Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English: Art of Crisis 9780367437428, 9781003005414

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Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English offers an engaging, ambitious, and comprehensive survey of American and British collage literature in the new century. Focusing primarily on the experimental novel, with some detours through experimental writers and poets who turned to creative non-fiction projects, Wojciech Dra˛g’s excellent critical account of collage shows it to be a surprisingly vibrant literary technique for writers responding to the emerging crises of the new millennium. David Banash, Professor of Contemporary Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, Western Illinois University This book is a valuable and original contribution to the fields of twentyfirst-century literature, collage, and the legacies of modernism and postmodernism. By surveying a range of related but divergent texts by authors with a demonstrable interest in the collage practice, the author moves to create an identifiable twenty-first-century collage canon, with clear roots in 20th-century collage and avant-garde practices. Rona Cran, Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American Literature, University of Birmingham In Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English, Wojciech Dra˛g convincingly demonstrates that collage remains a poignant aesthetic in the twenty-first century. Through techniques such as juxtaposition and thematic joints, the poetics of collage enable contemporary writers to engage with the personal and political crises of the contemporary. Alison Gibbons, Reader in Contemporary Stylistics, Sheffield Hallam University

Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English

Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English: Art of Crisis considers the phenomenon of the continued relevance of collage, a form established over a hundred years ago, to contemporary literature. It argues that collage is a perfect artistic vehicle to represent the crisisridden reality of the twenty-first century. Being a mixture of fragmentary incompatible voices, collage embodies the chaos of the media-dominated world. Examining the artistic, sociopolitical and personal crises addressed in contemporary collage literature, the book argues that the twenty-first century has brought a revival of collage-like novels and essays. Wojciech Drąg (PhD) is an assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Wrocław in Poland.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change Lessons from the Underground Presses of the Late Sixties Matthew T. Pifer Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English Art of Crisis Wojciech Dra˛g Patrick McGrath and his Worlds Madness and the Transnational Gothic Edited by Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction Phil O’Brien Reading Contingency The Accident in Contemporary Fiction David Wylot Death-Facing Ecology in Contemporary British and North American Environmental Crisis Fiction Louise Squire Poetry and the Question of Modernity From Heidegger to the Present Ian Cooper Apocalyptic Territories Setting and Revelation in Contemporary American Fiction Anna Hellén For more information about this series, please visit: https://www. routledge.com

Collage in Twenty-FirstCentury Literature in English Art of Crisis Wojciech Drąg

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Wojciech Drąg to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-43742-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00541-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figuresx Acknowledgementsxi List of Abbreviationsxiii

Introduction: Madly in Love With Crisis: Collage Literature Today

1 Theory and Practice of Collage Historical Outline  13 Poetics 18 Politics 22 Literary Collages in the Twentieth Century  27 Analyzing Collages  34 Multimodality 34 Rhetorical Structure Theory  37

1 10

PART I

Art in Crisis45 2 “Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?”: David Markson’s Late Novels Collage Structure  48 Death, Senility and Anti-Semitism  61 Novel(ist) in Crisis  63 Conclusion 68 3 Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art: David Shields’s Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life Collage Structure  74 Reality Hunger: A Manifesto  75 How Literature Saved My Life  79

47

73

viii  Contents The Novel’s Obsolete Apparatus  83 Blueprint for a New Literature  87 Conclusion 90 PART II

Society in Crisis97 4 It’s the End of the World as We Know It: Lance Olsen’s Sewing Shut My Eyes, Head in Flames and Dreamlives of Debris Collage Structure  102 Sewing Shut My Eyes  102 Head in Flames  108 Dreamlives of Debris  115 World in Flames – Crises Present, Past and Future  118 Conclusion 126 5 When We Were Human: Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland and The Book of Portraiture Collage Structure  133 VAS: An Opera in Flatland  134 The Book of Portraiture  140 All That Is Solid Melts Into Pixels  145 Conclusion 152

99

131

PART III

The Self in Crisis157 6 I’m Every Wo/man, Guaranteed One Hundred Per Cent Genuine!: Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World Collage Structure  161 Everything Must Go! – The Empty Self and Other Selves in Crisis  170 Conclusion 178 7 Diaries of Bad Years: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation Collage Structure  185 Bluets 185 Dept. of Speculation  190

159

183

Contents ix Things Fall Apart  195 Conclusion 201

Conclusion: Collage Is Here to Stay

205

Index212

Figures

4.1 Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, “Telegenesicide” (in Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, Sewing Shut My Eyes, U of Alabama P, 2000), p. 15. 4.2 Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, “Telegenesicide” (in Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, Sewing Shut My Eyes, U of Alabama P, 2000), p. 13. 5.1 Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (U of Chicago P, 2004), pp. 86–87. 5.2 Steve Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture (FC2, 2006), p. 297. 6.1 Graham Rawle, Woman’s World (Atlantic, 2006), p. 142. 6.2 Graham Rawle, Woman’s World (Atlantic, 2006), p. 234. 6.3 Graham Rawle, Woman’s World (Atlantic, 2006), p. 264.

105 107 136 144 163 168 173

Acknowledgements

I must begin by expressing my gratitude to the authorities of the Department of English and Comparative Studies, the Institute of English Studies and the Faculty of Letters at the University of Wrocław – Prof. Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak, Prof. Marek Kuźniak and Prof. Marcin Cieński – for the institutional support of my project and for all their advice and encouragement. I am much obliged to The Kosciuszko Foundation for awarding me a research fellowship which enabled me to spend three months at the University of Utah in 2018. During that time, I was able to meet several novelists and critics whose work was of crucial importance to my project, and I wrote a considerable part of this book. I am very grateful to the said authors – Andi and Lance Olsen, Graham Rawle, David Shields and Steve Tomasula – for being very generous with time and attention. Their insights into collage and their feedback on the relevant chapters of this book have been very helpful. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to David Banash, Rona Cran, Alison Gibbons, Marjorie Perloff and Joseph Tabbi for agreeing to consult my ideas. I am particularly thankful to Alison, David and Rona for their invaluable feedback on the entire manuscript. My thanks go to Grzegorz Maziarczyk, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill and Laura Sims for reading parts of my book and responding to my academic queries. I remain grateful to my friends and colleagues – Craig Dworkin, Dominika Ferens, Vanessa Guignery, Robert Kusek, Maciej Masłowski, Lisa McAfee, Rod Mengham, Merritt Moseley, Katarzyna NowakMcNeice, Joseph Plowman, Marcin Tereszewski and Travis Vick – for assisting me in various ways during the last four years I spent developing this project. Thank you to my late friend Wiktor Jakubczyc for helping me acquire some of my research material and for devising a remarkable electronic dictionary, which I have used throughout the writing process. A number of ideas that contributed to this book originated during my elective courses at the University of Wrocław’s Institute of English

xii  Acknowledgements Studies. I would like to express my gratitude to some of my best and most dedicated students – Mathias Foit, Alina Hanusiak, Eleonora Imbierowicz, Joanna Kluga, Radosław Siewierski, Martyna Szot and Lech Zdunkiewicz – for their enthusiasm about experimental literature and for the many ways in which I benefitted from their kindness and generosity. I wrote most of the book in two cafes: Starbucks Coffee at Grunwaldzki Center in Wrocław and Coffee Garden in Salt Lake City. I am very indebted to their friendly and welcoming staffs. Finally, I wish to thank Kacper Podrygajło for being the best possible companion. * Earlier versions of small parts of Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 appeared in the form of journal articles and edited chapters, and I am grateful for permission to include them here: Drąg, Wojciech. “Collage and Crisis in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland and Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames.” Notre Dame Review, no. 48, Summer–Fall 2019. ———. “Collage Manifestos: Fragmentation and Appropriation in David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger.” The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, edited by Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drąg. Vernon, 2018, pp. 107–22. ———. “Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and the Revival of Fragmentary Writing.” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 56, 2017, pp. 57–72. ———. “ ‘A Novel Against the Novel’: David Markson’s Antinovelistic Tetralogy’.” Polish Journal of English Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 11–26.

I am much obliged to Andi and Lance Olsen, Graham Rawle and Steve Tomasula for their permission to reproduce figures 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3.

Abbreviations

BP DS HF HLSML LN RB RH SSME TINN VAS VP WW

The Book of Portraiture Dept. of Speculation Head in Flames How Literature Saved My Life The Last Novel Reader’s Block Reality Hunger Sewing Shut My Eyes This Is Not a Novel VAS: An Opera in Flatland Vanishing Point Woman’s World

Introduction Madly in Love With Crisis: Collage Literature Today

Although it emerged over a century ago, collage continues to be a resonant artistic form – attractive, evolving and amenable to multiple media. The world of today resembles little the world of 1912 – when Pablo Picasso produced Still Life with Chair Caning – yet collage has retained its capacity for responding to contemporary concerns. In Collage Culture (2013), David Banash describes it as an apt and popular metaphor for the “phenomenal experience of everyday life,” which is marked by fragmentation, overproduction and media saturation (14). Collage remains relevant also because it requires the same kind of attention as the reality of the twenty-first century, with its proliferation of media stimuli that need to be integrated by the individual for meaning to consolidate (Banash, Collage Culture 200). Budd Hopkins notices that, because of their immersion in the mediascape, contemporary viewers of collage have been better trained to “grasp a sequence that has missing parts” and to “make connections between seemingly disjunctive units” than the audience of the Cubists, Surrealists and Dadaists (12). As fluent users of the Internet and digital media, the twenty-first-century audience has also become adept at processing complex juxtapositions of text and image. Despite the ubiquity of multimodal and appropriative strategies in mainstream culture, collage has retained an avant-garde dimension. Many of its twenty-first-century practitioners – such as the visual artist Christian Marclay, novelists Lance Olsen and Steve Tomasula and filmmaker György Pálfi – are regarded as experimentalists. In 1948, Clement Greenberg called collage “the most succinct and direct single clue to the aesthetic of genuinely modern art” (259).1 Seventy years later, that statement has not lost its relevance. Steve Tomasula notes that although “collage has been called the most important organizing principle for art during the twentieth century,” an examination of twenty-first-century “music, video, and visual arts” demonstrates that it is “even more prominent today” (“Electricians” 5). Literary works are not exempt from this phenomenon: on the opening page of David Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010), the collage novel is listed as one of the most important vehicles for “breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ ” into a work of art (1).

2  Introduction The craved fragments of “reality” are assimilated in the form of appropriated material, in accordance with Robert Rauschenberg’s dictum that a work is “more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world” (qtd. in Hodge 186). Such texts are not standard literary practice: in contemporary fiction, collage is far more popular as a “metaphor for experience of modernity” than as a “formal principle” (Banash, “Collage as Practice” 264). The formal criteria adopted in my study are relatively strict and involve the following characteristics: extensive appropriation, fragmentation, heterogeneity of material, multimodality and reliance on juxtaposition. Although, admittedly, the body of texts whose structure incorporates all or most of the above formal principles is not vast, I believe we can still speak of a recent resurgence of interest in literary collage.2 Its most important Anglophone representatives are the authors examined in this book: David Markson, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, Lance Olsen, Graham Rawle, David Shields and Steve Tomasula. Except for Markson, all of them are alive; except for Rawle, all are American and have a literary background (Rawle’s is in the visual arts).3 As mentioned before, Olsen and Tomasula are associated with innovative literature: they are both connected with the independent publisher Fiction Collective Two and the biennial &Now Festival; they both contributed to, and were discussed in, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012). The experimental tag has also been applied to Markson (whose Wittgenstein’s Mistress was called “the high point of experimental fiction” in the United States by David Foster Wallace) and Nelson (also an occasional guest of the &Now Festival). Markson’s late work was credited as a considerable influence by most authors considered here – Nelson, Offill, Olsen, Shields and Tomasula – and can thus be seen as the genesis of the literary phenomenon examined in this volume (Personal interviews).4 Despite their adherence to the outlined formal principles (and the Marksonian influence), twenty-first-century collages vary substantially as regards genre. Out of the fourteen works under consideration, ten were released as novels, although five of them – Markson’s last four novels (1996–2007) and Olsen’s Dreamlives of Debris (2017) – challenge most expectations that readers may have of novels. Paradoxically, of the remaining ones, it is Rawle’s Woman’s World (2005), a book assembled out of forty thousand cut-ups from women’s magazines, that reads most like a traditional novel. Nelson’s Bluets (2009) and Shields’s How Literature Saved My Life (2013) have been classified as memoirs or extended essays, while the previously mentioned Reality Hunger is subtitled “A Manifesto.” Finally, Olsen’s Sewing Shut My Eyes (2000) is a collection of mostly multimodal short stories (co-authored with Andi Olsen), which invites an analogy with Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture (2006) – a highly visual novel in which each chapter has a different setting and a different cast of characters.

Introduction 3 For all their thematic and generic variety, collage works are informed by two desires which Banash sees as the quintessence of collage: the critique or protest embodied in the process of cutting and the conservative nostalgia that underlies the act of gathering and pasting (Collage Culture 31–32). The “progressive” and “regressive” impulses are thus made to function simultaneously in a given image or text, which accounts for the inherent tension at the heart of collage. The coexistence of multiple voices representing the sources juxtaposed by the collagist further unsettles the work’s inner disunity. Thomas P. Brockelman, who calls collage “a technique whose existence depends upon a contradiction,” declares that it is “in some sense, an art of crisis – an art in perpetual crisis” (35, emphasis original). Reflecting on the content of collage, Shields arrives at a similar conclusion; he argues that at the heart of collage books lies “the animating cataclysm” and proposes that “they’re all madly in love with their own crises” (HLSML 177). I wish to develop Brockelman’s and Shields’s critical insights and demonstrate that the link between collage and crisis is particularly strong in twenty-first-century literature. The works by the seven considered authors can be interpreted as testimonies to the crises afflicting the new millennium and as (quintessentially heteroglot) sites of confrontation of competing voices and ideologies. In Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (2013), Peter Boxall speaks of literature after postmodernism as marked by “a strange sense of disconnection, in response to a world that is more closely connected” (17). As shown by the example of Olsen’s Sewing Shut My Eyes and Dreamlives of Debris, the epistemological chaos of media-­dominated society can be effectively evoked by collage. Boxall adds that at the beginning of the new millennium “we have entered into a new sense of our age, in which our conception of late culture comes into a difficult contact with the apprehension of a youthful time” (12). Because of its structure, collage is well suited to represent a collision of two epochs or value systems and the crisis of their uneasy coexistence. The tension between the old and the new is particularly apparent in the works by Markson and Shields, which confront the exhaustion of conventional fiction with a hunger for literature which – similarly to the antinovel of the nouveaux romanciers – is free from the restraints of plot, character and genre. Boxall also diagnoses in twenty-first-century fiction “a new kind of hybridity, a new category of being that emerges from the failed connection . . . between the human and the non-human” (101). The anxiety prompted by the prospect of a post-human future is addressed most forcefully by Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) and The Book of Portraiture. Hybridity, singled out by Rachel Greenwald Smith as the most salient characteristic feature of the literature of the 2000s (388), is represented by those (and several other) works also through multimodal means – by combining text and image and employing audacious typographical experiments.

4  Introduction Most collage works considered in this volume meet some of the criteria of “crisis art” as laid out in Harold Jaffe’s article “Picketing the Zeitgeist” (2011).5 A form of “cultural activism,” crisis art is described by Jaffe as aiming “to effect social change or a wider social awareness” (3). That motivation is particularly visible in the works of Olsen, Shields and Tomasula, who are committed to engaging with artistic, sociopolitical and technological crises of their day. A case in point is Shields’s Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump (2018), subtitled “An Intervention,” which offers an incisive diagnosis of American society under Donald Trump. It serves as the quintessential example of contemporary collage’s capacity for engaging with the here and now – exercised in the previous century most memorably by the Berlin Dadaists. Shields’s text also best exemplifies Jaffe’s notion that crisis art is “situational” and thus tends to be “created rapidly rather than painstakingly revised and refined” (3). (On the other hand, Offill, Nelson and Rawle have taken many years to execute and polish their works.) The claim that crisis art is “dialogic” invites a clear parallel with the essentially polyphonic structure of collage. Jaffe’s closing statement, that crisis art’s “primary obligation is to not avert your eyes” and “to bear witness,” is particularly relevant to the works relating the experience of a grave personal crisis – Nelson’s Bluets and Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014). Will Jackson and Bob Jeffery open their interdisciplinary volume Crisis, Rupture and Anxiety (2012) by diagnosing the near ubiquity of the concept in the new millennium. “We are seemingly faced with crises in every aspect of our lives,” they add, “and as academics working across the arts, media and the social sciences a confrontation with events and phenomena labelled as ‘crises’ is inescapable” (1). In the United States, the new century is marked by crisis right from the outset – the immediate aftermath of the disputed election of George W. Bush, followed by the collective trauma of 9/11. Consecutive years have seen Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, the BP oil spill and the election of Trump (perceived by many involved in the artistic and academic worlds as no less of a national disaster than the Great Recession). The collapse of Lehman Brothers and its aftershocks, together with the international Occupy movement, can be called a crisis of capitalism (though, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, capitalism is a mode sustained by the condition of permanent tension and crisis [Pervert’s Guide]). In the global perspective, the fear of climate change, the refugee crisis and the unrest in the European Union must be added to the equation. The new millennium has also had its share of wars – from the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan to the ongoing bloody conflicts in Syria and Yemen. While the concentration of wars has not necessarily been higher than before (the 1990s was not a peaceful decade either), the continual threat of terrorism since the fall of the Twin Towers – and exacerbated by the arrival of ISIS – could be regarded as a crisis peculiar to the new century. Likewise, while the laments of the death of

Introduction 5 the novel (Will Self) and of serious literature (Federman) are nothing new, the digital revolution and the danger of the print book being displaced by electronic literature, e-books and audiobooks have posed a new challenge to literature. Seven years before the advent of the new millennium, Sven Birkerts declared that literature was “in the midst of an epoch-­ making transition” – “as consequential for culture as was the shift instigated by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type” (192). Among the most resonant analyses of the current times as an era of crisis are Lauren Berlant’s “Thinking about Feeling Historical” (2008) and Cruel Optimism (2011). In those two texts, Berlant examines the present as a “disturbed time” involving a “shift of historic proportions in the terms and processes of the conditions of continuity of life” (“Thinking” 5). The traditional “norms and intuitions” are no longer applicable; without their protection, the contemporary is marked by great vulnerability (“Thinking” 5, Cruel 62). In the social and economic spheres, that vulnerability assumes the name of precarity, understood as a lack of control over one’s own future, which is dependent on the “dictates and whims” of the capitalist system (Cruel 192). That condition results in the gradual abandonment of such “fantasies” as “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality . . . meritocracy” and the overarching illusion of “life as a project of adding up to something” (3). Berlant argues that contemporary crisis is not experienced as an exceptional state; rather, she speaks of “crisis ordinariness” (10) and “lower case drama” (“Thinking” 6). She traces in the contemporary the “waning of genre,” manifest in the inapplicability of genres such as melodrama and tragedy and the loss of a “predictable arc” of human experience (7). The absence of drama and the impossibility of tragedy result in a “sense of flatness” and a weakening of affect – in a “post-vital” life, devoid of prior intensities, “exhausted but not dead” (7–9).6 In this book, I do not wish to determine if Berlant’s diagnosis is accurate or whether the twenty-first century has indeed been marked by graver crises than any other. When considering the matter, it is worth bearing in mind Michel Foucault’s assessment of the conviction that the present moment is “the break, the climax, the fulfillment” as “one of the most destructive habits of modern thought” and a symptom of the deluded belief that “the time of one’s own life” is a unique “moment of history” (359). In his commentary on the rhetoric of crisis in literary criticism, Paul de Man expresses equally strong disapproval of the critical practice, which he sees as misguided and erroneous. However, he makes an important concession: “It remains relevant . . . that these people are experiencing it as a crisis and that they are constantly using the language of crisis in referring to what is taking place” (6). Whether the rhetoric of crisis is justifiable and logically defensible, the fact remains that it has been consistently employed in the new century to refer to many sociopolitical, economic, ecological and artistic developments. My argument

6  Introduction is that crisis has also found its way into contemporary collage literature, where it is present both as content and as form. As illustrated earlier, crisis tends to be invoked in such varied contexts that the word’s denotation has become somewhat fuzzy, while the attempts to define the notion differ depending on the discipline. In my analysis of personal crisis, I will follow the definition provided by psychiatrist Gerald Caplan, who sees crisis as “an upset in the steady state of the individual” – “a reactive state provoked by hazardous events that threaten important life goals.” The “obstacle” that triggers the state appears “insurmountable,” which results in a prolonged “disorganization” or disequilibrium (qtd. in Janosik 3, 18). The aftermath of the crisis-inducing event is pervaded by anxiety, a factor emphasized in accounts of crisis in the context of literature (Horton 3), culture (Wilde 45), counselling (Janosik 46) and social science (Jackson and Jeffery 2–3). I shall also draw on Berlant’s definition of crisis as having to “bear an extended burden of vulnerability for an undetermined duration” (Cruel 62). In my discussion of artistic and sociopolitical crises, I shall work with the conceptualization of crisis as “an unstable condition seeking change” (Egan 5) – a disturbance of order and a threat to accepted values, such as liberalism, democracy or environmental sustainability. Crisis is a condition, it is worth remembering, whose name is derived from the Greek word krisis, meaning “decision.” The situations and experiences represented in many of the said works are set during “critical” (another word etymologically connected with “crisis”) moments for art, society and the individual – at times when decision and action are imperative. In the three parts of this book, I examine the aesthetic, sociopolitical and personal crises addressed in contemporary collage works. The first part is devoted to texts diagnosing the crisis of the novel on the eve of the new century: Markson’s late novelistic tetralogy and Shields’s Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life, each of which forcefully asserts the obsolescence of the novel and calls for a radically new literature, freed from the burden of conventional fictionality. The second part offers an analysis of the pernicious influence of television and celebrity culture as outlined in Olsen’s Sewing Shut My Eyes, of the crisis of liberal society in confrontation with religious extremism (Head in Flames) and of the dystopian vision of the digital world conjured up in Olsen’s Dreamlives of Debris (2017). The other author discussed in this part is Tomasula, whose VAS: An Opera in Flatland and The Book of Portraiture are testimonies to the destabilization of the notion of the human by the latest advances in science and technology. The last part focuses on the crisis of gender identity and of the self in consumer society as evoked in Rawle’s Woman’s World. Finally, I examine Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation as accounts of personal crisis precipitated by the experience of a breakup or marital rupture. The point of

Introduction 7 departure for the analysis of every text is an examination of its formal composition: the kind of ready-made material used and the way in which the original and the appropriated elements have been interwoven. In the formal analysis, I use the tools afforded by William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson’s Rhetorical Structure Theory (particularly Joint, Contrast and Sequence relations) and the burgeoning field of literary multimodality studies, represented by Alison Gibbons, in order to examine the interactions between text and image, as well as to interpret variations in the use of colour, typography and layout. The book begins with a chapter outlining the history, poetics and politics of collage since its inception and closes with a concluding section, which, besides offering a synthesis of the relationship between collage and crisis, considers the reasons for the continued relevance of collage in the new century.

Notes 1. Greenberg’s words come from a review of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which featured collage works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Arp and Kurt Schwitters (Cottington 188). 2. In Collage in Twentieth‑Century Art, Literature, and Culture (2015), Rona Cran observes that while the legacy of collage in the visual arts has been sufficiently documented, the role it has played in literature is still under-researched (37). The few publications that exist tend to focus on twentieth-century collagists such as T.S. Eliot and Kathy Acker. The most important critical books about literary collage published in the new century have been the earlier mentioned works by Banash and Cran, Thomas P. Brockelman’s The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and Postmodernism (2001) and Scarlett Higgins’s Collage and Literature: The Persistence of Vision (2019), none of which discusses any of the authors considered in my book. Edward S. Robinson’s Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present (2011) only offers a two-page commentary on one of them. While the novels by Rawle and Tomasula have elicited a fair number of academic articles (the latter being the only author whose output has been the focus of an edited ­collection – Banash’s Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media ­Fiction [2015]), the remaining works have been paid less critical attention than they deserve. One of the aims of this book is to remedy that situation. 3. Although this project was not originally conceived as US-centred, the dominance of American authors is very conspicuous. It can be argued that collage played a more important role in American poetry and fiction than in other Anglophone literatures, which can be attested by the work of such authors as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, as well as the poets associated with the New York School and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. That special significance of collage to American literature has been carried over into the new century. 4. While working on this project, I met or corresponded with all the authors except the late David Markson. Their feedback regarding the chapters devoted to their work has been taken into account in the final version of the book. 5. Parallels can also be found between some of the fourteen texts and Emily Horton’s notion of the crisis novel as outlined in Contemporary Crisis Fictions: Affect and Ethics in the Modern British Novel (2014). Among its formal characteristics Horton numbers “genre subversion,” “temporal digression and

8  Introduction fragmentation,” as well as a “subversive appropriation of popular genres and intertexts” (5, 32). 6. Besides the notion of crisis, Berlant makes use of the related categories of “impasse” and “trauma” in her analysis of the present. The former is conceptualized as a figure of irresolution, indecision and anxiety, while the latter as a violent disturbance of a state guaranteeing constancy and security (Cruel 9–10, 199–200).

Works Cited Banash, David. “Collage as Practice and Metaphor in Popular Culture.” Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law, edited by Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli. Duke UP, 2011, pp. 264–75. ———. Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption. Rodopi, 2013. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. ———. “Thinking About Feeling Historical.” Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 1, 2008, pp. 4–9. Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2013. Brockelman, Thomas P. The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Postmodern. Northwestern UP, 2001. Cottington, David. Cubism and Its Histories. Manchester UP, 2004. Cran, Rona. Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan. Ashgate, 2014. de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Routledge, 1983. Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. U of North Carolina P, 1999. Federman, Raymond. “Critfictional Reflections on the Pathetic Condition of the Novel in Our Time.” Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation, edited by R. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo. State U of New York P, 2008, pp. 213–29. Foucault, Michel. “How Much Does It Cost for Reason to Tell the Truth.” Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1861–1984. Semiotext(e), 1996, pp. 248–362. Greenberg, Clement. “Review of the Exhibition Collage.” The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, edited by John O’Brian. U of Chicago P, 1986, pp. 259–62. Hodge, A. N. The History of Art. Rosen, 2017. Hopkins, Budd. “Modernism and the Collage Aesthetic.” New England Review, vol. 18, no. 2, 1997, pp. 5–12. Horton, Emily. Contemporary Crisis Fictions: Affect and Ethics in the Modern British Novel. Palgrave, 2014. Jackson, Will, and Bob Jeffery. “Introduction.” Crisis, Rupture and Anxiety: An Interdisciplinary Examination of Contemporary and Historical Human Challenges, edited by Bob Jeffery et al. Cambridge Scholars, 2011, pp. 1–13.

Introduction 9 Jaffe, Harold. “Picketing the Zeitgeist: Crisis Art.” American Book Review, vol. 32, no. 6, 2011, pp. 3–4. Janosik, Ellen Hastings. Crisis Counseling: A Contemporary Approach. Jones & Bartlett, 2014. Nelson, Maggie. “Re: An Academic Inquiry Regarding Bluets.” Received by Wojciech Drąg, 20 Feb. 2019. Offill, Jenny. “Re: An Academic Inquiry Regarding Dept. of Speculation.” Received by Wojciech Drąg, 19 Feb. 2019. Olsen, Lance. Personal interview. 5 Sept. 2018. The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Directed by Sophie Fiennes, performance by Slavoj Žižek. Zeitgeist Films, 2012. Rawle, Graham. Personal interview. 18 Aug. 2017. Self, Will. “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real).” The Guardian, Guardian Media, 2 May 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-selfnovel-dead-literary-fiction. Accessed 3 Apr. 2019. Shields, David. How Literature Saved My Life. Knopf, 2013. ———. Personal interview. 7 Aug. 2018. ———. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Vintage, 2011. Smith, Rachel Greenwald. “Afterword: The 2000s After 2016.” American Literature in Transition: 2000–2010, edited by Rachel Greenwald Smith. Cambridge UP, 2018. Tomasula, Steve. “Electricians, Wig Makers, and Staging the New Novel.” American Book Review, vol. 32, no. 6, 2011, pp. 5–6. ———. Personal interview. 13 Oct. 2018. Wilde, Alan. “Modernism and the Aesthetics of Crisis.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 20, no. 1, 1979, pp. 13–50.

1 Theory and Practice of Collage

Although collage is widely regarded as an invention of Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it was the Surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire who used the term for the first time – in reference to his own play Les mamelles de Tirésias (1903) (Cran 1, 21). “Collage” is derived from the French verb coller, whose primary meaning is to “paste,” “glue” or “adhere.” However, in colloquial French the word can also mean “having an affair” or “living in sin,” which suggests a parallel with Cubist collages based on a daring cohabitation of words and images (Frascina). Among the coexisting elements one usually finds “photographs, pieces of paper, newspaper cuttings [and] string,” which are all “placed in juxtaposition and glued to the pictorial surface” (Montgomery et al. 177). As Scarlett Higgins observes, collage denotes both a “process of working with textual materials,” which is a “formal strategy,” and a “presentational mode that invites specific reader/viewer expectations,” which makes it akin to “genre” (2). One of the earliest and most often cited definitions of collage was formulated by another Surrealist, Max Ernst, who called it “the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them” (qtd. in Cureton 106). The incongruity of constitutive elements has been emphasized by a number of critics. Budd Hopkins defines the “collage aesthetic” as “the presence of several contradictory systems in a work of art, and the absence of a single controlling system” (7), whereas David Antin argues that the absence of “explicit syntactical relations” between the work’s “disparate materials” is the key characteristic of collage (106). Beata Śniecikowska stresses that a collage-like juxtaposition is not merely a combination of different elements; it needs to generate some tension (115), which, according to Ryszard Nycz, can appear on the syntactical, stylistic or semantic level (257). Lance Olsen states boldly that “collage is the quintessential art of the non-sequitur” (Architectures 89). An aspect of collage which is not mentioned by any of the above definitions but which nonetheless remains central to this study is the incorporation of appropriated material. From the very beginning, collages – such

Theory and Practice of Collage 11 as Picasso’s Bottle, Glass and Violin (1912–13) and Braque’s Glass Carafe and Newspapers (1914) – employed “real objects, such as bits of newspaper or other mass-produced images” (Kostelanetz 124). Such objects are called ready-mades and can take the form of any external material – two- or three-dimensional, verbal or visual – which the artist chooses to include in their work. In literary texts, the ready-made usually takes the form of an unintegrated and often unacknowledged quotation or a photograph.1 Since collage is based on appropriation, it is always vulnerable to the accusations of copyright infringement and plagiarism. As Joshua Clover pithily remarks, there is “no collage without theft” (93). As noted before, the use of appropriated material is not considered a necessary condition by all critics. In Collage in Twentieth‑Century Art, Literature, and Culture (2014), Rona Cran proposes a very accommodating understanding of collage as “the experimentation with and the linking of disparate phenomena: democratically, arbitrarily, even unintentionally” (4). She cites Marjorie Perloff’s observation that there is more to collage than merely cut and paste, which is “only the beginning” (Cran 3). A similarly open conception of literary collage – retaining the need for a ready-made, yet understanding it very liberally – has been adopted by Agnieszka Karpowicz in Kolaż: Awangardowy gest kreacji (2007). In this book, however, I shall adhere to a stricter idea of collage, which requires the following criteria to be met: the use of heterogeneous, fragmentary and conflicting components; the absence (or serious disruption) of linear plot development; and the incorporation of a sizeable proportion of appropriated material. In the essay “Fourteen Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction, Or: Fiction by Collage,” Lance Olsen distinguishes between two understandings of collage in literature – the narrower and the broader: The notion of collage can be used literally or it can be used metaphorically in fiction composition. That is . . . collage fiction can be deeply appropriative in nature, cutting up previous texts to create new ones, as in, say, the work of Eliot and William S. Burroughs. But it also can be used as a structuring principle for new textual units – not only as a juxtapositional combination of ready-mades, then, but of justmades, as in, say, the work of Milorad Pavíc or Julio Cortázar. (Olsen, “Fourteen” 187) In this book, I shall use the term “literary collage” in the first meaning. I agree with Śniecikowska that it is often used too broadly as a critical tool and that it is important to be precise in its application so that its scope does not overlap with that of several other related concepts such as mosaic, assemblage and montage (112). Mosaic has been defined as a composition of “a multitude of small (usually multicoloured) pieces of glass, marble or other suitable materials

12  Theory and Practice of Collage in a bed of cement or plaster” (“Mosaic” 425). Although its origins date back to antiquity, it was most extensively practised in the Middle Ages, particularly in Italy, the Byzantine Empire and Mexico (425). Despite evident similarities with collage – assembling a picture out of smaller components, using materials not necessarily manufactured by the ­artist – mosaic remains a distinct technique. In Collage Culture (2013), David Banash argues that “the brutal difference” between collage and earlier mosaic-like practices is that “twentieth-century fragments come ­readymade” – they have been “worked over, shaped, formed, completed” by “human hands” and cannot be taken directly from nature (like pieces of rock) (18–19). “Assemblage” is a term coined by Jean Dubuffet to account for twoand three-dimensional compositions of “natural or preformed materials, such as household debris” (Seitz 150). Like collage, it is a technique relying on the juxtaposition of incongruous material, including ready-made objects. Whereas The Oxford Dictionary of Art notes that the category is rarely “employed with any precision” (“Assemblage” 29), William Seitz and Thomas P. Brockelman see it as a master term for all kinds of composite art, such as collage, montage and photomontage (Seitz 150, Brockelman 190). Ultimately, montage – a method deriving from film and first theorized by Sergei Eisenstein in 1929 – is a notion which, nowadays, is frequently used interchangeably with collage. However, even those critics who insist on treating them as distinct categories differ in their understanding of what they denote. Perloff, Nycz and Banash consider “montage” as a narrower term than “collage,” while Karpowicz sees it as broader. Perloff regards “collage” as “the master term” and “montage” as an “offshoot” (Futurist Moment 246). Nycz, in turn, accords “the superior status of a method of constructing an artistic expression” to collage; montage is viewed as a “technique” (11). For Banash, collage is a wider notion because it may incorporate “all sorts of readymade material,” whereas the latter usually concentrates on the photograph (132–33). Conversely, Karpowicz sees montage as the superior category, insofar as it combines “any heterogeneous or non-heterogeneous elements” and does not need to employ ready-mades (63). The idea that montage does not require the use of appropriated material is not shared by all critics. On the contrary, The Oxford Dictionary of Art defines it as a “pictorial technique” in which “ready-made images alone are used” (“Montage” 338–39, italics added). A common way of differentiating between collage and montage is using the former to refer to spatial relationships and the latter – to temporal ones (Perloff, Futurist Moment 246). Brockelman observes that “whereas collages demand that the viewer relate elements spatially next to or in front of each other, montage demands a reading of images presented sequentially,” particularly in the case of watching a film (190). The last difference frequently noted by critics lies in the compatibility

Theory and Practice of Collage 13 of constituents parts. According to Jean-Jacques Thomas, collage tends to emphasize the “heterogeneous nature of diverse components,” while montage “aims at the integration of the diverse combinatory constituents and, as such, provides unity” (85). Perloff agrees with Thomas that collage highlights “fragmentation” rather than “continuity,” which is the domain of montage (Futurist Moment 246). Monica Tavares, likewise, pits the former – understood as a “dissemination of texts in conflict of meanings” – against the latter’s “assimilat[ing]” and “centralizing project” (194). In this study the notions of mosaic and assemblage will not be used, as their scope, I believe, should be restricted to the visual arts. Both collage and montage, on the other hand, can easily be applied to literary texts and will be used here: collage, as a category meeting the earlier outlined criteria of a non-harmonious arrangement of heterogeneous material, non-linear plot and the use of appropriation, and montage, as a similar yet distinct technique, involving a smoother organization of various components and the lack, or scarcity, of appropriated elements.

Historical Outline Collage is regarded, by many artists and critics, as one of the quintessential art forms of the twentieth century. American painter Robert Motherwell announced, somewhat bombastically, that “collage [was] the twentieth century’s greatest innovation” (qtd. in Judkins). Hal Foster, similarly, argued, in 1983, that it was “the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century” (84). American authors Donald Barthelme and Pierre Joris went so far as to assert that all of twentieth-century art was to some degree inspired or affected by the principle of collage (Hoffmann 203, Cran 40). Although it is generally acknowledged that collage emerged in France at the beginning of the previous century, critics indicate its numerous antecedents. Whereas Foster calls it an “ancient technique” (without providing any examples), others tend to attribute its origins to the late Middle Ages. Among the many precursors of collage scholars list Italian mosaics, Japanese calligraphic poems, Persian leather-bound books of images, paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, silva rerum chronicles and Comte de Lautréamont’s Les chants de Maldoror (1869) (Cran 11–12, Karpowicz 46–50). The credit for composing the first collage proper is usually given to Picasso and his 1912 work Still Life with Chair Caning, an oval Cubist still life incorporating a scrap of oilcloth and framed by a piece of rope (Hopkins 5). Other Cubist practitioners of collage around that time were Braque and Juan Gris, the former being occasionally seen as the actual founder of the method, who should have received more recognition for his contribution (Harris and Zucker). Their interest in collage hinged on its “hybridization of painting and sculpture” and its

14  Theory and Practice of Collage liminal status between a two- and a three-dimensional work (Jennifer A.E. Shields 2), as well as on its inherently non-figurative orientation (Brockelman 4). Brockelman argues that what clearly distinguishes Cubist collage from all the earlier listed antecedents (and justifies the idea of the “invention” of collage in the twentieth century) is its primary aim to “represent the intersection of multiple discourses” rather than to build an artwork out of various components (2). Banash examines the novelty of collage through the prism of its use of fragmentation. He contends that although “material cultures have always produced a flotsam and jetsam of fragments,” collage is the first method of reusing those fragments while exposing them as “ripped, torn, and broken readymades” and underlining “the seams equally with the glue” (42). According to A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, collage was introduced by the Cubists but “extended” by the Surrealists, Dadaists and Futurists (Kostelanetz 43). The Surrealists, who were keen to explore Freudian territories such as dreams and the unconscious, embraced collage as a vehicle for conveying what Max Ernst called an “eruption of the irrational” (Banash 25). Even though they did not invent the method as such (only its name), the Surrealists today are more closely associated with collage than the Cubists (or any other group) because their engagement with it was more “ostentatious” and “controversial” (Cran 21). Besides coining the term, their most notable contribution to the development of collage was applying its principle to literature. Ernst’s La femme 100 têtes (1929) was the first collage novel – a book-length narrative composed of nonsensical woodcuts accompanied by scant subtitles. The emerging pictures, characteristically Surrealist in their poetics, were seamlessly arranged juxtapositions of arbitrary objects, such as human figures, birds, butterflies, bottles, severed limbs and cacti. Among the practitioners of Surrealist collage were the representatives of the so-called Young Group (later known as the Independent Group), which flourished in post-war Britain: Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull and Richard Hamilton. The latter is the author of possibly the most iconic British ­collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) (Taylor 133–34). The last of the modernist groups which were instrumental in the rise of collage were the Futurists and the Dadaists. The former saw in collage a potential for launching an “attack on tradition and the museum status of works of art” by incorporating various “nonaesthetic materials” (Poggi xii). John Heartfield, Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann contributed to the development of collage by artfully combining manipulated photographs (which had been in use for almost a hundred years) with words. The Berlin Dadaists, as they came to be known, were the first to subject collage – or photomontage, as they preferred to call it – to political uses.2 They believed in the “supremacy of the message” rather than in the primacy of the aesthetic (Ades 19). Heartfield became the most

Theory and Practice of Collage 15 important Dada propagandist and agitator against capitalism, militarism and Nazism. Among his best known, and most bluntly political, works are Adolf the Superman Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk (1932), showing Hitler’s spine as made of gold, and Through Light to Night (1933), which juxtaposes the figure of Joseph Goebbels, the Reichstag and a stake of burning books. Dadaists, such as Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, also introduced the use of ready-mades in their works, including discarded objects found in the street. The earliest and most iconic of them – Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Fountain (1917) – are not collages as such but their role in establishing this art form is indisputable. By putting forward the ready-made, they lay the foundation for what Banash calls “collage culture” (29). In many ways, collage was the product of the social, economic, aesthetic and philosophical context of the early twentieth century. For Banash the socio-economic grounding of collage is essential to grasping its politics and poetics. He sees it as an artistic method inspired by the transition from local to mass production (epitomized by Fordism), commodification and the rise of consumer culture (11). Karpowicz, likewise, regards it as a product of the contemporary industrial reality and of the experience of mass copying (60). The link with mass production finds its clearest expression in the characteristically extensive use of fragments of newspapers in the earliest collages of Picasso, Braque and Gris. The newspaper, apart from serving as a ready-made, is meant to “define their work as modern” and convey the “vast amplification of information volume and speed” (86). Banash calls the newspaper “the ur-form of the historical avant-garde and of modernism itself” (83) and argues that, alongside cinema, it had a tremendous influence on the emergence of such modernist techniques as “juxtaposition, montage, fragmentation, simultaneity” (119–20). It was also a common vehicle of circulating advertisements, whose picture-slogan structure induced the coexistence of images and words in the collages and photomontages of the time. Among the other formative influences on the birth of collage Banash singles out the epoch’s “new emphasis on a divided self” – a consequence of Sigmund Freud’s exploration of the split subject as well as of the political and philosophical writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche (43). In addition, Karpowicz argues that collage was a symptom of the rejected mimetic potential of artistic representation and of the waning belief in language’s capacity to signify reality (20). Cran, in turn, points to the two world wars as the most important context for the emergence of collage. She quotes Antin’s remark that post-war Europe resembled “a readymade rubble heap (a collage)” and Kurt Schwitters’s invocation of the sense that the war-ravaged world needed “new things . . . to be made out of the fragments” (qtd. in Cran 129). Banash proposes that collage is “an uncanny mirror of both the Fordist production that characterized the first half of the [twentieth] century and

16  Theory and Practice of Collage the consumerist ethos that defined the postwar years” (14–15). Collage’s vast temporal scope complicates its perception as a specifically modernist practice despite its evidently modernist origins. As a result, there is little critical consensus as regards the classification of collage as a primarily modernist or postmodernist method. Thomas P. Brockelman, the author of The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and Postmodernism (2001), muses on the challenging task of his study – to assert the strong ties between postmodernism and the method which, among others, John Golding, Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg pronounced to be “the quintessential modernist art” (Brockelman 1). In the end, Brockelman situates collage as central to both movements and sees it as an “intertwining” of the modern and postmodern – an expression of “a postmodern as crisis of the modern announced from within modernity” (6).3 The close relationship between collage and postmodernism has been attributed to the former’s opposition to the “principal modernist aesthetic tenets of autonomy and unity” (Raaberg), its outright rejection of “totalization” and “synthesis” (Hassan 19) and to its “deconstructionist impulse . . . to look inside one text for another, dissolve one text into another” (Harvey 51). Conversely, the idea that collage is far more rooted in the modernist rather than postmodernist aesthetic has been advanced by Karpowicz, who ascribes its commitment to experimentation as well as its iconoclastic and progressive orientation to the politics of the avant-garde (or the neo-avant-garde). She argues that the basic tenets of postmodernism – including repetition and the commodification of art – are not applicable to collage (316–17), even though both of them could be related to the quintessential collage practice of cutting and pasting. A major milestone in the history of twentieth-century art was the “Exhibition of Collage” held in New York City by Max Ernst’s wife, Peggy Guggenheim. The rich collection of artworks included pre-war works by Ernst himself, Picasso, Braque, Schwitters and Joseph Cornell, as well as new commissions by Motherwell and Jackson Pollock. Since then, as Cran demonstrates in her book on Cornell, William S. Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Bob Dylan, collage and New York City have enjoyed a special relationship (27). Other notable practitioners of collage in the two decades following the end of the Second World War were other Americans: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning; British artist Richard Hamilton; and the Czech Jiří Kolář. The two significant groups which practised collage at the time were the abstract expressionists and the pop artists (Jennifer A.E. Shields 8). In the 1960s collage is considered to have lost some of its revolutionary edge. Kostelanetz calls it “dead” by the end of the decade, whereas Cran maintains that it “continu[ed] to flourish” despite the slump (Kostelanetz 124, Cran 214). Among the most prominent (yet unmentioned) visual artists who practised collage in the last decades of the twentieth century were Joe Brainard (also the author of a collage-like autobiography I Remember

Theory and Practice of Collage 17 [1970]), David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, John Stezaker, Lee Krasner and Jeff Koons. In Collage: The Making of Modern Art (2004), Brandon Taylor notes that on the eve of the new millennium – “in a culture where eclecticism is the norm” – collage has become generic and ubiquitous (208). The physical process of cutting and pasting with scissors and glue has been replaced with “cut” and “paste” commands on the computer (212). The most important computer collagists include Sarah Lucas and Joseph Nechvatal. The collage aesthetic, although primarily associated with the visual arts, can be traced to other arts, such as music, film, architecture and literature. A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes credits John Cage, Morton Feldman and German-Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel as the key collage musicians. Bob Dylan and David Bowie are also recognized as having followed the principles of collage in their songwriting (Kostelanetz 43, Cran 214). Although the term itself is rarely used in musicology, its basic tenet – appropriation – is central to much of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century music and is referred to as sampling or remix. It underlies the conception of pieces from Steve Reich’s experimental Different Trains (1988), which appropriates audio recordings of Holocaust survivors, to popular mash-ups, such as Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (2004), a blend of sound elements from the Beatles’ White Album (1968) with tracks from Jay Z’s The Black Album (2003). Because of its “permanence” and “preconceived order,” architecture is rarely associated with collage. Nevertheless, as Juhani Pallasmaa argues in the foreword to Jennifer A.E. Shields’s Collage and Architecture (2014), collage has been a “conscious and deliberate artistic method in architecture” ever since Giulio Romano’s design of Palazzo Te in the sixteenth century (ix–x). Among the most often cited examples of collage architecture are Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (1929), Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kaufman House (1937) and Le Corbusier’s Casa Curutchet (1953), as well as, more recently, the works of Jean Nouvel, David Chipperfield and Frank Gehry (Hopkins 10, Pallasmaa x, Jennifer A.E. Shields 12). Although collage was an important inspiration for early twentieth-century architects in their “experiment[s] with spatial and material juxtapositions,” the concept had not gained wide currency in theoretical discussions until the publication of Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s Collage City (1978) – a postmodernist call for replacing the modernist, utopian “total-design” approach with the idea of a “city of fragments,” citing existing places from various epochs and cities (Jennifer A.E. Shields 9, Cutler). In film studies, collage is not a frequently used critical category either. The closely related (and essential) notion of montage is used instead when different camera shots or subplots are interspersed. The term “collage film” is applied mostly to short experimental films which juxtapose found-footage material from different sources. Early examples of the

18  Theory and Practice of Collage genre include Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) – a surrealist reworking of George Melford’s East of Borneo (1931) – Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958) and Stan VanDerBeek’s Breathdeath (1964). Among the contemporary film-makers who use collage are György Pálfi (the director of Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen, a feature film narrative assembled from iconic scenes from cinema history, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012), Daisy Asquith (the author of Queerama [2017] – an examination of the lives of homosexuals as presented in BBC productions) and Christian Marclay, who won great acclaim for The Clock (2010) – a twenty-four-hour collage of short scenes from several thousand films, each of which shows real-time references to the clock, from midnight to midnight. The film, which had a budget of over one hundred thousand dollars and took five years to complete, was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

Poetics The collage method can be reduced to the simple actions of cutting and pasting: Silke Krohn speaks of “taking apart” and “putting back together” (3), whereas Banash prefers to use the terms “selection” and “arrangement” (14). The selected elements are cut out of their original context and juxtaposed with other, similarly decontextualized, materials. The combination may be seamless if the cutting is performed meticulously and the appropriated part is integrated with the rest. Such is the case with Ernst’s collage novels, in which the contours are so fine that they can only be detected during a close examination of the original images. On the other end of the spectrum are works which deliberately expose the stitches. Several contemporary collagists favour the latter strategy: Sergei Sviatchenko makes seemingly hasty or careless cuttings, while Andrew Lundwall and Nicholas Lockyer occasionally do not use scissors at all and tear out certain elements (Krohn 4). Banash notes that, as a result of the technical simplicity of cutting and pasting, the collage artist is “deskilled,” since the process of creating art does not require a talented craftsman and could be performed by an “assembly line worker” (63). Harold Rosenberg argues that collage’s removal of the need to “know how to paint” or even make the “effort of painting” imbues it with an “element of mockery” (64). Because, by definition, collage does not combine the cut-out material into an organic and logical whole (which can be the case with mosaic or montage), the “negation of synthesis” is its “structural principle” (Bürger 82). Cran argues that the “inherent” property of collage practice is “a defence against singularity and wholeness” (127). That defining lack of cohesion, according to Perloff, stems from the “dual function” of each component, which “refers to an external reality even as its compositional thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it seems to assert” (Futurist

Theory and Practice of Collage 19 Moment 49). When identifying the formal characteristics of the method – the poetics of collage – critics tend to use adjectives containing negative prefixes such as “incoherent,” “discontinuous,” “nonrepresentational,” “antimimetic,” “antinarrative” and “anti-utopian” (Antin 108, Karpowicz 10, 56; Brockelman 165). Since collage emphasizes “the cut, ripped, and fragmented,” it can be seen as a “violent” artistic method (Banash 41). Invoking the example of The Waste Land, poet and critic David Antin emphasizes the method’s dynamic aspect visible in the poem’s “savage collage cuts” (121). Among the other properties highlighted in collage criticism are ambiguity, ambivalence, self-referentiality and openness to multiple interpretations (Nycz 11, Brockelman 185). Several authors also point to irony and humour as traits resulting from the coexistence in every collage of two or more incongruous voices (Bell, Brockelman 2). In place of synthesis, collage offers juxtaposition. The complex, although tenuous, logical connections between its components have also been outlined by Antin: Collage involves suppression of the ordering signs that would specify the “stronger logical relations” among the presented elements. By “stronger logical relations” I mean relations of implication, entailment, negation, subordination and so on. Among logical relations that may still be present are relations of similarity, equivalence, identity, their negative forms, dissimilarity, nonequivalence, nonidentity, and some kind of image of concatenation, grouping or association. (211) In a similar vein, Perloff sees the principle of collage as based on the replacement of “subordination” by “coordination” and of “logic [and] sequence” by “likeness and difference” (“Collage” 386). In more general terms, she argues that collage renounces any structural “hierarchy” of its parts and organizes them according to the logic of parataxis – a rhetorical strategy of placing phrases, clauses or sentences alongside one another without the use of any conjunctions (Perloff, Futurist Moment 75). The example “I was angry. I punched him. The sun came out” juxtaposes three clauses but leaves out the implicit connectives (“because, “and then”) which indicate the relations between them. In collage poetry, Perloff declares that “the things described exist: the poet puts them before us without explicit comment or explanation” (“Collage” 386).4 Besides parataxis, other notions which could be invoked here as denoting a similar organization are Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopia, defined by Harvey as the “coexistence . . . [of] incommensurable spaces that are juxtaposed or superimposed upon each other” (48), and – in a strictly literary context – the lesser-known concepts of the spatial form by Joseph Frank and of the architectonic novel by Sharon Spencer. In “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945), Frank proposes a spatial

20  Theory and Practice of Collage approach to literature in response to the narrative discontinuity of modernist fiction (particularly in the works of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Djuna Barnes). He postulates a non-sequential reading of novels as if they were imagist poems in which the flow of time is arrested and all the elements are to be experienced simultaneously. Drawing on Frank’s method, Spencer introduced the notion of the architectonic novel to account for the structure of, among others, the nouveaux romans by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor. Such texts are “constructed from prose fragments of diverse types and lengths and arranged by means of the principle of juxtaposition” (xx–xxi). The diverse fragments – like “bricks, stones, steel rods, and concrete blocks” (174) – are combined and amount to an architectonic structure. The egalitarian, antihierarchical structure of collage is underlined by Lance Olsen in his already quoted essay “Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction, Or: Fiction by Collage.” He observes in many contemporary literary collages a commitment to “effacing, or at least deeply and richly complicating, the accepted difference between privileged and subordinate discourses,” such as fiction and literary criticism (130). The underlying strategy of collage, according to Olsen, is to welcome diverse material, both humble and noble in origin, and thus to celebrate “conflation, fusion and confusion, Frankensteinian fictions, cyborg scripts, centaur texts, and the narratologically amphibious writings that embrace a poetics of beautiful monstrosity” (130). What emerges out of this juxtaposition is inevitably a highly fragmented whole which does not constitute a linear narrative. In order to account for this property of most collage fictions, Olsen cites Serbian writer Milorad Pavić’s distinction between “nonreversible” and “reversible” art. Whereas the former – traditionally the domain of literature and music – is “unidirectional” and needs to be experienced in a prearranged order, the latter – a category including most visual arts – is “multidirectional and rhizomic” (131). Both Pavić and Olsen regard reversibility as one of the aspirations of literary collage. Of course, the specificity of print books makes complete reversibility impossible since the structure of the bound book predetermines the order of reading. However, such publishing solutions as releasing texts as collections of loose pages or including notes that encourage the reader to experience the work in the order of their choice are some of the ways of distancing literature from the pole of non-reversibility. Pavić’s distinction echoes that between the organic and non-organic work of art as introduced in Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984). The former rests on the “assumption of a necessary congruence between the meaning of the individual parts and the meaning of the whole” (Bürger 80). In the latter kind, the overall meaning of the work is not a synthesis of the meanings of its components.5 Therefore the individual parts are no longer necessary and may be omitted without the work being materially changed (80).6 Bürger argues that even such

Theory and Practice of Collage 21 a work yields to interpretation, as it is possible to detect some minimal degree of unity to it. Nycz indicates that collage’s minimum of unity includes drawing space and time boundaries as well as determining a certain thematic scope. He sees those properties as characteristic of Umberto Eco’s notion of the open work (12). Brockelman, in turn, states that even though collage is a “composition,” it is “difficult indeed to ascribe to it a sense of ‘totality’ ” (29–30). The emerging whole is created out of the “contradictory relationship of heterogeneous elements” rather than out of harmony (Bürger 82). However, that complex whole does not become immediately apparent – the initial reaction to the avant-garde work’s “refusal to provide meaning” is most often that of “shock.” Some recipients, Bürger points out, will not progress beyond that response; others will invest more effort to comprehend the work’s “enigmatic quality.” In order to gain a richer understanding of it, they must shift their attention to its formal construction (80–81). Whereas Bürger’s considerations apply to avant-garde works in general, Nycz outlines a very similar interpretive process in the context of literary collage – he speaks of the passage from the sense of being lost, from perceiving the text as “strange” and incomprehensible, to the need to examine the text more closely and concentrate on its organization. The initial feeling of incomprehension can, therefore, be regarded as a “unique rhetorical device” whose aim is to motivate the reader to become more active and “inventive” (27). In that respect, collage fictions belong to the Barthesian category of “writerly” (scriptible), rather than “readerly” (lisible), works (S/Z 4). Their formal complexity and reluctance to yield meaning encourage the reader to increase their engagement with the work: to focus maximum attention, to reread the text and to become a virtual co-author of its meaning. “In collage,” argues Brockelman, “sense is something to be made rather than secured” (37, emphasis original). Cran stresses that the reader’s engagement in collage is not exclusively intellectual but also emotional (4). Because collage involves an “invitation to participate” as well as an “assault” on the recipient, it is meant to be not only interpreted but also “experienced” (223–24, 136). One of the most influential examinations of the poetics of collage is Rosalind Krauss’s essay “In the Name of Picasso,” in which she proposes that the “absent origin” – the discarded context – of each appropriated component plays a crucial role in the practice of collage.7 “It is this eradication of the original surface,” Krauss argues, “and the reconstitution of it through the figure of its own absence that is the master term of the entire condition of collage as a system of signifiers” (19). This results in the necessity of what the avant-garde Group Mu refer to in their manifesto as the “double reading” of every collage – “that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin” and “that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality” (qtd. in Brockelman 2). The multiple contexts submerged in every collage make it a

22  Theory and Practice of Collage highly demanding art form to interpret, requiring both expertise and time to reconstruct its buried origins. Krauss draws a parallel in her essay between the “absent origin” in collage and the absence as a prerequisite for the Saussurean sign. She also points to the analogy between the equivocality of the components of Cubist collage with the diacritical nature of the sign. On that basis, Krauss suggests that the meanings of both sign and collage are “never an absolute, but rather a choice from a set of possibilities, with meaning determined by the very terms not chosen” (16–17, emphasis original). The lack of a single fixed meaning of any collage has been asserted most forcibly by Brockelman, who contends that any interpretive “key” to its meaning is “by definition, missing.” “The point is,” he states, “rather, to fiddle indefinitely with the lock” (67). Each attempt to pinpoint its ultimate meaning is doomed to failure and can only lead to a reduction of its complexity and a limited understanding. In order to avoid that pitfall, collage should be examined from a variety of perspectives and with a wide range of methods (Cran 223). The impossibility of arriving at any solid truth in the process of interpreting a collage means that this art is – willfully – incapable of serving the ethical function of “showing us our place in the universe” (Harries qtd. in Brockelman 38). Brockelman coins the term “collage hermeneutics” to account for the outlook on the world inherent in collage practice. Its foundations are “radical ambivalence,” undecidability, the rejection of “totalization” and the refusal to privilege any form of knowledge (184–85). In that respect, collage is, according to Brockelman, a “deconstructive” and essentially postmodern practice (184). In the light of the formal characteristics outlined in this section, the poetics of collage could be defined by means of the following qualities: incongruity and discontinuity, lack of narrative coherence, fragmentation, parataxis and antihierarchical structure. A combination of those traits necessitates a greater commitment from the reader to process the non-organic amalgam of components, which frequently results in interpretive ambiguity and imbues the work with a capacity to puzzle, alienate or shock the audience. The poetics of collage is by no means homogeneous; as Stephen Fredman notes, works of assemblage and collage greatly depend for their effect on the ready-mades they incorporate, “objects which bear traces of time and association with prior functions,” and on the “rhetorical interchange [they] set up between objects” (15).

Politics The politics of collage can be derived from the two essential practices of cutting and pasting. In an earlier cited passage, David Banash argues that they represent two opposing “desires” which fuel each collage: “the cutting edge of critique that seeks the differential frisson of new contexts to

Theory and Practice of Collage 23 explode possible meanings of any fragment and the conservative desire of nostalgia that persists in any collage that calls out to the earlier contexts of its fragments” (31–32). The progressive and regressive impulses coexist and “form the dialectic of the technique” but not necessarily in equal measure: some collagists choose to foreground the deconstructive element by exposing the seams, while others emphasize the reconstruction by meticulously integrating the components (246). The former strategy can be a vehicle of critique, social, political or artistic, and the latter – of resistance to change and of the nostalgic idealization of the past. Cutting is a violent act, and such are often the practices of collage: “opening the sutures,” “revealing the seams and hidden contexts” (Banash 165), challenging established norms and conventions and “breaking down perceptual habits” (Karpowicz 135). The deconstructive gesture of cutting has been, since the advent of collage, used as a tool of exposing the “fragile nature of ideologies,” such as nationalism, fascism and capitalism, particularly by the Surrealists and the Dadaists (Banash 25–26). Brockelman proposes that collage-as-critique can have a vast scope and function as “an aesthetic weapon for resisting the establishment of any utopian totality” (165). The irreverent refusal to respect the integrity of any material, including scriptures, and the anarchic readiness to mix the high and the low make collage a radically sceptical artistic strategy. An example of that kind of writing is found poetry, also referred to as flarf – a poetic genre dependent on Google-sculpting, which gained popularity during George W. Bush’s presidency and ridiculed the vacuity of public statements by Bush and other members of his administration – for example, Hart Seely’s Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld (2003). The collagist of the first, deconstructive, kind does not recognize authority, challenges received ideas and (to quote Michel de Montaigne) “sleeps on the pillow of doubt.” Pasting, on the other hand, is motivated by the nostalgic desire to “gather together” and “make a new whole” (Banash 173). Rather than celebrating fragmentation, which is implicit in the act of cutting up, it attempts to collect the shards and integrate them. Banash perceives that wish to “redeem” fragments as symbolic of the hope that “the flood of words, images, and objects that make up our chaotic modern lives could be put together and made whole” (173). The reconstructive side of collage has also been noted by Karpowicz, who regards it as an expression of the rupture of reality as well as an effort to “darn” or repair it. She cites Jean-Ives Bosseur’s remark that collage may operate as a “dressing of the void” (40). Among the collage artists who emphasize gathering over fragmenting are T.S. Eliot, Joseph Cornell and Andy Warhol; the opposing camp includes Tristan Tzara and other Dadaists (Banash 173, 245). Although collage may at first glance appear an escapist art, the above remarks point to its capacity for an intense engagement with the

24  Theory and Practice of Collage contemporary world. The following oft-quoted statement by Picasso can afford an insight into collage’s subtle ways of commenting on reality: If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too. This displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that the world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring. (qtd. in Brockelman 31) Instead of explicitly naming its concerns by using mimetic means, collage may employ displacement or an objective correlative (an element whose function is to stir a specific emotion) to evoke a given response in the reader. The idea of conveying the “strangeness” of reality and of encouraging the recipient to see it afresh is also known as defamiliarization. Although Viktor Shklovsky’s notion is rarely applied to collage, there is a significant overlap between their politics. Both rely on the initial effect of shock, whose purpose is to stun the audience into attention and shake them out of their perceptual lethargy.8 Cran states that the recipient of a collage is often confronted with the inner question “What the fuck is going on?” in response to the work’s refusal to conform to their expectations of art (222).9 That gesture can be symbolic of reality’s noncompliance with people’s expectations of it. William S. Burroughs made the boldest assertion of collage’s potential to represent reality. In a manifesto for the “cut-up” technique, which he devised with Brion Gysin, Burroughs announces that collage is a form of realism whose capacity to convey the substance of modern reality is, paradoxically, greater than that of ostensibly realist art (Nicol 70). Since the contemporary experience of fragmentation resists realist representation, it needs to be expressed by other means: “Take a walk down a city street and put down what you have just seen on canvas. You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments” (Burroughs, “Fall” 76). Burroughs goes so far as to say that human consciousness is itself a cut-up rather than the steady and ongoing “stream,” from William James’s famous coinage (76). The idea that a special affinity between collage and contemporary reality springs from their use and experience, respectively, of fragmentation continues to be advanced by twenty-firstcentury critics (Banash 14; Brockelman 183). Another foundation of the close relationship between collage and reality is the method’s commitment to transcending “the borders between literature and reality, art and life, the world and the text” (Karpowicz 53). Collage achieves that aim through incorporating elements of

Theory and Practice of Collage 25 reality – ready-mades – in the form of quotations and objects of everyday use.10 By juxtaposing them with originally created elements, and thus placing them on the same level, the distinction between reality and art collapses. Bürger indicates the far-reaching implications of that process in Theory of the Avant-Garde: “The insertion of reality fragments into the work of art fundamentally transforms that work. The artist not only renounces shaping a whole but gives the painting a different status, since parts of it no longer have the relationship to reality characteristic of the organic work of art. They are no longer signs pointing to reality, they are reality” (78, emphasis original). Collage’s engagement in reality is also discernible in its political commitment, which was inaugurated by the Dadaists. The earlier mentioned anti-Nazi photomontages of John Heartfield are among the most openly and radically political works of art. Collage, however, is rarely unambiguous in its political statements, as that requires a straightforward message, which is at odds with the poetics of this art. Karpowicz sees its political potential not so much in taking sides and demonstrating specific sympathies but rather in its enactment of agency – fueled by the “belief that one can rearrange their reality,” as one reorganizes materials by cutting and pasting, and “create it anew” (297). Yet since the avant-garde is often associated with left-wing politics, some critics (including Theodor Adorno) wanted to see collage as an inherently anti-capitalist and progressive practice. Indeed, many collage artists, such as the Russian avant-gardists, Burroughs and the members of the New York School, had distinctly leftist views. On the other hand, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are notorious for their fascist and anti-Semitic sympathies, respectively. Bürger concludes his discussion of the political entanglements of modernist collagists (or “montagists,” as he prefers to call them) by stating that it is “fundamentally problematic to assign a fixed meaning to a procedure” (78). Banash, likewise, notes that collage may serve as a “transgressive force” as well as a tool of “the most reactionary and conservative desires” (122). Bürger’s overall assessment of the political influence of collage is mixed: although it contributed to subverting the modernist idea of autonomous art, which abstains from social and political engagement, it failed as an avant-garde project of a politically oppositional art (Raaberg). Although collage is not a natural ally of any political stance, it has undoubtedly been used in the service of specific ideas and political movements more often than of others. In her article “Beyond Fragmentation: Collage as Feminist Strategy in the Arts,” Gwen Raaberg asserts the privileged position of collage in feminist literature and visual arts. Lucy Lippard, who views it as the dominant aesthetic of feminist art, explains this phenomenon by pointing to collage’s method of “putting things together without divesting them of their own identities” and, as such, serving as “a metaphor for cultural democracy” (209). Lippard argues that feminist collage, unlike its postmodern variety, demonstrates

26  Theory and Practice of Collage “positive fragmentation,” where the “political consciousness” functions as a “glue” that ties the pieces into a “new order,” if not a “new whole” (136). Feminist identity itself, she proposes, can be called a “collage of disparate, not yet fully compatible parts” (168). Among the most important representatives of feminist collage are, according to Raaberg, Kathy Acker and Barbara Kruger. Although the former was a writer and the latter is a visual artist, their strategies of violently or humorously appropriating and confronting fragments of mainstream culture are alike. Such are also their political aims: to shock the audience out of political indifference, to subvert “monological discourses” and deconstruct “hegemonic cultural representations” (Raaberg). The lasting symbiosis of feminism and collage has been recognized in Miriam Schapiro’s coinage “femmage,” which has been a productive label applied to the works of such artists as Betye Saar, Mimi Smith, Harmony Hammond and Schapiro herself. Owing to its reliance on the practices of cutting and pasting and on the appropriation of ready-made objects, collage has been particularly well positioned to respond to the rise of consumerism, which coincided with the latter’s own development. Banash, whose book on collage is subtitled “Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption,” advances the thesis that, throughout the twentieth century, collage was the most important vehicle for representatives of all arts to comment critically on various aspects of the pervasive commodity culture (12). He distinguishes between two major artistic approaches to mass production: “direct resistance” and conformity – “becoming the very thing the system demands.” Among those who opposed the dictates of consumer culture Banash includes the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. The group of wilful conformists, who embraced the idea of the artwork as a commodity, features Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol (12–13). Whatever the individual artist’s stance towards consumerism, Banash believes that each collage formally emerges from, and is complicit in, the culture built on consumption: The process of assembling a collage . . . mirrors the consumer wandering through a vast mall, selecting this and then that, bringing it all together in a new arrangement. . . . Like the consumer speaking a code of identity by assembling particular elements, the collage artist assembles a work from readymade materials to make an individual statement that nonetheless speaks the universal code of capitalism. (16) The above is not the only parallel that can be drawn between the construction of collage and mass production. In his study, Banash invokes Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the “technique of fragmentation,” which is the “essence of machine technology,” exerted a profound

Theory and Practice of Collage 27 influence on the human disposition and activity in the twentieth century (McLuhan 8). He concludes that, as both Karl Marx and McLuhan would concur, “we become the reflections of our modes and means of production” (50). This remark could be extended to include collage, which, like machine technology, relies on the practice of assembling fragments.

Literary Collages in the Twentieth Century Collage is not a frequently used category in literary studies. Most dictionaries of literary terms, including the classical ones by Joseph T. Shipley and M.H. Abrams, omit it altogether. Those which do feature an entry discuss it briefly: J.A. Cuddon’s A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory offers an explanation of its etymology, an indication of its visual provenance, a very short description of its structure (“a work which contains a mixture of allusions, references, quotations, and foreign expressions”) and an enumeration of authors associated with collage: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and David Jones, as well as “modern anti-novelists” (“Collage” 133). More in-depth discussions of literary collage can only be found in specialized publications either on collage at large or on experimental writing. Alison Gibbons, in The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012), notes that there is a critical consensus that the founder of the collage novel was Max Ernst (430–31), whose three consecutive booklength narratives – La femme 100 têtes (1929), Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au carmel (1930) and Une semaine de bonté (1934) – interspersed cut-outs of images appropriated from nineteenth-century pulp books with short, and often ironic, subtitles. Even though Ernst’s invention of the collage novel did not attract many followers – the term is usually applied either to Ernst’s works or to homages to them, such as Two Women and a Nightengale: A Novel in Collage (2004, sic) and Artemis: A Tragedy of Collage (2004) by Michael Betancourt – it is credited by some critics with influencing the emergence of the graphic novel genre (Madden, Bane and Flory 43). Among other modernist novels whose structure is occasionally considered collage-like (although I would classify most of them as montage, since they rarely appropriate external content) are Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), as well as the works of Leonora Carrington and Raymond Queneau. Modernist poetry depended on collage to a far greater extent than the novel – collage is considered by some critics to have been one of its central principles from the beginning of modernism (Antin 107). It was embraced as a vehicle for “more accurately evok[ing] the strangeness of life” and “shrug[ging] off and destabiliz[ing] the established structures of Western literature” (Cran 24). The landmark collage poems of the time are Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) and The Waste Land (1922), Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and The Cantos

28  Theory and Practice of Collage (1917–1962), and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946). Among the most important practitioners of collage poetry in other languages were Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Seitz 13–15). The most often cited passage of modernist collage poetry is the closing eight lines of The Waste Land, in which Eliot juxtaposes excerpts from seven sources – a children’s song (line 1); the Upanishads (7–8); poems by Algernon Swinburne (3b), Alfred Lord Tennyson (3b) and Gérard de Nerval (4); an ancient Latin poet (3a); Dante’s The Divine Comedy (2); and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (6) – all of them in their original language (English, Italian, French, Latin and Sanskrit): London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam uti chelidon – O swallow swallow Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins (5) Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih Having been cut out of the contexts in which they carried their original meaning, the fragments are “virtually meaningless” and their arrangement is “of no consequence” – they “simply coexist” (Brooker and Bentley 201). The relationship between the consecutive appropriated lines is best understood as governed by parataxis – a juxtaposition without explicit transitions or discernible logical relations. According to Jay Parini, the collage method of the poem serves a “mimetic” function – its many fragments resemble “a heap of broken images” and evoke the “desiccated ruin that Eliot sees as the condition of postwar Anglo-­American civilization” (538). The fragmentariness of The Waste Land was radically reinforced by its dedicatee – Ezra Pound, whose heavy revision of Eliot’s poem involved considerable cuts, such as the deletion of over 70 lines from the opening parts of “The Fire Sermon” and “Death by Water” (Beach 43–44). As mentioned before, Pound’s most important contribution to collage – besides his work on The Waste Land – were his long poems Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and The Cantos, though harbingers of a collagelike structure can already be detected in his earlier poem Homage to ­Sextus Propertius (1919), which combines quotations and references to high culture with colloquial passages. The Cantos, Pound’s unfinished magnum opus of approximately twenty-three thousand lines, is generally regarded as particularly indebted to the collage principle. Like The Waste Land, it draws on literature, myth and history (its wide range of reference includes such figures as Confucius, Thomas Jefferson and

Theory and Practice of Collage 29 Benito Mussolini) and liberally appropriates passages from, among others, Homer’s “Hymn to Aphrodite” and The Odyssey (excerpts from both are featured in Canto I) (Beach 32). Among the many intertextual allusions is an address to Eliot – “These fragments you have shelved (shored)” – followed by two vulgar interjections, “ ‘Slut!’ ‘Bitch!’ ” Parini sees that passage as Pound’s recognition of “overlap, as well as divergence, between his allusive collage method and Eliot’s.” In place of structural mimesis, Pound favours “synecdochic” fragmentation – the function of parts is to point to a whole (539). In Collage and Literature: The Persistence of Vision (2019), Scarlett Higgins analyzes The Cantos as the embodiment of Pound’s “ideogrammic method” (conceived on the basis of Ernest Fenollosa’s writings about Chinese poetry), which relies on a collage-like juxtaposition of “two or more concrete images without conventional syntactic connectives” (27). Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s collage was an important inspiration for the New York School of poets. Most of their main representatives – John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, James Schuyler and Anne Waldman – applied the principles of collage in their own writing and drew inspiration from such artists as Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of them, like Ashbery, O’Hara and, in particular, Brainard, composed visual collages themselves.11 The New York poets frequently appropriated lines from newspapers, which either serve as the sole material of the poem (Schuyler’s “The Times: A Collage”) or as a trigger for original content, as in O’Hara’s famous “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed).” Even so, appropriation is not always the main criterion of the collage-like structure of their works. Cran argues that collage in O’Hara’s poetry “operates conceptually” and that instances of actual cutting and pasting are not very common (138). Instead, his texts – particularly the so-called “I do this, I do that” poems – interweave multiple fragmentary glimpses of urban life, producing a “remarkable collage of ideas, moments, quotations, emotions, thoughts, and situations” (135).12 Cran emphasizes that O’Hara’s collage poems, despite their fragmentation and resistance to “overarching meaning or poetic universality,” succeed in evoking an emotional response from the reader thanks to their candid, personal tone (comparable to Brainard’s earlier mentioned collage-like memoir I Remember) (183). Other notable poetic collages by the representatives of the school are Ashbery’s collection The Tennis Court Oath (1962), Schuyler’s “Freely Espousing” and Koch’s long poem “When the Sun Tries to Go On.”13 Another American writer to use collage in the 1960s was Donald Barthelme, the author of the much-quoted dictum that collage was “the central principle of all art in the twentieth century.” The method was particularly important to his early works, such as his first novel Snow White

30  Theory and Practice of Collage (1967) – a multimodal, metafictional and quintessentially postmodern retelling of the popular fairy tale set in contemporary New York City – and a number of short stories (Barthelme’s favourite literary form) such as “The Rise of Capitalism” and “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning.” The novel is composed of an array of heterogeneous, fragmentary pieces including pictures, textual graphics, parodic advertisement slogans, passages of mock literary criticism and a famous questionnaire, asking the reader increasingly nonsensical questions. Actual ready-mades, however, are rare and usually take the form of literary quotations, for instance from Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Barthelme has described his method as a “mosaic” and a “collage” – a juxtaposition of “one little piece of noise to another little piece of noise” and “mak[ing] music out of noise” (qtd. in Sloboda). In his later work “The Rise of Capitalism,” collage serves a different end. In this nine-paragraph mixture of prose fragments, Barthelme intersperses Marxist slogans (“Cultural underdevelopment of the worker, as a technique of domination, is found everywhere under late capitalism”) with Biblical lines (“It is better to marry than to burn”), everyday clichés (“Another day, another dollar”) and disconnected statements (“Strands of raven hair floating on the surface of the Ganges”). This time the aim, according to Luisa María González Rodríguez, is to subvert “dominant cultural discourses,” such as capitalism, Marxism and religion, whose fragments are interspersed with trivial and meaningless content and thus deprived of their privileged status and ultimately “turn[ed] into verbal waste.” Other notable American metafictionists of the 1960s and 1970s who should be mentioned in this context are John Barth, Robert Coover and Ronald Sukenick, all of whom were to some degree influenced by the principles of collage and montage. The latter called collage “one of the mind’s most formidable methods of organizing the disparities of experience” (Sukenick 14). Using collage as a means of opposing hegemonic systems was one of the strategies of yet another American writer of the time – William S. Burroughs. Born in the same city as Eliot (St Louis, Missouri) and taught by him at Harvard, Burroughs was a great admirer of Eliot’s poetry, particularly The Waste Land, whose structure inspired him to invent the cut-up method.14 Another influence was British multimedia artist Brion Gysin, who persuaded Burroughs that literature in the 1960s was five decades behind the visual arts because of its resistance to adopting collage as its governing formal principle (Burroughs, “Cut-Up Method” 268). In his manifesto essay from 1961, Burroughs offers instructions on how to practise the technique, which he sees as open to all, artists and non-artists alike (269): The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4. . . . Now rearrange the sections placing section

Theory and Practice of Collage 31 four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different. (268) Burroughs used the cut-up method, as well as its slightly modified version called the fold-in method, in his three consecutive novels: The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964).15 The middle one is formally the most experimental and radical in its use of collage. In the below passage, Burroughs cuts up lines from “Auld Lang Syne” and several popular songs of the time, such as “Do You Love Me” and “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” to create completely non-linear and non-narrative parataxis: Do you love me? – But i exploded in cosmic laughter – Old acquaintance be forgot? – Oh darling, just a photograph? – Mary i love you i do do you know i love you through? – On my knees i hoped you’d love me too – I would run till i feel the thrill of long ago – Now my inspiration but it won’t last and we’ll be just a photograph – i’ve forgotten you then? i can’t sleep, Blue Eyes, if i don’t have you – Do i love her? i love you i love you many splendored thing. (Ticket 179) In his book-length reassessment of Burroughs and his legacy Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from Burroughs to the Present (2011), Edward S. Robinson argues that in the years following Naked Lunch “collage . . . would inform Burroughs’ work” and lead him to “developing experimental techniques beyond anything hitherto seen in literature” (38). Robinson shows how the cut-up has transformed across decades from “splicing together random phrases cut from newspapers, through the use of word and image in collage combination, to the application of modern word processing and other digital technologies” in the twenty-first century (1–2). As for Burroughs’s writing, although he continued to write novels until the 1980s, his belief in cut-ups and fold-ins gradually waned. In a later interview, he reflected on some of the pitfalls of formal experimentation: “writers get carried away by a technique and what they can do with it and carry it so far that they lose their readers” (Miles 124). Whereas Eliot was the literary role model for Burroughs, Burroughs himself was the first significant influence on Kathy Acker – American novelist, poet, playwright, essayist and feminist critic. Both of them also regarded themselves as outcasts – in their personal life, their artistic choices and their political allegiances (Winterson ix). As Rob Latham argues in “Collage as Critique and Invention in the Fiction of William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker,” they were also both wary of “conventional systems of literary representation,” which they saw as ideologically

32  Theory and Practice of Collage normative and harmful (47–48). Their use of formal experimentation, together with shocking imagery (such as graphic depictions – verbal or visual – of outlawed sexual encounters involving incest and paedophilia), may be viewed as fuelled by the wish to scandalize the conservative audience and challenge hegemonic normativity. Gwen Raaberg describes the politics of Acker’s work as confronting the reader and “jolt[ing them] out of comfortable patterns of reading.” Acker explained her rationale for adopting collage in the following way: “To copy down, to appropriate, to deconstruct other texts is to break down those perceptual habits the culture doesn’t want to be broken.” Her radical appropriation, or “merciless raiding,” of such writers as Marquis de Sade, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Keats, Arthur Rimbaud, William Faulkner, Eliot, Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze is interpreted by Jeanette Winterson as “revenge on a male literary tradition” and by Susan E. Hawkins – as “textual piracy” and an act of “feminist guerrilla warfare” (Winterson ix, Hawkins 637). Acker’s most collage-like novels, both highly appropriative and employing the cut-up method, are The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1975) and the partly autobiographical Blood and Guts in High School (1978). The latter incorporates drawings, handwritten fragments and diagrams, some of which bear no evident relation to the book’s narrative focus. Robinson sees Blood and Guts as particularly indebted to Burroughs’s later multimedia works such as White Subway (1973), The Book of Breeething (1975) and The Third Mind (1977, cowritten with Gysin). Its arbitrary structure – making it possible to read the book’s short sections in any chosen order – is viewed by Robinson as a parallel with Naked Lunch (165–66). The vast majority of writers discussed so far come from the United States, which reflects America’s position at the forefront of formal experimentation in the second part of the twentieth century. Despite Britain’s substantial contribution to the modernist avant-garde, it showed relatively little interest in literary experiments after the Second World War. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the nouveau roman flourished across the English Channel and Burroughs published his cut-up novels and manifestos, most British authors embraced social realism and renounced formal innovation. Among the few British novelists who adopted some of the principles of collage in their work were Alan Burns, B.S. Johnson, Tom Phillips, Ann Quin and J.G. Ballard. Except for the latter, none of those authors managed to receive wide acclaim at the time. The best known British work influenced by the cut-up method,16 Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), is a highly fragmentary mixture of short disconnected texts, classified either as a novel or a collection of stories. Andrzej Gasiorek calls it “a literary collage, a Surrealist potpourri assembled out of found objects taken from popular culture,” whose diverse material, through “suggestions, resonances, echoes,” enables the reader to form

Theory and Practice of Collage 33 “speculative patterns” but resists “overarching synthesis” (58). Jeanette Baxter also suggests the book’s indebtedness to Surrealist collage, while Roger Luckhurst sees it as more influenced by the Cubist method (Baxter; Luckhurst 90). Baxter argues that the full extent of Ballard’s intention to engage with collage in The Atrocity Exhibition can be traced in stories – such as “The Summer Cannibals” (1969) – whose modified versions became part of the book. She calls that piece “Surrealist collage at its most heretical” – a chaotic, anarchic even, “multi-media spectacle,” composed of text and images appropriated from road safety manuals, films with Brigitte Bardot and urban-planning materials. The post-war British author who most persistently followed the collage method was Alan Burns. Influenced by Ernst and Burroughs alike, he adopted a very similar technique to the cut-up as early as in 1965. His novel Europe After the Rain was even accused of plagiarizing Burroughs’s innovation, although he claimed not to be aware of it until several years later (Darlington 167). His later novels are collage-like in the sense that they eschew plot and character (Babel [1969]); appropriate, cut up and intersperse recorded voices of various people (The Angry Brigade: A Documentary Novel [1973]); and mix – without semantically integrating – original text with images by another artist (The Day the Daddy Died [1981]). Burns’s friend and artistic ally, B.S. Johnson experimented with a montage of perspectives in House Mother Normal (1971) and tested the aleatory potential of the novel-in-the-box format in The Unfortunates (1969). His most collage-like novel is Albert Angelo (1964), which is composed of sections using different points of view and contains appropriated adverts, posters and teacher assessment forms as well as typographic and material experiments (including the famous holes in two consecutive pages). Though primarily associated with the pop art movement in the visual arts, Eduardo Paolozzi also contributed to British collage literature in the 1960s. Titled like a Swedish chocolate bar, Kex (1966) is a seamlessly arranged and laid out (by Richard Hamilton) structure consisting of “passages of text culled from thrillers, film reviews, advertisements for electronic equipment and articles on history, physics, interior decoration, ornithology and atomic weapons,” which reads like a “surrealistic embrace of the random, the disconnected and the revelatory non sequitur” (“Kex”). The book’s extreme reliance on appropriation became the model for such works as Sally Alatalo’s A Rearranged Affair (1996) and Joseph Kosuth’s Purloined (2000). A vital aspect of the history of twentieth-century collage literature is the unprecedented commercial success, popular appeal and social resonance of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). Hailed as a voice of the post–baby boomer generation and an expression of the zeitgeist, Coupland’s book was originally contracted as a non-fiction guidebook, but in the course of writing the author decided that fiction would better suit his purposes (Doody 11). The design of the

34  Theory and Practice of Collage final product, nonetheless, retains the look of a textbook or a magazine article with its unusually wide external margins occasionally filled with slogans in rectangular squares (e.g., “Dead at 30 buried at 70” and “Our parents had more”), dictionary entries of neologisms (e.g., of “McJob” and “Brazilification”), comics and other images. All of those multimodal components look as if they were appropriated but, in fact, most of them were created or commissioned by Coupland (Doody 24). The only purely appropriative part of the book is the “Numbers” appendix, which consists of a three-page compilation of various statistics and data about demographics and economics culled from the press, polls and reports. Alongside its composite structure and multimodality, including experiments with the layout and typography, Generation X has a very non-­ linear and episodic plot, which positions it between a novel and a­ collection of short stories (David Shields, RH 61). Its intense social engagement anticipates the politics of many of the twenty-first-century literary collages which will be the subject of the ensuing chapters.

Analyzing Collages This section aims to introduce several methodological tools which can be used in the formal analysis of literary collages. The two main sources of critical terms which will be employed in the subsequent parts are multimodal studies and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Following a brief introduction to the emergence of academic interest in multimodality and an outline of multimodal literature since the 1960s, I shall introduce Alison Gibbons’s taxonomy of literary texts that employ multiple modes and then present the tools afforded by multimodal studies to the analysis of images, typography and the layout of a given text. The next part aims to introduce the main principles of William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson’s RST model, focusing on Joint, Contrast and Sequence relations. I shall also advocate the inclusion of a relationship based on Confrontation, which will be of particular relevance to my analysis of literary collages. Multimodality Multimodality is a study of texts which communicate their meanings through more than one semiotic mode (Gibbons, Multimodality 4). The “mode” has been defined by Gunther Kress as “a socially shaped and culturally given semiotic resource for making meaning,” such as “image, writing, layout, gesture, speech, moving image, soundtrack and 3D objects” (Kress, Multimodality 79). Narrative and colour are also possibilities (Kress and Leuwen, Multimodal Discourse 51). Multimodality is a notion connected, but not synonymous, with multimediality. Whereas the “mode” is a semiotic category, concerned with the production of

Theory and Practice of Collage 35 meaning, the “medium” is a technological notion denoting the material resources involved in its production. Also, the “mode” is a broader term, since a single mode may be realized by several media (Maziarczyk, Novel 24). One of the underlying assumptions of multimodal literary studies is that the verbal mode is one of many semiotic modes participating in the construction of a narrative (Page 3). Visuality and materiality are among the other significant, and previously overlooked, dimensions of literary texts examined by multimodal critics. Although the multimodal novel is a new critical label, the practice can be said to be almost as old as the novel itself – the famous blank and black pages in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) could be cited as evidence. Throughout the next two hundred years, individual authors such as William Blake and Wyndham Lewis paid meticulous attention to the visual as well as verbal qualities of their works, but it was not until the 1960s that writers began to use multimodal means programmatically to contest the received ideas about literature. B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968) and Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1971) are some of the most exuberant multimodal experiments from that period. Most of them are strongly associated with postmodernism because of their radical self-reflexivity and playfulness. Other examples of twentieth-century works which relied on the coexistence of the verbal and visual modes were comics, graphic novels and picture books (Gibbons, “Multimodal Literature” 421). The next resurgence of multimodal texts at the beginning of the twentyfirst century coincided with the emergence of multimodal literary studies. Gibbons locates one of the reasons for the rise of multimodality in the “paradigm shift” occasioned by the fall of the Twin Towers (Multimodality 3). She also observes that multimodality tends to gain popularity at times of “significant communicative and technological development” (3). The fact that the production and publication of images has become cheaper has also contributed to the increase in the number of literary texts offering rich visuals (Gibbons, “Multimodal Literature” 421). Another factor was the wide critical acclaim garnered by the multimodal novels of such authors as Mark Z. Danielewski and Steve Tomasula. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2001) has even developed a cult following. On the other hand, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) featured in the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock. His 9/11 novel combining many visuals (including a series of photographs of the “falling man”) and typographic manoeuvres with a sentimental and contrived plot is a perfect example of the multimodal novel’s entry into the mainstream. Emphasizing the contrast with the reception of the avantgarde experiments of authors like Federman four decades earlier, Grzegorz Maziarczyk argues that the contemporary multimodal novelists have

36  Theory and Practice of Collage appealed to a broad reading public because most of them are used to the “multimedia environment of print, film [and] computer” (“Print” 184). Maziarczyk also points to contemporary literature’s paradoxical engagement with the materiality of the book at the time of the increasing marginalization of print, evidenced by, among others, the popularity of the e-book and the audiobook. “In response to the challenge of other media, especially digital,” Maziarczyk observes, “many contemporary writers self-consciously exploit the potential of the printed novel in a manner allowing it to retain its unique identity in the media system” (“Print” 169). This demonstration of the print novel’s rarely recognized possibilities, which may be fraught with anxiety over its extinction, is an example of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call hypermediacy – “a style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium” (272).17 Another paradox lies in the fact that such a process of reminding the reader of the unique status and vast potential of the print novel – a medium generally associated with the verbal mode – relies on lending it certain attributes of other media, mostly visual (Maziarczyk, “Print” 176). Multimodality is a productive framework for the analysis of collage literature. It provides many tools for examining text-image as well as text-text relationships between multiple components of collage works. Although there is a significant overlap between the two categories, it needs to be stressed that there are literary collages which are primarily monomodal (such as David Markson’s last four novels) as well as multimodal works which are not collages, since they do not incorporate any foreign material (such as Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! [2012]).18 The most significant overlapping properties of literary collages and typical multimodal works are the following: the use of heterogeneous material, fragmentary structure and non-linear narration. The frequent coexistence of verbal, visual and tactile components in both categories demands a greater interpretive effort on the part of the reader, who needs to “cognize and integrate meaning from the creative synthesis of word, image, and tactility” (Gibbons, “Multimodal Literature” 433). The reader of a multimodal collage may thus more accurately be described as an active “user” or a “hybrid reader,” whose task is not only to read the text but also to turn the book around, examine its visuals and feel its texture (Maziarczyk, Novel 45). In more specific terms, the “user” of multimodal collages needs to be alert to the following properties listed by Gibbons as the distinctive features of multimodal novels (besides the inclusion of images, which is taken for granted): 1. Unusual textual layouts and page design. 2. Varied typography. 3. Use of colour in both type and imagistic content.

Theory and Practice of Collage 37 4. Concrete realisation of text to create images as in concrete poetry. 5. Devices that draw attention to the text’s materiality, including metafictive writing. 6. Footnotes and self-interrogating critical voices. 7. Flipbook sections. 8. Mixing of genres, both in literary terms, such as horror, and in terms of visual effect, such as newspaper clipping and play dialogue. (Multimodality 2) In the collage texts to be discussed in the following parts of this book, particular attention will be paid to the use of images, typographical variation and the layout of the page. Rhetorical Structure Theory Devised by William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson, Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is “one of the most explicitly developed and frequently used of currently available linguistic approaches to explaining textual coherence” (Bateman 144). Its formulation was preceded by a meticulous examination of several hundred documents including formal and informal letters, scientific and press articles, advertisements and travel brochures (Mann, Matthiessen and Thompson 42). RST relies on the observation that consecutive textual units – from individual clauses to larger segments, such as paragraphs – convey information about their relationship which is not explicitly stated (Bateman 145–47; Mann, Matthiessen and Thompson 47). In the passage “He explains things well. He’ll make a good teacher,” the first sentence provides evidence for the second despite the absence of any connective discourse marker (such as “because” or “since”) (Bateman 146–47). Taking into account the hierarchical organization of many text spans, RST differentiates between nuclear (more important) and satellite units (dependent on the former). All kinds of rhetorical relations between a nucleus and a satellite are called “asymmetric,” whereas those between equally significant units are referred to as “symmetric” relations (147). In “Rhetorical Structure Theory and Text Analysis,” Mann, Thompson and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen distinguish between as many as twenty-one types of symmetric relations.19 Symmetric relations allow for fewer varieties – Mann, Matthiessen and Thompson indicate only three: Sequence, Contrast and Joint (52). Owing to the democratic, non-­ hierarchical structure of collage texts, the symmetric relations, where neither element is superior, will be of more import in my analysis. I shall, therefore, discuss them in greater detail. Sequence and Contrast relations are self-explanatory: whereas the former expresses a relationship of succession (as in a recipe or an anecdote), the latter asserts a degree of similarity between the two elements – their “comparability” – in order to

38  Theory and Practice of Collage emphasize the differing aspect (Mann, Matthiessen and Thompson 74). Joint, on the other hand, “represents the lack of a rhetorical relation” between the elements despite their commitment to the same subject matter (“Relation Definitions”). Mann, Matthiessen and Thompson provide the following example: Employees are urged to complete new beneficiary designation forms for retirement or life insurance benefits whenever there is a change in marital or family status. . . . Employees who are not sure of who is listed as their beneficiary should complete new forms since the retirement system and the insurance carrier use the most current form to disburse benefits. Joint comes closest to the quintessentially collage-like relationship of juxtaposition – elements are placed next to one another because they have some, largely elusive, common denominator while resisting a harmonious symbiosis. When the juxtaposition is visibly confrontational, a combination of opposites, I propose – for lack of a corresponding relation in the RST model – to call it Confrontation. The following passage from David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel (2001) could serve as an example: Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants. There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega. (10) The lack of the above rhetorical relation is not an oversight on the part of its authors but rather a consequence of the origins and the intended application of the RST model. As has been noted, it was devised to provide tools for examining the rhetorical coherence of functional written texts. Evidently, such texts serve different purposes from literary ones and are therefore governed by a different set of principles. The RST model is, for instance, heavily focused on authorial intention, which is no longer recognized as an important consideration in the analysis of literary texts. Also, it relies on the assumption of the rhetorical coherence of each text, which, particularly in the case of collage literature, applies to a limited degree. Nonetheless, I believe that this framework can be a useful instrument for assessing the semiotic relationships between the juxtaposed elements in collage fictions. Following Bateman, who has extended the scope of RST to encompass rhetorical relations in multimodal texts, I shall use it also to examine the coexistence of verbal and visual material. In Multimodality and Genre, Bateman concedes that the application of the RST model to multimodal texts is problematic in that the original assumption of sequentiality in verbal texts becomes complicated by the difficulty of predicting the exact reading path in a multimodal document.

Theory and Practice of Collage 39 For that reason, Bateman decides to “restrict RST relations to pairs (sets) of document parts (segments/spans) which are adjacent in any direction” (158). In my analysis, I shall adhere to this limitation. The proposed combination of methodological tools afforded by multimodal studies and Rhetorical Structure Theory is an original approach, which, to the best of my knowledge, has not yet been used in literary criticism. Also, the application of RST to monomodal literary texts, such as those by David Markson, Maggie Nelson and Jenny Offill, is a relatively novel interpretive strategy, particularly in the context of collage literature. Given the formal variety of the capacious category of literary collage, whose history, poetics and politics have been the subject of this chapter, certain texts will be shown as more conducive to being examined through the RST model and some through the tools derived from multimodal studies, while the others – through a combination of both. In each case, after a discussion of the given work’s collage structure, the focus will be placed on the ways in which the text exploits its formal potential to respond to one or several kinds of the new millennium’s multifarious crises.

Notes 1. Karpowicz specifies that, in order to function as a ready-made, the quotation needs to be distinctly separated from the rest of the text rather than submerged in it (61). All ensuing quotations from Karpowicz and Nycz are given in my translation from Polish. 2. The term “photomontage” was coined by Dadaists in order to differentiate their new method from the Cubist collage, which did not incorporate photographic images (Ades 15). The claim to founding photomontage has also been made by Russian Constructivists (Jennifer A.E. Shields 8). 3. Brockelman cites Christine Poggi’s argument that Cubist collage can be interpreted as the birth of an “alternative to the modernist tradition in ­twentieth-century art,” paving the way to postmodernism (Poggi xiii). 4. Scarlett Higgins regards juxtaposition as “the primary identifying factor of collage” (1). 5. Emily Bell suggests that the suspension of “strict structural restrictions” in collage allows for some degree of “randomness,” which may manifest itself in the inclusion of whimsical or zany material. 6. Bürger notes that changing the order of successive parts is also possible in a non-organic work, such as André Breton’s Nadja (1928) (80). 7. The persistent presence of the absent in every collage has been compared by Cran to the influence of the absent parent on the appearance and personality of their child (8). 8. Scarlett Higgins considers the unprecedented reaction of the audience to Kenneth Goldsmith’s infamous reading performance of “The Body of Michael Brown” on 13 March 2015 at Brown University as “visceral” evidence of collage’s capacity to evoke shock through appropriation and juxtaposition (12–14). 9. The question cited by Cran was formulated by Alfred Leslie as the audience’s expected reaction to his experimental short film The Last Clean Shirt (1964). 10. Margaret Millar notes that collage is “the means through which the artist incorporates reality . . . without imitating it” (qtd. in Seitz 6).

40  Theory and Practice of Collage 11. In the last decade of his life, Ashbery had several exhibitions of his visual collages, many of which were assembled out of ready-mades presented to him by Brainard. In 2008, New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery organized a solo exhibition of his works. O’Hara and Brainard collaborated on several collages including I Grew This Beard . . . and I’m Not Really Flying I’m Thinking (both 1964). The latter was, at the time, better known as a visual artist than a writer. Among Brainard’s best known works are collages featuring Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip character Nancy and assemblages incorporating images of the Virgin Mary, the packaging of consumer products and cigarette butts. Following Library of America’s 2012 publication of his collected writings, Brainard’s critical standing has been on the rise, culminating in Yasmine Shamma’s edited volume Joe Brainard’s Art (2019), to which the afterword was written by Marjorie Perloff. 12. In her discussion of the poetry of Polish author Miron Białoszewski, Agnieszka Karpowicz proposes the term “situational collage” for this kind of account of various events and impressions as experienced by the speaker (232). Their personal associations become the only principle of organizing the disparate and fragmentary parts of the poem (267). 13. Another poetic group which emerged in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century and embraced collage as a vital formal principle was the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets – Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe and Robert Grenier. For those authors, in Bernstein’s words, “the poem was imagined not as the fixed voice of a self-contained ego conveying a predetermined, or paraphrasable, message but a collage or constellation of textual elements: not voice, but voicings” (288). 14. Burroughs paid homage to The Waste Land by cutting up several lines from sections two and five of the poem and inserting them into his novel Nova Express (1964) (Robinson 52–53). 15. Burroughs’s most famous novel, Naked Lunch (1959), was written before he devised the cut-up method, although the book does share a number of formal qualities with that technique: a sense of structural randomness, the accidental order of components and the use of epistolary fragments. 16. Burroughs even wrote a preface for the first edition of the book, which he called “profound and disquieting.” He praised its undercurrent of perverse sexuality and compared its artistic strategy to that of Robert Rauschenberg. 17. A related notion is “technological metareference,” which Maziarczyk defines as the “elicit[ation of] the recipient’s awareness of the technological form of a given medium” (“Print” 169). 18. In her taxonomy, Gibbons considers “collage fictions” as one of seven categories of multimodal literature. The others are illustrated works (exemplified by Lance Olsen’s Girl Imagined by Chance [2002]); multimodal (re)visions (the illustrated rerelease of Tristram Shandy by Visual Editions in 2010); tactile fictions – subdivided into epistolary multimodal novels (Nick Bantock’s The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy [1994]), card-shuffle novels (Johnson’s The Unfortunates) and cut-outs (Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes [2010]); “altered books” (also Tree of Codes); concrete fictions – the most popular category comprising novels by Tomasula, Danielewski and Safran Foer; and “ontological hoaxes” (William Boyd’s Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960 [1998]) (“Multimodal Literature” 426–33). 19. The open set includes relations of Evidence, Justify, Antithesis, Conces sion, Circumstance, Solutionhood, Elaboration, Background, Enablement, Motivation, Volitional Cause, Non-Volitional Cause, Volitional Result, Non-Volitional Result, Purpose, Condition, Otherwise, Interpretation, Evaluation, Restatement and Summary.

Theory and Practice of Collage 41

Works Cited Acker, Kathy. “Dead Doll Humility.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, 1990, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.990/acker.990. Accessed 5 Aug. 2019. Ades, Dawn. Photomontage. Thames and Hudson, 1993. Antin, David. Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005. U of Chicago P, 2011. “Assemblage.” The Oxford Dictionary of Art, edited by Ian Chilvers, Harold Osborne and Dennis Farr. Oxford UP, 1997, p. 29. Banash, David. Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption. Rodopi, 2013. Barthelme, Donald. “The Rise of Capitalism.” Jessamyn, http://jessamyn.com/ barth/capitalism.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. Hill and Wang, 1974. Bateman, John A. Multimodality and Genre: A Foundation for the Systematic Analysis of Multimodal Documents. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Baxter, Jeannette. J.G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship. Ashgate, 2009. Kindle. Beach, Christopher. The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2003. Bell, Emily. “Collage.” Theories of Media: Keywords Glossary. U of Chicago P, http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/collage.htm. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017. Bernstein, Charles. “The Expanded Field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. Routledge, 2012, pp. 281–97. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 2000. Brockelman, Thomas P. The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Postmodern. Northwestern UP, 2001. Brooker, Jewel Spears, and Joseph Bentley. Reading “The Waste Land”: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. U of Massachusetts P, 1992. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. U of Minnesota P, 1984. Burroughs, William S. “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin.” A William Burroughs Reader, edited by John Calder. Picador, 1982, pp. 268–70. ———. “The Fall of Art.” The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, edited by William S. Burroughs. Arcade, 2013, pp. 75–80. ———. Preface. The Atrocity Exhibition, by J. G. Ballard. Flamingo, 2001, pp. vii–viii. ———. The Ticket That Exploded: A William Burroughs Reader, edited by John Calder. Picador, 1982, pp. 169–97. Clover, Joshua. “Collage and Theft.” Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law, edited by Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli. Duke UP, 2011, pp. 84–93. Cran, Rona. Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan. Ashgate, 2014. Cuddon, J. A. “Collage.” A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Wiley, 2012, p. 133. Cureton, Paul. Strategies for Landscape Representation: Digital and Analogue Techniques. Routledge, 2016.

42  Theory and Practice of Collage Cutler, Ed. “Colin Rowe (1920–99) and Fred Koetter: Collage City.” Architecture and Urbanism, 26 Apr. 2010, http://architectureandurbanism.blogspot. com/2010/04/colin-rowe-1920-99-and-fred-koetter.html. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017. Darlington, Joseph Andrew. Contextualising British Experimental Novelists in the Long Sixties. Dissertation, U of Salford, 2014. Doody, Christopher. “X-Plained: The Production and Reception History of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, vol. 49, no. 1, 2011, pp. 5–34. Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” Poetry Foundation, 2017, www.poetryfounda tion.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land-56d227a99ddeb. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. Foster, Hal. Postmodern Culture. Pluto, 1983. Frascina, Francis. “Collage: Conceptual and Historical Overview.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly. 2nd ed. Oxford UP, 2014. Fredman, Stephen. Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art. Stanford UP, 2010. Gasiorek, Andrzej. J.G. Ballard. Contemporary British Novelists. Manchester UP, 2005. Gibbons, Alison. “Multimodal Literature and Experimentation.” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. Routledge, 2012, pp. 420–34. ———. Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. Routledge, 2012. González Rodríguez, Luisa María. “Intertextuality and Collage in Barthelme’s Short Fiction.” DQR Studies in Literature, vol. 49, no. 1, 2012, pp. 249+. Questia, www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-2845192691/intertextualityand-collage-in-barthelme-s-short-fiction. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017. Harris, Beth, and Steven Zucker. “Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning.” Khan Academy, www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/early-abstraction/ cubism/a/picasso-still-life-with-chair-caning. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell, 1989. Hassan, Ihab. “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective.” Exploring Postmodernism, edited by Matei Calinescu and Douwe Wessel Fokkema. John Benjamins, 1990, pp. 17–40. Hawkins, Susan E. “All in the Family: Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 45, no. 4, 2004, pp. 637–58. Higgins, Scarlett. Collage and Literature: The Persistence of Vision. Routledge, 2019. Hoffmann, Gerhard. From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction. Rodopi, 2005. Hopkins, Budd. “Modernism and the Collage Aesthetic.” New England Review, vol. 18, no. 2, 1997, pp. 5–12. Judkins, Rod. Figurative Painting with Collage. Crowood, 2016. Karpowicz, Agnieszka. Kolaż: Awangardowy gest kreacji: Themerson, Buczkowski, Białoszewski. Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2007. “Kex.” Eye Magazine, 1996, http://eyemagazine.com/feature/article/kex. Accessed 2 Feb. 2019. Kostelanetz, Richard. A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. Routledge, 2001. Krauss, Rosalind. “In the Name of Picasso.” October, vol. 16, 1981, pp. 5–22.

Theory and Practice of Collage 43 Kress, Gunther. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Routledge, 2010. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. Arnold, 2001. ———. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge, 2001. Latham, Rob. “Collage as Critique and Invention in the Fiction of William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 5, no. 3, 1993, pp. 46–57. Lippard, Lucy. The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art. New Press, 1995. Luckhurst, Roger. The Angle Between Two Walls: Fiction of J.G. Ballard. Liverpool UP, 1997. Madden, David, Charles Bane and Sean M. Flory. A Primer of the Novel: For Readers and Writers. Scarecrow, 1980. Mann, William C., Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, and Sandra A. Thompson. “Rhetorical Structure Theory and Text Analysis.” Discourse Description: Diverse Linguistic Analyses of a Fund-Raising Text, edited by William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson. John Benjamins, 1992, pp. 39–78. Markson, David. This Is Not a Novel. CB Editions, 2010. Maziarczyk, Grzegorz. The Novel as Book: Textual Materiality in Contemporary Fiction in English. Wydawnictwo KUL, 2013. ———. “Print Strikes Back: Typographic Experimentation in Contemporary Fiction as a Contribution to the Metareferential Turn.” The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation, edited by Werner Wolf. Rodopi, 2011, pp. 169–94. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, 1994. Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible. Virgin, 2010. “Montage.” The Oxford Dictionary of Art, edited by Ian Chilvers, Harold Osborne, and Dennis Farr. Oxford UP, 1997, pp. 338–39. Montgomery, Martin, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, and Sara Mills. Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading Skills for Students of English Literature. Routledge, 2001. “Mosaic.” The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists, edited by Ian Chilvers. Oxford UP, 2009, p. 425. Nicol, Brian. Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2009. Nycz, Ryszard. Tekstowy świat: Poststrukturalizm a wiedza o literaturze. Universitas, 2000, pp. 247–92. Olsen, Lance. Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing. In collaboration with Trevor Dodge. Guide Dog, 2012. ———. “Fourteen Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction, or: Fiction by Collage.” Symploke, vol. 12, no. 1, 2005, pp. 130–35. Page, Ruth. “Introduction.” New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality, edited by Ruth Page. Routledge, 2010, pp. 1–14. Pallasmaa, Juhani. Foreword. Collage and Architecture, by Jennifer A. E. Shields. Routledge, 2014, pp. ix–x. Perloff, Marjorie. “Collage and Poetry.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly, 4 vols. Oxford UP, 1998, vol. 1, pp. 384–87.

44  Theory and Practice of Collage ———. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. U of Chicago P, 2003. Poggi, Christina. In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage. Yale UP, 1992. Raaberg, Gwen. “Beyond Fragmentation: Collage as Feminist Strategy in the Arts.” Mosaic, vol. 31, no. 3, 1998, pp. 153+. Questia, www.questia.com/ read/1G1-21240456/beyond-fragmentation-collage-as-feminist-strategy. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017. Robinson, Edward S. Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present. Rodopi, 2011. Rosenberg, Harold. “Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers.” Collage: Critical Views, edited by Katherine Hoffman. Ann Arbor, 1989, pp. 59–66. Seitz, William. The Art of the Assemblage. Museum of Modern Art, 1961. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Vintage, 2011. Shields, Jennifer A. E. Collage and Architecture. Routledge, 2014. Sloboda, Nicholas. “Heteroglossia and Collage: Donald Barthelme’s Snow White.” Mosaic, vol. 30, no. 4, 1997, pp. 109–23. Śniecikowska, Beata. “Wszystko jest kolażem?” Teksty Drugie: Teoria literatury, krytyka, interpretacja, vol. 119, no. 5, 2009, pp. 111–23. Spencer, Sharon. Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel. New York UP, 1971. Sukenick, Ronald. In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction. Southern Illinois UP, 1985. Tavares, Monica. “Digital Poetics and Remix Culture: From the Artisanal Image to the Immaterial Image.” The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, edited by Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and Xtine Burrough. Routledge, 2016, pp. 192–204. Taylor, Brandon. Collage: The Making of Modern Art. Thames & Hudson, 2006. Thomas, Jean-Jacques. “Collage/Space/Montage.” Collage, edited by Jeanine Parisier Plottel. New York Literary Forum, 1983, pp. 79–102. Winterson, Jeanette. “Introduction.” Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker, edited by Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper. Grove Press, 2002, pp. vii–x.

Part I

Art in Crisis

2 “Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” David Markson’s Late Novels

This chapter aims to assert the collage structure of David Markson’s last four works and to examine their representation of the novel in crisis.1 After introducing the author and his novelistic cycle, I shall investigate Markson’s unique method of composition and his reliance on parataxis, appropriation and fragmentation. In my analysis of the relations between consecutive components of the text, I will draw on Rhetorical Structure Theory. I shall then consider several of the tetralogy’s recurrent themes, focusing primarily on advancing senility and the crisis of art. Finally, I will propose a reading of Markson’s text, particularly the second book in the series, as a manifesto for a new form of writing – a manifesto which is collage-like in its structure and which advocates collage as an artistic strategy. Despite his considerable and varied literary output, Markson did not, in his lifetime, gain wider recognition outside a circle of fellow authors (including Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith) and critics (particularly, Françoise Palleau-Papin, the author of the only book-length critical study of his work). However, his death at the age of 82 in 2010 was reported by both The New York Times, who called him a “postmodern experimental novelist” (Weber), and The Guardian, who referred to him as “one of the most original of US novelists” (Dempsey). Both obituaries emphasize Markson’s renunciation of the standard elements of the novel such as plot and character in the last three decades of his literary career. They also cite his most famous champion David Foster Wallace, who devoted a long and enthusiastic article to Markson’s most acclaimed work Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) and called it “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction [in America].” His current reputation as an experimental writer rests on his last five works, even though much of his earlier output was not formally innovative. Among his more traditional works are hardboiled crime novels featuring a New York City detective and the anti-Western The Ballad of Dingus Magee (1965), which was made into a film with Frank Sinatra. Against Markson’s supposed wish,2 his last four books – Reader’s Block (1996), This Is Not a Novel (2001), Vanishing Point (2004)

48  Art in Crisis and The Last Novel (2007) – tend to be regarded by critics as forming a tetralogy. They are so different from any work that Markson or any other writer has produced and, at the same time, so similar to one another that it would be unreasonable not to consider them as parts of a larger artistic project. Rather than call them a “tetralogy,” however, I shall follow Anne Beattie and Tyler Malone’s proposition of referring to those books as a “quartet,” which emphasizes their lack of narrative drive, their “high-literary” feel and their musical qualities (Malone 78, Moore 99). Each work is a 150- to 200-page-long arrangement of snippets, whose bulk conveys facts and anecdotes about the lives of well-known artists, philosophers, scientists and historical figures. Those erudite trivia are in each case interspersed with metafictional passages commenting on the properties of the book in hand and on its narrator, who is called differently in every consecutive book: Reader, Writer, Author and Novelist, respectively. The length of a single passage ranges from one word (such as “Wanhope”) to six lines. Each chunk of text is separated by a space, which makes the layout reminiscent of a collection of aphorisms. That analogy is strengthened by the fact that many featured quotations are followed by the phrase “said X” or “wrote X,” in the example above. Although such form, eschewing plot and characterization, may run the risk of monotony and tedium, Markson succeeds in sustaining the interest of the knowledgeable and art-savvy reader. James Gibbons exaggerates only slightly when he remarks that This Is Not a Novel “reads as addictively as an airport thriller” (27). Laura Sims, in turn, calls the series a “remarkable hybrid” of formal experimentation and “fiction that is emotionally satisfying, intellectually rewarding, formally distinctive, and compulsively readable all at once” (“David Markson” 59). Markson’s “exceptional accomplishment” was recognized in 2007 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the same year, the members of the National Book Critics Circle included Vanishing Point and The Last Novel on the list of the best underrated works of the previous decade (Palleau-Papin xxvii).

Collage Structure The main reasons why Markson’s quartet can be regarded as a collage are the nature of its components – heterogeneous, fragmentary and appropriative – and the character of their arrangement: startling, disharmonious and occasionally purely arbitrary. Besides, the narrator alone hints at collage as a possible category for his experiment in the refrain which recurs in every book of the series: Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. (RB 14, 140; TINN 128; VP 12, 180; LN 8)

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 49 Two of its occurrences are followed by narratorial statements emphasizing the relevance of the four formal properties to the structure of the quartet: As is already more than self-evident. (VP 12) Self-evident enough to scarcely need Writer’s say-so. (TINN 128) The collage-like character of the series is also signalled in a list of possible generic classifications scattered across This Is Not a Novel, among which is “an ersatz prose alternative to The Waste Land” (101). However, other entries suggest altogether different formal parallels: “a sequence of cantos” (23), “a mural of sorts” (36), “an autobiography” (53), “a polyphonic opera” (73), “a disquisition on the maladies of the life of art” (86), “a classic tragedy” (171) and a “synthetic personal Finnegans Wake” (185). Critics such as Palleau-Papin (209), Joanna Scott (229) and Arnaud Schmitt (Phenomenology 42) accept collage as a fitting formal category and use it without explicitly considering its applicability. Lance Olsen cites Vanishing Point as an example of a text “near the middle of [the collage] continuum,” occupied by “particulate fictions that assume but do not require a reading strategy that arcs from beginning to end” (“Fourteen Notes” 189). The only critic who has contested the collage structure of Markson’s series is Camelia Elias, the author of The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre (2004). Elias declares that for all its non-linearity, fragmentation, intertextuality and formal similarities with works of William S. Burroughs, Markson’s project “cannot be contextualized as a work of collage” (340). In support of her claim, she misquotes the above-cited refrain as “Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like? An assemblage?,” adding four question marks where Markson in its ten occurrences across the series uses none, calls it a “repeated question” rather than a statement and interprets it as “simply a dismissal of all those attributes” (341). She thus implies that the narrator himself rejects the four characteristics even though in the ensuing passages, which she omits, he refers to them as “self-evident.” The present section is the first critical attempt to examine methodically the collage features of Markson’s quartet.3 It will begin by considering the specific components, or building blocks, of each book in the series. I will then demonstrate the project’s reliance on parataxis and propose a classification of the rhetorical relations between the juxtaposed elements which are indebted to the poetics of collage. From Reader’s Block to The Last Novel, the elements out of which Markson weaves his books are heterogeneous, but their variety lends

50  Art in Crisis itself to categorization. As there appears to be no apt word for those components, I shall refer to them interchangeably as passages and snippets. Each book consists of approximately two thousand passages, whose length usually oscillates between one and three lines, never exceeding six. They can take the form of words, phrases, statements, questions, ­quotations – acknowledged and not, as exemplified by the below samples from This Is Not a Novel: 1. Dizzy Dean died of a heart attack (190). 2. Writer is weary unto death of making up stories (1). 3. What is Hamlet reading, in Act II Scene ii, when Polonius inquires and Hamlet says Words, words, words? (27). 4. The greatest lesbian poet since Sappho, Auden called Rilke (29). 5. Tell all the Truth but tell it slant (11). 6. Ludwig Geyer (17). 7. Timor mortis conturbat me (148, 163). The first passage is an example of the most numerous category constituted by curiosities about widely known public figures. Françoise Palleau-Papin observes that the quartet focuses on “famous creators” – “in their whole lives, from birth to death, with a predilection for the end of a life” (248).4 Indeed, the first example is also one of close to five hundred snippets contained in This Is Not a Novel which concentrate on the cause and circumstances of the deaths of public figures – in this case, an American baseball player. The recurrence of anecdotes focusing on certain aspects of the lives of renowned individuals as well as the choice of those characters enable the reader to notice emerging themes, which are going to be discussed in a later section of this chapter. To an impatient reader, however, the text might seem a random mixture of trivia. Disappointed readers of This Is Not a Novel (who awarded it, respectively, one and two stars out of five) called the book in their review on Google Books “just a grocery list of anecdotes” and a “mishmash of historical/literary details.” In The Last Novel, Markson incorporates a nonplussed response to Vanishing Point by a schoolmate, who phoned him to say, “Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?” (LN 155; Sims, Fare 140). The second passage is an example of a metafictional comment on the process of writing. It is the vehicle through which, in This Is Not a Novel, Markson formulates charges against the traditional novel and postulates for its resuscitation, which will all be discussed later. In Reader’s Block that metafictional strand is far more developed than in the ensuing parts of the series. According to Markson’s own estimate, it occupies 20% of the first book and only up to 1,5% of the others (Sims, Fare 132). Whereas the latter parts make continuous reference to only one

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 51 metafictional figure – Writer, Author and Novelist, respectively – ­Reader’s Block features both Reader (who stands for the author) and Protagonist (the character in the novel written by Reader), alongside the voice of the first-person narrator, who also sounds like Markson. Throughout the quartet, the metafictional comments often address the author-figure’s advancing age and the resulting health problems, which, as Markson admitted, are entirely autobiographical (Palleau-Papin xxvi).5 The third passage represents one of many questions which apparently nag the nameless narrator and which are likely to arouse the curiosity of Markson’s bookish reader as well. Many of them are concerned with literature – either with fictional worlds (“Is Macbeth impotent?” [TINN 76]) or with literary reputation (“If Stephen Crane had in fact lived on an additional forty-plus years, how different might the hierarchy of American letters have been in that period?” [TINN 42]). There are also many evaluative questions regarding the visual arts or music (“Was Liszt the greatest pianist who ever lived?” [TINN 46]). Other questions frequently focus on religion (“Where was Jesus between the ages of twelve and twenty-nine?” [RB 82]) and history (“Could Richard the Lion-Hearted speak English?” [TINN 28]). The fourth example – W.H. Auden’s humorous assessment of Rainer Maria Rilke – represents one of several hundred quotations, which despite not being enclosed in quotation marks are accurate and whose attribution is signalled, albeit laconically. The sources of those snippets are multiple and include mostly biographies and encyclopaedias, as acknowledged by Markson in interviews. Its authors are largely the same as the heroes of the earlier noted anecdotes – writers, other artists, critics, philosophers and historical figures. The fifth passage exemplifies one of several hundred unacknowledged quotations – in this case, a line from a poem by Emily Dickinson. Their provenance ranges from highly recognizable texts such as the Bible, The Illiad and Shakespearian plays to lesser-known sources (such as Wisława Szymborska’s poem “The Terrorist, He’s Watching”), which readers can identify with the help of a search engine. Although most of those quotations come from books, essays and poems, Markson also uses passages from popular songs (“The Cherry Tree Carol” by Joan Baez), statements by celebrities (Marilyn Monroe’s “Sure I posed. I was hungry” [TINN 32]) and advertising slogans (Abe Stark’s “Hit Sign Win Suit” [TINN 39]). “Ludwig Geyer” (6) is an example of a short cryptic snippet consisting of a proper name. Most of them are composed of the names of historical figures, such as Geyer – a German artist and the stepfather of Richard Wagner – or literary figures like Salathiel Pavy and Pechorin. Other common categories are titles (Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe), foreign phrases (No pasarán!), dates (June 16, 1904), addresses (26 Piazza di Spagna) and names of towns (Jedwabne). As the meaning of those elliptical snippets is not articulated, they appeal either to the reader’s erudition or their

52  Art in Crisis diligence, which – as with the previous category – consists in looking up the entry in a reference book or a search engine. The last example represents one of several recurrent lines, or refrains, to be found across individual books or the entire quartet. The Latin passage from a Catholic prayer, meaning “fear of death distresses me,” appears three times in This Is Not a Novel, twice accompanied by its English translation. The citation, popularized by William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers” (1505), reappears both in Vanishing Point and The Last Novel. Among other refrains to be found across the series are “Nobody comes. Nobody calls,” “Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo” (the opening words of the Kaddish), “Met him pike hoses” (Molly Bloom’s truncated version of “metempsychosis”) and the earlier mentioned “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.” The use of recurrent lines and motifs prompts Laura Sims to compare the structure of the quartet to that of the fugue.6 This kind of composition poses a challenge for the reader, who must “remain attentive and active . . . constantly connecting the lines/fragments/quotations not only with their immediate neighbors, but also with lines from previous books” (“David Markson” 65). In his study Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel (2009), Alan Shockley also cites the recurrent passages as an indication that Markson’s series “works much more like a work of music than a novel” (156). The last four types of passages can be regarded as the quintessential components of collage – ready-mades, defined in the opening chapter as any external material, two- or three-dimensional, verbal or visual, which the artist chooses to incorporate in their work. In literary texts, as has been asserted, appropriation often takes the form of unintegrated and unacknowledged quotations. In Markson, no passages are seamlessly integrated with the rest of the text as they are all spatially set apart from the preceding and succeeding ones. However, one may determine different levels of semantic integration. Whereas the Auden quotation is followed by a three-word commentary indicating its context, and therefore has its ready-made quality diminished, the last three examples offer no interpretive hint – either within the passage itself or in the immediate surroundings. As I argued in the opening chapter, citing David Antin and Budd Hopkins, the lack of a semantic (or narrative) coherence resulting from the incongruity of constitutive elements is, besides the inclusion of appropriated content, a crucial characteristic of collage. Most parts of Markson’s text are marked by what Marjorie Perloff calls a replacement of “subordination” by “coordination” and of “logic [and] sequence” by “likeness and difference” (“Collage” 386). In other words, it is governed by the principle of parataxis, or juxtaposition of elements without the use of conjunctions, which can be illustrated by the following excerpt from This Is Not a Novel:

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 53 Gammer Guiton’s Needle. Goldengrove unleaving. It took Eliot forty years to allow that the word Jew in Gerontion might be capitalized. Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed. June 16, 1904. Stephen Dedalus has not had a bath since October 1903. (TINN 65) In the six consecutive passages, Markson juxtaposes the title of a sixteenthcentury English comedy, a fragment of the second line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Spring and Fall,” a fact about T.S. Eliot, the beginning of a line from the Book of Genesis (17:17), the date on which James Joyce’s Ulysses is set and a commentary on the protagonist of Ulysses. None of those elements is connected by a conjunction which would account for the logic of this sequence. Instead, the reader may only observe the looser relation of thematic analogy, the common denominators being the child (the addressee of Hopkins’s poem and the prophesied heir to Abraham, whose birth is announced in the previous line of Genesis) and Jewishness (of the character in Eliot’s poem, of Abraham and of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses). The arrangement of the six snippets also exemplifies the lack of “teleology or any temporal development,” or, in other words, the “flattened-out presentation of the past and present,” as a result of which Abraham, Eliot and Writer function on the same “timeless” plane (Palleau-Papin 297–98). Furthermore, the above excerpt illustrates the radical fragmentariness of Marksonian snippets. The only self-contained passages are the comments on Eliot and Dedalus. The opening title and the date in line five, while not technically fragments of any larger whole, are devoid of any explanatory note, which may render them incomprehensible to many nonscholarly readers. The passage on Abraham begins with the word “then,” which emphasizes the elimination of the earlier part – a sentence offering the reason for Abraham’s surprised reaction. Markson also cuts the rest of the Biblical line, which continues, “and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him who is one hundred years old?” (“Genesis”). The most fragmentary element in the above excerpt is the passage from “Spring and Fall” – the last two words of the poem’s opening question: “Márgarét, áre you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?” The fragmentariness of Markson’s work and the programmatic absence of clear relations between successive components prompt the attentive reader to become a

54  Art in Crisis virtual co-author of its meaning. It is therefore a “writerly” (scriptible) text, which conforms to Thomas P. Brockelman’s earlier-cited argument that in collage “sense is something to be made rather than secured” (37). The need for reader involvement in Markson’s “interactive” fiction is also stressed by Joseph Tabbi, who argues that “for a narrative to develop at all, significant connections need to form in a reader’s mind” (“Solitary Inventions” 766–67). The critic sees Markson’s “nonsequential method” of fragmented units that touch on a given subject only to proceed to another and then return from a different angle as indebted to the style of Ludwig Wittgenstein.7 The reliance of Markson’s method on “connectivity” – the capacity for establishing links between numerous fragments8 – is regarded by Tabbi as a signum temporis, “appropriate to an era committed to virtuality” (“Solitary Inventions” 768). Stephen Burn regards the structure of the quartet as a response to the modern information overload and an invitation to consider the mechanisms of perceiving and synthesizing the abundance of data (34–35). Tabbi highlights the paradox that despite using highly traditional methods of composition, such as handwritten notecards later typed on an old machine,9 Markson is “among the forebearers of electronic literature” due to his renunciation of characteristic elements of print fiction, such as plot, character and narrative (Tabbi, “David Markson” 685).10 Although parataxis is the dominant organizing principle of Markson’s series, throughout its eight hundred pages, one can find instances of several kinds of rhetorical relations. In my attempt to classify them, I shall make use of the terms afforded by the Rhetorical Structure Theory, as outlined in Chapter One. As I argued earlier, collage tends to employ multinuclear rather than nucleus-satellite relations between consecutive units; in other words, those governed by the logic of parataxis or juxtaposition, where none of the units is privileged. The kinds of relations I wish to consider are Contrast, Sequence, List and, the most paratactic of them all, Joint. Among the examples of Contrast, indicating the comparability of two elements in order to emphasize the differing aspect (Mann, Matthiessen and Thompson 74), are the following excerpts from Vanishing Point and The Last Novel, respectively: Our first aim is to serve God and spread the Christian faith. Said Cortes. I have come to take away their gold. Said Pizarro. (VP 154) A real good guy. William Carlos Williams called Emily Dickinson.

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 55 A bitchy little spinster. Denise Levertov saw her as instead. (LN 56) In both cases the juxtaposed quotations have a clear common denominator, which ensures their comparability: in the first set, the authors of quotations are alike (they are both conquistadors); in the second, the object of the comment is the same. Besides, the contrasting passages employ a degree of repetition (the opening “said” in the second line of the first pair and the opening “a” in the first line of the second extract) and syntactic parallelism (the article-adverb-adjective-noun structure of “A real good guy” and “A bitchy little spinster”). Their role is to reinforce the sense of formal similarity the better to highlight the element conveying semantic difference. In the above passages, both quotations in each set convey contrasting messages and could thus be connected by means of a conjunction such as “whereas.” The former is devoid of any explicit indication of contrast, which grants it a more paratactic – and collage-like – quality, while the latter points at the divergence by using the word “instead.” Sequence, which conveys a relationship of succession between adjacent elements, is most often exemplified by instructions (such as recipes), anecdotes and introductory metastatements using words like “firstly” and “secondly.” Although no such instances can be found in Markson, one may note several consecutive passages which have been arranged into a chronological sequence, such as the following: Jan van Eyck died in Bruges in 1441. Petrus Christus died in Bruges in 1472 or 1473. Hans Memling died in Bruges in 1494. Gerard David died in Bruges in 1523. (TINN 120–21) Despite the chronological order, the excerpt retains a paratactic quality owing to the lack of discourse markers, the repeated use of “died in” and the employment of a distinct parallelism. A different kind of sequence can be traced by an attentive reader who keeps track of references to the consecutive sightings of the mythical wandering Jew, which are scattered throughout Vanishing Point. Beginning with a snippet on his supposed apparition in Hamburg in 1542 and ending with one in Salt Lake City over three hundred years later, each successive reference is made at a fairly regular interval of approximately twenty-five pages. Both examples are very rare instances of temporal continuity in Markson’s books – exceptions rather than the rule.

56  Art in Crisis One of the two most common rhetorical relations in the quartet is List, which relies on the enumeration of comparable items. Characteristically, Markson prefers using a fixed formula for each listed element: Gluck’s face was pitted from smallpox. Haydn’s face was pitted from smallpox. Mozart’s face was pitted from smallpox. (TINN 11) Dante quotes The Consolation of Philosophy. Chaucer quotes The Consolation of Philosophy. Milton quotes The Consolation of Philosophy. (TINN 27) Although most often parataxis favours anaphora (Lanham 31), most Marksonian examples are epistrophic – with only the first word differing – which results in numerous repetitions.11 In the later books in the series, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel, Markson employs more elliptic parallelisms, such as the following: Wordsworth’s illegitimate daughter. Byron’s. Shelley’s. Schopenhauer’s. (VP 71) A quack, Vladimir Nabokov called Thomas Mann. A complete mediocrity – D. H. Lawrence. That total fake – Ezra Pound. Despicable, loathsome, sick, third-rate – Dostoievsky. (LN 91) One of the characteristic features of Vanishing Point is the frequent use of single snippets listing numerous individuals (separated by commas or periods) and followed by a succinct explanation for their grouping, usually introduced by a statement beginning with the word “all” or “who”: Johnson. Boswell. Gibbon. Walpole. Goldsmith. Sterne. Garrick. Edmund Burke. Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Sarah Siddons. All of whom sat for Joshua Reynolds. (VP 53)

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 57 The above is a clear instance of asyndetic listing – the kind which favours commas in place of conjunctions, as it refuses to use a single “and.” Although grouping the multiple persons in one line is a step towards greater integration of the items (compared to a series of statements based on the formula “X sat for Joshua Reynolds”) and therefore away from a collage-like jumble, the choice of the period rather than the comma and the lack of conjunctions accentuate their separateness. The last and the most common multinuclear relation used in the series is Joint, which represents the lack of any specific rhetorical relationship between consecutive elements. Examples of Joint can be divided into groups of passages which are related to a common topic and those that are not marked by any noticeable thematic unity. Two examples of the former arrangement can be found below: Tolstoy, asked if he had read a recent play by Maurice Maeterlinck: Why should I? Have I committed a crime? They who write ill, and they who ne’er durst wrote, Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite. – Said Dryden. Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss. – Added Pope. (TINN 45–46) Emotion recollected in tranquility. The best words in the best order. (TINN 82) Whereas the theme of bad writing is readily identifiable in the first example, the unifying element of the second one – English Romantic poetry – becomes apparent only if one recognizes that the authors of both statements are William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Despite the thematic unity to both sets, their succeeding statements appear to have been arranged arbitrarily and are thus interchangeable. One of the multiple examples of random Joint which can be found in This Is Not a Novel is the following: How beautiful yellow is! Says a van Gogh letter. Sortes Virgilianae.

58  Art in Crisis Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight. (TINN 92–93) It is a grouping of four cryptic snippets which incorporate, respectively, Vincent van Gogh’s statement from a letter to his brother Theo, the Latin name of an ancient method of bibliomancy and the titles of poems by Robert Browning and Rose Hartwick. Besides their connection with art, which in Markson’s highly bookish quartet is a very tenuous thematic link, there is no evident reason why the four elements should be juxtaposed with one another. Alongside being an excellent example of Joint and parataxis, the above passage relies entirely on appropriated content, which further enhances its collage quality. The last kind of rhetorical relation that I wish to discuss is what I propose to call Confrontation – a juxtaposition of statements expressing antithetical or highly differing positions. In addition to the example given in Chapter Two (a clash of statements on art and subject matter by Writer and Ortega y Gasset in This Is Not a Novel), the following excerpts fit into this rhetorical category: Fra Angelico. Who never painted without first offering a brief prayer. Bach. Who would not compose without doing so also. Thanks to God, I have always remained an atheist. Said Luis Bunuel. (VP 40) It is the business of the novelist to create characters. Said Alphonse Daudet. Action and plot may play a minor part in a modern novel, but they cannot be entirely dispensed with. Said Ortega. If you can do it, it ain’t bragging. (TINN 166) In both cases, the third statement is antithetical to the previous two – devout religiosity is confronted with atheism, and conservative statements regarding literary theory are pitted against a sporting remark by the American baseball player Dizzy Dean.12 Even though the statements in the latter set are not strictly antithetical, as they initially concerned different topics, Markson has created a context in which they engage with

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 59 one another. The sportsman’s statement, not followed by the “said X” formula, reads like a metafictional comment by Writer on the present book, which aims to demonstrate that a novel without character, action and plot is possible. Other instances of Confrontation include the juxtaposition of two contradictory remarks by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (TINN 69) and of one-word lines reading “Dasein” and “Einsatzgruppen” (VP 160), which enacts a sarcastic confrontation of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical concept with his political support for the Nazi regime. The Heidegger example is one of many instances of juxtaposition through which the implied author seems to be commenting on the author of the cited s­tatement – usually an expression of disapproval or mockery: Eliot was not a very experienced writer, he didn’t write very much, he didn’t write very much poetry. Said Allen Ginsberg. Every poet is a fool. Which is not to say that every fool is a poet. Said Coleridge. (VP 65) In or about December 1910 human character changed. Yes, Virginia. (TINN 56) Whereas the former set indicates quite clearly that the implied author regards Ginsberg’s remarks about Eliot as foolish, the latter is more subtle. Virginia Woolf’s oft-cited announcement of the symbolic inauguration of modernism from her essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” is juxtaposed with the beginning of The Sun’s famous editorial from 1897 written in response to a young girl’s enquiry about the existence of a Santa Claus. (“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” is the first sentence of the article.) As a result, the former statement is patronized – perhaps on account of the overly grand claim that it wants to make or because of the undeservedly (in the narrator’s opinion) iconic status that it now enjoys. Whatever their specific functions in a given instance, Contradiction and Joint are the rhetorical relations most suited to collage, as a result of their reliance on parataxis and the denial of synthesis, and because they frequently produce the effect of confusion, surprise or shock. List, with its commitment to the same theme and the resulting sense of unity, may not be inherently collage-like, but the way Markson uses it – repetitive, unintegrated and formulaic – accentuates its paratactic quality and makes it compatible with the poetics of collage.

60  Art in Crisis Besides the above-examined statements, Markson juxtaposes numerous proper names and noun phrases whose referents – people, places and objects – could also be said to constitute a collage. Such an extension of the notion of collage has been proposed by Agnieszka Karpowicz in her analysis of the works of Polish twentieth-century poet Miron Białoszewski, which abound in short descriptions of many objects found in the poet’s room or of his daily routines (232). Rona Cran, likewise, refers to Frank O’Hara’s poetry as a “collage of ideas, moments . . . emotions, thoughts, and situations” (135). Although I object to stretching the category of collage to include texts which are not composed of any ready-mades, or appropriated elements, and so I would be hesitant about applying the term to certain works by Białoszewski and O’Hara, I accept the idea of a collage of referents, on condition that they refer to known (and hence, in a sense, appropriated) rather than generic objects. An example of this kind of juxtaposition is the following passage from The Last Novel: Turner’s eternal stovepipe hat. Eliot’s bowler. Saul Bellow’s fedora. (LN 78) Each component is the given artist’s distinguishing attribute, which can be found in their numerous portrait photographs. Markson’s quartet contains many instances of collage groupings of artworks and literary texts, such as the following: Piero della Francesca’s St. Agatha. Tiepolo’s. Zurbaran’s. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s. (TINN 114) The George Grosz drawing of Jesus, crucified, wearing a mask and combat boots, and captioned Shut up and carry out your orders. Dated 1928. The Max Ernst painting of the Virgin Mary spanking the infant Jesus. (VP 167) 1922. Ulysses. 1922. The Waste Land. 1922. Reader’s Digest. (LN 88)

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 61 While the first two sets juxtapose thematically similar artworks, the last one confronts two milestones of modernist literature with a popular magazine offering abridged versions of bestselling books. The two other most common types of such groupings are people and places. Markson brings together – by merely listing their first names – three members of the Florentine Gaddi family and three members of the Bolognese Carracci family (TINN 47). Besides confronting the historical figures, he also invites a juxtaposition of their respective family portraits: Self-Portrait and Portraits of Taddeo and Gaddo Gaddi and Portrait of Annibale, Ludovico and Agostino Carracci, which present them in the same configuration. Other instances of similar groupings include “Maria Caniglia. Magda Olivero. Renata Tebaldi” (TINN 102) and “Benoit Mandelbrot./Benoit de Sainte-Maure” (LN 81). The former set consists of famous Italian operatic sopranos while the latter of individuals from different epochs and fields whose only apparent link is their first name. Markson’s juxtapositions of places are mostly endowed with a greater degree of unity: “Manolete. Islero. Linares” – all bullfighting arenas (TINN 131); “Katyn./Nanking” – sites of mass murders committed in 1940 and 1938, respectively (TINN 132); and “Café Guerbois. The Bateau-Lavoir” – meeting places of Parisian artists (TINN 151).

Death, Senility and Anti-Semitism My analysis of the quartet has so far concentrated on its formal properties, which was aimed to substantiate the claim that collage is the central structural principle of the text. In the two final sections, in turn, I wish to examine the thematic concerns of Markson’s series. A work so fragmentary, discontinuous and appropriative may not seem a natural vehicle for carrying themes. However, as David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman argue in Life Is Short – Art Is Shorter (2015), the structure of collage does in no way preclude thematic engagement: “collage depends upon the orchestration of variegated materials – separated by white space and unconnected by plot – into theme” (161). In the quartet, the dominant concerns can be identified by investigating refrains, recurring references and specific blocks of text. The purpose of this section is to introduce three of the four most prevalent themes that run through the quartet – death, anti-Semitism and literary criticism – while saving the discussion of art in crisis (and the connected theme of senility) for the final section. The prospect of the impending death looms large from Reader’s Block to The Last Novel, whose very title accentuates the imminence of demise. The author-figure appears intensely preoccupied with mortality, which is signalled by the earlier considered refrain – “Timor mortis conturbat me.”13 What is more, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel conclude with a suggestion of Author’s natural death and Novelist’s suicide, respectively; in Reader’s Block, it is Protagonist who commits suicide. The terminal

62  Art in Crisis resolutions of Markson’s books illustrate Ernest Hemingway’s claim – cited in This Is Not a Novel – that “all stories, if continued far enough, end in death” (TINN 181). Besides making numerous references to literary accounts of death (from King Arthur’s in Thomas Malory’s canonical romance to Snowden’s in Catch 22 by Joseph Heller), individual works in the quartet are focused on a particular aspect or kind of death. Markson explained this engagement in an interview: “In Reader’s Block I got hung up on the suicides and listed all those suicides.14 Then in This Is Not a Novel, how people died. Vanishing Point was where they died” (PalleauPapin 254). In the (then yet unwritten) last book, the emphasis is placed on when artists died. Markson admitted that he was fascinated by great artists, such as Céline, Eliot and Pound, turning out to be “rotten human beings” (qtd. in Palleau-Papin 251). Among the unpalatable facts about famous individuals which are highlighted by the quartet are their professions of anti-Semitism and misogyny. Evidence of the former can be found in the following excerpt from The Last Novel: Be informed, Christian, that after the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous, more violent, than the Jew. Pronounced Luther. World War II – started by sixty kikes. Pronounced Ezra Pound. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God. Pronounced the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – well before a State of Israel existed. While also citing Adolf Eichmann as both gallant and noble. (LN 42) The theme of anti-Semitism is particularly prominent in Reader’s Block, which contains as many as eighty-six snippets following the format, “X was an anti-Semite.” The misogyny of famous men is asserted by their attributed remarks, such as Thucydides’s claim that “the greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of” (LN 107) and Schopenhauer’s conclusion that “it is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulses who could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged race” (RB 138). All such statements are quoted without any commentary, which enhances their status as collage-like ready-mades. Another theme running through the quartet is the narrow-mindedness of literary critics and their failure to recognize genius. The series abounds in more or less direct charges formulated against critics, mostly targeting their laziness, carelessness, small-mindedness and prudery. In Reader’s

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 63 Block alone, critics are called “lice in the locks of literature” (Tennyson), “little envious Prigs, snarling, bastard, puny” (Rabelais), “horseflies that keep the horse from plowing” (Chekhov) and “the leprosy of letters” (Flaubert) (RB 24, 29, 66, 146). The utter lack of critical foresight is exemplified by Samuel Johnson’s remark, “Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last” (RB 161). The catalogue of critics’ chronic fallibility feels tinged with Markson’s personal resentment and the fear that his own works will also fall prey to their misjudgement, as in the following excerpt from The Last Novel: Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over. Like their grandly perspicacious uncles – who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also. (LN 104) The reader of the quartet is also presented with numerous statements indicating that artists themselves are often equally mistaken in their initial responses to works currently regarded as highly important, as evidenced by Virginia Woolf’s notorious assessment of Ulysses as “an illiterate, underbred book” (RB 26). The imagined incomprehension of artists far apart in time is humorously suggested by two ruminations from Vanishing Point: “What Giotto would make of a Gerhard Richter canvas” and “What Balzac would make of a novel like Author’s” (VP 145, 147).

Novel(ist) in Crisis As implied by the persistence of the refrain “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke” (LN 2, 3, 93, 190),15 the theme of old age is central to The Last Novel. The combination of references to Novelist’s senility; to “near mythic figures of aging” such as Socrates, Diogenes and King Lear; and to the late style of artists from Michelangelo to Picasso makes the final book in the quartet, in the words of Andrea Charise, “a stark, yet improbably lively, memento senescere” (165). Old age, however, is a major theme in the entire series. The main characteristics of the authorfigure’s advancing senility are indicated by the adjectives listed in the above refrain: general fatigue, health problems, loneliness and poverty. In Vanishing Point, Author frequently complains about his tiredness, which stands in the way of his writing. He realizes that “much of his lack of energy is simply a matter of age” but still he finds “it’s been excessive, most recently” (VP 6). Increasingly frustrated, he asks, “Why . . . is Author so often so damnably tired?” (VP 114). On the last page of This Is Not a Novel, after fifty-two snippets enumerating famous people who died of various kinds of cancer – from Plotinus throat cancer to Anais Nin’s “cardiorespiratory arrest while enduring metastatic

64  Art in Crisis vaginal cancer” – comes the cryptic note: “Writer’s cancer” (TINN 60, 125, 166). The author-figure’s loneliness is marked by the recurrence of the lines “Nobody comes. Nobody calls” (RB 11; TINN 186; VP 162; LN 56, 58) and “The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before./Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come” (RB 180, VP 168, LN 172) from Reader’s Block to The Last Novel. In the final book, Novelist admits to his “isolation – ever increasing as the years pass,” as a result of which on many days he finds himself “speaking to no one” except a clerk, a postman or an anonymous neighbour (LN 28).16 All the above-listed ills of old age inspire Novelist to contemplate suicide, which – the reader may infer – he ultimately commits by jumping from the roof on the last page of Markson’s series. That outcome is suggested by The Last Novel’s framing reference (on the first and last page) to the roof in Novelist’s building. The final instance of the “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke” refrain is directly preceded by the snippets “Access to Roof for Emergency Only./Alarm Will Sound if Door Opened,” which may be interpreted as the last inscriptions that appeared to Novelist on his way to his suicide spot (LN 190). Author’s previously cited grievance about being “damnably tired” is followed by the opening line of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Brise Marine”: “La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres” (VP 114).17 The connection between the tiredness of old age and the sense of literary exhaustion (suggested by the reference to all books having already been read) creates a bridge between the themes of senility and the crisis of the novel (or, to some degree, of art at large). The ailing protagonist of the quartet is, after all, not referred to as an individual (by his name or surname) but rather by their function – Reader, Writer, Author and Novelist. Despite certain autobiographical characteristics attributed to the author-figure, he appears to stand for more than only Markson, which is indicated by the capital letter and the lack of the definitive article. His condition can thus be interpreted as mirroring the crisis of contemporary literature, as perceived by Markson. That sense is accentuated by hundreds of ­references – in each book – to the circumstances of great artists’ deaths. Furthermore, one can trace in the quartet the manifestations of a weakening faith in art’s capacity to survive. Works of art, particularly paintings, are described as prone to annihilation – by the artist t­hemselves (such as Georges Rouault, who burnt 315 of his canvases at the age of 77) or by their hypothetical owner in desperate need of combustible material: If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Writer were to burn a Roy Lichtenstein – qualms? Qualmless. (TINN 86)

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 65 If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Author were to burn a Julian Schnabel, qualms? Qualmless. (VP 104) If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth, Novelist were to burn an Andy Warhol, qualms? Qualmless. (LN 86) The above almost-refrain (alluding to the title of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller [1979]) is tinged by what sounds like the cynicism of a disillusioned artist – aware of art’s limitations and distrustful of its pompous eulogies, such as the three ancient assertions of literature’s immortality (by Pindar, Horace and Ovid) at the end of This Is Not a Novel, which Markson confronts with the opening line of the Kaddish, thus humorously – and somewhat cynically – mocking the notion of non omnis moriar (TINN 165). The author-figure also appears to have lost faith in the purposefulness of his own literary endeavours. This Is Not a Novel opens with two snippets announcing Writer’s “tempt[ation] to quit writing” and his “wear[iness] unto death of making up stories.” Four passages down comes the admission that he is “equally tired of inventing characters” (TINN 1). A similar aversion to the basic attributes of the novel – character and plot – is hinted at in the following snippet in Reader’s Block: “Valéry said he could never write a novel for one insurmountable reason. He would have to include sentences like ‘The Marquise went out at five’ ” (RB 128). Palleau-Papin describes the cited sentence as “a fake event, a fake past, the fake beginning of a story that inaugurates a chronology, a description set in time when the artifice is blatant” (300). In conversation with Sims, Markson implies that the renunciation of plot and character in the quartet may be linked with his own disappointment with novels – even his once favourite ones, by Dostoevsky, Joyce and Malcolm Lowry, which “in recent years . . . stopped evoking that sort of resonance for [him]” (Sims, Fare 131).18 Despite the scattered intimations of disenchantment with the novel and the apparent rejection of the form as an apt generic category for Markson’s project expressed in the title of This Is Not a Novel, the author ensured that each book in the series contains the contentious word “novel” either in the title (as is the case with This Is Not a Novel and The Last Novel) or the subtitle (both Reader’s Block and Vanishing Point are subtitled “A Novel”). Furthermore, This Is Not a Novel includes what might be regarded as Markson’s literary manifesto (or rather mini-­ manifesto), which consists of postulates regarding the novel, even though

66  Art in Crisis most attributes of the form that the narrator wishes to conceive may be called antinovelistic (a term never mentioned in the quartet). What Markson proposes, both in the programmatic strand of snippets and through the construction of the book, is the novel stretched beyond recognition – the novel composed through a consistent elimination of devices traditionally associated with the form. The earlier cited admissions of weariness of “writing,” “making up stories” and “inventing characters” prepare the ground for a series of passages scattered across the ensuing seven pages. It begins with the passage “A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive./And with no characters. None” (TINN 2). The consecutive snippets prescribe the following characteristics: “Plotless. Characterless” (2); “Actionless . . . with no sequence of events . . . with no indicated passage of time” (3, emphasis original); “with no setting./With no socalled furniture . . . without description” (5, emphasis original); “with no social themes, i.e., no picture of society./No depiction of contemporary manners and/or morals” (6); “Categorically, with no politics” (7); “entirely without symbols”; and “without even a subject” (8). The last passages echo the book’s epigraph from Jonathan Swift: “I am now trying an Experiment very frequent among Modern Authors, which is, to write upon Nothing.” It also ties in with Gustave Flaubert’s famous declaration (made in a letter to Louise Colet) about wanting to “create a book about nothing” and with Mark Rothko’s remark, “There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing,” which Markson uses in Reader’s Block (183). The passage announcing the renunciation of “subject” is directly followed by the following three snippets: There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega. A novel tells a story, said E. M. Forster. If you can do it, it ain’t bragging, said Dizzy Dean. (TINN 8–9) Besides being another example of the collage technique of juxtaposing appropriated material, the sequence is the culmination of Markson’s manifesto. Ironically, it is a remark by a baseball player, rather than one of the ubiquitously cited artists, that affords the most direct insight into Markson’s strategy in This Is Not a Novel – to formulate a manifesto for a new novel and to embody its radical claims in the selfsame book.19 Despite the opening expression of exhaustion by the novel and the repeated references to death, Markson’s work is not defeatist, or at least not consistently pessimistic. Writer experiences a surge of faith in his project by comparing it to the works of Monet, Picasso and Joyce.20

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 67 One of the nine references to the Spanish painter is the following exchange: You can actually draw so beautifully. Why do you spend your time making all these queer things? Picasso: That’s why. (TINN 137)21 Several pages later, a parallel passage appears: Writer has actually written some relatively traditional novels. Why is he spending his time doing this sort of thing? That’s why. (TINN 144) Writer’s statement offers a clear autobiographical analogy with Markson’s own career – specifically, having written several formally conventional novels such as The Ballad of Dingus Magee (1965) before turning to experimental fiction in the 1980s. Markson’s gesture of discarding “traditional novels” in favour of “this sort of thing” arises from his earlier professed weariness of the standard safety nets of plot and character. Once the art of constructing elaborate fictions, or the art of realist painting in Picasso’s case, has been mastered, a new direction needs to be pointed out. The direction is forward, as suggested by the words of the hockey player Wayne Gretzky quoted in The Last Novel: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been” (155).22 Rather than emulating a tired, three-hundred-year-old literary form – still misleadingly called a “novel” – Markson wishes to propose a genuinely novel form. That ambition is indicated by the epigraph for Vanishing Point, by Willem de Kooning, which reads: Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it. Picasso did it with cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Once more implying a link between his own work and that of the author of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Markson wants to see himself as the Picasso of contemporary literature – a destroyer of “our idea” of a novel. Although Markson, unlike David Shields, Will Self, Lars Iyer and several other contemporary writers, does not explicitly announce the death of the novel, the sense of its exhaustion pervades his quartet. The series could therefore be numbered among the twenty-first-century texts which, as Pieter Vermeulen’s argues in Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel (2015), “stage” the “dissolution” of the novel as genre and its replacement by the novel as form. That act, Vermeulen maintains,

68  Art in Crisis constantly oscillates between “creativity and destruction” (2–4). That dialectic applies very much to Markson’s method of undermining the pillars of conventional fiction while postulating a novel form – “nonlinear,” “discontinuous,” “collage-like.” Markson’s project can also be regarded as a fine example of what Peter Boxall refers to in Twenty-First-Century Fiction as the “fin de siècle mood” resulting from the transition from one century to the next – the “collision between the old and the new” (4). The quartet, whose publication dates range from the end of one millennium to the beginning of the next (1996–2007), is marked by “a sense at once of being extraordinarily old, and impossibly young, stranded somewhere between the end of one world order and the beginning of a new one, bereft of a clear sense of our own age” (Boxall 23). Stephen Burn argues that Markson’s quartet appears to “absorb the crepuscular backdrop of the millennium’s end and lets that larger cultural sense of proximate endtimes diffuse into the melancholy air of a self-reflexive work whose reflexivity insistently points to the author’s own bodily decline” (32).23 The Marksonian author-­ figure – on the verge of death throughout the series and presumed to die on the final pages of all books except the first – can certainly be referred to as “extraordinarily old.” That impression is accentuated also by his consummate erudition and the world-wise sadness of one who, like the speaker of Mallarmé’s “Brise Marine,” has read “all the books.”24 The sense of being “impossibly young” is not immediately apparent in Markson’s works but can be detected in the avant-garde and forward-looking disposition of his artistic project – as articulated in his manifesto in This Is Not a Novel, the ambition to “destroy” the novel as we know it (as implied by the epigraph from de Kooning) and his earlier quoted credo about heading “where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.”

Conclusion Little over a decade after the last book in the series, it is too early to make a definitive assessment of the extent to which the unique literary strategy devised by Markson has anticipated, or pointed out, the direction of the puck of literary innovation. However, as the structures of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames demonstrate, as well as those of Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks (2010) and Rachel Zucker’s Mothers (2014), Markson’s combination of appropriated content, parataxis and fragmentation – as well as the diminished role of plot and character – have been embraced by some of the most notable and promising experimental authors in the United States. As I signalled in the introduction, the unique form devised by Markson in the last decade of his career (between the publication of Wittgenstein’s Mistress and the arrival of The Last Novel) exerted a significant influence on all the American authors discussed in this study. In

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 69 that light, David Foster Wallace’s description of one of Markson’s novels as “the high point of experimental fiction” in the United States may be accepted as fully justified.

Notes 1. An earlier version of small parts of this chapter appeared in two articles of mine entitled “Collage Manifestos: Fragmentation and Appropriation in David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger” and “ ‘A Novel Against the Novel’: David Markson’s Antinovelistic Tetralogy’,” which were published in the edited volume The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction and in Polish Journal of English Studies, respectively. 2. A passage in The Last Novel reads, “Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?” (161). 3. My article “Collage Manifestos: Fragmentation and Appropriation in David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger” considers several aspects of collage structure with reference only to the second novel in the series. Several passages from that article have been incorporated into this chapter. 4. In an interview by Tayt Harlin, Markson describes his choice of material in this way: “I know in the end that there’s going to be more literature, but I try to make sure I have as much about art and music, too. There’s always a certain amount of the classics and philosophy. With the historical stuff, it just depends upon its significance or irony.” In the same conversation, he discusses the process of accumulating the anecdotes, which come from his extensive reading on art, philosophy, the classics and the lives of artists. Markson admits to relying mostly on his vast personal library, which included about twenty-five hundred volumes, and on nearby public libraries. He also insists that none of the anecdotes were invented. 5. Palleau-Papin considers Markson’s project in the light of Roland Barthes’s unconventional autobiography Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Martin Winckler’s notion of autolexicography (defined in his unpublished correspondence with Palleau-Papin as a “novel in which a character close to the author defines himself through list-making”) and Louis Marin’s category of the self-ptych (a self-critical fragmentary and discontinuous self-portrait) (249, 261). 6. Palleau-Papin draws a similar comparison in her discussion of Markson’s previous novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which she calls “a hypernovel in the form of a fugue” (xxxvi). 7. Tabbi proposes that in Wittgenstein and Markson alike one may find harbingers of a “hypertext aesthetic” (“Solitary Inventions” 749). PalleauPapin, in turn, finds an analogy between Markson and Italo Calvino’s idea of the hypernovel – a “space open to a multitude of stories” (277). She also regards the tetralogy’s narrator as similar to that of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), in that the reader only “get[s] glimpses [of him] in the network of images that conveys a kaleidoscopic portrait as in the many fragments of a broken mirror, its shards constituting a puzzle for a patient reader” (280). 8. In an interview by Laura Sims, Markson talks about his efforts to locate related passages at a distance which would enable the reader to notice the subtle connections. He admits, however, that he is “aware that a fairly

70  Art in Crisis high percentage of [his] readers are conscious of very little of it at all” (Sims, Fare 126). 9. Markson’s use of notecards to assemble the factoids that constitute much of his cycle has led critic Tyler Malone to propose the title “The Notecard Quartet,” which is used consistently in the first issue of The Scofield magazine, almost entirely devoted to Markson’s oeuvre. 10. Several critics have recently pointed out the quartet’s anticipation of the poetics of Twitter and observed the popularity of its excerpts when posted individually by fans in social media (Bucher 106; Sims, “David Markson Dominates” 44). 11. Markson’s use of epistrophic parataxis echoes the structure of certain pages in Heimrad Bäcker’s transcript (1986) – a collage constructed out of fragments of historical documents about the Holocaust. For instance, page 91 of transcript contains twenty-six lines consisting of a date, a number and the immutable passage “prisoners in hartheim reported as having died.” 12. A similar contrast between high art and sport, with the added humorous effect, is achieved by employing the words of another sportsman, Muhammad Ali, in Vanishing Point: I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger. Said Muhammad Ali. What cause have I to war at thy decree? The distant Trojans never injured me. Says Achilles, in Pope’s translation of the Iliad. (VP 10) 13. When asked by Laura Sims about the omnipresence of death in his quartet, Markson replied humorously, “Hey, Sims, I’m a hundred and nine years old” (Sims, Fare 133). 14. Near the end of the book comes a list of fifty-four literary suicides, which includes characters from Alcestis and Jocasta to Septimus Smith and Willy Loman. 15. Markson used the phrase “Old tired sick broke” for the first time in a personal letter to poet, critic and friend Laura Sims in 2006. It was meant to encapsulate the condition of his own life at the age of 79 (Sims, Fare 64). 16. That passage, as well as many others regarding the loneliness of old age, mirrors Markson’s own complaints as signalled in his personal correspondence with Sims anthologized in Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson (2014). 17. In Arthur Symons’s version, the line translates as “The flesh is sad, alas! and all the books are read” (Mallarmé). 18. In one of his letters to Sims, Markson writes about being “bored” by the most acclaimed novels of the recent years, including those by José Saramago and W.G. Sebald. He wonders if the reason for this might be that he has simply “read enough novels” in his life (Sims, Fare 82). 19. Dizzy Dean’s words – this time without any attribution – reappear on the last page of the book, confirming their importance. 20. Among numerous labels (some of them ironic) that Writer considers for his book is that of a “synthetic personal Finnegans Wake” (TINN 185). 21. This passage echoes an earlier one from This Is Not a Novel: “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael. But it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like they do. Said Picasso at an exhibition of children’s art” (TINN 2). 22. A similar note is struck in the following statement by Sergei Prokofiev: “To write only according to the rules laid down by previous classics signifies that one is not a master but a pupil” (VP 30).

“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 71 23. Burn situates Markson’s invocation of the end times within the context of the late works of John Barth, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo and Philip Roth, and points to the quartet’s formal and thematic affinities with Carole Maso’s AVA (1991) (32–33). 24. Boxall’s observations mostly refer to authors such as Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and J.M. Coetzee, whom he calls a “generation of writers . . . who find themselves unattuned to the time in which they only partly live.” He notes that they appear to be possessed of the sense – articulated by René Chateaubriand – of having “lived too long” (38).

Works Cited Bäcker, Heimrad. Transcript. Translated by Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling. Dalkey Archive, 2010. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2013. Brockelman, Thomas P. The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Postmodern. Northwestern UP, 2001. Bucher, Matt. “David Markson as the Original Tweeter?” The Scofield, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 106–8. Burn, Stephen. “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-Like. An Assemblage: The Architecture of David Markson’s Last Works.” The Scofield, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 32–36. Cran, Rona. Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan. Ashgate, 2014. Dempsey, Peter. “David Markson Obituary.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 June 2010, www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/14/david-mark son-obituary. Accessed 22 Jan. 2018. Drąg, Wojciech. “Collage Manifestos: Fragmentation and Appropriation in David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger.” The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, edited by Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drąg. Vernon, 2018, pp. 107–22. ———. “ ‘A Novel Against the Novel’: David Markson’s Antinovelistic Tetralogy’.” Polish Journal of English Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 11–26. Elias, Camelia. The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre. Peter Lang, 2004. Gibbons, James. “This Is Not a Novel.” Bookforum: The Book Review for Art and Culture, vol. 8, 2001, p. 27. Karpowicz, Agnieszka. Kolaż: Awangardowy gest kreacji: Themerson, Buczkowski, Białoszewski. Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2007. Mallarmé, Stéphane. “Sea-Wind.” Translated by Arthur Symons, Poetry Archive, 2003, www.poetry-archive.com/m/sea-wind.html. Accessed 21 Jan. 2018. Malone, Tyler. “In the Beginning, Sometimes He Left Messages in the Books.” The Scofield, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 67–83. Mann, William C., Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, and Sandra A. Thompson. “Rhetorical Structure Theory and Text Analysis.” Discourse Description: Diverse Linguistic Analyses of a Fund-Raising Text, edited by William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson. John Benjamins, 1992, pp. 39–78.

72  Art in Crisis Markson, David. “Fourteen Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction, or: Fiction by Collage.” Symploke, vol. 12, no. 1, 2005, pp. 130–35. ———. Interview by Tedd Haylin. Conjunctions, 21 June 2007, www.conjunc tions.com/online/article/tayt-harlin-06-21-2007. Accessed 22 Jan. 2018. ———. The Last Novel. Counterpoint, 2007. ———. Reader’s Block. Dalkey Archive, 1996. ———. This Is Not a Novel. CB Editions, 2010. ———. Vanishing Point. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004. Moore, Steven. Interview by Tyler Malone. “Keeping the Novel Novel.” The Scofield, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 93–101. Palleau-Papin, Françoise. This Is Not a Tragedy: The Works of David Markson. Translated by Françoise Palleau-Papin. Dalkey Archive, 2011. Perloff, Marjorie. “Collage and Poetry.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly, 4 vols. Oxford UP, 1998, vol. 1, pp. 384–87. Schmitt, Arnaud. The Phenomenology of Autobiography: Making It Real. Routledge, 2017. Scott, Joanna. “The Masking Art of the Biographical Novel.” Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, edited by Michael Lackey. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 217–30. Shields, David, and Elizabeth Cooperman. Life Is Short – Art Is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity. Hawthorne, 2015. Shockley, Alan. Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel. Ashgate, 2009. Sims, Laura. “David Markson and the Problem of the Novel.” New England Review, vol. 29, no. 3, 2008, pp. 58–70. ———. “David Markson Dominates Twitter.” The Scofield, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 44–47. ———. Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson. PowerHouse, 2014. Tabbi, Joseph. “David Markson.” The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction: Twentieth-Century American Fiction, edited by Patrick O’Donnell, David W. Madden, and Justus Nieland. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 684–86. ———. “Solitary Inventions: David Markson at the End of the Line.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, 1997, pp. 745–72. Vermeulen, Pieter. Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Wallace, David Foster. “Overlooked.” Salon, Salon Media Group, 12 Apr. 1999, www.salon.com/1999/04/12/wallace/. Accessed 6 Aug. 2019. Weber, Bruce. “David Markson, Postmodern Experimental Novelist, Is Dead at 82.” The New York Times, 7 June 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/ arts/08markson.html. Accessed 21 Jan. 2018.

3 Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art David Shields’s Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life

This chapter aims to examine the poetics and politics of collage in David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010) and How Literature Saved My Life (2013).1 Although collage has been the default formal principle of Shields’s writing since the early 1990s, I shall discuss only those two texts, because – alongside their structural indebtedness to collage – they directly engage with it on the level of ideas, by critiquing the conventional novel and presenting collage literature as the desired alternative. The validity of such a comparative analysis has been asserted by Arnaud Schmitt, who regards them both as “manifestos” which “should primarily be read as a theoretical diptych” (144). Following a presentation of the collage structure of both texts, I shall outline the numerous charges that Shields, particularly in Reality Hunger, levels against the traditional novel. That critique will serve as the basis for my discussion of Shields’s postulates of fragmentariness, free appropriation and the obliteration of the fiction/non-fiction divide, all of which can be combined in collage literature. Among the writers considered in this study, Shields is undoubtedly one of the most popular. Several of his more recent books – including The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (2008) and Reality Hunger – have achieved the status of bestsellers and have been translated into over twenty languages.2 With over twenty books to his name, Shields is also among the most prolific and versatile contemporary American authors. He has written novels, collections of essays, short stories and several autobiographical books. Shields is also a co-author of a biography of J.D. Salinger and a co-editor of Life Is Short, Art Is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity (2015), a manifesto-cum-anthology celebrating radically short literary forms. His most acclaimed work to date has been Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999) – an extended essay in the form of a diary, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the PEN USA Award. Shields has also taught creative writing in several academic institutions, including the University of Washington.

74  Art in Crisis Shields’s tenth book, Reality Hunger attracted much critical attention and was reviewed by many leading newspapers. Its reception, however, was somewhat mixed. Luc Sante praised its “complex and multifaceted argument” and the way it successfully taps into the zeitgeist, while Laura Miller saw it as a self-important celebration of the author’s own “offbeat preference” masking as a series of postulates made in the name of many. Several reviewers, including Zadie Smith and Lincoln Michel, claimed to appreciate aspects of Shields’s book while remaining sceptical about its main theses. James Wood found Shields’s critique of the novel convincing but had reservations about his simplistic privileging of “reality” over fiction and the general instability of his argument (“Keeping”). Blake Morrison called Reality Hunger a “spirited polemic on behalf of non-fiction” as well as a “provocative and entertaining manifesto,” while expressing doubts as to the soundness of Shields’s thesis, which, he felt, was as “smart” and “stimulating” as it was “dodgy.” Finally, Sean O’Hagan found fault with the book’s debt to a “certain kind of endlessly referential, post-modernist lit-crit theory from the 1980s” but conceded that much of Reality Hunger was “thought-provoking.” Some of the same objections were raised three years later against How Literature Saved My Life. Most reviewers stressed the parallels between the two books: Mark O’Connell called it “as much a manifesto as its predecessor,” John Williams – “in many ways, a sequel,” while Lowen Liu noted that the new book “continues the crusade . . . against narrative fiction, but less effectively.” All three critics complained about Shields’s susceptibility to narcissism, manifest in his interest in other works only insofar as he can see in them a reflection of his own self. Another common criticism has been of his tendency to shift from one quotation or idea to another so quickly that he rarely manages to say anything revealing about them. That appears to be a potential pitfall of the collage technique, which privileges confrontation and juxtaposition over analysis. Williams criticizes Shields’s use of collage by stating bluntly that he is “not very good at the form he likes most,” whereas O’Connell concludes that How is a “thwarted exercise in technique and artful self-display.” New Statesman’s Leo Robson, however, found the book “consistently enjoyable” but only “occasionally convincing.” His discussion of Shields’s strategy of cutting up quotations (in this case by J.M. Coetzee) so that they appear to support his argument ends with a hint that How may be liable to the charge of “formless garrulity.”

Collage Structure As Shields asserts in How, collage has been the formal principle of all his books since Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (1996). While working on Remote, he claims to have had his “Nataliedown-the-rabbit-hole moment,” as a result of which he has never resorted

Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art 75 again to any orderly structure (HLSML 124). Since Shields understands collage very broadly and applies the notion to texts which do not always meet the formal requirements adopted in the present study, the collage structure of Reality Hunger and How will not be taken for granted but carefully tested in this section. Following a general description of their form, I shall assert the books’ reliance on appropriation, heterogeneity, fragmentation and parataxis. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto Reality Hunger is composed of 618 numbered passages, which have been arranged into 26 chapters titled from “a” to “z.” Apart from the consecutive letter of the alphabet, the title of each section contains a word or phrase which corresponds to the thematic engagement of a given segment. The three opening ones are “overture,” “mimesis” and “books for people who find television too slow.” Although the book’s length (two hundred pages) is unusual for a manifesto (which Reality Hunger claims to be in its subtitle), the layout – snippets surrounded by a lot of space – and the use of numbering are common in the genre.3 The length of passages varies from two words (“I exaggerate” [80])4 to two pages, which makes the average snippet considerably longer than in David Markson’s quartet. Over two-thirds of Shields’s passages are either direct or slightly modified quotations from multiple sources. Among the most commonly cited authors are Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.G. Sebald, John D’Agata, Jonathan Raban, Vivian Gornick, Ross McElwee and Geoff Dyer.5 Shields, like Markson, never uses quotation marks to set off original from appropriated content. Neither does he credit the author in the text, except in the endnotes contained in an appendix at the back of the book, which – as Shields admits – he was forced to attach by the lawyers of his publisher.6 In order to dissuade the reader from looking up the origin of each passage, he advises them to cut the section off along the indicated dotted line (p. 209). Reality Hunger is also a generically hybrid text, mixing the conventions of the critical essay, the autobiography and the manifesto. In line with its first epigraph, by Walter Benjamin, it oscillates between the ambition to “dissolve” and to “invent” a genre. In that respect, it should be viewed in the context of Benjamin’s own The Arcades Project (1927–1940, published in 1982) – a genre-defying homage to nineteenth-century Paris assembled out of archival material accessed in Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Benjamin’s rationale for his work is quoted verbatim on the opening page of Reality Hunger: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them” (6). The new genre in whose parameters

76  Art in Crisis Shields writes and whose rationale he celebrates is, in the words of critic Cathy Alter, “one that doesn’t draw distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, originality and plagiarism, memoir and fabrication.” Shields’s favoured label for that generic hybrid is the lyric essay, whose defining ­characteristics – eclecticism, heterogeneity and fragmentation – overlap with the poetics of collage. The composition of Reality Hunger is very much indebted to Jonathan Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” (2007). Published in Harper’s Magazine, Lethem’s piece is woven out of numerous quotations by, among others, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau and David Foster Wallace. What is more, Lethem has also included at the end – in this case voluntarily – the key to his text, where he explains the origins of all the plagiarized passages. Both authors admit to having edited certain passages in the appropriated parts in order to grant their texts a greater coherence in terms of style as well as content. Such practices of smoothing out appropriated texts are common in collage literature and were implemented quite frequently by, among others, William S. Burroughs. To hide the seams between consecutive borrowed passages, Lethem integrates all of them into a continuous, fluid text divided into standard paragraphs. As a result, “The Anxiety of Influence” reads like a sustained argument in favour of plagiarism as an artistic strategy. According to Zara Dinnen, Lethem “fully reconfigures others’ words within his own framework” and “stifles the differences between the discrete materials,” while Shields presents them as “distinct fragments” (219–20, 226). Besides the use of numbering and blank space between consecutive passages and the incorporation of a variety of sources, Shields enhances the fragmentariness of the text by occasionally employing snippets which do not constitute self-contained semantic elements. An example of that is passage 345: “– the singular obsessions endlessly revised,” which, as the appendix explains, is taken from Thomas Lux’s “Triptych, Middle Panel Burning.” Even when the passage takes the form of an extremely short but complete sentence, as is the case with the earlier cited “I exaggerate” from Lauren Slater’s Lying or the cryptic “And I shall essay to be” (478) from Emerson, the eradication of the original context heightens the sense of its incompletion. The resulting disorientation is a common feature of collage. The paratactic and appropriative composition of Shields’s book can be exemplified by the following excerpt: 121 These are the facts, my friend, and I must have faith in them. 122 What is a fact? What’s a lie, for that matter? What, exactly, constitutes an essay or a story or a poem or even an experience? What happens when we can no longer freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience?

Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art 77 123 During the middle of a gig, Sonny Rollins sometimes used to wander outside and add the sound of his horn to the cacophony of passing cabs. 124 Have you ever heard a song that makes you feel as good as Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips – Part 2”? I haven’t. It’s so real. When you listen to the song, you can hear a guy in the band yelling, “What key? What key?” He’s lost. But then he finds the key, and boom. Every time I hear that guy yelling, “What key?” I get excited. In the passages 121 and 122, Shields juxtaposes a quotation from Cicero with that of John D’Agata’s The Next American Essay. Although both are concerned with the notion of fact, they differ radically in their assessment of the accessibility of facts. Passage 123 is an original text, whereas the last snippet is by John Mellencamp; both regard music. As soon becomes evident, the excerpt is not marked by what David Antin calls “explicit syntactical relations.” Instead of logic and sequence, one can observe relations of likeness and difference. The common denominator for all the passages is their interest in authenticity, but there is little sense of a coherent arrangement of parts that would unify the multiple voices. On the contrary, the distinctness of the passages is emphasized – both by their physical distance from one another and by the lack of logical consistency between them. The above cluster, like many others in Reality Hunger, is governed by the Joint relation. Since, as has been noted, the juxtaposed passages focus on the same subject, we can speak of what I called Joint with thematic unity (as opposed to random Joint) in the previous chapter. Compared to Markson’s tetralogy, Shields’s book is more disciplined in its treatment of specific issues thanks to the earlier indicated division into content-based chapters or sections. That appears to be a consequence of the explicit agenda of Reality Hunger – to make a set of specific points about art and reality, which will be discussed in the next section. Whereas Markson’s tetralogy is playful and flippant and proceeds by association, Shields’s manifesto takes itself seriously and selects its ready-mades with a view to demonstrating evidence for its claims. As a result, certain parts contain expository passages from different sources which make very similar, if not identical, points. A case in point is the “f” chapter, which is composed of short assertions, mostly by contemporary authors, of the unreliability of memory, as in the following cluster of quotations by Patrick Duff and David Carr: 166 Anything processed by memory is fiction. 167 When memory is called to answer, it often answers back with deception.

78  Art in Crisis 168 Consciously or unconsciously, we manipulate our memories to include or omit certain aspects. Are our memories therefore fictions? The effect is somewhat tautological, and certain passages may seem redundant. The potential benefit of juxtaposing such analogous statements would be in revealing the names of their often eminent authors (like Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.M. Coetzee), which would lend them gravity and create connections between writers otherwise not considered together. Shields, however, remains reluctant to signal the sources, including the bibliographic appendix, which enables the most persevering readers to look up most sources except those the author “couldn’t find or forgot along the way” (p. 209). The decision to withhold information about the source in the main text seems more effective in Lethem’s plagiarism, as his text aims to create the illusion of a consistent argument by covering the seams between consecutive quotations. Shields, on the other hand, flaunts the fragmentariness of his building blocks – particularly through the use of numbered snippets rather than a continuous text broken down into conventional paragraphs – which suggests but does not determine their appropriated status. Even if Shields’s method is at times less effective than Lethem’s, it is certainly more in line with the poetics of collage, which programmatically resists coherence and exposes its seams. If Reality Hunger is less coherent than “The Ecstasy of Influence,” it is considerably more so than Markson’s tetralogy. The consistency of the manifesto agenda prevents Shields from frequently juxtaposing contradictory statements, of which Markson is very fond. One of the very few instances of the Contradiction relation is the following cluster: 184 . . .“Fiction”/“nonfiction” is an utterly useless distinction. 185 Tell all the Truth but tell it slant. 186 Genre mingling is responsible in no small measure for the moral debility of intellect and character and will. 187 These categories are plastic. But they aren’t. Ah, but they are. Shields constructs the cluster by juxtaposing his own assertion about the futility of certain generic labels, a line from a poem by Emily Dickinson

Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art 79 (also quoted in This Is Not a Novel), Irving Babbitt’s statement about generic hybridity and an apparent snatch of dialogue (not appropriated) between a proponent and an opponent of the malleability of the notions of fiction and non-fiction. Passage 187 stands in contrast to the statement in 184. The two clash in 187, where Shields’s position triumphs, as he appears to have the last word (“Ah, but they are”). The above confrontation inaugurates the “g” chapter, the rest of which is composed of multiple statements (from T.S. Eliot to Werner Herzog) supporting Shields’s insistence on the need to escape the constraints of genre, defined (by Shields himself) as “a minimum-security prison” (RH 210). Another characteristically collage-like rhetorical relation which can be discerned in Reality Hunger is List. Shields frequently resorts to enumerating titles of books which exemplify a critical point which has just been made. For instance, directly after a remark (appropriated from Dyer) about his preference to “write stuff that’s only an inch from life” comes an enumeration of nine titles, including David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (188–89). The context suggests that the consecutive titles are to be understood as examples of highly autobiographical texts which, however, deviate from straight autobiography. Other similar passages bring together works which – in the manner reminiscent of the speaker of The Waste Land – consist of “fragments . . . shored against [one’s] ruins” (368) and of texts that “dissolve a genre or invent one” (590). How Literature Saved My Life The general structure of How Literature Saved My Life is substantially different from that of Reality Hunger. It appears to be a more conventional text in the way it fills the entire page (renouncing the radical choppiness of the latter) and divides its parts – a prologue and nine titled chapters. Some of the titles – such as “Love is a long, close scrutiny” (appropriated from a novel by John Hawkes)7 and “Life v. art” – recur several times across the book as headings of smaller sections. The frequent recurrence of titles (“Love is illusion,” for instance, being used as the heading of four consecutive sections) is one of the most prominent and unusual structural characteristics of How. The arbitrary relations between the title and the content of given sections, as well as the fact that many of the headings have been appropriated, are the first noticeable collage-like features of Shields’s book. In the first critical response to How, more concerned with the content rather than the form of Shields’s book, Arnaud Schmitt notes parenthetically that it “resembles a collage . . . despite its formal regularity (short subparts) and its overall question: has literature saved Shields’s life?” (143–44). Another important collage-like aspect of How – its generic hybridity – is also signalled by Schmitt, though not in connection with

80  Art in Crisis the poetics of collage. The critic gathers a number of generic tags which Shields considers in reference to the book in hand, including “antimemoir” (HLSML 29), “wayward nonfiction” (50), “mediation” (130), “essay” (134), “cultural autobiography” (141) and “collage” (111).8 While none of those labels is applicable to all the sections of How, each is an apt category for specific parts of the book. Their uneasy coexistence, however, resembles at times a paratactic juxtaposition of genres, which is redolent of collage. Although How’s reliance on appropriated material is not as strong and comprehensive as in the case of Reality Hunger, there are several sections in the book which are almost exclusively composed of quotations. How is far more forthcoming about its borrowed elements, most of which are enclosed in quotation marks and preceded by a brief indication of their source.9 An example of this strategy is the microsection entitled “Other people,” which consists of a single quotation:

E. M. CIORAN:  “The

universe is a solitary space, and all its creatures do nothing but reinforce its solitude. In it, I have never met anyone, I have only stumbled across ghosts.” (HLSML 111)

On the following page, Shields places – in the same way – solitary citations from Arthur Schopenhauer and Vladimir Nabokov. The only commentary that the author supplies is included in the section title. In the case of Schopenhauer and Nabokov, it is “A day like any other” – an intertextual reference to death, which is the subject of both statements. In certain sections, Shields enters into a dialogue with the quoted fragments, as is the case in the following passage from “Our ground time here will be brief”:

Tolstoy:  “The meaning of life is life” – for which much thanks. IceT’s answer: “A human being is just another animal in the big jungle. Life is really short and you’re going to die. We’re here to stick our heads above the water for just a minute, look around, and go back under.” Burt Reynolds: “First, it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reynolds?’ Then it’s ‘Get me Burt Reynolds.’ Then ‘Get me a Burt Reynolds type.’ Then ‘Get me a young Burt Reynolds.’ And then it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reynolds?’ ” Beckett’s mantra: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Okay, you’re going to go on, I hope and assume. Congratulations. Why, though? What carries you through the day, not to mention the night? Beckett’s own answer: he liked to read Dante, watch soccer, and fart. (99–100)

What intensifies the collage-like effect of the passage is the incongruity of the confronted speakers: Leo Tolstoy and Samuel Beckett, on the one

Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art 81 hand, and Ice-T with Burt Reynolds, on the other. Becket’s juxtaposition of Dante, football and farting further enhances the sense of an amusing collision. As can be seen in the above passage, Shields does not provide extensive commentary on the quoted parts. The only authorial contribution besides the selection and weaving of the cited material are the tersely ironic “much thanks” and “congratulations” (followed by two questions) in response to Tolstoy’s and Beckett’s remarks. O’Connell posits that Shields’s method of broaching important issues consists in finding quotations from other writers, which “reliev[es] him of the need to consider [them] in any kind of penetrating way himself.” That strategy, he adds, is “not a lapse; it’s the foundation of [his] collage method of writing.” O’Connell appears to call into question the effectiveness of the collage technique in essayistic texts that advance arguments and put forward ideas. His doubts could be substantiated by Lance Olsen’s earlier cited definition of collage as “the quintessential art of the non-sequitur” (Architectures 89), which proposes that the foundation of collage writing is what academic discourse condemns as a logical fallacy. Shields puts forward his counterarguments in the almost exclusively appropriated section titled “A day like any other, only shorter,” which begins with the following series of quotations:



ROYAL AIR FORCE (RAF) MEDICAL CHIEF:  “All war pilots will inevitably break down in time if not relieved.” BEN SHEPHARD:  “In the Battle of Britain, a stage was reached when it became clear that pilots would end up ‘Crackers or Coffins.’ Thereafter, their time in the air was rationed.” DICTIONARY OF RAF SLANG:  “ ‘Frozen on the stick’: paralyzed with fear.” PAUL FUSSELL:  “The letterpress correspondents, radio broadcasters, and film people who perceived these horrors kept quiet about them on behalf of the War Effort.” (89)

He closes the section with the only original passage serving as the rationale for his method of argumentation: “In Human Smoke, [Nicholson Baker] takes hundreds of passages from innumerable sources and positions them in such a way that an argument clearly emerges.” Unlike O’Connell, Shields declares his faith in collage as a vehicle of argumentation. However, the simplicity of the argument which the section appears to advance – “War, even WWII, is never justified” (91) – may serve to undermine the belief in collage as an effective tool of substantiating complex claims. Shields’s use of collage is more convincing when its aim is to represent the variety of discussed material. A case in point is the section “All great books wind up with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.”

82  Art in Crisis Following the heading “Fifty-five works I swear by,” Shields lists, in alphabetical order – from Renata Adler’s Speedboat to Kurt Vonnegut’s ­Slaughterhouse-Five – his favourite books, essays and short stories. The text’s author and title are accompanied by a very brief description of its form, content or personal response. Although the section does not meet all the criteria of collage proper, it has a collage-like quality owing to its juxtaposition of external heterogeneous elements in alphabetical, and hence not entirely logical, order. There is also a collage feel to the account of numerous books that Shields praises in various sections of How – such as Markson’s This Is Not a Novel,10 Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams and Lance Olsen’s Calendar of Regrets – without clearly integrating them with the previous (or ensuing) sections. How uses images to illustrate the opening pages of each chapter. The book’s multimodal potential, however, remains undeveloped. The pictures used are in most cases bland and purely illustrative. They revolve around the subject of books and resemble images taken from repositories of stock photographs. Rather than meaningfully engage with the title of each chapter, they most often provide a banal visual accessory. A case in point is page 41, on which the chapter heading “Love is a long, close scrutiny” is accompanied by a photo of several lines of a book page presenting in focus the word “love” – a trite combination of literature (the main theme of How) and love (signalled by the title of the chapter). In order to determine the role of all the employed images, it is useful to invoke a distinction introduced by Belgian scholar Jan Baetens. Baetens proposes the term “picture of the text” to account for illustrations or “visual synopses” of what is also expressed verbally and the notion of “picture as text” (or “picture in itself”) to denote images independent of, or not subordinate to, the adjacent text (Baetens 187; Maziarczyk, Novel 199).11 The images in How are subservient to the text, which they only echo without entering into a dialogue with the neighbouring verbal components. Although a mixture of images and text is a familiar harbinger of a literary collage, their flatly harmonious coexistence in How is barely rooted in the poetics of collage. Whereas Reality Hunger’s employment of collage is comprehensive, How could be said to use it only locally. That difference could be accounted for by the books’ distinct rationales. While the iconoclastic zest and determination of Reality Hunger invite the politics of collage, How’s more meditative tone, a consequence of its autobiographical foundation, makes it a less obvious site of collage-like confrontation. It is, however, its fusion of collage technique and life-writing content that, according to Schmitt, remains How’s greatest achievement. The critic announces that Shields’s book is “the autobiographical equivalent of what David Markson tried to achieve with his novels”: while Markson prefers to keep his distance as a narrator, Shields “infuses” the book “with his own psyche” (Schmitt 144).

Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art 83

The Novel’s Obsolete Apparatus “Valéry said he could never write a novel for one insurmountable reason. He would have to include sentences like ‘The Marquise went out at five’ ” (RB 128). This snippet from Reader’s Block, although not appropriated by Shields, encapsulates Shields’s deep-seated distrust of the novel. For the author of Reality Hunger, its traditional tools – plot, character and genre, which are indicated by the germ of the Marquis narrative – are artificial and obsolete conventions. A product of their time, they are no longer capable of resonating with a contemporary audience: genre is a “prison”; plot is for “dead people,” while characters are “puppets in which [authors] themselves have ceased to believe” (RH 210, 326, 50). Shields particularly denounces, in the words of Malcolm Gladwell, “novels based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of character and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before” (RH 101). As a result, such texts are “unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless” (RH 347). Their reliance on formulas also makes them artistically null – after all, the mark of a successful work, according to Shields (echoing Richard Serra), is “how much [their authors] are able to rid themselves of convention” (591). An equally important reason for the novel’s incompatibility with the appetites (or “hunger,” as Shields would put it) of a contemporary audience is its programmatic inability to deliver “the ‘real’,” or at least the “semblances of the real” as an antidote to the proliferation of “fabrication” in the “manufactured and artificial world” (239). As a relic of a bygone era, the novel and its attempts, sincere as they may be, to breathe life into the Marquis narrative are doomed to failure. In an interview accompanying the publication of Reality Hunger, Shields dismissed some of the most acclaimed literary novels of the turn of the century – Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (both 2001) – as “antediluvian texts that are essentially still working in the Flaubertian novel mode” and as “works of nostalgic entertainment,” which are unable to “convey what it feels like to live in the 21st century.” “I read these books,” he added, “and my overwhelming feeling is, you’ve got to be kidding” (O’Hagan). The novel’s considerable length, solid narrative structure and general preference for cohesion12 are at odds with the dynamic, protean, media-saturated and fragmentary dawn of the third millennium.13 For Shields, the “apparatus of the novel” is a “huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set” which makes the reader plough through “seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written” (RH 379). Why not strip it from all the unnecessary machinery and convey only the gist, Shields is asking. His is the principle of divestment, formulated using the words of David Mamet: “How much can one remove and still have the composition be intelligible? This understanding,

84  Art in Crisis or its lack, divides those who can write from those who can really write. Chekhov removed the plot. Pinter, elaborating, removed the history, the narration; Beckett, the characterization. We hear it anyway. Omission is a form of creation” (RH 357). A similar elimination of successive elements of the novel is what Markson proposes in the metafictional passages at the beginning of This Is Not a Novel. While Markson’s Writer admits to being tired of the novel, Shields goes so far as to pronounce it defunct: “The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps” (327). Hence Shields’s decision to renounce the category altogether rather than continue to situate himself within it, as was the case with Markson and his tetralogy. Shields can pinpoint the moment when he resolved to abandon the novel, which he calls his “conversion” (RH 515). First came an epiphany in the shower, which brought the realization that it was possible to “take various fragments of things – aborted stories, outtakes from novels, journal entries, lit crit – and build a story out of them” (514). Several years later, in the mid-1990s, the rejection of the novel was sealed by Shields’s recognition that he was no longer able to “commit the requisite resources to character and scene and plot” (515). The fact that Shields’s theses about the condition of the novel in the twenty-first century are heavily rooted in his own experience and are occasionally supported by opinions and statements of personal preference rather than arguments might be invoked to undermine the validity of some of his observations, as was the case with the earlier cited criticism by Laura Miller. An instance of such a general claim being made on the basis (at least partly) of idiosyncrasy is the following passage: “I can never remember characters’ names, plot developments, lines of dialogue, details of setting. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition” (RH 347). Several times Shields openly admits to the subjective underpinnings of his position, as when he states, “something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form” (594).14 Blake Morrison, in his review of Reality Hunger, facetiously notes that the name for Shields’s malady is “fiction fatigue” – a condition experienced at some point by most readers and one which “usually passes.” In Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel, Pieter Vermeulen gives a somewhat muted response to Reality Hunger, whose motivation, he argues, is to “frame a personal sense of ennui with the inherited forms of the novel as a diagnosis of a broader cultural malaise” (38). According to Vermeulen, Shields chooses to make his own “readerly sensibility” the arbiter of literary taste and the basis for his theses, which is meant to justify what he regards as “the book’s indulgence in repeated confessional passages” (39). His main charge is that Reality Hunger – for all its rhetorical attacks on the novel – “ends up reanimating the form it wishes to bury” (22). However, Vermeulen’s evidence for this

Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art 85 claim – “the teasing sentimentality of its title,” the length of the book and the “overt presence of a continuous consciousness that guides the reader” (41) – is debatable, as none of those elements, bar the last one perhaps, is peculiar to the novel. The personal anchoring of Reality Hunger’s postulates is emphasized by Georgia Christinidis, who aligns Shields’s position with the claims made by James Wood in “Tell Me How Does It Feel?” – his much-quoted response to the crisis of 9/11, published in The Guardian less than a month after the event. Christinidis cites Wood’s argument that in the aftermath of the collapse of the Twin Towers the Stendhalian mirror carried along any of Manhattan’s high roads would “explode” (33). The impossibility of ignoring 9/11’s legacy may, Wood announces, “allow a space for the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell us not ‘how the world works’ but ‘how somebody felt about something’ ” (“Tell Me”). The focus, therefore, will be shifted from literature-seeking to make objective assertions to that concerned with “subjective truth claims” (Christinidis 33). Christinidis argues that Wood and Shields question the relevance of the realist novel for essentially the same reason. They believe that since external reality is not reducible to any “order” or “pattern,” the “only reality that can be represented is that of subjective experience” (34). She adds that their claims can be regarded in the context of the “crisis of representation” that has afflicted realism since the advent of modernism (34). Writing almost a decade after the attack on the World Trade Center, Shields does not explicitly situate his diagnosis of the crisis of the novel in the post-9/11 context. While the two passing references he makes to this event in Reality Hunger do not merit closer attention, in How he twice addresses the question of the most effective ways to respond to such an experience. First, he discusses Annie Dillard’s “This Is the Life” – an investigation of the relativity of cultural convictions, which he finds “by far the best essay yet written about 9/11.” Shields uses the preposition “about,” even though the author “doesn’t come even close to mentioning” the calamity (104). He then mentions Markson’s Vanishing Point, which he calls “the best book . . . about 9/11, because it’s barely about it” (150). Following Shields’s logic – which is occasionally liable to the charge of sacrificing clarity for the sake of extravagance – his books’ lack of direct engagement with 9/11 can serve as best proof of their commitment to it. Leaving aside the question of the context of the Twin Towers attack, the crisis of the novel continues to be a prominent theme in How, although Shields does not devote to it as much space as in Reality Hunger. The reason for this might be the fear of restating the points that have already been made.15 Several times he refers to the controversy sparked by Reality Hunger, mostly to clarify that book’s rationale and halt misreadings.

86  Art in Crisis In particular, Shields protests against regarding his work as “anti-novel jihad” (Geoff Dyer’s humorous phrase used in The Guardian) or seeing it as a “brief for the memoir.” Rather, it should be interpreted as an “argument for the poetic essay and the book-length essay,” and as a call for works of non-fiction that investigate “our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world” (37).16 In a different section, he calls Reality Hunger his “blue life raft” (a notion reminiscent of the title of How Literature Saved My Life) which enabled him to “articulate . . . the aesthetic tradition out of which [he] was writing” – n ­ either that of the novel nor the memoir but rather the tradition of formal experiment and of readiness to “break the forms” (126–27). At times, a note of bitterness, even the sense of having become a martyr to his cause, can be detected in How. Such is the case when he complains about being regarded by some as “the Antichrist,” because he refused to “genuflect at the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property” (117). How does not offer any new arguments to Shields’s earlier discussion of the ills of the novel. It remains a relic of a time long past – an “artifact,” a form cherished by “antiquarians,” one that – unlike science – refuses to “progress” (117). He asserts the novel’s obsolescence by pointing to its reliance on devices associated with the nineteenth-century novel (Balzacian descriptions of setting) and twentieth-century cinema (Hitchcockian climaxes) (177). How also reiterates Shields’s critique of the “tidy coherence of most novels,” with its presuppositions of divine order and a meaningful existence, which falsifies “the chaos and entropy that surround and inhabit and overwhelm us” (178). Schmitt dismisses the last point as “highly refutable” and symptomatic of Shields’s ignorance about “our cognitive modus operandi.” Although people may indeed be enveloped by entropy, their brains, Schmitt explains, are “programmed” not to perceive it, as a result of which entropy remains an abstraction as regards one’s subjective experience of the world (141). Schmitt also levels a more general charge against Shields’s argumentation, which, in his view, exposes the author’s “lack of knowledge of the history of the novel.” He finds fault with Shields’s refusal to acknowledge the tradition of the avant-garde novel, which has been able to engage meaningfully with, if not predict, the myriad developments of the contemporary world (141). It is true that Shields does not engage with the earlier announcements of the “death of the novel,” which may create the impression that he sees himself as the first one to diagnose its decline. The recognition of that broader context could alert him to the existence of a pattern within which Vermeulen locates Reality Hunger – one that makes “declarations of the end of the novel” coincide with “moments of productivity and innovation,” as a result of which “the history of the end of the novel becomes almost coextensive with modern literary history as such” (Vermeulen 2).

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Blueprint for a New Literature As was noted at the beginning of the chapter, both Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life can be regarded as manifestos. Besides asserting the inadequacy of the novel, they call for the emergence of a new literary form that would embrace the zeitgeist and satisfy what Shields has dubbed “reality hunger.” This section aims to examine the propositions advanced in both books, particularly those which converge with the poetics and politics of collage. Shields’s ambition is to “write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists in a multitude of forms and media . . . who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work” (RH 1).17 Although the exact make-up of that group is never specified, from the repeated references to their works it may be inferred that Shields has in mind such authors as, among others, John D’Agata, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Raban and Dave Eggers. The characteristic traits of the movement which they are meant to constitute are the following: A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. . . . Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, selfethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real. (RH 3) Many of the myriad tags listed above could be subsumed under the notion of the pursuit of greater authenticity, which – consistently with the title of the manifesto – remains Shields’s central proposition. Among the ways of incorporating “reality” into a literary work are appropriation, hybridity and the renunciation of structural coherence, all of which are going to be examined below. At the heart of Shields’s manifesto is an account of the earlier noted artistic epiphany, during which he realized it was possible to construct a book out of “fragments of things” by setting “shards in juxtaposition to other shards” (RH 514). “Fragments” and “shards” are the building blocks of the literature which Shields postulates and celebrates – ­fragmentary, appropriative and hybrid. His rationale for advocating these three properties is that they allow for “smuggling” more of reality into the work (1). Fragmentation, Shields suggests, results from candour and

88  Art in Crisis the rejection of the idea of life as “prepackaged along narrative lines.” “Reality-based art” cannot bear the straitjacket of narrative and inevitably “splinters and explodes” (70). Appropriation and plagiarism, in turn, are discussed in Reality Hunger as woven into the fabric of all creativity and art. One of the epigraphs to the book is Picasso’s statement that “art is theft,” on which Shields later elaborates and notes that “all of culture is an appropriation game” (261, 289).18 His advice for contemporary artists echoes Burroughs’s manifesto for the cut-up published five decades earlier: “Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest. Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing” (RH 350). Shields’s postulate of a hybrid literature springs from his earlier noted distrust of generic conventions, which is highlighted in the earlier referenced epigraph by Benjamin: “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one” (590). In the course of the book, Shields quotes various authors – from Emerson to Terry Gilliam – asserting the need for art that combines multiple sources, disciplines and genre conventions. Otherwise, the categories (such as “novel,” “memoir” or “Hollywood movie”) adopted by a given work impose on them a set of limitations which drain them of their potential to affect the audience on the intellectual or emotional level (208). Another combination which Shields considers unavoidable is that of fiction and non-fiction.19 Both notions are tinged with the other: all that is ostensibly fiction is in some way anchored in reality while all apparent non-fiction (of which the memoir is Shields’s favourite example) resorts, deliberately or not, to fictional tools. Shields’s literary forms of choice, which accommodate fragmentariness, appropriation and hybridity, are the lyric essay and collage. The former is a recently coined notion used to refer to writing which draws on the conventions of poetry, autobiography and criticism. Shields embraces it as a fresh conflation of “art and fact . . . imagination and observation, rumination and argumentation, human faith and human perception” (72). Its poetics – admittedly consistent, for the most part, with that of Reality Hunger – involves “gaps,” mosaic-like fragments, abrupt shifts of focus, suggestiveness rather than exhaustiveness and “advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic” (384). Several of those proposed characteristics, interestingly, have been numbered by critics among the shortcomings of Shields’s texts. Among the authors most often associated with the lyric essay are writers frequently cited in Reality Hunger: John D’Agata, Anne Carson and Annie Dillard. The second form postulated by Shields is collage, to which he devotes an entire 63-passage-long section. In it, he juxtaposes statements about its poetics and politics by authors such as Walter Benjamin, James Joyce, Ronald Sukenick, W.G. Sebald and Lance Olsen.20 What Shields appreciates most about collage is the renunciation of plot and its teleology – the sense that “life is a coherent, fathomable whole”

Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art 89 and “everything happens for a reason” (319, 321).21 Released from the obligation to impose order on the surrounding world, collage can convey how modern “life . . . flies at us in bright splinters” (319). Echoing Burroughs, Shields points to collage as the artistic strategy most suited to realist representation of the contemporary world. What collage gains by shedding the “apparatus of the novel” is the unlimited space to explore directly the subjects in which the author is genuinely interested. Shields likens “linear fiction” to a heavy rocket that needs to drop its components at regular intervals in order to accelerate and, ultimately, reach its climax as a lone capsule. In collage, on the other hand, the narrative ballast is dropped from the start, and “every fragment is a capsule.” As a result, the reader is “on [their] way to the moon on every page” (348). Collage embodies most aspects of the idea of art advocated in Shields’s manifesto, including the central proposition of drawing on “reality” in the form of “raw,” unprocessed material. As he explains in the collage section, borrowing the words of the poet Charles Simic, “found objects [and] ready-mades . . . abolish the separation between art and life” (340). Their familiarity helps create “an immediate identification . . . between the viewer and the work of art” (364). By flaunting its composition out of multiple appropriated elements, whose source texts belong to different genres of fiction and non-fiction alike, collage answers perfectly to Shields’s proposition of a heterogeneous, hybrid literature. Although Shields often uses the word “mosaic” as a synonym for collage,22 he stresses that no ultimate consolidation of varied components is expected to occur (314). Among the other propositions formulated on the opening page of Reality Hunger which are fulfilled by collage are a degree of “randomness” involved in the construction, the need for “reader/viewer participation” in synthesizing the meanings of the work, and the propensity for “self-reflexive” commentary. In How Literature Saved My Life Shields also devotes a separate section to the politics and poetics of collage. Its title – “Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled” – creates a bridge with the equivalent section in Reality Hunger, as it appropriates one of its statements (HLSML 176, RH 328). Shields begins by contrasting collage and the “classic” plot-driven fictional narrative, which only gradually reveals its theme. Instead of this “slow burn,” collage favours an immediate – and undisguised – confrontation with its subject (HLSML 176). Another difference singled out by Shields is that between conventional fiction’s “seamless fluency” and collage’s “stutter[ing]” quality, which manifests itself in its embrace of white space, ellipsis and “deliberate silence” (177–78). Shields also emphasizes the potential of collage for “entering the author’s mind” and confronting it with the reader’s. It enables a “transfer of consciousness,” which besides offering intellectual stimulation can be “loneliness-assuaging” (177).

90  Art in Crisis An important idea about collage, and one unexamined in Reality Hunger, is its natural connection with the theme of crisis. Shields notes that “the collage-narrator, who has the audacity to stage his or her own psychic crisis as emblematic of a larger cultural crux and general human dilemma, is virtually by definition in some sort of emotional trouble.” He then adds that all collage books are “madly in love with their own crises” (177). The phrase “their own crises” could be interpreted as both a reference to the subject matter of literary collages as well as to their construction – a non-hierarchical juxtaposition of heterogeneous, often conflicting, elements.23 The earlier statement about a “personal crisis” pointing to a “larger cultural crux” suggests collage’s synecdochic disposition and its capacity to address themes of broader sociopolitical significance while remaining ostensibly confined to the personal. Shields reaffirms this idea by ending the section with the statement that for him collage “convey[s] . . . what it feels like for one human being to be alive, and by implication, all human beings” (178).

Conclusion Both of Shields’s books give a similar diagnosis of the crisis of contemporary fiction as that formulated in Markson’s tetralogy. What they all see as its greatest burden is the excessive reliance on the “apparatus of the novel” – the demands of plot, character and genre. In place of meticulously crafted narratives, they advocate heterogeneous structures that incorporate “shards” of seemingly incompatible materials and flaunt their borrowings from multiple sources. In other words, they point to collage as one the most accommodating forms for literary experimentation in the twenty-first century. Whereas Markson’s propositions did not provoke much critical debate, Shields has been very successful in attracting attention to his ideas. Vermeulen, despite his reservations about their soundness, concedes that Reality Hunger “has become an almost compulsory point of reference in discussions of contemporary literature” (21). In the years following its publication, other writers expressed a similar dose of scepticism about the novel’s future. In the second volume of My Struggle (2009–2011), Karl Ove Knausgård echoes Shields’s words when he confesses that “just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made [him] feel nauseous” (505). Lars Iyer’s “Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss (A Literary Manifesto After the End of Literature and Manifestos)” (2011) gives different reasons for the demise of the novel (and literature at large), yet reflects Shields’s insights in its insistence on “unliterary plainness,” “writ[ing] about this world” and “resist[ing] closed forms” (Iyer; Vermeulen 44). Among the best known and most consistent spokesmen for the death of the novel in the last decade has been Will Self. His position, however, as

Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art 91 demonstrated in “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s For Real)” (2014), is radically different from Shields’s, since for Self the crisis of the novel is a cause for mourning rather than celebration. The extent to which Shields’s predictions have been accurate and his propositions accepted will become known in the next years. Critics have been divided in assessing their prospective influence. Concerned with its significance to autobiographical literature, Schmitt is not sure if Reality Hunger and How will become “the blueprint for ‘end-of-the-genre texts’ ” and thus stir a “revolution heralding a no-genre land” or have “no impact whatsoever on the evolution of life writing” (144–45). Sean O’Hagan, in turn, is rather sceptical about Reality Hunger’s influence “beyond the rarefied world of literary culture.” Susan H. Greenberg and Luc Sante are among the critics with the greatest confidence in Shields’s literary intuitions. Greenberg wonders if the author is “simply ahead of the rest of us, mapping out the literary future of the next generation,” while Sante predicts that Reality Hunger “may not presage sweeping changes in the immediate future, but it probably heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come.”

Notes 1. An earlier version of small parts of this chapter appeared in an article of mine entitled “Collage Manifestos: Fragmentation and Appropriation in David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger,” published in the edited volume The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. 2. One of Shields’s books, I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel (2014, co-authored with Caleb Powell), was adapted to screen by Hollywood star James Franco in 2017. Interestingly enough, Shields is not the only collage author discussed in this study whose work Franco wanted to make into a film. The other one is Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World, for which Franco put in an unsuccessful bid. 3. In her study of the poetics of avant-garde manifestos, Marjorie Perloff notes that enumeration is practised in order to hold the reader’s attention and endow the text with a sense of practicality – each consecutive passage serves as another goal to be attained (Futurist Moment 96). Shields’s avoidance of blocks of continuous text and his favoured structure – a compilation of short, often elliptical, statements set apart by empty spaces – also forges a strong link with the poetics of the manifesto. As Laura Winkiel argues in “Manifestos and Ars Poetica,” the connection between the genre and fragmentation is “striking and apposite” (255). In adopting the form of the fragment with its inherent incompletion, the manifesto fashions itself as a project – a “fragment of the future” – to be realized, or completed, when the advocated ideas are implemented and the utopia is achieved (Winkiel 255–56). 4. When referring to Reality Hunger, I shall offer the number of the passage rather than that of the page, as it is a more precise indicator of location (also applicable to the electronic version of the text). For quotations from the appendix, I shall give the page number (preceded by “p.”).

92  Art in Crisis 5. In his blurb for Reality Hunger, Dyer makes a humorous comment on his experience of the book: “Reading it, I kept thinking, ‘Yes, exactly, I wish I’d said that, and then I realised I had’.” 6. A rare exception to both rules is the following passage, which reads like a pastiche of the typical Markson snippet: “ ‘The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, or fantasy,’ said the New York Globe in 1851 about Moby-Dick” (40). 7. Among the other recurring titles of chapters and sections which have been borrowed from other sources are “Our ground time here will be brief” (the title of a book of poems by Maxine Kumin), “A day like any other, only shorter” (Samuel Beckett’s description of one’s death day) and “The wound and the bow” (the title of a book of literary criticism by Edmund Wilson). 8. How’s vocal and frequently asserted resistance to simple generic classification leads Schmitt to call it curiously “obsessed with genre.” He also notes that Reality Hunger and How could both be classified as paradigms of a new genre that could be named “genre-bashing” (140). 9. Even so, Shields does not occasionally refrain from using submerged ­quotations – such as “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” from The Sun Also Rises and Wittgenstein’s “the world is everything that is the case” (HLSML 111, 124) – without any form of acknowledging their appropriated status. 10. Shields notes that despite Markson’s frequent practice of “mashing up” other writers’ texts, he “insisted upon verbatim quotation of his ‘own’ work in Reality Hunger.” He goes on to call the book a “bibliophile’s wet dream” (103). 11. Both terms are related to Roland Barthes’s distinction between the two functions of the text accompanying images – “anchorage” and “relay.” The former kind aims to “elucidate” the visuals by narrowing down their range of signifieds, while the latter’s role is to “complement” them (Barthes 156–57). 12. Shields argues that the politics of the novel is also obsolete, as the form “tends to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal, entirely decipherable universe” (39). 13. In Life Is Short: Art Is Shorter, Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman appropriate Charles Baxter’s association of the novel with “expansionism, empirebuilding, and the contemplation of the heroic individual” (22). Against the novel Shields and Cooper pit “short short stories” as “products of mass societies in which crowding is an inescapable part of life” (23). 14. In How, Shields confesses, “I find that I almost literally can’t read a book if it’s unbroken text. . . . Whereas the moment I see the text broken up into brief fragments, I’m intellectually and aesthetically and almost erotically alert” (177). 15. Even so, Schmitt observes that How demonstrates Shields’s “proclivity to repeat himself” (142). 16. The quoted passages originally appeared in Shields’s “harrumphing” letter to the New York Review of Books, whose fragment is copied verbatim in How (37). 17. In The Age of Distraction: Reading, Writing, and Politics in a High-Speed Networked Economy (2011), Robert Hassan argues that despite Shields’s stated aim and his insistence on Reality Hunger’s status as a manifesto, his book is actually an “antithesis” of the genre’s political program, which offers “an ordered and structured and rational and reasoned basis for promoting reconstruction” (141). 18. Like Lethem in “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Shields condemns those who attempt to staunch appropriation through the appeal to copyright laws. In the appendix to Reality Hunger, when he urges the reader to cut off the ensuing bibliography, he argues that “reality cannot be copyrighted” (209).

Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art 93 19. Schmitt situates Shields’s position in the context of the French tradition of auto-fiction and the postmodernist principle of panfictionalism (135–36). 20. One of the passages in this section is a direct quotation from Markson: “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. As is already more than self-evident” (RH 359). Other quotations from the tetralogy which are incorporated by Shields are “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (185) and “In the end one experiences only oneself” (532), originally by Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche, respectively. 21. According to Morrison, in this passage (appropriated from Olsen’s 10:01), which he calls “patronising to novelist and reader alike,” Shields “sells fiction short,” claiming that the fragmentariness of life can only be conveyed in fragmentary form. In his review of How, Lowen Liu attacks the same idea by calling it “the imitative fallacy.” 22. Shields does not draw a sharp distinction between the two terms and understands the mosaic as a work composed of numerous elements which “flaunts” its compositional heterogeneity (333). He notes that in literary mosaic “momentum . . . derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances” (334). 23. According to Vermeulen, Reality Hunger is animated by the ongoing confrontation of “the old and the new” – “the form it dismisses and the new poetics it does not quite manage to articulate without this confrontation” (38).

Works Cited Alter, Cathy. “I Stole from Paul Simon and Elvis Costello – or Did I?” The Atlantic, The Atlantic Monthly Group, 11 Mar. 2011, www.theatlantic.com/ entertainment/archive/2010/03/i-stole-from-paul-simon-and-elvis-costello-ordid-i/37332/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018. Baetens, Jan. “Illustrations, Images, and Anti-Illustrations.” Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick. MIT Press, 2003, pp. 179–200. Barthes, Roland. Rhetoric of the Image. Translated by Stephen Heath, Faculty Georgetown, https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Barthes-Rhetoricof-the-image-ex.pdf. Accessed 27 Aug. 2017. Christinidis, Georgia. “Truth Claims in the Contemporary Novel: The Authenticity Effect, Allegory, and Totality.” Realisms in Contemporary Culture: Theories, Politics, and Medial Configurations, edited by Dorothee Birke and Stella Butter. De Gruyter, 2013, pp. 33–48. Dinnen, Zara. “In the Mix: The Potential Convergence of Literature and New Media in Jonathan Lethem’s ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 42, no. 2, 2012, pp. 212–30. Drąg, Wojciech. “Collage Manifestos: Fragmentation and Appropriation in David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger.” The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, edited by Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drąg. Vernon, 2018, pp. 107–22. Greenberg, Susan H. “Endorsement.” Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Vintage, 2011. Hassan, Robert. The Age of Distraction: Reading, Writing, and Politics in a High-Speed Networked Economy. Translation, 2012. Iyer, Lars. “Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss (A Literary Manifesto After the End of Literature and Manifestos).” The White Review, Nov. 2011, www. thewhitereview.org/feature/nude-in-your-hot-tub-facing-the-abyss-a-literarymanifesto-after-the-end-of-literature-and-manifestos/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018.

94  Art in Crisis Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper’s Magazine, Harper’s Magazine Foundation, Feb. 2007, https://harpers.org/archive/2007/ 02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018. Liu, Lowen. “How Fiction Doesn’t Work: David Shields Continues His Quest for a More Perfect Genre.” The Slate Book Review, Slate Group, 1 Feb. 2013, www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/02/david_shields_how_literature_ saved_my_life_reviewed.html. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018. Maziarczyk, Grzegorz. The Novel as Book: Textual Materiality in Contemporary Fiction in English. Wydawnictwo KUL, 2013. Michel, Lincoln. “Reality Boredom: Why David Shields Is Completely Right and Totally Wrong.” The Rumpus, 8 Mar. 2010, https://therumpus.net/2010/03/ reality-boredom-why-david-shields-is-completely-right-and-totally-wrong/ ?full=yes. Accessed 7 Aug. 2019. Miller, Laura. “RIP: The Novel.” Salon, Salon Media Group, 10 Mar. 2010, www. salon.com/2010/03/10/reality_hunger/?source=newsletter. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018. Morrison, Blake. “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 20 Feb. 2010, www.theguardian.com/ books/2010/feb/20/reality-hunger-david-shields-review. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018. O’Connell, Mark. “Spread the Word: ‘How Literature Saved My Life,’ by David Shields.” New York Times, The New York Times Company, 8 Feb. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/books/review/how-literature-saved-my-life-bydavid-shields.html. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018. O’Hagan, Sean. “Reality Hunger by David Shields.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 28 Feb. 2010, www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/28/ reality-hunger-book-review. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018. Olsen, Lance. Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing. In collaboration with Trevor Dodge. Guide Dog, 2012. Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. U of Chicago P, 2003. Robson, Leo. “Renata Adler, Ben Marcus and David Shields: Pushing the Limits of the American Novel.” New Statesman, New Statesman, 22 Aug. 2013, www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/03/list-life-richard-avedon-oneamericas-great-post-war-photographers. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018. Sante, Luc. “The Fiction of Memory.” New York Times, The New York Times Company, 12 Mar. 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/books/review/Sante-t. html. Accessed 12 Nov. 2017. Schmitt, Arnaud. “David Shields’s Lyrical Essay: The Dream of a Genre-Free Memoir, or Beyond the Paradox.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 133–46. Shields, David. How Literature Saved My Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. ———. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Vintage, 2011. Shields, David, and Elizabeth Cooperman. Life Is Short – Art Is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity. Hawthorne, 2015. Smith, Zadie. “On the Rise of the Essay.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 21 Nov. 2009, www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/21/zadie-smithessay-guardian-review. Accessed 21 Sept. 2017. Vermeulen, Pieter. Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art 95 Williams, John. “More Literary Remixes from a Mash-Up Artist: ‘How Literature Saved My Life,’ by David Shields.” New York Times, The New York Times Company, 3 Feb. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/books/how-literaturesaved-my-life-by-david-shields.html. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018. Winkiel, Laura. “Manifestos and Ars Poetica.” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. Routledge, 2012, pp. 253–66. Wood, James. “Keeping It Real.” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 7 March 2010, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/15/keeping-it-real-3. Accessed 7 Aug. 2019. ———. “Tell Me How Does It Feel?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 6 Oct. 2001, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct/06/fiction. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018.

Part II

Society in Crisis

4 It’s the End of the World as We Know It Lance Olsen’s Sewing Shut My Eyes, Head in Flames and Dreamlives of Debris After examining how collage has been used in contemporary literature to represent the experience of artistic crisis, I now wish to turn to a discussion of texts that employ collage in order to comment on situations of social and political turmoil. This chapter is devoted to the analysis of fiction works by Lance Olsen: two multimodal short stories (co-authored with Andi Olsen) from the collection Sewing Shut My Eyes (2000) and two novels – Head in Flames (2009) and Dreamlives of Debris (2017).1 Following an overview of Olsen’s oeuvre and a brief presentation of the works in question, I shall consider the indebtedness of their formal properties to the poetics of collage, focusing in particular on their use of appropriation, juxtaposition and multimodality. The last section will focus on the content of Olsen’s works and examine the numerous contemporary crises which they address, including the damaging social effects of television and celebrity culture in Sewing Shut My Eyes, the violent clash of Western liberalism with Islamist fundamentalism in Head in Flames and the anxieties of digital culture in Dreamlives of Debris. The final part will also consider the suitability of collage to represent those phenomena while referring to Olsen’s own theoretical pronouncements on collage as a literary form. Olsen is the author of fourteen novels and four collections of shorter fiction, as well as author, co-author or editor of eight works of non-fiction. Besides being an extraordinarily prolific novelist, he has also been a professor of creative writing (himself a graduate of the famous Iowa Writing Center, which he attended together with David Shields) at the University of Idaho and, since 2007, at the University of Utah. His teaching experience gave rise to the publication of two “anti-textbooks,” the latest of which is called Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing (in collaboration with Trevor Dodge, 2012). Olsen is also the author of the first book-length critical study of William Gibson’s work. From 2002 to 2018, he was in charge of Fiction Collective Two – a not-for-profit publishing house of experimental literature (which released Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture – to be discussed in the next chapter). On account of the style and thematic interests of his novels from the 1990s – including Tonguing the Zeitgeist (1994), a finalist for the

100  Society in Crisis Philip K. Dick Award – Olsen came to be associated with speculative fiction and the literary movement called Avant-Pop, which announced the death of postmodernism and advocated non-linear, “pla(y)giarist” and “writerly” (to use terms introduced by Raymond Federman and Roland Barthes, respectively) fiction influenced by cyberpunk and chaos theory and drawing on the legacy of authors such as William S. Burroughs, Federman and Kathy Acker (Nettles; Olsen, “Avant-Pop” 204). Around the turn of the century, Olsen’s works began to assume very noticeably collage-like characteristics thanks to the more frequent use of quotations and computer-generated images. Rather than employing the latter as mere illustrations, Olsen, together with his wife, collaborator and assemblage artist, Andi Olsen, developed a method of combining the textual and visual so that they interact with each other on an equal footing. Out of this “ambiguous, suggestive, lyrical zone that exists when words and images kiss” came Sewing Shut My Eyes, Hideous Beauties (2003) and Theories of Forgetting (2014) (Olsen, “Hideous Beauties”). Alongside those richly multimodal works, Olsen has also created many works which can be thought of as collages in the sense that they refuse a linear narrative, meld literary genres and intensely employ appropriation. Among them is his critically acclaimed unofficial trilogy – constituted by Nietzsche’s Kisses (2006), Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka (2007) and Head in Flames – of novels devoted to three modern geniuses: Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka and Vincent van Gogh, respectively. The three works chosen for analysis in this chapter offer a representative sample of Olsen’s engagement with the poetics and politics of collage. The first of them, Sewing Shut My Eyes, is a collection of nine fictions couched in the eccentrically flamboyant aesthetics of Avant-Pop, as apparent in the titles such as “Cybermorphic Beat-Up Get-Down Subterranean Homesick Reality-Sandwich Blues” and “Kamikaze Motives of the Immaculate Deconstruction in the Data-Sucking Rust-Age of Insectile Hackers.” Reviewer John G. Nettles notes that they give the reader a foretaste of a book that “crackles with attitude” and has “the ghosts of Dick and Burroughs . . . shoot it out in the atrium of MoMA while David Cronenberg films it.” The epigraph from Jean Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra” introduces the volume’s dystopic engagement with the themes of simulation, technology and the media. Of the five dark and quirky multimodal fictions in the volume (the remaining ones involve text only) I have chosen the two most overtly concerned with experiences of crisis: “Telegenesicide” and the titular “Sewing Shut My Eyes.” Only several pages long, both pieces resemble actual visual collages in their creative conjunctions of original and borrowed images, individual words, commercial slogans and longer quotations. The little critical attention garnered by the collection has focused primarily on those collaborative multimodal pieces, which Bob Riedel described as “truly disturbing” at

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 101 their best and J.R. Foley as “unique . . . funny but also quite disturbing” (Olsen, “Hideous Beauties”). Olsen’s tenth novel, Head in Flames was inspired by the widely publicized murder of the controversial Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh by Muslim fundamentalist of Moroccan origin Mohammed Bouyeri in Amsterdam on 2 November 2004. The reason for the attack was van Gogh’s unceremonious critique of Islam articulated in his televised interviews, on his website The Healthy Smoker and in his recent film Submission (2004). That ten-minute feature targeting Islam’s treatment of women was the result of his collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the first Muslim member of the Dutch parliament, who was the addressee of a violent letter that Bouyeri affixed with a kitchen knife to van Gogh’s body after shooting at him multiple times (Burke). Olsen’s novel is told through three alternating perspectives – those of Bouyeri, van Gogh and the brother of his great-grandfather – Vincent van Gogh. Broken down into brief, often one-line snippets, Head in Flames witnesses its three ill-fated protagonists on the last day of their lives or – in Bouyeri’s case – freedom. The novel received very favourable reviews: John Madera praised its “inventive, playful form and . . . evocative content”; Review of Contemporary Fiction called it “a tour de force of formal innovation” reminiscent of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch; Scott Esposito compared Olsen’s spare, economical style to that of Don DeLillo and J.M. Coetzee; while John Domini argued that Head in Flames “set a new standard for the social consciousness of postmodern narratives” (“Head in Flames”). Dreamlives of Debris is a retelling of the Minotaur myth whose large cast of characters (or voices) includes Theseus, Ariadne and Daedalus, as well as Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. The protagonist and principal voice are the illicit child of Pasiphaë and the bull, who in Olsen’s version is a disfigured girl calling herself Debris. A shunned and deeply insecure creature, Debris has a curious ability to channel various voices from the future, which are presented in the novel as “songs” or “choruses” formatted as if their speakers were characters in a play. The recurrent motif and underlying structural concept in Dreamlives is the maze, which Olsen addresses using textual and graphic means. The conventional rectangular shape of the book has thus been replaced by a perfect square. In order to evoke the mazelike sense of disorientation, Olsen – who laid out the book with the use of the software application InDesign – has withheld any location markers such as chapters or even page numbers. Again, critical reception was very positive: Kirkus Reviews applauded the novel’s broad thematic scope, “deeper emotional truth” and the ability to remain “experimental” and “accessible” at the same time (“Dreamlives”); Jon Cone called it “a machine to think with” and a challenge to “received notions about what constitutes story and storytelling”; and Aimee Parkison described it as a “rare and brilliant

102  Society in Crisis novel” which “break[s] boundaries of horror, science fiction, nonfiction, love story, and myth” (“Dreamlives”).

Collage Structure Of all the authors considered in this study, Olsen is among the ones following the poetics of collage most closely and consistently. The majority of works discussed in this chapter enact minimal narrative progression, whereas their reliance on appropriated material, paratactic arrangement of text and generic eclecticism is much greater than in works like Shields’s How Literature Saved My Life. Furthermore, Olsen is one of the three discussed authors – besides Graham Rawle and Steve Tomasula – who acknowledge their debt to visual collage by incorporating images and experimenting with the font and layout of the page. Owing to the significant formal differences between their employment of collage properties, Sewing Shut My Eyes, Head in Flames and Dreamlives of Debris will be examined separately. Sewing Shut My Eyes “Telegenesicide,” “Pentapod Freak Nest” and “Sewing Shut My Eyes” are the most exuberantly visual – and collage-like – works in the collection. Although scattered across the volume, the three fictions appear to be companion pieces on account of the various formal parallels between them. Each of them is the result of the earlier mentioned collaboration between Lance and Andi Olsen, which, as the former explained in an interview by J.R. Foley, was a multistage process: Andi began to create a given number of panels – seven, say – comprised of computer-generated collaged visuals, without any narrative in mind. She then gave me the panels, which I arranged in an order that appealed to me. I came up with words, phrases, quotes, and other bits of language that somehow seemed appropriate to each panel, gave everything back to Andi, and she then wed text and visuals. Only after that would we come together and edit each panel. (Olsen, “Hideous Beauties”) The visuals, as becomes evident from Olsen’s report on the creative process, are by no means a mere addition or illustration of the text but constitute an integral part of the entire composition – exactly like in a visual collage. The images employed in Sewing Shut My Eyes could, therefore, be said to function as “pictures as text,” to use Jan Baetens’s earlier introduced notion. They are, in other words, equal partners in the production of the overall meaning of the piece.

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 103 It is symptomatic that Olsen speaks of the works being divided into “panels” rather than “pages,” which emphasizes their distinctness from one another (as well as alludes to the tradition of comics and graphic novels). Indeed, each page – there are between five and seven of them – of the three works could be displayed in an art gallery on its own (as indeed they have been) in the same way as individual pages of Tom Phillips’s A Humument. What makes this possible is the fact that the arrangement of pages, or panels, does not impose a strong sequential order. Except for the titles on their initial page and a dictionary definition of “pain” which is broken down into four numbered parts that appear on the consecutive odd pages of “Telegenesicide,” the three pieces are perfectly reversible. Interestingly, reversibility is for Olsen an important criterion for literary collage. In his earlier quoted critical article “Fourteen Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction, Or: Fiction by Collage,” he discusses Milorad Pavić’s ambition, realized in Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), to “make literature, which is a nonreversible art, a reversible one” (Pavić in Olsen, “Fourteen Notes” 186). Granting the reader the possibility to ignore the way the book has been bound and to read the text in any chosen order makes their experience more similar to that of a viewer confronted with a visual collage, whose investigation can begin in any place of the picture. In the case of “Telegenesicide” and “Sewing Shut My Eyes,” the reader will first be drawn to the large human (or humanoid) figures which appear in most panels. Their salience2 is the result of their size and central position (210); in one panel in “Telegenesicide,” the prominence of the image is further enhanced by the layout of the surrounding text, which appears to radiate from it (SSME 15). The most important image in the first work is a black-and-white photograph (colour is not used at all in the collection) of an old woman with her mouth wide open, which suggests that she may be screaming, singing or yawning; or else, she may be in ecstasy and serve as the embodiment of what Baudrillard calls in his essay under the same title “the ecstasy of communication” (150). On her head, Andi Olsen has put oversized earphones and in her arms – an equally disproportional image of a foetus. Besides appearing in the first panel, the woman’s characteristic (and disturbing) grimace recurs on two further pages, in both cases embedded in a television set (15, 16). The second recurrent visual motif is the foetus, which in later panels is attached to an old man’s back (13) and floats in limbo with a tiny TV set in its belly and a large remote control in its hands (16). The images of both the old woman and the old man, as well as of another man on panel seven, are taken from nineteenth-century medical textbooks, where they served as illustrations of patients with psychiatric issues (Olsen, Personal interview). In “Sewing Shut,” the foetus is replaced by a small baby, who – in the opening panel – appears desiccated, either partly burnt or prematurely

104  Society in Crisis wrinkled, with an open mouth, an earring in one ear and a necklace (79). Two panels later the baby reappears – looking more alive this time but with an enormously swollen forehead – holding a portable phone (81). The second visual motif in common with “Telegenesicide” is the multiple TV sets, which in this piece tend to contain zombie-like faces (of Claudia Schiffer in one instance) and other body parts (82, 83). The piece also features images of other high-profile models such as Cindy Crawford and Kate Moss. The rich multimodality of those works is not confined to their intense use of images. In her earlier cited list of eight most common formal properties of multimodal texts, Alison Gibbons includes four features which can be traced in the pieces under discussion: “unusual textual layouts and page design,” “varied typography,” “concrete realisation of text to create images as in concrete poetry” and “mixing of genres . . . in terms of visual effect, such as newspaper clipping” (Multimodality 2). The best example of the Olsens’ use of all of the above devices is panel five of “Telegenesicide.” First of all, seven out of eight portions of text that appear on the page are laid out at a different angle. The exuberant play with angles is reminiscent of Raymond Federman’s experiments in Double or Nothing (1971); therefore, it is only fitting that “Telegenesicide” is dedicated to him. Second, the textual fragments in the panel are rendered in various sizes of the Times New Roman typeface, including variations of shade, italics and bold lettering.3 The three blocks of text in the upper part of the page (bar the quote attribution in the top left corner) are broken down into 21 lines, each of which is tilted at a different angle in order for all the lines to look as if they were radiating from the television set. That feature, third on Gibbons’s list, pays tribute to the tradition of concrete poetry, which uses words as building blocks of figurative images. Finally, the little snippet underneath the feet of the central creature – a fragment of the dictionary definition of “pain” – has been designed to look like a cut-out. That effect, exemplifying Gibbons’s notion of mixing visual genres, is achieved through superimposing on the text an irregular rectangular patch, which is slightly darker than the panel’s background. Besides their multimodality and the resulting structural heterogeneity, “Telegenesicide” and “Sewing Shut” meet the other criteria for collage texts such as the intense use of appropriation, juxtaposition and – to a lesser extent – fragmentation. As regards the employment of borrowed content, each piece relies heavily on quotations and photographs. While textual appropriations are, for the most part, enclosed in quotation marks and accompanied by the name of the author and, in several cases, the title of the source, images – as is customary in visual collage – come without any indication of origin. Among the acknowledged quotations in “Telegenesicide” are passages from Baudrillard’s “The Ecstasy of Communication,” Arthur Kroker and David Cook’s Television and the Triumph of Culture (15) and David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram:

Figure 4.1 Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, “Telegenesicide” (in Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, Sewing Shut My Eyes, U of Alabama P, 2000), p. 15.

106  Society in Crisis Television and U.S. Fiction” (16). The ones without acknowledgement vary from easily recognizable (“NASA, WE HAVE A PROBLEM HERE” [17]) to rather obscure, as is the case with a Barbie quote featured in the American Postcard Company’s series called Nostalgic Barbie (11). Whereas “Telegenesicide” appropriates mostly critical statements about the influence of television on American society, “Sewing Shut” targets the vacuity of celebrity culture by citing trivial remarks – about money, clothes and physical appearance – by seven female top models of the turn of the century, including Tyra Banks, Cindy Crawford (two photographs of whom are also featured) and Brooke Shields. The use of fragmented language, which is a signature characteristic of Lance Olsen’s style, is marginally present in the multimodal pieces in the collection. Portions of original text offered on every page are self-­ contained and invariably end with a full stop. The earlier referenced appropriated passages are also given in their complete form. Among the few instances of verbal incompletion is the design of the word “FEEDBACK” running across panel five of “Telegenesicide” – seven out of its eight letters have either been cut by the page margin or hidden behind the central image of an embryo (16). Also, all the consecutive sections of the dictionary definition of “pain” have been partly obliterated – most visibly in the opening panel, where the middle part of the entry is concealed behind the central figure. The last panel of “Telegenesicide” has the most fragmentary look in the collection.4 In addition to the partly obscured dictionary snippet, it incorporates four barely legible segments of identical statistics concerning the incidence of various kinds of cancer in men and women. Each of them is only visible in fragments as large parts are covered by images and slogans in the foreground. The panel also includes instances of three layers of text being superimposed on one another, which makes them impossible to decode (17). The juxtapositional structure of the Olsens’ multimodal collages can be best illustrated by examining panel three of “Telegenesicide.” The panel confronts two pictures, each of which is a combination of two separate images, with seven pieces of text. The latter includes three commercial slogans – by Coca-Cola, Pepsi and the US Army – a fragment of the definition of “pain,” the phrase “remote control,” and two original sentences – one at the top and one at the bottom of the page. Melding the recurrent image of a television with an open mouth displaying white teeth (which, incidentally, resemble plastic bags packed with cocaine)5 addresses the notion of the destructive voice of television, which, in an embedded microfiction on the following page, prompts a girl to “kill dad” (14). The second visual blend, involving an old man coupled antithetically with an embryo, employs the Confrontation relation and functions as a suggestion of the cradle-to-grave hold that television has over its audience. “Remote control” is a phrase that assumes ironic connotations in this context, since it appears to suggest that it is television that controls

Figure 4.2 Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, “Telegenesicide” (in Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, Sewing Shut My Eyes, U of Alabama P, 2000), p. 13.

108  Society in Crisis those who watch it rather than the other way round. Among the manifestations of its pervasive influence are the commercial slogans, whose recognizability to the reader serves as evidence of television’s success in permanently implanting them in one’s consciousness. The prominence of commercial catchphrases can also be interpreted as an illustration of Baudrillard’s point in “The Ecstasy of Communication” that “advertising . . . invades everything as public space . . . disappears” (149). What this brief examination of the chosen panel of “Telegenesicide” also illustrates is the surprising compatibility of its multiple and varied components in contributing to a comprehensive indictment of television and a spirited assertion of its damaging social effects. Beginning with the title, which melds “television,” “genesis” and “-cide” (a suffix conveying an act of killing), each panel advances the same argument while offering a different unsettling composition and highlighting a different aspect of television’s social repercussions – for instance, its analogy with brainwashing (panel two) and its status as a global disease (panel seven).6 In “Sewing Shut” a similar mechanism occurs – despite the use of the myriad textual and verbal means, most panels could be described as monologic. The polyphony of voices by seven famous models is only apparent as they speak virtually the same voice – that of an ignorant celebrity addressing the audience of a glossy magazine. A rare example of a dialogic confrontation is panel three’s juxtaposition of Cindy Crawford’s and Linda Evangelista’s narcissistic remarks (such as “I don’t wake up for less than $10,000.00 a day”) with American cultural critic Steve Shaviro’s assertion of the Barbie doll figure’s unrealistic demands imposed on women. Shaviro, however, is evidently pitted against the models as the scientific voice of reason, which grants his words authority. The inanity of Crawford’s and Evangelista’s remarks, on the other hand, serves as proof that the fashion industry deserves to be ridiculed. Such one-sided treatment of the issue need not be seen as a weakness. Although collage at its best often confronts opposing positions without privileging any of them (as is the case in Head in Flames), it has also been successfully used as a political tool where the author’s attitude towards a given ideology (e.g., the Berlin Dadaists’s towards Nazism) or politician (as in Peter Kennard’s Thatcher Cuts Healthcare [1985]) was unambiguous. As the examples of Burroughs and Acker demonstrate, collage can also be a means of shocking and disturbing the reader, both of which Sewing Shut My Eyes succeeds in doing. Head in Flames Olsen’s tenth novel grew out of the author’s intense preoccupation with the form of collage, as he explained in an interview by John Madera: I’d been reading, thinking about, and teaching collage around the time the premise for Head in Flames arrived. I stumbled across an

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 109 observation by Robert Motherwell (“Collage is the 20th century’s greatest innovation”) and one by Donald Barthelme (“The principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the 20th century”) that wouldn’t leave me alone. (Olsen, “O for a Muse”) To a greater degree than any of Olsen’s previous works, Head in Flames is a collage on the formal as well as thematic level. The author has admitted that while searching for a literary form to represent the relationship between Vincent van Gogh, Theo van Gogh and Mohammed Bouyeri he realized that collage would be the best tool to “bring together such radically different consciousnesses, perspectives, and time periods in a single text while actively refusing to privilege any” (“O for a Muse”). Indeed, the three protagonists have very distinct personalities and hold radically different beliefs, as a result of which placing them alongside one another could be called a collage in itself. Portrayed on the day when he will commit suicide, Vincent revisits memorable events, numerous debates with fellow painters – Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec – and his evolving views on painting. He emerges as introspective and a “dreamer” – consumed by his art and oblivious of the external world, which makes him a “foil” to the other, intensely political, characters (“O for a Muse”). Despite his family connection with Vincent and his artistic ambitions, Theo is an entirely different person – arrogant, extrovert and seeking public attention. In one of the snippets, he is described as “the sort of person who had the compulsive urge to goad and insult even his closest friends, preferably on TV” (HF 34). Olsen described the original Theo as “crass,” “unpleasant” and at times “embarrassing” in similar ways to Michael Moore but conceded that, at the same time, he finds him “lovably mischievous” and admires his “will toward iconoclasm” (Olsen, “Complexities”).7 Theo’s mind is preoccupied throughout the novel by the dangers posed by the toleration of Islam’s social doctrine, the recent murder of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, his recent art projects and his sexual exploits. Bouyeri’s radicalism and complete dedication to his beliefs aligns him with Theo, but the substance of their views could not be more contrasting. The former’s orthodox adoption of strict religious mores, coupled with a total conviction that any form of criticism of Islam deserves capital punishment, is confronted with the latter’s atheism, liberalism and commitment to unconditional freedom of speech. Bouyeri’s voice focuses on Theo’s and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s transgressions and the punishment he will mete out; it also goes over his many daily humiliations suffered in Holland as a result of his ethnicity and offers an insight into his conversion from a person aspiring to be accepted by the West to its militant enemy.8 Such different voices call for different styles and means of representation. Olsen decided to offer Vincent’s account in a predominantly first-person perspective following the “lush, lyrical style” of his correspondence with

110  Society in Crisis his brother Theo, whose fragments are frequently incorporated (“O for a Muse”). The latter-day Theo, in turn, is presented from a third-person point of view, occasionally resembling free indirect discourse, which often accommodates actual or imagined quotations from his frequent public pronouncements regarding religion and immigration. The vocabulary in Theo’s section attempts to mirror the uncompromising and divisive style of his real-life counterpart: “On the next episode of his talk show, A Nice Chat, Theo called Jahjah the Prophet’s Pimp and told his gorillas to go fuck themselves” (HF 39). For Bouyeri’s perspective, Olsen has chosen the stream-of-consciousness technique, whose lack of organization (including the complete disregard of punctuation and capitalization) conveys the character’s disregard for the rules of Western civilization and the intensity of his passion, unmitigated by any external constraints. The collage of personalities and styles is accompanied in Head in Flames by a collage of fonts allotted to each protagonist. Olsen explained the typographic arrangement of the novel in an interview by Madera: [M]y imagination came to associate a gentle, graceful Times font with Vincent van Gogh. The brash bold version of that font seemed quintessentially Theo. And a font from an entirely different dimension – elementary, brutal, even – felt right for Mohammed: a Courier for the courier delivering a message that the western world doesn’t want to listen to; you can’t see that font, I don’t think, without hearing the loud, unsettling clacks of a manual typewriter.9 (“O for a Muse”) Olsen’s individualization of the font is a very effective device not only because of the added visual insight into the three protagonists’ personalities but also for practical reasons. Thanks to this typographic solution, the three voices appear visually distinct and enable the reader to differentiate more easily between the regularly interspersed minuscule passages, or “narraticules,” as Olsen prefers to calls them. That creates the opportunity, seized by many actual readers of the novel, to follow the text on each double-page in three separate sequences – first all of Vincent’s narraticules, then all of Theo’s and so on. The fact that Head in Flames offers at least two reading paths, in a manner reminiscent of J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007), makes it an interactive and “writerly” text by granting its readers the chance to assume an active role in its perception.10 That, in turn, brings the experience of reading a page closer to that of examining a visual collage. The arguably most significant collage feature of Head in Flames is its heavy dependence on appropriation. Of the many texts which Olsen used to source exact or slightly edited quotations the most important are Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother; Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s script for Submission and her autobiography Infidel: My Life (2006); imam Saifu Deen

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 111 al Muwahhied’s letter to Hirsi Ali, which was knifed by Bouyeri into Theo van Gogh’s chest; and Ian Buruma’s book Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006). Bouyeri’s part also employs salient passages from the Quran, such as the calls to “strike [unbelievers] in the neck” (38) and “flog [fornicators] with a hundred stripes” (115). Those cruel words of religious sanction are counterbalanced in Theo’s part by quotations attacking or mocking religion, such as the following – by Steve Weinberg and Voltaire: With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.11 (HF 29) If God created us in his own image, Voltaire proposing, we have more than reciprocated. (87) Voltaire is a frequent point of reference for Theo, four other quotations from his works appearing at different moments of the film-maker’s part, as well as a narraticule informing that on Sunday mornings his family would gather in the living room and “read aloud, not from the Bible, but from Voltaire” (78). Olsen also delights in interspersing quotations from established authors, such as Heinrich Heine, August Strindberg and Julian Barnes, with lines of popular songs by the likes of Cher and Britney Spears. Passages from Spears’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time” appear six times throughout Theo’s part, who seems to be humming this radio hit from 1998 as he is cycling towards the scene of his murder. Not all lyrics are offered in their correct form. For instance, a passage from Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” – “Children don’t grow up – our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up” – is quoted with two minor modifications: “but” is replaced with “and,” while “hearts” is swapped for “minds” (HF 105). This and the many other inconsistencies that can be identified by a meticulous reader of the novel are not evidence of Olsen’s sloppiness but manifestations of his artistic strategy, which he pursues in Dreamlives of Debris as well. In an interview, Olsen talks about being “drawn to the concentrated, epigrammatic power of a rich quotation,” which can serve in literary texts as an “insight-compression,” but concedes that he likes “misbehaving with them.” He calls those approximate quotations “slant quotes” – a neologism which evokes connotations with slant rhymes (“O for a Muse”). Olsen’s “misbehaviour” is often confined to minor alterations which are meant to eliminate certain irrelevant traces of the original context. For example, Vincent van Gogh’s sentence from a letter to his brother – “After all, if I fail, what does my loss mean?” – turns into

112  Society in Crisis “If I fail here, what does my loss mean?” (HF 10). The opening “after all” is dropped, as it refers to previous sentences which Olsen does not retain. Other modifications are governed by economy: Vincent’s answer to the question “How does one become mediocre?,” which the original letter puts this way, “by going along with this today and conforming to that tomorrow, as the world wants,” is paraphrased as “by compromising with the world” (122). On many occasions, the changes are restricted to individual words: “convene” instead of “meet” (115), “matters” instead of “things” (118), “bolted” instead of “left” (22). Some of those alterations, as noted by one reviewer, seem motivated by the wish to enhance the original text’s “dramatic effect” (“Head in Flames”). Olsen does not follow a consistent system of signposting cited material. Whereas in Sewing Shut My Eyes most of it is enclosed in quotation marks and accompanied by a short bibliographic note, Head in Flames rarely indicates a borrowed passage or reveals its source. If it does, only the surname of its author is offered, usually in a manner strongly reminiscent of David Markson’s peculiar syntax developed in his quartet. One of several examples of the characteristically Marksonian usage of the closing “as” (discussed in Chapter Two) is the following narraticule referring to Toulouse-Lautrec: “The syphilitic dwarf with hypertrophied genitals, Gauguin referring to him as” (65). In a personal interview, Olsen acknowledged this stylistic practice as a subtle homage to the author of This Is Not a Novel. Another important element of the collage poetics of Head in Flames is how Olsen confronts the three voices at the level of individual adjacent narraticules.12 Madera notes that the “coupling of these three distinctive characters and voices never coheres . . . into a single silent consciousness,” which results in “juxtapositional tensions” between the neighbouring lines (Olsen, “O for a Muse”). Kelly Cherry points out that those passages are often “diametrically opposed or cacophonous.” Such diametric oppositions are examples of the typically collage-like Confrontation relation, which can be exemplified by the following excerpt from an early part of the novel: The culture of consumption they call it. Please don’t think too hard, the still lifes say. It will only get you into trouble. Theo’s middle-of-the-night note to himself: It’s not my fault that some citizens hang on to the fundamentally uncivilized faith of a little-girl-fucker who roamed the desert in 666. Because it consumes them.

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 113 In French: nature morte. Ayaan in the Q&A after a public lecture: They froze the moral outlook of billions in the amber of the seventh century – brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women. It eats them up spits them out.

(HF 26–27)

The above sequence brings together, or rather clashes, Vincent’s silent meditation on the art genre of still life, Theo’s and Hirsi Ali’s fervent condemnations of Islam and Bouyeri’s expression of contempt for Western consumerism. On the one hand, Olsen confronts three extreme positions on Islam: an outsider’s witty and vulgar mockery, an ex-follower’s bitter critique and an ardent neophyte’s complete submission. On the other, he clashes all three radical stances with Vincent’s ponderous and seemingly otherworldly aesthetic considerations of the inner voice of a still life painting and the genre’s connotations with mortality. Vincent’s consistent immersion in art throughout the novel situates him as the antithesis of the other – intensely political and highly emotional – voices, not only of Theo and Bouyeri but also of those whose words are channelled by their sections. An example of such disharmonious polyphony is the following block: It smelled like chicken shit. AYAAN HIRSI ALI YOU WILL SMASH YOURSELF TO BITS AGAINST ISLAM! Monsieur Vincent leaving behind patches of quick thick paint wherever they fell among patches of uncovered fabric. (93) The first is one of the concluding narraticules reporting on the painful ritual of female genital mutilation to which Hirsi Ali was subjected at the age of five. It conveys her memory of the breath of her male mutilator. The middle passage is the culmination of the already mentioned threatening letter to Hirsi Ali penned by an imam. The religiously sanctioned violence of the first two passages is confronted with the serenity of artistic composition. Referring to van Gogh as “monsieur Vincent” evokes the elegant style of a nineteenth-century novel, which further distances the passage from the vulgarity of “shit” and block capitals. Despite incorporating some very harsh pronouncements by Bouyeri, al Muwahhied and Abu Khaled, which are bound to meet with the Western

114  Society in Crisis reader’s instant resistance, Olsen is careful not to demonize Bouyeri’s position. On the contrary, his background and gradual radicalization are embedded in the context of the socio-economic alienation of the Muslim minority in Holland. There are glimpses of Bouyeri’s humiliation at school and his realization of the Dutch state’s systematic economic discrimination against immigrants. Olsen also includes an account of a scene witnessed by Bouyeri which seems a spur to the hardening of his stance against the West. Sitting at a café run by a Muslim man, Bouyeri saw five drunk teenagers asking the owner, “Hey mate you eat cats and dogs?” (29). They then burst into laughter, while the man “smil[ed] so broadly his eyes almost disappeared” (30). The teenagers’ jolly provocation – “as if it were a joke as if his life were a simple joke” – as well as the owner’s calculatingly submissive reaction, conveyed by the implicit “come and drink my fucking coffee you fucks,”13 fills Bouyeri with disgust and pushes him towards adopting a more assertive attitude towards endemic racism (29, 31). The inclusion of this evocative scene and the larger context for Bouyeri’s frustration grants him a roundedness and psychological depth, which contributes to the genuine dialogism of the novel. In a similar vein, Theo’s anti-Muslim rants are interspersed with statements showing his greater insight, such as the following rhetorical question, “Why should we accept such racist notions as the one presuming Westerners are the only people capable of dissenting from their traditions, Muslims somehow too backward to think for themselves?” (81). As a result of the novel’s confrontation of arguments held by both opposing sides, reviewer Davis Schneiderman concludes that Head in Flames is “not a one-dimensional portrayal of either fundamentalist Islam or its critics.” The last characteristically collage-like quality of the novel which needs to be addressed is its heavy dependence on fragmentation. The sense of fragmentariness, created by the dismemberment of each perspective into over six hundred narraticules, is reinforced by Olsen’s frequent use of interrupted and incomplete passages, which end mid-sentence – as in the case of “Is that –” (54) and “I am –” (59) – or even mid-word: “Oh baby, ba –” (71), “fi –” (136) and “nev –” (165). The closing dash suggests that the abruptly cut passage will be continued in the next corresponding narraticule but that usually does not occur. The sense of reading a highly disjointed text is accentuated by the great number of single-word passages, such as “Gezellig” (5, 6, 7), “Hoping” (61, 74) and “You” (102).14 The last contributing factor is the use of blank space – a device frequently practised by such postmodernist experimentalists as B.S. Johnson and Ronald Sukenick. In Head in Flames, a typographic gap in place of a given protagonist’s narraticule communicates their passing. The first blank space appears on page 140, right after Theo has received his ninth bullet. For another twenty pages gaps alternate with narraticules reporting on his agony until the former finally take over. Vincent’s act of dying

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 115 is conveyed in the same way – occasional blanks giving way to permanent silence. As a result, the last nine pages of the novel only contain passages conveying the voice of Bouyeri – the sole survivor of the deathly confrontations enacted in the novel. Dreamlives of Debris In an interview accompanying the publication of his most recent novel, Olsen said, “we’re all, essentially, collages – amalgams of texts. . . . Our writing is always archival, although usually unconsciously so. In Dreamlives, I simply literalize the metaphor” (“Choreography”). Olsen’s novel can indeed be viewed as an archive of a great number and variety of texts. The main vehicle for presenting appropriated material are the forty figures who channel their so-called “songs” (Olsen’s another subtle nod towards the musicality of collage) through the consciousness of Debris – the protagonist and principal voice of Dreamlives. Among this extensive cast of characters are writers (from Sophocles to Denis Diderot to J.G. Ballard), philosophers (such as Plato, Saint Augustine and Slavoj Žižek), contemporary professors (including Anne P. Chapin, Robert Herman and Robert Fagles), activists (Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden), mythical heroes (Ariadne, Daedalus and Odysseus) and the author’s alter ego, Celan Solen (anagram of “Lance Olsen”). Not all texts of “songs” involve appropriations: “:::: Danielle Steele Song,”15 for instance, is a pastiche of her literary style, while several others are creative inventions. As with Head in Flames, Olsen uses both verbatim and “slant” quotations, whose fidelity to the original varies considerably. Although their thematic range is also wide, close to a half of all “songs” are concerned with various conceptions, examples and philosophical implications of labyrinths and mazes – a distinction that Olsen is careful not to blur. “Labyrinths are unicursal; they possess only one way in and one way out,” he explains, echoing the interpretation offered in “:::: Leonardo da Vinci Song.” “Mazes, on the other hand, have many entrances and exits.” It is the maze, he adds, that is the underlying metaphor in Dreamlives (“Choreography”). Other recurrent themes addressed in the appropriated passages are ancient Greece (particularly the figure of the Minotaur and the Minoan civilization), disease, cataclysm and chaos. How the maze and labyrinth, as well as the other thematic interests, feed into the novel’s representation of contemporary crises will be examined in the next section. A unique form of appropriation occurs in two sections, placed fifty pages apart, of “:::: Catastrophe Chorus.” Both are examples of altered fiction – a niche experimental genre which erases most parts of an original, often canonical work, as in Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (1977), a “treated” version of Paradise Lost, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of

116  Society in Crisis Codes (2010), a reworking of Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles (1934). Olsen chooses to alter individual passages from “The House of Asterion” (1946) by Jorge Luis Borges and Seneca’s tragedy Phaedra. The reason for the selection, as with many other quoted fragments, are the texts’ connections with the story of the Minotaur. Like Johnson and Safran Foer, Olsen retains words and phrases which correspond with each other grammatically, but, unlike both of them, he ignores most punctuation marks. The Borgesian sequence, created out of several phrases from the opening paragraph of the short story, reads “accuse me/It is/true/but it is also true/Shall I repeat.”16 The retained elements are barely the most salient in the opening part of Borges’s text, as a result of which it is improbable that the reader will be able to identify the source. The passage culled from Seneca reads, “of mind/incest?/Why do monsters cease?/love?” The puzzling mid-sentence opening appears to invite reading it as a continuation of the passage from Borges, which is grammatically possible. In defiance of chronology, a text from the first century thus completes a twentieth-century one.17 Atemporal juxtapositions are necessary in a novel whose character list includes imaginary and real figures, ranging from ancient and contemporary, such as Athena, Saint Augustine and Julian Assange. The fact that the majority of textual chunks (the word “narraticules” seems less applicable here, as most of them do not advance the narrative in any way) are laid out separately on consecutive pages creates a lot of white space. That could be said to soften the confrontations of adjacent passages and thus weaken the novel’s collage-like quality. There are, however, pages where three distinct voices are paratactically placed next to one another, as exemplified by the following block: :::: THE TERRIBLE ANGELS SONG Jump and it’s exemption all the way down. :::: DIODORUS SICULUS SONG – as the myth relates, a beast called Minotaur; yet, be that as it may – :::: JULIAN ASSANGE SONG I never had a mentor, so I was forced to make myself up as I went along. It can be classified as what in previous chapters was referred to as a thematic Joint, since the three elements do not constitute a clear, logical entity beyond having a certain thematic common denominator, which in this case is their relatability to the figure of Debris. The second passage is one of the numerous examples of fragmentary constructions in the novel. Although this particular middle element of a sentence is both preceded and succeeded (on neighbouring pages) by passages which enable the reader to create a comprehensible sequence,

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 117 many other instances of interrupted sentences (such as the twice appearing “One step and –”) are never continued. What is more, Olsen follows the practice adopted in Head in Flames of using broken sentences as well as severed words (for instance, “a mere two y –”). Reviewer Jacob Singer concludes that “[w]ith its fragments that don’t necessarily match up, Dreamlives forces readers to crash into walls and dead ends.” In a foreword to the novel, Lidia Yuknavitch, likewise, calls it “a journey . . . through the fragmentation and displacement of all meaning” and goes on to draw a comparison between the protagonist’s name and Walter Benjamin’s concept of “history as a pile of debris.”18 The notion of debris, however, could as well be interpreted in the context of the novel’s composition, which could be described as – to paraphrase Eliot’s famous ­phrasing – a heap of broken voices. The many interruptions to be found in Dreamlives are marked by an em dash, which is the most prominent punctuation mark in the novel. A sample of its usage is offered in the following passage of Debris’s monologue: The walls around me exploded into shocked Icarus dropping through luminous blueness — hands raking sunlight — shredded wings coming apart in mid-flight — a miniature cloud of gray-white commas — and I watched as daddy locked Daedalus and son deep inside my ­nightnothing — watched them stumbling forward — scouring my heart for an outlet. Despite the possible associations that reader may have with Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Olsen notes that his use of the em dash is a nod to Tristram Shandy, where it functions as a mark “between a comma and a white space and an ellipsis” and is elevated to the status of “a mode of thinking,” communicating “hesitation that leads to new thought” (Personal interview). Not surprisingly, Olsen chooses to end the novel on an elliptical note, having Debris declare puzzlingly, “I squat, raise [a twine line with a large stone attached to it], snip the thread with my restless teeth, stand, and begin to follow, curious to see where it leads, what new toy lies at the –.” * A formal analysis of Sewing Shut My Eyes, Head in Flames and Dreamlives of Debris warrants the conclusion that Lance Olsen is a paradigmatic collage writer. Besides meeting all the criteria that I have adopted in this study – the employment of fragmentation and appropriation being particularly extensive and effective – Olsen’s work recognizes its debt to visual collage by incorporating numerous multimodal means – from introducing original and recycled images to experimenting with font and layout. Those features are also present in works which could not

118  Society in Crisis be discussed in this chapter, most importantly in Theories of Forgetting, which mingles text – rendered in different-colour fonts – with close to two hundred images, including over forty photographs of Robert Smithson’s land-art work Spiral Jetty (1970) taken by Andi Olsen.19 By offering the reader two equally legitimate ways of reading the novel – from either end of the codex – it takes one step further Olsen’s ambition of enhancing the reversibility of literary texts, also noticeable in Sewing Shut My Eyes and Dreamlives, whose unnumbered pages invite a non-sequential reading. Theories, as well as all the texts discussed in this chapter, is also characteristically hybrid as regards its generic markers, adopting “a poetics of beautiful monstrosity,” which Olsen sees as the quintessence of collage (“Complexities”).

World in Flames – Crises Present, Past and Future Despite the ancient costume of Dreamlives of Debris and Olsen’s frequent references to canonical figures from Sophocles and Plato, his works remain intensely contemporary. The firm embedding of his texts in the context of Western culture is meant better to illuminate the current crises which each of them addresses. The focus of Olsen’s examination of the twenty-first century’s anxieties, traumas and discontents is, I wish to argue, on social concerns – the influence of the media, celebrity culture and digital culture, as well as the arrival of the post-human, immigration and terrorism. The representation of social crises is often accompanied, or interwoven, in these texts with an exploration of a self in crisis. This section aims to outline the multiple aspects of the works’ bleak diagnosis of contemporaneity in order to consider the suitability of the form of collage for addressing such thematic concerns. The grim assessment of a society enslaved by television is highlighted as early as in the titles of “Telegenesicide” and “Sewing Shut My Eyes.” As previously noted, television’s deathly impact is hinted at by the etymology of the former neologism. The connection between television and death is further emphasized through the analogy with cancer in the closing panel and in a microfiction occupying the entire panel five. In it, television speaks through the medium of a 7-year-old boy who tells his mother to “kill dad,” which she obediently does the same night (SSME 14). The notion of television having a sinister voice is reinforced in panel three, where the screen of a TV set is filled with a gigantic mouth spewing slogans, including that of the US Army, whose implicit message to “kill enemy” corresponds to the boy’s call to violence. That, in turn, could be related to the second panel’s juxtaposition of images showing an electrocuted man and a rat being subject to experimental testing, which implies television’s capacity to brainwash and manipulate its audience. The word “VIDEORAPE” looming large in the opening panel also indicates television’s invasive and violent designs (11).

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 119 In confrontation with the wiles of television, the human subject is shown to be completely vulnerable and incapacitated, as exemplified by the reaction of a girl lured by television to “come into [her] body” – “she tried to scream but couldn’t” (11–12). Television’s power to hypnotize, if not paralyze, its viewers is also implied by the appropriation of David Foster Wallace’s passage describing people who “sit and face the same direction and stare at the same thing and then structure commercial-length conversations around the sorts of questions myopic car-crash witnesses might ask each other – ‘Did you just see what I just saw?’ ” (SSME 16). While the self is hijacked by television, reality is replaced by hyperreality. The applicability of Baudrillard’s theory to Sewing Shut My Eyes is suggested on several occasions, including the volume’s epigraph from “The Precession of Simulacra” and a quotation in “Telegenesicide” from “The Ecstasy of Communication.” The latter defines the schizophrenic self as one which “can no longer produce the limits of his own being” and has been reduced to “a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence” (SSME 15). The renunciation of agency reduces the subject to the status of an externally governed instrument, or, to quote Baudrillard’s phrase from the same essay, “a computer at the wheel” (146). Such is the case with the girl killing her father at television’s behest. Olsen ironically indicates the schizophrenic subject’s lack of self-awareness by having the 13-year-old girl comment on her deed using Baudrillard’s own dense words from “The Precession”: “The second-order simulacrum simplifies the problem by the absorption of appearances, or by the liquidation of the real” (14).20 Another schizophrenic product of the media-generated reality is the barely literate crazed admirer of Cindy Crawford, whose fan letter to her, broken into five parts, occupies all the panels of “Sewing Shut My Eyes.” In it, she admits to having literally “sewed shut [her] eyes” when the model “looked at [her] from the tv” and “said its inner beauty whats important” (79, sic). The girl describes her complete alienation from her parents and peers at school and finishes the letter with a plea to her idol to “come hold [her] in [her] arms” (81). Her immersion in the mediagenerated reality prevents her from fostering any healthy relationships and pushes her to embrace a simulation reality, which results in an act of self-mutilation. She is the embodiment of the Baudrillardian schizo – a subject “living in the greatest confusion,” deprived of “interiority” and unable to “produce the limits of his own being” (Baudrillard 153). Another social phenomenon addressed in “Sewing Shut” which could be examined through the lens of “The Ecstasy of Communication” is what Baudrillard calls “obscenity.” It is an obliteration of the distinction between private and public space, as a result of which “the most intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media,” and thus all secrets and intimacy are annihilated (150–51). The Olsens’ work could be said to confront the obscenity of celebrity culture,

120  Society in Crisis focusing in particular on the world of fashion. The seven female models whose quotations are included in the text were at the time the stars of tabloids and glossy magazines, which are notorious for their unhealthy interest in celebrities’ private lives. The deranged fan’s reference to Crawford’s recent divorce from Richard Gere is a subtle manifestation of this collapse of the private sphere, as a consequence of which – to quote Sewing Shut’s blurb – “pain has become home theater and given enough channels, watching would beat sex.” The idea of sex being outstripped by television is also indebted to Baudrillard’s essay, in which the philosopher diagnoses the replacement of “hot, sexual obscenity” by its “cold, communicational” equivalent and of “carnal promiscuity” by that of “superficial saturation” (150–51). Olsen resumes his exploration of the schizophrenic subject in Dreamlives of Debris, whose eponymous character embodies the idea of the self as “a pure screen” and “a switching center for all the networks of influence.” One of the manifestations of that sense of “switching” is the instability of her identity, which makes her oscillate between speaking of herself in the first and the third person.21 Her consciousness becomes the site of a chaotic confrontation of multiple texts. Olsen sees Debris’s textual construction as emblematic of the textuality of human consciousness – its reducibility to Barthes’s definition of the text as a space where various writings (and consciousnesses, Olsen adds) clash with one another (Interview by Tedesco). The result of this ongoing confrontation of a wide array of texts is confusion, to which Debris admits on numerous occasions: “I don’t know what any of those words mean”; “I don’t understand myself”; “I’m never sure.” Her sense of bewilderment and experience of being lost are conveyed through the novel’s central metaphor of the maze. Olsen elaborated on that idea in an interview by Alex Behr: In our post-facts contemporary, one could argue it’s become that sort of maze all the way down. I imagine it, therefore, not just as a structure, then, but as a method of knowing, a method of being, an extended and dense metaphor for our current sense of presentness – the impression, for instance, that we are always awash in massive, contradictory, networked, centerless data fields that may lead everywhere and nowhere at once. (“Choreography”) Olsen went on to specify that he had in mind a particular kind of maze – “an impossible liquid architecture that bears no center and hence no discernible perimeter” (“Choreography”). Rather than having one way in, one way out and a firm middle, as is the case with the traditional codex, the World Wide Web, and digital culture at large, has multiple points of ingress and egress. The variety of hyperlinks allowing for constant

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 121 detours turn the pursuit of information into a rhizomatic path, which offers no guarantee that one will reach their destination. Olsen’s portrayal of the hyperconnected world is highly dystopian. References to the malicious computer worm called Stuxnet as well as to the viral pandemic caused by email messages ironically entitled “I Love You” emphasize the vulnerability of all interconnected networks. A brief account of how “a forkful of infected chimpanzee meat” eaten by a teenager in Kinshasa developed into the global pandemic of AIDS throughout sixty years indicates that viral dangers are not confined to the virtual world and can claim the lives of thirty-five million people. The inclusion of fragments of correspondence between Brigitte Reimann and Susan Sontag, both of whom went on to die of cancer, reinforces the sense of anxiety and vulnerability, which the continued advance of medicine is unable to allay. Debris’s early mention of her doll named Catastrophe prefigures the novel’s preoccupation with cataclysms past and future. The catalogue of real and imagined catastrophic events includes references to the Minoan eruption of Thera from the mid-second millennium bce, Plato’s myth of Atlantis, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 (by invoking the writings of Pliny the Elder, who died in the aftermath of the blast), the Black Death pandemic in the fourteenth century and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. There is an acute sense in Dreamlives that the not too distant future will bring equally, if not more, cataclysmic events. One of the dystopic scenarios considered in Dreamlives is the aftermath of global warming, which is the subject of “:::: JUSTIN BIEBER SONG.”22 The novel’s concern with ecology – one of the central issues in Theories of Forgetting23 – situates Olsen within what Peter Boxall calls in Twenty-First-Century Fiction “[t]he contemporary imagination,” which is “haunted by the prospect of planetary death, of irreversible environmental disaster” (14). Both Dreamlives and Theories could also be numbered among twentyfirst-century “apocalyptic fictions,” which Andrew Tate defines as texts “characterized by a certain kind of pre-apocalyptic anxiety,” “haunted by dreams of a future that is a place of ruin” and featuring characters (often narrators) who “fear that their societies exist on the brink, for better or worse, of an imminent, radical change” (2, 8).24 The two novels also share some of the concerns of the emerging genres of cli-fi and anthropocene fiction.25 The mixture of fear, anxiety and false reassurance about humanity’s prospects are evoked in a Beckettian litany delivered by Debris: “Meaning the worst is still to come, was still to come, will still be to come, has come, had come, is coming, has been coming, might come, will have come, would have come, but not today, and already.” The novel’s “sense of an ending” pervades the companion soundtrack which Olsen has chosen for Dreamlives. In the selection elicited by the Largehearted Boy online magazine can be found songs entitled “It’s the End of the World

122  Society in Crisis as We Know It” (R.E.M.), “Exit Music” (Radiohead) and “The Future” (Leonard Cohen), whose lines “I’ve seen the future, brother/It is murder/ Things are going to slide, slide in all directions/Won’t be nothing/Nothing you can measure anymore” sound as if they could be spoken by Debris herself (“Book Notes”). Several bleak visions of the future are conveyed through fragments of the Swedish philosopher Nick Bolstrom’s TED talk, in which he formulates the hypothesis that “the human species will go extinct before reaching a posthuman stage,” suggesting that the end of humanity may be closer than generally assumed. An echo of angst about the prospect of post-humanism can be read into Debris’s mention of her “next donation,” which besides being a reference to the custom of offering sacrificial victims to propitiate the Minotaur can be interpreted as an intertextual allusion to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) – a dystopic vision of a reality where clones are bred and reared for the sole purpose of giving “donations” of their vital organs to humans. In his earlier referenced commentary on Ishiguro’s novel, Boxall asserts the emergence in twentyfirst-century literature of “a new kind of hybridity, a new category of being that emerges from the failed connection . . . between the human and the non-human” (101). Olsen’s Debris, who came into being from the union of Pasiphaë and a bull, could perhaps also be seen as symbolic of the bleak prospect of post-humanism, indicated by her Frankensteinian desolate alienation culminating in what can be interpreted as a suicidal jump into the abyss. Head in Flames addresses very different concerns to those articulated in Dreamlives of Debris and Sewing Shut My Eyes, but its social diagnosis is no less pessimistic. Its engagement with crisis could be examined on the level of the social context and of individual characters, which will be discussed first. Notably, each of the novel’s three focalizers is shown at a critical point of their life. For Vincent, 29 July 1890 – the day when he commits suicide – is the culmination of his most intense period, marked by deteriorating mental health and an unprecedented outpouring of creativity accompanied by the growing anxiety about the decline of his talent. His last moments show little of the “lust for life” with which he has come to be associated in popular culture. Olsen shows his departure not as a passionate act of a deranged genius but as a gradual fading, marked by quiet despair. For Theo, 2 November 2004 was supposed to be an ordinary working day, but it came amid an anxious and emotionally trying time. Before making Submission, he is quoted as making light of Hirsi Ali’s concern about the danger of associating his name with the project and remarks that “no one shoots the village idiot” (HF 109). However, following the broadcast of the film on national television Theo received many death threats, as a result of which his public appearances had to be accompanied by increased security. Also, his friends reported that he was apprehensive

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 123 about his safety during the upcoming flight to the United States. Olsen illustrates that sense of foreboding in Theo by making him review in his consciousness the gory details of the assassination of his friend and political ally Pim Fortuyn while cycling to his death down the Linnaeusstraat. This passage foreshadows the painfully precise thirty-page sequence reporting on his own agony while receiving consecutive bullets from Bouyeri. His long struggle, marked by bewilderment – ­manifest in van Gogh’s reputedly last words, “Can’t we talk about this?” (125) – and sustained by “[t]he fierce desire to always be here” (129), ends with the ninth bullet. Of the three protagonists, Bouyeri appears the one most in control of his life, for the most part of the novel methodically realizing his plan to assassinate Theo. In that respect, he is not in a state of crisis; on the contrary, he feels elated and hopes “these minutes will last forever” (131). The murder is not an act of desperation, but the culmination of the most purposeful period of his otherwise desultory life. And yet his thoughts on that day go over several painful rifts experienced as a consequence of his radicalization: the row with his father concluding in his “disgusted” look conveying that he wants “nothing to do with his son anymore” (13) and the last meeting with his sister, whose confession of premarital sex made him slap her “across her filthy mouth” and call her a “fucking whore” (75–76). It is unclear, however, if Bouyeri regards those scenes with regret or self-congratulation. The note of confusion and anxiety only comes into his voice after the execution is over and, to his amazement, he finds himself still alive. He appears utterly unprepared for the prospect of facing any kind of afterlife, which signifies the indefinite deferral of his glorious ascension to reunite with Allah and which is to bring upon him life imprisonment without parole. The idea that Olsen’s novel is a portrayal of a self, or selves, in crisis is implied by the title phrase. A “head in flames”26 evokes associations with an individual whose equilibrium is disturbed as a result of emotional upheaval. Besides that general meaning, as John Madera perceptively notes, the title refers to different aspects of the personality or appearance of the main characters. Vincent is once described wearing “his hat rimmed with shivering candles,” in which he is said to look like “a flaming sunflower in the night” (HF 170). In Theo’s case, the flames stand figuratively for his “burn[ing] . . . indignation about religious intolerance” (Madera) and can be related to his “wild blond head” (HF 129). Bouyeri, Madera argues, has his “head in flames” in the sense that he is “a hothead,” since “his mind burns with hatred, prejudice, and bitterness, as well as his own confusion” (Olsen, “O for a Muse”). Besides the earlier observations of a strictly personal nature, Bouyeri can be regarded both as a victim and a catalyst of social crisis in Holland. Following the first interpretation, it is possible to see his radicalization as primarily determined by the continued humiliation since his school

124  Society in Crisis days, which he has only recently learnt to notice, name and rebel against. Among the several insights which Olsen provides into the socio-economic status of Muslim immigrants in Holland are the following narraticules: How you could neither blame your parents and their friends nor rely on them as they swept the Netherlands’ streets hauled away its rubbish cut its grass scrubbed its toilets mopped its floors cooked its food filled its potholes hosed its busses squeegeed its shop windows. (15) Almost forty years in this country eight children a cramped flat a dishwasher’s salary and your father has to sit in a chair when he prays. (25) There is a strong sense that an affluent country like Holland could afford to offer better economic prospects to immigrants who have lived in the country for decades. Bouyeri grows to be disgusted at the hypocrisy of the Dutch “boasting about their long history of tolerance while willfully forgetting the opportunism wrapped up inside it” – their sense of racial superiority implicit in the statement “Welcome to our country now shut the fuck up and scour our fucking toilets you fucking muzzies” (62). The reality of tacit social discrimination strikes Bouyeri also when he tries to court “braless Dutch girls,” who consistently rejected his advances regardless of what he said and how kind he was to them (27). All of those aspects amount to a portrait of the turn-of-the-century Holland as a society wrought by quiet prejudice and discrimination. The sobering realization of socio-economic exclusion, aggravated by the rise of the political right represented by outspoken critics of Islam such as Fortuyn and van Gogh, is indicated by the novel as the genesis for Bouyeri’s act, which was to deepen the social divisions in Holland to an alarming degree. The wordless violence of Bouyeri’s gratuitously brutal murder confronted with van Gogh’s agonized plea to “talk about this” offered itself as a graphic illustration of Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis (formulated a decade earlier) about the upcoming “clash of civilizations.” The fact that in the relationship between van Gogh and Bouyeri sharing Dutch nationality and language was of far less importance than their experience of coming from radically different religious traditions could be regarded as a confirmation of Huntington’s intuition that, following the end of Cold War, cultural and religious allegiances were going to replace political ones as “the flash points for crisis and bloodshed.” Huntington closes his famous 1993 article with the prediction that shortly “there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations” and that each of them “will have to learn to coexist with the others.” In view of that statement, Bouyeri’s act can be interpreted as a severe blow to the left-wing belief in the possibility of

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 125 creating a harmonious multicultural state and as evidence of the potential consequences of failed intercultural coexistence. Although no critic has invoked his name, one could trace Huntingtonian echoes in the reception of Head in Flames. One reviewer praised the novel for its “great power” resulting from its “unflinching confrontation with painful salients in the conflict of civilizations commonly called the clash of Islam and the West” (Foley). Another critic invoked Theo’s “ridiculous final words” as the evidence that he “died not understanding” in the final act of “a tragedy beyond words” caused by the “cultural and ideological fissures between the West and Islam” (“Head in Flames”). Olsen himself sees the irreconcilable conflict between Bouyeri and van Gogh as rooted less in religion than in the attitude towards relativism. He refers to Jean-François Lyotard’s notions of the demise of grand narratives and the related idea of communication as a network of language games as the context for postmodernity’s shift from the belief in a single truth to the acceptance of a multiplicity of meanings and possible perspectives. Despite his rhetorical radicalism, Theo grows out of that tradition, which Bouyeri rightly sees as a threat to religious orthodoxy. His decision to murder his adversary – in Olsen’s words – “violently terminates the possibility of language, the possibility of play, the possibility of conversation that is and should be unresolvable” (“O for a Muse”). The social aftermath of Bouyeri’s act, which could be called the crisis of tolerance or of faith in a multicultural society, is left for the reader to imagine, as the novel ends with the assassin’s capture. The social unrest triggered in reality was acute and made the headlines of international newspapers for weeks. Five days after van Gogh’s assassination, The Guardian referred to it as “the murder that shattered Holland’s liberal dream” and reported that the Dutch were “gripped by tension, anger and insecurity.” The situation was escalating and the prospects were “grim,” as the event seemed to have “catalysed a steady erosion of the Dutch tradition of moderation and self-censorship on race and religion” (Burke). Ian Buruma’s book-length account of the murder and its repercussions, published in 2006, notes numerous incidents of retaliation (arson attempts in mosques and Muslim schools across Holland) and counter-retaliation (attacks on Christian churches) (7). The media added to the mood of hysteria by using phrases such as “the country is burning” and giving disproportionate coverage to petty incidents, such as the imam from Tilburg’s refusal to shake hands with the Dutch minister for the integration of minorities. The latter image, Buruma observes, was taken as “a prime symbol of the Dutch crisis, of the collapse of multiculturalism, the end of a sweet dream of tolerance and light in the most progressive little enclave of Europe” (8). There is a trace of irony in Buruma’s use of such grand words but perhaps they were not such a great exaggeration since Olsen, speaking from the vantage point of 2010, maintained that Dutch society perceived van Gogh’s assassination as “its own 9/11 in miniature” and

126  Society in Crisis “a crisis of the Enlightenment tradition of secular reason that their culture champions.”

Conclusion Olsen’s consistent engagement with the form of collage and the theme of crisis is not an accidental pairing. By confronting numerous incompatible images and opinions, his works convey the sense of the contemporary as riven by social, political and religious difference, as well as disoriented by the abundance of media stimuli. Their construction out of fragmented textual and visual components, on the other hand, evokes a sense of urgency and restlessness and points to the experiences of loss and lack. Alongside the myriad crises addressed in Olsen’s fiction, there is also what he calls the “crisis of reading” – one which is not so much represented as enacted, or imposed on the reader by the form of the work. The a-maze-ment and alienation of Debris are conjured up in the reader through the novel’s pagelessness and the dominance of empty space. Each consecutive chunk of Dreamlives is meant to “feel a little like every click of our mouse on the web: a moment of disorientation followed by a moment of orientation followed, unfailingly, by a moment of disorientation, forever” (“Choreography”).27 That experience of being buffeted from orientation to disorientation, from comprehension to incomprehension is vital to all of Olsen’s works and, in fact, to all effective collage.

Notes 1. An earlier version of small parts of this chapter appeared in an article of mine entitled “Collage and Crisis in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland and Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames,” published in Notre Dame Review. 2. A notion introduced by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen in Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (2001) and defined as “the degree to which an element draws attention to itself” through one or a combination of factors including “its size, its place in the foreground or its overlapping of other elements, its colour, its tonal values [and] its sharpness or definition” (210). 3. Apart from Times New Roman, “Telegenesicide” uses Helvetica and Typewriter typefaces. 4. The only other panel which features a considerable degree of fragmentary text is panel three in “Pentapod Freak Nest,” whose entire background consists of a thirty-one-line enumeration of synonyms for “penis.” Each line begins and ends with a cut word, like “LITTL –,” “ROLL –,” and “SWE –” (39). 5. The similarity between teeth and drugs could be interpreted as an indication of television’s addictive influence. 6. Nettles mocks this recurrent thematic concern throughout the collection by stating, “TV bad. Got it.” 7. Madera calls him “a maverick and outsider always sharpshooting from the hip” (Olsen, “O for a Muse”).

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 127 8. Olsen noted that yet another contrast between the three protagonists is their “radically different view of what art was, why it was, how it functioned and should function.” Theo treats art as an instrument of “political critique,” Bouyeri sees it as a “monologic polemic,” while Vincent – as “existential and aesthetic exploration” (“O for a Muse”). 9. Olsen’s remarks on the connotations of the bold typeface are consistent with those contained in Theo van Leeuwen’s article “Towards a Semiotics of Typography.” Van Leeuwen notes that bold can either evoke associations of “daring” and “solid” or of “domineering” and “overbearing” (148). All of those qualities are applicable to Theo’s personality. Olsen’s use of three distinct fonts mirrors Mark Z. Danielewski’s employment of three t­ypefaces – Times New Roman, Courier and Bookman – to distinguish between the layers of narrative in House of Leaves (Gibbons, Multimodality 47–48). 10. When asked about this dilemma and his preferred order of reading, Olsen first pointed to the chronological sequence of interspersed narraticules, which brings out the consonances and dissonances between the adjacent passages, but then added, “I like that being a problem” (Personal interview). 11. A position similar to Weinberg’s is expressed in a remark inconclusively attributed to Denis Diderot and Émile Zola: “Civilization will not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest” (76). Surprisingly, it is channeled not by Theo but Vincent, whose attitude towards Christianity did fluctuate throughout his life but at no point was decidedly hostile. 12. Although rare, there are also juxtapositions occurring within a given passage, especially in Bouyeri’s part. Examples of such paratactic structures, following the Joint relation, include the two following complete narraticules: “Backstreet Boys Ricky Martin Sugar Ray Cher” (23) and “Daniel Pearl Nicholas Berg Kim Sun-il” (46). The former contains some of Bouyeri’s favourite Western singers and bands, while the latter enumerates victims of Islamist terrorism. 13. Both this statement and the earlier quoted question asked of the owner function as the novel’s recurrent lines or refrains. Among several more passages that appear more than once across Head in Flames are Vincent’s opening words, “I am standing inside the color yellow” (1, 180). The use of refrains, as well as other connecting motifs, is a manifestation of the novel’s indebtedness to musical composition. For Olsen, it is a characteristic feature of all collage fiction, which in the title of his essay he refers to as the “musicality of creative disjunction.” 14. The general brevity of narraticules has been noted by Schneiderman, who has called Head in Flames “the first or at least the most interesting twitter/ facebook novel” (original spelling), observing that most passages are under 140 characters, which constituted Twitter’s space limit at the time. 15. The title of each “song” is preceded by a quadruple colon, which in his nonfiction work [[there.]] (2014) Olsen defines as “what cannot be accurately articulated” (qtd. in Gibbons, “Fragments” 198). Another unconventional punctuation mark used in Dreamlives are double brackets – [[]] – which stand for “what must be removed from the chronic to be experienced” (Brunvand). 16. As noted before, Dreamlives of Debris is unpaginated, hence no page numbers are given in parenthetical references. 17. “:::: Catastrophe Chorus” is dominated by white space, as the retained words are very few. Blank space takes over completely in the “choruses” of Athena, Poseidon, Bull of Heaven and Minos. When asked about the significance of their silence, Olsen replied that gods’ words cannot be heard by

128  Society in Crisis humans (Personal interview). That explanation, however, accounts only for the blank space in Athena’s and Poseidon’s “choruses.” 18. The foreword to Dreamlives, entitled “how to lose your breath,” is not paginated. 19. In “Entropology and the End of Nature in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting,” Alison Gibbons discusses the significance of the Spiral Jetty to the novel’s discussion of the vulnerability of life on earth, which is subtly signalled by the fading saturation of Andi Olsen’s photographs as the novel progresses (288). 20. Olsen has asserted the importance of Baudrillard’s theory to Avant-Pop artists in his critical article for The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, where he outlines two possible responses to Baudrillard’s diagnosis: “to embrace . . . an array of neo-realisms for a hyper-mediated, late-stage capitalist ‘reality’ that is no longer perceived to be real” or to “create compositions that focus on the very problematics of representation itself” (“AvantPop” 206). Sewing Shut, with its disturbing imagery and the focus on media representation, could be regarded as combining the two approaches. 21. Another symptom of that general instability of identity is the fluid nature of gender illustrated by Bradley Manning’s transition into Chelsea Manning (announced in the ex-soldier’s post-sentence statement, which is quoted verbatim in two sections of “:::: BRADLEY MANNING SONG”). It is reinforced by Olsen’s decision to change the gender of two mythical figures – Tiresias (who is consistently referred to as Lady Tiresias) and the Minotaur. The fluidity of gender is important for Olsen as one of the aspects of the Heraclitian, or protean, notion of existence, which conceives of the self as constantly metamorphosing (Personal interview). 22. The section begins with the young pop star’s imagined remark – “who gives a fuck about global warming anyway?” – and goes on to include a pastiche of the arguments delivered by its deniers. 23. An incisive reading of the novel through the lens of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of entropology is offered in Gibbons’s earlier noted article “Entropology and the End of Nature in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting.” 24. Among the examples considered in Tate’s book are Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2007) and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13). 25. As outlined, most notably, in Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (2015). 26. Schneiderman observes that the phrase predates Olsen’s novel and can be found in Shelley Jackson’s short story “Nerve” (2002). 27. What Olsen calls the “crisis of reading” could be related to Wolfgang Hallet’s critical discussion of the contemporary multimodal novel as enacting a conceptual shift “from reading to transmodal construction of narrative meaning.” Rather than merely turning pages, the reader is “engaged in constructing a holistic mental model of the textual world in which she/he incorporates data from different semiotic sources and modes” (150).

Works Cited Baetens, Jan. “Illustrations, Images, and Anti-Illustrations.” Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick. MIT Press, 2003, pp. 179–200. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” Translated by John Johnston, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. Bay Press, 1983, pp. 145–54.

It’s the End of the World as We Know It 129 “Book Notes – Lance Olsen Dreamlives of Debris.” Largehearted Boy, 3 Apr. 2017, www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2017/04/book_notes_lanc_2. html. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2013. Brunvand, Amy. “Threads of Mythology in Lance Olsen’s Dreamlives of Debris.” Artists of Utah, Artists of Utah, 28 Jan. 2018, http://artistsofutah. org/15Bytes/index.php/threads-of-mythology-in-lance-olsens-dreamlives-ofdebris/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Burke, Jason. “The Murder That Shattered Holland’s Liberal Dream.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 7 Nov. 2004, www.theguardian.com/ world/2004/nov/07/terrorism.religion. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Buruma, Ian. Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. Penguin, 2006. Cherry, Kelly. “Lance Olsen: The Art of the New.” Hollins Critic, vol. 50, no. 5, 2013, pp. 1+. Cone, Jon. Review of Dreamlives of Debris, by Lance Olsen. Entropy Magazine, Accomplices LLC, 9 Oct. 2017, https://entropymag.org/review-dreamlives-ofdebris-by-lance-olsen/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Drąg, Wojciech. “Collage and Crisis in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland and Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames.” Notre Dame Review, no. 48, Summer–Fall 2019, forthcoming. “Dreamlives of Debris.” Lance Olsen, n.d., www.lanceolsen.com/dod.html. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Foley, J. R. “Van Gogh in Flames.” Review of Head in Flames, by Lance Olsen. Flashpoint Magazine, n.d., www.flashpointmag.com/headinflames.htm. Accessed 8 Aug. 2019. Gibbons, Alison. “Entropology and the End of Nature in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting.” Textual Practice, vol. 33, 2019, pp. 280–99. ———. “Fragments of a Postscript.” The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, edited by Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drąg. Vernon, 2019, pp. 197–205. ———. Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. Routledge, 2012. Hallet, Wolfgang. “The Multimodal Novel: The Integration of Modes and Media in Novelistic Narration.” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, edited by Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer. Walter de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 129–53. “Head in Flames.” LanceOlsen.com, n.d., www.lanceolsen.com/hif.html. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1993-06-01/clash-civiliza tions. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. Arnold, 2001. Leeuwen, Theo van. “Towards a Semiotics of Typography.” Information Design Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, 2006, pp. 139–55. Nettles, John G. “Stabbing Smoke.” Pop Matters, n.d., www.popmatters.com/ books/reviews/s/sewing-shut-my-eyes.html. Accessed 21 Apr. 2017. Olsen, Lance. Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing. In collaboration with Trevor Dodge. Guide Dog, 2012.

130  Society in Crisis ———. “Avant-Pop.” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. Routledge, 2012, pp. 199–211. ———. “The Choreography of Reading.” Interview by Alex Behr. Propeller Magazine, Propeller Publishing LLC, Sept. 2017, www.propellermag.com/ Sept2017/BehrOlsenSept17.html. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. ———. “The Complexities of a Moment Felt.” Interview by Scott Esposito. The Quarterly Conversation, 5 Apr. 2010, http://quarterlyconversation.com/thecomplexities-of-a-moment-felt-the-lance-olsen-interview. Accessed 21 Apr. 2017. ———. Dreamlives of Debris. Dzanc, 2017. ———. “Fourteen Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction, or: Fiction by Collage.” Symploke, vol. 12, no. 1, 2005, pp. 130–35. ———. Head in Flames. Chiasmus, 2009. ———. “Hideous Beauties.” Interview by J.R. Foley. Flashpoint Magazine, n.d, www.flashpointmag.com/hbeauty.htm. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. ———. Interview by Adam Tedesco. Tarpaulin Sky, Tarpaulin Sky Press, n.d., https://tarpaulinsky.com/2018/09/lance-olsen-interview/. Accessed 21 Apr. 2017. ———. “O for a Muse of Fire.” Interview by John Madera. Rain Taxi Review of Books, Rain Taxi, n.d., www.raintaxi.com/o-for-a-muse-of-fire-an-interviewwith-lance-olsen/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. ———. Personal interview. 5 Sept. 2018. Riedel, Bob. Review of Freaknest and Sewing Shut My Eyes, by Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen. New York Press, 17 Nov. 2000, www.nypress.com/reviewsof-lance-olsens-freaknest-and-sewing-shut-my-eyes-plus-brian-evensons-conta gion/. Accessed 21 Apr. 2017. Schneiderman, Davis. “On Lance Olsen’s Latest, Head in Flames.” Big Other, 24 Mar. 2010, https://bigother.com/2010/03/24/on-lance-olsens-latest-head-inflames/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Singer, Jacob. Review of Dreamlives of Debris, by Lance Olsen. Fiction Advocate, 1 Nov. 2017, http://fictionadvocate.com/2017/11/01/dreamlives-of-debris-bylance-olsen/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Yuknavitch, Lidia. Foreword. Dreamlives of Debris, by Lance Olsen. Dzanc, 2017.

5 When We Were Human Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland and The Book of Portraiture

This chapter aims to continue the examination of the use of collage as a response to twenty-first-century social crises.1 The term “social” will be understood very broadly and will also include the changes induced by the advances in science, technology and the media. The texts under analysis are two early novels of Steve Tomasula – VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) and The Book of Portraiture (2006). The organization will be analogous to that of the previous chapters: a brief introduction to the author and the considered works followed by a discussion of their collage properties and an exploration of their engagement with crisis. Both novels lend themselves to a joint analysis owing to their formal similarities and their shared thematic interests, which prompted Tomasula to declare that they could, in fact, be called “two volumes of the same book” (Chevaillier 118). Tomasula is the author of five novels, a collection of short stories and many academic essays and shorter fictions. Alongside Lance Olsen, he is among the most important and most acclaimed authors of contemporary experimental fiction in the United States. In a recent report on the ninth edition of the &NOW Festival of innovative writing, founded by Tomasula in 2004, The Guardian referred to him as a “cult novelist” (Thomlinson). The characteristic qualities of Tomasula’s writing are intense visuality and multimodality, generic hybridity and an abiding interest in science, philosophy and the arts. His formal audacity is arguably most apparent in TOC: A New-Media Novel (2009), which was published first as a DVD and five years later – as an iPad app. A large collaborative enterprise involving designers, programmers, animators and composers, TOC investigates various conceptions of time through a multimedia collage of text, image, animation and sound. That work earned Tomasula the Mary Shelley Award for Excellence in Fiction and the eLit Award for Best Book of the Year. Tomasula obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was also a faculty member. Since the turn of the century, he has been a professor at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches creative writing and contemporary literature. Although he is

132  Society in Crisis primarily known as a novelist, Tomasula is also the author of a number of academic articles focusing on post-humanism, bioart, the new media and various aspects of formally innovative fiction, including texts on the most important representatives of American postmodernism, such as Robert Coover, Raymond Federman and Ronald Sukenick. Out of all the authors considered in this book, Tomasula has attracted the most critical attention. Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction (2015), an edited volume by David Banash, offers a selection of comprehensive readings of all of Tomasula’s novels as well as of his collection of short fiction Once Human: Stories (2014). Banash and Andrea Spain begin their introduction to the volume by positing that Tomasula is the writer whose arrival was long awaited by J.G. Ballard – an author whose work would “engage the unprecedented changes in human perceptions and experiences of everyday life that science was inevitably producing” (1). They also argue that his output, in which “the biological and the cultural are enmeshed,” cannot be understood without taking into consideration the myriad contexts of hypertexts, video games, digital networks and bioart (4, 14). Tomasula’s literary debut, VAS: An Opera in Flatland is a 370-pagelong collage novel addressing the dilemmas, anxieties and discontents of humanity on the brink of entering a post-human phase. The book borrows its setting and cast of characters from the nineteenth-century science fiction classic Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) by Edwin A. Abbott – a novella set in a two-dimensional world populated by geometrical figures and narrated by a square named A Square. In VAS, Square is faced with the task of undergoing voluntary vasectomy in order to free his wife, Circle, from further complications of becoming pregnant. What initially appears to him as a short and painless procedure assumes increasing gravity and raises serious doubts, which he ultimately suppresses to fulfil his promise. Whereas one of Abbott’s aims was to satirize the narrow-mindedness of Victorian England, symbolized by Flatland’s residents’ militant opposition to the idea of the possible existence of a third dimension, Tomasula targets the broader myopia of humanity, focusing on the pitfalls of the naïve beliefs in the idea of progress and in the certitudes of science. According to Grzegorz Maziarczyk, VAS could be read as “an allegorical story about a (post)modern everyman living at the turn of the twenty-first century” (Novel 145). Despite the novel’s universal scope, it is very closely tied to the contemporary. The fragmentation, chaos and media-saturation of the turn-of-the-century experience is rendered in the form of an exuberant multimodal collage, which Olsen has called “an unforgettably unique reading experience” (“Fourteen Notes” 188) and which Paweł Frelik has referred to as “one of the most challenging-looking novels of the last fifty years” (“Book” 233). VAS, which was originally conceived as one of the chapters of The Book of Portraiture, remains Tomasula’s most critically acclaimed and commercially successful work to date. Its multimodal richness – to be

When We Were Human 133 examined in a separate section – is the result of collaboration with art designer Stephen Farrell. His third novel, a “historical book,” as Tomasula calls it in the acknowledgements section (BP 328), has a much greater chronological and generic span, which extends from an ancient parable to a present-day dystopia. It begins with a short chapter recounting the story of a nomad trader who invents the phonetic alphabet and renames himself “Moses.” The second chapter is, for the most part, narrated by Diego Velázquez and focuses on the circumstances of his arrival and service at the court of King Philip IV, particularly on his brush with the Inquisition. Like several other parts, it contains deliberate anachronisms, which include the painter’s reference to Harold Bloom’s notion of the “anxiety of influence” and the Inquisition’s allusion to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (71, 75). Chapter three is a pastiche of a psychoanalytic report about the case of a young woman diagnosed as suffering the symptoms of sexual deprivation. Offered in the form of a diary, the psychoanalyst’s account abounds in subtly sexist and racist remarks as well as archaic convictions suggesting the general misguidedness of psychoanalysis and its implication in the prejudices of the day despite the pretence of independent scientific inquiry. The fourth chapter, by far the longest and the most disorienting in the novel, assembles the stories of nine professionals – from a pharmacy cashier to a digital photograph retoucher – who fall victim of, or exploit, the dangers and possibilities afforded by the world on the verge of a digital revolution. In the final chapter, Tomasula juxtaposes the story of laboratory workers Mary and Paul, who devise a bioart project reminiscent of the works of Eduardo Kac, and the tale of Saroush and his dying daughter Fatima set in an Arab country. In an interview, Tomasula notes that the “controlling idea” of much of his fiction is “the relationship between our world and the representations we make of it” (Banash, Afterword 289). That statement is most evidently applicable to The Book of Portraiture, whose title attracts attention to the importance of acts of representation. The reader is thus invited to interpret each chapter as an account of a different stage or medium in the evolution of the human conceptualization of the portrait: “the alphabet, painting, dreams, digital imaging and spliced DNA” (Frelik, “Reading”). The novel received very favourable reviews praising its “breathtaking” “historical sweep” (Moore 16) and its zestful “reimagin[ing of] what the novel, particularly the historical novel, might mean in the digital world” (Wark 55), as well as Tomasula’s continued effort, inaugurated by the publication of VAS, “to reshape the novel to accommodate technology, artistic, social, and sexual history” (Barrett).

Collage Structure As regards layout, typography and visual qualities, VAS: An Opera in Flatland and The Book of Portraiture are among the most experimental and

134  Society in Crisis varied works discussed in this book. Consequently, much of the ensuing analysis will be concerned with those aspects of Tomasula’s work. Owing to significant formal differences between the two texts (and despite certain similarities), their collage structure – far more evident in the case of VAS – will be considered separately. Although Tomasula sees his works as more indebted to the organizing principle of emergence – understood as “the process by which lower-level conditions and interactions give rise to higher-order behaviors, patterns, formations, meanings” – than collage (Tomasula, “Emergence” 13–14), I will argue that collage remains a productive category for interpreting his works, which meet most, if not all, of the formal criteria adopted in my study. Among the numerous critics who have used the collage label towards one or both novels in question are David Banash, Erin Frauenhofer, Grzegorz Maziarczyk, Lance Olsen, Françoise Sammarcelli and Anthony Enns, who called VAS “one of the most ambitious collage novels ever created” (51). VAS: An Opera in Flatland Tomasula’s novelistic debut is a compendium of multimodal possibilities – offering seven out of eight features of multimodal texts specified by Alison Gibbons (2) – which include experiments in page design, layout and typography; the extensive use of images; and generic hybridity. For that reason, the multimodal richness of VAS will be discussed as the first and most important collage quality of the work. I shall then outline the ­novel’s reliance on the related notion of heterogeneity and the uses of appropriation and juxtaposition – the book’s organizing formal principle. The fragmentariness and reversibility of VAS will be noted briefly at the end of the section. There is not a single page in VAS which follows the conventional layout of the novel – a continuous block of text with a consistent typeface and incidental paragraph indentation. In an interview by Sandra Bettencourt, Tomasula speaks of the significance he attaches to laying out his books: “[it] is part of writing for me, as it would be for a poet, thinking about how lines work together, or how the text will work on the page as a whole, or how an image can carry narrative weight” (Tomasula, “Novel” 156).2 One of the most characteristic formal traits of VAS is its extensive use of images – over 150 pages contain graphs, diagrams, stamps, drawings, print screens, scans, X-rays and photographs. The vast majority of pages that do not feature any images (and some that do) contain vertical lines on the outer side, which look a little like “margin identifiers” (Gibbons 86). Their number ranges from one to five and, according to Tomasula, reflects the number of voices, and fonts, incorporated on the page (Personal interview). The correspondence between them, however, is far from regular. The stencilled lines, which remain “the most consistent feature of the novel’s design” (Gibbons 86), appear to have been devised to

When We Were Human 135 evoke the musical scale (gesturing towards the operatic theme, signalled by the novel’s subtitle) and the double helix (echoing the book’s interest in genetics) (Tomasula, Personal interview). Several critics have pointed out analogies between the layout of individual pages in VAS and that of websites (Maziarczyk, Novel 250; Sammarcelli 88) and digital works (Olsen, “Ontological Metalepses” 218). Pages 253–77, for instance, employ many graphically edited print screens of turn-of-the-century web pages as well as scattered Internet icons with inscriptions such as “Begin Search” (253), “click here” (258) and “Reset” (276). Maziarczyk notes that the structure of Tomasula’s novel “resembles very much that of hypertext with its web of links” (Novel 250), while Sammarcelli makes a more general observation about VAS’s employment of “internet aesthetics” in its pastiche of “information overload” (88).3 That strategy can be regarded as an instance of “intermedial evocation” – a notion introduced by Werner Wolf to account for the phenomenon of a medium “imitat[ing] the effects of another medium” (255). Although individual layouts are occasionally governed by radical economy,4 the sense of overload can indeed be experienced in confrontation with most pages. It is achieved through saturating the page with numerous textual and visual chunks and withholding any clues as to the method according to which they should be perceived and assimilated. Tomasula intensifies the experience of information overload by incorporating unintelligible strings of binary digits, which form the background of page 265, and letters, like As, Cs, Gs and Ts, occupying the most part of pages 340–41. The most extreme instance of such an alienating mixture of incomprehensible data is a 22-page-long section offering the whole code of the gene sequence SHGC-110205 from chromosome 12 (Enns 64), with the embedded word “THE FACTS” towards its end. The sense of chaos created by the coexistence of diverse material on the same page is heightened by the novel’s typography. There are many pages which feature textual fragments in three different fonts. Besides, Tomasula consistently experiments with boldface – in most pages the letters contiguous to one of the vertical lines (either first or last in every horizontal line) are printed in bold type. Although the dominant font colour is black, VAS makes occasional use of brown and red in order to single out a specific phrase, such as the refrain “For the good of society,” which frequently appears in red. Apart from the several conventional fonts used interchangeably to mark intermixing voices, Tomasula sporadically employs unique typefaces, such as a barely legible Gothic font on page 51 (reminiscent of that used in William H. Gass’s amalgam of typographic possibilities – Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife [1968]) and the block capitals embedded in balloons, which recall the typographic conventions of comics.5 The extent of multimodal play in VAS can be illustrated by the double spread on pages 86–87. Near its centre lies a caption with the

136  Society in Crisis

Figure 5.1 Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (U of Chicago P, 2004), pp. 86–87.

recurrent phrase “A LINEAR PLOT” combined with the onomatopoeic “BTANNG!” – both elements strongly gesturing towards the visual poetics of the comics. The caption appears to announce the ensuing sequence of nine three-letter words in block capitals, which begins with “APE” and ends with “MAN” (both printed in black), offering seven intermediate stages of “evolution” composed of words differing from the neighbouring ones by a single letter (all in brown). The sequence evokes the gradual mutation of DNA, which is suggested both by the background of page 86 and the snippets of text on page 87. The former, which at first glance looks merely like a backdrop for the caption in the foreground, on closer inspection resembles the shape of a Greek column and the body of a woman (Tomasula, “Novel” 156). The concrete object is created out of the repetition of the chemical formula for salt. The shape of the column combined with the notion of salt and the phrase “PILLAR (NAME UNKNOWN)” at the top of the page are meant to create an association with Lot’s wife. Her transformation serves as the Biblical context for the metamorphosis of ape to man, which is invoked on the adjacent

When We Were Human 137 page. The allusion to Lot’s wife is evoked through multimodal means and requires that the reader should integrate textual and visual stimuli. The aim of many multimodal strategies in VAS is the construction of the “fleshy presence of book” (Enns 67). In the novel’s design, Tomasula is committed to creating visual analogies between the book and the human body. An in-depth analysis of VAS’s realization of the conceptual metaphor “people are books” is offered by Gibbons: The cover is a dappled peach colour, added to which are lines of greyish-blue. Undoubtedly, this is representative of skin and underlying veins. Additionally, the pages are printed in the colours of flesh and blood; they are an off-white shade, while text and image are presented in black, beige, or red. Furthermore, just like a human body, this book will age: as it is read, the spine will crease and it will effectively develop “wrinkles.” (98) Farrell adds that the red title on the cover is presented in such a way as to resemble a “scar” and that the intense red of the inside covers is meant to make the reader feel as if they were “peel[ing] back the skin to the blood” (qtd. in Enns 67). The rationale for pursuing the book-body analogy is described by Tomasula as rooted in the observation that with the advent of the “biotech revolution” genes have become as easily editable and manipulable as text (“Novel” 158). The implications of this shift will be discussed in the last section of this chapter. Most of the fleshy aspects of the novel’s design could scarcely be achieved in any other than the print form. Despite its earlier noted visual allusions to digital media, VAS remains firmly committed to the idea of the book as a physical object. Tomasula once noted that if the novel were to have “a palindrome relationship to the human body, it had to have a body, body text, and a spine,” and, for that reason, it was deliberately designed in a way that “couldn’t exist online” (“Novel” 163). This strategy of fully exploiting the possibilities afforded by the material page can be viewed in the context of hypermediacy – a notion introduced in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999) and defined as a “style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium” (272). Maziarczyk suggests that VAS, together with novels such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, may be seen as a reaction to the increasing marginalization of print and the challenges posed by digital media (“Print” 169). Related to multimodality is another collage aspect of Tomasula’s novel – the heterogeneity of its components. Besides the already asserted formal diversity, VAS is a generically hybrid work, as its myriad parts appear to follow the conventions of the novel, the essay, poetry and the

138  Society in Crisis comics. According to Maziarczyk, VAS integrates a multitude of generic codes because it “aspires to the condition of opera,” which is an amalgam of different art forms (Novel 252). Also, its thematic engagement comprises several fields of scientific inquiry including biology, philosophy, mathematics and logic, as well as literature and the visual arts. Among the novel’s recurring components are page-long descriptions of kid projects entitled “Science Rocks,” family trees, elaborate questionnaires and commercial ads, all of which enhance the book’s complex and protean character. The disorienting coexistence of distinct material is further accentuated in the so-called “cyborg edition” (2009), which includes an audio CD featuring significant portions of VAS being presented by the author, his wife and three other readers. When asked about the hybridity of the book, Tomasula replied that “writing a hybrid novel” was not his conscious resolution; rather, this choice felt “natural, given the times we live in, i.e., given all the graphics, collaged video etc. in something as pedestrian as the nightly news.” “This just seemed to be plain old realism to me,” he added, “the way we communicate today” (Gibbons 97).6 The next formal criterion of collage which is unambiguously met by VAS is its employment of appropriation. Although Tomasula’s facetious statement that he “made up almost nothing in this novel” is not entirely accurate (Personal interview), it is true that a significant percentage of its material comes from external sources. Apart from incorporating a great number of images, such as a picture from Time magazine on page 257 and print screens of “Rons Angels” website on pages 264–65, VAS makes use of over fifty acknowledged quotations – by figures from Galileo to Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler. Most of them endorse various aspects of eugenics or genetic manipulation and appear shockingly misguided – for instance, Knut Hamsun’s statement that “[n]o one has written more idealistically about mankind than Dr. Goebbels” (132) – or disturbingly recent, as is the case with a proposal made in the 1969 issue of the Harvard Educational Review to establish a “more lavish version of the Indian reservation” for certain groups of America’s population to stop them from breeding (245). In his quoting strategy, Tomasula highlights the contrast between the fine reputation of its authors – Nobel Prize winners and presidents of the United States are prominent groups here – and their unsound, frequently racist, opinions.7 VAS occasionally uses quotations without any indication of their source;8 those include the entire poem by Byron entitled “She Walks in Beauty,” whose three stanzas are embedded in separate speech balloons in the closing, “operatic,” section of the novel. In his discussion of Tomasula’s formal “departure from the canonical form of the novel,” Maziarczyk notes the following paradox: by incorporating many stand-alone quotations, Tomasula deviates from the structural cohesiveness of the novel while at the same time radically enacting heteroglossia, which Mikhail Bakhtin saw as the foundation of the novel

When We Were Human 139 (Novel 253).9 In VAS, heteroglossia also takes the form of juxtaposing dubious quotations with ironic comments. For instance, an appropriated phrenological table from 1858, which places “Negroes” one slot above “Chimpanzee,” is followed by the statement “Statistics are a wonderful tool to reveal untold histories” and, on the side and in fine print, a remark on the lack of any mention in American court convictions until 1957 about a white man ever having raped a black woman (65). Tomasula also introduces dialogization by adding ironic statements such as “for the good of the patients” (120, 122) and “for the good of society” (122, 128, 129, 195, 234, 252), as well as brief comments like “no doubt” and “obviously” (233). The structural principle that the novel follows in arranging its many quotations, images and other components is juxtaposition rather than narrative sequence. Although VAS succeeds in conveying the story of Square’s mental preparation for a vasectomy, it is not driven by plot development, since over two-thirds of its pages make no reference to Flatland or any of its characters. As a result, its form is largely reversible, and most of its pages do not seem tied to their location in the codex. For that reason, Eugene Thacker calls VAS “a novel to sort, sift and wander through” – rather than a book to be read in a necessarily linear way (Frelik, “Book” 233). Kass Fleisher, in turn, commends it for “tak[ing] juxtaposition and digression to new heights” (4). The most common rhetorical relation between the elements juxtaposed on any given page is that of Joint. Of its two varieties which I have distinguished – thematic and random – the former is far more common. Except for those that advance Square’s story, most pages in VAS are composed of unintegrated textual (and occasionally visual) elements which riff on one of the novel’s thematic interests, such as eugenics or genetics. The relation which, as I argued in previous chapters, is most symptomatic of the poetics of collage is that of Contradiction – a juxtaposition of elements aiming to pit them against one another. An example of this strategy is a double spread on pages 36–37, which places nineteenth-century attributes of phrenology – a seemingly sophisticated device for measuring the size and angles of the skull above a specialized form with a list of its multiple anatomical varieties – next to a form resembling an answer sheet for a multiple-choice test. The juxtaposition of an archaic method of gauging intelligence on the left with its modern equivalent creates the sense of a great gap between fake and sound science. However, given the novel’s scepticism about scientific certainties, the confrontation may be interpreted as a suggestion that both methods are contingent products of their time and, in the long run, equally misguided. Tomasula noted that sixteen years after the publication of VAS it was evident that both ways of measuring intelligence were “just as absurd” (Personal interview). A similar example of Confrontation which questions the received conviction of an enormous gap between elements in some ways alike

140  Society in Crisis is the juxtaposition of statements about eugenics made by the leading politicians of the rival camps during World War Two. Page 96, otherwise almost entirely blank, contains the following quotation by Winston Churchill: “The rapid growth of the feebleminded classes coupled as it is with steady reduction among all superior stocks constitutes a race danger which should be cut off before another year has passed.” The next page features an identically laid out statement by Adolf Hitler: “Whoever is not bodily and spiritually healthy and worthy shall not have the right to pass on his suffering in the body of his children.” Banash sees this as one of the novel’s many “shocking juxtapositions.” “This critical collage,” he observes, “collapses the differences between the seemingly clear cut ‘sides’ represented by would-be Anglo freedom fighters and evil Nazis, reminding us . . . that the terrible specter of genocide and eugenics was no German monopoly” (Collage Culture 252–53).10 The last collage aspect of VAS that needs to be examined is the novel’s disposition to fragment its multiple and varied components, textual as well as visual. Whereas most appropriated sources are quoted in selfcontained portions, a great percentage of original content is broken down into tiny pieces. The earlier mentioned page with a quotation from Whitman begins with the following words being offered one per each consecutive line: “Economic,” “Man,” “Sexual Male,” “Person,” “­AfricanAmerican,” “Hero” (298). Sammarcelli argues that “the numerous noun phrases and paratactic statements scattered throughout the book draw our attention to the page as (dis)organized space” (87). Besides the novel’s reliance on sentence fragments, it occasionally features cut words. For instance, the interrupted phrase “By delet –” appearing in the middle of page 98 is followed by three-and-a-half pages of blank space. Many of the visual appropriations are also presented in a way that emphasizes their cut status, such as the scan of a book titled Inheritance of Personal Traits, which contains the entire page 119 together with an illegible quarter of the previous page (115). This recurrent gesture could be read as an acknowledgement of VAS’s status as a collage – a form originating from the physical gestures of cutting and pasting. The Book of Portraiture Although Tomasula’s third novel does not draw on the poetics of collage to such an extent as VAS, I will argue that it meets all the collage criteria adopted in my study except for that of reversibility. Despite its division into self-contained chapters (reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas), the novel is constructed in such a way as to benefit from a linear reading, which yields multiple subtle references to the previous parts. Also, most chapters enact a narrative development, which emerges from sequential assimilation of the text. The Book of Portraiture’s most apparent collage feature is its rich multimodality; for that reason, my

When We Were Human 141 discussion of the novel’s formal structure will begin with an account of its experiments with layout, typography, page colour and the use of images. The Book of Portraiture was co-designed by Robert P. Sedlack, Jr., whose work is credited on the copyright page, rather than on the cover, as was the case with Stephen Farrell’s contribution to VAS. The multimodal variety of the book can be noted even before opening it. When examining its edge, the reader may observe several layers of colour, which Tomasula compares to “layers in an archaeological dig” (“Novel” 159). The two colours of pages used throughout the novel are white and tan, the latter appearing in three – increasingly dark – shades. Whereas white is reserved for chapter four (by far the longest in the novel) and for parts of chapter five, the darkest shade of tan is used in the opening chapter, where it is meant to evoke sand, and parts of the closing one, in which it is intended to trigger associations with human skin (Chevaillier 121). The concept of constructing a book out of different colour pages appears to be yet another multimodal allusion in Tomasula’s work to Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (a book, incidentally, also very much dedicated to pursuing the book-body analogy),11 whose original edition combined sections in four distinct hues. The numerous departures from the standard layout and typography must be examined in relation to the specific chapters in which they occur, as the design of the novel is closely tied to the subject matter of consecutive parts. The opening story of Moses is designed in such a way as to resemble an ancient manuscript, which is achieved through the use of dark-tan paper and a disproportionately large opening word. It is also consistently double spaced and – like chapter two and parts of chapter five – uses a brown font. The second chapter pretends to be a manuscript originally belonging to Velázquez, which contains the painter’s textual account of his career, as well as eighteen drafts for some of his most famous works (all of them drawn by the author’s wife – visual artist Maria Tomasula). Besides the colour of the pages, its status as an old document is achieved through peppering the text with highlighted comments such as “pages lost,” “later altered” and “unintelligible erasures” (18, 19, 27). The psychoanalytic report in chapter three is laid out like a diary and accompanied by copious footnotes, numerous illustrations and several inserts, such as scans of contemporary leaflets and embedded mini-articles, which resemble curiosity sections in course books. All of those multimodal means support the scientific and educational aspirations of the self-important narrator. The first of the two contemporary chapters experiment with the top margin of the page, which is consistently occupied by horizontal lines marking the appearances and disappearances of each of the nine characters of the chapter. Tomasula calls them “data streams” and compares them to the outlines of people walking in and out of view from surveillance cameras (Personal interview). Another formal characteristic of

142  Society in Crisis chapter four are over seventy inserts in the form of tan-coloured boxes which contain various kinds of twenty-first-century data, such as websites, TV listings, prices, fashion tips (accompanied by pixelated images) and various instalments of the ongoing string of binary digits – zeros and ones, which are referred to as a “choreography of bytes to and from massive data banks” (156). Frelik argues that the excess of “manifestations of electronic media . . . strengthens the sense of contemporary life awash in the electromagnetic soup and information overload” and “reflects the inherent chaos of the world,” which is addressed by the content of the chapter (“Book”). In the last chapter, the two interwoven stories are rendered very differently. The biogenetic section features few multimodal elements except for a highly experimental page 297 (to be discussed later) and the consistent tan-coloured margin frame. The section set in an Arab country is printed against the dark-tan background and contains several news inserts, two earlier used images from Velázquez and multiple empty portrait frames, which reference the title of the book, as well as banks of surveillance monitors. According to Frelik, all multimodal elements in The Book of Portraiture are “not merely ornamental or decorative, but construct highly complex subtexts to the verbal narrative” and therefore play a “crucial part” in the novel – an observation which could be applied to VAS, as well as to all of Tomasula’s later works. The critic also posits that The Book of Portraiture, similarly to Danielewski’s House of Leaves, “re-establishes codex-based literary texts as capable of conveying modes of story-telling and sense-making which one tends to exclusively associate with new media” (“Book”). Part of that achievement consists in demonstrating that the codex is also capable of conveying the sense of information overload, created by filling the pages of the two contemporary chapters with shards of online content that actively compete for the reader’s attention. Since the heterogeneity of material used in The Book of Portraiture is a matter of course, I wish to turn to the novel’s employment of appropriated content, which, it needs to be conceded, is not as frequent as in the case of VAS. Although the list of sources on which Tomasula relied when writing the novel occupies the most part of his three-page acknowledgements at the end of the book, their influence appears to have been limited to facts and ideas, and rarely involves borrowed text. Some of the most significant textual appropriations are adapted fragments from Charles Darwin’s The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) and William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1917). Other sources include The Book of Job, Socrates and two advertisements from the beginning of the twentieth century promoting “The Timely Warning,” an appliance devised to stop erections and nocturnal emissions, and a vibrator marketed as “The Belbout Electric-Powered Vibro-Wand” (107, 148). The ads, however, have been reworked by Tomasula, who admits in the

When We Were Human 143 acknowledgements section that while he extensively relied on “historical documents,” he took “many liberties” with them (325). Among the unambiguous cases of straightforward appropriation are a number of images: from reproductions of iconic paintings (Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Titian’s Venus of Urbino) to early ­twentieth-century photographs of the native inhabitants of Haiti. It needs to be noted that whereas in VAS images frequently carry meanings not conveyed by the neighbouring text (and can thus be called pictures-astext), The Book of Portraiture often uses them as illustrations, which makes them subservient to text (pictures of the text). In the psychoanalytic chapter, for instance, most images are accompanied by short explanatory captions, such as “Curing a Hysteric, 1889” (125). The principle of juxtaposition – another collage feature of The Book of Portraiture – operates most visibly in chapter four, where the earlier mentioned seventy inserts are in most instances randomly combined with the stories of the nine characters. The relations of random Joint contribute to the chapter’s evocation of the sense of a world overloaded with persistently flowing but often incomprehensible data. The most radical example of parataxis occurs on page 297 in chapter five, which combines two lines from The Book of Job (19:23–24), formulaic expressions used during funeral services, genetic data, a string of zeros and ones, the earlier mentioned blank portraits and cryptic phrases such as “knight/damsel” and “Music in Her Soul.” Frelik interprets the page as an indication of “the collapse of all time frames” (“Reading”), while N. Katherine Hayles notes that those “fragments from diverse contexts [are] tossed together as if they were body fragments,” which she sees as a possible form of “commemorat[ion]” of the 9/11 attack (“Beyond” 143–44). Although she herself does not make that connection, the alteration of meaningful and meaningless elements (particularly, the recurring sequences of binary digits) on the page may serve as an illustration of the argument Hayles makes in her seminal How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999) about the modern systems of information technology relying on a “complex dialectic” of “pattern and randomness” (25). The logic of juxtaposition operates also in the second chapter, where the autobiographical story recounted by Velázquez is accompanied by many drafts of his oil paintings, which, in most cases, stand in no apparent relation towards the content of the page on which they appear.12 Page 297 also offers an example of the novel’s occasional use of fragmentation. It contains as many as sixteen instances of ellipsis, which indicate passages being cut off or started in mid-sentence. The many disconnected paratactic noun phrases – such as “white hat/black cat” and “General (Version A)” – enhance the sense of incompletion. Other instances of fragmentation in the novel include suspended sentences, portions of text obliterated by little blank squares and the already

Figure 5.2 Steve Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture (FC2, 2006), p. 297.

When We Were Human 145 mentioned meta-comments signalling lost pages and cut off passages in the Velázquez manuscript. Despite numerous gestures towards fragmentation, The Book of Portraiture is characterized by a higher degree of cohesion than VAS owing to its division into chapters, some of which could stand on their own. The latter, as has been mentioned, was initially conceived by Tomasula as one of the chapters of The Book of Portraiture, whose growth came to the point of warranting a separate novel. Both works, as should be evident from my analysis, are highly unconventional novels meriting the labels of “experimental” and “innovative” literature. Their multimodal richness (particularly the numerous fusions of text and image) and use of appropriation, alongside their formal as well as thematic heterogeneity, fragmentariness and reliance on juxtaposition (local in The Book of Portraiture and global in VAS), are the main arguments in favour of considering them as works of collage.

All That Is Solid Melts Into Pixels Despite their heavy dependence on historical sources, VAS and The Book of Portraiture are keenly interested in the challenges of the contemporary world, which they address by embedding them in the context of relevant turning points in the previous centuries. Both novels conceive of their historical moment as being on the brink of a significant and irreversible change, anticipating what Lauren Berlant has called, in an earlier quoted passage, “a shift of historic proportions in the terms and processes of the conditions of continuity of life” (“Thinking” 5). Although Tomasula is very far from damning the developments that have led to the present anxiety and from viewing past times with nostalgia, there is a strong sense of crisis permeating his works. That crisis does not necessarily need to be understood as a lamentable situation but rather as a time of reconsideration, or redefinition, of certain fundamental notions regarding the human body, ethics, science and capitalism. Of the many crises represented in Tomasula’s novels, as well as in the symptomatically titled collection Once Human, the most prominent is the crisis of the received concept of the human in the light of the millennial advancements in medicine and science. The epistemological chaos and distress occasioned by the premonition of that change is portrayed in VAS from the perspective of Square. The previously asserted sense of disorientation emanating from the pages of the novel corresponds to the turmoil experienced by its protagonist. VAS begins with Square holding the hospital form needed to sign up for vasectomy and ends with an account of that procedure. In the meantime, he struggles with the implications of the decision which turns out to be much harder to make than he expected. Prevented from withdrawing the application only by his wife’s continued insistence and the wish to spare her the suffering of further miscarriages, Square fears the far-reaching implications of his act:

146  Society in Crisis “He could see what was happening, this transubstantiation of being his body into having his body” (315). That may sound like an overly dramatic description of a vasectomy; in VAS, however, according to Cristina Iuli, the operation assumes the symbolic importance of “the final act of a history (and concept) of evolution based on natural selection” and of an irreversible intervention which alters the “contingent, individualized outcome” of human evolution (77). Square’s unease about any technological intervention in the body is also reflected in his reaction to his mother-inlaw’s surgical implant of “a synthetic sponginess” to eliminate her problems with blood circulation (146). As a result of it, in Square’s view, she has now become “part machine,” and hence a “cyborg” (145, 146). Both instances of human enhancement can be interpreted through the lens of Hayles’s notion of the post-human subject, defined as “an amalgam . . . of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (How 3). The two medical procedures function as initial but critical steps towards turning the human body into an endlessly alterable object. In the light of that development, Anthony Enns argues that VAS “vividly illustrates the dangers of a world in which bodies are reducible to texts and humans are manipulable as information” (56). He adds that the concluding scene in the novel – that of Square’s vasectomy – enacts his “transformation from a natural body to a rewritable text, signalling the loss of his autonomy and integrity” (73). Enns’s remark about the body’s transition into information should be read in the context of Hayles’s argument about post-humanism’s shift of emphasis from “material instantiation” to “informational pattern” (How 2). Hayles argues that human bodies, previously conceptualized as material entities, are “constituted as information,” which, in a capitalist system, makes them vulnerable to being reshaped “in response to market pressures” (42). In the fourth chapter of The Book of Portraiture, digital retouchers manipulate the images of female bodies according to social expectations, while fashion designers maintain a “library of Virtual People . . . developed as folders of digital information,” which the narrator also calls “re-arrangeable” and “collage-able” (205). With that theoretical background in mind, it is possible to interpret VAS – or rather both novels, as I shall later demonstrate – as addressing the crisis of human embodiment. Among its causes is the already mentioned crisis of materiality, encapsulated in Hans Moravec’s idea that human consciousness may soon become downloadable into a computer (Hayles, How 54). As a result, the human subject stands on the verge of disembodiment, their body an expendable costume for the information pattern contained within. Besides the discomfort experienced by Square, as well as Paul in the last chapter of The Book of Portraiture, the anxiety about the human body being reduced to a code is conveyed by the recurrence – in both novels – of the previously noted random

When We Were Human 147 strings of zeros and ones, which stand for the binary notation of modern computer systems. Their significance becomes apparent in the context of Hayles’s question, “If we can capture the form of ones and zeros in a non-­biological medium – say, on a computer disk – why do we need the body’s superfluous flesh?” (How 13). The binary digits can thus be read as insistent portents of the human body’s approaching redundancy. Finding his attachment to the old body “irrational” and the available alternatives to vasectomy –“sentimental and absurd,” Square does not rebel against the inevitable. Only he longs for a reassurance “that it was okay to feel like you owed your body a fond farewell” (178–81). Moments before that parting, he feels “his own body take on the function of the microscopes: passé except as philosophy.” It becomes a Heideggerian “broken hammer,” whose rupture is the reminder of its “hammerness” (365). The understanding or consolation he craves is not offered by his wife or anyone else. Ultimately, he is even denied a fitting musical setting for his transformation. The tragic pathos of a Wagner opera, which his doctor was inclined to play during the operation, is replaced by the banality of David Cassidy’s 1970s pop hit “I Think I Love You.” Square’s failure to secure a fitting accompaniment to his vasectomy can be read through Berlant’s notion of the waning of genre, according to which “life can no longer be lived even phantasmatically as melodrama” or “Aristotelian tragedy.” Marked by exhaustion and flatness, the contemporary experience “begins not with drama but its absence”; at most, it can offer what Berlant calls “lower case drama” (Cruel 6–7). The personal crisis experienced by Square is matched by that of Paul, whose struggle with similar bioethical dilemmas exemplifies The Book of Portraiture’s interest in the darker prospects and corollaries of the post-human, which also involve – in Hayles’s own assessment of the novel – “surveillance, data mining, the war against/with terror, genetic engineering, massive data collection” (“Beyond” 144). A lab worker experienced in “euthanizing” mice, Paul is casually asked by his boss and domestic partner, Mary, to help him “make an embryo” of a rat, to which he readily agrees (BP 285). Her idea is to create a work of bioart, inspired by Eduardo Kac’s Alba and tentatively titled Trinity, whose ingredients are supposed to be his sperm, her eggs and an addition of another person’s DNA – a genuine genetic collage. A lapsed Catholic, he does not have any firm ideological objections to the project, but he, nevertheless, “[feels] himself squirm, thinking of his own protonucleus semifused with hers under the light of the microinjector” (294). He is too embarrassed to confront Mary with his conservative second thoughts, but when she appears to broach the subject, he is relieved to confess, “at first I didn’t think it was any big deal but now that it’s starting to seem more real,” at which point he trails off, uncertain what it is exactly that he feels (302). Like Square, he fails to win any sympathy for his doubts; his awkward attempt at articulation is met with Mary’s “Would you give

148  Society in Crisis it a rest!” uttered in “mock disbelief” (303). Similarly to Square, he lacks the will to act according to his ethical impulse but, to his surprise, finds himself seized with an equally elusive nostalgia for religion. What he rejected years ago on account of its untenable beliefs “that a man could simultaneously be a dove” now – given his own genetic interventions, which include designing “mice with tobacco genes” – does not appear to him “so farfetched anymore” (315). Paul’s sudden longing for a set of beliefs which insists on rigid ontological categories can be interpreted as a faint intrusion of a world already replaced by one which is no longer concerned with bioethical qualms. The extent to which the human body has become the material of manipulation under the reign of capitalism is illustrated by chapter four of The Book of Portraiture. Populated by characters who contribute to creating and perpetuating the image of a desirable body – a model, a photo/digital retoucher and a videographic designer – the chapter conceptualizes the modern female body as a collage of social notions of physical attractiveness. In that dystopian world, models on the covers of fashion magazines are “often composites of several women, or different shots of the same woman: separate photos of hair, face and body, all seamlessly combined.” In a clear invocation of the post-human, the narrator calls them “Frankensteins without the stitches” (195). A similar mechanism operates in the case of pornography, which relies on “seamlessly adding” the face or another body part of a chosen woman into a ready-made video. Lured by the advertising slogan “BE THE DIRECTOR OF YOUR OWN INTERACTIVE PORN” (172), men like the character named X_ are constantly on the lookout for a “perfect shot” of a female body which they can insert into their own digital fantasies (271). The digital body enhancement industry includes the retoucher, referred to as a “digital plastic-surgeon,”13 whose job is to airbrush images of “surreally beautiful women,” whom, even in private situations, he cannot help but view as “infinitely re-arrangeable, highly . . . ‘tweakable’ ” (168).14 All of the above instances point to the link between collage and consumerism asserted by Banash, who compares the process of assembling a collage to “the consumer wandering through a vast mall, selecting this and then that” and “bringing it all together in a new arrangement” (Collage Culture 16). The side effect of the technique is wastefulness – “buying what is not needed, discarding what is not broken, and engaging in an unprecedented relationship to abundance” (57) – which is evoked in The Book of Portraiture by the practice of maintaining numerous virtual personalities for various possible purposes: “one self that was more or less permanent, others that could be ditched” (BP 212). The novel envisages the social and psychological consequences of a reality where bodies have become as easily rewritable as texts. The crisis of embodiment entails a crisis of identity, exemplified by a female model who discovers online that some of her numerous digital personas (legally

When We Were Human 149 owned by fashion agencies) have been reworked. The fact that “somebody was molding her into something other than her self” produces the sense that her “ ‘real’ self, i.e., the fashion persona she had worked hard to project” appears to “evaporate before her very eyes” (198). The loss of control over one’s own body – including its virtual image – leads to the loss of a broader sense of autonomy. The latter phenomenon is illustrated by the characters’ renunciation of names as markers of individuality and their replacement by arbitrarily imposed letters. Those letters are arranged on the opening page of the chapter into the word “PIXELS” (149), which can be read as a suggestion that its characters have been reduced to the status of mere components of digital technology, which, as Chevaillier observes, are “controllable elements” (125). The connection between characters and pixels also emphasizes their disembodiment on account of the earlier discussed shift from materiality to information pattern. In the light of those phenomena, the chapter’s closing words – a passage of free indirect discourse focalized by the model named U_ – assume a sadly ironic tinge: “No matter how [her body] was photographed or digitally manipulated, she knew, her self had kept company with her body. And always will” (284). The subtly mournful effect of her deluded certainty echoes Hayles’s reminder that “as we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available,” we need to “remember the fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced” (How 49). Hayles’s statement is underwritten by a lack of confidence in the direction of scientific development, which is conceptualized as a “rush” rather than a process marked by careful consideration. Tomasula’s novels, VAS in particular, represent the development of science far more harshly. Science emerges as completely devoid of any ethical foresight and consistently failing to learn from its past mistakes. Conceiving of science as “a history of failed theories,” VAS is a catalogue of its many embarrassing misjudgements – ethnic and gender prejudices masquerading as objective findings (VAS 73). Tomasula mercilessly quotes various scientific authorities in their time – including a host of Nobel Prize winners – who voiced their support for various eugenic policies, such as the forced sterilization of undesired social groups. In her critical discussion of VAS, Mary K. Holland proposes that the novel views science as “an evolving collection of stories, a narrative whose facts change as surely as do its forms.” Its status, she argues, is “reduced to the status of culture and religion, composed of irrational conviction and mass opinion” (38). Furthermore, Iuli interprets the recurrent insertions of US Patent stamps across VAS as an indication of the “collapse of science” under the pressure of “the marketable, the usable, and the fashionable” (65). Tomasula appears to suggest that the failures of science can be blamed on social ignorance and amnesia – on society’s resistance to facts and reluctance to learn from the past. The refusal of the residents of Flatland – in Abbott’s novel – to accept the existence of the third dimension

150  Society in Crisis became for Tomasula the point of departure for his twentieth-century travesty of the nineteenth-century science fiction classic. Then as now, Tomasula points out, humanity finds itself on the brink of a new era and fails to recognize its challenges (Personal interview). The inability to realize the implications of present scientific trends is encapsulated in the following passage of VAS: [C]aressing its epidermis, to all appearances unchanged, [Square] couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t hold in his mind a change from wine to water any more than the moment message becomes material, material becomes man, man becomes patient, patient becomes material and a heart, cradled by latex fingers from ice chest to some other’s needy cavity, drinks in and starts a new life, servant to some other emperor with no clothes. (315) As long as the “appearances” are “unchanged,” the abstract consequences of actions are hard to “hold in . . . mind.” That general obtuseness of humanity and its shortage of foresight are asserted as early as in the novel’s epigraph, in which Goethe calls people “the organs of their century, which operate mainly unconsciously” (VAS 5). Contrary to the principle formulated in the opening lines of the novel – “first pain, then knowledge” (9–10) – no actual accumulation of experience and wisdom is shown to take place. That phenomenon is exemplified in VAS by the shifting attitude towards “chemical companies releasing new life forms into the ocean.” While, initially, the prospect “scared people” and inspired “doomsday movies,” soon Square and “everyone else” ignored it or forgot all about it (40). Whereas VAS could be read as a reflection of a crisis of faith in the idea of scientific progress, The Book of Portraiture, especially its contemporary chapters, expresses unease about various aspects of a globalized information society. The adverse effects of multinational capitalism are indicated in the strand of chapter four concerned with the character of a sales representative – a “girl in a third-world country,” trained to neutralize her Bombay accent while serving on the phone American customers ordering lingerie which she will never be able to afford (180–81). However, the economic repercussions of capitalism are of less interest to Tomasula than the information society, which, according to Robert ­Hassan – the author of The Information Society: Cyber Dreams and Digital Nightmares (2008) – “seems to have been originated for and developed for the interests of capital first” (65). Among the many assertions of the reign of data is the earlier discussed recurrence of streams of binary digits, news snippets, commercial ads, website addresses and disorienting paratactic fragments. Through those inserts, Tomasula illustrates the sense that “we are drowning in information, the production of which has

When We Were Human 151 no objective limits” and represents what David Shenk has dubbed “data smog” (Hassan 115). The most sinister aspect of information society to be highlighted in The Book of Portraiture is the ubiquity of surveillance. “Wherever you go, whatever you do, no matter what you say, your digital shadow will always be there,” remarks one of the characters (277). The annoyance at the sense of being constantly monitored by CCTV cameras, and the conviction that surveillance is commercially driven, is articulated in a passage focalized by the computer programmer: “The fuckers would jam a telescope up your ass if they thought they could make a dime by examining what you had for lunch” (237). However, surveillance is also represented as a tool designed to guarantee order based on the fear of punishment. The fourth chapter’s refrain – “If you don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of” – encapsulates the twisted logic of the surveillance ideology. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant emphasizes the dubious status of contemporary surveillance industry as one of the pillars of the “society of control” and its disingenuous combination of “the idiom of disciplinary security with the protective language of care” (239– 40). In Tomasula’s novel, its reach is not restricted to the public sphere: couples are shown to spy on each other’s hard drives and send furtively cut strands of each other’s hair for DNA testing. According to Tomasula, the chapter offers “a portrait of people being videotaped, but also a portrait of society and how we relate to one another, what’s become of the idea of a private individual” (Chevaillier 127). If VAS and The Book of Portraiture can indeed be read as “two volumes of the same book,” their overriding concern may be subsumed under the notion of an ontological and epistemological crisis precipitated by the social and scientific changes which have undermined the rigid boundaries between “the natural, the human, and the technological” (Iuli 65). As a result, the instability of the category of the human becomes readily apparent. The discovery that “[t]he 3,000 million letters of the DNA lexicon that is a human” are “made of the same letters used to compose a tree” (VAS 62) cannot be without consequences for how humanity conceives of itself in reference to the world. In his article “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” Tomasula cites Michel Foucault’s idea that “man is an invention of recent date” and “one perhaps nearing its end.” He also invokes Gerald Bruns’s observation that “the human has never been a stable, much less determinate, homogeneous concept.” Both remarks emphasize the contingency of the received notions of the human – their rootedness in social contexts, whose radical change must necessitate a radical rethinking of what constitutes and differentiates them. In another article, Tomasula references Burke’s statement that “a conception of man as that being who stole fire from the gods is going to result in very different works of literature than will a conception that sees man as a link in an evolutionary chain” (Tomasula, “Emergence” 11).

152  Society in Crisis Tomasula’s own novels should be read in the context of that remark – as attempts to fashion a literary form that addresses the challenges to the humanist ideas of the self.

Conclusion That form, as I argued in the earlier sections, shares many characteristics with collage. Its suitability to Tomasula’s project can be summed up as depending on three central analogies. First, collage functions as a metaphor for the genetic interventions and manipulations addressed in both novels. Rearranging DNA and combining the genes of various organisms are actions parallel to cutting, pasting and appropriating. Second, collage – with its hybrid structure – is a perfect vehicle for evoking the sense of information overload, which Tomasula aims to convey in VAS and the later chapters of The Book of Portraiture. Finally, the crisis of the physical book, metaphorically paralleled by the crisis of the human body (and of the human at large), is confronted in both novels through hypermediacy – a reminder of the uniqueness of a given medium. Thanks to its intense multimodality, in particular the materiality of the cut and paste, collage is one of the most fitting forms to flaunt the physical book’s advantages over its hopeful successors – e-books and digital texts. The concern about the crisis of both kinds of flesh – human and literary – is echoed in How We Became Posthuman, where Hayles articulates the following warning: “Because they have bodies, books and humans have something to lose if they are regarded solely as informational patterns, namely the resistant materiality that has traditionally marked the durable inscription of books no less than it has marked our experiences of living as embodied creatures” (29).

Notes 1. An earlier version of small parts of this chapter appeared in an article of mine entitled “Collage and Crisis in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland and Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames,” published in Notre Dame Review. 2. In the same interview, Tomasula explains that he usually produces the rough draft of his novels in Microsoft Word and then continues his work in Adobe InDesign, where he fine-tunes the layout and adds images. The final version of VAS, however, was created in Quark, a software which has since become obsolete (Tomasula, “Novel” 157). 3. The frequent visual evocations of modern technologies are interspersed in VAS with throwbacks to earlier periods, such as handwritten passages and the consistent use of the thumb index on all pages containing acknowledged quotations. 4. VAS contains five blank pages, including three in a row, and three entirely black ones. There are also several pages that include very small chunks of text, which can be as short as the passage “Sometimes silence is the most eloquent” on the otherwise blank page 102.

When We Were Human 153 5. The significance of typography and layout is suggested by the double use of the same quotation by co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick on consecutive pages (125–27): the first time – in standard typeface and laid out in a way to command respect – and the second – in block capitals, inside a speech bubble and embedded in a scene reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! (Sammarcelli 85). 6. A metafictional indication of the novel’s heterogeneity is the appropriation of Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” on a page with an excess of disconnected textual fragments (VAS 298). 7. Among the many instances of such quotations is President George Washington’s statement about his “immediate objectives” being the “total destruction and devastation of [Indian] settlements,” as well as “ruin[ing their] crops” (VAS 108). 8. A recurrent allusion in VAS is an unacknowledged reference to the so-called infinite monkey theorem as mentioned in Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” 9. Bakhtin coins this term in “Discourse in the Novel” (1982) and defines it as the novel’s essential inclination to accommodate multiple and diverse languages and voices. Among them are “the languages of social groups and classes, of professional groups, of generations, the different languages for different occasions” (Dentith 35). Heteroglossia is meant to be a marker of the novel’s “stylistic and linguistic variety, its openness to the world-inprocess of the present” as opposed to the monologic structure of epic poetry (Dentith 46–47). Crucially, the voices embedded in the novel are to be democratically arranged; Bakhtin asserts that in genuinely polyphonic novels the voices are “independent” and “fully valid” – not subordinated to the author’s restrictive jurisdiction (Bakhtin 6). The autonomous languages spoken by individual characters affect – often “powerfully so,” Bakhtin adds – the “authorial speech,” or, in other words, the voice of the narrator (315). 10. In an interview by Flore Chevaillier, Tomasula speaks of that juxtaposition as illustrative of a broader theme in the novel: One of the ideas that circulates through VAS is the way that we demonize Hitler, and rightfully so, but the danger in demonizing Hitler is to not recognize how “natural” it was for him to put the extermination of “undesirables” into play. The novel asks us to remember that Germany was only like the eleventh industrialized nation to legalize the elimination of “undesirables” – it took twenty years before the Nazis got around to it. So I put a quote by Hitler next to one by Winston Churchill – both of which basically make the same claim – in the hope that a third thing will emerge: the commonness of the assumptions that much of the industrial world was operating under, the banality of it all. (207–8) 11. See Grzegorz Maziarczyk’s chapter titled “The Book as Multimodal (Dis) Embodiment” in The Novel as Book. 12. In a personal exchange, Tomasula clarifies that whereas there may often not be a clear relationship between the drafts and the corresponding pages, he wanted to relate the former to the themes addressed by the entire chapter. Among such links is the drawings’ status as drafts, which emphasizes “the constructed nature of the histories they depict” (Personal interview). 13. Actual plastic surgeons are also needed – to “shape the body to the Carnival Ideal: a breast that can be cupped by one hand, a buttock by two” (BP 191).

154  Society in Crisis 14. Although he is in a relationship, the object of his deepest admiration appears to be the “Venus of Photoshop icon,” which he has created out of multiple fragments of “perfect bodies” and which he stores on his hard drive. Looking at prints of that woman, his partner feels she is in “a temple to a single goddess that her boyfriend ha[s] constructed” (BP 266).

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson, U of Texas P, 1982, pp. 259–422. Banash, David. “Afterword: An Interview with Steve Tomasula.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 285–303. ———. Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption. Rodopi, 2013. Banash, David, and Andrea Spain. “Introduction: Composition, Emergence, Sensation: Science and New Media in the Novels of Steve Tomasula.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 51–74. Barrett, Mike. “Seeing the Novel in the 21st Century.” Electronic Book Review, 15 Nov. 2008, www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/histori cized. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. ———. “Thinking About Feeling Historical.” Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 1, 2008, pp. 4–9. Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. Routledge, 1996. Enns, Anthony. “The Material Is the Message: Body as Text/Text as Body in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 51–74. Fleisher, Kass. “Word Made Flesh and Blood.” American Book Review, vol. 25, no. 2, 2004, pp. 3–4. Frelik, Paweł. “A Book, an Atlas, and an Opera: Steve Tomasula’s Fictions of Science as Science Fiction.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 227–39. ———. “Reading the Background: The Textual and the Visual in Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture.” Sillages Critiques, vol. 17, 2014, http://journals. openedition.org/sillagescritiques/3582. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Gibbons, Alison. Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. Routledge, 2012. Hassan, Robert. The Information Society: Cyber Dreams and Digital Nightmares. Polity, 2008. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Beyond Human Scale: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 133–46. ———. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. U of Chicago P, 1999. Holland, Mary K. “The Work of Art After the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Work of Steve Tomasula.” Steve Tomasula: The

When We Were Human 155 Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 27–49. Iuli, Cristina. “Playing with Codes: Steve Tomasula’s VAS, an Opera in Flatland.” Writing Technologies, vol. 3, 2010, pp. 64–85. Maziarczyk, Grzegorz. The Novel as Book: Textual Materiality in Contemporary Fiction in English. Wydawnictwo KUL, 2013. ———. “Print Strikes Back: Typographic Experimentation in Contemporary Fiction as a Contribution to the Metareferential Turn.” The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation, edited by Werner Wolf. Rodopi, 2011, pp. 169–94. Moore, Steven. “Brilliant Stretch of Time Travel.” American Book Review, vol. 28, no. 1, 2006, p. 16. Olsen, Lance. “Fourteen Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction, or: Fiction by Collage.” Symploke, vol. 12, no. 1, 2005, pp. 130–35. ———. “Ontological Metalepses, Unnatural Narratology, and Locality: A Politics of the [[Page]] in Tomasula’s VAS  &  TOC.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 209–23. Sammarcelli, Françoise. “Encoding the Body, Questioning Legacy: Reflections on Intersemiotic Experiments in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 75–98. Tomasula, Steve. The Book of Portraiture. FC2, 2006. ———. “Electricians, Wig Makers, and Staging the New Novel.” American Book Review, vol. 32, no. 6, 2011, pp. 5–6. ———. “Emergence and Posthuman Narrative.” Flusser Studies, vol. 9, 2009, pp. 1–18. ———. Interview by Flore Chevaillier. Divergent Trajectories: Interviews with Innovative Fiction Writers. Ohio State UP, 2017, pp. 197–214. ———. “The Novel as Multimedia, Networked Book.” Interview by Sandra Bettencourt. Entrevista, 2016, http://impactum-journals.uc.pt/matlit/article/ view/2657/1985. Accessed 29 Oct. 2018. ———. Personal interview. 13 Oct. 2018. ———. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. U of Chicago P, 2002. ———. “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative.” Open Editions, 2014, https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/3562. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Wark, McKenzie. “The Book of Portraiture by Steve Tomasula.” Bookforum, vol. 12, no. 2, 2006, p. 55.

Part III

The Self in Crisis

6 I’m Every Wo/man, Guaranteed One Hundred Per Cent Genuine! Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World

Formally, Woman’s World is the quintessence of collage literature. Its sustained narrative unity, however, makes it a highly paradoxical text – fragmentary and appropriative as well as curiously coherent. Before a discussion of the ambiguities of Graham Rawle’s second novel, I shall offer a brief introduction to the author. Then the formal properties of Woman’s World will be examined, especially those enhancing its status as a literary collage. Finally, I shall consider how the novel can be read as a representation of myriad crises of the self – particularly in the context of gender and consumerism. Rawle is the only writer discussed in this book who has produced numerous works of visual collage.1 Coming from the visual arts and design background, Rawle rose to prominence on account of his non-­literary achievements. His “Lost Consonants” series2 appeared every week in The Guardian between 1990 and 2005 and gave rise to other regular series in The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine and The Times. In the 1990s, Rawle published several anthologies of “Lost Consonants,” as well as comic art books, such as Wonder Book of Fun (1994) and Lying Doggo: He Sometimes Tells a Fib (1995). His first novel was The Diary of an Amateur Photographer (1998) – an exuberantly multimodal murder mystery containing numerous images and newspaper cuttings, as well as a piece of cut-up text placed in an envelope at the end of the book. Rawle’s latest novels were The Card (2012) and Overland (2018) – both of which employ multimodal means but cannot be regarded as collages. Rawle has also worked as an illustrator; his visual interpretation of The Wizard of Oz (2008) won the Best Illustrated Trade Book Award and was chosen Book of the Year at the British Book Design Awards. Woman’s World (2005) is the outcome of five years of strenuous work – seven days a week, seventeen hours a day (Phillips) – which involved drafting a hefty novel and then cutting up an enormous collection of women’s magazines from the 1960s3 in search of chunks of text, from individual words to entire paragraphs, to substitute his own writing. In order to achieve this, Rawle developed a very complex s­ystem of cataloguing his cut-outs into thematic and linguistic sections. He also created

160  The Self in Crisis an electronic database of over one million words included in his cuttings, which made it easier to locate the fragments needed (Gibbons 170). The result is an unprecedented feat of collage literature – a 437-page cut-up consisting of approximately forty thousand textual fragments – which earned Rawle the reputation as a “Stakhanovite of the scissors and paste” (Phillips). The collage form of Woman’s World cannot be dismissed as a mere gimmick since the textual assemblage artfully mirrors the constructed nature of its narrator-protagonist’s identity. The novel is a first-person narrative focalized by Norma – the feminine self of transvestite Roy Little, who appears to speak the voice of his tragically deceased younger sister. Grzegorz Maziarczyk notes that the protagonist’s continual wavering between the two personalities is marked by an oscillation between homodiegetic (when Norma is in control) and heterodiegetic narration (when Roy prevails) (81). The fact that Norma and Roy are one person becomes evident to the reader only halfway through the novel. Until then, the narrator consistently refers to Roy as her brother and to his mother as a housekeeper named Mary. Despite claiming to be a different person, Norma focalizes all situations involving Roy, such as his activities as a laundry delivery man and his romantic engagements with Eve. Although she is mostly confined to the home, where she obsessively reads women’s magazines, Norma occasionally goes out in female clothes, invariably attracting the attention of the residents of a drab 1960s English town. During one such outing, she is approached by Mr Hands, who invites her to his place for a professional photo shoot, which greatly flatters her vanity. When she realizes his ignoble intentions, she hits him in the head with a high-heeled shoe, as a result of which he loses consciousness, and Norma panics that she has killed him. Days later, it becomes apparent that Mr. Hands has survived and wants to take revenge by breaking the news about Roy’s transvestism to his girlfriend, Eve. In the last chapter, Norma is coming home in a very agitated state when she is badly hit by a van. The novel ends with Norma’s confused reverie about Roy and Eve’s happy future together, as she appears to be dying as a result of the collision.4 Woman’s World was released in 2005 with the subtitle “A Novel” and then reissued in paperback in 2006 as “A Graphic Novel,” which the publisher considered a better marketing label (Personal interview). The book won unanimous critical acclaim. In The Guardian, Tom Phillips praised its combination of unparalleled formal invention and compelling readability, which, he predicted, might make it “metafiction’s first bestseller.” That enthusiastic review ends with the following image: “I once saw the virtuosic John Tilbury play, recognizably, the opening movement of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with his back to the keyboard. It was a feat I never thought to see equalled, but this, as Rawle himself might say, eats everything.” Rick Poynor also emphasized the novel’s success in delivering a gripping narrative despite its “unconventional

I’m Every Wo/man 161 and perhaps initially daunting appearance” and concluded that its “triumph is that it works on every level.” Fellow novelist Neel Mukherjee announced in The Times that Woman’s World was “a work of genius” and “the most wildly original novel produced in [Britain] in the past decade” (“Woman’s World Book”). Besides praising the uniqueness of the book’s form, other critics stressed the darkness of the novel’s overall effect despite its comic tone. Over a decade later, Woman’s World continues to be Rawle’s best known, most critically acclaimed and most studied work. It has been presented at numerous artist book and graphic design exhibitions mostly in Europe and the United States, and has become part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp and the National Art Library at Victoria and Albert Museum (“Woman’s World Book”). Soon after the American premiere, the option to make a film adaptation was bought by Diana Napper, who then partnered with Jean Doumanian (the executive producer of many of Woody Allen’s films). Despite their efforts, the film was not made (Bigge; Rawle, Personal interview). Among the artists who expressed interest in adapting Woman’s World to the big screen is the Hollywood actor James Franco, who even commissioned a photo shoot of himself dressed as Norma. Rawle, however, ultimately decided that he wished to create the film on his own terms (Personal interview). On his official website, he states that he is “in the early stages” of work on a film adaptation, which will be “montaged from thousands of clips,” including “feature films, commercials, public information shorts and television shows from the late 1950s and early ’60s” (“Woman’s World Film”).

Collage Structure That Woman’s World is a work of collage is not a statement requiring much substantiation. Its strong reliance on appropriation and fragmentation, as well as its visual richness, are so evident that no critic has, to my knowledge, disputed that formal categorization. Variously referred to as a “cut-up” (Vivera), a “paste-up” (Poyner) and a “typographical rollercoaster” (Phillips), Rawle’s novel has been situated in the tradition of literary experiments from Tristan Tzara to William S. Burroughs, Eduardo Paolozzi and Tom Phillips. Anna Gerber and Teal Triggs regard Tzara – the Romanian-born Dadaist, who used to cut individual letters and then randomly reassemble them – as the precursor of Rawle’s method (66). In Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present (2011), Edward S. Robinson argues that the principle of Woman’s World is “almost identical to Burroughs’ cut-ups” except “the use of textual fragments is anything but random, but is, in fact, a system of careful selection” (257). He also concedes that, unlike Burroughs (or Tzara), Rawle exposes the visual aspect of the cut-up by retaining its typographic

162  The Self in Crisis distinctness. Despite those rather important differences, Robinson sees Rawle as a direct descendant of the cut-up tradition and applauds Patrick McCabe’s description of him as “Burroughs let loose with dressmaker’s scissors” (257). Finally, in his search for the novel’s closest artistic relatives, Mikko Keskinen points to limited-edition artists’ books such as Joseph Kosuth’s Purloined (2000) and Sally Alatalo’s A Rearranged Affair (1996), which are entirely made up of fragments of earlier published works and presented in facsimile reproductions (87). An earlier important antecedent was Joe Brainard’s The Friendly Way (1972) – a short collage of cut-up fragments (transcribed sentences and short paragraphs) from American “homemaking” magazine Women’s Household. Although significant formal similarities can be traced between Woman’s World and the works of each author mentioned above, Rawle’s novel deserves to be treated as a unique artistic experiment – in both its employment of collage to literary means and its fusion of form and content. This section aims to examine the collage poetics of Rawle’s book, focusing on its use of fragmentation (and its interplay with continuity), multimodality and appropriation. I shall base my discussion of the collage structure of Woman’s World on page 142, as it displays many key formal properties of the entire work. What becomes immediately apparent when looking at the page is the coexistence of numerous chunks of text (58 in total), whose distinctness is noticeable on account of their typographic variety and the visible contours of the cuttings. For example, the second sentence on the page consists of as many as thirteen cut-outs and features six fonts. The constituent elements of the sentence are the following textual fragments: Like me,/Roy/abhor/s/thoughtless/littering, and besides,/Mary/LIKES HIM TO/save/the paper so it can/be used for next day’s/SANDWICHES/. (142) The multiplicity of parts and the typographical variety (including the indicated use of italics and bold font) pose a serious challenge: as Gibbons asserts, the potential readers of the novel, when confronted with a different sample on the Jezebel.com literary blog, regarded the text as straining for the eyesight and “requiring greater reading processing effort” (173). Page 142 provides examples of both extremely short cut-outs – such as the third-person “-s” in “abhors,” the full stop after “sandwiches” and the plural “-s” in “parcels” – and very long ones, like the eightyword-long paragraph in the middle of the page, which is reproduced with very few alterations. While the need to modify inflected forms by adding or replacing a letter is a perfectly understandable motivation, Woman’s World contains numerous instances of harder to explain fusions of words common enough for Rawle not to be forced to assemble them

Figure 6.1 Graham Rawle, Woman’s World (Atlantic, 2006), p. 142.

164  The Self in Crisis from individual letters. Among such surprising melds are “my/self” (30), “foo/d” (126), “othe/r” (128), “M/y” (198), “m/oney” (228), “wo/man,” “her/self” (both 251), “t/ook” (394), “r/ed” (412), “wom/e/n’s” (428) and “wa/s” (431). While in the case of words such as “k/ron/king” (196) a recourse to a blend may be inevitable, the construction of “smoked” out of a lower-case “smoke” and a capital “D” (337) deliberately attracts attention to the fragmented quality of the novel.5 That sense is further accentuated by Rawle’s occasional use of words whose enormous size disrupts the continuity of the sentence of which they make part. On page 142, the word “Roy” in the opening line could be cited as a case in point.6 While in that instance the word’s prominence could be explained by the fact that it marks the first reference to the protagonist on the page, in many other examples exceptionally large words seem to be used rather arbitrarily. The almost two-inch-tall “I WAS” (in “I was hunched over the sink, washing the make-up from my face when a knock on the door startled me” [244]) and the even larger “HAIR” (in “She lifted her hair while his deft fingers set to work on it” [377]) are not used for semantic or dramatic emphasis; rather, their aim appears to be aesthetic. In his explanation of specific typographic choices on page 209, Rawle admits to placing a disproportionately large version of the word “forty” because it “happened to be sitting on the top of [his] numbers file” and “added a nice graphic element to the page” (Interview by Kachka). The graphic variety is thus privileged over the coherence of a reading experience. Rather than smoothing out the seams, Rawle regularly disrupts narrative immersion and reminds the increasingly collageaccustomed reader of the text’s constructedness.7 The oscillation between regular and incommensurately large fonts could thus be regarded as a metafictional gesture.8 The visibility of the seams makes most sentences in the novel resemble Frankenstein’s monster – a creature sewn together out of fragments of long-dead texts, as noted by Paul Matwychuk (qtd. in Gibbons 171). The fragments, adds Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, remain “alien bodies, stubbornly retaining a visible connection to an anterior site and time.” Woman’s World is, for Wurth, never “its own” but a consistently “prosthetic text” (Between 85). Even so, it successfully conveys a sequential and fairly linear narrative, which grants the text unity and cements it as a novel. Wurth calls this paradoxical coexistence of fragmentation and coherence a “discontinuous continuity” (“Posthumanities” 127). Another related paradox is the fact that, as a general rule, a greater number of constituent elements in a given sentence usually guarantees greater continuity. The highlighted sentence on page 142 is a case in point: although composed of thirteen elements, it is both syntactically and logically structured. Logical connections are often more tenuous in sentences containing longer one-piece phrases such as “tablecloth of plain and simple design” in “He stared back at her blankly, his face a tablecloth of

I’m Every Wo/man 165 plain and simple design” (WW 322). In such cases, the availability of a specific quirky cut-out appears to dictate the development of the passage. When each word comes from a different source, the cut-out serves as a mere visual realization of a preconceived word. The former arrangement is far more in tune with the poetics of collage. Among the examples of eccentric and disharmonious blends are the following sentences (the length of the idiosyncratic cut-out or cut-outs is marked by underlining): He sat with his slim hands knotted between his knees, his boyish complexion pale and sickly, like Wall’s ice cream. (17) The rain had stopped now, but for a few heavy drops that were bouncing intermittently off the van’s roof like chocolate-covered Payne’s Poppets thrown from the branches above them by playful confectioners. (175) Humiliation bubbled in the pan as the heat was turned up to gas mark six. (269) The van moved slowly, as if being pushed by two teenage boys from Dagenham. (295) A recipe book might suggest that a casserole is really nothing more than stew, but to Roy it was a symphony conducted by Mantovani. (379) In each case, the peculiarity, or absurdity, of the underlined passage – in confrontation with the rest of the sentence – is an example of the quintessentially collage-like clash of incompatible components. Rawle’s inclination to produce sentences such as “His face wore the quizzical look of a monkey with a lemon squeezer” (54) is rooted, according to Maziarczyk, in the “the principle of surreal juxtaposition” (80).9 Rick Poyner, likewise, sees Rawle as a descendant of André Breton, calling him a “kitchensink surrealist.” The pairing of raindrops with Payne’s Poppets and lips with “Batchelors peas” (340) are indeed no less idiosyncratic than Comte de Lautréamont’s idea of a “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” (qtd. in Cran 21) or Salvador Dalí’s fusion of a lobster and a telephone. Collage-like collisions in Woman’s World are not restricted to surreal similes. Arguably, the most frequent kind of discordant combinations

166  The Self in Crisis contains advertising slogans. The climax of an intimate scene between Roy and Eve is rendered in the following way: “Overwhelmed by their feelings, they practically fell into each other’s arms. This was the genuine article. 100% pure” (169). The romantic description is thus interrupted by a lapse into blatant commercial speak. That is also the case when Roy explains to his mother their rather hasty decision to marry: “Two weeks is long enough, if you’re certain about someone. This is the real thing, Mum. Guaranteed one hundred per cent genuine!” (395). Besides clashing the discourses of the romance and the commercial, Rawle exploits the irony of advertisement slogans celebrating authenticity. A longer discussion of the novel’s representation of consumerism will be provided in the next section. Another essential component of the collage poetics of Woman’s World is its multimodal richness. Page 142 alone contains three features of multimodal texts as specified by Gibbons: the use of images (a small parcel next to the word “parcels”), an unconventional layout (lack of rightjustification at the top and bottom of the page as well as a sudden narrowing of the text in the middle) and varied typography (four different fonts in the opening sentence). As regards the first characteristic, Rawle employs images on approximately half of the pages, which amounts to just over two hundred throughout the book. Most of them serve as illustrations of objects referred to on the page, usually right next to them, as is the case with the parcel image. The opening five pages of the novel, for instance, contain four images: that of a house, a clothing top, a lipstick and a human head. In two cases, the illustrations appear directly below corresponding passages. On the opening page, a drawing of a house appears on the same level as the capitalized word “home” (3). Finally, a simple sketch of a head comes right above the word “head” – both elements protruding from the otherwise left-justified text (7). The straightforwardness of the relationship between the word and image, as well as the complete redundancy of the latter, generate a mildly humorous effect. Most images in the novel create the sense of being placed there rather arbitrarily: although they are tied to specific words in their vicinity, they do not seem motivated by the wish to bring out new meanings from the text. In that way, they are subservient to the verbal content and should be regarded – to reference Jan Baetens’s distinction – as pictures-of-the-text. Among the examples of images whose status transcends that of mere illustrations is a large surreal drawing of a coffee-drinking man whose head has been replaced by the letter “O” (162). There are also several pages in Woman’s World where the coexistence of text and image is such as one would expect to see in an autonomous visual collage: on page 287, for example, the image of five headless beauty contest participants occupies half of the page and dominates the textual layer, which is usually given pride of place. Whereas the varied typography of Woman’s World is a matter of course, its page design requires closer attention. While the default arrangement

I’m Every Wo/man 167 of text on the page takes the shape of a tall and narrow rectangle (6 inches by 2,5), leaving a lot of empty space (well over an inch each) for side margins, Rawle occasionally introduces substantial alterations. The most common variety involves the exploitation of the blank space of one of the margins by a protruding individual line of text or an image. While such occasional textual chunks rarely stick out by more than 0,8 inch from the rest of the rectangular block of text, some images (such as the two large photos of lipstick on pages 204 and 205) occupy the entire top margin. Among other unusual layouts throughout the book is a page opening with a six-inch-tall capital-letter “P” (125), a rhombus-shaped block of text on page 332 and a nine-line chunk of text divided by an invisible strip across the bottom of page 349. The last two examples can be classified as what Gibbons calls a “concrete realisation of text,” since the arrangement of words is aimed to evoke a specific shape. Other concrete units involve words scattered on the page rather than neatly placed in straight lines. One of several instances of such experiments with layout is the bottom part of page 234, where the dramatic moment of the plot (Norma’s conviction that she has killed Mr Hands) is rendered by means of falling lines of text, in accordance with the conceptual metaphor DEATH IS DOWN, as described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (15). Other instances of scattered letters – such as “a/m/u/s/e/m/e/n/t” (21) – or words – “it/was/nothing/to get/sentimental/about” (180) – are confined to the top or bottom edge of the page and lack a clear semantic motivation. The last but arguably most important collage quality of Woman’s World is its radical reliance on appropriation. Rawle’s novel is the only text considered in this study to be composed in its entirety of external elements. What is more, it is the only work which so clearly highlights the appropriated status of its constituent parts – in this case, of forty thousand “facsimile snippets,” to use Keskinen’s phrase (99). In order for the edges of each snippet to be visible, Rawle adjusted the saturation levels of the facsimile and chose to paste the cut-outs onto a markedly lighter coloured paper. By employing black-and-white reproductions of the original artwork (which is, naturally, as colourful as women’s magazines tend to be), Rawle alludes to the tradition of cutting up the newspaper, which David Banash calls the “ur-form of the historical avant-garde and of modernism itself” (Collage Culture 83) and which has been the classic component of collage since Picasso and Braque. As for the textual aspects of appropriation, Rawle rarely uses wellknown quotations. The few exceptions to that rule are fragments of religious prayers – such as “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (262) and “Ashes to ashes; dust to dust” (366) – embedded in incongruous contexts. A reference to a “Hovis van” is, for instance, followed by the sentence “Hovis – give us this day our daily bread” (12), whose invocation of the Lord’s Prayer in conjunction with the

Figure 6.2 Graham Rawle, Woman’s World (Atlantic, 2006), p. 234.

I’m Every Wo/man 169 British bread company produces a comic effect. Many of the appropriated phrases that are recognizable to the reader are staple ingredients of advertisements, as exemplified by “Everything must go!” (289) and “apply now while stocks last” (the latter discordantly followed by “True love conquers all”) (395). Occasionally, Rawle incorporates longer advertisements, whose banality and utter dispensability from the narrative point of view can be a source of amusement: “A glass of Lucozade might have helped. Lucozade is a very delightful way of giving glucose, a rapid source of energy. It does not upset the most delicate stomach. Invalids take Lucozade willingly because it is so delicious and refreshing” (277).10 Rawle also achieves humorous effects by incorporating commercial speak in ill-matched contexts, as when he follows a mention of Roy’s mother’s “thread of tenderness” by the uniformly typefaced and much larger sentence: “Crunchy nut coating on the outside; soft, creamy filling on the inside” (396). A chocolate bar thus appears to become a vehicle for tenderness in a bizarre metaphor. Besides mocking the vacuity of the advertising rhetoric permeating women’s magazines, Rawle ridicules their reliance on clichés and platitudes by appropriating the former and creating pastiches of the latter. Among the instances of clichéd expressions employed in the novel (and offered, as a rule, in one piece) are phrases such as “until the coast was clear” – used four times, including the eccentric variation “until the coast was crystal clear” (326) – “as white as a sheet,” “putting two and two together” and “one thing leads to another.” Some examples of what Rawle calls women’s magazines’ “breathless platitudes” (Interview by Barry Lynch) are the following sentences: “Painters have been trying to define beauty of face and form since the dawn of art” (WW 219), “A mother who stands by you in crisis is worth a thousand rubies” (250) and “Television is an excellent medium of entertainment, and in the long winter months, helps to while away the time most pleasurably” (389–90).11 Poyner credits Rawle for “transform[ing] the linguistic clichés peddled by [women’s] magazines into something fresh, subtly subversive and often laugh-out-loud funny.” Keskinen, in turn, traces the lineage of Rawle’s practice to Gustave Flaubert’s The Dictionary of Received Ideas (1911) and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977). While those texts expose the language of “the aspiring petty bourgeois and the earnestly amorous as being similarly clichéd” or at least highly “formulaic,” Rawle makes the same point about the discourse of the women’s magazines of the time (91). Another critic who has commented on the novel’s appropriation of clichés is Tania Mary Vivera, who interprets Woman’s World as a parody of the “peppy wisdom and inane optimism” promoted by the magazine industry. Her remark is a response to Rawle’s frequent inclusion of upbeat statements about stereotypically female topics, such as “Housekeeping is, after all, the most thrilling work in the world” (5) and “As a woman, you must never look less than your loveliest” (5–6).

170  The Self in Crisis The above passages exemplify Rawle’s strategy of constructing statements that retain the unique rhetoric of his source material. Norma’s frequent use of direct address, Gibbons argues, springs from the prescriptivism of women’s magazines in the 1960s, manifest most vividly in advice columns and editorials (170). Their zeal to educate is so conspicuous that Rawle has compared them to “an instruction manual for how to be a woman” (Gibbons 199). Indeed, Norma admits that magazines were “an invaluable source of advice” during her long journey towards “the fulsome splendour of womanhood” (WW 415). The suffusion of Norma’s voice with their language and ideology has prompted Michael Leong to call her “the collective unconscious of the women’s magazines personified,” while Banash has labelled her rhetoric as rooted in the “aggressive discourse of normative femininity” (Personal interview).12 Of all the collages discussed in this study, Woman’s World is the one which displays its reliance on found text most ostentatiously. The persistence of what Rosalind Krauss calls the “absent origin” of collage – the discarded context of the source material – is particularly manifest in the situations when a specific cut-out appears to hijack the passage and trumps narrative coherence. In an interview by Mark Wigan, Rawle has admitted that what he “love[s] about collage” is the fact that “both visually and in terms of the content” words can “retain the essence of their original context” (qtd. in Gibbons 170).

Everything Must Go! – The Empty Self and Other Selves in Crisis Despite its predominantly humorous tone – an effect of the continued presence of the source material’s amusing absurdities – Woman’s World is a grimmer novel than it may first appear and one concerned with several aspects of individual and social crises. I shall begin my analysis by a brief discussion of the narrator-protagonist’s crisis-ridden experience, which is marked by increasing disorganization and anxiety. I will then consider the crisis of a split self as represented by the uneasy coexistence of Norma and Roy, which will lead to an examination of the crisis of gender as a stable category, indicated by the novel’s illustration of its constructed status and by the portrayed acts of transvestism. The most important crisis which Woman’s World represents is that of the self immersed in, and defined by, consumer practices. A detailed analysis of that notion, with reference to critical frameworks formulated by Jean Baudrillard, Kenneth J. Gergen and Erving Goffman, will conclude the section. The novel covers the span of several days during which the protagonist Roy Little experiences events leading up to the disintegration of his life, which, until that point, has rested on the fragile balance between his two competing selves. Roy’s inability to confine Norma to the home leads to her increasingly daring outings, which culminate in a visit to the

I’m Every Wo/man 171 flat of Mr Hands. Lured by the promise of a professional photo shoot, Norma becomes prey to his sexual assault. Their physical confrontation leaves Hands lying motionlessly on the ground and Norma convinced that she has killed him. The encounter with the obnoxious man, resulting in the double trauma of attempted rape and manslaughter, catalyzes further emotional turmoil. To use Ellen Hastings Janosik’s terminology, the ordeal at Mr Hands’s is a “hazard” – an “event that endangers the adaptation or adjustment of an individual” and has the capacity for precipitating crisis (4). The ensuing period, until Roy’s presumed death, is marked by what Janosik calls “disequilibrium” and “disorganization” (3, 9). The balance between the private/domestic (Norma) and the professional/external (Roy) is disrupted, and Norma’s exploits threaten to shatter Roy’s budding romance with Eve. The burden of Hands provokes anxiety, whose continued presence is “a major factor in the disequilibrium of crisis” (Janosik 46). Out of fear of being arrested, Roy decides to dispose of Norma’s clothes from a bridge. However, he is so paralyzed with indecision that he cannot drop the suitcase into the freight train passing underneath. Instead, he attracts the attention of two patrolling policemen, who, upon discovering the contents of his suitcase, brutally tease Roy and make him put on Norma’s clothes and smear lipstick over his lips. His embarrassment is described as boundless: “Roy’s eyes were closed now and he could not open them. The humiliation had for ever stripped him of all dignity. He felt the tears form under his eyelids and fought to staunch the flow” (272). The “defilement of his spiritual selfdom” makes him realize that his transvestism, when acted out outside the home, can only meet with social ridicule (Vivera). Roy is unable to shake the distress of both humiliations endured during that one night. Even while kissing Eve the next day, in otherwise idyllic circumstances, he is seized with terror on spotting a trace of lipstick on her shoulder. Although he “scrubbed his mouth thoroughly clean with a soapy flannel” after the police interview (WW 304), Roy finds himself obsessed with the idea of his lips still being covered with lipstick forced on his mouth by the policemen. The turmoil reaches its apogee when, walking home dressed as Norma after discovering that Hands has compromised him in Eve’s eyes, she is so bewildered and distracted that she fails to notice an oncoming car when crossing the street. That failure can be read as an illustration of Janosik’s point that “a person in crisis” is vulnerable to “cognitive errors” in the aftermath of an “extreme emotional reaction” (8). At the heart of Woman’s World is the crisis of the split self, whose culmination Gibbons locates in the scene of Roy’s momentary switch to Norma’s personality occurring in the bathroom of Eve’s flat on the day of the tragic denouement (200–1). When Roy sees his reflection in the mirror,13 he is instantly aware that he is looking at Norma: “ ‘Oh, hello,’ he said with surprise. ‘I thought you were in Scotland’.” Norma, always

172  The Self in Crisis the narrator regardless of whose self is in control, clarifies that “it was not himself he was talking to, it was me” (WW 416). Gibbons offers a cognitive analysis of that passage, focusing on the linguistic indicators of Roy and Norma’s split subjectivity (202). Her reference point is Catherine Emmott’s article about the theme of the split self in fiction, which, according to Emmott, “commonly occurs at times of personal crisis” and serves to evoke “the sense of fragmentation of identity in postmodern society” (Emmott 153). In Emmott’s tentative classification of various literary instances of the split self, Woman’s World would most likely be included among the narratives whose characters “go as far as to apply different names to different aspects of their personality, as perceived by and/or presented to others around them” (165). The origin of Roy’s condition dates back to the death of his younger sister, Norma. According to Vivera, Roy’s invention of his female self is an act of atonement for failing to hold her hand while she was crossing the street and got hit by a car. Although their mother “never actually said it was his fault,” he has always known that that was how she has felt about it (WW 265). When ordered by her soon afterward to hand over her clothes to the Salvation Army, Roy, only 8 years old at the time, had a strong sense that it was “somehow wrong . . . to remove all trace of someone’s existence” (266). Having kept the clothes, one day he put them on and imagined he was looking at Norma in the mirror. That was the beginning of Roy and Norma’s coexistence, which appears to have been, for the most part, fairly peaceful and harmonious. In the earlier parts of the novel, Norma speaks of them as though they were remarkably alike: once she even refers to herself as “being pretty much the same as Roy” (192). However, Roy’s relationship with Eve – leading to their spontaneous engagement and the prospect of a hasty marriage – is a source of concern for Norma, whose privileged status in Roy’s consciousness comes under threat. “Eve’s a lovely girl, don’t get me wrong,” she explains, “but the more time Roy spends with her, the less time he has for me.” Norma resents his plan to spend a Saturday with Eve, as a result of which she “will be left in limbo” (201). The incompatibility of their priorities results in what Maziarczyk calls a “clash between these two aspects of the protagonist’s psyche” (77). That it is impossible for Roy and Norma to continue co-inhabiting his consciousness becomes apparent to Roy after the disastrous scene at Hands’s flat. With a firm resolve to bid Norma a symbolic farewell, he attempts to drop the suitcase with all of her attributes to an open freight train carriage. As was mentioned before, at the crucial moment he fails to do so, seized with “shilly-shallying hesitation” (264). Roy’s indecision about how to act in that situation as well as the broader theme of a rift within his self are represented through multimodal means. Page 264 – one of the most distinctive and commented on pages in the novel – is divided into two triangular parts by a long and narrow bird’s-eye view

Figure 6.3 Graham Rawle, Woman’s World (Atlantic, 2006), p. 264.

174  The Self in Crisis drawing of a railway track and a train. While Leong sees the multimodal design as an illustration of the “psychological split of the protagonist,” Vivera interprets it as a reflection of the “crisis of gendered identity” and of Roy’s “begrudged struggle to chalk out the boundaries of space levied by the society.” At the bottom of the second triangular column of text, Norma explains that even to Roy the symbolic significance of his failure to dispose of the suitcase is evident – “it was about not being able to let go” of Norma (WW 264). Nonetheless, Roy perseveres in his resolution never to allow Norma to return and decides to leave her clothes with Eve. Yet when he finds himself alone in Eve’s room several days later and opens the door to her wardrobe, it becomes apparent that he is not immune to Norma’s hold over him: “He touched the dresses one by one, his hands shaking a little in their clumsiness. It was all too much to take in” (381). Although at that moment Roy manages to contain the impulse, Norma is bound to resurface at the next moment of weakness. She does, as has been noted, return in the final chapter. At first determined to stay and be “very happy” (418), she recognizes her “overexcite[ment]” as a common symptom and resolves to make room for Roy: “Au revoir, Norma; bonjour, Roy, full-time husband” (420). For Roy to marry Eve, Norma realizes she needs to “be out of the picture once and for all, no hiding at the back of the wardrobe, no turning up unexpectedly, like an uninvited guest” (421). Soon after that shift, however, she begins to make plans for the future and entertains the idea of “starting a scrapbook” composed out of cut-outs from her vast collection of women’s magazines, which, after publication, would serve as “a guide to womanhood, dealing with all the things that matter to the average woman” (429).14 A moment later, Norma concludes that after all the disappointments with the “outside world” she is “better off at home” (431). The inner conflict played out in the final chapter – the “crisis of gendered identity,” in Vivera’s words – is also conveyed by typographical means. Two of the larger cut-outs with the capitalized word “women’s” are assembled out of two and three components, the letter “e” being in each case cast in a different typeface from the remaining letters (428–29).15 In consequence, the reader’s attention is drawn to the make-up of the word “women” and its inclusion of the word “men,” which, in turn, emphasizes the interpenetration of the male and female. Maziarczyk notes that “the constructedness of Woman’s World as a book, signalled via its typography, reflects the constructedness of the woman’s world it depicts on the verbal level” (79). The notion of the woman as a construct evokes Judith Butler’s conception of gender identity as fluid and performative. Indeed, Vivera calls Norma a “product of gender performativity,” as well as an agent of “gender perpetuation.” She is a model product insofar as she is eager to be moulded by women’s magazines – her sole educator about the “splendour of womanhood”

I’m Every Wo/man 175 (WW 415). Being a woman, for Norma, is an ongoing task, at which she dreams of excelling: it is a “challenge to be met with careful preparation and planning” (6) and a “demanding role” (217). Besides readily assimilating gender norms, Norma is keen to promote them – most notably by the planned scrapbook “guide to womanhood.” She perpetuates gender stereotypes also by adopting a judgmental attitude towards those who fail to live up to the standards set out by the magazines. A receptionist is criticized for not using any make-up and wearing a “cheap” dress, while Roy’s boss disappoints Norma by not having “dark crisp hair” or “piercing blue eyes” (41, 48). Although Norma seems at home with the feminine self she has diligently constructed and does not see herself as experiencing a crisis of gender identity, the notion of crisis is inherent in Butler’s conception of performativity, which destabilizes and undermines rigid gender categories. Woman’s World further unsettles fixed gender boundaries by introducing the theme of transvestism. As Marjorie Garber argues in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety (1992), the transvestite figure is a marker of “category crisis” precipitated by the process of “calling attention to cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances,” as well as by the commitment to “disrupt, expose, and challenge . . . the very notion of the ‘original’ and . . . stable identity.” The “category crisis” results from the “failure of definitional distinction” and the opening up of an impermeable borderline, which begins to allow “border crossings” between the male and the female (16). In The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Social Theory (2015), Joanne Entwistle argues that cross-dressing undermines gender norms by exposing their “arbitrary nature” and can thus be seen as aiming for the “diminution or disappearance of gender” (175, 11). However, she insists on retaining a distinction between the practices of transvestism and cross-dressing, which Garber treats as synonyms. Citing other scholars, Entwistle notes that transvestites tend to be motivated by sexual pleasure and the wish to “pass off” as a woman, whereas cross-dressers rarely seek sexual arousal and often flaunt the “artificiality of their appearance” (177). According to Entwistle’s differentiation, Roy appears to fit into the former category, even though both Keskinen and Vivera make passing reference to his “cross-dressing” practices (Keskinen 91).16 While Norma never explicitly mentions sexual pleasure, she frequently gushes over her delight at looking feminine and wearing beautiful clothes. She certainly aspires to be regarded by strangers as a woman. What is more, she expresses contempt for cross-dressing as portrayed in a film Roy and Eve are watching in the cinema. The policemen dressed as women to foil shoplifters are described as a “grotesque caricature of womanliness.” She criticizes their crude representation of femininity (reduced to highheeled shoes, red lips and flowery hats) and concludes that “not one of them would pass as a woman in real life” (344). Passing, the ambition

176  The Self in Crisis of transvestism, is her aspiration too.17 Also, in her motives there is no sense of a social or political transgression, which often underlies acts of cross-dressing. On the other hand, Norma’s conviction that she is a woman and her wish to act accordingly characterize neither transvestites nor cross-dressers. Woman’s World, after all, is clearly not a work of psychological realism but a collage novel, its treatment of a crisis of gender categories (and other crises) a mixture of the earnest and the tongue-incheek, of the credible and the absurd. The figure of Norma can also be read as an illustration of a crisis of what Kenneth J. Gergen calls “a palpable self.” In his article “The Self: Death by Technology” (1999), the American psychologist examines “polyvocality, plasticity, repetition, and transience” as symptoms pointing to the decline of a belief in “the individual self as an originary source of moral action” (32). Of the four tendencies, the first two are particularly relevant to Norma. Polyvocality is understood as the self’s susceptibility to many voices, especially that of the media. The result of the constant bombardment of various stimuli, enabled by the rise of information technology, is chaos and cacophony. Norma’s uncritical espousal of women’s magazines and their gender prescriptions, accompanied by the absence of any non-textual foundation to her being, exemplifies a polyvocal self. The utter dependence of her identity on external sources and the lack of any immutable core are symptomatic of the plasticity of modern subjectivity. Gergen also proposes the notion of the “pastiche personality” to account for the mechanism of “borrowing bits and pieces of identity” from the available material (Saturated Self 150). The idea of an appropriated identity creates an obvious analogy with the collage form of the novel. The correspondence between collage-as-form and collage-ascontent will be examined in the concluding section of this chapter. The idea of the self as a collage-like construct deprived of any solid foundation is explored in David J. Burns’s “Self-Construction Through Consumption Activities” (2006). The consumerist self, he argues, draws on “material possessions” as its basis and attaches great importance to the activity of shopping, whose primary role is no longer to secure the products necessary for regular functioning, or even to find bargains, but rather to acquire goods that will forge and reforge the consumer’s identity (151). In Woman’s World, the lack of sufficient means to indulge in shopping makes Norma settle for its substitute – selecting and comparing products advertised in magazines and displayed in shop windows. “Like most modern ladies,” she once declares, “I have very strong ideas about shopping and think the women of this country, particularly the ­working-class women, need to be educated in the art of window-­ shopping. It doesn’t take a minute and it can be fun for a woman to gaze longingly at something she will never be able to afford” (61). The second sentence suggests an ironic critique of the wiles of capitalism and consumerism, but the irony is Rawle’s rather than Norma’s. She creates the

I’m Every Wo/man 177 impression of being a natural product of the consumer system and hence perfectly attuned to its demands. The consumerist self is consolidated and reinforced by “presentation” – the activity of displaying “one’s chosen self” to others and to oneself (Burns 150). Norma satisfies her need for presentation by fantasizing about a professional photo shoot and by spending hours in the window, hoping to be noticed by passersby. “Being a woman, I do have a dream,” she explains, “I would love just once to model a glamorous evening gown and have it on film to always look back on to prove that I could look feminine and alluring” (WW 63). The photograph functions here as tangible evidence of one’s existence (and gender identity) in a consumer world. The consumerist self, however, also requires the fuel of external gaze. For that reason, Norma locates the most exposed window in the house to pose and hope to “provoke a second glance.” There is a specific impression she wishes to evoke in the viewer – that of “a modern woman attending to her daily duties.”18 An uncomprehending gaze is unsatisfactory: “Dogs sometimes look up, but they don’t know what they’re looking at” (9). This kind of subjectivity can present itself in alternative ways and thus be “easily adapted or changed at will”; like the customer in a supermarket, the individual is free to “choose between a number of different possible selves” (Burns 153). Many characteristics of the consumerist self – the emphasis on appearance and clothes, the need to be seen and the freedom to alternate between available selves – invite an analogy not only with Norma but with the figure of the transvestite as a whole. Another conception applicable to Norma is Philip Cushman’s idea of the empty self, understood as one that “seeks the experience of being continually filled up” with “food, consumer products, and celebrities.”19 In its pursuit of momentary satisfaction, the self becomes vulnerable to manipulation by politicians and advertisers alike (599–600). Black Hawk Hancock and Roberta Garner speak of a “new form of subjectivity of images and events” – a self constructed “without an inner life,” “transparent and exterior,” reminiscent of Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the schizophrenic self (175). In the earlier cited essay “The Ecstasy of Communication,” Baudrillard defines the “schizo” as a subject “living in the greatest confusion” and incapable of drawing the “limits of [their] own being” (153). Norma’s radically uncertain ontological status serves as a marker of that kind of confusion. Baudrillard’s characterization of the schizo as “a pure screen” and “a switching center for all the networks of influence” corresponds to Norma’s radically constructed status – her absolute dependence on media content (153). Norma’s habit of using commercial speak – incorporating advertising slogans and adopting a vacuously enthusiastic style when describing products – can also be interpreted in the light of Baudrillard’s diagnosis of the full-scale invasion of advertising coupled with the complete disappearance of public space (149). Woman’s World, after all, abounds in

178  The Self in Crisis references to commercial products (such as Lux, Omo and Ovaltine),20 facsimiles of logotypes (including those of Hovis, Maltesers and Murraymints) and images of various items on sale.21 Norma’s narrative is also frequently punctured by promotional remarks such as “Sugar Puffs are the tasty breakfast treat made from crisp wheat puffs glistening with sugar and golden honey. Energising honey to give kids extra go! No need to add sugar” (319). As noted by Poyner, Norma’s (and Roy’s) lapses into commercial speak sound “quaint” and are marked by “deliberate awkwardness.” One example is Norma’s peculiar expansion on the idiomatic phrase “to work oneself into a lather” by preceding the noun by the adjectives “rich” and “creamy.” In consequence, the passage strongly evokes an advertisement for cosmetics, which is humorously at odds with the description of a poodle dog (WW 209). Rawle has admitted that the original phrase “a rich, creamy lather” has been cut out from “an ­advertisement for beauty soap” (Interview by Kachka). In an earlier scene, Roy’s bemusing eulogy to Omo’s “active whitening ingredient that can actually get your clothes whiter than the day they were bought” is met with Eve’s sober reaction, “You sound like one of those adverts off the television” (177). The infiltration of advertising into everyday language and the resulting crisis of the private are also comically signalled in Norma’s earlier cited effusive description of Roy and Eve’s love as “the genuine article” and “100% pure” – both clusters of words visibly cut from an advertisement (169). “The real thing” and “one hundred per cent genuine!,” in turn, are the phrases used by Roy to convince his mother of the authenticity of their feeling (395). That paradoxical insistence on the “genuine” and “real” in advertisements can be interpreted in the context of Erving Goffman’s notion of commercial realism – a mechanism of replacing the real by “faithful copies of reality” in the form of “the polished ideal without defects or flaws.” The imperfections of everyday life are thus “edit[ed] out,” while the constructed ideal is promoted in the media and “become[s] the basis of social interaction” (Hancock and Garner 175–76). It is this kind of ideal to which Norma aspires throughout the novel, “perfect” and “perfectly” being among Norma’s favourite words, used fifty-one times throughout her narrative.22

Conclusion The correspondence of the consumer theme and the collage form has been most persuasively asserted by Banash, who has called collage “one of the most widespread and perceptive metaphors for the phenomenal experience of everyday life in consumer culture characterized by overproduction and media” (Collage Culture 16). In an already cited passage, he compares the process of composing a collage to the wanderings (down supermarket aisles) of a consumer who speaks “a code of identity by assembling particular elements.” Despite the collagist’s and the consumer’s

I’m Every Wo/man 179 conviction of the uniqueness of their choices, they both, according to Banash, speak “the universal code of capitalism” (16). His reference to the consumer “shopping (or sometimes scavenging, stealing, or faking) new identities” “out of an infinite number of individual fragments” reads like a statement about Woman’s World – about its construction out of thousands of minuscule textual chunks and its concern with the themes of consumer acts, authenticity and identity formation (58). The form-content correlation in Woman’s World is so strong that Maziarczyk suggests it is the perfect literary embodiment of the McLuhanian principle, according to which the medium is the message (82). Its “typographic exuberance,” fragmentation and other multimodal eccentricities serve the purpose of reflecting the “singularity” and the “projected/constructed status” of the novel’s narrator (76–77, 82). Wurth also points out the “evident, and almost inevitable, interaction between the identity of Norma/Roy and the materiality of the text,” which are equally “patched” (“Posthumanities” 135). Keskinen, in turn, observes the close correspondence between the novel’s illustration of the “sartorial and cosmetic formation of gender and identity” and its collage-like composition (98). The formal crisis at the heart of collage, stemming from the incompatibility of assembled fragments, reinforces in Woman’s World the representation of the many thematic crises, ranging from an account of the protagonist’s ordeal to a comic denunciation of the social effects of consumerism. “The cutting edge of critique,” however, is accompanied in collage by a “conservative desire of nostalgia” (Banash, Collage Culture 31–32). In Rawle’s text, the nostalgic impulse is arguably more manifest than in any other twenty-first-century literary collage. The setting of Roy/ Norma’s story in the 1960s, the decade of the author’s childhood, as well as the choice of a print book as a medium (at the time of the digital turn)23 can be viewed as a nostalgic gesture, parallelled by the collagist’s desire to assemble the fragments that they have just cut into pieces.

Notes 1. His individual works were acquired by, among others, Roger Ebert, Melvyn Bragg, Will Self and Peter Gabriel (Rawle, Personal interview). 2. The idea of the series was to extract humour from the deletion of a single consonant in an insipid sentence – such as “Every time the doorbell rang, the dog started barking” – which transforms it into its surreal counterpart – “Every time the doorbell rang, the dog started baking” (emphasis added). The caption was always accompanied by an illustration (and, occasionally, a speech balloon); in this case, of a dog wearing an apron and holding a tray of tarts. 3. Rawle’s corpus was composed of weeklies such as Woman, Woman’s Own, Woman’s Realm, Woman’s Journal, Wife and House Beautiful (Gibbons 169). 4. Alison Gibbons offers a detailed discussion of the ambiguous ending of the novel (92–93). 5. On the other end of the spectrum are very long textual chunks amounting to entire paragraphs of magazine articles or even entire columns – such as

180  The Self in Crisis the problem page complaint by a reader concerned with couples kissing unashamedly in the front rows of the cinema on page 337. 6. That cut-out also exemplifies Rawle’s method of acquiring the necessary number of Christian names for his novel. When Rawle realized that he would not be able to find the required several hundred instances of any common first name in his collection of women’s magazines, he decided to use names that could be cut out from popular words. Hence he settled for “Roy” (acquired from the numerous references to the Royal Family), “Eve” (taken from “Every” and words beginning with “Every –”) and “Norma” (out of “normal”) (Rawle, Personal interview). As can be noticed, the first cut-out with “Roy” on page 142 is cut along the right-hand edge of the “y” – at an angle which obliterates the succeeding “– al.” 7. As proved by Gibbons’s reading experiment, most of those questioned found the “forty” cut-out “undeniably eye-catching” and admitted to wondering about its prominence (186). 8. Rawle also attracts the reader’s attention to certain, otherwise completely transparent, conventions of book design. Rather than introduce automatic pagination, he favours page numbers individually collated from magazine cut-outs. In an interview by Kachka, he declares that it was “fun trying to find a printed number for every page of the book” and informs that “a bit of tinkering was often required.” However, many of his choices go far beyond the “tinkering” involved in assembling “157” out of “15” and “7” but exhibit the wish to poke fun at traditional pagination, in a manner reminiscent of Laurence Sterne’s metaliterary gestures in Tristram Shandy. Among the quirkiest page numbers in Woman’s World are “unlucky thirteen?,” “only 39?,” “No. 46,” “one ‘Four-Two’,” “Over 150” (for 151), “265,” “28/3rd” and “FOUR0two.” 9. Maziarczyk also notes that every page in Woman’s World is – in the words of Roland Barthes – “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” and that Rawle’s function, like that of the Barthesian scriptor, is “to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them” (Barthes, “The Death” 146). Wurth makes a similar assertion about the novel’s radical intertextuality and calls it a “prosthetic” work which operates as a “verbalvisual conjunction defined by [its] connections and interactions with other texts” (“Posthumanities” 126). 10. The reader may notice that the entire passage is assembled from longer fragments of the same source text, which suggests it could be an unmodified authentic advertisement of the popular soft drink. 11. Such platitudes and banal observations can also be found in Brainard’s earlier mentioned The Friendly Way, which contains such statements as “I have many memories of the old pump – some good, and some bad – but that is the way of life” and “I wish I had a home on the ocean, where I could watch the ocean wash the beach” (Brainard 398, 401). 12. The contemporary women’s magazines’ promotion of capitalism, patriarchy and the ideology of homebound femininity was critiqued, most famously, in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Among the more recent accounts of their gender politics are Ellen McCracken’s Decoding Women’s Magazines (1993) and Anna Gough-Yates’s Understanding Women’s Magazines (2003). 13. Vivera notes that the recurrent mirror motif in the novel “reflect[s] the selfobsessiveness” and “the perturbing duality of the protagonist.” 14. Maziarczyk reads that passage as a metafictional hint that Woman’s World might be the very “scrapbook” Norma has conceived at that moment (78–79).

I’m Every Wo/man 181 15. Keskinen comments on the fact that the word “woman” appears in the novel in diverse fonts and sizes, often in bold or ornamental script, which he interprets as an indication of “the inner variability of a seemingly uniform category, or, reversely, the inevitable categorization of variation into given possibilities, be they typefaces or gender roles” (91). Vivera, likewise, sees that device as a suggestion of the “multifarious character of a woman.” 16. Keskinen likens Roy to Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (91). 17. Leong suggests the term “linguistic transvestism” to account for the novel’s “creative employment of found material to ‘dress up’ the book in new attire.” 18. Elsewhere, Norma tries to visualize how she would come across to somebody passing by the window at that very moment. She is pleased to think that they “would probably catch sight of [her] legs, perfectly framed in the window.” She is hoping her position is such as “to create the image of a stylish young woman, as seen from the waist down, like an advert for a skirt in a mail order catalogue” (30–31). 19. Norma is, in fact, a great admirer of popular actresses such as Joan Fontaine and Sylvia Syms. She even adopts the former celebrity’s surname, introducing herself during a job interview as “Miss Norma Fontaine” (42). 20. Wurth calls Norma “a patch-worked version” of Patrick Bateman – the antihero of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) – owing to “her fascination with brands, stylistic prescriptions, and cosmetics” (“Posthumanities”123). 21. Gibbons observes that Rawle’s use of the original typography of such promotional content reinforces the “readers’ imaginative visualisations and the strength of their associations with brands and product types” (190–91). 22. The opening sentence of the novel is Norma’s question, “What is your idea of a perfect home?” (1, emphasis added). Later, she uses the adjective “perfect” mostly in reference to clothes, women and her own outlook. 23. An illuminating analysis of Woman’s World – in conjunction with Ste ven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007) – as a work which uses the “ ‘old’ medium of paper” to address “ ‘new’ posthuman subjectivities” is offered in Wurth’s “Posthumanities and Post-Textualities: Reading The Raw Shark Texts and Woman’s World” (120).

Works Cited Banash, David. Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption. Rodopi, 2013. ———. Personal interview. 12 Oct. 2018. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” Translated by John Johnston. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. Bay Press, 1983, pp. 145–54. Bigge, Ryan. “Using Disconnection to Invent Meaning.” The Star, 16 Mar. 2008, www.thestar.com/news/2008/03/16/using_disconnection_to_invent_meaning. html. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019. Brainard, Joe. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. Edited by Ron Padgett. Library of America, 2012. Burns, David J. “Self-Construction Through Consumption Activities: An Analysis and Review of Alternatives.” The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis, edited by Paul C. Vitz and Susan M. Felch. ISI Books, 2006, pp. 149–67. Cran, Rona. Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan. Ashgate, 2014.

182  The Self in Crisis Cushman, Philip. “Why the Self Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology.” American Psychologist, vol. 45, no. 5, 1990, pp. 599–611. Emmott, Catherine. “ ‘Split Selves’ in Fiction and in Medical ‘Life Stories’.” Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, edited by Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper. John Benjamins, pp. 153–81. Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Social Theory. Polity, 2000. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. Psychology Press, 1992. Gerber, Anna, and Teal Triggs. “Acrobat Reader.” Print, vol. 60, no. 4, 2006, pp. 62–67. Gergen, Kenneth J. The Saturated Self. Basic Books, 1991. ———. “The Self: Death by Technology.” Hedgehog Review, vol. 1, 1999, pp. 25–33. Gibbons, Alison. Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. Routledge, 2012. Hancock, Black Hawk, and Roberta Garner. “Erving Goffman: Theorizing the Self in the Age of Advanced Consumer Capitalism.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol. 45, no. 2, 2015, pp. 163–87. Janosik, Ellen Hastings. Crisis Counseling: A Contemporary Approach. Jones & Bartlett, 2014. Keskinen, Mikko. “Facsimile: The Makings of the Similar in Graham Rawle’s Collage Novel Woman’s World.” Image and Narrative, vol. 17, no. 1, 2016, pp. 86–100. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live by, U of Chicago P, 1980. Leong, Michael. “ ‘Writing with Scissors’: Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World.” Hyperallergic, 6 May 2012, https://hyperallergic.com/51070/graham-rawlewomans-world/. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019. Maziarczyk, Grzegorz. The Novel as Book: Textual Materiality in Contemporary Fiction in English. Wydawnictwo KUL, 2013. Phillips, Tom. “Powder and Paste.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 15 Oct. 2005, www.theguardian.com/books/2005/oct/15/featuresreviews. guardianreview15. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019. Poynor, Rick. “Paste-Up Ladies.” Eye Magazine, 31 Oct. 2005, www.eyemaga zine.com/opinion/article/paste-up-ladies-web-only. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019. Rawle, Graham. Interview by Barry Lynch. The Georgia Straight, 4 Feb. 2009, www.straight.com/article-199803/womans-world-qa-author-graham-rawle. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019. ———. Interview by Boris Kachka. New York Magazine, 24 Mar. 2008, http:// nymag.com/arts/process/45309/. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019. ———. Personal interview. London. 18 Aug. 2017. ———. Woman’s World. Atlantic Books, 2005. Robinson, Edward S. Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present. Rodopi, 2011. Vivera, Tania Mary. “Cut-Up Voices in Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World.” The IUP Journal of English Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2015, pp. 31–36. Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg. Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace. Fordham UP, 2012. ———.  “Posthumanities and Post-Textualities: Reading The Raw Shark Texts and Woman’s World.” Comparative Literature, vol. 63, no. 2, 2011, pp. 119–41.

7 Diaries of Bad Years Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation

This chapter will address the relationship between collage and personal crisis in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009) and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014).1 The two works will be examined alongside one another owing to many formal and thematic parallels between them – from their reliance on short paragraphs and appropriation to their concern with depression and thwarted love. Bluets and Dept. of Speculation shall be discussed in chronological order; each part will outline the context of the book’s publication and critical reception, investigate its indebtedness to the poetics of collage and analyze the work’s representation of personal crisis. Bluets is a hybrid work composed of 240 numbered meditations (or “propositions,” as Nelson refers to them in interviews) on loss, heartbreak, depression and the colour blue. The title – the French word for cornflowers – pays tribute to the painting Les Bluets (1973) by the American abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell. On account of its fragmentariness and preoccupation with colour, Nelson’s book has been compared by reviewers with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on Colour (Als, Dicinoski 6, Francis). In an interview, Nelson admitted to Wittgenstein’s influence on Bluets and indicated Sei Shōnagon’s tenth-century classic The Pillow Book, Peter Handke’s Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), as well as Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977) and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), as other texts which she kept rereading while working on her book (Nelson, “Fragment”). The bulk of Bluets was written between 2003 and 2006, when Nelson struggled with depression in the aftermath of heartbreak and looked after a quadriplegic friend (Francis). Published in the United States – to great acclaim – in 2009, Bluets attracted more attention2 following the success of Nelson’s next work The Argonauts (2015), which won the National Books Critics Circle award for criticism. There is no critical consensus over the generic classification of the book, but the most commonly attributed category has been that of the memoir (Dicinoski 6, Graham, O’Rourke 17). Acknowledging Nelson’s

184  The Self in Crisis use of autobiographical content, Jocelyn Parr argues that Bluets has been written “against the traditional autobiography,” the generic domain of a “white, straight male.” Instead, she situates it alongside Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997) and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010) – works which eschew autobiography’s “prescriptive presentation of selfhood” and infuse it with a dose of literary criticism. Several critics have stressed the book’s fusion of numerous categories. Michelle Dicinoski cites the term “cross-genre” as applicable to both Bluets and The Argonauts, given their employment of “memoir, essay, philosophy and cultural theory” (6). She also examines the former as a typical example of the lyric essay – a genre whose structure and affinity with collage are discussed in the previous chapter. Among other critical labels that have been attributed to Bluets are creative nonfiction (Singer and Walker 2), the paraliterary3 (Tsitsovits) and the prose poem (Francis). There has been much less disagreement about classifying Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, which tends to be read as her second novel, released fifteen years after her celebrated debut Last Things (1999). The book was highly acclaimed and made the shortlists of the Folio Prize and the PEN/ Faulkner Award. Its narrator is – to a considerable degree – an alter ego of the author: a married woman in her 30s, with a child, who works as a creative writing instructor in a Brooklyn College and struggles with writer’s block. Despite the clear autobiographical parallels, the narrator (who in the middle of the novel becomes merely a focalizer referred to as “the wife”) remains nameless like other major characters (“the husband” and “the daughter”). For the first half, Dept. of Speculation portrays a reasonably happy couple facing various problems (from sleep deprivation to a plague of lice in their apartment). Near the middle, it turns into an account of a severe marriage crisis, occasioned by the husband’s infidelity. The marriage is on the verge of collapse, but by the end that danger seems to have been averted. In the New York Review of Books, Elaine Blair calls the book an unusual adultery novel, since it adopts the rare perspective of the “wronged” wife, rather than the betrayed husband or the “adulterous partner.”4 However, the word “unusual” is even more suited to describing the form of Dept. of Speculation. This short novel is composed of fortysix chapters and around eight hundred separated one-paragraph (often one-sentence) fragments. The narrative of the marriage crisis (with all its accompanying strands restricted to the narrative present) is conveyed through about a third of the paragraphs. The remaining majority offer various insights into the narrator’s memory and intellect, her state of mind, erudite associations and her current reading. On account of the thematic and formal parallels between Dept. of Speculation and Nelson’s book, Offill has been asked about its influence. She admitted to having read Bluets when she was “halfway through” her novel and “freak[ing]

Diaries of Bad Years 185 out that maybe [Nelson] had already done what [she] was trying to do.” She also called it a “great book, jagged and dark and expansive” (Offill, “Subterranean Lives”).

Collage Structure If, as Lance Olsen proposes in “Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction,” literary collage can be conceived of as a “narratological continuum” (188), then Bluets and Dept. of Speculation need to be placed further from the pole of radical appropriation, fragmentariness and parataxis than Markson’s quartet, perhaps further also than Reality Hunger. What situates Nelson’s and Offill’s works nearer the pole of non-collage is their greater sense of cohesion, achieved by the degree of thematic and narrative unity, as well as their strategy of embedding appropriated content. Nonetheless, as I will argue, both Bluets and Dept. of Speculation are sufficiently dependent on quotation, the fragment and juxtaposition to be regarded as texts from within the poetics of collage. The respective sections on the collage-like aspects of the works by Nelson and Offill will examine the types and characteristics of their minuscule components, their use of cited material and how the different snippets have been arranged. Bluets The basic unit of Nelson’s book is a numbered paragraph, whose length varies from a short sentence (“46. Disavowal, says the silence”) to an almost two-page-long block of text (205).5 There are on average two or three such paragraphs on every page, which makes them similar in length to the earlier mentioned Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein – a text that Bluets “structurally echoes” and “leans against” (Dicinoski 6). According to Jocelyn Parr, Nelson follows Wittgenstein’s strategy of promising order through numbering the passages while “subvert[ing] that order” by contradicting the arguments that have just been formulated. The effect of this method, for Wittgenstein and Nelson alike, is “destabilizing but also intimate,” as it creates the sense that the reader is invited to think aloud together with the author (Parr). As regards the content of the passages, or “propositions,” an apter point of reference and a strong influence is the Marksonian quartet. Gina Myers points out that both Markson and Nelson create a “collection of quotes and facts” – a wealth of erudite content addressed to a bookish reader. In both cases, the recurrence of a certain kind of material develops into a theme – whereas Markson is particularly interested in the lives and reputations of fellow artists, old age, mortality and anti-Semitism, Nelson shows preference for what she calls the “major categories” of themes in Bluets: “love, language, sex, divinity, alcohol, pain, death, and

186  The Self in Crisis problems of veracity/perception” (“Fragment”). Also, in Nelson’s book, quotations and other cultural references are not as prominent as in the quartet, which consists primarily of them. Bluets places the emphasis on the narrator – identifiable with Nelson herself – and her meditations and experiences regarding loss, heartbreak and the colour blue. External material is appropriated only when it supports, or enters into a dialogue, with the narrator’s own remarks. The variety of sources employed by Nelson is as wide as in Reader’s Block and ranges from the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood” and the philosophical tracts by Goethe, Wittgenstein and Simone Weil to the lyrics of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. As well as Markson, Nelson tends to acknowledge the origin of the cited fragments. Sometimes she does so in a typically essayistic manner, by providing an academic lead-in (complete with the name of the author and the context in which the remark was made) and following it with a commentary on the quotation’s significance. Usually, the embedding is rather scarce, and the quote’s relation to the rest of the text is left for the reader to determine, as is the case with the paragraph below: 32. When I say “hope,” I don’t mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean thinking that it’s worth it to keep one’s eyes open. “What are all those/fuzzy-looking things out there?/Trees? Well, I’m tired/of them”: the last words of William Carlos Williams’s English grandmother. The most collage-like employment of cited matter in Bluets occurs when Nelson creates a paragraph out of a single bare quotation followed only by the name of its author in parentheses: 58. “Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing” (Leonardo da Vinci). 77. “Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?” (Thoreau). In both instances the ready-made is placed in between unappropriated passages, and its function, as is often the case in visual collages, is confrontational. The bare quotation serves here as an intrusion of an incongruous voice. Da Vinci’s remark on the “ugliness” of love appears in the context of the narrator’s discussion of lust and female sexuality – topics which she clearly does not regard as “ugly.” The feeble consolation of Thoreau’s passage, in turn, is sandwiched between evocations of the narrator’s prolonged struggle with depression. Several times Nelson indicates an incorporated passage only by enclosing it in quotation marks or by italicizing it, as is the case with the following paragraph:

Diaries of Bad Years 187 83. I tried to go with the theme: I bought a yellow journal. On its cover sheet I wrote a slogan of penetration: Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate, for all things are manifest in the sight of heaven. A Google search of the italicized part reveals it as coming from The Gospel of Thomas, but the attribution is withheld by Nelson. As a general rule, from which the passage above is an exception, Nelson uses italics when she quotes herself or her friends and quotation marks when the source is a published text. Besides the use of heterogeneous and appropriated material, another feature of collage poetics which is present in Bluets is the reliance on the fragment. The composition of the book out of short, numbered paragraphs set apart from each other by a space evokes the sense of a list, catalogue or inventory rather than of a tightly woven cohesive whole. Incorporating brief passages cut from other sources further accentuates the fragmentary feel of the text. In the following entry, Nelson includes a disconnected fragment of an exchange between two actors from Andy Warhol’s erotic film from 1969: 175. Viva to Louis Waldon, the other fucker in Blue Movie: “We don’t want to see your ugly cock and balls. . . . It should be hidden.” Louis: “You can’t see it.” Viva: “Well, it should be hidden.” Another common strategy of collage literature – the use of unfinished or incomplete sentences – is not pursued by Nelson. The closest she comes to highlighting incompletion is in one-sentence paragraphs whose meanings are partial and predicated on previous paragraphs, even though their separate number suggests a degree of self-sufficiency: 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see. 115. In which case seeking itself is a spiritual error. 237. In any case, I am no longer counting the days. The opening phrases – “as if,” “in which case” and “in any case” – are clear indications that the entries which they begin are not self-contained entities and need to be read in relation to earlier passages. The radical brevity of those entries – surrounded as each numbered passage in Bluets by a large space both above and below – enhances the visual dispersion of the text. Nelson has acknowledged her book’s debt to the poetics of fragmentation; in one interview she even proposes her own taxonomy of fragment varieties, which are all “put . . . into play” in Bluets. Out of the many

188  The Self in Crisis categories (exemplified by works of Sappho, Edgar Degas, Sigmund Freud and T.S. Eliot), the most important ones to her work are, in Nelson’s own estimation, “the fragment as fetish, as catastrophe, as leftover, as sample or citation [and] as memory” (“Fragment”). Among the categories considered by Nelson is also the “contemporary fragment,” understood as a snippet whose format is reminiscent of that of social media messages (“Fragment”). Although Nelson concedes that there are “possible similarities” between Bluets and “Tumblr et al,” she stresses that the actual models for her poetics – such as Wittgenstein and Barthes – lived long before the advent of the Internet (Nelson, “Sort” 93–94). Nelson weaves her fragments together more meticulously than any of the authors considered so far, although collage-like juxtaposition remains an important compositional principle for Bluets. The connections between successive paragraphs rest on their logical or thematic continuity accentuated by the use of discourse markers, such as “and so” (which opens the second paragraph of the book) and “however.” As many as eleven numbered paragraphs begin with “but,” which situates them in opposition to the ideas presented in the preceding paragraph. Nelson admits that “some of the propositions are very much in dialogue with the ones that have come before it, acting as rebuffs, or conclusions, or swerves” (“Fragment”). Another way of ensuring a degree of continuity is placing the passages in a specific order. Nelson has complained about her frustrating struggle with the “almost endless” ways of rearranging the components of both Bluets and The Argonauts (Interview by Quinn). A meta-commentary on the arduous editing process is even included in a passage of Bluets, where the narrator remarks that her “propositions . . . have been shuffled around countless times” and “have been made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river” (184). Gavin Francis notes that the arrangement, however complex, is not governed by chronology or theme but rather by “a poetic, bittersweet logic.” The word used by Marie O’Rourke and Michelle Dicinoski to describe Nelson’s strategy of interweaving consecutive paragraphs is “associative” (O’Rourke 17, Dicinoski 7). One of many blocks of text in Bluets which exemplify this method is the sequence of propositions from 196 to 198. The first of them opens with an address to Nelson’s ex-lover and is followed by a reflection on making one’s intimate experiences public. The sense that such an act might be “foolish” is supported by the remarks of other artists, Goethe and Sei Shōnagon, who have expressed regret about their literary confessions. Then Nelson returns to the lover and ponders the possibility of a future reunion devoid of any trace of the present pain. Again, a literary reference is invoked – this time a passage from William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Descent.” Williams’s meditation on memory triggers a remark by Leonard Cohen about his failure to remember the details of the autobiographical experience which inspired one of his songs. Sequences like this appear to be governed by the associative

Diaries of Bad Years 189 properties of the mind, which accounts for the mixture of a qualified thematic unity and a tendency to digress. O’Rourke argues that the composition of Bluets imitates the “structure of neural pathways” and illustrates “the power of involuntary memories” (17, 20). Besides the many meticulously constructed connections between consecutive passages, Bluets contains many blocks which resist a clear pattern of logical progression. In an interview by Jess Cotton, Nelson explains that readers of the book are “forced to leap from thing to thing” and “make the bridge” between adjacent fragments. She adds that her experience of being a poet makes her “invested in what juxtaposition is as a tool.” The importance of juxtaposition to Bluets is also asserted by Dicinoski, who observes that it is a common structural principle of the lyric essay, alongside what she calls a “sidewinding poetic logic” (2). As I argued in the earlier chapters, the two most collage-like rhetorical relations based on juxtaposition are Joint and Confrontation. Below is an example of the former type, a paratactic and interchangeable arrangement of consecutive components: 207. I can remember a time when I took Henry James’s advice – “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” – deeply to heart. I think I was then imagining that the net effect of becoming one of those people would always be one of accretion. Whereas if you truly become someone on whom nothing is lost, then loss will not be lost upon you, either. 208. Cornell’s diary entry for February 28, 1947: “Resolve this day as before to transcend in my work the overwhelming sense of sadness that has been so binding and wasteful in past.” 209. Duras did not think of alcohol as a false god, but rather as a kind of placeholder, a squatter in the space made by God’s absence. “Alcohol doesn’t console,” she wrote. “All it replaces is the lack of God.” It does not necessarily follow, however, that if and when a substance vacates the spot (renunciation), God rushes in to fill it. For some, the emptiness itself is God; for others, the space must stay empty. “Lots of space, nothing holy”: one Zen master’s definition of enlightenment (Bodhidharma). Although a thematic link – the notions of loss and absence as theorized by, in most cases, artists – between propositions 207–9 can easily be traced, there is a degree of arbitrariness to the order in which they have been placed. In other words, there is little sense of a logical progression, but rather a sense of – to use Nelson’s word – accretion. Confrontation, understood as a juxtaposition of antithetical statements, can be exemplified across propositions 217–21. The sequence

190  The Self in Crisis begins with a series of clichés that the narrator’s quadriplegic friend has heard from friends and acquaintances: “we’re only given as much as the heart can endure,” “what does not kill you makes you stronger,” “our sorrows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn” and “there must be a reason for it.” This “religious or quasi-religious” advice, which the friend sees as “another form of violence” (217), is confronted by Nelson with the narrator’s own assessment: “As her witness, I can testify to no reason, no lesson” (218). Nelson further accentuates the disparity between the two positions by asking the reader first to “imagine someone saying, ‘Our fundamental situation is joyful’,” then to imagine “believing” it or “feeling, even if for a moment, that it were true” (220–21, emphasis original). The benevolent vision of a purposeful world, epitomized by a quotation (unacknowledged) from the self-help book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, is shown as antithetical to the non-religious world view represented by the narrator, her disabled friend and – Nelson assumes – the reader of Bluets. The idea of clashing conflicting statements or quoting sources in order to contradict or take issue with them is a common strategy in the book. Nelson refers to this method of incorporating other texts into her work as “leaning against” rather than “leaning on” them (“Sort” 123). The preposition “against” implies that Nelson does not wish to blend other voices with her own and obscure their distinctness, which would result in the emergence of a montage or mosaic rather than a collage. O’Rourke argues that Bluets abounds in contradictions and dualities which are made to coexist on its pages: “sight and blindness; dark and light; pleasure and pain; remembering and forgetting” (19). The overall effect is a collage-asform – fragmentary, heterogeneous, appropriative, ­paratactic – but also a collage of ideas and sentiments. Dept. of Speculation Like Bluets, Offill’s novel is a slender volume (of just under 180 pages) composed of short, mostly one-paragraph units, whose number exceeds eight hundred. Many of them consist of a single sentence; the shortest are composed of a single word (“Loneliness?” [18]; “Nothing” [37]). The small chunks of text surrounded by a lot of blank space on the page grant the book a fragmentary feel, which has been noted by reviewers referring to Dept. of Speculation as “fragmented,” “fractured” (Beth Jones) and “shattered” (John Self). Offill’s style is highly economical – it relies on ellipsis and short sentences. She favours sparing descriptions and pithy meditations. When a narrative progression is suggested, Offill prefers to show rather than tell, sometimes resorting to haiku-like concision. For instance, in order to suggest a gradual recovery after the marital crisis, the narrator offers the following self-contained passage: “The leaves are nearly gone now. The daughter is pressing them into a book. The husband is outside chopping wood” (174). Offill provides the reader

Diaries of Bad Years 191 with momentary glimpses, or snapshots, leaving out the days or weeks in between, which enables her to relate the narrative developments of six or seven years in twenty-five thousand words. In an interview, she has admitted that her ambition in Dept. of Speculation was to renounce a linear plot in favour of “something stranger, something that captured the quicksilver of thought and was radically distilled in form” (Offill, “Emotional Recalibrations”). The most distinct building blocks of Offill’s novel which are not essential to narrative progression are quotations, anecdotes and curiosities. The book contains a high number of acknowledged quotations and proverbs (which function as self-contained paragraphs) – mostly by writers and philosophers – from Hesiod and Ovid to John Keats and T.S. Eliot. Many of them are preceded by the “What X said:” formula, as in the following microscopic entries: What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer. (54) What Wittgenstein said: What you say, you say in a body; you can say nothing outside of this body. (78) What John Berryman said: Goodbye, sir, & fare well. You’re in the clear. (113) Moreover, there are at least as many quotations whose source is not provided. Some of them are singled out as quotes by the use of italics (“Here lies one whose name was writ in water,6 I thought pleasingly” [18]), while others take the form of submerged intertextual references, as exemplified by the sentence “His father was from another country so maybe that was how they did things over there” (19), which alludes to an oftcited maxim from L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) – “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The length of appropriated passages varies from a single clause to a 133-word-long excerpt from the epilogue to Carl Sagan’s book Billions & Billions (1997). An example of the most collage-like use of appropriation is a page-long paragraph (one of the longest in the novel) – an amalgam of fragments of various songs and literary texts – which ends with the following passage: A my name is Alice and I want to play the game of looooove. Lightning bugs, falling stars, sea horses, goldfish, gerbils eat their young, please, no peanut butter, parental signature required, #1 Mom, show-and-tell, truth or dare, hide-and-seek, red light, green light, please put your own mask on before assisting, ashes, ashes, we all fall down, how to keep the home fires burning, date night, family

192  The Self in Crisis night, night-night, May came home with a smooth round stone as small as the world and as big as alone. Stop, Drop, Roll. Salutations, Wilbur’s heart brimmed with happiness. Paper valentines, rubber cement, please be mine, chicken 100 ways, the sky is falling. Monopoly, Monopoly, Monopoly, you be the thimble, Mama, I’ll be the car. (72–73, italics original) The borrowed passages are from the lyrics of the Osmonds’ song “My Name Is Alice,” an airplane security announcement, the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie,” e.e. cummings’s poem “maggie and milly and molly and may,” E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and the children’s folk tale “Henny Penny.” The manner of juxtaposing the passages is reminiscent of the closing lines of The Waste Land and of William S. Burroughs’s cutups in The Ticket That Exploded. The intertextual parallels with Eliot are further reinforced by the reference to “falling,” the use of a nursery rhyme and the use of repetition (“Monopoly, Monopoly, Monopoly” possibly echoing “Shantih shantih shantih”). There are also numerous passages which convey anecdotal references to a variety of writers, religious leaders and thinkers from Thales to Vladimir Nabokov. One of the passages focuses on Anaxagoras, an Athenian philosopher who believed that everything is composed of small particles designed by eternal intelligence. Although the particle claim is not mentioned, the reference itself may be interpreted as a subtle self-reflexive comment on the novel’s own fragmentariness. Many snippets are devoted to scientific trivia concerning psychology (mostly coming from divorce self-help literature) and astronomy (inspired by the ­narrator-protagonist’s experience of ghostwriting a book by a rich would-be astronomer). Other standard components of Dept. of Speculation are lists and question-and-answer sequences, often preceded by an organizing heading, such as “Personal Questionnaire,” “Three things no one has ever said to me” and “Three questions from my daughter” (DS 43–44, 68, 74). In a section headed “Student Evaluations,” Offill appears to include – like B.S. Johnson in Albert Angelo (1963) – pieces of original feedback on her teaching: She is a good teacher but VERY anecdotal. No one would call her organized. She seems to care about her students. She acts as if writing has no rules. (45, italics original) The first, second and fourth statements could be interpreted as metafictional, since they may correspond with some readers’ impressions of Offill’s highly digressive, if not anarchic, style. Other blocks organized by the List relation enumerate such incidental elements as the sounds

Diaries of Bad Years 193 that NASA recorded for the aliens and the narrator’s “really American” slogan ideas for fortune cookies (83–84, 52). Unlike Markson, Offill does not use refrains and very rarely employs the same passage twice. If certain lines are repeated (such as “Why would you ruin my best thing?” [59, 102]) or reappear in a modified form (“I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” [sic, 69] and “I CAN HAS BOYFRIEND?” [111]), their reoccurrence is not aleatory – as is usually the case in the quartet – but tied to a specific narrative situation, in the light of which it gains a new significance. The words “Why would you ruin my best thing?,” for instance, are quoted first as an expression of the narrator’s daughter’s annoyance at having her favourite blanket shrunk in a laundromat and the second time as a manifestation of the narrator’s own resentment towards her husband over having an affair with another woman. Although the arrangement of the eight hundred separate passages that constitute the novel may at times seem arbitrary, Offill has admitted to putting much effort into the process of organizing the fragments. Her method consisted in writing the minuscule passages on index cards followed by “shuffl[ing] and reshuffl[ing]” them. Although she feared that such an arrangement would “make no sense to anyone” except her, she was encouraged by the advantages of this strategy, which involve the possibility to “play with all sorts of odd and surprising juxtapositions” (Offill, “Emotional Recalibrations”). One of many such juxtapositions occurs at the end of chapter 24, which gives an account of a scuffle between the narrator and her husband. The wife’s demands that he admit what kind of video he has recently sent his lover culminate in his anticlimactic confession: “Of guinea pigs eating a watermelon.” Two brief snippets follow that statement: “What Kant said: What causes laughter is the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing” and “What the Girl said: Hey, I really like you” (105). Offill places alongside one another a transcript of marital discord, a quotation from Critique of Judgement (1790) and the imagined words of the husband’s lover. Other benefits of the fragmentary, paratactic method are, in Offill’s own words, the opportunities to “capture how emotion moves through a person” and to combine “quiet, self-contained moments” with those “when the world rushes in again” (“Emotional Recalibrations”). An intrusion into the private and homely by the exterior can be exemplified by the following clash of an intimate scene of family idyll with a proverb portending an infestation of the narrator’s flat with lice: I find a cheap piano and surprise my husband with it. Sometimes he composes songs for us after dinner. Beautiful little things. If it is after eight, the neighbors complain. Anyway, the bugs get in it. An Arabic proverb: One insect is enough to fell a country. (56–57)

194  The Self in Crisis The above excerpt could also be interpreted as a subtle instance of the Confrontation relation, which Offill frequently employs – more so than Joint, the other common strategy in parataxis and collage. In the below sequence, the mawkish opening quotation mistakenly attributed to W.B. Yeats (rather than Robert Browning) is confronted with Yeats’s much bleaker passages: Grow old with me. The best is yet to be, say the cards in the anniversary section. But there are other lines from Yeats the wife keeps remembering. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal Things fall apart. (136) The last two quotations – from “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Second Coming,” respectively – are in stark contrast with the glibness and false reassurance of the opening rhymed cliché. The idea of incorporating statements rooted in an ideological position very distant from the narrator’s own is a strategy used in Dept. of Speculation as well as Bluets. In Nelson’s book, the cited words of religious comfort offered by the visitors of the narrator’s quadriplegic friend serve the same purpose. Other instances in Offill’s novel are the following: a line from the Gospel of Matthew (“If your eyes are sound, your whole body will be filled with light”) in the context of buying glasses in a particularly dark hour of the narrator’s life (68), a nineteenth-century warning against wives reading novels (“one of the most injurious habits,” which may lead to an “indifference to the performance of domestic duties” [49]) and examples of banal advice from self-help publications such as Thriving Not Surviving and a “horribly titled adultery book” (6–7, 124). Characteristically for Offill, she rarely articulates the disparities, incongruities or connections between the juxtaposed elements. Although James Wood observes that many of Offill’s “paragraphs link with their successors, so that a continuous narrative is not hard to construct,” he adds that others are “opaque” and “eccentric,” which causes the reader to “experience deliberate discontinuities and obstructions.” It is thanks to the latter group of components that Dept. of Speculation can be considered a collage. While the novel’s partial reliance on narrative progression undoubtedly diminishes its collage effect, the fulfilment of the other criteria – multiple and varied components, fragmentation and appropriation – sufficiently justifies the use of this category. If Offill’s novel achieves a degree of coherence through its plot-dependence, it is – in

Diaries of Bad Years 195 Wood’s words – a “randomized coherence.” As Roxane Gay argues in her review, the book poses a challenge to the reader by compelling them to consider “the why of each fragment and how it fits with the others.” The same could be said about each collage work, visual or literary. It is because the collagist – “instead of building dutiful bridges” – has the freedom to “leap into space” (Offill, “Emotional Recalibrations”).

Things Fall Apart Both Bluets and Dept. of Speculation use the form of collage to represent an experience of personal crisis, understood – after Gerald Caplan – as a “reactive state provoked by hazardous events that threaten important life goals or values” (qtd. in Janosik 3). As Ellen Hastings Janosik argues in Crisis Counseling: A Contemporary Approach (1994), the trigger for crisis, referred to as “hazard,” often takes the form of “interpersonal change such as loss of a significant person through death or divorce” (4). Loss is the main cause of the crisis suffered by the narrator of Bluets, who mourns the separation from her lover. In Dept. of Speculation it is the threat of loss – the fear of divorce instilled by the husband’s infidelity – that serves as the major hazard. Both texts address several other crisisinducing factors, all of which are going to be discussed in this section. According to Janosik, the individual in crisis is confronted with a longterm “disorganization” and “disequilibrium,” marked by the presence of intense anxiety (3, 46). That sense of disorganization is conveyed in both works through their form as well as content. Formally, it is evoked through the use of the collage-like anarchy of parataxis and the confrontation of opposing statements. The fragmentation of both works could also be interpreted as indicating the disintegration of the narrators’ lives. In her review of Bluets, Dinty W. Moore has suggested that the “splintering” of its material into 240 “lyrical prose entries” illustrates “how grave personal losses can shatter us into pieces” (184). The disturbance of the narrators’ daily existence is also, directly and indirectly, conveyed through the accounts of their struggle with grief, resentment and anxiety, which are going to be examined in the ensuing part of this section. On the opening page of Bluets, the narrator cautiously confesses her loneliness, which she knows is capable of “produc[ing] bolts of hot pain” (4). Seventy entries later, she speaks of her emotional state more openly when she admits to “becoming a servant of sadness” (75). Soon afterwards, she announces, “Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself” (90). Although she never explicitly diagnoses herself as depressive, it is implicit in her choice of reading. At one time she admits that eight months after discovering a book subtitled “How Women Face and Overcome Depression” she finally overcomes her embarrassment and orders it online (85).7 She is inclined to address her own condition through the examples of other figures. For instance,

196  The Self in Crisis she quotes one of the most famous depressives, Vincent van Gogh, as saying, “The sadness will last forever,”8 to which she only adds, “I imagine he was right” (98). Right from the start, she declares that her love for the colour blue does not make her inclined to wallow in “blueness.” On the contrary, she wishes to put an end to her dejection. “Above all,” she states, “I want to stop missing you,”9 the “you” referring to the lover who abandoned her for the sake of another woman (8). The process of working through the experience is the subject of her therapy, which is mentioned in passing on two occasions – each time a different therapist is involved. The second one reassures the narrator that a year on she will not feel the same about her situation anymore. “The truth is,” she adds with hindsight, her “feelings haven’t really changed” although she has learnt to behave as if they have (44). Although the narrator declares that she “can hardly remember” the lover’s face (188), the memories of their lovemaking still carry a great emotional charge. It seems to her that, regardless of her attempts to come to terms with the loss, the lover is “etched into [her] heart” (206). It soon becomes apparent that the book’s combination of subjects – grief and the colour blue – is far from arbitrary. Nelson demonstrates that the relevance of blue to personal crisis extends beyond its traditional association with sadness. She points to artists and philosophers who became intrigued by colour in general and blue in particular during “a particularly fraught moment” of their lives: Goethe at the mysterious time of inner disequilibrium, Wittgenstein while struggling with stomach cancer and Derek Jarman – the author of the film Blue (1993), inspired by Yves Klein’s monochrome painting IKB 79 – in the final stages of AIDS (23). Nelson considers Goethe’s claim that blue is a colour of “disturbance” and confesses to feeling comfort at the thought of blue as “the color of death” (36, 134).10 When reflecting on the lyrics of Billie Holliday’s “Lady Sings the Blues,” she concludes that “to see blue in deeper and deeper saturation is eventually to move toward darkness” (135). Some of Nelson’s considerations about the colour blue could be interpreted as symptomatic of an epistemological crisis. Her meditation on what is known as the “illusion of color” – the fallacy of treating the colour’s “experiential quality” as its “intrinsic” property – leads her to consider a more radical scepticism about the reliability of human perception (53). She wonders if, by analogy, the subjective experience of love is also illusory. During therapy, she is confronted with the idea that although she used to be convinced that she loved the man “completely for exactly who he was,” she was deceived about his nature (44). That inability to distinguish with confidence between truth and falsity, and, consequently, between love and not-love “pains [her] enormously.” If it follows that what she felt for the man was not love, she is resigned to admitting that she does not “know what love is.” The arduous process of examining the causes of her feelings strips love of its “blue” – this time a synonym of

Diaries of Bad Years 197 beauty – and turns it into “an ugly, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting board” (45). Bluets can be read as an account of yet another crisis – graver than the ones already examined although experienced vicariously by the narrator. It concerns one of her closest friends, who in the aftermath of an accident has been rendered quadriplegic. Nelson’s meditations on blue and loss are interspersed with brief insights into her condition from the shock of the first hours in hospital, through the years of intense daily pain and the ongoing struggle to accept the irreversibility of her loss, to a degree of equanimity about her situation. Although the chronological account of the friend’s condition imposes a narrative of gradual acceptance, Nelson is careful not to slip into a tone of false optimism. She emphasizes that several years after the accident the friend is still “busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it” (217). In the last passage devoted to her, Nelson acknowledges the positive changes in her condition but stresses her continued “intense” and “bottomless” “grief for all she has lost” (228). In How Literature Saved My Life, David Shields includes Bluets in the section headed “fifty-five works I swear by,” where he describes it as a “cri de coeur about Nelson’s inability to get over the end of a love affair” and a “grievous contemplation of a close friend’s paralysis.” He adds, however, that the book’s scope extends much further so that, in the end, Bluets addresses “nothing less than the melancholy of the human animal” and “wrestl[es] with existence at the most fundamental level” (151). The same could be said about Dept. of Speculation, whose examination of a personal crisis is embedded in the larger context of philosophical reflection – signalled by the title of Offill’s novel. One of its narrator’s first “speculations” asks whether her “mental anguish” is a permanent or temporary condition (7). That remark is later confronted with the observation that, despite the Buddhist belief in the existence of as many as 121 states of consciousness, most people oscillate between the only three which entail “misery or suffering” (11). The narrator ventures the bleakest (and angriest) assessment of the human condition and the fragility of any human constructs when she marvels at her husband’s capacity not to lament how “unbearable it is that things keep breaking” and that “you can never fucking outrun entropy” (37). Even though the major crisis-inducing event, or the main hazard, as Janosik would call it, occurs only in the middle of Dept. of Speculation, the book is tinged with crisis right from the beginning. On the opening page, the narrator declares that she is “so weary of all of it” (3). Soon afterwards, she discloses her miscarriage, which is, however, described in a rather affectless manner. The loss is mentioned in the context of a new apartment: “by the time we moved in, we had found out that the baby’s heart had stopped and now it just made us sad to look out the window at it.” That understated confession, reminiscent of the voice of Kazuo

198  The Self in Crisis Ishiguro’s first-person narrators, continues for a single paragraph and conveys the sense of pained resignation rather than despair. “We had told people. We had to untell them,” the narrator announces flatly (20–21). That frequently adopted tone evokes what Berlant has diagnosed as the “sense of flatness in the world, as though affects and emotion themselves are exhausted from adjusting to all the intensities.” What might have been represented as tragedy Offill renders as “lower case drama” (“Thinking” 6–7). When the next pregnancy succeeds and the long-awaited baby is born, the narrator is plunged into a cycle of constant apprehension, exhaustion and sleep deprivation. Her immersion in the role of the mother exacerbates her professional anxiety and her sense of failure about not having produced her second novel for much too long. The pressure to write is accentuated, deliberately or not, by the people around her: the head of the department where she teaches creative writing asks her bluntly, “Where is that second novel? . . . Tick tock, tick tock” (38), while a friend whom the narrator has not seen for many years notes apologetically, “I think I must have missed your second book” (51).11 After the birth of the child, however, there is no time for any creative work, as the narrator can barely fulfil her teaching obligations. An insight into the difficulty of maintaining a professional facade at a time like that is offered by a passing reference to the narrator’s alarmed realization, a moment before her class, that she has a “chunk of vomit” in her hair (36).12 The routine imposed by the child results in the narrator’s days being “cut . . . up into little scraps” (26), which can be interpreted as a metafictional allusion to the composition of the book. As with Bluets, the disintegration of the narrator’s experience is echoed in the formal fragmentation of the text and its hybrid, collage-like structure. The best example of the representation of crisis through collage and fragment is afforded by Chapter 22, which marks a turning point in terms of both form and content, as it signals the onset of the marriage crisis and represents a shift from a consistent first-person to a third-person narrative (in which the former narrator begins to be referred to as “the wife” and her husband as “he” or “the husband,” instead of “you”). The chapter opens with the heading “How Are You?” followed by an eighteen-line sequence of “soscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredso” (94), which constitutes a solid rectangular block of text reminiscent of a concrete poem. This litany of fear is followed by a short statement about “the wife praying . . . to Rilke” and a longer passage warning the reader against answering unthinkingly the question about their happiest memory: before replying, the reader is advised, they should consider the questioner and be careful not to hurt them by describing a time that did not involve them (95). The next passage is a note about Hipparchus’s discovery of a new star in 134 bc, which made him realize that stars were impermanent entities capable of appearing and disappearing.

Diaries of Bad Years 199 The ten consecutive paragraphs describe the consequences of the wife’s failure to include the husband in her happiest memory: the look on his face, his absence at home one of the subsequent evenings, their ensuing bitter conversations, whose cryptic fragments function as three distinct paragraphs. The last of them – “That’s not what I asked you” – is followed by one-sentence paragraphs reporting on Thales’s belief that the earth was flat and Anaxagoras’s conviction that there were people living on the moon (97). After a note that the narrator’s sister is coming from Pennsylvania to help look after the daughter comes a piece of advice from Ovid on what to do when one has been caught in the wrong. The penultimate section contains what seems a snippet of a conversation between the wife and the husband about the woman with whom he has begun an affair: Taller? Thinner? Quieter? Easier, he says. (98) The chapter ends with another scientific fact – the note that in 2159 bc astronomers Hi and Ho were killed for failing to foresee an eclipse. The quotations and anecdotes recounted in Chapter 22 exemplify cases of famous thinkers and scientists being wrong about the universe or failing to predict a crisis. Although none of them makes any reference to the narrative situation, the notion of misjudgement clearly corresponds to the wife’s inability to assess the effect of the fateful conversation with her husband and her general disregard of their strained relationship. The coexistence of the plot-driven paragraphs with erudite analogies in the novel does not come across as contrived or pretentious, as the bookishness of the narrator – a writer and writing teacher herself – justifies her resort to the knowledge that she has at hand at the time of emotional upheaval. The novel’s resort to intense intertextuality in the context of personal tragedy is reminiscent of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), whose narrator relies on the author of Madame Bovary to make sense of his wife’s infidelity and suicide.5 Offill’s narrator, in turn, chooses to “pray” to Rainer Maria Rilke and seek analogies in astronomy. The earlier mentioned sudden shift that occurs in Chapter 22 – the transition from an intense first-person narration to a third-person account focalized by the wife – has been interpreted by Elaine Blair as “a kind of dissociation, perhaps brought on by a crisis.” It may also be interpreted as a response to being reduced to a cliché, which involves “the wife” despairing over “the husband’s” affair with “the girl” and desperately attempting to make him stay with her and “the child.” That alone causes her great distress and precipitates what might be seen as a

200  The Self in Crisis crisis of identity – a period of intense reconsideration of what she has become as a result of the husband’s infidelity and the threat of separation. At one point she reproaches the husband for having “made [her] into a cartoon wife,” which she finds undeserved and humiliating (138). Her embarrassment about turning into a stereotypical wronged woman is also reflected in a description of the measures she takes in order not to be caught buying or reading the earlier mentioned “horribly titled adultery book” (125). The awareness of repeating certain conventional patterns of behaviour – such as laughing sarcastically whenever the husband uses a lighthearted word like “nice” or “fun” – occasionally makes her feel sorry for herself: “She has seen this rhetorical strategy used before by a soon-to-be ex-wife talking to her soon-to-be ex-husband. Poor creature, she thought then” (123). The focalizer’s crisis of identity also manifests itself in the confusion about her provisional and highly uncertain position, described by the deliberately awkward label of a “soon-to-be ex-wife.” “If the wife becomes unwived,” she wonders in a different entry, “what should she be called?” The focalizer notes that there is no accurate word describing the status of a woman who is no longer a wife and not yet a divorcée and concludes that what she is can be best captured by the phrase “stateless person” (121). Her statelessness, understood as the lack of foundation, finds its expression also in her emotional volatility – the newly discovered propensity to fall in love on an impulse, with friends, students and strangers (111). The danger of divorce, however, seems ultimately averted, which attenuates the state of permanent crisis. The last chapters of Dept. of Speculation offer a narrative of gradual reconciliation between the wife and the husband until, on the final page, the third person switches to the first. That enables the use of the form “we,” which was absent for the previous twenty-four chapters. In order to describe a peaceful winter scene – the parents waiting for their daughter at a school bus stop – Offill renounces collage and fragmentation and resorts to traditional paragraphs, free from any appropriated content. The novel thus ends on a serene note, which seems to herald the end of crisis and the advent of better times. However, in personal correspondence, Offill suggests that the novel concludes with an evocation of “a fragile peace, brittle even,” as the daughter, now older, may not keep the parents together very much longer. When they are standing in the icy wind in the closing scene, they, Offill notes, “don’t know the name for what they are” (“Re:”). Whereas the resolution of marital problems may not be definitive, another source of anxiety does recede from view: the completion of the novel, although not accompanied by any metafictional commentary, may be felt by the reader as putting an end to the narrator’s struggle with writer’s block. After all, Dept. of Speculation can be associated with the frequently mentioned “second novel,” which Offill produced fifteen years after her debut.

Diaries of Bad Years 201 In Bluets, on the contrary, the final pages do not bring anything even vaguely resembling a happy ending. While Nelson also creates a sense of closure, her resolution is far more pessimistic about the possibility of coming to terms with loss. “I learned my lesson,” the narrator announces, “I stopped hoping” (231). The last two quotations in Bluets note that “there ain’t no bottom” to “the blues when you got ’em” and that Paul Cézanne spent his last days acutely aware of “the wretchedness of his empirical life and of his unsuccessful attempts” (235–36). The closing passages contain an address to the ex-lover which brings together for the last time the book’s two chief concerns – loss and the colour blue: 238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. 239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.” 240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light. Through the use of the past tense (“there was a time,” “I was alive”), Nelson imbues the last lines with a sense of finality which seals the earlier asserted loss of hope.13 Her tone matches the sentiment of contemporary crisis – “flat, post-vital, exhausted” (Berlant, “Thinking” 8). The last sentence augurs a future enveloped by death and darkness, the only alternatives to what the narrator claims to have renounced – life and light. Sadness, it feels, will indeed last forever.

Conclusion Towards the end of Dept. of Speculation, Offill includes the following quotation from Rilke: “Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further” (171). Both books considered in this chapter appear to have been born out of their authors’ immersion in a grave and prolonged personal crisis. As I have aimed to demonstrate, both seek to render that experience employing the formal principle of collage, whose reliance on fragmentation and inner conflict corresponds to the sense of personal disintegration and the disturbance of emotional equilibrium. The correlation of form and content is also evident in the resolution of both texts: the abandonment of fragmentary structure and appropriation in Dept. of Speculation signals the overcoming of crisis,

202  The Self in Crisis while their persistence in Bluets conveys the failure to work through the pain of loss. In the end, Bluets proves to be the bluer book, its mournful heart manifest in the publisher’s choice of a darker hue for its cover than that of the blue on the binding of Dept. of Speculation.14

Notes 1. An earlier version of small parts of this chapter appeared in an article of mine entitled “Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and the Revival of Fragmentary Writing,” published in Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies. 2. Due to the high sales figures of The Argonauts, Bluets was finally released (and widely reviewed) in Britain in 2017. 3. Paraliterature is a notion introduced by Rosalind Krauss in reference to Roland Barthes’s act of “blur[ring] the distinction between literature and criticism” in such works as The Pleasure of the Text (1973), A Lover’s Discourse and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (282). 4. Examples of the much commoner perspective of the betrayed husband can be found in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Alain RobbeGrillet’s Jealousy (1957) and Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) (Blair). 5. As with Reality Hunger, the figure in parenthesis represents the number of the section rather than that of the page on which it can be found. 6. The epitaph on John Keats’s grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. 7. In a parallel scene in Dept. of Speculation, the narrator cannot bear the humiliation of buying a “horribly titled divorce book” and chooses to travel to a bookshop in a different neighbourhood to purchase it (124). 8. This line is also the epigraph to Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames. 9. Another formal similarity between Bluets and Dept. of Speculation is the narrator’s frequent use of “you.” Whereas Offill makes it refer exclusively to the husband, Nelson employs a wider range of referents. In the author’s own commentary on this narrative device, she suggests that in Bluets the second person can designate “the ‘you’ that’s actually ‘me,’ the ‘you’ that’s ‘you, the reader,’ the ‘you’ that’s a particular other (a beloved in absentia), the ‘you’ that’s rhetorical, as in ‘one’ ” (Nelson, “Sort” 101). 10. The connection with death returns near the end of Bluets when the narrator confesses that if she were on her deathbed, she would indicate her love of blue and having sex with her ex-lover as being among “the sweetest sensations [she] knew on this earth” (212). 11. In a later section – a bitter summary of a particularly bad year in the form of an imagined Christmas card to be sent to the family – the narrator also stresses the non-occurrence of her novel: “It is the year of the bugs. It is the year of the pig. It is the year of losing money. It is the year of getting sick. It is the year of no book. It is the year of no music. It is the year of turning 5 and 39 and 37. It is the year of Wrong Living. That is how we will remember it if it ever passes” (64, italics original). This passage can also be read as an encapsulation of the prolonged and multifaceted crisis experienced by the narrator of Dept. of Speculation. 12. In a corresponding scene in Bluets, right before beginning a class on prosody, the narrator bursts into tears upon seeing the word “heartbreak” (an example of a spondee) in her lecture notes (42). 13. In personal correspondence, Nelson pointed to the possibility of interpreting the narrator of Bluets as “already dead,” which accounts for the words

Diaries of Bad Years 203 “when I was alive,” as well as for the opening passage – “suppose I were to begin.” The latter, she noted, “places the book in a speculative space.” Nelson credited the voice of the focalizer of Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress as an inspiration for this idea (“Re:”). 14. I am referring to the paperback editions by Wave Books and Vintage Contemporaries, respectively.

Works Cited Als, Hilton. “Immediate Family.” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 18 Apr. 2016, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/maggie-nelsons-many-selves. Accessed 16 July 2018. Berlant, Lauren. “Thinking About Feeling Historical.” Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 1, 2008, pp. 4–9. Blair, Elaine. “The Smallest Possible Disaster.” The New York Review of Books, NYREV Inc., 24 Apr. 2014, www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/04/24/jenny-offillsmallest-possible-disaster/. Accessed 29 May 2016. Dicinoski, Michelle. “Wild Associations: Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson and the Lyric Essay.” TEXT, no. 39, 2017, pp. 1–12. Drąg, Wojciech. “Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and the Revival of Fragmentary Writing.” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 56, 2017, pp. 57–72. Francis, Gavin. “Heartbreak and Sex in 240 Turbocharged Prose Poems.” Review of Bluets, by Maggie Nelson. The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 8 June 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/08/bluets-maggie-nelsonreview-heartbreak-sex. Accessed 16 July 2018. Gay, Roxane. “Bridled Vows.” Review of Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill. The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 9 Feb. 2014, www. nytimes.com/2014/02/09/books/review/jenny-offills-dept-of-speculation.html. Accessed 29 May 2016. Graham, Tom. “Short Review: Bluets by Maggie Nelson.” The Financial Times, The Financial Times Ltd., 9 June 2017, www.ft.com/content/28742468-49ef11e7-a3f4-c742b9791d43. Accessed 16 July 2018. Janosik, Ellen Hastings. Crisis Counseling: A Contemporary Approach. Jones & Bartlett, 2014. Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. MIT Press, 1986. Moore, Dinty W. “Positively Negative.” Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, pp. 181–88. Myers, Gina. Review of Bluets, by Maggie Nelson. Bookslut, Dec. 2006, www. bookslut.com/nonfiction/2009_12_015550.php. Accessed 16 July 2018. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. 2009. Jonathan Cape, 2017. ———. “The Fragment as a Unit of Prose Composition.” Interview by Ben Segal. Continent, vol. 1, no. 3, 2011, pp. 158–70. ———. Interview by Jess Cotton. The White Review, May 2015, www.thewhite review.org/feature/interview-with-maggie-nelson/. Accessed 16 July 2018. ———. Interview by Molly Rose Quinn. The Atlas Review, no. 4, 2014, www. theatlasreview.com/maggie-nelson/. Accessed 16 July 2018.

204  The Self in Crisis ———. “Re: An Academic Inquiry Regarding Bluets.” Received by Wojciech Drąg, 20 Feb. 2019. ———. “ ‘A Sort of Leaning Against’: Writing with, from and for Others.” The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House, edited by Christopher Beha. Tin House Books, 2012, pp. 83–103. Offill, Jenny. Dept. of Speculation. 2014. Granta, 2015. ———. “Emotional Recalibrations: PW Talks with Jenny Offill.” Interview by Seth Satterlee. Publishers Weekly, 3 Jan. 2014, www.publishersweekly.com/ pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/60520-emotional-recalibrations-pwtalks-with-jenny-offill.html. Accessed 16 July 2018. ———. “Subterranean Lives.” Interview by Anjali Enjeti. Los Angeles Review of Books, 29 June 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/subterraneanlives/#!. Accessed 16 July 2018. O’Rourke, Marie. “Memory’s Fracture: Instability in the Contemporary Memoir.” Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir, edited by Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph. Routledge, 2018, pp. 13–28. Parr, Jocelyn. Review of Bluets, by Maggie Nelson. Brick: A Literary Journal, 26 Nov. 2015, https://brickmag.com/review-bluets-maggie-nelson/. Accessed 16 July 2018. Self, John. “Intense Vignettes of Domestic Life.” Review of Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill. The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Mar. 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/14/dept-speculation-review-jenny-offill. Accessed 29 May 2016. Shields, David. How Literature Saved My Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Singer, Margot, and Nicole Walker. “Introduction.” Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, pp. 1–7. Stein, Bob. “Reading and Writing in the Digital Era.” Discovering Digital Dimensions, Computers and Writing Conference, 23 May 2003, Union Club Hotel, West Lafayette, IN. Keynote Address. Tsitsovits, Ioannnis. “The Afterlife of Theory in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.” Fragmentary Writing in Contemporary British and American Fiction. U of Wrocław, 23 Sept. 2017. Conference Presentation. Wood, James. “Mother Courage.” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 31 March 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/31/mother-courage-3. Accessed 29 May 2016.

Conclusion Collage Is Here to Stay

Collage is a formal principle operating in works as distinct as Woman’s World and Bluets. Among the fourteen texts examined in the entire study are works spanning a broad spectrum of contemporary literature – ­classified as fiction and non-fiction and representing genres from the short story, manifesto and the essay to memoir and the novel. It is noteworthy – and paradoxical – that the latter label has been applied to as many as ten of those works, even though, according to Marjorie Perloff, “collage goes against the very idea of the novel” (Personal interview). Although Woman’s World meets all the common criteria of the novel, while Head in Flames and Dept. of Speculation satisfy most of them, the term “collage novel” can, admittedly, be viewed as an oxymoron. The most evidently collage-like works – such as Markson’s quartet and Dreamlives of Debris – could only fit a most lenient definition whose main criterion is considerable length. Their authors’ and publishers’ adherence to the generic label should be viewed in the context of the ever-widening range of the novel as the hegemonic literary form. Despite their partial or complete fulfilment of the adopted formal criteria, the fourteen works have been shown to vary in their incorporation of the collage principle. As regards appropriation, the sine qua non of all collage, several variables should be noted: the reliance on borrowed content (from rather limited in Dept. of Speculation to complete in Woman’s World), the accuracy of its presentation (from precise citations in VAS to “slant quotes” in Olsen’s and Shields’s works), the acknowledgement of the source (clear indications in VAS versus the lack of quotation marks in Markson and Reality Hunger) and its function (from the object of pastiche in Woman’s World to argumentative material in Shields and Nelson to the evidence of the heteroglot noise of contemporary world in Dreamlives of Debris). Much emphasis has been placed on what Olsen has called “a poetics of beautiful monstrosity” – the heterogeneity of collage works, which results from the multiplicity and diversity of appropriated elements (Markson’s quartet is a case in point); the construction of distinct narrative voices (Head in Flames); and the incorporation of other semantic modes than text (Sewing Shut My Eyes). The latter kind

206  Conclusion was discussed as multimodality in chapters referring to Shields, Olsen, Tomasula and Rawle, where focus was turned to the use of images (over two hundred in Woman’s World) and the experiments with typography (most exuberant in Rawle’s cut-up novel), layout and page design (most daring and varied in VAS). Through multimodal means, several works, it was suggested, close the gap between collage in literature and the visual arts: all pages (or panels, as the author has referred to them) in Olsen’s “Telegenesicide” and many from VAS and Woman’s World could be displayed as individual exhibits in an art gallery. It has also been argued that all the considered works rely on the principle of juxtaposition, which renounces synthesis and what David Antin calls “stronger logical relations” (211). Markson’s enumerations of related names, dates and places; paratactic joints of facts and situations; as well as confrontations of conflicting statements are the most characteristic examples of that formal trait of collage literature. In the absence of explicit logical connections, the reader is compelled to reflect on “the why of each fragment and how it fits with the others” (Gay). The examined motivations for placing appropriated elements one next to another range from evoking shock (as in Tomasula’s juxtapositions of unsettling statements about eugenics) to provoking laughter (the surreal lexical constructs in Woman’s World). One of the effects of the replacement of “subordination” by “coordination” (Perloff, “Collage” 386) is collage’s potential for reversibility, which was asserted in the discussion of Olsen’s and Tomasula’s work. While Reality Hunger could also be read in other sequences than that imposed by the bound book, Rawle’s novel, which relies on its meaning for plot development, could not. Bluets, in turn, is an interesting case of collage which appears to have a capacity for non-linear reading, although Nelson admits to having struggled with the endless urge to rearrange its “propositions.” Unlike a visual collage, literary texts (especially in print form) are composed with a view to being experienced in a given sequence, which in certain works may be disobeyed by the reader without severe disruption to its reception. Finally, all the texts have been examined with reference to their employment of fragmentation, which has been achieved by numbering the components (Reality Hunger and Bluets), incorporating minuscule passages – such as single words and unfinished sentences (in Olsen and Tomasula), constructing words and sentences out of individual letters and words (Woman’s World), and using a lot of blank space (a strategy followed by most works, particularly noticeable in Dreamlives of Debris). In twenty-first-century collages, differences in poetics entail differences in politics. The competition between the critique embodied in the act of cutting and the nostalgia inherent in the practice of gathering and pasting results in texts situated near either end of the spectrum. The former strategy, fuelled by the ambition to “explode possible meanings” and undermine ideological positions prevails in the works of Markson, Olsen

Conclusion 207 and Tomasula (Banash 31). Their texts are visually and structurally more fragmented than those of the other authors, while their representation of the aesthetic and sociopolitical crises shows greater readiness for sharp criticism, sarcasm and parody. For Offill, Rawle and, to a lesser extent, Nelson and Shields, gathering appears more important than dismembering. What David Banash calls “the conservative desire of nostalgia” rooted in the act of “calling out” to the original context of the collage’s appropriated elements is nowhere more visible than in Woman’s World (32), which is steeped in the poetics of post-war British women’s magazines. Although Bluets, Dept. of Speculation and Reality Hunger are constructed out of fragmentary entries, their composition seeks a qualified unity – signalled by Nelson’s thematic discipline, Offill’s narrative arc and the driving argument of Shields’s manifesto. The latter group of texts could be said to show greater serenity in the face of the represented crisis. The comic tone of Woman’s World, the ultimate reconciliation between the narrator and her husband in Dept. of Speculation and the passionate defence of authors offering to revive contemporary literature in Reality Hunger convey the sense that crisis can be overcome, alleviated or, at the very least, spoken of without alarm. The last statement also applies to Bluets, whose narrator makes it clear that her wounds have not healed (and never will) but appears reconciled to the sadness which will “last forever” (Nelson 98). Works by Markson, Olsen and Tomasula, on the other hand, are strongly marked, from beginning to end, by the repercussions of unresolved crisis: “incomprehension, disorientation, perplexity (aporia), revolutionary violence, disorder, interpersonal conflict, and ontological uncertainty” (Hollahan 22). The sense of exhaustion and the anxiety triggered by the imminence of death (evoked by the recurrent line “Timor mortis conturbat me”) are never assuaged in Markson’s quartet, which culminates in the suicide of the destitute and abandoned author-figure. Dreamlives of Debris and VAS end on an equally bleak and dystopian note, which can be encapsulated by the feeling that “it’s the end of the world as we know it” and by the Beckettian mantra (quoted by Debris) “the worst is still to come, was still to come, will still be to come, has come, had come, is coming” (Olsen, Dreamlives). They do not indicate (or even believe in the possibility of) a way out of the “impasse” – the condition which Lauren Berlant compares to a “cul-de-sac . . . a holding station that doesn’t hold securely but opens out into anxiety” and sees as intrinsic to the experience of contemporary crisis (199). The angst and gloom about the political, ecological and technological developments is more prevalent in twenty-first-century collage than at the time of Barthelme, Burroughs and Acker. Whereas many of the American collagists of the 1960s and 1970s were committed to opposing hegemonic systems, such as capitalism, patriarchy and social normativity, Olsen and Tomasula have aimed to evoke the epistemological and ontological

208  Conclusion chaos of the new millennium and to indicate its potential repercussions. Capitalism continues to be a thematic interest of contemporary collage but – except for Woman’s World, where it is a central concern – mostly as a context for other sociopolitical and aesthetic phenomena. Acker’s fierce attacks on the male literary canon find no equivalent in recent literary collage; on the contrary, Nelson and Offill have no qualms about “leaning against” (to use Nelson’s phrase) the work of such towering figures as Goethe, Wittgenstein and W.B. Yeats. Whereas much of collage in the second half of the twentieth century wished to shock and scandalize its readership, for example, through explicit descriptions of nonnormative sexuality in Naked Lunch, that ambition is less prominent in contemporary collage. The only work discussed in the present volume which adopts a similar aesthetic is Sewing Shut My Eyes, which, having been released in 2000, technically belongs to the previous century. When Markson, Olsen and Tomasula appropriate shocking statements – racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic – their aim is not to outrage the reader but rather to demonstrate how recently such opinions were tolerated. Collage enables them to juxtapose and confront multiple voices, past as well as present, as a result of which their works are radically polyphonic and adopt a broader historical perspective. Both of those characteristics align their authors with Eliot and Pound rather than Burroughs and Acker. The abundance of appropriated voices in twenty-first-century collage may be attributed to the rise of the Internet, which grants access to a virtually infinite and chaotic archive of texts and standpoints, clashing like the words of Vincent, Theo and Mohammed Bouyeri in Head in Flames. Almost all the discussed authors play with incongruous juxtapositions – achieved by placing passages from canonical texts alongside references to the likes of Britney Spears and Justin Bieber. “One minute he’s quoting Dostoevsky, the next he’s asking his wife if he can share her vibrator,” writes Blake Morrison of Shields’s collage method. “High/low, private/ public: the demarcations disappear.” Although the mixing of high and low sources is not new to collage (it can be found in The Waste Land), the frequency with which it is employed is a recent development and, most likely, an influence of the anti-hierarchical information structure of the Web and the social media. In Cognitive Fictions (2002), Joseph Tabbi points out that “arrangements of visual, verbal, and aural media . . . take on a new proximity and an expanded potential for recombination in the age of the Internet, when for the first time in history all media can exist on a single digital platform” (ix–x). In that respect, collage literature has also followed suit and exploited its multimodal potential more than ever before. Even the richly visual works of Acker and the material innovations of B.S. Johnson pale in comparison with the exuberance of typography and page design in works such as Woman’s World and VAS. Whereas experiments with font and the appropriation of images are not practised by all the examined

Conclusion 209 authors, each of them makes use of blank space in order to separate textual chunks. As a result, contemporary collages have a much more fragmentary look than texts such as Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded, Paolozzi’s Kex and Acker’s The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec. Burroughs’s dominant method of seamlessly merging appropriated passages has been replaced by a more overtly plagiaristic strategy of laying bare the borrowings and, more frequently than before, acknowledging their status. The more daring multimodality of twenty-first-century collage can also be attributed to the rise of electronic literature and the e-book. As Adam Hammond argues in Literature in the Digital Age (2015), we live in a “hybrid moment,” with “one foot in the print world and the other in the digital” (20). For the contemporary collagist, the print book is no longer the default medium but a medium of choice. What lies behind that creative decision is often the wish to achieve an effect which cannot be produced by electronic means. VAS, whose visual and material qualities are designed to evoke associations with the human body, and Woman’s World, which constantly draws attention to its status as a material cutand-paste text, are among the quintessential examples of hypermediacy – the practice of “remind[ing] the viewer of the medium” (Bolter and Grusin 272) – and of what Jessica Pressman has labelled “the aesthetic of bookishness.” The authors’ exploitation of the potential of print technology presents a challenge to the patterns of online and e-book cognition; like Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, their works are defiantly “inert” and “unclickable” – conceived as “anti-Kindle[s]” (Kachka). The adherence to the print medium by the authors1 discussed in this study, combined with the commitment to explore the potential afforded by visuality and materiality, may be regarded as a position “hover[ing] between futurism and nostalgia” – represented by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth’s category of “current cutting-edge paper-based writing,” which “re-invigorates” contemporary literature (138). The examples of such formally reinvigorating collage works are more numerous than this book has been able to reference. Among them are Carole Maso’s AVA (1991), Michael Betancourt’s Artemis: A Tragedy of Collage and Two Women and a Nightengale: A Novel in Collage (both 2004, sic), Stewart Home’s 69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess (2002) and Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (2004), and Steven Hall’s Raw Shark Texts (2007).2 Last years have seen the publication of new collage works by Shields, whose Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump (2018) embodies the poetics and politics of collage as understood in my study. Jeremy Gavron’s collage novel Felix Culpa (2018) has recently attracted a fair deal of critical attention by its incorporation of lines from over a hundred literary works and the construction of almost half of its chapters from entirely appropriated content. The formal influence of collage can also be traced in the highly acclaimed novels of Max

210  Conclusion Porter – Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015) and Lanny (2019). Most remarkably, collaged fragments of historical sources constitute a sizeable proportion of George Saunders’s Man Booker Prize–winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). Time will show if Saunders’s Booker will spur greater domestication of collage techniques and ensure their entry into the mainstream of literary fiction. The authors of Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity Crisis (2011) blame the ubiquity of collage as a cultural practice – a once “daring” method which is used today so often that “nobody notices” (Khan 19) – for the loss of originality and the demise of youth subcultures (Rose 72). “The age of collage should finally come to a close,” announces Aaron Rose in the closing essay of the book (92). On the other hand, Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying (2010) celebrates the wider cultural consequences of a perspective afforded by montage and collage, namely “openness” and “the freedom toward which we are heading” (175). While the assessments of the artistic and sociopolitical legacy of collage vary, it is safe to venture the opinion that collage is here to stay, at least for a long while. Among the reasons for its continued relevance are its strong relationship with capitalism and mass production and its capacity for political engagement, rooted in the act of gathering the fragments, which shows “an intuitive grasp of how the world might be put together” (Perloff, Futurist Moment 72). Its democratic propensity to incorporate an array of conflicting voices and convey the resulting sense of epistemological crisis proves particularly useful in the media-saturated reality of the new millennium. Finally, collage’s commitment not just to represent the modern world but to insert “reality fragments,” to use Peter Bürger’s phrase (78), or “the thing itself” endows it with greater authenticity, so desired in our reality-hungry times. Over a century after its invention, collage – in Olsen’s words – “is still the realism that best captures much of our culture’s sense of the world” (“Complexities”).

Notes 1. Tomasula’s loyalty to print is not absolute, as his TOC: A New-Media Novel (2009) is a hybrid electronic work – an assemblage of text, photography, painting, film, animation, voice-over and music. 2. A number of works critically labelled as “conceptual writing” – including Kenneth Goldsmith’s famous Day (2003) and his American Trilogy, composed of The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007) and Sports (2008) – share an essential formal affinity with collage (its heavy reliance on appropriation) but have been omitted because they do not fulfil the other formal criteria I have adopted.

Works Cited Antin, David. Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005. U of Chicago P, 2011. Banash, David. Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption. Rodopi, 2013.

Conclusion 211 Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 2000. Boon, Marcus. In Praise of Copying. Harvard UP, 2010. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. U of Minnesota P, 1984. Gay, Roxane. “Bridled Vows.” Review of Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill. The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 9 Feb. 2014, www. nytimes.com/2014/02/09/books/review/jenny-offills-dept-of-speculation.html. Accessed 29 May 2016. Hammond, Adam. Literature in the Digital Age: An Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2015. Hollahan, Eugene. Crisis-Consciousness and the Novel. U of Delaware P, 1992. Kachka, Boris. “Reinventing the Book: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Object of AntiTechnology.” New York Magazine, New York Media, 21 Nov. 2010, http:// nymag.com/arts/books/features/69635/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2019. Khan, Mandy. “Living in the Mess.” Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity Crisis, edited by Mandy Khan, Brian Roettinger, and Aaron Rose. JRP Ringier, 2011, pp. 5–45. Morrison, Blake. “The Trouble with Men by David Shields Review – Reflections on Porn and Power.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 23 Feb. 2019, www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/23/the-trouble-with-men-davidshields-review. Accessed 2 Mar. 2019. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. 2009. Jonathan Cape, 2017. Olsen, Lance. “The Complexities of a Moment Felt.” Interview by Scott Esposito. The Quarterly Conversation, 5 Apr. 2010, http://quarterlyconversation. com/the-complexities-of-a-moment-felt-the-lance-olsen-interview. Accessed 21 Apr. 2017. ———. Dreamlives of Debris. Dzanc, 2017. Perloff, Marjorie. “Collage and Poetry.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly, 4 vols. Oxford UP, 1998, vol. 1, pp. 384–87. ———. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. U of Chicago P, 2003. ———. Personal interview. 2 Dec. 2018. Pressman, Jessica. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 48, no. 4, 2009, http://quod.lib.umich. edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0048.402; rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg. Accessed 4 Mar. 2019. Rose, Aaron. “The Death of Subculture.” Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity Crisis, edited by Mandy Khan, Brian Roettinger, and Aaron Rose. JRP Ringier, 2011, pp. 67–112. Tabbi, Joseph. Cognitive Fictions. U of Minnesota P, 2002. Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg. “Posthumanities and Post-Textualities: Reading The Raw Shark Texts and Woman’s World.” Comparative Literature, vol. 63, no. 2, 2011, pp. 119–41.

Index

Abbott, Edwin A. 132, 149 – 50 Acker, Kathy 26, 31 – 2, 207 – 9 Adler, Renata 82 Alatalo, Sally 33, 162 Antin, David 10, 15, 19 appropriation 10 – 11, 29, 32, 52, 88, 92n18, 104, 115 – 16, 138, 142, 167, 191 – 2, 205 Ashbery, John 29, 40n11 assemblage 12, 40n11 Bäcker, Heimrad 70n11 Baetens, Jan 82, 102, 166 Bakhtin, Mikhail 138 – 9, 153n9 Ballard, J.G. 32 – 3, 115, 132 Banash, David 1, 3, 7n2, 12, 14 – 15, 18, 22 – 3, 26, 132, 140, 148, 167, 170, 178 – 9, 207 Barnes, Djuna 20, 27 Barnes, Julian 111, 199 Barthelme, Donald 13, 29 – 30, 109 Barthes, Roland 21, 69n5, 92n11, 120, 169, 180n9, 183, 202n3 Bateman, John A. 37 – 9 Baudrillard, Jean 100, 104, 108, 119 – 20, 128n20, 177 Beckett, Samuel 80 – 1, 84, 92n7, 121, 207 Benjamin, Walter 75, 88, 117 Berlant, Lauren 5, 6, 8n6, 145, 147, 151, 198, 201, 207 Betancourt, Michael 27, 209 Białoszewski, Miron 40n12, 60 Birkerts, Sven 5 Bolter, Jay David 36, 137, 201 Boon, Marcus 210 Bouyeri, Mohammed 101, 109 – 15, 123 – 5

Boxall, Peter 3, 67 – 8, 70n24, 121, 122 Brainard, Joe 16 – 17, 29, 40n11, 180n11 Braque, Georges 7n1, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16 Breton, André 39n6, 165 Brockelman, Thomas P. 3, 7n2, 12, 14, 16, 19, 21 – 4, 39n3, 54 Bürger, Peter 20 – 1, 25, 39n6, 210 Burns, Alan 32, 33 Burns, David J. 176 – 7 Burroughs, William S. 7n3, 11, 16, 24, 25, 30 – 1, 40n14, 40n16, 76, 100, 161 – 2, 209; Naked Lunch 31, 32, 40n15, 208; The Ticket That Exploded 31, 192, 209 Buruma, Ian 111, 125 Calvino, Italo 65, 69n7 Coetzee, J.M. 70n24, 74, 78, 101, 110 Cohen, Leonard 122, 186, 188 collage: in architecture 17; in film 1, 17 – 18, 161; future of 210; history of 10, 13 – 18, 27 – 34; in music 17; poetics of 10 – 13, 18 – 22, 27; politics of 22 – 7, 82, 87 – 90, 206 – 7, 209; in visual arts 1, 7n1, 10 – 17, 21 – 6 conceptual writing 210n2 Coover, Robert 30, 132 Cornell, Joseph 16, 18, 23, 29, 189 Coupland, Douglas 33 – 4 Cran, Rona 7n2, 15, 16, 18, 21, 24, 29, 39n7, 39n9, 60 crisis 3, 63 – 8, 90, 118 – 26, 179, 198 – 201, 207, 210; 9/11 attacks

Index  213 4, 35, 85, 121, 125, 143; and capitalism 2, 5, 150 – 1, 177 – 8; “crisis art” 4; “crisis novel” 7n5; of the human 145 – 52; of identity/ self 148 – 9, 170 – 8, 199 – 200; of the novel 3 – 4, 83 – 6; political 4, 85, 124 – 6; psychological 6, 171, 195 – 7; of reading 128n27; rhetoric of 5 Cubism 10, 13 – 14, 22, 33, 39n2, 39n3 Cushman, Philip 177 cut-up 24, 30 – 3, 88, 161 – 2

Gibbons, Alison 7, 27, 34 – 7, 40n18, 104, 128n19, 128n23, 134, 137, 162, 164, 166, 167, 170, 171 – 2, 180n7, 181n21 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 150, 188, 196, 208 Gogh, Theo van 101, 109 – 14, 122, 123 – 5 Gogh, Vincent van 101, 108, 109 – 14, 196 Goldsmith, Kenneth 39n8, 210n2 Grusin, Richard 36, 137, 209 Gysin, Brion 24, 30, 32

Dadaism 1, 4, 14 – 15, 23, 35, 39n2 D’Agata, John 75, 77, 87, 88 Danielewski, Mark Z. 35, 127n9, 137 Dickinson, Emily 51, 55, 78, 93n20, 117 digital literature see electronic literature Duchamp, Marcel 15, 26, 133 Dyer, Geoff 75, 86, 92n5 Dylan, Bob 16, 17

Hall, Steven 181n23, 209 Hammond, Adam 209 Hassan, Robert 92n17, 150 – 1 Hayles, N. Katherine 143, 146 – 7, 149, 152 Heartfield, John 14, 25 Higgins, Scarlett 7n2, 10, 29, 39n4, 39n8 Hirsi Ali, Ayaan 101, 110, 113 Hollahan, Eugene 207 Home, Stewart 209 Hopkins, Budd 1, 10 Horton, Emily 7n5 Huntington, Samuel P. 124 – 5

electronic literature 5, 131, 209, 210 Elias, Camelia 49 Eliot, T.S. 7n2, 7n3, 23, 25, 27, 30, 53, 188, 191; The Waste Land 19, 27 – 8, 30, 40n14, 49, 60, 79, 192, 208 Ernst, Max 10, 14, 16, 18, 27, 60 Farrell, Stephen 133, 137, 141 Federman, Raymond 35, 100, 104, 132 flarf see found poetry Foer, Jonathan Safran 35, 40n18, 115 – 16, 137, 209 Foster, Hal 13 Foucault, Michel 5, 19, 151 found poetry 23 fragmentation 2, 8n5, 11 – 15, 19 – 30, 53 – 4, 76, 86 – 9, 92n14, 93n21, 104 – 6, 114 – 15, 161 – 4, 179, 185 – 9, 193 – 5, 206 – 7, 210 Frank, Joseph 19 – 20 Frelik, Paweł 132, 133, 142, 143 Futurism 14, 209 Gass, William H., Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife 35, 135, 141 Gavron, Jeremy 209 Gergen, Kenneth J. 170, 176

Ishiguro, Kazuo 122, 197 – 8 Iyer, Lars 67, 90 Janosik, Ellen Hastings 171, 195, 197 Johns, Jasper 16, 29 Johnson, B.S. 32, 33, 35, 40n18, 192 Joyce, James 20, 27, 53, 66, 88 Karpowicz, Agnieszka 11 – 13, 15, 16, 23, 25, 39n1, 40n12, 60 Keskinen, Mikko 162, 169, 175, 179, 181n15, 181n16 Kooning, Willem de 16, 26, 29, 67 – 8 Kosuth, Joseph 33, 162 Krauss, Rosalind 21 – 2, 170, 202n3 Kress, Gunther 34, 126n2 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets 7n3, 40n13 Lavender-Smith, Evan 68 Leeuwen, Theo van 126n2, 127n9 Lethem, Jonathan 76, 78, 87, 92n18 Lippard, Lucy 25 – 6

214 Index Mallarmé, Stéphane 28, 64, 68 Man, Paul de 5 Mann, William C. 7, 34, 37 – 8 Marclay, Christian 1, 18 Markson, David 2, 3, 6, 36, 47 – 8, 75, 77, 78, 82, 84, 90, 92n6, 92n10, 93n20, 112, 185 – 6, 205 – 8; The Last Novel 48 – 50, 52, 54, 56, 60, 61 – 5, 67, 69n2; Reader’s Block 47, 49 – 51, 61 – 2, 65 – 6, 83; This Is Not a Novel 38, 47 – 50, 52, 57 – 8, 61 – 70, 79, 82, 84; Vanishing Point 47 – 50, 52, 54 – 6, 61 – 3, 65, 67, 70n12, 85; Wittgenstein’s Mistress 2, 47, 69n6, 202n13 Maso, Carole 70n23, 209 Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. 37 – 8 McLuhan, Marshall 26 – 7, 179 Mitchell, David 140 montage 12 – 13, 15, 17, 27, 33, 75, 210 Morrison, Blake 74, 84, 93n21, 208 mosaic 11 – 13, 30, 89, 93n22 Motherwell, Robert 13, 16, 29, 109 multimodality 1 – 2, 3, 7, 34 – 40, 82, 99 – 100, 104 – 6, 126n2, 127n9, 128n27, 132 – 7, 140 – 2, 166 – 7, 172 – 4, 179, 206, 208 – 9 Nelson, Maggie 2, 4, 183; The Argonauts 183, 184, 188, 202n2; Bluets 2, 4, 68, 183 – 90, 194, 196 – 7, 200 – 2, 205 – 8 New York School 7n3, 25, 29 Nycz, Ryszard 10, 12, 21 Offill, Jenny 2, 184 – 5; Dept. of Speculation 4, 68, 184 – 5, 190 – 5, 197 – 202, 207, 208 O’Hara, Frank 16, 29, 40n11, 60 Olsen, Andi 2, 99, 100, 102, 103, 118, 128n19; Sewing Shut My Eyes 2, 3, 6, 100, 102 – 8, 118 – 20, 126, 206, 208 Olsen, Lance 1, 2, 10, 11, 20, 40n18, 49, 81, 82, 88, 93, 99 – 100, 126n7, 132, 134, 185, 202n8, 205, 208, 210; Dreamlives of Debris 2, 3, 6, 101 – 2, 115 – 18, 120 – 2, 126 – 8, 205 – 7; Head in Flames 6, 68, 99 – 101, 108 – 15, 117, 122 – 7, 208; Sewing Shut My Eyes 2, 3, 6, 100,

102 – 8, 118 – 20, 126, 206, 208; Theories of Forgetting 100, 118, 121, 128n19, 128n23 Pálfi, György 1, 18 Palleau-Papin, Françoise 47, 49, 50, 65, 69nn5 – 7 Paolozzi, Eduardo 14, 33, 161, 209 parataxis 19, 22, 28, 31, 52 – 61, 70n11, 76 – 7, 80, 116, 127n12, 140, 143, 189, 193 – 4, 195 Pavić, Milorad 11, 20, 103 Perloff, Marjorie 11 – 13, 18 – 19, 40n11, 52, 91n3, 205, 210 Phillips, Tom 32, 103, 160, 161 photomontage 14, 15, 25, 39n2 Picasso, Pablo 1, 7n1, 10, 13, 15, 16, 21, 24, 63, 66 – 7, 70n21, 167 plagiarism 11, 76, 78, 88; see also appropriation Poggi, Christina 39n3 Porter, Max 209 – 10 postmodernism 3, 16, 17, 35, 39n3, 93n19, 100 Pound, Ezra 7n3, 25, 27 – 9, 56, 62, 208 Pressman, Jessica 209 Rauschenberg, Robert 2, 16, 29, 40n16 Rawle, Graham 2, 159, 179n1, 179n2; Woman’s World 2, 7n2, 91n2, 159 – 81, 206, 207 ready-made see appropriation Rhetorical Structure Theory 37 – 9, 54 – 61, 77 – 9, 116, 127n12, 139 – 40, 143, 189 – 90, 192 – 4 Robinson, Edward S. 7n2, 31, 32, 161 – 2 Saunders, George 210 Schapiro, Miriam 26 Schmitt, Arnaud 49, 73, 79 – 80, 82, 86, 91, 92n8, 92n15, 93n19 Schwitters, Kurt 7n1, 15, 16 Seely, Hart 23 Seitz, William 12 Self, Will 4 – 5, 67, 90 Shields, David 2, 3, 4, 61, 73, 99, 205 – 9; How Literature Saved My Life 2, 6, 79 – 82, 86, 87, 89 – 93, 197; Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump 4, 209; Reality Hunger: A Manifesto 1, 2, 6, 73 – 9, 83 – 93, 205 – 7 Shockley, Alan 52

Index  215 Sims, Laura 48, 52, 65, 69n8, 70 Smith, Rachel Greenwald 3 Śniecikowska, Beata 10, 11 Spencer, Sharon 19 – 20 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy 35, 40n18, 63, 117, 180n8 Sukenick, Ronald 30, 88, 114, 132 Surrealism 1, 10, 14, 23, 33 Tabbi, Joseph 54, 69n7, 208 Taylor, Brandon 17 Thompson, Sandra A. 7, 34, 37 – 8 Tomasula, Steve 1, 2, 4, 7n2, 35, 40n18, 131 – 2, 206 – 8; The Book of Portraiture 2, 3, 6, 133, 140 – 54; Once Human: Stories 132, 145; TOC: A New-Media Novel 131, 210; VAS: An Opera in Flatland 3, 6, 132 – 40, 145 – 53, 205 – 9

Vermeulen, Pieter 67, 84 – 5, 86, 90, 93n23 Wallace, David Foster 2, 47, 68, 76, 79, 104 – 6, 119 Williams, William Carlos 28, 55, 186, 188 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 54, 69n7, 78, 92n9, 183, 185, 186, 188, 191, 196, 208 Wood, James 74, 85, 194 Woolf, Virginia 20, 59, 63 Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg 164, 179, 180n9, 181n20, 181n23, 209 Yeats, W.B. 194, 208 Žižek, Slavoj 4, 115 Zucker, Rachel 68