[I left my monster hobby-horse in the stable and wrote the following all-purpose, any-venue review of James Elkins’ new novel, Stories, Like Illnesses, with the hope the review could be published in some mass market magazine that would want to discover Elkins. No luck there. Good luck for Monsterpieces, though, as you don’t have to leap a pay wall to read the review below. There are numerous references to monsters and the monstruous in the novel—as if Elkins were writing it for this Substack—so beneath the review are my comments on the hyperparasitical monstrosity of Stories, Like Illnesses. As you know if you were here at the beginning of Monsterpieces, the first post was reviews of Elkins’ first two books to be published of his Five Strange Languages novel. For your convenience, that Substack post is here below the review and my comments on monstrosity in Stories, Like Illnesses. It will be out early October. I’m posting early so you can clear your decks for another 500 pager.]
Stories, Like Illnesses
In the conclusion to Walden, Thoreau fears his expression has “not been extravagant enough” and breaks his key word into its Latin roots “extra” and “vagance” to suggest “outside” and “wandering.” About a man who bemoans wandering away from his childhood innocence in nature (near a pond) and then regrets losing clear memory of a day in that “paradise,” Stories, Like Illnesses is the third volume of James Elkins’ five-volume Five Strange Languages novel, completed after two decades of work but appearing serially in the last several years. Like William Vollmann’s four-volume A Table for Fortune, each of Elkins’ three books to appear so far is long, dense with factual information, filled with interesting visuals, digressive, sometimes oppressive, consistently audacious. And yet Five Strange Languages has been inexplicably ignored—neglected might be more precise--by reviewers. Therefore, you probably missed Weak in Comparison to Dreams and A Short Introduction to Annieliese, but not to worry because Stories, Like Illnesses is the backstory--or backstories--of Elkins’ protagonist and narrator in those two volumes. Why didn’t Elkins release Stories, Like Illnesses first? Perhaps because it provides relatively straightforward ease of access, and he didn’t want to mislead readers about how far the following volumes would wander from the path of conventional fiction into wildernesses of nature and thickets of typography. For Thoreau, “extra” meant “outdoors.” For Elkins, extra also means excessive, another similarity to Vollmann.
Stories, Like Illnesses is a multi-story metafiction with a 10-page index of stories at book’s end. For Elkins, the stories that create the most dangerous psychological and even physiological illnesses are origin stories. His protagonist--Samuel Emmer, a mid-40s microbiologist whose wife and daughter have left him in “disquietude”—eventually realizes his memory of a paradisial origin is defective, but he insists on holding onto it into his 90s when he’s writing the ending of this “autobiography.” Forty years ago, he imagined what a psychologist would say about his depressive state but discounted the therapeutic story of early trauma. Much of the novel is about other unwelcome information and distressing experience that Samuel also refused to accept. In its exploration of psychology and memory, Stories, Like Illnesses has a modernist feel, but Samuel is not Bloom wandering the streets of Dublin, talking with others, and taking in the varieties of lives there. Samuel is socially isolated like a decomposing Beckett narrator, but Samuel is most like someone who has wandered in from Franzen’s realistic fiction to be overwhelmed by postmodern “strange languages.” Not an everyman but close enough to be a sympathetic sieve.
Samuel eventually understands being raised by a widowed mother obsessed with cataloguing mushrooms and calculating comets probably affected his disengagement from people as an adult. Thinking about his wife and daughter as parts of a microscope he could adjust didn’t help his family situation. His boring job analyzing water samples in a small Ontario city finds him talking to the amoebae he sees in his microscope. In the early chapters, stories Samuel tells on his sad-sack self are rather comic as Elkins invites readers into Samuel’s first-person, stylistically innocuous narrative. In those chapters, Samuel’s story about himself shares page space with numerous illustrative photographs--of mushrooms, comets, microscopes, and amoebae. So far, so “factual,” so visually relevant.
But about the time that a new intern named Viperine (a self-chosen name by a non-binary young person) shows up in his lab, Samuel feels increasing cognitive and emotional pressure, and the pages of the story he is telling about himself get compressed by specialized texts running down both margins. One text is about fracking that Samuel converts into a metaphor for his headache. Then there’s a multi-page discussion of a jet engine breaking down, another metaphor for his stressed self. Both texts are mechanical. Viperine is full organic but not from Walden; she has studied parasites, even amoebae that turn into parasites. Samuel believes in common-sense bodily autonomy (another origin story). Viperine tries to disabuse him with her knowledge, her conclusion that the original state of a human is illness, even if it’s not recognized. Nature is not red in tooth and claw, but gray, miniscule, sneaky, energy sapping, illness producing.
Samuel tries to deflect Viperine’s origin story by originating an affair with a fellow worker named Rosie who believes in the healing power of crystals and goes to great lengths—with Samuel as accomplice—to save her family by hiding the crystals (like parasites) around their home. Stones are an even earlier part of nature than organisms to tell an origin story about. Samuel’s narrative surrenders more page space, now to many columns of documents about different crystals, their contributions to health, and their humanizing names--comic relief from the danger posed by Viperine’s eccentric ideas and strange personal appearance.
The novel has a dying fall plot. In the intellectual and psychological climax or nadir of the book, Samuel has to listen to Viperine’s presentation on hyperparasitism in a Borneo bat cave where young bats fall from the roof, pick up earwig parasites that have amoeba parasites that are hosts to viruses. Now Elkins’ pages resemble densely cluttered pages in Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Samuel’s “realistic” life-story is ultimately squeezed into a small box in the center of the page, compressed by sometimes four columns of scientific texts, other characters’ voices, Samuel’s own mewling, Viperine’s ideas, and some ditties Pynchon might have written. Some of the marginal texts also have footnotes—like the endnotes in Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Here is postmodern excess, the marginal texts going hyperparasitical to press in on Samuel’s mind and story. Samuel feels assaulted. So will some readers, but this section of simultaneity and ambiguity is the most thought-provoking—and in a way representative—part of Elkins’ novel. Samuel summarizes in sentences that include “strange” and “languages”:
“My life is like writing that is turning from English into languages I don’t read. Each day appears to me as a page from a strange document, crowding me with voices, recounting frantic airless stories and odd images, giving them back to me as noise.”
In William Paulson’s The Noise of Culture, a book about the French theorist Michel Serres and his concept of the parasite (the French word for noise in an information channel), Paulson argues that literature is the noise of culture because literature’s essential ambiguity resists the pure communication function of messaging and computer coding. For Paulson, noise--Elkins’ “strange languages,” specialized discourses far from ordinary language—is creative, causing mutations in cultural systems. In the terms of Stories, Like Illnesses, noise in a novel’s story may disrupt readers, if not characters, to tell and write and read stories about themselves that are not as delusional and harmful as many stories of the past. Even Dante gets taken down: he “must have had a terrible fear of wandering in forests,” says Samuel, to tell a story about devils and angels, though it worked out okay for him.
Noise becomes more excessive and oppressive to Samuel in the next two novels. In A Short Introduction to Annieliese, Samuel is conversationally and conceptually bullied by the title character who resembles a much older Viperine. Annieliese repeatedly insists he read her roomful of unpublished notebooks about the origin of humans’ understanding of life in ancient languages. Samuel refuses. In Weak in Comparison to Dreams, he thinks a new job assignment to investigate the treatment of animals in world-wide zoos will provide an escape. The travel story doesn’t work. Samuel observes animals’ strange body languages and suffering, becomes increasingly erratic, has recurrent nightmares of burning forests, melts down, quits his job, and moves to a remote area of northern Ontario where he is unbothered by people and the noise they make. So far, Five Strange Languages is not White Noise, a filmable novel in which the professor and his family are together watching a sunset at story’s end.
According to Samuel, he wrote Stories, Like Illnesses and the two other published “autobiographies” 40 years ago, put the manuscripts in his basement, and only recently rediscovered them at age 90 (in 2061). This seems like a story, a very old story from the beginnings of the novel as a form. But at the end of each recovered manuscript, now a book, is a long section entitled “Notes” in Samuel’s present in which he describes in no less than 50 pages how he plays the notes of difficult modernist compositions on his piano, activity that gives him only a vague and therefore harmless feeling of what his past experiences were like. Now he’s the parasite, burrowing into and gaining sustenance from non-linguistic compositions. His pages don’t have to share space with marginal texts. The body of his text is autonomous. For most readers, the plethora of notes pictured will be another strange language, visual noise, an odd and puzzling parasite within the main text, not in its margins. Do the “Notes” show Samuel has recovered from his old resistance to new stories or is he now using music to evade rigorous thinking about his past or is the past at age 90 so nebulous for him—even when “recorded” in his manuscripts—that thinking about it would serve no purpose? The noise that Samuel makes at his piano and in his “Notes” is ambiguous--as Paulson said literature is.
But Elkins is not through yet with parasitical ambiguity. In the “Notes” to Stories, Like Illnesses and to Weak in Comparison to Dreams, Samuel discusses the lives and plays the works of two composers who do not exist. Given Samuel’s feeble imagination, it is very unlikely that he invented these stories about the composers. Suspicion multiplies like parasites. In fact, if I can use that word this deep in ambiguity, I think it’s also unlikely that Samuel was capable of writing the manuscripts he discovers. Maybe he could have done the basic first-person narrative, but not the textual noise in the margins. Yes, Elkins wrote or collected all of the texts and visuals, but the invented composers treated as real suggest to me that some other character might be the secret, originating author parasiting into Samuel’s life and using it to represent the dangers of stories, including the one being told by Samuel in Elkins’ volumes. He has said the books are not like the difficult jigsaw puzzles Samuel’s mother put together, but there are enlarged photographs of puzzle pieces in the last chapters of Stories, Like Illnesses.
In a book about origins, a puzzle about authorship would be appropriate in a fiction as layered and as postmodern as Elkins’ is. In House of Leaves, the reader must wade and wait through hundreds of pages before learning the possible origin story of the novel’s scarred narrator. Some fundamental secrets of Infinite Jest are revealed in its endnotes. Postmodern suspense is not what the protagonists will do but what they and readers might learn if willing to fall into a possibly infinite regress.
Only Viperine has the education, scientific knowledge, passion, and interest in Samuel to be a likely author. He calls her a “masterpiece” and says, “her stories were carefully constructed. They included things that would be hard to make up.” On page 344 of my ARC, there’s a marginal text on Moulins, Viperine’s hometown, that it would have been impossible for Samuel to know or “make up” (if one thinks of Samuel as the source of the marginalia). For Viperine, a “tower of parasites” is “the perfect story.” Because of his passivity and story illnesses, Samuel is an easy host for Viperine the parasite, the source of the book’s noisiest noise—much of which she in turn cribbed from the Britannica and scientific journals. She could be the internal analogue or avatar of the author. If she is the “author” in between Samuel and Elkins, she, like a clever parasite, conceals her presence until, perhaps, the end when she invents those un-Samuel stories about eccentric foreigners (like her) and puts the stories in Samuel’s mouth. The fictional composer in Stories, Like Illnesses, Elnar Valen, reminds Samuel of Viperine. He says Valen’s “strange language goes on and on, filling entire pages, without changing its style. It must be saying something very serious . . .[but] it becomes more and more obscure.” Stories, Like Illnesses is serious, not just a Nabokovian game of authorial hide and seek. This volume and the ones that follow can be “obscure” and are noisy, but in his Babel tower of parasites Elkins is presenting a comprehensive and inventive deconstruction of the faulty stories that people live within or that live within people.
But again, Elkins is not done with parasitism. A much-published art and photography historian who reads a lot of long novels and high literary theory, Elkins offers on his website a 100-plus-page document called “Ideas and Materials” (which will become a printed book, a “companion volume,” when Stories, Like Illnesses is released). It reveals in detail Elkins admits is “excessive” what went into the making of Five Strange Languages. There are graphs and statistics and linkages about technique. More important are the many pages about his impressive readings in literature, literary theory, and philosophy that generated his volumes. In a note to reviewers about “Ideas and Materials,” he warns that “a reading of just the fiction alone would be incomplete, the same as reviewing a novel without finishing it.” Can he be serious now? This non-fictional Elkins sounds like that fictional parasite Kinbote in his foreword to Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all.” This reviewer takes “Ideas and Materials” as a dense and learned parasitical origin story about many of the works that influenced Five Strange Languages. But in its textual obsessiveness and numerous visuals, the “companion volume” also resembles Stories, Like Illnesses. “Ideas and Materials” could be a parody of critical analysis, something like an unreliable fiction, or a revealing joke like Nabokov’s wacky index to Pale Fire with its ambiguous authorship.
In all of the pages in “Ideas and Materials” about how Elkins wrote the volumes, not once does he say why this non-fiction-writing art professor turned in late middle age to fiction, and not just some modest starter fiction but a sequence he would work on for decades without publishing a single volume. The whole, so far, of Five Strange Languages flows from one day in Samuel’s life. No such origin story from Elkins. Wisely not telling the story of his original motivation, Elkins leaves a hole in “Ideas and Materials” and returns us to the books themselves, those excessive exercises in literature’s healthy ambiguity. Literature, Elkin says, has no prime-mover origin, and any novel published now is a parasite on the history of the novel—and, somewhat less persuasively, on the criticism and theory of the novel. Perhaps Stories, Like Illnesses and its “companions” require a new literary term: hyperparasitism.
In “Ideas and Materials” Elkins says his books are about the failures of systems, showing, I’d say, that even an author as learned and sophisticated as Elkins may not fully understand the parasitical books he has created or may be planting a Samuel-like error in the companion. No, not “created,” like a God, but “assembled.” The failures of what Lyotard called “master narratives” and the minor story-machines of popular culture, yes but not, I think, the failure of some science. Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the many long novels Elkins has said he read. It is about the failure of systems but also includes flashes of ecological wisdom. I believe the same is true of the three Elkins volumes I’ve read. What fails in Stories, Like Illnesses are religious notions, romantic ideals, unexamined expectations of normal life, outmoded scientific systems, pseudoscience, entertainment, and the human users of more sophisticated systems. Samuel’s mother became obsessed with cosmology and mycology at the expense of her children. Samuel’s brother Tee is fixated on financial success. Samuel’s boss twits him with travel stories he can’t understand. Some of the composers Samuel tries to play failed because they attempted to invent a new system of music. Elkins makes numerous value judgments about success and failure in “Ideas and Materials.” Readers will need to make similar judgments about the stories within Stories, Like Illnesses and the novel itself. My judgment in a sentence: the novel is like what addiction counselors called marijuana--a gateway to much heavier things already published and, I presume, to come. And when the full weight of Five Strange Languages is available, reviewers will no longer be able to ignore the extra extravagant fiction of James Elkins.
Monsters
Two women characters, Samuel’s mother Martha and Viperine, are called “monsters” because of their power over little Sam. Viperine also appears monstrous because Samuel can’t tell what gender she (I think) is. Actually, for Samuel all people are “monstrous” because they are “intricate, fractured . . . and complicated.” He comes to project these qualities on nature: “The things in the world that seem to make sense,” he says, “are actually stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster, from scraps, and the stitching is hasty and uneven.“ Samuel doesn’t think of himself as a monster but says his “ideas had become monstrous and entangled. I needed to compress my thinking, squeeze out the leaky emotions stamp them into mineral and metal” —partly because of the influence of the book’s women. He thinks of the amoebae as “little monsters,” a nice alternative to the usual association of “monster” with great size—and a lead-in to Viperine’s horrifying “tower of parasites” in the bat cave.
Elkins’ use of monsters and monstrous alerts readers to think of his book as a monstrosity. Stories, Like Illnesses, like Samuel’s view of the world, is stitched together from many different sources, a collage of narrative and marginal texts and visuals. The early photographs of mushrooms are grotesque. The mathematical formulas and calculations in “Notes” are opaque, as are the many pages of notes and staves. If I’m right about Viperine’s authorship of the book, she is a natural (or unnatural) manager of its monstrosity, its hybridity and ambiguity and its hyperparasitism. In the “Notes,” a description of Johnston’s Sonata for Microtonal Piano serves as a description of Stories, Like Illnesses: the sonata “was a kind of monster. Johnston said he created something violent, a `monstrous parody-enigma, allusive, referential, sometimes derisive, distorted, a tissue of familiarity in radically strange garb.’” The quote is an even more accurate description of “Ideas and Methods.”
Is Stories, Like Illnesses a monsterpiece? Formally, moreso than Elkins’ first two published novels. The intellectual content of A Short Introduction to Annieliese is more original and, perhaps, profound. Samuel’s experience with caged animals in Weak in Comparison to Dreams probably has a more powerful emotional effect. But one should remember that these are parts of one long novel that from the extant evidence will be a monsterpiece of extravagant proportion and perhaps unsolvable complexity. Vollmann’s A Table for Fortune is one continuous narrative broken up into four volumes. Five Strange Languages will be five separate, stand-alone books “stitched together” like the Frankenstein monster referred to within Stories, Like Illnesses. The seams will show, but the connections at the information and image levels will be the equal of any monsterpiece I have discussed so far. And the range of Elkins’ imagination will, I believe, have reviewers saying Five Strange Languages belongs up on monsterpiece mountain with Gravity’s Rainbow and Underworld.
First Monsterpieces Post (slightly revised)
To paraphrase old mapmakers’ designation of the unknown: “Here be monsterpieces”—my reviews of recent long novels.
The impetus: I’ve just reviewed a new monsterpiece, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, that I bet you haven’t heard of, a 569-page novel about a monstrously egocentric natural scientist who dominates her story with obsessive and excessive monologues, a story interrupted by a hundred-page chapter on long books including long novels. If a novelist can find a publisher for such a long-shot work, a long novel that the author says is about the long novel form and is one-fifth of a longer novel, then I thought there must be some readers still around who will buy (if not always finish) the long novel, the literary version not the fan fiction version.
The novelist above is James Elkins, and the longer novel is, he says, “Strange Languages.” Elkins has been working on this project for twenty years but published the first of the five—the 605-page Weak in Comparison to Dreams—only in 2023. Though a distinguished art and photography critic, Elkins had never published any fiction before Weak in Comparison to Dreams. After its reception, his publisher, Unnamed Press, agreed to bring out the remaining four long works. I’m leading off here with reviews of Elkins because A Short Introduction to Anneliese has that hundred-page chapter on long books and because Elkins’ two published works represent some extremes of the experimental long novel, the type that aspires to be a monsterpiece.
Long fictions used to be common and are still in certain sub-genres, but the long literary novel is now almost by its mere existence experimental. Since one definition of monster is “thing of large size,” the unconventional length of a work makes the novel monstruous for some readers, but length is not enough to create a monsterpiece. Linear narrative must be deformed and reformed by interruptions, digressions, excess information, non-textual materials, the kitchen sink. Tristram Shandy is a good example. A more familiar example is Moby-Dick, an adventure story constantly deformed by Melville’s cetology that transforms the novel into ontology, a profound study of nature and being. Another definition of monster is “something unnatural.” Moby-Dick conveniently has two monsters within it—the unnatural white whale and the only partly natural peg-legged Ahab.
If “Monsterpieces” had a subtitle, it would be “Long Novels, Long Shots, and Longueurs.” About and largely by an overbearing, compulsive but digressive monologist named Anneliese Grul who has spent more than twenty years writing a roomful of notebooks on the philosophical origin of life, A Short Introduction, true to the protagonist’s make-up, has often lengthy, even, she admits, “boring” passages that illustrate her manias. These passages are necessary for “showing” psychological reality, but readers accustomed to the “telling” of machined and oiled 200-page “realistic” novels may experience the passages as longueurs. Elkins’ risks at displeasing or alienating readers represent the chances most authors of monsterpieces take when they include material some—make that “many”—readers may find excessive, a failure of economy and efficiency. I won’t be claiming long novels, even those I’d call monsterpieces, are without longueurs. I’m saying that reviewers and readers should be careful judging what doesn’t fit a model of excellence based on The Great Gatsby.
After reading a raft of old and recent long novels, Anneliese says their authors become insane because they cannot control the complexities of their work and thus lose touch with the world outside their project. If by “control” she means organizing a linear plot or creating a predictable collage, she’s right, but long novels often have more subtle and demanding ways of connecting their materials. Anneliese did lose her grip during her long project, but given what I’ve read of Elkins’ non-fiction I don’t think he did.
A more common, less drastic charge against long novels is authors’ self-indulgence. After reading interviews with and talking with some authors of long novels, I believe the opposite is often true: authors self-risking, defying the odds against publication and sales by taking ambitious and often difficult long shots. Think of DeLillo in his study with 27 volumes of the Warren Report. The reviews that follow evaluate authors’ risks and readers’ rewards novel to novel. Unlike Anneliese and some academic critics, I have no enforceable theory of the long novel, just 60 years acquaintance with and interest in the form from Moby-Dick on.
Thirty-five years ago I published a book called The Art of Excess about monsterpieces of the 1970s and 80s: Gravity’s Rainbow, Something Happened, J R, The Public Burning, Women and Men, LETTERS, and Always Coming Home. Thirty years ago I published an essay on “Prodigious Fiction” that discussed then prodigies William Vollmann, Richard Powers, and David Foster Wallace as authors of monsterpieces. Twenty-five years ago I published an essay called “False Pretenses, Parasites, and Monsters” about women novelists rewriting novels about monsters by men.
As I said, my hobby-horse. Giddyup.
A Short Introduction to Anneliese
Let’s say you think of yourself as a Marine of literature, one of the few and proud because you love the challenge of long and excessive and even maybe crazed contemporary novels. You appreciated the bullshitting digressiveness and odd endnotes in Wallace’s Infinite Jest but not all that tennis. You admired the multivolume connections and off-beat illustrations in Danielewski’s five-book Familiar series but not the fantasy elements. I have a writer for you—James Elkins, who refers to both Wallace and Danielewski in a hundred-page chapter on long books in his A Short Introduction to Anneliese, which has all those features you enjoyed in Wallace and Danielewski. Semper fi.
Every day for the past twenty years, Elkins has said, he worked on five interlocked books he calls a single novel entitled “Strange Languages.” One of them, the 607-page Weak in Comparison to Dreams, was published in 2023. Now comes the 569-page A Short Introduction to Anneliese, while I’ll shorten to Anneliese here. That first to be released—and Elkins’ first published fiction after a career writing art and photography criticism—was about a sad-sack public health functionary, Samuel Emmer, whose daughter leaves for college, whose wife leaves for Bratislava, and whose supervisor makes him leave his undemanding job to investigate possible animal suffering in zoos world-wide—a triple whammy that causes Samuel’s psychic meltdown and strong, persistent dreams that Elkins illustrates with numerous photos of burning forests. When questioned about his increasingly outrageous behavior with zoo directors, Samuel quits his job, moves to a small town, writes most of Dreams, puts the manuscript in his basement, runs across it forty years later, and adds more than a hundred pages of endnotes about the manuscript and his present life.
At the same time that Samuel is visiting those traumatizing zoos, his supervisor Catherine arranges contact with Anneliese Glur, a septuagenarian Swiss former professor with whom Catherine collaborated when both were graduate students in biology. In an act of apparent revenge for Anneliese’s stealing a crucial formula from Catherine, she recommends the barely functioning Samuel as a reader of Anneliese’s life’s (unpublished) work, a whole roomful of large notebooks. Most of Elkins’ book is composed of Anneliese’s monologues explaining why she is hectoring Samuel to take on the task. Like Dreams, Anneliese purports to be a manuscript Samuel wrote long ago, rediscovered, and again appends notes to.
Under the pressure of family and work events in Dreams, Samuel becomes floridly obsessive compulsive. Anneliese has been so since she was a child. Samuel has little emotional and intellectual life. Anneliese has always been enraged by the stupidity of most people and the ignorance of scientists and famous writers. She talks so much and at such volume that the elevator operator at her university asks her to stop, just stop. That was before Anneliese was fired for breaking into a colleague’s home to correct errors in her work and before Anneliese spent most of every day and evening writing her grand unified theory of biology in her notebooks. Anneliese knows that she may be demented and therefore dementedly analyzes various forms of insanity that may plague her, but she still wants someone—actually anyone, even a weak slug like Samuel—to read the 20,000 or 30,000 pages of those notebooks and, perhaps, arrange their publication.
With its pervasive and dominating voice, Anneliese less resembles the work of Wallace and Danielewski than the angry, unfiltered, run-on first-person narrator of Lucy Ellmann’s thousand-page Ducks, Newburyport (to which Elkins refers) and, more familiarly and briefly, professor Kinbote/Botkin of Nabokov’s Pale Fire in which the visiting Russian professor imagines himself the escaped King of Zembla, believes he has found an ideal interlocutor in the American poet John Shade, and writes a long wacky commentary (with index) on Shade’s 999-line poem.
I mention these similar works with obsessive narrators to suggest there’s considerable comedy in Anneliese—satire of academic discourse, doctors and hospitals, Wikipedia, movie credits, popular culture, and writerly ambition along with burlesque of the elitist know-it-all who does everything to excess: over-sharing details about her body scabs, over-ordering in a diner, over-engaged with worms and ticks, over-reacting to real and imagined slights. Overweening Anneliese puts a new spin on Nietzsche’s “ubermensch”—over-doing even the most trivial activities.
For Elkins, employing such an overbearing protagonist and narrator is about as risky as walking a tightrope stretched between Manhattan and New Jersey. Every long novel has longueurs. Because of Anneliese’s repetition compulsions, Elkins’ daredevil book often lurches toward the Hudson but is repeatedly saved by his mimicry, beady wit, unparagraphed riffs, quite amazing anthropological learning (if authentic), and equally amazing inventions, which may seem like learning. Anneliese has fewer visual materials than Dreams, but some important ones emerge near the end and in Samuel’s notes. Anneliese also has less contact with the naked-eye world than Dreams, but Anneliese has much to say about the world seen through a microscope.
Elkins arranges his own possible pitfalls. Unlike realistic novels, Anneliese sacrifices character conflict because Samuel is barely present and Anneliese is not so much a character with an explanatory backstory as she is an overflowing font. Traditional fictional setting is reduced to various sites of hours-long conversations. For so long a book, the plot is simple: will Samuel read the notebooks and, if he does, what will he find? Some overwhelming philosophical/biological synthesis, some evidence of recovery from the author’s madness, or maybe materials that will influence his frightening dreams of burning forests?
What replaces these novelistic conventions is language. “Strange Languages,” as Elkins’ overarching title says: foreign sentences and made-up words, specialized discourses from the sciences and humanities, fulsome meta analyses of disparate styles, a wonderful parody of epic poetry, voluble takedowns of that great philosopher of language, Wittgenstein, and that great massager of language Proust. Eventually we find that Anneliese’s whole project of understanding the origins of life begins with language, the words ancient cultures had for the phenomenon. Like dormant bacteria, dead languages come back to life in Anneliese’s notebooks and connect them with all humans, living and dead.
Given Anneliese’s fascination with, suspicion of, and dependence on language, it’s odd that she calls William Gass’s The Tunnel, a lengthy novel about a self-absorbed and unstable professor, “bats,” odd because her “book” (her collected notebooks) resembles Gass’s high-wire linguistic performances in that novel. Furthermore, Anneliese thinks of herself as occupying a well that she, like Gass’s narrator in his basement, hopes to escape. “It seems a country-headed thing to say,” Gass wrote in a 1979 essay, “that literature is language, that stories and the people and the places in them are merely made of words.”
Given Elkins’ metalinguistic passions, metafiction can’t be far behind. At the physical and conceptual center of Anneliese is that hundred-page chapter on long books—scientific, historical, medical, philosophical, religious, and fictional—that Anneliese reads and criticizes. She comes to believe in “Long Novel Insanity.” Her chief examples are Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and exceedingly long works by Arno Schmidt and Marianne Fritz. Perhaps projecting her own vexed relation to her notebooks on these and other authors, Anneliese concludes that writers of such works disappear into them, become inhuman, insane.
Here is a short introduction to Anneliese’s conclusion in her inimitable, extravagant, hyperbolic style:
“Long complex books are slow-acting poisons, everything in them is coated with a thin lacquer of poison, every stone in those opalescent worlds has been licked by the author’s poisoned tongue. The writers of long books do not stand outside their books like carnival barkers, striding confidently on stage, basking in applause…because they are sunken into their books, they can no longer step back, they can’t climb out.”
In Anneliese’s statement, one can hear Elkins’ anxiety about his own decades-long and five-volume long experimental project (that was completed before one of the books was published). Anneliese claims to have discovered “uncultivable organisms,” “completely new forms of life that had never been cultured.” She wanted her notebooks to create something similar, a new understanding of life, an intellectual wonder. On the strength of these two published novels, Elkins seems on the way to creating a new version of or, at least, a radical bricolage of the long novel, an aesthetic wonder. His chapter on long books both explores some possible influences and distinguishes his differences from them. In a way, A Short Introduction to Anneliese would seem to be a long introduction to “Strange Languages,” but Elkins was probably wise to publish the more conventional and solicitous Dreams before the “uncultivable” Anneliese.
At what cost the cultivation of wonder? The many pages of “Notes” that end both Dreams and Anneliese imply that Elkins survived or maybe will survive “Long Novel Insanity.” Samuel returns to the two manuscripts but cares little about them or the past they contain. Now in his nineties, Samuel occupies himself, in Dreams, playing dissonant notes and scores on his piano. In Anneliese, he plays and comments on demanding, almost impossible pieces by Stockhausen, whose difficulties sometimes remind him of Anneliese and her notebooks. Samuel believes he wrote the manuscripts so he would remember life back then, but now he seems to agree with Anneliese (when she discusses Proust) that such recordings of memories are inauthentic, made-up, fabricated—no matter how maniacally a writer such as Anneliese tries to capture experience. So Dreams and Anneliese are Samuel’s fictions within Elkins’ fictions as the frames within frames within frames on both covers imply. Live long enough, Samuel—and perhaps Elkins—imply and the largest and longest memories, even “systems of outlandish intricacy” will seem insignificant. The music stops, only the notes remain.
Anneliese says she did not read long novels by Gaddis and Pynchon, writers to whom I compared Elkins in my review of Dreams. Elkins’ novels won’t attract the kind of youthful cult following that formed around novels by Wallace and Danielewski, but if the remaining three works in “Strange Languages” are equal in complexity and profundity and pleasure to Dreams and Anneliese, I predict Elkins’ work will receive—like the novels of Gaddis and Pynchon—intense and continual study by academic critics. Disappointed academic Anneliese hoped for something much more, but Elkins, a long-time professor, may be happy with attention in universities where, somewhat counterintuitively, literary Marines are often found. “Oorah,” as the leathernecks shout.
Weak in Comparison to Dreams
James Elkins is a 68-year-old much-published historian and theorist of visual arts, a professor who holds a chair at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Weak in Comparison to Dreams is his first work of fiction, and it is the most courageous and fascinating debut I have read since Mark Z. Danielewski’s multi-media House of Leaves in 2000. Other precursors --- obsessive and excessive first fictions --- include William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Thomas Pynchon’s V, and Don DeLillo’s Americana, all concerned with images as Elkins’ novel is. I hasten to add that the origin of “fascinating” is negative, all the way back to a definition as an “evil spell.” Elkins’ courage is casting a binding spell some readers might consider a curse: writing a 600-page novel about obsessive compulsion in the voice of an obsessive-compulsive character. His first name is Samuel. Whether or not Elkins wanted the name to remind us of that master of repetition --- Samuel Beckett --- he is another one of those courageous fascinators.
Elkins’ 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-40 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 500-page manuscript is discovered by Samuel in his basement 40 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 100 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 contacts with living creatures. “Notes” may make Weak in Comparison to Dreams look like a recovery narrative, but it’s actually a re-coverup 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’ 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’ photographs don’t create a sense of mystery as those of Sebald or Catherine Lacey in Biography of X. Instead, Elkins 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 90s, 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 twenty-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’ 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’ 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.
---end---