Blake Butler’s Ever: Can Humpty Dumpty Translate?
by Joe Sacksteder
A quick Google search has alerted me to the fact that comparing Blake Butler’s novella, Ever, to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, is approximately as original as the basic premise both books share: a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside, a house that organically sprouts doors and corridors, a house that itself becomes a character, both symbolically and biologically. One book in each hand, you’ll immediately notice a huge difference: where Danielewski is surfeit, Butler is sparseness – 709 pages to 104, respectively. Open the books, and a few similarities become evident. Both texts are hybrid, using innovative typography and unsettling images that make them seem almost as akin to visual art as to literary fiction. Read both works, and you might find yourself, like me, unable to think of one without the other. But where Danielewski veers too far towards straight genre fiction, turning something experimental into a conventional love/horror story, Butler chooses the route of un-fun incomprehensibility. Danielewski’s hero goes on an expedition through the lightless vault at the core of his house, whereas Butler’s heroine kind of just hangs out and wallows in her hallucinatory self-confinement.
Ever tells the story… no, that’s not really the appropriate way to put it… The novella deals with an unnamed female protagonist barricaded inside her house from the apocalyptic collapse she witnesses outside her windows. The reader never really knows whether some disaster has truly befallen the novella’s world, or whether the narrator – due to derangement or just a gloomy disposition – might instead be re-imagining contemporary suburban society in such grotesquely aberrant terms. Butler got me all geared up with busses of children eaten by “a yawning,” a parade of color-tinted rooms a la The Masque of the Red Death, and thirteen mysterious plastic doors that have appeared like crystalline growths in the woman’s house. I became increasingly frustrated, however, upon realizing that Butler would lead us through this labyrinth and never show us the minotaur. Possible minotaurs: 1). What has happened to the outside world? Fungus? Light? 2). What past trauma caused the protagonist’s deranged and/or dismal and/or trippy perspective? 3). (How) did the narrator’s family die? 4). Does the house actually catch fire at one point?
Even the most beautiful and surreal landscape painting in the world would struggle to hold a viewer’s attention for several hours. While Ever began very powerfully, I felt like it attempted to maintain a climactic intensity over the course of the whole novella. Intense is no longer intense when everything is intense. Take your hand from my throat for a few minutes, please. I felt like this book could have benefited by tempering the unflagging, bordering-on-emo turbulence with something a little more light and breathy.
Several specific novelties grew tiring as Ever progressed, one of them being Butler’s tendency to use “incorrect” parts of speech or words that just plain seem to make no sense: “in hopes of numb,” “Some words had spurs or burped incisions,” “The air hung wet with spit and rupture,” and “The voice was tattered full of leak,” to give a few examples. Some readers will relish the newness and unfamiliarity of such phrases. Others will roll their eyes. The experimental typography worked better when there seemed to be a specific reason for it. Sometimes the page functioned as a type of room, or a door, and so it made sense that single lines about doors and adjacent rooms might fill the white space of the page. Other times, the artificial isolation of lines awakened a nagging voice telling me, “Slow down here,” or “Isn’t – this – line – beautiful…” In my opinion, works in traditional paragraph form actually have to work harder to earn the isolation of a climactic line, sometimes spending hundreds of pages for one epiphanic moment. Readers, too, then have to earn the understanding by voyaging with the writer (and characters) through the necessary buildup. Many readers who pick up Ever, of course, will have no problem with Butler’s avoidance of a traditional narrative arc – will count it as one of the work’s daring virtues.
Near the end of the novella, the narrator finds a tape recorder, “one small forgiveness,” humming in her lap. I desperately hoped it would relay some semblance of an answer to the hundred-page riddle. But instead of the Jabberwocky, we get only his nonsense: “YUNKYI-DEEKLETOTISH EISBEN BEELVIT NOIKKID DISHDOR…” In my more frustrated moments, I hyperbolized that Ever might as well have been written entirely in nonsense syllables. Pencil in hand, I underlined such seemingly relevant textual landmarks as, “Mother’s tumor babble,” “thirteen plastic doors,” and “I hid the pickaxe in the closet.” I slowly began to understand, though, that these implicit author-to-reader promises would have little relevance to any kind of narrative – and neither would expectation be cunningly thwarted. While I usually react against tidy conclusions, I do like some reason to read the pages in order. I really enjoyed the nightmarish, fungus-infested world Butler fashions in the opening pages, but I admit I wanted to journey through it, arrive at a destination… not just inhabit.
Joe Sacksteder is twenty-six years old. He teaches and takes classes at Eastern Michigan University, where he’s also an editor of the BathHouse Hypermedia Journal. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Filling Station, Aethlon, and Penumbra, and this year he has been named a finalist for the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, and Big Muddy's short story contest.
by Joe Sacksteder
A quick Google search has alerted me to the fact that comparing Blake Butler’s novella, Ever, to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, is approximately as original as the basic premise both books share: a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside, a house that organically sprouts doors and corridors, a house that itself becomes a character, both symbolically and biologically. One book in each hand, you’ll immediately notice a huge difference: where Danielewski is surfeit, Butler is sparseness – 709 pages to 104, respectively. Open the books, and a few similarities become evident. Both texts are hybrid, using innovative typography and unsettling images that make them seem almost as akin to visual art as to literary fiction. Read both works, and you might find yourself, like me, unable to think of one without the other. But where Danielewski veers too far towards straight genre fiction, turning something experimental into a conventional love/horror story, Butler chooses the route of un-fun incomprehensibility. Danielewski’s hero goes on an expedition through the lightless vault at the core of his house, whereas Butler’s heroine kind of just hangs out and wallows in her hallucinatory self-confinement. Ever tells the story… no, that’s not really the appropriate way to put it… The novella deals with an unnamed female protagonist barricaded inside her house from the apocalyptic collapse she witnesses outside her windows. The reader never really knows whether some disaster has truly befallen the novella’s world, or whether the narrator – due to derangement or just a gloomy disposition – might instead be re-imagining contemporary suburban society in such grotesquely aberrant terms. Butler got me all geared up with busses of children eaten by “a yawning,” a parade of color-tinted rooms a la The Masque of the Red Death, and thirteen mysterious plastic doors that have appeared like crystalline growths in the woman’s house. I became increasingly frustrated, however, upon realizing that Butler would lead us through this labyrinth and never show us the minotaur. Possible minotaurs: 1). What has happened to the outside world? Fungus? Light? 2). What past trauma caused the protagonist’s deranged and/or dismal and/or trippy perspective? 3). (How) did the narrator’s family die? 4). Does the house actually catch fire at one point?
Even the most beautiful and surreal landscape painting in the world would struggle to hold a viewer’s attention for several hours. While Ever began very powerfully, I felt like it attempted to maintain a climactic intensity over the course of the whole novella. Intense is no longer intense when everything is intense. Take your hand from my throat for a few minutes, please. I felt like this book could have benefited by tempering the unflagging, bordering-on-emo turbulence with something a little more light and breathy.
Several specific novelties grew tiring as Ever progressed, one of them being Butler’s tendency to use “incorrect” parts of speech or words that just plain seem to make no sense: “in hopes of numb,” “Some words had spurs or burped incisions,” “The air hung wet with spit and rupture,” and “The voice was tattered full of leak,” to give a few examples. Some readers will relish the newness and unfamiliarity of such phrases. Others will roll their eyes. The experimental typography worked better when there seemed to be a specific reason for it. Sometimes the page functioned as a type of room, or a door, and so it made sense that single lines about doors and adjacent rooms might fill the white space of the page. Other times, the artificial isolation of lines awakened a nagging voice telling me, “Slow down here,” or “Isn’t – this – line – beautiful…” In my opinion, works in traditional paragraph form actually have to work harder to earn the isolation of a climactic line, sometimes spending hundreds of pages for one epiphanic moment. Readers, too, then have to earn the understanding by voyaging with the writer (and characters) through the necessary buildup. Many readers who pick up Ever, of course, will have no problem with Butler’s avoidance of a traditional narrative arc – will count it as one of the work’s daring virtues.
Near the end of the novella, the narrator finds a tape recorder, “one small forgiveness,” humming in her lap. I desperately hoped it would relay some semblance of an answer to the hundred-page riddle. But instead of the Jabberwocky, we get only his nonsense: “YUNKYI-DEEKLETOTISH EISBEN BEELVIT NOIKKID DISHDOR…” In my more frustrated moments, I hyperbolized that Ever might as well have been written entirely in nonsense syllables. Pencil in hand, I underlined such seemingly relevant textual landmarks as, “Mother’s tumor babble,” “thirteen plastic doors,” and “I hid the pickaxe in the closet.” I slowly began to understand, though, that these implicit author-to-reader promises would have little relevance to any kind of narrative – and neither would expectation be cunningly thwarted. While I usually react against tidy conclusions, I do like some reason to read the pages in order. I really enjoyed the nightmarish, fungus-infested world Butler fashions in the opening pages, but I admit I wanted to journey through it, arrive at a destination… not just inhabit.
Joe Sacksteder is twenty-six years old. He teaches and takes classes at Eastern Michigan University, where he’s also an editor of the BathHouse Hypermedia Journal. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Filling Station, Aethlon, and Penumbra, and this year he has been named a finalist for the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, and Big Muddy's short story contest.
