David Hoenigman, Burn Your Belongings
(Original images by Yasutoshi Yoshida), Jaded Ibis Press, 2010. [2008]“David Hoenigman's First Book written over a period of Five years is an autobiographical text dealing with his experiences as an American Living in Japan and the difficulty of fitting in where one is out of place.”
“Burn Your Belongings slowly, relentlessly builds the emotional ebb and flow of a love triangle over a period of months, perhaps years. Every fear, joy, doubt, hatred, desire and elation manifests through a litany of interior monologues – from the mundane to the profound and always lyrical. The accretion of imagery and often frighteningly stark examination of Self and Other create a transformational emotional experience. Hoenigman's brilliance is his ability to transfer language to the reader so that by novel's end, the feelings and observations of the characters become not their memories but the reader's own. All 190 pages contain an original image created for the book by famed eletronic musician and producer Yasutoshi Yoshida”
“In a letter to Charles Olson on June 5, 1950, the late Robert Creeley wrote that "form is never more than an extension of content." In her "How To Write" published in 1931, Gertrude Stein claimed "Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are." These two exclamations of style, made in the first half of the 20th century, make problematic any contemporary so-called "experimental" fiction.
David Hoenigman's book is manifestly "new," anti-narrative, and anti-dialogue (Robert Grenier's "I HATE SPEECH," 1971, springs to mind). "Burn Your Belongings" presses all the right buttons to be branded experimental or modern — and that is the key word: "modern."
The action of the "novel" takes place in a nameless city, peopled with nameless characters. However, the city is obviously Tokyo and the characters are the I, she, he of a postmodern menage a trois. This is an avant-garde autobiography, written in minimalist sentences, each page containing the space of a paragraph. If I take a passage at random, the style will become apparent:
'I can see the backs of their heads. I want to sneak up behind him. whisper in his ear. it never happened. it's never going to happen.'
I'll review this book. I'll do it in sentences without commas. without semi-colons. and if you notice I don't capitalize words. only "I." not "i." after a time it reads like a list. but you can't stop reading. it draws you in.
For all its troubled angst, its inclusivity and exclusivity, this is manifestly a throwback to late "Modernist" techniques. For a "novel" written in the 21st century, its closest antecedents are Samuel Beckett's "Molloy" (1955): "I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I'd never have got there alone. There's this man who comes every week." And Ron Silliman's "Sunset Debris" (1978) "Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft? Do you like it? Do you like this? Is this how you like it?"
However present the book desires to be, it feels locked in a continual past. The form — single-clause sentences, minimal punctuation, one paragraph per page — does not adhere to the content. Rewritten with added commas, semicolons, question marks and full stops, the narrative becomes a variation of a "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, older man gets girl, boy writes about it" novel — a 21st-century version of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther."
The narrative is minimalist, monotonous, but at times — like a ticking clock when you're trying to sleep — it moves from annoying to soothing, the monotony becomes metronomic, rhythmic, it pulls you into its beat until you find yourself moving from page to page, zombie-like, in thrall to the simplistic prose and the accretion of emotion.
Hoenigman has worked with the techno-noise-artist and hypermodern writer Kenji Siratori. In "Burn Your Belongings," the page creates a kind of static intensity, the words become white noise. Each word is equal in power to the next. The lack of real names, the replacement of proper nouns with common nouns and the absence of dialogue, creates a theoretical space of loss, of unhappiness, of nothingness, out of the simple memory of a relationship. Desire in the narrative is displaced by the object's disappearance. Emotions are alien and alienated. Where once was harmony now is noise. Where once was communication now is silence. Where once was subject now is other. The I, she, he of the narrative elide and merge. The he is sometimes the desiring I. She is always and forever other.
In his "Poetics of Space" (1958), Gaston Bachelard wrote: "Thus the house is not experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story. Through dreams, the various dwelling places in our lives copenetrate and retain the treasures of former days." If this is so, and the house is the page and the novel, then Hoenigman's "Burn Your Belongings" uses and fuses contemporary Tokyo with autobiography to copenetrate earlier literary experiments.
"Burn Your Belongings" — however dependent on older experimental writing — re-enacts a poetics of space: the rooms with their paper-thin walls, the train stations, the busy streets, the offices, the objects of memory — umbrellas, staircases — pitch memory against the imagination and reality against fantasy. Whether it works as a piece of fiction or not is debatable but Hoenigman's "novel" is a brave exercise in anti-narrative, a reminder to us that there is more to writing and reading than best-sellers." – Steve Finbow
“Reading David Hoenigman's novel, Burn Your Belongings, one is struck almost instantly by its unusual, though not altogether unfamiliar, style; one is instantly made to recall the work of Samuel Beckett, and even Pierre Guyotat's anti-novel, Eden Eden Eden, sharing that book's relentlessness, its obsessiveness, its disregard for the niceties of orthodox storytelling. Burn Your Belongings is an ultra-minimalist work: each page is a paragraph and each paragraph is devoid of proper names, commas, colons, semi-colons, question marks, dialogue and standard capitalization – apart of course from the all important first-person pronoun.
The narrator's mnemonic journey, recounting a tale of love, jealousy and betrayal, is told in lean, declarative sentences. But perhaps the real journey is one of extrication, as we watch the narrator attempting to pull himself free from the reminiscences that consume him and from which he is barely distinguishable, such are the coils and bonds that have been forged.
He presents love as nothing less than complete consumption of the other, so that the narrator is doomed not so much by the reality of the situation he finds himself in, but by the very attempt to assimilate another person so completely. There is a battle being played out as we oscillate between the glories of such a union and the dangers faced should one need to survive alone. Hoenigman writes:
'I like saying goodbye to people I know I'll never see again. it reaffirms what I've come to believe. that I was a ghost. that I'll continue to dream and speak far beyond where there's nothing more to see. places only I could inhabit. my face blurred. my eyes a different color. my name forgotten.'
And later on the same page:
'I can piece the rest together. my life is the same as hers.'
At times it is like watching an operation to separate Siamese twins from the inside. A torching of possessions, or rather the very possibility of possession itself, is it seems the only way to facilitate such a split. The hope of a more complete coming together and the hazards that such a condition poses underscore every page, as the narrator remakes his lover and unmakes her at every turn, remaking and unmaking himself in the process.
The absence of names, proper nouns and dialogue not only serves to blur the distinction between mind and world, self and other, but also allows the reader an at times uneasy sense of access. For by stripping everything back to its introspective underpinnings, Hoenigman manages to construct a space that is both universal and perversely personal – the sad generalities of intimacy laid out for inspection – so that when the narrator states 'I don't belong here. I don't belong anywhere' the reader can at once understand and sympathise.
Reading this book I was reminded of the philosopher David Hume's bundle theory of self, and then rather more recent narrative accounts of the self (such as Daniel Dennett's) sprung to mind, as did Galen Strawson's comment on such notions in his paper, 'The Self', where he states that
'There is an important respect in which James Joyce's use of punctuation in his 'stream of consciousness' novel em>Ulysses makes his depiction of the character of the process of consciousness more accurate in the case of the heavily punctuated Stephen Daedalus than in the case of the unpunctuated Molly Bloom.'
Hoenigman's terse, staccato prose is the language of consciousness, and his book not so much anti-narrative as true to the realities of one's inner sense-making, true to the convoluted and seemingly disparate tales we tell ourselves. This is definitely one of those instances where a bare and experimental prose style is necessitated, being precisely what is needed to capture the inexorable meanderings of a person's mind as he confronts his past and the possibility of a future without it.
In short, Burn Your Belongings is a well-crafted and adventurous book from what is undoubtedly a writer of great promise.” - Gary J. Shipley
“David F. Hoenigman first novel Burn Your Belongings. has just been released by Six Gallery Press. Hoenigman is originally from Cleveland but has lived in Tokyo since 1998. Heavily involved in the experimental music scene in Japan, Hoenigman has worked on four albums with writer/musician Kenji Siratori, three of which have been released on Hyper Modern records.What is the extension of your experimental writing? Incidentally my writing extension is "life=noise". It functions as the genetic sea of the deconstructive meaning.
- One aspect of my work is the idea that "lessening=nub". I want my writing to be as anti-prescriptive as possible. I find a lot of writing too heavy-handed, too manipulative; to me it's more interesting to read something that is limitless, something that doesn't strong-arm me into drawing a desired conclusion. That's why the people (I purposely don't use the word "characters") in my books don't have names, ages, physical attributes or any kind of status. They are stick figures rescuing each other, breaking each other's hearts. They are not tools I use to make a point, they are living and breathing. I believe that if we strip everything away then what remains is universal, something we all recognize; yet different for each of us.
Do you think the anti-prescriptive writing is the post-humanistic struggle to the selfish gene? I think your writing deconstructs Samuel Beckett's space on DNA.
- I've always loved Samuel Beckett. I probably think about him more than any other writer, but I think it's important to distance yourself from your influences. I went about 10 years without reading Beckett and have just started to get back into his work again recently. I tend to binge on things and then put them down. I'm most interested in the long-term, enduring effects of art on the psyche. I think it's interesting to think about a book you read 5 or 10 years ago and to reflect on what you've retained from it. Often it's just a few flashes, maybe things that wouldn't be significant to anyone else, but the feeling remains, the highly specific emotion that your soul has reserved for only this book. I'm intrigued by the idea that if all that's left after time and memory have internally deconstructed a book is a swirling mist of ash, dust and skin particles (but a mist that we treasure, a mist that we feel indebted to) — then why not begin with this mist? Why not throw all unnecessary clutter away when we write? - all adornment, all manipulation, all that will be easily forgotten. Why not attempt with each line, with each brush stroke to stamp oneself upon others' souls?
I consider about abandoning "all adornment, all manipulation" paradoxically. It's life as limen of chaos. How is your writing constructed inside this edge?
- I had this idea that I wanted to welcome chaos, write down everything that came into my head and just let it takes it's course. But I needed to impose a form and a structure, I needed to make it follow my rules without losing its identity. I liked the idea of framed bits of chaos, somehow preserve the little monsters and arrange them in rows like some rare beetle collection. If you pick up Burn Your Belongings and just flip through it, I think you'll notice right away that the layout of every page is identical. When you read it you'll see that there are strict rules of language and punctuation that the text must adhere to throughout. It's a display case really, something to take to show-and-tell.
Do you feel text itself controls you? And do you function as free gene that escaped from the word spiral on the text?
- I feel the text controls me in the sense that I can't always write when I want, that sometimes I simply feel empty. Other times things click and I'm able to get some work done. I like to pick up something that I don't remember writing and read it over - it's almost creepy sometimes, like there's been an intruder. Initially I don't try to escape the word spiral, I let it imprison me and then tunnel my way out with a spoon I stole from the cafeteria. I suppose I function as a free gene when I've completed the task, when I can put it down and move on to something else, some new prison.
Dose the apoptosis prison of our brain that was deconstructed by the mind physical task of your writing incubate the hyper abolition worm like the artificial sun?
- I imagine it will be different for everyone, I like to think that people can take something from my writing that will incubate within them, something meaningful; but it's really not for me to decide. The only way I could write Burn Your Belongings the way I envisioned it was to absolutely not care what anyone would think. I didn't talk to anyone about it, I didn't show anyone, I just wrote. It was more important to me that it was pure than that it was anything others could pronounce good or bad. Who cares what some sardine is scribbling in a notebook anyway? I was invigorated after moving to Tokyo, thousands of miles away from everything I'd ever known. I'd stay up all night writing sometimes, I didn't have to answer to anyone so why should my writing? I had no idea who or if anyone would ever read it and I don't think I really cared. Since I didn't even have a computer my first four years in Japan, it was just a big pile of notebooks and papers, it took a long time for me to get it into presentable condition - to display the beetles as I wanted. I still have a lot of material left over. So I guess what I'm saying is that it wasn't written to inspire a uniform impression in people, so I have no idea what the ideal heat of the worm incubator should be. I'll just be happy if it's a worm some feel is worth the trouble incubating, however they see fit.” - An interview by Kenji Siratori
Excerpt
Burning Behind the Unnamable: an interview with David F. Hoenigman by David Moscovich
A Genuine Enslavement of the Attention, David F. Hoenigman explains PAINT YOUR TEETH — an interview by Jason Kushnir.
David Hoenigman: My Tokyo Life
