Review - Jonkil Dies by Kane X. Faucher

Jonkil Dies
by Kane X. Faucher
Blazevox

http://www.blazevox.org/

Reviewed by Anthony Metivier

Despite its hip reference to Beckett in its general title, we know immediately by its bulk that Kane X. Faucher’s Jonkil Dies (A Mesophysical Eulogy) emerges as a representation, not of the speaker’s death, but of the author’s “megatext” project. Thinly disguised as Jonkil, we excuse Faucher’s excessive self-victimhood because his voice digs into practically everything – industry, technology, sex and scripture, the punk propaganda of postmodern pedagogy, not to mention how memory plays against memoir in what reads like a Hades of endless diversions, appendixes, and footnotes.

Should you, as I do, read Jonkil as Faucher, you’ll easily find yourself dragged into his Augustinian, Carthaginian bio-origins and body (though a body, I suspect, complete and intact with all its organs). But unlike Augustine’s saintly fountain of frenzied foibles, Faucher doesn’t bother to tell us what we’re already supposed to know. Instead, he sins reflectively, beginning his heresy with a spate of condescending remarks, promising his readers a challenge, indeed a war against a “pondiferous, misalliance text replete with pithecanthropic fervor, written for occultist gulls and proto-projectionist puppeteers of the new.” I don’t know if that includes me or you, future reader, but the Latin style, jumping with puns swerves into and out of multiple centuries of English, occasionally delighting us with Swiftian abuses of German, not to mention an invented language far more ornate than the Ecbatan city-puzzles from which Pound so feverishly excluded himself, Canto to canton.

This review should not read like unequivocal praise, however. In fact, I find that Faucher far too often descends into the literary “darkness” Goethe warned against. Should we take the trouble to look up – or even think of researching – Faucher’s endless historical and “cacademic” references, we encounter nothing more than ambiguous sets of endlessly doubled illuminations, complete with Nietzschean avec Derridian “undecidabilities.” This impossible, all-embracing type of writing provides a place where one takes refuge as a writer, as a practitioner of writing, but not as a reader. Faucher offers us a Derridian “scene of writing” reserved for those moved to seek out texts of oracular dimensions in terms of avoiding the crime of writing what I have called elsewhere (and often parodied) “crapht” poetry. But like Wyndham Lewis before him, who set similar “total-text” goals, this style of writing won’t form or even inform the production or reception of future books. It becomes too self-cohesive, too self-interpretive to allow the reader a single access point, a spot to insert the board into the wave and ride for even just an instant before spilling back into the tumult of Faucher’s textual ocean.

Question: So why should you buy – and possibly even read this enormously enticing and enticingly enormous book? Answer: Because, despite its systematized grammars and lexica, its dense accretion of idiosyncratic, and often idiotic utterances, its argumentative and associative structures, its material maintenance of its materiality, its impossible understanding of its own impossibility, Faucher demonstrates a keen awareness in this novel that “unique” is an abused word, a droll adjective whispered by broken and accidental people (pathetic writers in particular). Faucher, and Jonkil along with him, will teach you, improve you, take you somewhere – though only Godot knows exactly where – and do so without caring about you having a good time, a positive experience, a sense of familiarity or friendly expedition. Jonkil Dies doesn’t require your foolish open mind, nor your subjective objectivity. You will not take a vacation from your precious identity. You will be bombed in, summarized, robbed of meaning and the superabundance of your dithering daily performance. After all, Jonkil “has lived through more wars than some people do divorces” brandishing “the terms that please me in the moment … forcing you faux poets at wordpoint to go shit in your hats!”

So don’t read this book to be amazed at just how ineffectively modernism keeps dying. Read it because you, the reader, want to be radically compromised, unstuck from the corpse of language. You are never going to have all of this book anyway. You may consume Jonkil Dies as an object, but beware: this is text that cannot be possessed.