Book Review : Blake Butler - Aanex (2022)
Anti-geometrical, anti-logical, anti-significant (p.15)
In his 1993 interview with critic Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace claimed the purpose of fiction was to give readers access to imaginary selves in order to share their suffering and therefore feel less alone. It is also a form of intellectual entertainment. That access to imaginary selves needs to be stimulating and pleasant, like being wined and dined and given a house tour by a fascinating person. Otherwise readers take their money and attention elsewhere.
Somehow, this is not at all the game Blake Butler is playing. His latest novel Aaneex feels more like being held hostage inside someone else's dream and being forced to play a sick game with someone who speaks a language that doesn't exist.
I know this description isn't unfamiliar to whoever has already read Blake Butler, but I would suggest that you read this interview before giving Aanex a go because it's on another level even by his standards. In his own words, it is a "religious text composed in algorithmic language that does not exist yet" and that is very accurate, but it's also (somewhat) the story of Polyana Maskerson, a modern day corporate saint having epiphanies and transcending reality in an infinite office tower.
I'm not sure about anything else, to be honest. But I'll try my best to break it down.
A novel meant for no one
The meaning of Aanex largely eluded me, but I believe it was supposed to. This a novel (because this IS a novel with characters, plot and whatnot) that is not only completely devoid from any commercial pressure, it is also devoid of any desire to please. It isn't really antagonistic either. It just is. Blake Butler channeled something out of the primordial creative ether, filtered it through his creative sensibility and offered it to us in a form that's closer to raw data than conventional storytelling.
I believe Aanex is a novel you're supposed to feel more than understand. Any attempt to make sense of it the way you would a conventional novel will eventually hit a dead end. At some point Polyana is the protagonist. At some other point it is a man named Hanritty. It becomes a lot murkier who is actually talking near the end, but it seems like Blake Butler himself has broken the fourth wall of his own novel and stepped in. The text is also constantly glitched out with computer code.
While reading Aanex is a hostile endeavour, I really appreciate the purity of it. I don't think any author ever gave me such brutally honest access to his mind. Trapped between lines of code, self-generated images and religious epiphanies, the lines between the self and the infinity of constructed selves accessible via technological means becomes blurred. You don't know who you are anymore. You don't know who you can be. This is one of the rare novels that made me dream.
Aanex is pure creation in its most chaotic form.
WHO IS STILL HERE? WHY ARE THE COMPACTORS SO LOUD TODAY OF ALL DAYS. OVERRUN WITH SMEGMA. THE LIPS OF THE FINGERS. GRIP OF THE LOCK AROUND THE NECK OF A SECOND BETWEEN IMPACT AND IMPRESSION. As the oldest child ever weeps into his neckbrace on his sickbed, praying to science: "I can't believe I've been given the overwhelming ability to be able to become anything and this is what I've chosen." (p.261)
Language as an end itself
Not going to lie: Aanex made me feel a little stupid and this is not an unfamiliar feeling I get while reading Blake Butler. I'm someone for who understanding is very important and when letting go of this desire to understand is the point of the exercise, it feels like I'm abandoning a problem halfway through. But I don't believe there's a secret, coded meaning to Aanex and that I somehow missed the cipher key. It’s a fuckload of sensory data Blake Butler manifested from nothingness.
But it doesn't have no meaning either. Aanex is a portrait of (for lack of a better word) singularity. That moment where machine becomes human and human become machine and both of them are confused and glitching out. Aanex doesn't construct meaning over time and pages, but offers these raw scenes where both realities are corrupting. When turning each page, you have to be 100% there. In the moment. Letting the words and what they evoke brutalize you.
Kind of like noise music. I kept thinking of Merzbow when reading Aanex. It requires your total presence. You can't be in the future or in the past while reading it. Its pure, unadulterated intensity requires you to remain in the now.
*
But did I enjoy Aanex? You bet your sweet ass that I did. I live for the kind of discomforting paradigm shifts that Blake Bulter has to offer. Reading him provides me with similar thrills than extreme physical exercise to. It's very difficult (and often frustrating) in the process of, but afterwards it feels like I've accomplished something not everybody could. It was perhaps less rewarding than 300 000 000 or Alice Knott, but there’s still nothing like it. If you know, you know.
