The republication of Alice Knott (2020) as Void Corporation demonstrates that Blake Butler is allowed to rehash history as many times as he likes—just like his controversial 2023 airing of his marriage to the late Molly Brodak, who cannot defend herself. Molly will predictably follow Butler throughout his career, with even his publisher describing Void Corporation as a “definitive edition” for “fans” of Molly—the book, not the woman herself.
Alice Knott was released before the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of its ideas (what comes after irony poisoning, cold coastal disappointment in the world, our lack of interest in each other’s welfare) are seemingly still prescient as we approach 2025. In Void Corporation, Butler once again asks what we find in art and whether it provides any relief. Knott, the protagonist, finds herself at odds with the arts community and later herself in a 2001: A Space Odyssey-styled deconstruction of her childhood. Throughout my reading of Void Corporation and Butler’s whip-smart Twitter, I found that Butler has had and still has a lot to say about the relationship between art and healing. It made me wonder—did Butler find healing, or some worse thing while writing Molly? While his text states that his lesser-known female avatar Alice Knott is “not at all difficult to find,” the overall meaning of Void Corporation is unclear.
Butler’s command of language is tasteful, demonstrating his true vitality as an artist. I only know of Butler through Molly and the geriatric alt lit 1.0 publication HTMLGiant. Several of his longer lines in Void Corporation made me wonder if he had ever considered taking poetry more seriously. A quick search revealed past poems he published in 3:AM Magazine in 2007; Butler’s syntax and use of sound are so aesthetically and lyrically substantial that his prose could easily become long-form poems. Towards the end of Void Corporation, Alice is in some Evangelion-styled situation with her childhood self. “Mirror after mirror, hall after hall; hour upon hour; all without timecode, any cut that’s not an ad. What appears is what there is- and it is all there is. Chamber after chamber, body after body, screen after screen- no next direction to the world but what the world itself decides to see depicted on demand,” Butler writes (296).
While the common themes in Butler’s writing have been connected to theorists such as Baudrillard by clouted alt-lit scholars such as Parisian Dr. Maud Bougerol, the ideas expressed occasionally seem pulled directly from the dialectics themselves. When Butler speaks of audiences choosing what they see on demand, the average Dimes Square adjacent chud performs the pointing Leonardo DiCaprio meme in their head, which achieves exactly what Baudrillard and Butler spoke of.
Gideon Leek in The Village Voice suggests that reading Molly before Void Corporation adds a soothing layer of context to the artistically indulgent bent of the re-released Alice Knott, as Leek believes Brodak was a sort of muse for the female protagonist. When I read this, I recalled that Butler armchair diagnosed Brodak with borderline personality disorder in Molly and that Brodak will never have any opportunity to answer Butler’s defamation by way of lyrical style. With the publication of Void Corporation and its author’s continued retreading of his marriage, I disagree with Leek’s assessment. Instead, I’m positing that Butler is demonstrating he has granted himself the authority to reinvent the past—but what credibility does he have to do so? My question is whether or not reinventing the past has fidelity to it, but the true question at hand is whether caring about it has value anymore, especially when you get to be the deep and complicated bad boy who wrote about his crazy wife. When ugly things, like a loved one’s suicide, are presented to us, it is apparently Butler’s belief system (and could be many others) that we instinctively want to witness them. Butler showed his marriage and its end to the world with no afterthought. It’s content exchanged for income, it’s a confessional text offered for clout. “You know you want the lard,” reads Void Corporation, speaking about anything but actual rendered fat. “You want the lard so much, you would pay any price they ask” (150).
When I read the line about lard, it reminded me of David Lynch’s idea of garmonbozia—creamed corn that represents pain and suffering. Void Corporation does not identify why its readers want the lard. Butler, for the past year now, has served his wife’s pain and suffering to the world while receiving high praise from normie publications such as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. If it is not clear, the biggest issue I take with Butler is that there is no opportunity for Molly Brodak to ever defend herself. He has awarded himself the final word in their marriage. In republishing Alice Knott, Butler goes for a victory lap. Reading Void Corporation led me to ask what we gain by revisiting the past and whether or not editing its contents is faithful. Despite Butler’s clear talent, it’s my belief that cherry-picking the past (his marriage, an old novel) for an audience does not pass my moral litmus test. To me, it shows that Butler has anointed himself the authority over existing narrative—in fiction and his personal life.
FICTION
By Blake Butler
Archway Editions
Published December 17, 2024
