Synecdoche, New York

Grant Maierhofer is Scholarly Associate Professor at Washington State University, USA. He is the author of over ten books of fiction and nonfiction. He teaches creative writing, editing and publishing, as well as other adjacent courses, at Washington State University, USA.

Grant Maierhofer's Synecdoche, New York is by no means another volume of contemporary cinema criticism but an attempt to aesthetically exhaust Charlie Kaufman's film, as in Georges Perec's book about a place in Paris. In the manner of the Nouvelle Roman, Oulipo, and conceptualist writing, the mandatory "minute by minute algorithm" is adapted by Maierhofer here as a style tool for investigating his experiential relationship with the film — highlighting the ways in which that experience evolved across time and got emotionally and intellectually entangled with his biography and his art. The result is an outstanding reflection on an extraordinary film. Brilliantly arranged for turning the "abstract timer" into a synchronization device to evoke the film's original rhythm, each "minute" of Synecdoche, New York becomes an inspiration for the recalling, in each "minute-chapter" of the book, of Maierhofer's own experience as an artist: "What, in the end, does an artist have to offer the world?" — he writes in minute 42. This might be the question haunting both Kaufman's movie and this essay — and, perhaps, the traces of having failed to answer it properly is what remains of any artistic practice. As Maierhofer confesses in the preface: "I feel, I'd imagine, how John Cage must've felt when he'd solved the puzzle of reading Finnegans Wake by composing his own texts." Read the book. Watch the movie. Solve some puzzles.

• Author's Preface Minutes 1-119EndnotesIndex