ONE

by Blake Butler, Vanessa Place

An Oulipian collaboration from three of today's more progressive writers: From the room inside the room, from the house inside the
house, memories of a one-legged father and various acts
of jurisprudence haunt the mysterious creature who writhes
in somatic isolation from one waking nightmare to another.
In ONE two writers have produced textual bodies, one
speaking for the interior and the other describing the
exterior, while a third writer has assembled these two
bodies into a single grotesque symphony of chimerical
language. A hitherto unprecedented collaborative
experiment, ONE defies categorization and heralds a
new approach to exploring the boundaries of authorship
and narrative.

Genres: Fiction

152 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2012

About the author

Blake Butler is the author of EVER, Scorch Atlas, and two books forthcoming in 2011 and 2012 from Harper Perennial. He edits 'the internet literature magazine blog of the future' HTML Giant. His other writing have appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009. He lives in Atlanta.

Reviews

[Nate D]

A strange and daring fiction experiment: Two writers write without conferring. They're given a viewpoint (first person singular), a set of three "movements" (discovery, secrecy, escape), and while one is told to stick to external action (Blake Butler), the other is to write only the interior (Vanessa Place). A third, the initiator of the project, will then edit the two texts generated into a single whole, only cutting and pasting, never modifying (Christopher Higgs).

This is pretty fascinating. The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, are also borderline-incoherent. Both Butler and Place seem to have a tendency to towards words as words, allowing each phrase in isolation to generate its own sequel as much as any underlying narrative guidance. I don't know if this is true, but that's how it feels at points. There's a word-for-word pleasure in it, though it increases the sense of displaced meaning that's already unavoidable given that the multiple non-communicating sources here. The result has a Burroughsian cut-up quality, particularly given Butler's tendencies towards squeaming bosy fluids and such in his external action. Actually its often hard to describe Butler's abstracted action as being more obviously external than Place's introspection. Sometimes they're almost indistinguishable. Though, the extreme concreteness of some of Places thought-patterns actually sets them apart. AND SO, content-wise, what you end up reading here seems to be something like:

a character caught in intense bodily ordeal in a shifting house confronts externalized identity issues while introspecting in obsessive detail about the evolution of legal systems into the modern jury trial.

If I actually take this to be all one text, as I should, it's hilarious in places. Here's someone ringing a bell drawn out of his/her own body into a mirror, or watching his/her own body rise up through ice, while considering the writ of subpoena in 12th or 13th century England.

Yeah, this is strange. It's a striking attempt at totally new creation process, an improvement on the best in exquisite corpse science perhaps; as a simple result, though, say as a novel in itself, it's part garble, part blasted psychological unspooling, part bizarre poetry collapse.

Though only one part of the trinity of creators at work here, I suppose I can't help but take this through the lens of Blake Butler Collaborative Books in 2012. This category also comprises:

-Anatomy Courses, with Sean Kilpatrick
-14 Dreams of Death, with M. Kitchell and Ken Baumann

Add to this his two major works from 2011 (There Is No Year and Nothing) and other major work from 2012 (Sky Saw, just out), plus three others since 2009, and we're looking at a pretty insane level of output.

I'm gonna go ahead and say that Blake Butler is a literary improv-noise band. Basically, he's the Magick Markers circa 2008 or 2009, a band whose extraordinary output comprises countless obscure 12"s, hand-lettered CDrs that turn up unannounced in record stores, self-bootlegged live recordings, and strange one-off collaborations by one or both members with countless other projects. This wild and impossible-to-keep-up-with body of work swirls around a couple "big" albums designed to poke up into view of wider audiences. Arguably, the very best bits of the Markers catalog turned up on these broader-aimed releases when all their clamor and experimentation coalesced into identifiable perfect songs. But the fascination lay in tracking down all of the other Markers esoteric spinning around out there in confusion, picking out the origins of your favorite song in a live noise-blast from Paris, 2006, or marveling at the sustained alienness of a half-hour improvisation. All the same, you could never hear all of them, and sometimes the effort to hear these things wasn't entirely born out by the actual content. But still, the fascination.

So anyway, There Is no Year and Scorch Atlas are brilliant, if psuedo-mainstream Butler, and anchor a confusion of other experiments, like this one, which expand the allure without necessarily satisfying in and of themselves. (Or so maybe: all these collabs and isolated riffs make him more of a freeze-jazz musician who is also capable of exquisitely controlled composition. Though also maybe in this case, Place's more concrete interpositions from hard historical fact kind add a sampled or musique concrete aspect. I dunno.) Anyway, I read this book and it's interesting and I'm glad I did but I look forward to having my patience renewed by the hopefully more cohesive "major 2012 work" of Sky Saw.

[Ashley Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dennis Cooper nailed this succinctly when he said of this bizarre collaboration that it is "as sublimely integrated as any single-minded novel I can think of." The likelihood of this strange triumvirate culminating in a cohesive, albeit decidedly odd, narrative should have been zero, but somehow the result is a seamless surrealist exquisite corpse.

[Marc Nash]

Video review to follow

[Alex Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's not much one can go here. This book is an assemblage by three writers, one for the "inside" one for the "outside" and one to arrange its parts. Like much writing via concept, the major tension is inherent within the presentation of the language. Eventually the two sides disappear and through the figure of the narrator (narration) we get the formation of a unity, a strange assemblage (as one reviewer put it) that defies the normative structure we place on narrative. There is by its very conception, a defiance of structure and yet as readers we wish to cram the content of this piece into that structure, in order to make sense of it. This is another way of saying, as Deleuze brought up, that the mind is a cage on the body. Only in this case, understanding is cage that the narration ends up against, struggling to coexist with the cage and yet trying (not) to be in it all the more. Congruent with other fiction aspects of American writing, we get the figure of the house, in which an immanent logic of familial cognizance underlies the bizarre presentation. In this One the very boundaries of the text are arbitrary in nature. In art we may attempt for spiritual awakening through inexplicable experience -- this text is an attempt at that -- though I find it more to be an exercise in writing tedium than an inspired masterpiece.

The major issue I have with this text is that it is "too easy" that the writing placed out here is somewhat mediocre only because there's nothing to it. I would rather have something crafted that pushes the envelope than something that can be hurriedly put together. In a sense, James Joyce had already come upon this level of abstraction -- although he did it in a way that is more labor intensive. And considering that he had already done so before, to enter that distant abstraction -- this text is more of a statement of who the writers are and what they are doing than it is either thought provocative or interesting.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one, no joke, will likely make you say "unnhhhhhhh." Sick, sick assemblage.