The Strange Power of the Dance-Floor Novel
The experimental German writer Rainald Goetz’s 1998 novel, “Rave,” translated by Adrian Nathan West, is set largely in the night clubs of Berlin and Munich. The book flows in and out of rooms, conversations, memories, and sensations, riding up and down on intoxicant waves, with the music pulsing always beneath it. Goetz is trying to capture the essence of the dance age, guided by a question posed by his narrator: “How would a text about our lives have to sound?”
The French writer Ann Scott tried to answer this question in her 2000 novel, “Superstars,” recently translated by Jonathan Woollen. Scott’s narrator, Louise, is a musician of sorts, a frequent drug user, and a desperate diehard romantic, forever dogged by her ex-girlfriend Alex. Louise receives a huge advance to produce an electronic record, but proceeds to make barely any music at all. She cycles in and out of Paris’s queer techno scene, going to clubs, helping her friends d.j., and dropping a lot of E.
“Rave” is told in restless fragments, “Superstars” in an almost perversely detached style that privileges visual observation over physical experience. Yet there are moments in “Superstars,” as in an early scene set at an underground rave, when Scott lets the music take over. She knows how a dance track can arise from a set of vinyl records—flexing and flowing from sample to sample, transition to transition—and how those tiny musical choices take hold of the body and make it move. “Loops overlapped, unfolded, weaved all kinds of structures, infinite trails,” Louise narrates, “and my brain wanted to follow them all, one after the other.”
From time to time, these novels partake of Tillmans’s sensual utopia, but more often they reveal its limits. In the recent book “Hyperpolitics,” the political historian Anton Jäger uses Tillmans’s photographs to illustrate the uniquely apolitical character of post-Cold War life, its retreat from the ideological churches of an earlier era. In Jäger’s view, the spread of club culture in the eighties and nineties reflected the retreat of mass public institutions like political parties, churches, and unions. In this new culture, freedom was attained not through engagement in political struggle but through individual consumer choices. Having been freed of political commitments by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of great-power conflict, the increasingly well-to-do dancers of the nineties and early two-thousands sought fulfillment in the marketplace of self-gratification.
The period’s dance-floor novels are similarly myopic. Their narrators worry about the corruption of their music scenes by news presenters, magazine writers, major-label scouts, and (for Goetz especially) academics. They watch foreign TV and obsess over brand names. Scott seems to find some special profundity in the science of advertising, devoting part of a chapter to describing a stream of TV commercials, and stopping her novel short to point out pieces of clothing worn by people at a rave, along with the designer.
There does not seem to be much of substance beyond the dance floor, and even there the rush of movement often gives way to a spiritual desolation. Louise’s drug use quickly becomes a heroin addiction, shrouding the later part of “Superstars” in an opiate haze. The characters in “Rave” can act out only in their fantasies, saying things like “No danger, no party; no fear, no fun; no beat, no logic, no nothing.” In Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 adaptation of “Morvern Callar,” the protagonist enters a Spanish night club and then disappears into herself, still listening to her own music on a Walkman. The result is a collection of novels that, while intermittently electrifying, expend an incredible quantity of words on the semiotics of TV marketing and the ethics of selling out. The authors write to us from the seemingly endless present of the nineties, when d.j.s soundtracked Hollywood movies and trips to Ibiza were dirt cheap—and then the lights came up, and the utopia vanished.
The nineties club kids and their literary representatives might have eschewed historical memory and organized politics, but the newer dance-floor books possess considerably more perspective. Less depressive, more earnest, and more explicitly political, they place the club in a larger context, rather than adopting the moment-to-moment focus on the immediate present employed by Scott, Welsh, and Goetz. In “Berghain Nights,” Cagney relates the history of techno, from its emergence in deindustrializing Detroit to its explosion in a reunified Berlin, where it was performed in air-raid bunkers, abandoned depots, and the former East German power plant that today houses Berghain. Witt and Wark both write about the liberatory potential of the rave scene among those pushed out of more mainstream spaces. And, in her Yale Review essay, Aber writes that her time on the dance floor taught her “a way of thinking with other people, not alone.”
