The Sick List

by Ansgar Allen

'The Sick List operates on the far side of literature.' John Schad

In this novel, an unnamed academic in an unnamed contemporary university, relates his obsession with his tutor, Gordon. He pores over the increasingly bizarre mis-readings in Gordon's annotations in a strange selection of stolen library books. Is Gordon unraveling a mystery? Or is his own mind unraveling? Meanwhile, an epidemic of catatonia breaks out; academics are found slumped and unconscious at their desks. Is reading itself the cause of this sickness? Is the only escape to return to illiteracy?

Witty, moving, and beautifully written, The Sick List plays with the dividing line between deploring and exemplifying what it most despises. Inspired by the work of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, it considers how the minds of educated people are moulded by both the breadth of literary culture and the narrowness of academic institutions.

'The Sick List is about menace, about a menace (Gordon), and is written in the voice of a menace. It reads like one of the pen-portraits of surreal ultra-violence in Bernhard's Gargoyles, where education turns out to be the most deceitful panacea of all.' Katharine Craik

Genres: Fiction

120 pages, Paperback

Published June 30, 2021

About the author

Ansgar Allen is the author of works of fiction, theory-fiction and philosophy. He lives and works in Sheffield, in the UK.

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This incessant reading of Bernhard, prompted by Gordon, was clearly becoming an obsession.  

So I read Extinction very slowly indeed, and did most of that reading in the toilet cubicle at work. Most thinking and much else at work must be done in toilet cubicles. Toilet cubicles are about the only place where thinking can happen, I thought, where the associa-tion between thinking and shitting seemed entirely appro-priate to my deplorable state of mind. It was unbearable to read a book like Extinction that slowly. Only so much time can be spent in a toilet cubicle before one leg goes dead, followed by the other. It is easy to spot these toilet cubicle thinkers, I thought. They walk around with one dead leg from too much sitting on the pot. They think for the amount of time it takes for one leg to go dead, I thought, but not the other. Being habitual toilet cubicle thinkers, they leave the cubicle before the second leg goes dead so that they have one leg to hobble with. Becoming an experienced cubicle thinker myself, I only read Extinction in one-leg sittings. 

The Sick List by Ansgar Allen is part of Boiler House Press' new Beyond Criticism Editions, a "reincarnation of the Beyond Criticism book series, originally published by Bloomsbury and now part of Boiler House Press' own experiments with the radical new forms that literary criticism might take in the 21st century."

This book is in the form of a novel, one heavily influenced by the great Thomas Bernhard. In his list of Five Books
by Thomas Bernhard Allen explains how the Austrian author influenced heavily the writing of The Sick List:

Working with Thomas Bernhard, not just the content of his work but the style of it, helped me to break into a different register, in this case the form of the monologue. This mode of writing works through repetition, return and extension, self-adjustment, and self-contradiction. Bernhard’s monologues are not consumed by their negativity, but fly with it, quite lightly at times. They are also self-undermining, because the spectacle of the remorselessly negative critic is at the same time an exhibition of the worst traits of that critic. Bernhard’s complainers do not come off well in his books, and seem to know that too (there are occasions of self-criticism in amongst all the attacks). These monologues also remain open, I think, although I’m aware this may sound counter-intuitive. Their refusal of paragraph breaks (and the above mentioned cycles, repetitions, adjustments, and contradictions) ensures that no sentence becomes the clincher, a minor conclusion within the text. Instead, we encounter a wilful, often playful expenditure of arguments.

The Sick List is narrated by an academic in (like the author himself) the school of education at a university. His story is told in one unbroken paragraph where he largely relays the thoughts of his senior and tutor, Gordon, although the narrator, unusually, receives this not directly, but via Gordon's annotations and underlinings, in green-ink, in the copies of various books the narrator sees him reading, and which he then immediately borrows once Gordon returns them to the university library.

Though Gordon was not a writer, or not anymore, Gordon did underline, highlight, and occasionally annotate. The evidence was abundant. It accounted for the ink. Gordon trailed green ink across the books he read. Gordon filled books with marks, dashes, encirclements, and the odd comment. The first book I read under Gordon's influence drained his pen more than most. It was a respectable book on a crude topic, a chronicle of farts and related outbursts in medieval texts. After Gordon checked it back into the library, I checked it out, extracting sentences Gordon underlined in green. I read these passages as if they were highlighted for my benefit. Gordon left traces quite deliberately for me (or someone like me) to pick up, I decided. I coped with the task of reading Gordon's books by telling myself his notations were for me, or someone similar, so that it might just as well be me.

This gives the whole text a neat variation on the Bernhard technique of reported speech, and reported reported speech, with constructions such as:

This introduces a suspicion of teaching, a constant fear that he (Roithamer) may well have meant to destroy me... Bernhard writes, Gordon underlined, I thought.

The narrator's text, complete with its own footnotes, parodies academic texts, and indeed parodies academic texts that aim to parody academic texts:

It is a scholarly book he would have said, I thought. It diligently footnotes each scatological record, for the book does not call for abandonment of the rules of academic engagement. There is, nonetheless, much affectionate parodying of them. That annotation appeared just inside the front cover. It was a quote from comments made elsewhere, written by the author of this book on farting.(1). When speaking I imagined Gordon would give the reference in a similar way, appended as a footnote to our conversation. Footnote, he would say. As a result of this tendency to footnote, our speech developed a mechanical inflection. It was punctured by the mechanics of continually referencing what we said, perforated by references, page numbers and publication details. Everything we said was footnoted where appropriate. It was the death of thought all this footnoting, I thought, as Gordon would say. We have long fallen ill of this endless need for references and page numbers, they serve as our intellectual props. That is why we could tolerate this book, another monograph filled with footnotes and references. On my estimation, Gordon went on, this book does not subvert what it parodies. This book manifests (Gordon indicated in the margin) the academic ideal that science in the broadest sense (Wissenschaft) should be pursued for its own sake and the university should be left to its own devices. Despite its scatological title, Gordon said, as I listened, and despite some of its contents, this book sits comfortably within academic convention.

Footnote (1) Valerie, Allen. Author's Response to Professor Danuta Shanzer, review of On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages, (review no. 733). Reviews in History 2009.

Not surprisingly Gordon's most annotated books are the works of Thomas Bernhard:

Gargoyles is one of Thomas Bernhard's earliest novels, an author who was to become my obsession. Before Gordon I hardly knew his writing, or if I thought I knew it to some degree, hardly did. I checked Gargoyles out of the library as soon as Gordon checked it in. There was some ink in the book, not as much as I hoped, though enough to begin with. The book opens with the death of a schoolteacher found dying and left dead, Bernhard writes. In the last months of this life this schoolteacher developed an astonishing gift for pen drawing, writes Bernhard. He drew a world intent on self-destruction that terrified his parents who were looking after their son, already ruined at the age of twenty-six.

Meanwhile in the university itself, and in the wider national academic community, lecturers and professors are increasingly struck with a blight of catatonia, typically found at their desks, sitting in their swivel chairs, apparently having been there for several days, dehydrated and in a stupor from which they cannot be raised. A sickness that mirrors that which the narrator (via Gordon, via Bernhard) see in academia.

Intellectual culture is sick with words, I thought. These words are useless to us. We read them and feel tired by way of them. Then we write more of them, filling a void that we are told, as we tell ourselves, we should not have to defend in terms other than our own ineffable intuition of the importance of intellectual culture. The uselessness of the academy remains its original defence, I thought, even though that argument is instantly betrayed by its history, since the first and highest mission of the medieval university was to manufacture and reproduce a priesthood. It would then produce lawyers, statesmen and doctors, masters in the practical arts of duplicity and control. What haunts the contemporary academic, then, is a growing sense of weakness unfamiliar to the profession. Gordon knew that. The traditional defence—entirely spurious, deceptive—is now accompanied by a second, opposite argument that survives quite well in the corpse of its predecessor. The university declares to all who will listen that it is useful after all. Greed and desperation comingle, a disgusting mix, and the university is finally rendered useless before its own growing systems of obsessive self-inspection.

One of the book's cited is Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, which is close to, an affectionate, pastiche of Bernhard. Interestingly, the narrator here argues that this misses the point of Thomas Bernhard, in that often the Bernhardian narrator's biggest issue, amidst his rants, is with himself, where here the narrator, and Gordon, are very aware they are they are part of the problem.

One minor personal limitation was that the picture of academic painted is rather different to my own exposure, 30+ years ago and to the rather different world of pure mathematics and statistics. I don't mean to question its accuracy, rather that this didn't resonate and I was unable to fully appreciate its accuracy.

Overall a both entertaining and erudite exposition on education.

Bibliography

The slim book contains 65 footnotes referencing 17 different books:

- Bernhard's novels Gargoyles (* translated by Richard and Clara Winston), Yes (Ewald Osers), Wittgenstein's Nephew (David McLintock), Extinction (David McLintock), The Lime Works (Sophie Wilkins), Correction (Sophie Wilkins) and Old Masters *Ewald Osers)

(the narrator also reads On the Mountain and laments the lack of Frost and Concrete from the library - no mention of The Loser and The Cheap-Eaters)

- two social-history-via-scatology studies History of Shit and On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages

- as well as:
Writings from the Late Notebooks
The Antichrist
The Jokers
For The Good Of The Cause
The Library of Babel
Gordon of Khartoum: Martyr and Misfit
The Writing of the Disaster
Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador

and not footnoted:
Futility: Novel and Kleist: Selected Writings

* My addition. One minor gripe is that if footnotes referencing a text originally written in a foreign language, then please #namethetranslator, whose English-language words (not the original authors) are being quoted.  Perhaps that isn’t de rigueur in academic circles, but if so that’s another damning charge against academia.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

An acidic evisceration of academia by way of Thomas Bernhard pastiche, The Sick List may be of limited appeal to those not already under the spell of Bernhard's prose, but for those who are, it should be an amusing and on-point read. I'm still not sure how I feel in general about Bernhardian pastiche, but this is well done and Allen puts it to good service in his clever critique of the culture of higher education. (3.5, rounded down to 3 because the first half or so dragged, which in such a short book is difficult to dismiss [in fairness, this may have been reader-related]).

The university was already falling apart when I first met Gordon. But even a ruined institution can still grip you. The sector as a whole was already sliding into a hollow of its own making when I first saw him. Only the books Gordon threw away mattered, though they were falling apart in my hands. There was no escaping their fate. The preservation of these books for a future, less barbaric age, was out of the question. The preservation of books and the preservation of our ability to read and understand books no longer made sense to me.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unnamed narrator at an unnamed university becomes increasingly obsessed with man named Gordon, who may be his tutor, as we are led to believe initially, though could be his colleague. Their relationship unfolds as the novel proceeds, with reference to books Gordon has borrowed from the library, that the narrator then borrows, paying particular attention to the annotations and highlights Gordon has made in them. These become increasingly bizarre and lead to the narrator wondering if Gordon is attempting to unravel some sort of mystery. Many of these books are studies of waste and disorder, with Allen often providing footnotes; for example Valerie Allen’s On Farting (2009) or Dominique Laporte’s History of Shit (1978).

Meanwhile, a mysterious illness breaks out, a sort of catalepsy that affects only academics. Scholars are found semi-concious at their desks, and soon, other universities also experience it. That only academics fall ill, and are slow to recover challenges the hierarchy of intellectualism; a reference to the debilitating long term effects of a pandemic perhaps, or even that the solution may be a return to illiteracy. Either way, this second strand of the novel is for me, the more compelling one, and yet gets less time spent on it.

With its theme of peril, or threat, this is certainly a fascinating short novel, though I personally prefer my Ansgar Allen darker, as in Wretch. As inventive and compelling as it is, it didn't go to the places I hoped it would.

[Alex Kudera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ansgar Allen's The Sick List is a compelling work of art and a fine contribution to Thomas Bernhard studies. At least twice, the text produced irregular guffaws and giggles that burst out in such a cacaphonic manner that I feared the neighbors or random passersby might alert the authorities to my condition. Alas, to the best of my knowledge, no such communication came to pass, and I finished the novella outside under a public awning minutes before a massive thunderstorm erupted. Good book.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the next best thing to reading Bernhard himself, I reckon.

The meditation on Correction that begins on page 80 through until the near-perfect ending is a charge that leaves me eager to explore more of this man’s work.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Most books do not deserve to be read line-by-line.” I have never read a book that rails as fervently against reading as Ansgar Allen’s The Sick List, a dark, humorous, philosophical novel that unfolds over a single paragraph in 112 pages. An academic, seriously doubting the purpose of his line of work (and all those who are in it with him…), is obsessed with Gordon, whom he sees initially as something like a mentor (though later he insists he was never Gordon’s “disciple”) — obsessed with a vague thing that Gordon may or may not be teaching him through marginalia and reading notes left behind in green ink in the library’s books. From a book literally called History of Shit (as scatological as it sounds) to novels of ultra-violence and the deceit of education. It is never dry, despite its subject matter, and the narrator’s fervour — his menace, to quote Katharine Craik’s blurb — makes it so horribly compelling, even as the structure makes it an oppressive, cloying read. With its subplot — in which a plague of catatonia sweeps through academic institutions — and the deterioration of the narrator’s life/mental state, The Sick List is most effective in its imagery and flows of logic (or a kind of counterlogic). There are so many instantly quotable bits — about books remaining unread, about cities “intolerant of darkness”, about how “distortion, ruination, and abuse, are all modes of interpretation” — this, clearly, is a book “to be read line-by-line”.