The Voracious Ones
Excerpts from a new novel
(Cover art: “Walka” by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz—painted some time before the Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland, and probably while incredibly high on hallucinogens)
I plan to release a new short novel called The Voracious Ones on September 22nd. You’ll find some excerpts below, should you care to scroll (and should you, in fact, exist). I began work on this one shortly after my latest series of “raw” novellas, in December of 2022, if memory serves. This one, too, is quite raw. But it required more tinkering. Dabbing at it here and there over the years while fantasizing about never publishing it. I wrote it entirely for my own amusement, without even a hypothetical audience in mind. I can scarcely imagine to whom it might appeal: Some other creature who spent the years between 2020 and 2022 grappling with the immense and devastating implications of Lysander Spooner’s essay “No Treason.” An auspicious confluence of dark world events and readings in anarchist literature left me unmoored from prior biases and pieties—dizzied and vexed and yet strangely hopeful—and I just had to spew it all onto the blank page. The result is a fragmentary novel that attempts, reflexively, to digest itself.
The Blurb:
Maurice Leclerc is a disgruntled and disused professor of Austrian economics who whiles away his widower days devouring books and dreaming of some fantastical revenge upon the mental illness that is Modernity. In fragments of varying length, a picture of the life of his mind comes into view: a torrent of ideas, often contradictory.
The torrent is viewed through the eyes of a college student, bored with her studies and eager to find out what life is really all about. She pursues a friendship with the acerbic Leclerc—a “literary romance” that consists of borrowing his books and picking his brain—and supplements this cerebral education with a much more vulgar one, supplied by her roommate, a free-range prostitute named Jackie.
Life seems suspended in a kind of intellectual bliss. But all the while, the three of them are converging upon an unimaginable darkness as old as mankind. And it begins with this: A student, an economist, and a prostitute walk into an orgy . . .
Some Excerpts:
1. With respect to humanity, no, the city planners had none. From afar, there is no difference between the activities of humans and those of ants. No fundamental difference, that is. Human activity is simply more varied. What are we doing? Building things. Destroying other things we’ve already built to make room for new projects. Filling space. Cities like this one are the abominable epitome of efficiency—its cold, unpleasurable orgasm. Built on a rigid grid aligned with the cardinal directions. Monochrome, the color of the surrounding desert. Prevailingly low, flat, with only intermittent skyward priapisms. As if the planners were afraid anything they built was at risk of falling over or of flying off the Earth. Who even knows the names of the monuments? From afar, a hideous and inhuman city. But you cannot zoom in close enough to find humanity in it. At any scale, there is nothing to look at. Nothing ignites marveling or inspires wonder. The religiosity of architecture is conspicuous in its absence. It’s no mystery how or why anything here was built, nothing to contemplate, and no pleasure to be taken in merely looking. Zoom in far enough and all you will see are the homeless encampments, rows of shabby tents leaking piss and shit into the flat, curvless, rigid horizontality of the streets. The denizens of our sidewalks and underpasses aren’t human anymore, if they ever were; they aren’t even alive in any meaningful sense of the word. Animated only by hunger for chemicals that are somehow not killing them fast enough. No matter how many of them die or simply vanish into the hot, stinking air—evaporation—their numbers are always growing. We could call it the Law of Conservation of Indigence: for each one of them that is killed by the drug, another is created. The streets are theirs; the city was built for them.
He said this to me as if I weren’t there. Coffee mug in hand, staring out the kitchen window at the lush garden out back. (The garden and its lushness made mysterious by his abhorrence of soiling his hands, his lack of a proverbial green thumb.) It had just stopped raining, and the driblets of water running down the glass lent his reflection a gloomier cast than the face he was actually making. This was early in our sequence of encounters (which were always forced upon him by me), so that I had not yet gotten used to this semblance of being ignored, of not being there at all; so that I hadn’t yet learned that for him to speak at all in your presence was a sign of great respect—perhaps even a sign of trust. He doesn’t respect many people, and trusts even fewer; this, he’ll tell you within five minutes of learning your name.
It was unnecessary for me to respond—perhaps even preferable that I didn’t. I thought about what he’d said about the city for a while, sitting there at his little two-seater kitchen table and sipping my coffee, and then I asked him if he hated the city so much, why not leave? He asked me what other city would have him—a question I found obscure and unanswerable. Then, waving his own question off, he said that in order for a man to remain present, he must live in “philosophical opposition” to his ecosystem. If he loved where he lived, he said, then he would have to move.
2. He is dispirited, he writes, by the “rectilinear world.” That is, by modern architecture and city planning. By this city above all, with its paucity of pillars and domes, its dearth of curvature; one rarely finds even the suggestion of a curve anywhere one looks. Brutalism par excellence, saved from invoking the Soviet mystique only by the ubiquity of glass. “Voyeurism interrupted only by the eternal reflective glare of our bastard sun.” One is not only permitted, Leclerc says, but obliged to move through the city without thinking; and while one is not thinking about where one is going or how one shall get there, one finds nothing to look at along the way beyond flat, rectilinear surfaces and objects which are not worth looking at even for one second. Look up and you’ll only get the sun or its searing reflection in your eye. “It peels the eye to look in any direction.” The effect is that of a prison, he writes: imprisoned within the ugliness of efficiency, the spirit stifled by a deficit of classical beauty. “All that modernity has wrought are bondage, aesthetic impiety, and atrophy of mind.”
3. The first line in Blasphemies & Commodities is this:
“Beyond caffeination, the human being is not perfectible.”
The short lines were numbered, and broken up into sections: “On Architecture,” “On Decor,” “On Music,” “On Fashion,” “On Cinema,” etc.
The second line in the book is this:
“Drink hot beverages from short mugs: coffee from an opaque mug of porcelain; tea from a translucent mug of glass. Drink cold non-alcoholic beverages from a tall glass, and alcoholic beverages from a short, rounded glass with a sturdy base.”
Third:
“A man who does not drink alcohol can be trusted with your secrets. But not with political power.”
4. On Fashion: “Sandals are for the beach—and should never be paired with socks on pain of a lengthy execution.”
As with all of my published work, The Voracious Ones will be available at www.gsrichter.com or more directly at www.amazon.com/author/gsrichter.
Thank you, whoever you are.