecdote, if only for the duration of their telling. They make the speaking endearing, despite his flaws and failings.
Hodgson’s influences are worn on his sleeves. Perec, whose old haunts the narrator seeks out, is the most obvious, with the allusion to Proust following behind. The mingling of humour with humiliation perhaps owes a debt to Roland Topor as well; a novel of whom’s, Head-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne, was recently translated into English for the first time by Hodgson. Other voices, British ones, B.S. Johnson and Ann Quin in particular, are present here as well. If any of these writers are of interest to you as a reader, I would warmly recommend Hodgson’s latest work. He offers an original voice, both innovative and grounded in an innovative tradition. It is a novel that quietly moves the novel, as a notion, forwards.- Joseph Darlington


www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-cross-the-crosshatch-and-the-swoopy-lines/

Andrew Robert Hodgson, Reperfusion, WPS&B, 2012.


Set in nightmarish Black Stump, a Northern English port town sometime in the mid-20th century, Reperfusion builds the story of a place and people from the blank page word by word like so many bricks in an artifice. The story centres on the character of Albert, and follows him in a single day in his life. He begins his day like every other in a greasy spoon cafe before heading to work at the docks, however he becomes aware of the presence of two people following him, the narrator and the reader, who, embodied in the text, increasingly impose themselves on his everyday life. It is not long before Albert begins to realise their intentions for him, and that this day may not only be his last, but his first, his only and his every. The reader is welcomed in to the book by the narrator, who while seemingly beginning the story with the best intentions in turn builds and pulls away the facade of truth, character, plot and narrative itself. The narrator passes himself off as the king within his realm weaving strands of story about the streets of Black Stump, lambasting the ever growing presence of the spectre of a writer figure, before these strands join, tie up, fray and disintegrate. A disintegration leaving the blank space from which a place and life was created, and closing the loop on a 24 hour reality which exists in the twilight between the real and nothing. Reperfusion is a discussion on the roles of all those involved in fiction, characters, narrators, writers, readers. And the play between truth and lies which makes a book a living thing in symbiosis with its host, the reader. As the narrator himself says, "As an object, this book by its very nature is frigid and unresponsive. However, by process of reperfusion the blood seeps from your finger tips and in to these pages. Flushing life through these stale words and names. And before you know it it's become part of your circuit. It's part of you, sitting up there among the malice and disappointment. Feeding your id." Reperfusion, noun - the restoration of blood flow to an organ which is devoid of blood.



Andrew Robert Hodgson, The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945 – 1975, Bloomsbury, 2019.


The Post-War Experimental Novel constructs a topography of how the traumatic experience of the Second World War formed – or perhaps malformed – the post-war experimental novel. Focusing on British and French fiction, this book critiques how the aesthetic of symbolic violence became an empathetic means of communicating and building a memorial space omitted by literatures and societies of the post-war period. Themes of amnesia, myopia, delusion and dementia are constantly referred back to and posit in narrative a motive for the very broken forms these books often take – books in boxes, of spare pages to be shuffles at the reader's will; with holes in pages; missing whole sections of the alphabet; or books written and then entirely scrubbed out in smudged black ink.
Covering the works of B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Georges Perec, Roland Topor, Raymond Queneau and others, Andrew Hodgson shows that there is method to the madness of experimental fiction and further legitimises the form as a prominent presence within a wider literary and historical movement in European and American avant-garde literatures.

Paris, Ed. by Andrew Robert Hodgson, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019.

This collection approaches the theme of interacting/interactions with language(s) that, across the contributors who are French speakers, English speakers, English/French speakers, has developed in myriad diverging ways. Impossible translation, engine translation, dictionary work, 'resistant reading'; text as physical medium. Also artistic discourse on language itself, what it's for, what it does; how it forms us, how it perhaps constrains us. As too interactions with it in life and everyday settings, how it might get in the way, or fall apart, help or hinder. 

With, among the contributors, writers of prose, essay, poetry alongside conceptual artists, as too members of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique and the Oulipo/Outranspo, DW Paris is a diverse showcase of Paris-centred experimental and innovative literature in 2019.

I Digress (story)
Patron (story)
Notation (story)


He is translator from the French of Roland Topor’s Head-to-toe Portrait of Suzanne (Atlas Press, 2018) and from the Danish, Carl Julius Salomonsen’s New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness (New Documents, 2019). He is Teaching and Research Fellow in British literature at Université Paris Est.