annotations, by john keene

[taotie]

There was a time on literary Twitter when everyone adulated the poet-turned-novelist. A bevy of these writers were coming out with new books, and there was a common and strangely unquestioned refrain of, “Well, of course poets would make better novelists than even novelists themselves.” I have several of my own contentions with that claim, least of which is that narrative is its own skill that isn’t necessarily equivalent to managing the flow of a poem, which requires a different skill altogether. (What that skill is, I couldn’t tell you myself, as I don’t know it — there’s a reason I could never cut it as a poet.) Most stridently, it’s a claim that cheapens both parties’ work, and overall flattens the art of writing, a medium that positively overflows with an abundance of techniques, and ways to use them.

I’m reminded of the blurbs that decorate John Keene’s debut novel, Annotations, which glowingly use the language of poetry to describe his work: prose with “poem-like compression,” a novel with “poetic meditations.” I’d like to think that prose is capable of encompassing what we consider in the purlieu of poetry without these strict genre divisions, and I think it’s also a bit of a disservice to Annotations. Its prose is kinetic, decisive, sharp, its sharpness winking with bewildering specificity. Keene does not wait for you to catch up (a quality I highly admire in a writer) — he speeds ahead, sending up snapshots, names, images, cultural references in a quick and private associative game that I imagine only Keene will be privy to the whole landscape of. Like catching, out of context, glimpses of a stranger’s home movies, through someone else’s window, on your way home yourself. These snapshots are interspersed with analytical considerations from an unspecified “future self” ruminating on the nature of memory, recollection, and identity formation (“Comprehension does not hinge upon an image”; “Our dreams are but hulls for our souls”; “Brief observation of any personality proves that human existence cannot be reduced to a science”). Characters are present in the text but mostly through a rotation of various personal pronouns — “you,” “he,” “they,” “we,” “she” — uncertain as to whom these recollections belong for everyone but the narrator, who is always engaged on the page in the process of reflection.

Keene’s style is not merely an exercise to flex writerly prowess (though, of course, it is this too; more on this later), or to approximate delineated poetry. This, too, is a way to write prose — to simulate the journeying and spiraling of thought (reminiscent of modernist projects) — to create, even, an affect of the experience of memory — not just to record the memory proper into the archives of our mental cataloging, but to explain the act of remembering, how the brain might retrieve information and jump from image to image, as a fly might flit from fruit to engorged fruit. I would argue, even, that this style is unique to prose, dependent on prosaic format, in that it bucks the chronology of narrative, which is assumed as default by every contemporary reader, and deconstructs what we think of narrative and even chronology itself.

For writing prose, too, is an act. Not a simple record but a process made tangible by restricting various far-flung thoughts, images, references, pulled from the amorphous soup of one’s brain, and tying these together by apparent force of will. That Annotations is pure construct, one in which its author shows you its architectural bones and undergirding, is part and parcel with its memory-mythmaking. Prose can be like this, he says. Prose can be experiment, and texture, and treatise, and methodology — language has the strength of architecture to try it. (So much of contemporary prose lacks this knowledge, which is why reviewers have resorted to the language of poetry. Can we not try to rescue this art?)

Crucially, Annotations is a construct of marginalia, as put forth by its very first chapter title, “Notes, Inscribed Initially in the Narrow, Running Margin.” This is the basis of its sociopolitical setting; halfway through the novel, the narrator refers to Toynbee’s thesis that “St. Louis had consisted of an originary Creole core” subsumed by “successive waves of English Southerners and Yankees, then Irish, and later Germans.” Various anecdotes that take place across the narrator’s childhood, but especially Missouri, insist on local histories that are often only recorded by the memories of the people who once lived there, whose sublunary existences, whose Black communities, were subject to erasure and overwriting by the whites who supplanted them with an “official” archive. Even place, location, brick-and-mortar buildings, are as impermanent, prone to fraying, as memory. To any student of racialized history in the United States, such stories about the transience of Black communities are familiar. Keene resists a cloying emphasis on tragedy, however, and insists that such an “effect” is “novelistic,” however bittersweet. “Oh, Saint Louis,” he writes, “such a colored town, a minefield of myth and memory.”

If remembering is an act of resistance, then what of the act of misremembering? What I find clever about Annotations’ style and format is its ability to fit its multi-threaded, complex conceits into a single book. All run towards the question of the narrator’s identity formation — what memories, experiences, influences make a person? What, early on, hammers certain nails into place? Keene’s narrator cites literature as an integral factor, but also, maybe, lying, which is a kind of escape, or a form of writing. What’s the difference, after all, between myth and mendacity, between fiction and formation? Keene’s lines are often slippery, loop back into themselves, e.g.: “Desire, among other things, derives its force from repetition, or so your general pattern of behavior would lead you to believe.” The origin of things is tricky to parse, and words, beliefs, literature, can be a lie that transforms the truth. Here is where his verbal abilities shine — in the double meanings, in the wordplay, in his refusal to be pinned down to one meaning — in writing as a mode of inquiry. Sometimes this requires, as we do in fiction, being slant with the truth: “The genius lies, in the execution.” (A line so genius it has never left my brain since I read it.)

For Keene, again, is deeply aware that literature is something constructed, that even memoir is not equivalent to true memory. That the act of writing prose is an artificial one, that to write a novel that purports to simulate the neurological phenomenon of memory naturally invites all kinds of falsities, contrivances, and misconstrued remembrances. His project attempts to surface “that vital image” out of the “muck,” but of Annotations, there are many images. All and none are vital. “Your cognizance linked these as a chain of incidents… but what you sought, like any artist, were the very events themselves.”

Annotations culminates as an artist’s dedicated excavation of self, though it is difficult, nigh impossible, to contain an entire life in words. “Always the desire to be loved formed the nucleus,” Keene writes, “about which other events and moments, positive, negative, or otherwise, whirred like the elementary particles… Were these accounts, as was projected for this aesthetic project, selected and set down as carefully as tesseracts, the cumulative effect would approximate that of a living, dazzling, eighteen-panel mosaic.”