Watches define Sanders Anderson's Manichean Knights in a way one wouldn't expect. Timekeeping in drabs and dribs intersect incessantly:
He looked at his watch, the second-hand synced diabolically with the buzz of sunrays nastifying through the apartment's top-to-bottom glass. 'Guess she'll just be late, then.' he muttered while a siren wailed and the wine went flat. (72)
And this, in the novel's penultimate scene, drenched in palpable irony: "Her Hamilton ticked away, like an ad, already, like the veritable abdication of her presence at the graveside" (389).
Elsewhere, bidets "keep time," and apples act as sundials (143 and 92, respectively).
What Anderson is up to baffles while it edifies, subjugates while it illuminates. By recentering the temporal, Anderson indemnifies and makes practical Federico Nacho's notion of the non-normal and its transvaluation of venues.
Briefly, Nacho notes how reframing creates reassessment and how the reordering of the product renders it practical and symbolic in turn ("Ben Hur? How Long?"). "Dissipation is the same as amelioration," becomes the battle cry of those wishing to purposefully cheapen the brand (Cheez Doodles and other Spacial 40). What it is vs. what it means is the final plot, and it devolves into "nothing, fewer, and non," and into an ever-recursive entropy ("Tagline: You're Zits" 44).
Anderson matches tagline for Tang, placing his characters in kitchens full of "Froot Loops and Jif, Starbucks and Dole" (204). The temporal obsession is merely a reminder that we're all on the list of the next thing to buy.
Nacho's reassessment of the real brings up the very mundanity of corporate producthood, that "non-normalization" can only occur when the chain breaks, when the essence of possession loses its mojo. In Anderson's world, the product is (re)placed in its proper place, "a plastic lei, the tag still on, a Tony The Tiger plush toy, the yellow fog reflecting off the shiny forehead of Mr. Peanut" (44). The living end is the coming purchase, evil vanquished into its "landfill of neutrality" as the antagonist of Manichean Knights is released from his contract and drifts back to the "solemn dirt of Beanfield, Iowa" (390). It's a longed-for reiteration of the consumer order, and the surviving protagonists "walk the aisles of Target, numb and happy for the having" (394).
Here we see how, in contrast, Bree Battersea's Rom-Com Redux busts the cycle wide open; as if counterpoint to Anderson's simple, if not simplistic, certainty, Battersea brings the sidereal energy, veritable bombardment of cosmic rays: "The cold stone was littered with the loosened petals of a lei—maybe placed there by a mourner, their eyes watery with the volcano's sulfur, their lungs screaming at the height" (97). Here, "tooth and claw, beak and talon" reify the non-normal, "streaming skyward in blasts of garish color" (104). A Hawaiian mountain becomes a venue for romance; a rooftop becomes a scene for the reassessment of particle physics. Nacho himself makes cameos in the stalls of fruit sellers (37) and the basement of a disused power station (92).
The hack is not intentional but not exactly enervating; it's the result of dispossession, a refusal to accept the prevailing order by a population that has run out of things to lose within the constant wash of others' cast-offs.
Scandalous?
Maybe.
Or maybe it's just the re-framation of the crassly commercial into the scattered trail of receding love.
Works Cited
Anderson, Sanders. Manichean Knights. New Haven: Pantaloon, 2017.
Battersea, Bree. Rom-Com Redux. Portland: Puholz, 2017.
Nacho, Federico. "Ben Hur? How Long? Non-Normality in a Bad Humor." Criticality Online, 22 August, 2005, www.criticalityonline.net/ben_hur_nacho. Accessed 3 Feb. 2018.
>---. Cheez Doodles and Other Spatial Renderings. São Paulo: Chinwag, 1997.
>---. "Tag Line: You're Zits." Criticality Offline, vol. 3, no. 4, 2014, pp. 39-56.