Xenobacillus glossophagii by Kenji Siratori. Xenopoem. 2025.
Reviewed by Tom Bowden
Kenji Siratori’s Xenobacillus glossophagii is a science fiction novel. Written according to “scientific” discourse, the novel doubles as a document both about and expressive of the eponymous bacterium. This bacterium seems to be in cosmic competition with William Burroughs’s virus from outer space. Whereas Burroughs only sought to identify the origin of language, Siratori wants to apply the rules of evolutionary biology implied by bacterial infection: Language is an infectious organism whose instability leads to an eventual dissolution of meaning that ultimately disturbs the biological foundations of consciousness and spiritual experience. Mutation, as a universal principle of genetic evolution, incurs transformations that necessarily alter how language shapes our perception of reality.
As a form of mutation, think of Morton Feldman’s notion of repetition with change (cf. String Quartet 2). Where differences in Feldman’s compositions accrue through repetition, furnishing material for further repetition and modification, Siratori’s Xenobacillus only offers circularity and endless deferral. The deferral of mutation seems to owe to the bifurcation between the explanation of what is supposed to happen to words) and the demonstration of that evolution. In the demonstration – the book itself – one idea segues into another, but soon the recycling of verbal phrases, citations, and allusions brings you back to the beginning, later premises yielding earlier premises that had never been independently established in the first place.
In Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Bertrand Russell notes, “Since the dictionary defines words by means of other words, there must be some words of which we know the meaning without a verbal definition.” Dictionary words are “theoretically superfluous” because they can be replaced by their definitions, as opposed to object-words – those learned through direct experience. And perhaps that’s an aim of Siratori’s: to imply a sterility in the form of technical reports validated by other reports used as citations, creating abstraction lacking experiential grounding.
There’s a playfulness here, perhaps of a game being set up. Siratori’s narration presents as impartial, didactic, and straightforward – but not necessarily transparent. Each of the book’s three sections is written as a single paragraph. Within each paragraph a succession of topics shift one into the next, with such transitions as “Similarly,” “Just as,” “[subject] parallels X. glossophagii,” and other equivalences in which physical systems become/are semiotic systems.
Here is a sample transition from one set of claims to another:
In a sense, the spiritual content conveyed through glossolalia – when it emerges unbidden in a seemingly uncontrollable manner – might be understood as a biochemical infection of the brain, with DMT as the medium facilitating an altered state in which the speaker becomes “possessed” by a higher order of cosmic truth. The Pineal Gland and the Chemical Gateway to Cosmic Consciousness: The pineal gland’s role in consciousness has long been a subject of intrigue. As one of the few glands in the body capable of synthesizing DMT…
This is the human centipede structure upon which much of the “argument” is built: one head up the ass of another. And notice the abruptness in transition from the first to the second sentence, the first sentence being a conclusion and the second the title of a paper, without paragraph break or introduction, creating the appearance of documentary evidence in lieu of doing the work to demonstrate a relationship.
Siratori’s prose often conflates literal and metaphorical explanations so that biological, linguistic, cognitive, and metaphysical processes cease to be distinguishable. Saying “language behaves like a parasite” can be a productive metaphor. Saying linguistic systems reproduce in ways analogous to biological systems can become a theoretical model whose correspondences can be examined. Saying language is literally being genetically modified by a xenobacterium impersonates an empirical/material claim.
Furthermore, the book never explores its scores of assumptions, and presents a system that, for all its alleged genetic alterations, remains static – i.e., it contains change, and lots of it, but little difference to speak of. Difference without change is either the novel’s weakest imaginative point or its basis for a critique that embodies the form it critiques. But the narrative method seems unable to imagine a sample trajectory for the changes it claims the Xenobacillus introduces: it can’t tell how artifact A of a mutated language might become artifact B, and thus the narrative remains static.
Evolutionary accounts must provide – in addition to a succession of forms – some explanation of how A can become B through intermediate states, and how those states persist. The earlier structure needn’t perform the later structure’s function, and a present function needn’t explain the origin of its structure. Some feathers have possessed thermoregulatory functions before becoming implicated in flight.
An evolutionist might conduct a thought experiment by imagining language as temporary. Human symbolic language could be one contingent communicative/cognitive adaptation that eventually produces conditions under which some other adaptation supersedes it – just as biological structures can acquire functions unrelated to the selective circumstances in which they originated. Then the interesting question isn’t “What happens when language mutates?” but “What could language become such that we no longer recognize the result as language?”
While Siratori’s narrator insists that language is prone to infection, and infection to mutation – with mutation of language leading to changes in cognition that produce changes in perceived reality – his narrative fails to actually model an instance of that transformation. Nor are consequences of this evolutionary change explored, even though one might imagine that, among social animals such as humans, the need to communicate and cooperate will not have changed. Given the prevalence of Xenobacillus glossophagii reported here and its alleged tendency to cancel meaning, it’s a surprise that humanity is still alive.
Without bearing that trajectory out, “mutation” becomes essentially decorative vocabulary. Add infection, hybridization, recombination, evolution, etc. – there seem to be no limits to Siratori’s expressions, yet the machinery contrived by all that language stays frustratingly put. The text generates extensive surface variation without producing much in the way of functional novelty. And it’s the sheer proliferation of surface variation that makes me wonder if Siratori wrote portions of this book with the aid of AI. Not because the prose displays telltale signs of machine generation, nor because I have evidence of its use, but because the sort of labor involved in producing the hundreds of narrow variations on a slight theme found here might encourage a writer to delegate some of that labor to a machine. The rhetorical procedure established, its execution strikes me as an arduous and potentially tedious exercise. But I also don’t discount the power of obsession to propel a writer, whether forward, in circles, or some other direction.
Xenobacillus glossophagii mimics the outward authority of scientific literature while keeping its evidentiary obligations at a distance. The result is a parody of meta-analysis: a 767-page, oversized book with a scientific-sounding name, much of it written as a single paragraph in small print – and yet, for all its scientific claims, it remains uncontaminated by footnotes and references to technical articles. Much purported research is summarized but rarely is a name attached to a summary, let alone the title of the paper and its provenance. Its “scientific” claims, too, tend to be bogus, shaped by terms that should never apper in conventional technical reports: “cosmic cannibalism,” “cosmic hunger,” etc.
Overall, I found the book funny – as in Andy Kaufman funny – that sort of guerrilla comedy that goes all in, like the bit in which Kaufman would dress in formal wear, speak with a snobbish British accent, and recite as much of The Great Gatsby as the audience could stand. What heckling couldn’t deter, audience abandonment ended. After who knows how much time of Kaufman declaiming Fitzgerald in a monotone, audiences knew they were in for a long night, assuming they wanted to stay for the full performance, since they already got the joke.
Like many in Kaufman’s audience, I couldn’t sit through the entirety of the performance that is Xenobacillus once I saw what I was in for (I made it through some 80 pages). While Xenobacillus fails to demonstrate transformation, it does succeed in making readers experience the exhaustion of a system that cannot transform. There is no narrative arc or cumulative effect, no plot, and a circular argument. The first two qualities are also employed by Kenneth Goldsmith – and to great effect – as when he reproduces, word-for-word, a month of 5-minute weather reports from the radio.
So why don’t they work here? While Goldsmith retained the same rhetorical structure and cadence from report to report, the weather changed; in Goldsmith’s Traffic (a compilation of traffic reports), arteries clot then open, bad weather causes bad accidents; in Sports a very long baseball game is recounted. Both the technical report format followed by Siratori and the media reports that served as Goldsmith’s materials have highly and conventionally delimited rules about what to report and how to talk about it. For me, Goldsmith’s conceptual works are largely studies in rhetorical parameters placed upon unpredictable events. But by eliminating the unpredictable from Xenobacillus, Siratori leaves little to make the results compelling: The method by which language is said to mutate never contaminates his novel. Rather than a novel that slowly changes according to its own premises it remains unaffected by the process it presents. A bacterium’s mutations ought to introduce unpredictability; Siratori’s narrative structure prevents unpredictability.
While the implicit message of Xenobacillus is funny – if it is intended as an assertion of circularity within the sciences – I’m not convinced that it’s worth the payoff to read all the way through rather than own as a document that embodies the form it critiques. Warhol’s Empire (1964) – a moving picture of a static object lasting more than eight hours – comes to mind as an artifact of endurance not really meant to be endured. I confess to not getting past page 80, having dipped in here and there between page 80 and page 767 to see if I could detect some deviation, some straying from the first ten percent of the book’s words. I did not detect what I hoped to detect.
I don’t doubt Siratori’s earnestness, and I suspect that the novel’s exhausting circularity is part of its design. But recognizing the design doesn’t necessarily make the experience rewarding. Siratori’s experiment, doggedly pursued, ultimately failed to sustain my engagement.
Tom Bowden reviews literature and poetry in translation, with emphasis on classical and contemporary works from mainland China. His monthly review column may be found at The Book Beat.