Rob Halpern on the Hypertrophic Novels of Taylor Brady

Fortune favored us this weekend, and as Rob Halpern read from his brand-new book, Common Place, for Ugly Duckling's quiet Cellar Series on Saturday evening, we were reminded also of Halpern's piece on the two novels of Taylor Brady. At Mediations, Halpern writes that Brady’s Microclimates (Krupskaya, 2001) and Occupational Treatment (Atelos 2006) are "hybrid works of hypertrophic narration cross-hatched with passages of lyric verse, at once full-throated and broken. Situated in relation to the built environment of South Florida whose cycles of financialization could be felt long before the subprime collapse of 2007, the novels perform self-consciously in the manner of a Bildungsroman as they recount the constitution of their narrator’s subjectivity, 'an inevitable history poised to birth a subject,' like an inverted ouroboros delivering its own head." More:

Emerging as a bastard child of Language Writing’s critique of narrative (Lyn Hejinian’s My Life) and New Narrative’s embrace of storytelling (Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist), Brady’s novels pursue a rigorous critique of subjective plenitude without disowning the excesses of narrative in a critical effort to grasp, in the words of the narrator, “my full relation to my time.” Drawing on poet’s theatre and critical theory, economic analysis and procedural constraint, cartographic plotting and musicological echolocation, the work’s conceptual, thematic, and formal horizons are dynamic, and they traverse resources as varied as the socio-aesthetics of Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism and Rosa Luxemburg’s analyses of crisis and accumulation, among a thick reservoir of cultural allusion.

Later, Halpern does refer to Franco Berardi's work on poetry and finance, but with a good distance:

...While language has no doubt been profoundly affected by a range of epiphenomena mediated by forms of capital accumulation that go under the sign of “finance,” and while I do believe that experimental literary forms of poetry and prose are well-attuned to respond to its crises, it would be naive to argue as Franco Berardi does in The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance that “only an act of language escaping the technical automatisms of financial capitalism will make possible the emergence of a new life form.” The late nineteenth century offers plenty of evidence as to how a profit-driven print culture governed by the mass daily newspaper — and whose full-blown dominance accompanied the rise of new financial instruments under the Second Empire in France — aroused a range of counter-discursive practices, many of them literary, whose symbolic logic, one seemingly shared by Berardi, arguably exhausted itself by the turn of the century in the work of Mallarmé and Valéry. This doesn’t, however, exhaust the question of literature’s use — its function on the one hand, and its promise on the other — in relation to precisely those processes whose structures, at once material and affective, literary works might allow us to cognize as if for the first time. And this is the case I wish to make for Brady’s novels.

You can find Taylor Brady's Microclimates and Occupational Treatment at Small Press Distribution. Read all of "Narrating the Financialized Landscape: The Novels of Taylor Brady" at Mediations. Photo at top of Halpern and Brady at SPD by Alan Bernheimer.