Nut: Jobs Author

This author started writing a memoir. Halfway through, the “I” fragmented. Reality slipped. The Confessional Collapser cannot distinguish between what happened to them and what they dreamt happened. The result is a work like Blood and Guts in High School , where the author becomes a character who becomes a prostitute who becomes a Persian slave girl, all while rewriting Nathaniel Hawthorne. Or, more tragically, the works of John Kennedy Toole , whose A Confederacy of Dunces is so perfectly, painfully a product of its author’s isolation and paranoia that Toole killed himself before it won the Pulitzer. The nut jobbery here is not malice; it is a permeability of the skin between self and fiction.

The reader of the nut job author is an anthropologist of the extreme. We are looking for the boundary where belief becomes art and art becomes madness. We want to touch the electrified fence. nut jobs author

This is the most lovable archetype. The Holy Fool writes a 1,200-page sci-fi/fantasy/horror/romance epic in which the grammar is optional, the plot relies on the concept of “quantum feelings,” and the hero defeats the Dark Lord by crying really hard. Think before he invented Scientology—his Battlefield Earth is a masterpiece of delusional pacing and accidental comedy. Or think of the self-published sensation Vernon Sullivan (a pseudonym of Boris Vian, who pretended to be a black American author translating his own work from a non-existent English original). The Holy Fool believes they are writing the next Dune . They are writing a beautiful, insane, unreadable fever dream. And we are richer for it. This author started writing a memoir

This feature is not about the mentally ill writer as a tragic figure, nor about making light of genuine suffering. It is about the aesthetic of the unhinged: the moment when a writer’s personal cosmology becomes so intricate, so obsessive, and so resistant to consensus reality that the resulting text becomes something other than a novel. It becomes a revelation —or a hallucination. Sometimes, both. The nut jobbery here is not malice; it

Every era gets the nut jobs it deserves. The 20th century gave us the high-modernist crackpots, men like , who, while revolutionizing poetry from his cage in Pisa, also believed that usury and a vast Jewish conspiracy were the root of all cultural decay. His Cantos are a masterpiece of unreadable, beautiful, and morally repugnant obsession. To read Pound is to swim in a brilliant, poisoned stream. He is the patron saint of the genre: a writer so convinced of his own system that the system eats the art alive.