Again and again, Carlos Labbé’s narrator repeats “I am he.” This declaration coincides with the unspecified identities that roam throughout Spiritual Choreographies, which is a novel in multiple modes, or a grafting of prose onto the form and idea of a record album, or a chopped and screwed version of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It’s difficult to define the result of Labbé’s work, the text that sits between the covers of the book called Spiritual Choreographies: a novel, a fable, a mixtape. The strategies Labbé uses are esoteric, but not wholly frustrating for the reader. Something matters here, if in a Beckettian way: something indefinable presses on the text, makes it urgent and strange.
However, it’s within the reader’s rights to find the book impossible, since every apparent structure breaks down across the page count. At first, it seems as if the chapters are arranged in pairs: an abstract, italicized chapter (“I am he, the other, she, you, they”), and a subsequent “correction” chapter, which shares or alters the first line of the prior chapter, but narrates with slightly more comprehensibility (“Ten minutes later they were all sitting in silence around the kitchen table”). These chapters are numbered backward, starting at 13. But then the number eight repeats for two correction chapters. There are four chapters numbered seven. A section in the middle of the book entitled “Pastortale,” with new, animal characters, is numbered forward, with three six chapters and two eights. Afterward, the Correction chapters resume but have new names: “Bonfire,” “Beaching,” “The Gleam Is Only in the Pupil of the Eyes.” We get to chapter zero and then count up to two before the book closes.
By then, the reader cannot avoid the fact that the book has no recognizable patterns. Spiritual Choreographies deliberately presents itself as untidy and lopsided. Nothing about it, except the sheer power of its prose, gives the reader peace or confidence. That causes a certain frisson — makes reading feel precarious and strange. But for certain readers, it’s going be achallenging if not enraging experience.
What of the plot? The characters? It becomes clear eventually that one of our narrators is a paralyzed man, dictating a story via eye-blinks à la Jean-Dominique Bauby. Whether that story forms the italicized chapters, the corrections, or some other narrative altogether remains unknown. Whether the paralyzed man relates a true history — a story regarding a musical group composed of himself (“he”), his brother (“the other”), and the girlfriend of one of the brothers (“she”) — also remains unknown. It’s a story which leans on subjectivity and emotional resonance rather than consistency and tension. The Band (or perhaps it’s called Cueros? or Maria y las Primas?) was evidently very famous, and possibly more famous for its artistry than for its accessibility, which seems appropriate in a book like this. Whether the brothers are actually one man, whether it’s one band or several projects, whether this is all invented or heavily revised by an invisible, “correcting” editor … the questions pile up thicker and deeper the more one tries to untangle Labbé’s riddles. Much of this book floats up in the atmosphere instead of descending to the page. That makes the text a heady, unique experience, but it also makes a reviewer sound nuts.
Spiritual Choreographies has two central virtues: the verve of its prose, and its possibilities. The prose contains many finely drawn details but only mere sketches of people. Labbé explains it best:
The autobiography of The Band, underlined with the lowering of a brow, is neither the story of the other nor of her enlightenment, nor a character study starring the vocalist, no, it is the barbed wire, the streams, the tracks, the signs, and the pathways that divide these lands as they connect them. The mass of flesh, weaving together muscle, skin, tendon, vein, lymph, nameless matter, nerve, and bone doesn’t constitute a specific organ: it is our body.
The story always feels grounded in a genuine experience, in objects and spaces, in clothes and colors. But the identities attached to those experiences are loose, unseated, as in dreams when the dreamer is everyone and no one.
As for the possibilities of the text, Labbé never forecloses the dishonest nature of fiction. Immediately before the Pastortale section, “she” tells the vocalist that “together, they were going to have a son and every night, to help him fall asleep, they would take turns telling the boy — she used that word — “variations of the same fable.” The section that follows could be described in just that way. Later, at the end of a chapter composed of just a few very long sentences, in which the characters haplessly set out in a leaky boat, the narrative offers up the idea that it’s just a narrative: “The thing was that out of all of us she, he, and the other were the only ones who knew how to swim, so it is likely the rest never made it to the boat and it is even more likely the three of us just stayed there drinking on the sand.” This destabilizes the entire chapter, and some of the prior chapter as well.
Reading Spiritual Choreographies reminded me of watching Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — a masterpiece that also lacks balance and a conventional narrative pattern. Its uneven sections circle around ideas and visuals rather than developed characters or extended plots. One’s memory of the movie is of colors, sounds, the sensation of weightlessness — not the personalities of the characters involved or even the actions they took. Arguably, 2001 depends upon music more than most films to achieve its effects. Spiritual Choreographies narrates both life and music, oscillating between the two, and attempting to ascertain what “the choreography needs.”
The choreography needs a rhythm, a rhythm that isn’t moving.
I am he. He is that.
That is the beat. The beat is distant.
I, on the other hand, your shadow and I.
What was your shadow doing at night in the waves?
The following chapter begins “The choreography needs a rhythm.” Most chapters start this way, in paired assertions of what the choreography needs, each a little different from the last: simultaneity, a libretto, its place, three. Whoever is writing, and whoever is making corrections, are both working something out related to “the choreography,” some essential question about life and music that remains hidden from the reader. The stress of that question, of attempting to answer it and of correcting its answer, recalls Beckett, as does some of the rhetoric in the Pastortale section: “It is unjust that justice is a paradox and not a concrete fact: justice does not exist and Justice does not exist, but we cannot not have it.”
Perhaps the correction takes place between music and the narration of music. Or between soul and body. “I correct and let myself be corrected.” The phrase “spiritual choreography” hardly makes sense at all, but the gap between the soul’s dancing (spiritual) and the body’s dancing (choreography) could be the distinction between the italicized narration and the correcting narration. Or this could be speculation, and Labbé may intend something else entirely. It would not surprise me.
Fortunately, Labbé has such skill with words and details that the reading experience, though abstract, is always pleasurable. Hisbookengenders large, confounding questions, and answers remain excitingly out of reach.
[Published May 21, 2019 by Open Letter Books, 120 pages, $13.95]