UXA.GOV – Blake Butler

[Inside the Castle; 2024]

In the finale of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain, the director commands the camera with a flourish to zoom out, revealing the cast surrounded by the crew and their equipment. In addressing the viewer directly, he brings them in as a participant in the film of which they had theretofore only been passive observers. Blake Butler’s new novel UXA.GOV, published by experimental press Inside the Castle, turns this invitation into a kidnapping, a starting point rather than denouement. With scant warning, the reader is strapped in for a breakneck ride through the nightmare of a dying empire. The result is a dizzying feat that treats Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty as an ante to be upped.

In the introduction, Butler writes that the book “began as a response to John Zorn’s ‘Treatment for a Film in Fifteen Scenes,’” a short text collected in the 2000 anthology Arcana: Musicians on Music. “Treatment” is made up of 254 numbered descriptions of shots organized into fifteen scenes separated by line breaks. The shots are extremely brief: “45. HANGMAN’S NOOSE,” “88. MAN WITH GUN,” “176. TWO MEN WALKING UP A SPIRAL STAIRCASE.” UXA.GOV is organized in the same manner, except that the scenes are separated by blank pages and the shots expanded to paragraphs or pages. The shots in “Treatment” act as prompts for their counterpart in UXA.GOV, the brief images in the former broadened or inverted in the latter. Shot number 88 in “Treatment, “MAN WITH GUN,” becomes in UXA.GOV:

The man with one gold pupil stands in a white room and brings a gun up to his face. He licks the nozzle, winks and winks at no one there, stuck in performance mode even now, as in his prior life he’d been a mime, assigned to patrol the thoroughfares where unmarked kids had hid from the unknown. He’d fed them ice cream with black pliers that in exchange gave him everything they’d need to know of who the children might have been, given the chance in a system less already earmarked in the annals of the last recorded blocks of time, outside this text.

The relationship between two corresponding prompts can be clear, sometimes tenuous and other times hidden. Zorn’s noirish text is suggestive in its brevity, and Butler blows it up like popcorn kernels into a dark fantasy of hellish landscapes peopled with ruthless actors bent on cruelty.

The introduction ends by instructing the reader that the book “is meant to be read as a film; perhaps the kind one might otherwise only be allowed to view through slits in a training helmet deep before being work-released into what remains of the land where America once was.” This refers the reader to Butler’s previous novel, Aannex (2022), in which the phrase “UXA” appears briefly early on. That novel takes place in a future US where authority is hidden but ever-watchful, punishment unremitting and the population yoked in working bondage to ultra-corporations. UXA.GOV develops the project of Aannex; viewed intertextually, the former is like a propaganda film produced in the world of the latter, perhaps watched by Aannex’s Polyana Maskerson. UXA.GOV, seen in this way, reinforces the working of authority and legitimizes the depraved ruling class that wields it.

The hub of authority in UXA.GOV is the Complex, a fortress of shifting dimensions and a redoubt for the scriveners of government. It is “the sum and total of God’s land, all else to be considered in violation of an eternal pact only those who can still read the language from Her body with precision can comprehend.” The Complex performs a similar narrative function as the eponymous castle in Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle, both symbols of bureaucracy and the machinations of power. In Kafka, the castle is impenetrable and its dicta cloaked and mysterious. The Complex is more like a black hole whose gravity the reader is trapped by and can never escape, where the ministers of control are disrobed, their skin flayed and their shining innards removed for use in obscene rituals. The Complex is a dynamic space that grows to house whichever room a given scene needs: “Many believe that the building has been growing, breaking through new ground all on its own, into the earth and far beyond,” and it “wants nothing else but to be allowed to exist and will persist within this at all costs—a behavior once thought only possible in living flesh.”

The Complex is the seat of an imperial, techno-feudal society, at the top of which sits the Woman with Language All Over Her Body. Also called the empress, she is the source of law in the blasted terrain of UXA.GOV: “Her skin is printed all over with a text we cannot read, can hardly see except for how it deflects all other thought. Before Her, there was nothing, you understand, and even if there had been, you’d wish there hadn’t, were you able to remember any stitch of how the world once worked without Her.” She is attended to by a retinue of faceless, priestly drones tasked with snipping off her skin to scry its text for meaning. Despite this culling, her flesh expands until she takes up rooms and rooms inside the Complex. She is both the embodiment of state power and a victim, at turns wrathful and helpless. The harvesting of skin is torture, but it is what gives her monarchical power over the population of the Complex and the viewer themself.

The Complex and its attendant figures make up, in sum, a grotesque and meandering self-parody of sober governmental institutions, where every part of each process, including the end goal, is unknown to every participant. Pleasure and punishment are meted out with abandon, divorced from their normal cues. Hence the frequency of masturbation throughout the novel; the characters simulate the function of government for its own sake and for their own pleasure. Characters die in droves, suffer torture or inflict pain on others in grand rituals that no one perfectly understands, yet they continue on all the same. The shock value of this parade of depravity eventually settles into a deadening new norm.

The state in UXA.GOV has become a self-perpetuating machine, growing for its own sake and exacting obedience for no ulterior purpose. Its subjects are branded with its logo and its empress grows fat merely so as to continue to produce more skin to be harvested, studied, and haphazardly applied by a juridical class. This is the state stripped of any pretense towards benevolence or aid and left with only the drive to control. The French post-structuralists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari developed in Anti-Oedipus (1972) a theory of political philosophy that situated libidinal desire within the state. They wrote that “the State is desire that passes from the head of the despot to the hearts of his subjects.” Butler has revised this to change head to skin, but desire passes nonetheless. UXA.GOV illustrates Deleuze and Guattari’s position that desire is manifest in the workings of statecraft; the Woman with Language All Over Her Body is even described as having “the ferocity of wrath implanted in Her like an anvil where there should be organs,” in a nod to the French writers’ famous concept of the body without organs. Desire in the novel is uncoupled from an object and manifests in cycles of orgasm and disinterested violence. The viewer of the film, and by extension, the reader of the novel, is complicit in all of this. They do not watch safely from the other side of the screen, but are brought into the picture and forced to act. The book seeks to place an oneiric curse on the reader, challenging them to consider their place in the relationship between text and reader, film and viewer.

Addressed in the second person, the viewer is invited to consider what is told to them as personal instruction. The narrator often intimates to the viewer that they have a choice in the proceedings, though these often have strange and irreversible consequences. These choices, offered as if the film were an interactive installation, begin to seem hollow. After all, the narrator tells the viewer in shot number 189, “What occurs inside the film has already taken place in the future and can’t be stopped.” Gradually, through fragments, the world of the novel into which the viewer has been invited is disclosed: the Complex is the seat of what is left of government after a great diluvial apocalypse. Control is tenuous and discipline all the less forgiving. The setting of the novel does not ask to be decoded in terms of a relationship to our world, instead its nightmarish parameters flex and expand, break and reassemble. It is the fluid backdrop to discrete episodes of nauseous body horror, forlorn suffering, and surreal liturgy.

Language in UXA.GOV is a tool of paramount, even regal, importance, but its content is often hidden to its users, audience, or both. The Woman with Language All Over Her Body’s “skin is printed all over with a text we cannot read”; later, she “claws at Her skin until it bleeds, marring the print until it can no longer be received”; a man “cracks a joke in some dead language.” Communication in the novel is nearly impossible, speech divorced from communication, yet this does not diminish its importance. It takes on a magic quality, its efficacy deriving from its being spoken, not its being understood. The Beat writer William Burroughs called language a virus; he was wary of the symbiotic relationship it had established with its host, the human being, and the ease with which it could be used to control. In UXA.GOV, it has turned its hosts rabid and reorganized the infected towards its own reproduction, leaving coherence by the wayside.

The novel does not hesitate to extend this hostility towards comprehension against the reader. The Woman with Language All Over Her Body’s slow growth and the viewer’s growing ensnarement are the closest the book comes to a plot. Passages can fail to cohere and the language of some later shots lose their efficacy after so long spent inside the mirrored halls of the Complex. Shot number 245 begins with the following:

Diamond-colored background. Pixel representing traveler indicates motion across range of impossible planes linked through devastation of their imagination as commanded by crude bottlenecks in fake code broken by replacing the obvious with the ineluctable. Slick wipes of crystal pixels divulge lost landscapes reencoded into fragrance that fills the mask and makes us choke till we black out.

This passage has a poetic appeal, with the rhyme of “crystal pixels” and “devastation of their imagination,” the alliteration of “lost landscapes.” However, the common use in the novel of phrases like “impossible planes” which defy imagistic comprehension stretch the ability of the reader to match them with a mental picture. The failure or success of this language is perhaps beside the point. The prose is often abstract, and the tendency towards meaning-making is intentionally rebuffed thereby. Passages of the book must be appreciated for the sonic quality of the words in sequence without recourse to exegesis. To read the novel is to submit to its style and let it be, to decide that “What does it mean?” is an inappropriate question. Consider shot number 120: “It should feel like every image falls apart; every syllable shredded where it tries to touch another; every sentence stunted where it lays seed. . . . It should seem as if you will never understand and never need to.”

Such abandonment means experiencing a barrage of startling violence. Characters are subjected to Sadean torture, sometimes expire and often resurrect. They are trapped in a cycle of cruelty from which they do not hope to escape. This is transgressive literature in the era of the “For You” page, and reading the novel is like swiping through consecutive videos of people annihilated by rocket fire in a war zone, smashed in industrial workplace accidents, or executed by state fiat without a chance for mercy. The human being is flattened and anonymized in UXA.GOV; characters are frequently masked, or smoke hides their faces, or they are never named and made interchangeable. Besides the Woman with Language All Over Her Body, the only character with a distinguishing title is the man with one gold pupil. Their individual personality is destroyed, but they, in turn, engage in the destruction themselves, following mysterious rules towards perverse ends.

The novel is powerful not for the originality of the world it presents, though it is, but rather for the creeping similarity of its world to our own. One can wonder in faint horror about the kind of society that would produce a film like UXA.GOV, but it is our own: Scrolling through the unending timeline of the internet, bombarded by unfiltered violence and advertising, the modern subject is not so alien to the film’s viewer. The further the reader proceeds in the novel the more they are treated as an accomplice by the narrator. Near the end of the novel, in shot 234, the viewer is asked:

“What do you want me to do right now? Whatever you say. It will be done.” Suddenly there’s a polished steel lock around your neck without a keyhole chained to the silver ceiling, locks around your ankles chained to the floor. You know the question expects an answer. You always knew there’d come a time where you’d be put on the spot for all you know.

In UXA.GOV, complicity has its price, and there is no such things as a passive observer. By reading we are implicated, infected by the language virus and changed irretrievably as its host.

Theodore Sovinski is a writer living in Worthington, Ohio.