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A hurtling account of the accelerating desire of a University of Toronto
philosophy student (simply called “X”) to firebomb the Toronto head-
quarters of notorious Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, the book charts X’s
growing rage at the Zündel supremacy, rage continually fuelled by Garnet’s
frequent interrupting of X’s narrative with the rhythmic imposition of
12 documentary texts (Garnet calls them “footnotes”) culled from the
writings of famous anti-Semites like Henry Ford and David Irving, along
with, for example, postings from the Zündelsite and hunks of The Turner
Diaries, the infamously racist 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce (writing
as Andrew Macdonald). It’s like pulling teeth to read these bone-crushingly
bureaucratic screeds— and just as painful. But it does tend to make you
as angry as X.
Here is X in the early stages of preparing for his upcoming assault on
the Zündel bunker: he decides, for example, that he needs to read Sartre’s
book Anti-Semite and Jew ( 1946 ). He feels the book “could easily serve as
a signifier of [his] propensity for obsessiveness: the desire to need” (even
though, in the end, it doesn’t).
The phrase “the desire to need” is almost redundant. Almost, but not
quite. And Garnet has expended a great deal of tightly focused time since
2007 (the year of Lost Between theEdges) in a fearless, full-chorded exfolia-
tion in the rest of his art of the modalities of human need and our perverse
and punishing desire to pursue Need Itself. And to hold up an unflinching
mirror to the price we seem willing to pay for it.
All need is risk. And needing, therefore, engenders fear. And it is thefear that lies at the core of our desires that has been Garnet’s province—from
the very beginning of his long, fecund career.
Fear already tinctures his epic poem, Brebeuf: A Martyrdom of JeanDe,
from way back in 1977 , continues through his satirically severe 1983–84
photo-installation, Caves (a catalogue of the deadly sins), informs his
first novel, I Shot Mussolini ( 1989 ), and orders the bleak and violently anti-
bureaucratic photo-work Dominion ( 2009 ).
Fear is jabbed, as if by inoculation, into the beautiful rigours of the
Helpless photomurals (2 0 11) (about which novelist Sheila Heti noted in
her catalogue introduction, “Everything is either a place something is
dropped into or from. There is no place from which we can’t fall.”), con-
tinues into the provisionally retrospective Shadows and Shades ( 2014 ) and
culminates in his latest photo-sequence, the chilling, highly disturbing
Garden of Hell on Earth (2 016)—a long, muffled groan of hopelessness, a
mighty surge of chthonic anguish over our own inability or unwillingness
to transcend ourselves.
Garnet’s fourth novel, Categories of Disappearance, published as a limited
edition in 2 013 by his own Impulse [b:] press (an addendum and outrigger
to the much-admired art and culture periodical Impulse, which Garnet so
brilliantly edited and published from 1975 to 1990 ), is a bleak analogical tale
about a mysterious epidemic that is decimating the entire population of a
city (like Toronto) —and presumably the entire world—by making it impos-
sible for anyone to take in or absorb food. Everybody’s starving to death.
Garnet, who is now in his late 60s, tells me he sees the book as a longEldon Garnet Categories
of Disappearance #44 2009
C-print 2 0.3 x 25.4 cm COURTESY
TORCH GALLERY, AMSTERDAMEldon Garnet Categories
of Disappearance #51 2009
C-print 2 0. 3 x 25.4 cm
COURTESY CHRISTOPHER CUTTS GALLERYGarnet_ sp16_14TSLR.indd 87 02/04/16 1:53 PM