Transductions

Edited by Michael D. Brown. This looks amazing.

‘The debut issue of Some Ways to Disappear presents the writings of Swedish author, Helena Kvarnström, with her short story, A Stranger, A Happiness and the photographs of featured American photographer, Anthony Blasko, taken from his long-term project, The Way Things Are.

With windows and doors / That weep when you hold them, is a group-show-in-print, featuring the photographic works of international artists, Hin Chua, Alistair Dickinson, Peter Eavis, James Hendrick, Kirill Kuletski, Carles Rodrigo and Nastya Tailakova. The work that constitutes the exhibition has been sensitively curated to form a collection of images that is at once distinct and ambiguous. The show casts a long, sideways glance at the nature of intimacy, loneliness, and abandonment.

Throughout the publication precisely culled extracts from hundreds of written submissions act as clues as to the first issues manifesto. Like all aspects of the publication, nothing stated or shown is ever obvious. Some Ways to Disappear resides in the misty-eyed space between the everyday and the dream.

Everything is lucid, nothing is apparent.’

Format details:
A5, soft cover, saddle stitched, full colour litho printing, 36 pages.
Limited edition of 150 copies, each hand numbered.
ISSN 2044-4354
July 2010

Photographers:
Anthony Blasko (Featured Photographer), Hin Chua, Alistair Dickinson, Peter Eavis, James Hendrick, Kirill Kuletski, Carles Rodrigo, Nastya Tailakova.

Writers:
Kevin Finley, Ethan Joella, Michael Lee Johnson, Helena Kvarnström (Featured Writer), Sayre M. Quevedo, Mary Sheffield. ‘

Purchase it here: www.somewaystodisappear.co.uk

When you love something that can’t love you back you ideally want everyone to love it so that they too can feel the deficiency, the cordoned off block-coloured-pixelled pleasure that the subject of this love represents and withdraws through its necessary fixity. As if the feeling itself, love, were the form of the horizon.
You make a case out of worship. Worship is lonely and drives people insane. Enough people thinking they love the same thing and being insane about it doesn’t make you any less lonely or right. Instead it exhausts you. You pretend to transcend this love but really only reject it. Eventually you begin again. And I ask you, in what way are we not already ghosted?

SuperRefraction refers to a meteorological condition that causes the trajectory of electromagnetic waves to bend in an arc as they approach the earth’s curvature. An unexpected and counter intuitive property of the heat and moisture content of the atmosphere, SuperRefraction serves to plot an arc between the chance happenings of our environment and a deeper understanding of our everyday, habituated, interactions with it.

Generally, radar ranges are extended when superRefractive conditions exist.

Five artists and one writer have set about a group show at the artist run space Vulpes-Vulpes in Deepest Clapton. Working in sculpture, performance and drawing these artists strive to question and understand the abstract assumptions made of the material object through the explorative nature of their work.

The work of these emerging artists and the new developments that emerge through their showing together is the reason for this exciting and forward looking show. Some work will be made in response to the gallery space some to ongoing conversations between the artists and some to a text which will be printed as part of the show.

The work revolves variously around our relationship to the object, an exploration of wonderment, lyricism of form, links between form and history and ideas of integrity and honesty in material discourse. An ethic of openness and generosity binds these artists work and although their practice and thought shares a history this will be the first time they have all shown together. The space is intended as generative, each work angling off from another, sustaining in potential a dialogue that the viewer enters upon and thus activates and physically disrupts. This is a trap set for light.

The acid ravaged mask of beauty, its lips worn away like the pockets of an old billiard table, an unframed, uncushioned, encastling wall of hard pimpled gum expressionless but for the querying opened up space of it before us; is it not ashamed to look upon our faces?

People say, or would if they could in fact say anything, that beauty is an umbrella term. I agree but this term is an umbrella held out in a storm, upended, turned inside out, glinted spokes swinging broken and useless, it’s pants pulled right over its head. It is to be thrown in the hallway, curated only by the indifference of hoarders, while we drip sodden with what it couldn’t stop.

Still, something persists. Don’t wallflower there. It’s us, it is always us, who are to blame. We dressed you wrong. Expected too much. What were you for? Don’t look away. A world of resemblances surround you.

I know a little about personal apocalypses. My parents told me I would never die. There were clauses of course, only god could be invulnerable. I might still be forgotten after all. The end of the world would come like a thief in the night. This is all true. I was always thinking the world was ending. When I stopped believing in God I became very afraid. I had always been afraid though then I realised the world could still end. The first time I doubted God’s existence I was six or seven. I drove my head repeatedly into the springs in my mattress. I exhausted myself trying to batter down the thought. I was red faced, hurt but I had given something up in myself. The thought was still there and my body was now its reflex.
I’ve been reading Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas.
Scorch Atlas feels like a deformed twin of some sort or a lost sibling of that very specific fear and emotion. This might explain the mixture of attraction and repulsion operating echoic, clattering in the lidded gap of my personal circuit break _/ _
I think the tabloid term is Genetic Sexual Attraction.
Scorch Atlas has been making me sick. Kathy Acker’s writing got me in a visceral way too. Except Kathy’s viscera was made tangible via the emotional and political and there was something transcendent to be gained by tearing the world through the body open.
Butler’s Scorch Atlas is transfiguration through sickness, the body out of control, full of growths, growths which are of course always a digging inwards, an inside job.
I can’t remember who said it, maybe Elizabeth Young (I am sorry I cannot remember), that the body in much modern American fiction represented the last van guard of the real. This is maybe changing. The body is now the site for radical experimentation. We’re frustrated with the limitations of our extension in space.
Scorch Atlas punches evolution in the kidneys. I think I might be projecting. I feel close to the writing. Maybe the writing is uncomfortably close to me, depressing my capillaries. This is an effect of its remorselessness. The work makes morsels of us all.
There is a lot going on in this writing. I’m only five stories in and I had to sit down and make some feverish notes. When something makes me sit down and take notes there’s something in it that I can’t approach. That’s what I look for.

Scorch Atlas is frightening and horrific. This is Horror the way Polanski’s Repulsion was horror, the way ‘the birds’ is horror. In fact what I find most fascinating stylistically, now that I can put a little distance between myself and it, is how Scorch Atlas organizes then slaloms around its influences like checkpoints on a down hill skiing race.
The way a crack will race across panes of glass.
I see Lynch via Hitchcock via Stephen King via Lutz via Cormac Mccarthy via the authors own controlled momentum.

But I’m digressing, making it safe. I’m going to finish the book and then burn it.

(1) Lutz’s language institutes the estrangement of modern life at a linguistic level. In doing so his prose has a curiously paradoxical quality. Oddly embodied and physical in their syntax and grammar Lutz’s sentences are also simultaneously removed and abstracted from their affect. Lutz’s style creates odd shifting channels, each sentence following its own set of gears and mechanisms. The emotional affect of the writing comes from the seepage of these forces acting upon one another. By the end of certain stories it even comes to oil them.

(2) Lutz is a very strange kind of realist-minimalist, the writing is so present, so gripping that the act of reading becomes oddly pressured, your mind gets worked into uncomfortable forms. I remember writing in an essay once that David Foster Wallace’s work was intellectually chiropractic, that it was rigorous and at times painful but that you always got the sense it wanted to make you better, leave you feeling refreshed and limbered up. Lutz’s writing has no such concerns. Lutz’s writing is crippling in affect, he demands our language honestly reflect something both abstract and real. This feels terrible but occasionally I’m reminded of Francis Bacon if one removed the overt ‘drama’ from the paintings, drained the colour and showed them only under the pale fluorescence of office light. His characters while always held at a stylistic distance are incredibly raw, appear always to have been pruned too far back. These disfigurements work because they are rooted in our received language, notions, expectations etc and it is once again a display of the paradoxical tensions at work in his writing. Lutz’s work, I think, serves a particular critique of a society warping under the pressure of its own compulsive mundanity. Often in his writing a cliché is obliquely referenced only for it to be turned on its head because its generic literalism, its acceptedness in the world, requires it to be hammer-locked, turned to honestly confront the audience it had forgotten.

(3)Lutz writing is so disorientating because it reverts the already reflected world back into position and what we see is nightmarish and recognizable.

(4) Lutz’s work belongs to that very special canon of realists that show us a legitimate and real version of hell, a hell all the more hellish and demeaning because we can and do tolerate it. The tax of it is so very stealthy after all. Traditional realist novels accept the representation of the world they are given and make critiques within it. Lutz is like Kafka but divested of his mythmaking narratives (we are not even allowed that now).

I want to make or write, can i just say make instead of write from now on? I want to make diamond structures and trap light in them.
Either that or be digitized by the sun.

* Apologies to anyone who may have already seen this posted on my blog, I just thought it might be worth reposting here.

Meta-fiction often functions in modern literature as intellect without object/subject. It seems to designate literature as a static form albeit one that the writer is free to play with and dissect at will. However these ‘games’ or this play is often tiring and uninspired lacking as it does the risk required to move the reader emotionally. This may exhibit a cultural synecdoche and be valid as a description/product of our times but I think this type of text’s failure to resonate beyond its own impotence, its failure to admit its own weakness limits it, makes of it’s language a dead end. Cooper’s work in the George Mile’s cycle and especially in the novel Guide does much to rescue Meta-fiction conceptually as well as reinvesting the process of fiction with a power which, however compromised, is nonetheless incorruptible. It holds a slim impenetrable truth that pierces the heart of the matter and Cooper’s prose, no matter how coldly it may at times penetrate, is nothing less than a beautiful realisation of this truth. Guide’s complex structure which is nonetheless allied to a deeply engaged sense of feeling works effectively through a series of integrations, filmic cuts, complex time signatures and most importantly in an appeal to the unknown world. The book itself functions as a manifestation of that appeal as we will see. In order to appreciate Cooper’s achievement in creating a structure which appears deceptively simplistic on the surface but in fact leads down to a labyrinth of meta- textual strategies (at the centre of which is a yearning desire for love) and that have practical application it is important, I think, to discuss meta-fiction in relation to the difficulties and opportunities it presents for a potential writer. In doing so the focus on Coopers work will be further personalised by my own aims as a fiction writer and the pitfalls that I hope to avoid in my writing.

The inherent danger of meta-fictive practices is that the work may appear weakly ironic; either apologizing for itself at several removes or positing itself in an ironic relationship to its reader. However, the conceit of meta-fiction can I think be used to explore our fear of solipsism, the difficulty and need of seeking out new means of communication and may be a useful tactic in which to deflect/genuflect back to the real. I’m personally interested in the way meta-fiction may be used to question the process of representation and also how it functions in an epistemological sense. The act or will to create, its function born out of a crisis of disconnection with other people and the world, as an attempt to escape the very strictures of which the necessitation of it’s (the fiction) appearance is a symptom. I think the right kind of meta-fictional approach could explore this theme which I believe is heavily to do with how consciousness and language function and interface. I’m interested in creating characters in which a schism is both linguistic and physical and who use and appropriate art or different text’s or media in order to construct their selves. In a hyper aware world of multiplying fictions the self is exhausted and starved of myth. In the overload of information and endless co-modification of choice, history and enforced nostalgia the endlessly self referential culture becomes internalized. The one language I recognize myself and my closest friends as being most invested in is the language of appropriation. I want to be able to represent this at both a conceptual and emotional level. In other words I’m looking for a trace; combing the dirt and ruins for an arrowhead. Something from a lost world that’s been missed and whose meaning I’m forced into guessing at.

I’m hoping the conceit of meta-fiction could function thematically and emotionally if it successfully dramatized a sincere desire for communication through whatever collapsible means the characters could invent themselves in. Both contemporary and deeply formal, the fiction in the text; the need of fiction and the act of writing would be acts of a faith at once mitigated and transcendent. This is again something that I am interested in exploring: How the urge to know someone else, how re-imagining relationships is an essential part of being human and how we must necessarily believe that our fictions hold a portion, however small, of that person within them.

The first means of achieving this effect seems to me to be to construct a meta-fictional framework that does not compromise emotional affect since the form itself is so loaded with potential pitfalls. Guide does this by inverting the primacy of meta-fiction so that the structure of the novel allows for a meta-fictional conceit. It does not dominate the novel, it’s not a twist or a dénouement or even a privileged announcement and in the very casualness of it’s insertion it creates the subterranean ebb and flow of the meaning working underneath its exterior structure. The use of meta-fiction often posits a real (I.E the author behind the work, the work as an object rather than an operational system, engagement with which would constitute a constantly shifting set of meanings and relations etc) above the text. Cooper’s work levels that hierarchy so that the creation of fiction while causally dependent on the outside world does not exist hermetically. It denies simple categorization and instead opts to create permeable and multiplying borders that allow the reader to move through the membrane of the writing into a space where fiction and ‘reality’ break upon one-another. In doing so Cooper hits on something that is both highly contemporary and emotionally affective. As Ballard says in his introduction to Crash ‘The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction’[1] and that in light of this world of proliferating fictions the definition of a writers function his role has changed:

The writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of opinions and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of a scientist…All he can do is devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.[2]

In a world surrounded by fictions, it is important I believe to reveal the crisis point of representation and attempt at least to move beyond this crisis and into faith; a faith which we or the writer must have the strength of will to continually test. Guide by delivering the meta-fiction conceit back to being, in essence, a fictional construct while still playing with our received notions of faction and meta literature creates an effect where everything is simultaneously laid bare and completely obscured and centre-less. The novel begins and ends with a series of terse statements:

‘Luke’s at Scott’s. Mason’s at home jerking off to a picture of Smears bassist, Alex…Pam’s directing a porn film. Goof is the star. He’s twelve and a half. I’m home playing records and writing a novel about the aforementioned people, especially
Luke. This is it.’[3]

In this section the apparently simple set of sentences already illustrates a certain tone of minimalist brevity allied to a quick stylistic rhythm. This is an opening paragraph that has been designed to make an impact. What is interesting about this impact is that it’s rhythm is purposefully obscuring the conceptual inversion at play. The ‘This is it’ in relation to the rest of the paragraph reads like a natural statement that the preceding sentences rhythm had demanded due to the impossibility of sustaining their rapid fire effect. However that ‘This is it’ forces a revision, creates in fact a loop, in which the text and its relationship to its referents feed into each other creating a level of distortion. The ‘This is it’ throws significant doubt about the reality of each of the characters. They are both ‘there’ and not ‘there’ linear time is disrupted and the novel’s relationship to their presupposed real existence is problematized . This is further evidenced when the ‘real’ start of the novel is revealed on page sixty five after Dennis has taken acid:

Then magically or whatever, I start writing a novel. I start by describing exactly what’s happened to me since I snapped myself out of the heaviest part of my LSD trip. In other words, I start here – or, rather, a dozen or so pages back. That’s where everything begins. (pg.65)

The fictional act of construction is revealed but the retrogressive affect of this revelation does nothing to diminish what has preceded it. The real and the fictional merge naturally each containing a portion of the other. Almost like a chemical composition being arranged into a different structure. Fiction and truth and reality are inseparable co-dependent structures in Guide. This is opposed to what I would describe as traditional meta-fiction wherein a dualism occurs and proceeds in a dialectic. Guide instead situates itself between those two poles and refuses value judgements in favour of a naturalized postmodernism, one in which the diminished delineation between truth and falsehood is not treated dramatically. When Dennis does interrupt the narrative to give a piece of non-novel information such as:

‘They tried to get Luke on heroin, basically to hurt me…when I heard what they’d done I chopped them out of my life. And now I’ve removed them from Luke’s-in this novel at least’ (pg.90)

It serves not to denude the fiction of its power but rather to heighten the readers emotional involvement in the fictional aspect of the characters. It creates a sense of purpose behind their construction, a sense of the real within or underneath their construction. This again is not one sided, does not merely travel from the exterior (what is posited as outside the novel) to the interior (the representation of the outside within the novel) but also from the representation to what is ‘real’. The two are not separate entities but exist in mutual transferring relations. This can be seen in Dennis’ attempt to use the novel to try and inoculate certain desires within himself/character.

The idea of art as an inoculation is represented on various levels within Guide. It is present both in the ‘fiction’ and also presented as being outside of the fiction and thus within the process of imagining/creating. The character of Chris is a twenty two year old heroin addict who wishes to ‘become dead as gradually and with as much intricacy as is humanly possible’ (pg.9) because ‘There’d be a point. he imagines, where he’d be simultaneously dead and alive. For that moment, however tiny, he’d know everything there is to know about human existence’ (pg.9). There is an inherent romanticising at work here that the novel dissects and explores at different operating levels. Within the novel Dennis conceives of creating a narrative that would allow Chris to ‘watch…(himself) die for the rest of (his) life’ (pg43). The project is a ‘a kind of pseudo snuff kiddie porn film to be scripted by me (Dennis).’ This film never occurs in the text but Chris does re-enact the story line with a dwarf who castrates and murders him. This in turn, because the novel is of course fictional, functions to create a situation where Chris (the real Chris in whatever form he may exist in) would be able to view it forever. What is particularly interesting though is the authorial interruptions that disrupt this scene. In two distinctive paragraphs Cooper succeeds in maintaining the continual transference between the inner of the novel and the outer of it’s referent. The first takes the form of an admittance:

‘I know the… Chris story line is preposterous. But I’m in this dilemma. I’m still fascinated by Kiddie porn, snuff, and so on, but I want to diminish their presence in my thoughts and consequently, in my work. And the only way I can think to remove them is through a kind of gentrification, since I guess they still have to be here, as long as I can’t keep them out, which I can’t. I’ve tried.’ (pg 72)

A whole part of the novel is here not only revealed to be wholly fictional but also ridiculous and denigrated. However, the section is disingenuous because as much as it seeks to purport a confessional mode the rupture that this creates is far too interesting to dismiss. What takes place in the novel, the ‘preposterous’ nature of this story line is being used for a purpose beyond its fictional manifestation.

The second invests the fictional with the concerns of the real and suggests a heavy engagement by the author with the emotional process of writing:

‘This part’s almost over. It has to be gross, a touch abstract, and relatively implausible. Otherwise I’ll get too emotionally involved. If it’s any consolation Chris is in pain. Period….People romanticise these kind of moments. I certainly have. But this is just an incomprehensible, private, interpersonal trip’ (pg.87)

The emphasis here on ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘private’ excludes the possibility for communication and thus for knowledge. The involvement with the action of writing reverses the inner to outer affect occasioning a point where-in the recognition of being unable to mentally make Chris death plausible due to a relation outside the text make necessity of his death all more emotionally affective.

In this section Cooper also asserts that ‘without the imaginations elaborate input, dying’s no different than breaking your leg’ (pg.87). Chris’ position as consenting victim is thus stripped of its romance. The compulsion that had been fantasized in Chris’ character and never wholly critiqued becomes through the experiment of fiction mixed with a personalized perspective: ‘Otherwise I’ll get too emotionally involved’.

Here we see that Cooper is purposefully deploying the meta-fiction conceit that he has constructed in its fluid, looped form. The idea of Chris being ‘real’ of his having a referent in the world forces the author to analyse the legitimacy of his desires. The interchangeable ‘sign’ of the character becomes invested with something outside the discourse, outside what is able to be represented I.E the real relations between people. The real is decanted into fiction which in the form of a novel is injected into and merges with the real. Cooper’s decision to base his character on someone he evidently has feelings thus uses a fictional sign (‘Chris’) which he has invested with a personal referent to dismantle and highlight compulsions which have physical affects I,E transgressive, sexual desires. Concurrently a scene that has already been flagged as explicitly fictional retains its emotional impact. The death of a fictional Chris in a ‘preposterous’ scenario is moving because of the sadness inherent in Cooper’s compulsions. Chris still needs to die because his fictional death may hold just enough, a fraction of the virus, to help Cooper diminish those compulsions in his ‘thoughts and consequently…work’. Also as Chris’ character is so lovingly detailed, so fully rounded by the authors relationship to him in the text the death still means something, still resonates.

At the level of consent we can thus see that the text has inoculated itself from romanticising the notion and freed itself from being able to justify doing harm through a thought experiment. The desire however is still there. It is part of the process/gentrification. There is a third section in the text where this process into understanding the desire itself is explored. It is when Dennis writes of the explicitly fictional dwarf in relation to Chris’ dying, mutilated body:

‘It was a whole , unique, miniaturized world complete with roads, towns, mountains, lakes, national parks. It was so beautiful. And best of all, the dwarf felt huge and all powerful by comparison. Not that he knew what to do with his new super-powers. Other than to destroy what he’d been given to play with of course’ (pg.94)

This acts as a demystification of destructive urges that simultaneously reveals the compulsion. Previously in the novel Cooper had asserted, in relation to the transformation that overcomes ‘cute fashion plate’ boys that ‘lose their cool’ prior to sex, that it can seem like ‘the greatest magic trick in the world…Or should I say, it makes me feel all-powerful, which is hot.’ (Pg.84).

Here two elements are at play.

The emphasis on ‘trick’ illustrates the illusory nature while the feeling of being ‘all powerful’ is directly related to sexual urges. This passage dovetails nicely with the Dwarf sections of the novel and asserts the relationship between sex and power. Guide is here deconstructing the authors relationship to his text, a relationship of power, the ability or right to destroy the ‘miniaturized world’ is called into question or at least it’s motives are. The phrase a ‘miniaturized world’ could stand as a meme for all individualized consciousness. Guide is a highly analytical novel disguised by it’s stylistic flair and subject matter which uses the meta-fiction conceit in order to invest more humanity in the characters. It is an epistemological exploration into the power and potential of fiction.

Since Guide is, I think, a novel precisely concerned with deconstructing notions of authority or power in order to examine, question or neutralise them I think the undermining of the dwarf’s sensation is here represented as being the dead end of a power so total and complete over the suppressed object (Chris’ body) that it is no longer able to communicate itself except through the destruction of it’s creation/source (a creation that is necessarily made out of the world despite whatever has been made out of it) and that this functions as an exploration into the nature of all power. In this manner the text stays true to its author’s anarchistic beliefs[4] by systematically revealing power’s appearance. So much of Cooper’s work is concerned with the interplay of transgressive impulses and the necessity of exploring them honestly. This honesty therefore must also extend into questions of what is legitimate and of the nature of abuse and consent. Transgressive desires are subjected to thought experiments. In this manner and reading it in light of Ballard’s comments on the role of modern fiction basing a character on someone you love functions as adding a control element to the experiment.

Thematically Guide is a novel heavily interested in communication and to what extent we can know or presume to know one another. There is a constant flow from the effect of the world on the novel to the novels effect on the world. This is in fact a major theme of Guide and is conceptually heightened by the Novel’s sigil like structure. Within the novel Guide Dennis comes into contact with Luke who is interested in performing magical rituals that change reality. While Dennis feels ‘cowed by the biblical tone’ (pg.64) of much of the literature he finds in Luke’s rucksack one particular ritual piques his interest, that of the sigil:

‘a sigil, is an emblem of made up letters drawn one on top of another, then enclosed within a circle, so that all one sees is a pattern that looks like an extremely busy logo…..Once you’ve devised an acceptable logo…the wish enters reality virus like’ (pg.65)

‘within a few seconds I have this idea, which, if it’s not obvious involves writing a novel/sigil that has a wish neatly embedded in it’ (pg.65)

The novel in fact uses these rules. The majority of paragraphs in the novel jump around, switch scenes and tense, cross hatching time and space in a manner that belies the careful construction at work. In a casual reading of the piece one can be swept away by this seemingly conversational tangential style, the ‘busy logo’ of the writing. Within Guide stories that once collated perhaps stretch to a page or two last the entirety of the novel being told as they are in short paragraphs that are collaged next to others throughout. The novel closes with a paragraph that is virtually identical to the opening in terms of sentence style and rhythm:

‘Luke is thinking of me…Across town Drew’s sleeping. Mason is watching him breathe. It’s nice. Scott just came…I’m in toilet stall kissing that club kid. I’m thinking sex. He’s thinking… God only knows. It’ll all come to nothing. I’m sure. You can basically forget us’

In doing this Cooper creates the circuitous structure required for the book to function as a sigil. It also hints that there is a secret embedded in the text, one that is not explicitly told, one in fact that cannot even be to do with his love for Luke. In the novel as sigil Cooper collapses the distance between creator and creation and between the art and life while at the same time insisting on fiction’s power to engage with the world, that it is already in fact part of the world. He succeeds in making the novel both a personalized object (the sigil) and a vast engaging matrix of logos and signs that interact disabling or affirming one another. There is a line in the novel which I think could stand as an emblem for my relation to the text:

‘the shock was so dense and complex that it collided with the worlds very different complexity, sort of what happens when a very strong light hits a very big jewel’ (pg.87)

To me this serves as a perfect example of what fiction at its best can do. Entering the carefully constructed matrix of the text, constructed so carefully that one does not at first notice it’ rigorous construction, the motion of our thought through the writing creates new prisms of light. We encounter the writing, it changes us and we illuminate its possibilities. Meta fiction shouldn’t function as a writer’s display of empty incommunicable power but instead should be a piece of work through which the reader can pass. Cooper’s book like the very big jewel that it is can be seen from multiple perspectives at once while still maintaining a near formal perfection. Cooper in his own distinctly personalized way is reinvesting language with a modulated power of affect. One that occurs in the communication a reader feels through the medium of the text. In this way the decision to structure the novel as a sigil has I think added pathos because a book or story isn’t just a collection of symbols it’s a spell…an illusion yes but one that continually tests reality and which affect reality the same way any of our thoughts may get portioned into action. By
disempowering the author/god scenario through his casual admittances and sincerely represented emotions Cooper is also making that power available. He puts the author among us, confused and lonely and desiring love; the same as any potential reader.

The idea of burying a truth so deep in a form that it essentially flavours what surrounds it, is built anachronistically out of, has an allegorical function in Cooper’s text. Guide is the fourth novel in a cycle. Each text in Dennis Cooper’s ‘George Miles Cycle’ regurgitates some of the material, while destroying other aspects, of the novel preceding it. Each of the five books posits itself in a different relationship to Cooper’s twin themes of sexual desire and bodily violence and each book is designed as a monument to his relationship with his muse George Miles. As Cooper has written on his website about the cycle:

‘the central contradiction in the work, and in my own psyche, is of unqualified love and support for George Miles and unqualified fascination with the sexual fantasy of possessing, exploring, and destroying young men like him. George would be the central character of the cycle, but, because of the effect of the mirroring structure, he would mutate, subdivide, and shift from one identity to another to suit each novel’s central purpose, then gradually reformulate into George by the final novel of the cycle, while always retaining his general appearance and emotional/ psychological make up. …. I’d decided that each of the middle three books would concentrate on
one of the ways in which I viewed my subjects. The second novel (Frisk) would prioritize the libidinal, sexual, erotic appeal. The third novel (Try) would prioritize my emotional response. The fourth novel (Guide) would prioritize the cerebral, intellectual, and analytical.’[5]

Guide as in the other novels within the cycle is an experiment which uses real interpersonal relations in order to test the boundaries of fiction and thus life. Guide is analytical but paradoxically leads to the heart. What is affirmed ultimately in its final analysis is love; not the erotic sex and death investigations that Cooper is famed for but rather an affection which seeks to protect it’s unknowable source :

‘I’m making this narrative safe for Luke’s character, whatever that takes. I don’t care whom I destroy along the way. I only wish I could do the same thing in the less malleable life we’re beginning to share’
(pg.82)

The end point of all analysis is that which it is impossible to represent. This is obviously qualitatively different from what may exist. Luke is identified in the text as embodying the extreme of one of Dennis’ two archetypal relationships with people he may love. These relationships have ‘almost always involved an unspoken, fierce sexual tension and/or an attachment I couldn’t explain except in vague, spiritual terms…Luke must be the ultimate example of the latter’ (p.74). Here the polarisation between Cooper’s relationship not just with Luke but also with ‘George Miles’ and his textual clones is laid out systematically. That this aspect survives Guide’s analysis in a manner that the sexual urge to destroy them does not is precisely because it cannot be formulated/represented. The decision to keep Luke ‘safe’ in the narrative is justified precisely because there is no rationality to it. Guide leads to an affirmation of love because there is no power to disperse in this attachment between people. It cannot be articulated because it has not been constructed by the uses of power. While not wholly altruistic the feeling is genuine and whole. It has at its heart a faith that is the motivation for Cooper to create a novel, one of the stated aims of which, is to free himself of certain life-long obsessions, to Guide him.

If this essay has become increasingly a close reading of Guide and strayed into academism it has been necessitated by a point that I feel feeds not only into my meta-fictive interests but also the very reasons for my wanting to write. Guide is clearly written from a series of beliefs attempting to work themselves out. What is evident is a series of meanings in transit that invest themselves in systems without privileging any one of them. It is written in good faith and does not spare the raw detail. I, like most people of any age or modern generation, am confused, lost and searching for meaning. I cannot presume myself to be above the subjects I am writing about. I need to represent this confusion and representing this confusion is perhaps the first step to resolving it. My work is increasingly concerned with its own processes and structure because I feel that I have not inherited forms which can hold my beliefs in the world. Those beliefs themselves are not yet fully formed, hopefully never will be ‘completed’ (I.E dead) but in the act of expression I hope to discover, explore and critique my own beliefs while still communicating with whoever may read my work. This for me is the challenge of being an artist. I don’t want my writing to be closed or separate, there’s no communication in that. I want to write something that moves. At the moment I’m interested in meta-fictional structures because I feel that in using the disorientating mirror like structures which can be built from that conceit that it might be possible, in light of their multiplication, to create a sense of overwhelming distortion under which the lives of the characters, their buried melodies, may still be faintly recognizable. If I can write something that is architecturally complex and thus in some small way illustrates the deafening environment we now live in but which still manages, underneath the proliferation of both the text’s and the worlds artifice and however obliquely, to affirm a real human emotion then I will feel like I have succeeded (from my current perspective) as an artist. Dennis Cooper’s work provides a model that is at once wholly contemporary and yet beautifully and resonantly emotional.

[1] Ballard, Crash , (Vintage 1995) pg.5
[2] Ballard, Crash , (Vintage 1995) pg.5-6
[3] Cooper, Guide (Serpent tail 1998) pg. 3 All further references to this text to be included in the body of the essay
[4]Dennis Cooper in conversation with Robert Gluck: ‘As soon as you get power, disperse it. For me, that simple idea reverberates out through instinct into a way of thinking about everything. I think my novels are entirely informed by anarchism on the levels of form, style, approach, and philosophy’ (http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity/issue_three/gluck.html)
[5]Cooper, http://www.denniscooper.net/georgemiles.htm