Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist (Calamari Press, 2007)«The title character of Miranda Mellis' The Revisionist conducts covert surveillance on a Saunders-esque city whose inhabitants are subject to uncanny transformations as a result of catastrophic weather, political corruption, invasive technologies and environmental degradation. Hired to spin, or 'revise,' the facts, the revisionist's perceptions in turn become detached and distorted - inevitably unreliable yet all the same, revealing. This civil scientist of a narrator sardonically observes a distressed landscape inhabited by mutant children, a seeing-eye dog, a centenarian with iguanas and constellations beneath her dress, brooding frigate birds, insurance love clones, a terrorist curator, a private investigator, and a little girl who's discovered the world's largest conch.»
"There's an uncanny lightness about Miranda Mellis's gliding techno-novella. It's slow and glimmery like steam punk - and wise about gender too. She's right up there (for me) with Bob Dylan, folk art, anime and all the kind and great animals and plants of the world. I love this book so much." - Eileen Myles
"Caught somewhere in that nexus of living, observing and manipulating from which our current American malaise most convincingly reveals itself, the conflicted narrator of Miranda Mellis' taut story telescopulates to capture and possess a variety of lives from a distance. The Revisionist is at once a beautifully simple fable and a wonderfully lyrical apocalyptic tale. Though its motion seems at first Brownian, it manages almost because of this to get to where few books ever manage to go." - Brian Evenson
"Like a panopticon of virtual dystopia, The Revisionist allows characters which seem human only by dint of a certain nostalgia. A world is wiped away, but leaves a smudge on the lens. This is the eye's response to the everyday workings of what no longer quite works. A jarring and beautiful book." - Thalia Field
«The first time I finished reading Miranda Mellis’s The Revisionist, I started to turn the book back to the beginning and read immediately again. The book is only 82 pages, many of which only house a paragraph or depict ornate black and white collagist imagery, and the overall effect, as I felt it, is to feel in want of more. The nugget at the heart of this bizarre and wicked fever-dream of a book is a depiction of a world both on the verge of collapse and in midst of mutation - some absurd realm where men explode as car-crashes and the threat of apocalypse hinges on one lazy girl’s duty to seal envelopes. But I stopped myself from rereading The Revisionist immediately. Instead I lay back on the bed and let it jar around in my mind. I found myself still thinking about it hours later, and beyond that, days, unable to shake the bizarre dreamlike imagery that'd so quickly been uploaded.
The frame on which this cracked riff of Kafka seems to ride is based around the observations of a woman, assumedly The Revisionist herself, who is assigned by an unnamed private institution to, “conduct surveillance of the weather and report that everything was fine.” The narrator watches from her observation tower, not so much recording physical weather as the weathered human ruin of a strange and unraveling world. She sees a man so confused that he turns into a conch shell by forcing himself into the ground. She sees people tearing off their own heads and running around with them. The world is made of flux. Even the forms of destruction aren’t fully palpable, or even natural. She says, “Buildings were curdling. The very air had faded, was pixilated.”
Mellis’s fresh portrayal of such a relevant-seeming kind of downward whirl of everything is not, however, the basis of a linear projection. Instead of an arc, we’re plopped in the middle. We’re made a witness to things left unexplained. The narrative weaves between a wide cast of helpless characters - dissolving fathers, daughters who wear their father’s head. As well, the illustrations provided by Derek White evoke a jarring swarm of information. Through most of the depictions, text and collage, I couldn’t help but think of an idea from Deleuze and Guattari’s text A Thousand Plateaus: "There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a single assemblage, operating in the same assemblage: packs in masses and masses in packs.” Indeed, The Revisionist seems not only to be an assemblage of ruin, but an assemblage of assemblages, each one weird and volatile in its own way, each slurping up and off the page and nesting in the brain like some wicked colony of dervished birds.
Indeed, in Mellis’s evocation, things come together and split apart, only to reform again another way, to burn and blip and blunder. Even the narrator herself doesn’t quite seem to know which way she’s heading. She leaves her position early on in the novel to join the masses fleeing to “Start Over Island,” a “dream getaway” sold by a get-rich-quick con-man as a solution, where, “One came to the island seeking a new identity, but found things the same as before.” Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of multiplicities becomes more and more apparent as we find that nothing in this ruined world is ever resolved, just reported over and over, reflecting itself to death: “For every event, there were multiple documents and artifacts, until there were more documents and artifacts than events.”
In the end, The Revisionist leaves the reader reeling, the brain glutted with wicked imagery expressed in looping, well-aimed prose. It seems less a story than a document itself, a transmission from not too far ahead. Perhaps a warning without answer, a photograph clipped from the center of some damaged splay. I have absorbed this document several times now, and will again, again, again.» - Blake Butler
«Miranda Mellis is one of the editors of the Encyclopedia Project, a collaborative collection of definitions, images, stories and crazy etymologies created by a host of poets, artists, and experimental writers. The first volume, which ranges from A to E, includes sections like Denouément and Erzulie... Miranda told me about her latest book, a lyrical and unsettling post-apocalyptic novella called The Revisionist. I bought it, read it, and its dreamlike tendrils almost instantly compelled me to immediately read it again. The revisionist in question, who largely narrates the story, conducts surveillance on the weather from a lighthouse and then issues falsely glowing reports. Early on she spies the nuclear blast that merely concretizes the flattening of affect and meaning that is Mellis' true subject. A host of hypnogogic images and half fables and delicate cognitive snapshots populate this slim volume, as if George Saunders was dreaming of Brautigan doing puppet theatre or something. An old woman vomits her bloody prayers onto the carpet; a guy digs a hole in the chips aisle of a convenience store in order to bury his shit, and then gleefully videotapes a robbery. It is a world where mutations have replaced transformations, where you lick and seal envelopes to help prevent the apocalypse, where kids only hear their grandma's stories "as text and/or some form of either marketable or unmarketable object." Where trauma is sold or simply forgotten.
Mellis's words, generally packaged in stand-alone paragraphs that gently collide with their neighbors like soap bubbles, are at once limpid, wry, and abstract. "Inherited ambitions distracted people from the surreal encroachment of death. Some suspected they did not know their true desires. They were entrenched in so many contracts it would take the dexterity of a contortionist to escape." Mellis seems understandably saddened by things but not moralistic, and long past the tears. But though The Revisionist comes from a place of quiet grief, its dada is also charming. Imagination and intuition still stitch and weave the void. At one point a girl and a rag-doll man, who she initially mistakes for a giant conch, share "the camaraderie of two marooned astronauts, their salvation, at the last hour, catalyzed by a series of events whose effects may be described at once—without any temporal contradiction — as both predestined and accidental."» - Erik Davis
«In her novella The Revisionist, Miranda Mellis plunges her readers into a looming, apocalyptic existence where the natural world resembles an ominous machine, and the local convenience store has become known as the new natural jungle. Complemented by the mechanical yet strangely beautiful artwork of Derek White, whose images seem to be almost motorized, Mellis’ story of a nuclear age weatherman paints a world without sensation, or truth, or reaction. Yet, despite the empty void felt between her characters, Mellis manages to transcend the predictable feelings of hopelessness, and subtly, tastefully adds an afterglow of promise to her story.
A short 82 pages, The Revisionist vividly observes the world through the eyes of its narrator, a weather surveillance reporter who documents his - or her, Mellis never tells us - findings from an abandoned lighthouse, seven miles outside the city. Ironically, Mellis emphasizes the heightened sensation that can be felt through the use of the narrator’s telescope - to hear another’s heartbeat, or to read another’s mind - and juxtaposes this advanced machinery with both a narrator who has significantly distanced himself from the subjects of his observations and a human population that fails to feel anything at all anymore.
From the blind to the hearing impaired, Mellis’ world is one in which, as the narrator claims, “nothing was felt any longer, or known through the sense portals, despite the fact that every part of the body was designed for contact.” Some fail to even notice that their bodies are dramatically mutated or gone completely. Indeed, Mellis also intends to highlight the fact that even the animals of this world are more engaging and receptive than the people. While “people howled and chirped at one another” in convenience stores, spiders, seeing-eye dogs, and birds give long soliloquies on selfhood and pain. A postmodern tone of human disconnection and a sense of lost wholeness seem to glaze the narrator’s panoramic view of the broken down metropolis.
The theme of sensation is further emphasized throughout the book, both by Mellis’ spatial designing and by Derek White’s vivid illustrations. Mellis replaces the conventional use of chapters with artistic spacing throughout her prose, almost as if she is leaving legroom for the reader to think, question, or simply stare at the lack of words or images and treat the blank page as an aesthetic experience in itself. The randomness of her spacing choices further accentuates the fragmentation of this world of hers, as if Mellis is forcing the reader to acknowledge the vast distances and spaces present among characters and their stories, refusing to let them be ignored.
As for White’s images, dispersed throughout the book, they not only add an additional aesthetic angle to Mellis’ already pulsating descriptions, but seem to evoke something of the sublime in the reader. When viewed in conjunction with the story, these images are both horrifying and beautiful, painful and pleasurable. Below is one of White’s images, construed from Mellis’ following description: “Through my telescope, survivors were running around in circles. Buildings were curdling. The very air had faded, was pixilated.”
Though the reader knows that he gazes upon a scene of nuclear holocaust when viewing White’s image, he sees horror only in the fact that he finds the image pleasing to look at. Perhaps there is also satisfaction found in the fact that the scene takes place from a distance, just as the narrator sees it. Untouched by the disaster, the reader therefore feels no remorse - and that in itself calls for horrified reflection. Not all of White’s illustrations portray such infernal scenarios, but they are all captivating in their intricate detail, drawing the reader in and beckoning him to study each image for its elaborate elements. One might argue that Mellis’ colorful imagery requires no supplement, but the graphic illustrations are difficult to pass up, and one finds oneself excitedly anticipating the picture on the next page.
The sublime emotion found in White’s drawings provides a reiteration of Mellis’ subtle ambivalence present throughout the story. Though hers is predominantly a tale of loss and absence, of a deteriorating human race, leaving the reader feeling hopeless and depressed is clearly not her aim. Instead, Mellis manages to extract the beauty - or what little, simplified part remains left of it - from the rubble, giving her piece a more optimistic outlook overall. Various pairs of characters find camaraderie or “mitotic love” through each other’s company. In defense of the monotony of the world, the narrator argues for repetition as a new art form, saying “you could pathologize the repetition, call it futile, but if you considered the aesthetics of repetition as such, you might actually begin to embrace eternal recapitulation.” Though Mellis’ sarcasm is apparent, the narrator’s ambivalence between false and authentic feelings presents itself as a constant. Often he deems human feelings and relations pointless, while other times he sways and thinks there is something to them; and this ray of doubt in the uselessness of human contact becomes the beauty behind Mellis’ seemingly sad story. Mellis also mentions an intuition that all humans share, one that helps them know when they are being lied to - perhaps the only sense they still commonly possess, and perhaps the most important one of all: the common knowledge of what it means to be human.
Such instances in the story, though often fleeting, provide evidence that Mellis has captured in The Revisionist an aura of both a slow deterioration towards an end and, perhaps, an eccentric new beginning, tailored from the past. Even the narrator feels unsure as to which direction his world is leading, and this seems to be Mellis’ point - that the questioning and doubting are what must remain after most everything else has ceased to exist. The Revisionist is a tangle of surfaces and images that struggles to undo itself before the reader’s eyes; and its attempt- not its failure - to do so is where its beauty unearths itself.» - Caitlin Brown
