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Holding onto Despair

January–February 2013 In physical form, Scorch Atlas presents itself as an artifact of aftermath. The slim volume’s blackened covers appear charred around the edges and severely water damaged, an effect repeated throughout pages that are sometimes blotted with inky spots, suggesting post-Katrina like mold or perhaps blood, and bear the traces of having been crumpled up and discarded. The single cover image is earth viewed from somewhere in space, an atlas of mutilated landmasses, unrecognizable from the continents and oceans we know, or perhaps it is a heavy dispersion of cloud, thickly hovering over what terrain is left. This manifestation of decomposed materiality evokes a testament to the disappearance of the book itself. In an age of e-readers, the feel of a book’s covers, the texture of touch as one turns a page—all that, it seems to say, is lost. Equally adrift is the once-familiar image of a writer whose frustration with setting out words prompts tearing a page from a notebook, crushing it in to a ball and tossing it into the trash. Word processors now replace such customary gestures of the romantic artist with robotic resolve as one cuts and pastes anew or drags a document into an icon of a trashcan stuffed with failed efforts. But Blake Butler has created a work that goes well beyond that recent lament for the disappearance of the book and long-form reading. A series of poetically torturous vignettes and stories of varying length, Scorch Atlas embodies after-the-fact destruction of the world as we have known it, a world rendered so devoid of hope that and its remaining life forms from above to injure, contaminate, and mark a further descent into the madness of survival after apocalyptic obliteration. The stories themselves often appear to be exercises in abjection. Sentences engorged with words of bodily degradation spurt out onto the page. In “The Ruined Child,” we find that “Where once he’d had the father’s features, his skin expunged a short white rind. First in his crevices—armpits, nostrils, teeth holes, backs of knees—then the chest and cheeks and eyes.” Taking place within the confines of home and focusing on the mother’s womb as symbol of both life and death, the story tells of agonized parents driven to drown their diseased child, only to have him return, hugely swollen, and haunting the tormented mother until she drives a “kitchen knife into her stomach.” The son then turns to taunt the father: “‘Soon your skin will rupture and your eyes will vomit grease.’” The child continues, his voice now several voices: “‘Your balls will pop and worms will wriggle and the air will liquidate.’” In “Bath or Mud or Reclamation or Way In/Way Out,” the earth itself suffers the same kind of fate as these doomed family members.