On September 1, 1659, the English son of a Bremen merchant sails north out of Brazil on a slaving expedition. He follows the coast thirty days and, in inclement weather, his ship is run aground. On a sandbar off an island near the mouth of the Orinoco, the men lower a boat from the deck and are swallowed in a wave, “mountain-like,” of which the one survivor is the merchant’s prodigal son. Lately he was the proprietor of a sugar plantation, and before that, in Morocco, he himself was a slave. He lands with a knife, a pipe, and a small ration of tobacco. “Two shoes that are not fellows” later wash up on the beach, and he does not wait for more to arrive. His byword is “providence,” and he labors with Calvinistic zeal to prove it accompanies him. The next day, the wreck has been pushed nearer the island by the tides. He returns to it to supply himself. Among other provisions, he recovers the several books he will have to entertain him through the next twenty-seven years: three English Bibles and an assortment of books in Portuguese, among them, he notes in his diary, some Catholic prayerbooks.
As Ricardo Piglia will observe in The Last Reader, this library will prove as essential to life on the island as any other tool or salvage. When he is almost a year into his trial and on the verge of surrender to illness and despair, he reaches for one of his Bibles, and he opens it at random. “Call on me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver,” he reads, “and thou shalt glorify me.” Instantly he is sure that the words are addressed to him, that they could not be addressed to another reader. They cure him and, in this life, he is delivered. With respect to this deliverance, Piglia will make a further, more consequential observation. The lonely slaver, he writes, “is the inverse of Don Quixote, whose reading makes him ill. But like Don Quixote, and like Hamlet, as a reader he is among the great heroes of the modern subject.” The first English novel.
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In the middle of the eighteenth century, on an island or peninsula down California’s central coast, a boy in the company of a desperate pirate spies through a loophole on a council of buccaneers. One of them holds a book next to a knife that shines under the moonlight, an image that the boy finds “incongruous.” Where is the incongruity? In the eighteenth century, as in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth, a book would appear with no partner more congruous than a knife. For most of history since Gutenberg, a book could not be opened without making incisions in every page. Now a book will open itself.
Instead, the incongruity arises for the boy from the combination of a book and a pirate, a combination hardly less congruous, after some thought, to an observer free from ignorance or prejudice. Even if the role of the pirate in English literature from Crusoe to Burroughs is dismissed as irrelevant, the reality of the pirate is less easily set aside. Three hundred years ago, the border between criminal and officer was porous and thinly or capriciously patrolled, up to a court’s interpretation, and a famed privateer gone rogue might be educated and, for his time, even schooled to a high standard. Pirates are isolated by their outlaw condition, their entertainments are limited by the size of a ship’s hold, and between raids and exotic ports, they have more time for leisure than whalemen, slavers, and scientists. In fiction, as in life, they are continually being surprised reading maps or plotting to steal them, a mania not so different from the library rat’s relationship to the book. If not already a reader, a pirate makes an easy mark.
The buccaneers’ council the boy sees in the moonlight happens to be both literate and, at least tonight, possessed of a rare facility for innovation. When they reenter the blockhouse, one of the conspirators hands a slip of paper the size and shape of a coin to the boy’s companion: a large man who is missing a leg and who wears, on his shoulder, a parrot. One side of the paper coin has been rubbed black with wood ash, and the other, as evidence of pirate literacy, is inscribed with a verdict. The large man, Silver, reads he has been “depposed.” His successful defense of his leadership will begin with a close examination of the text, followed by its context. The substrate of the verdict has been cut from the last leaf of a King James Bible. He provokes debate.
“It’ll do to kiss the book on still, won’t it?” asks a buccaneer.
“A Bible with a bit cut out!” shouts Silver, who is, without question, restored to command. “It don’t bind no more’n a ballad-book.”
Rubbing off the ash on the printed side of the disk, the boy reads from Revelation 22:15, “Without are dogs and murderers.” A book remade and disarmed by a single choice deletion, a deletion made the mechanism of an ill-starred revolt: the original avant-garde.
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In his lectures on the three avant-gardes that followed the twentieth-century explosion of Argentine literature, Piglia draws a line through 1967. The first period, which belongs to Borges, is marked at either end by seminal moments in the life and afterlife of Macedonio Fernández, his teacher. In 1904, he begins to draft Museum of the Novel of the Eternal Woman, and fifty-three years later, fifteen after his death, his manuscript is published. The next period is contested by three distinct approaches, three plans of attack on the “centers of cultural control” that belong to avant-gardes insofar as they open toward “what is considered non-literary, foreign to literature.” They operate in or against the state, mass media, and received ways of seeing, from which they claim a share of territory for themselves. In Argentina after Borges and after Macedonio, the three names of the avant-garde are Saer, Puig, and Walsh.
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Juan José “El Turco” Saer: the aesthete, the stalwart enemy of kitsch, a dramatist of the gap between experience and the narrative techniques that reproduce it or die trying. A Saer novel is contained in almost every Saer sentence in its extent, its misdirections, its hyperbaton that resists any less than total absorption. He writes away from genre, and he rejects all mediation other than his own. Against the enemies of perception he brandishes the present participle as a dagger, unthinkable in English and perversely, deceptively obvious in Spanish. A more honest writer, in the end, might have turned it on himself.
His project had reached its limit in 1967 with the story “La mayor,” deadly, illegible, and longer than it appeared. He had to step away, and his most acclaimed novels were written in the decades that followed. He described everything but the unspeakable, and he made its likeness in negative space without having to leave the world, in contrast to Beckett. He rarely left the fictional banks of his beloved Paraná. He died in Paris. On occasion, his work touched on the unspeakable more directly, but if there were no other avant-garde, his would have to be the last. His legacy is a bundle of lenses, methods, gestures.
I
Modes of Combat
Early in the morning of September 1, 2003, the cult novelist Rachel Zozanian receives an email from the libertine, paparazzo, and Australian Alyosha Pechorin. She does not respond. They had met the night before in an organic pub in Hackney where his original, Ilya Gridneff, had by his own admission assailed her for reading Adorno alone at the bar. He was unaware that Zozanian’s original, Helen DeWitt, had recently published a novel believed by many to be one of the century’s best. Forgiveness might be extended more liberally to his failure to recognize DeWitt’s alter ego, who is the writer not of The Last Samurai but of the surprise “hit” Lotteryland, a statistical picaresque that readers in this parallel world are condemned by authorial whim to treat as a work of genius.
In spite or apparently because of her brilliance, Rachel’s readers use her poorly. The few years that follow are unhappy ones, and after a suicide attempt that appears in the New York Daily News and Fandango, she is admitted to a Buffalo mental hospital. When she is released, she does not in a meaningful sense return into the world. A spell of near catatonia follows that is aggravated by staying with friends and listening on the phone to supposed friends who, when she can parse what they say, alternately comfort her and try to insert themselves into her financial affairs. Interest from Hollywood in her work during this time is not received much better, if it is received at all. Her sole comfort is the email from the twenty-four-year-old stranger, Alyosha, in whose ordinary nights of youthful debauchery she detects, from her hermit’s perspective, “the world of Fellini, that sordid glamorous world in the rubble of a dead empire.”
It is a footprint in the sand on the Island of Despair. For almost two years she studies his email and finds a genius accessible only to her, joined to a vitality apparent to anyone. The vitality is the vitality of youth, though not the Australian’s youth. It is the vitality of a new technology. On August 5, 2005, she writes him back and begins unwittingly the collaboration that will develop into a novel, the first of a kind.
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The seed of the distinctive features of Your Name Here is sheathed in Alyosha’s email. When it arrives in the text, every letter and digit is reproduced on the page, from the originating IP to the ad for Hotmail in the signature. New types of information are pressed into literary service and the invisible context of communication online is made explicit. In an email address, characterization is more succinct than in a physical address, and if a history of class, taste, and desire could be written from a street and a London post code, its loss is compensated partly by the knowledge that Alyosha chooses to identify as <popesonxtacy@hotmail.com>. Gridneff, his author, is <anarchicus@hotmail.com>. The timestamp is better than a postmark, and it dates each missive precisely to the second, as well as to a time zone.
Here it catches Alyosha in a lie or contradiction. In the body of his email he reports it is 3:22 AM, and the header reveals he sent it precisely at 3:20:44 AM. At best he is not the herald of the future he at first seems, and he gets the time from a source other than his laptop. Between checking his wristwatch when he begins to write his email at, he claims, 2:58 AM and finishing twenty-four minutes later, Alyosha produces two and a half pages marked most notably by a trait that could be deduced without having reading a word, from the metadata: speed.
A novel that begins in an unabridged email is hungry for information, and nothing extraliterary will be foreign to it. The same impulse that draws a skier to powder after first tracks will send them chasing other forms, and what begins in the header at 3:20:44 AM will end, unavoidably, in screenshots, URLs, and excerpts from Wikipedia.
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In a departure from The Last Samurai, here DeWitt practices the twentieth-century art of the manipulation of frames. Gone for the most part are the adventure stories that, despite her lack of style, would have appealed to Stevenson and Bioy. In their place she operates with a cooler, harder set of tools, the minimal instruments hewn and first used to effect by Duchamp. Like most discoveries, the change in approach is owed to a perceived necessity. She is convinced that Gridneff is the next Hunter S. Thompson, and the best she can produce as evidence is a cache of his emails. She recognizes that the publication by a major press of a collection of letters by a twenty-six-year-old unknown is unlikely, but their publication in the context of a novel by an older, celebrated author has better prospects. A form is invented to contain them beside a collage of purpose-built and readymade attractions that are juxtaposed, misattributed, and surgically revised. Chapters of another novel that languish on DeWitt’s hard drive are assigned to Zozanian, as are the Google results for a search made after her 2004 suicide attempt.
The contents of an intake form that establishes the terms of voluntary admission to a psychiatric ward may be more interesting when they appear over the signature of the semi-glamorous Zozanian. When they are printed a page after the results that establish she is missing, they interest more still. Similarly, the comic potential of an email signature cannot be realized until it appears a second time, in the frame of a book, and then appears in the same book, with minor alterations, a third, a fourth, and a fifth time. Drama, humor, and pathos are exposed, as any filmmaker understands, as a matter of presentation.
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For literature to work assiduously for its own legitimation is not unusual, if unnecessary. The taboo is to do it in the open, without a sense of shame or at least reserve, decorum. The success of a breach of literary etiquette hinges on the same aristocratic extravagance as a breach of the rules of polite conversation. On one side are The Cantos and Vila-Matas, and on the other is the catalog of influences that appears in the final pages of Fuccboi. In Your Name Here, DeWitt claims descent with some justification from Sterne, Calvino, and Martin Amis. Philip K. Dick is also conscripted, but the most attractive lineage is established through film. Stills, namedrops, and epigraphs link different elements of the project to Charlie Kaufman, Terry Gilliam, and Fellini.
Behind all these names lurks an unacknowledged tutelary ghost, a novelist and the book’s one authentic predecessor. Read or unread, cannibalized or ignored, the source of every success in Your Name Here is the example of Puig, the second avant-garde, according to Piglia, after the Borges parenthesis.
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Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne: the closest model, a library reduced to a tape recorder and a collection of video cassettes. In his apartment in Rio de Janeiro, whatever he read in Argentina is replaced on the shelves with movies and every available translation of his own novels. He is a true polyglot artist, not a dilettante. Every language that he claims, he speaks to a high level. His translations into French, English, Italian, and Portuguese were supervised by him personally to whatever extent allowed, and he first drafted An Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages in English. His career is marked by an extraordinary formal heterogeneity that reaches its high point in 1973 with The Buenos Aires Affair, a satire of the literary world refracted through the art world that incorporates an autopsy, a CV template, the principal characters’ sexual histories, fragments from the news that recount violence as often as not, and a series of dialogues with the police or in psychoanalysis, where the speech of one participant is omitted. He does approximately for psychoanalysis, Argentina’s middle-class religion, what DeWitt has done for elementary statistics, the English-speaking professional’s.
Each chapter begins with a selection from a screenplay, and his next novel, The Kiss of the Spider Woman, projects the former’s epigraphs into the organizing logic of the text, which takes a more economical approach to form. The spine of the novel is a romance, a narrative of seduction in dialogue between two prisoners in Buenos Aires, interspersed with the uninhibited flow of their thoughts, visions, and wants in italics. One is a young left-wing guerilla taken by the dictatorship indefinitely, and every night his cellmate, gay, middle-aged, and held for corruption of minors, describes to him a film for a bedtime story. It is Puig’s greatest work and a transitional work, his first use of recordings as a tool of characterization. He does not trust himself to render a guerilla from scratch, and to begin to assemble a model for his prisoner, he finds and interviews the real thing. The voice of the young leftist is a readymade.
By Blood of Requited Love in 1982, the figure of the collaborator has near totally erased the figure of the author. Puig records conversations with a contractor in Rio and extracts from him a confused, circular, and oddly immediate account of his life as it spirals out of the night he claims to have taken his teenage girlfriend’s virginity. The interviews are transcribed, translated into Spanish, and revised and threaded together by a series of interruptions from a shifting, disembodied voice. Part of the first chapter returns as the last, much of it verbatim and, regardless, transformed irrevocably.
Through the six summaries of films and one synthetic dream-film that are most of The Kiss of the Spider Woman, in between his unstable frames and subjectivities, Puig smuggles a hard base for more than an avant-garde, the foundation for a literature that, waiting to escape, has not left its cell.
Gladys, the artist in The Buenos Aires Affair, suffers a nervous breakdown in New York, and she returns to Argentina to convalesce in Playa Blanca with her mother. Early in the mornings, she goes to the beach to gather the trash and forgotten toys she uses to construct a new kind of sculpture. She returns with her catch to her bedroom, and she holds each item individually and whispers into it. These whispers are the essence of Puig, his effect and his approach.
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Crusoe in his obsession with “providence,” parodied unforgettably as Ben Gunn in Treasure Island, never strays far without his Bible. After it rescues him from his sickbed, salvation becomes a routine occurrence on the island. His reading structures his days and gives him the sense of order he requires to carry on alone. Fifteen years after the shipwreck, when he is established between his citadel and his summer house, less desperate for intervention from above, he is startled on his rounds by a footprint in the sand. He examines it, he draws his conclusion, and he flees in terror.
For three days and nights he refuses to leave his castle. His reading will comfort him much as before, but the threat of cannibals calls for a more sophisticated operation, a weapon effective against an unplaceable, asymmetric force. On the fourth day, he comes to an answer that does not restore him permanently but does allow him, though skittish, to return to his work. The foot, he reasons, could as easily be his own as a stranger’s. He goes outside.
Against the invisible army, he wields a sharp, invisible tool: a reinterpretation, a displacement.
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What in Your Name Here survives the comparison with Puig? What is new? Following Macedonio, another great original, Borges questions the value and even the existence of originality, but he allows for a collective exception. Returning to his early work, he writes decades later, “To be modern is to be contemporary, to be current; inevitably, all of us are. Nobody, apart from a certain adventurer dreamed by Wells, has discovered the art of living in the past or in the future.” Borges suggests a keener, subtler question, more informative: What in Your Name Here is contemporary?
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In the late 1930s, a wanted man flees his home in Caracas and arrives by way of India on an uninhabited island in the Pacific. “For you, for a fugitive,” he is told by an Italian in Calcutta, “there’s only one place in the world. It’s an island. White people were building there, around 1924, a chapel, a museum, and a swimming pool. They finished work and abandoned it.”
Early one morning, after a hundred nights on the island, he wakes to the sound of jubilant shouts and music. He tells himself he is sure he did not miss the arrival of a boat, a plane, or a dirigible, but however they arrived, he accepts he is no longer alone. Taking shelter in the lowlands, he almost drowns in his sleep.
For company in his hideaway, he has his own writings and a book he removed from the museum during his first reconnaissance of the island, Travaux-Le Moulin Perse, an eighteenth-century treatise by Bernard Forest de Belidor on harnessing tidal energy. The book does not need to be read to resolve the mystery of the island and establish the purpose of the vacationers who arrive from nowhere, who disappear from one day to the next, and who act as though they are perceptible to no one but themselves. As a member of a special class, the book conceals a potential revelation apart from its contents, and its lack of religious or literary character does not diminish its power. In fact, the treatise is the one book the fugitive finds in the museum that is not a play, a novel, or a collection of poems.
One evening during an interval in which the vacationers are present, he returns to the museum and passes through the grand hall, and he finds the same book on the shelf where he first saw it. The replacement is identical in every visible aspect. He removes his copy from his pocket and compares its cover to the impostor’s. An identical scratch runs across the lower corner, and an identical cloud of ink has bled from its title. If he stops to consider the unlikely resemblance, the fugitive will realize he already has the solution, a solution that can be read at a glance and without a word.
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In blog posts and interviews DeWitt has proposed alternatives to the book for the packaging, presentation, and monetization of literature. Her stated purpose is to identify revenue streams for writers that would supplement income from a book with minimal loss of time, revenue that would fund, without a publisher’s largesse, the completion of further work. One suggestion was the sale of CDs containing digitized notes, manuscripts, and ephemera from the author, a high-priced special edition of outtakes for the fan, the Criterion Collection model.
Another suggestion, less developed, not so scalable, is more indebted to the art market. Why not, she asks, import a version of the gallery into publishing? Preliminary work from a young talent could be shown and even sold by an agent or a dealer who provides the writer with a stipend in exchange for the production of a masterpiece. Alongside a selection of books and printouts from her library, she has already shown pages from works in progress in a gallery in Manhattan. Just the financial element is missing.
The implications are less radical for the speculator than the reader, who is no longer limited to the sequential turning of pages in a book, who is hardly limited to reading. What kind of reader is the gallery reader, or the fan who opens files in a directory according to a fleeting personal interest, in alphabetical order? What kind of writing responds to the new reader, who receives each page at leisure, as an objet d’art? In fiction if not in poetry, the mechanical act of assimilating one word after another has not substantially evolved, but the leap into the gallery favors a literature less constrained by reading. It imparts concepts at a glance, it reveals itself in any sequence, and it possesses qualities that can be appreciated as attractive or distinctive from the opposite end of a room. It operates faster than the speed of reading, and it approaches the speed of the eye.
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Peter Handke, a humanitarian, has mourned language as “the first casualty of war,” and in the moment, it would have been rude to challenge what was more an expression of distress than an argument. (Prynne challenged him anyway.) Now he can be corrected without self-censorship. The first casualty of war, like the last, is human. Language is its first beneficiary, and the history of literature is the history of combat.
An offensive lineman may be a “tank,” a fraternity may get “blitzed” on a Thursday, and an accountant can be said to go “AWOL” as much as a sniper or a specialist in intelligence. An accountant, in fact, is more likely to go AWOL than either. War enriches the language even as it inflicts permanent moral and physical harm on its willing and unwilling participants.
Ways of making war affect the language more deeply than their expansion of the lexicon, and if war has been literature’s inseparable companion since Homer and earlier, the twentieth century and its aftermath have produced a literature more formally indebted to conflict than were its predecessors. The most important writers from 1914 up to now, the unanimous writers who open traditions rather than finish them, have adopted modes of combat that suffuse and determine their lives as much as their work. The critical moment for Kafka is dated usually to the September night he wrote “The Judgment” in one sitting, but the birth of the other Kafka, the secret birth of the Kafka myth and the stranger, more architectural writer of The Castle, “The Burrow,” and “The Great Wall of China,” is not for three more years. On November 6, 1915, Kafka goes to Kaiserinsel, an island on the Charles, to attend an exhibition devised to raise funds and enthusiasm for the war effort. He follows the “antlike movement of the crowd” past a military band and sausage carts, and he descends into the fair’s cutting-edge centerpiece, the replica of a frontline trench. He returns to the surface clinging to a metaphor.
Kafka, who is characterized by his less perceptive critics as indifferent to the Great War, is closer in his method to the logic of the trenches than Hemingway, Owen, Jünger, and Sassoon. No writer has latched more tightly with his teeth onto a foot of desolate ground, and his enemies (rodents, disease, insufficient solitude) are those endured by the trench-bound soldier between one bombardment and the next. Space is fragmented less in the early work than in the frenzy of motion without advancement of the late work, where advancement is plausible and structurally forbidden. His every convalescent leave ends with a return to a Prague that changes for him most strikingly in a growing personal hostility that is unarrested, if not aggravated, by his rank. Until the final, fatal breakthrough, he consistently returns to the same dugout and assignment. Kafka’s dream is an earthwork, his lawyerly approach draws deeply from the earthwork, and in the end, with “The Burrow,” that is the solitary image of his life that will outlast the portrait of the upturned beetle, his sigil. He is lucid enough to understand that his fortress is a deathtrap.
The opposite face of World War I is Céline, whose brief service in the earliest phase of the conflict biases him permanently, in his pacifism too, toward the attack. Below, in the trenches, writes the century’s presiding saint of letters with extraordinary difficulty, and above him, unaware, its patron madman crouches by the machine gun he uses to riddle a blank page with his “little music.” In the language of the most tired conceit applied to Céline, the most striking element in his books, especially after Journey to the End of the Night, is the bullet holes.
Borges, too young for the first war and too old for the second, far from any relevant theater of operations, turns them into exotic landscapes for his intrigues. For an ethos, for his plots, for a mode, he reaches, as he does for so much else, into the century of his birth. As Alan Pauls argues definitively in The Borges Factor, he is a duelist, as practiced in the elaborate knifing rituals of the pampas as in the violent, abrupt dispatches of an English gentleman. He identified and memorized the least flattering lines of poets he believed were overpraised, and when a friend or acquaintance expressed admiration for Neruda or Girondo, he would recite the prepared lines. He will finish the most consequential period in his work on the cusp, in The South, of a duel.
If Bolaño succeeds in positioning himself as his heir, the affinity is strategic. He explodes the logic of the duel to the level of great-power conflict. Bolaño is a cold warrior. In his life as in his work he changes accents, his voice is recognizable and impossible to locate, and he travels across borders and through languages with the ease and fluency of ideology. He assembles teams, two teams, literature and not literature, and in Blanes he leaves the rubble of hot wars in Mexico and Chile to manage affairs from afar, to organize resources, alliances, and the vivid propaganda he seeds in the Spanish press. There is no shorthand for Bolaño. Instead of an emblem like Kafka’s, he is attended by a network of guerillas, avant-gardists, and creatures of the demimonde who may at any moment disappear. He is trailed by their photographs.
Like Borges, he adopts a mode of combat early, before and likely long before that prolific final decade that culminates in 2666. The controlling metaphor for literature, for himself, for his cool, strangely considered assault on the canon, was established no later than the close of the eighties, the moment he wrote but did not publish his romance of tabletop war games, The Third Reich. Board games of the Axis & Allies type, modeled on a textbook World War II in which tactics have been excised and lacquered beneath strategy, production, and tokens on a map, are a Cold War phenomenon that take as a given an atomic-age paradigm of maneuvers. Bolaño is not his game-obsessed protagonist Udo Berger, but Udo like his creator is a writer and thus a combatant whose world, unmistakably, is the literary world. In the bitter game he plays with a man who lives on the beach are echoed the great civilizational duels not of the nineteenth century, but of the twentieth: Kennedy/Khruschev, Reagan/Gorbachev, Vargas Llosa/García Márquez.
There are others. Marianne Moore, weaving, is a boxer. Burroughs is a literary-psychological operation, and Ballard’s most significant work is a mirror of the concentration camp that raised him. DeWitt, whose career begins with the twenty-first century, has adopted the methodology of terror.
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Your Name Here opens in the second person in a Barnes & Noble where, from a selection that features Mao II and Lotteryland, the passenger assigned 65B on a flight from New York to Paris decides to purchase a copy of Your Name Here. On the plane he learns that the novel is not primarily a novel, that his copy may have been sabotaged. He turns the page and discovers either the book has been infiltrated by Arabic, unexplained by the English that precedes it, or it was designed, like a killer shoe or tube of toothpaste, to smuggle Arabic into the air. His initial rage (“THIS IS NOT MOTIVATED”) passes quickly as he is tricked or hijacked by the secondary text into learning to read “Fellini,” “Visconti,” “Kurosawa,” and “Kafka” in an unfamiliar alphabet. He is pleased to think that, in the event of a more perilous hijacking “to some remote village of feuding Sunnites and Shiites,” he will be better prepared than other passengers to seek help. He continues to think along these lines until he notices, in his neighbor’s copy of The Da Vinci Code, the words “banana” and “Titicaca” in Arabic script. What he believed to be an innovation of Your Name Here instead may be, he realizes, the work of a program sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security to promote interest in learning Arabic. In the latter case, Arabic could appear in any book on any plane, which it apparently does for the readers in 98C, 100C, and 103D, as well as on a later flight from Baltimore to the Bahamas, where it returns in Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist.
Bush-era paranoia is ironized and presented as a potential motor of education, but little in the way of Arabic is offered above the level of the alphabet and occasional fun fact. The animating interest seems less the enlargement of understanding between peoples than the exploitation of a device, the turning to literary ends of a stereotyped vision of terror, the form of terror most legible to the Transportation Security Administration. Engagement with any Middle Eastern culture is almost absent from the text because culture is not the attraction, and DeWitt and Gridneff’s portrayal of the region as seen on television, however ironized, cannot be read as humanitarian.
In life they are almost certainly anti-war, but on the page the attitude toward war, a very particular scenario of war, is fascination. Terror becomes a strategy for flexibility, a metaphor that suggests a distinct spectrum of choice. It insinuates an element of suspense into the everyday. In a paradigm of terror, the expectation of continuity between one line and the next is suspended (“THIS IS NOT MOTIVATED”), or the concept of continuity itself expands: “What if the next page…? What if the person next to me…?” It is an atmosphere, if not for the threat of death, of carnival.
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DeWitt is better as a tactician than a strategist. Her asymmetric war on English-language publishing has become a crutch for journalists, and her public response to agents, reviewers, editors, and academics has been, in literary terms, coarse and self-defeating. Terror at its most effective is context manipulation, a public space remade as a security theater through a subtle change in perception, or an ex-prime minister returned to the public eye as the tribune of a cult. A change of ending can shift an emphasis or impose a contradictory frame. DeWitt is most effective where she controls all her frames, and every innovation that matters is contained in the body of her work, not in her cavils, her polemics, and her dubious endorsements. It may not be a coincidence that her least credible published fiction, parodic, tasteless, appears in the New York Review of Books. Her most interesting, if not her greatest, must be hidden on her laptop.
The discrepancy is natural. For instance, the signature below an email, including any of Alyosha or Gridneff’s feral productions, is an attribution at best and an advertisement at worst. It has all the resonance of terms and conditions. To be read as one of Chekhov’s guns, as a promise that will be dangerously or bathetically fulfilled, it has to be folded into a book. After four hundred pages punctuated with exhortations to “get Hotmail on your mobile phone” or to join MSN Messenger, Gridneff in one of his guises instructs DeWitt/Zozanian in a Berlin café to try MSN Messenger for herself. “Now we can chat,” writes Gridneff as Misha Kropotkin, and Zozanian replies, “Yes. The thrill of it.” In DeWitt’s domain of total control, the junk text of an email’s footer can be reinvented as a resource of comedy.
Compare the sophistication of the structure of a clandestine cell to the same cell’s efforts, grainy, bumbling, likely medieval, to cut and distribute a propaganda film.
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The most effective practitioners of terror have never been terrorists, who are confined to appearing in the works of others, who operate exclusively in a foreign context. The terrorist, or the popular image of the terrorist, works with readymades after the fashion of the Shoe Bomber, the Underwear Bomber, and their many-headed earthbound precursor, the car bomber. Like an authorial ideal, a perfect terrorist would exercise total control in the theater of operations, where invention and redefinition could be deployed with indifference, where fantastic juxtapositions could be produced with few if any constraints. Piglia likes to return to the idea that the decisive modern fiction, the most intricate narrative machine of his time, is the state. No surprise then that the foremost practitioner of terror, the least encumbered, also is the state, which exerts a sovereignty that is communicated without resort to persuasion, reason, or style.
There is a difference between the terrorist and the liberator, the guerilla, the rebel. The trite observation is that the difference is one of perspective, but what kind of perspective is it? The state can define at will a legal observer as an assassin, or an expression of support for a different state, not yet sovereign or existent, as a criminal act, but it cannot force anyone to accept its definition in private. Outside the frame of the state and its own methods of terror, the choice of names is individual, and the distinction between the hero and the terrorist is self-evident. The problem is less choosing than understanding how the choice is unconsciously made.
Shimon Naveh formerly directed the Operational Theory Research Institute, where he trained senior staff for the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to be “operational architects.” Above all he trained them in the liberatory principles of Deleuze, principles developed into practical techniques for the maintenance of occupation through terror. In a chapter from Hollow Land on Naveh and the 2002 operation “Defensive Shield,” Eyal Weizman cites a Palestinian woman on the sensation of being ripped, after Deleuze and Guattari, from striated space into smooth. “Imagine it,” she says,
“you’re sitting in your living room that you know so well, this is the room where the family watches TV together after the evening meal… and suddenly that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris and through the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming orders. You have no idea if they’re after you, if they’ve come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else. The children are screaming, panicking… is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, twelve soldiers, their faces painted black, submachine guns pointed everywhere, antennae protruding from their backpacks that make them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall?”
What kind of perspective is it? Moral, not technical.
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Aviv Kohavi led the Paratrooper Brigade in Nablus in 2002, he later led the Gaza Division, and he served as IDF Chief of Staff until he stepped down at the beginning of 2023. He is a thin man with sharp features and heavy eyebrows, a friendly face marred only by intelligence. He is a vegetarian. In an interview, he explains to Weizman,
“This space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. Now, you can stretch the boundaries of your interpretation, but not in an unlimited fashion. After all, it must be bound by physics. It contains buildings and alleys. The question is, how do you interpret the alley? Do you interpret the alley as a place, like every architect and every town planner does, to walk through, or do you interpret the alley as a place forbidden to walk through? This depends only on interpretation. We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through, and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through.”
Kohavi teaches the Israeli soldier, in a refugee camp, to walk through walls “like a worm that eats its way forwards,” a worm that rewrites “the urban syntax by a series of microtactical actions,” one that opens every living room to the possibility of assault. The soldier becomes a machine that can link any room in any sequence via reinterpretation, and the worm can consume or define any kind of space into absence. It can enclose any content without loss of plausibility in its narrow, roving frame.
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Of all the accusations leveled against the IDF since 2023, since 2003, since 1948, it has never had to answer to the charge of too much style, too much music. (Two countries that are indisputably located outside Europe send contestants to Eurovision, and just one of the two has appeared to try to rig the vote.) Style was a necessary sacrifice made to the exercise of power without limits, and a method for the liquidation of a refugee camp, however unexpected or ingenious, could never exhibit style. A longing for style remains, and the knowledge of its insurmountable absence.
In 2006, Naveh published a story in the now defunct Brooklyn magazine Cabinet, “Beyond the Striated and the Smooth,” a fictionalized account of the “war council” that preceded the Defensive Shield invasion of Balata. It has value as a primary source and maybe also, as Naveh intended when he shared the piece at the Institute, edutainment. Naveh is a clever person, and he openly relishes the nickname “Foucault on steroids.” His other flaws can be read in “Beyond the Striated and the Smooth.”
Anyone could reproduce Puig’s juxtapositions, and anyone could incorporate found materials into a fictional text. Anyone could imitate the language of an autopsy, and nothing could be more natural than to summarize the contents of a film to a friend. Anyone could record an interview, and now more than ever its transcription could be accomplished without an ear and without a memory. Puig’s real achievement lies in what Pauls has called his location in other voices and other media of an indefinable music, a music that became his own.
II
The Last Comma
A Galician fisherman sends his son to the ocean with a single word: bacalao. He leaves the port of A Coruña for a vast, landless West, and he obeys his father’s command wherever he sails. At the head of each cross-current he empties that region of the sea of bacalao, and he follows the fish past the black islands of the Far North until he discovers, in the early fifteenth century, the West is not as landless as those before him had believed. An evergreen scent reaches ahead to him through a heavy fog, undiminished by the surf, and the pressure of the spyglass leaves a faint red circle that is the permanent companion of the Galician’s left eye. He points it into the mist as it clears, and soon there is no need for a spyglass, they have entered a deep bay that contains an archipelago, and the Galician, overjoyed, dashes to the prow and takes the first mate in his arms. Each whispers a new word in the other’s ear, and in the quiet of a new world it cannot help but echo between the bulwarks, from which it returns to every seaman’s lips: discovery.
They lower one of the boats when they see a thin plume that rises behind the trees along the shore of the first island, and a small delegation of the people of the bay slips out of the woods as the boat approaches. Two sailors leap over the side and push its keel through clear water into the stones, where silvered fish dart from their boots at every step. On the beach the Galician stands facing a tall man with long, straight hair. His bare skin is darker, not much darker, than his own. Between the trunks of the conifers behind the welcome party he notices the smooth hulls of strange vessels partly camouflaged in the brush, and he addresses their leader or their spokesman as a mariner. He reaches for the universal sign language of the ocean to ask him, “What is this place? How does one call it?”
The tall man sweeps his arm across all the islands and ocean in sight with an open palm, he looks away from the fisherman to what appears to be a mainland, and he says, and he cannot be misunderstood, “Bacalao.” The Galician strains his vision and gazes to the west into the narrows where he finds, once his eyes adjust, a quick white stain over the horizon, but he cannot tell whether he sees a cloud, a tendril of mist, or the billowing of a sail, a cataract on his hopes or an invitation to a dream.
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Macedonio predicted the lector salteado, the distracted reader, the faithless reader who at the first intimation of tedium skips a paragraph. The lector salteado skims whole chapters or reaches for the next book without closing or setting aside the first. In Borges, in the reader that Borges becomes, the prophecy is fulfilled. Piglia juxtaposes the lector salteado with the other essentially twentieth-century reader, his devout, retiring opposite in Kafka, whose ideal is to read one book at a time to completion at the end of a subterranean hallway, where distraction is impossible. Hot meals are left for him outside a faraway door. Kafka does not own many books, and his ideal type in the Talmudic scholar is the student and proprietor of a library of one. Borges, as the director of the National Library, is his own ideal type. Aware of the dangers incurred in his position (dramatized in “The Aleph,” “The Library of Babel”), dangers to which Macedonio himself may have succumbed, his personal library is comparable in size to Kafka’s. (Borges, it happens, is the third blind director of the National Library after Mármol and Groussac. A future director of the National Library will note that Piglia, at the end of his life, will succumb to a progressive disease that allows him to move only his eyes. He will use them to write.)
Later in the twentieth century in a difficult situation, the captive model for another species of reader emerges. Nobody sees him. The next reader appears from necessity in conditions of isolation that mimic the logistics of Kafka’s dream scenario, with an additional threat of future deportation or the firing squad. Kafka would have screamed, then laughed. In 1942, Christopher Burney, an uneducated son of the Scottish upper class, parachutes into occupied France on a mission to aid the Resistance. Betrayed by the double agent Mathilde Carré, alias “The Cat,” he falls shortly after his arrival into the hands of the Germans, who hold him for seventeen months in Fresnes in solitary confinement before he is transferred to Buchenwald. The cells where he is kept are ten feet by five feet, and at midday he receives three hundred grams of bread with a bowl of cabbage and water through a hatch, his sole contact with an outside world through most of his captivity. Each day he paces, from one end of the cell to the other, seven miles.
Eventually his rations are augmented by a sausage or a cheese, and he receives a French copy of the Bible, which he reads twice almost in full, leaving out Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. In the months before, he survives on half-recalled verses from the KJV and assorted scraps from his allotment of toilet paper. The latter he guards and inspects until every page is memorized, and if each one could be recovered they might be compiled into astrange and various anti-encyclopedia, for months Burney’s only companion, unredacted, unsummarized, incomplete. He reads the end of a biography of St. Francis with the same intensity he turns on a scrap of the Pariser Zeitung, or a few stray equations from a work on Planck’s constant. Despite his having left school at age sixteen, his desperation and his solitude are education enough. Everything that he reads, he understands.
His most astonishing feat of reading comes early in his confinement, when he is taken before a Nazi intelligence officer for his last interrogation. In essence the problem is narrative. The officer is aware of certain facts about the prisoner and his friends in the Resistance, and the prisoner is forced to assess, based on the details of his capture, what the interrogator is likely to have ascertained.
Over a skeletal form of disparate names and figures, he is required to drape a history to conceal another history, a lie as valid as the truth given the enemy’s established facts and, if he wants to live, a lie more plausible than the truth. He also has to consider what might be verifiable after the interrogation, beyond the text. Inverisimilitude will cost him his life, and any unjustified intrusion of reality in his interpretation will cost him the lives of his friends. He reads a selection of events from his biography in an invisible dossier, and he weaves them into a second biography, a shadow life that grows and deepens until its original is vanished in the dark. “Goodbye,” says the German when he returns him to Fresnes, “I don’t believe a word you’ve told me,” but the problem is more fundamental than belief. Burney and his contacts will live.
The lector salteado gave every sign of being the last reader, the definitive answer to the relic or curiosity of the Kafka type, but its more authentic opposite is the Burney type, cautious and deprived, whose advantages are unrecognizable as such in other modes of reading. He is the enemy of the text written for the lector salteado, the perfect opponent of an open form and the framer of the last interpretation. Underfed, uneducated, unoccupied, and desperate, he is the reader who reads for his life. Most surprising of all about Burney is his exquisite, inexplicable style.
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On her blog Dewitt posted an excerpt from her email correspondence with an Israeli sniper commander. She writes that she finished Infinite Jest by watchlight in a bunker in the West Bank wall. A reflection on David Foster Wallace concludes with a piece of wisdom: “Teach a boy to shoot,” the sniper tells her, and the rest is interpretation.
On November 23, 2023, two young men who were raised in Munich and Naperville, Illinois, would kill at least three unarmed members of a single Palestinian family. First Mohammed Doghmosh, a twenty-six-year-old scrap collector, was shot after he crossed an unmarked “security perimeter.” The Illinoisan, a gifted basketball player, explains Mohammed’s death succinctly: “There is a line that we define. They don’t know where the line is, but we do.”
Soon thereafter Salem Doghmosh, nineteen years old, also a scrap collector, ran to the scene to confirm his older brother’s death and recover his body. The Illinoisan claims that Salem was his “first elimination,” and Mohammed had been the German’s “second elimination.” Next Montasser Doghmosh, their father, came to the scene to retrieve both corpses, and he was shot and killed by one of the two men. Three other members of the family, one of whom later died from his injuries, were shot by snipers the same day. The IDF defines anyone who comes to collect the body of a person it has eliminated as a “co-conspirator.” Video of the killings appears in a celebratory edit posted five months later by another Israeli soldier.
A fictionalized version of the sniper commander returns in Your Name Here, where DeWitt explains that National Service prevented her from accepting a scholarship to Harvard. The sniper is convinced that “a work of art should be self-contained, something that exists for its own sake.” When she closes her eyes, DeWitt writes, the sniper sees “dead children,” and as the passage is written in the second person, “you” can see them yourself. The sniper must understand, or “you” must understand, that juxtaposition, like a bullet, is a more efficient organizing principle than style.
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Early in his career or before his career begins, Joyce delivers two lectures in Italian on Defoe, in whom he insists “the star of poesy is, as they say, conspicuous by its absence.” Like DeWitt, Defoe wrote to entertain, to educate, and in her terminology “to make a million bucks,” but he was artless, not styleless, and in Joyce’s words he exhibits “a style of admirable clarity quite free of all pretension.” He might have added that his clarity is free of all anxiety, and nowhere does he appear to have preferred one word over another, to have paused before deploying or withholding a comma, even where he borrows from another text and makes a change.
Crusoe, who in English owns the KJV and no other book, has the luxury of time to review each citation and the absolute poverty to never be far, when he writes his diary in a cave, from an edition of his exclusive source. Errors in the parts of his account written after his return to Europe could be attributed to carelessness or indifference or, less plausibly, lack of access to a Bible. (On the island Crusoe whips himself into a permanent religious frenzy.) Errors in his twenty-five years of solitude, if they are errors, betray a work ethic or a memory so profoundly compromised that not just his account but his survival would be impossible, yet almost every verse he quotes is altered. His “errors” double as subtle improvements. Less than a conscious preference, Crusoe’s misquotations trail the incontestable scent of intuition, the instinct that a verse as it returned from the rude currents of an isolated mind would, when remembered, be honed, smoothed, and enhanced. The sentence that saves his life does not appear in the KJV or any other translation as he records it in his journal: “Call on me in the Day of Trouble, and I will deliver and thou shalt glorify me.” Decades later he reproduces the same text, almost verbatim, with a small change that suggests he does not copy from his journal, enlarging the “on” into “upon.” Crusoe’s formulation is more memorable than the Bible’s.
Through the first English novel runs the thread of a familiar voice, receding and returning with every misquotation: the inverse of an editor’s, the voice of uninhibited style.
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Misquotation lost its innocence, irreversibly, with the arrival of copy and paste. It may be mistaken for paraphrase, its pale wide-eyed cousin, but its legitimate heirs are ellipsis, misattribution, and recontextualization. The typewriter was as indifferent between forms of appropriation as the pen, while a word processor with an Internet connection favors one unauthorized use over another. If Crusoe’s revision of the word of God remains feasible, today the same gesture would be tainted by a wink or at least, between the lines, the hint of an ulterior motive. The exception is translation, increasingly constrained as it is democratized or devalued.
What is contemporary in Your Name Here? The residue of copy and paste, the promiscuous changes in font, the letters repeated across a line by a finger allowed to linger on a key, they all come together, viewed from a distance, as a sketch in black type of a relationship with a word processor near to Vertov’s with his camera. The book’s most exhilarating fiction, a map depicting the electoral college labeled in Arabic, was dragged and dropped into the manuscript. Less obvious and more consequential than the features of the text that could be apprehended in a gallery, on a wall, is the effect on the texture produced by its inorganic, rebarbative punctuation.
Piglia predicted that the ubiquity of email, the fact that a slip of the finger would send a message into the void, would lead to a general hypersensitivity to little marks and symbols. A more computer-literate theorist would neither have stopped nor begun with email, but Your Name Here is a delivery on his promise, the wheels of which already were in motion in DeWitt’s earlier work. In an account of a dispute with her editor and production manager over changes to The Last Samurai, DeWitt discusses the formation and subversion of notions of correctness via usage and punctuation. She claims to be “a, perhaps even the, world authority” on the subject on the back of her dissertation on the “concept of propriety in ancient literary criticism,” which she qualifies as a “a monster of erudition.” In Gridneff’s emails she discovers a high-tech addition to the arsenal of impropriety in the mojibake, a character misread between the keyboard and the screen: a comma presented as an apostrophe, or a “ý” or “ý” substituted for an “i.”
A profusion of unconventional decisions that do not always adhere to a pattern gives even the preservation of a typo an air of deliberateness, and the apparent exercise of intent everywhere can end in perverse results. The time zones in the emails’ datelines correspond usually to where the sender claims to be located, but in a nine-day period during which Gridneff, now “Kaplan Thornhill” at <nxnw@hotmail.com>, gives no indication of traveling farther from Berlin than to Munich, he sends emails from UTC+0000 (perhaps England), UTC-0300 (perhaps Argentina), and UTC-0400 (maybe the mouth of the Orinoco). Startlingly, he is never in Germany. A week and a half later he writes a description of German policemen outside his house “today” from UTC-0200 (probably Greenland). Either Kaplan is fleeing across continents in a high-stakes pursuit to rival his namesakes’, or the authors’ inattention has shipped him on a delirious cruise into the abyss. A typo can be amplified into a secret fiction.
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What was style? When did we fall out of sync with ourselves?
In the late 1950s in Fort Dupree, South Dakota, a twenty-five-year-old garbageman, recently fired, and a student ten years younger, recently arrived from Texas, run away together to the west. The garbageman has been told that he resembles James Dean, and he reinforces the impression with his uniform of jeans and a white t-shirt. Before they depart Fort Dupree, he kills the girl’s father. They begin their life as fugitives in a forest where they build a treehouse by the river, assemble small comforts from whatever is available, and survive on eggs and fish as if they lived, rather than in the middle of one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, on a desert island. When “bounty hunters” find the camp and try to capture and deliver them to the police, the garbageman shoots them, and the couple resumes its flight across the prairie, pausing to kill witnesses wherever the garbageman deems it necessary and fair.
They follow a circuitous route over the plains in hope of reaching Alberta, and until the day they are captured, they do not cross paths with representatives of the law. On that day, near an oil well, a helicopter appears from behind a small rise, and the girl announces to the garbageman that she will follow him no farther.
Here begins the final chase. He leads the squad cars that pursue him through the brush and onto a dirt road, where his focus appears to shift from the possibility of escape to the mise-en-scene of his arrest. He checks his hair in the rearview mirror and, with ample distance between himself and the police, stops the car and puts a bullet in one of its tires. By the side of the road he leaves a small pile of rocks, and as the sheriff approaches on foot, a revolver trained on his quarry, the garbageman turns to the cairn a few yards off and tells him, “Right there’s where you caught me.” While they escort him to the airport from which he is flown to South Dakota, the deputy comments to the sheriff that he resembles James Dean. The garbageman, from the start, is never himself, and he is never where he is.
In the dungeon where she is held before her execution, Marie Antoinette asks to be allowed to read. According to Calasso, she requests only “the scariest adventures.” The teenage girl from Texas, at the start of the great adventure of her life, with no limit on her freedom but a law in whose existence she must half believe at most, lounges in her treehouse and leafs through the pages of National Geographic and The Kon-Tiki Expedition. As if Crusoe, in place of his Bible, had pored over Hakluyt and Oroonoko.
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Calasso, a genius, makes a rare approach to the banal when he observes that style resides in the belief that a comma can change the world. What is the opposite of the stylist’s position? The obvious answer, the belief that a comma changes nothing, does not bear scrutiny. Whatever the conventions of their time, the most enduring styles of the eighteenth century are indifferent to punctuation. English has not produced a more convincing practitioner of style than Swift, and not his ease, not his velocity, not his acuity, not the force of necessity in his every phrase is vulnerable to the addition or retraction of a comma. He never gives the impression of having selected a word, he seems to arrive at each as naturally as his punctuation, but the punctuation, unlike his language, is not inspired. Nothing essential is lost in a modernization of A Tale of a Tub.
The opposite of believing that a comma changes the world is something else, the consensus position, and at some point in the previous century, writers of literature began to adopt the consensus. They proclaimed it with a self-seriousness that suggests they believed they were extending the tradition of style even as they emptied it. Like the professional editor, the non-stylist or the post-stylist believes that a comma is responsible only to a sentence.
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The publication of Museum of the Novel of the Eternal Woman revealed the star under which Argentine literature had been written for sixty years. The publication of Your Name Here reveals the star under which English literature has been written for the last twenty. Whitespace, a thin affect, arrythmia, fragmentation, a haphazard structure, the deployment of digital forms and mannerisms, and the preference for abbreviation over compression had arrived already in an anthology of gestures, a Woman with a Word Processor circulated on the margins and hidden from public view. Until now it was denied the reach to be influential, but in its use of the tools of its production to their fullest extent, in its fealty to the blinking cursor’s invitation to choose, to revise, to scroll to the last paragraph and change a “the” into an “a,” it anticipated the inevitable.
The first novelists to compose with a word processor used it as a typewriter with a screen, but DeWitt, with the assistance of a more authentic digital native, is the first to use the technology to write, belatedly, the way it wants to write. More than Tristram Shandy or If on a winter’s night a traveler, she performs a close reading of the word processor.
Progress is not made without casualties. The star of poesy is conspicuous by its absence, and before an onslaught of new techniques, plural, style is retired without ceremony. It has not been missed.
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What was style? Something that conformed not to itself, not to a contrived ideal, but to a pattern in the language as it was. The stylist could say, “Right there’s where you caught me,” and look down or into the future instead of behind and to the side. Natural and sculpted, intentional and unaware, measured and undetermined by a rule, capacious enough to be shared between Burroughs and Quine, Kipling and Woolf, it would appear unexpected in ordinary letters, field reports, and transcripts of speech. Before style was the exclusive property of literature, a part of it belonged to everyday life, and after its withdrawal, the threats to its survival as more than a souvenir multiplied and continued their advance.
Literary fiction, that enormous category of prizewinners and grant recipients invisible to literature, is now beneath style and beneath notice, but the middlebrow used to have composure. A more instructive case is the phenomenon of the contemporary “stylist,” increasingly a synonym for “Lishian” and, however intriguing, antithetical to style, which was whole and indivisible and incompatible with methods, also plural, magicked from names like “consecution” and “the swerve.” Style had no connection to the predictability of the unexpected, to the wrong preposition or adverb. It had nothing to do with tools, tools that have been turned to scratching out a living on an island from which only DeLillo has escaped. The rest are stuck reading each other and their cousins, thinner, poppier, who wash to shore in the wet season from their increasingly degraded settlements on the American mainland. Self-exile, at least, is an acknowledgment of a problem.
The rest of the landscape is haunted by an absence as glaring and overlooked as the lightning bug’s, and most of the true living stylists are over fifty, typically eighty. On Substack there is vitality, experiment, invention, and maybe three or four newsletters with style and a real following, one of which is a series of annotations to other essays. (John Pistelli, a genuine stylist, was given line edits in public in a piece about his work by The Paris Review’s food woman: another sign of the times) Some of the best writing on Substack, some of the best being published today, is tainted by stray emphases and alliterations, an obvious grasping after weak metaphors, but the disappearance and replacement of style is less unnerving than the indifference that meets it wherever it persists.
“They need an editor,” chimes in the editor, as if any Harvard graduate could exercise the taste and judgment of a Pound. Left alone, it may be that one or two could, but few non-styles are as effortlessly recognizable as the halting cadence of a piece on the fifth round of “rigorous” edits in Google Docs, a trial that a usage error outlasts invariably as the signature of the little magazine in English. The form editing has taken in the English-speaking world, treated as an essential and universal good, incidentally does not exist in every language. “The problem,” writes Kafka in his diary in a dark period, “is I am choosing.”
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In the whitespace of an absent comma shines an invisible choice, and in each visible choice shines another lapse in style.
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Rodolfo Jorge Walsh: the seer, the hero, the “terrorist,” the journalist, the consummate stylist. The third avant-garde and the synthesizer: another brilliant Argentine without a true novel, known best for his book Operation Massacre, the “nonfiction novel” that anticipates In Cold Blood by a decade. He is a precocious right-wing aesthete who transforms into a Marxist, a translator of Raymond Chandler who himself becomes a detective. In Guatemala, dressed as a priest, he infiltrates the training camps the United States has established to ready batistianos for an invasion of Cuba, and in Cuba, where he co-founds Prensa Latina, he decodes the cable from the US embassy in Guatemala that reveals the plot that culminates in the Bay of Pigs landing. His education in cryptography is a handbook he finds at a used-book stall in Havana. He is a reader who reads for his life, and for others’. In Argentina, he searches for Eva Perón’s body and writes the hard, luminous, elliptical stories that would be a larger part of his legacy had he not joined the Montoneros, the armed left-wing Peronists whose public life begins with the trial and execution of the dictator Aramburu for the crimes, in part, documented in Operation Massacre.
As a Montonero, Walsh is a specialist in information, a reprise of his role in Cuba, and he works intelligence from both ends as a codebreaker and the founder of the Clandestine News Agency. On September 29, 1976, his daughter dies in a firefight under siege by forces of the Videla regime. On March 24, 1977, the military dictatorship’s one-year anniversary, Walsh finishes his “Open Letter from a Writer to the Junta,” and he is murdered by a regime “task force” in the middle of Buenos Aires. That night, his home without gas or electricity in San Vicente, south of the city, is ransacked by another task force. Walsh’s papers are never found, and his corpse is never found.
The third avant-garde is the simplest in design, the fulfillment of the urge to dissolve literature in reality in service of a durable ideal, to find the limit of what can be said about what is. The terrain Walsh navigates is mined with kitsch, egoism, absolutes, and hypocrisy, the birthright of the political avant-garde, but he survives it guided by his infallible nose for the essential and his way, as Cortázar writes in an elegy, “of saying anything as if it didn’t matter, especially what mattered most,” or the way he arrives always at the crossroads, unnoticed, where the necessary takes the impossible’s cold hands in its own.
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The first reviewer of Your Name Here, the only reviewer in 2008 at a major publication, commits an interpretive error from an excess of good will. “Although the book may appear, to begin with, to be plotless,” she writes, “it turns out to be tightly organized,” as if it were sustained by an exculpating architecture. Read honestly the book reveals it was engineered, not architected, and that its components were devised or salvaged as needed. On several occasions the improvisatory nature of its construction is treated by DeWitt and Gridneff concretely, without pseudonyms.
Wikipedia is used as a font of narrative tropes and devices just as Borges draws from the Britannica, albeit with a chance element that more closely tracks Dick’s composition with the I Ching. Near the end, extracts from the pages for “Chekhov’s gun” and “MacGuffin” are copied and pasted with the formatting preserved, and the contents of other pages appear either verbatim or in paraphrase in descriptions of “plot vouchers” and “unexposed contents.” A few pages later, a MacGuffin is summoned in rumors of unproduced films that serve as money-laundering fronts. Even if the exchange is a pure fiction meant as ironic commentary on the authors’ dishevelment, their dishevelment is not a fiction. The inclusion of the singularly unappealing Lotteryland recalls the logic of a subprime loan slotted into a doomed and inflated security.
Mechanical and financial engineers can be forgiven a strip of duct tape or a strange little excrescence that would bring an architect shame. Form, in their world, can be subordinated to function and to functional inelegance. In this last category belong Dewitt’s translations (“schwarzweiss” for “black-and-white,” “manytongued” for “polyglot”), initialisms (“dBb” for “drinks Bitburger,” “2FC2E” for “too fucking complicated to explain”), and allusions (a pointless reference to Dylan’s role in Billy the Kid in, of course, Lotteryland). Similar but distinct indiscretions are the fabric of Gridneff’s emails, which can be amusing (“sauerkraut and worst”), stupid (“Lackney” for “Hackney”), and admissibly both (Angelica and “Bread Shitt”) though they never achieve the sublime juvenility of Céline (“Fartre”).
An engineer cannot and should not be judged by the standards of an architect. The end of the style is as sufficient to explain a few lapses in taste as it is to excuse a few thousand.
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The unspoken appeal of the The Last Samurai was aesthetically conservative, a return to adventure legible to Defoe but more efficient, more propulsive, closer to Borges. Like Macedonio, DeWitt has always taken seriously the phenomenology of reading, how a reader in a given technological paradigm might move through a text, what literary sleights of hand might resist attention or attract it. She considers and manipulates variables like the speed at which the pages of a book, a physical book, will be turned.
Macedonio’s insight into how his work will be read by a lector salteado leads him away from Adriana Buenosayres, a less radical text and “the last bad novel,” in his own assessment, to Museum of the Novel of the Eternal Woman, “the first good novel.” Since Museum, the bad novel and the good novel have both been said to be dying, as if either were sufficiently advanced in age to die. Architecture, painting, and style, their ancestor, are geriatric and at risk, but the novel is barely four hundred years old. It will evolve without them and achieve forms more appropriate to its age.
In retrospect, in English, The Last Samurai may prove to have been the last good novel. Your Name Here, a departure, would be the first bad novel, the first in a large and variable class that precedes it and will endure.
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Juan, who was descended from a gaucho though not himself a gaucho, fled from the outskirts of the city on foot. First he took a path that no car could follow and then, as he entered the low, tangled forest that leads into the marsh, he found a path that no pursuer on horseback could follow. When he would come to a clearing impassable on either side, he listened for the rumble of an engine and trusted to the high grass to shield him from reconnaissance above. He would crawl and crane his neck at any unnatural sound to search the surface of the clouds for the metallic gleam of a PA-51. More than a plane he feared that on the other side of each meadow waited a sentry, idle, violent, half-asleep and half-awake, who would be bearing a rifle and a knife. On his hip, Juan concealed a revolver he had not used. As the grass lost ground to the river, he waded through the reeds, he struggled and failed to keep his only weapon dry, and he did not know whether, if he needed to turn it on a sentry or on his temple, it would fire. He decided to act as though he were beyond its help, and he dropped it into the marsh and pushed it down beneath the muck with the sole of his boot. In a thick cluster of reeds, he lowered himself into the water to the chin, and he waited for sunset and the miracle they had promised him in the safehouse, the miracle of the tides.
He did not know how many hours had passed in the dark when, to keep his body beneath the waterline, he had to sink his haunches into the mud. Finally a cloud moved over the moon, and he stood and he began, as they had told him the night before, to walk into the river as though it were a road. The water had receded already from the marsh, and it started to retreat from the vast channel, and after what he believed was a mile of wading up to his knees, it began to pull away faster than he could walk. He watched the reflection of the moonlight on the riverbed as he went. The sound of any planes passing above did not reach him, and he rarely turned away from the ground he traversed and the mud he had never seen except as silt near the surface, clay-colored and unyielding to romance, to elegy, to his dream of escape: a surface that had moved but had not, he was sure, ceased to exist. Still, when he turned to face the west, he saw to the horizon a smooth, rippling mud like the wet skin of an eel laid on the bank, an expanding bank that he supposed he had not left. He stepped over and around coins and other artifacts of metal and glass that had lodged themselves at the bottom of the river. Each hot gust through the channel reminded him of the fish that had not caught the tide, some of them still breathing in small, brackish ponds, most of them not.
He was near its deepest point before the castoffs began to affect the color and texture, to his eye, of the landscape. When he stopped to catch his breath and looked ahead for the slope that marked what was the opposite shore, he saw at the edge of his field of view a long stretch ribbed and speckled with ivory. He felt a chill he did not understand, it was a warm night and a muggy one, but he had nowhere else to go and he carried on his march.
Having come to the first of the long, pale stones half-buried in the mud, he bent at the waist to lift and examine it, and he realized, as he realized he had known from afar, that it was neither stone nor ivory. The shoe soles, the belt buckles, and the litter of silver teeth confirmed the intuition that he knew, as he reflected, he had when he was crouched and shivering under the reeds. He continued to the north with admirable coolness and fixity of purpose, a poise of which he would not have thought himself capable a week before. He did not allow himself to stop and study the refuse.
It was not until he reached what he imagined was the center of the burial ground, or a brief dip in the channel like any other, that he came to such a density of bones that he was overcome and forced, though time was running out, to pause and collect himself before he pressed on. He counted his breaths. A heaviness afflicted his chest as if he were drowning, but he told himself that he was not drowning, that the tide was out and would stay out, that he was alive, that he would need to go on if he hoped to live again, and he may have believed himself had he not noticed, near a thicket of bones he would not have recognized as a skeleton, much less a person with a name, the arm of a pair of glasses that protruded from the mud.
He lifted them, and he inspected them. The broken lenses were almost square, and the frames were thick and black, and when he studied them he knew he would not reach the other side. The lenses did not catch the moonlight as clearly as the silica in the riverbed, but their history, he knew, or he remembered, was congruent with his own.
He felt as though he could not exist as though he never had. It was plain to him there was not and could not be a miracle, not of the tides or of anything else, and his miracle, in any case, would soon come to an end. Sitting among the bones, he lit the first of many cigarettes with a waterproof match. He turned, resolved, to watch the sweep of the rising tide.
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One plausible continuation of the century will make Your Name Here a classic, and the other will know or forget it as an exception. In the first case, the avant-garde of Your Name Here is the next avant-garde, perhaps the last avant-garde, and the beginning of an age of discovery. In this world, DeWitt’s tools are turned to a second orality, an orality less oral or spoken than the first, better-suited to a textual collage at the price of the sonic charms of the first orality, charms of which Puig had an unfailing command. Down this path style remains confined to a fringe, and it does not return.
In the second case, Your Name Here becomes less legible with time. With Herbert Quain it belongs not to art, but to its history. Of the thousands of possible iterations of this world, maybe one would entail the restoration of style.
Neither path is promising, and the more attractive probably leads to failure or to nowhere.
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In his appraisal of Walsh, his gifts and originality, Piglia stumbles. Where he discusses Walsh’s style he treats the stories as equal in their achievement to the late work, the more explicitly political writing, however personal, in his “letters” to the junta, to his daughter, and to his friends. Walsh was always possessed of style but not perfection, and he did not achieve perfection until he had seemed, from the outside, to have let pure literature go. The last fiction in his Complete Stories was written in 1968.
Piglia, who was Walsh’s dear friend, also discusses one more fiction, a last work that he describes alternately as a story or a novel that was begun in 1968 and finished in 1977. He finishes it almost as he concludes the last letter that will end in his public execution. In “Juan, que iba por el río” (“Juan, who went by the river”), after a miraculous withdrawal of the tide, a political fugitive from Mitre at the end of the nineteenth century crosses the Río de la Plata on horseback to Uruguay. On the riverbed he finds the detritus of the history of Argentina. In 1977, on the day Walsh is killed, a policeman or a soldier or a secret agent steals the manuscript. Its only trace is a hole in the canon.
If the author of the last fiction is the author of the letters, then Piglia does not err when he calls it “one of the great crimes of the military dictatorship.” It was the theft of a bridge to a literature, to a style, that never was and never would be.
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Down the first path lies the exacerbation of certain tendencies, interpretations imposed and imposed again, an emphasis laid on an artless exaggeration. Brevity will stay a virtue, freed from the old concomitant expectation of density of meaning, and borrowings will be freed from the expectation of taste. Targets will be short-range, and they will always be hit.
On the morning of December 4, 2024, Luigi Mangione, a twenty-six-year-old software engineer, allegedly shoots the CEO of UnitedHealthcare on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan. To every shell, he adds an emphasis, the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” inscribed on the cartridge cases. In an open letter giving thanks on his twenty-seventh birthday, he names his three favorite reads in prison. They are Anthem, Fahrenheit 451, and Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy. He gives thanks for a numbered list of twenty-seven items, of which the eleventh is “keyboard shortcuts.”
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From a letter to his friends:
Today marks three months since the death of my daughter, María Victoria, after a battle with the armed forces. I know that most of those who knew her have mourned her already. Others, who have been my friends or known me from afar, would have liked to reach me with a word of solace. This letter was written to give them thanks but also to explain how Vicki died and why she died.
The Army’s report published in the newspapers does not depart, on this occasion, much from the truth. Vicki was, in fact, a second official in the Montoneros Organization as director of the Workers’ Press, and her nom de guerre was Hilda. She was, in fact, meeting that day with four members of the Political Bureau who fought and died beside her….
The 28th of September, the day she entered the house on the Calle Corro, she turned 26. In her arms she carried her daughter because, at the last minute, she could not find anyone to take her. She went to bed with her, in a nightgown. She wore long, ridiculous nightgowns that never fit her.
At seven on the 29th she awoke with the Army’s loudspeakers, the first shots. Keeping to the agreed plan of defense, she went to the roof with the political secretary Molina while Coronel, Salame, and Beltrán were returning fire from the ground floor. I have looked on the scene with her eyes: the rooftop over the low houses, the brightening sky, and the siege. The siege of 150 men, the heavy machine guns in place, the tank. Before me now I have testimony from one of these men, a conscript:
“The fight lasted more than an hour and a half. A man and a girl were shooting from above. It got our attention because every time they shot a burst and we ducked, I heard her laughter.”
I have tried to understand that laughter. The submachine gun was an Halcón and my daughter had never fired it, though she’d learned how to handle it in classes. New things, things that surprised her, always made her laugh. No doubt it was new and surprising to her that from a simple contraction of a finger sprung a burst, and from that burst 150 men would dive to the cobblestones, beginning with Colonel Roualdes, head of the operation.
The trucks and the tank were joined by a helicopter that circled the roof, held back by fire.
“Suddenly,” says the soldier, “there was silence. The girl set down the gun, she leaned across the parapet and opened her arms. We stopped shooting without anyone telling us to stop and we saw her clearly. She began to talk in a loud voice, but she was calm. I don’t remember everything she said. But I remember the last words, I hear them and I can’t sleep. ‘You will not kill us,’ she said, ‘we choose to die.’ Then she and the man each put a pistol to their temple and killed themselves in front of us all.”
Below any resistance was finished. The Colonel opened the door and tossed a grenade. The officers followed it. They found a little baby a bit more than a year old, sitting on a bed, and five corpses.
In the time that has passed I have reflected on her death. I have asked myself if my daughter, if everyone dying like her, had another path. The answer springs from the depths of my heart and I want my friends to know it. Vicki could have chosen other paths that were distinct and not dishonorable, but she chose the most just, the most generous, the most admissible. Her lucid death is a synthesis of her short, beautiful life. She did not live for herself, she lived for others, and those others are millions. Her death however, her death was gloriously hers, and in that death I take strength and I am born again from Vicki.
This is what I wanted to say to my friends and what I hoped they would transmit to others by whatever means their goodness bids them.
Rodolfo Walsh
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Vicki Walsh, an incomparable stylist.
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Down the second path, Your Name Here is extinguished. The dictates of more impressive technologies, or their refusal, usurp its innovations. The word processor is revealed as a brief anomaly in the history of the human production of writing, if essential to machine writing. In a century it is obvious that nothing in Your Name Here was novel, and DeWitt and Gridneff were outdone and anticipated in every way that counts by Wallace, by the conceptual poets, by Federman, by Gass, by the new journalists, by Burroughs, by the concrete poets, by the letters in Paterson, by the many variations on the epistolary novel, and by Sterne.
In this world, in its most likely permutation, the distinctiveness of the sentence without rhythm is forgotten anyway as it establishes itself as the baseline, invisible, irrevocable, and the reader without rhythm, the reader who does not distinguish between the right word and the wrong word and the right, wrong word, is the last reader. An avant-garde survives, and it chooses a lineage for itself that will only be sensible in the far future. Somewhere in this path, down the center or the unfinished edge of the road on which the last few decades are a blip, an exit not taken and forgotten, runs a narrow corridor, however, more clear-eyed and discriminating, and it treats Your Name Here as exceptional in the purest sense while preserving certain distinctions: the path, or the corridor, of style.
Of all the possibilities, the most likely are those in the first category, those in which Your Name Here is a significant text, not a masterpiece in any paradigm but the seed of other masterpieces, impossible to see from here over the final, weathering palisades of style. “If it were given me to read any contemporary page,” writes Borges, channeling Macedonio, “as it will be read in the year 2100, I would know the literature of the year 2100.” Borges, if he were alive, could see a century into the future, but Borges was a great reader. I am not half the reader Borges was, and I am only able to see how I and a few others will read in the year 2100. I can only say there will always be a few of those who read, and who will read when I am gone, for their lives.
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More than the prologue to Facundo, more than the prologue to The Maker, the most affecting prologue in Argentine literature is the third introduction to Operation Massacre. It begins in a café in La Plata where Walsh, before he is Walsh, goes to play chess and discuss literature with the dandyish clientele. In 1956, the night of the failed Valle revolt against the anti-Peronist junta, gunshots are heard, and the crowd pours out of the café into the street. They rush across the city toward the noise. As they come closer, they themselves grow quieter and more and more fall away until Walsh, alone and silent, enters the Plaza San Martín. He goes on.
He comes to the bus station, and he finds a different kind of crowd has assembled, among its number a security guard who tells him that, “revolution or not, they weren’t going to take his gun.” The revolution, by then, has in effect ended. Walsh arrives home, and his house is crawling with soldiers from the neighboring barracks who pack into his kitchen, into his bathroom, who crowd behind the panes of every window. Elsewhere the junta has begun the executions that end, in fourteen years, with the dictator Aramburu’s own execution, but the night is wide enough to hold the beginnings of a second transformation, if not a revolution, and with it another trial. Walsh, when he crosses the Plaza San Martín, has entered into history. He will not leave it.
Six months later, on a “stifling summer night,” he hears a rumor in the same café: “A man they executed is alive.” He begins the investigation that becomes Operation Massacre. He moves twice, he quits his job, and he begins to carry a revolver. (He fires it once in his life, when he is surrounded by the men who come to take him away: his last comma.) He forges new documents with the name “Francisco Freyre,” and the moment he becomes Freyre is the moment he is reborn as Walsh.
What is the narrowest path, and where does it go? There is a story that has been lost, or maybe it was never written, and there is a journey of discovery or rediscovery that leads back into the world, where style was determined by contact with an ocean, a revolver, a physical page, a spoken language. No one can be sent to find it in your place. Crusoe arrives on a desert island “with a knife and a pipe in his pocket” and a small trunk of books, and he makes himself an “architect, carpenter, knife-grinder, astronomer, baker, shipwright, potter, saddler, farmer, tailor, umbrella-maker, and cleric.” So must the writer go into the world, with a pencil and a sheet of paper, even if that world is a library, a trench, or a map.
Style is or was inseparable from an ethic, even where that ethic’s limit was the limit of the text. Style is a place or a vision of a place identical to this one but slightly, now, to the side. There is another world, and Walsh, like others before him, like others after, knew it could be found in this one. They touched it. Style, wherever it appeared, was for us the proof or memory of its existence, and it can be lost or superseded, but it cannot be replaced. A few, inevitably, will find the path and go to the end of the road and wait for it to appear, to reappear after revisions, after masterpieces, after the last comma, and they are very brave. I suspect, though, however far they travel, no one and nothing will be there to meet them. The end of style, when it ends, is a post on a dejected, impassable frontier. It is the beginning of something wider and colder, and it will have no name.
Chapman Caddell
Chapman Caddell is a writer in London.