Audrey Szasz Invisibility: A Manifesto (2020)
As always with Amphetamine Sulphate titles, it takes me a few pages of settling in before I feel I have some sort of handle on what I'm reading or what I might reasonably expect from the text. Most of them seem to end up doing something completely different, but I actually quite like that, at least providing I've achieved an understanding of what the hell I'm letting myself in for. Invisibility: A Manifesto seemed to establish itself as a Surrealist novel, or at least novella, quite early on - capitalised Surrealist as in Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and those guys as distinct from more lazy contemporary understandings of the term usually amounting to not much more than the juxtaposition of disparate images. Invisibility: A Manifesto seems to tap into something of the human subconscious and, as such, presents questions rather than the definitives one might expect from something calling itself a manifesto; and, for what it may be worth, there's some fairly stark juxtaposition of disparate images going on, but clearly nothing arbitrary.
Principally we have the contrast of author as wholesome child detective in the general mode of an Enid Blyton character, although not clearly drawn, with atrocity, murder, fucking, and framing of victims, although thankfully rendered with a degree of honesty thus disassociating itself from low-calorie goth versions of the same contrast - all those wearyingly mental versions of Alice which have kept Tim Burton in Cure reissues over the years. The contrast drawn up by Szasz are genuinely affecting, and possibly a clue to the title: the victim abused as powerless, worthless, and yet whose victimhood constitutes both the real power and value in the equation; so we have elements which simply won't be jammed together, and perhaps in the resulting interference pattern, the subject becomes invisible, blending in with the background from either angle.
Hopefully that makes sense to someone. At least that's how Invisibility: A Manifesto reads to me. I'm sometimes a little uncomfortable with the idea of the victim as the one with the power because while it may be philosophically useful, I'm not convinced it works in real life, which is why, I would suggest, Pauline Réage's Story of O is honestly just a massive pile of wank (and not even good for that); although this, much shorter work does some of the same thing, but succeeds simply through an elevated self-awareness, meaning it knows what it's doing, even if I don't. I think what this amounts to is another Amphetamine Sulphate title mapping the disparity between the real and its interpretation, which is always welcome, not least because this one takes a quite different narrative approach to others I've read.
Most of the above comprises impressions picked from the text and should probably be best regarded as me scrabbling around, from which you should take that Szasz certainly provides plenty of material from which such conclusions, or possibly completely different ones, may be drawn, which is, I suppose, inevitable with any exploration of the subconscious; so it's at least as rich, fertile, and shocking as anything Max Ernst ever painted, and is additionally a lot more coherent than I may have implied here.
Disturbing for all of the right reasons and very satisfying.
As always with Amphetamine Sulphate titles, it takes me a few pages of settling in before I feel I have some sort of handle on what I'm reading or what I might reasonably expect from the text. Most of them seem to end up doing something completely different, but I actually quite like that, at least providing I've achieved an understanding of what the hell I'm letting myself in for. Invisibility: A Manifesto seemed to establish itself as a Surrealist novel, or at least novella, quite early on - capitalised Surrealist as in Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and those guys as distinct from more lazy contemporary understandings of the term usually amounting to not much more than the juxtaposition of disparate images. Invisibility: A Manifesto seems to tap into something of the human subconscious and, as such, presents questions rather than the definitives one might expect from something calling itself a manifesto; and, for what it may be worth, there's some fairly stark juxtaposition of disparate images going on, but clearly nothing arbitrary.
Principally we have the contrast of author as wholesome child detective in the general mode of an Enid Blyton character, although not clearly drawn, with atrocity, murder, fucking, and framing of victims, although thankfully rendered with a degree of honesty thus disassociating itself from low-calorie goth versions of the same contrast - all those wearyingly mental versions of Alice which have kept Tim Burton in Cure reissues over the years. The contrast drawn up by Szasz are genuinely affecting, and possibly a clue to the title: the victim abused as powerless, worthless, and yet whose victimhood constitutes both the real power and value in the equation; so we have elements which simply won't be jammed together, and perhaps in the resulting interference pattern, the subject becomes invisible, blending in with the background from either angle.
Hopefully that makes sense to someone. At least that's how Invisibility: A Manifesto reads to me. I'm sometimes a little uncomfortable with the idea of the victim as the one with the power because while it may be philosophically useful, I'm not convinced it works in real life, which is why, I would suggest, Pauline Réage's Story of O is honestly just a massive pile of wank (and not even good for that); although this, much shorter work does some of the same thing, but succeeds simply through an elevated self-awareness, meaning it knows what it's doing, even if I don't. I think what this amounts to is another Amphetamine Sulphate title mapping the disparity between the real and its interpretation, which is always welcome, not least because this one takes a quite different narrative approach to others I've read.
Most of the above comprises impressions picked from the text and should probably be best regarded as me scrabbling around, from which you should take that Szasz certainly provides plenty of material from which such conclusions, or possibly completely different ones, may be drawn, which is, I suppose, inevitable with any exploration of the subconscious; so it's at least as rich, fertile, and shocking as anything Max Ernst ever painted, and is additionally a lot more coherent than I may have implied here.
Disturbing for all of the right reasons and very satisfying.
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