Joel Katelnikoff's ​Recombinant Theory

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

This appears in our reviews section, but it is not a review, and, because of that, it requires an explanation. Joel Katelnikoff’s collection of essays Recombinant Theory is not yet available to readers, and there is, as of my writing this, no date set for its publication. It was one of several books whose release was canceled at the beginning of this year when the sale of Insomniac Press to a new owner fell through. So, this is not a review. It is, instead, a preview, a discussion of a book that deserves both publication and a readership, written in the hopes of contributing in a small way to stimulating interest in the text. I have based it on the advanced reading copy provided to me by Insomniac Press in the fall of 2020.

Recombinant Theory consists of 10 essays, each constructed out of/based on/responding to the work of another writer: Annharte, Charles Bernstein, Christian Bök, Johanna Drucker, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Erín Moure, Sawako Nakayasu, Lisa Robertson, and Fred Wah. Katelnikoff explains his compositional methodology in his acknowledgements: “In each essay, the title, the section headers, and the sentences in the first section are direct quotations from the writer’s textual corpus. All other sentences are spliced together from diverse materials found throughout the corpus.” The result is a fascinating book in which each essay is unique, marked indelibly by the style and preoccupations of the author out of whose work the essay is constructed, but which also consistently returns to a collection of linked themes, interrogating questions of originality, authority, authorship, etc. The result is a complex and rewarding book that is distinguished by its lyricism and craft.
​
One of the pleasures of reading Recombinant Theory is tracing a particular theme or issue as it wends its way through essays, disappearing in one or two, only to return in another, often transformed, in other terms and a new context. The first essay, “I don’t understand what I adore,” based on the work of Lisa Robertson, takes up the question of authority:

Authority flows into us like a negative space of habit. What code is honest and practical yet irreducible and contingent? Authority is just a revolutionary costume, a diversion that ritually formalizes circulations of meaning across time.
​
Authority flows into us like the formation and transformation of borders. But how to articulate the politics of the vigour of our own language? Authority flows into us like a cadence in the body, and what we hear erupts into architecture. But also the scaffold wants to fall away from a fixed or authorizing value.

Authority, and particularly the question of textual authority, of the boundaries and limits of meaning and who polices them, returns over and over again: 

The ultimate authority is the frame of reference.

[. . .]

We think of days to promote habits of waking and sleeping, nostalgic for the authority of coded procedures.

[. . .]
​
The demand for intelligibility is fostering the bureaucratization of knowledge, authority, rationality, order, control.

Each of these sentences is taken from a different essay in the book, and there are a handful of terms/concepts that one can trace through the collection like this, mapping their mutations and transformations.
​
It may seem strange to write about lyricism in an essay collection, and stranger still to write about it with respect to a collection of essays constructed through the methodology used in Recombinant Theory, but the book is often remarkably well written, offering sentences that are as notable for their rhythm and phrasing as for their insight. Consider the closing paragraph of the first section of the first essay:

​We are furnished by our manners and habits. We adapt to a random texture, and this adaptation becomes a material movement. The codex continuously transforms desire and this has become a life. Here is a point of inexplicable opacity: to illustrate our opinion we’ll ramble through a picturesque landscape of quoted fragments.

The final sentence is welded together by the interplay of assonance, consonance and alliteration, and much the same can be said of the paragraph as a whole. It is rare to see prose written with a poet’s attention to sound, but the book is replete with similar passages. And it is fascinating to watch the shifts in Katelnikoff’s style as he engages with a new author in each essay, not so much reflecting their voice as producing a hybrid style in which the traces of both his and the author’s voices can be glimpsed, but which operates in its own unique register. This is, in short, a remarkably rewarding and stylistically sophisticated book.
​
As I began by saying, this is not a review, but preview, an appreciation of a book that is a unique synthesis of concept and craft. It is my sincere hope that Recombinant Theory will find a publisher who appreciates the thought and care that have gone into these essays, and that many more people will be able to appreciate Katelnikoff’s work.  

---

Aaron Schneider teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, where he also runs the Creative Writers Speakers Series. His stories have appeared in The Danforth Review, filling station, The Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, untethered, and The Chattahoochee Review.  His first book, Grass-Fed, is available from Quattro Books. Visit his website here.