Nightmares in the Language of Kitsch
Reviews
By K Hank Jost
The interior of Europe is in flames. The sea is rising to quench it. Riots abound. Mosques and synagogues are being torn down. It’s Kristallnacht somewhere. The sky is covered over with human skin and Lars von Trier has eaten himself alive. Anders Breivik has escaped from prison by way of a giant teleporting egg, and the formerly last-living Nazi lies in state deep within the Black Forest, mummified on an altar to his atrocities. Around the altar a town, gleaming with enough light and good Weihnachten cheer to make Thomas Kincaide lose his lunch, is born out of a professor’s hysterical ahistoric nostalgia. A Hungarian incel dons a berserker’s wolf hide and gives birth, through an unwillingly transplanted vagina/womb apparatus, to a violent myriad of Aryan Übermenschen. Deep in the Russian taiga the fractured and failing bodies of the Berlin Wall’s fallen fragments reunite in a world-ending orgy. Or something like that.
These are a small few of the happenings peppered through David Leo Rice’s latest novel, The Berlin Wall. There are many more oddities and horrors described therein, roughly four hundred pages more, but Rice’s novel sits in a classically paranoid mode wherein its reality on the page, the discrete instances bound between the same covers, in no way indicates its reality in story. Nor does it offer any clues as to its unreality. Nor, again, whether or not any of these events have anything to do with one another. The narratives of the three principals—the aforementioned professor, Anika; the Hungarian incel above, Gyorgy; and a living chunk of Wall, Ute (don’t bother imagining it just yet, we’ll get there)—do manage to cross in the novel’s middle before enough escape velocity is achieved by each to rocket the reader again away from solid ground. But they don’t meet to mix into a solution—they’re only water, oil, and corn syrup sharing a vessel: forever separated and only emulsifiable by adding agents of tunnel-visioned exegesis and analytic compromise.
What can be said with some certainty is that David Leo Rice’s The Berlin Wall is a novel about the Berlin Wall if the Berlin Wall were alive—broken into a million pieces, but living—and those broken pieces are people? Or they look very much like people, until you look really, really close. And by look really, really close, I mean fuck. There are folks in Rice’s The Berlin Wall who want to fuck the Berlin Wall, the pieces of it, the pieces that look like people, and by fuck I mean like a sex party at Berghain, but with an extra dungeon where the ball gags are made of rubble and shibari bondage is done by weaving wires, rebar, and iron cable through one’s guts and limbs. And the Wall, the Berlin Wall and all its pieces, also wants to fuck itself—to make a Wall again, in the taiga, where there is nothing to divide nor any false world-historical order to uphold.
Again, this can be said with some certainty.
This lack of certainty, though, is no discredit to Rice as a writer or the brick-and-mortar prose style he’s adopted for this text. His previous novel, The New House, is a melodious little thing, dreamy in its horror and mythic/folkloric in its temperament. His Wall however is stylistically Spartan, stony voiced, and densely packed with information. Puns accounted for, if not intended, the thing is bricky. It’s apt, perhaps intentional, ultimately lending the material contained in the prose a clarity that the form and substance of the novel itself denies.
The nature of The Berlin Wall’s hallucinatory happenings is akin to the happenings upon another wall, namely that of Plato’s allegorical cave. However, though each character seems to be experiencing a different reality, the characters themselves are at least real to each other—they’re all watching the same wall, only so close up or chained in such a manner as to not be able to see the whole of it. They phase in and out of each other’s lives. Which means, of course, that something is certainly happening, and we can probably place our bets that it’s neither the aggregate of the events as relayed by the characters, nor any one character’s experience holding more truth than any other, but more that what is happening includes everything and nothing of what we’ve been shown—that the foundation of the revealed knowledge is void.
There’s an undoubted Gnosticism to Rice’s approach, but to say that his work here renders a text that is Gnostic would be a disservice to its depths. It would also undercut what Rice has actually done. Comparatively, the most immediate analogs at hand are perhaps Pynchon and K. Dick, but in the work of these authors the paranoia and revealed unreality of things usually serve as the revelation itself: We end with reality uncovered as simulated in some way and either close the volume there or sally forth heroically toward the off switch. Not so with Rice. Better analogs would be the work of Sorokin or Cronenberg. Cronenberg is very obviously Rice’s visual guide, so much so that many gestures in the novel feel like loving homage. Whether it’s the preponderance of Nazi-birthing eggs, the stone embedded in flesh, the lily-white, mole-pocked skin saran-wrapping rural Germany, or the surgical implantation of foreign sexual organs, Cronenberg looms large throughout. However, Rice’s satire reaches more into the realm of Vladimir Sorokin, especially when compared with the Russian’s own post-Cold War-vacuum-of-the-USSR epic, The Ice Trilogy, which rolls its plot out—such as there is one—with very similar video-game logic as Rice’s novel, complete with power-ups, discovered abilities, accomplishment-based level grinding, and boss fights galore.
But the piece of narrative media that I found most resonates with Rice’s Wall is the legendary, eternally recursive, and Gnostically flavored anime saga Neon Genisis Evangelion—not only in form, but in spirit, both resting their arguments in a similar theosophical space, namely the abortive nature of Gnosticisim. Where Evangelion is thematically composed of half-literate Freudianism and joyously, laughably, violently skewed Christology, The Berlin Wall takes for its inspirations—running them through an absurdity mill of a different brand but strikingly exact make and function—the cultural traditions of Germany and brain-dead mythologizing of the white supremacist fantasy. A key difference between the two, though, is the manner in which their Gnosticism is fundamentally abortive. In Evangelion, the hidden nature of reality is thwarted by the power of individual Grace. In Rice’s Wall, the hidden reality is so obscure, so transcendent, so massive and inhuman that even the characters’ realizations of its nature, as variously shadowy or direct as their revelations are, can do little to inform them regarding what there is to do about it.
The cynic would say that Rice’s principal observation relayed through his Wall is simply that reality is a simulation, and further that knowing reality is simulated will do nothing to change that fact—it will not give you access to a truer reality—so what does it matter? I don’t think such a conclusion could be further from the truth of the text. I don’t think Rice is really talking about simulations or hallucinations; I think (and know in some more certain way—see below) that Rice is talking about the reality, or unreality, of culture. Further, Rice is talking about kitsch.
I got a chance to speak with the man himself at an afterparty following the most recent Brooklyn Book Fair. Our conversation was general—I informed him that I was writing a review and asked if I could ask him a few questions for clarification, just to see if I got anything massively wrong. He confirmed that I had understood the book well enough, and our conversation continued in that vein, finally resting on what the American analogs for these hallucinations would perhaps be. We discussed The Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell, Coca-Cola, Lana Del Ray, the current alt-country revival, saving the polar bears, bar-b-que, the films Anatomy of a Murder and It’s a Wonderful Life, key chains, John Waters, as-seen-on-TV bird clocks, autumn, and Lutheran Christmas traditions. Then, during a reading, David sidled up and said, “If you get a second to step away, I’ve got another thought about kitsch . . .” And we went outside.
We all know that kitsch is the product of preserving authentic meaning frozen in some object that one can purchase—a talisman of values, days gone by, nostalgia trinkets, etc. But what David wanted to talk about was what happens when the kitsch-object is reified with “real” meaning: whether that meaning must be directly connected to the original content preserved in the kitsch-object, and if not, then what conditions make which new meanings arise—not only how does something which once meant one thing come to mean another, but how do pleasant memories aestheticized in trinkets create nightmares?
The question is well exemplified in a section of Rice’s Wall. Here, Anika, our history professor, has been working diligently, if not drunkenly, on her state-sanctioned tome Reflections on a Normal Life in Southern Germany—which was initially to be a rather dense volume of political theory regarding the reality of the “living Wall,” but is now a saccharine familial and cultural memoir, a syrup-paged autofiction of everyone. All the while, as her text has grown and the Gewurztraminer has flowed, the town of Baersbronn has erupted around her, amassing within a bubble of human skin shielding the imagined place from the encroaching fires that are currently devouring the Black Forest. Taking a break from her work, she rises to inspect her bookshelf, which is packed tight and orderly with volumes by Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Heidegger, Novalis, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Hölderlin.
I asked Rice about this scene: “What’s the relation between all this kitschy nonsense and these authors? I’ve read most of them to some degree or another, and it’s hard to imagine these being source texts for anodyne fantasy.” His response: “Could you derive American kitsch any easier from Melville, Whitman, Faulkner, Emerson, Thoreau, or Dos Passos?” Me: “Probably not but . . . I mean, where’s Hegel? He’s not on the shelf—to my recollection he’s not mentioned in the book at all. Where’s Hegel?” Rice: “Good question . . . Where did Hegel go?”
K Hank Jost is a writer of fiction, educator, and editor born in Texas and raised in Georgia. He is the author of the novel-in-stories Deselections, the novel MadStone, and is editor-in-chief of the literary quarterly A Common Well Journal—all published and produced by Whiskey Tit Books. His fiction has been featured in Vol.1 Brooklyn, Hobart, Archway Editions Journal, and Serpent Club’s New Writing, among other outlets.
More Reviews