The House Sequence was posted to Turner’s publishers in mid-October. Near the end of that month, Killian Turner was reported as missing by his landlord. His rent had been due for three weeks. His apartment bore no suggestion that Turner had fled — the cupboard was reasonably well-stocked and his personal belongings had not been removed. The West Berlin authorities interviewed acquaintances of Turner, along with residents of his apartment block. No one could say where he had gone, nor did they know of any friends or family of Turner’s who might be contacted in Ireland. After an examination of the diaries and notebooks found in his apartment, efforts were made to trace the individuals referred to as Mother D/Frank Lonely and Anashka. However, none of Turner’s acquaintances were able to identify either of these from the descriptions given by the authorities. It appears that those involved in investigating Turner’s disappearance reached the conclusion that neither Mother D nor Anashka really existed. Eventually, when several months had passed and nothing came up in the case, Killian Turner was officially declared a missing person by the West German authorities, and the whole affair was quickly forgotten.
Today, Killian Turner is remembered and read by but a few scattered devotees to the literature of collapse. Perhaps this is a fitting destiny for the man who declared, in a typically self-consuming aphorism, ‘It is not enough to court extinction; our aspiration is never to have been.’
1 For instance: ‘Why should it be that, in an age of burgeoning communication technologies which render geographical space increasingly insignificant, a writer, or any artist, must continue to be categorised primarily in reference to his national peers and forebears? It is obvious to me that. . writers should henceforth be categorised according to affinities of style, areas of enquiry and formal concerns, rather than by the comparatively inexpressive fact of their birth-proximity to other writers.’ (Erased Horizons, Forgotten Shores: Essays 1975–1982, Sacrum Press, Dublin).
2 Turner’s gradual shedding of his national identity undoubtedly had a stimulating effect on the development of his art. Shorn of the parochial concerns which predominate in the work of many Irish writers of his generation, Turner was freed to soar far from the homeland, towards universal or exotic themes. In a famous essay, Jorge Luis Borges expresses frustration at Argentinian authors’ unreflecting attachment to place in their work; seeing themselves primarily as Argentinian writers, they crowd their stories with local colour and content that caters to the literary sightseer and tourist. Yet why, asks Borges, should an Argentinian writer not eschew the constraining tropes of locational realism, and take as his subject the universe itself? Just as Borges met his own challenge, revolutionising the short story by engineering sublimely playful, metaphysical mysteries and ingenious hoax-narratives, so too did Killian Turner explode prejudices about what ‘Irish literature’ was allowed to do, grappling as he did with ideas of reckless scope and ambition: time, infinity, chaos, Nazism, nuclear war, sex, evil and language itself (conceived, via Burroughs, as a relentless viral weapon, of origin foul but obscure).
3 At twenty-four he published his first short story, in a Trinity College journal. ‘Father Coward’ is the confessional monologue of a north Dublin priest who secretly harbours heretical notions concerning the true, chilling significance of the visions at Fatima.
4 Thomas Duddy, ‘Bludgeoning the Muse — the Transgressive Anti-Fiction of Killian Turner’, Review of Contemporary Literature, Issue 68, June 2002.
5 For a period, Turner even seems to have entertained the belief that he himself was the reincarnation of Bataille: ‘Not figuratively, but in the full meaning of spirit recast, power enfleshed. . There are nights when, woken by the howl of a junkie down in Boxhagener Strasse or the rattle of a late U-Bahn train, I walk to the darkened mirror, and from it peer the radiant, saintly eyes of Georges Bataille.’ (Visions of Cosmic Squalor/The Upheaval, Anti-Matter, London.) However, as Bataille lived until 1962, and was therefore Turner’s contemporary for fourteen years, it is difficult to understand how Turner even considered holding this eccentric notion.
6 Admittedly, while all of the late Turner is challenging, some of the fragmentary work of his final years, especially certain of the pieces collected in Visions of Cosmic Squalor/The Upheaval, can only be described as unhinged. And yet, even the most aberrant of his work has a quality of dazzling entertainment. Consider the sprawling, unfinished essay, worked on during the early eighties and unpublished at the time of his disappearance, in which Turner asserts that Joyce’s final novel, the monstrous Finnegans Wake, is nothing less than a coded transmission intended to trigger the apocalypse. According to Turner (and this has been ridiculed by the few scholars who have bothered to address the issue at all), while Joyce was living in Trieste, he was contacted by a sinister group of Cabbalistic Jews who, given impetus by the events of the First World War, were promulgating an eschatological doctrine in which language itself figured as a kind of super-weapon, radiating metaphysical contaminants through the media of literature, radio and cinema. Joyce, writes Turner, most likely considered the conspiring Cabbalists as nothing more than a picturesque nuisance. However, he goes on, the Cabbalists submitted an unwitting Joyce to a refined form of hypnotism, implanting him with the apocalyptic codes, syntactic rhythms and linguistic motifs which their ancient studies had revealed to them as the ammunition of cosmic disarray — and which, according to Turner, were to surface, unbeknownst to Joyce, across the expansive tapestry of his most mystifying novel.
7 A certain lightness of tone, unusual in Turner’s work, can be detected in passages and diary entries written during these months, as if the happiness inspired by his friendship with Mother D could not but seep through into Turner’s authorial voice.
8 Thomas Duddy, ‘Ecstatic Slaughter: Human Sacrifice in the Work of Georges Bataille and Killian Turner’, Radical Philosophy, Issue 116, Winter 1999.
Paris Story
It happens like this. While living in Paris, X writes a novel based on his experiences as an expat. The novel receives interest from several publishers, but none of them is finally willing to take it on. Meanwhile, X’s friend K, who is also living in Paris, completes her first collection of short stories. K is signed up by a literary agent and, within a month, the collection is sold to a major publisher.
While X has always been encouraging of K’s writing, in private he considers it sentimental storytelling, of no great literary moment. X begins working on another novel, but progress is slow and difficult. Meanwhile, K’s collection is published and is an immediate success. K begins appearing in newspapers and on radio shows. X and K still meet for coffee, or drink in wine bars with their friends, and take walks in the Jardin du Luxembourg. While they walk, K admits to X how pleasant it is to receive the media attention, yet ultimately how silly and inconsequential. Maybe, maybe not, thinks X.