“Hang Him When He Is Not There” by Nicholas John Turner. Fiction for cyborgs?

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting… The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this result (of interesting us) strike me as innumerable and such as can only suffer from being marked out, or fenced in, by prescription… The form, it seems to me, is to be appreciated after the fact… The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant — no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.
— Henry James, The Art of Fiction

Henry James would have recognised in a moment that Nicholas John Turner’s transgressive, rule-defying Hang Him When He Is Not There (whose Splice 2018 edition I have read on Kindle) was not the kind of novel to which he was accustomed. Indeed, it is not the kind of novel to which many contemporary readers are likely to be accustomed. Take twenty-two occasionally related short stories and fragments. Throw in a good strong dose of metafictional schtick, some ponderings on an observation of Wittgenstein’s. Add numerous references to masturbation, the odd scene of assault and rape (we all have our fantasies, don’t we?) and five buckets of ice. Garnish with random scraps of scar tissue. Serve cold.

If there are to be “no limits to (the novelist’s) possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes“, is it possible that even a recipe as bizarre as this may produce a result that Henry James, or even we for that matter, might regard as interesting?

Well, tastes vary. Some people will regard an autopsy report on a bushfire victim as interesting. For myself, I must admit that Hang Him When He Is Not There strikes me initially as a cold, benumbing, mindfuck of a book, obtuse, tedious, grotesque and sometimes downright sickening. Indeed, it looks to me like a book that is actually calculated to distress a reader such as myself — another of those projects that stretch back to Escher, and possibly beyond, that seek to expose and highlight the petty “limitations” of the benighted viewer or reader, shocking him or her into whatever higher state of enlightenment the artist may be presumed to have attained. Up yours, baby!

How many times, I wonder, can the same poor, unfortunate virgin be deflowered?

Such is my first, gut reaction to this novel. But if I am prepared to look a little deeper?

Let’s assume this novel contains at least some hints as to how it wants to be read. This is possibly a dangerous assumption (I wouldn’t know), but if there are such hints, perhaps the following lines represent a clue:

In the future there will be completely new brands of curiosity, as in people will want to know things that they’ve never even thought about until now. They will ask a question that it is not yet even possible to ask, not today. Even the nature of this question will be completely new… (T)he question will be anonymous in the purest sense—a meaningless outburst mistaken for language—which, once the mistake has been made, will seem like a medium by which it has become possible to publicise some entirely personal, yet eternally constitutional, part of the human experience (humanity).

“A meaningless outburst mistaken for language” — to my eye, that looks like a description of large swathes of this novel, which I initially assumed were just badly written. Whole pages read like descriptions of random events with no inherent significance whatsoever. Here’s one extract from a much longer passage that has a similar quality:

I moved on. It went on forever like that. Then one night I was chased along the Indian border by a pack of children or else very small people wearing masks, which was like the subcontinent itself anthropomorphising to capture me. I was caught and thrown over the back of a motorcycle and driven into a cave in the side of a mountain. There a woman with layer upon layer of ruffled skirts and nothing to cover her breasts tried to talk to me in a language I didn’t know. Then she used a language I did know. She asked me what it would cost to make me leave the East forever. I realised that she was frightened of me, but I also understood that she was obviously the bravest of people, and that that was why she’d been given the task of bargaining with me. I don’t remember answering her. Instead I woke up with a new face, which is to say as another person. I was in Peru, in civilian clothes, in a market, and there was a Japanese girl trying to talk to me. I didn’t understand her. Not then, nor ever. But anyway I took her hand and made her my own. After Peru we moved to Argentina, and then to Colombia. (We spent too long there. That’s the truth of it. Not that I want to say anything bad about the city, or Colombia, for that matter. The fact is that I don’t know the first thing about either of them—that’s exactly the problem. For a while I couldn’t tell what was happening because I was happy and that was something new for me. We took the bus to a hotel in Melgar one weekend. But as we came down the mountain and passed through the little towns on the way, I saw a kind of fear overcome her that didn’t really subside until we returned to the city a couple of days later. We stayed on in Bogotá until the end of the year, travelling to the coast a couple of times because it seemed to please her. We hadn’t made friends with a single soul in over five months. Nor had we been apart, except in our dreams. That is, unless she was following me in my dreams, as I once suspected. Though there was the one week when she flew home out of Cartagena, and I waited for her in this old woman’s apartment, wondering if I’d ever see her again. That was a week of unbelievable anxiety. I pretended to be someone else, an artist, and I almost went crazy. I probably would have kept the alternate personality if she hadn’t returned. I have nothing to offer artistically but I’m better at lying than anything else.

This is surely about as about as close to a “meaningless outburst” as prose can get. We know next to nothing about any of these characters. We’re not the slightest bit invested in their fates, and the only intrinsic interest I found in the passage was wondering when it was going to end. Is is, then, being offered as an example of text in which lurks “a question that it is not yet even possible to ask” and from which may one day arise “new brands of curiosity”?

Presumably time will tell  — though at my age, I don’t expect to hear an answer back in my own lifetime.

Out of interest, to set some kind of benchmark for determining what might constitute a “meaningless outburst of language“, I entered the words that start the passage above into a GPT-J 8B program to see what text it would auto-generate from that initial prompt. This was the result:

I moved on. It went on forever like that. Then one night I was chased along the Indian border by a pack of children or else very small people wearing masks with faces of children and singing songs about the great god and the big-eyed baby. I don’t know what I’d said or done or promised or if I’d been kind or indifferent. After I ran, I fell into a stream. The river was broad and the current strong. In those days, we never knew who was chasing us, but when it was over, the leader stepped in with a great laugh and grabbed my hair. He started to pull. My head whipped back as the water hit my lips and chin. Then he laughed again and let go. His people laughed also. I think there were eight or nine or ten of them, big and small. They were all dressed in white, and I could see something shiny glinting on their wrists. The leader’s eyes held an old sorrow. I was his guest, but I think he was not a stranger. Or perhaps it was his own child that I had stolen and the man had come for it back. But still I was happy to find a human face to stare at, and my eyes must have been like stars in their black shining. They held such a light in them that I wanted to be a part of it for good and true. So I said his name, and his sorrow became a sigh, and his light became a star and his face was an ancient face, a face that held all I had ever dreamed and all I would ever wish for. “My name is Ril.” I said it like a song. “My name is Ril. I live in the valley.” “Then go and live in the valley.” He smiled. “But where is it?” “Just where you are. Just where you live.” “How can I live where I am? I don’t understand.” “Don’t be afraid. Ril is beautiful. Everything is beautiful, if you look.” His people stood at the edge of the valley, looking down at me and staring, and Ril took my hand and led me down into the valley. He knew where to find food for me. Ril told me his people were called the People of the Valley, and he gave me a name. I took it with me, and a star came in my heart that was mine alone, mine forever. And Ril told me how he and his people were going to follow me, going all the way to the Sea. “I will be your guide,” he said. “I will show you the way.” “You will?” “I will. And I will take care of you, and I will take care of all the things you like.” We passed the first of the People, who smiled at me and gave me a bowl of water. Then we came to another People. And there were many more.

I am expecting to enter this in a short story competition soon. I believe It went on forever like that may be an appropriate title.

Call Hang Him When He Is Not There discomforting or clever in the respect, but the novel is nothing if not forward when it comes to laying out critiques of methods of reading. This is probably not the worst ploy in the world if one wants to set one’s reader on the back foot and get in the first blow, as it were — or at least to present oneself to the world as a kind of literary demolition expert.

In one instance of this kind of thing, a character speculates that another reads a novel “looking for proof of her own life there, as a bee looks for flowers that resemble itself. Which is to say, not by visiting each flower on a single plant in a meticulous and ordered and exhaustive manner.”

This speculation will no doubt come as news to many honey bees, which as far as I am aware actually look for flowers that resemble themselves only in rather rare instances, such as with the bee orchid. The general thrust of the argument here is probably fair enough, however, in that I imagine many readers do approach a text like a novel looking for a proof or validation of their own concerns, rather than reading in the kind of “meticulous and ordered and exhaustive manner” that might satisfy, say, a New Critic. I would certainly own to this practice myself at least some of the time.

The novel comes back to talking about various ways of reading (and writing) fairly often, and several positive reviews of the first edition of this book on Goodreads focus particularly on this (to my mind, somewhat solipsistic) aspect of the work.

One four star reviewer writes:

At heart though I think the book examines the very concept of art, particularly literature, its creation and even more so consumption. What does it mean to read a book, and how should a book be read.

Another four star review describes the book as being “about writing and reading and literature and stuff“, while a third notes the presence of, amongst other things, “a theme concerning the processes and philosophical nature of reading and writing.” A twenty minute five star video review by Marc Nash is particularly enthusiastic in this regard.

To me, most of this reading/writing stuff sounds like preaching to the choir in a church I’ve never attended with any great enthusiasm in the first place.

One group of passages along these lines, though, did catch my eye as offering a possible clue as to how the author himself has approach the writing of this book. The narrator of Chapter 1 claims to be “proof reader” or “polisher” whose skills in knocking prose into shape are much in demand.

My work was rhetorical, a sort of intimate, literal engineering. Would that, by analogy, I had been working on a building (rather than, for example, a speech), I could not have determined its usefulness or aesthetic value, only assured you of its ability to stand and withstand. In other words I could speak only and absolutely of its (the building’s, and nothing else’s) integrity.

He continues a page later:

I was a specialist, capable of living for hours, days, weeks or even months among the fine, structural details of a text without once concerning myself with its ultimate relevance or value or meaning.

And again, soon afterwards:

I simply moved from one word to the next, and occasionally back and forth within phrases, or sentences, or paragraphs, or else chapters or entire books, changing this or that word or punctuation or ordering of things, until I felt that a kind of equilibrium had been reached, or else (and this is only to best describe my experience) until I felt as though I could stretch out the whole text in one long line and hold it up to a light to be assured of its straightness, like a pool cue.

The avowed prioritisation here is of “integrity”, “equilibrium”, “the ability to stand and withstand” (to withstand the reservations of a reader like me?) over “aesthetic value” and “ultimate relevance or value or meaning”. We have no way of knowing whether this amounts to Turner’s own literary manifesto, in effect, but if it is, it’s an astonishingly limited one. But then again, Turner does seem to be much more in the business of astonishing than in merely “interesting” the reader, rather like Duchamp with his urinal Fountain.

Come to think of it, an even more apt paradigm in this connection might be the same artist’s Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating, a “painting” that was announced for exhibition, but that never appeared, and that may never have existed at all. I mention this because the whole business of things being in a state where their existence (or non-existence) can never be precisely determined, so that they can never be precisely “grasped”, physically or metaphorically, seems to be a recurring preoccupation of this work, from its title right through to its final plea of “allow them to open this door and find me“.

The book’s title comes from item 462 in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:

I can look for him when he is not there, but not hang him when he is not there. One might want to say: “But he must be somewhere there if I am looking for him.” — Then he must be somewhere there too if I don’t find him and even if he doesn’t exist at all.

I’m no philosopher at all (failed 101, in fact), but, reading this naively, I take the first sentence to mean that some language expressions that describe an action (for example “look for”) are capable of being physically enacted even if the nominal grammatical object of the expression does not actually exist, while others (such as “hang”) are not. On the other hand, the mere fact that an expression of the former kind is capable of being physically enacted does not guarantee that carrying out the action will cause the nominal object to come into existence.

I’m not too sure where this observation of Wittgenstein’s ranks on the World Philosophical Significance Scale, but I can’t imagine it’s terribly high (or at least not when compared to, say, 464 “My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.”) It’s observation 462, however, and not the arguably more germane 464 that has evidently struck a chord with Turner, for his novel riffs extensively on this idea, with characters frequently being presented to us as if they in a state of indeterminacy, like so many instances of Schrodinger’s cat.

Thus, for example, in the wake of some “incident” whose nature is not initially disclosed to us, a resident in a nursing home sits “looking out over the lawns or something at something maybe just down the hill that she couldn’t see yet“, with a look on her face that our narrator has never seen before and cannot satisfactorily describe.

Errol Doyle, a resident in the same nursing home, appears to be “incapable of speech” and of “any physical movement, with the exception of the rotation of his eyeballs, very slow chewing, and manual gestures that were so subtle and incoherent as to have been deigned to be involuntary.” Left leaning forward in a van against straps in a position that “made lifting the weight of his head, for the purposes of the circulation of blood and of breathing, just beyond (his) present capacity”, Errol dies of suffocation, a doctor concludes, before launching on an obscenely prolonged philosophical riff on the “titillating riddle” of precisely when and why Errol’s death occurred “so fine or else vague was the line between living and dead in the case of a man who, for so long, had described a sort of miraculous or else ridiculous parody of survival or humanity.”

An unnamed character tells us that through performing acts that “are considered among the more marginal acts of sodomy” his adulthood began, and “I… truly became someone other than myself.”

A writer sent to interview a hitherto reclusive author with an androgynous pen-name glimpses a “bald, brawny figure… with his back to the door” and concludes, erroneously as we subsequently learn, that “I was perhaps the first to look at him and know who he was.”

Wittgenstein’s gruesome choice of the verb “hang” to illustrate his point is also taken up by Turner as riff fodder.

The centenarian narrator of Chapter 6, a man who tells us twice he does not know whether it is morning or afternoon, reminds his interlocutor that thirty years ago he attempted to hang himself, but achieved only “excruciating pain. Then nothing” — hardly the definitive and irreversible outcome Wittgenstein presumably had in mind when he chose the word “hang” for his observation, rather than, say, “kiss”.

Containing the only literal reference to hanging in the novel, Chapter 6 may contain another, more extended allusion to Wittgenstein if the interlocutor’s “notebook” wrapped up in “brown paper and jute string” and “fastened by that impossible knot of yours” is a reference to the so-called “blue and brown books” that contained notes of Wittgenstein’s lectures focussing on language which were subsequently incorporated in Philosophical Investigations.

The narrator of Chapter 6 tries to avoid this material, he tells his interlocutor, but he has clearly dipped into these writings in the past:

Sometimes whole passages return to wake me at night. I believe that every word you ever wrote back then is deferred somewhere inside of me, awaiting a moment to secrete on my consciousness… I retain nothing of what you write these days. Sixty years ago I wanted your words to be a world. I tried to raise your every sentence from the page, to lift it up and turn it over, like some improbable invention or else a strange animal, to see the force or mechanism that animated it. Under your roughness of style and your crudeness of ideal lay an immense philosophy… Today I do all in my power to read your words without understanding them… Your notebooks have become an abyss into whose depths I must glance, quickly and wincingly, craning forward but leaning back on my heels, aware of a kind of gravity that wants to pull me in.

Perhaps it it is a similar force of “gravity” (pun on “seriousness” presumably intended) that has pulled into this novel less direct allusions to the “hanging” of the title. Errol Doyle’s death by strangulation while restrained by straps sounds like a kind of hanging, while a fleetingly introduced character called Jimmy, with whom another narrator used to “hang out“, has been “beheaded“, which fate our narrator tells us, rather unfeelingly, “really puts a lump in your throat“. A doctor, propositioned by a colleague’s wife, tells her “you’ve lost your head darling… I’ll leave you now to get yourself together.” In the long passage I cited earlier that begins “I moved on“, an opening bracket is left, ahem, hanging. An effect of gravity? Who knows?

There is much other derring do with echoes and like-sounding terms in this novel.

A character named Arthur writes for hours on end, becomes Art, and soon finds himself featuring in sentences like “They hardly noticed this radical change in Art” and “For Art there really could be no attraction without some intellectual chemistry.” One character buys the novel Anna Karenina. Another watches a Godard film, and is reminded of the actor Anna Karina. As well as snakes that crop up frequently, there’s also a “she” that “curls up in a small ‘s.’“, a “slither in the curtains” behind a glass door, and a male nurse who “realised that his belt was twisted in the loops of his pants, sometime after it had been noted that Errol Doyle had passed.” Stockings, flesh-coloured and otherwise, turn up in the strangest places.

From my limited reading in this area, I gather that the correct term for this kind of thing is “play”, and that a quality of “playfulness” of this kind is taken to have a more or less sacred value by practitioners and aficionados of this kind of literature. I’m afraid I don’t quite see the sacred value here myself, and my own reaction is a more curmudgeonly “so what?” But then it seems this kind of writing really does bring out the truly humourless in me.

To be fair to Turner, there’s rather more that’s genuinely clever about this novel in the way some of the various, seemingly disparate, elements of the novel are linked together. If I was to elaborate any further on that, though, I think I would risk giving a misleading impression as to my overall reaction to this novel even after rereading, for this still remains strongly tinged with disgust.

For how, really, am I supposed to respond to the casual horror of a passage like this?

Walking alone one afternoon, I became lost, and woke in a trailer with a woman asleep on the other side of the cabin. Her tracksuit was blue and came off without her waking. Fights in the house never crossed the sexes, occurring only between women, inexplicably, or else between men when homosexual encounters devolved.

Or this:

I had initially noticed her at a meal; supine on a beanbag at the room’s opposite side, legs carelessly splayed, revealing her bush to my neighbours and to me, oblivious or else liberal in the extreme. At every meal thereafter she fulfilled the same position.

Or this:

Her face was plastered the sheerest shade of white. For a moment I suspected, or else fantasised, I can’t honestly tell you which, so let’s say I imagined, that she was not at all a person, but rather an inanimate object, a big piece of plasticine that had been dressed in a gown and painted to resemble a middle-aged lady. Then she breathed and her breath was like ash. I told her I didn’t realise, and she turned and then moved away quickly, like she had been freed from a sticky web, or trap.

Or this:

Her starchy, grey-black hair is tied up in a bun and the loose hairs make a kind of aureole that is lit up by the window behind her. She is a horror of obesity, balancing even as she sits, knees splayed, the shapeless dress of an Islander woman draped over her Danish flesh. Her feet, one bridge atop the other, and bare beneath the table; these are two strange, arced masses.

Or this:

The old man put his mouth hard against my ear. His breathy whispers echoed and reverberated and sent a wave of shivers down me that his three fingers, jagged and thin, rode into my anus. I protested in good faith, scratched him at the hip. There seemed to be a fight at the doorway, a fight to be witness, but none would enter. Except for Kathy, in her sacred obliviousness. She crawled in unnoticed between legs, moved docilely toward me on her hands and knees, turned and retreated without breaking rhythm. She soon settled in her own atmosphere, curled up against the wall. Her eyes batted sleepily, generally, in my direction. I fought some more, respectfully, and bit a cheek, then let myself be held, in silence, as the man’s old body wound down, slowly eased its vigour, and dripped off me like a wet shell.

Or this:

Kathy dropped my son there and walked me to an unlit park. She pulled her dress over her head, leaving her gloves on. What I thought was underwear turned out to be a very tight strap that fastened a small, solid, thick leather pad over her vagina. She lay face-down on the grass, and then arched her back slowly, shifting her knees forward until they sat almost beside her ears. I was presented with her tightly knotted anus, lightly strewn with a rash, which seemed to be an uncanny and sympathetic reading of my fear of progeny. Kathy’s hands appeared between her legs like insects emerging from the corollas of flowers. Intimately lit, they proceeded to pick and tear at her flesh-coloured stockings.

What disgusts one person will not necessarily disgust another, so what I say here is clearly highly subjective. What I find truly disgusting and disturbing in this novel is not just these specifically problematic passages, difficult as they are, but rather the remorseless, relentless flattening of affect that seems to have bleached and deadened the speech of almost every narrator we met in the course of this work. Virtually every voice in this novel, to my ear, speaks like a cyborg programmed to imitate the colloquial tics of human conversation, yet without any of the emotional component that I would expect to associate with an actual, warm-blooded human voice. These narrators sound like the outputs of so many unsuccessful attempts to build a Turing machine. The net effect is impossible to capture in short quotations, but suffice it to say after reading (and re-reading) page after page of this kind of thing, my gorge starts to rise, and I find myself wanting to scream “Is there a human anywhere in the house?”

In this whole novel, I found only one line I would care to remember:

they buried him on the playing grounds, among the laurels and jacarandas, so that it snows Brisbane purple on him in spring.

Even this line, sadly, is probably ill-founded, for since when were rugby players ever actually buried on playing grounds?

There are certainly strong elements of cleverness in Hang Him When He Is Not There, but they float on a frozen sea. What is truly “not there” in this chilling post-modern novel is any skerrick of what I recognise as ordinary humanity, and hence of ordinary human interest.