Brian Baker – Argo-0 (Steel Incisors)
The most obvious reference point for this work is Tom Phillips’ Humument versionings. Painted surfaces have been constructed over older texts. The Chronic Argonauts by H.G. Wells appears at one point, which was essentially a dry run for The Time Machine. But I believe there is another late nineteenth century text under this, too, as there was under Phillips’ Humument.
Like A Humument, the narrative and the aesthetic surface is open and shifting, it is darkly psychedelic. It does not pin a strong main reading down. This is a strength, but it is important to mention upfront that what follows is my interpretation of this work only. This can be taken as a trippy, graphic short story, or an open visual poem, inside which you can expand out, imaginatively, your own reading.
But this is not just aesthetic play. You can take this book on one level, that of a strange journey, but those who have read more deeply will see more and more in it. This is a strong literary work. Here’s how.
The main protagonist of the narrative is a ‘doctor’. This most immediately takes us into the history of science fiction. All those ordinary scientists suddenly recast as heroes, after Vernes, and Wells, and most obviously Dr Who – those many doctors – but also Quatermass, and the odd scientists of John Wyndham, encountering weirdness from outer space – or inner physics – with their strangely distant, unworried tones of voice.
It’s also, then, Goethe and Faust and all of the Fausts which followed. A key origin myth for modernity. But this is the modernism of Nash and dazzle ships, of Orwell’s wars and Pynchon’s libidinous, primitive robot bombs. The horror of modernity is thankfully retained and explored here. The Devil’s bargain, the double bind of modernism. The robot bombs are now landing on Ukraine, with a re-awakened nuclear peril. What keeps you safe here can also kill us all. This is Pharmakon, poison and cure in one.
But what is incommensurable about all of our lives in late modernity is here, too. It is best represented by the abstract. When it is hard to see the full picture the representational itself is weakened. So here, we are always in dizzying patterns and details. The gothic in it is quite strong, too, aesthetically. There would be no science-fiction, or horror, without the gothic.
But look for the clues. It is a ‘doctored text.’ The author of this book is also a doctor, Dr Baker. For those of us privileged to know him, he is a scholar of science fiction and other strange literatures. I can sort-of see the real Dr Baker in there – visually I mean – somewhere in the layers. So the author is in the text, but buried. He is trapped here in his own work, in the history of science fiction most immediately, but also in its origin myths, Orpheus, Hamlet, Faust. He takes us with him.
The parallel underworlds-of-the-future incubated by odd Victorians such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton seem to be part of this too. The anachronic man, the man out of time, recalls Philip K Dick’s Time Out of Joint, more recently explored by the late Mark Fisher. But its origins are Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘The time is out of joint, oh cursed spite! That ever I was born to set it right’ Hamlet exclaims. His father has just returned as a ghost, revealing that he was murdered by his uncle.
Similarly this book is a kind of gash, or wound, in time. Brian is burrowing through his own underground stores of decades of literature. On the back of Starless and Bible Black, an album by the band King Crimson, is another Tom Phillips artwork: ‘This Night Wounds Time’ cuts down the sleeve. Inside are minor earthquakes, such as the track ‘Fracture’. This book is another sort of fracture, revealing what is under the smooth surface of contemporary life. It shows what was behind the brochure version of modernity, under its smooth surfaces. All the fizzing wires and blown pipes and millions of deaths. The rats and the shit. The darkness of the signifiers picked out of the obliterated text really pushes this reading.
But there is another dimension to this work, which is trying to see what is coming, the world of Quantum logic applied to everyday life, and its inevitable double binds. Weird shapes dub-echo off into infinity. Language stutters and fails us in this dimension, because we are not there yet, we are still stuck inside a broken and haemorrhaging late modernity. A post-modernity falling apart, awaiting its pre- … what?
The title Argo-0 takes us back to the classical hero myths of the Greeks. Perhaps the Argo-0 is the ur-hero. All those who wander. There is an adventurer, trapped both in and outside of time. It is a specific adventurer, and all adventurers, at the same time. The grail myth, then, is also present at some level, but the cup is lost and the reason we looked for it blasted away by drugs and technologies and sheer time. This is a shattered surface, not a simplistically coherent one.
The layers are bleeding through here, nothing is stable. How very now. The zero of Argo-0 could be a year zero, the calculated reset of modernist literature and culture, as well as countercultures such as punk. But it could also be the void, the nought, that which we do not know, that which is beyond our necessary bubbles of language. Wittgenstein’s beyond which we cannot speak, that is always coming from the future, to destabilise your present. The inevitable vortex which opens up and swallows us all, in whatever historical era, whatever cosy enclosures of belief we create around ourselves. And there is more than a hint of Vorticism in this work.
This was the real u-topia or ev-topia all along. Not the shiny spaceships of a fantasy such as ‘Safe At Any Speed’ by Larry Niven, but simply that which is coming, that place which is opening up, into which we have no choice but to go.
– Steve Hanson
manchestereviewofbooks.wordpress.com 