Doe appears to be simple, minimal, a clear concept that should speak for itself. 648 pages of identifying information on unidentified bodies. However, the book, and the experience of reading it, was much more complex and layered than I expected.
The text is taken from doenetwork.org, a website dedicated to, as stated on its homepage, "assisting investigating agencies in bringing closure to national and international cold cases concerning Missing & Unidentified Persons.”
On the site, each missing or unidentified person has their own page with all available identifying information neatly organized. This information is given to the site by various unnamed volunteers. The book takes the "distinguishing marks/features" as well as the "circumstances of discovery" sections of persons files and places them into a poetic format. Almost all of the cases used were for unidentified persons, only a few were of missing persons. Each poem title is the city of discovery, the chapters titled by state. All 50 states of America have a chapter.
The apparent rules of forming each poem are as follows: the text is uncapitalized, periods and commas are removed, and the following words are altered: with, through, and; becoming: w/, thru, &.
No grammatical or orthographical corrections to the original texts are made beyond this. Some poems seem to include less of the given information than others. In short, the information is excerpted and aestheticized into poetry.
Besides the obviously harrowing and disturbing aspects to be expected in a work such as this (descriptions of mutilated bodies, suicide, murder, etc.), there are interesting layers of meaning and narrative that crop up between poems, by the nature of the book's conceit. Certain poems seem to have the same author (not Conor Hultman, but the volunteer who posted the information on the website) and odd stylistic trends occur.
For example, there are at least 11 poems which begin with either the word "circumcised" or "uncircumcised,” and several poems with extended background information on the case presented in a clean narrative style.
Throughout, therefore, there is the sense of various characters seeking out and uploading this information, and I found myself wondering about their reasons for making these contributions. Most especially with the author who noted the state of circumcision on the decedent…. Like, what the fuck is this dude’s problem? There were two or three other poems that didn’t start with the circumcision note, but said in the third or fourth line “the decedent was circumcised” or “the decedent was uncircumcised.” And I imagine this had to be the little foreskin freak—because who else would do this(?)—getting a bit nervous that people will catch onto him, the boss realizing it’s always this particular volunteer noting men’s poor preputium and maybe confront him. The way the site runs you have to go through an administrator to get permission to upload case information to the site, so I could imagine this conversation one day in fact occurring, if it hasn’t already.
Anyway, the notable author styles gave a general sense that I was with a larger crowd while reading the book, and had me reflecting on the many people involved and the interactions between us all. How the victims are known by the authors; how the authors and victims are known by the readers and by Conor; how we readers are in a sense connected by the book. This sense of connection was furthered by the organization of poems by city and state, at least for American readers.
The clarification of city and state for all poems (and therefore victims), allows for readers to more directly connect with the realities of death, murder, these lost lives and possibilities. Especially for me!
Whenever I reached the Texas chapter, specifically Houston and Fort Worth, I realized something. Before Texas, the locations often felt relatively unimportant, sometimes certain states would have trends that gave them more of an identity. Florida mentioned a few alligators, Nevada had cavedeaths, etc. But for the most part it all felt somewhat detached from the specific locations.
The Houston section brought memories of my childhood, spurned on by the silly names of persons mentioned, such as “Elmer Wayne Henley,” and “Dean Corll,” which reminded me of my relatives who still live down there and all have names similar to this (embarrassing — is my name funny and southern? It’s Christian Luke McDonough), and also wear cowboy boots on occasion and go square dancing. All of this. It made these poems all the more vivid. And then when Fort Worth came along, a street I drive down on a regular basis was mentioned, and the strip club Baby Dolls too, which I have also driven past but have never (Never ever, I swear!) entered.
All this made me think about connection. I was shocked to see these streets and places mentioned along with all the others, and mentioned in this book written by someone I vaguely know through the internet. And I’ve wondered about it before, if our individual actions really could impact each other, change something or make some difference. Reading this part of the book, I believed it. It was true. And maybe all those things I’ve done to try and help people really have helped people, in ways I could never know. And people have helped me, I’m sure, in this same way, but I haven’t taken the time to really appreciate them. Even just little moments where people have made me smile, strangers, said something worthwhile to me. Have I forgotten their impact? Did I ever really notice it?
Then I got to Iowa and it only had one entry in it. I imagined another reader, from that state, how he or she might have a totally different experience of the book because of this. A sense of detachment, and perhaps only the overwhelming inevitability of death, of being forgotten and unknown. This only furthered the many possibilities of meaning created through the book. Perhaps they would be relieved in a way, less death for them, or the nihilistic possibility of the book might shine through. The book operates well in this way, as a conceptual device. Allowing for many possible meanings to be read into it.
DOE is a complex meaning-making machine grid, an elegant conceptual device for the proliferative questions of identity. In its structure and construction, there is no set or clarified interpretation or understanding on the stance or meaning of the book and its contents, only a communion of many different voices and lives arranged in poetic format, almost mechanically. Conor Hultman’s name does not appear in the book except in the copyright. The Doe Network is not mentioned. Additional identifying information of all decedents is kept from the book. The book is dedicated to Lyle Stevik, the pseudonym of an identified decedent who killed himself. The name is a misspelling of a character from a Joyce Carol Oates novel.
Through this gridded-out interaction, between the writers, the decedents, and the possible readers, then, we see the possibility of all of these lives. Each death becomes a question of who this person was, what happened to them or who did this to them, what led them there? And, of course, then, why write it out, why comment on dead men’s penises, why collect all these lives here for us to fail to see? And we wonder then why we live our lives, too, and what purpose do they serve, seen or unseen. In the end, what do we make of it?
And so. Grasping towards and away from identity, turning each reality into a kind of fiction, a literary and aesthetic thing to be experienced abstracted from the truth. Ultimately, despite all of the people involved in the creation of this book, and all the attempts to make them known, their identities remain concealed. The motives, the meanings, and the truth are all unknown, and so may be interpreted to their fullest extent, however any one reader might see it.
