Ben Robinson's The Book of Benjamin

and Joel Katelnikoff's ​Recombinant Theory

Reviewed by Carl Watts

(Palimpsest Press, 2023)

(University of Calgary Press, 2024)

​Maybe one should approach these two texts via two strikingly simple concepts: everyone has a name, and every writer has a series of recurring themes. Robinson’s name isn’t even particularly noticeable, but that’s precisely the point. Something similar obtains in Katelnikoff’s mashups of several authors’ corpuses.
 
Most of The Book of Benjamin alternates between, first, mentions of the name from various sources that run together in all-caps and continue on alternate pages; and, second, prose poems with a familial and biblical theme. For instance, a prose poem starts on page 9 (about the different Bens in kindergarten and forward); another, darker section about a stillborn sister is powerful, especially in the statement that, “It has taken a child of my own to begin to understand that my mother was pregnant not twice, but three times, to consider what she might feel when someone asks how many children she has and what their names are.”
 
The sections of found material underscore the stubborn specificities that inhere in even the most generic examples of print text. Recurring references to Manus Island (a Papua New Guinean island controversially used as an offshore migrant processing facility by Australia, beginning in 2001) connect with Benjamin Robinson-Drawbridge, a New Zealand journalist who seems to have reported extensively on the matter. (An athlete named Ben Robinson-Patch also makes a few appearances.) It’s an information-age coincidence many readers will be familiar with—I, for one, am reminded with some regularity that I share a name with a contemporary scholar of Rhodesia as well as a deceased serial killer.
 
The arrangement of found-text excerpts can also be pretty funny. Page 16 ends, “DIRECTOR OF SALES AT ROBIN / SONS BEN ROBINSON ADDS:,” the line breaks resulting from the constraint seeming to mock the consistency of the book’s premise. Something similar happens when the statement “BENJAMIN ROBINSON IS A LIAR, MANIPULATOR, AND” is followed by a reflective prose poem on the next page, only to resume, “CHEATER. HE WILL LURE YOU IN AND MAKE YOU BELIEVE YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE. I PROMISE YOU YOU AREN’T.” Like a lot of good conceptual writing, The Book of Benjamin dares you to be in it for the long haul, and it also isn’t afraid of being laughed at.
 
The deadpan humour of the found text bleeds through to the other sections: “One of my closest friends is also named Benjamin. People often ask if this is confusing for us, though we lived together for two years and never once confused the other for our self.” Thematically, it comes together in the tropes of interchangeability and seriality: “Growing up, I slept in a bunk bed. My brother and I had separate rooms, so sometimes I slept on the top bunk and sometimes on the bottom”; a few pages afterward, another prose poem reads, “At this point, Benjamin reveals he has recorded his brother’s story in the same way his mother and father recorded theirs—by documenting it in the names of the next generation.”
 
Things change toward the end of the book, several pages of which are comprised of single lines discussing the origin of Ben-Oni, the name the dying Rachel in Genesis chooses for her son before Jacob suggests Binyāmin, i.e., the English-language Benjamin. After this narrative, the book reverts to its usual format, but with an affecting addition to the history of names in Robinson’s family.
 
There are oddball tie-ins with the above themes, not only in the found texts but in the staggered, interweaving narratives that emerge from the prose poems. At one point, a patient assumes Robinson’s father must be Jewish because he is a physician. Conceptual writing has had its supporters and detractors. This makes sense given the genre’s ongoing absorption into a poetry “mainstream” that is often more kinetic and all-encompassing than some avant-gardists would admit.
 
Speaking of names, in Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory, the epigraph from The Death of the Author doesn’t mention Barthes. So, I guess, an opening signal that the text will be taking liberties with the collected writings of several authors.
 
Katelnikoff’s acknowledgements describe his procedure as follows: “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.”
 
Katelnikoff uses individual lines and phrases in a way that reveals the common themes of the writers in question while also yielding something a bit new. For example, the section on Johanna Drucker features the passage,

Classical in our logic, medieval in our illness: the haphazard character of a police state where one is in X country at X time. Repressive power structures are personal boundaries, and media play their role in what is “really” happening. The world we see is digital media; the message is conceived as the material fact of history.

​“In X country at X time.” At the risk of being a little long-winded, I’ll quote a large part of the passage in Drucker’s Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (2014), from which the phrase comes:

If I set up a bar chart or graph, my first act is to draw a set of one or more axes and divide them into units. The con­ventional forms of the graphical display of information, “data,” make use of a formal, unambiguous system of standard met­rics. Charts use simple (if often misleading) geometric forms that lend themselves to legible comparison of values, propor­tions, or the exhibition of state changes across time. Lines, bars, columns, and pie charts are the common and familiar forms. They render quantitative relations with a transparency that seems natural, so that, for instance, if we look at the changes in population across a series of years for a particular location, we can simply accept that from one year to the next rises or drops occurred in the numbers of persons alive in X city in X country at X time. A pie chart showing percentage of resource allocation from national budgets seems com­pletely transparent, self-evident even. A bar chart could com­pare daylight hours at different latitudes, or the average size of men and women in different countries, or the number of hospital beds in different institutions in a single geographical location and not raise a skeptical eyebrow.

​One sees in Recombinant Theory similar ideas condensed into shorter, more conventionally “poetic” (at least prose-poetic) passages. Similarly, the book’s opening section, on Lisa Robertson, weirdly hangs together. It’s at times sort of hard to imagine that these passages are not simply full parts of Robertson’s own texts. Much of it flows together using the ligatures of the authors’ themes and patterns of thought.
 
One interesting aspect of the book is how deliberate references to recombination keep cropping up. In Robertson’s section, the passage,

​Our own language in recombination intersects with our experience, to blend perfectly with a fixed or authorized value, to blend perfectly with art and decay. So we study our fractured emotional syntax. A series of games of chance has situated us as human, but also the scaffold wants to fall away from a series of games of chance

​does so. In Charles Bernstein’s section, the opening line (verbatim, according to Katelnikoff’s acknowledgements) states, “We are trained by expository writing models not to think of essays as combinatorial; that is, that you could, and might well, reorder all the sentences.” Whatever one thinks of Language Poetry, recombination has been part of the game all along.
 
There are interesting sections on Lyn Hejinian and Sawako Nakayasu. Things get a bit rougher with writers like Fred Wah. We all have our biases; I’ll admit that I’m not much of a Wah person. I wonder how many people could tell the recombinations apart from Wah’s original texts. Perhaps this is the point of the project: after all, something similar obtains in its recombinations of texts by stronger writers like Robertson and Drucker.
 
Erin Moure’s section features drinking and Calgary themes. This section, like Bernstein’s, returns to institutional culture, academia, and conferences. This is an instance of the book excavating a real and interesting undercurrent of certain types of academic discourse. A compelling phrase in Moure’s section is “What I am is below your window covered with flowers.” But tracking down all the originals is hard, especially given Katelnikoff’s numerous online publications of sections of the cutups. Christian Bök’s section includes identifiable chunks of ‘Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (2001) and Xenotext (Book 1) (2015), for instance, but it’s often hard to determine the size of what might be swaths of the original material.
 
The cutup technique goes back to Burroughs and has since been filtered through pop-culture figures such as David Bowie. Beyond its aiding of the creative process, I sometimes have a hard time seeing the value in such an approach. The recombined texts sound like the authors—and, of course, the authors have fairly consistent sets of concerns that span their output. Reading the book isn’t so much different from reading the authors’ own works. This is clear especially when it comes to somewhat limited writers like Wah or McCaffery. In these instances, it’s just not clear what recombining is or isn’t doing. A lot seems to depend on the richness of the source texts. The mashups of Robertson’s and Drucker’s works, for instance, yield a lot more, their twists and turns making one question how much is coming from where, and the extent to which there can still be sense in the cutup sense. 

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​Carl Watts holds a PhD in English from Queen’s University and currently teaches at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in mainland China. He has published two poetry chapbooks, Reissue (Frog Hollow, 2016) and Originals (Anstruther, 2020); a short monograph, Oblique Identity (Frog Hollow, 2019); and a book of essays, I Just Wrote This Five Minutes Ago (Gordon Hill, 2022).