Victor's IF Comp 2024 reviews

[VictorGijsbers]

The Lost Artist: Prologue by Alejandro Ruiz del Sol

It’s not very auspicious when we’re told that an entry is just the prologue to a full work. That’s what IntroComp is for. IFComp is for works that are fully baked and ready to be judged.

In the event, though, The Lost Artist turns out to be such a surreal text, unburdened by all pedestrian concerns like plot and narrative, that it is perhaps of no particular importance whether we have here a mere prologue or the work entire. Every page is written in a breathless prose that defies sense. Here’s the very first scene:

The bank was hardwired to go. I smelled like gun powder. K had a nail gun; she didn’t believe in guns.

The job was sort of spur-of-the-moment. Our bird sanctuary went into disrepair after our very-intelligent-and-not-at-all-suspicious raven escaped. We tried a few unusual ways to get our unsuspicious raven back, even time travel. For whatever reason, our raven always ended up free.

We gave up on that raven. There were millions of birds, many needing rescue.

And, in this moment, with this perfectly timed bank heist, we were unstoppable. Clumsy but accomplished. Like two bozos barreling down the same hill.

You can try to make sense of this, of course, but my experience with the rest of the piece suggests that it’s not going to be a fruitful use of your time. “K had a nail gun; she didn’t believe in guns.” This sentence could be used to set up a future event or exchange where we find out in what sense K does not believe in guns, and why she nevertheless has one. But neither K, nor the guns, nor her belief in them, is ever returned to. One suspects that the author first wrote “K has a nail gun”, and then decided to add “; she didn’t believe in guns” just to get a little paradox on the page.

DemonApologist, whom I take seriously, writes:

The work has a somewhat surrealist quality to it. Admittedly I haven’t read much work like this, but I think there’s merit to work that is challenging in this way—readable, yet reticent to be neatly consumed. I suspect that if someone reads it with a significant lit/poetry background, they would have an enjoyable time piecing together the narrative.

I do not (yet) share this view of the piece. It’s possible that I am merely being obtuse, but I do not (yet) have the impression that there is any narrative or meaning to be pieced together here. Of course I could quote Poe – whose Nevermore-quothing raven is on full display here – and argue that the lines ‘And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted—nevermore!’ are about artistic despair, and that The Lost Artist is using this symbol (also associated with Odin, the creator of the runes, language shaped into a form that changes the world) to discuss the despair of creativity in late-stage capitalism… but I would then be doing more work than the piece itself. Take this, text that is shown when you have the artist draw a cave entrance:

The image depicts a cave entrance carved in rock. But to see the actual entrance, you’d have to be inside the image. You’d have to fall into the image backwards and think of someone you love. That way, you can truly find the truth of the image.

It’s not that this is bad prose, because it’s fine; it’s just that it’s random. The game could just as well have given us this:

The image depicts a cave entrance carved in rock. But we’re not gazing into it; it’s our own world that is the cave. You’d have to fall into the image backwards to escape into the light. That way, you could taste freedom.

Or this:

The image depicts a cave entrance carved in rock. But the actual picture is behind and through the paper. You’d have to tear a hole in space itself and wriggle backwards through time. Then you’d hear the voices of angels echoing in the cavern, confessing their future mistakes.

It would have made no difference, because The Lost Artist: Prologue is not in fact telling us anything.

Perhaps I’m wrong. As I said, I may be merely obtuse and missing out on what’s going on; I certainly wouldn’t be the first critic making a fool of himself. Hell, it wouldn’t even be the first time I made a fool of myself while reviewing the IFComp! It’s also possible that a full version of the game would start gathering some of the (narrative, symbolic, linguistic) threads and weave them into a whole that is greater that the parts. But so far, I’m not seeing it.