Without Escape

Leopold’s Labyrinth, Mike Corrao, Astrophyl Press, 2024.

Are you willing to admit that you’re lost? “We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world…always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand,” says trial subject Ted to Allegra, an infamous video game designer in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. Throughout the film, Ted and Allegra attempt to navigate the game designer’s opus through a flesh-based console, which attaches to their spine and makes their imagination an appendage of its will. Ted struggles to derive rationality from the confusions that circle, while his sense of control and object-permanence is torn asunder. Allegra is incapable of providing any explanations, even to herself, so the two paw, bewildered, through the game.

Enter Leopold’s Labyrinth, Mike Corrao’s novel, released in winter of 2024. Corrao has spent almost a decade clearing space in the literary discourse for monstrosity; his body of work includes more than a half-dozen collections and the multimedia publishing project CLOAK. Nearly every press worth reading prints his work. His influences include the Action Books literary galaxy, experimental hip-hop artists and the CCRU (a divisive 1990s theory-fiction collective). Without question, Corrao has fostered an impressive aesthetic milieu.

To discern his influences requires little guesswork, at least while reading Leopold’s Labyrinth. Heavy chunks of the book contain direct quotes from other artists, ranging from Anais Nin to Zach Hill. Each of these quotes is accompanied by the choose-your-own-adventure style imperative: “left or right.” While this is presented as a “choice” to the reader, it doesn’t resemble any choice that readers actually have. You can continue reading, or stop- like any other book. You can read a quote one way, and then reject that reading, and adopt another, or another, ad infinitum, just like any other book. Sure, these are choices, but they are not directional or exclusive choices. This experiment implies a method of reading beyond binarism. Distinctions like yes-or-no, pleasure-or-pain, correct-or-incorrect are insufficient responses to the text. Readers in search of maxims or relatable personalities will not find them. Divisions between self and other molt into one bilious communion. Corrao proposes a method of reading appropriate to the surrealist literature he has helped to elevate: not of categorical demands, but of limitless texture. You read the text the way your body reads a wound.

This brings to mind one quote in particular, printed early in the Labyrinth. Writes Alexandra Campbell: “A labyrinth is not a maze. A maze is only the complexification of a straight line. A labyrinth is a network of lines.” A maze consists of one path, complicated by misdirection, towards a single solution, which results only in an exit from itself. On the contrary, a labyrinth consists of many paths exploring each other, without the compulsion towards resolution or escape- a unity of action and environment. Horror develops, of course, because this betrays the modern drive for satisfaction. This drive is largely generated by the consumer economy, which teaches that exchangeable possessions and power are one and the same (and purchasable through military enforcement). Corrao’s aesthetics do not adhere to the principle of exchange value, so, in this Labyrinth, you live through a state of withdrawal and uncertainty- is this all that there is?

Body horror operates prominently throughout the book. “And your eyes are stained with blood and sealed open. Turning your irises crimson and your corneas into a teardrop shape. Something that can absorb all of the redness flowing into you.” As the labyrinth’s second-person navigator spirals through fluctuating corridors, you encounter artifacts, which probe, possess, and stun you, artifacts which leak light or blood or both. Wounding you, these items bring your entrails to the surface. As you grip one of the artifacts, the artifact grips you back, shredding and exposing your carpals. This is bodily desublimation. Muscles, organs, arteries, and intestines oxygenate; the interior of your body appears and you finally recognize its horrifying miracle. The shock is exacerbated by a sabotage of autonomy. Echoing Sun Ra’s demand- “Whoever refuses to dance will be shot-” one artifact traps you inside an insurmountable rhythm, your “free will” subdued by the contortions of an omnipotent galvanism. Your nerves twitch and seize relentlessly. Leopold’s artifacts make a marionette of what you once believed to be yours alone. You become a conduit for the labyrinth’s riddle.

What is the purpose of this? Remember the aforementioned Alexandra Campbell quote. A maze expects satisfaction; a labyrinth refutes it. In attempting to understand these artifacts, you seek to possess them, but their abrasiveness takes possession of you instead. Infections spread to your spinal column and take hold of your occipital lobe. This does not cease until you are rearranged by violence. Once any given artifact hits its limit, you no-clip to another map without the chance to address (or even comprehend) prior wounds. Leopold’s Labyrinth phases through permutations of an eternal return. You are unsatisfied, out of control, incomplete.

In other words, there is no escape. I’m not talking about the book anymore. Think of what you have done to eliminate pain or frustration from your life. Have you ever succeeded? or did you merely furlough your own suffering, asphyxiate yourself, perpetuate lies and cowardice, punish your body to preserve your mind, punish your mind to preserve your body, bury your complicity in the suffocation of living matter? “You are a neanderthal pawing the ground, looking for anything you can wrap your meaty paws around.” The medieval christian mystic Marguerite Porete thought piety’s attempt to escape from meat-space was a farce. Instead, she dove headfirst into her labyrinth, embracing her infinite distance from divinity. Are you capable of such surrender? If you are, would you be willing to accept its consequences? or would you rather keep wishing for a way out, a way to convert the labyrinth of your mortality into a maze?

I ask these questions in part to explain the function of Leopold’s second-person perspective. It’s true that this technique contributes to the text’s arcade-glow, but I think this choice involves more than mere stylization. Withholding a name from the novel’s primary character deepens the absence of personality, drawing readers further inside Leopold’s precarity. Tonally, the second-person registers like a threat, especially in more scathing passages. “You remain where you were/In the fetal position, holding an exit sign.” “And this is your fault. Because you were selfish and unwilling to let an unfamiliar object exist in the world.” These indictments apply to readers, not through any aspect of their identity, but as readers, broadly. Your struggle while reading Leopold’s, or any other literary work, is to embrace challenge, to prioritize exploration over gratification, to smile at the impossibility of escape from the text (or the impossibility of escape from your own world).

After numerous rounds in the labyrinth, you encounter the titular Leopold. At first, this encounter occurs at a great distance: Leopold is depicted like a trickster god, a Frogger-style Huehuecóyotl, an unmoved mover who “unveils the sun and illuminates the full breadth of the structure.” Leopold “lures you further into your hermitage” and “creates the generative programs who determine your fate…” Contrary to every other aspect of the labyrinth, it appears as if a responsible party has emerged, if only as an omniscient manipulator. Will the division between actor and action assert itself at last? Are you about to rediscover the individual? to find yourself, whatever that means?

You finally arrive on the same plane as Leopold, who pursues you, “kitchen knife in hand...” But this is not the maniacal demiurge you imagined (or hoped) might define, and thereby end, your mystery. Rather, Leopold speaks to you, mostly in questions. “Do you feel any guilt?” he asks. “What is your aversion to the boundary-zone? Is it the nothingness. The voidal fluids by which you are suspended. Or the sudden omniscience of that perspective? Are you not curious about the shape of the labyrinth?” When manipulating the artifacts, you felt nothing but resentment and fear towards their unpredictability, their impermanence, the turbulence and vacillations which they leveled against your search for control. You desired domination of yourself and your environment; encumbered with this desire, you were unable to harmonize with the labyrinth, so it tortured you on repeat. Leopold has no impulse to destroy you in response, because in a labyrinth there is no destruction-- only Heraclitean flux. Recall the prior quote about selfishness, that “inability to let an unfamiliar object exist in the world.” This selfish need to dominate through identification has only produced in you a disunity with life itself. Are you willing to give it up? “Are you willing to admit that you are lost?”

The above question might suggest despair at first, but your Labyrinth-spun avatar experiences something like a revelation instead. “What a time to be alive, baby!” you exalt, in a rare moment of colloquial language from the text. As you abandon the farce of escape, your attention shifts from that impossible satisfaction to a limitless amor fati. Opposition to one’s environment no longer registers. “Every encounter creates the potential/for future mutations…we construct something together/does this please you?//Your body mingles with the labyrinth//(cybernetic-aug).” Corrao’s reference towards “cybernetics” ought to be taken in its broadest sense, as an understanding of sociality where inputs are also outputs, where creation and reception are one and the same. Such an understanding is an “aug[mentation],” in that it adjusts the common understanding of life as a conflict between self and other. Certain literary texts, including the work of many authors quoted in Leopold’s Labyrinth, point readers towards this embrace of the exterior. In their approach to literature, language is not reduced to communication. Rather than a pursuit of meaning obscured by style, these writers offer “encounters,” which necessarily “mutate” under a reader’s eye, a reader who “construct[s] something” with the writer and enters into composition with the text as an active participant, “mingl[ing] with the labyrinth.”

Note the above qualifier: Leopold delivers you something like a revelation, but not quite. While a fragment from the labyrinth remains “sutured” to your face (as an “interface,” an imprint of a relation), nothing has been “realized.” You still cannot command your environment entirely. Instead, you have been refreshed; you are imbued with an appreciation of meat-struggle “and you are tasting something/As if for the first time….pressing on in each direction/without knowing why,/or considering your place in the labyrinth.” This revelation is anti-epiphanic; this rapture is without end. The labyrinth, or your role in it, has not been satisfied, but re-enchanted. If this text can be read as a model of Corrao’s aesthetic values- of literature as a collaborative mutation between writer and reader- then Corrao wants his readers to forgo salvation in order to embrace vitality. “The labyrinth beckons for new flesh. Something to be consumed/cherished.” Literature is a bloody sheen which glitters upon the vision of all those who desire exaltation without end.

With the fear of hell heavy on his mind, Hakuin Ekaku left his home at age fifteen to become a Zen acolyte. Disappointment confronted him from all angles; he frequently abandoned his station, wandering fruitlessly through a worldful of illusion and anguish. He was assailed by psychological vertigo during meditation; he endured beatings from his superiors or from nearby villagers. At a moment of severe despair, Hakuin hallucinated himself suspended, with one foot on a patch of rapidly deteriorated land, entirely surrounded by an incomprehensible abyss, and one hand gripping a single, tearing vine. This produced in Hakuin his first instance of satori, a moment of crystalline insight that eventually rescued him from a lifetime of struggle and disharmony and allowed him to produce some of the most revered Buddhist scripture. Until this instance, the man’s central torment was the illusion of escape from pain. Hakuin had been unable to embrace the fact that this escape was impossible because he was unable to embrace existence as a labyrinth, not a maze. His torment is yours, and so is his embrace. “You remain where you were,/In the fetal position, holding an exit sign.” Your labyrinth folds inward forever. Are you willing to admit that you’re lost?

//

PJ Lombardo is a writer from New Jersey. He earned an MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Previously, he worked as a publishing assistant for Action Books, and he currently serves as co-founding editor of GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. Read his writing in Tagvverk, The Quarterless Review, Tripwire, Hobart Pulp, Lana Turner Journal and elsewhere.

[image: Pyramid-Shaped Stamp Seal Inscribed With A Labyrinth Design, circa 2150–2040 B.C.]