Irritating, Stimulating

‘The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.’ 

That’s Gertrude Stein in her 1926 lecture ‘Composition as Explanation’. Is ‘outlaw’ a corny way to describe a writer? Maybe. But no more than ‘outsider’, ‘renegade’, or ‘punk’. Turning to Stein to understand how mainstream literary economies overlook talent might seem anachronistic, except that every writer since her death who is serious about disrupting the linear and orderly is her progeny. So, if ‘outlaw’ works for Stein, it works.  

Shane Jesse Christmass is an outlaw. He is one of Australia’s most original and prolific contemporary authors. Yet, with his last seven novels published by small independent presses in the United States, he operates outside his own national literature. Although he’s an outlaw, it’s yet to be seen whether he will become a classic, as long as mainstream publishing and the prize economy keep shy of beauty’s sharper edges. As Stein put it, ‘If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating, not only when it is accepted and classic.’  

For Stein, to be a classic, it is necessary to be dead, so it might be best to stay an outlaw. Meth-DTF, Christmass’ latest, published in 2023 by the American-based Filthy Loot Press, is nothing if not irritating and stimulating. Irritating in a way that suggests deep structural disruption. Stimulating like a synaesthetic striptease that might irreversibly derange the psyche. 

Meth-DTF is road trip as escape plan taken by the narrator and his companion, Samuel, through and out of a Los Angeles familiar to David Lynch and Kenneth Anger. That is to say, it is a phenomenological city. The book is filled with invisible links between endless highways, the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles Times headlines, noise rock and Lesley Gore on the radio, old films, and oxycodone addictions, connecting them in one sentence, cutting it all to ribbons the next. Sentences like: ‘Smoking Kools—watching Boris Karloff in Bagdanovich’s Targets. Thumbs—eyes—insects—I am late for the dinner service. Rain over Terminal Island. Little air for me to breath. Crying in bed as the sun comes up over Los Angeles.’ Much like Los Angeles itself, somewhere we’re only passing through anyway, this is a novel composed of bad dreams. 

Across Christmass’ body of work, disjunction is a form of invention. As the unnamed narrator in Meth-DTF claims early in the text, ‘I am a science fiction novel with no science fiction references.’ The usual elements of fiction – plot, character, and setting – have a deliberate oneiric quality, linking what is real to what resists reality. Scenes often read like the retelling of a dream: ‘Samuel and I stand at the Malibu Bluffs. Samuel’s head is cocked upward at an unnatural angle. I talk to him about the Pacific Ocean. He answers in a monotone. I don’t think he is here.’ And on it goes. It could all be a sign, but then again, it all slips away so readily.  Do not expect character development, or a plot to fix the story in time, or a setting to hold it all in place. The composition is one of flux.  

If Christmass is showing us anything about composition, and I’m not even sure he cares to, it’s because the scaffolding of his novel is deliberately left exposed, constructed from a jumble of references and dislocated places. 

This novel reads like a scrambled index of places, moods, and cultural discharge, presented without hierarchy and often without context. Its narrator is unstable, always disoriented. So too is Samuel – guide, lover, double. The narrative slips, roams, forgets where it is. The narrating mind might belong to a drifter, but the novel does not drift so much as drive. It drives through circadian time, collapsed time, and no time at all, accumulating the detritus of being alive, or only just. Composition becomes a method of misplacement, where continuity gives way to accumulation, and the world arrives out of order. 

Yet Meth-DTF is located; it is written from here. Though the fact that Christmass lives and works in Victoria is not exactly the point. Rather, his work is produced from inside the conditions that shape what Australian literature tends to exclude or overlook, exposing how the centre is drawn. Composition becomes a way to locate the edge. Stein’s configuration of composition is useful because she makes the word mean both an artwork, such as a novel, and its context. Stein says, ‘The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living in the composition of the time in which they are living.’ ​Got it? In a literary economy that prizes familiarity, composition becomes a filter for visibility until it becomes the impetus for change.  

In that case, it is important to understand that Christmass is not invisible, far from it. He has been publishing steadily for over twenty years, with work appearing in national publications such as The Age, Cordite Poetry Review, and The Lifted Brow, as well as in short story collections from small local publishers, among them, Adelaide-based Paroxysm Press. He maintains a presence both online and in print, often under the alias SJXSJC, and has the distinction of being listed in AustLit’s Dictionary of Australian Pseudonyms. Christmass is not obscure so much as evasive. His AustLit entry drops out after 2010, perhaps around the time his publishing no longer aligned with what AustLit implicitly tracks: not nationality, but national presence. Although his first novel, ACID SHOTTAS, was published in 2014 by The LedaTape Organisation, an international artists’ co-op with offices in Australia, it set the tone for a writing practice shaped by transnational small press and a refusal to play to the centre. All of Christmass’ novels, including Xerox over Manhattan (2019), Belfie Hell (2018), Yeezus in Furs (2018) push against the expectation that Australian literature should present as rooted in national tropes, a national style, or any national interest. 

Tapping into Christmass’ impressively catholic reading and writing networks, both digital and geographic, I read a blurb for Meth-DTF by Los Angeles-based writer and artist Kate Durbin, and balk at this comment: ‘Shane Jesse Christmass is one of our great cult novelists.’ Our! Just what does Durbin mean by ‘our’?  ‘Our,’ I huff. She’s right, but it begs the question: is Christmass one of our great cult novelists? Do we even have cult novelists? That question might be beyond the scope of this review. Still, is Christmass ours? If so, he‘s ours in the way a glitch belongs to the system it disrupts. By his own admission, Christmass’ motto is, ‘half shits, half giggles … all reckless.’ It’s the kind of attitude that feels more at home with its head in a photocopier than in the marketing kitchens of mainstream Australian publishing and prize culture.  

Few Australian writers have committed as fully as Christmass to the aesthetic principles of experimentation that favour cutting into narrative and syntactical continuity, creating staccato sentences where absence is as charged as presence. His style recalls Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ method – not because Meth-DTF reads as intertextual collage, but because it shares the same impulse toward textual mutilation. The momentum of much experimental literature comes from a desire to destroy and create simultaneously. As the text ruptures – it flaunts its lack. A typical scene in Meth-DTF:  

If Meth-DTF’s narrator is, as he says, a science fiction novel without science fiction references, then this scene – if we can call it that – is more like a collection of clues without the crime. We have a body, illicit substances, violence, a police presence, maybe a break and enter, and apparently, the press is having a field day. At times, the voice is reminiscent of a hard-boiled character, some grifter from a pulp novel with an eye for detail and an ear for sensation. But don’t mistake this voice for psychological realism, because we’re not so much in a story as we are in language – structural and shared, as well as personal and private – the voice in your head. Form takes precedence over convention. I can hear Burroughs’ famous directive, ‘Rub out the words!’, echoing in the gaps. This is a novel of sentences where punctuation is equal to the word. Ellipses omit all but the red flags, opening up ambiguities, creating hesitation and drift. The em dashes, meanwhile, signal interruption, changes in thought and mood, creating a splintered rhythm. Clauses collide. Syntax unravels. There is no arc, only accumulation. Language is a pulse. It jolts, stalls, surges again. Keep reading.  

Perhaps this crime scene belongs to Samuel’s body after all? Is it an overdose? Has our narrator lost his Shadow, his Other? It’s only on my second reading that I realise my copy of Meth-DTF is missing pages 43 to 48, not torn, but never there. The missing pages don’t affect the narrative’s sense-making – if anything, their absence feels appropriate. But then Samuel reappears on page 49, and he is: 

Anything could have happened to the narrator and Samuel in those four pages. Maybe they sobered up, woke from the dream, or whatever was playing on the radio cut out. Either way, they are returned and continue travelling through an apocalyptic America, dressed in their Walmart finest and drinking Pepsi. They are always drinking Pepsi.  

They. It seems that Christmass’ narrators rarely travel alone. In Meth-DTF, there’s Samuel, and in Latex, Texas, Christmass’ previous novel (also published by FilthyLoot), there’s Michael. In both novels, the narrators are entangled with their companions – protagonists or antagonists – who, in one way or another, tear open the narrators’ subjectivities. Perhaps they are projections, doppelgängers, or cases of folie à deux. The relentlessly shifting descriptions of Samuel and Michael free them from the confines of character and identity, granting them the gift of impersonality. In both novels, human presence is ironically marked by indistinction. This from Latex, Texas:  

The charge of sexual obsession is the tie that binds the narrators of both novels to their impossible objects. What Christmass looks for and discovers in the relationships he writes is that the greatest intimacy might in fact be brutally impersonal. We are, after all, compelled by what is unknowable. Getting a full sense of so-called personality can be quite off-putting. The thing we want most must always be that which is unavailable, and all that. So, the male stranger on the bed, who could really be anyone, and who is an intentional experiment in inscrutability, is typical of why you want to read what Christmass does with his characters. He gives us proof that narrative intimacy can be developed through negation; thus, dependency is one of his great themes.  

Reading across both novels reveals a pattern of cohesion breaking down, allowing a different sort of alignment to emerge – one that is less causal and more gravitational. Christmass’ novels align with some of the great literary experimenters: the campy insider/outsider bitterness of Gary Indiana’s Do Everything in the Dark, the darkly forensic tone of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, a hint of Louise-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, and even the mirror work of psychotic transference in R.D. Laing’s Knots. Except for Indiana, who is all over Christmass’ Instagram, I’m not sure if these are the author’s influences or not, but to my reading eye they seem to be kin. As for writers Christmass admires outright, his tastes, unsurprisingly, lean towards non-conformity. Writing for X-Ray magazine, Christmass names Danielle Chelosky, Thomas Moore, Derek McCormack, and Kate Durbin as contemporary authors working outside the establishment to challenge expectations of what narratives should do. Within his canon is Édouard Levé, an author who, shortly after publishing his final novel, Suicide, took his own life, but whose legacy includes some of the most conceptually challenging and playful work of recent decades. Christmass has also written about the American writer Nate Lippens, who shares with him a bittersweet, fragmentary style, and whose first novel, My Dead Book, deserves to be widely read. Christmass states that such authors ‘represent literature that stands apart from the hegemonic literary marketplace … operating outside the structures of commercial garbage publishing, which prioritises market-driven narratives and commodifiable claptrap stories.’  

Ooft.  

Returning to the question of Christmass’ position within his own national literature, we might ask: where in the Australian market do such radically non-market-driven narratives get noticed? Particularly when even our established small presses prize fluidity as the marker of good prose and conform to the national obsession with story, while reviewing platforms circle back to what is already selling, and what sells already feels overstuffed. I know a writer who was told by a major publisher that their slim, perfectly quivering manuscript needed another hundred pages before it could be considered. Perhaps for these reasons, Christmass has received little critical attention in Australia, with notable exceptions like Briohny Doyle’s 2016 Guardian recommendation of Police Force as a Corrupt Breeze and an early review by Alice Allan of Ten Years of Things That Didn’t Kill Us – a collection Christmass co-edited and contributed to, which appeared in Cordite Poetry Review.  

Considering Catriona Menzies-Pike’s review of Trent Dalton’s novels, where she questions how his colossal success aligns with his hyper-visibility and what that reveals about contemporary Australia, we might ask the inverse of Shane Jesse Christmass: what does the marginality of his work reveal about the literary economy? After all, the distribution of attention is not neutral. Reviews, prize shortlists, and media coverage signal which works are deemed significant and which ones are overlooked. Prize culture reinforces hierarchies further by privileging certain narratives, styles, and depictions of national life. It almost goes without saying that the Miles Franklin Award, which prioritises representations of ‘Australian life in any of its phases’, enforces a framework of content, meaning, and nationalism that should somehow be recognisable. Forget about ‘Australian life’; writers like Christmass challenge the very concept of ‘life’ itself. His work, created largely outside these networks, exposes the structural forces influencing visibility. If literary recognition depends on relationships with local publishers, prizes, and networks, then what space remains for works that are uneasy with the composition of the moment? 

Beyond visibility and market forces, the question of how literature generates meaning comes to the fore. If attention and recognition are structured by external hierarchies, what of the work itself? Stein’s conception of composition as both a work of art and a reflection of the collective consciousness of the time suggests that society’s way of seeing shapes what is seen – a dynamic Menzies-Pike identifies in the Dalton and Scott Morrison iteration of Australian conservatism. Stein remains useful here because she insists that an artist, no matter how much of an outlaw, is never really outside their own time, never even ‘ahead of his time’. This insight complicates Christmass’ uneasy placement, because outsiders are always insiders somewhere or at some point. It also gestures toward the inevitability of change. When that change might arrive is unknowable, yet Stein’s formula for history holds: ‘everyone refuses and then almost without pause almost everyone accepts’. 

The danger of being overlooked is inseparable from the potential of being recognised; for the outlaw, irritation is never a flaw but a prerequisite for lasting impact, a dynamic evident online and across social media, where Christmass’ fervent fans recommend and forward his novels, tagging him. This is how cult writing circulates; the underground has always been cybernetic. Who, then, is the local reader for Christmass? I suspect there are already many, but for those yet to be initiated, their weariness of conformity might finally give them a constitution for something they can make no obvious sense of; they might be craving the experience of being in the dark, the fun of ‘not getting it’. His readers will find him because they are looking for transformation, even if only for the span of a sentence.  

At a time when half the books being published are born begging to be optioned by Netflix, reading Christmass is exhilarating. Meth-DTF is funny, repellent, and thrilling. The reader is a passenger in this speeding vehicle of a book. No stops along the way, cigarettes for breakfast, no toilet breaks, and don’t ask the driver if we are there yet. There is no there. Unlike the slog of plot-heavy novels, Christmass does not use language only to drag the reader toward a story’s resolution. Neither are we stuck; in fact, we are moving along quite deliberately, the prose rapid, the attention focused. Words matter; gaps reveal something. Keep reading and you’ll realise that a reading experience does well to irritate and stimulate at once. Taking pleasure in the problem of language is what writing does best. Meth-DTF returns us to what is inherently absurd and maddening about language, not smoothed out or written to shore up what we already know, or instruct us in what we should, but setting us adrift in a world of signs both familiar and frightening, an experience of being outlaws to ourselves.