“A rose is a rose and a heart is a heart. Until they’re not.” (9)

1In this 260-page critical essay, 20^th and 21^st-century American literature scholar Stéphane Vanderhaeghe proposes an original approach to contemporary North American works of fiction that are generally labeled as experimental because they fail to operate along conventional novelistic lines. He chooses to call this body of texts “speculative fiction,” not because they conform to the genre that is usually associated with the phrase (a subcategory of science fiction), but because the fictional content of these narratives is an object of speculation. These often confusing fictions may be different from one another, but they share the capacity to “abstract [the world] from the very heart of representation” (5). They challenge the reader’s expectations and thwart criticism, ultimately resisting interpretation.

2Vanderhaeghe turns to Graham Harman’s and Timothy Morton’s speculative realism to navigate these texts that “withdraw” (like Harman’s objects) from all relations, and “tell the story of their own unreadability” (18). According to Vanderhaeghe, these fictions that elude correlation raise the question of how to read or “use” them (90), and open the reader to a sublime experience. “Lacking conventional mimeticism,” “never coincid[ing] with [themselves]” (140), these narratives are made problematic and unapproachable by the deceptive nature of their language.

3Vanderhaeghe’s essay is a groundbreaking and critically fertile exploration of an experimental body of texts that spans the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries: Ben Marcus, Shelley Jackson, Azareen van der Vliet Oloomi, Blake Butler, Mark Doten, Sarah Rose Etter, Joshua Cohen, Jason Schwartz, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jane Unrue, Lucy Corin, David Markson, Alexandra Kleeman and, to a lesser extent, Garielle Lutz. His approach to these narratives through Harman’s and Morton’s speculative realism, as well as through Quentin Meillassoux’s extro-science fiction (XSF), is both illuminating and convincing, offering scholars of ultra-contemporary fiction a very compelling way to look at texts that fascinate specifically because they resist.

4Throughout this essay, Vanderhaeghe attempts to define speculative fiction by way of its absences and deficiencies—what it doesn’t or fails to do. His approach to typically unapproachable narratives is one driven by curiosity, doubt, and humility, the critic adopting something akin to a Socratic stance, aided by a sprawling philosophical and critical body of texts from some of the most demanding thinkers: Massumi, Bogost, Agamben, Jameson, Nancy, Deleuze and Guattari, Didi-Huberman, Rosset, but also Blanchot, Barthes, Robbe-Grillet, Kant, and Heidegger, among others. These foundational texts allow Vanderhaeghe to inscribe his meticulous close reading of each of the aforementioned narratives within a greater reflection on the (im)possibilities of representation. His meticulous text analyses are very comprehensively contextualized, which makes this essay accessible to scholars who are not specialists of these authors, while remaining elaborate and challenging, much like its subject matter.

Dear incomprehension

5Vanderhaeghe’s essay opens with a short letter from the author to “Incomprehension.” Personal in tone (“This book, I’m afraid, is a contradiction. Or so I tell myself,” xv), it illustrates the scholar’s struggle with the “blind spots” speculative fiction is riddled with. This original device is sustained all through the book, the transitions between the three main parts of the essay (“Approach,” “Sightings,” and “Withdrawal”) also using the epistolary form. These personal addresses highlight Vanderhaeghe’s personal approach to criticism in general, and to his object in particular. These rather unconventional snippets are, however, not to be divorced from the rest of the text, which is also written in the first person, albeit in a more scientific tone. They emphasize an aspect of criticism that all too often goes unmentioned in academic essays—the doubts and difficulties the scholar encounters as their research progresses (or sometimes fails to):

The texts I have in mind are those that, try as I might, leave me in the lurch; I read, or try to, reread, or try to, but to not much avail. As one eloquent reviewer puts it about one of them: “I gotta say, it’s a complicated and fractured read. I had a couple of ‘what-the-fuck-am-I-reading?’ moments.” (12)

Approach

6In the first part, Vanderhaeghe speculates his own definition of speculative fiction (3), by trying to identify the relationship to reference and referentiality of the works he has chosen to include in his study: they have to mean something (4). He calls on Graham Harman’s retreating objects from his object-oriented ontology to understand the way speculative narratives elude the reader’s and the critic’s grasp. He proposes the following definition:

speculative fiction, as defined in these pages, is a specific regime of fictional discourse that eludes understanding; it is experimental fiction at times aggressively directed against readerly expectations—of plot, character consistency, realism or verisimilitude, logic, sense, and readability. Such fiction baffles reason, foils interpretation, thwarts the meaning-making process, tears it apart, opacifies language, resists or frustrates conventional narrative moves—and, in the process, may challenge what fiction is and what it does. (13-14)

7As content and language work together to make reception difficult, the reader might look to other modes of reading (haptic, for example) to experience the text in a more satisfying, or at least satisfactory, way.

8Vanderhaeghe also sees speculative fiction as a variant or intensification of Quentin Meillassoux’s extro-science fiction (XSF), insofar as it eludes understanding and rationalization, and challenges anthropocentrism.

9Once described in critical terms, speculative fiction must be mapped. Vanderhaeghe establishes a corpus of twenty-six contemporary American long and short fictions that are either considered speculative by their author, or present thematic and generic lines that fit within the frame he establishes/has established for speculative fiction.

Sightings

10This is the main part of the essay, divided into five thematic subparts. In the first one, entitled “Speculative endings,” Vanderhaeghe analyzes the adjacent literary concepts of ending and apocalypse in the context of the speculative body of work he has established. He considers Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas (2009), Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet (2012), Lucy Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (2013), Marc Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha (2019) and David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) as examples of a postapocalyptic brand of speculative fiction that makes the reader experience forms of radical estrangement from the world they are called upon to encounter. Some of these even repeat themselves, exhausting the concept of apocalypse, all the while refusing to end.

11In “Speculative topologies, or ‘This is not for you’,” Vanderhaeghe takes a closer look at what he calls the “speculative terrain” (71). A correspondence between content and form, as well as metafictional (or at least critical) concerns appear as common traits of many speculative works: Markson’s, Marcus’s, Butler’s, but also Jane Unrue’s Love Hotel (2015), Michael Joyce’s Was (2007), Shelley Jackson’s Half Life (2006), Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Fra Keeler (2012), and Mark Z. Danielewksi’s House of Leaves (2000). These texts (that he also calls “novels in performance,” 88), appear reluctant to conform to traditional structures, and are pervaded by discrepancies, gaps, and absences.

12In “Speculative Sublime, Or ‘________’,” Vanderhaeghe uses Morton’s terminology to define speculative sublimity as a form of “brilliance” that “hides objects,” and so “thwarts all systems of representation” to depict worlds of “pure objectness” (110) and “alien presence” (113). He proposes a reading of Jackson’s and Butler’s fiction, but also of Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String (1995), Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015), and Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X (2019) in the light of a problematic relationship to mimeticism, notably when it comes to the body and the way language tackles it.

13“Speculative Language, Or ‘Understanding Is Overrated’,” explores the materiality of the speculative language that forges sensation instead of meaning, especially in fictions such as Butler’s 300,000,000 (2014) and Marcus’s works like Notable American Women (2002). Language is deregulated, and deprived of referentiality, creating instability and discrepancies in meaning(s), the narratives highlighting their own fictionality.

14Vanderhaeghe’s last “sighting,” entitled “Speculative Interface, Or ‘cr!tical fa1lure/r3port loX0red’,” extends his reflection on works that emphasize their own materiality, using a language that resists utterance. He takes the examples of Butler’s Ever (2009), Shelley Jackson’s Riddance (2004), Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers (2005), Doten’s The Infernal (2015), Joyce’s Was, and Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous (2013) that draw the reader’s attention away from the signified and toward the density of the signifier (177-178), notably through techniques of hybridization with other media.

Withdrawal

15Vanderhaeghe’s essay ends on a personal note, an ultimate address to Incomprehension, underlining the “perverse” (208) contradictions, challenges, and withdrawals of speculative texts.

16This essay is a precise and detailed inquiry into a difficult group of texts that often eludes scholars’ understanding. Written in the form of a personal investigation, its occasional lyricism and the author’s clear mastery of his subject will enthrall scholars of experimental fiction and adjacent contemporary genres alike, as it constitutes one of the rare forays into this often opaque body of texts. Comprehensive, accurate, well-written, and loyal to the scholar’s intellectual progression, this essay is no doubt a significant milestone in the study of ultra-contemporary American literature.