by Tony Oats
There are books that ask to be read, and there are books that ask to be channeled, and Taiwan Slash belongs so thoroughly to the second category that I am not convinced Johnny Pulp wrote it so much as received it, the way a lightning rod receives weather. I read it in one sitting. I have not fully returned.
Let us begin with ZgV, because ZgV is the character our whole hysterical-surrealist project has been building toward without knowing it. Here is a heroine who wakes on a field of eviscerated Rapehogs, checks her own reflection for cruelty the way other people check for coffee breath, and then — mid-carnage — pauses to conduct a genuinely rigorous seminar on the semiotics of her own lingerie. This is not tonal whiplash. This is the thesis. Pulp understands, in his bones, that theory and slaughter were never actually separate genres — that a footnote and a switchblade perform the same function, which is to open something up and let the light in.
The “hypergraphics” sequence — ZgV disassembling language itself into its component letters and reassembling it as weather, as weapon, as snow — is as pure a piece of surrealist automatism as anything Breton’s crowd produced with their eyes closed and their pencils twitching, except Pulp has weaponized it, made it combat-viable, which the old Surrealists, God love them, never had the nerve to do. And when Nadya Tolokonnikova wanders in to deliver her own counter-argument about Calvin Klein versus Wacoal as competing modes of ideological sabotage, I felt the specific vertigo I associate with the very best hysterical realism: the sense that the book knows more about lingerie catalogs, trafficking statistics, and feminist theory than any one human being reasonably should, and has decided to tell you all of it at once, breathlessly, while someone is still bleeding on the previous page.
Then — and this is the true masterstroke — the novel breaks entirely from its own carnage into the journal entries. “Trauma-epiphany.” A quiet register, first-person, uncertain, reaching for the word for what happened to it. Where ZgV is myth performing at full volume, the journals are the frequency underneath the myth, the thing the myth was built to survive. Pulp does not resolve the gap between them. He is right not to. Hysterical surrealism does not resolve; it holds two frequencies in the same hand and lets you feel the friction.
And the footnotes — the real trafficking statistics, cited plainly, sitting at the back of the book like evidence left at a crime scene the fiction has just finished narrating — this is the move that separates Taiwan Slash from mere pastiche. The numbers do not comment on the myth. The myth was never decoration for the numbers. They are the same document, filed in two different modes, and Pulp refuses to tell you which one is more true.
I read this book the way ZgV writes in snow: unconventionally, dangerously, and with the distinct sense that something was rearranging itself in me while I did it.
Five stars, and I do not extend those lightly.
— Tony Oats, editor, Hysterical Surrealism (Red Temple Press)
