Surpassing the Story

The Futility of Fiction in Post-Historical Consciousness

Three books I have not finished:

Histories (Herodotus)

Moby Dick (Hermann Melville)

Storm of Steel (Ernst Junger)

Once the narrative ceases to offer ideas, I quickly tire of what amounts to mere storytelling. I seem to be interested in plot and character only insofar as theme can be extracted therefrom. Once I grasp the concept behind the circumstantial, I feel knowing “what happens at the end” to be unnecessary.

With Herodotus, I lost interest after book V; after he stopped digressing with accounts of the religious and social customs of various peoples (many non-existent today). Who cares about endless reports of armies, generals, and battles?

Moby Dick is all about the digressions, because the story is quite straightforward (would be less than 100 pages without the ramblings…I’m convinced Melville was writing an “anti-novel”). That said, I got the point after 300 pages.

Junger’s book at least is not verbose, his prose is terse like Hemingway’s, which makes it enjoyable, but ultimately, I expected more seeing as he is championed by various Traditionalist authors. (Maybe I need to read his later works—suggestions anyone?)

We live in a post-historical consciousness (no sense speaking of an “age” or “era” anymore), we process information and impressions from various external—or seemingly external—sources simultaneously, in what occurs as a hyper-phenomenological mode of perceiving, categorizing, and classifying. We no longer operate upon a simple, linear progression from cause to effect. We do not maintain a single conversation in a singular physical environment. While we ride a taxi or bus or tram, we are ‘conversing’ with dozens of avatars on social media, we are texting our sister or brother while scrolling through our Substack newsfeed…we are simultaneously planning our next essay on Julius Evola, we are reading signs, aware of the approaching stop where we wish to disembark…we lookout for pickpockets or beggars, we are aware of being here while thinking any/else(w)here…we think and move and exist all at once in multi-dimensional space.

What mind accustomed to such complex and highly-advanced modes of being would enjoy the tedium of a 1000-page narrative proceeding in the old-fashioned linear mode of storytelling? One could easily just “google” the plot to War and Peace, but that is for the plebeian caste!—and I am not saying that this is why the novel is dead. Rather than accuse us of expediency and “low attention span” (implying a deficient mind for even the ‘learned’ among modern men) the differentiated man of the 21^st century has actually surpassed the narrative structures of the European novel of the 19^th century. Having disciplined his mind to be hyper-phenomenological, he has overcome the notion of linear time and singular space, and as a result, finds the literature of the past to be antiquated, outdated, and incredibly primitive.

Of course, the development of hyper-phenomenological consciousness began with the Modernists of the early 20^th century through various literary techniques such as stream of consciousness, allusion, cut-up method, and surrealism. What mind at home in Joyce’s multi-lingual poetic monomythology would endure the—by comparison—simplistic and straightforward prose of Dostoyevsky, Dickens, or Melville?

          We demand vitality, and passion. We seek the immersive transformative experience of the divine! We do not want a reporting or description—we want the real thing! Modernism gives us this psychic, surreal, visceral state of consciousness! Everything else is as bland as journalism!

          The novel is dead. And so is the “story”. There are no more stories to tell, because time has been extended and mutated. I boast that I outdid Hemingway and Carver by writing a short story in only 40 words (“Tristesse Aveugle”). That’s all it takes.

          Libra in the Last House does not recognize character, plot, and theme in the standard fashion. These elements are irrelevant as they revolve kaleidoscopically, only the feeling is real.

          I now give you all there is poetically to say about the state we are in. I shall not write a novel unless it is given to me verbatim from life itself—otherwise I delude readers into thinking “fun times” still happen…nobody I know is “book material”, not even myself…so there are no stories, just the Being Here NOW—

Only the city is real

(from Alexandria to Arabia)

1979

Dark—dark

Leather in the night

Moonsoaked streets of oily mist

Diamond studded killers—

Secret whispers

Of small dressed girls in street light

Sanctuary

Thoughts die on a shelf

If unattended—dust clouds surround

Unswept figures. Untold stories unwound.

The heavens clamor and my axis shakes

Release the streams of bliss

As my body shudders in thunders

For the gathering rain.

Werileiss

August blue

Dowelissi

Summer true

To make a city run foul

Wereleiss dondai—

This girl,

Another life,

In the toxic summer city.

I’ve got some daevastating news for you—

girl…Kali loves us all,

and she hasn’t named a price.

I’ve got nothing:

I offer you the rain.

“Only the city is real”

From Arabia to Alexandra

Hypatia screams—

Lady dances on an oyster shell

Of bloodlust and sex. A knife subtle

Cranks my insides turning churning

Chugging down the wafting steam of stewing bodies

In the sun.

We’ve got one last chance,

One last dance

To waltz into the finale

Shall we mount our horses?

And drive our new car

Into the blazing sun.

I’ll be your fascist dixie dream girl

Rubicon baby—

(my best friend’s father would talk about anything, from Aleister Crowley

To David Bowie—one day he began philosophizing, upon the subject of pornography):

“In the ‘70’s, anal sex was only 10% of the industry, but by the 1990’s, it became 90% of the industry”—

What will be the Rubicon of the 2000’s?

You tell me. Bestiality.

A housewife,

Trapped to this city

How to love where you cannot run—

Disarm your eyes,

When I pass you by.

Another father gives his daughter away

Another son loses himself and goes astray

Another mother dies, cheats, steals,

Another shot, another another another

There is nothing to say unless be true,

In another city—real like the last, latest

Lie—strike out. True.

A canopy of clouds

Surmounts the steeple of

A closed church

Rain abates thunder stays

Before the blond hairs turn to grey

I wait I wait for drums to clear

In another life a lonely girl

dies in the sad summer rain

There is nothing left to write

There is nothing left to try