The Devil From Supermarket: Images of Postmodernity in After the Plague

In his interview with Peter Wild for 3:AM Magazine, T.C. Boyle said:

“Literature can be great in all ways, but it’s just entertainment like rock’n’roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn’t capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn’t work. Nothing else will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterisation, the structure, all that’s irrelevant if you are not getting the reader on that level – moving a story. If that’s friendly to readers, I cop to it.”

As an incredibly productive writer (T.C. Boyle is an author of twenty-three books of fiction – approximately one book per year of his thirty-four year long writing career) he has mastered the art of literary entertainment to perfection: his fiction is witty and enjoyable, moral but not overtly didactic, it deals with issues of current importance but doesn’t fall into historicism. Although Boyle tries to maintain an image of an unpredicted writer (“I want to defeat your expectations. I don’t want you to pick up any of my stories or books and have any idea what it’s going to be,” says Boyle in the same interview), there is certain thematic and stylistic unity to his works. Most of Boyle’s favoured themes are sure to attract the widest audience: he addresses the issues of masculinity, sexuality, politics, drug abuse, illegal immigration to name just a few. His fiction is rooted in popular culture and often adopts characteristics of other genres. In the above cited interview Boyle continues:

“Literature has taken a third seat to film and music. You could go as far as to say a fourth seat, if you factor in games. Fair enough, a fourth seat, but I do think it remains viable because of its magic. The reader creates it as much as the writer does and that can’t be said of any other art form. Except for maybe interactive games – which is a kind of a novel… Forget what I was saying, that’s the doom of literature right there. It’s all over, our time is up!”

This interview was taken in 2003, shortly after the publication of his collection After the Plague (2001). It is not surprising, that the short stories of this collection are reminiscent of mainstream cinema and computer-games; here Boyle uses dark comedy and satire to draw pictures of post-apocalyptic society (After the Plague, A Friend of the Earth) and to comment on American social issues (Killing Babies, Mexico, She Wasn’t Soft). In many stories Boyle uses images from consumer culture to illustrate the postmodern context of the plot. The author recreates the world which is seduced by the image, dominated by Baudrillardrian simulacra and in this sense representative of the crisis of postmodernity.

Thomas Boyle was born in 1948 and as a representative of the baby-boom generation, experienced many of the social and cultural swerves of the second half of the 20th century. In his first novel Water Music published in 1982 the author already used many conventions of postmodern literature, including blurring the line between history and fiction: in his foreword Boyle admits that he does not claim “historical accuracy or even faithfulness to contemporary accounts whose reliability is doubtful anyway” (“Water Music”). In the short story collection Greasy Lake and Other Stories published three years after the appearance of Boyle’s first book, the writer moved away from the seriousness of a literary formula into entertaining his readers: in his own words “a story has failed when it requires a critic to mediate between the reader and author” (“Greasy Lake”). These 16 stories are set in present-day America and their plots are often organized around an extraordinary event in the life of an average working-class man – the story-line favoured by the pulp-magazines’ stories.

Although Boyle decided to disregard the intellectual prerequisite of the postmodern prose, he nevertheless continues to follow the canon in a number of other principles. Here I refer to postmodernism in the light of Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, which addresses the symbol as more real than reality itself: “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting signs of the real for the real” (Baudrillard, 4). In this sense, the age of postmodernism may truly be called “the age of symbol and spectacle. […] The new technologies of information and communication permit spectacularizations that have not been possible before, leading to the fabling of the world” (Firat, 250).

Boyle opens his 2003 collection After the Plague with a story Termination Dust, which starts with a following paragraph:

“There were a hundred and seven of them, of all ages, shapes and sizes, from twenty-five- and thirty-year-olds in dresses that looked like they were made of Saran Wrap to a couple of big-beamed older types in pantsuits who could have been somebody’s mother – and I mean somebody grown, with a goatee beard and a job in MacDonald’s. I was there to meet them when they came off the plane from Los Angeles. [...] We came up to the first of the ladies, Susan Abrams, by her nametag, and started handing out corsages, one to a lady, and chimed in chorus, “Welcome to Anchorage, Land of Grizzly and the True-Hearted Man!” (Boyle, 1).

Boyle uses easily recognizable cultural signs (young women in tight transparent dresses, middle-aged women in pantsuits, countermen in fast-food restaurants, an image of a manly man as related to an archetypal symbol of a bear) in order to recreate experience that is defined by the plurality of images. This is what William Carlos Williams called “no ideas but in things”: as the reader is being drawn into the plot of the story, the author provides little characterisation apart from a collage of vivid cultural icons, which invite the reader to recreate the missing details in the description.

Similar stereotypical characterisation is also present in other stories of the collection, including a story Friendly Skies – here the main male character Michael is described as “either a writer or a journalist”, who “works on his laptop, the gentle blue glow of the screen softly illuminating his lips and eyes, and drinks Chardonnay.”

Such accumulation of seemingly random domestic images epitomizes literary minimalism of the late 1970s (which Boyle was very well familiar with as this was the time he started his writing career and soon afterwards received a PhD diploma in Creative Writing and Literature). The paragraph exemplifies minimalism’s reliance upon the seemingly unordered presentation of everyday domestic details.

Andrew Hoberek describes minimalism as “a school of realist writing characterized by neo-Hemingwayesque aesthetic of terseness and excision, working-class characters and settings, and a preference for the short story over the novel that came to dominate American fiction during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this period minimalism arose to challenge the prominence of the big, non-realistic postmodern novel associated with writers like Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Robert Coover” (Hoberek, 103). John Barth in this short piece entitled A Few Words About Minimalism invokes this school of fiction as “K-Mart realism,” “hick chic,” “Diet-Pepsi minimalism” and “post-Vietnam, post-literary, post-Postmodernist blue-collar neo-early-Hemingwayism” (qtd. in Hoberek, 104).

However, minimalism needs to be understood less through its frequently domestic content than through its formal commitment to discrete objects divorced from systems that give them meaning. In other words, minimalist text presents images stripped of the organizing principles of linear narrative. For example, in the story Friendly Skies Boyle never directly describes the aircraft – the main setting for the story’s events, but makes it vividly realistic by numerous images, such as Plexiglas windows, “Fasten Seat Belts” sign, tray tables, a boarding pass, overhead bins etc. Moreover, to make the illusion of reality even more palpable, the author also recounts objects commonly associated with planes: “a neat French braid of a flight attendant”, paperback book, pretzels and pieces of fruit, “sloughed shoes”, “the handbags skittering by underfoot” to name just a few. In Boyle’s extensive list, these objects, autonomous from each other, are deprived of references to their use, and consequently become icons of their images. The space of a plane then becomes “a construction of language and discourse” (Firat, 244), or rather of popular and common idea of itself.

Here is a thread towards the postmodern context of a minimalist narrative. The text’s investment in fragments shows a Lyotardian suspicion to metanarrative, similar to how DeLillo depicts a postmodern decentring of the self in White Noise. In this sense we can argue that the postmodern interest in Petite Histoire (Hassan, 6) caused the appearance of minimalism as the further step away from the modernist grand-narrative. The minimalist stories about consumerism embrace “merely personal experience” and replace historic postmodern narratives: they “retreat from the kinds of things one finds in history books” into “the smallness, privacy, and racial homogeneity of domestic life” (McGurl, 407).

In his stories Boyle uses various images to depict the every-day life of America, among them the strongest marker being multiple references to food and drinks. Although technically being a sign of a minimalist domestically-oriented style, they at the same time refer to the postmodern idea that reality is a construct of well-recognizable signs. Boyle’s frequent mention of food brands and ethnic dishes not only intensifies the idea of the supremacy of images in the hyperreal, but also suggests fragmentation of cultural and social spaces. In the story Friendly Skies the characters are offered “stale beer at the airport bar”, peanuts on board, “a dry six-dollar bagel and three-fifty cup of espresso at one of the airport kiosks”, and “(the eternal question) chicken or pasta for lunch”.

In the story everyone seems to be consuming food for its mere availability, without actually wanting or enjoying it: “Everyone had got free drinks and peanuts, but nobody wanted peanuts, and the drinks tasted like nothing, like kerosene.” In postmodern terms this suggests that the characters are freed from the necessity to find consistent reason in every act, they are “engaged in nonlinearities of thought and practice, in improbable behaviours, contingencies, and discontinuities” (Firat, 255). Each individual pursues multiple consumption experiences, which represent the variety and availability of images in the postmodern era.

This assumption leads us to another peculiarity of a postmodern text: symbolically comprehensible food images not only serve as a background for the action, but also become signs of commodification and prosaicness of consumer culture. To use Barth’s terminology, “the reaction to the all but inescapable hyperbole of American advertising” has caused the consumer society to equate commercial images with their real-life projections. This is to say, the postmodern culture of consumerism has transformed linguistic signs into cultural stereotypes. The author’s portrayal of the two characters flirting over an airline meal is erotic and ironic, if not sarcastic:

“Their meals had come. The broad-faced attendant was again leaning in confidentially, this time with the eternal question – “Chicken or pasta?” – on her lips. Ellen wasn’t hungry – food was the last thing she wanted – but on an impulse she turned to her neighbour. “I’m not really very hungry,” she said, her face too close to his, their elbows touching, his left knee rising up out of the floor like a stanchion, “but if I get a meal, would you want it – or some of it? As an extra, I mean?”

Following the tendency to depict social stereotypes through food, Boyle chooses to characterize his characters by their preferences in drinks. In the same story Friendly Skies the nameless “saddlebag face woman with a processed pouf of copper hair” orders “Sprite”: she is so unremarkable that the only other reference provided to her by the author is that “the dull thump of her voice is swallowed up in the drone of the engines”. Sophisticated and charming journalist Michael asks for a Chardonnay, whereas the protagonist Ellen’s multiple glasses of Scotch-and-soda add certain restrained masculinity to her character (after all, she doesn’t want to drink her whiskey neat) and to some extend foreshadow her violent break-down at the end of the story.

The identities of Boyle’s characters are neither stereotypical sketches, nor the author’s play on the reader’s expectations, but the readers’ interpretation of their discourse. The readers recognize the well-known images and combine them into a kind of “speculative identity” (Zizek, 36). In the second story of the collection, She Wasn’t Soft, the female character is understood as a ferocious and powerful woman through the meal she is having together with her boyfriend:

“She wasn’t shy about [eating] – not like the other girls he’d dated, the ones on a perpetual diet who made you feel like a two-headed hog every time you sat down to a meal, whether it was a Big Mac or the Mexican Plate at La Fondita. No “salad with dressing on the side” for Paula, no butterless bread or child’s portions. She attacked her food like a lumberjack, and you’d better keep your hands and fingers clear. Tonight she started with potato gnocchi in a white sauce puddle with butter, and she ate half-a loaf of crusty Italian bread with it, sopping up the leftover sauce till the plate gleamed. Next it was the fettuccine with Alfredo sauce, and on her third trip to the pasta bar she heaped her plate with mostaccioli marinara and chunks of hot sausage – and more bread, always bread. He ordered a beer, lit a cigarette without thinking, and shovelled some spaghetti carbonara, thick on the fork and sloppy with sauce” (Boyle, 25).

It is not accidental that Boyle describes the meals of the partners in contrast with each other, so that the man’s indecisiveness is opposed to the self-control and willpower of the woman. Boyle thus alludes to one of the most damaging effects of postmodern consumer culture that is the process of diluting gender differences which allows women more freedom in a male-dominated society but at the same time feminizes men. Just as a minimalist story replaces historic narratives of postmodernism, emasculated and feminized characters of the consumerism era substitute heroic protagonists of the late modernism. Sally Robinson in the article Gender and Consumption in the Critical Reception of DeLillo’s White Noise claims that “the crisis of postmodern culture [is represented in the] descriptions of ‘the consumer’ as the ‘quintessentially passive figure’ and of consumerism as a replacement of authentic experiences with ‘phony’ ones” (Robinson, 98). The critic continues her argument saying that “the crisis of postmodern culture that consumerism subtends is a crisis of traditional masculinity” (Robinson, 99).

Boyle’s characters strive to regain their masculinity but often do it in an unfair or unlawful manner, which causes their defeat. In the already mentioned story Friendly Skies an archetypal plotline of Prince Charming fighting and defeating a dragon is recomposed through the postmodern false mirror. Although at first Michael, the main male character of the story, stands-up to the evil, represented by another passenger’s assault against the passengers and crew of the aircraft, he is immediately defeated: “in a single motion, [Lercher] snatched the laptop from Michael’s hand and brought it whistling down across his skull, and Ellen felt him go limp beside her.” Understandably the postmodern parody causes “the fair lady” to take a sword and kill the dragon herself:

“At that point she didn’t know what she was doing. All she knew was that she’d enough, enough of […] this big, drunken, testosterone-addled bully and the miserable, crimped life […], and she came up out her seat as if she’d been launched – and in her hand, clamped there like a flaming sword, was a thin steel fork that she must have plucked from the cluttered dinner tray. She went for his face, for his head, his throat, enveloping him with her body, the drug singing in her heart and the Scotch flowing like ichor in her veins.”

The narratives which aim to describe crisis of masculinity commonly turn to the description of violence. Slavoj Zizek is among the scholars who relate the society’s conformism with violence to the development of consumer culture. The critic argues that aggression is inherent in every aspect of society’s existence, but individuals distinguish violence when it is “experienced against the background of the non-violent zero-level” (Zizek, 2). In other words, the society’s sensitivity level for understanding violence is distinguished by the culture, whether it accepts or refuses it.

In the story Friendly Skies violence is constantly present in the background of the events, so it is perceived as a normal way of the characters’ interaction with each other (“The man in front of him lifted a great, swollen dirigible of a head over the seat back and growled, “Give it a rest, asshole. [...] This is bullshit. I’m not going to sit here squeezed in like a rat. I paid full fare, and I’m not going to take this shit anymore, you hear me [...] Fuck, that’s all we need. There’s no way I’m going to make my connection now. [...] What do you mean, I have to check it, you idiot.”) When these situations are considered within their context, the characters’ anger is understandable if not justified. Boyle constructs and at the same time deconstructs the rationality of social conditions to respond to the postmodern pluralities, instabilities and paradoxes of everyday life.

In other words, we can argue that the images of consumer culture in Boyle’s stories are aimed to reflect and represent the postmodern era. Although his works can hardly be distinguished as purely postmodern, the postmodern canon still continued to influence the cultural context of the early 21st century. Because of the author’s desire to attract and entertain his audience, he creates a text with numerous cultural icons which help the readers relate to the plot. The stories do not ‘celebrate’ the simplification of an image, but the author’s mimicry of cliché and contradicting the traditional stereotypes allow us to relate the collection to postmodern practice.

–Mariya Doğan
Department of American Culture and Literature, Hacettepe University
Ankara, Turkey

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Mariya Doğan graduated from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine), where she received her Master’s degree at the Department of Foreign Literatures. She now lives in Ankara, Turkey, and is a graduate student at the Department of American Culture and Literature, Hacettepe University. She is a member of International Organization of Folk Art (IOV), Centre for American Literary Studies in Ukraine (CALSU) and Association of American Studies of Turkey (ASAT). Her area of interest and research include contemporary Jewish-American fiction and focus on representations of ethnic identity, trauma and violence.

Works Cited:
Barth, J. (26 Dec. 1986). A Few Words About Minimalism. The New York Times Books Review.

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Boyle, T.C. (2001). After the Plague: Collection. London: Bloomsbury.

Boyle, T.C. (2003). Interview by Peter Wild. 3:AM Magazine.

Firat, A. F., Venkatesh, A. (1995). Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of Consumption. (pp. 239-267). Journal of Consumer Research, Vol.22, No.3.

Gleason, P. W., Bruccoli, M. J. (2009). Understanding T.C. Boyle (Understanding Contemporary American Literature). (pp. 1-32). University of South Carolina Press.

Hoberek, A. (2010). Foreign Objects, or, DeLillo Minimalist. (pp.101-125). Studies in American Fiction, Vol.37, No.1.

McGurl, M. (2009). The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. (pp. 399-410). Harvard University Press.

Robinson, S. (2013). Shopping for the Real: Gender and Consumption in the Critical Reception of DeLillo’s White Noise.” Postmodern Culture.

“Water Music (Novel).” (Inc.25 Aug 2004). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation,

Žižek, S. (2008). Language, Violence and Non-Violence. IJZS - International Journal of Žižek Studies. Vol. 2, No. 3

Žižek, S. (2009). Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. Big ideas: small books. Profile Books.

The Rats: a Malediction

The rats are not doing well, and I want them to do worse. Ten days rain: Harold’s bin of chicken grain across the road tight in its tin can, the duck grain & goose grain gone & tucked under the house, unattainable. None of the neighbors chucking kitchen-scraps out the windows anymore, no fruit in the trees, no nuts. Leaflessness, no grass seed, no dead deer, just deluge: water off the hills, rivulets on the slightest slope; meadows recall their lakes. Wet nights for the rats, wet nights.

I want them to shrivel, stumble, starve. Prolific in the attic, I want them desperate for the peanut butter on the ten traps I set—traps that smell of old death—let them smell that death but be hungry, hasty, and let each trap snap & snap well—slice a neck, crack a skull, flip & sink them into insulation, stinking in dead rat silence.

Because I hate their entry, which I can’t find, I have caulked & filled, found each hole larger than a dime, stuffed coarse steel wool, cut screen, nailed it in, gone up the extension ladder & down, reshingled, soffited, and still they get in.

Because I hate their acrobatics, clawing across the rafters, gnawing the soft joists smooth, rolling their goddamn acorns across the false ceiling or squealing as they’re screwing, I see every one of their beady eyes from our bed.

Because I hate the smell of their sweet piss in the attic—unmistakable—on summer days it rises through the vents, rides the breeze.

Because I have tried poison, which they take, seek water, sway across the fields toward the creek, speared by an owl, now the owl’s poisoned, so I poison no more.

Because they are huge. Because they are healthy—the one who flipped down from the attic last week, dead from the trap, his coat shining, lamp-black & gray, lovely.

From Night of Pure Breathing, Hanging Loose Press (Brooklyn), 2011

Gerald Fleming is the author of The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2005). He lives in California.

Crucifixion, Kinetic

Often, the scene depicted as tranquil—fait accompli, three men in their proper places, on crosses, assorted provokers and grievers below, sky leaden, sense overall not meat but vegetal, varnished, tableau.

Let’s say it did occur.

Then: cross? This planed and surfaced lumber in pictures we knew long ago—in Giotto, Raphael, even Goya?

No. Rough spar. Oak, or cedar. Maybe an adze hacked away the bark, maybe a few draw-knife marks, but it’s still tree, still round, chunks of its skin left on, bleeding sap, lots of knots—strong enough, though, to hold a man.

Each upright so tall no mother at night might take down a son, no brother a brother. And the cross-strut surely not mortised, fit tight/square to its vertical other, but cruder stuff: hemp-rope to lash the X together, coarse fiber, the cross-strut at front, main beam behind, rope laps raising it farther so that a man’s deltoids and pectoralis majors are either racked backwards, spine arched out from the upright, or else his arms straight, pinned at wrists and elbows, thoracic vertebrae torqued inward, rolled; he’s hunchbacked.

The tying’s done on the ground, of course, crowd gathered ’round, a few protesting at first, most goading, quick-tempered, spinning to kick dogs fighting underfoot.

And of the three: do they accede, span themselves over each cross? Not likely.

Struggle, boots to the gut, the men blindsided, bare-knuckled, yanked down, faces struck and kicked, clothes ripped, and their cursing—all three, and all three self-mucused and bloodied and pissed, pinned now at the wrists, ankles crossed and bound, four soldiers to a man, More rope! More rope! Knives tossed to slice the hemp, and they’re stilled now, fixed, the crowd cheering Yes!—one of the men in the crowd with a hard-on.

Some few curse the soldiers, their epithets kept under breath.

Three tall crosses, one by one to be raised.

Who dug these goddamn holes? Not deep enough! One-third the length of each pole! Who trained you fools—your mothers?

And the laborers, new men, bend again, fifteen minutes’ work, their blades shear rock, much complaint, the tied men still supine, new rubble beside the postholes, and now the call to raise: a soldier at each side of the struts, two at the vertical, they count, lift, the wet wood heavy and the bound man heavy, no balance to be had, pitching backward, swaying, Lift higher! says one with a helmet on, and the cross is lifted, lowered into its hole, voice of man on pole dolorous and lost in the crowd, but still it’s not plumb, It’s leaning, and they heave too far left, foolish workmen, compensate now too far right, finally straight, the workmen shamed, angry, There—now fill it in, shovelers packing rubble into the hole, slapping it with the back of their blades, the pole-holding soldiers still shouldering it, heroic poses in opposition to each other, more rubble, more soil. Done. Next one.

The second one plumbed, and now to the third man, still on the ground, bound, the one they were told to nail. The nails flat-shafted, pounded on an anvil, tapered, black. The man’s right wrist bound tight, one nail straight through the capitatum. That’s no pain, they say, you woman. Want nails in the tips of your fingers? Now the left.

The man’s feet, wrong in literature and tableau, here crossed at the ankles, bound in hemp, loosed briefly so that each crossed foot can find a surface for nailing. Two men on their knees—each takes a foot, jerks it downward, works it around the side of the post, nails it in. The cord tightened again.

The man himself now, as if oiled: in blood, in sweat, in piss, and the noises he makes animal noises, inhuman. He is raised, the skies leaden, yes, the birds already circling, the soldiers folding their arms, well pleased.

From The Choreographer,  Sixteen Rivers Press (San Francisco), 2013.

Gerald Fleming is the author of The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2005). He lives in California.

Hilary Mantel and the historical novel

From an essay by Sara Knox first published  in Twenty-First-Century British Fiction, Bianca Leggett and Tony Venezia (Eds.). Canterbury, U.K.: Gylphi, 2015.

What the literary historical novel is, and what it should or shouldn’t do, are questions that have long exercised critics, readers and authors from the period of the genre’s triumph to that of its decline.…In a frequently quoted letter dated 5 October 1901, Henry James warns Sarah Orne Jewett of the almost impossible requirements for a true representation of an era, and its habits of mind. ‘You may multiply the little facts to be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like’, writes James, but ‘the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its absence the whole effect is nought; I mean the invention, the representation of the old consciousness.’ His last word to Jewett was about the cheek of it all: ‘you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force — and even then it’s all humbug’  (quoted in Horne, 1999, 360). James’ letter is itself too frequently ‘simplified back’ to those final three words: ‘it’s all humbug’, forgetting what a perfectionist James was; how high set was his bar. Literary naturalism’s critique of the historical novel is that some feats of imagination are hubris: efforts beyond the artist and therefore beneath the art. But this is to miss James’ qualifier: ‘The real thing is almost impossible to do’, which means: it can be—might be—done. Which is surely reason enough to make the attempt. 

The question of what the literary historical novel is, and what it should and shouldn’t do, seemed to have found its moment in 2012, the year in which Hilary Mantel won her second Man Booker prize for Bring Up the Bodies—17 years after the publication of her first historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety. Bring up the Bodies is the second instalment of three novels on the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. The first, Wolf Hall, had won Mantel the Man Booker in 2009. Peter Carey, J. G. Farrell, Peter Carey and J.M. Coetzee are the only other authors to share the honour of having won two Booker prizes, but Mantel is the only person in the history of the prize to win twice in quick succession, and to win for historical novels in series. Mantel’s Man Bookers (should we call these Man-tel Bookers?) are also distinctive in that her novels represent an era more remote than any other winning ‘historical’: 250 years earlier than those treated, say, by Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger. What is notable, then, about Mantel’s double-win is not only how pre-eminently ‘historical’ the novels are, but also the complexity and breadth of the history they offer, intra- and extra-textually. They play out along the same line of historical events—what Wolf Hall begins, Bring Up the Bodies continues—but differ in technique and strategy, as the author learns her subject (Tudor history and the political and intellectual progress of the Protestant reformation) and her Subject (Thomas Cromwell, from whose point of view the events are narrated)

…. 

In Bring Up the Bodies we are closely schooled about narrative partiality—the second novel builds on the first book by strengthening Cromwell as a pivot of its action. He is agent and doer, an author of change. This is not only a matter of our orientation to Cromwell as the central character (who is speaking? ‘He, Thomas Cromwell’ is speaking) it is an argument in the making about Thomas Cromwell (Mantel: ‘look to my book for accuracy where I can contrive it, but don’t look to it for impartiality’ [Mares, 2009]).  Taken together, the series proposes a history. That they do so troubles some people—particularly (and predictably) Tudor historians. Susan Bordo takes issue with the author’s partiality in Bring Up the Bodies, arguing that what gets storied (or omitted from the story) tells on Cromwell, with whom both author and reader are closely tied. Mantel ‘excludes some key historical material’ that ‘might cause readers to question (her) Cromwell’s view of Anne [Boleyn] as an unfeeling strategist’, and show Cromwell to be ‘more like a thug’ than the author would have us take him (Bordo, 2012). Or rather a different kind of thug—Mantel’s Cromwell is not at all averse to cowing people, though he does so less with violence than by play upon other people’s expectations about what kind of man he was, a man from a ‘dishonourable estate’ (WH, 70), with a past career as a soldier in Italy. Bordo’s concluding judgment vindicates Mantel the novelist but condemns her as a writer of history: ‘the imaginative fiction of “Cromwell’s point of view” is both the novel’s greatest achievement and a handy rationale for playing very loose with the facts’ (2012). But the judgement sits beneath an equivocation (the subtitle of the piece): ‘whether we approve of the liberties taken with history depends on who is taking them—Hilary Mantel or Showtime’ (Bordo, 2012). Mantel’s current pre-eminence as a novelist, and the referred glamour of that eminence on literary historical fiction more generally, secures the ground for the return of a long embattled genre to respectability. 

I would here like to assess the contribution of Hilary Mantel to the historical novel—and the question of its existence, its reason for being—by taking up a thread left dangling by A. S. Byatt in her essay ‘Forefathers’ where she talks about the relationship of the historical novel to secrecy, revelation, and the power of interrogation. Byatt first observes the tenacity of writers working in the genre to imagine an ‘extraordinary variety of distant pasts’ (Byatt, 2000, 36) despite the dictum that ‘we cannot know the past … and therefore should not write about it’ (38). Whether a technique of ‘historical ventriloquism’ like that practiced by Peter Ackroyd in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), or ‘novels which play serious games with the idea of narrative itself’ like Graham Swift’s Waterland (Byatt, 48), or the ‘apparently straightforward, realist narrative’ of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety (Byatt, 2000, 54), she finds the contemporary English historical novel effectively engaged in telling us what we cannot know (2000, 56). Discussing Mantel’s ‘experimental third person narrators’ in A Place of Greater Safety as inheritors of the ‘knowledgeable narrators’ of George Eliot (2000, 54), Byatt suggests that narrators do not have the ‘omniscience of a god’ mistakenly taken to characterise the nineteenth century narrator, but are fictive narrators of small compass and considerable acuity, who ‘can creep closer to the feelings and the inner life of characters…than any first-person mimicry’ (2000, 55). Her sense of Mantel’s ability to ‘tell us what we can’t know’ hinges partly on the novelist making history accessible (viz. the past we cannot know) and partly in her success at bringing the made world near to the reader where the historical record—Henry James’ ‘little facts’—might leave the reader hanging. But the question of what we cannot know shades into that of what we should not know when Byatt observes in passing that there is an ‘interesting path to be explored along the connections between modern historical novels and the popular genres that tell stories about secrecy’ (2001, 57). She quotes historian Richard Cobb on the compulsions of the historian to get the ‘foot in the door, to get behind the façade, to get inside’.  For that ‘is what being, or becoming, an historian is all about—the desire to read other people’s letters, to breach privacy, to penetrate into the inner room’ (quoted in Byatt, 2001, 56). The idea of trespass presumes a realm of privacy, but is imagination the realm of privacy against which all trespasses must be defended? Or is imagination the culprit, the trespasser on fact and the real of a vanished past? 

In Hilary Mantel’s historical novels the question of knowledge—its standpoint, its limitations, its rights—looms large. So too does that question loom large in the criticism of her work, and of the genre more broadly: in regard to the construction of the historical novel (narrative technique and plotting); in terms of the weltanschuang—what James’ terms the ‘old consciousness’—that the novel must evoke; and in the way historical novels are weighed as historiographical representations, as propositions for imagining a specific past and historical persons. 

….

The use and abuse of the record, and the question of knowledge—facts promulgated or withheld, ideas traded upon or proscribed, associations owned or denied—is at the heart of Mantel’s … historical novels. In her evocation of the Royal Court, of Cromwell’s Putney, and of county and country in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies the covert is dangerous, although a danger Cromwell recognizes as ‘the way of the world’—and like the world—a danger that even-handedly presages a bad end: ‘a knife in the dark, a movement on the edge of vision, a series of warnings that have worked themselves into flesh’ (WH, 76). These threats are general, even democratic, but they loom large for Cromwell since he’s made himself so much the centre of things, agent—even—of actions accounted to others. ‘He used to say, “the king will do such and such.” Then he began to say, “We will do such and such.” Now he says, “This is what I will do.’” (WH, 28). And the spectre of knowledge haunts Mantel’s earlier historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, where questions posed by Enlightenment social thought are answered by ever more bloody inquiries into the workings of order as Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins work to imagine and bring into being a revolution that is something more than the one events have served them. 

The question of what-is-knowable but also of who-knows-what leads us to narrative authority and to techniques of narration, but also brings into view the historiographical nature of literary historical fiction in its constructed-ness and subjectivity … as well as its intrusiveness: its tendency toward trespass. That impulse would not be foreign to Mantel, the author, or to her characters. It’s hard to imagine Thomas Cromwell or Camille Desmoulins scrupling much at reading another’s letters, or even from writing them: as Cromwell does for the King (BUTB, 210). And Mantel could not have served the history, or drawn her character, without having read letters—Cromwell’s letters—as they are ‘virtually our only source’ (Mares, 2009) in the documentary record where Cromwell speaks directly, for himself and as himself. To read an historical resource is not to trespass, where the past—and the dead—have by rights given up their ground, but nevertheless the spectre of trespass, and questions about the propriety of knowledge, haunts Mantel’s historical novels.

Mantel’s protagonists are animated by tensions between the impulse to know and the countervailing pressure to repress some knowledge—to obscure a fact, keep a story from the gossips, or suppress a thought. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies treat a period in which the concept of privacy as we recognize it did not exist, while the concept of rights upon which privacy discursively rests is only coming into view in the period of revolutionary upheaval in Europe, the larger world enclosed by the ‘inner rooms’—the domestic interiors—within which the action of A Place of Greater Safety is staged. It narrates the revolution from a near, even an intimate, proximity to Desmoulins, Danton and Robespierre (and to a lesser extent, the wives of Desmoulins and Danton) in a ‘blurring of the boundaries between the political and the domestic’ (Hidalgo, 2002, 205). Seldom do we glimpse the public revolutionary about his work, unless it is in the moment just prior to a significant political act or utterance, at its formation but not its completion. Someone says something to someone else; a joke is made at another’s expense while the real cost—a career, a corpse—is still to be counted; the seed of a plan is sown, a rumour set about, an accusation made; something is committed to writing, for private record or publication. In A Place of Greater Safety it is not the concept of privacy per se that is canvassed but the disappearance of the ‘private’ (private life sacrificed to public vertu; private rooms become meeting houses). That the ‘private’ is so swiftly disappearing is fateful for everyone caught up in the revolutionary events in Paris, but particularly so for Danton and Desmoulins. A newly minted man of the people for his part in the street riots leading to the storming of the Bastille, Camille finds his likeness turned out on crockery: ‘[t]his is what happens when you become a public figure, people eat their dinners off you’ (APOGS,  249), while Gabrielle Danton discovers that she and her husband are to have little space to themselves in their new apartment: ‘[a] curtained alcove sheltered twin beds, marked off their private territory from the patriotic circus it had become’ (APOGS, 346). The private is a preserve of privilege and privilege is quickly becoming a liability, as Mirabeau lugubriously observes: ‘I can remember the days…when we didn’t have public opinion. No one had ever heard of such a thing’ (APOGS, 325). This is a response to Danton’s fondly barbed characterisation of Camille, who ‘has to be running ahead of public opinion all the time’ (APOGS, p. 324). Camille leads opinion, but there is also something fugitive and vulnerable in all this ‘running ahead’.

….

It is over this distinction between the public and the private that the crisis ensues. Danton falls after being implicated in a conspiracy of profiteering (the revolutionary nation is at war), a ‘stock market scandal’ characterised—tellingly—by ‘insider trading’ (Mantel, 2009b). And what condemns Desmoulins, finally, is his commitment to private life—not his own so much as that of an increasingly wide-array of citizens condemned by the Committee for Public Safety, with its private proceedings and its process bearing down on evidence that is, as likely as not, public rumour. Camille remonstrates with Robespierre as the Terror deepens, first doing so in public, and then face-to-face. His article about the tyranny of the reign of Emperor Tiberius makes its accusation by analogy, his revolution having become the thing it derides: ‘the corruption of all human feeling, the degradation of pity to a crime’ (APOGS, 770). Desmoulins means the reader to see Robespierre’s agent, Antoine de Saint-Just, as the instrument of tyranny, but when Robespierre reads the article he recognizes himself. When they meet to discuss this last instance of Camille’s fervor for liberty, it is on a bridge over the Seine, for ‘inside’—as Robespierre puts it—‘you can’t keep secrets’ (APOGS, 771). To which Camille replies,  ‘you see—you admit it. You’re eaten away with the thought of conspiracy. Will you guillotine brick walls and doorposts?’ (APOGS, 771). Those ‘brick walls and door posts’ are what sets home off from the world—border to the last preserve of the private. But for Robespierre there is only one inside that counts, one sanctified preserve. After he has agreed to Saint-Just arraigning Camille before the Tribunal, Robespierre tells him: ‘[w]hen this business is over, and Camille is dead, I shall not want to hear your epitaph for him. No one is ever to speak of him again, I absolutely forbid it. When he is dead, I shall want to think of him myself, alone’ (APOGS, 862). This inside is the place of greater safety. Not that arch public face of memory, posterity (‘your epitaph’), nor even the grave itself: it is thought, and that fragile vessel, memory.

For the Thomas Cromwell of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the place of greater safety is even more remote, beyond his power to conjure or keep. It is not memory, for the dead do not dwell only there: after his wife, then his daughters, die they can be glimpsed on the stair, they put their small hands beside his on the page as he stands reading by the window. Despite his faith, Cromwell finds little practical comfort in his own inviolate soul: it is not a ground to stand upon; it does not even belong to him. When he imagines the dead in their afterlife, it is in Augustinian terms, resurrection in the shadow of mourning (Augustine: ‘the flesh resurrects in order not to possess but to be possessed, not to have but to be had’ [quoted in Segal, 2004, 279]). When his eldest daughter dies of the sweating sickness Cromwell thinks of her, suddenly complete, not the girl still learning Greek, but the girl ‘who knows it now’. He wonders if that is how it is ‘in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming,’—the dead suddenly knowing ‘everything they need to know’ (WH, 152). For the Cromwell we meet at the height of his power, there is only one place of respite from its burdens, only one way to shake off the constant nagging fact of what needs to be done (what he must do). After he has terrified Mark Smeaton, breaking him for the confession that will condemn Anne Boleyn, Cromwell retires to bed. He cannot sleep, and ‘it is only in his dreams that he is private’. Cromwell nurses his wakefulness, remembering the ascetic Thomas More, who ‘used to say you should build yourself a retreat, a hermitage, within your own house. But that was More: able to slam the door in everyone’s face. In truth you cannot separate them, your public being and your private self....’(BUTB, 281) Cromwell would not follow More’s thinking, being Wolsey’s man. When Cromwell first marked down Mark Smeaton it was with the thought ‘the cardinal always says, there are no safe places, there are no sealed rooms’ (WH, 199): meaning, nowhere we won’t have an eye and an ear on you, Mark Smeaton. But in the context of his later interrogation of Smeaton, ‘no safe places’ and ‘no sealed rooms’ has a meaning more pointed. It’s Cromwell who is without a place of greater safety. 

Early in the novel of that name, we find Robespierre crafting his public position on the matter of private interests: ‘…private interests and all personal relationships must give way to the general good’. The young lawyer from Arras then puts down his pen and remonstrates with himself: ‘this is all very well, it is easy for me to say that, I have no dearest friend. Then he thought, of course I have, I have Camille’ (APOGS, p. 109). Put in mind of his friend, he searches for his last letter from him, which is ‘rather muddled, written in Greek’. It seems to Robespierre that by ‘applying himself to the dead language, Camille was concealing from himself his misery, confusion and pain; by forcing the recipient to translate, he was saying, believe that my life to me is an elitist entertainment, something that only exists when it is written down and sent by the posts’ (APOGS, 109-110). The passage draws for the reader the whimsical Camille and shows us the central tension—and tragedy—for Robespierre, the seed of his betrayal of his friend to the guillotine.  But so too is there something of the reflexive here, a take on historical narrative, the novel, and the historiographical all at once: ‘elitist entertainment’,  ‘something that only exists when it is written down’ and transmitted; something that obliges a work of interpretation, and something that obfuscates as much as it reveals.

While it would be too much to suggest that Mantel’s historical novels are ‘historiographic metafictions’ in Linda Hutcheon’s terms they nevertheless do ‘problematize the question of historical knowledge’ (1996, 474) without either the play of the mendacious or the self-referential knowingness of the postmodern historical novel. Respect for fact and the historical record grounds the fiction for the author must keep the ‘conjecture…plausible and grounded in the best facts one can get’ (Mantel, 2009). This commitment to the history in the fiction does not forestall the scholar/story-teller’s healthy respect for the labour of interpretation, whatever the degree of its imaginative working of the facts. ‘The past is not dead ground,’ writes Mantel, ‘and to traverse it is not a sterile exercise. History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.’ Then, implicating herself in the comment, she adds: ‘the most scrupulous historian is an unreliable narrator’ (2009). In Bring Up The Bodies, Thomas Cromwell meditates on the slippery Thomas Wyatt, ‘the cleverest man in England’ (BUTB, 347).….and the slipperiness of … his craft: 

…you trap him and say, Wyatt, did you really do what you describe in this verse? He smiles and tells you, it is the story of some imaginary gentleman, no one we know; or he will say, this is not my story I write, it is yours, though you do not know it. He will say, this woman I describe here, the brunette, she is really a woman with fair hair, in disguise. He will declare, you must believe everything and nothing of what you read. 

(BUTB, 348)

The substance of the art is indivisible: it can’t be ‘taxed’. Cromwell is admiring the infuriating Wyatt, how self-contained he is; that collected hauteur under interrogation. But from whence comes that strength? ‘You point to the page, you tax him: what about this line, is this true? He says, it is poet’s truth. Besides, he claims, I am not free to write as I like. It is not the king, but metre that constrains me. And I would be plainer, he says, if I could: but I must keep to the rhyme’ (BUTB, 348).

The whole passage can be read as at once a justification for, and a critique of, the imaginative work of the historical novel and the ‘trespasses’ of the novelist. Consider the context for the passage: Cromwell is characterising Wyatt—the Wyatt who is lucky, protected. There is evidence that could have damned him along with the other ‘conspirators’ in Anne’s sexual betrayal of the King but when Mark Smeaton is naming names, and blurts Wyatt’s, Cromwell is definite: ‘No, not Wyatt’ (BUTB, 283). Partiality and evidence contest here, and partiality wins. It is necessary for Cromwell to preserve Wyatt, for Wyatt is a principal embodied—albeit a troubled principal. The passage tellingly turns from its mediation on art (‘A Statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it’ [BUTB, 348]) to the messages of Angels, and the elusiveness of their nature. Cromwell has no doubt that Angels exist, but knows not whether they have the ‘plumage of falcons, crows, peacocks’ (BUTB, 348). And the only evidence he has from someone (‘a turnspit in the papal kitchens’) who has seen one provides little comfort, for ‘the Angel’s substance was heavy and smooth as marble, its expression distant and pitiless; its wings were carved from glass’ (BUTB, 349). These are terrifying emissaries of the only truth that counts, the truth toward which a ‘poet’s truth’ is aimed, but can never reach. 

In this passage—from Cromwell explaining Wyatt to Risley, to the meditation on art and the nature of angels—it is difficult not to hear the author remonstrating with critics like Bordo: ‘You point to the page, you tax him: what about this line, is this true?’ Mantel’s defence is ‘poet’s truth’: ‘I would be plainer, but I must keep to the rhyme’. For the literary historical novelist, history is ‘the king’ that does not constrain, and form ‘the metre’ that must. But if this is a defence, it is a qualified one: recognising the privilege of the interpretation, and its trespass (Wyatt is favoured, Wyatt is protected; Wyatt’s ‘lines fledge feathers’—so just leave him to his work). For there are Angels, they hover at a farther horizon. They are History—which is the blind passing of human time on this earth, not the ‘history’ that remembers us.

Sara Knox is an Associate Professor in the the Writing and Society Research Group and the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of Western Sydney. She is the author of Murder: a Tale of Modern American Life (Duke University Press, 1998) and other notable works on violence and representation. Her most recent publications include work on Hilary Mantel, including a study of the moral geography of violence in Mantel's novels,  and the regeneration of the historical novel as literary genre. Her novel The Orphan Gunner (Giramondo, 2007) won the 2009 Asher Literary Prize and was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and the Age Book of the Year.
Her blog can be found at: saralouiseknox.wordpress.com
 

WORKS CITED

Bordo, Susan (2012, May 6) ‘When Fictionalized Facts Matter: From ‘Anne of a Thousand Days’ to Hilary Mantel’s New Bring Up the Bodies’, Chronicle of Higher Education, URL (consulted December 2012):

Byatt, Antonia S. (2000) ‘Forefathers’, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. London: Chatto and Windus.

Hidalgo, Pilar (2002) ‘Of Tides and Men: History and Agency in Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety’, Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 10: 201-216.

Horne, Philip (1999) Henry James: a Life in Letters. New York: Viking.

Hutcheon, Linda (1996) ‘The Pastime of Past Time: Fiction, History, Historiographic Metafiction’, in Hoffman & Murphy (eds.), Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. London: Leicester University Press.

Mantel, Hilary (2008a, 24 May) ‘Author, Author’, The Guardian. URL (consulted December 2012)

Mantel, Hilary (2009a, 17 Oct) ‘Booker Winner Hilary Mantel on Dealing with History in Fiction’, The Guardian. URL (consulted December 2012)

Mantel, Hilary (2012) Bring Up the Bodies.  New York: Henry Holt and Company. 

Mantel, Hilary (1992) A Place of Greater Safety. London: Viking.

Mantel, Hilary (2009) Wolf Hall. London: Harper Collins.

Mares, Peter (2009, 18 June) ‘Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall’ [Radio Interview], The Book Show. ABC Radio. URL (consulted December 2012)

Segal, Alan (2004) Life After Death: a History of the Afterlife in Western Religion. New York: Doubleday.

The Others

 "It is the absence of facts that frightens people:
the gap you open, into which they pour
their fears, fantasies, desires.” 
― HILARY MANTEL, Wolf Hall

We’re having a good time—bottle of red wine, spaghetti, we’re here in our garden, warm breeze scented with lilac, light on its way out.

Others, though, are having a better time. In Newport it’s three hours later—already more advanced than we—and those others sit not only with their spouses but with four friends on a verandah overlooking the Atlantic, torch-lights behind them, the ocean a swath of black, only its sound in the cove—easy waves, rolling pebbles—announcing it. Theirs is an understated ocean. Their wine is better, their dinner later, and there’s laughter. One of the women has on your favorite perfume, and were we there, its scent would come our way. Someone in the kitchen with deft hands has cooked their meal, another serves it attentively, and there is no guilt.

But each guest knows in his longing that elsewhere others are having an even better time. Just outside D.C., for example, on a marble terrace overlooking the Potomac there’s a similar dinner—the same number of couples plus one—and it’s the addition of that couple that has made all the difference. The wine a little older, and the food, though served in smaller portions, richer—ah, but that one couple, the man black, the woman white—has energized the group, put everyone at their best. Listen: people are joking in German, saying sexy things in Italian, cursing in Russian, laughing in French. They’re almost raucous, but just shy of raucous—they know exactly where the line lies—it is there, in the mist above them; it will not descend. And look how well they’re dressed: the men in linen shirts, earth-tone slacks, the women’s breasts exposed slightly from each trimmed dress, each guest almost completely in the moment, this warmest night of the year.

They, too, though, know of those others, those betters, off the coast of Carolina in the stateroom of the hundred-foot Harmonium as it drifts in its easy private sea. The same number are there, but there’s a confidence, an intimacy lacking in the others. Same wine as Washington but more of it, plates garnished more imaginatively, dinner not even on until midnight, a little dancing just before, a switch of partners for one spin around the circular floor, and now they’re at table: how hearty they are, each of them an artist, not a banker among them, each smart & funny, intuitive & wise, their humor more subtle, implied. When they speak—which is often—there’s a largesse about them, a sense of kindness toward their host. They know each other well, the ship rocks languorously, honeysuckle scent from the coast. They could communicate simply by looking into each other’s eyes.

And we all know that after dinner that is what they do. A little tipsy but none drunk, they move to love each other on the deep carpet of the stateroom floor—all of them there, each knowing the others’ secrets, fit bodies melting into fit bodies, one moving being, many skin tones, many special sighs, the ship swaying imperceptibly, each to each to each, and as the first rays of sun fall across the bow someone says, Let’s sleep…

And we here, in this pitiful garden...

From Night of Pure Breathing, Hanging Loose Press (Brooklyn), 2011

Gerald Fleming is the author of The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2005). He lives in California.

Etgar Keret On Lying: three examples

In the story “Days like today”, from Keret's first book, Pipelines, published 23 years ago, the squad commander tortures Yoav, the new soldier, by lying:  

"So, what are you saying? That I'm a liar?" 
"He had a malicious smile on his face, and both him and Yoav knew he was lying […] and both of them knew that there is nothing Yoav can do about it, and he knew it even better then Yoav did".  

(Translated here by the author- D.S.S.) 

Lying is the worst form of abuse for the young soldier, who explicitly declares that the things he hated most were "thieves and more than that–liars". Rather than the military combatant he was supposed to be training for, Yoav perceives himself as a champion of justice. However, he has no choice but to be part of the IDF reality, in which "everyone is eating shit". Yoav is caught in between the rock that is what is right in the real world and a hard place of what is right in the IDF world, where all the rules are twisted.

In Yoav's case, coping with the lie is a dilemma of a person on the border between childhood and adulthood. The young soldier has to decide whether to react again as he did "once, when he was in the Scouts", or as an adult, as is expected of him in the current situation. Yoav reacts with an uncontrolled, but hidden, sobbing, while he pays the price for calling the squad commander out on his lie. The lie is something wrong, cruel and immoral but the accepted social codes direct Yoav to accept it, to make peace with it, and basically to grow up: "Yoav kept repeating in his head that this is the IDF, and everyone eats shit here, he went on and reminded himself time and time again that what he is doing is exactly what’s right". 

The squad commander’s habitual, petty, and mostly-obvious lying is used as a "realty-check" that allows Yoav to recognize his place and act according to the situation. Or not. The wonderful ending of this story manages to hold at one and the same time the option of revenge and that of restraint, while insinuating both. 

***

Unlike Yoav, Robbie from “Lieland” (From: Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, 2012. Translated by Miriam Shlesinger) does not "eat shit". His lies led him, ever since he was 7 years old up to his 30's, to eat ice cream while avoiding any and all consequences. He does not use his lies to torture others nor does he torture himself over them. He lies easily to benefit himself, always using the same technique: "He made up these lies in a flash, never thinking he'd have to cross paths with them again". Telling lies, before the discovery of “Lieland”, keeps Robbie in the naïve forgetfulness and embracing world of childhood.  

Robbie dreams "a short, fuzzy dream about his dead mother". The dream forces him to act in the real world. He wakes up at 5 a.m. and drives all the way to his childhood home to discover Lieland:

"Here” was a different place, but a familiar one too. […] Stark white, no walls, no floor, no ceiling, no sunshine. Just whiteness and a gumball machine.

This "infinite white surface" only seems empty. In fact, it contains all of Robbie's oral-history. The idea of a close and artificial space, where one faces his own imagined creation had visual representations on the screen as well: The late 80's Star-Trek: The Next Generation introduced the Holodeck, a virtual space in which one loads different reality-programs (even though it was a black space with green coordinates rather than white). Another well-known example is the 1999 blockbuster The Matrix in which the loading program is a white space called "the Construct", that holds everything and nothing at the same time. Lieland of course, is a much simpler space from the Holodeck or the Construct; its internal logic is not fully clarified, and its borders and influences are not thoroughly examined, mostly due to genre limitation (it is a short story and not part of an epic TV series or philosophical film trilogy–but perhaps one day).     

In films and TV shows, as well as for Yoav, the young soldier, the main issue is controlling the lie or the narrative, and the protagonist's ability to draw the line between reality and virtual reality. On a similar note, Robbie's insight about the way people do not believe "positive lies" resembles the premise of The Matrix, in which the imprisoned human minds naturally rebelled against perfect and harmonized virtual reality, while willingly accepting the mimicry of the world as was known, and as we know it, filled with suffering, tensions and anxieties.  

In the dream about his dead mother, Robbie has no control, nor does he have control over the lies in Lieland (therefore being "kicked in the shins" and robbed by the redheaded boy). However, from the moment he discovers the mechanism, he gains control in both worlds: He can keep lying in the real world without suffering any consequences, Lieland will hold it all, ensuring that the lies will not threaten nor undermine the real world. A perfect childish escapism. In Lieland, the quantity and nature of the lies change: Robbie actually takes better care of his lies, giving them a better life in Lieland. He is still a child in the real world (lying stupid lies and getting away with them) but becomes the good and merciful god (or father) in Lieland. 

Robbie allegedly "deals with his lies", but in fact all of his lies, even those "Lies without arms, lies that were ill" are not mad at Robbie for making them what they are, they are OK with it. The redheaded kid laughs, hits and runs, Igor thanks Robbie for the crippled dog he invented for him, and even the beaten niece is not mad at Robbie for her tragic destiny and helps him and Natasha. 

***

In “Fat Cat”, a short segment, first published in 2010 and lately in the memoir The Seven Good Years (Translated by Sondra Silverston), Keret is the father of 4 year-old Lev and has to deal as a parent with severe accusations. The kindergarten teacher accused Lev of manipulating the school cook and telling lies:

"little Lev had forged a secret pact with the school cook, that she was bringing him chocolate on a regular basis, even though the board of education had strictly prohibited children from eating sweets on school grounds".

Lev explains to his puzzled father why he is getting a lot of chocolate, but never gives the other kids in his class:

“I always explain to them that I can’t give them any, because kids aren’t allowed to eat sweets in school.”
“But if kids aren’t allowed to eat sweets in school, why do you think you can?” [asks the narrator]
“Because I’m not a kid,” Lev smiled a pudgy, sneaky smile. “I’m a cat.”
“You’re what?”
“Meow,” Lev answered in a soft, purry voice. “Meow, meow, meow.”

The next morning, while reading the paper, in particular reports regarding former Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert's trial as well as the sentencing of former Finance Minister, Avraham Hirshson, to life in prison, the narrator realizes something:

"Those men, just like my son, cheat and steal and lie only because they are sure they are cats. And as adorable, furry, cream-loving creatures, they don’t have to abide by the same rules and laws all those sweaty two-legged creatures around them have to obey."

Just as Natasha talks to Robbie in “Lieland” "in a gentle, almost therapeutic voice" and thinks that the humor of this "nutcase" and "oddball" is some form of joke, the narrator in “Fat Cat” is using the same gentle and therapeutic way to look at Olmert andHirshson. By ascribing the kid's lie to the public figures who transgressed, a lie that was sweet, harmless, and irresistible, Keret transformed a very personal family story into a cynical and sad one, as it reflects not only the parallelization of the simple man facing a public figure that bluntly lies, but also reflects the crazy Israeli atmosphere that enables those lies to sound reasonable and even legitimate. As stated by Keret in interviews regarding his latest book (The Seven Good Years), it is the first book in which the child’s point of view – a perspective which was considered to be indicative of Keret’s prose style – is no longer present, instead we are offered the point of view of an adult and a parent.  

***

When comparing these three lies, a common thread is found: even if they evoke discomfort on various planes, they nevertheless are all accepted. They do not undermine reality; Yoav probably "swallowed" his squad commander's lies. Robbie and Natasha probably made together some "happy lie, full of light, flowers, and sunshine […] maybe even a baby or two". And also, the "the pathological Israeli combination of violence and normality", as the world of Suddenly, a Knock on the Door is described by Nissim Kalderon, will remain a good platform for corruption and lies of public figures. 

In a way, “Lieland” may offer some twisted comfort to all of the truth-loving people in this world: it conveys the idea that even if in the real world lies are everywhere and can "pass" as truth, lies do not disappear. They are all waiting for us in some other space to "Hit us in the shins” and knock us "Down on our knees".

A version of this paper was originally delivered at the International Conference “Keret’s Happy Campers: Etgar Keret and the Fate of Israeli Culture in the World Today” held at the University of Chicago in 2015.

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Dekel S. Schory is a PhD candidate (since 2011) at the department of Hebrew literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel. Her dissertation title is To live and write in a linguistic exile: Jewish writers in the German-speaking sphere and their linguistic selections (1930-1900). The advisor is Prof. Yigal Schwartz, a leading researcher in the field. Dekel taught in the department of Hebrew Literature in BGU university, Sapir College among other institutes. Dekel Holds a BA from Tel Aviv University (Hebrew Literature and Linguistics), and a MA diploma with honors from Ben-Gurion University, (Hebrew Literature). The MA thesis title was "To breath in a different world": Linguistic aspects as a way of poetic analysis of G. Shoffman. The MA thesis was awarded with the Gershon Shaked prize (2014).   

Her main subjects of interest are Modern Hebrew literature, German-Jewish literature, connections between languages and cultures, urban thought.

Class-Consciousness, Violence, and Dystopia in George Saunders

The Semplica Girl Diaries: Class-Consciousness, Violence, and Dystopia in George Saunders’ Vision of Contemporary America

To speak meaningfully about those who ‘work at the margins,’ it is advantageous to have a term with which to contextualize the presence of the Semplica Girls in this story. Like Johan Galtung’s ‘structural violence,’ Slavoj Žižek’s “systemic violence” refers to forms of “objective violence” that while not necessarily visible, hold sway on society to large extent through its systems and institutions. Nevertheless, Žižek moves quickly to specify the actor of this violence as Capitalism. Žižek explains systemic violence as: “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.” A few pages later Žižek clarifies, “[it is] the violence inherent in a system: not only direct physical violence, but also the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence.” While both go far in naming the insidious presence of a supposedly invisible violence, it is Saunders’ story that provides a most tangible representation of systemic violence. His Semplica Girls are a clear and palpable embodiment of systemic violence in short story. The SGs are literally the metonymic representation of the commodification of life and living beings by and through capitalism. The girls strewn on the line are ‘a part’ alluding to ‘the whole’ of the history and actuality of migrant/illegal/slave labor—the subjugation of marginal bodies for the use and benefit of the dominant classes—a part of Foucault’s “the asymmetries of power.” The family, on the other hand, is at times victim to and at other times benefactor of Pierre Bourdieu’s “symbolic violence.” That is, the power and honor mistakenly ascribed to status its real source being economic and cultural capital and which authorizes the perpetuation of its practices and resulting stratification of the social space. They are victims and perpetuators of what critic Ana Manzanas calls “the society of sameness and accumulation” in which the SGs represent the “dominant model of life” as much as if not more so than their predecessor, “the assembly line of the early decades of the twentieth century.” 

Aesthetically, “The Semplica Girl Diaries” works on readers in ways subtle and yet jolting. Saunders employs a variety of techniques to reveal the violent ‘heart of darkness’ at the opaque center of affluent American life. This opacity is something like a dusty mirror to a narcissistic America that finds itself embarrassingly impotent to avoid or adjust the reflection away from its unwanted margins. Just as in the story the narrator cannot maintain the discourse of optimism however hard he tries. Although obfuscated this mirror represents a growing postmodern sense of self-awareness about inequality and violence in the North Atlantic societies, a subject we return to later in this paper. To make matters worse, though this violence is considered deplorable, its presence is accepted because it is the very system upon which America was and is constructed. This appears in “The Semplica Girl” via the threatening presence of a sub-textual narrative—a doppelganger narrative of violence and fear—juxtaposed on the story being told, looming just below the surface at the subconscious level like a nightmare, or at the subterranean level, like the basement of a suburban home. In particular, Saunders builds an extended analogy between the Semplica Girl diary and historical slave owner diaries. This simulacrum rises to the surface in poignant moments offering semantic clues. When the Semplica Girls escape, they are described as “connected via microline like chain gang”. In another example, during oldest daughter Lilly’s birthday party—what should be the happy, domestic scene of a family celebration—the children play a game of “crack the whip.” Although a real children’s game, in the context of the story and in light of the backdrop of the Semplica Girls swaying on their line as did punished slaves, the name can only be read as a satirical allusion to lashing slaves. This analogous story of slavery from the “naïve” colonialist perspective is arguably more disturbing than when told from the slave perspective. The family’s indifference, and, moreover, pride in the SGs agonizing existence marks the party with violence. This extended analogy with colonialist slave owner narratives is also present in the characters’ obsession with their yards. Their overabundant admiration for their lawns is not unlike the colonialist’s pruning of the plantation. In fact, the SGs’ presence can be equated to the colonialist estate’s mandatory spectacle of human property working on the horizon. Saunders acknowledges having read slave owner and abolitionist diaries during the writing of “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” One can imagine that Saunders’ story imitates the tone of quotidian normalcy with which the slave owners approached their daily habits on the plantation: at nine in the morning, breakfast, at ten, study Latin, and, at noon, a slave lashing.

In his book on violence, Slavoj Žižek takes as a point of departure a childhood story about the Russian philosopher Nikolai Lossky. He and his family were members of the Russian bourgeoisie exiled during the Bolshevik revolution. As a boy Lossky could not understand why he received scathing remarks in school or why the others seemingly wanted to destroy his comfortable and normal way of life. What problem was there with the family’s servants, nannies, and love for the arts? Žižek argues that the boy was blind to the systemic violence latent in the social arrangement beneficial to him—like those slave owners that had normalized even the subjective violence of life on the plantation mentioned in the paragraph above. Similarly, in “The Semplica Girl Diaries” the latent violence beneficial to wealthy American families is realized and embodied through the Semplica Girls. While most of the family feigns naivety in order to legitimate their middle class desires, the Semplica Girls are a constant reminder of the violence used to maintain and secure their position. The Semplica Girls are a specter, an embodiment of the modern day and historical structures of systemic violence that loom over the postcolonial world as sustained after-effects. The Semplica Girls bring to the fore those mechanisms Foucault describes as being “on the underside of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power” as well as “those ‘sciences’ that give it a respectable face.” The Semplica Girls remind of the proximity of a bloody past and an equally troubling present; one that relegates the violence at its center to its margins in an incredible exercise of the illusion of distance and periphery to gain a profit. The dehumanization of the Semplica Girls as products and docile bodies that can be bought, sold, and strewn up on a line as an adornment is mirrored by their place in the narrative—they are not even characters in their own right. In our diarist’s account they are purely background, never really stepping into the foreground and speaking only through indecipherable whispers.

Here we pick up the loose end in our comparison between the modern sense of guilty self-awareness in the face of affluence vs. the historical naivety. In the continuation of the description provided by the narrator of his initial sighting of the SGs in the paragraph above, he writes, “Wind stops, everything returns to vertical. From across lawn: soft sighing, smattering of mumbled phrases. Perhaps saying goodnight? Perhaps saying in own lingo, gosh that was some strong wind.” Here we can see the difference between our modern day narrator and the slave owners in their diaries. The modern day narrator seems to know the SGs are people even if dehumanized and occupying the place of lawn ornaments. In trying to interpret their signs, he displays an at least minimal comprehension and awareness of their humanity and possibly their subjugation. Yet his perspective is limited showing little to no understanding of causality as the story progresses. He seems incapable of--or positions his narration in such a way as to avoid--offering meaning to his readers, especially concerning the reality of the SG trade. The construction of this limited perspective adds another layer of intertextuality to the already layered scene, one in which the narration displays commonalities with the slave narrative form, as well: “To varying degrees all slave narratives are conditioned by the narrator’s partial understanding of his situation [...] He is a blind receiver whose perspective on the motive behind all the demands and actions which govern his life have been short circuited.” At a difference from the slave owners who held a justified stance backed by law on why the slaves were only three-fifths of a person, Saunders narrator simply avoids providing a realistic frame for the SGs subhuman conditions. It is common knowledge that in the past, wealthy planter aristocracy effectively conceptualized slaves as property or animal livestock in the same way that a pig or cow was (is). Again, this is not to say that the slave owners were somehow on moral high grounds because of their belief in this fallacy. Both groups, the modern and historical, have their delusions that allow for them to sustain a sense of morality in the face of the unethical. Rather, the point here is similar to the one brought forth by the anecdote about the Patriarch’s Balls; part of modernity is a sense of self-aware guilt about perpetuating inequality and benefiting from it. There are no more Nikolai Losskys. The modern day affluent class is aware that they benefit from the domination of the poor and working classes of the world and that they live at arm’s length from its margins, even if, as is the case for Saunders’ narrator, they simply try to avoid it. On a different note, it goes without saying that the use of the limited point of view in slave narratives had a different expected outcome: to avoid accusations of falsehood on the part of the author (accusations that white abolitionists were writing the diaries) and to defamiliarize the images of the slave trade to which contemporaries would have been desensitized. 

Saunders’ stories can often appear at first glance comical and absurd, yet their messages require audiences to reexamine cultural notions that may feel as intimate to them as a “second skin.” Saunders compels readers to confront the realities of their societies while urging us to continue onwards towards individual responsibility and purpose given that current, prevalent methods of confronting those same realities can echo the absurdity of the condition itself. To illustrate Saunders' use of the absurd as rhetorical strategy, one has only to look at the verisimilitude between his formulations and the absurd (and manipulative) rhetoric emerging in the American linguistic landscape of today.  Saunders' playful revisiting of these linguistic realities involves using them as the basis for absurd themes and situations in the fictional worlds he creates. Ultimately, their 'absurdity' serves a function, inciting readers to question the logic underpinning the supposed values and ethics of contemporary consumer culture. Warranting Saunders’ caustic humor, in the United States inequality already has a meme, a twitter hashtag, a name in popular culture: “#First World Problems.” Referring to a problem that is relevant to the First World but admittedly irrelevant and gloating when contextualized globally, the phrase seems to get to the heart of America’s digitally enhanced self-awareness and American pop culture’s peculiar way of addressing it. Furthermore, as in the curt, jumpy, almost journalistic language of Saunders’ narrative, the hashtag points towards the violent severing of language necessary to rationalize the irrational. If there is, as well, some kind of perverted ethics implicit in the hashtag, the character most representative of this ethical sense in the story—if in more genuine derivation—would be the narrator’s youngest daughter Eva. However, she does engender her honest concern with an almost anachronistic sincerity only capable of a child, or, of Saunders himself. Literary critic Sarah Pogell has pointed out that Saunders’ reverent treatment of human conflict and emotion could easily garner him accusations of maudlin triteness. I would have to agree that his desire to address real world problems demonstrates an optimism he may not share with the majority of postmodern writers and theorists, but which may be exactly what Literature with a capital “L” needs. Saunders’ attention to real-world problems and his Eva character, rather, link the story generally to the realist tradition of anti-slavery literature and specifically to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The seminal American text prominently features a character—“little Eva”—that is also a depiction of the innocent girl-child vehemently against slavery. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as we know, Eva befriends Uncle Tom after he saves her life and she begs her father to buy him. Towards the end of the story Eva once again pleads with her father this time to free his slaves and specifically to free Uncle Tom. The resonances with “The Semplica Girl Diaries” are quite clear, again pointing towards the story’s intricate and intentional connections with slave literature. In a kind of sad, happy and ironic ending, “Eva” of “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” eventually frees the SGs out of sympathy to their pain, this time leaving her parents with loads of debt to pay—modernity’s brand of indentured servitude. 

The intuition that the story is set in our own contemporary world—Saunders’ brand of realism—is joltingly suspended when the mechanism of the Semplica Girls’ acquiescence is revealed. In a postmodern, sci-fi twist characteristic of the writer, we are asked to observe the apparatus of the semplica girls’ pain but also to ontologically question the proximity of this world to our own: “[A] microline though brain that does no damage, causes no pain. Technique uses lasers to make pilot route. Microline threaded through w/silk leader,” explains the father to the story’s most conscientious objector, aforementioned Eva. Saunders writes the SG girls as literally having a hole burned through their skulls for easy hanging in the yards of yuppie Americans. Nevertheless, this invention approaches reality when the narrator assures Eva that the mechanism does not hurt as doctor “Lawrence Semplica” ingeniously designed it. This is Saunders’ nod towards a world not only entrenched in corporate discourse, but also as Foucault diagnosed in the 1960s and 70s, hegemonically invested in the rhetoric of science and medicine to a fault. Consider that many people are willing to undergo potentially lethal and expensive cosmetic surgery based on the promise of comfort and ease doled out by doctors (and, of course, those mimetic desire machines called “style magazines” aid the process). The establishment of science as the official discourse of knowledge—“an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes the ‘facts’”—endowed the medical/scientific community with alarming power (as during slavery). In short, the violent mechanism used to hang the SGs is disturbing but so is the narrators willed belief that it could be as innocuous as a simple haircut, again revealing the violent subtext underlying the characters’ daily-lives which surfaces at key points in the story.

But the SGs’ acquiescence, we are told, is not only a byproduct of the subjective violence that literally holds them in place. Short bios on the girls called “microstories” comically gesture towards the saturation of “societal marketing programs” in modern media while also realistically providing a backstory to the SGs forced immigration to the US. Saunders employs the postmodern aesthetic of embedded narrative and discourse to remind readers of the similitude between the world of the short story, however absurd, and their own. At the same time, Saunders also sardonically points towards how “#First World” guilt is co-opted and managed by the capitalist system.  By now, most people are quite aware of the methods of “societal marketing” and can immediately identify the sort disseminated by the Semplica Girl Company and reified by the family themselves:

Pam: Sweetie, sweetie, what is it?

Eva: I don’t like it. It’s not nice.

Thomas: They want to, Eva.  They like applied for it.

Pam: Don’t say like

Thomas: They applied for it.

Pam: Where they’re from, the opportunities are not so good.

Me: It helps them take care of the people they love.

Then I get idea: Go to kitchen, page through Personal Statements. Yikes. Worse than I thought: Laotian (Tami) applied due to two sisters already in brothels. Moldovan (Gwen) has cousin who thought was becoming window washer in Germany, but no. sex slave in Kuwait (!). Somali (Lisa) watched father + little sister die of AIDS, same tiny thatch hut, same year. Filipina (Betty) has little brother “very skilled for computer,” parents cannot afford high school, have lived in tiny lean-to with three other families since their own tiny lean-to slid down hillside in earthquake. 

Saunders’ family portrays postmodern American culture’s concepts of responsibility and idealism, as well as its political, economic, and social superiority and personal identity. In his aforementioned book on violence, Žižek critiques the tendency of modern-day capitalists like Bill Gates to refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and with fanfare laud their latest donation to charity in front of the media. Žižek asserts that it re-establishes the balance essential to the capitalist system’s ability to perpetuate itself and the objective and systematic violence at its heart. “The same structure-the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses-is widely visible in today’s ideological landscape” poses Žižek. Like the nuclear family version of Bill Gates, the American family are “good people who worry…the catch, of course, is that in order to give, first you have to take.” The societal marketing method of packaging the human element via story for consumers is used to accommodate the family’s sense of the charitable. Their profiles, and the family’s bourgeois sense of philanthropic righteousness, are consequently bought and consumed along with the physical girls themselves legitimating their violent and painful existence on the lawn. For the speaker the embedded semplica girl narratives undoubtedly re-invoke his existant sense of guilt—but their true function is the one of evoking a sense of relief and complacency. As a father, he is also able to or at least hopes to transform the microstories into manageable tales of hope for daughter Eva. Žižek analyzes this function of ideology in The Sublime Object of Ideology concluding that “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.” Hence, the “microstories” engender that false sense of knowledge that Žižek alleges exists in today’s ideological landscape; the father escapes the real of his guilt into the social reality of the girls’ awful conditions on the lawn—finding a solace in them that is in equal parts utterly believable and preposterous so as to be offensive. Furthermore we see ideology at work in the family’s paradoxical belief that the exchange of money for power over human beings, however marginal, is the morally correct action to take in order to combat the very issue of modern slavery. “Only violence can put an end to violence, and that is why violence is self-propagating”. 

On another level, these prepackaged narratives of the lives of each Semplica Girl are a form of symbolic violence themselves—just like the narrative, another “line” to assuage the pain. Symbolic violence, a term used by Bourdieu and later by Žižek, can describe the violence enacted by a symbolic community via its rites and rituals of stratification, or, by its use of language and representation. Here language’s capacity for violent “essencing” is used to strip the girls of humanity reducing their entire lives into nothing more than a sterilized pair of compressed sentences. Furthermore, this is yet another form of the linguistic distancing that the narrator practices throughout his archiving of the girls’ story. He consistently uses semantics to deceive himself, as in his refusal to acknowledge the girls’ utterances as “language” instead calling it “lingo” or in his willed belief that the microline “does no damage, causes no pain.” Across the story, this symbolic violence enacted through language and discourse is generally evident in the pervasiveness of the curt, reduced syntax the narrator uses to write the diaries—more reminiscent of journalistic briefs than of the diary form in which he claims to write. As some would argue about modern news media, the narrator’s focus on ‘the now’ and on his own desire blinds him to the importance of history and more importantly to the particular history behind the Semplica Girls and their seemingly immaculate and estheticized presence on the lawn.

Saunders writes an all too familiar America with a sardonic twist, but does so for the purpose of revealing an urgent need for readers to overcome beliefs made popular by modern times, chiefly the grass root tendencies that cultivate and protect systemic violence at all levels. Saunders incisive criticism of the capitalistic ways of the USA is at its best when unpacking (or ridiculing) the sense of class-consciousness that informs the hopes, desires, and decisions of its households. As we noted at the beginning of the paper, the speaker’s impetus for buying the Semplica Girls derives from his feeling of inadequacy and ineptitude at not being able to “keep up” with his affluent peers. In a critique of capitalist dogma, Saunders helps us to understand that class-consciousness today simply equates to acquiring the same or better products as the others in our imagined community. Our narrator buys the SGs in order to “keep up with the Joneses.”

We step out. SGs up now, approx. three feet off ground, smiling, swaying in slight breeze...Effect amazing. Having so often seen similar configuration in yards of others more affluent, makes own yard seem suddenly affluent, you feel different about self, as if you are in step with peers and time in which living. 

Saunders could just as easily have written that the family had “stepped up” a rung on the invisible ladder that is social mobility and class (at least conceptually) in the USA. He includes the narrator, “stepping out,” and reportedly finally feeling “in step with peers and in time.” This is what class-consciousness translates to in contemporary America warns Saunders. An invitation to The Patriarch’s Balls would signify less today than the size of one’s house and its contents. The systemic and subjective violence implicit in the seemingly miraculous apparition of the objects that populate our domestic lives is of little importance although one can imagine. Nevertheless, by story’s end the family no longer owns Semplica Girls, who having escaped with the aid of the narrator’s youngest daughter, Eva, are now labeled illegal immigrants “on the loose.” The loss of the SGs results in the Greenway Company indicting the family with some $8000 dollars in due back-charges. This, of course, plunges the family into debt. And with that the family’s precious social status descends to equal or less than that of the beginning of the story. Debt in modern-day America is clearly the primary capital of the working classes, if not of the petite bourgeoisie, as well.

“The Semplica Girl Diaries” is an attempt to narrate the violence we inflict on ourselves and on others during the mindless and irresponsible pursuit of happiness. Saunders’ rendition of the modern American family takes into account power as a byproduct of colonization or in the least globalization as it is contemporarily understood. He offers a critique of the coloniality of power and those ways of knowing that often complement and uphold its systems, which are also constitutive of modernity. This critique, or Saunders’s message, appeals to readers to free themselves from social and political definitions of success, instead embracing individualized concepts of ethical responsibility towards others. It is this sense of responsibility that child character Eva seems to represent, suggesting that we are born with a capacity for empathy that society and its funny games quickly takes from us. Furthermore, Saunders reveals discourse as one of the mechanisms used to rationalize the irrational and humanize the profoundly inhumane. As a result we contemporaries may suffer a guilty awareness, more so than our historical counterparts, but as in the wealthy estates of the past there always is a trapdoor, a manner in which to ask to be excused from the table, to leave early from the ball. Nevertheless, by bringing the First World’s exploitation and dehumanization of third world bodies to the center of American family life, Saunders also performs an act of magic allowing the Semplica Girl to be in two places at once: at the center of his story and sweating in the factories of the Global South.

Excerpt of “The Semplica Girls Diaries: Class Consciousness, Violence, and Dystopia in George Saunders' View of Contemporary America”, first published in Miscelenea: A Journal of English and American Studies.

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Juliana Nalerio is a PhD researcher at the University of Valladolid, Spain, in American Studies and Comparative Literature. Working at the intersection of literature and critical theory, her research explores the aesthetics and ethics of modern American literature in the continental sense. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation, a project that attempts to unpack literary violence in its symbolic, systemic, and subjective forms in both North and South American novels and short story texts. She holds a master's degree from The University of Valladolid (Premio extraordinario) and a B.A. from New College of Florida-the Honors College of Florida, as well as certificates from studies at Middlebury College, The University of Chicago, The University of Edinburgh, as well as Birkbeck, University of London, and Texas A&M University (upcoming).

Juliana is a member of the national research group, "A Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach," directed by Dr. Jesús Benito Sánchez.

Post-9/11 New York: Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006)1

Of all American metropolises, New York has become one of the most interesting and representative cities for writers, some of whom, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, have tried to reflect in their fiction the consequences of this traumatic event. In this essay I want to deal with one of these novels, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), which uses the image of a “broken” New York after the attacks as a metaphor for a society that, for a while, had its social rules and organization deeply altered. McInerney’s fiction is inextricably linked to New York since his main novels, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), whose first edition cover had featured the Twin Towers, Story of My Life (1988), Brightness Falls (1992), Model Behaviour (1998) and, of course, The Good Life (2006), are all set in New York and deal with Manhattan’s narcissistic and shallow upper classes. The author’s interest in superficiality, money, sex and drugs aroused the suspicion of some literary critics, who believed the 9/11 subject was too serious to be handled by a social satirist like McInerney, who has often been accused of sharing the values of the same wealthy and shallow New York socialites he vividly portrays. However, McInerney seems to have changed his style and has constructed a touching story in which the physical disintegration of the city causes the temporal disintegration of the glitterati’s narcissistic values. In this essay I will analyse to what extent McInerney’s eye for social satire, together with his portrayal of Manhattan as a theatre of social action, brings forth one of the most vivid representations of the effects of terrorism in New York.

The literary critics’ misgivings about the novel cannot be understood without briefly reviewing McInerney’s career as a writer. In 1984 the author hit the bestseller lists with his debut novel Bright Lights, Big City about a young aspiring writer who works as a fact checker at a prestigious New York magazine. At night he spends his time in nightclubs and bars, consumes cocaine and has casual sexual encounters. McInerney’s interest in sex, drugs and morally corrupt characters linked him to two other young writers, Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis, and together they came to be known as the “Brat Pack.” At the time, the label was usually attached to a young generation of actors like Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson and Emilio Estevez, who had starred in very popular teenpics. In 1988 Bruce Bawer applied the term to a group of writers who, just like the Hollywood Brat Pack, had in common their being young, overly hyped and who shared an excessive sense of their own importance. Their works combined a minimalist style with a focus on urban angst and the surface details of contemporary phenomena (Bawer 16). As in the case of the other Brat Pack members, McInerney’s loose lifestyle as a literary celebrity has marked his career and the way his novels have been received.

Apart from the original Brat Pack label, McInerney is also considered part of Blank Fiction, a term which was first used in 1992 by Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney. According to James Annesley (1998), Blank Fiction writers deal with contemporary urban life and violence, indulgence, crime, sexual excess, media overload, decadence, drugs, consumerism and commerce. Excess is a key term in their novels since they draw their material from the extreme particularities of the 1980s and 1990s. Postmodernity and late 20th-century life are vividly portrayed through references to all aspects of consumer culture: specific products, labels and celebrity names build up the superficialities of the time. Instead of using dense plots and elaborate styles, they favour a blank style and a flat, affectless, atonal prose. Although the subjects they deal with are usually very controversial, they tend to choose first-person narrators that keep a distance from the morally despicable acts described and who do not usually condemn them. This distance is one of the most criticized aspects of Blank Fiction. 

McInerney shares with other Blank Fiction writers his choice of subjects and his interest in the lifestyle of the vapid urban upper classes, but his style is more satirical and his characters are not as morally vacant as Bret Easton Ellis’s, his best friend and quintessential Blank Fiction writer. However, his image as a bon vivant is strong and most reviewers of The Good Life mentioned it. For example, in The Village Voice Benjamin Strong noted that it was difficult to approach the novel without making reference to McInerney’s well-documented hedonism and his “smug, bespoke-suited public persona—the rail-blowing, model-dating, sommelier-in-a-club-chair frat boy.” In The San Francisco Chronicle Heller McAlpin also considered that the author had been personally drawn to the self-destructive excesses of the high life he satirises in his fiction. As a result of these initial preconceptions, some reviewers accused McInerney of being too charmed and fascinated by the people he intended to criticise (Caldwell; Parini) and of being magnetised by the worlds of celebrity and fashion (Mars-Jones). For some other reviewers, this fascination made it impossible for the author to construct a story in which the privileged Manhattanites realized the superficiality of their values since “the author so clearly cherishes every upscale item and behavior that he thinks he deplores” (Mallon). In the same line, Paul Gray in The New York Times and Louis Menand in The New Yorker concluded that McInerney found his characters both fascinating and blameless and expected his readers to do the same.

In spite of this criticism, The Good Life shows a new direction in McInerney’s career. He still deals with the upper classes and many of his characters are morally vacant socialites but the main characters in the story are aware of the shortcomings of their social atmosphere. In the novel, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks gives way to important social changes and part of McInerney’s ironic distance and satire is softened in the chronicling of the romance between Corrine and Luke. McInerney himself announced in The Guardian that his blank style would have to change to face the topic of his new novel (“The Uses”). This article was a response to VS Naipaul, who had declared in an interview for The New York Times that only nonfiction could capture the complexities of today’s world. For the Nobel Prize winner fiction falsifies reality and it is of no account since the world cannot be contained in the novel (qtd. in Donadio). In his response McInerney defended fiction from these attacks. He admitted that, after 9/11, fiction had seemed inadequate for a while but by 2005 people wanted to have a novelist process the experience. McInerney claimed that he had to confront the most important and traumatic event in the history of New York, which had always been his proper subject. However, he also admitted that he had to change his style to do it: “At the very least, certain forms of irony and social satire in which I’d trafficked no longer seemed useful. I felt as if I was starting over and I wasn’t sure I could” (“The Uses”). When the New York 9/11 terrorist attacks took place, many commentators claimed that it meant “the end of the end of history” (Zakaria), “the end of irony” (Gordon), “the death of irony” (Rosenblatt) or “the death of postmodernism,” (Bennett) whereas others believed that irony was what Americans needed most (Fish; Beers; Didion). McInerney offers in the novel some of his usual social satire but also some ethical guidance, since we see how the physical disintegration of the city parallels the temporal disintegration of the glitterati’s narcissistic values. 

It is interesting that in order to change his style the author chooses to continue the story of the main characters in one of his previous books, Brightness Falls (1992). This book was the story of Corrine and Russell, a yuppie couple who pursue successful careers in New York in the 1980s, Russell as an editor and Corrine as a stockbroker. The excesses of the 1980s that engulf them—drug addiction, AIDs, casual sex and conspicuous consumerism—together with their ambition, come to an end on 19th October, 1987, when the 1980s bubble bursts with the Wall Street crash. In The Good Life we find the same couple ten years later about to face a different crash: the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Russell Calloway, still an editor, Corrine Calloway, now a housewife, and their 6-year-old twins live in a rented loft in TriBeCa and are “trying to subsist on less than two hundred and fifty grand a year” (18). Their path will cross with that of another wealthier family: Luke McGavock, an ex-investment banker, his wife Sasha, a professional beauty and socialite, and Ashley, their teenage precocious daughter, who live on the Upper East Side and enjoy a seven-figure income. Although both couples seem wealthy enough the money they earn and where they live set them apart in the pre-9/11 status-conscious Manhattan. On 12th September, 2001 Luke and Corrine meet and start volunteering at a soup kitchen to feed rescue workers. As they fall in love and start an adulterous affair their world changes completely and so does the geography of the city and the social difference it had entailed.

Guy Debord considered the city the locus of history because of its concentration of social power and its consciousness of the past. In fact, he even claimed that universal history was born in cities (124-125). Of all cities, New York has established itself as an image and symbol for America since it contains its contradictions and both the dream of success and the risk of failure. Writers have helped construct this symbolic image through the many representations of the city in literature. As Shaun O’Connell states:

The pressures of New York have lent the city’s literature a rare intensity. The tests, personal and public, imposed by the City upon its residents, new and old, have made it America’s most interesting and revealing city for writers. (307)

The Twin Towers were New York landmarks and a symbol of US power. Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin have called them “fluorescent chessboards against the black night sky” and “the Everest of our urban Himalayas” (vii). They were a symbolic reference but also a geographical sign since many New Yorkers looked for them in the sky to find their way downtown. The collapse of the Twin Towers altered New York’s geography and brought chaos to an ordered world in which boundaries had been clearly established. According to Lewis Mumford, alterations in the city affect the behaviour of its inhabitants since the city is a theatre of social action and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity. As he claimed:

The physical organization of the city may deflate this drama or make it frustrate; or it may, through the deliberate efforts of art, politics, and education, make the drama more richly significant, as a stage-set, well-designed, intensifies and underlines the gestures of the actors and the action of the play. (480-1)

The collapse of the towers deflates the drama in the theatre of the city. Suddenly people are at a loss because the roles they used to play are changed by the enormity of the events. Facing the threat of personal disintegration, Luke and Corrine suspend their daily routine to find a new sense of purpose at the soup kitchen at Bowling Green.

In The Good Life, the geography of the city and its role as a theatre of social action is clearly established from the very beginning. The Calloways live in TriBeCa in an old, small, tunnel-style loft. They moved there in 1990 before the process of gentrification of lower Manhattan and they have not benefited from it because they didn’t buy but rented the loft. As a result, it is now too small for the couple and their twins. However, the idea of moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn or Pelham is something Russell refuses to accept. On the other hand, the McGavocks are further up in the social scale as they live on the Upper East Side. Their double-height living room seems “to be holding its breath, as if awaiting a crew from Architectural Digest or House & Garden to set up and shoot” (27), even though Sasha wants to change their Biedermeier neoclassical decoration because it looks too mid-nineties. Luke has also rented a little studio over on Seventy-sixth to write a book about samurai films and they also have a place in the Hamptons. This lifestyle is apparently about to come to an end because Luke has decided to take a sabbatical, which has made Sasha alarmed at the prospect of a declining standard of living. Sasha lives in a world in which the people she knows do “the three-house thing—one place an hour outside the city and another in the Hamptons for the summer” (202). The previous year she had wanted to move to 740 Park, where one of her wealthy friends lives, even though the apartment had been smaller and on a lower floor. The short address is 

resonant with talismanic significance in her rarefied world. This simple address on an ecru Crane note card consecrated the embossee as an Olympian who had attained the heights of Manhattan social aspiration. (213)

Social identity is inextricably linked to place-identity in the novel. Proshansky, Fabian and Kaminoff define place-identity as a “pot-pourri of memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas, and related feelings about specific physical settings, as well as types of settings” (60). Place-identity is a factor that contributes to the formation of self-identity together with gender, race or social class. In the novel place-identity is an obvious component of social class. In fact, geographical space defines social identity to the extent that geographical references are used to describe people’s dressing style. For dinner Russell wears a stripy English dress shirt with a blazer and jeans, which Corrine finds “[v]ery Upper East Side at home for the evening” (18). Washington looks “very downtown, black suit over a black shirt with a seriously long and pointy collar—black on black on black” (34). Ray Levine, a neighbour of the Calloways is “the very image of a downtown ad guy with his salt-and-pepper goatee, black turtleneck, and black jeans” (108). For the pre-Christmas lunch at “21” Sasha is dressed “conservatively, Upper East Side matronly, in a tweedy vintage Chanel suit, accessorized with a single string of grape-size pearls” (346). The use of place references to pigeonhole people and describe their dressing style underlines the close connection between geographical boundaries and social boundaries. 

In the novel the events of 9/11 destroy all these neighbourhood niches and social conventions for a while. According to Zulaika and Douglas, the real efficacy of terrorism lies in its power to provoke disruptions of the existing order and in creating media spectacles by attacking symbolic buildings (76, 84). In a way, the World Trade Centre represented both the economic power of the city and its symbolic power. In the novel its collapse makes many New Yorkers believe they are witnessing the beginning of the end of the whole idea of the city. Suddenly, the city seems fragile because of the bomb threats, chemical scares, the sirens… Due to this symbolic function, the collapse of the World Trade Centre distorts the whole city. Police barricades are established at Fourteenth Street, isolating the whole downtown area. As the love affair between Luke and Corrine develops, the barricades keep moving down from Fourteenth Street to Canal Street, then down to Chambers, ending the siege of Corrine’s neighbourhood. The day before Thanksgiving they close the soup kitchen where Luke and Corrine have been volunteering. In a way, that closing also marks the end of their affair, turning the distance between TriBeCa and the Upper East Side into an insurmountable barrier again.

The changes in the city affect its own divisions in a literal way, through the barricades, but also in a metaphorical way, through the flow of people going both uptown and downtown. In contrast to the initial chapters, in which the worlds of TriBeCa and the Calloways and the Upper East Side and the McGavocks were presented in separate unconnected chapters, after the attacks “the borders had gotten porous, at least until the eleventh, when the word downtown had acquired an ominous new meaning” (223). The downtown area and the soup kitchen suddenly become the centre of Manhattan and both the wealthy and the less socially favoured are drawn towards it. From the day of the attacks, Luke’s thoughts tend downtown (79) and, as the story develops, Luke feels protected there with Corrine. In fact, every morning after their night shift at the soup kitchen he panics at the thought of going back uptown (168). 

The physical changes in the city boundaries also bring about important social changes. As Lewis Mumford claimed, the city’s 

unified plans and buildings become a symbol of their social relatedness; and when the physical environment itself becomes disordered and incoherent, the social functions that it harbors become more difficult to express. (481) 

In this sense, the soup kitchen becomes a melting pot where social differences are unimportant. Obviously, Corrine shares with Luke “a certain tribal sense of identity, affinities of background and education that weren’t supposed to matter anymore, at this leveling moment” (94). The real levelling is seen in the range of people they meet at the soup kitchen. Its main organiser is a carpenter who embraces and accepts Luke “despite his Bean boots, chinos, and rugby shirt, some Upper East Side dilettante” (93). Corrine feels especially close to Captain Davies, a policeman from Brooklyn: 

Until a few days ago, the chances of their sharing a cup of coffee together would have been astronomically remote, but by now Corrine knew a great deal about Davies’s family, his boat, and the intricacies and inanities of the NYPD pension plan. (95) 

The range of the volunteers includes a Russian exotic dancer who is recovering from her latest boob job, a hippie girl from Brooklyn who works as an herb gardener in Prospect Park, an insurance adjuster who commands a National Guard contingent camped out in Battery Park and three young women who work at Ralph Lauren. When Luke visits his family, who live a few miles south of Franklin and who think Luke has become a city snob, he is eager to tell them about the demographic range of his new acquaintances. 

The attraction that Ground Zero exerts is also satirised in the book. In fact, McInerney’s eye for social satire is undeniable and most reviewers saw it as one of the highlights of the novel (McAlpin; Block; McKenzie; Zipp; Bailey; Matthews). The shallowness of some upscale New Yorkers does not come to an end with 9/11; in fact, as a way to recover consumer confidence, they were encouraged to go out, shop, and eat in expensive restaurants. New York Magazine published an article detailing 17 ways to help New York since “eating and drinking and theatergoing and spending (not to mention giving and volunteering) are the patriotic duty of all who consider themselves New Yorkers” (“New York”). The socialites in The Good Life take their “patriotic duty” all too seriously. For example, Casey, a crass socialite and friend of Corrine’s, has gone “to the Ralph Lauren boutique to do her bit for the city’s traumatized economy, just as the mayor had advised everyone to do” (92). After the attacks, publicists and party-planners cancelled or rescheduled parties in New York because they felt people were not in the mood for partying. A mood also reflected in the novel when Sasha and other socialites fear that the autumn benefits may have to be cancelled. However, they become suddenly interested in the soup kitchen when they realise that they can do a joint benefit for the soup kitchen and the ballet. 

Gaining access to Ground Zero has also become a sign of social status and power, as we notice when Sasha’s friends compete to get a pass down to Ground Zero. For example, we learn that the Portmans got “a tour” because he is a big Republican donor (181). In the same line, the new must-have fashion item for Manhattanites is a Cipro prescription. One month after the attacks panicked patients were asking their doctors for Cipro prescriptions as a result of the mail-based anthrax attacks. In an article written in October, 2001 we could read that Stephen Kurtin, an Upper East Side dermatologist, had written more than 100 prescriptions for Cipro (Kaufman). Since these prescriptions were not easy to get, in the novel they become the perfect present party hosts can offer their guests. As wealthy Casey proudly explains: 

I was at Minky Rijstaefal’s for dinner—you know Minky; her husband’s Tom Harwell, the plastic surgeon—and it was so sweet: Folded inside the name cards at the table, we all had prescriptions for Cipro. (212-3) 

The attacks have not changed socialites’s wish to buy the very best but now their choice is not between a Louis Vuitton or a Gucci bag but a Marine Corps or a Israeli combat-grade gas mask (212). Circumstances have changed but the behaviour of some self-absorbed New Yorkers has not.

Apart from these touches of social satire, McInerney reflects especially well two moods of the moment: the sense of community and the need to leave the city. In The New Yorker Louis Menand noted that New York turned into a small town after 9/11, the asymmetries of metropolitan life disappeared and people made eye contact. McInerney had already noticed this trend in an article published four days after the attacks. In his description of what he had witnessed and the way the city had changed, McInerney underlined the way New Yorkers had left behind their capacity for jaded equanimity and felt part of a community (“Brightness Falls”). This change in the city may have led McInerney to the belief that he had to change his blank style in the novel. After all, Blank Fiction novels usually depict mass society, which, according to Dominic Strinati, “consists of atomised people, people who lack any meaningful or morally coherent relationship with each other” (6). The links in mass society are contractual, distant and sporadic instead of communal and well integrated. There is no sense of community to provide values and, as a result, people in mass society turn to fake moralities and find in mass culture and mass consumption “the moral placebos of a mass society” (7).

In a way, this is the society McInerney presents in the novel before the attacks, but both Corrine and Luke have always felt outsiders in the jaded mass society of New York. Corrine hates about the city “how you were supposed to be cool and take for granted the awe-inspiring people and events you’d fantasized about back home in Altoona or Amherst” (10). Luke also feels like a social outsider in the life that her socialite wife wants to lead. The night before 9/11 they attend a charity benefit at the central park zoo where

[t]he women were beautiful in their gowns, or at least glamorous in their beautiful gowns, their escorts rich in this richest of all cities, and Luke had never felt less like one of them, reminded now of the figures he’d seen this summer in Pompeii and Herculaneum, frozen in their postures of feasting and revelry. (59)

Both Luke and Corrine feel that their couples are too jaded and that the city has destroyed any innocence they may have shown in the past. Corrine misses the sensitive and insecure Russell she met at Brown University, who was intimidated by native New Yorkers (104). Luke longs for Sasha’s past provincial enthusiasm for the city and her appetite for the more innocent pleasures it provided, before she became “the epitome of a certain rarefied type of urban sophisticate” (87).

Some critics claimed that the banality of Luke and Corrine’s affair is at odds with the enormity of the cataclysm of 9/11 (Matthews; Reese); however, Luke and Corrine’s dramatic meet-cute is in a way the result of the new sense of collective identity, purpose and intimacy that invades New York. After the attacks Luke spends the night digging at Ground Zero because he was supposed to meet a friend for breakfast at Windows on the World the morning of 9/11. Luke cancelled at the last minute and fears his friend never got the message and is somewhere under the burning rubble. Covered in ash, Luke meets Corrine, who offers him not just a bottle of water but a bottle of Evian—this is after all a novel by Jay McInerney and brand names do find their way into the novel. She gives him her telephone number and asks him to phone her once he has made it home safely. A connection between two needed strangers is established in a city where strangers used to be too jaded and distrustful to speak to each other: this is the spirit of wartime camaraderie which is all over the city. Even though they had not talked for a year due to a domestic dispute, the Calloways are invited to share a meal at their neighbours’ penthouse the night of the attacks (108). When Russell’s building is evacuated because of a bomb scare there is “a sense of collective identity and purpose on the anarchic impulses of the urbanites” (125). In this atmosphere it is only normal that the wartime intimacy and camaraderie of Luke and Corrine should turn into a love affair.

As part of this general sense of community, there is also a strong need to leave the city for the suburbs, which become the place to find a face-to-face community of identifiable people. Some of Luke and Sasha’s acquaintances are moving out to their houses at the Hamptons, and Russell’s friend Washington and his family decide to move to New Canaan. Corrine’s mother wants them to leave New York and move to Massachusetts, an idea that Russell has also considered, but among the simple articles of his faith is the belief that “lawn care and commuting were incompatible with the higher pursuits, that the metropolis was the source of the life force” (125). This philosophy is best summarised when Ashley decides she does not want to study in New York but in Tennessee. She tells her mother that there is life outside of New York but Sasha’s answer is clear enough: 

There’s life on the bottom of the ocean, Ashley, but fortunately for us, our ancestors crawled up on the beach and developed lungs and feet, not to mention hand-stitched Italian footwear.(364) 

The suburbs and the countryside are seen in the novel as a place of innocence. This is especially obvious in the case of Ashley, who after overdosing flees to her grandmother’s house in Tennessee, where she becomes aware of the superficialities of the city and its upper classes. The quiet life and family bonds she finds in the rural and natural landscape at her grandmother’s home lead her to a crystal-clear conclusion: “I don’t want to be a selfish bitch […] I want to be a good person, like Gran” (336).

However, for most people life still turns around the metropolis, and the idea of moving to the suburbs or the countryside horrifies them. Lewis Mumford found these instincts justifiable since “in its various and many-sided life, in its very opportunities for social disharmony and conflict, the city creates drama; the suburb lacks it” (481). Both the Calloways and the McGavocks decide to stay in the city and resume their life. Russell and Corrine organise a dinner similar to the one opening the book. However, there are some important changes in the list of invited friends and in their attitude towards life. Jim Crespi died in the attacks and his widow, Judy, has become a much more sensitive and less shallow person. Hilary, Corrine’s promiscuous sister, comes with Dan O’Connor, a policeman she met when visiting Corrine at the soup kitchen and who has left his family for her. From the soup kitchen also comes an overdressed Jerry, the carpenter who opened the soup kitchen and who is the first to leave the party. Washington and Veronica are also there but now they are about to move to New Canaan and start a new life. The McGavocks also return to the social scene and attend the pre-Christmas lunch at “21,” but there are some noticeable changes as well. Both Ashley and Luke can see through the superficiality of the event and the people who attend it. Ashley is much more confident after her stay in Tennessee and does not need her mother’s approval as to her dressing style. Luke sees people with a distance:

It all seemed a little unreal to him, like some tableau from the distant past; the centre of Luke’s city had shifted south, to a downtown loft he’d never seen but which he’d measured and furnished in his mind. . . . (343) 

The changes in the city have also brought forth changes in their lives and their personal horizons.

The end of the novel brings us back to Mumford’s idea of the city as a theatre. The “stage” is the Lincoln Center Plaza where the Calloways and the McGavocks finally meet. Neither Luke nor Corrine have told the other that they plan to go the ballet to see “The Nutcracker” with their families. In the middle of the plaza Luke sees Sasha walking towards him and notices that Corrine is just five feet to her left. Corrine and Russell become to Luke’s eyes “an enviably handsome family that appeared, from this distance, to illustrate some cosmopolitan ideal” (367). He also remembers something his mother had told him, that love involved putting someone else’s well-being ahead of your desires, and decides to let Corrine go. The two families end up bumping into each other and both Corrine and Luke feel embarrassed for having lied to each other. The situation is presented in both theatrical and dramatic terms: “In that moment, the nighttime plaza with all its swirling throng blurred and faded as if engulfed in a sudden storm of sand or snow”  (369). Luke’s last thoughts bring us back to the centrality of the city and its power. He hopes they will meet again in the city as one used to in New York “before the idea of the protean city as eternal and indestructible had been called into doubt” (370). He imagines the city again as a backdrop to the dramas of daily life and he takes “comfort in that vision of the city as the setting for a future encounter with Corrine, and in the fact that he could imagine it now” (370).

The Good Life is an urban novel that focuses on the lives of the privileged Manhattanites and glitterati. The subject is characteristic of Blank Fiction literature and, taking into account McInerney’s career, it was to be expected that there would be plenty of name-dropping, brand names, consumerism, drugs and shallowness. The fact that this is a post-9/11 novel and is set against the backdrop of the terrorist attacks affects the way McInerney deals with these common topics in his fiction. 9/11 did not cause the “death of irony” or the “death of postmodernism” but it is undeniable that McInerney constructed a touching and sincere story in which social satire is accompanied by romance. Luke and Corrine are not morally faultless but, by contrasting them with their more shallow partners, they are morally grounded. Through their eyes we see the way the terrorist attacks softened jaded New Yorkers and broke with the rigid social system and its niches. For a while, the physical disintegration of the city also put an end to narcissistic values and made people feel part of a community rather than a mass society of isolated people. 9/11 may not have been the end of all Blank Fiction but, in the case of Jay McInerney, it softened his style, making it less ironic and less blank.

–

“Post-9/11 New York: Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006)” was first published in Literature of New York, edited by Sabrina Fuchs-Abrams (Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2009)

Sonia Baelo-Allué is an associate professor at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), where she primarily teaches U.S. literature. Her current research centers on trauma studies and 9/11 fiction. She has published Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction: Writing between High and Low Culture (Continuum, 2011) and co-edited The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond (Rodopi, 2011) and Between the Urge to Know and the Need to Deny: Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British and American Literature (C. Winter, 2011). She is also co-editor of Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies.

Works Cited

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Bailey, Blake. “The Trivial Life: Why Jay McInerney Should Embrace Frivolity.” Slate 20 Feb. 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

Bawer, Bruce. Diminishing Fictions: Essays on the Modern American Novel and Its Critics. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1988.

Beers, David. “Irony is Dead! Long Live Irony!.” Salon.com 25 Sept. 2001. 27 Nov. 2008

Bennett, William J. Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2002.

Block, Allison. “A Couple Redeemed by 9/11: Jay McInerney’s ‘The Good Life’ Showcases.” Chicago Sun-Times 12 Feb. 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

Caldwell, Gail. “All Fall Down: Amid the Ashes and Grief of 9/11, Two Manhattan Marriages Struggle to Survive.” Boston Globe 12 Feb. 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967. New York: Zone Books, 1994.

Didion, Joan. Fixed Ideas: American since 9.11. New York: New York Review Books, 2003.

Donadio, Rachel. “The Irascible Prophet: V. S. Naipaul at Home.” New York Times 7 Aug. 2005. 27 Nov. 2008

Fish, Stanley. “Condemnation Without Absolutes.” New York Times 15 Oct. 2001. 27 Nov. 2008

Gordon, Devin. “The End of Irony: Where Were You on Sept. 11? A New Generation Comes Face to Face with its Defining Moment.” Newsweek, 27 Sept. 2001. 27 Nov. 2008

Gray, Paul. “Collateral Damage.” New York Times Book Review 19 Feb. 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

Kaufman, Joanne. “Doctor’s Dilemmas.” New York Magazine 15 Oct. 2001. 27 Nov. 2008

Mallon, Thomas. “In the Ruins of Love.” Wall Street Journal 28 Jan. 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

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Matthews, Charles. “Mired in Mush: Jay McInerney’s Novel about 9/11 Undone by Banality.” Houston Chronicle 12 Feb. 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

McAlpin, Heller. “McInerney’s Party People Feel the Hangover of 9/11.” San Francisco Chronicle 5 Feb. 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage, 1984.
—. Brightness Falls. New York: Vintage, 1992.
—. “Brightness Falls.” The Guardian 15 Sept. 2001. 27 Nov. 2008
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McKenzie, Thomas Scott. “The Good Life.” PopMatters 6 Feb. 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

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O’Connell, Shaun. Remarkable, Unspeakable New York: A Literary History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Parini, Jay. “Salman didn’t Show.” The Guardian 11 March 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

Proshansky, Harold M., Abbe K. Fabian, and Robert Kaminoff. “Place-identity: Physical World and Socialization of the Self.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 3 (1983): 57-83.

Reese, Jennifer. “The Good Life.” Entertainment Weekly 27 Jan. 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

Rosenblatt, Roger. “The Age of Irony Comes to an End: No longer Will we Fail to Take Things Seriously.” Time Magazine 24 Sept. 2001. 27 Nov. 2008

Sorkin, Michael and Sharon Zukin. Introduction. After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City. Ed. Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. vii-xi.

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Strong, Benjamin. “Last Night: On the Other Side: Brightness Falls Sequel Sets the Calloways Adrift in the Wake of 9-11.” The Village Voice 30 Jan. 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

Young, Elizabeth and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American “BlankGeneration” Fiction. London and New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1992.

Zakaria, Fareed. “The End of the End of History.” Newsweek 24 Sept. 2001. 27 Nov. 2008

Zipp, Yvonne. “Love and Society Among the Ashes of Manhattan.” The Christian Science Monitor 14 Feb. 2006. 27 Nov. 2008

Zulaika, Joseba and William Douglas. Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism. London: Routledge, 1996.

Notes

The research carried out for the writing of this essay has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (MCYT) and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), in collaboration with the Aragonese Government (no. HUM2007-61035/FILO). I also want to thank the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin for awarding me a grant to carry out research at the Institute’s library.

Invisible Writer, Invisible Readers

Not only is the writing process invisible—a process of dreaming, imagining, envisioning–the (woman) writer is also invisible, according to Joyce Carol Oates. Since Oates has been a public figure for decades–she appeared on the cover of Newsweek in December 1972–how can she possibly describe herself as invisible? The answer, she says, is that a woman is not truly “seen;” she is more often defined and judged in terms of her body–is she an attractive or unattractive woman?—rather than in terms of her writing. Thus, her true self, her thinking, creating, observing self, is a phantom–invisible. Yet, as Oates’s creativity demonstrates, to be an invisible woman is not necessarily disabling. For while a woman is intensely immersed in the creative process, she is not limited by how others perceive her. While imagining herself as “other,” dividing herself into different characters, a (woman) writer escapes gendered notions of identity. Describing her creative process, Oates has said, “Most writers divide themselves up lavishly in their novels” (New Heaven, New Earth). She has also asked, in an essay published in 1984, “Does the Writer Exist?” (New York Times Book Review), a question she answered in 1994: “’JCO’ is not a person, nor even a personality, but a process that has resulted in a sequence of texts” (Keepsake on exhibit, University of Rochester Library).

If such a notion of an authorial self, or selves, seems extreme, we have only to reflect upon our own experiences of “self” while engaged in a creative activity. At such times—whether as writers, musicians, painters, or even as readers–we may lose all awareness, not only of the passage of time, but also of our social selves. Deeply immersed in a novel, engaged in a kind of “time travel” (another Oates metaphor), we imaginatively divide our reading selves into different genders, races, classes, and nationalities. To apply to readers another of Oates’s metaphors for writing, while reading we may “marry” ourselves to different characters, wedding our minds to theirs and, in some instances, refusing fidelity to “them.” (See, for example, how this metaphor is employed in Oates’s short story collection, Marriages and Infidelities). If the writing is powerful enough—if the writer has successfully imagined herself as “them”—we, her readers, willingly suspend our disbelief to become “them,” if only temporarily. In short, while engaged in reading, we become invisible. Some readers may resist such deep engagement, especially when asked to imagine those who commit acts of violence; however, as Oates has stated, she writes in order to “bear witness” for—and to develop readers’ sympathies for— those who are too poor or uneducated or unsure to speak for themselves (Kenyon Review, Fall 2014).

In a book‐length study titled Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (Mississippi UP, 1996), I examine Oates’s notion of an invisible writer, as well as her multivocal and historical concept of authorship. As stated in the book’s introduction, the name “Joyce Carol Oates” does not refer to an absent writer, but rather to the many voices and texts represented in novels published between 1964 to 1994 under the name “Joyce Carol Oates.” In each decade, Oates’s novels reveal a different author‐self: an anxious author in the 1960s; a dialogic author in the 1970s; a communal author in the 1980s. Of course, Oates has published many novels since 1994, as well as novellas, short stories, poetry, plays, critical essays, book reviews, art criticism, journals, and a memoir. Joyce Carol Oates has also written novels under at least two pseudonyms, Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. She continues to be a visible public figure, as, for example, when President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Humanities in 2010. Yet in a twitter post in July 2016 Oates insisted, once again, that the writer does not exist: “The artist remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence.”

Brenda Daly
University Professor of English Emeritus, Iowa State University

Brenda Daly’s scholarship on Joyce Carol Oates’s novels and short stories includes numerous articles and one book, Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (1996). She has also published a personal scholarly book, Authoring a Life: A Woman’s Survival in and through Literary Studies (1998), and co-edited a collection, Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities (1991).  She has published numerous articles on multicultural pedagogy and contemporary women’s trauma narratives and phototexts. She is a former director of Iowa State University’s Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities (2005-2008), and a former editor of the National Women’s Studies Journal (2004-2007).

La huída del Mordor caribeño: el exilio y la diáspora dominicana en...

La huída del Mordor caribeño: el exilio y la diáspora dominicana en The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, de Junot Díaz¹

Escape from Caribbean Mordor: Exile and the Dominican Diaspora in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Publicado por primera vez en Revista de Filología Románica 2011, Anejo VII, 265-277.

Resumen: Desde el comienzo de su historia como colonia británica, Estados Unidos ha recibido un gran número de exiliados que en numerosas ocasiones han empleado la literatura para narrar su experiencia de diáspora original y la posterior búsqueda de raíces de los descendientes de aquéllos que en su día iniciaron el proceso de migración. Analizaremos la obra The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), del escritor dominicano-americano Junot Díaz, como un terreno de tensión entre el país que fuerza el exilio (la República Dominicana) y el de acogida (Estados Unidos), algo reflejado también en el complejo equilibrio de la identidad de los protagonistas, escindidos entre dos culturas. Estudiaremos, asimismo, cómo el texto principal y las numerosas y larguísimas notas a pie de éste, algo no habitual en la novela como género, representan la tensión entre voz autorial y otras voces relegadas a los márgenes, reflejando la tensión entre dictador y disidentes exiliados o desaparecidos de la República Dominicana durante el Trujillato. 

Abstract: Since the beginning of their history as British colonies, the United States have taken in a large number of exiled, who have often used fiction to recount their diasporic experience and the subsequent search for roots by the descendants of those who migrated. We will analyze The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), by Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz, as a locus of tension between the country that forces into exile (the Dominican Republic) and the country who takes in (the United States), also reflected in the complex identity of the protagonists, split between two cultures. We will examine, as well, the connection between the main text and the abundant and long footnotes – something quite unusual in the novel as a genre –, and expound how this reflects the tension between the authorial voice and other voices which are banished into the margins, mirroring the tension between the dictator and exiled or disappeared dissidents in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillato. 

Palabras clave: Junot Díaz, exilio, literatura dominicano-americana, el Trujillato en la literatura
Keywords: Junot Díaz, exile, Dominican-American Literature, Trujillato in literature

[Trujillo] was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up (Díaz 2007: 2).

Resulta complicado, a estas alturas, escribir nada sobre los Estados Unidos no sólo como país de inmigración, sino también como país de acogida a exiliados, sin caer en la obviedad o en análisis ya demasiado trillados. Igualmente evidente es que el exilio ha tendido a centrarse geográficamente en territorio norteamericano alrededor de tres grandes zonas que muestran, claramente, una identidad propia como resultado de dicho exilio: la costa Este, especialmente el territorio más cercano a la ciudad de Nueva York; la zona de Florida, más concretamente Miami; y California, demasiado amplia territorialmente para buscar un solo foco, pero con mayor protagonismo de las áreas urbanas de San Francisco y Los Angeles. Estados Unidos no sólo no es una excepción al flujo migratorio, tan característico de los siglos XX y XXI, sino que fundamenta su historia, primero como colonia inglesa, y posteriormente como nación, en la llegada de inmigrantes, de exiliados, de poblaciones desplazadas, y de grupos migratorios y diaspóricos. Resulta, por tanto, de sumo interés explorar cómo distintas comunidades o autores hayan podido enfocar “su” historia de exilio y diáspora expresándola a través de la literatura, una expresión que siempre aúna, necesariamente y por más que el autor se centre en su propia experiencia, lo grupal y lo individual. George O’Brien ha definido el exilio como “a movement of the mind, a cultural reaction, a metonym for the restlessness, disaffection, isolation and self-respect” (O’Brien 1988: 99). Es en este sentido metonímico como analizaremos la obra The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), del escritor dominicano-americano Junot Díaz, estudiando cómo en el texto se mezclan el exilio (real, geográfico, de Santo Domingo a New Jersey) de una generación con el exilio (cultural, de aislamiento, “a movement of the mind”, siguiendo a O’Brien) de otra. 

La costa este de los Estados Unidos, y específicamente la ciudad de Nueva York, ha asistido no sólo a la llegada masiva de inmigrantes dado su carácter mítico de puerta de entrada a los Estados Unidos (simbolizado por la Estatua de la Libertad y el centro de inmigración de Ellis Island), sino que también, quizá precisamente por su relevancia como centro económico y por el auténtico crisol que se configura en su espacio, ha resultado foco de interés para grupos que provenían del exilio ymovimientos diaspóricos. En las siguientes páginas, sin embargo, no nos referiremos al estado ni al ciudad de Nueva York (donde los dominicanos constituyen el segundo grupo más importante de latinos, por detrás sólo de portorriqueños), sino a la muy cercana New Jersey, un estado limítrofe donde se han ubicado gran parte de las comunidades inmigratorias o diaspóricas que han llegado a Estados Unidos tras pasar por el portal que es Nueva York, siguiendo la admonición del famoso soneto de Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”, publicado en 1883 e inscrito en el pedestal de la Estatua de la Libertad en 1903: "Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” 

Nada mejor para hablar de movimientos diaspóricos en New Jersey que esta novela de Junot Díaz publicada en 2007. Agotaría el espacio destinado a este artículo listar la gran cantidad de premios que ha obtenido una obra tan reciente, y sin embargo ya tan conocida: aparte del afamado premio Pulitzer, se podrían destacar también el National Book Critics Circle Award a la mejor novela de 2007, el Massachusetts Book Prize for Best Fiction de 2008, y la elección de la novela por parte de las prestigiosas revistas Time y New York Magazine como mejor novela de 2007. Desde un punto de vista académico, en la conferencia nacional de la MLA (la Modern Language Association, una de las asociaciones de literatura más importantes de EE.UU., y auténtico referente académico e investigador de este país) de 2008, en San Francisco, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao había recibido la suficiente atención crítica, al tan solo un año después de su publicación, como para merecer un panel exclusivo, situación no muy habitual en autores sin una larga trayectoria, algo que no es el caso de su autor. En Time, el crítico Lev Grossman definió la novela como

so astoundingly great that in a fall crowded with heavyweights –  Richard Russo, Philip Roth –  Díaz is a good bet to run away with the field. You could call . . . [it] the saga of an immigrant family, but that wouldn't really be fair. It's an immigrant-family saga for people who don't read immigrant-family sagas (Grossman 2007).

Las historias de la primera colección de cuentos de Díaz, Drown, publicada más de una década antes, en 1996, ficcionalizan la infancia y adolescencia del autor, también, como el protagonista de los relatos, pobre y abandonado por su padre, mientras trata de adaptarse a una nueva vida en New Jersey: resulta notable que todos los personajes de la obra vivan en el campo o en barrios marginales, tanto en la República Dominicana como en Nueva York, en espacios que podría definirse como abyectos, como una especie, en el caso de aquellos viviendo ya en EE.UU., de exilio dentro del exilio. El texto fue traducido al español como Los Boys (Barcelona: Mondadori), y mientras que sirvió para llamar la atención de numerosos lectores hacia el autor, recibió críticas de muy diversa índole. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, sin embargo, se ha convertido en un unánime fenómeno editorial y crítico, ha entrado en el currículum de las universidades en los cursos que estudian literatura contemporánea (sea o no escrita por minorías), y sigue resultando atractivo para el gran público, sobre todo el más joven, por sus juegos intertextuales (como luego veremos) que incluyen guiños a la cultura popular, con menciones constantes a obras de fantasía, cómics y ciencia ficción. Y todo esto en una novela que dedica, al menos, un tercio de su duración a hablar no de la vida breve pero llena de maravillas de Oscar Wao mientras crece en New Jersey, sino de la vida, llena de sufrimiento y represión, de su familia en Santo Domingo, y de sus problemas con las esferas de poder de la isla. Asistimos así a la historia del declive profesional y personal de Abelard, el abuelo de Oscar, que es arrestado (y, posteriormente, encarcelado y torturado hasta la muerte) por motivos políticos, por “the Bad Thing he said about Trujillo” (Díaz 2007: 212), es decir, por bromear en público acerca de la desaparición inexplicable de enemigos del régimen. Pero también el destino de Abelard se debe a motivos carnales (intentar evitar que el dictador disponga a su antojo de Jacqueline Cabral, su hija y hermana de Beli, de la que se ha encaprichado) que enfatizan el poder absolutosobre los cuerpos y las almas del dictador y su círculo en la isla. Completando este episodio de los antepasados de Oscar en la República Dominicana con la narración del posterior exilio de su madre a los Estados Unidos, Díaz relaciona dos mundos bien diferenciados, pero en el fondo íntimamente unidos: la tierra de origen, la República Dominicana, plagada de fantasmas, que se muestran una y otra vez en las pesadillas de los protagonistas que viven ya en el exilio; y la tierra de libertad, sueños y esperanza simbolizada por New Jersey, donde han acabado los personajes como parte de lo que se ha dado en llamar la gran Diáspora dominicana. 

La obra, así pues, refleja las vivencias de una familia de dominicano-americanos (el cuarto grupo hispano en número de residentes en Estados Unidos) en la ciudad de Paterson, en New Jersey, que hiciera conocida para las letras norteamericanas el poeta William Carlos Williams entre 1946 y 1958. Paterson es, de hecho, la octava ciudad de Estados Unidos con mayor porcentaje de dominicano-americanos: resulta lógico, por otro lado, desde un punto de vista geográfico, que todas las ciudades que integran esta particular clasificación estén ubicadas en la costa Este, bien en Nueva York (Sleepy Hollow, Haverstraw, el Bronx o Manhattan) o New Jersey (Perth Amboy, Union City, o el mismo Paterson), con la única excepción de la muy cercana Lawrence, en el cercano estado de Massachusetts (Shorter 2005).

La acción de la novela tiene lugar, de forma alterna, en el presente en el ya mencionado Paterson, y en Santo Domingo tanto en el presente como en el pasado, durante la época del dictador Trujillo (1930-1961), reflejando en los dos últimos escenarios caso la herencia de la represión, mediante torturas, amenazas y coacciones brutales, de éste en el actual gobierno y cultura de la isla, mediante una reflexión sobre la megalomanía de Trujillo. En la vida real, según se nos informa en la primera nota a pie de la novela, esta megalomanía se tradujo, entre otras cosas, en “renombrar” con su apellido o el de algunos de sus familiares numerosas zonas del país, como Santo Domingo, que pasó a llamarse temporalmente “Ciudad Trujillo”, o Pico Duarte, el pico más alto del Caribe, que fue renombrado como “Pico Trujillo”². También dedica la novela un amplio espacio de reflexión acerca de los métodos de control de los disidentes que incluían, a menudo, la tortura y la casi imposible elección entre la muerte o el exilio.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao no es la única, ni seguramente todavía la más conocida representación literaria del llamado Trujillato, aunque como parte de una posible intención didáctica, Junot Díaz dirige gran parte de las notas a pie, parte integral de la narrativa, a aquellos “who missed our mandatory two seconds of Dominican history” (Díaz 2007: 2). Posiblemente, La fiesta del chivo (2000), del reciente premio Nobel Mario Vargas Llosa, quedara en primer lugar en una hipotética clasificación, o incluso sería más conocida la obra de otra dominicano-americana, Julia Álvarez, con su In the Time of Butterflies (1994), sobre el asesinato de las “mariposas”, las conocidas hermanas Mirabal. Álvarez y su familia huyeron a los Estados Unidos escapando del Trujillato, y su obra de 1994 supone la búsqueda de respuestas y una posible “reconciliación” con las personas oprimidas por el régimen, aunque al contrario que los Mirabal, la familia de Álvarez encontrara una solución en el exilio³. La dictadura de Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ha sido definida como “one of the most hermetically tyrannical states in the history of Latin America” (Lifshey 2008: 435), y es el tema fundamental de otras obras como El Masacre se pasa a pie (1973) de Freddy Prestol Castillo, el relato “La Mancha Indeleble” (1980) del también dominicano Juan Bosch (exiliado durante parte de la dictadura de Trujillo en Puerto Rico), The Farming of Bones (1998) de la haitiana-americana Edwige Danticat (sobre el genocidio de haitianos en la República Dominicana conocido como “el corte”), o incluso Galíndez (1991) del escritor español Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Gran parte de estas obras se podrían englobar en el género, bien establecido en literatura hispanoamericana, de la “novela de dictador” (Lifshey 2008: 438), y es en parte dentro de esta tradición donde se engloba la novela de Díaz, que sin embargo también se inscribe como antes vimos dentro del género de la saga familiar, que goza de excelente salud en literatura hispanoamericana, con obras que se extienden desde Cien años de soledad (1967) de Gabriel García Márquez, hasta La Casa de los espíritus (1982) de Isabel Allende, por ejemplo. La historia del exilio dominicano se vincula en la obra de Díaz, por tanto, a través del uso de géneros bien establecidos en la literatura hispanoamericana como las novelas de dictador y las saga familiares, con la historia de los De León, protagonistas de la obra, en un resultado que también bebe del realismo mágico, y que es así mismo un bildungsroman; todo ello para crear un texto que refleja la imposibilidad por parte del exiliado renunciar a su “unextinguishible longing for elsewheres” (Díaz 2007: 77).

Tanto Junot Díaz como Julia Álvarez nacieron en Santo Domingo y fueron llevados a Estados Unidos durante su infancia. El escritor cubano-americano Gustavo Pérez-Firmat ha elegido para referirse a este tipo de exiliados la etiqueta “generación uno y medio”, término que destaca no sólo la dificultad de tener que negociar la transición de infancia a edad adulta, sino de hacerlo pasando de un entorno socio-cultural a otro (Pérez-Firmat 1994: 4). Para Pérez-Firmat, la negociación de culturas específica de esta generación “uno y medio” es lo que convierte a sus integrantes en miembros de una “cultura con guión” (Pérez Firmat 1994: 13): no son ni uno, ni otro, lo que paradójicamente facilita la “negociación” entre ambas culturas; para otros críticos, sin embargo, mientras que los adultos son capaces de traer el pasado con ellos al llegar a una nueva cultura,there is no diaspora of children. Their individual survival comes at the cost of their old identity . . . They receive the priceless gift of life . . . [and] a new future opens up where only bleakness or extinction may have threatened before, but only by means of a substitution they did not choose. . . They live on in the identity accepted . . . from a new culture, aware that something will always persist in them of a destiny broken off by fate, always irreparably lost though never completely overcome (Bullock, citado en Fehervary 2008: 15)

there is no diaspora of children. Their individual survival comes at the cost of their old identity . . . They receive the priceless gift of life . . . [and] a new future opens up where only bleakness or extinction may have threatened before, but only by means of a substitution they did not choose. . . They live on in the identity accepted . . . from a new culture, aware that something will always persist in them of a destiny broken off by fate, always irreparably lost though never completely overcome (Bullock, citado en Fehervary 2008: 15).

Quizá sea éste el motivo por el que escritores como Díaz o Álvarez se ven obligados a re-imaginar el pasado (directo de su familia, en el caso de Díaz; o histórico de su nación, en el caso de Álvarez) a través de sus obras. Habitualmente las obras escritas por esta generación enfatizan la dificultad, frente a la generación anterior (preocupada por integrarse en la sociedad del nuevo país), de habitar el espacio liminal en el que se ven forzados a existir, que no es ni el país de origen (en este caso, de exilio) de sus antepasados, ni los EE.UU., donde por ubicarse dentro de una comunidad de expatriados, siguen existiendo de alguna manera en los márgenes de la sociedad⁴. Al mismo tiempo, estos autores han de fundamentar su conocimiento y descripción del colectivo dominicano-americano desde posiciones de exilio, no de migración convencional (Ink 2004: 782). Estos escritores “regresan al pasado, no para confrontar la historia o lamentar la pérdida como lo habían hecho los escritores del grupo anterior, sino para encontrar una oportunidad de balancear [sic.] las dos culturas que viven simultáneamente en ellos” (Álvarez Borland 2003: 42). Así lo aplica Díaz a su propia experiencia:

I have a sense of the Dominican…it’s not much of a theory, more a collection of words, a dot dot dash code that I use to, in another way, decipher a larger code, which is the Dominican experience, the Dominican diasporic experience, and the American experience, all hooked together (Lewis 2002).

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao supuso un inesperado éxito editorial para Díaz, que se convirtió en el primer dominicano-americano en ganar el premio Pulitzer. En 2008, transformado ya en figura mediática, Díaz reflexiona sobre su éxito como escritor en términos no alejados del “sueño americano” al que se exponen comunidades inmigrantes y diaspóricas, definiéndose como inmigrante a los Estados Unidos en los siguientes términos:

I can safely say I've seen the US from the bottom up . . . I may be a success story as an individual. But if you adjust the knob and just take it back one setting to the family unit, I would say my family tells a much more complicated story. It tells the story of two kids in prison. It tells the story of enormous poverty, of tremendous difficulty (Ying 2010).

Junot Díaz no oculta, en su mismo título, las referencias temáticas a “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, de Ernest Hemingway. En este relato, publicado por primera vez en 1936, el protagonista, el Francis Macomber del título, tan sólo encuentra el verdadero sentido de una vida enraizada en la cobardía cuando se enfrenta a la adversidad, por primera vez, desde una pose heroica que, in extremis, le costará la vida pero que al mismo tiempo dotará de un cierto significado trágico a su muerte. Algo similar sucede al protagonista, Oscar de León, que hallará el sentido de su vida en un último e inesperado acto heroico que, paradójicamente, replica experiencias de su familia en su isla de origen, y precisamente será tan solo en los momentos previos a su muerte cuando sea capaz de hablar perfectamente, sin acento y de forma articulada, el idioma de sus ancestros: “[t]he words coming out like they belonged to someone else, his Spanish good for once” (Díaz 2007: 321). “Wao”, el apodo del protagonista, Oscar De León, es, también, una deformación de “Wilde”, por el parecido que sus compañeros ven con otro Oscar, el conocido autor irlandés. Con estas referencias literarias, Díaz (profesor de literatura creativa en el MIT) mezcla, en la vena del espíritu postmoderno, lo que se ha dado en llamar “alta” literatura (como el extracto de “The Schooner Flight” (1980), poema del reconocido autor caribeño Derek Walcott que se encuentra al comienzo de la novela) con la denominada “literatura popular” (ya en la cita del cómic Los Cuatro Fantásticos con la que se inicia el libro: “Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus??”). Así, Díaz se ubica dentro de una tradición claramente angloamericana, canónica pero también anclada en lo popular, al tiempo que introduce elementos (y una gran parte de la trama) decididamente dominicanos, como el uso del castellano y de palabras y conceptos que parten del Caribe, y que acaban conformando una obra mixta, que habla de exilios, políticos, pero también lingüísticos o exilios interiores, como es el caso del joven protagonista. 

Tras una primera sección donde el narrador Yunior de las Casas (novio ocasional de la hermana de Oscar, Lola, y amigo y “protector” del propio Oscar) comienza a contar la breve historia del protagonista, asistimos en las páginas intermedias del libro a las vivencias, narradas en primera persona, de Lola durante una larga visita a Santo Domingo, donde vive con una prima de su abuelo, La Inca). De esta manera, el libro intercala vivencias actuales de la generación más joven de los De León, Oscar y Lola, y de su madre (Hypatia Belicia Cabral, “Beli”) en New Jersey con las circunstancias (narradas en pasado) que motivaron el exilio de la familia de Santo Domingo, con protagonismo absoluto en el segundo caso de los abusos del dictador Trujillo, que asesinó a la familia de Beli, forzándola a criarse con una serie de familias de acogida hasta ser rescatada por una prima de su padre (La Inca), y que posteriormente hace que, debido a la relación ilícita entre Beli y uno de los cuñados de Trujillo, ésta tenga que abandonar la isla. El libro comienza a cerrar el círculo en la tercera y última sección, con el regreso y última visita de Oscar a Santo Domingo: regreso que, por otra parte, terminará por costarle la vida en circunstancias muy parecidas a las que hicieron que su madre tuviera que exiliarse a New Jersey, precisamente en el mismo lugar donde aquélla recibió una brutal paliza, y donde Oscar ya había sido llevado en una ocasión sin que demostrara la valentía que muestra en los últimos momentos de su segunda visita. La repetición del contexto geográfico, de las motivaciones (amorosas) que provocan la suerte de ambos protagonistas, e incluso la aparición fantasmagórica, en la tradición del realismo mágico, de una mangosta en episodios similares, aporta una estructura circular de exilio y regreso, que por otra parte ya habían iniciado otros personajes de libro como Lola. El texto se cierra recurriendo a un capítulo de tintes tradicionales (que contrasta con la inclusión ya mencionada de elementos de la cultura popular, y que por virtud de dicha mezcla ubican el libro dentro de lo que se ha dado en llamar lo postmoderno), en el que se informa al lector del final de cada uno de los personajes, culminando, en su última frase, con otra referencia inescapable para cualquiera siquiera mínimamente versado en la tradición literaria angloamericana: “The beauty! The beauty!” (Díaz 2007: 335), un eco del final de Heart of Darkness (1902) de Joseph Conrad, una obra, también, sobre dictadores, exilios, y viajes de descubrimiento personal a través del encuentro con la oscuridad que subyace en el ser humano.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao utiliza de forma insistente, como ya hemos adelantado (y quizá en esto radique parte de su éxito) una plétora de referencias a la cultura popular, a los cómics de superhéroes, a la literatura fantástica, a la ciencia ficción, al manga, a los juegos de rol, a la literatura llamada “de género” o “de fórmula” (novela de horror, o novela romántica), a los juegos de mesa, y a películas de culto como The Matrix (1999). Muchos lectores, inicialmente atraídos por el éxito del libro, han reconocido sentirse superados por la cantidad de referencias⁵, por el número de géneros utilizados, la alternancia de narradores, el abusivo número de notas a pie, larguísimas y digresivas (si bien excepcionalmente divertidas e iluminadoras) y por la ausencia de una narrativa principal que “guíe” al lector por el relato⁶. A las objeciones acerca de esta falta de coherencia narrativa contesta Junot Díaz:

the idea of a master narrative scares the hell out of me. As a child of the dictatorship of course it’s going to scare the hell out of you. And so . . . [you have] the footnotes competing with the narrative of the master overtext; . . . [and] the book . . . [countering] its own authoritativeness by directing you to other books on the same theme, competing books (Christchurch City Libraries 2008).

Para Díaz, esta huída del narrador “dictatorial” es una de las lecciones “that we learned in this kind of post-dictatorship / dictatorship-traumatised country” (Christchurch City Libraries 2008). Díaz insiste en atacar esta noción de la historia en la que el texto “is sacrosanct and one. That was the national myth of the Dominican Republic as long as this story’s going on, this story is sacrosanct and the only one. Competing narratives were dismissed, marginalized – they were assassinated (Christchurch City Libraries 2008). 

Las referencias intertextuales no son, pues, intención por parte del autor solo de descubrir al lector el tipo de obras que forman parte de su educación cultural, sino que también aspiran a crear “metaphors and lenses through which to interpret the world” (Christchurch City Libraries 2008), y también surgen del deseo de cambiar la forma de leer: la digresión, las notas a pie, funcionan como una manera de “sacar” al lector de la voz dictatorial que impone un narrador único durante largas secciones de la novela. Dichas notas, a pie, metafóricamente, se convierten pues en un “exilio” de parte de la narración (al ser expresadas “fuera” del texto principal, dominado por la voz autorial que es, en cierto modo, “dictatorial”). Y es curioso cómo en la historia narrada, literalmente, a pie de página, se incide en ocasiones en figuras de resistencia al Trujillato: así, el escritor Juan Bosch, nombrado en la nota a pie número 30 (Díaz 2007: 250), Galíndez, en las notas a pie números 11 (Díaz 2007: 96) y 28 (Díaz 2007: 225), o las hermanas Mirabal, en la nota a pie número 7 (Díaz 2007: 83). Las notas a pie se convierten así, también por su contenido, en foco de resistencia al texto principal.

La intención de Díaz al utilizar, además, un largo número de referencias a la literatura de ciencia ficción, cómics, fantasía, etc. va más allá de una educación llamémosla “sentimental” como adolescente norteamericano: se trata, también, de la intención consciente de mostrar la experiencia de exilio, de alienación, a un amplio público lector no familiarizado con los modos narrativos de estos géneros populares, describiendo el horror, la locura, y lo incomprensible del regimen y sus consecuencias sobre los De León desde la perspectiva desfamiliarizadora de géneros como la ciencia ficción. “What’s more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo, what more fantasy than the Antilles?” (Díaz 2007: 6), se pregunta Oscar en la novela. El rechazo, al menos parcial, del canon, sirve para liberar a estos autores de la diáspora, como reflexiona Díaz:

if you’re a person writing about a Dominican diasporic experience, to hew too closely to canonical ideal of what literature is would limit you. The conventions of what is canonically known as literature can’t hope to encompass these radical experiences that you undergo when living in a diaspora like the Dominican one. And sometimes the only way to describe these lived moments – the surreality and ir-reality of some of the things that people like myself have experienced – is through lenses like science fiction” (Lewis 2002).

 Oscar es definido en el libro como alguien cuyo 

commitment to the Genres had become absolute . . . Could write in Elvish . . . knew more about the Marvel Universe tan Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic . . . Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber . . . Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to (Díaz 2007: 21).

El narrador, Yunior, intrigado por la obsesión del protagonista por la ciencia ficción, se pregunta si el amor de Oscar por este género no partirá, precisamente, de su experiencia diaspórica: 

[i]t might have been a consequence of being Antillean (who more sci-fi tan us?) or of living in the DR [=Dominican Republic] for the first couple of years of his life and then abruptly wrenchingly relocating to New Jersey – a single green card shifting not only worlds (from Third to First) but centuries (from almost no TV or electricity to plenty of both). After a transition like that I’m guessing only the most extreme scenarios could have satisfied (Díaz 2007: 21-22).

Los cómics, además, tal y como expresa el crítico Albert Jordy Raboteau reflexionando sobre el texto de Díaz, “fed my imagination with larger than life characters of good and evil, with dramatic and cosmic battles between light and darkness, life and death, and especially power used for good vs. power used for domination” (Raboteau 2008: 920-921), algo más que relacionado con los temas que se tratan en la novela. En la narración, se colocan casi al mismo nivel de realidad (o irrealidad) las historias de superhéroes y supervillanos y la lucha y represión histórica que supone el régimen de Trujillo: se desestabiliza, así, la pretensión de realidad del discurso histórico sobre los episodios de represión política, y se pone al descubierto la incapacidad por parte de disciplinas manipulables (como ya sabemos que es la Historia) de captar una verdad objetiva, quedando dicha disciplina al nivel de las historias, en ocasiones profundamente maniqueas, de los cómics de superhéroes. Una reflexión, por más que apresurada, sobre los temas fundamentales de la literatura fantástica y de los comics destacaría, precisamente, el exilio, relacionado con la búsqueda, como el tema fundamental de un gran número de obras de ambos géneros, y es imposible no leer la vida de Oscar Wao como una novela de búsqueda, casi en términos jungianos, en la que el exilio interior al que le relegan sus dificultades para relacionarse con el mundo “normal” reflejan el exilio (exterior, real) de su familia por la imposibilidad de seguir viviendo en Santo Domingo durante la época de la dictadura de Trujillo. Oscar es, durante su infancia, la promesa, para su entorno, de lo que ha de ser un joven dominicano, pero se “exilia” de ese contexto familiar y étnico al entrar en la adolescencia:

[i]n those blessed days of his youth, Oscar was something of a Casanova. One of those preschool loverboys who was always trying to kiss the girls, always coming up behind them during a merengue and giving them the pelvic pump, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it any chance he got. Because in those days he was (still) a “normal” Dominican boy raised in a “typical” Dominican family, his nascent pimp-liness was encouraged by blood and friends alike. . . In the DR [=Dominican Republic] during summer visits to his family digs in Baní he was the worst, would stand in front of Nena Inca’s house and call out to passing women – Tú eres guapa! Tú eres guapa! . . . It truly was a Golden Age for Oscar . . . [but] [e]arly adolescence hit him especially hard . . . making him self-conscious, and his interest – in Genres! – which nobody had said boo about before, suddently became synonymous with being a loser with a capital L. Couldn’t make friends for the life of him, too dorky, too shy, and . . . too weird (had a habit of using big words he had memorized the day before) . . . He forgot the perrito, forgot the pride he felt when the women in the family had called him hombre (Díaz 2007: 11-17, passim).

La metáfora en torno a la que se articula la obra desde el primer momento es el concepto de “Fukú”, una maldición similar al mal de ojo que parece hundirse en el pasado animista de la isla, y que para el narrador ha perseguido al Caribe (y, específicamente, a los De León) desde la época de la colonización de La Española. El narrador habla de un “Fukú americanus”, que se ha extendido desde la isla a todo el continente:

the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fukú’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not (Díaz 2007: 1-2).

Existe a continuación en la obra una identificación explícita entre el fukú y la represión del régimen de Trujillo:

No one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse’s servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight. It was believed, even in educated circles, that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond. If you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo, fuá, a hurricane would sweep your family out to sea, fuá, a boulder would fall out of a clear sky and squash you, fuá, the shrimp you ate today was the cramp that killed you tomorrow (Díaz 2007: 3).

De forma específica, se conecta el fukú con la diáspora, convirtiendo el exilio en maldición y castigo: “My paternal abuelo believes that diáspora was Trujillo’s payback to the pueblo that betrayed him. Fukú” (Díaz 2007: 5). El exilio dominicano formulado por Díaz recoge, así, los ecos del exilio mítico original del Jardín del Edén, que para Rossbach convierte para siempre el exilio en un castigo “inflicted . . . as a consequence of their [=Adam and Eve’s] action” (Rossbach 2008: 76). Al identificar la expulsión del paraíso a la experiencia del exilio, podemos derivar que el exiliado, aun habiendo escogido el exilio como opción legítima (en el sentido de que, pese a que suponga una renuncia moral a sus ideales políticos, permite seguir vivo), arrastre a menudo sensación de culpa por no haber aceptado, cediendo y dejando a un lado sus ideales, algo que le hubiera permitido seguir viviendo en el país: esto explica la visión idealizada, paradisiaca e idílica, que en ocasiones tiene el exiliado del país abandonado. 

Raboteau habla del silencio que rodea las historias de exilio que se viven en la novela como “a legacy of silence required to survive under the constant threat of a brutal dictator – a Sauron ruling a nation as his own private Mordor” (Raboteau 2008: 921). Para Díaz, uno de los elementos que definen el libro es, precisamente, las cosas que faltan por decir, las que no se narran:

[t]he mother’s entire childhood is missing . . . The grandfather is disappeared by the government, imprisoned, tortured, a whole slice of his life disappeared . . . The protagonist, Oscar, is always filtered thought this other narrator, Yunior . . . how do you put a story together from fragments and how you put a story together from absences . . . The consequences of being in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo Regime were unspeakable (Roberts 2007).

El narrador principal de la obra, Yunior, sugiere que la única solución al poderoso hechizo del Fukú es un contra-hechizo, el “Zafa”,

[the] only one way to prevent disaster from coiling around you, only one surefire counterspell that would keep you and your family safe. Not surprisingly, it was a word. A simple word (followed usually by a vigorous crossing of index fingers) (Díaz 2007: 7).

Yunior plantea desde el principio de su narración que quizá “now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell” (Díaz 2007: 7). Para Kalí Tal, gran parte de la literatura que hace referencia a traumas históricos (pero también familiares, o individuales) como el exilio politico está escrita “from the need to tell and retell the story of the traumatic experience, to make it ‘real’ both to the victim and to the community. Such writing serves both as validation and cathartic vehicle for the traumatized author” (Tal 1996: 21-22), al tiempo que identifica “displacement [as] . . . the goal of any story, in degree; all fiction aims to usurp the real world with a world that is imagined” (Tal 1996: 21-22). El desplazamiento, la desubicación (genérica, intertextual, individual, social) es, pues, el tema fundamental en esta novela de Díaz, una obra sobre exilios, exteriores e interiores, textuales e intertextuales, sobre el trauma y lo incontable, sobre maldiciones que producen diásporas y desplazamientos, y en última instancia sobre el posible poder curativo (o, siguiendo a Yunior, el “Zafa”) que pueden tener la palabra y la literatura.

Dr. Carmen Méndez García is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Department of English and American Literature, Complutense University, Madrid (Spain). Her doctoral dissertation, The Rhetorics of Schizophrenia in the Epigones of Modernism (2003) was based on her research as a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Massachusetts, in 2001 and 2002. She was also a participant in the 2010 Study of the United States Institute on Contemporary American Literature at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, funded by the Spanish Fulbright program and the US Department of State. Current research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century US literature, postmodernism and contemporary fiction, the counterculture in the US, minority studies (especially Chicana studies), psychology and psychiatry as applied to literature, and trauma theory. She leads the research for the group “Space, Gender and Identity in US Literature and Visual Arts: A Transatlantic Approach” (Franklin Institute-UAH), and she is a participant in a research group dealing with Women's Studies in English and American literature at Complutense University. She is a member of the International Committee of the American Studies Association (ASA). She was an Associate Dean for Student Affairs (2010-2014) and the managing editor of Atlantis, Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (2009-2012). Current research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century US literature, postmodernism and contemporary fiction, the counterculture in the US, minority studies (especially Chicana studies), psychology and psychiatry as applied to literature, and trauma theory. She leads the research for the group “Space, Gender and Identity in US Literature and Visual Arts: A Transatlantic Approach”, and she is a participant in a research group dealing with Women's Studies in English and American literature at Complutense University. She was a member of the International Committee of the American Studies Association (ASA), from 2012 to 2015. She is the coordinator of the Master in North American Studies (MANAS) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

REFERENCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS

“Junot Díaz, the Devil and Me - Interview with Junot Díaz”. Christchurch City Libraries. Consultada 18 de diciembre de 2010.

ÁLVAREZ BORLAND, Isabel (2003): “Las raíces al desnudo: narradores cubanos en los Estados Unidos”, en Guayaba Sweet: Literatura cubana en los Estados Unidos, Laura P. Alonso Gallo y Fabio Murrieta (eds.), pp. 37-52. Valencia: Aduana Vieja.

DIAZ, Junot (2007): The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Nueva York: Riverhead Books. 

FEHERVARY, Helen (2008): “Tales of Migration from Central America and Central Europe”, en Aftermaths: Exile, Migration and Diaspora Reconsidered, Marcus Bullock y Peter Y. Paik (eds), pp. 15-32. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers.

GROSSMAN, Lev (2007): “What to Watch For: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”. Time Magazine. Consultada 18 de diciembre de 2010.

INK, Lynn Chun (2004): “Remaking Identity, Unmaking Nation: Historical Recovery and the Reconstruction of Community in In the Time of the Butterflies and The Farming of Bones”. Callaloo 27. 3: 788-807.

KAKUTANI, Michiko (2007): “Travails of an Outcast”. The New York Times. Consultada 10 de diciembre de 2010.

LEWIS, Marina (2002): “Interview with Junot Diaz”. Other Voices 36. [http://webdelsol.com/Other_Voices/]. Consultada 10 de enero de 2011.

LIFSHEY, Adam (2008): “Indeterminacy and the Subversive in Representations of the Trujillato”. Hispanic Review 76.4: 435-457.

O’BRIEN, George (1988): “The Muse of Exile: Estrangement and Renewal in Modern Irish Literature”, en Exile in Literature, María-Inés Lagos-Pope (ed.), pp. 82-101. Lewisburg: Brucknell University Press.

PÉREZ-FIRMAT, Gustavo (1994): Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press. 

RABOTEAU, Albert Jordy (2008): “Conversation with Junot Díaz (To the Woman in the Mountain Cabin)”. Callaloo 31: 919-922. 

ROBERTS, Caroline (2007): “Bostonist Interview: Junot Díaz, Author”. Bostonist. Consultada 18 de diciembre de 2010.

ROSSBACH, Stefan (2008): “On the Metaphysics of Exile”, en Aftermaths: Exile, Migration and Diaspora Reconsidered, Marcus Bullock y Peter Y. Paik (eds), pp. 223-242. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers.

SHORTER, Daniel (2005): “Dominican Republic Ancestry Maps”. Epodunk, the Power of Place. Consultada 4 de enero de 2011.

SUAREZ, Lucia M. (2004): “Julia Alvarez and the Anxiety of Latina Representation”. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 5.1: 117-145.

TAL, Kalí (1996). Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

YING, Hao (2010): “Writing Wrongs”. Global Times. Consultada 18 de diciembre de 2010.

¹ Una primera versión de este artículo se presentó en forma de participación en una mesa redonda durante el congreso internacional “Espacios y escrituras del exilio”, celebrado en la Facultad de Filología de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid en el mes de mayo de 2010.

²“Famous for changing ALL THE NAMES of ALL THE LANDMARKS in the Dominican Republic to honor himself . . . for making ill monopolies out of every slice of the national patrimony . . . for expecting, no, insisting on absolute veneration from his pueblo” (Díaz 2007: 2).

³Julia Álvarez retoma la huída y exilio de otra familia dominicana, los García, en How the García Girls Lost their Accents (1991).

⁴Al hablar de Julia Álvarez, Suarez destaca también cómo parte del problema de los jóvenes dominicano-americanos puede ser que la experiencia de exilio se complica por el convencimiento de que la huída por motivos políticos es, en cierto modo, y una vez que se ha llegado a tierra salva, un tipo de inmigración “privilegiada”, frente al estigma que supone la inmigración por motivos meramente económicos (Suarez 2004: 126). Es además, más sencillo para los dominicanos que para los emigrantes de otros países de Hispanoamérica obtener la ciudadanía norteamericana sin tener que renunciar a su nacionalidad.

⁵Resulta imposible analizar completamente el complejo sistema de referencias e intertextualidad que encontramos en The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, hasta tal punto que se ha creado ya una versión anotada del texto, disponible en internet, que pese a estar en constante desarrollo no agota, sin embargo, todas las referencias de la obra: [http://www.annotated-oscar-wao.com/].

⁶Kakutani ha definido el libro como una novela donde “Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace” (Kakutani 2007)

Review: Jesus, Aliens, Loving your Wife and Not Wanting to Write Anymore

With every new novel, Michel Faber (The Hague, 1960) seems to want to test his own writing skills. As such, his novel Under the Skin (2000) is a fusion of science fiction and horror, while the very successful novel The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) has been described as Sex and the City in Victorian London. The starting point of The Book of Strange New Things (2015) is as improbable as it is alien, and once again it seems like Faber has set himself an impossible task.

Heading for Oasis
The Book of Strange New Things takes place in the (near) future, in an unspecified, cynical world where sincere human interaction has become a rarity: calling or writing each other is considered to be old-fashioned and impractical. A mysterious and almighty multinational, called USIC, sends pastor Peter Leigh to a newly colonised planet to preach the gospel. A comparison with apostle Peter is suggested. Far beyond page sixty (this novel contains almost six hundred of them) it is still unclear on what planet, which USIC has named Oasis, Peter will end up. His first meeting with an alien only takes place on page one hundred twenty. In this way, his experience runs in parallel with that of the reader. As it turns out, Oasis is a pretty liveable but nevertheless amazing planet with a real atmosphere and its own flora and fauna, where the days last for seventy-two hours.

'[...]Peter's heart pumped hard, and he breathed shallowly in his excitement. The rain! The rain wasn't falling in straight lines, it was ... dancing! Could one say that about rainfall? Water had no intelligence. And yet, this rainfall swept from side to side, hundreds of thousands of silvery lines all describing the same elegant arcs. It was nothing like when rain back home was flung around erratically by gusts of wind. No, the air here seemed calm, and the rain's motion was graceful, a leisurely sweeping from one side of the sky to the other [...]'

Faber's style appeals greatly to the imagination and it is therefore not surprising that many of his books have had film adaptations. In 2011, the BBC turned The Crimson Petal and the White into a television series and 2013 saw the premiere of Under the Skin (with Scarlett Johansson in the leading role). As early as October 2015, BBC Radio broadcast a ten-part radio play of The Book of Strange New Things.

Amazing Alien Grace
As it happens, a real evangelisation of the inhabitants of Oasis is not necessary anymore: the aliens form a very peaceful, Old-Testament-like society. What's more, another pastor has preceded Peter before breaking down and disappearing for reasons that remain unclear. The majority of the aliens are very religious and they have given themselves names from Jesus Lover One up to Jesus Lover Sixty-Three. 'The book of strange new things' is their name for the bible. The tribe has already mastered rudimentary English, albeit with one major defect: they cannot pronounce -s- or -t- sounds, which is quite a nuisance when trying to say 'Jesus' for example. Faber notes down their sounds by means of characters that remind one of Thai. The speech disorder adds to a very funny scene when the full congregation assembles in honour of Peter to sing a hardly comprehensible and rather demolished Amazing Grace.

Beatrice and Eva
Peter's contacts with and his thoughts of his wife Beatrice are the main storyline in the novel. His partner, who also works for the church, has fallen pregnant shortly before his departure. Never before a couple was separated from each other at such a distance and her name, that reminds one of Dante's divine beloved, might not have been chosen accidentally. Love stories are the core of the majority of Faber's oeuvre and here again the goodbye and correspondence between Peter and Beatrice express an endless tenderness.

Ever since his literary debut, interviews with Faber showed how deeply his authorship was connected with his wife Eva, who was his sounding board and inspiration. During recent years, their existence was overshadowed by Eva's terminal cancer. Too upset, Faber had wanted to abandon his latest novel after having written two hundred and fifty pages, but Eva encouraged him to keep writing. Eva Youren passed away shortly before Faber completed The Book of Strange New Things.

Faber's latest book is also his most emotional book, which is not surprising when one thinks of the circumstances under which it was written. This novel has an uncommonly poignant moral that is felt especially in Peter's contacts with an alien called Jesus Lover Five. Peter feels a special affection for her. When she gets hurt, it turns out that Oasans cannot recover and that the well-known 'God healeth all diseases' does not apply to them. Peter realises that it is a miracle that humans can be cured from diseases and that a wound can heal into a scar.

No spoiler alert
In the meantime, a lot remains unclear about the motivations of the USIC imperium, which aims to keep the colonists as ignorant as possible of what is happening on planet Earth. The only way of communicating with home is by means of 'The Shoot', a kind of e-mail system that is subject to strict censorship. Beatrice’s messages to Peter are getting more and more alarming: tsunamis, earthquakes, wars, dramatic bankruptcies; the earthly troubles do not seem to end. Is this really what is happening on Earth or are Beatrice’s texts being manipulated by USIC? In the end, it seems like Peter chooses to go back to his wife, but even here Faber leaves his readers in the dark.

An open ending is not unusual in Faber's work. The many readers of The Crimson Petal and The White were so curious to find out how the protagonist Sugar would fare that they kept nagging the writer for a sequel. Whereupon Faber wrote The Apple in 2006, a collection of stories that, although they indeed embroidered on The Crimson Petal, didn't not offer any relief for languishing readers.

This time, there will be no follow-up. To the consternation of his editor and his readers, Faber announced in an interview to stop writing: 'I think I have reached a limit.' No matter how much readers long for more Faber or more Peter and Beatrice: in God's name, let us leave a writer alone who lost the wife who was not only his major support but even the core of his authorship.

Marjolein Corjanus obtained a Master's degree in French Literature in The Netherlands. She works as a freelance translator, editor and critic. Next to this, she conducts independent research in the field of modern French and comparative literature. An overview of recent publications can be found through her profiles on LinkedIn and Academia.edu.

Recensie: Jezus, aliens, de liefde voor je vrouw en nooit meer willen schrijven

Michel Faber (1960) lijkt met ieder nieuw boek zijn eigen schrijverskunst op de proef te willen stellen. Zo is zijn roman Under the skin (2000) een mengeling van sciencefiction en horror terwijl het uiterst succesvolle The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) wel omschreven is als Sex and the City in victoriaans Londen. Het uitgangspunt van The Book of Strange New Things is al even onwaarschijnlijk en buitenaards en ook hier lijkt het aanvankelijk of Faber zichzelf een onmogelijke taak heeft gesteld.

Naar Oasis
The Book of Strange New Things speelt in de (nabije) toekomst, in een niet nader gedefinieerde cynische wereld waar oprecht menselijk contact een zeldzaamheid is geworden: elkaar schrijven of bellen wordt als ouderwets en onpraktisch beschouwd. Hoofdpersoon is predikant Peter Leigh die door een ondoorzichtige en almachtige multinational, USIC genaamd, naar een nieuw gekolonialiseerde planeet wordt gezonden om daar het geloof te verkondigen. Een vergelijking met apostel Petrus dringt zich op. Tot ver na pagina zestig is niet duidelijk op wat voor planeet, door USIC Oasis gedoopt, Peter terecht gaat komen. Zijn eerste ontmoeting met een alien vindt pas plaats op pagina honderdtwintig. Zo loopt zijn ervaring parallel met die van de lezer. Oasis blijkt een aardig leefbare maar niettemin wonderlijke planeet met een heuse atmosfeer en eigen flora en fauna, waar de dagen tweeënzeventig uur duren.

'Peter's heart pumped hard, and he breathed shallowly in his excitement. The rain! The rain wasn't falling in straight lines, it was ... dancing! Could one say that about rainfall? Water had no intelligence. And yet, this rainfall swept from side to side, hundreds of thousands of silvery lines all describing the same elegant arcs. It was nothing like when rain back home was flung around erratically by gusts of wind. No, the air here seemed calm, and the rain's motion was graceful, a leisurely sweeping from one side of the sky to the other [...]'

Fabers stijl spreekt zeer tot de verbeelding en het is dan ook niet verrassend dat veel van zijn titels verfilmd zijn. In 2011 maakte de BBC een televisieserie van The Crimson Petal and the White en in ging 2013 Under the skin in première (met Scarlett Johansson in de hoofdrol). Van The Book of Strange New Thingszond BBC Radio al in oktober van dit jaar een tiendelig hoorspel uit.

Amazing Alien Grace
Echte kerstening van de planeetbewoners is overigens niet meer nodig: de aliens vormen een zeer vreedzame, oudtestamentische samenleving. Bovendien is een andere predikant Peter al voorgegaan totdat deze om onduidelijke redenen doordraaide en verdween. De aliens zijn voor het merendeel al zeer gelovig en hebben zichzelf al namen aangemeten van Jesus Lover One tot en met Jesus Lover Sixty-Three. 'The book of strange new things' is hun benaming voor de bijbel. Inmiddels spreekt het volkje ook een rudimentair Engels, met wel één belangrijk manco: ze kunnen de -s- en de -t- niet uitspreken, wat best lastig is als ze bijvoorbeeld 'Jesus' willen zeggen. Faber noteert hun klanken middels tekens die nog het meest weghebben van Thais. Het spraakgebrek draagt bij aan een bijzonder grappige scène als de voltallig congregatie zich verzamelt om voor Peter een nauwelijks verstaanbaar en enigszins vernacheld Amazing Grace te zingen.

Beatrice en Eva
Als een rode draad loopt door het boek Peters contact met, en zijn gedachten aan, zijn vrouw Beatrice, die kort voor zijn vertrek zwanger blijkt te zijn geraakt. Nog nooit was een echtpaar zo ver van elkaar verwijderd en haar naam, die aan Dantes hemelse geliefde doet denken, zal niet toevallig gekozen zijn. Liefdesgeschiedenissen vormen de kern van het merendeel van Fabers oeuvre en ook hier getuigt het afscheid en de briefwisseling tussen Peter en Beatrice van een grenzeloze tederheid.

Sinds zijn debuut bleek steeds weer uit interviews met Faber hoezeer zijn schrijverschap verbonden was met zijn echtgenote Eva, die zijn klankbord en inspiratiebron was. De laatste jaren werd hun bestaan overschaduwd door de terminale kanker waaraan Eva leed. Te zeer aangeslagen wilde Faber zijn nieuwste boek na tweehonderdvijftig pagina's laten liggen maar zij moedigde hem aan om te blijven schrijven. Eva Youren overleed kort voordat Faber The Book of Strange New Things voltooide.

Fabers nieuwste is ook zijn meest emotionele boek, en gezien de ontstaansgeschiedenis ervan is dat niet verbazingwekkend. De roman heeft dan ook een zeldzaam indringende moraal die tot uiting komt in Peters contact met een alien, genaamd Jesus Lover Five. Voor haar vat hij een speciale genegenheid op. Als zij gewond raakt, blijkt dat Oasans niet kunnen genezen. 'God healeth all diseases' gaat voor hen niet op. Dat een mens van ziekte kan genezen of dat een wond kan dichtgroeien tot hooguit een litteken is een wonder, zo beseft Peter.

No spoiler alert
Ondertussen blijft er veel onduidelijk over de bedoelingen van het USIC-imperium dat er veel aan gelegen is de kolonisten onwetend van de aardse actualiteit te houden. De enige vorm van communicatie met het thuisfront is 'The Shoot', een soort e-mailsysteem dat aan strenge censuur onderworpen is. Ondertussen worden de berichten die Beatrice aan Peter stuurt steeds alarmerender: tsunami's, aardbevingen, oorlogen, dramatische faillissementen, de aardse ellende houdt niet op. Is dit werkelijk wat zich afspeelt op planeet Aarde of worden Beatrices teksten gemanipuleerd door USIC? Het lijkt erop dat Peter er uiteindelijk voor kiest terug te keren naar zijn vrouw, maar ook dat laat Faber in het ongewisse.

Een open einde is in Fabers werk niet ongebruikelijk. Lezers van The Crimson Petal and The White waren zo nieuwsgierig hoe het heldin Sugar zou vergaan, dat ze de schrijver de kop gek zeurden om een vervolg. Waarop Faber in 2006 The Apple schreef, een bundel verhalen die inderdaad voortborduurden op The Crimson... maar de hunkerende lezer niet echt soelaas boden.

Deze keer zal er geen vervolg meer komen. Tot consternatie van zijn uitgever en lezers liet Faber tijdens een recent interview weten geen romans meer te willen schrijven: 'I think I have reached a limit.' Hoe men als lezer ook kan verlangen naar nog meer Faber of nog meer Peter en Beatrice: laat men in godsnaam de schrijver met rust laten die zijn vrouw verloor die niet alleen zijn steun en toeverlaat was maar zelfs het hart van zijn schrijverschap vormde.

Deze recensie werd eerder gepubliceerd op de site van de Athenaeum Boekhandel in Nederland: https://www.athenaeum.nl/recensies/2015/jezus-aliens-de-liefde-voor-je-vrouw-en-nooit-meer-willen-schrijven/

Marjolein Corjanus studeerde Franse taal- en letterkunde aan de Radboud Universiteit te Nijmegen, Nederland. Zij is werkzaam als freelancevertaler, -redacteur en -recensent. Daarnaast voert zij zelfstandig onderzoek uit op het gebied van de Franse en vergelijkende literatuurwetenschap. Een overzicht van recente publicaties is te vinden op LinkedIn en Academia.edu.

The “Outsider”: Neil Gaiman and the Old Testament

The following excerpt has been edited for concision. Mr Camus’s full-length essay can be found in Derek Royal’s Visualizing Jewish Narrative (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

Neil Gaiman is a prominent Jewish comics-writer, although his experience of Jewishness is very distinctive. In Robert K. Elder’s interview printed in Darrell Schweitzer’s Neil Gaiman Reader, he states: “I was brought up Jewish. But I was Jewish and attended High Church of England schools […]. It was a lovely way of receiving all the religion one ever needed, as an outsider.” 

His Jewish identity certainly made him an “outsider” in his Anglican educational environment but being half immersed in another belief-system than his family’s allowed him to put both systems in perspective. As he puts it in an interview for Hy Bender’s Sandman Companion, “in a sense, it made [him] view everything as myth”. His comics and other writings often feature pagan gods from many different traditions. As for “believ[ing] in a biblical god,” he claims in his interview with Elder: “sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t”. It is as if the spiritual stance he had decided to adopt was the same as Samantha Black Crow’s in his novel American Gods—“I […] can believe anything” or the child protagonist’s in his semi-autobiographical short story “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock”: “a magnificent anarchy of belief”. Being a believer with an outsider’s outlook on the belief systems most familiar to him, could easily qualify him as a modern-day Kafka, if it were not for his being absolutely not melancholy about it. He states, in Bender’s book: “I actually love feeling like an outsider. For example, I really enjoyed the first six years I spent in the U.S. because everything was so alien. […]” This cheerful embracement of the privileged position of the “alien” often shows on a close analysis of his writings. “Part of Sandman’s dynamic stemmed from Neil’s discovery and fascination, as both a European and an Englishman, with America,” according to Mike Dringenberg, one of Sandman’s pencilers, inkers, and co-creators, in Joseph McCabe’s Hanging Out with the Dream King. It is even truer with American Gods, as the meditation on American culture is more explicit, as Gaiman emphasizes in Golden, Wagner and Bissette’s Prince of Stories: “I don’t think American Gods could have been written by someone who was American.” Similarly, instances of Gaiman enjoying the feeling of being an outsider can easily be traced as far as religion is concerned. Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament is an anthology of short, black-and-white graphic narratives released in 1987 by Knockabout Comics. These works of ruthless theological satire take their inspiration from the two traditions, in the history of comics, which defined themselves by their offensiveness: underground “comix” and EC Comics horror anthologies. To understand what Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament is all about, it seems particularly relevant to stress that various theoretical works have shown that violence and fear are important aspects of the religious experience. Theologian Rudolf Otto has identified “awe” as a primordial part of the “numinous,” the irrational feeling that lies at the core of the rational concept of the “holy”. Philosopher René Girard understands ritual murder in primitive and ancient religious communities as an implicit model for the way any human community builds the integrity and harmony that it needs to preserve. It is that essential link that the writers and artists of Outrageous Tales deal with. And this emphasis is made humorous by the way it systematically trivializes Otto’s dramatic notion of “awe” or Girard’s almost lyrical styling of violence as “the heart and secret soul of the sacred.” For instance, awe-related phrases such as “Wrath of God” and “Enormous Boils” or signifiers linked to Girardian violence such as “Human Sacrifice” and “Murder” are listed on the cover, ironically suggesting that those are to be considered as exciting thematic assets of the narratives, in a way that is deliberately reminiscent of exploitation movies’ posters. Among Gaiman’s six stories for the anthology, five are adapted from the Book of Judges. The first chapters of this Book depict Yahweh’s recurrent punishments against the Israelites. Gaiman and Mike Matthews’s rendering of those chapters makes as clear as possible the tyrannous absurdity, from the point of view of a modern outsider, of Yahweh’s behavior. Matthews visually emphasizes the gory aspects of every massacre. The penultimate panel, notably, shows Shamgar, one of the Judges, standing on top of a mountain of corpses. The panel would look like one from a warlike heroic-fantasy comics-series if it were not for the iconic style in which it is drawn, and the anachronistic and misspelled colloquialisms printed in Shamgar’s speech balloon, which make him sound like a lampoon of a dumb action hero. That hypotextually rich depiction satirically suggests a purposeful likening of the Old Testament wars to the combat trances of comic-book barbarian heroes. Gaiman has given to this biblical passage a visually embodied narrator who is typical of the horror-host tradition launched by EC Comics in the early 1950s. The character is even named “the Bible Keeper” in an obvious allusion to the Crypt Keeper, who was the host of EC’s Tales from the Crypt. By this narrative conceit, Gaiman suggests that, not only is the Book of Judges a typical barbarian fantasy but also, in a way, a collection of gruesome horror tales Dr Fredric Wertham would have strongly disapproved of.

Gaiman’s contributions to Outrageous Tales would probably not be as interesting if they could not be contrasted with his very different approach to the biblical hypotext in Sandman. Those British short comix would merely be an extreme version of the “ironic or playful domestication of myth” that Robert Alter finds in most Jewish humor inhis 1972 article “Jewish Humor and the Domestication of Myth”. They become a clue to Gaiman’s delight in being a perpetual cultural outsider when you compare them to Sandman. If Gaiman enthusiastically helped to give some cachet to Knockabout’s systematic desacralization of the Old Testament’s violence, it is a work of resacralization that can be enjoyed in Sandman. Sandman is a mainstream comics work published by DC Comics. It is the story of the Endless, seven siblings whose very existence is the cosmic framework that shapes human imagination and condition. The protagonist is one of the Endless: Dream. Throughout the millennia-encompassing plot, he interacts with Norse, Egyptian, Greek, and other gods, fairy folk, angels and demons, and historical figures. But as Sandman is a DC series, characters from Batman or members of the Justice League of America also make cameo appearances. However, just as Alan Moore had done in Swamp Thing, Gaiman preferred to use mostly less famous DC characters like Cain, Abel, and Eve. They first appeared as horror-hosts in DC horror anthology series. As Hy Bender explains in his Sandman Companion, “[in the 1970s] Cain and Abel were respectively hosts of […] The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets”. From mere heterodiegetic narrators, the two characters had already been made homodiegetic in Swamp Thing. In Sandman, they are much more involved in the action, as assistants to the Dream-King. So is Eve, a woman who is sometimes young and beautiful, sometimes old, and who spends her time alone with a raven. In an interview with Bender, Gaiman explains: “another obscure 1975 series, Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love […] was hosted by a beautiful unnamed woman with a raven. That made me remember a mad crone named Eve who had a raven, and who appeared in several other short-lived DC titles […]. It occurred to me that the beautiful woman […] and the crazy crone […] were aspects of the same character […].”

Cain and Abel were clearly inspired by the eponymous brothers in Genesis. And Eve’s name, given to an ageless character, cannot but evoke the Eve from Genesis. Yet, the obviously intertextual nature of the characters was never much exploited by the writers who used them before Gaiman. In The House of Mystery, Cain is the caretaker of a Gothic mansion adjoining a cemetery, and he spends his time telling horror stories to the reader. In The House of Secrets, Abel does exactly the same thing across the cemetery. Moore first introduces a reference to the brothers’ biblical models, in the form of a horror/slapstick routine, consisting in Cain recurrently killing Abel, who resuscitates every day, so that he can be killed over again. In Sandman, the brothers are very similar to that depiction, except that the reader encounters them much more often. That allows Gaiman to develop their relationships, giving some poignancy to it, by suggesting that Abel hopes that he and his brother will make peace some day, or that, secretly, Cain could actually not live without his brother. More importantly, those Gothic/slapstick characters are resacralized inasmuch as some passages make very clear that the DC Cain, Abel, and Eve, and the Old Testament Cain, Abel and Eve, are indeed the same. In “Chapter 1” of the storyline entitled “Season of Mists.” Dream needs to go to Hell and decides to send Cain to announce his visit. When they meet, Lucifer greets Cain as “the first man born of woman”. When some demons offer to destroy Cain, Lucifer explains, partly quoting from Genesis 4:15: “You cannot hurt him. Cain is under protection of one far greater than the Lord of Dreams. ‘And the Lord said unto him, therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold, and the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.’”

In the issue “A Parliament of Rooks”, Cain, Abel, and Eve are having a “tea party” with a baby dreamer. Cain suggests that as “old storytellers” (an intertextual allusion to their editorial past as horror-hosts), they should tell stories to their guest. Eve and Abel successively narrate their origin stories, which are similar to their Genesis counterparts’. Eve’s story is recognizable but strangely different from the best-known Genesis tale. The story starts with a hermaphrodite Adam, Adam’s first wife, Lilith is “expelled from Eden,” and a new wife is made. She is also expelled, or destroyed, and finally God makes Eve. This version of the story is “what the Midrash states” (i.e. The Alphabet of Ben Sira and Genesis Rabbah). The “esoteric” nature of that Jewish lore confers numinosity to the comic-book character of Eve. Gaiman’s intimate yet detached knowledge of the Jewish sacred texts gave him assets to create some powerful details in his syncretic Sandman mythos. As to Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament, the main difference between Gaiman and the other writers is that most of the others wrote about very famous stories: Creation, the Garden of Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah. Gaiman chose books that are known mostly to people who read or studied the Old Testament. Both as a Jewish author and as a Western popular culture author, Gaiman could not have ignored the founding text of the rich Jewish storytelling tradition of which he is part. However, as an author who also has the passion of creative retelling he sometimes pays his debts in quite unexpected ways. Ways that are sideways: an outsider’s ways.

Cyril Camus teaches English in Toulouse, France, training students for the admission tests of business schools. He is a former teaching assistant and doctoral student at the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, where he wrote a thesis on Neil Gaiman’s works in comics, literature and cinema, which earned him a Ph.D in Studies of English and English-Speaking Cultures. He participated in Northampton University’s Magus conference on Alan Moore in 2010, and wrote several articles on Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and postmodern fantasy in comics, literature and cinema, which were published in the French journals Otrante and Caliban, the US journals Shofar and Studies in the Novel, the British journal Studies in Comics, and in books published in Britain, such as Mountains figured and Disfigured in the English-Speaking World (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) and Visualizing Jewish Narrative (Bloomsbury, 2016). A book adapted from his Ph.D thesis is due to be published in mid-2018 by the Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

Diegetic Space in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

A main element to both the advancement of the plot and the psychological complexity of the characters in Joyce Carol Oates’ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? is the management of space. 

In his introduction to the theory of narrative, Mieke Ball calls the physical space where a character is situated a ‘frame’ (134). This concept is of the utmost importance in Where Are You Going, because the different frames in the short story are fraught with meaning and often symbolise very specific states of mind.

Before starting my analysis, it is important to elucidate on an ostensibly simple distinction. We can divide spatial frames into two different categories; these, I must add, imply an inherent dichotomy: inside and outside. It is their contradictory character that gives them its meaning. Traditionally, an inner or intimate frame is a symbol of security and protection, more so if we are talking about someone’s home. An exterior frame, naturally, carries the opposite connotations. This dichotomy however, becomes much more complicated when we apply it to Oates’ short story. 

Let us think about ‘the outside’ as every space that is not Connie’s family home, irrespective of whether we are talking about the restaurant, Eddie’s car, the cinema or other traditionally interior spaces. If we agree to that distinction, then it becomes evident that the symbolic dyads outside-danger / inside-protection are reversed in this narrative.

We can see such a process happen from the very beginning of the short story. When Connie and her friend arrive in the restaurant wherein they meet Eddie, the narrator says that they approach the premises ‘expectant, as if they were entering a sacred building […] to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for’ (1). The restaurant is given a veneer of religious connotations and actually described as a ‘haven’ a safe place from the world’s dangers. This religious protection is something that Connie is unable to find with her family, and this situation is exacerbated when they leave the frame of their home. On the next page, the narrator tells us that ‘none of them [Connie’s family] bothered with church’ (2). Connie is therefore forced to overcompensate for the lack of religious instruction in her life, and in a clear example of what we call a ‘transference’ in psychology, she seeks the state of mind that the restaurant gives her, after all, ‘the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon’ (2).  

This inversion of symbolical associations to space is not natural, and this is something that the narrator himself is able to convey by dint of subtle details. To start with, the restaurant which Connie and her friends patronise is a place ‘where the older kids hung out’ (2), and therefore inherently dangerous to 15 year olds. In frequenting it, Connie is breaking social mores that dictate which kind of clientele can go where. Two further details make their presence there unwelcome: in the first place, the fact that to reach the restaurant they have to go through a ‘maze of parked cars’ (6), and in the second place, the fact that the restaurant itself is ‘fly-infested’ (2). These clues lead the reader to conclude that Connie’s safe ‘haven’ is not as safe as she would think it is: it is a frame infested by flies, patronised by an older clientele than she, and in the middle of a labyrinth. 

This complicates the symbolic relationship between the inside and the outside and protection and danger. At the beginning of the narrative, it seemed as though the connotations of the two different frames would be reversed, nevertheless, that only happens to a limited degree. Maybe the restaurant is a religious haven for Connie, but let us remember that it is there that she meets Arnold Fiend. His role is also important in terms of the frames in the narrative. It is none other than Arnold who introduces the danger present in the outside into Connie’s privacy when he shows up at her house. It is telling that, when Arnold drives to Connie’s house, the latter ‘dawdles in the doorway’ (3), as though tittering on the very boundary between the public and the private. 

 Even if Connie does pick up the receiver, Arnold does not step into the house. This might be due to the fact that he represents the outside, and therefore, he cannot trespass on Connie’s inner territory. In Arnolds own words, ‘I ain’t made plans for coming in that house where I don’t belong (7). Nevertheless, this presents an obvious problem: if Connie’s house can afford her a certain degree of physical protection, why is it not extended to the psychological sphere?

I propose a linguistically distinction to account for such an aporia. In her short story, Oates uses two words to refer to Connie’s family household; these are, ‘house’ and ‘home’. The difference between the two is of the utmost important, as they are far from being synonyms. The word ‘house’ refers mainly to the physical place, while ‘home’ implies its being lived in by a family. The latter naturally conveys an increased degree of protection both psychological and physical. Both terms are used in Where Are You Going, but not indistinctly, and not an equal number of times. ‘House’ is used thirteen times, meanwhile ‘home’ only eleven. This would seem to imply that the place whereby Connie seeks to fend off Friend is merely a house, viz., a non-descript construction with a least four walls and nothing else, an ‘asbestos ranch house that was now three years old [and] looked small’ (2). Even if we dismiss the fact that ‘house’ is used two times more than ‘home’ as a mere coincidence, we can see the inner frame lose its powers of protection in other ways.

Connie’s house is deconstructed when it loses that symbolical veneer of family protection. It is because Connie is home alone that Arnold is able to manipulate her in the first place. He tells her that ‘anybody can break through a screen door and glass and wood or iron or anything else if he needs to, anybody at all, and specially Arnold Friend’ (7). I must note that Arnold only lists the material components that make up a home and not the symbolical elements that are thereto attached. While he might go through the screen door easily, he will obviously find it a little harder to go through the paternal, maternal, and filial protection that Connie can rely on in normal situations. This makes Connie’s mother’s last comment to her daughter, ‘Stay at home then’ (2) rather ironic, for the moment she stepped out the threshold, the frame stopped being a home, to become a house.

It is at this point of the story that the dichotomy of inside and outside and the symbolic connotations thereto pertaining is turned on its head. After Arnold’s psychological siege on Connie, the frame that used to protect her becomes ‘nothing but a cardboard box, that [he] can knock down any time’ (9). Upon losing the ability to protect her, the house becomes strange to Connie, and so, ‘the kitchen looked like a place she had never seen before’ (7).

However, the house not only loses its status as a ‘haven’ when it fails to keep Connie safe, but it also actively harms her. Instead of helping her fend off Friend, the house acts against Connie: ‘she turned and bumped against a chair or something and hurt her leg’ (8). Arnold needs not harm Connie physically because the very same house she inhabits takes up that role. Finally, even though Connie is able to lift up the receiver, she finds it impossible to phone the police because ‘something roared in her ear’ (9).

In conclusion, we can see how the concept of space is of the utmost importance for a deeper understanding and interpretation of this short story in terms of the psychology of Connie. This being said, the implications of frames in the story are too complex to be analysed in a paper this size. Because of this, I decided to focus only on the use of space in its more conventional or literal sense. Nevertheless, as Jörg Schönert notes, ‘when speaking of space in narratology, a distinction should be made between literal and metaphorical uses of the concept (324). Metaphorical space in this short story undergoes a completely different approach and, because of that, it lies outside of the scope of this paper. However, I must mention briefly that one of the main ways in which metaphorical space is used in Where Are You Going is as an apparatus for dehumanisation. Arnold does not see Connie as a human being, but a place he wants to enter into: ‘And I’ll come inside you where it’s all secret’ (6).

Ian Iracheta is a student of English at UNAM in Mexico City where he specialises in Shakespeare Studies. He writes short and long fiction and critical essays on literature.

References:
Ball, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Print.

Handbook of Narratology. Gen ed. Schönert, Jörg. London: Walter de Gruyter. 2009. Print.

Oates, Joyce Carol. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? 1966. Web. https://www.d.umn.edu/~csigler/PDF%20files/oates_going.pdf

El espacio diegético en Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
por Joyce Carol Oates

    Un elemento esencial para el desdoblamiento de la trama y la complejidad psicológica de los eventos en Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? por Joyce Carol Oates es el concepto del espacio. En su teoría de la narratología, Mieke Ball llama al lugar en donde un personaje se encuentra situado el frame o marco (134). Este componente es especialmente importante en el cuento de Oates, ya que los marcos topográficos están cargados de significado, y se pueden incluso concebir como símbolos. 

    La primera distinción que es menester hacer es una ostensiblemente sencilla. podemos dividir los marcos espaciales en dos simples categorías que implican una dicotomía inherente: éstas son adentro y afuera, y es exactamente su carácter de oposición lo que les da su significación. Tradicionalmente se concibe a un espacio interior como símbolo de seguridad y protección, más aún si éste se trata de un hogar familiar. Sin embargo, esta dicotomía teorética se complica al momento de aplicarla al texto.

    Si concebimos al concepto de “afuera” como el espacio exterior al hogar de la familia, sin importar que éste sea el restaurante,  el coche de Eddie o del padre de Betty, o el cine u otros espacios interiores, es entonces evidente que las relaciones simbólicas exterior-peligro / hogar-seguridad se ven invertidas en el cuento. 

    Éste, sin embargo, es un proceso que podemos apreciar en retrospectiva desde el principio de la narración. Cuando Connie y su amiga se acercan al restaurante en el que encuentran a Eddie, el narrador dice que ellas se acercan al lugar “expectant as if they were entering a sacred building […] to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for” (1). El restaurante es entonces recubierto con una investidura religiosa que lo presenta como un lugar seguro, un “haven” donde nada les puede pasar a las niñas. De la misma manera, esta seguridad religiosa es algo que Connie no encuentra con su familia, y mucho menos en la casa vacía. El narrador nos dice que “none of them [la familia de Connie] bothered with church” (2). Connie entonces se ve forzada a compensar la falta de religiosidad en su vida y a buscar la seguridad mental que ésta otorga en el restaurante: “the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon” (1).

    Sin embargo, esta inversión de significación espacial no es natural y el narrador logra expresar este hecho por medio de pequeños detalles. Para empezar, el restaurante es un lugar en el que Connie y sus amigas violentan ciertas convenciones sociales. Es un establecimiento “where the older kids hung out” (2), y por lo tanto, podríamos deducir que es inherentemente peligroso para niñas de quince años. Agregado a este hecho se encuentran dos detalles menores: primero, el hecho de que para llegar al restaurante tienen que atravesar un “maze of parked cars” (6) y en segundo lugar, que el restaurante mismo está “fly-infested” (2). El lector entonces deduce que el “haven” de Connie no es tan seguro como a ella le parece: es un lugar infestado de moscas, frecuentado por jóvenes mayores y a la mitad de un laberinto.

    Podemos concluir entonces, que aunque la tabla de relaciones simbólicas exterior-peligro / hogar-seguridad es violentada en el cuento, ella no sufre una inversión completa, por lo menos en la primera parte de la fábula, ya que cabe mencionar que Arnold Friend es un personaje que Connie conoce por primera vez en su “haven.” Empero, es este mismo personaje el que introduce el peligro del exterior a la esfera privada de Connie al presentarse en su casa. Cuando Arnold llega a la residencia, Connie “dwadle[s] in the doorway” (3), es decir, se encuentra justo en el punto de entrada, en el punto medio en el que convienen la esfera interior y la exterior. Aunque Connie toma el teléfono, Arnold nunca entra a la casa, a pesar de que la amenazó con hacerlo, tal vez porque lo que él representa, i.e., el exterior, no puede invadir el interior del hogar de Connie. En sus propias palabras “I ain’t made plans for coming in that house where I don’t belong”(7). Sin embargo esto presenta un problema: ¿si la casa le brinda a Connie cierta protección física de Arnold, por qué no también psicológica?

    En Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? se usan predominantemente dos palabras cuando se tiene que hacer una referencia a la residencia donde vive la familia. Estas palabras son house y home. La distinción entre ambas es de suma importancia, ya que no son exactamente sinónimos. La palabra house simplemente indica el inmueble, mientras que un home es una casa habitada por una familia, lo que implica un grado mayor de seguridad psicológica. En el cuento se utilizan las dos versiones, sin embargo, no en números iguales. La palabra house es usada trece veces, mientras que home sólo once. Este hecho implica que el lugar en el que Connie se intenta refugiar del sitio psicológico de Arnold Friend es solamente un inmueble de cuatro paredes, solamente una “asbestos ranch house that was now three years old [and] looked small” (2). Incluso si no aceptamos la superioridad numérica de la casa sobre el hogar cómo índice de este proceso, éste también se ve realizado en otras maneras. 

    La casa es deconstruida al perder esa investidura simbólica que la reforzaba con la seguridad que provee una familia. Cabe mencionar que es exactamente el hecho de que Connie está sola en la casa lo que le permite a Arnold manipularla psicológicamente. Su atacante le confía que “anybody can break through a screen door and glass and wood or iron or anything else if he needs to, anybody at all, and specially Arnold Friend” (7). Sobre esta cita es importante mencionar que Arnold solamente enlista los aspectos materiales de la construcción y no los simbólicos. Él bien podrá atravesar el mosquitero, mas no la protección paternal, maternal y fraternal que Connie tendría si su familia se encontrara en la casa. Este hecho vuelve el último comentario que su madre le dirige a Connie, “stay at home then” (2), marcadamente irónico, ya que en el momento que su familia se fue a la barbacoa, el frame dejó de ser un home para convertirse en una house y por lo tanto perdió su sistema más fundamental de seguridad. 

    En ese mismo momento la dicotomía mencionada en la primera parte de este ensayo se encuentra por primera vez totalmente invertida. Después del asedio psicológico de Arnold, la casa que defendía a Connie “is nothing but a cardboard box that [he] can knock down any time” (9). Al perder su función primaria, la de la protección, la casa se vuelve igualmente extraña para Connie. “The kitchen looked like a place she had never seen before” (7). Sin embargo, la casa no sólo pierde sus cualidades de ser un “haven” al romper la promesa de mantener a Connie a salvo, sino que, en las escenas finales, es la misma casa la que lastima a la niña. De esa manera invierte totalmente su carga simbólica de protección. En vez de ayudarla a pelear en contra de la amenaza que es Arnold, la casa violenta a Connie: “She turned and bumped against a chair or something hurting her leg” (8). Arnold nunca lastima a Connie físicamente en el cuento, ya que es la misma casa la que toma ese rol. Finalmente, aunque Connie llega a sostener el teléfono en su mano se ve incapaz de hacer la llamada a la policía ya que “something roared in her ear” (9).

    En conclusión, podemos notar que el tratamiento que el espacio recibe en este cuento es de suma importancia para una interpretación más profunda de su contenido psicológico. Las implicaciones del espacio diegético en Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? son por lo tanto naturalmente demasiado complejas para analizarse en su totalidad. Para limitar el tema, decidí concentrarme en el análisis del espacio en su sentido más “tradicional” o literal. Empero, como Jörg Schönert menciona, “when speaking of space in narratology, a distinction should be made between literal and metaphorical uses of the concept” (324). El espacio metafórico en el cuento recibe un tratamiento completamente diferente al literal, y por lo tanto se encuentra fuera de la jurisdicción de este ensayo. Sin embargo, cabe mencionar brevemente, que el espacio metafórico es usado como un aparato de deshumanización en el cuento. Arnold no ve a Connie como un ser humano, sino como un simple lugar al que quiere entrar: “And I’ll come inside you where it’s all secret” (6).

Bibliografía:
Ball, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Print.

Handbook of Narratology. Gen ed. Schönert, Jörg. London: Walter de Gruyter. 2009. Print.

Oates, Joyce Carol. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? 1966. Web. https://www.d.umn.edu/~csigler/PDF%20files/oates_going.pdf

Time, Trauma, and the Machinery of Memory

[Originally published as “When the Life Giver Dies, All Around Is Laid Waste: Structural Trauma and the Splitting of Time in Signal to Noise, A Graphic Novel” in Journal of Popular Culture Vol. 45, No. 5 (John Wiley and sons, 2012)]

In 1978, the narrative iconical subgenres witnessed the appearance of a work that helped define a new trend in the world of comic-book production. The work was Will Eisner’s masterpiece, A Contract with God, which the author described as a “graphic novel.” The use of this phrase marked the birth of a new orientation in the narratives of sequential art. Consciously or unconsciously, it is commonly accepted that Eisner inaugurated the contemporary subgenre of the graphic novel in English, a type of text that explores the narrative possibilities of visual language by means of complex narrative structures.

Among the many authors who have devoted their creative efforts to these narrative texts, Neil Gaiman stands out as one of the most prolific and celebrated graphic-novel writers. His magnum opus, The Sandman, revolutionised the comic-book mainstream during the eight years of its publication, reoriented the medium and established the foundations of the newborn graphic novel. With the graphic artist Dave McKean, Gaiman constituted a fully creative tandem that authored three groundbreaking graphic novels (Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, and The Comical Tragedy or Tragical Comedy of Mr Punch), outstanding illustrated novels (The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, The Wolves in the Walls), and the visually-astonishing feature film Mirror Mask.

MEMORY AND TIME

Their graphic novels show a recurrent concern with the role of memory and the subjective perception of time in the shaping of the adult subject’s identity. By recalling past events, these narratives display characters that seem to obsessively dwell on different events taking place simultaneously. Thus, in Violent Cases the present time of the autodiegetic narrator intertwines with his childhood memories of his meeting with Al Capone’s osteopath, and his problematic relationship with his parents. In a similar vein, the concept of time plays an essential role in Signal to Noise, as it affects the technical disposition of the narrative. And The Comical Tragedy or Tragical Comedy of Mr Punch portrays the traumatic events in the past of a character who recalls his childhood memories parallelly with the representation of a Punch-and-Judy puppet show. 

Within the theoretical framework of Trauma Studies, the following pages will focus on Signal to Noise as a trauma narrative that explores the collapse of the fragile boundaries of temporal perception in the mind of a subject affected by traumatic experiences. Originally published in 1989, this graphic novel portrays the final moments of a forty-nine-year-old film director who is diagnosed with lung cancer. With only a few months of life expectancy, the protagonist secludes himself in his apartment, and starts questioning the meaning of his own life as both creator and human being. His trauma triggers off the harsh thought that everyday life is interrupted by a disturbing noise that prevents the individual from listening to important signals and relevant information. He realises that even his own creative worlds, his film productions, have been corrupted by noisy intermediaries, thus resulting in tainted messages, carrying different meanings from the ones he originally had in mind. Consequently, he decides to compose his last work, a film entitled Apocatastasis, inside the visual world of his own mind. This posthumous mental production will deal with the metaphysical fear of the apocalyptic end of the world that flooded European minds at the end of the first millennium. Still, as he feels the relentless approach of his impending death, the protagonist eventually writes the script of his film on paper as the last resort, for both his characters and himself, to survive the disintegration of their respective worlds. 

Thus, this article aims to analyse Signal to Noise as a representation of the mental unease of a subject affected by a traumatic experience that inextricably leads to an in-depth examination of the significance of human existence. The following analysis will explore the shattering of the concept of time in the agonist protagonist’s mind, as it is perceived after the suffocating experience of what Dominick LaCapra labels “structural trauma” (82). It will be argued that the philosophical category of time splits into three different parallel representations, which become associated with three different conceptions of time: firstly, the protagonist’s everyday life, perceived as a linear and uniform time continuum, will be related to Henri Bergson’s ideas of measurable time, la durée réelle (41), and to Martin Heidegger’s concept of Jeweiligkeit (1999, 34). Secondly, coherent associations of the character’s memories of the past and his creative thinking for the production of Apocatastasis emphasise the importance of the subjective awareness of time and existence (Bergson’s la durée interne). And finally, a traumatic apprehension of unconnected and unmotivated images breaks the continuity of narrative time and disrupts the associations of the two previous perceptions. This shattered representation of time is to be understood as a projection of the character’s traumatic memory (in Pierre Janet’s terms), that has been created in his mind after the traumatic discovery of his inexorable death.

TRAUMA AND TRAUMA STUDIES

A definition of trauma according to Trauma Studies will prove helpful for the understanding of the subsequent argumentation. Cathy Caruth defines trauma as “an event that . . . is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known, and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (1996, 4). The shocking episode escapes the subject’s ability to understand and internalise the event. Hence, a traumatised individual is unable to translate into words the memories of the original traumatic situation, because, as Anne Whitehead affirms, “trauma comprises an event or experience which overwhelms the individual and resists language and representation” (3). After a traumatic experience, which may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the subject is deprived of the mental defences that normally allow the individual to arrange his or her memories of the past and provide him or her with a linear perception of life. The memories of the extreme event, thus, become dissociated and stored in the subject’s unconscious, where they remain blocked until another apparently unrelated happening brings them to the conscious. Characteristically, they return to haunt the patient in the shape of compulsive reenactments of the original trauma (fashioned as flashbacks, nightmares, recurrent imagery, or compulsive behaviour), although the traumatised individual cannot consciously comprehend the origin of these symptoms. 

In Violent Cases, Gaiman and McKean’s first graphic novel, the narrator offered a short definition of what could be considered as dissociated memories. These “bits of one’s memory,” the narrator explains, “simply do not work —or do not work in relationship to the rest of it, anyway.” 

NARRATIVE AND TRAUMATIC MEMORY

Aware of these dissociative processes through the analyses of neurosis and hysteria he carried out, in 1889, Pierre Janet distinguished two different types of memory in the traumatised mind, namely, “narrative memory” and “traumatic memory” (Van Der Kolk 158-182). Narrative memory allows remembrances of past events to be organised and arranged sequentially, thus granting a narrative, coherent sense of the passing of the subject’s time. By contrast, traumatic memories are the memories of extreme events which cannot be assimilated by the mind, and therefore, surface to the conscious as dissociated images which find no logical place in the lineal structure of the narrative memory. Drawing on these ideas, Maren Linett defines traumatic memories as “bits of images or memories that erupt inexplicably into consciousness . . . moments of mental dissonance [that] interrupt logical narration and so can be seen as subverting norms of coherence and unity” (444). Traumatic memories return unexpectedly to plague a traumatised mind that is not capable of integrating them within the structure of narrative memory. Hence, these fragmentary memories imply a destruction of the conception of time as a lineal continuum in the subject’s everyday life. As these memories “elude temporal placement” (450), we can positively affirm that trauma breaks “the mind’s experience of time” (Caruth 1996, 61), because the subject is unable to understand traumatic memories as past events as long as they return to the mind as unprocessed experiences which are continually lived and reenacted.

Additionally, a further consequence arises from this destruction of the linear, coherent perception of existence. These fragmented memories also shatter the concept of unity of identity of the self. Sheila Benhabib contends that identity is “a coherent narrative that stands as [the individual’s] life’s story” (161). This contention presupposes that the individual gives sense to his or her own identity by means of the meaningful narration of his or her existence, with the help of narrative memory, which stands as a lineal story of the subject’s life. This understanding of existence offers a comprehensible and comprehensive vision of life as a sequentially arranged narration, where past events are naturally included in the definition of the subject’s identity. Consequently, trauma and the subsequent traumatic memories destroy the perception of the subject as a coherent unity that moves forward in the lineal progression of time. The traumatised individual becomes shattered as his mind must come to terms with two different timelines: the lineal perception of narrative time, and the fragmented memories of traumatic time. 

IDENTITY AND THE ENTRAILS OF THE MACHINERY OF MEMORY

In Signal to Noise, the film director’s identity shivers as he is forced to face the trauma of his relentless demise. As the narrator of his own story, he seems incapable of taking control of certain images which sharply break the continuity of his narration, making him anticipate his tragic end. Thus, his narration is clogged with symbols of death and time that reflect the imagery dissociated in his traumatic memory, as can be seen on pages 16 and 35. On page 35, we find representations of clocks and sundials that plague the director’s mind. These images break the continuity of his storytelling, undercutting unexpectedly the visual narrative. As mental reenacments of the traumatic moment when he learnt about his terminal illness, they reveal the narrator’s unconscious anxiety of a human being for whom mortality has moved from the realm of abstraction to that of suffocating truth. This awareness provokes an obsessive concern with the meaning of time itself and the human devices that try to control it by confining it within measurable segments. 

Similarly, page 16 illustrates this collapse of the concept of time as a lineal, logical entity, revealing the entrails of the machinery of memory. At the moment when he feels the proximity of death, the notion of time seems to be shattered and deconstructed into minimal units, made not of seconds, minutes or hours, but of artificial mechanisms and metallic devices. Unable to verbalise the sensations produced by the clash of narrative and traumatic time, the narrator portrays clocks as mechanical artefacts immersing the subject in pure noise. Thus, clocks force the individual to centre his attention on themselves, instead of drawing his attention to the important signals of life. 

THE IMAGE OF DEATH WITHIN EACH ONE OF US

The protagonist’s traumatic memory also expels images of death from the narrator’s unconscious mind. As portrayed on page 32, despite his efforts to evade himself while writing his last film on paper, aseptic X-ray images of skulls hover over his head, evoking the scene at the beginning of the story, when he remembered how he was diagnosed with lung cancer. These skulls, as the narrator had previously thought in a different context, are “the image of death that waits within each one of us” (29). Nevertheless, there is no logical reason why they should appear on this page. They break his train of thoughts and appear free from any kind of motivated association.

On this page, the splitting of the film director’s mind according to his three different perceptions of time is visually portrayed. On the one hand, we can see the background situation of the time of his narrative memory, with the film director sitting on a chair as he is creating Apocatastasis. On the other hand, superposed over this background, two panels of pictures portray his subjective creation and perception of time, as they depict two characters of Apocatastasis. Interestingly enough, these two panels behave as a visual frame for the page layout. And finally, imposing their presence over the film director and his creation, we discern traces of his traumatic memory in the form of X-ray images which break the continuity of the narrative and appear unmotivatedly to make him relive the traumatic truth in its own trauma time.        

THE TRAGEDY OF EXISTENCE

A notable aspect of the dissociated images hiding in the film director’s traumatic memory is the fact that they do not refer to an extreme event that has already happened in the past. On the contrary, they point towards the suffocating future of his imminent death. His trauma does not come from an event that “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known, and is therefore not available to consciousness,” as Caruth defined trauma (1996, 4), because he has not experienced the event yet. It is the news about his lung cancer and short life-expectancy that produces in the narrator an anxiety linked to the traumatising truth of human existence: that human life is axiomatically related to mortality. There is no possible human means to escape from this. The certainty of death awakens the urge not only to struggle for continuing alive, but also to distinguish the important signals from the noise surrounding the character’s life.

Since the tragedy of human life is one of the recurrent motifs in Gaiman and McKean’s graphic novels, it also appears in their third production, The Comical Tragedy or Tragical Comedy of Mr Punch. After considering photographs as tokens of past memories, the narrative voice concludes that “each image carries with it a sense of loss, even if the loss is tinged, no matter how faintly, with relief. Age carries strange burdens with it, and one of them, perhaps inevitably, is death” (Gaiman 1995, 10).

STRUCTURAL TRAUMA

From the perspective of Trauma Studies, the film director’s case in Signal to Noise would be an illustrative example of what Dominick LaCapra has termed “structural trauma.” LaCapra, in Writing History, Writing Trauma, establishes an operative distinction between “historical traumas” and “structural traumas” (81). Historical traumas refer to the type of traumas that have been previously defined in this article in Cathy Caruth’s line. In terms of Greg Forter, who calls them “punctual traumas,” historical traumas are “historical events of such singularity, magnitude and horror that they can be read as shocks that disable the psychic system” (259). Characteristically, then, these traumas are inextricably connected with punctual events that happened in the past of the survivor, and which have not been assimilated into his or her narrative memory. Hence, LaCapra can affirm that “in historical trauma, it is possible (at least theoretically) to locate the traumatizing events” (81).

The narrator of Signal to Noise is traumatised not by a past event, but by the anxiety that arises from the recognition of his imminent death. This anxiety is precisely what Dominick LaCapra labels “structural trauma.” According to LaCapra, “structural trauma . . . is not an event but the anxiety-producing condition of possibility related to the potential for historical traumatization” (82). As the film director is confronted with the absolute certainty of death, he feels the anxiety coming from the natural human fear of the end of his own life. 

MELANCHOLY AND ACTING OUT

The trauma of his illness, thus, reveals a deeper, structural distress that makes him stare at the mortal nature of human beings, leading to a deconstruction of the concept of time and the questioning of the meaning of existence. This plunges him into a melancholy process through which he secludes himself in his small apartment, as portrayed on page 17, in order to relive, in a compulsive acting out, the bits of images that are stored in his traumatic memory. 

On this page, the protagonist of the graphic novel has secluded himself in his apartment, trying to avoid any human contact from the outside world. Hanging on the room’s walls, a number of photographs of nameless individuals impassively grin at him as he is yielding to the process of melancholy that the structural trauma provokes in him. These photographs portray single and simple visions of subjects frozen outside time and space. Hence, they represent the film director’s inner wish to escape from the implacable flow of time, and exist as an entity outside the boundaries of human reality. 

The narrator’s structural trauma makes him wonder about the significance of human existence and time itself. Echoing the shattering of his mental defences, his own perception of time is also split and represented as fragmented in his narration. In this sense, Signal to Noise strongly recalls Patricia Moran’s contention that “the splitting of the narrative mirrors the dissociative thinking and patterns of depersonalization” (119) that trauma brings about. The graphic novel, by means of repetition and indirection, mimics structural trauma’s forms and symptoms, leading to a collapse of the categories of temporality and existence (Whitehead 3).  

HENRI BERGSON’S LA DURÉE RÉELLE

Mirroring the traumatic experience in the subject’s mind, the reader is offered three parallel perceptions of time in this graphic novel. Firstly, the narrative presents the time of everyday reality in the narrator’s life. Through this conception, the protagonist interacts with other characters who share a lineal representation of existence divided into a structure of past, present and future time. Vyvyan Evans explains the function of this structure, arguing that “it serves to distinguish the present from the past, and allows us to anticipate the future” (25). This type of time helps the subject create a narrative memory of his or her own existence and, therefore, identity, in the shape of a lineal narration, where past events lead to the present state of being, and may anticipate a prediction of the future time to come. Time is, thus, perceived as a constantly uniform, homogeneous entity which can be positively measured and cut into sections. 

This notion of time can be related to the ideas of two important philosophers. On the one hand, Henri Bergson’s conception of measurable time, la durée réelle (41), approaches time as an entity that can be measured in the objective units given by the clock. Consequently, a mathematical formula may give the individual a quantitative description of the amount of time elapsed during a precise event. Time would thus be understood as segments of elapsed time that can be conceived as small units of seconds, minutes and hours.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER’S JEWEILIGKEIT

On the other hand, this type of measurable time, which distinguishes between past and future from the perspective of the present, can be related to Martin Heidegger’s concept of Jeweiligkeit (1999, 34). According to this philosopher, the subject (which he calls the Dasein, as a combination of Sein, “being,” and Da, “there”), acquires absolute individuality of being in a precise instant of present time and existence. That moment of the present is arbitrarily established in contrast to the past and the future, in a conception of time where this category can be measured by the clock. In order to define the subject or human being as an absolute individuality that cannot be substituted, the Sein has to be placed in its particular place in time, becoming the Dasein, or “being there.” Therefore, in order to reach a full apprehension of the self, the individual has to establish his or her own definition in the present, as a result of the events of his or her linear past, while being aware, at the same time, of the disparate possibilities of change that may come from the future. 

In Signal to Noise, the narrator shares his existence with two other characters in this measurable time of everyday life. This perception of time is emphasised by the narrative structure, though the introduction of three sections, entitled “Prelude,” “Interlude,” and “Postlude.” The structural arrangement of the text recalls the objective division of time as past, present and future. Thus, in these sections, it can be stated that the narrator faces his Jeweiligkeit, the moment when he is defined as a being in a precise objective time in connection to other beings, against which he defines his identity. Hence, this type of time perception helps him base his identity on the foundations of a narrative memory which plainly distinguishes between past, present, and future.

SUBJECTIVE TIME, LA DURÉE INTERNE

The second perception of time in Signal to Noise escapes the possibility of being measured in objective units. The subjective, internal perception of time, or la durée interne in Bergson’s philosophy (61), cannot be approached in terms of minutes or seconds, as time itself becomes part of the feelings and memories coming from the inside of the subject (mémoire intérieure 41). Through this perception, the associative processes of the mind distort the linearity of time by means of constant connections between present events and memories of the past. Consequently, time is not perceived as a lineal movement towards the future, but as a coherent present which significantly associates events with the past.

The distortion of the linearity of time may also affect the visual representation of memories. Thus, we relate our present with the past by means of reinterpreting those past events from the perspective of the current moment of time. In their first visual narrative, Violent Cases, Gaiman and McKean already explored this concept, as the physical aspect of Al Capone’s osteopath changes according to how the narrator remembers his physical description at different moments in time. Thus, the osteopath is first presented as a “Polish Red Indian chief;” then as an Albert Einstein-looking old man; and finally, “like Humphrey Bogart’s partner in The Maltese Falcon” (29). Interestingly enough, the osteopath seems to have no physical reality outside the narrator’s mind and memories. 

Although the film director in Signal to Noise does not represent remembrances of the past connected with his current situation in a lineal, coherent structure, he binds his present circumstances, his impending death, to other cultural references that come to his mind à la Proust through free association of ideas. On pages 44 to 47, the reader is offered visual and textual references to the Biblical end of the world, St John’s Revelations, which are directly associated with the present time of the character’s mind. Nevertheless, the most important influence that this subjective perception of time has for the narrator is the urge to compose and, eventually, write his last film. His creative thinking of Apocatastasis takes him to the writing of the script, thus consciously associating his looming demise with the disappearance of his characters’ world at the end of the first millennium. Significantly, the graphic novel divides the narration mostly between the lineal time of the director’s everyday life and the subjective time of the film that is being created in his mind. In this way, the form of the text seems to emphasise the fact that both perceptions of time are equally important for the development of the narration, as well as for the self-definition of its protagonist.

TRAUMA AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS

The urge to record his film on paper would be, according to Stef Craps’ conception of “story-telling as an existential necessity” for a traumatised person (2), an example of the attempt by the film director to come to terms with his trauma. With this idea in mind, we can introduce the third type of time perception to be considered in this essay: trauma time. Whereas measurable time and subjective time are related in the sense that the memories of subjective time are motivated by logical and coherent associations with lineal, measurable time, trauma time breaks the continuity and logic of narrative memory by introducing “fragmented components of frozen imagery and sensation that possess iconic, visual qualities” (Moran 5). These elements of traumatic memory destroy both lineal and subjective time, thus becoming what Fredric Jameson describes as “the derealization of the whole surrounding of everyday reality” (76) in the life of the film director.  

As portrayed on page 19, the director’s perception of his everyday life is shattered into fragmentary and incoherent images and immersed in noise. On this page, Inanna, one of the narrator’s closest friends, tells him how sorry she is about the sad news of his cancer. Nevertheless, the narrator just perceives noise, as her words are no meaningful signals that might help him overcome his structural anxiety. In his own words: “Inanna [is] talking, saying things, she’s sorry, doctors make mistakes, she’s so sorry, new treatments every day, if there’s anything she can do, so very sorry, on and on, saying nothing at all. Just noise” (19). 

The experience of structural trauma in the narrator’s mind brings about the collapse of the foundations of a meaningful existence. Visually, this page shows the destruction of the reality of everyday life, laying bare the machinery of what Fredric Jameson has described as the “photographic simulacrum” of reality (66). Since the protagonist suffers from structural trauma, he seems to realise that the social agreement on what constitutes reality is just an artificial simulacrum. As the perception and representation of lineal time burst into pieces, time loses its value as the basic unit for giving coherence to the memories of the past and the expectations of the future. This leaves the subject immersed in the continuous present of trauma time, where he is doomed to compulsively act out the scenes and images of his structural trauma in a never-ending, repetitive gesture (LaCapra 21). 

The title of the graphic novel proves quite meaningful in these terms. Literally, the phrase “signal to noise” refers to a measurement employed in electrical engineering for evaluating the amount of noise in a sound signal. As Jerry C. Whitaker explains, “the amount of noise in a signal can be characterized by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which is the ratio of the power of the signal to the power of the noise” (1396). Hence, it might be stated that the narrator of the graphic novel has found the signal-to-noise ratio that helps him evaluate the amount of noise that is present in the signal of his life. The structural trauma of his imminent death has made him fall into the signal-to-noise ratio of his own existence. Therefore, his life, understood as a meaningful succession of events in a lineal conception of time and memory, has collapsed.

THE DISSOLUTION OF TIME AND LANGUAGE

Through this deconstruction of chronological time and the abolition of the notions of past and future, the narration falls into a continuous present, thus imitating the temporality of trauma narratives (Whitehead 9). Hence, conceiving trauma present as a verbal tense in which no past and no future can exist, we witness the dissolution of the essential category of time. According to Vyvyan Evans, time “provides a means of segmenting and so analysing experience, processing raw perceptual data into events and states, into change and stasis, experiences which can be encoded in language” (251). In other words, the concept of time as a progression from the past to the present models the understanding of the world and of human existence in community. As the subject is able to verbalise and share experiences of the past, he or she is also able to grant unifying coherence to his or her existence. As Martin Heidegger explained, language and the subsequent verbalisation of the understanding of time and experiences are two essential characteristics that help define the subject in a precise moment of existence. The subject is defined not only as a being in a concrete instant of time, the Dasein, but also as a being included in the community the individual is related with by means of language (191). 

As we have seen, the unexpected surfacing to the conscious of fragments of a traumatic memory breaks the subject’s sense of coherent existence, which is essential for the definition of the self. These fragmentary memories not only destroy the conception of linear time, they also undermine the subject’s ability to arrange his memories into verbal expressions (narrative memory). Hence, language itself suffers a deep deconstruction. The protagonist of Signal to Noise realises that language is not an effective tool to express and explain his structural trauma. Pages 41 and 42 are an overt expression of the narrator’s frustration with language. On this double splash page, superposed on an incoherent background of letters and figures, we can read the following statement: “You know you can set fire to the capacity to say.” As these words suggest, the narrator is painfully conscious of the futility of words to express his structural trauma coherently. He cannot approach his death and face mortality by means of language, because words acquire meaning through their position in the linguistic chain and are, therefore, dependent on lineal progression, development and temporal sequence, and this is something that makes no sense in the stagnant reality of the traumatised character. 

Thus, as Cathy Caruth affirms, “this failure to arrange the memory in words and symbols leaves it to be organized on a somatosensory or iconic level: as somatic sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares and flashbacks” (1995, 172). At the same time, the structural anxiety that comes from the absolute certainty of death is reflected in the nightmares and icons of suffering that clog this graphic narrative. As we have seen, when language fails to reconcile the film director with the outside world, he is left speechless and incapable to make sense of other people’s words in the meaningless existence of noise. As portrayed on page 20, the structural trauma in his mind plunges the film maker into a speechless world, where words flee, giving way to visual sensations. 

WRITING ONESELF INTO EXISTENCE

Speech, thus, becomes just a disruption of meaning, rather than a source of meaning. Words turn out to be void entities made of air which noisily interfere with the important signals of life. They stop being real in order to reveal the trim reckoning of the self-sustainable lie of reality, as Falstaff already recognised in the first part of Henry the Fourth (Act V, sc. 1, ll. 132-140). Thus, the film director remains as quiet as the photographs that hang in his flat’s walls, because his ability to establish a communication has been utterly deconstructed. 

Nevertheless, his lack of verbal language for speech communication does not prevent him from writing his last film. Echoing Samuel Beckett’s characters, he feels the urge to express himself in some way in order to corroborate his existence. Hence, the narrator writes the story on paper in order to create a place for him to exist. The existentialist Angst of ceasing to be pushes the protagonist forward to create, in an indirect way, a parallel existence of words without noise where he can escape the structural trauma of human mortality. In this sense, it might be stated that writing Apocatastasis contains a healing principle for his structural trauma. The film director finds a way to work through the shocking news of his impending death by placing himself as a fictional character in a different ontology outside death’s reach. As Dominic LaCapra explains, “in post-traumatic situations in which one relives (or acts out) the past, distinctions tend to collapse, including the crucial distinction between then and now” (46). The concept of time in the protagonist’s real world has collapsed due to the acting out of his historical trauma. Still, his looming death makes him face the structural trauma of human mortality. 

DEATH, MELANCHOLIA, AND ENDLESS MOURNING

Death, as Martin Heidegger affirmed, is the end of the subject in the world (267). The Dasein, as he called the subject, finds meaning as a unity in a precise moment of time, but it always has the potentiality of becoming something different in the future. There is, thus, a projection of the sense of being inside the horizon of time (269). The essence of the Dasein is constituted by the possibility of being in the time to come. Hence, death implies the end of the “being there” in time, as well as of not “being there in the world” (273). In other words, death is the final loss of the subject in his or her disappearance from existence. 

When the narrator is forced to face the structural anxiety of human mortality, he falls into a melancholy process that makes him reject time and external reality. He secludes himself in his apartment, and considers the world as noise that distracts him from the important signals. Dominic LaCapra, in his analysis of structural and historical trauma, distinguishes two symptomatic processes that affect the traumatised subject: melancholia and mourning (65-66). As he explains, the loss involved in a historical (or punctual) trauma may lead to a compulsive acting out of the traumatic event. This acting out plunges the subject into a state of melancholia, thus becoming one of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. In order to overcome this situation, the traumatised subject has to undergo a process of working through, by means of which he or she is able to verbalise the fragmented traumatic memories into a coherent narrative, so that, eventually, melancholia changes into a state of mourning that can help the subject heal.

By contrast, structural trauma does not imply a loss. Rather, it is the product of “an anxiety-producing condition” (81) related to an absence. In the case of Signal to Noise, the structural trauma is the absence of time and the traumatic recognition of mortality. According to LaCapra, “when absence, approximated to loss, becomes the object of mourning, the mourning may (perhaps must) become impossible and turn continually back into endless melancholy” (68). Hence, the structural trauma will never lead on to the healing stage of mourning. The subject, thus, remains for ever in a stage of endless melancholy.

BEYOND MORTALITY

In spite of this fact, the narrative of Signal to Noise offers an optimistic alternative to the anxiety of existence, by presenting a possible escape from structural trauma. The narrator finds a way to work through the trauma of human mortality by means of creative writing. In the new reality of Apocatastasis, that he starts to create in his mind, the narrator will find a place to continue his own existence. Although, at first, he cannot consciously explain the reason for writing the story, as he declares on page 29: “Today I did something strange. I started to write. There can be no purpose in this. Still, I am writing,” it can be stated that he has found a path to triumph over death, not only for himself, but also for the villagers that live in that fictional world. Thus, in his new community, he may be capable of overcoming death and human mortality.

Nevertheless, before he is able to create his own new diegesis, he has to metaphorically destroy the ontology of his everyday life. Page 25 illustrates this moment of revelation in the subject’s existence. Feeling that his previous productions were corrupted by noisy intermediaries, the film director rebels against himself by breaking into pieces the symbols of his life (the film posters that were hanging on the walls of his flat). In this scene, he rips out the pages of his manuscripts. Still, superposed on the pictures of the page, the attentive reader can catch a glimpse of torn-out pieces of a different and meaningful script. The fragmented words on these pieces show the script of Signal to Noise, the graphic novel itself. Through this metafictional leap, the film director is willingly shattering his own existence in the diegesis of his real life, the diegesis of the graphic novel, in order to start creating his own existence in his last film.

THE AGONIST’S ARTISTIC REBELLION

Hence, the narrator becomes what Miguel de Unamuno referred to as an “agonist” character. In the prologue to Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo (1920), Unamuno differentiated between those characters showing voluntad (from Latin volo, meaning “will and volition”), and those defined by noluntad (from Latin nolo, meaning “lack of desire, strength and, therefore, will”). Those having voluntad are the central characters of the Spanish writer’s narrations; they become the agonistas (2000, 47), Greek term for “fighters,” as they wrestle for their own existence in the struggle between life and free will. Their willpower is such that they even come to rebel against the author himself, as in the case of Augusto Pérez, agonist protagonist of Niebla (1907), who, when shocked with the news about the author planning to kill him, begs the author to prolong his life in the following words: “Es que yo quiero vivir, don Miguel, quiero vivir, quiero vivir...” (1982, 283). This metafictional leap of ontologies portrays the traumatic reality of the subject’s struggle against mortality. 

Similarly, the film director in Signal to Noise rebels against his own life by shattering the script of his own reality. He denies the possibility of his own death as he tears out his reality into deconstructed pieces of meaningless paper. By means of this destruction of ontologies, he finds a way to work through the structural trauma of his impending death. And this will result in his final overcome of the structural trauma of death, because he writes himself into immortal existence in Apocatastasis, his final production. Drawing on these ideas, we must consider here Roland Barthes’ quotation with which Gaiman and McKean introduce the graphic novel: “Everything has a meaning or nothing has. To put it another way, one could say that art is without noise” (Gaiman 1999, 1). Taken from the “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” included in Image, Music, Text (1977), Barthes’ words are telling for this reading of Signal to Noise: “Even were a detail [in a narrative] to appear irretrievably insignificant . . . it would nonetheless end up with precisely the meaning of absurdity or uselessness: everything has a meaning, or nothing has. To put it another way, one could say that art is without noise (as that term is employed in information theory): art is a system which is pure, no unit ever goes wasted” (89-90). Art, in contrast to real life, establishes a communication free from the noise that impregnates human existence. “Fuzzy communications” (89) can exist in art, but they do so as coded elements, and they become, therefore, imbued with meaning. 

FROM APOCALYPSE TO APOCATASTASIS

Hence, in spite of the fact that, at the end of the narrative, he does not survive his lung cancer, the narrator of the graphic novel has created a different place, thus showing his voluntad to control his own fate. On the final panel of the graphic novel, the reader can see the film director as survivor of his traumatic death in the new diegesis of Apocatastasis, grinning hopefully at the horizon. The narrator seems to feel a relieving pride after having been able to control his existence after the non-existence that death implies. 

In that new ontology, he has created a space for a continuous Heideggerian Jeweiligkeit, as he is in control of his own time, where he can meaningfully define his existence. Interestingly enough, his last film is entitled Apocatastasis, Greek word for “restoration.” Although it would have been quite predictable to use the term “apocalypse” for the title, since the film deals with the end of the world, the narrator realises that the collapse of his own world does not end up in an apocalypse, a revelation of the mortal nature of his tragic human condition. Wilfully, the protagonist transforms his apocalypse into an apocatastasis, into a restoration of the previous condition where he can defeat death and work through his structural trauma.    

WORKING THROUGH TRAUMA

To conclude, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Signal to Noise depicts the extreme suffering of the subject affected by structural trauma. In his process of melancholia, the category of time in his mind splits into three different perceptions: firstly, measurable, objective time of the clock, which controls everyday life; secondly, memories and creative thinking that emerge parallely to the previous perception; and finally, trauma time which surfaces in the shape of recurrent imagery and flashbacks, and leads to the deconstruction of the basic foundations of human existence, to wit, time itself and language. In this sense, it can be stated that this graphic novel portrays the modernist worry about subjective perception of time, filtered through the postmodern ethos, which is reflected in a fragmented narrative that echoes the fragmentation of the self. Nevertheless, the text takes the form of trauma narratives, “characterised by repetition and indirection” (Whitehead 3), and mimics the forms and symptoms of trauma by depicting the contents of the protagonist’s traumatic memory.

This graphic novel offers an illustrative example of the process of working through structural trauma. The film director’s strong will plunges him into the creation of his own diegesis, thus breaking the fragile boundaries between fiction and reality. In that new world of Apocatastasis, the narrator overcomes mortality and glances at the horizon with hope.

Andrés Romero-Jódar is a writer an independent scholar based in Berlin (Germany). He holds a BA in English; an MA in English Cultural Studies; a BA in Hispanic Philology; an MA in Teaching Pedagogy; and a PhD in English Literature. For several years, he developed his career at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), where he carried out his research, as well as at the University of Northampton (UK), the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität of Munich (Germany), and the City University of New York (USA). His research on graphic novels, contemporary literature and trauma studies has been published in edited books (Routledge, Continuum, Winter) and academic journals such as the Journal of Popular Culture (Wiley), Studies in Comics (Intellect), Critical Engagements (Modern Contemporary Fiction Studies Network) and Atlantis (Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies). In 2017, his monograph, The Trauma Graphic Novel, will be published by Routledge in the series, Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies.

His blog can be read at: https://420wordsblog.wordpress.com

His publications can be found at:
https://independent.academia.edu/AndresRomeroJodar

WORKS CITED

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Caruth, Cathy. Trauma. Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Print.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.

Craps, Stef. Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift. No Short-Cuts to Salvation. Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Print.

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Gaiman, Neil and Dave McKean. The Comical Tragedy or Tragical Comedy of Mr. Punch. 1994. New York: DC Comics, 1995. Print.

Gaiman, Neil and Dave McKean. Signal to Noise. 1989. London: VG Graphics, 1999. Print.

Gaiman, Neil and Dave McKean. Violent Cases. 1987. Oregon: Dark Horse, 2003. Print.

Gravett, Paul. Graphic Novels. Stories to Change your Life. London: Aurum Press, 2005. Print.

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LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Print.

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Moran, Patricia. Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. Print.

Romero-Jódar, Andrés. “The Quest for a Place in Culture: The Verbal-Iconical Production and the Evolution of Comic-Books towards Graphic Novels.” Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 14 (2006): 93-110. Print.

Romero-Jódar, Andrés. “Comic Books and Graphic Novels in their Generic Context. Towards a Definition and Classification of Narrative Iconical Texts.” Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 35.1 (2013): 117-35. Print. 

Shakespeare, William. Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994. Print.

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Van Der Kolk, Bessel A. and Onno Van Der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” Trauma. Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995: 158-182. Print.

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Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction (A Selection). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Print.

Counting Backwards: The Colour of Memory in retrospect

In Geoff Dyer’s debut novel The Colour of Memory (1989), the characters go out to play soccer in the park. Midway through the match:

I looked around. The trees around the park were perfectly still as if time had stopped, as if every second of the afternoon were held in a single moment: [...] players jumping for the ball, their feet suspended in mid-air, the goalkeeper’s hands rising above their floating hair; the ball hanging over them like a perfect moon. And everything around us: the crease of the corner flag, the wind-sculpted trees, the child’s swing at the top of its arc, the water from the drinking fountain bubbling towards the lips of the woman bent down to drink, the cyclist leaning into the curve of the path, a plane stalled in the sky, someone’s thrown tennis ball a small yellow planet in the distance.

Geoff Dyer, The Colour of Memory (London: Abacus, 1997 [1989]), p.91. (Further quotations from this text unless otherwise stated.)

This is the most extreme instance in the novel of attempting to stop time, to freeze its flow into a moment. Geoff Dyer is surely a writer of the moment: of ecstatic moments as in Paris Trance (1998); of the ‘ongoing moment’ of photography. His first novel has the distinction of being about the moment in two senses at once. It’s a book about a historical moment – understanding the word as a more circumscribed, specified, punctual version of historical period or conjuncture. But it conveys that historical moment through a sequence of moments, in the more miniature sense of the word. One of the novel’s epigraphs reads: ‘There are happy moments but no happy periods in history’. We may paraphrase that to say that the historical moment of the novel is not happy, but the local, transitory moments it snatches from time can be.

I came across The Colour of Memory at the beginning of this century, 2000: actually when I was trying to put together a course on UK fiction of 1980s and 1990s. There were some more famous names and titles lined up or available. But I wanted something to go very early in the course, to represent something that was hard to find precisely represented in fiction – an alternative view of the 1980s in Britain, one that wasn’t about success and money, even in a satirical way. There were fictions of postindustrial Britain and people struggling to survive – James Kelman, Pat Barker. Those have their own value. But I was looking for something else, which would speak more of an everyday experience of the alternative 1980s; a 1980s that I myself could remember from childhood in London, an age of GLC festivals and CND posters. And in The Colour of Memory, I just about found it – a novel in which characters go to the Country Fair in Brockwell Park in 1987 and walk around stalls for the Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign, the Anti-Apartheid group and the El Salvador support group, ‘all selling T-shirts and pamphlets, badges and books’ (217-8). The green, black and gold flag of the ANC flutters above Brixton Town Hall (178).

Here was a novel that talked of things I clearly recognized, though at the time the book was set (around 1986-7) I had been too young to experience the era as its characters do, with late nights, drugs and alcohol. I was thrilled, for instance, to discover a novel in which, 200 pages in, characters are discussing what they would have liked to do with their lives, and the narrator explains:

‘What I’d really like to have been is a third division footballer, a fairly solid player for a team that tended to end up in the middle of the table each season without ever being close to getting promoted or relegated. That would have suited me nicely. Maybe one lucky cup run that climaxed with a goalless draw at home to Everton before getting hammered 6-0 in the replay at Goodison Park, just something to tell the kids about’. (206)

It wasn’t the general use of a sport as a resource that struck me – sport here a way of describing afresh the narrator’s limited horizons, his perhaps very Dyeresque desire for uneventfulness – but the specificity of the imagined vignette. Everton? I could still recite you most of that Everton team, who were at their quite brief peak in the period in which the novel takes place. Quite likely a few years later, when the first Howard Kendall era was past, Dyer wouldn’t have mentioned them in this role. Sport too has its temporary conjunctures.

Then again the time of the novel, at the turn of the millennium, still felt recent: much of what it described didn’t seem to have passed on. Even now, that is extensively the case: partly because the life described in the novel is more one that tries to stand aside from history, to get out of the way of the steamroller of time, than to chase it into the changes of the future.

I think that this novel, as long as it retains people’s interest, will invoke a sense of time, in a concrete rather than an abstract sense: a time, that time, the time of your life, a lifetime: the experience of time filled with content, matter, or memory. Until one day, perhaps beyond all our lifetimes, when this experience of London, or youth, is no longer recognizable, it will finally be historical in another sense: its Brixton exotically distant like the Austin Friars of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009).

clicking away

I invoked the phrase counting backwards because I’m trying to reach back towards the text and its time. But also because that’s the central structural action of the novel itself. It is formed of 60 segments, starting 060, ending 000 – with an italicized coda that falls outside the countdown, and an italicized introductory line that is taken from that coda. The count has actually subtly shifted lately: revising the 2012 Canongate reissue, Dyer stripped out an entire long chapter, 030, meaning that the remainder are now each one number higher than they were, and the book ends with 001 not 000. We don’t reach zero hour in the new edition, then, but otherwise the principle is the same. What does it mean? Why is the novel shaped this way?

The book gives us its own gloss on the principle. The narrator thinks back to an afternoon in Paris, with his friend Freddie.

Outside the Pompidou Centre there was a huge electronic row of numbers. When we started watching the number was about three hundred and seventy million. Then with every second that went by the last digit went down one. Neither of us could work out what the point of it was. Then somebody explained that it was counting down the number of seconds to the year 2000. Freddie thought it was terrific and made a note of the exact number of seconds left: 376, 345, 060. It didn’t seem that long at all – in fact it seemed quite possible that you could just sit there and watch the digits click their way back to a long line of noughts. I liked the idea of time getting denuded like that instead of simply piling up – a countdown to nothing, to an apocalypse that would last only for a second. A new kind of time. It was both awe-inspiring and, at the same time, absolutely pointless: pure anticipation. (207)

The narrator has been explaining to this to a woman, Monica:

‘And what would happen after it worked its way down to zero zero nothing?’ asked Monica. ‘What would happen then?’

    ‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Or maybe the whole process would begin all over again. The funny thing about it though was that it actually seemed like a reasonably rewarding way of spending your time, standing there watching the seconds clicking away and waiting to see what happened.’ (207)

A few observations on this.

1: the whole image of the Pompidou clock is a memory – it’s introduced with the words ‘I thought back to an afternoon [...] a couple of years ago’. This is quite a characteristic maneouvre in this novel which is so explicitly about memory: an act of remembering that gives the author an extra, earlier space in which to spread events and ideas. As the memory is specifically about time, it also has a self-referring or self-interfering character: the clock will have counted down an awful lot more seconds since the last time the narrator looked at it.

2: plainly this vignette is a commentary on the novel itself. It is as though the narrator is describing the novel, while not admitting it; as though he doesn’t realize that he exists within a textual structure that is analogous to the clock he is describing. It’s logically possible to think that the narrator is aware of the parallel, as the novel is presented as a discovered manuscript in a notebook. But if so, he isn’t going to point it out to us: he can let it stand in its own obviousness. It seems pointed that the Pompidou clock at the moment the characters witness it ends with the digits 060: surely a reference to the novel’s own starting point of section 060, but a curiously discreet one, tucked away in the official, neutral- looking realm of number. I doubt that many readers, first time through this novel, have seen its structure encoded in those three digits.

3: the narrator sees a ‘new kind of time’ in the fact of counting down, not piling up. Reduction, not addition, is the preferred model of temporal organization that the clock reveals. This countdown to nothing, he says, is empty, yet it also means ‘pure anticipation’ – which sounds powerful, a principle of narrative compulsion or at least of readerly attention. Transfer this to the novel. Why count down, 060 to 000, rather than up from 000 or 001? Well, if we counted up, we wouldn’t know how far it was going. Once 060 has reached 059 and 058, it seems likely that we are heading down to zero. It’s hard to explain this, but it would seem counterintuitive, a wilful frustration, to organize such a countdown and stop it at 033 or 014. The countdown thus implies a certain knowable form, a scale that quietly communicates itself to the reader from an early stage: which Dyer may have wanted precisely to counteract the otherwise relatively non-narrative, apparently formless quality of the book. As a principle of order, the countdown is arbitrary and abstract. It scarcely contains any meaning or value judgement. It amounts, as the narrator says, to pure anticipation.

4: I wonder now, venturing a long shot, whether Frank Kermode was anywhere in the author’s thoughts in writing the passage. Probably not. But I am thinking of Kermode’s classic work The Sense of an Ending (1966), which like Dyer invokes the idea of ‘apocalypse’ as characteristic of modern thinking about time, and which in a quite celebrated passage posits the ticking of a clock as a model for narrative. We provide a ‘fictional difference between the two sounds’, he says: ‘tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our word for an end’. Kermode goes on:

The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form; and the interval between tock and tick represents purely successive, disorganized time of the sort that we need to humanize. Later I shall be asking whether, when tick-tock seems altogether too easily fictional, we do not produce plots containing a good deal of tock-tick; such a plot is that of Ulysses.

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p.45.

Kermode seems to say that to break from reassuring tick-tock into the comparatively disorientating movement tock-tick is analogous to a break from conventional narrative into modernism: ‘purely successive, disorganized time’. That last phrase might not be a bad description of the time of The Colour of Memory – though I take it that the Parisian clock invoked by Dyer’s narrator doesn’t go tick-tock or tock-tick but just tick ... tick ... tick. Or indeed click ... click ... click. Which may be to the point: in this novel, the countdown marks time, grants a modicum of purely abstract structure, but doesn’t correspond to the narrative back & forth, up & down, implied by Kermode’s clock.

dislocations

The countdown, I have said, ends at 000, or now 001, in the autumn of 1987, about 15 months after the book began. Two characters are in a park witnessing the aftermath of the great storm of that October, making this one of, and quite likely the first of, a select group of novels to take on that meteorological event and make it a narrative event too. (One example: the storm is the primary literal source of the title of Tim Lott’s Rumours of a Hurricane [2001], a novel much more explicitly about Thatcherism.) The last line of the last section reads: ‘We walked back through the waste ground, fires dying all around us’ (250).

The book could have ended there. But as I’ve indicated, there is a coda, in italics, that takes us – to borrow a phrase from Thomas Pynchon – beyond the zero. In offering an italicized coda that is in some sense slightly exterior to the main narrative, The Colour of Memory echoes another novel that is a more plausible candidate than Pynchon as an influence upon it: Martin Amis’s Money (1984). In that earlier novel, the coda ties up loose ends as the narrator finds himself back on the outside of the moneyed world from which he’s just been ejected. In The Colour of Memory, something different happens in the italics. A narrator describes entering an abandoned apartment belonging to one of the characters, Freddie. Here he finds the notebook in which, supposedly, the whole of the novel we have just read is written. The handwriting, he says, ‘was still unmistakably Freddie’s’ (253). The sentences that follow are those that started the book, 250 pages earlier:

The pages were bathed in the yellow light of the reading lamp. I read a few phrases at random, flicked through some more pages and then turned back to the beginning and read the first sentence:

    ‘In August it rained all the time ...’

Skipping here and there, impatient to get to the end, I read all the way through, remembering incidents that I had totally forgotten, recognising many episodes despite the distortions and dislocations. (253)

This coda may have an unnerving effect on the reader of The Colour of Memory. It takes the whole novel that we have just read – savouring descriptions, observations and jokes – and places it at one remove. The novel of Brixton is a text within a text: an allegedly found manuscript like that of numerous eighteenth-century novels, or Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth (1941), or many others. It is customary enough to bracket this bracketing – to experience the text within a text primarily as just a text, to forget the factitious framing that started the book with a fictional Editor’s Introduction or the like. In this case, the effect is slightly different as the framing really only emerges at the end. A wrench is involved in having the main narrative thus distanced from us at the last.

But more than this, Dyer spreads confusion. We are now to think of the whole narrative as written by Freddie – who has repeatedly and often appeared as a main character within it. Freddie was writing Freddie, as a figure in the third person: something of a figure of fun, in fact, who tends to wisecrack his way through scrapes and disappointments.  But he is also emotionally acclaimed within the novel, shortly after he has been mugged, as the friend whom the narrator has known the longest, the one whose friendship, with unique benevolence, exerts no pressure (165). So, the logic goes, he has written a manuscript notionally narrated by a friend of his, in which he himself emerges as a benign alter ego. This narrator, we might think, is supposed to be based on the very person, the friend of Freddie, who narrates the italicized coda and discovers the manuscript. This last voice, perhaps, is the person who has been fictionalized into Freddie’s narrator – which means, in effect, that the same figure narrates the whole book, first as Freddie’s creation, then briefly under his own steam.

These textual tangles can get more tangled still, with echoes and references between the two narrative zones. But I have always had a feeling that we should not take the novel’s coda too literally, or fixate too hard on whatever logic it implies – as I have just begun to do. My sense remains that the coda’s role is just to destabilize the status of the narrative, and to make the narrator’s identity float even more uncertainly than it has already done through his anonymity. The role of the narrator, the coda reminds us, is a convenience, a construction: he’s not a figure solid enough for us to lean safely upon him. I think that in forging his metafictional frame, Dyer was gesturing towards something he discusses in the more recent preface to the book: the border between fact and fiction, which he wished to trouble and render more marshily obscure. Dyer recounts that the novel started – in the magazines New Society and New Statesman – as a journalistic text:

It was commissioned as something loosely termed ‘The Brixton Diaries’ in the hope that the life my friends and I were leading in a particular area of south London at a particular time (the mid-to late-1980s) might have an interest that was more than local and personal. Gradually I saw a way of using and shaping the material in a slightly different way, in a form that would deploy it to better, more personal ends (I invented a sister for myself, or for my narrator, rather) and, hopefully, more lasting effect. A couple of years ago I said somewhere that ‘I like to write stuff that is only an inch from life – but all the art is in that inch’. The importance of that inch – and the fun to be had within it – first made itself apparent in these pages.

Geoff Dyer, ‘Note on revised edition’, The Colour of Memory (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012), n.p.

Note that here, looking back after over 20 years, Dyer doesn’t draw much distinction between ‘myself’ and ‘my narrator’: he has to remind himself to do it. That is an indication that the ‘Freddie’s manuscript’ conceit is less a deep structural clue to the narrator’s true self, more a piece of deliberate narrative interference aimed at making things less straightforward than they seem.

The other function of this conceit, finally, may be to pluralize and collectivize narration. The notion of the narrator’s identity is blurred, spread between the first person of the novel and the figure of Freddie with his odd intimacy with that narrator – but then, even another major character, Steranko, is described as uncannily like the narrator, sharing his tastes and appearance. We may sense that Dyer, moving from ‘The Brixton Diaries’ to a more deliberately literary experiment, tried to diffuse himself.  Even while writing a book that seems as though it reflects himself, his life, his attitudes, he has taken the precaution of spreading himself across characters, creating decoys – and the effect may in part be to suggest that the protagonist is less one individual than a whole community or group. I am reminded of Jonathan Lethem’s insistence, when discussing his own fictional urban reverie The Fortress of Solitude (2003), that the novel had not in fact been drawn just from personal memories but from the anecdotes of a whole community of witnesses:

[The characters] are receptacles for urban lore. No one of them maps to any other one person; rather there are dozens of people who rightly feel a claim on those characters, because they see parts of themselves and their experiences reflected in those characters.

Jonathan Lethem (2005), in Interviews with Jonathan Lethem ed. by Jaime Clarke (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), p.91.

Dyer dedicated the book to my south London friends, and in the novel he writes of a time in life ‘when you do not form friendships but are formed by them, when there is no difference between having good friends and being a good friend’ (165). Perhaps in writing a novel that seemed to express himself, he also wanted to smudge the boundaries of self. To name one last precursor: Virginia Woolf was a London writer of co-consciousness, of the invisible threads between people, and the mystery of what she called ‘living in one another’. In a Woolfian gesture, The Colour of Memory suggest that sometimes, which might be the best times, we live through each other.

Joseph Brooker is Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, where he is also Director of the Centre for Contemporary Literature. He is the author of Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture (Wisconsin University Press, 2004), Flann O’Brien (Northcote House, 2005) and Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He has edited and co-edited special issues of New Formations, the Journal of Law and Society, Textual Practice and Critical Quarterly.

Creativity in Fiction: Oates’s Blonde and Dear Husband

Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Blonde is a fictional account of the life of Marilyn Monroe and is studied for the ways in which it has crafted fiction with non-fiction and stylistically for its use of multiple points of view. Blonde follows a form of writing that has marked much of Oates’s work, namely, fictionalising of contemporary American events, such as in her novel Black Water (1992), which re-enacted the Chappaquiddick case involving Senator Edward Kennedy, and Zombie (1995), a novella about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. 

The novel breaks from traditional historical fiction by employing complex narrative devices. Much of the story is told in an intimate third person narrative focussed on Norma Jeane, Monroe’s real name to which Oates has added an ‘e.’ This point of view is interspersed with passages taken from Norma Jeane’s journal in the first person. There are also dreamlike chapters which seem to come from Norma Jeane’s subconscious. Some passages take a more poetic and distant perspective of the ‘Monroe’ story, the reinvented Norma Jeane. Occasionally, the narrative switches to first person accounts from minor characters, such as a reporter and a surfer.

The story starts poetically in a prologue on the subject of death in 1962, the reader knowing that it refers to Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death:

There came death unerring. Death not to be dissuaded. Death-in-a-hurry. Death furiously pedalling. Death carrying a package marked *SPECIAL DELIVERY HANDLE WITH CARE* in a sturdy wire basket behind his seat.

As if a film flashback from the grave, the narrative restarts with Monroe’s childhood as Norma Jeane in 1930’s Los Angeles. There she is raised briefly by her mother and does not know the identity of her absent father. After her mother is hospitalised with mental illness, she ends up in an orphanage. This is followed by a foster home, where Norma Jeane’s developing female body creates tension between her foster parents. Her foster mother deals with this by pushing her foster daughter into marriage at the tender age of sixteen. 

Norma Jean grows into Monroe and it is her relationships with men that dominate the novel and fix the story into a chronological narrative. After her first divorce, her next significant relationships were with Hollywood residents, Cass Chaplin, who was Charlie Chaplin Jr, and Eddy G, the son of Edward G Robinson. This a manage a trois is historically only rumoured to have happened. Although it was with the two men that Monroe became addicted to sleeping pills and had an aborted pregnancy, her relationship with them is depicted positively through Norma Jean’s eyes: “She never felt so content. Never so happy.”

For other men in Monroe’s life, Oates plays with the reader’s knowledge of celebrities and has given them sobriquets reflecting the public perceptions. Her second husband, the baseball player Joe DiMaggio, is “the Ex-Athlete”; her third husband, Arthur Miller, is “the Playwright”; and President John Kennedy is simply “the President.” With each relationship, the objectification of women is further explored, as Monroe becomes the “mammalian Marilyn” and “the Blonde Actress,” removed further from herself as Norma Jean.

Throughout the story there is also an elusive character called The Dark Prince. The reader is told that this prince is not present in her childhood. “Even in daydreams, even with her eyes shut hard, Norma Jeane could not imagine him. He would be waiting for her in the movie dream: this would be her secret happiness.” At one point the name Dark Prince is given to a photographer, named Otto, who makes a small fortune from photographing her in the nude for a calendar (although she only earned $50). But the maturing Monroe later realises that Otto cannot be a Prince since he’s “a pornographer and a pimp.” The name of the Dark Prince is also ascribed to the actor Marlon Brando, who is one of the few men in Norma Jeane’s life not to have a sexual relationship with her. This search for a prince plays with the view that American society has nourished the idea that every woman wants to be princess.

Like Blonde, Dear Husband, a collection of fourteen short stories, departs from conventions of the short story genre with three epistolary stories and two stories that borrow their characters, names unchanged, from real life. 

“A Princeton Idyll” is written as a series of letters between two women, a retired housekeeper and the granddaughter of a once famous professor, the latter is inquiring about her deceased grandfather. This exchange of letters uncovers a world of greed and perversion. ‘Dear Joyce Carol’ also employs lettering writing. Here the author breaks the wall between fiction and non-fiction and is potentially autobiographical. This story chronicles the mental deterioration of an admirer of the author, who receives the disturbed letters, but never replies. The fan’s letters reveal an arrogance in a way that provides humour. “Dear Husband” is a fictionalised account of the infanticide carried out by Andrea Yates, a much-publicised case in the United States. Told in a letter to her husband after the murders of their five children, Lauri Lynn’s ramblings and self-justification reflect upon the role of women as wives in a supposedly post-feminist society, alongside the way the mind can distort religion; throughout the letter Lauri claims ‘God instructed me’. As with other stories from this collection, social satire mixes with violence and mental fragility.

Another fictionalised history, “Landfill” tells of a missing college student whose body is found in “amid mounds of trash, cans, bottles, Styrofoam and cardboard packages, rancid raw garbage, stained and filthy clothing” as the result of a fraternity hazing. While this story deals sensitively with the grieving parents and the mystery and callousness behind their son’s death, it has been criticised for its mixing of fact and fiction. Identifiable as being based on a true-life story, Oates has changed the location of this event, but has retained the original date of the fraternity murder. 

The “The Heart Sutra,” the lover of a famous poet who has long suffered under the weight of the poet’s celebrity, suffers even more at his sudden departure. As the poet is meditating and chanting at a Zen Buddhist retreat in the Adirondacks, his lover reviews their life together. In these reminiscences, fictional and real characters are mixed. The poet Derek Walcott is a friend of a poet, but he makes himself unreachable to the poet’s lover. The reader is taken along this psychological exploration of fame, love and raising a small child from birth, as it becomes slowly apparent to the reader that the lover plans on killing their child, as well as herself. 

This playfulness of form and subject gives the collection texture and style, alongside the emotional intensity characteristic of Oates’s work.

Paola Trimarco is a writer and linguist. Her short stories have been published in several literary magazines and some of her stage plays have been professionally performed with the support of Arts Council England. One of her essays was shortlisted by Wasafiri Magazine for their Life Writing Competition 2014. As a linguist, she has authored four textbooks, including Digital Textuality (2015, Palgrave Macmillan), and she has had her research published in several books and journals. She is also a regular contributor to the Literary Encyclopedia.

Trimarco. P. "Blonde" by Joyce Carol Oates. The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 November 2015

Trimarco, P. "Dear Husband: Stories" by Joyce Carol Oates. The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 March 2015

Joyce Carol Oates Revisits the Schoolhouse Gothic

Essay first published in American Gothic Culture, An Edinburgh Companion, Joel Faflak and Jason Haslam (Eds.). Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Reproduced with permission of Edinburgh University Press via PLSclear.

The history of the Gothic as a counter-Enlightenment discourse, albeit an ambivalent one, suggests the suitability, if not the inevitability, of the Gothic portrayal of education and educators. Previously, I have designated representations of teachers, students, and academic institutions that rely on Gothic tropes such as the monster, the curse, and the trap as ‘Schoolhouse Gothic.’ Works in this mode examine schooling in relationship to central Gothic preoccupations such as the tyranny of history, the terrors of physical or mental confinement, reification, and miscreation. Considered together, they suggest that schools are haunted or cursed by persistent power inequities (of race, gender, class) and, ironically, by the Enlightenment itself, which was to rescue Western civilization from the darkness of the past but which had a dark side of its own, born of its compulsion to dissect, define, and dominate nature and humanity alike. 

No stranger to the Gothic, Oates has returned more than once to the school as a source and scene of horror in novels like Zombie (1995) and Beasts (2002), which use zombification and consumption as metaphors for the effects of formal education. The Accursed, published in 2013 but conceived and partially drafted in the 1980s (shortly after Oates began teaching at Princeton), both exemplifies and diverges from the Schoolhouse Gothic. Like other works in this mode, The Accursed portrays the university as a place of mystified power, physical isolation, social stress, and emotional disintegration. Unlike these works, however, school does not leave its primary student-figure, Josiah Slade, permanently damaged, vengeful, and monstrous. Josiah’s most significant literary ancestor is fellow Ivy League student Quentin Compson of William Faulkner’s The Sound the Fury and Absalom, Absalom, and neither character experiences physical or psychological abuse at the hands of their professors, nor victimizes others in retaliation. Both are compared, implicitly or explicitly, to the most famous of literary students, Hamlet, and appear more melancholy and ineffectual than monstrous. Comparing the two brings into focus the political and economic implications of the Schoolhouse Gothic, an oblique feature of Beasts but more prevalent in works like Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which, as I have previously argued, portray the democratizing promise of American schooling as a grimly parodic threat. In comparison, The Sound and The Fury and The Accursed say less about democracy than about capitalism. Harvard represents for Quentin Compson an accursed future of loss and failure that must be avoided, a capitalistic nightmare inferior to the elegant, mythic Southern feudalism he has been raised to mourn, while Princeton represents for Josiah Slade an accursed capitalist past that can be replaced with a more promising socialist future. Quentin’s breakdown is permanent and irrevocable, while Josiah’s makes possible the development of a new, more ethical consciousness, one in which Enlightenment values such as intellectual curiosity, unsentimental objectivity, and faith in human reason are recuperated and redirected, but only after being severed from their customary but accursed educational, political, religious, and economic entanglements. 

The Accursed, a sprawling, summary-resistant tale of the so-called ‘Crosswicks Curse’ that plagued Princeton, New Jersey and the Ivy League university for which it is known from 1905-1906 features a large cast of characters and weaves together the fictional and the historical, the realistic and the fantastic. Its fictitious author, M.W. Van Dyck II, eventually revealed to be the son of a Princeton Philosophy professor who died trying to murder him when he was an infant, is pedantic, prudish, anxious about his authority as a historian, and prone to interrupting the story to comment on the shortcomings of previous chroniclers, brag about obtaining and deciphering a wide array of often bizarre primary sources, bemoan the challenges of writing the history of such a singular event, and offer his personal opinions about various figures and topics in the narrative. The tale he constructs illustrates what a central Gothic formula defined by Chris Baldick: ‘a fearful sense of inheritance in time [a curse]’ combined ‘with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space [a trap], these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration.’ While curses in the Gothic can be metaphorical in nature, Oates’s titular curse appears to be literal, complete with ghosts, demons, vampires, and hellish alternate dimensions that may be manifestations of supernatural intervention, psycho-sexual repression, mass hysteria, or some combination of the three. As is typical in the Schoolhouse Gothic, the trap is the claustrophobic campus, here inseparable from the equally claustrophobic town after which it is named.

Josiah Slade is the grandson of prominent and beloved minister, former New Jersey governor, and Princeton University President Winslow Slade, and the heir to Slade fortune, which came from ‘railroads, real estate, manufacturing, and banking,’ and, further in the past, from the slave trade. When the curse begins, Josiah has already graduated from Princeton, abandoned his studies at West Point out of restlessness and boredom, and occupied himself with unknown pursuits out west before returning home with a vague notion that he might study German idealist philosophy at Heidelberg or pursue a career in law, medicine, or journalism. The curse first strikes publicly at his sister’s ill-fated wedding and appears to have arisen from a decades-old crime committed by his grandfather when he was a student. During the time of the curse, Josiah inadvertently kills his favorite professor while trying to prevent him from murdering his own infant son (the author), injures one of his literary heroes, suffers a mental breakdown caused in large part by his failure to protect his sister or defend the family honor from invisible enemies, embarks on an ill-advised polar expedition to escape voices telling him to cleanse Princeton in an apocalyptic fire, and takes a suicidal plunge into the icy water to rescue his phantom sister from a demonic seducer. After the curse, he repudiates his family privilege, joining (along with his sister) an agrarian socialist commune sixty miles away from Princeton, and marrying an artistically-inclined childhood friend known in their hometown as a scandalously independent woman. 

Despite their very different fates, Josiah Slade and Quentin Compson share a series of instructive commonalities. Both come from prominent, ‘aristocratic’ families (one southern, one northeastern) and grow up in the shadow of legendary but morally compromised grandfathers; both are willing to endure hellfire to defend the honor of their sexually fallen sisters but fail in their chivalric quests and experience psychological breakdowns as a result; both hear voices and drown themselves. In addition, both are students at Ivy League universities in the first decade of the twentieth century and suffer from a profound sense of guilt over this privilege. In fact, school is truly ‘accursed’ for each.

These similarities are unlikely to be accidental, given Oates’s well-documented fascination and engagement with William Faulkner. Oates described herself to Lee Milazzo as having been ‘bowled over by Faulkner,’ and she told Greg Johnson that as a high school student, she wrote ‘a bloated trifurcated novel that had as its vague model The Sound and The Fury.’ Johnson also reports that in a 1982 interview, she described Faulkner as ‘the most significant writer’ among her contemporaries. Scholars have noted Faulker’s influence on Oates; for example, Anna Sonser’s A Passion for Consumption: The Gothic Novel in America, describes Bellefleur, one of Oates’s most famous and successful novels, as ‘an imitative recasting’ of Absalom, Absalom, ‘an ironic inversion that engages the metanarrative that tells the “story” of America, its mythology, omissions, and distortions.’ In addition to actively imitating and imaginatively revising Faulkner’s works in her own writing, Milazzo notes that she has taught at least one of the novels: The Sound and The Fury. 

Readers will not readily connect frightening schools, teachers, and students with the writings of William Faulkner, who did not complete any formal education past the 11th grade, though he attended classes at the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. Instead, Faulkner’s name calls to mind the decaying houses, farms, and barns of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi and the haunted, luckless, or depraved planters, servants, and criminals who inhabit them. Indeed, biographer Philip Weinstein asserts that schools ‘never play more than a negligible role’ in Faulkner’s works. Nevertheless, educators and schools that do appear in those works, both within and beyond Yoknapatawpha, are typically portrayed as cruel, corrupt, or incarcerating. For example, before marrying Anse Bundren, Addie, the adulterous wife and distant mother of As I Lay Dying, had been a schoolteacher whose only pleasure in the job was whipping the children in her care. Hapless schoolteacher Labove attempts to sexually assault young student Eula Varner, and Houston runs away from school and the woman who pushed him through it in The Hamlet. A date to a school dance gone wrong becomes the occasion for horrific violence for university student Temple Drake, who then condemns an innocent man to a terrible death, in Sanctuary. But the most Gothic of Faulkner’s schools is neither in nor near Yoknapatawpha: it is Harvard University, where Quentin Compson narrates Absalom, Absalom and commits suicide in The Sound and The Fury.

While The Accursed presents a global, multi-faceted view of 1905 Princeton University, The Sound and the Fury portrays 1910 Harvard University exclusively through Quentin’s eyes and ultimately as Quentin’s death. For Quentin, Harvard represents at once the ‘dream’ of his emotionally unavailable mother, the loss of the family land particularly cherished by his mentally stunted brother Benjy, the place that ‘form[ed] [the] character’ of his sister Caddy’s manipulative fiancé Herbert Head, a source of guilt and humiliation, and ‘a fine dead sound.’ Quentin’s obsession with his sister’s purity, combined with his incestuous desire for her, cause him to behave differently from skirt-chasing classmates, who then tease him by calling his roommate Shreve his ‘husband.’ His morbid, guilty preoccupations also lead him to a Quixotic fight with the strong, handsome, nouveau riche Gerald Bland. Ultimately, Harvard comes to symbolize for Quentin not a cursed past, but a (paradoxically) cursed future, the defeat of an elegant past at the hands of a crude modernity.

The section of the novel narrated by Quentin takes place on the day of his suicide, and, although it moves unpredictably back and forth between the past and present, it remains a linear narrative punctuated by the coercive, oppressive bells of Harvard.  Quentin’s section opens in the morning as he contemplates his watch, remembers his Father’s aphorisms on the absurdity of fighting time, and endures Shreve’s interrogation about his plans, accompanied by the reminder that the bell indicating the start of chapel will ring in two minutes.  When the bell does ring, Quentin notes that ‘it stayed in the air, more felt than heard, for a long time.  Like all the bells that ever rang still ringing in the long dying light-rays and Jesus and Saint Francis talking about his sister.’ While the bells evoke in Quentin memories of Caddy’s ill-fated wedding, among other things, they also symbolize time, Harvard, and the whole slew of cultural expectations that Quentin strenuously resists.  They also call to mind uncomfortable childhood moments in which his ‘insides’ would ‘move . . . in school when the bell rang’ because his countdown to release ‘never could come out even with the bell,’ and he would lose track of his lesson and risk humiliation.  Before committing suicide, Quentin embarks on a day-trip designed as an escape from what Foucault’s Discipline and Punish would suggest are the surveillance tactics of the university and of society at large—tactics known to produce the likes of banker Herbert Head—culminating in the ultimate escape of suicide, defined as the state of being ‘dead in Harvard.’  During the course of the day, he identifies with the uncatchable fish sought by the three boys at the lake and tells them that it ‘deserves to be let alone’ and becomes agitated at the sound of the bells. Quentin’s association of the bells at Harvard with the bells at Caddy’s wedding makes thematic sense in that both signal the loss of the mythical past for which Quentin longs, leading him to muse, ‘Somewhere I heard bells once.  Mississippi or Massachusetts.  I was.  I am not.’  His suicide is the concurrent denial of Caddy’s wedding (his primal loss), of Harvard, and, finally, of modernity itself, all of which are equivalent to non-being.  Confronted by the forces of surveillance impinging upon him, he retreats into the feudal past and rejects the self and the future that Harvard offers. In the end, he grimly notes that calculating the amount of weight in flat-irons required to drown himself is ‘the only opportunity [he] seemed to have for the application of Harvard.’ 

Although Oates’s portrayal of Princeton University is more layered than Faulkner’s portrayal of Harvard, Princeton is as ‘accursed’ for Josiah Slade as Harvard is for Quentin Compson. The university represents, however, a blighted past that Josiah must reject rather than a cursed future he must annihilate himself to prevent. The Accursed depicts the Princeton of 1905 as a place of mystified but anxious white male authority characterized by a terror of encroaching modernity not unlike Quentin’s. This fearful future is marked especially in Oates’s portrayal by the threatening demands of ‘Jews’, ‘Negroes’, ‘hysterical females demanding “rights”’, and teachers of ‘heretical evolutionism’ and ‘atheistical socialism,’ groups whose demands are both feared and derided by every authority figure in the novel, including the ones with reputations for being politically or culturally progressive. Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton during the Crosswicks Curse and a central character in the novel, repeats with pride that the university will incorporate ‘no new ideas’ into its curriculum, signaling the commitment of the academy to defend tradition at all costs. Oates depicts the university as inseparable from the town and its entrenched class hierarchies and as serving a critical function in preserving and perpetuating those hierarchies, replicated in a student body which, while ‘naturally gracious and schooled in courtesy,’ concerns itself less with intellectual discovery than with getting into, while cruelly banishing others from, exclusive ‘eating clubs,’ and with perpetrating ‘unspeakable’ hazing practices discussed in hushed tones throughout the novel. The university’s stance of intellectual detachment enables it to give an apparently rational defense of irrational prejudices, as well as a veneer of respectability. In addition, its much-celebrated integration of learning and faith appears in the novel as pathological enmeshment, where vulnerabilities or deficiencies in one are hastily shored up by the other in an endless cycle that unleashes terror upon university and town alike.

    Josiah’s privileged background and family money protect him from even the (relatively light) hazing that Quentin experiences and prevent him from seeing this dark underbelly of Princeton until the curse strikes. In contrast to the narrator of The Accursed, who simply ‘will not speak’ of his undergraduate days at Princeton except to report that he would commit suicide rather than relive them, Josiah had been a ‘sought-after’ freshman, not unlike Quentin, whom Mrs. Bland pursues as a friend for her son out of respect for the ‘blundering sense of noblesse oblige’ she associates with his background. Josiah had been, in fact, ‘the envy and awe of all’ after receiving and ‘ignor[ing], in his Slade arrogance,’ an invitation to join Ivy, the most exclusive eating club on campus. His friends, identified as ‘few,’ came from ‘elsewhere’ in the school, outside the coveted cliques and clubs. In many ways, Josiah is an ideal student in that he ‘merit[ed] high grades’ and was ‘at times, even a brilliant …student’ and in that ‘friendship and popularity had not seemed to him the point of college.’ After Josiah graduates, however, the curse and the suffering that it brings to the Slade family force him to rethink everything about his identity and his education.

    Josiah’s sense of self, deeply bound to family history and tradition, begins to disintegrate when that family and those traditions appear radically altered amidst the ravages of the Crosswicks Curse. More significant for our purposes, however, is the part of Josiah’s identity rooted in his relationship with his Dr. Pearce van Dyck, the narrator’s father and Josiah’s favorite professor. Josiah feels less ‘comfortable’ with his own father Augustus than with van Dyck, a long-time friend of Josiah’s family and ‘a specialist in Kantian idealism,’ who is ‘taciturn by nature, scholarly and earnest’ and known for ‘expecting a great deal of his students, and grading them severely.’ In other words, Josiah resembles many Schoolhouse Gothic protagonists in that he strongly desires the approval of a professor that is clearly marked as a parental figure. Part of what attracts Josiah to this professor is his lack of sentimentality, which Josiah associates with van Dyck’s chosen discipline, Philosophy, in which ‘one cuts through subterfuge …; one goes for the jugular.’ When a ghost appears on Slade property, Josiah picks up some unusual flowers near the sighting of the apparition and brings them to van Dyke, an amateur botanist. Van Dyck tries to identify them and explain their pungent odor and rapid decomposition. Josiah does not initially tell him where he found the flowers but basks in his professor’s confident pronouncements, which ‘seemed the very essence of the philosophical temperament: to wrench some sort of sense out of senselessness,’ an effort that ‘gives the illusion of comfort.’ Van Dyck’s identification of the flower as a cala lily turns out to be wrong, and the flower is eventually revealed as a toxic ‘Angel Trumpet’ capable of producing ‘a gradual deterioration’ of the brain characterized by ‘paranoid suspicions and rage.’ Shortly after Josiah brings the dessicated flowers to his professor, van Dyck begins to do what so many Princetonians do in the course of the novel: he ‘turns.’ The line between ‘turning’ and simply having one’s true self revealed is, however, never very clear in The Accursed.

The Philosophy professor’s uncompromising rationalism and philosophical detachment deeply appeal to Josiah but come to manifest themselves in horrific ways that lead to van Dyck’s death and Josiah’s terrible, Oedipal guilt. As disappearances, demon sightings, and murders begin to happen with regularity in Princeton, van Dyck’s wife Johanna becomes pregnant with a child that van Dyck tells Josiah cannot be his own. The professor invites Josiah to observe and admire an intricate ‘Scheme of Clues’ he has created in order to track manifestations of the curse and the activities of mysterious and possibly demonic interlopers, including Annabelle Slade’s seducer. Van Dyck explains that the chart represents his attempt to bring the ratiocination of his hero Sherlock Holmes to bear on the Crosswicks Curse. When Josiah protests that the Holmes mysteries are not real, van Dyck responds with ‘disapproval’ at being challenged by ‘a former, favorite student’ who should, in the professor’s mind, regard him as a ‘protector, mentor—savior.’ The professor defends his fictional hero by describing the Holmes tales as ‘distillations’ of life’s ‘messy, impenetrable mysteries’ that are, in fact, ‘superior’ to real life. After some time passes, and the van Dycks have temporarily relocated to an isolated and purportedly haunted property belonging to Johanna’s family, Johanna invites Josiah to visit as a way of distracting her increasingly insane husband from his chart. The Philosophy professor then receives a nocturnal visit from Sherlock Holmes himself, presumably a hallucination brought on by the toxic flower Josiah brought to his office. Holmes admonishes van Dyck to eschew the ‘contemptible’ ‘life of emotion and sentiment’ so as to clear his mind and see that his son is ‘the spawn of a demon’ that the professor must kill even if doing so means murdering his wife as well. Holmes enlists the professor’s ‘beloved Kant’ in making his case that ‘local law’ must sometimes be ‘transcended.’ Van Dyck moves to attack the child with a hot poker, and Josiah, awakened by Johanna’s screams and mysteriously admonished by his sister Annabelle’s voice, rushes to the nursery, grabs the hot poker with his bare hands, and knocks his professor to the floor. Van Dyck soon dies from a head injury, adding to Josiah’s considerable burden of accumulated guilt and filling him with despair for betraying a man who had ‘trusted’ him ‘as a son’ and for turning from van Dyck’s ‘admiring pupil’ to his ‘executioner.’ Although Josiah does not publicly admit to bringing the poisonous flowers to van Dyck’s office and is found ‘blameless’ in his professor’s death, Josiah becomes increasingly paranoid that ‘all of Princeton [is] observing him, and passing judgment,’ as though he bore the ‘mark of Cain.’ Killing the professor he most loved and admired, even in defense of a helpless baby, irrevocably alters both Josiah’s self-concept and his relationship to Princeton.

Unlike Quentin Compson, for whom a ‘Harvard self’ is a contradiction in terms, Josiah Slade flails helplessly as his Princeton identity slowly disintegrates. His violent encounter with Dr. van Dyck, whose philosophical detachment had become both a mask and a justification for murderous impulses, is paradigmatic of his relationship to Princeton. The Crosswicks Curse exposes a nightmare world that reveals the worst in everyone he has been trained to respect and exposes the dark side of everything that Josiah has been trained to be—proud, refined, paternalistic, detached.

The Crosswicks Curse destroys the complacency and pride that came with Josiah’s wealth, status, and elite education. During his sister Annabelle’s absence from Princeton, she appears to have been suffering in a hellish alternate dimension, the ‘Bog Kingdom,’ where servants have overthrown aristocrats and subjected them to degrading, deadly service and horrific abuse. Instead of interpreting her experience as a nightmare revolution and an affirmation of the inherited order, she resolves to ‘consecrate’ herself ‘to freeing … fellow-sufferers’ and after she returns (and dies giving birth to a deformed and possibly monstrous child, who also dies), Josiah begins to read the works of socialist writers like Jack London and Upton Sinclair. Josiah is alarmed to discover that Sinclair’s most famous work, The Jungle, exposes the unsanitary conditions and shocking labor practices in meat-packing plants owned by Slade family friends. After reading The Jungle, he realizes with great mortification that his expensive education has left him wholly ignorant of basic realities such as the sources of his own wealth as well as the wealth of the rest of his set. Although he experiences ‘envy’ and ‘a yearning for his lost youth’ while watching Princeton undergraduates go about their studies, Josiah feels an increasing ‘revulsion for his ‘Slade-self, seeing this individual through the eyes of others, as one of privilege and shame in equal measure.’ 

The Crosswicks Curse also brings religious disillusionment. Although Josiah is skeptical by nature and has ‘long abandoned the hope of acquiring his grandfather Winslow’s combining of faith and intelligence,’ Winslow’s reasonable, moderate, post-Enlightenment Presbyterianism is an integral part of Josiah’s upbringing and sensibility. As a young child, he had even ‘imagined’ Winslow to be ‘God himself.’ By the end of the novel, however, Winslow has confessed to murdering a young girl and allowing another man to be executed for the crime, an old injustice that appeals to have triggered the Crosswicks Curse. This blatant hypocrisy, however, represents only the simplest part of the novel’s commentary on institutional religion and its enmeshment in industry, politics, and education. The novel’s epilogue suggests that Winslow regarded the curse as God’s punishment for experiencing true love for his grandchildren and failing to live up to a dark ‘Covenant.’ In a bizarre final sermon that Winslow spoke about but died before he could deliver, a sermon the author claims to have acquired years later at an estate auction, Winslow declares that after his crime, God revealed to him that he treasures men most ‘WHEN THEY GROVEL IN DESPAIR’ and ‘TAKE NO SOLACE IN HUMAN LOVE.’  At this time, God also agreed to protect Winslow from disgrace and punishment if he would ‘preach discord while employing a vocabulary of love’ and ‘disguise the workings of evil on earth with a pacifist smile.’ In other words, just as the novel presents Dr. van Dyck’s philosophical detachment in a horrific light, it also highlights the role religious moderates of the period played in perpetuating injustice. The epilogue also adds to the novel’s commentary on class by intimating that Winslow’s nightmarish vision of God may be a product of the distortions that come with pride and privilege. Winslow writes in his sermon, ‘I am a Slade, and ordained by God; and guilty of no crime; for all that falls from my hand must be God’s own desire, and cannot be deemed sin.’ The Accursed simultaneously indicts religious moderates whose reasonableness and caution mask a deeper complicity with institutional evil and a wealthy class whose extreme sense of entitlement allows for no distinction between its behavior and God’s will. Neither identity remains an option for Josiah.

Given the hypocrisy and violence lurking within Josiah’s ‘dreamlike’ town and ‘enchanted’ university, it is little wonder that he becomes increasingly ‘altered and strange’ as the ‘jeering voices’ in his head instruct him to ‘purify’ Princeton with a ‘torch.’ Like Quentin Compson, he is plagued by fantasies of suicide. Unlike Quentin, he struggles mightily against them rather than calmly and quietly succumbing. To escape Princeton, he joins an ill-conceived and under-resourced expedition to the South Pole reminiscent of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, explaining in a letter to his parents that ‘the Southern sky has no history, …& no memory; no mind.’ Early in the journey, he obtains a brief respite from the voices, but they eventually return, urging him to commit all manner of heinous and self-destructive acts, from seducing and murdering the captain of the ship (provocatively named ‘Oates’) to plunging into the arctic waters so that he might investigate the sea like a proper ‘man of science.’ Increasingly, he sees the ‘Ice Kingdom’ as his own ‘Scheme of Clues,’ and he is visited by visions of his grandfather, his Philosophy professor, and many other figures from his past. When he finally plummets into the sea, he does so in the belief that he is rescuing Anabelle from the ice, marking even his suicide as a gesture of hope. That hope is fully realized when the Crosswicks Curse is lifted, an event that coincides with the moment that Josiah’s recently deceased cousin Todd defeats Annabelle’s demonic seducer in a game of draughts in the Bog Kingdom, as well as the moment that Winslow Slade dies at the front of a crowded church eager to hear the simultaneously esteemed and cursed Princetonian deliver a sermon. At this time, all of Winslow Slade’s grandchildren are miraculously restored to life. Having experienced a complete breakdown of identity, however, Josiah leaves his Princeton self behind forever.

Despite the myriad similarities between Quentin Compson and Josiah Slade, their stories imply quite different views of history, modernity, gender, class, and learning. Quentin, incapable of empathy and lost in a world of abstractions (family honor, southern womanhood, noblesse oblige) rendered meaningless by history, succumbs to narcissism and madness. His story dramatizes the pathos of losing a cherished, though untenable and defeated, way of life that Harvard, ‘a fine dead sound,’ cannot replace. He neither sees nor desires a future, particularly one exemplified by the crass ways and tastes of nouveau riche Harvard classmates like Gerald Bland. In contrast, Josiah ‘discover[s] that a traditional way of thinking, whether of theology, intercollegiate sports, or the eating clubs on Prospect Avenue, was disagreeable to him’ and rejects the ‘accursed’ customs and habits of his upbringing and education. Instead of surrendering to religious fatalism or melancholy; adopting a narrow and imperious but acceptably ‘masculine’ rationalism; clinging to fantasies of racial superiority and inherited privilege; or pursuing success on bourgeois capitalist terms, Josiah embraces an agrarian socialism and takes his place in a community committed to promoting social justice and caring for (rather than dominating) one another and the earth.

Although the novel concludes on a decidedly anti-capitalist note, Oates does not canonize the socialists who play a role in the tale. In fact, she depicts Upton Sinclair as earnest but pedantic and devoted to an asceticism that is destructive to his own health as well as that of his young wife, who contemplates suicide and eventually leaves Upton and returns with their son to her well-to-do family. Worse, she portrays Jack London as a narcissistic, hyper-masculine alcoholic whose socialism is compromised by fantasies of racial superiority. When Josiah meets the very drunk London in a restaurant after a socialist rally planned by Sinclair, London wrongly accuses Josiah of sending covert ‘signals’ to his lady-friend, and a fight ensues in which Josiah ends up knocking London to the floor just as he did to his beloved professor, though London does not die from his head injury. Despite the failings of these characters, as well as the fact that 2013 is hardly an historical vantage point from which the socialist vision of the early 20th century can be portrayed without irony, that vision is presented within her novel as the only real alternative to a sordid and corrupt Princeton.

Significantly, Oates presents Josiah’s new socialist consciousness as one that recuperates certain aspects of the Enlightenment humanist tradition typically rendered horrific in the Schoolhouse Gothic. The qualities that made Josiah Slade an ideal student—his curiosity, his earnest but unsentimental bookishness, his habits of observation and analysis, his skeptical nature, his Enlightenment faith in the human mind—do not destroy him and the people around him, as they do in most works of the Schoolhouse Gothic. Instead, those qualities enable him to play a significant role in making the ‘Helicon Home Colony’ a success, ‘self-sustaining, and even profitable,’ as he and his comrades teach themselves ‘such disciplines as agronomics, organic agriculture, animal husbandry, and greenhouse-horticulture.’ His Enlightenment frame of mind is, however, divorced from the corrupting influences and interests of Princeton society and its esteemed university. The end of the novel provides scant details but paints an idyllic picture marred only by ‘an arson-set fire’ targeting the colony, a fire survived by all of the principals. The novel proper ends with the ‘double wedding’ of Josiah and Wilhelmina and Annabelle and Yaeger Ruggles, at which Upton Sinclair proclaims, ‘It is the dawn of a new day! Revolution now!’ Although an epilogue containing Winslow’s disturbing sermon follows this exultant scene, Josiah is left secure and happy. Instead of continuing his prestigious formal education, as he once seemed destined to do, he chooses to join a community of learners devoted to one another and to nature. As such, he represents a new development in the Schoolhouse Gothic: the student who escapes the curse of institutional schooling and breaks its cycle of terror.

Juhl and Jørgensen have described the Gothic novel as ‘a protest against bourgeois rationalism which claims that human reason can master nature as well as itself.’ Such a formulation identifies the dark underbelly of the Enlightenment not as human reason itself, but as human reason enmeshed in capitalist exploitation, bent on domination, and unchecked by the equally human capacity for respect or empathy. It is precisely this type of ‘bougeois rationalism’ that Josiah rejects. We could attribute his achievement to hero worship on the part of an unreliable narrator who owes Josiah his very life and may wish to remove his rescuer, ideologically and physically, from a town and university he regards as hopelessly compromised. We could also credit Josiah’s renunciations to the fantastic elements of the novel in which he appears, a novel unbound to strictures of realism that might render his choices implausible. While these formal considerations do ironize Josiah’s portrayal, the fact remains that in The Accursed, Joyce Carol Oates has granted a student character an uncharacteristically happy ending that sharply contrasts with the bleak fates suffered by most of his fellow Princetonians and by other students in her own Schoolhouse Gothic canon. By imagining an alternative socialist future for this character, she foregrounds political and economic considerations that Gothic and Schoolhouse Gothic texts typically incorporate but sometimes downplay or obscure. At the novel’s conclusion, Josiah has embraced not the familiar, seductive posture of neutrality that masks a deeper complicity with the capitalist status quo, but rather a healthy rationalism directed towards achieving harmony with the environment and with others. He has repudiated the inherited wealth, corrosive elitism, destructive competition, and mystified institutional power of his time—and challenged students and educators alike to imagine how we might do the same in our own.

Sherry R. Truffin was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and holds English degrees from Baldwin-Wallace University (BA, 1993), Cleveland State University (MA, 1995), and Loyola University Chicago (Ph.D., 2002). She has held teaching posts at colleges and universities in Georgia, Illinois, and Ohio, and she is currently an Associate Professor of English at Campbell University in North Carolina, where she teaches courses in American Literature and English Composition. Her research interests include Gothic fiction, popular culture, and literary stylistics. In addition to her first monograph, Schoolhouse Gothic, she has published essays on works by Edgar Allan Poe, James Baldwin, Chuck Palahniuk, Donna Tartt, Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis, and Joyce Carol Oates. She has also written about postmodern storytelling in The X-Files and the Gothic literature of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Bibliography

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Bauer, Margaret D. (2000), ‘“I have sinned in that I have betrayed innocent blood”: Quentin’s Recognition of His Guilt’, Southern Literary Journal, 32:2, 70-89.

Brooks, Cleanth (1952), ‘Primitivism in The Sound and The Fury’, English Institute Essays, 13-14.

Faulkner, William (1930), As I Lay Dying, New York: Vintage International, 1985.

Faulkner, William (1929), The Sound and The Fury, ed. David Minter, 2nd ed, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.

Hanson, Elizabeth (2011), ‘Fellow Students: Hamlet, Horatio, and the Early Modern University’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 62:2, 205-229.

Hanson, Philip J. (1994), ‘The Logic of Anti-Capitalism in The Sound and the Fury’, The Faulkner Journal, 10:1, 3-27.

Johnson, Greg (2006), Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations, 1970-2006, Princeton: Ontario Review Press.

Juhl, Marianne and Bo Hakon Jørgensen (1993), ‘Why Gothic Tales?’ Isak Dinesen: Critical Views, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. 88-99.

Milazzo, Lee (1989), Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Oates, Joyce Carol (2013), The Accursed, New York: HarperCollins.

Roberts, Diane (1995), Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Smith, Wendy (2013), ‘Joyce Carol Oates is at Her Gothic Best in The Accursed’, LA Times, 29 Mar 2013.

Sonser, Anna (2001), A Passion for Consumption: The Gothic Novel in America, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Sykes, John (1990), The Romance of Innocence and the Myth of History: Faulkner’s Critique of Southern Culture, Macon: Mercer University Press.

Taylor, William R. (1963), Cavalier and Yankee, New York: Anchor Books.

Truffin, Sherry R. (2008), Schoolhouse Gothic: Haunted Hallways and Predatory Pedagogues in Late Twentieth Century Literature and Scholarship, New Castle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Truffin, Sherry R. (2013b), ‘“Gigantic Paradox, … Too Monstrous for Solution”: Nightmarish Democracy and the Schoolhouse Gothic in ‘William Wilson’ and The Secret History’, A Companion to American Gothic, Ed. Charles Crow, Hoboken, NJ: 164-176.

Truffin, Sherry R. (2013a), ‘Zombies in the Classroom: Education as Consumption in Two Novels by Joyce Carol Oates’, in A. Whelan, C. Moore, R. Walker (eds.), Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education, Bristol: Intellect Press. 203-215.

Weinstein, Philip (2010), Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A Vegan Perspective on “Tenth of December”

Vegans and any individuals blessed or cursed with the ability to stand on the banks of our cultural mainstream and assess both its charms and its madness with a critical eye often feel like souls wandering alone in a surrealistic desert of casinos built of cow skulls. This is why we may gravitate to dystopian fiction or other deeply-felt books about man's place, or rather misplace, in the world. And this is why our hearts go pita pat with gratitude to find a kindred social spirit.  A novel like 1984, for instance, makes vegans nod wisely, for we understand exactly what Winston Smith is feeling in those ever darkening pages. We live there; in our carnist world, everything having to do with non-human animals is an Orwellian vista of doublethink.

That is why stumbling by chance on this collection of stories by the American writer George Saunders is an experience to be deeply savored by all who understand the negation and denial necessitated by our universal enslavement of animals. This is not ostensibly a book aimed at vegans. There is hardly a non-human animal mentioned; only one of the ten stories features an animal. And when Saunders mentions a mother as "vegan" in the title story it’s almost a throw-away line, though in fact the mom resurfaces later on in the plot as a good Samaritan, with biceps no less. And there's no suggestion that the author himself is vegan, at least not yet.

But Saunders patently understands the double nelson we as a civilization have got ourselves into through outmoded traditions and cultural conditioning,  increasingly shored up by a frenzy of consumerist brainwashing--all of which have their hand in that resulting arch nemesis here: moral obfuscation glazed over with spin.

His most successful story and the most subtly savageis “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” originally published in The New Yorker.  The author lulls the reader at first with a happy-go-lucky first person narrator who regurgitates with bonhomie the American shop 'til you drop mentality. But then this apparently naive account of keeping up with the Jones'sbegins to toy with our waylaid discomfort over such encroaching reminders of worker rights, minimum wage, and immigration. In the spine-tingling conclusion Saunders masterfully slips in the psychological sleight-of-hand we use to justify the unjustifiable. And it is here we vegans knowingly recognize thetest pattern for animal/human exploitation.

Then the gloves really come off. Saunders' even more chilling "Escape from Spiderhead" echoes not only Marvel comic strips but elements of animal experimentation, Nazi Germany, and sociologist Stanley Milgram's ground-breaking if controversial work at Yale on obedience to authority.  Not only do we know that guinea pigs in labs have it bad, but Dr. Mengele proved humans can be easily used as stand-ins.

The more traditional short story "Puppy," which is indeed about a discarded pet, surpasses no literary boundaries but still offers a heart-tugging glimpse at human egoism with pets as property, having no more status than a stick of furniture or a game of Scrabble. Though no down-with-puppy-mills manifesto, this shrewdly unveiled accountabout misguided social one-upmanship, would do the SPCA proud.

The creepiest story of all,  “Exhortation,” written in epistolary form looks–on the surface–like a dull American middle manager trying to inspire his staff to work harder. It is only as the paragraphs are peeled back that we see Saunders’ fine scalpel bring to the surface the heart of darkness that is man’s ability to be convinced of anything when financial rewards or other ideologies are hammered home. No vegan or vegetarian will read this story without a shuddering sense of total recognition in an era of factory-farming. This distinctive narrative is not merely about averting our eyes from disconcerting truths, but ratchets up the consequences of our active social capacity for distorting the truth to actively pursue what we may cynically want. As the 17th century French author Jean de la Fontaine quippedwith irony in one of his most famous fables: "La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure." (Might is what makesright.)

George Saunders is an artist of uncanny ability to delineate quixotic characters with astoundingly original voices, and to poke sometimes burlesque fun at the ludicrous, even as you weep.  The range of his writing styles is such that you sometimes wonder and perhaps check–as I did–to see if you are reading a collection of short stories by an array of America’s best contemporary writers, with Saunders a compiling editor? But no, by the end you know this variegated chorus of testimonials, grown as if from the hothouse of some mad scientist comes from the pen of just one extraordinary talent. The Tenth of December is a crafty and craftily constructed monument to what vegans have already learned is mankind’s unrelenting penchant for denial and hypocrisy.

Victoria Foote-Blackman is a writer, a translator, a teacher, and a vegan actively involved in animal rights advocacy. A reporter for nearly ten years for Time magazine's bureau in Paris, she covered social trends and cultural subjects such as theatre, dance, and art. She also worked as the editorial coordinator for an international online news agency in Paris.  Previously sheworked in publishing(the New York Times Book Company) , in press relations, and as a documentary TV producer abroad. She has taught English and French in France and in the U.S, and taught creative writing workshops at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She obtained her B.A. from Wellesley College and a Masters in education, in educational psychology, social foundations, from the University of Virginia.

WRITERS MUSEUM INTRODUCTIONS

From the introduction to the inaugural exhibition at Sorbonne 1 - Panthéon in March 2016

It is pleasing to note that it was in Ireland that Mia Funk began her painting career and formed herself as an artist; the humour, light and dark, of her paintings, her subversive use of the conventions and her technical versatility are features familiar to Irish culture and common to many of the greatest Irish writers. If water themes, so recurrent to her work, are another influence of this moist island, it is because they involve ambiguity, reflection and the visualisation of things that cannot be grasped. 

The Dublin Writers Museum is the first literary museum of its kind and was an inspiration for the American Writers Museum. What has emerged from our experience is that people are drawn to writers as much as to books, and that an understanding of individual authors not only illuminates their works or their national culture but leads to an understanding of the creative process itself. This is why Mia Funk’s The Creative Process is so important and exciting. Her idea is that literature and art are vehicles for bringing people together, and the project is designed as an exhibition for public spaces such as museums, galleries and libraries, where it can be shared by all sections of the community, including universities and cultural centres across America and Europe, where it will be of tremendous benefit. As Ms Funk says, ‘As an artist, I find that writers open up to me in a way they might not to critics. I’m not a journalist. I’m an artist who also writes.’ The interviews she has done are revealing not only of individual writers but of the shared experience of the creative process, and the portraits which accompany them are themselves like interviews in paint.

–ROBERT NICHOLSON

curator of the DUBLIN WRITERS MUSEUM and the JAMES JOYCE MUSEUM

Writers have always had a profound impact on our thinking. They influence our history, our culture and our daily lives. They reveal to us who we are. They educate and entertain us. Their works are the keystone of our cultural heritage. Therefore, it is vitally important for young people to understand the role writers play in society. It is particularly so at a time when reading and writing are being so impacted by technology. I would love to see a day when people have the same reverence for great writers as they do for sports heroes and film stars.

That’s why Mia Funk’s The Creative Process exhibition is an exciting project and very much in the spirit of what we are doing here at the American Writers Museum, opening in Chicago in March 2017.

Dr. Malcolm E. O’Hagan

President of the American Writers Museum

Ideas and Identity in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin

Writing in 2008 for Wired Magazine, Clive Thompson makes the following assertion about the status of science fiction (interchangeably referred to as ‘SF’ in this essay) in the contemporary literary milieu: “if you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.” This statement is not without antecedent. Similar claims which identify SF as an ideas-driven, thought-provoking genre have been made by academic and plebeian critics alike over the past century. Using Thompson’s statement as a point of departure, this essay will interrogate the genre’s credentials as a literature of ideas via an analysis of Michel Faber’s SF novel Under the Skin. It will be argued that Faber’s novel is an example of a text which innovatively uses the conventions of science fiction to address ontological anxieties surrounding the formation and maintenance of identity. Of particular interest will be the ways in which the novel deals with the sociocultural issues of class and gender through its protagonist Isserley. This essay will demonstrate that Faber’s novel, although relatively short, stands as an exemplar of the way in which science fiction, as a genre, succeeds in creating a literary space which facilitates the exploration of ideas, on both a personal and societal level. 

It was not until the 1970s that SF criticism became widely accepted as a course of academic study, and it was during this period that some of the seminal works in science fiction scholarship were produced. Arguably the most influential study of the genre was conducted at this time by Neo-Marxist critic Darko Suvin, who posited the thesis that science fiction is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment. Clive Thompson’s article in Wired essentially paraphrases Suvin when he states that authors of SF “rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds — so we can learn more about ourselves.” Suvin coined the term “cognitive estrangement” to describe this narrative technique and David Seed succinctly summarises the concept and its purported effect in the following statement: “science fiction estranges the reader from the familiar world and produces striking new perspectives as a result.” While it is fair to say that SF, even in the period before it gained academic acceptance, was a literary genre associated with ideas (being immediately and indelibly associated with technology, space-travel, and the ‘science’ from which it took its name) the early theoretical work conducted by Suvin and others made significant strides towards defining a poetics of SF which clearly articulated the ways in which the genre interacts with ideas and, perhaps more significantly, with ideology. 

If science fiction is the literature of ideas then cognitive estrangement is perhaps the genre’s most important generative tenet, as it is through this style of narrative, and the process of alienation (in the Brechtian sense) it prompts in the reader, that the ideas contained in SF texts fully reveal themselves. The most innovative works of science fiction do not indulge in escapism for its own sake, instead they distance the reader from their immediate cultural surroundings in order to open up a space for critical thought, where non-hegemonic discourses can emerge. In other words, they have the effect of inducing a perspective of critical displacement from the distorted ideological perception of social reality. Michel Faber’s Under the Skin is a novel which deploys the techniques of cognitive estrangement in order to engage with complex sociocultural ideas, in ways which, despite protests from its author, distinctly mark it as a work of science fiction. 

Under the Skin is set in a coastal area of the Scottish highlands and details a short period of time in the life of Isserley, an alien woman who has been surgically altered to resemble a female from Earth in order to fulfil an important but menial corporate job. She lives on what is ostensibly a typical Scottish farm, but in reality these farmlands serve as a processing and exporting plant for “voddissin,” an alien delicacy made from the flesh of humans. Notably, the alien race that Isserley is a member of are referred to in the text as “human beings,” and they refer to the people of Earth as “vodsels.” Isserley’s job, which effectively amounts to a form of bonded labour, involves driving the roads of the surrounding areas in order to pick up and sedate male vodsels who are then brought back to the farm to be processed. Even from this brief description of the plot it is apparent that there are a number of complex sociocultural issues at stake in Faber’s novel, and that these issues revolve around Isserley; a protagonist who exists somewhere on the border of human and alien, possessing some of the language of both, and who occupies a marginal position in society because of her class and gender. The narrative impetus of Under the Skin centres on the fractured sense of self which Isserley feels as a result of her sexual and economic marginalisation, an identity crisis which is further complicated as a result of her transspeciated status. 

Helen Merrick, writing about gender representation in early science fiction, proffers that aliens were often used to “signify everything that was ‘other’ to the dominant audience of middle-class, young white Western males – including women, people of colour, other nationalities, classes and sexualities.” Faber’s use of aliens in Under the Skin is much more nuanced than this and Isserley is far too complex a character to be conflated with the ciphers of earlier SF texts, who existed purely to stand in binary opposition to a hegemonic norm. However, while we can no longer presume a ‘dominant’ white/male/middle-class audience for science fiction literature, Isserley can still be identified as ‘Other’ within a hegemonic social paradigm; she is female, a member of the underclass (although not at the very lowest rung of the social order), and, tied to an unfulfilling job for which she has been surgically mutilated, possesses very little social autonomy. Her physical alteration is significant, as this renders her finally and irredeemably Other; her marginalisation extending beyond social constructions of class and gender to her very physiognomy. By positioning Isserley as the central character of his novel, Faber places the experience of the Other at the foreground of the text, denying the reader the stability of a ‘safe’ or ‘familiar’ subject position, and in so doing, initiating cognitive estrangement. Not only have the Scottish highlands been transformed into the locus of a macabre alien project which undermines the position of human beings at the top of the food chain, but the reader’s access to this now-foreign landscape is granted via an alien Other in the midst of an existential crisis. Sarah Dillon, in a paper which looks at human/non-human animal relations in the novel, identifies this perspective as “the source of much of the social satire of contemporary culture evident in the novel,” a statement with which I concur. This is not the Scotland with which most readers are at least tangentially familiar, but, despite the use of a ‘foreign’ perspective, the culture presented in Under the Skin remains recognisably ‘human’, allowing us to identify and engage in the critique of societal attitudes towards class and gender which runs through the text.

It is apparent from the early stages of Faber’s novel that the narrative will engage with discursively constructed social inequalities, and how these can result in anxieties which impact on identity formation. Isserley is a character who is forced to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances both physical and societal, and as a result she struggles to retain a sense of self. During her time on Earth, Isserley clings to the notion of a monolithic identity based on the difference between her ‘human’ species, and the vodsel species which populates her adopted home. No longer subject to the rules which governed society on her home planet, class and gender lines are temporarily flattened in favour of defining identity along lines of species. Her human self is defined by the vodsel Other, whose brutal farming she is involved in and whose subjectivity she repeatedly denies in order to insulate herself from their suffering. As Dillon posits, “a conviction of her difference from them is all that enables her to remain impervious to the plight of the vodsels she captures. Such is Isserley’s psychological determination in this respect that it leads to a virtually pathological inability to recognize their suffering.” Isserley stresses this difference throughout the text, as if desperately trying to reinforce it in order to maintain her identity and justify her treatment of the vodsels. Her physical similarity to the species she actively subjugates undermines this effort however, and she struggles to reconcile the inner conflict this causes with the sense of self she has cultivated since coming to Earth. When asked by Amlis Vess, a member of the elite from her home planet, to translate some vodsel writing from the floor of the enclosure pens, Isserley is confronted with her liminal status and struggles to contain her emotions. Nearing tears, she refutes any common ground she may share with the vodsels, stating “I’m a human being, not a vodsel.” As Dillon observes, “Isserley needs to define herself by what she is not, but the attempt to do so is constantly challenged by the surgical modifications made to her body, which cause her to inhabit physically the limit between human and vodsel.” The strain placed on Isserley’s psyche by her physical transformation is most clearly articulated before her first meeting with Amlis Vess, in her fear of his first reaction to her ‘freakish’ appearance: “He’d be expecting to see a human being, and he would see a hideous animal instead. It was that moment […] of the sickening opposite of recognition that she just couldn’t cope with.” In these lines there is a suggestion that Isserley understands that defining her identity through physical difference is no longer tenable, while at the same time acknowledging the mental anguish that this causes her. 

The minutiae of Isserley’s surgical transformation are also significant because they can be read as a commentary on the standards imposed on female beauty by Earth’s media, and the mass cultural objectification of women in general. The perception of Isserley’s physical alteration, from what Faber himself describes as a “cross between a cat, a dog, and a llama” to a human woman, combined with Isserley’s own observations on how the female body is portrayed in the media, provide insight into how woman are represented and viewed in human culture. Here, again, is an example of cognitive estrangement, in that the reader is literally presented with an alien perspective on aspects of the media so commonplace that they might otherwise escape notice or critique. The purpose of such an argument is not to credit Faber with a striking new take on the politics of gender representation, rather, it simply serves to highlight the ways in which the text encourages a critical engagement with this aspect of human society. 

In a particularly revealing moment, the reader is informed that the surgeons who performed Isserley’s transformation modelled her new body on pictures from a magazine which were sent to them from Earth. The resultant body is a distorted caricature of female anatomy, with significant attention seemingly being given to the construction of exaggeratedly large breasts. It is difficult to read the descriptions of Isserley’s breasts in the text – referred to at one point as “puffy” and “artificial,” and at another as “alien mounds” – as anything other than an indictment of a culture which engenders insecurities around female body image, and in which cosmetic surgery is becoming increasingly commonplace. Faber has acknowledged that this was an issue which preoccupied him during the writing of the novel, admitting to one interviewer that he was “thinking a lot about plastic surgery and the whole idea of women voluntarily allowing themselves to be carved up and reshaped to a cast master, as if their selves, as they were, weren't good enough.” Anxieties around body image are amplified through Isserley, whose new body represents a drastic external reshaping which she finds increasingly difficult to reconcile with her inner sense of self. She demonstrates a particularly strong antipathy towards her new breasts throughout the text, as these seem to be one of the more obvious and inescapable markers of her alterity. The strain this causes to her psyche is clearly articulated in a bathing scene late in the novel, when looking down at her artificial breasts she is described “easily imagining them as something other than they were. Marooned like this in the sunlit water, they reminded her of rocks in the ocean, revealed by the tide. Stones on her chest, pushing her down.” Isserley’s view as an outsider in human society is also useful in highlighting how unlike reality the template used by the surgeons has proven to be, as she notes how “never, in all her far-ranging travels […] had she seen a female vodsel with breasts like the ones in the magazine.” This underlines the implication that the female body-type which is predominantly promoted in the media bears little resemblance to reality, a point which Isserley makes explicit in her observation that “real life wasn’t at all like the smooth images celebrated by magazines and television.”

Early in the novel Isserley is described in one hitch-hiker’s internal monologue as “half Baywatch babe, half little old lady,” an account which is indicative of both the difficulty of transforming her species into humanoid form, and the standards which were used in the creation of her new body. Her face is described as: “small and heart-shaped, like an elf in a kiddie’s book, with a perfect little nose and a fantastic big-lipped curvy mouth like a supermodel.” The mention of her ‘supermodel-like’ mouth is not insignificant as this again draws attention to the types of women, and moreover the particular physical attributes, that are held up as the ideal standard in the media, and against which all women are compared. It is significant, also, that Isserley’s lips are described as “red as lipstick,” as opposed to “red with lipstick.” This indicates that a decision was made during the surgery that her lips should be permanently pigmented to an unnatural hue which approximates a shade that could otherwise only be achieved cosmetically. While it is fair to say that an alien race using photographs from certain magazines could easily make the mistake of thinking that all women on Earth have lips of this colour, this detail can nonetheless be read as further evidence of the sustained critique of mediated images of the female body which runs through Under the Skin. Furthermore, by removing the step of actually having to apply make-up, Isserley has been stripped of a measure of autonomy she might otherwise exercise over her appearance, ensuring that she remains at all times in anticipation of an objectifying (male) gaze. 

Under the Skin is very self-aware in its engagement with ideas around the surveillance of bodies, and particularly the notion of the ‘male gaze’, a term coined by Laura Mulvey in an influential critique of Hollywood film to describe the cinema’s apparent obsession with framing female bodies “for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” Large sections of the novel are dedicated to the time Isserley spends driving around with male hitch-hikers, and it is during these meetings that the reader is informed in detail of the methods Isserley uses to capture vodsels. There are eleven such encounters in the novel, and in all but one of these episodes the hitcher makes reference to her breasts, either internally or in conversation. It is made apparent that wearing clothing which exposes her cleavage is a part of Isserley’s modus operandi, and in a description which serves as an early indication of the novel’s willingness to engage with the politics of ‘looking,’ the reader is informed in one of these episodes that she “craned forward a little […] and allowed herself to be examined in earnest.” Regardless of whether or not Faber is intentionally commenting on the idea of the male gaze in his narrative, the next line appears to make the connection inevitable, as we are told of how “immediately she felt his gaze beaming all over her like another kind of ultraviolet ray, and no less intense.” Isserley is very conscious of how her body is constantly under observation for varying reasons, either from male vodsels or men from her own planet, and appears wearied by it. A recurring motif in the novel is Isserley’s desire to escape from her current circumstances, and this is at least partly because the constant scrutiny she endures, as indicated in lines which describe how she longs for “somewhere more private, where no-one was subjecting her to surveillance or speculation.” It is not a stretch to suggest that Isserley’s anxieties in this regard might resonate with the lived experience of women in a culture in which the female body is subjected to surveillance on a grand scale. 

The novel’s opening also seems to indicate the text’s awareness and wilful engagement with ideas around the objectification of bodies, appearing to play with and actively subvert the idea of a dominant paradigm of active/male and passive/female viewers. The language used to describe Isserley’s visual assessment of male hitchers, while later revealed to be the vocabulary of livestock evaluation, at first appears to be sexually charged. As Dillon notes, “Isserley uses the language of assessment and objectification that is usually reserved, in our sexual politics, for men observing women,” highlighting the way Faber’s text draws attention to an unequal ‘hierarchy of looking’ by actively subverting it. Estranged from the hegemonic male gaze, the reader vicariously participates in Isserley’s apparent objectification of the male body in these passages, as demonstrated in lines which describe her gaze “following the curves of his brawny shoulders or the swell of his chest under his T-shirt, savouring the thought of how superb he’d be once he was naked.” When she picks up her first hitcher in the novel she is again described as “noting the ripples of muscle momentarily expressing themselves through his T-shirt,” adding soon afterwards that “the bulge in his jeans was promising.” Although it is later revealed that Isserley has no sexual interest in the hitch-hikers, these descriptions are nonetheless a deliberate challenge to the default setting of an active-male/passive-female viewership which many cultural texts assume, again demonstrating the novel’s willingness to engage in broader issues of gender politics. 

Isserley’s interactions with male characters in the novel, both those from earth and those from her home world, betray an ambivalence about her status as a woman in the society of either planet. Isserley’s conflicted emotional state is evident in one instance where she tries to assess her emotional state after a troubling exchange with a vodsel hitch-hiker who aggressively questions her on the subject of her surgically enhanced breasts. Tring to decide whether or not she was upset, Isserley concludes that “it was difficult to decide, because her own emotions hid from her. The inarticulate rage of Isserley’s youth is replaced in her adult life by an emotional evasiveness which produces effects bordering on depression. As described in the text, “she could glimpse her feelings, but only out of the corner of her eye, like distant headlights in a side mirror.” Her melancholia is apparent as we are told of “the way perfectly ordinary events could bring her down.” This emotional distress cannot simply be explained away as a result of her physical transformation, and Isserley seems cognisant of this, as we are told that “she suspected her feelings were getting swallowed up, undigested, inside purely physical symptoms. Her back-ache and eye-strain were sometimes much worse than usual, for no real reason; at these times, there was probably something else troubling her.” The unfocussed anger Isserley felt in her youth, and her inability to directly interact with her emotions as an adult, can be read as the damaging effect that societal marginalisation has had on her psyche at both stages of her life.

As the reader learns more about Isserley’s home world, an ecologically-ravaged, strictly class-divided planet, it becomes apparent that her arrested emotional development is connected to her status as both a woman and a member of the underclass. It is revealed that the lower classes on her planet, when they reach a certain age, are forced to live in an overcrowded, underground network known as the New Estates. Here, they are forced to work in water and oxygen plants in order to address an unspecified environmental catastrophe which has resulted in a severe lack of both of these essential resources in the natural environment. The naming of this area is significant as it connects the dystopian division of class on Isserley’s home planet with the working class housing-estates of Earth, encouraging the reader to draw parallels between the limited opportunities which are offered in both. This point is reinforced by the heavily accented dialogue of one of Isserley’s hitch-hikers who, after noting his boredom living in an estate, remarks that “jobs dinnae exist up here.” While there is a marked difference between the forced labour of Isserley’s home planet and unemployment in the highlands of Scotland, the implication for the subaltern class in each case is that they are denied social autonomy. There is a suggestion much later in the novel that, as a young woman, Isserley may have become romantically involved with members of the elite in an attempt to escape a life in the Estates. Ruefully she recalls “all the men who’d promised to keep her safe as she neared the grading age. […] Spoilt little poseurs, the lot of them.” Ultimately the promises of protection made to her by these men never materialise, and in a desperate attempt to avoid the Estates she accepts the assignment on Earth and the radical surgery which it entails. 

Class also plays a significant role in the selection of vodsels for the farming process. It becomes clear as the novel progresses that Isserley only chooses vodsels who she thinks will not be missed by the broader society, and more often than not this means preying on the unemployed. While other factors are taken into consideration, such as their marital/family status, she explicitly states at one point that “unemployed vodsels were always a good risk.” Once again, Isserley’s perspective as an outsider offers the reader a clarity which emerges primarily by virtue of the distance she feels from the society she observes. In an interesting contrast with her own treatment by the elite, Isserley can now be said to participate in a form of class discrimination herself. This is apparent in both her treatment of the vodsels and also the men of her own species who work at the farm. It is revealed that Isserley was sent to the Estates for just three days before being offered her job on Earth, and as a result she feels a sense of superiority in relation to the men who work on the farm. She refers to these men as “estate trash,” and maintains a considerable distance from them in both her personal and professional life. While this is partly as a result of her desire to escape the surveillance which is a constant reminder of her difference, it is also evident that Isserley has internalised the classed prejudice she herself has been a victim of, and is now reproducing some form of it. It is difficult, however, to divorce her relationship with her co-workers from her status as the only woman of their species on the farm. In a moment which seems to indicate that gender difference ultimately trumps class difference in their society, the male workers side with Amlis Vess when he challenges Isserley on the ethics of her role in the production of voddissin. ‘Estate trash’ and ‘elite’ standing together in opposition to her, the reader is told how this moment “reminded her of all her other differences from the men who stood in a semicircle before her.” 

As demonstrated, Michael Faber’s Under the Skin is undeniably a novel which follows in the tradition of science fiction as a literature of cognitive estrangement. By presenting the reader with a view of the highlands of Scotland through the lens of an alien outsider, Faber’s text encourages a critical engagement with complex sociocultural ideas around class, gender, and identity itself. Under the Skin achieves this feat by forcing the reader to adopt the position of the Other, and in so doing to question the hegemonic subject position that is often presented in cultural texts. Due to her status as an alien, and the perspective it brings, Isserley’s travails on Earth as a working-class woman, highlight socially constructed inequalities along lines of class and gender which can have an impact on identity formation. The text confronts these complex issues with a directness which may not be achievable in the genre of literary realism, further demonstrating the validity of science fiction’s reputation as the “last great literature of ideas.” 

[2015]

Patrick Rogers holds a Bachelor's Degree in English, Media and Cultural Studies from IADT Dun Laoghaire and a M.Phil in Popular Literature from Trinity College Dublin. He is currently travelling South East Asia while working on a PhD Submission concerning Media Concentration and Bias in the Republic of Ireland.

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