These fragments I have shored against my ruin

“A book has neither object or subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.” –Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Entertain this conceit with me for a moment: most of your run-of-the-mill novels exist in a solid state – your airport bookstore fare, your beach/pool-side reading – you know. Some will exist in liquid form, generally with a more experimental bent: Ulysses, maybe, Pale Fire. That sort of thing. Well.

David Markson’s Readers Block: novel-as-gas. It is free-form and rhizomatic, not so much following lines as generating them – lines of flight, lines of desire, lines of insight, lines of articulation.

Roughly: a character (referred to only ever as “Reader”) sits in his room and considers writing a novel. But to reduce the thing down to this is like referring to a Rembrandt as simply “that painting.” Sure it gets the general idea across, but there’s an awful lot more going on that’s being left out entirely.

So in the case of Reader’s Block, what, exactly, is the “awful lot more”? It is a treasure: nearly 200 pages of Reader’s thoughts, as his mind wanders, contemplating his novel (starring a character named “Protagonist”). And what thoughts! Quotes, references allusions. Lists of names. Lists of things (the location of every Nazi concentration camp). Literary trivia (“Keats may have been born above a livery stable”). Titles. Items in any number of languages. Every few pages he will note that such-and-such a historical figure was an anti-Semite (is Reader a Jew? It is never specified). And, of course, interspersed are vague ruminations on Reader’s past, and the development of his novel (Protagonist lives either by a cemetery or on the beach). What finally emerges from all of this is an intricate portrait of a man who has spent his entire life (doing possibly nothing but, and perhaps obsessively) reading and remembering.

The net result of this is a constant undermining of what we think of as “a novel.” Concerned more with flow and connectivity than with plot and characters, we discover that, in the end, we’re left with a highly developed and compelling character anyway. The traditional signifiers of the novel are removed from their signifieds, hierarchies are subverted, emphasis is placed on simultaneity and multiplicity. And it works. There is of course the danger that the nuance will turn into gimmick, and that the gimmick will get old. The thing could have been a complete disaster. Instead it’s utterly mesmerizing.

But is it a novel? What is a novel? And, once we decide on the answer to that (if at all), can this one so be called? And if not, what is it?

Who can say. A meditation on the relationship between form and emptiness, perhaps (can dialectics break bricks? Proclaim the mantra which says: gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha). If you’d like.

(Richard Payton)