BRUT: Writings on Art & Artists by Harold Jaffe (review)

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Reviewed by:

• BRUT: Writings on Art & Artists by Harold Jaffe
• Eckhard Gerdes (bio)

brut: writings on art & artists Harold Jaffe
Anti-Oedipus Press
https://anti-oedipuspress.com/books/brut/
144 pages; Print, $16.95

Harold Jaffe's transgressive fictions range from the social critique of his novel Mole's Pity (1979), through his fiction treatments of celebrity in Madonna & Other Spectacles (1988), 15 Serial Killers (2003), and Brando Bleeds (2022), and carry on throughout his disturbing and astute docufictions such as Porn-Anti-Porn (2019) and False Positive (2002). But in all cases, Jaffe makes one consistent decision as a writer: the dominant methods of employing fiction are not the essential basis of literary art.

What makes Jaffe's writing unique is, perhaps, how he creatively and effectively combines the strategies and techniques of fiction with nonfiction. His docufictions blur the distinction between the two. In that sense, Jaffe's work reimagines the first dictum of the English novel: the pretense of being nonfiction. Readers of eighteenth-century novels must have realized that writers such as Defoe and Swift were not actually relating true accounts but were using nonfiction as a conceit upon which to build their novels. This process has been thoroughly discussed in Lennard Davis's Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (1997), which traces the history of the novel from the printed ballad, which was ostensibly the sharing of the "news" (cf. novellus in Latin), to the adoption of the conceit by eighteenth-century novelists. But the factuality of the work was not a real issue. It only had to look like that. [End Page 158] Present-day readers can read The Onion or the satire of "The Borowitz Report" without believing the stories are true. This synthesis of fact and fiction was foundational in the novel but has been misunderstood and misused by scores of writers who believe that they are so special that all a novel really needs to be is a roman à clef. Indeed, hundreds of these works are of the type that I call "I hate my parents" or "I screwed my grad student" novels. And though some value can be found in these works, the novel as a form is much larger than that. It can certainly be used for social purposes, but is a work whose goal is to effect social change primarily social commentary or a literary novel? What destination is the author driving toward? Is the goal social commentary or literary excellence? Those are clearly separate and distinct goals. Which of those choices is more important to the author? We should not conflate astute social commentary with literary excellence.

Jaffe does not avoid social commentary, but in treating the writing with an enormous set of tools that ultimately obfuscate and complicate our notions of the difference between fact and fiction, he is using the very strategies of the dominant class that are used to keep readers ignorant of the truth. Words such as "truthiness" spring to mind as having been weaponized in order to have readers not know what to believe. Jaffe's blurring of this distinction can be seen in his motto that appears on his website, that a writer's task is to "Find a seam, plant a mine, slip away" (haroldjaffe.wordpress.com). But in Jaffe's case the social commentary seems to be more in the service of literary expression than vice versa. In this sense, he uses fact as a tool for fiction rather than the other way around.

This can be seen, for instance, in the first fiction in BRUT, the first of three pieces called "Queen of Hearts," this one about an indigenous community that is going to be slaughtered by the US cavalry in its racist mission to eradicate the First Nations. The entire community is murdered except for one woman, who, wearing a "white mask war-painted with mustangs and buffalo," begins to "Ghost Dance" feverishly to ward off the cavalry. Her dance quite literally kept her alive, and she remained the only one not shot. Her dance was her act of defiance. It was not a precious piece of social commentary meant to seat the cavalry in...