A Xerox of Feeling: Dennis Cooper's Frisk

Abstract

Dennis Cooper’s Frisk only gradually discloses the device that structures its narration. It’s a novel in the first person singular, proceeding from a character identical in name and overlapping in biography with the author, “Dennis.” And because it’s a novel largely about extravagant desire, the nominalism that tempts identification between author and narrator—Dennis the poet and Dennis the pilgrim—Frisk opens, and leaves unresolved, a series of questions about the reality or fictiveness of those desires. Questions like, to what degree is Dennis the narrator authentically or deceptively narrating events that are ‘true’ to the actual, which is to say the fictive, events of the novel? To what degree do these events index real events in the social world of Cooper the author? If we really listen to them, we’ll discover that questions about the relative authenticity and fictiveness of the nested representations of desire turn out to be questions of trust, willingness to be deceived, and receptiveness to certain forms of sentences and dramatic turns of event. That is to say, questions about the reality of narration turn out to be questions about the willingness to be seduced into reading a work of fiction, and narration appears as a form of topping in which the top seems to be in control, until he isn’t. Decidedly after the fact, Cooper’s novel appears easily consigned to the continually expanding, still kind of sexy and decidedly overtheorized category of autofiction.1 But this isn’t quite right, at least by comparison to the most obvious examples of that genre. In a forthcoming essay in Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke’s Transgender Marxism, Jordy Rosenberg suggests that autofiction testifies, recursively, to the authenticity of a