Modernist literature was working to uncover something. It had a purpose. It existed in the age of Freud, back when there was a strong faith in the power of dark truths revealed, and what wisdoms can be found hidden undetected in our streaming consciousness—but ideologies wane and ebb. They surge. They subside.
There was a time when manically playful experimental literature was a mainstay of the art, and the lone scribner penning a piece of madness, comedic or otherwise, was a type. From James Joyce to John Kennedy Toole, writers were treated as a kind of amusing malady of the age, to be found in the cafe’s of Paris or living with their mothers, and sometimes, these madmen and madwomen could actually write. But that idea, of geniuses peering over the heads of their small-minded peers, began losing its definition somewhere around midcentury, and slowly morphed into something more insidious. The MFA student.
Nietzsche was right to mistrust the institution. It has done little good for philosophy. Throughout the twentieth century, philosophy has become an increasingly academic pursuit. These days, our philosophers are either populists (like Sartre) or produced by and for the institution (Lyotard and really the whole postmodern school), and at best a bit of both (Foucault and Žižek). The dangerous exoticism of a lone philosopher pontificating in print seems almost as quaint today as the tradition of prophecy that came before.
And the institution is doing the same thing to literature.
People say that writers who learn at MFA programs and writers who sprout from the sidelines are equally numerous, but that is not the point. The point is that, just as the philosophy being produced today is entirely academic, the type of literature being produced is now wholly commercial. You will disagree, I am sure, and rightly so, but when I say something is ‘commercial’, what I mean is it’s written up to the audience, rather than written to some point beyond the audience. There is no more writing for posterity. The thinking class has lost hope in their grand project, and so the publishing industry has lost its purpose beyond the barest of business models.
Experimental literature itself only exists as a subgenre of the institution. We call it “experimental” because it fits that genre, but actual experimenting is no longer something we envision being done by covens of artists with manifestoes clutched in hand but by grad students who are more articulate at pontificating upon their ideas than in presenting coherent works. Which is why The Reeking Hegs is such an important book.
It doesn’t fit into any of these little holes.
*
“Little Knowing What, the Shaman, and the Jester ruminate, consume and excrete. Manic figures flicker in the Jester’s eyes; ideograms like flashing blades complete with aborted screams. He watches the great wall-of-lights-show that blazes and dazzles by order of the King. It is a desperate order. The loyal Ugzcykens line up, shuffling around and around the wall, regarding their own murky reflections with disdain and suspicion. What is it they see? wonders Little Knowing What. He perceives a subliminal echo of genetic entropy generated in the long lines that spiral away from the wall, lines that the King could not have imagined even if he had seen them—that fragile, bizarre double jigsaw helix. Life is a house of cards. A jigsaw. Next comes the mass creamation of the moose manikins, censorship of childrens’ TV. Pinky Porkies pop eyed purge. Pigswill fires lick up the puppets to counterpoint the dischords of drunken dentologists. The Jester wrings his bells while Little Knowing What scribbles frantically,” The Reeking Hegs, [Peru&Tupelo, 2020].
It is experimental without being in any way academic. It has no set thesis accompanying. It is pure absurdity, filled with an ongoing frenetic eruption of wordplay and characters that have more the weird warbliness of schizophrenic delusions than anything grounded or consistent as realism. The Reeking Hegs is instead a kind of stream of consciousness of the author—in this case authors—where whole chapters will be declared phantasms, and whole crowds of characters named after pronouns, the book itself treated as a terrain that a polar bear, say, can escape out of only to then insert its polar-bear-ness in some earlier portion of the story. Occasionally, the detective poet narrator flat-out declares himself the author of the book, and sometimes, the book veers from first person to a more third person account with a wanton brazenness.
Perhaps more than Joyce or Toole, the appropriate lineage for a book such as this would be Laurence Sterne or William Burroughs, but this is a Burroughs of the icy tundras, and the surrealism herein described sometimes slips into Maurice Sendak territory. (There is a whole section that involves traversing a landscape of soup.) In the end, Sterne comes out as the most likely progenitor of this ideology, Peru and Tupelo’s “glorious non-sequiteurs” not unlike Sterne’s “explanatory diversions” and both rely heavily on the reader’s involvement in the text. In both, the reader is an accomplice to the crime.
It’s a world where fossils are “inverted anthropological physicalities” where the narrator mentions “cunnilingering” in his fiance’s “belfry” and a newborn that is stolen by a swarm of mosquitoes is named “Guided Airpiece Secret Mosquito Attack Baby,” or… “Let us stop for a moment and consider the high drama of ant life,” as well as… “No human hand can write inside a vegetable.” Not to mention the chapter that ends with this mind-bender: “All at once that was the last we were to see of him and it was many years ago this week since then to the day. Yes, things were certainly different in those days.”
That having been said, it’s true that The Reeking Hegs can feel anachronistic, but it’s also true that we have reached a point where anachronisms can themsevles seem very forward-looking. As was recently argued, John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius Reilly, at the time seemed to be an anachronism, but in truth, he was a prediction of the Internet troll, neckbeards, and 4chan. Because, the anachronisms of yesteryear are only seen that way because we continue to believe in the endless upward crawl of progress, even when our vehicle is at this very moment barreling over the cliff.
There is no clear future anymore, and what sounds like the past is very much what’s coming, and these books that are too uncategorizable for the modern palate may very well be it.
*
“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A Train … Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me,” Naked Lunch, [Burroughs, 1959].
What I am speaking of here is a literature of delirium, a place that does not fit into any specific genre, is both an elusive fiction of no clear parameters and a kind of nonfiction document of the author’s fevered imaginings. It’s the sort of book that has no doors in and many doors leading out. Besides The Reeking Hegs, two other contemporary works come to mind that are equally unnerving and unknowable.
Giant Slugs is a kind of ghost story that takes place in a Nintendo afterlife. It follows the coming of the giant slugs and the exile of the Prince of Uruk. As with The Reeking Hegs, its extreme playfulness can be a bit of a put-off: “Ghastly gastropods of magnitude, periwinkles of power, extraordinary examples of the terrestrial genre Limax, as big as tall outdoors, they demanded an adjective appropriate to their style. They were larger than lunchboxes, bigger than pickpockets, more sizable than bulls—but surely we’d uncover new cures, a means to erase them, by echoing the old. We girdled our swords and bum-rushed the trespassing bulky bully mollusks.”
But there is a key at the end of this tunnel. I won’t tell you what it is, but the book puts you into a state, prepares you for the final moment—which some would argue is the purpose of life. What greater realism can there be than one that captures the equation of a person’s search for meaning? A book that presents us with an impenetrable wall of near nonsense only to clarify at the last moment into a koan that crystalizes this unnerving journey and by so doing reshapes our vision of it like a Magic Eye?
These books do not present the illusion of realism. They present only illusion, but the aftertaste is something like reality.
The Job of the Wasp, on the other hand, is a gothic tale that takes place in a school for wayward boys, where nothing is what it seems. It is also a ghost story, but in this story, the question isn’t who is the ghost? The question is, who isn’t?
“‘Why do you suppose a ghost haunts?’ she said, watching me struggle with my neck.
“I had an answer, but I could not manage it.
“‘They have lost their ability to connect to a world that no longer belongs to them,’ she said. ‘Memories fade to the point where they can’t remember why they’ve made a particular choice, or that a choice was made at all, at least not for very long. A ghost will circle whatever feels familiar, or whatever starts to feel familiar after a period of aimless wandering. They will circle and circle until the possibility of the afterlife presents itself again, or the light of the candle finally burns out, and they are fully lost. A spirit turning in the yard without anything behind the act that could even resemble a conscious mind. It’s a pitiable state, whatever gruesome affairs it may yield, but not something to be afraid of, Ashley. Not here. Not with me.’ She smiled kindly as my eyes began to water,” The Job of the Wasp, [Winnette, 2018].
The Job of the Wasp is a bit distinct from the other two in that it is less playful, and more seemingly real, albeit with the most unnervingly unreliable author you are likely to find in print. We are led blindly through almost the entire book, and in the last chapter, the blinders are removed and we can look back with a clarity at the landscape we have traversed.
For, if the narrator is unreliable enough, then even the most apparently straightforward of scenes becomes a kind of stream of consciousness, which is again, what makes this book so unnerving. All three of these books flatly refuse to allow the reader to suspend disbelief. Which is also a good part of what makes them so profound.
As unnerving as I found The Job of the Wasp to read, looking back on it, I find myself faced with a crime scene that I long to comprehend. As with Giant Slugs and The Reeking Hegs, the reading is only half the battle. Much of the joy in these books comes after the fact. We become like the ghosts who do not want to believe themselves dead, and the purpose of these books is to free us from our disbelief.
Of course, the analogies I make are not perfect. For example, this idea of a sudden uncovering is not as obviously apparent in The Reeking Hegs, although it does have its own moment of congealing. The Reeking Hegs is also the most literal and perhaps comprehensible, in that it’s always telling you what it’s doing, even if that involves a polar bear that’s leapt out of the book to go find an earlier scene to occupy.
And how does The Reeking Hegs occupy its afterlife? What sort of post-existential fantasy does it present?
Whether or not it was the authors’ intention, the book reads a bit like an absurdist view of the bardo, a kind of modern genre version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Bardo Thodol or "Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State", and specifically the Chönyi bardo, that state just after death when the spirit is, according to the Tibetans, beset by visions if it does not immediately enter the white light.
*
“Mouth at the worm’s ear, Father said:
“We have loved each other well, dear Willie, but now, for reasons we cannot understand, that bond has been broken. But our bond can never be broken. As long as I live, you will always be with me, child.
“Then let out a sob,” Lincoln in the Bardo, [Saunders, 2017].
All of this should remind the reader of George Saunders’ acclaimed work, and for good reason. Saunders is similarly dealing with an afterlife and the ghosts to be found there. The difference is that the sense of realism is too great, the sense of a thing that’s been crafted, to please and confound, of a work that has been consciously built—rather than a vision experienced—by the author. This is still a work of realism couched in the framing of the beyond. It does not have the wild abandon of the Bardo Thodol. The comparisons to The Spoon River Anthology are apt.
In contrast to this, the figurative afterlife presented by the other books mentioned is indeed our post-apocalypse reality. The prose can be jarring, but it also feels closer to what decaying minds might be like. A realism of unraveling imaginings. Not the most accessible, but interesting to ponder.
The Reeking Hegs, Giant Slugs, and The Job of the Wasp all appear allegorical in nature, although these allegories are amoral, apolitical, and perhaps nonsensical, but the point is that their realism is an allegorical realism. It is the meaning-making portions of the mind on trial. For, what is a ghost but a thing making meaning neurotically long after its purpose is gone? It does not breathe, but it speaks.
And this is what makes these books so much “diseased, inferior, excrementitious stuff,” to quote William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience. Their brand of allegorical thinking does not fit into the healthy realism we are all meant to ascribe to. It is a dangerous anachronism that could foretell some coming dark ages of returned magical thinking, because that’s exactly what these books do. Even now, staring into the void of a civilization at its end, we cling to the fallacy of an ongoing reasonableness—of a rational framing of ourselves—when the fires are already clicking at our toes.
You would think that this unknown rearing up to fill our horizon would also serve as a fuel for the imaginations of our creators, which—if we’re being honest here—it does. It’s just that I take issue with some of their conclusions and postulations. Saunders, an author who I have enjoyed quite a bit in the past, is really like a modern-day Mark Twain filtered through the lens of PKD, and his particular mixture of sentimentality and wry humor is befitting to the now, but not the tomorrow of now. He captures our anxieties, not the doom that’s causing them.
And there are many other remarkable works being made, works that belong to what I call the DFW period of literature, which I’m imagining spans from 1990 till something like 2040—a sort of post-post-modern period when all sorts of things are tried half-heartedly, and none of them stick. Why 2040? Because, I imagine, by that point civilization will have more than likely already collapsed under its own lack of imagination in the face of disaster.
Another type of avant-garde I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is Ducks, Newburyport, which also has a kind of retro experimental quality in that it is a single sentence threading through a thousand page tome like a list. The author, Lucy Ellimann is the daughter of Joyce scholar, Richard Ellmann, which fact seems an important addition to the list of facts that make up the 1,000 p. run-on sentence that is this book, with its “the fact that…” punctuating each new addition to her endless list.
Again, her work is a delight to read for the readers among us, and I do not mean to belittle her remarkable efforts. She has succeeded in capturing a mind on the page, which is something so wonderfully modernist. It’s like a miracle appearing in our scientific age. But is this the book of the future?
If you create a work that has the heft and feel of the avant garde, but is actually a mirage in that it does not show us what is to come, but rather exists as a marvelous growth with no future or past to it, a thing that does not connect two epochs, is not of its time or of what’s coming, what is that thing? When I think of the modern literary scene, I often think of the late Roman period. Nothing of note came out of those final centuries. It was all just a rehashing of old favorites, and when the dust cleared and the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance, no one cared about these elaborate fan fictions of the Roman Empire’s end times. I would argue that Post-modernism was the beginning of our modern equivalent.
*
Do we really believe that whatever post-apocalyptic peoples may still scrounge through the world of trash we have left them, that somehow Joyce’s Ulysses will be part of their culture? Joyce’s audience was the critics of the day and the undergrads of tomorrow, and both of those will be gone too.
Burroughs’ books are just as dense as Joyce, but they are more accidental densities than anything clearly crafted, and they are very authentic documents of his own seedy madness. A kind of anti-Joyce, he was also a lover of pulp and pulpiness and presented viewpoints that would never be fully accepted by any institution. He wasn’t just an alcoholic, he was a junkie. In the Moroccan community he made his home, pedophilia was a normal part of expat life, and in the politics of Naked Lunch (as with The Reeking Hegs) we have a utopia stripped of everything but the author’s maniacal idiosyncrasies.
Joyce trusted that he would be read by the critics if no one else. Burroughs wanted to create something unreadable. And in our factory-farmed literary age, this is the only authentic position.
At the very start, The Reeking Hegs clearly announces itself as Burroughs’ offspring—or at the very least, the same type and kind of surreal literary noir:
“It was a cold June. The dead month. Ugzcyk lay grey and smoking, silent and dull with a texture of frozen velveteen undergarments. My phone split the silence. Gina Lorrabitchinner, my secretary, called to me through the closed door to my inner sanctum. It was Dogsson on the line, the District Commissioner. I lodged an ice cube in my throat. Cool was the watchword where Dogsson was concerned,” The Reeking Hegs, [Peru& Tupelo, 2020].
Then the madness.
Because the madness is coming, my dears, and it’s Burroughs who is the prophet of this stink and unpleasantness not Joyce, but more than this, the chaos that’s coming will very possibly embrace our more chaotic elements. The punks and Dada, the descendants of Greil Marcus’ famous “secret history of the 20th century” may very well rise up from the rubble and consume our more studious literary efforts.
Which also happens to be what Peru and Tupelo were going for in their collaboration. (They would pass pages back and forth through drink-and-hash-filled writing sessions that could often end up being very long.) They had wanted to create the world’s first Arctic Gothic Novel but they also wanted it to be the literary equivalent of the Sex Pistols’ “great rock and roll swindle”, and were indeed fans of Kurt Schwitters, Dada, and Duchamp, even “appropriating” passages from Gogol and Dostoevsky as a kind of homage, which would in the process become mutilated into something new and fresh.
The past has us all by the scruff of the neck, but we have chosen different pasts, because we see different futures. John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius Reilly is a prediction of the incel and MAGA monstrosities unfolding daily in our comments sections, but that’s because those things were there, and we just didn’t want to see them. The madness is going to rise up and eat up our literatures in its flames, and it will be all vision literature all the time again, like it was in the Medieval days of before. Before Dante cleverly adopted this nonfiction genre and turned it into a ‘comedy’ or a work of artifice.
Allegory will kill the literary star.
*
Post-Modernism’s sugary offerings were in no way superior to Modernism. They could be enjoyable, but Modernist literature, at least, attempted to get at something true. Post-Modernist literature just thumbed its nose at everything.
And in the wake of all of this, various schools of writing have appeared, such as The New Sincerity, Metamodernism, and something I like to think of as Genre Realism. (Think Jeff Vandermeer.) These different schools are all trying to grapple with things as they stand, either through a kind of sincere/ironic synthesis (The New Sincerity) or self-referential authenticity (Metamodernism) or psychological realism packaged as potboiler (Genre Realism), but all of these genres exist in a society still propelling itself forward after the ground has fallen out. They are speaking to that society, and that society is doomed, as Vandermeer himself has commented in a recent interview. “I think one reason not to hope is the fact that so many scientists are now saying, ‘oh, put the idea of hope aside, we just need to do whatever we can to not have the worst possible outcome’… These systems that we live within are so complex and the feedback loops are horrifying right now in terms of how things interplay with one another. But there might be some that are less so. And those of us who have the privilege to still be able to sometimes talk about these things in a hideously theoretical way and not be living them to do whatever the hell we can… Trying to do things that mean that if we can get past this, there will be a lot of things left to treasure.”
Writing for the future has become writing for the now, whether that’s a kind of activism or a bestseller, but for those of us who continue to “write for posterity” what does that mean? Is it like Asimov’s Foundation, where we’re working to create a beacon of light through the coming darkness? Or does it mean we are writing for the dead?
Those of us who cannot stop writing feel an urge to write these fictions that are for no audience, that are a kind of talisman of the now, a mystical document that can only be understood if you envision it from society’s grave.
The Job of the Wasp is more a traditional work of supernatural horror, but it’s too aware of itself to become some Turn of the Shrew. Winnette himself has described his writing like entering a dream, and his most well-received book, Haint’s Stay, is a dream into the Western, which seems appropriate considering Winnette’s West Texan background. We here at Mutable put out his first novel, Revelation, which is something like if Raymond Carver were writing during the end times.
So, these other fictions by Winnette do have that sense of a realistic genre fiction. And on the surface, The Job of the Wasp, is similar. But what is unusual about the book is that the entire book feels like a puzzle. It is not built as a story, and you do not feel invested in the characters, because the characters are these forever elusive elements that do not have the deeper realism of his other works, but seem rather to be the opposite, to be impossible fictions that never fully come into focus.
And this element of character as impossible fiction that never fully comes into focus is true of Giant Slugs as well. Although, the difference is that Winnette’s work is the closest of the three to a kind of comprehensible realism, while Giant Slugs is the weirdest.
I have been accused in the past of using words in a way that completely ignores their meaning and makes my writing a dense wall that cannot be penetrated, and Giant Slugs is like this. We come across words or phrases that should be familiar, but they seem to describe a world that we do not know, and only through our reading do we start to understand it for what it is.
“I lay down and snuggled my way back underneath the afghan, munching on my chubby ape doll’s leafy bittersweet ears. I slept; I dreamt no more. But I never regained the bazaars or resumed the sand chase, and I never embarked on the one-year trip befitting my noble blood. For that night, while I dozed, great Uruk, my home, was invaded by giant slugs,” Giant Slugs, [James, 2011].
The author of Giant Slugs, AD Jameson, is a critic and champion of “geek culture” as he calls it, and this is sort of a high concept novel that is meant for that geek culture. But again, it reads like post-apocalyptic mythology. I think of tribes scouring the cities for usable bits after the current climate crisis has wiped technology off the face of the Earth and coming across strange plastic boxes and weird instruments of the pre-apocalypse, and these are the stories they would tell of them. How we journeyed into the beyond and what we saw there using our wizardry.
*
I’m actually a really big fan of some of Vandermeer’s earlier work, all of which take place in the city of Ambergris. It’s a city Vandermeer dreamed up that is controlled by an intelligent fungal people who manipulate the human population. I have also always been struck by a comment Vandermeer made, in which he said he started writing The Southern Reach Trilogy because of a dream in which he was descending into a subterranean tower, following along behind a monster that was writing eerie sermons on the wall in bioluminescent fungus. He used the monster’s words in his novel.
As you may have noticed, The Reeking Hegs, Giant Slugs, and The Job of the Wasp, all inhabit a kind of afterlife, and share some similarities with the vision literature that Dante’s Comedies derive from. They are not just writerly musings, but a dream we are going on through the writer’s mind.
“Where was the frost? I was thinking about the Big Bang origin of that infamous abomination, that strange cowboy heaven land, where everything is about done in and the Bludcrg stance has advanced, and it is longhorn country in the Hegs at last. Flying from Bog’s Dry Goods Store an all-enveloping cloak flapped into my path, out of which came a head and a hand leafing through a thick manuscript. The head said, in a broken rasp, ‘I’d like to read you a pa-rabble about a good ‘ole workin’ critter, a mule, name o’ Barnaby.’
“I felt like a cat wearing a stupid hat in a bucket. ‘Yes, read it—out loud—as only you can—read it. Read it,’” The Reeking Hegs, [Peru&Tupelo, 2020].
Because of course, The Reeking Hegs is also a ghost story. The Hegs themselves are like some kind of afterlife, and the author is spending the whole book trying to get there.
In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the phantasms we face in our post-life pre-death journey are endless mirages of ever-increasing unpleasantness. (The longer we refuse nirvana that is.) The Reeking Hegs is like a madcap Modernist version of this, but instead of monsters, what we are faced with is increasing mayhem and narratological impossibilities.
The Reeking Hegs is full bardo. It is in between now and then.
Personally, I feel that listening to The Reeking Hegs while perusing the MS is the best way to enjoy it, but all three of these books are readable and enjoyable. They just do not fit into our ever-narrowing understanding of what books should do.
The modern reader expects the author to spoonfeed the story, caressing it down the reader’s throat with the gentlest of phrases and the most crystalline of character developments. The modern reader says, “There are millions of books I could be reading. Prove to me why I should read you, or I’m going to put you down in the next five minutes.” The modern reader has no patience, and the publishing industry is fighting for its life even if that means all they ever make again are various type and kind of potboiler.
Our world is made of gimmicks, and all our gimmickry is coming apart, and these books are a testament to that. Even if no one reads them.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
