On the Horn

At first, a savvy reader might place Michael Redhill’s The Trial of Katterfelto as a postmodernist work of historiographic metafiction, a term coined by the Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon. It is, after all, an epistolary novel set in the eighteenth century, consisting of letters penned by Roger Gossage, an alcoholic who repeatedly insists that his story is “entirely true.”

Surprisingly, much of his story is indeed historically accurate. Roger’s travelling companion, Prussian-born Gustavus Katterfelto, was a roadside magician who is sometimes credited with inventing germ theory. Other notable figures are present, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge (to whom Roger is writing), William Hazlitt, Erasmus Darwin, John Cartwright, and a stand‑in for Caroline Herschel. Characters authentically date themselves, as when Roger recalls, “I arrived the day that Joshua Reynolds died, and left just after Britain took Martinique.” And such details suggest Redhill might be aiming beyond the postmodern.

The cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker have argued that, since the turn of this century, postmodernism has been slowly replaced by metamodernism: “characterized by the oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment.” That’s an “impossible possibility,” in other words, where one must strive toward what cannot be achieved. This state of flux — moving toward but never arriving — is where The Trial of Katterfelto finds its home.

The plot rolls along in a picaresque mode: as they cross England, Roger and Katterfelto scrape by, enchanting audiences with “Enlightening Magicks” of legerdemain and science. Everything changes when Katterfelto cuts his foot on a shard of rubbed silver. Roger recovers the rest of the object: a disk with crimped edges, which he restores to something like a horn. During their next performance, Katterfelto attempts to use it to amplify his voice to a waning crowd, but after a hellish roar of static, a woman’s voice emerges. Her accent is of the King’s English — though not one the narrator has heard before — and her words are bewildering. Siri, as she calls herself, speaks of transmission layers, parallel universes, dead children in flooded cities, AI, mind viruses, and Donald Trump.

From this point on, Redhill’s use of genre approaches a “both-neither” construction. On its surface, the novel belongs to post-apocalyptic speculative as well as historical fiction, but Siri’s voice represents its deeper preoccupation with our present. “The only place where change can happen is now,” she says.

The Trial of Katterfelto embodies its “impossible possibility” form, made obvious within the paradox of time travel. Siri speaks — her words are a recording of soliloquies — from a future that is already realized. This does not stop Roger and Katterfelto’s earnest attempt to help her share her prophecies. They carry the horn across England, forming a band of the era’s greatest intellectuals. Along the way, we discover that this is why Roger writes to Coleridge: not just to document their journey but to use the poet’s publishing connections to warn the world of this future.

A Moroccan Jew, Roger Gossage was born Raphael Mechoulam Gozlan. His two first names are at odds, translating to “healed by God” and “paid with money,” respectively. Inhabiting a long list of contradictions, he is drawn to helping others, “because it is satisfying to see one’s actions do good in the world,” but he doubts whether his decisions can be altruistic if they give him pleasure. He trusts in science and demons, fate and logic, skepticism and faith. He is self-conscious of his Judaism but relies on fellow Jews to survive. He believes his “best trick” is bringing people together while remaining aware of his social standing. Ultimately, he is a man who is brimming with contrasting qualities, who recognizes the irony of his own futility but strives in earnest despite it.

This tension is carried throughout, touching every character and challenging the difference between neoclassical rationalism and Romanticism. Katterfelto is a man of science, who uses a microscope during his performances to show “twirling little worms and bugs” in the water, understands the movement of the moon, and spreads awe of electricity and magnetism around eighteenth-century England. But he is not wholly opposed to a Romantic sensibility. As a conjurer, he is animated by the same wonder that drives Coleridge. “The magician misdirects attention while the poet focusses it, but there is much of similarity in their arts,” Roger observes. And when Coleridge recites The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to an audience including Roger and Katterfelto, the latter commits the lyric poem to memory, reciting it back mere minutes later. In explaining the meaning of his lines —“God save thee, ancient Mariner!”— Coleridge cautions of the consequences of man’s unnatural acts toward nature, represented in the mariner’s irrational killing of a peaceful albatross with a crossbow.

The clearest expression of this ideological oscillation is found in the horn. Only when touched by blood can Siri’s transmission from the future, itself a warning about man’s unnatural acts toward nature, be heard. The instrument operates as a metamodern artifact; it is the product of Enlightenment progress but requires a Romantic sacrament before it will speak. Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is here literalized. Indeed, as Vermeulen and van den Akker have noted, the metamodern work of art has an “emergent neoromantic sensibility,” because Romanticism wasn’t a repudiation of the age that came before it. It too was a movement that recognized the incompleteness of prior epochs.

By the end, Roger has carried his manuscript to Toronto, where Siri is from, hoping to effect change with his tale through Coleridge’s literary connections. In an appended letter from the poet dated thirty-five years after the story’s events, however, we learn that he failed to pass it along to his publisher. Instead, Roger’s son, Nelson Gossage, preserved the story, perhaps handing it down until it landed with Redhill. So the novel once again affirms its great irony: Roger cannot succeed. The future Siri describes is paradoxically inevitable. The point — Redhill’s point — is that Roger acts as if he can change the course of history and so should we. To not heed a warning like hers would be to knowingly shoot the seabird with our own crossbows.