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Spaces of Expression and Repression in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture
 9783631665473

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of contents
Introduction
Negative Mobilities (Julia Leyda)
Eye(s) in the Sky: Icons of War and Techno-Gaze in Contemporary Audiovisual Culture (Paweł Frelik)
Portraits Painterly and Poetic: John Ashbery and Gerhard Richter (Paulina Ambroży)
The Dynamic Space of Divinity and Ontology in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (Andrew J. Ploeg)
Self-Expression and Sexual Repression in Joyce Carol Oates’s “The White Cat” and Beasts (Joanna Stolarek)
A Space in-between Genders: Rethinking the American Bildungsroman from an Intersex Perspective (Elli Kyrmanidou)
Expressing the Uncertainty, Reflecting Memory: The Role of Memorabilia in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (Aleksandra Kamińska)
Representation of Asexuality in The Big Bang Theory (Petra Filipová)
#effyourbeautystandards: Body Positivity Movement as an Expression of Feminist Identity (Olga Korytowska)
Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County (Ewelina Feldman-Kołodziejuk)
Affect and Memory in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (Patrycja Antoszek)
A Sense of Otherness: Auditory-Gustatory Synesthesia and Cultural Identity in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth (Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis)
Text, Image and Sound: Artistic Tiers in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams (Izabella Kimak)
A New Take on “The Mournful and Never Ending Remembrance”: Personal Loss and the Trauma of History in E. L. Doctorow’s Andrew’s Brain (Sławomir Studniarz)
Repression and Control in a Post-Panoptic Anti-Utopian State: The Radch Empire in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy (Anna Gilarek)
Emotion Management and Damage Control: Navigating Global Reality in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy (Julia Nikiel)
Player as a Victim of Repression and a Tool of Oppression in the Totalitarian World of Papers, Please (Paweł Kołtuniak)
Notes on the Contributors

Citation preview

NEW AMERICANISTS IN POLAND Edited by Tomasz Basiuk

Vol. 9

Izabella Kimak / Julia Nikiel (eds.)

Spaces of Expression and Repression in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture

The essays included in this book offer an overview of literary works, films, TV series, and computer games, which reflect current social and political developments since the beginning of this century. The contributions intend to x-ray the most crucial aspects of contemporary North-American literature and culture. Addressing a variety of media, the authors of the essays probe the many ways in which repression and expression are the primary keywords for understanding contemporary American life and culture.

Izabella Kimak and Julia Nikiel work at the Department of American Literature and Culture at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland. They created and coordinate the ExRe(y) project and organize its biannual conferences.

www.peterlang.com

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NEW AMERICANISTS IN POLAN Edited by Tomasz Basiuk

Izabella Kimak / Julia Nikiel (eds.) · Spaces of Expression and Repression

Spaces of Expression and Repression in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture

V

Izabella Kimak / Julia Nikiel (eds.)

Spaces of Expression and Repression in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture

NEW AMERICANISTS IN POLAND Edited by Tomasz Basiuk

Band 9

Izabella Kimak / Julia Nikiel (eds.)

Spaces of Expression and Repression in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. This publication was financially supported by the Institute of English Studies of the Maria Curie Sklodowska University in Lublin.

ExRe(y) Logo: © Martyna Bomba

ISSN 2191-2254 ISBN 978-3-631-66547-3 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-05884-0 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-70941-2 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-70942-9 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-05884-0 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2017 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Table of contents Introduction ................................................................................................................. 7 Julia Leyda Negative Mobilities ...................................................................................................  11 Paweł Frelik Eye(s) in the Sky: Icons of War and Techno-­Gaze in Contemporary Audiovisual Culture ..................................................................  25 Paulina Ambroży Portraits Painterly and Poetic: John Ashbery and Gerhard Richter ..................  37 Andrew J. Ploeg The Dynamic Space of Divinity and Ontology in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves ............................................................  59 Joanna Stolarek Self-­Expression and Sexual Repression in Joyce Carol Oates’s “The White Cat” and Beasts ...................................................................................  71 Elli Kyrmanidou A Space in-­between Genders: Rethinking the American Bildungsroman from an Intersex Perspective ..................................................................................  83 Aleksandra Kamińska Expressing the Uncertainty, Reflecting Memory: The Role of Memorabilia in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home ...................................  93 Petra Filipová Representation of Asexuality in The Big Bang Theory .......................................  103 Olga Korytowska #effyourbeautystandards: Body Positivity Movement as an Expression of Feminist Identity ............................................................................  113 Ewelina Feldman-­Kołodziejuk Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County ............................................................................................  123

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Table of contents

Patrycja Antoszek Affect and Memory in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child .............................  135 Urszula Niewiadomska-­Flis A Sense of Otherness: Auditory-­Gustatory Synesthesia and Cultural Identity in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth .............................................  143 Izabella Kimak Text, Image and Sound: Artistic Tiers in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams .....................................................................................................  155 Sławomir Studniarz A New Take on “The Mournful and Never Ending Remembrance”: Personal Loss and the Trauma of History in E. L. Doctorow’s Andrew’s Brain ..........................................................................  163 Anna Gilarek Repression and Control in a Post-­Panoptic Anti-­Utopian State: The Radch Empire in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy ............................  173 Julia Nikiel Emotion Management and Damage Control: Navigating Global Reality in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy .....................................................................  185 Paweł Kołtuniak Player as a Victim of Repression and a Tool of Oppression in the Totalitarian World of Papers, Please ....................................................................  195 Notes on the Contributors ....................................................................................  203

Introduction The turn of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries was characterized by events that left an indelible mark on the American mentality, life, and art. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon shattered American sense of security and the belief in American invincibility. A sense of threat was further exacerbated by the economic crisis of 2008 that left hundreds, if not thousands, of people without the protection of home and spawned the Occupy Wall Street movement, an expression of mounting social anger at the economic inequality of the US. As the second decade of the twenty-­first century is drawing to its close, feelings of anxiety and tension show no tendency to subside. The world-­ wide threat of terrorism and the refugee crisis, together with the Donald Trump presidency at home and a sense of insecurity that it generates for millions of Americans, especially undocumented aliens, are heralds of more tension and fear to come. It comes as no surprise that this overwhelming sense of anxiety has found its reflection in the productions of contemporary American authors and artists. Fiction writers, film makers, and game producers exhibit a proclivity to address in their works issues of oppression, trauma, sexual liminality, economic instability, surveillance and control, political repression and persecution. The current interest in the topic of repression, with its many facets and nuances, is paralleled by a growing preoccupation with various novel modes of expression, both on the level of content and form. The essays included in this collection offer an overview of literary works, films, TV series, and computer games, released after the year 2000, which reflect current social and political developments. Addressing a variety of media – text, image and the intersection of the two – the authors of the essays gathered in this book probe the many ways in which repression and expression are the primary keywords for understanding contemporary American life and culture. The collection begins with Julia Leyda’s powerful take on the concept of negative mobility, which she understands as movement caused by desperation and lack of prospects. Analyzing as case studies two novels from the 1930s – William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl – side by side with two contemporary movies – Interstellar (2014) and Wendy and Lucy (2008), Leyda investigates the ways in which cultural productions may prompt people to think over possible responses to moments of crisis. In the subsequent essay, “Eye(s) in the Sky: Icons of War and Techno-­Gaze in Contemporary Audiovisual Culture,” Paweł Frelik uses the example of two movies – Apocalypse Now (1979) and Sicario

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Introduction

(2015) – to examine the ways in which contemporary visual iconography reflects shifts in global power relations and the dynamics of systems of power before and after the watershed of 9/11, with special emphasis put on the global position of the United States. Two subsequent essays draw on/from the interplay of text and image in two very distinct ways. Paulina Ambroży in “Portraits Painterly and Poetic: John Ashbery and Gerhard Richter” attempts a comparative study of poetry and visual art, addressing the deployment of postmodern portraiture in the poems of John Ashbery and the paintings of Gerhard Richter. In “The Dynamic Space of Divinity and Ontology in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves,” Andrew Ploeg analyzes Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 ergodic novel arguing that by proposing corresponding concepts of God and self as what Ploeg calls “unforeseeable becoming,” the novel questions the founding premises of both essentialism and fundamentalism. The following five essays revolve around questions of sexuality and corporeality. First, in “Self-­Expression and Sexual Repression in Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘The White Cat’ and Beasts” Joanna Stolarek shows how Oates relies on and ultimately challenges her male literary masters – Edgar Allan Poe and D. H. Lawrence – in the creation of her strong-­willed female characters. Elli Kyrmanidou in her article titled “A Space in-­between Genders: Rethinking the American Bildungsroman from an Intersex Perspective” offers a definition of the genre of the intersex bildungsroman on the basis of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and Kathleen Winter’s Annabel. In “Expressing the Uncertainty, Reflecting Memory: The Role of Memorabilia in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,” Aleksandra Kamińska looks at what memory is made of according to Alison Bechdel. In Bechdel’s queer narrative, Kamińska argues, memorabilia provide a means of communication and a way to arrive at and express the truth. In “Representation of Asexuality in The Big Bang Theory,” Petra Filipová tackles the under- and misrepresentation of the asexual minority in contemporary American television, while in the final essay in this group “#effyourbeautystandards: Body Positivity Movement as an Expression of Feminist Identity,” Olga Korytowska offers an interesting analysis of the phenomenon of online body positivity movement, situating it in the context of feminist legacy and pointing to the movement’s strengths and limitations. Next, the book moves on to three essays which are all analyses of literary texts that deal with trauma in the context of family life. First, Ewelina Feldman-­ Kołodziejuk in her “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County” employs psychological theories on the transmission of trauma in her reading of Letts’s play. Patrycja Antoszek and Urszula Niewiadomska-­Flis, in turn, present literary depictions of familial trauma that are further complicated

Introduction

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by questions of race. Antoszek’s essay, “Affect and Memory in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child,” uses psychological theory of affect in the analysis of the child protagonist of Morrison’s novel as a victim of racial and sexual oppression. Niewiadomska-­Flis in “A Sense of Otherness: Auditory-­Gustatory Synesthesia and Cultural Identity in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth” focuses on the phenomenon of synesthesia as a reflection of the protagonist’s complex racial identity. Like the preceding three, the succeeding two essays are explorations of literary representations of trauma, but this time it is a trauma generated by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In “A New Take on ‘The Mournful and Never Ending Remembrance’: Personal Loss and the Trauma of History in E. L. Doctorow’s Andrew’s Brain,” Sławomir Studniarz examines the archival character of E.L. Doctorow’s novel and shows the horrible extent to which (a national) disaster and the trauma of history can pulverize human mind. Izabella Kimak, in turn, in her essay “Text, Image and Sound: Artistic Tiers in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams” analyzes Divakaruni’s post-9/11 novel, in which art functions as both an antidote to trauma and an illustration of a complex position of a racial subject in the post-9/11 landscape. Finally, the last three essays in the collection attempt to shed light on the issue of political and economic repression. First, in “Repression and Control in a Post-­ Panoptic Anti-­Utopian State: The Radch Empire in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy,” Anna Gilarek provides a detailed analysis of the coercive measures and mechanisms of control and surveillance in an expansionist, authoritarian, and militaristic state. Then, in “Emotion Management and Damage Control: Navigating Global Reality in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy,” Julia Nikiel examines William Gibson’s characters’ emotional response to the reality of globalization and late capitalism and argues in favor of controlled paranoia as the best epistemic tool for interpreting contemporary reality. In the last essay in the book, “Player as a Victim of Repression and a Tool of Oppression in the Totalitarian World of Papers, Please,” Paweł Kołtuniak shows how the interactivity of the game Papers, Please acts to engage players in a totalitarian system of oppression, and examines the game mechanics, which, according to him, succeed in both implicating players in moral dilemmas and forcing them to become parts of the oppressing system. All of these essays, whether read separately or against one another, offer glimpses of a broader cultural shift under way in the post-­millennial America. The authors of the essays show how after the year 2000 American culture reflects, grapples with, and tries to counteract predominant feelings of anxiety, insecurity, and confusion.

Julia Leyda

Negative Mobilities Abstract: This article traces the interrelations among geographical, economic, and social mobility as central concerns arising at particular flashpoints in US history, literature, and cinema. Keywords: mobility, American literature, American film.

Mobility and American Culture Students and scholars of American studies are quite familiar with mobility as a founding trope in early American history, starting before it was even a nation. The early exploration of the New World, in which European powers sought resources, trade, territory, and knowledge, led in many cases to colonization, whereby colonizers could pursue strategic advantages in intra-­European conflicts and alliances. Capitalist expansion in the form of mercantilism marked the colonial period and preceded the nation’s founding as a democracy; the myriad colonial administrations strove to develop agriculture, acquire raw materials and labor, and establish trade routes and markets. Through the allegedly divine mandate of “Manifest Destiny,” the US continued to expand as far west as possible, inspiring Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” which argued that the essence of American identity derived from this spirit of expansion, where he located the quintessentially American notion of self-­invention as a product of the frontier experience. After the Western frontiers “closed” at the end of the nineteenth century, the first, most literal, phase of American mobility also came to an end. Up until the closing of the frontier, American mobility generally carried positive connotations associated with expansionism and adventure, at least in dominant cultural discourses. By this metric, a more mixed array of mobilities characterize the early twentieth century and its ongoing transitions to modernity.

Twentieth Century Mobilities Modern American everyday life comprised a range of mobilities unknown to previous generations, thanks to game-­changing technological innovations that transformed communication, transportation, and mass production. As scholars from Stephen Greenblatt to Morris Dickstein, and Stephen Kern to David Harvey have argued, albeit with very different emphases, twentieth century modernity

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ushered in a reconfiguration of the experience of space and time. Inventions such as the radio, the telegraph, and the railroad allowed people, ideas, and things to move across the country at speeds hitherto unthinkable. The new aesthetics of modernism spoke to the fascination with speed and the future in its streamlined, metallic, at times radically experimental representations, reflecting the influence of European practitioners of cubism and futurism, who attempted to portray movement and space-­time in visual terms. American literature of the time belonged to the “Lost Generation” of (relatively) elite transatlantic expatriates living large in Europe as the US dollar and stock markets soared. Meanwhile, the arguably homegrown musical form – and sociocultural phenomenon – of jazz and the new medium and sociospatial site of moving pictures both in their own ways engaged with modern mobilities. And increasingly these experiences of modernity were urban ones. Back in the 1820 census, the American population was 7% urban; in 1920, the majority of Americans – 51.2% – lived in cities. This marked the inception of the “melting pot” metaphor, in which the multicultural society we take for granted today began to be theorized. The newcomers, however, were not always welcome as mass immigration challenged the democratic values of nativist Americans. From 1900–15, 13 million new arrivals joined the already growing US cities, with a range of cultural impacts and upticks in xenophobia, not coincidentally around the time the pseudo-­science of eugenics began to make inroads into not only medical discourses but public policies, which then added further hindrances to mobility for new immigrants and others deemed genetically “inferior.” The Great Migration also contributed to the increases in urban populations during this time, as millions of African Americans moved out of the rural South and into the cities and towns of the North and West hoping to escape Jim Crow and find a better life. Although the 20s were a boom time, the greatest gains were among the top tier of earners, which led to a dramatic worsening of wealth inequality. Similarly to the US today, a wide gap opened up between the super-­rich and the rest of society, such that, by 1929, 0.1% of Americans own as much as the 41% at the bottom. Things came to a head in the stock market crash, as the speculation bubble burst, leading to 1929’s Black Friday, and setting in motion the global depression.

Negative Mobility in the 1930s Then, for the first time in US history, in much of the literature of the 1930s, geographical movement is no longer tethered to socioeconomic advancement. Instead, in many Depression-­era texts, geographical mobility appears motivated and/or accompanied by stasis or decline. Novels continue to document the de-

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mographic shifts from rural to urban and private to public, yet many of these journeys are no longer portrayed in the light of inevitable progress. Instead, they feature the anxious, desperate, and disenfranchised. The characters are no longer the ambitious, triumphant heroes of Western expansion, but wandering, uncertain victims of circumstance. Consider the most dominant forms of mobility during the Great Depression. During 1929’s stock market crash Americans rushed their banks, no longer trusting their savings to the institutions that were beginning to appear distressingly fragile (and they were, as there was as yet no insurance on deposits). The Great Plains and prairie lands of the US and Canada were literally blowing in the wind as the drought, erosion, and deadly storms of the Dust Bowl uprooted 3.5 million people. As the consequences of the economic collapse and environmental catastrophe resonated across all sectors of society, 43,000 people marched on Washington in the Bonus Army of 1932, demanding that WWI veterans receive their pension “bonus” early. By 1933, most Americans blamed President Hoover for the 25% unemployment, as half of all home mortgages were in default, and massive numbers of people were forced to go on relief to feed their families, including 10% of white workers and 18% of African American workers. Homeless encampments called Hoovervilles cropped up around the country, named after the ineffective president. While there are intermittent examples of what I am calling negative mobility in American literature before and since the Depression, it is not until the 1930s that the trope spreads across such a wide swathe of published fiction, from the high modernism of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to the only partially published feminist proletarian novel, The Girl, by Meridel Le Sueur. These, among others such as The Grapes of Wrath, serve as examples in my book American Mobilities, in which I argue that the newly proliferating trope of negative mobility offers a pathway to better recognizing the reconfigurations of US culture sparked by the Great Depression.1 The trope of movement, both geographical and socioeconomic, plays a crucial role in these texts: the privileging of industrial over agrarian and the modern city over the antiquated countryside marks poor white characters as deficient in geographical capital. These subjects occupy a low position on an axis of class and geographical privilege in what Pierre Bourdieu calls “socially ranked geographical space” (124). For the characters in these novels, attempting to move from private to public sphere, from country to city, and from working to middle

1 Portions of this section about the 1930s are drawn from this work, which was based on revised published dissertation chapters (see Leyda).

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class involves difficult and often unsuccessful forays across those geographical and socio-­economic boundaries. The movement of individual characters from country to city in The Girl and As I Lay Dying accompanies the geographic shift on a national scale from agriculture to industry and from rural to urban spaces. As the balance of the U.S. population shifted from a rural to an urban majority, new relations of space and movement developed in tandem with the changing modes of production that encouraged urbanization. While some Americans were buying new cars and making money in growing industrial markets, many others were not as successful and thus not as mobile. The mode of transport also speaks volumes about the characters and their place in the changing nation: the Bundrens in their wagon and the unnamed protagonist, called simply the Girl, hitchhiking and walking suggest that Raymond Williams was correct in noting that “traffic is not only a technique; it is a form of consciousness and a form of social relations” (296). Working-­class characters are affected by developments in the modes of transport which, when they are left behind by the new kinds of traffic, signal a “growth and alteration of consciousness: a history repeated in many lives and many places which is fundamentally an alteration of perception and relationship” (Williams 297). The highway and the ability to use it carry symbolic value in As I Lay Dying and The Girl. For Faulkner’s Anse Bundren, the roads represent a tax expenditure that may speed the destruction of his family’s subsistence-­level farm economy; for Le Sueur’s nameless Girl, the highway holds the memory of her dead lover and his failed ambition to own a service station. The Bundrens’ grueling incremental progress and the Girl’s brief tragic flight from and return to the city exemplify the profoundly limited opportunities held out by geographical mobility for working people. Private life is forced into the public sphere as these characters struggle to adjust to their negative mobility: the decay of Anse’s wife Addie Bundren’s corpse and the birth of the Girl’s baby all take place in public space. Modernity also introduced new forms of labor relations, which had geographical and socioeconomic dimensions. As Williams argues, “[t]he division and opposition of city and country, industry and agriculture, in their modern forms, are the critical culmination of the division and specialization of labor which, though it did not begin with capitalism, was developed under it to an extraordinary and transforming degree” (304). To the rural poor in Faulkner’s novel, increased geographical mobility means exposure to consumer goods they cannot afford and the growing likelihood of urban migration in search of higher wages. For the Girl, it also means moving from country to city for work, but the descriptions of city life throughout the novel make a stark contrast with the fantasy of the gleaming

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modern metropolis. Faulkner’s death knell of the pre-­modern rural South and Le Sueur’s woman-­centered Midwestern proletarian novel explicitly problematize their characters’ positions in the markets, as well as on the highway, of modernity. The Bundrens’ meandering wagon trip and tragicomic attempts to fix a broken leg suggest more than Anse’s ineptitude, however. They also convey the dialectic of mobility and immobility that pervades the novel. When the wagon breaks up in a flooded river, Cash tries to hold onto his mother’s coffin (which he crafted himself) and winds up nearly drowned with a broken leg. After an agonizing day of traveling with Cash’s leg in splints, Anse pours cement on it to immobilize it. Predictably, the leg worsens, clearly a result of the poorly conceived cast: his leg and foot turn first red “like they had been boiled” and then black (213, 224). When young Vardaman remarks on his brother’s discolored, gangrenous leg, he layers another symbol of immobility onto Cash’s already horrifying and ridiculous situation by linking him metaphorically with African Americans, who were even more definitively shut out of the economic promise of mobility in the New South. Moreover, the journey itself signifies mobility only superficially, since the circumnavigation of floods and other calamities that befall the Bundrens more emphatically marks their inability to reach their destination, rather than real movement. Driving in circles, mending broken wheels, crossing flooded rivers, the traveling family is the living (and dead!) proof that just because there is a road does not mean everyone can get somewhere. The highway leads not only to Jefferson via Mottson, but to modernity via consumerism, and the Bundren family wagon is a worn-­out, barely roadworthy vehicle, representing (complete with corpse) the outmoded and bottomed-­out agrarian economy. Cash’s cement cast is not only an ineffective remedy; it inflicts further injury. Similarly, the roads built to foster greater mobility of goods and people for the state of Mississippi in As I Lay Dying bring the Bundrens only misfortune, pain, and loss. In the 1920s and 30s the Mississippi highway system was in its infancy, and Anse speculates whether such a modernization is even worth the tax money, bringing as it does the increased mobility of labor: “Durn that road. . . . A-­laying there, right up to my door, where every bad luck that comes and goes is bound to find it. . . . it seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road” (35, 38). He further laments the temporary losses of his sons, Darl to the World War I draft and (aptly named) Cash to waged carpentry, in addition, of course, to the tax money that finances the highway in the first place: “[g]ot to pay for the way [literally the road] for them boys to have to go away to earn it [money]” (37). In his usual hyperbole, Anse even blames Addie’s death on the road, since “[s]he was well and hale as ere a woman ever were, except for that road” (37). His resentment

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of the highway illustrates, on the one hand, the suspicion and resistance to change typical of many poor whites during the economic restructuring of the 20s and 30s South. On the other hand, however, Anse is right: the road is killing his family’s way of life, signaling the urbanization and modernization of the agrarian South in which poor white characters like him are positioned as virtually immobile trash along the highway, the waste of change. In Meridel Le Sueur’s novel, moving between city and country likewise fails to improve the socioeconomic status of its working-­class protagonists. The Girl’s parents “moved from one house and city to another in the Midwest, always trying to get into something bigger and better” (9). The working-­class aspiration for social and economic mobility comes through in her father’s explanation for the move to a Wisconsin bee and plum farm: “think of it, honey and plums, that will be different from the coal mines where I was raised” (27). Predictably, the honey and plums did not feed eight children, and the Girl recalls being sent out to work for room and board (and abuse) at a neighboring farm when she was eleven. The dream of escaping to a country idyll surfaces again when her friend and fellow waitress at a Minneapolis speakeasy suggests moving to Canada to establish a homestead: “Belle threw her arms around us laughing, throwing back her wild head. We’ll go in my car” (13). But the Girl recognizes the desperation and futility in the plan and knows “that car wouldn’t cross the Mississippi” (13). Inferior vehicles, unattainable fantasies, and inadequate geographical capital prevent the poor characters in The Girl from securing any real upward mobility. Whether the move is from city to country or vice versa, these characters cannot achieve what they seek: class mobility. The Girl’s rural origins are far from ideal, however, since she leaves her parents’ small-­town home at such a young age because they cannot support her. As Williams points out and the novel illustrates, the country often serves as a mythical repository for the “good old days” and a “golden age gone by” that never existed and that often masks the harsh realities of rural experience. But if we historicize the pastoral mode as always already nostalgic for a fictive past, questions arise. What struggles are elided by this pastoral myth? How does the elision of the modern industrialized country affect the people who live there or who move from there to the city? The city, racked by poverty and labor unrest, resists any contrary impulse to compare it favorably to the backwards country. In The Girl and As I Lay Dying these questions lead to a revealing reading of the geographies of city and country, in which neither is as prosperous as popular wisdom would allow. As a result, for the poor there is no paradise on earth, city or country, although

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popular imaginaries of these two places may motivate them to migrate toward one or the other. Although the Girl survives in the big city, she is no more successful than her father. And though she grew up moving from place to miserable place, the Girl’s only road experience in the novel is driving the getaway car after a failed robbery. She ends up broke, hitchhiking back to town alone after her lover dies, leaving the car out of gas on the shoulder of the highway, a forlorn symbol of her own immobility. Back in the city, she considers buying second-­hand shoes in a thrift store: “I tried one on and it was like stepping into another’s grief ” (96). The Girl folds a bit of newspaper to block the holes in her old shoes, preferring her own grief for her only mode of transport, her feet. Like Cash’s broken leg, the Girl’s feet symbolize her physical mobility but also her metaphorical immobility: she walks instead of driving, in shoes that are falling apart. And like the Bundrens’ wagon trip, as the homeless Girl walks through the Minnesota winter in her bad shoes, she moves around but does not get anywhere: “The streets used to be only something you walked through to get someplace else, but now they are home to me” (107). The characters in the two novels even have their immobility written on their bodies: the broken leg and the freezing feet symbolize their ill-­equipped and ill-­fated efforts at movement. In the high-­speed, technologically advanced modern age, the Bundrens and the Girl are one step above immobile – they can move from one place to another, but only laterally and literally. The class status they are born into and the Depression economy in which they must survive ensure that they will be stuck, if not where they started out, then somewhere comparable or worse. The highways and city streets in As I Lay Dying and The Girl represent the national push to modernize and urbanize, but the people in the novels have nowhere to go and little way to get there.

Negative Mobility in the Twenty-­First Century The next point in US history when negative mobility again comes to the fore is in the past decade, another moment of extreme wealth inequality in the US. Americans are increasingly squeezed by the narrowing of the middle class, growing precarity in employment and social services, and the rampaging gentrification making it impossible for working people to live anywhere near the center of most major cities. As in the 1930s, demographic shifts and xenophobia are being politicized to bolster right-­wing politicians, even as the ideal of egalitarianism loses traction even among the most privileged white middle-­class Americans. In the remaining portion of this article, I would like to argue for the continuing relevance of the negative mobility analytic, particularly in the context of two dire,

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world-­changing events: the (apparently) sudden collapse of the housing markets that led to the global financial crisis and normalization of precarity, and the slow-­ motion (so far) disaster of anthropogenic climate change. In considering how the concept of negative mobility might be dusted off and brought to bear on these contemporary crises, I propose case studies of, again, one very well-­known text and one smaller, woman-­authored, woman-­centered one: Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Interstellar (2014) and Kelly Reichardt’s independent movie Wendy and Lucy (2008). Like the two 1930s novels, these texts deal with desperation as motivation to movement: unemployed, homeless, and out of luck, Wendy (Michelle Williams) takes to the road in search of work in faraway Alaska, while the Cooper family watch their farm destroyed by a new Dust Bowl, in response to which the father and daughter struggle to facilitate the survival of the human race, resulting in the foundation of a new colony in outer space. Negative mobility permeates the 2008 film Wendy and Lucy, an anticipatory articulation of the recessionary affects of the early twenty-­first century as well as a gendered slice of “life at the rustic margin,” as Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed dub the rural US. Like The Girl, this film portrays with great pathos an independent young woman estranged from her family and struggling to survive on the ragged edge of despair. Unlike the feminist proletarian novel with its glimmers of hope in the solidarity of women and symbolic flourishes linking female resilience with nature, however, Wendy and Lucy offers no consolation or optimism. Wendy’s precarious conditions deteriorate until the gut-­wrenching finale, in which she severs her last emotional ties with another living creature as the final result of her vulnerability. Lauren Berlant argues that cultural texts provide insights into what she calls the cruel optimism of our time if we study them “not to see what happens to aesthetically mediated characters as equivalent to what happens to people but to see that in the affective scenarios of these works and discourses we can discern claims about the situation of contemporary life” (9, emphasis in the original). This film depicts the affective scenario, with a simple plot and very little character development, in which Wendy, a young white woman, now unemployed and homeless, drives with her dog Lucy across the country towards the salmon canneries of Alaska; she has no credit, no support network, little cash, and few prospects. Like the work of many independent women filmmakers, Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy took a long time to make and release: it was produced just before the housing crash but released later, in 2008, leading critics and reviewers to draw connections between the film’s representation of millennial precarity and the post-­production reality that the rug had just been pulled out from under them in real life. While Le Sueur’s

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novel sets out to inspire social change by depicting the Girl’s coming to socialist-­ feminist consciousness, Reichardt’s film leaves us to our own devices, offering us little hope that Wendy’s story will end well, much less lead to revolution. The landscapes and townscapes in Wendy and Lucy make manifest the ambivalent socioeconomic conditions of the rural Northwest: the setting is portrayed mainly in exterior extreme long shots, including deserted highways, strip malls, and vaguely sinister woodlands. The predominant emotion in the film is anxiety, as Wendy has no private, domestic space, sleeping in her car until she loses even that. She then finds herself at the mercy of strangers and enduring ever-­present apprehension about personal safety. Yet Reichardt’s movie is a slow, meditative experience that shows rather than tells. It gradually builds a profound sense of powerlessness, personal failure, and melancholy, expressing some of the predominant affects of the recessionary twenty-­first century, which in other recent films congregate around the melancholy of privileged, white, male Wall Street workers, as in Margin Call (2011) and to some extent also The Big Short (2015), or white, working-­class men striving (and often failing) to support their families, as in Hell and High Water (2016) and Manchester by the Sea (2016). This film also represents the function of the other titular character, Wendy’s dog Lucy, as not so much a pet as a life companion who provides the emotional connection Wendy conspicuously lacks with her family or any other humans. When Wendy acknowledges her inability to provide adequately for Lucy, she leaves her in the care of others and hops a freight train, in a clear intertextual reference to the Great Depression. We despair for her in her loneliness and vulnerability, now worse off than before without the protection of either car or dog. Wendy and Lucy paints a portrait of an affective scenario in which extreme precarity makes it impossible to weather the everyday setbacks of contemporary life, and makes it difficult for people to help one another. This film takes care not to simplify or to over-­individualize Wendy’s misfortunes, producing situations imbued with complex human sympathies. Unemployed and homeless, Wendy must survive with only the decidedly ambivalent generosities allowed in the brutal economy of a small rural town, where the mill closed years ago, the drugstore security guard tells her, saying, “I don’t know what people do now.” This is the guard who had ordered her to leave the parking lot where she had slept in her car; he later expresses concern for her, lends her his phone, and even gives her some cash as he realizes the gravity of her situation. But he is not wealthy; he gives her $7, an amount so small it breaks our hearts just a little more. In another scene, we wonder if the auto repair shop could have reduced their fee instead of charging her more than she could afford and essentially forcing her to abandon her car.

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Later, Wendy wakes in the middle of the night terrified and runs away from her makeshift campsite in the woods because an agitated, mentally ill homeless man crashes through the brush shouting incoherently. She is the protagonist and of course we respond emotionally to her helplessness and vulnerability, as a homeless woman sleeping rough. However, we also feel concern for the distressed and possibly violent man, realizing that, like so many Americans, he obviously needs but may well have no access to medical care or social services. The movie gives us a sense of what it feels like for a young woman to live in this dire situation, in which she has little hope or support from other people: it is exhausting. As an economic actor, Wendy has become almost completely ineffective; she has little to offer the market. Elena Gorfinkel observes that an element of weariness dominates Wendy and Lucy: “fatigue becomes the baseline for a subproletarian existence and forces a recalibration of the possible and the endurable” (320). Visually referring to the flagging, formerly timber-­based regional economy, the film presents desolate sounds and images of the trains and bus stops of the now postindustrial rural Northwest. In this landscape, now almost exhausted from the extraction of natural resources, the exhausted Wendy is stranded without a car or much cash. Her immobility and the economic stagnation of the region convey the insecurity that prevailed in the twenty-­first-­century US, even before the financial crisis threw record numbers of Americans out of their homes and jobs. As Wendy’s luck continues to run out, Wendy and Lucy depicts the negative mobility feedback loop of losses and sacrifices that accompany economic hardships. Wendy loses her car, then her animal companion, and ends up traveling on alone with no recourse to any private space whatsoever. Wendy and Lucy recalls, too, Hollywood melodrama’s maternal sacrifice, as when Barbara Stanwyck’s unpolished, working-­class title character in the 1937 film Stella Dallas watches through a window as her now upwardly mobile daughter marries into a comfortable, middle-­class family. Wendy and Lucy depicts Wendy voluntarily parting ways with Lucy after she has struggled through most of the film to keep her safe and to get her back when she goes missing. She explains tearfully to her pet that she will come back for her after she earns some money and is again able to care for her; meanwhile, Lucy will remain well-­provided for in rural Oregon. The question of how Wendy will fare remains unanswered as, at the end of the film, it is clear that her dog, now taken in by friendly benefactors, is in a better situation than she is, reduced to riding the rails like a Depression-­era hobo. Depression iconography and mobility tropes resurface, albeit quite differently, in the next film I discuss. Today’s slowly escalating environmental crisis is an unintended consequence of the industrialization and modernization that all but

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left behind working-­class figures like Anse Bundren and the Girl, and neither the tragicomic mode in Faulkner’s experimental novel nor the political sincerity and pathos of Le Sueur’s rediscovered feminist classic can match the twenty-­first-­ century bleakness of Wendy and Lucy. However, the blockbuster Interstellar takes the least effective approach of all: transposing negative mobility from the Dust Bowl populism of The Grapes of Wrath into an appeal for heroic expansionism, as if what Jason Moore calls “cheap nature” – the seemingly limitless resources that have fueled capitalism over the past several centuries – can be easily located in outer space now that we have exhausted the Earth. The film cynically capitalizes on contemporary anxieties about the largely irreversible process of global warming, yet skirts any serious consideration of pressing questions about sustainable adaptation to anthropogenic climate change, evident in the form of an uninhabitable Earth environment closely resembling the environmental catastrophe of the 1930s (extreme drought exacerbated by human agricultural practices). Interstellar evades climate science and politics entirely and focuses exclusively on the search for alternative habitats, motivated only by the desire to preserve the lives of Earth-­bound loved ones (depicted in the most traditional configurations of families and relationships).2 The narrative celebrates individual bonds – filial and hetero-­romantic love – above any broader eco-­ethics; indeed, the only character who critiques such egocentric incentives turns out to be a traitor who endangers the entire mission, while those apparently inspired by love for their own families and/or romantic love succeed and save (some of) humanity. In our introduction to Extreme Weather and Global Media, Diane Negra and I argue that, among other recent films, Interstellar represents environmental disaster as a “proving ground for paternal love and patriarchal power” (4). Even in the sentimental final scene, when the valiant astronaut father reunites with his brilliant scientist daughter on her deathbed, there is no indication that humans, now living on a replica of Earth (or at least the United States), complete with baseball fields and farmhouses, have learned from their disastrous mistakes that brought on the collapse of Earth’s sustainability. The contradictory gender dynamics of the film also skew highly traditional: although it features two strong, intelligent female characters, of which there are admittedly

2 Elements of this discussion of Interstellar draw on a working paper that grew out of a very productive cli-­fi film workshop that brought myself and a colleague from the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies together with M.A. students and their instructors at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin (see Leyda et al.)

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not enough in today’s Hollywood, both women’s success appears to be completely bound up in their admiration for and devotion to their fathers. Similar to the recent Disney film Tomorrowland (2015), with its retrograde celebration of a utopian techno-­fix for the survival of humanity facing climate disaster, Interstellar’s superficially hopeful ending only demonstrates that the people of the Earth (portrayed by predominantly white American and British actors) still possess the bootstraps ingenuity to find an escape route after they have ruined their home habitat. Interstellar repurposes for the space age the masculinist, expansionist, and imperialist rhetorics of the American past, returning to a valorization of mobility for its own sake. George Monbiot succinctly observes the film’s essentially anti-­environmentalist politics using a line spoken by protagonist Cooper (a NASA pilot played in full cowboy mode by Texan Matthew McConaughey), which Monbiot points out “could be the epigraph of our age”: “Explorers, pioneers, not caretakers . . . We’re not meant to save the world. We’re meant to leave it.” Award-­winning science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson critiques this failure of imagination in his article for Scientific American, reprinted in Salon. com and illustrated with an image from Interstellar, entitled “There is no Planet B.” Robinson avers, “[g]oing to the stars is often regarded as humanity’s destiny,” but even if a space colony were scientifically feasible – a big if – it would take centuries of preparation. Those are centuries we may not have, because “[i]f we don’t create sustainability on our own world, there is no Planet B.” Indeed, Robinson’s 2015 novel Aurora reads like a direct rebuttal to Interstellar, refuting its retrograde manifest destiny rhetorics and asserting instead the necessity of climate mitigation and adaption to ensure human survival. As the sarcastic narration of a spacecraft’s AI tells us, humankind seems to have been seduced by fantasies that interstellar mobility – evacuating Earth and settling a new planet – was a viable and desirable response to the degradation of Earth’s ecosystems: “That a starship could be built, that it could be propelled by laser beams, that humanity could reach the stars; this idea appeared to have been an intoxicant.” Instead of harnessing the creative potential of science fiction to produce cli-­fi that pushes us to take responsibility for averting climate disaster and imagining adaptation strategies to ensure our future survival here, Interstellar presents us with “[t]echnological optimism and political defeatism: this is a formula for the deferment of hard choices to an ever-­receding neverland of life after planetary death” (Monbiot; see also Svoboda). Unlike Faulkner’s grotesque paterfamilias Anse Bundren, who is in fact the object of authorial disdain and ridicule, McConaughey’s Coop is unreservedly positioned as the hero. He celebrates the space

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program’s recourse to negative mobility – we have destroyed our planet and must simply relocate to another, putting the dust bowl behind us – by reviving the traditional frontier thesis once more, this time describing the movement to space as our manifest destiny, even a final frontier, as immortalized in science fiction precursor text Star Trek. Where this movie fails miserably, despite its impressive special effects and provocative visualizations of space-­time, is in its unironic resurrection of the very expansionist ideologies that in large part contributed to the environmental mess in which we now find ourselves. This article has broadly sketched some of my developing ideas on how the concept of negative mobility can offer scholars of contemporary culture a useful rubric for tracing connections between the challenges of our time and crisis moments of the past. At a time when humans must take responsibility for the imagination and creation of economically and environmentally sustainable futures, we should remember to look to cultural productions such as fiction and film to help us recognize and debate as wide a range of available responses as possible as we develop a process for rethinking negative mobility in post-­millennial culture.

Works Cited Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Harvard UP, 1984. Ching, Barbara, and Gerald W. Creed. “Introduction: Recognizing Rusticity: Identity and the Power of Place.” Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy. Routledge, 1997, pp. 1–38. Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. Norton, 2009. Print. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. 1930. Vintage, 1985. Gorfinkel, Elena. “Weariness, Waiting: Enduration and Art Cinema’s Tired Bodies.” Discourse, vol. 32, no. 2–3, 2012, pp. 311–47. Greenblatt, Stephen. Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Cambridge UP, 2010. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Wiley-­Blackwell, 1989. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. 1983. Harvard UP, 2003. Le Sueur, Meridel. The Girl. 1939. West End P, 1990. Leyda, Julia. American Mobilities: Class, Race, and Gender in US Culture. Transcript, 2016.

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Leyda, Julia, and Diane Negra. “Introduction: Extreme Weather and Global Media.” Extreme Weather and Global Media, edited by Julia Leyda and Diane Negra. Routledge, 2015, pp. 1–28. Leyda, Julia, Kathleen Loock, Alexander Starre, Thiago Pinto Barbosa, and Manuel Rivera. “The Dystopian Impulse of Contemporary Cli-­Fi: Lessons and Questions from a Joint Workshop of the IASS and the JFKI (FU Berlin).” Working Paper of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam. Dec. 2016. Web. Monbiot, George. “Better Dead than Different.” Guardian. Guardian Media Group, 12 Nov. 2014. Accessed 2 Dec 2014. Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life. Verso, 2015. Robinson, Kim Stanley. Aurora. Orbit, 2015. —. “There is no Planet B: We’re not Colonizing the Milky Way Any Time Soon.” Salon.com. Salon Media Group, 17 Jan. 2016. Accessed 19 Feb 2016. Svoboda, Michael. “Interstellar: Looking for the Future in All the Wrong Spaces.” Yale Climate Connections. 12 Nov. 2014. Accessed 2 Dec. 2014. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford UP, 1973.

Paweł Frelik

Eye(s) in the Sky: Icons of War and Techno-­Gaze in Contemporary Audiovisual Culture Abstract: Launching off with the juxtaposition of two individual frames from Apocalypse Now (1979) and Sicario (2015), the article investigates the visual iconography of systems of power in the pre- and post-9/11 United States. Keywords: aesthetics, film, military, politics

In 10/40/70: Constraint as Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory (2014), Nicholas Rombes proposes a new way of looking at movies. Instead of engaging in a belabored hunt for the elusive master meaning in a maze of words, images, and sounds, what he calls “plagues of meaning” (Rombes 3), he asks us to pause a film at 10-, 40-, and 70-minute marks and consider the frames at hand – no matter what they are. Rombes’ tactics is obviously indebted to Roland Barthes and his concept of the third meaning developed in his analysis of Eisenstein’s stills from Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Ivan the Terrible (1944). For Barthes, the first meaning is purely informational, denotative. It is narratively important but also sensorial: images convey all kinds of information about their own content. The second meaning is symbolic and tied to signification, often larger than the content of a single frame. It is at this level that shots and sequences connect with each other and offer parabolic messages. But it is Barthes’ third meaning that is, arguably, his most lasting contribution to the study of visual media. The third meaning is obtuse and rooted in the very materiality of cinema as a medium. It is tied to the emotion-­value through its sheer significatory excess that forever eludes verbal expression. Barthes finds it in the minute details of an image, a film still, a 1/24th of a single second of a movie, a species of attention that in itself is subversive and antithetical to the historically dominant mode of cinematic experience. Running with the Barthesian scissors, Rombes thus singles out three frames from a number of films – from Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948) and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949), to I Shot Andy Warhol (Mary Harron, 1996) and Jerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002), to Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009) – and burrows in pathways suggested by the image itself. In this essay, I am not going to be as disciplined as Rombes in my temporal selection and I intend to use his tactics somewhat obliquely, as will eventually

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become evident. Nevertheless, my discussion is very much informed by a sense that frames, snippets, and fragments have their life too, paltry as those lives are, and that gazing at them yields rewards. More specifically, I want to gaze at two stills sourced from two films separated by a third of a century, diverse genres, and dramatically different aesthetics. These two frames are, to my mind, beautiful in themselves in ways which may not even be easy to explain, but, more importantly, there are elements in these two frames that I find emblematic of major transformations in American cinema. More interestingly, though, from the perspective of this volume’s theme, they are also reflective of the reconfigurations of global geopolitics and the position that the United States has occupied in it. They are artistic expressions of repressive systems and they are centrally concerned with the social repression of various kinds of expression. There are ways in which the two films from which the stills have been extracted are very similar, especially in how they engage their central issues, but I do not really want to offer extended thematic comparisons. The first of these stills is universally recognizable (see Figure 1). Showered with awards and honors, including two Oscars, one of them for Cinematography, and six further Academy nominations, two BAFAs (before they became BAFTAs), three Golden Globes, and a Palme d’Or, Francis Scott Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is an enduring American masterpiece and a classic of not only Hollywood but of world cinema. Interestingly enough, this particular image, whose variants have been widely used in the film’s paratexts, such as billboards, posters, and VHS and DVD packaging, does not, in fact, appear in the film and was only prepared for publicity purposes. The actual in-­film shots are only slightly less dramatic, though, and equally recognizable, perhaps the reason why so many viewers seem to retain the former as false memories of the film. At the center of both variants is the rising sun. Orange-­red in the former and yellow in the latter, it promises a good day to die as much as it foreshadows carnage that Kilgore’s Ahabian madness is about to inflict on a Vietnamese village. Shown in Cannes almost exactly four years after the capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese Army in April 1975, for many original audiences the bloody sun was an all-­too-­fresh and raw reminder of almost 60,000 deaths, over 150,000 wounded, and over 1,500 missing in action on the American side. Slightly less memorable for many viewers in 1979 were probably between 4,000 and 10,000 civilian deaths caused by the American military, not counting the estimates of 40,000 to 150,000 civilians and combatants fallen as a result of bombing of Cambodia. There were, of course, sunsets and sunrises in Hollywood before (and not only on the Boulevard): For A Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965), The Wild Bunch

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(Sam Peckinpah, 1969), and Tora Tora Tora (Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda, Kinji Fukasaku, 1970) are only a few examples that combined solar cycles with combat. And yet, it seems that after Apocalypse Now, sunrises and sunsets have never been the same and the iconic image seems to have infiltrated life itself, replacing reality with the Baudrillardian simulacrum, as comments on digital photography forums demonstrate (Ralf B.). Nevertheless, in these two images, the New Age-­y and Zen-­like serenity of the rising sun provides a backdrop to something else, something that has, arguably, become one of the most iconic cinematic images of the last three decades. Dominating the frame are Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopters, ordered into production in 1960 and deployed in combat for the first time in Vietnam, where almost 7,000 of them saw service. In the poster image, Hueys, as they were unofficially known, enter from stage right (which is the left side for the audience), for some theater practitioners a position of power, and exit stage left, suggestive of open possibilities and continuation of mobility. Their movement coincides with the Western sense of the direction of progress as exemplified by the “x” axis in timelines and data visualizations and the direction of writing and reading in Western alphabets. In the in-­film sunrise shots, their movement is, again in the dramatic terminology, downstage towards platea, the general acting area of the traditional European stage. In freeze-­frame images, their movement is arrested, so the most enduring impression is the very silhouette of the machines, the image whose persistence seems to control American cinema like the zombie undead that can never be quite laid to rest. Apocalypse Now is largely — if not single-­handedly — responsible for insinuating the military helicopter into American cinema and beyond and even a brief flare of F-14s fighter jets in Top Gun (1986) could not unsettle the chopper from its throne of contemporary military iconography. The visual clade of a military helicopter in flight, more often than not against a rising or setting sun and most frequently shown frontally to allow it to preen its banks of armament subsystems, is nothing short of pornographic, appearing in movies from Blue Thunder (John Badham 1983) and Rambo III (Peter MacDonald 1988) to Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1993) and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001). It has also featured in practically every single movie directed by Michael Bay: Bad Boys (1995), The Rock (1996), Bad Boys II (2003), The Island (2005), and the Transformers series (2007), the only exception being the historically incompatible Pearl Harbor (2001). Bay even managed to insert it into Armageddon (1998), ostensibly a film about extraterrestrial flight. Most recently, the reverberations of this particular composite can be detected in Dan Mindel’s cinematography in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J. J. Abrams, 2015), which compels the viewers to seek similarities between the American presence in Vietnam and the

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post-­Empire First Order but also demonstrates the futuristic Star Wars universe to operate according to the old-­fashioned understanding of power (see Figure 2).1 In narrative and symbolic terms, Apocalypse Now is, of course, based on a novel from a different time and geopolitical situation, but what anchors it as the American story for the late 1970s is not only Vietnam but precisely the image of the military machine. Vittorio Storaro’s iconic photography of Bell UH-1 helicopters is a perfect encapsulation of the U.S. geopolitical position in the 1970s. Coppola’s film may well be the ur-­father of the dark strand in the Vietnam War cinema (not that there is much of a lighter strand), but it also (pre)configures the political as well as cinematic imagination of increasingly advanced technology in the service of new imperial endeavors. This is a war that, at least from the position of those who wage it, can be won through sheer firepower and technological sophistication. The helicopter belongs here to the same imaginary clade as the WWII-­era fighters, the F-­family fighter jet, and the Gulf War’s Patriot missile, but it lends itself to audiovisual representations much more gracefully. Grumman F6F Hellcats are only good for historical movies; the skirmishes of jet fighters are ultimately too disorienting; and the missiles are only spectacular at the moment of launch and impact. Military helicopters, on the other hand, have become the synecdoche of the human dimension of the military. They are the new cavalry that marks the majestically glorious return of the now-­global f/F-­rontier. Against the rising sun of the new era’s bloodshed and the Wagnerian soundtrack resounding over a jungle half a world away from the American soil, the helicopter squadron comes to emblematize the American mode of politics during the late Cold War. In the last two decades of the 20th century, military choppers became a visual shorthand for the global Pax Americana and the Bell UH-1 even more so than later models and Boeing’s equally menacing but more recent AH-64 Apache. Built in several dozens variants by American contractors, fueled by Saudi oil, and operated by over 50 nations from Salvador to Israel to Afghanistan, the Huey still remains the second most-­produced military helicopter in the world almost 30 years after Bell discontinued its basic model. 1 There is a faint line of Hollywood DNA here as George Lucas was originally slated to direct Apocalypse Now but rejected the offer as he was already working on Star Wars. Interestingly, The Force Awakens seems to reference the famous scene in Apocalypse Now at least once more in the scene depicting Alliance fighters flying low over water on Takodana. Elsewhere, the equally iconic sound of a helicopter in flight has similarly rippled through popular culture and has been inserted into numerous compositions from Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” to Metallica’s “One” to Oasis’ “Morning Glory” to Offspring’s “Lightning Rod,” R.E.M.’s “Orange Crush,” and Alice In Chains’ “Rooster.”

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Let us now consider one of Roger Deakins’ many ecstatically gorgeous shots from Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015), which almost uncannily resonates with the helicopter scene in Apocalypse Now but also aptly mediates – and meditates on – the current political moment the United States has found itself in (see Figure 3). Ostensibly a crime-­thriller drama and a commentary on the ongoing War on Drugs in the trans-­border region between the U.S. and Mexico, most notably the El Paso/Juarez area and Arizona, Sicario largely dispenses with spectacular chases and massive gunfights. This does not detract from its ravishing grimness and tight-­wound tension that is almost tactile – also thanks to its sound design nominated for two Oscars (Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing) and the outstanding performances by Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin. Both narratively and aesthetically, Sicario is, to my mind, one of the best movies of 2015. A screenwriting debut of Taylor Sheridan, known for his acting appearances in the television series Sons of Anarchy (2008–2014), the film follows the principled FBI agent Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt), enlisted into a government task force to bring down the leader of a brutal drug cartel, a trajectory that is, for all purposes, a journey into the heart of darkness. In fact, Chris Ryan juxtaposed Villeneuve’s seventh full-­length production with Coppola’ masterpiece, comparing the former’s thematization of the Mexican drug wars to the latter’s treatment of the Vietnam war and noting that del Toro’s Alejandro Gillick and Brolin’s Matt Graver bear close resemblance to Colonel Kurtz and William Kilgore respectively. In the frame, led by Graver, who has now been revealed to be a CIA operative, and accompanied by Macer, only needed to legitimate the Firm’s operations on the American soil, a group of Delta Force commandos are descending into an underground tunnel that the cartel has been using to ferry drugs from Mexico, a mission that turns out to be a diversion securing an entirely different task. The image bears Roger Deakins’ signature style of silhouettes, high contrast, and limited light sources, but my interest in it extends beyond visuality. Compositionally, the frame is a negative mirror of Coppola’s and Storaro’s iconic image. Instead of being far away from home, the soldiers are now on the American soil, in the brutal Sonoran Desert instead of the lush jungle teeming with life. The commandos enter left stage and exit right stage, as if reversing the direction of progress and returning into darkness. They are walking rather than being airborne. In Apocalypse Now, the Bell choppers figure as advanced military hardware carrying humans; here, humans are seen carrying advanced military hardware. The gorgeous red in the sky of the American Southwest is that of dusk, rather than dawn. While in Apocalypse Now the sunrise turned into broad daylight made even brighter by napalm, in Sicario the characters are descending into an even deeper darkness of a

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tunnel leading straight into a yet deeper darkness of what is not so much a war on drugs but a drug war with its own equivalents of My Lai.2 In the same way in which Coppola’s image, as well as a sequence that surrounds it and, ultimately, the entire film, says much about the 1970s political and military milieu, Villeneuve’s frame tells a story of the dramatic re-­alignments of 2015. This is not open war of traditional domination, however misconceived and misguided. The U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force no longer serves as a surgical instrument of global intervention. Pulled from Afghanistan, they are now part of drug wars — and not even of the maligned but much-­publicized, capital W and capital D War on Drugs but of an evil charade with nightmare-­grade allies. The global Pax Americana has now deteriorated to a flimsy semblance of politico-­business order worked out not between the United States, its allies, and despotic regimes but between the Firm (CIA) and a firm (Medellín). Coppola’s version of Heart of Darkness is a 20th-­century analog of Moby Dick — both are grand narratives of guiltily admirable insanity but with the moral compass still around. In Sicario, that ship has already sailed — much as the audiences are likely to sympathize with Agent Macer, they may also feel compelled to unwillingly concede to Graver’s and Gillick’s devilish logic. The position of the two frames in their respective films is, to my mind, very meaningful, too. Storaro’s helicopter photography is placed early in the grand story of the war, which, however protracted, had the beginning and the end and whose convolutions (and convulsions) can be mapped. However terrifying, the grand narrative of Vietnam lends itself to linear presentation and requires an effective establishing sequence. Roger Deakins’ shot is buried two-­thirds into the movie and, despite its reflexive beauty, does not aspire to any centrality in its overall mood. Its compositional inconspicuousness is an apt reflection of Sicario’s narrative. That story is unchartable. It has no clear beginning – after all, what could it be: the U.S. involvement in Latin America? Nixon’s War on Drugs? Collapse of the Medellín cartel? Its end is not even imaginable, very appropriately like the Žižko-­Jamesonian end of capitalism, in which the global drug trade seems to be inextricably imbricated. That story has unclear priorities, is informed by muddled causality, and features no central human protagonist. It unfolds not in a fiery storm of napalm ridden by mad military Valkyries but as part of a covert subterfuge within subterfuge in which one sleeps with their enemy (which Macer almost does half way through the movie). Sic transit gloria mundi. At least as long as Bell choppers in combat formation are glorious.

2 The sound design of the scene is also equally reversed. Instead of the triumphant “Ride of the Valkyries,” Jóhann Jóhannsson supplied the tense score with rising menacing rumbles of trigger-­ready double bass.

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The two frames I have discussed so far are the effigies of the American power in the late Cold War and the post-9/11 era respectively. In their frame-­frozen depths the viewers can see the never-­ending war and the madness of those who wage it. But there is something missing here. If the Bell helicopter and its progeny are the icons of Pax Americana made manifest in Apocalypse Now, what is their counterpart in Sicario? This is where the obliqueness of my use of Rombes’ method comes in for to see the other icon one has to look beyond the Arizona still life with Delta commandos. The sequence following the frame discussed earlier is nothing like the rest of the movie, a transition that is so much more pronounced because of it singularity in Sicario. As Macer, Graver, Gillick, and the Deltas continue their descent into the underworld, the human gaze of the camera, which in significant portions of the film simulates Macer’s bewildered look as she is trying to understand what is really happening around her, becomes replaced with the technologized gaze of night-­vision scopes, heat-­signature cameras, and satellite imaging (see Figure 4). This techno-­gaze is the true counterpart of Coppola’s helicopters and the icon of the post-9/11 operations of power. Sicario is not, of course, the first movie to use its iconography. Its visual roots are in the 1980s science fiction movies such as the Terminator movies, Robocop (1987), and Universal Soldier (1992). Their cyborg vision, not infrequently accompanied by the skeumorphic sounds of computation, often represents subjects perched on the edge of the human and the technological, whose perception and cognition have been, to varying degrees, taken over by cybernetic systems and digital imaging. This visual and narrative tradition continues to run in contemporary science fiction cinema, but in the last fifteen years the technologized gaze has transitioned from the future to the present. Its arrival can be seen as the evidence of science-­fictionalization of not only entire textual bodies of contemporary cinema but of reality itself, whose technological saturation, corporate empowerment, and dystopian corruption as revealed by Snowden, Manning, and Panama Papers are all too reminiscent of hardcore cyberpunk rather than how the 21st century was imagined for most of the 20th century. Much more importantly, the cyborg gaze also signals the transformation of the dispositive (Foucault 196) of American power in the new millennium. In Sicario, it is not science fiction’s mechanical Other that is gazing at humans through the overlay of data but the bureaucratic procedures and systems of information collection and retrieval handled by individuals some of whom do not even appear on the government payrolls. It is significant that the visual icon of the now obsolete Pax Americana is a tangible – and sizeable – object. The icon of the new world order evades tactility. It is a mode of representation which can convey anything and everything but in

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itself has very little physical presence. The techno-­gaze is, after all, a way of representing information that is, as William Gibson suggested in Count Zero, “not intended for human input” (Gibson 40), and which, in its basic form of zero and ones, possesses no dimensions, no weight, and no material instantiation. Its logic reduces the human world to immense databases of words, images, and sounds in which algorithmic triggers send SWAT teams and strike drones to eliminate targets whose parameters have tripped the system. Unlike Kilgore’s troopers in Apocalypse Now, electronic systems of surveillance do not recognize the traditional divide between the civilian and the military. Anyone can be a target and no privacy is spared, in life or in death. Real-­time surveillance recordings, night- and heat-­vision, satellite imagery, and military drone live feeds are operational technologies of the panoptic gaze writ visual and contemporary audiovisual culture has used them with increasing regularity. Many texts deploy them somewhat casually, as they impart an aura of cool modernity and allow film producers to show off some of their software tools. Most notable examples include, of course, Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, recent installments in the Mission Impossible series, and the Jason Bourne quadrilogy. There is, however, an increasing number of texts that position the omniscience of techno-­gaze as their thematic preoccupation, questioning the ethics of surveillance and drone technologies. This is very much the case with such television series as Person of Interest (2011–2016) and Homeland (2011–2017); movies such as Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow 2012) and Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood 2015); and artistic projects such Laura Poitras’ Astro Noise, exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2016, and Trevor Paglen’s The Other Night Sky.3 This contemporary landscape of surveillance imagery is a long way from the original two frames, but I suspect both Barthes and Rombes would be happy with such visual peregrinations. Apocalypse Now and Sicario are both downward spirals into their respective hearts of darkness, but they narrate stories of dramatically different geopolitical configurations. Their continental/international re-­alignment is, to a degree, evident even in the production of both films. Apocalypse Now is a Euro-­heartland film: based on a novel by a Pole/Englishman, directed by an Italian-­American, shot by an Italian, and (partially) scored by a German. Sicario

3 Some imagery from Paglen’s project can be found at http://www.paglen.com/?l= work&s=othernightsky&i=2

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is a work of the erstwhile marginals: directed by a Québécois, centrally enacted by an Englishwoman and a Puerto-­Rican, and magnificently scored by an Icelander.4 For all their resonances and affinities, they are, to my mind, also fundamentally different in their ultimate messages. Coppola’s masterpiece is an epic story of exotic madness from which, for all “horror, horror,” it is possible, as a member of the audience, to emerge unscathed and fortified in a normative ethical system. There is nothing epic about Sicario and a few home truths that it drives into us are inconvenient and painful. But, boy, does it look gorgeous! Figure 1: The promotional still for Apocalypse Now (Francis Scott Coppola, 1979)

Figure 2: The First Order’s TIE fighter in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J. J. Abrams, 2015)

4 In all fairness, though, Sicario is supremely filmed and edited by two Englishmen.

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Figure 3: Delta commandos descending underground in Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015)

Figure 4: The techno-­gaze of satellite imaging in Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015)

Works Cited Coppola, Francis Ford. Apocalypse Now. United Artists, 1979. Foucault, Michel. “The Confession of the Flesh.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, Vintage, 1980, pp. 194–228. Gibson, William. Count Zero. HarperCollins, 1993. Ralf B. “Sunsets like in ‘Apocalypse Now’, Wow!” Digital Photography Review, 27 Dec. 2009, https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/34089059. Accessed 15 December 2016. Rombes, Nicholas. 10/40/70: Constraint as Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory. Zero Books, 2014.

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Ryan, Chris. “Are My Methods Unsound? Why ‘Sicario’ Is the ‘Apocalypse Now’ of the Drug War.” Grantland, 28 Sept. 2015, http://grantland.com/hollywoodprospectus/are-my-methods-unsound-why-sicario-is-the-apocalypse-now-ofthe-drug-war/. Accessed 15 December 2016. Villeneuve, Denis. Sicario. Lionsgate, 2015.

Paulina Ambroży

Portraits Painterly and Poetic: John Ashbery and Gerhard Richter Abstract: The article undertakes a comparative study of visual and literary poetics in relation to the genre of modern portraiture. The discussion focuses on the tension between specularity and non-­representation in the works of John Ashbery and Gerhard Richter. Keywords: poetic and painterly self-­portraits, subjectivity and representation, ekphrasis, John Ashbery, Gerhard Richter

The primary intention of this study is to discuss the postmodernist approaches to the self-­portrait genre in a comparative study of painterly and poetic media. I would like to argue that, in the explorations of the limits and possibilities of the visual and verbal media as tools of self-­representation, both poets and painters question the very notion of the autonomous subject, showing the impossibility of finding the coherent and stable truth of the self. Instead, this truth becomes a series of constructed but ultimately untenable fictions, self-­identifications and partial narratives, continuously displaced, elusive and relational, held in the interstices of cross-­polluting images and discourses. My starting point in the analysis is the poetry of John Ashbery, whose ties with the world of art and whose innovative engagement with auto-­reflexive genres of both painting and poetry are well documented and rich in critical insights. Particularly significant to this study is the fact that Ashbery’s complex poetics also exhibits a strong fascination with the notion of a fluid and transitional subjectivity and the possible modes of its (mis)representation. As noted by Judy Norton, “Ashbery’s principal concern – a concern that mirrors its poststructuralist theoretical moment – is to explore the shifting configurations of subjectivity, which take place not only in, but as, language” (282). His employment of painterly discourse and the genre of ekphrasis invites further intermedial confrontations and becomes an important field of theoretical and meta-­critical inquiry. John Ashbery’s interest in the portrait as a paradigm of representation, problematizing a self-­reflexive tension between gazer and his image, brings him particularly close to the work of his European contemporary, the German postmodernist painter, Gerhard Richter. I have selected this artist’s work rather than that of Ashbery’s American contemporaries for at least two reasons: firstly, Ashbery’s relations to various American artistic groupings have been widely recog-

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nized and explored by others1; secondly, and more importantly, it is my strong intuition, which I hope to confirm in my analysis, that Richter’s critical stance, aesthetic experiments and ideas have more in common with Ashbery’s own poetic vision than those of many American Abstractionists with whom he has often been compared or grouped. As noted by Charles Altieri in his study of Ashbery’s relation to art, [m]ost of the work on Ashbery’s relation to painting has linked him to abstract expressionism because he accepts its principle of composition as the articulating of states immediate to the writing. But this version of his immediacy ignores how much for him that mode of consciousness frees one to elaborate the duplicities of the imaginary ego. Or, to put the same point in more general terms, treating Ashbery in relation to abstract expressionism misses the central focus of his own basic imaginative project – to find an alternative to the existentialist attitudes which sustained the assertive egos in pursuit of imaginative self-­sufficiency that one finds both in painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and in the projections of desired identity that fuel confessional poetry. For Ashbery, tracing the immediate processes of the writing self leads one to recognize the endless vacillations and doublings of consciousness which require models of humility and adaption very different from the heroic fantasies of modernist art and their echoes in the new politics. (808)

Indeed, Ashbery, and Richter, as I shall argue, explore new aspects of subjectivity which, to borrow Altieri’s words, “address culture’s constantly shifting demands for ways of interpreting and altering its imaginative investments” (Altieri 807). The questions which I wish to foreground in my study concern the conceptualizations of the image-­body-­self relations with respect to the chosen medium of representation: painting and photography in the case of Richter and poetic ekphrasis in the case of Ashbery. Like Ashbery, who was influenced by the American Abstractionists of the 60s and 70s, Richter arrived at his individual style via American avant-­garde painting, especially Pollock, Fontana, Cage and DeWitt, as he admits in an interview with H.D. Buchloh (1–2). Paul Moorhouse claims that “it was the first-­hand contact with expressive abstract painting that was a major contributing factor in Richter’s subsequent decision to leave East Germany and move to the West” (32). 1 See for example Fred Moramarco’s essay “John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara: The Painterly Poets” (1976); Leslie Wolf ’s essay “The Brushstroke’s Integrity: John Ashbery and the Art of Painting” (1980), Barbara K. Fisher’s essay “‘Returned Again to the Exhibition’: John Ashbery, Avant-­Gardism, and Ekphrastic Risk” (2006); David Lehman’s study of the New York Poets and Painters The Last Avant-­Garde (1998); and James W. A. Heffernan’s Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (1993).

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This contact, enabled by his 1959 participation in the Kassel Documenta 2, not only exposed him to a wide range of innovative models, but it made particularly poignant the difference between the prescriptive paradigms of social realist art, in which the painter was trained, and the expressive freedom and variety of Western art. This invites interesting parallels with Ashbery’s career: in 1960, the American poet moved to France, where he accepted the position of art critic for the Paris Herald Tribune. The appeal of Paris for Ashbery was similar to that of the West for Richter: “unlike New York and most other capitals, [Paris] provided a still neutral climate in which one can work pretty much as one chooses” (Ashbery, Reported Sightings xv). Thus, both artists looked for a neutral space in which their imagination could develop freely and in which, as the poet wrote in his sketch “American Sanctuary in Paris,” there would be no “axes to grind” (Reported Sightings 88). Ashbery’s sojourn in Paris tightened his relation with the art world and had a major impact on his own artistic work, as the poet soon began to write reviews also for ArtNews, Newsweek, and New York, and his art journalism became an important “extension” of his own poetic practice (Bergman, Reported Sightings xi). Perhaps it is because of this cross-­pollination of interests and search for artistic independence that Ashbery envisioned his own artistic position as that of a sitter on a fence, occupying the liminal position between inner and outer realities (Ashbery, “Soonest Mended,” 87). Similarly, Richter, reluctant to embrace abstraction as the only artistic alternative, has adopted a hesitant stance vis-­à-vis the outer reality and the self-­contained reality of art. Like Ashbery, whose poetry repeatedly problematizes the possible subject matter for a contemporary poet and explores multiple choices, Richter, himself intensely engaged with the dichotomy between the world and its individual and collective perceptions, vacillates between “the principled avoidance of the subject” and “the subject secretly handed to [him] on a plate: one not invented by [himself], and for that reason more universal, better, less perishable, more generally valid” (Richter, Daily Practice 131). There are further grounds for establishing a connection between the poet and the painter, clearly indicating a shared aesthetic sensibility. Like Ashbery, a deeply philosophical poet attentive to the cognitive complexity of reality and its image, Richter is, in Robert Storr’s apt words, “[a] broadly philosophical painter,” an “image-­struck poet of alertness and restraint, of doubt and daring” (89, emphasis mine). Both understand artistic practice as a product of a dense network of polysemic discursive practices. Both also feel a strong spiritual kinship with the painters and poets of the past, believing that each new work of art or literature is inescapably contaminated by past discourses, historical contingencies and mythographies. Both are also deeply skeptical towards the authoritative role of the

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artist and his absolute “originality” in the construction of meaning as well as towards the epistemological capacities of words and images. Both, through their diverse forms, genres and techniques, as well as their deconstructive dissolutions, offer representations not so much of the artist’s persona as the frequently baffling and incomprehensible material that drifts into the artist’s mind. Richter’s original use of photography, along with his signatorial techniques of quoting, blurring, in- and un-­painting, can be compared to Ashbery’s idiosyncratic poetics of indeterminacy. The latter is formed through the poet’s frequent use of, for instance, indefinite pronouns, shifting tenses, changing registers, serpentine and oddly subordinated syntax, as well as misrepresentation, cryptic quoting2 and revision. All these produce a stance which, as Elger puts it, “rejects the possibility of definitive truth” (86). Richter has been reluctant to embrace any system, including the label of an abstract painter, and Ashbery has similarly resisted programmatic methods; both, as a result, have been engaged in a search for a form which can articulate the gap between the subject and the object. In a 1972 interview with Robert Schön, Richter formulated his artistic credo: “I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever” (Richter, Daily Practice 74). In his notes from the 1960s, the painter confessed: I pursue no objects, no system, no tendency, I have no programme, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don’t know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-­committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty. Other qualities may be conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are outworn – as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts and names for things. (Richter, Daily Practice 58)

Ashbery sounded a similar note in one of his interviews: “there is no systematic rationale or systematic anything in my poetry. If it is systematic, it’s only in its total avoidance of any kind of system or program” (Shoptow 10). This insistence on not-­knowing and refusal to define the exact directions and aesthetic goals of their art constitute the ground on which their creative practices find their impulse for critical engagements with the legacy of the past. Naturally, the sources of 2 John Shoptow’s study of Ashbery’s poetry – On the Outside Looking Out (1994) – is devoted to the poetics of misrepresentation and “cryptology.” In his careful readings of Ashbery’s oeuvre, Shoptow argues, however, that the purpose of those blurring devices is to create a “homotextual discourse” which refrains from overt topicalization of homosexuality and yet creates a subversive and revisionary mode of cultural, social and aesthetic commentary.

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Richter’s diverse experiments with the aesthetics of uncertainty go beyond a mere disillusionment with the systems and conventions of art, as they lie also in his encounters with totalizing systems of thought and authoritarian political regimes, which, as Storr aptly notes, “dictated how he should conduct himself and what his painting should be” (46). Thus, the inherent doubt and deconstructive impulse of his work stems as much from his rejection of style inspired, as in Ashbery’s case, by this encounter with the European and American avant-­garde, as from his struggle with the totalitarian heritage and the reductive artistic formulas that it created. The dictates of Social Realism, under which Richter’s early works came into being, as well as the East German artists’ isolation from the mainstream art world triggered his desire for defiance and confrontation with authority, also that of dogmatic art, along with its prescriptive styles. This anguish and dissent have become an important and generative undercurrent in Richter’s work. Despite the apparent lack of systematicity or rationale behind the American poet’s and the German painter’s work, both locate their practices within the discourse of tradition and both work to probe the possibilities and techniques still available within their respective media. One of their fields of inquiry is the portrait – a genre deeply entrenched in painterly art and ekphrastic history, especially as regards painting and photography. “There is probably no subject that better illustrates the general historical transformation of the image,” Stefan Gronert observes, linking the development of the genre also to the “socially emancipated self-­conception of the artist” (43). Strongly informed by the impulse towards representational and psychological truth, and driven by, in Brillant’s words, the “necessity of expressing [the] intended relationship between the portrait image and the human original” (7), the portrait as a genre became the subject of inquiry, experimentation, as well as critical and intermedial exchange in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. The twentieth century both embraced and questioned the practice of portraiture because avant-­garde experimentation showed a strong penchant for abstraction and self-­reflexivity, probing the complexity of representational possibilities and limitations of traditional genres. The portrait – which, as Brillant claims, “stifle[s] the analysis of representation” (8), for it interpolates the relationship of authenticity and unity between the signified and the signifier – has paradoxically become an important vehicle of self-­reflection, which enabled artists and poets to revisit questions of personhood, interiority, the material body and the possibilities of their representation. As argued further by Brillant, the postmodernist era foregrounded the “‘eroded’ sense of self,” questioning the autonomy of the person and seeing the self as constructed, intersubjective, dialogic, heterogenic, unstable

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and indeterminate (66). “Today,” Joanna Woodall similarly observes, “the fixed immovable features of a portrayed face can seem like a mask, frustrating the desire for union with the imagined self. In looking at a conventional portrait, we no longer have implicit faith in a moment of phantasized unmasking, of release, the carnival’s conclusion when one can ‘call things by their real names’” (9). Tracing the history of the Western conceptualizations of the self, John Barresi and Raymond Martin likewise contend that in our times, “as a fragmented, explained, and illusory phenomenon, the self can no longer regain its elevated status” (55). Poststructuralist deconstructions of the metaphysical notions of subjectivity, coupled with a renewed interest in embodied cognition, neuroscience, pragmatics and developmental psychology have raised new doubts about the existence of the self as a psychological or spiritual continuity. Numerous thinkers, such as Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes, have contributed to the dissolution of traditionally understood subjecthood. Frederic Jameson boldly announced the end of “the centered subject” and the “depth model” in the understanding of the self, as he argued that in postmodernism “the alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation and indeed by the ‘death’ of the subject itself – the end of the bourgeois monad or ego or individual” (14–15). The process of differentiation and decentralization produced the postmodern “schizophrenic,” a multiform and diversified self: “a mode of being / awareness not bifurcated into a subject and object but participating in / interactive with the emerging spiral of differences that make up phenomenal experience” (White and Gert 7). The new psychological theories of Freud’s disciple Jacques Lacan further complicated models of identity by emphasizing the significance of language and desire in the construction of the self. As part of the shared but changing system of signs and a result of the mirror stage process, based on identification with the gaze of the Other and the subsequent entry into the sphere of the Symbolic, the self could no longer be perceived as existing a priori, autonomous, purposive, or stable. The focus on the interpersonal, phenomenological, experiential and ecological aspects of the self undermined the conclusiveness of the knowledge about the self ’s existential status. The subject was treated more often as a set of incomplete potentialities, private and social imaginaries, narrative fabrications, contingent performative positions and processes dependent on the experiential and social milieus. Naturally, the above changes and theoretical formulations affected all aesthetic practices of the time, informing also the new approaches to the portrait form. Both artists and poets of the period responded to the destabilized notion of the self, asking new questions about identity, refiguring modes of inquiry and seeking fresh forms of access to the elusive nature of self-­knowledge. Among those, Ashbery’s

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and Richter’s respective engagements with the genre of portraiture have proven it to be a particularly fertile ground for interrogating the notion of postmodern identity and the problems of its delineation, construction and representation. What connects Ashbery’s work to Richter’s inquiries into the possible representations of the self is the American poet’s ekphrastic return to the past. In an interview with art critic Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter admits that his art “[i]n every respect . . . has more to do with traditional art than with anything else” (Daily Practice 23). The painter claims further that “[he] do[es] see [him]self as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting – of art in general – which we have lost, but which places obligations on us” (Daily Practice 156). Ashbery’s use of ekphrasis fulfills a similar function: hailing the artistic and poetic tradition of mimetic commitments, it simultaneously exposes their sublime fictions and inadequacies. Admiring the impersonal self-­portraits of de Chirico or Tanguy, Ashbery similarly argues that he is more attracted to their “patient, minute, old-­masters technique” than to the gestural painting of American Abstract Expressionists. It is in the mimetic meticulousness of the European masters that we can see a reflection of “the realities of the spirit (rather than the individual consciousness) and of the world perceived by it” (Ashbery, Reported Sightings xvii). A strong “anxiety of influence,” visible in Ashbery’s writing especially in relation to the Romantic and modernist tradition, links the poet to Richter’s considerations and deconstructions of past aesthetic imperatives. Given the above, the genre of poetic ekphrasis seemed more than a natural choice for the American poet seeking to connect his interest in the painterly and poetic tradition with the innovative thrust of his own era. As observed by Frances Dickey in her study of the modern portrait poem, the poetic portrait in particular is a genre that “brings in conversation” the new and old techniques in painting and poetry, as it “explores the relations between surface and depth, exterior and interior, as aspects of both art and persons” (1). The portrait, Dickey notes further, is a “vessel for questions about identity, interiority, and the relationship between images and words” (1). The poetic self-­portrait is especially interesting from this perspective, because it demonstrates a strong “intermedial flexibility” and “reaches out across the boundaries of media, hailing the visual arts as a point of reference” (2). Ashbery’s ekphrastic “Self-­Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1974), which will be the main point of reference in my analysis, brings into such a conversation the genres of poetic ekphrasis and the self-­portrait, revealing self-­representation as a very complex discursive structure. Quoting Rimbaud’s famous statement “Je est un autre” in one of his critical essays (Reported Sigthings xvii), Ashbery locates the self in the mirror gaze of the Other, signaling an inherent fracture at the heart of the essentialist notions of the unified subject.

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Significantly, in “The Self-­Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” the poet revisits the Renaissance, when the modern idea of the portrait as an independent and major form of representation came into being. As observed by Patricia Simons, “[c]onventional accounts of portraiture’s history regard the genre as a Renaissance invention articulating the rise of the individual” (29). Aided by a technological evolution in the use of oil paint and the “mirror craze” (Hall 34),3 which resulted in the refinement of texture, detail, light and perspectival constructions, the Renaissance masters perfected their techniques of portraiture and self-­portraiture towards a more naturalist representation. Simons notes further that history assumes “a particular kind of modernist, western, autonomous individualism, a sense of unique and publicly staged selfhood” (29), usually subjected to the norms of nobility, masculinity and heterosocial relations. And yet, Francesco Parmigianino’s work from that period (fig. 1), chosen by Ashbery for his ekphrastic meditations, exhibits a clear attempt at destabilizing that normative image. In Brillant’s words, Parmigianino’s Self-­Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1523–4) is a tour-­de-­force of contradictory illusion, self-­deception, and abortive alienation. The spectator is made to feel that in looking at this mirror image he is intruding into the apparently reciprocal relation between the artist and the mirror, although the projecting right hand leaves no room for an interloper. The intrusive eye of another is permitted access only by the painter’s crafty objectification of the distinction between himself and his reflection, through his art. (158)

The multiple ambiguities with which the original painting resonates uncover both the incredible inventiveness on the part of the artist-­as-­subject and the anxiety at the heart of the processes of viewing, posing for, and producing portraits. As noted by Simons, through its play with the narcissistic gaze and the multiple distortions as well as removals of the reflected and the seeing self, Parmigianino’s self-­portrait demonstrates further that the “Renaissance Man” was far from “an indivisible, singular and coherent entity” (32). What we are offered instead is the specular field in which the notion of the undivided self is threatened by the fundamental otherness and artificiality of the represented image.

3 In his most recent study of self-­portraiture, James Hall discusses in detail the influence of the technological revolution and the use of convex mirrors on the development of self-­representation in the fifteenth century and after. He traces “the mirror craze” back to the medieval period, which is known for its interest in the symbolism and science of mirrors. “The clearest manifestation of this mirror craze,” the critic argues, “was the use of the title ‘speculum’ – Latin for mirror, from specere, ‘to see’ – for books of moral and/or factual instruction: a mirror of virginity, mirror of conscience, mirror of alchemy, mirror of magistrates, princes, etc.” (33).

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Figure 1: Parmigianino, Self-­Portrait in a Convex Mirror, c.1523–24, Oil on convex panel 24.4 cm diameter, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

Ashbery embraces that creative “incision” in the subject represented in this Renaissance masterpiece, seeing himself as the postmodern continuator of Parimigianino’s productive doubt and confusion. The poet, like his painterly predecessor, employs the genre of self-­portrait as “a mode of speculative looking . . . – provisional, approximate, contradictory, continually self-­revising” (Fisher 83). The fact that the original self-­portrait is a mirror reflection further expands the space of critical inquiry. In a 1993 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gerhard Richter boldly pronounced the mirror to be the most perfect work of art: “the only image that always looks different. And just like a picture, it shows something that is not there at all, at least not where we see it” (Olbrist 26). Ashbery reflects on this poetics of displacement in his poem when he confesses: “I see in this only the chaos / Of your round mirror which organizes everything” (“Self-­Portrait” 70). The resulting ekphrastic reflection of the reflection continuously oscillates between figures of order and chaos, sameness and difference, between excess of meaning and its unsettling elusiveness. In Fisher’s apt words, Ashbery shows the inexhaustibility of the ekphrastic poem, translating its

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“liability [related to its belated and retrospective relation to the original] into an asset by employing ekphrasis as a prolific mode of description, interpretation, apostrophe, response and counter-­response – an always approximate and ongoing rather than precise or complete treatment of its object” (59). In Ashbery’s poem, the opening image of Parmigianino’s unusually enlarged hand evokes the original self-­portrait and its topicalization of the unstable relation between the center (traditionally taken up by the portrayed head) and the periphery (here represented by the grotesquely foregrounded hand). The mannerist deformation of the peripheral hand, which in traditional iconography represented the genius of the creator, stands in contrast to the meticulous finish, immobility and the perfectionist “rounding” of the head, symbolically implying the split between the physical act and the material limits of painting and the mental idealist image of the represented self. This split – or, as McPerson sees it, “decalage between surface (that which is visible, or the physical aspect) and interior (that which is hidden, or the psychological aspect),” or “the difference between an inner, abstract subjectivity and an objectivized, material body” (4, emphasis in the original) – becomes Ashbery’s own “ground” as Parmigianino’s pointedly artificial “manner” is translated into the brittle playfield of temporal shifts, metaphorical distortions, displacements and revisions. As noted by Shoptaw, Ashbery’s “Self-­ Portrait” is likewise organized around an unstable set of relations between head and hand: center and circumference, matter and manner, signified and signifiers, depth and surface, whole and parts, inside and outside, past and present, present and future, concealment and exposure, self and other, and so on” (179). “Roving back to the body of which it seems / So unlikely a part” (“Self-­portrait” 69), the distorted hand, through its expansion and flaunted status as painted artifice, constitutes for the poet the punctum of the portrait, activating subjective desire, which works against the general appearance of the image, or its stadium – the visual content free for interpretive decoding as part of an imagined fullness of self-­ presence.4 As Ashbery’s speaker sees it, “thrust at the viewer / And swerving easily away,” it serves to “protect / What it advertises” (“Self-­portrait” 68). At once welcoming and sheltering, directed at the viewer and swerving away from him/her, the hand epitomizes the nature of the aesthetic force which emerges in the encounter of the representing, represented and the observing self. The encounter with the painterly 4 I am using the terms punctum (a piercing detail that activates the aesthetic force of the representation and forges the viewer’s involuntary relation to the represented image) and stadium (understanding of the general interest and function of the image as well as the artist’s intention, followed by a negotiation of the viewer’s relation to them) after Roland Barthes, who used them in Camera Lucida (see Barthes 27–28).

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self-­portrait that advertises its own illusory and artificial nature exposes the constitutive aspects of framing and different modalities of the subject’s self-­construction, deconstruction and effacement. Framing his poem with this physical image, Ashbery seems to claim the ordering power of the Renaissance painter’s creative gesture and to admit the authority of the original as well as the centrality of the gestural and visual in fixing the meaning. However, the distortion of the painter’s body and the elusiveness of its limits revealed by this representation implies the potential for unfixing and deformation inherent in the same gesture. As the closing image of the hand in the last section of the poem indicates, behind the globed image and its protective-­defensive self-­advertising, the painter hides a fragmented knowledge of the self: The hand holds no chalk And each part of the whole falls off And cannot know it knew, except Here and there, in cold pockets Of remembrance, whispers out of time. (“Self-­Portrait” 83)

As shown by the final words of the poem, the fragmented self cannot be recuperated or bound by the gesture of the artist’s hand; rather it dissipates in a “temporicity of language” (Norton 282) – the mysterious “whispers out of time.” The material force of the opening image in Ashbery’s “translation” of Parmigianino is also displaced by the discursive frames used throughout the poem, the first of which is the loose and chaotic catalogue of the props included in the painting to delineate the painter’s self: “A few leaded panes, old beams, / Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring rung together” (“Self-­portrait” 68). The discontinuity of the list is the first signal of that otherness which fails to succumb to the spherical “perfecting” of the image. As shown by Ashbery, through its curving decorativeness the painter’s convex mirror displaces the centrifugal, plural and “non-­captive,” disparate realities and truths through which the subject tries to assert himself: “The surface / Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases / Significantly; that is, enough to make the point / That the soul is a captive. . ., unable to advance much farther” (“Self-­portrait” 67). Shoptaw aptly observes that Ashbery attempts a deconstruction of the spherical polish of the original, proving that the sphere onto which Parmigianino projects his image “is a geometrically perfect but rhetorically imperfect figure, granting central, synechdocal power but prohibiting linear movement” (177). The subsequent and strongly spatiotemporal metaphors with which the poet tries to claim and shelter the truth of that “firm, oblique self ” – e.g. the “dozing whale,” the ship on the sea surface, the carousel, the diagram, the ping-­pong ball, the balloon, the globe, the crystal and light – subtly point to the mannerist formality and décor.

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Nevertheless, although they imply closed circumference, hollowness, arrested movement or transparence, Ashbery does not allow them to stay put: the balloon “pops up”; the ping-­pong ball is balanced precariously on a water jet; the crystal forms “irregular clumps”; the light disperses “behind windblown fog and sand”; the diagram is “sketched on the wind”; “the globed life” is flattened into a smooth band; the sphere turns into an hourglass (“Self-­portrait” 68, 82). As the poem develops and the sense of passing time becomes more marked, those “spherical” images begin to implode, cloud, burst or “dissolve / Into dust” (“Self-­portrait” 76), suggesting either the hollowness of the mannerist containment of the self, or the ultimate impossibility of stabilizing it in an objective form. “This otherness, this / ‘Not-­being-­us’ is all there is to look at / In the mirror,” the poet states, “though no one can say / How it came to be this way” (“Self-­portrait” 80–81). The dissolution of the painter’s image through its repeated hollowing in metaphors of surface, suspension and void, as Richard Stamelman claims, is Ashbery’s way of recognizing and disclosing “how poems, stories, and paintings (like Parmigianino’s self-­portrait) hide, disguise or suppress realities of temporality and loss” (Stamelman 611). The reflected “room” in Parmigianino’s work, which lacks recesses, transparent windows or depth, and in which “everything is a surface” (“Self-­portrait” 68), is transformed by the poet into a vortex-­like space of memory and desire which cannot be fully controlled, governed as it is by “the turning seasons and the thoughts / That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds / Like the last stubborn leaves ripped / From wet branches” (“Self-­portrait” 68). The space is filled with sounds of “raindrops at the pane” and the “sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind” (“Self-­portrait” 69). In the following lines, the poet stirs and breaks the suspended immobility of the painterly original: “I feel the carousel starting slowly / And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books, / Photographs of friends, the window and the trees / Merging in one neutral band that surrounds / Me on all sides, everywhere I look” (“Self-­Portrait” 71). The circular, accelerating and decentering movement of the carousel – which exposes the illusion of perspective and obliterates distinction between individual objects, as well as between the background and the foreground, flattening the picture out into an abstract “neutral band” – is a perfect metaphor of the dispersal of the postmodern self which can be ascertained only provisionally, against the shifting background of disintegration and change, and defined as a process of corrections rather than a finished product, a process realized in an interplay between difference and an ever fugitive identity. In “The System,” Ashbery sums up his impulse of dismantling the notion of the uniform subject, arguing that “irregularities are all functions of its [the subject’s] uniformity” (Ashbery, Three Poems 101–2). Paradoxically, this flattening out of the self into a neutral

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surface brings Ashbery’s self-­portrait close to Parmigianino’s polished reflection, as the metaphor of the neutral band functions as the silver veneer, covering “the back” of his mirror-­poem – a screen-­image against which Ashbery can activate his own eccentric play of singularities and differences, dismembered approximations, restless memories, perceptions, experiences which result in dispersals of the self. Just like Ashbery in his engagement with the representational traditions of portraiture and ekphrasis, Richter revives the genre of the portrait to interrogate the classical conception of the image and self-­image. “Appearance, semblance,” the painter observes, “is the theme of my life. All that is seems and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visible” (Daily Practice 116). As noted by Gronert, a substantial portion of Richter’s work is constituted by portraits and self-­portraits, and there is almost no genre category (single or multiple portrait, head, head-­and-­shoulder view or full-­length views) that the painter has not attempted (52, 69). Paul Moorhouse likewise singles out the portrait as “a vital, ongoing, and important aspect of [Richter’s] activity” (9), showing the curious variety of his viewpoints, techniques and interests. The critic even ventures that “all of Richter’s work can be seen as a portrait” (9). The most prominent and “centrally important” works (Gronert 56) include the 48 Portraits painted for the 1972 Venice Biennale, the October cycle of 1977, which includes the painting of Ulrike Meinhof, titled Portrait of a Young Woman, more private representations of his daughter Betty from 1977 and 1988,5 his wife Susan, his son Moritz and the tragic history-­haunted portraits of his other relatives, e.g. the frequently exhibited and paired Uncle Rudi (1965) and Aunt Marianne (1965). Richter also photographed himself and painted a few self-­portraits, as well as various artists’ portraits (Gronert 55). A separate category of Richter’s interpretation of the portrait and self-­portrait is constituted by his mirror paintings and installations, exemplified by his Four Panes of Glass (1967) or 8 Grays (2002). As in Ashbery’s case, a question arises about the nature and significance of the painter’s fascination with this highly conventional genre, as well as its function in his confrontations with the “end of painting” and the postmodernist prophecies of the “death of the subject.” Like Ashbery, Richter is aware of living in the Age of Media, where depictions and images are often destabilized, multiply refracted, reproduced, intertextually embedded and scripted. For example, his monumental work Atlas consists of a compilation of private and public photographs, drawings, collages and sketches that constitute his rich archive as well as an ever-­growing artistic “Imagi-

5 Gronert cites a poll in the English periodical Frieze, where Richter’s Betty (1988) was among the best loved artworks of all time (57).

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narium” through which we can trace his development. The collection points both to the painter’s search for the origin of his works and the impossibility of establishing it in the endlessly receding horizon of pictorial reproductions, allusions and citations. His creative use of the mirror, both in self-­representations and as independent “image-­ objects,” often of the size of his abstract paintings (Gronert 63), further shows his fascination with repetition, multiplication and copying. It also points to his frequent positioning of himself at the fragile boundary between the observer and the observed. Ashbery’s self-­reflexive and deconstructive return to the Renaissance in “Self-­ portrait” can be juxtaposed with Richter’s intervisual quotations from and references to the Old Masters. The painter’s most celebrated and critically provocative portrait of his daughter – Betty (1988) (fig. 2) – illustrates well the painter’s major concern with portraiture, namely the tension between realism and abstraction (Gronert 58), coupled with “the purs[uit] [of] both a rhetoric of painting and a simultaneous analysis of that rhetoric” (Buchloh 161). Figure 2: Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1988, Oil on canvas, 102 cm x 72 cm. CR: 663–5. Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, USA. © Gerhard Richter Studio 2017

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Richter mixes two conventions here: 17th century Dutch painting (Betty explicitly echoes Jan Vermeer’s portraits, both in the arrangement of the figures on the canvas and in the reflexive mood which the representation evokes) and the Romantic use of the Rückenfigur. Through this fusion of conventions and the mannerist positioning of the body, the artist frustrates our expectations concerning the representation of the individualized self – the side view of the girl’s averted profile and her twisted body conceal her face from the viewer as much as they captivate his/her attention by projecting the viewer’s gaze. In this way, the girl is both the subject and object, becoming the focal figure of the painting and mimicking the visual trajectory of the viewer looking at another painting. Evoking the Romantic Rückenfiguren, which guided the viewer’s eyes towards the sublime mystery and infinite magnitude of Nature, Richter deconstructs the convention, as he has his Betty stare at what appears to be a grey abstract emptiness posing a threat to the aura of white and red hues as well as to the meticulous and lovingly delineated soft patterns that adorn the girl’s clothing. At a closer look, the viewer realizes that what the figure wishes us to confront is not only the haunting, depthless void, but Richter’s own painting – one of the grey abstractions which marked his break with realist representation. As noted by Gronert, the portrait is thus a self-­reflexive image of the viewer looking at the image of Richter’s painting (58). A few issues are addressed in the painter’s ambivalent treatment of the subject and the deconstructive employment of the Romantic and mannerist painterly “rhetoric.” Gronert sees in it a frustrated “promis[e] [of] an identification that the viewer knows is impossible within the medium of the image” and a “negation of a psychologizing portrait” (58). The portrait thus becomes an “anti-­portrait” which “fulfills the criteria of the genre while at the same time undermining them” (58). But there is more to this self-­referential project: by shielding the face from identification and by endowing the girl’s body with an almost unreal, simulacral glow, the painter reveals his general skepticism towards the revelatory power of the image and stresses its ephemerality. This ephemerality is further emphasized by the employment of the technique of photo-­painting. “One of the most important differences between photography and portraiture as traditionally mimetic practices,” Roger Scruton claims, lies in the relation of each to time. It is characteristic of photography that, being understood in terms of a casual relation to its subject, it is thought of as revealing something momentary about its subject – how the subject looked at a particular moment. And that sense of the moment is seldom lost in photography . . . Portrait painting, however, aims to capture the sense of time and to represent its subject as extended in time, even in the process of displaying a particular moment of its existence. Portraiture is not an art of the momentary, and its aim is not merely to capture fleeting appearances. The aim of painting is to give insight, and the creation of an appearance is important only as an expression of thought. (586–7)

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Richter uses photographic snapshots and the fleeting experience which they capture to both imply and block “the insight-­giving” function of portraiture: we will not obtain the truth of Betty’s likeness or identity, but her suggestively temporal presence and her choice as the viewing subject are themselves revealing. Elsewhere, Richter argues that in his family portraits he often paints himself, showcasing the need to explore the shifting movement of gaze and reflection in the intersubjective mirroring of the artist’s, the viewer’s and the represented subject’s selves. In his 1986 self-­portrait expressively titled Grauer Spiegel [Grey Mirror] (fig. 3), Richter indicates further his interest in the mechanics of making art and the artist’s own position as a maker. The photographic image reproduces the painter at work – here taking a photograph of himself in the mirror, with his face almost completely covered by the camera, which acts as a “mask” and implies the painter’s unwillingness to “show” himself. Figure 3: Gerhard Richter, Grauer Spiegel (Reminiszenz), 1986. 50 x 60 cm Float Glass, stove-­enamelled with Grey on the rear side. Edition for the Museumsverein Mönchengladbach. © Gerhard Richter 2017 (05052017), courtesy of the artist

This self-­portrait’s play with self-­reflexivity begins already with the grey hue of the mirror-­panel, the color characteristic of Richter’s series of “grey” abstractions, and is deepened by the blurry shape of Richter’s own painting in the background. This solipsistic exercise of looking in which the painter-­photographer is at once the subject and the object of the gaze recalls the mise-­en-­abyme in Ashbery’s

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treatment of Parmigianino’s work. The camera in the hand of the painter points to Richter’s frequent use of photography as his tool, model and basis, implying also a fusion of agency and mechanics in photographic self-­representation. As a fuzzy snapshot, however, the self-­portrait becomes a form of reluctant exposure, based not so much on self-­display but on self-­concealment and erasure. This meta-­image underscores the inevitable mediality of depiction and the distance between the public and the private selves, and as such it can be compared to Ashbery’s ekphrastic mirroring of the mannerist work: both the poet and the painter establish the ground for a critical (anti)specularity of the genre, which at once promises and withholds the presence of the self, reaching out towards the viewer only to suspend or break the possibility of communication. The imprecision of the subject, which eludes the viewer’s grasp in Richter’s work, matches Ashbery’s conception of self-­representation, which is always mediated and discursive, and thus incomplete and inadequate, always a blur and misrepresentation. Richter himself denies the portrait’s epistemological openness, claiming that the painter does not need to “see or know his sitter. A portrait must not express anything of the sitter’s ‘soul,’ essence or character. Nor must a painter ‘see’ the sitter in any specific, personal way” (Daily Practice 57). For the painter, the self-­image is only a false promise of authenticity, which he repeatedly exposes by using in his portrait representations the characteristic blur, superimpositions or squeegee overpaint. Hubertus Butin sees the blurred focus and the deliberately diminished optical accessibility of his work as “a paradigm of [Richter’s] fundamental skepticism,” his avowed mistrust towards reality, of which, as the painter himself confesses, he “know[s] next to nothing” (Butin 216). The consequence of this skepticism is the painter’s rejection of the portrait as “an arena of autobiographical ‘truths’ or self-­reflexive revelations” (Butin 216). Instead, it becomes a vehicle for “demystifying and satirizing idealizing myths of artistic identity” (Butin 218). The painter himself speaks of a reluctance to ascribe a definite significance to any representation: “Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures” (Richter, Daily Practice 31). Echoing Parmigianino’s Self-­portrait in the Convex Mirror and other mannerist works, Richter employs various distortions to question the concept of the portrait as a path to a better understanding of the artist’s genius and, more generally, human subjectivity. In what Butin calls his “theatrical self-­representations” (221), the painter self-­mockingly depicts himself as crossed-­eyed, wearing absurd attire such as sheepskin over his naked body or a rubber balloon over his face (Untitled 1966), or covered in strips of translucent tape glued to his face so tightly that its features become grotesque to the point of illegibility (see for instance his silver plate print of 1966). Even in his overpainted photo-­portraits, the artist distorts

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his image by creating a grid of oil smudges, thick horizontal striations and blurs that destabilize the validity of photographic perception, creating an impression of the self ’s imprisonment behind the disturbing haze of squeegee “bars” (fig. 4). Figure 4: Gerhard Richter, 4. 05. 07. 2007. Oil on colour photograph, 16.7 cm x 12.6 cm. CR: 04.05.2007. © The Gerhard Richter 2017

The desire to scrape off the fuzzy surface to see the hidden image which those paintings generate in the viewer evokes Ashbery’s attempts at breaking the polished artifice of Parmigianino’s mirror-­like canvas with the hope of reaching and communicating the essence of the painter’s self. However, the artist’s identity remains here similarly undisclosed, constructed, accessible only as an artificial and staged Other. In his self-­portraits, according to Uwe M. Schneede, “Richter wants above all to acquire the alien, even for him alienating image” (195, emphasis in the original). The overpainted photographs make this sense of alienation especially poignant, as the photographs capture presence-­as-­absence, serving as a “death mask” (Barthes

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83),6 while paint, with its life-­like texture, creates a haptic “skin,” a depth and bodily current bursting with a promise of revelation and bearing a counter-­reality and counter-­narrative that opens up the sealed surface for an incision, wounding, fragmentation, temporality, defamiliarization and doubt. In the critic’s words, When the autobiographical material is brought into contact with the thick paint, two worlds meet, materially and in terms of the senses: the uniformly glossy, cold, two-­ dimensional surface of the photographic paper that nevertheless captures a personal moment in the past, and the paint, which tends to be warm, richly textured, diverse, thick or thin, pasty or cracked, tending toward the relief; the photograph, whose interest lies in what it represents, and the paint, whose interest lies in its emotional impact. The impulsive material turns against the scene, which is petrified but still contains life (though that life is in the past): the reality of the color as a substance that has no memory, but is rich in emotion, suggestion of color material against narrative. For there is no doubt that there is continuous opposition. Richter is not decorating his photographic scenes, he is not completing them with paint, he is countering them. The paint remains on a plane at the front of the picture (as if on the glass), it is fragmented, has something vehement, even fleeting about it, disturbs the image, signals elemental doubt about the order of photographic reality. (Schneede 96)

This defamiliarizing impulse, which breaks the continuity of the subject and creates a “film” separating us from the “truth” of the image, is Richter’s version of Ashbery’s dialectical movement between the Self and the Other, the knowable and the unknown, the temporal and the atemporal, the dead mask of the surface image and its continuous overpainting, scraping off and negation. Siri Hustvedt notes that in Richter’s works “[t]he dynamic between photo and paint becomes one of revelation and concealment, of seeing and blindness, of playing one dimension against and with the other, and of creating ambiguities between them” (77). Richter himself sees a photograph as “a statement about reality,” “the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style” (Daily Practice 31, 37). Paint breaks its absoluteness, introduces amorphous liminal zones and “grey areas” (Richter, Daily Practice 37), the incomprehensible and the uncontrollable component, equivalent of Ash6 Analyzing the nature of photographic representation, Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida: “But when I discover myself in the product of this operation, what I see is that I have become Total-­Image, which is to say, Death in person. With the photograph we enter into flat death . . . The horror is this; nothing to say about the death of one I most love, nothing to say about her photograph, which I contemplate without ever being able to get to the heart of it, to transform it. The only ‘thought’ I can have is that at the end of this first death my own death is inscribed; between the two, nothing more than waiting; I have no other resource than this irony: to speak of the ‘nothing to say’” (83).

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bery’s “neutral band,” that blurred version/vision of himself at once formed and deformed out of a carousel of texts, memories and images. “All that interests me are grey areas, the passages, the tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings,” the German painter admits (Daily Practice 37), showing a deep affinity with Ashbery, whose poetry locates itself exactly in the interstices between framed reference and abstraction, the “overlaps and interlockings” of center and periphery, of the visible and the hidden, the private and the public. In their engagement with the genre in the two respective media, Ashbery and Richter deliberately undermine the traditional psychology of the portrait and deconstruct the subjectivity of the artist as well as the notion of authorial self-­ understanding, as they show that what lies beyond the images is not the inner core of the self but surface projections, imaginary and symbolic constructions and phantasms, susceptible to shifting cultural and representational traditions. “We are all talkers / It is true, but underneath the talk lies / The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose / Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor” (“Soonest Mended” 18) – these words by Ashbery capture the American poet’s and the German painter’s shared desire to undercut the denotative solidity of description and mimetic representation, and thus to slip from the traps of coherent signification, which prevent us from grasping “the loose/ Meaning” of reality.

Works Cited Altieri, Charles. “John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in the Visuals Arts.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 14, no. 4, 1998, pp. 805–830. Ashbery, John. “American Sanctuary in Paris.” Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1978, edited by David Bergman. Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 87–97. —. “Self-­Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Selected Poems. Elizabeth Sifton Books Viking, 1985, pp. 188–206. —. “Soonest Mended.” Selected Poems. Elizabeth Sifton Books Viking, 1985, pp. 87–90. —. “The System.” Three Poems. Viking, 1972, pp. 50–103. Barresi, John, and Raymond Martin. The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity. Columbia University Press, 2006. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1981. Bergman, David. Introduction. Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1978, by John Ashbery, edited by David Bergman. Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. xi–­xxiii.

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Brillant, Richard. Portraiture. Harvard University Press, 1991. Brunette, Peter, and David Wills, editors. Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Buchloh, Benjamin, H.D., editor. Gerhard Richter. MIT Press, 2009. —. “Interview with Gerhard Richter.” 1986. Gerhard Richter. MIT Press, 2009, pp. 1–34. —. et al. Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on Atlas. Consorci del Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2000. Butin, Hubertus. “Unknown Photographic Works by Gerhard Richter.” Gerhard Richter: Portraits, edited by Stefan Gronert. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006, pp. 209–227. Dickey, Frances. The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound. University of Virginia Press, 2012. Elger, Dietmar. Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting. Translated by Elizabeth M. Solard. The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Fisher, Barbara K. “Returned Again to the Exhibition: John Ashbery, Avant-­ Gardism, and Ekphrastic Risk.” Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry. Routledge, 2006, pp. 53–94. Gronert, Stefan, editor. Gerhard Richter: Portraits. Hatje Cantz, 2006. —. “Portraits of the Image.” Gerhard Richter: Portraits, edited by Stefan Gronert. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006, pp. 41–111. Haidu, Rachel. “Arrogant Texts: Gerhard Richter’s Family Pictures.” Gerhard Richter, edited by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. MIT Press, 2009, pp. 154–168. Heffernan, James, A. W. Museum of Words: Poetic Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago University Press, 1993. Hustvedt, Siri. “Truth and Rightness.” Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs, edited by Markus Heinzelman. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008, pp. 73–88. Lehman, David. Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery. Cornell University Press, 1980. —. The Last Avant-­Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. Random House, 1999. —. “The Pleasures of Poetry.” Interview with John Ashbery. New York Times Magazine, 16 Dec. 1984, pp. 47–51. Lyotard, Jean-­Francois. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. 80–89.

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Moorhouse, Paul. Gerhard Richter: Portraits. Painting Appearances. National Portrait Gallery, 2009. Moramarco, Fred. “John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara: The Painterly Poets.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 5, no. 3, 1976, pp. 436–62. Norton, Jody. “‘Whispers out of Time’: The Syntax of Being in the Poetry of John Ashbery.” Twentieth-­Century Literature, vol. 41, no. 3, 1995, pp. 281–305. Olbrist, Hans Ulrich. Gerhard Richter und die Romantik. Kunstverein Ruhr, 1994. Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Fragments of a Buried Life’: John Ashbery’s Dream Songs.” Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery, edited by David Lehman. Cornell University Press, 1980, pp. 66–86. Richter, Gerhard. Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962–1993. Translated by David Britt. The MIT Press, 1995. Schneede, M. Uwe, et al., editors. Gerhard Richter: Images of an Era. Hirmer Publishers, 2011. Schrag, Calvin O. The Self After Postmodernity. Yale University Press, 1997. Scruton, Roger. “Photography and Representation.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 3, 1981, pp. 586–601. Shapiro. David. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry. Columbia University Press, 1979. Soussloff, Catherine M. The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern. Duke University Press, 2006. Stamelman, Richard. “Critical Reflections: Poetry and Art Criticism in Ashbery’s ‘Self-­Portrait in a Convex Mirror.’” New Literary History, vol. 15, 1984, pp. 611–624. Storr, Robert. Introduction. Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting. Catalog. Museum of Modern Art, 2002. West, Shearer. Portraiture. Oxford University Press, 2004. White, Daniel R., and Hellerich Gert. Labyrinths of the Mind: The Self in the Postmodern Age. The State University of New York Press, 1998. Wollheim, Richard. Painting as an Art. Princeton University Press, 1987. Woodall, Joanna. Facing the Subject: Theory of Portraiture. Manchester University Press, 1997. Woolf, Leslie. “The Brushstroke Integrity: John Ashbery and the Art of Painting.” Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery, edited by David Lehman. Cornell University Press, 1980, pp. 224–255.

Andrew J. Ploeg

The Dynamic Space of Divinity and Ontology in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves Abstract: House of Leaves offers parallel notions of God and self as unforeseeable becoming, which disrupt the presumably stable foundations upon which essentialism and fundamentalism are built and from which they precipitate intolerance and violence today. Keywords: House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski, divinity, ontology, postmodernism

Multivalent and mercurial, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) is as resistant to summation as the paradoxical Navidson house that constitutes its complex and elusive subject. The thoroughly postmodern novel is, in part, a fictionalized study by a blind, elderly recluse, referred to simply as “Zampanò,” of a film entitled The Navidson Record. It is also composed of extensive contributions by “Johnny Truant,” the troubled and hard-­partying tattoo parlor employee who discovers, annotates, and eventually publishes Zampanò’s manuscript. In the film, the Navidson family, comprised of Will, his partner Karen Green, and their two children, discovers that while outwardly quite conventional their house contains within it an infinite and ever-­changing maze of doors, stairways, and corridors. A highly successful photojournalist, Will is driven to investigate and to document the house’s structural anomalies, entering the labyrinth alone late one night. During this initial foray, Will begins to realize not only the immense size of the house, but also its confounding mutability, which makes even a “simple path into an extremely complicated one” (Danielewski 69). Later, struggling to express this inexpressible space, he turns to the language of theology, explicitly describing the house as “God” (Danielewski 390). Easily dismissed by readers and scholars alike as poetic or hyperbolic, this description, when taken seriously, offers a conception of the divine with significant and far-­reaching implications. In this way, the novel queries into the nature of the divine and, more specifically, into the kind of space that is God. Along with this distinctive approach to divinity, the novel also explores a corresponding conception of ontology. Entering the house on Ash Tree Lane initiates profound change, causing some to lose their way, some their minds, and some their lives. It is as if in seeking to become other than one is, one must necessarily risk altogether ceasing to be. As one of the few to survive the labyrinth that the novel both embodies and expresses, Will emerges not only transformed but also endlessly transforming. My contention, then, is that Danielewski’s post-

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modern text articulates parallel notions of divinity and ontology as endless and unforeseeable becoming. These notions actively disrupt the presumably fixed foundations upon which essentialism and fundamentalism are built and from which they precipitate intolerance and violence in our world today. Mirroring the labyrinthine space of the Navidson house, the novel is comprised of a maze of different typefaces, page-­layouts, appendices, letters, and footnotes. Its peculiar postmodern form – which is intended to represent Zampanò’s “original” manuscript – visually undermines the supposed stability of the text and subverts conventional methods of meaning making through its graphically connotative structure, always leading to more and to other interpretations. In order to construct meaning with the novel, the reader must participate in the meaning-­ making process by twisting and turning the book in her hands, flipping back and forth through indices, and reading page layouts that are sideways, upside-­down, and backwards, layouts that challenge even the opacity of its pages. As Ronald Shusterman asserts, the novel demonstrates that “the reading experience can be a spatial and bodily experience as well” (83). Martin Brick describes additional aspects of the novel’s formal design and the seemingly endless narratives that they enable: Just a peek inside the covers of House of Leaves reveals the ambitious typographical endeavor that asks readers to engage the text in ways that may seem foreign. Danielewski uses marginal notation, multiple typefaces, appendices, color-­coded text, fractured poetic layouts reminiscent of Pound and cummings, and nearly bare pages to produce a highly-­ layered document that tells several tales, not only in, but also through the physical text. (5)

Brick argues that the unique space of the novel compels readers to encounter the object and the process of reading in new and unfamiliar ways.1 In this sense, Danielewski accentuates the textuality of the text itself, with its intricate layering and its radically open structure, which enable meanings to multiply and which perpetually resist closure. Its form is a significant performative aspect of this postmodern text, a multilayered maze that visually enacts the complex multivocality of authorship and the endless and endlessly proliferating network of interpretations. The novel then constitutes a literal and literary labyrinth, a disorienting textual space that the reader is forced to negotiate and that replicates, to some extent, the experience of the Navidson house.

1 See Nathalie Aghoro’s “Textual Transformations: Experience, Mediation, and Reception in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” in Revolutionary Leaves: The Fiction of Mark Z. Danielewski (2012) for further analysis of the novel’s unconventional reading experience.

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Described as a “small house in the Virginia countryside” (Danielewski 23) and thought to have been built as early as 1720, the house on Ash Tree Lane appears to be a thoroughly conventional residence, complete with all the trappings of a typical American home. It gives the impression of a safe, secure, and stable dwelling, a “cozy little outpost,” as Will puts it, “set against the transience of the world” (Danielewski 23). However, as the Navidson family discovers, what first appears simply as a stubborn ¼-inch difference between the internal and external measurements of the house soon transforms into additional closets, shifting walls, and, eventually, a hallway into a “virtually unfathomable space” (Danielewski 386), “‘a labyrinth without end’” (Danielewski 136). What is most remarkable about the house, then, is not its immense spatial parameters, but that those parameters are not static. In an attempt to help his readers think this “immense, incomprehensible space” (Danielewski 155), Zampanò explicitly draws upon the work of Jacques Derrida regarding the idea of a stable center whose function is “not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure . . . but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure” (qtd. in Danielewski 112). According to Derrida, a structure without a center cannot be delimited, resisting demarcation and organization through its “play.” The “changing nature” (Danielewski 164) of the Navidson house demonstrates the very sort of “play” characteristic of decentered structures, in that its “[s]ize and depth vary enormously” and its entire geometry transforms “instantly and without apparent difficulty” (Danielewski 371). For example, as Will’s twin brother Tom begins to descend the mysterious “Spiral Staircase” within the labyrinth in an attempt to rescue Will and the rest of the expedition group during a particularly extensive exploration, “the stairs suddenly stretch and drop” (Danielewski 272). Moreover, when he looks up, “he sees the circular shape of the stairwell bend into an ellipse before snapping back to a circle again” (Danielewski 272). This spatial shifting has disorienting and dangerous consequences, snapping the rope that holds the wheelchair-­bound engineering professor, Billy Reston, and stranding Will at what is, at least momentarily, “an impossible distance down” (Danielewski 305). The house’s transformations, which seem to emit a “dull roar or ‘growl’” (Danielewski 371) yet do not leave any trace, suggest that the house is not simply a spatial, extensive structure that undergoes change, but rather change itself. In this way, the house undermines permanence, presence, and stability, resisting even Will’s most rigorous efforts to conclusively chronicle it. Due to its extreme mutability, the Navidson house is, to use Zampanò’s words, “neither homey nor protective, nor comforting nor familiar” (Danielewski 28); instead, it is “alien, exposed, and unsettling” (Danielewski 28). Though he por-

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trays it as “not exactly sinister or even threatening,” Zampanò nevertheless insists that the indefinite structure of the house is precarious, “destroy[ing] any sense of security or well-­being” (Danielewski 28). Interestingly, while one would expect that which obliterates one’s feelings of comfort and safety to be “sinister” or at the very least “threatening,” Zampanò maintains that the house is neither, implying that its dynamic space may amount to a productive disruption, to the subversion of a sense of stability or certainty that constitutes a profound threat in itself. As Aleksandra Bida contends, “The perhaps obvious yet often overlooked point that House of Leaves continually makes is that home is never simply good or bad, safe and comfortable or dangerous and traumatic, but that it is always (potentially) all of these things” (45). The postmodern, pharmakonic logic that Bida identifies here operates not only in the novel’s depiction of home or, more narrowly, of the Navidson house, but throughout the entire text. In it, Danielewski rigorously undermines absolutism in its many forms through the use of such Derridean double binds. The stubborn ambiguity that these double binds engender is made even more apparent through Truant’s “Introduction,” in which he conveys the intense, near-­ paralyzing fear of spatial instability – of “open” space that fluctuates, changes, moves – that accompanies his work on Zampanò’s manuscript. Truant’s terror is born from a growing awareness of the fluid nature of that which he previously considered to be static and stable. “Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace,” Truant writes, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. . . . You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting . . . [Y]ou’ll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you’ve walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper. (Danielewski xxiii)

Truant suggests that the awareness of this volatile space undoes conventional assumptions, even calling into question the seemingly stable extensivity of objects in the world, while the shadowy, indefinite, and undecidable, by contrast, seem to gain a previously overlooked depth and force. He asserts that to acknowledge and understand such space and its ontological and existential implications is to have one’s meticulously constructed facades systematically torn asunder. In this sense, Truant’s fear derives less from the shifting walls themselves, and more from the implications of a space that subverts not only the stability of extensivity, but of self, being, knowledge, and truth as well. It is then not an evil presence, a malevolent monster, or a mythical creature that constitutes the house’s primary menace, but

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rather its radical unknowability and undecidability. Conceived in this way, mutable space undermines static notions of truth, revealing in its purportedly stable foundations fissures from which creativity and newness may emerge. Assumptions long accepted as truths can then be rethought, opening the possibility for new concepts, approaches, and modes of being to develop. The danger of creating artificial boundaries lies in their potential for the systematic invention, imposition, and manipulation – whether through subtlety or brutality – of a definite identity, subjectivity, morality, and truth, built upon foundations that are indefinite. The imposition of stability where there is and can be none not only creates seemingly absolute justifications for absolute actions, but also potentially limits the advent of the unforeseen. Zampanò suggests that the Navidson house violates not only an “incontrovertible fact” of physics (Danielewski 32) – that “the exterior measurement must equal the internal measurement” (Danielewski 32) – but enduring conceptions of divinity as well. He draws upon scholars who maintain that the house calls into question an understanding of the universe founded upon an idea of God as transcendent and secure – as the “equal sign” (Danielewski 32) that makes the universe reasonable and rational. It offers instead a view of the divine as that which subverts the presumed stability of traditional divinities. Will most directly articulates what he considers to be the divine nature of the house in a letter that he pens to Karen while intoxicated: Do you believe in God? I don’t think I ever asked you that one. Well I do now. But my God isn’t your Catholic varietal or your Judaic or Mormon or Baptist or Seventh Day Adventist or whatever/whoever. No burning bush, no angels, no cross. God’s a house. Which is not to say that our house is God’s house or even a house of God. What I mean to say is that our house is God. (Danielewski 390)

Will attempts to articulate his perspective of the house on Ash Tree Lane, describing it unequivocally as God. However, while he specifically declares his house to be the divine, he nevertheless insists that it is not an orthodox deity, but something far more unconventional. William G. Little emphasizes Will’s reluctance to reduce the divine to traditional conceptions and man’s articulations of them. He characterizes the novel, and particularly its extensive references to “experts” and their typically postmodern implications that the house cannot be restricted to a sign that refers to a “stable signified,” as a critique of what Mark C. Taylor terms the “ontotheological network” (Little 181), the attempt to “sort through modernity’s increasingly complex network of shifting signs in order to locate an abiding Truth” (Little 181–182). Drawing on the novel’s epigram – “This is not for you” (Danielewski ix) – he suggests that House of Leaves actively resists such truth

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making, offering an understanding of divinity that subverts the notion of God as absolute truth. Little asserts, “While the subject seeks to make itself the independent, divine centre of all things through seizure and subjugation of everything other than itself, God, as transcendental signified, is a difference that cannot be reduced to the same” (182). He argues that God, as wholly other, is not for you, in that the divine cannot be reduced to a single, stable meaning that can be “had” or can be “for” anyone. Instead, he proposes that the novel depicts divinity as dynamic and indefinable through the paradoxical space of the Navidson house. This dynamic divine demands of those who seek to inhabit it an equally dynamic ontology, what Gilles Deleuze might term “univocal being.” For Deleuze, univocity of being means that all that is shares the same is-­ness, but that which is differs in its intensity of relation to being, not in its kind or type of being. “Being,” he maintains, “is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself ” (Deleuze 36). Matthew S. Linck contends that, for Deleuze, difference, in its “development and temporality” (516), is “not a concept,” but rather “the name for being” (516). It is “substance,” in the sense that that which differs from itself “in an unmediated way” (Linck 516) is in and as that very differing. It cannot be reduced to a distinction between “things” or a “characteristic” of them (Linck 516), but is instead discretely ontological and metaphysical. In other words, beings are not distinguishable by static identities or imposed hierarchies but only by the degree – the power and intensity – to which they are becoming other.2 This unique ontology is expressed most effectively in the novel through the contrasting characterizations of Will and Tom, brothers who, while twins, are entirely distinct in their ontological modes. According to Zampanò, they shared the same “fairly bleak” childhood (Danielewski 22), one shaped by an alcoholic, violent, and largely absent father and an entirely absent mother. “By the time [the twins] were teenagers,” Zampanò writes, “they were already accustomed to a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and the lack of any emotional stability” (Danielewski 22). “Unfortunately” he adds, “‘accustomed to’ here is really synonymous with ‘damaged by’” (Danielewski 22). This transience and the resulting search for stability led Will to photography, which Zampanò describes as his attempt to give “permanence to moments that were often so fleeting” (Danielewski 22), and Tom to alcohol and drugs in order 2 For a more extensive exploration of Deleuze’s notion of ontological difference in House of Leaves, see Ridvan Askin’s “‘Folding, Unfolding, Refolding’: Mark Z. Danielew­ ski’s Differential Novel House of Leaves” in Revolutionary Leaves: The Fiction of Mark Z. Danielewski (2012).

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to mute his pain. By most measures, the two brothers could hardly be more different: Tom is “an affable, overweight giant of a man who has an innate ability to amuse” (Danielewski 31), who smokes marijuana, and who is “content if there happens to be a game on and a soft place from which to watch it” (Danielewski 32); Will, by contrast, “works out every day, devours volumes of esoteric criticism, and constantly attaches the world around him to one thing: photography” (Da­ nielewski 32). Estranged from his brother for almost a decade, due to what Karen characterizes as “a lot of resentment over the years” (Danielewski 31), resentment which she attributes to Will’s success and Tom’s lack of it, Will nevertheless turns first to Tom for help when he cannot square the internal and external measurements of the house on Ash Tree Lane. Beyond simply their physical, financial, and even temperamental differences, Will and Tom contrast on a much more fundamental level, one that demonstrates the ontology necessary to inhabit the Navidson house, to inhabit the dynamic divine. In this regard, Zampanò draws an interesting and significant distinction between the two brothers when he asserts that “Tom just wants to be, [Will] must become” (Danielewski 32). On the one hand, Tom is as his apparent contentment and comfort, remaining static in a supposedly stable self that he accepts and even celebrates as immutable – what Zampanò terms his “getting by” (Danielewski 32). On the other hand, Will is as constant flux, marked by rigorous attempts at physical and intellectual transformation in an ongoing effort to be other. Tom exists in a conventionally metaphysical mode, while Will is as his own continual metamorphosis. Therefore, Tom, in his static mode of being, struggles against the movements of the house and is eventually destroyed by them, while Will moves with them, exploring the house to a greater extent than anyone else and ultimately emerging damaged and scarred but continuously transforming. For example, when Will finally exits the depths of the house after having been lost for days during a rescue attempt in the course of “Exploration #4,” Tom quickly bolts the four locks on the door to the labyrinth and creates a makeshift barricade of household furniture as additional protection against its creeping darkness. Tom’s barricade, however, proves entirely ineffective as it soon becomes clear that the paradoxical space of the house is not and cannot be limited to the labyrinth within it. Suddenly, the house begins to collapse on itself, sucking everything and everyone into its rapidly growing shadows. Zampanò describes the scene as follows: The whole place keeps shuddering and shaking, walls cracking only to melt back together again, floors fragmenting and buckling, the ceiling suddenly rent by invisible claws, causing moldings to splinter, water pipes to rupture, electrical wires to spit and short out. Worse, the black ash of below, spreads like printer’s ink over everything, transforming each corner, closet, and corridor into the awful dark. (Danielewski 345)

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While Will narrowly rescues both Karen and Billy from the house’s increasingly violent transformations, Tom finds Daisy, Will and Karen’s daughter, “frozen in the shadows” (Danielewski 345) and succeeds in passing her to the safety of her father’s arms through a shattered kitchen window. Tragically, Tom fails to save himself, in what amounts to a vivid example of his inability or refusal to move with but rather only against the house, as each step he takes toward safety drags him two steps backwards, eventually pulling him into the house’s inky blackness. Tom resists the volatile space of the house and he is disrupted, destabilized, and, in the end, destroyed by it, while Will echoes this space and is thus able, though not without difficulty, to navigate it in order to save his partner, his friend, his daughter, and himself. The clear distinction here between the Navidson brothers provides an example of the inherent and genuine danger of dynamic divinity to the presumably static and certain, threatening purportedly stable modes of being, as well as, I argue, the moral and religious paradigms of which they are composed. Despite his brother’s death in/by the house, Will is compelled to return to it months later because, as he explains to Karen, “going after something like this is who I am” (Danielewski 389). Therefore, in “Exploration #5,” Will sets off on his own to exhaustively explore the labyrinthine house, armed with cameras, film, survival supplies, and a mountain bike with a headlight, odometer, and trailer (Danielewski 424). As he rides his bike through the endless darkness of the house, he passes through corridors that are constantly changing shape, shrinking and expanding around him. Finally reaching an edge beyond which “There was just this terrible emptiness reaching up for [him]” (Danielewski 436), Will begins the next stage in his journey, one that results in his complete loss of time, distance, and even physical orientation. After negotiating an inverted and shifting maze of staircases and emerging on an elevated tier, the walls of the house fall away entirely, and eventually even the small slab of floor upon which he lays inexplicably disappears. Will describes his experience of the dynamic space that he is now in and becoming of as follows: “‘I’m no longer sitting on anything. The slab, whatever it was, is gone. I’m floating or falling or I don’t know what’” (Danielewski 468). He is no longer conscious of whether he is in one place or in motion; the two have become imperceptible. He continues, “‘I have no sense of anything other than myself ’” (Danielewski 471). At this point there is no clear distinction between the house and Will himself, as the latter succeeds in echoing and thus inhabiting the former. Thoroughly exhausted and with seemingly no further place to go, apparently fixed in his position within the labyrinth, Will shoots his final frames of film, which suggest that he is moving or, perhaps more accurately, that he is as movement, as change, as ontological difference.

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Yet, House of Leaves does more than offer parallel notions of divinity and ontology; it also challenges assumptions regarding the atheism often thought to pervade postmodern literature. Little furthers this argument when he contends that the novel “wonderfully problemati[zes]” the assertion that postmodernism is a “dead phenomenon destined to rest in peace” (169), resuscitating it through a “complex consideration of the ethico-­religious problem of responsibility” (170). He continues, “the novel may be read as a religiously-­minded meditation on the crucial, yet impossible, task of responding to an other that, marked by death, resists proper understanding, housing, burial” (Little 170). According to Little, House of Leaves demonstrates the vitality of postmodern literature precisely through its interest and investment in performing the inescapability yet impossibility of responding to otherness, to that which necessarily exceeds our ability to comprehend, contain, and control. For both Little and Danielewski, postmodern literature’s relationship to the ethical is a vital one, particularly at a time when, as Little describes, “the issue of how to respond to the death of God is a crucial matter in that it is intimately linked to a broader concern about responsibility” (185). He argues that this concern is an especially urgent one given “the increasingly far-­ reaching influence of fundamentalist ideologues whose claims of responsibility are underwritten by an assumption that God is on their side” (Little 185). Little insists that postmodern literature’s interest, whether explicit or implicit, in the ethical and its connection to new conceptualizations of divinity, like the one offered in the novel, suggests that it is neither “insular” nor “nihilistic” (185), as it is often critiqued for being, but rather aware of and engaged with heterogeneous ideas of meaning and a dynamic conceptions of truth. This approach to ethics, as distinct from a fundamentalist morality, is vital in an era “after God,” an era no longer considered to be buttressed by the inviolable authority of sacred truth. In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, Danielewski himself fosters this same sentiment, declaring that, in House of Leaves, there “is no sacred text” (121). He elaborates: That notion of authenticity or originality is constantly refuted. The novel doesn’t allow the reader to ever say, ‘Oh, I see: this is the authentic, original text, exactly how it looked, what it always had to say.’ . . . The question is, why? Well, there are many reasons, but the most important one is that everything we encounter involves an act of interpretation on our part. And this doesn’t just apply to what we encounter in books, but to what we respond to in life. . . . In House of Leaves you’re always encountering texts where some kind of intrusion’s taking place. The reason? No one – repeat no one – is ever presented with the sacred truth, in books or in life. (McCaffery 121)

Danielewski maintains that the novel continually subverts its own authenticity and originality, undermining what he terms the “sacred” nature of his or any text

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and self-­consciously resisting any single or stable meaning that may be assigned to it. He contends that without such truth, “we must be brace and accept how often we make decisions without knowing everything. Of course, this poses a difficult question: can we retain that state of conscious unknowing and still act, or must we, in order to act, necessarily pretend to know?” (McCaffery 121). He argues that the inability to ascertain absolute truths and the complex issues that it raises are not merely aesthetic or theoretical concerns, but ethical ones, as they involve the ability or inability to act both politically and practically. If there is no transcendental truth, or if it is at best inaccessible, upon what basis can one make decisions and act? Must one, as Danielewski wonders, “necessarily pretend to know” in order to act, or is it possible to act in the continual awareness of such unknowability? This distinction between decision and indecision, action and inaction, knowledge and faith, is at the core of the relevance of the novel’s conception of divinity to contemporary concerns. Such an understanding of divinity paradoxically reveals the instability of what is often taken for steadfast meaning and abiding truth, while simultaneously constituting the textual and ontological non-­space necessary for an endless matrix of meanings and modes of being, each with the potential to enact and perpetuate newness and creativity. While some insist that this subversion of stable truth is detrimental, as it calls into question objective meaning, authoritative interpretation, and absolute knowledge, House of Leaves suggests that this subversion has the potential to be productive. Conceived in this way, the dynamic divine undermines the certainty that essentialism and fundamentalism require, and, in doing so, is particularly relevant to issues shaping the world today. The novel illustrates that the prevailing attitudes fueling many of our most urgent issues are built upon the assumption that a particular perspective is inherently or objectively true, including: stable ethnic binaries and hierarchies that produce discrimination, hatred, or genocide; widespread poverty, hunger, and disease whose slow address is exacerbated by a sense of national superiority; and religious terrorism empowered by universal truths passed down from an unerring and unquestionable God. These attitudes free us from the responsibility attendant with ethics, to making decisions without the luxury of basing them upon what we consider to be unquestionable knowledge or absolute truth. That is not to say that the novel offers a divine that is its own absolute or universal truth with the power to ensure peace, prosperity, and equality. Instead, it offers a divine that is as a critique of such an idea, embodying an ethos that holds that if truth is unstable, it cannot be infallible. If meaning is endlessly interpretable, it cannot be inerrant. If being is an endless becoming-­other, then it is irreducible to definition. If subjectivity is fluid, then it cannot be defined. And,

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if the divine is destabilized and destabilizing, then it cannot be absolute. In other words, the divine expressed in the novel is not the author or arbiter of morality, but rather that which ensures the instability and uncertainty of ethics. It is not a superhuman being or an embodied deity to be worshipped, not that which demands faith, but that which makes genuine faith possible. Disentangled from the notion of transcendental truth and its associated dangers, such an approach to the divine enables an endless array of opportunities for new modes of thinking, writing, acting, and being.

Works Cited Bida, Aleksandra. “Hauntingly Sweet: Home as Labyrinth and Hospitality in House of Leaves.” Revolutionary Leaves: The Fiction of Mark Z. Danielewski, edited by. Sascha Pöhlmann, Cambridge Scholars, 2012, pp. 43–61. Brick, Martin. “Reading the Book of Someone’s Reading: Spatial Allegories of the Reading Experience in Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Gascoigne’s Master F.J.” The McNeese Review, vol. 47, 2009, pp. 1–17. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. Pantheon, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton, Columbia U P, 1994. Linck, Matthew S. “Deleuze’s Difference.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies vol. 16, no. 4, 2008, pp. 509–32. Little, William G. “Nothing to Write Home About: Impossible Reception in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism, edited by Neil Brooks and Josh Toth, Rodopi, 2007, pp. 169–200. McCaffery, Larry and Sinda Gregory, “Haunted House: An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski.” Critique, vol. 44, no. 2, 2003, pp. 99–135. Shusterman, Ronald. “Leafing Through a Universe: Architectural Bodies and Fictional Worlds.” Architecture and Philosophy: New Perspectives on the Work of Arakawa & Madeline Gins, edited by. Jean-­Jacques Lecercle and Francoise Kral, Rodopi, 2010, pp. 169–87.

Joanna Stolarek

Self-­Expression and Sexual Repression in Joyce Carol Oates’s “The White Cat” and Beasts Abstract: The aim of this article is to examine the forms of self-­expression and sexual repression in Joyce Carol Oates’s “The White Cat” (1995) and Beasts (2002). The article analyses independent female characters, shows how Oates draws on Edgar Allan Poe and D. H. Lawrence and simultaneously paves the way for her own fiction. Keywords: Joyce Carol Oates, self-­expression, repression, femininity, masculinity

Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most prolific and versatile contemporary writers in the United States, is gifted with the ability to preserve her sublime integrity and individuality in her art. The author of numerous novels, short fiction, drama, critical essays, theatrical plays, poetry, several books of non-­fiction and literary criticism, Oates frequently underlines that writing, especially the writing of novels, is a process of assigning value to human experience in the social world. With respect to the responsibility and professional ethics of the artist, Oates remarks: “A writer’s job, ideally, is to act as the conscience of his race. People frequently misunderstand serious art because it is often violent and unattractive. I wish the world were a prettier place but I wouldn’t be honest as a writer if I ignored the actual conditions around me” (Oates Conversations xiii). The novelist is an artist who dramatizes the nightmarish conditions of the present, with its angst, paranoia, dislocation and escalating conflict. Her fiction often focuses on the moment when a combined psychological and cultural malaise erupts into violence; one may notice several recurrent “types” in her works that present certain distinctive aspects of the turbulent, unsettling American experience (Johnson, Understanding 10). According to the American writer, an artist ought to contemplate her/his own experiences and see how they illuminate the experiences of others. In accordance with this rule, Oates endeavors to explore the living conditions of individuals and scrutinizes the roots and causes of their problems. In her fiction, the author often praises the complexity of her characters and expresses her fascination or even obsession with the mysteries of human relationships. In one of her interviews, Oates remarks: In the novels I have written, I have tried to give a shape to certain obsessions of midcentury Americans – a confusion of love and money, of the categories of public and private experience, of a demonic urge I sense all around me, an urge to violence as the answer

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Joanna Stolarek to all problems, an urge to self-­annihilation, suicide, the ultimate experience and the ultimate surrender. The use of language is all we have to pit(y) against death and silence. (qtd. in Johnson, Invisible 181)

Brutality and sadistic violence which feature in many of Joyce Carol Oates’s works are often inextricably linked to sexual tension, tempestuous male-­female relations, specifically sexual oppression and emotional abuse of women. Employing a dense, elliptical prose style, Oates depicts such cruel and macabre actions as rape, incest, murder, abuse, and suicide to delineate the forces of evil which individuals must contend with. Despite the fact that the writer frequently depicts female characters, especially their domestic problems and traumas, she is regarded as a genderless author since she is known for skillfully writing in both female and male voices, and even more famous for leveling her steady eye at what some may regard as a “masculine” subject – namely, violence. According to the critics such as Mudrick and Oberbeck, “[t]ypical activities in Oates’s novels are arson, rape, riot, mental breakdown, murder (plain and fancy, with excursions into patricide, matricide, uxoricide, mass filicide), and suicide” (Mudrick 142), and to read Oates “is to cross an emotional minefield, to be stunned to the soul by multiple explosions” (Oberbeck 142). In response to the critics’ accusations of excessive depictions of violence and sadism in Oates’s works, the author asserts that her writing is not explicitly violent but it deals with the phenomenon of violence and its aftermath (Oates, The Profane 3). Additionally, she underlines that what appears as disorder, instability or even madness to the critics is in fact the creative activity itself which aspires to blossom in hostile climates, free itself from its confining spaces, celebrate the individual and the idiosyncratic, even at the cost of criticism (Oates, The Profane 3–4). More importantly, the writer underlines that her depicting life brutality and sadism is her reaction as a female writer to the belief that aggression and rebellious urges are ascribed to the male world, whereas “[t]he territory of the female artist should be the subjective, the domestic,” and she herself “is allowed to be ‘charming,’ ‘amusing,’ ‘delightful’” (Oates, “Why Is Your Writing so Violent?”). In this regard, Oates offers a realistic alternative to a traditional dichotomy between “serious” male social-­philosophical texts and female domestic narratives. In Oates’s fiction, violence and brutality lead to repression and problems with self-­expression, particularly in the case of women. In her late 20th-­century and especially 21st-­century works, the American writer focuses on the power of female sensibility, on women challenging the patriarchal model of the society, in particular men’s physical and spiritual domination in various areas of life. Among the works which portray strong, independent, frequently aggressive and preda-

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tory heroines that question the legitimacy or normalcy of the patriarchal world, especially in professional and domestic spheres, it is worth referring to those texts which reflect Oates’s challenging of certain artistic and cultural canons defined by classical male authors. As Showalter underlines, while Oates’s novels, novellas and short stories satirically explore the more grandiose and ferocious manifestations of patriarchal power, they additionally imply, through their interplay of “masculine” and “feminine” narrative conventions, how the plots and fantasies of the novel and short story genre have ill-­treated women (141). The aim of this article is to scrutinize two works by Joyce Carol Oates, “The White Cat” from Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1995) and Beasts (2002), the texts which constitute the author’s response to the masculinist writings of Edgar Allan Poe and D. H. Lawrence. Although both writers largely influenced Oates’s fiction, she challenges the American short story writer and the English novelist and poet by conveying a feminist message. In “The White Cat” Oates rewrites Poe’s “The Black Cat” from a feminist perspective. Her treatment of the female is not only a reversal of the Romantic writer’s tale but also a departure from her portrayal of women as victims in her own work. Hence, Oates’s two texts are crucial illustrations of contemporary female rewritings of male literary models and texts of the past. In Beasts, the author ironically depicts the antagonist’s obsession with D. H. Lawrence, his idealization of the English novelist, who was a misogynist with a twisted morality that wrote explicitly for the sake of it. The main theme of the book is a warning against obsessive, deluded relationships. “The White Cat” and Beasts exemplify a feminist reaction to the idea of “hegemonic masculinity,” male domination and sadism saturating the works of Edgar Allan Poe and D. H. Lawrence. “The White Cat” is a postmodern and parodic rewriting of Poe’s classic “The Black Cat” (1843), showing that even though Joyce Carol Oates preserves the domestic atmosphere of Poe’s tale and its central motif – the uncanny reappearance of the cat – she reverses the characteristics of the original story and thereby creates an abrupt and parodic denouement that undermines “the effect” intended by Poe’s tale. Poe’s story depicts a first-­person narrator-­protagonist who prepares a written confession of his crimes on the eve of his execution in the gallows. The fearful turns into the horrible when Pluto, the first cat, is brutally abused (its eye is sadistically extracted by the narrator) and sacrificed (it is hanged) prior to his wife’s similar suffering a motiveless, violent death (her spouse buries an ax in her brain in a paroxysm of rage). In the light of its sociohistorical context, “The Black Cat” can be read as a portrayal of a relationship between man as a master to his wife and servants as his property, his right to absolute power over family, slaves

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and pets. Thus, “The Black Cat” exemplifies the domestic tyranny of a man, his subjugation of family members and his confusion of persons and pets (Nadal). Whereas “The Black Cat” is filled with horror and excess, Oates’s story turns out to be “genteel,” subtly comical and “ladylike,” devoid of superfluous violence and sadism. Oates skillfully plays with the American Romantic writer, one of her literary masters, whom, as she confesses, she worshipped and was greatly influenced by. Oates frequently stated that while writing these two texts she remained under the influence of her spiritual, intellectual, visionary fathers, whose narratives she nevertheless deconstructed and re-­wrote (Nadal). According to Oates, the artist is a collaborator and co-­conspirator, imaginatively responding to literary models and human history, finally submitting all work for revision. She adds that ultimately the oeuvre turns on its creator, hence the artist creates and is created by his/her art (Bender 49). Joyce Carol Oates begins her tale by copying the title of Edgar Allan Poe’s story but in her text black turns into white. In contrast to the black male cat Pluto, referring to the Roman god of the dead and the ruler of the underworld and epitomizing the victim of the protagonist’s rage while simultaneously contributing to his owner’s doom, Oates’s text features a white female cat Miranda (in Latin signifying “to be admired”), alluding to the beautiful, pure heroine of the same name in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Nadal). Nevertheless, by introducing the color white, which traditionally has symbolized purity and innocence, also with reference to the name of the cat, the author does not provide a mere contrast to Poe’s black, associated with fear and power of darkness, but rather deconstructs color symbolism altogether and creates a parodic reversal of his text. In fact, the cat Miranda, beautiful and capricious, intelligent and devious, hardly embodies the good qualities attributable to whiteness; rather, it evokes Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: in “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishmael, despite recognizing the positive aspects of this color, accentuates its negative attributes, which evoke terror, void, annihilation and indefiniteness (Nadal). As for the cat’s name, Miranda, it reinforces the intertextual, parodic and ambiguous character of Oates’s tale. When the male protagonist is asked about the cat’s gender, “[t]he question lodged deep in him as if it were a riddle: Is it a male or a female? ‘Female, of course,’ Mr. Muir said pleasantly. ‘Its name after all is Miranda’” (Oates, “The White Cat” 75). Providing this indifferent, illogical answer, the writer implies the protagonist’s confusion of cause and effect, which in turn refers to Poe’s narrator-­protagonist’s asking for “some intellect more calm, more logical; and far less excitable” than his own to recognize in his story “nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects” (Poe 1388–1389).

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When set beside the gloominess and macabre of Poe’s text depicting Pluto’s savage, senseless murder committed by the lunatic yet clever murderer, Oates’s tale illustrates the main character’s murderous tendencies, his desperate attempts to kill Miranda, yet simultaneously his lack of agency and inability to kill the cat and, later, his wife. Oates dexterously reverses the plot of Poe’s story. In her work, Miranda, despite Muir’s recurrent, frequently grotesque efforts to kill her, turns into his victimizer. Interestingly enough, in comparison with the more frightful weapons used by Poe, such as a pen-­knife, a rope, or an axe, Muir singles out more sophisticated tools, like mice poison and subsequently his elegant English-­built car. Nevertheless, both of them prove fruitless against the seemingly preternatural creature. Finally, even the protagonist’s endeavor to strangle the cat with his own hands ends up in a failure, which accentuates the weak personality of this character, his powerlessness, lack of control over others, particularly when set beside Poe’s more impressive and dynamic fictional figure. Muir’s inefficiency and unreliability are especially recognizable through the narration. “The White Cat” features an external, third-­person narrator, who focalizes events from the male character’s perspective. This limited viewpoint, which recalls the point of view used by Henry James, one of the author’s masters, preserves the subjectivity of the situation and highlights the unreliability of the protagonist’s observations. It concomitantly diminishes the power of his personality: deprived of the agency of voice, and with a tendency to observation rather than action, Muir becomes steadily reduced to a passive role. The narrator’s lack of poise and power is contrasted with the figure of his wife, Alissa. It is through the character of Muir’s wife that Oates reverses Poe’s original plot. When set beside Poe’s text, in which the narrator’s wife is reduced to an unnamed, voiceless person, a shadow of her husband and his passive victim, in “The White Cat” she becomes the central and most influential character. Furthermore, Oates underlines the connection between Muir’s wife and the cat since both of them, like in Poe’s story, fall prey to the narrator’s rage, but, unlike in “The Black Cat,” they outsmart their persecutor and escape the tragic fate. Thus, in this late 20th-­century tale the author clearly depicts the triumph of the female, both in the figure of the spouse and the cat, who turn out to be superior to the male character, and withstand his ridiculous, futile attempts to eliminate them, whereas the female in Poe’s text can take revenge only after death and through the male cat, Pluto. In contrast to “The Black Cat,” in Oates’s story the narrator becomes blind and paralyzed, and therefore utterly powerless, after a car accident which he provoked in order to kill his spouse and himself. Contrary to his expectations, his wife survived and started thriving after her husband had undergone a number

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of operations and became finally confined to a wheelchair. In this respect, Joyce Carol Oates denies the statements of some reviewers, particularly feminist critics, who claim that her late 20th-­century fiction mostly shows the objectification and abuse of women, and lacks strong female role models. In “The White Cat” it is the man who suffers the haunting and becomes powerless, both physically and mentally. Nonetheless, the superior position of the female in Oates’s story goes beyond mere contrast with the marginal role of the woman in “The Black Cat” when one recalls the transgressive behavior of Muir’s wife: ironically, her lack of emotions and implied adultery become rewarded rather than punished. In this regard, as Nadal remarks, “The White Cat” bears resemblance to Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1966), in which the wealthy female protagonist, Séverine, combines her monotonous life as a wife of a well-­known, respected doctor with her peculiar entertainment as a prostitute in a Paris brothel. Playing with the real and the unreal, the film’s dénouement displays Séverine’s devoted spouse with dark glasses on, paralyzed and seated in a wheelchair as a result of being shot by one of his wife’s unfortunate jealous lovers (Nadal). While “The White Cat” depicts complex, tense relations between men and women, accentuating the superiority of the female, including her final triumph over her husband, Beasts is a thriller that illustrates sadomasochistic relations between Andre Harrow, a charismatic professor of English literature, his wife Dorcas and his student Gillian, the narrator of the story. This novella, filled with quotations from D. H. Lawrence’s writings, is another response of Joyce Carol Oates to the “hegemonic masculinity” and male-­centered viewpoint saturating the literary output of the English novelist. Oates describes a perilous sexual game between Harrow and his student, which is based on the poisonous mixture of fascination and destruction, domination and submission. In contrast to “The White Cat,” in which the events are narrated by the naive male character, this text by Oates is in the hands of a young, inexperienced, unreliable female student who becomes unhealthily obsessed with her sophisticated, extravagant, diabolical poetry-­writing-­ class teacher. Professor Harrow has an endless fascination with Blake, Shelley, Whitman, Yeats and Lawrence, the last of whom he particularly worships, stating that the writer “teaches us that love – sensual, sexual, physical love – is the reason we exist. He detested ‘dutiful’ love – for parents, family, country, God. He was in fact a deeply religious man but he celebrated, not a dead God, but a living Eros. He tells us ‘Love should be intense, individual,/ Not boundless” (Oates, Beasts 30–31). Andre’s fascination with the British novelist and poet manifests itself in the professor’s endless allusions to D. H. Lawrence’s critical texts, philosophy of art and life, in particular his underlining the complex of emotions and the unflag-

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ging sexual energy that drives the world, while referring also to the writer’s most acclaimed works, especially to his collection of poems Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923). In one of the courses Gillian becomes mesmerized by Professor Harrow’s passionate reading of the poem “Peach”: Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy? Why hanging with such inordinate weight? Why so indented? Why the groove? Why the lovely, bivalve roundnesses? Why the ripple down the sphere? Why the suggestion of incision? Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball? It would have been if man had made it. Though I’ve eaten it now. (Lawrence, Birds 8)

As Oates writes, Gillian, unaccustomed to reading bold, erotic literature, becomes hypnotized by “the poem’s sensual language,” which is like “an incantation” (Oates, Beasts 28) to her. An inexperienced, apparently innocent young woman is shocked and intimidated by the genuine theme of the poem, which “wasn’t a peach, a peach devoured by the poet, a peach he finds delicious, juice running down his fingers” but “the true subject of the poem was the female body. The female genitals. The vagina. That secreted femaleness at the core of a woman’s being, hidden from the world. Hidden, because it is fearful of being injured. Hidden because it is fearful… of being mocked. Derided as ugly” (Oates, Beasts 29). “The Peach” is one of the poems which introduces the young student into captivating sensual literature as well as into the world of sadomasochistic sexual experiences. Nonetheless, alongside this poem cited in the novella one can allude to other poems from D. H. Lawrence’s collection, most notably to the Tortoise poem (“Tortoise Shout”), in which the poet praises sexual love and passion in human and animal world, his central statement in Birds, Beasts and Flowers: Worse than the cry of the new-­born, A scream, A yell, A shout, A paean, A death-­agony, ........... All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn ...................................... Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the Deeps, calling, calling for the complement,

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According to Hobsbaum, in a tremendous series of similes – like the scream of a frog, the cry of wild geese, the scream of a rabbit, the blorting of a heifer in heat, the howl of cats, the sound of a woman in labor or the bleat of a lamb – Lawrence links a bird, a beast and a human being in a concatenation of relationships turning upon the impulse of sex, which is common to us all. However, Lawrence’s brilliant amalgam of natural description, vivacious imagery, comic characterization and apprehension of the life force driving the world (Hobsbaum 134) provide not only an artistic inspiration for Andre Harrow but above all the impetus for the professor’s and his spouse’s erotic experimentation with students. The eponymous “beasts,” Professor Harrow, his extravagant artistic wife Dorcas as well as all the young women participating in wild sexual orgies fall prey to their perverse sense of physical and emotional fulfilment, glowing with illusory temporary happiness. Herself an admirer of Lawrence, Oates shows, however, how the true artistic assumptions of the British writer, his symbolic representation of erotic love, and search for self in sexual relationships become misinterpreted and corrupted by the main male character of Beasts. In this regard, the American writer follows the remarks of D. H. Lawrence’s critics, like Fiona Becket, who claims that readers, reviewers, as well as publishers and editors have wrongly assumed that the principal subject of the British author’s works is sex, whereas his real subjects – language and the birth of the self, whereby sex is a resource and not an end – have been overlooked by the reading public (83). Needless to say, by presenting Andre Harrow’s morbid fascination with D. H. Lawrence and his students’ fatal attraction to their professor, Oates shows that an unhealthy obsession with somebody’s life and art of philosophy can lead to self-­destruction, agony or painful redemption. Like in the majority of her works, in Beasts the American writer focuses on female experience, depicting the situation of Gillian, the main character and the narrator of the story. Obsessed with Andre, his teaching and philosophy, and later with his wife, a talented extravagant sculptor, the young woman soon falls prey to the couple’s sexual-­artistic experimentation, a sadomasochistic game which is both thrilling and destruc-

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tive. Interestingly enough, even though Gillian becomes a victim to Mr. and Mrs. Harrow’s sadomasochistic drives, Joyce Carol Oates implies that the narrator is a naïve yet not an innocent prey, a sacrifice or a martyr of male sadism, like in the writer’s earlier texts, but a woman who is fatally obsessed with her diabolical professor and his amoral conduct. However, she is conscious of the consequences of her imprudent behavior and actions. This awareness ultimately saves her from the hands of her “oppressors,” who themselves turn into victims. Hence, the book is an unsettling exploration of the sexual games in which people can and do get badly hurt. It is a warning against obsessive, deluded relationships which lead to repression and self-­destruction irrespective of gender and class. Such a didactic, highly moralistic ending of the novella, in which sexually diabolic characters burn in a fire and are thus cleansed of sins, stands in contrast to the grotesque, satirical ending of “The White Cat,” where the female protagonist escapes death and enjoys full autonomy whereas her husband becomes wheelchair-­bound but is still alive despite causing a serious car accident. Taking into account male-­female relations, in Beasts the author shows the characters’ inability to transcend the singleness of self through love. In fact, Gillian’s participation in a wild sexual orgy in Professor Harrow’s house illustrates the girl’s desperate attempt to find happiness in love, which is impossible to attain since, as the author implies, in male-­female relations there is always an imaginary wall, and very close contact between the lovers must inevitably lead to death. In this respect, Oates shares with D. H. Lawrence the view that “[i]n sensual love, it is the two-­blood systems, the man’s and the woman’s, which sweep up into pure contact and almost fuse. Almost mingle. Never quite. There is always the finest imagin­ able wall between the two blood-­waves through which pass unknown vibrations, forces, but through which blood itself must never break, or it means bleeding” (Lawrence, Studies 75, emphasis in the original). In this sense, the British novelist and poet voices criticism of Poe’s perverse love stories where the protagonist madly insists upon a close union with his loved one. As Friedman observes, Oates, similarly to D. H. Lawrence, recognizes deathly facets of romantic love which aim at oneness (83). The failure of fusion in this story constitutes another breakdown of the romantic promise, indicating human limitation, including the limitations of love. Nevertheless, behind all of Oates’s protagonists’ dramas in which romantic goals are thwarted is an awareness that in this defeat, which is imposed by human limitation, lies the characters’ salvation and redemption (Friedman 83). As Lawrence suggests, the achievement of these goals would lead to death. In Beasts, Gillian, Andre Harrow and Dorcas are unable to sustain emotional and physical fulfilment. The student’s desperate endeavor to maintain the relationship with

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her professor falls through and ultimately leads to the Harrows’ demise. In this novella, Oates follows Lawrence’s belief in the impossibility of lovers’ total fusion and simultaneously opposes Poe’s notion of perverse, deviant love. The author’s criticism of the American Romantic writer’s theory is even more emphasized in “The White Cat,” a parodic reversal of tempestuous male-­female relations present in Poe’s tales. By and large, “The White Cat” and Beasts illustrate Joyce Carol Oates’s responses to the masculinist writings of Edgar Allan Poe and D. H. Lawrence as well as her deconstructing classical and modernist male literary conventions. Despite the fact that the author used in her works the motifs, themes and symbols from the works of the American writer and the British novelist and poet, as well as referred to their views on human relations, art and creation, Oates made critical remarks on them while conveying a feminist message. Among numerous literary fathers that influenced and inspired the author, such as James, Joyce and Kafka, Poe and Lawrence indubitably remain her long-­lasting masters. Nevertheless, by rewriting, reexamining and invariably parodying their texts Oates challenges both American Romantic and British modernist tradition, claims her autonomy and struggles for originality. While retelling and reimagining narrative forms, themes and symbols from Poe’s and Lawrence’s works, Oates performs a balancing act and strives for some new synthesis, versatility and eclecticism. Besides, employing a dense, elliptical prose style, the American writer depicts violence, sexual obsession, emotional confinement, alienation and madness to delineate the forces of evil which individuals must contend with.

Works Cited Becket, Fiona. The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence. Routledge, 2002. Bender, Eileen T. “Autonomy and Influence: Joyce Carol Oates’s Marriages and Infidelities.” Modern Critical Works: Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 45–59. Friedman, Ellen G. Joyce Carol Oates. Frederick Ungar Publishing CO., 1980. Hobsbaum, Philip. A Reader’s Guide to D. H. Lawrence. Thames and Hudson, 1988. Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. Plume, 1999. —. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. University of South Carolina Press, 1987. Lawrence, D. H. Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Dog’s Tail Books, 1923. —. Studies in Classic American Literature. Doubleday, 1953.

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Milazzo, Lee. editor. Introduction. Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates. University Press of Mississippi, 1972, pp. i–­xv. Mudrick, Marvin. “Fiction and Truth.” The Hudson Review, vol. 25, Spring 1972, p. 142. Nadal, Marita. “Variations on the Grotesque: From Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ to Oates’s ‘The White Cat.’” Mississippi Quarterly of Southern Literature, vol. 57, no.  3, Summer 2004. Proquest, http://0literature.proquest.com.fama.us.es/ searchFulltext.do?id=R03544443&divLevel=0&area=abell&forward=critr ef_ft. Accessed 22 February 2016. Oates, Joyce Carol Beasts. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002. —. The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews. E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1983. —. “The White Cat.” Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. A Plume Book, 1995, pp. 72–96. —. “Why Is Your Writing so Violent?” The New York Times, 29 March 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/05/specials/oates-violent.html. Accessed 18 April 2016. Oberbeck, S. K. “A Masterful Explorer in the Minefields of Emotion.” Washington Post Book World, 17 Sept. 1971, p. 142. Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Works. Gramercy Books, 1985. Showalter, Elaine. “Joyce Carol Oates: A Portrait.” Modern Critical Works: Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 137–142.

Elli Kyrmanidou

A Space in-­between Genders: Rethinking the American Bildungsroman from an Intersex Perspective Abstract: This article examines the elusive boundaries between the two normative categories of the male and female Bildungsroman through the perspective of hybrid intersex gender identity in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and Kathleen Winter’s Annabel. Keywords: Middlesex, Annabel, Bildungsroman, gender, intersex

The Bildungsroman, or its American English synonym the “coming of age novel,” first appeared in the late 18th century when the term was used to describe the literary genre that focused on the intellectual, spiritual and social coming of age (Bildung) of the young protagonist. Although there are many definitions of this term in various literary glossaries and dictionaries, many of them often contradict one another. The German scholarly tendency used to claim that these novels were a product of the period between 1796 and the mid-­nineteenth century only, whereas modern and minority scholarship believe that it is a genre that is always under construction, continuously questioning and reinventing its core features. For the sake of this article, whose objective is not to investigate the keystone elements of the traditional Bildungsroman, I will adopt its first definition, which was introduced by the German philosopher and sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey, as a novel “that has as its main theme the formative years or spiritual education of one person” (188). These formative years are usually represented through an actual or metaphorical journey of the hero from young age to the first adult years, a journey during which he undergoes various personal and social challenges, falling out of innocence into the knowledge of the adult world. The final stage of this personal development, or “journey of wisdom,” as it is also called, is the maturity or epiphany of the hero. It is a stage when, after a phase of disillusionment, he deeply understands the rules of the world and when he has a conscious awareness of society’s compromises and conformities. A representative Bildungsroman and, according to many, the first example of the genre was Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, published in 1795–1796. Many scholars regard the Bildungsroman as an eighteenth and nineteenth century phenomenon which “has often been criticized for its androcentrism” (Abao 4), as from its first appearance in the eighteenth century until the 1970s the

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genre’s sole concern had been the male protagonist’s sufferings, conflicts and final success. In the early forms of the genre, where the values of bourgeois society were reflected, only male protagonists were represented because before the twentieth century only men had unlimited access to education, occupation, and politics. However, in the 1970s a new wave of awakening that raised society’s awareness of women’s position again put the genre of the coming-­of-­age novel under the spotlight. Feminist critics analyzed nineteenth and twentieth century novels that depicted “the suppression and defeat of female autonomy, creativity, and maturity by patriarchal gender norms” (Lazaro-­Weiss 17). Feminists concluded that the scientific construction of the woman’s role and predestination was a highly political act. The heroine’s personal development and transformation was the main focus in Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre, which was published in 1847 and is generally regarded as the first female Bildungsroman. Since the 1980s the LGBT – and, nowadays, the LGBTQIA – movement has played an immense role in ensuring the freedom of sexual expression. The “coming out” rhetoric facilitated the discussion of taboo issues regarding sexual identity as there was a general need to redefine and theorize existing discourses on identity, gender, and sexuality, which were being questioned. According to Antosa, “queer theories acknowledge and valorize all forms of identity that differ from the heterosexual model and recognize identities as socially constructed, thus, [they] constantly try to concede the fluid dynamism that characterizes human existence” (9). An identity that distances itself from the prevailing dichotomy of male/female is undoubtedly the intersex identity. The earliest term for “intersex” was “hermaphrodite,” deriving from Hermaphroditus, the son of Aphrodite and Hermes in Greek mythology. Hermaphroditus combined characteristics of both man and woman because his body fused with the body of a nymph at the age of fifteen. According to the UN Office for Human Rights “[i]ntersex people are born with sex characteristics (including genitals and chromosome patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies” (United Nations). In some cases, intersex traits are visible at birth, while in others they are not apparent until puberty. The connection with the coming-­of-­age novel is essential at this point as puberty is a period of transition during which people undergo major physiological and psychological transformations; at the same time, these adolescent years are the essence of the coming-­of-­age novel. In the end, reaching adulthood, intersex people seek recognition in an indeterminate third sex category even while living either as a male or as a female. The first novel of my study is Middlesex, which was written by Jeffrey Eugenides in 2002 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Calliope Stephanides, the narrator

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and protagonist of the novel, is a third-­generation Greek American who grows up in Detroit, Michigan in the 1970s. Although the first half of the novel is about Cal’s ancestors and their arrival from Asia Minor to the States, the second half is a coming-­of-­age story in which Callie is raised as a girl until the age of fourteen. That is the point when she is discovered to have a mutation of her fifth chromosome which makes her look like a girl, although she has biological and hormonal traits of a boy, too. After the discovery of her intersex identity, she decides to assume her male identity and changes her name into Cal. The second novel analyzed in this article is called Annabel. It was written in 2010 by Kathleen Winter and it depicts the story of young Wayne, who was also born intersex in the 1970s, but at birth his parents decided to raise him as a boy without ever letting him know. Annabel is the name his mother’s best friend gives him and calls him when they are alone as it reminds her of her own lost girl child. During puberty because of a medical emergency his abdomen is discovered to be filled with menstrual blood and his true identity is revealed to him. His first adult years find him estranged in a bigger city, where he decides to quit taking the masculine hormones that he had been taking from birth and let his body grow into the person he was actually born, an intersex. Taken together, these two novels fit into a new category of the hybrid Bildungsroman, the intersex Bildungsroman. It is only natural to crave for order and clear categorization in every aspect of the society: specific gender, specific race, specific sexual identity. The need for only two clear-­cut categories of sexual identity lies at the root of the society, a society that marginalizes anybody who exists on the threshold between the two sexes. Weiss highlights the fact that “the demands of legitimacy and legibility . . . call for the impossible separation of objects as mechanisms of institutional authority” (170). Only when something or someone is broken down and made intelligible in every single detail can it/he/she be categorized and controlled by normative institutions. The deterministic model that relies heavily on the “‘born that way” rhetoric stresses the fact that the bodies that matter are only the bodies that can fit into the binary social constructions of male and female. Binary constructions have been created artificially and are based arbitrarily, as Simon de Beauvoir has pointed out, on the “female creature”: “No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and the eunuch, which is described as feminine” (249). This constructed act of division in the society has created the misconception of a male/female human existence as the only true gendered possibility. If the society’s rules and conformities are to be questioned and broken, the final goal should be to pave the way for a “sexless so-

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ciety,” as Atkinson voiced clearly throughout her work. A sexless society would be blind to gendered stereotypes and its goal would be not to normalize minorities. In 1990 Judith Butler published her ground-­breaking Gender Trouble, in which she questioned the universally accepted categories of woman and man. According to her, the distinction between sex, which is biologically constructed, and gender, which is socially constructed, is a false assumption. Butler asserts that “[t]he cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of ‘identities’ cannot ‘exist’ – that is those in which gender does not follow from sex” (Gender Trouble 24). On the contrary, what actually characterizes the real world is the performativity of genders and the fluidity between sexes, the existence of a space in between genders. Additionally, Monique Wittig claims that the nature of sex is an artificial infliction in the human society to serve as a supporting system to the ideology of the two and only genders. More specifically, she argues that “a new personal and subjective definition for all humankind can only be found beyond the categories of sex (woman and man) and that the advent of individual subjects demands first destroying the categories of sex, ending the use of them, and rejecting all sciences which still use these categories as their fundamentals (practically all social sciences)” (Wittig 108). Contemporary Gender and Sexuality Studies argue for the fluidity of genders, which is evident in contemporary fiction as well. Just as intersex bodies challenge “traditional beliefs about sexual difference . . . [for] they possess the irritating ability to live sometimes as one sex and sometimes the other” (Fausto-­Sterling 24), the intersex Bildungsroman distances itself from the strict notions of male and female Bildungsromans and creates a hybrid category in between genders. What causes distress to Western societies is the fact that “[i]ntersex bodies are strikingly visible because they challenge cultural notions of normative femininity and masculinity, and as such disrupt a fundamental structuring principle of western cultures and societies, i.e. the gender binary” (Amato 49). In the same manner, the intersex Bildungsroman challenges notions of the traditional genre and questions its indisputable features, thus causing the genre to take a step beyond its classical form and to reiterate the fluidity between genders. As far as the core elements of this intersex category are concerned, the intersex Bildungsroman not only combines motifs and themes from both the male and the female genre but also sets forth new ones. It goes without saying that there are some motifs and themes which many classic Bildungsromans, like Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre, Great Expectations, David Copperfield and many others, have in common. Telnes Iversen has created a Bildungsroman Index, also known as BRI, “which is an effort to pinpoint and de-

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scribe typical features of novels that are generally recognized as Bildungsromane” (Change and Continuity 51). These include first person linear narration, encounter with love, life at school and an open ending. All these motifs are standard mainly for the male Bildungsroman. On the other hand, the female Bildungsroman can appear in two forms, either following the male model or representing a novel of awakening. Instances of awakening happen after the female protagonist has been married and has created a family, at a point when she realizes the feeling of incompleteness in the male-­centered value system. According to Hirsch, Abel and Langland, “[f]emale fictions of development reflect the tensions between the assumptions of a genre that embodies male norms and the values of its female protagonists” (11). Though the cost of self-­development is high for a female protagonist, it is still higher for the intersex hero, for the risk of exposure in a perilous environment will cause personal and social alienation. The intersex Bildungsromans Middlesex and Annabel comply with the Bildungsroman genre, blending motifs of both male and female Bildungsromans and creating new ones. Some of the most distinctive motifs and themes of the intersex Bildungsroman are the following: • • • • • • • •

Setting in the countryside or a provincial town Passive/absent parents (patriarchal family) Obedience and low self-­esteem during teenage years Troubled sexual identity construction Encounter with love – unsuccessful or unrequited love Heteronormative imperative: medical management of the intersex body Awakening or moment of epiphany Elucidating ending: the protagonist finds a place in the society

Needless to say, all of the above-­mentioned motifs and themes are found in both novels. Firstly, the setting of the novels, which in both cases is a provincial town, foregrounds the conservative family which objects to accepting anything different from the norm. When having to make a decision of whether to let her baby live as an intersex, Wayne’s mother is faced with a dilemma: “It was the growing up part she did not want to imagine. The social part, the going to school in Labrador part, the what will we tell everyone part, the part that asks how will we give this child so much love it will know no harm from the cruel reactions of people who do not want to understand” (Winter 28). It might be assumed that if the family’s living environment was urban, they would be more open to accepting differences. As Urbaniak-­Rybicka argues, “[c]hange for Wayne and his family becomes a source of the sublime. The child’s intersexuality breeds misunderstandings, intolerance

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and emotional estrangement in the family and the small community of Croyden Harbour, Labrador” (86). Expressing difference appears definitely more difficult within a rural setting, where nonconformity would invariably result in ostracism from the community. The patriarchal family is a theme that both novels have in common, too. Both mothers are passive, complying with the fathers’ will, definitely recognizing their children’s special behavior but making the choice to ignore it in order to avoid unpleasantness. In Middlesex, at the Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic, Callie describes her parents’ reaction towards seeing their child growing up differently: “For a year now they had been denying how I was changing, putting it down to the awkward age. ‘She’ll grow out of it,’ Milton was always telling my mother . . . and Tessie was dreaming a family dream” (Eugenides 422). It is generally proven that parental denial of an unpleasant situation regarding their child does not make the situation disappear, but it only postpones the confrontation and additionally burdens the child psychologically. Another motif of the intersex Bildungsroman is that the teenagers experience adolescence compliantly, not only trying to please their parents but also never arguing with them, even when they are being unfair. In Middlesex, for instance, Callie wants so desperately to please her parents and be a girl that she fakes her tests at the Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic due to feelings of guilt for her gendered identity. The hero/heroine’s self-­image is broken because he/she is aware of his/her difference compared to others. This feeling of incompleteness and inefficiency does not allow them to be self-­aware and self-­confident. In Annabel, for instance, Wayne goes fishing with his father only to win his love and approval although what he really wants is to go dancing: “There was an intangible promise that Treadway would love and approve of Wayne if he came. By the end of most such outings, that promise had turned into disappointment” (Winter 88). The troubling realization of one’s engendered identity is a further motif that the intersex Bildungsromans share. No one has revealed to Wayne his intersex identity, so he is in a baffling situation when he does not understand why he is attracted to girls and boys, why his body responds to stimuli coming from both sexes: “He could not escape from the fact that a man had wanted him, and that his body had responded to that man with a secret desire of its own. An exquisite stirring, unwanted, involuntary, mysterious. A child of eleven awakens to sexual ecstasy and keeps it to himself, and thinks for a brief time that he, or she, is the only one in the world to whom this has happened” (Winter 109). Both novels include moments of homoerotic and heterosexual love, emphasizing their protagonists’ hybrid sexual identities.

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The epiphany or moment of awakening is vital for the intersex Bildungsroman as it leads to the climax of the narration. The secret identity is finally disclosed, the truth is told and the hero/heroine has to face his/her real intersex identity. In order to understand more about her condition, Callie decides to look up the word “hermaphrodite” in Webster’s dictionary. When she reads that one of the synonyms is “monster” she experiences a moment of sheer epiphany: “The synonym was official, authoritative; it was the verdict that the culture gave to a person like her. Monster. That was what she was” (Eugenides 431). The identification of her condition with monstrosity made her realize the deceptive character of her own being: “She was aware that she would never be like other people and that the politeness and diminishing of her state was just hypocrisy from both doctors and her parents” (Sirkovic and Jovanovic 261). The stereotypical attitude of the society towards intersex people is what scares Callie and pushes her to making the choice of taking her life into her own hands. In the same manner, Wayne also experiences an awakening in Annabel when, after an accident, the doctors reveal to him the truth about his intersex identity: “A true hermaphrodite means you have everything boys have, and girls too. An almost complete presence of each” (Winter 236). However, Wayne’s reaction is not as immediate as Callie’s. It takes him some time to become conscious of what he really is and assume his intersex identity: “He wished at that moment that his whole life had not been a secret, that lots of people were like him, instead of his being alone in a world where everyone was secure in their place as either woman or man” (Winter 414). Finally, contrary to the ending of the traditional Bildungsroman, the ending of the intersex Bildungsroman does not leave the reader with unanswered questions. The protagonist’s choice is clearly expressed. In the case of Middlesex, Callie decides to leave her body untouched by medical intervention, to clearly define herself as a male and to reinvent her whole existence as Cal. In the case of Annabel, Wayne defies medical intervention too, but chooses the socially non-­compliant road to lead life as an intersex, realizing Judith Butler’s words: “It may well be that my sense of social belonging is impaired by the distance I take, but sure that estrangement is preferable to gaining a sense of intelligibility by virtue of norms that will only do me in from another direction” (Undoing Gender 3). According to some queer theorists, “the medical and surgical management of intersexed bodies can be considered symptomatic of a heteronormative imperative” (Carroll 18). Although neither Wayne nor Cal agrees to be medically normalized once and for all, Cal chooses to make a sort of compromise and fit into the social stereotype of a male in order to be accepted by the society. He explains it

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by saying: “I operate in society as a man. I use the men’s room . . . I’ve lived more than half my life as a male, and by now everything comes naturally” (Eugenides 41). Nonetheless, the intersex Bildungsroman closes with the notion of accepting the sexed identity that was given at birth and denying the artificial intervention of society’s heteronormative norms. What my analysis supports is that the Bildungsroman should not only be divided into its male or female variants. A third option is possible, whereby the novel encompasses elements of both subgenres, illustrating the development of the young protagonist in the framework of a hybrid third gender in an intersex Bildungsroman. Besides, the social and cultural changes that have taken place since the first appearance of the genre demand a reconsideration of its form and structure. In his The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha states that “these ‘in-­ between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself ” (2). Following an interpretation of his definition of hybridity, the intersex Bildungsroman opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy. Free will succeeds in conquering the society’s deeply rooted stereotypes and generates a prototypical form of hybrid identity. Realizing the power of free will in life “even when other outside forces interfere and make them [the Bildungsroman hero] feel it is hopeless” is one of the mostly undisputed Bildungsroman elements (Telnes Iversen, Polythetic Definition 73). In conclusion, neither biological predisposition nor cultural influence constitute the only factors that shape sexual identity, but it is their combination accompanied by free will that contribute to the development of the self. Both Eugenides and Winter promote a new model of adolescent journey that not only eliminates stereotypes, but also paves the way for a space in between sexes.

Works Cited Abao, Frances Jane P. “Retelling the Stories, Rewriting the Bildungsroman: Cecilia Manguerra Brainard’s When the Rainbow Goddess Wept.” Humanities Diliman, vol. 2, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–14. Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Lang. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. University Press of New England, 1983. Amato, Viola. Intersex Narratives: Shifts in the Representation of Intersex Lives in North American Literature and Popular Culture. Bielefeld, 2016. Antosa, Silvia. Queer Crossings: Theories, Bodies, Texts, edited by Silvia Antosa. Mimesis, LGBT, 2012.

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Atkinson, Ti-­Grace. Amazon Odyssey. Links Books, 1974. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990. —. Undoing Gender. Routledge, 2004. Carroll, Rachel. Rereading Heterosexuality Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction. Edinburgh University Press, 2012. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. Bantam, 1952. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Poetry and Experience, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton UP, 1985. Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. Fourth Estate, 2013. Fausto-­Sterling, Anne. “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough.” The Sciences, March/April 1993, pp. 20–24. Lazaro-­Weiss, Carol. “The Female ‘Bildungsroman’: Calling it into Question.” NWSA Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, 1990, pp. 16–34. Sirkovic, Nina, and Aleksandra V. Jovanovic. “Middlesex as a Bildungsroman: Cal/ lie and the Problem of Identity.” Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 2, no. 9, 2013, pp. 259–263. Telnes Iversen, Anniken. Change and Continuity: The Bildungsroman in English. University of Tromso, 2009. —. “Towards a Polythetic Definition of the Bildungsroman: The Example of Paul Auster’s Moon Palace.” Literatura, vol. 49, no. 5, 2007, pp. 68–75. United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. https:// unfe.org/system/unfe-65-Intersex_Factsheet_ENGLISH.pdf. 2015. Accessed 15 March 2016. Urbaniak-­Rybicka, Ewa. “‘Everyone is a Snake Shedding its Skin’: Identity Re/ (de)formation in Kathleen Winter’s Annabel.” Ad Americam. Journal of American Studies, vol. 13, 2012, pp. 83–93. Weiss, Margot. “Discipline and Desire: Feminist Politics, Queer Studies, and New Queer Anthropology.” Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-­First Century, edited by Ellen Lewin and Leni M. Silverstein. Rudgers University Press, 2016, pp. 168–187. Winter, Kathleen. Annabel. Vintage Books, 2011. Wittig, Monique. “One is Not Born a Woman.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Heny Abelove, Michele Aina Barale and David M. Halperin. Routledge, 1993, pp. 103–109.

Aleksandra Kamińska

Expressing the Uncertainty, Reflecting Memory: The Role of Memorabilia in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home Abstract: In her graphic memoir Fun Home Alison Bechdel draws numerous documents from her and her father’s past. In the article, I analyze the role of these memorabilia and argue that Bechdel’s unique narration is a tool that enables her to make the story similar to actual memories. Keywords: memoir, graphic novel, memory

Just by browsing Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) it can be noticed that the graphic novel is full of copied documents – photographs, letters and maps. On one of the pages a young girl carefully studies a drawing from The Addams Family; on another the author’s hand is holding an enlarged photograph. These memorabilia are not scanned, but meticulously copied by Bech­del, re-­drawn from original images. In Bechdel’s memoir, detailed presentation of memorabilia adds a new dimension to the story and serves as a specific form of self-­expression. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is Alison Bechdel’s coming of age and coming out autobiography, and at the same time a memoir of Bruce, her closeted gay father, who may have committed suicide. Bechdel’s graphic novel is full of doubts, but the author’s uncertainty leads only to a more careful analysis of the past. The memoir is not drawn in a chronological way, but divided into seven idiosyncratic chapters. Each of those chapters is focused on a different theme and starts from a different memory, presented in the form of an opening image, a photograph. In all of the chapters there are certain parts where the story intensifies. A climax, however, cannot be clearly identified. Fun Home’s narration is not a display of its author’s artistry, but a tool which enables Bechdel to make the story more intimate and more similar to actual memories, often fragmented or partially repressed. Not only does the author address the ideas of uncertainty and fragmentation of memory through plot and narration, but the narration itself intensifies that uncertainty as well. The medium of graphic novel allows the author to build the story both with illustration and written word, and by juxtaposing these two, Bechdel creates a narration that is unique and complex. However, as Robyn Warhol observes, Bechdel’s work introduces an “opening into further dimension

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less easy to articulate than the verbal or the visual” (2), emphasizing the tension between drawings and captions or dialogues. The primary dimensions – image and text – subdivide into what Warhol calls “multiple separate and overlapping narrative tracks, creating narrative elements that ‘work with’ the space between image and word” (2). One of the most interesting aspects of narration in Fun Home is the graphical representation of memorabilia, items that have both visual and textual dimension: drawings of diary pages, notes, letters, book covers, photographs, and maps. As Warhol points out, “each of these classes of images gestures in the direction of different diegetic levels, multiplying the worlds invoked by the narrative structure of Fun Home” (5). Those memorabilia play multiple roles in Fun Home, both in its narrative structure and as important elements of the plot. In this essay, I examine photos, maps, letters, diaries and book covers presented in Fun Home in order to delineate Bechdel’s unique mode of representing memory. First, I connect the narration used by Bechdel with the novel’s plot, and the ideas and emotions that the story conveys. Next, I examine the role of photographs and books drawn and mentioned in Fun Home; while the former, I argue, function as the evidence of Bechdel’s father’s secret life, the latter enable communication both between father and daughter and between the author and the readers. Subsequently, I focus on Bechdel’s diary, reading it as the representation of Bechdel’s struggle with storytelling and finding the truth. After analyzing the role of copied documents in Fun Home, I focus on Bechdel’s relationship with her father and suggest that Fun Home should be read as a queer narrative.

Photographic evidence and the cartography of memory Fun Home is filled with copied photographs, which, as Bechdel admits, were extremely important in the process of creating the novel. While drawing the memoir, Bechdel took numerous photographs of herself posing as each of the characters in order to carefully portray every one of them. This exceptional technique contributed to Bechdel’s search for truth and accuracy, and added an extremely emphatic approach to the memoir. Julia Watson rightly points that Bechdel’s “practice suggests ways in which she . . . quite literally – could imagine the positions of her characters” (38). Bechdel’s willingness to create a close connection with the characters of her memoir – especially the father – surfaces also in the process of re-­drawing documents. By re-­drawing photographs, she not only incorporates the important aspects of Bruce’s identity into the narrative, but also carefully studies each photograph. Through the manual work put in this task, she is physically closer to her father. Photographs are not the only documents copied by Bechdel into the narrative; she re-­writes also letters, including those written

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by her father. The need to copy her father’s handwriting once again points to the laborious manual work she had to perform in order to create closeness between herself and her father. Yet, the most important role of photographs is different – copied photographs mark key moments in the novel, not only in head chapters, but throughout the whole narrative. Right after her father’s death, Bechdel browses through a box of photos and finds one that she has not seen before: an intimate and almost erotic photograph of Roy, the gardener, helper, and baby-­sitter in Bechdel’s family, and – as she discovers – Bruce’s lover. She already knows that her father had sexual contacts with men, but the photograph serves as evidence that cannot be overlooked or missed as easily as a vague memory. The photograph was taken during the holidays she spent with her brothers and father: it is the evidence not only of Bruce’s secret life but also of the fact that this covert life was happening right next to her family’s. The photograph and Bechdel’s reception of it can be read to symbolize Bechdel’s full acknowledgement of her father’s homosexuality – she is not indignant at it and even calls the photograph beautiful. According to Watson, in this way Bechdel actually “acknowledg[es] both . . . her identification with her father’s erotic desire for the aesthetic perfection of the boy’s body and her distanced critique as a sleuth of this evidence of his secret life” (41). Presented with the narrator’s enlarged hand holding the photograph, the reader involuntarily witnesses this acknowledgement from the narrator’s perspective. Bechdel almost demands from the reader to look at the photograph through her eyes. She places this evidence of Bruce’s secret life in the book’s centerfold, signaling further the importance it has to her. The proof and confirmation of Bruce’s double life is even more visible on the next page of the book, where the reader sees a strip of negatives. Three of the images show young Alison and her brothers playing while the fourth is an image of Roy. As Watson observes, “at strategic moments, photos also offer Alison occasions for introspection, as she rereads her past to discover untold family stories” (39). Bechdel learns about things that happened not only in her childhood but even before she was born, which allows her to uncover and understand family secrets. In the same box where she finds the photograph of Roy, Bechdel also discovers two other photographs of her father and, in an attempt to better understand her relationship with Bruce, she juxtaposes them with her own. Copied photographs play numerous roles in Fun Home: they bring Bechdel closer to her family, mark key moments in the novel, and are a symbol of the long process that Bechdel had to go through in order to see and understand all the details. They are memory triggers that start several recollections and thus the narration in Fun Home resembles the way memory often works, by starting from a single image.

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Not only photographs are supposed to help Bechdel understand the past and create a coherent narrative; in Fun Home the same role is assigned to maps. Through maps the reader can see Bechdel as a collector of images and as an archivist. Even more importantly, however, the maps represent Bechdel’s way of looking at cartoons, and by logical extension, images in a graphic novel. “Cartoons are like maps to me,” Bechdel states, “in the way they distill the chaotic three dimensional world into a layer of pictures and a layer of words” (qtd. in Warhol 10). One of the main functions of maps is how they represent or depict reality on paper. Bechdel points out similarities between the work of a cartographer and the work of a cartoonist; in the case of a graphic novel, she seems to be arguing, an image usually represents a much more complex fragment of reality, because it deals with events, emotions and often abstractions.

Language of literature and the epistemological crisis Yet another distinctive characteristic of Fun Home is its intertextuality. Throughout the story, Bechdel and her father, an English teacher, read and discuss several prominent literary works by Joyce, Colette, Fitzgerald, and Proust. Both for Bechdel and her father, literature was a mode of communication. When young Alison ended up in her father’s course about rites of passage, they started developing closeness and intimacy. Because of their shared passion for literature, their relationship had a chance to develop further, and as Bechdel states, they “grew even closer after [she] went away to college. Books – the ones assigned for [her] English class – continued to serve as [their] currency” (200). Books are important in Fun Home both with reference to narration and in terms of visuality. Not only are there numerous literary references in dialogues but Bechdel also draws several book covers and places them strategically for the reader to notice. As Ann Cvetkovitch observes, these visual literary references “serve as a kind of bibliography for the narrative” (122); they are not an accidental collection of novels, but a careful selection which Bechdel uses to communicate with the reader, the way she was communicating with her father. Other important images that contribute to the structure of Fun Home are copies of hand-­written and typed letters as well as parts of Bechdel’s diary. Letters (mostly those written by her father) are a part of the paper archive that can be found in Bechdel’s memoir; instead of just describing them, Bechdel presents the reader with fragments of pages. Copied pages are especially meaningful when Bechdel redraws fragments of her old diary, which she started when she was ten years old. She was encouraged by her father to keep a diary when she showed first signs of OCD. Writing down “what’s happening” seemed simple enough at first, but soon

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she began inserting the phrase “I think” into the descriptions of her everyday activities. When Bechdel started menstruating, an event that marked important changes in her life, the phrase “I think” transformed into a special sign, to which Bechdel referred as “a curvy circumflex” (142). The author herself admits that her actions were emblematic of a “sort of epistemological crisis. How did I know that the things I was writing were absolutely, objectively true?” (141). As much as an epistemological crisis of a ten-­year-­old may sound disturbing, it could have stemmed from a difficult time in Bechdel’s life. Secrets, the lack of proper attention, lies, and the Watergate scandal which cast a shadow over her childhood contributed to Alison’s problems with understanding the meaning of truth. As a result, Cvetkovich observes, the ordinary life that [Bechdel’s] diaries document[ed] – school, TV, vacations – [took] an ominous turn . . . . Alison’s efforts to witness in a world of silences, secrets, and repressions [led] to various forms of writer’s block, censorship … Even though she ha[d] no direct knowledge of her father’s sexual desires or activities, the diaries provide[d] witness to the secrecy and uncertainty that pervade[d] the house. (120–121)

Serving as Fun Home’s prototype, Bechdel’s diary is the best representation of Bechdel’s struggle with storytelling and finding truth in everyday life. Doubt is inscribed in Bechdel’s storytelling. The memoir does not reveal any ultimate truth but offers Bechdel’s opinions and allows the reader to form their own. In Bechdel’s home – full of secrets, repression, and lies – she couldn’t ask for answers and explanations. That is why, years later, she looks for answers by gathering the memorabilia, trying to recall the past, and asking questions. All these factors contribute to the way of narrating Fun Home. Because of Bechdel’s way of storytelling, the reader witnesses and can almost feel the author’s confusion and is thus keen to take part in her investigation, to which they are invited since Bechdel willingly presents all the collected evidence. While most of Bechdel’s struggle with storytelling is connected with truth, lies, and ambiguity pervading her family, there are also doubt-­generating elements that Bechdel and her family could not have had any control over: the times the family lived in and the political events Alison witnessed growing up. Bechdel uses the Watergate scandal to observe how truth can slowly make itself visible; in Fun Home she comments on this by writing that even though at first the hearings bored her, over time she “began to take notice as the truth wormed its way … towards daylight” (172). The same happens when Bruce is arrested. As a result of the arrest, Bechdel starts doubting authorities (both political and familial i.e. her father) and asks herself who she can trust. To quote from Jared Gardner, “in 1972 . . . ‘national innocence’ was lost in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, and with it the fantasy that the

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nation’s ‘fathers’ could be trusted to protect and tell the truth” (20). Having no one to depend on, Bechdel struggles with the truth.

Queering the memory The third chapter of Fun Home starts with a drawing of a dictionary opened on the word “queer.” Some words from the definition are highlighted: “strange,” “suspicious,” “to thwart, to ruin; to put (one) in a bad position.” Bechdel comments on the image, saying that her “father’s death was a queer business – queer in every sense of that multivalent word” (57). I would argue that queerness applies not only to Bechdel’s father or his death but to the whole Fun Home, a truly queer graphic novel. Some queer elements are obvious: Alison is a lesbian, Bruce is having sexual relationships with other men, and can be described as very eccentric and strange. It is, however, possible to find also more complex queerness in Bechdel’s story. The story deals with themes such as gender relations in the family, discovering one’s sexuality, masculinity, femininity, and desires. It is a double coming-­out story (Pearl 286), full of paradoxes and inversions. In each chapter of Fun Home the reader learns something different about Bechdel and her relationship with her father and discovers new clues to answer essential questions the novel asks. Bechdel’s narrative is full of secrets, repressed feelings, doubts and ambiguity. The labyrinthine structure of her work, where the reader has to look for answers (often only to find more questions) and circle around certain themes, helps the story’s effectiveness as the reader joins Bechdel in her quest for the truth. Watson suggests that “Fun Home is narrated not through the linear chronology of a developmental story, but in a recursive pattern of returns and reversals punctuated by the rhythmic movement of self-­questioning and self-­commentary” (51). One of the prominent examples of this recursiveness is the crucial scene of Bruce’s death, that Fun Home revisits several times. Searching for truth among uncertainties, Bechdel re-­draws the circumstances of her father’s death from different perspectives, thus allowing for deeper and fuller understanding. Bechdel’s creation of these revisions of reality constitutes her rebellion against the traditional timeline, narration and even genealogy1. The intimacy and the mixture of biography and autobiography in Fun Home are in line with the idea of Valerie 1 Throughout the whole novel Bechdel plays with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, putting her father in a double role of both Icarus and Daedalus. What is more, Bechdel comments on a conversation in which Bruce discloses his queerness, stating: “which of us was the father? I had felt distinctly parental listing to his shamefaced recitation” (221).

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Rohy that “queer literature is dominated by autobiography and rooted in personal testimony” (343). Fun Home is, in fact, a deeply personal novel. What seems even more essential in reading Fun Home as a queer narrative, is Rohy’s claim that “efforts to reimagine queer history have sought, albeit in different vocabularies, to resist teleology, linearity, causality, and the pose of epistemological mastery in favor of nonidentity, plurality, circularity, and the nonsequential narrative” (343). The reader can easily find all these characteristics in Bechdel’s novel. Throughout the narrative, Bechdel gradually uncovers more and more aspects of her father’s homosexuality. She recalls certain events and goes back in time. She revisits her childhood to observe the signals that she did not understand at the time, but now sees as evidence of Bruce’s homosexuality. As Monica B. Pearl observes, Fun Home is a double coming-­out story: “the protagonist herself . . . in a turn typical of the coming out story (but not of the graphic genre), realizes she is a lesbian over the course of the narrative. But in a spin of the typical coming out tale, Fun Home is [also] a story of the protagonist discovering her father’s homosexuality” (286). Alison’s discovery of her own sexuality comes to her unexpectedly and atypically. She discovers that she is lesbian while reading coming out stories. This is, however, understandable in a home where books construct a necessary form of expression or another language, one that Bechel’s family use to talk about things that they repress and do not have the boldness to discuss openly. There is some circumstantial (although also very stereotypical) evidence of Bechdel’s father’s homosexuality, e.g. his love for dandy suits and anachronistic fashion. It is an example of Bruce’s queerness in every meaning of that word. Writing about her book Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman confesses that the book “began when [she] understood someone else’s self-­presentation as drag, if drag can be seen as the act of plastering the body with outdated rather than just cross-­ gendered accessories, whose resurrection seems to exceed the axis of gender and begins to talk about, indeed talk back to, history” (xxi). Bruce’s velvet suits and extravagant ties are especially unusual in a small town in rural Pennsylvania. They are outdated and dandy, and reference the past. Equally important is Bruce’s passion for interior design. As Hélène Tison argues, Bruce’s careful and conscientious renovation of his family’s gothic house as well as his passion for detail can function as further sign of Bruce’s queerness: “his relationship to the house epitomizes the quest for the original, in an excessive manner. Indeed, the drag metaphor is most obvious in the over-­accessorized, overdressed house” (28). Already as a child, Alison Bechdel realized that Bruce’s attachment to their house was unconventional. At one time, she even started comparing the house (and the family) to those she knew from The Addams Family.

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The queerness of Fun Home can be observed beyond the themes of Bechdel’s memoir or its characters. The non-­linear, fragmented and repetitive narration of Fun Home is queer. Bechdel narrates in a way that stands in acute opposition to conventional narration where time is moving only forward. In the text, the factors distinctive for queer temporality abound: “asynchrony, anachronism, anastrophe, belatedness, compression, delay, ellipsis, flashback” (Freeman xxii). Bechdel’s memory of her father is full of painful and tragic elements. She recalls many memories where her father is angry, distant and cold; Bruce’s suppressed sexuality and the life of secrets and fear have had their toll. However, the father-­ daughter reconciliation is not only possible but actually executed by means of Fun Home. The graphic novel sets on a journey to deconstruct, analyze and understand Bruce. By understanding him and his relation with her, Bechdel achieves insight into her own identity. The queerness that is central to Fun Home is also central to understanding the bond between Alison and Bruce. Whenever she struggles to understand herself or her queer identity, she can turn back to her father’s life for reference.

Final remarks Each chapter of Fun Home focuses on a topic which is then recreated through different scenes and illustrations of items presented in a thematic, not chronological order. In this way the narration mimics memory: it is fragmented, concentrated on particular extracts of reality, it comes with emotions and afterthoughts of the past. Queer narrative of the memoir corresponds with the main themes of Bechdel’s story. Narration sets out to at least partially overcome young Bechdel’s “epistemological crisis:” the multidimensional visual narration of Fun Home allows the adult Bechdel to capture the most accurate interpretation of reality. As Warhol observes “Fun Home itself is the corrected version of Alison’s journal. Where she had left holes marked with the ‘curvy circumflex’, Fun Home fills with pictures” (10). Bechdel, however, does not choose visual narration over the textual, as she realizes that in order to accurately describe the past, she needs those two dimensions combined. The gaps in her memory are filled with evidence such as maps, letters and photographs. Those solid fragments of the past create an archive with the help of which she attempts to create a coherent narrative. Drawings and illustrations become a form of therapy, which helps her capture all the shades and nuances of what she lived.

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Works Cited Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. A Family Tragicomic. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly vol. 36, no. 1–2, 2008, pp. 111–128., doi: 10.1353/ wsq.0.0037. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010. Gardner, Jared. “Autography’s Biography, 1972–2007.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly vol. 31, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–26., doi: 10.1353/bio.0.0003. Pearl, Monica B. “Graphic Language.” Prose Studies vol. 30, no. 3, 2008, pp. 286–304. doi: 10.1080/01440350802704853. Rohy, Valerie. “In the Queer Archive: Fun Home.” QLG: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol. 16, no. 3, 2010, pp. 340–361. Project Muse. Accessed 25 Sept. 2016. Tison, Hélène. “Drag as metaphor and the quest for meaning in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.” GRAAT vol. 1, March 2007, pp. 26–39, http:// www.graat.fr/bechdel003aaaa.pdf. Accessed 8 Sept. 2016. Warhol, Robyn. “The Space Between: A Narrative Approach to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” College Literature vol. 38, no. 3, 2011, pp. 1–20. doi: 10.1353/ lit.2011.0025. Watson, Julia. “Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bech­del’s Fun Home.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly vol. 31, no. 1, 2008, pp. 27–58. doi:10.1353/bio.0.0006.

Petra Filipová

Representation of Asexuality in The Big Bang Theory Abstract: Using the example of The Big Bang Theory (2007-present), this paper strives to demonstrate the stereotypization of asexual characters in American sitcoms as less human, socially inept, and incapable of forming healthy relationships. Keywords: asexuality, American television, sexual minorities, The Big Bang Theory

Human sexuality undeniably represents a significant part of everyday life, particularly in contemporary Western society. In the past several decades, we have seen great progress towards rights for minorities such as gay, lesbian, and transgender people. It is no longer shocking to see an openly homosexual character on prime-­ time television. There are still, however, minorities which are severely under- or misrepresented. One of these minorities is asexuals. Asexuality, as understood today, is a sexual orientation marked by the lack of sexual attraction towards anyone (Asexuality Visibility and Education Network). The study of asexuality is relatively new: it was only in 2013 that the American Psychiatric Association allowed for the possibility of asexuality as an orientation in its diagnostic manual. Despite the increase in the amount of research done on the subject in the past decade, researchers have still merely scratched the surface of the issue. The possibility of people feeling no sexual desire or attraction was noted as early as the end of the 19th century (the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-­Ebbing in his notable work Psychopathia Sexualis described a condition he named ‘anaesthesia sexualis’ – an absence of sexual instinct or feeling). However, asexuality was consistently portrayed as abnormal, and most of the time as a disease to be either ignored, or studied and cured. Asexuality can be found in the margins of some important works of sexology, such as Kinsey’s research on human sexual orientation, published in the 1940s. A category named X was introduced in Kinsey’s tables and charts to represent individuals with “no socio-­ sexual response” (Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male 658), where socio-­sexual is determined to mean sexual behavior including at least one other person of any sex. The prevalence reported by Kinsey for the X group was between 3 to 4% of unmarried men aged between 20 and 35, 1–2% of previously married men in the study, 14–19% of unmarried women, 1–3% of married women aged between 20 and 35, and 5–8% of previously married women (Kinsey et al., Sexual

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Behavior in the Human Male; Sexual Behavior in the Human Female 488). The first explicit mention of asexuality occurred in the 1970s, but it was not until the very beginning of the 21st century that asexuality emerged as a valid research topic. One of the possible reasons why asexuals have remained invisible for so long is that the orientation has been treated as a sickness or something unnatural and unwanted, and thus only the emergence of the Internet in the late 20th century provided the necessary anonymity and freedom to share experiences with other likeminded individuals. The asexual community online has been steadily growing in the past two decades and increasingly asking questions about how they are represented in the media. Asexuality gained presence on American television at the beginning of the 21st century. Asexuals have been looking for answers much earlier in various newspaper and magazine advice columns, but the appeal of asexuality as a sensational topic for television production only arose with the publication of Anthony Bogaert’s 2004 report on the prevalence of asexuals in the British national sample, a study often cited as a source of statistics calculating the number of asexuals as 1% of the population (279). While examining talk shows and newspaper or magazine articles, it is easy to spot several trends in how asexuals have been described in the past two decades. Some of the stereotypes and questions are very similar to what gay and lesbian people had to face in the past. First is the subject of choice. While it is widely acknowledged nowadays that homosexuality and heterosexuality are not a matter of personal choice, asexual people still often face the presumption that they have decided to become asexual of their own free will. Physical and mental health also comes into question with alarming frequency. Sexual activity has been conflated with a healthy life for several decades, and due to the previous classification of the lack of sexual desire as a mental health issue, asexuals are often asked to corroborate their mental and physical health. The question is further complicated by the difficult status of asexuality vis-­à-vis disability: it is necessary to avoid positioning asexuality and disability as cause and effect, and yet, it is equally vital to acknowledge the possibility of a person being both asexual and disabled. The research done so far on asexual women shows that physically there is little to no difference between asexual, heterosexual, and lesbian women in terms of the capacity for physical arousal (Brotto and Yule 707). However, asexuality and disability have long stood in opposition with regard to each other. As Enjung Kim argues, “[t]his mutual negation is driven by the efforts of both to avoid the stigma of connection to the other” (273). Disabled people have often been wrongfully imagined or perceived as asexual: when disabled people have to fight for their right to be seen as equally sexual, it is understandable that their

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relationship with asexuality, often wrongfully ascribed to them, would be a forced and unhappy one. On the other hand, asexual people who have had to endure being treated as sick simply for their orientation would be equally wary of any talk about disability. This creates a difficult position for disabled asexuals who are often asked to validate both their identities in complete separation. The third assumption about asexuality is its frequent connection to immaturity, loneliness, inability to find a partner, and no capacity for love or desire. Many media discussions on asexuality have argued that asexuals are simply “developmentally young” (“Young and Asexual”). In addition, as according to some research the notion of sexuality is interconnected with the perception of someone as ‘human’ (Bishop), physical desire is often wrongfully conflated with the capacity for love, be it romantic, familial or friendly; a fact, which undervalues relationships not based on or not including sex. Looking at the portrayal of asexual characters in the media helps understand not only how media themselves influence the perception and identity-­making of a sexual minority, but also how relationships are constructed in contemporary society. Additionally, in 2012, a study by MacInnis and Hodson on prejudice against sexual orientation groups found that attitudes towards asexuals were the most negative, and that asexuals were perceived as the least human when compared to heterosexuals, homosexuals, or bisexuals. This illustrates the importance contemporary society ascribes to sexuality: being sexually attracted to someone or experiencing sexual desire automatically means that the person is seen as more human. The stereotypical view is that an asexual person is not only inhuman and robotic, but also child-­like, emotionally distant, and socially awkward, as exemplified by numerous instances in the media. Using the example of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, this paper aims to examine the presentation of asexuals in popular media, which, due to their wide reach, influence not only the societal opinion on asexuality but also the construction of asexual identities. The paper focuses on such stereotypes concerning asexuals as inhumanity, emotional coldness, mental health issues, and the inability to establish or maintain meaningful relationships. The choice of The Big Bang Theory as source material was motivated by the series’ steady viewership of approximately 19 million viewers for the later seasons (Patten n.p.) and by the fact that it is the first show which explores how asexuals might construct and negotiate their identities within romantic, and even sexual, relationships with other people. The Big Bang Theory is an American sitcom which started airing in 2007, and is built on the premise of a hopeful young actress moving into an apartment across the hall from two socially inept scientists. Many viewers would say that the most memorable character of the show is Dr. Sheldon Cooper, a theoretical physicist

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who is extraordinarily intelligent, but more than a little odd. The humor of the show is often centered against Sheldon’s oddities, and his perceived strangeness is often rooted in his lack of sexual desire and attraction. In other words, Sheldon’s asexuality is the source of amusement, even though what singles him out as strange, different and abnormal is not only his disinterest in sex, but also his unconventional thinking and inability to understand some forms of humor and most social clues. All of this has led many viewers to believe that Sheldon could be autistic and have Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental disorder which often manifests as incredible skill or talent for a specific subject and an inability to orient oneself in social situations. However, the creators of the show have outright denied claims that Sheldon might be autistic, and never openly admitted Sheldon’s asexuality either, even though, based on his behavior, both would be more than plausible. This leads to the possibility that both autism and asexuality still carry the stigma of the unspeakable on primetime television, something that the creators choose to either ignore or outright deny: both Sheldon’s autistic and asexual behaviors are explained away as “oddities” and seen as room for personal improvement, perpetuating the harmful stereotype that both autistic and asexual people can change who they are if they only try hard enough and/or find romantic love. The subject of asexuality as a choice comes into question within Sheldon’s dialogue about feelings. The character often directly states that he wishes to rise above human emotion and to discard feelings completely. In one episode, Sheldon is asked to participate in a documentary about Spock, a half-­alien character from the science fiction franchise Star Trek. When questioned about the reasons why he has found the character appealing as a child, Sheldon replies that what interested him was “the dream of a cold, rational world, entirely without human emotion. Spock came from a planet governed only by logic. . . . The entire point of emulating Spock was to rise above human emotion, which [he’s] spent a lifetime mastering” (The Big Bang Theory 9.7). This would imply that Sheldon has attempted to master emotionless logic, in other words, he chose to be the way he is. In view of Sheldon’s discussion of physical intimacy and sexuality, where he states that he is “working on” his discomfort with physical touch (The Big Bang Theory 6.14), these instances only serve to reinforce the stereotype that asexuality is a chosen state, an attempt to discard emotionality in favor of logic, as well as a condition to work on, and eventually, to overcome. Sheldon also fits the stereotypical view of an asexual as child-­like. He often forces his friends to drive him everywhere, and expresses exaggerated interest in things that even his friends, who all enjoy comic books, sci-­fi, games, and so on, see as childish (e.g. Sheldon is interested in trains and often feels infantile joy at

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being allowed to travel by train). It is also insinuated that Sheldon is unable to take care of himself: when ill, he demands that his friends sing him a lullaby and provide food and care. His best friend and roommate is often shown treating Sheldon as his child or even a pet. Moreover, most of the main characters of the show joke about Sheldon being an alien or a robot. This way, Sheldon is not only consistently portrayed as less than a self-­sufficient adult, but also often shown to be seen by others as less than human, reinforcing the stereotypes about asexuals as inhuman, robot-­like, and immature. In The Big Bang Theory, the question of (Sheldon’s) humanity reappears also in the use of humor. According to some theorists, one of the most important bases for humor is sexuality. Bogaert discusses this connection in Understanding Asexuality, where he explores the building and releasing of tension common both to sexual activities and the creation and reception of humor and jokes (135–137). Bogaert himself poses a question as to whether or not asexuals might be able to understand sexual humor and be amused by it. In Sheldon’s case, the question is why sometimes sexual humor goes unnoticed while at other times it causes bafflement. Bogaert admits that in order to be amused by a sexual joke, a person needs to understand it: humor is often understood to be one of the basic factors of being human, and thus if asexuals fail to comprehend humor, which, in many cases, is based on sexual activity, knowledge, or interest, they are perceived as less human for it. Humor also serves the purpose of establishing intra- and inter-­group relationships and boundaries: when a hearer laughs in response to a speaker’s humorous utterance, they signify that they . . . share the speaker’s attitude . . . . The humor contributes to a sense of solidarity, reinforcing the notion that they belong to the same group. . . . When humor is targeted at an out-­group, it further creates a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’. (Hui 194)

Consequently, when Sheldon’s asexuality becomes the source of humor for other characters, he is established as the out-­group, the outsider who does not share certain values, opinions and interests and is thus treated as odd among his group of friends. It is particularly interesting to note that nowadays, when laughing at a stereotyped version of homosexual people is becoming less and less acceptable, humor at the expense of asexual characters, and by proxy, asexual people, is still widely tolerated. Despite the fact that Sheldon Cooper is one of the most frequently discussed characters in regard to asexuality, another character on the show also provides an insight into the way this orientation is represented. In her initial appearances in the show, Sheldon’s girlfriend, Amy Farrah Fowler, is portrayed as asexual, too. Sheldon and Amy meet through an online dating website when Sheldon’s friends

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treat his disinterest in romantic and sexual relationships as a social experiment and set up his dating profile. This is symptomatic of both a disbelief on the friends’ part that Sheldon could be content without a romantic and sexual partner – a sentiment increasingly present in the show throughout the progressing seasons – and the friends’ disrespect for Sheldon as an adult human being: for his friends, Sheldon’s life is merely a source of entertainment. On their first date, Amy declares that all forms of physical intimacy including sex are “off the table” (The Big Bang Theory 3.23). At that moment, it becomes apparent that the show presents asexual relationships as inferior and even unhealthy or worrisome: Sheldon’s friends, who come to the date with him to see Amy, express dismay and discomfort, as if imagining Sheldon content in a partnership without sex was more distressing than imagining him never finding anyone. Furthermore, Amy says that she is only dating because of a deal with her mother that she would go on a date at least once a year. This would suggest that Amy is not only asexual, but also aromantic: without any interest in romantic relationships, very much like Sheldon. In the first several episodes following her appearance, Sheldon and Amy develop a relationship based strictly on friendship. Amy even explicitly states that according to her, romantic love is just a cultural construct and adds no value to relationships (The Big Bang Theory 4.5). Amy and Sheldon call Amy’s mother in order to lie about having a vigorous sex life, even if they both end up sounding rather clinical and disinterested in sex. Pretending to be in a specific kind of relationship merely for the sake of one’s parents or societal approval is not a new concept. Homosexual people have done so for decades to avoid the homophobic backlash from their family members, friends, or colleagues. However, this scene with Amy and Sheldon holds special value for the asexual community, members of which have often had to pretend to be romantically and sexually interested in someone or even dating someone in order to avoid being treated as odd. That a woman like Amy, a successful scientist in her late twenties or early thirties, would have to pretend to have a boyfriend because of her mother’s failure to understand that she did not wish for a romantic and/ or sexual relationship, illustrates that asexual people indeed face prejudice in their lives and often have to resort to lies and ruses in order to overcome it. The significance of this scene is later overshadowed by the decision of the creators to negate Amy’s asexuality and aromanticism. One of the first representations of asexual women on television in general, Amy is later over-­sexualized to the point of being subject to ridicule. This change occurs several episodes later when Amy encounters a handsome man and suddenly becomes sexually attracted to him. Such a situation clearly

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points towards one of the most harmful stereotypes about asexual people: that they are just ‘late bloomers’ and that one day they will meet someone they will be attracted to. After this forced awakening, Amy not only ceases to act and talk as an asexual person, but also becomes sexually aggressive. She constantly expresses her sexual frustration, wishes for physical intimacy, or addresses certain homoerotic sentiments so explicitly that even non-­asexual characters on the show feel uneasy. This becomes also a source of humor, if a little controversial due to the suggestion that a woman portrayed as not conventionally beautiful or physically attractive can either be absolutely asexual to the point of appearing cold, unfeeling, robotic and/or career- and logic-­oriented, or express her sexuality in an exaggerated, grotesque manner which makes everyone around her uncomfortable. However, Amy’s exaggerated expression of her sexuality also draws on the stereotype that asexual people are merely repressed, and once they undergo an awakening of their sexual feelings, like Amy did, they will immediately become sexual, i.e. ‘normal’. Following her “transformation,” Amy begins to negotiate physical intimacy with Sheldon: she is seen demanding intimacy (i.e. a kiss as payment) or asking for sex as a form of comfort. When Sheldon refuses, they barter for a while until they reach the compromise of embracing for an extended time (The Big Bang Theory 5.8). Sheldon is still clearly unhappy about overt physical intimacy, but while Amy seemed understanding and even similarly disinclined towards sexual activity before, ever since her awakening, she is increasingly dissatisfied with the level of intimacy Sheldon offers. Even after Sheldon admits having some romantic feelings for Amy, sex is still constructed as the finish line, as the important goal Sheldon has to reach in the end. Having sex is presented as character development, as an important line that Sheldon needs to cross in order to grow as a person and as a character. The other characters, such as Sheldon’s best friend and his girlfriend, constantly support Amy in her pressure on Sheldon to be physically intimate with her. In the five seasons of their relationship, there is only one instance in which one of Sheldon’s friends tells Amy that she should stop pressuring Sheldon to accept intimacy on her terms. Otherwise, everyone seems to be of the opinion that Amy is making compromises by staying with Sheldon as long as she has without sex. On several occasions, someone comments that Amy could do better, that her relationship with Sheldon isn’t “going anywhere” simply because they are not having sex. Sheldon’s perspective is, obviously, different, considering he was thinking about asking Amy to marry him. The difference between how an asexual and a non-­asexual person perceive the progression of a relationship is obvious: while for Sheldon, trust and comfort are likely more important, Amy seems happiest when he offers

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some sort of a physical progression to their relationship. The contrast once again illustrates the status of sex as vital in the contemporary society. The importance of sex in The Big Bang Theory has been established and re-­ established all through the show’s first nine seasons. Finally, after several seasons of Amy’s displeasure and Sheldon’s discomfort, Sheldon agrees to have intercourse with Amy. Nonetheless, while many viewers see this as a deviation from Sheldon’s asexuality, it is clear from the episode that Sheldon has not suddenly become sexually attracted to Amy. He agrees to have sex with her as a birthday present for her, after he asks her friends for advice, but while he claims that he enjoyed sex more than he thought he would, it later becomes clear that the activity remains at the very periphery of his mind. Sex, in Sheldon’s case, is something offered as a gift to another person, not something he is eager to do or wants to do very often. And while there are many asexual people who will also concede to have sex with their partner just for the sake of making their partner happy, it is noteworthy that the first in-­depth media portrayal of a relationship which includes an asexual person is the portrayal where the asexual person is consistently pressured into having sex. Where the show had room for depicting a non-­sexual romantic relationship between two asexual people, the creators chose to portray Amy as a hypersexual woman who will not be satisfied until she pushes her partner into having sex with her, and Sheldon as a weird person who has to be taught how to be a healthy, functioning human being experiencing romance and having sex. The show never discusses how problematic and harmful such assumptions might be in real life. This could, of course, be the result of the show never discussing Sheldon’s asexuality except in half-­jokes and hints. Yet, pretending that Sheldon’s asexuality is merely a personality quirk does not change the fact that young asexual people watching the show might question their right to refuse sex indefinitely, without having the sort of hypersexual awakening Amy has experienced, or the kind of personal development through sex that Sheldon has been slowly pressured into.

Works Cited Asexual Visibility and Education Network. Accessed 10 Oct. 2014 Bogaert, Anthony. “Asexuality: Prevalence and Associated Factors in a National Probability Sample.” The Journal of Sex Research, vol. 41, no. 3, 2004, pp. 279–287. —. Understanding Asexuality. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012. Brotto, Lori Anne, and Morag Yule. “Physiological and Subjective Sexual Arousal in Self-­Identified Asexual Women.” Archive of Sexual Behavior, vol. 40, 2011, pp. 699–712.

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Hui, S. Y. Jon. “Power and Connection: Humor in a Cantonese Family.” Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives, edited by Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini, Routledge, 2014, pp. 182–198. Kim, Eunjung. “Asexualities and Disabilities in Constructing Sexual Normalcy.” Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, edited by Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks, Routledge, 2014, pp. 249–282. Kinsey, Alfred C., et al. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. W. B. Saunders Company, 1948. Kinsey, Alfred C., et al. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. W. B. Saunders Company, 1953. Krafft-­Ebing, Richard. Psychopathia Sexualis, 7th ed., Translated by Charles Gilbert Chaddock, The F. A. Davis Company, 1894. Lorre, Chuck, and Bill Prady. The Big Bang Theory. Chuck Lorre Productions and Warner Bros. Television, 2007-present. Patten, Dominic. “Full 2012–2013 TV Season Series Rankings.” Deadline.com. 23 May 2013. Accessed 1 Feb. 2016.

Olga Korytowska

#effyourbeautystandards: Body Positivity Movement as an Expression of Feminist Identity Abstract: Focusing on online body positivity movement in the context of feminist legacy, the article analyzes its promises of fostering new appreciation of various embodiments as well as the limitations posed by potential appropriation of body-­positive ideals. Keywords: body positivity, body image, feminism

A photo of a bikini-­clad woman standing in a confident pose and smiling. Underneath there is a short description and hashtags, giving additional context for the photo. Arguably, this is a ubiquitous image online.1 What makes it stand apart from many other pictures of women enjoying the summer heat, however, is the size of the model (her body is considerably larger than required by mainstream standards) as well as the already-­mentioned hashtags, such as #bopo and #effyourbeautystandards. It is those small but powerful indexing tools that put the photo in another context and make it one of the increasing number of examples of body positivity movement, which can be found across social media. This recent abundance of body positive content online has been accompanied by a proliferation of body positive discourses, a change visible in the mainstream culture as well – with “empowering” advertising campaigns like those by Dove, careers of models such as Winnie Harlow, Tess Holiday or Shaun Ross, or Lena Dunham’s performative nudity on HBO’s Girls (Marghitu and Ng). #Bopo stands for body positivity, which can be understood in two ways. On a more general level, it can be described as an affirming approach towards the human body, one that appreciates all body types, disregarding their size, shape or color. A more narrow definition, however, leads to the concept of body positivity movement, which is not merely an affective approach towards the human body, but rather a type of activism, connected to a particular community, usually a community of women. Even though body positivity movement is not solely focused on the bodies of women, it usually acknowledges that body image issues and body shaming are gendered phenomena that require a gender analysis. In advocating to overcome them, the movement very often positions itself as a path 1 Cf. the Instagram screenshots of most popular hashtags included at the end of this article.

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towards female empowerment. In this paper, I would like to trace the intersections of body positivity with feminism, understood both as a theory and social movement. I am basing this paper on the observational research carried out across social media and traditional webpages. In identifying particular posts and media outlets as examples of body positivity movement(s) I relied on their own identification, expressed in metadata labels such as hashtags. While this obviously is not a perfect method of sampling, it has certain advantages: hashtags generate a kind of snowball effect, allowing one to identify the group observed pretty easily and widely. What is more, this method does not lead to imposing labels on the users, but rather lets them self-­identify as the proponents of the movement. I argue that there is a considerable legacy of feminism traceable within online body positivity movement. However, while drawing heavily from feminism has allowed body positivity movement to expand towards the issues of social justice and intersectionality, there are certain elements of the movement which are problematic in/for the feminist context and, thus, require a closer analysis. I believe that some of the paradoxes of body positivity movement are similar to what has also been identified as traps for feminism by authors such as Nancy Fraser and Angela McRobbie.

The online body The body positivity movement has found a perfect outlet in the post-­millennial world of social media, especially the platforms which are particularly visually-­ oriented, such as Instagram, and microblogs that aggregate online content, such as Tumblr. There are a number of plausible explanations as to why those outlets are attractive for the movement. First of all, because of the fact that they are open-­ access and anybody can create an account and post there, social media offer a new outlet, or a new space of expression for those whose bodies have been historically repressed, or deemed unacceptable and undesirable in public places. Social media and photoblogs create a type of public space, but a safer one, and may provide a sense of community produced between interlinked social media accounts, blogs, etc. Perhaps then, it would be valid to ask what, if any, features of social media specifically enhance this possibility of sharing one’s psychological journey towards body acceptance. Richard Perloff identifies a few characteristics that have an explanatory potential: their interactivity, user activeness, interpersonal nature, rich modalities which “lend a feeling of presence” and “can encourage suspension of belief and attitude change,” as well as the fact that they allow for the creation of like-­minded individuals (Perloff). The internet is also a medium that allows any message to be dispersed easily and quickly, which is of significance for the activist goals of the movement. Be-

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yond creating a sense of community for the non-­normatively bodied, the movement also aims at facilitating the visibility and thus expanding the representation of different bodies in culture. Very often, it also includes consumer actions, such as influencing the marketers to offer clothes, products, and services for those whose bodies fall outside the societal or cultural body ideal. This comes paired with actions aimed at reducing body shaming, stigmatization, prejudice and outright discrimination. Such goals are often presented in the context of ideals of social justice and intersectionality. A very interesting example of that comes from “The Body Is Not an Apology,” a website fully dedicated to body positivity: we believe in the possibility of sustainable social change, community, and personal health and wellness. We know such change must be built on a foundation of deep radical self-­ love. We are an intersectional, global, difference-­celebrating movement that knows our age, race, size, gender, dis/ability, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, class, and every other human attribute are assets towards unapologetic radical self-­love and living. We know that each time we heal our shame, love our bodies, value ourselves, and step into our power, we give someone else permission to do the same!2

This quote indicates an intersection of various aspects of identities from which certain modes of knowledge come. The founding element for this kind of message is the standpoint theory, which places the epistemic authority in the experiences and knowledge of the group or individual in question and allows for a social and political disadvantage to be “turned into an epistemic, scientific and political advantage” (Harding 7–8). The reason for employing the standpoint theory, popular in feminism, race studies as well as disability studies, is that it “challenges a range of binary norms around, for example, researcher and subject; theory and practice; self and other; mind and body, and relocates knowledge and practice within the messy and contradictory realm of lived experience rather than abstract theorisation and dualistic locations of power and control” (Inckle 256). The rhetoric behind such an approach has also been reflected in the seminal 1970s book Our Bodies, Ourselves, which opened conversation on women’s bodies and the ways in which they have been historically controlled without female oversight. At the same time, messages that emphasize the physical abilities and strength of plus-­ size bodies are reminiscent of the Health at Every Size movement. This interest in health is two-­fold in so far as it challenges the rigid, BMI-­based, biomedical definitions of overweight and obesity, as well as expanding the concept of what a healthy body might look like.

2 https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/about-tbinaa/history-mission-and-vision/ [access: 15.06.2016]

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Legacy of feminism As I have claimed earlier, rather than subject women to rigorous beauty regimes, body positivity movement urges them to accept their bodies as they are. In that sense, I would like to argue, it positions itself as a path to female empowerment and can be analyzed as an expression of feminist identity. Such a claim is complicated in so far as the rhetoric of choice characteristic of both third wave feminism and the so-­called pop-­feminism allows one to characterize as feminist the statements and phenomena which may not seem to be so at first. Nevertheless, among the most visible intersections of body positivity with feminism I identify four: fat-­positive feminism, which first emerged during the second wave, the legacy of 1960s and 1970s consciousness-­raising groups, emphasis on intersectionality traceable within the third wave feminism (due to the legacy of earlier race and class studies) as well as, at least to some extent, certain similarities to feminist new materialism. First of all, a strong legacy of the second-­wave feminism is discernible in body positivity movement, namely in the refusal to succumb to the oppressive norms of beauty. As Susan Bordo reminds her readers, one of the important and, in a sense, community-­founding events of the second wave was the protest against the Miss America beauty pageant that took place in 1968 (Bordo 19). It is in this cultural context that fat-­positive feminism first emerged and while partially in line with the second-­wave in general, it also formed a critical and counter-­mainstream trend within feminism. As I have pointed out earlier, through showcasing personal narratives of body acceptance and journeys towards the love of one’s body, body positivity movement employs a largely psychologized language of self-­help. While this proliferation of popular psychology is certainly in par with the individualistic American culture, this particular strain of self-­help discourse can also be traced back to feminist activism, according to Eva Illouz, who in her book Cold Intimacies points out the shared elements of psychology and feminism: perhaps most importantly, both feminism and therapy shared the idea and the practice of converting private experience into public speech, both in the sense that it was a speech with and for an audience, and in the sense that it was a speech to be committed to the discussion of norms and values which had a general, rather than particular character. An obvious example . . . is the consciousness-­raising group which was so important to grass-­roots second-­wave feminism. (26–27)

The microblogs through which women (and men) fighting to change body stigma can be indeed conceived of as consciousness-­raising groups are both a space for healing and education. This is perhaps again most visible in the case of sites such as the afore-­mentioned “The Body Is Not an Apology,” which regularly features

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a number of articles devoted to mental health issues resulting from body image problems. Another current, not necessarily a conscious one, is the similarity to new materialism, which urges feminist theory to look back and focus on the embodiment. As one of the founding authors of the feminist new materialism rebukes, “[w][e have forgotten the nature, the ontology of the body, the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency. We have forgotten where we come from” (Grosz 2). Whether this emphasis on the body and biology, also known as the “ontological turn,” is indeed an unprecedented feature within feminist history has been a contested issue3; however, without a doubt, a similar sentiment seems to run under body positivity movement. The recurring origin story here, besides the individual dissatisfaction with the body, is the emphasis on how mainstream culture does not recognize the cultural, social and political forces which lead to the devaluation of certain types of bodies, instead treating them as sites of individual responsibility.

In the crux of double entanglement In her interesting reading of cosmetic surgery “Women and the Knife,” Kathryn Morgan identifies three paradoxes stemming from the application of the language of choice in the context of elective surgery, which can be extrapolated to any kinds of decisions concerning beauty and appearance. She observes that the rhetoric of choice has to be undermined by the fact that the choices typically lead to one particular ideal of beauty, reinforced by racist and heteronormative assumptions on what female beauty should be like (Morgan 172). She further questions the supposedly transformative effects of cosmetic surgery, showing that such an approach in fact implicates a certain image of the female body as a “raw material” which can – or rather, within the mainstream paradigm, has to – be colonized (Morgan 173). Finally, the third paradox, centered around what she calls the “technological imperative,” tackles the problem of voluntary informed choice and coercion. She points to the fact that the omnipresence of beautification technologies has made them obligatory – the lack of beauty can no longer be blamed on “bad” genes, but rather on the lack of trying to undergo specific transformations. The paradoxes help to show the problem of the rhetoric of choice in a broader light, and its problematic status in what has also been deemed “post-­feminist” cul3 See for instance: S Ahmed, “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism,’” European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2008, pp. 23–39.

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ture. The post-­feminist problem of the co-­existence of seemingly contradictory values and cultural trends, which should exclude one another but do not because of the category of choice, has been perhaps most vocally discussed by British feminist Angela McRobbie, who described it as “double entanglement” (12). A somewhat similar argument about the ease with which feminism can be appropriated by fundamentally different ideologies has been made by Nancy Fraser, albeit in a different, more political-­historical context. In a widely-­discussed lecture “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” Fraser indicates how feminism was able to converge with neoliberalism in the 1970s, due to the theory’s shift towards cultural issues and recognition of difference and identity, which in turn partially stemmed from the disenchantment with the largely patriarchal Left. I consider these two diagnoses an important cautionary tale against considering all examples of body positive messages as automatically empowering, even less so liberating. It seems to me that the main danger of the appropriation of body positivity lies in emphasizing its individualistic aspects, while this partially comes from the said neoliberal power to depoliticize and appropriate even the most radical ideas and turn them into either consumer products or trendy buzzwords (for instance in the form of hashtags).

Negatives of body positivity For instance, one of the first problems that calls for attention here is the issue of potential backlash. The inclusion of different body types may lead to advocating some body types over others. This is manifested in hashtags such as #realwomenhavecurves, among others, which, though superficially aiming at challenging the existing beauty norms, do impose other requirements of what female bodies should look like. This shows that the movement might not be as inclusive as it often presents itself to be. Additionally, while supposedly fighting the ubiquity of the unattainable mainstream beauty ideals, body positive “advertisements obscure their own investment in the ‘fat talk’ they claim to oppose, but they also – seemingly paradoxically – rely upon repeatedly making visible what we might call ‘hate your body’ talk – reinforcing the very ideas they purport to challenge – and relocating them as individual women’s problems” (Gill and Elias 184). It is also vital not to forget that the advertisements that appropriate the body positive message have a principally monetary goal and thus they might encourage the development of commodity feminism. What is more, as much as inspirations of the second-­wave feminism can be emphasized, the truth is that there is a significant difference between the radical feminism’s message on beauty and the body and one currently promoted by many body positivity activists. That is, much of current body positivity movement insists on using the category of beauty, rather than rejecting it altogether. While certainly

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this new category of beauty is much more inclusive (of various body types) and encompassing (as it makes space for inner beauty as well, however it might be defined), it still links a woman’s worth with aesthetic pleasure. Similarly, in the context of the disability theory, insistence on the category of health, as used by the proponents of Health at Every Size movement, is equally problematic, because it favors health as justification for non-­normative embodiment and its presence in the public space. But perhaps the most twisted outcome, or rather an underside of body positive movement, comes in what can be described as the “terror of self-­love.” This flip coin of the affirming approach towards one’s own body is akin to the underside of positive thinking as presented by Barbara Ehrenreich in her fascinating book Smile or Die (US title: Bright-­sided), where she enumerates different dimensions in which optimism as the driving ideological force of the American culture led to paradoxical consequences. The reason for that is partially because, behind positive thinking, there always is “the darker message that if you don’t have all that you want, if you feel sick, discouraged, or defeated, you have only yourself to blame” (Ehrenreich 146). When applied to the context of body image and beauty, an insufficient level of self-­love becomes a reason to blame the individual. What makes it even more problematic is that self-­love in popular narratives is often constructed as a condition for being accepted and loved by others – thus making it a vicious circle for the person who wants to change their self-­image. A similar belief and insistence on personal responsibility in the context of healthcare and health promotion, emerging in the late 1970s and 1980s, was deemed “healthism” by American social economist Robert Crawford. I believe that it is worth mentioning, because it seems to me that there is a common element behind this insistence on individual responsibility for one’s health, happiness and self-­acceptance. A similar line of critique appears in an important article by Rosalind Gill and Ana Elias, who criticize “love-­your-­body discourses,” that is, popular media messages that urge women to accept and love their bodies, manifested in television programs such as the British How to Look Good Naked and their American as well as worldwide counterparts. The authors see the problem as an “intensification of the pressure and its extensification from body work to psychic project” (Gill and Elias 185) and see its roots partially in the “interplay between neoliberal and postfeminist governmentality, emotional capitalism and the labour of self-­confidence” (Gill and Elias 185). Again, beauty is a still used category, but rather than being “in the eye of the beholder,” it becomes a mental state that has to be achieved by the individual in question – in the capitalist paradigm achieved through the consumption of self-­help.

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Perspectives for the future Despite the undoubtedly positive aspects of the shift towards body positivity visible in social media, which slowly begins to enter mainstream media, some of its elements may contradict its self-­proclaimed goals of greater inclusivity. In this essay, I aimed to identify and emphasize them. This, however, should not be read as a dismissal of body positivity movement. On the contrary, I believe that it is a vital message that needs to be repeated again and again so that it is body positivity rather than unattainable beauty standards that becomes what young girls and women (as well as boys and men) internalize. However, I believe that for it to be truly liberating, body positivity should not be articulated in an overly individualistic language, which risks being appropriated by hegemonic discourses. Instead, it needs to be placed in the context of social justice, where equal emphasis is placed on the problems of gender, race and class inequality. Figures: Instagram screenshots of most popular body positivity hashtags

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Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism.’” European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2008, pp. 23–39. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. University of California Press, 2005. Crawford, Robert. “Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life.” International Journal of Health Services, vol. 10, no. 3, 1980, pp. 365–88. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & the World. London, 2009. Fraser, Nancy. “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History.” New Left Review, vol. 56, 2011, pp. 97–111. Gill, Rosalind, and Ana Sofia Elias. “Awaken Your Incredible: Love Your Body Discourses and Postfeminist Contradictions.” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, vol. 10, no. 2, 2014, pp. 179–188. Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Identity and the Untimely. Duke University Press, 2004. Harding, Sandra. “Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate.” The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader, edited by Sandra Harding. Routledge, 2004, pp. 1–15. Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity, 2011. Inckle, Kay. “Bent: Non-­Normative Embodiment as Lived Intersectionality.” Intersectionality and Sexuality, edited by Y. Taylor et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 255–273. Marghitu, Stefania, and Conrad Ng. “Body Talk: Reconsidering the Post-­Feminist Discourse and Critical Reception of Lena Dunham’s Girls.” Gender Forum, vol. 45, 2013. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. Sage, 2009. Morgan, Kathryn Pauly. “Women and the Knife: Cosmetic Surgery and the Colonization of Women’s Bodies.” The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance and Behavior, edited by Rose Weitz. Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 164–183. Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century: A Book By and for Women. Simon & Schuster, 1998. Perloff, Richard M. “Social Media Effects on Young Women’s Body Image Concerns: Theoretical Perspectives and an Agenda for Research.” Sex Roles, vol. 71, 2014, pp. 363–377.

Ewelina Feldman-­Kołodziejuk

Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County Abstract: The article analyses August: Osage County through the prism of psychological theories pertaining to the intergenerational cycle of trauma and violence and aims to manifest how well grounded in these theories the discussed play is. Keywords: intergenerational transmission, trauma, cycle of violence, motherhood, mother-­ daughter relationship.

The recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County is a poignant play that has gained worldwide popularity thanks to its 2013 film adaptation, directed by John Wells and starring a great many acclaimed actors. August: Osage County unravels the story of the distressed Weston family. The sudden disappearance of Beverly Weston, the father, forces his three daughters to come back to their family home and confront their terminally ill and drug dependent mother, Violet Weston. In the climax scene at Beverly’s wake, for it turns out that he committed suicide, the family dinner converts into a bona fide battlefield. Graphic details of Violet’s tragic childhood are revealed and her long-­felt disappointment with her daughters is overtly vocalized. Her borderline behavior and sudden mood swings make her recurrent dependence on pills so conspicuous that, consequently, the Weston girls have no choice but engage once more in acting out a well-­known scenario of coercing their mother into going into rehab. The following article analyses August: Osage County through the prism of psychological theories pertaining to the intergenerational cycle of trauma and violence and aims to manifest how well grounded the discussed play is in these theories. The characters’ development, their life attitudes and choices lend such verisimilitude to the play that, but for its literary value, it would read like a clinical study of the cycle of trauma within the family context. Special focus will be placed in the article on the overlap between the characters of the three Weston girls: Barbara, Ivy and Karen, and on the third-­generation scenarios presented in the theoretical model of the Cycles of Trauma and Violence posited by Pamela Alexander, a renowned American researcher and specialist in family violence. The three possible scenarios for the third generation that Alexander’s model singles out are as follows: controlling behavior toward a parent with an increased risk for aggression, caregiving role-­reversing behavior toward a parent with an increased

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risk for abuse by others and, finally, disorganized behavior with an increased risk for aggression and abuse by others (Alexander 12). This intricate theoretical model reflects perfectly well what a complex and environment-­dependent process breaking the cycle of violence and trauma might be and what divergent routes family trauma might follow. The model discussed predominantly rests upon two complementary theories that explicate possible scenar­ ios, namely, the attachment theory that focuses on the relationship between the child and the caregiver, and the family systems theory that focuses on the larger context of this relationship. According to both of these theories, unresolved inner conflicts can lead to the perpetuation of oppressive behavior, but the extent to which one can become abusive towards others, including one’s children or intimate partner, may be moderated by a number of factors, among which are secure attachment to the caretaker at an early stage of life, the presence of any other significant person who was of support and help in childhood, a supportive life partner or even self-­reflection and therapy. On the other hand, “the cumulative effects of five socioeconomic risk factors (low income, substance abuse, young maternal age at childbirth, low level of education, and single parenthood)” (Alexander 41) can lead to the disorganized attachment of a child to the same extent as actual child maltreatment. Therefore, the difficult socioeconomic situation of the family may not only increase the risk of further abuse in the family, but it may itself constitute the source of trauma. All the representatives of generation one in the cycle of trauma and violence of the Weston family are most likely dead at the outset of the play. However, their absence is just an illusion for they have always held a strong grip on generation two, namely, Violet and her late husband Beverly. The harsh family backgrounds and childhood traumas of both partners have had a tremendous impact on their life choices and partly account for the current dramatic state of the Weston family, Beverly’s suicide inclusive. Both partners experienced extreme poverty and lack of security and stability in their childhood, the extent of which becomes evident when the reader learns that Beverly lived with his parents in a Pontiac sedan till the age of 10. The fear of poverty and most likely the shame associated with it seem to be an underlying motivation for Violet and Beverly’s actions; after all, their private story may be read in terms of a “from rags to riches” narrative, with a homeless boy becoming an award-­winning poet. Their choice of a life partner was most likely an example of assortative mating, which Pamela Alexander writes about: There is good evidence that, to some extent, individuals choose their partners on the basis of their family history and their preexisting state of mind with regard to attachment. Evidence of assortative mating exists with regard to insecure attachment and unresolved attachment. (55)

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Having grown up in dysfunctional families, Violet and Beverly had a common resolution to never experience poverty again, but their marriage was also based on mutual acceptance of each other’s addictions. In order to resolve, or perhaps evade resolving, their inner conflicts, both Violet and Beverly turned to substance abuse, medications and alcohol respectively. In the opening scene of the play the husband explicates the nature of their relationship: BEVERLY: My wife takes pills and I drink. That’s the bargain we’ve struck … one of the bargains, just one paragraph of our marriage contract … cruel covenant. (11, emphasis in the original)

As for “the cumulative effects of five socioeconomic risk factors,” apart from low income and substance abuse, another effect that applies to the Weston couple is young maternal age at childbirth. They must have married young for their first child, Barbara, was born when Violet was merely 19 and, consequently, at the age of 25, she was already mothering three girls. Trapped at home looking after her three daughters and struggling to take care of her household, Violet could have been one of the frustrated housewives Betty Friedan portrayed in her seminal work, The Feminine Mystique. Like many women depicted in Friedan’s book, Violet most likely never worked professionally and her primary identity was that of a wife and a mother. Due to the absence of a sense of self that would not encompass her husband and offspring, Violet depended on them to fulfill her psychological, emotional but also financial needs. Shifting the fulfillment of one’s needs to the outside world unfailingly leads to frustration since it always depends on someone else and is beyond one’s control unless one resorts to forms of manipulation like emotional blackmail or veiled threats. In the case of Violet, the source of frustration and disappointment stems from the fact that her identity and sense of success have always been bound to her husband’s and daughters’ achievements. If they fail, she fails as a wife and mother, too. Friedan elucidates this dependency in the following way: A woman’s work – housework – cannot give her status; it has the lowliest status of almost any work in society. A woman must acquire her status vicariously through her husband’s work. The husband himself, and even the children, become symbols of status, for when a woman defines herself as a housewife, the house and the things in it are, in a sense, her identity; she needs these external trappings to buttress her emptiness of self, to make her feel like somebody. She becomes a parasite, not only because the things she needs for status come ultimately from her husband’s work, but because she must dominate, own him, for the lack of an identity of her own. If her husband is unable to provide the things she needs for status, he becomes an object of contempt, just as she is contemptuous of him if he cannot fill her sexual needs. Her very dissatisfaction with herself she feels as dissatisfaction with her husband and their sexual relations. (260)

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Violet’s feelings for her husband fluctuate between admiration for his poetic talent and downright contempt. The marriage cannot have been a happy one from the outset since Beverly had a history of escapes from home and a covert love affair with Violet’s much younger sister, Mattie Fae, who gave birth to his son, Little Charles. At that moment his daughters were aged nine, seven and three, respectively. The fact that Violet was in the know from the beginning of their secret affair but chose not to reveal it points either to the manipulative nature of their marriage or perhaps exposes the extent to which Violet depended on her husband financially and had no choice but pretend to be the moral victor: BARBARA: You’ve known about Daddy and Mattie Fae all these years. VIOLET: Oh, sure. I never told them I knew. But your father knew. He knew I knew. He always knew I knew. But we never talked about it. I chose the higher ground. (135)

In the scene when it becomes evident that Violet could have prevented Beverly from committing suicide but instead “waited so [she] could get [her] hands on that safety deposit box” that contained their lifetime savings, she herself reveals in an invocation to her late husband the power struggle they both engaged in: VIOLET: You want to show who’s stronger now, Bev? Nobody is stronger than me, goddamn it. When nothing is left, when everything is gone and disappeared, I’ll be there. Who’s stronger now, you son-­of-­a-bitch?! (137)

One can only imagine how destructive such a game of who is in control and who hurts more might be not only for the marriage but the whole family system, too. The association with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is inevitable. August: Osage County could be read in terms of an alternative version of Edward Albee’s play; per chance, if George and Martha were able to conceive, instead of overt verbal abuse that let them vent out their frustrations and disappointment on each other, they would be drinking in silence and falling into a sulk like Beverly and Violet. Both couples, however, are bound to each other through the same psychological mechanism of “the similarity of the stuff in front of their screens,” as Robin Skynner phrases it (45, emphasis in the original). The partners have denied the difficult feelings they have experienced in the past and severed themselves from them by setting up metaphoric screens. As it has been previously mentioned, through the mechanism of assortative mating, people are unconsciously most attracted to individuals with the same contents hidden behind the screen. Therefore, similarly to George and Martha, Beverly and Violet are drawn to each other because they sense the same deprivation, longing or suffering in one another. Skynner explicates it to Cleese in the following terms:

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George and Martha are both enormously vulnerable. Each of them has an almost child-­ like longing for affection. But they’ve put that longing behind the screen. They deny it completely; they’re quite unaware of it now, and they’ve covered it up with a sophisticated facade. (45)

Though the barrier they built allows them to avoid confrontation with unpleasant, repressed feelings, it is not altogether conducive for unsatisfied needs and affection inevitably lead to anger and frustration. Furthermore, repressed anger and irritation that slowly build up eventually reach their climax, resulting in angry outbursts. In consequence, spouses “spend half their lives in infantile rages with each other” (45). The difference between the two couples, nonetheless, would be that while Martha and George were locked in a passionate love-­hate relationship, Violet and Beverly most likely stopped caring for each other, for, as Ivy notices, “I think this time is different. . . . Because I think back then they were trying” (19). Growing up in a home that is free from physical violence but where parents bear grudges against each other can have equally detrimental effect on children as physical abuse. In the chapter entitled “Why Emotional Abuse Is So Insidious,” Beverly Engel elaborates on the severity of emotional abuse which is often undermined and belittled: Abuse is any behavior that is designed to control and subjugate another human being through the use of fear, humiliation, and verbal or physical assaults. Emotional abuse is any kind of abuse that is emotional rather than physical in nature. It can include anything from verbal abuse and constant criticism to more subtle tactics, such as intimidation, manipulation, and refusal to ever be pleased. (10)

It must be acknowledged that Violet has, figuratively speaking, gone a long way from her family home, refraining from using physical violence she was herself subjected to as a child by her “dear mother’s many gentlemen friends” (94). However, she did not manage to avoid the pitfalls that await those who wish to break the cycle of trauma and violence. As Pamela Alexander observes, “[i]ndividuals who interrupt the cycle of abuse with their own children are less likely to idealize their parents and more likely to remember specific instances of abuse as well as their emotional reaction to the abuse” (9), and Violet has fulfilled that condition. The heartrending anecdote about muddy boots given as a Christmas present instead of the desired cowboy boots reveals the true horror of Violet’s childhood in the form of her vicious sadistic mother. Even though Violet Weston loved her daughters and put a lot of effort into providing her children with what they needed, her anguished past resulting in unresolved inner conflicts and self-­destructive tendencies that led her to drug dependence turned her new family home into

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an insidiously traumatic environment. Nevertheless, she denies sharing any responsibility for Beverly’s death or her daughters’ misery. Interestingly, her denial might possibly stem from her genuine conviction of being guiltless if we assume that Violet suffers from borderline personality disorder. In her article “Intergenerational Transmission of Abuse: Implications for Parenting Interventions From a Neuropsychological Perspective,” Lisa DeGregorio links child maltreatment with the development of the aforementioned condition: The relationship between early adverse events in childhood and negative psychological outcomes in adulthood has also been highlighted by the study of psychological disorders such as borderline personality disorder (BPD). . . . BPD is characterized by deficits in affect (e.g., chronic feelings of emptiness, inappropriate displays of anger, affective instability), cognition (e.g., stress related paranoid ideation and identity disturbance, impulsive behavior, and suicidal ideation), and unstable and intense interpersonal relationships. (161)

Undeniably, Violet fits this medical description perfectly, and her sudden mood swings testify to her emotional instability and problems with affect regulation. A similar description of a borderline patient is offered by Hill, who writes: Deficiencies in affect tolerance, modulation and resilience manifest as psychiatric symptomatology, such as anxiety states or depressive states. Borderline personality disorder is marked by chaotic vacillations from one affective extreme to the other and by remaining in dysregulated affect states for prolonged periods. (4)

Violet oscillates between a fairly loving and understanding mother and a ruthless tyrant determined to hurt everyone she can, out of spite and for sheer entertainment. Heavily shaded yet suffocating, the house itself points to her ongoing bouts of severe depression interrupted by fits of unbridled rage. Despite the fact that neither Violet nor Beverly used violence against their daughters, not physical at least, their home was permeated with the air of maternal martyrdom and high expectations that led to disappointment. VIOLET: Now what else do you want to say about your rotten childhood? That’s the crux of the biscuit: we lived too hard, then rose too high. We sacrificed everything and we did it all for you. Your father and I were the first in our families to finish high school and he wound up an award-­winning poet. You girls, given a college education, taken for granted no doubt, and where’d you wind up? . . . Jesus, you worked as hard as us, you’d all be president. You never had real problems so you got to make all your problems yourselves. (95, emphasis in the original)

Such high expectations are typical of ambivalent mothers who treat their children as their personal extensions. Violet incessantly emphasizes her love and the sacrifices she made in order to raise her daughters and provide them with everything

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that they needed and that she herself was deprived of. She feels she is entitled to their happiness and successes since she paid for them with her own blood, not only in a metaphorical sense. Nonetheless, none of the Weston daughters is happy but all of them seem to bear a grudge of some kind. Though each of them chose to follow a different life scenario, eerily, their lives are overshadowed by the presence of their critical (inner) mother who seems to be deeply disappointed with her daughters. Their predicament is thoroughly captured and universalized in the epigraph to the play that comes from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men: When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can. And the good old family reunion, with picnic dinner under maples, is very much like diving into the octopus tank at the aquarium. (7)

All the Weston girls moved out of their family farmhouse and went to live in Colorado, Tulsa and Florida, respectively. Only the middle daughter, Ivy, stayed close enough to look after their parents, and she is the one that engaged in “care­ giving, role-­reversing behavior toward parent.” Unlike Barbara and Karen, who come home every few years, Ivy is the only one to visit their parents regularly. Yet, her presence seems to be belittled by her mother, who may call her “a comfort” but does not perceive her in terms of help and reliability. “I need Barb,” Violet confesses. Strong parental favoritism emphasized by Violet but also the Weston girls themselves may partially account for the poor relations between the sisters. In one of the most intimate scenes in the play when the three sisters gather to talk and reminisce, Ivy is the only one to bare naked the truth of their feeble sisterly bond: “I can’t perpetuate these myths of family and sisterhood anymore. We’re all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing more” (102). Living closest to her toxic family home, Ivy seems to be the only Weston girl that has managed to relinquish the grip of her family home and resolve her inner conflicts. Since she has finally plucked up the courage to move to New York and abandon her work at a college library in Tulsa, she appears to have set free from her mother’s omnipotence and guilt for not catering for her. Eventually, she has come to realize that she is entitled to happiness. Presumably, the burden of taking care of her parents without her sisters’ support and being incessantly exposed to her mother’s ambivalence helped her to complete her individuation process through self-­reflection and, quite likely, a fulfilling relationship with Little Charles. When accused by Barbara of being cynical, Ivy retorts: “Maybe my cynicism flowered with the realization that the obligation of caring for our parents was mine alone” (103). However excruciating

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looking after her parents must have been, it was worth it since Ivy is the only one who can break the cycle of trauma and violence in her family. Of all Weston girls, she would stand the biggest chance of not transmitting her family trauma onto the next generation. Ironically, she cannot have children herself as a result of a hysterectomy she has had due to cervical cancer. Thus, inadvertently, Ivy’s fate epitomizes the overall message of the play, that is, the only absolute guarantee of breaking the cycle of trauma is the choice of childlessness. At first glance, it is Barbara who gives the impression of having severed the family tentacle-­like ties and broken the cycle of trauma and violence by setting up her family with Bill, with whom she has a fourteen-­year-­old daughter, Jean. Despite appearances, it soon becomes evident that Barbara displays an unresolved attachment to her mother and is still locked up in their ongoing battle. Violet, on the other hand, desires her presence for she is the only daughter who can pick up the gauntlet and openly challenge her tyranny. The violent nature of their relationship and the power struggle is disclosed when Barbara realizes her mother’s dependence on pills and attempts to take them away from her. Stage directions read: Violet shakes the pill bottle, taunting Barbara. Barbara snaps, screams, lunges again, grabs Violet by the hair, pulls her up, toppling chairs. They crash through the house, pursued by the family. Pandemonium. Screaming. Barbara strangles Violet. With great effort, Bill and Charlie pry the two women apart. (97)

The scene ends with Barbara ordering a pill raid on Violet’s house and bellowing “I’M RUNNING THINGS NOW!” (97). Henceforth, Barbara is once more in charge of the whole family and getting her mother clean. Similarly to Violet, Barbara is also full of bitter memories of her childhood that was lived to her mother’s in-­and-­out-­of-­rehab-­center rhythm. Unlike Karen, who is still in the infantile phase of denial, Barbara does not embellish her past at a family home and her visit reminds her why she fled that place. However, she has not learnt to manage her anger effectively and, as a result, it resurges violently in the least desirable and predictable moments, like when she slaps her daughter across the face for talking back to her father. Though she constantly needs to be in control of everything, she cannot regulate her affects. After she has snapped or verbally assaulted someone, Barbara repents and occasionally apologizes, but this pattern severely undermines her self-­image of being in control and contributes to her sense of defeat. In a conversation with her husband Bill, she admits: “I fail. As a sister, as a mother, as a wife. I fail. . . . I’ve physically attacked Mom and Jean in the space of about nine hours. Stick around here much longer and I’ll cut off your penis” (122). Conceivably, Barbara’s problem might stem from the “it is all or nothing” attitude; she is as hard on others as she is on herself. Her uncompro-

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mising approach is pointed out by her sister Karen after it turns out her fiancé attempted to seduce the teenage Jean. I know Steven should know better than Jean, that she’s only fourteen. My point is, it’s not cut and dried, black and white, good or bad. It lives where everything lives: somewhere in the middle. Where everything lives, where all the rest of us live, everyone but you. (121, emphasis in the original)

The fact that Barbara’s furious outburst may result from an affect dysregulation, rather than boil down to an impulsive character, may be supported by Scene 5 of Act 3, in which Ivy comes to inform Violet of her departure for New York. In a truly desperate attempt to stop Ivy from telling her mother about her plans, Barbara engages in an irrational and abusive exchange in which she repeatedly urges her mother to “eat the fish,” interspersing her chant with invectives. At that moment in the play, the house of the Weston family becomes a bona fide madhouse, crockery smashing inclusive. When, devastated by the news of Little Charles being her half-­brother, Ivy runs away and Barbara endeavors to defend herself by saying she did nothing and that Ivy should be blaming her mother, Ivy pronounces the notable words: “There’s no difference” (135). At a metaphorical level, there is no difference between Barbara and Violet, as the daughter is the continuity of the mother. Of the three Weston girls, Barbara is most similar to her mother in her unresolved attachment to her own mother, in her affect dysregulation and her disappointment with the way life has turned out. The last of the Weston girls to discuss is Karen, the youngest daughter, who is characterized by “disorganized behavior and increased risk for aggression and abuse by others.” But for occasional taunts, Karen is entirely ignored by her mother, yet, interestingly, she seems to be the only daughter that is still in the phase of denial. She is not capable of standing up for herself or even reacting adequately to an adverse situation with anger, retorting or at least sulking. She claims to feel sisterly connection despite not having had any contact with her siblings for years. Her scanty lines in the play are largely hackneyed phrases which are not even adequate to the actual situation, like, for instance, her remark about her parents’ longstanding marriage: KAREN: That’s one thing about Mom and Dad. You have to tip your cap to anyone who can stay married that long. IVY: Karen. He killed himself. (101)

In the conversation between Karen and Barbara upon their arrival at the family home, it becomes evident that Karen has a history of abusive relationships from which she allegedly has managed to escape thanks to self-­help books, discussion

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groups and Scientology. Generally, she is the least stable and the least mature of the Weston girls and since she is emotionally disorganized, she is attracted to men that clearly neither respect her nor treat her seriously. With such low self-­esteem, she falls easy prey to womanizers and is consistently reduced to a sex object. Even the current relationship with her fiancé Steve, who is ten years Karen’s senior and in the course of the play endeavors to pick up the fourteen-­year-­old Jean, is far from perfect. It seems that Karen readily swapped her role of an abused party for the role of a trophy wife, with her uttermost dream of a honeymoon in Belize. Though Karen learns about Steve’s advances towards Jean, rather than leave him unconditionally, she justifies his actions by underscoring how we all make mistakes and do things we can be ashamed of. In lieu of adequate steps, she projects her frustration on Barbara, who forces her to acknowledge the fact that her fiancé is far from a decent man. Importantly, Karen is neither ignorant nor imperceptive; she chooses not to take any action and go along with her dream scenario of a wealthy businessman’s spouse. Leaving her family home precipitously, she tells Barbara: I’m not defending him. He’s not perfect. Just like all the rest of us, down here in the muck. I’m no angel myself. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of. Things you’ll never know about. Know what? I may even have to do some things I’m not proud of again. ‘Cause sometimes life puts you in a corner that way. And I am a human being, after all. … Come January … I’ll be in Belize. Doesn’t that sound nice? (121)

In her pursuit of happiness and sustaining illusions of being in a fulfilling relationship, Karen is a hopeless case, for she refuses to acknowledge the fact that she still perpetuates the same pattern of abuse. Unlike her sisters, the youngest Weston girl seems to be incapable of being on her own, it is the relationship with a man that validates her existence. In this respect, her choices might be interpreted as a realization of Violet’s creed that “[e]verybody needs somebody” (26). Similarly to her mother, Karen would rather be in a toxic and destructive relationship than make a living on her own. Though it is difficult to ascertain whether their fear of being single stems from their psyche or is economically conditioned, it certainly provides some continuity to the intergenerational transmission of attitudes towards marriage from Violet onto her youngest daughter. To recapitulate what has been argued, despite refraining from physical violence, Violet’s unresolved attachment to her own mother did not allow her to break the cycle of trauma and violence. As Pamela Alexander observes, “maltreatment cannot be simply categorized in terms of identifiable instances of violence or even characteristics of the abuse, but is much more pertinent to the nature of the relationship in which it occurred or to the reactions of the important people in

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the individual’s life” (x). Thus, Violet’s ambivalent motherhood, in addition to her self-­destructive tendencies of drug abuse, resulted in an unresolved attachment to her daughters and, rather than break it, perpetuated the family cycle of trauma and violence. Through the character of each of the Weston girls, Tracy Letts manifests three different shapes an unresolved attachment to the caretaker can take, namely, “controlling behavior toward parent,” “caregiving role-­reversing behavior toward parent” and disorganized behavior. Though verging on being a traumatic experience for the reader, August: Osage County is a masterful literary realization of theoretical models that demonstrate the intergenerational transmission of violence and trauma. The play beautifully resonates with Philip Larkin’s poem “This be the verse”; sadly, they both conclude with the conviction that the only guarantee of not perpetuating the cycle of trauma is not to conceive any children yourself.

Works Cited Alexander, Pamela C. Intergenerational Cycles of Trauma and Violence: An Attachment and Family Systems Perspective. W. W. Norton and Company, 2015. DeGregorio, Lisa J. “Intergenerational Transmission of Abuse: Implications for Parenting Interventions from a Neuropsychological Perspective.” Traumatology, vol. 19, no. 2, 2012, pp. 158–166. Engel, Beverly. The Emotionally Abused Woman: Overcoming Destructive Patterns and Reclaiming Yourself. Fawcett Columbine, 1990. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Dell Publishing, 1979. Hill, Daniel. Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model. W. W. Norton and Company, 2015. Letts, Tracy. August: Osage County. Nick Hern Books, 2008. Skynner, A. C. Robin, and John Cleese. Families and How to Survive Them. Oxford University Press, 1984.

Patrycja Antoszek

Affect and Memory in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child Abstract: The article discusses the problem of repressed affect in Toni Morrison’s novel God Help the Child. Drawing on the psychoanalytical theory of affect, the article comments on the ways in which Morrison’s novel deals with the problems of individual traumas and the oppressive power of memory. Keywords: affect, memory, trauma

After nearly five decades of her literary activity, critics and readers of Toni Morrison’s fiction have become accustomed to the moral ambiguity and complexity of her prose. In his 1991 essay, Anthony C. Hilfer advised critics to avoid simplified or “moralistic” interpretations and warned them against “unified critical analysis” of Morrison’s novels (qtd. in Otten 651). As Terry Otten observed later, “Morrison works the gray areas, avoiding the comfortable absolutism and resolution that can satisfy or reassure most readers. There is an underlying strain of cruelty and violence that can erupt in her most sympathetic and victimized characters and compel them to inflict frightful destruction on seemingly innocent people” (651). A common practice in Morrison’s novels is to give voice to marginal subjects, previously excluded from the dominant discourse, to challenge accepted norms of conduct and proper behavior, and to allow for the articulation of uncomfortable truths and alternative desires. In God Help the Child, published in 2015, Morrison in her characteristic, uncompromising way confronts her readers with the darkest aspects of human experience. As in her other novels, especially The Bluest Eye, she focuses on children as the most vulnerable members of society and, therefore, victims of racial and sexual oppression. Consequently, the book becomes a profound meditation on mechanisms of repression, the complex nature of memory and the role of affect in coping with a traumatic past. Like Morrison’s other novels, the narrative deals with the painful issue of inter- and intraracial violence. Morrison’s protagonist, Lula Ann Bridewell, is a glamorous and successful young woman with a career in cosmetic industry in present-­day California. The opening section reveals, however, that the girl’s ebony blackness “embarrassed” her light-­skinned mother to the point of attempting infanticide when “once – just for a few seconds – [she] held a blanket over her face and pressed” (5). Lula Ann’s father sees her as “a stranger – more than that,

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an enemy” (5) and abandons them right after her birth. To prepare Lula Ann for a life in a racialized world, her mother does not display any affection towards the girl; she makes her daughter call her Sweetness, instead of mother, and even avoids touching her. “When she soiled the bedsheet with her first menstrual blood,” Lula Ann remembers, “Sweetness slapped her and then pushed her into a tub of cold water. Her shock was alleviated by the satisfaction of being touched, handled by a mother who avoided physical contact whenever possible” (79). As Sweetness begins and ends her monologue with the statement: “It’s not my fault,” and insists on repeating the phrase several times, the reader is reminded of the moral complexity of Morrison’s characters. As Mary Helen Washington observed, “motherhood, complicated and threatened by racism, is a special kind of motherhood” (qtd. in Burrows 129), and like Eva Peace in Sula, or Sethe in Beloved, Sweetness cannot be judged easily. Her profound feeling of guilt and vulnerability for shame is complicated further by the fact that her grandmother, who passed for white, rejected her own children because of their skin color. Sweetness’s monologue seems to be an attempt to explain her mistreatment of Lula Ann motivated by a deep-­seated feeling of shame transmitted from one generation of African Americans to another. As J. Brooks Bouson points out, In a white, male American culture . . . African Americans not only have been viewed as objects of contempt, they also have served as containers for white shame. Because white Americans have historically projected their own shame onto blacks, African Americans have been forced to carry a cripplingly heavy burden of shame: their own shame and the projected shame of white America. (15)

This profound sense of inferiority as part of African American experience may be seen as a form of racial memory, a memory of the violence inflicted upon black people that is transferred from generation to generation. Unlike cultural memory, which contains mostly verbal accounts of communal history, racial memory is not verbalized and is transmitted from generation to generation as symptom or affect (Durrant 80). In the words of Sam Durrant, “[i]t passes itself on as a memory of the body, a memory of the violence inflicted on the racially marked body that is also a bodily memory, a memory that takes on a bodily form precisely because it exceeds both the individual’s and the community’s capacity for verbalization and mourning” (80, emphasis in the original). The “bodily memory” has a particular significance in Morrison’s novel. After leaving home and getting a job at a cosmetic company, Lula Ann changes her name to Bride and invents a new identity. As a grown-­up woman she capitalizes on her exquisitely beautiful black body and, in keeping with her vanity name, she wears no other color but all existing shades of white. Her successful career in the cos-

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metics business relies to a large extent on her stunning looks, while her new name sounds significantly close to “pride.” However, when Bride is suddenly abandoned by her partner, as she was earlier abandoned by her father and, emotionally, also by the mother, the familiar feeling of fear and the pain of rejection return to haunt the protagonist with unexpected symptoms. Booker’s devastating words: “You not the woman I want” (8) are a verbalization of what she was made to feel since earliest childhood: she was not the child her parents wanted. As a consequence, Bride’s body begins to undergo an uncanny transformation into a body of a little girl, while Bride’s first words in the novel are: “I’m scared. Something bad is happening to me. I feel like I’m melting away” (8). The combination of bodily symptoms and painful emotions experienced in childhood allows for approaching the text from the perspective of the psychoanalytical theory of affect. According to Freud, a traumatic emotional event has to be abreacted in order to stop a particular affect from recurring over and over again. In other words, “the psychical process which originally took place must be repeated as vividly as possible; it must be brought back to its status nascendi and then given verbal utterance” (qtd. in Flatley 59). Freud and Breuer also believed that the experience of trauma could induce in some individuals “hypnotic states in which autosuggestion occurs, which in turn leads to symptoms” (Stein 2). Therefore, it is necessary to relive, or re-­experience a particular emotional event in order to resolve the trauma and leave the past behind. Freud and Breuer suggest that “affect as such is incapable of representation; it cannot qua affect become an object of memory”; it can, however, be repeated as if happening for the first time (Flatley 54). In short, it is by allowing a strangulated affect to find a way out through language, and by “repeating” or reenacting the traumatic situation, that a cure may be produced. As Flatley explains, “[t]he therapeutic moment is like a time machine that brings us back to the moment of the birth of the affect” (54). A similar process appears to take place in Morrison’s novel. Although Bride never asks Booker questions, she “spilled [her] guts to him, told him everything: every fear, every hurt, every accomplishment, however small. While talking to him certain things [she] had buried came up fresh as though [she] was seeing them for the first time” (53). Then, the feeling of being rejected by Booker allows Bride to return again to the moment in the past, which has been forgotten: “the world was more than confusing – shallow, cold, deliberately hostile. Like the atmosphere in her mother’s house where she never knew the right thing to do or say or remember what the rules were” (78). As Bride sets out for a solitary trip to find her former lover, she feels her body shrinking and herself “changing back into a little black girl” (97). Brought back to the traumatic situation Bride/Lula Ann is made to re-­experience the affect

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that remained strangulated and unchanged by the passage of time. As Bride’s body slowly begins to transform, her pubic and armpit hair is gone, she stops menstruating, her breasts disappear, and so do the holes in her earlobes. She lets herself be beaten up by the ex-­convict Sofia Huxley and experience the familiar helplessness: it was “like Sweetness’s slap without the pleasure of being touched” (79). After a car accident, in which she remains stuck inside her Jaguar, Bride is rescued and taken care of by Evelyn and Steve, a white couple living their simple lives in a forest. In their Spartan cabin, where she has to stay for six weeks with her wounded foot, she feels powerless and vulnerable like a child again. She lets herself be fed and tended by Evelyn, and cries like a baby in moments of crisis. If the adult Bride attempted to forget her horrible childhood, now her life begins to disintegrate again: “[t]he pieces of it that she had stitched together: personal glamour, control in an exciting even creative profession, sexual freedom and most of all a shield that protected her from any overly intense feeling, be it rage, embarrassment or love” (79). While Bride must have remembered experiencing some difficult emotions as a child, she is re-­living them now. As Jill Bennett suggests, only by recreating a situation which produced specific emotions is it possible to truly feel them again. Therefore, a properly evoked affective situation can lead to a real somatic experience as traumatic memory frequently leads to bodily reactions (22–3). Hence, the direct confrontation with the long familiar affects of fear and shame produces changes in her body invisible to anyone beyond herself. While she wonders if “all of this might be a hallucination, like the vivid dreams she was having when she managed to fall asleep” (97), her emotions are real, taking her back to her traumatic, complicated childhood. When she hears Evelyn sing an old hippie song, Bride “dashed a bright memory of Sweetness humming some blues song while washing panty hose in the sink, little Lula Ann hiding behind the door to hear her” (87). Just as the wounded foot does not let Bride continue her journey to find Booker, her childhood trauma – as a wound inflicted upon the mind (Caruth 3) – prevents her from moving on with her life. Booker’s leaving becomes a triggering event which makes her realize “she had been scorned and rejected by everybody all her life” but it also makes her see that he “was the only person she was able to confront – which was the same as confronting herself, standing up for herself ” (98). Returning to her childhood self and confronting the fear and shame she fought so hard to forget, Bride appears to undergo a belated healing process. As Cathy Caruth’s reading of Freud makes clear, wound of the mind – the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world – is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that . . . is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor. (4)

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The re-­enactment of childhood and the return to the body of Lula Ann is then a way of approaching the incomprehensible part of Bride’s experience and ultimately coping with a strangulated affect. In Freud’s treatment of a traumatic event, Flately notices an interesting discovery: “in order to repeat or mime a powerful emotional event from the past, it seems that it is necessary also to have a mimetic relation to someone in the present” (55). This suggests that a mimetic presence of another person helps one experience the reality of the affect, “as if one cannot experience an affect without being able to imagine someone else also experiencing it; as if affects are somehow essentially collective” (Flatley 55–6). Bride’s encounter with Rain, the white girl who lives with Evelyn and Steve and who was a victim of sexual abuse in her mother’s house, is also a confrontation with herself as a girl. Listening to Rain’s story, Bride feels a “companionship” like “the closeness of schoolgirls”; while offering Rain her compassion, she “fought against the danger of tears for anyone other than herself ” (103). When she protects Rain from the shot, Bride performs what she could not do for herself as a child: she shields the little girl from the pain and rescues her from the wound. The situation allows Bride to distance herself from her own emotions, to see them from a different, defamiliarized perspective. It is only after she confronts the difficult past, including the fact she lied as a child and put the innocent Sofia Huxley in prison in order to get Sweetness’s attention, that Bride feels free of the burden of painful memory and feels “[n]o longer forced to relive, no, outlive the disdain of her mother and the abandonment of her father” (162). While Morrison’s novel is clearly a story of one’s relationship to one’s own past, it is also a story of what Cathy Caruth describes as “the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead . . . to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound” (8). The burden of memory and the need to leave the past behind is also the problem of Booker. Reluctant to talk about his own life, the man, too, is haunted by a traumatic past – when he was a boy, his older brother, Adam, was kidnapped, abused sexually and killed. The body was found in a culvert months later and Booker accompanied his father to identify the remains. Many years later, Booker cannot detach himself from the feeling of loss – his retreat into silence is a form of melancholia. According to Freud, “the affect corresponding to melancholia is that of mourning – that is, longing for something lost” (qtd. in Flatley 43). The process of mourning involves the practice of “disattaching and carefully repairing ‘each one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the [lost] object’ so that the strands of attachment can be used again” (Flatley 44). Booker’s

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rejection of his family, his withdrawal from the world and inability to develop a relationship with Bride are effects of his prolonged, unfinished mourning, “the haunt and gloom in which for years Adam’s death had clouded him” (132). What is more, the sexual exploitation and horrible death of the older brother is for Booker the ultimate loss of innocence. He still carries in his mind the idealized picture of Adam as his “flawless,” most beloved companion, his disappearance marking an end to the carefree, uncorrupt childhood: The last time Booker saw Adam he was skateboarding down the sidewalk in twilight, his yellow T-­shirt fluorescent under the Northern Ash trees. It was early September and nothing anywhere had begun to die. Maple leaves behaved as though their green was immortal. Ash trees were still climbing toward a cloudless sky. The sun begun turning aggressively alive in the process of setting. Down the sidewalk between hedges and towering trees Adam floated, a spot of gold moving down a shadowy tunnel toward the mouth of a living sun. (115)

When aunt Queen tells Booker to hang on to Adam’s memory, she does not expect the despair to take hold of him for so long. It is the same aunt Queen who, years later, finally makes Booker realize that the mourning has never been completed, and that Adam “must be worn out having to die and get no rest because he has to run somebody else’s life” (156). Only then, after confronting this truth, but also after hearing Bride’s confession, is Booker able to write down what he cannot say: “I don’t miss you anymore adam rather i miss the emotion that your dying produced a feeling so strong it defined me while it erased you leaving only your absence for me to live in” (161, emphasis in the original). It is the emotional attachment to the feeling of loss that has shaped Booker’s subjectivity for so long and which now he seems to have left behind. By writing down these words he can finally develop a distance to his own emotional state and put an end to mourning. Only then is he able, together with Bride, to look ahead, “to imagine what the future would certainly be” (175). This may be a moment when, as Burrows suggests, “previously dissociated unconscious trauma finally moves into consciousness through a triggering event, it is the moment when time returns back into the present but in a way that provides for a new separation from the traumatised past. A distinction can now be made between past and present, making possible the imagination of a future” (153). While it has always been Morrison’s aim to unearth painful truths, or “to rip [the] veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’” (qtd. in Burrows 136), in God Help the Child the author goes beyond the African American cultural and communal history. More explicitly than ever before she focuses on individual traumas and forms of oppression directed at children, both black and white.

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Though the painful childhoods of Rain and Sofia Huxley are only background stories, it is telling that Bride identifies with the white Rain and the police find in the house of Adam’s killer pictures of other victims – the representatives of different races. Just as “Sweet Home” in Beloved is an ironic name for a slave plantation, and “Sweetness” refers to an embittered and emotionally cold mother, childhood memories in Morrison are anything but sweet. Dedicating the book not to anyone specific but to the very general “You,” the author highlights the universality of violence and reminds her readers that “[w]hat you do to children matters. And they might never forget” (43). Yet underneath the all-­too-­obvious lesson lies a commentary about another form of oppression – that of memory. As Bride observes, “[m]emory is the worst thing about healing” (29) and unmourned losses have the ability to shadow even the brightest future. In this sense it is possible, perhaps, to read God Help the Child as a development of Morrison’s vision and a footnote to her earlier novels: the only way to move on is to mourn the losses, get past them and get rid of the ghosts (cf. Flatley 62).

Works Cited Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford University Press, 2005. Bouson, J. Brooks. Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. State University of New York Press, 2000. Burrows, Victoria. Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother-­Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Toni Morrison. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Durrant, Sam. Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison. State University of New York Press, 2004. Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Harvard University Press, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xiv. Translated by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1957, pp. 243–258. Morrison, Toni. God Help the Child. Vintage, 2015. Otten, Terry. “Horrific Love in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 39, no. 3&4, 1993, pp. 651–667. Stein, Ruth. Psychoanalytic Theories of Affect. Karnac Books, 1991.

Urszula Niewiadomska-­Flis

A Sense of Otherness: Auditory-­Gustatory Synesthesia and Cultural Identity in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth We kept secrets to protect, but the ones most shielded – from shame, from judgment, from the slap in the face  – were ourselves. We were selfish in our secret-­keeping and rarely altruistic. We acted out of instinct and survival, and only when we felt safest would we let our set of facts be known. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth (256)

Abstract: The aim of the present study is to analyze Linda’s disconnection from her self and her troubled presence in both the Hammerick family and their community, which is revealed in three secrets, one of which is her synesthetic perception of reality. Keywords: synesthesia, American South, foodways, cultural identity

Bitter in the Mouth is the retrospective coming-­of-­age narrative of Linda Hammerick, daughter of Thomas and DeAnne, who reside in North Carolina. Monique Truong builds her nonlinear narrative of Linda’s Southern existence around three secrets, two of which the narrator reveals in the first part of the novel, called “Confession,” while the third one is explored in the second section, called “Revelation.” The “Confession” part focuses on Linda’s growing up in Boiling Springs with two secrets. Linda is presented as an outcast because of what she dubs her “secret sense” – that is synesthesia, a condition in which she experiences words as tastes whenever she hears or speaks them. These incoming tastes are typographically highlighted in the narrative as italicized words. Kelly, her best-­friend, is the only person who knows about Linda’s secret, which seems to have isolated Linda from her family and community. The second secret, which she shares with her great-­uncle Harper, is that she was raped in her own home at the age of eleven by Bobby, Kelly’s cousin. While “Confession” offers a glimpse into Linda’s childhood, “Revelation,” which is a revision through which the adult Linda comes to terms with her Southern childhood, includes the third secret, which is withheld from the readers till halfway through the novel. It is my intention to analyze how a multisensory experience of reality becomes an expression of Linda’s sense of otherness affected by the third secret. Hence, an analysis of synesthesia can afford broader

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comments on diasporic identities which are characterized by a clash between a sense of self and a sense of being seen as a different / other self. The novel begins with Linda introducing herself to the readers, using simple, straightforward facts about her life: My name is Linda Hammerick. I grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. My parents were Thomas and DeAnne. My best friend was named Kelly. I was my father’s tomboy. I was my mother’s baton twirler. I was my high school’s valedictorian. I went far away for college and law school. I live now in New York City. I miss my great-­uncle Harper. (Bitter 4)

A stable identity emerges from this set of neatly and logically ordered descriptions of Linda’s existence. However, immediately afterwards, Linda reveals that the truth about her existence may not be as easily accessible as it was implied: I grew up in (Thomas and Kelly). My parents were (valedictorian and baton twirler). My best friend was named (Harper). I was my father’s (New York City). I was my mother’s (college and law school). I was my high school’s (tomboy). I went far away for (Thomas and DeAnne). I live now in (Boiling Springs). I miss (Linda Hammerick). (Bitter 5)

By layering “geographical facts with affective ones” (Janette 156) and by “metaphoric shuffling of factual cards” (Price 56) Truong expresses Linda’s need for belonging and recognition, which she can hardly find in her family. This overwritten description might suggest that Linda is out of step with the image of a typical Southern girlhood. Especially the final sentence alludes to a sense of disconnectedness and alienation. As the narrative evolves, Linda’s mother DeAnne will prove to be dismissive, neglectful and cold. Linda’s grandmother will whisper on her deathbed: “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two” (Bitter 5). Her father Thomas, the epitome of the Reasonable Man for Linda, will prove to be less ideal in the course of time. Her great-­uncle Harper, a transvestite with a talent for photography, will be the only person who can relate to Linda’s outcast status and thus sympathize with her. The taste of “Hammerick,” Linda’s last name, is the first instance of synesthetic experience mentioned in the novel: “I drew out the ‘Ham,’ lingered on the ‘me,’ and softened the clip of the ‘rick.’ I repeated the word, and with every slow joining of its three syllables, the fizzy taste of sweet licorice with a mild chaser of wood smoke flooded my mouth. A phantom swig of Dr Pepper” (Bitter 14). The dissection of her last name mirrors the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of her identity and her attempts to understand its constituent elements. These attempts refer her to the taste of something forbidden but comforting, the very first bottle of Dr. Pepper secretly shared with her diabetic grandmother (Bitter 9–10). The immediate, involuntary perceptual experience of the sound of her family name

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as gustatory sensations on a metaphorical level may be illustrative of secrets that plague her family. Literally, “synesthesia” means “to perceive” (esthesia) and “together” (syn). It is a dissolution of boundaries between five senses. The model of synesthesia was advanced by Lawrence Sullivan, a scholar of comparative religion, in a seminal article entitled “Sound and Senses” (1986). Basing his observations on Sullivan’s research, Howes claims that “synaesthesia is a very rare condition in which the stimulation of one sensory modality is accompanied by a perception in one or more other modalities” (162). Inter-­modal associations experienced by people with perceptual synesthesia have various forms: hearing colors, seeing sounds, or feeling tastes; auditory-­gustatory synesthesia is an extremely rare manifestation.1 Jean Pierre Ternaux posits that “synesthesia can also be considered a physiological behavior that involves a multimodal combination of all senses. Such an expression of sensory perception can also be considered a natural process that contributes to the adaptation of the living organism to its environment” (321). Such an understanding of synesthesia as an adaptive measure resonates well with the coping mechanisms of trauma victims. Neurobiologists Bessel Van der Kolk and Onno Van der Hart assert that “[w]hen a subject does not remember a trauma, its ‘memory’ is contained in an alternate stream of consciousness . . . [Traumatic] experiences can be so overwhelming that they cannot be integrated into existing mental frameworks, and instead, are dissociated, later to return intrusively as fragmented sensory or motoric experiences” (168, 176). Linda’s earliest memory of her silence in response to Thomas, her father, calling her, reveals the extent of the child’s disconnection with reality: “I was beginning to understand that this man was calling me by a name that he thought was mine . . . I was lost, which was another way of saying that I had no memory of where I had been” (Bitter 164). The taste of something bitter is part of the synesthetic-­traumatic recall of what happened to Linda at an impressionable early age: “When I was seven, I heard a word that made me taste an unidentifiable bitter, and I never forgot the flames cutting through the seams of a trailer home, the sound of footsteps on gravel, then darkness” (Bitter 116). An accidental exposure to a stimulus (the sound producing a gustatory sensation) reveals that in order to cope with her feeling of incongruity Linda might have evolved a “secret sense,” much like trauma victims do. Inter-­sense connections come involuntarily

1 Prior to Julia Simner and Jamie Ward’s research (2003–2005), “reports of taste as a synesthetic experience were rare – only three cases existed in the historical literature” (Cytowic and Eagleman 145).

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and naturally to synesthetes.2 Thus, an event in the past might have triggered, or possibly precipitated, the appearance of Linda’s synesthesia.3 Her memory of early childhood may be inaccessible, but on a synesthetic level a glimpse into her cultural identity is possible – sound-­taste synesthesia reveals Linda’s confusion and instability. Linda’s feeling of otherness and her disconnection from others is conveyed and experienced synesthetically through (con)fusion of the senses. In synesthetic experience sensory modes meet and overlap but there is a nonhomologous relationship between the sound of a word and the evoked taste of food.4 Early in the narrative Linda explains: from childhood “[m]any of the words that I heard or had to say aloud brought with them a taste – unique, consistent, and most often unrelated to the meaning of the word that had sent the taste rolling into my mouth” (Bitter 21). Thus, the tastes that are evoked by spoken words are not a type of associative metaphor. Rather, they are clues that Linda’s sense of self is fragmented, if not perceived as aberrant.5 As an unconscious coping mechanism, synesthesia might refract Linda’s narrative of herself into multiple crumbs that protect her from the impact of total recall of early childhood while still implying her incongruous status in her family and community. Sometimes the words draw Linda emotionally to the speakers: “It wouldn’t be the last time that I would fall for a name. Canned peaches. Dill. Orange sherbet. Parsnip (to my great regret)” (Bitter 43). In other cases the sound of a word spoken in the present tense carries the taste of something Linda has previously eaten: “The experiential flavors had to come first. Once the memories of them . . . had lodged themselves in my brain, then and only then could these tastes attach themselves to the words in my vocabulary, without cause or consideration for the meanings of the words” (Bitter 74). Synesthetic perception allows one to augment or broaden one’s experience of the surrounding world. Synesthesia is also an alternative form of perception, which, according to Janette, does not violate, but rather augments

2 Cytowic explains that “[s]ynesthesia is involuntary but elicited. Synesthesia is insuppressible but cannot be conjured up at will. It happens to someone, automatically, in response to a discrete stimulus” (67). 3 Dykema mentions research in which “scientists theorize that it [synesthesia] is passed from parent to child” (117). 4 Jamie Ward and Julia Simner “confirmed that it actually is the phoneme sound rather than its written form that determines synesthetic taste” (Cytowic and Eagleman 147). 5 Linda’s sense of fragmentation may be the reason why at Yale she takes a Literature and Sociology class called “Alienation/Alien Nation,” which teaches her that an aberration is “a mirror that failed to produce an exact image” (133).

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the conventional mode of comprehending the world, which leads to “opening new possibilities for both beauty and comfort” (158). Despite this, experiencing “incomings” – to use Linda’s term describing words that conjure up tastes – can be burdensome. The onslaught of a cacophony of words which carry tastes of particular foods may cause distress. Linda wants to prevent her brain from being constantly bombarded with sensory input. If suppressing stimuli is impossible (tuning out a noise one cannot block can be a mouthful), Linda at least attempts to temporarily dull the incomings, whether by smoking, consuming alcohol, or having sex. Not surprisingly, such inter-­modal associations and transpositions may interfere with academic progress. She can barely hear her teacher’s questions about North Carolina’s history because the tastes of mint, maraschino cherry, Pepto-­Bismol, mustard, cheddar cheese, and canned peas evoked by the teacher’s words interfere (Bitter 21). Any attempt to explain the connotative associations behind these sound-­induced tastes is futile, as there is no correspondence between the connotative meaning or the sound of the word and an involuntary taste reaction.6 No one but Kelly, her best friend, can empathize with Linda’s condition, least of all, her mother DeAnne. At the age of 11 Linda tries to share her secret sense with her mother and simultaneously convey her emotions. She tries desperately to explain an experience that cannot be easily described; she is then reminded of her isolation and repression of her true self: I blurted out as quickly as I could, “Momchocolatemilk, youcannedgreenbeans knowgrapejelly whatgrahamcracker tastes like a walnuthamsteaksugar-­cured? Godwalnut tastes like a walnuthamsteaksugar-­cured. The wordlicorice Godwalnut, I meanraisin, and the wordlicorice tastes—” “Lindamint, pleaselemonjuice don’t talkcornchips like a crazyheavycream persongarlicpowder,” my mom said, cutting me off. . . . “Lindamint. Stopcannedcorn it! I can handleFruitStripegum a lot of thingstomato. Godwalnut knowsgrapejelly I have had to with youcannedgreenbeans. But I won’t handleFruitsStripegum crazyheavycream. I won’t have it in my familycannedbeets. Do youcannedgreenbeans understandeggnoodles me?” my mom asked without really asking. (Bitter 107–8)

The reader can only fully appreciate the meaning of this exchange with the benefit of hindsight – only once all the three secrets are revealed. However, at this point, we are offered DeAnne’s reaction to Linda’s revelation. Instead of perceiving them as an alternative form of conventional perception she disavows these sounds that change into gustatory synesthesia, taking them to be a sign of craziness or abnormality. 6 Cytowic and Eagleman remark that “it is usually the phonetic or, less often, semantic properties of words that trigger taste” (144).

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There are words that are “tasteless,” that trigger no gustatory incomings. Such words bring Linda comfort: “For me, the few words that didn’t bring with them a taste were sanctuaries, a cloister in which I could hear their meanings as clear as my own heart beating” (Bitter 15–16, emphasis in the original). However, among the words that do not have any incoming taste at all are those “that speak to Linda’s very desire for recognition and empathy throughout the book: I, me, understand, honest, and taste” (Cruz 727). Interestingly enough, the “I” as the symbol of Linda’s subjectivity has no word-­taste correlation, as if she desired a stable identity which could fill the void and resonate with any gustatory sensation.7 With no incoming taste, the word “mother” also seems to poignantly comment on the emptiness of the word for Linda. Her complicated relationship with DeAnne is reflected in the guilty pleasure Linda feels while repeating words “out of gluttony or homesickness”; one of them is “matricide” (Bitter 103). The narrative representation of the secret sense is the symmetrical opposite of the third secret that Linda keeps from the readers. While Linda’s synesthesia is invisible to those around her but disclosed to the readers, Linda’s interstitial racial status is invisible to the readers up until page 160 (the very end of “Confession”) but more than clear to the residents of Boiling Springs (Simal-­González 14). When, during her graduation from Yale, Linda is referred to as “Linh-­Dao Nguyen HammerickDrPepper, summa cum laude, Literatureroastbeef” (Bitter 158), her ethnic heritage and her transracial adoptee status are exposed to the readers. Again, as with the first person pronoun, Linh-­Dao “triggered no taste whatsoever” (Bitter 165). Thus, the overlapping of her earliest memories of her childhood (as Linh-­Dao) with auditory-­gustatory associations at the age of seven marks/underscores her status as a transracial adoptee (as Linda). In the novel’s following section, titled “Revelations,” readers learn that Linh-­Dao was born in Vietnam in 1968 and emigrated to the United States in 1974 with her parents, Khanh and Mai-­Dao Nguyen. A year later she was orphaned by a trailer fire in North Carolina, at which point Linh-­Dao was adopted and renamed by Thomas Hammerick, a friend of the family, and his wife. The omission of the fact of Linda’s Vietnamese heritage in a description of her cultural identity at the outset of the novel does not suggest the extent of her assimilation into the American South, which by extension might symbolize Asian American experience in the region. On the contrary, her conspicuous “invisibil7 My reading of the lack of synesthetic representation of “I” is congruent with that of Dykema’s: “I is not associated with any taste. As such, it implies an unmarked subject (untouched by synesthetic production) and also establishes the subject as a fluid conception that cannot be stabilized, even by the process of synesthetic sensation” (119).

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ity” in Boiling Springs (the townspeople “vowed to make themselves color-­blind on [her] behalf ” (Bitter 170)) illustrates the Asian and Asian-­American anomalous and interstitial presence in the South.8 There is some irony in the fact that due to her hypervisibility (Linda is the only child of Asian descent in the town) she “became a blind spot in their otherwise 20–20 field of vision. They heard my voice . . . but they learned never to see me” (Bitter 170–71). Interestingly enough, in order to describe her Asian-­American subjectivity, which is “unseen, overlooked, and abused by the community around her” (Price 51), Linda looks for self-­reference among Southern Gothic figures: “Boiling Springs made an open secret of me. I was the town’s pariah, but no one was allowed to tell me so. In Boiling Springs, I was never Scout. I was Boo Radley, not hidden away but in plain sight” (Bitter 171). The community, and to a lesser degree her family, subsumes Linda into the category of Boo Radley, “someone who has a physical or rumored physical or, perhaps, mental ‘defect’” (Squint and Yousaf 42). Since the age of seven Linh-­Dao Nguyen Hammerick’s identity is defined as both Asian-­American and Southern. However, neither reflects her fragmented self. Linda confesses that “[n]either name was familiar to me. ‘Linda’ was the void. ‘Linh-­Dao’ was the missing” (Bitter 165). Neither white nor black, Linda is “partly colored” and thus is the stigmatized social other. Once Linda comes out of the racial closet she revises her racial subjectivity and experiences of growing up in a Southern town: “Since leaving Boiling Springs, I was often asked by complete strangers what it was like to grow up being Asian in the South. You mean what was it like to grow up looking Asian in the South . . . How could I explain to them that from the age of seven to eighteen, there was nothing Asian about me except my body?” (Bitter 169–70). Linda’s correction points to the fact that she did not identify herself as Asian at all, which is confirmed by the culinary references of the incomings bombarding Linda daily. Her Asian diasporic identity is repressed (the process of transcultural adoption requires repression, if not erasure, of one’s own personal history9) to the point that Southernness establishes culinary supremacy in the words conjuring up tastes. The tastes do not emerge from the darkness that covers Linda’s childhood. None of the incomings have Vietnamese tastes or flavors. Her identity is firstly influenced by the region (the South), and only after 8 Leslie Bow analyzes the Asian American anomalous and interstitial presence in the South in Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the American South. 9 In her article, Price notes that David Eng, in his book The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, likens queer coming-­out to the maturation of adoptees – both involve a transition from invisibility to visibility, from denial to declaration of one’s true self (60–61).

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that by race (Asian), which is evidenced by new acquisitions. Any given sentence Linda hears can combine, as she reveals, “flavors that I had experienced after leaving Boiling Springs” (Bitter 193) with others that “reached back to the Dark Ages of my childhood” with the Hammericks (Bitter 194). The tastes evoked in Linda’s “incomings” comprise a typical Southern shopping list: molasses, boiled shrimp, salted butter, canned peaches, mint, instant vanilla pudding, Nilla Wafers, Nestea, dates, fruitcake, collard greens, and Ritz crackers (Bitter 190–92). The assumed Southernness of these food products is not surprising, bearing in mind Linda’s early exposure to North Carolina. However, what is peculiar is that the list also includes African-­American soul food. This twist in word-­taste pairings reflects Linda’s unusual status in her family, or, by extension, society.10 As a daughter of Thomas and DeAnne Hammericks, whose ancestors “made their money in cotton, which was another way of saying that they had made their money in slaves” (Bitter 55), it is implied that Linda’s whiteness, to use George Lipsitz’s words, “never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations” (1). Thus, the inclusion of foods associated with African Americans in Linda’s gustatory sensations (collard greens, fried chicken, fried okra, watermelon, grits and molasses)11 might hint at her racial inappropriateness in Boiling Springs. The (con)fusion of tastes is also an interesting comment on Linda’s sense of self: “I was most startled when a new word had a very familiar taste. I would lose my ability to absorb what was happening to me” (Bitter 102–03). The confluence of new words Linda incorporates into her mental lexicon with familiar incomings illustrates her diasporic double-­consciousness. Her memories of school bullies calling her “Chink,” “Jap” and “Gook” mix with inquiries about the difficulty of being Southern in “an unlikely package.”12 This situation is reminiscent of DuBoi10 If we accept, after Cytowic and Eagleman, that “someone’s precise pattern of taste synesthesia is a result of both heredity and experience” (148), then Linda’s present synesthetic tastes suggest that her diasporic cultural identity, with childhood diet as its daily representation, was repressed (there are no references to Asian American cuisine). 11 Cruz also mentions soul food in her analysis of synesthesia in Bitter in the Mouth (723). Yet the examples of food that Cruz provides in her article constitute the core of Southern food rather than Black American cuisine. The two should not be used interchangeably. 12 In my description of Linda’s Asian Americanness in the U.S. South I have appropriated the phrase “A Tennessean in an Unlikely Package,” which Jasmine Kar Tang used to describe stand-­up comedian Henry Cho. Much like Cho’s positionality, Linda’s racialized subjectivity is not seen as “either/or” but as “both-­and” within “dominant narratives of the U.S. South and Asian America” (Tang 258).

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sian double-­consciousness, which was “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois 5). Linda’s situation is further complicated by the fact she is neither black nor white in the South, where Jim Crow laws died hard. Linda’s presence disrupts racial binaries, and thus she equates “being Asian” with “being hated.” At the age of thirty, Linda’s awareness of her status as the double “Other” and her concomitant desire to be recognized and understood is finally satisfied by a PBS program “Synesthesia: Sense Something Different?” Upon hearing an interview with a British man in his late thirties who also “suffer[s]” from auditory-­gustatory synesthesia, Linda has “an in-­another-­body experience.” Her fragmented sense of self is healed: “Everything but this man and me faded into darkness . . . I had never experienced recognition in this pure, undiluted form. It was a mirroring. It was a fact. It was a cord pulled taut between us. Most of all, it was no longer a secret” (Bitter 217). This scene raises the possibility of establishing a connection between two humans based on sameness, which actually is viewed as deviation from the perspective of the nonsynesthetic world (Dykema 120). This is the kind of connection and recognition Linda was looking for when she attempted to confide her secret sense in her mother. However, by dismissing Linda’s synesthetic otherness DeAnne attempted to erase the otherness of Linda’s biological ancestry. When Thomas brings the seven-­year-­old Linh-­Dao home to DeAnne after the fire that killed the child’s parents, DeAnne agrees to adopt her on two conditions: that her name be changed to Linda and that Mai-­Dao and Khanh Nguyen never again be spoken of. DeAnne presents these as necessary conditions for affective bonding: “Otherwise how could I learn to love you, Linda?” (Bitter 278, emphasis in the original). Linda’s Vietnamese subjectivity painfully reminds DeAnne of her husband’s first and true love for Linda’s mother, Mai-­Dao. The fact is made even more crucial when Linda confesses that “Thomas never liked the name that his wife gave me . . . [and] also never legally changed my name, except to add his family name to it” (Bitter 165). Denying the difference in Linda, be it racial or synesthetic, DeAnne conditions Linda’s inclusion in the Hammerick family on the repression of her adopted daughter’s secrets. Linda’s multisensory experience of reality becomes an expression of racial doubling that has been repressed by her adopted family. The adoption by a white family synecdochally reflects the repression of national traces demanded from ethnic minorities in order to become “model minorities” in American society. Thus, Linda’s synesthesia offers a broader comment on the multicultural environment of diasporic identities / communities

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that have to function within the homogenizing forces of Americanization. Linda’s experiences serve as an illustrative example that the promise of acceptance of immigrants and love for “the model minority” have “historically been used not to include but to exclude and dehumanize” (Janette 172). In the past DeAnne represented what Janette identifies as “the most colonizing of majoritarian subjectivities: repressing complexity and difference, able to recognize only itself and those who conform unthreateningly to that self-­definition” (172). Linda’s attempts to share her secret sense with DeAnne by saying that mom tastes to her like chocolate milk were initially rejected by the mother. At the end of the narrative, however, DeAnne revises the lines of their subjective memories when she looks at Linda “and ask[s] low-­fat or whole” (Bitter 247). In contrast to her initial disbelief and demand for repression, DeAnne now accepts Linda’s condition and takes a step towards becoming reconciled with her adopted daughter. An expression of Linda’s ethnic identity, her sense of otherness in her family, and, by extension, in the Southern society, seems to be metaphorically reflected in her synesthetic perception of reality. These two secrets are interrelated; individually and in tandem, her synesthetic perception of the world and her being “a racialized Southern subject of Vietnamese descent” (Dykema 108) reveal the extent of her disconnection with her self and her troubled presence in her family. I concur with Price’s argument that Linda’s “hybrid cultural status leads to a hybrid, expanded means of experiencing the world” (63). Linda’s mind erases the past as a protective measure and later on fails to cognitively explain her “otherness” in Boiling Springs. However, in a process of “adapt[ing] to environmental conditions” (Ternaux 321), what was lost in memory finds expression through atypical sensory combinations. Such an interdependence of secrets shows the predominance of synesthesia as a means of expressing one’s identity. Such a perspective resonates well with Monique Truong’s explanation in an interview: “I wanted readers to come to understand Linda the way that she understands herself. The difference that is most important and is most self-­defining to her is her synesthesia because she really has no way to contextualize her exterior difference” (Squint and Yousaf 44).

Works Cited Bow, Leslie. Partly Colored. Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South. New York University Press, 2010. Cruz, D. “Monique Truong’s Literary South and the Regional Forms of Asian America.” American Literary History, vol. 26, no. 4, December 2014, pp. 716–741.

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Cytowic, Richard. Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses. The MIT Press, 2002. —. and David Eagleman. Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. The MIT Press, 2009. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. With an Introduction and Chronology by Jonathan Scott Holloway. Yale University Press, 2015. Dykema, Amanda. “Embodied Knowledges: Synesthesia and the Archive in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth.” Melus, vo. 39. no. 1, Spring 2014, pp. 106–129. Howes, David. “Scent, Sound and Synaesthesia: Intersensoriality and Material Culture Theory.” Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilley et al. Sage Publications, 2006, pp. 161–172. Janette, Michele. “‘Distorting Overlaps’: Identity as Palimpsest in Bitter in the Mouth.” Melus, vol. 39, no. 3, Fall 2014, pp. 155–177. Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment of Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Temple University Press, 1998. Price, Rachel. “‘The Void and the Missing’: History, Mystery, and Throwaway Bodies in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth.” North Carolina Literary Review, vol. 24, 2015, pp. 50–64. Simal-­González, Begoña. “Judging the Book by Its Cover: Phantom Asian America in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, 2013, pp. 7–32. Squint, Kirstin, and Nahem Yousaf. “Both Souths that I’ve Known: An Interview with Monique Truong.” North Carolina Literary Review, vol. 24, 2015, pp. 38–49. Tang, Jasmine Kar. “‘A Tennessean in an Unlikely Package’: The Stand-­up Comedy of Henry Cho.” Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Immigration in the South, edited by Khyati Joshi and Jigna Desai. University of Illinois Press, 2013, pp. 245–263. Ternaux, Jean-­Pierre. “Synesthesia: A Multimodal Combination of Senses.” Leonardo, vol. 36, no. 4, August 2003, pp. 321–322. Truong, Monique. Bitter in the Mouth. Random House, 2010. Van der Kolk, Bessel, and Onno Van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 158–182. Ward Jamie, Julia Simner, and Vivian Auyeung. “A Comparison of Lexical-­ Gustatory and Grapheme-­Color Synaesthesia.” Cognitive Neuropsychology, vol. 22, no. 1, 2005, pp. 28–41.

Izabella Kimak

Text, Image and Sound: Artistic Tiers in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams Abstract: The article analyzes the intersection of text, image and sound in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s 2004 novel Queen of Dreams, in which art functions both as an antidote for loss and a reflection of an ethnic subject’s position in the post-9/11 US. Keywords: Divakaruni, ekphrasis, Queen of Dreams, post-9/11 literature, South Asian American literature

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, an American author of South Asian descent, interrogates in her 2004 novel Queen of Dreams the intersection of textuality and two other modes of artistic representation, the visual and the aural. Art, both visual art and music, plays a two-­fold role within Divakaruni’s narrative. On the one hand, art functions therapeutically as a means of aiding the characters’ recuperation from personal and communal traumas. Struggling with the death of her beloved mother, her own divorce and the post-9/11 backlash against Arab Americans and other ethnic groups resembling them physically,1 Divakaruni’s protagonist Rakhi ultimately finds solace in her work as a painter, after a long period of inability to even touch the paintbrush. The therapeutic function the author imbues art with goes hand in hand with its symbolic role of reflecting and commenting upon the complex questions of personal identity that the protagonist grapples with as a second-­generation immigrant in the US barred through her parents’ decision from any knowledge of her South Asian background. Furthermore, invoking the discourse of multiculturalism, particularly in her descriptions of fusion music created together by people from various walks of life and diverse ethnic backgrounds, Divakaruni points to art’s capability of fostering inter-­racial alliances that may help individuals come to terms with their losses. This article intends to probe the

1 As K. Scott Wong argues, “[t]he events of September 11, 2001, have had a grave impact on Asian Americans, especially Muslim Americans and those mistaken for Muslims,” leading to “domestic detentions, deportations, murders, and the steady harassment of these groups’ members” (243). Divakaruni’s novel may be seen as an example of post9/11 South Asian American literary “works that insist on enlarging a narrow United States-­centric vision and seek to counter the indifference to other peoples of a United States-­focused world” (Srikanth 75).

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symbolic and therapeutic role of various forms of artistic expression present in Divakaruni’s narrative. To begin with the realm of the image, any analysis of literary representations of visual art needs to address the discourse of ekphrasis, which W.J.T. Mitchell defines as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (152). Ekphrastic methodologies seem a perfect choice for the study of minority literatures for, as Mitchell argues, what ekphrasis hopes to do is to overcome otherness (156). For him, in ekphrastic literature text encounters its representational others, that is other modes of representation, be it visuality or aurality, both of which are present in Divakaruni’s novel. Mitchell likens visual representation to other others, such as “the masses, the colonized, the powerless and voiceless everywhere” (157) in light of the fact that visual representation “cannot represent itself ” but “needs to be represented by discourse” (157), just like others in general cannot represent themselves but need representing by mainstream discourses. What is particularly significant, the visual image represented in ekphrastic literature, “the textual other,” as Mitchell calls it, “must remain completely alien; it can never be present, but must be conjured up as a potent absence or a fictive, figural present” (158). Thus, “[t]he ekphrastic image acts . . . like a sort of unapproachable and unpresentable ‘black hole’ in the verbal structure, entirely absent from it, but shaping and affecting it in fundamental ways” (158). In light of the above, it seems to be a very effective strategy on the part of ethnic writers to verbally represent visual representation in order to not only comment on the otherness of visuality as a mode of representation but to reflect as well upon the otherness of ethnic subjects, including the writers themselves. Furthermore, in the same way as some ekphrastic scholars negate the existence of any essential binary differences between text and image, minority writers point to the artificiality of the binary constructs of “self ” and “other,” “us” and “them.” Finally, the actual absence in the narrative of the image that is being verbally “cited” – in contrast to being “sighted” – is a reflection of the simultaneous presence and absence of ethnic subjects within the fabric of Western societies that ethnic literary texts oftentimes illustrate. Ethnic subjects are, on the one hand, hyper-­visible on account of their skin color and other corporeal features while at the same time remaining invisible in the sense of being inconsequential or insignificant, absent, as it were. As far as the symbolic deployment of visual art in Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams is concerned, the thematic preoccupations of Rakhi’s paintings are reflective of the development of her subjectivity and her gradual realization of what it means to be a second-­generation South Asian American. She starts out producing landscapes of India that may be evaluated as stereotypical at best: “temples and

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cityscapes and women in a marketplace, and bus drivers at lunch” (Divakaruni 10), or “a Calcutta train station, fishermen on the Ganga, the Belur Math [temple] at sunrise” (204). Longing for the homeland she never knew, Rakhi re-­creates numerous stock images of what is called in the novel “an imagined India, an India researched from photographs, because she’d never traveled there” (10), not through her own fault, but due to her parents’ decision to keep her away from all themes Indian, which remains for Rakhi an unfathomable choice until she gets to read her mother’s journals in the wake of her death. Rakhi decides to use some of her Indian paintings to decorate the walls of the coffee shop she runs with her friend, hoping to add a veneer of authenticity to the Chai House. Yet, it is obvious that the images of Mughal gardens and “water drops glisten[ing] on the hides of bathing elephants” (23) that Rakhi hangs on the store walls do not constitute an authentic part of her experience as a second-­generation immigrant living in California at the beginning of the twenty-­first century. The simplifications that the paintings unwittingly perpetuate are a testimony to Rakhi’s limited knowledge of India, which is based to a large extent on cultural clichés. Rakhi’s understanding of India and Indian art is altered when she receives from an unknown giver five photographs of paintings by Indian artists that are a far cry from the conventional images she herself has created: “Neither the subject matter nor the style is Indian in any traditional way, though one of the compositions places words from an Indian script in midst of geometric shapes” (Divakaruni 233). What all the five paintings have in common are extraordinary combinations of shape and color that leave a lot of room for interpretation: “The first is an abstract landscape in flesh-­pink and chalky yellow, with startling insertions of blue and red,” an emerald-­green river and a triangle that can signify either “a temple or a rock” (234). The thing that “strikes her [Rakhi] most is the energy behind the lines, a sense of a hidden presence” (234). The second painting is a nude, showing a woman’s body submerged in the dark submarine blue color with white petals floating in it. The third one refers to Hindu mythology, depicting “a many-­armed being with a moon-­like face float[ing] above a nest of serpents” (234) against “a background of neon yellow” (234). In the fourth one, the dark hole at the center of the painting is surrounded by “squares made up of geometric shapes, richly textured rugs. Crosses, arrowheads, concentricities in earth colors” (234). The final painting comes in two parts, the first “giv[ing] her [Rakhi] the sensation of bending over and peering into a blue-­green well, spheres within spheres, like ripples” (234), while the second part shows “a closed door with an arch above it” (235). What is significant about these paintings is that they do not leave Rakhi indifferent but invite her to engage with them, both on the intellectual and emo-

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tional levels. She is drawn by the magnetic colors and compositions that provoke her to rethink both her own identity and the definition of what Indian art is. The geometric shapes employed in some of the compositions seem to be an artistic commentary on an ethnic subject’s position. The black hole in the center of the fourth painting surrounded by a variety of other shapes located on the margin may be seen as an evocation of the center/periphery distinction that lies at the heart of much postcolonial theory. The final painting that invites the viewer in – to look into the concentric well – while at the same time positioning her on the outside of a closed door is a symbolic rendition of how immigrants to the West feel: they manifest a longing to get inside while at the same time being acutely aware of their outsider position, particularly in moments of crisis such as 9/11 that call for the construction of a homogenous national identity, which to a large extent excludes ethnic subjects.2 The discourse of inside and outside, of presence and absence that some of these paintings metaphorically represent is also evoked by the painting of the eucalyptus grove that Rakhi struggles to complete in time for her first gallery exhibition. Following her morning walk to the nearby eucalyptus grove, Rakhi decides for the first time to try her hand at a painting with a non-­Indian theme: she wishes to draw the man she sees practicing Tai Chi against the backdrop of lush Californian vegetation. To her dismay, however, she is unable to give life to the image. No matter how long and with what devotion she works on the painting, “re-­working the strokes” (Divakaruni 55) late into the night, “something is still out of balance” (56). It is not the greenery that Rakhi has trouble painting but the man himself, whose “body seems stiff and posed; there’s something fake about the angle of his neck” (65) and whose face remains unpainted. Frustrated with her inability to do the man painterly justice, Rakhi returns to the grove hoping for a chance to look at him once again. She gets so involved in producing sketch after sketch of him that she does not even realize when the man leaves the grove: “He’s left something in the grove, though,” she notices, “an energy of some kind. I see an orchestra of movement in the emptiness, the shape of his body carved into the space between the treetrunks. Presence and absence, they form a flickering pattern. . . . the seed of an idea is beginning to form. A perhaps” (81). Still unable to paint the man to any satisfaction over the following days, Rakhi finally decides to paint him over. Though no longer in the picture, the man nevertheless remains

2 As Sunaina Maira argues, in the post-9/11 US legal citizenship ceased to be a guarantee of legal protection; what mattered instead was cultural citizenship, understood as “cultural belonging in the nation” (449).

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in it as “a man-­shaped gap of darkness you wouldn’t even see if you weren’t looking right. A man with his left arm arced high over his head, at once in the picture and absent from it, the final element the painting needed” (87). Simultaneously present and absent, painted over but remaining “the final element the painting needed” (87), the man shows that presence and absence are not binary opposites but rather two parts of the same whole that cannot exist without each other. In this way, Rakhi’s painting – just like the first of the Indian paintings she received, with its hint at a “sense of a hidden presence” (234) – points to the significance of what seems to be absent. Read as a commentary on ethnic relations, these paintings show the visibility of the seemingly invisible. If, as Foucault argues, silence “is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said” (27), invisibility could by the same token be inextricably connected to visibility. Even if ethnic subjects are rendered virtually invisible by mainstream discourses, they are nevertheless a part of the American landscape that refuses to be ignored. The therapeutic function of art, in turn, comes to the foreground in the context of personal and communal traumas that Divakaruni’s protagonist lives through. To give an example, following her mother’s death in a self-­caused car accident, Rakhi experiences a standstill in her artistic work. She desperately needs the comfort of her art but cannot bring herself to paint. Her state of mind is reminiscent of the difficulties she had painting after her divorce with Sonny, a second-­generation Indian DJ. When she finally managed to paint then, it was the interior of her store that she sketched and pinned to the wall to draw “comfort from its solidity” (Divakaruni 24). The materialness of the sketch stands in marked contrast to the emotional vulnerability of the protagonist, whose sense of stability is at this point of her life shattered as a result of her acrimonious divorce and the legal battle over the custody of her daughter. Even if periodically unable to paint, Rakhi needs her art to give vent to her pent-­up emotions generated first by her divorce and later by the death of her mother and the ensuing necessity to take care of her father injured in the accident. What contributes to Rakhi’s complex emotional situation is the violence she becomes victim of on 9/11 because of her South Asian looks and because of the fact that she keeps her coffee shop open late into the evening. She makes this decision out of respect and care for her customers who have developed a habit of gathering in her coffee shop to produce music together. Initially, it was Rakhi’s father’s signing that drew to the store a group of elderly Indian men who wished to sing old songs together with him as a way of remembering home. After a while the group is joined by “an African American . . . with a tall, carved drum,”

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a flute-­player from South America, and “a hippie with a braid and a tambourine” (188). Each time, the group “shift around and make place” for the new-­comers, “nod[ding] approvingly when they hear how the new instruments add timbre to the songs” (189). In this way, Rakhi’s store becomes a locus of peaceful multicultural intermingling of bodies and sounds, a space where people of various ethnic backgrounds draw comfort from being close to one another and encircled by music. The multicultural mixture of sounds is a symbol of inter-­racial alliance that Divakaruni sees as an antidote to racial segregation, fear, and hatred.3 This fantasy of a multicultural haven is put to test by the clash with the outside reality: Rakhi and her family and friends fall victim to the backlash against Muslim Americans when they are attacked by a group of white men who mistake the song of mourning – “a low chant, a drawn-­out mourning song, or maybe a prayer” (254) – for one of celebration and accordingly challenge their victims’ rightful belonging in the US.4 When Rakhi is finally able to render in painting both the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the backlash against Muslims she herself has experienced, the images produced reflect the confusion and fear permeating the post-9/11 landscape: She takes out her easel, the first time since September. She closes her eyes and doesn’t fight when the images deluge her. . . . She starts painting them in: a Sikh man shot at a gas station because someone thought he was Middle Eastern; terrified women peering from behind curtains that looked like burkhas; Jespal’s [Rakhi’s Sikh friend’s] turban unraveled like a river of blood; his eye the swollen purple of a monsoon sky. The background is a collage of faces striped red, white and blue. A fist waves a flag so mammoth that if it falls, it’ll suffocate them all. The birds have disappeared, their places taken by airplanes. Some crash into buildings. Some drop bombs as easily as insects drop their eggs. She paints in a GOD BLESS sign, she paints in tablas, bamboo flutes, violins. Kicking feet, swinging chairs, cookies swept off a counter and ground into the floor by bootheels. Knives fly across painted space like the props of jugglers – but they’re deadly real. A police car glides through the broken night under a pock-­marked moon. When she stands back to look, the colors and shapes come together in a rush that makes the hairs on her arms stand up. She gives it the only name possible: You Ain’t American. (266–267)

What contributes to the vitality and strength of Rakhi’s painting is its topicality, understood as the painting’s immersion in the current political and social context. 3 Inderpal Grewal considers Divakaruni to be a writer who employs the discourses of hybridity and multiculturalism in her works as an easy option for resolving the tension between (American) modernity and (Indian) tradition (77). 4 According to the data cited by Sunaira Maira, in the three weeks after 9/11 seven hundred hate crimes were reported against South Asian Americans, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans (460).

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For the very first time, Rakhi addresses in her art the particular situation of an ethnic subject in the USA, expressing the fear and anxiety felt by South Asian and Arab Americans in the wake of 9/11. Inspired by the five unconventional Indian paintings she has pored over, she carefully chooses the colors for her post-9/11 painting. The reddish colors of open wounds are a reminder of the violence Rakhi and her friends experienced when their store was raided by angry young white men. The background composed of faces striped white, red, and blue is an obvious allusion to the American flag, which becomes a symbol of non-­belonging that ethnic subjects are reminded of in the days following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It is in this painting that the symbolic and therapeutic roles of art merge: the painting both illustrates and helps the artist come to terms with the attacks of 9/11 and the resultant precarious position of ethnic subjects in the US. To conclude, textual representations of visual – and aural – representations strike one as particularly effective when they are produced by ethnic writers, for in their case the otherness of visuality and aurality as modes of representation corresponds to and reflects the otherness of ethnic subjects in the US. With its focus on the symbolic and therapeutic role of art, Divakaruni’s novel The Queen of Dreams can be read as an illustration of the argument made by Mitchell that “the impulse to ‘interartistic comparison’ cannot be totally pointless. It must correspond to some sort of authentic critical desire to connect different aspects and dimensions of cultural experience” (87). Or, to put it somewhat differently, those diverse aspects and dimensions of cultural experience – text, image, sound – come all together in Divakaruni’s text to accentuate the need for an ethnic subject’s self-­ acceptance as well as the need for inter-­racial alliance in moments of personal and communal crisis.

Works Cited Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. Queen of Dreams. Doubleday, 2004. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage Books, 1990. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Duke University Press, 2005. Maira, Sunaina. “‘Racial Profiling’ in the War on Terror: Cultural Citizenship and South Asian Muslim Youth in the United States.” Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader. 3rd edition, edited by Min Zhou and Anthony C. Ocampo. New York University Press, 2016, pp. 444–463. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. The University of Chicago Press, 1994.

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Srikanth, Rajini. “‘The War on Terror’: Post-9/11 South Asian and Arab American Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by Crystal Parikh and Daniel Y. Kim, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 73–85. Wong, K. Scott. “War.” Keywords for Asian American Studies, edited by Cathy J. Schlund-­Vials, Linda Trinh Vo, and K. Scott Wong, New York University Press, 2015, pp. 238–243.

Sławomir Studniarz

A New Take on “The Mournful and Never Ending Remembrance”: Personal Loss and the Trauma of History in E. L. Doctorow’s Andrew’s Brain Abstract: The article examines E. L. Doctorow’s novella Andrew’s Brain, dealing with personal loss and the national disaster of the attack on the World Trade Center. The novella exposes the trauma of history and its shattering effect on human consciousness. Keywords: trauma, disaster, confession, archive, intertext

Poe’s ballad “The Raven” remains arguably the most famous literary representation of loss in American literature, and its message of the “Mournful and Never Ending Remembrance” continues to echo throughout the works of diverse American authors. The present article aims to explore the reworking of this idea in the last novel of E. L. Doctorow Andrew’s Brain, published in 2014. This strange valedictory offering of Doctorow stands perhaps as the author’s philosophical and artistic testament, on the one hand, firmly placed in the context of the Western metaphysical tradition, while on the other, critically reexamining its long-­standing claims in the light of recent findings of neuroscience and genetics. In the novel, the protagonist’s individual trauma, the loss of his beloved Briony, is enmeshed with the national tragedy of September 11. The novel’s fictional characters mix with thinly disguised historical figures, such as the US president Bush Jr. or Donald Rumsfeld. The novel is marked by the extensive inscription of intertexts from history, literature, opera, and popular culture and draws also from other modes of discourse: philosophy, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, genetics, information technology. Clearly, then, Andrew’s Brain, like much postmodernist fiction, situates itself within what Michel Foucault termed “the archive,” defined as “the general system of the formation and transformation of statements” (130). In tantalizingly indefinite circumstances, Andrew, a middle-­aged brain scientist, the first-­person narrator and the protagonist of the novel, discloses his misfortunes to a sympathetic interlocutor in a series of what appear to be psychoanalytical sessions before taking on a more ominous character. Thus, the narrative situation in the novel comes across as the blend of what Jeffrey Williams calls an “interview frame” and a “confessional preface” (121). Both, according to Williams, indicate an oral source of the story, with the confessional preface giv-

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ing “direct testimony” of the events, and both ascribe the privileged and unique access to “intimate events” (121). They attribute the source of a narrative, locating it outside the public realm, thus making it more desirable and alluring. These two framing scenarios, the interview and the confession, “normalize what would otherwise be inaccessible and perhaps painful or embarrassing events” (Williams 121). In a confessional mode, as Dennis Foster puts it, the narrator discloses “a secret knowledge to another,” and this private knowledge is revealed “in a way that would allow another to understand, judge, forgive, and perhaps even to sympathize” (2). Foster points out also the crucial similarity between confession and psychoanalysis – the latter, like the former, “transforms a feeling of alienation, of sickness, into an account of separation; it encourages one who is lost to trust his past to a listener who will make sense of it” (8). The aim of psychoanalysis is to bring to light repressed emotions and experiences, which are then subject to scrutiny. Likewise, in Foster’s view, “each confession appears to contain as yet unexpressed truth to be discovered by interpretation” (11). The tension between these two modes, confessional and therapeutic, is clearly observable in Andrew’s Brain; after all, Andrew’s listener is called by him “Doc” and treated as a member of the medical profession, a psychiatrist. This results in the double function of the narratee in Doctorow’s novel. As the receiver of his confession, Andrew’s interlocutor is expected to understand and forgive, or in religious terms, “to absolve the sinner.” However, as a therapist, Doc’s aim is to analyze Andrew’s predicament, to bring to light the roots of the problem, and perhaps help him recover from his trauma, since release from the trauma, from the isolation imposed on the traumatized subject by the original experience, cannot be effected without the subject telling of the event. The presence of the listener is indeed indispensable, since as Cathy Caruth relevantly observes, “the history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another” (10–11). Andrew’s rambling confession is interrupted by digressions, detours, reminiscences. There is little straightforward progression; rather, Andrew’s delivery frequently regresses and circles around the suppressed traumatic events before they are reluctantly and painfully narrated. At first it is hard to see a pattern, a convergence of all the separate threads of Andrew’s enunciations and speculations. Yet what holds them together is the intermingling of his personal experience, the loss of Briony and his individual trauma, with the national disaster of September 11. In this, Doctorow’s novel follows closely the conventions of historiographic metafiction, which attempts, as Linda Hutcheon puts it in A Poetics of Postmodernism, to make “individual experience the source of public history as well” (162).

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The relation of an individual to disaster is intertwined with the larger question, which many scholars after Linda Hutcheon perceive as the central question in metafictional historiographic criticism and which Jonathan Boulter formulates in the following way: “How can the self respond ethically to the demands of history?” (8). Historiographic metafiction, of which Andrew’s Brain is a prime example, investigates the very possibility of communicating history, of dealing with unbearable historical truths. Yet how can a literary text articulate disaster? The question is answered negatively by Maurice Blanchot, for his definition of disaster is that it is precisely something that “ruins everything, but cannot be known” (qtd. in Boulter 11), the experience that “none can undergo”; “the written of the disaster . . . will always be in the condition of ruin, the trace” (Blanchot qtd. in Boulter 14). The impact of disaster destroys the subject’s ethical relation with history. As Boulter puts it, disaster affects “the subject’s sense of his or her interiority,” and “may in fact rupture the subject’s ability to stand in ethical relation to history, to the past” (8). Also, the image of history as the “viral, material presence” (Derrida qtd. in Boulter 6) seems quite relevant for Doctorow’s novel. Under such terms, history is invasive and contagious, changing the subject from within, turning him into a “walking archive,” continually inhabiting the past. Andrew, the confessing subject and a victim of history, indeed emerges as a “speaking archive,” or in Boulter’s terms, as a “site” where loss is maintained and nourished. Devastated by the cataclysmic event of September 11, he cannot deal with his personal loss and with the national disaster. He has turned into what Blanchot calls “a wounded space,” which Boulter explains as “a peculiar, traumatized, fractured sensibility,” “a subject radically at ontological odds with itself ” (10). This fracturing is directly reflected in the mode of narration. Andrew usually recounts his past in the first person, but the third-­person mode intrudes quite often, producing an unsettling effect. According to Hutcheon, such shifts, common in postmodernist fiction, amount to a “challenge to the traditional transparency of the first-­person pronoun as a reflection of subjectivity and of the third-­person pronoun as the guarantee of objectivity” (177). In Doctorow’s novel, in addition, this modal switching works as a distancing technique – adopting external perspective in reporting his thoughts, Andrew analyzes himself like a detached observer. It is not only the notion of the unified subject that is radically undermined in the novel. The text problematizes the very idea of the self, too, by reexamining the relation between consciousness and the brain in the light of the latest advances in genetics and neuroscience, and by speculating on the possibility of creating artificial intelligence that would simulate a thinking, self-­aware subject. The novel

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poses also an added “hermeneutic” problem of dealing with the fragments of Andrew’s memories, the task made even more frustrating by his own avowed inability to distinguish memories from dreams or visions. In the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center and the annihilation of Briony, Andrew, in his deranged condition, engaged in imaginary conversations with the dead lover, asking her advice and listening to her answers. He nearly goes insane: “I’d have hallucinations where she’d appear beside me, as in life, and then a moment later be a tiny figure doing cartwheels and handstands and somersaults on the kitchen table” (Doctorow 95). He still identifies himself with his dead beloved, and looks at things, people, and the world through her eyes. He keeps Briony alive in his mind; she is incorporated by him, preserved in his ego. In Freud’s terms, it is a sign of true melancholia, because the suffering subject cannot break his attachment to the lost person. As a result of his trauma, Andrew seems to be caught in the twilight zone between waking and dreaming; he hears soundless voices when he is falling asleep, but he reluctantly admits he hears “the soundless voices too when he is up and about in his daily life” (9). The blurring of the boundaries between imaginary situations and reality, between recollections and projections, gives rise to an ontological and epistemological confusion. Andrew as the narrating subject is evasive; he avoids taking a definite position. Instead he spins out the web of conjectures, equivocations, and fabrications. In effect, his discourse is submerged in tentativeness. To top it all, under the impact of the catastrophic event, Andrew has irrevocably lost his illusions about human nature; in his grim view, mankind evinces thirst for violence, it relishes conflict. Its self-­destructive tendencies are captured by him in the impressive rhyming sequence of epithets: “politicidal, genocidal, suicidal humanity” (186). To properly convey the magnitude of his bereavement, Andrew discusses at length the metamorphosis effected by his love for Briony. According to his confession, he suffered a radical change of personality, rendered as “neural resetting” (42), leading to his new capacity for love and happiness, the sense of being connected to life, “finding redemption in the loving attentions of this girl” (77). He broke out of his solipsistic confinement and detachment, of his former indifference, isolation, and numbness, figured as the “cold clear emotionless pond of silence” (77). Briony’s near-­magical influence turned him into “something resembling a normal, functioning citizen of the world” (110). He was picking up new habits, “doing all sorts of un-­Andrew things,” such as holding hands in public or simply “being happy” (81). However, the loss of Briony and his involuntary “virtual” participation in the catastrophe caused Andrew to shed his acquired

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personality, and restored his original overriding sense of himself as the “bringer of doom.” He was once again assured of his essential being as that of Jonah and Job combined, inadvertently bringing disaster on those whose lives he touches. Andrew sees the fatality that pursues him throughout his whole life as his personal damnation. He blames himself for all the mishaps and calamities trailing him and his loved ones. He poignantly refers to “the wreck” he has made “of people’s lives, helpless infants or women” he loves (19). Martha’s, his ex-­wife’s, present husband sarcastically points out to Andrew his “gift of leaving disaster in his wake” (6). In his first “confession” – to Martha’s husband over a cocktail in a bar – Andrew admits to inadvertently killing his first child: “It is true I accidentally killed my baby girl that I had with Martha: In good faith I fed her the medicine I believed had been prescribed by our pediatrician. The druggist sent over the wrong medicine and I was not as alert as I should have been” (16). Andrew’s true identity, according to Martha’s husband, is that of “Sir Andrew the Pretender . . . whose well-­meaning, gentle, kindly disposed, charming ineptitude is the modus operandi of the deadliest of killers” (17). Martha’s husband, a singer performing the part of Boris Godunov in the Metropolitan Opera production, provides the overt motivation for introducing the plot of Mussorgsky’s opera as the novel’s central intertext. He calls Andrew “The Pretender,” and, the double meaning of the term is crucial to understanding the complex identity of Andrew and the role he assumes in the events. The first and obvious reference is to the figure of the Pretender in Mussorgsky’s opera, “announcing himself as the czarevich Dmitry, the rightful heir to the throne (99).” As Andrew explains, for the drunk singer listening to the opera broadcast on the radio it was natural “to see the fellow standing at the door as the Pretender Grigoriy, with his Polish-­Lithuanian army, arrived to take the crown” (102). In his eyes, Andrew adds, “I was the false claimant to the throne . . . Some basis for that in my being Martha’s ex” (102). But this designation expresses a deeper insight into Andrew’s nature: “That was the name he’d devised for me,” Andrew says, “when we’d had that drink the day I brought the baby to their door. That I only pretended to be a nice human being generously disposed to my fellow man when in fact I was a dangerously fake person, congenitally insincere and a killer (98).” Andrew’s entanglement with contemporary history and his inevitable brush with disaster come to happen through the chain of coincidences so unlikely that they strain credibility, as if to vindicate Foucault’s claim that “forces operating in history . . . always appear through the singular randomness of events” (qtd. in Hutcheon 162). The first link in the near-­improbable sequence is Andrew’s fateful move to New York with his young bride. In their new environment, Briony and

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the child are in the center of the whole neighborhood’s attention, presenting the communal spectacle that brings to mind the adoration of Madonna and Baby Jesus. Breastfeeding the baby, Briony is perceived by Andrew as “a sacrament of nature in the green park (127).” Ironically, the idyll is destroyed when Briony is overcome with the sudden and inexplicable fascination with the New York City Marathon. The innocent idea to take part in the famous mass run proves to be her undoing because of the route she chooses for her practice: “down along the Hudson to the Esplanade, across Liberty Street, with maybe a stop at the WTC to run some flights of stairs, and then turning north up Broadway” (129). Briony, unwittingly, toys with fate when she accepts the invitation of her former boyfriend Dirk to meet him for lunch downtown on September 11, 2001. In the morning of that memorable day, Dirk unexpectedly calls Briony from one of the two towers to cancel their meeting. Dirk, the miserable rejected lover, decides to commit suicide by jumping from the window, and by yet another unimaginable twist of fate, he inadvertently records the attack on the World Trade: “I’ll put the phone in my pocket and he will hear my flight, and keep it for posterity, deliver it as lecture: How Bri’s lover died” (130). The pronoun “he” refers here to Andrew, to whom, in the absence of his sweetheart, Dirk is directing his last words via the answering machine. In effect, Dirk “broadcast[s] his death” (133), in an act of revenge deliberately implicating Andrew in his suicidal fall. But little does he realize that at the same time he makes Andrew an involuntary witness, a virtual participant in the disaster. The personal tragedy of Dirk, the banal story of a love triangle, the suicide of a distraught abandoned lover – all these literary clichés become entangled with the national tragedy, an unimaginable catastrophe, a disaster unprecedented in the history of the USA. In Doctorow’s novel, the attack itself is represented through recorded sounds and thus relayed from the very center of the disaster: And then I heard the flame behind him like a whoosh of a monstrous breath and think now, as I have listened to the point where I don’t have to listen to hear it, I hear too the voices of the others on the ninety-­fifth floor with him as they burned to death, their cries the last organic traces of their enflamed bones, a weird awful chorus finally indistinguishable from the roar of the oil fire and the cringe and screech and squeak of the tortured steel. (131)

The impression of the disaster is vivid and powerful, for Andrew, without even listening to the tape, can hear the voices of the annihilated. As close to being a part of the disaster as it is possible without losing his life, he is forever burdened with the memory of the event through his near-­participation in it. He is physically unscathed, but mentally seared for the rest of his life. The mark cannot be removed.

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It is not only Andrew that becomes implicated in the disaster. The novel establishes the chain of what Bernard Duyfhuizen calls “narrative transmission” (17). The issue of the receiver’s complicity is highlighted through the embedded story of Dirk’s suicidal jump and the direct broadcast of his farewell speech, which incidentally records the attack on the World Trade Center. First, a witness against his will, Andrew is projected right into the scene of the cataclysmic event. His interlocutor, in turn, shares Andrew’s experience by listening to his verbal representation of Dirk’s story, and vicariously participates in the catastrophe, even though twice-­removed from it. Finally, the extratextual addressee of the novel becomes affected and implicated: the personal reader is brought into hideous proximity to the disaster as well. Even though Andrew ran away from the demands and unbearable claims of history, and moved out of New York, in his new environment he becomes once again embroiled in the larger political context of his life. There, in Washington, by yet another inconceivable twist of circumstances, his life is finally determined by the unexpected visit of the US president in the high school in which Andrew has found a temporary job, another demeaning episode in the chain of the mortifying circumstances of his life. On this occasion, as if to crown the dizzying spin of events, it is revealed that Andrew and George W. Bush were roommates at Yale. This unexpected encounter, in turn, leads to Andrew being offered a position in the White House, thus becoming the “director of the White House Office of Neurological Research” (150). This appointment is more of a joke than a distinction, because, as Andrew explains, he “had never heard of such an office and with good reason: It was newly devised and . . . [he] would be the first appointee” (150). The real reason was to keep an eye on Andrew, to prevent compromising disclosures of the misdemeanors of Bush Jr. at college. The president provides the link unifying Andrew’s personal loss and the nation’s trauma: Andrew blames Bush Jr. for the disaster and in consequence, for Briony’s death as well. In Andrew’s view, both could have been prevented: “Analyses had been done. All you had to do was read the newspaper. Those flights should never have happened. The intelligence was there” (153). The president uses Andrew’s presence in the White House against his advisors, as an element of a power struggle. As part of this struggle, he invents “funny” names for his associates: Peachums, Chaingang, Rumbum. As Andrew explains, this was “a sign of his affection, a kind of honorific, or maybe a brand such as you burn into a steer, because it was also a means of letting you know he owned you” (172). Toyed with by Bush Jr., the butt of an elaborate but obscure joke, Andrew realizes that he wanted to engage with history, to respond to it in the only way

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that seemed appropriate to him: “I meant to step into history, to act. To make a statement that would finally be the end of me” (154). Andrew’s need to engage echoes those of E.L. Doctorow’s other characters’; as Terrence Rafferty pertinently observes in his review of Andrew’s Brain, “[r]esponding to the history of one’s times is the sworn duty of a character in a novel by E. L. Doctorow, who has in his half-­century of writing fiction placed a remarkable number of people, both real and imagined, in their history just to watch them respond.” Andrew’s response to the unbearable claims of history takes a very peculiar form, though, one that confirms the centrality of “Boris Godunov” as the novel’s intertext. Besides the Pretender, Mussorgsky’s opera features the dramatis persona of the Holy Fool, the figure “lamenting Russia’s fate as the curtain comes down” (103). This operatic character proves to be of immense significance, as it became Andrew’s role model. Andrew eagerly embraces his transformation from the Pretender to the Holy Fool, which is the role he finally chooses to play in the events. Accordingly, his mission would consist in lamenting the fate of his country and denouncing George W. Bush as a tyrant. Yet in his demonstrative act, a gesture of mockery and defiance, he is also inspired by the recollection of Briony, her image on the high bar and his first glimpse of her. To “bring her into resolution there in the White House” (189), he does a handstand in front of the president in the Oval Office. “An act of inspired madness,” Andrew’s “mimetic act,” his gymnastic feat, is of multiple significance. First of all, it is his tribute to Briony; it conjured up in his mind the image of Briony on the day she had disappeared, just before she left the house for her practicing routine. It is also a fitting expression of the role that had been assigned to him in the White House: “I was alone versus the triumvirate and the joke was on me – the three of them in collusion to put me in a foolscap with bells” (187). Paradoxically, however, the handstand helped Andrew regain agency and dignity: “Really it was a triumph. I had for a moment risen out of my characteristic humility, my ordinary citizenness, and in one upsidedown gesture achieved equity with these governors of my country” (190). But above all, this act conveys Andrew’s reaction to the nightmare of history; this reaction cannot involve an ethical response, only a burlesque performance. Andrew as the Holy Fool highlights the degradation of modern-­day politics. It is no longer the question whether or not the past, in particular the most recent, can be objectively presented, but whether it deserves to be treated with respect so far conferred on history. Andrew can no longer treat history as something that requires a proper ethical response. He mocks the White House politics, turning it into a travesty. In his ridicule of Bush Jr., he passes judgment on the tyrant and as

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befits the Holy Fool, mourns for his country: “You are only the worst so far, there is far worse to come. Perhaps not tomorrow. Perhaps not next year, but you have shown us the path into the Dark Wood” (191). Andrew derides Bush Jr. for his military ineptness, for his political blunders, and for his staggering incompetence as the US president: “His war was not going well. He’d invaded the wrong country. You can’t imagine the anxiety that produces” (174). But, sadly, this act is without any cathartic effect. It produces no renewal; it brings no relief to Andrew. It is not only his performance in the Oval Office that fails to bring about a recuperative effect. Andrew’s sharing of his devastating personal loss with his interlocutor and his verbalization of the trauma effect no healing, either; his confession ends in a therapeutic fiasco. Andrew is still haunted by the oppressive nightmare of history, but this time it manifests itself in soundless and terrifying shows projected on the walls in his cell with the cell turning into “a darkened movie theater where another silent horror show is about to begin” (196). As he painfully confesses, “I hear soundless voices, phantoms loom up out of my sleep and onto the wall, lingering there, cringing in anguish, curling up in visible contortions of pain and crying out wordlessly for my help” (196). He speculates that perhaps he is “carrying in [his] brain matter the neuronal record of previous ages” (196), the racial cellular memory that has been somehow accessed and released now, revealing to him the true legacy of mankind – the endless suffering of countless victims. Against this bleak vision of the historical process, Andrew pits his dream of artificial intelligence, the emulation of God. This supercomputer will have the capacity to preserve memories; all life will be on record forever: “this one awesome computer . . . suppose it had the capacity to record and store the acts and thoughts and feelings of every living person on earth once around per millisecond of time. I mean, as if all of existence was data for this computer” (44). Andrew imagines a technological salvation by the computer-­assisted reconstitution of all the stored personal data of each human being. Through this technologically-­enabled method of overcoming loss, of recapturing what has been destroyed, he envisions a way of bringing Briony back from the dead. But this new version of human immortality, the prospect of a digitally reconstructed person, is also his desperate attempt to alleviate the trauma of history, and to overcome nihilism engendered by the observation of history’s inexorable and harrowing progression. Imprisoned in his cell indefinitely, Andrew may be a mental patient or a detained subversive incarcerated after the attack on the US president. But perhaps even more outrageously, he might be a new-­fangled computer attaining the sophistication of a human brain, as the following exchange tantalizingly suggests:

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Tell me, Doc, am I a computer? What? Am I the first computer invested with consciousness? With terrible dreams, with feelings, with grief, with longing? No, Andrew, you’re a human being. Well, you would say that (197).

The novel leaves the question of the narrating subject’s identity and ontological status unresolved, but what clearly emerges from Andrew’s tangled and tortured confession is the exposition of the trauma of history and its shattering effect on the mind.

Works Cited Beck, J.G., and D.M Sloan. The Oxford Handbook of Traumatic Stress Disorders. Oxford University Press, 2012. Boulter, Jonathan. Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, Memory, and History in the Contemporary Novel. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011. Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by C. Caruth, John Hopkins University Press, 1992, 3–12. Doctorow, E.L., Andrew’s Brain, Random House, 2014. Duyfhuizen, Bernard. Narratives of Transmission. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon, 1972. Foster, Dennis. Confession and complicity in narrative. Cambridge University Press, 1987. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Taylor & Francis e-­Library, 2004. Rafferty, Terrence, “The Mind’s Jailer ‘Andrew’s Brain,’ by E. L. Doctorow,” Sunday Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/books/review/andrewsbrain-by-e-l-doctorow.html?_r=0. Accessed 19 May 2016. Williams, Jeffrey. Theory and the Novel. Narrative reflexivity in the British tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Anna Gilarek

Repression and Control in a Post-­Panoptic Anti-­Utopian State: The Radch Empire in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy Abstract: The article discusses the anti-­utopian character of the social reality depicted in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy. It focuses on the maintenance of discipline and power in a militaristic state, paying special attention to the issue of surveillance. Keywords: utopia, anti-­utopia, panopticism, surveillance

Ann Leckie, the author of the Imperial Radch trilogy, entered the science-­fiction literary scene fairly recently, with her debut novel, Ancillary Justice, published in 2013. The remaining two volumes of the trilogy, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, were published in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The novel achieved instant success and critical acclaim, which brought Leckie multiple literary prizes, including the prestigious Nebula and Hugo awards. The trilogy deserves special recognition for, among others, its highly detailed and fascinating world-­building, in particular the highly complex social reality of the Radch Empire, in which the novels are set. It is this social reality, and in particular its anti-­utopian character, that is the focus of this article. In the article, I explain first why the depicted society can be classified as an anti-­utopia, as opposed to a utopia or dystopia, elements of which are also perceptible in the novels. Next, I discuss the oppressive character of an expansionist authoritarian state, paying special attention to the mechanisms of control and coercion which function in the society, especially to ubiquitous surveillance. The analysis is based on several notions introduced by Michel Foucault, such as discipline, the panopticon, as well as the power-­knowledge dynamic. Finally, I show the depicted reality to be post-­panoptic and congruent with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the society of control. The Radch is an expansionist superpower which controls a large part of the known universe. The narrator, Breq, is an artificial intelligence, which constitutes the remnants of a warship, Justice of Toren, and which is now reduced to a single body which used to be the ship’s ancillary – a human body controlled by the ship’s AI. After the destruction of the ship and its crew, Breq sets out on a revenge quest against its destroyer – the Lord of the Radch herself.

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The trilogy has been classified as a space opera, as it displays certain defining characteristics of the genre, such as a far-­reaching galactic empire, interstellar conflict, the quest theme, thrilling adventure, and advanced weaponry. Still, next to these clearly space-­operatic elements, the novels display a wider thematic scope: they provide a fascinating insight into the nature of artificial intelligence and include philosophical considerations regarding fate, choice and moral obligation. In addition, the novels explore, against the backdrop of Breq’s daring exploits, various sociopolitical issues, in particular the nature of imperialist enterprises and the repressive character of colonial undertakings. Owing to the inclusion of these themes, the trilogy has been described as a “sociopolitical space opera” (Valentine), a term which points to its extension of classic space opera tropes. Moreover, the trilogy exhibits an undeniable affinity with the utopian and dystopian genres in its anti-­utopian depiction of a social reality that purports to be distinctly superior, only to be exposed as highly questionable. Leckie’s fictional reality gravitates towards a dystopia, or rather anti-­utopia. Although the two terms are sometimes used synonymously, this conflation is seen as largely inaccurate (Blaim 80). While dystopia is limited to a depiction of a highly negative social reality, anti-­utopia aims to criticize a specific, failed utopian venture (Sargent, “Three Faces” 8). Due to the ambiguous character of the Radch, the trilogy may be analyzed from anti-­utopian perspective. Despite the fact that the Empire may be said to exhibit certain features of a planned utopia, it is gradually revealed to be fraught with underlying flaws. According to Darko Suvin, anti-­utopia may be described as “a pretended eutopia – a community whose hegemonic principles pretend to its being more perfectly organized than any thinkable alternative” (189). Indeed, the citizens of the Radch Empire are convinced of the superior status of their state, as evidenced in the use of advanced technology and medicine, well-­ordered and seamless functioning, or the emphasis on politeness and manners. The Radch prides itself on its efficiency and propriety. Moreover, the Radch displays features of a welfare state, inasmuch as it provides all citizens with basic necessities, such as housing, clothing, and food. Additionally, the Empire has all the features of a feminist variety of utopia, most important being absolute gender equality. The Radchaai are genderless – no distinctions are made among people based on their sex, which is not indicated by any outward markers. As a result, the Radchaai are virtually gender-­blind, as they do not distinguish between males and females. Since such a distinction is deemed entirely inconsequential, there are no prescribed gender roles and all the citizens are truly equal – at least in terms of gender. The post-­binary character of gender relations within the Radch finds reflection on the linguistic level: the Radchaai

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language is ungendered and the pronoun “she” is used as a default for both sexes. The depicted reality also fulfills other requirements that are commonly regarded as crucial for a feminist utopia, such as revolutionized reproduction and parenthood. As in numerous feminist utopias, the procreative process has been revolutionized by means of advanced technology, which results in freeing women from the inconveniencies of pregnancy. Also the manner in which children are raised harks back to feminist utopian solutions. The child raising process is overseen by multiple parents who agree to share responsibilities within large households. Despite these inclinations towards utopia, the Radch is far from perfect in its totalitarian tendency towards uniformization and strict social control, which are seen as essential for ensuring order and stable progress. Also, the Empire’s economic prosperity stems from its aggressive colonial expansion. For L. T. Sargent, this is characteristic of what he calls “flawed utopias,” which represent “the fundamental dilemma of what cost we are willing to pay or require others to pay to achieve a good life. If someone must suffer to achieve that good life, is the cost worth paying?” (“Notes” 226). According to Dohra Ahmad, inhabitants of anti-­ utopia are predominantly willing to pay that cost: An anti-­utopia, or negative utopia . . . portrays a place that is not bad per se but functions exactly as it should, a place where most people are content with the utopian compromise to which they have implicitly consented. It is essentially a utopian society – but the author portrays it as a horror, and judges the compromise not to have been worthwhile. (qtd. in Blaim 84)

The Radch Empire falls into this category as it purports to be an ideally governed state and a purveyor of a superior civilization, while in fact there is a definite dark side to their ostensibly noble ventures. In a social system as that of the Radch, the accepted status quo is revealed to be a result of a series of concessions in which certain values have to be sacrificed for the sake of striving towards perfection, however it may be understood. Anti-­utopia exposes the impossibility of achieving such self-­proclaimed excellence, due to its imposed and totalitarian character. First of all, the whole Empire is ruled by a single person – the Lord of the Radch, Anaander Mianaai – a multi-­bodied dictator, who is virtually immortal and omnipresent, due to the fact that “she possesse[s] thousands of bodies, all of them genetically identical, all of them linked to each other” (Justice 95). This one person in multiple bodies holds all kinds of power: executive, legislative and even ecclesiastical: “It was she who made Radchaai law, and she who decided on any exceptions to that law. She was the ultimate commander of the military, the highest head priest of Amaat, the person to whom, ultimately, all Radchaai houses were clients” (Justice 95). Mia-

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naai’s power is absolute and her orders must be obeyed unconditionally. Defying the Lord’s orders results in immediate execution, even if it means authorizing the utter destruction of a whole planetary system. The most troubling aspect of the Radch Empire is their extensive annexation of new planets. The Radchaai believe that by means of their expansion they are ensuring the spread of civilization and high culture – a common misapprehension in expansionist, colonialist superpowers. In the Radchaai language the world “Radchaai” means both citizen and civilized, thus equating being a citizen of the Radch with being civilized and therefore superior. Officially, the annexations are unproblematic and seamless, bringing benefits for both the Radch and all those who are incorporated into the Empire. In reality, they do not go as smoothly as Radchaai propaganda would have it: the incorporation of subsequent planets and systems into the Empire, irrespective of the inhabitants’ preference, can hardly be seen as benevolent. The newly annexed planets are disarmed and Radchaai way of life is imposed. If those annexed agree to this imposition they may benefit from being residents of the Radch, even if in reality they are frequently treated as second-­class citizens, depending on their degree of assimilation and status. Those who do not adapt are eliminated, which accounts for the reduction in population which typically follows such an annexation. Thus, annexations are in reality conquests, or, as Breq puts it, “the polite term for the Radchaai invasion and colonization of entire star systems” (Mercy 19). The use of this euphemism is concordant with the Radchaai reasoning behind annexations: they seem to adhere to the “ends justify the means” philosophy, claiming that “whatever is beneficial must be just” (Sword 20). Thus, benefit becomes the sole indicator of justice. The fallacy of this assumption goes without saying. In the Radch, overall progress is seen as most beneficial and therefore whatever is done to facilitate it is considered just, even if it might seem questionable. The twisted logic of this attitude is adopted as justification for all their actions. In annexations, the Radchaai “see the spread of civilization, of Justice and Propriety, of Benefit for the universe. The death and destruction, these are unavoidable by-­products of this one, supreme good” (Justice 103). The anti-­utopian character of the Radch is evident here – the Radchaai focus their attention on the end product of their endeavors, whose benefits, they believe, outweigh the costs which have to be paid for its achievement. Not only is it supposed to be a planned utopian society attained at any price, it is also utopian only from the Radch perspective. Even one of Breq’s lieutenants, a Radchaai officer, begins to see this incongruence: How can there be any benefit at all? She [the Lord of the Radch] tells herself. . . that all of it is ultimately for the benefit of humanity, that everyone has their place, their part

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of the plan, and sometimes some individuals just have to suffer for that greater benefit. But it’s easy to tell yourself that, isn’t it, when you’re never the one on the receiving end. (Mercy 166)

Thus, the Radch is obviously a utopia with a limited availability, a fact which undermines its alleged perfection. Additionally, it is far from being just, as those who enjoy the benefits of the expansion are not the ones who pay the price for the Empire’s progress. The anti-­utopian character of the Radch is also exemplified by the totalizing force that the Empire represents. It promotes homogeneity according to their own standards. This leads to the creation of a uniform state, which “presses worlds through a single ‘civilizing’ mold” (Valentine). Indeed, once the annexation is complete, assimilation is the only option. Even though the Radchaai adopt quite eagerly the religious beliefs of those they conquer, continually adding new gods to their expanding polytheistic pantheon, in other spheres of life they expect the unconditional adoption of Radchaai ways. As stated by a Radchaai officer, You know how annexations work. I mean, yes, they work by sheer, undeniable force, but after. After the executions and the transportations and once all the last bits of idiots who think they can fight back are cleaned up. Once all that’s done, we fit whoever’s left into Radchaai society – they form up into houses, and take clientage, and in a generation or two they’re as Radchaai as anybody. (Justice 54)

The forced assimilation entails the establishment of Radchaai-­style, hierarchical, quasi-­feudal society, in which wealthy citizens are grouped into houses, to which lower houses are clients, based on a clientage contract. All the houses are ultimately clients to the Lord of the Radch. The contracts between individual patrons and clients have all the markings of a sponsorship relation and clientage is frequently offered in exchange for sexual services. In this highly stratified society, class consciousness plays a crucial role. Displays of wealth and status are customary, as is contempt for lower classes. Belonging to a prominent family, having notable antecedents, as well as proper accent and manners affect one’s social status and access to prestigious positions. The fact that reforms are introduced to change the system into a more meritocratic one evokes indignation among upper-­class citizens. In the second volume of the trilogy, while residing on the planet Athoek and in the Athoek Station, Breq focuses her attention on a host of other post-­annexation problems which affect the annexed worlds: intergalactic slavery, corruption, privileges for the rich, the exploitation of workers, and discrimination against the lowest classes. The latter include those who assimilate poorly and refuse to join in houses of their own. Their unwillingness to establish those basic Radchaai social

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units means they cannot become clients to more prominent Radchaai houses and without such patronage they are unprotected and disrespected. Considered “barely civilized” (Sword 100) and practically non-­human by the Radchaai, they occupy slum-­like parts of the station which are not adapted for habitation and receive no medical care. As for the forcibly transported field workers on the planet Athoek, they are routinely deprived of their rights, not allowed to withdraw their labor or even to obtain travel permits. Such treatment of workers is justified by the commonly held view that they are nothing but “a bunch of houseless savages” (Sword 200). Any attempts at protest, be it an uprising or a workers’ strike, are swiftly stifled by means of punitive and coercive measures such as food rationing, military action, reeducation or executions. Thus, the maintenance of an imperialist state relies on strict disciplinary procedures and unconditional submission of the conquered subjects, as well as on social and institutional control and enforced conformity. An example of a disciplinary measure is reeducation, advocated as a safe procedure which eradicates a person’s criminal tendencies and alters their behavior so that it is acceptable by Radchaai standards. The procedure is understandably feared by those conquered and often referred to as brainwashing. Such tampering with a person’s mind is also used during interrogations or aptitudes tests, which allows for a truthful evaluation of an individual. While the success of the method seems undeniable – crime within the Radch is not a very common problem – the violation of individual liberty it entails is hard to accept. Even some of the Radchaai have misgivings about the procedure. Breq describes these doubts as “a horror of interrogation and reeducation” (Mercy 21), which is a topic the Radchaai prefer not to bring up in conversations. Still, they consent to the use of reeducation, rationalizing that it is one of the necessary costs of achieving a better world – in this case, one without crime. The mechanisms of control and correction are both enforced and exemplified by the Radch military. The Radch Empire is a state with a strongly developed military culture. The army not only performs the annexations, but also constitutes the highest authority which continues to assert their presence all over the Radch space, even after the annexation process is considered complete. It might be stated that the relation between the annexed peoples and the soldiers mirrors to some degree the relations within the army itself, insofar as similar mechanisms of coercion and control are used to achieve unquestionable compliance. Michel Foucault made the following observation regarding such a relation: “discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies. Discipline . . . dissoci-

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ates power from the body” (138). In consequence, a person is forced to relinquish their own will, submitting oneself to a higher authority – one that wields power. Constructing an army involves molding “docile bodies” for various tasks through drilling and repetitive training, as a result of which soldiers become, to use Foucault’s words, “something that can be made; out of formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; . . . turning silently into the automatism of habit” (135). The desired effect is the mechanical functioning of individual soldiers, who are supposed to display total obedience and become easily manipulated elements of a larger uniform whole. It is a process which involves the drilling of docile bodies into automata and in the case of the Radch army the process seems to be fully successful – they are perceived by outsiders as “rank on rank of identical silver-­armored soldiers, with no wills of their own, no minds of their own” (Justice 37). The most efficient kind of docile bodies in Leckie’s trilogy are non-­human soldiers – the so-­called ancillaries: human bodies whose consciousness has been removed, while they were connected to an AI-­controlled spaceship in order to serve as extensions of the said AI. The procedure is done forcibly, most commonly to those inhabitants of the newly annexed worlds who offer resistance. Needless to add, it eventuates the death of the prisoner, hence the reference to ancillaries as “corpse soldiers.” The ancillaries are the ultimate example of docile bodies, literally devoid of consciousness, unquestionably obedient and always ready to sacrifice their lives – an ancillary body is easily replaced. The ancillaries are recognizable by their bland, expressionless faces, which human soldiers try to imitate in order to become as ancillary-­like as possible – the paragons of perfect service. Also, like ancillaries, they go by numerical names based on their unit, rather than by their individual names. This state of affairs, which may be seen as a “relation of docility-­utility” (Foucault 137), is effectuated by the imposition of a series of disciplines, which are best exercised in what Foucault described as spaces of enclosure: “the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony” (141). This kind of environment merits the launching of disciplinary machinery, which “partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement” (Foucault 137). In the Radch military, such partitioning within an enclosed space is particularly conspicuous on warships, where soldiers live according to rigid rules, strict hierarchy and a timetable, resulting in firm temporal and spatial management of their existence. The soldiers’ time is divided into shifts and their activities scheduled and monitored. The implementation of such a strict timetable and constant repetitive exercise, as well as ceaseless supervision, are

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what Foucault perceived as the “disciplines” which are enforced within enclosed spaces to automatize and normalize behavior (Hopper and Macintosh 132). The most crucial factor in upholding order and discipline is surveillance, which is constant on warships and space stations and less so on the planets belonging to the Radch Empire. It corresponds to another concept discussed by Foucault: the panopticon. The panopticon was originally Jeremy Bentham’s design of a prison in which inmates are subjected to the constant possibility of observation. For Foucault, the panopticon becomes “the emblem of modern power” (McKinlay and Starkey 3), as well as a metaphor for disciplinary societies with well-­developed regulatory institutions (McKinlay and Starkey 2). The power which stems from panoptic surveillance is dispersed, disembodied and decentralized. It does not require any central power figure, as the surveillant objects exercise control over themselves, having internalized “the probable gaze” (Elmer 28). In other words, the very possibility of being watched, even if observation is discontinuous, causes them to modify their behavior. In Leckie’s trilogy the idea of panopticism is taken to an extreme, as, within AI-­controlled environments, such as warships and space stations, the surveillance indeed is continuous, which goes beyond Foucault’s understanding of the panopticon in its original eighteenth-­century form. Consequently, the Radch space can be described as a society of control, to use a term introduced by Gilles Deleuze, who differentiated between Foucault’s disciplinary society and a modern society of control. The main difference between the two lies in the fact that in the latter control and monitoring are continuous (“Postscript”). Another divergence point from the panoptic model is the fact that the supervision is not performed by a human observer, but by computers. This situation is made possible due to the use of advanced technology and it pertains both to Leckie’s fictional universe and, to some degree, to the contemporary extratextual reality. The change in the “socio-­technical landscape” results in the remodeling of power dynamics (Galič et al. 11), leading to the creation of post-­panoptic surveillance. This transformation has led some scholars, such as Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ercison, to consider the Foucauldian panoptic model no longer applicable in the contemporary world (Galič et al. 12). Haggerty maintains that “Foucault’s model does not completely fit the contemporary global, technological or political dynamics of surveillance” (Haggerty 26). Instead, it is believed to have been replaced by what Mark Poster termed the superpanopticon: “a system of surveillance without walls, windows, towers or guards” (qtd. in Jordan 201). This deterritorialization is yet another feature of post-­panoptic society (Lyon, “The Search” 13), which can be contrasted with the classical panoptic prison, where an inmate is

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confined to a cell. The Radch fits this definition of post-­panoptic control, as Radchaai citizens enjoy relative freedom of movement, while still being supervised. Within post-­panoptic systems, like the Radch, control is exercised by means of computerized information-­gathering and communication technologies, which enable tagging and tracking people. Such dataveillance in the Radch is enabled by the fact that every Radchaai citizen is implanted with a tracker, as a result of which they are never “lost or invisible to any watching AI” (Mercy 18). This is mostly the case on stations and on board of military ships, as these are AI-­controlled. As Breq mentions, on a station, privacy was . . . non-­existent . . . Station saw your most intimate moments. But you always knew Station would never tell just anyone what it saw, wouldn’t gossip. Station would report crimes and emergencies, but for anything else it would, at most, hint here or guide there. (Sword 171)

Hence, being an AI herself, Breq perceives such surveillance as a benevolent gaze, whose aim is primarily the protection and benefit of citizens. In accordance with the assumptions of panopticism it is also a preventive measure, as criminal undertakings are largely discouraged. A similar situation takes place on warships, where “no Radchaai soldier [can] so much as take a breath without her ship knowing it” (Sword 309). This is the case with the troop carrier Breq used to be, or the one whose captain she becomes in the second part of the trilogy. What is more, soldiers are fitted with various medical implants, which constantly gather information and record data. Breq recalls her ability to watch the soldiers while she was still a ship: I had been always aware of the state of my officers. What they heard and what they saw. Every breath, every twitch of every muscle. Hormone levels, oxygen levels. Everything, nearly, except the specific contents of their thoughts, though even that I could often guess, from experience, from intimate acquaintance. (Sword 5)

All of the soldiers’ activity is seen by the ship’s AI, monitored, recorded and reported to the captain if necessity arises. Furthermore, the captain has access to each soldier’s medical records, correspondence, as well as personal belongings. The resultant knowledge about the whereabouts and actions of all individuals is a source of power – also in accordance with Foucault, who often equated the two notions. Knowledge, in Foucauldian perspective, can be used to regulate and standardize the conduct of others, resulting in the enforcement of discipline and an establishment of a power relation (Hall 77). There is thus an inextricable relation between power and knowledge, a relation in which the latter may become “one of the weapons with which society manages itself ” (McKinlay and Starkey

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2). The power which stems from surveillance is a primary disciplinary mechanism within the Radch space. Still, it might be argued that despite the fact that the Radch can be described as a post-­panoptic society of control, it still displays features which have a lot in common with the classical panopticon. First of all, it still operates most successfully in spaces of enclosure, such as AI-­controlled ships. Furthermore, the aim of surveillance is centered on the disciplining factor, contrary to post-­panoptic control societies, in which the purposes of surveillance vary and are often commercially-­ oriented (Galič et al. 14). Finally, similarly to panoptic power, the operation of the surveillance system in the Radch, particularly in the army, results in the creation of docile bodies which rely to a similar extent on external control and self-­regulation. In conclusion, Ann Leckie’s depiction of the fictional Radch Empire poses questions regarding the balance between perceived benefits of strict governmental control and the amount of personal freedom which needs to be compromised to achieve a safe and well-­functioning state. It may be stated that there is a definite correlation between the post-­panoptic environment depicted by Leckie and the current situation in the post-9/11 United Sates, with its intensification of surveillance and government intrusion in the name of security. Similarly to the Radch, the United States is seen by some as a society of control (Lyon, Electronic Eye 12), in which technology-­enabled supervision has become widespread. The ubiquity of surveillance is supposed to result in increased security yet it evokes suspicion and uneasiness due to its Orwellian connotations. The anti-­utopian Radch Empire from Leckie’s trilogy may be a futuristic vision yet it draws the readers’ attention to the potentialities of abuse in the spheres of both governmental control and technologized surveillance, both of which have become pervasive and invasive.

Works Cited Blaim, Artur. “Hell Upon a Hill: Reflections on Anti-­utopia and Dystopia.” Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, on Screen, on Stage, edited by Fátima Vieira, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, pp. 80–95. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, vol. 59, 1992, pp. 3–7. JSTOR. Accessed 25 Feb 2016. Elmer, Greg. “Panopticon – Discipline – Control.” Routledge Handbook on Surveillance Studies, edited by Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty and David Lyon, Routledge, 2012, pp. 21–29. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1977.

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Galič, Maša, et al. “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation.” Philosophy  & Technology, 2016, pp.  11–29. SpringerLink, doi: 10.1007/s13347-016–0219-1. Accessed 20 Aug 2016. Hall, Stuart. “Foucault: Power, Knowledge and Discourse.” Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, edited by Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates, Sage Publications Ltd., 2001, pp. 72–81. Haggerty, Kevin D. “Tear Down the Walls: On Demolishing the Panopticon.” Theorizing Surveillance, edited by David Lyon, Routledge, 2011, pp. 23–45. Hopper, Trevor, and Norman Macintosh. “Management Accounting Numbers: Freedom or Prison – Geneen versus Foucault.” Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self, edited by Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey, Sage Publications Ltd., 1998, pp. 126–150. Jordan, Tim. Cyberpower: An Introduction to the Politics of Cyberspace. Routledge, 1999. Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Justice. Orbit, 2013. —. Ancillary Mercy. Orbit, 2015. —. Ancillary Sword. Orbit, 2014. Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society – Computers and Social Control in Context. Polity Press, 1994. —. “The Search for Surveillance Theories.” Theorizing Surveillance, edited by David Lyon, Routledge, 2011, pp. 3–20. McKinlay, Alan and Ken Starkey. “Managing Foucault: Foucault, Management and Organization Theory.” Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self, edited by Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey, Sage Publications Ltd., 1998, pp. 1–13. Sargent, Lyman T. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 1994, pp. 1–37. —. “The Problem of the ‘Flawed Utopia’: A Note on the Costs of Eutopia.” Dark Horizons, edited by Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, Routledge, 2003, pp. 47–68. Suvin, Darko. “Theses on Dystopia 2001.” Dark Horizons, edited by. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, Routledge, 2003, pp. 47–68. Valentine, Genevieve. “An Intergalactic Adventure Winds To A Close In Ancillary Mercy.” NPR Books. Accessed 10 Feb 2016.

Julia Nikiel

Emotion Management and Damage Control: Navigating Global Reality in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy Abstract: The article examines the multiple ways (i.e. panic, resistance, attempts at rational navigation) in which the characters in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy deal with their emotions triggered by the reality of globalization. Keywords: William Gibson, Bigend Trilogy, conspiracy, cognitive mapping

The reality of late capitalism breeds imbalance; disparities are visible not only in access to information, wealth, experienced control, or complicity in global processes but also in the very experience of global reality. The degrees of power and privilege contemporary people exhibit are inversely proportional to their psychological susceptibility to global influences. The most empowered and privileged are in no way affected, let alone disturbed, by what is happening around them; on the contrary, thriving on change and friction, they quickly learn to not just navigate but surf global reality. Still, the majority experience global reality as destabilizing and oppressive; pushed around by the forces of globalization, they go to great lengths to keep their heads above the global flows. Throughout the Bigend Trilogy, William Gibson chronicles the various ways in which most people respond to and cope with the reality that surrounds them. People’s emotional response to global reality, Gibson demonstrates on the example of his characters, is twofold; it includes the corresponding feelings of dislocation and instability as well as the sensation of all-­encompassing terror. The intensity of emotions people experience following their confrontation with global reality pushes them to develop a variety of coping strategies. In this article, I analyze the various ways in which the characters from the Bigend Trilogy manage their emotions. The strategies the characters employ include panic as well as multiple forms of resistance; they are aimed, I argue, at externalizing, controlling, and acting against the characters’ anxieties. These strategies are, however, only provisional. In the long run, successful functioning inside the reality of globalization requires the characters to both reconcile themselves with this reality’s conspiratory nature and develop the ability to navigate the global conspiracy by cognitively mapping its patterns and transformations.

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Learning to cope Everyone has their limits. Throughout the Bigend Trilogy, constant surges of anxiety and frustration slowly impede the characters’ ability to handle their circumstances. Once the build-­up is too big, the characters panic, accrued emotions being relieved through uncontrolled hysterical rage or temporary emotional withdrawal. At the end of Pattern Recognition (2003), to the total astonishment of her friends Peter and Damien, Cayce throws herself into a mass grave from World War II and, fighting tears, starts frantically digging through the remains: she’d found herself, out of some need she hadn’t understood, down in one of the trenches, furiously shoveling gray muck and bones, her face streaked with tears. Neither Peter nor Damien had asked her why, but she thinks now that if they had she might have told them she was weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know. (Gibson 355–356)

Cayce’s sudden rage attack expresses her grief over both a personal loss and the global condition in which she feels complicit (Gibson, Pattern Recognition 194). As the grave site apparently reminds Cayce of Ground Zero – “Heaps of bone. The initial seventeen stories of twisted, impacted girder. Funeral ash” (Gibson, Pattern Recognition 77) – her reaction directly corresponds to the disappearance of her father in the September 11 attacks. Still, as she admits herself, what she is mostly reacting to and weeping for are the past and future atrocities of her times. Whereas panic can take the form of unexplained frantic agitation, it can also manifest through a sudden retreat into emotional numbness. In Spook Country (2007), Gibson illustrates this with the example of Hollis, who, overwhelmed with weirdness and fear of what she got herself into, enters what she calls “tubal” mode: She lay very still, on her back, the sheet forming a cool dark tunnel, and gave her body explicit permission to relax. . . . Inchmale had called it womb-­return, but she knew it was the opposite, really; not so much the calm of not yet having been born, but the stillness of already having died. She didn’t want to feel like a fetus, but like the recumbent figure carved atop a sarcophagus, cool stone. . . . [S]he’d been returned to the tunnel by that sudden stab of weird fear, in Starbucks; fear that Bigend had gotten her into something that might be at once hugely and esoterically dangerous. Or, she thought, if you looked at it as process, by the cumulative strangeness of what she’d encountered since she’d accepted the assignment from Node. . . . She sighed. Let go, she told herself, though she had no idea of what. . . . “Let go,” she said, aloud, and fell asleep. (171–172)

Hollis resorts to tubal mode whenever she feels she can no longer handle what is being thrown at her; her trigger in this particular case is the feeling of terror at the realization of how easy a target for surveillance she is. While first of all a

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strategy to externalize panic, tubal mode is also a tool for this panic’s control. Unlike womb-­return, as Hollis’s friend mistakenly calls her withdrawal, tubal mode does not offer Hollis a safe haven from reality but rather allows her to temporarily inoculate herself against a threatening situation. Imagining she is cool as stone, “the recumbent figure carved atop a sarcophagus,” Hollis stops ruminating and is able to slowly recuperate. Panic, together with attempts at its containment, is just one of Gibson’s characters’ reactions to the globalized reality. Once the characters overcome or at least come to terms with their rage and fear, they begin to look for ways of resistance. As Dave Itzkoff writes in “Spirits in the Material World,” Gibson’s Spook Country “is arguably the first example of the post-­post-9/11 novel, whose characters are tired of being pushed around by forces larger than they are – bureaucracy, history and, always, technology – and are at long last ready to start pushing back.” Whereas in the article Itzkoff refers only to Spook Country, his diagnosis seems applicable to the whole trilogy. All three novels, Pattern Recognition – a post- rather than post-­ post-9/11 novel – included, present the characters’ endeavors to oppose the global condition; the endeavors include attempts at atemporality, re-­appropriation of the global landscape, return to traditional value, and the so-­called grand gestures. The global reality Gibson describes in the Bigend Trilogy is governed by changing trends and constant stream of novelty. All-­encompassing in their reach, the trends homogenize and simulacralize not only the sites of consumption but to a large extent also the whole global reality; what is more, fleeting as they are, they force the characters into a permanent [sic!] struggle not to fall behind and, as a result, be swept away by the transforming present. In order to resist the imperative to follow prevailing trends one has to consciously opt out of the mainstream, a choice Gibson chronicles in both Pattern Recognition and Zero History (2010). In the novels, Gibson uses the example of Cayce’s aversion to branding and fashion to demonstrate that in the transient global reality resistance often involves becoming atemporal, deliberately failing to meet the expectations of one’s time. Literally allergic to certain brands, in Pattern Recognition, Cayce resorts to wearing only the most inconspicuous and minimalist of clothes, CPUs or Cayce Pollard Units, as one of her friends calls them. “CPUs,” Gibson writes, “are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention” (Pattern Recognition 8). In the world where people are defined rather by what they wear and own than by who they are, CPUs allow Cayce, to use Konstantinou’s words, to “strip . . . herself of meaning as much as possible, minimizing (or minimal-­izing) her semiotic footprint” (70, emphasis in the original). Cayce’s personal success in preventing brands from shaping her identity pushes her towards

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creating a brand founded on the very rejection of fashion. The atemporality of Gabriel Hounds, the brand whose designer Cayce turns out to be in Zero History, resides in what one of the characters calls “opting out of the industrialization of novelty” (Gibson 116). The brand is resistant to changing trends; it does not function in terms of seasons and collections, but is instead timeless, appealing exactly because of its universality. In addition to opposing time and novelty regimes, the characters in the Bigend Trilogy resist global reality also by using the mechanisms of its functioning to their advantage. Gibson’s characters never really domesticate the terror they experience in confrontation with contemporaneity. Nonetheless, the more aware of their situation they become, the better they acquaint themselves with the way “they” operate (“they” referring in the trilogy to the entities which tip the global scales to their advantage, i.e. the government, multinational corporations, and the likes of Bigend). Having gained at least partial understanding of how global reality functions, the characters learn to exploit both the weak and the strong points of the global network and thus to re-­appropriate for themselves the spaces “they” normally usurp. A comprehensive analysis of one of Gibson’s characters’ ability to exploit the shortcomings of the global system of surveillance is offered by Alex Wetmore in “The Poetics of Pattern Recognition: William Gibson’s Shifting Technological Subject.” In the article, Wetmore examines Cayce’s wanderings through the global cityscape (London, Tokyo, and Moscow). Far from directed, Cayce’s wanderings are random, resembling, as Wetmore argues, “a contemporary flâneuse” (76): “[s]he has no idea where she’d gone,” Gibson writes describing Cayce’s tour of Moscow, “riding for at least two hours, changing trains on impulse, taking madly majestic stairs and escalators at random” (Pattern 310). Wandering aimlessly, Cayce moves upflow, against the city’s people flow, and thus, as it turns out, outside the usual circuit of surveillance. Making use of the gaps in the visual field of the global networks of surveillance, she is able to at least temporarily evade “their” gaze (Wetmore 73–79). Whereas Alex Wetmore focuses solely on Pattern Recognition, Cayce’s endeavors to use global reality to her advantage continue into Zero History. In Pattern Recognition, Cayce escapes surveillance and thus reclaims for herself at least parts of the globalized urban landscape; in Zero History, on the other hand, Cayce manages to use Hubertus Bigend’s ideas about advertising to create a brand which surpasses Bigend’s own notion of brand vision transmission. Stretching to their limit the very mechanisms employed by Bigend’s multinational corporation, Blue Ant, in its construction of brand narratives (i.e. novelty, exclusivity, allure of secrecy), Cayce’s brand, Gabriel Hounds, operates by limiting access to information, top commodity in information economy, to everyone,

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Bigend included. As a result, the brand allows Cayce to operate outside of Bigend’s totalizing information imperialism. Both by eluding city surveillance and by taking advantage of Bigend’s own advertising strategies, Cayce carves out from the globalized reality a little space of her own. The third form of resistance Gibson’s characters employ against the global condition also hinges on attempts at autonomy; it involves a turn against such markers of globalization as the acceleration of life, instrumental connectivity, and physical and emotional detachment, and towards traditional values, such as stability, intimacy, and belonging. Both of the trilogy’s main characters’ involvement with Bigend ends with the characters’ retreating into nurturing and rather traditional heterosexual relationships. Cayce starts a family with Peter “Parkaboy” Gilbert, whom in Pattern Recognition she chooses over Boone Chu, a male epitome of everything global. Hollis, on the other hand, enters a relationship with Garreth, a base jumper and strategist, whose presence, in a symbolic scene at the end of Zero History, helps her liberate herself from a recurring nightmare of Bigend. Distancing themselves from Bigend, Cayce and Hollis reject the usurpative powers of capitalism Bigend embodies and opt out of the global network of allatonceness, real virtuality and control. Instead, the characters not only choose to anchor their sense of belonging in the meaningful space of human connection but also return to traditional pre-­globalization gender roles, with the man supporting a family and providing a scaffold for a woman’s self-­development – “[M]y husband’s work was going well,” Cayce admits at one point in Zero History, “[s]o I could afford to experiment” (337). It seems partially reasonable to follow John Marx in arguing that the choices made by the trilogy’s female protagonists do in fact point to women’s subordinate position in global reality. Not only do women active in the public sphere act mostly on male (Bigend’s) orders, but also, regardless of their contribution to global reality, they still, as Marx puts it, “find their stories resolved only when they find themselves embroiled in the usual comforts of private life” (15). It seems, however, equally right to claim that the female protagonists’ choices might testify to their superior understanding of the global condition and its implications. Unlike many male characters, Cayce and Hollis do not lose themselves inside the global network, but rather realize that only by anchoring themselves outside it, can they regain autonomy and avoid manipulation, and subsequently re-­enter the network on their own conditions. The last strategy of resistance Gibson’s characters resort to in the Bigend Trilogy involves symbolic subversion. Confrontation with global reality often leaves the characters helpless. Still, even if lost for ways of actually invalidating the intrusion of global forces into their lives, the characters feel the need to at

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least symbolically emphasize their stand and thus not only vent their terror but hopefully also impede the forces’ future operation. Hence, the characters turn to grand gestures, aimed as statements of dissent and admonitory messages to others. An example of such a gesture appears at the end of Spook Country, when, too feeble to actually confront Bigend yet well-­aware of his destructiveness, Hollis has Alberto project on Blue Ant’s head office a hologram of a Mongolian Death Worm, a cryptid deadly animal allegedly indigenous to the dunes of the Gobi Desert. The choice of the hologram reflects Hollis’s misgivings about Bigend. Throughout Spook Country Hollis associates the death worm with unspecified but real danger, “[s]omething circling, hidden, beneath . . . [the] surface” (Gibson 32), “any major fear . . . [she can’t] quite get a handle on” (Gibson 350). Planting the worm on Bigend’s headquarters – “its tail wound through the various windows of Bigend’s pyramidal aerie like an eel through the skull of a cow, waved imperially, tall and scarlet, in the night” (Gibson, Spook Country 370) – Hollis symbolically marks Blue Ant as the nest of the menacing forces of contemporaneity. Although visible only with the right equipment, the hologram, just like the virtual reality it rests upon, is everting; almost indiscernible from reality, it is aimed to become a material warning sign for those confronting Bigend’s empire.

Paranoid epistemology, or navigating the conspiracy Regardless of its form, Gibson’s characters’ resistance against global reality is rarely random or blind but rather stems from and draws on the characters’ inner knowledge of the global network of flows. Still, Gibson suggests in the Bigend Trilogy, atemporality, elusion, family life, or theatricality are only temporary fixes in the characters’ (and contemporary people’s) struggle with global reality. The more entangled in the network Gibson’s characters become, the more they realize that in order to successfully function in the reality of time-­space compression, either by surfing it, like Bigend, or by going against the flow, they have to constantly update their tactics, alter them according to changing variables. Staying afloat and keeping up with global reality demands that the characters learn to tap global reality and navigate, or cognitively map, its patterns and transformations. The task is in no way simple; it requires the characters to first accept the totality of the global network for what it is – an intricate conspiracy mobilized and controlled by unspecified “they” – and then domesticate and use their paranoia to their advantage. In the Bigend Trilogy, Gibson follows Fredric Jameson in arguing that conspiracy theory and paranoia provide a legitimate way of “think[ing] the impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (38). Unlike Jameson, however, in the trilogy Gibson focuses less on technology (which, contrary to Jameson, he

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describes as an integral and familiarized part of reality), and more on those who (ab)use and conspire behind it, the so-­called “they”. What is more, while echoing Jameson’s recognition of conspiracy theory as an adequate way of theorizing global reality, Gibson points also towards the potential of paranoia as an epistemic tool for this reality’s reading and disalienation. In Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson introduces the term “high-­tech paranoia” (38). According to Jameson, high-­tech paranoias represent a mode of literature in which “the circuits and networks of some putative global computer hookup are narratively mobilized by labyrinthine conspiracies of autonomous but deadly interlocking and competing information agencies in a complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind” (38). Although Gibson’s Bigend novels could definitely be classified as high-­tech paranoias – they present global reality as informational and oppressive, generating fear and distrust and arousing suspicions of control and surveillance – their focus is not technological. The novels do indeed circle around intricate conspiracies; however, unlike Gibson’s cyberpunk novels, they do so less by emphasizing the ubiquity and scope of technology (definitely significant in its influence but no longer perceived as a figure of estrangement) and more by foregrounding the nebulous “they,” the agents of conspiracy, who mobilize and control the majority of flows in the global network. Apart from introducing changes in focus, in the Bigend Trilogy Gibson develops Jameson’s take on paranoia also by proposing that far from being just an involuntary response to the suspected presence and power of “they,” paranoid thinking, if well-­managed, might serve also as a valuable tool for the cognitive mapping of global reality. Like most post-9/11 American fiction, the Bigend Trilogy familiarizes paranoia: in global reality, to quote from Keniston and Follansbee, paranoid reactions are no longer “signs of psychosis or existential alienation. Instead, they are logical and rational responses to contemporary life” (16). Still, paranoid reactions vary; whereas some only increase noise, others serve as sources of valuable information. Thus, in the trilogy, Gibson distinguishes between apophenia – “careless conspiracy theory” (Kneale 175) – and controlled, calculated paranoia. Apophenia, Gibson writes, refers to “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things” (Pattern Recognition 115). Apopheniacs, for example Cayce’s mother, tend to reject coincidence and to read conspiracy into everything they encounter. Drowning in meaningless details, they often miss the obvious. According to Gibson, whereas apophenia only intensifies the characters’ disorientation in global reality, controlled paranoia provides “perceptual equipment” (Jameson 38) for deciphering at least some of the variables of the global conspiracy. Equipped in these variables, the characters can

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partially map their circumstances and thus contest the disalienating influence of the global space. In the Bigend Trilogy, a protocol for controlling and using one’s paranoia as an epistemic tool is provided through the character of Win Pollard, Cayce’s father and a Cold War security expert. Although the majority of characters in the trilogy are not as composed as Win in confrontation with their paranoias, throughout the trilogy they too learn to recognize the potential latent in paranoid thinking and begin to use it to scan global reality for recognizable patterns. As Gibson reveals in Pattern Recognition, during his life Win adapted his paranoia to his own needs. “[E]ver watchful,” Gibson writes, Win treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained. . . . It was there, constantly and intimately, and he relied on it . . ., but he wouldn’t allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies. (Pattern 124)

Far from just accepting his paranoia, Win “domesticated” it; having learned to manage and restrain it, he treasured it as a regular source of information. Win’s attitude towards paranoia serves as an example for Cayce. Two other characters, Hollis and Milgrim, learn to appreciate paranoia on their own: Hollis on emerging from tubal mode, having mastered her panic and replaced it with curiosity (Gibson, Spook Country 172), and Milgrim upon realizing there might be truth to his delusions. Instead of allowing their fears and suspicions to overpower them (thus surrendering to panic or apophenia), Cayce, Hollis, and Milgrim choose to intentionally sensitize themselves to the “contours and configurations” of global reality (Jarvis 256) and engage in the process of the so-­called pattern recognition. As Hubertus Bigend once puts it, pattern recognition involves “risk management, [t]he spinning of the given moment’s scenarios” (57). In “After the Future,” Paul Youngquist defines this same process as the “imagining [of] possibilities, tipping the present into what’s to come by means of observed trends” (276). All three characters – Cayce, Hollis, and Milgrim – use their paranoias to scan the present for points of interest (i.e. connections, irregularities, patterns) which they then “spin” (i.e. analyze and interpret). In so doing, although still unable to fully grasp the totality of global reality, the characters manage to map their circumstances and at least partially predict what might come next.

Conclusion In the Bigend Trilogy, William Gibson novelizes globalization. The incisiveness of Gibson’s portrayal of global reality reaches beyond his analysis of the processes global reality is governed by and the transformations it undergoes; it lies also in

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Gibson’s diagnosis of people’s response to global reality and his suggestion of potential ways of relieving this reality’s often destructive influence. Whatever the strategy, the aim, Gibson wisely suggests, is to learn to swim both with and against the global flow.

Works Cited Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. Penguin Books, 2004. —. Spook Country. Viking, 2007. —. Zero History. Penguin Books, 2010. Itzkoff, Dave. “Spirits in the Material World.” The New York Times, 2007. Accessed 19 Aug 2015. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1997. Jarvis, Ben. “‘It is always another world’: Mapping the Global Imaginary in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.” Land & Identity: Theory, Memory and Practice, edited by Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson, Radopi, 2012, pp. 235–257. Keniston, Ann, and Follansbee, Jeanne. “Paranoia in Post-9/11 American Fiction.” Phi Kappa Phi Forum, vol. 91, no. 3, 2011, pp. 16–17. Kneale, James. “Plots: Space, Conspiracy, and Contingency in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 29, 2011, pp. 169–186. Konstantinou, Lee. “The Brand as Cognitive Map in William Gibson’s ‘Pattern Recognition.’” Boundary 2, vol. 36, no. 2, 2009, pp. 67–97. Marx, John. “The Feminization of Globalization.” Cultural Critique, vol. 63, 2006, pp. 1–32. Wetmore, Alex. “The Poetics of Pattern Recognition: William Gibson’s Shifting Technological Subject.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, vol. 27, no. 1, 2007, pp. 71–80. Youngquist, Paul. “After the Future.” Minnesota Review, vol.  61–62, 2004, pp. 275–281.

Paweł Kołtuniak

Player as a Victim of Repression and a Tool of Oppression in the Totalitarian World of Papers, Please Abstract: The article examines the multiple ways in which Papers, Please uses interactivity to engage the player in a highly realistic world of totalitarian oppression, and explains the mechanics through which the player is forced to take part in the oppressive system. Keywords: Papers, Please, video game, interactivity, totalitarianism

Lucas Pope’s graphical adventure Papers, Please (2013) is a game that allows players to experience a totalitarian state at two levels. The spirit of a dystopian Soviet-­ bloc country is present at the audiovisual level, but more importantly, the creator of Papers, Please uses the interactive potential of the medium to allow players not only to see, but also to experience a totalitarian system and, to some extent, take part in it. The game implicates players in moral dilemmas, and allows them to make decisions, but within the totalitarian system of Papers, Please each choice leads to oppression. The aim of this article is to describe the totalitarian world of Papers, Please and to examine the multiple ways in which the game’s interactivity engages the player into a highly realistic world of totalitarian oppression. After a brief introduction concerning the participatory character of video games and the unique features of interactive story games, focusing on the games’ interactive potential, the article moves on to demonstrate how Papers, Please builds the oppressive, totalitarian world through graphics and narration. The final part of the paper concerns the level of gameplay, and the explanation of the mechanics through which the player is forced to take part in the system of oppression. Video games are a medium that, unlike other narrative forms, fosters the conditions for participatory experience. In “Games Telling Stories,” Jesper Juul notices that “[t]he relations between reader/story and player/game are completely different – the player inhabits a twilight zone where he or she is both an empirical subject outside the game and undertakes a role inside the game” (“Games Telling Stories?”). While in most media the consumer is engaged exclusively in the receptive process, games require involvement on the part of the player. Unlike a book reader or a film viewer, a video game player does not only follow a story and identify with characters, but, by controlling an avatar, he or she can be a

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character: that is undertake a role in the game, experience the game world, and, to some extent, influence its outcome (King and Krzywinska 126). In other words, unidirectional “flow” of content is changed into an interactive loop between the game and the player. The situation on the screen provokes the player to action, which, in turn, makes the game adjust to players’ decisions (Friedman 126). What is more, playing a video game, a player is “attached to the outcomes of the game,” i.e. he or she experiences positive or negative feelings that depend on the outcome (Juul, “The Game, the Player, the World”). Technological development has allowed players to interfere with the world of the game even more and make decisions important for the further part of the presented story. Advanced technology has allowed to produce more and more complex games with non-­linear storytelling, in which players can not only follow a fixed path in order to achieve the goal the game has set for them, but also make decisions that may result in altering the sequence of the story or even the very task that the player is to fulfil in order to complete the game. This has made players even more embedded in the game, as the world of the game is now changing not only at the level of gameplay, but also at the level of the narrative. In recent years, games that focus on the narrative as the most important element of the game, like Heavy Rain (2010) or The Walking Dead (2012), have gained great popularity. These titles remember players’ choices and decisions and model the story accordingly. In the games, not only does the player exert influence at the level of gameplay, but his or her choices also contribute to the way the story unfolds, while the action-­based gameplay elements, which were the core of most “traditional” games, served only as an addition to the presented story. What is more, the choices the player faces are not easy to make, the time to make them is often limited, and their consequences are not easy to predict. This stands in direct opposition to many previous games where decision-­making was based on the binary opposition of good and evil, which made it effortless for the player to foresee the consequences that followed. The complexity of the so called “Interactive Story Games” consists in the intricacy of characters and presented situations. Most such game narratives are built around moral dilemmas. Heavy Rain raises the question of how far the player would go to save the main character’s son, while The Walking Dead often lets the player choose which character should be saved, featuring two characters in danger at the same time. Most of these games have multiple endings that are triggered depending on the choices the player makes. Playing the same title, two players who make different choices can, in fact, play different games, activate different narratives, and take part in different stories.

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The interactivity of a video game makes it possible to place a player in a complex situation; choices and decision-­making in the situation of moral dilemmas are a totally different experience than watching somebody else make them from a safe distance (Sterczewski). Thus, the difference between interactive story games and the traditional ones, as well as, to some extent, between games and other media, consists in the immersion of the player into the dilemmas presented at the narrative level. He or she is faced with a predicament and forced to make decisions. A player may thus observe his or her own reactions in the situation of moral dilemmas, which he or she is unlikely to encounter in reality. The specific features mentioned above allow video games to influence players in a different way than the “old” media do. In Tactical Media, Rita Raley claims that new media tend to approach internalization in a new way. Instead of a direct message, they use more subtle signals, engaging the consumer in a “micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education” (1). In the case of some video games, “critical arguments are made via the emphasis on the effects of gameplay actions” (4) by modelling causality and consequences. According to Raley, such games are well suited to political themes (4). By rewarding players’ desirable actions, and punishing the undesirable ones, a game can influence players’ further decisions, judgement, and behavior. Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please is undoubtedly a title that, apart from the means typical for traditional media, uses the mechanics pointed out by Rita Raley. On the one hand, the totalitarian world of the game is constructed and presented using “conventional” methods – audiovisual layer and narration – on the other hand, Papers, Please employs the interactive potential of video games to engage players in moral choices, in order to emulate the totalitarian system in which the narrative is set. It also models causality and consequences through the punishment and reward system and other game mechanics, to force the player to participate in the machine of oppression. The world of the game is constructed on both visual and narrative level. Arstotzka – a fictional country in which the main character lives and works – is modelled to resemble the Soviet-­bloc countries of the Cold War era. The symbols used in the game allude to the symbols of the most recognizable totalitarian systems – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The national emblem of Arstotzka is an eagle that is very similar to the Reichsadler of Nazi Germany, and the Labor lottery symbol, a hand wielding a hammer, is a reference to the Communist symbolism of the Soviet Union. What is more, many reviewers, for example Jens Erik Vaaler in his Papers, Please review for Gamer.no., highlight that both the game visuals, composed of wash-­out color palette and pixelated

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graphic models and the solemn and ominous music contribute to the construction of an oppressive atmosphere that corresponds well with the eastern side of the Iron Curtain of the 1980’s. Apart from the visuals, the totalitarian system of Papers, Please is mainly built through narration. Although the player is not provided with much information about the structure of power or the ruling party of the country the main character lives in, by observing the game world and experiencing the game story, it is easy to come to the conclusion that Arstotzka is a totalitarian state oppressing its citizens. Arstotzka’s oppressiveness is exhibited in its use of terror and propaganda as well as in its willingness to control and force its citizens to obey fixed rules. The main tools of terror are capital punishment and forced labor. 14 out of 20 possible endings show the main character sentenced to death, prison or forced labor. What is more, the punishments apply even to minor offences and are so common that it is virtually impossible to complete the game without triggering one of the “bad” endings. Arstotzka is also a highly-­propagandized country. Almost every official conversation in the game ends with the statement “Glory to Arstotzka”. Furthermore, the only source of information in the country is a national newspaper called Arstotzka Truth distributed for free, an obvious reference to Pravda, a Russian broadsheet newspaper, formerly the official newspaper of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Finally, the state controls every aspect of the citizens’ lives. At the beginning of the game, the player learns that his or her character has been chosen in the Labour Lottery as a border inspector and placed with his family in an apartment in a border town. Therefore, it is not the citizen that applies for a position, it is the state that decides about its citizens’ jobs, living place and conditions. The State decides even about the size of families. If the main character fails to provide enough money to buy food or medicine, and as a result all his family members die, he is dismissed from office and informed that Arstotzka supports only large and “healthy” families. In Arstotzka, control manifests also in constant surveillance: every decision is immediately checked by the system. If a player makes a mistake, or intentionally breaks the rules, he receives a citation right after the entrant leaves the booth. In many endings, the player learns that the system has been controlling him or her all the time: “We have audited your activities for the past 20 years” (Papers, Please) the displayed message reads. Also, the main character’s finances are being scanned all the time. If he runs into debt, the game ends with arrest for delinquency. If the main character takes too many or too high bribes, he is also arrested with the information that “the Ministry of Income has discovered an anomaly in [his] earnings” (Papers, Please).

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So far, I have demonstrated how the game builds an oppressive system by means typical of visual and narrative media. Papers, Please, however, goes further, and, by using gameplay mechanics, lets the players not only see, but also experience and feel complicit in the totalitarian system. The main character of the game is confined to the totalitarian state; so is, to a certain extent, the player. The player is actively engaged in the narrative, so, as long as the character is being oppressed, the oppression is transferred to the player, on whose shoulders lies the responsibility for the development of the plot. Even more importantly, the game forces the player to make ethically ambiguous choices which in a way turn him or her into a living (playing) tool of oppression. The gameplay is connected with the narrative and provides the most important context for the game. The player takes a position of an immigration inspector and his or her role is to decide, on the basis of regulations and documents, who can pass the state’s border. The rules and regulations tell the player who should be allowed and who denied admission. Every mistake or intentional breach of the regulations results in a fine. At the end of each day, the money earned by the player can be spent on rent, heat, food, and medicine. If a player fails to provide enough income, his family members get hungry, cold, sick, and eventually die. A plain board with the protagonist’s earnings and his family status provides the most important context for the game: the player is aware that his or her failure in observing the rules might result in personal harm. At this point, the punishment and reward system begins to impact the player. Every situation he or she encounters during the work day is based on a binary choice: he or she can follow the rules or break them, and as a result be either rewarded or punished with financial gain or loss. The only exception is the situation when the entrant offers a bribe that is higher than the punishment suffered for disobeying the regulations. From the above perspective, the choice seems very easy, but the narrative makes it complicated, because, in many cases, following the rules requires the player to go against his or her moral code. A significant example features a couple who seek refuge in Arstotzka. The husband comes first, he is very polite, and all his documents are fine. Leaving the booth, he asks the inspector (the player) to be kind to his wife who is right behind him. She does not have an entry permit which is required that day. When the player points to it, she starts to beg the player to let her through, saying that she will be killed back in her country. There is no reason not to believe her, and the player is aware that her husband is waiting for her on the other side of the border. But if the player decides to allow her entry, he will be punished for breaking the rules, which may result in trouble for the player’s

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character’s family, including their death, depending on how well he or she has played up to this point. Many players, realizing that following regulations makes the main character a tool in the hands of a totalitarian system, are tempted to ignore the rules, and play in accordance with their moral values. Yet, the game mechanics make it impossible. Complete disobedience results in a very quick failure, and triggers the worst ending: all family members are dead, and the protagonist is dismissed from the office and informed that the state promotes “large, healthy families” (Papers, Please). Therefore, to survive in the totalitarian world of the game, the player must adapt to the rules and, to some degree, compromise his or her moral values. The game mechanics are constructed in such a way that even a player with no intention of harming NPCs (non-­playable characters) does so without even realizing it. The game allows to make exceptions to the rules, but there is no possibility to help all entrants who the player sympathizes with. The more money the player earns, the more people he or she can help. At the beginning, the rules of admission seem very simple. However, they change every day and, as the game proceeds, additional documents like visas, work permits or vaccination certificates are required to grant admission. The player is also given a list of criminals who should be detained if they try to cross the border. All these documents have to be checked for discrepancies. The player works under the pressure of time: his or her earnings depend on the number of people processed. This leads to a self-­contradictory situation, in which the player processes entrants as quickly as possible to be able to make more exceptions. However, by quickly dealing with documents, the player makes decisions that he or she is not even aware of. Processing documents and following the regulations, it is easy to disregard the entrants’ problems and the player’s own moral code, as well as forget about the oppression in which the player actively participates (Juster). Being denied entrance is not the only way in which the entrants can be harmed; gradually, the game introduces other forms of oppression. This is perhaps best visible on the example of a body scan. Following the terrorist attack on the checkpoint, a body scanner is added as a further security measure. If the entrant’s weight stated in the documents does not match his or her current weight, the player must perform a body scan to check whether the entrant carries weapons or contraband. The scanner has to be used in one more situation: when the entrant’s physical appearance does not match stereotypical gender features for the sex stated in the documents. In that case, the player has to point out the discrepancy, ask whether the entrant is a man or a woman, and

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perform a scan to determine their biological sex. The discrepancy may suggest forged documents; some of the entrants, however, are simply transgender and for them the procedure is especially humiliating: not only does the question asked embarrass and confuse them but also the body scanner returns their nude pictures. Many players interpret this procedure as highly demeaning for transgender people, as well as for the players themselves, since the players are forced to humiliate others. As Justin Davis writes, for some, the procedure is “almost enough . . . to stop playing entirely, for fear of outing yet another person.” The game, however, is devised in such a way as to toy with the players’ moral compass as much as possible. If the player wants to, he or she is allowed to be even stricter than the system requires. There comes a moment, for instance, when the checkpoint guard informs the protagonist that additional money is paid for every person he or she arrests, offering the player to share his income if he or she detains people for minor offences, like discrepancies in their documents. Whether the player chooses to benefit from somebody’s harm remains a matter of choice (and temptation). By using the interactive potential of video games and the unique relation with the player they generate, Papers, Please not only portrays the oppression in a totalitarian system, but also lets the player experience it, and even allows him or her to become an active participant in the creation of the totalitarian structure. The game forces the player to make difficult, morally ambiguous decisions, creating a narration in which it is impossible to make “ethically right” choices without disobeying the regulations. Using the system of punishment and reward, the game manages to incriminate the player. Even though he or she is given an opportunity to make decisions, within the totalitarian system presented in Papers, Please, each choice leads to oppression, and the only real choice the player has is who to oppress. The game has 20 different endings, most of which show the main character sentenced to death or prison. But even the endings considered “good” are far from happy. Thus, in his game, Lucas Pope demonstrates how easily a person can become a part of an oppressive system just by following the rules (“Papers, Please”). As Becky Chambers notices, Papers, Please shows that “[the] sense of compassion can be neatly overridden with the right set of pressures. All it [takes is] a scorecard and some imaginary context. I hate what that says about me,” Chambers adds, “even though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. There are no monsters here. Only humans, following rules.”

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Works Cited Chambers, Becky. “Papers, Please: A Game About Borders, Stamps, and My Family.” The Mary Sue, 2013. Accessed 31 March 2016. Davis, Justin. “The Emotional Impact of Papers, Please.” Venturebeat, 2013. Accessed 23 March 2016. Friedman, Ted. “The Rise of the Simulation Game.” Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture, NYU Press, 2005, pp. 123–126. Juster, Scott. “Experiencing the Banality of Evil in ‘Papers, Please’.” popMatters, 2013. Accessed 27 March 2016. Juul, Jesper. “Games Telling stories? A brief note on games and narratives.” The International Journal of Computer Game Research, vol. 1, no. 1, 2001. Juul, Jesper. “The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness.” Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference Proceedings, edited by Marinka Copier and Joost Raessens, Utrecht University Press, 2003, pp. 30–45. King, Geoff, and Tanya Krzywinska. “Film Studies and Digital Games.” Understanding Digital Games, edited by Jason Rutter and Jo Bryce, Sage, 2006, pp. 126. Papers, Please. Lucas Pope, 2013. “Papers, Please: A Dehumanization Simulation,” Queen Blister, 2015. Accessed 20 March 2016. Raley, Rita. Tactical Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2009, pp. 1–31. Sterczewski, Piotr. “’Papers, Please:’ Computer Games & the Joys of Obedience in Eastern Europe.” Muftah, 2014. Accessed 21 March 2016.

Notes on the Contributors Paulina Ambroży is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of English, Adam Mic­ kiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She has published articles on American poetry and prose and is the author of a book (Un)concealing the Hedgehog: Modernist American Poets and Contemporary Critical Theories (Poznań, 2012) which approaches American modernist poetry through contemporary critical theories. Her research interests include modernist and contemporary American poetry, 19th century American literature, word-­image relations, intermedial studies and literary theory. Currently, she is working on an intermedial project Turn of the Sign: Crisis of Representation in American Poetry and the Visual Arts. Patrycja Antoszek is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Literature and Culture at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. She teaches courses on American literature and literary theory. She published several articles on contemporary American novels and short stories and is the author of The Carnivalesque Muse: The New Fiction of Robert Coover. Her professional interests include postmodernist literature, literary theory, contemporary gothic, and psychoanalytic criticism. Ewelina Feldman-­Kołodziejuk is a teacher at the Institute of Modern Languages at the University of Białystok, where she runs General English courses. She is also a doctoral student working on her dissertation devoted to the fiction of Margaret Atwood. Her primary area of academic interest is North American literature and culture. She is the author of several articles that oscillate around the themes of motherhood and mother-­daughter relations. In 2015 she was awarded a scholarship from the Corbridge Trust in Cambridge. Petra Filipová is an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of British and American Studies, University of Pavol Jozef Šafárik in Košice, Slovakia, specializing in gender studies as well as American media and culture. She is currently finishing a double degree PhD program at the university in Košice and at the University of Balearic Isles in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, with a thesis dealing with the topic of asexuality in American television fiction. Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor in the Department of American Literature and Culture at Maria Curie-­Skłodowska University (Lublin). His research interests include science fiction, video games, fantastic visualities, digital media, and transmedia storytelling. He has published widely in these fields, serves on the

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advisory boards of Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and is the co-­editor of the New Dimensions in Science Fiction book series at the University of Wales Press. Anna Gilarek earned her Ph.D. from Maria Curie-­Skłodowska University in Lublin and her doctoral dissertation was devoted to utopia and dystopia in feminist speculative fiction. She teaches British and American literature at Jan Kochanowski University, Department in Sandomierz. Her academic interests include science fiction, feminist speculative fiction, alternative history, apocalyptic novel, gender studies, and utopian studies. Aleksandra Kamińska earned her MA at the American Studies Center, the University of Warsaw, where she wrote her thesis on how daughters remember and commemorate their fathers in graphic memoirs. Currently she is a PhD student at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw. Her interests include images of girlhood in American popular culture, graphic novels, and memory in culture and literature. Izabella Kimak is an Assistant Professor at the Department of American Literature and Culture at MCSU in Lublin, Poland. Her research interests include postcolonial and gender studies and minority literatures in the US. She is the author of Bicultural Bodies: A Study of South Asian American Women’s Literature as well as other publications on women writers of Indian descent. Paweł Kołtuniak is a member of the Video Game Research Center, and a doctoral student at Maria Curie-­Skłodowska University in Lublin. His current research centers on the image of Eastern Europe in video games. Olga Korytowska is a doctoral student at the Graduate School for Social Research, Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2014, she graduated from the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, and currently, she is finishing her MA studies in Bioethics at the same university. Elli Kyrmanidou is a graduate from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki from which she has a BA in English Language and an MA in European Literature and Culture. She is currently pursuing her PhD in American Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Among her research interests are Gender Studies and Culture Studies. She has been a teacher of English for more than ten years. Julia Leyda is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Her most recent book is The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (co-­edited with

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Joshua Paul Dale, Joyce Goggin, Anthony P. McIntyre, and Diane Negra, 2017). Her current research centers on the financialization of domestic space in 21st-­century US screen culture and climate change narratives (cli-­fi). Urszula Niewiadomska-­Flis teaches at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. Her scholarly interests hover around representations of foodways in literature and film, Southern literature, and ethnic/immigrant literatures of the USA. She is the author of Aristocratic Ethos in Ellen Glasgow’s and Walker Percy’s Fiction (KUL Publishers, 2011) and The Southern Mystique: Food, Gender and Houses in Southern Fiction and Films (Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2012). She is a member of PAAS, Southern Studies Forum and Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her post-­doctoral research project explores foodways and race in the texts of the American South. Julia Nikiel is a Junior Lecturer and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Literature and Culture at MCSU, Lublin, Poland. Currently, she is working on a dissertation in which she examines the influence of the 20th-­century restructuring of capitalism and the consequent emergence of a global informational society on contemporary North-­American literature. Andrew J. Ploeg is an Assistant Professor in the Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas program at Bilkent University. He specializes in contemporary American literature and culture. His research interests include language, literary theology and a/ theology, critical theory, continental philosophy, and popular culture (particularly sports and fantasy sports). His work has appeared in journals such as Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies and the Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, as well as in book collections. Joanna Stolarek is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Modern Languages and Interdisciplinary Studies at Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities and at the Institute of English Philology at University of Social Sciences, Warsaw, where she teaches courses in English literature, American culture and film. She holds a PhD degree in Literature. Her dissertation was devoted to Martin Amis’s fiction. She is a member of Polish, Irish and European Association for American Studies and Crime Studies Network. Her areas of interest include metaphysical crime literature, existentialism, Southern Gothic, poetic realism in American and French movie. Her post-­doc research project focuses on metaphysical labyrinth in in the works of Paul Auster, Patrick Modiano, Alain Robbe-­Grillet, Flann O’Brien, and Gilbert Sorrentino.

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Sławomir Studniarz is a faculty member at the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, where he gives lectures in American literature and runs M.A. seminars. He has published articles on Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, John Gardner, Philip K. Dick, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His latest book publication is the monograph on Poe’s poetry The Time-­Transcending Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe published by Mellen Press in 2016. His new monograph Narrative Framing in Contemporary American Novels will be published by Cambridge Scholars in May 2017.

New Americanists in Poland Edited by Tomasz Basiuk Vol.

1

Tomasz Basiuk / Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska / Krystyna Mazur (eds.): the American Uses of History. Essays on Public Memory. 2011.

Vol.

2

Bohdan Szklarski (ed.): Quo vadis America? Conceptualizing Change in American Democracy. 2011.

Vol.

3

Irena Ksiezopolska: The Web of Sense. Patterns of Involution in Selected Works of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov. 2012.

Vol.

4

Ewa Alicja Antoszek: Out of the Margins. Identity Formation in Contemporary Chicana Writings. 2012.

Vol.

5

Izabella Kimak: Bicultural Bodies. A Study of South Asian American Women’s Literature. 2013.

Vol.

6

Jerzy Kamionowski / Jacek Partyka (eds.): American Wild Zones. Space, Experience, Consciousness. 2016.

Vol.

7

Małgorzata Ziółek-Sowińska: Images of The Apocalypse in African American Blues and Spirituals. Destruction in this Land. 2017.

Vol.

8

Agnieszka Łobodziec / Blossom N.Fondo (eds.): The Timeless Toni Morrison. The Past and The Present in Toni Morrison’s Fiction. A Tribute to Toni Morrison on Occasion of Her 85th Birthday. 2017.

Vol.

9

Izabella Kimak / Julia Nikiel (eds.): Spaces of Expression and Repression in PostMillennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture. 2017.

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