The title story of Canisia Lubrin’s collection is taken from the King’s Decree, a document of terror that became law in 1685, the draconian edicts and regulations of Code Noir, which was the French empire’s attempt to regulate what cannot be regulated—extreme violence, gratuitous death, annihilating extraction, Sadeian excesses. Each of the fifty-nine stories of Code Noir is accompanied by an epigraph from the Code—the decrees provide the architecture of the worlds depicted in these stories, and the stories envision the defacement of law and its undoing. The stories address obliquely the legal decree and span nearly two millennia and the entirety of the globe. Code Noir isn’t speculative fiction, yet these stories estrange the world and make it utterly unfamiliar; the world is not to be taken for granted and in its strangeness, in its startling alterity, the reader must reckon with the unthought and recalibrate their ways of reading and knowing. The collection might be described as a metafiction about writing and the sense and logic that govern narrative, the rules that dictate what can be said and delimit what can be done with words, exploring the intimacy or complicity between law and fiction, terror and everyday life, empire and time. The writing welcomes opacity and embraces difficulty. Code Noir is another iteration of dysgraphia, from which Lubrin’s award-winning poetry collection, The Dyzgraphxst, derives its title. For her, difficult writing is necessary and essential to cultivating other modes of existing and knowing. The stories in the collection are dreamy, surreal, labyrinthine, and surprising. The book is an assemblage, by which I mean that the stories sound collectively and achieve their force and singularity in relation to one another. The prose pushes at the limits of legibility and its imposed forms. Lubrin, after Toni Morrison, is most concerned about “book voice,” not character or plot or narrative or resolution, but with the book as material object, and as the primary matrix of enunciation, not narrator or character or authorial voice. “How does a book sound when it is speaking as itself and taking the prerogative of being both a voice, the narrator’s voice, and the voice of a talking book?” Code Noir is a metafiction, a thought experiment in language that explores other ways of telling and (un)knowing. The stories critically rearrange the extant world and gesture toward another, and in the process challenge the reader’s modes of perception and cognition, suspend and worry our beliefs. Simply put, this experimental prose throws sentence and story into crisis, inviting the reader into the open field of story, asking us to find our way and name the world anew.
Even in documentary fiction, listening to Billie Holiday on a riotous night in Los Angeles seems fantastic and otherworldly. Under the sway of Lubrin’s intellect and imagination, the world becomes plastic and assumes forms that are disquieting and astonishing, like the condensation and displacement of reality in a dream that demands our full attention.
Earth in the Time of Billie Holiday
February 24, 1942, was our last day in the City of Angels.
Combat was nothing like what they promised. It commanded no serious loyalty from me or Siem, though it did have a first taste, a sound—the rapid sound of an illusion coming apart. Siem did not pay my gripes about war much mind, and he could not appreciate why my hand shook on that trigger, but he still agreed that we should run off, far away from here, and risk the dishonour that made no fuss about us anyway. Because some people got to be a nasty kind of clean, they could play the pastimes of country or new lives, any of them as they pleased, while others of us got to kill or be killed for it. Plus, this rule breaking involved both Siem and me, so it would be a thrill to have a dirty joy in the core of other disturbances.
