But as I see it, it’s first cousin to something like the 1930s “essay-novels” of Virginia Woolf, Orlando or The Pargiters-books written simultaneously in two veins, each illuminating the other in unexpected, and here thrilling, ways. Designed not to be acted or produced, Durgin calls this work a “script,” which I like for its straightfoward modesty. With a genuine sweep and suspense, PQRS up-ends and pats down received ideas of genre, putting its principal characters (the eponymous P, Q, R and my own favorite, S) through their paces on an imaginary stage in an imaginary play. “The text succeeds its own conditions.” In dire and unsuccessful times, that’s the hope. The many models and forerunners for a project this radical include the posthumously published texts of Gertrude Stein, referred to explicitly here as “the most exhaustive syllabic implosion in prose of any language.” But if Stein’s implosion was horizontal, PQRS goes vertical, running up and down the scale of rhetorics: essay, drama, lists of potential performance art projects, lit crit, film crit, music history, autobiography, back to drama, intermission, critique of capital, URL of a Tumblr page of women laughing while holding salads, back to drama (and: scene). That is, it fails with such clarity, indifference, legitimate anger, and abandon that it turns into a kind of monument, marking the point where the intellect’s pessimism collapses into the will’s optimism. As a play, PQRS is not just unstageable, it is a monumental failure. It’s one thing to advocate for writing that pushes boundaries, mixes discourses, and transgresses the dominant aesthetic, but it’s quite another to actually write it.

The pargiters