Some time ago, I tried to nail down the origin of the phrase—none of the Gene Wolfe books in the house were thusly blurbed, not Castleview or any of the Severians, or the Suns of various shapes, not The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, not Free Live Free or Peace, and so I turned to Google, which was better then than it is now, but still: I couldn’t find the actual origin of the phrase. Just a handful of quotes, and echoes, enough to somehow leave me with the notion that it was maybe coined by Algis Budrys, in one of his review columns for F&SF, that, yes, may well have been mined for a blurb, and thus, and so—but, though this was some (considerable) time after, it was still quite some time ago, and I didn’t, at the time, bother to take any notes, or bookmark any finds, and so here and now I couldn’t tell you what it was that led me to that notion, or why.

Just recently, I was seized for whatever reason by the urge to dig into the lupine loop again, to see if I couldn’t this time nail down the circumstances of its coinage. I mean, it’s an evocative phrase. Somebody else might’ve noticed. So off I went to Google again (DuckDuckGo, for all its advantages, yet lacks some critical juice; it turns up no results for the phrase), and Google came back with, well, just one (1) hit, out of all the billions of pages out there: an entry in a Wolfe wiki that features the phrase “loop-the-lupine loop sense of things,” an obvious allusion that nonetheless misses the point in overly elaborating it. —I tried the same search in Google Books (which, yes, you’d expect would appear with the others when you’ve asked it for all results, but often for whatever reason just don’t), and got another lone hit: the same malappropriate phrase, “loop-the-lupine loop,” in a somewhat different context.

And that was it.

Which is maddening, for a number of reasons—websits dissipate, disappear, are deleted every day from the Akashic record, and thus our various search engines—but, I mean, that phrase, “loop the lupine,” it’s here, on the pier, and should ought to have also come up in the results. —Google, it must be said, in this benighted age, now frequently returns additional new and different results as you add search terms to your query—an entirely counterintuitive means of refining one’s searches, but here we are. So I added “budrys” to my search—and there I was—but also, Google offered up, well, this:

Which, I mean: no.

—I should note these searches were performed on my usual home browser, which is never logged in to Google in any capacity. (Fruitless, I know, but a man’s got to have a code.) At the office I’ve got a browser logged in to Google, for office reasons, and so on a break, I tried that initial search again, “loop the lupine”—

And got eight (8!) hits: my site, and the Wolfe wiki, as well as a smattering of fortuitous phrase- and sentence-breaks (“include the Lower Loop, the Lupine trails”; “then over the collar loop. The Lupine, you just hold the snap”; and another one, about, well, lupins)—and, and! These two additional hits: one for a copy of (aha!) There Are Doors, which quotes the various blurbs in its copy, and one for (oho!) the Official Philip José Farmer Web Page, listing blurbs he’d given throughout his career, including the one I’d obviously remembered from oh so long ago:

THERE ARE DOORS is another splendid example of what I call the Loop-the-Lupine school of writing. Gene Wolfe is its originator and sole practitioner. His works are always singular and brilliant, the rare kind you read until you’re at the end, everything else going to hell while you read.

So here we are, and you’d think I’d be happy, to’ve finally run this down, to be vindicated, even, so many years later. Instead, I’m dispirited, I’m evervated, I’m mildly appalled, even—it’s one thing to sigh along with your morning reading of the latest enshittification tirade, to nod along with a chorus of Google sucks!; it’s another entirely to have your face rubbed quite so thoroughly in the fact of it. —I tried the search once more when I got home; there, and then, that evening, it returned zero results. None whatsoever. Not a webpage in the whole wide indexed world to be found, where someone had entered those lexemes in that particular order, “loop the lupine,” despite what had been found at the office, despite what had been found that very morning with this selfsame browser, despite what I know to be true.

All I’ve got left is something akin to the bewildered tone in Samuel L. Jackson’s voice when he says to Robert De Niro, “Your ass used to be beautiful.”

(Since then, results for the search have settled down both at home and the office to the same basic nine [9] results, which now also includes another indirect reference to the blurb itself, from the archive of a thirty-year-old Long Sun mailing list. —Which is somehow even more pathetically unsettling.)

But! But. Begin as you mean to go on, and all: the this in question is Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending: the Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction, which, well, let’s go to the book’s preface, Beyoncé and Werewolves:

That premise is that writers of literary fiction have been enthusiastically adopting the genres that historically flourished in popular fiction because they have recognized the utility and endless plasticity of genre.

And there is just, so much wrong, with that premise? I mean, for starters: genres aren’t plastic. Genres are rules. Rules to be at all useful must be fixed, agreed-upon, or at least legible enough to be contested; you can’t thrust your fists if there are no posts. —Genres can be changed, can be bent, can even be forged anew, it happens all around us, but it takes great effort over gobs of time: they’re social objects, genres, and you need to get buy-in from enough other sociable players to make it at all noticeable, much less arguably worthwhile.

No, what’s plastic is the work itself: the way it molds itself to the rules of the genre it’s decided to play with, the forms it takes to dutifully follow this, to provocatively break that, the sinuous moves it makes to run the course set for it, to be recognizable, and yet itself. —One does not speak of the plasticity of the sonnet; one speaks of its rigidity, even as one quibbles over rhyming schemes. One admires the endless facility and ability of the words and work that might be packed within its confines. —And even the most aridly austere free-verser can find themselves envying the energy and wit of a well-formed couplet.

Thus, the enthusiasm mentioned in that premise, and the next wrong thing: the direction of that enthusiasm. Writers of literary fiction, we are told, are enthusiastically adopting the genres of popular fiction, and why not? There is energy, and wit: having ground rules and barriers can embolden flights of spectacular fancy in the unencumbered directions, and sprezzatura’s so much more easily admired when one appreciates the demands that are effortlessly being met. What’s not to envy?

But note what’s missing from this statement of the premise: any notion of bending genre. —Writers of literary fiction have been adopting the genres of popular fiction since the turn of the millenium, we are told, and in so doing,

articulate a theory of genre’s utility and plasticity that explains the newfound allure of genres that had largely been relegated to genre fiction fields, and these writers’ discovery that such genres have not been exhausted by their often-repetitive use in popular culture but remain as malleable and generative as any others. To think otherwise, these writers assert, would be to adhere to a kind of generic fallacy—the notion, familiar since Aristotle, that certain genres are inherently superior to others—or the anthropomorphizing view that genres have life cycles and eventually grow old and die out.

And look at the assumptions that must be made, for this to be noteworthy; look to the flow of power, and regard, from this perspective. —Oh, lip-service is paid to the notion that literary fiction is a genre much as any other, and no genre is inherently superior; it would be foolish not to, since this is a truism of our democratic age, accepted by all. But, that lip-service having been paid—I mean, look to the rules that we are told define this genre of literary fiction:

a focus on individual subjectivity and consciousness; formal innovation and linguistic exuberance; dedication to rendering the intricacies of character psychology and voice; careful attention to style; and treating “consciousness as the primary site of experience, the medium through which oppressive workings of power are felt and the vehicle for generating resistance to them.”

You know. The good stuff. The good mid-(last)-century stuff. —There’s no mention of bending genre in this statement of the premise because the adoption of genre forms by these literary writers—say their names with me, now, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Kazuo Ishiguro, Chang-rae Lee, David Mitchell, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Haruki Murakami, and Colson Whitehead—this adoption is itself the bending: literary writers do not by definition write popular fiction, therefore, their adoption of the genres of popular fiction must necessarily bend those genres to some new form, with the subjectivity and linguistic exuberance and careful style and intricate psychology that were presumably lacking before such literary interventions. —Sure, everything’s a genre, and no genre’s inherently superior over any other, but nonetheless the underlying logic’s nothing but a kinder, gentler form of McCarty’s Error: “To label The Sparrow science fiction,” he once said, in an age-old review, “is an injustice and downright wrong.”

If you wanted to look to the actual bending of genres, the forms and rules and audiences and conversations that make them up, and change over time, in slow irreducible gradations and suddenly punctuated equilibria, why wouldn’t you look to the very popular fictions as well, where the rulesets of many and various genres have been bent and intersected, implicated and imbricated for centuries, where locked-room murders are set on generation starships, and happily-ever-afters played out within the kingdoms of high fantasy, where the very act of combining and bending genres has itself developed its own rules and conventions and (yes) genres; and where (yes) the tools and rules of literary fiction have been picked up, kicked around, put to use, and given back, just as altered and renewed as any other convention? Why limit yourself to this (very) recent and (very) particular phenomenon?

Because that’s where the clout is, yes, thank you, Willy Sutton. —I mean, maybe Rosen does do this, or at least gestures toward it, somewhere in the rest of his book that I did not read; maybe Sparrevohn glossed over it in his review to make other points, I mean, time and space are limited. But I’m not optimistic on this front. To state that it’s but anthropomorphizing to assert that genres have life cycles, grow old, die out (of course they do! The attention of the audience is a critical component of any genre, and that attention waxes and wanes!), to so confidently state that, one must really have grappled with (say) Joanna Russ’s magisterial essay on The Wearing Out of Genre Materials, to find a way beyond the cycle she delineates, to reveal the mechanisms that allow these materials to recombine and recur, again and again, to explain why vampires suddenly worked once more (and fell once again to decadence), to actually get at the engines that bend genres, and the conditions that render them plastic. But: the index (which the river’s free preview allows one to peruse) lists Russ precisely once in Rosen’s book, on page 10, where there’s a gesture toward the “politically motivated work to come out of genre fiction fields—like that of” (say them with me, now) “Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Le Guin, and Joanna Russ.” —Better by far had those works been read and examined and discussed (as a start!), instead of just checking their names.

And anyway, besides: a lot of the cinematic stuff downright sucks.

Which is maybe why some sort of defense, I mean certainly not a manifesto but maybe a set of some sort of proposed, I dunno, guidelines? considerations? alternatives? something, anyway, is perhaps, maybe, in order, to show a way to make it better, if it’s bad, or at least lay out some possibles that might be could be reified with some modicum of thought, but—but. That would entail pretending what it is I’m doing, or think I’m doing, is in any way better or more considered or grew from thoughts worth the thinking; would mean setting myself up however haphazardly as an expert, or at least an authority, which is unseemly; and now this Thing is rapidly becoming a Chore, and so we set it aside, I mean, I’m behind on the next novelette as it is, you know, the actual doing of the cinematic prose I’d be thinking of talking about instead. So! Zimiamvia it is.

Except.

I was clearing out old browser tabs, as one does, and fell into reading a Baffler take on the post-postmodern novel, as one does, and here, in this article I’d originally opened God knows how many months ago, about (in part) a novel I’m, and no offense or insult intended here, but I’m not at all likely to ever want to read, honest, it’s called UXA.GOV, which was apparently blurbed as “an unhinged occupation of the cinematic mechanism of Robbe-Grillet’s novels of the ’70s,” which novels the article goes on to describe as novels in which “tropes of cinema and genre fiction are playfully misappropriated as vehicles for Robbe-Grillet’s perverse preoccupations.” —And, I mean, I knew the name, Alain Robbe-Grillet: French, experimental, perverse, sadist, misogynist, that’s what’s jotted on his index card in my memory cabinet, in which he’s filed next to George Bataille (French, experimental, sadistic, perverse, and their names both end in disappearing consonants) who, because his most famous book or at least the title I can most readily bring to mind is Histoire de l’œil, the Story of the Eye, is filed next to that comic Jodorowsky wrote for Mœbius, the Eyes of the Cat (Chilean and French, perverse): thus, a glimpse of my personal filing system. —So! Here’s Robbe-Grillet, the French experimental sadist, and I’m being told his fiction, or at least what was written in and around the ’70s, is cinematic, and, well.

(If I’d been paying attention, I might’ve noticed him earlier—there he is, after all, in the introduction to Marco Bellardi’s Cinematic Mode in Fiction, mentioned with Hammet and Vittorini and Ballard as possible touchstones, but I was mildly dreading the approach of something called the “para-cinematic mode,” and skipped on by.)

Curiosity sparked, I went surfing, which is still possible, even in an enshittified age, and found, thank you, London Review of Books, here’s Robbe-Grillet railing against Balzac’s

omniscient, omnipresent narrator appearing everywhere at once, simultaneously seeing the outside and the inside of things, following both the movements of a face and the impulses of conscience, knowing the present, the past, and the future of every enterprise

and here he is, insisting on the primacy of the object, the material, the surface, denying even the possibility of depth:

The reader is therefore requested to see in it only the objects, actions, words and events which are described, without attempting to give them either more or less meaning than in his own life, or his own death.

But—but! Be careful: here he is with the rub of the green:

…no sooner does one describe an empty corridor than metaphysics comes rushing headlong into it.

The visible world is merely their skin. So I’m nodding along with the beat, here. —The point, for me, with the idea of cinematic prose or the screen æsthetic or whatever we’re going to end up calling it, cinematic, I think, it’s cooler, but anyway, the point has always been not so much to ape or mimic or reproduce this or that technique of cinema qua cinema in prose, to write a montage or a pan or a smash-cut: that can be done, sure, certainly, and is even a part of it, of course, but it’s not the point. The point is to take the limitations imposed and implied by the form of cinema and apply them as ground rules and organizing principles to prose—tennis, as more than one poet has noted, is no fun without a net. So:

• The point of view is at all times relentlessly focused on a specific here and a particular now: no speculating forward or ruminating backward, no pondering elsewhere, idly or otherwise.
• No conclusions are ever directly drawn. No inferences are explicitly made. Judgment is out of the question; metaphor and simile become unfortunate compromises.
• What is described is limited to what might be perceived by a camera, or a microphone. Anything else—touch, weight, temperature, smell or for God’s sake taste—they’re all too suggestive of a body, and thus of a subjective presence, and are to be avoided.
• Essentially, and crucially: there is no interiority, whatsoever. Interiority is the bunk.

What’s being evacuated, in the end, is any trace or notion of a narrator—which is patently absurd, of course: narratives must have narrators; tales must have tellers; what am I trying to hide? And where? —But there’s power in hiding, in cloaking, in what’s done where you can’t see: negative space is a vital component of any composition. I’m building empty corridors with the hope that you, dear reader, will fill them with metaphysics—but the shapes of those corridors can’t help but suggest and direct whatever ghosts you bring.

It’s not as if I set out to write like the cinema, or was impelled in that direction by a disdain for the smugly blinkered omniscience of so many third persons. The technique and the philosophy assembled themselves concurrently, as I was tinkering with stories and criticism way way back in the day on alt.sex.stories.d: something about pornography would seem to encourage a flatly objective approach, and a narrator to get out of the way. (For me, at least. Mileage varies, and all.) But at this much later point, I mean—this is how I write the epic, and the epic is what I write; I need to be able to say something entertaining if not intelligent about it, at salons, and cocktail parties; thus: technique, and philosophy.

Still: it was some kind of surprising to see arguments that I might very well have been making issue from the fifty-year-old pen of the soi-disant bad boy of French letters, a maître à penser of the nouveau roman whom, and no offense or insult intended here, but I’d never been all that interested in reading—it’s validating, sure, I suppose, but also disconcerting, what with the perversion and the sadism and the misogyny and the hebe- and pædophilia, and what with these arguments being made about and in service of the writing of his own infamously pornographic works. These are hardly new or unique or surprising arguments, but it’s still very much a this is the guy I’m standing next to? moment.

The library had copies of Project for a Revolution in New York and Recollections of the Golden Triangle, squarely within “the cinematic mechanism of Robbe-Grillet’s novels of the ’70s,” so I snagged them to have a look for myself, as one does. —Right off the bat, Project is a first-person text, and Recollections—well—features first-person narration; rather than being evacuated, the narrator’s right there, in the way, hectoring, chiding, speculating, inferring. What’s cinematic is more piecemeal, aping, mimicking, borrowing: a very visual approach, yes, as well as a cavalier abruption of transitions that tends to be noted, and commented upon, as it goes. (An earlier novel, Jealousy, seems ironically rather closer to my mark, with its deliberately if conspicuously absented narrator, but even here, dialogue’s condensed, summarized, subject to the judgment of someone supposedly not there.) —Project has an appealingly slippery beginning, and I very much enjoyed the energy of the opening of Recollections, but: and you can tell me all you like that the tortured women and girls are not women and girls but texts subjected to figurative mutilations, it’s all metaphor: and I wouldn’t want to dismiss him as little more than a dirty old man: still. The dirty old man bits are boring. —He’s excessive, yes, but very (sadly) conventional in his excesses; somewhere along my Robbe-Grillet surf I bumped into someone noting that his taste in lingerie is very Victoria’s Secret, which bon mot I’ve lost and can’t directly cite, apologies. His id is freed, sure, to set down whatever he might like from his subconscious, but none of it’s interrogated or investigated—merely indulged.

And it’s all a little too Screwfly out there right now to put up with any of that for whatever else might be on offer.

The only reference to any world outside of this setting is the description of a global economy whose elaborate rules and regulations, tariffs and taxes, aim at collecting wealth, either to maintain social status, or to support a corrupt state or government whose interest in money is rivaled only by its own complicity and participation in the perpetration of sexual torture. The socio-economic world of the book might not stand up to scrutiny as a model republic, but it does, overall, reflect Robbe-Grillet’s mistrust of laws, authority, and righteousness.

—the Translator’s Preface to
a Sentimental Novel

Speaking, then, of women in trouble—I noticed the other night that Lynch’s Dune had returned to Netflix, so I put it on as I was cooking (pasta with the simple kale sauce, I think); I like the rhythms of it, the soothingly whispered internal monologues, the charming hoke, Brad Dourif’s tightly hinged mentat, Big Ed drawling Stilgar’s stilt, and dang if those worms aren’t still somehow majestic. But this time I happened to look up from whatever it was I was doing (slicing ribs out of kale leaves, maybe, while the water built to a boil) as the leaving Caladan sequence began—

—and was struck by a couple of notions as it unreeled. The first, as the bizarrely mutated and poorly matted Guild Navigator floated up through spice-soaked light to fold space, and travel without moving, is that this time, I was immediately, almost painfully struck by how unutterably similar the moment is to a moment in Part 8 of the Return: the Giant, floated slowly up in a corner of the extra-dimensional movie theater, tilts supine as a glittering galaxy is spun about his head, and the golden pearl of Laura Palmer that he creates is doubled by the worlds the Navigator spits. —So utterly unexpected, so magically, shockingly beautiful, those painfully awkward forty-year-old special effects striving to depict something impossible, this electrifying connection with something so much sleeker, more assured, just as mystifyingly impossible. The hair stood up on the back of my neck; I went back to slicing kale.

The other notion, less disruptive, more germane: a moment earlier in the Dune clip—it’s all a bit stagey, elements almost collaged onto the screen, a planet, a moon, the great distant column of the heighliner, the gracefully orderly arcs of countless Atreides shuttles lofting slowly, stately toward it. Nothing looks or feels “real”—the lighting, the motion, the construction of the ships—but the effect is still somehow effective. It’s satisfying, in a way that meticulously worked out computer models with reams of lore behind every panel and strut to show us what it “really” would’ve looked like would not, could not, I mean I’ll step it back to might not, but that meticulousness and the working-out and the drive toward a “real” obviates the dreamlike meditativeness Lynch is striving for, that would short-circuit depiction and perception to reach straight instead for the experience, in all the many and varied senses of the word, the world, of something so unutterably impossible. —I found myself thinking of, of all things, Ladyhawke, and of how the transformations were not depicted, no, but suggested—shots of eyes, and feathers, a wing, spread, and the rising sun, which were all so much more effective, so much more satisfying, than the most “realistic” depiction of Michelle Pfeiffer morphing into a hawk could ever have managed to be.

An objective medium—cinema—reaching for subjectivity when its stock-in-trade fails. A subjective medium—prose—reaching for objectivity to force those moments when its stock-in-trade will fail. —In either case, in both cases, by frustrating expectations of what can or should or ought to be done, by leaving negative a space that positively should’ve been filled, the art, the expression, invites requests demands allows the reader, the viewer, the audience to step in, to fill in, to become the God of this or that particular gap, to assemble these subjective glimpses into a rendering of what it might’ve objectively been like, to shuffle these objective glimpses until the subjective meaning of them all becomes graspable if not clear.

Cinematic prose; prosaic (ha!) cinema. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking of. How’ve you been?

No, when you’re in it, you’re in it. You believe in it, otherwise it’s just having fun, and I’m not interested in that.

—Catherine Robbe-Grillet