“History is an act of sailing to a shore that isn't there.”
In mathematics there exists what is called the “Expectation Threshold” Conjecture, posited in 2006 by graph theorists Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai. Very generally stated, the Kahn-Kalai conjecture concerns the probability at which structure emerges in a random system, often very abruptly. In graph theory this is expressed in terms of edges & vertices from which patterns emerge. If, instead of random graphs we were to speak of writing, & if instead of edges & vertices we were to speak of a concatenation of textual elements, then the Kahn-Kalai conjecture wld stand for the threshold at which “coherent” textual structures emerge from apparent randomness. Contrary to the kinds of truisms that circulate in literary criticism, the more complexity a textual object exhibits the higher the probability that it will be characterised by emergent structures. Likewise, textual objects that appear “well formed” exhibit a high degree of redundancy & are consequently less structurally interesting. Yet not only are complex textual objects more “productive” of structure, but the actual threshold at which structures emerge is surprisingly low. Indeed, wherever there is concatenation, structure appears to follow, from the level of chains or simple networks of signifiers (words side-by-side, as it were) to overarching narrative schemas. The notion of an “unreadable” text is therefore a kind of fiction, produced by overdetermination (expectation) rather than by actual reading, since reading is the work of making sense, which accomplishes itself whenever a structural threshold is met.
This is the simple calculus that lies at the heart of Rick Harsch's writerly project.
In his 2021 A Circumnavigation through Maritime History, Harsch – an American exile in Izola – hints at a method of “circumstantial navigation.” Neither history nor its particulars are given; the meanings attached to them are radically contingent, polymorphous, “literary” in fact. “Just as two circumnavigations of the globe were never the same, neither are two histories.” It shld come as no surprise, then, that Harsch's own writing stands in a kind of “horror of the mundane, the rote, the terra too firma of a world that has given us schedules & joyless work, predictability & vast unnatural holes that suck hope from man the way maelstroms devoured ships in 16th-cenury nightmares.” Harsch's early “La Crosse, Wisconsin” trilogy – The Driftless Zone (1997), Billy Vérité (1998), The Sleep of Aborigines (2002) – conducts a master class in writerly counterintelligence & sabotage of the literary trade's “pale epiverbalising.” With its companion piece, Voices After Evelyn (2018), the Driftless Trilogy takes the great American small-town novel by the throat & performs an elaborate variation of the socalled Chinese-burn before summarily throttling it. Suppose, for the sheer gratuitous sake of it, that Elmore Leonard & Henry Miller were to couple uninhibitedly for several hundred pages, beneath the inscrutable gaze of Djuna Barnes disguised as Roberto Arlt. Or, by all means, don't. Suffice it to say that Harsh's excursus into the all-American genre procures no less satisfaction than might be anticipated from having Dr Benway probe in Norman Mailer's gall bladder for the fabled lapis philosophicus. That Harsch has yet to be hailed a genius in his native land is as sure an indictment of the fascism of lazy critics (to paraphrase Edward Bond) as the seditiously-minded ought hope for.
But there is a kind of anti-establishment writing that stands equally opposed to the mindset of an establishment-in-waiting. Harsch may indeed piss in the pockets of the gatekeepers (& on their heads, too, & elsewhere besides), but you won't find him clamouring to be let in. If in Izola, Harsch's chosen exile, "all the streets flow down to the sea" this is no rationale to launch the ships, set keel to breaker, to sail down the Adriatic & up the Potomac like some barnstorming Ezra Pound with a flaming torch. Incendiarising the White House is a parlour trick that gets stale & what good can it possibly serve humanity-at-large in this day & age to put a fire under the arse of a trillion-megaton hysteric? Besides, Harsch has far more interesting fish to fry (haha) & his writing in elective exile unfolds like a periplus charting both a littoral & literal “wor(l)d revolution” around & beyond any one nation's cultural hegemonics. In other words, not a belle-lettrism of resentments, & this is an essential point to get across to those incapable of imagining a life of writerly fulfilment outside the Anglo-American industrial publishing fold & its machinery of permissions & validations. Hence the imprint (Corona/Samizdat) that Harsch has founded in Izola – perhaps the most unpresupposing locality of an operation of its kind – through which he has clearly signalled a fraternity with the dissident, underground, illegal & otherwise suppressed authors of samizdat.
The term samizdat comes with some history. During the Soviet Union's tyrannising of its own inhabitants & those of the socalled Eastern Bloc, samizdat was the secret network of presses, copyists, distributors & readers that kept the work of prohibited writers (& often the writers themselves) alive under a regime of censorship, prosecution & disappearance into the gulag archipelago. Since the end of the Cold War, Sovietisation has been displaced by Americanisation on a truly global scale (& anyone who quibbles with that need only speak the sacred word “tariff” aloud thrice to summon the evil genie from its ether). And while samizdat does not covet those instruments of the culture industry bewailed by Adorno, nor does it shrink from poking this cyclops in the eye with a burning stick. Whether the cyclops acknowledges it is blind is entirely moot, for samizdat doesn't care what the cyclops thinks, poking it in the eye is merely a pleasant diversion from the serious work of parole in libertà, “where a word like commerce,” as Harsch says, “is spoken through lips the same as those whose sneer is acknowledgement without necessity of invitation that what power there is to be had has been had” (The Driftless Zone).
If, as Joanne Kyger once wrote, “literary history is the phenomenon of looking back & trying to make a picture of a puzzle,” it must be assumed that this puzzle is one that holds some interest, is more or less definable as a puzzle (such that, as Wittgenstein wld insist, it predicates a solution) & that the phenomenon of trying to make a picture of it isn't distressingly self-defeating for those so inclined. Perhaps Kyger was merely in the flush of brash youth seizing the day, since it might equally be said that while “literary history” may indeed be a phenomenon of looking back, only those confident of finding themselves reflected in it (metaphorically speaking) will see a puzzle that may be resolved into a picture (by hook or by crook), the rest ought to be able to recognise it for what it is. “What're you trying to say, Joe?” Let us give the word to one of Harsch's innumerable avatars in The Driftless Zone:
...looking up between the night clouds to a void he was certain he had the measure of, in all humility oblivious of the wobbling scaffoldings supporting the mundane world, scaffoldings the rest of us held up with our shoulders, our feet perpetually slipping as we swaddled our tiny fears and wondered how we managed so much of so little at once; I could sit there between these two and begin to sink into the driftless zone where escape is posed as a false question and equilibrium and the void are one...
You get the drift. In any case, what good's a puzzle that promises nothing better than “the verisimilitude of a mediocre painting” (Harsch)?
“You can discover a lot about a civilisation,” says Harsch, “by paying attention to where its more determined adherents hole up” (Billy Vérité). And learn more, perhaps, from where its adversaries “escape” to. A civilisation marked (without the slightest suggestion of paradox) by “the dull aggression of creatures that had mastered a world devoid of intellect” (The Sleep of Aborigines). It's also somehow incumbent upon the writer, as much as anyone, “to combat the extraordinary tendency of the human brain,” as Harsch puts it, “to think in monolithic terms” (Circumnavigation). To this end, the reader is advised to turn to the last of Harsch's “American” anti-novels, The Manifest Destiny of Eddie Vegas (2022) & his “anthological novel” of Izolian exile, The Assassination of Olaf Pale (2023) – 650 & 500 pages respectively (in other words, there is nothing slight about these books). Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History, has described the former as a “word-drunk, transhistorical odyssey,” which Scott Coffel has likened to a terrain “where at any moment language erodes into a mindscape of hoodoos & canyons.”
If Eddie Vegas is an “American novel,” it is so, in Coffel's terms, by formal analogy to “that geological fantasia, that palimsest of usurpation: The American West.” Olaf Palme, by contrast, presents itself as what Julia Kristeva (vis-à-vis the texts of Philippe Sollers) called a polylogue. Harsch shares the author credit for Olaf Palme with some 69 others, including Corona/Samizdat authors David Vardeman & Randal Leong (“theorist of deranged conspiracy”), yet there's an inescapable sense that all of them merely serve as further Harschian avatars, as “fictional” as the novel's own self-narration. Or if not avatars, then literary reincarnations, if we consider that Harsch – who turns up dead in The Sleep of Aborigines (yet, like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, manages to provide an unreliable voice-over throughout) – here masquerades under the assumed identity of one Gospod Novak, inhabitant of the Slovenian seaside town of Izola, who (like Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy) expires on a night-bus, head lolling on the author's shoulder. In Novak, Harsch discovers a counterpart to his American anti-heroes, Eddie Vegas, Spleen, Billy Vérité, a “prodigal son” who will be made to find that “every stereotype is absolutely true & absolutely false”; to find “if not rebellion itself, a rebellious spirit – often made grotesque... & if not, a permanence of distrust.” Inevitably Harsch is unmasked towards the end of Olaf Palme in a quasi-Marx Bros routine about the World Wide Jewish Conspiracy, the White House & the US Strategic Defence Initiative. A secret war is going on & Harsch is the ubiquitous undercover provocateur stumbling through ex-Yugoslav backwaters onto the centre stage of world historical events (even if the stage has already been deserted by the actors, the atavistic, doomed necessity of these missed encounters avers to a conspiranoiac literary historical puzzle that waits to be solved, oh yes, oh no). “Wait, Rick—that's not, I mean that is, but I had the copy, I have it right here. This is what we got”:
On the 11th of December, Agent Mike was lost, but he recognised Rick Harsch, which is to say mistook him for someone else...
Words were exchanged.
Clearly, though Rick's intentions were unclear, he was not taking Agent Mike seriously...
Wait, Spear sent you to test me didn't he?
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Agent Mike put Rick in a headlock, a friendly one at first, but, well, what the fuck was going on.
Really, guy, this thing is serious. You just got to get the hell out of here.
OK, so I'll get out of here.
Contraindications, shit like that. A guy who can't find his ass with two hands, a directive order, a search warrant, a flashlight held in one of them, etc.... the whole time Mike thinking should I? Should I? Finally deciding, but no more nonsense.
Shot Rick in the foot.
//
Louis Armand’s critical works include Feasts of Unrule (2024), Entropology (2023), Videology (2015), The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (2013), Event States (2007), Techne (1997) & Incendiary Devices (1993), poetry collections including Infantilisms (2024), Vitus (2022), and Descartes’ Dog (2021), & novels including Anizar (2024), Glitchhead (2022), Vampyr (2021), The Garden (2020), Glasshouse (2018), The Combinations (2016) & Clair Obscur (2011). He co-directs the Prague Microfestival & is the director of the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague. www.louis-armand.com
[image: by Louis Armand]
