Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction 9781628923681, 9781628923674, 9781501304811, 9781628923704

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations for Steve Tomasula’s Major Works
Introduction: Composition, Emergence, Sensation: Science and New Media in the Novels of Steve Tomasula David Banash and Andrea Spain
Part One Bodies, Signs, Codes, and Books
1 The Work of Art after the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Work of Steve Tomasula Mary K. Holland
2 “The Material is the Message”: Coded Bodies and Embodied Codes in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland Anthony Enns
3 Encoding the Body, Questioning Legacy: Reflections on Intersemiotic Experiments in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland Françoise Sammarcelli
4 Steve Tomasula’s VAS, or What if Novels Were Books? R. M. Berry
Part Two Genealogies of Representation
5 Literary Archeologies in Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture Flore Chevaillier
6 Beyond Human Scale: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture N. Katherine Hayles
7 Mining the Gap: Word, Image, and Loss in Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture Birger Vanwesenbeeck
Part Three New Media and the Novel
8 Touch and Decay: Tomasula’s TOC on iPad Kathi Inman Berens
9 Intermediality in Steve Tomasula’s TOC: A New Media Novel: A Semiological Analysis Anne Hurault-Paupe
10 Ontological Metalepses, Unnatural Narratology, and Locality: A Politics of the [[ Page ]] in Tomasula’s VAS & TOC Lance Olsen
Part Four Writing Wonder
11 A Book, an Atlas, and an Opera: Steve Tomasula’s Fictions of Science as Science Fiction Pawel Frelik
12 “Do We Not Bleed?” “The Color of Flesh” in a Pop Cyborg World Anne Larue
13 Enumeration and the Form of the Short Story in Steve Tomasula’s Once Human Françoise Palleau-Papin
14 Steve Tomasula’s Work of Wonder Anne-Laure Tissut
Afterword: An Interview with Steve Tomasula
Contributors
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Steve Tomasula

Steve Tomasula The Art and Science of New Media Fiction Edited by David Banash

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © David Banash and Contributors, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Steve Tomasula : the art and science of new media fiction / edited by David Banash. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62892-368-1 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-62892-367-4 (paperback)  1.  Tomasula, Steve–Criticism and interpretation. 2.  Literature, Experimental–United States–History and criticism.  I. Banash, David C., editor. PS3620.O53Z87 2015 813'.6–dc23 2015000343



ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2368-1 PB: 978-1-6289-2367-4 ePub: 978-1-6289-2369-8 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2370-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

For Ruedi Kuenzli

Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations for Steve Tomasula’s Major Works Introduction: Composition, Emergence, Sensation: Science and New Media in the Novels of Steve Tomasula David Banash and Andrea Spain

ix xi xii

1

Part One  Bodies, Signs, Codes, and Books  25 1

2

3

4

The Work of Art after the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Work of Steve Tomasula Mary K. Holland “The Material is the Message”: Coded Bodies and Embodied Codes in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland Anthony Enns Encoding the Body, Questioning Legacy: Reflections on Intersemiotic Experiments in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland Françoise Sammarcelli Steve Tomasula’s VAS, or What if Novels Were Books? R. M. Berry

27

51

75 99

Part Two  Genealogies of Representation  115 5 6

Literary Archeologies in Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture Flore Chevaillier Beyond Human Scale: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture N. Katherine Hayles

117 133

Contents

viii 7

Mining the Gap: Word, Image, and Loss in Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture Birger Vanwesenbeeck

147

Part Three  New Media and the Novel  165 Touch and Decay: Tomasula’s TOC on iPad Kathi Inman Berens 9 Intermediality in Steve Tomasula’s TOC: A New Media Novel: A Semiological Analysis Anne Hurault-Paupe 10 Ontological Metalepses, Unnatural Narratology, and Locality: A Politics of the [[ Page ]] in Tomasula’s VAS & TOC Lance Olsen 8

167

183

209

Part Four  Writing Wonder  225 11 A Book, an Atlas, and an Opera: Steve Tomasula’s Fictions of Science as Science Fiction Pawel Frelik 12 “Do We Not Bleed?” “The Color of Flesh” in a Pop Cyborg World Anne Larue 13 Enumeration and the Form of the Short Story in Steve Tomasula’s Once Human Françoise Palleau-Papin 14 Steve Tomasula’s Work of Wonder Anne-Laure Tissut

227 241

259 273

Afterword: An Interview with Steve Tomasula

285

Contributors Bibliography Index

305 310 320

Illustrations 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 5.1 5.2 5.3 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5

Page 57 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Page 68 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Pages 86–87 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Pages 202–203 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland The front cover of the Station Hill hardcover edition of VAS: An Opera in Flatland The front cover of the University of Chicago Press paperback edition of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Pages 10–11 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Pages 264–265 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Pages 9–10 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Pages 60–61 VAS: An Opera in Flatland Page 51 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Pages 126–127 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Pages 162–163 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Pages 273–274 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Page 298 of VAS: An Opera in Flatland Page 107 of The Book of Portraiture Page 92 of The Book of Portraiture Page 317 of The Book of Portraiture An error report for a failed start of TOC iPad as stylus for TOC A handwritten text from the Chronos animation in TOC: A New Media Novel The main navigation screen from TOC: A New Media Novel Introductory video; the appearance of the novel’s title from TOC: A New Media Novel The magnifying glass in the Logos section of TOC: A New Media Novel The rectangles of contrasting light in the Island section of TOC: A New Media Novel

60 62 62 64 66 67 69 71 75 81 84 86 88 92 94 124 126 130 168 182 186 189 190 191 192

x

Illustrations

Layers of images in the Chronos animation from TOC: A New Media Novel 9.7 The haphazard ordering of components in the Logos section of TOC: A New Media Novel 9.8 Illumination illustrating the month of June in Les Très Riches Heures de Jean de France, Duc de Berry (Limbourg brothers, 1412–1416) 9.9 The remediation of the Riches Heures illumination in the Chronos animation from TOC: A New Media Novel 9.10 Albrecht Dürer, “Artist Drawing a Nude with Perspective Device,” a 1525 woodcut 9.11 The remediation of the Dürer woodcut in the Chronos animation from TOC: A New Media Novel 12.1 Lynn Randolph, Cyborg, 1989 12.2 Lynn Randolph, The Laboratory/The Passion of OncoMouse, 1994 12.3 Film still from RoboCop 12.4 Title drawing by Maria Tomasula for “The Color of Flesh” 12.5 Maria Tomasula’s drawing of the “Monster of Doubt” in “The Color of Flesh” 12.6 Maria Tomasula’s low-angle drawing of Yumi in “The Color of Flesh” 12.7 Maria Tomasula’s drawing of Yumi in the forest for “The Color of Flesh” 12.8 Maria Tomasula’s drawing of the forbidden door in “The Color of Flesh” 12.9 Maria Tomasula’s drawing of Yumi’s “kawai” universe in “The Color of Flesh” 12.10 Maria Tomasula’s drawing of the two “RoboCops” in “The Color of Flesh” 13.1 Page 66 of Once Human 9.6

194 198

203 204 205 206 242 243 244 245 247 249 253 254 255 256 262

Acknowledgments Thanks to Tama Baldwin, Robert Banash, Marcus Boon, Jamie Currie, Bradley Dilger, Anthony Enns, Judi Hardin, Bhanu Kapil, Ruedi Kuenzli, Rob Latham, John Mann, Kymberly Miller, Kevin Moist, Owen Rogal, Davis Schneiderman, Paul Trembath, Lynne Ward, and Jeanne J. Wilcox. Thanks Mark and Amy Mossman, who saved me again. To Guy Shadwick, for the glass and the music. Thanks to Bill Thompson, Krista Bowers Sharpe, and everyone at the Reference Desk of the Malpass Library. Thanks to Rebecca Gonner for copyediting and preparing the bibliography. Thanks to A. J. Rocca for preparing the index. Many thanks to Jeff Brice for the cover image. Special thanks to everyone at Bloomsbury, Haaris Naqvi, Mary Al-Sayed, and Balaji Kasirajan. Special thanks to Andrea Spain for her remarkable insight and fierce spirit of intellectual inquiry. Finally, this book would not have been possible without the amazing work and remarkable generosity of Steve Tomasula.

Abbreviations for Steve Tomasula’s Major Works VAS: An Opera in Flatland: A Novel

VAS

IN&OZ: A Novel

IN

The Book of Portraiture: A Novel

Book

TOC: A New Media Novel

TOC

Once Human: Stories

Once

Introduction Composition, Emergence, Sensation: Science and New Media in the Novels of Steve Tomasula David Banash and Andrea Spain

Composition is aesthetic, and what is not composed is not a work of art. However, technical composition, the work of the material that often calls on science (mathematics, physics, chemistry, anatomy), is not to be confused with aesthetic composition, which is the work of sensation. Only the latter fully deserves the name composition, and a work of art is never produced by or for the sake of technique. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari In 1965, the English novelist J. G. Ballard became the prose editor for Ambit, the avant-garde literary magazine. Asked to explain his guiding principles for selecting new work, Ballard replied, “I wanted more science in Ambit, since science was reshaping the world.”1 Ballard was not being ironic, nor was he talking about science fiction as it is usually practiced. He was looking for work that would somehow engage the unprecedented changes in human perceptions and experiences of everyday life that science was inevitably producing. These alterations of life and its organization were brought about not only because of the new realities of nuclear war, the space age, and the discovery of DNA, but also by more subtle changes, like statistics and computer modeling that reshaped psychology and sociology. At stake was the very definition of the human. Ballard was also keenly aware that whenever possible every new scientific discovery and technical advance was exploited by capitalists and circulated by emerging media, also helping to utterly transform practices of everyday life. Ballard believed that most writers of his time were sadly disconnected from this revolution in perception and meaning; they were either oblivious to it or actively disavowing it in rehearsals of romanticism, realism or modernism that merely echoed the revolutionary 1

J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton, An Autobiography (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 211.

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aesthetics and pleasures of decidedly past moments. What Ballard sensed was the need for modes of writing that would produce a literature that addresses and even performs these transformations in perception, scale, and practice. Today, in addition to Ballard’s postwar realities, the new innovations and impacts of genetics, digital networks, and big data are accelerating these changes. One way of grasping the work of Steve Tomasula is to see him as the very writer Ballard imagined, a novelist willing to abandon the comforts of tradition and invent ways to encounter and represent a new world. The aim of this collection is to bring together contributors who demonstrate the myriad ways Steve Tomasula writes a literature that is equal to the complexity of these new realities. To date, Tomasula has written four novels, each more formally innovative than the last. VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) takes on the biotech revolution and brings the innovations of new media into the pages of a codex. IN&OZ (2003) is a meditation on art, design, and life under the sign of the commodity. The Book of Portraiture (2006) is a genealogy of representation that moves from the invention of the alphabet to the bleeding edge of the bioart movement. TOC: A New Media Novel (2009) reverses the movement of VAS, becoming a novel that exists outside the codex by using the resources of digital new media to meditate on life and time. A collection of Tomasula’s stories, on themes including disability, cyborgs, courtly romance, surveillance societies, anatomy, and scientific methods, has been collected in Once Human: Stories (2014), and just as with his other print novels, the influences of new media are everywhere to be found. In addition, Tomasula is a prolific essayist, and he has written critical work on experimental writing, representation, bioart, and design. Indeed, had he never written a novel, his critical work would make him a leading figure in these fields. However, it is his work as a novelist that has won Tomasula a devoted readership who see his books as uniquely addressing the problems and possibilities of our era. While the contributors to this volume will offer sustained and nuanced readings of all these works, this introduction contextualizes Tomasula broadly, sketching the constellation of science, art, and new media that can help us navigate his fictional universe.

Life sciences At first glance, Steve Tomasula’s novels seem impossibly hip. As one flips through the pages, the images, typography, and unabashed will to experiment are all there, creating a dramatic first impression. And yet the careful reader moving at novel-speed through these texts will also find that these stories,

Introduction

3

with their dizzying leaps into historical contexts that generate the genealogies of our new scientific and technological realities, unfold through plots that could often be best described as Edwardian comedies of manners. One might say that if the first impression of Tomasula is that of a cutting-edge experimentalist, the careful reader will slowly realize it is also impossible to grasp his work without remembering the novels of E. M. Forster. Like Forster, in all of Tomasula’s work it is the small, recognizable, and often domestic conflicts and desires of his characters that become enmeshed with larger forces of change and evolution that drive the plots along. It is from these quotidian, often trivial frictions that Tomasula is able to hang such diverse images, typography, and design. Of course it is tempting to say this is how science fiction has always operated, taking the struggles of the individual and connecting them to the cosmic, but it would be difficult to think of Tomasula’s work as primarily science fiction for several reasons.2 Firstly, there is almost always a strong sense of the domestic and the rather drab realities of an everyday life, be it that of a court painter, an early psychologist at the turn of the century, or a humble mechanic in our contemporary moment. Secondly, rather than imagined futures, his characters much more often struggle with imagined pasts, as Tomasula contextualizes their small and present problems as the expression of vast historical forces, from the invention of writing to the very evolution of an animal capable of speech.3 Thirdly, rather than imagining the impact of a particular technology, as much science fiction from the golden-age to cyberpunk so often does, Tomasula works from a deeper and more coherent insight that drives along his work and that is touched on in almost every essay in this volume: that the evolutionary forces and material expressions of biological life are enmeshed in every cultural expression, so that both the biological and the cultural exist in feedback loops whose resonances produce the worlds we experience. This insight drives not only the plots of most of his novels, but indeed their very innovative forms. Tomasula’s emphasis on language’s similarities to processes of evolution should not be mistaken for the most often repeated interpretations of Jacques 2

3

Tomasula’s work does have much in common with the science fiction that is co-extensive with the postmodern novel, including science-fiction writers like Samuel R. Delany, William Gibson, or Octavia Butler. For a sustained discussion of this issue, see Pawel Frelik’s essay in this volume. For an elaboration of aesthetic work expressing the “facts” of historical forces, see Andrea Spain’s work on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “the event” in “Event, Exceptionalism, and the Imperceptible: The Politics of Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 58.4 (Winter 2012), 747–772. See also “Sensation and the Art of Capture,” Trickhouse 7 (2009), accessed September 1, 2014, http:// www.trickhouse.org/vol7/guestcurator/andreaspain.html on imperceptible forces in contemporary experimental writing and visual art

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Derrida’s claim that “There is nothing outside the text,”4 or Jean Baudrillard’s world of simulation, in which “the map precedes the territory.”5 In the dominant reception of both these poststructuralist formulations, différance as the movement of language and simulacra as the multiplication of images in a series of infinite regress are the result of a decidedly human activity, and this cultural circulation of code produces the ephemeral worlds of meaning that we experience. However, in this reading of poststructuralism, the operation of meaning is always virtual, detaching representation from the material world, lifting sense away from the referent. Hence the charges of linguistic idealism. This over-emphasis on the discursive was perhaps essential to deconstruct the idea of “the theme of God’s book (nature or law, or indeed natural law).”6 Tomasula, however, revives the idea of “the book of nature,” but he does not do so in the spirit of a naive and totalizing faith in some transparent and absolutely available, stable presence. Instead, Tomasula sees the cultural production of meaning and the physical realities of nature meeting on the plane of the human body, and not merely a body understood as an inert surface of social inscription. Through his deep and thoroughgoing readings of the history and philosophy of science, as well as his continued scholarship in contemporary science proper, Tomasula’s writing answers the charge posed to cultural theorists by philosopher Elizabeth Grosz: We need to understand not only how culture inscribes bodies—a preoccupation of much social and cultural theory in the past decade or more—but, more urgently, what these bodies are such that inscription is possible, what it is in the nature of bodies, in biological evolution, that opens them up to cultural transcription, social immersion, and production, that is, to political, cultural, and conceptual evolutions. We need to understand, with perhaps more urgency than in the past, the ways our biologies work with, and are amenable to, the kinds of cultural variation that concern politics and political struggle.7

At the heart of all his work, Tomasula takes up the ways in which the biological and the cultural are enmeshed. Unlike earlier theories of culture Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158. 5 Jean Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1. 6 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 16. 7 Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2004), 2. Also see her chapter “Vibration, Animal, Sex, Music,” in Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of Earth (New York: Columbia, 2008), 25–62. 4

Introduction

5

that sought to create a firewall between the prison house of language and the forces of bodily materiality (i.e., the natural world), Tomasula’s work seeks to break down that wall in artistic practice, elaborating the ways in which the radical contingency of both nature and culture are caught up within one another. In essence, his books operate as if it is not possible to think about representation without also thinking the body and the entire history of evolution out of which “the cultural” emerges. This points to a much broader and far more interesting reading of Derrida’s formulation, “there is nothing outside the text.” As Grosz would have it, “Darwin’s own account uncannily anticipates Derridian différance”8 because both evolution and language operate not through stable and immutable identities (the book of nature) but rather through bodies that endlessly differ in processes of emergence and proliferation, processes in which species and languages themselves can only be grasped as open-ended, variating systems that have no teleology. To grasp the unfolding of life as variation, for Grosz, “we need to understand the body, not as an organism or entity in itself, but as a system, or series of open-ended systems, functioning within other huge systems it cannot control, through which it can access and acquire its abilities and capacities,”9 as the body clearly does through systems including language and art. These systems are the processes of evolution itself that give rise to our bodies and through which culture is itself evolving and feeding back into the process of the evolution that is its condition of possibility. In all Tomasula’s works, a refrain declares the simultaneous operations of life and representation. It is at the center of VAS, the book itself bound in a facsimile of skin, both a representation and a body. The narrator, Square, has to rethink his whole life through the history of eugenics and the newer science of genetics, so much so that at one point the narrative dissolves into a representation of the genetic code of an entire gene, some twenty-five pages of AGCT permutations. In VAS Square realizes that editing sentences and editing bodies are similar operations of emergence, each process as unstable and malleable and open to différance as the other. This twin-movement of life and representation can be found in less expected moments in Tomasula’s work. In IN&OZ, the protagonist, Mechanic, has an epiphany that transforms him into an artist. It happens when he is hard at work, repairing an automobile transmission. He removes its cover and stares into the gears, suddenly seeing much more than a banal machine: Though he has seen gears like this thousands of times before, it had never once occurred to him how eloquently their polished metal 8 9

Grosz, The Nick of Time, 21. Grosz, The Nick of Time, 3.

6

Steve Tomasula teeth explained his life: their mesh and power ratios may as well have been engineers, and foundry men, all on a shaft, with machinists, and mechanics, as his father had been, and the farmers, and cooks, as his mother had been, who fed the factory workers, and highway builders who made it possible for everyone to get jobs that brought into existence the need for marvels such as cars which needed transmissions which needed gears which needed him.10

In this metaphor, Mechanic imagines the teeth of the gears as the bodies of the workers who produced not only the car, but the entire culture that is implied by the car’s existence. And yet this is not just the function of the objects of culture. The objects are caught up with bodies, with mechanical and sexual reproduction, so Mechanic imagines his mother, and father, and their ancestors, a whole chain of life’s emergence in a churning feedback loop with the culture that produced them and the variable bodies that enable the future reproduction of bodies and machines. In a very important way, the metaphor breaks down by dissolving the machine’s presumed identity into complex, interlacing systems of organisms, the machinic, affects, and effects. Material cultural production—machines, factories, agricultural production and distribution (via the bodily labor of farmers, cooks, and mothers)—together with the virtual (generative affective life, desire, gendered imaginaries, and strains of the reproductive family), becomes “a complex power ratio,” a mesh that brings about the contingency of his birth: complex cultural and biological variation “brought into existence the need for marvels such as cars which needed transmissions which needed gears which needed him.” It is not that his ancestors are like the parts of the machine; they in fact pass between life and the machinic, and produce consistencies in life, compositions. For Tomasula, metaphor passes into the literal if only we change the scale of our vision. In their chapter, “1837: Of the Refrain” in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari describe such overlapping, vibratory systems as “milieus”: the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and action-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction. Transcoding and transduction is the manner in which 10

Steve Tomasula, IN&OZ (Madison: Ministry of Whimsy, 2003), 19–20.

Introduction

7

one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it. The notion of the milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another; they are essentially communicating.11

The point that this is not nature versus culture but nature opening out to culture is powerfully underscored when Mechanic turns to yet another metaphor to explain the power of this shift in scale and vision of the world. Mechanic imagines that he is “a child, who upon overturning a rock and finding grubs reducing a apple to dirt is able to think for the first time, ‘That apple is I’ ” (IN 20). The child’s image of the apple is one of interlacing systems. What the child realizes is that, like the apple, he too will be undone, just as Mechanic’s quotidian sense of himself is undone—quite literally decomposed—by his vision of contingency and emergence that suddenly reveals a very different plane of composition at a scale that Tomasula will call the posthuman. For Mechanic, this is a traumatic realization that creates an impasse, and the only way to move forward is to become an artist; art becomes a strategy for life. What we share with the grubs and the apple is our participation in a process made possible in part by our shared genetic code and its openness to variation, composition and decomposition. In his essay “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” Tomasula writes, Since the advent of Dolly the sheep—another watershed moment in how we see ourselves—much has been written about the material of the posthuman, and indeed it is easy to slide from a discussion of discourse into one of material concerns, for the two seem to form a Möbius strip that forces us to consider the individual person—even the body—in much more flexible terms than we have been accustomed. It is becoming increasingly easy to speak of human bodies as we have spoken of textual bodies—those “material-informational” entities Hayles refers to—for the very real cut-and-paste-and-burn mentality that has migrated to our bodies has translated on the literal body a vocabulary of instabilities generated by the proliferation of body texts: imitation, pastiche, influence, quotation, irony, puns, or significantly, plagiarism and copyright infringement.12 11

12

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 313. Steve Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” Sillages critiques 17 (2014): 15–16.

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One of the most important inspirations for Tomasula’s fiction, and a frequent subject of Tomasula’s essays, is the bio-artist Eduardo Kac, most famous for his work Alba, a genetically manipulated rabbit that glows fluorescent green. Kac has also created work, such as Genesis, that uses the genetic code as a text that is then transformed through the process of evolution. Kac himself coined the name “BioArt” to describe these new forms. Whether biological or aesthetic, that which was understood as relatively stable code is undone, and zoë and technē are realized as simultaneous processes of transcoding, or even better, transduction.13 Both meanings of “transduction” should be heard at once when conceptualizing cross-coding in Tomasula’s work: it must be simultaneously understood as a biological process by which “DNA is transferred … into another cell via a viral vector” and a physiological conversion of one sensory stimulus to the form of another. Tomasula plays with this crucial double sense, thinking the transduction of bio-text and the insinuation of altered code back into bodies as a process that rewrites bodily sense, but bodily sense also enters into the process of evolution and affects selection, so the two form a complex feedback loop. This process of multidimensional transduction happens almost as easily as re-writing sentences, again demonstrating the force of historical processes of representation in the unfolding of life’s variation. As Manuel Delanda writes, Whether the system in question is composed of molecules or of living creatures, it will exhibit endogenously generated stable states, as well as sharp transitions between states, as long as there is feedback and an intense flow of energy coursing through the system. As biology begins to include these nonlinear dynamical phenomena in its models … the notion of a “fittest design” will lose its meaning … . As the belief in a fixed criterion of optimality disappears from biology, real historical processes come to reassert themselves once more.14

In his essay “Genetic Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,” Tomasula surveys the surprisingly long history of the bioart movement, locating its origins in ancient practices of breeding and flower cultivation that are recognized first as modern art in 1934, when photographer Edward Steichen mounted a show of genetically altered delphiniums at the Museum of Modern Art.15 13 14 15

Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. “Transduction.” Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 1997) 14. Steve Tomasula, “Genetic Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,” Leonardo: The Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technologies 35.2 (2002): 143.

Introduction

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Tomasula also points out that the techniques used by artists like Kac are not really so new, having been used in labs to do everything from cancer research to developing new seeds since the 1970s.16 What is new is using such techniques to make art, and the art then raises a host of ethical and legal questions that are never asked behind closed corporate doors where profit is the guiding principle. As Tomasula puts it, art that addresses the fact that genes can now be rewritten like sentences emphasizes the everyday reality that “change is occurring, whether artists join in the discussion or not.”17

Sensation and art As evidenced by the work of philosophers like Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, and many others, as well as scholarship about media such as Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information to Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, there is no shortage of conceptualization about how science and technologies are transforming everyday life and the meaning of the human. In a sense, this raises a question: why is there a need for the kind of novels that Tomasula writes? Moreover, given the utterly transformed mediascape we inhabit, why the novel at all? Clearly, Tomasula’s populations of readers suggest his work speaks to a necessity, an urgency, to render visible ephemeral relations and material forces informing our lives that previously we could only intuit. Tomasula facilitates a transduction between technological milieu (genetics, digital networks, etc.) and those of discourses of science, literature (including genre), and artistic practice, in which “not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another … are essentially communicating.”18 For Deleuze and Guattari, the milieus of science, philosophy, and art are distinguished by the compositions (or “blocks of consistency”) they create: science creates percepts; philosophy creates concepts; and art creates affects. As they put it in What Is Philosophy, while science gives us “figures and partial observers” in order to make perceptual life more predictable, it is art that organizes and makes available to us “the force of sensation.”19 Rather than serving to regulate and understand percepts as science hopes to do, Tomasula’s novels incarnate not only concepts for the new worlds in which 16 17 18 19

Tomasula, “Genetic Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,” 143. Tomasula, “Genetic Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,” 144. Gilles and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313. Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), 216.

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we live, but capture the sensations of these worlds in profound and powerful ways. While we may at some intellectual level understand that genetic engineering is happening or that we are the outcome of an inscrutable process of evolution, Tomasula creates work through which we can sense the force of the reality in which we now live. Even more importantly, this aesthetic sense might diversify our perceptual and affective capacities which then become the motor for further bodily diversification. In other words, through the form of the novel, Tomasula counters Mechanic’s initial despair at facing the compost of “God’s book,” making alternative sense and sensation available to his readers through what we call in the last section of this collection, “the work of wonder.”20 Despite the formal innovations that animate his work, Tomasula composes novels that have deep roots within the tradition of this bourgeois form. The word “novel” that appears in the subtitle of almost every book he has written is in part certainly a question of marketing, indeed, of searching for or even shelving his books. However, we want to affirm that the form of the novel carries far more weight than mere marketing department shorthand, that Tomasula must be understood as a novelist. Tomasula is most often thought of as a writer of the flesh, that is to say, of overlapping textures, especially because of how he thematizes and performs an interest in surfaces. Again, while the cover of VAS itself mimics the textures and tones of the skin, the collage elements create unreadable layers of image, text, and code that overwhelm and interrupt the narratives. Indeed, many critics figure Tomasula as a writer who is best understood as a painter or a typographer or designer. And yet, when Deleuze and Guattari distinguish the novelist from the painter, they emphatically state it is the house and its rooms that define the novel: Everything begins with Houses, each of which must join up its sections and hold up compounds—Combray, the Guermantes’ house, the Verdurins’ salon—and the houses are themselves joined together according to interfaces, but a planetary Cosmos is already there, visible through the telescope, which ruins or transforms them and absorbs them into an infinity of the patch of uniform color.21 20

21

Pivotally anticipating critical theory’s turn to new materialisms, Paul Trembath’s early essay on aesthetic sense emphasizes the double meaning of sense, particularly resonant in the French sens and difficult to hear in translation. Trembath argues that sens at once evokes the bodily senses as well as sense as meaning. See Paul Trembath’s “Aesthetics without Art or Culture: Toward an Alternative Sense of Materialist Agency,” Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture And Politics 9–10 (1996): 122–151. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy.

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In Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense, the novel creates chronotopes, as well as the peculiar, historically specific subjects that emerge in and through them. For Tomasula, interiorities produce subjects, but as the characters repeatedly answer to the refrains of bounded and scripted spaces they are also radically open to disorganizing, cosmic forces. In VAS, we first come upon Square and Circle in their house, staging a domestic drama that will blast Square out beyond those rooms, connecting him finally with “opening, mixing, dismantling, and reassembling increasingly unlimited compounds [of percept and affect] in accordance with the penetration of cosmic forces.”22 And yet, Square will end his story first in a box seat at the opera and then finally in a surgical theater. Take Mechanic in IN&OZ, who begins “in the Garage behind his house” (IN 9), there encountering that penetration of cosmic forces that will drive him from his home into an entirely new relation to the world only to settle for a toll booth that gives him both a “home” and an expansive view of the city with OZ in the distance. In The Book of Portraiture, the ancient trader traveling with a caravan has a sort of house as he sits on his carpet and scratches the first alphabet across the sand. He is so surprised by his invention that “[t]he sight of it caused him to get fully out of his carpet” (Book 8). From the carpet that functions as his portable home, delimiting the space of a human subject, the trader, like Mechanic and Square, senses these cosmic forces: “And he trembled to find himself among their number, for he could see this curse for the power it held, a spell or a power he could multiply” (Book 10). Even the least domestic of his novels, TOC, itself has rooms, from the box where the reader must vote to the hospital room and its drama of relation, and then beyond to all the frames for the screen, room after room. Whether or not Tomasula’s characters settle in bounded spaces of the home, each of his novels dramatizes the negotiation of its rooms, lines of exit, and infinite refrains of interiorization. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of art and the novel thus offers a powerful way to both locate Tomasula in the tradition of the novel, and to explain the formal power of his work. His work almost always begins in the delimited spaces of everyday sociality, be that the carpet of the caravan trader or suburban Flatland. Through the narratives of these characters, and the complex counterpoints that Tomasula collages together with readymade quotations, illustrations, fragments of scientific research, music, and a vast pastiche of genres ancient and modern, the recognizable bourgeois subject of the novel is revealed to be caught up in vast forces of history, of evolution, of their feedback, and Tomasula carries us along until we can no longer think 22

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy, 188.

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of them as the bourgeois “human” at all. Still, his accomplishment is that he does not achieve this at the level of argument or opinion. His characters are not flimsy puppets for exposition. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “What matters is not, as in bad novels, the opinions held by characters in accordance with their social types and characteristics but rather the relations of counterpoint into which they enter and the compounds of sensations that the characters either themselves experience or make felt in the becomings and their visions.”23 In other words, it isn’t what Square, or Mechanic, or the Vogue Model, says, or what happens to them, or even how they feel about any of it, that matters. Tomasula succeeds as novelist because he puts us in touch with the sensations of their worlds.

New media and scale Tomasula’s novels emphasize a radical openness to other media while still managing to retain their formal consistency. The emphasis on the refrain as that which lends compositional consistency enables a shift in understanding the novel in relationship to new media. In a resonant example thinking through the novel’s relationship to cinema and the periodic press, Deleuze and Guattari find a consistency in works like John Dos Passos’s U. S. A. Trilogy even as it opens to the outside of its form, writing that a “novelist like Dos Passos achieves an extraordinary art of counterpoint in the compounds he forms with characters, current events, biography, and camera eyes, at the same time as a plane of composition is expanded to infinity so as to sweep everything up into Life, into Death, the town cosmos.”24 Just as earlier novels incorporated the diary, the letter, and the illustration, the form of the novel can open itself to take in more and more. So, rather than a radical break with the novel, Tomasula might best be understood as developing the form. Again, in “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” his essay on the novel, Tomasula writes,  … but in an age of interlocking subdivisions and identical restaurants, in a world that each year generates 100,000,000 Miracle Slacks™, each of which had to be filled by “HELLO! MY NAME IS:_______________,” in a country of actuary tables, and service manager uniforms (filled out by Service Managers), hip-hop fashions (filled out by Hip Hoppers), personalized mail-order catalogs, look-a-like Sports Heroes, News 23 24

Deleuze, What Is Philosophy, 188. Deleuze, What Is Philosophy, 188.

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Teams and other types—that is, to paint a portrait of our time, do the particulars of name matter? What seems important is the ways in which millions of interactions made of individual movements, motives, desires and fears call into being patterns as surely as temperature, pressure and vapor form snowflakes, and snowflakes form storms, and storms create climates and other patterns—a Weltanschauung, as humans once called their cultural climate.25

The world that Tomasula describes is no longer that of Dos Passos’s newspapers and cinema camera, and certainly not the world of the handwritten letter or the illustrated novel of the nineteenth century, for it is also the world in which people … no longer seduce one another face-to-face but Facebook to Facebook; nor do they—when they go to war—face off in linear trenches but launch attacks with pilotless drones or a bricolage of the weapons that have emerged from the openness of society: cell phones to coordinate attacks; ATM machines and borderless currencies; a postmodern world of tomato-fish hybrids and cow-human embryos.26

This is a world that is made possible by a vast array of digital technologies that have transformed the scales, speeds, and distances of human life. The computer, its digital codes, and the interactive networks it enables are usually seen as the dividing line in old versus new media worlds.27 Tomasula’s rhetorical question is, “To depict such a world, do the techniques of 19th century oil painting suffice?”28 Obviously they do not, as Tomasula seeks other scales to find the patterns that will create sense in this new context. Given all this, it is still somewhat surprising to affirm that the vast majority of Tomasula’s work is not strictly new media at all, with the exception of works like TOC and the “Cyborg” edition of VAS. In general, Tomasula’s novels are codexes, operable without electricity or digital network connections. And yet, as the title of this collection affirms, it is not really possible to read Tomasula without the horizon of new media. It is the digital and networked 25

26 27

28

Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” 17. (emphasis added). Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative”, 17. However, even here one should be careful. For instance, while Lev Manovich sees the digital as generally a good dividing line between old and new media, he is very careful to point out the huge continuities old and new media share. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2002), 52. Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” 17.

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Steve Tomasula

world that has allowed us to track to the patterns so important to his work, and in other cases it is new media that is driving forward the storm of patterns Tomasula perceives. Then there is the design of the books themselves. While theoretically possible without the aid of software, it would become almost a practical impossibility and certainly prohibitively expensive. Thus though arguably not new media themselves, Tomasula’s books are most certainly the products of new media technologies. In this way, Tomasula has much in common with Dos Passos, a writer who did not reproduce images in his novels, but without the existence of film and its montage style Dos Passos would not have perceived or written as he did. Further, just as we cannot read Dos Passos without the horizon of cinema, it is impossible to read Tomasula without the horizon of hypertexts, video games, digital networks, bioart, and all the other new techniques of representation and interpretation these kinds of technologies make possible. As Deleuze and Guattari say of novels like U. S. A. Trilogy, The composite of sensations, made up of percepts and affects, deterritorializes the system of opinion that brought together dominant perceptions and affections within a natural, historical milieu. But the composite sensation is reterritorialized on the plane of composition, because it appears within interlocked frames or joined sections that surround its components.29

In their reading, the mass of perceptions, feelings, moods, actions that take place in life are “deterritorialized” by the writer until they are caught again in the novel form, “in interlocked frames or joined sections,” the writer’s cultural climate that is greater and more intense than the sum or its parts sensible. In a similar way, we can think Tomasula’s relation to new media. Sense made possible by new media is deterritorialized, brought into the form of a novel that enables us to grapple with the counterpoints of these new technologies. Conversely, in Tomasula’s TOC, his new media novel, the consistency of the novel as a form reterritorializes the new media forms, bringing transcoding sensation from the novel into the world of new media. In this way, the meaning and force of Tomasula’s work is never merely given in the way the pages of a codex are designed or how a text like TOC is encountered on a digital device. Debates about form, devices, operability, genre, and more will play out through the pages of this collection. Bringing all this together in this codex allows the essays to both resonate and lend counterpoints, allowing us to 29

Deleuze, What Is Philosophy, 196–197.

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perceive in Tomasula’s work and discourses about it the larger movements of our contemporary milieus in their complexity. In this, we hope to make possible a precision in our apprehension of the ways art, and Tomasula’s novels, might capture the seemingly imperceptible material and virtual facts of sensation.

From bodies and genealogy to media and wonder In the above, we have tried to locate Tomasula’s work in the broadest contexts of science, art, the history of the novel, and new media. In what follows, the contributors to this volume will offer nuanced readings of all of Tomasula’s major texts, providing both a far finer-grained contextualization of the issues we have sketched here, and much more far-reaching offerings of interpretations, arguments, and formulations of the problems that all readers of Tomasula’s innovative work must wrestle with. The chapters are divided into four sections: 1) Bodies, Signs, Codes, and Books; 2) Genealogies of Representation; 3) New Media and the Novel; and 4) Writing Wonder. While each section tends to emphasize one of Tomasula’s major works, just as important is the organization of thematic and conceptual concerns as the collection moves from issues of representation and the body to the aesthetic of wonder. In Part One, “Bodies, Signs, Codes, and Books,” each contributor investigates the ways in which Tomasula’s signs and bodies, mixtures of representation and life, raise a host of philosophical questions and also interpretive problems. As they demonstrate, not only are the ethics of the body in play, but so are our methods of reading and making meaning. While raising issues that persist in all of his work, the first section of this collection focuses primarily on VAS: An Opera in Flatland and IN&OZ. In “The Work of Art After the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Work of Steve Tomasula,” Mary K. Holland demonstrates through careful close readings how Tomasula’s work understands the limitations of art and science as strategies to unveil the Real. At the same time, she highlights Tomasula’s sense of what “the work art can do in an age defined by information systems, reproducibility, and technological manipulation of the material world and the body.” For Holland, Tomasula insists that art cannot grant any kind of unmediated access to the Real, but because art can make mediation visible through a meta-commentary on its making, the work celebrates an aesthetics of labor in which biological, material, and aesthetic reproduction are co-extensive. As Holland has it, Mechanic realizes “being as constituted by labor, function, the body, and home, and

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of the self crucially in relation with the Other.” At the same time, Holland reads Tomasula’s critique of scientific objectivity, showing how his plots and formal innovations reveal science to be deeply inflected by ideologies that give partial and often destructive meaning to its labors despite its ability to predict and manipulate the material world. She concludes by linking these critiques to the forms of Tomasula’s books, arguing that his break with the realist novel performs the very critiques of both art and science that his plots thematize. In “ ‘The Material Is the Message’: Coded Bodies and Embodied Codes in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland,” Anthony Enns situates Tomasula’s VAS within posthuman conceptualizations of the subject. Rather than seeing Tomasula as celebrating new posthuman realities or expressing only a questionable nostalgia for an older humanism, Enns shows that VAS is inconsistent, at turns celebrating and at others offering deeply pessimistic and critical perspectives on our growing abilities to treat the body as text. For Enns, “The novel thus attempts to strike a balance between these opposing viewpoints by representing bodies as malleable, rearrangeable, and rewritable assemblages of codes.” Enns argues that rather than resolving these contradictions at the level of the concept, the book uses its innovative typography and visual elements as a “new kind of literary language that integrates poststructuralist theory with new information and biotechnologies, which allows the novel to combine divergent and seemingly contradictory notions of the ‘posthuman.’ ” It is precisely the densely textured and often fractured, even sometimes illegible, pages of VAS that Françoise Sammarcelli takes up in her chapter, “Encoding the Body, Questioning Legacy: Reflections on Intersemiotic Experiments in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland.” In a series of finely textured close readings, she examines Tomasula’s and his designer Stephen Farrell’s use of the page. Sammarcelli writes, “The book thus redefines the question of legacy in a complex of formal and epistemological dynamics. Like the double helix of DNA or language and lineage, the quotational-textual and the visual threads constantly interact through the masterful use of typographic art.” In her reading, the complexity of VAS thus performs its larger argument about inheritance, not only of a genetic code but also of representational forms. As Sammarcelli has it, “What is at stake is not denying one’s heritage but exhibiting or overcoding one’s sources, whether past or present: the body of the text thus emphasizes its relations with intertext and paratext.” That is to say, inheritance is not destiny, but nor can it be lightly discarded. Her readings gesture toward Tomasula’s sense of the fraught, contradictory, and sometime illegible ways our future emerges from the confusion of our past and our present.

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While Tomasula’s work is thus often presented as an example of a revolution in design, in “Steve Tomasula’s VAS, or What if Novels Were Books?” R. M. Berry takes up the problem of interpretation through Sigmund Freud’s concept of transference and Walter Benn Michael’s critique of “the affective turn” in literary and cultural criticism. For Berry, the very experiments with the page that critics like Enns and Sammarcelli show us present difficult problems of interpretation that cannot be answered merely by turning to the horizon of new media. He writes, “Unlike those who interpret Steve Tomasula’s fiction as a representation, enactment, or reflection of cognition under conditions of digitalization and biogenetic engineering, I understand the novel VAS as a solution to the problem of meaning’s disembodiment, and I take understanding it to entail understanding the difference between these interpretations.” For Berry, Benn Michel’s critique of affect theory largely holds, which is to say that even on a given page of VAS an embodied experience or affective relationship to the materiality of the text always relies on a romantic appeal to the subjective experience of reading. However, as Berry points out, what Michaels “does not acknowledge” is “the organic relationship of experiencing to becoming experienced.” It is the history of this becoming, which Tomasula manages to incarnate in the form of the book that, for Berry, “means to know at every turn, forgetting the pain of knowing no better, that one is on the page one is on, that what happens happens on the plane of trying to tell it, and how could anyone fail to know this?” Part Two, “Genealogies of Representation,” takes up The Book of Portraiture and the ways in which Tomasula historicizes different modes of representation in the full sense of the term. Originally, Tomasula conceived VAS as merely a chapter in this larger project, although it took on a life of its own. The Book of Portraiture thus provides a complex frame for epistemic concerns in VAS that lends a much deeper and more nuanced reading to Tomasula’s other work. Each chapter in this section emphasizes how Tomasula underscores the role of particular historical artistic forms and practices and how their technologies function in our everyday lives. In “Literary Archaeologies in Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture,” Flore Chevaillier contextualizes The Book of Portraiture in a broad overview of Tomasula’s work, including his major novels, his short stories, and his critical essays. Additionally, she draws on her own interview with Tomasula to connect this book to his ongoing critique of representation. She follows this with nuanced close readings of The Book of Portraiture, demonstrating the ways in which Tomasula creates a continuity between our contemporary consciousness of the perils, limits, and seductions of technologies of representation within their larger history. She demonstrates

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Steve Tomasula

that while Tomasula’s work may be made possible by the emergence of new media, his critique of new media must be read back into a critique of every form of human representation. In other words, as unprecedented as our technological contexts might be, we face the same problem that representation has always presented—its inability to forward a full presence even as it asserts one—though in new and even less immediately tangible forms. As Chevaillier puts it, “In this context, the impossibility of representation underlined by Velázquez, although still relevant today, has taken on another layer of paradoxes.” In “Beyond Human Scale: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture,” N. Katherine Hayles argues that the model of quantum mechanics might well be our best way to grasp the meaning of Tomasula’s works, particularly the ways in which he handles narrative. Hayles begins with an analysis of Tomasula’s essay “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” to position The Book of Portraiture as an attempt to narrativize forces and patterns that coordinate human life but are not readily visible at human scale. She writes, “If I were to describe this aesthetic in my own terminology (rather than Tomasula’s), I would relate it to quantum entanglement, the spooky correlation between subatomic particles that spans space and time; although many interpretations have been proposed, no one understands it completely.” Her readings show how the components of the book, specifically the chapters, relate in these eery ways, acting at a distance (“spukhafte Fernwirkung”) where different moments in the history of representation and human life interact with and inform the present. Thus, the book can only hint at “webs of connections too vast to grasp in their entirety, too tangled to represent directly.” She names this a “posthuman aesthetic of entanglement.” Most importantly, rather than a sense of mastery that might “reveal … a design we can comprehend,” Hayles concludes on a much more cautious and challenging realization that Tomasula’s work demonstrates that at most we get “stray bits of data that just happen to reflect or repeat other bits,” signaling that we have arrived at an “ongoing impossible-to-represent history of representation.” While Tomasula is most often characterized as a cutting-edge, avant-garde figure, Birger Vanwesenbeeck’s essay “Mining the Gap: Word, Image, and Loss in Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture” suggests instead that we might best think of Tomasula as a late postmodernist. Focusing on the history of art, Vanwesenbeeck situates Tomasula’s work in the history of ekphrasis, or the “paragone, the agonizing conflict between word and image, whose centuries-long tradition includes the invention of writing, where iconic symbols are turned into arbitrary signifiers.” Vanwesenbeeck develops a richly nuanced reading of how iconic and indexical signs, images, and bodies

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are enmeshed in The Book of Portraiture, and he then concludes by situating Tomasula’s problematics as grappling with the drive to “still the movement of time” with the image, even while answering to the experimental upheavals of the historical avant-garde and early postmodernism. Taking up the challenge to write in the face of these innovations, experiments, and critiques with a full awareness of the impasses they have created, Vanwesenbeeck argues that Tomasula has developed a way to be “late” in large part through strategies of ekphrasis. Or, as Vanwesenbeeck puts it, “To the extent that it marks an attempt to still the movement of time, ekphrasis may be regarded as the master trope for lateness in literature.” Part Three, “New Media and the Novel,” focuses in a more pointed way on Tomasula’s engagement with the technologies that are transforming literature. While most of Tomasula’s works are arguably old media, the contributors to this section investigate TOC: A New Media Novel, Tomasula’s fully digital work. TOC demands new strategies and practices of reading, and the contributors to this section do groundbreaking work in surveying its digital landscape and its technical infrastructures. While mapping out its complex semiological systems of gestures, shapes, images, sounds, and movements, these contributors offer broad interpretations of the work’s theme of time. They also demonstrate the ways in which the techniques and materials of TOC find their way back into the pages of Tomasula’s codexes, showing just how important it is to take account of new media in order to grasp Tomasula’s seemingly old media. Kathi Inman Berens’s “Touch and Decay: Tomasula’s TOC on iPad” addresses the ways in which all new media is caught up in the technological infrastructures that support it. Thus, rather than a thematic reading of TOC, she considers its existence as an object enabled by quickly evolving technical contexts that render it surprisingly unstable. As she observes, “TOC’s medial evolution prompts me to propose a device-specific reception history examining what’s at stake in porting desktop-born works into the touchintensive mobile environment.” In the second part of her essay, she connects the “touch and gesture as reinflected elements of TOC” to the themes of the work itself, and she reads the emphasis on time and mortality in TOC as, in part, evoking the inevitable obsolescence of the artwork itself. Where Berens deals with TOC as in physical entity subject to software and hardware updates, Anne Hurault-Paupe offers a systematic and wonderfully detailed analysis of the virtual objects that comprise TOC. In “Intermediality in Steve Tomasula’s TOC: A New Media Novel: A Semiological Analysis,” she argues that given its complex use of media, both old and new, readers lack the kinds of tested and well-understood methods of interpretation that serve the traditional novel. While those methods of reading were developed

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over centuries, TOC disrupts these established procedures and demands the invention in reading, as each reader must “consider how the interaction of linguistic, graphic and auditory elements turns the reader/viewer into a semiological investigator in search of a system for interpreting the novel.” Her essay offers comprehensive survey of TOC’s semiological systems, whether those of geometric shapes that individual users can manipulate at times but can’t control at others or the system of voice-overs highlighting the complex implications of gendered voice-overs, audio narrative, or that of a sudden indistinguishable cacophony. Hurault-Paupe also draws attention to the semiotics of the geographic textures of scenes, such as sand, water, peeling paint or swirling stars, in all, creating a much needed map into its fictional world. She demonstrates that the new media features of the text are not mere illustrations or elaborations, but must be grasped as actively constituting the meaning of the text. In the final pages of her essay, she then performs the kind of improvisational reading for which these interlacing systems call. Lance Olsen concludes Part Three with his essay “Ontological Metalepses, Unnatural Narratology, & Locality: A Politics of the [[Page]] in Tomasula’s VAS & TOC.” In a wide ranging meditation on both works, Olsen identifies and formulates the challenges of reading Tomasula’s work, both at the level of its material embodiment as well as its narrative invention. He emphasizes how the possibilities of new media find their way back into the more traditional pages of Tomasula’s print works, writing that “turning a page in VAS is like clicking a link in TOC: a surge of disorientation followed almost immediately by a surge of reorientation, a Heideggerian concealment followed almost immediately by a Heideggerian unconcealment, as our eyes and hands constantly figure out what to do next, where to settle, how to proceed.” For Olsen, Tomasula’s work is most successful exactly when it is forcing readers to reinvent or simply improvise acts of reading. In this, Olsen formulates what so many contributors to this collection value in Tomasula’s challenging forms: their ability to create new subjects, new populations within highly specific chronotopes, who deploy variable modes of reading texts that allow—or rather demand—so many materials resonate in spooky, “quantum” ways, as Hayles put it. Her metaphor is something akin to what Olsen names metalepsis, the leap from one level of narration to another, the story within the story. He writes, “metalepsis is the primary mode of narrative jamming in both VAS and TOC because, no matter which others are brought to bear in the texts, the participant is continually aware (as part of an ergodic operation of which s/he isn’t aware when traversing normative narratives) that s/he is part of the corporeal event.” That corporeal event is also what is at the heart of analyses such as R. M. Berry’s insistence on the embodied nature of experience and

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meaning for both Tomasula’s characters and readers. Olsen’s essay thus picks up refrains and sets up resonances with the other contributors. Part Four, “Writing Wonder,” expressly addresses the role of the fantastic and the aesthetic of wonder that animates all of Tomasula’s work. While primarily focusing on his most recent book, the collection of stories entitled Once Human, the contributors in this section all seek to show the profound aesthetic force of the fantastic in Tomasula’s work. They argue that these elements of the fantastic break the continuum of the realist novel. To adequately grasp Tomasula, they argue that we must both contextualize Tomasula in the traditions of the science fiction, the fantastic, and an aesthetic of wonder. Pawel Frelik begins this section with his essay “A Book, an Atlas, and an Opera: Steve Tomasula’s Fictions of Science as Science Fiction.” He surveys Tomasula’s reception, noting that his work is never fully received as science fiction. He attributes this in part to the ways in which writers, readers, and institutions of publishing maintain artificial demarcations between genres. Frelik then demonstrates that it is essential to think of Tomasula’s work through the genre of science fiction and its “megatext,” the wealth of themes and figures from the whole tradition. As he says, rather than merely writing about the future in a prose style and page layout not significantly different than that of Henry James or Ernest Hemingway, Tomasula’s work “redresses this lacuna in its attempt to adjust the form to the content and to convey not only the discourse of the future but also a sense of what living in it could be like.” In this, Frelik makes a compelling case that Tomasula’s writing is more directly engaged and formally radical than the texts that are typical of the genre. In other words, rather than writing descriptions of a probable future, Tomasula uses the form of his text to make readers perform a sense of that future. Read in this way, science fiction is a critical dimension of Tomasula’s work, and his work could also be seen as a formally revolutionary development in the genre of science fiction itself. In “ ‘Do We Not Bleed?’ The Color of Flesh in a Pop Cyborg World,” Anne Larue offers both close readings and a broad contextualization of Tomasula’s story “The Color of Flesh” from Once Human. Elucidating the story’s complex evocation of gender, race, disability, and queer sexualities through the figure of the cyborg, she argues Tomasula revivifies popular culture from Japanese manga to Hollywood blockbusters via the cyborg feminist theory of Donna Harraway and Beatriz Preciado. Her work expresses how deeply connected Tomasula’s experimental work is to popular culture that now occupies our globalized screens. In her reading, Tomasula actualizes the latent, fantastic, and potentially revolutionary content of our globalized cultures, a potential that is usually carefully repressed, elided, or framed as

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cultural imaginaries that serve the interests of the twin ruling ideologies of patriarchy and global capitalism. Through a collaboration with painter Marie Tomasula, even as “The Color of Flesh” takes on politics of racial discrimination in contemporary police states, according to Larue, the Tomasulas reappropriate manga’s sexist imaginaries, forcibly directing readers to re-experience these fantasmatic materials of popular culture in a mode of queer wonder. Françoise Palleau-Papin takes up the fantastic dimensions of lists, summas, and alternative histories in “Enumeration and the Form of the Short Story in Steve Tomasula’s Once Human.” Beginning with the paradox between the traditional form of the short story and the outsized role that enumerative lists play in these stories, Palleau-Papin argues that enumeration both seeks to stave off narrative death and to cope with the perplexing and incomprehensible influence of the past on the emerging present. In this way, she “follows Giorgio Agamben’s theory that the ‘contemporary’ is not an historical framework centered on the present, but an anachronistic consideration of one period from another, seen with both proximity and estrangement.” Palleau-Papin thus conceives Tomasula’s narrative strategies as enactments of the problem of time and history, and she positions Tomasula as a writer of what might be best grasped as a speculative science fiction. As she writes, “Cluttering his text with repetitions and echoing patterns, Tomasula immerses his readers in an experience of dissociation, often uncomfortably so, but not without rewards, the main one being that it allows us a glimpse into the contemporary.” Fittingly, this collection’s final essay is Anne-Laure Tissut’s “Steve Tomasula’s Work of Wonder.” Arguably, an aesthetic of wonder unites all of Tomasula’s work, accounting for the kind of pulsing, positive energy that animates his texts even as his subjects and themes are so often troubling or simply pessimistic. Despite the catalogue of horrors and dangers his books narrate (eugenics, violence, failures of communication), their evocation is of “a world which would seem to have been conjured up by magic and thriving on the supremacy of its distinct order, of divine origins or at least suggesting some mysterious otherness.” Tissut contextualizes Tomasula in a tradition of wonder that runs through American literature, and she argue that “while the writers of wonder deny the benefits of education and even refuse it, calling for a continued state of naivety or a return to such state, Tomasula would seem to stand closer to Rousseau, who celebrated the child’s virgin gaze as but a first step towards knowledge, a prime condition that needs to be overcome.” She thus connects him to an alternative tradition of wonder, “ranging from Plato’s Theoetetus to François Cheng’s Five Meditations on Beauty.” Wonder

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here has a kind of theological dimension, not one evoking a god but instead summoning an awe of the diversifying world of nature, human creation, and inquiry that Tomasula conjures on the page for his readers. For Tissut, Tomasula’s work of wonder thus creates a humanism that produces a “clearsighted vision relying on the strength of a continued faith in people despite a sometimes bitter clairvoyance. The thought-provoking aesthetics of his work are likely to arouse in readers an intense curiosity indefectibly bound to the respect of otherness, and a propensity to cultivate humility in the acute awareness of our finitude.” In the Afterward, David Banash interviews Steve Tomasula, posing questions emerging from the problematics explored by contributors to this volume. Banash asks Tomasula to elaborate on various aspects of the contemporary cultural climate within which he and his work are embedded and through which both have been transfigured: the optimism of technologists and cross-coding; the reception of his work as science fiction; his understanding of an aesthetic of wonder; his turn to metaphors of old media performance; his personal relationship to science and its discourses; the periodization and consistencies of experimental work; and the work of literature and aesthetics as different from that of science. His answers are as provoking and challenging as any work in the volume, lending refrain to counter-points as well as compositional consistencies to our sense of his work.

Part One

Bodies, Signs, Codes, and Books

1

The Work of Art after the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Work of Steve Tomasula Mary K. Holland

The world according to Steve Tomasula—and according to poststructural theories of language, Darwinist perceptions of nature, and systems-theory constructs of digital technology that inform his work—can only be experienced by the transient, particular human as fragmented, incomplete, relative, and irresolvably multiple. And yet art traditionally gathers and organizes these pieces into the wholeness and meaning that the world lacks, re-presenting the world with the apparent passivity of a mirror. For Steve Tomasula, however, the work of art is most integrally about work: it exists materially and physically impacts the world; it is defined by its function and use, not by cloaking and aestheticizing of these active dimensions; and it results from the work done by humans: it is human-made, not a product of nature. At bottom, Tomasula’s fiction aims to cram a wedge into the nearly non-gap between the Real and the endless ways we represent it to ourselves, while accusing itself of being no wedge at all. The essentially Lacanian—which is to say, Freudian, or perhaps Cartesian—notion that the self necessarily experiences everything as mediated by the self, and therefore has no direct access to reality, presents the basic problem of Tomasula’s work; whether and how art might offer a solution to that problem, or simply a way of comprehending the problem, while also identifying itself as part of that problem, motivates its unfolding. Ultimately for Tomasula, art is one of the many lies—like science, like history, like culture—that we cannot live without, if we are to live at all. But unlike the other scaffoldings we cling to, the other masks of the untouchable Real, art

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for Tomasula offers the possibility of making the Real present, pointing to the Real,1 by exposing itself as nothing more than mask. But Tomasula’s work does not confine itself to critiquing systems of signification and their relation to an abstract Real. Rather, his novels connect that theoretical inequity between representation and reality to a materialist critique of the inevitable inadequacy of any individual vision of the physical world, and a social critique of the inequities of power producing those visions. Thus, in all of his novels, the frameworks we use to stand in for reality—whether conceived as abstract idea or material whole—change as the dominant ideology changes: in VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002), music evolves from earthsounds to mouthsounds, melody, then genetic duet, while The Book of Portraiture (2006) depicts the evolution of modes of perception via mechanisms of representation, from the invention of alphabetic language to the reinvention of human life via genetic alphabet. TOC: A New Media Novel (2009) goes one step further, imagining a looping creation myth in which frameworks of perception evolve in and out of complexity as humanity repeatedly builds and destroys the master framework of time. These texts suggest that our ways of understanding reality are culture, insidiously self-perpetuating in that it both results from the gathering of individuals’ understandings, reactions, and desires, and shapes them, invisibly. VAS demonstrates how the most horrifying societal practices become accepted, even forgotten, not just through its story, but through its real-world examples of horrors we’ve assimilated, lost track of, or not even noticed. Years after learning in school of the Nazis’ sterilization programs, Square (the narrator of VAS) learns of those programs instituted decades before in America, “The Land of Free Choice”2: he marvels that one can acculturate to his own commodification, as did Ota Benga, who killed himself after his removal from the Bronx Zoo where he had lived in the Monkey House with an orangutan (VAS 297); he fills pages with pictures of ads selling gene manipulation and the eggs of beautiful women, meticulous documentation of Miss America’s decreasing dimensions, and reports of the eighteen surgeries required to transform a woman into a living Barbie—all of which we will find exist in the real world, if we check. The fact that we will have to check (how could I never have heard of Ota Benga?) indicates how little we know about the 1

2

See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). Foster argues that postmodern art enacts a kind of “traumatic realism,” which invokes the Real by illustrating, via neurotic and poorly apprehended returns of repressed affect, the impossibility of making it present in representation. Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 54.

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world we live in, how inaccurate any concept of reality is. The ultimate simulacrum, culture produces reality so thoroughly that we forget, or never know, that reality is anything more than the set of assumptions, fragments, and misperceptions that we live in. Such a wholesale substitution of representation for reality can’t be helped: there is no Adam’s Peak, which Tomasula imagines in both VAS and IN&OZ (2003) as a point on earth from which one can view all of creation, unframed.3 The danger, then, comes in confusing our methods of framing (narrative, schools of knowledge, facts) with the thing itself, and thus allowing particular lenses to dominate our vision in ways that distort or destroy our understanding of what it is to be human—that is, how we relate to the larger world, to each other, to the self. Tomasula’s four major works of fiction investigate our methods of representing and knowing reality (science, technology, history, language, image, story), the risks and benefits of each, and art’s value as such a method, asking what kind of art best allows us to know what is real by confronting the necessarily incomplete, fragmented, irresolvable ways that we (attempt to) encounter it. It considers the work art can do in an age defined by information systems, reproducibility, and technological manipulation of the material world and the body. Today’s most popular mask/ideology being science and its technologies, Tomasula’s writing focuses on the concerns of science and language as interrelated arms of the culture industry that shape our world and our bodies. His fiction considers what art is in that industry, and what it needs to be in order to resist it, to be revolutionary. Just as his art explores thematically how a science grown ever more atomic in scale, and a technology evolved from mechanical to digital, make increasingly profound alterations to the physical world and the human body, so does his fiction formally explore how literature in a digital age must grow increasingly and insistently material. The implications of his theory and execution of art revise the status of literature, the genre of the novel, and material theories of art.

The danger of art One aim of Tomasula’s fiction is exposing the dangerous lie of narrative. As a mimetic method, narrative pleases by offering the appearance of knowledge, wholeness, and immediacy, but through the mechanisms of forgetting, partiality, and construction. VAS and The Book of Portraiture (2006) enlist the constellation as metaphor for such constructive/destructive acts of 3

VAS, 190; Tomasula, IN&OZ, 129.

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understanding, in which “seeing the constellations/patterns … was more a matter of not seeing than seeing.”4 The narrator of the “Chronos” section of TOC: A New Media Novel also explains the pull of art as its ability sensibly to connect the random pieces of our lives: “She longed for a way to approximate the sense of a whole that was easier to fake in art than in life.”5 IN&OZ, more allegorical art manifesto than novel, demonstrates the danger of traditional realism and its invisible methods by contrasting two kinds of cars as two kinds of art with two very different societal functions and meanings. Mechanic, who becomes the novel’s artistic guru, transforms himself from worker to artist when he starts “fixing” cars in ways that make them inoperable as cars but revelatory as art objects: “Having grasped the essence of Car, he could no longer participate in the lie that was Not-Car, the lie that blinded people from the beauty of the Truth that resided beneath the false beauty they mindlessly used to tool about their work-a-day lives” (IN 25). Instead, he tools about the neighborhood pushing his car, whose wheels he has mounted to the roof and replaced with its doors like skis (IN 35), allowing the car in its functional brokenness to showcase its essential carness, just as his broken hammer allows him to “see its hammerness for what it was” (IN 26).6 Having been Heideggerianly thrown into the mechanic’s life simply because he grew up with a father who became a mechanic because cars often broke down under the bridge where they lived (101), Mechanic knows how material conditions shape our lives, how form determines function and fate— how form is the essence of meaning—as it is for his watchdogs with their “powerful bodies,” (IN 67) and for the Designer’s dog whose delicacy fits into her owner’s petite lap. Only removing this function allows us to see things for what they are, for the function they lost. Pointing to meaning/function by removing it is for Mechanic a true reproduction of the absent truth that all art is after, is testament to his understanding that such a truth can only be made present in its absence, that art neither conjures nor substitutes for the Real but rather exists entirely separate from it, and more often obscures than illuminates it. Designer, on the other hand, creates designs that “mask the grotesque viscera of cars,” as a dress or eyeglasses are “more of a language than an article of clothing or a medical aide” (IN 17). Her cars derive their power not from their ability to reveal their material function, but from their ability to “giv[e] desire form—and shap[e] the world by doing so” (IN 17). In transforming the cars’ essences into the language of desire, Designer creates “invisible cars” whose “wordless language” enables people to “change their 4 5 6

VAS, 167; Steve Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture (Tallahassee: FC2, 2006): 284. Steve Tomasual, TOC: A New Media Novel (Tuscaloosa: FC2), 2009. Tomasula uses the same hammer analogy in VAS (365), attributing it to Heidegger.

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selves by changing what they drove” (IN 91, 16, 18), thus masking both the mechanism of the car and the mechanism by which cars can be made to act ideologically on the world. Like Mechanic’s inoperable cars, Photographer’s mental photographs and Composer’s silent music present an argument for anti-realist art. When Photographer finds that Mechanic has “fixed” his car by replacing the windshield with the radiator, he recognizes their kindredness: “All my life I have driven this car without once considering the beauty, the functionality of its radiator … but now I shall never drive again without first appreciating its handiwork, and yours, and all of those whose labor has helped make my locomotion and comfort possible” (IN 27). This attention to the object’s material function and the labor that produced it Photographer calls the “true beauty of art,” which he contrasts with the “lies and illusions we are expected to live by” (IN 27). Photographer’s own art expresses the same distrust of the “lies and illusions” perpetuated by mainstream art; having abandoned filmmaking after being “sickened” by “the artificiality of time in films,” Photographer turned to stills and then photos with increasingly tiny frames, in an attempt to minimize the opportunity for misreading: “the photos themselves, the mere flotsam of looking were what most people wanted in a photograph while the photos were the very thing that arrested looking” (IN 29–30). His quest to escape the tyranny of the frame, of frameworks of representation that manipulate viewers who believe they are seeing unmediated reality, leads Photographer to “take pictures without any film in the camera,” and then to abandon framing devices altogether by building a house as a “walk-in camera obscura,” in which he stands, “eyes shut, letting the image that came in through the window that was a lens project itself onto his closed eyelids” (IN 30). Composer presents a similar argument for anti-realist art that results in a similarly solipsistic alternative to traditional art. His concert begins with a manifesto for anti-realist art, which accuses mainstream art of distorting reality by “FRAMING the world in such a way so as to CROP from view the WHOLE OF MUSIC and make of it a standardized assemblage of sounds to play while in the car or vacuuming the house” (49). Later, Composer will argue, as if he has been reading David Foster Wallace, that “by preventing audiences from slipping into the passive, dreamlike trance of listening, by forcing them to instead work for every note with their eyes, they apprehend the constructed nature of music. That is … they see how there is nothing natural about it” (IN 74). Further, he points out the structuralism of music, that it, like a language, operates and means only relationally, and that our investment of meaning in its distinct parts is also a construction: “we see how illusory is the concept of ‘a’ note. There can be no ‘note’ without an absence

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of sound between other sounds. … And so it is with all genres of music and the invisible assumptions that make them possible: No military music without a military. No church music without a history of churches” (IN 75). In this description, traditional art, and our traditional understanding of art, hides not just the truth of function but also the historical, political, and cultural forces that brought the art into being. But Composer’s methods of turning away from the lies of mainstream art, like Photographer’s, produce art that cannot communicate at all. For the entrancement of aural music he substitutes the dispassionate exercise of reading sheet music, ironically for more hours than the most devoted musician could endure. And the sound of the music is replaced by the roar of the diesel engine used to power the projector, so unbearable that the audience must stop its ears. In his attempt to produce “real Music, true Music” that cannot be misconstrued as mindless pleasure, Composer makes “music” that cannot communicate, or even be born, at all. It will be left for Mechanic to invent an art that can preserve function and communicate truth. TOC, on the other hand, enacts anti-realist practices while depicting in a variety of ways the seduction of realism. The illusion of realism is the engine for the novel, in the form of the Difference Machine, which, fueled by human desire—a woman’s beating heart—codifies the seemingly meaningful differences of words and images into a perception of understanding and mastery, even of time itself. In TOC, this machine, the clock, is the ultimate realist technique, the trompe l’oeil inside which we live, representing for us the reality we can never actually grasp. The clock is the art that contains all other attempts to represent the world. In The Book of Portraiture, Tomasula also uses trompe l’oeil to contrast realist and anti-realist art and its purposes. Chapter 2 develops another manifesto of art, this time from the point of view of Diego de Velázquez, a historical painter in the court of King Felipe IV of Spain, during the reign of Louis XIII. For Velázquez, trompe l’oeil, or mimesis, fails in the proper project of art in two ways: by reflecting only what the viewer already knows and thus expects to see, and by fooling the viewer into believing the identity between her expectation/concept of the material object and its fulfillment in art—by creating an illusory connection between representation and thing, art and life, that seems to heal the pain of the gap that lies between us and experience/reality. Instead, Velázquez realizes that it is only by making visible the artist’s artifice that the art of painting can express its own essence: the directions by which the viewer is to note the breach between the marks he sees and the things he believes them to represent. That is, it is only when paint represents itself as paint that

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its craft can become an art—a form of knowledge that signifies a way of being as well as represents ... . (Book 53)

The opposite of mimesis (or, attempting to trick the viewer into believing the representation is the Real), the essence of art for Velázquez and for Tomasula, is its ability to call attention to the gap between the two. Thus art becomes not a salve for or distraction from the painful gap, but a “form of knowledge”— which VAS pairs with pain in its opening line—and a “way of being” that is an alternative to the pleasant ignorance of mimetic magic.

The work of art The Church fathers in Book of Portraiture are right to panic at the implications of such a theory of art. By using as his mouthpiece for anti-mimetic art an artist who worked for the Church when it asserted its power through the Inquisition, Tomasula moves beyond the personal seduction of aesthetic realism to examine the cultural dangers of aesthetic ideology. Rather than re-inscribing the authority and power already concentrated in state and religious rulers, as portraiture had long done, art as evolved by Velázquez unmasks mimetic representation as itself a system of power that sanctifies certain “truths” while repressing others. Such anti-mimetic art has the potential to expose the repressive mechanisms of all inscribing systems, so that “a confusion of origins would replace the Origin … the Tower of Babel falling—forever,” as a Church father bemoans (Book 72, 73). Velázquez unmasks mimetic art as a prime instrument of ideology via its inevitable reliance on perspective—its requirement that a viewer must occupy its point of view in order for the work to make sense: “This is why a crucifix paint’d from the perspective of one on his knees then hung at the right height before a pad’d kneeler will act as an invisible hand, bringing its viewer down into alignment. It is only by aligning himself with the assumptions embody’d in the work that it will appear normal” (Book 79). The work of art similarly imposes a physical relationship between itself and its viewer that moves the viewer into “proper” alignment with the contextual assumptions inherent in it. Velázquez’s connection between art’s ability to manipulate the body to take its perspective and its deployment of a belief system echoes Althusser’s explanation of “the material existence of an ideological apparatus,” which, through ritual, governs the actions that dictate and contain people’s beliefs.7 7

Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd edition, gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2010), 1354.

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In order to avoid such tacit manipulation, Velázquez paints his masterful Las Meninas, which absorbs its viewer into it, moving her into place as witness to the scene. She shares this position with the implied mirror that reflects both the scene as the artist paints it and the marginalized subjects of the scene—king and queen, who end up trapped in an infinity of reflection. The painting makes plain the influence of every work of art over the viewer whose body it moves to accommodate its perspective; of the viewer who is conscripted into its making; and of the desires and beliefs of the artist that enable both. “Every portrait can only be a self-portrait; a portrait of its viewer, its author, a portrait of the I (nosotros),” Velázquez concludes, displacing the work’s subject onto creator and viewer and dispersing self into the other that is its co-creator (Book 84). From one origin, many: and so Velázquez transforms art from an instrument of placating, totalizing ideology into one of the painful knowledge of multiplication and separation, of the self from the self, and of the self from the Real. Thus Las Meninas operates primarily as disruption: of the viewer’s thoughtless absorption into art, and of the power structures that create the hierarchies and assumptions that invisibly shape art. It is a disruption of the self-perpetuating cycles of power—authority shaping cultural artifacts that re-inscribe that authority— of which realist art is a reliable handmaiden. Whereas Velázquez exposes the church as an ideological state apparatus, Mechanic exposes the ideological state apparatus of the consumerist forces that transform every thing and self into a commodity that is absorbed into the capitalist machine. Not only does Designer draft invisible cars used by people to remake themselves in the cars’ own images, but she also demonstrates how a perspective of commodification creates the simulacra of OZ’s music (which fills the elevators that have replaced the interior of the OZ building, means entirely replacing ends) (IN 24), and the “Technicolor rainbow over amber waves of grain” (IN 31) that accompanies her morning jogs. The pastiche of OZ comprises and composes her world, a virtual patchwork of pieces— sounds, images, even branded verbal expressions—all of which quote something else unreal. Thus Designer’s only way of appreciating the “unique” work of art she purchases (from an unsurprisingly commodifying gallery of “authentic” art) is to bring it into the language of commerce that defines her expectations and assumptions: she makes the painting “less of a dominating sneer” by buying more products, more magazine images, that will align the work of art with their comfortable, commodified perspective, until “she found it harder and harder to say which was product and which art” (IN 107). Meanwhile, Composer and Photographer understand only in theory what Mechanic comes to understand through embodied experience: that all art participates in ideology that materially shapes the world. Composer

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teaches Mechanic this link between art and the real world as they, along with Photographer and Designer, sit and talk in an IN bar called DRINK BOOZE (its name, like all place names in IN, invoking function rather than creating desire, and so pointing to how different strategies of signification in IN and OZ create differences in inner states and behavior). Composer pontificates that “aesthetic decisions have real-world consequences,” (IN 74) an assertion that is meant to support his argument for art that prevents viewer passivity but also, ironically, explains why his unbearable version of nontraditional art can never actually shape the world. But it does succeed in resisting commodification, by being as unreproducible as it is unsellable; for “any music that can be bought and sold … is a force in the maintenance of the status quo” (IN 79). Ultimately, though, the novel exposes the limits of Composer’s materialist theory of art, not just by showing the limits of his consuming audience, but by indicating the limited conviction of his purely intellectual understanding in the face of the forces of ideology and its capitalist cooption. The bar scene foregrounds—for us and for Mechanic, if not for the less savvy other artists—this divide between embodied and intellectual knowledge as a framework for examining the impact of class on the human body and experience, in the tradition of Marx and Engels, and other theories of art. Mechanic realizes he should have known that Composer and Photographer “had both been born in OZ and educated in OZ and still had the money to live in OZ, their families made up of wealthy OZ professors and business people, even doctors and judges … the first time they shook hands, their hands being as soft as the foam rubber of luxurycar seats” (IN 72). He sees “the lifetime of premium, not standard, health benefits written in the luster of Designer’s blonde hair, … the straightness and whiteness of Composer’s teeth” (IN 74). Designer, unapologetically of OZ, makes herself comfortable in this world of bodily labor in the same way that she made her piece of art fit comfortably in her commodified world— by appropriating the world of labor into her commodifying designs: she is “dressed down in a faux work shirt,” wearing “matching stoker’s cap,” and “shoes designed to resemble work boots only not so much that it wouldn’t be obvious that she didn’t actually ‘work.’ … her faux work boots were too petite to contain the steel reinforcing that real boots needed to protect toes from being crushed by a dropped beam” (IN 73). Designer converts real function into functionless fashion. On the other hand, Composer illustrates how one’s alienation from the world of bodily labor can inadvertently convert function into fashion: though he and Mechanic buy their shirts at the same “resale and vintage boutiques of gas-station attendant uniforms and high-voltage-proof hip-waders, the work shirts that Mechanic wore looked

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like work shirts, while Composer’s work shirts somehow came off as fashion” (IN 73). The same signs signify differently depending on the experiences and uses of the body employing them. Thus, it is Composer’s own limited experience of physical labor in the world that limits his understanding and therefore also the works of art he produces, in their ability to shape the material world and represent material relations. Mechanic learns from this bar talk “the idea that art could shape its viewer” (IN 80). But he knows from growing up in IN what the other, OZ-bred artists never will: how art necessarily arises from hands that have been shaped by the world. His embodied way of understanding the other artists’ cerebral concepts of art is evident throughout the bar scene, not through anything he says but from what he notices as the others talk. He observes in the surrounding scene, which is mere window-dressing for the others, evidence of the hard lives lived by residents of IN. While Composer pontificates about aesthetics impacting the world, Mechanic notes the massive forearms of the sheet-metal worker and the protective paunch of the jackhammer operator. Then he understands that the men’s ferocious fist fight erupts not because of an adolescent prank but rather “because their bodies had been in the bargain, the big guy going nuts over the graffiti of chalk, his body being something so not-to-fuck-with because during the rest of the week all of their bodies were little more than tools that the factories they worked in would slowly consume” (79). While the others theorize art’s ability to affect the world, while producing objects that either refuse to perform that impact (Composer’s silent, alienating music; Photographer’s mental pictures) or fail to be true art (Designer’s commodified, invisible cars), Mechanic learns to make art that does not “shape its viewer” in the dominating way of labor and modes of production, but that instead allows its viewer to become aware of the various ways she is forever shaped by the world and by art. Mechanic’s unusable cars point to our assumptions about the systems that constitute a car and make us see how each piece does its work, just as the “visual sonnet” he composes for Designer—a bouquet of car parts salvaged from the automobiles she designed—means to make her invisible cars and the labor they do and that produced them visible again. The art disgusts her, of course; what he creates as an ode to her as creator of Carness, she reads as “butchered parts of her children” (IN 117), in a fundamental disagreement about what exactly it is that art creates or destroys. If, in the language of Gramsci,8 Mechanic is an organic intellectual and Designer an unabashedly traditional intellectual, Composer, in his 8

Antonio Gramsci, “The Formation of the Intellectuals,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd edition, gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2010), 1002–1008.

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unconvincingly worn work clothes, presents a more dangerous, insidious version of the latter. His collaboration with Designer by novel’s end indicates that he replaces his romantic rejection of birthright and assertion of artistic independence with grateful acceptance of his place on the world’s consuming stage. More damning still is the story about humanity’s relationship to artmaking with which he leaves us at the end of the novel. In a book that is already a parable about the dilemma of making art in a commodifying world, the three parables about ways of seeing and representing the world stand out as conspicuous devices for exploring that dilemma. Composer’s later parable comes as a pessimistic rebuttal to the more productive theory of art espoused by Photographer, and by the novel. Expanding on the “Adam’s Peak” image alluded to in VAS, Photographer explains that he moved his house to the “highest point around, even higher than OZ” in order to approximate that point “protruding from The Garden of Eden” from which “Adam could hold the entire world in one, unframed view” (IN 129)—the artist’s holy grail. When the sprawl of OZ and his own oncoming blindness conspire to teach him the impossibility of such a total view, he realizes that “the Sur myth for an artist is not the story of Adam’s Peak … but The Tower of Babel” (IN 131), which he reads as teaching these lessons: “resolve yourself to an earnestness of such intensity that you will succeed gloriously—or fail so tragically that your failure will become legendary as success,” and “live where you work … work where you live” (IN 132). In advising Mechanic to do earnestly what he loves and to live where he works, he advises Mechanic to resist commodifying culture by maintaining an identity between self and work that will protect his sense of self and make his work meaningful. Photographer’s subsequent repetition of this advice in “some six thousand living languages,” a surprising assortment of them painstakingly represented in alphabetic and logographic characters, lends his parable the same power and earnestness that he urges Mechanic to adopt. This advice resonates backwards to a moment when Mechanic, whose home is his garage as Photographer’s is his camera, hears Designer complain of her twenty-mile commute to work and innocently asks, “why don’t you live closer to your work?” (IN 54). Thus the novel aligns this work-art-self identity with a philosophy about art that Photographer lives, Mechanic learns, and Composer and Designer will never understand. Instead, Composer counters Photographer’s evolution from Adam’s Peak to the Tower of Babel with his story of the “Tunnel of Babble,” dug to “undermine the foundations of not only their own tower but of all buildings,” to bring down institutions, “the deconstruction of Babel” leading to “the lesson we live with to this day: Which is to say, I just can’t say what is right any more” (IN 138). It is impossible to read a Tomasula novel and conclude that this ultimate skepticism of meaning

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and value, beyond multiplication and decentralization and into destruction, is what his fiction intends. As much as his work insists on the relativity and multiplicity of meaning, the futility of fully articulating reality or of fully getting outside the biased frameworks necessary to express it, his fiction also insists that, at the least, this exposure of frameworks of meaning is one kind of truth art can aim for; moreover, exactly this is the crucial job of art. Whereas Tomasula ends Composer’s intervention in Mechanic’s education about art with this fantasy of total deconstruction, we leave Mechanic in yet another physical discovery of how the world stamps itself on us in ways we can’t help but perpetuate, and how our art must be born of and participate in this material shaping. He aids in the births of two puppies, which “looked exactly like the other ones, exactly like the mother, and the father,” and marvels at the materializing destiny of biology: “Not one bird. Not one cat” (141). This hand that birthed the dogs he then recognizes as “the most essential part of his art,” just before crushing it in his counterweight. When he then catches Poet/Sculptor in the act of creating a poem from the dirt of his yard, recognizes the “beauty” and “simple logic” of her broken bike, and gestures to fix it with his broken hand, Poet’s immediate attention to both hand and injury signals a collaboration of selves and ideas of art that directly opposes the commodifying affair of Designer and Composer. In the end, Mechanic sees art as exposing the essence of being as constituted by labor, function, the body, and home, and of the self crucially in relation with the other. Tomasula’s first novel, VAS: An Opera in Flatland, examines the dangers of a more insidious form of ideology: science. It opens and closes with an empirical example of the natural body readily absorbing and being visibly altered by scientific technique: Square’s daughter’s white carnation transformed by “TV-red” water, which Square carries in his pocket in the book’s last pages as he submits his own body to alteration via a medical technique (VAS 10, 366). Later definitions of the Greek roots of “chromosome”—color (chroma) and body (soma)—reinforce the analogy: as our genetic elements color our bodies, so do our scientific stories about those elements color our understanding of the world we live in, and what is true. VAS insists that science is an evolving collection of stories, a narrative whose facts change as surely as do its forms, according to the assumptions of other frameworks of understanding that inform it: “How odd it was to go into a library and find the crumbling volumes of The Eugenics Review and other learned sciences now so completely dismissed that coming upon their artifacts was as startling and enigmatic as coming upon pyramids and great stone heads” (VAS 18). Science is reduced to the status of culture and religion, composed of irrational conviction and mass opinion, a “history of

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failed theories” that progresses by eliminating the problems it cannot solve or explain using its own limited, flawed framework of understanding (VAS 87). VAS also demonstrates how science is composed of language, is a matter of language—both in its methods of ordering and defining via naming and cataloging (VAS 171), and in its mediation by the dominant languages and cultures that write it (VAS 80). Further, by illustrating the extent to which science has become a language itself—the language of genes—VAS suggests that genetic manipulation is today’s method of translating concepts of what makes a “desirable” human (dictated by those with the means to impose them, whether wealthy couples designing their offspring or governments dictating reproductive rights) (VAS 122), into bodies, of making ideology material. Like Mechanic’s discovery about the relationship between labor and art and Velázquez’s discovery about perspective and portraiture, Square’s narrative is a process of making these invisible workings of science visible in the art he creates. Ultimately Tomasula asserts that art must both separate itself from the dominant ideological narrative and expose its own inherently ideological narrative work. Sitting in the clinic, awaiting his vasectomy, Square sees a collection of antique microscopes and considers how much of the “truth” they revealed to their users in their time has become eclipsed—falsified—by the technologies of today, whose own “truths” will one day become equally quaint, will become “history or art … not technology” (365). He realizes that only in their unusefulness, in their inability to perform acts of meaningmaking consistent with the epistemological system that produced them (to “naturalize” them, as Jonathon Culler explained traditional realism9) can they expose the limits and framework of that system in which they no longer seamlessly belong, and so, like Mechanic’s undriveable car and Poet/ Sculptor’s unrideable bike, say something true. “If his story, or any art, was to compete with surgery, it was in this way, he realized” (VAS 365): in order to convey truth that is as compelling as the “truths” of a society’s dominant narrative, story and art must refuse to operate in the system of that dominant narrative, and must represent things and bodies in ways that are outside of their usefulness by that system, that culture. Art must do for the body and thing what its techniques, according to Shklovsky, must do to its ideas and concepts: it must defamiliarize them, make the familiar strange and therefore visible.10 Tomasula’s books do this by failing to perform the mimetic devices of traditionally realist fiction that offers the text as substitute for reality, as 9

10

See Jonathon Culler, Structural Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975): 136–150. See Victor Shklovsky’s “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991): 1–14.

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immediate, unmediated, unbiased, and true. His manipulation of the book’s formal and physical dimensions to mount his critique of ideology, and of art’s complicity with it, acknowledges his deliberate intervention in an evolving intimacy among art, ideological power, and the material conditions of the world.

The work of art after the mechanical age: The history of form The titles of three texts spanning what we are for now calling modernism, postmodernism, and post-postmodernism announce their reflection on how changing modes of production evolve the role of art in society and shape the work it can do. First, Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (2010 [1936])11 famously reevaluated for modernism the role, abilities, and risks of art that could be mass-produced by machine rather than painstakingly by human hand. Written in a new cultural and literary period, Donald Barthelme’s short story “At the End of the Mechanical Age” (1981 [1976]) asks to be read in the context of Benjamin’s essay, as a demonstration of the greatly diminished capacity of art to be meaningful as we move beyond the age of mechanical reproduction and into the age of “metaphor.”12 The narrative of his story is only a skeleton— assembling the bare bones of two people meeting, marrying, divorcing, and having a child, in that discombobulated order, and his characters are similarly skeletal, lacking interiority, acting as frames that carry the plots we have come to substitute for our lives. At the “end” of postmodernism, David Foster Wallace’s “A Radically Condensed History of Post-Industrial Life” opens his short-story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), framing the book’s central dilemma—the near impossibility of sincerity— in the context of late-capitalist, post-mechanical society.13 “Post-industrial” signifies a changed mode of production in the Marxist sense, beyond a mere change in modes of technological reproduction. It signals the changed social relations that come with a restructured economic base in which commodities constitute the economy, their material origins so distant and powerless as to 11

12

13

Also translated as “technological reproducibility” by Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, but for my purposes I like the preservation of the physical machine in the term “mechanical” from Zohn’s earlier translation in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217–252. Barthelme, Donald, “At the End of the Mechanical Age,” in Sixty Stories (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), 272–279. David Foster Wallace, “A Radically Condensed History of Post-Industrial Life,” in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Boston: Little and Brown, 1999), 0.

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have all but disappeared. As a “History,” the story implies that we have been post-industrial for a long time, long enough for the transformation from material relationships between products and people to virtual ones between commodities and information to have wholly reshaped how humans relate to society and to each other. These three texts chart a movement from the loss of the aura of the work of art and art’s subsequent liberation from its enslavement to ritual; to the questioning of art’s (especially narrative’s) ability to communicate anything but itself and its forms; to the crises of the subject and relations with the other that result from our unreflective entrapment in the forms of art. When Square compares art to surgery at the end of VAS, he suggests a very different relationship between art and science, and thus a different set of potentials for art, than does Benjamin when he uses a similar analogy at the end of his essay about art in an age of technological reproduction. Benjamin compares the surgeon to the filmmaker, opposing them to the magician and painter, in that the latter “maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue.” This penetration of reality by film, which he also describes as “the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment,”14 Benjamin credits with an ability to represent the world more extensively, in greater depth and detail, more truly than has any other mode of art: “Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the [motion-picture] camera as compared to the eye,” exposing via close-up and slow motion a degree of reality hitherto unobserved. This “reality” he accepts as unproblematic, a cognate of “nature,” leading him to declare that “Demonstrating that the artistic uses of photography are identical to its scientific uses—these two dimensions having usually been separated until now—will be one of the revolutionary functions of film.”15 Art in the age of technological reproduction, for Benjamin, has the capacity not just to transmit true knowledge about the real world, but also to uncover knowledge about the physical world that had been hitherto unavailable. “Emancipate[d]” from “its parasitic subservience to ritual,” the technologically produced work of art can express more than its aura (as does an original, pre-technological work of art in its original context), can generate more than a social relationship between the artist and viewer (as does a live theater performance). Art devoid of aura and ritual use, like the film, can instead present not the reality specific to the work of art or artist but a reality contained in the world. But this reality 14

15

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 1nd edition, ed. David H. Richter (New York: Bedford, 1989), 1064. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 1066 (original italics).

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is, like the patient’s body after submitting to the surgeon’s knife, different than it was before the intervention, cut into pieces that are then reorganized into a different whole: “the illusory nature of film is of the second degree; it is the result of editing … the equipment-free aspect of reality has here become the height of artifice, and the vision of immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of technology.”16 Thus the “interpenetration of art and science” seems to suggest an elevation of art to the level of science, to the level of objectively capturing and allowing meaningful study of the world, while the technology of film also obscures the mediation involved in the construction of that reality. Benjamin’s flower is VAS’s carnation, but blue, and read with more admiration than abhorrence. This contradiction in the abilities of technological art lies at the heart of Benjamin’s predictions for the future capacities of art. On one hand, his essay celebrates the revolutionary potential of film to fully accomplish what the Dadaists strived for when they “turned the artwork into a missile.” Film for Benjamin produces “shock effects” beyond what static art could do, causing the kind of “shock” or “shudder” of the I for which Adorno praised modern art: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”17 Such simultaneous distraction from the I and attention to both the work of art and the collective experience of the work of art that Benjamin claims is characteristic of film results in “reception in distraction,” which Benjamin locates as the primary tool of technological art to communicate meaning beyond the self ’s reflection on itself and the limited ritual use of the unique work of art. On the other hand, Benjamin’s “Epilogue” about the violent consequences of aestheticized art points to the dangerous potential of such reception in distraction—the potential of art to feed ideology, disguised as aesthetics by the techniques of art, to the distracted masses. Benjamin’s solution to this problem is to politicize art; that is, to make art’s ideology visible, to align technique with ideology. Mechanic makes disclosing ideology the visible goal of his technique when he creates functionless art that points to the labor behind the art and to the function made absent by transforming cars into works of art. Velázquez does the same when he produces a painting that includes the viewer, implies its framing of the viewer’s point of view, asserts its production of its own reflected point of view, and demonstrates, via displacement of king and queen into an infinity of reflection, its domination (and equation) of subject and viewer. That is to say, Tomasula’s art shares with Benjamin the aims of shattering aura, freeing art from ideologically determined cult value, and 16 17

Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 1064. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 1068.

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foregrounding ideological content that Benjamin discovers for film. But it accomplishes these aims via insistently nonfilmic methods, and according to a different understanding of the relationship between technology and art. For Square, technological penetration of reality, specifically surgery, means not the liberation of art from aura but the excision of humanity from the human body. The Strange Voyage of Imagining Chatter, the opera within the opera of VAS, traces an evolution of modes of art from primitive (nature sounds and chatter) to realistic (artistic representation of the real) to anti-realistic (exposure of the tricks of representation), culminating in a projected future, or an extreme version of the present, in which the manipulations of the body by science create a new human body and thus new paradigms for beauty and art. This final act does not represent such a future but embodies it, through the live surgical swapping of the heads of two monkeys, which Square renders in drawings reminiscent of the centerpiece of the Sistine Chapel—a new creation myth. In this vision, surgical penetration and manipulations of the real as the ultimate technology of science and accomplishment of technological art is a nightmare, not a revelation. It is a use of technology not dreamt of in Benjamin’s philosophy, and an example of how far technology itself, and its effects on reproduction and manipulation of art and the human, have evolved since Benjamin’s essay. As in that essay, however, technology and means of technological reproduction in VAS are not static; they are forms whose manifestations change over time as our expertise in developing technology and our desires for using technology change—just as art changes in form according to evolutions in technology. So the antique microscopes displayed in Square’s doctor’s office are now “history or art now, not technology,” just as his own body is now “passé except as philosophy” (VAS 365). Technology in VAS has so thoroughly penetrated the real—the human body—in its ability to manipulate and reproduce it on the genetic level that technology has begun to supersede the body, to make the real, unaltered human body a thing of art apart from reality, so that the technological body begins to become a simulacrum. It is this context in which Square realizes that his art must “compete with surgery” in the way of the antique microscope, whose unscientific biases—Leeuwenhoek seeing his own face in spermatozoa (VAS 365)—we can see only now that we view the mechanism as art, outside the framework of technology. Art’s ability to affect the body, our ideas of humanness, and the material world we produce with those ideas, depends on our ability to hold art apart from science and its ideological manipulation of our ideas and its physical manipulation of the human body. Thus art must preserve the materiality of the human body and our concepts of it as apart from the surgical interventions of science and the uses to which science

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would put it. It must continually call attention to the difference between body and ideology, body and narrative, and assert the importance of the material in a world becoming increasingly virtual. Tomasula draws attention to the material in an increasingly digital world even in the bodies of his books. He does so perhaps most obviously in VAS and The Book of Portraiture, whose innovative textual designs so clearly depend on their print medium.18 But he also asserts the importance of physical form when he describes his DVD novel TOC as comprising the viewer’s readerly encounter with its collage of materials: “it is still a book: unlike a film, it is read as well as watched; like a book (and unlike a film), it is interactive.”19 Perhaps most noteworthy, because most unexpected, are Tomasula’s methods of privileging the material medium in his most narratively straightforward book IN&OZ: six pages repeating “$1.00” do more than convert Mechanic’s toll-booth tedium into a foregrounding of mimetic devices; by boring the reader across the time and space of serially pointless page-flips, they materialize Mechanic’s boredom. Similarly, the complicated joke of the “bored” billboard that “is not a billboard” (what is a sign that refuses to signify?), represented as drawings in chapter twelve, and the litany of languages represented in chapter twenty-three using not just signs (letters, pictographs) but signs for signs (drawings of hand symbols, Morse code, Braille), remind us how far the novel removes us from the material world, how slippery is the relationship between signs and what they are meant, or able, to represent. Even the physical form of IN&OZ shapes the way it signifies: tall and thin between narrow covers, the book recalls an art book much more than novel: is it a novel about art? Or a piece of art about the novel? Such assertive embodiedness amplifies the many formal and thematic ways that Tomasula’s fiction accomplishes its insistent materiality— emphasizing the physical body and its labor, drawing attention to gaps 18

19

Tomasula remarked in an interview in 2011 that “I’ve always incorporated the materials of the book into the story. In VAS—a novel about the bio-tech revolution we are living through—I made a conscious effort to use the body of the book as a metaphor for the human body and vice versa; if you look at the edge of The Book of Portraiture, the pages appear as strata in an archeological dig, which evokes, I hope, the central idea of that novel: the archeology of human representation through layers of history that make up its chapters.” Yury Tarnawasky, “Not Just Text: Interview with Steve Tomasula,” Raintaxi (Spring 2011), http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2011spring/tomasula.shtml# Steve Tomasula, “Electricians, Wig Makers, and Staging the New Novel,” American Book Review 32.6 (2011): 5. When asked whether he thought of himself as writing a movie script when writing TOC, Tomasula again compared the digital book to the print medium: “No—maybe more like a graphic novel, or poetry that uses space as part of its poetics,” and later, “I wrote it like any other text-only story for print publication” (Yury Tarnawasky, “Not Just Text”).

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between the physical world and representations of it, and alerting readers to the tension between narrative’s capacity to absorb the reader into the ideology through which its techniques become meaningful, and its ability to reflect upon that tendency inherent in narrative. It is the need for this tension as a mechanism for avoiding the distraction used by narrative to absorb the reader that further differentiates Tomasula’s revolutionary methods of print art from Benjamin’s vision for revolutionary film. Rather than “reception in distraction,” Tomasula employs methods espoused by Adorno, who argued that “to catch even the slightest glimpse beyond the prison that it itself is, the I requires not distraction but rather the utmost tension.”20 Unlike the “spontaneous collective experience” of film,21 Tomasula’s novels require the individual reader to do the difficult work of making meaning via methods of representation that seek not to reproduce a world for the reader to inhabit but to reflect on the concepts and delivery systems of those concepts that shape her world. Thus, Tomasula’s fiction asks to be read as Fredric Jameson proposes reading in “The Political Unconscious”—invoking “metacommentary,” or an examination of the “master codes”22 it perceives in society and uses in its own making rather than interpretation that remains blind to the codes that make it meaningful. Tomasula’s works present themselves as cultural artifacts, drawing attention to acts of reading and social structures that shape the text and shape our naturalizing of the text, rather than as aspects of literariness that reproduce a total meaning that lies either inside or outside the text. Their methods of doing that work also allow his fiction to resist the “strategies of containment” that Jameson sees texts as using to “project the illusion that their readings are complete.”23 Similarly, his texts refuse to act as element or instrument of today’s dominant mode of production, late capitalism, and, further, present neither contained symbolic acts in response to a particular historical moment, nor simply evidence of the workings of a particular ideology in a particular historical society. Rather, Tomasula’s texts, by collectively exposing the ideologies of science, consumerism, history, religion, time, and art itself, take as their topic what Jameson calls the “form of history,”24 making visible not just a 20

21 22

23 24

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 245. Space limitations will not permit me properly to explore how Tomasula’s methods of insisting on particularity relate to Adorno’s theory of the “the ugly, the beautiful, and technique.” See Aesthetic Theory, 45–61, 244–250. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 1069. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 10. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 10. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 100.

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collection of discrete ideologies that shape our lives but the condition of form, of framing, of forces that constitute the human experience and that we create, inescapably, as the characters of TOC continually reinscribe their own mortality by creating the universe as Time.

The future of form In his recent essay on “innovative literature,” Tomasula articulates in theory what I have aimed to show through these readings of his work, that literature can reflect upon the cultural forces that shape it by reflecting on its own form. Innovative literature, according to Tomasula, “takes its own medium as part of its subject matter, … or works out of assumptions, including those about literature, other than those of the status quo or mainstream.”25 In contrast to the traditional novel with its emphasis on authenticity, craft, transparency of language, sentiment, and the text as trompe l’oeil, the innovative novel would be the novel more interested in exploring the possibilities of form, the limits of language: a type of literature suggested by Sterne’s Tristram Shandy that emphasizes text as medium, the material nature of language, and the role of these materials themselves in shaping what we think we know.26

Its primary goal in exploring possibilities of its own form is to show how “literary form … both reflects and emerges from its historical moment” and “embodies epistemological, or ontological positions, or otherwise articulates convictions about how the world works.”27 Such an approach to writing and reading literature is, as I have argued, an extension of evolving Marxist-materialist methods of reading texts as expressing and shaped by assumptions of the dominant ideologies of the society in which the texts were produced, and reading texts as cultural artifacts of those societies. But it is an extension of culturally based ways of reading that are crucially grounded in formalist ones. In this way, Tomasula’s fiction, and innovative literature in general, relies on a meeting of the tenets of formalism—reading form as content and the techniques of form as the 25

26 27

Steve Tomasula, “Where We Are Now: A Dozen or So Observations, Historical Notes and Soundings for a Map of Contemporary American Innovative Literature as Seen from the Interior,” Études Anglaises 63.2 (2010): 217. Tomasula, “Where We Are Now,” 217. Tomasula, “Where We Are Now,” 218.

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primary subject of literary criticism—with the fundamental objection to formalism’s naïve insularity that pushed theory in a variety of ways toward concerns “exterior” to the text. This literature, as Tomasula describes it, seems to have absorbed the fallout over story form, originality, authorship, and the other hot buttons of an earlier generation the way an earlier generation of writers might have absorbed assumptions about the unconscious with or without ever having read Freud, or the way female pilots flying combat missions embody current assumptions about women without having read Hélène Cixous.28

One suspects that many of these writers have in fact read not just Freud but also Marx, Jameson, Lacan, and perhaps Lévi-Strauss and Hayden White, but in any case his point is that certainly culture and especially academic literary culture have absorbed the throughline of theory that has divorced language from direct meaning and discovered ideology in narrative, and narrative everywhere. One of the great tricks of innovative literature, then, is its insistent reminder of the importance of form as the way texts operate in the nexus of cultural assumptions they absorb and/or comment on, that no reading of a text is complete without paying due attention to both. As Tomasula points out, though authors of innovative literature today may draw heavily from popular forms, they tenaciously hold onto the belief that aesthetics matter, and therein lies the difference between literature and other kinds of vernacular loveliness … . They exhibit a (retrograde?) belief that the difference between literature and entertainment or other kinds of writing is the writing, [or,] an intense attention to language.29

Perhaps more promising still for the future of literary studies is Tomasula’s assertion that innovative literature’s ability to reveal form’s relationship to ideology will keep the book—and specifically the print book—viable in an increasingly digital world. “At a time when the book is being transformed more than it ever has been since Johannes Gutenberg,” Tomasula writes, the newly technological and collaborative model of writing “won’t mean the end of printed books … rather, it allows some books to be more themselves in the way that photography freed painting to be more itself, i.e., to do things that 28 29

Tomasula, “Where We Are Now,” 222. Tomasula, “Where We Are Now,” 223.

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only painting can do better than any other medium.”30 New and old forms of the book will “remediate each other,” as painting and photography do, the latter freeing the former to be less about documentation (depicting kings and queens, for example) and more about painting itself; Tomasula demonstrates just this remediation via Velázquez in The Book of Portraiture. He imagines next evolutions of book forms allowing print books to “become more about their materials, the experience of reading”—perhaps freeing print books from their own historical dictate to “document” reality like the “mirror traveling down the road of life” of Stendhal.31 Instead of a collection of mimetic tricks, pointing away from narrative’s sleight of hand and to a trompe l’oeil of the world, books can point to the genre of the print novel itself, and ask how it does the work that it does in relation to other genres and other literary and nonliterary acts of narrative. Such a transformation in the form of books can produce a great boon, for printed books and for the study of literature. The printed book, in its “justification for printed paper,”32 will differentiate itself from the kind of book that can be “poured into a paper or electronic container like the Kindle,”33 by asserting its materiality and primacy of form, and thus generate a new set of experiences for its readers, and change the relationship of author, reader, and text. Such changes are exactly what catalyze creation and revision in literary theory, in our evolving history of reading and textuality. While we may today scoff at the idea of an “ideal form” into which all existing texts— as if we can pinpoint each and all—nicely fit, we will never unlearn Eliot’s revelation that every new text forces us to reread every other text, backwards and forwards.34 The emergence of a new genre of insistently physical books at a time when literature, along with everything, begins to move into the digital will change how we conceive of genre, form, and literature form backwards and forwards in our history of literary form. And so such literature will also be a great boon to theory, to the study of literature, and to literature’s relevance to our ways of conceptualizing the enormous transformation in modes of production—from mechanical to digital, from industrial to information—and its attending ideological strategies that we are undergoing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Books will maintain their status, or in fact assert their newly important 30 31 32

33 34

Tomasula, “Electricians,” 5, 6. Tomasula, “Where We Are Now,” 217. Yury Tarnawasky, “Not Just Text: Interview with Steve Tomasula,” Raintaxi (Spring 2011), accessed April 2, 2013, http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2011spring/tomasula. shtml#. Tomasula, “Electricians,” 6. See T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975).

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status, as productive tools for registering and understanding human reactions and contributions to what today unfolds as a change in art, society, and their relationships to each other that is at least as transformative as our entrance into the age of mechanical reproduction. Tomasula, in his essays and fiction, along with other contemporary writers of conceptual literature and literature informed by its techniques,35 is composing, dispersed fittingly across a network of acts of reading and writing, a new manifesto for the work of art after the mechanical age.

35

Including R. M. Berry, Roberto Bolaño, Mark Danielewski, Robert Coover, Dave Eggers, Percival Everett, Raymond Federman, Kass Fleisher, Jonathan Safran Foer, William Gass, and David Markson.

2

“The Material is the Message”: Coded Bodies and Embodied Codes in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland Anthony Enns

Steve Tomasula’s novel VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) tells the story of a family of geometrical figures living in a two-dimensional world. This premise was inspired by Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland, a Victorian satire that similarly employs geometrical figures as characters. Like Flatland, VAS incorporates numerous mathematical graphs and diagrams, yet it also features illustrations and “screenshots” taken from scientific textbooks, government and medical forms, magazine advertisements, and internet websites. The layout of the text also features a wide range of fonts, dramatic variations in margin and line spacing, as well as a plethora of paratextual elements, including citations, page tabs, and even speech balloons. This juxtaposition of found material and experimental typography makes VAS one of the most ambitious collage novels ever created, and the design of the book is so significant that the graphic designer’s name, Stephen Farrell, is included directly under the name of the author on the front cover. VAS thus represents an artists’ book in the true sense of a collaborative literary and artistic project, and the challenge that it presents to readers consists in discerning precisely how the narrative elements of the text are related to its design elements. Early reviewers frequently pointed out that these design elements were highly intimidating and disruptive. Rick Poynor notes, for example, that they pose “a barrier to full immersion in the writing,” which makes the book “appear more demanding to read than it is.”1 Contemporary critics tend to agree, however, that the narrative and design elements are deeply intertwined, interrelated, and interdependent and that an analysis of the complex relationship between the novel’s content and form serves to elucidate how new technologies are transforming the process of literary production as well as how this transformation of literary production helps 1

Rick Poynor, “Evolutionary Tales,” Eye 49 (Autumn 2003): 5.

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us to understand the impact of new technologies in other fields, including medicine, biology, and communications. When discussing the history of experimental typography historians usually begin with Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), which includes chapters composed of blank pages, paragraphs containing only asterisks, and graphs that chart the progress of the narrative from various perspectives. As Peter Mayer explains, Sterne’s “visual effects are an attempt to push literature beyond verbal depiction into the direction of painting or music,” and Tristram Shandy thus represents “a literary forerunner of what Wagner was to call a Gesamtkunstwerk.”2 Early twentieth-century avant-garde groups like the Dadaists and the Futurists similarly celebrated experimental typography as a form of multimedia art. In his 1913 manifesto “Destruction of Syntax— Radio Imagination—Words-in-Freedom,” for example, the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti called for a “typographical revolution” that would “redouble the expressive force of words” by using different typefaces to convey multi-sensory information: On several parallel lines, a poet will launch several chains of colors, sounds, odors, noises, weights, densities, analogies. One line, for example, might be olfactory, another musical, another pictorial. Let us imagine that one chain of sensations and pictorial analogies dominates several other chains of sensations and analogies: in that case it will be printed in a heavier typeface than the one used in the second or third lines (the one containing, for example, a chain of sensations and musical analogies; the other, a chain of sensations and olfactory analogies). Given a page containing many groups of sensations and analogies, with each group composed of, say, three or four lines, then the first line of each group might be formed of pictorial sensations and analogies (printed in heavier typeface) and the same sort of chain would continue (always in heavier typeface) in the first line of each of the other groups. The chain of musical sensations and analogies (second line), though less important than visual sensations and analogies (first line), yet more important than the olfactory sensations and analogies (third line), might be printed in a typeface lighter than that of the first line, but heavier than that of the third.3 2 3

Peter Mayer, “Visual Prose,” Eye 30 (Winter 1998): 67. F. T. Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax—Radio Imagination—Words-in-Freedom,” Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 150.

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Like Sterne, therefore, Marinetti employed experimental typography to transform literature into a synesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk capable of storing and transmitting optical, acoustic, and even olfactory sensations. There was another resurgence of interest in experimental typography in the late twentieth century, yet instead of using typography to convey “colors, sounds, and odors” these experiments more often attempted to challenge the conventions of print literature. Samuel Beckett’s 1961 novel, for example, ignores the standard rules of punctuation and capitalization. Raymond Federman’s 1971 novel employs a different typographic design on nearly every page. Several pages in Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1975 novel are presented in the form of crossword puzzles, in which the letters become part of several different words at the same time. Perhaps the most famous example of experimental typography from this period is William Gass’ 1968 novel, which configures graphic and textual elements in startling ways in order to direct the reader’s attention to the materiality of the text itself. The kinds of typographic experiments employed in this novel were first made possible by the development of phototypesetting in the 1960s, and critics often associate these experiments with postmodern aesthetics. Barry Lewis argues, for example, that these typographic experiments reflect the inherent sense of fragmentation in postmodern culture.4 Ursula Heise similarly claims that these typographic experiments represent “the fracturing of narrative time into alternative temporal universes.”5 In his own theoretical writings, Federman also links experimental typography to poststructuralist theory by arguing that it produces “writerly texts,” which allow the presumably passive reader to assume the more active role of the author: “[They] give the reader an element of choice (active choice) in the ordering of the discourse and the discovery of its meaning.”6 Experimental typography is thus seen as one of the basic characteristics of postmodern literature, as it enables authors to disrupt traditional ways of reading. The typographic experiments employed in VAS certainly support these claims. The collage-like structure of the novel represents a complex network of seemingly unrelated threads, which forces the reader to play a more active role in the construction of meaning by drawing connections between the various textual and visual components. However, the typographic 4

5

6

Barry Lewis, “Postmodernism and Literature,” The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim (New York: Routledge, 2001), 127. Ursula K. Heise, Chronoscisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 63. Raymond Federman, “Surfiction—Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction,” Surfiction: Fiction Now … and Tomorrow, ed. Raymond Federman (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), 9. See also Michael Kaufmann, “The Textual Body: William Gass’s Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife,” Critique 35.1 (Fall 1993), 27.

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experiments featured in VAS primarily focus on the relationship between textuality and materiality or the difficulty of distinguishing between code and world. Tomasula originally addressed this question in his 1996 essay “Three Axioms for Projecting a Line (or Why It Will Continue to Be Hard to Write a Title sans Slashes or Parentheses),” in which he discusses the impact of scientific and technological revolutions on literary texts. Tomasula argues, for example, that following the separation of words and objects, as described by Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Peirce, and Jacques Derrida, authors were “forced to reconsider the nature of Nature by being forced to reconsider its representation … through language.”7 Tomasula also argues that new technologies like photocopying machines and the internet similarly work “against the modern novel, just as the absorption of Marx, Freud, and Einstein worked against nineteenth-century realism.”8 As a result of these changes, “writers today, as they always have during times of great social change, are in search of a new language.”9 Tomasula’s essay can thus be read as a manifesto for a new kind of literature that would reflect the transformations in knowledge brought about by poststructuralist theory and the development of new media technologies at the end of the twentieth century, and VAS would then represent an attempt to imagine what this “new language” might look like. Not only is the form of the novel made possible by the development of new publishing software, but it also contains a wide variety of technical images that could only be compiled and distributed through photocopying, microfilm, and the internet. VAS also demonstrates the influence of poststructuralist theory on literature, as it is constantly engaged with the relationship between signifier and signified. In contrast to Sterne and Marinetti, therefore, Tomasula employs experimental typography not to create a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, but rather to analyze the relationship between code and world. Its examination of the relationship between textuality and materiality thus illustrates the impact of poststructuralist theory and new technologies on our understanding of language and the body. The relationship between textuality and materiality is a uniquely contemporary problem due to the rise of molecular genetics and biotechnologies, as Donna Haraway points out in her famous “Cyborg Manifesto”: 7

8 9

Steve Tomasula, “Three Axioms for Projecting a Line (or Why It Will Continue to Be Hard to Write a Title sans Slashes or Parentheses),” Review of Contemporary Fiction 16.1 (Spring 1996): 103. Tomasula, “ Three Axioms for Projecting a Line,” 105. Tomasula, “ Three Axioms for Projecting a Line,” 109.

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The organism has been translated into problems of genetic coding and read-out … . In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processing devices  …  Immunobiology and associated medical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of coding and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as constructions of bodily reality for us. Biology here is a kind of cryptography.10

While Haraway ultimately celebrates this translation of body into code, as it has the potential to resist what she calls the “informatics of domination,” other critics are less enthusiastic about this notion of identity as information. In her 1999 book How We Became Posthuman, for example, N. Katherine Hayles identifies the physical body as the locus of identity, as it guarantees the agency, autonomy, and integrity of the individual subject. Hayles also argues that the theme of embodiment is particularly important for the field of literary studies, as there is an inherent connection between the representation of bodies in books and the materiality of books themselves: Because they have bodies, books and humans have something to lose if they are regarded solely as informational patterns, namely the resistant materiality that has traditionally marked the durable inscription of books no less than it has marked our experiences of living as embodied creatures. From this affinity emerge complex feedback loops between contemporary literature, the technologies that produce it, and the embodied readers who produce and are produced by books and technologies. Changes in bodies as they are represented within literary texts have deep connections with changes in textual bodies as they are encoded within information media, and both types of changes stand in complex relation to changes in the construction of human bodies as they interface with information technologies.11

Hayles thus describes books as “embodied discourses” rather than “informational patterns,” and she argues that the representations of bodies in literary narratives reveal how the reader’s own embodied subjectivity is constructed through the material text. 10

11

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 164. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 29.

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Several critics have already noted that VAS is largely an exploration of the concept of the “posthuman.” In her 2010 essay “Playing with Codes,” for example, Cristina Iuli describes the novel as “a narrative of cultural evolution from biological to post-biological life and identity, and from a humanist to a post-humanist logic.”12 Iuli also provides a brilliant explanation of how the novel’s critique of “the technical, scientific, discursive, and economic procedures in which the human is imbricated” is related to the novel’s material form, which challenges “the relevance and meaningfulness of conventional hermeneutics and reading habits.”13 The novel’s form is thus clearly related to its critique of humanist discourse, yet it is important to add that its representation of a “post-humanist logic” is far from straightforward, as it appears to support several fundamentally contradictory interpretations of the “posthuman.” On the one hand, the novel emphasizes the connections between biological and textual production, as the codes that constitute the book gradually become indistinguishable from the codes that constitute actual living matter. On the other hand, the novel also expresses a certain degree of anxiety concerning the translation of the body into code, as this process appears to deprive subjects of any stable sense of identity or agency. VAS thus focuses on both the textuality of the body and the materiality of the text, and it is often difficult to determine precisely where the book stands on the issue of coded bodies and embodied codes. Does the novel ultimately endorse the concept of identity as “informational pattern” or does it argue for the preservation of some aspects of the traditional notion of the liberal humanist subject by firmly grounding identity in the material body? The following chapter will show that VAS reconciles these seemingly contradictory positions. While Tomasula repeatedly emphasizes the materiality of the text, he also shows how embodiment itself is always already a discursive effect, which reveals the underlying affinities between living tissue and the tissue of language. The novel even draws parallels between scientific practices like dissection or genetic manipulation and textual practices like semiotics or deconstruction, as bodies can also be coded and edited like texts. VAS thus successfully performs a delicate balancing act, as it vividly illustrates the dangers of a world in which bodies are reducible to texts and humans are manipulable as information, yet it also refuses to endorse any reactionary attempt to preserve the traditional notion of the “natural body,” which is most clearly evident in the novel’s 12

13

Cristina Iuli, “Playing with Codes: Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland,” Writing Technologies 3 (2010): 66. Iuli, “Playing with Codes,” 72.

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explicit condemnation of racial hygiene programs. The novel also illustrates the historical parallels between these attempts to preserve racial purity and contemporaneous efforts to preserve linguistic purity, and therefore it also refuses to endorse any reactionary attempt to preserve traditional notions of literature or “natural language.” By demonstrating the impact of biotechnologies on human reproduction as well as the impact of new information technologies on literary production, the novel clearly shows how bodies and texts have become indistinguishable in that they both represent “embodied discourses”—a position that effectively undermines techno-fantasies of disembodied subjectivity as informational pattern as well as retro-fantasies of embodied subjectivity that seek to privilege the site of the physical body as the guarantor of the autonomy and integrity of the individual subject. Abbott’s Flatland already emphasizes the interrelationship between textuality and materiality by imagining a world that has the same dimensions as the printed page. The novel’s main character, who is known simply as “Square,” is literally a two-dimensional square, and his graphic representation in the book thus becomes indistinguishable from the character’s actual body. It is unclear whether “representation” is even the appropriate term to use in this context, as the drawings of Square do not actually refer to anything beyond the space of the page itself. By constructing characters from twodimensional figures, therefore, Abbott’s novel effectively blurs the distinction between subject and object or between signifier and signified. This equation of body and text is also reflected in the social structure of Flatland, which is fundamentally based on the idea that a person’s physical form reflects his or her mental or intellectual abilities: Our Women are Straight Lines. Our Soldiers and Lowest Classes of Workmen are Triangles with two equal sides … Our Middle Class consists of Equilateral or Equal-Sided Triangles. Our Professional Men and Gentlemen are Squares … and Five-Sided Figures or Pentagons. Next above these come the Nobility, of whom there are several degrees, beginning at Six-Sided Figures, or Hexagons, and from thence rising in the number of their sides till they receive the honourable title of Polygonal, or many-sided. Finally when the number of sides becomes so numerous, and the sides themselves so small, that the figure cannot be distinguished from a circle, he is included in the Circular or Priestly order; and this is the highest class of all.14 14

Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963), 9.

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Flatlanders are thus committed to a kind of biological essentialism that closely resembles the scientific theories of physiognomy and phrenology— nineteenth-century pseudosciences that interpreted a person’s outer form as a system of signs that revealed his or her inner qualities. Square claims, for example, that the symmetry or regularity of a figure is a sign of superior intellectual or moral faculties. As a result, Flatland has developed a strict caste system, in which the figures with the most sides and the most regular angles have the highest social status. Square refers to this as the principle of “natural fitness,”15 and he explains that if it were not possible to identify a person’s social status visually then the entire “civilization would relapse into barbarism.”16 If regularity is a sign of one’s intellectual and moral superiority, then “Irregularity of Figure” signifies “a combination of moral obliquity and criminality.”17 For example, Square attributes “all faults or defects, from the slightest misconduct to the most flagitious crime … to some deviation from perfect Regularity in the bodily figure.”18 Squares notes that there are some skeptics “who maintain that there is no necessary connection between geometrical and moral Irregularity,” but he remains convinced that “the toleration of Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the state … I for my part have never known an Irregular who was not also what Nature evidently intended him to be—a hypocrite, a misanthrope, and up to the limits of his power, a perpetrator of all manner of mischief.”19 On rare occasions when an equilateral son is born to isosceles parents, the child is “immediately taken from his proud yet sorrowing parents and adopted by some childless Equilateral, who is bound by oath never to permit the child henceforth to enter his former home or so much as to look upon his relations again, for fear lest the freshly developed organism may, by force of unconscious imitation, fall back again into his hereditary level.”20 These equilateral children thus represent exceptions that prove the rule, yet even they are considered to be in danger of degeneration because of their hereditary background. Square emphasizes that behavior has nothing to do with personal choice or environmental conditioning, but only with hereditary “configurations,” and he neatly summarizes the 15 16 17 18 19 20

Abbott, Flatland, 11. Abbott, Flatland, 30. Abbott, Flatland, 31. Abbott, Flatland, 48–49. Abbott, Flatland, 31–32. Abbott, Flatland, 10.

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doctrine of Flatland with the maxim “Attend to your Configuration.”21 Square also notes that the priests “have effectively suppressed those ancient heresies which led men to waste energy and sympathy in the vain belief that conduct depends upon will, effort, training, encouragement, praise, or anything else but Configuration.”22 The social system described in Flatland is thus based on the principle of biological determinism, as Flatlanders believe the conduct of their citizens is fully inscribed in their bodily form.23 VAS not only employs the same two-dimensional setting as Flatland, but it also references various passages in Abbott’s novel that appear to endorse the practice of eugenics. The narrator notes, for example, that “the Supreme Court … agreed with the inhabitants of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland that the toleration of an Irregularity was incompatible with the sobriety of the State. And that sterilization was like vaccination … . For the good of the patients [and] society.”24 To the narrator, in other words, eugenics is only thinkable when the body is regarded as a text that can be corrected, revised, and improved. Like Abbott’s Flatland, therefore, VAS employs two-dimensional figures as characters in order to illustrate how bodies and texts have become indistinguishable. Nevertheless, there are also significant differences between these texts, such as the representation of women. While the women in Abbott’s novel are straight lines, a form which emphasizes their low social status, the women in VAS are round with no angles. This alteration not only reflects a shift in the social power of women, but also refers to the common method of employing geometrical figures to represent gender on genealogical charts. This parallel between bodily forms and genealogical archives becomes even more apparent when it is revealed that Square’s family tree is an etymological chart that traces the history of the word “square” (see Figure 2.1). 21 22 23

24

Abbott, Flatland, 48. Abbott, Flatland, 48. As Lila Marz Harper points out, Abbott is essentially “critiquing the late Victorian limitations of class, gender, and social structure, while also sending a prophetic warning about the dangers of the normalization and, indeed, standardization of the human body inherent in the concept of eugenics.” Harper even speculates that Flatland “may have been the first literary work to address the social impact of eugenics, and thus a fitting starting point for VAS’s postmodern meditation on what it means to live in a world where biological and reproductive manipulation is made more and more accessible.” Lila Marz Harper, “Flatland in VAS,” electronic book review (June 28, 2012): www. electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/affixed. Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 122.

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Figure 2.1  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 57. Courtesy of the author.

Square’s father was the word “sqware,” whose father was “squier,” a descendent of the Old French term “esquarré,” which was itself a descendent of the Latin “quadrus” and the Indo-European “kuetuer” (VAS 57). Square’s family tree thus equates the history of bodies with the history of words, which shows how “[d]escendancy [is] a matter of pedigree” and “etymology” (VAS 61). In other words, the characters are not only synonymous with their twodimensional forms, but also with their names, as these names contain vital information about their ancestry and heredity. The narrator adds that this connection between pedigree and etymology is also true for people in our own world, which explains “why isolated gene populations have so few surnames” (VAS 62). The narrator also illustrates the connection between bodies and words by comparing the history of genes and languages. The narrator emphasizes, for example, that a DNA helix is an informational code as well as a material substance out of which physical bodies are formed: “DNA being both message and material” (VAS 58). On the one hand, this passage indicates that bodies are subject to manipulation and editing, which makes them indistinguishable from texts. As Cristina Iula points out, this idea represents “a paradigmatic cultural shift … into a thoroughly different kind of evolution in which biology no longer describes an ‘original,’ natural state, but is recoded as a branch of information science. If all life is coded by the four letters composing the DNA double helix, then a ‘little editing’ of the body corresponds to the editing

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of the text.”25 VAS thus questions the impact of genetic engineering on the autonomy, integrity, and stability of the body by showing how bodies have essentially become manipulable and rewritable as texts. On the other hand, this passage also emphasizes the materiality of information, as “messages” can become “bodies solid as bricks.”26 Words are also revealed to be the material substance of language, as they are capable of aging, migrating, and even reproducing, much like living beings. Returning to the problem of etymology, for example, the narrator points out that words contain a “legacy” of “hidden histories,” like a “Y chromosome traceable to a single ancestor” (VAS 58). The narrator provides evidence of these parallels between genes and languages by noting that “DNA testing and linguistic reconstruction on both sides of the Bering Strait show reverse migrations” (VAS 80). Looking for the “hidden histories” within genetic codes and languages thus functions as complementary means of deciphering the past. These parallels help to explain the existence of societies dedicated to promoting racial purity as well as the purity of language, such as organizations like the “National Christian League for the Promotion of (Racial) Purity” and the “French Academy for the Promotion of (Language) Purity,” which were founded precisely because the existence of these unseen traces inspired fears of racial and linguistic contamination (VAS 58). Another similarity between bodies and languages is that languages also have the potential to become extinct, which means that they too are mortal. The narrator describes the history of several extinct languages, and he is particularly interested in memorializing the deaths of the final speaker of a language, as these are moments when bodies and languages die simultaneously (VAS 77). Several such cases are mentioned in the novel, and in these brief obituaries the narrator is careful to include the age of the deceased speaker as well as the age of the deceased language, as if the language itself had a life span. The narrator adds, however, that languages are also capable of evolving and mutating over time: “New words, like fools, rush in. Existing words change their meaning (the material)” (VAS 104). The narrator illustrates this aspect of language by showing in a single paragraph how English grammar and spelling changed over the course of several centuries (see Figure 2.2) (VAS 68). The narrator also illustrates the evolution of language using the game of “word golf,” where a single letter of a word is changed to form a new word. For example, the word “ape” can transform into the word “man” in eight steps: “APE ARE ARM AIM DIM DAM RAM RAN MAN” (see Figure 2.3) (VAS 87). 25 26

Iuli, “Playing with Codes,” 77. Tomasula, VAS, 58.

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Figure 2.2  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 68. Courtesy of the author.

Figure 2.3  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 86–87. Courtesy of the author.

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This word game, juxtaposed with Darwin’s theory of evolution, is designed to show that there is no inherent difference between linguistic and biological evolution. This idea is further emphasized by referring to these eight steps as “eight generations,” which indicates that the words are part of the same genetic ancestry, just as the words in Square’s family tree are part of the same gene pool (VAS 87). Bodies and texts are also linked in a legal sense through copyright law. The narrator notes, for example, that there are parallels between “copyright for works of culture (stories) and registered trademarks for works of nature (life),” such as “Gene sequence©, Blood Sample®” or “Mickey Mouse©, Oconomouse®—same deal” (VAS 246). The “Oconomouse®,” for example, is a mouse that was genetically modified to increase its susceptibility to cancer, which was seen as an invaluable aid to cancer research. The mouse was created in 1984 by two scientists at Harvard University—geneticist Philip Leder and molecular biologist Timothy Stewart—and in 1988 they were granted the first patent on a genetically engineered animal. (The patent subsequently expired in 2005, although the name remains a registered trademark.) The narrator thus claims that there are significant parallels between “cultural” mice like “Mickey Mouse©” and “natural” mice like the “Oconomouse®,” as they are both considered to be intellectual property: “[T]he elements of Mickey Mouse© … existing in a state of nature … until people, smart as chimps, figured out ways … to make products … of words … of lives.”27 Another similarity between words and bodies, therefore, is that they can both be transformed into technically reproducible, legally copyrightable, and commercially marketable products. This commonality is further emphasized when the narrator discusses gene banks, sperm banks, and egg banks, which also treat living tissue as a commercial product. The narrator even cites Body Worlds founder Gunther von Hagens, who developed a method of plastinating bodies using epoxy resin, which effectively transforms them into copyrightable artworks (VAS 269). The novel thus illustrates how bodies and texts have also become indistinguishable in the eyes of the law, as they are both seen as potential commodities. This equation of textuality and materiality becomes particularly evident when the novel shifts from literary language to pure code. While discussing the biblical story of Lot’s wife and her transformation into a pillar of salt, for example, the novel displays a visual column on the page composed of the letters “NaCl,” the chemical formula for salt (see Figure 2.3) (VAS 86). This 27

Tomasula, VAS, 247. See also Ann Larue’s discussion of OncoMouse and Lynn Randolph’s paintings of it in her essay “Do We Not Bleed? The Color of Flesh in a Pop Cyborg World” in this volume.

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pillar would appear to be an example of concrete poetry, as the symbolic signifiers collectively constitute an iconic signifier that represents a physical object. However, the use of the chemical formula also emphasizes the ways in which the constituent elements of the object can be reduced to a coded text. This connection between world and code becomes even more pronounced later in the novel, when the narrator includes the entire code of the gene sequence SHGC-110205 from chromosome 12, which was copied directly from the online database of the National Center for Biotechnological Information (see Figure 2.4) (VAS 202–227).

Figure 2.4  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 202–203. Courtesy of the author.

This passage, which continues for more than twenty-five pages, deeply frustrated one reviewer, who complained that it was “totally unreadable.”28 While this statement is obviously true, it seems to obscure the fact that this 28

“VAS, Not Quite Reviewed,” The Complete Review (December 17, 2003): www.completereview.com/saloon/archive/200312b.htm.

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unreadability is precisely the point. The passage defies interpretation because it consists of coded information that can only be read by a machine or by the body itself (at the cellular level). Like a computer program, in other words, it does not represent a coherent set of linguistic messages but rather a series of executable instructions, and its meaning lies not in the ideas that it conveys but rather in the effects that it produces. Alex Link provides a useful explanation of the dilemma that this passage poses to conventional hermeneutics: “[B]y making the body the sum of its genetic coding, its representability in simple letter combinations approaches the dream of a pure sign, in which speaking something creates that thing.”29 This passage thus provides a perfect illustration of Haraway’s argument that “communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the world into a problem of coding.”30 By translating the body into code and then presenting this code as part of a literary narrative, the passage blurs the distinctions between materiality and textuality as well as the distinctions between the discourses of molecular genetics and literary studies, which are both engaged in the practice of deciphering texts. This slippage between scientific and literary discourses is made even more explicit at the end of the passage, which includes the names of the gene sequence’s “authors.” Not only can bodies be reduced to genetic codes, but these codes are also “authored,” like works of literature. Through these connections between biological and literary production, VAS once again illustrates the affinities between bodies and texts, as the linguistic codes out of which the novel emerges become indistinguishable from those that constitute living beings.31 This connection between bodies and texts is further emphasized when the narrator discusses the Japanese botanist Masaichi Fukushi, who chose “to have his hide cured then used to bind a slim volume of nature verse.”32 The transformation of Fukushi’s body into a book of nature poetry (appropriately enough) was presumably the inspiration for the cover of the novel, which was also designed to represent human flesh.33 In interviews, Tomasula explains that the cover of the hardcover edition, published by Station Hill Press, was 29

30 31

32 33

Alex Link, “Pierre Menard with a Pipette: VAS and the Body of Text,” electronic book review (June 28, 2012) : www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/naturalized. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 164. For more on Tomasula’s interest in the interplay between literature and genetic code, see Steve Tomasula, “Gene(sis),” Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, ed. Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle (New York: Routledge, 2004): 249–257. Tomasula, VAS, 155. The “Production Notes” on the last page of the paperback edition reveal that it is “Printed on Cougar Natural Opaque Vellum … in PMS722 Flesh (as designated by the Crayola Co. and the Medical Specialties division of 3M) and PMS186 Blood” (Tomasula, VAS, 370).

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designed to resemble layers of “bone, muscle, and flesh,” with a cardboard section bordered by a vertical red strip and then a pink leatherette section (see Figure 2.5).34

Figure 2.5  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 2002), front cover. Courtesy of the author.

The cover of the paperback edition, published by the University of Chicago Press, was similarly designed to resemble human skin with veins underneath (see Figure 2.6). 34

Qtd. in Susan Vanderborg, “Of ‘Men and Mutations’: The Art of Reproduction in Flatland,” Journal of Artists’ Books 24 (Fall 2008): 11.

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Figure 2.6  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), front cover. Courtesy of the author.

Farrell explains that the title is lettered in red in order to resemble a “scar” and that the inside covers are also red in order to create the impression that the reader is “peel[ing] back the skin to the blood” underneath.35 The cover thus visualizes Farrell’s metaphorical description of the “fleshy presence” of the book36—a metaphor that plays on the long-standing practice of referring to a book’s binding as its “spine.” To the reader holding the material book “in flesh and blood,” the cover also serves as a constant reminder of the embodied 35 36

Vanderborg, “Of ‘Men and Mutations.’ ” Qtd. in Alison Gibbons, Multimodality, Cognition and Experimental Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012), 113.

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presence of the text, as Emily Pérez points out: “Bound in a cover made to look like human flesh with branching veins beneath its surface, VAS … visually conflates the body with text at the moment of first encounter.”37 Alison Gibbons similarly points out that “like the human body, this book will age: as it is read, the spine will crease and it will effectively develop ‘wrinkles.’ Therefore, the book’s visual design … acts … as a corporeal realisation of the blending or conceptual integration of two conceptual domains, body and book.”38 The notion that bodies can be transformed into texts frequently reappears throughout the novel, such as when the narrator discusses the “Visible Man,” also known as Joseph Paul Jernigan, who donated his body to science after being sentenced to death for murder in 1981. After his execution Jernigan’s body was transported to the University of Colorado, where it was frozen in gelatin and cut into 1mm thin slices, which were then digitally photographed and eventually made available for public access on the internet.39 Some of these slices are reproduced in the novel, and the narrator refers to this process as the translation of a body into an image, which reveals how the “mortal coil” and “information” are equally “rearrangeable.”40 The narrator also compares the process of cell replication to the act of reproducing a text: “[Y]our body is constantly plagiarizing itself … . It’s like making a copy of a copy. Copies of copies proliferating. Children as well. The Story of Life being a common metaphor. Birth being a fresh copy” (VAS 306–07). Sexual and textual reproduction are interrelated, therefore, because every birth is a “new copy,” and the narrator plays with the terms “origin” and “original” in order to argue that an “original” is “hardly original” (VAS 307). In other words, while birth represents the origin of an original being, it is never anything more than a copy of an already extant being, which is already implied by the very term “reproduction.” The narrator also argues that these similarities between sexual and textual reproduction make the difference between humans and their representations confusing. Most people would not mistake “a person for their representation,” but “it gets confusing … . Bodies becoming as rearrangeable as they are (and malleable as they are). People and their bodies being inseparable as they are … . That is, the message is the material. People and their stories being as inseparable as they are. Material also being 37

38 39

40

Emily Pérez, “The Hybrid and the Helix: A Journey into the Body/Text of VAS,” Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts (Spring 2005): www.gulfcoastmag.org/ Book%20Reviews/gc18.1_perez_tomasula.html. Gibbons, Multimodality, Cognition and Experimental Literature, 98. See “The Visible Human Project,” U.S. National Library of Medicine: www.nlm.nih.gov/ research/visible. Tomasula, VAS, 302.

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the message, logically” (VAS 308–10). While books may possess the same characteristics as bodies, bodies are also readable and writable like texts. The message of a text thus lies in its materiality, and the material of the body is its message. The relationship between textuality and materiality is further illustrated through the use of signatures. The novel begins, for example, with the image of Square’s handwritten signature on a medical consent form for a vasectomy (see Figure 2.7).41

Figure 2.7  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 10–11. Courtesy of the author.

This image is somewhat confusing, as it looks like an authentic document and the handwritten signature appears to be an indexical trace of the character’s unique physical presence. Jacques Derrida points out that signatures always appear to refer to “pure events”: “In order for the tethering to the source to occur, what must be retained is the absolute singularity of a signature41

Tomasula, VAS, 11.

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event and a signature-form: the pure reproducibility of a pure event.”42 This connection between the signature and bodily presence is further emphasized when the narrator notes that illiterate Native Americans often voluntarily signed their names using fingerprints. These fingerprints similarly blur the distinction between body and text, as they represent indexical traces of bodily presence, yet they are also textual inscriptions or iconic signifiers that represent the individual signing the form. This confusion between indexicality and iconicity helps to explain Derrida’s argument about the inability of a signature to refer to the singular event of a body’s physical presence: “In order to function, that is, to be readable, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to be detached from the present and singular intention of its production. It is its sameness which, by corrupting its identity and its singularity, divides its seal.”43 In order for a signature to serve as a marker of bodily presence, in other words, it must be legible, which means reproducible, yet this very reproducibility reveals that signatures are ultimately incapable of capturing and recording a singular, unique event. Even the fingerprints of Native Americans are unable to provide evidence of such an event, as they are similarly required to be iterable in order to represent the identity of the signator. By emphasizing the inability of signatures to guarantee bodily presence, Tomasula’s novel thus reveals the inherent confusion between living bodies and textual inscriptions, which the signature itself already implies. This confusion becomes even more profound when markers of individual identity are translated into binary code by the computer. The narrator even provides a page of such code, which is described as a “pointillist portrait” of the subject (see Figure 2.8).44 The fact that this code can only be read by a machine provides further evidence that it no longer even claims to represent an indexical trace of a pure event or the subject’s unique bodily presence. These connections between bodies and texts are central to the narrative of VAS, which primarily focuses on the story of Square’s attempts to come to grips with the rise of new biotechnologies, like genetic screening and genetic engineering. Square frequently describes the discovery of genetic code, for example, as the fundamental revelation that all living matter is composed of text: “[H]e couldn’t help but marvel at the species of free verse Darwin had helped midwife, so long ago, intimating that all life … spoke the same 42

43 44

Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 20. Derrida, Limited Inc. Tomasula, VAS, 265.

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Figure 2.8  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 264–265. Courtesy of the author.

language, written in the same genetic letters and could be parsed like tenses” (VAS 179). Square thus recognizes that living beings are now understood as linguistic constructs, and he even conceives of genetic code as a form of “free verse” that is capable of being analyzed like a written text. What makes Square uneasy is the idea that these new scientific discoveries have made the practice of “rewriting your body [seem] natural” (VAS 98). Square notes, for example, that this idea is more readily accepted by women, presumably due to the medical procedures and technologies associated with reproduction: “He looked on Circle with awe now, now that he understood the routine élan with which women lived within their edited, critiqued, and rewritten bodies. And what a luxury he had had in being able to take his ‘natural’ body for granted” (VAS 323). Square also notes that the idea of the body as a rewritable text will most likely be taken for granted by subsequent generations. For his daughter Oval, “composing a body as if it were a crossword puzzle was natural … . She was young and didn’t know any other way” (VAS 179). Unlike Oval, however, Square still remains committed to the concept of the “natural body,” as he

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believes that the body should not be seen as malleable and iterable but rather as a unique, embodied singularity: “To be your body, and not just have your body” (VAS 180). The translation of the body into code not only threatens the autonomy and integrity of the individual subject, but it also alters the traditional meaning of various words, like “birth,” “father,” and “daughter,” which explains why Square feels as if he is losing his identity as well as his language: “[H]e wished Circle [his wife] could see that … the death of any language was a tragedy, and that his was surely going extinct since the speakers who knew the old meanings of fossils like ‘birth,’ ‘father,’ ‘daughter’ were probably down to a handful” (VAS 181). In other words, the interrelationship of body and text threaten not only the concept of the “natural body” but also the concept of “natural language.” For Square, this danger is also connected to his position as head of the family, as the traditional roles of “fathers” and “daughters” are suddenly being brought into question. Square thus describes the danger of the body-text conflation as a danger to language itself and a threat to the stable meaning of words, and he seems to mourn the passing of a simpler age when bodies and languages were both natural. The notion that words are no longer stable also reappears when the narrator discusses the Babel episode from the book of Genesis: [W]hen talking about the prison house of language men and women inhabit, most people point to the fall at Babel where Language shattered into languages. But medieval cartographers and theologians … used to refer to an even more telling geography—Adam’s Peak—the highest point on earth and home of Eden from where it was possible to view the entire world at once—until Adam and Eve were forced to leave and, like all of their descendants, live out their days on the flat land below. (VAS 190)

Tomasula’s novel thus employs the two-dimensional world of Flatland as a metaphor for the “flat land” below “Adam’s Peak”—a symbol of the postlapsarian world, in which an ideal, unifying “Language” has been replaced by multiple “languages” that no longer guarantee a stable relationship between words and objects or signifiers and signifieds. In this fallen world, linguistic instability has also infected the body, as bodies have become malleable, rearrangeable, and rewritable assemblages of codes. In other words, bodies no longer serve to guarantee the autonomy and integrity of the individual subject, as embodiment itself has become as unreliable as language. VAS thus extends the poststructuralist critique of logocentrism to the body itself, which helps to explain the narrator’s claim that medical practices like “dissection” represent “an original form of deconstruction” (VAS 300).

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The novel ends at the precise moment when Square finally has his vasectomy—a surgical procedure that seems to represent his ultimate transformation from a natural body into a rewritable text. This scene could be interpreted as signaling the loss of his autonomy and integrity, as Square practically disappears from the text following this event. It is also possible to interpret Square’s fears concerning the loss of his natural body as a form of castration anxiety provoked by this procedure, which is further reinforced by his fears of being displaced as head of the family—fears that are presented as concerns about the impact of new technologies but whose true source may actually be the decentering of white male authority. In her 2006 book The Anxiety of Obsolescence, for example, Kathleen Fitzpatrick points out that white male authors often express anxieties concerning the impact of new technologies, but these anxieties usually “mask inadequately repressed fears of the social other.”45 As this chapter has shown, however, Tomasula’s novel clearly does not endorse Square’s reactionary nostalgia for the natural body or natural language, as it repeatedly exposes and critiques many of the atrocities that have historically been committed in the name of racial and linguistic purity. The novel thus attempts to strike a balance between these opposing viewpoints by representing bodies as malleable, rearrangeable, and rewritable assemblages of codes, which effectively makes them indistinguishable from texts while incorporating design elements that remind the reader that language is always already embodied in material texts that have their own tangible and finite existence. In other words, bodies and texts both represent “embodied discourses” that are simultaneously material and rewritable, which explains why embodiment itself no longer serves to guarantee the autonomy and integrity of the individual subject. By emphasizing the materiality of codes, the novel clearly critiques techno-fantasies of disembodiment or the notion of individual identity as an informational pattern. By emphasizing the instability and malleability of the body, however, it also rejects the idea that it would be preferable or even possible to preserve some aspects of the traditional notion of the liberal humanist subject by treating the body itself as a privileged site of individual identity and agency. The interrelationship between the narrative and design elements of VAS thus gestures toward a new kind of literary language that integrates poststructuralist theory with new information and biotechnologies, which allows the novel to combine divergent and seemingly contradictory notions of the “posthuman.”

45

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 231.

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Encoding the Body, Questioning Legacy: Reflections on Intersemiotic Experiments in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland Françoise Sammarcelli

“First pain. // Then knowledge.”1 After the epigraph taken from Goethe, which defines men as the organs of their century, these are the first words that greet the reader of VAS: An Opera in Flatland. This opening sets the tone with its juxtaposition of two strikingly contrasting modes and regimes (an aggressive style reminiscent of comic strips, and narrator Square’s classical, conventionally printed prose) (VAS 9–10) (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9–10. Courtesy of the author. 1

Tomasula and Farrell, VAS: An Opera in Flatland, 9–10.

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Steve Tomasula dramatizes the origin and subverts the discourse of Genesis, substituting pain for chaos or the light created by God. He then introduces knowledge as the immediate next step.2 Ironically, with a somewhat anticlimactic effect, this first crisis is caused by “a paper cut,” an element that relates both to the theme of vasectomy, defined as “just ‘a little snip,’ ” (VAS 15) and to the problematic existence of writer Square and his medium. Paper can cut, but what matters more is that all of Square’s adventures happen on paper, in a fictional two-dimensional world, the eponymous Flatland. “Knowledge” thus involves a sense of metaleptic tension insofar as Square is both a geometrical shape and an imaginary character among others. If (a) Square can be an individual and a category, VAS is one of its kind. Bound in a cover that looks like human skin—pink, veined with blue, and lined with deep red3—, VAS is a stunning image-text resulting from Steve Tomasula’s collaboration with graphic designer Stephen Farrell.4 Thematically, the text evinces a strong interest in issues of creation and reproduction, descent or sterility and sterilization, as it tells the story 2

3

4

This is not Tomasula’s first use of the motif of Genesis or works that revisit it: his essay “(Gene)sis,” originally printed in 2000, was a response to bioartist Eduardo Kac’s experiments with art and genetics in Genesis (1999). On Kac’s website, Genesis is described as “a transgenic artwork that explores the intricate relationship between biology, belief systems, information technology, dialogical interaction, ethics, and the Internet.” The key element is an “artist’s gene,” a synthetic gene that Kac created “by translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis into Morse Code, and converting the Morse Code into DNA base pairs according to a principle specially developed by the artist for this work. The sentence reads: ‘Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ … The Genesis gene was incorporated into bacteria, which were shown in the gallery. Participants on the Web could turn on an ultraviolet light in the gallery, causing real, biological mutations in the bacteria. This changed the biblical sentence in the bacteria.” See Eduardo Kac, “Detailed Description of Genesis,” accessed August 30, 2014, http://www.ekac.org/geninfo2.html. In “(Gene)sis” Tomasula eloquently comments on Kac’s use of DNA coding and his concern with lineage, and he underscores the way in which “art and science are thus collapsed into one another.” He dwells on the creative effect of constraints, illustrated by the eight-step mutation between APE and MAN, and already uses the extended metaphor of the body as text. See Steve Tomasula, “(Gene) sis,” accessed August 30, 2014, http://www.ekac.org/tomasulgen.html. While a book in codex form like VAS is less interactive than Kac’s Genesis, Tomasula obviously shares many concerns with Kac. To some extent VAS could be read as a fictional reworking of Tomasula’s essay. This mimetic effect is confirmed by the “Production Notes” to be found in the paratext: “Printed on Cougar Natural Opaque Vellum by Four Colour Imports, Ltd. in PMS722 Flesh (as designated by the Crayola Co. and the Medical Specialties division of 3M) and PMS186 Blood.” (370) Note that the French translation of the novel includes a new, simplified layout and visual material by other designers, and thus provides a different reading-viewing experience. See Steve Tomasula, Ligatura. Un opéra en pays-plat, trans. Anne-Laure Tissut, with design by Dan Warner, with Mervi Pakaste (Orléans: Hyx, 2013). I will however be referring to the original version throughout.

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of Square (a writer who reluctantly agrees to undergo vasectomy), his wife Circle and their daughter Oval, who live in a postbiological reality. Aesthetically, the book can be approached as a twofold citational construct, in keeping with the motif of inheritance. On the one hand, it functions as a rich intertextual network, bringing together fiction and nonfiction (Ovid and Desmond Morris, Darwin and Byron with the poem “She Walks in Beauty,” quoted in full on one page and transposed on another (VAS 349, 352–353). VAS also borrows from various narrative forms: comic strips, travelogues, scientific reports, and other fictions such as Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a satirical novella by Edwin Abbott published in 1884. On the other hand, it also intertwines various visual genres and exploits a wide range of representations of natural objects, such as drawings showing the clockwise spiral growth of a mollusk shell (VAS 135, 137), or the expansion of the universe (VAS 139). VAS also emphasizes the body, from drawings of hands (VAS 30, 160–161, 272), heads, or skulls, to photos of naked bodies (22–23), doctors at work (74, 124), hair samples (236), and also includes other medical and scientific forms such as x-ray photographs, charts, and even genealogical trees. The book thus redefines the question of legacy in complex formal and epistemological dynamics. Like the double helix of DNA or language and lineage, the quotational-textual and the visual threads constantly interact through the masterful use of typographic art.5 The helical structure is thus emphasized by many typographical devices, as Alex Link has remarked: “much of VAS’s text is justified toward the lines at the edge of the page, and is ragged toward the book spine. The raggedness of these facing lines of text suggests that they interlock” and the novel’s facing pages “form an interlocking visual double helix in which its code meets and combines to form a body”6—a case best illustrated by the symmetrically displayed photos of naked bodies that the reader is invited to superimpose in a clinical representation of sexual intercourse (VAS 22–23). It is worth examining the interrelation between text and body, and their potential interchangeability in a novel that textualizes the body and rematerializes the text, but this essay, combining macrotextual analysis and close reading, also aims to explore the effects of hybridization and 5

6

As Radan Martinec and Andrew Salway, among others, observe, contemporary typographic art has been enabled by recent developments in electronic media, but has a precedent in medieval illuminated manuscripts and was also explored by avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century. See Radan Martinec and Andrew Salway, “A System for Image-Text Relations in New (and Old) Media,” Visual Communication, 4.3 (2005), 339–374. Alex Link, “Pierre Menard with a Pipette: VAS and the Body of Text,” Electronic Book Review (June 2012), http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent.

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intermediality in VAS. The book has been acclaimed by critics as a “reinvention” of the novel, or “a leap forward for the genre we call ‘novel,’ ”7 but what kind of physical and mental experiences does it offer? And what kind of reading/viewing does it call for?

“Writing the body”: The body as text VAS obsessively reshuffles representations of the body while treating it both as subject matter and as a textual construct. While investigating the future of living creatures and considering the vertiginous potential of contemporary scientific discoveries, the book goes back through the history of the sciences and focuses on past and present experiments concerning the body. Mutation and heredity come to the fore, all the more so as the intertext is mostly nonliterary and the novel borrows from genuine scientific sources and medical imaging. According to its home page, VAS is concerned with how “differing ways of imagining the body generate differing stories of knowledge, power, history, gender, politics, art.”8 It provides a rich compilation of such versions, thanks to numerous and sometimes hair-raising statements from scientists and politicians that are then often presented alongside literary quotations. In that respect one cannot but admire the brilliant choice of anchoring the text in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland. In the beginning was not only pain but the geometric simplicity of a flat space and the humorous title chosen by a writer to fictionalize his observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian England. Tomasula was inspired by the geometrical bodies of Abbott’s characters who live in a two-dimensional land where women are straight lines and men are regular polygons. Thus in the 1880s, Abbott’s narrator Square anticipates his reader’s curiosity about women’s status or rather “invisibility” (200). Likewise he criticizes British politics and addresses the topic of equality in comically unexpected terms which Tomasula mischievously quotes: I have been assuming … that every human being in Flatland is a Regular Figure, that is to say of regular construction … . It does not need much reflection, then, to see that the whole of the social life in Flatland rests upon the fundamental fact that Nature wills all figures to have their sides Kass Fleisher, “Word Made of Flesh and Blood,” American Book Review 25.2 (January/ February 2004): 3–4. 8 See Steve Tomasula, “VAS Homepage,” accessed July 26, 2014, http://www.stevetomasula. com/vas.htm. 7

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equal. If our sides were unequal our angles might be unequal; in a word, civilization would relapse into barbarism. (quoted in VAS, 188)

Now a science-fiction classic, Flatland first became famous in the scientific community in the twentieth century when Einstein’s theory of relativity was published, owing to its theoretical discussion of dimensions. If Square, Abbott’s narrator, discovers the existence of a three-dimensional world (Spaceland) and later contemplates the theoretical possibility of a fourth dimension, what does this connection enable our twenty-first-century writer to achieve? In the age of 3D and of the internet, this intertextual dialogue with Abbott obviously reaches further than a mere citational homage as it constitutes one way of putting our culture in a perspective and questioning our episteme, all the more so if one agrees with Lila Marz Harper that, as early as 1884, Abbott sent “a prophetic warning about the dangers of the normalization and … standardization of the human body inherent in the concept of eugenics.”9 As Tomasula’s Square points out, “To name [is] to impose an order … . To list [is] to catalog” (VAS 171). One cannot miss the echoes of Michel Foucault’s inquiry in Tomasula’s problematizing of the relationship between power and knowledge: what is the “truth” that “we march in” (VAS 350)? Who can decide what defines “nature” or “culture” or what constitutes “improvement” (VAS 108) or the “common good”? This is a question particularly raised by forced sterilization programs meant to “improve the gene pool” (VAS 105–107). If what authorities present as “scientific knowledge” are really means of social control, how do we distinguish “between good science and bad?” (VAS 94). Modern science and genetic manipulations are not the only target since the book indulges in quoting earlier theories and now disqualified methods, like phrenology that relied on the measuring of skulls (VAS 36) or the proportions of a face (VAS 70) in order to assess an individual’s intelligence or establish distinctions between races. Old scientific representations and narratives are conjured up as Square remembers his childhood visits to the Museum of Natural History, “that neo-classical book visitors could wander within” (VAS 27): “Entering its stone veracity, dim as the past,/they could saunter through centuries. Each/time, American Natives eating out of a communal/bowl became Asians on the far side of the/Bering Straits; then cave painters, then—/At the end of the hallway, near a janitor’s/ closet, was the Origin” (VAS 29). While the conventional expectations of novel readers are challenged, here a “linear plot” is reintroduced and 9

Lila Marz Harper, “Flatland in VAS,” Electronic Book Review (June 2012), http://www. electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent

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both sketched and mocked, as the old institution of the museum aimed at providing connections with our remote “ancestors” and a simple predictable meaning that the literary narrative no longer offers. A striking combination of differing stories is to be found, for instance, when a harmonious-looking representation of meiosis (a special type of cell division necessary for sexual reproduction in eukaryotes such as animals and humans) faces a page that records Square’s disenchanted musing on identity: He could see what was happening, this transubstantiation of being his body into having his body. But caressing its epidermis, to all appearances unchanged, he couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t hold it in his mind a change from wine to water any more than the moment message becomes material, material becomes man, man becomes patient … (VAS 315)

From being one’s body to having one’s body, as the numerous patent stamps in VAS10 remind us, Square acknowledges an epistemological shift which his use of personal markers, from the masculine subject (he, his) to the neutral object (it, its), subtly echoes. Do we hold the copyright on our body? In the same vein as Kac’s Genesis, both text and visual effects in VAS draw attention to codes and coding. Significantly the theme of DNA coding obsessively circulates and comes to the foreground with twenty compact pages for the sequence of chromosome 12 of the gene “SHGC—110205,” combinations of the letters A, C, G, T, representing the nucleotides (A for Adenine, C for Cytosine, G for Guanine, T for Thymine) in dot-matrix type, only interrupted by two words “| The| facts| ” (VAS 225). Several critics have commented on the illegibility of the passage, as we may “have public access to [this type of] common knowledge” (201) but only very few specialists are able to understand it, and part of its appeal may reside in its very intransitivity. Marjorie Perloff aptly concludes that “ ‘story’ is the wrong word here for Tomasula’s dissection of post-biological life is about the new interaction of bodies and DNA possibilities.”11 10 11

See VAS 176–177 where these stamps reach a sort of climax. See Tomaula, VAS homepage.

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Letters are not only the components of the text, but those of the body as text, so that codes are often made to migrate into one another and verbal messages overlap with the genetic ones, prompting us to read any new occurrence of the combined A, C, G, T letters like a scientific formula: “trying to get sCATTerings to AGGlutinATe” (VAS 58). In a sense the body’s mutations echo those of the text, while genealogy and etymology often sound synonymous, a possibility increased by the protagonists’ geometrical designations (after all “square” and “circle” logically lead to “oval”) (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 60–61. Courtesy of the author.

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If “Family trees and language trees/overla[p] like a branch and its shadow” (VAS 62), the novel can equally offer a chart retracing George Washington’s “family stock” (VAS 109–111) and one showing that “father,” “vader,” “pitar,” and other words have a “common ancestor” (VAS 60–61), just as human beings do or thought they did.12 Moreover, natural selection operates between languages as between species: “Spake/Old words die out./Races too/ New/words,/like/fools, /rush/in” (VAS 103–104). Anne-Laure Tissut underlines Square’s awareness of “the many points in common between text and body, one being metaphorized by the other” and comments on his “hop[e] to act upon his body by working on his text.”13 Hence an insistent network of images explicitly relating the two: thus the narrator remarks that “composing a body as if it were a crossword puzzle was natural to Oval” (VAS 179); vasectomy is compared to the corrections on the writer’s manuscript, “just a little editing” (VAS 192, 312), and later genetic anomalies are referred to as “typos” (VAS 365), while Square understands “the routine élan with which women lived within their edited, critiqued and rewritten bodies” (VAS 323). Do these repeated images relativize the impact of figurative discourse? The text addresses the question of originality, but transposes it in terms of genetic inheritance and variations, thereby also problematizing its own rhetorics: “Though your body is constantly/ plagiarizing itself, it never gets it right. // It’s like making a copy of a copy/Copies of copies proliferating / … Birth being a fresh copy” (VAS 306–307). The effect of symmetry or interchangeability between body and text is eloquently illustrated when two complementary paragraphs give us access, respectively, to Square’s reflections: (a) about his fingertips, leading to genealogy and genetic coding (down to the metaphor of the “book of his body”); and (b) about the letters of his name and his handwriting, leading to images of hands and education (“an unbroken string of hands on hands”), all the way back to the illuminated pages of sacred books (VAS 51). The perspectives of science and religion/art are thus confronted, but in both cases the long chain of transmission is conveyed by the syntactic organization of only two sentences for seventeen lines in the first paragraph, and one long sentence for eighteen lines in the second paragraph, relying on accumulation and apposition. The individual subject looks backward in time to his ancestors (“his father and mother and their mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers … ”) in the first paragraph and to the medieval scribes 12 13

See the edited running head, Tomasula, VAS, 107. Anne-Laure Tissut, “Languages of Fear in Steve Tomasula’s VAS, an Opera in Flatland,” Electronic Book Review (June 2012), http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/ fictionspresent

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(“the dead working through him”) in the second one. A network of echoes adds continuity between the two paragraphs, exploring the figurative/literal interaction in a symmetrically metaphorical way: repeated elements such as the “little miracles of line” and the motif of “reification” reinforce the effect, while “pages of chromosomes within the cells which made up the book of his body” are transformed into “sentences coagulating into cells on pages, pages making up sacred books of mysteries.” No wonder poetic effects permeate the passage: the phonetic echoes and rhythmical quality convey Square’s ambivalent attraction to a time when “the world was written differently” and unity prevailed in the name of God, that is, when poetry literally meant Creation (VAS 52). In Act 2 of the “Opera” that concludes VAS, the notion of writing on the body is radically reinterpreted thanks to literalization (VAS 352). The same dots and dashes, like elements in some weird Morse Code transmission, can be seen on the photographed skin and on the white page, the absence of interruption suggesting that one “medium” is as good as the other. The human face exposed to the light of science may be just an extension of the page, yet the disturbing close-up on the red scratches and the dysphoric context reorienting Byron’s poem (“Inquisitor, come write”) enhance the suggestion of violence. How do Tomasula and Farrell interrogate the potential of the page and what kind of materiality does the text evince?

Watch my words: The text as body If our discourse on the body is more and more abstract, if one can go body-shopping and acquire “designer genes” from “gene banks” (VAS 268 ff, 182 ff), the novel makes up for it by offering itself as an object to be seen and manipulated, as it remobilizes the space of the page with tremendous vitality and includes scientific plates, comic strips effects, but also fold-out pages, etc. Its inventive page layout seems to dissolve the boundaries between the verbal and the visual as the reader is confronted with dramatically juxtaposed or superimposed layers of texts using various fonts, and numerous kinds of images or visual effects that often obscure one another. All the resources of typography and computer technology are taken advantage of, often with conflicting background/foreground effects, so that the page seems to acquire depth, contradicting the announced flatness. This cohabitation of different fonts and types, in various sizes, also suggests the existence of various story “lines” corresponding to several voices or narrative

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threads.14 The linear-lineage motif is conspicuously taken up in the vertical lines running down the outer edge of many pages with its interruptions, cuts, sutures (VAS 158, 263). As Alex Link puts it, “the line is key in that it transforms the novel into a coherent and metaphorically corporeal body as well as into a part of a greater hereditary body.” VAS’s narrator remembers that “Body text once had body” and wonders “Couldn’t it again?/What would it look like if it did?” (VAS 51) (See Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 51. Courtesy of the author. 14

This is well illustrated by the “cyborg” edition of VAS, which comes with an audio CD that performs much of VAS with various voices and sound effects: the first track, entitled “Bodies of Flatland” features text read by Steve Tomasula, Christian Jara, and Maria Tomasula. Tracks 2–12 correspond to “The Strange Voyage of Imagining Chatter” and are read by Steve Tomasula, Paul Appleby, and Paul Johnson. Music and sound design add complexity to the performance, Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland, Cyborg Edition (Portland, OR: Chiasmus Press, 2009).

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Significantly, the right-hand side of the same page and part of its verso are printed in Gothic script, an old font that jars with its very contemporary content since it is an excerpt from Square’s hospital acceptance form for the vasectomy. Moreover, the text in Gothic is decentered so that the last words of each line are missing, offering an incomplete message that is continued on the other side of the page, thus hinting at the technical actions, such as guillotining, involved in bookmaking and publishing. One could argue that the whole of VAS provides answers to its own question. This textual materiality is paradoxically displayed in blank pages (VAS 99–101) or semi-deleted words (VAS 171, 173, 176–177). It also comes to the foreground by contrast when the same quotation by Dr. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, about controlled procreation is printed twice: first in conventional typography (VAS 125), then with more aggressive layout effects reminiscent both of comic strip aesthetics and of Roy Lichstentein’s style, with its Ben-Day dots and stylized lettering (see Figure 3.4). The drama is suggested by the image of an explosion, and the typography adds artificial emphasis and suspense by separating words (or … // it … it) and putting some words in bold type. Elsewhere, scientific documents about genetics and eugenics have been Xeroxed but are not always reproduced in full-page format, hence the presence of incongruous margins that show the book within the book, with its book-marks and outdated typography, old paragraph markers or yellowed pages (VAS 70, 93, 95, 115, 240). Incompatible page numbers underline this distancing effect, as is the case for quotations from C. B. Davenport’s Heredity in Relation to Eugenics.15 Besides, the Xeroxed copies may be arbitrarily cut in the middle of one page (VAS 95), again illustrating the dynamics of selection—what is worth repeating? What is not? Forms of scholarly discourse belonging to the past are thus exhibited and framed in highly effective ways. Like researchers, readers are invited to manipulate the object or unfold and fold back up some pages (see Figure 2.1), if only to understand that the apparent order of the recto (showing Oval’s etymology/genealogy and asserting the importance of “pedigree”) is undermined on the back of the page which betrays the narrator’s lack of confidence and conveys selfcorrection and reflexivity: “Message and material becoming bodies solid as bricks”/“No, that’s not right/What was right?” (VAS 58). Dispersion, fragmentation, and random association prevail, in keeping with the scattering/agglutination motif: “fragments come together like nucleotides/ 15

Thus page 115 of VAS quotes from page 119 of Davenport’s study, and page 240 shows page 81 of the same book. The same discordant effect occurs with other sources. See Tomasula, VAS, 70, 107.

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Figure 3.4  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 126–127. Courtesy of the author.

some split apart and die/others hold/linking up into double helixes … ” (VAS 58). Careful reading here should warn us against the temptation of systematic interpretations. Even in less conspicuous collage pieces, the body of the text also shows through effects of discontinuity. Contrasting with the fluidity of some of Square’s elegant developments, the numerous noun phrases and paratactic

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statements scattered throughout the book draw our attention to the page as (dis)organized space. Likewise the cut-and-paste effect inherent in quotations does not only contribute to the investigation of context but adds to spatial defamiliarization. However, owing to fragmentation, VAS’s aesthetics signals the materiality of the medium without necessarily creating a heightened sense of presence. After all, on the one hand the text diegetically explores the disturbing effect of metalepsis with numerous transgressions of narrative levels, for instance as Square is writing the story we are reading (VAS 286). On the other hand, in a visually exuberant context some panels of the final “Opera” strictly rely on our imagination by telling us about actions or characters instead of showing them, with a cliché reinterpretation of evolution: “simian images come faster now,” including “monkeys dressed in bowlers” and “monkeys riding bicycles” (VAS 335). There is even “A monkey in a derby grinning as he bangs away on a typewriter” while there is another “monkey painting abstract expressionist paintings” and “A monkey being taught sign language” (VAS 337). The attention paid to handwriting and calligraphy pertains to a similar dynamics, ambiguously playing with material presence and absence. As W. J. T. Mitchell remarks, “writing, in its physical, graphic form, is an inseparable suturing of the visual and the verbal, the ‘imagetext’ incarnate.”16 Handwriting samples supposedly give a sense of individualized presence, as our signature proves our identity, but the context actually transforms this awareness into a feeling of loss: Square offers a mock-graphological analysis of Mother’s handwriting, with close-ups of some letters, their loops and idiosyncrasies, just as they are vanishing with the paper turning to ash (VAS 294). Likewise, more dramatically, Square’s handwritten name appears on his hospital form, “Square” in little boxes or squares (VAS 11), and a later handwritten message, facing the “consent for the procedure” form, takes up the motif with an invitation to his narratee to cut the form from the book, “fill in” [his name] and hold it in his hands to experience its “presence” (VAS 318). The implicit pun on “form” as shape and official document to be filled in also reactivates the connection with Abbott’s Flatland, as does the reference to the “invisible city.” But are we willing to mutilate the body of the book? We would rather browse through its pages and take advantage of its twofold encyclopedic dimension, as the book mixes the qualities of a dictionary in print and information presented in the styles of new media: 16

W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 95.

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both acknowledging and seemingly transgressing the limits of the book as object, VAS thus pretends to offer the experience of surfing the web, where we could branch off onto numerous fields, with key terms as nodes and links. Many pages look like webpages and enhance seemingly virtual communication; the book integrates internet aesthetics, screen captures, complete with ads, email addresses, and cookies, and mimics or parodies the information overload which has become a cliché of contemporary life (see Figure 3.5).

Figure 3.5  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 162–163. Courtesy of the author.

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Seven years before Tomasula’s new media novel TOC, VAS travels in time and has it both ways, imitating the “flickering signified”17 of hypertextual structures within the lasting form of printed paper. VAS even plays with the codes of older “reference books,” as it can be perused like a dictionary of quotations complete with a thumb index: “ABBO” for Abbott, “GOE,” “DARW,” “MALT” for Malthus, “MORR” for Desmond Morris, etc., even “TOMA” and “FARR.” In keeping with this system, some of the last thumb-indexes only show a small square, referring to the protagonist now considered as a figure of authority. A kind of encyclopedic ambition is thus both flaunted and mocked, pointing to an inexhaustible inquiry. What is at stake is not denying one’s heritage but exhibiting or overcoding one’s sources, whether past or present: the body of the text thus emphasizes its relations with intertext and paratext. A case in point is to be found in pages that imitate the conventions of academic publication (VAS 89–91): the proliferating footnotes refer to controversial essays supporting genetic determinism, identifying specific genes that cause homosexuality, or criminal tendencies, etc., tenets that Square challenges. In that section the paratext providing genuine sources takes precedence over the narrative, the better to be problematized: notes 14–16 (VAS 90) can then be read as intruders in the system and function like a meta-discourse conveying an alternative view through an increasingly embedded degree of reflexivity, with note 15 as a comment on 14—bearing on “academic honesty,” and note 16 commenting on 15: Footnotes always a ventriloquist act that speaks authority/truth.15 Unless they are used to undermine a claim to ‘authority/truth.’ 16 16 (quote marks, same deal (as are parenthesis)). 14

15

Further down the page, the second part of note 23 adds, “Isn’t it odd how footnotes make a thing seem more scientific,—just the way phrenologists gave all their concepts Latinate names in the hopes that their narratives would morph into classical learning?” (VAS 90). Rather than functioning like a science-fiction novel, VAS frames and disseminates scientific discourse (both in its most complex and most simplified, popularized forms)—thus the “Science Rocks” sections, echoing Robert Winston’s famous teaching aids, are juxtaposed with more learned sources.

17

Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 157.

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Unsurprisingly, we cannot process all this often contradictory information: how are we to cope with dismantled paragraphs showing partly deleted words and ever more intrusive patents (VAS 176–177)? How can we reconcile Square’s aphorisms on lineage or his lists of mollusks with the diagrams/patterns that look like chromatographies (VAS 65–66, 69)? If VAS indulges in quoting so many textual and visual sources, it is the better to teach and tease us, sharing documents but also confronting us with new hermeneutic difficulties, since the book is not meant only to be read, but above all to be viewed/watched. In many respects it thus complicates a problem that has already been much debated. In Picture Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell emphasizes the fact that, owing to the “pictorial turn” that took place in the 1980s and1990s, spectatorship may now be “as deep a problem as various forms of reading … and visual experience or ‘visual literacy’ might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality.”18 According to him, we have witnessed a “postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality.”19 We must bear this warning in mind when reading-viewing VAS, since the future of bodies, whether physical or virtual, is a main concern and the burden of institutions and cultural apparatus looms large in its various narratives. VAS seems to situate itself at the core of the problematics delineated by Mitchell and others, a problematics which can be extended to the saturated imagetext. Besides, critics face an additional dilemma: how can one quote or comment an imagetext without betraying it? Most of VAS cannot be quoted in a conventional way since meaning relies on contextual effects on the surface of the page, layers of combined text and visual signs, and one needs to describe or show the book to convey a sense of its complexity, that is, one has to re-present (part of) it. How does the event produced by the reading/viewing affect the reader and his/her own body? More recently, while asserting the need for renewed criticism adapted to the “pictorial third,” Liliane Louvel commented on the ways in which the imagetext displaces the reader and on the double gaze required by the hybridity display.20 This experience is hyperbolically produced by VAS which exploits all the resources of computer-assisted publishing. It becomes increasingly difficult to answer basic definitional questions: no longer just what is a human being, but what is the difference between text and image, textual and visual objects? 18 19 20

Mitchell, Picture Theory, 16. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 16. Liliane Louvel, Le Tiers pictural. Pour une critique intermédiale (Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2010), 244–252.

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Hybridization revisited: Reinventing the novel? VAS blurs the generic and semiotic borders and resorts to hybridization in an attempt to confront the phenomena of emergence and our immersion in augmented reality. Like the “linear plot” of evolution, all forms of knowledge may be questioned, no longer providing master narratives about “Progress in science,” or “History [as] written by the victor” (VAS 87). Neither do literary texts seem to offer comfort or act as safeguards against this transformation, even if Tomasula visibly enjoys transposing the topos of mutation into an accelerated history of English (VAS 68), just as he fully exploits the ambiguity of Square’s name, which promotes a form to the rank of a subject. Instead of performing transitivity, lineage becomes a language game that consists in shifting letters in order to achieve transformation: “Try to mutate the word APE into the word MAN” (85) “if every intermediate step must make sense/then the change can be made in eight generations” (see Figure 2.3). The book exhibits the artifice and the artifact by substituting the signifier for the referent. “MAN” becomes literally a “man of letters” as the text changes scales, an essential aspect Tomasula insists upon in a recent essay.21 In keeping with a modest redefinition of literary narrative, Square writes a “pedestrian story” in both senses of the word (VAS 149–159), and Shahrazad’s narrative genius is ironically echoed in the more prosaic invention of “1001 salad-dressings” (VAS 237). VAS even goes as far as framing its own visual rhetoric with a miniaturized layout and smaller fonts, thereby debunking its own potential for didacticism or moralizing diatribe (see Figure 3.6). The book reasserts the energy of the carnivalesque, as scientific discourses or symbols circulate and lose their authority. Temporal short-circuits further disrupt linearity, such as when Square (or some avatar of this character) performs an autopsy on a female Australopithecus with the help of Grant’s Anatomy and Dissector (VAS 165 ff). This symbolic passage increasingly stresses the difference between theory and experience as the dissection triggers the character’s confusion—while the textual margins offer a slightly modified version of Shylock’s rhetoric in The Merchant of Venice, culminating in the famous “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” argument (VAS 164–165, 167–168). A plea for a common humanity is thus both echoed and relocated, perhaps understood as a thing of the past, as VAS acknowledges the shift to the posthuman, defined by Katherine Hayles as “an amalgam, a collection 21

Steve Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” Sillages critiques, online edition 17, Exposure/Overexposure, ed. Monica Michlin and Françoise Sammarcelli, 2013. Accessed February 21, 2014, http://sillagescritiques. revues.org/3562

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of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.”22 Both science and literature are deterritorialized. Elsewhere the letters referring to the nucleotides are conspicuously taken up in a parodic tale of hierarchy and power set in the Ancien Régime and imagined by Square the contemporary writer:

Figure 3.6  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 273–274. Courtesy of the author. 22

Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3.

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He’d been filling out a lady’s dance card when Master Ascot-Gevilles-Chandos-Temple, the last in a long line, laughed at his elaborate signature […] (VAS 279)

Square, the son of a merchant, shoots his aristocratic adversary: “a miniball putting a period to the line of A-G-C-Ts/by shattering the skull of this last link” (VAS 280). While Edwin Abbott’s Flatland describes a society rigidly divided into classes, in this subplot of VAS social order seems to be restored since the victorious duelist is executed, but the text sets off the idea of a challenge in a provocative rewriting of our systems of representation. The discordant imagetext can thus be seen as an aesthetic response to the prospect of sterility confronted by Square and the vertiginous horizon of postbiological existence. The vibrant space of the page has infinite potential, echoing Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” (VAS 298) (See Figure 3.7). Just as Whitman advocated contradiction in the context of nineteenthcentury American democracy, Tomasula reframes this as plurality and doubt. Whitman’s famous line is recontextualized, since it is true and relevant both in genetic terms and in terms of linguistic creation. On the surface of the page, Christian motifs such as Immaculate Conception (“Virgin Birth”) or the Fall (“Eve in Stained glass”) are juxtaposed with scientific experiments (“Adam in a Petri dish”); the “naked ape” cohabits with a “patent,” allowing the plosive [p] to resonate, against a pale background of computer-programing using binary 0/1 coding. However, the latter binarism is misleading since the novel discourages any manichean reading and constantly plays with the signifier, from the polysemic “stained glass” (denoting an art form and connoting sin) to the “Petri dish” (referring to biology and to Eduardo Kac’s rewriting of Genesis). Likewise, the vertical lines that cross the page both emphasize evolution and introduce musical language on the following page, whose margin displays the lines of a stave with its F key (VAS 298). Hybridity is both thematized and performed in VAS and, when looking at increasingly chaotic pages and stridently subversive images, one is not likely to forget the element of excess traditionally implicit in hybrids. Tiphaine Samoyault reminds us that the Latin ibrida (“of mixed blood”) became hybrida by connection with the Greek hubris (“excess”).23

23

Tiphaine Samoyault, “L’Hybride et l’hétérogène,” in L’Art et l’Hybride, ed. N. Batt, et al. (Saint-Denis: Presses University de Vincennes, 2001), 175–186.

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Figure 3.7  Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 298. Courtesy of the author.

Hybrids result from crossbreeding (between species or between genera) and the issue/topic comes to the foreground in numerous forms in VAS, with images of the “applorange” and the “zucchana” (VAS 262), or references to the alleged dangers of miscegenation and to “humanized mouse,” “tomato-fish,” “cow-humans” (VAS 298), etc., but also to mother as a “cyborg,” that is, a being with both organic and mechanical parts (VAS 144, 146). This recurring theme of postmodernist and postcolonialist

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theories is thus recontextualized in biological and technical terms that resonate with/in our culture. Hybridity also prevails in the elaborate imagetext which calls for constant adjustment on the part of the reader. Discussing the aesthetics of collage, critic Noëlle Batt defines hybrids as works that “invite us to effect a ‘transaction’ between elements that we immediately feel to be heterogeneous [celles qui invitent à opérer une ‘transaction’ entre des éléments ressentis d’emblée comme hétérogènes]”24—an element which VAS also comically stages in stylized genetic diagrams, showing how the foreign element or hetero-gene, the “round gene,” is passed on (VAS 228), etc. Batt further argues that, after we become aware of heterogeneity, a second phase involves “a negotiation whose aim is not to achieve a type of dialectic resolution … but to allow heterogeneous zones to interact in order to create a new range of relations, a new type of cooperation between these zones [une négociation dont la visée n’est pas une résolution de type dialectique … mais une mise en interaction des zones d’hétérogénéité afin de créer une nouvelle gamme de rapports, un nouveau type de coopération entre ces zones].”25 Such an intellectual transaction precludes complacent denunciation, and the page showing the “Ron’s angels” prank, notorious in 1999, is a case in point, since the erotic photographer Ron Harris exploited consumers’ credulity while combining eugenics with Playboy-type visuals. In a sense the printed page imitating a screen (VAS 264) is no more fake than the website at which young supermodels allegedly auctioned off their eggs to the highest bidders. Yet new technologies also mean profit, real business is to be conducted, as Stephen Farrell signals by including advertisements, especially for American or global bio-pharmaceutical and -technological companies (VAS 255–275). Samoyault also reminds us of the debate about the sterility of hybrids in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with correspondences in the theories of art.26 In VAS this fear of sterility or loss of creativity is manifested by blank pages, apparently resulting from the act of deleting text (VAS 99–101) and followed by the aphoristic “Sometimes silence is the most eloquent” (VAS 102). What kind of voice can the hybrid have? This dilemma is metaphorically answered by the surgery performed 24

25 26

Noëlle Batt, “Que peut la science pour l’art? De la saisie du différentiel dans l’art,” in L’Art et l’Hybride, ed. Noëlle Batt, et al. (Saint-Denis: Presses University de Vincennes, 2001), 73–82, my translation. Batt, “Que peut la science?,” 75, my translation. Samoyault, “L’Hybride,” 176.

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on a chimpanzee which consists in grafting a dead man’s larynx on the chimp to allow him to sing (VAS 254–255), and this focus on “voice” and its modes of representation is further enhanced by the insertion of spectrograms (or sonograms), that is, visual representations of the spectrum of frequencies in a sound or other signal as they vary with time or some other variable.27 In this context the old genre of the opera may function as a catalyst or highly productive metaphor. First related to Square’s mother-in-law, just back from the Milan Scala, it is dealt with in an educational book offered to Oval, The Big Book of Opera— which allows Tomasula to insert a summary of the romantic libretto of La Traviata (VAS 20–26) in sharp contrast with the clinical focus on “copulation” in the quotations from Desmond Morris and the photos of naked bodies (VAS 22–23). All this becomes another richly woven thread. We should perhaps not be surprised to find that opera seems to mean melodrama for Circle and the emergence of the subject for Tomasula: according to the text, “With the solo, melodrama became possible and Bravissimo! the birth of opera!” (VAS 277). Far from the recent evolution of the genre, VAS looks back to the golden age of Italian opera, with models such as works by Puccini and Verdi—a form perhaps more easily parodied— but makes them far more complex with allusions to discordant twentiethcentury instruments.28 The eponymous opera model offers further opportunities for investigation insofar as it traditionally foregrounds combination, with singers and musicians performing a dramatic work associating text and musical score, incorporating many of the elements of spoken theater, such as acting, scenery, and costumes, and sometimes including dance. VAS as an opera involves a visual performance as well and, fittingly, various forms of musical notations often appear in the margins, with notes or a few bars scattered throughout the book: even autopsy is performed as music: “Hold the scalpel like a cello bow,” Grant’s Anatomy advises, with continued references to the strings in the following pages (VAS 164). The motif is taken up and dramatized in the last pages of the novel. Significantly, this Sometimes also called voiceprints, or voicegrams, spectrograms can be used to identify spoken words phonetically, and to analyze the various calls of animals. They are used extensively in the development of the fields of music, sonar, radar, speech processing, etc., which accounts for Tomasula and Farrell’s fascination. 28 In that respect it is worth observing the reference to “intonarumori” (336), the family of instruments invented by futurist Italian musician Luigi Russolo: these acoustic noise generators permitted the creation and control of dynamics and pitch for several different types of noises. The invention of the intonarumori was the natural outcome of Russolo’s musical theories expounded in his 1913 manifesto L’Arte dei rumori (The Art of Noise) in which he presented his ideas about the use of noises in music. 27

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“opera” recycles Byron’s famous poem “She Walks in Beauty,” originally published as part of his volume Hebrew Melodies, which was set to music. Tomasula achieves a parodic appropriation in which beauty is replaced by truth, and once more hybridization rules with a grotesque encounter of poetry and science, as Byron’s lyrical celebration of innocent beauty is updated with modern mottoes and scientific images are gradually substituted for literary topoi. Can the opera house or operating room replace the “house of fiction” in a time when point of view can no longer be represented? Whereas at some point VAS’s narrator ponders on “a history, really, of language” (VAS 235), the embedded opera does not focus on talk but on the less dignified “chatter,” testifying to ironical reflexivity. Entitled The Strange Voyage of Imagining Chatter, it is announced on a poster-program that recycles a famous painting by Charles Willson Peale: the collector reveals his “cabinet of curiosities” which became the first museum of natural history in the United States. This “opera,” structured in three acts with an intermission, weaves together the evolution of music and that of life on earth with a tremendous energy and a carnivalesque display of signs. Musical directions (allegro, crescendo, appassionato), supposedly indicating tempo, do appear and become more and more numerous as one reads on, but noises are also figured in vibrant comic strip style: “BONNG” and “KRAAASH” (VAS 33, 336–337). The initially almost empty panels gradually fill, but with letters instead of images (the by-now familiar combinations of A, C, G, T), in “a gene sequence duet” performed by a male tenor and a female soprano (VAS 340). The stage-set itself is made to vary from the opera theater stage with its trompe-l’œil décor to a minimalist tableau, then to the operating theater. Meanwhile the evolutionary narrative unravels, as Darwin and a female Australopithecus are featured in Act 1, soon replaced by a nude woman and scientists in white lab coats in Act 2, then by experimental surgeons in Act 3. During the “Overture” a sheet of greyish paper similar to that of the “linear plot” (VAS 28) is folded then unfolded into a series of origami figures on the bottom half of the pages, naming and reshuffling the various stages of evolution as previously summed up (from ape to man). It gradually also fills up the main space of the comic strip panel (VAS 346–347), while ambiguously calling to mind both origami art and irreverent paper hens— indeed Circle, Square’s wife, cannot conceal her boredom (VAS 361) and Tomasula cleverly undermines the dignity of the scientific epic. It is worth remembering not only that the Italian word opera means “work,” both in the sense of the labor done and the result produced, but also that it derives from a plural form (the Latin opera, the plural of the

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word opus). This plural inscription is relevant as it hints both at the dialogue between literature and science and at the collaboration of Tomasula and Farrell (who might play the parts of the soprano and tenor engaged in a duet) (VAS 342). This interaction also includes the reader’s participation, just as Square wishes he could make his wife see “how the audience was part of the opera” (VAS 355). If “music” is replaced or complemented by noise, as Luigi Russolo suggested, the issuing work, with its gaps, disorder, and disturbance, may also strike us as brilliantly illustrating William Paulson’s definition of literature as “the noise of culture.” In Paulson’s view, “literature is a noisy transmission channel that assumes its noise so as to become something other than a transmission channel, and … literature, so constituted, functions as the noise of culture, as a perturbation or source of variety in the circulation and production of discourses and ideas.”29 Vegetal or animal hybrids might be sterile, but cultural hybrids are not. VAS is not a dead-end but a brilliant experiment, embracing humanist and formalist concerns with striking honesty. Thus connecting aesthetics with ethics and epistemology, Tomasula and Farrell’s work both redesigns the novel and radically illustrates Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of the genre in “Epic and Novel” as flourishing on diversity, “the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted.”30 Indeed, according to Bakhtin, this genre is unique in that it is able to ingest other genres: “it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own structure, reformulating and reaccentuating them”31—a somewhat Darwinian approach after all, and one whose irony Tomasula probably enjoys. If the novel is “the most fluid of genres,”32 its heuristic power has not changed: it still looks at the world and reflects cultural changes. After authoritative discourses have been both overcoded and debunked, what remains or emerges may be the power of conceptual imagination. For Tomasula the novel, like the human, is “a design problem” and art has to make one think while retaining aesthetic value.33 Remobilizing scientific narratives and all kinds of legacies, VAS thus constitutes an intensely critical object and transforms its reader-viewer into an active player in the “sequencing” and “decoding” of the (body of the) text. William R. Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), ix. 30 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3–40. 3. 31 Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” 5. 32 Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” 11. 33 Steve Tomasula, “Conceptualism(s) + 1,” lecture given in the “Writing as conceptual art” seminar, Paris 8 University, May 16, 2013; unpublished. 29

4

Steve Tomasula’s VAS, or What if Novels Were Books? R. M. Berry

Unlike those who interpret Steve Tomasula’s fiction as a representation, enactment, or reflection of cognition under conditions of digitalization and biogenetic engineering,1 I understand the novel VAS as a solution to the problem of meaning’s disembodiment, and I take understanding it to entail understanding the difference between these interpretations. However, I do not find that my reading perfectly aligns with those of Alison Gibbons and Flore Chevaillier, both of whose emphases on the interaction of body and word in VAS I have found instructive.2 By meaning’s disembodiment, I refer to the now-banal experience of meaning as a human creation, one projected onto an ordered but essentially meaning-neutral materiality, the experience institutionalized in technical and social applications of data and statistics. Part of Tomasula’s narrative achievement is to show how those of us who do not ascribe to, or who even decry, this separation of meaning and matter live it every day, and another part is to dramatize the consequences of our alienation. In other words, the problem VAS confronts is as old and new as modernity, and the solution it offers is of an unusually concrete kind. In what follows, I want to address this problem in the context of Walter Benn Michaels’s critique of textual materiality and the reading that theories of textual materiality have enabled or presupposed,3 and my interpretation will adapt Wittgenstein’s therapeutic account of “experiencing the meaning of a word,” an account meant to address our modern separation of meaning 1

2

3

The best known example is the work of Kathryn Hayles. See, N. Kathryn Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Tecnogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 85–121. Alison Gibbons, Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012), 86–126; Flore Chevaillier, The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 101–132. Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2004).

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and matter.4 My idea is that underlying the problem of disembodiment in VAS is a problem of consent and that this problem does not arise, as VAS’s epigraph from Goethe may suggest, from our operating “mainly unconsciously” as the organs of our century.5 The problem of biogenetic engineering is not to know to what body one has consented. It is to acknowledge the consent that, being embodied, one cannot fail to know.

Bodies and stories I want to begin where both Alison Gibbons and VAS begin, with the opening action. Gibbons has described how the first two sentences of the narrative—“FIRST PAIN. Then knowledge: a paper cut”—“invite the reader to momentarily self-implicate,”6 imagining the represented cut as an experience the reader herself undergoes. Gibbons identifies three sources for this imaginative self-implication: the concrete depiction of the painful event in the form of a cartoon, the separation of “FIRST PAIN” from “Then knowledge” by our turning a page, and the absence before the narrative’s third sentence of any character who has been cut (see Figure 3.1). I will say nothing against Gibbons’s systematic analysis, except that, if challenged, I would not know what to say for it. That it describes the stages of my actual comprehension I am far from sure, and even though I fully share Gibbons’s experience of implication in the novel’s opening, my experience, to the extent it is transparent to me, involves no confusion of “[my] own body with represented space.”7 In truth, I recognize nothing imaginary or fictional about my relation to the narrated action. I am implicated because, first, like the character Square, I hold a piece of paper in my hand, and because, second, the narrative begins by saying how it begins: with pain first, then knowledge. In other words, instead of immersing me in the illusion of an action, the novel from the outset is acknowledging what it and I are doing. The question is why this acknowledgment has become necessary. It is important to notice that in the opening scene there are two pieces of paper. Square holds in his hand a hospital consent form on which he has cut his finger, and in his lap is “the page” (VAS 10)—possibly more than one, since he will start “flipping” them (VAS 13)—on which he has been writing Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd edition (London: Blackwell, 1958), 175–176, 181, 210, 214. 5 Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland, 5. 6 Gibbons, Multimodality, 92. 7 Gibbons, Multimodality, 92. 4

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his story. The paper cut has “pricked,” presumably bursting, the “bubble of presence” in which were the “people and dramas” he had been “writing into existence,” and he has “buried them”—the pain having killed them off—underneath the form (VAS 10). The page of his story now strikes him as “dead-skin white” (VAS 10). When Square’s wife—Circle—approaches, however, Square reverses this action, exhuming the dead page to serve as a cover story for his consent. Two questions naturally arise or, if not, need to be unearthed. The first is, what has made Square’s story so painful for him to look at? And the second is, why does he want to conceal his consent from Circle? That is, once his story’s “bubble” bursts, Square seems to want to hide his writing from his own eyes, as though his mindfulness of it—the sight of his lifeless page—has made him more uncomfortable than the thought of consenting to a vasectomy. Later, when Circle appears, the page of Square’s story abruptly becomes less painful for him than the page on which he just cut himself, as though the conflict with Circle has either taken his mind off or breathed life back into his story. Either way, what is odd is that, when Circle enters, Square has already signed the form, has given his consent (VAS 11). That is, the ending of the novel 350 pages away, Square’s arrival at the clinic for his surgery, has already been decided. More than once in the intervening pages Square will treat it as foretold (VAS 181). Why, then, when his wife asks, “Figure out how your story’s going to end?” does Square answer, “No” (VAS 13)? Part of the interest of Freud’s theory of transference is its model of how narratives relate to the context of narrating. In his essays on therapeutic technique, Freud assigns the motive for narrating to a subject’s dissatisfaction with reality, a dissatisfaction that, while not unique to the one telling the story and generalizable across social and sexual groups, has in the life of each subject a historically specific onset. Although Freud’s therapeutic practice involved recounting this onset, he found that his patients resisted cure, attempting to transfer the plot of their original conflict onto the present context and making their re-enactment of childhood frustration a condition for, hence the form of, its representation: “We soon perceive that the transference is itself only a piece of repetition, and that the repetition is a transference of the forgotten past not only on to the doctor but also on to all the other aspects of the current situation.”8 What results is an impasse in the patient’s story, as though repeating the past has displaced the ongoing action. In his practice, Freud’s therapeutic object was to enable patients to understand the real source of their dissatisfaction, enabling them to 8

Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol XII, trans. James Strachey (New York: Vintage, 2001), 151.

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reach a more practical compromise with the present, but over his career he became increasingly clear that “a systematic narrative” of the originating conflict was inessential to this work.9 Because each subject reproduced her problem in narrating it, comprising what Freud called a “transference neurosis,”10 he concluded that the narrative’s repetitive form could itself provide, for both the analyst and the patient, “immediate” access.11 What makes acknowledgment necessary for novel readers and writers is an impasse of the kind Freud describes, one in which the action is blocked, not by material constraint, but by the act of representing. When, following Square’s introduction of a sex scene, Circle asks, “Have you figured it out yet?” (VAS 283), Square treats her question as in the opening scene, that is, as “only a way for her to segue into the question of his body,” and his rambling reply about the problems of narrative realism seems as evasive as his earlier “No.” However, the couple can also be quite direct about superimposing these topics, as though “people and their stories” and “people and their bodies” really were for them “inseparable” (VAS 310). In their continuing after-sex conversation, Circle complains that the issue of Square’s vasectomy has made her life into a melodrama and tells Square, “I just wish you’d end it” (VAS 285), explicitly identifying the plot she inhabits with the resolution of his bodily conflict, and Square recognizes that his narrative irresolution, instead of an imaginative escape from domestic tension, represents a real-life threat: “If he didn’t go through with it, would he even have a marriage?” (VAS 289). Although claiming that he wants to make both Circle and the reader (“you”) “experience the text as an object in the world, real as a brick” (VAS 284), Square paradoxically complains that what impedes his story is this very lack of aesthetic distance, that “it was taking so long because the story had fused with his life” (VAS 283). That is, what he finds difficult is not to invent an ending—Square nowhere complains of writer’s block or a lack of inspiration—but to invent the ending he actually experiences. As he explains, he wants to make his story, “not just seem real, but be real,” and this appears less a problem of accuracy than of never-ending editing and revision (VAS 56, 312). What he hopes to say in the end is “the real thing” (VAS 56). Why is what Square says from the beginning, that is, his life’s unedited version, not “the real thing”? The passage where Square’s “transference neurosis” seems to me most nakedly on display is the opening description 9 10 11

Freud, Standard Edition, Vol XII, 136. Freud, Standard Edition, Vol XII, 154. Freud, Standard Edition, Vol XII, 108.

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of Circle’s body. Looking at her, Square sees, “ ‘His turn.’ She didn’t need to write a story for him to know she had taken hers” (VAS 14). There seem two ways in which the impasse in Square’s account—the 350-page delay in acknowledging a consent he has already given—follows from this description. First, the fusion of Square’s story and life impedes the action, not because his story is composed of words rather than bricks, but because he has experienced his own conclusion—that he must have a vasectomy—as a meaning imposed on him from without: “It was written in wrinkles from worry … . It was written in a tiredness from lack of sleep … . It was written in … stretch marks … ” (VAS 14). If Square’s ending is to be his invention, his story needs to displace Circle’s, to repress this meaning that, in responding to her, he has already experienced in the flesh. Otherwise, he no more needs to write a story than she does. His vasectomy just goes without saying. And, second, Square’s ending fails to materialize, not because his consent is less than “the real thing,” but because, in trying to be his life’s creator, he is compensating for something his body lacks. As he recounts, no sooner did he write the first words of VAS than “castration imagery came to mind” (VAS 286). Like novelists and readers from Quixote to the present, Square hopes to augment his life with storytelling, as though by imagining vividly enough, concretely enough, viscerally enough, he could know what Circle has experienced without himself having to suffer. However, he cannot consummate this action, not because his climax keeps getting cut short, but because, from the start, Circle’s body makes painfully obvious what he must do to be a man. Square is right to feel that he is playing Judas to his body (VAS 10), but not by cutting himself. His betrayal is in making the disembodiment of his story—that is, of his life—his own doing. If my interpretation is right, then Square’s bodily conflict is not resolvable within the narrative. As in so many of the major novels of the last hundred or more years, narrating in VAS is symptomatic. The only positive function of the represented action is to dramatize the problem that the novel must solve and to demonstrate its human consequences. We have not yet followed out these consequences in VAS, or not to their exorbitant conclusions, and in doing so, my interpretation divides those materially implicated in the work from those for whom VAS is a representation, enactment, or reflection. That is, what remains to understand narratively is Tomasula’s account of how pedestrian stories can turn metaphysical, limiting meaning as such, as though our organic relation to history predetermined every context. However, if it seems doubtful that anything so trivial as one heterosexual male’s vas deferens—to say nothing of a piece of paper—can have such far-reaching consequences, then, for a reader of VAS, that should not be surprising. Pain comes before knowledge, and this

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precedence means the acknowledgment VAS requires, assuming we are to know how life could be both susceptible to endless editing and dictated by genetic code, is of our responsibility for what we read. The sterility to which Square feels sentenced is merely a form on which we have inscribed our consent from the start, and if that explanation seems inadequate, if it leaves out the real dissatisfactions that, once recounted, would show Square’s impasse to be inevitable, then our failure to know is not because of any knowledge we lack. It is because, in trying to tell what Square is doing, we do it, too.

Flatland The paradox of Freud’s theory of transference is that the same psychic automatism that in everyday life functions as “the vehicle of cure and the condition of success” functions in therapy as “the most powerful resistance.”12 Freud’s explanation of this paradox is that transference imposes on every new context the “stereotype plate”13 of childhood frustrations, assigning to others the idealized roles of “the subject’s infantile imagos.”14 As a result, it enables normal adults to obtain the satisfactions—however compromised or displaced—that they were denied in the past, while in therapy it blocks the subject’s narration from recognizing its own function, its displacement of present reality with an earlier form. This introduces an ambiguity into Freud’s theory. Does the subject’s resistance result from something genuinely disappointing about reality, some historical or natural frustration that would make the adult’s idealized version, if only real, more satisfying, or is the idealization itself the source of the adult’s frustration? That is, does the subject’s resistance express her refusal to compromise, her demand for nothing less than complete satisfaction, or has the problem now become this ideal requirement the subject keeps placing on reality, a requirement that could never lead to satisfaction, even if fulfilled? The logical circularity of answers to these questions does not mean that satisfying answers are unattainable. However, it does mean, as Freud recognized analyzing Dora, that when an impasse in the subject’s narration occurs, telling her the answer will not help. The problem of living in Flatland is that reality always lacks a dimension. Despite limited foresight, Square and Circle must make lifeFreud, Standard Edition, Vol XII, 101. (original emphasis). Freud, Standard Edition, Vol XII, 108. 14 Freud, Standard Edition, Vol XII, 102. 12 13

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and-death decisions that were in the past, if not natural occurrences, then “a crap shoot” (VAS 45). On their everyday plane of existence are heart transplants, in vitro fertilization, genetically engineered micro-organisms, bodily enhancement surgeries, and the Family Center for Reproductive Services, where fertility drugs and abortion, far from being incompatible, imply each other. During Circle’s third pregnancy, amniocentesis becomes an insurance requirement, and when it reveals a 75 percent chance of heartbreak and misery, termination seems less an option than just the “procedure” (VAS 14). Neither Square nor Circle regrets their decision, but neither wants to make it again, and they particularly dread having to make a similar decision about Mother (VAS 195). As a result, their reality has a dimension scarcely imaginable to her. When Circle laments having never had a chemistry set, Mother replies, “You didn’t miss anything,” ignoring the meaning of Oval’s Science is Cool kit at her feet (VAS 33), and when Circle surveys the parameters within which she and Square must act—“I was trying to make her understand that sometimes circumstances … ”—Mother treats their unparalleled expanse of decision making as incommensurate with humanity: “[S]he kept insisting that … I might have more empathy for people if I went to the opera” (VAS 292). Circle and Square experience in their own bodies the new, often painful meanings of “birth,” “father,” “daughter” (VAS 181), and “death” (VAS 195), but they also experience Mother’s refusal of these meanings, her experience of their natural sphere as just a void. Although opera, with its forced marriages, unintended pregnancies, and scandalous liaisons, strikes Circle and Square as antique, its meaning is still in Mother’s blood (VAS 26), and when Mother deems herself “just the organ” through which children came or didn’t (VAS 45), she physically incorporates its space of action. Rather than try to tell Mother what her reality lacks, Square and Circle choose to keep their life-anddeath decisions private, becoming in Mother’s presence two-dimensional versions of themselves while trying to live well-rounded lives alone. An effect of reframing of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland in VAS is to idealize Mother’s refusal of meaning, making it a general inability to view the plane of existence with detachment or from a height. In Abbott’s geometry, what rules out the accurate depiction of reality is a universal limitation of perspective, a flattening of all viewpoints that resembles, if not democracy, then the relinquishing of transcendent authority, as though no longer able to rise above the page one is currently on (VAS 12). As one’s plane descends to the surface (VAS 34), one’s perspective increasingly approximates that of an explorer or primitive life-form (VAS 35), with far-sightedness counting for less and every new experience tending toward the same level. Mother imagines such a come-down as an insidious process of naturalization, as

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though her feelings about life and death might come to mirror those around her (VAS 292), and in “A Pedestrian Story,” Square represents it as the countless unconscious adjustments one makes to the movements of others when walking in a crowd (VAS 157; cf. 248). When imagined in these spatial terms, the tendency of stories to repeat, to impose the same old form on reality, seems a direct result of the narrator’s contextualization, of immersion in the meanings that strike him or her as natural. Once the represented action and the act of representing occur on the same plane, perceptions lose their depth, other perspectives becomes difficult to imagine (VAS 230), and the teller can no longer tell what form his or her own story is assuming. Square calls these imperceptible forms “fashions in thought” (VAS 98), suggesting that in every context some two-dimensional version of reality— the lens of one’s specialization or time (VAS 136) or of statistics (VAS 150) or perhaps just a familiar diorama (VAS 27), paradigm (VAS 190), or myth (VAS 191)—functions like “an involuntary tic” (VAS 104), causing people to write what they do not know (VAS 56) and would not acknowledge as their intended meaning if they did (VAS 68). Being the organ of one’s century gives this limited perspective a historical inflection, and Square imagines its contrasting vista as Adam’s Peak, “the highest point on earth … from where it was possible to view the entire world at once” (VAS 190). It is Square’s discovery that he is living in Flatland (VAS 315), inhabiting a two-dimensional reality which, if viewed from a superior perspective, would appear blind to its own form, that makes his consent to the vasectomy seem to him less than real consent. On Square’s plane of existence, vasectomies have become perfectly natural (VAS 312). Like other biogenetic options—for instance, “Children engineered to repel mosquitoes, engineered to not develop an appendix, or wisdom teeth, or any anachronistic appendages” (VAS 178)—the possibility of risk-free sex hardly seems a choice at all (VAS 313). Square’s marriage will be better; he and Circle can eventually stop paying for private school; Circle’s conflict with Mother will, if not end, be decided: “And of course he wanted what was best for his family” (VAS 178). What impedes his story, at least from Square’s perspective, is not any lack of inevitability about what comes next. Rather, it is the very naturalness of his ending that gives Square pause: “Facts keep changing … ” (VAS 189), “paradigms … keep shifting” (VAS 190), “[e]very generation’s map becoming the next generation’s myth … . And that was what was scaring him, he decided. The finality of story’s end. The fear of closure” (VAS 191). By “story’s end,” Square refers directly to the case of Karen Anne Quinlan and “[t]he ‘fact’ of a stopped heart no longer being synonymous with the fact of ‘death’ ” (VAS 195), but

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his recollection of Circle’s abortion, following her having again posed the vasectomy question (VAS 178), makes apparent that, when Square speaks of “[w]alking away from a nature aligned to continue itself ” (VAS 192), he has his own body in mind. As he explains, “momentous migrations”— like that of the Australopithecus 3.8 million years ago (VAS 80)—“were made with tiny steps” (VAS 181), steps as small as indicating a patient’s race on a hospital form (VAS 148), each of which feels as Mother felt when becoming a cyborg: “[S]o natural. So welcome” (VAS 146). How else had the Australopithecus become sufficiently alien that Square could imagine killing one for science (VAS 164–168)? How else had Cro-Mags gone from having better memories to becoming an altogether different animal (VAS 173–174)? It is simply the naturalness of this story that Square distrusts, for “How could you be sure you weren’t just acting like any other organ of your century?” (VAS 196). For Square to be sure—specifically, to be sure that having a vasectomy will not mean an altered relation to his own and others’ bodies, one that by tiny steps and without anyone’s intending will lead, as it has in the past, to experiments on human subjects, state-sponsored genocide, euthanizing the elderly, vivisecting dogs, and suppressing traditional languages—he must imagine the dimension his reality lacks. In Flatland, to represent the plane of existence three-dimensionally, not just in the superficial way of its inhabitants, requires detachment and perspective, “stepping out of your diorama and looking back at what you assume to be natural” (VAS 158), as though critically reviewing the story one is trying to write. Square’s impasse, his difficulty inventing his ending, does not result from any failure to fulfill this requirement. That is, his tendency merely to repeat the same story even when revising and editing it, is not due to any metaphysical limit on transcendence, to “it being impossible for anyone to be from a time other than they were from” (VAS 365). Square’s difficulty is more nearly the opposite. For him, the present is always being displaced by the future and past. “[G]enerations unfold” when he looks in the faces of Neanderthal youths (VAS 173), and in Oval he sees “an etymology of himself ” (VAS 179). The rings of Circle’s neck represent changing seasons (VAS 324), and in his own fingers Square traces “mothers and fathers back through 125,000 generations to the ape” (VAS 51). Every word he writes is “passed down through generations” (VAS 61), and even Mother’s implant seems a historical recurrence: “This was how it always went, Square realized. First a procedure was tried out on the dying or otherwise desperate who were grateful for the peace. Then everyone wanted it … ” (VAS 147). That reality in Flatland always

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lacks a dimension does not prevent Square from inventing the end he is experiencing. It only prevents his avoiding, merely by the denial of his consent, the end that strikes him as inevitable, that feels like his natural conclusion. Square repeats his story in trying to change it, not because it cannot be changed, but because detaching himself from what comes naturally just is the altered bodily relation he fears. What Square calls “having a body,” as opposed to “being a body” (VAS 180, cf. 157), is this experience of meaning’s naturalness—its permeation of muscles, nerves, pulse, breathing, posture, etc.—as a possibility only, one among countless others. It is a matter of seeing the page one is on, not as life’s materialization and ground, but as a mere surface, a base level of meaning that, precisely because of its fixity in time and place, one can always rise above. Square’s imagination is rarely held down by the context his body inhabits. When in Mother’s hospital room he sighs, “I miss my old body” (VAS 147), he does not refer to a body he no longer has. He just means his body, the one that, as Circle’s eye-rolling reminds him, has never been “edited, critiqued, and rewritten,” the “natural” body he still has the luxury of taking for granted (VAS 323). It is as though what strikes him as actual, as materially present in Mother’s hospital room, were a future body about which he has been reading (VAS 145), a scarcely imaginable flesh in which diseases like Mother suffers are a thing of the past, while the meaning he and Circle embody at Mother’s bedside seems, if not literally obsolete, then virtual. No longer being the body one has involves detaching meaning from its material conditions in just this way. And because such detachment seems almost indistinguishable from modernity, fashioning everyone's thoughts, muscles, nerves, breathing, and posture, Square experiences his own heartattack, when it flattens him, not as an altered relation to his body, but as a radically altered world (VAS 49). Square’s longing for books he can really sink his teeth into (VAS 284), like his nostalgia for words’ continuous creation (VAS 52), reimagines the flat land of the page, no longer from the superior perspective that Abbott’s geometry rules out, but as this radically altered space of mortal being. That its limits are not surveyable ceases to mean that Flatland lacks a dimension. It simply means that, apart from its natural conclusion, the form of one’s story is not known. There are countless possible meanings to “death” only until the represented action and act of representing occur on the same level. And if Square seems determined to imagine otherwise, if his story repeatedly avoids what to a more detached perspective looks inevitable, then trying to tell him, were it possible, would only repeat his story, since, if anything is inevitable, it is Square’s perspective from which to know.

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Tomasula’s book In The Shape of the Signifier, Walter Benn Michaels has presented an account of meaning much like the one I have been attributing to Square. Michaels shares Square’s distrust of the organic relationship to language, culture, and history, exposing the way it operates through the immediacy of bodily—that is, sensory—experience. In Michaels’s view, any privileging of affect over cognition tends to underwrite identity politics, making the fundamental difference between human beings their contextualization, their naturalization of certain meanings and assimilation of interpretations to bodily responses. What results is an historical impasse, one in which conflicts over beliefs get reduced to the narration of subject positions, of culturally or racially or sexually different experiences, eliminating the possibility, not just of agreement, but of meaningful disagreement, of productive criticism of others’ beliefs. For VAS, the interest of this account lies in Michaels’s treatment of textual materiality. Michaels persuasively argues that experiencing the physical features of a text, as opposed to interpreting its meaning, enacts this organic relation to language, culture, and history.15 That is, instead of decentering the subject and unfixing identity, as widely claimed, such reading represents a resurgent romanticism, preserving the individual’s experience of naturalness from skeptical attack. In his introduction, Michaels distinguishes Paul de Man’s thoroughgoing version, in which physical features of writing are experienced precisely because of their meaninglessness, from Susan Howe’s less consistent but more down-to-earth version, in which physical features of writing are experienced because, like drawings or pictures, they express meanings difficult or impossible to communicate verbally. However, in both cases, Michaels believes that a consequence of this putatively reductive materialism is to deny a text’s autonomy, making the reader’s experience essential to its creation, as though the words were virtual only.16 I think Michaels has accurately described a contemporary impasse, one in which, because of the absence of any opposable belief, criticism becomes futile, as though nothing real were at stake, and I agree with his account of the avant-garde’s—or of one version of the avant-garde’s—complicity in this impasse. However, Michaels’s treatment of experience as noncognitive affect seems to me exactly as confused as the belief against which he argues. In Michaels, Shape of the Signifier, 6. Michaels, Shape of the Signifier, 8.

15 16

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truth, I think it is the same belief. Such a treatment does not acknowledge the organic relationship of experiencing to becoming experienced,17 making Square’s affective response to Circle’s stretch marks and scars seem a response to externals only. Understood in this way, Square’s story could only be a projection of meaning onto Circle’s body, not an accurate registering of the way her experience has changed her. Nor can the reduction of experience to an inarticulate affect account for the authority of experience, especially in conflicts over beliefs. This specific value accorded the viewpoint of actors and sufferers is what, late in the novel, purchases for Square “a right to opinion” in Circle’s conflict with Mother, transforming him from a neutral party and making his decision to burn Mother’s note more than just an arrogation of male privilege (VAS 294). And, finally, to abstract experience from meaning is to naturalize the most alienating feature of Square’s writing, its representation of human expression as bodily change first and only secondarily as meaningful: “A softening in Circle’s eyes, call it dilation, indicating that she was receptive” (VAS 282). If imposing this analytical distinction onto our experience feels natural to us, as though bodies were just evidence for or causes of interpretation, then that fact seems historically diagnostic. Experiencing Tomasula’s and Farrell’s typography, layout, and formatting is not a matter of responding affectively to a meaningless or ineffably meaningful materiality. Rather, it is what, in the second part of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein calls “experiencing the meaning of a word.”18 That is, the significance of Tomasula’s book, as opposed to Square’s story, is not its foregrounding of textual features that, because they convey no discursive meaning, disrupt the representational illusion, returning the reader’s attention to the surface of the page. On the contrary, the appearance of words in VAS is significant because it just is their meaning. I should add that certain features of the novel’s appearance, particularly those that are pictorial and mimetic—for instance, the cover photograph of human skin or the various cartoon ikons—function somewhat differently from the typography, layout, and formatting and seem less directly relevant to the experience Wittgenstein has described. 17

18

To my mind, the best discussion of the concept of experience is H. G. Gadamer’s in Part II of Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Doepel, Joel Weinsheimer, Donald G. Marshall, 2nd edition (New York: Continuum, 2004), 340–355. Wittgenstein’s account of experiencing words’ meaning occurs in his discussion of aspect seeing, with its famous duck-rabbit, where his aim is to show, among other things, how deeply words penetrate into our bodily reflexes and how peculiar it would be for someone to know what words mean and not experience their meaning. See, in particular, Philosophical Investigations, 213–219.

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Some other features, such as the replicated consent form (VAS 319) or the code for Chromosone 12 (VAS 202–227), function in ways specific to their role in the narrative and may or may not be relevant. However, the design of the written text has a concrete and specific significance, one that is brought out by Square’s transference of the meaning of Circle’s embodiment onto his story and the idealization of his subsequent impasse as reality’s lack, and it interprets, rather than refuting, Michaels’s account of textual materiality. To read the words of VAS as Square’s narration, that is, as telling Square’s story, we must do more than understand them within a context provided by Square’s narration, a context of other words; we must also recognize the physical features of Tomasula’s book as meaningful, as decisive for Square’s story, and this recognition will neither precede nor follow understanding the words. On the contrary, responding to the physical features of Tomasula’s book will itself be experiencing the words’ meaning, such that, even if our experience seems a mere affect, that reduction will no longer entail any contrast with interpretation.19 We can say exactly what the words of Tomasula’s book mean. All we cannot do is transfer our experience of their meaning onto anyone else. The text of pages 189–195 appears representative of the typography, layout, and formatting throughout VAS. Words on these pages occur in different fonts and type sizes, sometimes bolded, italicized, or sans serif, and the sections of text are arranged at different locations on the page or occur at irregular distances from one another. The writing is richly dialogized, with quotes attributed to Malthus and Darwin or sometimes with the changes of speakers unattributed, and the continuity of a speaker or quotation is usually indicated only by sense and typography. These pages occur between Circle’s repeating her question about Square’s vasectomy (VAS 178) and Square’s recollection of her last pregnancy, which accounts for her insistence (VAS 196 ff), and if we want to know how the intervening pages relate to this narrative context, we have to connect their discontinuous sections of text. The line on page 191, “And that was what was scaring him, he decided,” seems to continue Square’s internal monologue on pages 178–181, where, in response to Circle’s question, he puzzles over his “irrational attachment to his old body” (VAS 178). The font and type-size of these passages are identical. The line occurs in the middle of a description of Cartesians’ brutality to I take my account of experiencing the meaning of Tomasula’s work to exemplify what Stanley Cavell means in saying: “[A]bout works of art one may wish to say that they require a continuous seeing of the point,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 191.

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dogs, which is printed in an italicized, lighter, and smaller type and is preceded by the marginal exclamation, “Here be dragons!” italicized and bolded (VAS 191). I take the account of the Cartesians to be an example of “what was scaring [Square],” and I understand “Here be dragons!” to underscore its monstrousness. However, the demonstrative pronoun, “And that was what … ,” refers directly, not to the Cartesians, but to “the constant that people with facts as good as their intentions sometimes make bad decisions,” the typography again indicating the lines’ continuity (VAS 191). Although it is tempting to imagine that the lighter type means the Cartesians are in the back of Square’s mind, rather than the forefront of his consciousness, the formal idiom of the description’s prose, like the sardonic glee of the bolded line, sounds nothing like Square’s internal monologue. Nor does the Cartesians’ brutality make them an obvious example of people with good intentions making bad decisions. If, when reading Square’s internal monologue, one does not find the Cartesians example meaningful, insisting, as anyone sensibly might, that Square can neither refer to an event of which he is not conscious nor decide that it is what scares him, what grounds would I offer for my interpretation? In truth, it hardly feels like an interpretation. The significance of the Cartesians example simply occurs to me as I read, without my thinking, and when its relation to the narrative context is questioned, I have no ready reply. I might note the proximity of Square’s word “scaring” to the dogs’ “shrieks,” although proximity in VAS can mean anything or nothing, or I could draw comparisons with juxtapositions elsewhere, perhaps reinforcing their affinities with interwoven themes, but as long as my questioner does not experience the Cartesian example as meaningful, my observations will only reproduce our original discord. That the vivisection of dogs exemplifies what scares Square, that it is swept up in his “that,” rests on nothing more solid than the naturalness of their association, and the alternative to experiencing it as meaningful is not to entertain it as possible. The alternative is to find the Cartesian example without meaning in the narrative context. Michaels is right that, unlike conflicting interpretations, divergent responses to a text’s materiality tend to generate narratives of experience, not assessments of beliefs, but he is mistaken to conclude that experience and interpretation are therefore at odds or that emphasizing the former makes a text’s meaning the reader’s creation. That Circle’s body is meaningful may depend on Square’s perspective—the subject position of one who loves her—but what Circle’s worry lines, C-section scar, and stretch marks mean is hardly Square’s invention. To live in Flatland is to embody such meanings, and that another dimension is possible, makes them no less actual. On the contrary, Tomasula and Farrell’s typography,

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layout, and formatting make them as real as the piece of paper, the page, in my hand, and turning it is consenting, naturalizing this form of life. If I do not alienate myself, then like Square’s vasectomy, my consent will go without saying, but once Square’s story separates from Tomasula’s book, acknowledging it becomes another matter. It is easy to forget that VAS is written in third person. Both Tomasula’s use of free indirect discourse and Square’s position as writer of his own story insinuate an immediacy of relation that can make a line like, “And that was what was scaring him, he decided,” seem as though Square were speaking. Therefore, it can be a little jarring to read, “But Karen [Ann Quinlan] was the first I had to deal with” (VAS 193). Who addresses us? This “I” identifies himself, not merely with, but as the readers and characters (“ ‘I’ meaning us”), all of whom become identical in wondering, “How would I end her [Karen Quinlan’s] story if it was up to me?” (VAS 195). The implication is that none of us is experienced in such a context, none acts with the authority experience confers. It is this gap between our present context and our nature, by which I mean culture’s permeation of our flesh, that makes the meaning of the words “life” and “death” seem like a mere human projection. The gap materializes for the characters as the impasse in Square’s story and for the readers as its unnatural appearance. Of course, experienced readers will know from the beginning how they would end it, if up to them, but only so long as its form is not a matter of life and death, only so long as the body at issue is not “the real thing.” Just before the opera’s final act, as Square looks from the mezzanine on the opera-goers below, he wishes Circle could realize that opera and audience formed an organism, a structure, “the way a tree falling in the forest couldn’t make a sound unless—” (VAS 355). Square’s wish is for Flatland, for naturalness, for life’s immersion in context, but he immediately retracts it, knowing that “if she realized it … then it would be a denial of what he meant” (VAS 355). Acknowledging consent is relinquishing transcendence, but like unearthing repressed desires, it is nothing I can just choose to do. To experience Square’s story as Tomasula’s book means to know at every turn, forgetting the pain of knowing no better, that one is on the page one is on, that what happens happens on the plane of trying to tell it, and how could anyone fail to know this? And yet, experience is acquired on no other condition. Where detachment and perspective are not its fruits, they become the obstacles.

Part Two

Genealogies of Representation

5

Literary Archeologies in Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture Flore Chevaillier

Steve Tomasula’s work has ventured into diverse media to examine and reconfigure the possibilities of narrative. Tomasula’s early experiments with multimedia fiction, such as “Dog” (2000) and “C-U-See-Me” (2000), his essays on genetic art including “Gene(sis)” and “Genetic Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,” and his essay on the relationship between image and text, “Art in the Age of the Individual’s Mechanical Reproduction,” all illuminate the impact of technology on our lives.1 Tomasula’s latest TOC: A New Media Novel (2009) involves digital technologies even more directly: it presents an assemblage of text, film, music, photography, spoken words, animation, and painting about our conception and experience of time—the invention of the second, the beating of a heart, the spiritual and everyday use of human time, and the history of their past and future. In this work, “ ‘time’ [is] one of the materials [of the novel]: […] the clock inside the computer [is] read on as part of the story, along with the language, visuals, music, programming, and other elements that can be used to tell a story digitally. TOC is a time-arts piece in that it is both read and plays out in real time.”2 Thus, much like The Book of Portraiture (2007), “which makes the materials of the novel part of the story it tells,” TOC uses time as a material that can be manipulated in the artistic process and in the process of reading.3 Tomasula’s interest in the materials of texts and in the intersections between technology and the human has led him to explore how the bodies of texts and of humans are constantly reshaped, modified, and “edited.” Therefore, his fictions ask questions about embodiment and materiality 1

2 3

For a complete bibliography of Tomasula’s extensive essays, see Steve Tomasula, “Author’s Homepage,” accessed February 20, 2008, http://www.stevetomasula.com Steve Tomasula, interview by Flore Chevaillier, March 29, 2006, transcript. Tomasula, “Electricians, Wig makers, and Staging the New Novel,” 5.

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in the physical realm of the body and in the intellectual realm of writing and reading. In VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2004 [2002]) and The Book of Portraiture (2006), Tomasula’s exploration of the material of the book and of human modes of representation leads to a dramatization of narrative, thereby emphasizing the physicality of the modes of production and presentation of literature. In fact, Tomasula “really want[s] to make books that are material objects.”4 To this end, he collaborated with graphic designer Stephen Farrell to create VAS; the novel is composed of a collage of documents from across popular culture and the sciences. These documents are enmeshed with the life of Square, a writer whose wife suggests that he have a vasectomy after she has a miscarriage and an abortion. Initially, Tomasula’s work on VAS was to be incorporated as the last chapter of The Book of Portraiture, but VAS took a life of its own. Consequently, Tomasula thinks “of The Book of Portraiture and VAS as two volumes of a single work.”5 That is why it is not surprising to see in The Book of Portraiture questions parallel to those explored in VAS: both novels make visible the pagination of fiction, the contexts of publication, the manipulative abilities and effects of all media, and the role a consciousness of media can play in prompting questions about human existence. Unlike VAS, however, The Book of Portraiture focuses more specifically on the relationship between textual and visual productions in the act of portraiture. The novel is “a postmodern epic in writing and images” about how we represent ourselves, thereby shaping the definitions of humanity.6 The Book of Portraiture’s depiction of the act of portraiture starts with humans’ initial linguistic steps and ends with the production of the DNA alphabet. The first chapter explores the creation of the phonetic alphabet by a character that may or may not be Moses, as he crafts what will become the story of Moses. In the second chapter of the book, we find the “restored volume” of Diego de Velázquez’s “Book of Portraiture.”7 Velázquez’s personal accounts relate his artistic research from the first days he spent at the court to his trial during the Inquisition. The third section of The Book of Portraiture focuses on a psychologist’s recording of his treatment of P., who allegedly suffers from sexual repression. The documentation of Miss P.’s analysis, à la Freud’s case study on Dora, carefully documents the patient’s sexual disorder. Yet, the young woman’s therapy ends up revealing more about Steve Tomasula, interview by Flore Chevaillier. Steve Tomasula, interview by Flore Chevaillier. 6 Steve Tomasula, “Steve Tomasula.” Author’s home page. Accessed February 20, 2008, http://www.stevetomasula.com/ 7 Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture, 17. 4 5

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the psychologist’s own sexual needs than about those of his supposedly neurotic patient. Chapter four elaborates on today’s complex world of video surveillance systems, photo and identity manipulations, and digital (re)constructions. All action is captured and modified through photo or video lenses, computer screens, and hidden cameras. The characters of this section, identified by letters only, move through a maze of deception and manipulation. The last chapter of the book explores the possibility of genetic art, as Mary works on creating “Resurrection or Self-Portrait(s),” a genetic fingerprint made of the DNA of herself, her sexual partner, and a third from someone important “Like the President. Or Christ” (Book 294). Mary’s story is interlayered with a narrative set in Lebanon, which provides a reflection on the use of bodies as war martyrs. The juxtaposed narratives of the novel each have a different focus, narrative structure, tone, and voice, but there are echoes between each section—Velázquez’s Las Meninas appears in several chapters, for example. In addition, anachronisms link the artistic research of different eras: the members of the Inquisition’s sarcastic allusion to “a chamber pot” that “if enough people say so, can be a work of art,” obviously refers to Duchamp’s Fountain (Book 75). This remark also evokes the theme of art experimentation that Mary takes up in the final chapter. Furthermore, all chapters include a level of meta-fiction and ask questions about the narrator’s reliability. The second chapter, for instance, contains bracketed comments, [PAGES MISSING] or [LATER PAINTED OVER], alluding to some unknown editorial presence rooted in our world, as the typeface used in brackets is obviously coming from a computer, while the rest of the chapter mimics Velázquez’s stylized presentation of information (Book 72–73). While The Book of Portraiture’s chapters present snapshots of different stages of human history, they all set up situations in which “human beings seek to become what they are by representing it.”8 As Velázquez concludes at the end of his document, “every portrait tells more of its creator than its subjects; every portrait is and can only be a self-portrait; a portrait of its viewer, its author, a portrait of the I (nosotros)” (Book 84). This theme is carried on until the end of the novel, where we read in the last few pages of chapter five, “All people are shaped in Your image … ” (Book 316). The arc of self-portraiture from “I (nosotros)” to “You” is demonstrative of a self-reflective mode of writing that stresses artists’ self-imaging, which naturally calls for the reader’s self-examination. Tomasula’s comments on

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Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture, back cover.

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humans’ self-representing acts are therefore comments on the artifact that we are holding in our hands as well—The Book of Portraiture. Hence we must answer the question, how does The Book of Portraiture become what it is by representing it? Tomasula’s layered exploration of self-portrayal “form[s] a history of representation, especially in terms of the political or philosophical consequences that emerge from the way we represent people, and how our representations shape our lives in how we relate to each other.”9 He thereby asks questions about the present and future of the written page. Indeed, The Book of Portraiture pushes these questions to a level beyond the familiar codex binding, as it produces an archeological mode of writing that engages the materials of the novel. Tomasula’s goal in designing The Book of Portraiture with Maria Tomasula and Robert Sedlack was to make “the means and materials of representation,” which have radically changed over time, part of the story: the sketches done by a seventeenth-century artist in the novel are a form of “writing” constraint that allows him to depict people in some ways but not in others, just as the surveillance cameras and data mining used to depict people in a later chapter cause a kind of portrait to emerge, one that is very different from that of the seventeenth-century artist.10

From the second page of the novel that opens on the picture of a literal fingerprint to the “genetic fingerprint” of Mary, The Book of Portraiture’s design questions the status of literary works as immaterial. In fact, the image of a fingerprint appears after the first page, where the title of the novel is printed, and it is in fact Tomasula’s fingerprint we find where we typically expect the author’s name underneath the book’s title.11 Thus, from the beginning of the novel, Tomasula underlines the physical-ness of writing by giving the author a bodily presence in the book. The physicality of writing is also stressed by the fact that each chapter presents a specific discourse along with a stylized mode of representation that is part of the very discourse of each era. The shades of beige that color the pages of the novel materialize the excavation of social evolution, so that, if one looks at the side of the book, the archeological activity of writing, much like the strata of an archeological dig, becomes physically apparent. Steve Tomasula, interview by Flore Chevaillier. Tomasula, “Electricians, Wig makers, and Staging the New Novel,” 5. 11 Steve Tomasula to David Banash, email, September 25, 2014. 9

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As Tomasula notes, “In the first chapter the tan pages are supposed to evoke the sand that the narrator is writing in with his finger. In the last chapter, the chapter with the genetic artist, the same color is supposed to evoke skin. We (the book designer Robert Sedlack and I) were trying to pick a color that would stand in for different things in different points of the book.”12 This visual dramatization of the chapters performs the questions that The Book of Portraiture’s artists ponder. At the center of Velázquez’s project, for instance, is a crucial problem of representation, as he works through the issue of copying reality or illustrating what people know as real. He elects to use paint to create a mode of visual representation that, like the workings of a system of signs, enables the artist’s vision to become “real.” Accordingly, as he explains when finished with his painting of The Surrender of Breda, “I had achieved during an ebb of might what no general could accomplish: to recast the signs of military victory into a laurel of mortality and dignity of such leverage that Spain would seem victorious even, if need be, in retreat” (Book 42). Here, the transformation of the “real” through art raises questions about the role of the artist himself, and thus, quite logically, Velázquez notes that in his “Modern handling of paint which captures exactly what the eye sees— without mediation—yet shows it to be artifice [, … ] the gap between word and image that we unveil each time we attempt to depict one by the other” is revealed (Book 67). This treatment of paint leads to the creation of Las Meninas, which, as the painter explains, asks if “I, don Diego de Velázquez, now posed before the canvas whose back is to you was (am) painting every viewer who is myself painting myself painting this painting?—a scene that cannot be thought to exist without a viewer?—You, I?—the pivot point of all the representations within the work?” (Book 83). The Book of Portraiture itself uses its visual and linguistic media in a way that transforms it (much like Velázquez uses paint) while also stressing, metafictionally, its very existence as an artifact. Those familiar with Michel Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas in The Order of Things will see parallels between the ideas about representation articulated by Tomasula’s fictional Velázquez and Foucault’s conclusion that, in Velázquez’s work, representation “can offer itself as representation in its pure form.”13 Foucault notes that, in Las Meninas, Philippe IV and his spouse remain invisible in the picture while also being the foundation of its very existence. The sovereign and his wife are both absent and present 12 13

Steve Tomasula, interview by Flore Chevaillier. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications Limited, 1970), 16.

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from representation, so that our focus lies in the self-reflexive qualities of the painting. Velázquez’s unusual treatment of the portrait of the sovereign, “missing” from the painting that we are looking at, engages us in the act of representation because the artist is looking directly at us while we view the work of art: “we are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him.”14 In other words, Velázquez depicts the painting activity and the painter: unlike paintings that exclude the activity of representation from the work of art to direct our attention to what is being represented, Las Meninas attempts to include the act of representation itself in the portrayal of the royal family. This approach to portrayal highlights the limits of representation: traditionally, when focusing on what a painting represents, we must overlook the process of representation and the medium that made this representation possible. Velázquez, by representing the act of artistic creation, forces us to acknowledge what we ignore when we usually view paintings. Because Las Meninas encompasses a “double relation of the representation to its model and its sovereign, to its author as well as to the person to whom it is being offered, this relation is necessarily interrupted.”15 That is, art cannot represent and self-represent simultaneously; even a self-reflective mode of representation cannot escape the fact that a direct representation of representation cannot be represented. But Velázquez’s staging of this very impossibility allows a reflection on the limits of representation: because the painting captures the very oscillation between what art can and cannot represent, it prompts us to contemplate issues of representation, selfrepresentation, and misrepresentation. As such, Las Meninas marks a shift in modes of human representation, and is unsurprisingly central to Tomasula’s examination of human portrayal. The novel’s depiction of historical markers in artistic portrayal, such as Velázquez’s work, is also part of The Book of Portraiture’s self-portrait, asking readers what a book is. For this reason, the artistic materials that make the novel cannot be unnoticed—the book’s layout is not transparent; its form cannot be ignored. The Book of Portraiture’s dissolution of the confines of image and text implies that the framing, coloring, and design of pages do not function as mere decorations to the story. In incorporating historical materials and modes of representation “into the narrative, not as illustrations or decorations, but as elements that shape the story as surely as line brakes or rhymes shape a poem,” Tomasula invites his readers to see what the book

14 15

Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 6. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 16.

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has been and can become.16 Each drawing, photograph, typeface, and page design—the sand-like first chapter on which the narrator’s finger draws an alphabet, the typewriter typeface of the third chapter, the letters followed by pixel-like dots at the top of the pages of chapter four—stresses the material medium of the page and its historical mutation. The oscillation between the inconspicuousness of these materials as “background” to the story and the exposure of their physicality highlights the kind of impossibility of representation that Foucault brings up in The Order of Things. In fact, Tomasula, asks us to reconsider the book as a two-dimensional space of printed text at the same time as it points out what we take for granted about the ways texts store and display information. Chapter three prompts such reconsiderations, as it records the “treatment of sexual nervousness” (Book 17) of P., using the format of a typed script (the typeface is similar to typical twentieth-century typewriters). Each entry appears on a new page starting with the date; some entries are several pages long, while others are only a few lines. The re-presentation of the typed script includes several instances of uneven margins: words appear in the space of the margins, marking the moments when the writer did not move the carriage of the typewriter. The chapter also includes numerous notes that, in a medical style, sometimes take over the “main” text of the entry: note three on hysteria, for example, takes up most of two pages (Book 94, 95). At times, documents are inserted into the recording of P.’s therapy: photos, texts, drawings, and advertisements are printed with darker beige-colored edges, evoking the aging of old documents. Some of these visuals appear as actual pages inserted into the text: their coloring is white with dark beige edges, giving the impression that an actual document was inserted in the medical diary. Page 107, for example, features what looks like an entire advertisement entitled, “THE TIMELY WARNING: Stop the Vampire of Youth,” which describes the workings of a metal device that “does not excite erections” but “prevents emissions, even at night, by alerting the wearer before a loss is suffered” (Book 107) (see Figure 5.1). The document includes sketches of the device, description of its uses, testimonials, and the price. The insertion of the white page within the beige page gives the illusion of “direct” access to the advertising, while also self-reflectively pointing to the page of the book that we are holding— to the artificiality of the entire process of re-presentation of an allegedly twentieth-century advertisement in a re-created twenty-first-century portrayal of a supposed case of neurosis in a narrative on self-portrayal. The multitude of frames and mirroring effects draws our attention to the 16

Tomasula, “Electricians, Wig makers, and Staging the New Novel,” 5.

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Figure 5.1  Steve Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture (Normal: FC2, 2006), 107. Courtesy of the author.

acts of representation and re-presentation themselves. In other words, The Book of Portraiture, a book about self-imaging that dramatizes its own selfportrait, quite logically engages its reader in self-reflection on writing and reading experiences. Chapter four emphasizes this self-reflective process in its use of letters to name characters. The attribution of letters to each character alludes to the fact that, in today’s world, we are so immersed in letters, codes, and numbers—Social Security numbers, IP addresses, bar codes, credit card transactions—that our identity is no longer rooted in our name. This chapter plays with the concepts of “literal” and “non-literal” representation of identity. That the word “literal” both refers to nonfigurative representation and to a use of letters is important here: letters literally become people’s identity. This use of letters evokes the first chapter of the book where the alphabet, originating from a shadowing process, also becomes a literal object. In this earlier chapter, the origins of verbal representation are rooted in the image of an image: the shadow puppet of the ox that the narrator creates with his hand generates the shape of the first letter, A. The shadowing and projection of information that initiates writing in the first chapter prompts a reflection on representation: Is art a shadow

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of reality? Must it be removed from what it is representing? Here again, Foucault’s considerations on “the visible and the invisible” in art, where the artist cannot “at the same time be seen on the picture where he is represented and also see that upon which he is representing something,” are relevant.17 The Book of Portraiture attempts to capture such questions of representation in its very existence—not only in the words that make up the narration but also in the very presentation of it (i.e., its layouts, designs, and visual texts). Tomasula’s insertion of pixelated pictures of bodies (often half-nude women selling lingerie or sex) in the novel is a good example of his exploration of the capacity of representation. In these pictures, the pixels delineating the un-identifiable bodies are visible, so that the medium of representation is more accessible than that of the represented. Our focus on the pixels—also alluded to in the lines of dots following the letters (the list of characters appearing in that very page) at the top of each page of the chapters—visually stresses the fact that characters are also “pixels.” They are single points that constitute the overall image, and, like pixels, they are controllable elements. While these characters and pixels direct our attention to the artificiality of representation, the action of pixelating the body is not foreign to us: it is the mode of representation used to cover naked bodies on TV, to blur people’s faces if they have not authorized the release of their image, etc. In that sense, The Book of Portraiture points out the physicality of the technology that has become “natural” to us when encountering such images on a screen or on the cover of a gossip magazine. It also underlines that we overlook the means of display of textual information in print novels. Because the reader cannot interpret The Book of Portraiture without engaging with its physical manifestation, she must reconfigure her reading methods, while also realizing that her physical relationship with the text stresses what has become virtually invisible to her—how literature has been represented, manufactured, and produced. In chapter four, the use of manipulated images highlights these issues of representation. In a world where a “library of Virtual People” is “being developed as folders of digital information, rearrange-able, collage-able … ” (Book 205), Photo Retoucher B__ has a “hard-drive […] filled with body parts: dismembered fashion models: images of beautiful ears, lips, breasts, waxed legs, tummies, thighs, tight buns—pictures of parts of the models that he had blown up, sculpted one pixel at a time, and then reassembled, like Frankenstein” (Book 217). Even U__, a fashion model, cannot recognize her own photograph when facing some of the advertising images for which she has 17

Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 4.

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posed. Thus, the notions of origin, essence, manipulation, and power come to the forefront of U__’s story. In other words, Tomasula not only uncovers the material presence of the media he utilizes (and that we often take for granted) but also sheds light on the social forces that shape the use of such media. The first chapter establishes this mode of storytelling, as we are told that “each telling of a history, speech, situation, proclamation, translation, or revelation had to be altered, at least a little, to fit its times or the customs of its hearer” (Book 6). This sentence is printed on the light brown page characteristic of the sand-written narrative of the opening of the novel. In this chapter, the spacing between lines is quite large, and numerous pages are half filled with text and oddly located in the space of the page—some paragraphs appear toward the middle or the end of the page without apparent reason (except that we are reading the rendering of a primitive text). The document’s existence as a text written in the sand justifies the elusiveness of its presentation mirroring the ephemeral essence of sand-writing, parts of which may be erased and modified rapidly. As the narrator reminds us, though, each text, including the one that we are reading, is altered to fit the demands of the society that it is a part of; each era is, of course, oblivious to the frameworks that shape its narrative. This is obvious when, in chapter three, we face the image of a “native” couple atop the image of a European couple. In between the two images, we read, “The differences between native and civilized courtship rituals are striking” (Book 92) (see Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2  Steve Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture (Normal: FC2, 2006), 92. Courtesy of the author.

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Yet, in both pictures, the positioning and postures of the characters represented in the “native” and “European” stylized drawings are almost identical. The place (hut vs. living room) and dress code (nude vs. formal attire) of each document are obviously different, but the characters exhibit similar “courtship” practices: both women are represented as passive, while both men have an offensive, if not dominating, attitude. Here, the juxtaposition of the two pictures and the caption reveals the sexist and racist traits of the narrator, though he is evidently blind to them. Hence, each chapter of human portraiture, emblematic of a mode of representation, is also a revelation of its misrepresentations. In the fourth chapter, misrepresentation and manipulation of information become a major preoccupation: in the case of U__’s life, no narrative seems to be stable, and the alteration of “history, speech, situation, proclamation, translation, or revelation” (Book 6) mentioned in chapter one is pushed to the extreme. In U__’s world, much like in ours, human’s interactions with technology form complex patterns of life that can be tracked and monitored: consider, for example, the way the aggregation of individual on-line searches for flu symptoms can form a snapshot of the spread of the actual disease; or the way Macrosense merges data from GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, RF identity chips and other sensors to create an information-laden snapshot of people and their movements: the time stock traders report to and leave work, for example, or which nightclubs you and your friends are going to tonight.18

In the novel, such data is used to make profit (in manipulating photos that sell products), to monitor lives (in the video monitors of surveillance recordings and in the recoding of people’s purchases and personal information to craft a consumer’s identity to be stored and sold), to implement economic tasks (in the numerous monetary exchanges in the pharmacy, over the phone, online—with or without people’s knowledge or authorization). In this chapter, the narrative is interrupted by advertising and references to websites, such as “www.anywho.com,” which helps “find out the names of everyone on your block,” constantly reminding us of the ways in which economic forces shape lives (Book 159). In fact, these lives, continuously monitored, create “a kind of portrait, a portrait of the people being videotaped, but also a portrait of society and how we relate to one another, what’s become of the 18

Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” accessed December 15, 2014, http://sillagescritiques.revues.org/3562

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idea of a private individual.”19 The surveillance theme of chapter four evokes Foucault’s panoptical model, as all the information gathered on individuals has been screened by video cameras, credit card purchases, and other technological profiling. Many of these technological recordings are also modified, so that access to the “real” individuals of the story is impossible and futile. Here, the play with shadows and re-imaging initiated in previous chapters takes the form of a complex labyrinth of information that cannot be untangled. Navigating through the confusing interconnected and falsified information of chapter four leads us to question how we have come to perceive and understand what we perceive. Indeed, for Tomasula, “the creation of knowledge is endlessly interesting, especially given how much of it turns out to be wrong, mainly in terms of its workers, and their politics, and the ontology implied by one system, particularly as it evolves into another and some assumptions embodied in a way of life rise to dominate while others fade.”20 In fact, the social networks described in each chapter reveal the powers that have controlled and shaped human representation and, as Tomasula points out, these networks also produce various omissions and produce what are always later read as mis-portrayals of the humans caught in their webs. In the first two chapters, for instance, women and non-westerners remain in the background of the story—Velázquez mentions that he has a wife and a slave, but they do not have any direct impact on his endeavors or on the document that we are reading. Yet, Tomasula subtly stresses their absence in their indirect participation in the narrative; they are forces that are not at the forefront of this part of human portrayal, but their “invisibility” is crucial to the Western narrative explored in The Book of Portraiture. In fact, women start to appear in the middle chapter of the novel, which acts as a connector between the women-less and women-centered narratives. Of course, in this “hinge” chapter, women “appear as ‘text’ to be read or rather misread.”21 Later on, Mary, who adopts genes as her media, and the Arabs, who use their bodies as a statement, “speak by equating bodies with speech,” so that there is an “inversion of how their bodies had previously been equated with speech as a way to suppress them.”22 The pagination of chapter five physically roots such bodily preoccupations. Mary’s story appears on white pages that are inserted into the larger brown 19 20 21 22

Steve Tomasula, interview by Flore Chevaillier. Steve Tomasula, interview by Flore Chevaillier. Steve Tomasula, interview by Flore Chevaillier. Steve Tomasula, interview by Flore Chevaillier.

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pages that relate Saroush’s story. This physical juxtaposition of the West and the East is humorously alluded to in the text itself, when the characters wonder if they should “face the television where they could see Mecca, or face the Pepsi machine against the western wall, Mecca’s true direction” (Book 287). It is also important to note that both chapter one and five are called “In a Beginning” and have similar coloring, which prompts the reader to make direct connections between the two narratives. While the first chapter depicts the creation of the alphabet, the fifth chapter elaborates on the creation of a different kind of alphabet—DNA. Additionally, in Saroush’s story, the use of the body as a literal device of communication problematizes the endeavor of chapter one’s character, who uses his body to form the first narrative in the sand. Lastly, as Pawel Frelik notes, the coloring of the pages of chapters one and five highlights “the sand so characteristic of the region; Saroush’s homeland shares much with Moses’ place in terms of modes of inscription and representation.”23 Chapter five stresses, in its insertion of Mary’s white narrative on the brown pages, the theme of narrative physically embedded within a narrative. This physical embeddedness is a kind of response to the theme of mirroring explored in the first linguistic steps described in chapter one. Linking Mary’s and Saroush’s narratives is the reproduction of empty rectangles beginning several pages into the chapter (Book 307ff). These shapes grow and overtake the text until they fill an entire page (Book 322) (see Figure 5.3). As Frelik notes, “in another context,” these rectangles “could be yearbook photos or an image gallery, but here could be interpreted as suggestive of the shape of a coffin—both for Saroush’s daughter and the victims of a plane crash Mary is asked to identify.”24 Adding another layer of mirroring to the selfportrayal that is The Book of Portraiture, these rectangular shapes may also be miniature reproductions of the rectangular pages of the very book that we are reading. As such, they fit our contemporary mode of representation, which often relies on thumbnails. This interpretation is in line with the novel’s reflection on selfrepresentation: the stylized chapters of The Book of Portraiture exist only thanks to the digital means of the twenty-first century. As Frelik points out, “while the main impulse of The Book of Portraiture appears to be to foreground the history of self-representation in a historically accurate or, at least, compatible form, the text also constantly reminds the readers that 23

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Pawel Frelik, “Reading the Background—The Textual and the Visual in Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture,” Sillages Critiques 17 (December 15, 2014), http://sillagescritiques. revues.org/3562 Frelik, “Reading the Background.”

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Figure 5.3  Steve Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture (Normal: FC2, 2006), 317. Courtesy of the author.

its codex version, and particularly one so lavishly designed, is only made possible by electronic technologies of production.”25 In a world where the manipulation of media and portrayal has become conspicuous, is the act of portraiture an act of representation or is it a rendering of the representing process? The novel problematizes the media used for self-portrayal over 25

Frelik, “Reading the Background.”

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time, as well as its own materiality, and therefore, the materiality of the novel today, where digital forms of storytelling are prominent.26 As such The Book of Portraiture is also a portrait of what the novel can be, in an age when portraiture, while as compulsive to human beings as it was in earlier centuries, ventures into DNA writing, cloning, robotics—all part of the posthuman bodies that inhabit the twenty-first century. In this context, the impossibility of representation underlined by Velázquez, although still relevant today, has taken on another layer of paradoxes. Interestingly, this layer of paradoxes is showcased in Tomasula’s use of materials more than in the text of the novel itself, which explores new technologies only in the final chapter of its epic of portraiture. The development of technology, the basis for the novel’s very existence, is thus a fact that we are both “unaware” and “aware” of as we engage with Tomasula’s fiction. The advancement of technology-enhanced modes of representation has made the creation of a book such as The Book of Portraiture possible; it also sheds an additional layer of questioning on its concerns about self-imaging.

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Frelik also indicates that the oscillation between an awareness of the technology needed to craft a book, such as The Book of Portraiture, and the immersion in its beautiful designs relates to Jay David Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s work on remediation; see Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT, 2000). For more information on remediation and Tomasula’s work, see also the chapter dedicated to VAS in Chevaillier’s, The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction, 100–132.

6

Beyond Human Scale: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture N. Katherine Hayles

A posthuman aesthetic of entanglement In the essay “Emergence and Posthuman Narrative,” Steve Tomasula aligns the traditional narrative form—linear, causal, focused on a group of recognizable characters followed throughout—with a level of representation that he calls the Human Scale, the level at which face-to-face interactions take place.1 He points out that many other scales exist, from the microscopic to macroscales, as illustrated in Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten (para. 8). He contrasts Aldolph Northern’s painting depicting Napoleon’s retreat from Russia, with its foregrounding of a defeated Napoleon amid crowds of dark, suffering soldiers (para. 3), a Human Scale representation, with Charles Joseph Mindard’s famous graph of the statistics of Napoleon’s invasion and retreat (para. 6), a scale that far exceeds the individual. He suggests that in the contemporary period, where floods of information are available at a touch or click, the Human Scale is no longer sufficient to represent our posthuman condition. Or rather, not sufficient by itself, requiring different kinds of representations that can reflect the immense scales at which data processing and retrieval now proceed (paras. 17–21). These new kinds of stories, he argues, may be considered emergent narratives, generated by multiple agents and agencies interacting to produce unexpected and surprising effects.2 1

2

Steve Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” in Exposure/Overexposure, eds. Monica Michlin and Françoise Sammarcelli, special issue, Sillages Critiques 17 (2014), accessed August 14, 2014, http://sillagescritiques.revues. org/3318 Although there are similarities between how “emergence” is used in fields such as artificial life and Tomasula’s sense of it, there are also significant differences. One of these is the emphasis on whether emergent effects can coalesce into a higher order of organization. For many artificial life researchers, this is the point, whereas for Tomasula, emergence is associated much more with glancing connections and improbable coincidences. See, Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer.

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Tomasula’s essay provides an excellent starting point to understand the aesthetic strategies at work in The Book of Portraiture. While each individual chapter works mostly at Human Scale, with a set of characters we can understand in the ways typical of realistic novels, the entire scope of the text is much, much larger, stretching from the (fictional) invention of writing to gene manipulation in the present. Because it greatly exceeds the span of a single life, this larger scale may be considered posthuman. It is also nonlinear and noncausal, working not by direct relations between the different chapters but by glancing repetitions, odd coincidences, and subtle stagings that repeat earlier patterns. In this sense, the work as a whole is emergently posthuman, weaving patterns that do not make conventional sense but that hint at webs of connections too vast to grasp in their entirety, too tangled to represent directly. Insofar as the text can be read as a history of representation, this emergent effect suggests that such a history is impossible to represent. At best, it can only be gestured toward, evoked by images and words, hinted at by patterns that hover at the edge of coincidence, balanced between accident and design. If I were to describe this aesthetic in my own terminology (rather than Tomasula’s), I would relate it to quantum entanglement, the spooky correlation between subatomic particles that spans space and time; although many interpretations have been proposed, no one understands it completely. The spin of a photon, for example, which experiments indicate is undetermined until measured, seemingly determines the spin of the entangled photon, even if the two are far apart at the time and place of measurement. Given Karen Barad’s argument3 that quantum mechanics is the most satisfactory theory we have for explaining how the world works, including for the macroscale where classical approximations come into play, the noncausal, nonlinear aesthetic that Tomasula employs for his text seems to be consistent with the material properties of the universe as quantum mechanics expresses them, mysterious as they seem from a human perspective.

Surveillance in/of/through portraits The posthuman aesthetic of entanglement can be illustrated in the complexities and interconnections between chapter two, focused on Diego Velázquez and his masterpiece Las Meninas, and chapter four, “Pixels,” located in the contemporary moment of ubiquitous surveillance and the proliferation of virtual images and informational code. The connections that 3

See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

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emerge culminate in a re-staging of Las Meninas at the climax of chapter four, a glancing reflection that has no causal relation to its first presentation in chapter two and that seemingly emerges spontaneously from the local events surrounding it. Lacking a clear causality, the connections are nevertheless not beyond possibility, either, especially given the immense flows of images bouncing around the screens, mirrors, monitors, and other reflective and generative surfaces of chapter four. Like the small but real probability that an electron can tunnel through an energy barrier, the earlier painting seems to have tunneled through time and space to affect the present. The juxtaposition of the two chapters illustrates how the local causal narratives work together to produce the global posthuman aesthetic that emerges from the text as a whole. The book announces its visual/verbal play in the images that decorate the cover and many of its pages, in its typographic variations, and in the variously colored pages that delineate the different chapters. Viewed from the side, the page ends suggest a stratigraphic formation that is archeological in its layers, hinting that the narratives will trace winding evolutionary paths from the invention of writing in chapter one, in which letters begin as iconographic images and mutate to discrete alphabetic symbols, through to chapters four and five, recounting a present marked by surveillance and digital technologies, as well as by American imperialism, Islamic jihads, and terrorism. The narratives resist immersive readings, constantly reminding the reader of their status as fictions and representations. In chapter two, for example, the sepia-colored pages have inset white words and phrases that appear in square brackets, posing as extra-textual editorial comments such as “[pages lost]” or “[later altered]” (Book 18–19ff). Anachronisms pepper the text; in this narrative set in the seventeenth century, we are startled to see references to Pierre Menard and the anxiety of influence. The title of chapter two shows both the mimetic impulse to present the chapter as an actual account of Diego Valázquez, and the interpolations that indicate we are not to forget this is a fiction whose referent is unstable: “THE [SKETCH] BOOK OF PORTRAITURE [RESTORED VOLUME] BY DIEGO DE VALÁZQUEZ, PAINTER AND COURTIER [HOPEFUL] AS WRITTEN BY HIMSELF” (Book 18). True to the theme of the history of representation, chapter two presents Diego’s struggle4 to go beyond the conventions of his age to a more nuanced and insightful understanding of the nature of portraiture. He moves from 4

When referring to the character, I will use “Diego,” and for the historical personage, Velázquez.

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a conventional style, complete with allegorical representations, to one that strives to capture accurately outward appearances. Although he wins praise from his aristocratic patrons, he becomes dissatisfied with these also and begins to experiment with a style that aims to capture not the outward appearance but the inward personality, a risky approach that he can safely enact only with subjects without power in the court, a dwarf and a fool. He realizes that perception depends less on the eyes than on the mind. His insight is confirmed when, in a competition with two other painters, he paints on the floor an ambiguous object that could be perceived either as a gold coin or a sacramental host, depending on the viewer. When a churchman approaches known for his liking for gold, he perceives the painted object as a “gold host,” suggesting that the religious and secular inclinations are equally determining his perception. In this move, Diego already departs from realistic painting to a style that, in its emphasis on perception, links with other anamorphic paintings and anticipates the Impressionists.5 Throughout, Diego sees the importance of status at the court and recognizes the dominance of aristocratic lineage over character, ability, or ethics. As a painter, he is seen not as an artist but as a craftsman, a “lowly stretcher of canvas, a grinder of pigments” (Book 40). After an evening gala in which he was assigned the menial task of arranging the seating to reflect the proper protocol, he also refers to himself as one of the “re-arrangers of chairs,” indicating as well the triviality of events that occupy the court (Book 47). A trip to Italy heightens his awareness of his low status in Spain, for in Rome he is regarded as an artist and a humanist, the equal of poets and philosophers. When he returns to Spain, he is determined to be granted aristocratic recognition, but not even his position as King Philip IV’s favorite is sufficient to win him a certificate of Limpieza de Sangre (“pure blood”) necessary to be elevated to a title. At the same time, he also senses that the fortunes of Spain are in decline, “the fade of Spain’s rose” (Book 46) becoming increasingly apparent. One of his triumphs is a painting that shows the Spanish general Spinola not as a victor determined to vanquish his enemy, Justin of Nassau, but rather one who treated the defeated with generosity—albeit a generosity necessitated by a lack of power to do otherwise (the painting is The Surrender of Breda). He thus gives to the Spanish nobility an alibi for their growing impotence; more importantly, he understands the power of his paintings not only to shape but to alter perceptions. He sees that as Spain grows less powerful, the court’s insistence on status becomes increasingly fierce, setting up an ironic contrast 5

In particular, Édouard Manet was heavily influence by Velázquez, as were Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Francis Bacon, the British painter.

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between the putative purpose of “pure blood”—that Spain be kept strong by resisting “contamination” by Moors, Jews, or even commerce—and the reality of its dwindling power. This understanding, however, does nothing to diminish his determination to achieve a title. After his breakthrough of showing inner reality rather than outward appearance, the next step is understanding that it is “only by making visible the artist’s artifice that the art of painting can express its own essence: the directions by which the viewer is to note the breach between the marks he sees and the things he believes them to represent … a form of knowledge that signifies a way of being as well as represents” (Book 53). Smuggled into this insight is a connection that becomes fully conscious only when he is interrogated by the Inquisition. The questioning borders on the ludicrous; they demand to know, for example, why Diego did not paint Moses with the horns that Scripture said he had when returning with the stone tablets. This bizarre detail, revealed in the final chapter to be a mistranslation of “rays” for “horns (314),” nevertheless is posed as (literally) a life or death issue. Although he is forced to treat their questions with (dead) seriousness, Diego finally realizes that their questions are aimed less at ferreting out heresies than assuring the basis of their own power, the “lineage they traced directly to Christ” (74). Specifically, Diego trembles on the edge of a momentous realization that Foucault, in his masterful exposition of Las Meninas at the beginning of The Order of Things, makes explicit: in any epoch, the mode of representation is intimately connected to the exercise of power.6 For Diego, this means that the techniques of perspectival painting, of ordering perception so that everything is arranged according to a specific spatial point, reflects and instantiates a system of power in which one perspective—that of the sovereign—orders and arranges all the events around him. The realization crystallizes everything Diego has experienced at court: the power that makes the female dwarf Maribárbola play only the music she is commanded to perform, never what she wants; the disjunction between the foolishness and extravagance of the court and the merit to which the dandies pretend as a result of their “nobility”; the carelessness that sets off a conflagration when noblemen coated in wax and fur burst into a royal party and are inadvertently set on fire, destroying themselves as well as the opulent furnishings. The challenge, then, is at once to represent and at the same time reveal the connection between the mode of representation and the workings of power, the subtle, insidious ways in which perspective is not merely an 6

Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.

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artistic technique but a manifestation of a “way of being” that defines an epoch and pervades the workings of a society. The result is Las Meninas, Valázquez’s masterpiece, a painting so powerful that it has inspired centuries of artists to engage with it. Since the painting has received many, many notable interpretations, I will comment only on the aspect most applicable to this argument, the viewpoint the painting creates for the spectator and its congruence with the presumed location of the King and Queen, absent from the painting as such but reflected in the small mirror on the back wall. The painting reveals that it is the sovereign whose presence explains and orders all the personages represented in the painting—the dwarf Maribárbola, the Infanta Margaret Theresa, and the painter himself. The convergence of the sovereign’s viewpoint with that of the viewer can be understood in multiple ways. It suggests that the viewer is interpolated into this system of power; it reveals the ordering viewpoint as a social construction rather than a natural inevitability; it denaturalizes the representation and reveals it as a representation rather than an objective rendering of what is; and most importantly, it reveals the connection between the exercise of power and the techniques of perspectival painting. That the painter depicts himself within the painting indicates that he is not above or beyond this system of power but interpolated within it, as indeed Diego realized on an everyday basis. At the same time the painting, by showing only the back of the picture on which he works, intimates that regardless of the represented content (which can nevertheless be inferred to be a portrait of the sovereign), the workings of power are pervasive and cannot be escaped. Chapter four, “PIXELS,” announces its differences from chapter two with its title. Whereas Diego’s narrative is preceded by his full name and a page of lineages, the characters of chapter four are designated merely by letters and occupations, as if already experiencing the shift from the individual to “dividual” that Gilles Deleuze lays out in his famous “Postscript on the Societies of Control.”7 The page image cunningly points to the digital nature of the alphabet, insofar as it is composed of discrete symbols that can be recombined in many different arrangements, thus glancing toward the transformation of hieroglyph into symbol traced in chapter one. It also reminds us that notwithstanding the dominance of ones and zeros in our present culture, letters got there first (as John Cayley puts it).8 To keep 7 8

Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7. John Cayley, “The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text),” Electronic Book Review (September 2002), accessed August 14, 2014, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/ thread/electropoetics/literal

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track of who is speaking, the text uses not conventional dialogue signals but dotted lines across the tops of the pages, with the letter indicating the character and the length indicating how much of the page is devoted to that character. The reigning power in these pages is not the sovereign but diffuse and ubiquitous surveillance, carried out through cameras, monitors, one-way mirrors, keystroke monitoring software, databases, computer screens, handheld devices, and a host of other digital hardware and software. Middle management such as V__, a video-graphic designer, is surveilled by those above her, at the same time that she surveilles her subordinates. The recurring response, echoed over and over, is, why should you or anyone else mind, as long as you are doing nothing wrong? Like the sovereign’s power, however, the surveillance structures everyday processes so thoroughly that it amounts to a worldview, a presumption that underlies decisions and subtly shapes how life is lived. Along with surveillance, often manifested as a stream of images, go all the images being pushed out over broadcast media and print advertising. V__, the videographer, has a job that requires her to create images to accompany news stories and TV ads. Each day she is presented with a list of items that require images, which she has to create at a pace so dizzying that it puts her in a kind of dream state. In an evocative passage, the narrator notes that the images stream from her screen “out over the airways, through satellites and other nodes and systems and onto everyone’s screen as if there were no boundary between the images in her head and the images in their heads, which is probably where the images in her head came from to begin with” (164). The circulation of images saturates the cultural space with the same icons, the same kinds of associations, so that the result is a kind of group think in which it is as impossible to avoid clichés as it is to escape the power of the images to form cultural practices. In this swirling mélange, the putative origin of the images becomes as problematic as the images themselves. U__, a high-fashion model, sees this first-hand as she watches images of herself retouched, photoshopped, transformed, recontextualized, her skin color is made a shade lighter or darker, her breasts fuller or slimmer. As if to anchor herself to her own body, she has a tiny gold dumbbell inserted in her navel, testimony that her body belongs to her. At the same time, she becomes vaguely aware of an insistent force behind some of the images, as if the transformations are not merely random but are taking place along a particular vector of desire. Indeed this is the case as B__, a Photo/Digital Retoucher, becomes obsessed with her images and begins devoting hours to his fetishized version of her, an avocation that distracts his attention and desire from his putative

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girlfriend V__, who receives calls from his alibi service, strangers who agree to call with various excuses in exchange for receiving the same service themselves. V__ turns to P__, a Programmer/Hacker, for help in surveilling B__’s hard drive to determine if indeed he is cheating on her. Stymied by the physical lock that protects the hard drive from digital incursions (an ironic nod to the fact that obsolescence may be the only real defense against digital surveillance), V__ waits for her chance to have access to the physical device, worn on B’s belt as a kind of ornament, which glancingly connects with the U__’s gold dumbbell and establishes a link between U__ as an actual body and the images of her that B__ manipulates. Q__ is also obsessed with U__ but for an entirely different reason: for her U__ represents Mother, a surrogate for her actual parent now three years deceased. An Army vet who works as an Employee Profiler, Q__ suffers from PTSD, replaying over and over the moment when a young girl ran in front of their Army convoy and the driver stopped to avoid running over her, providing the opportunity for jihadists to ambush the convoy, killing almost everyone except Q__. What haunts her is the child’s smile, as mysterious as Mona Lisa’s and just as mysteriously recalling the smile from chapter two that Diego paints on Moses’s face. Punctuating the narrative are drug specifications and treatment procedures for PTSD, which Q__ encounters when she visits her psychiatrist. The protocol for such visits, interpolated onto the white page in dun-colored insets, advises the psychiatrist to “Engage the patient through appropriate ‘greeting’ gestures” and “Establish ‘rapport,’ ” while also cautioning him to “Maintain a high index of suspicion” (Book 181), repeating the patterns of patriarchal condescension laid out in chapter three in the context of a woman treated for sexual repression, when actually she is the victim of the psychiatrist’s projection. For X__, the manager of a Family Pharmacy, obsession with U__’s image takes the sleazy form of inserting her face on top of bodies he collects from porn sites, recalling the face that Diego was commanded to leave blank in his painting when auditioning for the position of court painter. The manager also buys interactive software that lets him bob the head up and down, as if giving him a blow job. Fittingly for this context, U__’s image also adorns a brand of condoms that the pharmacy sells, photoshopped in beside a male head to project the image of the perfect loving couple. X__ meanwhile surveilles N__, a Pharmacy Cashier, and T__, a Pharmacy Technician, who together are running a scam in which they sell unauthorized prescription drugs to B__ and other selected customers. The strands of the web that begin in this fashion to intersect are pulled tighter when I__, an Investigator for Family Pharmacy, becomes

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suspicious and begins surveilling N__, T__, and also X__ through keystroke monitoring software, video cameras, and other devices. The last strands are added when we discover that I__, a former FBI agent, exercises by jumping rope naked in his apartment; one day he notices that he is being watched by a neighbor with a facing window, who turns out to be P__. I__ muses on the fact that it doesn’t bother him to be watched, even when P__ also starts appearing naked, working at his computer as he watches I__ jump rope. The abnormality is not being surveilled, but knowing one is surveilled and not being bothered by it. The intersecting sight lines reach their apotheosis in a scene in the Family Pharmacy that repeats, with glancing connections as well as differences, the staging of Valázquez’s Las Meninas. The text prepares for the scene by providing an image of an artwork, currently showing at the local museum, in which a gay Japanese artist has replaced the Infanta’s face with his own. Its visual eruption into the text (Book 162) serves to remind readers of the painting’s details as well as the crucial implication that was the centerpiece of chapter two, the relation between power and artistic technique. In the Family Pharmacy scene, the staging occurs not through the medium of paint but, appropriately, through various surveillance devices. At the center of the scene, taking the place of the Infanta, is U__, the model whose images prove obsessive for B__. She has just dropped a box of condoms on which her image appears; B__ retrieves it and reverentially hands it to her, replacing the kneeling Maid of Honor whose attention is focused on the Infanta. V__, in the next aisle, has also glimpsed U__ and moves items aside so she can spy on U__’s encounter with B__, replacing another attendant in Las Meninas. The Manager X__, observing the scene and also videotaping the model U__ through the one-way mirror in his office door, stands in for the male figure at the back of the painting, poised at the threshold of the room beyond. N__ and T__ complete the scene, watching U__ and B__ from the mirror above the cash register. The whole tableau is seen by Q__ as she steps from a restroom (presumably at the front of the store). She views it in the “bowed security mirror of the store,” where she perceives “Mother posed in the center of a group of people exactly as the Amber Princess in that Old Master painting—a scene that Q__ knew wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t stumbled upon it just at that moment, that couldn’t exist without someone like her to put together its pieces: a moment frozen in time like a snapshot of poses and expressions” (Book 273). If it were not already clear, the following passage, which deserves to be quoted at length, makes the parallels explicit:

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A woman at the center of the bowed security mirror who has being offered a box she was not looking at; the man holding the box with a look of reverence; a Pharmacy Technician about to be told something by someone to whom he was not listening; another hidden woman spying through a gap in the merchandise at those in the next aisle; Q__’s own reflection in the disk of the security mirror—her face as enigmatic as the girl’s [that ran in front of the convey] and reflected again by the one-way mirror that ran along the wall—mirrors facing mirrors—like a fun house of the wider world around diminishing with each reflection till she could fit in her own mind’s eye and as though her life flashed before her eyes she was chilled by the realization that she had seen her Mother and the girl and the girl and her Mother were her—within her—and her very body ached as though it would burst, as though bursting was the only way she could get them out … . (Book 273)

Q__’s position as the viewer of the tableau parallels that of the sovereigns, a realization foreshadowed by her name: Queenie. Like the King and Queen in Las Meninas, she enters the space of the tableau through a mirror. As for the King, his position is perhaps taken by I__, who sits outside the Family Pharmacy in a van, surveilling N__’s cash register on a screen while the tableau is constructed. What are we to make of this elaborate re-staging, this re-creation through mirrors, cameras, monitors, and other surveillance apparatus of Las Meninas? Whereas perspective hinted at the ordering power of the sovereign to create a viewpoint in which everything took its proper place, the surveillance equipment creates multiple lines of sight that crisscross each other, with only Q__’s psychotic obsession to impose an order upon them. Q__ herself instantiates in her body the damages done by and to American imperialism as it seeks to order the world in its own image. Most important, perhaps, is Q__’s perception that Human Scale is no longer adequate to represent all the complex interactions and connections that saturate the tableau. Perceiving that the girl and Mother, her constant obsessive hallucinations she sees everywhere, have now penetrated her body, she feels her frame inadequate to contain them, as “her very body ached as though it would burst, as though bursting was the only way she could get them out … .” Some other scale is needed to contain these images, to understand the connections so entangled and oblique that they extend beyond human comprehension or endurance. Unable to find such a scale, Q__ leaves the Family Pharmacy and returns to the children’s playground that she haunts (and that haunts her), exploding there the grenade she has been carrying around for days, literally bursting her body in an attempt

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to exorcise connections too dense for her to bear.9 She thus re-enacts the regime of terror that she fought against but nevertheless brought back in her body to the Homeland, thus creating another glancing connection explored in the following final chapter.

Bodies in/as media The parallel narratives of the final chapter have no title, alternating on differently colored pages as they juxtapose an Islamic father somewhere in the Middle East with two bio-technicians in New York City—Mary, an aspiring artist, and Paul, her boyfriend (that both names are Biblical creates another glancing connection as the narrative proceeds). Scale enters immediately as we see Paul efficiently killing a lab mouse, the animal curious about its surroundings but “of course, oblivious to the big picture descending from above” (Book 285), that is, the killing rod and the human priorities demanding its sacrifice. “Everyone was shaped by their world, at least a little” (Book 286), Paul thinks, but despite being part of a culture that condones killing lab animals, he is still bothered by their sacrifice, their bodies making a heap as he proceeds. Saroush, the Islamic father, faces a different kind of sacrifice as the Imam comes to collect Fatima, his beloved and frail daughter, for her “martyrdom,” which the Imam assures Saroush will carry her directly into Paradise. Although Fatima is not directly identified as the girl that runs in front of the convoy and haunts Q__, the logic of the narratives suggest that she either is that girl or, at least, stands in her place. Making the sacrifice of Fatima more painful, and indeed almost incomprehensible, is the fact that Saroush has recently lost his wife to cancer. There is a connection, however; she has no chance of being treated by chemotherapy because of the American embargo, and as the Imam reminds Saroush, “the embargo was as deadly as bombs dropped on villages” (Book 298). The lab in which Mary and Paul work has been commandeered to use their DNA equipment to identify the remains—or rather fragments of the remains—of those killed in the Twin Towers attack on 9/11. The attack is commemorated by a page of pastiche (Book 297), with phrases and 9

One of the few good articles on The Book of Portraiture is Shoba Venkatesh Ghosh, “The Archeology of Representation: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture,” Electronic Book Review (December 2013), accessed August 14, 2014, http://www.electronicbookreview. com/author/shoba-venkatesh-ghosh. Inexplicably, Gosh locates the grenade explosion in the Family Pharmacy, although the text clearly indicates it is the playground. I suspect that Ghosh altered the location in her memory because thinking of it exploding in a playground with innocent children was too horrifying. Indeed, many passages in this chapter and the one following are not easy to read.

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sentence fragments from diverse contexts tossed together as if they were body fragments, including passages from the Book of Job, a string of ones and zeros, and gruesome tags identifying body parts. The page presents the reader with a jumble that refuses to be ordered into any kind of humanscaled web that makes sense. Yet the juxtaposition of the American narrative with the Middle Eastern one implies that, were we only able to see it, the oblique connections are there. Feeling a twinge of remorse for killing the mice, Paul is bothered much more by Mary’s planned art project, which will involve using his sperm to fertilize one of her eggs, with the addition of a stranger’s DNA mixed in. The project is technically demanding, and she is practicing for it by using rat egg and sperm; as soon as she masters the technique, she plans to move on to the real thing. To be effective, she argues, it can’t be faked. Meanwhile, Paul finds at the back of her home freezer compartment containers of sperm from several men, including him. Raised as a Catholic, he is filled with misgivings, although he finds it difficult to articulate a convincing rationale for his objections to Mary. The juxtaposition with the Middle East narrative, especially when Saroush takes Fatima to a “Western” beach and is scandalized by the nearnaked bodies, provides a silent commentary on the ethics of Mary’s project, in which the commodification of body parts (she sells her eggs to a fertility clinic when short of money) is taken for granted as a normal course of events. Charged with ordering supplies for the DNA lab, Paul has bookmarked sites where he could buy tomatoes that carried codfish genes so they would be less susceptible to freezing; blue cotton that didn’t have to be dyed to make jeans; synthetic skin, ears and noses grown in petri dishes; cow embryos that were part human; goats that gave steroid-laden milk; Dr. Pashvani, Dr. Woo and thousands like them asking if all plants, animals, cells—all nature— could be used as rearrangeable packets of information. (Book 312)

The swirl of information that permeated chapter four in the form of zeros and ones has now penetrated into the body, rendering DNA and associated body parts as so much data to be analyzed, massaged, manipulated, and bought and sold. Mary, we are told, does not use paint as an artistic medium, and does not associate with anyone who does. From the era when one mixed pigments to represent bodies, as Diego did, art has now entered a phase where bodies themselves constitute the artistic medium. Scale re-enters the narrative when Paul takes Mary to see the church where he grew up, which features a status of Moses with horns, echoing that

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detail from chapter two. The priest ordered them to be painted gold after the mistranslation was uncovered, in the vain hope the horns could be taken to represent rays; instead they simply look even more bizarre than they did originally. For her part, Mary is fascinated by the deep blue of a stained glass rose window, carefully photographing it. She uses the color in an artwork closely based on Eduardo Kac’s Genesis, to which Tomasula refers in his essay.10 An example of bioart, the piece encoded a Biblical phrase into the DNA of a bacterial culture, with the added feature that internet users could visit the site remotely and activate a UV light source, which presumably would encourage the bacteria to mutate, with the idea that their DNA would again be sequenced at some later point to see how the message changed. The sentence, which Tomasula renders as “LET MAN HAVE DOMINION OVER ALL THE PLANTS AND ANIMALS OF THE EARTH,” presents all the entangled complexities as if they were a simple hierarchy, with humans at the top (Book 318). Ironically, as I pointed out in my critique of Kac’s project, “Genesis” both criticizes this sentence and unwittingly enacts it through the human domination of the bacteria and other life forms involved in creating the project.11 The very small scale of these life forms (including plants in the gallery version of the installation), the work seems to imply, makes it OK to appropriate and exploit them. The theme of domination contrasts sharply with Paul’s meditation on his own entangled heritage when he revisits his home church to have a mass said for his deceased parents. He thinks about the immigrants from war-torn Europe who came to this location because of rumors they would find others from their village here: When he thought of the web of words and bodies that had been needed to bring him into existence, he couldn’t help but wonder—Who were any of them?—5,000 generations back to African Eve … as few as fifty of her descendants walking out of Africa into Europe to continue a web of chance and circumstance so old and interwoven that it almost seemed as if it was his one true creator; the number of accidents and chance encounters—a world war had to have been fought—and miscarriages, the number of births that it took to get to him as too large to hold in his mind—like thinking about god. Or infinity. (Book 315) 10

11

See Steve Tomasula, “Genetic Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,” Leonardo 31.5 (1998): 137–144. See N. Katherine Hayles, “Who Is in Control Here? Meditating on Eduardo Kac’s Transgenic Art,” The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac, eds Sheilah Britton and Dan Collins (Tempe: Institute of Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University Press), 79–86.

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The sense of a scale past human comprehension, not as violent and explosive as that tormenting Q__ but now meditative and spiritual, is repeated in the visual motif that decorates the closing pages, white lines forming rectangular boxes against a sepia background, as if they were framed portraits with the contents missing, perhaps pointing to histories yet to be written—or already existing portraits too vast to depict in their particularities, and so left blank (echoing the blank face on Diego’ portrait) to gesture toward the infinity that Paul senses. So concludes the posthuman emergent narratives of The Book of Portraiture, themselves manifestations of a contemporary aesthetic in which its entanglements with contemporary regimes of power—surveillance, data mining, the war against/with terror, genetic engineering, massive data collection—weave a web so complex, interconnected, and vast that no one can entirely control it, much less represent it in linear streams of words and images flowing across the page. As the scale grows larger, any connections revealed are bound to appear arbitrary, glancing, and coincidental, echoing through the chapters as stray bits of data that just happen to reflect or repeat other bits, hinting at but never definitively revealing a design we can comprehend. But that is precisely the point—and the point we have reached in the “ongoing impossible-to-represent history of representation.”

7

Mining the Gap: Word, Image, and Loss in Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture Birger Vanwesenbeeck

Near the end of Steve Tomasula’s novel The Book of Portraiture, a chance encounter takes place in a local pharmacy between an advertising model and the digital retoucher responsible for photoshopping so many of her globally circulating images. While standing in front of a rack with condoms that all bear the model’s picture as “the female half of a romantically perfect couple in a passionate embrace,”1 the photo retoucher asks the real-life model to autograph one of the condom boxes. It is a defining, or better still, high-definition, image for the paragone, the agonizing conflict between word and image, whose centuries long tradition Tomasula’s novel meticulously traces and unpacks. Mandatory stops in this tradition include the invention of writing, where iconic symbols are turned into arbitrary signifiers; post-Renaissance Spain where Simonides’ well-known statement of painting as mute poetry begets a new relevance in the paintings (and writings) of Diego Velázquez; the founding of psychoanalysis with its understanding of “dreams as language” (Book 1); the contemporary aesthetic appeal of transgenic art, which turns DNA code into live sculptures; and, as is the case in the pharmacy thread, the challenge to maintain a sense of self within an image-driven cybernetic society of avatars and virtual identities. Time and again in these historical face-offs, which each beget a separate chapter in The Book of Portraiture, the desire of words and images to, respectively, carry out each other’s work (and thus outdo the other on its own terrain), or to wipe themselves clean of the other’s influence altogether, are exposed as illusory and doomed attempts to undo a dialectic of intermediality that is as deeply rooted historically as it is tenacious in the present. The vaunted promise of ekphrasis to turn text into images and thus “still” the temporal flow of words by congealing them into spatial form is betrayed by the extra-referential nature of words, that is by their inability to not point 1

Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture, 270.

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beyond themselves.2 Murray Krieger, in a seminal study of ekphrasis, speaks in this regard of the “illusion of the natural sign,” the utopian desire of words to act as their own referents, that is, to evoke themselves as distinct, material objects rather than as signifying elements within a consecutive narrative chain.3 According to Krieger, this displacement from temporality to spatiality is frustrated at once structurally and affectively, by, respectively, the “incapacity of words to come together at an instant”—that is, de Saussure’s insight about the “linear” nature of the signifier—and by the poet’s own ambivalence to let go of the “freedom” that temporal flow affords.4 If stillness in movement is what gives the ekphrastic poem solidity and weight, it is also, paradoxically, what undoes ekphrasis’s very claim to vivacity, losing the patient on the table as it were even if the operation may be called a success technically speaking. Ekphrasis may in this regard appear as an example of the poet trying too hard, a pedantic, if not in fact ethically questionable, attempt to “overcome” the “otherness” of images by assimilating them into text.5 In his foundational essay on the “limits” [Grenze] of poetry and painting, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing thus accuses the ekphrastic poet of “Schilderungssucht” or “picturitis”6: “In every word I hear the labor of the poet,” Lessing writes, “but the thing itself [i.e., the image] I am far from seeing” (Laokoon 886). From the opposite end, the painter’s aspiration to coopt the narrative logic of words finds itself similarly thwarted by that medium’s structural constraints.7 Called on by the Inquisition to account for his having juxtaposed temporally disparate scenes from the lives of the Saints in one and the same painting, Tomasula’s Velázquez explains that this historical distortion follows directly from painting’s inability to represent temporal sequences. Yet, so he defends his art, the resulting artificiality of his composition is purposive in that it urges viewers to question their secular The expression “spatial form” is Joseph Frank’s, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Three Parts,” The Sewanee Review 53.4 (1945): 643–653. 3 Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 10. 4 Krieger, Ekphrasis, 10. 5 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 156. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation PT and followed by the page number. 6 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Laokoon: Oder über die Genzen der Malerei und Poesie,” in Gesammelte Werke. Zweiter Band, ed. Wolfgang Stammler (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1959), 785. 7 Lessing speaks in this regard of “Allegoristerei,” the ill-conceived attempt of visual artists to craft images that point beyond themselves, and thus tell a story (Laokoon 785). 2

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perception of time, which is linear and “immediate,” in favor of “God’s always-ever-present” (Book 66–67): My Modern handling of paint … captures exactly what the eye sees— without mediation—yet shows it to be artifice. Without mediation, then, we learn what words cannot express: the gap between word and image that we unveil each time we attempt to depict one by the other. (Book 67)

Painting’s immediacy, its inability to coopt either the extra-referentiality or temporality of words or, more precisely, its ability to only do so clumsily by rendering simultaneous that which exists sequentially in language, here becomes an ideological vehicle in the service of the Church by making present a divinely eternal now that otherwise remains hidden. Yet this reasoning also implies that it is images rather than words that are the seat of divinity, or, to put it more provocatively, that in translating Biblical stories unto the canvass, Velázquez is effectively purifying Scripture, a heresy that is not lost on the members of the Inquisition. Indeed, the next step in Velázquez’ art, as Tomasula’s artistic genealogy shows, is to create paintings that do away with referentiality altogether and that no longer point to anything besides themselves. Such auto-referentiality is at the heart of one of Velázquez’ most famous (and most mundane) paintings, his portrait of the Meninas family. Although every family portrait inevitably will have a narrative quality to it if only for the fact that the different generations it depicts tell the story of a blood line—Velázquez duly notes, for instance, that the infanta in the painting’s foreground passed away shortly after he finished the painting—Tomasula’s protagonist also cunningly obfuscates any such concerns with finitude by evoking a dazzling display of mirrors and frames that perpetually reflect each other, not to mention the inclusion of his own persona in the family portrait. Such auto-referentiality is what Velázquez, in the chapter’s closing lines, refers to as “the deepest secret of portraiture, the answer I did not make the Inquisition—every portrait tells more of its creator than its subject; every portrait is and can only be a self-portrait; a portrait of its viewer; its author; a portrait of the I (nosotros)” (Book 84). Within psychoanalysis— the topic of the chapter that immediately follows these words—the term for such auto-referentiality is of course narcissism, a pre-verbal state of holism and integration which Jacques Lacan famously associates with the order of the image and which he opposes to language-mediated realm of the Symbolic. Within the pre-verbal universe of Las Meninas, then, the gap between word and image still appears as absolute because there is as

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of yet no gap. Hence it is a pure painting devoid of any verbal tampering in a way that Lessing might have approved of it. Yet this does not mean that Tomasula buys into the territorialist purism of his Neoclassicist precursor, who, in his eagerness to render unto Ceasar what is Caesar’s and unto Christ what is Christ’s, effectively sets up a border patrol to police the boundaries between the spatial and the temporal arts. Instead, part of the relevance and appeal of The Book of Portraiture lies precisely in the way which it selfconsciously situates itself on the gap between words and images (the book is saturated with images including reproductions of paintings by Velázquez; pixelated computer images; as well as a single fingerprint that does in fact belong to the Tomasula himself;8 and different color fonts) even as it holds on to the traditional literary notions of authorship, book, and novel as well as a classical structural division into chapters. Why this attachment to a seemingly dated nomenclature and method even as The Book of Portraiture rather obviously exhibits a more hybrid approach? What does it mean for a multimedia writer like Tomasula to identify so exclusively with the genre of the novel, including with one of its foundational texts, Don Quixote, when so many of his contemporary peers—both fictional and nonfictional— have abandoned the genre in favor of other modes of expression. Why not work in hypertext; turn to flash fiction; or, as does Don DeLillo’s authorprotagonist, Bill Gray, embrace silence as the only viable alternative left for words in an image-driven society?9 Because its setting effectively raises the issues of agony and (sterile) desire, the condom scene in the pharmacy may serve as a privileged vantage point from which to explore these questions and thus help us chart the political and aesthetic stakes behind the word–image dialectic in the present as Tomasula sees them. On the one hand, the act of writing, of writing the self more precisely, is here evoked as a salvaging attempt to regain authenticity and identity within an image-driven society of artificiality and pretense. The photo retoucher’s obvious pleasure in seeing the model “[in] the flesh” (Book 271) triggers in him a desire to preserve this moment of real presence, a desire that can apparently only be fulfilled through the act of writing. On the other hand, it is a liberating moment for the model, too, one that allows her to regain a long lost sense of bodily authenticity. By marking one of the condom boxes with her signature, she sets it apart from the “doctored image repeated on box after box” (Book 270), thus breaking the 8 9

Steve Tomasula to David Banash, email, September 13, 2014. According to Don DeLillo’s contemporary author-protagonist, “[t]he withheld work of art is the only eloquence left,” Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1992), 67.

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cycle of endlessly repeated mechanical substitutions for her real self.10 When reflecting on the “anniversary of that weird day at the pharmacy” one year later, she refers to it as “that time that she got her body back—that is, since that day the ads she posed for showed photos of her as she was, her face, her eye shape, her skin tone, not those digitally manipulated ones” (Book 284). It is the palimpsestic act of writing over the image of her own body that allows her to regain the latter, thus reversing the paragone’s traditional gender dichotomy, which associates images with femininity and words with men.11 Here, by contrast, it is the female handwriting over the malemanipulated image of her that allows her to regain, maintain, and sustain her body. Indeed, one might say that is the very object that she is holding in her hands—a condom, or, as it is called in French, a préservatif—that signals this logic of preservation as it pushes back against the male carrier of information—that is, semen—that would otherwise transform her body. Put differently, it is the palimpsestic sterility of the word and image encounter, its substituting one for the other (rather than merging), that allows her to reclaim her body. Yet such a close association of writing and bodily presence goes against one of the central tenets of poststructuralist criticism, where the act of writing is predicated upon corporeal absence. As Roland Barthes famously puts it at the beginning of “The Death of the Author,” “Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”12 In Tomasula’s pharmacy scene, by contrast, writing appears as a preservative measure, one that puts the lost body back into its author, thus undoing the damage that images wreak on our selves. But then the autograph is of course a very curious form of discourse, one that, particularly as it is here evoked, belongs to the category of performative statements. For in order for the autograph to be “felicitous”—in Austin and Searle’s sense of that term—in order for it to play its role as safeguard of authenticity and identity, both the autographing agent and the recipient need to be present during the act of signing. It is only this co-presence that guarantees that it is indeed the model’s autograph, and not somebody else’s, that the photo retoucher takes 10

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12

This link between image and inauthenticity is furthermore explored by the fact that a third character believes the photoshopped image to be a picture of her mother (Tomasula, Book, 187). On the gendering of ekphrasis, see, among others, Mitchell, Picture Theory, 164ff, and James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1993 (1ff). Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142.

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home with him, a certitude that is lost when one purchases an autographed copy from a third party. Moreover, as Derrida has shown, as a form of discourse, the signature is itself contingent upon the very structure of iterability that the model seeks to undo.13 For it is only the signature’s repeatability, the fact that the model would be able to sign other boxes in exactly the same fashion, that makes it possible for the autograph to stand in for identity. It follows, then, that the interaction between word and image, as it is here evoked, may be less sterile than initially thought; and that the link between bodily identity on the one hand and writing and painting on the other cannot be reduced to being one of antithesis or equivalence. Nor has it ever been different. Commenting on the invention of writing as it grew out of the cave paintings in Altamira and Lascaux, Tomasula speaks of a “something” that informs both the acts of writing and painting alike: [Long before] men and women everywhere proclaimed their bodies to be, after all, their most potent weapons, their poems, their canvas, something powerful had been straining to come into the world. Its silent efforts were there in the bloodstains aborigines made on boulders— perfect prints of human hands—first portraits that were repeated and repeated as if out of the sheer awe that they could be repeated, and wonder at what that might mean. This something was there in cave paintings—stick figures wielding stick spears as if to shout I! I was! I did! (Book 1–2)

The “something powerful” that induces “sheer awe,” the “weaponry” that bolsters the belief in our own bodies, is none other than the perpetual wonder of representation, not the representation of reality of traditional mimesis, but the capability—or more precisely, the inability not to—capture oneself in images and words (“I! I was! I did!”), to see our selves reflected in the words or images we create. If the pleasure that primitive man derived from such doublings may be attributed to what Freud, in “The Uncanny” essay, identifies as the primordial narcissism of this primitive stage, when such doublings had not yet acquired the threatening (i.e., self-destructive) qualities associated with them in the modern era of individualism, then the model’s elated response, indicates that some of that wonder obviously persists even in the present. Writing may indeed be that space where the subject slips away but it is also the space where that loss is recovered by the text’s internalization 13

See Derrida, Limited Inc.

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of the author’s foreign body, transforming and working through it so that the latter may be incorporated symbolically within the fabric of the text. If the terminology I am using recalls that of Freud’s theory of mourning— according to which the mourner symbolically “incorporates” (einverleibet) the deceased so that he/she may live on in a psychological sense—then this is no coincidence.14 Every text bemoans the author it so necessarily removes, working through that loss and recalling the author in precisely that which is most foreign—or defamiliarizing—about it, that is, its imagery or style.15 Writing in The Book of Portraiture, then, acts like a pharmakon, as both that which kills and cures at the same time, as both a toxin and a palliative. This is of course how writing is described in that other great pharmacy scene of postmodern writing, the one presided over by Plato in Derrida’s 1972 essay. Unlike Plato, however, for whom the wonder and detriment of writing reside in its cursed ability to serve as a mnemonic device—recalling for us what the philosopher would much rather have our minds to retain actively—Tomasula is interested in how writing both removes the author and recovers (and thus mourns) him/her via precisely that which distinguishes him/her from others, that is, style. What we call poetic style is essentially the attempt to craft imagery out of words, to stall the flow of words by congealing it into spatial form. To put it in the terms of Roman Jakobson, it is to “project” the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination;16 it is, as Jakobson’s very use of the term “projection” implies, to impose a visual order on the temporal order of language.17 Signifiers, which otherwise link up with each other in a sequential fashion, suddenly call attention to themselves due to either repetitive patterning that suggests substitutability (anaphora, alliteration, chiasmus) or due to description (i.e., ekphrasis, metaphor, simile) which upholds the narrative progression. One thus arrives at the curious paradox that the literariness of a text hinges on its ability to be nonverbal, that is, visual; and that what is most foreign 14

15

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Sigmund Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie,” Gesammelte Werke Textlog. Par. 14, accessed July 10, 2014, http://www.textlog.de/freud-psychoanalyse-trauer-melancholiepsychologie.html. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation T&M and followed by the paragraph number. All translations from this essay are my own. For a comparison of Barthes’s and Freud’s views on mourning, see Kathleen Woodward, “Freud and Barthes: Theorizing Mourning, Sustaining Grief,” Discourse 13.1 (1990– 1991): 93–110. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (New York: Wiley, 1960), 358. Wendy Steiner also reads Jakobson’s projection as an example of the imposition of image over word. See Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 37, 42.

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or defamiliarizing in a literary text is at the same time that which is most proper (or proprietary) about it because such stylizations always implicitly bear the mark of its author. By autographing the condom box Tomasula’s model defamiliarizes it, turning it into an objet trouvé seemingly devoid of intention, yet her signature is also what claims it, setting the objet apart from the dozens of other boxes. Given the figurative meaning of “signature” as a shorthand for style one is moreover tempted to read the gesture as a symbol for Tomasula’s poetics in general. One other way of putting this is to say that the attempt at vivacity (or enargeia) in literature, which already the ancient Greek rhetoricians associated with ekphrasis,18 is also always the implicit attempt to symbolically revive the author. To the extent that it constitutes an attempt to bring a visual (or plastic) work of art to life on the page, ekphrasis constitutes the external equivalent of that which the process of mourning— according to a well-known formulation by Freud—seeks to do internally: to keep the deceased alive within us. The way in which each process attains this vivacity may moreover be put in complementary terms. In the same way that ekphrasis seeks to spatialize the temporal medium of words, so the process of mourning aims a (re-)temporalization of a spatial object, i.e., the body of the deceased. As Freud points out, mourning is a cannibalistic measure that aims at a piecemeal interiorization of the deceased so that the latter may be “continued in a psychological sense.”19 As with ekphrasis, therefore, where words try to act as their own referents, mourning constitutes a domestic economy—Freud speaks of it as “inner work” [innere Arbeit]20—whose seeming self-sufficiency further highlights its complementarity to ekphrasis. For neither the stilling of movement associated with ekphrasis nor the “unstilling” that characterizes mourning (the deceased living on within us) can ever be fully realized: mourning cannot reanimate the corpse; the textual corpus cannot help but be animated. In this fashion, the close integration of ekphrasis and mourning, as Tomasula evokes it in The Book of Portraiture, plays off against each other the similarly unsustainable economies of its two constituents at the same time as it highlights crucial differences between the malleability of textual and actual bodies.21 18

19 20 21

For a discussion of what ekphrasis signified in ancient rhetoric, see Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009). Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie,” 5. Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie,” 7. My thinking about the links between corpus, corpse, and the visual arts have been informed by Sarah Kofman’s superb analysis of Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Nicolaes Tulp” in her essay “Conjuring Death: Remarks on the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolas Tulp,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault, in Selected Writings, eds. Thomas Albrecht, Georgia Albert, and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 237–241.

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Yet to realize the contiguity and complementarity of the processes of mourning and ekphrasis is also to acknowledge the significance of tradition and of history more generally, which may be one reason for Tomasula’s attachment to the notions of novel, book, and authorship. Both the definite categorization of Tomasula’s title (“the book”) and the generic categorization of its subtitle (“a novel”) suggest a belief in the continued relevance of such generic markers, as does Tomasula’s self-identification as “the author” (Book 325) of the work on the acknowledgments pages that close The Book of Portraiture. That the novel closes with such a section is part of the counter-Barthesian and counter-Lessingesque logic that structures it for it is by employing and endorsing these terms that Tomasula very self-consciously assigns himself a place within a larger literary and artistic tradition. Also the novel’s classical division into five self-styled “chapters,” perhaps recalling the five sections of Greek tragedy, should be looked at in this fashion. To mourn in writing is not only to recover the author via style; it is also to work through the literary tradition that produced this author and to revisit the primal scenes of his connection to others. In short, it is to bear witness to what T. S. Eliot, in his essay on tradition, calls the “historical sense.”22 Only through this “historical sense,” which starts with the identification of oneself as author, may one hope to maintain a transformed presence within the writing one leaves behind. To assign an author to a text is indeed, as Barthes correctly asserts, “to impose a limit on [it], to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing”23 yet it is also a measure to stave off the textual equivalent of melancholia that Barthes ends up in (and indeed celebrates), a textual universe whose “structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning to ceaselessly evaporate it.”24 Within such a universe there can be no mourning for, as Freud writes, within melancholia there is no longer a central agency to steer the process: “the self itself that has become empty.”25 If the stocking reference is meant to give Barthes’s poetics an aura of eroticism and thrill, it should be noted that this is the death-wish eroticism of Thanatos, the sterile desire exemplified by the “castrato 22

23 24 25

T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1932), 4. Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 147. Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 147. Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie,” 7.

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disguised as a woman” passage from Balzac that opens his essay: “This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.”26 What is scandalous about this passage is neither its implied misogyny nor the apparent inability to decide who is speaking these words (and thus hold the speaker accountable), but rather the implications it carries for the word and image dialectic. For Balzac’s woman is of course an image, one that is summoned up by words, just as the castrato it disguises is a figure whose singing ties him to words. The significance of her disguise, then, is twofold: first of all, it registers the familiar point that words may at best pretend to coopt the corporeality of the images; more unforgivingly, it posits that the very summoning of such imagery “castrates” the verbal text, thus removing the very “pleasure” of the text which Barthes’s poetics is otherwise known for. In this logic Barthes shows himself a late descendant of Lessing who similarly (and tellingly) compares the ekphrastic poet to mutes in a seraglio.27 In both Barthes and Lessing, the interaction between (female) image and (male) word produces no legacy or offspring; there is no internalization of the author’s body; writing forecloses the mourning of the very body it removes. If Tomasula’s condom scene intuits the potential sterility of the word and image encounter, it also shrinks back from the radical effacement of authorial presence that it implies. His advertising model, as we have seen, recovers her sense of self by writing on her image representation. In her case, it is the endless proliferation of the un-marked mass-marketed condom boxes that acts as the textual equivalent of melancholia, one that she brings to a halt through the act of writing. In contrast with Barthes’s aesthetic development from work to text, then, Tomasula’s poetics is one of working through, which means that it occupies a midway position somewhere between work and text, holding on to a notion of authorship even as it acknowledges the scattering and transformation to which images and texts submit their creators. As Pawel Frelik notes in his analysis of the novel, “While postmodern historiographic fictions, or postmodern fictions in general, often dethrone or even bury the author as the voice behind narratives, The Book of Portraiture appears to resolutely mark his presence.”28 If for all its experimental fervor, The Book of Portraiture remains a remarkably structured and traditional novel, then, this orthodoxy should be directly related to the way in which it is haunted by 26 27 28

Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 142. (original emphasis). See Mitchell, Picture Theory, 155. Pawel, “Reading the Background,” 28.

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death, and is therefore anxious to recover the losses of meaning and origin that writing incurs with every mark that it makes.29 Given this deep concern with finitude and loss it is no coincidence that Tomasula’s novel closes with a reference to the Eucharist, the great Catholic ritual of mourning, whose symbolic ingestion of the body and blood of Christ is here evoked as an artwork of sorts, presided over by word and image.30 This, at least, is how it is perceived by Paul, the Polish American protagonist of Tomasula’s last chapter: “This is my blood,” the priest said, raising the chalice of wine above his head. A Mexican altar girl in dingy tennis shoes and a surplice as white as a lab coat rang the chimes, just as he had as a kid, to mark the moment of the wine’s transformation. It was about words, but also about bodies. Always the body. Even if bodies were becoming as permeable as words: him standing there because twenty-six years ago his forty-yearold parents, good Catholics to the end, bet rhythm against chemistry. (Book 315)

Paul’s musings are in part triggered by the “religious art” of his girlfriendcum-colleague Mary with whom he works in an FBI-controlled DNA lab that analyzes scraps of human flesh from blast sites in order to identify victims. If this professional work already suggests a link with mourning (the identification of remains being one of the necessary conditions for survivors to be able to mourn),31 then it is in Mary’s art project—for which she uses the lab’s equipment on the sly—that the theme of mourning is specifically connected to the loss and recovery of identity, as it is elsewhere in Tomasula’s novel. Like the bioartworks of contemporary artist Eduardo Kac,32 Mary’s is a transgenic art project, one that, in her case, aims to have one of her eggs merge with Paul’s sperm and “some junk DNA from a third person” 29

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32

For an alternative view of authorial loss and its simultaneous recovery as it pertains twentieth-century American writing, see Benjamin Widiss, Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth Century American Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). On the Eucharist as a mourning ritual, see Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, trans. and eds. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 139–164. On the importance of the identification of remains to the mourning process, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9. Tomasula explicitly cites the artworks of Eduardo Kac as an inspiration for his evocation of Mary’s transgenic art (Book 325).

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(Book 294) on a petri dish and then put the resulting on display in liquid nitrogen. For Mary, whose adoption as a child was kept a secret from her by her foster parents until she presented them with hard DNA evidence, the “poly-parentage” (Book 319) of this transgenic art project affords her a way of working through the loss of her own identity and to recover, if only symbolically, a pre-embryonic state at which she had not yet been separated from her biological parents. This urge to translate her lost identity into her artworks is already evident from an earlier bio sculpture named “Self Portrait” which consists of “an egg … encapsulated beneath a bubble that functioned as a magnifying glass, placed in the frame that used to house her baby portrait” (Book 294). What distinguishes the new art project from its predecessor is the apparent need to frame it in religious terms. After a visit to Paul’s parents’ Roman Catholic Church prompts her to photograph a rose window (because “its shape reminded her of a petri dish” [Book 314]), Mary starts to wonder about her own art’s contiguity to religion, something that is reflected in the subsequent titles she considers for it: “Trinity,” “Resurrection,” and, eventually, “Self Portrait(s).”33 Before anything else it is the corporeality of Roman Catholicism—as opposed to the cerebral nature of a Protestant upbringing which forbade her to major in art—that appeals to Mary: its iconology and its statues (the church features a copy of the Moses of Michelangelo famously interpreted by Freud) but, particularly, the bodily nature of the Eucharist: “[Paul had] never noticed how much body stuff there was in the church till Mary started asking about the cannibalism of their rituals: ‘This is my body, take and eat?’ ” (Book 314). As Paul later on comes to realize—in the passage cited above—both the Eucharistic ritual and Mary’s art project hinge on a belief in the transmutability of matter, something which not only connects them to mourning (as Freud defines it) but also to the very strategy which Tomasula relies on in order to make Mary’s artworks visible to the reader: ekphrasis. On a metatextual level, then, both the Eucharist’s transubstantiation of wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ (and its subsequent consumption by the believer) and Mary’s “Self Portrait(s)” may be read as figures for the similarly transformative mechanism of ekphrasis, which turns words into images, and then folds the resulting foreign element (which, as we have seen above, is really the transformed presence of the author) back into the text. It follows that both the Eucharist and Mary’s artwork share a refusal to accept bodies for what they constitute in the science lab where Mary and 33

Frelik, “Reading the Background,” 28.

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Paul work, that is, mere objects. It is precisely such a refusal that opens Tomasula’s chapter with Paul objecting to Mary’s quipping that “the neck of a mouse is easier to snap than a pencil” (Book 285). Put differently, it is the phenomenological distinction between Körper and Leib, between the body as a scientific object and the body as it is lived, that is at stake here. Even if, on a scientific level, the wine and bread that the priest holds up are just mere food items, this is not how they are perceived by the believer, just as Mary’s artwork is an object that has meaning beyond its instrumental value. In Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work Art,” still the best introduction to the phenomenological account of the work of art, this meaning is identified as the very “work” that artworks carry out.34 This is not to say that the instrumental value of Mary’s harvested egg— that is, its usefulness to the reproduction of the species—is irrelevant to the artwork. But this use value only gains in importance as a result of the artwork’s own phenomenological status. Even though Mary does not intend to implant the fertilized egg in a womb, it should have that “potential, at least for a while” (Book 294), as she tells Paul. Without such “Integrity of materials” (Book 294), the artwork could not be a success: “it wouldn’t get anyone’s attention if she only faked it” (Book 294). It is only because the embryo can still be allowed to follow its “natural” function that the audience will perceive its non-instrumental, that is, artistic, value. Aesthetic value has here effectively become a function of use value, thus suggesting a logic of interchangeability between the two that is brought to its breaking point as Mary’s piece acquires its final form. As her conception of the art piece develops, she starts to fantasize about obtaining the third-party DNA “from someone important … . Like the president. Or Christ” (Book 294). After researching the thirteen churches that claim to possess a part of Christ’s foreskin tissue, and not finding any “that wasn’t totally iffy” (Book 295), she settles on the idea of using a relic from “any garden-variety saint with good provenance” (Book 295). It is Paul who eventually provides her with such a relic as the two of them get ready, at novel’s end, to “borrow” (Book 320) a silver heart containing the dried blood of his namesake, Saint Paul, from his parents’ church. “Borrow” here presumably means that the silver heart will be used as a petri dish on which the poly-parented merging of Mary’s egg, Paul’s sperm, and, symbolically at least, the Saint’s blood will take place. It is therefore the very object that is meant to add aura to the work that is being instrumentalized, whereas the modern artwork itself ends up enhancing 34

Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursrpung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege. Gesamtausgabe V, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a. Main: Klostermann, 1963), 5–74.

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the relic’s aura in turn. As Paul puts it, referring to Mary’s newfound fame after she has won a major prize for techno art in Tokyo—and justifying the theft—“After you amplify the DNA, they’ll be enough relics for a million churches” (Book 320). This final image of the relic as petri dish offers an interesting counterpart to the earlier scene of the model autographing the condom box. Here, too, an image—in this case a silver plate relic—is being written over by “text”—the joint DNA material of Paul, Mary, and Paul—in order to recover (and thus also mourn) a loss of identity. Yet this time the mourning that is enacted by the word–image encounter is one that is multiple, as can be gathered from the plurality evoked in the artwork’s title. What is being mourned and recovered in “Self Portrait(s),” in contrast with the earlier “Self Portrait” piece, is at once the adoption-induced loss of Mary’s own identity and the losses of the artwork’s other (pseudo-)genetic constituents: Paul’s parents on the one hand and his Saintly namesake on the other. Such a communal or cultural form of mourning is already implicit in Paul’s reflections on the Eucharist, which occur during his attendance at a remembrance mass for his parents. His attendance at the mass (as a nonbeliever) not only indicates the need to mourn together—“he had paid to have their names said at mass, if for no other reason than to remember” (Book 313)—but it also shows how such forms of cultural mourning may be directed at more objects than one. For the church service is in fact a remembrance mass for all recently bereaved families, who paid their dues, whereas the altar girl ringing the chimes triggers in Paul a reminiscence of his own lost childhood when he performed that task (Book 315). Most significantly, the Eucharistic ritual folds these individual pockets of grief into the overall mourning for Christ now that their subjects have all been “[born] into Christ” (Book 313). If mourning is here shown to be “multidirectional”—in Michael Rothberg’s sense of that term—then it is only because such cooptability is either institutionally enforced (the church service cramming these individual losses into one and the same mass memorial service) or because of the rather obvious contiguity of Paul’s childhood to the loss of his parents; but not, so I would argue, because of a presumed spillover logic at the heart of commemoration itself.35 While it is true that Tomasula’s final 35

According to Michael Rothberg, the process of remembrance “cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites.” Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2009), 11.

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chapter juxtaposes the story thread of Paul and Mary with a (presumably) contemporaneous mourning narrative, set in the Middle East, where a Muslim father mourns the loss of his daughter, the two stories are also kept apart from each other thus highlighting the privacy of loss rather than its cooptability across cultural or historical borders. Neither does The Book of Portraiture evoke the artwork as a privileged site for facilitating such empathetic transfers of mourning, as it has been in some recent critical work.36 Rather the cultural mourning that the artwork fosters is, as with Paul’s experience of the Eucharist, one that extends the individual experience of mourning toward a communal horizon that is homogenous with it: in mourning the loss of his parents, Paul also mourns the loss of his childhood as a whole. Such homogeneity is also what characterizes the communal extension of the strategic link between ekphrasis and individual mourning as The Book of Portraiture evokes it. If, on the individual level, Tomasula’s deployment of ekphrasis serves as a measure for the mourning of authorial loss, then its communal equivalent zooms in on the passing of the literary movement of whom the author forms a part. Put differently, it is the relative lateness of Tomasula as a postmodern author that provides a cultural horizon for the link between mourning and ekphrasis in The Book of Portraiture. To the extent that it marks an attempt to still the movement of time, ekphrasis may be regarded as the master trope for lateness in literature. The awareness of being latecomers to a movement (or century) already on its way out often prompts in writers the desire to stall (and thus prolong) the historical moment through the spatiality of form, something for which ekphrasis is the most representative expression. The aestheticism of the Decadents of the late nineteenth century, with their cultivation of art for art’s sake, is the most obvious example of this kind of logic, with Dorian Gray’s abhorrence at his ever-changing portrait representing the symbolist writer’s utopian desire for stasis even as the century sped to its predestined end. But it would be as easy to show how the “millennial writers” of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century, writers whose own sense of lateness is superimposed upon that 36

As Freedberg and Gallese have shown, for instance, the neurons that are activated when we experience suffering are also activated when we see someone suffer in a painting, something that has in turn prompted a renewed interest in the ethical aspects of vivacity in literature. See in particular Jajdelska, Elspeth, et al., “Crying, Moving, and Keeping It Whole: What Makes Literary Description Vivid?” Poetics Today 31.3 (2010): 434–463. It should also be noted that that Rothberg opens his paired study of the Holocaust and colonization memory with a discussion of a painting by André Fougeron where the two are brought into contact on the canvass (33).

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of the economic system within which they wrote (and write),37 employ the trope of ekphrasis to similar ends.38 What makes this condition of postmodern lateness particularly conspicuous in an author like Tomasula is that he has made no secret of his identification with founding postmodern authors like Charles Bernstein and Robert Coover on the one hand and with theorists like Derrida and Foucault on the other.39 Like the late modernist works discussed by Fredric Jameson in A Singular Modernity, a late work like The Book of Portraiture inevitably has something formulaic about it if only for a fact that it “practices” postmodernism after that aesthetic has been duly codified and institutionalized as ideology.40 Indeed, in many ways, the issues broached by Tomasula as I have explored them here (the question of authorship, the link between writing and the body, even the question of mourning itself) cannot help but strike us as somewhat dated: in many ways it all feels like the ground it covers has been covered before, by the likes of Gaddis, Coover, and DeLillo. Yet to dismiss The Book of Portraiture on these grounds is to misrecognize the fact that there might be value in lateness, that to bring a movement or literary period to conclusion may require as much artistic skill and insight as it does to break new ground, that to “make it late” may carry as much merit as the (still prevalent) Poundian imperative to make it new. This is the case even if Tomasula’s is not the lateness of willed irreconcilability that Edward Saïd ascribes to the late works of Beethoven, works that “do not fit any scheme, and they cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and unsynthesized fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else.”41 Even though scholars 37

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According to Fredric Jameson’s famous formulation, “postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism.” Such a study would include, among others, a discussion of the centrality of the photograph in Richard Powers’s debut novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985); the direct link between death and the titular film in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1995); the significance of “the renter’s” sculpture in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2006); and the anonymous crying fit in front of art in the opening chapters of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). In each of these works, the interest in the stillness of the plastic and visual arts is ultimately a part of a complex formal strategy that simultaneously mourns the passing of its predecessor even as it seeks to prolong its aesthetic just a little longer. Such, we might say, is the inevitable paradox of lateness. Both Derrida and Foucault are referenced in the novel’s acknowledgments pages; The Book of Portraiture opens with an epigraph from Bernstein. For a discussion of Tomasula’s indebtedness to Coover, see his essay “Many Makers Make Baby Post: 40 Years of Reading ‘The Babysitter,’ ” Review of Contemporary Fiction 32.1 (2012): 219–234. See in particular Part II of Jameson’s A Singular Modernity. Edward Saïd, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Vintage, 2007), 12.

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have pointed out that The Book of Portraiture marks in some way a return to a more traditional literary form after the experimental VAS: An Opera in Flatland,42 its central themes are all too easily reconciled with the broader issues of Tomasula’s oeuvre: the concern with the body, with mortality, and with art. The challenge, then, for those of us writing literary history is to understand what “sense of an ending” (Book 293) Tomasula’s novel provides to the postmodern project. The latter phrase of course refers to Frank Kermode’s classical study by this same title; and the fact that Tomasula employs it here highlights his awareness that to be a latecomer is to be saddled with the question of meaning, both the meaning of the movement itself and of its passing. What complicates the question of meaning in Tomasula’s case is the fact that postmodernism itself has to a large extent been centered around the idea of the irrelevance or unavailability of meaning—the above-cited Barthes passage on the “ceaseless evaporation of meaning” may stand as a case in point—so that Tomasula’s hermeneutics inevitably risks placing him beyond the movement rather than as its rear guard.43 Hence, so I would argue, the particular strategic appeal of ekphrasis which allows him to simultaneously stall the mo(ve)ment and to mourn its passing in advance. The following description of Mary’s prize-winning artwork In a Beginning may serve as a case in point: Mary had contracted a lab to infuse [E.  coli bacteria cells] with a synthetic gene whose sequence of amino acids carried a message: LET MAN HAVE DOMINION OVER ALL THE PLANTS AND ANIMALS OF THE EARTH. The actual petri dish was set up in a Tokyo gallery, but anyone could see the same view of it that he and Mary were looking at by going to her website. Once there, they could use their mouse to trigger an ultraviolet flash on the bacteria. When they did, the projected circle flashed whitish, then returned to its deep blue glow, the blue of the rose window in the church Paul’s parents had been buried in. The idea was that each flash of the UV light would cause the bacteria to mutate a little, corrupting the message in a way no one would know until she translated the genetic code back into English. (Book 318)

If the gradual corruption of the artwork’s initial message may serve as a figure for the postmodern assault on meaning more generally, then Mary’s 42 43

See, for instance, the opening paragraph of Frelik, “Reading the Background,” 1. For an extensive critique of the postmodern assault on meaning, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

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retroactive “translation” attributes intentionality to it and thus articulates a belief in the recovery of its meaning. That her translation would in fact only render gibberish does not invalidate this claim for the artwork’s meaning is already implicit in the obvious irony of the opening message’s distortion by bacterial corruption: rather than confirming man’s position at the top of the food chain, the artwork becomes a measure of our frailty in the face of an eventual bacterial hegemony. Such a loss, however, is still being deferred momentarily by what is really the ekphrastic heart of this passage, that is the permanent “deep blue glow” of the petri dish that marks a stilled continuum between past and present in spite of the occasional light flashes that indicate a decay in process. I would argue that it is in a similar fashion that The Book of Portraiture both expresses its belated status as a postmodern novel and always already mourns the movement’s passing in advance. “In a Beginning,” both the title of Mary’s artwork and also of the first chapter of The Book of Portraiture, indicates that such an aesthetic of lateness necessitates a return to basics: in the case of Mary’s bio works, to the bacterial organisms that first emerged and will outlive us; in the case of Tomasula, to the discovery of art and writing, the focus of his first chapter. Tomasula’s interest in art, and in the word–image dialectic more generally, is thus ultimately a function of this concern with meaning as if by writing a history of art—from Lascaux to Kac—The Book of Portraiture is also trying to make sense of its own place within (recent) literary history.

Part Three

New Media and the Novel

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Touch and Decay: Tomasula’s TOC on iPad Kathi Inman Berens

It’s after midnight in Washington, D.C. The next morning, I’m to meet Steve Tomasula, who’s reading during the noon hour at the Electronic Literature Showcase at the Library of Congress, of which I’m co-curator.1 The hotel’s quiet hum enveloping me, I extract the DVD for TOC: A New Media Novel (2009) from its book-like cardboard container and slide the disc into my MacBook Pro’s drive. As I wait for TOC to load, I turn the DVD container over in my hands and think about how it frames the “novel.” The illustrated cardboard container opens like a book and features the four authors’ names2 printed on the spine; there’s dust-jacket copy on back, and an ISBN. The novel is a cultural totem, and TOC’s “bookishness”3 summons expectations of seriousness, relevance, immersive reading: qualities traditional literary critics sometimes doubt that electronic literature can impart. My eyes graze the jacket copy: “You’ve never experienced a novel like this.” I look up at my screen (see Figure 8.1).

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I co-curated this first exhibit of electronic literature at the Library of Congress with Dr. Dene Grigar, Associate Professor at Washington State University Vancouver, and Dr. Susan Garfinkel, Digital Reference Librarian at the Library of Congress. “E-Literature and Its Emerging Forms,” The Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (April 3–5, 2013): http://loc.gov/rr/program/elit-showcase.html The cover of TOC credits include “story by Steve Tomasula, direction and design by Stephen Farell and Steve Tomasula, programming and additional animation by Christian Jara, and sound design by Christian Jara.” Jessica Pressman uses this term to “define the [21st-century] book as an aesthetic form whose power has been purposefully employed by literature for centuries and will continue to be far into the digital age.” See Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First Century Literature,” in “Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age,” special issue, Michigan Quarterly Review 48.4 (Fall 2009): 465–483.

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Figure 8.1  An error report for a failed start of TOC. Courtesy of the author.

I noodle around with my laptop. My operating system doesn’t recognize TOC as a file that can be opened. If this were my first time reading TOC, I’d probably “never experience” it at all. I eject the DVD and I am left holding all the book’s information in my hands, but access to its contents is 3,000 miles away on my 2006 MacBook at home. Unless I decide to uninstall my machine’s current operating system and reload an older one—which I doubt Apple’s restrictive software agreements would even permit me to do—I have updated myself out of a novel. TOC’s promotional tease inadvertently highlights the obsolescence that locks away so many works of electronic literature from present-day readers. Even an exceptional work like TOC—exhibited internationally, prizewinning, the subject of many scholarly articles, underwritten by a university press—is no less subject to the cycles of novelty and obsolescence that render many works of electronic literature only slightly more enduring than a hummingbird. “The accelerating pace of technological change,” N. Katherine Hayles observes, may indicate that traditional criteria of literary excellence are very much tied to the print medium as a mature technology that produces objects with a large degree of concretization. In newer technical milieu, changing so fast that a generation may consist of only two or three years, the provisional meta-stability of technical individuals may become even less stable, so that it is more accurate to speak of continuous transformation than meta-stability at all.4

TOC’s DVD container is “concretized.” Its DVD contents are not.

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Hayles, “Tech-TOC: Complex Temporalities and Contemporary Technogenesis,” 120.

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TOC’s adaptation to Apple’s mobile operating system (iOS) in 2014 is an end-run around a “generation” that lasts only two or three years. It’s a preservation strategy that achieves its absolute goal of restoring this brilliant, canonical work to readers. But this novel that was once available to anyone running one of the two dominant operating systems (PC and Mac) is now accessible only to people who own or can borrow an iPad: an expensive device that commands less and less of the tablet market share.5 TOC is too large a file set to load on the more commonly purchased iPhone; Apple doesn’t offer that option. The glutted Apple App Store surpassed one million apps for sale in October 2013, which means TOC must vie for smaller slice of the already-niche iOS population alongside productivity apps and unironic variations on Cow Clicker.6 TOC on desktop possesses an ISBN, which aligns it with books and makes it eligible for sale on sites like Amazon.7 But only e-book apps are eligible for ISBNs in the App Store, and Apple has a lock on all iOS app distribution.8 What does TOC gain and lose in adapting to the iPad? This is rare opportunity to examine a canonical work of electronic literature where the identical content has been ported from desktop to iPad. In doing so, TOC programmer and co-author Christian Jara transformed its reader interface from click to touch, which in the iOS environment is stylized into a lexicon of eight gestures.9 The reader’s touch is a performance, not an “end-point,” as performance theorist Jerome Fletcher puts it; touch is an act of writing that “performs throughout the entire apparatus/device”: story, machine, 5

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Apple’s share of the tablet market declined from 52.8 percent in 2012 to 36 percent in 2013. During the same period, sale of Android tablets surged from 45.8 percent to 68.9 percent. See Sam Frizell, “Android Tablets Eat Up a Slice of Apple’s Market Share,” Time Magazine, March 3, 2014, accessed August 30 2014, http://time.com/11384/androidtablets-eat-up-a-slice-of-apples-market-share/. Despite Apple’s declining market share, mobile developers have been known to design for Apple’s specifications first because they are more restrictive than Android’s, and it’s easier to adapt to Android than begin with Android and adapt to Apple. TOC has yet to be adapted to Android. On October 22, 2013, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the App Store had surpassed one million apps for sale. Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker as a game satirizing social games that promote monetization and mindless social interaction such as Farmville. See Wikipedia, s.v. “Cow Clicker,” last modified August 6, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Cow_Clicker. In this essay I’ll use the “desktop TOC” to refer to laptop display as well. Effectively “desktop” means “not an iPad.” A search on TOC’s ISBN within the Apple App Store yields no results. Accessed June 1, 2014, http://itunes.apple.com/lookup?isbn=9781573661522 Those gestures are: tap, drag, flick, swipe, double tap, pinch, touch and hold, shake. See iOS Developer’s Library, “Human Interface Guidelines,” accessed June 1, 2014, https:// developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/ InteractivityInput.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006556-CH55-SW1.

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code, human body, and the physical setting in which the performance transpires.10 Part one of this essay examines the material components of TOC on desktop (2009), iPad (2014), and printed short stories (1994, 1996). TOC’s medial evolution prompts me to propose a device-specific reception history examining what’s at stake in porting desktop-born works into the touch-intensive mobile environment.11 Part two reads touch and gesture as reinflected elements of TOC, a prescient work that thematizes the probability of its own decay.

I. For literary arts, the jump from laptop to mobile is at least as profound as the jump from book to desktop computer. Having jumped twice, TOC modified itself to the aesthetic and medial particulars of each setting. But where the reader’s physical practice of interface engagement of printed TOC (in 1994) or even desktop TOC (in 2009) were relatively “trivial,”12 the physical habits of iOS engagement are active. The smaller screen means that users have to tap more often to obtain information that might be present in one click on a desktop. Apple’s Human User Interface goal is always to “let users focus on the experience and the content, not the interaction.”13 It strives to erase the traces of its mechanics, to be “intuitive.” Lori Emerson convincingly argued in her 2013 talk at the Modern Language Association Convention that Apple’s “philosophy as much as its GUI [graphical user interface] directly paved the way to the closed architecture and consumption-based design of 10 11

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Fletcher, “Introduction,” 1. I owe a debt to Katherine Hayles’ concept of medium-specific analysis, of which device specificity is a variant. In the decade since she published “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” Hayles’ MSA has been cited as a core assumption in digital humanities, media archeology, game studies, electronic literary criticism, and others. See Hayles, N. Katherine, “Code is Flat, Print is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis,” Poetics Today 25.1 (2004), 67–90. DOI: 10.1215/03335372-25-1-67 Espen Aarseth distinguishes “trivial” from “non-trivial” textual traversals. See Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 39–40. One expends “trivial effort” to read a book: tracking text with one’s eye, turning the page. One expends “non-trivial” effort to read hypertext: one chooses a link, tracks how that fits into the whole of the work, and understands the links grouped together as a node or branch. TOC on desktop mostly requires both trivial and nontrivial effort to read it: one click initiates the 30-minute Chronos narrative. The Logos interface requires nontrivial effort because readers must click the links embedded in the piano roll; this gets progressively harder as read passages disappear as possible links to click. The Island narrative also requires nontrivial effort. Apple Corporation, Human User Interface Guidelines, accessed June 1 2014, https:// developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/ InteractivityInput.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006556-CH55-SW1.

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the Macintosh.”14 Apple’s foreclosure on the philosophical value of users’ ability to modify their machine is an ideology that manifests itself today in Apple’s prohibitions against user modification of its proprietary code, such as the prohibition against “jailbreaking” one’s own iPhone to remove Apple’s limitations on modifying that phone’s operating system. Touch is the prominent design element in mobile environments, which use parallax, transparency, and color to create the illusion of depth. Parallax creates “3D” movement on 2D surfaces. iOS7 uses parallax to create a vaulting effect on its home screen. Activate an app by touching its icon on the home screen, and the others seem to fall away as the user’s perspective zooms into the opening app. For Apple, gesture is the conduit between human and device. Vibration and accelerometer, respectively, provide haptic and hapticvisual interactivity. Readers loading TOC on their iPads bring a set of haptic, proprioceptive, and gestural expectations that are at odds with TOC’s touch-passive, desktopborn user experience design. The TOC story is identical in both settings, but the habits of readerly engagement with the text are not; they are devicespecific. Apple believes that touch “gives people a close personal connection to their devices and enhances their sense of direct manipulation of onscreen objects.”15 Apple standardizes such “connection” by limiting app developers to a lexicon of eight gestures: “People generally expect gestures to work the same in all the apps they use.”16 A desktop or laptop environment, with its proxies of mouse, keypad, and keyboard, yields something that iOS does not: hover, which can be a remarkably fast way to parse information. Hover does not exist in the iOS. It is an expressive loss to artists.17 Several duos and two teams of four worked at irregular intervals over a decade to develop desktop TOC.18 The asymmetry of TOC’s narrative 14

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Emerson, Lori. “From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the UserFriendly.” This talk was culled from chapter two of Reading Writing Interfaces, online ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), accessed May 23, 2014, http:// loriemerson.net/2013/02/02/from-the-philosophy-of-the-open-to-the-ideology-of-theuser-friendly-2/. Apple Corporation, “Human User Interface Guidelines.” Apple Corporation, “Human User Interface Guidelines.” The digital poets Stephanie Strickland and Ian Hatcher presented a paper entitled “Loss of Hover,” Electronic Literature Organization Conference, “Hold the Light,” Milwaukee, WI, June 19–21, 2014. They recount adapting a 2002 Shockwave text instrument, Vniverse, to iOS in 2014. See also, http://vniverse.com/. Computer programming, animation, sound design, visual design, music, spoken narration, and storytelling: these are the different elements created by eight artists who worked on TOC, and the nine who worked on Zoe Beloff ’s “The Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A.,” excerpts of which are featured in the “Logos” sequence of TOC. I did not double count artists who worked on both projects.

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design is noticeable but not objectionable. The first QuickTime movie loaded to TOC’s “Components” file is “GlassDropsOutputs_1,” dated April 14, 2004; the last, “DVDSmlOutputsRevPC_H264,” is dated almost five years later: January 24, 2009. To give perspective on that same period, in January 2004, only Harvard students could sign up for Facebook. By January 2009, Facebook had 150 million users, and by September 2009 it had 300 million users.19 The number of Wikipedia entries doubled in 2004, “from under 500,000 articles in late 2003 to over 1 million in over 100 languages by the end of 2004.”20 By late August 2009, Wikipedia exceeded 14 million entries in all languages. While hundreds of millions of people explored the networked possibilities of Web 2.0, the TOC team hunkered down making a self-contained, multimodal story that never needed to touch the internet. The result is thirty-seven QuickTime Movie (.mov) files that are stored in the memory of the device that displays them. In 2014, this is very unusual. Cloud storage is cheap, reliable, and pervasive. The incentive to buy mp3s or DVDs, for example, is greatly diminished by on-demand access to leasing services like Spotify and Netflix. TOC in this sense is out of sync with 2014. Its medial weight, 1.75 gigabytes, is gigantic.21 1 gigabyte is equivalent to 1,024 megabytes; most apps fall into or beneath the 100–150 megabyte range. This is where TOC’s desktop heritage meaningfully differentiates it from mobile-born apps. Unlike the touch-intensive narrative experience of most literary apps, TOC’s QuickTime movies can’t be manipulated beyond entering and exiting them. One can scrub, but imprecisely, so it’s almost impossible to wind backward to hear a line again. Simogo’s heralded novel-length thriller Device 6 (2013) which weighs in at just 137 MB; it’s highly interactive: the gamer taps through the rooms to solve puzzles. TOC, at 1,792 MB, is thirteen times larger than Device 6, which plays about three times longer (six hours) than TOC. If the mobile device were real estate, most apps are row houses. TOC is Versailles.

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Wikipedia, s.v. “Timeline of Facebook,” last modified July 26, 2014, http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Timeline_of_Facebook; see also “Number of Active Users at Facebook over the Years,” Yahoo Finance, October 23, 2012, http://finance.yahoo.com/news/numberactive-users-facebook-over-years-214600186–finance.html Wikipedia, s.v. “History of Wikipedia,” last modified August 5, 2014, http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia#2004 iPads are for some people “consumption” devices where they read or watch TV; such people might be more comfortable loading a large app onto an iPad than an iPhone. It is also possible to store iOS TOC in the cloud, but one would have to install it each time one wanted to play it.

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The TOC iPad experience lets you wander Versailles, as it were, and marvel at the exquisite visuals and the quality of the writing at every level: spoken word, animation, editing. It is splendid. But just as at Versailles, mostly you look at things and keep your hands to yourself. There’s not much call for touch beyond summoning a lexia; in the Chronos section (one of the two major story nodes, the other being Logos), just one click initiates the movie, and then you watch for thirty minutes. On desktop, this is ordinary. On iPad, this is how one engages YouTube, Vimeo, and other video content. But in the class of mobile literary works developed since 2010, TOC is touch passive.22 It engages none of the haptic tools native to iOS: accelerometer, vibration, and the touch lexicon standardized by Apple. Wishing to zoom on a movie, for example, I double tapped and was repeatedly booted out of the app. I first read TOC on laptop. I wonder if for mobile natives the pacing and scope of TOC translate to iPad if the desktop experience isn’t “aesthetically funding” the mobile exploration.23 From the point of view of corporations, “digital writing is by and large still seen as digitized text formats that resemble the printed book but now permit quicker and economically advantageous distribution through various e-book formats,”24 observes Maria Engberg. But the ubiquity of mobile computing and the physical habits of interactivity it inculcates might spark, a more complex understanding of the tactile … different from the notions of the feel of a printed page or binding of a book. However, the aesthetic possibilities of a complex writing surface—with its animated, 22

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Erik Loyer, Jason Edward Lewis, and Jody Zellen have created a number of works that exploit iOS’s capacity for robust haptic engagement. These artists’ experiments, particularly Loyer’s use of accelerometer in Ruben & Lullaby (2009) and parallax in Strange Rain (2010) and Upgrade Soul (2012), broke new artistic ground. “Thinking Apple should pay @opertoon for their use of parallax graphics in iOS7, which are clearly inspired by Strange Rain,” Tweeted Mark Sample on 8 October 2013, shortly after release of iOS7. “Hear hear!” responded Loyer, “Strange Rain wasn’t the first app to use the effect, but I like to think it’s one of the best … .” See https://twitter.com/ samplereality/status/387658564451704832 and https://twitter.com/opertoon/status/ 387660436155277312 “Aesthetic funding” is a concept Brad Berens invented to explain how Shakespeare’s original audience parsed doubling in the King’s Men. See his dissertation Shakespearean Contingencies: Repertory Allusion and the Birth of Mass Culture (Ph.D. diss, U.C. Berkeley, 1998). Maria Engberg, “Performing Apps: Touch and Gesture as Aesthetic Experience,” in “Writing and Digital Media,” special issue, Performance Research: A Journal of Performing Arts 18.5 (2013), 20–27. Accessed online May 27, 2014, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.828932. Note that Engberg’s use of “complex writing surfaces” alludes to John Cayley’s seminal piece in Dichtung Digital, “Writing on Complex Surfaces” (Dichtung Digital 2): www.dichtung-digital.org/2005/2/Cayley/index.htm

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tactile and sonic capabilities—are a potential to be explored, not an inherent ever-present quality of any one medium’s affordances.25

Engberg makes the case for “polyaesthetic” engagement as a discrete “performance,” not a transhistorical or transcultural category of being. Radically individual, polyaesthetics “gives each user at each separate moment a distinct experience—a perceptual and creative event, at times musical, textual, visual or gestural, and most often all of those things at once.”26 “The novel is the most traditional, the most conservative art form there is,” Tomasula said in a 2014 interview with Huffington Post electronic literature columnist Illya Szilak.27 He continues: But genres are a way to talk about works of art or writing; and we do come to different genres with different expectations. One reason I like working in the novel form is that it’s baggy enough to include anything— letters, reports, poems—so why not music and animation? The novel naturally lends itself to a collage aesthetic, or to the sort of mindset of appropriation, or cut-paste-burn that infuses all of the arts, all of culture today. So yes, TOC is literature, in that it retains reading and language as its medium and it’s a book, even if you have to read TOC on an iPad.28

For Tomasula the novel is hospitable to “collage,” and he wants the historical freight of the genre to be “cut up” and unbound from the conventions of print literary culture. Invoking Henry James, Tomasula liberates the novel from that particular heritage and portrays it as a site where “anything” goes. Certainly that has been TOC’s evolution. Printed as a short story in 1994, and printed again in 1996 as a text-and-image story, TOC was then cut into Mobius strips and hung from the ceiling at The Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago, where Steve and Maria Tomasula (his wife) read from the work while images were projected on a screen behind them.29 After that, Tomasula recalls, 25 26 27

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Engberg, “Performing Apps.” Engberg, “Performing Apps.” Tomasula quoted in Szilak, “Interview Steve Tomasula,” accessed May 22, 2014, https:// docs.google.com/file/d/0BxFsB_7ofjCAR1BnU1pFRm0xTzA/edit Tomasula quoted in Szilak, “Interview Steve Tomasula,” accessed May 22, 2014, https:// docs.google.com/file/d/0BxFsB_7ofjCAR1BnU1pFRm0xTzA/edit Alison Gibbons, unable to procure the original stories from 1994 and 1996, contacted Steve Tomasula who provided TOC’s medial evolution via email correspondence. See Gibbons, “You’ve Never Experienced a Novel Like This: Time and Interaction When Reading TOC.” “e.b.r. (electronic book review), June 28, 2012 accessed August 30, 2014, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/linear

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the model I had more in mind was a “chamber opera”—a mini opera with the intimacy of a book, instead of a more public stage, where this individual audience member could intreat [sic; “interact”?] with a story that was told through music, and visuals as well as by reading. iPads hadn’t been invented yet, but after they came along I recognized them as the perfect “stage” for the one-to-one kind of “reading” experience I was originally hoping to create—a reading where a person could hold this chamber opera in the palm of their hands.30

Tomasula’s attention to the circuit between story/music/intimacy/grasp summons Engberg and Caley’s “complex writing surfaces.” The complexity in this case isn’t just the screen, the hands, or the intimate story, but the fast circuit moving between and through these elements: a performance in the sense of its making, like a speech act that fulfills itself in the annunciation: I thank you. I promise. I bet you. For Bakhtin, events were “unrepeatable” and so contingent: the seed of their unmaking is pent up in the doing itself.31 Similarly, the site of reading/writing digitally is an “event,” not an object. Jerome Fletcher notes: “Apparatus” refers not simply to the physical object, the hardware, but to the whole assemblage of hardware, software, code, writing, performance, usage, texts, ideology and so forth [that produces a digital text/reading]. The use of the term “event” here is important. What takes place within the apparatus is a series of events. This is the position adopted by N. Katherine Hayles: “Less an object than an event, the digital text emerges as a dance between artificial and human intelligences, machine and natural languages as these evolve together through time.”32

Hayles examines the “coordinated epigenetic dynamic” between humans and techne as exemplified in TOC and uses the dynamic as a lens through which to explore “the temporal scales involved when humans and digital media interact.”33 Whether one uses the metaphor of individual “performance” or Hayles’ massively scaled “[epigenetic] adaptation,” TOC creates conditions to appreciate the mutually adaptive force of human/machine evolution. It isn’t just that the TOC story evolved form-to-form over twenty years, nor that 30 31

32 33

Szilak, Interview. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson, Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 126–133. Fletcher, “Introduction,” 2. Hayles, How We Think.

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Tomasula is contradictory in what he wants from a novel generically, but that the full Fletcherian “apparatus” by which we perceive a performance (code, device, story, human body, physical setting, ideology, and so forth) expands concentrically around the event. These ripples are real but hard to delimit for analysis, even on the single event level. It’s a curious atavism that Tomasula’s tactic for enticing an audience to read TOC on the iPad is to depict the reading experience as “one-to-one.” Who or what is “one-to-one?” Reader and author? Reader and device? Reader and a bounded story uninterrupted by the network, by “liveness?” What is the role of the “book,” the “new media novel” in this intimate “oneto-one” setting? Tomasula trades on the long cultural history of the novel as the sine qua non immersive reading experience to vest his “new media novel” with some of the novel’s traditional attributes, and he’s not mistaken to do so. TOC is complex; it requires immersion and concentration to be read. Like poetry, it improves with rereading. “New media” stories and reading practices (skimming, partial attention) are supposed to deform precisely the deep focus TOC rewards.34 “The term new media announces its relativity,” declares Jessica Pressman. “It only has meaning in relation to ‘old media,’ and of course, what is old is always also historically specific: ‘The terms involved are not stable and true but qualitative and changing: and yet, they are often employed rhetorically as if there exists a common definition of digital, book, print culture, and so on. This paradox renders it vital that we rigorously and repeatedly examine the ways in which new and old are used.35

It may seem abrupt to classify Ed Falco’s 2009 review of TOC as historically distinct from present-day 2014, but when he describes the “new media novel” as the “current web-based amalgams of art, animation, video, sound, and narration,” he’s referring to TOC’s suite of cinematic elements that prompt interactivity that’s more typical of desktop environments than 34

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In How We Think, Hayles delves into the sources on which Nicholas Carr bases his claims in The Shallows that digital reading is “rewiring” our brains to make sustained attention and deep focus less obtainable. But after surveying the studies that point to hyperlinking’s role in the degradation of concentration, she reviews the work of neurophysiologist Stanislas Dehaene, which prompts her to assert, “Current evidence suggests that we are now in a new phase of the dance between epigenetic changes in brain function and the evolution of new reading and writing modalities on the web.” See Hayles, How We Think, 66. Jessica Pressman, “Old Media/New Media,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, eds. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Ben Robertson. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 365.

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mobile.36 Alison Gibbons has argued of desktop TOC that the long chunks of animation that can’t be scrolled or fast-forwarded produce a wait that is “important in itself, particularly in terms of the connections between HCI [human/computer interaction] and temporal experience.”37 To read TOC is to surrender control of time, an experience of constraint that might deepen the reader’s capacity to feel the clashing temporalities that disorient TOC’s characters. TOC requires something like 120 minutes to read the first time through, depending on one’s path; but although it is clearly plotted in a hierarchical structure with an epigraph, introduction, navigation screen, and two sequences (Chronos & Logos) that lead to the final node (The Island), Tomasula hasn’t necessarily designed TOC to be read sequentially, or even entirely. In a 1998 article published in Leonardo, Tomasula suggested that new media stories are “meant to be browsed.”38 In the sixteen-year interval between that statement and the launch of TOC on iPad, medial browsing has become less “novel” and novels have become browsable: networked, shared, atomized, disintegrated. Such an inversion may have left Tomasula hankering for a closed circuit of “one-to-one.”

II. Any book that can be opened to reveal legible text still “operates.” Roaming the stacks of the Library of Congress with Digital Reference Specialist Susan Garfinkel, I was struck by how any book I touched still “operated.” I would ease a book from the tightly packed shelf and it would “open” for me exactly as it had for its first readers. Book spines decay and break; but even a “broken” book is still readable to those who work around the deficiency: tying books together with ribbons or string, as my great-grandmother did her Bible. A book’s decay is visible, slow and evitable, but the “[d]eterioration of digital media is mostly unnoticeable until the file no longer works is irrecoverably lost,” notes moving image archivist Dave Rice.39 36

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Ed Falco, “New Media and Time,” review of TOC: A New Media Novel by Steve Tomasula, American Book Review 31.1 (November.–December 2009), 21–22. Gibbons, Gibbons, Alison. “You’ve Never Experienced a Novel Like This: Time and Interaction When Reading TOC,” electonic book review, June 28, 2012, accessed August 30, 2014, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/linear Tomasula, “Bytes and Zeitgeist: Digitizing the Cultural Landscape,” Leonardo 31.5 (1998), 337–344; cited in Jacques-Yves Pellegrin, “Tactics Against Tic-Toc: Browsing Steve Tomasula’s New Media Novel,” Études Anglaises 63.2 (April–June 2010), 187. Dave Rice, a moving image archivist at CUNY, Tweeted that sentence May 14, 2014 in the context of a meetup called “Digital Preservation Myths,” accessed May 29, 2014, https://twitter.com/dericed/status/466546273836105728.

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“The preservation of digital objects is logically inseparable from the act of their creation,” asserts Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Director of the Maryland Institute of Technology and the Humanities (MITH).40 He goes on to say that “The cycle between creation and preservation effectively collapses because a digital object may only ever be said to be preserved if it is accessible, and each individual access creates the object anew,” and he delineates the “.txtual condition” as “a way of capturing full-bodied haptic, even proprioceptic relations to our newest textual media.”41 A device-specific reading of TOC for iOS turns upon “haptics” (perception through touch) and proprioception (one’s sense of how one’s body interacts with its immediate environment). Driving a car is proprioceptive: our sense of self extends to the car, so if that car is struck by another, we might say, “that car hit me!”42 Haptics in the specific medial environment of a tablet versus a desktop invites different proprioceptive experiences that uniquely impact a reader’s experience of TOC, even though the source material is identical. TOC is an interactive novel, and on desktop the way it prompts clicks and responds to them is both lovely and unremarkable. But one’s posture with the iPad is more various. I’ve read TOC on my laptop and on my iPad. On the laptop, the screen was almost always on my lap, my head tilted down toward the screen. On laptop, I was inclined to read TOC when I was working or in work mode, and I touched it by proxy using my laptop’s touch pad. The iPad, by contrast, is light and portable. I have watched or engaged iOS TOC in many postures at all hours of the day. I associate the iPad with play or relaxation, so I’m more likely to pick up TOC for fun. I also read on iPad in smaller snatches of time, which inclines me to think of the lexia more like poems than chapters. Tomasula began to conceptualize adapting the print version TOC into a new media environment when he encountered e-literature on disks in the mid-90s.43 The aforementioned decadelong collaborative composition process ensued. Only toward the end of that decade did smart phones and touch aesthetic come into existence. The popularity of early-2000s BlackBerries demonstrated that non-techies wanted constant access to virtual environments, “CrackBerry,” but the BlackBerry was not a “touch” 40

41 42

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Matthew Kirschenbaum, “The .txtual Condition,” in Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Post-Print Era, eds N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 65. Kirschenbaum, “The .txtual Condition,” 65. Scott McLoud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 38. Szilak, “Interview,” 2014.

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device grounded a gestural lexicon. BlackBerry (and many Android devices) feature tiny touchpad keyboards; on iOS the keyboard is virtual.44 By the time Apple introduced the first iPhone on June 29, 2007, Tomasula and team were well into building the animations that form the TOC experience. Whether or not they knew it at the time, they were designing an aesthetic experience that’s native to the desktop. Amazon, in its algorithmic omniscience, knows something about desktop TOC that its third-party used booksellers don’t yet: unlike other “books” crated in warehouses, desktop TOC operates for a shrinking population of customers who have computers running older operating systems released prior to 2011. Amazon sells TOC at a steep 44 percent discount, which suggests it’s trying to unload the desktop version before it becomes universally obsolete. At least at this time, Amazon does not post a caveat that the book won’t open on Mac operating systems subsequent to 10.6 Snow Leopard and Windows 7. Currently Amazon sells new TOC for $9.64; used copies from third-party vendors begin at $14.47 and go up from there. Full price at the University of Alabama site is $16.95. This inversion—new is much cheaper than used—suggests the all-or-nothing economic consequence of obsolescence. We think of obsolescence as we might the baby’s growth inside the Vogue model in the Chronos narrative: a gradual process that can be anticipated in specific ways, whose progress can be monitored at regular intervals. The surprise pregnancy jolts the Vogue model, who visits daily her comatose husband. She’s befuddled in her own vapor of timelessness. But the pregnancy and the moral weight of incestuous adultery she finesses as “masturbation” because her partner is her twin jettisons her from the “jet-lagged,” “dimensionless present where they bring you your midday broth … waiting for a defining moment” (TOC). Pregnancy does not spare her the ennui and dread caused by her life’s complex temporalities (younger models, her twin/lover, impending pregnancy weight gain, graying hair). Anticipating her husband’s medical bills, she wonders how she will pay them if she’s unable to “freeze” her smile for the camera and stave off the march of girls eager to take her place. In this array of past, future and present worries, the baby’s body declares its chronic primacy. It’s a timepiece not strapped to her wrist but sunk in her belly, an “external” measure of alien time gradually growing inside her. Obsolescence is not like that. Obsolescence is more like the husband’s sudden car crash: one moment a reveler fiddling with heroin, the next a 44

At time of writing, external keyboards can be purchased and added on to an iPad, but not an iPhone.

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comatose “organic machine.” That locution “organic machine” (TOC) is the model’s. It suggests she doesn’t assign ontological priority to the human: her husband is not “on life support” (TOC). He is an “organic machine” symbiotically dependent on the machine as the machine is dependent on him. The machine requires the broken human to orient itself in time; the broken human requires the machine to oxygenate and pump his blood, the only measurement of time he can know. Obsolescence is to discover that the symbiosis is short circuited. One party no longer requires the other. TOC is a story of generation, and obsolescence is its necessary threshold. The People who inherit from Ephemera hourglass fingernails must elevate their arms as they sleep so that the sand gravity has tugged toward their fingertips should flow back toward the palms. As The People age, the “hollow artery” that conducts the sand between the two glass chambers enlarges because frictive sand wears away the aperture. The sand flows faster and faster. When The People age to the point at which their bodies can no longer tolerate the pace of accelerated organic life, they die “of natural causes.” What is “natural” here? Material obsolescence. We too are The People with glass at our fingertips. Mobile device screens are our proxies, our virtual selves blooming at the end of our fingertips. Studies from the Pew Research Internet Project suggest that the rate of adoption for mobile computing is climbing quickly.45 2012 was the first year more Americans accessed the internet via mobile device than desktop. “Software written for the first iPhones, released only six years ago in 2007, no longer works on today’s iPhones,”46 disclose Sebastian Chan and Aaron Cope. They are curators at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. According to Trevor Owens, digital archivist with the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress, the Planetary app code Chan and Cope acquired is the first mobile app code acquisition by a cultural heritage institution.47 Explaining the potential causes of digital obsolescence, Chan and Cope continue, “It might be because the operating 45

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Pew Research Internet Project, “Mobile Technology Fact Sheet,” Accessed June 2, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fact-sheet/. The Pew information is current to January 2014. Sebastian Chan and Aaron Cope, “Planetary: Collecting and Preserving Code as a Living Object,”Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (blog), August 26, 2013, http://www.cooperhewitt.org/object-of-the-day/2013/08/26/planetary-collecting-andpreserving-code-living-object. Author’s conversation with Trevor Owen via Twitter May 29, 2014. See https://twitter. com/kathiiberens/status/472100943807279104 and https://twitter.com/tjowens/status/ 472112580807643137

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system was taught a fresh new way of thinking about things. It might be because new hardware was invented that is foreign to and misunderstood by the past. Often it’s both.”48 I’m struck by their casual anthropomorphizication of code, the premise they take as axiomatic that code might be “taught” a “fresh new way of thinking about things.” “Software and hardware are separate but inescapable companions that exact a sometimes profound and warping, and sometimes destructive, influence on one another,” they note.49 TOC anticipates this in the rivalrous twins Chronos and Logos asserting primacy even as it becomes clear they are inextricably connected. Everything in the TOC story world—the characters, the haptics, the code, and the devices that conduct TOC to our (glassy) fingertips and our fingertips to TOC—everything is subject to obsolescence. But obsolescence works in the opposite direction as well. At moments TOC slyly telescopes forward through time to envision or pre-materialize aspects of our future not palpable in 1994, or 1996, or 2009 or even 2014. Elements of TOC’s story eerily presage what would become the material conditions of its existence in iOS. “ ‘Glass” fingertips in the story, like human fingertips touching a glass iPad screen, conjure touch haptics. The rivalrous twins Chronos and Logos, like hard- and software, exert a “sometimes warping, sometimes destructive influence on each other.” “Organic machines,” human-like creatures, bear time’s imprimatur as a sign of their co-evolution with techne. In this, Tomasula comments on the way in which human perception of time has moved from relational (in tandem with natural markers such as sunrise) to machinic. In so doing, humans’ perception of time has moved from an external abstraction to an abstraction calibrated by machines we attach to our bodies, such as wristwatches. Time is TOC’s theme and also, in a very material sense, its undoing. TOC is a time travel app: a “new media novel” that skirted assured death, once again, and bears the traces of the sojourn in its medial substrate. TOC’s adaptation to the iPad succeeds on its own terms, in the way of a black 1964 Thunderbird on a 5-lane freeway of SmartCars. Its ancient stylus, depicted 48

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The Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s splash page announces, “The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has acquired the iPad music application Planetary, developed by Bloom Studio Inc., along with the underlying source code, which is being freely released to enable developers to build upon and incorporate it into other software design. Released in 2011, Planetary uses the visual metaphor of celestial bodies to represent the relationship between artists (stars), albums (planets) and tracks/songs (moons). Planetary represents an important branch of interactive data visualization, which was a first in the consumer marketplace,” accessed May 29, 2014, http://www.cooperhewitt.org/planetary-bloom Chan and Cope, “Planetary Collecting.”

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always on the navigation screen next to the boxes for Chronos and Logos, reminds us that TOC is both ancient and futuristic, which we glimpse in a visual homology that suggests their transcendent kinship. TOC knew the filiation a decade before iOS was born (Figure 8.2).50

Figure 8.2  iPad as stylus for TOC. Courtesy of the author.

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Acknowledgments: I thank the Creative Media and Digital Culture program and its director Dr. Dene Grigar at Washington State University Vancouver for a post-doc fellowship at the Mobile Technology Research Initiative during summer 2012. The hands-on work building a mobile app enlarged my literary critical capacity and affirmed my sense that critical making is a form of scholarship. I dedicate this essay to Brad Berens.

9

Intermediality in Steve Tomasula’s TOC: A New Media Novel: A Semiological Analysis Anne Hurault-Paupe

Steve Tomasula’s TOC: A New Media Novel is a collaborative effort, the result of ten years of team work involving at least fourteen people.1 Along with writing proper, it required image and sound design, programming, animation design, voice acting, music composition, painting, DVD authoring, and, later on, the preparation of an Apple application. The work’s title nevertheless foregrounds its quality as a novel, and the “Reader’s Guide” repeatedly uses the term “reader” and not “viewer” or “user.”2 This paratext creates the expectation of a primarily textual artwork, based on narration, but using an extremely modern medium, what is now called new media, that is strongly dependent on technology. This seems to imply that, contrary to multimedia art that borrows some of its processes from previously existing art forms, TOC purports to do something quite different, that is, to incorporate old and new art forms into the relatively old literary genre of the novel. It begins with a frame narrative which tells the story of Ephemera, a queen who invented a “Difference Engine” which made it possible to measure time. This led her civilization into chaos and she had to flee, giving birth to twins named Logos and Chronos during her escape, and then settled with her people on an island. This frame narrative begins in an introductory video, and then we reach the main navigation screen, which contains two sets of embedded stories: on the one hand, the Chronos animation, which tells the story of a Vogue model who is faced with a double dilemma, and on the other the Logos screen, in which we access a series of videos, parables (some of 1

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Tomasula, TOC: A New Media Novel. These fourteen individuals are credited, almost in the style of a movie credits inside the front cover of the TOC DVD. As Kristen Daly points out, several alternative terms have been coined to refer to the new roles created by digital art. She herself uses the term “viewser,” but also mentions the terms “(v)user,” “produser,” and “prosumer.” Kristen Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The interactiveImage,” Cinema Journal 50.1 (Fall 2010): 82.

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which are related to Ephemera’s story), and figures. Another click leads us to a screen representing an island, superimposed with a circle made up of moons on which we click to open parables which continue to tell the story of Ephemera’s people. Finally, after opening all the parables, we start the “Final Journey” animation that leads to the end credits. With almost constantly changing visuals interrupted by static thresholds, this novel presents a challenge: how are we to make sense of these multiple texts, images, and sounds? It is obvious from the beginning (and even from the paratext) that the novel is a reflection on time, and this provides something of a guide to the reader. While the existing work on TOC has focused on the treatment of time and on the reader’s cognitive activity when faced with this novel, my view of TOC will be based on the principle of intermediality, which is defined here as the conjunction of several semiological systems in a single artwork.3 Following Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, who notes that the prefix “inter” in “intermediality” suggests a dynamic “in-between,” I will examine how this new media novel tackles the fact that it is a hybrid of old and new media forms.4 My analysis will be twofold: first, I will consider TOC as a combination of equally significant visual, auditory, and linguistic codes. Then I will consider how the interaction of linguistic, graphic, and auditory elements turns the reader/viewer into a semiological investigator in search of a system for interpreting the novel.

Signs in TOC Before considering TOC in its totality, it is necessary to isolate its main semiological elements: texts, voices, textures, and shapes. This section will study each of these components separately and finish with an examination of the treatment of space and movement.

Texts Even though the text itself deserves a longer analysis, it is still possible to pin down some of its main semio-narrative characteristics.5 Paradigmatically, it is organized around oppositions and complementarities between time and 3

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Hayles, How We Think, 85–121; Gibbons, “You’ve never experienced a novel like this,” http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/linear; Pellegrin, “Tactics Against Tic-Toc,” 174–190. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, “Multimediality, Intermediality, and Medially Complex Digital Poetry,” Revue des Littératures de l’Union Européenne, 5 (2006): 8. For a linguistic and philosophical approach to TOC, see Pellegrin, “Tactics Against Tic-Toc.”

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space, between time as organization and time as transience, between present and past/future, between antagonistic characters, between individual and collective stories, between concrete everyday considerations and abstract reflections. Syntagmatically speaking, it is fraught with simple narrative sentences (e.g., “Late in the day, Ephemera, the queen in exile, gave birth to twins”6) that simultaneously introduce new situations and provide them with some temporal anchoring. However, it alternates these with complex, enumerative sentences that are often characterized by references to literary conventions, medicine, and science (e.g., “It was as if the one-ina-googol chance of all the iambs, throbs, arrhythmic rhythms, and other contradictions of heart had, according to the laws of probability, hit a single beat in unison”7). At intervals, Tomasula uses unexpected tenses (e.g., “as during all the times that the final bong of time seemed to toll, people reacted as they always will in the past, which is to say, true to their present”; “the organic machine that was, had been, is, her husband”8). He also has recourse to repetition, especially in the Logos scrolls (e.g., “There was a man, who was a man, who was a man [repeated eight times]”9), but these repetitions attract our attention to the importance of variations. For instance, ten out of the twenty-three Logos scrolls begin with variations on this sentence: “There was a [man/woman/people/bottlemaker] who,” and in the Chronos animation there are five reworkings of the sentence “The Vogue model, with dread in her heart, set her clock before going to bed” (TOC). However, one should rather use the plural than the singular when referring to TOC, as the media which convey these texts are significant. Indeed, the texts of TOC may be heard or read, audible or visible. This is established right from the beginning of the novel, which draws a reading/ viewing/listening contract with the “reader.” First, the epigram by Augustine is superimposed on the gradually emerging image of a planet, while an offscreen male voice enunciates an introductory riddle: “A distant world shines from another’s past that is simultaneously our future. Is this a ripple in time? Or in life?” (TOC). Then, after the planet has morphed into a glass globe, two other questions appear, written inside the sphere: “How is it possible for a day to start at dawn, and also at midnight? It is time, language, or us that has such fuzzy boundaries?” (TOC). Finally, what seems to be the same off-screen male voice begins to relate the story of Ephemera. By then, readers have learned to expect textual information to be conveyed either visually or audibly. 6 7 8 9

Tomasula, TOC, Excerpted from the introductory animation. Tomasula, TOC, Excerpted from the beginning of the Chronos animation Tomasula, TOC, Both quotes excerpted from the Chronos animation. Tomasula, TOC, Excerpted from “Escaping the Influence, 2024.”

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Indeed, right from the introductory video, we understand that typography, that is, the graphic characteristics of the text, is to play an important role, thanks to the contrasting typefaces that are used and to the inventiveness in the way they are displayed. The epigram is set in a very classical lowercase serif font, possibly Times Roman, while the two questions which appear inside the globe are in sans-serif fonts (also lowercase). In contrast, the title TOC is presented in an uppercase sans-serif font, as are the words CHRONOS and LOGOS in the main Navigation Screen. At this point, we might think that the epigram was marked as ancient by the choice of a serif font, but that this would be an isolated phenomenon. However, the Chronos animation uses diverse typefaces (both serif and sans-serif) and emphasizes varieties of writing. In particular, when the Vogue model has to make decisions concerning her pregnancy and her husband’s coma, while the off-screen voice tells us that “she played out versions of human history that differed only in duration,” (TOC) a series of book pages seem to be leafed through by an invisible hand, revealing a variety of handwritten and typed texts in many different languages (see Figure 9.1). Therefore, because hardly any reader would be

Figure 9.1 Steve Tomasula, TOC: A New Media Novel (Tuscaloosa: FC2/ University of Alabama Press, 2002), A handwritten text from the Chronos animation. Courtesy of the author.

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able to understand all these texts—which, besides, are only fragmentary— attention is drawn to writing not only as a communicative process, but also as an aesthetic act (see Figure 9.1). Not only this, but the novel also displays competing book forms: the volume embodied by the scrolls in the Logos section contrasts with the codex which appears in the passage quoted above. However, it also sets them in opposition with auditory manifestations of the word, and hence, with such media as the radio or the cinema.

Voices Throughout the novel, the image, whether it is static or moving, is accompanied by auditory signs: voices, music, and noises. While the music is extra-diegetic and is used very classically, to signal our entrance into the fiction (at the beginning of the novel) or to contrast with the catastrophes announced by the text, particularly in the “To the Island” animation, the voices are an idiosyncratic characteristic of the novel. In most fiction films, “heterodiegetic voice-over narrators speak only intermittently and do not mediate every moment of the story.”10 Conversely, heterodiegetic voice-over narrators prevail in many sections of TOC, which confirms to the readers that they are indeed reading/viewing a novel. These voices mostly belong to two storytellers. A man (Christian Jara, one of the graphic designers in the team) relates the opening story of Ephemera and speaks right from the beginning of the novel, then is heard again in the “To the Island” animation, so that we “accept [his] voice-over as primary.”11 This male narrator fits the criteria for literary omniscience: he “know[s] more than any of the characters in the story,” freely moves across time and space, and he has “privileged access to characters’ thoughts and feelings.”12 This differentiates him from the omniscient narrators of many fiction films, where “nuances of performance, close-ups, expressionistic lighting, or music” are used to “reveal characters’ thoughts and emotions.”13 However, his wispy voice is almost drowned twice: first, in the introductory video, when he tells us of the fight between Chronos and Logos, his voice is briefly almost inaudible because of the hubbub of people arguing, and second, in the “To the Island” 10

11

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Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers. Voice-over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 74. Kozloff writes that “in order to accept the voice-over as primary, as the teller of the whole film, the voice must speak at the very beginning” Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers, 77. Both quotes are from Kozloff ’s summary of the attributes of literary omniscient narrators. Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers, 80. Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers, 81.

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animation, the noise of civilization burning almost submerges it. That suggests that when the diegetic world is on the brink of catastrophe this storyteller is briefly disempowered. In the Chronos video, it is a woman’s voice (Maria Tomasula) that tells the story of the Vogue model. Since the main character of Chronos is a woman, the status of this second storyteller is less separate from the story. We might feel tempted to attribute her voice to the model herself. Besides, her voice is periodically interrupted by the voice of another woman (Michelle Grabbner), who says brief sentences (she is the one who utters the variations around “the Vogue model, with dread in her heart,” in particular). At other moments, we hear a male voice who sounds like a combination of a professor of mathematics, linguistics, and history reciting facts (e.g., “360 days has the Mesopotamian year”). As a result, this second voice-over narrator, though she remains heterodiegetic, is less omniscient than the frame narrator. She is also closer to the reader, whom she calls to witness once—“What would you do, gentle reader? Tell stories like Scheherazade, or keep your appointment at the abortion clinic?” (TOC)—as if the Vogue model’s dilemmas were her own. However, in Logos, there is no such omniscient authority. We are left to read the parables in utter silence, and the videos do not feature a uniting, recognizable voice-over. Instead, five of the eight videos feature a grating, croaking voice that explains, in a fragmentary narration, about an “influencing machine.” One of these videos (“The Influencing Machine, 1935”) shows an extreme close-up on vocal chords moving in synchronization with the voice-over as it explains the components of the machine. In another video (“Ownership, 1936”), a machine is being inserted inside a person’s open mouth, while the female narrator explains that “all those who had [her] welfare at heart” fell “under the influence of the diabolical apparatus.” By foregrounding the fragility of the narrator’s voice and the medical-looking experiments undergone by unknown characters onscreen, these videos hint at the unreliability of the narrator and draw attention to her voice as an auditory phenomenon with a specific pitch, timbre, and texture. In sum, the novel is built on the contrasts between weak and empowered, and between female and male narrators. However, these contrasts are assembled into a wider system of signs, in which graphic elements also play an important role.

Textures TOC also foregrounds textures. First, the background for most of the introductory video and for the main Navigation Screen resembles the rough and uneven surface of an old brown wall (see Figure 9.2). There seem to

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Figure 9.2 Steve Tomasula, TOC: A New Media Novel (Tuscaloosa: FC2/ University of Alabama Press, 2002), Main Navigation screen.

be wear-and-tear marks on the background, and one might even wonder if there are inscriptions among them. At any rate, the texture of the background is noticeable. The Navigation Screen also suggests other raw elements, as the Chronos drawer contains sand, and the Logos drawer, water. Each of these elements symbolizes a specific conception of time: sand refers to the counting and ordering of time thanks to hourglasses, while water refers to the transience of time, in keeping with Heraclitean philosophy.14 The presence of water is made more perceptible audibly, through the sound of water lapping.

Shapes The first shape we encounter in TOC is the rectangle of the screen, whose 16:9 aspect ratio conditions our experience of the novel. Depending on the display resolution we choose for our computer, the novel’s image can perfectly 14

Tomasula writes, “Chronos always wanted to lead, for he was certain that he knew what was what and in what order things came, but couldn’t say so without Logos’ help. Logos delighted in making all Chronos said slippery as soap and as transient as a bubble.” Tomasula, TOC.

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fit our computer’s screen, or appear in a smaller rectangle inside the main screen. As this is the most frequently sold aspect ratio for television sets and computer monitors, it makes the reading experience similar to most users’ everyday viewing, working and/or playing practices, while differentiating it from the vertically oriented format of most books. This rectangular shape is then subdivided into different smaller shapes throughout the novel, but what is striking is the recurrence of circles. As Pellegrin notices, “In a novel that comes in the telltale form of a disk, the motif of the circle proliferates.”15 Circles are the first shape we see in the introductory video, when a planet appears onscreen. This shape is particularly memorable, as the title TOC is superimposed on it (see Figure 9.3).

Figure 9.3 Steve Tomasula, TOC: A New Media Novel (Tuscaloosa: FC2/ University of Alabama Press, 2002), Introductory video; the appearance of the novel’s title.

It is then taken up by the glass globe in which images related to the story of Ephemera and her sons appear. Then, when we reach the Navigation Screen, a circular shape appears in the upper half of the screen, just left of the Chronos drawer. When we vote for Chronos, it becomes a sphere inside 15

Pellegrin, Tactics, 176.

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of which the Chronos animation is displayed. We can decide to enlarge the Chronos animation to the novel’s rectangular screen, but the animation itself is built around the repeated circular motif of an astrolabe. When we vote for Logos, the videos and the parables appear inside a magnifying glass, where they have to be watched and read, as the image cannot be enlarged (see Figure 9.4).

Figure 9.4 Steve Tomasula, TOC: A New Media Novel (Tuscaloosa: FC2/ University of Alabama Press, 2002), The magnifying glass in the Logos section.

The circular shape is then a recurring motif in the “To the Island” animation, in which the image of a planet turns into the round shape of the island. Finally, the island screen is composed of moons arranged in a circle over the island. Clicking on each moon makes a rectangular page appear, but again, the images that appear are superimposed with several circular shapes, especially that of the astrolabe which also features in Chronos. This accumulation of circular shapes creates continuity between the different sections of TOC, while at the same time graphically exploring the various connotations of the circle inside this novel by connoting the

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circularity of clock time, the eternal return of events, and the parallel between cosmic time (the planets) and measured time (the clock). A second recurring motif inside the screen is that of the rectangle, which has been placed at key moments in the novel. First, it appears in the main Navigation Screen, to the right of the magnifying glass: the two drawers into which we cast the pebble to vote for Chronos or Logos form two horizontally oriented frames within the frame and play an essential role in our navigation. Similarly, the island screen is divided into three vertically oriented rectangles with contrasting lighting (see Figure 9.5), representing the Past (Dawn), the Present (Noon), and the Future (Twilight). While these three rectangles are not navigation tools, they emphasize the organization of the stories, which in this section can be divided into three categories: they are about the People “who live in the present, those who are oriented to the Future, and those who can only look to the past.”16

Figure 9.5 Steve Tomasula, TOC: A New Media Novel (Tuscaloosa: FC2/ University of Alabama Press, 2002), The rectangles of contrasting light in the Island section.

16

Tomasula, Steve. “TOC. A New-Media Novel,” accessed March 14, 2014, http://www. tocthenovel.com/clips/readers_guide.htm.

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Most interestingly, the circular and rectangular shapes coexist within the same frame, in these two key sections of the novel. It seems logical to infer that meaning is conveyed not just by each shape in isolation, but also by the combination of the two shapes. Since there is no graphic motive drawing our attention off-screen, it is all the more noticeable that the image is divided vertically into two zones. My hypothesis for the time being is that this graphic conflict of antagonistic shapes informs us of the importance of discontinuities and of differing ways of “reading” in the novel (watching, scrolling, clicking, etc.). As the two shapes are in fact combined in the recurring oblong shape made of the crystal glass or magnifying glass and its rectangular base, we might also deduce that apparent antagonisms conceal underlying complementarity (more on this below).

Space Our apprehension of depth of field varies as we evolve through TOC. At the beginning of the introductory animation, as well as in the transition to the island and in the final animation, we are faced with the infinite space of the cosmos or with deep-focus images of the sea, which convey an impression of absolute depth. However, there is no depth at all in the greatest part of the introduction and in the main Navigation Screen where our gaze is blocked by the brown background. Instead, the presence of the glass globe and of the two drawers conveys a sense of volume to the image, as if these artifacts were protruding from it. The Chronos animation relies on the illusion of a three-dimensional space, by accumulating layers which seem to be placed one atop the other. This can be illustrated by its first two minutes: the animation begins with an extreme close up on what looks like a thread, which then becomes just one line in a grid, on which typed letters appear. Then, a clock emerges on top of this first layer, to the left, with an ultrasound scan of a fetus that seems to have been placed upon it to the right. As we move back from these images, the foreground shatters, so that it is as if all this had been placed under a glass pane. Meanwhile, atop this glass pane, the letters “TOC” have come up, soon replaced by “TIC,” while, in the background, the ultrasound scan has vanished, and instead, we see a close up on a woman lying with a cloth over her eyes, in the upper left quarter of the screen. Meanwhile, the word “STOP” becomes visible, displayed upside down in the background to the left. Soon, the woman’s image appears three times, as if three photographs had been piled upon each other (see Figure 9.6).

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Figure 9.6 Steve Tomasula, TOC: A New Media Novel (Tuscaloosa: FC2/ University of Alabama Press, 2002), Layers of images in the Chronos animation.

As we now move in, some words from the text that are being read off-screen fade in, and then fade out, between the shattered glass and the clock. When we seem to have moved across the glass pane, the background becomes white, and these layers are gradually erased, leaving only the clock. However, almost immediately, new layers with new visual elements are added. During these initial two minutes, the screen has contained up to six layers. This creates an effect of extreme depth, and, as anything is possible in computergenerated imagery, of endless possibilities. Besides, since it is also possible not to enlarge this animation and, instead, to watch it inside the glass globe which seems to protrude from the navigation screen, the effect of volume and depth is made even stronger, as the artificial volume of the image is added to its equally artificial depth.

Movement In the Chronos animation, there are no literal camera movements, as the image is computer-generated. However, this animation is made up of constantly moving images. The movement of the frame dominates, generating what appear as camera movements. For instance, in the first two

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minutes of TOC, the transition from the thread to the grid is conveyed by moving away from the thread while shifting toward the left, which reveals that the grid seems to form a sort of ceiling and this turns out to be an oblong shape. However, we also have the feeling that it is the thread itself that is moving very rapidly from right to left, and this incites us to pay attention to the new elements soon revealed in that part of the image. Similarly, at the end of this segment, when almost all the layers disappear and are replaced by a white background, new images are shown by shifting to the left. Therefore, the movements of the frame exploit not only the two dimensions of a single plane of the image (moving up or down, crossing from one side to the other), but they may also shift from one plane of the image to another (from background to foreground, etc.). The repetition of the same image several times within the screen, as when the image of the Vogue model appears three times simultaneously, reinforces this sense of overwhelming motion. This is also made more sensitive by stopping all movement at key points in the narrative. For instance, when the glass shatters, it corresponds to the off-screen voice saying “they felt as one the shattering of Time into its monumental, cosmic, historic, romantic, and personal versions” (TOC), and the image stands still for a few seconds. Transitions from one shot to another do not involve cuts; instead, components of the image morph into new ones, a process that is based on fading out the first image while fading in the next one, provided these shapes are graphically similar. While filmic terms are inadequate to the description of digital images, these transitions are kin to dissolves and fades, and often rely on what film specialists would call graphic matches. In the prologue, for instance, the transition from the planet to the glass globe is based on the graphic analogy between the two shapes.

Looking for a system A tentative typology of readers Texts, sounds, colors, textures, shapes, space, movement—the disparateness of these components might cue readers to consider that they are faced with “something of a patchwork […] a work that is more abstract than concretized.”17 However, this semiological variety also suggests that the author has taken into account the variety of his potential readers, as it is possible to identify at least two types of implied readers. On the one hand, 17

Hayles, How We Think, 120.

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text-oriented readers will probably appreciate the possibility of skipping the introductory and “To the Island” animations and of directly opening the Chronos or Logos drawers. They may also like being left the possibility not to enlarge the Chronos animation, which will stay inside the glass ball, preferring to listen to the recorded text as to an audio book. On the other hand, cinephiles and digital animation enthusiasts might delight in enlarging the Chronos animation and enjoying its skillful fluidity, while also using the many visual clues in the image to better understand the text (more on this below).18 Thus, incomplete readings of the novel are a possibility. However, it is also possible to imagine readers who start out by behaving like Logos and sampling excerpts from each part of the novel, but are then drawn into the fiction, and wind up trying to look for coherence, thus acting like Chronos. Such a reordering enterprise will necessitate drawing diagrams of the novel, taking notes on its elusive text, looking for information elsewhere, and perhaps eventually producing a written interpretation of the novel—as is the case here—so that TOC will turn out to be a “writerly text,” freeing readers from “the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user.”19 Assuming this writer/reader tries to perform a semiological reading of the novel, the key interrogations will probably be: how is the status of the text (made as it is of linguistic and narrative signs) affected by its interaction with all these other types of signs? How are all these signs combined into syntagmatic relations in TOC? By asking these questions, we behave like the spectator of digital cinema who, as David Rodowick points out, “is no longer a passive viewer yielding to the ineluctable flow of time, but rather alternates between looking and reading as well as immersive viewing and active controlling.”20

Voting and exploring While an analysis of the main signs of TOC in isolation focuses on such activities as reading, listening to texts, and watching animations and videos, looking for a system forces us to understand that choosing and exploring are also fundamental when perusing this novel. These tasks are 18

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However, as the Chronos animation is rather abstract and does not accompany any of its characters with live sound, its implied cinephiliac readers are probably aficionados of experimental cinema. Cf. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 4. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 10. David Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 177.

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foregrounded in the principal thresholds in the novel. Before we get to the main Navigation Screen, the omniscient narrator tells us that: Occasionally, a philosopher might stop by to wonder at the commotion, or a historian might listen for a while looking for a way to organize a plot, but even they would shake their heads and walk away after perhaps dropping a pebble into one of the boxes that someone had set up so that the curious could wager on which ever brother the moment led them to believe would win. (TOC)

Thus, when the Navigation Screen itself appears, with its two boxes and its small pebble, we already know what to do because of this prompt. However, if we “vote” for Logos (to use the verb found in the “Reader’s Guide”), we have to take the initiative and move the crosshairs over the open drawer in order to click on the small colored rectangles which make it possible to open components of the Logos section one by one. Even though this procedure is explained in the “Reader’s Guide,” it remains painstaking, which highlights the properly “digital” side of reading this novel, that is, the manual skillfulness involved. Reading the Logos section is the result of factors that are impossible to fully control, and may turn out to be a frustrating experience for the Chronos-oriented readers.21 It is impossible to bookmark the animations or the parables, and there are no timing devices as can be found for instance on DVD players, so that the reader has no mastery of order and is faced with a flow. Besides, not only do our clicks on the rectangles which appear in the scrolling player-piano roll open their content in a haphazard way, but there does not seem to be any logical order in the (unchanging) way in which they are displayed onscreen (see Figure 9.7). For instance, when we read the titles of the scrolls from left to right, “Under the Influence, 1959” is the thirtieth and “Influencing Machine, 1788” is the nineteenth scroll. It is the same with the videos: “Under the Influence, 1938” appears left of “The Influencing Machine, 1935.” Besides, after we have opened all videos and texts, we are still faced with what looks like fragmentary information: to wit, two scrolls are entitled “Origins of the Influencing Machine” (IV and V), but this numbering leads us to wonder where the first three fragments are. Some readers might also be annoyed by the apparent contradictions in the novel: for instance, while the Chronos animation unwinds very rapidly, 21

Alison Gibbons comments on this. Cf. Gibbons, “You’ve Never Experienced a Novel Like This.”

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Figure 9.7 Steve Tomasula, TOC: A New Media Novel (Tuscaloosa: FC2/ University of Alabama Press, 2002), The haphazard ordering of components in the Logos section.

the word “STOP” features prominently in the images at the beginning. Besides, while the work is presented as a novel, it contains many texts that are displayed upside down, or scroll by too fast to be readable, so that they always seem to remain out of reach. In sum, as could be expected, the Logos section presents itself as a riddle for Chronos-oriented readers. Supposing they insist on reading the scrolls and watching the videos in the chronological order, they might not fully grasp the reflection on time brought about by the analepses and prolepses. Supposing they read the scrolls from left to right, they might be surprised at noticing that this yields a logical series of stories, as this sort of reading reveals that the scrolls start with the search for time-storage machines, and end with the discovery by scientists in 2008 that an ancient machine found in 1902 “could completely undermine the “march of history.”22 They might also consider the information about the distance from the Earth to “the suns of other planetary systems” yielded by clicking on the green rectangles (as explained in the “Reader’s Guide”) a waste of time. They might be annoyed by the lack of a 22

Excerpted from the last scroll, entitled “The Difference Mechanism.”

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hierarchy on the Logos screen, which makes it more difficult to find the scrolls and videos, which have more explanatory power. Conversely, Logos-oriented readers, who might perform a fully random reading—not oriented from left to right, zapping between scrolls and animations—might uncover unpredictable links and nonobvious relationships. In retrospect, as Alison Gibbons observes, it is these difficulties and apparent inconsistencies which make the paradoxes of time physically perceptible, and encourage repeat readings.23

Investigating One way or another, many readers might be tempted to turn themselves into investigators, looking up information on the internet, for instance, to find information on Zoe Bellof, who is credited as the creator of some of the Logos animations (presented in the DVD credits as “excerpted from her installation ‘The Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A.’ ”). This way, they would find a rational explanation for the paranoid discourse uttered by the coarse female voice in these animations, as they are excerpted from an installation by Bellof that was inspired by the writings of a Viennese psychoanalyst, Dr. Tausk, on a deaf schizophrenic patient of his, Miss Natalija A. Indeed, a quick internet search gives access to the Flash adaptation of Bellof ’s installation, to a text by Bellof herself explaining the purpose of her installation, as well as to an English translation of Dr. Tausk’s text.24 In turn, these extraneous elements would enable such readers to compare the Logos videos with the original installation. On the one hand, the synopsis on Beloff ’s website specifies that “It is 1919. Victor Tausk, a Vienese psychoanalyst examines a patient, Miss Natalija A. She tells him that her mind and body are being manipulated by a mysterious electrical apparatus operated secretly by physicians in Berlin.”25 The Flash animations available on Bellof ’s site present Natalija’s case coherently (interestingly, they appear in the simulacrum of a book) and, most importantly, explain that “she is deaf and can only make herself understood by writing.”26 On the other hand, the 23 24

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Gibbons, “You’ve Never Experienced a Novel like This.” Zoe Bellof, “The Influencing Machine,” accessed March 13, 2014, http://www.zoebeloff. com/influencing/influencing.html; Zoe Bellof, “The Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A. An Interactive Video Installation,” Rhizomes 6 (Spring 2003), accessed March 13, 2014, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue6/beloff.htm; Paul Roazen, ed., Sexuality, War, and Schizophrenia: Collected Psychoanalytic Papers. Victor Tausk (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991). Zoe Bellof, “Interactive Work,” accessed May 16, 2013, http://www.zoebeloff.com/pages/ interactive.html. Zoe Bellof, “Interactive Work,” accessed May 16, 2013, http://www.zoebeloff.com/pages/ interactive.html.

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Logos videos do not introduce us to Natalija or to Dr. Tausk. While images of a woman appear in some of them, it is impossible to link them with certainty to the strange voice-over narrator, hence an uncanny impression, which is reminiscent of countless horror films. What’s more, two of these videos do not feature any voices, and another (“The Mosaic of Time”) is narrated in a voice-over by a female narrator whom we had never heard before (Joyelle McSweeney). In sum, this comparison makes it clear that Tomasula and his team intentionally made Natalija’s story elusive and complex. The investigation might also lead readers to try and make sense of the recurrence of circular shapes that, as shown above, is highlighted by the novel’s treatment of space and movement. This way, it is possible to overcome the dichotomy between Logos and Chronos oriented readers: a complete reading of the novel, be it chronological or random, reveals that the graphic continuity between the planet and the glass globe is just one instance of the general paradigmatic opposition between extremely small and infinitely large phenomena in the novel. Besides, the planet, a world unto itself, is reenacted with the island, a “new island nation”27 for Ephemera’s people. The oblong shape formed by the globe and its rectangular base turns out to be a graphic illustration of the “glass fingernails” which cause Ephemera’s people’s troubles. The flickering “O” which regularly skips over the epigram then morphs into the central letter of TOC, in retrospect, turns out to be the whirl at the end of the biggest hand of the clock which appears repeatedly in the Chronos animation and in the island parables. Finally, the complementarity of the rectangular and circular shapes is resolved in the Chronos animation by the appearance of the oval egg, which symbolizes the model’s unwanted pregnancy, and is an intertextual reference to Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland, in which the father is called Square, the mother, Circle, and the daughter, Oval.28

Reflexivity This synthetic view of the significance of circularity in the novel, in turn, draws attention to the importance of narrative reflexivity, that is, of moments when the “narrative refers to itself, to its own medium, mode and process.”29 The novel’s narrative structure, with its frame story and embedded stories, 27 28

29

TOC, excerpted from the introductory video. Tomasula, VAS, an Opera in Flatland. I wish to thank Françoise Palleau-Papin for suggesting this parallel. Jeffrey Williams, Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1.

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attracts attention to its process. The authorial intrusions—for instance, “like many of us, maybe you who are reading this”30—momentarily interrupt our “willing suspension of disbelief ”31 by drawing us back into the present of reading. The list of distances to the suns of other planetary systems may be considered as digressions that, by generating impatience, also put immersion inside the fiction at risk. So do the references to narrative conventions as to tenses (e.g., “Upon a time, in a tense that marked the reader’s comfortable distance from it, a calamity befell the good people of X.32”), or to endings (e.g., “the most pressing problem in this narrative wouldn’t be characterization, or the creation of suspense, or any of the other traditional concerns; the first and most pressing problem would be the ending. What would the main character in her narrative do in the present, if she knew that the next moment would be her last?”), which draw attention to norms by deviating from them.33 So does the incorporation of various literary genres (mostly myths and parables), and the intertextual references to literary or philosophical texts (Boccacio’s Decameron, The Thousand and One Nights, Augustine’s teachings, or “Shakespeare by way of Hawthorne”34). However, readers noticing the importance of reflexivity in TOC might be tempted not to pay enough attention to its variegated semiological materials, and to focus exclusively on literary reflexivity. They might conclude that TOC uses devices that were not uncommon in the canon. Indeed, it might seem at first that the auditory and visual elements of the novel merely illustrate the text. For instance, in the Chronos animation, when the sentence “the final bang of time seemed to toll” is uttered by the voice-over narrator, a bell tolls. Similarly, in the introductory video, the evocation of the island by the narrator is illustrated by the appearance of the image of an island inside the glass globe, and made more tangible thanks to the addition of gull shrieks on the soundtrack. However, it is quickly apparent that the image provides information that completes the soundtrack, instead of only illustrating it. Indeed, when the opposition between Chronos and Logos is first evoked in the introductory video, while the voice-over says “Chronos always wanted to lead,” we can read the words “who was dogmatic” scrolling inside the glass globe (TOC). Just after this, when we hear “for his part, Logos delighted in making all Chronos said slippery as soap and as transient as a bubble,” we can read “who was 30 31 32 33 34

Excerpted from the Logos scroll “Sliding into the Past, 2781.” Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (New York: Orion, 1997), 145. TOC, excerpted from the introductory video. TOC, both quotes are excerpted from the Chronos animation. TOC, Excerpted from the Chronos animation.

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playful and prone to pranks” (TOC). And again, when we hear that Logos and Chronos are co-dependent, we can read “whose brother was whose puppet was whose brother,” and when the narrator tells us that “chronology would get a desperate outward move of logic,” we can read that “sun sets before sun rises before sun sets.”35 Thus, our attention is stimulated by the fact that we have to read some texts while the voice-over narrator continues his own narration. As Michel Chion points out about the presence of written texts in talking films, these texts that are uttered by no one are mute calls requesting that we pronounce them in our minds.36 This in turn reveals that there are key moments in the novel when the image initiates an idea which is only later expressed in the text. For instance, when the novel’s title appears in the introductory animation, the stars around the planet are absorbed into it. Much later on, in Chronos, when the Vogue model is faced with her dilemma, we hear that “her mind was an expanding and contracting universe, and the weariness of stars falling into each other, only to explode their stuff into womblike blackness, to coalesce into stars and planets again, then people and clinics and words and time, ad nauseam” (TOC). Thus, the first images of the novel have made us more receptive to the image of the “contracting universe” given by the narrator. Many of the images in the Chronos animation thus function as clues to the reader-investigator. For instance, the image of an egg mysteriously appears at the beginning of the Chronos animation, and then we can see an egg falling down minutes before we even heard of the model’s pregnancy. Next, we see the egg shattering, seconds before the lover/brother points out that “an egg, being broken, never spontaneously goes back together.”

Remediation By incorporating many different ways of combining texts and images as well as spoken and written words, the novel thus attracts our attention not just to its novelistic essence, but to the words “new media” which are used in its title. More specifically, it makes us aware of the ways in which the Chronos animation remediates several famous artworks. A first example of this is the novel’s use of a manuscript illumination by the Limbourg brothers, illustrating the month of June in a book of hours entitled Les Très Riches Heures de Jean de France, Duc de Berry (see Figure 9.8).37 35 36 37

TOC, All the quotes in this paragraph are excerpted from the introductory video. Michel Chion, L’Ecrit au cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), 67. The manuscript was made in 1412–1416 and first published by Paul Durrieu, Les Très Riches Heures de Jean de France, Duc de Berry (Paris: Plon, 1904).

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Figure 9.8  Illumination illustrating the month of June in Les Très Riches Heures de Jean de France, Duc de Berry (Limbourg brothers,1412–1416).

While this image is easily recognizable, comparing its animated version to the original makes it possible to see that the image has been reversed left to right as well as incorporating other changes. Whereas the illumination places two female figures in the foreground, one with a rake and the other with a pitchfork, its remediation in TOC leaves out the woman with the rake, cutting out one third of the image, and replaces the pitchfork with an enormous scythe, which she wields rhythmically (see Figure 9.9).

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Figure 9.9 Steve Tomasula, TOC: A New Media Novel (Tuscaloosa: FC2/ University of Alabama Press, 2002), The remediation of the Riches Heures illumination in the Chronos animation.

This brings to mind the numerous reversals that we have noticed, for instance the display of the word STOP upside down just after the beginning. It suggests the following reading/investigating itinerary: if we accept the hypothesis that the reader was not a specialist of medieval illuminations, she probably looked up the expression “book of hours” and found out that these contained prayers to be said at the canonical hours, that is, Vigils, Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. This would have enabled her to link the use of the Limbourg brothers’ illumination with the words “Matins, lauds, prime, terce, vespers, none, compline,” which are recited by the second female voice a few minutes later, and to notice that they are then displayed upside down, and finally shown in a legible manner and repeated by the same voice. Noticing these occurrences of repetition and reversal provides a cue to the structuring principle of Chronos, namely that of the Moebius strip, long before it is actually expressed linguistically. Of course, other hints of this are given in the novel, for instance the importance of binary oppositions in the narrative structure of this novel. Pellegrin, commenting on the existence of “diptychs” such as “Visiting the Past”/”Visiting the Future,” shows that they are linked with the idea of

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symmetry, “foregrounding symmetry — and the concomitant notion of reversibility — as their dominant structural principle.38” Nevertheless, as the remediation of the Riches Heures du Duc de Berry shows, disseminating clues throughout the novel’s semiological system is equally instrumental in enriching our understanding of the text.

Figure 9.10  Albrecht Dürer’s “Artist Drawing a Nude with Perspective Device,” a 1525 woodcut.

A second example of remediation can be found just after this, when the model, who has to spend long hours in a hospital room with her comatose husband, forgets “this year’s fashions” and “[falls] into an era that existed before timeserving shouldered eternity off the stage” (TOC). A bell tolls and an iris-in introduces us to a new image, in which we can recognize Albrecht Dürer’s “Artist Drawing a Nude with Perspective Device,” a woodcut illustration for his Painter’s Manual (see Figure 9.10).39 As we move closer to this image, we enter it on the artist’s side (see Figure  9.11) and the model’s portrait is now displayed on the grid. Meanwhile, the voice-over informs us that “her perfect smile was luminously fixed, opening for ever by an artful manipulation of film and shutter speed, a softening of lips by focus,” a statement which is then questioned by the intervention of the other female speaker, who says “Intimate portraits of legs,” and then the male speaker, who declares that “the camera is truth itself ” (TOC). Onscreen, the model appears on the rectangle Dürer’s artist is looking at, while the words “Tomorrow was another day” are displayed underneath (TOC). At this point, the voice-over says, “The wonder was, that 38 39

Pellegrin, “Tactics of Tic-Toc,” 185. Albrech Dürer, The Painter’s Manual, A Manual of Measurement of Lines, Areas and Solids. Trans. Walter Leopold Strauss. New York: Abaris Books, 1977. Initially published as Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt (Nuremberg, 1538).

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photo shoots hadn’t suggested to her sooner the arbitrary nature of time, an artificial grid through which people could model the unmodeled. How else explain the existence of a sentence like ‘tomorrow was another day of work’?” (TOC).

Figure 9.11 Steve Tomasula, TOC: A New Media Novel (Tuscaloosa: FC2/ University of Alabama Press, 2002), The remediation of the Dürer woodcut in the Chronos animation.

This segment plays on our ability to read and listen at the same time, by inserting a written text underneath the drawing. It attracts our attention to its new media nature, as the computer-generated images display their ability to explore and create virtual space, while the main purpose of Dürer’s woodcut was to demonstrate how the Italian-invented system of centered perspective made it possible to order a representation of the real world from the individual point of view of the draftsman.40 While the original 1538 image was a static representation of one artist at work, its 2009 remediation 40

Cf. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1992), 28 : “Through visual perception we may achieve the illusion of a coherent and unified self; the gaze of the draughtsman in Dürer’s print symbolizes the aesthetic distance and control invested in the visual image.”

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is a mobile blend of old and new images, as well as the product of several artists’ collective work. Furthermore, noticing the multiplication of grids onscreen, one cannot help wonder whether the artists intended this as a reference to the contemporary specialized use of the term “grid,” which refers to multimedia networks and to the preset grids used in many of the software applications used by graphic designers as drawing aids. Finally, by inserting an iris-in, an early cinematographic effect, this segment also foregrounds its similarity with and difference from analog film. This may cause the reader to establish a parallel between this example and the use of the glass globe as a projection device in the main Navigation Screen, a device which is reminiscent of the camera obscura and other devices for viewing images which preceded the cinematograph. It might also bring to mind the moments when the Chronos animation reflexively refers to the cinema: first, the image of a reel which unwinds rapidly soon after the beginning of the animation, and second, the “film burning” effect used later on. Interestingly, the latter effect is used in a similar way in the middle of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), where it happens as tension is escalating between its two female protagonists: Alma, the nurse, has deliberately left a shard of glass on the floor for Elisabet, the actress, to cut her foot on it. At this point, the film seems to break and burn, then the screen becomes blank and several apparently unrelated shots are shown before the story resumes, “another reminder that we are witnessing a filmic construct that Bergman can manipulate at will in both form and content.”41 In TOC, when the model is thinking that “the first and most pressing problem would be the ending,” an increasingly fast beat is heard on the soundtrack while the narration continues, then the voice-over narrator addresses the reader and says, “That was the only answer that could be given by someone who believed what they were writing” (TOC). At this point, the image seems to burn and is replaced by a white screen, then the burning effect is seen in reverse and the same image that was displayed before the film burn effect reappears, only reversed left to right and upside down. This interruption is marked by a long bell sound. Contrary to what happens in Persona, the text had already been drawing attention to its writing process and this burn effect marks the climax of a built-in suspense, thanks to the music. Therefore, as burn effects (just like irises) are now common tools in animation design, this segment uses it in a dramatic way in order to stress the aesthetic difference between its rarity in analog films and its frequency in animated images. 41

Wheeler Winston Dixon, “Persona and the 1960s Art Cinema,” in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, ed. Lloyd Michaels (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47.

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Finally, the novel attracts attention to its new media form itself by describing the “boxes that held time” as “very ornate boxes, decorated with inlays of exotic woods and the numerals of a long-dead civilization.”42 A reader who has already been cued to the significance of reflexivity in this novel by the examples given previously might reflect that this scroll is accessed by throwing a virtual pebble in a virtual drawer full of virtual water, an apparently very simple act in which the complexity remains hidden.

Conclusion Writing about digital poetry, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth describes digital art as “an art of fusion: different media are not merely combined, but welded into a hybrid that rewrites older versions of the media involved.”43 This comment perfectly fits TOC, a novel in which sounds, images, and navigation tools are as significant as the text itself. The novelty of the medium used transforms many of the novel’s readers/viewers into investigators and empowers them by encouraging digital and internet-based activity. However, to readers oblivious of its digital origin and audiovisual features, the novel arguably also constitutes a perfectly satisfying traditional reading and listening experience. This probably accounts for the use of the words “new media novel” in the title, to refer both to its literary form and to its novelty.44

42 43 44

TOC, from the Logos scroll “The House of Time.” Wurth, “Multimediality, Intermediality, and Medially Complex Digital Poetry,” 6. I wish to thank Steve Tomasula for answering my numerous questions, and to express my gratitude to Françoise Palleau-Papin for introducing me to Steve and his work, as well as for her perceptive comments on this essay.

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Ontological Metalepses, Unnatural Narratology, and Locality: A Politics of the [[ Page ]] in Tomasula’s VAS & TOC Lance Olsen

:::: The first book by Steve Tomasula I ever saw: VAS: An Opera in Flatland. I read the manuscript as chair of FC2’s (an independent press by and for authors committed to publishing innovative fiction) Board of Directors. This was, I want to say, sometime in 2002. Only the first 20 or 30 pages had been laid out as they currently appear in order to give the Board a flavor of the imagined aggregate. The rest, as I recall, looked like a more or less conventionally typed manuscript with accompanying images. I wrote up a reader’s report that was energetically positive. It talked about how impressed and excited I was by Tomasula’s bracketing of the page, his unnatural narrative gestures, his production of an art book that wasn’t actually an art book because it had been designed to be (relatively) massproduced. How VAS was a novel about the problematic text of the body that was also a text about the problematic body of the text. In the end the other readers on the Board disagreed, outvoted me, and passed on VAS. I count that among FC2’s real editorial missteps, although I’m happy to say we have been fortunate enough subsequently to bring out Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture, TOC, and Once Human. :::: Yet when I speak of Steve Tomasula as the author of a hardcopy book like VAS: An Opera in Flatland, the narrative (printed in a trade paperback whose cover is the approximation of flesh traced with blood vessels) concerning a [[  man  ]] named Square’s decision about whether or not to undergo a vasectomy, or a hypermedia project like TOC, a digital compilation of steampunk aesthetics, creation myths, an audio recitation about a model’s husband kept alive on a respirator after a terrible accident, and a continuous meditation on the unimaginable nature of time, I am of course misspeaking. I don’t mean what I say, or, perhaps closer to the point, I mean it in a modified sense.

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:::: Because the author-function in VAS apparently possesses two names: Steve Tomasula, the writer at Notre Dame who initially conceived the project, produced and compiled the text, mailed it, say, to FC2, and Stephen Farrell, the associate professor of visual communication at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who created the art and designed the layout. As with most other books, naturally, the author-function in VAS also possesses myriad invisible collaborators—editor, publisher, printer, distributor, reviewer, reader, teacher, blogger, tweeter, and so on. With TOC, which itself exists within a bifurcated physicality—it is available both as a DVD one may upload onto one’s computer and as an app one may download onto one’s iPad—and which Tomasula initially imagined as a unique genre inhabiting the aesthetic space “somewhere between reading and [watching a] film—a Frankenstein of a book,” as well as a chamber opera, “a story told to an audience of one, on a tiny stage, as if a 12-inch monitor were puppet theater”1—with TOC, as I say, the author-function possesses yet more collaborators, and yet more nebulously. In addition to the usual suspects, there was programmer Christian Jara, for example, and a number of artists, animators, musicians, and actors—fifteen in all scattered across three countries, most of whom never met or interacted with each other during the ten-year-long undertaking to bring TOC into being. :::: What I mean to say, then, perhaps by way of a parenthetical statement that isn’t one, is that when any writer touches pencil to paper or fingers to keyboard—when any writer commences to commence even imagining imagining a new work—she or he can’t help launching into a collaborative experience, embarking on an intricate conversation across history and geography with other creators, with the inventors of his or her means of production and distribution (said pencil, said computer, said whatever), with the genre with or against which she or he is working, with specific texts (in VAS, for instance, Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 satire about Victorian culture’s myopia, Flatland, scientific graphs and flow charts, and so on)—not to mention with several thousand years of language development. The sum of such collaboration will almost always be more interesting and surprising than its parts. :::: The reason I bring up this obvious fact that isn’t, in fact, a fact obvious to most readers, is to point to how in both VAS and TOC Tomasula sets about 1

Yuriy Tarnawsky, “Not Just Text: An Interview with Steve Tomasula,” Rain Taxi Online Edition: Spring 2011, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.raintaxi.com/ online/2011spring/tomasula.shtml.

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making visible what has become invisible in our culture by virtue of its ubiquity. Tomasula becomes not simply author of a novel but rather problematically director of a film or digital program, conductor of a soundtrack, producer of a Gesamtkunstwerk … or perhaps a grant application to fund it. By doing so he seeks to make strange bookish ecology, call attention to its dynamics and definitions, flag his undoing of the Romantic myth concerning the solitary artist-genius by announcing through his texts’ overt materiality and intertextuality that creation is invariably a Barthesian collaboration all the way down, every text always textured, every one a “tissue [recall that selfreferential flesh-and-blood-vessel cover of VAS] of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture.”2 :::: (O. never understood why we should stop at 14 punctuation marks in English, I (and [[ I ]] use the term loosely) should add.) :::: To approach a Tomasulian text is thereby more times than not to enter into a larger problematics concerning [[ identity ]], both with regard to that of the text itself—i.e., the nature of its technological delivery system: if this isn’t a book that behaves quite like a book, then what is it, and how do we begin to find a language to discuss it?—and to that of the status of the actants moving through its narratives. :::: (Perhaps, for instance, there should be special punctuation for not-beingat-home in the Heideggerian sense :::: for what cannot be accurately or fully articulated.) :::: [[ I ]] hestitate to use the word characters because many if not most of Tomasula’s don’t evince deep psychology, full roundedness—“the old myths of ‘depth,’ ”3 as Robbe-Grillet used to call it. Many if not most tend to exist externally rather than internally, as Skinnerian black-box beings reflecting the issues surrounding the posthuman subject position. Many if not most tend to act as placeholders for something closer to theses than, say, modernist Freudian selfhood or conventional plot-drivers. :::: Tomasula’s [[ real ]] [[ characters ]] often operate as abstract ideas rather than plump people, thereby calling into question the philosophico-cultural assumptions behind various modes of characterization itself. 2 3

Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 146. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “A Future for the Novel,” in Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 814.

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:::: (Maybe [[ ]] for what must be removed from the chronic to be experienced.) :::: (As in: [[ Once upon a time, we already knew these things. ]]) :::: What, Tomasula’s books wonder, again and again, is a [[  book  ]], and what an [[  I  ]]?—which is to say his texts (echoing Wittgenstein’s news in Tractatus) perform a difficulty: that our rules of grammar have been repeatedly misunderstood by Western culture as a metaphysics. :::: And so let me begin again, this time in someone else’s voice: Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.4 With that N. Katherine Hayles launched an argument in 2004 urging literary analysis to train itself to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—a point that points to the fact a story is never merely a story. Each is mediated not only through the systems of narrative discourse by which events in it are rendered, but also remediated through its tangible means of being-in-the-world. How a text matters to us will henceforth always matter to us. :::: By contending that texts are comprised of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture, Barthes advocates an intertextual approach to reading. Intertextuality is always-already a kind of writing, a kind of rewriting. By encouraging such an analytic strategy, Hayles argues, Barthes becomes both textual liberator and blind man—the former because he sets free a mode of engagement with texts that in many ways initiate[s] semiotic and poststructuralist approaches to discourse, arguably among the most important developments in literary studies in the twentieth century; the latter because suddenly every medium becomes every other medium. All texts come to evince a textual existence that fails to register the textural. In treating everything from fashion to fascism as a semiotic system, Barthes’s method has the effect of eliding differences in media.5 :::: As a teen (children, we should remember, are taught differently: think of pop-up and other sorts of text/image books), as an undergraduate, 4

5

N. Katherine Hayles, “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis,” Poetics Today 25.1 (Spring 2004): 67. Hayles, “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep,” 68.

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as a graduate, and no matter our field of interest, we are habituated to conceptualize pages as meticulously Windexed® windows through which we tumble into narrative worlds. If we (and [[ I ]] use the term loosely) come to think about the page at all, it is typically as we sit composing at our computer screens within the context of what Bill Gates has guided us into believing a page should be and look like by means of Microsoft Word—its margins, its movements, its fonts, its flatness—which, of course, Gates unthinkingly absorbed from those five hundred years of print history. Tomasula’s texts wrench the non-ergodic reading process by making reading a non-trivial visceral event, the foreignness of the reading/writing moment (and hence of meaning-making itself) foreign once more. :::: Hayles redux: The crucial move is to reconceptualize materiality as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies.... In this view of materiality, it is not merely an inert collection of physical properties but a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of readers and writers. Materiality thus cannot be specified in advance; rather, it occupies a borderland—or better, performs as connective tissue [there’s that word again]—joining the physical and mental, the artifact and the user.6 :::: Once upon a time we talked about politics at the level of thematics, but Tomasula, along with many other author functions over the course of the last few decades, if not the last few centuries—Laurence Sterne, Max Ernst, Kathy Acker, Anne Carson, Mark Danielewski, Marc Saporta, Chris Ware, et al.—is invested in the politics of structuration as well: in how, that is, every narrative procedure, every material choice in composition, be it in the replacement of commas with em dashes or insertion of a black page in Tristram Shandy, the creation of a book that shows up as a sheaf of loose pages in a box that invites the reader to choose the order and amount s/he reads in Composition No. 1, or the archeological layering of different colors of paper comprising The Book of Portraiture, implies a cluster of political and metaphysical resonances. :::: Deciding to render a narrative one way rather than another, out of one substance rather than out of another, means deeply, and so the question for the innovative writer always takes some form of the following, either consciously or unconsciously: Do I retell received narratives, thereby perpetuating their deep-structure lesson that the world of the text, the text of the world, should remain as it is, or do I short-circuit those narratives, imagine 6

Hayles, “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep,” 72.

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myself into different ones, thereby advocating that the world of the text, the text of the world, can (and should) always be a possibility space—which is to say other than it is? :::: Because, once upon a time, travel and travail were same words. The O.E.D.’s first definition of the former: to torment, distress; to suffer affliction; to labor, toil; to suffer the pains of childbirth. Serious travel—whether through a radically alien country or a radically alien text—is accompanied by an element of calamity that can run the gamut from mild discomfort to affliction, depending on who you are, when you are, where, with whom. Why, [[ I ]] wonder, hasn’t more been written about reading as a mode of productive pain? :::: The travail, for instance, of traversing TOC, which arrives—as do many hypermedial texts—foremost as a reading dilemma, a series of questions minus monologic solutions. How, the reader/viewer/listener is asked to ask, do [[ I ]] travel such a complication, not in a figurative sense (with regard, say, to establishing the impression of a coherent plot, sense of character, thematics), as s/he might in most novels, but, rather, physically. How, the participant is asked to ask, do [[ I ]] pilot this prosthesis for my brain with mouse or finger? Do [[  I  ]] navigate in ways similar to other hypermedial projects with which [[ I ]] am familiar? Dissimilar? To a greater degree than with most novels, nearly every manifestation of the hypermedial becomes a fresh (dis)embodied exploration of not-knowing, an irruption of the material in the immaterial, as the participant journeys through another person’s or other peoples’ byte-topography. :::: And so let me begin again, this time in someone else’s voice: No literature in the world has ever answered the question it asked, and it is this very suspension which has always constituted it as literature: it is that very fragile language which men set between the violence of the question and the silence of the answer.7 :::: By the medium’s nature—that is, by means of the medium’s continuous defamiliarization of meaning making, its troublings of normalization practices—TOC brings forth what feels as if it has always been unseen, almost nonexistent, in most hardcopy texts: the continuous somatic code-breaking calculus by which we make them to a greater or lesser extent intelligible. 7

Roland Barthes, “The Last Word on Robbe-Grillet?” trans. Richard Howard, Critical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 202.

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TOC—and VAS as well, but more on it later—functions as a performance of disclosure, unconcealment. :::: In both TOC and VAS, Das Heimlich (the homey as well as the secret) is also Das Unheimliche (the un-homey as well as the uncanny), but Das Unheimliche has been displaced from, say, plot or character into structuration itself. :::: The travail of navigating TOC—which travail, needless to say, is simultaneously the enjoyment of navigating TOC—is analogous (but not identical) to discovering how to navigate a three-dimensional maze. While both maze and labyrinth seem to depict deliberately bewildering sets of routes, the maze takes the shape of a branching conundrum that includes election of ingress, egress, path, direction. The labyrinth, on the other hand, is unicursal: a single, non-branching trail (whose entrance is also its exit) that leads to a defined center. Their structures therefore suggest radically different odysseys from one world to another. The labyrinth implies that, although the wandering may skirt close to the endpoint only to veer away from it on manifold occasions, the quest (be it sacred or mundane) will always eventually resolve into relatively comfortable conclusion, which is to say relatively stable signification. The labyrinth, then, is readerly architecture in Barthes’s sense, the maze writerly. The maze (think Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story; think Shelley Jackson’s My Body; think Stuart Moulthrop’s Reagan Library) implies that disorientation is our major mode of movement, multiplicity invariably trumping monologism, inconclusiveness conclusion. The next world, the maze argues, is simply this world, baffled and baffling and thready. :::: Another way of saying this: the maze is a shape that reveals those elements the readerly text attempts to cloak, flummoxes conventional meaningmaking systems, flings the participant out of his or her subject position, puts everything up for grabs. Whether material or hypermedial, the maze contends through its daedalic design that the idea of center is at the end of the day contrary to fact, the extent of our compass-less not-knowing precisely what we can know. Or as Heidegger has it: being-at-home is not the primordial phenomenon. Not-being-at-home is forever the more fundamental. :::: Late in VAS, the narrator recounts how strange the family’s move to Flatland has made Square feel. It used to be the case that his wife Circle would follow him as he followed this or that job prospect. Now their roles are reversed: Square finds himself following her as she follows her own. And hence he spends all his time being-at-home not being at home, solo and

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adrift (daughter Oval is off in school much of the day): “So, he did what spouses of the-one-with-the-job have always done: Gone boating. But since there weren’t any oceans in Flatland, his sail was a blank whiteness and his oar a pen and he began to write, First pain, then knowledge....”8 :::: With that, Square commences composing a Borgesian version of the book we are reading, whose opening words are exactly those: first pain, then knowledge. They take us back, that is, to the novel’s inaugural language, where Square accidentally receives a paper cut and kisses his finger, part Judas, part lover, examining “the world he’d been writing into existence”9 on the page lying in his lap. The strange winks and withdraws. Partially this is because there is a good chance the reader has forgotten (or simply didn’t realize until this fleeting mention) that the third-person narrative mash-up s/he is traversing originated from Square’s pen, that Square is the narrator of Square’s story, that we are reading something like his memoir, except it isn’t quite his memoir (he thinks of himself throughout as someone else, for instance; he seems to be writing, impossibly, both as we are reading and after the fact), and partially because s/he has just been further dislocated in a text built on an architectonics of dislocation, where textuality itself has been made uncanny in Ernst Jentsch’s sense of a situation producing “intellectual uncertainty”10 as well as in Freud’s of an encounter with “something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed,” then encountered again in a different form.11 :::: In this case (“his sail was a blank whiteness and his oar a pen and he began to write...”), the uncanny arises through Tomasula’s adoption of a particular narrative technique: metalepsis—that frame-rupturing procedure, that unsettling violation of narrative levels wherein the world of the told becomes contaminated by the world of the telling. Such moments call the participant’s attention to her or his own engagement within the unfolding event of [[ reading ]], and hence to his or her own engagement within the constantly unfolding reminder that [[ reading ]] is nothing if not a mode of [[ writing ]], [[ writing ]] [[ re-reading/re-writing ]]. :::: Yet it isn’t merely that the words first pain first appear at the beginning of VAS. It is also how they appear: in a comic-book font inside a drawn box below which floats a comic-book sign for, perhaps, the tiny explosion of 8 9 10 11

Tomasula, VAS: A Opera in Flatland, 286. Tomasula, VAS: A Opera in Flatland, 10. Freud, The Uncanny, 125. Freud, The Uncanny, 148.

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pain Square experiences as the hospital form he is filling out (and not, as we are led to believe when this compressed scene is reiterated-cum-variation later in the novel, a page from the memoir he seems to be composing) slices his finger (proleptic intimation of Square’s vasectomy encountered down the narrative convolution—and hence those references to lover and Judas, both, when he kisses his finger), as the materiality of the page physically changes Square’s relationship to it even as in another sense it changes the participant’s. :::: Besides that tiny explosion, the page on which the words first pain first appear is blank, the word-duet unsituated in time (which is to say unsituated in narrative), but fully situated in space (which is to say situated in design), untethered to the right and slightly below the page’s center. The participant must turn the leaf to find the thought completed and hence signification established: Then knowledge—although, oddly, that Then is capitalized, suggesting paradoxically (more on paradox in a moment) that it is the beginning of a new thought rather than the completion of a previous one. If the participant has read VAS before, s/he also knows that, given the novel’s finale—the doctor preparing his surgical instruments for Square’s operation—the novel’s first words are a continuation of its last scene, its climax, which completes, not with a period, but an ellipsis, thereby forming an infinite hermeneutic loop. :::: That narratological stutter-step is emblematic of a sort that permeates VAS, where paratext (here unfixed comic-book design) adulterates an already visually impure text constituted precisely from other paratexts (those forms, graphics, marginalia, etc.) that are integral to the primary text. Paratext collapses into text even as text collapses into paratext. :::: Or to rephrase using the language of art books: sign becomes gesture even as gesture becomes sign. “That is,” VAS’s narrator—who both is and isn’t Square—tells us, “the message is the material. People and their stories being as inseparable as they are. Material also being the message, logically.”12 Materiality also being the missive: the body of the text about the text of the body and a body called language calls attention to itself as a (de)formed, (dis) abled anatomy, a change in the nucleotide sequence of the literary genome called the novel—and, as we all know, genetic mutations are integral to evolution, which is to say bodily/textual/aesthetic innovation: a constantly fluctuating form based on constantly fluctuating forms. 12

Steve Tomasula, VAS: A Opera in Flatland, 310.

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One could thus call Tomasula’s a recombinant narrative: i.e., a narrative mutative as the DNA that is referenced throughout its physical and conceptual being(s). :::: The novel: that omniphagic literary undertaking par excellence that is always in the process of figuring out what it is. :::: Turning a page in VAS is like clicking a link in TOC: a surge of disorientation followed almost immediately by a surge of reorientation, a Heideggerian concealment followed almost immediately by a Heideggerian unconcealment, as our eyes and hands constantly figure out what to do next, where to settle, how to proceed. :::: H. Porter Abbott speaks about narrative jamming as that kind of technical maneuver which “arouses and then refuses to satisfy our narrative perceptions”; he cites by way of illustration how a painting such as Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” discomposes a straightforward response by means of its ambiguities of subject matter, form, context, and lack of indications about what codebreaking strategies the viewer should enlist to provide interpretive coherence.13 Tomasula jams narrativity in both VAS and TOC by the use of not one, but two kinds of metalepsis: rhetorical and ontological. For Marie-Laure Ryan the former (an instance of which we see enacted in that pair of first-pain-then-knowledge passages) “opens a small window that allows a quick glance across levels, but the window closes after a few sentences, and the operation ends up reasserting the existence of the boundaries,” whereas the latter “opens a passage between levels that result[s] in their interpenetration, or mutual contamination.”14 Alice Bell and Jan Alber take the distinction between rhetorical and ontological metalepsis further, pointing out only the latter involves “disorienting transgressions of boundaries that are physically or logically impossible, and hence properly unnatural”—that is, properly anti-mimetic in the sense that they violate logic by re-presenting situations that are contrary to fact in the actual world.15 13

14

15

H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10. Marie-Laure Ryan, Avatars of Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 207. Alice Bell and Jan Alber, “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narrotology,” Journal of Narrative Theory 42.2 (Summer 2012), 167.

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:::: Metalepsis is the primary mode of narrative jamming in both VAS and TOC because, no matter which others are brought to bear in the texts, the participant is continually aware (as part of an ergodic operation of which s/ he isn’t aware when traversing normative narratives) that s/he is part of the corporeal event. :::: That event evinces itself both in the text (VAS’s posthumanist deemphasis on deep-structure character, by way of illustration, that asks us to contemplate in what other ways character might be conceived as a marker for contemporary culture’s sense of diffused, plural, messy identity) and of the text (which, for example, is committed, as Tomasula has pointed out, to “making art that mirrors biological processes”16—literal literary genetic and generic permutation, deviation, recombination). :::: To pick up VAS is to be asked to ask what the relationship is between its epidermal cover and the organs within; whether or not that cover (unlike most codices, which are designed and controlled by publishers rather than authors) is where we are meant to begin making semiotic sense of the text; how we should treat and how physically navigate the various sorts of charts, photographs, drawings, tests, scribbles, epigrammatic narraticules, and other formal elements that comprise VAS that are not simply formal elements, but themselves part of the signifying system we term this novel; what sort of work our eyes should do with, say, the DNA sequence that confronts us with twenty-five pages of genetic code (the words THE FACTS—suggesting we are nothing if not our biological [and cultural and aesthetic] codes—easy to miss, buried as they are deep within the twenty-fourth); what sort of work our hands should do when they encounter, say, a fold-out page on one side of which is printed an elaborate family tree echoing the satiric impulse on the reverse where the participant comes upon the fusion and confusion of DNA data with a lyrical meditation about the generative potential of genetic/ generic/linguistic impurity. :::: To pick up TOC is in certain ways an even more complicated affair. In part this is because to pick up TOC is exactly not to pick up TOC, while it is at the same moment to pick up a plurality of TOCs. The participant must first choose between the DVD iteration (which no longer functions on the current Apple OS) and the iPad app (which doesn’t function on other tablets). Choose, and one is no closer to holding the thing itself. Rather, 16

Tomasula, “Genetic Art and the Aesthetic of Biology,” 35.2 (2002), 140.

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at best the participant can hold a device that holds TOC—and yet s/he is more conscious of the holding than s/he is with the normative codex exactly because the holding is concurrently a not-holding. :::: In order to begin interacting with Tomasula’s new-media novel, the participant is made conscious of physically manipulating her or his cursor or his or her finger-as-cursor; made conscious, in other words, that he or she has entered an ontologically metaleptic field of play (and pain?) where s/ he is both prosthetically inside and corporeally outside the text, here having infiltrated t[here]. :::: Click on the faux-button that opens the app (accompanied with the sound of a bell, sonic indicator of passing minutes), and meet a polymodal prelude in the form of an epigraph from St. Augustine’s Confessions about the unknowability of time hovering across the image of a star-misted galaxy accompanied by a warped (one could almost say out-of-time) waltz soundtrack: What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I know not.17 In addition to announcing TOC’s principal thematics—or, better, its essayistic thesis—those sentences reveal one of the project’s principal structuring devices: paradox, that self-contradictory concept expressing possible veracity; that word descended from the Greek paradoxon: a statement which is contrary to expectation, unexpected, strange (one could almost say uncanny). St. Augustine’s observation fades out even as a narrator’s voice begins to speak: “A distant world shines from another’s past that is simultaneously our future. Is this a ripple in time, or in life?” A moment, and then the following text scrolls across the screen: How is it possible for a day to start at dawn and also midnight? Is it time, language, or us that has such fuzzy boundaries? With that question, the participant drops like Alice down a digital rabbit hole into an investigation of duration that, structurally, is to a great degree— again paradoxically—actively spatial rather than temporal. :::: The human mind organizes time (chronos) by narrativizing events, which is to say by means of rational discourse (logos), but TOC problematizes temporality even as it problematizes narrativity by making the boundaries between the two convoluted, permeable, the ideas on either side of the binary both commensurate and incommensurate. 17

Tomasula, TOC, Apple app.

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Such tensions are literalized through the myth of Chronos and Logos to which the text turns next. Chronos, we learn, believes he should ascend to the throne because he is first born. Logos believes he should ascend to the throne because he is first born. Both are—again paradoxically—correct and incorrect: the ship on which their mother, Ephemera, birthed them as she fled her troubled homeland crossed into an earlier time zone during its journey. While Chronos was therefore born first early Friday morning, Logos was also born first late Thursday night. A never-ending struggle ensues between the brothers (and the seeming binarism they represent) and the participant, like the inhabitants of the island on which Ephemera and her sons finally settle, is directed to wager who will win by plunking a stone into one of two boxes. :::: The answer, given the hypermedia’s narrative logic, is neither and both, the point that the two boxes are really one box (and not precisely one box) seen from different perspectives: narrative is time organized even as time is narrative organized. By its very nature, each term (dis) arranges the other. Drop the stone one finds waiting on the right side of the screen (even if at first glance the eye is unclear where to go, what to do, whether the object represents a stone or something else, whether it is a significant locus of attention or whether one’s reconnaissance should take one in another direction altogether) into Chronos’s box and the top slides off to expose a player-piano roll interface and half-hour-long audio narrative (which, like that ellipsis at the end of VAS, forms an infinite hermeneutic loop), a postmodern reconfiguration of the oral tradition, about an unnamed Vogue model whose husband drifts in a timeless coma following a terrible car accident. Embodiment of the posthuman, an “organic machine,” he is attached to a respirator and pump circulating his blood. The model—pregnant by her brother, a “man of scientific bent” with whom she has had an affair (another bio-cultural binary made impure)— sits beside her husband’s hospital bed in another mode of timelessness, torn from her hectic, glitzy routine, waiting for something to happen even as it has already happened, contemplating both an abortion (a clinamentic beginning) and unplugging her partner from life support (a clinamentic conclusion). But the narrative begins re-looping before she makes her decision, which is to say that that non-moment of choice remains pregnant, both a pre- and afterbirth, the fairytale assumptions connoted by the once-upon-a-time pivot undone by time moving forward relentlessly, while also going in circles, while also forever fetched up at the cusp of resolution.

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:::: Drop the stone one finds waiting for one on the right side of the screen (even if at first glance the eye is etc.) into Logos’s box and the top slides off to expose a player-piano roll interface which the participant must physically probe before understanding how it works. Touch that interface and a crosshairs appears. Every time it zeroes in on one of the highlighted slots a bell (like the one at the entrance to TOC) sounds: the red slots link to short videos; the blue to a series of mythological narratives written on what appear to be sepia-colored text scrolls within a bell-jar frame; the green into Ephemera’s past, which also illogically seems to be her future. Everyone’s body, the participant learns, is in essence a kind of time machine—a Difference Engine, of which Ephemera is inventor and with which, impossibly (or, perhaps better, metaphorically), she is pregnant (thereby echoing the Vogue model’s situation of a vital gravidity that is simultaneously a kind of death)—a time machine that experiences the second law of thermodynamics from the inside out. And so it is with civilizations. Ephemera’s comes apart, but before it does she escapes onto a ship on which she will birth, one imagines, the belligerent brothers Chronos and Logos. Put differently, we are confronted with another metaleptic leap that corrupts one narrative frame with another: TOC ends where it begins, and the participant finds him or herself reading myths created by the cultures apparently founded by Ephemera on her newfound island. :::: Yet, of course, those micro-narratives—like the ones housed in the bell jars, containers built to protect precious relics as well as mere bric-a-brac— are what Barthes calls artificial myths, the kind reconstituted and turned back upon themselves in order to jam the ideological coherence and naturalness implied by controlling mythologies.18 Another way of putting this: in a Debordian gesture, TOC derails Myth even as it perpetuates myths. :::: Both VAS and TOC lead to a sense of perpetual forced dislocation wed to an invitation to contemplate the very idea of locality, and about the question the concept perpetually carries pregnant within itself: [[ Where ]] [[ am ]] [[ I ]] [[ when ]] [[ I ]] [[ am ]] [[ reading/re-reading ]] [[ writing/re-writing ]]? Composing that sentence, [[ I ]] am reminded of Oliver Schneller’s Polis. Istanbul—Cairo—Jerusalem – Beirut, an eight-channel soundscape montage commissioned in 2009 by the Berliner Festspiele as part of an exhibition 18

Roland Barthes, “Myth Today” in Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (New York: Noon Day Press, 1993), 135.

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entitled “Taswir: Pictorial Mappings of Islam and Modernity.” Schneller’s sonic installation generates the illusion on the listener’s part of being in four places at once by producing ambient noise from a quartet of geographically disparate locations through an octet of speakers: 11.00 a.m. in Cairo, 11.00 a.m. in Beirut, 11.00 a.m. in Jerusalem, 11.00 a.m. in Istanbul. What, the listener is asked to ask, does auditory identity sound like, if it sounds like anything at all? VAS and TOC, through their deployment of onotological metalepsis, raise an analogous question with respect to the happening labeled [[ reading/rereading  ]], [[  writing/re-rewriting  ]]: the participant reads as s/he listens, listens as s/he views, touches as s/he forgets (and doesn’t forget) about touching, is continuously reminded of being both fully here and there even as s/he is neither fully there nor here. :::: What’s extraordinary for [[  me  ]] about these texts is the kind of static they introduce through their use of ontological metalepsis into the various mechanics of meaning making. The consequence of such unnatural—such Frankensteinian—structurations allows what our culture has made invisible through its pervasiveness—which is to say through its mobilization of the chronic—to become visible again, not simply for aesthetic reasons, but as a means to re-open a space of politics in innovative writing practices that bears some relationship to Debord’s perceptual revolution: his attempt to shortcircuit the passive relationship between human and deadening spectacle of the contemporary again and again, even if only for brief moments at a time; disorder the desensitizing spectacular by devising instants that reorder life, give rise to sudden rushes of self-consciousness about one’s material and existential being-in-the-world. :::: Through the creation of an aesthetics of contamination inimical to the ones familiar to target audiences (here let us call those familiar ones myths, in Barthes’s sense, as well as expressions of the novel—and not only those corporate expressions by such authors as Dan Brown, John Grisham, and Nora Roberts, but also those faux-literary middlebrow ones by such authors as Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, and Joy Williams)—through the creation of an aesthetics of contamination, Tomasula appropriates and perverts the grammar of the distractive habitual, disturbing it endlessly while making the participant re-conscious both of the procedures of the spectacular—which is to say the dynamics of power, which is to say the dynamics of [[ reading ]] and [[ writing ]]—and the opportunity for nonnormative modes of narrativity in the world, which is to say non-normative modes of individual and social existence itself.

Part Four

Writing Wonder

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A Book, an Atlas, and an Opera: Steve Tomasula’s Fictions of Science as Science Fiction Pawel Frelik

Among many descriptors of Steve Tomasula’s work, “science fiction” (sf) is probably very low on the list. His fiction has been described as archeological, postmodern, and experimental, while critics have pointed out its intertextuality, visuality, and intricacy of design. However, to my mind his texts are, first and foremost, quintessential science fictions, and not in one sense but in three: as fictions about science; as nongenre sf texts; and as narratives effectively compelling readers to adopt vantage points that can be, for all purposes, considered science-fictional. In the following essay, I will illuminate these three dimensions of science-fictionality in Tomasula’s work. Additionally, I will also demonstrate why this qualification extends well beyond mere genre “pigeonholing” and explain the critical benefits of grasping Tomasula’s work as sf. First of all, Tomasula is a sf writer if one is to take the adjective at face value. After the April 1929 issue of Science Wonder Stories and the subsequent freezing of this two-word cluster into the name of the genre, whose understanding was, for a long time, burdened with condescension and prejudice, it has not been easy to remember that sf is, first of all, fiction about science. In the United States, the country that in the last century seems to have been going through a constant culture shock connected with dramatic transformations brought about by new technologies of life, production, and marketing, there has been a long tradition of writers committed to unraveling the multifarious ways in which these transformations have affected people. While science per se does not have to feature prominently in such texts (it certainly does not in many texts explicitly known as “sf ”), many such novels are committed to investigating the ways, often minute and almost imperceptible, in which scientific discoveries and their consequences percolate into everyday lives. That such texts are not known as “sf ” is a

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consequence of complicated genre debates but also enthusiastic marketing by such magazine editors as John W. Campbell, who in the 1940s tied the legitimacy of the newly emergent pulp genre to accuracy in the depiction of scientific and technological change. This does not necessarily entail the expansion of the label onto any and all texts preoccupied with technological progress, but it is important to remember that what most readers know as “sf ” has not been the only cultural site addressing these issues. In many mainstream novels (at least as seen from the genre perspective), scientific and technological representations and metaphors have been combined with social, economic, and political issues. Theodore Dreiser’s novels and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) comment on the consequences of industrialization and the mechanization of life, while Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams (1919) is permeated by the author’s bewilderment at the dramatic transformations of techne. Later in the twentieth century, Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Don DeLillo in White Noise (1985) used technological frameworks to talk about the impasses of American life while Richard Powers has kept returning to scientific systems and codes in such novels as The Gold Bug Variations (1991) and Generosity (2009). For Steve Tomasula, science and technology have remained absolutely central in practically all of his writings—in many ways they are as much characters in VAS, The Book of Portraiture, and Once Human as human actors. More specifically, there are several clusters of fields and topics that recur with increased frequency in his fiction. Genetics, biochemistry, and medicine are almost omnipresent, both their history and their latest developments. The concept of evolution, whether of Homo sapiens, culture, or writing, surfaces regularly. Tomasula is also intensely interested in the “soft” technologies of representation, data recording, and preservation, as well as related fields such as statistics. All these themes are clearly discerned in VAS: An Opera in Flatland, which problematizes the science of genetic inheritance in “a unique statement on the relation between science and fiction,”1 and The Book of Portraiture, which focuses on the technologies of representation. Mixing fiction with fact and using narrative gaps to insert extensive historical detours, Tomasula shows how intimately enmeshed these two areas are with virtually every single sphere of life but also how their understanding has evolved over time. Science and technology also underpin every single story in Once Human:2 prosthetics in “The Color of Flesh,” surveillance in “C-U See-Me,” or medicine and filmmaking in “Farewell to Kilimanjaro.” Against these 1 2

Thacker, “VAS: An Opera in Flatland (review),” 166. The collection of short stories Once Human was originally titled The Atlas of Man (If by Man We Also Mean Woman).

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texts, IN&OZ, the author’s second and shortest novel, seems to stand out as an outlier. Clearly drawing on surrealist imagination and featuring a range of characters from the Duchampian Mechanic to the Cagean Composer, the novel is heavily weighed with the aesthetic discussions of truth and beauty, whose tradition in the United States goes to the very beginning of American culture. It is, however, possible to think about IN&OZ as a fictionalized, latter-day version of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Designer, Photographer, Composer, Poet/Sculptor, and Mechanic fight out their conceptions of individual creativity, but underpinning their struggles are the over-determining forces of techno-modernity, unspoken but materially present in the distance. It is significant that of all characters in the book, it is Mechanic that seems to attract most attention, someone who does not seem to participate fully in Designer’s world of glass and steel, but whose mind and thinking are entirely structured by the technological imagination.3 The two titular lands, while most immediately perceived as metaphors of social class, are also clearly divided in terms of their access to and participation in the brave new world of muzak, industrial design, and mass reproducibility. Designer is the only one that feels at home in this world, but the other characters, too, must come to grips with the mechanisms of the late capitalist market: the temptation of mass recognition or the myth of the avant-garde artist producing a one-copy book. IN&OZ is as much about the vanity of such stances as it is about the world of commerce and marketing, both of which are really science and technology. The second sense in which Steve Tomasula’s writing is science fiction is the most literal. Certainly, there is no commonly accepted definition of sf and there is no other genre that has had such a rich and complicated history of identity struggle, but most critics would probably agree that sf is a kind of literature that deals with the impact of science and technology on contemporary life through staging some kind of alterity or estrangement from the world as we know it. More specifically, sf relies on a set of elements, icons, scenarios, and parables that Damien Broderick, drawing on Philippe Hamon and Christine Brooke-Rose, calls megatext.4 The operation of a shared megatext is so central to sf since, as literature, it cannot rely on

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In his thinking about Designer’s face in terms of “clean design” (75), Mechanic is a perfect embodiment of Emerson’s dictum of a man becoming a machine from “The American Scholar.” See Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures: Nature: Addresses and Lectures/ Essays: First and Second Series/Representative Men/English Traits/The Conduct of Life (New York: Library of America, 1983), 54. Damien Broderick, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 1994), 57–60.

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the solid referentiality of the world that so-called realist literature takes for granted. However, since no single sf element (clone, supercomputer, generation spaceship, apocalypse) has a fixed meaning or shape, this results in “a vast range of connotations hang[ing] above or behind any given sf text,”5 and thus the experience of writing and reading sf is one of moving in a dense cloud of echoes, allusions, recollections, associations, and resonances, some of which are intentional and others not— intertextual in the common and Kristevan sense, respectively. Consequently, the sf megatext is shared, inconsistent, and accretive; it relies on the foundation of earlier texts and evolves with each new text that connects to any number of others by means of any numbers of characters, situations, or objects. Some of its elements circulate in the traditional venues of the genre, such as sf magazines, but others may branch out beyond the traditional interpretive communities, the way in which pulp elements kept appearing in the postmodern fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, and Robert Coover, or how the figure of the clone has endeared to itself such diverse writers as Eva Hoffman, Danielle Steele, and Kazuo Ishiguro. If the presence of elements from the sf megatext is a measure of a text’s science-fictionality, then most texts by Tomasula fully qualify. In VAS, there are Christmas trees with genes that keep them green even when they are completely dry, microbes eating oil spills, and a mother considered a cyborg by her son-in-law. In The Book of Portraiture, chapter four, although technically set in the present day, abounds in the descriptions of surveillance that feels very sf, and chapter five, set in the near future, addresses the question of genetics and scientists’ as well as artists’ right to manipulate a subject’s genetic material without their knowledge. TOC begins with the image of a cluster of stars floating in the blackness of space and, although its narrative leans in the direction of the phantasmagoric, we are given to understand that the inhabitants of the island in the text live in some postapocalyptic epoch after the collapse of time. Finally, Once Human’s title already announces that all stories in the collection narrate, in one way or another, the condition of posthumanity, as much somatic as cognitive. The reason why novels such as VAS or The Book of Portraiture have not been traditionally considered sf, despite their conscious use of the genre’s megatext, is related to the relationship between the genre and other literary domains. In “The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction,” originally published in Village Voice in 1998, Jonathan Lethem mourns the fact that in 1973, Nebula, one of the top field awards, was not awarded to Gravity’s 5

Damien Broderick, “Megatext,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, accessed August 4, 2014, http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/sf_megatext.

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Rainbow. Pynchon’s novel was nominated but lost to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama, a text that Carter Scholz reportedly described as “less a novel than a schematic diagram in prose.”6 For Lethem, “Pynchon’s nomination now stands as a hidden tombstone marking the death of the hope that science fiction was about to merge with the mainstream,” a sad memorial strengthened by the committee’s failure to even shortlist Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star in 1977. These omissions are symptoms of the fierce territoriality of many sf writers, critics, and the long-standing debates over the genre’s borders. Among the most infamous instances of border policing is Damon Knight’s dismissal of A. E. Van Vogt’s fiction or Darko Suvin’s despotic denial of the sf label to Ray Bradbury’s fiction. The fact that the Nebulas are awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, an association of professional sf and fantasy writers, is also very telling of the field’s jealous guarding against writers interested in science and technology but not grounded in the traditional sf circles. While sf circles have never explicitly excluded writers such as Tomasula, the genre’s relationship with the literary mainstream or high postmodernism, both categories that his fiction can be viewed as part of, is very conflicted.7 Another dimension of this split is constituted by the disparate business models and interpretive communities of science fiction and experimental fiction which have largely remained separate.8 Because of this, at the risk of overgeneralizing, one could hazard the statement that very few readers of genre sf know Tomasula’s work while most Tomasula readers do not customarily read genre sf. And yet, the socioeconomic rift notwithstanding, it is difficult to read VAS or the last two sections of The Book of Portraiture as not science fiction. Traditionally, one of the ways to deal with this dissonance was to consider such texts “non-genre sf ” or “slipstream,”9 the qualification that 6

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Jonathan Lethem, “The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction,” Voice Literary Supplement (June 1998), 45–46. One of the best analyses of the genre’s internal discussions and definitional anxieties can be found in Roger Luckhurst’s “The Many Deaths of Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 21.1 (March 1994): 35–50. According to Luckhurst, science fiction critics regularly issue “panic narratives” (36) about the genre’s crisis that conceal a secret desire for its death—but death understood as the end of science fiction in the form known until that point and occasioned by the emergence of a new movement or a body of writings that transforms the genre into something else and transports it into the territory where it is not science fiction but simply fiction. There have been, naturally, instances of bridge-building between the worlds of science fiction and experimental fiction: in his critical writings and projects he was involved in, Larry McCaffery long postulated the natural Alliance of SF and postmodernism. For the critical discussion of the discourse of slipstream see Pawel Frelik, “Of Slipstream and Others: SF and Genre Boundary Discourses,” Science Fiction Studies, 38.113 (March 2011): 20–45.

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Tomasula’s novels and stories share with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day (2006); Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969); Joseph McElroy’s Plus (1977); Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977); Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980); William Burroughs’ trilogy opening with Cities of the Red Night (1981); Steve Erickson’s Day Between Stations (1985), Arc d’X (1993), and Amnesiascope (1996); William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels (1987); Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988); Lance Olsen’s Tonguing the Zeitgeist (1994) and Time Famine (1996); Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), Amnesia Moon (1995), and Girl in Landscape (1998); Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 (1995) and Plowing the Dark (2000); and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), to name only some American writers. While the firmly circumscribed definitions of science fiction, which have put such texts as those listed above outside the genre, have been historically important and can be tied to the genre’s struggle for legitimation, the last few decades have marked an advent of a new approach to sf, one that is far more open-ended and significantly less restrictive. Within it, sf is considered to possess no point of origin that would be “unique [and] common”10 and no strict boundaries circumscribed by the requirement of rationality or sufficient scientific plausibility. One of the most eloquent summaries of this new perception of the genre as a process rather than a finished object can be found in Bould’s and Vint’s 2009 piece significantly entitled “There Is No Such Thing as Science Fiction”: genres are never, as frequently perceived, objects which already exist in the world and which are subsequently studied by genre critics, but fluid and tenuous constructions made by the interaction of various claims and practices by writers, producers, distributors, marketers, readers, fans, critics and other discursive agents.11

With this definition, it is not difficult to see VAS or The Book of Portraiture as sf novels. Whether considered sf or slipstream, Tomasula’s texts register and narrate the influence technologies exert not so much on the societies at large, although these are necessarily impacted, too, but on individuals. Even 10

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Paul Kincaid, “On the Origins of Genre,” Extrapolation 44.4 (Winter 2003): 409. Also see John Rieder, “On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF and History,” Science Fiction Studies 37.111 (July 2010): 194–197. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, “There Is No Such Thing as Science Fiction,” in Reading Science Fiction, ed. James Gunn, Marleen Barr, and Matthew (Candelaria, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 48.

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in this respect, certain convergences can be discerned between Tomasula and a new generation of sf writers. While older science fiction tended to foreground fantastic science and technologies in narratorial introductions and extensive info-dumps delivered by characters serving as the author’s mouthpieces, many new writers construct their worlds through the slow process of dropping into the plot small details and observations that accrete to create a broader sense of futurity. Similarly, instead of the expository landscaping of the imagined future, Tomasula uses discrete clues and hints that slowly build up to a more or less complete vision. The previous two frameworks for understanding Tomasula’s work as sf are, hopefully, at least partly intuitive. The third one is, to my mind, the most important, since, while partly dependent on the previous two, it extends beyond thematic preoccupations and the recurrence of sf icons and ventures into the very structure of his fiction and its effect on the readers. With the possible exception of IN&OZ, all fiction by Tomasula is what Espen Aarseth calls “ergodic,” a kind of literature in which “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.”12 While “trivial” activity of the reader is limited to the predominantly linear eye movement and the periodic turning of pages,13 ergodic texts demand from their readers (or users—as Aarseth considers games ergodic, too) a degree of decision-making in the very activity of traversing the text, even if this activity is limited to deciding whether to follow the textual narrative or inspect complicated diagrams. Tomasula’s works are very clearly ergodic, and intensely so at that. Writing about VAS, Eugene Thacker notes that “one does not so much read this book as one sorts, sifts and wanders through it”14—it is very telling that the first two verbs suggest active agency. Next to Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), VAS is possibly one of the most challenginglooking American novels of the last fifty years. Its reliance on graphics and typography alone demands a species of attention from the reader that is not required in most traditional texts. There are probably very few readers who have actually “read” twenty five pages of the code for the gene SHGC-110205, but they cannot avoid deciding whether to treat the linguistic genealogical chart (VAS 57), which is really three pages, or the facsimile of a page from on old book (VAS 107) equally cursorily. More importantly, the novel also 12

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Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1. Naturally, any kind of reading also involves noematic processes of thought and understanding, but these can be dulled or diluted by the routine standardization of the form in which the text is presented to the reader. Thacker, Eugene. “The Book of Portraiture: A Novel,” review of The Book of Portraiture: A Novel by Steve Tomasula, Leonardo 40.4 (August 2007): 404.

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puzzles with pages in which the traditional demarcation between text and image is dissolved. Traditional literacy, even of the academic kind, does not provide guidelines concerning the reading protocols and the granularity of understanding that should be applied to the late section of the novel in which typography, colors, images, and online screenshots merge and bleed into each other (VAS 250–277). The Book of Portraiture seems at first a significantly humbler affair, even with the intricate design of individual sections, each of which mimics the historical period in which they are set. The true ergodic complexity emerges in chapter four, the longest in the novel, which abounds in the representations of digital sources: surveillance logs, corporate networks, price tags, catalog items from online stores, and web clippings. Some of them are reminiscent of the journalistic “newsreels” from John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy (1930–1938) or digital transcripts from Greg Bear’s Slant (1997), while others invite auto-intertextual associations with VAS. Additionally, running along the upper edge of each page in the section are the dotted lines of varying length, sometimes multiple on a single page, each preceded with the capital letter. These are decoded on the first page of the chapter as referring to a number of otherwise anonymous characters in the story while their length seems to be related to the degree of the character’s presence on a given page. In some cases, the lines are redundant, as the character’s letter is explicitly described in the text. Other times, though, the lines are puzzling but ultimately revealing (Book 224–225). Both have P’s line running along their full width, but the pages seem to be occupied only by U’s musings about her classes. The assumption is that she is on the same bus as P, whose line begins one page earlier (Book 223)—the transition to a different focalizer is thus marked only visually. Arguing for the ergodic character of TOC seems practically unnecessary because of its materiality and the form of a new media novel, a categorization which is both commonsensical and completely un-illuminating, as it fails to reflect the text’s uniqueness and exposes the insufficiency of current descriptive categories. Nevertheless, the ergodicity of much of Steve Tomasula’s fiction is not unique as a quality, although it is extraordinary in terms of its complexity and ingenuity. It is only when it is considered in the context of sf that it becomes something truly unique. In fact, it is possible to view VAS, The Book of Portraiture, and Once Human as instances of the very few texts that develop the logic of science-fictionality to its conclusion and reveal a yawning absence at the heart of the literary manifestation of the genre. In its fantastic explorations, most sf literature has been characterized by a major dissonance. While the genre’s texts revolve around non-, post-, and

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inhuman perspectives embedded in postcontemporary timelines and otherspatial realities, the actual material forms and narrative patterns in which these stories are instantiated have remained perplexingly tame, if not outright conservative. There is, naturally, much to be said for the traditional narrative structures built around highly individualistic protagonists that science fiction evolved in its early decades. As a genre born in the notorious pulps but committed to the popularization of scientific ideas and technological inventions, early science fiction was practically doomed to the undemanding modes of presentation of its core ideas. In fact, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. argues that even nowadays much of SF has been resolutely committed to “pseudorealistic plausibility”15 and “realistic verisimilitude.”16 While this was understandable in the early decades, after the 1960s the thematic complexity increased exponentially while many characters became less and less recognizably human. This creates a jarring opposition between the represented alterity and the manner of representation—cyberpunk’s visions of digital multi-flows of information and bodiless ecstasies of cyberspace have been deployed in novels whose layout is no different from that of Henry James’s novels and whose focalizers could legitimately come from Hemingway’s stories. This conservatism of form extends to film and television, the other two major narrative media of sf, which have also failed to break the yoke of realistic representation and channeled their sense of futuristic media overflow into the largely gimmicky cyborg vision and data display overlays. More radical experiments in the sciencefictionalization of the form as well as the estranging of the effort elicited from the audiences have been undertaken in digital forms such as video games or transmedia narratives—but, as many critics note, at the expense of narrative. All along, however, sf literature has remained largely immune to such explorations. To what extent this is a consequence of the writers’ lack of interest in abandoning traditional storytelling templates and how much of this is a function of industry processes and production standards is uncertain. The fact is, though, that the few sf texts that have taken their cue from the experimental novels of 1960s and 1970s postmodernism have been successful with the genre’s readers, and so those works have remained marginalized within the genre. Steve Tomasula’s fiction redresses this lacuna in its attempt to adjust the form to the content and to convey not only the discourse of the future but also a sense of what living in it could be like. The ergodicity 15

16

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown,: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 24. Csicsery-Ronay, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, 76.

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of literary texts does not have to be futuristic per se, and more often than not it engages the reader in a detective-like play, in which the traditional faculties of reasoning suffice. This is, for instance, the case with Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which, for all its hypertextual appearance and meandering digressions, is, in fact, a very linear narrative. VAS and The Book of Portraiture are not like that. While their narrative layer is also linear, with the clearly discernible commencement and conclusion, the visual aspect of both books overloads the readers’ senses, calling for a recalibration of attention and reading habits that is commensurate with the science-fictionality of the narratives themselves. In How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, Katherine Hayles suggests that our current immersion in and interactions with digital technologies have not only ushered new cognitive patterns but also “have bodily effects on the physical level.”17 In unpacking the character and consequences of this transformation, Hayles offers, among others, the discussion of various types of attention and the related types of reading, including hyper attention and the attendant hyperlinked reading, which relies more on the extent rather than depth of the probed material. It should not come as a surprise that one of Hayles’ case studies in How We Think is TOC, which anticipates the inherent instability of temporal regimes happening in societies in which the speed of technogenetic change increases.18 Although VAS and The Book of Portraiture seem to be less radical in their paper-based codex form, they also produce a reader that occupies the position of being already “once human”—an appropriately sf reader-cyborg, as originally envisioned by Donna Haraway. While many critics focus on the three boundary breakdowns she invokes in “A Cyborg Manifesto,”19 it is necessary to remember that the starting impulse for the invocation of the cyborg figure was to propose a different type of thinking, a cognitive position unconstrained by the binary polarity and the desire for holism.20 Tomasula’s novels are cyborg texts that call for cyborg readings. On the one hand, they steep their readers in what could be called traditional episteme. They reflect the author’s academic and critical interest in bioart and biotechnologies, as evidenced by his nonfiction writings; are often results of long archival research; draw on the rich history of numerous sciences; and are built around real-world artistic and philosophical discourses. They also cherish the recurrent human and humanistic element in individual stories 17 18 19 20

Hayles, How We Think, 3. Hayles, How We Think, 120. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 151–153. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 151.

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that emerge from them: a memoir of a young, sexually repressed psychiatrist in chapter three of The Book of Portraiture or the very need for a heartfelt solidarity with Circle that Square is struggling with in VAS. At the same time, however, this old-world content is packaged and presented to the reader in a very science-fictional form. Although, technically, the verbi-visual avalanche of pages from VAS or The Book of Portraiture reflects our media-saturated and image-obsessed present, it also creates a distinct sense of estrangement, a psychological mechanism that has been central to understanding sf.21 But while the science-fictional estrangement is caused by the thematic and narrative dimension of texts, Tomasula’s sf creates it in relation to its form, going further than most texts that we commonly know as sf. In the same way in which Heinrich Khunrath’s sixteenth-century alchemical treatises forced their readers to adopt cognitive perspectives inherent in their esoteric and hermetic worldview, Tomasula’s narratives assume truly twenty-first-century forms and compel the readers to assume points of view appropriate to the stories they tell—not incomprehensible but always tottering on the edge of confusion and uncertainty. They force the readers to develop new reading strategies, new criteria of selection, and new regimes of memory. Hayles posits them to be already current among users of digital technologies, but at the same time they are also science-fictional and reminiscent of the ways in which the protagonists of Neuromancer, Queen of Angels, and Blindsight perceive and process information. Gibson, Bear, and Watts only described what it would be like to interact with data and images. Tomasula explores the ways to engage his readers in a simulation of this experience. In his essay on spatial history, Richard White cautions us that visualization and spatial history are not about producing illustrations or maps to communicate things that you have discovered by other means. It is a means of doing research; it generates questions that might otherwise go unasked, it reveals historical relations that might otherwise go unnoticed.22

It is almost uncanny how accurately this formulation describes the experience of reading VAS, The Book of Portraiture, or TOC. If Steve Tomasula is, indeed, a writer of sf in any or all of the three senses, and, needless to say, I do think he is, it is legitimate to ask about the value 21

22

The mechanism of estrangement and cognition and its role in the operation of science fiction was elaborated by Darko Suvin; see his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Richard White, “What Is Spatial History?” Spatial History Project, accessed February 1, 2014, http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29

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of such categorization. There are several possible perspectives that address this question. When inspected from inside the genre of sf, his novels and stories demonstrate how the science-fictional preoccupations—media saturation, biopower, surveillance society, posthuman condition—can be successfully framed and conveyed in a way that is consistent with the narratives themselves. Mark Danielewski’s wild designs in House of Leaves are reflections of the mind at the end of its tether, convincing but ultimately arbitrary. The whole of VAS and the significant portions of The Book of Portraiture and Once Human are uncanny imitations—and intimations—of what it feels like to live in the society of information glut and omnipresent visuality. Secondly, reading Tomasula’s fiction as sf allows us to see both his books and sf within a broader literary continuum that engages some of the most immediate preoccupations of our times, contemporary transformations of communication technologies, genetics, and media saturation, but also how they relate to the otherwise very normal human lives. In Constructing Postmodernism, Brian McHale suggests that until the 1970s the mutual transactions between postmodernism and sf had been out of sync, with the high postmoderns drawing on the pulps imagination and the New Wave sf writers seeking inspiration in modernist writers.23 However appreciative each partner of this exchange was of the other, the model still maintained the sense that science fiction and mainstream were somehow separate cultural worlds. There are few better examples than Tomasula’s fiction that this is no longer the case. Finally, there is a role which sf, as a cultural repository of certain thematics, can play in contemporary culture. In one of his nonfiction pieces, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” Tomasula discusses some possible examples of a new type of narrative that would reflect the world that we increasingly live in, in which “much of our lived experience seems to privilege pattern over presence; where biology is information and information can be turned into biology; where email signatures replace the penmanship of an actual hand while human voice and intelligence is augmented by that of the machine.”24 Admittedly, many of the qualities that he envisions for such narratives, “malleability, ease of recombination, dependence on the image, interactivity, infinite linkage and therefore indeterminacy, the dispersal of Origins, of Author/Authority, its 23 24

Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1993), 227–229. Steve Tomasula “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” Sillages Critiques 17 (2014), accessed August 30, 2014, http://sillagescritiques.revues. org/3562

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grounding in pattern rather than presence, and material-informational entities,”25 cannot be realized in the limits of the printed page. Still, I would like to propose that VAS, but also his other fictions to an extent, is as close to such a posthuman narrative as it is possible in the print medium. Reading it, and any other texts that will follow its lead, without the megatextual repository of sf and sf theory, would be like approaching Ulysses without any knowledge of Greek mythology.

25

Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative.”

12

“Do We Not Bleed?” “The Color of Flesh” in a Pop Cyborg World Anne Larue

Steve Tomasuala’s short story “The Color of Flesh” conjures up the new and queer face of our world.1 At first glance, it seems to be a plain story of love, doubt, and marriage: two people are in love with each other, the girl finds out worrying details about her boyfriend, she doubts him, and then as in any classic comedy, all ends very well. Yet what is hidden underneath this familiar love story is a radical change in our habits of thought. The marriage story, arguably once the core moral standard, is subtly turned upside down. Funny and optimistic, Tomasula’s short story deals with the human condition, disability, sexuality, and social violence. It shows how two young people can use such an old narrative pattern as love and marriage in a radically new way. Heavy subject, light proceeding: the Shakespearian tradition, obvious in the title of this short story, is not only a subtle allusion. Read in the context of Shakespearian comedy, “The Color of Flesh” uses these old narrative patterns in a very original way. Perhaps the dominant concept in our brave new world is the dominance of majority, and this includes majority in the world of ideas. At its best, this would be a consequence of a political hope for democracy, but, on the dark side, it is also a part of the advance of globalization. When Baudelaire, in the nineteenth century, wrote that the “bourgeois,” who are now so numerous, represent truth and intelligence because they are so numerous, he prefigures in an ironical way issues of normalization and standardization.2 In “The Color of Flesh” it is quite the opposite. In Tomasula’s fictional world, majority does not exist any more as a dominant concept. On the contrary, all of us actually belong to a complex constellation of minorities. Now we can think about and study these previously hidden minorities that were formerly inexistent because they were not the object of any discourses. This shift from majority to minority could clarify the meaning of Steve Tomasula’s “The Color of Flesh,” which can be read as a modern tale about 1

2

Steve Tomasula, “The Color of Flesh” in Once Human: Stories (Tuscaloosa: FC2, 2014). I warmly thank Françoise Palleau-Papin for her linguistic assistance. Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques, “Aux bourgeois” (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1868), 77–193.

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cyborgs, on the one hand illustrating the issue of cyborg gender confusion, and on the other hand the new reality of humans as composites who refuse to be grasped as an “organized cosmos,”3 as Donna Haraway puts it. Indeed, this new way of being human could be linked with Haraway’s theories about cyborgs and gender in A Cyborg Manifesto, as well as with Beatriz Preciado’s Contrasexual Manifesto.4 Let us enter, Haraway’s universe through the paintings of Lynn Randolph. One of them represents “Haraway’s description of Asian women with nimble fingers, working in enterprise zones for very little remuneration”5 (see Figure  12.1). The next shows OncoMouse, the first medical cyborg Haraway

Figure 12.1  Lynn Randolph, Cyborg, 1989. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist. 3

4

5

Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (New-York: Routledge, 1991), 149. Beatriz Preciado, Manifesto contra-sexual: prácticas subversivas de identidad sexual (Madrid: Opera Prima, 2002). An excerpt in English is available online in the journal Total Art, accessed June 20, 2013, http://totalartjournal.com/archives/1402/the-contrasexual-manifesto/. See Lynn Randolph, “Modest Witness: a Painter’s Collaboration with Donna Haraway,” accessed June 25, 2013, http://www.lynnrandolph.com/ModestWitness.html. In my opinion the painter gave her special interpretation to the meaning of “modest witness,” a phrase that is clearly negative in Haraway’s view.

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wrote about. In Randolph’s painting, the OncoMouse is a giant, with human breasts, arms, and legs (see Figure 12.2). Why illustrate philosophical texts with paintings?

Figure 12.2  Lynn Randolph, The Laboratory/The Passion of OncoMouse, 1994. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.

Once Human raises similar issues. Lynn Randolph’s paintings and Maria Tomasula’s drawings in “The Color of Flesh” are not merely illustrations. They are something much more like illuminations, where the visual becomes fully an integral part of the text. Indeed a new text format, enhanced by new digital possibilities, allows graphic and typographic variations, emphasizing every movement of the text itself and creating a different reading that plays with headlines, topics, and boxes. Now, in the era of the internet and digital technology, we can read shorter pieces of text, and linear reading is a receding practice. Steve Tomasula plays with these new graphic opportunities. But in another way, illustration gives another dimension.

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Is the theme of cyborg itself generating such new figurative representations? The importance of cyborg filmography and comics seems to be an indication. Cyborgism is not an abstract concept. First, it is a representation. Let’s return to Lynn Randolph’s interpretation of A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway. A woman surrounded by electronic devices, a giant mouse watched in secret by hidden eyes behind a wall: in those pictures, the concept of standardization is denied by the cyborg (a woman, a mouse) at the center of the image. Importantly, this is not the traditional location of the deviant figure, which previously had to be rejected, kept in the margins. Let’s look for example at an ordinary and contemporary American superhero movie poster for Watchmen (Warner Brothers 2009). In the center of the picture there is the Man, the Hero. In the margins, the woman, the monster from outer space, the beast and all the faithful adjuvants of the Man. It’s the same with action movies posters, for instance the Tom Cruise vehicle Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (Paramount 2011) follows the exact same composition. This patriarchal pattern keeps running in these posters as a tradition, a habit, but it is now meaningless. This pattern is now completely obsolete, and this can be read in Haraway’s essays, Randolph’s paintings, and in Tomasula’s “The Color of Flesh.” In Haraway’s text the cyborg is no longer a RoboCop mirroring only the male and dominant culture, obsolescence, and technology (see Figure 12.3). Haraway’s cyborgs

Figure 12.3  Film still from RoboCop, directed by Paul Verhoeven, 1987.

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are on the contrary a mix of human, natural, and artificial devices, a composite of queer sexual and political cultures. While the male cyborg is an economic problem of capitalism and spare parts, the new cyborg is primarily a political issue. In Tomasula’s story gender and race problems are linked with social issues. And his cyborg is a woman with good shoes and a peace flower in her hand, as shown in the title drawing (see Figure 12.4).

Figure 12.4 Steve Tomasula, “The Color of Flesh” in Once Human: Stories (Tuscaloosa: FC2, 2014), 1. Title drawing by Maria Tomasula. Courtesy of the author.

Yumi, main character of the short story, is a Japanese girl, and a sexy girl, and a manga artist, and an amputee. She is all of that. She has no unity; she is made from several juxtaposed identities. Haraway defines the cyborg as “a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities.”6 Haraway quotes Audre Lorde who defines herself with a nondefinition as a black-lesbian-mother-warrior-poet—and feminist. Cyborg is a mix of identities; it’s not only an artificial device connected with a human body, as it is with the RoboCop. The cyborg is simply a new human who refuses to be unified under a scheme consistent with the majority. S/he accepts internal 6

Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 174.

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contradictions and the uncomfortable reality of forming a whole that is divided, even agonized, in the sum of her many identities. We will define Tomasula’s story outline as more complex than a heterosexual and normative pattern, upsetting gender, race, and class across the spectrum of several mythologies, from Western patterns to Japanese ones, including science fiction mythologies. What’s this queer story? A love story, in fact—ending with the traditional wedding. But the way to reach this goal is all but traditional. Here it is the meeting between “the heteronormative regime,” to quote Beatriz Preciado, and what she calls “dildology,” a new philosophy of the sexual prothesis which could summarize the aim of this Shakespearian sounding short story “The Color of Flesh.”7 Preciado writes that “Dildotectonics locates gender and sexual technologies of resistance. It studies their functioning, the ways in which they interrupt the flow of production of body-pleasure-capital not only within heterosexual but also within queer cultures.”8 Drawings from her book show how to transform every part of the body into an erogenous zone. Queer culture induces a digression, a shift. In “The Color of Flesh,” the association of commonplace, manga-like black-and-white drawings with the text introduces a contemporary pop effect. In a close relationship with the theme of the story, the “color of flesh” being first the artificial color of all the devices—a Band Aid or an artificial leg—fitted for posthumans. Incidentally, Yumi cuts her finger with an X-acto knife, but the actual problem is first the difference between men and women and not at all, extraordinarily, her prosthetic leg. When Yumi cuts herself, at the beginning of the story, she seems disproportionately overwhelmed by such a minor injury. The reader glances down to her leg, and surprise, it’s a prosthetic. But Yumi is not directly interested in her legs: she has a problem, a doubt about love. The question is: “Is it possible that my boyfriend loves me only because I’m an amputee?” (Once 6–7). Funny question, because she should have been thinking about that before. Jerome is a performance artist who works with medical supplies, crash-test dummies, naked store manikins, and even an “inflatable Suzie” (Once 9). Ballard’s novel, Crash, adapted by David Cronenberg for the cinema, gives us a good reference of that kind of sexual, medical, and motorized universe.9 One day, the naive Yumi discovers that her boyfriend hides a very special collection of pornography dealing with prosthetic limbs and amputation. The domestic dispute takes place Preciado, The Contra-Sexual Manifesto. Preciado, The Contra-Sexual Manifesto. 9 J. G. Ballard, Crash (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973). See also the adaptation Crash, directed by David Cronenberg (1996; Hollywood, CA: Warner Archive Collection, 2014), DVD. 7 8

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in the midst of a jumble of manikins, one of them presenting a false penis removal device from a Geriatric Care Manikin, another a Breast Self Exam Vest, worn by Jerome himself. Sexual devices are “dildos” taken in Preciado’s sense, removable and interchangeable devices which scramble gender identities. Jerome, to enact his performances, can use two voices. Changing voice is known to be a classic transgender performance. A good example is given in the second “feminine voice lesson” by CandiFLA on YouTube.10 Jerome turns a male into a female: “Mr. Invincible is reincarnated as Old Mother so he was switching the genitals of the manikin” (Once 9). He turns himself into a female, with his vest with breasts. Genders are confused in the middle of the dispute, producing an ironical distance because the first problem for the two lovers is, in fact, about the gender struggle. Yumi has no “studio of her own,” to quote Erica E. Hirshler’s book about women artists in Boston and alluding, of course, to Virginia Woolf.11 Yumi works in the kitchen, but Jerome calls their bedroom his “studio” (Once 10). It’s a classic case of differential, gendered treatment in the occupation of space. This encroachment problem is represented indirectly by the “monster of doubt” in the drawings: the “doubt’ ” looks like the invasive shadow of the typical sexual monster in erotic “hentai” manga from Japan (Figure 12.5).

Figure 12.5 Steve Tomasula, “The Color of Flesh” in Once Human: Stories (Tuscaloosa: FC2, 2014), 4. Maria Tomasula’s drawing of the “Monster of Doubt.” 10

11

candiFLA, “009 Transgender Voice-2,” YouTube, accessed June 20, 2014, http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=BaxxEyZBgR4. Erica E. Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870–1940 (Boston: Museum of Fine Art, 2001).

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This is not a coincidence because Yumi’s art is to create a sexually attractive manga universe, cyborgs “with girls from magazines, associated with guns from gun-lover magazines” (Once 6). When the real subject of the dispute is faced (the doubt about love), Yumi herself becomes a manga heroine, as in her graphic work. She turns into a strong, gigantic and angry manga girl in the time it takes for the writer to write it in an interpolated clause: “Protect? she yelled—morphing as she never had before” (Once 14). A drawing in full-screen emphasizes the morphing. It’s manga-like but quite different from the common eroticized and sexist representations of the manga girl warriors. For example, Black Lagoon Anime, a Japanese TV series, emphasizes the breasts and the sex of the warrior Revy with extreme low-angle shots.12 But in Marie Tomasula’s drawing of Yumi, the low-angle shot is used to show and emphasize her two strong legs (see Figure 12.6). The strength of her sex, clearly shown in the middle of the picture, is linked with the strength of her legs. The steel protects the body as an armor. This is very different from typical anime and manga like Black Lagoon where the heroines are usually scantily clad. Yumi was dreaming, when she was a little girl, of buying a steel leg and not a poor imitation of the “color of flesh,” which is impossible to match. This problem is a classic “colorist” issue in the art of painting. From the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, theorists of painting have confronted the problem of the “color of flesh.” In the works of Lodovico Dolce (sixteenth century), De Piles (seventeenth century), and Diderot (eighteenth century), it is a recurrent theme. We can quote for example Diderot in his Essai sur la peinture: “Do women’s skin tone remain the same when anticipating pleasure, feeling pleasure, during and after intercourse? Ah, my friend! Painting, that is art.”13 But in Marie Tomasula’s drawing the legs are made of steel, both of them, which announces the end of the story—the false leg becoming the good one, a weapon. In the drawing, the heroine is screaming her powerful rage; in the text she attacks the manikins and destroys everything around her. Destruction is represented 12

13

Black Lagoon Anime, dir. Sunao Katabuchi (Tokyo: Chiba TV and Madhouse, 2006), 12 episodes. The series was adapted from the manga written and drawn by Rei Hiroe. See www.renders-graphiques.fr/galerie/Filles-Femmes-109/Guerrière-Combattant-10434. htm. Accessed June 2013. This image is a render: an isolated drawing ready for use in every composition, making it a very common picture. Denis Diderot, Œuvres complètes, édition de Jules Assérat et Maurice Tourneux “Essai sur la peinture,” vol. 10 ( Paris: Garnier-Frères, 1876), 473. Translation by Line Langlois.

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Figure 12.6 Steve Tomasula, “The Color of Flesh” in Once Human: Stories (Tuscaloosa: FC2, 2014), 13. Maria Tomasula’s low-angle drawing of Yumi.

with the buildings on fire, with clouds of smoke, in a classically apocalyptic urban landscape. When Jerome answers Yumi’s accusations, he turns the doubt onto her, revealing her own “queerness,” if we can call it that. We have noticed in the text the importance of the Shakesperian intertext: Jerome tells a story of his youth when he was compared to Othello and accused of stealing a scooter because he looks like Othello. From the beginning of the story it has been a real tour de force not to reveal in the drawings that Jerome is Black. For example, he is represented in shadow … . Nobody can notice exactly the color of his flesh.

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The “defense” of Jerome against Yumi’s accusations is a “performance,” with an implicit reference to As You Like It: “all the world is a stage.”14 Jerome is a performer and for him the revelation of the truth is not possible without a theatrical device. The quote from The Merchant of Venice is all the more important: the title, “The Color of flesh,” has its roots in Shakespeare’s drama, and the allusion of cutting the flesh and bleeding when cut is precisely what happens to Yumi when she cuts herself. “If you prick us do we not bleed?” 15 Like the character of Eva, in Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, Yumi uses her lost leg as a weapon, and Sula cuts herself too (she slashes off her finger to show she can resist men).16 Yumi resists men (her boyfriend, and then a policeman) with a very little cut, comparatively. When she crashes dummies and puppets, when Jerome removes genitalia or limbs from one dummy to another, there is no flesh and no blood. All that stuff can be broken without damage. But Jerome himself reveals that the living flesh is fragile: the last scene of police violence stages the vulnerability of the real flesh. Jerome was accused of being a thief when he was young because of the color of his flesh; now he is injured by a policeman, who has arrived with his female partner and reproduces the gender diagram in an ironical way. When she sees Jerome attacked by the policeman, Yumi uses her false leg as a weapon to knock him out. She is no longer interested in finding out the truth, the difference between life and theater in Jerome’s parody of Shakespearian performance. His first posture is very theatrical, "I admit to being a man," and this provokes an increasingly angry Yumi (Once 18). This resonates now in the action that is a source of pain for him. It is impossible for him to “get off stage,” to interrupt the human comedy when he finishes as the victim. Yumi can “[see] him as she never had before: a black man explaining himself fast to two white cops” (Once 18). In the most extreme theatricality this expresses a crude reality. It is a striking image—and, again, a kind of theatrical situation, paradoxically. She can see as an evidence “the color of flesh”: female against male in the first part of the short story, human against dummies, confusing genders, and male and female police violence 14 15 16

William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.7. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 3.1. Line Langlois, in conversation: “The amputee really makes me think of Eva, a black character in Toni Morrison’s novel Sula who lost her leg and uses this loss as a weapon against the stiffling male dominated society she lives in, a bit like Yumi when she hit the policeman. The amputation clearly appears as a means of resistance in Medallion where women mainly live for men, bear children and work, except for the fascinating Eva and Sula who resist and affect the lives of both men and women there. Sula, like Yumi, cut herself, slashed off her finger in front of men to show she is capable of doing anything to them … Eva and Sula could fit into a ‘dildology.’ ”

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against her lover in the second part. The gender argument doubles up with those of race, social class, and violence. When she fights the policeman, Yumi uses her “good” leg—that is, the false one. This inversion could represent an assumed disorder in the order of the world, a generalization of queerness. To be queer, to add minority identifications without turning into a “cosmos,” pace Haraway, becomes the new human condition. Hers is the lesson of cyborgs, or in Haraway’s words: The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are an issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.17

Yumi is no longer an innocent amputee, living with a lying and theatrical boyfriend. She lives “without innocence.” She is no longer the “heterosexual mate” of a triumphant white man who wants to know the plenitude of being a whole, a cosmos. It is over with “the model of the organic family” and the oedipal scheme. It overthrows the Bible and religions. This frame of “cyborg” humanity admits minority characteristics as a new standard. The norm is no longer the heterosexual-white-healthy-not perverse-man’s, but the human being’s (and not the man’s, as we can refer to the first title considered by the author: The Atlas of Man, (If by Man We Also Mean Woman).18 A human being who can bleed but who lives with robots and dummies, who has a prosthetic leg, who is Japanese or Black, who is equally perverse—Yumi with her sexy manga girls with guns and Jerome with his theater of cyborg puppets. 17 18

Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 151. This was the early title for Once Human that appeared in Tomasula’s interviews and press in 2012. See for instance Newcity Lit, “LIT 50: Who Really Books in Chicago,” June 7 (2012), accessed August 11, 2014, http://lit.newcity.com/2012/06/07/lit-50-who-reallybooks-in-chicago-2012/.

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We can think of Maul (2003), by Tricia Sullivan: it is the story of a girl whose gun is both her dildo and her weapon. In Maul, male clones are used to test a bacteria invasion.19 In fact the “cyborg era” now replaces the “patriarchal era,” as I tried to show in my book Dis papa, c’était quoi le patriarcat?20 (Hey Daddy, what was patriarchy like?): a world where the summary of special features becomes the dominant standard of identification, turning the traditional pattern into an old fantasy. At least, to be disabled can be better than to be fully able-bodied: that is the meaning of Jerome’s two voices, referring to transgender skills. The same point can be made with the prosthetic leg: Yumi uses it at a terrible weapon, and she is put on trial because of this use. Likewise, Aimee Mullins, a handisport runner and a beautiful model, was born without legs: she has more than twenty pairs of prosthetic legs, can change her size, her look, as she likes—and noncyborg friends of hers were jealous of her.21 She says in another interview that athletes are desperate to improve their performance, and may even be willing to remove a solid member to have a false but better one put in.22 We are close to contemporary “body hacking,” as analyzed by Cyril Fiévetin.23 In the short story, Yumi falls down after her prowess: her leg detaches during the wrestling. It’s an ironically real situation, in opposition with the indestructible manga heroine, which summarizes all the skills of queer people: amputees, gender troublemakers, cyborgs, dummies, black people, and women have recourse to legal violence (I am referring to the studies of Genevieve Pruvost24) to cause a departure from the social standards. In fact everybody, even the representatives of order, is in a problematic situation in front of the so-called “majority.” The majority becomes an empty type, a reference to the past. Haraway shows that the world is becoming another world, with women everywhere working to make chips in factories or in a close relationship with digital devices, becoming heads of their families and introducing a definitive change in the old structures.25 19 20 21

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Tricia Sullivan, Maul (London: Orbit, 2003). Anne Larue, Dis papa, c’était quoi le patriarcat? (Donnemarie-Donmartin: Ixe, 2013). Aimée Mullins, “My Twelve Pairs of Legs,” TED Talk, Feb. (2009), accessed June 5, 2014, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/fr/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html. See Gwendal Fossois, “ ‘Un homme presque parfait,’ cyborg m’était conté,” Liberation, June 9, 2011, accessed June 20, 2013, http://www.ecrans.fr/Un-homme-presque-parfaitcyborg-m,12928.html. Cyril Fiévet, Body Hacking. Pirater son corps et redéfinir l’humain (Limoges: FYP editions, 2012). Genevieve Pruvost, Profession: policier. Sexe: féminin (Paris: Éditions de la MSH, 2007). See also her De la « sergote » à la femme flic. Une autre histoire de l’institution policière (1935–2005) (Paris: La Découverte, 2008). Haraway, A Cyborg manifesto, 166–167.

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Patriarchal reference is fading, even if the reality barely changes (referring to gender crimes all over the world). The gender battle for territory is followed by the union of the two lovers before the common enemy: such shifting alliances conveys the difficulty of being made of “flesh”—or simply human—in a cyborg world, invaded with graphic manga art, false legs, and medical supplies. But as Shakespeare said, “all’s well that ends well”: in the comedy of life all ends with a marriage— Yumi and Jerome end as in a Shakespearian comedy. But this “straight” end, to speak as Monique Wittig, is an ironical surface: underneath there is the new world of cyborgs, which has been undeniably established. To conclude, I am going to turn to Maria Tomasula’s drawings, diverting the universe of erotic mangas. A woman alone in a forest is a commonplace in hentai erotic mangas (see Figure 12.7), as is the sadistic legs-shop (Yumi seems scared of opening the forbidden door) (see Figure 12.8).

Figure 12.7 Steve Tomasula, “The Color of Flesh” in Once Human: Stories (Tuscaloosa: FC2, 2014), 2. Maria Tomasula, drawing of Yumi in the forest.

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Figure 12.8 Steve Tomasula, “The Color of Flesh” in Once Human: Stories (Tuscaloosa: FC2, 2014), 3. Maria Tomasula’s drawing of the forbidden door.

Such scenes are usual in Japanese eroticism, as shown in video games for all audiences—the famous survival horror game Zero has a college girl opening forbidden doors in an old mansion to discover very sadistic scenes against women, called “rituals”: blinding a woman with a mask with nails in the eyes, tearing apart the neck, arms, and legs of another one. The heroine takes the place of the tortured victim.26 The Japanese artist Aida Makoto represents amputee Japanese girls as “dogs” or little feminine bodies crushed and mashed in a giant juicer. The young Yumi’s s fright upon opening the door and finding the collection of legs could be a distanced reference to this cruel universe. Yet another register is the manga for girls, with little flowers and cute rabbits—the “kawai” universe we see 26

Zero (Tokyo: Tecmo, 2001–2012).

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when Yumi is sobbing after her crisis (see Figure 12.9). It’s cute and a little ridiculous, a new diversion, because Yumi has broken everything around her before crying like a little girl.

Figure 12.9 Steve Tomasula, “The Color of Flesh” in Once Human: Stories (Tuscaloosa: FC2, 2014), 14. Maria Tomasula’s drawing of Yumi’s “kawai” universe.

The two “RoboCops,” male and female, who are absolutely identical in the drawing (except, ironically, for the robot’s buttons suggesting female breasts; the triangle, feminine symbol, appears on the side of man!) (see Figure 12.10) take a perceptible distance from the different treatment of male and female in traditional gendered filmography: for example, in Robocop, the man, Murphy, is saved to become a robot, but the woman (his female cop partner, Anne) dies, and she is not turned into a “RoboCop” of her own. It is the same in Battlestar Galactica (2004): men and women have the same clothes, the same jobs, the same showers (as in Robocop), but even the character of Starbuck, who was a man in the first series (1978), becomes a woman in the new one, but the treatment of men and women is not identical in some details, such as a necklace for Starbuck, and this breaks the vision of equality.

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Figure 12.10 Steve Tomasula, “The Color of Flesh” in Once Human: Stories (Tuscaloosa: FC2, 2014), Maria Tomasula’s drawing of the two “RoboCops,” 19.

Marie Tomasula represents the two cops in low-angle framing, dominating the little human beings in front of them. This unification suggests the progress of the idea of cyborg: no genre, no class, no race, no patriarchal and biblical patterns. To quote Haraway: “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.”27 “Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs—creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted,” writes Haraway.28 At the core of science-fiction, some texts can be ranked under the name of political anticipation fiction; “The Color of Flesh” is one of them, with Neuromancer by William Gibson or Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler. About Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, John Varley, James Tiptree Jr. (alias Alice Sheldon), Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, or Vonda McIntyre, Haraway says: “These are our storytellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds. They are 27 28

Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 150. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 173.

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theorists for cyborgs.”29 All these stories depict a new world through issues of gender and race, and they highlight the relativity of these classifications. Gender and race are both patriarchal inventions, and they merely reflect a particular social organization. Nothing is eternal or universal in such a pattern. In these terms, the goal of cyborg philosophy is not the raise to masculine power—star wars, RoboCops, and triumph of male technology— but on the contrary a return to the margins, the representation of composites, a deal with split identities in a broken but exciting world. We call woman, Black, Japanese, cripple, stranger, sexual deviant, queer, etc. this experience of fragmentation and refusal of an artificial and politically driven unit. The “post-human” is not a terrible erection helped with electrical energy but a way to manage with scraps and remains of the destroyed patriarchy. The fear of losing power—at the double meaning of electricity and politics—appears meaningfully in movies like the American science-fiction film Escape from L.A. (1996) where the hero, Snake, switches off the whole Earth with a small device. In the same way, the recent fantasy television series, Game of Thrones (2011), depicts the same issues: a little English-like world—Starks against Lannisters, that is, Yorks against Lancasters?—leads to laughable struggles in tiny territories while, on the margins, two distinct powers are being organized: frozen zombies coming from the North, and a generous woman with dragons—a traditional goddess, mistress of the animals, liberating the chained people. In the central location of the action, between these two superpowers, the focus is on the particularities and disabilities of people: a giant warrior woman, a fat man, a dwarf, a eunuch, a half-witted giant, a paralyzed boy. The fourth episode of the first season is meaningfully named: “Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things.” The new “cyborg” sensibility is running deep under the patriarchal appearances. “The Color of Flesh” illustrates too what it means to be embodied out of the ruling normality, dealing with social traditional patterns like policing and marriage. The story is facing the issue of high-tech worlds in several respects: sexuality, social violence, and art. It is representing how to be a cripple and a Japanese, a Black and a queer. In this direction, it offers a contribution to “cyborgology” in literature.

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Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 173.

13

Enumeration and the Form of the Short Story in Steve Tomasula’s Once Human Françoise Palleau-Papin

As a generic form, short stories are generally praised for their economy, and are usually sparse and to the point, unlike the longer, more discursive mode of the novel. But such generalities do not obtain in Steve Tomasula’s work. In the short stories that make up Tomasula’s collection Once Human, there are several long enumerative passages, a stylistic tendency not traditionally associated with the form of the short story. I will here argue that his use of enumerations slows down the narrative flow and clutters the chronological sequence of events it evokes, thus inscribing death in the text. Crowding so many details of the history of Western civilization into a short story may reveal a fear of death, for as much as it slows death down by staving off end of the story, it also courts death by impeding the forward movement of the reading process itself. The delay enumerations provide inscribes, mimetically, the political and historical critique which his stories develop thematically, conveying a general impression that our contemporary culture is bombarded with data, a process that turns people into machines rather than allowing them develop and function in some more traditional mode once named “human.”

The dark side of the contemporary In Stendhal’s enumeration of the women he has loved, Louis Marin argues, the list inscribes death in the text: “Moreover, for a moment, by this projection, the story of the subject is turned into an a-temporal, a-chronic group of names which sum it up for ever: here is, in the text, the event of death.”1 Likewise, in Tomasula’s stories, the enumeration of things past 1

Louis Marin, La Voix excommuniée: essais de mémoire (Paris: éditions Galilée, 1981), 103 (translation mine).

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may be done tongue in cheek, but not without a deadly purpose. When enumerations convey accumulated history, as in “Medieval Times,” the list becomes anachronistic and flattens out the time sequence into a confusion which impacts on the present but shortcuts any attempt to make sense of the sequencing, thus reducing the differences between medieval times and our contemporary times. This follows Giorgio Agamben’s theory that the “contemporary”2 is not an historical framework centered on the present, but an anachronistic consideration of a period from another, seen with both proximity and estrangement. In “Medieval Times” the list of events leading to the present is considered in the form of a negative enumeration of causes and consequences, of what did actually happen: Alternate histories: Native Americans don’t rise up against French colonies so Napoleon doesn’t send troops to put them down so the troops can’t be bitten by mosquitoes and contract malaria so Napoleon doesn’t give up on the colonies and sell the U.S. half of its continent and the U.S. never becomes a superpower with global ambitions of its own and Jude never gets sent to the Middle East.3

Enumerations, far from being a mere matter of style, contain and embody ideology. This one hinges around the connectors “so” and “and,” but still functions as a list of events which build up into the Western world as we know it today. The connectors seem to follow an unavoidable succession, in a deterministic view of history as produced by the “butterfly effect,”4 a principle the text acknowledges before enumerating the list of what happened under a series of negations (don’t, doesn’t, can’t, doesn’t, never, never), to consider what might have been if things had not happened in that sequence from the start. The “butterfly effect” is part of chaos theory,5 in the sense that a dynamic system, followed to infinity, is a nonlinear function of its initial state. A slight initial variation (as the legendary flapping of a butterfly’s wing) will produce greatly different results in a later state, taken to its limit. In its provocative denial, and inscribed under the egis of chaos theory, such a negative enumeration arrests time to ponder the dark side of what we might otherwise fail to reflect upon, because without the arrest of time, we 2

3 4 5

Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” in What is an Apparatus and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 39–54. Steve Tomasula, Once Human: Stories (Tuscaloosa: FC2, 2014), 238 (emphasis mine). Tomasula, Once Human, 232. After Michel Serres and Nayla Farouki, Le Trésor: dictionnaire des sciences (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 140–141.

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are too immersed in it to see it. Agamben thus believes that to consider the contemporary is an experience of dissociation: “Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it, through a disjunction and an anachronism.”6 Cluttering his text with repetitions and echoing patterns, Tomasula immerses his readers in an experience of dissociation, often uncomfortably so, but not without rewards, the main one being that it allows us a glimpse into the contemporary. In the illustrations to the text, which Tomasula supervised actively,7 the accumulation of similar images serves the study of the contemporary as meaningfully as stylistic enumerations. For example, in the story “The Color of Pain and Suffering” the repetitive medical illustrations convey a trauma which the narrator and illustrator can only repeat; the repetition denies significant recuperation in the present, and only signals the dark side of what escapes analysis. The medical illustrations bear the digital menus of graphics programs, which are also repetitive. For example, three successive illustrations of human bodies are displayed over two pages, next to a close-up of one of them, which itself bears the same digital menu three times (Once 66–67) (See Figure 13.1). Their threefold layout in a succession of small computer icons suggests the artistic changes one may submit the images to by clicking on the icons, and provides a metaleptic leap: we see the illustrations not as set images, but as visuals that can be worked on, treated digitally, subjected to the hand of the writer, graphic artist or even the reader once, twice, or even three times. We are under the impression that if we could click the icons on the page, we could take part in the transforming process and the creation being performed under our eyes. Thus the list of images builds up the imitation of hyperlists, or lists within lists, each displaying the same menu of possible actions for the transforming hand, in a troubling way: are we compulsively condemned to repeat the same drawing gesture and stammer on in our expression of what it means to be “human” in our times? On the page next to the visual layout of human bodies that can be paintbrushed, a character reads the medical report of an accident: “Multiple operations, possible nerve damage, rehabilitation, pain and suffering” (Once 67). The short textual enumeration reduces the human experience of pain to a clinical list without affect, just as the illustrations of the human body, in their Agamben, “What is the Contemporary?”41 (original emphasis). Steve Tomasula, “Writing as Conceputual Art: A Seminar with American Author Steve Tomasula,” May 16, 2013, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis.

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Figure 13.1  Steve Tomasula, “The Color of Pain and Suffering” in Once Human: (Tuscaloosa: FC2, 2002), 66. Courtesy of the author.

repetitiveness, dismantle purpose and meaning. Tellingly, on that page (Once 67), as on several others, text and visual layout coincide, because the dialogue between the characters is interrupted with a line of icons from a graphics program (with all the functions cropping a photo, adding text to an image, or just doodling). Text and image, thus disembodied, become a list of graphic functions one may operate endlessly, but not without consequences. One may say that Tomasula’s enumerations and repetitive layouts, in both text and image, rupture the fabric of story-telling, and thus solicit a strong reader response in which the reader must engage in a hermeneutic search for significance to understand the contemporary in the sequence of stories; simultaneously we have to resist being overwhelmed by the accumulation of the lists in an attempt to make sense of them and to keep the reading process moving forward. In other words, we need to escape the melancholy seduction that the inscription of death and paralysis in the text operates if we want to get a grasp of the dark side of our contemporary.

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Why read? Why go on? The reading process is at stake in Once Human. How may one read when near death, and if the text, like the mind, is cluttered with enumerations of items from a culture difficult to make sense of, especially once the narrator seems to have lost any sense of priorities? The story “Farewell to Kilimanjaro” riffs off Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by displacing it from Africa to a nursing home in the USA. It also narrates the death of the male character, but in so doing, recapitulates American literary history. In the protagonist’s final journey eastward, time’s arrow goes backwards, concluding with the arrival of the Pilgrim fathers on their Atlantic Ocean—a journey of the intertext through time. The most famous page of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation can be read in a digital layout on a double page toward the end (Once 292–293), as if the letters of the text moved “over the furious seas” described by Bradford (and here the text is to be read upside down). The numerous intertextual references end with a quotation from Christopher Colombus’s letter to Luis de Santangel, in which he describes his discovery in Spanish (Once 296– 297), on a double page displaying the words as if they were coming out of Hemingway’s typewriter. Moving backward through the intertext, laid out as a figuration of the real, gives the sense that one moves toward regress rather than progress in assessing the state of things in the present. This conveys the pessimistic and critical outlook of the story that concludes the whole collection. The story’s multiple references to founding texts converge to imply that what constitutes American heritage may be a template gone wrong, possibly because it was flawed from the start. Even as a parody, the open reference to Hemingway’s story looms large. Beginning with the epigraph, it follows Hemingway’s theme of settling accounts with oneself before dying, of cramming in what one has not had the time to write. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Hemingway’s protagonist, Harry, expresses his memories in long, enumerative passages written in italics to set them apart from the interaction he has with his lover as he lies dying. Likewise, in Tomasula’s story the main protagonist, now near death, reminisces about his father when he too was dying of cancer: “He remembered long ago his father in intensive care after undergoing an eleven-hour operation to cut out cancerous nodes like the ones the doctors now tried to melt away in him with radiation and chemistry” (Once 274). The cancer that killed his father is now killing the protagonist, and the retrograde motion through the literary canon of American literature shows that the intertext seems to be part of what went wrong. Cancerous nodes in an otherwise healthy body, like the ideology of

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greed and imperialism that gnawed at the altruistic ideals of the founding fathers from the beginning, tend to proliferate, and then to kill. The best way to show the progress of the disease is to clutter the otherwise flowing syntax with enumerations, mimicking the progress of cancerous nodes in a double metaphor, at once medical and political in its criticism. To assess the state of a civilization in the form of an accumulation, as well as the state of an individual life, exposes its sterility. Such clutter echoes the summae of the Middle Ages, which gathered the knowledge of the time, much like Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica. For Aquinas, the sum of God’s marvels on earth shows in the state of the arts, all arts stemming from metaphysical knowledge. But the dying narrator in Tomasula’s story has no teleology, and his listing of knowledge strikes a despairing tone. Rather than to sing the praise of God’s infinite wisdom, the enumerations in the story resonate the end of hope. What is knowledge for if it only heads on toward more knowledge without a purpose other than a headlong thrust into the abyss? This is the echoing burden T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” seems to imply in the mess of things enumerated: its burden-like phrase “falls the shadow” occurs on several time in “Farwell to Kilimanjaro,” (Once 276, 279, 281). The story and the enumerative form it takes are an answer not simply to Hemingway’s seminal story, an obvious reference, but more importantly, to Thomas Aquinas and his opening question in the Summa Theologica, as well as to T. S. Eliot’s argument, for the “shadow” which “falls” is that of Christ’s death from the Cross, and the phrase which follows in Eliot’s verse is “For Thine is the Kingdom”8—although not quoted in Tomasula’s story, it remains an implicit continuation to the Eliot reference, referring to the ritual of Mass (in the Catholic tradition). Thus, the Eliot and Aquinas references converge to give a sense of eschatology, the first as a direct quotation, the second as an imitation of the summa of knowledge. One may quote Thomas’s second article (of the first question) to understand what philosophical issue Tomasula is addressing (and although the names of both authors sound like namesakes, no pun is intended): it would seem that it is proper to the rational nature to act for an end. For man, to whom it belongs to act for an end, never acts for an unknown end. On the other hand, there are many things that have no knowledge of an end; either because they are altogether without knowledge, as insensible creatures: or because they do not apprehend 8

T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 92.

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the idea of an end as such, as irrational animals. Therefore it seems proper to the rational nature to act for an end.9

Thomas Aquinas argues that reason is what distinguishes men from animals, and that if animals have no teleology, man, in his reason, has. God being the ultimate end, man in his reason will ensure that all his actions are governed by this principle toward this end. In “Farewell to Kilimanjaro,” however, a disease eats away the body of the protagonist as well as at the entire body politic. Cancer nodes, like nuggets of despair, proliferate. God is no longer the ultimate end, as the Pilgrim Fathers and Saint Thomas proclaimed, but has been replaced by progress without ethical questioning or humane consideration for the person made in God’s image, who bears the brunt of such progress. The protagonist in Tomasula’s story remembers his father after his cancer operation, transformed into an object of experiment by physicians: “His father had been an iron worker and very good with children. But that night he was a lab animal, trapped in some tortuous experiment” (Once 274). The word “tortuous” has sinister connotations, and implies a crooked process, with anything but a straight ethical line, and is almost homophonic to torture. The protagonist, named E. (like Ernest for Hemingway?), then takes a distance from the way his father was treated, and generalizes on his entire culture, whose medical treatment has not much improved through history, except technically speaking, because it still treats the body mechanically, not holistically, without consideration for whole of man as a human being. He deplores the sorry state of contemporary medicine: “State of the art, though a living antique, E. thought, already beginning to see the man as an oddity with a logic bizarre to all but cultural historians” (Once 275). Mankind may have been, as the story collection sadly states in its title, “once human” at the time of Saint Thomas, or in an ideal vision of the world, set before history and conquest, at a time both “antique” and antiquated if it ever was, but from then on, it has long been considered as a mechanism or a despised animal rather than as a human. It is taken for an object on which to exert mastery and dominion, not as an equal. The figure of the physician takes on the inhuman and threatening action it has often had throughout history on people’s bodies: He was tending to his gauges and blood pressures and machines that were to make so much difference with a faith that was as unshakable or as shakable as that of physicians in all ages, bleeding their patients, or 9

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Bros., 1947), 584.

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administering leeches, or placing the egg of an all-white chicken on the afflicted body part.” (Once 275)

Tellingly, the sentence about the physician takes on an enumerative trend, beginning the lethal clutter that numbs the brain and turns humanity into a set of master-and-servant relationships. In a three-part, expanding condemnation of doctors throughout the ages, all three activities having proven useless, the enumeration implies that things may go on, that we may well be practicing similarly useless acts with great self-importance today. Such enumerations are not only rhetorical devices for emphasis in ternary rhythms, they also open the possibility of a series, with a reason that one may not avoid, ineluctably forcing one onward. In this instance, the list exposes the blindness of physicians who think they know better, because they believe they understand the mechanics of the human body, without questioning the principle that leads them to apprehend man as a machine. In a similar way, the entire collection of stories exposes the various ways we turn humanity into a mechanized unit, thus abusing mankind through reification. Columns and charts are the most visible way Tomasula uses to reveal our propensity to dehumanize our and each other’s lives, turning people into simulacra one may compute and manipulate endlessly.

Columns and charts to “de-poetize” narrative There are charts of figures in the story “The Atlas of Man”: charts of groupings for scientific research, as a page draws a chart of “preliminary datum” with numbers and figures only, in a dense layout of eleven columns and thirty-nine lines (Once 148), assorted to psychological tendencies. On the right-hand page of the chart, another column displays the list of “Dr. Johnson’s Doctrine of Affections” (Once 149), grouping psychological traits in three categories. Group One seems to pamper itself (with traits such as “Relaxation, Love of Comfort, Pleasure in Digestion”); Group Two sounds very active (with traits such as “Assertive Posture, Energetic Characteristic, Need of Exercise”), and Group Three exhibits neurotic traits (such as “Restraint in Posture, Overly Fast Reactions, Sociophobia, Inhibited Social Address”). Such categorizing of human feelings and psychic states raises the question of the purpose of the organizing principle. To classify people in order to understand their patterns may empower one to anticipate their reactions, and therefore manipulate them, as consumers, as co-workers, as citizens submitted to a State, or in any

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way that disregards their autonomy and liberty, to treat them as cogs in the great social machine, or in the way insurance companies compute data with their actuaries, for example. In the story “C-U See-Me,” two lists are inserted in the text in a vertical layout. The lists stand out sharply from the white page, as they are against a yellow background. The first one is a list of “aberration reports” and the second of “activity aberration scores,” both registering the error scores of cashiers, regardless of any other aspect of their being (Once 39). They are valued solely in terms of their margin of error at work, turning them into a continuation of the machine they operate. The only difference between them and the machine lies in the margin of error that is proverbially human, but not considered as a humanizing trait. In the story, it is rather seen as a deficiency, the cashiers performing less efficiently than the machines against which they may be measured. The title thus resonates as a question, asking whether one can still see the “me” or person behind the machine set as a standard of employee performance. If the machine is the only standard, the reflexivity of the title, written like a text message on yet another machine, raises the problem of definition: see the machine (the “you” across from “me”), see me. The person has become the text message of the inscription, shortened for efficiency, deprived of the complexities and the unpredictabilities that make people human. In “The Color of Pain and Suffering” an illustrated page draws a vertical list of eleven body parts, each replicated three times horizontally (Once 59). Mankind is here reduced to a bodily mechanism, emphasizing the articulations of the body, because the illustrations display joints such as ankles or shoulders, or the ways muscles and sinews are connected. All lists have a similar narrative functions in the story in which they appear. Just as thematically they dehumanize mankind, stylistically they tend to literally “de-poetize” narrative, in the expression of French critic Louis Marin, to convey the dismantling of poetics in narrative.10 Marin uses Jakobson’s definition of poetry to analyze the inversion that lists operate: If, to recall Jakobson’s famous definition, making a text poetic consists in projecting various paradigms on a syntagma, our text displays a reverse process: the narrative syntagma is projected onto and summarized in a paradigm of names, a process that dismantles poetics in the narrative [dépoétise/ literally, de-poeticizes].11 10 11

Marin, La Voix excommuniée, 102 (my translation). Marin, La Voix excommuniée, 102 (my translation).

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The narrator refuses to let his list-making become seductive by depriving it of poetry. It stands outside of syntax, on its own, a catalog out of context. The burden of T. S. Eliot’s quotation “falls the shadow” works as an ironic reminder of the poetry the text thus dismantles perversely. The criticism implied in the list sounds a harsh note, that of bitterness and dispossession. Moreover, a list tends to erase the subjectivity of the speaker, as the items take on greater importance than the organizing voice enumerating them (although the voice never disappears fully), because, as philosopher Bernard Sève puts it somewhat provokingly, “in a list, nobody speaks.”12 Drawing the list of people’s affections to classify them in certain categories sounds objective, largely erasing the manipulating figure whose computations turn people into quantifiable data. In keeping with the idea that a list sounds voiceless, the story “Medieval Times” reflects on medieval summae, which elude “saying”: “the sum of all histories appears clearer the closer we look and seeing more renders saying less” (Once 211). The speaker turns into an all-seeing eye, a god-like viewer that flattens out time sequence into an eternal present, surpassing historical chronology in its all-encompassing vision. The sentence is syntactically balanced around the polar opposites of “more” and “less” and around the dichotomy of “seeing” and “saying,” rendering the sense of a balanced knowledge, from a great philosophical distance.

To take stock from afar Far from the lyrical expression of a subjective voice, the list detaches the utterance from any incarnated expression and reaches the abstraction of a supernatural vision. The summa is reified, detached from feelings, objectified. Sève generalizes on listmaking, arguing that “the list is naturally more destructive than constructive,”13 in his view, because it provokes laughter or outrage, and it is conducive to thinking, to unsettle the voiceless organization of data. In this way, Tomasula’s lists induce an effect of estrangement, as we wonder who is speaking from such a position of anonymity, because it could be anyone speaking, forcing us to consider practices that may have gone unobserved in our everyday existence. The list that summarizes, like a Medieval summa, the history of our Western culture 12

13

Bernard Sève, De Haut en bas: philosophie des listes (Paris: Le Seuil, 2010), 89 (my translation). Sève, De Haut en bas, 145 (my translation).

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is thought-provoking because it forces us to face our bent toward inequity and destruction while we take pride in technological progress. The main emphasis of Tomasula’s enumeration seems to deplore the loss of ethics in the whirl of technological progress, as a sequence makes clear, particularly burdened with T. S. Eliot’s line used as a leitmotiv: […] falls the shadow, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, falls the shadow, Amritsar Massacre (the white man’s burden), abandonment of the gold standard, abandonment of absolute time = E = mc2 = duck and cover = abandonment of absolute knowledge: abandonment of absolute moral standards, 100 flips of the coin […]. (Once 277)

The punctuation of the list guarantees the overwhelming rule of parataxis, “placing the main elements of a statement in a sequence of simple parallels” rather than “specifying the relations between them with subordinate conjunctions” which Robert Alter, in his analysis of the Bible, sees as a move “away from the stable closure of the mythological world and toward the indeterminacy, the shifting causal concatenations, the ambiguities of a fiction made to resemble the uncertainties of life in history.”14 One segment of the list even eschews the complexity of language and syntax to replace it with mathematical syntax, which is a minimal syntax with symbols acting as set verbs. The sign “=” reads “equals” and functions like the verb “to be”—but the shift from language to symbol signals a reduction of language to a number of functions, with a different encoding and reading process. Not only does the list use parataxis, it also reduces linguistic expression, assuming that every reader knows enough to pronounce the symbols and understand the scientific allusions. The reader should know minimal mathematics and be culturally aware of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which acknowledges what escapes human calculation: “If the position of an electron (for example) is known exactly, then its momentum would be completely unknown and hence its position at the next instant would be incalculable.”15 This limit to knowledge “came as a profound shock to the scientists in the 1920s when it was proposed by Werner Karl Heisenberg.”16 Far from explaining the successive allusions, the list concatenates a smattering of scientific and historical knowledge such as Albert Einstein’s famous equation, which many of us believe we understand, though few can really think it fully. In the midst of this lack of coordination, the echoes 14 15 16

Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 26–27. Michael Clugston, Dictionary of Science (London: Penguin, 2004), 301. Clugston, Dictionary of Science.

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of the word “abandonment of absolute” seem to build up a reasoning that oversteps the simple concatenation of random cultural items. The repetition of the structure opens the possibility of syntax, overstepping the minimal mathematical syntax. One expression “abandonment of absolute” seems to lead to another in a logical sequence that reveals order and thought in the chaos. Following this lead, the reader is solicited to make order out of chaos, thus taking part in the elaboration of meaning. The repetition of the word “abandonment” four times in close succession seems to imply a causal link between economics, science and ethics, as the “abandonment of the gold standard” (an absolute of monetary standard) is followed by that of “absolute time” because of Einstein’s discovery of relativity, in turn followed by the “abandonment of absolute moral standards.” The series of expressions of “abandonment” was introduced thematically by the mention of the “Amritsar Massacre” which opens up the lack of “absolute moral standards” in the colonial enterprise. The narrative voice does not sound ironic, but rather like the harbinger of doom, deploring moral decadence, and the lament sounds genuine. In context, because the story is told from the viewpoint of an old man on his death bed, assessing his life and his culture, the list amounts to a jeremiad, admonishing an entire culture—his own, to an active reader who is willing to draw inferences and understand the ethical implications of such an admonition. The story “The Atlas of Man” probes what went wrong in the culture, in a passage that may connect to the enumeration. It presents a scientific experiment on a population of men and women, aptly called “males” and “females.” They are reduced to their grouping by sex, and the irrelevant question of the sex of the photographer taking pictures of the group takes on great importance as the text offers the mind-numbing list of possible combinations in what reads like the epitome of un-poetic uselessness and boredom. The decision to quote the passage in its entirety is a conscious testing of the reader’s patience (both Tomasula’s and mine), because the combinations are given in an exhaustive list, the “et cetera” omission of additional items coming very late in the list: He believed that if a woman interviewed and photographed the females, ordinary housewives, students and mothers would feel more comfortable stripping for our camera. To this I replied, what if the data began to indicate that Ectomorphs were more “comfortable” being photographed by Ectomorphs? Or Mesomorphs preferred a Mesomorph photographer? Given the fact that we had preliminarily identified 18 body types and confirmed a base line of two sexes, we could by this logic be driven to the use of 36 observers. And this didn’t account for the possibility of other

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combinations: not just an Endomorph photographed by a fully-clothed, i.e., neutral Mesomorph. Or an Ectomorph photographed by a neutral, i.e., clothed Mesomorph, but also, say, a nude Ectomorph photographed by a nude Mesomorph; or a Mesomorph photographed by an Ectomorph; or a Mesomorph photographed by an Endomorph; or an Endomorph photographed by a Mesomorph; or an Ectomorph photographed by an Endomorph; or an Endomorph photographed by an Ectomorph or an Ectomorph photographed by an Endomorph with a Mesomorph as a neutral observer. This last permutation obviously implies a Mesomorph photographed by an Endomorph with an Ectomorph as an observer; or an Endomorph photographed by a Mesomorph with an Ectomorph as an observer; or an Endomorph photographed by an Ectomorph with a Mesomorph observer; or a Mesomorph photographed by an Ectomorph with an Endomorph observer; or an Ectomorph photographed by a Mesomorph with an Endomorph observer, and et cetera … . (Once 139)

By the time the reader has reached the relief of “et cetera” or has paused to giggle at the absurdity of the exhaustive listing of all these combinations, one may wonder the purpose of such exhaustiveness. Rather than summarizing the principle of the research process, the narrative voice puts us in the middle of the work plan it elaborates in all the fastidious and absurd (because predictable) branches of the arborescence. Reading the list, one hesitates between following its logic to check on it, or letting the mind rebel against such predictable and tedious reading and skipping over it in haste, or getting into the intricacies of it for the sake of humor. This passage may be read as inspired by Beckett’s endless repetitions, following the tone of Lucky in Waiting for Godot, or the enumerations in Molloy or Malone Dies. The reader must choose a path, between going along with the narrator in his logic, for the fun of it, and resisting him, or both, because humor turns ironic and takes the carpet from under the exhaustiveness of the reading process. Such a choice is the case in any reading, but more excruciatingly so in this instance. The list may be strictly rigorous, but it sounds so echoic that it reaches the limit of intelligibility and the epitome of absurdity. It clutters the flow of the reading process, in yet another dismantling of poetry in the narrative, through derisiveness this time. It reaches a climax of endlessness when the narrator adds an ad infinitum formula: “If the groupings began to cluster (e.g., two Ectomorphs), why the permutations could spiral to X=N1+N2+N3+N4+N5+N6N — a number of observers that would quickly exceed those who witnessed all World Series series combined” (Once 139). This sentence offers the same type of reasoning as the long, but changes the writing from linguistic syntax to a mathematical formulation. The key word

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to make sense of the passage may be “spiral” because the repetitions from one formulation to a similar one occur with variations, as in the case of a spiral the return to the same in a circle is translated laterally, thus providing a progress in spite of the cyclical revolution. The dual mode of writing, both in language and in mathematical equations, thus parallels the spiral that the text mentions thematically, turning upon itself, not without humor. Paradoxically, the figure of the spiral offers a return to the same with a constant variation. In that sense, the spiral may provide a model from which to consider the contemporary, in the way that it allows for a reflexive return to the same, but with a displacement sideways.

Conclusion: Enumerator, or census-taker The narrative voices of Tomasula’s stories enumerate many items, the way a census-taker draws population or property lists, or even, when distorting the impersonality of the record, as a censor who assesses, proscribes, and prescribes through taking stock of the sum of human histories. In reflexive, spiral-like enumerations, combining language, visual layout, charts, and mathematical syntax, the text accumulates data, hoping to reach meaning as much as to unsettle it through quantity, in the multiplication of infinitesimal variations, as in the story “The Atlas of Man” the character of Dr. Johnson claims from the start: “A single photo of a nude man is mute. But photograph 50,000 nude men, nude women also, and just as celestial bodies divulge their temperatures to astronomers, so the bodies of the jealous, the bed wetter, the murderer, the pick-pocket, and alas, the heart-sick, will speak of themselves” (Once 137). If the taxonomy of human emotions fails to prove infallible, the order of the enumeration holds the key to the madness of the times, like the two characters in the story who arrange their “photos, those mute, isolated moments, into patterns that spoke volumes. To someone” (Once 167). In a medieval view of science, the patterns found in the microcosm reflect a macrocosm of similar schematic organization: “Using a telescoping lens, I was able to focus so closely on the navels of some subjects that their whorls formed abstract patterns that could have just as easily have been those of an inner ear, watery vortex, or galaxy” (Once 169). Thematically as well as stylistically, such whirling figures (of the whorl, the vortex or other dynamic spirals) encapsulate the form enumerations take in Tomasula’s stories, progressing through repetitions with variations, to destabilize knowledge and assess the unseen of our contemporary, which is all times, seen anew.

14

Steve Tomasula’s Work of Wonder Anne-Laure Tissut

In the largely desacralized twenty-first century, Western art still seems to offer refuge to an aspiration for transcendence or to a desire to understand the world. The contemporary American novelist Percival Everett states that artistic creation is his own mode of relating to the world—a “religious” mode, consisting in weaving links, according to a speculative etymology of the term.1 One part of contemporary American fiction is animated by such an impulsive move toward the world. It is made of works of wonder, in the long American tradition brought to light by Tony Tanner in The Reign of Wonder. The texts analyzed by Tanner all show great care to present the reader with the environment as such, without the intervention of any perceiving consciousness—a world which would seem to have been conjured up by magic and thriving on the supremacy of its distinct order, of divine origins or at least suggesting some mysterious otherness. The illusory nature of such nonintervention comes to be flagrant when the world evoked is constantly transformed by an increasing number of manipulations of all kinds while human action introduces artifice everywhere. Such is the case in Steve Tomasula’s work, conveying the sense of an apparently boundless wonder toward life—its synthetic artifacts equally with natural things and beings, the near and the far, the past, present and future. If it is no longer really possible today to feign the presentation of an untouched and wholly given world, then from what point of view should the narrative of wonder be delivered, and how far away should the narrator locate himself? To what extent do readers become actors both in the construction of meaning and the blooming of wonder, opening themselves to a sense of surprise while giving up the prospect of complete knowledge, since no truth is to be revealed to them straightforwardly? By questioning the erasure of narrative authority in contemporary fiction, as well as its so-called neutrality, this study of Steve Tomasula’s work is More precisely, Everett also stated that art was his “way of processing the world” and the novel his “way of making meaning” (presentation, The Sorbonne, Paris, March 15, 2007).

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meant as an attempt to show how the strategies of representation developed in his work both amount to and call for a celebration of human ingenuity and of the never-quenched thirst that pushes people into a perpetual quest for knowledge and meaning. The worship of an eternal, immutable being has been replaced by an attentiveness to becoming, in which the readers are invited to take part in their own way. After examining the forms of wonder in Tomasula’s work, we shall turn successively to writing and reading as a means of achieving a contemporary religious sense offering a propitious milieu in which to define the subject anew in relation to the total environment.

Forms of wonder in Tomasula’s work Steve Tomasula’s works now include four novels, most recently the new media novel entitled TOC, and a collection of stories, Once Human, his latest published work. In his books, expressing a boundless and sincere enthusiasm, an on-going meditation is carried out, on creation, representation, languages, and the influence of science and technology upon the subject’s place in the world as well as on the subject’s conception of herself. In this resolutely anticreationist literary universe one can still feel some sense of the religious— albeit often a highly ironical one, made of reverent, universal openness, in the respectful awareness of belonging to a community of beings. IN&OZ is a tale or satirical fable illustrating the nonselective nature of the wonder expressed by the author toward his environment as a whole. Human production especially arouses admiration, as demonstrated by the characters’ names, each assimilating them to their job: Mechanic, Designer, Photographer, and Poet. Each are looked upon with the same kindly and often amused narrative gaze, and if an ironical nuance sometimes blends in, it is never caustic. Despite failings and disappointments each character plods ahead, blindly wandering under the sole guidance of instinctive values that eventually let love and altruism triumph in a deeply human tableau showing affection-deprived characters in quest of recognition. IN&OZ forms a diptych, contrasting the physical world of IN and the highly sophisticated and abstract OZ. OZ is a caricature of the high tech invasion which has denatured our relation to the world and to others. Such counterpoint offers a symbolic representation of the imaginary construction of an invisible world to be found in most religions, and Tomasula plays with the codes of religious discourse, for instance in Designer’s meditation: “And when she looked beyond her art book on the windowsill and out toward the sun rising dully over the brown stain on the horizon that was IN, she couldn’t help but feel that there was some answer that she wasn’t seeing, something

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beyond OZ that she knew nothing about.”2 Beyond OZ, ruled by technology and productivity, lies the down-to-earth world of IN, where poetry thrives. There, Mechanic receives the revelation of the essence of his life while examining the parts of a car engine: One day in IN, Mechanic was lying in sludge beneath a car, utility lamp tight in his teeth, when something in him snapped. No sooner had he gotten the filthy-black underbelly of the car unbuttoned than he found himself staring into the gleam of silver gears, radiant with honey-gold lubricant. Though he had seen gears like this a thousand times before, it had never occurred to him how eloquently their polished metal teeth explained his life. (IN 19)

He discovers with wonder an order in which everything connects: “It was as if he stumbled upon one of those forces which guide the planets in their orbits and the flight of an arrow-a force that had been there all along, making the visible what it was, though the force itself remained invisible, unspeakable, unrecognizable. Until now” (IN 20). Everything is a source of wonder, including those parts of the environment that are not usually seen and that the wondering gaze tears from the banal background into which they had melted. Far from amounting to blind fervor, the enthusiasm conveyed by the text is mitigated by an often ironical clear-sightedness. The various modalities of appropriation and exploitation of the environment are indeed sources of fascination, while the inadequate mastery of their consequences is considered from a sustained critical distance.3 2 3

Steve Tomasula, IN&OZ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 34. This passage echoes a similarly ironical one in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, when Oedipa is reminded of the printed circuit of a transistor by the geometrical arrangement of houses. Interestingly while Mechanic accesses a different vision of something he has seen a thousand times, Oedipa is reminded of her first look upon something that had been materially hidden, locked up inside a transistor radio. She notices its likeness with the pattern of the houses in a suburban development and brings out the sense of mystery rather than some unique character: “She drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.” Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper, 1966), 14.

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Much as with the writers of wonder in Tanner’s analysis, landscapes and scenes are described with the exaltation of discovery. Yet the virgin gaze of the tradition of wonder has been replaced by an ever-adjusting vision, constantly sharpened by experience and education. While the writers of wonder deny the benefits of education and even refuse it, calling for a continued state of naivety or a return to such state, Tomasula would seem to stand closer to Rousseau, who celebrated the child’s virgin gaze as but a first step toward knowledge, a prime condition that needs to be overcome. More precisely then, Tomasula’s work does not so much belong to the tradition brought to light by Tanner as to the tradition studied by Michael Edwards in De l’Émerveillement, “Of Wonder,” ranging from Plato’s Theoetetus to François Cheng’s Five Meditations on Beauty. Indeed Edwards offers wonder as itself a mode of knowing, neither a force resisting knowledge in favor of a direct apprehension of reality, as in Tanner, nor a primitive condition soon to be replaced by the triumph of reason. The insatiable quest for knowledge and limitless curiosity perceptible in Tomasula’s works entail a perpetual creation of associations, with various fields and domains, other times and continents. Thus an imposing sum of knowledge is to be found in his texts, from which nothing seems to have been excluded, while nothing is emphatically exalted either, there being no sense of the sacred in his literary universes. Frontiers keep fluctuating as an effect of the constant restructuring caused by scientific advances, allowing the colonization of nature by technology and artifice to spread ever further. Tomasula’s literary works, most of which are the fruit of collaboration with designers or computer programmers, constantly shift toward other fields and media, making good use of the openness of the novel. Such practices tell us much about the vision that the author has of himself: a hard worker, tenaciously pursuing his passion and striving for the achievement of his ideals with the humble feeling of belonging to a community. Throughout his books, but above all in VAS: An Opera in Flatland, Tomasula contrasts the man who thinks of himself as one subject among others from the one who sees himself as the hero who stole fire from the gods, or as the center of the universe, or again the top of the ladder of evolution. What holds such community together is their attitude to the world while the gaze they cast upon it offers perhaps the only constant feature among them. Wonder comes to people through the process of exploring and discovering the environment, to which s/he is brought closer in the course of the enterprise of acquiring knowledge—as a contrast from the passivity with which the characters absorb their environment in the tradition of wonder. Mute nature is thus given a voice through the quest or search taking it as an object and milieu of investigation. For instance, in VAS: “The driver and legionary

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ants are the Huns and Tartars of the Insect world. —Ants: Their Structure, Development and Behavior, 1910” (VAS 71). And immediately below this, to the right of the five parallel vertical lines partly giving the page the look of a musical score: “Or if you prefer, ‘Ants, driven by their genes, organize themselves into patterns for survival’ ” (VAS 71). If ants are smart the narrator-observer is even smarter. While the sense of the sublime allows man but a brief glimpse an imposing other that remains unreachable, wonder launches a process of immersion into a dissimilar element that the observer partially appropriates through his capturing gaze. Wonder amounts to a dynamic of exchanges between a subject and a contemplated object radiating a force of attraction and contagion that inspires the rhythms and sounds from which the wondering speech is elaborated. Tomasula brings to light the interactions involved in the process of representation, the latter being influenced by the object which in its turn is modified by the speech delivered about it or by the image given of it. In IN&OZ, the invisible world is built through language, understood in the larger sense of the term, including the language of clothes and style. Such is Designer’s conviction: True enough, her curvaceous fenders and hoods did mask the grotesque viscera of cars. But they did so in the way that an arty dress or designer eye-glasses were more of a language than an article of clothing or medical aide-a dominant language, the way French had once been the tongue of diplomacy, or Latin of conquest. If she wasn’t giving desire form—and shaping the world by doing so—what exactly was she or any designer doing? (IN 17)

Language builds the world by fashioning the vision we have of it, thus imposing its frames upon the world and orienting it according to its points of view, as Photographer found out: “For a while, I took great joy in looking through the viewfinder, changing the world by the way it was framed” (IN 29). The other world, the fruit of imagination, emerges through fiction, which reveals, brings to light, makes visible. The tone of Tomasula’s wonder, resolutely turned toward human appreciation and perception, sheds light on the powers of writing as understood in the larger sense of creation, already illustrated by Tanner’s texts of wonder under the pretense of celebrating virgin nature. Tanner underscores the modality of simulation proper to the writing of wonder as the narrating subject feigns to be a mere mediation and not to intervene upon his environment, the reign of illusion is maintained.

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The reign of wonder: Almighty writing Contrasting with nineteenth-century realist writers whose narrative presences at times can be felt as intrusive, the erasure of narrative authority in wonder may seem to offer an avatar of a godly figure. But the writerconjuror is the one who brings the landscape to light and allows the readers to immerse themselves into it. For instance, Tanner analyses the uses made by Mark Twain of coordinating conjunctions in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to create the illusion that the character’s thoughts are delivered as such. Yet much like stream-of-consciousness technique, artifice is at its utmost. The writer is responsible for the architecture of the text, its rhythms and its sounds, but in turn the author owes his power to writing’s own resources, as distinct from those of the spoken word. Whereas writing may have seemed to be freezing semantic options, on the contrary it launches an interpreting dynamics anew, served by the possibility of returning to an earlier element in the text, of checking and anticipating, and finally of going to and fro in the book, concretely or virtually, through the workings of memory. Such potentials are illustrated by the play on juxtapositions in The Book of Portraiture. The novel consists in a chronological succession of various forms of writing in the larger sense of self-expression: chapter one begins with the invention of writing in the desert, starting from mimetic signs traced in the sand; chapter two shows Velázquez’s fictitious diary; chapter three presents the professional notebook of a psychoanalyst at the beginning of the twentieth century; chapter four focuses on a contemporary surveillance society in which all relationships are dematerialized; and chapter five compares a contemporary artist working in an American genetics laboratory in the United States and an Iraqi family hit by the war waged against their country by the United States. At the scale of the book, in the absence of any transition from one chapter to another, discourses nevertheless seep into each other through the interplay of echoes. Irony also contributes to the interpenetration of discourses, relying as it does on anachronism—between the various chapters located in different ages—as well as on the reader’s privileged stance, enjoying the temporal contextualization offered by the specific architecture of the novel. Thanks to a device of reflections and collage, Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, evoked in the second chapter, is taken up in chapter four, set in contemporary American society. But there the Infanta’s face has been replaced by that of the Japanese artist who hijacked the Spanish master’s painting: a face crested by an Iroquois hairstyle on a

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digital collage standing as heir to Velázquez’s piece, into which the artist had already painted himself.4 The digital photograph stands as a reminder of the extent to which the power of the written text largely comes from its capacity of absorbing other media. The chronological progression of chapters, while introducing the game of anachronism, also exposes the artifice of written discourse together with the illusion of identification: the “I” in the text may well wander as far from the author’s personality as allowed by the fertility and extent of the latter’s imagination. Such creative distance suggests an autonomy of writing that would develop alone from the original idea, progressively fleshing out the created characters while being fed from them. All along the successive chapters, points-of-view keep multiplying while consciousness is represented with increased sophistication, thus conveying the developing complexity of communication and of relations in general between increasingly unstable subjects. Bits of sentences pass each other in chapter four, in which characters only receive a letter as a name. In the age of the proliferation of messages it becomes difficult to actually meet, as shown by the fragmentary, disconnected forms of discourse as well as the layout of the pages. Whether they are aware of it or not, the characters are fashioned by the type of society in which they live. Each and every one of us is the product of his or her times, expressing in speech or writing a given cultural moment. In writing especially, with its lasting power, there is something that exceeds the individual, an irrepressible trend conveying meaning outside the writer’s intentions. The opening of The Book suggests as much: Long before the heroes of martyrdom began to fade5 from living memory, before monks (†430) discovered faith through the malleability of words, long before the heroes of psychiatry (1900) construed dreams as language, and almost four millennia before cows began to carry the genes of fish; before mile-high buildings collapsed into dust, or men and women everywhere proclaimed their bodies to be, after all, their most potent weapons, their poems, their canvas, something powerful had been straining to come into the world. Its silent efforts were there in the bloodstains aborigenes made on boulders—perfect prints of human hands-first portraits that were repeated and repeated and repeated as if out of the sheer awe that they could be repeated, and wonder at what Steve Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture: A Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 162. 5 The words forming this first sentence are written in increasingly smaller font, starting from the huge adverb “LONG” that takes up the whole line (Book 1). 4

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that might mean. This something was there in cave paintings-stick figures wielding stick spears as if to shout I! I was! I did! Its silent efforts grew stronger in the ciphers that ancient Chinese scratched on tortoise shells, in the tally marks of Minoan merchants, in the runes destroyed by Assyrian armies, and in the clay tablets listing animals sacrificed by Sumerian priests. But not until these efforts began to gain a voice, emerging as it did form the symbols for fish and shields and owl in Egyptian hieroglyphics could this force. (Book 3–4)

The force of writing shows in the visual dimension of the page. For instance in chapter five the dual layout of the pages materializes the confrontation between enemies, in this case the Americans against the Iraqi people.6 The diversity of styles, as heightened by the juxtaposition of chapters referring to various times and belonging to various genres is fed by the diversity of typographical forms. For instance the antique letters in Velázquez’s diary evoke the old-style handwriting of a manuscript, while the flesh color of the background and the brown one of the ink bring to mind sanguine paintings or sketches, or at least the natural materials once used for writing and painting. Gothic types, on the other hand, may well suggest order, if not violence (Book 51). Everything bears an effect in writing, and the apparently most neutral narrative, even the rough presentation of a dialogue, vigorously orient reception. Structures speak, as much as silences and blanks, as though under the thrust of some intrinsic force. In chapter four for instance, writing delivers the thoughts of characters who are no longer able to communicate directly, thus creating a subterranean world of sorts, in which the fate of the tangible world is determined. The most powerful forces remain invisible, as Q realizes: Before shrapnel ever peppered Q-’s face, before her fingers had begun to go numb, before she’d ever joined the army, she’d seen how the most potent forces in the world were invisible. In fact, desk-jockeys like her, soldiers who operated computers not rifles, probably knew more about invisible forces than any VA doctor could imagine, the data and the tools she’d used to massage it an invisible force as potent as those that guide the path of an arrow, the planets in motion, that call down napalm fire on hostiles. Or not. (Book 183)

The anaphoric play on “before” and the taken up consonants “p” and to a lesser degree “d” and “t” endow the sentence with a specific rhythm that 6

See Tomasula, Book, 288–289 or 320–321.

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forcefully brings its meaning home to the reader. In such a disembodied universe, scanned by surveillance cameras, the materiality of writing comes out of the page to touch the reader’s senses. The text stages the return of the body, through the sounds of the text that give it thickness and substance, or in the radically different context of power conflicts, in which the body becomes a weapon in the suicide terrorist attacks evoked in chapter five. In the same chapter the body also is used as an artistic medium, through the frozen blood statues produced by bioartist Mary. In the works of the writers of wonder a single vision is imposed above all others, even if discreetly, via its opposite or in a suggestive, elliptical mode, thus leaving the reader some leeway. Tomasula creates an open system of instability, doubt and surprise, thanks to the multiplication of points of view presented as equal apparently, without any perceptible hierarchy. Favoring proliferation over the succession of the narrating subject’s impressions, VAS for instance offers a multiple and fluctuating vision of identity, exemplified by Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” that stretches across the five vertical lines evoking a music score, with fragments of sentences being written on both sides, and lending themselves to various associations, which somewhat liken the reader’s unpredictable course through VAS to his or her free trajectory in an electronic literary text.7 A thorough reconsideration of the definition of experience is at stake in those texts of revelation, orchestrating the mysteries of fiction so as to arouse questions without providing any simple answers, inviting the readers to let themselves be carried along by the changing cadences of a perpetually mutating text. Another type of relation is sought between writer and reader, whose judgment indeed is oriented but with much freedom left thanks to the many possibilities of play opened out by language. Fiction seems to offer the most favorable milieu to the development of continued collective creation through reading become an existential model.

A universal reading community? Reconfiguring the subject Of all of Tomasula’s books, VAS is the one that most explicitly suggests such possible continued creation. Novelist Square has to undergo a vasectomy on his wife’s request. Indeed she has been exhausted and shocked by two miscarriages and believes that now he should “take his turn.”8 Faced to this radical decision he is experiencing writer’s block. This is the beginning of 7 8

Tomasula, VAS, 298. Tomasula, VAS, 1.

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a meditation on creation in all senses of the term. Having been deprived of his traditional landmarks or beacons by the exponential development of technology and the shaking of the limits between the natural and the artificial, Square is trying to decipher the signs around him, as well as on and in his body, in an atmosphere of confusion that seems to threaten human sovereignty. God’s image has been dethroned by the image of a self that can be reproduced ad infinitum, as hinted at by the advertisement showing a little girl holding a doll which looks very much like her (VAS 258). Genetic manipulation even offers the means of transforming the model itself and not only its image—and the numerous advertisements to be found throughout VAS, for plastic surgery or for genetic manipulations allowing choice in the eye and hair color of one’s offspring suggest as much. Despite such exaltation of the self, no individual lives at the center of the worlds depicted in Tomasula’s works, drowned as men are in the constantly growing flux of data. Such diffuse configuration is reflected in the narrative choices as well as in the structures of the work, promoting instability and discordance by largely resorting to the wide range of available media: comic book pages, scientific charts or tables, musical notation and a variety of typographical characters compete on the surface of the page, infusing it with changing dynamics and questioning any claim to a prominent viewpoint. Emerging parallels and cycles defuse any dominant stance as well as any hasty moral judgment. For instance racial cleansing policies existed in the United States before Nazi Germany. Despite the manipulation perceptible in the architecture of the text as well as the layout of objects on the pages, the author does not claim mastery over anything. The elaboration of meaning is collective. From the offered text the readers strike their own individual courses and much like Square, a hero who is deeply aware of his limitations, the readers have to decipher the signs surrounding them, weaving their way through the semantic, visual, and sonorous proliferation. We all are readers, as VAS tends to show, blind and blinded to several degrees. The invasive question-form in the novel reflects confusion and doubt, often introduced through fragmentation and spacing, which break the unity of speech. Throughout the novel, mentions of iniquitous experimental practices on patients’ bodies are followed by such ironical comments as “for the good of the patient,” or “for the good of society.” From one repetition to another, the reader’s point of view keeps changing, according to an unpredictable trajectory proper to each reader and not offering the immediate reflection of the evolution of the text that yet stands at its origin. Thus reading may seem to offer a paradigm for an ideal human behavior: while leaving the world intact, it brings to light its inordinate wealth and

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diversity via the multiplication of interpretations. The read text remains while its changing imaginary versions keep blooming, contributing to the reader’s maturation process through his opening to the other. Such sharing of identities is described by Jean-Luc Nancy in An Inoperative Community (La Communauté désœuvrée): I cannot find myself, nor recognize myself in the other: in the other or of the other I experience the otherness and “othering” which “in myself ” sets out my singularity while infinitely achieving it. The community is the singular ontological condition in which the other and the same are kin: in other words the sharing of identity.9

From an identification phenomenon and through the play of imaginary projections, reading contributes to the elaboration of the reader’s identity. Against sterile repetition or a continued status quo, the vital practice of reading allows readers to assimilate and transform the elements necessary to the development of their minds and bodies. By essence creative, reading meets writing in the behavior that the reader of Tomasula’s work is encouraged to adopt, a behavior recalling American writer Paul West’s description his mother, a pianist, as being able to put as much gusto into playing Beethoven as in cooking soup (Mother’s Music).10 Not only through the forms of creation yielding tangible products but through reading too, and not necessarily to a lesser degree but according to different modalities, individuals take part in defining what being human is, if one is to follow Emmanuel Lévinas when he sees in the human character the continued invention of a demand, an ideally responsible prospect kept up by man in the awareness of each and any one of us’ duty toward others and the whole of humankind. The human would be “such being as it matters anyway”11 according to Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the “characterless singularity,” that is “determined only through its relation to an idea that is the totality of its possibilities.”12 In the moment of suspension offered by reading man escapes both the categories and demands of society and yet he is put face to face to his kin, sharing the same fundamental needs and the same fears. Looming above the horizon of reading, a potential, ever-shifting community appears, protected by no savior, and relying on itself alone for its perpetuation, each member 9

10 11 12

Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée (Paris: Bourgois, 1986), 83–84, my translation. Paul West, Mother’s Music (New York: Viking, 1996), 189–190. Emmanuel Lévinas, L’Humanisme de l’autre homme (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1972), 9. Lévinas, L’Humanisme de, 68.

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yielding to the other that part of himself “that in poetry one gives up to the other” as Edouard Glissant writes about the process of translation.13 I would argue that a similar giving away occurs in reading, also opening onto a “language of sharing […] which is the very mode of grazing thought through which we keep recomposing the landscapes of the world.”14 Recomposing landscapes certainly is part of what Tomasula’s work does, by constantly offering new visions and propositions for readers to gather around and adhere to, assembled by the links of reading.15

Conclusion After the postmodern era Tomasula offers his readers the refreshing vision of a trusting work, carrying hope but with no illusions, celebrating the prodigies of human inventiveness while humorously exposing its perverse effects and its dangers. Should his work be viewed as the expression of a new, atheistic and reasoned form of transcendentalism, whose impulse would have been moderated by over one century of wars and destruction? I would rather see in Tomasula’s work, twenty-first-century version of Humanism, a clear-sighted vision relying on the strength of a continued faith in people despite a sometimes bitter clairvoyance. The thought-provoking aesthetics of his work are likely to arouse in readers an intense curiosity indefectibly bound to the respect of otherness, and a propensity to cultivate humility in the acute awareness of our finitude.

13

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Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 46 (my translation). Glissant writes of this language: “langue de partage … [qui] est la pensée même de l’effleurement, … par quoi nous recomposons les paysages du monde.” Glissant, Introduction, 46. Such links are present in the etymology of “reading” through the Latin verb legere.

Afterword An Interview with Steve Tomasula

DB:  Is it fair to say that evolution and technology are arguably the two coordinating themes in your work? ST:  Yes, that seems fair: literary or historical evolution, as well as biological. But it’s probably more of a consequence of what I was trying to do with the novels, which is to think about the questions Who am I? What am I? What are we? How did we become whoever or whatever that is? DB:  You bring together the images of bodies produced by evolution with a powerful account of how culture and its technologies evolve. And yet the approaches that have defined the study of technology and evolution differ widely. Technologists often tend towards the utopian and a sense of humanist mastery. One thinks, for instance, of the very Catholic and teleological optimism that underpins most of Marshall McLuhan’s work, in which technology propels us to greater and greater expressions of our essential humanity. Evolution, in contrast, is a terrifying and blind process that operates without any divine plan or stable image, and it offers little space for utopian hopes with its history of extinctions and variation. So many of your characters and plots have some sense of humanity becoming an active and profoundly self-aware participant in practices that are viewed in terms of evolution, or as something more like what philosopher Elizabeth Grosz describes in her account of Darwin, in which we actively participate in our evolution but never with any possibility of mastery or even an illusory image of mastery. Put another way, do you see yourself bringing a technologists’ optimism to human evolution or a Darwinian pessimism to technology and culture? ST:  Funny you should put it this way since evolution and teleology—or actually its opposite, extinction—run through the novel I’m working on now. But even in the books you’re referring to, I see what you’re saying. I mean, I’m always struck by how optimistic scientists seem, especially when contrasted with how pessimistic novelists can be,

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Steve Tomasula especially when it comes to human nature. Talking to scientists, or reading their journals, you can’t help but be struck by how firmly they believe that there’s this thing called Truth, and that we can know it. And because of that, scientists seem to have this optimism that the future will be better, or at least better understood, while in literature there seems to be an understanding that the human is eternal, which is another way of saying it’s static. And most of it isn’t pretty: we’re all capable of the self-interest that comes out when people are put into situations as in Maus; we have Ahab’s obsessive capacity to project evil onto nature—the whale; there’s lots and lots of back-stabbing, lots of violence—The Iliad, Shakespeare—lots and lots of absurdity— Beckett, Gogol, or Platonov, or the rocket descending on our heads at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, or the mob chasing the artist at the end of Day of the Locust. Page after page of suffering. Toni Morrison’s Beloved. (What bitter irony there is in that title!) We might have our epiphanies, but we all know the price that has to be paid to gain the moment of understanding and usually what epiphany a character might have is a recognition of—or at best, a reconciliation to— whatever we mean by being human. After 700+ pages, Isabel Archer’s epiphany is that she’s been a tool! And we know what happens to innocence in literature: think here of Paul Bäumer in the trenches of WWI and reaching for a butterfly at the end of All Quiet on the Western Front. And if literature tells us that human nature can’t be changed, it certainly says it can’t be improved, the way eugenicists thought they could improve the human, or some genetic engineers think they can improve the human today—here’s that teleological optimism you mentioned—even if it’s only for improving human life, even if only by eradicating disease.   I guess it’s the disconnect between the two that motivates a lot of my own fiction: the history of human sciences can be seen as a history of one failed theory after another; something like 3 percent of scientific journal articles are read only a few years after they’re published. So it seems incredibly optimistic for a person to go into her or his lab every day, thinking they are going to discover Truth when practically everyone before them has been shown to be partial, wrong-headed, or otherwise in error. There’s that Darwinian pessimism I think you’re referring to.   But more so, what really interests me is the role of language in all of this, and how it’s used to create our day-to-day reality. Our mundane, work-a-day life. Think here how the “whites only” signs on water fountains shaped daily life, and were once the “natural” way to

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write, which is to say, to think, in the South. That language, and the representations that came along with it, was propped up by a whole lot of scientific “truths”—and it wasn’t just the work of cranks, or extremists, but rigorously logical thinking by respectable scientists doing the cutting edge research of the time: even Darwin thought that the face could be used as a map of the mind. I mean, scientists like to think that what they do is outside society, objective—some make fun of the idea of a “female gravity” for example; but history says otherwise: Victorian society comes with Victorian science; a racist society comes with racist science. There are other axis as well: for example, Christianity (think here of stem-cell research); Patriarchy (up until recently, scientists considered heart attack a male problem); global capitalism (almost daily the news contains announcements of prescription drugs that are found to be either useless or dangerous—50 percent of them according to some French estimates).   Exploring how the play of language allows these social formations to become natural, or normal, and so invisible, is partly what motivates my own fiction, I think. Sometime people call it science fiction, but I think it’s more like fiction about science. Or technology. But mainly it’s about how the various evolutions modulate what we mean when we think of who or what we are. And so how we live. Or cause others to live. DB:  The way you think about science fiction here is really interesting, since you emphasize how you can see science fiction as really about defamiliarizing our everyday existence and our languages of the mundane. ST:  I remember being really surprised when a story of mine, “The RiskTaking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects,” was selected to be included in an anthology of the year’s best science fiction. I mean I just never thought of it as sci-fi. If anything, my fiction seems to have more affinity with detective fiction in that there is often an investigator or some kind of researchers involved, even if they learn more about themselves than the thing they are investigating. Anyone who writes about what it’s like to be alive today will automatically be writing a kind of science fiction because we live in such a science and technology saturated culture. I bet it would be hard to write even a romance without having the story modulated by things like cell-phones and Facebook. Especially the way social media sites like Facebook or OkCupid spy on, and manipulate their users to conduct their own social/marketing

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Steve Tomasula experiments. And wouldn’t this culture of surveillance echo the future Orwell imagined for us back in 1949?—even if it’s kind of like the 1950’s version of the flying car of the future?—compared to a Google Car of today? Sci-fi often gets a lot of things right about the future, but it can be even more revealing through the things it gets wrong, and culture unfolds in ways other than people thought it might.   Still, I know what you mean: fiction as a way to defamiliarize the familiar, including technologies that are so familiar they are mundane as a teapot vs. science fiction with aliens, or futuristic machines and technology, or whatever. A lot of sci-fi uses technology to champion old-school, humanist assumptions. It’s also formally conservative: content oriented; plot driven. And yeah, you’re right to say I try to work through a different emphasis, even if I’m trying to use fiction to deal with some of the same issues, an emphasis on how we know what we think we know (this is what I mean by it being like a crimeless detective fiction); how we represent what we think we know, and the consequences that come out of these representations. If my “science fiction” is doing any cultural work I hope it’s more along the lines of what lots of literary literature does—teaching us to read, or reread— and I don’t mean read as an astronaut, but more as a poet, even if the texts read are big-data sets. I’m thinking here of C.P. Snow’s two cultures: the culture of the technocrats vs. the humanists, and what each has to offer the other. While writing “The Risk Taking Gene” I kept coming across studies that were trying to identify the gene that controls anger—as if anger was one thing (and as if there was one gene). And I kept thinking how any literary critic, poet, or just reader who’d had a real education (and not just the job training that often passes for education) could probably come up with a list of fifty different definitions for “anger” and so, immediately see why the study failed before it even started. So the inability to identify a gene wasn’t for lack of funding, equipment, or science, but rather a naiveté about language; and how the things we think are real are enmeshed with our use of language, no matter what else they might be. But beyond this, there’s the kind of culture that emerges though this sort of literal thinking (a lot of sci-fi has to do with people dealing with the consequences of literalist thinking); or the attitudes to things like “anger,” or how we treat each other, that grows out of representations that imply it can be “fixed” (e.g., find a cure for homosexuality). So much of what gets framed as a scientific, or technical problem, is actually a linguistic problem—or at least has a strong linguistic component— say, for example, how we represent an animal in words and how those

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representations allow some real-world consequences to emerge but not others: the way referring to cows as “protein units,” as factoryfarms do, allows for a whole set of attitudes and gives permission to treat animals as some sort of “chemical package.” And of course the conditions for animals being treated as packages of chemicals influence the people who work in these “disassembly plants”—often to the point where they are more abused than the animals, though maybe in more subtle ways.   Did you know that Henry Ford got his idea for the assembly line from slaughter houses? And that Nazis designed their killing factories by studying how Ford engineered assembly lines for cars? There’s a great passage in William Gass’s Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife that shows how naming machine parts after body parts, like a pipe elbow, makes it easier to equate bodies with machines: the passage ends with a limerick about Jews going up a chimney as smoke—one logical conclusion—but this dynamic works whether the language being used is English, or math. Physics professor Alan Sokal once denigrated literary theory by claiming that it would never find a cure for AIDS. But that’s where he was wrong: the science, and the funding to look for a cure for AIDS didn’t exist until scientists and politicians stopped thinking of it as only a gay problem; and this change in thinking was to a large degree due to the deconstruction of the language used to describe AIDS by activists informed by queer and feminist studies. It’s sort of absurd to think theory—think here of feminism—doesn’t help shape the world. Or that any one sphere of activity—church or state; art or science—can be isolated from all the others. So if there’s a controlling idea that cuts across my writing it’s probably this: the relationship between our world and the representations we make of it.   Anyway, this is the aspect I’m more interested in, using fiction as a way to explore though language these “mundane” realities we’ve created here on our planet, at our time—through art as well as science, but mainly through language. I never make up any of the technologies or scientific studies I use (or art or politics for that matter); instead of inventing some postapocalyptic scenario, it’s more interesting to me to explore the ways our use of language brought us from there to here. For example: how cattle-judging contests at state fairs in America led to “fitter family” contests at state fairs in the ‘20s (which still survive today in the form of Miss Ohio, Miss Montana, and the other run-ups to the Miss America contest), and how all of this was of a fabric with judging the “fitness of families” of immigrants

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Steve Tomasula coming through Ellis Island; the extermination of “inferior” races, and all the rest. That’s one example of the inseparability of aesthetics, science, and political will, just to name a few. Imagining a new kind of ray gun makes it easy to forget that a paintbrush is a technology. Or that the most lethal weapon during WWII was the typewriter. The vision of life that Monsanto has for us, and how we contribute to it through the way we talk about food, even the messages we send about the malleability of the body by getting tattoos, for example, is far more complex, fascinating, and consequential than some imaginary society, or new kind of Death Star. Despite all the science devoted to global warming, aren’t the largest obstacles to dealing with it linguistic? It’s almost like the AIDS problem Sokal was referring too, only on a massive scale.

DB:  The power of that kind of critique can often produce the kind of pessimism that you track so well above, or it can produce the kinds of guarded irony that then become the standard operating procedures of so much postmodern fiction. David Foster Wallace diagnosed exactly the kind of paralysis that can be produced by the strong, critical selfawareness that is generated by literature. And yet, science fiction has another dimension, and that is the sense of wonder. Like other genres of the fantastic, it attempts to offer the reader whole worlds that, even if horrifying or simply strange, also produce an experience that is beyond irony, and that seems to be an affective register closer to Wallace’s ideal of sincerity.   I’ve often been struck by how your books all seem to produce something of this sense of wonder. Indeed, in IN&OZ, when Mechanic stares into the gears of the transmission, he isn’t just defamiliarized, but sent into an experience of wonder. With the overwhelming designs of all your other books, the reader is in a similar position, thrown into this state of wonder as we look at the gears, so to speak. That is especially true with TOC, I think. While there is a powerful critical dimension, this also produces something I am tempted to call a kind of positive energy or excitement or even optimism. In her essay for this volume, Ann-Laure Tissut tracks the work of wonder in your books. She writes, After the postmodern era Tomasula offers his readers the refreshing vision of a trusting work, carrying hope but with no illusions, celebrating the prodigies of human inventiveness while humorously exposing its perverse effects and its dangers. Should his work be viewed as the expression of a new, atheistic and reasoned form of transcendentalism, whose impulse would have

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been moderated by over one century of wars and destruction? I would rather see in Tomasula’s work a twenty-first century version of Humanism, a clear-sighted vision relying on the strength of a continued faith in men despite a sometimes bitter clairvoyance.

  Is the experience of wonder an important dimension of your own life as a reader and thinker? Is it something you find in literature, in science, in other experiences? Have you consciously deployed wonder as a strategy in your work, perhaps as a way to get out of the prison of irony, or do you think of it in different terms altogether? ST:  I love the idea of a novel as a kind of Wonder Cabinet—those Renaissance cabinets of curiosities that contained all sorts of monstrosities, inexplicable or otherwise wondrous objects thrown together: the horn from a unicorn; or a tiny altar that bees made out of wax; or maybe a stone fish, along with a beaker holding Galileo’s last breath—things that we in our more knowing, and cynical, time would recognize as narwhal tusks, frauds, and fossils. I think the impetus was partly just the sheer marvel of coming across those things—like coming upon a really unusual seashell on the beach— the unexpectedness of it, the urge to take it home, display it like a work of art and share this feeling with others. I think this is partly what’s behind Lydia Davis holding up these odd, beautifully made sentences she comes across. I can recite some of them because they stick in memory for that reason. Her story “Information from the North Concerning the Ice,” for example, goes like this: “Each seal uses many blowholes and each blowhole is used by many seals.” That’s it! That’s the whole thing: just a weird little sentence that she came across somewhere, and is beautiful for its symmetry, and she holds it up for us to admire like it’s a beautiful piece of driftwood, or a smooth stone she found in a river. At least I think this is what she’s doing because I often feel that same impulse when working on a novel or a story—just this desire to show something you’ve found—like the data I used in one of the stories in Once Human that tabulates the measurements used to correlate body types to personalities. When you get down to it, libraries are wonder cabinets of odd texts and images that people believe in. Or used to. Just trolling through a medical library is like walking along a beach and coming upon a weird stone every few feet. Getting lost in the ecstasy of research. I wish I could remember who called it that. Do you know? Some of these “objects” are just so wondrous, so grotesque, that you just have to know the story behind them. But those collections were called Wonder Cabinets, I think,

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Steve Tomasula because that’s how some were used: to inspire wonder, which we know is the first step to philosophy: the weird roots, and crystals, and monsters (i.e., maybe a deformed fetus)—the Marvelous and the Grotesque—make us wonder about our place in the cosmos; what we are; our relation to nature, to the divine, if there is one—questions that would later become natural philosophy, cosmology, theories of evolution, etc. Narratives about how the world is ordered, and our place in it: it’s when they don’t line up with our own assumptions that things get interesting—like that collection of fossils, organs, and skeletons assembled by nineteenth-century naturalists in Paris. The comparative anatomy museum? I think you’ve been there? It’s kind of a wonder cabinet on the scale of a small museum with herds of animal skeletons arranged to demonstrate an aesthetic order in nature, not one based on DNA as we would create—a number of its animals are known by name, some because they came from Marie Antoinette’s menagerie. There’s a rhinoceros there that’s accompanied by the historical record of all the artists who drew it during its life. It’s a unique individual, as well as a type (much like an author, come to think of it). Places like this remind me of that Borges story where animals are categorized according to criteria that have nothing to do with the taxonomies we would think of as normal: categories like whether the animals are stray or not, or have had their pictures painted, or look like flies from a distance—I should look this up to get it right—because that’s probably closer to what I’m trying to do—if there’s a project that cuts across the novels and short fiction it probably has more to do with using these older systems of thought as a way to shed light on our own time, or conceptions of the self as outgrowths of them, or contrasts to them, or recycled versions of them, or based on assumptions that seem natural to us but will seem aesthetically beautiful, and/or as absurd and incomprehensible, to those who come after us, just as we think using electroshock to cure a solider with PTSD would be today. Or curing a woman plagued by “nervous hysteria” by pouring water on her head: practices that were completely logical, by the logic of the day, and used early in the last century—and speak volumes about attitudes of the day. (Darwin subjected himself to some of these water cures.) They speak about things like what a human is; how men (mostly men here) saw manliness, and female nature … I myself wouldn’t think of this as a humanist agenda in that humanism comes with a lot of baggage that seems of another time (e.g., individuality, or genius, especially originality). Maybe it goes more for an understanding, or acceptance of other ways of being?

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  If I had to step back and look at my own writing (which is probably impossible), it seems to have more affinity with an emergent posthumanism—lots of people doing lots of little actions for their own motives, creating these larger patterns, these larger realities, which is also a kind of transcendence, I guess. I’ve always loved that transcendental period of American lit—Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman—for that link they saw between the physical and the unseen zeitgeist.    I’m glad it comes across as optimism. The dying of one age into another has never seemed so much tragic as simply different; I wouldn’t see the transformation of the human into the posthuman as anything to mourn, or something to celebrate either. Are our holy wars any more enlightened than those of the past? In a way they’re worse because one would think we’d know better by now—at least that’s what I was trying to explore in “Medieval Times.”   But really, to be honest, what usually gets me going on these things is how funny it all is!—the idea that there are holy wars today, after all we’ve been through is funny. Freud with all his theories of penis envy, etc., seems like the great comedian of the twentieth century—maybe funny isn’t the right word; maybe absurdity is better—the way black comedy is absurd—but also illuminating—Freud was also one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, though he thought he was a doctor. That was one of the ideas I was trying to work through in The Book of Portraiture, anyway: all those centuries of earnest longing, and sincerity, and everyone trying so hard, doing their best, and constantly getting it right, in their minds, and constantly getting it wrong, in ours. It’s touching. Us, poor humans. And that’s a kind of optimism, even if it’s in a Beckett “I can’t go on; I’ll go on” way. DB:  As you have described many of your books, from short stories, to novels, to the fully digital work of TOC, you have most often turned to metaphors of performance. You have talked about TOC as a “chamberopera,” for instance. Opera reappears of course in VAS, and in IN&OZ the characters are composers, designers, painters, and poets. Scientists and artists of all sorts abound, but I’m struck reading your work by the absence of film. While there is often video and almost always photography, the discourses, technologies, and familiar reference points to film are simply not there, and so often it seems to me there are profoundly cinematic dimensions to your work, especially as Walter Benjamin or Sergei Eisenstein theorize film formally. Has film been an important influence on you in some ways?

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ST:  Probably not as much as theater, or the book itself—which is a medium that we’re once again being forced to rethink. But I can think how lots of films show up in my work, or at least have influenced it: Kaursimäki’s La Vie de Bohème; Jill Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught. Especially Close-Up by Abbas Kiarostami; Fellini’s E la nave va—I could probably give you a list, if you wanted. Film figures importantly in the novel I’m writing now, using film to document nature. The more I think about it, the more I can see how many contacts there are with film in my writing. They’re mostly in formal terms: for example, how a director designed the presentation of his or her narrative. Maybe this kind of “information design” is more obvious in opera sets or graphic novels—and how the staging affects the experience—changes the context—layers the meaning—Barbara Gaines’s The Merchant of Venice with everyone dressed in contemporary business suits, for example. Some of Murakami’s animations are so gorgeous you want to stop the movie so you can just look at the screen—there’s a contact with film for me: this idea of making a page visually compelling, or intriguing enough to slow down the reading; to make a reader want to look, and think about what they’re reading. I think what I take away from films (or graphic novels or plays, for that matter) is the ways their makers address the design or embodiment of their stories, especially when they are making it seem true, or at least real, especially when the very medium they are using says it’s fake. Artiface. What a magician does to make a coin “disappear” has always been more interesting to me than the sight of a coin disappearing.   The very people you mention—Eisenstein and Benjamin—are particularly interesting in this way. Especially in terms of the aura of an original, or a film as a montage of unmediated moments—a film like A Man with a Movie Camera. I think that’s why I try to include actual documents, things like the directions for how to measure intelligence by measuring the volume of a skull: there’s a power in seeing in a manual, the actual diagrams that someone measuring skull volume would have followed. Looking at these things we understanding viscerally that this wasn’t something that was just made up, or happened by accident. An incredible amount of thought and industry went into creating systems of thought that had profound consequences. Same thing with seeing all the effort that went into constructing George Washington’s pedigree chart as way to prove how “greatness” is something passed down by genes. Or the complexity of a gene sequence.   Documentaries are particularly interesting in this way: why do we think they portray truth or reality that only has to be “documented”

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when they’re obviously as subjective as a painting? The documentary subject shot as a “talking head” against a black background is such an obvious setup, yet somehow we accept it as unmediated. I’m sure there are more points of contact between my writing and the directors who point this out—Jill Godmilow, for example, is a filmmaker who will put a laugh track behind a politician’s speech to expose the seams of her documentary instead of trying to hide them. Exposing the artifice as a way to get closer to something true. Which of course always remains over the horizon—the end of the rainbow—no matter how far you walk. It’s sort of the problem Photographer has in IN&OZ—reducing the movies he made until they only consisted of a single frame, and then, finally, nothing but his own “looking.” But he was just dealing with the same kind of aesthetic problems that anyone making any narrative addresses, whether they do so consciously or not, whether they are writing a history, or a novel. I guess I’m just drawn more to the filmmakers and historians, and novelists who do so consciously: Joe Sacco’s graphic-novel documentaries; Johanna Drucker’s prose-poetry artist books; Bruce Conner’s A Movie, or Kiarostami’s films have a lot of affinities even though the materials are different. I hope the influence of these show in my own writing especially as it addresses the problem of the representation of reality, or put another way, the problem of representations creating reality. DB:  Your work is deeply informed by both the history of science and contemporary science as it is being practiced today. There are relatively few novelists that seriously engage science at the level you do, and even a glance at the references in VAS or the bibliographies of your essays makes the serious reading you do in science evident. ST:  I think what first drew me to science was its many test cases for the very problem we were talking about: how to represent the world. But I wouldn’t make any claims to deep reading—it’s more of a literary reading; Charles Berstein has this series of videos reading the Yellow Pages as if it was an epic poem—usually we read things like Craig’s list, or a web search for a flight reservation for information: to see what time our plane will land; but if you read it to see what it implies about what we value, or how society has come to be organized, then you’re doing a literary reading and that’s closer to how I read nonliterary works—for what they imply, rather than for information. That’s what I mean by the novels and short fiction being more about us, especially

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Steve Tomasula as we navigate the landscapes our actions bring into existence. I do try to get the science right, though—I think that’s part of the literary message.   For the novel I’m working on now, I worked out an evolutionary tree for feather lice—the kind of lice that birds get. The chapter I was doing this for is set in the early 1980s. Back then there were only a few known fossils of lice, one found while digging a well in India; an unconfirmed one from Russia, a couple of others. Fossils of lice are still pretty rare. So there were huge gaps in the fossil records—and so in the literature. Anyway, I read all the entomological literature I could on lice and from it worked out an evolutionary tree, filling in the gaps by speculating, the way you’d make assumptions for how a word was pronounced back in 1200, for example, by looking at what other words it rhymed with in a poem. When I took the tree I’d created and laid it on top of the evolutionary tree for dinosaurs, they matched like hand and glove. It was obvious that dinosaurs must have had feathers because feather lice evolve to match very specific “microclimates”: the lice that live on a hummingbird will be different from those that live on a seagull. Even on the same bird, the lice on a seagull’s back, for example, will be different from those that live on its wings, or tail, because the feathers have different functions, and so different shapes, while lice evolve mouth parts that fit a particular diameter of feather shaft. It was impossible for the evolution of lice to so closely match the evolution of dinosaurs without the two evolving together, and they couldn’t have done that without the lice living on the dinosaurs—on dinosaur feathers, that is. But of course this was just a speculation; it wasn’t like I had any actual data. Anyway, since then, with the opening up of China, there’s been this explosion in the discovery of feathered dinosaur fossils; the introduction of DNA analysis has allowed many of those gaps in the fossil record to be closed by extrapolating from gene sequences. And now it’s common knowledge that dinosaurs had feathers—even the colors of the feathers are being worked out. But back then, even the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs was controversial, let alone the fact that some dinosaurs themselves were feathered. Or as we might put it today, that birds are dinosaurs. But the most shocking thing was how little the different fields seemed to know about each other—entomologists didn’t seem to read paleontologists and vice versa. And why would they? That was partly what was motivating me in writing the novel, though—the idea of how we create knowledge, or know what we think we know, and how we depict it— and what this says about us, and maybe ultimately what it says about

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the chances for our planet. I’m thinking of climate change here. So I had really different motives in reading the literature than would a paleontologist, or an entomologist. The novel has always been a great epistemological probe, and applying it to science opens up such telling territory because science is so associated with objectivity, and linear progress, and cause and effect … . It’s easy to forget how inseparable from culture it is; we see theories laid out as progression in a textbook and it seems to be marching in a straight line to truth, but what gets lost is the cultural cloud it always emerges from. We extract Newton’s laws of gravitation from all his writing about the Apocalypse, then forget how intertwined they were to him. It’s no different today, though today instead of theories being bound up with thinking about the Apocalypse, our theories might be more bound up with funding, or politics, than religion, though religion, politics, and money are, of course, inseparable as well. DB:  Did you take course work in science or consider being a scientist when you were a student, or did you come to science in a different way? Do you find challenges reading science as a humanist? ST:  For a year I was an astrophysics major. And I probably would have stuck with it had I not been so naïve about how academia worked. Once I discovered that anyone who wanted to go into that field had to have a Ph.D. just to mop the floor, it seemed like it would be easier to grow wings than come up with the money to pay for another 7–10 years of college, so I switched to something more practical, industrial and electronic engineering technology, though all the while I kept taking philosophy courses—more than enough to have a major in philosophy though I never took the right sequences; I just took courses at random, signing up for ones I liked. While working on my first novel, I worked as a writer for an electronics company that sold satellite TV equipment. I did a little of everything—scripts for training videos, corporate speeches, radio ads, technical manuals—but mainly I got to work with the research and development engineers a lot. I guess this was my version of going off to work on a whaling ship. I think I did learn how to read technical literature in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise; those years were also good for absorbing how a lab works; how an idea becomes a physical reality, or not. How does one actually get human DNA into a flower, for example? I think authors and critics, and others in the humanities often gloss over the technical details in order to focus on the ethical or sentimental aspects

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Steve Tomasula while the actual materials, or processes are even more revealing, an important part of the story. So I try to stay involved in that way, the way a journalist might. While working on one story I spent a lot of time in labs that did experimental surgeries. At first I just tried to be a fly on the wall, but after a while, like when someone suddenly needed an extra hand, or something like that, I started to help out in minor ways: things like giving a pig an injection, or sewing up a rat that had been prepped for a gene therapy.   While writing VAS, my parents both went through long, life-ending illnesses, first my father, then my mother, which meant I spent a decade within the hospital system, witness to the logic by which humans and machines become one. As I wrote, the novel became more and more a story about one ordinary family, and the pressure they were put under by the choices new technologies were forcing them to make: choices about when life begins or ends. We don’t often consider how these technologies are shaping what we see when we look at each other. Or when we look in the mirror. VAS was supposed to have been the last chapter of The Book of Portraiture, but gradually it became its own novel, a story about how ordinary these changes are, how quietly we and our bodies seem to be slipping into what some call a postbiological future where body technologies are becoming more extreme even as they become more common. I think I can read the technical literature, and talk to people in the sciences—especially the people doing the grunt work of a lab. But really, I think I’ve always been drawn to thinking about these practices for the philosophies they embody, or reading scientific literature as literary literature.

DB:  On the one hand, your work is generally received through the metaphors of the avant-garde, and thus it is almost always described in terms of a “cutting-edge” or formal “breakthrough” etc. On the other hand, Birger Vanwesenbeeck argues that your work is best grasped as “late” postmodernism, and he sees this very lateness as its power, synthesizing and developing the postwar traditions of experimental work. Do you have an active sense of your work as early or late? ST:  Again, these are hard questions—it’s hard to step away from the work and try to read it from the outside—but if these were someone else’s books, and I came upon them, I think I’d pretty much agree with Birger. At the time, I was just trying to use writing as a way to think through some of the things going on all around me, but of course, trying to do so in a way in which the form itself was part of

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the story. The way form is part of what’s said in any art, music for example. I was immersed in writing the book, and if I’d thought I was trying to do anything it was to be realistic. I remember telling myself at the time to write like Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a farmer in prerevolutionary America. He wrote about what was happening around him—the land, but also the revolutionary changes in society being brought about by the way common people lived: for example, how in America, people from different nations were marrying each other—a German marrying a Dutchman, then having five sons who married women from five other nations. I think he was the one who gave us that image of America as a melting pot … . His Letters from an American Farmer is a depiction of ordinary life at the time, something almost anyone could have written by staying attentive to the changes happening in the life of his community. So I wanted to do the same thing: to get down on paper a little bit of what it was like to be alive at a time when equally revolutionary changes were going on all around: ordinary people were forced to make moral decisions our ancestors never had to consider; technology was becoming more invasive as it also became more advanced—when TV first came out, some people distrusted it because they thought it could watch them, which was funny for most of the history of television, but that’s exactly what the various screens we use do now—watch us, monitor us. Now our cars are starting to do the same thing. While I was working on VAS, biologists began talking like soon they’d be able to tell a person how long their genes said they had to live. We were all going to have to live with knowledge we might not want, along with things like rabbits that glow green, or tomatoes that are part fish. That is, people were developing the ability to reshuffle nature in really fundamental ways that went beyond natural breeding. It was clear that the reverberations would carry through ordinary work-a-day life as profoundly as the things Crèvecoeur wrote about were shaping America—even more so. And I think it was out of this impulse that the formal play of the text came—trying to find a form for ambiguity or shifting contexts. “Genetic counseling” means something really different to people in 1919 than it did in 1949, or 2015. Or, as Ronald Sukenick once said, he liked all those novels with linear plots, well-defined characters and all the rest, but they seemed to have nothing to do with life as lived at his time. That pretty much sums up trying to force the crazy-mix of body modifications, and genetic engineering, and Big Pharma, and global markets and all the rest into a novel with a linear plot, and welldefined characters.

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Steve Tomasula   So yes, I guess every novel is a reflection of its own time as surely as vases depicting scenes from the Odyssey belong to classical Greece, or religious, perspective frescos are of the Italian Renaissance, which would make my fiction of late postmodernism. The word gets defined in a lot of different ways, but here I’m thinking of late postmodern as a time when the characteristics of modernism or postmodernism have matured to such a degree that they are different in kind, not just degree, from early postmodernism, or Modernism: Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the global village has been a reality at least as long as the first communication satellites but the global interconnectedness he was describing through a critique of reel-to-reel tapedecks, and other analog technologies is a shadow of the ability of Google to sort through every single email of every single gmail user, worldwide; or that allows an ad hoc group of a few guys to blowup skyscrapers— something that only an army, that is, a nation, could have pulled off only a few years earlier; and they did it by leveraging a network of cell phones, ATM machines, global markets, flight simulators … That is postmodernism as the lived experience of lots and lots of ordinary people, not just theory, or observations in a book. Yeah, late, mature, postmodernism, as widely spread as it is deeply ingrained.   Ten years ago—when I was writing that novel—I wouldn’t have had the language to describe my fiction this way, but yes, it is invested with ideas of emergence; posthumanism—ideas that seem to come out of a maturation of, or later developments within, postmodernism: the absorption of postmodern thought that Vanwesenbeek points out, for example … . Especially if you think of early postmodern writing as writing that’s invested in formal experimentation (Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing, for example), while “middle” postmodernism is more marked by the conversation authors like Barth and Coover were having through their fiction with literary theorists like Barthes and Derrida … . Or responding to the intellectual climate created by these theorists, just as artists, musicians, architects and other “authors” were responding in their work. At least I hope my fiction has absorbed this conversation; I hope it is part of the conversation that is being had by lots of us today, in what does seem to be a maturation or even culmination of earlier postmodernism—fiction as a way to work through experience as experienced today, not when Henry James, or Barth, or McLuhan were writing. And doing so in ways that have more to do with the way we express ourselves rather than the way James expressed himself.

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  Every art form has a history that is partly due to its response to the culture at large, and the novel is no exception: it’s a reaction to its own literary history, as well as the history happening outside the book. Maybe that’s what Birger is referring to: the avant-garde as works that are responding to their time rather than the avant-garde as the advanced guard. In this sense Shakespeare’s invention of soliloquies was avant-garde; so was Faulkner’s stream of consciousness: in any case, both are highly experimental, trying to invent a way to portray a character’s inner thought life, but doing so in forms that grew out of an extra-literary history, the invention of the essay, or psychology, for example. DB:  Earlier, you suggest that literature, its questions and answers, are seemingly eternal, that they last in ways the science does not. This is very close to something like Ezra Pound’s definition of literature as “the news that stays news.” And yet, in The Book of Portraiture you show how all representation is evolving, though always flawed, and just as in your essay on scale you suggest that older forms of humanscale literature just aren’t quite up to the task of representing our contemporary, globalized reality. Is there a paradox here? In our introduction, Andrea Spain and I turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the novel and argue that the success of your work is in part its ability to resonate with the milieus of science, the way science is conceptualized by philosophers, but that your books really resonate, or “stand up” to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, because they make available through art the sensations of our world. That is, in a way, they teach the reader how to feel the present. ST:  Sociologist Peter Berger captured this idea in one sentence: We are not ancient Egyptians in airplanes. I find this such a compelling statement because, on one hand, we are ancient Egyptians: I remember reading a poem that the Field Museum translated from hieroglyphs. It was by a father expressing his hopes and fears for his son, but the thing is that anyone alive can relate to it: any parent today probably has similar fears and hopes for their kids, so there’s something human that spans the centuries, and lets us still be moved by Romeo and Juliet, or the thought of Hector’s mother watching Achilles drag the corpse of her son around Troy. But at the same time, we really aren’t ancient Egyptians in airplanes, or with Kindles, or the internet—and they wouldn’t be either if these things had been part of their world. The sky

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Steve Tomasula simply isn’t the same thing to us that it was to them even if we’re both looking at the same thing. Space and time aren’t the same thing to us as they were to people alive before trains. And so we’re not the same. This is partly why Jerry Bruns writes that our conception of the human has never been stable. Words like “god,” or the “human” have always been in flux, especially in art, and literature—but also in science, or really in any field. Isn’t this partly why art has a history at all? Why it changes? Or another way of saying this is that our art forms, including literature, continually change as a function of how we conceive of ourselves and the world—the reason the art of Dante is different from the art of Boccaccio, which is different again from the moderns, and—as Birgir Vanwesenbeeck puts it—the late postmoderns? Another touchstone for me has always been Kenneth Burke’s statement that an author who thinks of humans as those beings who stole fire from the gods is going to write very different works than the one who thinks of himself as a link in an evolutionary chain. Or, we can add, the one who conceives of humans as nodes in a dispersed network.   Any poet, visual artist, musician, critic, architect, or really anyone trying to communicate does so from a particular place and time, so it can’t help but show up in some work. The critic Franco Moretti gives some really good examples of this: using software to read across thousands of novels, he shows how the topography described in “village novels” maps a social space that is essentially circular, like village life, every point equidistant from every other point, oriented toward its center, and with its back to the outside, in contrast to Victorian novels, where the circle is replaced by webs of commercial causes and effects. The thing is, Moretti says, a circle, or any geometric pattern is too orderly to come about by chance, so what is it that made it? We could ask the same question about the patterns being created by the increasing power of computers, the increasing number and sizes of databases, our tools and social organizations both virtual and physical. All these changes seem to put pressure on the older art forms until finally, as Moretti says, they “no longer represent the most significant aspects of contemporary reality … ”   I remember this so well because coming across it some years after writing VAS, it made me realize that I was trying to articulate some of that contemporary feel of the present, as you put it, in VAS, and especially in TOC.   Sukenick was right, the linear novel no longer seemed to fit, but what form did? Looking back, I think I didn’t get the metaphor quite right—I was thinking of them more as collages, or a mosaic, where

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lots of little pieces come together to form a large picture, but now I can see more clearly that what I was groping toward was a way to emulate a form of emergence: a form where lots of little actions, all created for their own reasons, come together to create larger patterns; then those larger patters combine with other larger patterns to create larger patterns still, and so on: for example, temperature, pressure and humidity combine to form snowflakes, snowflakes combine to create snow storms, snow storms and weather patterns combine to create Antarctica, Antarctica and other complex confluences create a climate. The same model can be used to depict lots of phenomenon, especially through time, from the formation of culture to locust swarms, and it seems like a really useful way to organize a narrative as well. One that fits our understanding of the world in the way that the circular organization fit village life, or the linear cause-effect plots fit rationalism. It also seems like a way to think about that paradox or contradictory nature of the novel you were talking about earlier: the matter of scale.   I think you’re right that on one hand the novel seems really inadequate to describe the large scale, or global and interlaced nature of contemporary life; or even the massive amounts of information we generate just by living—sometimes it seems like the narratives created through data mining, and dynamic information design make the novel irrelevant, the way some people probably thought of painting at the advent of photography. But of course each is better at different things, and we’re still trying to figure out what the novel is good at. At least I am. But the one-to-one relationship that a reader has with a book seems to be part of the answer: the intimacy one has with the page while writing, and while reading, seems to be part of it. That is, the novel seems to be really good at interior, or reflective thought, and so maybe these new technologies will drive it deeper into that aspect.   The materials of the book also seem to be part of this—the way Johanna Drucker uses the pace at which it takes to turn a page, or its opacity, to help tell her story, for example. I’m saying these things partly because this aspect of writing, the materials, the intimacy, seem to be diminished when the same book is read on screen, or in a format that allows for social reading. I’m now reading a collection of short fiction on a Kindle, and it shows me which passages other readers have marked, so I know that the book I’m reading is simultaneously reading me, monitoring my reading behavior, and reporting back to a corporation the passages that I mark; the corporation may or may not share this information with advertisers or other readers. But reading a

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Steve Tomasula book becomes a different experience—a public experience. Reading a newspaper in its paper format is a different experience than reading it online, where ads are animated, competing for attention, and tailored to you, the reader. For months, I couldn’t read the news without looking through a forest of ads for a pair of shoes I was thinking of buying on a shoe-store website. The ranking of news stories continually shifts, and is based on which ones we clicked on in the past, how long we stayed on it, and other metrics.   That is, we’re really being made aware of how things like books aren’t just inert objects. While reading a “newspaper” online, the fact that our reading is being monitored becomes part of our consciousness, and at some level we realize we are “voting” for what gets covered, or at least shown to us, by which articles we click on. I’m not saying private reading is better than “social reading” anymore than I’d say painting is or is not better than photography. I’m simply trying to work out what the novel is as a medium. It’s always been used for large-scale stories—those grand historical sweeps—a novel like Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. And of course it’s always been used to explore intimate, personal thought life. This is partly what attracts me to thinking through the novel in terms of emergence: it seems like a way to move between both scales, the personal, but in a way that resonates with the large-scale changes— like Global Warming—that are also part of our personal lives. There seem to be a number of novels that can be understood in terms of emergence: Bolaño’s 2666, David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Lance Olsen’s Girl Imagined by Chance, and Theories of Forgetting, or Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana, to name a few. Even Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. I’m sure there are others that can be thought of this way. I just wrote an essay that reads Achilles’ shield in the Iliad as a network diagram; Homer never thought of it this way, of course, but that doesn’t mean we can’t read it that way—just as a feminist reading of an old, pre-feminist text can offer up important insights—about us as well as about the original readers and writers. Emergence seems to be both a good lens through which to read as well as a way to organize a narrative: a way to write that seems more in sync with today than a plot. At least this seems true for the novel I’m working on now. At least that’s one of the ideas I’m trying to work through. Maybe this is the source of the themes you identified earlier: technology putting pressure on what it means to be human; “book” technology putting pressure on what it means to read and write; the two together contributing to an evolution of the novel?

Contributors Kathi Inman Berens, Assistant professor of Digital Humanities in Portland State University’s department of English, works on interfaces and performance in electronic literature. A curator, Kathi has installed literary exhibits and live performances at the Library of Congress, the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, and two conventions at the Modern Language Association. Her shows have been reviewed in academic journals and The Huffington Post. She’s published in Literary and Linguistic Computing, Hyperrhiz, Hybrid Pedagogy, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education and other venues. Kathi was the 2014-2015 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Norway at the University of Bergen’s Digital Culture Research Group, and is a Fellow of the Annenberg Innovation Lab’s Research Council at the University of Southern California. R. M. Berry was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and received his M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. His first collection of stories, Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, was chosen by Robert Coover as winner of the 1985 Fiction Collective Prize, and his novel, Leonardo’s Horse, was a New York Times “notable book.” He is author of Dictionary of Modern Anguish (FC2, 2000), a collection of short fictions, as well as the novel Frank (Chiasmus, 2005). Berry coedited with Jeffrey Di Leo Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation (SUNY, 2007) and edited the fiction anthology Forms at War (Univ. of Alabama, 2009). His criticism has appeared in Soundings, Symploke, Philosophy and Literature, Narrative, Rain Taxi, American Book Review, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, Routledge Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature and numerous anthologies. Former publisher of FC2 and chair of the Florida State University English Department, he is currently a professor at FSU. Flore Chevaillier is associate professor of English at Central State University, where she teaches writing and literature courses with an emphasis on multicultural and inter-disciplinary questions. Her book, The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction (Ohio State, 2013), examines readers’ experience of sensuality in their engagement with the language of fiction. She is currently working on a collection of interviews with formally innovative American novelists. Her essays have appeared in Journal of Modern Literature, Critique, Literature Compass and European Journal of American Studies.

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Anthony Enns is an associate professor of English at Dalhousie University. His work on literature and science has appeared in such journals as The Senses and Society and Science Fiction Studies as well as the anthologies Victorian Literary Mesmerism (Brill, 2006), Consciousness, Literature and the Arts (Brill, 2006), Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow: Literature’s Refraction of Science (Rodopi, 2011), The Ashgate Research Companion to Victorian Spiritualism and the Occult (2012) and The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (2014). Paweł Frelik is associate professor of American Studies at Maria CurieSkłodowska University, Lublin, Poland. His research interests include science fiction and its visualities, postmodern literature and theory, unpopular culture and trans-media storytelling. He has published widely on these topics and is currently finishing a book about science-fiction visualities beyond film and television. He is also an editorial consultant for Science Fiction Studies and Extrapolation, a member of the editorial board of Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and the co-editor of the New Directions in Science Fiction book series at the University of Wales Press. N. Katherine Hayles, professor at Duke University, writes and teaches on the relations of literature, science and technology in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998–1999, and her book Writing Machines won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Her latest book is How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, published by the University of Chicago Press. Mary Holland is associate professor of Contemporary Literature at SUNY New Paltz. Her book Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature (Bloomsbury 2013) argues that fiction of the twenty-first century uses poststructural narrative techniques toward humanist and realist ends. Other publications include articles on Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, Palgrave, 2013) and Infinite Jest (in Critique, 2006), on A. M. Homes (in Critique, 2012), and on media and mothering in The Ring (in The Journal of Popular Culture, 2009). Currently, she is editing a volume of essays on teaching David Foster Wallace and working on a book tentatively titled Contemporary (Meta)Fiction: Literary Form and Function in the TwentyFirst Century.

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Anne Hurault-Paupe is a lecturer at Paris 13 University, a division of the Sorbonne Paris Cité research and teaching pole. She teaches American film studies, visual studies and literature. In her doctoral dissertation, “Road Movies: Definitions, Structures, Forerunners and Evolution” (Paris Ouest University, 2006), she examines the interaction of semiological codes in a corpus of forty road movies, paintings and photographs. Her current research fields include a semiological analysis of space in the cinema, American independent cinema and American film criticism. She has published several articles on road movies, analyses of the treatment of space in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita and in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre, as well as of the representation of the American South in the films of Victor Nunez. She has also written on Pauline Kael, and a paper on the evolution of critics’ discourses about the Sundance Film Festival is forthcoming in a book coedited by Melvyn Stokes and Zeenat Saleh. She has recently co-edited an issue of the Revue française d’études américaines on American independent cinema (136, no. 2, 2013). Anne Larue is professor of Comparative Literature at Paris 13 UniversitySorbonne Paris Cité. She is the author of Fiction, féminisme et post-modernité (Classiques Garnier, 2010), Dis papa, c’était quoi le patriarcat? (Ixe, 2013), Histoire de l’art d’un nouveau genre (Max Milo, 2014), with the participation of Magali Nachtergael. Lance Olsen is author of more than twenty books of and about innovative writing, including Theories of Forgetting (FC2, 2014), the intersemiotic novel based on Robert Smithson’s earthwork, the Spiral Jetty. His short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies. A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, Artist-in-Berlin Residency, N.E.A. Fellowship and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as Fulbright Scholar, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah and serves as chair of the Board of Directors at the independent press Fiction Collective Two. Françoise Palleau-Papin is Professor of American Literature at the University of Paris 13-Sorbonne Paris Cité, where she is the co-director of an interdisciplinary research center (Pléiade, EA 7338). After completing a Ph.D. dissertation on Willa Cather, she has published a critical monograph on David Markson (ENS Éditions, 2007; English trans. This Is Not a Tragedy, Dalkey Archive, 2011). She has edited a collection of critical essays on William T. Vollmann’s novel The Rifles (Le Roman historique en question, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2011) and on Patricia Eakins (Reading Patricia

308

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Eakins, University of Orleans Press, 2002). She recently co-directed An Introduction to Anglophone Theatre (Rennes University Press, 2015). She has written numerous articles on contemporary American authors, including Carole Maso, Ben Fountain and William T. Vollmann. Françoise Sammarcelli is professor of American Literature at the University of Paris Sorbonne where she created the Research Group on American Literature: Text and Image. A former editor of The French Journal of American Studies (RFEA), she is the author of John Barth: les bonheurs d’un acrobate (Belin, 1998) and many articles addressing issues of representation, intertextuality and the relation between text and image. She has also edited two books, Image et mémoire/Picture and Memory (Presses de l’Université Paris Sorbonne, 2009) and L’Obscur/Obscurity (Michel Houdiard, 2009), and coedited the latest issue of French online journal Sillages critiques, entitled Exposure/Overexposure, which includes an essay by Steve Tomasula. Andrea Spain investigates philosophies of materiality and becoming in the context of postcolonial literature and new media arts. She teaches courses on world literature, postcolonial theory, gender studies and film at Mississippi State University. Specializing in South African literature, she has published on Zoë Wicomb, Sello Duiker and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She has recently written on Nadine Gordimer for a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, “Modern Fiction and Politics,” edited by R. Radhakrishnan, and has guest-curated a volume of Trickshouse, an online journal of new media arts. Her manuscript, “Postcoloniality and Event,” explores the role of time, memory and perception in the postcolonial present. Anne-Laure Tissut is professor of American Literature at the University of Rouen, France. Her research focuses on contemporary American literature, aesthetics, exchanges between forms and media as well as on translation. She also translates American and English fiction and poetry into French (Blake Butler, Percival Everett, Nick Flynn, Laird Hunt, Adam Thirlwell and Steve Tomasula) and takes part in collective translations from French into American English. She was co-organizer of the 2012 &Now Festival in Paris. Birger Vanwesenbeeck is associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Fredonia. He is the coeditor of William Gaddis: The Last of Something (McFarland 2009) and of Stefan Zweig and World

Contributors

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Literature (Camden 2014). His current research focuses on the strategic triad of mourning, ekphrasis and lateness within the American literature of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Editor David Banash is professor of English at Western Illinois University, where he teaches courses in contemporary American literature, popular culture and film. He is the author of Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption (Rodopi, 2013) and coeditor of Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices, and the Fate of Things (Scarecrow, 2013). His essays and reviews have appeared in American Book Review, Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design, Literature/Film Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, PopMatters, Postmodern Culture, Reconstruction and Science Fiction Studies.

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Index Note: The letter “n” following locators refers to notes. Aarseth, Espen 233 Abbott, Edwin A. 51, 57–9, 77–9, 87, 93, 105, 210 Abbott, H. Porter 218 Acker, Kathy 232 Adam’s Peak 29, 37, 72, 106 Adorno, Theodor 42, 45 affect 6–9, 10, 17, 109–11, 261, 301 Agamben, Giorgio 22, 260–1, 283 Alber, Jan 218 alphabet 28, 118, 124, 129, 138 Alter, Robert 269 Althusser, Louis 33 Ambit 1–2 American culture 28, 227–9, 289, 299 imperialism 135, 142 literary history 22, 263, 273 anachronism 119, 135, 260, 278–9, 293 anatomy 2, 91 animation 173–4, 176–7, 193, 294 Apple Inc. 169–71, 179, 183 Aquinas, Thomas 264–5 art 9, 15, 27–49, 98, 119–38, 149, 159, 229–30, 264–5, 273, 302 artifice 32, 91, 121, 137, 149, 273, 278–9, 294–5 artist books 44, 51, 209, 295 Augustine of Hippo 185, 201, 220 aura 41–2, 159–60, 294 author 48, 53, 65, 150–64, 278–9, 282 autograph 69–70, 151–2, 154, 160 avant-garde 52, 298, 301 Bacon, Francis 218 Bakhtin, Mikhail 11, 98, 175 Ballard, J. G. 1–2, 246

Balzac, Honoré 156 Barth, John 230, 300 Barthelme, Donald 40 Barthes, Roland 151, 155–6, 196, 211–15, 222, 300 Batt, Noëlle 95 Baudelaire, Charles 241 Baudrillard, Jean 4 Bear, Greg 234, 237 Beckett, Samuel 53, 271, 286, 293 Beethoven, Ludwig 164 Bell, Alice 218 Bellof, Zoe 171, 199 Benga, Ota 28 Benjamin, Walter 40–4, 229, 293–4 Berens, Brad 173, 182 Berger, Peter 301 Bergman, Ingmar 207 Bernstein, Charles 162 Berry, R. M. 49 Berstein, Charles 295 bioart 2, 8, 76, 117, 119, 145, 157, 281 biological determinism 59, 89 biology 8, 55, 60, 63–5, 219, 238 biotechnolgies 2, 16, 57, 70, 73 Bocaccio, Giovanni 302 bodies body hacking 252 as books 16, 44, 55, 65–9 and class 35–8 and code 16, 51–74, 76–89 and copyright law 63 and gender 100–6, 112–13, 128–9 and genetics 99–100 as image 125, 139–42, 261–2, 267, 279 and language 29, 289

Index and media 143–64 and medicine 41–3, 265–7, 270, 272, 282 natural 71–3, 108, 180 and philosophy 4–7, 15, 42–4, 99–116 postbiological 43, 298 posthuman 131 and representation 125 as reproductive commodities 39 and sex 246 and terrorism 128, 143, 281 as text 15–16, 55–7, 59–61, 70, 73, 78–90, 119–20, 128, 150, 209, 217 and time 180, 222 Body Worlds 63 Bolaño, Roberto 49 book 47–9, 55, 65–9, 120, 177, 294, 303–4 The Book of Portraiture 2, 11, 17–19, 28, 33, 44, 117–31, 133–46, 147–64, 209, 213, 228, 230–8, 278, 293, 298, 301 Borges, Jorges Luis 292 Bould, Mark and Vint, Sherryl 232 Broderick, Damien 229–30 Brooke-Rose, Christina 53, 229 Brown, Dan 223 Bruns, Jerry 302 Burrough, William 232 Butler, Octavia 3, 256 butterfly effect 260 Byron, George Gordon 77, 97 camera 31, 205, 207 Campbell, John W. 228 CandiFLA 247 capitalism 22, 34–5, 40, 45, 229, 245, 287 Carr, Nicholas 176 castration anxiety 73 catholicism 157–8, 264, 285 Cayley, John 138 Chabon, Michael 223

321

Chan, Sebastian and Aaron Cope 180–1 character 57, 59, 133–4, 138, 211, 219, 279 Cheng, François 22, 276 Chevaillier, Flore 99 Chion, Michel 202 christianity 287 see also catholicism cinema see film Cixous, Hélène 47 Clarke, Arthur C. 231 class 35, 57, 246, 251, 256 climate change 290, 297 Clugston, Michael 269 code 6, 10, 45, 55–6, 64–5, 70, 75–98, 214, 218–19 codex 2, 13–14, 19, 130, 220 collage 10, 11, 51, 53, 95, 125, 174, 278–9, 302 comedy of manners 3 comics 75, 77, 85, 97, 217, 244 complex writing surface 173–5 computer-generated images 193, 206 Conner, Bruce 295 consumer culture 34–7, 45 the contemporary 259–62, 272 Coover, Robert 49, 162, 230, 232, 300 Cope, Aaron see Chan, Sebastian Copyright Law 63, 80 Crèveceur, Hector St. John de 299 Cronenberg, David 246 Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. 235 Culler, Jonathon 9 culture industry 29 cyberpunk 3, 235 cyborgs 2, 21, 54–5, 94, 107, 236, 241–57 dada 42, 52 Danielewski, Mark 49, 213, 233, 236, 238 Dante Alighieri 302 Darwin, Charles 5, 63, 70, 77, 285, 292 Davis, Lydia 291

322 death 61, 106, 108, 259, 262–4 Debord, Guy 223 defamiliarization 39, 153–4, 214, 287–8, 290 Delanda, Manuel 8 Delany, Samuel R. 3, 256 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix 1, 6–7, 9–12, 138, 301 DeLillo, Don 228, 231 Derrida, Jacques 3–4, 54, 69, 152–3, 162, 300 De Saussure, Ferdinand 54 design 30, 36, 51–4, 73, 98, 134, 146 detective fiction 287 Diderot, Denis 248 diegesis 87, 187–8 digital 47–8, 99, 117, 125, 173–84, 236–7, 243 dildology 246–7, 250, 252 disability 2, 21, 241, 252 disembodiment of meaning 17, 99–100, 103 Dixon, Wheeler Winston 207 DNA 1, 5, 8, 16, 60, 61, 218–19 DNA texts 70–1, 77, 129, 144, 160 documentary 294–5 Dolce, Lodovico 248 Dos Passos, John 12–14 Dreiser, Theodore 228 Drucker, Johanna 295, 303 Dürer, Albrech 205–6 Edwards, Michael 276 Eggers, Dave 49 Einstein, Albert 54, 79, 269–70 Eisenstein, Sergei 293–4 ekphrasis 18–19, 147–63 Eliot, T. S. 48, 155, 264, 268–9 emergence 91, 96, 133, 238–9, 300, 303–4 Emerson, Lori 170 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 229, 293 Engberg, Maria 173–5 Engels, Friedrich 35

Index enumeration 22, 185, 259–72 ergodic 170, 213, 233–5 Erickson, Steve 232 etymology 59–61, 81, 85, 107 eucharist 157–61 eugenics 5, 38, 59, 79, 95, 286 event 70, 90, 174–6, 212–13, 216, 219–20, 259–60 Everett, Percival 49, 273 evolution of art 43, 56 of culture 56, 87, 91, 97, 120, 181, 228, 285 of history 285–7 of humanity 10, 11, 175, 228, 276, 302 of language 60–1, 63, 135, 176n. 34, 228, 282, 304 of life 217, 285 of media 19, 28, 43, 48, 60, 87, 170, 174 and philosophy 3–9 and science 292, 296 and technology 285 experimental writing 46–9, 51–4, 231, 235 extinction 61, 72, 285 Falco, Ed 176–7 Farrell, Stephen 67, 76, 98, 110, 118, 210 Faulkner, William 301 Federman, Raymond 49, 53, 300 feedback loops 3, 6, 8, 11, 55 Fellini, Federico 294 Fiévetin, Cyril 252 film experimental 18 and gender 241–58 and literature 12–14, 31, 187, 293, 293–5 and new media 183n. 2, 117, 195–6, 200, 228 and postmodernism 162n. 38

Index and representation 41, 205, 235 and sound 201–2 in TOC 176, 187, 207, 210–11 and Walter Benjamin 41–5 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen 73 Fleisher, Kass 49, 78 Fletcher, Jerome 175 Foer, Jonathan Safran 49, 162 Ford, Henry 289 form 46–9, 56, 77, 219, 294, 298–300 formalism 46–7, 98 Forster, E. M. 3 Foster, Hal 28 Foucault, Michel 79, 121, 128, 137, 162 Frank, Joseph 148 Franzen, Jonathan 223 Frelik, Pawel 129, 156, 231 Freud, Sigmund 17, 47, 54, 101–4, 118, 152–5, 158, 216, 293 Fukushi, Masaichi 65 futurists 52, 96 Gaines, Barbara 294 Garfinkel, Susan 177 Gass, William 49, 53, 289 Gates, Bill 213 gender 21, 59, 241–2, 245–57 genealogy 2–3, 59–61, 81–2, 85, 149, 233 Genesis 72, 76 Genesis 8, 76, 80, 93, 145 see also Eduardo Kac genetic engineering 9–10, 56, 61, 70, 230, 286 genetics 2, 5, 9, 38–9, 54, 60–1, 64–5, 219, 228, 288 genre 9, 48, 174, 201, 210, 227–39 Gesamtkunstwerk 52–4, 211 gesture 19, 169–71, 217, 261 Ghosh, Shoba Venkatesh 143 Gibbons, Alison 68, 99–100, 177, 184, 197, 199

323

Gibson, William 3, 237, 256 Glissant, Edouard 284 globalization 21, 241, 299–300 global warming see climate change god 76, 83, 145, 264–5, 282, 302 God’s Book 4, 10 God’s eye view 149, 268 Godmilow, Jill 294–5 Gogol, Nikolai 286 Grabbner, Michelle 188 Gramsci, Antonio 36 graphic elements 20, 51–3, 57, 76, 135, 183–208, 233, 243 graphic novel 44, 294–5 grid 193, 195, 206–7 Grisham, John 223 Grosz, Elizabeth 4–5, 9, 285 Guattari, Félix see Deleuze Gutenberg, Johannes 47 Hamon, Philippe 229 haptics 19, 167–82 Haraway, Donna 21, 55, 65, 236, 242, 244, 251, 256 Harper, Lila Marz 59, 79 Hayles, Katherine N. 9, 55–6, 91–2, 168, 170, 175, 184, 212, 236 Heidegger, Martin 159, 215, 218 Heise, Ursula 53 Heisenberg, Werner K. 269 Hemingway, Ernest 235, 263 hermeneutics 56, 65, 90, 163, 217, 221, 262, 304 heteronormativity 246, 251 Hirshler, Erica E. 247 historical sense 155 Hoban, Russell 232 Hoffman, Eva 230 humanism 16, 23, 56, 73, 98, 284–5, 288, 292 human scale 18, 133–4, 142, 301 hybrid 77, 91–8, 184 hypermedia 176, 214, 209, 214, 236

324

Index

ideology in art 33–5, 39–48, 149, 162, 260 and power 28 in science and technology 16, 29, 38, 171 illuminated manuscript 77, 82, 202–4, 243 illustrations see graphics image-text 76, 77n. 5, 202 IN&OZ 2, 5–7, 11, 44, 15–16, 29–39, 229, 274–5, 277, 290, 293, 295 interactivity 173, 176 interface 169–71 internet 51, 54, 79, 88, 145, 199, 208, 243, 304 intertext 16, 77–9, 89, 200–1, 211–12, 230, 234, 263 iOS 169–73, 178–9, 181–2 iPad 19, 169–78, 181–2, 210, 219 irony 278, 290–1 Iuli, Christina 56, 60 Jackson, Shelley 215 Jakobson, Roman 153, 267 James, Henry 235, 300 Jameson, Fredric 45, 47, 162 Jara, Christian 187, 210 Jentsch, Ernst 216 Jernigan, Joseph Paul 68 Joyce, Michael 215 Kac, Eduardo 8–9, 76n. 2, 80, 93, 145, 157 Katabuchi, Sunao and Hiroe, Rei 248 Kaurismäki, Aki 294 Kazuo, Ishiguro 230 Khunrath, Heinrich 237 Kiarostami, Abbas 294–5 Kincaid, Paul 232 kindle 48, 303 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 178 Knight, Damon 231

knowledge 91, 103–4, 137, 264, 268–9, 273–6 and art 33–5, 41, 272 creation of 75–80, 128, 296 Kofman, Sarah 154 Kozloff, Sarah 187n. 10–13 Krieger, Murray 148 labor 35–6, 39, 42, 44 Lacan, Jaques 27, 47, 149 language 27, 30, 60–3, 72, 277, 286–7 lateness 161–4, 298 Leder, Philip 63 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 148, 150, 155–6 Lethem, Jonathan 230–2 Lévinas, Emmanuel 283 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 47 Lewis, Berry 53 Lewis, Jason Edward 173 liberal humanism see humanism life see biology Limbourg brothers 202–4 Link, Alex 65, 77 list see enumeration literary Criticism 47, 65, 289 Lorde, Audre 245 Louvel, Liliane 90 Loyer, Erik 173 Luckhurst, Roger 231 majority and minority 241, 245, 251–2 Makoto, Aida 254 manga 21–2, 246–8, 253–5 Manovich, Lev 9 Marin, Louis 259, 267 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 52–4 Markson, David 49, 304 Martinec, Radan 77 Marx, Karl 35, 47, 54 Marxism 46 mass production 40, 156, 209, 229 material 5, 212–13, 217, 281, 303

Index mathematical syntax 269–72 Mayer, Peter 52 McCaffery, Larry 231 McElroy, Joseph 232 McHale, Brian 238 McIntyre, Vonda 256 McLoud, Scott 178 McLuhan, Marshall 300 medicine 55, 71–2, 228, 246, 261, 264–6, 291 megatext 229–30, 239 melancholia 155–6 Melville, Herman 293 metalepsis 20, 87, 216, 218–19, 223, 261 metaphor 6–7, 29, 40, 82–3, 293 metaphysics 103, 212, 264 Michaels, Walter Benn 17, 99, 109, 112 Mickey Mouse 63 milieus 6–7, 9, 14–15, 168, 274, 276, 281, 301 mimesis 29, 32–3, 39, 48, 135, 218, 259, 278 Mitchell, W. J. T. 87, 90, 148 modernism 40, 162, 238, 300 modernity 99, 108, 229 Monster of Doubt 247 montage 14, 294 Moretti, Franco 302 Morris, Desmond 77 Morrison, Toni 286 Moulthrop, Stuart 215 mourning 153–4 Mullins, Aimee 252 Murakami, Takashi 294 music 11, 28, 31–2, 35–6, 52, 97–8, 117, 174–5, 187 musical notation 93, 96, 277, 281–2 Musil, Robert 304 myth 28, 43, 106, 222–3, 269 Nancy, Jean-Luc 283 narcissism 149, 152

325

narrative 29–30, 45, 202, 213, 238, 268, 273, 295, 304 natural language 57, 72–3, 175 nature 4, 27, 54, 58, 144, 292, 294 nature versus culture 4–7, 78–9, 251, 276–7 Nazis 28, 289 Nead, Lynda 206 networks 2, 9, 13–14, 53, 82–3, 128, 176–7, 300, 302 new media 2, 12–20, 87, 176–8, 183–4, 202–8, 234 Newton, Isaac 297 the novel form of 54, 98, 117, 174–7, 183–4, 299, 303–4 and genre 155, 297, 301 and scale 134 theories of 9–15, 301, 303–4 obsolescence 19, 73, 140, 168, 179–81 OncoMouse 63, 243 Olsen, Lance 232, 304 Once Human: Stories 2, 21–2, 209, 228, 230, 234, 236, 238, 241–57, 259, 263, 265, 274, 291 opera 96–8, 105, 113, 175, 293 Orwell, George 288 the other 16, 273, 283–4 Ouředník, Patrik 304 Owens, Trevor 180 painting 32, 47, 121–2, 136–8, 147–50, 152–3, 218, 242–4, 248, 280 Pakaste, Mervi 76n. 4 Palleau-Papin, Francoise 200 parable 37, 183–4, 201 paradox 22, 199, 217, 220, 272 paragone 18, 147, 151 paratext 16, 51, 89, 183–4, 217 Passos, John Dos 234 patriarchy 22, 140, 244, 252–4, 256–7, 287

326 Paulson, William R. 98 pedigree see genealogy Peirce, Charles 54 Pellegrin, Jacques-Yves 177, 184, 190, 204–5 performance 16, 20–1, 23, 39, 91, 93, 96, 151, 169 perspective 33–4, 105–8, 112–13, 137, 142, 205–6 philosophy 9, 15, 43, 171, 292, 301 photography 31, 41, 77, 117, 119, 125, 219, 270–2, 279 photoshop 139–40, 150–1 phrenology 58, 79, 89 picture see image Piles, Roger 248 Plato 22, 153, 276 Platonov, Andrei 286 police violence 250–1 popular culture 21–2, 118 portraiture 13, 33–4, 39, 118–31, 134–6, 149, 152, 158, 160–1, 205, 279 posthuman narrative 18, 133–46 posthumanism 293, 300 and postmodernism 300 and scale 7–8, 13, 238–9, 293 subject 16, 55–6, 73–4, 91–2, 211, 219, 221, 230, 238–9 postmodernism 18–19, 28, 40, 53, 161, 235, 238, 284, 298–300 poststructuralism 4, 16, 27, 53–4, 72–3, 151, 212 Pound, Ezra 301 Powers, Richard 162, 228, 232 Preciado, Beatriz 21, 242, 246–7 Pressman, Jessica 176 print 2, 20, 44–5, 47–8, 53, 123, 173–4, 212–13, 239 Pruvost, Genevieve 252 pseudosciences 58, 79 psychoanalysis 147, 149 pulp 228, 230, 235, 238 Pynchon, Thomas 228, 231, 275

Index quantum mechanics 18, 20, 134 queer 21–2, 241, 245–6, 249, 251–2, 257 race 21–2, 57, 61, 245–6, 249–52, 257, 286–7, 290 Randolph, Lynn 242–4 reading 45–6, 53–4, 124, 176, 193, 213–16, 263, 271, 281, 283–8, 303 readymades 11, 51, 118, 125 the real 15, 27–49 realism 30, 32–3, 39, 54, 102, 230, 278 Reed, Ishmael 232 referentiality 149, 230 reflexivity 85, 89, 97, 200–2, 208, 267 religion 45, 157–8, 251, 273–4, 297 remediation 48, 202–6, 212 representation 122, 124, 274, 288, 295, 301 reproductive rights 39 Rice, Dave 177 Rieder, John 232 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 212 Roberts, Nora 223 RoboCop 244–5, 255 Rodowick, David 196 romance 2, 241–2, 287 Ron’s angels prank 95 Rothberg, Michael 160 Rousseau, Jean-Jaques 22, 276 Russ, Joanna 256 Russolo, Luigi 96, 98 Ryan, Marie-Laure 218 Sacco, Joe 295 Said, Edward 162 Salway, Andrew 77n. 5 Samoyault, Tiphaine 93, 95 Schneller, Oliver 222–3 Scholz, Carter 231 science see also ideology; pseudoscience and art 41–3, 76n. 2, 105, 158, 289–90, 295–8, 302

Index history of 78 language of 9, 23, 39, 65, 118, 185, 288–90 and literature 1–9, 92, 97–8, 227–8, 236, 297, 301 and philosophy 9, 270, 272 practices 56 and progress 91, 286 as story 16, 38–9, 38, 82, 287 and subjects 274, 287 and technology 29 and truth 15, 27, 29, 83 science-fiction 1–3, 21, 227–39, 256, 287–8 Sebald, W. G. 304 semiology 19–20, 56, 91, 183–4, 195–6, 201, 205, 212, 219 sense 6–8, 9–15, 56, 87 Serres, Michel and Nayla Farouki 260 Seve, Bernard 268 sexual reproduction 6, 68 Shakespeare, William 201, 241, 249–50, 253, 301 shape 189–95, 200 Sheldon, Alice 256 Shklovsky, Victor 39 short story 259 signatures see autograph signification 28, 35–6, 44, 54, 57–8, 64, 72, 89, 215, 217 Simonides of Ceos 147 simulacrum 4, 29, 43, 199, 266 Sinclair, Upton 228 Snow, C. P. 288 Sokal, Alan 289–90 space 44, 93, 184–5, 193–5, 200, 217, 302 Spanish Inquisition 33, 118–19, 137, 148–9 Steele, Danielle 230 Stendhal 259 Sterne, Laurence 46, 52–4 Stewart, Timothy 63 subject 215, 276, 279

327

Sukenick, Robert 299, 302 Sullivan, Tricia 252 surveillance 2, 119–20, 134–43, 146, 230, 278, 281, 287–8, 299, 303 Suvin, Darko 231, 237 Szilak, Illya 174–5 Tanner, Tony 273, 276 Tarnawasky, Yury 48 Tausk, Victor 199–200 technology see also science and art 39, 42–3 and computers 83 and culture 3, 117, 229, 244, 287, 299 digital 27, 125, 243 and engineering 297 and gender 257 and information 76n. 2 and literature 131n. 26, 168, 228, 231, 285, 287–8 and media 183 and progress 29, 131 and representation 29 and subjects 117, 274–5, 282, 304 and surveillance 127 teleology 5, 264–5, 285–6 television 235, 299 textures 10, 16, 188–9, 195 Thacker, Eugene 233 theater 41, 96–7, 210, 294 theology 23 theory 4, 48, 289, 300 Thoreau, Henry David 293 time 19, 28, 32, 177–82, 187–208, 220, 260–1 Tiptree, James Jr. 256 Tissut-Anne-Laure 76n. 4 TOC: A New Media Novel 2, 14, 19–20, 28, 39, 117, 167–207, 214, 230, 236–8, 274, 293, 302 Tomasula, Maria 22, 188, 247–8, 253–6 Tomasula, Steve 1–2, 167, 285–304

328

Index

touch see haptics Tower of Babel 37, 72 transcendentalism 284, 290, 293 transduction 6–7, 8, 9 transference 17, 101–2, 104, 111 transgenic art see bioart Trembath, Paul 10 trivial/non-trivial effort see ergodicity Trompe L’oeil 32, 46, 48, 97 Tufte, Edward 9 Twain, Mark 278 typography 16, 51–4, 77, 85, 110, 135, 186, 233, 243, 280 uncertainty principal 269 Vanderborg, Susan 66 Van Vogt, A. E. 231 Vanwesenbeeck, Birger 298, 301 Varley, John 256 VAS: An Opera in Flatland 2, 5, 17, 20, 28–9, 38, 42–3, 51–113, 118, 200, 209, 215, 228, 236–9, 276, 281, 293, 295, 299, 302 vasectomy 73, 76, 82, 107 Velázquez, Diego 18, 32–4, 48, 121, 149 Las Meninas 34, 119, 121–2, 134–5, 137–8, 141–2, 149, 278 voice 20, 83, 95–6, 184, 187–8, 247, 268

Vollmann, William 232 Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 75, 100 Von Hagens, Gunther 63 Vonnegut, Kurt 230 Wagner, Richard 52, 54 Wallace, David Foster 31, 40, 232, 290 Warner, Dan 76n. 4 Washington, George 294 Watts, Peter 237 West, Paul 283 Western culture 128, 212, 259–60, 268–9, 273 White, Hayden 47 White, Richard 237 Whitman, Walt 93, 281, 293 Williams, Jeffrey 200 Williams, Joy 223 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 99–100, 110, 212 Wittig, Monique 253, 256 wonder 10, 15, 21–3, 290–2 Woolf, Virginia 247 Work of Wonder 10, 273–84, 290 writing 150, 187, 216, 278, 303 Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg 184, 208 Zellen, Jody 173