The Fifteen Project: Eight, Issue 9

_____An indefinite space drafted within the confines of strict, though unusual, conventions. Burn Your Belongings is, formally, a negotiated coexistence between antagonistic forces of revolution and conformity, and, like its protagonist, it is the architect of the prison it struggles against. In terms of its structure, it is the rigorous segmentation of the novel into page-long passages that creates a set of bars for the novel's stream of manic transmissions. In terms of its character's psychology, it is the labyrinth of paranoid fantasies that constantly turns the searching I's mental journey back towards the center of his own generative topos. In both senses, the novel operates under an experimental form that is governed by an artificial constraint of the novel's own creation (on the one hand the limitation on passage-length and other various grammatical devices, and, on the other, the inescapable bondage of psychological solipsism). The resulting image is one of paradox, perhaps a model for existence on a non-artistic scale: liberty is an illusion, as is confinement-both products of the imagination.
_____On a more general level, the novel is one of triangulated love, a story about a man in competition with another over an inaccessible girl whose allure is magnified by her capricious behavior, by her very remoteness, and by the impossibility of truly possessing her, a condition that makes her the perfect love object of the impotent. Her presence in the story functions in large part as a point of mediated intercourse between the two male characters (in referring to the periodic pseudo-confrontations between the men who vie for her affection, the narrator seems to unconsciously elaborate the innuendo "each time we say less and less. regretfully replace unused weapons. wish each other well. go separate ways" [69]). Further amplifying her charms is her suffering at the hands of the unconscious (or less than fully-actualized) brute who does possess her (the doppelganger/nemesis/compatriot of the protagonist), but in a way that is portrayed as limiting her potential: an impure love that fails to activate her fully. This paradigm sees its predecessors in Mann and Hemingway, perhaps, as well as others, and is often the model of love for the artist, jealous of the practical and capable mensch, engaged in a mediated admiration of that man's abilities that borders on the erotic, and is a system that poignantly diminishes the woman-despite her idealization-to a foil for the conflict between the aesthetic and the worldly, and between the two men who come to represent those poles. Actually, Burn Your Belongings is often brazen about its objectification of its heroine/ingenue: "before I came she didn't exist. she was trapped in birth. why did he tell her. why did he steal her. she's my link to everything I've never understood. she refuses to accept this. what I'd choose as our paradise" (54); "I created her" (55); "I consider her a statue" (72); "I want to corrupt her. to expose the futility of her pursuits. reconstruct her soul. make her conform to these ideals." (160); and "I enjoy her cooking. someone to relate the events of the day to. to wait for me" (171).
_____This 3-way story is related in an atmospheric zone of ambivalent chronologies. Impossible juxtapositions of tenses and places erode the stability of the narrative, making it less a linear movement from beginning to end, and more a foggy meander through a monochrome-but rapidly shifting-space. This is in part due to a simple lack of specificity about time and place. Events aren't grounded or established in a particular locale, dates-even relative dates-aren't provided, meaning that the transition from states can't be marked or unraveled. Rather the reader lists on a tossing sea of memories, images, self-mortification, and anxiety.
_____Not only do the unmarked times make for a space of entropy, the almost-compulsive contracting of subjects and verbs glosses the action those verbs might denote. In addition to obscuring the verbs themselves ("would" and "had," for example, both become "'d" in contraction, and both "has" and "is" become "'s"), this move de-emphasizes the role the verb plays in the sentence (since, while the subjects remain intact, the verbs are uniformly truncated, losing letters-the markers of written territory-to the apostrophe), and this draws attention instead to the subjects and objects, creating a zone of existent entities without change or movement, but rather posed in a long series of states and stagings These verbs in particular, of course-the common irregular verbs like "to have" and "to be"-are verbs of place and state, rather than action, and so, even in their untruncated form, they would tend to evoke stasis rather than motion. Still, their elision through contraction takes this stasis to the maximal degree it could attain while still keeping to the minimum standards of sentence grammar established in this context (an unusual context, admittedly, but one with rules nonetheless-rules that necessitate the presence of verbs, even if their significance is forcibly diminished; after all, the protagonist states, "there's a logic to my stillness" [154]).
_____As with much of the novel's form, this meandering sense of time finds parallels in the protagonist's existential wonderings. Echoing the eternal present the text exhibits, he says "I have no past. I was born this way" (52). As justification for the stagnation this can produce, he reflects "I've never wanted to make progress. I've always felt that any movement forward was costly. any achievement or obstacle overcome was the death of something beautiful. innocent and irretrievable. I wanted everything to stay the same" (69). These parallels between the exposition of the I and the novel's forms are one of the things that suggest the solipsism of the text, since, in this sense, the novel becomes a material expression of the protagonist's mental landscape. Burn Your Belongings is the ethereal realm in which the I is free to explore his conflicting, jumbled impulses, but he often seems unaware of the limits of this realm, not necessarily drawn around him externally by subjects that are taboo, but restricted centrifugally by its continuous obsessive circling of the girl that is his motive object, and the tether of an experimental grammar.
_____However, amidst this even space, there are a finite number of recurrent motifs that give some semblance of re-iterative structure, a return of certain images that creates a sense of slowly and arduously-developed grounding. One of these recurrent entities is a bridge, an image whose iconic significance of transition and coalition is suggested, but not closed. In fact, the bridge is associated with mundane-ness, quotidian-ness (ironically). It is the antithesis of change and transition, indicating rather the fetid bond between the characters, the stagnant connection between the shores of their selves. To the extent that it does signify movement and transition, it does so only in the sense that it suggests that these are the same movements that have always taken place, the same transitions that are always made, that even their motion does not signify a real change.
_____In terms of its experiment, there are some lapses that make the text more of a gesture towards a potential arrangement of the text than an example of what it proposes. The text erects a basically-ambivalent space of multiple presents, but there are moments when alternate tenses creep in, seemingly by accident. In addition, there are places where the stream of internal thoughts is broken by dialogue, something which happens too rarely to set a precedent through recurrence. In the context of a more postmodern text, I might suggest these aporias indicate opportunities for the text to deconstruct itself, but this text operates more like a high modernist work. It does not attempt to destabilize or suggest the destabilization of all modes, rather, it suggests a particular mode-or experiments with a particular mode-which it constructs as unitary (for its purposes), even if its alterity suggests the failure of totalization of any textual system.
_____Beyond formal concerns (if one can ever be totally beyond them), the book does seem to slump in terms of characterization, and the emotions of the various characters, as well as the language and images used to evoke those emotions, leave one non-plussed. The diction can periodically seem stilted or unwieldy, alternating between moments of affectation of poetry and the simply conversational. The protagonist is alternately wretched or uninspiring, and since his perspective is the filter through which the other characters are seen, one senses an incompleteness in them. Still, the novel seems to be working at other concerns; from an aesthetic standpoint, of course, this mediation-this incompleteness of the image the protagonist grants us-is the crux of the paranoid project of the novel: everything mediated through the mind of the protagonist.
_____In the end, in sketching the outlines of Burn Your Belongings one must return to the idea of the paradox, which encapsulates this text, and, of course, does not (in making an oblique reference to a text I'm currently reading for another project, I could say it's the cornerstone of the text, rather than the keystone). By experimenting with formatting and style, Burn Your Belongings suggests the contextuality and subjectiveness of existing modes. Through its implementation of its experiment, it suggests the essential and objective nature of the new mode it proposes. In its breaking with tradition, it finds itself locked in the confines of the protagonist's mania. Burn Your Belongings is a prison, but it reveals that we have always been prisoners.

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TOC
	Burn Your Belongings By David Hoenigman (Six Gallery Press, 2008. $24.99, 201 pages)	contents
		contents


	Reviewed by Pat Lawrence
	Reviewed by Pat Lawrence



	_____An indefinite space drafted within the confines of strict, though unusual, conventions. Burn Your Belongings is, formally, a negotiated coexistence between antagonistic forces of revolution and conformity, and, like its protagonist, it is the architect of the prison it struggles against. In terms of its structure, it is the rigorous segmentation of the novel into page-long passages that creates a set of bars for the novel's stream of manic transmissions. In terms of its character's psychology, it is the labyrinth of paranoid fantasies that constantly turns the searching I's mental journey back towards the center of his own generative topos. In both senses, the novel operates under an experimental form that is governed by an artificial constraint of the novel's own creation (on the one hand the limitation on passage-length and other various grammatical devices, and, on the other, the inescapable bondage of psychological solipsism). The resulting image is one of paradox, perhaps a model for existence on a non-artistic scale: liberty is an illusion, as is confinement-both products of the imagination. _____On a more general level, the novel is one of triangulated love, a story about a man in competition with another over an inaccessible girl whose allure is magnified by her capricious behavior, by her very remoteness, and by the impossibility of truly possessing her, a condition that makes her the perfect love object of the impotent. Her presence in the story functions in large part as a point of mediated intercourse between the two male characters (in referring to the periodic pseudo-confrontations between the men who vie for her affection, the narrator seems to unconsciously elaborate the innuendo "each time we say less and less. regretfully replace unused weapons. wish each other well. go separate ways" [69]). Further amplifying her charms is her suffering at the hands of the unconscious (or less than fully-actualized) brute who does possess her (the doppelganger/nemesis/compatriot of the protagonist), but in a way that is portrayed as limiting her potential: an impure love that fails to activate her fully. This paradigm sees its predecessors in Mann and Hemingway, perhaps, as well as others, and is often the model of love for the artist, jealous of the practical and capable mensch, engaged in a mediated admiration of that man's abilities that borders on the erotic, and is a system that poignantly diminishes the woman-despite her idealization-to a foil for the conflict between the aesthetic and the worldly, and between the two men who come to represent those poles. Actually, Burn Your Belongings is often brazen about its objectification of its heroine/ingenue: "before I came she didn't exist. she was trapped in birth. why did he tell her. why did he steal her. she's my link to everything I've never understood. she refuses to accept this. what I'd choose as our paradise" (54); "I created her" (55); "I consider her a statue" (72); "I want to corrupt her. to expose the futility of her pursuits. reconstruct her soul. make her conform to these ideals." (160); and "I enjoy her cooking. someone to relate the events of the day to. to wait for me" (171). _____This 3-way story is related in an atmospheric zone of ambivalent chronologies. Impossible juxtapositions of tenses and places erode the stability of the narrative, making it less a linear movement from beginning to end, and more a foggy meander through a monochrome-but rapidly shifting-space. This is in part due to a simple lack of specificity about time and place. Events aren't grounded or established in a particular locale, dates-even relative dates-aren't provided, meaning that the transition from states can't be marked or unraveled. Rather the reader lists on a tossing sea of memories, images, self-mortification, and anxiety. _____Not only do the unmarked times make for a space of entropy, the almost-compulsive contracting of subjects and verbs glosses the action those verbs might denote. In addition to obscuring the verbs themselves ("would" and "had," for example, both become "'d" in contraction, and both "has" and "is" become "'s"), this move de-emphasizes the role the verb plays in the sentence (since, while the subjects remain intact, the verbs are uniformly truncated, losing letters-the markers of written territory-to the apostrophe), and this draws attention instead to the subjects and objects, creating a zone of existent entities without change or movement, but rather posed in a long series of states and stagings These verbs in particular, of course-the common irregular verbs like "to have" and "to be"-are verbs of place and state, rather than action, and so, even in their untruncated form, they would tend to evoke stasis rather than motion. Still, their elision through contraction takes this stasis to the maximal degree it could attain while still keeping to the minimum standards of sentence grammar established in this context (an unusual context, admittedly, but one with rules nonetheless-rules that necessitate the presence of verbs, even if their significance is forcibly diminished; after all, the protagonist states, "there's a logic to my stillness" [154]). _____As with much of the novel's form, this meandering sense of time finds parallels in the protagonist's existential wonderings. Echoing the eternal present the text exhibits, he says "I have no past. I was born this way" (52). As justification for the stagnation this can produce, he reflects "I've never wanted to make progress. I've always felt that any movement forward was costly. any achievement or obstacle overcome was the death of something beautiful. innocent and irretrievable. I wanted everything to stay the same" (69). These parallels between the exposition of the I and the novel's forms are one of the things that suggest the solipsism of the text, since, in this sense, the novel becomes a material expression of the protagonist's mental landscape. Burn Your Belongings is the ethereal realm in which the I is free to explore his conflicting, jumbled impulses, but he often seems unaware of the limits of this realm, not necessarily drawn around him externally by subjects that are taboo, but restricted centrifugally by its continuous obsessive circling of the girl that is his motive object, and the tether of an experimental grammar. _____However, amidst this even space, there are a finite number of recurrent motifs that give some semblance of re-iterative structure, a return of certain images that creates a sense of slowly and arduously-developed grounding. One of these recurrent entities is a bridge, an image whose iconic significance of transition and coalition is suggested, but not closed. In fact, the bridge is associated with mundane-ness, quotidian-ness (ironically). It is the antithesis of change and transition, indicating rather the fetid bond between the characters, the stagnant connection between the shores of their selves. To the extent that it does signify movement and transition, it does so only in the sense that it suggests that these are the same movements that have always taken place, the same transitions that are always made, that even their motion does not signify a real change. _____In terms of its experiment, there are some lapses that make the text more of a gesture towards a potential arrangement of the text than an example of what it proposes. The text erects a basically-ambivalent space of multiple presents, but there are moments when alternate tenses creep in, seemingly by accident. In addition, there are places where the stream of internal thoughts is broken by dialogue, something which happens too rarely to set a precedent through recurrence. In the context of a more postmodern text, I might suggest these aporias indicate opportunities for the text to deconstruct itself, but this text operates more like a high modernist work. It does not attempt to destabilize or suggest the destabilization of all modes, rather, it suggests a particular mode-or experiments with a particular mode-which it constructs as unitary (for its purposes), even if its alterity suggests the failure of totalization of any textual system. _____Beyond formal concerns (if one can ever be totally beyond them), the book does seem to slump in terms of characterization, and the emotions of the various characters, as well as the language and images used to evoke those emotions, leave one non-plussed. The diction can periodically seem stilted or unwieldy, alternating between moments of affectation of poetry and the simply conversational. The protagonist is alternately wretched or uninspiring, and since his perspective is the filter through which the other characters are seen, one senses an incompleteness in them. Still, the novel seems to be working at other concerns; from an aesthetic standpoint, of course, this mediation-this incompleteness of the image the protagonist grants us-is the crux of the paranoid project of the novel: everything mediated through the mind of the protagonist. _____In the end, in sketching the outlines of Burn Your Belongings one must return to the idea of the paradox, which encapsulates this text, and, of course, does not (in making an oblique reference to a text I'm currently reading for another project, I could say it's the cornerstone of the text, rather than the keystone). By experimenting with formatting and style, Burn Your Belongings suggests the contextuality and subjectiveness of existing modes. Through its implementation of its experiment, it suggests the essential and objective nature of the new mode it proposes. In its breaking with tradition, it finds itself locked in the confines of the protagonist's mania. Burn Your Belongings is a prison, but it reveals that we have always been prisoners.







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