John Menick

Portrait of Félix Fénéon by Paul Signac, 1891.

Félix Fénéon — fin de siècle French journalist, art critic, and anarchist — never intended to write a novel. In fact, he never published one during his lifetime. As he said, “I inspire only to silence.” What he did write was fragmentary and often done out of monetary necessity. The apparent low point in his career involved writing a series of short, anonymous blurbs for the newspaper Le Matin. As Julian Barnes explains:

… For some months [Fénéon] was assigned to compose the faits divers column – known in hackdom as chiens écrasés (‘run-over dogs’). He had at his disposal the wire services, local and provincial newspapers, and communications from readers. He composed up to twenty of these three-line fillers in the course of his evening shift. They were printed – unsigned, of course – and read for a quick smile or breath-intake or head-shake, and then forgotten.

Most of the blurbs concerned violent, ironic, and morbid everyday encounters: citizens run over by trains, strikes where no one showed up, household murders. Fénéon — and the rest of France it seems — saw the short writings as worthless ephemera. It was Fénéon’s mistress who collected, without the author’s knowledge, 1220 of these contributions. They were later published as the posthumous book we know today in English as Novels in Three Lines.

Recently, I remembered Fénéon’s story when reading Wikipedia’s entry titled “List of unusual deaths.” The Wikipedia article contains the same morbidity, the same fidelity to odd details, the same impossible situations and not-so-subtle social commentary as Fénéon’s “little novels.” And, perhaps most importantly, like Novels in Three Lines, the list was written anonymously.

What follows are some selections from the article, each condensed and corrected slightly. The full list makes for great reading.

***

1958: Gareth Jones, actor, collapsed and died while in make-up between scenes of a live television play, Underground, at the studios of Associated British Corporation in Manchester. Director Ted Kotcheff continued the play to its conclusion, improvising around Jones’ absence.

1974: Basil Brown, a 48-year-old health food advocate from Croydon, drank himself to death with carrot juice.

1978: Kurt Gödel, the Austrian/American mathematician, died of starvation when his wife was hospitalized. Gödel suffered from extreme paranoia and refused to eat food prepared by anyone else other than his wife. He was 65 pounds (approx. 30 kg) when he died.

1979: Robert Williams, a worker at a Ford Motor Co. plant, was the first known human to be killed by a robot, after the arm of a one-ton factory robot hit him in the head.

1981: Jeff Dailey, a 19-year-old gamer, became the first known person to die while playing video games. After achieving a score of 16,660 in the arcade game Berzerk, he succumbed to a massive heart attack. A year later, an 18-year-old gamer died after achieving high scores in the same game.

1983: American author Tennessee Williams died when he choked on an eyedrop bottle cap in his hotel room in New York. He would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye. Williams’ lack of gag response may have been due to the effects of drugs and alcohol abuse. There is speculation that he committed suicide or was murdered, but nothing has been conclusively proven.

1983: Jimmy Lee Gray, a man executed in Mississippi’s gas chamber, died bashing his head against a metal pole behind the chair that he was strapped into. The poisonous gas had failed to kill him but left him in agony and gasping for eight minutes. It was later determined that the executioner was drunk.

1987: Franco Brun, a 22-year-old prisoner at Toronto East Detention Centre, Ontario, died after attempting to swallow and choking on a small Gideon’s Bible. Brun reportedly had mental deficiencies, and as such, the coroner did not label his death as suicide, believing that “the swallowing of the Bible to him was some form of symbolism or allegory as though he was trying to purge himself of the devil by consuming religion”. He was only serving a 15-day sentence.

1998: Every player on the Basanga soccer team at a game in the Congo was killed instantly when a bolt of fork lightning struck the field. Nobody on the opposing team was struck by the bolt.

2001: Gregory Biggs, a homeless American man in Fort Worth, Texas, was struck by a car being driven by Chante Jawan Mallard, who had been drinking and taking drugs that night. Biggs’ torso became lodged in Mallard’s windshield with severe but not immediately fatal injuries. Mallard drove home and left the car in her garage with Biggs still lodged in her car’s windshield. She repeatedly visited Biggs and even apologized for hitting him. Biggs died of his injuries several hours later. Chante Mallard was tried and convicted for murder in this case and received a 50-year prison sentence.

2004: An unidentified Taiwanese woman died of alcohol intoxication after immersion for 12 hours in a bathtub filled with 40% ethanol. Her blood alcohol content was 1.35%. It was believed that she immersed herself as a response to the ongoing SARS epidemic.

2005: Lee Seung Seop, a 28-year-old South Korean, collapsed of fatigue and died after playing the videogame StarCraft online for almost 50 consecutive hours in an Internet cafe.

2008: David Phyall, 58, the last resident in a building due to be demolished in Bishopstoke, England, cut his own head off with a chainsaw to highlight the injustice of being forced to move out.

2008: James Mason, 73, of Chardon, Ohio, died of heart failure after his wife exercised him to death in a public swimming pool. Christine Newton-John, 41, was seen on videotape pulling Mason around the pool and preventing him from getting out of the water 43 times.

2009: Sergey Tuganov, a 28-year-old Russian, bet two women that he could continuously have sex with them both for twelve hours. Several minutes after winning the $4,300 bet, he suffered a heart attack and died, apparently because of having ingested an entire bottle of Viagra just after accepting the bet.

2009: Kim Sa-rang, a 3-month-old Korean girl, died from malnutrition after both her parents spent hours each day in an internet cafe raising a virtual child on an online game, Prius Online.

* “Shoot all scriptwriters,” he wrote in his popular, long-running Village Voice column, “and we may yet have a rebirth of American cinema.”

* “The original plan for the film was that every shot would be digitally placed over archival footage. So that literally, the film would be “shot” in 1945 Berlin; the actors would be green-screened over archival. There was a scene in a butcher shop, for example, and I had to find every camera angle we needed in a butcher shop in 1945 Berlin. If there was a scene outdoors, a destroyed park or a zoo, I had to find those camera angles. There was interplay between the writing, directing, and archival research: what I could find that was in Paul Attanasio’s script, and whatever else I found in my research that might work or that piqued Paul’s interest, or Steven Soderbergh’s… A colleague of mine in the art department, Joanna Bush, created an amazing database of all the footage I’d collected. It was organized based on the geography of Berlin. So that on Steven’s computer, he could click on a map of Berlin and it would find all the archival footage that I had gotten on a particular plaza or a particular street or a particular location, and pull up all that archival footage and all the stills. Steven could know where he was situated in Berlin, and the art department could recreate a particular strasse. We’d know the ruins and we’d know how much that area was bombed out and all that.” More…

* “My first exposure to the subject came in a book by another medical anthropologist, Margaret Lock, whose Twice Dead (2002) is a brilliant comparative anthropology of Japanese and North American attitudes to brain-death as the criterion of death. Hence the title: a person is ‘once dead’ when technical criteria establish that the brain has stopped, while the body is still ticking over quietly on a ventilator; ‘twice dead’ when the heart is stopped and the organs harvested.”

* “What, he wondered, did we want to do? Did we want to eat, to drink, to fuck? Uh, dinner sounds cool.”

* And last, but not least, the Athanasius Kircher Society 2006

After 10 years, Pynchon fans can look forward to Against the Day, a new novel to be released this December. Surprisingly, Pynchon may have written the Amazon description himself:

Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx. [More]