The world of Crystal Eaters, from its myths to its inhabitants’ futile struggles (to be remembered, to avoid death), mirrors so closely our plain old world, and all the more in its dissimilarities, the bits that simply seem out of place, because what it exposes is the movement of our beliefs, no matter what we believe in, as a movement beyond ourselves—and perhaps towards nothing. —Sebastian Ennis
Crystal Eaters
Shane Jones
Two Dollar Radio (June, 2014)
Paperback; 183 Pages; $16.00
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Shane Jones’ Crystal Eaters crossed my email with no more description than “tight prose, reckless imagination.” Basically: take note. This is the real thing. His debut novel, Light Boxes, was about a town that wages war against February. Jones followed that with The Six Failure, a “sick little fairy tale” set in a town where speech filters through a dream-machine of recycled bureaucracy and shuffles through stacks of papers so tall they touch the sky. That one’s about a group of messengers tasked with telling the life story of an amnesiac. It’s a novella of rhythmic variations and the unbecoming of memory. Then came Daniel Fights a Hurricane, which Jones described as “a novel of hallucinations.” This one popped up on our radar at Numéro Cinq. “[Daniel Fights a Hurricane] is a novel reminiscent of Don Quixote, some stories in the Christian Bible, and accounts of other eccentrics,” writes Jason DeYoung:
but it’s remarkable on its own merits for breaking with narrative orthodoxies while uncovering what is soulful and heartbreaking about its characters. And, yes, it has that hallucinogenic combo of being fucked-up and beautiful.
DeYoung, plenty risqué on his own to be sure, was actually quoting Jones there, from an interview with BOMB Magazine:
Beauty in novels is important to me. I really don’t care for novels that have an agenda, a political statement, a sassy take on contemporary society. Give me something fucked-up and beautiful.
(I’ll come back to this.)
And now there’s Crystal Eaters, published by Two Dollar Radio, a family-run outfit you should keep an eye on. It’s about a village where people believe they’re born with 100 crystals inside their bodies (probably in their stomachs), and as they age, as they get hurt, their count goes down. It’s also a family saga and a coming of age story; it touches on modern life, rituals, myths, and bygone days; it’s hallucinatory, dreamlike, lapsing into memory, collapsing landscapes and dreamscapes and mental states in drug-induced sensory overloads; it’s about a city that grows on its own like a fungus in the night spreading a quarter-inch further across the horizon each day; it’s about a mother dying; it’s about the sun colliding with the Earth; it’s one of those stories that seems familiar yet not, sci-fi but not really, poetic but only just, even _________ (but I can’t write “Kafkaesque” here; however apt, it’s a dull and overused adjective).
Here’s the thing about Jones and Kafka though: they both know how to do “fucked-up and beautiful.” Not only that, but their writing does something to us; it suspends fear and beauty in a complex and inescapable space of mundane human struggle, and by no more than presenting it thus, without overnaming the anxiety we feel when we realize the paradox of our situation, it creates a terrible effect (terrible because it’s impossible to place, impossible to trace back to an origin; it shouldn’t be and yet it is everywhere). Ben Marcus’ recent article on Kafka’s “A Message from the Emperor” pinpoints these feelings and their transformative effect:
The kind of feeling that Kafka traffics in I find especially appealing because of its contradictions and conflicts, and because of the mixture of fear and beauty, the seemingly incompatible sensations are suspended and held aloft and presented to us . . . An individual sentence can be penetrating, almost like a drug when it gets into me. I read, and as I read I find myself rearranged and transported and moved, as if I’ve swallowed a little pill. I love sentences that instantly hit my bloodstream and derange me.
The pills might look different, but the effect that Jones and Kafka produce when they’re at their best is the same: it’s what Marcus calls “defamiliarization”—it’s the sort of word that crawls out of your mouth one leg at a time, like some nasty academic thing. Describing the effect of Kafka’s intimate prose, the way it drags you in deep and shakes you off in a familiar place before spitting you out the other side of elsewhere, Marcus writes:
This is a stunning feat of defamiliarization—we’re not in the real world, and yet the world is entirely familiar to us—from stories, from myths, from legends. It’s dreamlike. It’s not invented to the degree where you have to suspend disbelief—there’s a feeling of plain normalcy, this banal particularity that is our world, at the same time it’s otherworldly.
Marcus doesn’t mention “the uncanny” here, which, given its proximity to what he’s describing, seems odd. Maybe because “uncanny” is as hard to define as “Kafkaesque”; as Freud put it, the word “uncanny” is not always used in a clearly definable way, but we expect that it implies some intrinsic quality which justifies the use of a special name. Of course, then Freud went and famously defined the uncanny as: “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” Something uncanny seems unfamiliar at first and then all too familiar; it syncopates between the two. So the uncanny produces an effect that can also be called “defamiliarization.” And yet, while the uncanny uncovers a banal strangeness we’re used to, it goes about it in a different way than what’s going on in Kafka and Jones, who aren’t particularly terrifying. Instead, they use the fucked-up, the odd, the out of place in a way that’s just familiar enough to affect not a gestalt shift but the feeling of a putting in question, digging at our beliefs from the edge of a precipice.
The world of Crystal Eaters, from its myths to its inhabitants’ futile struggles (to be remembered, to avoid death), mirrors so closely our plain old world, and all the more in its dissimilarities, the bits that simply seem out of place, because what it exposes is the movement of our beliefs, no matter what we believe in, as a movement beyond ourselves—and perhaps towards nothing. In a recent interview with The Paris Review, when asked about the layers of mythology in Crystal Eaters, Jones said: “The idea of choosing something—a value system—and believing in it is very beautiful, even if it’s absurd in the face of death.” Belief moves the soul outside itself, and it’s going on all around us—this form of transcendence—in a very mundane sort of way that might not mean anything. For Jones, the absurd beauty of belief isn’t reserved for the dirt dwellers, who, here, believe they have a number of crystals inside them; but a myth like this shows us something of our own beautiful distractions, our everyday beliefs and all we take for granted that’s odd and out of place in our lives while seeming unremarkable. Of course, it’s all absurd in the face of death and maybe it’s a bit fucked-up, but, hell, if it isn’t beautiful all the same.
— Sebastian Ennis
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Sebastian Ennis is a future law student living in Vancouver. He is a graduate of the University of King’s College in Halifax with a background in Classics and contemporary French and German philosophy.
Really great review. The Freud and Kafka discussions were excellently inlaid. Very cool!