The Machinery of Waiting: On Grant Maierhofer’s “The Compleat Lungfish”

Grant Maierhofer | The Compleat Lungfish | Apocalypse Party | 2022 | 226 Pages

One morning if you grew up with a father he at some point awoke you at some ungodly hour to take a few hours’ drive to some dock to get into some rickety rented boat to then push off into what feels like the middle of nowhere but which is in reality just some lake in Ohio where you’ll bob a bit for perch or bass or pike. And from there you’d sit with fishing poles in the water and not say much to one another, you being eleven and not having much of anything to say in general and him being an adult and tired and a little cranky that he’d consigned one of his weekend days, one of his mornings to sleep in, to you and this little ritual. To this thing that people do: go fishing.

And then you’ll get a little bit older and you’ll (unfortunately) be a wannabe aspiring academic or historian or whatever and probably stumble across Walton’s The Compleat Angler, that poetic and fragmented discourse on the eponymous fish and the process of fishing for said eponymous fish. Thinking back to those awkward and stilted mornings with your own father, you might wonder what it is about fishing that so unanimously captures the poetic eye. Maybe it’s something you’ll get when you’re older: just what it is that’s so special about waiting, especially when this waiting in particular is interrupted by not much, and even then only rarely. 

Grant Maierhofer’s newest book, The Compleat Lungfish, is, like the old book after which it is named, a fragmented affair, focused predominantly on waiting, on boredom, on repetition, on those things grabbed onto to defer the boredom of the repetition of waiting. Part memoir, part discourse on noise music (specifically the band Lungfish: “I POSITION MYSELF UPON THE MONITOR TO MORE DIRECTLY INGEST THE SOUND,” he writes), part meditation on the hibernational practices of the spotted African lungfish, and part literary collage—a small consolidation of quotes collected from writers such as Turgenev, Melville, and, indeed, Walton occasionally interrupts the disheveled narrative—the text resists strict narrative delineation, operating as a discrete series of images, ostensibly unified only by dint of being contained within a dustjacket. 

Maierhofer writes, in an evocation of Beckett’s famous I can’t go on, I’ll go on, “I don’t have my feet. I have my feet.” The allusion to Beckett’s “trilogy” (successive novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) is buoyed further on, when a “toothless bum” in Ireland is described as sucking on stones with the “flavor sustaining him” between drinks: this toothless bum is obviously a pastiche of Molloy himself, the central figure from the first novel in Beckett’s sequence. Like the earlier reference, Maierhofer concretizes this one too within his own life, drawing parallels between Beckett’s Molloy and how the dad of a friend from Maierhofer’s childhood would chew his dip. These allusions are not playfully thematic, but strictly material: that is, they are ossified into the bodily. Where Beckett writes about spiritual/intellectual toil as ceaseless paradox, situating the narratorial “I” somewhere in between life and death, in the process questioning the novel’s cultural primacy as a representational conduit of the self, Maierhofer makes this real: he writes about life lived in between life and death, as opposed to life spoken of from that same dissolutionary space. 

In outlining these ways in which toil is, first and foremost, meat, Maierhofer grants that expressions of “real life” must grant language a body. Hoever, for Maierhofer, “the world insists the human spirit be dashed and ruined in a sea of irony and removal,” and so “artists create in rebellion against the failure to create.” Crucially, this “irony and removal” is innate to the very fact of creation, of artistic representation itself: “the work will never get finished for the body.” That is, literary representation is an intrinsically metaphysical thing, something that occurs “out there,” cleaved from the material real. 

Maierhofer writes of this paradoxical struggle: how can one make matter felt in a novel when both reading and writing are intellectual events occurring in an atemporal cerebral theater? A text cannot be left to hang as an exclusively a priori event, not when one considers how much influence fiction has on the shaping of our lives, of our perspectives, tinting that which happens to fall within our ken with its influence. In recognizing that fiction is too often conceptualized as a generic circumscription in which representation is rendered into reference, evocation, and sheer discursivity, Maierhofer’s novel is one that makes represented experience into a literal force. 

It follows that, in Maierhofer’s writing, metaphor must contain bone; symbol must be able to bleed. This is, again, concretized within the text when the end of the novel is diegetically represented as the speaker’s suicide: the bullet enters his brain and the “meat of [him explodes] out,” explodes out as text, as the “heaving moment” that fiction both invites one into and simultaneously forecloses on. 

For pain is legibilizing. Matter makes immediate sense. Narrative is only ever functional when retrospective. To be cast into the interminable present is to blindly thrash one’s way forward based exclusively on external stimuli. Our situation within the mud of the real is felt, more than it is grasped as an object of knowledge. In describing the lungfish’s way of burying itself in the dirt to await the arrival of the proper conditions in which it can survive, the speaker of The Compleat Lungfish—like, in a way, Beckett’s How It Is—constructs a lived-in space for the self from deep within the mud, in which legibility is only retroactive, and it is the sensation of circumambient matter which produces meaning.

With this in mind, The Compleat Lungfish is a text ultimately predicated on the deictic: just count how frequently that word “there” appears and is utilized in this specific way: “The little lungfish there on the bottom of the thing with its gleaming little eyes and its comical little mouth…”; “The human being needs to rest, mostly, needs to rest there upon the floors”; “Instead, the only really acceptable answer is to let it persist in existing there where it’s existing,” etc.

Every time that word “there” is spoken, something odd happens: in spite of Maierhofer’s trying to ground the reader, to put them there, to make “there” into there, the reader is reminded of the fact that they in fact are not “there,” any more than they are there, but are rather, instead, here, reading a book, interacting with what is ultimately a representational inertia. It is an element of hypermimesis that yet produces an instant of antimimesis. 

But why is this so defamiliarizing, so alienating? Is fiction so ontologically removed from that which it represents that any attempt to invite the Outside in becomes actively jarring? Maierhofer would argue that, well, yes, it is—and yet Maierhofer recognizes that, insofar as it is always inert literary representation instead of dynamic ontological conveyance, and insofar as there is thusly no point in going on, ultimately still you go on, and then you continue to go on, and you don’t make money, and you scare your family and your loved ones, and, to some extent, you grapple daily with the shame and the guilt that comes in producing obliquely autobiographical narrative art, alchemicizing your life and the lives of those around you who have had the misfortune of crossing paths with you when you were at your most fucked up, all that guilt and shame that comes from alchemicizing all this waste and excess and refuse into narrative art, into an art that is trajectorial and tidy and representational, even though, outside of the text, it is endless, and it is recursive, and it is material, and you feel it, all of it, always.

So, for a work so focused on the alchemy of art, it is likewise not surprising that this is the rare work about noise rock that understands that the magic of noise rock is in the alchemy of it: the comprehension that all those wires and amps and pedals and processors serve to convert raw sound waves into electricity, to render material something incorporeal. (I think of the part in Heat where Tom Noonan’s character, speaking to Robert De Niro’s on the information one can gleam from the nascent internet, says: “This stuff just flies through the air, they send this information beamed out all over the fucking place: you just got to know how to grab it. I know how to grab it.”) Maierhofer is aware of the alchemy present in how noise artists construct meaning by way of that pounding repetition that defines most noise rock bands—the eponymous Lungfish obviously, but also Shellac, Oxbow, Daughters, Swans, those old PJ Harvey records, etc., all immediately come to mind.

Because when you have a dogshit thrift shop guitar and a half-broken distortion pedal and a dogshit amp and you crank the gain just a bit too high so everything sounds the way burning hair smells, then repetition is not repetition per se, because every botched note, every flubbed pluck and accidental harmonic, is picked up, is incorporated into the texture of the thing, so it’s not boring or dull, not really, because now you have the opportunity to listen closely and locate those incidental augmentations and now, and check this out, now you have the opportunity to produce your own singular meaning, generating it out of an ostensibly mindless repetition, and in a four- or five-minute song that repeats the same riff ad nauseum, you still are able have a “favorite part,” and it’s all yours. Repetition encourages boredom, but it does not engender boredom.

Though it is a genre without a geographical birthplace—yes, Steve Albini may have refined it in Chicago, but to focus on refinery is to ignore west coast hardcore and east coast no wave, and it is even to ignore free jazz, which even has some Cleveland to it, insofar as this is where pioneering figure Albert Aylers developed his approach—noise rock is aesthetically a music of the Midwest: it is a music of repetition, of waiting, of labor and daily drudgery. You have become locked into a perpetual toil; making meaning out of this endless string of similarity becomes a matter of close reading, of overlaying the real with the symbolic and from there identifying surges of intensity. Rather than overlooking these surges as anomalous and, as such, expungable, Maierhofer asks the reader to recuperate these topological bumps into their own narratives: to reconceptualize valleys and crevices into, instead, gyri and sulci.   

And in this bleak book—a book that certainly shares a wavelength with Beckett’s starved prose, but, likewise, is in tune with Denis Johnson at his most honest, Coetzee at his most moral, Claire-Louise Bennett at her most clever and most alien, and even Bolaño at his most confused and most allusive and most seething—in this quiet and touching book, Grant Maierhofer shows how, if you’re in tune with the right frequencies, and if you’ve developed a taste for timbre, waiting is not perpetuated boredom, and repetition is not mechanic: it is rhythmic.