ONE by Blake Butler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
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.
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