A Delicious, Pointless Intermission: A Review of Ansgar Allen's 'Black Vellum'
In this review, Roberts takes a smoke break and gives his thoughts on the experimental philosophical novella of the great author Ansgar Allen
Philosophy is a pejorative in my lexicon--those who engage in it are pretentious; those who admire it aspire towards pretension. The philosopher is artless, and proud of being so, often talking the way a Texan chews a two dollar steak. When held to account by a curious student or a person who has a better grasp of their shared language, they become indignant; they know what they say! why don't we? It is clear! Clear as mud…but let me avoid slandering Hegelians any further.
Every now again, though, when the role of philosopher is full of its own pretensions, bloated to the point of busting, an artist finds the time to step into the role and pokes a hole in its balloon. Be it Bion of Borysthenes, Jean Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag, Iris Murdoch, Friedrich Nietzsche, or several others (I refuse to be exhausted, and therefore cannot be exhaustive), there comes about this writer with a great grasp of prose or this playwright with a brilliant imagination or that musician who wishes to tell us about the world, and the philosopher becomes the stuff of legends. Once they are dead and gone, having lived the life they scrutinize, they find for themselves followers who exhume their corpse, turn its skin inside out, and make what we now call 'theory'--a product that is 'made' of the philosopher much in the way that excrement is 'made' from a devoured hot dog.
These artists, when they don the role of philosopher, can often create a form of art that would make Victor Frankenstein blush--and we call it 'philosophical literature'. More often than not, it is a monstrous mess, with a lot of skeletons, wearing personalities as skin, sitting in rooms and 'having a dialogue', where all of the action happens in between discussions--you know, when they move from the drawing room to the sitting room. There are still more than have stayed with us, gripping and burning us like herpes; anything by Ayn Rand comes to mind. Whether one is bored by dialogue or trapped by the prognathous protagonists of an upstart ideologue, philosophical literature makes one grumble like Virginia Woolf coming across the name 'James Joyce' in print--loudly and in protest.
And yet, in our time of global village idiots and cyberpunks, the literate folk yearn for literature in such an illiterate world, where chewing on tablecloths is received with the reverence people once reserved for Broadway plays. In my darker hours--sometimes my light bulbs go out--I peer over the barrenness and utter the bitter words of good ol' Sartre: the world would get along very well without literature--and it would get along even better without man. Unable to get rid of man, I prefer literature. Or what's left of it.
The rarity of literature nowadays makes philosophical literature even more rare, in both its good and bad forms. The good forms seem like dreams of yesteryear; Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness…damn these light bulbs, going out again…and anything by Jean Paul Sartre. The bad forms…well, let us let them flicker to their end. The rarity of philosophical literature is a lot like the Vu Quang bovid; if you see it, even if its odd form confirms that evolution is random and absurd, you admire being able to spot it and see it in all its wonder.
So when Ansgar Allen offered his newest work of philosophical fiction, Black Vellum, for me to read and review (admire his bravery), I felt almost as if I had committed a crime; almost as if I had eaten the flesh of a poached Saola.
And I just couldn't resist.
* *
Black Vellum is hailed as an experiment; in particular, a 'Nietzschean experiment', as the author has said. For me, it was an experiment in a book that lacks a main character and an established perspective. In this book, there are a few characters that the author lingers on--when he is not lingering on the feeling of smoking (my sympathies lie here) or considering the emptiness and boredom of mankind. There is a land surveyor and his assistant, a priest and an automaton the priest created. There is the momentary presence of an 'informer to the lord' and the lord himself. Ultimately, it is revealed that the entire story is being written as part of a suicide note--a note I can only assume took so long because the suicidal journaler expected to die before he (or, as an automaton, is it they?) was actually finished. The characters bleed together, when they are not bleeding separately, and anyone used to perspective in a novella will be quite caught off guard.
Of course, here I am revealing myself as something of a philistine; the novella is philosophical, and I can admit, perhaps, that it is beyond me. It is drenched in philosophical inquiry. Everything mentioned is part of the contemplation of the various consciousnesses that move about like shadows, with the book itself being one very long riff on the observation of the rock on which the land surveyor sat. The saturation of philosophic inquiry mirrors the saturation of the black vellum (or 'black vellum like', as the land surveyor reminds us…I think it was him) which covers the journal that is the main piece of the entire story. It is said, on Angsar Allen's site which promotes the book, that "[o]ther figures are encountered in the content of their thought; Schopenhauer, Cioran, Freud, and Bataille enter as minor actors", and the book holds true to this, just as it holds true the fact that they 'interanimate' as 'intuitions'.
The character that most stood out in this novella was, in fact, the priest. I could not help but be given to a bit of pop-culture reminiscence; a Nietzschean priest made me think of the show House M.D. and its own priest, who House sarcastically names 'Father Nietzsche'. And so, I give unto Black Vellum's priest this nickname, not out of spite but out of love. In Allen's story, Father Nietzsche seems to be something of a philosophical machinist, a Victor Frankenstein reincarnation, with a sense of Zarathustra-like tendency to make speeches. Unlike Frankenstein's monster, Father Nietzsche's automaton is not a creation gone awry, meant to prove the superiority of science but instead becoming a Romantic muppet. His automaton is meant to make religion obsolete by taking away its only practical application; consolation. Through the eyes of the informer, who is seen through the gossip of the automaton's suicide note, the priest is revealed as a man with thoughts on everything, and with an intention to tell us all of those thoughts. This did not trouble me; you see, Father Nietzsche is the most interesting part of this story, and his presence is the highlight of the entire novella.
The presence of Father Nietzsche required a sort of prose that, even in the midst of a listless perspective (to be generous), could hook the reader. His many statements, his ruminations, even his humor are felt like lightning and thunder--there is a comforting rumble, and then you are struck. Consider, if you will, the following passage:
"The priest said that before his work on the first automaton, or perhaps because of it, he had come to doubt the basic idea said to underpin the workings of his religion and its pagan antecedents, namely, the notion humans must be presented with a framework which gives cause and meaning to their pain. Worse still, the priest felt, was the accompanying argument which claims humanity has grown to such a weak condition that without such a framework these same individuals would decide they were done with living and rather would do away with each other and themselves, or at least wish it that, as if they were not already doing that, doing one another in and doing themselves over with the frameworks they still possessed. It did not matter what the framework of understanding was, or how the activity of sense-giving worked." (p. 54)
The trouble is that I did not want to stop quoting from this page; I could have quoted the entire page, and the next one, and the next one. There are pages of prose, particularly with Father Nietzsche but also dispersed among the other characters, that make it hard to put this book down. I, with all my Philistinism, was overpowered by the prose, by the deep thought, by the very saturation of philosophical inquiry that I noted with annoyance earlier.
And that is how Black Vellum proudly shows itself to be philosophical literature; the point of philosophical literature, unlike a majority of fiction and some of literature, is not to entertain you. My need for perspectives, flashy characters, and chapters are all balderdash, a terrible American affliction. Black Vellum has one demand of its readers: think! Let the words of Father Nietzsche sink in, let the curiosity of the land surveyor make you curious of your own world, ask yourself the questions that Allen's characters ask on their smoke breaks; smoking being, as the automaton puts it, 'a delicious, pointless, intermission'. Black Vellum, under Allen's artful prose and deep thoughts, offers its reader a delicious, pointless intermission from the disgusting, 'goal oriented' spectacle of our barren world.
And now, I will take my own delicious, pointless intermission as a reward for writing this review; after all, Black Vellum did as all philosophical literature should.
It has given me a lot to think about.