Ideas and materials (for publication)

Five Strange Languages

Ideas and Materials

James Elkins

Table of Contents

Preface - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -        3

Guiding ideas

Summaries  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -          5

Innovations - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -        6

Images of the whole - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -        7

Principal concepts - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -        15

Examples to avoid - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -         27

Sanity and insanity  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -          42

The title - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -        35

By book

Tables of contents of the books - - - - - - - - - - - - - -          49

Reason there are five books  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -          60

Book 1 Stories, Like Illnesses - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -          64

Book 2 A Short Introduction to Anneliese - - - - - - - -          77

Book 3 Weak in Comparison to Dreams - - - - - - - - -        101

Book 4 Ghosts Are  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -         105

Book 5 An Inventory of the Dead - - - - - - - - - - - - -        109

Places, dates, other books, work hours

Timeline - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - -         111

Maps and Streetviews - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -         118

Books that influenced this one - - - - - - - - - - - - - -         136

Word counts, work hours - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -         153

Essays

Four Sour and Stringent

Proposals for the Novel - - - - - - - - - - - - - -         157

An Introduction to A Fiction - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -         166

Preface

This publication collects theories and reference materials for Five Strange Languages. This is not like Joyce’s notebooks for Finnegans Wake or Georges Perec’s “specifications” for Life A User’s Manual, because those don’t contain explanations. These materials are also unlike Barthes’s Preparation of the Novel, because that is a coy and abstract meditation on a novel that only intermittently even seemed possible to its author. And they’re unlike Eliot’s notes for The Waste Land, whose scholarly voice is integral to the poem. A precedent in intent, but not content, might be Henry James’s introductions to his work (The Prefaces, 1907-09), which Fredric Jameson cites as the beginning of the modernist presentation of form (“Form-Problems in Henry James,” Inventions of a Present). These notes are close to Arno Schmidt’s “Calculations”: succinct position papers compressed into a single document.

        For me, reading becomes more interesting if there is an archive, as there is with Finnegans Wake and Life A User’s Manual. When there are notes to consult, reading can move back and forth between fiction and something that is half outside it.

        Almost all the material in this booklet was written to help me organize themes, narratives, times, and places, but also with the intent of having it available along with the books. This booklet is an integral part of Five Strange Languages. It developed over the same period of twenty years as the novel. Almost every day that I worked on Five Strange Languages I also adjusted, condensed, and clarified this document. It has been salutary to compress the novel’s guiding ideas into the shortest possible sentences (literary theory is traditionally elaborative), and I hope the result is an interesting and unusual accompaniment.

At the end I include the manifesto “Four Sour and Stringent Proposals for the Novel,” and “An Introduction To The Novel,” never intended to be published as the opening of Five Strange Languages, but always meant to be nearby. Many of the “examples to avoid” are revised from longer Goodreads reviews.

 James Elkins

2025

Guiding Ideas

Summaries

In one sentence

Samuel falls five times: three times figuratively (Books 1, 2, 3), once literally (Book 4), and once inevitably (Book 5).

In five sentences

Samuel Emmer’s memories, his career, and his family stop making sense. He calculates and executes a staged retreat from his own life. Five Strange Languages describes the final year before he disappears. Each book is in a different style and format to express a different end. Forty years later, the older Samuel provides notes, redescribing his earlier life as music.

Themes of the five books, in one sentence each

Book 1

A story about the failure of stories to explain a life.

Book 2

The fascination and insanity of complex books.

Book 3

How a life is torn apart by day and night.

Book 4

What it is like to live as a ghost.

Book 5

Where we are all going.

Innovations

I claim several things as innovations:

1. A life experienced as divided, without explanation or trauma. The notes in each book, written by the narrator in old age, present an experience of aging so extreme that the bonds of memory are broken, naturally, apart from the usual incremental losses of memory and without injury or dementia. This goes against the assumption that a life is a whole, or it can be mended.
2. Multi-volume novel comprised of disparate parts. The five books have different structures and styles, unlike multivolume novels by Balzac, Dickens, Proust, etc. There are parallels between this and the first point. Examples of multivolume novels where each book has a different style or format: Agustin Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy, Philipp Weiß’s Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen, Beckett’s trilogy, Tom LeClair’s Passing novels, perhaps Alban Nikolai Herbst’s five novels (published by Elfenbein) and Marianne Fritz’s Fortress.
3. Music as memoir. The older narrator’s writing about music is a new kind of biography and autobiography. For him music retells the characters and places in the book better than memory.
4. Music in fiction. Before this project only a few novels had sheet music, for example Beckett’s Watt and Zukofsky’s “A”–24. Book 4 contains an extended musical composition, Twelve Variations and a Theme. The music is seen by the reader. It does not need to be played or heard.
5. Diagrams as emblems of irrationality. The diagrams, graphs, and mathematical formulas are legible but not useful. Like the music, they are images, signs of the narrator’s crisis.
6. A novel with nonfiction explanatory material. These “Ideas and Materials” were written with the books, as a parallel text. I hope they invite readers to move between different kinds of writing.

Images of the whole

These are ways I have visualized the set of five novels. They illustrated the writing and also guided it. They were modified as I wrote.

As architecture

The sizes and shapes of the books as I imagine them, not including the notes added by the elderly Samuel. Red: disasters. Green: childhood.

As an underwater landscape

This is adapted from a cross section of the ocean off Antarctica, with salinity in the water as clouds.

Samuel walks along the ocean floor. Anneliese is an enormous block, an obstacle, which does not quite reach to the surface. The abyss in Book 4 is like rising darkness.

The salinity clouds are like Samuel’s drifting sense of himself.

Samuel’s thoughts

The black line = Samuel's sense of how close he is to his childhood. He doubts it in Book 1, and it falls steeply. There is almost no mention of it in Book 2 (dotted line).

The green line = our access to his thoughts. In Book 2 his thoughts are almost nonexistent until the end, then difficult to locate in Book 3, because dreams are at odds with his waking life, and again absent in Book 4, because he is affectless.

The red line = Samuel's distance from himself. Rising, high in Book 4.

The subjective passage of time

This is imagined time. Black = years Samuel does not fully remember. Lighter gray = more awareness.

Another way to think about subjective time is with shapes other than a line from the past into the future. Time can also be suspended—this is mentioned in Book 2, in relation to Stockhausen and Anneliese. Three models of suspended time:

Top left: the older Samuel (abbreviated S3) sees his life as an expanded field. Within it are his life as Samuel (S2), and within that, as a child (S2). Remembering means traveling toward, or falling into, those places.

Top right: the older Samuel also sees his life as the final contraction of the expanse of childhood. From his vantage in the shrinking middle, he looks toward the horizon in the direction of his earlier selves. Little Sam’s experience at the pond is the largest of all, the cosmic microwave background, distributed more or less everywhere.

Bottom left circles: the older Samuel also sees different moments in his adult life as islands in a rising sea of forgetfulness. On some of the islands there are traces of his life as a child (S1).

Ideally these three models would be made into a single image, although it’s not clear to me how that might look.

In this project time is not only suspended, it is compressed. The simultaneous events of Books 1, 2, and 3 are intended to produce a cumulative effect of compression. Samuel is crushed the way a fossil is flattened between rock layers. It is not easy to make this visual. The circles at bottom left and right are images of Samuel’s life at different times. The cone depicts the increasingly violent compression of those versions.

Emotional pressure

The emotional pressure Samuel feels goes up in Book 1. His feelings are largely excluded from Book 2 (the gray block), but in retrospect Anneliese precipitates his biggest crisis. Books 3-5 form a steep curve of rising and falling emotional intensity.

Chronologically, there are overlaps between Books 1, 2, and 3, so the increasing trauma of Samuel’s 12 days in Book 3 is shown superimposed on Book 2.

The relative sizes and positions of the books

Perec projected his last, unfinished novel as a set of two books, with references to three more, comprising five nested volumes.

The set of five and their relative sizes suggest a comparison.

Subjective and objective lengths of the books

On a shelf or in a box, it should appear that Books 1, 2, and 3 are the same length, because they are each around 600 pages (left graph below). However Book 2 has almost no images, so its word count is much higher and the reading time may be substantially longer (right graph below).

There are other ways of thinking about relative length. The graphic on the previous page shows the feeling I have of the sizes of the books and their positions (in time) relative to each other. The opening graphic (“As architecture”) shows the internal structures of the books as I imagine them.

Although Books 4 and 5 dwindle in length, no single book anchors or centers Five Strange Languages.

The larger book that surrounds Five Strange Languages

Anneliese’s notebooks, described in Book 2, are far larger than Five Strange Languages. This shows the growth in their page length, as it’s described in Book 2, measured against the development of Five Strange Languages over the past 20 years, gradually converging on about 2,000 pages.

Principal concepts

Novels conventionally present the self (meaning subjectivity, inner states, thoughts, self-awareness, affects) as a coherent, continuous thing, amenable to narration. Self and world are equally accessible and illuminate each other. This can produce a richness but also a confusion, because it involves unresolved mixtures of different senses of what can be put in words and how inner states are related to the world.

Five Strange Languages is an attempt to devise strong positions in relation to these problems. In particular I would like to avoid normative senses of the unified self or life, expected narratives about the course of life, explanatory accounts of trauma and its effects, and unrestricted access to consciousness and self-awareness.

The self

There are two narrators, Samuel in middle age and again in extreme old age. A third version of Samuel, as a child, is recalled by the middle-aged narrator.

S3 = the old Samuel, 90+, author of the notes and all of Book 5.

Calls himself Emmer.

S2 = Samuel in Guelph, author of Books 1-4.

Calls himself Samuel Emmer.

S1 = the young boy in Watkins Glen, remembered mainly in Book 1.

Calls himself Sam, aged between 3 and 12.

Novels often assume three foundational ideas of the self:

1. There is a sense of self. 
2. An individual life is continuous.
3. Every life has a story. 

These are ruined or absent from the novel:

1. There is a sense of self. This disappears for Samuel in Book 3. By Book 4 there is no longer a discoverable sense of self. In Book 2 Anneliese describes similar thoughts (see “declining the law of identity,” listed under potential titles).
2. An individual life is continuous. This is present in the beginning (Book 1, chapter 1), but it’s quickly undermined (Book 1, chapter 5) and decisively broken in the notes.
3. Every life has a story. S2 is aware of this cliché from the beginning, and it becomes a theme (Book 1, the title, and chapter 2).

Answers to the three common ideas:

1. There should be a sense of self. Strawson is against this (“The Sense of Self,” in Things that Bother Me). He acknowledges people’s experiences of multiple or fragmented selves (“The Unstoried Life,” pp. 193-95), which torture Anneliese in Book 2. Both Samuel and Anneliese experience aspects of their lives as incomplete or defective jigsaw puzzles (Book 1, chapter 11; Book 2, chapter 3). Anneliese’s divisions of herself (in her ladder theory) are the synchronic parallel to Samuel’s divisions of his life into S3, S2, and S1. (This sort of connection, between present divisions and divisions in time, is not made by Strawson.)

Daniel Dennett, in “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” proposes that multiple personalities like the one in The Three Faces of Eve are “confabulated” by a self in response to the world, and therefore not actually divided. Anneliese goes well beyond this in her awareness of the precarity of her speaking or thinking self.

2. Every life should be continuous. Strawson is also helpful here, although the novel represents experiences more extreme than the ones he describes. A life’s continuity is what Strawson calls “endurance,” and the similarity to narrative is what he calls “narrative life” (“A Fallacy of Our Age,” p. 55, 61, etc.). This novel goes farther than Strawson by describing a life that does not even have the most basic kind of unity—the sort he associates with Locke, who defined a person as “a creature who can ‘consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places’” (“The Unstoried Life,” pp. 187, 190). Strawson doesn’t touch this, and takes it to be a baseline definition. But S2 already doubts the view associated with Locke when he imagines talking to his younger self (Book 1, chapter 1), and in the world of the notes, S3 says in many ways that he does not imagine himself as “the same thinking thing.”

(Why doesn’t Strawson allow this more radical possibility? Why does he need a baseline, since he admits many other people’s experiences? He is arguing against Schechtman, eg. “The Narrative Self-Constitution View,” in The Constitution of Selves, ch. 5; cf. also Bernard Williams, “Life as Narrative.” In an essay in Feb. 2024, he lists Locke’s position as one of a number of “superplatitudes” that don’t mean we live lives as narratives: but he still doesn’t doubt Locke, even in regard to his own “profoundly anti-Narrative” position.)

The course of a life is not coherent for Samuel. The five books have an analogous disunity. The diversity between books is as strong as I could make it without  resorting to strategies like new characters or plotlines, or dispersing the single project into five.

3. Every life should have a story. For Strawson this is a specification, a special consequence, of “narrative life.” This is in “A Fallacy of Our Age,” p. 62 ff., where Strawson says that “if one is to count as genuinely narrative” (ie, if a person experiences their life as a narrative) then one must think of one’s life “as fitting the form of some recognized narrative strategy.” In “Against Narrativity” (Ratio 17 n. 4, December 2004) Strawson identifies this as the “psychological narrativity thesis,” that people “typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort.” This is Samuel’s fantasy in Book 1, chapter 2, and it doesn’t work, so Five Strange Languages abandons life stories very early on. (Strawson tends to not care about actual stories, and ends up thinking of a person who lives honestly in a discontinuous, intermittent present as experiencing “the unstoried life” which is “the only life that matters”; p. 196.)

These three ideas could also be articulated using Paul Ricoeur’s distinctions, as a criticism of “idem-identity” (because S. loses track of his sameness over time) as well as “ipse-identity” (since the older S. is no longer haunted by his inability to remember his middle age—unlike the middle-aged Samuel, who is haunted by his incapacity to think of his childhood as his own). (Ricoeur, Oneself as Another.)

A line modified fro Blanchot’s La folie du jour is the epigraph for Five Strange Languages, because (by some fascinating symmetry) its three images name the three periods of Samuel’s life.

Constructing the inaccessible self 

The representation of subjectivity is jeopardized or absent in different ways.

Samuel perceives his own life as partly lost. S2 loses his childhood self (S1) in Book 1, and the older Samuel S3 knows he has lost himself twice, with long gaps between each part of his life. This division, and the forgetting that produces it, is present in different ways in each of the books.

Samuel (S2) becomes increasingly unable represent himself in his own thoughts:

Book 1: He loses his experiences of his childhood.

Book 2: Until ch. 10 we have no access to his subjectivity. At the end he flees.

Book 3: The crisis. His nights are divided from his days.

Book 4: He is dissociated from himself, from his own apparent intentions.

Book 5: (This is written by S3.)

In Book 1, Samuel determines to cut his ties to his family, the people he loves, his friends, and himself. In doing this, he speaks from an increasing distance, alienating himself from the reader as he tries to separate himself from his own life.

In Book 2, much of Anneliese’s mind is inaccessible even though she talks continuously. This is modeled on characters like Dän Pagenstecher in Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream, who talks for 1,300 pages but has no “depth,” no inner life beyond his theories and his manipulation of his guests. Anneliese is also largely incomprehensible, because her imagination is so difficult to inhabit (as her notebooks finally show). Precedents for subjectivities that are described at length but remain difficult to comprehend include Bernhard, Markson, and Bachmann.

Also in Book 2, Samuel is nearly erased until the final chapter. No descriptions of his life are permitted by Anneliese, and neither his thoughts nor his reactions are described. In chapter 10 we hear his thoughts, but they are brief.

Book 4 is the most radical in this regard. S. acts on his desire to cut his remaining ties (as at the end of Book 1). This desire is clearly stated in the Introduction to Book 4, but in the text his actions are done without feeling, introspection, or further explanation.

The model here is the Robbe-Grillet of the 1950s, especially Jealousy, where the main character and narrator is nearly excluded from his own fiction. This remains an interesting ambition, because it is destructive, aimed against the central engine of narrative fiction, and it’s appropriate, because the Robbe-Grillet’s campaign against the conventional narrator parallels Samuel’s actions that are aimed against himself. In Jealousy there are three components:

(1) The literal excision of the voice and person of the narrator from the scenes of the fiction. This is, I think, just a superficial effect, because actually the detailed visual descriptions continually locate the narrator. It’s also just one of several possible ways of erasing the main character. I do not adopt it here.

(2) The removal of the narrator's feelings. In the reception of Robbe-Grillet, this is often understood as an effect of (1). But affect isn’t neutralized in Jealousy, it is carefully managed so its appearances are stronger than they might be if the narrative was conventional.

(3) The removal of the narrator's thoughts. This is more fundamental, and can be done separately from (1). In Book 4 there is a redaction of introspection: places where it might be expected are missing.

The inaccessible narrator in Book 4 is parallel to what Timothy Bewes sees as the generalization of free indirect speech. As Carson Welch puts it in a review of Free Indirect, Bewes thinks the contemporary novel has achieved “nothing short of an overcoming of perspective and point of view, the guarantors of form as much as of ideology and subjectivity… this has always been the promise of the novel—whether in the dialogic quality that Bakhtin praised in the works of Dostoyevsky or in the possibility of an ‘ultimate futility of man’ that the novel made visible to Lukács.” (“Thought Without Thinkers,” Radical Philosophy, April 2023.)

I am not convinced by most of Bewes’s examples aside from Coetzee—there aren’t that many novels that fit what he has in mind (eg. p. 92)—and I am not persuaded by his various definitions of what “thought” in a novel actually is, because his formulas tend to be unaccountably different from one another and ultimately Heideggerian (pp. 19, 83, 255-58). His mention of Banfield’s work makes her formulations seem stronger than his (p. 259).

But I very much like the idea of trying to generalize skepticism about the novel’s modes of representation, form, and subjectivity. This is a purpose of the sequence leading to Book 4, and ultimately Book 5.

In Genette’s terms

Five Strange Languages can also be thought of as an experiment in Genette’s concepts. The middle-aged Samuel, S2, narrates his life, so he’s what Genette would call intradiegetic and homodiegetic (he exists within the story, and he’s the main character in the story). The older Samuel, S3, is an unusual example of a heterodiegetic narrator (one who is not a character in the story), since he experiences his earlier self, S2, as someone else—creating a shift that may be something new in narrative forms. In Book 5 there are only remnants of S3’s extradiegetic position, as if it is evaporating.

In Richardson’s terms

In Unnatural Voices, Brian Richardson argues that Beckett’s trilogy “negates” the modernist practice of multiple narrators by performing two things simultaneously: a reluctant solipsism, where “seemingly disparate narrative voices” turn out to be inventions of a single isolated narrator; and “permeable narrators” vulnerable to “uncanny and inexplicable intrusions” of other voices (p. 95). In Five Strange Languages this is played out over time. S1, S2, and S3 remain disparate voices, and to S3 the others appear as inexplicable intrusions. The eventual division is more decisive than the many breaks between Molloy, Moran, Malone, Mahood, and the unnamed narrator, because the only bridge that remains is outside language.

Time

The graph on the next page plots fabula (chronology against syuzhet (order of telling).

The three principal periods of Samuel’s life, S1, S2, and S3, are separated from each other by “blackout years,” as in the graphic “The subjective passage of time.” above.

In the middle of the sequence of books, several volumes cover the same time period. This is shown in the graph by a red rectangle. The last three chapters of Book 1 take place after the opening of Book 2. Book 2 begins just before the opening of Book 3 and concludes after the end of Book 3. (That difference isn’t reflected on the graph, but is noted on the Timeline.)

The idea is to create a cumulative sense of S2’s crisis. Books 1, 2, and 3 have minimal references to one another, but for readers who know them all, connections will be evident, and it will become possible to see several simultaneous influences on S2’s mental state. This is new configuration of Gutzkow’s ideas of Nacheinander and Nebeneinander narration (Morse, “Karl Gutzkow and the Novel of Simultaneity”) because the simultaneous events are in different books, and combine in ways that will be different for each reader. To these I would add Miteinander, which Heidegger (and Nancy, Être singulier pluriel) use to describe engaged relationships (as opposed to Nebeneinander, where people are alienated): Books 1, 2, and 3 are literally Nacheinander, but chronologically Nebeneinander, and when read together Miteinander. 

Note S2 hardly remembers his childhood memories after Book 1.

Times of narration and writing

The three ages of Sam, S1, S2, S3, provide the book’s main temporal structure, but there are distinctions because Five Strange Languages also notes when Samuel writes the books, and when (in Book 1) he goes back over his manuscript to criticize it.

Tenses

* The body text in Books 1-4, recounting the year from fall 2019 to summer 2020, is in past tense, with deictic shifts and free indirect narration when Samuel or Anneliese speak in present tense. Present tense is used in the Notes in all books, and in the introduction to Book 4.

In Books 1-3, Samuel’s reflections are represented as immediate (“She said… but I had no idea what she meant”) To register the distance between the time of the events and the time of writing, S. also uses adverbial phrases with present participles (“I walked through the door, suddenly realizing how…”), past progressive (“I was thinking about that when…”), and present perfect (“I have realized that…”).

* * In Book 1, Part Two, present-tense voices (S2PR) appear that Samuel added during the writing of the manuscript.

* * * In book 1, marginal notes called jalousies record Samuel’s thoughts five months after he has finished writing the book.

More detail on these is under Book 1, “Time.”

In Book 2, Samuel mentions two things he thought about Anneliese’s notebooks, and then remarks, “That is a story I told myself at the time,” casting the entire book, in retrospect, into a completed past and implying a present tense S2PR.

Book 3 does not acknowledge the time of writing, and has only a few examples of the completed past: “I used to sit on the couch watching TV,” “I used to have all kinds of dreams.” “Would have” (modal conditional + auxiliary for perfect tense) is used for past hypotheticals (regarding Monika Woodapple for example) and dream hypotheticals (“if it weren’t for the fire this would have been a lovely spot”).

Book 4 opens with an extensive Introduction, dated in 2023 and written in present tense. Book 4 is in past tense, but with frequent deictic shifts into present using free indirect discourse, without marking thought (“I stopped on the little bridge. At the end of the map there is nothing, that’s always how it is”). Samuel uses completed action constructions like “I used to think” (past habitual aspect) or “I thought then.” He also uses conditional past perfect + unconditional present tense, eg. “Three years ago, I would have said... Now, without feeling, I can just watch.” The “now” is intended to feel indeterminate. Nominally it’s 2023, but Book 4 is the last thing Samuel writes for forty years, so the present tense expands into Samuel’s old age.

Suspensions of time

1. For S1, time does not move ("unnumbered years"). This is divine time, before creation, but it’s also non-novelistic time. Hamburger says that in poetry, only what is narrated exists: there is no time in the poem, and none outside (Kate Hamburger, "The Timelessness of Poetry," 1955). As in the "adventure-time" of Greek epics, time remains "empty" (Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and Chronotope," 1975 [?])
2. Book 5 is in past tense, but it is “tenseless” because the obituaries are composed and collected by a writer who is not located.
3. Time is also suspended in the older Samuel’s world, in the vignette about the pond at the end of Book 3, and differently, Samuel’s “blackouts.” Those, however, have plausible dates or date ranges.

These are forms of “empty” time understood as eternity, theorized by Anneliese in Book 2 as aion, as opposed to chronos. But even Book 5 has a possible, tenuous relation to chronology, but it is an open question how they are related. "Narrative theory is only marginally interested in forms of ‘story time’ which differ from the mimetic Newtonian concept. Forms of narrated time such as “circular,” “contradictory,” “antinomic,” “differential,” “conflated,” or “dual/multiple” which question the established taxonomy of narratological terms, have been largely neglected." (Michael Scheffel, Antonius Weixler, and Lukas Werner, "Time," in Living Handbook of Narratology, online; see Brian Richardson, "Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction," in Narrative Dynamics, 2002: 48–52)

Affect

Samuel tries repeatedly to avoid affect, to put distance between himself and people who love him, to lower the emotional temperature of his principal relationships. In Books 4 and 5 he succeeds, disastrously. Book 1 proposes that Samuel’s tendency is the result of his mother’s confession; Book 2 presents a challenge he runs from; Book 3 implies his flight is the result of his current life. These causes are not ranked or resolved. (In this sense Five Strange Languages is a trauma narrative without an explanation.) Samuel’s drive to minimize forms of love and contact is intended partly as an expression of the isolation of this project itself.

The affect of each Book:

Book 1

Stories, Like Illnesses

At first nostalgic, lost and full of love—then crowded, intense, passionate, disarranged

Book 2

A Short Introduction to Anneliese

Overwhelming and exhausting; alternating fascination and exasperation

Book 3

Weak in Comparison to Dreams

At first uncomfortable—then increasingly rushed and desperate, with an apocalypse in the dreams

Book 4

Ghosts Are

An unaccountable need to remove love, which is assiduously eliminated throughout

Book 5

An Inventory of the Dead

Perfect blankness, perfect inhumanity

Notes

(in all the Books)

Second-order affect: feelings are transferred to music.

Showing and telling

This is a central problematic in modernism, often confused beyond repair by word choices.

1. Wittgenstein developed an account of “showing” and “saying” in the Tractatus 4.022, 4.121. It has apparently been influential in the equation of showing with modernism.
2. Percy Lubbock, following Henry James, contrasted “showing” (intrusions of authorial presence, authors interpreting for readers) against “telling” (allowing readers to infer meanings) in The Craft of Fiction, 1921.
3. Fredric Jameson wrote about “showing” (the recounting of events) as opposed to “telling” (the description of inner states) in Antinomies of Reason, 2013.

Note in (a) and (c) “showing” is positive, and in (b) it is negative. Of these three, (b) has been taken up by E.M. Forster, David Lodge, and others. I am concerned with (c), Jameson’s version.

Book 1 makes use of free indirect narration mingled with description, exactly the thing Fredric Jameson thinks cannot save the modern and contemporary novel:

It is not by adding a few metaphors, or interrupting these self-indulgent streams of consciousness with fragments of an alleged objectivity, that this historical situation and dilemma, which is that of contemporary literature, can be productively addressed.

Ben Parker’s review (Los Angeles Review of Books, July 28, 2015) continues:

Probably without intending it, Jameson has written a forceful riposte to James Wood’s How Fiction Works, the figural hero of which is free indirect discourse and its special privileges into consciousness. For Jameson free indirect discourse is “a facile practice of narrative mind-reading.”

From Jameson’s point of view, modernist novels that “tell” rather than “show” are a disaster. He associates “telling” with “affect” and “intensity,” because it is about the body, the mind, and inner states. “Showing” involves “the outward manifestation of events, the depiction of external reality, and the unfolding of a narrative that prioritizes destiny and actions over inner states” (Antinomies of Reason, chapter 3). In his account, the realist novel is a confused attempt to do both, to have it all. In this sense (b) is a version of (c), and theories like Lodge’s and Forster’s, in which “showing” and “telling” should be mixed, are ill-advised or inadequately thought through.

It is helpful to dissect “telling” into three separate things:

(a) The ease of “narrative mind-reading.” Steve Mitchelmore similarly complains that Michael Silverblatt tends to have authors report “inner lives and experiences of people narrated in the third person” and that Updike represents “inner lives as accessible as mustard in a jar” (blog for November 20, 2013). In the modern English-language novel, “fiction inhabits the minds of its characters, telling us what they feel and think without any concern for boundaries and what crossing boundaries might destroy” (June 20, 2016).

(b) The tendency to write in an elaborate descriptive way, “adding a few metaphors.” Mitchelmore calls this “noodling with language” (April 7, 2018), eg. Barthelme, Bernstein, and Baker.

(c) The tendency to equate realism with description (Mitchelmore’s main target), especially by incorporating “fragments of an alleged objectivity.”

Five Strange Languages proposes five solutions to the problem, starting with the kind of impure narration Jameson dislikes, and moving to pure showing of different kinds.

Book 1

Stories, Like Illnesses

Telling, but as the narrator’s inner life is increasingly pressurized, the added columns have little or no inner narrative—they “show” documents, letters, texts

Book 2

A Short Introduction to Anneliese

Showing. The main narrator is occluded until the end. More pure than the examples often adduced for showing (Bernhard, Kafka, etc.)

Book 3

Weak in Comparison to Dreams

Telling, but divided against itself. Conscious/unconscious, waking/dreaming, preludes/fugues.

Book 4

Ghosts Are

Showing, but from the inside: the narrator is empty of reflection, so his narration does not reveal an inner state. Telling becomes showing.

Book 5

An Inventory of the Dead

Showing. Pure, except when S3 talks about his own headstone. There is no narration between obituaries (no sequence).

Notes 

(in all the Books)

Showing. The narrator has no interest in telling. Inner states of characters in the body text are drained of content and artificially applied to another system of meaning (music).

Other critical concepts

The novel-essay

The so-called “novel-essay,” as anticipated by György Lukács and studied for example by Stefano Ercolino, is a possibility or problem for the novel that first emerged in works like Musil’s Man Without Qualities, because of the narrator’s tendency to interrupt the narrative in order to present essays on different topics. The essayistic tendency can slow or even stall the plot. An early example is Bouvard and Pécuchet, and an extreme is Arno Schmidt’s Zettel’s Traum, where only threadbare and ineffectual gestures at plot remain.

A related tendency is what David Letzler calls “cruft”: intrusions of more-or-less opaque or unreadable material, often found text or technical subjects, as in Gravity’s Rainbow or JR. Michael Brodsky calls a similar phenomenon “thought-packets” (Stephen Graf, “An Oxymoronic Pair,” 2017). Jameson considers the “shameless” inclusion of “textbook” material as either the transformation of information into an aesthetic object, the transformation of aesthetic prose into information, or the synthesis of the two (“The USSR That Wasn’t,” in Inventions of a Present). In Five Strange Images it is the first of these, but unlike in Reznikoff or Goldsmith the transformation doesn’t work, and the purpose is to compel the reader to find a new way to read.

I consider “cruft” to be unresolved in the history of the novel: it is an ongoing possibility for plot to stall or atrophy, and its principal adversary is alien material, “cruft” or “essay.”

In Book 1 there are intrusions of material from mushroom guides, books on drilling, celestial mechanics, crystallography, and philosophy. Book 2 can be read as continuous interpolated “cruft,” in Anneliese’s thoughts and in the excerpts from her notebooks. Book 3 interrupts its story with scientific papers.

I can think of three answers to this unresolved imbalance:

1. Renounce essays and cruft. This is what almost all popular literary fiction does. (Genre fiction, murder mysteries, and military fiction permit themselves parenthetical descriptions of fantasy science, forensic expertise, and war technology, but those are ornaments that often serve to enhance interest in the plot rather than threats to the plot or the reader’s patience.)
2. Renounce plot. This happens in Zettel’s Traum and in some postmodern and conceptual writing in French and English. The drawback is that the tension is lost, and the novel becomes a disquisition, a demonstration, or a collage.
3. Stage the impasse. This is what Robbe-Grillet did, in deliberately different ways, especially in the four novels beginning with Les Gommes. In this project, I try to emulate and expand the idea of trying different strategies. Book 1 interrupts the narrative with increasingly intrusive parallel columns. In Book 2, chapter 7 is a book-length essay within the novel. Book 5 shows the final result: a non-narrative whole, overcome by the “essay”—but within each obituary there is a story.

Presenting books in the book

There is a history of fiction whose subject is books and manuscripts. The difficulty is conjuring long books without quoting them in their entirety. Borges’s “Library of Babel” and “The Book of Sand” are models of texts that do not include the books they describe. Canetti’s Die Blendung does not quote any of the books its author is said to know so well. Harry Mathews’s The Conversions evokes a massive text, but gives only snippets. Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler excerpts chapters from different fictional works. Nabokov’s Pale Fire incorporates John Shade’s poem.

The strategy of A Short Introduction to Anneliese is between Borges’s (write a brief text, evoking large texts from a distance) and Nabokov’s (include the entire text, but ensure it’s not longer than the rest of the novel). The idea is to include extensive, unedited excerpts, maximizing the sense of the length and complexity of the whole.

The influence of media

Five Strange Languages was made using Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Finale, Sibelius, Dorico, GraphViz, Mathematica, Desmos, WolframAlpha, InDesign, InCopy, Google docs, Word, Pages, Microsoft Equation Editor, Audition, and Final Cut Pro.

The five books were written in different media. Book 1 was drafted in Word but transferred to InDesign and written there. I think it may be one of very few extended works of fiction written using InDesign. (InDesign is intended to be used with InCopy for editing, but in this case all edits were made on hard copies, and writing was done in the app.) InDesign draws the writer’s or designer’s attention to the precise configurations of letters, words, and paragraphs on the page, promoting a kind of poetic composition in which words in one text frame are likely to resonate with nearby words in other frames, as they would in adjacent stanzas of poetry. In Book 1, several voices speak at once, and InDesign encourages controlling and adjusting their interaction at the level of page layout, so that each page is more self-contained than it would have been if it had been written in Word (or InCopy) and transferred to InDesign for publication.

Books 2 and 3 were written on Google docs. Books 4 and 5 were written in Word. These choices facilitated and influenced the different voices and styles of the books. Google docs is a simple interface, which draws attention away from formatting and toward long stretches of text, as in Book 2. Word is an old, complex app (I have used it since version 1 or 2 for Macintosh, 1985-1987), whose awkward features tend to interrupt writing, promoting a distracted form of attention appropriate to the narrative in Book 4.

Almost all the images are modified in Photoshop, some extensively, mainly to remove people, objects, and animals, but also to heal dust and flaws, control Moiré, resample, and adjust grayscale values. GraphViz and Mathematica were used for the diagrams in Book 3, and Final Cut Pro for screenshots of videos.

Sibelius, Dorico, and Finale are intricate apps that facilitate certain choices in music engraving—spacing of notes, positioning of accidentals, shapes and styles of expression marks, creation of nonstandard notation—and inhibit others. I tried, throughout the project, to maintain visible differences between engraving styles for different composers. (They do not necessarily correspond to styles used to print the original compositions.) I had professional help several times in creating unusual notations, and both apps suggested possibilities I would not have imagined. I consider this book a multimedia project because these apps create and limit meaning just like traditional media in visual and other arts.

Design of the novels

As in Philipp Weiß, Fernández Mallo, and others, each of the five books is differently designed.

The idea is to have a variety that is not obtrusive or distracting (as Danielewski and others can be), so the design choices harmonize with the narratives and tones of the books. The five form a coherent set of font families: Book 1 is in Baskerville and DIN Condensed, Book 2 is in Crimson Text and Enra Slab (Anneliese’s notebooks), and Book 3 is in Arno Pro.

The isolation of writing

Writing fiction, as everyone repeats, is an isolating experience. Writing fiction that is long and complex and does not meet market expectations of relevance is exponentially more isolating.

“Experimental” literary fiction is produced at a loss for publishers, who take on such titles when they can, or for the sake of their profile. Typically even the most dedicated “experimental” writers try to ignore these conditions, ornamenting their lives with social media and literary events, working hard on the few options for publicity. All this seems wrong to me.

It is necessary to acknowledge the writer’s isolation at the level of the novel itself, and not just on social media. I have spent 20 years of my life on this project. Its readers are the sum total of the people who wrote endorsements, and about a dozen others whom I know. Meanwhile every day I am exposed to the world of publishers, bloggers, reviewers, bookstore owners, publicists, and agents, who continue to broadcast their many connections. If I do not find a way to express, acknowledge, or embody that isolation in the book itself, I disconnect the fiction from a large part of the affect that necessarily suffused its making. No “experimental” literary fiction should be written without traces of its author’s isolation. This applies even to Finnegans Wake, whose author was at once the world’s most famous writer and also spectacularly and apparently permanently isolated by his work. Using social media and hoping for publicity and success are not just unrealistic, they occlude the writing’s full expressive potential by dividing the writer into dedicated author and quixotic self-publicist.

Ambition

The project is long and complex. “Ambition” in fiction sometimes means that. For me it means any writing that is aware of its most important precedents, no matter what they are. An ambitious novel, in this way of thinking, can have any length or form, but needs to show its author was preoccupied with certain novels of the past. An unambitious novel is one that wants mainly to tell a story—of people, love, violence, trauma, identities, ethnicities, society, politics. Those can be the most ambitious possible projects, measured by the author’s commitment, but they aren’t what I mean by ambitious. They use the novel’s form and history to do something else.

Experimental literary fiction

The qualifier “experimental” confuses this issue by conflating sometimes excessive or inadequately conceptualized or motivated formal experimentation with work that experiments with tradition. Any fiction that is ambitious in the sense I mean is necessarily an experiment in responding to precedent.

Politics, gender, identity, realism

Five Strange Languages has little to do with these. That is because the medium is not optimal: the most interesting novels are not ones that report on the world. The alternative to representing identity, ethnicity, gender, or politics is not formalism, unreflective production of privilege, surrealism, parody, or genre fiction: it is attending to writing and the history of the novel. Novels can include and explore politics and other real-world themes, but that is a use of the form, like using a car to drive to work, rather than an exploration of the form, which would be more like designing a new car.

There are many ways to put this. Eg. Maurice Blanchot: “the récit is not the narration of an event, but the event of a narration. In the récit, it is not a question of recounting, of describing, or of narrating something that happened, but of something happening by the act of narrating.” (Gaze of Orpheus, 1953, p. 109)

Gerald Murnane: “I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world.” As a writer, he says, “I need not be curious about what were called real people.” (“Landscape with Freckled Woman,” 1985)

Alain Robbe-Grillet: “In my first novels I still believed that reference existed.” (“Order and Disorder,” Critical Inquiry, 1977)

The opposite is Sally Rooney: “My novels are not fundamentally about language, they’re about people and their lives.” (London Review of Books, Sept. 26, 2024)

(More at the end, under point one in “Four Proposals.”)

Examples to avoid

To navigate among precedents it’s necessary to have guiding stars, but also authors and books to avoid and ways to steer around them.

Negotiating Sebald

For many readers Sebald appears to be the clearest influence on Books 1, 3, and 4. I have taught Sebald for twenty years, and thought about him for longer. I have his reply to a letter I wrote him the year he died, asking whether he would ever use color illustrations if his books became more successful. I organized a conference on his use of images in Ireland, and gave a keynote speech at another conference in Amsterdam. Sebald means two different things to this novel.

In terms of images: one of the principal arguments of the online project Writing with Images is that the history of novels with photographs is longer and more complex than Sebald. There are over 800 entries in Terry Pitts’s bibliography and many predate Sebald. Rodenbach was the first to plan a novel with photographs, and for a period Breton was the principal model. (See essays on the Writing with Images site.) So I think the automatic reference to Sebald is the product of a recent simplification of the history. The image practices in Five Strange Languages draw from a number of sources. The Writing with Images project details other practices I have tried to emulate.

Sebald anchored images to his narrative by placing his references (the equivalent of academic call-outs like “see Fig. 1”) one or two lines from the images, either before or after them. That practice ensures the eye travels with customary reading speed up to, through, and past the images. The majority of images in this project resist that by naming details in the images that invite the reader’s eye to leave the text and return to the image, to search and reconsider it. I am aiming at a discontinuous reading experience, in which the reader zigzags from text to image, interrupting the smooth flow Sebald usually designed. His use of images stresses integration of text and image, usually by privileging the text and reducing images to briefly seen Gestalten.

In terms of affect: I am uninterested in the becalmed and aesthetic melancholy of so much of Sebald’s work. (Discussed in the post on Rings of Saturn on Writing with Images.) Even deserted street scenes—used in this project and in Sebald, Breton, Rodenbach, and many others—can mean things other than unfocused anxiety, distance, Sehnsucht, isolation, decline, ruin, or historical pathos.

Negotiating Bernhard

Aside from Sebald, the most visible influence is probably Bernhard. Once again he can’t be avoided. Book 2 is the most like Bernhard. My intention there is to go directly at him, instead of around him. Three differences between Book 2 and Bernhard:

1. Anneliese’s monologue is longer than Bernhard’s. I hope this produces a different kind of exhaustion and irritation. Bernhard’s relatively short forms are a puzzle, given his characters’ irremediable conditions.
2. Anneliese’s monologues differ in their degree of organization. Some of Bernhard’s work may be organized into waves of repeated material (possibly inspired by Josef Matthias Hauer), but structure is mainly elusive. Anneliese’s monologues have an obsessive organization. She recognizes this as a pathology (as in her critiques of Linnaeus and Aquinas).
3. Book 2 supplies the detailed content of Anneliese’s work, unlike The Lime Works, The Loser, or Correction, which trade specific content (literature, music, architecture) for affect. (Cf. Goodreads notes on The Loser.)

It’s amazing how difficult it is to come to terms with Bernhard. Harder, I find, than Sebald, Joyce, Proust, Musil, Beckett. The species of influence is odd: it’s almost not literary—it’s more like coming to terms with ferocity or desperation.

Avoiding conventional narratives about memory

Lost memories are to be recovered: that’s universal in genre fiction as well as trauma memoirs and literary fiction. Lapses, repressions, and other miscarriages of remembrance can be repaired, healed, or enriched. Recovery may not be perfect, but that just makes a narrative more convincing, as in Annie Ernaux. Involuntary memory (Proust: mémoire involontaire; Stendhal in La Vie de Henry Brulard: images) is to be preferred to voluntary memory (Stendhal’s pourquois; see Michael Sheringham, “Visual Autobiography,” 1988).

(Counterexamples, where memory is not recovered, include documentary-style treatments of dementia like John Bayley’s Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch or the movie Still Alice, based on Lisa Genova’s novel.)

A better account of the attempt to recover memory is in M. John Harrison’s interview about Wish I Was Here (The Guardian, 2023): “I perceive memory, and especially the writing down of memory, to be a failed device. You make a note about something you want to remember and all you end up with is a fiction or a hyperbolic representation of what happened. And the moment you use it for any purpose, it goes through further transformations, and by the time you’re finished with it as a 77-year-old author, the memory you have when you look at the note isn’t really a memory at all. But you can’t really call it a fiction—it’s a hybrid thing.”

This is still too simple: you “end up with fiction” whenever you write, and he doesn’t take into account the way uncognized falsifications can accumulate around any memory that is repeatedly recalled. In Five Strange Languages, as soon as the narrator turns his attention to memories he overwrites them. Further attention, voluntary or not, continues the obliteration of what remains. Samuel recognizes his unintended overwriting of his memories in Book 1, chapter 11. In Book 3 his memories are sparse and frail.

Five Strange Languages includes several theories of memory: Samuel’s (in Book 1), Anneliese’s (Book 2, sometimes echoing Geoffrey Sonnabend), and others attributed to Andreas Albrecht (Book 1, chapter 11), Uekxüll (Book 2, chapter 4), and Proust (in several places). There are also stories of dementia and amnesia (fugue states in Book 3, longer stories at the ends of Books 1 and 3). I haven’t tried to see how these accounts fit together, but they converge on loss.

Avoiding the art history lecture

It can be tempting to explain images to readers in the mode of a professor or a tour guide. Teju Cole’s Blind Spot is an example of that kind of art historical voice. He tends to point to images like an artist, a critic, or an art historian. When he's not commenting on historical events, the narrator in Blind Spot often wants to tell us about his own photographs. On a number of pages we're told what to look at—effectively, we're told why the photos are good. There are several sequences of text/image pairings that work as self-contained lectures, in which the narrator tells us how to notice things in his images. These pages are unintentionally teacherly.

It doesn't make the prose natural or conversational to pretend the narrator didn't see the virtue of his own photograph, and then to tell us about it. As a writerly device, this doesn't work, because it brings us out of the narration and into a lecture hall, where Cole, just offstage, uses a laser pointer to show us the interest of his art. The mood, politics, and visual meanings are sidelined by the appearance of an unwanted cicerone who wants to lecture us about his cultural knowledge and artistic proficiency. (Sebald is native to his displaced culture, and is not obtrusive in that way: he never demonstrates knowledge, he just mulls over it.)

To avoid the professorial effect it helps to let readers attend to the images. Pointing shouldn’t be done with the intent of educating.

Avoiding popular science, music criticism, mathematics, etc.

It is common practice in literary fiction to represent mathematics and science by generalizations, adjusted and popularized expositions (Richard Powers), or intentionally illegible tokens and excerpts (Cormack McCarthy’s Stella Maris).

The microbiology in Book 1, the mathematics, philology, and biology in Book 2, and the behavioral studies in Book 3, are as detailed as they would be in those contexts. The music in the notes is given in full detail (although examples are chosen to be legible for people who don’t read music).

Music in novels is usually evoked poetically, as in Proust. A model of what I want to avoid is Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, where music is described in a faux-technical way, with reference to pitches and forms, but hazy evocations elsewhere. “The first part, inscribed moderato, is like a profoundly reflective, tensely intellectual conversation, like four instruments taking counsel among themselves, an exchange serious and quiet in its course, almost without dynamic variety.” Better to avoid the literary swill and show the scores themselves.

A review of Michèle Audin’s One Hundred Twenty-One Days by Corine Tachtiris in World Literature Today notes that "With powerful effect, Audin demonstrates that math can be both poetic and political." That’s not right because mathematics is actually not present in the book. A book as complex as Audin’s, with a full range of Oulipo-style research, constrained writing, appropriated styles, multiple chronologies, and densely allusive prose, should be able to present mathematics more fully. Instead we get hackneyed gestures in the direction of mathematical beauty: a character muses that pi is exquisitely beautiful; there's a chapter on numbers that includes a dozen mathematical constants without explanation; and there are hints of “genius” throughout.

But if readers are sometimes lost by the book's allusions and its collage of literary styles, why shouldn't they be temporarily detained by the presence of "illegible" equations? Why not complement the "technical" apparatus of the novel with actual mathematics (or chemistry, engineering, or any other technical discourse)? Why should an Oulipo project—or any other demanding, ambitious work of fiction—restrict itself to literary discourse?

Avoiding Oulipo

Oulipo is a temptation, with its self-imposed constraints and its unpredictable, contorted, congested narratives.

In Life A User’s Manual the metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle, proposed in the Preface, anticipates the largely successful completion of hundreds of narratives in the book. The narrative of actual jigsaw puzzles (Bartlebooth’s project) fails, but its execution in the book itself is perfect. The many clinamina (Jonathan Swift’s plural) in Life A User’s Manual complexify, but do not prevent, the construction of elaborate systems. Oulipo is about the management of constraint and clinamen—or rules and chance in Alison James’s reading—to produce successful systems. Five Strange Languages is about the failure of systems. In Book 2, Perec’s constraints in Life A User’s Manual are mentioned as a kind of fantasy of control, compatible with Pontalis’s characterization of Perec’s behavior in therapy, when he came armed with ready-made stories. The failed jigsaw puzzles in Books 1 and 2 are not Oulipean because they fail systemically, inevitably, catastrophically.

Systems and schemata in Five Strange Languages fail: Anneliese’s thirteen theories fail to explain her notebooks; the diagrams in Book 3 fail; the jigsaw puzzles in Books 1 and 2 are dysfunctional. These are failed systems as in Helene Sommer’s I was ⱦhere, not successful ones as in Christian Bök.

One point of coincidence with Oulipo is a few lines in Le Lionnais’s “Lipo,” the first manifesto of Oulipo, where he suggests, against much of Oulipo, that language itself, its words and its grammar, are primeval “constraints” (begging the question of what, exactly, they constrain). Le Lionnais’s formula in that passage is compatible with Anneliese’s theories of language in Book 2.

Another point of coincidence is an interest in strange narratives that are never adequately explained. Anneliese’s reading of Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa (that his sense of explanation is defective) is applicable to Oulipean writers like Harry Mathews, whose constraints are unknown, and to Oulipean projects where constraints are themselves unaccountable and in need of explanation.

Avoiding the compulsion to keep the reader’s attention: a novel need not provide good companionship

There is no reason to write with the reader always in mind. Some notion of a specific person, an indistinctly imagined reader projected indefinitely into the future (Joyce’s ideal reader in Finnegans Wake), or a member of a hypothetical group of perfect readers (as Schmidt imagined) is required for any writing, but it isn’t necessary to pander to that reader’s attention by plot (Jennifer Egan) or pyrotechnics (Nell Zink). This was part of David Foster Wallace’s concern both about his own writing and about Mark Leyner. Continuous verbal facility is typical of North American writing in the age of the MFA, from the 1990s to the present. Against this I think it can be interesting for the writing to ignore the reader.

After fifty pages or so reading Paul Auster’s Leviathan, I realized the author (not the narrator) is driven by an overpowering desire to keep my attention, to be the one whose stories I want to hear. That grasping for my supposedly faltering attention provides the book's drive, and it seems also to explain the author's urge to write, no matter what the subject is. His anxiety to please and entertain pushes so hard on his imagination that it even prevents him from pausing long enough to construct metaphors, analogies, figures of speech, or other tropes that could make the writing interesting in itself. (From the Goodreads notes on Levithan; this is elaborated in the third of the “Four Proposals for the Novel,” below.)

Why not try writing in such a way that the reader feels abandoned, perplexed by the absence of the author’s solicitude, tasked with reading long stretches of unrewarding exposition, suddenly left to find his own way? Why not let the implied author become an unappealing figure, unconcerned with the reader’s approval?

Avoiding ordinary stories

Recognizable kinds of stories identify texts as players in the field of international literature (see Tim Parks’s “The New Dull Global Novel,” New York Review of Books, Feb. 8, 2010) or as participants in popular genres (see Moritz Baßler’s Populärer Realismus, 2022). I have tried throughout to deviate from recognizable narratives.

Book 1 introduces the idea that Samuel’s life doesn’t coincide with conventional kinds of stories. He makes an inventory story types, concluding his is only interesting because it is none of them.

In Book 3 Samuel’s breakdown has no single cause and no cure: it is a story, but a difficult one to describe. This theme is elaborated in second of the “Four Proposals.”

Avoiding the white-guy-in-middle-age-crisis novel

Eg. Brad Leithauser, The Promise of Elsewhere. Louie Hake remembers an ideal childhood (a butterfly, which was a glimpse of “perfection”); he teaches art history at a “crappy” liberal arts college; his wife has left him; he’s losing his vision; he plans an epic trip to Greenland to recover his life. The reviewer, Erica Wagner (NYT, March 31, 2019): does the world need “another novel about a middle-aged academic suffering from an existential crisis”?

Strategy: this project is removed from academia (originally, the narrator was an academic); the crisis is unnamed; his strategies are unmotivated; there is no narrative of self-discovery; all trips fail; there is no epiphany, reconciliation, or resolution, and no moral.

Avoiding the deus ex machina of the mysterious discovered manuscript

Eg. Siri Hustvedt, Memories of the Future. An “autofiction” (lightly fictionalized memoir) of a woman who discovers a journal she’d written 40 years earlier, which contains notes for the novel she’d been hoping to write, along with drawings and doodles. The young writer describes NYC, reads Wittgenstein, and tries to write. For the older narrator, it’s like finding a “beloved relative I’d given up for death.” A trick with Minkowski space-time solves the narrator’s problems. (NYT, March 31, 2019, reviewed by Judith Shulevitz.)

When the old Samuel reads the manuscripts he’d written 40 years earlier, it’s the opposite of rediscovering a “beloved relative”: it’s the realization of his disunity. Also: no deus ex machina solutions!

The title

Titles of novels may fall into three groups: (1) usefully mnemonic or broadly descriptive (In Search of Lost Time, The Man Without Qualities, Dubliners, Mason & Dixon, War and Peace, Malina, Pride and Prejudice, Truth and Justice, Jealousy, The Tunnel, Whose Language You Do Not Understand), (2) capricious or trivial (2666, V, Prae, The Erasers, Ferdydurke, Finnegans Wake, or Ducks, Newburyport), and (3) allegories or metaphors of the book (Ulysses, Zettel’s Traum, Gravity’s Rainbow, Antagonía, Infinite Jest). Five Strange Languages is (3), and hopefully (1).

Titles normally appear as the author’s own voice. Even in books with omniscient narrators, titles are written by someone else: they go on the cover and title page along with a name that isn’t in the fiction. So the title is a chance to comment not only on the fiction but also on the implied author.

Each book here speaks a different language, with “language” understood in terms of lexicon (vocabularies), speech (voices), and grammar and syntax (narrative forms and page layout).

1. Vocabularies. Book 1: comets, mushrooms, crystals, bats, amoebas. Book 2: Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Tocharian, etc. Book 3: animal behavior, forest fires. Book 5: obituaries.
2. Voices. Book 1: Samuel is quiet and introspective. Book 2: Anneliese talks in continuous desperate monologues. In classical rhetoric, she would be an example of the grandiloquent or “Asiatic” style. Book 3: Samuel speaks in two voices, one unheard by his waking self. Book 4: zero affect. Book 5 and the notes in Books 1-4: the older Samuel speaks in the Ciceronian plain style.
3. Narrative forms. Book 1: parallel narratives. Book 2: continuous monologue. Book 3: Alternating chapters. Book 4: four journeys. Book 5: no narrative.
4. Page layout. Book 1: columns and marginal notes. Book 2: the only images are of book pages. (Books 3 and 4 are similar.)

The five languages are spoken only by Samuel or Anneliese, and only in the year described in the books, so they are like endangered languages, as Samuel says in the Preface to Book 4, and later when he imagines traveling to small villages in “shadowed mountain valleys where people speak strange languages.” In Book 1, he says his life is like writing that is turning “from English into languages I don’t read.” There are also languages he can’t hear: Linus’s language in Borneo (Berawan), the Jaina monk’s language (Prakrit), Adela’s Slovak, his own imagined language in medieval Great Moravia.

Actual languages are a theme in the book. A total of 70+ languages and 15+ scripts are used or mentioned in Book 2. (The hypothetical proto-languages in these charts are not used.)

As a model or metaphor, language is used in several ways:

1. Theories: Language is an invasive, awkward, arbitrary, “insane” restriction on what can be expressed; a fossil of irrecoverable prehistoric experiences; meaningless patterns (Book 2, chapters 1 and 6); it’s the reason people can never get to know one another (Mauthner, Book 2, chapter 6)
2. The language of Anneliese’s late notebooks (in Nulland, Book 2, chapter 10): an anagogic and mythopoetic way of writing; “a language of mosquitoes and sticks”
3. The language of music: an exact portraiture, which gives up meaning. Music is like a language family, and within it there is Wyschnegradsky’s language (like Samuel and Adela’s miscommunications); Stockhausen’s language (“the intensity came through, but not the sense”); unusual notations “like glyphs in an untranslated language,” eg. Guero; Johnston’s Grindlemusic, which only he could speak; Valen, “a language you do not understand”
4. The language, or script, of confined animals’ paths: the hyena’s figure eights; the diagrams of Melinda the fennec (Book 3)
5. Other writing systems: the manuals for Samuel’s large microscope (Book 1); machine language (Book 4); the starry sky, which Martha experiences as an “inhuman language” (Book 1); crystallography (Book 1, chapter 11)
6. Languageless languages: “I was like a child, with no language to help me think” (Book 3); Martha also says mushrooms are “outside language” (Books 1 and 4)

The title has some drawbacks. It sounds academic, like Borges or Akira Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages, and it’s reminiscent of Roman Jakobson’s six functions of languages (in “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics”; the Russian originals are “К ПОЗДНЕЙ ЛИРИКЕ МАЯКОВСКОГО,” translated as “About Mayakovsky’s Later Lyrical Poems” and “ДОСТОЕВСКИЙ В ОТГОЛОСКАХ МАЯКОВСКОГО,” translated as “Dostoyevsky Echoed In Mayakovsky’s Work,” 1956) and of Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (along with its echoes such as Colum McCann’s Thirteen Ways of Looking and Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei [1987, expanded edition 2016].) Another drawback: “strange” is overused and has a specific history—остранение, ostranenie (Shklovsky, 1917). The biggest fault is that the title suggests the five books are separate.

Sanity and insanity

Books 1-4 each tend toward social and cognitive dysfunction. Book 1 ends with a story about dementia. Book 2 is an extended study of forms of insanity. The epigraphs to Books 1, 2, and 3 announce difficulties or skepticism about reason. Functioning reason is overwhelmed in Book 3. There are periods when Samuel is unaware of his life, or fails to recall it afterward—i.e., fugue states. The novel as a whole is engaged imaginatively and sympathetically with non-normative thinking.

I am informed by several sources:

1. Wouter Kusters, A Philosophy of Madness—an encyclopedia of structural similarities between sane and insane reasoning, full of doubts about canonical philosophers
2. Jonathan Eburne, Outsider Theory—a disappointingly a mild sociological study, but on its way to anodyne conclusions, it entertains questions about the social reception of abnormal reason
3. Gregory Bateson, Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830-32—Anneliese’s writing after 2014 is compatible with Bateson’s idea that psychosis is a dangerous journey, “like some vast and painful initiatory ceremony conducted by the self,” although I agree with James Conant, in “The Search for Logically Alien Thought,” that there is no “deep nonsense,” only thought that’s “simply nonsense”
4. In general Five Strange Languages subscribes to the idea of the “experiential self” in dementia. The dementia stories in Book 1 (chapter 14) and Book 2 (Paul and Anneliese’s uncle) are told in sympathy with the “experiential self” or “now self”: the person with dementia, as opposed to their “critical self” or “then-self.” The “Margo case,” introduced by Andrew Firlik (1991) is the one elaborated in later discussions. The approach here is against Ronald Dworkin’s Life’s Dominion (1993), which argues that the “critical self” is the one with history, self-awareness, and coherence, and therefore the genuine self. (Cf. also New York Times Sunday magazine, May 14, 2023.)

Among several satellite meanings: Blanchot’s “disaster”; Empson’s more ungraspable ambiguities; Stephen Booth’s “precious nonsense” (especially for its creepy formalism, as if divergence could be domesticated by clarity).

Table of sanity and insanity

Divided into five categories. Colors indicate levels of disturbance.

This is a listing implied by the material, and it differs from Anneliese's diagnoses of "unreason" and "insanity" in Book 2.

Mathesis: symbols used to organize themes

As in Finnegans Wake, Leibniz, etc.

By Book

Tables of contents of the books

[Insert from the spreadsheets]

Reason there are five books

The five were originally one. They split—initially into four books—partly because a single long novel of 58 chapters, as it was in 2014, would not have been able to find a publisher. The principal reason for the split was to resolve an emerging problem: the writing developed in several distinct directions, each with a different kind of narration, a distinct voice, and a particular subject matter.

The different directions were: placid images of S’s childhood, bizarre and unpleasant laboratory classes, rants and monologues, journeys, and alternating dreams and zoos. As they developed they stopped talking to one another, so it seemed best to encourage that divergence.

Differences between the notes in the five books

The form of the footnotes in the earlier one-volume book was also adapted to the style and voice of each individual volume. Books 1 and 2 have footnote numbers in the main text, so readers can either turn to each note to see how it responds to the main narrative, or read straight through the notes when they encounter them at the end of the book. The notes in Book 3 have titles and no call-outs, so readers will read the whole book in order and encounter the notes as essays.

The idea was to suggest different orders of reading for each book. Book 1, with notes after each chapter, presents the most divided order of reading: the alternation echoes the alternation of dreams and waking life in Book 3. Book 2 becomes two monographs on Anneliese (text + notes), or a single monograph with academic endnotes. Book 3 does not suggest readers should turn back and forth between the body text and the essay-notes. In Book 4, the composition, Twelve Variations and a Theme, is presented as the older narrator’s definitive response to the events of the year described in the main text.

(In the earlier one-volume version, the notes developed their own stories of characters and composers throughout the book. When the book was divided the stories had to be distributed so that Books 1, 3, and 4 tell parts of the story of each of the character or composer in such way that the story is comprehensible even if a reader does not know the other books. The notes in Book 2 are a self-contained essay on Stockhausen’s piano music, to match the way Anneliese is confined to Book 2.)

Each of these dispositions of notes creates certain obligations and opportunities for the reader, and I hope these correspond with the five kinds of writing distributed across the first four books. In Book 1, for example, the reader’s surprise, or irritation, at being expected to interrupt pacific images of the narrator’s childhood in order to read about music, is paralleled later in the Book by the multiple columns that increasingly divide Samuel’s consciousness.

History of the project

As in Anneliese's account of her notebooks in Book 2, it's impossible to remember the early stages in the conceptualization of this project.

2006: then or earlier, the project was a memoir of Ithaca, with pictures I took when I was young, using a Zeiss Ikon Maximar with double-extension bellows (some are in Book 3 as pictures of gnat and fly paths). There was a second nonfiction project about deep history, with photos of archaeological sites. Several portfolios of photos, printed 8x10, survive. The idea was to write starting only with images.

2007: two fragments remain from a nonfiction project. Chapter 3, "Why the Visual World is Meaningless" (fragment on a nature film of a coral reef), and chapter 4, "Our Paths Through the World" (a report on Holzapfel/Woodapple and the scientific literature). These are now in Books 1 and 3. They remained unchanged in 2010. This is probably the year the project shifted to fiction.

2011-2014: the project was a single book, fiction, title unrecorded. It was essentially Book 3, with alternating dreams of fires, in 32 chapters. It started with photos of the pond and microscope parts, and included zoos and labs (now moved to Book 1). There was a character named Joachim (changed to Anneliese and sequestered in Book 2). This version also included visits to Bratislava and Borneo (moved to Book 4). The entire book was in third person. “Ideas and Materials” existed in different forms from c. 2011.

2014: one book in 58 chapters, ending with the animal photos now in Book 3.

2015: divided into three books.

2019: still three volumes, A Manual of Wandering, Joachim's Mind, Toward the Fall

2020: divided into four books, then into five.

2022: Book 3 completed, June 22.

2024: Book 2 completed, December 16.

Book 1

Stories, Like Illnesses

Summary

Samuel has an unrewarding job monitoring drinking water in Guelph, Ontario. His wife and daughter have drifted away: Fina’s at college, and Adela has gone back to her mother’s house in Slovakia. The people who remain are odd: Rosie, the Water Department’s administrator, is preoccupied with healing her brother using crystals; a new intern called Viperine is obsessed with parasites and animal perversions; and a colleague, Catherine, seems mainly interested in needling Samuel. He envies the creatures he studies in drinking water: amoebas have perfect bodies, he thinks, and they don’t know how to worry about their lives.  

Samuel is entranced by the few memories he has of his early childhood: an empty sky, a pond. It was a kind of paradise, which he barely remembers. His father died when he was six, and after that his mother became a recluse, spending her time on two scientific interests: calculating the orbits of comets, and identifying mushrooms. One day she tells him about her first husband and their baby girl, both killed in a car accident when the girl was one year old. Samuel’s mother says that she has only ever loved her daughter and her first husband.

This is a novel about the failure of stories: how stories might not heal us, but actually make us ill. Samuel reads books and watches movies to find life stories he can relate to, but his life only becomes more complex and confusing. He decides to make things simpler by ending his relationships with his remaining family and friends.

The book is illustrated, and as the chapters go on, the formatting gets more crowded, reflecting Samuel’s increasing anxiety.

Each chapter ends with a brief section of notes. The writer of the notes introduces himself as the author of the book. He wrote it forty years ago, he tells us, and he’s mainly forgotten the events it describes. He experiences the places and people from his own past as music, and he retells the book’s stories as music. There is sheet music in the book, which some readers may want to play.

Stories

“Stories” in the title means any fiction or nonfiction that is intended to provide a model, warning, or parallel for life—so biographies, memoirs, therapeutic and philosophic narratives, and fictional narratives in which readers might find themselves. In this book narratives are generally useless or harmful.

Watching movies, reading books, and listening to family and friends makes Samuel feel worse, because he fails to see himself in them:

1. He’s lost the path of his life, like Dante
2. His life isn’t any of the plots in movies (romantic, real-life, scifi)
3. He wanders and falls like amoebas or Euglenas (aimless, mindless)
4. His childhood was out of time, and therefore endless (“The Four Seasons”)
5. His life is an error (story about god and the angels)
6. There are powers he cannot understand (Three Fates)
7. He sees his life as a philosophic problem (the Swiss doctor)
8. Life is somehow the path, so there is no way to get lost on it (Jaina monk)
9. He’s just a privileged middle-aged white person with time to waste (Catherine)
10. He is sailing near a coast, but not landing, like Captain Cook and New Zealand
11. His life’s path is a series of maps
12. His life’s path is an enormous unreadable equation

In this book stories also literally make Samuel sick. Martha’s mushrooms make S. queasy. The interns’ presentations are nauseating. Rosie’s healing crystals send Samuel to his mineralogy texts. Martha’s revelation shocks S. and sends him to a book on fear.

The principal stories that function as illnesses:

• Stories about people wandering in forests have an especially bad effect because the stories themselves wander. They return in Book 3. Wandering itself is the subject of Book 4.
• Stories that end in falls are introduced in chapters 5 and 17, developed in Book 2 (inter pontem et fontem), and brought to a climax at the end of Book 4.
• Stories about pointless or unnoticed deaths are implicit in Book 1 (chapter 5), developed in Book 2, and elaborated as the main subject of Book 5.
• Stories about people who lose their memories are especially close to Samuel’s experience (chapters 6, 17). These are developed in Books 2, 3, and 4.

There is a link between the questioning of stories and the questioning of madness in Book 2. Derrida points out that the first printing of Blanchot’s essay La folie du jour was titled Un récit?, which is asked at the end of the text. When stories are in question, so is sanity, and vice versa. In The Madness of the Day, the narrator is “incapable of responding to the demand for narrative,” which is Anneliese’s anxiety (Derrida, “Living On: Border Lines”).

From the perspective of Book 1, When Blanchot’s narrator says, “I had to acknowledge that I was not capable of forming a story… I had lost the sense of the story; that happens in a good many illnesses,” he means a useful, meaningful, coherent story. In this book, the best attempt at a healing story involves losing all memories, effectively losing a sense of self(chapter 17).

Structure

As the book goes on it compresses and fragments. None of the other Books do this. The increasing pressure, suffocating interruptions, and internal divisions are S's actual story.

Part One: Remains

Dreamy, lyrical, and nostalgic, but uneasy. Samuel is concerned about shepherding his few memories. He was a solitary child who wrote himself out of his own memories. The older Samuel has forgotten most of his life and thinks only about music.

Part Two: Ruins

Chapter 6 is the first indication that Samuel feels pressure from several different sources at once. The chapters about labs (chapters 6, 7, 11) are weird and unpleasant. The chapters about Samuel’s mother are complicated and traumatic (9, 10). First Samuel decides to abandon his childhood memories (chapter 11) and his girlfriend (12). Then he realizes the other woman he’s interested in is possibly psychotic (13).  

Part Three: Compression

This is intended to be a more difficult read. After that comes a surprising chapter with material from other books in Five Strange Languages, showing how complex his life actually is (14). The final chapter is a quiet conversation in which Samuel decides to live his life without other people.

Part Four: Farewells

Samuel decides to abandon his childhood memories. The book becomes quiet. Catherine tells him her last story.

Narrative arcs

Part One: Puzzles

Samuel tries to retain his memories (chapters 1, 5),

and wonders why his life isn’t like other people’s (2, 4)

Part Two: Family

He takes inventory of his family (3, 4),

his brother (6, on Tee),

his mother (9, 10),

his girlfriend Rosie (3, 6, 12)

his acquaintances Catherine (2, 15) and Anneliese (14),

and other people at work (7, 11).

Part Three: Farewells

Samuel decides to let his childhood memories go (8, 15).

He decides to end his relationship with Adela (15),

and not to contact his brothers again (10),

He sees Rosie isn’t the person he had imagined (12),

and Viperine is not sane (13, 14).

Concludes he needs to remove people from his life (15).

References to Books 2 and 3

In chapter 14, Samuel thinks about events that are happening in other parts of his life. These are described in Books 2 and 3. For a reader who does not know those books, chapter 14 opens windows into different experiences, intensifying the sense of S's fragmentation. Readers who go on to Books 2 and 3 will understand how three crises are impinging on Samuel simultaneously.

Functions of the formatted material

The multiple columns, marginal notes, and other formatted elements express two things.

First: they show the division of Samuel’s attention: his life is no longer a single narrative but a number of competing, co-existing voices. The increasingly crowded pages express his crisis, which he feels as compression or suffocation. Text boxes that contain daydreams or excerpts from books are attempts to escape, heal, or calm himself.

Second: the book also includes elements Samuel adds to the manuscript five months after he first wrote it. Those columns and notes look back on his experiences and cast doubt on his own earlier feelings. Formatted pages therefore contain contested versions of the past alongside more direct reporting.

The formatted pages in Book 1 therefore express these two kinds of crisis: the division of Samuel’s attention in any given moment, and the change in his sense of himself over time.

The idea is to design the formatting so it draws minimal attention to the composition of the page as an image. Negative models here include Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Familiar, because his formatting is intrusive and aestheticized. To that end I have limited the number of kinds of formatted elements (paragraph and character styles in InDesign), standardized them, employed only a single font and only two sets of margins, to focus the reader’s interest on the thematic purposes of the formatting and away from any pictorial or aesthetic meaning.

Layout

The specially formatted text elements in Parts Two and Three.

Models for the formatting

Most modern formatted fiction adopts loose or simple strategies. Some books avoid assigning specific meaning to formatting (Butor, Between, Mobile; B.S. Johnson’s Unfortunates). Others use formatting intermittently and idiosyncratically (Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Rohner-Radegast’s Semplicità), to indicate a character or setting (Danielewski, The Familiar), or to mimic a certain kind of text like a encyclopedia or a monograph (Helene Sommer’s excellent I was ⱦhere).

Still others take the layout itself as an expressive element (Farrell and Tomasula’s VAS, Alisdair Gray’s 1982 Janine, or Grant Maierhofer’s “PX1383100-2686 User’s Manual,” where unusual layouts express fanaticism, anxiety, and hysteria), mimic manuscripts (J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S; Anne Carson’s Nox), mimic the forms of everyday communication from screenshots to redacted documents to plays (Matthew McIntosh’s theMystery.doc), work as concrete poetry (Steven Hall’s Raw Shark Texts, Brooke-Rose’s Thru), or a mixture of all of those (Danielewski’s House of Leaves)

Stories, Like Illnesses is an attempt to have formatting express the character’s crisis without using formatted pages as diagrams, images, palimpsests, or maps (as in Danielewski). Here are some principal historical models:

Anna Somfai’s “Medieval Manuscript Layouts” (2024) suggests several interesting possibilities:

1. Multiple columns of commentaries, especially Vatican Library Urb. lat. 206, a 13th c. edition of Aristotle, with notes above and below and in multiple columns at the sides (left). This is emulated in multiple columns using ➊ ➋ ➌

2. Commentary in the same column as the main text, ½ as large (right). This is emulated with interruptions ➏. When these glosses surround the text, they are called glossae ordinariae. That is emulated using suffocating text ➒.

3. Signes-de-renvoi: symbols in the text, repeated in the margins to tie commentary to the text. Signes-de-renvoi are like reference marks (eg, †, §). This is emulated in inner and outer notes ➑ and footnotes ➓.

4. Lemmatic glosses: underlining in the text, repeated in the margins. Somfai says signes-de-renvoi are also used to lead readers between text blocks when the page layouts become dense. Could use in Chapter 14.

Polyglot Bibles

These are an interesting model for parallel texts. A polyglot Psalter (Giustiniani, Genoa, 1516) has columns with titles and ornamental capitals at the head of each. On the right and bottom are scholia. 

The Hebrew (left) and Chaldaean Peshitta (right page, center) are glossed in Latin, and the original Vulgate is also given (third column), suggesting that some columns could run alternate texts (competing or parallel), and other columns could interpret those or provide “literal” translations into other languages.

Hebrew, Greek, Samaritan, and Arabic are translated into Latin in paired columns in the Walton Biblia sacra polyglotta (1657).

Arabic is translated into Latin across the page break on the lower halves of the pages in this polyglot Bible (Le Jay, 1629-45). Double-page spreads could make use of this format, with commentary on the right.

The Polyglotten Bibel zum praktischen Handgebrauch (1875) has four languages (Tanakh, Septuagint, Vulgate, Lutherbibel). The Latin (right) has inner marginal cross-references. Just below each column are textual variants for each language. Along the bottom, continuously across both pages, arranged by verse, are comments on variant readings (in German).

The possibility here is to have variant stories that are read back and forth across a single spread. At first, the multiple columns (using ➊ ➋ ➌) do not do this, since the columns are continuous across pages. In later chapters the page spreads are arranged as in polyglot Bibles. Variant readings or interpretations appear in footnotes (➓), as an additional signal to readers that a single spread is a reading unit.

The Douay-Rheims Bible (1582/1635)

This has extensive marginal notes.

A typical spread shows the Biblical text on the left, with verse numbers in the inner margin and left-justified commentary on the outside margin. On the right are annotations (endnotes to the chapter), in a smaller font.

On the inside margin are abbreviated references, all italicized. (The commentary is intended to help Catholics argue against Protestants.)

These formats are emulated with inner and outer notes ➐ ➑. Alongeails is from Tom Conley’s study of Montaigne (On Visualization, edited by Erna Fiorentini, 2024): it’s a word that Montaigne uses just once, to name the marginal notes he added for future editions.

The explanation of the Signes-de-renvoi: a crosse †, an unnamed sign ′′ , four prickes ∷ , and a starre * , to link the body text to the left and right margins and the annotations (endnotes) that follow.

These and other signes-de-renvoi are used in the inner marginal notes ➑ and footnotes ➓.

Derrida’s Glas

Glas is conservative in layout: pages have two columns, and each is interrupted by sans-serif inserts. Some less normative properties:

1. Judas windows and jalousies. ➍ This image shows the three kinds of interruptions in the columns: what’s called in English a “pull quote” (upper left), a “block quote” (lower left), and a divided column or gloss (right). Derrida calls all three of these judases or jalousies.

Miller, 2016: “A Judas window is an aperture enabling a prison guard to see into a cell without being seen by the prisoner, a peephole.” A jalousie is literally a louvered window, as in Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy—i.e., it stands for the police, for spies, traitors, voyeurs. Derrida also says the judases are like carvings in the columns—they deface the columns but also ornament them (Glassary, p. 32). In that sense they are Eingriffstexte, “intervention texts” (thanks to Martin Strickler for that word). At one point in Glas the judases are imagined as traitors to themselves: they no longer wish to work as comments on the text, but to “decapitate” themselves and return to the columns (p. 36), and in another passage they want to escape so they are no longer “imprisoned in the colossus” of the main text (p. 40).

2. Discontinuity. “Paragraphs break off in mid-sentence to make way for undigested [quoted] material… only to resume several pages later” (Jane Marie Todd, 1986). This is in service of Glas’s themes but can be used to indicate breaks in awareness (again, a device used by Robbe-Grillet in Jealousy and The Voyeur).

Emulated in the interruptions, ➏.

3. The white space between the columns is wider than the conventional separation of newspaper columns. It is read by Emily Apter as “an inscription… or trace that permits the subject to jump the line between life and death.” Chôra is not “emptiness” or “absence,” but something else (“En-Chôra,” 2005). Book 1 is the opposite: crowding of adjacent or simultaneous voices and texts.

4. White space in the text. White space invades the columns, but text does not surpass the margins. In at least one place a column splits, but the second text block is invisible: the column is inhabited by a void (image at left). This is an interesting possibility, which can be used for text the reader can anticipate. Again Book 1 is the opposite: columns expand toward the margins, pressing on the bleed and trim.

5. Typography only, no typescript or manuscript. “The master text of Glas itself has disappeared; there is no record of the manuscript in the Derrida archives at Irvine or the Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (IMEC)” (“Resounding ‘Glas,’” Introduction, 2016). This limits the possibility of explaining Glas as aesthetic choices.

Arno Schmidt’s Zettel’s Traum

The formatted texts in Book 1 are mainly in response to Schmidt’s “typoscripts.” In Zettel’s Traum, marginal notes are nominally thought, recalled, or, exceptionally, said at the same time as the reported conversations in the book’s main columns. Many of the narrator’s thoughts are skeptical, personal, or obscene in relation to what he says in the main columns, and in that sense the marginal notes are often a conventional inner voice.

The main columns are nominally on the left, right, and center depending on their subject matter, but the positioning is frequently random and has variants.

Time runs normally in these main columns and the marginal notes are more or less pegged to moments in the narrative. Schmidt is faithful to the present tense, but the typoscripts wreck the idea that the present is coherent. It can be difficult to know just when a marginal comment is spoken or thought. When there are several marginal notes together, the narrator does not acknowledge that his attention is divided.

My interest in Book 1 is to make these ambiguities of time and consciousness radical in a different way. Stories, Like Illnesses is about a mind that is divided, but the division is reflective—Samuel is aware of it as a problem.

In Stories, Like Illnesses added columns and text boxes can continue for pages, well outside the occasions that may have brought them to Samuel’s mind. The present moment, splintered but anchored in Schmidt’s book, becomes elusive. In Stories, Like Illnesses larger units, including whole chapters, represent “moments” in Samuel’s mind. This, together with more complex formatting, produce what Brian Richardson calls “unnatural construction,” where the reader needs to determine “exactly how to process the book.” (“Unnatural Narrative Theory,” Style, 2016. p. 391.)

Writing. There is almost no acknowledgment in Zettel’s Traum that the conversations and thoughts were written down. In Stories, Like Illnesses the writing takes place at several different times, that some elements on a page comment retrospectively on others.

Some of the longer added texts in columns (➋, ➌) are Samuel’s thoughts at the time of the experiences narrated in the body text. These columns, along with the interruptions (➏) divide the present. On other pages, the columns (➋, ➌) have material Samuel added at the time he wrote the text—references he has looked up, commentary he has added to his thoughts in the moment.

The jalousies (➍) comment directly on the body text, and were added by Samuel after he finished writing the main text. This is also true of the suffocating text in the penultimate chapter (➒) which was added sometime after the body text was written.

By acknowledging different times of writing, I hope to make a more unsettled representation experience than in Zettel’s Traum.

Chinese commentaries

Ming and Qing commentaries took the form of double-line characters (half the width of the primary text characters). Additional comments were made in colors, to assist students studying for the civil service exams. Important passages were marked by circles (sometimes of different colors) next to individual characters. (Yinzong Wei, Scholars and Their Marginalia, 2022)

Double-line characters in the same column as large characters mirrors small print interruptions in the main columns, ➏.

It might be possible to emulate colors and markers with signes-de-renvoi.

Arno Braun’s designs for the Bollingen Series

E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion uses one of Braun’s signature devices: the book has two sets of margins, one for the body text and images, and another only for images. The second set of margins are 0.5 cm. on all four sides of the page. Images can align with the body text margins or the narrower margins.

This is the inspiration for the two margins, the second one added in Part III.

(When the images are sufficiently small they can be fit into the margins around the body text. On this page the image is just slightly higher than the usual lower edge of the body text, so there is no wraparound. The caption is vertically centered on the left.)

Time in Book 1

The year described in Five Strange Languages is narrated in past tense. Usually in fiction the narrator tells us when they’re writing, and when the events took place. Five Strange Languages is written at specific times after the events. This requires a special terminology.

S2PA = The time of the events that are recounted (the “narrative present”). This is Genette’s temps de l’histoire, German Erzählzeit. Mieke Bal sees this as a range of narrated time. Passages that reflect S's thoughts at the time show the pressure he was under, and his distractions, but they are not self-reflective: S. doesn’t say “I just couldn’t pay attention, so I started thinking about drills.”

S2PR = The time Samuel composes the book. This is Genette’s temps de la narration, German erzählte Zeit. It’s the period of writing, but it has also been conceived as time of recitation, what Bal calls narration time. Passages that are added during writing are the first signs of S's dividing consciousness, because they are things he thought to add later, to complete the picture.

S2ED = The time Samuel looks back over his book, five months later. These passages are distinguished by consistent present tense—S. writes as he thinks and reads—and also by tone: he considers his book, and his experiences, to be misguided. Toward the end, he treats his own book as an unfamiliar artifact (the outer and inner notes) and finally loses his sense of what actually happened (the footnotes). The subscript is ED for “editor.”

This opens the possibility for the book to contain different levels of awareness and commentary about the events. S2ED, Samuel as “editor,” is unhappy with the way he recorded his experiences, and how he understood them at the time. S2PR is more concerned with elaborating his experiences of events by adding passages from books that he would have read at the time, or been thinking about.

Music in Book 1

S3 describes how music expresses his past. This description is repeated, with variations, in all the books, because readers need to be reintroduced to the theme if they don’t know the other books. The sequence of Samuel’s awareness goes like this:

1. When he plays music he feels as he did with certain people, although he is not aware of the connection.
2. When he reads about people he had known, composers come to mind.
3. He realizes music has taken the place of people in his life.
4. Music has allowed him to have those feelings without thinking of the people themselves.
5. He never understood people well, and so he turned to music.
6. In this he was like his mother and her science.
7. He decides music is more eloquent than people, more engrossing, more detailed, less vexing.

Book 1 and dreams

There are no dreams in Book 1, but in anticipation of Book 3, memories are presented as dreamlike.

Chapter 1 opens with a hypnopompic experience. Once Samuel is more fully awake the images are gone and his thoughts race (chapter 2). At the beginning of chapter 2, chapter 1 is described as a dream.

In chapters 2 through 4 his daydreams aren’t dreamy: they’re extended allegories that he believes might reveal where his life went wrong. (What Arno Schmidt called EMGs, extended mind games.)

Chapter 5 is a hypnagogic experience (a daydream, edging into sleep).

Similes for Adela

1. a heavenly object

1. a comet on a hyperbolic orbit (will never return)
2. an object temporarily in a halo orbit (diagram, chapter 12)
3. a Voyager-style spacecraft requiring simple communications

2. fine focus knob on a microscope
3. the light inside a microscope
4. a pilot light in a stove
5. chess moves in retreat
6. a rowboat that is untethered
7. a bird with a broken wing
8. an equation (chapter 15)

   ---

Book 2

A Short Introduction to Anneliese

Summary

This is the story of Anneliese Glur, an unemployed Swiss biologist who has been working in nearly perfect solitude (no social media, no colleagues, no readers), for twenty years.

When she meets Samuel Emmer, she tells him about her niece, her cat, her toothpaste, her illnesses, and everything else that comes into her head, especially her theories. Samuel tries to sympathize, but she shows no curiosity about his life. Her monologue is wild, endless, funny, repellent, and weird, but it is not random, and as it goes on Samuel realizes she is systematically introducing him to her work. She is no longer sure if she is sane, and she needs Samuel to read her notebooks to see if they make sense. She speaks more intensely and hypnotically each time they meet, drawing him further into her imagination. As soon as she’s finished writing, she says, he will have to quit his job and devote a year to reading her work, which is over a million words written in a hundred notebooks.

Her brother sends the notebooks to Samuel. He is overwhelmed: she may have written a kind of masterpiece. He leaves his office, intending never to return.

This is a novel about very long, complex writing projects, and what it means to spend years writing without readers. It’s for anyone who has battled through War and Peace, Proust, or any novel over a thousand pages long. Anneliese has read long books in hopes of finding guides to her own work, and she decides every book over a certain length is insane, including hers—and by implication, this one as well.

A Short Introduction to Anneliese has notes, which comprise a separate narrative at the end of the book. They are written by Samuel in extreme old age. He has found his memoir about Anneliese—the one we’re reading, which he had written as a middle-aged man—and he’s reading it again for the first time in forty years. He scarcely remembers Anneliese. Instead her way of talking sounds to him like music. Her startling ideas have evaporated, leaving only melodies.

This book in relation to the other four

Book 2 contrasts with Books 1 and 3. A Short Introduction to Anneliese is mainly an uninterrupted monologue. There are few images, no childhood memories, love stories, or labs (Book 1), no zoos or dreams (Book 3), no journeys (Book 4).

Readers who come to A Short Introduction to Anneliese without knowing the other books will learn almost nothing about Samuel. Anneliese doesn’t pay attention when he mentions his family and his childhood. Catherine is present in this book as an adversary of Anneliese’s.

Readers who come to this book after reading Book 3 will understand another reason for Samuel’s crisis.

This is the only book with information about Anneliese. There are a dozen brief, unexplained references to her in Books 1, 3, and 4. Her obituary is in Book 5.

A sequence of disappointments

The first five chapters (especially 4 and 5) are comedy, and the second five tragedy. The novel provides a series of disappointments for the reader:

1. Chapters 1-5: At first the book continuously disappoints readers who may hope for dialogue, or at least for Anneliese to stop talking.
2. Chapters 1-7: Anneliese instructs Samuel in her theories (especially chapter 6) and in the long books she’s read (chapter 7). The presumption is that this information will illuminate her notebooks. Chapter 10 ruins that expectation by suggesting that her theories and readings are hardly referred to in the notebooks. Everything readers have labored to take in is useless.
3. The Notes: These then disappoint readers who hope to learn more about Samuel, because the elderly narrator does not remember or offer insights into his earlier self.
4. The Notes also disappoint readers who hope for a conclusive report on the notebooks, because the elderly Samuel doesn’t care, and because he is still under Anneliese’s spell, as his Stockhausen obsession shows.

All these are intended to enable the reader to continue to wonder what kind of book, what sort of accomplishment, Anneliese’s notebooks actually are.

Themes

A Short Introduction to Anneliese has two concerns:

1. The fascination of long, challenging, complex books

After chapter 7, this turns out to be the principal subject. Long books are present in three ways:

1. Anneliese describes a number of actual books (chapter 7)
2. She describes her notebooks, which are then extensively quoted (chapters 8, 10)
3. A Short Introduction is itself is excessively long and complex

2. Ideas of sanity and reason

“Insanity” is Anneliese’s word for what happens when a person works, thinks, and writes alone for a long period. It means several things in particular:

1. Inability to engage with people and institutions. She has been fired and is the object of a lawsuit, and her behavior has caused her to lose friends and collaborators. (In this she is like Samuel in Book 1, but Samuel has no chance to mention that.)
2. Lack of control over arguments. For Anneliese unorganized thinking is a sign of insanity. She finds this kind of insanity in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Linnaeus’s System of Nature. Her own thinking, as she says, is wildly digressive, but she also repeatedly insists that everything she says is planned. This is evident or incipient in chapters 1 through 5.
3. Adherence to an inaccessible or incomprehensible way of reasoning. This is “madness” in Wouter Kusters’s or Hide Ishiguro’s senses, which Anneliese embodies and also finds in Roussel, Murnane, etc. Some of the later excerpts from her notebooks are like this, and so are instances of her reasoning in chapter 6 and 7.
4. Apparent meaninglessness or obdurate illegibility. Some of what Anneliese says is nonsense as in Wittgenstein (On Certainty) and Jean-Jacques Lecercle. Some of the earlier excerpts of the notebooks are like this.
5. Overly precisely organized thinking. When Anneliese discusses Wittgenstein, Linnaeus, Aquinas, and Burton, and when she talks about problems with her own classification of thirteen kinds of unreason, she counts obsessive organization (like these notes!) as a symptom of insanity. (In this she resembles Samuel’s mother in Book 1: Samuel mentions this but is ignored.)
6. False beliefs (delusions). Anneliese worries that her ideas as delusional, comparing them to Reich, Velikovsky, etc. There are a few moments when her reasoning sounds delusional (on cars, turtles, roses).

This way of listing what comprises “insanity” does not correspond to Anneliese’s own understanding. She classifies 13 disorders of her reason in chapter 6, and 7 kinds of insanity in chapter 7. Several times she criticizes the DSM and psychoanalysis for naiveté or simplicity. The classifications she offers in chapter 6 and 7 are intended to be swept away by the different (unclassifiable) writing sampled in chapter 10.

I didn’t think of these themes when I planned the book. Genetically, the book began with monologues, which progressively ruined the conversations they were supposed to be part of. Anneliese’s fear of insanity and nonsense grew along with her interest in long books, which in turn came from the increasing length of Five Strange Languages. The whole thing grew organically (or cancerously). The preceding paragraphs are attempts to understand this after the fact.

Readership

It’s usually assumed a novel is for anyone, provided they are interested in the story. I might not be interested in a novel on the working conditions of miners in the north of France in the 1860’s (Zola, Germinal) or the lives of people in a council estate in London (Zadie Smith, NW), but those books are accessible to me if I am. The assumption is fiction doesn’t have levels like science or engineering, and that it doesn’t refer to previous fiction in such a way that precedents need to be read first.

I think this assumption has never been true. This book is unusually specific in its prerequisites, because it is about long books, so it’s for people who have attempted to read long books of fiction, history, or philosophy, and ideally it’s for people who have tried to write books longer than, say, 1,000 pages. Chapter 7 is legible without knowledge of any of the specific books that are mentioned, but the entire novel will be most meaningful for people who have a personal interest in reading or writing long and complex books. In this, A Short Introduction is similar to Finnegans Wake, Bottom’s Dream, Montano’s Malady, or other books that are about actual books.

This theme is specific to A Short Introduction. The other books usually don’t refer to actual titles or authors, and don’t directly raise the question of long books.

Precedents

Every rant in literature from Rabelais to Notes from Underground to Thomas Bernhard.

Every over-elaborate and run-on sentence and anacoluthon in literature, from Dickens to Proust, John Barth, Jonathan Coe, Lucy Ellmann, and Mathias Énard. (But not the stream of consciousness pages in Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce. Anneliese’s sentences are composed and carefully if misguidedly punctuated by Samuel—they’re facsimiles of speech and writing, not records of consciousness.)

The opening five chapters should be legible as a metastatic version of Bernhard (or: Bernhard on steroids), especially Cutting Timber and the Prince’s monologue in Gargoyles.

The chapters on Anneliese’s notebooks are like all the books (not the narrative) in Kien’s collection in Auto-da-fé, or all the books (not the story) mentioned in Bouvard and Pécuchet, or all the footnotes (not the poem) of Eliot’s Waste Land, or all the citations (not the main text) of Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream, or all the books (but not the theme) of Vila-Matas’s Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady.

Voice, focalization

Five Strange Languages is first-person autodiegetic (Genette’s term), internally focalized on Samuel. In Book 2, the focalization is suddenly external (there is limited access to his thoughts; see Mieke Bal’s account).

For this project there are limits of the Genette/Bal/Jahn accounts:

In Book 4, focalization is internal but there are no inner thoughts to describe, so it is effectively an external focalization presented as internal.

In Book 5, there is intermittent internal focalization (eg. in the Introduction) but the narrative is mainly descriptive. This is not “zero focalization” (Bal) or “omniscient focalization” but reporting without a narrator—perhaps “distributed focalization.”

A diagram showing who gets to speak. Row heights are roughly proportionate to page counts.

Chapter 7, “Anneliese’s Summer Reading,” and chapter 10, “In Slow Steps, Toward” are meant to be subjectively equal in length.

Avoiding metafiction and the anti-novel

I distinguish self-reference or self-awareness from metafiction.

1. This book is self-referential because it is about long books and is an example of one. In that sense it is like Vila-Matas, Fernández, Murnane, or Borges. In the opening chapters A Short Introduction is not about long and complex books, but rather an example of one. Later when it becomes clear that Anneliese’s notebooks are the book’s real subject, A Short Introduction becomes a parallel case. When Anneliese describes her project of reading long, complex books (chapter 7) the analogy is expanded to the books she mentions.

The self-reference is always secondary to the primary subject, which is the possibly pathological fascination with long, ambitious books that require decades to complete. A Short Introduction is my response to years spent reading and studying long, complex books, including five or so years on Finnegans Wake (with all the notebooks, secondary literature, and the translations into various languages) and Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream. In that same period this project grew to be longer than a conventional novel. My misgivings and motivations for reading long novels, and for spending so many years writing Five Strange Languages, were herded into A Short Introduction. In that sense this book is the self-awareness of Five Strange Languages, which otherwise does not acknowledge its length or its relation to other writers’ books. (With two exceptions, Proust and Dante, mentioned in Book 1.)

2. This book is also metafictional because the reduced facsimile pages of Anneliese’s notebooks include images that occur in Book 3, as well as a reduced image of the frontispiece of A Short Introduction itself, implying Anneliese’s notebooks are, or contain, Five Strange Languages. This possibility is not acknowledged, so it is a suggestion of metafictional reference, not a solution to the contents of Anneliese’s notebooks or the novel’s narrative.

A Short Introduction to Anneliese is the only self-referential or metafictional book in Five Strange Languages, except for the detached “Introduction to My Novel.” However the self-reference is not intended to define a place in postmodern practice. Metafiction, autofictional references, self-referential texts, and anti-novels are part of the history of the novel, but they are not obligatory markers of a novel’s awareness of the cultural moment. Their most interesting use is affective.

The expressive purpose of metafiction has been present from the beginning. Ultimately the point of the anti-novelistic experiments in Macedonio Fernández’s The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel) is to live without pain. Fernández says “each person” in the estancia was “moved by this double impression: ‘I entered La Novela, and I entered the novel.’” (p. 136) That is not a definition of the modern novel: it’s the mirroring that he hopes will save him.

Fernández’s novel is less a piece of experimental fiction in the postmodern sense than a concerted dream of a life without pain: he was neurasthenic and exquisitely afraid of suffering, and he dreamed this book as an Eden, a museum, and in a perverse and improbable way, also a novel. The affect is strong, but in retrospect the anti-realist, metafictional apparatus that supports it, and continues to attract critical attention, is distracting because it appears as insufficiently metabolized unhappiness. In A Short Introduction, what matters is the feeling, the effect and affect, of the long books, not the ostension or the historical forms of self-awareness.

Samuel

Has no legible character in this book. He has sparks of sarcasm, and he resists Anneliese’s request. But he also helps her with language usage and offers sympathetic comments. These don’t add to a clear picture of his feelings or thoughts. In chapter 9 and 10 we have access to his thoughts, but they are so focused on Anneliese’s notebooks that we still don’t learn much about him. He remains an outline (as in Rachel Cusk, Outline).

Naturally, S2 tries to interpolate information about himself. He is ignored. He learns from Catherine he can make fun of Anneliese (chapter 4, “Ruheplatz”), but she doesn’t listen or care, and eventually he decides he won’t try to tell her more about himself. He sympathizes with her in chapter 6 and 7, but she warns him: from now on things are serious, and he shouldn’t interrupt.

Structures in Anneliese’s thinking

(a) Continuously opening parentheses. From Roussel, New Impressions of Africa, and Schmidt, Bottom’s Dream (inconsistent parentheses)

(b) Innumerable interruptions and asides, from Schmidt, Bottom’s Dream, Evening Edged in Gold

(c) Apparent endlessness governed by a hidden structure, from Bernhard (whose prose was possibly sometimes modeled on Josef Matthias Hauer, Nomos etc.)

(d) Mechanical (“autistic”) lists, quotations, and recitations, from Beckett’s Watt and Perec’s notes for La Vie

(e) Dissections of layers of awareness, from Murnane, and ultimately Notes from Underground

(f) Theorizations of all the above, from Pynchon, Wallace, Gaddis, Barth, etc.

Anneliese’s sense of science and literature

The Preface to Anneliese’s notebooks declares that the project is not science, but science reimagined as a liberal art, where writing is given a fundamental role. This comes from two sources:

1. Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind, with its exposition of geometric, literary, and philosophic discourse, and their conventional roles since Greek antiquity. Cf. the similarity between moral rhetoric, dialectic, and literary composition in regard to incessant demonstration (p. 74).
2. Chrysippus’s philosophic method, as it is described in Diogenes Laertius: he wrote voluminously, interrogating his own claims, raising “more objections against his own doctrine than he could answer.” (John Laursen on Pierre Bayle in Skepticism.) Note that according to Diogenes, people in Soli (where Chrysippus was born, supposedly named after Solon) corrupted Attic Greek: Anneliese’s notebooks are also a corruption, a solecism.

Poststructuralism in general, with its mixtures of “philosophy” and “literature,” and contemporary writing, with its mixtures of realism, autofiction, and fiction, are not models for Anneliese. An exception is Paul Feyerabend.

The Notes at the end of the book

These transcribe Samuel’s memory of Anneliese’s mind into music. S3 goes as deeply into Stockhausen as Anneliese went into her theories. Parallels emerge throughout, implying a lack of distance: Anneliese continues to entrance S3.

At the end of the notes, S3 again realizes Anneliese did something with her life. Just as S2 had realized it at the end of the main text, and just as Piano Pieces 9, 10, and 11 did for Stockhausen, if just barely. Samuel’s two realizations take place 40 years apart. The second is more sober: S3 sees that he is very close to Anneliese, even after all this time. He decides it’s time to set Stockhausen aside, just as S2 had tried to set Anneliese’s notebooks aside.

The books Anneliese reads in chapter 7, “Anneliese’s Summer Reading”

On the right: pages Anneliese read, and the days it would have taken her at 30 pages per hour, 10 hours a day. Rounded page numbers are estimates.

Anneliese’s assessment of her rationality

Anneliese’s thought has 7 dimensions (subjects) with 13 levels (kinds of irrationality) in each dimension. This is the opposite of Stockhausen’s theory about Piano Piece 10, which has 13 dimensions with 7 levels each.

Levels = kinds of irrationality = levels of unreason = diseases or disorders of her reason = defects of her thinking = the ladder theory

Above all these is the Elenctic Hammer Theory: Anneliese’s thought is zetetic, proceeding step by step, employing an elenctic hammer. After that ideal come the 13 levels of irrationality:

1. Avalanche Theory

Like an avalanche that miraculously forms a house.

2. Disassembly Theory

Anneliese’s mind and body are crumbling like a ruin.

3. Multiple Engastration Theory

Thoughts are hidden by being sewn inside other thoughts. They then have to be cut open.

4. Jigsaw Puzzle Theory: each of us has missing pieces, and other people add pieces. In “Thirteen Theories,” Anneliese can never assemble the picture but also never make any other picture.
5. Unspooling Thoughts Theory

Boy tugging on purple thread in closet; boy walking into the sea to follow a kelp; Casteret and Ysaye in the cave.

6. Infected Mind Theory: she is infected by a parasite, like a big spider, which eats her ideas. Or: there are things in her mind that do not belong. (cf. Stage Four insanity)
7. Encephalophagous Theory: she has been eating parts of her own mind; she is the parasite and when she is finished her mind will not be her own. The old je est un autre. (cf. Old Pine insanity)
8. Flood Theory: her thinking and speaking is like a flood. She is both an observer and in the flood, being washed away.
9. Compost Theory: she is a compost heap, reducing into a warm mass,

or the bottom of a well.

10. Surd theory: she is divided into unnameable pieces (like Paul’s father).
11. Despair Theory: people in despair cannot be cured. They are diseased, like comets (from Burton, Spira).
12. Non-Human Language Theory: language is a prehistoric artifact whose meaning has been forgotten (De Man-ish).
13. Waves on the Beach Theory: The mind itself does not make sense: it is a natural form, like “A.G.” or Celan’s “Niemandsrose” written in seaweed.

This book is also has kinds of narrative, subject matters, and characters that can be taken as sorts of sanity and insanity. These are on the spreadsheet of forms of sanity. Anneliese also names kinds of insanity:

1. Teenage Cartoon insanity
2. Computer insanity
3. Encyclopedia insanity
4. Fumigating Your Marble Mansion Against Infestations of Insanity insanity.
5. Colliding Worlds insanity
6. Anchorite insanity
7. Stage Four insanity (example of the Infected Mind Theory)
8. Old Pine insanity (example of the Encephalophagous Theory)
9. Counting by Twos insanity

Anneliese’s assessment of Samuel’s rationality

1. Samuel’s thinking is anguilliform
2. or like a hagfish
3. or an amoeba
4. She has a special worm theory for him, which she doesn’t reveal
5. She thinks Samuel wants to be anencephalic
6. She compares him to Bellerophon, wandering in forests (this is the right theory, prefiguring Book 3; she repeats it)
7. She has a social theory of Samuel,
8. a psychoanalytic theory, and
9. a literary theory (these last three have all been cut)

The seven dimensions of Anneliese’s thought

Seven dimensions = subjects = topics = problems = partitions:

Logical problems with Anneliese’s theories

The thirteen levels are all distinct, except Level 2, which ruins the list. Like most other levels, it divides into 7 parts (dimensions, above). Mind is the third, as always, but Level 2 also encompasses all 13 levels. (So, implicitly, does psūkhḗ.) As it is described at first:

Anneliese’s theories as they appear when she describes the synoptic outline of the seven stages in her work, each assigned to a dimension:

The original seven dimensions, as they are rearranged in the synoptic outline to the Gray Notebooks:

Her 13 marine worms

These help Anneliese not think about the fact that people are human. The idea of the worm list and most of the kinds are introduced in chapter 5.

1. Some segmented marine worms have colorful stripes and spots, and that is how I think of people who imagine they are stupendously entertaining, I picture them as colorful worms performing various dances. That way I do not have to listen to what they are saying, I can simply enjoy their colorful displays. There are thirteen kinds of segmented marine worms in my theory.
2. The second kind of worm has enormous gelatinous eyes that roll around in all directions, that is how I picture people who envy everything, they think everyone has it better than them, and they are right, because they are worms.
3. A third kind of worm is covered in a jacket of slime, those are the people who try to ingratiate themselves with everyone, when they hug you, you’re left with a coating of slime.
4. The fourth kind of worm has a rotary mouth like an electric floor polishing machine. That is how I picture the people who attach themselves to their so-called friends and scour away all their thoughts until there is nothing left. Catherine is one of those worms, she attached herself to me and rasped away all my ideas.
5. The fifth kind of worm has a toothless jaw with needles hidden in its gums that spring out and jab into its prey, those are the people who they think they are armed with lethal weapons but actually they only have little needles in their gums, and if you kiss them the little needles poke your teeth and puncture your gums, but those people are more irritating than anything else.
6. The sixth kind of worm swims rapidly and gulps at everything, it tries to eat fish that are twice its size, that is how I picture people who have huge ambition and try to eat everyone, but when they actually swallow a person they get horrible gastric pains, and they end up vomiting the person back out. (Maybe Anneliese = Worm Six. In the Black Notebooks, Schall is Worm Six.)
7. The seventh kind of segmented marine worm spends its life hiding in the mud on the sea floor, those are like our cowardly Rektor Morschmulmig.
8. These have overgrown mouthparts that project outward, like scale worms, blood worms, ribbon worms, bobbit worms. they also resemble goblin sharks, stargazers, and bearded sea devils, that’s because they are always opening their jaws as wide as possible to tell everyone how magnificent they are. (Applied to Morschmulmig.)
9. Some worms can spontaneously break up into segments. If you step on them they snap apart, and each segment is alive. That is how I think of people who seem to be there in the room with you, you think you’re talking to them, but actually their head is somewhere else, their head is at home watching television, and you are talking to the belly or the tail. (Applied to Catherine.)
10. Some worms have translucent bodies that pulse with peristaltic contractions, so you can see the clumps of food being forced along through their intestines, and you know how long it will take for the droppings to come out, those are people who live to eat, they do not think of anything except capturing more food, salivating, masticating, and swallowing. Morschmulmig.
11. The eleventh kind of worm has skin armed with thousands of stinging bristles that result in permanent numbness, those are the people who seem friendly but then you realize they hate and envy you and they only want to paralyze you so you will keep quiet. (Introduced late in the book, in chapter 8, applied to Catherine.)
12. Some worms have hundreds of little legs with hooks at the ends, those are the people who scurry into everyone’s business, they would crawl into your ear canal if they could. (Also introduced in chapter 8.)
13. The Samuel worm. Not defined in the book. (Hinted in chapter 9.) The Samuel worm feeds on the indigestible excretions of other worms, especially the immense repellent toxic excretions of the Anneliese worm.
14. (Anneliese promises an extra one in chapter 5.)

Anneliese’s list of the 33 meanings of psūkhḗ

This is not given in the novel.

1. Breath of life

(a) Pneúma, especially in the Stoic sense: pneúma is a heated combination of air and fire, and a heated version of that is the soul (von Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, 4 vols., 1924, I, 135). It’s a materialist sense of psūkhḗ, since this pneúma circulates in the blood “in the same way that god, who is also called pneúma, is spread throughout the kosmos” (Peters, 161)

(b) Hebrew nephesh נֶפֶשׁ the breath of life

2. A sign that life may depart. This is an early Greek meaning (Homer): “psūkhḗ appears only in the context of life lost or threatened, never of life held and enjoyed” so it is not possessed by the person in life. It is not the breath of life, “in fact it is that breath only in so far as it is dissipated… a sign of life lost or threatened… it is not “the substratum of mental life and consciousness.” (Michael Clarke, Flesh and Spirit, pp. 56-60)
3. Life itself, invisible in living but seen and risked at death. This is also in Homer; it’s. Douglas Cairns’s critique of Michael Clarke: “There is certainly plenty in Homer's narrative to show that the psūkhḗ can be represented as the dying breath, and Clarke shows (144-7) that the etymology of the word suggests that this is likely to be its original meaning, but this original sense has undergone a process of metonymous extension that goes further than Clarke allows, for the positive image of psūkhḗ as a prize to be won cannot be reduced either to a literal reference to the cold breath of death or to a metonymous reference to the process of dying. The word has come to stand for that which is lost at death, i.e. life; and while it is true that in this sense psūkhḗ is life liable to be lost rather than life enjoyed, still in the metaphoric associations that are integral to its conceptualization the word psūkhḗ (as something risked, saved, given up, or taken away) performs some, but not all of the functions of the English ‘life’.”
4. A soul of divine origin, which survives the body’s death. Another early Greek usage. “Its operation can best be observed in dreams where it is active while the body slumbers.” (Pindar fr. 131, probably in Diels; Peters, p. 169)
5. An immortal thing, destined to be reborn in different bodies. This is another early Greek meaning (“ancient account,” παλαους λόγος, palaois logos): the Orphic-Pythagorean psūkhḗ, an immortal (athanatos) unity, “subject to a cyclic rebirth into a body that is the source of all its ills.” At the end of life, the soul returns “to its natural habitat” (Peters, p. 170; Plato, Charmides 156d-157a)
6. An individual being, a “complete substance” (tóde ti),” the singular as opposed to the universal, “and one such is the ‘living or ensouled body’ (σωμα εμψυχων, soma empsychon) composed of a material (hyle) and a formal (eidos) principle. The latter is the soul.” (Peters 172-73). This is Aristotle’s definition in De anima.
7. Essence of a person. Vietnamese tâm hồn, “spiritual essence of a person,” but also “heart,” the animating principle of bodily life. Where is your soul, in the end? Hồn ở đâu bây giờ?
8. The “vital principle”

(a) It is always in motion (αεικινητον, aeikineton) and hence must be self-moved (ευτοκινητων, eutokineton; is there an English word “autokiniton”?). This is Plato’s proof of the immortality of the would in Phaedrus 245c-e (Peters p. 171)

(b) Chinese shēnghuó 生活 meaning “life” or “organism”

9. Atman: “breath, soul, essence,” the true self that underlies all change; “breathing, thinking, speaking, seeing, and hearing”; “life of the individual self” (Hyun Höchsmann)
10. Prana: vital functions, esp. breath, but also soul, life
11. Brahman: ultimate and basic essence of the cosmos, identical with atman; containing atman; “atman when embodied within a particular entity” (Hyun Höchsmann) S.v. world soul, atman, prana
12. The world soul

(a) Psūkhḗ tou pantos. Plato, Timaeus 35b-36b, 41d; “individual souls are second- or third-rate versions of it” (Peters 173)

(b) Sanskrit Brahman (s.v.)

13. Material fire or heated pneuma. This is the Stoic definition. (Cicero, De fin. IV, 12; D.L. VII, 157; Plotinus, Enn. IV, 7, 4)
14. Anima: never a harmless Latin translation, always the sign of a fundamental Christian misunderstanding. Cf. soul. This is the OED s.v. “soul,” meanings Roman numeral II ff., “The immaterial part of a person; a person's spirit,” which is mostly “Christianity and other religions,” eg. the “spiritual or immaterial part regarded as surviving a person's physical death and believed to be capable of happiness or misery depending on divine judgment” or “the disembodied spirit of a deceased person (or occasionally an animal) regarded as a separate entity and invested with some degree of personality and form”
15. Psyche: the modern psychological and psychoanalytic category

(a) OED s.v. “psyche” meaning I c: “The whole conscious and unconscious mind, esp. when viewed as deciding or determining motivation, emotional response, and other psychological characteristics.” Freud, Outline of Psycho-Analysis i.1: “We know two things concerning what we call our psyche or mental life: firstly, its bodily organ and scene of action, the brain (or nervous system), and secondly, our acts of consciousness.”

(b) Kannada manaḥśāstra ಮನಃಶಾಸ್ತ್ರ is close to this.

16. Soul: the locus of emotion and feeling.

(a) As in the OED meanings for “soul,” heading I, “An essential principle or attribute of life, and related senses,” as opposed to heading II (s.v. anima). Esp. OED meaning I 3: “The seat of a person's emotions, feelings, or thoughts; the moral or emotional part of a person's nature; the central or inmost part of a person's being.”

(b) Arabic self or soul (nafs, نَفْس).

17. Soul: an immaterial thing that settles into a body.

(a) The Christian immortal soul. OED s.v. “soul,” meaning III 7 a, “in Christianity and other religions”: “The spiritual or immaterial part of a person considered in relation to God and religious or moral precepts.”

(b) Vietnamese linh hồn is full of echoes of psyche and the Christian soul.

(c) A heavenly winged horse that has “lost its wing” and “settles down, taking on an earthly body… The whole, body and soul now fused, is called a living being with the epithet ‘mortal’.” (Plato, Phaedrus 2461-c)

18. Spirit

(a) The divine nature or essential power of God, regarded as a creative, animating, or inspiring influence. OED s.v. “spirit,” category II, “An incorporeal, supernatural, rational being,” esp. meaning a, “an incorporeal, supernatural, rational being, of a type usually regarded as imperceptible to humans”; c, “any being (as God, a human, a personification, etc.) conceptualized as essentially incorporeal or immaterial”; and “Phrases” P I a, “the Spirit of God [after post-classical Latin spiritus Dei, spiritus Domini: the divine nature or essential power of God, regarded as a creative, animating, or inspiring influence.”

(b) Wind, spirit of god in the universe: Hebrew ruach רוּחַ, which means “wind” but also “spirit,” as in “spirit of god,” “spirit of the lord”

(c) Arabic spirit (al-rūḥ, الروح). In Maltese people say ruħ for “spirit.” That word has also been translated as “psyche,” because it is the human soul that is driven by the spirit (al-rūḥ) of god.

(d) Chinese jīngshén 精神 meaning “spirit” or “soul”

19. Combination of spirit, soul, and breath of life. In the Georgian language, “breath of life” is sitsotskhlis suntkva სიცოცხლის სუნთქვა. The three words that so confused Aristotle, “soul,” “life,” and “breath of life,” are all synonyms in Georgian: suli, sitsotskhle, suntkva, სული, სიცოცხლე, სუნთქვა.
20. Ghost, as in the spirit of a person who haunts the earth.

(a) Vernacular.

(b) Hebrew ruach רוּחַ was also used to mean “ghost”

(c) Japanese seishin 精神 “spirit”

21. Ghost, as in the Holy Ghost. OED s.v. “spirit” meaning IV.15 (IV: “The divine nature or essential power of God”): “15. Theology. The divine nature or essential power of God, regarded as a creative, animating, or inspiring influence; spec. the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost.”
22. That which vitalizes and governs matter (Plotinus Enn. IV, 8, 3)
23. A hypostasis. Psūkhḗ is that which is “turned toward its source, the intelligible, and it is turned toward the world, which is vitalizes” (Plotinus Enn. V, 2, 1; V, 1, 2).
24. Harmonia between body and spirit (Simmias in the Phaedo 85e-86d)
25. Both life (ζώε, zoe) and a living thing (ζώων, zoön) (Proclus Elem. theol. prop. 188)

So it participates in eternity (aion) by reason of its ousia and in time by reason of its energeia. (Peters 176)

26. Proclus’s three souls:

(a) divine souls, including souls of the planets (ouranioi),

(b) those capable of passing from intellection to ignorance (“the immanent nous is always in operation, but we, because our attention is turned elsewhere, are not always aware of it ([Enneads] IV, 8, 8),” Peters c.v. noesis, p. 128,

(c) “an intermediate grade that is always active but inferior to the divine souls” (Elem. theol., prop. 184). (Peters, p. 176)

27. Plato’s three souls:

(a) the rational (logistikon). This is the νους nous (intelligence, intellect, mind) “immanent in human souls” (Peters, p. 133.5)

(b) the spirited (thymoeides)

(c) the appetitive (epithymetikon) (Plato Rep. IV, 435e-444e; IX, 580d-581a; Phaedrus 246a-b, 253c-255b; Timaeus 69d-72d

“The epithymetikon, located in the abdominal cavity,, receives no message from the logistikon, but its headline pursuit of physical pleasures is occasionally tempered by the presence of the liver, which is the seat of dreams (oneiros) and the basis of divination (mantike) (Peters, 171, summarizing Timaeus 69d-70b?)

28. Russian dusha душа
29. Kyrgyz jan жан and ruh рух
30. Yoruba ọkàn “soul” and ẹmi “spirit”
31. Bengali ātmā আত্মা
32. Lao vinnyan ວິນຍານ and n oa chai ນ​້​ໍ​າ​ໃຈ
33. Kannada atma ಆತ್ಮ which means “soul” but also “heart”

Anneliese’s notebooks

She calls these her “book,” her “work,” her “theories.”

Readers are introduced to the Gray Notebooks with pages of images of the pages, reproduced too small to read, to give a sense of how extensive and complex they are. These are meant to be intriguing, so readers want to read the notebooks.

Some of the images are modified from scans of books by Marianne Fritz. Some contain images that also appear in Books 1, 3, and 4, and there are images from Anneliese’s interests (marine worms, ticks, bacteria, viruses) and marginal references (to the Black Notebooks).

41 Black Notebooks (total in the set: 50)

A2 size (16 x 24”), bound in leather

Assembled 1992-1999, from pieces cut and pasted from her earlier lab notebooks

150 pages each, total 6,150

Anneliese does not estimate the word count, but at 150 words/page (because they are snippets) that would be 922,500 words

66 Gray Notebooks (total in the set: 70) A3 size (11½ x 16½”), bound in cloth

Written 1999-2020 (21 years)

300 pages each, total 19,800 pages filled

She fills the last 66 of them: she never explains what would go in the first 4 books, but it’s Samuel’s own introduction—in effect, A Short Introduction to Anneliese.

She estimates 6,500,000 words.

12 red notebooks

A4 size (8.3 x 11.7”) (Her notebooks get smaller each time she orders a set)

Written 2016

250 pages each, 3,000 pages total

This is the 12-volume index, which Anneliese declares to be unusable

1 supplementary lab notebook

This is the 100-page synoptic outline of the Gray Notebooks

= 120 books in all, 7,522,500 words (Anneliese says 7,523,000), 29,050 pages (all together, including 66 Gray Notebooks, the red notebooks, the outline), 8,850 images, not counting diagrams

The progressive ruin of Anneliese’s book

There are four stages to Anneliese’s collapse.

1. The Black Notebooks are “cruft” (David Letzler’s term): unreadable technical entries. Readers are compelled to look through them. There are small rewards: glimpses of her opinions of Catherine, beginnings of the worm theories.
2. The Gray Notebooks begin as philosophy, mainly Greek. These can be read, but are abstract, distant. Readers are meant to be drawn in to Anneliese’s speculations about the length of a life, aion, the nature of eternity. The excerpts should work as interesting nonfiction, the sort of thing a reader might try to verify and explore online.
3. The Gray Notebooks continue (after vol. 49) in the same voice that Anneliese used in speaking about her ladder: she knows she is lost. There are allusions to her theories and apostrophes to the reader. Distances open between her work and conventional science, philosophy, even memoir. These excerpts should be be immersive and perhaps moving, evidence of her precarious state of mind.
4. The Gray Notebooks end (after vol. 61) with a weird and repellent drama of characters known only by their initials: W.P. (Pichler), G. (Anneliese), S. (Samuel), and P. (Paul). It is an opaque allegorical mythopoetic drama in which G. and S. both nearly die, interred in a forest (prefiguring Book 3). The excerpts should be strange and suffused with despair. They are modeled on, and parodies of, Marianne Fritz’s Naturgemäß.

The illusion that there is a single enormous project, that we are reading excerpts, is meant to be as strong as possible.

The 1-page summary of the 100-page synoptic outline of the 19,800 pages of Anneliese’s 66 Gray Notebooks

This 1-page summary is in the novel, but without the key to the 100-page table of contents (rightmost column). The order of pages in that column is scrambled because the seven partitions are rearranged in the 100-page table of contents (but not in the Gray Notebooks) to reflect the order in which Anneliese gave them to Samuel.

Book 3

Weak in Comparison to Dreams

Summary

Samuel is a civil servant in Guelph, Ontario. The city is planning to build a zoo, and he is sent to zoos in different countries to study animal welfare. He is besieged by the sufferings of zoo animals.

Each night he dreams of walking through an endless mountainous landscape. There are forest fires in the distance, and they get closer each night. He knows that the fires mean something is happening to him in real life, but he can’t understand what. In the zoos he behaves more and more erratically, lying and provoking his hosts. His assistant, a person of indeterminate gender named Viperine, sees that he is suffering and tries to help, but word of Samuel’s misbehavior reaches his supervisor, and he is fired. In his dreams, the fires come up on all sides.

There are photographs of forest fires and zoos in the book—things Samuel sees and imagines.

The book has a shorter second part. It tells the story of Samuel in extreme old age. He has found the book—the one we’re reading, which he’d written as a middle-aged man—and is reading it again for the first time in forty years. He hardly remembers anything of the year recounted in the book. Instead the stories and characters come through to him as music. The elderly Samuel lives alone, and plays the piano. The stories in the book, the ones we’ve read, remind him of composers he plays, and he writes about their music. This part of the book has actual sheet music. Samuel’s stories about the music form a parallel narrative, retelling the book as music. When the book ends Samuel is at peace, because all that is left of his memories are melodies.

Lack of love

Samuel thinks about his family only intermittently. There is no love in this book except Viperine’s. Samuel’s love affair with Rosie is ongoing up to the time of chapters 7 and 8, but it is hardly mentioned. (It is in Book 1.) He does not speak to wife or daughter throughout the entire book. Sketches and hints of his relationships and his life are pushed away in favor of a relentless cascade of strange and unpredictable experiences and ideas.

Lack of narrative closure

Events appear to be potentially significant, as in ordinary novels, but turn out to be accumulations of disconnected random, intrusive, and in the end often insignificant occurrences. Samuel thinks about this in chapter 1, and the older Samuel recognizes the randomness of his own life toward the end of the notes.

With each new chapter readers should be increasingly concerned and puzzled that they’re not learning more about Samuel, that he is not succeeding in altering his life (until the day he ends his job).

Wandering

There are various figures for wandering.

Dromomania ➞ desire to wander

Stereotypies ➞ repetitive paths

Anankastic movement ➞ pathological and repetitive, like punding

Fugue states ➞ dissociative wandering

Unconsciousness

And various figures for states of unconsciousness.

Syncopes ➞ blackouts, which are dreamless

Dreams ➞ erase the memory of days (instead of only the other way around)

Fugues ➞ like dreams, like nights

Nights ➞ erase the memory of the days that precede them (in the Notes)

Compression

A mechanical alternation of waking life and dreams of fires. Dreams and waking life reverberate against one another. Samuel is hanging on, feeling suffocated, constrained, and at the same time wandering, lost.

Glimpses of his inner life are compressed in favor of verbatim reporting of experiences. This reaches its high point in the last narrative chapter (the drive north) and the last note (on the hedge). The book should feel like walking down a narrowing corridor. Chapters become clogged with inert, listlike or technical material (“cruft”).

Dreams of fires

The dream chapters aren’t remembered by the narrator. The sleeping narrator realizes the dreams are not anamneses or analepses (flashbacks to a time before the narrative, to little Sam’s life) but rather reports on his current condition: the dreams reveal Samuel’s actual life.

S2 registers the dream chapters in moods (which he doesn’t attribute to dreams)

S³ registers the dream chapters by talking about preludes and fugues.

The different themes

Book 4

Ghosts Are

Samuel Emmer has suffered a crisis, and possibly a breakdown: he has quit his job, his marriage has ended, and he has decided not to see his brothers or friends again. This is the story of a person who tries to remove himself from everything he knows in the world.

In the Preface Samuel recalls the previous winter. He thinks of himself as ash or embers. But he is not quite a ghost, because he is still haunted by memories of his family and childhood. He resolves to lay these ghosts so he can become a real ghost, light as air, a world away from feeling.

First he visits his daughter at her college. She refuses to engage, apparently because she’s been badly hurt, but he doesn’t see that, and leaves content with the thought that she’s become independent.

The second trip is to see his wife in Slovakia. She repudiates him as violently as his mother had years before, telling him he’s never understood her. He pretends to leave, but actually moves to a nearby city, where she says she works. He searches for her new husband.

Third is a drive back to his childhood home, to see if he can experience again what happened to him when he was a child. He calls his brother, Tee, one last time, but it only cements their separation. He sneaks into the yard of the house where he grew up; it has changed so much it overwhelms the few uncertain memories he has left.

The final destination is Borneo, to a cave his intern Viperine had told him about (Book 1, echoed in prints in Book 3). When he gets to the enormous cave chamber, he runs away from his guides, slips, and falls into the darkness.

After the book ends there is a composition written by the elderly Samuel, called Twelve Variations on a Theme. The theme itself is not given until the end. The variations evoke the old Samuel’s sense of how the events and people in the book revolved around a simple melody, just as Samuel’s life revolved around a simple picture of a mulberry, reproduced at the end of the narrative.

Samuel in this book

He is a ghost in training.

1. Samuel’s four trips do not produce insight. Ghosts Are is not a journey of exploration and self-discovery. That possibility has been ruined by the events in Books 1, 2, and 3.
2. Samuel is empty, with minimal affect, unemotional and detached from people and feelings. He welcomes the absence of pleasure or pain. Ghosts Are is an experiment in reaching the absolute zero of emotion. Affect is in things, not thoughts, as in Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy (see “Constructing the inaccessible self,” above).
3. Unaccountably obsessive. This also happens in Watt, who is suddenly attracted to puzzles. S. tells us about a book on Bismarck, invents an elaborate epitaph for himself in Bojnice (anticipating Book 5), recounts a geometric schema Martha invented; ponders indigenous burial customs; is unexpectedly detained by details of animals and plants in Borneo (plants, birds, bats), El Paso (ant lions), Bojnice (bats), and Watkins Glen (lampreys).
4. Intermittently not present. S. skips, in memory, backward through the preceding three books. There are also memories that are not elsewhere in Five Strange Languages. Those episodes lack clear connection to his immediate context, contributing to the sense that he has removed himself from the present.
5. Divided between the person experiencing the events (S2PA) and the one who writes them down three years later (S2PR). S2PA is referred to in the third person. This is the first appearance of the way the older Samuel (S3, in the notes) refers to his middle-aged self (S2) as “Samuel,” and how the middle-aged Samuel refers to his childhood self (S1) as “Sam.” It indicates an unseen gulf between the events of three years ago and the time of writing. (The gulf is revealed at the end.)

Models for Samuel’s lack of affect, especially Stoicism and Pyrrhonism

Psychology

It may seem S. is suffering from anhedonia, lack of pleasure. The return to Watkins Glen is not painful or disturbing, as he fears, but neither does it produce any pleasure. (Perhaps this is also close to ḥuzin حزن meaning melancholy and grief, but also lack of joy or pleasure.) But anhedonia would make him pathological in an inappropriate way.

Stoicism

Απάθεια is a better description, because it is a Stoic or Epicurean ideal, not a pathology. S. is interested in ataraxia, the Stoic ideal of calm. (Fina mentions Hollow Ataraxia.) Differences between Stoicism and S's interests: Stoics represent experience as painful, and the goal as lessening pain. S. does not reduce his friends and family because they are painful: he avoids them because they are too complex.

Pyrrhonism

His thoughts may imply epoché, the Pyrrhic ideal of the suspension of judgment. But he is not trying to avoid judgment. S's doubts about himself seem similar to the Pyrrhic ideal of akatalepsia (acatalepsy), the claim that knowledge is unattainable. But it’s not knowledge that S. is doubting: he doubts love. His word would be aphilepsia (ἀφιληψία).

Existentialism, absurdism, alienation

There are similarities with the behavior of Meursault in The Stranger, but Samuel is not alienated from society (as in absurdism) or from a meaningless universe (existentialism). He does not experience a lack of self-reflection, an absence of guilt, or illegible motivations.

Other possibilities

Some of Samuel’s behavior has similarity to the deadly sin of sloth (acedia, accidie), but his aim is torpor, not avoidance of work. In contemporary psychiatric terms, in Book 4, S. is close to depersonalization disorder, a miscellaneous category in Kaplan and Saddock, 7th ed., vol. 1, pp. 1,563-70, and cp. p. 817 for “flattened affect.”

The reader’s share

Samuel is more sympathetic in this book than in any of the others. He is vulnerable because he still feels jabs of emotion, and is trying hard to suppress them. Readers should care for him, but be conflicted about whether he should recover, or continue to tamp down his emotions until he has the “absolute zero” he wants.

Words and expressions

Samuel remembers these from previous books.

Inter pontem et fontem 

In chapter 2, Samuel recalls Anneliese’s description of Burton and thinks of life as the moments falling from the bridge (half-fallen trunk) to the stream. At the end of chapter 4 this is echoed by the rock slope (bridge to the inaccessible plateau) and the invisible stream.

Psychopannychia, psuchopannychia

S. reads about this in Adela’s mother’s library, and takes it as a description of his condition.

Ataraxia ἀταραξία, ἈΤΑΡΑΞΊΑ

The Stoic ideal of calm, introduced by Wan in the form of a manga, then in a textbook.

Káthodos κάθοδος, ΚΆΘΟΔΟΣ

“Fall from sense and reason toward despair.” Literally “the road that leads down.” In chapter 3, Samuel discovers the truth about Adela, and begins his wandering. He recalls Anneliese’s word.

Book 5

An Inventory of The Dead

Summary

The book has no plot. It is a collection of obituaries and epitaphs composed by the older Samuel. The obituaries include most of the novel’s characters, and several of the animals, including bacteria and bats. The obituaries of the main characters fill in details of their lives and show how they died.

Samuel imagines his own headstone. Some of the epitaphs are versions of ideas for the title of this project.

There is no explanation, no date, no preface or envoi.

Precedents

Obituaries are mentioned in Ulysses, Don LeLillo, Camus, Proulx, Thackeray, Dickens, Sterne, Collins, and Hardy, but rarely quoted. There is a “columbarium” of obituary poems at the end of Emilian Galaicu-Păun’s Living Tissue 10X10. Charles Reznikoff’s reports aren’t obituaries, but material for them.

The principal models for Book 5 are the Greek Anthology epitaphs and online databases of obituaries.

Places, dates, other books, work hours

Timeline

Excerpts from the large timeline: Samuel’s life from just before the book begins.

Maps

World map

There is an online map with locations mentioned in the novel.

Map of Guelph 

(Next page.)

This is as it appears in the novel.

Not shown: cell phone tower on Mt. Storr; Middle Eastern café on Taylor; Fowler’s the bar where Rosie’s boyfriend Joe drinks; Rosie’s apartment.

Harris Water Treatment Plant:

(1) Harris Water Purification Plant = Physical Plant, 29 Waterworks Place (= Harris building; Samuel, Catherine, Agathe)

(2) Water Services Center, 29a Waterworks Place (= Icon Construction personnel building; Samuel’s lab, Rosie) This is the actual plant in Guelph.

(3) Power plant, 1837 Lorck St.

Streetviews

Used to visualize locations.

Waterworks place, Guelph. Center right: modular construction service building where Samuel works (Book 1)

Waterworks Place, parking lot and trees in front of Everal River. Lorck is to the right one block. (Book 1)

Samuel’s apartment, next to the Everal river (Book 3)

Samuel’s prefabricated house near Shallow Lake and Mar, with optional porch and vinyl siding (Notes to all the books).

The farm lane with the woods, where Samuel hears the veery (Book 3 notes, Book 5)

Samuel’s lab (Book 1)

Maria-Kristiina Tank’s house in Saue, Estonia, where she retired (Book 5)

Maria-Kristiina Tank’s parents’ house in Saue, Estonia (Book 5)

Mainhard Moser’s house on Canandaigua Lake (Book 1)

Thomas Persoon’s house in Ava, north of Utica (Book 1)

Frankfurt hotel where Samuel first meets Anneliese (actually the Hotel Krafft in Basel, changed to Frankfurt) (Book 2)

Friedhof Roggwil, Canton of Bern, where Anneliese, Paul, her uncle, and her mother are buried (Books 2, 5) (Actually a different cemetery in Switzerland.)

Arnulf Trausch’s house in Basel, Starenstrasse, with the green shades, where Anneliese hears him crying (Book 2)

Anneliese’s house in Basel, older idea. But retaining the floor plan (Book 2)

Anneliese’s apartment in Basel (second floor).

Catherine’s home in Orange Grove, Texas (Books 1, 5)

Samuel’s view from the back of the converted stables in Cattaraugus (Book 4)

Fina Hodges’s house in Cattaraugus. Samuel’s converted stables on the left (Book 4)

Maschinka’s house in Bratislava (right), Družobná 5 (Book 5)

Sirje’s house in Nykoping, Sweden (Book 5)

Where Samuel imagines his manuscript will end up: Orange County landfill, VA, near Cismont. (Books 4, 5)

Where Anneliese’s notebooks end up: Watford landfill. Wind turbines in the distance. (Book 2)

Books that influenced this one

Of the many read over the last 20 years, these are the ones I keep so I can consult and re-read them. They are among the ghosts that haunt this project. These photos were taken in summer/fall 2023.

Middle 6 shelves on the left: books of use for this novel. (To the right: music. Top right: Finnegans Wake texts. Drafting table: editions of Zettel’s Traum.)

Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams for the limits of grief, mixed in my mind with Bachmann’s Malina. Nabokov’s notes on Pushkin for engastration of a text by obsessive endless scholarship. (Review of all 1,500 pages on Goodreads.) Auto-da-fé, a model for Book 2. Musil, the model for the novel-essay (a bad & a good translation). One Krasznahorkai (should remove it). Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter; Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal, Dixon’s Frog. One Knausgaard (should remove it).

Left: Tan Lin, BlipSoak01. Missing his Seven Controlled Vocabularies. Joseph Joubert, Notebooks. Missing other aphorists: Lichtenberg, Chamfort, Hohl, Novalis’s Allgemeine Brouillon. Gombrowicz, Bacacay. Missing Ferdydurke, Cosmos. The most useful of Roth, Powers, Murnane, Bolaño. 2666 for the part about the murders.

Right: the difficulty of selecting Bernhard (7 titles). Should be largest on the shelf: Old Masters. Brookner is a life model because she gave up art history at 53 to write. Celan, one edition of several. Butor, an independent Oulipean. A small cemetery of César Aira in the middle. Pamphlet right of Tom McCarthy: Deformities of Dr. Samuel Johnson. Missing: Pessoa, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Kobo Abe, The Box Man.

Michael Caywood Green’s Sinking. Not in the photo, but belongs with Green: Enzensberger’s Sinking of the Titanic. The wonderful Paul Metcalf’s U.S. Department of the Interior. A couple of books as warnings, to avoid: The Book of Other People, Reader’s Block, The Exception, Diary of a Bad Year, Paradise, Housekeeping, Tenth of December. These warning books can all be discarded once the warning’s read. Others would be Oates, Smith, Sanders. The wonderful, conservative Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Márai’s Embers, a kind of perfect book.

Burton, two editions of the book, four volumes of the expensive Cambridge edition, and three books about him. They are almost the only secondary literature on these shelves. Barthes’s hermetic experiment Preparation of the Novel. Missing Beckett, Watt and Ill Seen Ill Said.

The Abbé Dominique Bouhours, Manière de bien penser, 1787. Just right of that, in vellum: Alessandro Piccolomini, Delle stelle fisse, 1559. (First star atlas without figures.) Just left of it: Eugene Conwell, Discovery of the Tomb of Ollamh Fodhla, 1873, and left of that, Bouhours, Pensées ingénieuses des anciens at des modernes, 1758, and left again, Charles Vallancey, Grammar of the Iberno-Celtic or Irish Language, 1782. Right: volume 1 of Sartre’s incomprehensible unreadable Family Idiot. Far right: Julia Kristeva’s Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila; Pierre Senges, Fragments of Lichtenberg. Right of Piccolomini: Lewis Morery, Great Historical Dictionary, 1692.

The other side of the study: books that were read by characters in the novel. (Top: gouache paintings of mushrooms in Ithaca, by the ornithologist Bill Dilger, c. 1960. Top right and second shelf, left: accessories for the Zeiss Ultraphot microscope, Samuel’s in the novel, including a universal stage.)

Books read by Samuel (in Books 1, 3, and 4). Blue ring binder: Leboffe and Pierre, Photographic Atlas for the Microbiology Laboratory, 4th ed. Right of it: Coliform Index and Waterborne Disease. Popular books on animals in captivity. Old books of science, eg. The Microscopy of Drinking Water (1899), Pollen Grains (1935).

Books Martha read (in Book 1, Stories, Like Illnesses). Uranometria 2000.0; Boleti of North Carolina, Mainhard Moser’s Agarics and Boleti; left of it, Wintner’s Analytical Foundations of Celestial Mechanics; just left of that, Halling, “Annotated Index to Species and Infraspecific Taxa of Agaricales and Boletales”; left again, Introduction to Mycology. Missing: Jardetzky, Theories of Figures of Celestial Bodies; Wintner, Analytical Foundations of Celestial Mechanics; Hermann von Baravalle, Die Erscheinungen am Sternenhimmel (model for Pichler’s book).

Books Samuel read (in Books 1 and 3). Atlas of Urinary Sediments (1899); Handbuch zur Geschichte der Optik, surrounded by essays on microscope technique.

Four photos of books Anneliese read (in Book 2, A Short Introduction to Anneliese). Open: first edition of Nathaniel Bacon’s book on Francis Spira (Spiera), 1657. Left: books on the concept of species. Middle: excerpts and books on the Mishnah and Talmud, especially Negaim and Tohorot, and Michael Abraham’s Principles of Talmudic Logic. Right: a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th ed.; and the 1964-65 phone book of Basel.

Books Anneliese read (in Book 2, A Short Introduction to Anneliese). Red spine fourth from left: Jacob Neusner’s History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities, Part 7, Negaim; Kornman, Epic of Gesar of Ling; Anthony Yu’s Journey to the West, vol. 1; Consentius’s De barbarismis et metaplasmis; several of Anatoly Fomenko’s books; Russell’s Time in Eternity; Max Müller’s Buddhist Nihilism; Pseudo-Origen, Refutation of All Heresies.

On the left, a book Martha read (in Book 1, Stories, Like Illnesses), Botanical Latin; and a book Samuel read (in Book 3, Weak in Comparison to Dreams), Mathews’s Field Guide to Wild Birds and Their Music.

Books Anneliese read (in Book 2, A Short Introduction to Anneliese): Shyam Ghosh, Hindu Concept of Life and Death; the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad; the Narada Purana in 2 vols.; an excerpt from the Kyrgyz epic Manas called The Memorial Feast for Kökötöy-Khan, edited by A. T. Hatto; Trimpi’s Muses of One Mind.

Books Martha read (in Book 1, Stories, Like Illnesses): Boleti of North America; Agarics and Boleti;

Books Samuel read (in Book 4, Ghosts Are): issues of The Sarawak Museum Journal; Robin Hanbury-Tenison, Mulu: The Rain Forest; 

Books Samuel read (in Book 1, Stories, Like Illnesses): William Harlow, Inside Wood, Miracle of Nature; Atlas of Rock-Forming Minerals in Thin Section

Books Samuel read (in Book 3, Weak in Comparison to Dreams): W. J. Garnett, Freshwater Microscopy; F. C. Page, An Illustrated Key to Freshwater and Soil Amoebae; Giorgio Samorini, Animals and Psychedelics

A book Viperine read (in Book 3, Weak in Comparison to Dreams): Mites of Moths and Butterflies

Books Anneliese read (in Book 2, A Short Introduction to Anneliese): Jules Romains, The Seventh of October; Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, The Florentine Codex, Book 7, The Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the Binding of the Years, In Thirteen Parts, Part VIII; Max Picard, The World of Silence; Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Epistle of Forgiveness (an endless, annoying, intermittently entertaining book); Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, On Life, Death, and Languages, edited by Eric Ormsby; al-Tabari, The Commentary on the Qur’an, edited by M. F. Madelung, volume 1; John Ryder, “The Origin of Sex through Cumulative Integration, and the Relation of Sexuality to the Genesis of Species”; P. H. Yancey, “Origins from Mythology of Biological Names and Terms”; Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Ineffability: The Failure of Words in Philosophy and Religion; Michael Sellis, Mystical Languages of Unsaying; Hermann Meyer, Neues Konversations-Lexikon, second edition, vol. 1; Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1832 edition, vols. 1-3; the Táin bó Cúalnge, Irish Texts Society, vol. 49.

Book Samuel read (in Book 1, Stories, Like Illnesses): Shadakshari Settar (1935-2020), Pursuing Death: Philosophy and Practice of Voluntary Termination of Life [in Jainism]

Book Samuel read (in Book 2, A Short Introduction to Anneliese): Herbert Henck, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X.

Books Samuel read (in Books 1 and 3). Center: Detection Methods for Algae, Protozoa, and Helminths in Fresh and Drinking Water. Toward the left: Inside Wood: Masterpiece of Nature and Morphology of Human Blood Cells (used in Book 1). Left of it, the pamphlet “The Uncertain Hypholoma” (used in Book 3).

Other books, not here, are Viperine’s: Field Guide to Diseases and Insect Pests; Mites of Moths and Butterflies; Geary’s Fleas of New York; miscellaneous papers on parasitism.

Not in these photos:

Jonathan Eburne, Outsider Theory; Wouter Kusters, A Philosophy of Madness; Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen: Die Standardsprache in Österreich, der Schweiz und Deutschland [etc.]; Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922 ed.); Jonathan Cott, Stockhausen; Michael Nyman, Experimental Music; Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte zur Musik, 1963-1970, DuMont Dokumente vol. 3; The Clinical Interview Using DSM-IV, volume 2, The Difficult Patient; Polyglot from the Far Side of the Moon: The Life and Works of Solomon Caesar Malan (1812-1894); Edmund Jaeger, A Source-Book of Biological Names and Terms, third edition.

Summary of some influences:

Book 1

Stories, Like Illnesses

Encyclopedias, natural history textbooks (mushroom manuals, celestial mechanics texts, philosophy, psychology); Pessoa; Walser; Schmidt’s typoscripts; the “Night Lessons” chapter in Finnegans Wake, II.2.

Book 2

A Short Introduction to Anneliese

Gargoyles, The Lime Factory, Marianne Fritz’s Naturgemäß, Schmidt’s encyclopedism; Schreber’s memoirs; Kusters’s Philosophy of Madness; Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Epistle of Forgiveness. Cusk, Outline. The pasted-in look of Anneliese’s black notebooks comes from the old volumes of the catalog of the National Library in Dublin, which were composed with cutouts of an earlier catalog, glued onto pages of large signature-bound books. Missing: Blanchot, Madness of the Day.

Book 3

Weak in Comparison to Dreams

Rodenbach; Breton’s Nadja; Sebald; Anatomy of Melancholy; Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year

Book 4

Ghosts Are

Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress; Perec’s myopic puzzling; Beckett, Watt; Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy

Book 5

An Inventory of the Dead

Reznikoff, the Greek anthology, conceptual poetry

Notes

(in all the Books)

Music history and theory. Also Mazulo (on Shostakovich), Taruskin, Ton de Leeuw, Austin (my teacher in Cornell), Mason (on Beethoven)...

Word counts, work hours

These tables are interactive online.

Essays

Four Sour and Stringent Proposals for the Novel

or:

The Unambitious Contemporary Novel

Long before writing fiction began to absorb my time, to the point that I ended up arranging my teaching and my career so I could accommodate longer hours in coffee shops, I was an art historian. Back in graduate school, before I had any notion that the challenges and pleasures of fiction might someday loom so large that they could actually displace my career, I was struck by a book on the subject of linear perspective written by a French art historian, Hubert Damisch. Instead of thanking people who had helped him, or talking about the art he loved, he opened with the line, “This book was born of impatience.”

Even though I have set aside much of my professional career in order to make time for writing and studying novels, my motivation, like Damisch’s, is often negative. I’m occasionally energized and inspired by authors I love, but mainly my imagination works differently. When I’m reading, I find it helpful to think about what I would have done if I were the author. After I’ve finished a novel, I often spend a day trying to understand why I wouldn’t have written the book I just read. I make notes, which tend to turn the novels I’ve read into case studies. They have themes, like “What is genuine weirdness?,” “How do you know when to stop reading an author?,” and “When the author clearly knows things the narrator doesn’t.” These short essays have worked as warning signs for me, like KEEP OFF THE GRASS or NO SWIMMING: DANGEROUS CURRENTS. They reminded me where I didn’t want my own fictions to go. There were certainly some authors I loved, but that only made them more dangerous in my eyes. I’d learned from art history how treacherous it can be for an artist to emulate another artist. As any artist knows, when you’re working you don’t want to stop to theorize, and for years, it was enough to keep the writing diary. It showed me with increasing clarity what I did not like, what I wanted to avoid. Now that my own novel is finally finished, I’ve been able to look back at the hundreds of short essays I wrote and gather recurrent themes. The result is this list of four things I think contemporary novels can try to do.

This sort of essay, in which a writer proposes a manifesto of sorts, or tries to sum up the entire unruly and diverse scene of contemporary fiction, is itself a recurring trait of the literary world. Some years ago, Tim Parks started a productive controversy by claiming that some novelists—he named Haruki Murakami, among others—wrote an intentionally simple form of their language so they their novels could be quickly translated into English and compete on international markets. He called the result “the dull new global novel.” A few years earlier, Zadie Smith had proposed “Two Paths for the Novel,” complaining that “a new breed of lyrical Realism” had held sway, and needed to be avoided in favor of another sense of the self: more discontinuous, and less available to confessions and epiphanies. More recently the novelist David Shields wrote Reality Hunger, a manifesto for collage realism that undercut itself by including a number of contradictory claims—half of them written by other people. A quality shared by these and other manifestos and declarations is dissatisfaction, impatience, with the current state of affairs. This essay is no different in that regard, although my contribution comes from a little farther outside the literary community: I have a longer historical range in mind here, and I am less engaged by current interests in ethnic and other representations. It matters, too, that I am socially distant from the world of literary social media, which tends to both propose and dispose the terms of its arguments. What I have to say here is, I suppose necessarily, sometimes distant from current conversations about the novel.

A note before I start: these points are peppered with quotations from the literary critic Steve Mitchelmore, whose site, “This Place of Writing,” is a source for unrepentantly radical criteria for writing. Thanks to a correspondence from around 2016 to around 2018, which ended in the only possible way, with his silence to my last rejoinder, my own novel changed fundamentally.

1. Novels aren’t about real life. One of the commonplaces of criticism is that novels can be the best places to learn about the world, because they offer imaginative access, empathy, and a sense of lived experience. This is true in anti-realist positions such as conceptual writing and realist projects like Shields’s. Novels are said to open our eyes to other identities, show us the world from the perspectives of people we’ve never known. From novels we learn what it’s like to walk out of Sudan to save yourself, to live in a conflicted Hindu-Muslim community, to be queer in a conservative Laotian family in Minnesota, or to be a woman of color and suffer from the daily thoughtless prejudices of white Americans.

I don’t want to dispute any of that. The world needs more imaginative empathy, and novels are one of the best ways to get it, along with film and travel. Enlarging the world is something novels do, but I don’t think it’s what they are best at. Occasionally people like Joan Didion complain about “the increasing inability of many readers to construe fiction as anything other than roman à clef, or the raw material of biography” (“Last Words,” October 25, 1998). Here is the strongest, simplest way to think differently about this topic. It’s a line from the Australian novelist Gerald Murnane: “I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world.”

An amazing thought. Think of Rembrandt: he had exceptional skill at rendering dusky interiors, furs, ruffles, and jewelry, light falling obliquely across skin. But he had another skill, which is the reason he’s in museums: the capacity to represent inwardness, what German critics call Innerlichkeit. The people in his paintings are pensive, they’re working out some problem, remembering something from their past. Some scholars doubt that, and wonder whether Rembrandt put on a show of profundity for his clients. In this context it doesn’t matter. What counts is that Rembrandt’s skill at making us think about thoughtfulness is more important than his ability to paint naturalistic portraits.

Or think of Murnane’s idea this way. It’s easy to teach a dog to fetch or sit, but tricks are only one of its behaviors. A dog is a complex social animal, capable of what we call loyalty but might as well call love. Valuing novels for the social information they contribute, as many literary prizes do, is like judging dogs for fetching. It’s true that “novelists can provide insights about society that pundits and experts miss,” as the critic Adam Kirsch said of Michel Houellebecq, and when those insights include social violence, then reading novelists can be “more urgent than ever.” But if Houellebecq has done interesting things with the novel, providing insights about European society is not one of them.

American fiction in particular is often thought to be about bringing “news from a distinct corner of American” life, as Dwight Garner once said of Tommy Orange. From fall 2018 to fall 2019, I read the fiction installment in The New Yorker each month for twelve months. All but one of the selections taught readers about some corner of American life they may not have known: conservative Korean immigrants to California, Turkish families, Armenian immigrants, an East Asian couple dating by Skype. Literary prizes and best-seller lists show that novels are often places people go to learn about people they don’t know: Orhan Pamuk illuminates Turkish urban and rural society, Smith tells us about social configurations in the U.K., Jonathan Franzen reports on the North American middle class. As Parks has said, magic realism gave many North Americans and Europeans their ideas about South America, even though it represented that continent in a peculiarly textureless fashion, without allowing readers to see differences between Colombia, say, and Peru.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation was generally reviewed as a story about a privileged New Yorker, and critics praised it as a narrative of depression that can be applied to many social contexts. But in a 2021 Bookforum survey Moshfegh wrote, “I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media… We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason.” That was a nicely contrarian opinion in context of the Bookforum survey, which was titled “What forms of art, activism, and literature can speak authentically today?” but it is still a long way from Murnane. It’s one thing to cast doubt on the use of novels to argue ethical positions. It’s another to refuse the temptation to report on the world.

It’s routine for novels to be praised for the news they bring, and if they are large “encyclopedic” novels that can seem even more rewarding. David Vernon praises Olga Tokarczuk’s 900-page novel The Books of Jacob for its “vast detail” and “the rich imagination that fills it with beguiling characters, curious events and peculiar incidents,” its “lavish banquet” of “theological arcana and irresistible alchemy,” including politics, history, and culture, and he compares it to Moby-Dick and Ulysses. For me these are reasons not to read a long book of fiction.

I’m more intrigued by what novels can do other than reporting. Murnane’s an extreme case, but he is fundamentally correct: novels do many irreplaceable things, but the most important, the capacity that isn’t shared by any other medium, is the ability to weave imagination with logic, memory with reasoning, producing a sort of complexity I’ll try to define in the last heading. It’s a pity to keep asking such a complex medium to perform simple tricks, or to behave like a newspaper or a diary. I agree with Mitchelmore when he says fiction is most challenging when it’s doing something other than “engaging readers with... information.” If you’re a writer, and you want to tell people about your life, your culture, or your identity, by all means do, but keep in mind that novels have a different capacity.

2. A novel should not be “careful, cautious and professional” as Mitchelmore also says. In the wake of McSweeney’s and the collection MFA vs NYC, there is a fair consensus about what “professional” literary fiction is. The “MFA style” is capacious: it can accommodate the full range of new subjects and settings, but it’s typically well crafted, with unimprovable word choices, polished turns of phrase, carelessly skillful descriptions, well-managed elisions and ellipses, knowingly tweaked narrative lines, and sharp, pared-down dialogue. It does whatever it does with full assurance, protected by a hard veneer of competence. Workshop stories are “nice, cautious, [and] boring,” as David Foster Wallace put it back in 1988. They’re “as tough to find technical fault with as they are to remember after putting them down.” Erik Hoel notes the minimalist quality of much current fiction:

Workshop-trained writers are often, not always, but often, intrinsically defensive. This single fact explains almost all defining features of contemporary literature. What you’re looking at on the shelf are not so much books as battlements. Consider the minimalism of many current novels, their brevity—all to shrink the attack surface. Oh, the prose is always well-polished, with the occasional pleasing turn of phrase, but never distinctive, never flowery nor reaching.

This minimalism is very different from the one I teach in art history. Those artists—Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin—produced large, unexpected, often awkward and intrusive objects. Hoel is right that the anonymized surfaces and generic content of the new prose minimalism, as well as the masks of autofiction, can be understood as defenses: in autofiction, the author isn’t accountable, because they can’t ever quite be found.

The “professional” style isn’t a matter of who has an MFA and who doesn’t; that notion was nicely disproven in a study by Richard Jean So and Andrew Piper. But it can be clearly felt in a reading of literary journals, especially those associated with universities. During the last ten years I’ve read, and often subscribed, to 153 different journals that publish fiction. That list is probably about half the number of English-language literary journals that aren’t exclusively poetry. It’s a daunting ocean of writing. Here’s just the letter P, from my spreadsheet: Pank, Paperbag, Paris Review, Penn Review, Place, Ploughshares, Poets and Writers, Popula, Porter House Review, Prairie Fire, Psychopomp, A Public Place, The Puritan. Pretty much an impossible reading assignment, especially because the spreadsheet needs constant revision as small journals come and go. My ten years of reading didn’t give me a sense of uniformity. Some journals focus on regional literature, others nourish older styles and voices or are nostalgic or sentimental, and a few are determinedly experimental. But there is a style that comes through the haze of voices. It’s writing that’s smooth, assured, untroubled by awkwardness, with a minimum of technical faults, off-kilter phrases, or unaccountable lapses in tone. In short: it’s workshopped, professionalized.

In part I’m describing the kind of form-filling that Shields polemicized against in Reality Hunger, but it is also the professionalism of several generations of writers who have come out of MFA programs and been shaped by residencies, workshops, and conferences. It’s a difficult tide to swim against. Anti-professionalism, well-judged lapses, deliberate awkwardness, odd and quirky plotlines, and surrealist fantasies are not enough to escape the prison house of workshopping. In my own field of academic writing, there’s a similar interest in rule-breaking and innovation, and a similar despondency about the mills of higher education and their increasing fidelity to just a few universities. There isn’t an easy answer, and it’s been said that academic uniformity is the air our age has chosen to breathe. But it’s always possible to keep an eye on your imaginary reader for signs of unease. If they can read what you write without being upset or seriously confused, or if they keep nodding their head and smiling, then what you write might be more careful and cautious than you think.

3. A novel need not provide good companionship. For many millions of readers, novels are company, solace, escape, entertainment. You might be afraid to have a life like a character in a novel, but you can understand enough of what they experience to feel things along with them. Even bad characters become companions. A novel can keep you company like nobody’s business.

Sometimes, though, novels can do something stranger. They can ignore you. It’s like the difference between a public lecture where the speaker is attentive to the audience, eliciting laughs, making eye contact, and a lecture where the speaker is wrapped up in what they’re saying, and you just have to follow along. Each kind has its strengths. It’s always good to be in the company of a speaker who wants to involve you, but there are also times when the speaker has to concentrate on what they have to say. And it’s seldom a pleasure to listen to someone who panders too much, who’s desperate for your attention and approval. (I’m thinking of some over-produced TED talks.)

Most novelists think of their readers a lot. You can feel their eyes on you as you read. If you squirm or fidget, they ratchet up the drama, put in some sex, or lure you with a new mystery. But a novel can be something other than an opportunity for “engaging readers with company.” That’s another of Mitchelmore’s maxims. A novel can be like the most interesting person at a party, the one who sits at the bar looking glamorous and ignoring everyone.

I hadn’t realized how continuously authors seek my attention, how desperately they want me to keep reading, until I discovered some writers who don’t think that way. Joyce is like that in Finnegans Wake. Was he thinking of an actual human reader at all when he wrote that book? It’s not clear. He pictured ideal readers, who would basically dedicate their lives to reading (and he got them, in the form of academics), but there’s nothing in the book to indicate he spent time imagining or accommodating any plausible, real-life readers. When you read Finnegans Wake you’re teased with puzzles and amused by jokes, but the person telling them isn’t looking at you. His eyes are somewhere out on the horizon.

This sense of being ignored by the author is one of the reasons I like Arno Schmidt, a postwar German novelist who is as famous in German-speaking countries as Joyce. For over three years I moderated a weekly online group reading Schmidt’s monstrous novel Bottom’s Dream. Every Saturday we work through another five or ten pages, dense with references to hundreds of forgotten European writers, poets, and critics. Most of the time the author doesn’t help us at all: he quotes a line and names the author, and it’s up to us to find the source and read enough of it to understand why he’s mentioned it. His characters have no discernible inner lives, so there’s nothing to empathize with. There isn’t much of a plot, and only intermittent descriptions of the surroundings. Schmidt once said he wrote for four hundred people, but our group has wondered if there have even been more than a few dozen. Still, I love the feeling that Schmidt never felt he had to add a detail or a bit of dialogue to keep my attention. You can go for a hundred pages in Bottom’s Dream without encountering a hint that the author cares about you, wants your attention, or notices when you’re bored. Schmidt just wrote what he wanted, without even looking up to see if anyone might be there.

There are many novels like this. It’s sink or swim with Musil, Bernhard, Stein, Perec, Beckett, Gaddis, or, for that matter, Spenser’s Faerie Queene. After reading Schmidt or Joyce, a writer like Karl-Ove Knausgaard comes across as compulsively, pathetically addicted to my attention. I can feel how much he wants me to keep reading, and what he’ll do to ensure that I don’t close the book. Most authors fill their novels with helpful cues, tempting hints, friendly reminders, entrancing set pieces, accumulating tension. But if you’re a writer, consider this alternative. You can say to yourself: I won’t be a dependable source of pleasure, I’m not a guide, I’m not there to reassure the reader. I’m here to write what I want, what I feel needs to be said, and it will only be a distraction to continuously try to picture what my reader might want.

I think interesting contemporary novels should mainly fail to give dependable pleasure. They shouldn’t console, guide, or reassure. The reader should be on their own, repeatedly, even continuously. There’s an often-quoted passage in Kafka that puts this question of companionship very well. In fact, it says it so powerfully that I suspect some people who quote it can only hope to live up to it:

We ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

Not every novel needs to hack its readers to pieces or exile them into the wilderness. But perhaps we could use more of that, and less of the nurturing, healing, hugging, and handshaking of contemporary fiction.

4. A novel is complex. This is the most complex problem. Complexity itself is tarnished by its association with privileged, over-educated white male writers, from Joyce and Proust to David Foster Wallace. And it’s ideologically ruined by its association with the Frankfurt School of modernist criticism, according to which serious, ambitious modern art has to be complex. I have a different, and simpler idea of complexity, which I find helpful in thinking about why I’m attracted to complex novels. The sort of complexity that interests me comes naturally when a book is long enough. That’s because as Montaigne knew, despite our best intentions, thought wanders off wherever it wants, and so do moods and feelings. Any novel that gives itself the space to wander will eventually go off-topic. War and Peace has twenty-four philosophical essays in it. The Man without Qualities begins as essays, gets lost, and stays lost. Complexity isn’t easy to define. I’ve tried a couple of times, and I think it helps to distinguish real complexity from simple complexity. A high-rise building is complex in an uninteresting way (it may have special elevators, a rooftop water tank, or a tuned mass damper). Those might be of interest to engineers, but they are repeated in many buildings, and most people don’t care much about them. I’d like to call things like jets, atomic clocks, particle accelerators, and high-rise buildings “intricate,” and reserve “complex” for things that don’t follow patterns or formulas, things that are unique, or only partly known, or unclassifiable. That’s why I don’t count murder mysteries as complex: they often have intricate plots, but in the end everything’s tied up. A complex murder mystery, in this sense, would be Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur, because nothing’s resolved, or possibly Perec’s unfinished 53 Days. A complex novel will undermine a reader’s expectations as it goes. Is this a murder mystery at all? Maybe it’s a memoir, or an autofiction, or a romance… or possibly nothing that’s identifiable. Complexity isn’t easy to define in positive terms, but it has a specifiable effect on reader: it’s puzzling. A complex novel is one that keeps you wondering, keeps you working to understand what the author thinks they’re doing, and does not ever answer your questions. When you finish a genuinely complex novel, all the guesses you had while you were reading will be wrong, and the novel will only be like itself, and not like any other novel.

I hope these four proposals can suggest ways to write novels that are less conventional and more challenging. I wrote them mainly for myself, to help articulate some ideas that drive my novel, Weak in Comparison to Dreams. I was determined to do each of the things on this list: not report about the world, not be careful or cautious, fail to be a reliable companion, and create real complexity. I wanted to avoid intricacy and open the door to difficulty. I had ideas and themes—lots of them, since I’m the sort of writer who uses cards, spreadsheets, graphs, summaries, and outlines—but the novel wasn’t guided by them. Instead it was steered past a succession of achievable goals that I wanted to avoid. I knew I didn’t want the pleasure of the book to come from its intricacy, from its appeal to the reader, or from the unusual subjects I describe. I didn’t want to contribute a memoir, an entertainment, an intellectual puzzle, a political fiction, a historical fiction, a speculative fiction, an allegory, a satire, a comedy, a tragedy, a romance, an autofiction or a metafiction.

All this may sound negative and not very realistic, but it’s the way I have always thought about art: if you read enough, you’re likely to start seeing formulas everywhere, and then comes the question: what isn’t a formula?

There is a book’s worth more to write on this subject, but manifestos are personal. You have to make your own. You might reject a couple of these points, and add others of your own. What I’d like to communicate here is that most novels written these days are too easy. Too professionalized, too much concerned with reporting the “real world,” too simple in their structure, too familiar and friendly and entertaining and consoling, too hypnotized by fame, reviews, and imagined readers. Those are what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called category mistakes.

We don’t love dogs because they fetch.

An Introduction to A Fiction

My agent told me not to write an introduction. She said it’s not done, novels don’t need them, and when had I ever seen a novel with an introduction?

It’s true, few writers have contributed introductions to their own novels, and I think there are good reasons for that. Fiction stands on its own, and even insists on its independence by creating worlds that are incommensurate with ours.

Still, I wanted to write an introduction, so I set out to read as many as I could find so I might discover what is wrong with them. Some are mainly advertisements, and that seems strange to me, because if someone’s already bought your book hopefully they don’t need to be urged to read it. Nabokov is a curious example, as he always is. Late in his life, when he was living in Montreux, he wrote introductions to most of his novels, including the ones he’d written in Russian. The introductions are elegant but insufferable, even for someone like me who is still sometimes hypnotized by the mammillary luster of some of his prose. He’s continuously protesting that his novels have “a total lack of social significance” even if they happen, like The Eye, to be about Russian expats in Berlin in the late 1920s. And he’s awfully boasty. The preface to Bend Sinister insouciantly rehearses all the hidden bons mots that an “alert commuter cannot fail to notice,” such as the clever way that “a fusion between two cheap novels (by Remarque and Sholokhov)”—that is, All Quiet on the Western Front and And Quiet Flows the Don—“produces the neat All Quiet on the Don.” It’s the sort of thing that sinks the most devoted student into a light slumber.

Dostoevsky loved introductions, but he couldn’t settle on a way to write them. Some are titled in odd ways: “An Introductory,” “Instead of a Foreword,” “Instead of an Introduction,” “From the Author.” There are a couple of untitled introductions, and a few that have novelistic titles like “On Love of the People.” Some are anonymous but written by a person who’s clearly Dostoevsky. Others are evasive or they’re signed by fictional characters. It’s all very complicated. The literary scholar Lewis Bagby has written an entire book on the subject. He says it’s helpful to use a system devised by the French critic Gérard Genette, who divided writers’ introductions into authorial, authentic, fictive, allographic, actorial, and apocryphal. I find this nearly impossible to remember.

It’s been said that the best introductions to novels are the ones Henry James wrote for eighteen volumes of Scribner’s New York Edition of his works. He called them prefaces, but they’re for people who have already read all his books. They were opportunities for him to “dream again,” to look back over everything he’d written and reimagine the problems and purposes of each book and the growth of his “whole operative consciousness.” He was inordinately proud of them. They’re “a plea for Criticism, for Discrimination,” he wrote, “for Appreciation on other than infantile lines.” Indeed, they should galvanize “the odd numbness of the general sensibility.” As I make my way through them I try my best to be his ideal reader. He says he’s been impatient for years about people’s responses to his fiction, but increasingly gratified by his growing achievement, which now, in his sixty-first year, “looms large” in its impending “completeness.” I’m a bit worried that I won’t be able to keep up. After all, the art of fiction “bristles with questions the very terms of which are difficult to apply and appreciate.” I don’t want to be a bad student, one not gifted with what the critic Richard Blackmur called James’s “excess of intelligence.” It’s a relief to know he can’t ask me any questions. At the end I’m exhausted, I just want to creep away.

The best thing, as nearly every novelist seems to know, is just not to write an introduction. If you don’t, your reader is plunged from the very first line into an imagined world, and that can be a delicious feeling. You, the author, are absent, rendered fictional, along with the entire so-called real world. That’s one of those formulas that’s so simple it’s easy to read right past it: fiction is enabled by rendering the author fictional.

As soon as I present myself the way I am now, speaking in what I’m hoping will be understood as a version of my own voice, I imply that I’m providing my own feelings and beliefs, as opposed to the voices of the narrator and the characters in my novel. Even though this is not natural speech, the notion that it is truthful and direct may interfere with your capacity to sympathize with my characters. You are likely to recall the tone and style of this introduction when you read the novel, and compare it to the ways the characters think and speak. The fact that I seem to be proposing that there is a natural way to write, using something fairly like my own voice, may itself undermine your trust in my ability to create characters, because it may seem to betray a kind of irremediable naïvete about how voice works in fiction. You may be especially suspicious since my recent reading of James’s introductions is having a lingering effect on my writing, compelling me to stretch my thoughts, not necessarily past the breaking point beyond which they become irrelevant to the subject at hand, but toward that point, until it may seem that this couldn’t possibly be my real voice, and indeed, that my principal interest might be to linger over my thoughts, whatever they might be, rather than deciding, once and for all, what I actually intend to say. An introduction raises the possibility that the author may not understand that no writer has a nonfiction voice that is decisively, unambiguously distinct from the voices that appear in their novel.

If I’m Gerald Murnane, this isn’t a problem, because then what I am about to present, which we both call “fiction” even though it is nearly certain that my use of the word differs radically from yours, is already what you are reading. I am writing this so-called introduction and the following so-called fiction to solve some problem for myself: an issue of memory, most likely. You won’t get any news from my novel about the real world. I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. If I am Gerald Murnane, you won’t learn about contemporary life in Australia, and you certainly won’t learn about my life in any way that resembles what we both call  “nonfiction”—even though it is nearly certain that you look for “nonfiction” in places that I see as still well within the borders of what we both call “fiction”—but you will learn about how I imagine horse racing tournaments, or why I was prompted to remember a certain configuration of swampy streams that used to exist on the site of what is now LaTrobe University in Melbourne, and how I made that an occasion for a speech. But I am not Gerald Murnane, and I’m grateful for that, because among other things it means I think there has to be some difference between an introduction to my novel and the novel itself.

The infection of disbelief that I mentioned runs both ways. You may find it hard to believe that I am the author I claim to be. You might even put down this introduction and try to find out about my professional work or the story behind the novel you’re supposedly holding. And if you read the novel, you may find yourself wanting to fact-check as you go along. Scenes and characters may not seem satisfyingly fictional, because they will be haunted by the purportedly real voice on these opening pages. The real world, the one supposedly verifiable on the internet, will threaten to explain the novel, and conversely, the fictional world of the novel may seem frailer or more artificial because its author apparently believes there is a way to step outside it.

        The first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein opens with an unsigned preface, written in first person. It excuses the book by saying that what it describes couldn’t possibly happen, despite some evidence proposed by “Dr. Darwin” (that’s Erasmus, Charles’s grandfather), but that its “fancy” is licensed by such classics as the Iliad, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Paradise Lost. The unsigned preface is noble and defensive, and it was written by her husband. Thirteen years later, Mary wrote another introduction and put it before her husband’s. She’s coy about the earlier preface. “As far as I can recollect,” she says, he wrote it. Her preface tells the story of how she wrote ghost stories in Switzerland with Lord Byron (that episode has been staged in at least thirty-one movies according to the IMDb), but it’s really another apology for the book. She says that when she was a child she loved “indulging in waking dreams,” and when she was in Switzerland, her “imagination, unbidden, possessed” her until she saw “the horrid thing” at her bedside, staring with “yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.” Together the two prefaces are an intriguing pair, implying as they do that the true horror of the book is its creator’s imagination. If I then go on and read Frankenstein, I am impressed by the power of its author’s imagination but also distracted by the two embarrassed defenses.

The first novelist to write a nonfiction introduction to his work was the ancient Syrian satirist who called himself Lucian. He mainly just wants to defend the “lies” he’s about to tell. Everyone has the “liberty of lying,” he says, and in fact if there’s one thing he can say proudly and truthfully, it’s that he lies. What I am about to read isn’t inspired by real life, he says. It never existed, and could never exist. That’s Lucian’s version of the pusillanimous legal disclaimer, “Any resemblance between characters depicted in this book and real life is purely coincidental.” And with that he sets sail from the Pillars of Hercules into the West Ocean (that is, through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic), and the happy lies begin. But are they all lies? Don’t some have serious purposes? Maybe if you disclaim something you already protest too much. Whenever I read that legal disclaimer on the copyright page of a novel, I feel sure that the novel does refer to real life, and that ruins some of my enjoyment of the fiction and some of my trust in the author and the editor, because they’re apparently afraid of lawyers.

Writing an introduction also risks collapsing the distance between the author’s thoughts and the narrator’s. Novelists who have experimented with narrators who are nearly the same as the book’s implied authors—Proust, Murnane, Philip Roth, Ben Lerner, Sally Rooney, Lucian—depend on not being entirely forthcoming about who “Proust,” “Murnane,” “Zuckerman,” “Lerner,” “Rooney,” or “Lucian” actually are. If any of them had written introductions to their novels, it might have been especially difficult to believe that the “Proust,” “Murnane,” “Zuckerman,” “Lerner,” “Rooney,” or “Lucian” I encounter in the pages of the novels are significantly or even interestingly different from the people who had already introduced themselves to me in the introduction. I imagine Proust’s introduction might have ended up containing assertions of the following sort: “The narrator of this novel is an intelligent, thoughtful young man, of undisclosed age (his age is indeterminate for many reasons, which will become evident, but already a reader may sense the reason for the elision, because a novel three thousand six hundred pages long can hardly be written in one sitting, by a person of a single age, so to speak). The young man wants to become a writer, as you might suppose I did when I was young. So perhaps I am that person. If you read to volume five, The Captive, you will encounter this passage: ‘Now she began to speak; her first words were “darling” or “my darling” followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would produce “darling Marcel” or “my darling Marcel.”’ You may read that passage as an indication that the narrator of this book is, after all, myself, but please note that it is put hypothetically—‘if we give the narrator the same name as the author’—and further, that we agree to give the narrator my Christian name, but not to identify him as me. The sense of the passage, for a reader who has entertained the question of the narrator’s identity for the preceding two thousand pages, might be best captured by the possibility that the narrator happens to have my name but remains fictional, as if the name ‘Marcel’ can barely be distinguished through the shimmering veils of fiction.” I think an introduction like that, signed “Marcel Proust, Paris, 1927,” would pretty much ruin the book.

Maybe the worst damage an introduction can do is to make it seem as if the author has lost faith in the capacity of fiction. Just by writing these pages I imply that something in my novel is in need of support. Why would I write an introduction, if not to shore up some deficiency? Maybe I couldn’t work out how to put certain things in the mouths or minds of my characters. Perhaps I just don’t have the confidence it takes to jump in the deep end of the pool of fiction. Or I lack certain writing skills, so there are things I feel I need to present as truth, rather than explore through invention. Or I have fundamentally misunderstood the power and reach of fiction, imagining it can’t walk by itself, that it’s feeble and needs someone to speak up for it. If any of those things happened, I’d be a typical academic, generously assisting fiction so people can understand it.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of novelists have either decided not to write introductions or have followed the tens or hundreds of thousands before them and simply not thought of writing an introduction. That overwhelming majority surely indicates there must be a definitive reason for not writing introductions, something to do with the nature of the novel. By writing this introduction, I show I have missed that point, which is probably nothing less than the point of fiction and probably also the point of nonfiction.

I imagine some readers will suspect they know what I am up to. Ever since Don Quixote, Jacques the Fatalist, and Tristram Shandy, there has been a tradition in which the author steps to the front of the fictional stage and addresses the reader. Tristram Shandy is forever talking to his reader, that is his “male-reader” and his “female-reader,” who overlook the “excellence” of his many digressions, who need to be reminded of things they’ve just heard, who “will be content to wait” apparently forever for explanations, who have overly  “clean” imaginations, who are “unlearned” and have “never yet been able to guess at anything”—even though I do guess, I don’t need to be reminded, I’m not content to wait, and as far as I know my imagination isn’t especially clean. In the book, Shandy is a “caressing prefacer, stifling his reader.” Sterne sits in the wings, safe from his readers’ rages.

It has been a half century since William Gass coined the word “metafiction,” and there are many variations on that theme. In the idiosyncratic liner notes he wrote for the audiobook version of his metafictional novel The Tunnel, Gass tells us that the text of his novel, the one we’re about to hear him read, is to be imagined as hidden away between the pages of another book the narrator has written called Guilt and Innocence, which is itself barely quoted and may possibly not exist, even in the fictional world of the novel. Those liner notes are not part of the book, but later he surprises me, because William Frederick Kohler says the same thing in the book—he’s going to “slide the pages” of The Tunnel “between the pages of my manuscript.” When I hear that (or read it, on page 112) I have a strange feeling, like this part isn’t fiction, and then I wish, again, that Gass hadn’t said anything in the liner notes. I think people are annoyed at metafiction because it takes us out of the world of fiction in order to show us something unrewarding, like the person named Lerner, when all we want is more of “Lerner,” and I think it’s also annoying because it makes me wonder why the entire book isn’t nonfiction to begin with, perhaps ornamented with dollops of invention, and that isn’t a rewarding thing to be asked to think about, because I want it to be fiction, otherwise I wouldn’t have bought the book to begin with.

         Readers who are used to metafictional practices may suspect either that my voice will continue in the novel itself, or that the novel will refer back to this introduction, the way the characters  “Ben Lerner” or “Sally Rooney,” who are writers, refer to things written by the real-life authors with those same names, or the way the narrator coyly named “Marcel” refers in the end to the novel he will write, which is also the novel we have just read. If this book of mine is metafiction, you may expect me to announce there’s a character in the novel whom we might agree to call by my name, or that I will comment on the novel as you read it, or that this introduction is a fiction written by someone in the novel, or that this was never an introduction to the novel but simply the beginning of the novel.

I have no such intentions. No one I describe in my novel has any awareness of this introduction, or of my identity as I’m presenting it now. I am after something different. I decided to write this introduction, despite all the very good reasons not to, because I do not want my fiction to turn me into a fiction. I don’t want to lead an indistinct existence as an intermittently implied author. I’d rather not be the character with a name remarkably similar to mine who makes their way through a novel supposedly written by someone with that same name, or the character somewhere deep in the novel who suddenly looks up from his desk and sees the reader, and begins chatting as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. I also don’t want to be someone you can find if you’re curious, whose supposedly real self floats on social media or shows up at readings. I want to be this person, sequestered in this text, in this magazine, with this exactly specifiable level of detail and reliability.

I would like to be myself, different from “what are called real people,” as Murnane says, and distant from the “far-reaching vistas and the intricate topography,” as he also says, that will begin as soon as this paragraph ends.