It would not be hyperbole to say that I have never read a novel quite like this. It is Kaufmanesque in the very best sense. It is hilarious and intellectual and uncomfortable and very very weird. The pace is surprisingly plodding, because each scene is so disjointedly odd. The words need time to be savored. The novel is disorienting. Somehow, just like in Kaufman’s screenplays, the novel just works as a whole though. Did I mention it is over seven hundred pages long? The plot plays with the nature of time, of self, of memory, of consciousness, and of art.
The anti-hero of the novel is R. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a vehemently non-Jewish film critic living in New York City. He is opinionated, well read, and woke. “What I do, what I give to the world, is that I watch. I observe. I perceive. I take it inside me. In this way, I represent the Universal Feminine. I am not ashamed to be a feminine man. I take creative work inside me like semen. I allow it to impregnate my egg-like mind, to gestate. And what is born is the intercoiling of these two consciousnesses. Without sperm, there is no impregnation, but without the egg, the sperm is useless, hardened into an old sock. I am receptive to true art, to true creativity.”
Traveling down to St. Augustine, Florida on assignment, Rosenberg bumps into his neighbor in a ratty apartment complex. An elderly man of mystery, Ingo, who has created a claymation movie over the course of ninety some years, offers to show Rosenberg his masterpiece, “The film runs for three months including predetermined bathroom, food, and sleep breaks. My idea is the restlessness of the movie will cause it to enter your psyche and thus infect your dream life. It is a filmic experiment of sorts that posits an equal relationship between artist and viewer, in that the viewer will not, after viewing it in its entirety, be certain where the film has left off and his own dreams have taken over. Or hers.” Ingo dies during the course of the screening, extracting a promise from Rosenberg, before they began, that he will never show the film to another living soul.
Ingo has also made a whole world of clay puppets who never make it into his actual three-month-long film, but who, nonetheless, exist, off camera, residing in his film world. Rosenberg extols, “That all these puppets are so delicately and tenderly animated in their pain and that they were meant never to be seen—as most of us are meant never to be—brings an overwhelming pathos to the imagery.” He recounts the words of Ingo, ““Most of us are invisible,” he said. “We live our lives unrecorded. When we die, it’s soon as if we never lived. But we are not without consequence, because, of course, the world does not function without us…. The existence of us, the unseen people, must be acknowledged, but the dilemma is that once acknowledged, we are no longer truly those same unseen people…. Once the Unseen are seen, they are no longer Unseen. These [movie director] men have perpetuated a fiction. I have struggled with this issue, and my solution is to build and animate the world outside the view of my camera. These characters exist and are as carefully animated as those seen in the film. They are just forever out of view.”” Ingo poignantly echoes the end of Eliot’s “Middlemarch”.
One of Kaufman’s reoccurring gags is to have Rosenberg rip on Kaufman. He rips on his movies, his writing, and his comedy. “Who I do not honor are the comedians who condescend, the Charlie Kaufmans, the Pee-wee Hermans, the Robert Downey Seniors (Junior is a genius). These three men (and I use that term in the most derisively contemporary way) have sextuple-handedly corrupted the noble tradition of gentle humor that stretches back time immemorial, by inserting their toxic masculinity, their white cis privilege, their faux concern for the little man, their misogyny, into what was once a pure and delightful form that stretches back time immemorial. Why can’t they see women as a people rather than mysteries and saviors and manic pixie dream whatevers? Maybe they could start by having women as friends. Or maybe they need to get laid.”
Rosenberg’s bildungsroman ends as mysteriously as it began. A memory, perhaps false, of Ingo waxes philosophical, parroting Heraclitus, “Everything is different, always. That’s what I’ve concluded on this journey of mine. The trees along the road may look the same, but they’re not. They change. You can’t see again what you saw yesterday. It’s no longer here and neither are you. We are all of us the victims of the illusion of constancy. I may seem like a continuation of who I was a second ago, but that is only a trick, like a motion picture trick. And we humans do love to be tricked…. Look, you saw then what you could see then. After, you remembered what you could remember. Now you see what you can see now. This is what I call the human condition.”
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