LAIRD HUNT’S THE EXQUISITE AND STEVE ERICKSON’S ZEROVILLE

LAIRD HUNT’S THE EXQUISITE AND STEVE ERICKSON’S ZEROVILLE:

ANTI-NARRATIVE, ABSURD MACHINES, AND SCHIZOPHRENIC FRAGMENTATION IN POST-9/11 POSTMODERNITY

by

Val Killpack

Steve Erickson’s novel Zeroville branches into territory which eschews the traditional narrative.  Laird Hunt’s novel The Exquisite also leaves the linear plot and story framework behind.  Both of these novels, though with different techniques, explore a postmodern, fragmented reality.  Zeroville exposes a consciousness based on media exposure, and mimics that formulation, telling its story through the lens of hyperreality—where the image creates the reality, and the concepts and ideas then follow.  The Exquisite follows a parallel or removed reality, surrealist in nature, a consciousness based upon a certain schizophrenia symptomatic of late-capitalist society (such as America stands in the age of post-9/11).  Just as in post-1968 France, post-9/11 America yearns for new epistemological avenues, and in a time of ontological confusion—why did 9/11 happen?—disparity becomes an ally, and these novels embrace the fracturing of not only society, but of subjectivity itself.  In the time of late-capitalism, a time where norms exist within and are defined by rigid consumer/marketing structural systems, one reflects his/her subjectivity in a non-existent mirror, or more precisely, millions of tiny pieces of mirror, and schizophrenic identity results, at least in cases of true health, i.e. when the subject does not conform to tired tropes.  Both of these novels, then, reflect a narrative sensibility based not on linearity, but painted spatially instead—a montage, a collage.

                In Zeroville, the chapters count up to 227—“Vikar doesn’t know it, but everything now has been reset to zero”—then count back down (Erickson 2007, P 179).  This form, itself, suggests a restructuring of temporal functioning within the text.  The short chapters mimic scenes in a film, and these characters—virtually all of them in the book—seem to have based their identity on film, with all of it’s flashing from one scene to the next.  Dotty and Vikar, then, as editors, can exercise power over the identity formation of society.  They seem to be the wizards behind the curtain—ephemeral or not…

…Vikar can lay bare either credibility or mendacity in the character, irrespective of the actor’s intention or the writer’s or director’s.  […]  In a movie, every shot is a profile of something.  […]  Vikar reinforces or sabotages the audience’s perceptions, not to mention the film’s.  He sets free from within the false film the true film (Erickson 2007, P 156).

As a face is embedded into the film, which may be the baseline, the “zero,” then this image functions as the “father” of identity, the other schizophrenic half.  In Delueze and Guattari’s landmark text A Thousand Plateaus, there also exists a chapter that is the reset to zero, “Year Zero: Faciality.”  In this section, about the middle of their text, the facial image is discussed:

Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations.  Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion, would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that select the sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a dominant reality.  The face itself is redundancy.  It is itself in redundancy with the redundancies of significance or frequency, and those of resonance or subjectivity.  The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen.  The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, P 168).

Vikar, then, needs the face transposed into film in order to define himself.  The film The Passion of Joan of Arc, found in a mental institution, and manifested in various forms, comes from a history of schizophrenia, literally.  The split of two faces tattooed on the two lobes of Vikar’s head—this image signifies his schizophrenic nature.  Even the film A Place in the Sun alludes to a man split apart (by two women).  Vikar—named after Angela Vickers of A Place in the Sun?—formulates his own schizophrenic identity based upon his reflection in film.  Is this pathology, then, symptomatic of Hollywood consumerism?  Is it a pathology, at all, or is Vikar reaching beyond a system that is pathological in itself?  The face, being the images in film, especially ones subliminally inserted/viewed by Vikar, forms the original signified, from which human consciousness forms a signifier to attach to, namely in identity and formation of the self, and from this is born the complex system of consciousness, the sign, the lived idea.  When this all is based in a fragmented, split, flashing montage of images in film and media, though, the resultant human consciousness manifests schizophrenically in some cases, as demonstrated by Vikar in Zeroville and Henry in The Exquisite.

                Both of these novels operate outside of linear time.  Zeroville reflects a filmic sensibility, which elevates plot over story, and plot can be in medias res with flashbacks, flash-forwards, flashes of all sorts, as a matter of fact—a montage of faces and scenes.  Vikar plays with this notion of time through his “editing, or montage or mise-en-scène or whatever fancy word they’re using” (Erickson 2007, P 211).  This editing brings the many faces into a spatial field, negating temporality, in a sense:

“The scenes of a movie,” Vikar says, “can be shot out of sequence not because it’s more convenient, but because all the scenes of a movie are really happening at the same time.  No scene really leads to the next, all scenes lead to each other.  No scene is really shot out of order.  It’s a false concern that a scene must anticipate another scene that follows, even if it’s not been shot yet, or that a scene must reflect a scene that precedes it, even if it’s not been shot yet, because all scenes anticipate and reflect each other.  Scenes reflect what has not yet happened.”  […]  “Scenes that have not yet happened,” he explains to those around the table, “have” (Erickson 2007, P 237).

Time becomes less the issue here, and the story, the film, the novel—e.g. Zeroville and The Exquisite—move into a spatial dimension, where all times are part of a larger picture, and the temporal hierarchy dissipates into spatial memory.  Past, present, and future become merely directions, not unlike east or west.  This narrative—or anti-narrative—forms what Baudrillard calls a pseudo-reality…

…in other words, a world of events, history, culture and ideas produced not form the fluctuating and contradictory nature of reality, but produced as artifacts from the technical manipulation of the medium and its coded elements (Redhead 2008, P 29).

Vikar, Zazi, Soledad, Viking Man, as well as Henry, Mr. Kindt, Tulip, etc. all exist as those produced artefacts of media and its technical presentation, which is out of time, which is fragmented, which is schizophrenic in nature.

                In Zeroville, this representation of Vikar’s history, and of yet a deeper history, that of postmodernity, cannot be shown through the traditional story—no—not so easily.  Thus—how to portray it?—how…

…to present the fact that the unpresentable exists.  To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible:  […]  how to make visible that there is something which cannot be seen?  […]  This abstraction itself is like a presentation of the infinite, its “negative presentation.”  […]  It will please only by causing pain (Lyotard 1984, P 78).

And Vikar then sees, toward his end, flashes of pain, fragments of the infinite.  Is he Moses?  Is he Biblical?  The enigmatic end of the novel brings Vikar further into a realm that is not only infinite, but seemingly, unrepresentable.  This plain of reality, above and outside of the text, and undoubtedly, outside of linear narrative, shows a character, an identity, a subjectivity that fragments beyond traditional notions of temporality.  The fiction and the “real” combine, exchange, and intermingle into a collage/montage of narrative:

Here, the purely fictional intent is underscored and reaffirmed in the production of imaginary people and events among whom from time to time real-life ones unexpectedly appear and disappear (Jameson 1991, P369).

This confusion of what exists in the imaginary realm and what is “real-life” becomes, in the reader’s pragmatic sense, irrelevant.  Suspension of disbelief extends from the first sitting with the text, and the form of the novel envelopes into that suspension, along with the content—for these are inseparable.  The form, then moves beyond linear temporality, and must, in order to represent the multiple identities and aspects of the story, branch into an atemporal subjectivity:

The crisis in historicity now dictates a return, in a new way, to the question of temporal organization in general in the postmodern force field, and indeed, to the problem of the form that time, temporality, and the syntagmatic will be able to take in a culture increasingly dominated by space and spatial logic.  If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but “heaps of fragments” and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory (Jameson 1991, P 25).

Jameson’s logic here demonstrates what the writers and artists already understand as they create texts such as Zeroville and The Exquisite.  The multiple, short chapters of Zeroville bring this sensibility into form through the form, and mirroring that, through content.  Story lines intermingle in staccato throughout the book, flashing the text into being all at once.

                On deeper examination, The Exquisite seems to refer to a doubling of itself—as a schizophrenic mirror.  What business actually enacts what?  “It’s all fake” the texts states (Hunt 2006, P 195).  Is the text a simulacrum of itself?  “It’s a closed system.  No outside perspective” (Hunt 2006, P 234).  Which narrative is “real”?  The mystery resides therein.  Pseudo-murders or hospital ward?  Are these lines of narrative parallel, or are they consecutive in some way?  “My present bleeds all over my past” (Hunt 2006, P 113).  This bleeding of lines also happens spatially, “people and objects tended to lose their definition and bleed into each other, an erosion of border and contour” (Hunt 2006, P 211), “Like mist.  Drifting out over everything.  Blurring all the borders” (Hunt 2006, P 220).  This New York, a city in turmoil in the post-9/11 wake, leaves the inhabitants in a reverberating chaos that shatters identity, fractures the subjects as well as the city itself, bringing a split schizo-consciousness with it, an ephemera where signified and signifier become confused, it is “a city of subtle simulacra, of deceptive surfaces, of glib and phantom shimmerings” (Hunt 2006, P 2).  Consciousness, when shattered, brings multiple, simultaneous identities which defamiliarise the subjects, leaving the narrative ambiguous at best.  This consciousness—as portrayed in The Exquisite, as well as Zeroville—is referred to by Deleuze and Guattari as schizoanalysis, and is clearly visible in many post-9/11 texts:

This approach articulated a new mode of postmodern self organised around concepts of plural and multiple identities and decentred or displaced consciousnesses (Woods 1999, P 30).

Where, then, does consciousness reside?  This question, as posed in The Exquisite, cannot be easily answered.  The difference in the metaphor between the illusion and the “real” may not be so important, after all:

The metaphoric act constitutively involves the forgetting or repression of itself: concepts generated by metaphor at once conceal their origins and stage themselves as true or referential; they emit a claim to being literal language.  The metaphoric and the literal are thus at one, at least insofar as they are the twin inevitable moments of the same process.  That process, then, generates a variety of illusions (Jameson 1991, P 242).

The question, then, as must be present in the noir/detective novel, points not to what has happened and what will happen, as tradition might have it, but it aims at ‘what is happening now?’  And the answer?—all of it, everything is happening now.  The psychological process of dealing with trauma, of sorting through the remains of post-terror in New York, this process works on many levels at once.  The question is not what has taken place and what will, which may not even be relevant in the noir text:

The detective novel is a particularly hybrid genre in this respect, since most often the something = X that has happened is on the order of a murder or theft, but exactly what it is that has happened remains to be discovered, and in the present determined by the model detective.  Yet it would be an error to reduce these different aspects to the three dimensions of time.  Something happened, something is going to happen, can designate a past so immediate, a future so near, that they are one (as Husserl would say) with retentions and protensions of the present itself (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, PP 192-193).

The question is not ‘what has happened’ and/or ‘what will happen,’ since time is collapsed, and this temporal notion has broken down.  The novel works spatially, instead.  But, also, the question is not even ‘what is happening now,’ because ultimately the process does not need that clarity.  The collage of images presents a reality that should be understood aesthetically, and therein is the meaning.  Abstract expressionist art does not ask the viewer to create metaphors for the images on the canvas.  To stand before a [Rothko, Gottlieb, Olitski, Pollock] is not to interpret the images as objects that exist in the day-to-day world, but it is to hold oneself in the field of the creation, to allow the art to affect the viewer without working into the cognitive space of sign, signifier, and signified.  The work of art presents only itself.  To read these texts, also, works in a similar vein.  To ask the question of what and who—which may inevitably happen—but the answer may be the question itself.  To resolve in a certain ‘not knowing,’ at least in a literal sense, that is to understand the text more fully.  In The Exquiste, Henry asks:

What are your names?  Who is everyone?  What the fuck is going on?

[…]

Is that real?  I asked Cornelius.

Of course not, none of this is real, Henry.

None of it?

(Hunt 2006, PP 234, 236)

In these last few pages of the novel, Henry asks these questions, and none of them are answered—not really.  It all seems a little absurd, and perhaps that is the point.  The struggle and futility of sorting it all out, the experience, the process—this activity presents absurdly and nonsensically, yet it rings true, appears valid.  The imagination of the subject portrays the ephemera of reality, and reality portrays itself ephemerally, and both notions collapse into a magnificent anti-narrative, an abstract expression:

The artistic and literary imagination conceives a great number of absurd machines: whether through the indeterminate character of the motor or energy source, through the physical impossibility of the organization of the working parts, or through the logical impossibility of the mechanism of transmission (Guattari 2009a, P 91).

The splattering of paint—as written through the nonlinear hyperreality of these texts—brings with it the absurd machine.  Chaos of fragmentation ensues if the human experience of post-9/11 is to be brought into an accurate field of representation.  While The Exquisite refers to a disfigured depiction in a Rembrandt painting, Zeroville directs itself from a filmic sensibility, more of a montage than a collage, though both forms work in a space of linear collapse—a delirious, chaotic presentation.  And…

How does a delirium begin?  Perhaps the cinema is able to capture the movement of madness, precisely because it is not analytical and regressive, but explores a global field of coexistence (Deleuze & Guattari 1977, P 274).

These texts break new ground in working cinematically, in this sense, to bring forward the experience of media overstimulation, of the postmodern speeding train, speeding aeroplanes, crashing into chaos, into annihilation, into pieces of image and movement so scattered and disparate that only the imagination can capture it all.

                Marking new space with an unformatted anti-narrative appears as the only acceptable means of conveying the spirit of an age steeped in exploitation of media, consumerism, and images, speeding faster and faster, and then ‘playing’ among the chards of debris as the machines contort and splinter.  Absurdly, fantastically, and deliriously, a schizoanalytic approach to understanding of the post-9/11 world unveils itself as the only sane method of creating story, or maybe, one could say, anti-story.  Laird Hunt’s The Exquisite and Steve Erickson’s Zeroville exemplify this sensibility, and in so doing, pave the way for a freer, more imaginative, and truer novel of these late postmodern times.

REFERENCES

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari.  (1977).  Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  New York, NY: The Viking Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari.  (1987).  A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Erickson, Steve.  (2007).  Zeroville.  New York, NY: Europa Editions.

Guattari, Félix.  (2009a).  Chaosophy, revised edition.  Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Guattari, Félix.  (2009b).  Soft Subversions, revised edition.  Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Hunt, Laird.  (2006).  The Exquisite.  Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press.

Jameson, Fredric.  (1991).  Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  Durham, UK: Duke University Press.

Lyotard, Jean-François.  (1984).  The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.  Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Redhead, Steve.  (2008).  The Jean Baudrillard Reader.  New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Woods, Tim.  (1999).  Beginning Postmodernism.  New York, NY: Manchester University Press.