If I were a seasoned and astute investor, maybe I’d regale you with tales of how, way back in 1977, I heard about a kid named Steve Jobs who was looking for a few private backers, how I cut a cheque for a couple thousand dollars, how the kid took his company public in 1980, and the rest – as they say—is money. I’m no investor (and I have the portfolio to prove it). Instead, I’d describe myself as a seasoned and astute bibliophile. And while I’ll never know the feeling of picking a winning stock, I know the literary equivalent of that feeling. It’s the delight at discovering a fresh voice and then to follow that voice through subsequent publications as it gathers strength. If Matt Bell were a stock, I’d be telling all my friends to buy, buy, buy.
The comparison between Matt Bell and Apple stock is not so far-fetched given that Bell’s first book appears at a technological turning point and takes advantage of the opportunities this turning point affords. How They Were Found is published by Keyhole Press, an imprint of Dzanc Books, a non-profit dedicated to nurturing good writing. Matt Bell is on the staff of Dzanc and acts as editor for their online journal, The Collagist. Dzanc gets things right in so many ways. There’s the way it pumps oxygen into what is fast becoming the rich literary atmosphere of the web’s alternative space. There’s the way it uses social media to invite readers inside its dome to huff that fresh oxygen. And there’s the way it embraces DRM-free formats when more conventional publishing concerns pull out their garlic and rosebuds whenever conversation turns to open-source books.
The first story, The Cartographer’s Girl, sits on the threshold between the old and the new. The story uses special symbols to illustrate the markings the Cartographer makes on his maps. Because the symbols are graphic, they can’t be included in an ebook format without screwing up the flow of text, so Bell (or maybe his publisher) answers this challenge by linking to a pdf version of the story which preserves the layout. The story is strangely self-reflexive in the way it speaks to its own technical deficiency:
“It is never enough to assume that the reader of the map will approach it with the same mindset the cartographer does. Even omitting something as simple as a north arrow can render a map useless, can cast doubts on all it’s trying to communicate. Other markings are just as necessary. There must be a measurement of scale, and there must be a key so that annotations and markings can be deciphered, made useful.”
It is ironic that in its epub and mobi formats, the story’s “key” is missing, and so the reader, like the Cartographer of the story, can’t find his way. In the story, the Cartographer can’t find his way to “the girl” because of an ambiguity inherent in the meaning of a word. His girl used the word skinny but the Cartographer didn’t ask what she meant and simply assumed she meant some variation of the word slender. It is not until the Cartographer erases all the symbols and replaces them with words that he understands what the girl meant:
“One by one, he eliminates all his symbols, destroys them and replaces them with words. Mere words, great words, words that denote and words that describe and words that will direct him in the way he needs to go. Ground truth disappears, is replaced by something else, by truth as meaning, as yellow brick road, as key to a lock to a door to an entrance.”
The girl uses skinny not an adjective but as a noun. A skinny is a sliver in the landscape, or a sliver in the representation of the landscape, a secret place where they can disappear and be alone together. At the same time, this story can be read almost as a manifesto: Let’s erase all the symbols on this map we call a book and replace them with all our words, and then let’s create a hidden space for ourselves. Call it imagination, if you like, but that conceit is so last century. Now we have a skinny called the ebook that lives in a secret place called the server farm and the flash drive. The story’s conceit—the erasure of symbols and disappearance into a skinny—could well suggest the slipperiness of interpretation, but on this threshold between the old and the new, it could just as easily suggest the slipperiness that has crept into our understanding of what text is in the first place.
The story—and most that follow—is characterized by an eerie distance. We know the characters only as the Cartographer and the girl. The story has a dissociative feel to it, which is apt given the girl’s history of mysterious illness that includes hospitalization and electric shock treatment. This is like reading PTSD. The whole of the publishing industry is in a state of PTSD, wandering without usable maps and feeling dissociative.
This feeling of distance persists through the collection. The Receiving Tower is a post-apocalyptic story of a military bunker that secures a radio dish and waits for instructions from a world that we surmise no longer exists. All the personnel suffer from a new disease that causes a progressive dementia. They are losing their memories. Like the Cartographer who erases his maps, these people are losing their way. They meet one a week to tell one another stories so they can remember who they are and, most importantly, so they can remember the passwords to their computer terminals where they have to login and await their instructions. Memory and identity. Without our stories, how do we know who we are?
If we erase our maps and forget our stories, one option is to invent new stories. This is certainly the option that Birthers and various other fundamentalist Christian conspiracy theorist nutbars tend to adopt. This is also the option Bell follows in His Last Great Gift, the tale of a Joseph Smithish character named Spear who receives revelations—schematics for the New Motor—from a group of spirits called the Electricizers whose numbers include the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Somehow the machine will merge with a pregnant Mary figure who will transfer her messianic energies and start the machine to life. The difference between Birthers and Bell is that Bell is smart and His Last Great Gift offers a cunning response to the lunacy of ahistorical religious movements.
Notice a pattern yet?
Erasure and substitution. A map, a plan, a layout, a set of rules, a narrative, a story, a method. As one loses its power, substitute another and try it instead. In Her Ennead, a growing mass of cells could just as easily be a tumor as a fertilized ovum. Although the classroom has only one rule—Hold Onto Your Vacuums—as the power-drill wielding teacher captures his students and bores into their heads, the students sense that there might be new rules for them to discover too. In Dredge, a young man pulls a teenaged girl from a pond and keeps her in his freezer, trying for a “redo” of events from his childhood when he discovered his mother’s body in the basement and set about a daily ritual of cleaning it.
Notice a pattern yet?
The erasure and substitution is tucked inside the fable, the fabulous, the fantastic, the grim, the Grimm, the grotesque, the gruesome.
If, like me, you sometimes tire of all the commercial realism that gets cranked out of the mainstream publishing houses, let me suggest that invest in some Bell stock. It will yield high dividends.