This month sees the launch of the eagerly anticipated second issue of The Bleed. The latest installment, more of a book than a magazine, coming in at a whopping 140 pages, is the Bleed’s most ambitious offering yet, and, upon first glance, it appears to have lost none of its characteristic distinctiveness.

Presented as an unauthorized biography of the artist Ezra Maas, from the onset we are lured into a bewildering literary psychological thriller as we follow the central protagonist’s attempts to unravel the mysteries surrounding the former. Antagonist Maas, who has the uncanny knack of being everywhere and nowhere at the same time, becomes the crux spearheading our quest into the frontier between the true and the false, the real and the unreal and the certain and the uncertain.

The fissures, interruptions and incongruities created by such propositions are held together by the pervading metanarrative structure, which enables, not only the co-mingling of fiction and reality, but also acts as a cohesive agent, seamlessly merging disparate elements to produce a series of fluid, interwoven narratives.

It is this postmodern shift from the centre to the periphery, instigated by the metanarrative, that makes it impossible to read The Bleed from a single point of view. This in turn creates a myriad of new possibilities extending beyond the limits of narrative truth and which ensure the adage put forward by The Bleed: the book is constantly rewriting itself and changes as we read it.

The reader thus embarks on a process of what literary theorist Stanley Fish referred to as ‘hazarding’ whereby what is important is not the intended meaning put forward by the supposed author but the very attempt by the reader to unravel this meaning. According to Fish this process of hazarding eventually erodes the text until it is made to disappear entirely. (Fish, 1976)

‘You will only know that I have succeeded if you do not know who Ezra Maas is, if the name means nothing to you.’ (D.Thomson, The Bleed, Issue 2, 2012)
Of course, it soon will.

http://www.thebleed.co.uk/

Image courtesy of The Bleed, 2012

The Bleed Magazine, Review