The Fripperies of Petronius

The Faces of Pluto, Ansgar Allen, Stalking Horse Press, 2024.

Early in Ansgar Allen's The Faces of Pluto the reader is led to a wall. But not just any wall. Having journeyed (“having walked & read & lived”) in the company of an apocryphal Thomas Browne (part-concocter, part-doctorer of “labyrinthine sentences... that resemble processions or a funeral cortège in their sheer ceremonial lavishness”), through the somewhat apocryphal environs of Norfolk, the author brings the reader to a wall of books, which transects the landscape as far as the hapless reader's eye can see. The wall is immense & “contains all books, which means, both existent & imagined.” A Borgesian typology follows, by which the contents of the wall is classed according, e.g., to “anthropodermic bibliopegy,” “Library of St Victor,” & what we might call “Brownia” (such as the “posthumous” & “entirely fabulised” Biblioteca Abscondita, itself a catalogue of “fictive” writings). And from typology the work progresses to topology, by way of an eventual door, a balloon, a hill, valleys, a mountain, & so forth. The entire sweep of the proverbial textual apparatus, in other words, by which the reader is offered a prospect, if not strictly speaking a P.O.V., upon the general lay of the land. In other words, a way onward if not a way out. Immured in its environs, the text pretends that a certain terrain can nevertheless be got a grasp of. (What good wld be a reader, after all, if nothing of their situation permitted itself to be read?) In doing so, the text challenges the foolhardy reader to come forth w/ opinions, if not indeed judgements. Thus The Faces of Pluto is indeed nothing if not a morality tale about the seductions of doxa, alternative or perhaps even alliterative, if not merely literary, facts; whole cartographies of the pseudo-empirical & quasi-dialectical, drenched in the ectoplasm of Unheimlichkeit. Such dystopian hermeneutics cld promptly multiply into a parade of unlikely doppelgangers: The Farces of Plato, if not The Faeces of Plautus, or perhaps The Fakeries of Plotinus, The Flatulence of Polybius, The Funicular of Peisistratus, The Fuckeries of Polydeuces, all (implicitness alone demands it) offered here at a dime-a-dozen. So much for opinions. But is that all there is? By devious routes of seeming divagation & digression, the author leads the reader (by many devious routes) back to where they'd originally (so it might seem) set out, being that hollow of themselves, excavated, like some comforting homely, from a cogito which sums up its exalted self-being in pilfered mots justes. The word “palindrome,” for example. Like staring into a mirror & reading the “face” you find there like an open book. What does it matter if the book itself is “non-existent”? Or if it is a book, in the “shape of an orb,” rolled about merely in order to gather dust? Dear reader, this may be one of “the most pointless books” in the library y've been stuck waiting around in all yr life. And therefore one of its most exquisite sources of pleasure.

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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: Workers at Norwich Castle]