James Elkins’ Ambitious New Novel

What happened that year made me into something different. I feel like a caterpillar unwinding myself into a cocoon, settling in, losing my appetite for leaves, forgetting my fear of birds, contracting my soft green body into a hard brown shell, erasing my caterpillar memories, saying goodbye to the sun and rain, becoming a pupa. Soon I will be lost to myself, and before that happens, I want to write this book.

When we first meet Samuel Emmer, the narrator of James Elkins’ ambitious new novel Weak in Comparison to Dreams, he works for the Water Management Department in Guelph, Ontario. It’s 2019 and, as he puts it, “something was going wrong with me.” His family life has fallen apart, his wife has left him, and his boss has put him on the city’s Zoo Feasibility Committee, which is the last thing he wants to do. His role on the Committee is to travel to other zoos and familiarize himself with their most problematic animals, with the hope that the Guelph’s future zoo might be more humane. Guelph’s zoo planners want “no lions that pace endlessly or elephants that twitch and stomp or chimpanzees that pull their own fur out and scratch themself raw.”

As Samuel travels to zoos in the United States and abroad, two things begin to occur. He begins to emotionally feel the pain of the caged animals he is observing, and he is visited by a series of dreams that become more ominous with each episode. Samuel’s descriptions of his dreams are accompanied by sequences of photographs of forests. The first dreams are of innocent looking woods, a pond, a river. In the fourth dream he sees a distant fire, and with each succeeding dream the fire comes closer, more threatening. By the twelfth and final dream he realizes that “after the burning, the landscapes in my dreams were bare. No fires or smoke. I must have burned my life down.”

Elkins, who is Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, had let it be known as early as 2008 that he was working on his first novel. Being something a transparency geek, he created a section on his website called Writing Schedule where he laid out the full plan for his novel-to-be and kept readers up to date with his ongoing progress for Weak in Comparison to Dreams, including charts, graphs, word counts, dramatis personae, a synopsis of chapters, and the number of hours spent on the project. Even if you don’t read the novel (and I encourage you to!), take a look at this unique glimpse into the behind-the-curtains image of a novelist at work. If I am reading his chart correctly, Elkins has spent over 15,000 hours on his novel so far. But Weak in Comparison to Dreams, which was just published by The Unnamed Press, is only the beginning. According to Elkins’ website, it is Book 3 of a projected five-volume novel. Elsewhere on his website he refers to the numerous books that influenced his writing, including the massive novel written in multiple columns by Arno Schmidt, Zettel’s Traum (1970), which was finally translated into English in 2016 as Bottom’s Dream (Dalkey Archive Press) and is 1,496 pages long.

Just flipping through this volume’s 600 pages, it’s easy to see one of the reasons why Elkins’ book is so innovative. Weak in Comparison to Dreams is stuffed with b&w photographs (some which have lines drawn on them), charts, graphs, mathematical equations, line drawings, reproductions of old woodcuts, at least one map, and pages containing sections of musical scores. If you take a peek at his website Writing with Images, you’ll quickly see that Elkins has long been interested in the subject of how text and images interact on the page and on our screens. The variety of images he uses in Weak in Comparison to Dreams is unequaled in the world of fiction to my knowledge. Then again, Elkins is not your average art historian. He seems to have mastered multiple other disciplines as well, including several scientific disciplines, advanced mathematics, and contemporary music. But the theme for which he has harnessed these disciplines is deeply human.

As Samuel continues to visits zoos, he sees what we have all sadly witnessed when we have gone to zoos ourselves—that certain captive animals often make obsessive repetitive movements in their cages. Watching an African blue monkey, he sees that “she was protesting her intolerable existence by trying to stop time. If she did the same thing over and over, each time identically, then time would have to stop. She was refusing to let time pass, she was pretending she lived in a single spontaneous moment.” At first the book reproduces charts that graphically replicate the patterned movements of caged animals.

Later on, we see diagrams that Samuel believes show the mind maps of the animals he has been observing.

Finally, Samuel’s intern Vipesh and her “collaborator” Viperine suggest that Samuel himself has developed many of the same traits as the caged animals he has been observing, and we see charts that plot his movements around his own room.

One of the things that Elkins is suggesting is that all of the systems set up to take care of wild animals in zoos—the zoo professionals, the research scientists, the committees, the responsible politicians—have failed, and that only the empathy of individuals who look without prejudice at the unbearable horror of caged animals in zoos can see the emotional tragedy of what is really happening.

Eventually, Samuel quits his job with the Water Department and seems to be going crazy. He gets into his car and drives north toward the Arctic Circle. In the concluding section, Samuel is now a perilously old man who calls himself Emmer. “I live in a cheaply built house a hundred miles north of Guelph. A couple months ago, I was cleaning out the basement, because Fina Hodges told me it was leaking, and I came across the manuscript that I’d nearly forgotten.”

Every day I sit in my study, looking over the pages. I read about the things I said and saw forty years ago. I mainly fail to care about them, or even remember them.

This morning I am looking out the window, where an untrimmed hedge blocks my view of the uncertain distance. Can you say your life is your own when your childhood has gone so far away into the past that the boy with your name seems like someone else’s child? When you read about your own life and there’s no glow of recognition, no pleasure in revisiting scenes that had been long forgotten? I have added these Notes to explain, possibly to someone, how that feels.

Emmer’s only preoccupation in his old age is playing his piano and exploring music written for the solo piano. Composers “are the characters that fill my days and remind me what to feel.” For pages, Emmer thinks rapturously of twentieth century composers and their scores, as if they were old friends.

I see Alexei Stanchinski’s Three Sketches for Piano, feathery and lyrical, written when he was still hanging on to a normal life, before his father died, before he got hallucinations, before he was found dead by a river, not yet twenty-seven years old. Then Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s Nocturnes for the Vologda River, one of his last compositions using ordinary notes, before he decided to adopt the quarter-tones in between the keys on the piano. . . And in a corner of the study, rolled up in a big cardboard tube, is Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Piano Piece 11, a constellation of notes printed on a single enormous sheet of paper, like a map of some fabulous kingdom.

Elkin’s novel, which might at first look off-putting with its suggestion of complex science, higher math, and impenetrable music scores, turns out to be a novel that is all too human, a tragic story of a man who cannot solve the problems he identifies. It’s a novel about failure, empathy, memory, and loneliness. It’s about finding peace in the arts, in this case in music. And it’s a novel that questions the idea that you can truly recall your past. The reader need not master or even understand the various disciplines that Elkins indulges in. In fact, it’s perhaps better to feel a bit estranged from these faintly awe-inspiring practices.

In his summary of this book, which is found on his website, Elkins hopes that his novel will reignite “our love for the ambitious novel.” While there will be plenty of material for academics and those who wish to look deeper into the structure of this novel to pore over and write about, Weak in Comparison to Dreams was written first and foremost to be read and enjoyed. Elkins writes almost like a non-fiction writer. He’s keenly observant and always seeking the perfect description for difficult concepts and complex events, even when writing about Samuel’s dreams. This gives the book a clarity of purpose and a sense of confidence that makes it often exhilarating to read.

As of December 5, he Unnamed Press was offering a limited edition set that included a signed copy of Elkins’ book and a vinyl recording that features the author reading excerpts and playing original piano variations of sheet music that appear in the novel.

[Full disclosure: I was asked to provide a blurb for the back cover of this book, which I was pleased to do after reading it.]