Illustration of the anthology by Félix González-Torres
The international publishing corporation ;paranoia publishing group ltd. presents the compilation The Anthology of Non-Existent Books on February 6 in Art Museum of Estonia Kumu in Tallinn. Eighteen authors from Estonia are represented in this tour-de-force of experimental literature. The book is parallelly in Estonian and English, which gives an international dimension to the local radical literature.
If this anthology would not exist, neither would these books. They are ghosts from beyond the binary axis of non-existent and existent. This in-betweenness talks of their potential, articulation on the verge consciousness, and language before actual and fully realized existence in time and space. The books’ non-existence shows us the complicated relationship between reality and fiction, the meta-fiction, more precisely a literary technique where a “non-existent book” is mentioned or quoted in the fictional environment of the book (often by a non-existent author), thus creating a double-fiction.
The anthology is the outcome of a project aiming to map the scene of experimentalists working in non-place/terra incognita between literature and contemporary art in Estonia. Because of the rigidity in the Estonian understanding of “art” and “literature”, and smallness of the local language, the textual experimentation, or experimental literature, does not get much support from publishers or readers. Thus the scene is marginal and therefore invisible and non-existent itself.
According to literary critic Aare Pilv this scene is: “…a network of authors who have been active since the end of the 20th century, mainly (but not only) in Tartu. They can be characterised as having an experimental attitude and maintaining distance from the literary mainstream, but at the same time they do not try to be consciously polemical or innovative, because they partly repeat the techniques of the 20th century avant-garde and, what is perhaps even more important, they sidestep the dialectics of innovating or altering the literary canon.”
While fiction-in-fiction as a literary technique is totally dependent on the context, then this book skips over the frame story phase with a technical solution, the context for the non-existent books is the real world, instead of books. The Anthology of Non-Existent Books follows the Borgesian economy that compressed information is an energy cluster. The hunger for meaning, and the predisposition to believing in the possibility of hacking the concealing method and the description’s rationality, is powerful enough to create an active field of meaning, and that way the texts start to circulate as if proving their factual basis, of which the field of significance feeds on and develops further. As a mind experiment, this positive feedback loop does not only show the predispositioned factors in the creation of meaning, but avails some parts of the way in which people hunger for, construct and validate meaning, and fear the meanings disappearing, also how the created field of meaning structures social groups.
The anthology presents (and carefully hand-picks for the readers) a good selection of the most psychotic, hallucinating transborder dataflows and psychogeographies, immanence-crossing and irreversible deterritorialisations, textual manifestations of states of mind, texts too mystical or hermetic to exist, which are only visible through the backdoor of consciousness and senses, during its opening times.
;paranoia publishing group ltd that is publishing the anthology is an international publishing company, and its name comes from the Finno-Ugric words para (absolute) and noid (shaman, stalker, prowler). The semantic shift in the name is characteristic to the publishing group’s agenda, which focuses on innovation: experimental and non-creative literature, bibliomorphs, multiples and text-based art – statistically the most abnormal texts in the modern literary market. The aim of ;paranoia publishing group ltd is responsible action, consumer satisfaction and destruction of reality.
The Anthology of Non-Existent Books
Compiled by Kiwa
Designed by Tuuli Aule
Translated by Annika Laas
Edited by Jaak Tomberg
© ;paranoia publishing group ltd. 2014
The book can be purchased from online: www.paranoia.ee [1]