The Labyrinth

Abstract

The Labyrinth Tim Horvath (bio) Dreamlives of Debris Lance Olsen Dzanc Books www.dzancbooks.org/our-books/dreamlives-of-debris-by-lance-olsen 296 Pages; Print, $16.95 In the world of contemporary classical music, it isn't uncommon for composers to bend, stretch, and manipulate the physical environment of performance–spatiality, in other words, is fair game. Last year, I witnessed a performance of John Luther Adams's "Ten Thousand Birds" at MassMOCA in which listeners were invited to wander around, kneel, sprawl–there was nary an armrest, nor a place to kick back with either languor or critical poise, and say, "Ah, this is how it's supposed to sound." And this is nothing new; in 1994, LaMonte Young created The Dream House, tantalizingly described by Kyle Gann: Walk into The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry and you'll hear a whirlwind of pitches swirl around you. Stand still, and the tones suddenly freeze in place. Within the room, every pitch finds its own little niche where it resonates, and with all those close-but-no-cigar intervals competing in one space....you can alter the harmony you perceive simply by pulling on your earlobe... Moving your head makes those tones leap from high to low and back.... Given that so much of the "performance" of reading takes place invisibly and internally, perhaps it is no surprise that contemporary fiction writers have strayed less from the spatial conventions of the page; the expectation holds, by and large, that we read from left to right and top to bottom, in English at least. Naturally there are plenty of exceptions, from the typographic and graphic carnival of Danielewski's The Familiar (2015) to Jennifer Egan's PowerPointillism, but few have treated the spatial dimensions of the literary page as more up for grabs than Lance Olsen, whose Dreamlives of Debris is merely the latest in a ongoing series of provocations that poke and prod at our sense of how a story can be told, felt, assimilated. Calendar of Regrets (2010) masterfully weaves a rich, multitextured tapestry of loosely-nested narratives, while Head in Flames (2009) takes our instinctive ability to switch points of view and pushes it to a frenzied extreme in what amounts to a sort of perspectival perfect storm. More recently, Theories of Forgetting (2014), lacking even an obvious entrance, invites us to climb in through several windows, and has us rotating the book, our eyes scanning the margins, imbibing photographs, maps, handwritten commentary, x-rays, and other narrative detritus in ways that evoke the spiral jetty, one of its primary leitmotifs. And as though unable to contain itself on the page or be contained, Forgetting spawned a walk-through novel, a collaborative video exhibition with filmmaker (and spouse) Andi Olsen, entitled "There's No Place Like Time," which conjures the entire career of an imagined filmmaker complete with personal reminiscences and critical commentary; to call it a "spin-off" would only be to lowball the extent to which we were already spinning. All of which brings us to Debris, whose relatively tame appearance–no actual rotation necessary!–belies the radical nature of both its own challenges and its bountiful yields. In this case, Olsen has narrowed the aperture, and the resulting taut, concentrated outbursts of text, aphoristic and often syntactically skewed or ruptured, uncannily mimic the experience of dwelling in and moving through a dark labyrinth. Debris is the self-bestowed name of the Minotaur, in this case recast by Olsen as a girl with deformities and unusual gifts, and like her, we must cobble together meaning through sensations, introspection, and speculation punctuated by the occasional epiphany. In this unlikely guide, Olsen has not only created one of his most indelibly haunting protagonists, but has effectively transplanted us within her consciousness; the labyrinth echoes Plato's Cave in its darkness, literal and epistemological, but departs radically from it insofar as Debris is deeply, profoundly embodied. Thus we feel not only the "sparse hair tufs patching [her] body" and "the lump rising from [her] left shoulder," but we are with her as "the ceiling sinks without warning" and she "crawl[s] on [her] belly through the...