Laocoön’s Gaze: On Aliocha Coll, the Two Attilas, and the Literature of No Future
by Jon Repetti
Open Letter Books, 200pp, ISBN 9781960385376, £13.00
Javier Serena, trans. Katie Whittemore, Attila
Open Letter Books, 120pp, ISBN 9781960385352, £13.00
After a few too many drinks, a writer friend of mine made the sort of statement that writers have been known to make in such circumstances. ‘Obscurity wouldn’t be so bad,’ he said, ‘if I could believe in the future.’ As is the duty of writers’ friends when such statements are made, I bought us another round and asked him to elaborate. He rattled off the names of novelists, poets, and artists who had devoted their lives to the work and only found success very late in life, or posthumously — Keats, Melville, Dickinson, Kafka, Cézanne, Van Gogh, the usual roster.
He was humble enough, or at least self-aware enough, to clarify: ‘It’s not that I think I’m Kafka. I’m not Kafka. Probably nobody is Kafka. But that’s not the point. The point is that when you’re eating Top Ramen in your shitty apartment, living with roommates into your thirties, opening your eight-dollar royalty check, teaching composition to a bunch of eighteen-year-olds who give you nothing but AI-generated essays and blank stares, you need to believe that you could be one-percent of what Kafka was. You need to believe that the day after you die, somebody might pick your book off a clearance pile, flip a few pages, and say, “Man, this is really fucking good.” And they tell their friends, and those friends tell their friends. And somebody knows somebody. And then suddenly you’re a “rediscovered writer”. An “unjustly forgotten writer”. A “luminary before his time”. You need to believe in posterity.’
We talked for a while about all the reasons my friend had lost faith in ‘the future’, by which he meant not just his own personal posterity, but the future of literature in general, if not of human life on this planet. After paying lip service to the various extinction events under the shadow of which we have both lived our whole lives — climate change, pandemics, nuclear armageddon, that football-field-sized asteroid due for a close call with the Earth on Valentine’s Day 2046 — we turned to the more immediate problem of the disappearance of the readership necessary for literature to be written and understood: the intensifying literacy crisis in American schools; the conglomeration of the publishing industry; the defunding of university English departments; all predictable aspects of what Marshall McLuhan called the ‘post-literate society’ way back in 1962. I mentioned Christian Lorentzen’s now-infamous claim in Granta that ‘there are about 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in America’, and my friend called for shots of ‘the worst well whiskey you’ve got’ to wash the taste of that number out of our mouths.
What does it mean to write for the future when the possibility of any future at all — for literature, for humanity — is thrown radically into doubt? Anna Kornbluh has recently coined the term ‘too late capitalism’ to describe the historical moment in which such a question can and must be asked, and to characterise the artworks that have lately attempted to answer said questions. ‘Where postmodernism inscribes “a crisis of historicity,”’ she writes, the aesthetic forms of too late capitalism ‘encode a crisis of futurity, a beclouded non horizon’. The latter crisis is expressed, for Kornbluh, in a pervasive aesthetic of ‘immediacy’ in the cultural products of the past twenty years — ‘immediacy’ both in the sense of the stripping away of mediation and of the aspiration towards overwhelming speed.
Lacking both a useable past and a liveable future, both a living historicity and a meaningful futurity, where can the writer of today turn for her material, and how ought she to write? What narrative forms could possibly be appropriate for an anti-narrative age? Kornbluh offers one answer by citing the near-total ‘hegemony of first-person narration’ in literary writing since the 2010s — the dominance of autofiction, memoir, the pseudo-genre of the ‘internet novel’. Another answer might be the post-2020 popularity of a mode that is not so much a Marxist ‘littérature engagée’ so much as it is a liberal ‘littérature concernée’, taking its cues primarily from the auto-theory of bell hooks and Maggie Nelson. We are witnessing the emergence — and perhaps also the exhaustion — of a literature of and for the hyper-contemporary, and it’s no wonder that the hype-cycles around these books are accelerating season-over-season. (In hindsight, the most shocking thing about the 2024 fiasco that was Honor Levy’s My First Book may be the fact that it had a highly traditional, multi-month roll-out, courtesy of the hopelessly un-hip publicity team at Penguin.) On the Kornbluh model of ‘immediacy’, ‘contemporary literature’ must be contemporary first and foremost, and it must wear that contemporaneity on its sleeve in both content and form. This is, of course, why it gets dated so quickly.
There are, of course, counter-trends to this relentless production of immediacy, against the novel-as-blogpost, the novel as tweet, the novel as Instagram close-friends story. Consider the proliferation in the US of a relatively new European canon, mostly of works in translation by writers deceased or in the twilight of their careers. They are living (so to speak) my obscure writer friend’s dream: Vladimir Sorokin, Mircea Cărtărescu, Jon Fosse, Max Blecher, László Krasznahorkai, and so on. As unlikely as it may sound, there are hundreds if not thousands people for whom the most anticipated literary event of the year is the publication of the German experimental poet Michael Lentz’s 1001-page ‘novel’ Schattenfroh (2018, trans. Max Lawton 2025). Central and Eastern Europe have become hot commodities, though it’s unlikely that we’ll see a ‘Hungarian Boom’ on the level of the Latin American Boom, or that a Krasznahorkai will ever reach the global celebrity of a Bolaño. With Federico Perelmuter — author of that much-discussed LARB piece responsible for the portmanteau ‘brodernism’ — I am tempted to diagnose this phenomenon as a search for a useable literary past in the ‘would-be uncharted waters of modernism’.
It is in this context that the astonishing work of Spanish novelist Aliocha Coll has finally been translated into English, and he will surely have a place of honor among Perelmuter’s ‘brodernist’ canon before long. He has the right credentials. Born Javier Coll, he took ‘Aliocha’ as a nom de plume because his mother read him The Brothers Karamazov when he was a child. He published little during his life, but amassed a huge trove of private writings (novels, poems, plays, and translations), many of which have still never seen print. He spent the last years of his life in self-exile and isolation in Paris, working furiously on the book he believed to be his masterpiece, Attila (1991). And then there’s this: upon completing Attila, Coll mailed the manuscript to his agent (the legendary Carmen Ballcels) and then almost immediately committed suicide.
Open Letter, a nonprofit translation press connected to both Deep Vellum and the University of Rochester, is publishing both Coll’s Attila and a novel by Javier Serena, also called Attila (2014), in translations by Katie Whittemore. Serena’s Attila concerns, primarily, the last years of a writer named Alioscha Coll, a character based on the real-life Aliocha Coll, as he works to complete the manuscript of a novel called Attila, which we must assume to be the text of Attila (1991). Attila (2014) is told from the perspective of a sympathetic friend. This fictional friend, like many of Coll’s real-life friends, is convinced that Coll is a literary genius, and begs him to abandon the ‘long and impossible verses and nonsensical paragraphs’ of Attila (1991) for a more legible discourse that might one day find readers. Like the real-life Aliocha, Serena’s Alioscha takes his own life after finishing the novel. Though some facts of Coll’s life are preserved in distorted form, most of the events in Attila (2014) are inventions by Serena, a technique that should be familiar to readers of Benjamín Labatut and Thomas Bernhard.
Both Serena’s novel and Coll’s American and Spanish publishers cast him as a tragically belated figure, the very latest of the Late Modernists. This is not without good reason. His primary points of reference lie in the histories and literatures of various ancient cultures — Judaic, Hellenic, Roman, Chinese — and Attila itself often resembles nothing so much as a medieval European prose romance with psychedelic elements, as if Chrétien de Troyes discovered LSD. To emphasise this lateness, Serena describes Alioscha dressed in clothes more typical of the 1930s, wandering Paris in search of traces of the parks and cafés frequented by the surréalistes, the symbolistes, and other avant-gardes of yesteryear.
Second only to Coll’s belatedness is his isolation, a stubborn and romantic isolation maintained not only in his life but in his work, which seems to resist not only the reader but the very notion of a ‘readership’. His own translator states in her introduction that she doesn’t like the book very much, at least ‘not in the way that we usually “like” books’. Whittemore and Serena — the two readers who may know Coll’s novel as well as anyone alive — seem to agree that Attila is a kind of heroic failure. ‘[O]n the one hand,’ Whittemore quotes from an email Serena wrote her in 2024, ‘Coll perfectly achieves his narrative project: to create unintelligible literature… And at the same time, there was only one possible reader for that narrative project: himself. He succeeded in his project, but his project is a failure. And that impossibility — this hopeless negativity — is what makes Aliocha and his books so unique.’
Serious effort is being made on both sides of the Atlantic to promote Coll not merely as an ‘unjustly neglected author’, or an ‘eccentric, hermetic writer’ — the stock role of the rediscovered 20th-century genius — but as the very paradigm of belatedness itself, of isolation itself: the writer with an audience of one. If this critical-marketing strategy draws more readers to Coll’s extraordinary novel, I’m all for it. But I also want to suggest that it runs the risk of obscuring another, potentially more interesting way of understanding his project. While Coll certainly makes use of the past, there is an element, or better yet a vector, of his discourse that is always projected towards the future, towards the question of literary futurity.
There is a clue to how Coll understood his precarious place within literary history in the opening section of Attila. This section is presented as an excerpt from another ‘novel’ called Laocoön, which is itself in fact a long essay about the eponymous figure from Greek myth. Coll’s Laocoön is a strange amalgamation of various sources: Laocoön the Trojan priest of the Aeneid, who warns against Greeks bearing gifts and is devoured along with his sons by serpents sent by Athena; Laocoön the central figure of Laocoön and His Sons, the famous Classical statue carved from a single block of marble that was excavated in the 16th century, inspired generations of Renaissance and Baroque artists, and was later interpreted by Lessing, Goethe, and Winckelmann; Laocoön the protagonist of a lost Sophocles tragedy of the same name, in which the priest is killed with his offspring not by Athena for attempting to expose the ruse of the Trojan Horse but by Apollo for copulating in the god’s temple. Add to these another Laocoön, one that appears to have been imagined by Coll himself: a ‘teleological pedagogue’ who sought to raise his children as a ‘new race of Hercules’ on earth and was punished by the gods for his hubris.
In Coll’s own idiosyncratic account, one of Laocoön’s sons, ‘probably Melantho’, manages to escape the serpent’s grasp and the vengeance of the god(s). But there’s a problem here. Melantho is not, to my knowledge, named as one of Laocoön’s sons in any classical text. But Melantho is the name of one of Penelope’s house-slaves in the Odyssey, one of the many who allied themselves with the suitors. She is notable as a loose end of Homer’s epic — we are never told whether or not she survives Odysseus and Telemachus’s campaign of executing the traitors. From this bit of trivia, ‘Melantho’ becomes legible as a kind of literary Schrödinger’s Cat, a being whose fate remains radically indeterminate, perpetually both alive and dead. He is the future that Laocoön dies trying to protect, the future that might one day look back upon the past with the same mix of fascination and incomprehension with which the past looks towards the future.
This is not a comparative work that identifies and traces the irreconcilable between each version of the figure, nor is it a philological attempt to uncover the figure’s essence. Nonetheless, there is one telling thread upon which we cannot help but pull, which was perhaps the original source of Coll’s own fascination. In every version, Laocoön is positioned at the death of one culture and the birth of another that he anticipates but will never live to know. For this reason, it is Laocoön among the personages of the novel that comes closest to ‘standing in’ for the author, deeply embedded in the past but with his gaze fixed, without the compensations of hope, upon a temporal horizon he will never cross.
Whatever Coll has or has not achieved in Attila — and that achievement is so bound up with his use of language at the all-but-untranslatable syllabic level that I can only defer that judgment to better readers of Spanish than myself — his most urgent contribution to the literature of our time lies not in any single passage or stylistic innovation, but in the fact that his writing prompts at every turn a particular question: How does one write a literature ‘for’ the future when that future (as figured in Melantho) is conceived as radically indeterminate?
This is not the question of the romantic poet languishing in obscurity who wonders, ‘Will my works be discovered after my death?’; nor is it the question of the modernist avant-gardiste who asks, ‘What must the novel of the future look like, stylistically and formally, and how can I be the one to write it?’ It is instead a meta-question about temporality and legibility as such, posed in roughly these terms: If to write for the future is to address the readers of the future, and thereby to affirm that future, how can the writer — or, better yet, how can anyone — affirm a futurity that is not a mere continuation of the present but constituted by a break, a break as decisive as the fall of Rome itself, which is narrated in the central section of the novel? What would it mean to address an audience that is so radically other than oneself? How could one even begin to do so?
Kornbluh has suggested that the most common response to this problem in our time has been a rejection of the writer’s traditional role of speaking to the future and an embrace of the dazzling and pulsating Now. Another kind of response would involve the development of what Serena has called a literature of ‘hopeless negativity’, a writing that constantly cancels and undermines itself in the manner of Mallarmé, a writing that rebels against signification by going to the limit of sense. Coll, for all his admiration of the symbolistes and his delight in dancing at the edge of nonsense, ultimately offers a different answer. He confronts the radical indeterminacy of futurity by cultivating an absolute indifference to any particular future, without ceasing to address them all at once. In this way, he is able to address and affirm ‘futurity’ as such, as abstract virtuality, as a world without himself.
In order to forge a literature for the future, not for any particular imagined future but one conceived as a qualitative rupture from the present, Coll had to write a novel utterly indifferent to its own futurity, a novel that would moreover declare this indifference on every page without ever conceding to the suffocating demands of the Now. It was Coll’s destiny, for contingent historical reasons that we do not yet have the means to reconstruct (though perhaps we will one day after the publication of his voluminous private writings), to see beyond the ‘end of history’ triumphalism of his own present, as the Berlin Wall fell just before the moment of Attila’s completion, and to produce not a mere document of the radically ‘too-late’ present, but a literature addressed to a pure and open futurity.