victims

In researching the critical response to contributing editor Travis Jeppen's formidable new novel Victims (published in 2003 by Akashic Books), I felt overwhelmed by the magnitude and impact of Travis' work on his audience of peers. In fact, I'm so used to writers viciously tearing apart each other's words that I couldn't help but find myself in even greater awe of Travis than ever before. Take, for example, an excerpt from a review by Michael Schaub of Bookslut:

"But then someone like Travis Jeppesen comes along and fucks everything up by writing a novel that utterly defies description. There's no way to condense the plot into a brief little synopsis, no way to describe the characters with adjective-laden appositional phrases. Victims is a thrill to read, and it's the best debut novel I've read in a very long time, but it's harder to figure out than a Rubik's Cube. Unlike the toy, though, Jeppesen's novel has the potential to change your life... Victims really is the rarest of things--a novel of ideas. You don't see that much anymore, at least not in the United States, and that's probably for the best. Very few writers can pull it off."

Or this, from Dennis Cooper, who picked Travis' debut novel as the first book released under his Little House on the Bowery imprint.

"Victims may by the most exciting first novel I've read in a decade or more. This is a brilliant, haunting, and, strangest of all, very funny novel."

And from The Village Voice:

"Infused with schizophrenic logic and a gleefully unique syntax, Travis Jeppesen's debut novel, Victims, reads like a fictional embodiment of outsider art. Its bosky surrealism and anti-authoritarian aura suggest Henry Darger's Realms of the Unreal, and like Adolf Wölfli, Jeppesen has a flair for skewed reasoning and an obsession with internment... An artfully fractured vision of memory and escape, Victims maintains a rigorous structure throughout—even when the aliens show up."


And so, driven by sheer laziness and the realization that little more should be said other than to simply recommend that readers go out and buy this book immediately (yet be prepared for a challenge), I decided to take a slightly different approach to analyzing Victims, by translating an existing critical review into English from Italian using my favorite Internet tool, Babel Fish. The results were strangely illuminating, and although I didn't necessarily come away with a better understanding of the book, I feel compelled to share the results of this 'research.'


In English:

"It makes an impression to say it, but it is incontestably true. It exits from the farm of Dennis Cooper, young and aware of himself and is a talent in full outbreak and metamorphosis. Travis Jeppesen represents an apex of new lit the Western alternative. The history is worse how much the America New is irradiating, via ether and history, in this moment, and the intellectual of Jeppesen reside in the affirmation that this America New, all metaphysically, is the coherent fruit of the Old America. If it is still difficult to physically read its last book Victims (an experience and entrance with we in the Evil), that does not remove that the outcome of the literary job of Jeppesen makes badly. More: it makes the Evil. A lot in order to mean to us, here some coordinate.

Victims is the history of the last days of an American millenarista schism, the Overcomers, than it collects around its prophet, Martin Jones - rising of charismatic leader, the crazy one that it lead to the collective suicide the adepts person of its Fanta-religioso group; imprinted weft to drifts driven crazy of emotional character, while on the background, rural America. Crash of values consolidates to you and reactionary from the background of a systematically society, the vicissitude of the Overcomers is a history of psychical manipulation, to bloom of rhetoric that is approached the fiction dangerously of information.

To all this territory, philosophically lead from Jeppesen with an almost strabiliante maturity (it is clear: one is not bored to us), joins a deep meditation on the destinies of the spiritual in the advanced present who we are about living: Science Fantasy and Religion show the nexus that, to second of the times, the alloy or distance to them - in practical, are the abyss of the human freedom and the substance of the dreams of our species that come in dialectic crash.

An impressive novel: it enters in our time with the incautious intelligence, in order to put to knot mythologies, makes truisms, not inquired possibility of relationships. If pits an Italian publisher I would buy it to the fight and I would make it translate. A demonstration in more, for the skeptical idiots, than Dennis Cooper it sees more far away than anyone."
Published from Giuseppe


In His Own Words
(Travis Jeppesen)


photograph by ned schenck

"The writing of this book was an incredibly slow process, and for a long time I had no idea what I was doing. It wasn't until halfway through, or maybe even later, that things started to cohere, but the whole process was organic, and it wasn't until the later phases that I was able to make sense of the novel's internal structure. Since this is my first novel, I have no idea whether or not this process is unique or not, but I know that in the end I felt more like a sculptor or a composer than a novelist. It was only towards the end that I was able to find the wisdom in the waste, because I'd made a big mess, there were papers scattered everywhere, there was no order to it, but then it became sort of obvious where all the bits were supposed to go.

In Victims, to a certain extent, I'm deinventing the novel, although I certainly didn't set out to do this. It was motivated by the intuitive forces of boredom and depravity, or striving for what one critic termed "the bucolic ideal" (in reference to a tendency in early 20th-century Czech representational painting). That's what America means to me: all the negative forces people strive to keep under the surface. What people don't understand is that America wouldn't be America without them. It's sad, because the entire publishing industry is so jaded. "Write something we can sell to Hollywood" is the attitude. To me, the novel is an artform, up there with music and painting and sculpture and poetry and film. This is how I treat it and why I believe in it.

Alot of readers are going to feel that people like me have no business writing novels. I have no reaction to that, either way. My message to the reader: take it or leave it.

American society is a maze of conflicts, but only on the most superficial level, mostly because there is no longer any real violence in the fabric, but also because everything seems rooted in the same impulse: the desire to make everything -- the entire world -- as bland, mind-numbing, and easily digestible as possible. Americans are unable to foresee the negative consequences of this impulse, they have no desire to consider what all this will lead to: namely, that there will come a day when people are so stupid that they will be unable to function; when that moment arrives, the entire continent will freeze, all action will halt, there will be no more motion.

The fact is, if you remove hatred and conflict from the equation, the world becomes a really dull place. Imagine how boring it would be if people didn't hate each other.

Me, I think the whole thing is fucking hilarious, so I laugh. And Victims is a very particular form of laughter, one that is bound to alienate a lot of people. It even alienated the person I was living with at the time I was writing it. I'd be alone in my room late at night working, and he'd knock on the door, annoyed, asking me what this demented laughter was, what was so goddamn funny. And he'd look down at the desk in front of me to find nothing but a blank page. These are some of the things Victims says or implies about America, but I'm an artist, not a philosopher or sociologist, so I'm compelled to convey these things through an abstract framework. It's a less-than-direct form, and it's one rife with contradictions; I can't not contradict myself in anything I do. I am an American, and I can never deny this. But in order to understand America, I have to physically distance myself from it. In the process, I find that the America I love is the America I find in my dreams, in my imagination. Thus, the real America (or how I perceive the real America) is absent from Victims -- or the real is mapped out in contra-manifestation as the imaginary.

It's a coincidence that many of the writers I like are Europeans who aren't widely read in America today. But I'm opposed to the idea that there exists two separate things called European Literature and American Literature, or that Europeans write differently than Americans. I started writing Victims in America and finished it in Europe. I don't think that living in Europe has had much effect on my writing, other than it's somehow easier for me to live here so I get more done.

Ideas in the novel form the main crux of the narrative. Today, this may be an unusual approach to take in writing a novel, but it wasn't 100 years ago. I think it bores and angers most readers when they're confronted with a novel that makes them think; after all, novels are supposed to be entertaining like Hollywood films, filled with car-chase sequences. If not, then a novel must at least reveal intimate details about the author's life in order for it to have any value, right?

People pick this book up after reading the publicity for it, expecting to read a novel about religious cults. But this novel isn't "about" religious cults at all, so of course they're going to be disappointed! And when the so-called cult (I never use the word "cult" in the novel; I prefer the term New Religious Movement) does appear in the book, the focus is on their philosophy, not the dirty sensational tidbits; in fact, I consciously chose to exclude anything that could be remotely construed as sensational pertaining to the Overcomers, because I didn't want to undermine their ideology. Instead, by taking them seriously and listening to what they are saying, word for word, and taking it seriously as a valid philosophical doctrine, Victims does the opposite of what the media has done whenever the cult story has come up in the past.

Without intending to, I ended up writing this book against the reader, to a large extent, at least to the reader who comes to this book with any preconceived notions of what a novel is supposed to be. This is why it is immensely gratifying for me, on a purely egotistical level, when readers have a negative reaction to this book; it merely confirms everything I suspected! I'd much rather people hate this book than like it. If people like it, that means it fails. Then again, failure is a lot more interesting than success . . .

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