Navigating Not Blessed

Not Blessed by Harold Abramowitz

Les Figues Press, 2010

Reviewed by Janice Lee

Not Blessed is a difficult book to categorize. It is not a novel, in the straightest sense, nor is it a book of short stories. Indeed, we may not even be sure that is a work of fiction. In its rigorous, subtle, and almost scientific investigation of being, it may even be considered a bit pataphysical. Perhaps it is appropriate here to borrow a term from Ernst Bloch. The novum has been described as "the unexpectedly new, which pushes humanity out of its present toward the not yet realized,”[1] or an impending "blankness of horizon of consciousness...formed not by the past but by the future what Bloch calls a not yet conscious ontological pull of the future, of a tidal influence exerted upon us by that which lies out of sight below the horizon, an unconscious of what is yet to come.”[2]

Like the novum of a science fiction story, Not Blessed calls for the reader's awareness of their phenomenological perceptions. It seems to ask, how it is that we narrativize when we encounter stories, texts, myths? How do these stories affect us not only as readers, but as human beings with brains, brains that do not sit and simply process data but organic entities that may be altered profoundly even after what seems an insignificant encounter in the woods.

The story at the core of Not Blessed might be described simply. A man continually remembers his childhood, about being single-handedly raised by his grandmother and the stories she told him. He recalls one instance in particular when he goes for a healthful walk and reaches the edge of the forest, which he has been forbidden from entering alone. He notices another parallel road with a boy about his age standing across from him. He tries to follow the boy but encounters a policeman who does not recognize who he is, which angers him as his grandmother has lived in the village her whole life and he will grow up to become an important figure.

Yet, the story is not so simple. In fact, as Teresa Carmody's introduction relates, "the emphasis keeps shifting, word by phrase, which in turn emphasizes the text's and by extension our own, shiftiness. Not Blessed insists on this shiftiness. Not Blessed insists on this shift, just as it insists on sameness. Which leads us back to that strange uncanny feeling like déjà vu, that willingness to continue despite certain meaninglessness, and that deliberate compulsion which makes us." We as readers realize both the mundaneness and significance of false memory. As recent studies now indicate that reactivating a memory destabilizes it, putting it back into a flexible vulnerable state called reconsolidation, an old memory is actually changed as it is recalled. In other words, each time you remember, the original memory is replaced with a slightly modified version. Or, in other words, you are eventually no longer remembering what happened, you are remembering your story about it. Not Blessed seems to suggest that it isn't memory that is so essential for narrative to take place, but rather the act of forgetting itself. Or, in other words, as we become privy to the narrator's own phenomenological reshaping, we are forced to ask whether we are witnessing the manifestation of the narrator's subjectivity, or our own.

The recalling of each memory becomes a "hypostatized moment of apocalyptic cognition; and each such moment of cognition is a recognition,”[3] as the echo of "At first the boy was relieved, and then he was angry," becomes increasingly ambiguous, dramatic, urgent. The narrator asserts, "There are, in fact, no constraints here, and there is nothing more than meaninglessness." Yet, are we to believe this literally? The story's allegorical quality might lead us to certain conclusions, (ie. Are we to take the hunter entering the open window at the end of the text in an allegorical manner, or a literal one?), yet perhaps we are even incapable of taking such stories literally, as Les Figues co-founder Vanessa Place claims that "language always fails. But how horrible would it be if it were to succeed, how constraining that would be." Here, as the language circles around and around a Derridean blind spot, it is not the failure of story that drives the narrative, but the prolonged space of inarticulation and unknowingness. As the text struggles to articulate the significance of a particular inarticulatable "event" (Badiou describes an event as "a rupture in ontology, a being-in-itself – through which the subject finds his or her realization and reconciliation with 'truth,' ... because "if one constructs the world only from that which can be discerned and therefore given a name, it results in either the destitution of subjectivity or the removal of the subject from ontology.”[4]), what is demonstrated is that this infinite struggle is precisely where the possibility for meaning lies. In other words, perhaps the hunter's entrance to the open window indicates a further feedback loop for narrative, a prediction of the future that has already come true. As Badiou writes, "The paradox of an evental-site is that it can only be recognized on the basis of what it does not present in the situation in which it is presented," and "a subject always declares meaning in the future anterior."⁴ The narrator continues to echo, "How could the policeman not know who he would grow up to become." The future here is not impending, but rather has already become the past.

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[1] Tom Moylan, "The Locus of Hope: Utopia versus Ideology," Science Fiction Studies 9, no 2 (July 1982) quoted in Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008)

[2] Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972) quoted in Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008)

[3] Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008)

[4] Alain Badiou, Being and Event. (New York, NY: Continuum, 2005)