The Feeling of Reading ‘The Discarded’ by Colin Hamilton
As we ponder lists of books that don’t exist
Surely you’ve met “living people who carry a bit of death,” as the character Vojacek describes them, as written in Under the Raven by the author Josef Matousek and translated by Frederik Rosenkrantz.
But have you noticed the “dead people who continue to walk beside us in the evenings, who materialize in the passing windows of trams and subways, who shake their heads, slowly, when we are false, who tug at our sleeves when we try to change”?
(Reserve your assumption, for a minute, on whether the author Matousek is himself alive or dead.)
To shift his question:
Surely you’ve picked up actual books that may as well not exist, so obsolete, tangential, or simply dislikable are they.
But — by contrast — have you heard the whispers of nonexistent books that call you into your truth?
When I pick up a list like this, my instinct is to look up every title and author. Solely for the sake of thoroughgoing fact-check and admitting my non-knowledge of things that don’t exist, I’ve considered typing out the book list and linking to nonfunctional searches in WorldCat so you can share in my awareness or lack thereof.
But I don’t think that’s how to read Colin Hamilton’s The Discarded.
Some books we read not to scrape, verify, and assimilate information but to enter their world.
Often that involves suspending disbelief.
Unbound Edition Press describes this book, which it published last year, as a collection of metafictions: fiction about fiction. Metafiction isn’t always about other existing works of fiction; here, it’s more about how fiction works. What I think Hamilton wants us to do is to sit for an extended period of time with our private feelings of suspending disbelief. To triangulate, across our own blank slate, resistance, curiosity, return, like a hero’s journey through a mental library. Refusing the call to adventure is part of the process. Our refusal signals it’s a journey we must take.
People become librarians because they want books to continue to exist, and they want to be the ones to curate them. Yet curation turns out to involve throwing out many books for which there is no productive use or no significant demand. So librarians end up curating absence as well as presence. It’s the absence that The Discarded has us sit with. Hamilton wants us to visit those shelves.
The Discarded is a real book. I have a copy of it.
When, in the thirteenth month, I pick up this book as I’ve picked it up several times before, I start to see it differently: through the interplay of presence and absence, actuality and potentiality.
Real books can discuss fictional books, and fictional books may in turn discuss real books.
Some of the books mentioned herein may exist, and some may not. May we speak of, or absorb ideas about, both types of books in the same sentence? If we do, will we end up with information or story?
In a side note, discussing Shikha Sen’s Coiling and Recoiling: An Anthology of Anthro-Reptilian Eroticism, Hamilton gives us an “Oulipian challenge: write a story in which a lighthouse keeper is not deranged.”
Lighthouse keepers are always depicted as deranged, and I’ve read a suggestion that storytellers please try something different, I went on to tell a friend who was writing a story about a lighthouse keeper, though unfortunately I forget where.
Here. I read it here. In a metafictional comment that may or may not be “true.” Discarded, briefly, from memory. Re-curated.
Raymond Queneau, a co-founder of the Oulipo literary movement, called the Oulipians “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.” You can’t have groundbreaking literature until you give it a form to break.
Sylvia Armentrout in Six-Legged Stars tells us, as Hamilton puts it, about the green darner dragonfly: “the more he consumes, the faster he grows, and as he grows, his surging inner self must struggle against the hard, fixed shell that encapsulates him.” That’s a comment on being an avid reader. For the most part, we can only interpret a book within our own limitations. And yet, in stages, we crack through our own shell, hatch into our new form, ever larger, ever hungrier. If in the end we couldn’t grow, there would have been no point to all that book-chewing.
But growth doesn’t only mean getting huge; we also learn humility. A penciled note found inside a copy of Cesar Alvarez’s Killing Time: “One consequence of working in a library is the realization that everything you think someone else has thought before, and often with more rigor.”
We can talk about a book we haven’t read if we’ve got a “screen idea” of what the book is about. We’re the screen. Looking inside the book may not confirm or disprove our prior idea of it, as the book may turn out to be about something else entirely, and meanwhile “our idea of the book” still has meaning and turns out to be more about ourselves.
Maybe even if it’s a fictional book. Not a work of fiction; I mean a work that exists within fiction.
We have to look inside ourselves for those books, for our ideas of the books we’re pretty sure exist. We seem to remember them, anyway. Some guy in a lighthouse told us.
For the past couple weeks, everyone’s been talking about how a freelancer plonked a prompt into a large language model to generate a mostly-fake list of books and sent it off to his Hearst-owned employer, a syndication service that in turn sent it off to be published in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, presented as a recommended summer reading list. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m not talking about pressing a button to generate nonsense and passing it off as information. The Discarded announces itself as fiction, within which it uses the voice of nonfiction to cause us to ask about our experience of listening to it.
As when you enter a museum, the museum does not merely show you the artifacts but implicitly asks you about your experience of looking and your relationship to what you’re looking at.
Who’s sitting in the audience? Who’s performing?
If there’s no band, no orchestra, then who’s listening to this illusion, and who’s that friend you’ve been talking to? You came here to find out who you are, right? But you disguise yourself because you’re not quite ready to know?
“One of [Ichiro] Takamine’s most pronounced stylistic tics is a habit of describing people twice, often in diametrical terms,” Hamilton says of The Frivolous Ones.
That book is a fictionalized travelogue by someone who “had never actually set foot in America” and who also apparently is fictional and thus, considered within the real world, did not write this work of fiction which is itself a fiction.
“The second perception,” Hamilton says of Takamine’s writing style, “is almost always more threatening or uncomfortable than the first. I could never quite tell if this was meant to be a literary device, a worldview, or a dig at the American character.”
Humility, folks.
Tucker Lieberman is the author of Most Famous Short Film of All Time, a metafiction that mentions The Thirteenth Month by Colin Hamilton.
