…retrocede is a series of experimental texts written in varying, disembodied vocal styles. Meaning is not absolute. There are no characters, there is no plot, nor is it indeed a novel in any conventional sense. The context is the written now. There are traces & meditations on perspective and language, voice & nothingness; the corporeal and the ‘raw teeth of extinction’. The book takes its origins from a burgeoning sense of exile, & futility; violence has its place in the linguistics of the texts, the imagery… (made to rust, in the burning non-chambers of the ideational, taken as was once from the emptily of dispel, as dreaming a broken history to the point of non-exist, in a present/presence continuum, ever as of the once knowing little of the what of as of all… a sickly strain of diseased language rotting its innards out from the echo within the echo, the coil with each form that sanguine gives its traces…)
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“A nihilistic experience. As if flies enter the mouth, the room, the rotation of thought—what reality or whose? Lynch’s Mulholland Drive-dumpster-monster-scene meets paint splatter and methodical prose. Mc Aloran’s writing tackles modernism’s complex legacy in Joyce’s wake—one hundred years on. At the inscrutable core, that inner contingency: what do we name the sap, the nectar, the marrow? Retrograde, without agenda, Mc Aloran points with obsolescence to obsolescence… retrocede's metaphysical alteration of linear patterns carry the reader through chaotic undulations. Language is dispossessed, Shakespearian, confrontational. Yet as bedlam congeals, we find harmony itself is an inescapable shadow.” -- Maureen Alsop
“It’s difficult to situate the work of Michael Mc Aloran in literary terms. It’s easier to describe it in terms of what it bears little or no resemblance to (most prose and poetry). It’s also a mistake to look for things it does resemble (he’s been blessed and cursed by comparisons to Samuel Beckett – a comparison made chiefly, I suspect, because they’re both Irish). // ‘retrocede’ does have a narrative, but one devoid of time and/or space. Almost like a still-life where objects frozen in amniotic abandon are subject to an almost autistic focus and obsession, within totemic self-referential landscapes reminiscent of the early paintings by Tanguy and Masson. // Although time and/or space are absent, the element of ‘conscience’ is not. Objects and actions display a lugubrious abjection, landscapes shimmer with disgust or disappointment, a lightning flash is shameful, a miasma of resignation suffuses the pages. We feel instinctively familiar with this world, as if it’s something we’ve been carrying with us deep on some level of the reptilian brain. // I frequently find refuge in Mc Aloran’s writing; devoid equally of anxiety and hope, like a ground zero point in a maelstrom of increasingly meaningless information.” -- DM Mitchell
'retrocede' is available from Erratum Press
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