Headless World by Ascher/Straus
This review of Headless World, or, The Problem of Time (McPherson & Company, 2022) by Ascher/Straus first appeared in the print edition of Rain Taxi #109, Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2023.
There is in fact a profusion of heads in Headless World. One might even note that there seems nothing but, although most heads seem about to be, or are in the midst of being, severed from the necks they belonged to, the condition to which the title likely alludes.
To demonstrate it, there is a page of thin red cardstock bound in close to the middle of the book, the most obvious conceptual gambit in a novel that is based on many of them. It is also something of a mystery: What is the point of it being there, other than as an overdetermined divider between the novel’s two sections, where a noticeable shift in tone and approach takes place? Seen with the book closed, though, its symbolism grows real: a red slit running between the pages, such as might appear before a head detaches from its body—or the instantiation of a slash in a collaborative pair’s joint byline.
Documentation exists for Ascher/Straus’s “SPACE NOVELS” from the 1970s and 80s, “un-bound” novels that took place “largely in an art context” (see https://www.ascher-straus.com/), but it is the later “traditional publications” that form one of the most remarkable runs in the history of American experimental fiction. The high point would be the duo’s 1988 masterpiece The Other Planet; now Headless World arrives, thirty-four years later, as its successor. As with most things Ascher/Straus, a duality is at play: there is a manic, cut-up mode (“cut-up” in both senses, of collage and humor) that is dominant in The Other Planet and Red Moon/Red Lake, and a meditative, pointillist one, which is exemplified in their online “boundaryless” novel Monica’s Chronicle and the more contained ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party.
The remarkable autobiographical notes recently added to their website (“my illness left me with strange, heightened states of consciousness and what would probably be called ‘paranormal’ faculties … strange states [that] resembled what are known as ‘teleportation’ and ‘telekinesis’, but not exactly”) would suggest that, with the passing of Sheila Ascher in 2020, Headless World will be their last novel together. As such, it represents a synthesis of their two stylistic modes, bound together by that sheet of red paper, along with a third introduced toward the end, featuring some of their most beautiful and moving writing.
Perhaps it is the legacy from their background in performance art, but a striking aspect of these conceptual novels, and a source of their mystery, is how they demonstrate concepts with little by way of explication. More akin to New Wave science fiction than metafiction, we do not share the author’s structural awareness, as in the latter, but go along with its manipulated characters through the acrobatic shifts in setting, narrative time, genre, tone, and style in a state of continuous consciousness and identity. Characters (“heads”) exist in the fiction, while their experience lies in the meta: the infinite loops, self-reflexive commentary, and digressions into more deeply nested fictions.
Of course, this is all both disorienting and deeply familiar; it is our own headless world, after all, our consciousness projected back into our brains, as mass entertainment, while the insides of them remain obscure. Compared to its predecessors, Headless World drops more clues to the operative principles of this universe, but it is scattered, in stray bits of overheard speech, cryptic theorizing monologues, and digressive side-character rants. Nonetheless, our online Sibyl selves, which are, nowadays, the bare necessity to navigate the identity matrix of daily life, should recognize these strategies:
. . . human identity exists like this: each helped into existence by the gaze of the other. No existence at all, for anyone, without a perpetual exchange of gazes. Don’t they agree? Isn’t that how everything exists in the world? A conspiracy of looking, for which we’ve invented engines that manufacture things to see.
***
This is what it would be like to be dead-alive: not seeing, not feeling, not hearing: but knowing: the mind permanently embalmed in the delusion that it knows the world directly through its remote contact.
***
Two years from now you’ll be complaining about all the imitations of this stuff you find so hard to swallow. In every stupid Sunday Supplement of every stupid newspaper some idiot with a fax machine for a head will be repeating something he heard on one of our ‘invisible’ little so-called interior programs as if he just dreamed it up himself. [...] now every dummy with a set of ears attached to his skull suddenly has the possibility of hearing the inaudible dog whistle for which we happen to own the patent.
***
With every look we dig out even deeper the channel of abstraction that history flows through, impressing its shape on the next reality wired together by the next genius.
Make the world with our gaze, but can we unmake it?
And if the brain is growing increasingly impatient with its boring dependence on the eyes—what then? Zip it all together by wiring the brain directly to its source.
This is not an internet novel or satire; it is a description of something larger. Perversely, television represents the gateway to that realm, the scarlet marker between before and after. Film plays a role, along with driving (“the equation between the perspective of the automobile windshield and the movie screen”), but it feels like a preparatory evolutionary state, nostalgic even, to the main event. So the protagonist of the book, if there is one, is the “Television Genius,” who is responsible for this state of things, “the so-called ‘Memory Channel’,” a kind of dumb Singularity brought about by TV. Now the media has access to our heads on a daily, second-by-second basis, and “online” has been with us since before there was a personal computer, as this section makes plain:
‘It’s because they feel their own non-existence that they worry so much about reality mutating around them because of the supposed unreality of television.’ Raise your hands everyone who understands that. ‘The force of unreality is always stronger than the force of reality and is always changing it. But what do we actually mean by the ‘reality’ of a person? As soon as we’re born we begin to receive signals, to radiate signals and to accumulate garbage.
‘The accumulated family garbage and work garbage and everyday garbage that sits down in front of the set for some relief from itself—where’s the harm if that begins to mutate? To become less “real”? I could make an argument if I put my mind to it,’ he said, ‘that a person is just an imperfect form of television. That television is what the human soul has always aspired to. Designed to be a model of what we’d love to turn into, but can’t. We see a repetitive, retrievable life there that may or not be the immortality the soul has always longed for. And the simple, everyday act of looking out of the body at it means we’re always trying to get there but can’t quite do it. As if the secret key is getting through the bog of stupid content.
In sum, the science-fictional, or metafictional, premise of Headless World might be described as the answers to two different questions:
As more of our lives are experienced through media (“What we actually experience is very small. And what’s called reality is the territory that lies outside the tiny province of experience and presses it into shape”), then what distinguishes so-called memories of life from memories of media we consume? Or for that matter, from the media itself, which is no less immaterial a form than memory, but does not fade and is perpetually on-demand?
If the passage of time can be said to begin with the onset of life (“Time—always inside us, born at the second we are, like a virus that's sometimes benign and sometimes isn’t—stares out at a world that ages because we’re looking”, then isn’t time a biologically rather than absolutely determined dimension, experienced in the form of memory?
These parallel systems occupy the minds of the characters, but they end up intersecting to form a third, and it is this which the final sequence of the novel takes up in its reflections on mortality. For if time is a form of memory, and memory has been replaced by television (“Memory is worthless and may not even exist. The truth of experience is real but replaced easily by the next truth”), then have we reached a point where all time is simultaneous? Is this immortality?
But does that mean that if we could get rid of our head we’d also get rid of time, therefore aging? No head, no time, no aging. Is there some error in this logic? And, if there is, why can’t I see it?
***
At this late point it might be like sticking my head out the window to see where I’ve been and having the delusion that I’m getting a panoramic overview—a genius-flash of panoramic knowledge, when all that’s really happening is that my head’s been lopped off by the sharp edge of a train speeding the other way …
The “genius-flash” of this book lies not so much in its ideas, which it is coy about, as in the thorough and uncompromising enactment of their implications, utilizing the qualities of the novelistic form to shift between theory and the concrete of consciousness. Its characters exist in a literary-aesthetic state only. There is something poignant in their struggle to come to terms with being different people on different days, unsure if their identities have made it continuously from one waking day to the next, and unsure if they have stepped across the threshold into someone else’s fictional story. The novel is like the great novels, a mirror of our condition, as opposed to the virtual reality experienced in the fictions we consume daily, which are insidiously made coherent. We recognize this headless world, but it’s never been presented this way to us before.