Indeed, just as water can exist in its solid, liquid, or gas phases (or in various mixtures of these states), so too can literature be seen as existing in a number “phase states”. The story then follows the hallucinating yuppie’s point of view, to the point where it’s no longer clear that there is even really a “him” anymore-beyond that point the narrative jellies, coagulates, and liquefies into radically unstable characterization and wildly experimental typography.
His novel focuses on one rather miserable specimen of self-loathing yuppie excess who, for some reason, decides to eat the gelatinous pill handed to him in an alley by a homeless person and proceeds to experience total depersonalization.
In this spirit, with his new novel A Greater Monster, author David David Katzman has taken the plunge and produced an exuberantly psychedelic narrative. What, however, might be the possibilities of psychedelic fiction? What can you do with invention and imagination that you can’t properly (or easily) do with what “actually” happened? That said, for the most part the burden of this difficulty is born by those laboring to produce nonfiction accounts of their own experiences. Separated from the psychedelic experience itself, the language used to relate it is all too often left signifying, if not exactly nothing, then at least a whole lot less than had been hoped (as in: “I spent an hour and twenty-three minutes figuring out how to use a pen for this?”). Yet the moment that flow stops, the words themselves tend to go dead on the page. What most people find however, come morning, is that the real gist of a psychedelic experience is seldom expressed through the choice of words, but rather resides ephemerally in the feeling and energy that for a time flows through words, resides in words, or as often as not inhabits the negative spaces between words. Many an erstwhile young psychonaut has scribbled away into the evening with a shaky hand, trying to capture on a page the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of their vision before the whole insubstantial pageant fades away like fairy dross. The trouble with words as a medium for relating the psychedelic experience is that for the most part a trip is experienced not through language but through affect-that is, through feelings, intensities, currents, charges, zones of unbearable pressure and limitless expansion, etc. It’s tough to write novels about tripping really, really hard.
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