When I get bored I go up to a stranger and spin them to face away from me so I can count the disks in their spinal column. ‘Do not fear me,’ I whisper, ‘I am counting.’ Some strangers weep into their hands, some run - some cannot run fast enough to escape me. ‘Do not run from me,’ I whisper directly into their ears, ‘I am counting on you not to run. Do not fear me. I am counting.’ Some punch my face and stand over me, breathing hard. When I track them down and appear upon their doorstep I whisper, ‘Do not punch me, I will fall. Do not run from me, I am counting on you not to run. Do not fear me, I am counting.’ Some call the police and have me arrested and placed in to a prison. When I find them years later and stand at the foot of their bed, I whisper, ‘Do not call the police, they will arrest me. Do not punch me, I will fall. Do not run from me, I am counting on you not to run. Do not fear me, I am counting.’ Some club me to the floor, bind me with steel cable, set fire to me and roll me into garbage. When I return in their old age, a barely human remnant, I whisper, ‘Do not club me to the floor, bind me with steel cable, set fire to me and roll me into garbage, I will be harmed. Do not call the police, they will arrest me. Do not punch me, I will fall. Do not run from me, I am counting on you not to run. Do not fear me, I am counting.’ To understand, surely, is to forgive?
THE RETRIAL
Jeff Lint’s interpretation of Kafka’s The Trial was that the guilt felt by K - and depended upon by the state - derives from his having allowed the state to become so powerful in the first place. K therefore ultimately accepts his punishment.
In Lint’s story ‘The Retrial’, K feels no such guilt because he allows no such influence and storms into every circumstance like a berserk Touretter, somehow spanning the most chasmic beartraps by sheer velocity of mischief.
Lint’s K is a classic Lintian hero - individual to the point of parallel-dimensionality. In his novel Jelly Result Lint would portray the maintenance of oppression by automated human patch-and-repair, those dependent systems simultaneously and constantly preying on the life force of its maintainers. This is Lint’s idea of hell and he revels in the hero’s disengagement from it. His attempt at an Asimovian short, ‘The Robot Who Couldn’t Be Bothered’, portrays a robot whose apparently faulty inactivity is discovered to be the result of ‘eleven million nodes of personal consideration’. The entire second half of the novel I Am a Centrifuge is taken up with a volley of justified sarcasm so detailed and complete as to have its own visible lungs and nervous system. The hero in Lint’s story ‘Bless’ awakes one morning to find that he has no tentacles. Alarmed, he dashes out to discover that nobody else has any tentacles either and all claim in bafflement never to have had any. As Michael Hersh has observed, the metaphor points up ‘a moral or ethical sensibility which, unheld and unrecognized by anyone else on the planet, is not communicable’. In most Lint stories this sensibility is that of honesty and independent thought.
In ‘The Retrial’, Joseph K visits the zoo one morning to be greeted by two warders, Franz and Willem, who tell him he’s under arrest. He laughs good-naturedly, asking to see their underwear. They refuse, and this lack of reciprocity - their assumption that he must obey their commands while they need not obey his - is what seems to spark K’s apparently uncooperative attitude. An Inspector is stood scowling nearby but since no introduction or instruction is given and all is left to some unspoken assumption, K begins to shudder in place like a dodgy steam tank, his convulsions building as though toward some terrible outburst. At the apex his head sags like a bag, splitting to release precisely eleven scorpions on to the ground. K himself collapses like a rotted scarecrow and soon, kicked and scattered by the fleeing crowd, is no longer really in evidence. He is at the court, kicking the outer wall of the Usher’s cabin. ‘“I’m naked”, he thought, almost amazed: “First being born, and now this. No trousers for me.”’ When grabbed by K, the Usher sees that the complicated epaulets on K’s shoulders are actually the skulls of rabbits. He pleads with K to get off, that he has his own troubles, but K is adamant about doing what he sees as his duty. Finally four under-ushers try to pull them both out of the cabin but are foiled. The scene cuts to what appears to be several days later, as the Usher lays inert amid a jumble of steaming wreckage. There is a strange slamming sound as the Usher’s eyes start open.
Thus begins a course of what Jean-Marie Guerin has called ‘ecstatic disregard’ in relation to memo-level fascism: ‘Without this undercurrent of beatific irreverence it is impossible to pin down Lint’s Joseph K’s complete lack of need or desire to become involved with the processes of oppression. It should be noted also that the “berserk stenographer” style in which Lint relates the story is important in allowing these situations to actually appear less philosophically interesting than they are.’
Lint’s K tells the story ‘Beside the Law’, in which a man from the country comes to the door seeking admittance to the Law, but the guard says he can’t come in now. So the man constructs a precise replica of the door and locates it beside the first one, placing a sign above it for ‘$20 a blowjob’ and waiting for trade, which is brisk. Finally, when the guard at the first door is about to die, he asks why people stopped coming to his door. ‘That door could be profitable only for you,’ the man from the country says. ‘And now I’m going to close it.’
Like Kafka’s K, Lint’s has a mind of his own, but unlike that K, he has a breathtaking intuition for the lateral response: a sort of laser-guided effrontery. When asked where he was on a particular evening, K replies: ‘Well, I’ll tell you - if you have any money?’ Outraged, the Magistrate’s response is cut short by his perceiving what seems to be a mere sheaf of undulating bacon fibres where K had previously been standing.
Anyone who has actually broken official protocol will know that at best it sends its agents into a sort of contentless whirl which does not have the vibrancy of honest panic, nor even that of genuine surprise - they seem merely to swerve from familiar bureaucratic rails onto some of the minor, less used branches of evasion. Nothing is ever changed, admitted or learned. Yet in the world of ‘The Retrial’ some effect can be had; perhaps by the sheer diagonal intensity of K’s responses. Consider the cathedral scene - while you or I might merely windmill our arms and puff our cheeks out a bit, K delivers a roundhouse to the priest by detonating into a perfumed cloud of dandelion seeds and buff-coloured smoke. The priest, who had been ‘smiling like a warship’ only seconds before, now crouches on the floor like a spider, ‘karking and keening’ - he seems to have been both deafened and confused by the blast.
Recent critics have suggested that the satirical accesses of Lint heroes are a result of intense tetraneutron activity, supposedly explaining their combination of precision and apparent chaos. Hypercomplex satire operates by applying social rules in the ‘wrong’ contexts such as those of logic, morality or honesty, and the four-prong tetraneutron cluster (the four neutrons of which will arrive simultaneously if fired at a carbon target) would seem the perfect structure for it - all the more entertainingly so as the phenomena’s existence is doubted. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of Physics, vol 29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements formed after the big bang was inconsistent with what most people now believe and, even worse, the matter created would be far too heavy for the current model to cope.
The theory stated in Lint’s story ‘Death by Fred’ is that ‘sabotage is best accomplished by channelling bad luck’. In Lint, until you’re an individual, you’re not in contention. This is why Lint could never write about the sort of characters that appeared in other people’s books. Almost every scene has a sort of surreal exultation to it.
At the moment his case is due to be heard,
