On The Readymades

The Readymades

By John Holten

Words: Ann Cotten

Sometimes English seems too delicate a material to make books out of. Of course it is like spiders' thread: incredibly useful, sticky, and still working despite numerous total breaks. There are a large number of beautiful, delicate, and quite a few perfectly designed innovative uses of English in John Holten's fresh novel The Readymades.

"They crossed the street, clamoured into a taxi like a hundred animals seeking refuge from the wrathful eye of Odin." (p. 17) (though this represents a slight misreading, you will see) is a sentence of great beauty. Also to be enjoyed is Holten's expert handling of the swirling, separating, clumping-up worlds of embarrassment while traversing real spaces, as here:

"He noticed the little hatchback police car immediately, of course he did. He felt apprehensive suddenly and the appearance of a police car only heightened the reservations he had calmed since finding the note in his bag. Just then as John made to cross the street the inset, heavy door slowly, silently moved inward and a policeman stepped out like a surprise foil to a doomed project. John cursed and surprised himself by stopping right where he was – in the middle of the road, a car approaching from the avenue – and the policeman, naturally, looked at him." Maybe it's just me, but the effect of there being no comma before the inset, heavy door actually physically surprises me with the grammatical protocol of the sentence, just like the door is supposed to surprise John by suddenly opening.

Such mimesis – like all elegance, it might be criticized for not being kept up all the time – makes a footprint in the soul of the reader, anchors the feet of this Eiffel tower of a plot. The wind whistles through it, but at the bottom, just like in a good blues, you have your way of walking down the street. Altogether however, what with the frequent jolts and meta-texts in boxes and similar group sex scenes in different typesets, I am left with a feeling of emptiness. This is the topic of The Readymades. It is the gist of the performance the book actually is. The Readymades is an imitation, a sketch of a novel, brushing various topics and genres, coming close to emotion at the edges of sex scenes, using death too.

English is such a tender organ it will protect itself in its speakers, build a crust of convention, irony and resignation during their childhood. Only rarely, then, these people will be soothed enough by some peaceful moment, or rise to the occasion of some instance of beauty, to allow their full power of expression to unfold - trusting, demanding, brilliant, and flighty.

The first half of the book leads John Holten - the hero who is, I believe, identical to the editor of the book, though not to its author (there might be some dissertation on the details) – to the manuscript of Djordje, a member of the Serbian art group LGB. Djordje more or less tells their story, coming in the end, with inner difficulties, even to scenes from the war. This goes against the wishes of another LGB member, who beats up the translator and threatens the editor. The latter, in what turns out to be the final scene, seems blithely oblivious to the danger they both are in. Here is a remarkable effect produced by the device of the editor-in-the-story. I am quite uncertain about John and the straightness of his social acts, as his level of ingenuity seems to yo-yo steeply. It seems sometimes that the author feels some embarrassment about creating the figure that is he, perhaps indulging in some fantasies, and that his dunce mode is a strategy used in life as well as in fiction. Pretending oblivion or ignorance is a widespread Anglosaxon manoevre, but the Irish surely have quite another level of slyness in its application. For the hospital scene to be the last is an instance of the performative flightyness of the work: this parody of a thriller just breaks off and we never hear anything more about the fate of these two sympathetic young men. Of course there is every licence to have it be like this. And yet. I do find it refreshing to feel the wants classically awakened by works of fiction. I do indeed want to be taken farther in. Maybe I would like to count this as a failing because I honestly regret the work not going on a bit. It stops with the pathos of quoted death, the lives of the figures, halted, looking on. Halted artificially, quite as if they were playing on a tape recorder

with which there had been much fumbling already at the beginning of the work. In a scrapbook-like structure, the book is transpersed with examples of the artwork, emails, manifestoes and exhibit notices. They usually come startlingly, after another lovely, dreamy sex scene has petered out. Holten can sketch very sensual scenes, also of the morning of a translator, but where I would like to linger, he makes haste to join them with mechanical connection pieces to support the plot. I'm not quite satisfied with the humour that would be necessary to make this procedure feel like a grandiose prank.

I also missed Balkan idiom in the texts supposedly translated from Serbian by that unfortunate bachelor Tom. Only in few places was there a phrase that smacked or smelled right. In between, a lot of the narrative felt like an Englishman speaking. Now this could of course be because Tom, the Cambridge language student, embraced the story with his own English, and as if to confirm this excuse, Tom at one point thinks about his style in translating - as he claims, for the first time. However, the excessive use of participle clauses, past and present, irksome even in National Geographic prose, seems to betray the secret identity of John and Tom, and seems to suggest a bypassing of any actual Serbian text, or the missing of the rather exciting chance of doing something Serbian with English for half a book.

Is it our generation and sociotope's way to lack the ignorance necessary to really be something, really dive into it - be it an artist, a novelist, a prankster? "The Readymades" hovers oddly between these intentional identities, like a pendulum waiting to be drawn and followed to one side. It is a bit like those grisaille oil sketches for a painting that may never be painted. The three feet that support this coolish cauldron each prevent it tipping in one direction: the fake art group avoided being a real art-world joke because the LGB exhibit at the Motto bookstore in Skalitzer Straße was a presentation of the bound fictional account that was its occasion; the book avoids being a novel by refusing to do what a novel should and by naming its protagonists in reality, and they all wisely distain to give it a try as artists in the art world, having found this shelf where they can rest superior, because their art is mocking seriously meant art, good and bad, drawing back from any criticism and yet of course still serious in a way. Being earnest is what we desire, and are too inhibited to carry out except when drunk or surprised, and too sensitive to allow our earnest attempts to be criticized by career junkies, and this ideal is perhaps what shimmers through: desire for violence, sex, alcohol and conversation.