The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Breaking Through: A Narrative of the Great Work by André VandenBroeckJames DeRossitt
André VandenBroeck. Breaking Through: A Narrative of the Great Work. Introduction by Colin Wilson. City Lights, 1996. 374 pp. Paper: $15.95.
Breaking Through is a rough-edged philosophical treatise and novel about many things—among them art, time, technology, language, rocks, human bodies, and the prehistoric past. Dazzling, exuberant, and very strange, it is also a novel about the nature of seeing. The author’s argument, simply put, is that in the struggle for survival, humankind has invented instruments and technologies to exert dominance over the environment, and in doing so the human organism has become distanced from fundamental—and fundamentally human—ways of seeing, feeling, and being in the world. The philosophical adventure of Breaking Through suggests how we might regain this primitive, open relation to our environment, through a kind of improvisation rather than rules, an embrace of dilettantism, and learning not to see more, but to look better.
The central figure in this novel is a photographer named Piero Tallini. He made a fortune from a documentary about Indian holy men, but he has become disgusted with the trappings of artistic success. Tallini becomes interested in exploring man’s early origins; he’s convinced that our earliest human ancestors, the cave people at the “first glimmers of consciousness,” have something important to teach him about existence. He connects with the spirits of these early humans in a mystical awakening while he’s at an elegant Paris literary salon.
From there he goes to the southern coast of Spain, where he seeks to deepen his relationship with the primitive spirits. Tallini makes journeys into the rocky terrain and soon realizes that “improvisational consciousness” is the key to a renewed physical and spiritual relation with the land. Without the ability to improvise, modern man has lost the “kind of freedom that was most essentially human.” In route to this realization Tallini ponders the nature of modern society and how technology has taken on a mind of its own and begun to drag man behind it. What we need, Tallini discovers, is a “foreseeing mentality” to help us keep technology—and thus our minds, our language, our very existence—“in hand.”
Although clumsy and overwritten in places, Breaking Through is a fascinating novel that shows how relevant romantic notions are to today’s technocratic corporate societies. It’s also an utterly contemporary companion to the philosophy of Walter Benjamin as well as postmodern philosophers like Lyotard and Vattimo, who are saying many of the same things about man’s enslavement of himself to technology. [James DeRossitt]