unpublished novel
excerpts from the book at Wroclaw Jan 2025 & Lancaster May 2025, and a published excerpt is forthcoming at CounterText.
Situations returns to the only character ever named in Ansgar Allen’s fictions, the eponymous Gordon of The Sick List. As Gordon is approached, he becomes only more elusive, his intentions unclear, his face indistinct. But Gordon has now achieved notoriety, and this growing fame is what the novel seeks to assemble in the knowledge that fame will only bring erasure.
LANCASTER 2025
COUNTERTEXT
This novel adds further detail to the Gordonalia—the collected rumour-compendium of a life that was never envisaged as liveable. Gordon is not so much a character as a device, or principle (if such a word can be used) of a certain kind of criticism in which the position of the critic remains obscure, both in terms of their chief arguments, these will be multiple and will lack overall consistency, but so too in terms of the moral positions of the critic, they will also remain uncertain and shall invite suspicion. It notices but provides no remedy to the situation of university criticism, which operates in the context of advanced institutional decay and the familiar torpors that accompany performativity—the contemporary university is an idiot machine of sorts, a sophisticated system for embedding the vapid state at the core of what some misleadingly call ‘academic culture’, which raises the question of how the University could have been so vulnerable to the external aggressor which goes by many names, inter alia, managerialism, anti-intellectualism, neoliberalism, and so on, and whether or not there was something resolutely pedestrian and so anti-intellectual already embedded in its so-called intellectual heart—these are the conditions from which Gordon emerged. Divergent writing offers little, even if this little (in such contexts) can still be a large amount, the possibility of some kind of break with established forms, a glimpse at alternative thinking practices, and perhaps too the added effect of maintaining a disposition, or an outlook, slightly out of kilter with everyday performance. This is the performance a university employee will have to perform in order to remain, not so much employed (the idiot machine will happily sack the polite and industrious), but not entirely disliked by those they work amongst.
Ansgar Allen 