Theoretical Animals by Gary J. Shipley

Theoretical Animals Reviews

• 
  J.J.

  Though it does show its influences enough to trace recognizable threads to it, this is still definitely something I can't say I've read anything like before. This is a very avant-garde work of plotless vignette prose poetry that interweaves some disparate aesthetics and setpieces - namely that it's set in a nightmarish Victorian London yet one infused with an oblique cyberpunk-horror bent [though there is a point near the middle of the book where things suddenly seem to go more modern and recognizable before returning to what it was previously], and the vignettes are composed of barely lucid, extremely hallucinatory flashes of grotesque imagery and full of sentences that are headspinning in the amount of distinct images and words that are brought together, overall making it feel similar to the unconscious bizarro babble to be found in Burroughs' "Naked Lunch". The vignettes are very brief, making it feel like snapshots of some kind of eldritch alternate dimension you're seeing out of context, and they are divided by bolded headers, and in a few parts in the book the endless flow of images reaches a head and become throttling walls of text that are divided only by slashes. Overall I can't say I loved it, because while I am always a sucker for this sort of grungy experimentalism I can't say I felt like there was really much glue holding it together, at least not in my emotional brain, and its images, while evocative, are so fragmented that it's hard to parse out what exactly stood out in my mind [though this could have very well been the intended effect]. But despite these personal frustrations it's definitely a unique experience, and the compendium of images it conjures as well as its interesting formalist techniques kept me reading until the end. Fun to read aloud, too.
  
  "Infinite complexity negates understanding. A god worth having is always indirect and implausible; his creation must not forsake this. The ill god we praise has become all too fleshy: a stray human handed down to us, seemingly a foe creation manufactured from our complaints, doubts and questions. I hear without faith the day will turn our feet to lead, find us and devour us. Things are such that we could end this hollow life loyal only to endurance. When will it/he take us? Should we woo/favour/fail desire until then?"
• 
  Rodney

  “This world is made up of cities and their rivers, the raw and new made unreal and sold.” A flooded dystopia. Human meat merchants and corrupt inspectors. Nightmarish scenarios played out as all day occurrences. Like other Gary J. Shipley material, the fractured, heavily worded sentences evoke beauty and despair, in a seemingly random, disconnected fashion. This a challenging read. The intensity is at a peak level from start to finish.
  
  Shipley’s book “The Face Hole” is an all-time favorite, and I assure you that Shipley writes like no one else. The trouble I have with Theoretical Animals is the abstract approach of the writing is such a focus that it overshadows what is happening. Perhaps that is intentional, but at times, I found it truly fascinating, other times I found it to be a bit overdone. After letting it settle, I am still unsure of how to rate this one.
• 
  Paul Stubbs

  In 1959 in Paris when William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, following in Tristan Tzara’s footsteps, started in earnest to construct the ‘cut-ups’, they began the nominal process of reducing ‘conventional’ prose back down into the retinal-rush of the newsreel, the slogan, the hideously disgorged and fractious sentence, began to re-interview the brain itself in the process of writing. Burroughs, after cutting up and then ‘folding’ the pages of Shakespeare and Rimbaud, wrote: “Cut up Rimbaud and you will hear the voice. Cut-ups often come through as coded messages with special meaning for the cutter”. These ‘cut-ups’ performed semantic miracles of course, making T.S Eliot sound, for the first time, truly interesting, while creating supersonic sonnets of Shakespeare and opening perhaps a few inches wider Huxley’s Doors of Perception. The re-birth of these experiments, while not confirming the death necessarily of any other ‘modes’ of writing, paved the way at least for an attempt for literature itself to be surpassed.
  The writing of Gary J. Shipley in Theoretical Animals has some common ground with these endeavours yet seems also to have over-stridden the skeletons of these writers to flesh out his own particular vision. He explains himself in a recent interview:
  “I am celebrating enigma as an end in itself, an all-pervasive telos: the tangled spine of metaphysics/morality and aesthetics-enigma as driving force and (hidden) end.”
  Thankfully, when reviewing this book critics will lack the necessary ‘categories’ in which to place it, though I could easily announce to the reader that it is full of little ‘counter-fictions’ and ‘anti-poems’ and/or ‘contrary-styles’ and add any other endlessly superfluous literary formulations. A French critic (Thibaudet) once described Lautréamont’s Maldoror as a “frenetic monologue” which, true enough, could well allude to that horrorful pitch of voice within. Likewise Shipley’s voice should be stored upon a disc and played back to the deaf in their dreams, in which of course they can once again ‘hear’.
  
  
  http://paulstubbspoet.wordpress.com/2...
• 
  Alex

  I'm going to read this again as soon as I have time. At all times disgustingly fascinating & at points fascinatingly disgusting, Shipley has succeeded in crafting a work of enigmatic beauty. I mean, to treat the enigma as an end in itself was part of his project here. He did it. I'm not at all sure of what "it" is. But he made me want to read the entire thing over again which is its own special sort of feat.
  
  Supposedly a novel, the words present themselves in a series of prose poems or aphorisms or whatever you'd like to call them. You could think about Gertrude Stein writing vignettes about an Dickensian, industrial London in the near future. There is cannibalism & murder. There are many things that are absolutely unclear. I suppose that's how one would describe smog, too. "The air today was grey and it was not cloudy. The end." That was boring to read. Gary is not boring to read. An added bonus is that reading him makes you want to write, if you are me when you are reading him. Sensible.
• 
  Jim Ivy

  Huge fan of Gary Shirley’s writing but this one was difficult. Some very strong moment, unfortunately, clouded by a lot of outstanding word goulach.
• 
  Stephen Toman

  Easily one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. Can’t say I fully understood what was going on, though moments of it were fantastic. Reminds me a bit of The Atrocity Exhibition but for most of the book-which is composed of tiny fragments without context-felt like I was reading an intro to a scene that never came. No doubt the author knows exactly what he is doing but I can’t say I was able to keep up the whole time. But when I could this was excellent, especially towards the end.
• 
  anon

  
  http://5cense.com/17/534.htm