Historicity

The novel is concerned with probing the individual experience of history and deconstructing the idea of historicity. Adam’s project is to write poetry vaguely informed by the legacy of the Spanish Civil War. This is the entire premise for his fellowship in Spain. Yet he is not engaging with this history in any meaningful way. Instead, he is merely passing his time taking drugs and visiting museums. The museum represents for him a meta-experience of the historical – encountering history in a pre-inscribed way, where one is aware of the selected nature of the artifacts and artworks on display precisely to be encountered as “historical.”

Isabel’s brother’s notebook, filled with a series of numbers that she does not recognize as historical dates, inverts this dynamic, disguising the dry, reified matter of history as something personally meaningful. Isabel initially believes that the numbers might represent...