The new material, which Kroff reads with breathless relish, is even more graphic and painful than usual: a depiction of a garroting, at poetic length, as if Sade, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet had collaborated. In the voice of the eight-year-old victim there is recounted a ghastly torture scene, strangulation by garroting. Each time the boy (Kroff?) loses consciousness, the strangler (Kroff?) releases the pressure of the garrot to allow him to regain consciousness; when the boy has regained consciousness, the strangler again exerts pressure … On and on this goes, in the most excruciating “poetic” language, so that after a time it isn’t clear if there is an (actual) child being tortured or if the prose piece is sheer fantasy. Or (as Kroff has himself suggested) is it an exploration of simile?

It is pointless to inquire of Kroff if the material is meant to be interpreted as “real”—or “surreal”—for when he is asked this question, he is likely to say, with a scornful laugh, in reference to one of his idols (Wittgenstein, Derrida, Bernhard), that he has created a pseudonymous self—G***n K***f—in order to create a text, and that a text has no ontological existence apart from letters, words, sentences displayed on a page.

(But she feels so sorry for the little boy!—Caitlin, one of the young women in the workshop, has exclaimed. What Kroff has written might be merely a text, but it has the power to terrify her and to bring tears to her eyes.)

Of course, all this is true enough. As a writer, a creator of texts, you can’t disagree. Kroff has a naturally analytical mind, it seems, along with a naturally perverse, sadistic, and masochistic imagination, and all that he claims is plausible enough, as his use of profanities, obscenities, and racially tinged insults in his prose is merely textual. His ecstatic flights of prose are texts primarily, assemblages of words. That the words are often impenetrable, and the material often discomforting, is also true, but perhaps not the primary issue.

How to “criticize” such a writer? If he wished, Kroff could (probably) write as clearly and engagingly as others in the class, on other, less upsetting subjects; but he seems to have no interest in replicating reality, and it has been a cause for wonderment in the workshop (expressed not to Kroff himself, but to you, by other students) that he has so little interest in writing about the army, his fellow soldiers, Afghanistan. Perversely, his prose is set nowhere recognizable, like the prose of Edgar Allan Poe, and his “characters” scarcely exist except as vehicles for impressionistic descriptions of mental states. All is (maddeningly, exhaustively) interior and introverted, lacking psychological depth and dialogue: there are screams, groans, sighs, and utterances in Kroff’s prose, but no conversations. No discernible plots or stories in his prose, only dire existential situations.