Sometimes when I’m eating I think about starving myself. Sometimes when I’m waiting at a crosswalk I think about stepping into traffic. Sometimes when I’m on the computer I think about jerking off on it and throwing it a tub full of water. I don’t, of course. But another David, the main character of Justin Taylor’s first novel The Gospel of Anarchy, does.
(This, in case you’re wondering, is a book review of The Gospel of Anarchy. The novel hasn’t come out yet. I found an uncorrected proof in a box outside a bookstore in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and I’ve decided it’s in the spirit of the novel–that is, punk anarchy–to write and publish this review despite the fact that the back cover warns me not to, or, at the very least, ask the publishers, Harper Perennial, if it’s alright. But I refuse to ask permission. I won’t wait. Taylor, I’d think, wouldn’t have it otherwise. ((There are other reviews of it here and here and here and here, so my transgression is actually bullshit, a fact I mention only because it’s this review’s thesis.))
Beginning with that transgression (jerking off/tub-throwing of computer), David destroys the various ways late-capitalist conformism distinguishes “sanity” from “normalcy” in late-1990s Florida. This path, and The Gospel of Anarchy in general, disturbed me. In a great way. It reminded me of the line I toe so I can keep my place in this “society.” The one under which I sweep my deviant thoughts so my conspecifics won’t see them and think I’m “weird.”
But I am, in fact, weird. There’s a place in my mind where various madnesses, violences, aberrations, deviations, irregularities, glitches of mind, fantasies, and other non-sensicalities are born and thrive. I’m constantly confronted with them. That’s where the line is, similar to the one between dreaming and wakefulness, and it holds the deviations back from reality. This line holds like a battalion at a crucial front in the war between insanity and normalcy. These two old enemies confront each other in any situation where there is a difference between what’s appropriate and inappropriate. I’m not afraid of the thoughts on the other side of the line. I used to (maybe I still do) put them on a special pedestal, value them as being more “real” so the various menial mental tasks that the systems of control require of me.
Since I began thinking for myself (the result of a 9th grade incident involving one too many reruns of Full House) I’ve wondered if/when this line might break. In a way that Taylor’s characters might approve, I actually take perverse pleasure in this hypothetical moment. I used to hope that could get myself to a place where the line would give, dissolving the battalion and effectively ending the war between insanity and normalcy and achieving something like authenticity. As I get older and mature further within the ideologies that keep this line in-tact, I realize with more terrifying detail how entangled I am in them, how my life is a dance they’ve choreographed, and how my movements in the dance validate their choreography; how the extent to which I live them is the extent to which I approve of them.
What are these ideologies? What keeps David at his telemarketing job, looking Internet porn as a consolation? What keeps him in college? In his apartment? What keeps him pursuing the paycheck gerbil-wheel? I tend to think of these ideologies as “systems of control” acting upon me in concert, but this is sloppy thinking. I feel better calling them mutually supporting bonds. My education grounds these bonds, my beliefs and desires bolster them, and my obligations to others maintain and re-inscribe them. The bonds are internal (psyche) and external (culture). I freely enslave myself and others with them. I use these bonds (they use me?) to draw the line for myself between appropriate (normal) and inappropriate (insane). I can define my words with them. Use them to guide my action. The ideologies thereby create solidity in flux, grounds in the ocean, a station in space, a house in the wilderness. They’re conformity’s currency–everything the artist hates but takes her life-force from. They’re creation in chaos, as the Fragments From The Gospel of Anarchy, the half-fabricated spiritual-philosophical chapbook-in-the-novel would say. Acts done in their name are holy works: normal, fit, and right. Good citizen. Good boy. Good student. Good son. Good democrat. Good teacher. They’re the glass sides of the ant farm. The walls within which power, drama, glory, failure, and redemption take shape. Because of them I know who I am, where I am, when I am. I know what to do next, who to talk to, what to say. Apply to grad school. Get a job. Make a joke. Pay taxes. Wear pants. Stare at the screen. Listen to headphones. Keep a good credit rating. Make the purchase. Look for an apartment. Study abroad. Study for the test. Put commas after clauses, and periods at the ends of sentences. See the movie. Eat the food. Ask: “How are you?” Reply: “Fine.” Ask: “Do you have the time?” Reply: “Thanks.”
These ideologies, we come to find, are fabricated. Human-made. They’re not actually there. We can change them. This is definitely nauseating, to use Sartre’s term. One reaction to this nausea is nihilistic: give up, nothing matters in a virtue-less universe. This is a complete protest against assertion of anything that might resemble an ideology (though an ideology itself). Another reaction is artistic: play at the line between normalcy and insanity in a constant state of irony, showing from within the system that the system is a fabricated system. The artist thereby robs ideology of its reality in an attempt to become free of it while still ensnared by it, as Barthelme would say in “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel.” This is neither assertion nor non-assertion of ideology; it’s more like being an ideology-juggling clown at a circus with a packed audience. Another reaction is spiritual-political: overcoming, as in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. This means creating and carrying-out one’s own ideology, some approximation of the Ubermensch. This is where I would categorize The Gospel of Anarchy. Since Taylor is such a Barthelme fan I feel compelled to cite him more. At the end of “The School,” Barthelme’s pitch-perfect story, the children cry out, after so much death, “we demand an assertion of value!” Taylor, rather than succumbing to nihilism or the clowning of full-out artisanship, appeals to this last spiritual-political reaction to ideology. (Though Taylor himself is a novelist, which means he’s still a clown. But he’s an Uberclown, maybe.)
Taylor’s characters find themselves at different stages and proximities to Uberification. Instead of Zarathustra’s cave, their context is a punk safehouse in Gainesville called “Fishgut,” a remarkably well-named place in light of early Christianity’s symbol-of-choice. The de(a)scent into overcoming is remarkably depicted. I felt it deeply. Though the stylistic transition from coming-of-age punk novel to profound philosophical insight jostled me to the point of distraction. It was like going from Clueless to Donnie Darko in five seconds.
But a bumpy ride is to be expected: David overcomes. He crosses the line. He ends the war between insanity and normalcy. He dissolves the battalion. He unplugs, and then some. This is why I found the novel so deeply disturbing: even as I write this review I find myself still in the artist’s role, a clown at the war-front juggling ideologies and trying to amuse my audience. But I’ve always (secretly, terribly) wanted to cross the line like Taylor’s David. That his name is the same as mine makes it worse. All my terrifying fantasies of fire, flux, and truth arrive at the battlefield and it’s all that my small battalion–whose trust I don’t keep, whose objective I question hourly, whose weaponry I try to dismantle–continue to hold their position. What would happen if I relieved them of their post? Jerked off on my computer and walked out? I could overcome! Achieve authenticity! Get in tune with God’s favored state!
This, at the cost of my wonderful life: my girlfriend, my PhD, my parents, my best friends, my other friends and acquaintances, the novels and stories and essays and songs I might write, the places I might see, the conversations I might have, the websites and blogs and Twitter feeds I might create and maintain, the photographs I might take, not to mention the books I might read, the children I might spawn…All these things, in exchange for what? Chaos, flux, uncertainty–but, after all, truth. I could have the peace of mind that I didn’t toe the line, didn’t sacrifice the truth for any evanescent-material gain, that I didn’t believe the lies about sanity or normalcy or what I have to do or what’s appropriate, “Christendom” in Kierkegaard’s words; I could have the peace of mind that I didn’t obey, that I was and am in tune with dissonant metaphysical actuality. That this is my life. That it’s my choice.
But here I sit, typing. Words. The best I can do is write a review of a book that hasn’t come out yet, whose back cover warns me not to publish anything about it until it officially comes out next month. So this is it: my sad, safe, white life lived within a set of bonds I willfully maintain, perpetuating a capitalist system that robs the lives of millions so that I can live it. I admit it. I don’t disavow it. That’s “me”, “David Backer,” social security #000-00-0000 sitting at his computer typing, keeping track of Twitter feeds, writing, reading, talking, etc. I do my best to transgress but it’s never enough. Never a true fire. Never Grace, as Taylor’s prophet Parker calls it. I implore myself, bound, hoping that one day I’ll be a man and not some clown. Keep typing, David. Finish. Hit publish. Another day.
