Weak in Comparison to Dreams

by James Elkins

For years, Samuel Emmer has monitored bacteria levels in drinking water for the small city of Guelph.

He is content to focus on dangerous life-threatening single-celled organisms as his grasp on his own life recedes—and with it, family and friends. To be sure, it is more than a little surprising when Samuel learns that he has been appointed to the city’s Zoo Feasibility Committee. Even more so, that he is being tasked with interacting not just with animals, but human beings. His travel to zoos around the world and gather information on the stereotypical behavior of animals in their enclosures—the city of Guelph aspiring commendably, if naively, to a cruelty-free habitat for its animals. It is in Tallinn, Estonia, that the dreams start for Samuel. He is in a vast wooded landscape; there is a fire burning in the distance; and it is coming his way… 

Weak in Comparison to Dreams, by the historian and art critic James Elkins, is like no other novel you have ever read, even as certain inspirations, from Sebald to Tokarczuk, are clear. With an astounding breadth of knowledge and playful courage, Weak in Comparison to Dreams reignites our love for the ambitious novel with experimentation that never lacks intention, and whose empathetic scope explores the deepest aspects of our individual humanity.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

576 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 5, 2023

About the author

James Elkins (1955 – present) is an art historian and art critic. He is E.C. Chadbourne Chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also coordinates the Stone Summer Theory Institute, a short term school on contemporary art history based at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Reviews

[endrju · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous. Frighteningly so, and for at least two reasons. Frightening, I mean. Each chapter ends with a dream sequence consisting of a series of photos of forest fires with a short text. As soon as I figured out that the images were of an approaching fire, I started to feel uneasy, because it can only mean that something momentous is about to happen. And it does happen. The second source of fright is the description of the zoos and the animals in them. The description of a blue monkey almost made me cry, but all other animals are in awful condition too (how wouldn't they be all locked up?). These are just two aspects of the novel, which is dizzyingly complex in its weaving of meta, para, inter, and non-textual elements. Perhaps the most frightening thing of all is that it all actually works. I also have to mention all the summarized "scientific articles" that sound like complete and utter crackpots wrote them (I haven't googled them yet, hopefully they're fictional), and the last part about the music. I really need to hear those compositions because some of them sound like what I've been looking for (becoming a machine as a solace, indeed). I'd go back and read it all again in a heartbeat, only if I had more time.

[Christopher]

This is a novel that expands what is possible in the form. It is a novel written by an academic, someone who has studied the history of art (and written about it), and who is a deep reader and astute critic of literature and art more broadly construed. So, it is no surprise that is a work that anticipates its criticism, and incorporates them into the work. A work of art aware of its working as the work of art working. Difficult to execute.

For example, the use of the landscape and fire images in the dreams (I will not cover the use of the musical notation, which problematizes everything I am about to write here—the musical curation, emotional evocation, suggestiveness, location within music history, the music as image—like a word also being a picture of the word, the music as paratext, the author’s own alterations of the original scores, etc, etc.).

Elkins is aware of the use of the visual image embedded into a text. This is straight up stated. He’s an authority on this via studies on W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole. So, if he’s going to be faithful to his own “Four Sour and Stringent Proposals for the Novel” then he is going to be in conversation with these and contribute something new. (here’s a link to the referenced article/manifesto: https://www.academia.edu/116188791/Fo...)

You should read his “manifesto” yourself, but an important line that will serve this review is: “A complex novel is one that keeps you wondering, keeps you working to understand what the author thinks they're doing, and does not ever answer your questions. When you finish a genuinely complex novel, all the guesses you had while you were reading will be wrong, and the novel will only be like itself, and not like any other novel.”

I think Elkins has done this in this work. I finished the novel feeling like new capacities were opened. Language mutates.

For me, this novel is a little like “bad code” in that it sets off the interpretation function but then undermines working theories and is ultimately left irresolvable, which fuels a renewed sense of trying to find patterns, and failing again. Except that in code, the script attempts to run and when faced with a problem, or an infinite loop, an error code is produced. But there’s no fixing Elkins novel. Each interpretive failure on the reader’s part somehow invigorates.

So, back to the images in the text. At first, they appear as a strange sort of astute ekphrasis. This is at odds with Sebald, whose images (in the works I’ve read) function more as suggestive spectres or mood casters, and are varied. The images are mostly barren landscapes, in black and white. And they’re a series. They build. Fires smolder and only eventually appear. The reader must ask, why this particular empty landscape. The writing shows you how they’re not empty at all. The reader asks, how did the writer gather these set of images. The dullness of the early images suggest the author traveling into a locale and taking them himself. But this is undermined as the fires grow fierce. There are so many. Over time. Perspectives vary. How were these compiled? How do they, once compiled act on the viewer?

The images accompany the “dreams” which, usually are a bad topic to write about. Have you ever listened to someone talk about their dreams? They are almost always of interest to the dreamer alone. They fade and can have always only have been experienced by the dreamer. They are the most boring inside joke. Dreams are weak in comparison to reality. But this is again undermined by the narrator’s life. He tests water for contaminants. Again undermined when the zoo visits begin to resemble dreams themselves, in which one lives out the fantasy of saying whatever you want to people that you meet. Using the expectations of professionalism and role to see how far you can go. These become almost fantasies. Day dreams. But this is again undermined in that there are “real” consequences for the narrator-character.

Maybe I’ll add more here about the diagrams and extreme data capture calling free will, sanity and levels of consciousness into question.

There’s a lot more to discuss. But I’ll just skip ahead to part where the narrator character is 90 ish. The introduction of the musical notation section brings in lacunae and the experience of multiple media categories. And things here exceed the scope a reaction review.

I know a book is extremely good when it leaves me wanting to write an extended study or monograph on it.

I’ll leave you with this quote from the book: “I only write the reports. I have no control over where they go.” (303)

[T. Augenblick]

I’ve been following Jim Elkins’ intelligent reviews of formally challenging literature on Goodreads for a few years. I always find them insightful and thought-provoking, so I was eager to read his own novel. Folllowing Elkins’ practice, I choose not to give this book a star rating, which is essentially a way of providing data for popularity contests. I will assume that its effects are intentional, and that those who don’t care for them simply aren’t its intended audience. I’ll try to describe it objectively, making a variety of observations without passing final judgment.

When acute critics try to create their own fiction, the first obstacle may be their own judgment, which is so sharp it can create fatal writer’s block. If they do produce something, the text may strain so hard to be original and intellectually challenging that it becomes a gigantic cryptic crossword with no accessible human motives—no emotional grip. (Finnegans Wake is arguably the ultimate example.)

Elkins’ 600-page novel avoids these traps. The book keeps the reader’s mind engaged, but I was surprised by how accessible most of its vocabulary is (there are some exceptions, such as “anankastic” and “candent”). The reader is rarely left in the dark about what is happening, although of course the deeper meaning of the action is debatable. The novel’s structure is also straightforward—at first, anyway: the narrator visits a series of zoos (which he could have visited in a somewhat different order); his accounts of his visits alternate with his descriptions of a series of imagistic dreams that bring him closer and closer to wildfires. As for emotion, the main focus of the book is the narrator’s wrenching existential crisis. The causes of this crisis remain somewhat obscure to him and to the reader, but that is not unrealistic.

Literary fiction has more antiheroes than popular fiction, since literary authors may feel free to break rules such as “save the cat” (have protagonists do something kind early on, to make the reader identify with them). An early example is the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. An extreme case is William Gass’s The Tunnel, a formally inventive book narrated by a revolting antisemite. Elkins’ narrator, Samuel Emmer, is hardly so bad, but he does not do much to endear himself to the reader. Since his backstory is sketchy, we learn about him mostly from his rude behavior in the zoos and his thoughts during those visits, which are mostly harsh (though often amusing) fantasies about his tour guides. Then again, he gets increasingly exercised about the sad lives of the zoo animals, which could be seen as a huge way of “saving the cat,” or at least wishing you could. Emmer is also characterized as obsessive-compulsive and inconsiderate: he has an assistant whom he carelessly describes as Vietnamese at one point, though later in the book he correctly calls him Thai.

Dreams, as represented in fiction and film, are usually strange stories that link bizarre events and things. The dreams here are different: a series of visions, with little narrative context and a clear content that is frightening but not weird. (I have had both kinds of dreams.) The narration includes many comments on the nature of dreaming, so either the dreams are lucid, or the narrator is analyzing them from a later, waking standpoint. Given the all-too-real effects of climate change, these visions of wildfires would be strong and disturbing without any symbolic supplement. Nevertheless, it’s impossible not to read them symbolically, especially since the narrator bluntly concludes that they represent the collapse of his own mind. The dilapidated zoos and the compulsive behavior of their animals are also obvious parallels to Emmer’s own mind and acts.

After the collapse of Emmer’s sanity and career, we are surprised by a new voice in the last portion of the book: Emmer as an old man, some forty years after the crisis. The nonagenarian Emmer says he is not the same person as the one who experienced a breakdown, and he’s right: his tone, mood, and concerns are quite different. It also turns out that he’s a highly skilled pianist and a connoisseur of twentieth-century avant-garde music; oddly, there was no hint of this earlier.

The formal characteristics of this novel, such as the inclusion of photographs, diagrams, scientific texts, and musical scores, make it unusual, though not pioneering. An obvious predecessor is W. G. Sebald, but some of these techniques were introduced long before Sebald, even in nonfiction and popular fiction: W. E. B. Du Bois begins every chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) with a melody, and in 1936, mystery writer Harry Stephen Keeler published the experimental “documented novels” The Marceau Case and X. Jones of Scotland Yard, which include photos, diagrams, and a variety of other elements.

The use of images to accompany text affects the reading experience. The reader is likely to go back and forth between pictures and words, judging whether the author’s descriptions fit the images (I thought they did). Readers are also discouraged from forming their own mental images, and this effect can create a certain distance from the story. In McLuhan’s terms, the images make the book “colder” than it would be without them, because the reader’s imagination is activated less; we are not engaged as much in fleshing out the novel’s world. In an interesting move, Elkins withholds any images of zoo animals until the main narrative is over, and then presents them in their own, wordless section. This creates effects that I’m still considering. One is, perhaps, an immersion in the non-linguistic life of animals.

The final section of the book is packed with musical scores and descriptions of music, which lead us to a further element: YouTube. At least, it must be the rare reader who is familiar with all the music Elkins discusses, or who would resist going online to listen to it (almost all the composers and pieces described in the book are real). I did the same while reading Richard Powers’ Orfeo. The reader now triangulates among text, score, and recording. Or should I say quadrangulates? For Elkins tells us in a final note that he has altered the original composers’ scores. Is his purpose to avoid copyright problems? Or to encode secret messages in the alterations? If it’s the latter, this would be the kind of “cryptic crossword” approach I first mentioned, and so far I am not enough of a musician, or not patient enough, to discover the messages. In any case, the reader of this final section is provoked to ask a series of questions:

Does the narrator’s description of the music match the score and the recording?

How does the score in the book differ from the actual score? (Many videos on YouTube show you the original score, so a comparison is possible.)

The narrator claims that the moods of these pieces fit the feelings he had during his middle-age experiences. Do they?

The narrator claims that the prelude-fugue structure matches the structure of the earlier part of the novel. In a general way this is obviously true, but does the parallel work out in detail?

This is starting to look like a set of book-club questions, or suggested essay topics in a college course. I’ll close by thanking Jim Elkins for a thought-provoking novel that deserves to be read not only in college courses, but by many readers looking for an unusual and challenging experience in fiction.

[RF Brown]

"Why do caged animals pace? Because if they stopped, they’d see their cages clearly, they’d see their lives passing." This is an observation by Dr. Samuel, the protagonist in James Elkin’s astonishing, esoteric, and experimental novel Weak In Comparison to Dreams. Samuel is a civil water biologist assigned, despite having no expertise, to travel internationally to deteriorating and winter-lonely zoos and observe the behaviors of mentally ill animals. Diagnosed with zoochosis, some captive animals manifest abnormal stereotypies–pacing, punding, rocking, staring, scratching, self-mutilating, obsessive, repetitive, physical actions that serve no natural purpose in unnatural environments. Samuel observes at a zoo in Helsinki, a black leopard constantly pacing madly in figure-eight loops inches from the front of its cage. In Estonia, a Chinese quail continually jitters and shakes its head at a fence as if to tell the fence, “No, no, no, you don’t exist.” A pair of otters at the Salt Lake City zoo routinely perform a neurotic choreography of twitches, jerks and somersaults. And at the Zoo in Knoxville, a blue monkey trapped in an endless psychophysical tic, paces on a platform high in her cage, curling her arm over her ear, pulling her head into a twisting flip, then, taking four steps to the other end of the board, repeats the motions again and again, all day long, forever. As Elkin’s writes, “[the monkey] was protesting her intolerable existence… If she did the same thing over and over, each time identically, then time would have to stop.”
Samuel is anguished by the suffering of these animals, the apparent incompetence or denials of the suffering on behalf of the zookeepers, and by the abstracted conditions of captivity itself. He begins the job feeling lost in his own life, but now, cataloging the sensory deprivations of the animals, he sees what being lost really is. He begins to display erratic and difficult behavior toward the human animals on the outside of the cages. He lies about his ethnological credentials, cites made-up absurd scientific research to intimidate the zookeepers, and swears at oblivious zoo patrons. The compulsive behaviors of the animals become parallels to Samuel’s own sense of captivity and hopelessness in his cascading professional and personal life. Samuel's life in the conscious world is a mental cage in which he is losing control. At night, after the contentious zoo visits, he retreats to a strange serenity in his turbulent dreams, although his dreams, poetically described and concretely photographed in the pages of Elkin's book, are of walks through a hellish landscape of forest fires engulfing a North American frontier abandoned by people. Presumable nightmares to us as readers, are to Samuel a disentanglement, an escape to a realm where the impossible expectations and responsibilities of modern adult life are burning to cinders.
Between zoo visits, Samuel studies the broken behavior patterns of zoo animals, depicted in the novel in habitat maps, movement diagrams, tables, equations, and scientific articles. The novel is about Samuel's identification with the caught animals, he is as far from mental health and help as they are, but also more broadly about the intersection of natural order and human culture. The novel suggests how much of our lives are developed routines of repeated actions practiced to distract our human psyche from the terrifying reality that our time is passing and that we have no more control over our future than we do of the moment. Samuel’s disorderly behavior leads him to semiconsciously lose his job, and his life crescendos as he loses his mind. But his failures and losses are also the catalyst to his finding the way out of the pacing figure-eights of his species and out of the self-locked cage. Eventually Samuel finds the paths and lines and equations are not a maze of secret signs but a less complicated, and sometimes beautiful fabric of meaning. Maybe we should all learn to abandon the fear of unfulfillment and find serenity in stretching out on real grass and accepting the peaceful emptiness of the dark but open sky.

[John Caleb Grenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS
James Elkins
@unnamedpress 12/2023

An incredible work of brilliant art, WICTD follows Samuel Emmer, a washed-up burnt-out parasitologist newly thrust into a new career of international zoo inspection, in spite of his lack of experience with or interest in more “charismatic megafauna.”

He is somewhat of a self-made or self-proclaimed expert in animal stereotypical behaviors typically diagnosed in psychiatrically unwell animals living in enclosures, but his lack of expertise in human interaction makes for a fascinating and hilarious storytelling experience by a narrator who is quite reliably unreliable, and becoming moreso all the time. Unhinged burnt-out amoeba nerd? Count me in.

Interspersed with dream sequences featuring wildfire photography, Emmer passes back and forth from his waking life to his sleeping/dreaming one until the two become somewhat indistinguishable. This allows for profound, simply explained meditations on humanity’s own daily “enclosure” within our lives and our minds, and a exploration of the gray area between Truth and Falsehood, Fiction and Dreams, and where madness lives in the middle of it all.

Elkins is a bit of a synesthete with a massive diorama of fields of interest displaying a deep understanding of human psychology, mammalian behavioral sciences, ecology, parasitology, astronomy, music theory, art theory, medicine, and more. (Honestly, is any of it true???) This lends for a complex, but never uninteresting novel that features all of the above plus an incredible sense of humor.

I loved this book. It’s part one of a five part mega novel series with book two coming out this summer by @unnamedpress — and I cannot even WAIT.

Fan of Bolaño, Labatut, Ed Park or Catherine Lacey? Try this out.

“You have never seen this.” - James Elkins

[liv · Rating 5 out of 5]

neededddd this!! strange and unsettling and unlike any other book ive ever read <3

QUOTES:

"Something was wrong with me. I took wrong turns without knowing why. When I got lost, I stayed in place, wondering at the world that mirrored itself endlessly around me. I watched bemused as my relationships faltered."

"Let us call this flight in place. The animal wishes to run. Each observer frightens it, but it has nowhere to go. Forces impinge on it from all sides. Flight in place is a crushing fear that results in no movement whatsoever. If we look closely, we observe the animal is not actually sitting still. It is in motion, because all its muscles are working at once. It shakes and trembles, but it does not move."

"The point was just to remain in motion. The path was the shape of its unhappiness."

"Imagine loving nothing in the world except an animal as hideous as a hyena. Then being spurned. Then being abandoned. You'd have nothing. You wouldn't know what to do with yourself....Maybe stereotypical pacing is a kind of memory, a trauma that has no end. Each despairing animal learns from the ones before it. Their paths are diagrams of their memories."

"Then another part, less sunk down in sleep, a remnant of my waking self, thought: no, this is not a place, but a state of mind. It is a feeling of disturbed calm. Something is going wrong."

"This is what it is like to get older: the details of the world get confused and feeble. The mood of the world becomes strong and insistent. The image of the world grows powerful, it ruins your mind."

"A person like me likes to tell himself he's a secret to himself. It's a point of pride, as if it's an accomplishment not to understand yourself, it makes you deep and fascinating and helps you ignore the fact that you're anankastic, that you have a disorder which requires professional attention."

"The days were too strong."

"Does it matter if your mind becomes disarranged? If you dream about a lonely world where fires burn for no reason? If you get to actually like that world? Even prefer it to the other one?"

"Allende's pieces are sad in the complex way that only isolated people can be."

"Memories like Phorid flies swarmed over Samuel's ruined life and overwhelmed his thoughts."

[Aden · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was terrible, saved from a 1 star only because of some interesting images and setups. I had to skim the last 1/3rd because I just could not finish it. This took me 3 weeks! And it’s not even that long. If I hadn’t have gotten this in hardcover, I probably wouldn’t have finished it. I don’t feel like writing much about it, but would not recommend.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rounded up. Ambitious, haunting, and experimental. Art vs artifice with no clear winner at times.

[Jordan Holmes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fugues in fugues and a lonely dingo mirroring a lonely hyena mirroring the cosmos. This was a whole cartographic system. Hoooooly shit

[Tristan Searle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievable. So impossibly good, how does someone write this f*cking well. I’ve never read anything like this. Actual pure genius. Like what? So original, somehow underrated. Should’ve won the ManBooker Prize by a LONG MARGIN. Hands down easily indisputably and irrevocably among the top 5 best books I’ve read, cannot wait for his next novel.

[Lydia Gargano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I am a forest fire
And I am the fire and I am the forest
And I am a witness watching it” mitski

[Harry Meredith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was unlike any book I've ever read. I went to my local bookstore almost weekly for the past few months and every single time I would gravitate towards this book. I would take it off the shelf and then inevitably place it back, feeling a weird anxiety about pulling the trigger on it. I just finished it last night and I need more time to think about it. This is a book that I'll think about for a long time. It gave me multiple nightmares, and in one instance I was so unsettled that I couldn't fall asleep because I thought of the ramifications of what the protagonist was going through psychologically and applied that possibility to myself. At any point in this book, I can truly say I had no idea how it was going to end. All I knew for certain was an inescapable dread of total dissociation or as I now know- a fugue state. Totally surreal.

[Eddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly a one-of-a-kind book. I haven't ever read anything like this that I can recall. The writing is fantastic. The linkage to music and scientific studies is totally cool - especially the music. I've been talking about learning to play piano for a few years but haven't done so. It would be awesome to be talented enough to play the music incorporated into the book. The author even suggests how you should do that.

If you're interested in reading something like you probably have never done before, I'd pick this up.

[Conner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sebald descent into madness this book keeps its pace and then floors it until the end. Elkins driving faster and faster looks at you as you break the safety barrier of the mountains you have climbed. Somehow you survive the crash and are only left limping in the woods trying to identify some semblance of reality only to realize there is none. Bought the record, can’t wait to listen to it too.

[HAROLD · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you care about what imaginative literature is capable of in the 21st-Century, ESPECIALLY, in the United States, you MUST read this book:

there are still boundaries to push, there are still original yarns to be spun.

full review:

https://haroldrogers.substack.com/p/d...

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Veery good stuff, typos on pp157, 354 and 547. There also seems to be a line break problem on p.458 probably due to a misaligned image on the previous page.

I found this hugely enjoyable and intriguing. It might get a bit heavy-handed with the musical notation stuff at the end but it's definitely worth a read. The pagecount is misleading because there's a lot of images breaking up the text.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[August Waters · Rating 5 out of 5]

gaslight, gatekeep, gradually spiral into madness and watch as you become a shell of your former self dr.emmer! slay!

[Abbey · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a tediously surreal book. I will be thinking about it and its cosmic unpleasantness for awhile.

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

the hyena and dingo will haunt me for the rest of my life

[Nick]

DNF after 250 pages (with minor reasons to follow).

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

"How do you make music without making music? Music without pitches, without notes? You have to try. Otherwise, he said, the music will sing. It may even speak, and we've had about enough of those."

So very original - a book I suspect I will remember, despite my mediocre rating (which I may revisit when it has settled longer). Three perspectives (arranged a, b, a, b, [...], c), never really melding, though each had moments of profundity, beauty, humor.

Economy is a worthwhile, though slippery, tenet. Are the hundreds of pages of zoo visits required to build an artifice the final section can embellish?