Called To Fiction: A Review of Jacob Wren's "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim"

I object to "objective" reviews. Not only do I object, but I try and make my reviews as subjective as humanly possible. Jacob Wren's "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" came to me at an interesting time in my life and the very emotional and philosophical environment that I was in while reading it highly affected what I think about it, as much as it does any other "objective" reviewer, no matter how much they refuse to believe it. I've therefore decided to spend more time self-publishing my reviews on my website, rather than spending months head-to-head with a variety of publishers on what is ethical in the review process of a book. I write fast, I say my piece, I do minimal editing and move on, SO: I have put every ounce of my personal, emotional, biased opinion into this review:

NOW! Give me a few paragraphs and I'll get to Jacob Wren's book, but bear with me for now to set the scene. On September 28th, I bought a new notebook to start a new poetry project based on the relevance of art in our society. I, like anyone else at that time, was spending most of my days consuming a variety of media on the violence inflicted on the Palestinian people by the state of Israel. I was watching the genocide from what I, myself, considered to be a "radical left" standpoint, yet found myself lost in imagery and depiction that became slowly normalized, and sometimes even aestheticized to inspire more rage at the face of genocide. In a matter of a month I had been witness to more dismembered limbs and torn-up cadavers than I had been the rest of my life. I began to consider how writing, even at the moment of documentation, creates "Fictions" of the world around just as pictures and videos may . I embossed my new notebook with the title: Called to Fiction. I began a new project that, in my mind, was investigating how in writing, words, are "Called to Fiction" to perform the imagery they represent, still unsure of what may come; in my work and my world alike.

a month and 11 days later, I read Jacob Wren's "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" in a downtown Toronto cafe where the West-Asian diaspora gathers for monthly and weekly discussions of geopolitics and share space in grief. I sat with my coffee and finished the book in a matter of 4 to 5 hours.

When reading Wren's new book, many questions arise about the book's intentionally ambiguous setting. None of these questions are ones I'd like an answer to. I'm just spending the better half of a maddeningly hot November afternoon thinking about the book and by complete co-incidence, the only other book I have in my bag to read is Jacques Ranciere's "The Politics of Aesthetics", where a few dozen pages in, Ranciere speaks about Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter", and a majority of other American movies on Vietnam: 

"It can be said that the message is the derisory nature of the war. It can just as well be said that the message is the derisory nature of the struggle against war."

I come home to see Jacob Wren posted on his Facebook page a review of his book by Carl Wilson that asks: "So is it a satire of western activists’ mentality around the suffering of faraway others, or is it a case of it? Does it offer a utopianism we need, or a fantasy couched in sophistry? Yes and no, and guilty on all counts. "

This very passage of Wilson's review is what fuels my review, Since I think the inherent struggle of Jacob Wren's book is the many many such impossible riddles of post-colonial activism in our contemporary society.

Before I say anything informed and interesting, I'd like to start with something simple: that in my opinion, in a world drowning in Capitalist oppression, Colonial violence, Ecoterrorism, Fascism and Patriarchy, for me, calling political writing "Naive Activism" (or "Bourgeois Humanism" as Althusser would've put it!) isn’t as derogatory as people make it seem. for me, its very simple: Naive Activism is still activism, and Informed oppression is still oppression.

I'm not calling out anyone. Text is too often a difficult space for controlling tone. Putting Quotation marks around simple words can make them accusatory. I'm arguing back and not in any anger. I am sitting with a resting heartbeat of (let me check... 65) and writing this. THAT put aside I'm not reviewing this book as if the allegations of "Naive Activism" are true. I'm exploring Wren's book as a book "Called to Fiction", since that has been the grounding exercise of my entire October.

"Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" is a book of imagery, that is aware of the history of imagery, itself aware of centuries of depiction. I don't know enough theory or philosophy and I'm not here to put "Post-Modern"/ "Self-Referencing" claims on this book. These are labels for selling books and not for reading them. I'm interested mostly in how Wren explores the paradoxical progression of News and information throughout the ages. The Protagonist's very journey to an unknown, besieged land is because of a simple paradox: They have seen the land, the war and the struggle in depiction, but have they really SEEN it until they have set foot where bombs drop? We have reached a time where we have endless "Footage", inflating its value in the face of "Experience". We can watch a journalist film the war, we can hear the bomb crack the cement, we can even see the breath of the journalist inflate and deflate in the small handheld movements of the video. but what have we seen? has it been real? has it been our “experience”? If so why does it feel so fake? Why do real guns sound like fake guns? Why do bombs sound so flat and “Unreal”? Which side of the screen have we occupied all this time? Why are films and TV Shows “More real” in their violence that the blood on the real battlefield that we cannot recognize as blood?

the protagonist says "I'm here to observe and understand what I'm observing". It is misguided here to say "The protagonist is self-aware of being in the story". The Protagonist isn't aware of the text, it is afraid of it. What the book fears is not the horror of being consciously useless; the book fears fiction itself. The narrator is not afraid of being useless. The narrator is afraid that no matter how transformative the text will be, it may still remain "just art".

 "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" is therefore a book of questions for artists who devote themselves to their art. One of the central questions of the book therefore becomes a question for Marxism itself: "What happens when artistic practice (here writing), has no exterior (work)? What if there is no dichotomy between Art (developing the self) and Work (developing the other (through community))"

I refer back to my Ranciere where he argues one of the most important aspects of Modernist visual art was to once again "Flatten" art, since artists began to realize that what the canvas was missing wasn't the third dimension, but life. "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" is a book coming to terms with the fact that it may be dead, and that its possible for the text to move on as the story moves on from the protagonist. "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" is a swan song to fiction where the "Utopia" it imagines is NOT the utopia where a single person, through sheer tyranny of will, can change the world. It is instead a "Utopia" where "fiction" is once again useful in creating an immediate, urgent, revolutionary and libidinal mythos.