Drone and Apocalypse by Joanna Demers | Book Review

"An Exhibit Catalog for the End of the World"

Any good book will indubitably raise questions. And, for all practical purposes, this should be the only criteria for judging literature; for what better bridges the gap between the abstruse aesthete and the casual genre reader than the desire to inquire further? A piece of art should be highly engaging, and, if the last hundred years or so have taught us nothing, there are numerous (and some obscenely unorthodox) ways of achieving this engagement. Demers, while her garden of inquiries is certainly large and various, contains a single prize-winning fruit of a question:

What is this?

It’s a question that, in its unassuming fatuousness, leads us on a wild goose chase of conundrums. A quick glance at the online discourse of her book confirms this: Demers’ faculty page on the University of Southern California’s website calls it a novel, however, in an interview she says otherwise: “The thing about the book is that it has a fictional premise, but it’s not a novel. It’s not a fictional story.” This very same interview calls Demers’ book a “story” despite the author’s claim it is not. Interestingly enough, the book’s fictional premise also has a hat to throw in the ring, purporting itself to be the “exhibit catalog” of an art gallery showcasing the writings and “conceptual artworks” of the late (and fictional) Cynthia Wey. Any semblance of a novel (and indeed, as I will explain later on, the fictional premise itself) is implied by the apocalyptic through lines of Wey’s work, which is presented to us as if we were exploring this gallery ourselves.

This confounding premise, Demers notes, was inspired by the writings of W.G. Sebald, an academic turned novelist who perfected his idiosyncratic model for the academic-novel hybrid. Sebald, much like Demers, writes as if “by a ghost.” His seemingly omniscient narrators regale history while continually framing it within the feelings and motivations of the novel’s characters. History per se is thus shown to be a moot conceptualization of the past as he demonstrates its living, discursive presence amongst ourselves. Characters, narrative, and their concomitant emotions are not caught up in history but instead are history. Reading a Sebaldian work is to tune into the spirit box of a more intimate history, one whose ghosts speak to us within the viscerally resonant halls of time.

While I am in no ways an expert on Sebald, the success of his style seems to rest upon a delicate balance between the perceived latent and manifest content of history. Through the manifest details of historical fact is elucidated its latent meaning: in Drone and Apocalypse, Demers uses the fatal conquests of Alexander the Great in the lands of (what is now) Afghanistan to illustrate man’s insatiable desire to witness the ends of the earth, an endeavor that is ultimately self-destructive. This history is related not only to the music of drone artist Köner, whose sonic meditations on the liminal arctic gesture towards apocalypse, but to an anecdote about Alaskan cruises snatching a glimpse of melting glaciers—a symbol of both inhospitable remoteness and our impending climate disaster.

These geographical extremes, and the allegories of Armageddon they signify, reveal its latent content through the analysis given to us by our only character in the book, Cynthia Wey. She is, according to the historical documents found by the future museum curators in this fictional world, a failed artist and a seer of the end times writing from the distant past of the 2000s’. As is typical of Sebald’s works, Cynthia’s voice is never quite her own. She seems to speak from past, present, and future superimposed into an omniscient historian turned doom-sayer. But unlike Sebald’s characters, Cynthia seems, well, lacking in character. This is evidenced by the sparing use of the word “I” and detached, analytic tone of her writings. The book instead focuses on the ideas and their associated Sebaldian histories, leaving vacant quintessential elements of the novel such as plot motivation, descriptions of emotions, or cataloging of action. Cynthia’s detachment from her writing and the world is itself reflective of the unfeeling drone music she loves (a word I would not expect Wey to utter) so much.

Despite this, she is ostensibly the keystone of this book. She is the meticulous engineer connecting history to music to life and back again in an unending ouroboros of ends. However, the utter lack of convincing characterization effaces her authorial voice. Perhaps this is a product of Demers’ style of writing, or maybe reflective of the numbing theme of drone music, but Wey is completely emotionally divested from the contents of the book. Sebald’s ghostly balance between the novel and history has, in my perception, completely fallen apart. And as a result, the only person left to fill this authorial role is Demers herself.

I have a single anecdote to support this proposition. In writing this article, I discovered Demers had written a second “novel” by the name of Anatomy of Thought-Fiction: CHS Report, 2214 (2017) with the exact same premise as her first book! Far in the future, a cultural institution discovers the writings of a person who attempts to make sense of the world through music, this time replacing its theme of global annihilation with “thought-fiction”—her term for the erroneous opinions we hold despite being aware of their suspect validity. Just as I was thinking that Cynthia Wey (for who else could write something like this?) maybe should have invested in a better therapist, my eyes ceased scanning the book’s blurb and a huge grin appeared on my face.

The purported author is not Cynthia Wey, it’s Joanna Demers. Demers wrote this book both literally and fictitiously.

If we see Anatomy as the successive entry of a series of works that include Drone and Apocalypse, it would seem plausible that the latter is a dry run that was perfected in the former. Demers is, in retrospect, the author of Drone and Apocalypse, a collection of personal essays written by an academic seeking to marry the often dry writing of her discipline with the ubiquitous human tendency towards the visceral. And within this framework, these essays are fantastic. They deftly outline the overlapping of drone music and apocalypse and, whether you agree with her conclusions or not, are displays of a rigorous, probing intellect who deeply cares about their subject matter.

My only piece of advice: if you decide to give this book a spin (and I hope you do), replace all references to Cynthia Wey with Joanna Demers. It will all make a lot more sense.