The Pinocchio Theory

Jack O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh is a hardboiled crime novel, and also a meditation on language and writing, and memory and complicity. (Thanks to Ashley Crawford for recommending O’Connell). Like Hammett’s Red Harvest, Word Made Flesh uses the detective genre, and a story about competing gangs in a small city (Personville, sarcastically called Poisonville, in Hammett; Quinsigamond, a kind of dream version of Worcester, Massachusetts, for O’Connell) to convey a hellish vision of power, of a world in which “people are brutalized for the simplest reason of all: because they can be. Because when someone else holds power, they can fuck you over in ways that your imagination has never even considered” (215). But O’Connell replaces Hammett’s gritty realism with a phantasmal irrealism in which violent economic and political power, expressed through horrifying assaults on the body, accompanies, and seem almost interchangeable with, the power (which is also the delusive anti-power) of words and texts. So the violent, noirish plot turns out to involve a quest for a missing book, an Anne Frank-like work of impotent, yet enduring, testimony to a massacre (or worse than a massacre, since it sought to obliterate, not just people, but the memory of those people’s ever having existed). And we encounter such phenomena as a gang of violent terrorists who seek, on philosophical grounds, to eliminate all written language; a parasitic disease that feeds on the language centers of the brain, as well as on the tongue; not to mention a bevy of competing bibliomanes, literary scholars, linguistic theorists, and religious visionaries obsessed with the Word. All in all, a strangely gripping and compelling novel.

I am a sucker for “true crime” books, and Aphrodite Jones is, to my mind, the true mistress of the genre; she does for crime reporting what Jerry Springer does for live television. So I was excited to read Jones’ new book, Red Zone, about the incident in San Francisco a couple of years ago where a woman was mauled to death by a pair of attack dogs belonging to her neighbors. I wasn’t disappointed. As always, Jones delves into the sleaziest and most sensational aspects of the case. She focuses especially on the fantasy menage a trois – maintained through letters, photographs, and drawings – between the lawyer couple who raised the killer dogs and the white supremacist prison inmate who was their legal owner. It’s never clear how much of this was just pornographic fantasy on the part of the three, and how much involved actual incidents and practices – up to and including bestiality – but Jones insinuates where she is short on concrete facts, effectively maintaining a feverish atmosphere for her portrayals. The dog owners come across as arrogant megalomaniacs without a shred of remorse, whose fanatical self-righteousness ultimately leads them into a state of absolute delusion. Jones’ writing, as always, is itself deliriously non-linear, piling on minute details in no comprehensible order until the reader feels lost in a labyrinth of amazement and stupefaction. Her prose style combines the hyperboles of yellow journalism with the plodding repetitiveness of a befuddled court reporter. Occasional sentences take my breath away, they are so brilliantly off: “”To Ana, animals were the only real perfection of nature” (243); “Noel’s act was really quite good, so the prosecutor decided to pull out all the ammunition, to wipe Noel’s charming smile away” (259). I could never myself invent, nor find in even my worst students’ papers, “bad writing” that resonates in quite this way. Aphrodite Jones is a genius of misbegotten prose. Do I need to reiterate how much I love this book, both for its content and its style?

China Mieville gave a reading tonight, as part of the Clarion West series of summer readings in science fiction/speculative fiction. It was quite a treat: China read a chapter from his as yet unfinished new novel, which I am happy to say is set in the fabulous and tragic city of New Crobuzon, twenty years after the events of Perdido Street Station. In a not-yet-published essay, my friend Carl Freedman writes about how Mieville is a great urban writer; he gives an almost Dickensian or Joycean sense of the currents of city life–even though his city, unlike Dickens’ London or Joyce’s Dublin, is entirely imaginary. The background textures of city life were an important part of the power of Perdido Street Station; the subsequent novel, The Scar, though set in the same world, drew us away from New Crobuzon to a very different kind of city, interesting but not as rich (I mean the city was not as rich; the two novels, I feel, are equally rich, in their different ways). China said he hoped to have the novel finished by the end of this year, if not earlier, which would mean a publication date of about a year from now, summer 2004. It was nice to get a tantalizing glimpse of it, while we are waiting.

Maurice Dantec‘s new novel, Villa Vortex (in French only) is a stupendous book of over 800 pages, brilliant and obnoxious, exhilarating and exhausting, radical and reactionary–all of this in ways that are difficult to disentangle, or even to describe coherently. The book starts out (after an introduction in which the narrator informs us that he is already dead) as a kind of police procedural, a cop investigating various gruesome serial killings, against the backdrop of world events from 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) to 2001 (the bombing of the World Trade Center). The cop has more philosophical ruminations than is usual for a police procedural–way too much Eurocentric whining about the decline of Western Civilization for my taste–but for a while it doesn’t seem all that unusual. But then, as the book proceeds, we get all sorts of unexpected genre shifts, strange discontinuities, and many amazing and wonderful individual passages (I especially loved the chapter where the narrator, strung out on methedrine, is hallucinating on Omaha Beach, where the Allies landed in 1944, thinking about, not only the carnage of that invasion, but of Hiroshima, Nagasaki as well, and beyond World War II of burning oil wells in Kuwait after the first Gulf War, and so on). After that, there are all sorts of metafictional twists; the narrator comes to think he is really a character in an unwritten novel by a French journalist-photographer who died in Sarajevo covering the Bosnian war; we get more and more paranoid formulations of the narrator’s general thesis about the “suicide” of Western Civilization (of which 9/11 is only the confirmation–Dantec sounds a lot like Baudrillard in places, despite his apparent dislike of Baudrillard). And then–the narrator is killed (as foreshadowed at the start of the book) with over 200 pages left to go; and that’s when things really get crazy, as the writing of the book itself is dramatized within the book as a messianic act capable of undoing and inverting history, by means of a comic book science-fiction narrative that combines the visceral experience of video games with theological speculation mixing Maurice Blanchot with the Kabbalah, with the 2nd-century Church Fathers Iranaeus and Origen, and with crackpot theorizing about the mystical powers of the DNA “meta-code.” Whew. On one page I will be blown away by the sheer excess of it all, and the weird, unexpected connections Dantec keeps on making; then, on the very next page, I will be irritated by inane rants about the evils of technological domination in the modern world, or about the need to stand firm with America in its fight against international terrorism. All in all, I’d say that Dantec is taking some very particular gripes he has that are parochially exclusive to France in the 1990s, and blowing them up to world-historical proportions. I’m also disappointed that Dantec seems to have dumped Deleuze (who was the main philosophical influence on Dantec’s previous book, the brilliant , and also apocalyptic, Babylon Babies, which I wrote about earlier), instead, the key philosophical figure here is a French writer I know little about, Raymond Abellio, but who seems to have made a bizarre synthesis between phenomenology, on the one hand, and a Gurdjieff- or Rudolf Steiner-like mysticism, on the other. (As far as I’m concerned, it’s hard to decide which I find more boring, phenomenology or Gurdjieff/Steiner/etc). In short, Dantec is “too French for his own good” (as Pauline Kael, I believe, once said of Marguerite Duras); in spite of which, Villa Vortex is filled with much that is audacious and wonderful. (Not to mention that, in the French context, there’s a lot to be said for a book that takes, as one of its key allegorical images of evil, the architectural monstrosity that is the Mitterand Library).