Gary Lutz Online

Fiction on Web del Sol.

Gary Lutz is a writer I have grown acquainted with from the Internet. The sentences he writes are often of technical interest in the most surprising ways. A brief (but in no way comprehensive) survey of elements at play in his work which I find enjoyable and/or poignant:

- All his torturing with grammar, the micro-attentiveness to the materiality of language are echoed lock-step with thematic concerns. This is experimental writing that is *about something.*

- For all its self-referentiality and playfulness with the expectation and outcome of a sentence, his fiction is tempered by deep human concern. It is also very sad.

- If I were to suggest provisionally what the main concern is, my guess might be that Gary Lutz is attuned to how the grammatical elements that define our linguistic present come to be; that there may be social analogies that can shed some light on the most virulent of them.

- One gets a sense in Lutz of everything shrinking. In the strictly ruled micro-lives of Gary Lutz's highly ritualized characters, work is omnipresent but it holds no human purpose. Play, on the other hand, is omnipresent but banal, joyless, attended to with mechanic compulsion.

- The architecture of this world is inescapable, descriptions of it haunted by terminology of the office-place, playground, corporate campus, elementary school no matter what landscape or interior is being described.

- Sentences are often without subjects. Objects move from one place to the other, with the deliberate suppression of any descriptive window into the human agency normally involved. Or else the usual relationship between subject and object, animate and inanimate noun, is reversed. Tables operate on the people sitting at them, etc. The quality and duration of what one human life can hope to impress upon another is about that of warmth as imprinted by a hand on a fridge door.

- Unlikely parts of grammar function emotionally; conjunctions, articles.

- Familiar objects, especially objects whose name and use implies an institutional, domestic or office-like existence, often are transformed into verbs.

- A character's subjectivity might become another wholly unrelated subjectivity without the conventional attendant struggles and developments to get there.

- Human relationships are basically procedural. The basic condition between two subjects trying to relate is akin to a form of social autism.

- Any word, especially a neo-logism or buzz term, especially if it has functionalist or mechanistic overtones, any word that implies shrinking or further advances in technological discreteness is rejigged to describe the most private and intimate of activities.

- Industry-scale categorization permeates the smallest niche of human life.

- Micro attentiveness to the associative overtones of the smallest parts of language. i.e. the products of divorce become step-people. The prefix step- begins to govern their relationship will all other things.

- Instead of plot, lateral substitution of event for event, state for state, without emotional release or forward (or even backwards) movement on the subject's part. Things become other things, hopelessly, endlessly, over and over. Neither epiphany nor transcendence follows. Just an ever-plateauing state of change.

- Notable, Lutz's use of elements akin to what in film is Mumblecore: bad grammar, deliberately tortured grammar, generalization to the point of coyness, kid-like reductions in word and phrase complexity, some of which even anticipates twitter-speak.

- I might guess some literary sources for this style include Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein.