D. Harlan Wilson’s debut novel, Dr. Identity, Or, Farewell to Plaquedemia, is a story of an academe and his mechanical doppelganger who set out upon a killing spree of truly postmodern portions. The author, much like his story, comprises one-half of the face of a new literary movement called Bizarro Fiction. However, unlike a synonymous counterpart, Wilson represents the squeaky-clean side of the genre, the more visceral figurehead being Carlton Mellick III. What the duo embody is an idea that some have dubbed the 21st century’s rendition of Surrealism. For those unacquainted with this literary new wave of storytelling, Bizarro combines the Beckettian absurdity of the human predicament with the tyrannical force that is modern-day technology. As such, Bizarro is a sometimes extreme, sometimes (hyper)exaggerated, sometimes flippant, almost always blackly humorous critique of what our lives have become. Without a doubt, Wilson’s work is the epitome of just that.
Wilson’s scathingly satirical premise involves an unnamed narrator. It is not that his character refuses to divulge his title. Rather, he has merely forgotten it due to professional obligation: As a tenure-track professor, our character–who goes under the temporary designation of “Dr. Blah”–cannot recall his given name because, in order to display ready dedication to his field, he must assume the surname–as well as mental, emotional, and physical attributes–of his author of choice. At the open of the text we are met by Blah’s office-mate, a Dostoevsky scholar who has had plastic surgery so as to harbor the Russian novelist’s trademark eye bags. As anyone who has worked in academia is all too familiar, Wilson’s caricature of the illogical demands of the field are not that far removed from reality. However, Blah’s colleague, like much of the faculty at Corndog University, avoids the resident Virginia Woolf expert like the plague due to her mimicry of her chosen writer’s cardinal trait of overbearing narcissism. Wilson thus makes the physical adaptation requirements a moot gesture by contemporary standards where the adage of scholars largely consisting of failed writers proves to be all-too-frequently the case as subjective lionization is readily seen on every campus. Such wry criticism becomes all the more poignant when placed alongside tomorrow’s (or is it today’s?) teaching assistant: a robotic doppelganger (i.e. TA’s as rote, nearly indistinguishable, simulacrums of their mentors). Said assistants are so commonplace in next week’s daily routine that they are colloquially referred to as “gangers” because of their frequency–most everyone possesses one, even the cuckoo bird. It is debatable whether such entities are implemented due to the breakneck pace of “fasttime” or are merely a consequence of yesterday’s (today’s) lethargy and/or apathy. What is irrefutable is that, considering a ganger is modeled after its owner and, as such, makes the mold from which it was cast accountable, one shouldn’t go into three generations of debut by obtaining a stress-relieving double if the personage has even the slightest inkling of homicidal rage.
Unfortunately, Dr. Blah’s ganger, Dr. Identity (for the Freudians, read “Id” here or, for the postmodern set, the surname as a whole will critically suffice) makes its owner, in a Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? epiphanic manner, all-too-aware of his sublimated desires and urges after accidentally (or was it?) killing the annoying rich kid in class (Wilson aptly shifting the phrase “going postal” to “going plaquedemic”) before attempting to rectify its faux pas by clearing out the whole of the English department. You can all but hear every collegiate-level instructor tearing the text from the shelves while checking to see if anyone’s watching . . . .
And thus it goes that Wilson leads us on a Mickey and Mallory Knox-killing spree of hyper real, postmodern, post-capitalistic portions as only he could in a narrative that is equal parts Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Mike Judge’s Idiocracy made possible by a technological culpability issue, the likes of which haven’t been witnessed in such scope and range since Stanley Kubrick’s character of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey as cast through a Baudrillardian lens.
“It’s not my fault you programmed me to be the physical, intellectual and ideological superhero you’ve wanted to be since you read your first comic book” Dr. Identity tells Dr. Blah, whose jaw remains on the floor throughout much of the text in a world in which a person garners the Pulitzer twice over, once for his presence of mind in a greeting card and the other his reward for his insightful grocery list as Congress convenes in the Theater of the Perturbed to discuss–not the countless lying dead as a result of the two doctors–but the fate of the “Dystopian Duo” only after they erroneously murder a movie star, a high crime which falls under the heading of terrorism writ large.
Yet Wilson is not content, nor should he be given his acute skills as a satirist, to limit his critique to education and politics as he leaves no faction of society unribbed. The media reigns supreme as the minion droves which comprise the “papanazi” fear being caught forging a story, a temptation that is all-too-alluring given the second-by-second demands of the field which refuses to return to “realtime” in lieu of the media’s cutting-edge surveillance (which usurps even the military’s constant supervision) which perpetually checks the authenticity of its field reporters’ work. Of course, it wouldn’t be so difficult a task to locate, or even capture for that matter, the serial killers if the world hadn’t long ago given away to the Almighty Dollar. As a consequence, Wilson sardonically insinuates that any and everything that could sell has been lobbied to the nth degree and thus has become readily available on every consumer shelf, even phenomenological firearms which will fuck up the lexicon of anyone who gets in the brandisher’s way. Such should come as no surprise in a world in which, during a commercial break, a product is advertised only to be followed by a pitch for the upgraded, new-and-improved version of the merchandise in question before we resume with our regularly scheduled program.
As one might imagine, the pace at which Dr. Identity erupts is a challenge to maintain, but Wilson does so with style and grace. Not surprisingly, some have cited the climax as being just the opposite, yet in relation to what precedes it, the author refuses to force his narrative as his ending, however one chooses to interpret it, is nonetheless fitting. For some, the text’s conclusion will be the epitome of the author’s wry Swiftian appraisal of our world as it now stands while, for others, their disappointment will second just that.
-Egregious Gurnow
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