Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature: Voices Gone Viral 9780367563516, 9781032028811, 9781003097372

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Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature

Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature: Voices Gone Viral investigates the formation and formulation of the contemporary novel through a historical analysis of voice studies and media studies. After situating research through voices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, this book examines the expressions of a multi-media vocality, examining the interactions among cultural polemics, aesthetic forms, and changing media in the twenty-first century. The novel studies shown here trace the ways in which the viral aesthetics of the contemporary novel move language out of context, recontextualizing human testimony by galvanizing mixed media forms that shape contemporary literature in our age of networks. Through readings of American authors such as Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Michael Chabon, Joseph O’Neill, Michael Cunningham, and Colum McCann, the book considers how voice acts as a site where identities combine, conform, and are questioned relationally. By listening to and tracing the spoken and unspoken voices of the novel, the author identifies a politics of listening and speaking in our mediated, informational society. Joelle Mann is faculty in the Writing Initiative at Binghamton University, where she teaches courses on composition, rhetoric, technical writing, and digital writing. Joelle’s research investigates changing medial tropes and their sociopolitical implications in multimodal literature and writing. Aside from earning her doctorate from Stony Brook University, Joelle also has advanced teaching certifications in Media, Art, and Technology as well as in Cultural Studies. She is on the executive board for the SUNY Council on Writing, and she has published articles in a variety of literary journals, including Critique: Contemporary Studies in Fiction, Children’s Literature, The American Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literature, and Pedagogy and Literary Studies.

Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture

Rethinking Fiction after the 2007/8 Financial Crisis Consumption, Economics and the American Dream Mirosław Aleksander Miernik Interpreting Susan Sontag’s Essays Radical Contemplative Mark K. Fulk Trauma and Fictions of the ‘War on Terror' Disrupting Memory Sarah O’Brien Global Ambiguity in Nineteenth-Century American Gothic A Study in Form, History, and Culture Wanlin Li Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature Voices Gone Viral Joelle Mann Alzheimer’s Disease in Contemporary U.S. Fiction Memory Lost Cristina Garrigós For more information about this series, please visit: https://www​.routledge​ .com​/Routledge​-Research​-in​-American​-Literature​-and-​ Culture​/book​-series​/ RRAL

Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature Voices Gone Viral Joelle Mann

First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Joelle Mann to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her 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 title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-56351-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-02881-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09737-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For my parents, Mike and Judy Mann, who have given me my sense of inner voice and vision. For Stacey Olster, whose mentorship remains a guiding strength.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction

viii xi 1

1 Facing the Voices of the Imagetext in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

18

2 Voices within the Neoliberal Machine in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

43

3 Listening to the Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad

70

4 Vocal and Comic Deformance in Michael Chabon and Junot Díaz

100

5 The M/other Tongues of Michael Cunningham, Joseph O’Neill, and Colum McCann

137

Conclusion: One Final Voice on Voice Works Cited Index

175 182 197

Figures

1.1 Carrie Mae Weems, Blue Black Boy, 1987–1988. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. This image appears on pp. 102–3 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen 22 1.2 Toyin Ojih Odutola, Uncertain, yet Reserved (Adeola. Abuja Airport, Nigeria), 2012. © Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. This image appears on p. 87 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen 24 1.3 Carl Mydans, Back Yard of Alley Dwelling, 1941. Image courtesy of the U.S. Farm Security Administration and the Library of Congress. This image appears as the final image in Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941) 27 1.4 Michael David Murphy, Jim Crow Road, 2007. Image courtesy of Michael David Murphy. This appears as the first image in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen 28 1.5 Kate Clark, Little Girl, 2008. Image courtesy of Kate Clark: https://www​.kateclark​.com/. This image appears on p. 19 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen 30 1.6 AFP via Getty Images/John Lucas. Public Lynching, August 30, 1930. An altered photograph of a public lynching, Marion, Indiana, August 30, 1930, created by photographer, John Lucas, from p. 91 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen 32 1.7 Glenn Ligon, Untitled (Four Etchings), 1992, 2 in a suite of 4, Softground etching, aquatint, spit bite, and sugarlift on paper, Each: 25 × 17 3/8 inches (63.5 × 43.2 cm); Edition of 45 and 10 APs; Published by Max Protech Gallery; Printed By Burnet Editions, NY; © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Chantal Crousel, Paris. This image appears on pp. 52–53 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen 34

Figures  ix 1.8 Tennis-Brazil-Wozniacki-Exhibition, Dec. 7, 2012. Image courtesy of AFP via Getty Images. This image appears on p. 37 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen 36 1.9 Wangechi Mutu “Sleeping Heads,” 2006. Mixed media, collage on Mylar; “wounded wall”: punctured latex 16.93 inch H × 21.65 inch W (43 cm H × 55 cm W) each (series of eight). Inventory #MUT408 Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. This image appears on p. 147 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen 39 3.1 Organizational slide written by Alison Blake appears on p. 235 of Goon Squad. Image courtesy of Jennifer Egan and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Little Brown Book Group 92 3.2 Representation of family picture appears on p. 236 of Goon Squad. Image courtesy of Jennifer Egan and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Little Brown Book Group 93 3.3 Sasha’s language which repeats and returns on p. 239 of Goon Squad. Image courtesy of Jennifer Egan and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Little Brown Book Group 94 3.4 Drew and Lincoln’s nighttime conversation and reconciliation pp. 301–3 of Goon Squad. Images courtesy of Jennifer Egan and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Little Brown Book Group 95 3.5 Unnarrated slide to represent “US” p. 304 of Goon Squad. Image courtesy of Jennifer Egan and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Little Brown Book Group 96 4.1 René Magritte, “Les Mots et les Images.” La Révolution surréaliste, vol. 12, 1929, pp. 32–33. Gallica, Bibliothéque nationale de France, https://gallica​.bnf​.fr​/ark:​/12148​/ bpt6k58451673​/f38​.image 110 4.2 André Breton. “Le Surhomme.” First Papers of Surrealism catalogue, New York 1942. Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, Inc. with permissions from Artists Rights Society. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris 111

x Figures 4.3 The birth of the Fantastic Four: Susan Storm transforming into Invisible Girl, Ben Grimm into The Thing, Richard Reed into Mr. Fantastic, and Johnny Storm into the Human Torch. Stan Lee (writer) and Jack Kirby (penciller), “The Fantastic Four,” Fantastic Four (Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1961). Marvel Comics, reprinted in Fantastic Four Omnibus, Vol. 1, 2005 4.4 Stan Lee (writer) and Jack Kirby (penciller). Fantastic Four cover (Vol. I, No. 49, April 1966). Marvel Comics 4.5 In The Fantastic Four (Vol. 1, No. 66, April 1966), the Watcher informing members of the Fantastic Four of Galactus’s plan for evil while showing them through images he materializes in front of them. Stan Lee (writer) and Jack Kirby (penciller), Fantastic Four (Vol. I, No. 66, April 1966). Marvel Comics

119 122

123

Acknowledgments

The surreal nature of publishing a book about virality during the COVID19 pandemic cannot be overstated. The trauma experienced by our world at this time has reinforced the individual voices that strive to be heard while we work on the expression of our collective voice. By thinking of other voices, my own scholarly voice, inside and outside of my research, has been defined at this moment. What began as a dissertation idea at Stony Brook University has become a symbol of my teaching practice and research method. Because I endeavored to earn a doctorate after teaching public school for many years, I am indebted to many teachers and scholars—at different times and in different places—who have nurtured my curiosity. With that said, I am grateful to the many people who have helped create this book. Foremost, Stacey Olster, my dissertation advisor and mentor, has been a guiding force. I admire her intellectual verve and selfless nature. She embodies an ethical voice in academia: a voice that I will always strive to uphold. I would also like to thank Eric Haralson and Andrew Flescher. The input and critique of these literature scholars have informed my work. Their voices have lifted me when I needed it most. Some of my chapters were in progress during my coursework as a doctoral student. I would particularly like to thank Jacob Gaboury, E. K. Tan, Brooke Belisle, Michele Bogart, and Cynthia Davidson. The courses that I took with these professors at Stony Brook influenced the interdisciplinary nature of my work. I would also like to thank Margaret Hanley and Theresa Spadola for their friendship and support. I am so thankful to have such inspiring women in my life. I extend my gratitude to the artists who have allowed me to use images of their work in my chapter on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: Carrie Mae Weems, Blue Black Boy, 1987–1988 © Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Toyin Ojih Odutola, Uncertain, yet Reserved, 2012 © Toyin Ojih Odutola, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Michael David Murphy, Jim Crow Road, 2007 © Michael David Murphy; Kate Clark, Little Girl, 2008 © Kate Clark; Public Lynching, August 30, 1930, via Getty Images with alteration by artist John Lucas © John Lucas; Glenn Ligon, Untitled: Four Etchings,

xii Acknowledgments 1992 © Glenn Ligon courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Chantal Crousel, Paris; and Wangechi Mutu, Sleeping Heads, 2006 courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. It was important for me to use the artistic expressions of these artists in my analysis while also reinforcing Rankine’s intent to display citational equity. I would also like to thank the Artists Rights Society for the use of André Breton’s First Papers of Surrealism, © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Thank-you to the authors and publishers for permission to publish excerpts of their work: Claudia Rankine, for excerpts from Citizen: An American Lyric, copyright © 2014 by Claudia Rankine, reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress​.or​g. Published by Penguin Press, 2015 and reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. © David Foster Wallace for excerpts from The Pale King, copyright © 2011, 2012, reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd. Excerpts and “illustrations" in A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Egan. Used by permission of Little Brown Book Group and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpts from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: a novel by Michael Chabon, copyright © 2000 by Michael Chabon. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC and by permission of ICM Partners. All rights reserved. Excerpts from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, copyright © 2007 by Junot Díaz. Used by permission of Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Let the Great World Spin: a novel by Colum McCann, copyright © 2009 by Colum McCann. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC and Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Netherland: a novel by Joseph O'Neill, copyright © 2008 by Joseph O'Neill. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Specimen Days: A novel by Michael Cunningham. Copyright © 2005 by Mare Vaporum Corp. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from H.D.’s Trilogy, copyright ©1945 by Oxford University Press; Copyright renewed 1973 by Norman Holmes Pearson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Bloodaxe Books. The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1950, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1971 by Ezra Pound.

Acknowledgments  xiii Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Thank-you also to Mitchell Manners and Jennifer Abbott from Routledge for guiding me patiently through the publishing process. I wrote this book while living in a basement apartment in Long Island, New York. I am thankful to Lynn Marie Bonner, who rented her basement to me. Her warm potato soup and loving dog Fiona helped me through some difficult days. Lynn’s partner, John, frequently fixed my broken-down car at no cost, and they both made the drudges of doctoral study quite bright. My LI running partner, Phil Schoenfeld, was also a vital friend to me during this time. He let me talk freely while we ran around SBU’s loop, again and again and again. I miss seeing these friends. I am also grateful to be at Binghamton University among new faculty and friends. I work at a place which promotes equity and community. For that, I am truly thankful. Finally, I want to express gratitude to my family. My sisters, Nicole and Julie, and my brother, Matthew, have always centered me. I am so grateful to call them my siblings and my friends: they make me want to be a better person, and they are the people that I will always want to turn to in my life. Thank you to my nieces and nephews Jack, Ava, Ella, Henry, and Poppy; they have all brought a smile to my face when I needed it most. Thank-you to Brian and Joshua for always being ready with a pep talk or outdoor excursion. My family is a foundational force in my life. So, of course, I will end by acknowledging its heart, my parents, Judy and Mike Mann. They have always been my biggest advocates. They lead inspiring, selfless lives. I strive to lead the same life philosophy. I think of their love and guidance when I think of success. Joelle Mann Binghamton, New York August 2020

Introduction

Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) at once considers a voice’s embodied and ephemeral utility. Cole presents the voice of Julius, a psychiatric student of Nigerian and German descent, who begins by narrating his wanderings around the surreal streets of New York City. Set adrift in the city on his evening strolls, Julius fleetingly compares his migratory wanderings to the migratory movements of geese. He begins by recollecting a moment of domestic solitude, describing a flight of geese he observes from inside his apartment while, at the same time, we follow him walking as a mere face in the New York City crowd. Julius’s memory connects the domestic scene in his home with the sensory experiences he encounters on the streets. Taking a moment to muse in his memory, he recalls the comforting lure and connective agency of the European voices he hears on his apartment radio. “[I]t wasn’t at all difficult,” he tells us, “to draw the comparison between myself, in my spare apartment, and the radio host in his or her booth, during what must have been the middle of the night somewhere in Europe” (4–5). The voices of somewhere become part of an intimate fugue in Julius’s imagination, and his own voice attempts to blur a sense of proximity with distance, a sense of local sights with global sounds as he walks the streets of New York. Ostensibly self-aware, Julius further explains how he listens to the radio’s voices while he also reads a book, commenting on the odd ways the book “mingled with the murmur of the French, German, or Dutch radio announcers, or with the thin texture of the violin strings of the orchestras” (5). Julius notes how his voice seamlessly enmeshed with these voices from afar. And duly, as illustrated in this memory, he speaks through the voices of varied aesthetic and musical forms throughout the novel, further shaping diverse examples of technological, literary, and artistic mediation. In this respect, much like the voices moving across the radio’s airwaves, Julius’s voice, too, moves across the urban frequencies of New York City. His memories color his encounters and conversations on the streets. Consequently, he appropriates the voices of that eponymous global city, projecting what may be Cole’s rendition of a walking book and, perhaps too, a talking book. Striking an introspective tenor, however, Julius impresses upon us the ironic terms of his

2 Introduction apparent cosmopolitanism. He asks how we perceive an open city of voices that are always mediated by the testament and technology of his own voice. It is an inquiry into the evident plasticity and ephemeral connectivity of Julius’s voice, as I aim to show in this book, that begins an investigation of the vocal expressions of the twenty-first-century novel. If, as Julius suggests, the voice we listen to when we read is a combination of the voice in our head and the voices of an extralinguistic entity, authors prominently are experimenting with the techniques and technologies of the novel’s voice, asking about the voice’s ontological implications and characteristic effects. To add to the inventive utility of literary voice at this moment, I also address a sense of literary history inherent to the novel’s vocal construction. Contemporary novelists preserve the voices of the literary past, underscoring what counts as literary and what counts as history while theorizing new narrative perspectives. In this, the historicity of the literary cultivates the relational narratives that vocalize contemporary society, and the voice of the novel self-reflexively reveals its agency by accounting for other voices within its mind’s eye. For example, in Pym (2011), Mat Johnson gives new breath to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), and his professor-protagonist Chris Jaynes screams an apropos “TEKELI-LI. Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li” while also voicing the inarticulable black/white tensions at the forefront of our racial politics (22). Jesmyn Ward’s adolescent narrator, Esch, in Salvage the Bones (2011) grapples with William Faulkner’s tragic interrogative in As I Lay Dying (1930), while Ward revisions Faulkner’s southern gothic in contemporary terms: “Why does the young boy think his mother is a fish?” Esch initially asks, echoing Vardaman’s words in the present context of Hurricane Katrina (7). Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) presents the ways in which Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913) is reshaped by a young girl’s voice from her diary along with the voices of the Internet. She scrutinizes how different media relationally exist in the present while hacking our understanding of voices past. Even Ben Lerner’s protagonist-writer in 10:04 (2014) metafictively attempts to turn a short story into a novel by first, as he tells his literary agent, “project[ing] myself into several futures instantaneously” while still attempting to “work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid” (4). The eminence of literary history points to a mutability and efficacy that stresses the novel’s significance even as it is formally created anew. In other words, the novel announces its historicity while making available a sense of what it means to periodize contemporary times through its employment of literary voice. Thinking about a novel’s voice, and specifically the voices of the novel, typifies the novel’s role as a medium that attracts and refracts other forms of expression, emphasizing the struggles for knowledge and democracy within the changing media of our society. Bearing in mind the digital reach of our increasingly global world, my intent in this book is to illustrate how

Introduction  3 vocal networks of exchange interact with diverse forms of media inherent within the contemporary novel. Intrinsically, I wish to offer an account for the ways in which the novel’s voice has the faculty to link technical and sociocultural change made apparent by a writer’s stylistic conventions while exposing ruptures within hegemonic histories and canonical literary forms. The unity brought together by a polyphonic reading of the novel’s voice, which celebrates the twentieth-century “multivoiced” novelistic theory of Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin, suggests dissension created by the writer’s covert telling of a story as it combines with the contingent voices and other media within the novel.1 Working from a moment of increased formal innovation, the voices of the contemporary novel rearrange what Roland Barthes has referred to as a force field of the everyday objects of writing while exposing the inequities of our media-saturated culture: a culture that converges different types of media relationally within habitual, communicative acts (Preparation 144). A contemporary theorization of literary voice, as I see it, requires an evaluation of the ways in which voice critiques the expressions of our mediated, hyper-informational culture while, at the same time, recuperating vocal agency in the face of our mass media. Like the voice of Julius, the literary voices in this book attempt to deform and remix the images, voices, and sounds of our media-saturated surround. Analyzing literary voice as it actively remediates other forms of media in the novel, I aim to illustrate the ways in which the inequities of our media culture can be addressed and, perhaps more important, redressed through contemporary novel expressions of voice: word/image exchanges, lyrical reportage, inner speech, vocal remix, metaleptic voices, metafictive voices, etc. Providing a synergistic understanding of modes of media is not only a way to analyze new novel forms but also a way to listen to how those forms speak and the ways in which we understand the shifting literacies of our time based upon sociocultural and technological relationships, as first shown by Walter Ong.2 Because the rise of the novel is historically understood through the rise of literacy, and the historical and social differentials associated with reading and writing, as Raymond Williams has prominently shown, I trace how twenty-first-century literacies shift within the media convergence of the contemporary novel.3 The faces of our books have a reciprocal relationship with the interfaces of our Facebook. In other words, as we approach a moment of increased global connectivity, in which, as Sherry Turkle notes, our social networks seem to warn of the possibility of our collective isolation (SR1), the elasticity of voice suggests the ways in which the agency of human meaning can be expressed amid the inventive and ceaseless creation of media within our culture. So a study of the contemporary novel also recognizes the central role the novel must have within literacy and media education, for, as Lance Strate reminds us, it is the goal of media literacies to “restore the sense of novelty, that experience of strangeness” that additionally allows us to

4 Introduction evaluate modes of media while distancing ourselves from them—the novel allows us “to look at [our media] rather than through them” (61). Historically situating contemporary writing with respect to earlier nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, this book traces the evolution and continued agency of the novel’s voice while distinguishing the phenomenology of voice in American fiction today: what I term “voices gone viral.” A study of viral voices redresses the shifting agency of oral and written expression while reformulating expression within the novel’s mixed-media ecology. Evaluating aesthetic value in a postcapitalist world in this way, the novel’s voice shapes Alan Liu’s sense of the literary by “seeking new management amid the ceaseless creation and re-creation of the forms, styles, media, and institutions of postindustrial knowledge work” (2). The ceaseless creation and convergence of media forms have always been an integral aspect of cultural and media studies, as Jean Burgess notes, identifying the foundational link between technical and sociocultural change (47). Entering part of this conversation, my study asks how the literary contributes to our understanding of the inequities created by media convergence and participatory culture. Relevantly, I ask how literary voices extend cultural memory in a world that increasingly calls for shifts within prevailing modes of literacy while noting the evolution of old media into new media.4 Because media convergence continues to challenge forms of expression and communication, its evolution demands crucial reciprocity between the human and nonhuman (Burgess 48–49). Interestingly, the essential distinction given to convergence emphasizes the evolution of literacy through cultural competencies and modes of knowledge that are characterized within the very form of the novel. Traditionally delineated as a form that absorbs the junk of the everyday, the novel absorbs the communicative acts of its surround while scrutinizing the ways in which reading creates new conversations about the very act of conversing. In this way, the effects of literary voices subvert and expand the voices of media through a destructive creativity that Liu has associated with an understanding of virality.5 The biological roots and contagion encompassing what it means to go viral become manifest through a transformative power our Internet culture releases when it mobilizes a group of people around a voice, an idea, an image, a video, a website, or a tweet. Viral flows bring together the sensory registers of multiple media and, at the same time, can counter the creative destruction of informationalism and the New Economy, first theorized by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter who considered it “the essential fact about capitalism” (83). Schumpeter’s well-known metaphor asserts that technological innovation creates “gales of creative destruction” which motivates the capitalist economy through “industrial mutation” and “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within” (83). The circulation and gales of novelty that promote change multiply within the rate and reach of globalization, granting that economic development, like cultural growth, rarely advances evenly across all fronts simultaneously (Cowen 11).

Introduction  5 To counter capitalism’s “creative destruction” indeed means to create viral flows, and a “destructive creativity” associated with the viral and Schumpeter’s inverse can be found in the exchange of literary voices. Interestingly, voice captures attributes of viral flows as they are explained by Anna Munster—the viral is “less categorically about, or generative of, a concrete feeling and more often comprise[s] simply a sequence, even fragment, of rhythm and tempo” (104). The very creation of the novel’s voice— at once material and subjective while ephemeral and fragmented—aligns with a networked rhythm and tonality that manifests, to use Liu’s words, “a destructivity that attacks knowledge work through technologies and techniques internal to such work” so that it “introject[s] destructivity within informationalism” (331). The subversion apparent within Liu’s explication of virality is prominently situated within “a special, dark kind of history” that can be found in the voice of the literary (8). However, Liu’s supposition is expanded in this book by examining how a sense of virality as vocality demarcates the subversion of contemporary literary forms while voices remix and deform literature’s own inherent media: voice itself becomes the prevailing medium to evaluate human and nonhuman exchanges in what some have called our age of networks.6 The prominence of the viral, as recounted here and more recently on account of the COVID-19 pandemic, reaffirms the ways in which the material and symbolic effects of virality influence cultural, social, and economic politics. Tony D. Sampson and Jussi Parikka have drawn attention to the urgency of virality as not just the shape of a metaphor but also as a condition at the forefront of our moment spurred from a viral event that is relational and accidental. The global pandemic draws attention to the viral because of a shared network culture that is paradoxical and uncertain, heightening the need for us to critically understand information flows and mediated culture. We are part of the viral network, whether we want to be or not. And a sense of the literary allows for us to read and write a literary ecology that focuses on the agency of the voice’s destruction while also giving readers a sense of critical distance to evaluate the protocols of the corporate and consumer viral networks that create our society’s infrastructure. Notably, voices in the novel highlight the hegemonic forces that bolster the media network while revealing the silenced and marginalized voices that we might not listen to among the ubiquity of media in our quotidian world. As the book’s discussion of subcultural voices that move against hegemonic ideologies makes clear, of course, not all communicative exchanges are deemed equally valid. By tracing the spoken and unspoken voices of the zeitgeist, however, I also seek to identify a politics of listening and speaking amid the inequities of a mediated, information society: what Julius dubs “the art of listening … and the ability to trace out a story from what was omitted” (9). The mediations of voice in the novel underline patterns of sociality and expression among converging types of media which characterize the affective agencies and sociotechnical polemics of our global world. And, as

6 Introduction is well-established, the novel creates distinctive forms of social knowledge, further confirming the ways in which the novel’s voice evaluates cultural practices and quotidian sensibilities.

Sociality and Historical Reflections on Voice As previously stated, internal to the transformation of the novel’s ecology is also a sense of literary history—one which situates T.S. Eliot’s proclamation to “murder and create” within a digital panorama. As J. Alfred Prufrock reminds us: There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create. (Wasteland 4) Ruminating through a sea of talking faces in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), the dramatic mask of the poem conjures a literal and figurative prosopopoeia that foregrounds the changeable faces and voices brought up against Prufrock’s impossible proclamation. “Is it impossible to say just what I mean!” he exclaims (Wasteland 7). Like Prufrock, who drowns in a sea of human voices by the end of the poem, the novel voices of the literature in this book consistently ask about the ways in which certain voices drown within the communicative exchanges of our digital world. Drawing attention to the tensions associated with speaking and listening, a sense of the literary produces the voices of a destructive creativity that highlights historical difference; we can no longer just “make things new” as the modernist dictum pronounces, but we must destroy and then recreate how we interpret and utilize what is new to consider the stakes of the literary within the changing marketplace of late capitalism. Following voices within the subcultures that move against hegemonic ideologies exposes the ways in which an analysis of voice critiques a private cultural domain and the public network of relations that define both the nature and boundaries of that domain. My investigation of the shape of virality also exposes how, following Tony Sampson, the viral helps us to understand contagion theory in an age of networks while we simultaneously study the historical and relational forces in a sociotechnical field. The viral draws attention to the voice’s ability to enhance contagious encounters, underlining how even small vocal expressions resuscitate our understanding of embedded network subjectivity and the dynamics and affects of desire.7 One early case in point is provided by Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). As a voice of resistance to the capitalism characteristic of nineteenth-century Wall Street, Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” has a negative affect, or what Sianne Ngai calls “suspended agency” (35), that contagiously permeates within the voices of both the narrator and Bartleby’s coworkers, Turkey and Nippers. Even behind the

Introduction  7 screens and walls that separate him, Bartleby at once voices his resistance while at the same time embodying the very terms that create it. Bartleby’s copying and speech become one singular expression of his voice, and, even after his tragic demise, his voice presents his “manner of life” within the matter of his maxim while also critiquing a network of capital advancement (Melville 46). Tracing the characteristics of literary voices like Bartleby’s throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presents a historicist view of literary culture which also recognizes human patterns of sociality that are crucial to the ways in which we read and interpret our digital landscape. For this reason, the patterns of changing media in history—a history that has moved from oral to written to electromechanical and to digital technologies—underlie the ways in which we read and remember voices even as we approach the world connectivity of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” associated with Web 2.0 which sustains the domination of liberal democracy and laissez fair market practices (3–5). To refute this, and as another way to think about not just “the end of history” but “the end of new media history,” Lisa Gitelman argues the ways in which a history of new media does not move toward a converging synergy of media, but actually considers how changing forms of inscription “are complicated within the meaning and practice of history, the subjects, items, instruments, and workings of public memory” (Always 21). Historicizing media culture indeed means identifying the ways in which older media have transformed into new media, and citing Rick Altman, Gitelman further argues how media “provide new sites for ongoing and vernacular experience of representation as such” (Always 4). Because media, as Gitelman puts it, are “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols” (Always 7), they are historically situated within the ritualized and representative modes of cultural sharing among diverse people. In this way, the viral as explained in this book is akin to thinking about the ways in which vocal expression travels within social networks that affect how it spread and received. Privileging a specifically changeable social infrastructure, as Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley do when speaking about viral flows of exchange, viral voices draw attention to divisions among sociotechnical structures, stressing how virality both “reproduce[s] and transform[s] existing social norms and institutions” (3).Viral flows are based upon the social interactions of many people: the social movement of information impacts the ways in which we read and listen to our shared social structure, recognizing inherent injustices and knowledge formation performed and shared within communication and interaction. A sense of virality within vocality locates the ways in which the viral aesthetics of the contemporary novel move voices out of context, and hence destruction and creation become two sides of the same coin. To study voices going viral requires uncovering the networked connectivity of voices that grandly underlines the tensions among modes of expression to show how

8 Introduction writers, to recall Nancy Armstrong’s words in conversation with John Marx, are “restarting many different strands of history that have to be understood as more of a web than a road” (163). Examining the intersection of voice and media in regard to the historical past, the diverse group of American authors in this study recognizes shifting modes of vocal technologies and techniques that also shed light on what some have called the recent explosion of the “novelness” of the novel. For instance, Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan suggest that novels seem to be “aping other cultural forms … aspir[ing] to journalism, biography, history, ‘prose’ television and so forth” (viii). Armstrong situates this moment of amplified formal innovation within a combined view of how we understand “the contemporary” by citing both Raymond Williams’s structures of feeling and Giorgio Agamben’s supposition that we study the residual effects and not yet sensible parts of the literary past to understand the present (Armstrong and Marx 163). By tracing the viral patterns of voice through time, the creation of changeable faces and interfaces of literary production also stresses fluid literacies and a way to think about novel forms of reading. At its core, then, the voices in this book negotiate among the polarities of literary periodization while articulating the stakes of the literary in our technological world.

Vocal Mediation and Viral Networking Living in our networked era, habitual acts and everyday patterns live across local as well as global boundaries, as Raymond Williams distinctively pointed out, and make an understanding of the paradoxical nature of networks a key aspect of this inquiry.8 The proliferation of networked ideologies and topologies characterizes a society that is continually mediated by information and media technologies. As a medium, literature itself makes readers aware of its value as a media system, for it illustrates what German media scholar Friedrich Kittler’s work has shown is the historical potency of its discourse networks: “a network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and produce relevant data” (Discourse 369). The technical and institutional channels described by Kittler recount the movement of a post-hermeneutic framework that privileges the notion that the literary is medially constituted, changing along with the material and technical resources and communication channels of its time. The literary is entangled with the media and technological aesthetics that recompose it, and at the same time, its voice has the agency to destabilize and interact with the media channels by which discourses and voices are received. Literature examines the displacement of the voices of writing by media at the same time that it critiques the very terms of its own information network.9 In this approach, the ways in which the literary processes its data become of utmost importance to how we understand the function of the literary in contemporary society. Mixing media forms and vocal structures, vocal virality is embedded within networked as well as aesthetic considerations of the novel,

Introduction  9 recognizing media scholar Jussi Parikka’s assertion that the viral “gives an insightful approach to the patterns of interaction and indeed aesthetics of network culture.” Linking network topologies and aesthetic considerations, the novel stresses the pervasive nature of network culture, and its constitutive social, political, and cultural phenomena, examining, as Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker have shown, a muddling of the human and the nonhuman which are created in a “highly distributed and unequal fashion” (10, 5). Network culture recognizes a paradox inherent to its very structure: while humans thrive in networked interaction, the moments when network logic takes over can be disorienting and “the most threatening to the integrity of the human ego” (5). A conflation of human connectivity through networks created by corporate and technical algorithms, as argued by José Van Dijck, can engineer and manipulate social connections (Culture 12). So, while networks are crucial to understanding a sense of belonging and human interaction, they “also carry with them the most nonhuman and misanthropic tendencies” (Galloway and Thacker 6). These tendencies threaten the life of Mae Holland when she joins the social and corporate Circle of Dave Eggers’s Menippean satire The Circle (2013). Mae’s immersion into the network of the Circle encourages a loss of individual identity among the corporate and social sharks of neoliberalism, literally revealed through the novel’s re-creation of the shark as a spectacle and “a new species, omnivorous and blind,” which gives insight into “this new world, and the world, generally of the Circle” (309). A close relative of Herman Melville’s ubiquitous white whale and capitalistic whale hunt, the omnivorous and blind shark of the Circle’s social network creates power through sophist rhetoric and the Socratic turns of the voice of the elder, Eamon Bailey, whose mottos of “SECRETS ARE LIES / SHARING IS CARING / PRIVACY IS THEFT” exude the moral belief that “it is the natural state of information to be free” (304). However, free information and social flows consume Mae while the limitless bounds of sharing promote hierarchies that cross public and private lives. To be part of the network can enclose one off within a circle of limitless trauma, as Eggers indeed shows, having Mae consumed by the “fucking shark that eats the world” (484). Yet, while network topologies can stunt human progress and authentic social formation, as shown in Mae’s case, there is a necessary human resistance against the damaging ramifications of such nonhierarchical structures. Galloway and Thacker call for asymmetric interventions, “the exploit,” as a tactic to resist, threaten, and desert the dominant paradigm of the network (21, 22). This coincides with a view of the network that recognizes the circulation and creation of a media culture that has the potential to absorb inequitable power structures while also resisting them. This resistance can be situated in the power of the voices of narrative, as Oskar Schell shows in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005). The novel records Oskar’s trauma from the death of his father, who died in the terror attacks of 9/11: a death Oskar remembers through his father’s

10 Introduction recorded voice on the answering machine. Yet Foer situates the telling of Oskar’s story between the networked and multimodal voices of a digital milieu, foregrounding Oskar’s healing through the collective voices he meets in his odyssey around the five boroughs of New York City while searching for the memory of his father. By listening to a network of stories, Oskar remembers a story his father has told him about an imaginary Sixth Borough of New York. The memory comes to life through an imaginary place created within the story of his mind, and the story provides succor through his father’s words, which move backward “from ‘I love you’ to ‘Once upon a time’” (326). Telling the story of his father’s death while imagining the possibility of the future, Oskar revives the presence of his fallen father while bringing his voice back to life. These two opposing views of the network, as demonstrated by Eggers and Foer, gain agency through the voices from which literary forms speak— an asymmetrical network of sounds and silence—which create moments of subversion as voice interacts with and encounters the images, sounds, and silences that define our current moment. As a bearer of communication and mover of meaning within an existing literary work, voice represents network ideologies while rupturing their totalizing nature. In this, the networked interactions and circulations between voice and media in the novel reinforce the radical mediation, which Richard Grusin contends challenges a Hegelian dualism to understand mediation “as process, object, or event” (143). Starting in media res, the radical mediation is understood “dynamically or relationally” while accepting “everything as a form of mediation” (Grusin 142, 145). As a ubiquitous process that extends to all human and nonhuman activity, the radical mediation manifested by the voice of the novel—shown by voices that mediate as they are mediated—also questions how we understand participatory culture, or how we understand media convergence, and as Henry Jenkins has put it, “the terms of our participation” (“Rethinking” 273). By focusing on the agency of voice to present the shifts and dynamics of participatory culture, the novel’s voice highlights the ways in which media are appropriated and appropriate the voice that we hear when we read. The precarious positioning and proliferation of literary voice brings together our understanding of literary forms while recognizing our changing media culture and perhaps the value of the novel amid changing rhetorics and literacies spurred by the ubiquity of technological progress. In fact, one way that Peter Boxall describes The Value of the Novel (2015) is indeed through its voice, which “can’t speak and can’t cease, composed at once of sound and silence” while it “live[s] in a rather terrible gap, endlessly opening and as endlessly closing, between words and things, speaking and listening” (37, 38). Fittingly, this understanding of voice reinforces an evolutionary view of the novel’s discourse stemming from the influential work of Bakhtin, which I seek to expand by investigating the radical vocal interactions and mediations that occur among different voices, media, and contexts.10 As such, the

Introduction  11 medium of voice recreates our understandings of the individual’s modes of expression and participation within a global society. Thinking of virality in this study, then, requires a rethinking about the aesthetics of the voices of the novel and the reading public that contains the paradoxical nature of a viral spread—both its promises and its threats (Nahon and Hemsley 99). The viral networking of voices links to a spreading of ideas and images that stem from its biological root as contagion and, as André Siegfried’s mid-twentieth-century observation in Routes of Contagion (1965) asserts, “there is a striking parallel between the spread of germs and the spread of ideas” (85). The biological motifs linked to virality can also be associated with the subjective and protean agency recognized in twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the novel, which recognize the ways in which the novel does not privilege static formal conceptions. Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1971) characterizes the novel “as something in process of becoming” and as “the most hazardous genre” described by some “as only half an art by many who equate having a problematic with being problematic” (73). Surmounting itself, the novel’s subjective becoming has always aligned itself with a theory of contemporaneity, as Bakhtin has shown, which also stems from the novel’s ability to incorporate extraliterary genres, inserting “an indeterminancy, a certain semantic openness, a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)” (Dialogic 7). This living contact with an evolving reality allows us to use the novel to investigate how we understand the present. The novel’s incorporation of residual effects of the past also support’s Armstrong’s argument that a novel’s thinking is associated with the creation of modern man, rendering how the rise of literacy “could provide something on the order of a supplement capable of turning an early modern subject into a self-governing individual” (6). Boxall thus encourages us to read the novel while it reads us because it makes the world more readable: it “harbors new ways of experiencing embodiment, new ways of experiencing space and time, under an emerging global regime that is almost unreadable to us” (15). The novel, formally, is inimical to theoretical arguments that demand it to be an object of knowledge. And despite the fact that Walter Benjamin argues that the rise of the novel has obscured oral forms of storytelling, John Brenkman reminds us that the “novel form continues to replenish itself and transform its own modes of cultural commentary by drawing on living—or disappearing—practices of storytelling in the construction of novelistic narratives” (431). The novel requires us to think about changing vocal expressions within media cultures, spurring continued dialogues about its form as a formation and formulation in the twenty-first century. As such, my study also contributes to a growing body of scholarship that addresses how voice studies have reclaimed a resurgence within literary and interdisciplinary studies that look back to the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida while moving forward to a sphere of voice analyses that look beyond the bonds between voice and speech.

12 Introduction

Extending the History of the Oral/Aural Force of Voice Jacques Derrida’s tracing of voice within a history of Western metaphysics and his emphasis on phonocentric bias is indeed an important precursor to current studies of literary voice. Considering both the alterity and supplementarity of voice, Derrida identifies it as a form of relation and intermediation that encompasses the paradoxical simultaneity of presence and absence that he privileges through writing. Derrida’s work has incited some critics more recently to study the meaning of voice, both within and without a Derridean impasse: voice is a medium which takes part within the creation of meaning—an immaterial string which holds a chain of signifiers together— while seemingly escaping meaning through an excess or remainder (Voice). Mladen Dolar acknowledges that “[t]he voice is endowed with profundity: by not meaning anything, it appears to mean more than mere words, it becomes the bearer of some unfathomable originary meaning which, supposedly, got lost with language” (Voice 31). The profundity of voice, as shown through Dolar’s theorization of the Lacanian object voice, has more recent scholars critiquing the ways in which the voice’s acousmatic qualities allow increased understanding of collective as well as individual expressions through changing media technologies. At once situated within the gap between presence and absence, voice is “the very texture of the social, as well as the intimate kernel of subjectivity” (Dolar, Voice 14). Defined by a negative or lack that exemplifies its uncertainty while appearing to give shape to what may be certain, the voice is crucial to our understanding of the relationship between the human and society and, more importantly, the relationship that reads the changing expressions at the heart of twenty-firstcentury literary voices. The ability to interconnect allows for voice to create a relational network that critics such as Adriana Cavarero further associate with the links that are created among many voices through a voice’s uniqueness and the idea that one’s voice is always an individual voice. Cavarero’s For More Than One Voice (2003) analyzes the ways in which an ontology of voice challenges logocentrism through the acoustic sphere, pointing out how first and foremost speech communicates voice “beyond the specific content that the words communicate” (13). Working to extend Barthes’s “grain of voice,” Cavarero takes Barthes’s generalization of voice as a pathway between the body and speech to point out that the primacy of voice is “not yet captured in the order of language” (16). Cavarero’s emphasis on relationalism bridges studies of voice with digital and networked culture, and while she looks back to voice as a medium that Marshall McLuhan recognized to be an extension of man, she also elides McLuhan’s stark determinism.11 Additionally, some recent studies of voice that inform my own research are interdisciplinary and extend across the lines of cultural studies, media studies, and literary studies. Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, and Theo Van Leeuwen’s Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (2010), for

Introduction  13 example, analyzes how the paradoxes of voice “embodied and moving between bodies, sonorous and signifying,” which are also “always/already culturally (and politically) mediated,” help to rethink embodiment, alterity, and signification (xxix). Konstantinos Thomaidis and Ben MacPherson’s Voice Studies (2015) reflects on the academic study of voiceness across a series of disciplines, freeing voice from merely musical or linguistic constrictions while seeking to “find a voice for voice in the academy” (5). Brian Richardson’s Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006) analyzes the uncanny and contingent voices that manifest within modern and contemporary literary forms. Instead of the strict categorization and typology associated with narratology, Richardson asserts that “we need to employ the concept of a spectrum (even, at times an ourouborean one) to describe what writers of fiction actually produce” (139). Richardson’s study further supports John Brenkman’s question, which asks how “a writer’s stylistic realization of voice shapes the interplay of identity and anonymity intrinsic to language” while also recognizing the intricate human resonances and voice effects inherent within the novel’s conventions (439). In order to critique the intermediary role of voice as it stands between media and literary culture, I explore a diverse array of contemporary literature while tracing generic motifs throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that shape the current literary milieu. In so doing, I analyze literature that both recognizes the voice’s destructivity and highlights a larger generic lineage that can be studied. Part of my reason for this is to reinforce the importance of a historicity of literature while we attempt to understand the conventions of voice within contemporary literary forms, which are always in the process of becoming. The selection of literature in this book, then, depends upon following generic and formal conventions while pointing to the ways in which contemporary literature both incorporates and diverges from those conventions. To that end, I begin by examining the ways in which Claudia Rankine’s imagetext Citizen (2014) manipulates poetic voice and addresses through a matrix of found media images and visual aesthetics to stress the technologies of racial and cultural memory. By first exploring the narratives of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison, I reveal the ways in which Rankine’s conjoining of voice and image uncovers a larger statement about the history of documentation within African American literature. Mixing visual and verbal codes, Rankine professes the performative nature of voice through a speaker/reader who expresses the terms of American citizenship from under the hood of the Black Lives Matter movement. Rankine’s generic assemblage stresses the African American novel itself as something othered; her imagetext, as I argue, places prominence on visual and verbal encounters that historicize African American violence and cultural memory. The bricolage of discourse and image exists in online and offline forms, and readers are immersed within the racism and sexism

14 Introduction that inscribe her speaker in multiple spaces and on multiple platforms. Recombining media images and visual aesthetics along with an immersive second-person address, Rankine’s work also deconstructs archetypal media images while transforming them for her own purposes. Through lyrical prose, Rankine, following Morrison’s Beloved, subverts the images in her speakers’ and readers’ minds, reimaging the ways in which we hear the racialization of the image through a voice that refutes a postracial society. Turning to the use of subvocalization in David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King (2011), I explore the privatization of voice within a neoliberal society, in particular the “terror of silence” which, as the character David Wallace contends, is one effect of a postindustrial, informational age (87). Situating Wallace’s maximalism through literary precursors such as Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, and Ken Kesey, this chapter critiques the value of a work culture that largely connects to the literary and cultural codes which inform how we understand the neoliberal novel and, perhaps, Wallace’s own anxieties about his work as a writer. Through his allegory of the IRS as a microcosm for the nation, Wallace conceives of a workplace where human communication has absorbed the capital and computer codes that influence human behaviors, warning of a loss of human intimacy and discourse amid technological innovation. In this way, the novel’s voice is also intricately entwined with the biopolitics of disease and disorder, exposing the paradoxical flux of human input and output systems while emphasizing the dialogues created on the boundaries of human consciousness. Moving from silence to sound, from internal revenue to the music industry, the next chapter focuses on Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011) to consider the regulatory tensions between listening and speaking in contemporary society. Goon Squad is an American satire which critiques the music industry, and Egan is self-reflexively concerned with the ways in which sounds and voices produce memory before and after 9/11. Situating the 13-story cycle with respect to works by Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust, among others, I show how Egan collapses linear and acoustic modes, further enfolding different voices, times, and places. Through a novelistic fugue, readers absorb patterns of trauma that are recreated through a harmony further situated within familial ties that extend to readers. And Egan’s innovative style, which includes a chapter written in PowerPoint, reinforces how readers perceive the sounds of silence while absorbing the visual cues which reveal a multisensory experience of reading the world, despite what she calls the impending “goon” of lost time. In this novel, the memories of the past haunt the present, and yet Egan reaffirms that the future can be restored when listening to the sounds of voices coming together with the voices of sound. Musing over the memories of lost time then shifts to the memories of the lost homeland and the complex expression of the diaspora in the next chapter. I consider the use of comics as a narratological and tropological

Introduction  15 tool in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). After opening by exploring the superhero and surreal comics before and after the Second World War, I show how Chabon and Díaz manipulate the comic medium—a medium that is both and neither word nor image—to portray diasporic consciousness. In so doing, Chabon and Díaz uncover imaginative discourses, visual codes, and embodied languages that allow readers an alternate route to conceive of the voices of diaspora. Haunting and being haunted by the medium across which a writer tells, they emphasize the historical poiesis of comic books to move across interpretive worlds and decolonize diasporic history. In this way, comic books expose the paradox of being a diasporic writer and artist, and comics, as an intertextual trope, heighten the sensory effects that expose the traumas and violences of being and writing both here and there. The final chapter expands this writing of both here and there to analyze the contemporary novel of New York City as a global novel. Situating this argument with respect to earlier works by Walt Whitman and John Dos Passos, the novels discussed within this chapter—Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days (2005), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008), and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009)—communicate voices with an amplified lyricism that analyze the multisensory interculturality of the global city. These novels of New York engage the rhythms and resonances of socially situated utterances so that they might be heard in the text, reflecting voices that create a human world charged with meaning. Foregrounding poetic recursion, Cunningham, O’Neill, and McCann offer readers a way to read the global city while noting the inequities of its discourse networks of exchange. Heightening a sense of longing and belonging, these novels of New York recognize the city itself as a totalizing character, and by glancing back at Whitman’s all-inclusive and otherworldly city, the voices of the novel reveal the habitual expressions of not only the nation but also of the world. Inherently, the overwhelming and unreadable inequities associated with globalization become readable on a novel scale through the voices of the city of New York. The literary voices analyzed within this book express their own uncertainty about the terms of communication and sociality in a networked culture. Not only do the voices studied analyze the shifting forms of the novel while it embodies a notion of the contemporary, but this study also allows readers to listen to the voices that seem to fall through the holes of the network—voices that are overlooked, forgotten, or silenced. Listening to a mixture of images, silences, and sounds, readers not only hear the novel’s voice but also think about that voice as it interacts within a digital milieu. To think of the ways in which the novel “should be an edifice that is built anew in each of its eras,” as Roland Barthes advised (Preparation 143), enables the transformative nature of its voice to shed light on the ways in which human expressions continue to matter in our technological

16 Introduction world. Like Gertrude Stein reminds us in her brief and radical novel The Superstitions of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday: A Novel of Real Life (2002): “I can tell this story as I go. I like to tell a story so. Anybody will have to learn that novels are like that” (91). And novels are like that: they keep going, telling of our changing stories as we all go while giving voice to what still matters.

Notes 1 Bakhtin focuses on the ways in which the authorial intentions of a novel implicate the reader at once within the world of the novel to give form to the “multivoicedness” of autonomous characters while they interact with society. This frees readers from narrowly subjective views and instead opens them up to the tension created among characters, authorial style, and outside world. Citing Fyodor Dostoyevsky as the first polyphonic novelist in The Problem of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1984), Bakhtin gives value to the struggle of voices in the novel that are also, and ironically presented as dissension within unity: voices are “not within a single field of vision but within several fields of vision” which “combine in a higher unity, a unity, so to speak, of the second order” (16). 2 Working from a cross-disciplinary focus that includes literature, Ong’s wellknown Orality and Literacy (1982) examines our technological literacy and the continued technologizing of the word which has transformed how we understand human consciousness through a relationism that exists between orality and writing (172). This relationism, while contested by some, has expanded with the process of globalization to recognize the multiliteracies of digital media and their corresponding channels of communication. 3 See Williams, Writing in Society (1983) 2–5. 4 The most noted study of media convergence, Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008), recognizes the alterable relationship among producers, consumers, and technologies. In it, Jenkins stresses a muddling of corporate and grassroots convergence while asserting that “competing and contradictory ideas about participation … are shaping this new media culture” (23). The special issue “Rethinking Convergence/Culture” in Cultural Studies (2011) edited by James Hay and Nick Couldry inquires about the overuse of the term convergence while drawing attention to the pitfalls of Jenkins’s optimistic tone. The issue attempts to deconstruct the notion of “convergence” to understand the present while scrutinizing how we can recognize contradictory power hierarchies heightened by an age of convergence. Responding in 2014 to the critique, Jenkins asserts that his research in Convergence Culture and his more recent book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Media in a Networked Culture (2013), ultimately “identif[ies] mechanisms that allow for meaningful social change,” stressing how an analysis of participatory culture must also challenge institutional and governmental constraints (“Rethinking” 290). 5 In The Laws of Cool (2004), Alan Liu shows how the self-destructive performance art of the 1960s relates to a contemporary culture that embraces what’s “cool” in informationalism by countering it through a “destructive creativity” and “committing acts of destruction against what is most valued … the content, form, or control of information” (8). Liu uses a variety of literary works that also move backward and forward in time, asking whether they can live “through destructivity, creating a separate, alternative creativity of life” (339). 6 For more on the rise of the network, see Van Dijk, The Network Society (2012) and Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (1996).

Introduction  17 7 Sampson identifies two types of virality in our understanding of contagion and networked culture. First, he brings to light the representational social inventions of direct relational encounter which reinforce forms of control and social power while mobilizing the valence of human emotions. Second, he underlines how virality also takes shape within subconscious or happenstance circulations of desire in the network, further questioning how accidental events of desire can be captured and fixed (6). While Sampson’s research challenges Jenkins’s attempt to exchange the term “viral media” for “spreadable media” (and assert a sense of human agency within media circulation), Sampson points out that media virality (or spreadability) may not allow us to discern fully with individual choices and needs, allowing an uncertain and passive form of spreading and circulation than can be registered as a form of human empowerment. 8 See Williams, “Culture as Ordinary” (2002) 98–100. 9 The information network of the literary as stressed by Friedrich Kittler takes Foucault’s discourse analysis to another level, identifying the “literal materiality of the letter” (Discourse 370). Though Kittler focuses on the determinism of the material media and technologies that counter writing and our human interaction with it (a determinism that I prominently refute), his emphasis on the networked channels that create the information network of the literary is prominently underlined in my study. 10 See Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986). 11 See McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).

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Facing the Voices of the Imagetext in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

The cover of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric reveals a diametric image of black set on white: a black, faceless hood appears within the middle of a white backdrop. The formless face on the cover characterizes Rankine’s formless verse which materializes as fragmented, disjointed, and undefined. Through this imagetext, Rankine colors an unequivocal twenty-first-century interpretation of race. The faceless hood subsists as a violent reminder of race relations, conjuring the visual trace of the murder of 17-year-old African American Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman has claimed that Martin was indiscernible before shooting him, describing Martin as having been “walking slowly, his hoodie pulled up, in no hurry to get out of the rain.”1 Reflective of an unknown African American whose story has never been told in his own voice, Martin’s hood and, likewise, the hood on the cover of Citizen embody a faceless and silent victim of racial murder: a lack that denies a postracial America and emphasizes the violent bifurcation of racial identity. The violence of the hood remembers the lives lost at the hands of racist inequality. Our most recent victims sacrificed for public policing and brutality, while the protests over Black lives rage by way of the memory of their names: Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. The stark imagery of the frontispiece, also, descends from an African American literary tradition that marries optics and public perception. An ocular metaphor for vision, the hood notably links to W.E.B. Du Bois’s well-known delineation of the veil in The Souls of Black Folk (1997), which, as Ralph Ellison’s prototypal Invisible Man reminds us, recognizes African Americans as being “surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass” (3). Du Bois conceives the veil as a symbol of estranged sight, for it recounts a chiaroscuro of experience that identifies the blindness of racism and distinguishes an African American double-consciousness.2 Howard Winant explains Du Bois’s veil as a metaphor for the racial barrier of the color line, which “both keeps the races apart and mediates between them” (26). Rankine’s hood descends from the veil, and following DuBoisian dialectics, she adumbrates the contradictory realities of vigilante justice, racial

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  19 profiling, and civil rights, while imaging a cultural icon that sparked a hashtag and national movement, Black Lives Matter. To the cover’s faceless hood, Rankine presents a virtual, second-person voice. Catachrestically, the voice maintains a persona both within and without the text while persistently asking, “Who is this you?” (140). The secondperson speaker shifts across boundary lines—between speakers and readers, between presence and absence, and between poem and discourse. The apostrophic “you” creates an event, instead of describing an event, relating the performativity of poetic speech while, in Jonathan Culler’s words, troping on the circuit of communication itself.3 Most effectually realized in elegy, apostrophe breathes life into that which is dead, gone, ephemeral, or purely imagined, and Barbara Johnson explains how it magnetizes the lyric world, blurring the lines between addresser/addressee and subject/object.4 Collapsing temporality, Rankine’s apostrophe attempts to evoke the lost voices and visions of racism, reviving a racial unconscious that magnifies the complex relationships and intersecting color lines of vocal and visual expression. The second-person address within the text galvanizes coterminous expressions, enacting the violence of silence while giving structure to an uncanny voice that both eludes and elicits contemporary race trauma. In this fashion, Citizen recapitulates the violence of racist discourses, capturing, perhaps, what writer James Baldwin imagines to be literature’s ability to examine critically America’s race relations.5 In this chapter, I am concerned with the ways in which Rankine sutures readers within a racial unconscious to confront contemporary racism. Citizen immerses readers into the text through a stitching together of connective media and found documents while imparting a second-person address that concomitantly captures the silencing effects and growing specters of racist violence. Along with the documents and found images of the text, the second-person speaker expresses the experience of Black lives bound by what William David Hart deems to be virtual probation, which professes the voices of those who “ha[ve] been deprived of the rights and privileges of a citizen or a member of society; the legal status of one sentenced to life imprisonment” (91). Notably, Citizen reframes the legal and social construction of Black existence and, to use Rankine’s words, it “giv[es] back the lack” (70), reviving what Hart deems to be the postmortem experience of African Americans.6 The speaker explains in one key section of Citizen: You could build a world out of need or you could hold everything black and see. You give back the lack. You hold everything black. You give yourself back until nothing’s left but the dissolving blues of metaphor. (70) The participatory nature of the text, as shown in this passage, ascribes the discovery of in/justice to crossing boundaries of identity, enabling

20  Facing the Voices of the Imagetext sociopolitical associations among diverse voices while underlining a racialized polemics of listening and speaking. Rankine proffers a politics and aesthetics to cross over the twenty-first-century color line. Citizen reveals the multiple and indirect causes of systemic racism as a form of political contestation. Creating a shifting poetic space to envision past and present betrayals of racial in/justice, the text confronts the silenced crimes of colonialism and slavery that perpetuate the legal and extralegal issues of contemporary racism: the school-to-prison pipeline, the criminalization of race, the restrictive housing and gentrifying displacement, the mass incarceration of Black lives. Rankine portrays a chain of macro- and microaggressions to expose how the reification of racial difference grants political legitimacy while revealing a story, to use the words from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong (2008), of which “there is no telling” and yet “must be told” (189). In this way, the writer has an explicit role in the recreation of sociopolitical history, and like Philip, Rankine “determines which facts should or should not become evidence; what is allowed into the record and what not” (Philip 199). For that reason, Rankine’s use of documents creates a citational apparatus, and intertextuality incites new knowledge through inter-citation and reference to further illustrate Black aesthetic and political agency while paradoxically recounting the racism and violence of our visual culture.

Visual Voices and the Living Archive of the Black Citizen Like her other books such as The End of the Alphabet (1998), Plot (2001), and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Rankine ruptures frames of expression and typifies an immersive realism representative of our visual and digital culture. Her speaker links the tropes of memory and silence in order to portray retrospective snapshots that convey a mosaic of what Toni Morrison and the women of 124 Bluestone might designate as “unspeakable thoughts unspoken” (Beloved 235), submerging readers within a discourse which, in Morrison’s language in a different context, “shapes a silence while breaking it” (“Unspeakable” 23). To this end, Citizen visually and verbally retraces fragments of an African American rememory: the speaker expresses the extant visual and verbal encounters that bind her social and legal existence.7 The images presented in the text reflect a complex exchange and resistance, characteristic of what cultural theorist W.J.T. Mitchell has named “the pictorial turn” (313). The images implement or, in the words of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1981), advene within the semiotics of lyric addresses and utterances, eliciting what Barthes notes to be “an internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labor too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken” (19). What Barthes considers to be the image’s strain of the “unspeakable which wants to be spoken” creates an alienating visibility which admits participation within the life of the image while procuring distance.8 An evocation of both intimacy and separation allows for the images of the text to produce what Susan Sontag’s commitment to the image has shown

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  21 to be a polylogue of “dispersed, interchangeable ‘points of view’” (173). To experience the reality of images is also to “re-experience the unreality and remoteness of the real,” in a sense, depersonalizing our relation to the world and interrogating what is at once both “here” and “there” (Sontag 164, 167). The actualization of the image, then, retools an actualization of the real world, creating an abstraction of reality that is rooted within forms of social and legal violence. Markedly, Rankine’s confluence of voice and image, and the intricate voices that speak against and with the silence of racism, distinguish Citizen as a hybrid form composed of interlocking media to render its own quality of otherness, and, to use the language of Jean-Michel Ganteau and Christine Reynier, it “point[s] towards the possibility of a creative reconstruction of the lost other” (17). Facing the personal and public histories of racism also perpetuate a face-to-face encounter with media’s defacement of African Americans through what Citizen performs and makes visible for “you.” Providing readers access to the images and news of American life, Rankine’s reportage provokes inquiry into actual events while also creating a generative, living art, which she describes in The Art of Poetry (2016): I wanted the disparate moments in Citizen to open out to everyone rather than narrowing inside a single point of view. Only when I employed the second person did the text become a field activated by the reader, whoever that reader is. The living text of Citizen, thus, comprises ethical effects. Rankine underpins legal and historical relics, rewriting public memory and recreating the archives of the everyday: a version of Stuart Hall’s “living archive” which creates a “history of the present,” bearing the weight of contested interpretations through generational divides and the active re-production of documents (“Constituting” 92). Citizen’s living archive uncovers an African American experience that is always already within what Christina Sharpe calls the wake of slavery. Sharpe’s figuration of the wake disrupts the archive, for “the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present” (9), reinforcing “the ongoing problem of Black exclusion from social, political and cultural belonging; abjection from the realm of the human” (4). One such marked event in Citizen documents the story of the Jena Six—six adolescent boys from Jena, Louisiana, whose lives have been framed by the virtual reportage of racial tensions on display at their high school in 2006. The encounter of six boys who violently reacted to a racial insult from a white student after mounting racial tensions as a result of a segregated “White Tree” where no Black student dared sit illustrates “civil rights gone wrong,” as described by Richard Thompson Ford (5). The adolescent African Americans were initially facing up to 100 years in prison for the attack against the student, and the incident further prompted a firestorm

22  Facing the Voices of the Imagetext that racially divided media culture. The victims were exploited by media myths and a series of multifaceted and ambiguous versions of the facts which both criminalized and celebrated them (5). And the severe response of law enforcement after the boys’ attack resulted in a reaction to the consistent social issues that have besieged Black communities, underlined by the awareness that civil rights “have proven impotent against today’s most severe social injustices, which involve covert and repressed prejudice or the innocent perpetuation of past prejudice” (Ford 243). The slippery identifier of race stressed a separation that denies active, civic difference while stressing the factors that stage mass incarceration. Rankine outlines a continuation of violence through a new beginning of the incident in Jena, Louisiana. She characterizes “a dawn sun punching through the blackness as they noosed the rope” (99). The use of enjambment reinforces the pathology of racism in virtual and physical reality that is rebuked by the boys’ need to perform a “refusal leveled without give” (100). Flanked by the monochromatic image of American artist Carrie Mae Weems’s Blue Black Boy (1987–1988), shown in Figure 1.1, Rankine’s poetic telling of the encounter captures the public criminalization and indictment of the Jena Six. Their lives demonstrate the ambiguity of a position for only one kind of boy face it know it for the other boy for the other boys the fists the feet the criminalized already are weapons already exploding the landscape and then the litigious hitting back is life imprisoned (101) Rankine classifies the identifiers that color the categorizations of a “blue,” “black,” “boy” through a deliberate framing of a boy’s mugshot as shown by Weems’s image. Shedding light on the colorism linked to racialized policing, the image illustrates the lives of the Jena Six, who “experience the

Figure 1.1 Carrie Mae Weems, Blue Black Boy, 1987–1988. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. This image appears on pp. 102–3 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  23 position of positioning” while society situates them in a blue hue and racializes innocence via the legal system and the stigma of Black criminality (101). Like her portrayal of the Jena Six, Rankine portrays the wake through ruptures within hegemonic frameworks of history by way of a series of multimedia and aesthetic documents, echoing the violent history of what Elizabeth DeLoughrey has called “heavy waters.”9 Formally, Rankine lays bare the overflows of media representation and the “heavy waters” that have drowned out an African American experience. The subjection of the Black voice and body recalls the swirling depths of the Black Atlantic, linking swells of information with the waters of the Middle Passage. The coupling of drowning waters and information overflows is marked self-reflexively in Citizen through a situation video script with John Lucas, “August 29, 2005/ Hurricane Katrina.” Focusing in and out of the swirling faces of the victims of Katrina, Rankine proffers victims’ voices (actual survivor voices collected from CNN) alongside her second-person speaker to record the indeterminate information that besieges their un/survival: we are drowning here still in the difficulty as if the faces in the images hold all the consequences and the fiction of the facts assumes randomness and indeterminancy. He said, I don’t know what the water wanted. It wanted to show you no one would come. He said, I don’t know what the water wanted. As if then and now were not the same moment. (85–86) Bringing forth the facts of seeing faces “still in the difficulty” ossifies the political and economic forces that define inequality in America both “then and now.” Hurricane Katrina built upon the slow violence of environmental injustice that most prominently manifests within racial and class lines: New York Times columnist David Brooks recognizes that Katrina was a natural disaster that illustrates America’s social disaster (A29). The media accounts of Katrina accentuate bloated, floating bodies of the victims who were poor, marginalized, and primarily African American. Visual documentation “laid bare the racial and class fault lines that mark an increasingly damaged and withering democracy,” Henry A. Giroux writes, and it “revealed the emergence of a new kind of politics, one in which entire populations are now considered disposable, an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves” (174). This biopolitics of disposability, to use Giroux’s phrase, escalated during Katrina’s aftermath while the government maintained its neoliberal agenda and the Bush administration’s failure to provide succor rendered victims invisible, disposable, and homeless (175).

24  Facing the Voices of the Imagetext The traumas which thereafter engulfed the nation added to a sense of national amnesia and apathy in regard to the plight of Katrina’s victims. Anna Hartnell calls this the awakening of “Katrina Time,” and she contests that New Orleans post-Katrina acts as a microcosm for reading the contemporary inequalities of neoliberal America (2). The failure to retain the ongoing struggles of victims entrapped by the infrastructures of systemic racism and Black vulnerability, in Hartnell’s words, recognize a cross section of the city whose citizenship has long been denied (3). Invisible and disposable, the victims were out of public view, “drowning here/still in the difficulty,” and squandering in the slums of New Orleans, which some have labeled a “Third World” of America. The naming of this “Third World” zone denies “that New Orleans itself, often viewed as ‘foreign’ to the larger national imaginary, was really part of America at all,” Hartnell contends (3). Post-disaster New Orleans belies the American narrative of progress, and the disruptive temporality of “Katrina Time” highlights the city’s literal associations with death at the heart of America’s destruction, only further stressed by the media’s portrayal of racist stereotypes that indicted Katrina’s victims (Hartnell 5, 18). Rankine ends the section with an unanswered question looming against the multicolored image of Nigerian-American visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola’s pen and acrylic face, which is also shown in Figure 1.2. A gaze peers out from the variegated, darkened face, which maps a geography of reflective tones eddying among layers of skin and reflections of light. The abstracted face brings forth the complex layers of the personal/social history

Figure 1.2 Toyin Ojih Odutola, Uncertain, yet Reserved (Adeola. Abuja Airport, Nigeria), 2012. © Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. This image appears on p. 87 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  25 mirrored within the drowning waters of Katrina. The reflective layers of this singular face, too, capture the dynamics of a community of faces, inciting us, perhaps, to remember the “one from many” of the American dictum, e pluribus unum. Counter to the image, words call out to you: Call out to them I don’t see them. Call out anyway. Did you see their faces? (86) Creating a dichotomy between “them” and “you,” Rankine correlates the visual and vocal strains that have submerged Katrina’s victims within the known waters of racial encounters. The aesthetic distance that the final unanswered question signals between “their faces” and “you” fortifies the eventual denial of the tragedy by the media and its spectators. And the visual imprint of the storm that is left swirling within the dark face further crumbles within the “mumbling structures” of the victims’ houses and facedown bodies: “the bodies lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters, lying face-down, arms outstretched on parlor floors” (84). Rankine implodes the infrastructure of societal denial that refutes how the past informs the present, or in Hartnell’s language, how post-Katrina New Orleans seems to be “simultaneously representing a message from the past and a warning for the future” (28). Rankine’s facedown victims are counted as the faceless dead, swirling within the depths of the media’s portrayal of a racist tragedy that continues to stare back, questioning you.

Documenting History and Black Lives As shown by these examples, Rankine follows a trajectory of Americans, beginning with the nineteenth-century slave narrative, writing to document visually the representations, manipulations, and experiences that hemmed African Americans within the racism of American life—past and present.10 Following the visual inscriptions and documents of the slave narrative, documentary texts at the turn-of-century further gained prominence as mass media images besieged American society with debasing stereotypes that perpetuated the Jim Crow era in the aftermath of the Civil War. Early documentary or photographic texts of the century such as Booker T. Washington’s A New Negro for a New Century (1900) and W.E.B Du Bois’s “The Negro as He Really Is” (1901) sought to belie stereotypes that proffered images of prototypical mammies, pious Uncle Toms, inarticulate “coons,” Topsy-like “pickaninnies,” or lustful “brutes”—focal characters in the film Birth of a Nation (1915). The African American imagetext countered such exploitations, complicating American visual cultures and delineating what Du Bois himself described to be a candid social realism; the texts show and speak of

26  Facing the Voices of the Imagetext African American quotidian life: “of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meanings of their crimes” (“Negro” 851). The inflection among visual, oral, and textual modes also presupposes the literary uses of the photograph while Harlem became a cultural hub during the Renaissance. Sara Blair’s study attests that writers of interwar Harlem used photographs as expressive objects and forms of social agency (5). Rankine manipulates this tradition, and her imagetext expands upon the visual agency of the document. When juxtaposed with Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1969), a prominent imagetext that combines poetic prose with the multifaceted undercurrents of the image during the mid-twentieth century, Citizen stresses a restrictive visual and verbal landscape. Wright’s modernist experiment is a form of cross-disciplinary expression: Twelve Million Black Voices acts as a sociopolitical object, voicing and imaging “twelve million black Americans” who were collectively, as the teacher-narrator of the text says, “trying to break through the white wall that hemmed us in” (24). Wright’s bricolage of documentary mediations shows an African American consciousness while heightening the trope of looking through the black gaze.11 The final image of the text, as shown here in Figure 1.3, a photograph taken by Carl Mydans, pictures an African American man, squinting up into the light outside the backyard of his alley dwelling, ostensibly waiting for “the right to share in the upward March of American life” (146). However, that right to life is interrogated by Rankine, as shown in her portrayal of white suburbia in South Georgia, as indicated by the photograph taken by artist Michael David Murphy, and shown in Figure 1.4. Instead of Wright’s gaze upward and out, Murphy’s image lacks a human figure to illustrate “Jim Crow Road,” suggesting the dubious landscape of black address and oral/aural exchanges. Framing the profundities of the speaker’s school memories, “Jim Crow Road” is in a distinctive southern community, and yards of dried grass are desiccated to a yellow-brown hue within a residential neighborhood of large, white houses. A place known, as Murphy has noted, for its “sundown towns,” Jim Crow Road’s dried grass exposes the collocation from Rankine’s speaker’s dried voice to the vital “leaves of grass” that bellow for American poet Walt Whitman a century earlier.12 Whitman’s “leaves of grass,” which ubiquitously surround him, also pun on Whitman’s own writing composed on the leaves of his book. Writing and speaking are created as natural palimpsests that sing of a national culture in Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855), relaying the American experience as anagogic and cyclical. Whitman describes the nation inside and outside his poem to be a “uniform hieroglyphic” of American people that grows with original energy (96). The undulating grass, which is “sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, / Growing among black folks as among white” for Whitman (97–98), does not grow on Jim Crow Road or within the speaker’s own speech. Her words become the dried-out leaves of blank signs deadened by the whiteness of bourgeois suburbia. Much like the signs that grow within

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  27

Figure 1.3 Carl Mydans, Back Yard of Alley Dwelling, 1941. Image courtesy of the U.S. Farm Security Administration and the Library of Congress. This image appears as the final image in Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941).

the grasses in the photograph of Jim Crow Road, her mind wanders within moments of trauma which subsume language and imply misdirection. Citizen is filled with fragments of the dried-out visual and verbal remnants of African American expression, what we might call the racial signs of our times. Invisible and silenced, the speaker’s physical absence from the image accents an aphasia that manifests an embodied language of restriction within memory: Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx. Cough. After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven’t you said this yourself? (7)

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Figure 1.4 Michael David Murphy, Jim Crow Road, 2007. Image courtesy of Michael David Murphy. This appears as the first image in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

The storms of racism intercept the speaker’s voice, and Rankine employs the I-you relationship to muddle further the dichotomy between self and other while reinforcing it. Her apostrophe exhibits the hauntings of multiple selves within one self. This also confuses the position of the reader: the addressee, in the words of William Waters, has “an intrusive position, a confusion of levels” marked by the unclear relationship among, speaker, reader/spectator, and bystander that occurs as a result of an indeterminable “you” (49, 51). In the beginning of the text, the speaker is alone in her room, looking at the “missing moon,” and her individual reflections seem to project out to “you.” But, ironically, the speaker also appears to be a solitary, isolated figure. When such confusion between the individual and communal voice occurs, Waters proposes that the person addressed in the poem is lost to the speaker, opening up elegiac spaces and vast distances (52).

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  29 This confusion defines the factor of “you,” which is shown in section VII when the speaker calls out to “you there, hey you” (143): Who shouted, you? You shouted you, you the murmur in the air, you sometimes sounding like you, you sometimes saying you, go nowhere, be no one but you first (145) Attempting chiastically “to call you out, to call out you” (145), the speaker undulates as a floating signifier who at once accounts for a muddling of modes of address that both interrogate and exculpate “you.” The second person address sounds a ubiquitous murmur, which is concurrently “sometimes” in the air and going “nowhere.” And the impermanence of “you” belongs to “no one”: “The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much / to you” (146). This ominous mode of address, then, embodies loss through a voice that appears out of its self-same ability to disappear along with the possibility of its listeners: “you” calls into question the very terms of oral/aural exchanges. Alternatively, Rankine also blurs the lines between speaker and poet, and her own race, class, and gender become visibly constituted within the meaning of the poem, making historical subject and contemporary artist simultaneously in view. Consistently subjected to the “wrong words,” the speaker colors a voice/ body abjection when words enter “like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage” (8). This act of unspoken abjection metonymically correlates to the national abjection that conveys the speaker’s proliferating absence. She experiences hostility because her corporeality and language are composed of what she deems to be a linear trajectory of “yes/and” encounters rather than “yes but” encounters: she experiences “no turn-off, no alternative routes,” but a continuum of personal and communal violence (8). Her routes render a life rooted within one-way exchanges of aggression, and following the routes of the Black Atlantic, she travels within a history of the swells of racism that include the routes of the Middle Passage and, as her later depiction of public figures and events will show, the routers of communication technologies. The closing image of the first section further shows the circulation of racism that unfolds through mutual encounters and communications. The image intensifies the dehumanized landscape that will be unfolded within the remaining sections of the text. The digital representation of artist Kate Clark’s sculpture Little Girl (2008), shown in Figure 1.5, reminds readers of the animalism associated with racism and, perhaps, its uncanny return. Clark superimposes the figure of a girl’s face onto the body of a caribou, conflating their overlapping histories and cultures. By focusing on the intricacies of the face, Clark creates an intimate relationship with the viewer, which then also correlates an animal-human overlay. Rankine’s inclusion of this image implies a core,

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Figure 1.5 Kate Clark, Little Girl, 2008. Image courtesy of Kate Clark: https://www​ .kateclark​.com/. This image appears on p. 19 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

uncanny animality that characterizes the treatment of the speaker. Set against this picture, speaking becomes recollected ironically through the reciprocal echoing bark of a trauma therapist. The closing line, “I am so sorry, so, so sorry,” echoes and heightens the words and wounds communicated by the therapist which take on new meaning within memory, and we ask, “Who is sorry here?” This ambiguity conveys the internalization of racism: an “and/ with” encounter that implicates both persons and also “you.” In the face of sharp black/white imagery throughout the text, Rankine marks racism as a mutual encounter: one that is shared by blacks, whites, and you.

The Lack That Might Break You Apart The episodic encounters that move through layers of media and memory perpetuate a barrage of ontological falling and, like the pervasive rain that interspersed between the episodes, the exchanges are violent and vibrant. Rankine relates an aversion to a visual history of trees and lynching later pronounced through a negation of oral address and aural recognition when remembering Trayvon Martin in a situation video script with John Lucas, “February 26, 2016/In Memory of Trayvon Martin.” The speaker remembers a racial history from the inside-out: inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak,

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  31 blossoms, o blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue. (90) The blossoms that bourgeon through the body and bloom out of the mouth are “that kind of blue” of the no-place and no-speech of traumatic memory. The brotherhood of “that kind of blue” educes the “steep steps into a collapsing mind” and a blue tone engulfs the speaker’s tellings (89). Associating memory with the modal sketches of jazz performer Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), Rankine correlates the rhythmic blues of African American culture with Martin’s death which resides “On the tip of a tongue one note following another” (89). Notes “following another” convey past atrocities through paratactic syntax: “the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours” (89). The catalogue stresses an interminable tradition of trauma through a blue glow that manifests within the skies of the “silence of brothers” (90). Calling her brother on the phone, she says, “My brother hangs up though he is there. I keep talking. The talk keeps him there. The sky is blue, kind of blue” (90). The silent response presents a memory and a call to death for her brother, and all brothers: He won’t hang up. He’s there, he’s there but he’s hung up though he is there. Good-bye, I say. I break the good-bye. I say good-bye before anyone can hang up, don’t hang up. Wait with me. Wait with me though the waiting might be the call of good-byes. (90) The phone call identifies a separation of speaking amplified by a break of face-to-face contact, emphasized fully through the speaker’s deictic expressions that “he’s there, he’s there” although “he’s hung up.” As a result, the “call of good-byes” maintains the unfounded waiting that not only puns on the separation typified literally and figuratively by the phone call, for the “good-bye” is also syntactically broken into two words, conjuring scenes of public hangings through the speaker’s insistence that her brother not “hang up” the phone. And, so, both word and body are connected by a repetitive breaking, the silence rendered by an ominous waiting and the absence of the speaker’s brother, if indeed, he is not there. The exchange is placed alongside a photograph, shown in Figure 1.6, from August 30, 1930, Public Lynching.13 The image is photographer John Lucas’s altered version of an iconic lynching picture taken by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler, which later inspired the song “Strange Fruit” written by Abel Meeropol and popularized by blues singer Billie Holiday in 1939. Beitler’s picture and Holiday’s protest song remember the unsolved Indiana crime of white murder and rape that resulted in the double lynching

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Figure 1.6 AFP via Getty Images/John Lucas. Public Lynching, August 30, 1930. An altered photograph of a public lynching, Marion, Indiana, August 30, 1930, created by photographer, John Lucas, from p. 91 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

of two black men: Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith.14 Lucas’s image portrays a somewhat different illustration from the original picture: a crowd of shameless whites stands against a dark night, and one man points to the empty, dark sky. The pointing man looks out to viewers, visually calling to them to participate within a violent photographic exchange. Pointing to the “silence of the sky,” the man in the altered picture—a picture which omits the man pointing out two lynched bodies—and Rankine’s speaker memorialize Martin through failed forms of communication and representation. The speaker calls out to the memory of murder on the phone but receives no response while the image points to a lack that remembers bodily evidence of a hanging while reinforcing its in/visibility. Hence, Rankine conjures a failed calland-response to the memory of loss vanished within our public history and the images of digital remembrance, bringing attention to the mediation of all documents, even her own. The lack of response or speaking insinuated from the black silence that characterizes the memory of Trayvon Martin has angry consequences in

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  33 Citizen. Rankine’s depiction of American tennis star Serena Williams further subverts the African American literary tradition of call-and-response to highlight the bad calls and angry responses that typify the discriminatory speech of American culture and, perhaps, the recognition of what Rankine’s speaker identifies to be the consequences of the “lack that might break you apart” (24). Traditionally, call-and-response within African American history and literature cultivates an oral tradition that requires interrelation and interactivity. The success of telling through call-and-response depends not merely on what is said, but also on how it is said, enabling the call-and-response that informs twentieth-century African American narratives to enact symbolically the spoken word on the page, as John F. Callahan has argued (14). Equally, the patterns of call-and-response are especially well-suited to the “vernacular culture of an experimental democratic society, registering the changing relationship between the individual musician or storyteller and the community” (Callahan 16). By critiquing the patterns of call-and-response, Rankine breaks off from notions of democratic tellings in Citizen, exposing the racial and gendered lines that limit speech. Yet, duly, Rankine, too, crosses over those lines to expose inequity, elucidating the uneven volleys of racial epithets and speech, showing how bad calls evoke angry responses. The forms of negative address shown throughout the tennis careers of Serena and Venus Williams support a series of public, athletic events and media abstractions linked by Rankine. Before unraveling the color lines of contemporary sports, Rankine begins by first suggesting the color lines of visual aesthetics and stereotypes of Black anger. She points to the Art Thoughtz of YouTube personality Hennessy Youngman, aka Jayson Musson, and his appropriation of Black anger within contemporary artistic milieus. Rankine’s reflexivity ironizes Youngman’s advice: Youngman’s white face stares out from the screencast of a “Youtube” video, paradoxically explaining the marketability of Black anger, while his white face peers out at “you.” He simultaneously informs and creates the whiteness that espouses the spectacle of “commodified Black anger.” He, himself, performs the unassumed whiteness that controls the racial imaginary in the media. Still, despite Youngman’s support for the performance of Black anger, Rankine seems more interested in the build-up of a quotidian, habitual anger which stems from the silence of blackness. This reveals a type of situated knowledge that responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence, and the energy required to present, to react, to assert is accompanied by visceral disappointment: a disappointment in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived. (24) The hyper-visible blackness of American tennis champion Serena Williams embodies this knowledge and the amassed effects of its anger. Through this

34  Facing the Voices of the Imagetext example, Rankine correlates the news coverage of contemporary athletics with the dynamics of contemporary Black art and, hence, Black literature. Highlighting a sequence of bad calls for Williams, Rankine again colors a convergence of binaries, characterizing Serena’s Black body as confined within the lines of the tennis court which Rankine hyperbolizes through an abstraction of language: Zora Neale Hurston’s, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” from Hurston’s essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928). However, the artist Glenn Ligon links Hurston’s mental alienation with discursive alienation through two frames of his piece Untitled: Four Etchings (1992), shown in Figure 1.7. Ligon’s etchings stress the performance of text-as-image, and the increased incoherence of Black language running down the page further illustrates the terms of Black participation within an absorptive white world. The etchings render a blurred, illegible ink blot that appears irrational and obscured. There is a muddling of meaning throughout the piece, and the stenciled text both stabilizes language through its repetition while destabilizing language through changeable layers. The colored tensions of the

Figure 1.7 Glenn Ligon, Untitled (Four Etchings), 1992, 2 in a suite of 4, Softground etching, aquatint, spit bite, and sugarlift on paper, Each: 25 × 17 3/8 inches (63.5 × 43.2 cm); Edition of 45 and 10 APs; Published by Max Protech Gallery; Printed By Burnet Editions, NY; © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Chantal Crousel, Paris. This image appears on pp. 52–53 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  35 page also imply the racial terms of the tennis court and the incoherence that defines Serena Williams’s participation there. The tennis star’s wherewithal to ignore, or not-respond, a series of bad calls and blurred judgments given in 2004 by the tennis Chair Umpire Mariana Alves erupts anger in 2009 to show how Williams’s silenced voice and body have memory: She says in 2009, belatedly, the words that should have been said to the umpire in 2004, the words that might have snapped Alves back into focus, a focus that would have acknowledged what actually was happening on the court. Now Serena’s reaction is read as insane. (30) Williams’s belated, “insane” response abstracts her racialized body which has veered out-of-focus for the tennis umpire, and also the public who views her in HD. This collapse of focus also reveals “a collapsed relationship that had promised to play by the rules” because Williams, like others before her, is “hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background” (30, 31). But Williams breaks through the lines that weave her within whiteness, “smashing rackets and fraying hems” to illustrate the “turbulence of our ancient dramas, like a ship fighting a storm in a Turner seascape” (26). In another sense, William’s struggle on the court mirrors the struggle of the words in Ligon’s sketch, magnifying corporeal and discursive illegibility. Still, the criticisms of Williams’s misconstrued rage and, later, her “celebratory crip-walking” finally restrict Williams within an ambiguity that “could also be diagnosed as dissociation” (33, 36). Splitting “herself off from herself” (36), the final image of this section, shown in Figure 1.8, conjures a racist likeness to Williams which also supports the racist irony of Hennessy’s Art Thoughtz, and the spectacle of the image. The picture of Danish tennis player Caroline Wozniacki illustrates “in this real, unreal moment” an “image of smiling blond goodness posing as the best female tennis player of all time” (36). Wozniacki poses as Williams, accentuating satirically, like Hennessy has suggested in How to Be a Successful Artist, how to “be ambiguous, be white” while stereotyping parts of the Black female body (36). The incoherence of Williams’s actions and responses by modern media drama—characterized by her misconstrued “gangster” cripwalking and Wozniacki’s image—magnify Williams’s objectivity and also the unreality of white media coverage. Williams’s silence and invisibility in the end, staring back through an image of Wozniacki’s face, solidifies how, ironically, “no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which [Williams] is perceived” (24). The racist image magnifies the accrual of the anger of silence caught in a racial imaginary both literally and figuratively. Williams’s exterior anger also abstracts her typologically as a Sapphire caricature: the pejorative, Black-woman stereotype that goads Black women

36  Facing the Voices of the Imagetext

Figure 1.8 Tennis-Brazil-Wozniacki-Exhibition, Dec. 7, 2012. Image courtesy of AFP via Getty Images. This image appears on p. 37 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

in the early twentieth century to be passive, servile, and unseen. This likeness links to the photograph of the Rutgers women’s basketball team. The photograph is a visual portrayal of the women’s glaring responses to radio personality Don Imus after he refers to them as “nappy-headed hos” (Strauss). Imus’s bad call illustrates a bigoted name-calling, and the glares of anger that stare out of the women’s photograph visually reverberate within the speaker’s voice. After experiencing an insult by her code-switching white friend who calls out to the speaker, “you nappy-headed ho” (41), she contends, “You don’t know which response she expects from you nor do you care” (42). The transfer between apathy and anger espouses mutual incoherence: “You both experience this cut, which she keeps insisting is a joke, a joke stuck in her throat, and like any other injury, you watch it rupture

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  37 along its suddenly exposed suture” (42). The exposed ruptures of anger, which explode within these examples, visibly mark the racial epithets that trigger incoherence. The atmosphere of irascibility colored by these examples also conjoins with Rankine’s coverage of the 2006 World Cup—a situation video readers can also find on Rankine’s website, which adds to the work’s call for interactivity. In the video script with John Lucas titled “October 10, 2006 / World Cup,” a reel of World Cup snapshots of Zinedine Zidane, a French player of Algerian ancestry, is integrated among literary and philosophical quotations to portray a metaphoric, unreal depiction of the reel. Rankine uses the words of Maurice Blanchot to describe how “Something is there before us that is neither the living person himself nor any sort of reality, neither the same as the one who is alive, nor another” (122). Called out of the 2006 World Cup for head-butting an opposing player in-response to racist remarks, Zidane is portrayed by repetitive newsreels in Rankine’s text which implode the repeated, racial epithets called out to him by an Italian player: “Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorist, nigger” (122, 126). These words, according to the text, are captured through the translations of lip-readers and heard by no one but Zidane: spectators merely see his angry gesture and then removal. Ironically, Zidane is called out of the game by calling out the opposing player’s racist remarks. Following the examples of Williams and the Rutgers basketball team, the example of Zidane for Rankine, citing Homi Bhabha, reinforces how this “state of emergency is also a state of emergence” (126). Moreover, with the help of James Baldwin, she shows how the angry “rebuttal assumes an original form” (128). It is a moment of creation, or “original form,” that grasps “the living motion” of the media reel (128). Troping on misleading media coverage and an abstraction of language, Citizen, itself, embodies a living motion that translates anger into action. Taking a cue from the poet Audre Lorde, Rankine equates anger in these examples with energy and information: a circulation she places within the need to create literary and human forms out of a struggle of interpretation and representation. This struggle is what Lorde grasps as the translation of anger: “a liberating and strengthening act of clarification” (127). Any discussion of racism, according to Lorde, also always includes the discussion and uses of anger as a productive recognition of racist attitudes. Self-reflexively, Rankine’s work embodies the struggle that she herself is capturing, unfolding the mediated interchanges that haunt her speakers and subjects. Yet Rankine’s toil also counters the world she critiques: the anger shown in her newsreels incites insight to investigate the media against what it poses at face value.

Struggling to Hear the Noise in Your Voice Rankine’s subversion of call-and-response and her appropriation of the struggle of representation finally perpetuate the difficulties of “speaking”

38  Facing the Voices of the Imagetext and “seeing” through the noises of voice: the speaker’s voice resides within expressions of her sighs, hums, coughs, and moans. Despite their omission of linguistic expression, the sounds of the voice convey semantic agency; and, as Steven Connor’s work has shown, there are “particular kinds of meaning-making work done by the noises of the voice” that register their signifying intents (10). Rankine emphasizes the intents of this vocal noise through what Connor asserts is a type of phonophenomenology, or the “noisy infiltrators and fellow-travellers” of the “phenomenological phantom of the voice” intended to signify the unintended and accidental (36, 10). The speaker reveals the noise of her voice and its resistance against invisibility: “To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. / Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another / sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing /upsets” (59). The noises that emit out of the speaker exert her attempt at self-survival amid the possibility of erasure, an existence that Morrison’s Baby Suggs would describe to be “the self that was no self” (165). The speaker imagines a dream-like montage, “floating above your certain ache” (139). Voice, at these moments, resolves within the noises of the mouth, and the speaker associates speaking with breathing: “Even now your voice entangles this mouth whose words are here as pulse, strumming shout out, shut in, shut up” (143). The sounds of breathing for the speaker signal a chokehold that “shuts out, shuts in, shuts up” speech: the speaker’s belabored expressions fight “off the weight of nonexistence” (139). The physical weight of nonexistence correlates with the bodily ache and sounds of a sigh, what the speaker calls “a worrying exhale of an ache” (60). The interchange between injury and digestion, as the speaker likens herself to “a ruminant animal,” exposes her inability to digest “the trace” that “is the aftertaste” of silence (60). Rankine further characterizes choking and hacking as representative of an ontological crisis articulated through her speaker’s tottering, strangled state: yes, and because words hang in the air like pollen, the throat closes. You hack away. That time and that time and that time the outside blistered the inside of you, words outmaneuvered years, had you in a chokehold, every part roughed up, the eyes dripping. (156) Caught in a chokehold, the speaker’s choking hack echoes within collage-artist Wangechi Mutu’s Sleeping Heads (2006) shown in Figure 1.9. Consisting of overlapping body parts and various heads within a choked bust, Mutu’s “sleeping head” stresses the fatigue of cultural engravings that inscribe mind and body. The choked figure echoes choking sounds that emit from the speaker who grapples with memories that occur “that time and that time and that time.”

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  39

Figure 1.9 Wangechi Mutu “Sleeping Heads,” 2006. Mixed media, collage on Mylar; “wounded wall”: punctured latex 16.93 inch H × 21.65 inch W (43 cm H × 55 cm W) each (series of eight). Inventory #MUT408 Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. This image appears on p. 147 of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

Reaffirming moments that teeter between personal memory and public media, the speaker circles through oppression, reminding herself: “Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on” (151). Rankine turns and returns inaudible language, silently traveling across America: And yes, the inaudible spreads across state lines Its call backing away from the face of America. Bloodshot eyes calling on America that can’t look forward for being called back. America turned loose on America. (112) Conducting a journalistic investigation and manipulation, her speaker speaks from within and without, conjuring the vocal and visual traces “that can’t look forward for being called back.” Rankine turns “America loose on America,” transporting “you” through the contours and confines of a violent passage through discourse. This violence foregrounds the expressions of a nation where the faithful “execution” of the American presidency

40  Facing the Voices of the Imagetext becomes chiastically turned within a violent need to execute the presidency faithfully through its racialized incoherence: And what had been “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States” becomes “I do solemnly swear that I will execute the office of the President of the United States faithfully.” (113) Rankine ends Citizen by implying that the pictures of racial memory reverberate violence, and the text itself illustrates “the length of the silence becoming a living” expression (112). Citizen interrupts America’s passages to dreams in order “to tell him us her you me I don’t know how to end what doesn’t have an ending” (159). The proliferation of pronouns here indicates all those influenced by America’s past and present racial heritage: a heritage that Rankine heightens through the images of two of Joseph Mallard William Turner’s seascapes that end the text to convey silently the swirling pictures of racial trauma. Like the ships that move through the Middle Passage, Rankine’s Citizen passes through the heavy waters of racial oppression, uncovering the crippling effects of the micro-aggressions of racial interactions beside America’s racist media coverage. The final lines of the text, however, resound a hopeful tone. The speaker recalls for her partner what happened yesterday, for he calls her to “tell me a story”: Yesterday, I begin, I was waiting in the car for time to pass. A woman pulled in and started to park her car facing mine. Our eyes met and what passed passed as quickly as the look away. She backed up and parked on the other side of the lot. I could have followed her to worry my question but I had to go, I was expected on court, I grabbed my racket. (159) This final face-to-face encounter—as the women pass gazes between each other—emphasizes a penultimate division and union. Paradoxically, the racial gaze through the windshield of the car acknowledges their mutual encounter, a conversation taking place visually and silently between their eyes. Yet this “passing gaze” is also unacknowledged, for it is repetitively defined as a moment of negation, recounting how “what passed” also “passed as quickly as the look away.” In this moment, Rankine emphasizes the regressive terms of racial belonging in America, as the woman’s car, too, “backed up and parked on the other side of the lot.” Soon after, however,

Facing the Voices of the Imagetext  41 Rankine’s speaker returns this disavowal through a response on the tennis court. With the rising sun that is “dragging the light in, but barely,” she responds through her re-action and, perhaps, an irrevocable return: “Did you win?” her partner asks, “It wasn’t a match, I say. It was a lesson” (159). Teaching the lesson on race in America, Rankine’s examination of the documents that color the lines of our public and private memories finds within its flurry this closing, singular speaker: a speaker who serves back the volley of discourse, responding to the call of American racism by taking responsibility for the silence of “you.” The speaker’s final utterance returns the gaze of racial difference, speaking up and speaking out against inequity in America.

Notes 1 See Lizette Alvarez and Timothy Williams, “Documents Tell Zimmerman’s Side in Martin Case” in the New York Times for more on George Zimmerman’s testimony. 2 In The Souls of Black Folk (1997), African Americans are typified as “a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (38). A sense of sight which looks from without instead of within confirms Du Bois’s psycho-philosophical theory of double consciousness which explains African Americans as being simultaneous pulled two ways—like “two warring ideals in one dark body” (38). 3 Culler’s important essay on apostrophe in The Pursuit of Signs (2001) explains that to read apostrophe as a sign of fiction which knows its own fictive nature is to stress its impossible imperatives, demonstrating “commands in which their explicit impossibility figure events in and of fiction” (146). By troping on the very circuit of communication, apostrophe, also, “can in fact be read as an act of radical interiorization and solipsism” (146). This internalization is important because it works against narrative and its accomplishments; it discloses the animating activity of the poetic voice, through what Culler calls its poetic voicings (148). 4 See Johnson, Persons and Things 10. 5 See Baldwin, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” 175. 6 Hart, after George Zimmerman’s “not-guilty” verdict, regards Trayvon Martin’s life itself as a “post-mortem event,” saying that “[t]o be a black man is to be marked for death” (91). George Yancy concurs, relating that Hart’s words illustrate how Black bodies are always already dead prior to physical death: “They walk in the shadow of death; they wait to be killed according to racial logics that see them ‘out-of-place’ and not as existentially and ontologically irreplaceable” (xii). This too is what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) sees as the reality of a Black life. Coates asks his son, “how do I live free in this black body?” (12). 7 In a well-known passage from Morrison’s Beloved (2004), Sethe describes the residual effects of rememory to her daughter Denver: “the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating out there outside my head” (43). While rememory has become a ghosting of sorts, clichéd by the trope of ghost as representative of traumatic memory throughout the 1990s, Beloved was the first literal and literary ghost to transcribe this trope, according to Roger Luckhurst’s The Trauma Question (2008).

42  Facing the Voices of the Imagetext 8 Barthes refers to two themes of photography in Camera Lucida (1981): the studium, or the average experience of the photograph because of one’s immersion, or “certain training within ethical and political culture” and the punctum which breaks the studium, because it is an element within the photograph which pierces consciousness (26–28). The studium conveys the photograph as a material to be decoded while the punctum evokes the affective power of the photograph. 9 DeLoughrey describes the waters of the Atlantic as “heavy waters” where the haunting of the past overtakes the present subject. She describes Atlantic modernity as “an oceanic stasis that signals the dissolution of wasted lives” (703). DeLoughrey contends that patrolling the heavy waters of modernity and Atlantic modernity waste becomes understood as “a material residue of the past as well as the lost lives of oceanic subjects” (704). 10 Rankine recalls Robert Stepto’s well-known argument in Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1991) that the “eclectic text” shapes the pregeneric forms that comprise the phases of the slave narrative. Moving through Henry Bibb’s eclectic text, Solomon Northrup’s integrated narrative, Frederick Douglass’s generic text, and William Wells Brown’s authenticating narrative, Stepto highlights conversion and focuses on the “call-and responses” of these nineteenthcentury texts to the twentieth-century texts of African American ­writers. 11 Sara Blair notes how Wright actually wrote the text in response to Margaret Bourke-Wright and Erskine Caldwell’s photo-text You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a fictive account of black and white tenant farmers of the rural South. However, Wright uncovers a history composed entirely of African Americans, exploiting “the occasion of photo-text production to develop an aim of looking, observation, and witnessing” (78). 12 Relatedly, the faceless vision on Citizen’s frontispiece interrogates the absorption of African American experience. Unlike Walt Whitman, whose full-headed countenance appears on the front cover of Leaves of Grass (1855), individualizing the American citizen as one both absorbing and absorbed by the nation, Rankine’s faceless hood counters that intimation. Contrasting Whitman’s headpiece and the resounding “barbaric yawp” that “celebrates himself” and sings himself in Leaves of Grass (85, 1), Rankine’s hood reveals that her speaker will sing a different American song, or maybe not a song at all. 13 James Allen’s book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000) includes the original image along with a collection of photographs that illustrate the visual legacy of lynching later captured as postcards and circulated throughout the United States. Allen’s book is also an interactive website: http://withoutsanctuary​.org/. The image presented in Rankine’s Citizen has been manipulated by artist John Lucas to stress the invisibility of the African American body and the violence of a history of lynching as portrayed by her speaker. 14 Accused of raping an 18-year-old white girl and murdering her 24-year-old boyfriend, Shipp and Smith were exposed to a violent lynching mob on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana. The crowd of over 4,000 dragged, stabbed, and lynched 19-year-old Shipp and 18-year-old Smith (Apel, Imagery 20). A third accused man, James Cameron, was only 16 at the time of the lynching and was set free immediately before his own lynching took place. He later wrote a book about the experience entitled, A Time of Terror (1982).

2

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

David Foster Wallace was a cerebral writer. Voicing the mood of millennial America, his philosophical inquiries and romantic sensibilities shaped difficult, unwieldly texts. Wallace’s late works critique the mediation of our sociopolitical unconscious, expressing the potential psychological effects of our technological world. After his death in 2008, he left readers one final message collated in his posthumous novel, The Pale King. A brief but key scene of the novel aptly allegorizes the gothic effects of our techno-capital society. The voice of Julie, sister of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) worker Ted Nugent, appropriates the inhuman sounds of a vocal machinery; Julie’s voice is mediated by consumer culture, impersonating lines from the horror film The Exorcist (1973) for Ted’s coworkers from his office phone at the IRS. Speaking from within the speakerphone, the demonic lure of Julie’s voice simultaneously attracts and appalls a crowd: “What an excellent day for an exorcism, father,” she tells the workers (376). Julie’s voice evokes the demonic tone typified within the film, and the workers appear shocked into recognition, ironically exorcized when they hear the grotesque qualities of her mechanical and mediated voice: “Your mother sucks cocks in hell,” Julie taunts (376). The speakerphone proffers an eerie and disembodied telepresence, and Julie’s voice embodies an inhuman spirit, speaking as a ghost to the workers from the office machine. Like Julie’s voice, the voices of Wallace’s IRS workers in The Pale King are activated among the noises of technological and mechanistic communications. In a sense, their voices characterize them as the ghost-workers of the IRS, tirelessly data-mining information and calculating funds as working-class laborers for the government. Because of this, Wallace’s portrayal of the subvocalization of the workers radically warns of technological determinism and dehumanization during a time of late capitalism. In this chapter, I point out how Wallace’s account of subvocalization fluidly shifts between the human and inhuman tensions that typify both the individual IRS workers and their socialization within a neoliberal bureaucracy, or the networks of what I refer to as the neoliberal machine. The Pale King records informational overloads and capital gains through the contingency of voice, and specifically, as I argue, by attending to the private-sound worlds and

44  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine inner voices of the IRS workers. Through the novel’s complex expressions of subvocalization, Wallace reinforces the “terror of silence” which, as the character David Wallace contends, is one effect of a postindustrial, informational age (87).1 Fluctuating between the expressions of voice and silence, The Pale King’s inner voices chronicle technological and sonic ecologies which interlope private thoughts and meditations. And Wallace exposes the ways in which mediation and meditation clash in late capitalist society: he examines who or what is mediating whom. I also show how an analysis of voice in the novel seems to be intricately entwined with the biopolitics of disease and disorder which stems from a datadriven, informational culture. Inner voices shed light on the expressions of diseased and disordered bodies, which further allegorize the body politic of American democracy. In this way, the labor performed for the IRS heightens biopolitical concerns, exposing the paradoxical flux of human input and output systems while revealing an innate human resistance against the viral tax work of neoliberalism. Because inner voices in the text also conflate the democratic worker and the self-sacrificing writer in America, the tax work in the novel is linked to the writer’s work which created the novel. And The Pale King critiques the value of a work culture largely contained by the nation while, perhaps, reflecting on Wallace’s own work as a writer in American society. Because I am situating Wallace’s critique of neoliberalism in terms of literary voice, this chapter contributes to an ever-growing body of scholarship which recognizes the polemics of voice present within Wallace’s oeuvre itself. As I point out, however, I do focus on Wallace’s particular affinity to inner voices, and what Adam S. Miller argues may be Wallace’s greatest talent: “he can mimic, with disturbing and hilarious precision, the many voices in our heads” (2). Wallace himself admits his own affinity to the agency of voice patterns to Larry McCaffery in a well-known 1993 interview for Dalkey Archive Press: One of my few strengths as a writer is that I think I have a good ear for rhythm and for speech and speech rhythms. I can’t render as well as somebody like Updike—I just don’t see that well, with enough precision and accuracy—but I do hear real well and I can translate that. (“Expanded” 39) Relatedly, critic Shannon Elderon argues that tellers in Wallace’s late works manipulate what she calls narrative art(ifice) to compose attention and move away from a limited analysis of what critics like Christy Walpole have designated as Wallace’s paralyzing new sincerity (509). Likewise, David Hering claims that Wallace explicitly interweaves spectral voices through Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism and polyphony to create shifting sites of vocal anxiety and expression. Vocal anxiety finds its literary voice even in the voice of Wallace himself or, as Adam Kirsch posits, “the voice of his generation, for better or for worse” (“Importance”).

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  45 Perhaps we meet such a voice calling out to readers in the very opening of The Pale King. Much in the same way in which Wallace believed that John Keats’s “living hand” evokes an apparition, summoning its readers through the voice of the poem, a spectral voice speaks out to readers amid the living decay of a ubiquitous American landscape.2 The setting of §1 pronounces a terrain that appears both strange and familiar, and the uncanny surround manifests a likeness to Wallace’s description of “realistic fiction.” As he tells McCaffery, the goal of contemporary realism is the opposite from what it used to be—fiction has a responsibility to “no longer mak[e] the strange familiar but mak[e] the familiar strange again” (“Expanded” 38). The setting’s “untilled fields [that] simmer shrilly,” and the paratactic cataloguing of untamed and disordered wild, “shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgress, jimsonweed …” further preface the synesthetic portrayal of a strange American heartland that mirrors the ordered refuse and infiltration of information as portrayed later in the office of the IRS. The image conjures Wallace’s own version of T.S. Eliot’s “heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief” (Wasteland 30). Yet, in Wallace’s vision of this American wasteland, “all heads [are] gently nodding,” inciting readers to “[l]ook around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers” (5). In the shapeless brotherhood, death, and decay, symbolized by “an arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch” and angled crows “silent with intent,” permeate the neatly rowed taxonomies of flora and fauna amid an unreadable horizon. Wallace conjures the branded foot of “you” “incised in the dew” (6). Nature and culture interpenetrate in what emulates the sublimity of one of Jean Baudrillard’s desert scenes from America (1986), showing a view that both attracts and repels. One that, in Baudrillard’s words, reminds readers how our information culture “has wormed its way into everything, like a maniacal leitmotiv” which transmits messages “as a fluid to be decoded” among the bodies and minds of Americans (33). The exigence to decode exposes a sublime fictional character of America, and “a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture” (Baudrillard 133). Wallace leaves readers with the final image of the worms of Leviticus “incised in the overturn dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened” to represent the collective organism and dubious nature of our brotherhood and the brotherhood of the IRS (6). The voice implores readers to “Read these” and decipher “the worms underneath” (6), and perhaps, the voices underneath, which we must listen to in The Pale King. The opening landscape prepares readers for the excess of information and data that waste the bodies and voices of the tax workers of the IRS while Wallace searches for their heroism.

The Inner Voices and Machines of Neoliberalism Through an examination of inner voices, The Pale King exposes how the neoliberal politics of late capitalism have socialized Americans in an

46  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine increasingly networked, technologized bureaucracy. Following David Harvey’s well-known A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), neoliberal ideology first came to dominate economic policy between the years 1978 and 1980—a time in political history when Deng Xiaoping liberalized Communist China; newly elected President Ronald Reagan supported the changing monetary policies and deregulation of industry backed by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker; and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher limited union power and put an end to inflationary stagnation. These initial shifts in political power, which further altered economic power to liberate “finance both internally and on the world stage,” produced “an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2). The resulting neoliberalism extends free market exchanges through “technologies of information creation and capacities to accumulate, store, transfer, analyze, and use massive databases to guide decisions in the global marketplace” (Harvey 3). The global marketplace of neoliberal society saturates spheres of human activity and, to use Wendy Brown’s words, “it involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social actions” (“Neoliberalism” 39–40). Neoliberal policies close the gap between liberalism and democracy, and as Brown further contends, this indicates the creation of states and subjects organized by the infiltration of a market rationality and ideology (“Neoliberalism” 48). The penetration of free-market practices and information technologies into quotidian life turns neoliberalism into a hegemonic mode of discourse, creating consequences that affect the epistemological and ontological concerns of contemporary society (Harvey 3). Further complicating matters, neoliberalism can also be recognized through Baudrillard’s articulation of a politics rooted within habitual practice—“as pragmatic machine, as game, as interaction, as spectacle—which means that it can no longer be judged from a specifically political point of view,” he notes. “It has been ‘ecologized,’ psychologized, secularized for domestic use” (100). In so doing, political flows, data overloads, and capital values permeate mentality and corporeality in The Pale King, changing the pulse of quotidian existence while exposing neoliberalism to be a ubiquitous signifier which interpolates individuals as entrepreneurs and consumers.3 The inner voices of Wallace’s tax workers not only characterize the consequences of the increased technologies stemming from the rise of neoliberalism in the eighties—personal computers, video games and Atari consoles, cell phones, etc.—but perhaps also underline some of the inciting issues which have led to the threat of dehumanization in our technocratic world. Wallace’s workers support the nascent ways in which, according to claims by media artist Nigel Helyer, digital technologies create an increased attention to interiority in public spaces. Technologies such as MP3s, iPhones, and iPods, as Helyer argues, influence voices to engage silently within a neoliberal world. Listening in these terms focuses on an internal turning toward

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  47 the self, an immersion “as a turn away from public and shared aural forms towards an individualized and commodified aural experience” (Helyer). Through the advance of personal technologies, private audioworlds are created in public spaces, and people retreat from what Helyer calls the “sonic commons,” or public and shared aural forms, and toward a private, internalization of vocal narratives. The inner voices of the neoliberal subject reflect the effects of an increasingly insular, technologized society through a fusion of human and inhuman vocality, where meaning is both found and distorted. Aptly, the inner voices of the tax workers convey an inhuman core of capitalist production while exposing a vexed human struggle against the techno-capital codes of society. By this means, and as I illustrate later in the chapter, the workers impart the suffering of those who dwell in silence, representing a society irrevocably embattled against what Paul Virilio warns to be the technical progress that “mass-produce[s] populations of deaf-mutes” (37). In so doing, disorders and diseases of interiority illustrate a rupture between inner voice and speech in Wallace’s novel. And the divergence from their Aristotelian delineations reduces the chance that inner vocal expression turns into speech within a neoliberal society, which Nick Couldry’s important study has prominently shown.4 Principally, Wallace stresses a tension between voice and speech, showing how, in the words of Couldry, “The nature of social and political organization under neoliberalism requires us to focus on how the bare preconditions of speech are being challenged” (4). The challenge to the expressions of speech in The Pale King identifies a loss of communicative exchange that also reveals the ways in which inner voices, as Mladen Dolar contends, chronicle the “very epitome of a society that we carry with us and can’t get away from” (“Linguistics” 540). If, then, clearly, “voice stands at the axis of our social bonds,” the workers bring to light the unsociability of the political polemics which oppose and regulate speech in society (Dolar, “Linguistics” 540). To point this out, Wallace’s tax worker, dubbed in the novel as number 987613397, iterates just such an expression of speech as it is restricted by neoliberal doctrine: “I don’t believe I have anything to say that isn’t in the code or Manual,” he mutters (118). Wallace indeed characterizes the tensions of a neoliberal democracy through the workers’ expressions of subvocalization, yet he also advocates for resistance to the terrors of a totalizing political system. Using the IRS as a microcosm for the neoliberal politics and “heartbeat” of the nation, for it receives and distributes “the resources which allow [the] federal government to operate effectively” (103), Wallace further allegorizes the disorder and disgust produced from information capitalism through the excrement and excretion produced by the workers. In essence, Wallace literalizes the workers’ entropic speechlessness which calls for them to finally “spill their guts,” among other things, creating a material waste from the information overload of their minds. The Pale King presents the characters’ disordered abjection and disgust(ing) bodily waste which further mark citizens whose

48  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine wasted and wasteful bodies reveal a paradoxical complicity and resistance within the “data-dump” of the political machine (71). The workers themselves embody what Henry A. Giroux calls the “disposables of a larger regime” affected by the viral nature of a neoliberal network that characterizes them as useless data, commodities, and consumers (4). Their disposability verifies the ways in which, according to economic philosopher Philip Mirowski, the “neoliberal thought collective” has infected the populace, making it impossible to disavow the economic model that is the virus—for to do so would be to estrange us from ourselves (4). Besides focusing on ineffable speech and subvocalization, then, Wallace attunes readers to biopolitical concerns which reveal the disorders of consuming and consumed citizens of the modern democratic workforce. The biopolitical exploitation of the labor performed at the IRS redefines the body and the body’s work as fixed capital through modes of consumption. A conversation between workers metonymically reveals the ways in which citizens consume neoliberal democracy in their workplace culture, or what the workers refer to as our current “American pie”: “We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?” “Ask not what your country can do for you.” “Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it.” (138) Workers in the novel expose the oxymoronic citizenship that results from eating the neoliberal pie of late capitalist society. They ingest the overflows of labor, capital, and informational exchanges, and, therefore, they are always also entrenched within the political machine that is the IRS. The characters evaluate the notion of work through the corporate body. And so, the corporate body is reflected through their human bodies. As one worker points out, “Doesn’t the term corporation itself come from body, like ‘made into a body’?” (142). At the core of the novel, Wallace interrogates the ways in which the neoliberal body politic regulates the individual human body, tracing the move, as noted by a worker in the text, from “the production-model of American democracy to something more like a consumptionmodel” when people began “turning into consuming citizens instead of just producing citizens” (148). The workers consume the work of taxation in a neoliberal network that further marks a sense of degeneration which Karl Marx notes throughout his volumes of Capital (1867). Marx initially defines labor in Capital, Volume 1 to be “a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature” (177). However, Marx later explains the labor process under capitalism itself as an altered process of labor power which has been entrapped by production: “labor uses up its material factors, its subject and

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  49 its instruments; consumes them, and is therefore, a process of consumption” (183). Such productive consumption during the labor process is a condition of postindustrial society, quantifying labor through the instruments which now measure, in the words of Virilio, the ways of the world and the ways of people through exchange values (104). Virilio argues that people are no longer “the measure of all things”: his frightful determinism warns that technologies measure the world, stifling human behavioral and mental liberties amid technical contamination (104, 39). Yet, within The Pale King’s critique of techno-capital culture, Wallace refutes Virilio’s stark determinism. He expresses the prominence of free will, challenging a solipsism that relinquishes individual responsibility for a capital and corporate state of mind. As such, Wallace seems to pose Catherine Malabou’s essential question for readers: “What should we do so that consciousness of the brain does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?” (12).

Information Uploads and the Terrorism of Taxes Wallace’s depiction of the Internal Revenue Service’s Regional Center in Peoria, Illinois, explores the voices that both project and reflect a politics of the forms that turn and return to comment on personal and political life. A confluence of tax forms, bodily forms, technological forms, and discursive forms intermingle through the text’s layered and assembled voices, conveying what Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown, & Company, Michael Pietsch, suggests is “an exploration of some of life’s deepest challenges” (xiii). Granted the job of collating the various copies and drafts of the novel after Wallace’s death in 2008, Pietsch presents an unfinished novellike form for the unfinished life of a writer who himself struggled with the daily boredom, repetition, and sadness that his book so adequately presents. Arranging the novel, Pietsch comments, was “the closest thing to seeing [Wallace’s] amazing mind at play upon the world” (x). Pietsch’s difficult objective—to assemble the vocal and dialogic fragments left by Wallace into a readable and coherent literary form—becomes an apt metaphor for the IRS workers in the text who are assembled as parts and gears of the collective agency itself. Their voices contribute to a readable, or perhaps unreadable, whole of the IRS as a representation of our collective democracy. An experience of unreadability pervades the reading experience of the novel. Wallace images an illegible, informational society through his affinity with an obsessive maximalism and the superfluous forms of what is historically known as the encyclopedic novel. Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), has been considered an encyclopedic novel through its expansive endnotes and esoteric subjects. David Letzler even calls Infinite Jest a novel of “cruft” whose sections of “junk text” find its literary predecessor in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), and its expansive cetology chapters (131). The Pale King similarly cultivates sections of “junk text” through

50  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine excessive lines of prose and extended sentences, and readers self-reflexively confront the novel’s overarching themes: the cruft of “Servicespeak” and the boredom of reading tax codes and returns at the IRS (71). The form of the maximalist novel focuses on an excess of details that also allow readers to examine what kinds of details may be interesting to them. The parallel between a reader’s work and the tax work in the novel is plainly stressed in two-columned §25, the double-entry notes which catalog workers who “turn a page”: “Irrelevant Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page” (312). Like these workers, readers turn the pages of the novel through convoluted digressions that characterize a maximalist discourse, pressuring their own, as the narrator quips, “systems of ordering and retrieving data” (137). Readers themselves are likened to human data processors, and as Conley Wouters notes, The Pale King “mirrors a tax return form in its labyrinthine layout and disjointed, swappable collection of narratives,” pushing the novel “into data-driven territory, an area usually reserved for cold facts and humanless input,” with the aim of showing how the characters inwardly attempt to combat an informational society (186–87). To orient readers immersed within the information overload of the IRS, the mental tornado of fact psychic and IRS worker, Claude Sylvanshine, makes several appearances. Sylvanshine’s mental exercises while he studies for a tax exam flush “back and forth across” his brain in the same uneasy pattern as the 30-seater airplane bringing him from Midway Airport in Chicago to Peoria, Illinois, riding “the updrafts and downdrafts like a dingy in a gale” (9, 7). Creating an illustration of information entropy, or the disorder of information which characterizes information and communication theories written by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, Sylvanshine’s mind is fraught with excessive data. Markedly, a state of information entropy maintains a central role in the psychic disorders which characterize the inner voices of Sylvanshine and many of the workers of the IRS.5 Because the entropy of information relies on the plausible set of choices or probabilities among variances in language and data, it is important to note the necessity of choice among a surplus of information that is readily consumed by the workers (Shannon and Weaver 13). Since Wallace’s characters experience mental disorder, unable to choose among the facts and data in their brains, they appear to be unable to resist the entropy of information; hence, they cannot choose from the information that overloads and overwhelms their minds. As a result, an analysis of the talking inner heads of the workers also illustrates the political effects of an emerging society of what Lydia Liu calls “Freudian Robots.”6 Liu identifies the human-machine simulacra influenced by new technologies that alter not only habits of life but also patterns of thought and valuation (4). For Liu, patterns of thought illustrate a networked existence, one which makes apparent how technological transformation, including the era of Reaganomics that perpetuates the advent of neoliberal

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  51 technologies, impacts social and political life, and the changing ways we understand democracy within these terms. By way of Liu’s articulation, a networked existence subsists not in accordance with a metaphorical link to connectivity, but with Alexander Galloway’s protocols, or the uneven distribution of material networks which underlie a conception of the ways in which computers and information technologies shift power hierarchies unevenly.7 Galloway asks how to account for sociopolitical agency among unequal networks of distributed agencies (xix), arguing that the ubiquitous networks of the sociopolitical drama stifle public freedoms and personal thoughts within what Gilles Deleuze names our “society of control.”8 Sylvanshine’s psychological disarray is wholly wedded to the protocols of a neoliberal society evident though his role as a working-class employee at the IRS. Instead of exhibiting compatibility with a communicative network, Sylvanshine’s inner voice renders a networked disarticulation, an inherent illiteracy of his taxed life. A GS-9 IRS worker who shares his initials with Claude Shannon, Sylvanshine reads the images from the emergency laminated card on the plane. In a moment of typical Wallacean meta-irony, Sylvanshine explains that to create the card the airline “had to presume illiteracy” while he himself becomes increasingly distracted and therefore “illiterate” because he “hear[s] nothing more than drifting syllables of the exchanges around him” (12). The drifting syllables that perpetuate Sylvanshine’s internal illiteracy and abominable newsfeed also reproduce what his colleague Reynolds identifies as the entropy that delimits reality: “The trick,” according to Reynolds, “was honing in on which facts were important” (18). Reynolds advocates a system of negative entropy to Sylvanshine, paralleling Wallace’s own words in his now well-known address to Kenyon College’s graduating class of 2005, later published under the title This Is Water: “You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t,” Wallace tells his audience (95). Choosing what facts to focus on and what facts to drift unheeded is a precursor to survival in The Pale King, and many of Wallace’s literary works. For Wallace, to choose also means to exert a form of free will, affirming conscious cognizance amid the networks of neoliberal orthodoxy. The narrative violence of Sylvanshine’s syndrome, Random Fact Intuition, reveals words which are “connected, but barely in any way that yields what someone with true ESP would call meaning” (122). Sylvanshine’s syndrome directly links to the material impetus of language, and its perpetual inversals and reversals in the text also connect to Wallace’s well-known preoccupation with philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games.9 Conceiving of language as part of sociality, Wittgenstein’s language games theorize the utility, or more exactly the function of language, rather than its signification. Wallace self-reflexively entertains readers with his own language games to further underline Sylvanshine’s disordered mind and inner voice. For example, while studying for the CPA exam on the plane, Sylvanshine “briefly tried to remember the definition of yaw. Every so often while

52  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine studying for the exam this winter Sylvanshine would burp and it would seem like he’d almost thrown up a little” (9). And, then later, thinking of studying, Sylvanshine ruminates how “[y]aw was rotating slightly from side to side. The word for pitching forward and back was something else. Axes were involved” (11). Remembering the variability of the term yaw also phonically expresses a flashback to a Whitmanian “barbaric yawp,” evoking an untranslatable belch while associating the inconstancy of language with Sylvanshine’s own vomit, for he has felt “like he’d almost thrown up a little” (85). Yet Whitman’s belched words are “loos’d to the eddies of the wind” (25), showing individual expression in “Song of Myself” (1855), while Sylvanshine’s thoughts reflect his unsuccessful attempt to “build a model in [the] high wind” of his brain (11). A shifting yaw of language corresponds with the shifting yaw of the aircraft, relating Sylvanshine’s psyche to “the propellers’ shimmering sound [which] shifted either pitch or timbre” (19). The pitch and timbre of the “yaw-wobbled horror” of the plane noisily links to the pitch and timbre of Sylvanshine’s inner voice that embodies the modern taxation of America (20). The explosion of language within Sylvanshine’s mind also echoes the mental disorders which erupt into bodily diseases and ailments in The Pale King, clearly evident in what N. Katherine Hayles has named the “word as virus” (213).10 Most notably, a list of diseases and disorders associated with examining tax returns likens the diseased nature of tax work with the diseased language of the mind and, therefore, body. The catalogue of diseases in §11 presents motor and sensory disorders, and a number of spinal disorders: “Chronic paraplegia, Temporary paraplegia, Temporary paralysis agitans, Paracatatonic fugues, Formication, Intracranial edema, Spasmodic dyskinesia” (89–90). The list adumbrates the physical effects of mental dis/ order, a phenomenal and perspectival accordance. Specifically, according to Jeffrey Severs, Wallace’s catalog of spinal disorders characterizes the decay of moral and political life—the spineless inactions accentuated within a material world (9). Spinal diseases in the novel link a physical and moral divide and, focusing on the image of a neglected spine, the novel emphasizes its “dark, stunted, necrotic, and sad” appearance (398). The spineless inactions and political degeneration of most of the workers are contrasted with the boy in the novel whose spinal health allows him to press “his lips to every square inch of himself” (405). The contortionist boy galvanizes an “interpenetrating dance of spine, nervous system, spirit, and cosmos as totality” as well as “neurological hygiene and health and a wholeness of body and mind” (398). His spinal hygiene and undoubtable assurance spotlight a mental awareness that maintains physical and psychological interconnectivity, a conjoining that directly contrasts and thereby magnifies the inner lives of some the workers—certainly Sylvanshine, Lane Dean Jr., and David Cusk. Lane Dean Jr. is shown even before he becomes an IRS worker, characterizing a pain which renders how, as the character David Wallace reminds us,

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  53 today’s information society is not only a political problem but also “about something else, way down” (87). Unlike that of the contortionist boy, Lane is a frozen squall of stillness and silence: internally, he is an iceberg of inner disquiet which magnifies his “inborn fallen state” and the moral conflict at the heart of the gender dynamics in the subsection (44). The narrative style of Lane’s initial section formally descends from Ernest Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory, and Wallace’s narrative privileges what he deems to be the exformation of his readers, omitting information while simultaneously creating associative connections.11 To add to this, the subsection itself can be likened to Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), except that Wallace privileges free indirect discourse over Hemingway’s indirect dialogue. Wallace even literalizes his debt to the modernist writer, for Hemingway himself seems to make several ghostly cameos in the section, perhaps looking for a duck-hunt and appearing “more like a picture than a man. There were not any ducks in view” (39). Wallace’s tribute to an image of the writer’s appearance, perhaps, too, highlights the end of a transcendent realism championed by Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics, for while Lane Dean repetitively tries to convince us that “[t]his was the truth” (40), readers discern the apparent divide between Lane Dean’s thoughts and words. Images of “downed trees” and “dark shallows” in the park where Lane and his girlfriend, Sheri Fisher, meet foreground the dark knowledge of the subsection—“what a real vision of hell might be”—while asking, what do “good people” say, and moreover, what do “good people” think? (43). Titling §6 “Good People” when it first appeared in The New Yorker in 2007, Wallace’s narrative omission and silence present the impossibility of Lane’s authenticity when considering the possibility of Sheri’s abortion of their baby: “He pretended that not saying aloud what he knew to be right and true was for her sake, was for the sake of her needs and feelings” (40). Convincing himself while feigning affection, Lane Dean suffers through a circular hell reflected within his inner self; his interiority comprises selfdoubt and turmoil attended by verbal silence: It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be a battle but no victor. Or never a battle—the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across each other and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, they could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their faces looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way. (43) Lane’s thrashing alien armies characterize an internal violence while also stressing his ventriloquized mouth, for “different parts of him felt

54  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine unconnected” while “he was totally still except for moving his mouth” (40, 41). Lane dutifully and repetitively assures Sheri that “he’d go there with her and be with her,” yet he never completely speaks what separates them, and his inaudible speech and hollow prayers amplify misconnection: He knew it was wrong, he knew something was required of him and knew it was not this terrible frozen care and caution, but he pretended to himself he did not know what it was that was required. He pretended it had no name. (40) Lane’s ritualized rhetoric and limited dialogue adumbrate an inability to say exactly what he thinks: his silence accentuates uncertain morals and an incapability to succumb to an admittance of love, for “he could not say he did, it was not true” (42). The section conjoins the silencing question of abortion with the silencing question of love, marrying a core struggle between death and life, and Lane Dean’s thoughts and speech. Aptly, the subsection ends with a question of love—Sheri decides to keep the baby, and Lane’s dry, ironic question, “What would even Jesus do?” further tethers his emptied religious rhetoric with a clichéd question (45). The free indirect discourse of the subsection privileges Lane Dean’s thoughts while silencing Sheri, and Wallace foregrounds a Manichean divide that separates his characters. The rupture between inner voice and speech for Lane Dean exposes the many miscommunications among the characters in the novel. For example, while riding in the Mister Squishee ice cream truck, the CID agent Gary Britton asks Sylvanshine what he is thinking, “which seemed to Sylvanshine grotesquely and almost obscenely inappropriate and invasive, rather like asking what your wife looked like naked or what your private restroom functions smelled like” (52). Associating inner thoughts with obscenities reinforces the disgust generated from internal worlds caused by informational and technological disorder. During the ride in the truck, this is shown by IRS workers who are absorbed by video games, the “right tinny whisper of people listening to things on headphones,” and the lingering sounds of a Mister Squishee melody (49). The eddying noises inform the men’s disorder, later reflected through the visceral outputs of worker David Cusk’s obsessive sweating attacks. Cusk’s persistent sweating is, perhaps also, metonymic evidence of the struggle of his inner life: Cusk recognizes that maybe “his secret inner self was creepy and the attacks were just a symptom, his true self trying to literally leak out” (101). Cusk suffers from “phonic anxiety about attacks, which combined with the other terms ruminative obsession, hyperhydrosis, and parasympathetic nervous system arousal loop” (324). And his excessive sweating is also associated with a soundless conflict: “Now actual drops of sweat were falling off the ends of Cusk’s hair, as an inaudible scream resounded inside him” (335). The “inaudible scream[s]” of Cusk magnify his overprocessed mind, relating how, as

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  55 Sylvanshine says, “Information, per se is really just a measure of disorder” (344). The sweat pouring out of Cusk’s body also expresses the workforce capitalism which moves through the sweat of a disposable and exploited workforce. Hence, Cusk’s numerous phobias and “fear of disks. Fear of drains. Fear of pretty much all spiral movements in liquid across the board” coincide with his internal feedback loops, a swirling Charybdis of anxiety that expresses undue sweating in a corporeality “mechanically made out of a body of water” (426, 281). Cusk’s corporeal control must be regulated by an attempt to gain extreme awareness among currents of information capitalism. Equally, Cusk and the other workers are fixated by the temporal tracks of their work days, and Lane Dean personifies the clock’s second hand, “going around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn’t already been a million times before” (383). The clock’s domination over the stock-still day highlights the “politics of boredom and the boredom of politics” that, according to Ralph Clare, describes the neoliberal workplace at the roots of late capitalist life (187–8), a boredom which, as Lane Dean notes, “was boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt” (379). The workers’ days descend literarily from the clocked dis/order of Ken Kesey’s psychological novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), aligning with Kesey’s mental patients, who, like patient Old Pete’s catatonic discourse, sound “an old, worthless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing” (55). The meaningless discourse of Kesey’s patients and the silenced discourse of Wallace’s workers illustrate days that similarly run, as Kesey’s Chief Bromden says, “like a smooth, accurate, precision-made machine” (28). However, unlike the heroic cowboy of the 1960s counterculture who creates an uprising in Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest, there is no “bullgoose loony” to free the men imprisoned inside the orthodox boredom of Wallace’s 1980s tax machine (21). The taxing overloads and hours of boredom invoke hellish nightmares and phantom figures of the workplace, further connoting the nightmarish figures of their rote tasks and examinations. The clockwork revolutions of the workers’ minds also emphasize a circular, communal trauma as suggested by the work of Kai Erikson. And the workers’ mental and social trauma renders how suffering can be embedded “into the grain of the affected community, [showing how] they have come to supply its affecting mood and temper, dominate its imagery, and its sense of self, [and] govern the way its members relate to one another” (Erikson 190). Consequently, their communal mood perpetuates the consumption patterns that characterize the haunting nature of their work. The consumptive labor that brings workers closer to simulating a machine-like existence enacts Jean-Francois Lyotard’s foreboding question: “What if human beings, in humanism’s sense of the word, were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman?” (2). Wallace’s workers reveal, as Lyotard asserts, “mind[s] haunted

56  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine by a familiar and unknown guest,” and the ways in which, “if one claims to exclude it, if one doesn’t give it an outlet, one aggravates it” (2), reflecting the soundless terrors of a work civilization and its discontents. It is prominent to also note that the growing discontents cultivated by aggravated silence are prefigured by the nightmares of the narrator in Wallace’s short story “The Soul is Not a Smithy” in Oblivion (2004). The narrator’s “nightmares [are] of the reality of adult life” and “a large room of men in suits and ties seated in rows of great grey desks, bent forward over papers on their desks, motionless, silent, in a monochrome room or hall under long banks of high lumen fluorescents” (103, 108). The grey, motionless men-ghosts who stress the boredom of the workplace are echoed when Lane Dean conjures a visit from the ghost Garrity, caused by “the hallucination of repetitive concentration held for too long a time, like saying a word over and over until it kind of like melted and got foreign” (385). Perceiving the specter of Garrity situates Lane within a teleology of workplace decay, an inevitable death-in-life that illustrates Garrity’s fate as well as Frederick Blumquist’s: a worker who dies after being “absorbed in his work” (30). Blumquist’s death is initially unrealized at the tax center since “no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all the time and didn’t say anything” (30). Speechless and motionless, Blumquist dies affixed to his desk, a lurid self-imprisonment that reflects the dogged dignity and perverse heroism that ironically revives the chains of his tax work. Tied up by the physical and mental chains that fetter them to their work, the examiners magnify behaviors that are at once complicit within the very system that exploits them.

The Circular and Disgust(ing) Data-dumps of Democracy The circular disorders that typify the inner voices of the workers in The Pale King are also reflected within the circular metaphysics associated with a neoliberal democracy—aptly described by worker Dewitt Glendenning as “a tornado in my head” that he has “never been able to put into words in any sort of order” (140). As I have outlined up to this point in the chapter, the workers’ expressions—both vocally and corporeally—reinforce the infiltration of neoliberal doctrine into their lives. Bearing this in mind, the novel clearly critiques the discourses of a neoliberal democracy, which promises the twinned opposites of both liberty and equality and have spurred debates in past and present philosophical and political writings. Wallace, himself, begins in the nineteenth century, and particularly cites Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835). Drawing from French thinkers like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Guizot, among others, Tocqueville portrays American democracy as a diseased and deceptive state of government through abundant promises of material goods and an equality that “permits each citizen to conceive vast hopes [and yet] renders all citizens individually weak” (513). He describes the ways in which democratic values spherically

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  57 attract and resist people through promises they can never fully satisfy: Americans “believe they are going to seize it, and it constantly escapes their grasp” (514). To these causes, Tocqueville attributes “a singular melancholia that the inhabitants of democratic lands often display amid their abundance,” characterizing a “disgust with life that sometimes seizes them in the midst of an easy and tranquil existence” (514).12 Tocqueville’s philosophy of the diseased and disgusting state of democracy manifests his delineation of the threat of the solipsism of “a society that acts by itself and for itself”: “The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them” (55). So, unlike Emerson’s “circles” which concentrically are “repeated without end” (225) and forever redeemed based on conversations which persistently “draw a new circle” (238), Tocqueville decries the irresolution of a Melvillean vortex much like the one which swallows Moby-Dick’s Pequod.13 In so doing, as Jennifer Greiman has shown, both Tocqueville and Melville “expose a more fundamental crisis of democratic power beyond its representational need for a transcendent, absolute authority,” citing the tautology that blends “democracy’s origins and its ends, its causes and its effects” (122–3). The round shape of democracy, hence, precariously yokes together a turning rhythm of both limitation and limitlessness.14 Adding to democracy’s contradictory provisos, neoliberal democracy’s market rationality embeds itself within present-day democratic principles, amplifying tensions through two opposing viewpoints that coincide with the language of corporate capital. As Mitchum Huehls has prominently argued, neoliberalism speaks “the language of communal good as a cover for its systematic exploitation of individual-objects,” and “the anti-exploitive language of social justice as a cover for its championing of entrepreneurial individualsubjects” (After 12). Both discourses allow neoliberalism to prevail over the voices of individual democratic freedoms and the voices of democratic citizens through its exploitation of the “cog in the machine” while it furtively seems to champion the individual rights of the entrepreneurial actor. The entrepreneurial impulse of neoliberal values that remakes political aims in its own image and speaks the contradictory codes of corporate capital also appropriates Wallace’s sensibilities of Millennial America. He tells Ostap Karmodi in an interview for the New York Review of Books in 2006 that corporations are very strange, they’re composed of people, they have the legal status of a person, but they don’t have a conscience or soul the way people do. You end up with this increasing distortion of American values where everything becomes about money and selling and buying and display. The corporate conscience produced by neoliberalism sheds light upon a key discussion which occurs in a stalled elevator in The Pale King—a discussion

58  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine that models the “complex, messy, community-wide argument” that Wallace feels current politics lacks (Last 74–75). The workers in the elevator ironically model a complex conversation while they argue about how government functions as a form of conscience that devalues citizen agency. The character, Glendenning, explains: We expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don’t understand much of the theoretical aspect—what I see is what I live in. Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality. (132) Glendenning’s explanation proffers a view of a neoliberal regime which cultivates infantile citizenship while suppressing knowledge, which is satirically expressed when the elevator stalls, and several IRS workers are stuck in the dark, and as one worker quips, “everyone looks pale in the dark, man” (147). These pale kings debate the decline of civic duties and responsibilities of America’s citizens, and worker Stuart A. Nichols Jr. comments on the pervasive decay and existential fear that “goes beyond politics, civics” (144). According to Nichols, there is a Kierkegaardian fear that “everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine” (145–6). Nichols attributes the burning fires and passing decay of democracy partly to “the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world,” distinguishing how “the post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire” (146). Wallace illuminates the death of civics through a visibility of democratic decay and abjection, illustrating a disgust(ing) democracy which, according to Sianne Ngai, appears “dangerous and contaminating and thus something to which one cannot possibly remain indifferent” (336). His characters are impregnated with the virus of the political system, highlighting human abjection expelled because of the information bombs that explode within their heads. After remembering stepping in a pile of dog feces as a child, one worker recalls a story that perhaps comprises the scatological subjectivity in the novel: “Suddenly it wasn’t that he’d stepped in shit so much as become shit” (350). Another worker remembers falling hands-first into a pile of shit, recalling “both crying and roaring like some kind of shit-monster,” and claiming to be both “horrified and repulsed but somehow underneath it all glorious in [his] role as monster” (351). The recollection of “staggering

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  59 around moaning from house to house with [his] hands straight out like Frankenstein” recrafts a human technicity that echoes the futile minds of the characters who are drawn to and repulsed by the informational and capital wastes of current society (352). However, Wallace suggests that to purge the waste, the workers must assume a sense of awareness that reuses abjection as a form of subsistence.15 Indeed, several of the workers try to organize the disorder that defines American political life by purging political dirt and waste in the manner advised by anthropologist Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (1966). Douglas understands dirt to be “matter out of place” which defies “basic [social] assumptions,” and she argues that “eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organize the environment” (92). The removal of dirt or waste recognizes a “creative movement, an attempt to relate form to function, to make unity of experience” (Douglas 3). Aligning with Douglas’s ideas of social hierarchy and organization, several key characters purge bodily decay and wastes to organize their bodily space as an allegorical organizing of a body politic based on a free market system. Toni Ware is one such worker, a character complicit with the political system while she also defends herself against the exploitation of that very system. A roguish eccentric, Toni seems to be “aware” of her status as mere “ware,” and the text follows her through a bildungsroman of sorts, chronicling her life before revealing her adult status as IRS worker. To begin, §8 of the novel highlights her parallax vision: a vision that maintains how she is at once aware of her status as both object and subject, which is more fully realized through Wallace’s use of free indirect discourse. Self-reflexively, Wallace writes that Toni is “begat in one car and born in another. Creeping up in dreams to see her own conceiving” (61). Following a matriarchal line, Toni and her mother mobilize their immobile lives, following routes “on maps that yield no sensible shape or figure when traced” (56). The trailer park where Toni grows up is a twenty-first-century figuration of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes, replete with the rain of fine ash which “turned to soot and kept all souls indoors” even as the artificial glow of television screens warm the motorized hearth (56). The trailer park is located in the desert night between “the gypsum fires and the park’s lit signs,” while echoing the sounds of circling planes and the “long-haul trucks on 54 for Santa Fe whose tires’ plaint had the quality of distant surf’s lallation” (60). However, despite the mechanized noises of the environment, Toni “imagine[s] not the sea or the moving trucks themselves but whatever she right then chose” (62). Toni’s “inner life [is] rich and multivalent,” and despite the reification of her body as a wasted commodity by boys and men who surround her, “she was free inside her head” (57, 62). An avid book reader, Toni absorbs and revises the heroics of fiction, and she performs an in/human hybridity: a posthuman subject whose “evil eye” withstands intrusion (58). Toni’s abject gaze demonstrates a human technological system which, to use the words of Lyotard, “filters information

60  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine useful to its survival” while “memoriz[ing] and process[ing] that information” (12). Her mind and gaze construct her own systems and interpretations, guarding her from murder as a 13-year-old at the hands of a man after her mother steals his truck. The scene grotesquely images a truck accident that leaves Toni helpless while her unconscious mother’s “blood was dripping into some hollow of Toni’s throat” (444). To deceive the man after he comes to collect her and her mother out of the wreckage, Toni “stare[s] sightlessly and not blinking … [a]nd somehow succeeded in convincing the man she was dead” (444). Her inanimate eyes perform death-in-life, determining her allocation as an abject subject, and what Marx calls a member of the lumpen. Toni’s history follows her into adulthood as a tax worker (445), and the character David Wallace describes Toni’s stare, saying, “you knew that it was aware of you in some way, but it was unsettling because it wasn’t anything like the way a human being seems aware of you when he meets your gaze” (443). Toni’s in/human gaze dramatizes a self-regulating accountability. She feeds broken glass sandwiches to her predators, makes asbestos cloth dryer sheets to ward off intruders, kills shade trees to expose the burning sun, sends return-postage paid bricks to marketers in the mail, to name a few of her anti-capitalist tactics. In a penultimate incident, Toni exhumes her bodily waste to expose the consumerism of a QUIK N’ EZ gas station, furthering her toil against the solipsistic values of a neoliberal society. Fittingly, Toni’s agency throughout this section relies on her voyeurism and ventriloquism, for she “had twenty-different voices” (512). The cashier at the gas station is “unaware that Toni Ware was affecting the exact accent and cadence of [the cashier’s] own speech,” and thereby epitomizes the “disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism” (515–16). Disrupting this unawareness, Toni extracts a viscous fluid from her nasal cavity and then wipes it on the white lapel of her cream-colored coat. Blaming the cashier for the attack against her, Toni disgusts the manager with her nasal fluids while soon after fleeing with her dogs in a getaway car. From the burning trees in the trailer park of her childhood, Toni rises from the ashes, shaping conversations with her voice on “two home lines and a bulky mobile phone and two office patch codes but used pay phones for personal business” (514). Toni creates the disorder she also absorbs, manipulating speaking to her own ends and ventriloquizing against the system which shapes her. Her final transactions with the cashier and the then manager of the gas station emphasize the agency of her inner voices, speaking: she voices a form of human capital that overwhelms the silencing threats of techno-capitalism. Toni Ware distinguishes an agency of voice that also underpins the labored transactions and verbal connections between several of the workers. In a few instances, Wallace reveals how verbal connection refigures the muted aspects of capitalism, motivating a connective humanity of shared language and shared suffering. The first act of democratic unity occurs within the collective dialogue of the stalled elevator, as previously

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  61 mentioned. While the workers debate the current theories of democracy, it is speaking that brings about their common relationality. This human relationality exhibits Wallace’s imperative that existence is always also a shared existence—a claim which follows Aristotle’s assertion in the Politics that people are political animals, only able to achieve their highest level of flourishing by partaking in a shared life (I.2.1253a1-18). However, for most of the novel, the paucity of speech discloses what D.T. Max notes is Wallace’s impulse to create in his characters “a passionate need for encounter telegraphed by sentences that seem ostentatiously to prohibit it, as if only by passing through all the stages of bureaucratic deformation can we touch each other as humans” (78). The need to touch each other as humans is finally attempted between two workers in a tête-à-tête conversation, a conversation of therapeutic scope between IRS workers Meredith Rand and Shane Drinion. Rand and Drinion are brought together by Rand’s story of suffering, showing Wallace’s belief that “an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering” (“Expanded” 22). Yet much of Rand and Drinion’s initial interaction also recounts an acknowledgement of the query of human interest that defines two-way conversation and a human voice activation. Rand asks Drinion: “Is liking paying attention the same thing as being interested in somebody?” “Well, I would say almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.” “Is that true?” “I think so, yes,” Drinion says. (458) A dialogue based on what’s interesting reflects perhaps a form of “human interest,” and thus human capital, i.e., how to earn another’s interest, relating Wallace’s investigation of what arrests personal and public awareness. Rand notes that Drinion, also known as Mr. X, initially answers her questions “like a machine” (461), and it is only after voicing her painful experiences at the Zeller mental institution that Drinion’s total absorption in her narrative augments his awareness. Describing her affinity for cutting, Rand tells Drinion, “I thought of the scars and the cutting as letting the unbeautiful inside truth come out, be on the outside, even if I was also hiding it under long sleeves” (488). Explaining what is inside first to her husband at Zeller and then to Drinion creates an interconnection which causes Drinion’s body to levitate: “Drinion is actually levitating slightly, which is what happens when he is completely immersed; it’s very slight, and no one can see that his bottom is floating slightly above the seat of the chair” (487). In addition, throughout the colloquy, Rand deduces that

62  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine she is unaware of the noises around her, recognizing “that blocks of the tête-à-tête at Meibeyer’s seemed removed from any kind of environment at all”; she explains it as if “a sort of insulated container had formed around their table and sometimes hardly anything else had penetrated through it” (475). Immersed within one another, Drinion absorbs Rand’s information and Rand observes Drinion listening to her story, thinking, “It seemed like he was merely absorbing information and adding it to himself” (506). The calculations that occur add human experience together instead of capital for Rand and Drinion. Rand tells Drinion her story, and his interest in her becomes correlated with his own, grasping her internal plight which bonds them during their tête-à-tête. Through a self-reflexive analysis of Rand’s confessional, which acts as its own therapy session to connect Rand and Drinion, their union becomes electric. Rand thinks: There is a feeling that comes with sitting across from Shane Drinion and having his eyes and attention on you. It isn’t excitement, but it is intense, a little bit like standing near the high-voltage transformer park south of Joliet Street. (504) Electrically transformed, Rand and Drinion, however, leave the possibility of connection ultimately uncertain. Drinion miscalculates Rand’s resolution, desiring her to fill in the affective gaps that are left over: “Drinion’s mouth is in the distended position of someone who wants to ask something but isn’t sure where to even start, and is signifying that facially instead of out loud” (511). Rand does indeed spark Drinion’s interest, and he wants to know more. However, Drinion seems incapable of asking another question, or even knowing what to ask. The tête-à-tête ends with Rand’s submission—“Anyway, that’s how I met him”—and the two are separated, leaving Drinion with a grimace of confusion which marks his silence (511).

Doubling Author’s Voices and Spinning Readers’ Choices Drinon’s silence at the end of his conversation with Rand, and the silence that pervades the existence of the workers, are finally noted through the apparent silence of the author David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s ineffability pronounces itself through his character doubles and the parallel narratives in the novel which efface his role as author even as he seemingly announces it. In this way, Wallace feigns his authorial identity in the novel—his inexacting character provokes readers’ struggles while the storyline emphasizes the paradoxical nature of the contemporary neoliberal novel: a novel at once complicit with and indicting the neoliberal money-making machine. The neoliberal novel plagued Wallace while he negotiated between a writer’s obligation to communicate and a capital system that marked his fame. Mike

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  63 Miley explains Wallace’s double-bind: “he must inhabit an artistically toxic literary universe that is consumed by performance and the construction of literary personas” while creating something “honest and true” (193). Yet, in The Pale King, what is “honest and true” remains disordered by the alluring spin of a circular assembly of authorial figures in the novel, figures who spin within the contradictions of the neoliberal circle themselves despite what the character David Wallace otherwise claims. Wallace spins his authorial selves, revealing fiction itself as always also a mediated experience. In this way, the disordered inner voices of the workers correlate with the disordered voices of the modern writer, correlating a disordered metaphysics with a disordered metafiction. In accordance with his literary predecessor, Vladimir Nabokov, whose Humbert in Lolita (1955) makes constant references to literary themes while evoking authorial personae such as Edgar Allan Poe, John Ray Jr., and an eponymous Vivian Darkbloom to varied intentions, Wallace makes readers scrutinize his authorial associations with skepticism and awareness. The Pale King moves among authorial voices that deny hermeneutic absolutes, creating the impression of an author who feels, as Nabokov’s Humbert tells readers, “curiously aloof from my own self” (33). Wallace interrogates shifting authorial voices metafictively and intertextually. He even asserts a critique of authorial mediation itself through what some claim is the title’s allusive nod and references to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” (1818). The mediation of Shelley’s “King of Kings” creates an aesthetic parallel to the mediation of Wallace’s pale kings and authorial personas: I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Historically considered by critics to be the pale shadow of some of Shelley’s more political poems, the poem, as more recent scholars argue, may have been inextricably tied to questions of vocal exchange attempted by the artist, or by the sculptor in the poem.16 The poem’s discourse structure critiques the very nature of vocal mediation and circulation through an embedded

64  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine multivoiced layering: readers discern a voiced transfer from first-person speaker to traveler to sculptor and finally to the hubristic exhortation of Ozymandias, “King of Kings,” whose quoted discourse calls into question the very nature of the veracity of artistic telling. Ozymandias’s words are contingent upon their eclectic passage, and the poem cites the irrevocable vocal drift amid the decay of the “colossal wreck” of the statue. The fear of vocal mediation diachronically also links to a key scene in the novel itself between a father and son. Typifying the relationship between a young IRS worker, Chris Fogle, and the untranslatable words of his father, a cost-systems supervisor for the City of Chicago, Fogle’s father incites his “wastoid” son to “Look on my works ye mighty and despair” (172). The vocal struggles throughout the novel become apparent through Wallace’s complicated relationship to metafiction and multiple authorial doppelgängers, including Chris Fogle himself, whose first-person monologue dominates as one central narrative in the novel. Fogle’s narrative is a conversion narrative: he reverts from addictive, wastoid son to heroic IRS worker who is “called to account” after his father’s tragic death (178). Fogle’s conversion is portrayed by a series of epiphanies which transform him from drone-like machine to student to IRS worker. Initially, he recalls the doubling effect of the drug Obetrol as a college student: What it felt like was a sort of emergence from the fuzziness and drift of my life in that period. As though I was a machine that suddenly realized it was a human being and didn’t have to just go through the motions it was programmed to perform over and over. It also had to do with paying attention. (184) The doubling awareness of the drug metonymically exposes the luring spin of metafiction itself, which Wallace later hyperbolizes through Fogle’s spinning awareness, which exposes the self-same fictive nature that motivates the spin: a circular paradox which, according to Patricia Waugh, exposes the tensions of opposition between fiction and reality—causing form and content to collapse (138). In a rather heavy-handed turn, Wallace illustrates what he believes to be the extreme associations between the “self-conscious watching” of television and the self-reflexive reading of metafiction (“E Unibus” 669). When Fogle spins his soccer ball and watches the soap opera As the World Turns, the spin of the ball and the spin of the announcer’s voice mark the doubling of Fogle’s awareness outside of the entrancing circularity of this moment— he partakes in metawatching: It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep— “You’re watching As the World Turns.” It’s hard to explain. It was not

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  65 even the obvious double entendre that struck me. This was more literal, which somehow made it harder to see. (224) What’s hard for Fogle to see, an interchangeable medium and message that entraps him in a commercial, image-culture, eventually sparks a revelation that initiates his conversion into a tax worker who understands that “a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling and organizing that torrential flow of info” (242). Unlike the other workers, Fogle escapes mindless disorder through a perception of what absorbs him—or as Huehls says, of a perception that recognizes what’s right there: “the surface reality spinning in plain sight” (After 166). What’s in plain sight requires an acuity that corresponds to an awareness of the social contradictions of neoliberal capital and also a doubling spin that manifests itself in Wallace’s aim to repurpose the recursion of postmodern metafiction to achieve new ends. Wallace’s commitment to rework metafiction has also been shown, as many critics have noted, in his novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1989). Wallace attempts to show how, as the stewardess Magda reminds Mark Nechtr in Westward, readers must not only feel and see the metafictive spin but also “hear what’s true inside” (351). The focus on the act of listening suggests Wallace’s motive behind his authorial voices in The Pale King. He allows readers to spin within the inner voices of the IRS and the spinning personae of his author-selves in order to listen and hear the silence behind all of that noise. The role of Wallace as narrator then appears to further double his own authorial agency. Wallace’s author’s foreword appears in §9 when he pronounces himself: “Author here.” The first-person narrator David Wallace whose parabasis speaks to readers insists that “All of this is true. This book is really true,” claiming that “The Pale King is, in point of fact, more like a memoir than any kind of madeup story” (69). Doubling the fictional and nonfictional impulse at once calls into question the mimetic structure of contemporary life and, more importantly, Wallace’s writer’s life. Wallace escapes figurative stereotype through a parodic evocation of those very stereotypes, silencing his real self while also silencing the workers. To actually “override the unspoken codes” between author and reader (75), as the character David Wallace readily claims he attempts to do as “author,” the real David Foster Wallace stresses the unspoken codes outside what his authorial personas describe at face value. He doubles himself while attempting to elude direct correlation with the novel’s authorial personas, or as Stephen Taylor Marsh argues, while “maintain[ing] a continuing tension between the self and narration which, rather than concretizing the self, depletes it” (112). By characterizing many selves through the roles of character, narrator, and indirect author, Wallace confronts readers, making them aware of “the infinite internalities of the novel’s many characters” (Marsh 113).

66  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine Also, as a character himself with multiple personas, Wallace evokes the role of the author among fluctuating signifiers, perhaps self-reflexively asking readers, in line with Michel Foucault, “What is an author?” As such, the David Wallace in the novel who appears as “author” illustrates how the text and author create and annul one another; the accumulation of textual data determines the person as much as the person determines the textual data. The David Wallaces in the novel stress the novel’s own spinning awareness of the ways in which Wallace’s many selves demonstrate the difficulty of speaking singularly, as his own self. He is lost within the system, immersed within the informational overflows and data determinants that construct him. Ironically left as an open form that has been assembled by his editor, Wallace’s unfinished novel appropriates him as an author that we are still waiting to hear speak, stressing a perverse irony. The final subsection, which Michael Pietsch places in the 2012 edition of the novel, perhaps, also relates a foreboding warning that speaks for itself while readers act as the final “immersives” in the novel. §50 evokes an omniscient voice calling out to you: “You are a trained observer and there is nothing to observe” (539). Styling the abstract setting of an “office [that] could be any office,” the narrator focuses on an unnamed worker and facilitator who says, “You do have a body, you know” (539). The facilitator mediates the worker’s breathing who also, through a double deixis, is “you”: “Since we all breathe, all the time, it is amazing what happens when someone else directs you how and when to breathe,” the voice says (540). The facilitator’s voice mediates and controls your own, and two voices come together: “She’s right there, speaking calmly, and so are you,” the narrator says (540). Wallace mediates the most fundamental aspect of voice: breath. An omniscient narrative voice pervades the millennial landscape, and Wallace never tells us what he could not finish saying. Wallace’s own voice is silenced—both within and without The Pale King. By the end of the novel, he takes his own breath and our breaths away, prompting us to listen to his silence.

Notes 1 From this point forward, the author David Foster Wallace will be referred to by last name only or his entire name (David Foster Wallace), whereas the character David Wallace in the novel The Pale King will be recognized as David Wallace. 2 According to his biographer D.T. Max, Wallace referred to Keats’s poem when trying to explain a text’s ability to offer an embodied relationship to its reader. He would often say of his own failed drafts, “there’s no hand” (235). 3 Drawing on Michel Foucault’s series of lectures from 1978 to 1979 in France, Mitchum Huehls argues, with some help from Bruno Latour, that the ability to shift between the purification of normed logic and the hybridization of post-normative logic conveys a circular, impotent rationality that “treats individuals as autonomous beings pinging around inside a regulated social sphere committed to efficient profit maximization” (After 16). The difficulty of neoliberalism is its totalizing effect, and its ability to function between normative and postnormative modes (After 4).

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  67 4 Couldry argues that the work regime of digital media and neoliberal doctrine “disrupts the basic speech of voice/expression which Aristotle felt could safely be assumed ‘beneath’ political speech” (3–4). He is mainly concerned with the process of voice, or of what Judith Butler has called “giving account of oneself” (qtd. on 7). Couldry asserts that the loss of vocal expression results from neoliberalism’s reduction of the world as market which inhibits other narratives from being spoken or heard (6). 5 Theorized by the work of information theorists Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1949), and borrowed from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy exists only as long as the information source can select a desired message out a selection of possible messages (7). Further, Alexander Galloway explains the anti-entropic position of vital life forms, and that “in any given system, things will tend to ‘fall apart’ or tend toward disorder. Entropy means that information, defined as any nonrandom measurement or quality, has a tendency to be forgotten” (Protocol 103–4). 6 Defining the Freudian Robot to be based on communication networks of finitestate machines, Liu investigates whether or not there is “a psychic force that drives the feedback loop of human-machine interchange” (2). With a focus on digital writing, Liu explains how the techne of the unconscious entered into the invention of digital media (12). Pointing out a 1920 sculpture created by Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, Liu argues that Hausmann’s head serves as an ominous prediction of the networked beings that embody the feedback loops of the humanmachine simulacra which are trapped by the cybernetic unconscious (2). 7 Galloway defines protocol as a distributed infrastructure which reveals “standards governing the implementation of specific technologies,” which create “the issue of political and technological adaptation, situated between centralized control and decentralized regulation” (7, xviii). Protocol, then, is also a way to reveal how technological control persists after decentralization and perhaps a way to understand the sociopolitical logics of the computer age. In essence, Galloway claims that protocol functions based on a dialectical tension between two opposing machines: one which “radically distributes control into autonomous locales” while the other “focuses control into rigidly defined hierarchies” (8). 8 Deleuze illustrates the change from a Foucauldian disciplinarian society to what he calls “a society of control,” which “mark[s] access to information or reject[s] it” (5). Relating their differences, he points to the alteration of the exchange of capital and the functioning of bodies in social space. The disciplinary man was a “producer of energy” while Deleuze describes the “man of control” as “undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network” (5, 7). These changes are, in effect, the result of technological evolution and the alterations in capitalism that have been given to the social controls of markets and the vapid mega-corporations that act as a “spirit or gas” (4). 9 In Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein stresses that language always also contains the possibilities of its other uses within a social setting, and, as a result, “new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and forgotten” (9e-11e). Wallace’s biographer, D.T. Max, notes that Wallace’s engagement with Wittgenstein as a college student at Amherst led to the revelations that, like language, “experience was like a game, that people were all and ever radically disconnected” (32). Wittgenstein’s influence on Wallace has been well-documented by Max and others, and most effectively underlined by Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003). In an interview with David Lipsky, the writer himself reveals his affinity to Wittgenstein’s late philosophies, citing that his novel,

68  Voices within the Neoliberal Machine The Broom of the System (1987), can be considered “a conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida,” for language always includes the possibility of its own failure (Lipsky 35). 10 Discussing subvocalization in William Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded (1962), Hayles explains how Burroughs’s interior voices reveal how “[l]anguage is not merely like a virus; it is a virus. … [Burroughs] makes language erupt directly into the body. The body itself, moreover, is treated as if it physically were a recorder, regulated by the principles that govern magnetic tape in its reproduction, erasure, and reconfiguration” (213–14). Hayles explains that Burroughs’s internal monologues implicate both bodily inscriptions and embodied incorporations within 1950s technologies (208). 11 In Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway describes the Iceberg Theory as the omission of all but 1/8 of information, saying, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will still have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” (192). Wallace forms Lane’s narrative through his own process of omission, which he calls exformation, or when “vital information [is] removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient” (Consider 61). He describes exformation as an essential part of a reader’s struggle and, therefore, engagement. 12 The associations of disgust and disease with democracy occurs in writings from the revolutionary era and beyond, and Jason Frank cites democratic critics such as congressman Fisher Ames, political theorist Edmund Burke, social conservative William Cobbett, and founding father Alexander Hamilton to be some of the many politicians to make this association. By linking disgust with democracy, nineteenth-century politics drew on a metaphor of health and the politics of disease as it related to the body politic, and Frank notes that “[d]isgust has an uncomfortably symbiotic relationship with democracy because the latter is so closely associated with defiling or contaminating powers” and thereby threatens to corrupt the natural unity of the body and therefore body politic of the nation (397). 13 The circular paradox of nineteenth-century American democracy shown in Moby-Dick has been well-documented through critical analyses of Ahab’s tautological vengeance and the circular exchange of capital reflected through the Pequod’s chase of the white whale. Jennifer Greiman’s article pulls from a vast body of scholarship regarding the question of democracy in Moby-Dick that includes Wai Chee Dimock’s Empire for Liberty (1989), Nancy Ruttenberg’s Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (1998), and Cesare Casarino’s Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (2002), among many others. Greiman notes an impulse in both Melville and Tocqueville that relates the contradictory circular course of a democratic sovereignty (124). 14 The turning cycle of democratic discourse outlined by Tocqueville is also analyzed in a contemporary context in Jacques Derrida’s Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005). Derrida shows how democracy’s double question clashes with the question of the other, identifying a sovereign-self that evokes a suicidal autoimmunity through ironic promises of equality of freedom and equality of sameness (33, 48). A self-sovereignty enacts the understanding of the collective self of democracy, and the ways in which the recognition of the other (through promises of freedom) are always already revealed in an equality defined by sameness. In addition to his complex analyses of “democracy to come” through a deconstructive reading that explores democracy’s internal and self-destructive

Voices within the Neoliberal Machine  69 tensions, however, Derrida importantly notes the possibilities that deconstructive aporias also create for the future. 15 As a result, despite a staunch critique of neoliberal politics and its modern workforce of disordered tax workers, Wallace’s postmodern moralism also struggles to suggest a way out of the disorders of late capitalism. Ralph Clare recognizes the ways in which Wallace attempts to offer “a possible solution to the apparent malaise of post-industrial life,” stressing “the attention Americans must pay toward civic duty and maintaining their freedoms” (188, 204). Jeffrey Severs also argues that the formation and deformation of Wallace’s characters reflects the “inbent body trying to balance, to find its feet, to feel and be aware (but not debilitating aware) of its weight” (8). Like the balancing of a scale or checkbook, characters strive to reach for some sort of balanced existence, fostering an innate humanism while laboring to adapt to their technologized, bureaucratic surroundings. Conley Wouters thus describes The Pale King as a type of technological prequel to Infinite Jest, “one that suggests that with the right politicalphilosophical tools, we might be able to retain a traditional, liberal-humanist selfhood in the face of informational avalanches” and cultivate a “much keener eye for our own more mechanical water” (171). 16 See Austin, “Narrative Transmission: Shifting Gears in Shelley’s Ozymandias,” and B. Johnson, Persons and Things, pp. 11, 35–36, 67.

3

Listening to the Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad

In a 2017 interview with the New Yorker, writer Jennifer Egan admitted that while she strives to keep her life separate from her fiction, voices from her own memories unconsciously leak in. She told Alexander Schwartz how her schizophrenic brother, Graham, used to speak about the voices that rang in both of their heads. “I can’t believe this. You’re hearing voices and you’re making a living from it,” she remembered her late brother saying. “And I’m hearing voices and I’m spending a fortune trying to get rid of them” (“Watch”). As Graham duly observes, Egan’s writing privileges the sound of voices. This is clearly evinced in her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), which, indeed, chronicles the memories of voices which merge and diffract through 50 years of rock-and-roll history. A bold American satire that critiques contemporary times in a disjointed narrative time, Goon Squad’s account of the music industry more grandly explores the vocal impasses inherent within the technologies of memory and media. Like Susannah Radstone, Andreas Huyssen, and José Van Dijck, among others, Egan engages a “crisis of memory” among voices punctuated by the attendant reciprocity between temporality and mediality.1 Using the technical and cultural paradigms linked to the ever-evolving music industry, the voices conjoined in the novel create a medley of memories which ask readers how to go on amidst the hauntings of an unwanted goon: the terrors of lost time. My major aim in this chapter is to point out how Goon Squad confronts the effects of listening to the sounds of memory and trauma, underlining the impacts of a sonic substructure created amid a capitalist economy and celebrity society. In view of this, I will illustrate how Egan features, too, the history of file-sharing created by digital music technologies while exposing the negative consequences of music’s gift economy. Still, while I focus on the traumatic effects of sonic memories and technologies, my analysis of the discursive representations of sound and voice in Goon Squad allows readers to acknowledge how things that fall apart also come together: what appears to be divided becomes the framework of the zeitgeist. Fittingly, the sounds of voices and the voices of sound enliven a sonority that vibrates in conjunction with and beyond the sound effects of language in Goon Squad: Egan humanizes the sounding world, typifying

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  71 and animating its cultural valence in a 13-story cycle.2 She focuses on an agency of listening that attunes itself to multiple perspectives within distinct spatiotemporal frames. And the sonic memories of the novel overlap through different voices, times, and places: intrinsically, sound subsists as a central signifier among shifting sociohistorical conditions. As I illustrate later in the chapter, key scenes from Goon Squad also collapse the distinction between linear (or solely visual) and acoustic modes while focusing on the centrality of sound as a form of signification. For example, Egan’s innovative PowerPoint chapter uses a visual medium to convey a message about our material encounters with sound. And like the modernist writers before her, Egan creates a vanishing point that heightens the connections between linear and acoustic modes within the process of remembering. Goon Squad yokes together the effects of “looking” and “looking back” while underlining a politics of listening in a culture that favors a hegemony of sight over a democracy of the senses. So, working against the image’s “real unreality” as “the prevailing model of social life” in late capitalist society, first pointed out by Guy DeBord, Goon Squad creates vocal and sonic exchanges which spotlight biases that occur when a singular emphasis is placed on optical knowledge (13).3 By focusing on sonic memories, Egan redresses perceptions of time to show how, as Jonathan Sterne puts it, memories of the “audible past” work against an audiovisual litany which pits sight and sound as contrasting binaries: “sound is a little piece of the vibrating world” that rounds out the sensorium, Sterne argues (Audible 11). Discerning sound based on its exteriority, and thereby, as “an artifact of the messy and political human sphere,” as Sterne does, negotiates multiple models of hearing subjects and sonic technologies, while stressing a plurality of cultural and social hierarchies (Audible 13). Representations of sound in the novel are based on a primacy of listening, which challenges auditory terrains because “the history of sound is at different moments strangely silent, strangely gory, strangely visual, and always contextual” (Sterne, Audible 13). Egan grapples with the agencies of sound as a central form of perception, pointing out how sonic exchanges critique the efficacies of personal and public communications in our mediated society. Principally, the sounds of Goon Squad interpolate memories to voice traumatic pasts that have been overlooked, forgotten, and even stolen. The sounds of trauma reinforce the crucial insight that trauma is delimited based on its belated impact, or “in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time” (Caruth, “Introduction” 9). Grasping trauma’s dislocation of cultures, subjects, and histories, Egan’s characters consistently hear the voices of a dislocated past, which, as Dori Laub reminds us, is “in fact nonexistent; a record that has yet to be made” (57).4 Creating an unmade record that moves between two parts of her novel like two sides of a record, an A-side to a B-side, Egan’s characters listen to the sounds that express how they “have stopped being themselves without realizing it” while trying to remember (317).5 As such,

72  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  the voices of the novel create and listen to a consciousness that enacts forms of earwitnessing. The earwitness explores how recalling and witnessing are informed by auditory experiences and, as Carolyn Birdsall has shown through her study of Holocaust survivors, narrate larger cultural histories amid traumatic aftershocks (170). Reencounters with the sounds of trauma disrupt time, testing discursive efficacy to narrate the sensory remnants of traumatic memory. Sounds are not of the past but voice the past through their ability to evoke traumatic feelings, or what Joanne Garde-Hansen in her study of film and radio describes as a way to “renew the experience of horror and fear” and move people “emotionally and memorably, time after time after time” (92). In so doing, Egan sounds a representation of trauma that generates narrative possibility at the same time that it evokes that very impossibility. By this means, Egan becomes somewhat of a literary remixer. Much like Paul D. Miller’s musical remixer, Egan organizes “different voices and visions that constantly collide and cross-fertilize one another,” creating resonant sounds that link memory, time, and place “as a continuously moving still frame camera lucida capturing moment-events” (351). The mix of tracks that make up the 13-song movement of Goon Squad presents the vocal acoustics, which stand as chapters moving through the two parts of the novel, from A to B. It is what happens, as Egan’s character Scotty Hausmann conveys, between A and B that counts: “I want to know what happened between A and B. … A is when we were both in the band chasing the same girl. B is now” (101). Scotty’s unanswered question amplifies the aporias of memory that occur between languages—literally between the letters A and B. And yet the aporias of memory, or its unresolvable paradoxes, work to create a unified infrastructure in Egan’s work; her gaps are filled by an assemblage of conflicting but repeated motifs, united in a convergence that demands its own verisimilitude. Fittingly, the objectivity of the novel is contingent upon the simultaneity of subjective narrative timelines, and Egan creates her own musical remix—a version of Laub’s “record yet to be made”—while awaiting listeners who pass from the private thoughts of the past to the public sounds of the present and future. The logic of Egan’s formal structure, then, performs the very sounding structure conveyed by her content, harmonizing individual voices into a whole. The two focal characters of the novel, record producer Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha Blake, unfold their lives amid the voices of characters whose lives intersect amid the polemics of the contemporary music industry. While facing the effects of the changing media of music in the late twentieth century, the characters create what Egan describes to be “a polyphonic fictional world” comprised of voices that interrelate to create a novel that has “a more organic, tentacle, quality to it” (Reilly 460). A soundtrack of sorts itself, Goon Squad organizes a rhythm of language and sound that remains formally unclassifiable. Readers perceive characters who are “hanging on by a thread” (11), and patterns of voice and sound work to

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  73 remediate one another, identifying the ways in which aesthetic forms link to sociopolitical experience through Raymond Williams’s structures of feeling, or “elements of impulse, restraint and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships” (Marxism 132).6 Through related stories told from different perspectives, Egan composes narratives among the rubble of time past while her characters search for redemption. As Sasha tells readers, “Redemption, transformation—God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn’t everyone?” (18). Through formal discontinuity, Egan creates continuity, underscoring culturally productive ways of listening in a spatialized panorama of lost times.

Spinning the Musical Narratives and Lost Voices of Modernism The voices turning among Egan’s characters indeed spread sonic memory through the ethos of a musical metaphor. Like a musical score, the book records “a constellation of intersecting lives” and deviates from “the binary worlds” (Reilly 441), involving two tales at once, that Egan composes in some of her other novels such as The Invisible Circus (1995), Look at Me (2001), and The Keep (2006). Despite the differences in her growing oeuvre, the primacy of voice remains central. Egan told Charles Reilly in 2007 that “without a voice you’ve got nothing” (442). Revealing changing sites of memory, Egan’s musical reverie and narrative conceit stress Edward W. Said’s summation that musical elaborations are “a mode for thinking through or thinking with the integral variety of human cultural practices” that can be “worldly, possible, attainable, knowable” (105). Said’s understanding of the musical narrative agrees with that of critics such as Eric Prieto, Lawrence Kramer, and Hazel Smith, who argue that thinking of the literary in terms of the musical reinforces cultural and formal work that is neither limiting nor restrictive.7 The shared exchange of sound and language, as Smith shows, reveals a mutual facilitation of “specific culturally transgressive and boundary-interrogating effects” (24). The musical narrative centers around vocal dynamics, and Kramer indicates how musical signifying conjoin a paradox of collapsing distances with diverse experiences: “We may know the suspension between autonomy and contingency all round us, but in music we feel it in ourselves,” he argues (3). In this way, the musical narrative speaks through “its ‘own’ voice” only after “it finds a voice, or voices, among a multiplicity of others that constantly blend with, mimic, and chafe against the rest” (Kramer 6). The fusion between selfpresence and social construction reveals voice as a transectoral site, yoking together cultural, psychological, and social relations. And for Egan, the musical narrative becomes a way to amplify the traumatic effects of sound that cross public and private lives. To begin the novel, Egan collapses narrative time to illustrate traumatic memory: she muddles time and place, past and present. Hyperbolizing time’s

74  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  “goonish” nature, the novel begins without a beginning while also introducing the character Sasha’s misconnections and miscommunications. The first line breaks spatiotemporal limits, and readers are situated in media res in “the usual way”: “It began the usual way in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel” (3). Egan’s “usual” enunciation of time and place then becomes unusual, and readers experience a peripeteia while focusing on Sasha’s sensory experience and a memory of theft: Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the woman’s blind trust had provoked her. (3) Sasha recollects this memory, “looking back” in her mind’s eye and confessing this incident of theft to her therapist, Coz, while also “looking back” in the mirror to the bag behind her during the actual moment in the bathroom. Sasha’s doubling voice veers between past and present, correlating lost time with the memories of stolen objects and a litany of excuses she relays to Coz, which “throb through her head” (15). The idioms that Sasha repeats through her futile confessions to her therapist indicate the growing unreality and inauthenticity of her speech while she attempts to deal with her traumatic past. Sasha tells Coz about the thrill of her kleptomania which allows her to “seize the moment, accept the challenge, take a leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously” (3–4), further making excuses about the objects she steals through a language of finality: “winter is almost over; children grow so fast; kids hate scarves; it’s too late, they’re out the door: I’m embarrassed to return it; I could have easily not have seen it fall” (15). Her excuses reflect the irrevocability of a lost moment or the sense of an ending and “years of her life compressed” (15). Sasha speaks without listening to herself, creating a failed act of confession while heightening her personal traumas in a public milieu. Unable to confess underlying familial trauma and loss, Sasha is incapable of bringing her memories out into the open, and while she attempts to constitute her past through her dialogue with Coz, the confession itself, in Judith Butler words, “becomes a new cause for guilt and remorse” through its denial of the very act of confession (166). Beginning the novel through a failed confession, Egan emphasizes a trauma that is further heightened by the very act of confession: what the saying or not saying does is as important as what is actually said. In Sasha’s case, she redoubles her sense of loss through her own loss of voice: her inability to speak leaves both past and present unfixed and uncertain. Sasha is unable to speak or testify to any further extent, but she does listen to a disquieting silence with Coz:

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  75 They sat in silence, the longest silence that had ever passed between them. Sasha looked at the windowpane, rinsed continually with rain, smearing lights on the falling dark. She lay with her body tensed, claiming the couch, her spot in this room, her view of the window and the walls, the faint hum that was always there when she listened, and these minutes of Coz’s time: another, then another, then one more. (18) The falling rain and the passing minutes of the therapy session, “another, then another, then one more,” sound Sasha’s perpetual decline. Listening to the rain reflects the memories that fall within Sasha’s mind, enhancing her aphasia through the rhythm of raindrops and passing time. The silence between Coz and Sasha leaves a question of uncertainty looming toward Sasha’s “throbbing” head while listening to a “hum that was always there when she listened” and the sound of the goons of time that pass her throughout the novel (17, 18). As shown in this opening example, the duration of temporality, or the sound of the goons of time, for Sasha and other characters in Goon Squad, interestingly, and as I initially point out in the chapter, finds its precursor starting in the early twentieth century at the height of modernism. A modernist preoccupation with novelty contributed to the ways in which listening and preserving cultural memories were affected by the advance of new technologies and also musical media. At the fin de siècle, memory and music were linked by French philosopher Henri Bergson, who compared memory to a “melody to which we listen to with our eyes closed” (Key 144). Memory “is never posterior to the formation of perception; it is contemporaneous with it” (Key 144). Speaking of the succession of inner time and memory, Bergson defined “a memory within change itself, a memory that prolongs the before into the after, keeping them from being mere snapshots and appearing and disappearing in a present ceaselessly reborn” (Key 205). Bergson’s focus on a notion of perception that includes memory also correlates with a perception of audition; surrounded by corresponding ideas, the hearer “develops them into acoustic memories which go out to overlie the crude sounds perceived, while fitting themselves into the motor diagram” (Matter 145). The motor diagram that organizes auditory memories, in Bergson’s sense, also characterizes the ways in which technologies and media forms were styled at this time. Friedrich Kittler argues that technologies such as the gramophone, film, and typewriter allowed “immortals to live again” (13), and Kittler’s well-known study of Thomas Edison’s 1877 phonograph analyzes the public’s fascination with acoustic technologies at the turn of the century: sound technologies allowed acoustic hallucinations from the past to become real, altering the public’s relationship with time itself (Gramophone 35, 55). What’s more, the phonograph reconstructs public memory through its preservation and re-creation of public life, which, as Lisa Gitelman claims,

76  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  is the capacity of all new media (“Phonograph” 284). Edison’s capture of “fugitive sounds” offered a way to explore the talking machine as textual device, and what Gitelman describes to be “a metaphoric author and reader” that extended beyond the renovations of newsprint and other discursive formations of its time (“Phonograph” 283–7). As a turning point in media history, the phonograph/gramophone formed echoes of voices and new contexts for making visible notions of “reading” and “speaking” through the re-creation of what Leslie Morris has referred to as “elegiac sites of memory.”8 Morris points out how the sounds of memory created by the gramophone are more elusive and perhaps more transient than visual sites of memory, reverberating what exists beyond language, or as she puts it, the gramophone’s needle composes an iterative vibration of sounds that also reveals the very impossibility of speech, as perhaps underlined by the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida (372). Following scientific and technological discourses, literature during this period, too, displays a sense of forgotten individual pasts echoing within a literary present, as famously noted by T.S. Eliot and manipulated by the modernists.9 Egan credits the modernists, and specifically Marcel Proust’s epic In Search of Lost Time (1913), as one source of inspiration for Goon Squad.10 The modernists were not only concerned with “making it new” among their literary ancestors, but they also often relied on sonic tropes and musical metaphors to heighten a sense of interiority. In fact, stressing aspects of sonic and musical expression are often both form and content for modernist texts, creating interactions between an interior consciousness and exterior world. Eric Prieto argues that modernism allows readers to “listen in” to the interactions between psychological states and processes, and musical metaphors make modes of thought rather than performance accessible (13). Notably, in conversation with Marshall McLuhan’s The Interior Landscape (1969), Elena Lamberti explains that modernist writers “constitute a fundamental paradigm for the understanding of new psychodynamics triggered by new media and new technologies” that include both visual and auditory perceptive modes (432). For this reason, musical fiction requires an adherence to what Eliot calls “the auditory imagination”: the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. (“Matthew” 111)11 The auditory imagination relates the semblances of a shattered temporality that is also inherent in modernism’s epistemological and technological memory processes. Ezra Pound’s sailors are haunted by the auditory imagination in The Pisan Cantos (1948) through contrapuntal melodies and translations which

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  77 “carry on and, by carrying on, interact” (Ezra 403). Pound’s poetic melodies in Canto I speak the voices of Homer’s Odyssey through an “ocean flowing backward” (3), revisioning Tiresias’s sacrificial prophecy and recollecting Elpenor’s untimely death while the ghostly sailor himself requests a striking epitaph upon burial: “A man of no fortune, and with a name to come” (4). Yet not only does Pound’s content spur the sacrificial names of the past but also the sacrificial literary forms that are reformed; Pound’s Odyssey is not only Homer’s but also of sixteenth-century translator Andreas Divius, heightening the epic’s mediations created by technologies and translators throughout the centuries. What is to come, then, spurs the sounds and sights Pound reconfigures throughout his verse, and in Canto VII, he resurrects not only “the rattle of old men’s voices” like Homer but also the “domed head” of Henry James whose “old voice lifts itself / weaving an endless sentence” (24). Like James, Pound incites a sense of the past, yet he also captures variable shifts of temporality and language through the technologies of modern war and linguistic violence: “Life to make mock of motion: / For the husks, before me, move, / The words rattle: shells given out by shells” (27). What Pound refers to as “the husk of talk” reverberates as the bullet shells of wars past and present (26) and is in turn echoed by Hilda Doolittle’s reportage of the Blitz in Trilogy (1944–1946), which resounds through “An echo of an echo in a shell” (156). Doolittle’s resonant bullet shells and seashells also stand as a physiological substitute for Edison’s apparatus, and HD’s speaker explains that “the sound was other” for: It translated itself As it transmuted its message Through spiral upon spiral of the shell Of memory that yet connects us. (156) The echoes of sounds and voices bursting the realities of the world wars conjure the memories of a sonic language—memories both highlighting a sense of sameness while, as Doolittle notes, a difference that “yet connects us” through new memories and technologies. Doolittle’s warning supports Kittler’s early observation that “in the founding age of technological media the terror of their novelty was so overwhelming that literature registered it more acutely” (Gramophone xl). The technologies that evoke terror yoke together a paradox of sound that conjures the ineffable sounds of voices and the ineffable sounds of war. Eliot reminds us in Four Quartets that “Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness” (19). Sonic memories communicate ineffable voices through their very patterns and forms, and the sonic metaphors and musical interludes comprised within much of modernist poetry attempt to give voice to the voiceless while ironically perceiving, as Eliot

78  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  does, how “Time the destroyer is Time the preserver” (40). The speaker forebodingly reminds readers in Four Quartets that “the way forward is the / way back” (41), and the voices and sounds that unfold like the husks of corn show a connotative materiality of language, resounding the palimpsests of modernity and the potentialities of Futurist discourse. Poetry’s sonic impetus carves a path to interior consciousness that also motivates writers of fiction who experiment with psychological and poetic narrative forms. Virginia Woolf intensifies verbal repetition to create verbal color and affect, and her attraction to the musical narrative celebrates linguistic play and social relations. Joyce E. Kelley specifically points to Woolf’s affinity for using musical metaphors as a pattern to convey social relationships and language in works such as The Voyage Out, Night and Day, The Waves, and Between the Acts (417–36). Woolf narratively creates an act of relationality through sound and music in much the same way that her poet Orlando describes the act of poiesis to be “a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice” (238). By highlighting multiple voices and sounds through stream of consciousness, Woolf shows how lives interact, and her melodies and voices overlap to compose a narrative consciousness that perhaps, as Septimus Warren Smith tells us in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), is “an immortal ode to time” (68). Septimus famously meditates on how the word time split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to time. (68) Woolf combines musicality, language, and time, and while the striking of Big Ben—“first a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable”—sequences Mrs. Dalloway’s “plunge” into the past, it also anticipates the proleptic and violent plunge of Septimus into both madness and suicide among the “swing, tramp and trudge” of London (4, 3, 4). For Woolf, sonorous worlds reverberate the violence of memory and time; she relies on sound’s physical presence that also evokes the material body and its relationality with the world. Woolf’s ode to time, which synchronically moves among characters, correlates with the sensory memories echoed throughout Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Proust’s notion of involuntary memory recovers a reality that is always also a reality born within memory. For Proust, memory is an act of imagination, evoked by unexpected sensory experiences—the most frequently cited being Marcel’s drinking of “a little tea and petites madeleines” which evokes his memory of a morning at Combray (45). Memory for Proust moves like a melody, and one self-reflexive example of this occurs when Marcel describes the rhythms of his houseflies which perform “a sort of chamber music of summer” (85). In a famously cited passage in Swann’s Way, Marcel

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  79 reads in his darkened room, and the chamber music of the flies is “born of the fine days, born again only with them, containing a little of their essence, it not only awakens their image in our memory, it guarantees their return, their presence, actual, ambient, immediately accessible” (85). The flies evoke the ambient music that links to a memory-image, and also a politics of deconstructive reading, as Paul de Man has notably argued (12, 19). Egan’s novel manipulates representations of sound through memories that, as in Proust, offer a new way of seeing through a poetics of listening and reading. As such, the metafictional impulse of Egan’s novel situates voices that pivot around characters who act as both observer and observed across a complex network of events, which, as Lamberti notes, emphasizes the modernist imperative to reallocate linear modes to acoustic modes through a shifting vanishing point of spatial and temporal perceptions: “This new idea of the vanishing point, built around principles of ‘relativity’ and ‘inclusiveness,’ also mirrors a new understanding of the relation between those who observe and what is being observed as per modern physics” (437). Much like Eliot’s narrator in The Wasteland (1922), Egan’s narrator Rob self-reflexively models this synchrony of voices within one singular frame in “Out of Body.” Rob creates the effect of being within and without narrative time: his voice is both in the middle of the action while also distanced from the action, remembering while leaving open his narrative through a secondperson narration. Egan’s narrative style here veers between what is said and also what is heard, stressing a mindfulness she transfers to readers through Rob’s own traumatic thoughts. After thinking and then speaking of his own past traumas and suicide attempt to his friends, Rob looks at their sad faces, which are all kind of moving and sweet except that you’re not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking, Good, they’ll forgive you, they won’t desert you, and the question is, which one is really ‘you,’ the one saying and doing whatever it is, or the one watching? (191) Rob plunges into the past, and his final plunge into the East River connotes a man lost within the desires of his memories, literally and figuratively. “Out of Body” exaggerates Rob’s “out of body” voice also through his drug use; Egan presents the hallucinatory highs and lows of drugs as a way to illustrate his conflicting inner and outer voices. Currents of voices along with the currents of the river prevail, and Rob leaves Robert F. Freeman Jr. to manage the current alone while you withdraw to the broader landscape. … You slip through Sasha’s broken window, floating over the sill lined with artifacts from her travels: a white seashell, a small pagoda, a pair of red dice. (207)

80  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  Inside and outside of death, the specter of Rob speaks and then listens to Sasha screaming “Fight! Fight! Fight!” (207). Rob is both spectator and active partner in the event of his drowning and, much like the reader, attends to a modernist imperative that combines inner and outer perceptions. “Out of Body” performatively models how Goon Squad’s voices work as a whole: from observer to observed, characters move from periphery to center, while readers actively listen to make sense of the sounds of voices that keep returning.

Sister Memories and the Economies of Sound Moving to the present and perhaps recreating a modernist history with a contemporaneous twist, Goon Squad comprises the memories of vibrating sounds and voices that include the sound effects of digitation in our technocratic world. Egan creates voices that reflect the thoughts and feelings of the lived impact of historical transition while situating her work as a reflection of the changing music technologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Combining layers of trauma with technological mediation, the voices of Egan’s characters reflect their roles as what Zara Dinnen refers to as “medial subjects.” The uncanny voices that mix with a pervasive media society images a network of characters who move inside and outside of each other’s lives while shifting through mediated environments (Dinnen 148). Open and variable, the voices and sounds of memory are heterogeneous and dynamic in much the same way as the proliferating sounds of musical media. This accounts for the ways in which, as Elodie A. Roy contends, “[d]ifferent musical media, far from erasing each other, interminably coexist and intersect, creating a heterogeneous technological ecology” that includes both current music technologies and “dead” or “retro” musical artifacts (1–2). Old and new music technologies, as Egan shows through the lives of the musicians and music executives in the novel, are also marked by an inequitable capitalist economy. In Goon Squad, the influence of market capital projects voices that are mediated by the economies of the music industry. This is most often shown through the shame memories and nostalgic recollections of music executive Bennie Salazar. The novel follows Bennie’s conversion from punk artist to music executive at Sow’s Ear Records, charting the ways in which the increased commodification of sound adheres to the characters’ search for “some lost thing” amid the changing technologies of musical production: a change which Bennie himself describes to be “an aesthetic holocaust!” (11, 23). Bennie muddles his voice with his vocation while underlying the gritty industrialization of sound in contemporary life: sound is “an object to be contemplated, reconstructed, and manipulated, something that can be fragmented, industrialized, and bought and sold” (Sterne, Audible 9). While the novel is framed around the terror attacks of the World Trade Center, it is also framed around the release of the first iPod on October 23, 2001. These

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  81 two events couple after Bennie compares the digitized world of rock and its “husks of music, lifeless and cold as the squares of office neon” (36), and his assistant Sasha, “only half-listening,” looks to the empty space where the Twin Towers had been: “‘There should be something,’ she said, not looking at Bennie. ‘Like an echo or an outline’” (36). The empty echo connects the history of the nation to the history of the music industry while Sasha, “only half-listening,” collapses the distinction between visuality and aurality. Transitioning from music creator to money maker, Bennie measures his success from the garages of San Francisco’s 1970s punk scene to the “undulating lawn” that was “fluorescently bright” of his 1990s New York colonial house—a rendition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s East Egg mansions (35). The conversion of Bennie from an electric-Mohawk adolescent of 1970s punk culture to a “hairball” middle-aged man who dissolves gold flakes in his coffee to spur sexual desire (literally and figuratively) rings through his shame memories. Bennie’s feverish attempts to “make things right” and “stay on top” of the music industry require that his songs turn into ring tones after he sells his label to “multinational crude-oil extractors” in the nineties (23). As a result, Bennie reflects on a future based on the forfeit of music to the tools that create it: “Bennie knew that what he was bringing into this world was shit. Too clear. Too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization” (23). Bennie’s silent distress waxes nostalgic for outmoded and analog recording techniques that Egan juxtaposes against the music industry’s new concerns with fidelity, digitization, and immateriality. For Bennie, what is at stake is the necessity to bring back a punk past that rings through his head and electrifies his body: “the rapturous surges of sixteen-year-old-ness [the old songs] produced” (23). The 1970s punk ethos narrated by Bennie’s former bandmate signals a spirited musical subculture that marks adolescent rebellion through its titular refrain, “Ask Me If I Care,” the character Rhea thinks (49).12 Rhea watches and describes Bennie’s somatic response to feeling and hearing the sounds of their band: “I watch Bennie listen, eyes closed, his Mohawk like a million antennas pricking up from his head” (45). Touching Bennie while he performs as a teenager is “like touching something electric, his actual body in my arms,” Rhea says (48). Sexual energy moves through Bennie’s band the Flaming Dildos: they sing “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” and form their own human feedback loop, typified when Rhea explains her relationship with her friend Jocelyn: “We stand in for each other” (41). The human electricity of punk rock opposes the lifeless digital music made after Bennie becomes a successful music executive. From then on, he mediates digital music with his recurring shame memories, and digital music mediates his memories with its clean, raucous sounds. Visiting the Stop/Go sisters’ band in the beginning of the new millennium, Bennie’s memories wholly overlap with his capacity for listening to the group, and he reminisces about the “spooky-sweet sounds” of a group of nuns, another set of “sisters” that he hears singing in his mind’s eye.

82  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  Through Egan’s parody of Marcel’s desire for his mother’s bedtime kiss in Proust, the nuns’ voices replay in Bennie’s mind and incite a sense of bodily lust while he is “caught in a loop from twenty years ago,” trying to kiss Mother Superior and “lunging over the sill … like some haywire figure on a clock, again. Again. Again” (21). Bennie’s desire for the voices of the lost nuns ignites a lust that stresses the present state of his musical and corporeal impotence only fully realized after he hears the Stop/Go sisters amid the memory of an email that refers to him as a “hairball” (30). The exchange of memories is made manifest within the soundtracks of the sister group: “The sisters were screaming, the tiny room imploding from their sound, and Bennie tried to find again the deep contentment he’d felt just a minute ago. But ‘hairball’ had unsettled him” (30–31). Bennie concurrently hears “memory spasms” of shame in the present while “he want[s] to cover his ears, block out the cacophony of Stop/Go” (23, 31). That cacophony echoes among a list of shame memories Bennie has written on a parking ticket: “Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can,” Sasha asks, “They’re titles, right?” (37). As shown clearly in this scene, the associations among shameful memories and song titles yoke together the tracks of Bennie’s life with the tracks of his music production, for “everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out” (23). Musical circulation expresses Bennie’s melancholic nostalgia for a music industry of the past: an industry that once celebrated human creation and now strives to sustain technological innovation. Bennie critiques the changing economics of music to further reveal a crisis of musical memory and sound: “You’ve got Pro Tools on there, right?” Bennie asks the Stop/Go sisters, and even his best intents to hear “the music get made” manifest within the “laptop on a table amid the instruments” (29). The ruminating shame spurred by a sense of musical melancholia distinctively expresses itself through inexpression. Bennie tries to tell Sasha of his disillusionment, imploring her to “Listen … Listen Sasha,” yet the two part through the outline of an echo coming from her lips: “See. You. Tomorrow” (38). Bennie’s shame memories reflect the changing social and musical intercourse of a capitalist economy through the shifts from analog to digital music of the late twentieth century. His narrative captures the ways in which, as Andrew Leyshon et al. have shown, contemporary “music has become an important part of the infrastructure of capitalist society, and an essential crutch to all manner of acts of consumption” (182–3). Since Egan’s novel revolves around the growing prominence of the MP3 and the date of the first iPod, it also points to the Internet’s ubiquitous file-sharing of music, which results from broader social forces that have changed the role of music in the twenty-first century.13 Music file-sharing evaluates social relations while opening the ways in which the Internet alters the money economy, creating a mutation that entails a widespread cultural and economic logic. Egan critiques the music industry through what Richard Barbrook first described as the Internet’s

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  83 “hi-tech gift economy,” what Leyshon et al. call music’s “quasi gift-economy” (180), and what Jonathan Sterne describes as a music economy that holds “an ambiguous position that is both inside and outside of market economies” (MP3 224).14 The gift economy of music acts in conjunction with the Internet as a sociotechnical network and was first defined in terms of an exchange of cultural capital in the 1990s. However, after the dot​ .c​om boom, the colonization of music’s gift economy could be followed through capitalism’s income streams and marketing schemes; peer-to-peer file networks such as Napster, among others, have been a turning point to restructure music as a multimedia product which is bundled up with other goods and services (Leyshon, Reformatted 78). This is prominently shown through acts of perverse gift-giving that both circulate and encircle the novel, heightening the exchange of goods and conspicuous consumption within the music industry on which Bennie becomes dependent. In fact, Bennie’s musical success at Sow’s Ear Records is predicated on the gifts of conspicuous consumption. When Bennie’s old bandmate Scotty Hausmann visits Bennie at his office in New York City at the pinnacle of Bennie’s success in the chapter titled “X’s and O’s”—a satiric quip for the bits and bytes that form information data in computers—an exchange of gifts critiques the extravagant commodity exchange that comprises Bennie’s workplace. Scotty sees Bennie’s success before he sees Bennie, “looking up up, wondering how high Bennie’s office might possibly be” in the tall green glass building on Park Avenue (93). Digital musical production quickly becomes correlated with the masculinized agency and visual currencies that signal Bennie’s wealth: Scotty notices Bennie’s waiting room that reminds him of a “seventies bachelor pad”; when Scotty then meets Bennie, he observes his “fucking beautiful shirt” which “glowed, like there was light coming through from the inside” (95, 98). A reminder of the “beautiful shirts” radiating from the new money of Jay Gatsby, Bennie’s “fucking shirt” replaces the rebellion of 1970s punk (also expressed through the animated fucking of the punk group’s refrain), and contrasts with Scotty’s own meticulously dry-cleaned jacket. Too, Bennie’s business desk takes the place of a piano, overlooking a sumptuous view of New York City: “the whole city flung out in front of us the way street vendors fling out their towels packed with cheap, glittery watches and belts. That’s how New York looked like a gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me” (99). Scotty’s gaze looks out the window in Bennie’s office, stressing his proximity to but disconnection from Bennie’s wealth and status: “I pretended to look at the view, but my eyes were closed,” Scotty thinks (102). Bennie’s extravagance manifests in the silence of the memories of music in the past: Scotty thinks, “There was a long, strange pause, and in that pause I felt myself pulling Bennie back—or maybe it was him pulling me—back to San Francisco, where we were two out of four Flaming Dildos” (101). Inside and outside of the past, Scotty appropriates the inside/outside dichotomy that gestures toward his own fall outside of

84  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  the music industry while Bennie is adequately placed inside of monetary success. Egan heightens the irony of Scotty’s turn of fate by recalling that “Bennie was one of the lousier bass players” in the Flaming Dildos while Scotty is described as having been “magnetic” (101, 41). Scotty and Bennie recognize this contrariety, and Scotty notes that “behind Bennie’s smile the fear was still there: that I’d tracked him down to snatch away these gifts life had shoveled upon him, wipe them out in a few emphatic seconds” (102–3). The gifts of Bennie’s musical success surround him, yet Scotty stresses the sounds of capitalist pollution evident in Bennie’s consumptive wealth. Scotty thwarts Bennie’s visual currency through the resounding “thwack” of what he proclaims to be his gift to Bennie: “Striped bass. I caught it in the East River this morning” (95, 100). A contaminated fish that critiques a contaminated gift economy emphasizes the fetishistic qualities of digital music.15 The polluted fish from the East River critiques the ways in which digital music invokes Karl Marx’s notion of “commodity fetishism” in that it takes on the subjective qualities that define Bennie and Scotty’s altered relationship, and notably, Bennie’s altered relationship to the music industry. Ascribing the relations among people to the relations among objects, Egan amusingly heightens the hyperbole of market consumption through the fish; Scotty says, “Take it home and eat it!” (100). The fish as fetish underscores the invisible poisons that circulate within the music market, as emphasized when Scotty thinks about forms of visible versus invisible pollutions. Speaking of the East River, he thinks, “Pollution was present, yes, but the beauty of it was that you knew all about that pollution, unlike the many poisons you consumed each day in ignorance” (94). The thwacking sound of the fish makes visible the ways in which music consumption depends on an increased ignorance of market pollution that also transforms social circulation, and what media and music critics refer to as an increased promiscuity among music consumers.16 Promiscuity within an Internet culture reworks intimacy and interaction within a capitalist network, and contemporary forms of music sharing foster the continuous changeable relations between producers and consumers, or “prosumers.” The promiscuous habits of Internet prosumers manifest themselves through literal and figurative social intercourse in Goon Squad—multiple relationships form and fragment among the novel’s varied characters. Voices and memories exchange and interact like online file sharing, opening new relationships among endings that often also signal new beginnings. This is particularly shown at the end of Scotty’s narration when his sentimentality and spirituality mark him with an agency that triumphs over Bennie’s wealth. While in Bennie’s office, Scotty thinks, “All at once I felt strong, as if some balance had tipped in the room and all of Bennie’s power—the desk, the view, the levitating chair—suddenly belonged to me” (103). Egan figures Scotty’s story as one of redemption, and although he is haunted by recurring memories of his ex-wife Alice throughout “X’s and O’s,” Egan signals his possible return through the admittance of his painful past to his fishing

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  85 buddies. Walking away from the East River, Scotty separates himself from his traumatic past and Bennie’s wealth. He meets two music “junkies” to whom he gives Bennie’s card, enhancing his sense of sentimentality while he thinks about the junkies’ voices after they thank him: It had been a long time since anyone had thanked me for something. “Thanks,” I said to myself. I said it again and again, wanting to hold in my mind the exact sound of their voices, to feel again the kick of surprise in my chest. Is there some quality of warm spring air that causes birds to sing more loudly? I asked myself that question as I took the overpass across the FDR onto East Sixth Street. Flowers were just coming open in the trees. (107–8) Scotty hears the sounds of voices and the voices of sound, feeling a sense of rebirth while even his old, dry-cleaned jacket is made new in his mind. In spite of this, Scotty’s pastoral peace is interrupted in the final chapter of the novel by a warning from the near future. Egan’s futuristic “Pure Language” takes place at Scotty’s revival concert, and onlookers converge in the empty Footprint of the World Trade Center Towers meditating upon “two generations of war and surveillance [that] had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, steady man on a slide guitar” (335). Scotty’s emergence as a musician who conveys “something strong, charismatic, and fierce,” and whose music “explode[s] the quavering husk Scotty had appeared to be just moments before” (335) is called into question by the soundscape of a city embodied by what Roger Luckhurst argues is the impetus of the traumas of “future shock.”17 Egan colors the traumatic lens of the city through the highly surveilled noises that shock and then numb its inhabitants; the shocking sounds enhance their kinship to Walter Benjamin’s “shocks and collisions” which describe modern man’s relationship to the modern city (“Some” 175–6). Egan writes of the character Alex’s experience at the Footprint: “Traffic had stopped and choppers were converging overhead, flogging the air with a sound Alex hadn’t been able to bear in the early years—too loud, too loud—but over time he’d gotten used to it: the price of safety” (330). The noise of the choppers mediates Alex’s experience, chronicling him as one of a crowd of people marching toward Lower Manhattan who arrive at the concert with “an army of children: the incarnation of faith in those who weren’t aware of having any left” (330). Egan leaves readers with a paradoxical model of a city encouraged by hopeful of the sounds of Scotty’s guitar while still hearing the tragic sounds of terror from September 11, 2001. Alex remembers 9/11 as a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance. Now it seemed more insistent than ever a low, deep thrum that felt primally

86  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  familiar, as if it had been whirring inside all the sounds that Alex had made and collected over the years: their hidden pulse. (331) Just “out of earshot,” the “hidden pulse” of 9/11 stresses a mix of personal and collective memories remembered. Through the sounds of memory and music, Egan typifies a community relationally tied by the traumatic sounds of the city that collapse past-present-future. Yet, in this moment, music is also recreated as inciting a moment of convergence and community. And the crowd swelled “approval palpable as rain [that] lifted from the center of the crowd and rolled out towards its edges” while they intently listen to “a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar” (335). The convergence event at the end of the novel warns of the need for human connection among technologies that paradoxically bind people together while also creating separation. Fifty years of ruthless commodification have resulted, for Egan, in a society converged around gadget-addicted toddlers called “pointers” and handset employees who drive pop culture and the music economy. The network of communal relations from this scene not only reveals itself through the possibility of the connection created by Scotty’s concert, but also through the real-life handset operator of the future that is Lulu. Appearing at the concert, Lulu exemplifies her characterization presented earlier in the novel. Even at the age of 9, Lulu is described by her publicist mother Dolly/La Doll as an assemblage of wires in a community of girls: “And Lulu was the rod around which the wires were wrapped” (146). This early depiction of Lulu later connects to Lulu in Egan’s cityscape when she is described as “a living embodiment of the new ‘handset employee’” (317). Buzzing as a person who “lived in [Alex’s] pocket,” Lulu reminds readers of a brave new world where human connectivity is corralled by technologies and the empty sounds of a radical text-speak, what Lulu calls “T-ing,” because as Lulu notes, “You can never just Say. The. Thing” (321). Even while the Footprint marks the revival of Scotty’s music through a crowd of listeners, it also warns of a technological determinism that threatens the expression of voice.

Sound Geographies and the Reach of Global Times Despite Bennie’s and Scotty’s changing celebrity status in the novel, musical celebrity reaches exponentially through redefined stardom that is evident within the changing capital economies of music itself. As Bennie puts it, “it’s not about sound anymore. It’s not about music. It’s about reach” (312). Up until this point in the chapter, I have argued how Egan explores the corrupt economies of digital music and media. From this point forward, I wish to point out how Goon Squad also critiques the reach of the technologies of our global world. The reaches of music celebrity in the novel include not only the influence of the music industry but also the influence of mass media

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  87 toward increasingly linked affective and global publics. While much of the novel is set in New York City and its surrounding areas, Egan’s characters globe-trot, either mentally or physically, to California, Italy, Kenya, and an unknown Third World location, to illustrate Marshall McLuhan’s “global village,” or perhaps more accurately, what Arjun Appadurai refers to as a “rhizomic movement” that occurs between media and migration (29). Each location projects the technological influences in different culture industries that include the music industry and, also, journalism and public relations. So, while Egan focuses on the influences of musical media, she also critiques the cogency of a mixed media culture that spreads its information across national boundaries. Egan merges mediated accounts of genocide, sexual assault, and terrorism, creating multi-modal versions of history that flow across the violence of a capitalist, celebrity culture. Situating the local in terms of the global, Egan characterizes musical producer Lou Kline’s celebrity reach while with his family on a safari in Kenya. The safari satirically expresses a colonial critique of empire and kinship through the sounds and voices of the tourism industry.18 Lou’s family listens to the Samburu warriors whose “guttural noises pried from their abdomens,” and Lou wants to “yank [his daughter] away from these black men” (61). Illustrating the colonial imaginary as a product of a Western, gendered gaze, the safari shows the mutual relationship between patriarchal and colonial articulations of difference. The safari combines memories that sequence a time that is “out-of-joint,” as Jacques Derrida might say (“Time” 14–36), and characters are haunted by personal desires and global violence which split and structure their ontologies. Egan’s narrative time synchronically critiques masculine, imperial power through death, divorce, suicide, and infidelity. The narrator describes Lou as one of those men whose restless charm has generated a contrail of personal upheaval that is practically visible behind him: two failed marriages and two more kids back at home in LA, who were too young to bring on this three-week safari. (60) The safari signals Lou’s broken familial structure that moves among the spectacles of a public, surveillance culture, teasing out, in the words of Katherine D. Johnston, “the symbiotic relationship between the profile industry and celebrity culture” (158). Directly, Egan focuses on the violence of surveillance as Lou “opens the large aluminum case where his new camera is partitioned in its padding like a dismantled rifle” (65). Celebrity becomes characterized by the sounds of clicking cameras and the musicians’ “visceral-animal sighting competition” that occurs along with the musician Chronos’s “ranting[s] about animals” (66). Moreover, the jeep’s “ticking-motor silence” when the group views a pride of lions stresses the

88  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  mechanized words of the blond actor Dean who has a knack “for stating the obvious—‘It’s hot’ or ‘The sun is setting’” (67, 66). Egan colors the safari as a vanishing point to draw attention to the sounds of the empty violence of a masculine celebrity and media culture, amplified sonically by the lioness’s attack on Chronos which later resounds through “screams, a gunshot,” while “those overhead tumble back to their seats so violently that at first Mindy thinks they’ve been shot” (69). The doubled shots of the camera and gun typify celebrity culture through a violent, virile amplification. Within the layers of surveillance, the undertones of the “shuddering jeeps” and “startled silence” that abound during the lioness’s attack chronicle muddled memories in the mind of Lou’s son Rolph (64, 67). The safari intimates a sense of optical disorder through the voices of memories that jumble in Rolph’s head while he attempts to negotiate his entrance into American masculinity: His mind bends again and again to the jeep, but his memories are a muddle: the lioness springing; a jerk of impact from the gun; Chronis moaning during the drive to the doctor, blood collecting in an actual puddle under his head on the floor of the jeep, like in a comic book. (72–73) Diminished to the caricature of a comic book in Rolph’s mind, the public memories of the lioness’s attack are appropriated by the private and proleptic impressions of a celebratory mythic story that “unnerves Rolph” (72). The narrative anachrony of the chapter allocates the reeling memories which unravel through the repetitive refrain of his father Lou’s sexist language: “Women are crazy” (62, 74). Navigating his role in the safari group, Rolph learns the ways in which surveillance, along with his father’s recurring discourse, galvanizes the heteronormative pressures of masculinity. Rolph’s emergence into masculinity is interrupted by the intense tragedies that occur in future tense. Egan’s proleptic narration disrupts the present by the end of the chapter: the fates of the characters fast-forward through an omniscient narrative voice that ossifies the inevitable suicide of Rolph. The safari ends as a bleak counter to its beginning when Rolph had repetitively asked his sister, “Remember, Charlie?” (59). Remembering a vacation of their youth when their parents were married, Rolph wants his sister Charlie to remember again—“the two of them peering into the dark as if waiting for a signal from their distant grown-up lives” (60). But the only signal from the future confirms the reality of Rolph’s suicide when he is 28, which perhaps underscores Rolph’s difference from his father: Rolph is “quiet, reflective, attuned to the natural world and the pain of others” (63). Charlie’s memories of Rolph recur silently within her mind as an adult, and Rolph’s grim fate negates Charlie’s younger self, bolstering the intricate reciprocity between memory and subjectivity. The narrator indicates that “the woman who remembers won’t be Charlie; after Rolph dies, she’ll revert to her real

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  89 name—Charlene—unlatching herself forever from the girl who danced with her brother in Africa” (83). Charlie becomes Charlene, and while Rolph resounds in her mind’s eye as an adult, Egan implies a trauma from the past that’s akin to the memories of separation that plague the kinship relations of her father and Rolph. The safari commences Egan’s gendered and Western reading of celebrity culture. Egan shows the discursive power of celebrity, what P. David Marshall observes “is a voice above others, a voice that is channeled into media systems as being legitimately significant” (Celebrity x). Starting with Lou’s voice, Egan again situates the violence of masculinist desires through the near farcical satire and celebrity reportage of Jules Jones for Details magazine. Jules’s voice in his tabloid article speaks from Rikers Island Correctional Facility, adumbrating his assault in the past on film star Kitty Jackson in Central Park. Jules simultaneously writes and remembers the assault alongside his own personal relationship with his ex-fiancée Janet Green. Jules’s memories of Janet accent his memories of Kitty, and the confessional coverage operates as a mode of personal reflection that also correlates with a crisis of truth legitimized by today’s news media. Wendy Brown poignantly maintains that today’s news media empties private life into the public domain, abetting “the steady commercialization and homogenization of intimate attachments, experiences and emotions” by the global market (“Freedom’s” 85). Citing Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman’s proposition that we live in the age of testimony, Brown asks, too, whether or not “our contemporary crisis of truth has not been displaced into an endless stream of words about ourselves, words that presume to escape epistemological challenges to truth because they are personal or experiential” (“Freedom’s” 85). Jules’s footnotes and present narrative interjections accent and manipulate his memories of the attack, influencing a sense of “truth” that he conveys to his readers: Jules’s sense of skewed narrative truth notably follows the literary manipulations of David Foster Wallace and, before him, Vladimir Nabokov. Jules’s footnotes crawl up the page in the same way that Jules crawls toward Kitty during the attack. And the report tracks time like the counter of a bomb set to explode, for Jules must create a violent event (the attack) because he fails to incite Kitty’s own loss of control, which he tells us is “the sine qua non of celebrity reporting” (168). Egan’s spotlight on Jules’s article redresses the power of celebrity production literally and figuratively through the fallacies of public discourse. The publicist Dolly/La Doll remarks on the confluence of the reporting of the sexual assault and Kitty’s popularity, for the attack and trial had “enshrined Kitty in a glowing mist of martyrdom” (144). Following the variable exploits of Kitty’s celebrity status from Jules’s sexual assault to her relations with a fascist dictator, Egan exposes what Mark Seltzer describes as a “pathological public sphere” that links the representation of violence as well as the cause of violence in media cultures: “The pathological public sphere is everywhere crossed by the vague and shifting lines between the

90  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  singularity or privacy of the subject, on the one side, and collective forms of representation, exhibition, and witnessing, on the other” (5). After being victimized and martyred by Jules’s assault, Kitty has her celebrity agency remade when she is lionized along with General B., the foreboding dictator of a Third World country. Kitty’s relationship with the general exposes celebrity culture as “a new form of ideological colonization” within which, to use Marshall’s words, Kitty embodies desires “that are universalized as much as they mutate the organization of desires in particular cultures” (“Introduction” 7). Expressing the satirical slant of Sylvia Plath’s “Every woman adores a fascist” from the poem “Daddy” (1965), Kitty subsists as the ideal celebrity to “sell the general” after he commits genocide. The idea comes to Dolly in a dream sequence that echoes a movie montage: Then Dolly was aware of herself in the dream, sitting in a chair watching the general and his lover, thinking what a good job they were doing playing their roles. … She understood: the general should be linked to a movie star. (143–4) Real life imitates the movie reel, and Egan conflates hard and soft news in contemporary registers through the interactions of Dolly, Kitty, and the general. As such, celebrity has a luring incantation in the novel that manipulates social kinship in a global world among shifting frames of hegemonic power: celebrity agencies rework old logics of domination through the power of the imagination, which Appadurai has argued is a result of a modernity that offers new resources of imagined selves and worlds through the global scale of mass media and reportage (3–4). The media imaginary creates a moving montage of spectacular images, and those images in Egan’s Third World setting are rivaled by sounds steeped in the violence of silence. The silence in the novel disquiet the media imaginary, resetting, in the words of Brown, the antimony between silence and speech. Brown rethinks the potentials of silence that paradoxically point out its simultaneous regulation and resistance to discourse (“Freedom’s” 89). And the silences projected within General B.’s country illustrate the ways in which the sounds of silence impregnate the atmosphere with meaning. The encounter between General B. and Kitty is troubled by silence when Dolly and her daughter, Lulu, escort Kitty through secured checkpoints guarded by soldiers toting machine guns to his compound. Their black Mercedes is welcomed by “plump shiny black birds whose long purple beaks looked like scythes,” and Dolly reflects that they “looked like birds that would screech” (149). The “unsettling silence” of the birds anticipates the ominous silence of the market where people recognize the dictator’s assistant Arc (149), and Dolly confronts her own role in the general’s restitution, walking through the market and bringing “a source of terror and

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  91 anxiety to those he ruled” (154). The silent terror of the people becomes further pronounced by the sounds that surround them: a “jungle crazed with birdcalls,” the soldiers’ “creek and grind of boots,” the “humming” of Kitty, “not a tune, just the same two notes, over and over” (157). The gothic sounds of the jungle and mono-tune of Kitty’s hum juxtapose the deceit of the smiling secret exposed in the “click, click, click” of Dolly’s hidden camera during Kitty’s encounter with the general—“that smile was it, the thing no one had seen, the hidden human side of the general that would dumbfound the world” (158). Curiously, Kitty’s own voice brings back the vicious reality that is the reason for the meeting: “Is this where you bury the bodies?” she asks the general, and then, “Do you bury them here in pits … or do you burn them first?” (159). Still, the hidden silence of Dolly’s images restores the general’s reputation regardless of Kitty’s outburst, and “the photographers began showing up … they were suburb hiders, crouching like monkeys in the trees, burying themselves in shallow pits, camouflaging inside bunches of leaves” (163–4). Mirroring a type of guerilla warfare, the news reporters prompt the general and Kitty to reappear, and they perform in front of the “phalanx of cameras” as an eponymous contemporary couple: the fascist dictator and the celebrity socialite—both remade by the deceit of Dolly’s images (164). Despite the reconciliation that occurs between Kitty and the general, which also liberates Dolly from her own traumatic past, there is a foreboding twist at the end of Dolly’s story. Arc gives Dolly “a gift to express our immense gratitude for your invaluable service” after her images clear the general’s reputation (165). Speaking with Arc on the phone, “Dolly had heard his smile and understood: hush money” (165). The gift of “hush money” evidences a deviant and corrupt capitalist economy that globally circulates. Dolly’s memories at the end of the chapter ominously link the local to the global when she uses the money to open a small gourmet shop in an upstate town outside of New York City. Receiving shipments of star fruit at the store, Dolly reminds readers of the silence that characterizes the terror of the market in the general’s country. Away from its silent terrors, Dolly and Lulu “feast on the sweet, strange flesh” of the star fruit in their new home, further exploiting Dolly’s consumptive business as itself colonizing, maintaining the neocolonial relations of an uneven distribution of resources in a global marketplace (165). Dolly’s own comeback highlights the traumas of the world in the memories of silence that depict the terrors of the market square and the inequities of our global market economy.

Every New Beginning Despite the varied layers of trauma that move within the characters’ voices, Egan does not signify a totalizing, traumatic end. Having made her readers troubled by the sights and sounds of trauma, Egan’s remix defies the totalizing effects of a traumatized world. Her literary remix remakes and

92  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  refigures the trauma and traumatizing subject, creating a narrative that imagines a future that can begin again. As Jules tells his sister Stephanie, “Sure, everything is ending … but not yet” (132). Each section of the novel indeed suggests the sense of an ending, as I have shown throughout this chapter but the novel seemingly does not end, at least not yet. Goon Squad’s futuristic closing finishes with a loop that does not repeat but instead starts anew. Alex and Bennie walk through the streets of New York after Scotty’s revival concert. Remembering and looking for Sasha, both men hear “another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys” (340). Opening a door to the future, the girl closes the gap of time since the beginning of the novel and, through Bennie and Alex’s memories, the sounds of her keys fiddling instill the possibility of something new, or a way to “make it new again,” as Scotty previously notes (108). Closing the gaps of time extends itself, too, through Egan’s penultimate chapter, in which the visual medium of PowerPoint is used to reinforce the material presence of sound in the future life of Sasha Blake. Written by her 12-year-old daughter, Alison, the slide journal organizes itself, much like the rest of Egan’s novel, around a space-time compression of four sections as shown in Figure 3.1: “After Lincoln’s Game,” “In My Room,” “One Night Later,” and “The Desert.” Shrinking temporal and spatial difference, Ally signals an instantaneity expressed by forms of new media and memory. Yet the forward moving arrows of the slide also indicate that Ally’s journal does indeed move forward in time, expressing an unexpected faith in the future. In the journal, Ally pictures her mother, Sasha, as different from the kleptomaniac readers know from the past: Sasha is now a responsible mother to Alison and Lincoln. The family’s conflicting memories are apparent through the layered visual format of the PowerPoint. In Egan’s words, the PowerPoint “is a sort of microcosm of the way Goon Squad works as a whole, which is these vivid moments with big gaps in between, each one different from all the others” (“Watch”). A form inserted within a form, or maybe a take on Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message,” each slide presents overlapping layers that represent the memories of the past. As pictured by Ally in Figure 3.2, the family is a microcosm of the United

Figure 3.1 Organizational slide written by Alison Blake appears on p. 235 of Goon Squad. Image courtesy of Jennifer Egan and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Little Brown Book Group.

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Figure 3.2 Representation of family picture appears on p. 236 of Goon Squad. Image courtesy of Jennifer Egan and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Little Brown Book Group.

States, representative of the possibility of interconnection amid the family’s growing tensions and loss. In a slide entitled “Mom’s Reasons for Not Talking About That Time,” Ally visually depicts her mother’s memories as part of an alchemic mix along with the excuses Sasha gives for her own silence: “I don’t trust my memories; It feels like another life; It’s all so imbued with my own struggles,” Sasha tells her daughter (259). Still, Ally is credited as being close to her creator, Egan, because she tells readers: “My job is to make people uncomfortable” (262). Ally’s slide journal exposes the family’s personal traumas and also an overarching global trauma: climate change. Beneath her, Ally describes “heat coming up from the earth” in the parking lot which “glitters like coal in the streetlight” (238), and the family lives amid a desert climate which allows for no lawns. A disruption in weather cycles by cultural cycles is shown by the patterns of Sasha’s ritualized language in Figure 3.3, depicted by a visual turning of phrases Sasha repeats and returns. The inauthentic and cyclical language of Sasha stresses the family’s miscommunications which quickly manifest in an argument between Drew and his 13-year-old autistic son, Lincoln. Lincoln is fixated by the musical pauses in rock songs, which also become a way for him to communicate his

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Figure 3.3 Sasha’s language which repeats and returns on p. 239 of Goon Squad. Image courtesy of Jennifer Egan and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Little Brown Book Group.

own and Ally’s greatest fear: the sense of an ending. The pauses call for a type of “wait time” while listeners anticipate something more to the song. However, Drew cannot hear Lincoln’s words and pauses until he opens himself up to the sounds of his surroundings. More carefully attuned to the desert environment on a walk with Ally, Drew listens to the sounds of the desert’s silence. Later, he comes to Lincoln’s bedroom to communicate a powerful silence that brings them together; their conversation is recapped by Ally in the following sequence of slides. (Figure 3.4) Drew communicates to Lincoln through a visual rendering of the silence of the night, a silence which Ally perceives through the desert landscape: “the desert is quiet and busy,” she observes, for “the whole desert is a pause” (287). The chapter reveals the relational impetus of sounds, but this time through a visual rendering of the sounds of the desert’s silence which both Drew and Lincoln hear. Like the pauses in rock songs, the family comes together through a silence that connects them, implicitly shown through a parallel but unnarrated slide that speaks for “US” near the end of the journal in Figure 3.5. Listening to the sounds of silence is their most precious commodity.

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Figure 3.4 Drew and Lincoln’s nighttime conversation and reconciliation pp. 301–3 of Goon Squad. Images courtesy of Jennifer Egan and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Little Brown Book Group.

Egan reinforces that music’s “wait time” and the silence of the environment allow for a healing that is not ending but just beginning to be perceived through a primacy of listening. As a result, the fear of an ending is put in its place by a pause that occurs before a new beginning. For a novelist who appears to be focusing on trauma and forgetting, Egan proves she is equally interested in a human capacity for regeneration and reflection. This is best articulated by one of Lincoln’s graphed songs in the PowerPoint’s closing pages. The American rock band Semisonic’s song “Closing Time”

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Figure 3.5 Unnarrated slide to represent “US” p. 304 of Goon Squad. Image courtesy of Jennifer Egan and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Little Brown Book Group.

conveys the ways Egan’s own closing time allows her characters to begin again, for “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Readers find that Egan’s rock-and-roll novel proves itself to be structurally sound. Despite the kaleidoscopic relationships that are shredded with loss, Goon Squad changes the key of the traumas that characterize lost memories and voices. Egan reinforces a human resiliency among the dizzying heights and warp speed of our growing technocratic culture, perhaps inspiring readers to find their own “wait times” in these strange new times, what Alex refers to as listening to the “hidden portals of sound” (314). Alex leaves us with an image of such hidden portals of sound while he walks through the neighborhoods of New York with Bennie: “a storefront grate sliding down. A dog barking hoarsely. The lowing of trucks over bridges. The velvety night in his ears. And the hum, always that hum, which maybe wasn’t an echo after all, but the sounds of time passing”: the blu nyt th strs u cant c th hum tht neve gOs awy. (340)

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  97 The hum of time passes from Sasha to Alex, and Egan closes her narrative time with the sounds of the city’s surround which speaks to readers if they are listening. Alex’s text-speak opens up the possibility of listening to the discursive sounds of technologies as part of a natural ecology that can be humanized. Like the “hum tht neve gOs awy,” Goon Squad voices a humanity that endures amid the technologies of our times.

Notes 1 See Radstone, ed., Memory and Methodology (2000); Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Crisis of Memory (2003); and Van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (2007). 2 R. Murray Schafer’s soundscape refers to “actual environments, or to abstract constructions such as musical compositions and tape montages, particularly when considered an environment” (274–75). However, revising Schafer and adhering to the soundscape as described by, first, Alain Corban and, then, Emily Thompson, the soundscape here is considered to be a culturally informed auditory or aural landscape that also includes “the material objects that create and destroy those sounds” (Thompson 117). Routed within social and cultural change, in this context the soundscape is always also mediated by those changes. 3 Debord’s analysis of the political spectacle that penetrates the commodity into mass media communications in The Society of the Spectacle (1994) greatly influenced theories of late capitalism within postmodernism that include JeanFrancois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) and Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981), among others. The idea of the “society of spectacle” has become widely accepted and further manipulated in digital culture where the virtual and the real more and more overlap to inspire terms such as Geoff King’s “spectacle of the real” and Manuel Castells’s “real virtuality.” 4 Laub contends that any telling of a traumatic event is always also a “collapse of witnessing,” for the very act of witnessing involves testifying to an absence: “to an event that has not yet come into existence in spite of the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of its occurrence” (57). Describing the Holocaust testimony of a woman in her 60s, Laub notes how the woman’s remembering shifted from a burst of sights and sounds to an eventual stifling silence and an uneventful monotonous tone of voice (59). The testimony conjured “a quality of ‘otherness,’ a salience, a timelessness” that also put the memory “outside the range of associatively linked experiences” (69). An act of reciprocal hearing, then, also provides a necessity for recovery, and Laub proposes that “only when the survivor knows he is being heard, will he stop to hear—and listen to—himself” (71). 5 The challenge of the novel becomes listening to the characters’ departures from their traumatic pasts, requiring a listening that “does not rely on what we simply know of each other, but on what we don’t know yet of our traumatic pasts” (Caruth, “Introduction” 11). Witnessing, in this sense, proffers what Cathy Caruth deems “a new type of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility” (“Introduction” 10). An attunement to listening, also, binds multiple strands of trauma, linking group and personal memory. Trauma links unlike events, narrating what is at once singular and plural while folding a Gordian knot of time in the present. 6 Defined and redefined by Williams throughout his career, structures of feeling identifies the social character and patterns of communication through a framework that considers “the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity”

98  Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  (Long 53). By chronicling a series of active, changeable relations, and specifically patterns of a historical period, Williams uses the term feeling rather than thought in order to reinforce something not quite clearly defined, but still in process and shaping “social experiences in solution,” in contrast to the immediacy of social semantic formations (Marxism 133–4). 7 See Said, Musical Elaborations (1993); Prieto, Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (2002); Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (2002); Chapin and Clark, Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous (2013); and Smith, The Contemporary Literature-Musical Relationship (2016). 8 The partiality of sounds that recur confirm with Leslie Morris’s supposition that the gramophone indeed replays sounds of the past through what she deems to be the tones of “unspeakability,” or the sounds of a Derridean iterative, stuttering through the motion of the gramophone’s needle that composes “a litany of the impossibility of speech that closes back on itself as sound” (372). The repetitive sounds stress what is beyond language while also conveying an impossibility of speech that resounds. 9 See Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 91–93. 10 David Cowart describes how Egan both venerates and rebels against modernist forms: she reframes a modernist ethos from the vantage of her “second-generation postmodernism” that veers toward postmodern pastiche and collapses the distinction between high and low art (243). Still, as N. Katherine Hayles and Elena Lamberti argue, the modernists are credited with also experimenting with a “new network of events,” and Egan’s novel certainly seems to function like such an experiment: her voices move from “an old linear (exclusive) mode of perception to the new idea of acoustic (inclusive) space” (Lamberti 432). 11 The auditory imagination is both an asset and liability in Eliot’s work because it delineates a synchronic understanding of time which later has ominous effects in his long poem of the Second World War, Four Quartets (1943). The auditory imagination to fuses both perceived and imagined sounds, enabling it to synthesize temporal dimensions, and Don Ihde describes the end result in terms of “a doubled sound, a synthesized harmonic echo” that remakes the modern noises of war and technologies along with the sounds of the past (63). 12 Bennie’s punk rock adolescence in San Francisco, California, certainly models aspects of the punk subculture, as Danica van de Velde shows, but more importantly, Egan creates a punk mood through the subversive form of her novel and its marginalized voices (126–7). The narrative medium of Egan’s novel stands for a creative punk aesthetics that also embody Bennie’s musical production in his young life. The punk structure is used, therefore, for its structural aesthetics and its “cut-and-paste” process which colors “palimpsests of times, voices, and places, as well as its blurring of textual and visual mediums” (126). In line with critics who not only point to punk’s subversive response to the economic climate, as most known through Dick Hebdige’s account, Egan also underlines the ways in which punk’s style and spirit of volition critique cultural practices through generations to come (The Subcultures 7). 13 Internet piracy has been cited as one “tipping point,” to quote Malcolm Gladwell, which Leyshon et al. claim has triggered a reorganization of the music industry due to the changing value of music within society as a whole. Broad cultural forces led to music’s decreasing value for itself while it is more often valued for its consumption in relation to other things; Internet piracy isn’t the sole cause for the industry’s reorganization, but a crisis that occurred and allowed industry members to begin to devise new business models (184–5). Jim Rogers’s summation of the music industry’s most current output illustrates how “the internet has

Vocal Remix and Surround Sound of Goon Squad  99 not disrupted power relations in the music industry” but has seen major labels and companies mutate to bolster and maintain oligopolistic dominance (229). 14 The changing capitalist economy delineated by the Internet has been theorized and contested. Despite the free exchange of digital music on the Internet which began in the 1990s, music sharing and in general the Internet as a gift economy has been viewed as following Marcel Mauss’s theory that gift-giving is also already part of a capitalist economy which manipulates social relations and hierarchies. In Jonathan Sterne’s words, the MP3 partakes of “both commodity and something else” (214). While MP3s might elicit “free music,” their modes of exchange “walk and talk like the regular products of capitalism,” following the model of a money economy more closely (215). Sterne argues that the music economy reveals how nonmarket economies may not be anti-capitalist (216). 15 Jeremy Wade Morris shows how the fetish qualities and exchange values of music still hold tremendous weight despite their “immaterial” form (20). He reminds readers that “the wonder and mystique of the commodity fetish is precisely that it is not located in the object itself. It is something created around the object through the unseen labor that goes into it” (20). Music is exchanged across networks at times in a market economy where it is bought and sold and also circulated without payment, creating an “alternative gift economy” which often entails “users who are responsible for embedding the digital music commodity with information, features, functions that makes it more useable, organizable, and desirable” (20). 16 In Jonathan Sterne’s study of the MP3, he borrows the term “social intercourse” from Marx to delineate the ways in which the unique economic status of digital music—between gift and commodity status—show social relations that are not as definitively intimate as those described within a gift economy, but also not as defiant as a normative idea of “promiscuity” (218–20). Popular music critics Andy Bennet, Barry Shenk, and Jason Toynbee describe this in terms of the “promiscuous interconnectivity of the Internet” which makes it impossible to track millions of files exchanged among PC users who share music on a global scale (4). 17 In an important reliance on American journalist Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), Luckhurst agrees that the exponential speed of cities and the growing impetus of modern technologies interrupt human adaptation systems, causing overload and stress following the social unrest of the 1960s. Yet Luckhurst turns Toffler’s analysis toward a focus on science fiction to demonstrate contemporary notions of “human adaptation” and “future shock” that increasingly show the collisions between subjectivity and technologies (“Future” 161). 18 For a further close analysis of the safari as related to surveillance and profile culture, see Johnston 159–61; as related to a digital futures, see Dinnen 148–50; and, as related to the punk subculture, see van de Velde 127–8.

4

Vocal and Comic Deformance in Michael Chabon and Junot Díaz

Michael Chabon and Junot Díaz write the voices of writers. Their respective novels, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), self-reflexively investigate how writers and artists submit their voices to the creation of fictional worlds, critiquing the censorship of diasporic histories and mass cultural aesthetics. Interestingly, both writers also identify the ways in which aesthetic struggle and cultural violence are recapitulated by twentieth-century comic books. For Chabon, comic creation is embedded within metaleptic narrative levels, blurring the lines between the writings of comics and history, and the dreams and schemes of artists Josef Kavalier and Sammy Klayman. Díaz, alternatively, creates a testimonial first-person writer in Yunior de Las Casas, forming a paradoxical colonized and colonizing voice that sets a Dominican curse upon the episodic and testimonial comics of his characters. Recording colonial and diasporic pasts, both authors imagine the ways in which the voices of Jewish and Dominican histories create complex interfaces of art, for both readers here and characters there. Analyzing diaspora through comics indicates a way to critique a sense of political and cultural belonging through the complex transcription of historicity by way of the performing and hence deforming nature of voice. In this chapter, I investigate the self-reflexive tension among the performative voices that deform the act of fictional poiesis of comics in the novels; the novels themselves reenact the embedded panels of diverse voices as a metaphor for the representation of comics. Revising textual scholars Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuel’s notion of deformance, which involves tearing apart structures of discourse so that they appear new or different among interpretive lenses, deformance in this chapter relies on the mutations and manipulations of voice as it moves among varied modes of comic creation, performative speech, and technological mediations in the novels.1 Concerned with the world-making of ethnic writers and the problem of historiography that occurs between two (or more) geographic places, Kavalier & Clay and Oscar Wao illustrate the ways in which the voices of diaspora merge with the cultural and historical contingencies that shape comic books during and after the Second World War. Because both novels focus on the

Vocal and Comic Deformance  101 aesthetic creations of ethnic artists and writers, they collapse the conceptual distance between fictional and sociopolitical worlds. The novels, then, are not merely performative, self-reflexively bringing to life or replaying the inert aesthetics of comics, but they recreate sociopolitical dynamics that are productive within the multiple narrative levels of the novels. Fittingly, the voices of comics fuse within the voices of the characters, and so art imitates life and life imitates art, while voices are formed and then deformed to immerse readers within a comic world. Deforming voice in the novels opens possibilities of meaning, reimagining the agency of comics in telling the history of diaspora while emphasizing an originary sense of loss that represents the telling of a diasporic experience. By illustrating how the novels metafictively assert comic book tropes and vocal techniques, Chabon and Díaz uncover imaginative discourses, visual codes, and embodied languages that allow readers an alternative route to conceive of the voices of diaspora and to decolonize diasporic history. So comics inform the narratological and thematic tropes within the novels, stressing comparable topical concerns and a multisensory engagement while inherently addressing gaps and silences to create meaning.2 More to this point, Chabon and Díaz heighten imaginative spaces and surrealist dreamworlds to stress the traumas and tensions between home and host countries while also bringing to light the importance of Vijay Mishra’s “diasporic imaginary.”3 Foregrounding the ways in which memories of the homeland are recreated after an emigrant’s departure, the “diasporic imaginary” underlines the ways in which, as Monika Fludernik notes, “the memory of the past and its re-invention of an imaginary homeland are of the utmost psychological significance,” and a ghost reemerges to carry an emigrant’s attendant and ethnic responsibilities upon his or her arrival (xxviii-xxix). Haunted by the comics that reprise the memories of the past, Chabon and Díaz thus not only produce the writings of a diasporic experience but also write voices that attempt to write diaspora into the future. The novels collapse the gap between the manner of the telling and the matter of telling, and the writer’s voices implicate the reader, performing histories and connecting readers to the difficult expressions of their literary machines. The voices in the novels self-reflexively enact diasporic writings dense with surreal and gnostic cultural imaginaries. For example, Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay illustrates the epic plight of Josef Kavalier, a Jewish refugee who escapes Prague to avoid the violence of the Second World War. Josef’s plight and forced assimilation in America is animated through the voice of the comic book The Escapist; Chabon creates the comic book itself as a surreal object, correlating the aesthetic and political agency of surrealism during the Second World War with the diasporic history of Josef. While underlining the static agency of Josef and his cousin, Sammy Klayman, through comic figures and technological reproduction, Chabon also uncovers a multidimensionality which elides the voices of comics and radios to further recognize a gnostic form of communication which finds its historical

102  Vocal and Comic Deformance precursor in the Jewish Golem. Voice moves readers inside and outside of comics in mid-century America, and Chabon not only historically captures the polemics of the Second World War, but also the exploitation of comic creators. Díaz, on the other hand, tells the story of Belicia Cabral, or Beli, a Dominican woman who flees the tyranny and misogyny of the Trujillo regime during the mid-twentieth century. The intergenerational trauma created by Beli’s history is illustrated through her son Oscar de León’s comic book obsession and his love of genre fiction. While Oscar’s old college roommate Yunior de Las Casas narrates the majority of the Cabral/de León’s colonized history, Yunior, in turn, colonizes that history through his voice which uses the comics of Marvel’s The Fantastic Four to stress the otherworldly and science fiction aspects associated with the unspoken horrors of the Dominican Republic. The embodied inscription and silence of trauma narrate the stories of the four figures of the Cabral/de León family: Beli, Oscar, La Inca, and Lola. To add to this, Díaz evokes synesthetic language and a crude vernacular to further correlate the violence of language with the violence of Beli and Oscar’s history. Both Kavalier & Clay and Oscar Wao stress local perspectives while exposing the inescapable mediating role voice plays in the recording of colonial narratives and aesthetics. Allowing for intricate connections and dispersals, the novels stress the difficulty of expression within novel forms that defy categorization.4 Their works uncover necessary vocal ruptures and interruptions that reveal the ways in which writers and artists (like Chabon’s Josef and Sammy as well as Díaz’s alter ego Yunior) undermine assumed generic conventions to voice diaspora. By eliding historiography with the diasporic imaginary, both authors offer a unique perspective which, in the words of Françoise Kral, links to unconscious creations of cultural and aesthetic differences that have otherwise remained hidden: When exploring certain areas of the diasporic experience, the writer seldom aims for comprehensiveness. On the contrary, the writer foregrounds certain aspects, sometimes blowing them out of proportion, sometimes minimizing them, but this warped perspective draws our attention to issues which otherwise would have remained hidden. (24) Warping perspectives and straddling divides, the voices of the novels pull in multiple spatial and temporal directions, adumbrating diaspora by chronicling both the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of comic books and colonial history. In this way, Chabon and Díaz contribute to the polemics of contemporary scholarship on diasporic studies and literature, identifying how comic books create a hybrid form of words and images that are at once both and neither: a description that similarly characterizes a diasporic consciousness.

Vocal and Comic Deformance  103 This is important because, as one of the original theorizers of the term “diaspora,” William Safran, has recently shown, the word “diaspora” is currently overused in critical scholarship, causing it to “ha[ve] a more neutral and even positive connotation for many people,” which occludes the violence of certain histories and muddles the differences among refugees, exiles, and migrants, and their varied motives for migration (34). Fearful that the ubiquity of “diaspora” deprives it of analytic utility, Chabon and Díaz’s comic voices invite readers into the personal struggle of the creation of comics and the remembrance of colonial history. In turn, both narratives present several metadiegetic references and self-references to mediality, which emphasize the manipulations of voice in conjunction with comic aesthetics. And by specifically focusing on comics as a storytelling device, this chapter recognizes an otherworldly characterization of diaspora that reinforces its vexed relationship to writing its history.

Michael Chabon’s Deformance of Comic History Michael Chabon redresses his Jewish heritage in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay while relying on one main objective: “a home, a world to call my own” (Maps 171). He describes that home to be a “theme park in my brain” which speaks of “lands that can only be found in the imagination” (Maps 175, 187). Setting his sights on the revolutionary high art of the surrealists and the low art of superhero comic books, Chabon creates a speculative comic book history, confusing narrator and characters while evincing the ways in which “[e]very universe, our own included, begins in conversation” (119). In this way, Chabon writes about the process of comic creation while underscoring a marginalized history of comic creators of mid-twentieth-century America. Asserting self-representation and reclaiming imagination, Chabon describes the appropriation of the comic book form by cousins Josef Kavalier (later anglicized to Joe Kavalier) and Sammy Klayman (later professionalized to Sam Clay) who fuse American and Jewish aesthetics. Showing comic books to be an interactive and surreal medium, Chabon yokes together historical and imaginative realism, eliding historic speculation with comic book caricatures. To tell the story of the cousins’ rise to the top of the “funny papers” (19), Chabon spans two decades to create a surrealist landscape born of the mass culture of New York City and the violent imprint of the Second World War. Representing mid-century America through the marginalized and underground comics of Jewish immigrant workers, Chabon models the Escapist after high school friends Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman, first officially illustrated in a 1938 issue of Action Comics. Siegel and Shuster created a larger than life superhero typified by the will of the individual, a doubling persona that fuses the ostracized and awkward Clark Kent with the supernatural powers of his alter ego Superman. Superman’s secret identity aligns with the covert anti-war propaganda created by comic

104  Vocal and Comic Deformance books at this time, reinforcing a Manichean divide that highlights the evils of a­ nti-Semitism. Chabon recognizes how, as Mark Fertig’s study shows, comic books imagined a confrontation with the Nazis before the United States officially entered the combat, and the war became a formative influence on the content as well as the popularity of comic books (2–4). Equally, Superman comics incorporated furtive political themes while also combining stylistic techniques made popular by print culture and film reels which caught the public’s fascination (Fertig 4). As a result, Kavalier & Clay highlights the illustration and narration of the comic book as a setting for the national mood—comics expressed an anti-war narrative while capturing popular media forms. Chabon shapes historical fiction and the national humor through a retrospective speculation, recounting a verisimilar narrative that prioritizes the literary life of historiography. The narrative voice of the novel sets a chronology, adumbrating important dates and naming historical figures that intersperse among the characters’ voices—spoken, written, and imagined. Periodically, the voice critiques the very notion of written and spoken veracity, as shown in this opening passage: In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. … The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet, his account of his role—of the role of his own imagination—in the Escapist’s birth, like all the rest of his best fabulations, rang true. (3) Associating the fabulations of the imagination, the magic of Harry Houdini, and the written creations of comics, or what Will Eisner calls a “sequential art,” illustrates a powerful metaphor for Sammy’s voicing of comic history (5). Sammy’s fabulations of the creation of the Escapist also reinforce the collision of voices in Chabon’s novel itself. Chabon’s animation reveals the history of comics through voice, allowing Joe and Sammy, along with readers, to move inside and outside the voices of the comics in which they create. Creating a feedback loop with readers, voice retrospectively performs the inner logic of comics while the characters themselves play out the cultural dynamics of Jewish American aesthetics, underlining America’s capitalist imperatives and isolationism during the Second World War. In this way, Chabon foregrounds the writing of history through comics as the tour de force of the novel, helping us think about the ways in which historical sources, as much as interpretations, are produced and

Vocal and Comic Deformance  105 performed. Along these lines, a voice telling a story about the storytelling of comics also allows Chabon to distance himself as a postwar writer from the challenges associated with Holocaust representation, most notably foregrounded by Theodor Adorno’s infamous dictum that correlates Holocaust poetry with barbarism (34). The voice of the novel reveals the changes of meaning over time while marking continuity through, as Roger Simon et al. argue when discussing the preservation of traumatic history, “a repetition (a retelling) of the story of another but also the story of the telling of the story” (5). The voice, therefore, is what Dora Apel refers to as a secondary witness, and the teller who chronicles the story of Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay (creating and performing their comics) further “links to an obliterated past” while also revealing the Holocaust’s “continuing impact on the political landscapes of the twenty-first century” (Memory 8). This recognizes not only what is represented from the past but also how it is represented in the present. Chabon reinvents the comics of the past within a present that understands their generic implications within a broader historical context, mapping the conflicts between national ideologies and the machines of modern war. To relate the agencies of voice in the comics of history, Chabon must first foreground the animating and performative qualities of voice. He does this early in the novel, revealing the ways in which the voices of Joe’s family and homeland speak through and among varying mediated technologies. Before his second attempt of escape from Prague to America along with the Golem of Prague statue, a plan arranged by his magic teacher Bernard Kornblum, Joe visits his family’s flat to find moving boxes inscribed in his father’s hand. The written words affectively prescribe his father’s “stubbornness, persistence, orderliness, patience and calm” that compose “a series of messages in the alphabet of imperturbability itself” (58). His father’s “good handwriting and careful labeling” reveal the ways in which his family would “meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on” even though, as Joe himself realizes, “the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing” (58). The carefully lettered labels reinforce Joe’s nostalgia for his father and family: the handwriting preserves the ways in which “decency and order prevailed” (58). Acting as a vehicle for memories, the voices of his father’s writing also link to the memories created from Joe’s own voice recorded on an old radio set. When Joe’s mother conveys that she wants to remember Joe after he has gone, she chooses to save a 20-tube-set radio which Joe had made from various parts. Joe’s brother, Tommy, tells Joe, “She said listening to it was like listening to your voice, and she would rather have your voice to remember you than your photographs, even” (57). Through writing and radio, voice preserves the affective nature of memories, and when Joe composes the comics of Kavalier & Clay, he reveals the ways in which comics transform and perform the multiple voices from his memory, spatially and temporally.

106  Vocal and Comic Deformance The creation of comics cathartically compresses Joe’s yearning for his family into an artistic form. Fittingly, the comics substitute for the censorship of information that reflects America’s isolationist policies which frustrates Joe when he is looking for information about his family in various American newspapers in 1939. Scanning the New York Times, Herald Tribune, World Telegram, Journal-American, Sun, News, Post, Wall Street Journal, Brooklyn Eagle, the Bronx Home News, and Women’s Wear Daily, Sammy recognizes that “[Joe] was looking for an item detailing the condition of the Kavalier family (10). Brought to a moment of ineffable expression, Sammy stammers through his words, endeavoring to assuage his cousin’s fears about his Czech family living in the midst of Germanoccupied Prague: “we’re, uh, we’ve all been really worried … about Hitler … and the way he’s treating the Jews and … and all that. When they, when you were … invaded. … My mom was … we all.” (12–13). Sammy’s vocal stammer not only discerns the separation between Joe (a Jewish man from Prague) and himself (a Jewish man living in America) but also highlights the complexity of Joe’s diasporicity as a personal experience outside of both home and host countries; Sammy stresses the cousins’ miscommunication, recognizing that he is “not sure what he was trying to say” (13). However, by creating a personal narrative through the comic book, Joe unites the cousins, creating what Safran calls “the ultimate diasporic imaginary” (36). By opening up his imaginings through the comic form to Sammy, Joe creates a personal history; he uses “the power of the comic book as a vehicle of personal expression” while creating an imagined community through the medium itself (579). Just as his father’s voice lives on in Joe’s drawings, Sammy’s writing is inspired by the memories of his own father, Professor Alphonse von Clay, a vaudeville performer who abandons Sammy and then later dies crushed under “a Deere tractor he was aiming to upend” (108). As the narrator tells readers, the creation of comics for Sammy occurs because “memory and desire conjoin[ed] with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation” (113). Through a sense of loss, Kavalier & Clay’s “pang of creation” results in a new partnership for Joe and Sammy, drawing and writing through the stories of their traumatic pasts. Chabon’s deformative strategy is thus transferred to the comic creation of the Escapist. Creating a shared artistic terrain, the comics layer writing and graphics, conjoining Joe and Sammy’s voices, talents, and memories. The comics also heighten a sense of loss by providing two simultaneous points of view. This is perhaps most notably revealed through Joe’s initial writings created on an overlay of Sammy’s Pimpernel of the Planets comic strip. After situating themselves as quintessential American literary bedfellows, following close behind Herman Melville’s Ishmael and Queequeg, Sammy awakens to find Joe drawing on separate paper overlays to accentuate Sammy’s comics. In the sky of the drawing, Joe superimposes “five bat-winged demons, horns carefully whorled like whelks, muscles feathered

Vocal and Comic Deformance  107 in with a fine brush” (69). What had been tormenting Sammy’s mind is animated through Joe’s gradated illustrations: “The proportions of the muscular demons were perfect, their poses animated and plausible, the inkwork mannered but strong-lined. The style was far more sophisticated than Sammy’s, which, while confident and plain and occasionally bold, was never anything more than cartooning” (70). A metaphorical example and perhaps collaborative version of Sigmund Freud’s “mystic writing pad,” the drawing brings together the mental perceptions of both Joe and Sammy, beginning a telepathic partnership between confederates and the creation of the Escapist: [Joe] ran his mind back over the last half hour of conversation and, as if he were picking up a transmission direct from Sammy’s brain, saw in his own mind the outlines, the dark contours, the balletic contortions, of a costumed hero whose power would be that of impossible and perpetual escape. (120) The drawing traces written, visual, and sonic expressions. Like the Whoopee Hat Liner of Empire Novelties, a novelty production company soon to become Empire Comics where the men are employed, the comics “emit a sound more easily imagined than described,” as shown through Joe’s drawing of a fart which he illustrates through “a breathing of wind … with stars and curlicues and broken musical notation” (70). Imagining a comic world, Joe foregrounds artistic novelty against a historical backdrop while merging theological and surreal elements. Joe illustrates the first piece of cover art, a drawing of the Escapist fighting Adolf Hitler. His image is “startling, beautiful, strange. It stirred mysterious feelings in the viewer, of hatred gratified, of cringing fear transmuted into smashing retribution” (150). Viewing the cover, Sammy imagines Joe’s thoughts, wondering if Joe is wistfully recalling some part of his homeland, some marvel he had seen long ago. … All at once like the paper flower inside one of Empire Novelty’s Instant Miracle Garden capsules, the consciousness of everything his cousin had left behind bloomed in Sammy’s heart, bleeding dye. (150–51) By sharing the aesthetic space of comics, Joe and Sammy muddle personal pasts which, in the words of Sara Ahmed, “give a shape, a contour, a skin of the past itself” (343). Their narrative “skin,” to put it in Ahmed’s perspective, also emphasizes their embodied connection to the comics while reconstructing Joe’s experience of diaspora and lost home through a sense of communal expression. The act of comic telling forms new communities

108  Vocal and Comic Deformance because “[m]emory is a collective act which produces its object (the ‘we’), rather than reflects on it” (Ahmed 343). The “we” of Kavalier & Clay marry the unconscious traumas that shift from Joe to Sammy, and remembering his own father, Sammy looks at their “newly minted American names” on the debut issue of the Escapist and realizes “he was moved by a grief, half affectionate, half ashamed, for the loss of Professor von Clay that he had never before allowed himself to feel. He gave Joe’s shoulder a squeeze” (148). Their shared ink and sense of loss bleed together, motivating the psychic automatism that dovetails with the surrealist impulse of the novel which is introduced by a parodic cameo of Catalan painter Salvador Dalí himself. Chabon fittingly evokes comic creation through a surrealist and unconscious “wish-fulfillment” of a dream to escape and transform the past: a Freudian Interpretation of Dreams that coincides with Joe’s own sense of responsibility for his lost family. Thus, suturing words and images together, Joe and Sammy “write” the history of their pasts to evoke a speculative “comix,” to borrow Art Spiegelman’s words, or “to mix together as in words or pictures.”5 Joe’s drawings aligned with Sammy’s writings reveal a revolutionary and nonconformist surreal aesthetic to voice diaspora.

Surreality and the Writing Machines of Diaspora In fact, Joe and Sammy’s comics exhibit the revolutionary impulse of surrealism. The rise of surrealism as a transnational movement began during the rise of high modernism, and was especially prominent during the interwar period, abroad and in America. While many critics contest its starting point, French writer and poet André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) was a central document, recognizing surrealism as a literary heir to Dada, for surrealists intertwined social and political radicalism with artistic innovation. In the very first copy of the modernist magazine La Révolution Surréaliste in 1924, Breton and others dedicated themselves to “formulate a new declaration of the rights of man.”6 In a 1952 radio interview, Breton recounts the surrealists’ initial intents and vigilante attitude: I don’t mean to say that we considered ourselves “above the law,” only that we had serious doubts about that very law. We seized every opportunity to point out its failings, until another law, founded on true principles, could take its place. (Conversations 81) Going against bourgeois values while highlighting radical intents, the surrealists were advocates for marginalized and diasporic peoples, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, they internationalized their plight and message. Still, surrealism was apathetically received in America initially, mainly due to the antics of its most celebrated and contentious contributor, Catalan

Vocal and Comic Deformance  109 Salvador Dalí. Despite criticism over Dalí’s mixing of high art with consumer culture, his innovative assemblages of the high and low indeed link to comic forms celebrated in his own paintings and illustrations. This can also be shown in the work of Belgian René Magritte’s “Les Mots et Images” (1929), which scrutinizes the schisms between word and image in a structuralist vein in Figure 4.1, or in the later comics of American David Hare who identified how the black humor and imaginative freedom of comics were used to cope during the interwar years, as Mona Hadler’s study shows. Like Magritte’s mix of words with images, the surrealists’ visionary style and integration of comic creation was also seen at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism in December 1936, which included not only the works by European surrealist painters, but also the comics of American illustrators Walt Disney and James Thurber.7 Even Breton himself, who was frustrated by the mass appeal of American surrealism, recognized the connections comics had to surrealism by the end of his career, and in his First Papers of Surrealism exhibition (1942) he includes, as shown in Figure 4.2, the comic hero Superman as part of his own philosophy of surrealism. The image presents French poet Pierre Reverdy’s notion of the image as rendered in Nord Sud (1918), which Breton includes in the First Manifesto, praising it is “a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities” to create “emotional power and poetic reality” (Manifestoes 20). Drawing upon the distant realities of Joe and Sammy’s diverse backgrounds, Chabon semiotically imagines the surrealist images of the comics in the novel to represent an object of creation which, to use the words of Katherine Conley in a different context, “retain[s] an uncanny presence, almost to communicate, and at times to release psychic secrets” (137). Locating unconscious desires and messages within the comics, Joe and Sammy allow private thoughts to become increasingly public, creating revolutionary and avant-garde aesthetics inspired by anti-war propaganda. Hoping to effect change in the lives of Joe’s family members in Prague while also drawing comics that portray anti-Nazi propaganda in America, Joe and Sammy’s comics project a synthesis of dreams and reality akin to Breton’s notion of surreality in the First Manifesto: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are apparently so contradictory, into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak” (Manifestoes 14). Formally, Breton defined surrealism in the First Manifesto as “[p]ure psychic automatism … intended to express, verbally, or in writing, or in any other manner, the actual functioning of thought” (Manifestoes 26). The surreality of Joe and Sammy occurs through varied fabulations and dreamstates in the novel, channeling a specifically Jewish experience through Chabon’s portrayal of the Golem of Prague.8 In fact, Joe lives inside what he describes to be the dreams of the golem, which he only realizes by the end of the novel when the golem’s remains arrive at the door of the now married Sammy’s house: “Joe recognized it right away, with the ease and unsurprise of someone in a dream. He had been

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Figure 4.1 René Magritte, “Les Mots et les Images.” La Révolution surréaliste, vol. 12, 1929, pp. 32–33. Gallica, Bibliothéque nationale de France, https:// gallica​.bnf​.fr​/ark:​/12148​/bpt6k58451673​/f38​.image.

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Figure 4.2 André Breton. “Le Surhomme.” First Papers of Surrealism catalogue, New York 1942. Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, Inc. with permissions from Artists Rights Society. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

traveling inside of it, in his dreams, since the autumn of 1939. His traveling companion, his other brother, had survived the war” (608). Traveling inside the dreams of the golem, the psychic automatism of the comics pronounces itself not only through the collaborative telepathy of Joe and Sammy, as shown in a previous example, but also through the voices of a Jewish, mystic past: an allusive voice of creation that correlates with the golem’s own plight as both resistance figure and mute automaton. One version of the golem myth by Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz associates voice with the golem’s creation, molded from the clay of the earth to protect the Jewish section of Prague from Christian marauders. Peretz’s short story “The Golem” (1893) describes Maharal Rabbi Judah Loew reciting kabalistic verses to create the golem—a mix of stone man and automaton—and through the Rabbi’s voice, the golem emerges as savior and murderer.9 Furthermore, Chabon collapses readers’ distance to Jewish history much like the ways in which surrealist theater collapses “the audience’s safe distance from whatever craziness might go on in the performance arena” (Levitt 3). Chabon sets Joe and Sammy’s origin story of the Escapist on a stage for readers, emphasizing the performance of a mythic and superhero

112  Vocal and Comic Deformance ideology that allows readers, along with Joe and Sammy, to walk along the borders of the real world and the comic world: “the trembling hem of reality that separated New York City from Empire City” (153). The comic world of Empire City animates surrealist automatism: deforming the voice of the novel, Chabon shifts from the story of cousins Kavalier & Clay to that of the origin story of the Escapist, Tom Mayflower, to allow his protagonists and readers, in the words of Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem (1914), to “roam in that other, distant homeland, which lies beyond all thought” (49). Collapsing binaries, the comics recreate a form of imaginative and performative realism that accentuates the real-world tensions and traumas that Joe and Sammy face as both artists and Jews living in America. Fittingly, by enmeshing two spatial frames temporally in the novel, Chabon follows the formal structure of comic frames, which allow for different spaces to appear on the page simultaneously. Thus, frames of art and frames of thought become elided in order, to use the language of Henry John Pratt’s study of narrative in comics, to make sense of a narrative that appears in multiple spaces and yet exists at the same time (111). This aligns with Scott McCloud’s notion of closure which allows readers of comics to take two separate frames and combine them through the empty space of the gutter to mentally complete the frame (63). In novelistic form, Chabon recreates the notion of closure by transforming the comic world and the real world into one single narrative moment, bringing together the mental schemes of Joe and Sammy while allowing readers to understand the collapse of temporal and spatial relations. Creating a transition between worlds through a sort of narrative magic, the men’s imagined comic universe creates a fabulated world, and readers find themselves looking upon the proscenium of a stage. Peeking out of a black curtain, Tom Mayflower, joined by a motley crew of social outcasts and pariahs, unravels the unspoken secrets of the vaudeville act of Misterioso the Great: Tom’s uncle, Max Mayflower. Performing the comic the Escapist, automatism becomes self-reflexive while Misterioso’s narrative literally interrupts Joe and Sammy’s narrative, deforming the novel’s voice while seeming contiguous with it. When Max “the performer staggers into the wings, hands pressed to a spreading stain, darker than water and sticky looking, at his side,” Tom takes over for his uncle, performing a form of mind control that allows “the necessary thoughts [to] drive out the terrible ones” (127, 129). Tom’s performance allows his mind to become “peaceful and blank” instead of focusing on his uncle’s suffering (129). Like those comics that help Joe to escape from trauma and loss, Tom’s escapist tricks and magical self-liberation hyperbolize the transformative nature of Joe and Sammy’s art. After Max’s death, Tom and the other Escapist characters in the comics are devoted to “secretly fighting the evil forces of the Iron Chain,” and their voices, as the narrator tells readers, “can be heard clearly by a couple of young men who are walking past, dreaming their elaborate dream, wishing their wish, teasing their golem into life” (134).

Vocal and Comic Deformance  113 Peripatetically creating their “elaborate dream,” Joe and Sammy live within and without the voices of their comics. Realizing the futility of a comic hero to secure his actual family’s form of autoliberation, Joe says of the Escapist, “I wish he was real” (135). Still, their “comic book catechism” attempts to procure money and bring Joe’s family to America (146). Readers are not only privy to the voices of the Escapist’s troupe which “work for the liberation of all who toil in chains,” but to that of the comic world of character Luna Moth (134). An eroticized version of Joe’s love interest, Rosa Luxemburg Saks, Luna Moth deforms voice to transform the narration like “the last apparition of a fading dream,” which illustrates “an elaborate system of cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books” (274, 254). Changing from librarian Miss Judy Dark to a mystical Cimmerian moth goddess sprung from the Book of Lo, Luna Moth appears to criminals and police officers as a manifestation of transformation itself. The narrative and embodied metamorphosis that occurs within the voice and persona of Luna Moth archetypally illustrates the vocal changes that shift, flowing from comics to reality. Like Stuart Hall’s notion of a “diasporic identity,” the comics accentuate the novel’s formal features to highlight voices that are “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (“Cultural” 244). Thus, vocal deformance foregrounds the ways in which comics transform the self while escaping from the silenced and restrictive narrative of Jews censored by the Third Reich. Meeting at the border of comics and the Holocaust, Joe and Sammy forge a sense of belonging that also expresses Joe’s fears from home along with Joe and Sammy’s experiences of corporate America. As such, Joe and Sammy become what Breton might call “modest recording devices.”10 Joe realizes that while he remains distanced from the Holocaust, what he gains adumbrates the violent reality that also coincides with an old maxim often repeated by his teacher Bernard Kornblum, the man charged with both the golem’s and Josef’s escape: “Forget about what you are escaping from. … Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to” (21). Joe and Sammy confront their own dehumanization at the hands of capitalist America. Questioning the autonomy of the artist in a moment of increasing mechanical reproduction and industrial culture, as Walter Benjamin has so effectively done, Joe and Sammy find themselves within a comics war based on comics’ ability to communicate across media forms like radio and film. Aiming at novelty, originality, and invention, to appease a boss who tells them, “I want to sell novelties … I want to move radios,” the men’s comics combine the voices of radio and the expressionistic episodes of films like Citizen Kane with its “inextricable braiding of image and narrative” (153, 362). Eliding the voices of comics with his own “radio voice,” Sammy’s writings themselves conjure the violent confluence of advertising and history; he writes the “radio voices of history” while he tells Joe in his “radio-announcer tone” a “historic series of exclamations”

114  Vocal and Comic Deformance to write the Escapist into life (121). However, their boss silences Sammy’s voice and ideas while the men are in his office, saying, “And now I’m asking you to stop. That’s why a radio has a switch” (154). What’s more, a radio show entitled The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist is created as a spinoff from the comics, and all of the characters become mere “vocal embodiments of their characters,” revealing the appropriation of the comics at the hands of others (297). Amid the comics’ appropriation and censorship, Joe’s mother’s letters from German-occupied Prague “which had been emptied of information by the censor” remind Joe of the increasing silencing of the Jews and his own distance from his family (173). The futility of the comics war and the tragic death of his brother Thomas, drowned aboard the Ark of Miriam in the Atlantic in 1941, stimulate Joe’s reenactment of the heroic depths of his comics. Like one of his comic characters, described by his boss’s brother-in-law Jack Ashkenazy as “that guy that comes out of the radio” (157), Joe joins the US Navy, becoming his very own version of Radioman—mediating the war through his ability to manipulate the radio controls and voices that enact an act of technological violence while critiquing the artistic violence Joe and Sammy suffer at the hands of Empire Comics. Stationed at the Kelvinator Station in Antarctica, Joe finds himself the sole radioman after the majority of his fellow Navy officers have been killed off by carbon monoxide poisoning from an old stove in the Antarctic Waldorf. The remaining survivors of the casualty— Joe, a cowboy pilot named John Wesley Shannenhouse, and Joe’s faithful Alaskan malamute, Oyster—recognize a convergence of Antarctica’s vast surround with the evil of the war: “it was trying, at every moment you remained on it, to kill you” (436). Sinking into melancholia as “[t]he winter drove them mad” (437), and after isolating themselves from one another, Joe assumes the primary mission of the station: to monitor the airwaves for U-boat transmissions, to transmit all intercepts back to Command, which would relay them to cryptanalysts back in Washington, with their clacking electronic bombes, and finally to alert Command of any German movements toward the continent itself. (439) Verging on the depth of insanity through a surreal obsession with machines, “[Joe] became as inseparable from the radio as Shannenhouse from his Condor” (440). Joe’s radio interceptions, however, reaffirm his separation from his family while giving rise to an allegiance to the war machine of the Second World War. After locating a German voice on the ice, Joe becomes “the ghost of some failed expedition,” and “Joe want[ed] to kill someone, and he did not know who else to kill” (463, 453). His voice telephonically travels through the radio waves: “WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU” (461). Speaking like a ghost from the wires, Joe’s disembodied voice floats above him like his own comic speech

Vocal and Comic Deformance  115 bubble while he tries to seek revenge and escape from the arctic swells of war: physically and mentally. Joe’s final encounter on the ice with the German geologist, Klaus Mecklenburg, illustrates a primal death scene that in miniature presents an American/German standoff. Stripped of his Czech upbringing aside from the “flawless German” he speaks, Joe is referred to as the “American” by the German geologist and described as having a “smile as if caught for an instant as if on a sharp wire” (464). Despite Joe’s hard-wiring toward revenge, the shared language between the two men stimulates a fellow-feeling and sense of regret which characterize their final stand-off. In the midst of the desolate homelessness of the ice, both men realize too late that their shared language, in the words of Egyptian poet and exile Edmond Jabés, “is the exile’s true homeland” (85).11 Before dying, the German recognizes that his only chance at survival amid his loneliness is “friendly cooperation among the nations” (464), and after killing the German, Joe realizes his mistake: “In seeking revenge, he had allied himself with the Ice, with the interminable white topography, with the sawteeth and crevasses of death” (465). Mourning the death of the enemy, Joe “haul[s] a corpse behind him” (465), carrying the remains of death from the war that also embodies the memories of his own lost family. Chabon self-reflexively characterizes Joe’s direct encounter with the violence of the Second World War through a “whiteness” attributed to both an American and a German identity. Hyperbolized by the arctic ice, the final death of the German attributes the attendant violence from the war to both America and Germany. For Chabon, comics embody and narrate the violence of war and the diasporic imaginary. Readers move through interpretive levels in the novel, imagining worlds coming together while also experiencing enough critical distance from the Holocaust to facilitate a sense of reflection. Joe’s real-life comics imagine the Escapist as a superhero, and while Joe himself metaphorically performs the role of the Escapist throughout the novel—escaping from Prague, from Antarctica, from magician stunts and tricks—his final escape leads him back to his comic book family: Sammy, Rosa, and his own son with Rosa, Tommy. Facing the losses of war and the loss of his homeland after coming back from the Navy, Joe and Sammy switch places, and Joe assumes the role of husband in Sammy’s false marriage to Rosa. Making Sammy a bed on the couch, Rosa remarks how she feels it is strange that Sammy sleep there. “It’s been strange all along,” Sammy tells her (636). The strange beginnings of the makeshift family also unsettle the ways in which readers apprehend a sense of cultural belonging while underlying a non-normative notion of home. Before Sammy parts from Rosa and Joe, he leaves “the small two-by-three card that he had been given back in 1948, when he had purchased the lot on which the house now stood” (636): Sammy had taken a pen and, bearing down, crossed out the name of the never-more-than-theoretical family that was printed above the address,

116  Vocal and Comic Deformance and in its place written, sealed in a neat black rectangle, knotted by the stout cord of an ampersand, the words KAVALIER & CLAY. (636) The ampersand between the names Kavalier and Clay delineates an equal partnership between compatriots. In much the same way that the voices of comics capture the absurdist immensity of Joe’s own loss, the voices of Chabon’s comic-book history recreate a shared responsibility for the memory of home and perhaps a home for the memory of the Holocaust. The comic books themselves create, again in the words of Edmond Jabés, a people of the book, carrying the importance of remembering the violence of the Holocaust in new contexts that reform the histories of the past. In his poem, “At the Threshold of the Book,” Jabés’s speaker asks, “What is the story of the book?,” to which the keeper of the house answers: “Becoming aware of a scream” (31). Reading the book is an ever-changing process for Jabés, a continual confrontation and strange encounter that awakens the voices and screams on the thresholds of history and literature.12 Following Jabés, Chabon creates comic books as a way to open up the possibilities of reclaiming marginalized histories in the future. Noting that an “ending is an arbitrary thing” (645), Chabon’s resolution suggests the opportunity for a sequel, for his end signals the ability to read a new beginning. As he comments in his “Odds and Ends,” “the true sequel is the one that flickers briefly into your mind, O my friend by the fireside, after you read the last paragraph and lay the book down” (648). Sammy as sidekick to Joe’s Escapist persona departs to find his own adventures, leaving the future to be formed by the flickering voices inside readers’ imaginations.

Assembled Voices and Dictators in Díaz While Michael Chabon creates an imaginary homeland through the written comics of Kavalier & Clay, Junot Díaz performs the voice of the diasporic writer in his Pulitzer Prize novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Highlighting colonial persecution and violence, both institutional and literary, Díaz’s alter ego and narrator, Yunior de Las Casas, maintains two levels of diegetic poiesis, speaking as both narrator and character. Bringing readers face-to-face with an encounter of vocal alterity, Yunior writes the diaspora by chronicling the life of Oscar de León (Oscar Wao), while Oscar attempts to write himself into Western culture. In this way, Díaz implicitly invites readers to consider Yunior’s ethical intentions while, at the same time, considering Díaz’s own intents. What is at stake in Oscar Wao are the ethics of the diasporic writer whose agents rely on books rather than places: through the un/written voices of the Cabral/de León family, Díaz underlines the echoes of what remains beneath Yunior’s chronicle of their history. Yunior himself is positioned as a voice that dwells upon the threshold of the novel, stressing the expropriation and performance of the voices of

Vocal and Comic Deformance  117 the Dominican homeland. In this way, Yunior cannot be determined as an absolute insider or outsider to the story, and therefore opens the novel itself as a study of what James Clifford has notably called a “travelling culture.”13 However, Yunior also explores the fine line between delineating the difference of a diasporic identity and pathologizing it. Appropriating the voices of the novel, Yunior attempts to resignify the characters’ voices while also reinstituting his own voice into social reality. Aptly, readers and critics alike ask whether Yunior is merely a deformed echo of the tyrannical misogyny imposed by Dominican hegemonic history.14 However, I’m more concerned with the ways in which Yunior’s voice performs a comic book ethos that heightens the novel’s underlying interpretive levels and voices. Creating a hermeneutic framework, much in the same way that a comic book does, Yunior voices a synesthetic and pictorial language that also intertextually stresses the tropes and motifs of American comic books. Witnessing testimonies that characterize a diasporic history, Yunior recognizes a philosophy of vocality that aligns with the attitude adopted by Oscar’s Aunt Jacqueline while studying in school, “Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones” (219). Studying Yunior’s comic book vernacular indeed asks whether or not a writer’s voice can critique the racism, nationalism, and colonialism inherent within a diasporic history while being exposed to the remains of its violence. Yunior’s parabasis ruptures the lines between fiction and reality, opening up the novel as an immersive interface to readers. Yet, instead of inciting a familiar exchange, Díaz’s complex mélange of popular culture references, colloquial idioms, and creole tongues defies an easy writer-reader point of contact. His literary world interjects multiple generic and vocal registers that allow readers themselves to become part of the difficult process of cultural transmission.15 Moving characters from the Dominican Republic to the United States and back again, Oscar Wao’s palimpsestic layers and complex generic technologies situate readers within the fractal histories of the Dominican diaspora. Readers must assemble meaning from seemingly disparate testimonies. Intrinsically, Díaz defamilarizes a linear, Western frame, as many critics have noted: he integrates tropes through a generic mix that combines foundational romance, comic book tricks, and sci-fi futures, among others.16 At the center of his generic fusion, Díaz’s protagonist Oscar de León selfreflexively appears amid the disappearing voices and histories that define the era of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, a dictator who, according to Díaz’s footnote, “ruled the Dominican Republic … with an implacable ruthless brutality” (2). Blank faces and blank pages, or “páginas en blanco” (119, 149), subsume the novel’s mythic center, and therefore expose the paradoxical aporias, or decalages, that Brent Hayes Edwards has shown signify “the practice of diaspora”: “If a discourse of diaspora articulates difference, then one must consider the status of that difference—not just linguistic difference but, more broadly the trace or the residue, perhaps, of

118  Vocal and Comic Deformance what resists or escapes translation” (13). What escapes translation becomes stressed through the traces of overlapping voices which are always also in transit, meeting at the intersections of vocal encounters framed by Yunior’s own voice which transcribes the un/written histories of the Cabral/de León family. Yunior’s voice, present as both a narrator and character voice, relies on his interactions with a Dominican mythic center, writing a gnostic and spiritual past that colors a diasporic world afflicted by communal violence and repressive social practices. Díaz’s manipulation of vocal expression relies on his use of voicing mid-century comics. Specifically, Yunior speaks as though through Marvel Comics’ The Fantastic Four, calling himself the “Watcher”—a version of a version of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s extraterrestrial Watcher—while also assembling the four voices of his respective histories: Oscar’s, Beli’s, La Inca’s, and Lola’s. In this way, The Fantastic Four, in part, inspires the tellings of the characters’ histories. Bringing together transitional identities representative of national and postnational affiliations, the history of The Fantastic Four reveals a way for “negotiating (rather than exploiting) multiple, contradictory identities and affiliations” (Fawaz 11). Díaz recognizes that in postwar America, The Fantastic Four not only addressed an anticommunist impulse, but also, as Ramzi Fawaz has shown, a cross-cultural encounter championed by the Cold War logic of integration: “the cosmopolitan ethic of postwar superhero comic books valued the uncertainty of cross-cultural encounter and the possibilities afforded by abandoning claims of individualism in exchange for diverse group affiliations” (18, 16). Visualizing and transcribing the traumas of diaspora, Yunior shows how the comics of postwar America reveal the visually unstable anatomy of its characters. While analyzing the transnational vein of the Fantastic Four, Fawaz notes the identity politics of postwar comics that critique US nationalism. He argues that while superheroes were once icons of the force and pride of American citizenship, “now they were framed as cultural outsiders and biological freaks capable of upsetting the social order in much the same way that racial, gendered, and sexual minorities were seen to destabilize the image of the ideal U.S. citizen” (4). Unlike Chabon who characterizes the inception of the individual hero’s corporeal agency through the Escapist and Joe Kavalier, Díaz instead reveals how postwar comics like The Fantastic Four and the X-Men reimagined the ways in which the body absorbs the external violence of its world. For example, in Figure 4.3, the initial comic and origin story of The Fantastic Four in November 1961 features the Fantastic Four of Dr. Richard Reed, Ben Grimm, Susan Storm, and Johnny Storm, and their bodily transformations after being exposed to cosmic rays of light on a trip to outer space: Richard Reed becomes Mister Fantastic, Ben Grimm becomes The Thing, Susan Storm becomes Invisible Girl, and Johnny Storm becomes the Human Torch. All four use their otherworldly transformations to combat the evils faced while also manifesting the perverse evils that

Vocal and Comic Deformance  119 created those attributes. In this way, the comic characters and voices of The Fantastic Four allow Yunior to reimagine the marginalized identities of the diaspora while also demarcating a way to think about diasporic identities through diverse forms of creation that also illustrate the exploitive aspects of national identity categories. Aptly, the underlying structural and symbolic attributes of comic books explored throughout Oscar Wao also expose the ways in which national narratives are gendered and sexed to assert male heterosexual prerogatives. Yunior’s virile masculinity serves to stereotype a quintessential ethos of Dominican misogyny while also characterizing voices set against it. Through the characters and narrators, Díaz reveals how voices and bodies are nationally and postnationally constructed and transcribed. The voicing

Figure 4.3 The birth of the Fantastic Four: Susan Storm transforming into Invisible Girl, Ben Grimm into The Thing, Richard Reed into Mr. Fantastic, and Johnny Storm into the Human Torch. Stan Lee (writer) and Jack Kirby (penciller), “The Fantastic Four,” Fantastic Four (Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1961). Marvel Comics, reprinted in Fantastic Four Omnibus, Vol. 1, 2005.

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Figure 4.3 Continued

Vocal and Comic Deformance  121 of a narrative informed by comics allows Díaz to create a tone of tragicomedy, and the structural force of comics satirically shows layers of cultural and political commentary that have remained hidden or unspoken. As a result, the novel critiques the agency of comics as both verbal testimony and visual medium: a medium which Art Spiegelman has also called a “visual voice in the writer’s hand” (qtd. in D’Arcy 2). Oscar Wao forms where voices meet the language of visual bodies, revealing repeated rupturing expressions. At its core, the novel presents the difficulty of expression that hinges upon the understanding of diaspora: the form and content of the novel reimagine diaspora in order to reinstate it in its full complexity, reinforcing the misreadings and silences of a Dominican American culture. Further, Díaz creates varied allusions to point to the novel’s diverse literary and national allegiances to subvert national borders. To begin with, he creates a contradictory boundary that anticipates Yunior’s self-contradictory voice and eventual usage of comics as a means to critique diasporic history. His epigraphs juxtapose a quotation from The Fantastic Four with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight” to create an unclassifiable “place in the pantheon” for Yunior’s historiography (Genette 160). The epigraphs contextualize different economies of reading through the contrasting circulations of The Fantastic Four comic book (Vol. I, No. 49, April 1966) and the unreferenced Derek Walcott poem which invokes the colonial experience of its mixed-race speaker: “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” The epigraphs shift between popular culture and colonial history—both equally prominent in uncovering Díaz’s formal stratagem. The reading communities of fans, and what Yunior refers to as “True Believers” of comic books, are relayed both as part of Yunior’s characterization of Oscar and as readers (144, 148). Yunior recognizes the participatory culture of comic book fans as also a rhetorical move which further immerses the reader within the culture of his novel, for as Scott McCloud’s work has shown, comics “have harnessed the power of cartoons to command viewer involvement and identification. … [C]reator and reader are partners in the invisible creating something out of nothing, time and time again” (204–5). Yunior expresses the rhetoric of a comic book fan to include readers in an uncertain world that characterizes the sci-fi idioms and comic creations of diaspora. Moreover, Yunior’s comic fandom recognizes a community that creates a form of cultural capital while also stressing a literary tradition situated within ethnic writing. Ironically, through the epigraph references, Díaz points to the ways in which comic culture is far more predominantly developed through caricatures and stereotypical depictions than the histories written and circulated on the Dominican diaspora. In this way, Díaz creates a literary space for the subversion of gendered and racial categories in the novel while also assimilating key Dominican cultural and mythic aspects to reveal the ways in which he and his characters are counted outside of literary

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Figure 4.4 Stan Lee (writer) and Jack Kirby (penciller). Fantastic Four cover (Vol. I, No. 49, April 1966). Marvel Comics.

and historical narratives. In The Fantastic Four comic cited, for instance, the Watcher warns the Fantastic Four of the cosmic force of Galactus: a personification of evil who occludes the “brief, nameless lives” of the Fantastic Four as shown on the cover in Figure 4.4. However, through the Watcher’s ability to create pictures out of the words coming from his voice as shown in Figure 4.5, Díaz points to Yunior’s ability to do the same throughout the novel. Voicing ekphrastic and descriptive language, Yunior as Watcher further brings voice to an imaginary and pictorial world that describes the otherworldly occurrences and corporeal expressions that write diaspora.

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Figure 4.5 In The Fantastic Four (Vol. 1, No. 66, April 1966), the Watcher informing members of the Fantastic Four of Galactus’s plan for evil while showing them through images he materializes in front of them. Stan Lee (writer) and Jack Kirby (penciller), Fantastic Four (Vol. I, No. 66, April 1966). Marvel Comics.

Positioning himself as an authoritative shadow and intrusive narrator, Yunior introduces readers to the novel through an uncertain prefatorial communication. Yunior’s voice begins through the form of oral narration: They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. (1) Díaz appropriates communal sensibility through what appears to be an unknown omniscience. Already, the unidentified voice mixes the “screams”

124  Vocal and Comic Deformance and “utterances” of the enslaved past of the Antilles with a demon drawn through a “nightmare door” that is just beginning to open for readers (1). The gateway to begin the novel occurs through the memory of the sounds of a nightmare and a demon: the “Curse of the New World” otherwise named “fukú americanus” (1). The potency of oral history underlines what “they say (dique),” linking East and West while Díaz’s footnotes heighten the written form of the novel (1). Díaz’s use of footnotes places hegemonic history at the margins of the mythic history and gnostic knowledge which encircle the curse of fukú. However, despite the historical references included in the footnotes, readers also discern a cogent unreliability—the first-person voice interrupts and digresses through gossipy outbursts and ad hominem interjections that reveal Yunior’s vocal manipulations. Ironically, Yunior’s vocal digressions correlate with what he describes to be the paradoxical tricks and turns of fukú, for as he reminds readers, “no matter how many turns and digressions this shit might take, it always— and I mean always—gets its man” (5). Yunior’s voice establishes him as the ultimate vocal encounter for Díaz’s readers who must simultaneously follow his voice while mistrusting it. Yunior’s voice both perpetuates and falls victim to fukú, and, therefore, he reenacts the tensions that encompass colonized and colonizer. As such, Díaz’s overlay of Yunior’s oral and written digressions marks the overlapping of temporality and the vicious cycles of colonial trauma that plague the histories of his characters. The preface forthrightly points to the arrival of Christopher Columbus, “the Admiral,” to the Americas as the historical cause of fukú, saying, “it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since” (1). Amid a history of colonial violence—both Dominican and American—the plural voice translates stories of fukú through a crosscut of communication that not only bisects oral and written forms but digital forms as well: “A couple of weeks ago, while I was finishing this book, I posted the thread fukú on the DRI forum, just out of curiosity. … The talkback blew the fuck up. You should see how many responses I’ve gotten” (6). Illustrating a digital form of “call and response,” Díaz’s novel moves among multiple narrative registers that circulate and transform while recognizing the ways in which comics themselves circulate among mixed media. As Yunior tells readers, “before Kansas goes bye-bye,” he positions himself as writer among a multimedia and multivocal palimpsest: “Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell” (7). Yunior appears as a homodiegetic narrator, yet his opening omniscient presence conflates his status as a firstand third-person narrator: a narrator both within and without the novel, watching the characters while simultaneously experiencing their plight. In this way, Yunior’s voice in the preface conflates narrator and writer in order to emphasize the unreliability and objective truth of history while securing his role as “Watcher.” And in so doing, Yunior invites readers to recognize that histories themselves, like his novel, are cultural artifacts.

Vocal and Comic Deformance  125 Yunior’s ability to engage readers metafictively draws attention to their material engagement with the novel from the start. In an attempt to escape the doom of fukú, Yunior brings readers into his telling and writing of Oscar’s life, for as Oscar’s sister Lola says, “the only way out is in” (209). Yunior begins to unravel a fukú story that he proclaims has “got its fingers around my throat” (6). Similar to the ways in which E.L. Doctorow encourages writers to “constantly recompose and reinterpret history,” otherwise it “tighten[s] its grip on your throat as myth and you find yourself in some type of totalitarian society, either secular or religious” (184), Yunior writes history as myth and myth as history to loosen hegemonic history’s own grasp of his fukú story. Still, despite Yunior’s insistence that he writes a “zafa” or “counterspell” in contradistinction to the fukú of colonial history (7), readers are increasingly aware of Yunior’s own authoritative voice within the novel’s narrative regime. Indeed, Yunior himself correlates dictators with writers, and in a footnote, he tells readers that “Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like” (97). Associating himself with real-life writer, Salman Rushdie whose Satanic Verses (1988) created religious and political controversy through its metafictive blasphemy, Yunior draws attention to the political poignancy of Díaz’s (and his own) metafictive tricks. Yunior situates himself as a narrator who speaks within a vocal and artistic artifice that further subordinates the voices of characters like Oscar and his mother Hypatía Belicia Cabral, or Beli, even while he attempts to transcribe their stories. Yunior initiates a form of literary deceit that also stresses his likeness to the classical philosopher Epimenides’s paradoxical “Cretan Liar,” and the logical deception always created by language. Yunior’s “jiringonza,” or Spanish language games, complicate interpretation and formally stress the reflected layers of vocal inexpression. As Yunior reminds readers, “one man’s jiringonza is another man’s life,” stressing the inadequacy of language in communicating Oscar’s grandfather Abelard’s tragedy after Trujillo imprisons and subsequently kills him (235). Showing history itself as a fictional construction, Yunior’s voice creates contradictory expressions: readers identify his dissembling status as writer/dictator and therefore integral to the complex expressions of the Dominican diaspora. Yunior vocally exemplifies the Cabral/de León familial history based upon voice’s ability to be both a communicative tool and a form of pervasive cultural control.

Díaz’s Voices Un/written between Comics and Myth Yunior examines the Dominican diaspora specifically through comic book caricatures, science fiction imaginaries (“who more sci-fi than us?”), and technological changes traced from Santo Domingo to the United States, or the experience of moving from Third to First Worlds and having “almost

126  Vocal and Comic Deformance no TV or electricity to plenty of both” (21, 22). A panoptical figure and Watcher, Yunior informs constructed ethnicities through what archeologist Arjun Appadurai has described as “imagination as social practice”—or the ways in which imagination reveals itself to be the practice of everyday through an increased circulation of media in an increasingly migratory world (31). Yunior constructs an otherworldly account of Dominican American identity, and the imagined worlds conveyed by his own and Oscar’s infatuation with comic books are marked by the multimedia of 1980s neoliberal ideologies. Oscar’s New World books and screens also link to the Old World mythic dreams of his mother Beli. As a result, Díaz synchronically relates the old and new diaspora through an intergenerational, imagined history that collapses the futures of Oscar’s genres with the gnostic knowledge of Beli’s myths. Self-reflexively, Oscar’s life is not only screened by Yunior’s voice, but screens in general hide his existence—from the “DM screens” he hides behind at Don Bosco Tech high school to evade bullies and “watch his adolescence stream by” to the “enormous Section 8 glasses” that mask his close-set “Eyes of Mingus” (23, 20). Hiding behind screens, Oscar himself becomes tagged as the pejorative “parigüayo,” or “party watcher” (19). Yunior describes Oscar as the “kid who don’t dance, who ain’t got game, who lets people clown him—he’s the parigüayo” (20). Oscar’s watching distances him from being a cultural insider in America, which is further characterized through his likeness to a comic book character. Describing Oscar’s physical appearance while at Rutgers, Yunior says, “The fat! The miles of stretch marks! The tumescent horribleness of his proportions! He looked straight out of a Daniel Clowes comic book. Or like the fat blackish kid in Beto Hernandez’s Palomar” (29). Oscar’s grandiose physicality becomes a manifestation of his dedication to genres, and Oscar’s nerdy love for Japanese anime and sci-fi gore further situates him in the margins: You couldn’t have torn him away from any movie or TV show or cartoon where there were monsters or spaceships or mutants or doomsday devices or destinies or magic or evil villains’. … Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a lensman her lens. (21) In this way, Oscar literally embodies what he devours as a comic and sci-fi fanboy; he comes to manifest a likeness to the genres that consume him. Yunior, in essence, watches Oscar watch, comprising the metafictional surveillance that sits at the intersection between fiction and reality while also recognizing a symbiotic relationship between characters. And Yunior’s relationship to Oscar reveals the ways in which Oscar is doubly marginalized as both a Dominican and an American. The symbiotic relationship between Yunior and Oscar further illustrates an important exchange between the verbal and the nonverbal that underlines Díaz’s appropriation of the comic

Vocal and Comic Deformance  127 world of his characters. Wai Chee Dimock pronounces the tension between the verbal and nonverbal to be “the single most important legacy of the diasporic” for its ability to “giv[e] rise to many overlapping semantic fields on both sides of the Atlantic” (160). The verbal/nonverbal dialectic distances Oscar and his family through their ineffable voices which Yunior not only bears witness to but also records. Intermittently, Yunior comments on the recordings which also relay an increased uncertainty plainly pronounced while also creating himself as “a special kind of funnel, a privileged conduit of ‘native’ information imbued with insight precisely because of his racial status,” as Brent Hayes Edwards has shown through his study of Martinican poet René Maran and his role as a black colonial administrator (89). Speaking about Oscar’s grandfather Abelard’s downfall at the hands of Trujillo, Yunior tells readers directly that “[w]hat’s certain is that nothing’s certain. Trujillo and company didn’t leave a paper trail—they didn’t share their German contemporaries’ lust for documentation” (243). Yunior recognizes a lineage shrouded by a silence that “stands monument to the generations, that sphinxes all attempts at narrative reconstruction. A whisper here and there but nothing more” (243). The “whisper here or there” of the Cabral lineage creates a schism relayed through Yunior’s uncertain tellings, which bears witness to the embodied and silenced traumas that flow through the generations. Despite the fact that readers concomitantly question Yunior’s diegetic veracity, he does indeed bring forth a testimony that uncovers the trauma that occurs at the hands of the Trujillo regime. Yunior exposes a history of violence that catapults Beli and her children into diaspora while hyperbolizing forms of expression to destabilize normative images of nation and citizenship. Intrinsically, Beli’s nonverbal expressions convey an intergenerational mise en abyme, situating her past and her father Abelard’s past in Santo Domingo as precursors to Oscar’s present in America. In this way, Yunior’s formal construction of their stories also mirrors Ottmar Ette’s notion of an island metaphor which contains a fractal relation to a larger totality through self-similarity.17 The mise en abyme is also a common trope within comic books. As Michael A. Chaney reveals, the narrative structure of mise en abyme, or reflection within a reflection, is a tool of autobiographical artifice in comics, as illustrated by the comics of Lynda Barry, Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner, and Gene Luen Yang, among others (23). Embodying the doubling nature of an island within an island, and so on, reflected in the text, the Cabral/de Leóns live within the voices that espouse the ideologies of the Dominican nation-state, for as Yunior tells readers in a footnote, “Anything uttered for the first time summons a demon, and when twentieth century Dominicans first uttered the word freedom en masse the demon they summoned was Balaguer” (90). As a voice of an apocalyptic and otherworldly comic world, the “demon Balaguer” reifies the Cabrals’ existence, haunted by the fukú of their myths and the demons of their realities. Díaz’s “demon Balaguer” exposes the national narrative of the Dominican Republic

128  Vocal and Comic Deformance cultivated by politician Joaquín Balaguer whose own historical reconstruction of the Dominican Republic’s past conflates the discourses of race with that of nation (San Miguel 24).18 The footnotes that delineate Balaguer’s white discourse of Dominican history transition to the demonized black history of Beli, further relating white/black racial binaries. As “the darkest character” and an outcast in Bani, “[a] city famed for its resistance to blackness” (78), Beli embodies the negation of the history and politics of the African and Haitian heritage of the Dominican Republic. Díaz draws attention to the colorism on the island itself which separates and divides Dominicans while using comic iconography to elide voices with racist ideology. Intrinsically, the myth of Beli’s story correlates silenced and graphic personal tragedies with national histories: “Before there was an American story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our conviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatía Belicia Cabral” (77). Describing Beli’s past through “a dark period of her life neither she nor her madre ever referenced. Their very own página en blanco,” Yunior encapsulates Beli’s “Lost Years” in Outer Azua in the scar on her back which appears “as vast and inconsolable as the sea” and resembles “a bomb crater, a world-scar like those of hibakusha” (51, 257). Corporeally semiotic, Beli’s body bears a traumatic inscription, as further clarified by Michel Foucault’s theory of corporeal language.19 Using the Second World War as a platform for trauma, Beli’s narrative becomes expressed through Yunior’s collective memory, bringing the embodiment of voice and vision to the national ideologies of sexism and racism that mark her body and Dominican history while also reinforcing, to use Gloria Anzaldúa’s words, the ways in which Beli is “robbed of [her] female being by the masculine plural” (76). The scar links Beli to the conflicting memories of fukú that become prominent through the fluctuation between her silence and rebellion, illustrating the ways trauma is “always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality of truth that is otherwise not available” (Caruth, “Introduction: The Wound” 4). Beli marries past and present traumas in both Santo Domingo and, then, America, which also characterizes “the enigma of the otherness of a human voice,” and as Cathy Caruth has taught us, expresses a voice that Beli herself will never really know (“Introduction: The Wound” 3). Estranging voice through a silence filled with screams, Beli’s scar also represents what Ana Ma Manzanas and Jesus Benito claim “bespeaks of the body’s protection against vulnerability towards things external”: it gives two views of the body, “one as wall, another as breach parting two entities and leaving an opening” (94). Beli’s scarred body characterizes a space of vulnerability and resistance, signifying multiple viewpoints and shifting forms of identity while heightening the interpenetration of the voices that fluctuate within diasporic histories. Beli’s corporeality is also intricately connected with the national narrative: Trujillo, “the tyrant, hyperbolized, was seen as the very embodiment

Vocal and Comic Deformance  129 of the nation” (San Miguel 3). When Beli transitions from girl to teenager in Santo Domingo, she is comically animated: “only a pornographer or comicbook artist could have designed it with a clear conscience. Every neighborhood has its tetúa, but Beli could have put them all to shame, she was La Tetúa Supreme” (92). Beli’s breasts, which characterize her as “La Tetúa Supreme,” are described later by her daughter Lola as “one of the wonders of the world,” and manifest her objectification by the sexist ideologies of the nation and her first two heartbreaks, Jack Pujols and the Gangster (51). Pujols, “[El Redentor’s] handsomest (read: whitest) boy, a haughty slender melniboién of pure European stock,” exemplifies the male/female and white/black binaries depicted through his relationship with Beli (89). His white, masculine power becomes superior to Beli’s black, feminine sexuality while revealing the ways in which a black/white binary approaches Yunior’s expressions of a written and comic art. Beli flaunts her “colossal cleavage,” and while she hunts for Pujols, she embodies the essentialist ideologies that promote Dominican machismo and female objectification (95).20 As a rendition of a Dominican self-made man, the Gangster’s actions further mirror the hypermasculine values of Trujillo. And Beli’s dependence on the Gangster connects her to the female slave in traditional Dominican history. This ideology, supported by nationalistic writers such as Antonio Sanchez-Valverde in the eighteenth century, provided a sort of utopia for slave-owners, absolving them of the violence they committed against their female slaves (San Miguel 42). Beli’s dreams of escape are relinquished through the Gangster’s lies and violence; her symbolic beating in a field of sugarcane by Trujillo’s henchmen hired by the Gangster’s wife at the apex of the novel positions Beli as a woman bordering on dreams of escape while being enslaved by the national ideology. The beating Beli endures in the cane is both literal and symbolic and characterizes her relationship with both the Gangster and Trujillo: the wounding of her body evoking what Díaz describes as “the end of language” (147). Lost in the maze of the broken stalks of cane, “scratching at the dust with a stick, pretending that the scribble was letters, words, names” (148), Beli reinforces the invisibility and unspeakability of her personal history, further emphasized by her visions of the recurring image of the faceless man. The testimony of Beli’s trauma links, first, to La Inca and, then, to Beli’s daughter Lola. La Inca’s power of prayer connects to the mystical powers of the mongoose, and La Inca hears voices while also becoming a manifestation of the Voice. La Inca’s gnostic knowledge overcomes gaps of unknown Dominican history while defining a past through oral, spiritual faith: “The rosaries cabling through La Inca’s fingers like line flying through a doomed fisherman’s hands. And before you could say Holy! Holy! Holy! she was joined by a flock of women, young and old, fierce and mansa, serious and alegre” (144). Parodying Baby Suggs’s Word in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, La Inca’s communal orality transcribes a history derived from spiritual meditation and memory, and the dark struggle of Díaz’s Dominican characters reifies their role within American

130  Vocal and Comic Deformance literature given that La Inca notices a dark, brooding presence surrounding Beli: “La Inca glanced at the girl [and] she could swear there was a shadow standing just behind her shoulder. … A dark horrible shadow that gripped her heart. And it seemed to be growing” (157). Through the growing curse of fukú, La Inca and Beli performatively connect through prayer: [Beli] saw for a brief instant La Inca praying in her room—the silence that lay between them now, stronger than love—and in the gloaming of her strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she’d not even had her own name. (148) Within the space of prayer, La Inca and Beli conjoin to fill in the past, finding a space “where the flesh dies and is born again” (145). Following the mystical mongoose which “had a woman’s lilt” and “was singing” (150), Beli recognizes the paradoxical “something” that mystically sends her into diaspora and reveals the tensions between despair and hope that she encounters in the cane field (152). To escape the faceless man and the beating in the cane that denies her the Gangster’s child, Beli immigrates to the United States in hopes of finding a new life. However, before she leaves Santo Domingo, she has a sexual encounter with the Gangster, who ejaculates “on the dark ruined plain of her back,” her scar (163). His ejaculation can be seen as a form of writing, an attempt to cover her scar and control her story, which he jokingly acknowledges by describing it as “chalk on a chalkboard” (163). The racial imagery suggested by the Gangster’s white semen on Beli’s black back further implies the domination of her story by the misogynistic, racist history told by Trujillo’s regime. Though Beli lives within the borders of New Jersey and is identified as an American citizen, she is at once contained and displaced by the United States: “the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorías, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart” (164). Stuck with the memories of a homeland myth that, too, dispossesses her, Beli is caught between the United States and the Dominican Republic, both nations manifesting a form of power and coercion, which Judith Butler, in conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, claims is “designed to produce and maintain the condition, the state of the dispossessed” (5). Beli’s breast cancer inscribes the tragic end of her story through “the locus of a dissociated self” (Foucault 148). Imaging an embodied and tragic history, Beli’s breast cancer meets Lola within a space of contamiNation, as most notably delineated by Lola’s expression when she feel the lump in her mother’s breast: “I feel it, you say, too loudly. Lo siento” (53).21 The muddling of affect and apology through the Spanish phrase Lo siento, which simultaneously means to feel and to apologize, transfers responsibility from Beli to Lola for Beli’s own history. The second-person narration

Vocal and Comic Deformance  131 and the I-you tensions in this statement also reveal Lola’s connection to Beli as well as Yunior while he transitions to her own voice in the novel. As such, the second-person narration in the “Wildwood” section seeks to build suspense while drawing readers into the story through a heightened sense of affect that connects readers to all three characters. Aptly, all three characters are also implicated within the larger history of Beli’s silenced story which has been framed through Yunior’s own voice. The second-person narration which intertwines Beli, Lola, and Yunior, however, creates a space for Lola to enact change through her own voice: “It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: change, change, change” (58). Situating herself within the Gordian knot of her mother’s trauma, Lola describes feeling the breast of her mother and locating “a knot just beneath her skin, tight and secretive as a plot. And at that moment, for reasons you will never quite understand, you are overcome by the feeling, the premonition that something in your life is about to change” (53). Change rings through the “bruja feeling” of Lola’s narration (53): a narration she presumably shares with “you,” telling readers that when returning to the United States after visiting Santo Domingo, she starts crying: “I know this sounds ridiculous but I don’t really think I stopped until I met you” (210). After a cathartic release, Lola does not merely meet the “you” of Díaz’s readers, but her daughter Isis—an implied reader, who as Wolfgang Iser initially argued (xiv), discovers herself while discovering the voice of her mother. Through Isis, Díaz, too, retains a radical hope in his readers, for like Isis they read the voices between colonial history and the possibility of the future told by Lola. Isis hears her mother’s singular testimony—a striking narrative “I” that collectively remembers, expresses, and thereby begins the process of healing. Importantly, Lola’s dramatic monologue and testimony comprise the only significant first-person voice to counter Yunior’s own. And symbolically, Lola asserts her vocal agency by negating a sexual encounter with Yunior. Yunior narrates the encounter, saying: We went to her place on Handy and before I could really put a hurt on her she stopped everything, dragged me up from her toto by my ears. Why is this the face I can’t seem to forget, even now after all these years? Tired from working, swollen from lack of sleep, a crazy mixture of ferocity and vulnerability that was and shall ever be Lola. She looked at me until I couldn’t stand it anymore and then she said: Just don’t lie to me Yunior. I won’t, I promised. Don’t laugh. My intentions were pure. (199) Literalizing the metaphoric delineation of Yunior’s own connection to the main “Fuckface” Trujillo through this fucking and fukú encounter (216), Lola reverses Yunior’s sexual agency, subverting the sexist history of her

132  Vocal and Comic Deformance mother. Her voicings move readers continually between the United States and the Dominican Republic and, unlike her mother’s silenced and doubly colonized (raced and gendered) expressions, Lola’s portray the possibility of a regeneration and articulation of the past. Yunior, too, imagines that Isis will “stop being afraid and come looking for answers” (330). In a daydream, Yunior shows Isis the archives of Oscar’s history: “his games, his manuscript, his comic books, his papers,” commenting that “she’ll take all we’ve done and we’ve learned and add her own insights and she’ll put an end to it” (330, 331). Relating this final dream encounter with Isis, however, Yunior also closes with an ominous comic ending to his fukú story. Looking at Oscar’s old copy of the comic Watchman, he notes a panel Oscar circled, commenting that Oscar “never defaced a book in his life” (331). Oscar’s defacement relates a powerful message that ends with the comic’s Dr. Manhattan saying, “In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends” (331). The book’s defacement renders all of the histories that are faceless for Oscar and his family, for faceless books and faceless men still haunt Yunior’s memories. Yunior’s “end of story” relates his ongoing nightmares of Oscar, plagued by the disappearing voices and histories of his past. Yunior’s conjures Oscar: holding up a book, waving for me to take a closer look, and I recognize this scene from one of his crazy movies. I want to run from him, and for a long time that’s what I do. It takes me a while before I notice that Oscar’s hands are seamless and the books pages are blank. And that behind his mask his eyes are smiling. Zafa. Sometimes, though, I look up at him and he has no face and I wake up screaming. (325) Caught between dreams and reality like his readers, Yunior warns against the faceless men and faceless books of diaspora. For even Oscar’s final letter, which writes of “The beauty! The beauty!” (335) that counters Joseph Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!,” maintains that in Díaz’s Oscar Wao beauty and horror, dreams and nightmares, show two sides of the same face. Yunior’s own book trumps Oscar’s faceless one, reminding readers that the voices that escape hegemonic history are still waiting to be heard.

Writing the Future of Diaspora Chabon and Díaz write novels which write artists and writers into being through a comic book ethos. The histories that the novels write recount the prevalence of comics within a larger literary history that creates a space for marginalized and ethnic writers and artists. Like the superheroes of comic books, writers have an ethical responsibility to use their powers as a response

Vocal and Comic Deformance  133 to the wider community, and the voices of the writers within Chabon and Díaz draw attention to a transformation of the body of literary history that further records the silenced bodies of diasporic history. In this way, both authors relay the importance of comics in the mapping and understanding of history. Moreover, they write with a generic impetus to guide readers into a speculative future, recognizing the agencies of literary work within historical practices. In this way, Kavalier & Clay and Oscar Wao foreground how comics require a new respectability as a means of transcribing the past and a means of understanding the voices of the writers themselves.

Notes 1 In this chapter, vocal deformance highlights the performative variations of voice that deform the tellings of history, opening imagined possibilities and emphasizing voices that revise essential notions of history and nation through deviations of the comic form. Creating an alternative interpretive reality, vocal deformance recognizes the ways in which performance “always lies open to deformative moves” because it relies on interpretation rather than information, and therefore, on the warped structural impulses inherent in comics as well as a “poetic and polyvalent” agency of language (McGann and Samuels, 113, 19). 2 While critics have certainly noted Chabon’s and Díaz’s association with comics, most critical analyses work to engage each author’s comic book perspective singularly. Specifically, critics such as Daniel Bautista, A.O. Scott, and Henry Wessells have been concerned with the narrative eclecticism of Díaz’s fiction and use of genres. Also, Stephen Hock analyzes Chabon’s use of comics as comix, and Henry Brod specifically addresses Chabon’s engagement with Jewish immigrants as superheroes. By contrast, I am concerned with the ways in which the novels explore comics to examine the voice of the diasporic writer. Relatedly, many contemporary writers use comics intertextually or tropologically in their works, opening readers to larger historical and social concerns. Writers such as Sherman Alexie, Jonathan Letham, Salmon Rushdie, Austin Grossman, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others, draw inspiration from comics for their novels. Novelists and essayists such as Margaret Atwood, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and even Chabon himself have tried their own hands at the comic book medium to open up their interpretive and artistic milieu. 3 Mishra originally coined the “diasporic imaginary” to describe the contradictory views of the imaginary homeland in terms of the Indian diaspora. In his words, the term “refer[s] to any ethnic enclave in a nation-state that defines itself, consciously, unconsciously or through self-evident or implied political coercion, as a group that lives in displacement” (14). Situating the “diasporic imaginary” between Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage and Slavoj Žižek’s Nationstate as “Nation-Thing,” Mishra notes that “[i]f, for the dominant community, diasporas signify their own lapsed enjoyment of the Nation-Thing, for diasporas to face up to their own ghosts, their own traumas, their own memories is a necessary ethical condition” (16). 4 Chabon and Díaz pull from a wide range of generic categories and literary predecessors, eliding tropes that coincide with Marvel Comics’ surrealist heroes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magical realism, E.L. Doctorow’s historical metafictions, and Philip K. Dick’s speculative fictions, among others. As Mitchum Huehls has shown, because Chabon and Díaz rely on a mixing of genres—specifically, as he notes, the formal conventions of comic book tricks and superhero speculations—both authors create speculative alternative histories in order to

134  Vocal and Comic Deformance reveal how the contingencies of historical events and persons permeate into a speculation not only about the past but also about the future: “if we remember that the historical novel aims to help us think historically about the present, not the past [via Lukács], then it’s easy to imagine how writing the future might also help us think the present historically” (“Historical” 146). The acts of written historical creation and their censorship underwrite social, political, and economic forces that shape the readings of subjective lives and creative expressions to express diaspora. 5 See Spiegelman, Co-Mix: A Representative of Comics, Graphics and Scraps (2013). Harry Brod asserts that, aside from utilizing surrealist comics in Kavalier & Clay, Chabon’s novel acts as a bookend to Spiegelman’s own surrealist images in his Maus comic books (1980–1992), representing “an artistic coming-of age” of the post-Holocaust generation of American Jews (183). Maus characterizes the Holocaust through animal caricatures and beastly portrayals of allegory, which Hayden White claims “presents a particularly ironic and bewildered view of the Holocaust, but it is at the same time one of the most moving narrative accounts of it that I know of, not least because it makes the difficulty of discovering and telling the whole truth about even a small part of it as much a part of the story as the events whose meaning it is seeking to discover” (31). White notes that by assimilating the momentous events of the Holocaust to the generic and absurd registers of the comic book, Maus scrutinizes representation. 6 In La Révolution Surréaliste and its December 1924 cover, Breton announces the magazine’s revolutionary agenda. 7 The Museum of Modern Art’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibit in December 1936 marks surrealism’s entrance into American mainstream culture. Visited by 50,000 spectators, the exhibit was widely covered by print and news media. Alfred Barr’s curation of avant-garde and commercial aesthetics delineates surrealism’s commitment to a diverse artistic practice tied to the creation of a modern American mythology. MOMA’s display shows how American surrealism pronounces itself through disparate and transnational encounters illustrated through heterogeneous media (Bauduin 1–3; Ungureanu 144; Zalman 14–17). 8 Chabon points to the ancient texts of Talmudic and kabalistic creation through the golem, as Elizabeth Roberts Baer and Alan L. Berger have notably shown. Baer’s study traces the intertextual and imaginative agencies that create memory through the golem myth in twentieth-century fictions, including Chabon’s representation. Her argument reveals how writers intertextually manipulate the golem myth, choosing the golem as “a synecdoche of creativity, of imagination, of both text and intertext” (183). She cites four main critical texts, aside from her own, that outline the golem’s literary, mythic, and historical adaptations: Gershom Scholem’s “The Idea of the Golem” (1960), Arnold Goldsmith’s The Golem Remembered, 1909–1980: Variations on a Jewish Legend (1981), Byron Sherwin’s The Golem Legend: Origins and Implications (1985), and Moshe Idel’s Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Tradition on the Artificial Android (1990). As in other novels that trace the golem myth within fiction after the Shoah, the golem in Kavalier & Clay, as Baer points out, urges “readers and critics to accept the critical importance of the imagination and imaginative literature (in all its genres) in the post-Holocaust era” (143). Berger, on the other hand, analyzes Chabon as a third-generation Holocaust author and compares the novelist to the creator of a golem, and the golem in the novel serving as a therapeutic symbol via the medium of comic books (86). 9 Throughout literary history, the golem’s varied portrayals begin through a ritualistic form of theological creation. Several well-known works that include the golem as a cross between resistance fighter and unconscious menace focus on the

Vocal and Comic Deformance  135 controversies over the tensions wrought by creator and his creation. In Peretz’s short story “The Golem” (1893), for instance, the golem’s violent and uncontrolled killing spree causes the Maharal to transform it back into a mere image of clay. The story ends by reminding readers of the need to preserve the memory of the golem, inciting readers to “Do something—if you can” (131). The supernatural episodes of Viennese writer Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem (1914) describe an unreliable narrator implicated within the life of one Master Athanasius Pernath, living within “a strange state that was neither sleeping nor waking” while imagining a golem which haunts him (47). The golem of Pernath’s dreams follows him amid a murder mystery, until the narrator awakes to find the fantasy as part of the essence of real life. H. Leivick’s The Golem (1921), a dramatic poem in eight scenes, subverts and performs the act of creation through the golem’s own voice, as argued by Alan Sikes. The golem of Leivick, usually depicted as mute, speaks first to the Maharel before creation, as shown in David Fishelson’s adaptation: “I’m still but a shadow. Come to warn you: Create me not” (10). In this version, the golem recognizes his ability to be exploited as a servant “to be ruled and commanded” instead of “a people’s champion, a man of night,” as noted by the Maharel (11). Finally, Elie Wiesel’s The Golem: The Story of a Legend (1983), written more than 60 years later with illustrations by Mark Podwell, presents a version of the Maharal’s creation of the golem through the voices of scripture. Highlighting the bond the creator feels for his creation, Wiesel highlights the censorship of the golem by the Maharel: “Two beings unite and enrich the world: isn’t that a miracle? … I would have liked to hear the Golem’s opinion” (91). Like Wiesel and others, Chabon illustrates a paradoxical creator/creation tension, which also demonstrates the relationship of Joe and Sammy to the inventions of Empire Comics, eliding man and automaton. 10 Breton insisted in the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism that “we, who have made no effort whatsoever to filter, who in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes,” are “modest recording instruments not mesmerized by the drawings we are making” (27–28). Closely allied with this imperative to become akin to a machine is a metaphorics of the trace and tracing: “here again it is not a matter of drawing, but simply of tracing” (21). 11 Quoted in Stamelman 126. 12 Jacques Derrida’s study of Jabés’s “The Book of Questions” (1976) recognizes a passage beyond writing through a double-writing that allows the writer to stand on the threshold of the book: “The writer, builder, and guardian of the book posts himself at the entrance to the house …[t]he exit from the book, the other and the threshold can only be written, can only affirm themselves in writing. One emerges from the book only within the book, because for Jabés, the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book” (76). As such, as Derrida shows, a writing that is reflexive and doubles itself becomes simultaneously a legibility and illegibility that also recognizes Judaism as “the birth and passion of writing” (64). Like Jabes’s wandering Yukel, “the poet and the Jew are not born here but elsewhere. They wander, separated from their true birth” (66), and hence separated from a history that is always also a reflection. 13 See Clifford, “Travelling Cultures” 96–112. 14 See Sáez, “Dictating Desire, Dictating Diaspora” 522–55. 15 Intended readers, therefore, are never assumed to be “native readers,” as Rebecca Walkowitz’s study has shown, and find themselves blocked from straightforward hermeneutics. Equally, Walkowitz argues that Díaz’s oeuvre itself is born translated, or refuses to match language to geography, and therefore “seem[s] to occupy more than one place, to be produced in more than one language, or to address multiple audiences at the same time” (6). Positing literary production

136  Vocal and Comic Deformance itself through the reader’s acquisition of Spanish words as part of New Jersey’s native language, Díaz’s exchange of voices implies a transitional fluidity which, as Walkowitz notes, also creates a regional form: “readers are meant to learn words rather than to translate them” (39). 16 Like comic books themselves, Díaz’s novel utilizes multiple genres within its narrative. Díaz’s preoccupation with genre extends through both the form and content of the novel, and Oscar’s own love of “Genres!” (17) intricately informs a mix of generic compilations which have motivated many critical analyses. Daniel Bautista argues that Oscar Wao relates a form of “comic book realism” concerned with reworking a form of Latina/o magical realism (42). Monica Hanna finds its hybrid form creating a “resistance history” (500). Elena Machado Sáez calls Oscar Wao a foundational, homosocial romance that cannot be rendered as part of a traditional diasporic history” (524). Finally, T.S. Miller points out how “Yunior simply augments his literary arsenal with all the high-tech armaments of genre,” specifically through the lens of science fiction (94). My own argument recognizes comics itself as a genre that voices diaspora through interlocking sensory and performative moves. 17 Thinking about the Caribbean’s fractal archipelago and each island’s structural similarity, Ette explains the double character of the island: “[i]t is both fragmentariness and totality; a fragmented, splintered structure and a mise en abyme that goes on into eternity and that wants to create new totalities” (114). The intergenerational violence of the mise en abyme further signifies a structural violence that at once differentiates while totalizes to have specific cultural repercussions (115). Moreover, Ette points out that, in Caribbean literature, the mise en abyme is most often created through the structure of the house. However, despite the fact that the island metaphor most often imposes itself through the mise en abyme of the house in Caribbean literature, Díaz also relates the Dominican prison where Abelard is tortured to the cane fields where both Beli and Oscar receive similar beatings, exposing the inextricable relation between Dominican tyranny and colonial slavery. 18 Pedro San Miguel analyzes Balaguer’s historical and tragic narration of the Dominican Republic, stressing the “fundamental whiteness of the Dominican population” that minimizes the importance of the slave trade, which, [Balaguer] argues, left no mark on the racial composition of Santo Domingo until the late eighteenth century, after cession of the Spanish colony to France. Thus, for Balaguer, the national prototype is “the white campesino,” further erasing the mixed-raced and mestije people of the Dominican Republe (24–26). Two of Balaguer’s many books on Latin American history, politics, and literature are La realidad Dominicana (1947) and Historia de la literatura Dominicana (1955). 19 See Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice 148. 20 Relatedly, Díaz likens Pujols to the whiteness that Captain Ahab seeks to destroy in Melville’s Moby-Dick: “And of all these things the albino boy was a symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?” (95). In Moby-Dick Captain Ahab’s prosthetic leg is made of whale bone; he embodies, thus, the white whale he seeks, which his crew wants to make into saleable commodities. The crisscrossing of Dominican and American literary history here also underlines the contradictory violence that stresses the United States’ own colonial occupation of the Dominican Republic in the twentieth century. 21 Speaking of the Indian diaspora, Vijay Mishra notes that the history of diaspora is contaminated by social and national forces which govern the lives of citizens who remain on the border of two places: “For these hyphenated subjects’ diasporic space as an often contradictory, often contaminated space now engenders the possibilities of exploring hybrid, cross-cultural and intradiasporic relationships” (187). In Oscar Wao, this is shown through the character Lola who explores her hyphenated identity as a result of her retelling of history.

5

The M/other Tongues of Michael Cunningham, Joseph O’Neill, and Colum McCann

Walt Whitman’s house of poetry celebrates an epic history made by the inseparability of difference. Expanding his stanzas to the cosmos, Whitman opens his rooms to a global aura that defines an American inclusivity at home in the world. A reading of Whitman’s urban consciousness is found in the processions that define New York City’s streets. Whitman colors Mannahatta as the world, and his embodied discourse can be found within his “Poem for Procreation,” where he describes the aims of his poetry while “A Woman Waits for Me”: “I draw you close to me, you women, / I cannot let you go, I would do you good / I am for you, and you are for me, not only for our own sake, but for others’ sakes” (Portable 152). Pulling “I” to “You,” Whitman’s procreative verse refashions personhood and poetry within a m/other’s tongue: the turns of his lines imagine how newly born babes “interpenetrate with others, as I and you interpenetrate now” (Portable 152). Eliding the self with other, Whitman’s poetry can be contemporaneously set within the changing consciousness of the global city.1 Indeed, Whitman celebrates a newfound presence among twenty-first-century readers who attempt to perceive unification within a world divided by capital gains and global communications. Intertextual and recurrent, the voices of Whitman’s m/others still speak through the sounds and sense of his lyric voice: an individual igniting “a call in the midst of the crowd” while critiquing an epic sense of the world at home within New York (Leaves 1855, 72). With Whitman as my guide, in this chapter, I focus on three novels which situate the poetics of New York as home to the poetics of the world. New York takes on a super signification, illustrating the fluidity of crossborder movements to present diverse members of the population cohabitating. Intrinsically, New York is characteristic of other global cities and metropolitan spaces which “become more than their locations and boundaries and physical geographies; their populations flow over definitions and constitute a sort of world-in-itself” (Gupta 43). As a world in itself, New York recognizes the multidimensional and disparate effects of globalization, and the literature analyzed within this chapter, too, illustrates the global forces that have transformed New York City into a global city. If we are to

138  The M/other Tongues believe Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman’s assertion that “all literature is now global, all literature is a literature of globalization” (611), my chapter examines how Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days (2005), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008), and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) communicate the poems and the poetics of the city, stressing an amplified lyricism that calls for the heterogeneity and discontinuity of national cultures. Though these novels can also be generically considered post-9/11 novels, I draw attention to the intergeneric mingling within them—a mix of poetry and prose—that heightens our perception of the global city. Complicating forms of longing and belonging, the voices in the novels communicate what it means to inhabit the global city, bearing out, as Adam Kirsch has shown, Goethe’s belief that “poetry is the universal possession of mankind” (Global 10). Concerned with global processes—economic, social, material—these novels voice the tensions between home and homeland: they express lyrical language as a m/other tongue, and like Whitman’s own poetry, the novels lyrically redress expressions of belonging amid displacement.2 In this way, Cunningham, O’Neill, and McCann assess a recursion of poetic discourse while creating a novel sense of poetic renewal. Crossing generic boundaries, these novels of New York suggest that poetic discourses, what I’m examining through poetry’s lyric forms and language, express the intricacies of personal lives within a communal form. Indeed, I recognize that the poetics of the city is well-known, which I historically delineate later in this chapter. Still, it is my intent to distinguish the ways in which Cunningham, O’Neill, and McCann reconfigure lyrical expressions within narrative expressions. The lyrical language styled within these novels vocalizes the stories of marginalized characters through a shifting poetics that delineates the city’s mother tongue, or what Whitman described in an open letter to Emerson in 1856 as “that huge English flow, so sweet, so undeniable” which allows him to “say the word or two that has got to be said, adhere to the body, step with the countless common footsteps, and remind every man and woman of something.”3 Whitman’s mother tongue locates lyrical language within society while it evaluates society, and in accordance with Mutlu Blasing’s theoretical paradigm, lyrical language, in this sense, reminds us of our material relationship to language—a relationship at once foreign and familiar, communal and personal, in which the lyrical “I” simultaneously chooses and is chosen by language. “It institutes the ethical figure of an intending speaker and marks a will to mean even as it secures a full view of the abyss,” Blasing argues (35). Central to Blasing’s theory of lyrical language is a theory of the mother tongue which, as she notes, identifies a discourse which is “charged with individuating emotional histories, both personal and communal” (11).4 Part of my argument relies on the free play of lyrical discourse and its poiesis—a discourse where the sound of words “invokes the emotional texture of the materials of the mother tongue so as to remember and transmit this personal-communal history” (Blasing 10). Lyrical discourse counters

The M/other Tongues  139 the prose in the novel while it is implicated within it, and Cunningham, O’Neill, and McCann create discursive tensions that stress the lyric’s ability to resist what Jonathan Culler has termed “communicative efficiency and propositional meaning” and instead reinforce a sense of “memorability, ceremoniousness, harmony, charm” (Theory 305). Offsetting the prose of the novel, lyrical discourse, as Culler notes, allows readers to encounter “anomalous verbal combinations, along with the kinetic effects of rhythm” to “offer a challenge to homogenized experience” (Theory 305). The repeating sounds and images of lyrics in the novels create a connective network of discourse, evaluating spaces of dis/unity, while portraying the attendant politics of a post-9/11 world. Understanding the mother tongue as part and parcel of the lyrical discourse of the city, Cunningham, O’Neill, and McCann literally and figuratively regenerate language through the unheard and unspoken voices of m/others to create poetic space as a place for expression. Mediating the past in the present, New York expresses a longing for home that is old in the same way that it is new. Historicizing the lyrical codes of the city, the novels open the recurrent sounds and images of language to a vanishing world that critiques voices of representation—past and present. As such, the poetics of these novels transforms individual voices into a body politic to create a politically charged multivocality that subversively interrogates Michael Cunningham’s question in Specimen Days: “Do you think a great city endures?” (150). Inciting voices that are infused with a vibrating prosody and vernacular ethos, Cunningham, O’Neill, and McCann engage the rhythms and resonances of socially situated utterances so that they might be heard in the text, reflecting voices that create a human world charged with meaning. So the city sings its everyday secrets, uncovering voices that speak a habitual poetics and follow the rhythms of Whitman’s expanse in his long poem Leaves of Grass (1855). Situating this argument through John Dos Passos’s twentieth-century literature, my chapter also characterizes a history of novel consciousness that notes the widening scale of urban consciousness. Dos Passos’s sprawling montage in Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the USA trilogy (1930– 1936) foregrounds how lyrical narratives typify sociotechnical and capital domination within a vast landscape. Focusing on Dos Passos’s panoramic poetics, I begin by examining the ways in which the semiotics of the city reify the transmissions and interpolations of its poetic and technical channels. Like Whitman, Dos Passos sought to create an epic and unmediated account of American life (Pizer 31), and in this, his movement among narrative styles, varied voices, and cubistic settings shows a fast-paced progression of America’s global cityscape amid the turmoil of modernist literary and journalistic forms. Then, shifting to the present day, I illustrate how the contemporary novels of Cunningham, McNeil, and McCann expand upon Dos Passos’s narrative and poetic techniques while turning toward an important difference that unravels the boundaries of our literatures

140  The M/other Tongues and our borders. Fittingly, the poetics of the global novel creates the city as a continually emergent and oppositional body: a space for agencies to refigure and thereby enunciate terms of belonging while further challenging modes of intelligibility. As such, poetic resonances and refrains create interconnections among people, cultures, and aesthetic forms, conveying the interculturality of urban living.5 At the same time, the novels illustrate how intensified intergeneric traffic does not assume their confluence. And poetic tensions display the toil of the city: the struggle of discourse networks of exchange as they congregate and proliferate. In this, we hear the voices that both bind and free marginalized communities, ungrounding the legibility of heteronormative notions of reading the city and reading the novel.

American Cities and the Novel Language of Poetry At the fin de siècle, the American novel increasingly focused on the city as both geographical place and narrated space, as critics have argued.6 Starting with Theodore Dreiser’s naturalistic turn in Sister Carrie (1900), the urban novel commences a twentieth-century investigation, in Blanche Housman Gelfant’s words, into the city “as a key actor in a human drama” (4). Historically, the novel of New York captures a poetic underbelly, accenting the changeable tensions among the sociopolitical strata of society. Poetic discourse marks the quotidian practices of the denizens of New York, characterizing the city’s totalizing character through the city’s m/other tongues, and Michel de Certeau’s well-known “long poem of walking” (101). As De Certeau’s has affirmed, New York read poetically moves through moments of production and consumption: its residents socially construct and write the city, eluding a static legibility.7 Comprehending the city as a poetic palimpsest creates a textual and social pluralism which must be read in migratory, metaphoric terms. De Certeau creates a double-reading of New York, as Donna Stonecipher points out, and the interconnection of the concept city and the lived city deciphers “the hub of global capital” (15), highlighting the terms of not just De Certeau but also Raymond Williams and Henri Lefebvre.8 The free play of the city, or “the lived city,” expands to acts of personalization and authorization: networks of citizens demonstrate habitual acts of mediated poiesis—such as graffiti and skateboarding—that represent the ways in which social life is poetically mediated and constructed. The mediation of the cityscape, too, as Roland Barthes remarks, signals an exchange of poetic discourse: “not a classical poem, not a poem centered on a subject. It is a poem which deploys the signifier, and it is this deployment which the semiology of the city must ultimately attempt to grasp and to make sing” (“Semiology” 418). The urban denizen is an avant-garde reader, in Barthes’s terms, sampling and realizing poetic fragments while critiquing the inequitable and silent spaces of the city. In a naturalistic vein, John Dos Passos’s sprawling montage of urban life in Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the USA trilogy (1930–1936) weaves an

The M/other Tongues  141 array of poetic voices among a mosaic of documents and generic forms that muddle the differences between high and low art. Creating a grid of characters and technologies, Dos Passos encodes the totalizing and antagonistic nature of New York in Manhattan Transfer, an antagonism that reflects the urban milieu in America and abroad in USA. Continuing a genealogy started by Whitman, Dos Passos imagines an American epic through a revolutionary style and contradictory materials, and as critics Lois Hughson, Robert P. Weeks, and Kenneth Price have noted, Dos Passos recognizes Whitman as a key literary ancestor.9 Whitman makes cameo appearances in Dos Passos’s novels, initiating a sort of call and response between the two writers that can be shown in Dos Passos’s final and posthumously published Century’s Ebb (1975), when he asks: “Here, now, today, if you came back to us, Walt Whitman, what would you say?” (13). Dos Passos’s regard for Whitman, and his use of Whitman’s catalogues, parallelism, and envelops, as Weeks has shown, causes some to speculate that perhaps Dos Passos’s generic innovation resembles the form of a long poem rather than a novel. Still, Dos Passos’s tribute to Whitman gives insight into an American literary tradition composed of blended forms that still accounts for Whitman’s mythic and poetic past while calling that past into question. After all, as Hughson maintains, Whitman’s “vision of humanity” which brings him “a triumphant satisfaction permits Dos Passos only a triumphant hunger” (191). Dos Passos chronicles an epic of New York in Manhattan Transfer, stressing capitalistic exploitation and urban impersonality. New York’s static populace moves around an empty urban center, and the circular, polyglot narrative decenters multiple vocal lines. And while the character Bud Korpenning asks how to “get to Broadway” because he wants “to get to the center of things” when he first arrives in the city, his efforts stress a peripatetic melancholia that elides form with content (4). Unlike Whitman’s staunch individual who is rejuvenated by the bustling metropolis, Bud and others like him become “[n]o more’n a needle in a haystack” (17). Dos Passos’s New York burns from within: firebugs illuminate the finance capitalism inherent in the city’s loaming skyscrapers and their revolving doors, which move New Yorkers “out into Broadway, in off Broadway” (120). The lyrical epigraphs preceding the chapters color New York as the novel’s principal character, and the mechanization of capitalism comes alive in its oppressive infrastructure where “[g]lowworm trains shuttle in the gloaming through the foggy looms of spiderweb bridges, elevators soar and drop in their shafts, harbor lights wink” (305). The city’s aesthetic framework illustrates New Yorkers who come “out of the tall buildings downtown, grayfaced throngs flood subways and tubes, vanish underground” (305). The workers are implicated within the lyrical image of the metropolis, and Manhattan Transfer associates the destruction of New York with Old Testament cities like Babylon, Nineveh, and Sodom and their impiety. Fittingly, Jimmy Herf, Dos Passos’s poet-figure, departs from the city, “taking pleasure in breathing, in the beat of his blood, in the

142  The M/other Tongues tread of his feet on the pavement,” while moving “[p]retty far” from New York (404). The fatalism inherent within capitalism characterizes urban experience, accented by the movement between objective fictional prose and subjective lyrical narration in USA. A mélange of impartial biographies, fictional narratives, and poetic newsreels creates the zeitgeist, highlighting verisimilar voices set against Dos Passos’s lyrical Camera Eye sections which narrate his subjective experience and link the three novels on a global scale. As Sinclair Lewis claims in an advertisement and review featured in The New Masses in March 1930, “Dos Passos, may be, more than Dreiser, Cather, Hergesheimer, Cabell, or Anderson, the father of humanized and living fiction, not merely for America but for the world” (“Advertisement” 19). The global city extends in a cubistic manner in the USA trilogy and belongs to the proletarian masses. The Camera Eyes allow Dos Passos, as Donald Pizer has shown, to establish a greater “depth of introspection” which was “encouraged by the open and fully conscious exploration of self” (22). The form of the trilogy as a whole—both subjective and objective sections— constructs the economic and political dominance that blights the voices of Dos Passos’s radical workers. Still, as Pizer has shown, Dos Passos’s interlacing of narrative strands predates the fictional technique of multiple perspective, allowing for a “dramatic means of establishing connections” while Dos Passos moves across narrative lines and characters move across train lines (124). To begin USA, a summative catalogue conjures an ambiguous everyman of the road who incites readers to listen to “the speech of the people” in their home away from home, the United States (3). Illustrative of Georg Lukács’ contention that the novel as a form seeks to reveal “a transcendental homelessness” (41), Dos Passos’s USA. continues to characterize a shiftless image of the nation created in Manhattan Transfer within now a more global and dynamic reach. Imaging a young Dos Passos among a homeless crowd of immigrant voices in Holland, his lyrical voice commences by capturing a moment of adversity and transition on the streets of The 42nd Parallel (1930). He describes himself and his mother running away from an angry mob in the initial Camera Eye because his family “tread[s] on too many grassblades” (13). Treading on Walt Whitman’s self-reflexive grass, as Price notes, Dos Passos characterizes his derision toward his provincial background (220). Transitioning from the angry rabble of the crowd beneath his own poetic feet, he objectively shifts to the grey horizon of Irish immigrant Fainy McCreary’s (referred to as Mac) childhood home in Connecticut, identifying the homestead as part of an industrial unit: “When the wind set from the silver factories across the river the air of the gray fourfamily frame house where Fainy McCreary was born was choking all day with the smell of whaleoil soap” (14). Moving from public to private and rich to poor, Dos Passos collapses Whitmanesque binaries, noting how the industrial wind disperses through a breath of production, choking the

The M/other Tongues  143 air and stifling the family’s livelihood. Mac’s father’s lost job and mother’s death leaves the family no choice but to depart by train to Chicago, commencing Mac’s fleeting struggle. Indeed, Mac’s train moves through the urban voices of America while he watches “the telegraph wires that sag and soar” (21), capturing a distinctly American rhythm of communications and technology in the prewar landscape. This rhythm is captured initially when a section of William Shakespeare’s Othello is recited early on by Dos Passos’s father, whose “lawyer’s voice” is heard in the very first Camera Eye: “From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes / That I have past. / I ran it through, even from my boyish days” (33). Shakespeare’s poetry incites the nostalgic adventures of Dos Passos’s father and, later, the deceitful schemes of salesman Doc Bingham, muddling high and low aesthetics to generate a poetry that cuts across class divisions while creating parallels between them. And Doc’s interpolation into the political discourse about the farmer’s vote while on the train affirms his poetic influence and metafictive address. He ends his tribute to Othello, pronouncing to Fainy that “If after every tempest there come such calms as this / Then may the laboring bark climb hills of seas / Olympus High” (44). Doc’s lyrics recognize the heights of consumer exploitation while accenting a proletarian language that drives the workers’ plight. Ironically, still, Dos Passos later shows how William Jennings Bryan, “the boy orator of the Platte” with a “silver tongue of the plain people,” creates a Whitmanesque catalogue, conspiring for the “producing masses / of this nation and the world” in a similar poetic and stirring way (153). Fighting against the gold standard through poetic catalogue and religious treatise, his discourse elevates the poetic and communal undercurrent of Dos Passos’s work, chronicling a worker’s dissension while hypocritically sacrificing the values of the people for Jennings’s solipsistic desires. The characters and Dos Passos himself concede to the cadences of the city which, as the thirtieth Camera Eye (30) notes in 1919 (1932), illustrate an ominous dictum, while Americans are abroad during the First World War in France: “Give me liberty or give me Well they give us death” (446). The caesura between “me” and “Well” stresses an alteration from founding father Patrick Henry’s 1775 speech at the Second Virginia Convention, when Henry rallied the militia against imperial Britain. Dos Passos revises the liberty meant for the laboring class and America’s soldiers through a slow interjection that resolves into submission: No there must be some way they taught us Land of the Free conscience Give me liberty or give me Well they give us death. (446) The staggered caesuras in this section show Dos Passos’s disorientation as a soldier in France, rousing together his compatriots, for “I you we must,” while he realizes “the power and the glory” is really “theirs” (447). The

144  The M/other Tongues syntactic junctures stress the depth of the subject/object divide to acknowledge Dos Passos’s surrender, “or give me death” (447). Determined by the war machines of industrial monopoly and capital, Dos Passos’s lyrical discourses sing of the impossibility of liberty by The Big Money (1936), and while Dos Passos’s Camera Eyes reveal a Künstlerroman, the final scenes characterize imprisonment and inexpression for a group of minors from the Harlan County strike of 1931 (Pizer 181). A communal countenance typifies the imprisonment of “the men in jail [who] shrug their shoulders smile thinly our eyes look in their eyes through the bars what can I say?” (1208). And The Big Money’s epilogue focuses on the character, Vag, whose own prison discharge releases him to the edge of a vehicular and fast-paced American life: “the walk out of town with sore feet to stand and wait at the edge of the hissing speeding string of cars where the reek of ether and lead and gas melts into the silent grassy smell of the earth” (1239). The noise of the “hissing speeding string of cars” and a “reek of ether and lead and gas” recognize an excess of cultural production which counters a Whitmanesque and silent “grassy smell of the earth.” Vag finds himself on the side of the road, dreaming of the expanse and travel of an American frontier while his prospects for the future, as Dos Passos concludes, appear “[a] hundred miles down the road” (1240). The poetics of Dos Passos uncovers a dark struggle that highlights the changing refrains and toils that reflect the large scales of urban experience: a panorama of the global cityscape. He seemingly asks if his novel forms can account for the changing scale of the city and our sense of urban consciousness and language. Writing an urban poetics, Dos Passos follows changing turns that evoke both the despairs of silence and the shifting vocality of industrial society. However, as I move into the twenty-first century, the novels I highlight reveal the ways in which a poetics of New York reforms the deterministic atmosphere created by Dos Passos. While still underlining the dark capital gains and ritualized rhetoric that haunts the characters of cities past, New York incites a poetry that reverberates the sounds and sense of cultural coherence. New York is haunted by a Whitmanesque presence that reassures its denizens that Whitman himself may just be “under [their] boot-soles,” rhythmizing consciousness and drifting through the voices of the atmosphere to recreate the poetry of a global city (Portable 67).

Poetic Procreation and Homeland Insecurity in Michael Cunningham Poetic language becomes literally and figuratively manifest to enunciate the mother tongue in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days (2005). Situated as the language of the mother, Walt Whitman’s poetry recursively acts as a refrain in the novel while the nuclear family is reformed over an epoch. Using Whitman’s lines as a formal and thematic core, Cunningham shows poetry to be the “[u]rge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world”

The M/other Tongues  145 (21), and like the repeating lyrical language in the novel, Cunningham’s characters, too, are renewed to protect a human center amid a violent articulation of New York. His titular nod to Whitman introduces the peripatetic and poetic form of his novel: Specimen Days portrays a wayward experience, unraveling a teleology that highlights the gothic undertones and homeland insecurity of the American city. Critiquing the immigrant’s sense of belonging and a novel recapitulation of home, Cunningham’s revision and recursion of Whitman’s poetry critically engages Whitman’s own difficult relationship with American democracy and metropolitan progress later in his life. In fact, as Betsy Erkkila’s well-known work has shown, in the writing of Whitman’s own Specimen Days (1882), Whitman admits to the initial creation of what he calls a “negative book” to recreate an American myth of experience that embraces inclusivity and balance (Corr. 315).10 Like Whitman, Cunningham collates a negative, violent book while at the same time seeking to renew a sense of Americanness within a multidirectional and globalized world. To do this, Cunningham combines three separate generic modes that temporally advance in and around New York City and parts of the American West, using Whitman’s poetry itself as a connective machinery to conjoin disparate worlds. Spanning three distinct settings, the novel ranges from an Industrial Revolution ghost story to a post-9/11 detective thriller to a speculative, apocalyptic fiction. Cunningham redresses the sentiment of Whitman’s poetry, or as the young terrorists in his second vignette reveal, he “reverses the flow” (184). To complicate matters, Cunningham acknowledges the difficulty of reading our surroundings, or as the detective Cat from “The Children’s Crusade” articulates, “it’s getting harder to see the patterns” (168). Talking to her coworker Pete Ashbury about locating a childterrorist ring, Cat imparts, “I hope there’s something there to see. I hope it’s not just randomness. Chaos” (168). Reading the chaos at the heart of the novel expresses the struggle of enunciation for Cunningham’s marginalized and immigrant voices while they seek redemption amid violence. In this way, Cunningham incorporates lines from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to evaluate the hegemonic structures and infrastructures of the city: the poetic prose repeats, drawing attention to parallel yet unequal exchanges among ethnic, gender, and class stratifications while still underlining the possibility of order and connection for the future. Paradoxical yet constant, the characters seek to find their voices through deep-rooted poetic patterns from the past and, as it seems, from an invocation of Whitman’s poetic prose and persona. Inherently, poetic repetition emerges to underline a Whitmanesque philosophy of rebirth while also coinciding with what Gertrude Stein, in “Portraits and Repetition,” maintains is actually insistence defined by “an intensity of movement” and an emphasis different to different generations (287). Stein boldly proclaims that expressing anything there can be no repetition because the expression of that repetition is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use

146  The M/other Tongues emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis. (288) Eliding form with content even in her explanation, the insistence of language through repetition for Stein illustrates how poetic prose escapes the definitive principles of grammar through its diversion from a singular hermeneutics across time, for it is an individualized renaming of “essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything,” she notes (“Poetry” 210). Cunningham’s changing sociopolitical rhythms stress a modernist repetition with a difference, as noted above by Stein, and is also reminiscent most notably of the writings of Stein and illustrated in her novel Three Lives (1909).11 Much like Stein’s three narrative voices and even James Joyce’s Bloom, Molly, and Stephen, Cunningham’s characters find what Raymond Williams might call the “knowable community” of the city through a connective mother tongue: Cunningham offers “to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways” yet in different times, contexts, and settings (Williams, The Country 165).12 And, contrary to Stein’s dubious naturalism in Three Lives, Cunningham’s three novellas bind three separable characters within one familial core. The vignettes rotate around three central characters: a boy, a woman, and a man. Their interactions evaluate the seemingly changeable nuclear family, unsettling a notion of home and homeland within America’s national character. To do this, Cunningham’s knowable community at once links familiar social codes and learned feelings with the slippery use of poetic language, situating the familiar with the unfamiliar to further scrutinize codes of discourse and relation. Conjuring Whitman through a repetitive refrain reincarnated across time, Cunningham’s New York still moves within a poetry of the people while he also amplifies a sense of Freud’s unheimlich through voices that return as a result of what Aris Mousoutzanis has termed the “the trauma of industrialization” (130). Whitman’s poetry critiques industrial progress, calling for writing that is critical of America’s democratic character: “Patriotism,” the Whitman scholar that Cat visits notes, “implies a certain fixed notion of right versus wrong. Whitman simply loved what was” (158). Loving what was resets a notion of belonging which relies on the interrelation between urban and poetic consciousness. Hence, poetic space becomes a place for turning the machinery of the city into the machinery of a people’s poetry. Starting with an Irish immigrant story during the Industrial Revolution titled “In the Machine,” Cunningham’s evocation of Whitman opens with an important subversion: Whitman’s leaves of grass are turned into the “dirt and gravel and names on stones” of a graveyard (3). The funereal mood stresses a collapse of Whitmanesque binaries: a wedding turns into a wake, a feast turns into table scraps, and, for the twelve-year-old protagonist

The M/other Tongues  147 Lucas, the words of Whitman’s poetry resound a faithful plea: “I heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the talk of the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or end” (4). Speaking as a conduit for Whitman’s poetry, Lucas’s voice literally and figuratively sings the body electric. Lucas absorbs the surround, telling readers that if he “could rise out of his body, he would become what he saw and heard and smelled” (5). Yet, through the coloring of Cunningham’s urban milieu, the looming danger of the works, a factory which takes the life of Lucas’s brother Simon, echoes a tragic caesura that correlates Lucas’s poetry to the machines of industrialization. Speaking to the machine, Lucas realizes that “[t]he machine wouldn’t know or care, any more than Simon had” (5). The poetic turns of the machines reflect the turns of Lucas’s poetry, further implicating him into the rhythms of production and consumption which have already consumed his brother and, in part, his familial homestead. Lucas looks around his tenement, thinking “that the rooms were like the works and his parents like machinery” (37). The infrastructures of industrial society, which include the works, a charity hospital, and the Mannahatta Sewing Company, highlight the ways in which Lucas’s voice, among other voices in the novel, speaks as a “citizen of no place”: He was a stranger, a citizen of no place, come from County Kerry but planted in New York, where he grew like a blighted potato; where he didn’t sing or shout as the other Irish did; where he harbored not soul but an emptiness sparked here and there with painful shocks of love. (13) Living both here and there, Lucas, like his coworkers who “had immigrated to the works as his parents had immigrated to New York from County Kerry” (32), relinquishes his citizenship to his labor. Allegorically connecting the prosperity of the nation to that of the experience of the immigrant, Cunningham redresses a violence of poetic language, for as Lucas notes, “I wonder what it is I’m making at the works” (25). The ambiguity of making, or poiesis, aligns with the incoherence of Lucas’s ritualized verse, and Lucas struggles to be heard while hearing the whispering warning from the ghost of his brother Simon who speaks as a ghost from the machine. The continuum of life within the machine is shown through the rhythms of a breathing machine whose “little bellows rose and fell” while Lucas’s father relies on it to breathe after leaving the tannery (11), the elegiac Irish songs of the music box “that had ruined the family” by evoking the wounds of the family’s dead when it is tightly wound (9), and the turning wheels of the mechanisms of the works where Lucas himself “had set the wheel turning” (22). The turning wheels of the machines climactically exhibit terror when figuratively Whitman’s “spinning girl retreats and advances the hum of the big wheel” (54). A premonition inspired by the language of Whitman’s

148  The M/other Tongues poetry incites Simon to risk his own life to spare a call girl Catherine, who is also a “spinning girl” and pregnant mother who spins and sews thread at the Mannahatta Sewing Company. Lucas heroically sacrifices his own life, inducing a fatal injury at one of his machines at the works while telling his coworker to “[s]end for Catherine Fitzhugh, at the Mannahatta Company. Tell her I’ve been hurt” (83). Pulling Catherine away from her work, Lucas saves her from a fire at the company: a fire which fictionally parallels the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911.13 The terror of the final scenes illustrates how the “Angel of the Waters” monument at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park representatively comes to life before finally foreshadowing Lucas’s death. Previously in the novel, after looking up at the statue in the park, Lucas “saw that the angel was severe and contemplative, that she had blank and sorrowful eyes, that she had turned from heaven and looked down at earth” (78). The angel spurs Lucas to see Whitman’s kosmos: “The stars sparked, brilliant and unsteady on a field of ebony” (78) stressing the serenity of “grass and silence” along with “a field of stars” (79). However, this moment of natural tranquility later concludes when the statue becomes analogous to a “shrieking fire woman” in a moment of cultural violence that “spread her wings and flew” out of the burning flames of the Mannahatta Sewing Company (101). Cunningham writes that The fire woman shrieked toward the earth, trailing rhythms of flame. Lucas pressed closer to Catherine’s heart. His own heart, joining hers, swelled in his chest, grew bigger and bigger. He knew then that he was one of the dead and always had been. He felt his heart burst, like a peach breaking through its skin. (101) The bursting heart and flames link Lucas to the ominous narrative that moves from dust to dust. Like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History whose “face is turned towards the past” and thus perceives “a chain of events” as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (Theses 257), Cunningham’s fire woman redresses a historical outlook of America’s democratic character. The angel’s flaming wings haunt the novel, propelling the narrative from the nineteenth century into the future while Benjamin’s “storm of progress” heightens the ways in which, in his words, “the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge” (Theses 258, 260). Cunningham’s historical progress stresses an America that is old in the same ways that it is new. Still, despite the sacrificial death of Lucas, Catherine and her child are protected: the mother moves into the future with her unborn child while Lucas’s language renews a human similitude. Fittingly, the return of Catherine occurs in the mother-figure Cat in the second novella, “The Children’s Crusade.” An African American forensic psychologist in the NYPD, Cat, like Lucas, identifies that both she and her

The M/other Tongues  149 African American coworker Pete exist as strangers in post-9/11 New York. Reflecting on a sense of homelessness, she thinks to herself, we’re emigrants our native land is too barren for us, too hard what we should really and truly do is buy a good reliable used car and drive out the continent and see what we can find for ourselves. (169) Cat’s search for home is shown in the empty skyline of post-9/11 New York where “it was impossible not to be struck by the emptiness where the towers had stood” (113). The empty memory of 9/11 terror not only characterizes the skyline but also Cat’s own rent-controlled apartment. Looking around her residence, Cat “imagined it as the boys of the bomb squad would find it if she’d been blown up on the corner of Broadway and Cortland” (114). A dwelling place that reflects her own homestead insecurity, Cat’s apartment literally and figuratively characterizes Cunningham’s play on a domestic scene of terrorism: Cat’s terror stems from her own sense of loss and personal melancholia after the death of her child. Like the sliding poetic language which characterizes the child-terrorists in this section, Cat herself has “let things slide,” realizing that “[i]t all kept shifting under your feet” (114). Cat’s shifting feet further reinforce the shifting appropriation of Whitman’s poetry by terrorists who parrot the perverse language of their own “mother,” a woman who raises the gang of orphaned children in a warehouse: a woman who renames herself “Walt Whitman.” Speaking of the child-terrorist that she hears on the phone, Cat says, “he’s got the line, but he hasn’t got the circuitry to make sense of it. He’s like a vessel for someone else’s wishes. The poetry signifies something for him, but he’s not able to say what it is” (154). Poetic language underlines what it means to “be in the family” (187), or in Pete’s words, “The Brady Bunch. The Mafia. IBM. You know” (111). Correlating the company with the family, Cunningham analyzes a sense of belonging through the notion of familial bonds. In so doing, his character-mother Walt Whitman doubles for the dislocated mother in the actual Whitman’s “A Specimen Tramp Family,” described as taking care of her tramping family while her “figure and gait told misery, terror, destitution,” whose “[e]yes, voice and manner were those of a corpse, animated by unspoken voice,” a “[p]oor woman” whose language of maternal loss results in a hollow voice (166). Illustrating the effects of melancholia from the loss of her son, Cat’s silent catalogues express her inexpression as an African American woman. Yet, like the character Walt Whitman, Cat, too, becomes somewhat of a surrogate mother to the child-terrorists of the city, awaiting their calls: “She was bound to her cubicle, on the off chance of a callback. Momma is waiting. Call her. She’ll never leave you alone” (135). Cat begins communicating with one of the boys who writes her a secret message in graffiti outside her apartment door: “TO DIE IS DIFFERENT FROM WHAT ANY ONE

150  The M/other Tongues SUPPOSES, AND LUCKIER” (141). Writing this line from Whitman outside the walls of her apartment, the boy correlates Cat’s apartment with his own, a place where he and his brothers have covered the walls with pages from Leaves of Grass. This perhaps further indicates Cat’s own yearning for belonging; she, too, seems to want to “be in the family” through her link to the child-terrorist by the end of the vignette (110). Cat reinforces that she hears the connective machinery of the city, despite its grave consequences. She recognizes “the immense discordant poetry of the city (thank you, Mr. Whitman), racketed on. It all went on” (171). Reversing the flow, she recreates the mother-son relationship from “In the Machine,” first shown through Lucas’s relationship with Catherine, by way of her relationship with the child-terrorist. Eerily sharing a smile with the boy by the vignette’s end, Cat accepts the prospects of her relationship with her surrogate son: “he had ended her life and taken her into this new one, this crazy rebirth, hurtling forward on a train into the vast confusion of the world, its simultaneous and never-ending collapse and regeneration” (214). The poetry of the boy reforms Cat into a mother, for better or for worse. Recalling Whitman’s poetry, she moves toward the future, continuing to be the “[u]rge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world” (183). Hurtling into the unknown and moving from city to sea, Cat and her son characterize the beginnings of the final vignette through a “murderous smile” shared between them on the train (214). This ending revises Whitman while showing an uncanny allegiance: Cat’s smile identifies the danger inherent within this familial relationship, for being a mother characterizes a sublime experience and, as it seems, a hidden form of domestic terror. Focusing on the man in the third novella, Cunningham imagines an android named Simon programmed to speak Whitman’s poetry. “Like Beauty” characterizes a dystopian New York where drones surveille the scene and androids like Simon and his friend Marcus serve to perform violent sexual acts in Central Park for the corporation Dangerous Encounters. As mechanized outsiders, the androids are characterized best by Marcus’s Dickinsonian anaphora: “I’m nobody, who are you? Are you nobody, too?” (227). Marcus and Simon’s marginalization and exploitation critique the biopolitics of the posthuman while Simon increasingly becomes aware of the sublime nature of his poetic verse. Through this, he becomes conscious of the beautiful Nadian, Catareen, he meets in Central Park. An immigrant characterized as a literal alien from another planet, the exiled Catareen embodies the homelessness typified in the other sections of the novel: she “remove[s] herself to that lizard-eyed nowhere she seemed to call home” (294). Catareen’s eyes reflect an inexpression characterized by her voice which “sounded like a flute that could speak” (218), yet it is “hard to read. [Nadians’] voices were so sibilant, so full of slide and whistle” (237). On the run from the drones that track Simon’s escape from Dangerous Encounters and Old New York after Marcus is killed, Simon and Catareen set off on

The M/other Tongues  151 an epic American adventure west. Interestingly, America is distinguished through borders and territories that characterize a world-like configuration. Two fugitives on the run, they conspire with a fellow-outlaw and boy named Luke, and together the three create their own surrogate family through a secular faith and sublime fellow-feeling. Simon describes their connection after Catareen kills two squirrels for them to eat together: He stood over the carcasses as they slowly darkened. They put out a smell that was wild and sharp. Luke stood close by, watching. Catareen stood farther off. Simon had seen a vid once, ancient footage of a family engaged like this. The father was cooking meat on a fire as his wife and child waited for it to be done. (283) Being together arouses unconscious feelings in Simon, which, in his words, were “a floatier sensation, vaguely ticklish; an inner unmooring, like what preceded sleep” (286). Simon’s sensation makes plain of what he lacks as a nonbiological, or android, and what Catareen deems to be his stroth, or “something terrible and wonderful and amazing that’s just beyond my grasp” (253). The reach for stroth is exacerbated by the trace memory of the apocalyptic date of the summer solstice, which is “a pulse-y thing that’s always there,” as Simon tells Catareen, “like a song I can’t get out of my head” (254). Trying to find the meaning of his origins and traveling to Denver with the other two, he meets his creator, Emory Lowell. Recognizing that the verses that Simon plays in his head and sing from his mouth further introduce human feelings and subjectivity to his mechanical make-up. Lowell says, “It’s the poetry, isn’t it? All those conjurings and all that praise roiling around in your circuits” (307). Simon’s right to life is expressed in Whitman’s “many long dumb voices” flowing through him (80). The voices create a space for him to dwell within and upon expressions that are beyond his control yet help him to reveal, as he notes, “I am large, I contain multitudes” (307). Simon’s voice, like Whitman’s, becomes a way to enact perception: “My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,” he says (313). And the final novella reinforces the prevailing themes of the other two sections of the novel, resetting a brave new world which retrospectively glances back to Whitman. Lowell’s followers set off to a new planet on the summer solstice to create a civilization they call Paumanok. Revising the indigenous name of Whitman’s homestead on Long Island, New York, they intend to create a community away from the corruption of the earthly world they now inhabit. However, because of Simon’s poetic wiring, he cannot go with Lowell when he realizes that Catareen is dying: “I can be here,” he says, “I can do that. This is where I want to be” (324, 330). Through Catareen’s death, Simon illustrates “the procreant urge of the world” while remembering those

152  The M/other Tongues who pass on to other worlds: he resides both here and there (319). After Catareen’s death and Luke’s departure to Paumanok, Simon finds himself in an empty house: “The woman was in the ground. The child was on his way to another world. Simon was on his way someplace, and there might be something there” (333). Inhabiting and containing Whitman’s poetry, Simon’s commitment to the memory of his family pronounces his ability to embrace “a queer, queer race,” as indicated in Cunningham’s epigraph from Whitman’s “Song of Exposition”: “the same old human race, the same within, without, / Faces and hearts the same, feelings the same, yearnings the same, / The same old love, beauty and use the same.” Cunningham recalls Whitman’s valuable supplication, and Simon imagines possibility while riding west, a quintessential American cowboy, thinking, “there was something everywhere. He was going into his future. There was nothing to do but ride into it. A pure change happened. He felt it buzzing through his circuits. He had no name for it” (333). Unable to name the expanse of the frontier, Simon duplicates Whitman’s tension with naming.14 Crossing physical and formal boundaries, Simon’s poetry refashions not just the democratic vistas of America but also of the world, recognizing an internationality of people and poems—there and here, then and now. Addressing what Whitman calls the “solidarity of the world” accomplished by “a new chorus and diaspason,” Simon revives Whitman’s verse, recreating ways to understand how the poetry of the city creates a necessary and even otherworldly historicism (The Corr. 369). As Whitman states in “Starting from Paumanok”: One generation playing its part and passing on, Another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn, With faces turn’d sideways or backward towards me to listen, With eyes retrospective towards me. (Portable 166) Specimen Days’ retrospective poetic voice generates belonging, while Simon absorbs the aggregate voices of the past. Simon’s moral development, literally and figuratively shown through poetic discourse, expresses the physical and spiritual renewal of Whitman’s poetry.

Elegiac Images and Deixis from Joseph O’Neill’s Mind’s Eye While Cunningham celebrates the interconnectivity of Whitman’s poetry, Joseph O’Neill writes the voice of an individual consciousness unconscious of the collective self in Netherland (2008). Following Cunningham’s tribute to Whitman, O’Neill conjures Whitman’s invincible city through an epigraph: “I dream’d in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the / attacks of the whole rest of the earth; / I dream’d that was the new City of Friends.” O’Neill creates Whitman’s invincible city in post-9/11 New York by way

The M/other Tongues  153 of an elegiac realism that shapes the memories of a moving past within one static core.15 Distancing himself by way of a voice that indeed situates an American scheme within a global dream, Hans van den Broek’s voice undoes the borders of our cities and our literatures while redressing an aggregate solitude that mourns the passing of an old world approaching a new world border. Using a novel form taken from the root of poetic elegy, Hans mourns the loss of his mother and mother tongue while attempting to grapple with the criminality of American capitalism and colonialism. Hans’s voice pushes the boundaries of language, and by retrospectively evoking the death of Indo-Trinidadian Chuck Ramkissoon from the start, Hans recognizes death itself as a threshold event that motivates his telling: Chuck’s death allows for the elegist to test new conventions and crises for understanding while coming to terms with, to use the words of David Shaw’s description, “an experience not inside life but an event that takes place on its boundary” (5). O’Neill’s formal tour de force, like the generic root of the poetic elegy, in Shaw’s terms, “sooner or later reaches the limits to language” (5). O’Neill figures loss within Hans’s very vocal fabric, and Hans’s lyrical longing for his mother and motherland in The Hague, the Netherlands, evokes lost nations, peoples, and languages, attempting to show movement within permanence. O’Neill irrevocably imagines a netherland described from Hans’s sense of bereavement, further reinforcing Jahan Ramazani’s assertion that “[e]very elegy is an elegy for elegy” (8). Creating a novel which muddles generic categories and crosses geographical boundaries, O’Neill’s Netherland historicizes the global city while self-reflexively evaluating the expressive and aesthetic poignancy of the global novel.16 In this, Hans’s voice distinctly unsettles the tensions of inexpression at the heart of his transient and cosmopolitan characterization: the novel creates an enduring feeling of the unspoken while relating a sense of Hans’s homelessness. Among elegiac images and deictic discourses that intensify a sense of subjective and spatial distancing, O’Neill amplifies Hans’s lack of national and moral orientation. Deictic discourse in the novel emphasizes the problem of reference itself, and by including the “‘orientational’ features of language which relate to the situation of utterance” (Structuralist 193), as deictics are defined by Jonathan Culler, O’Neill further reveals the process of grief as an elision linking subject and object through language. Stressing the self-referentiality of language, obscure deictic discourse in the novel foregrounds a postnational displacement informed by Hans’s everyday experiences of spatial disorientation and impersonal reverie. In this, the novel does not just emphasize a loss of home and homeland but a voice at a loss to describe that very loss. Hans is distanced from the world in which he describes, and the novel blurs a clear, enunciative act and representation of the American Dream in a postnational world. Interestingly, the novel begins by describing New York as an evocative home for Hans’s family. The novel’s very opening recollects Hans’s experience of moving from London to New York while reminiscing

154  The M/other Tongues about a conversation with the senior vice president at the bank where he had worked in London: “[H]e asked me in detail where I intended to live (‘Watts? Which block on Watts?) and reminisced for several minutes about his loft on Wooster street and his outings to the ‘original’ Dean and DeLuca” (3). Mixing private habitation with public corporation, a senior vice president reminds Hans that the memories of New York’s capital cityscape dwell within his mind, evoking a resonant sense of loss: “New York’s a very hard place to leave. And once you do leave . . . I still miss it and I left twelve years ago” (3). While recognizing the vice president’s sense of “cheap longing” (4), Hans retrospectively recollects New York as a fleeting figure of home, and like F. Scott Fitzgerald invoking a “new world where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about” in The Great Gatsby (169), Hans narrates the ghosts of New York’s past, harkening back to America’s colonial beginnings and even recreating New York as New Netherland to show a sense of duration and complexity in mourning. Temporal limits become blurred, and Hans as elegist further reveals an interdependency between his sense of domestic and global terrorism. Fittingly, Hans retrospectively cuts his memory’s “grassy past to manageable proportions,” asking whether his narration secures what “keeps growing back, of course” (4). Like O’Neill’s other literary predecessor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose literary voice unravels the “unquiet darkness” of the dusty milieu of the Roaring Twenties (26), Hans’s mind’s eye attempts to recollect a dark form of urban history. He elegiacally narrates a story of New York which captures “a transitory figure” of international character while he further illustrates a paradoxical fantasy of the nation-state seemingly lost after the terror of 9/11 (4). Situating global terror by way of domestic loss, Hans’s voice narrates the collapse of his marriage in New York—a loss that is in the works even before the Twin Towers fall. Correlating the terror plot of 9/11 with the domestic plot of his union, Hans has a recurring nightmare about his own potential expendability and death while concurrently sacrificing his life to save his family in a bombed subway. Recounting the dream to his wife, however, he is soon made aware of the futility and fantasy of his heroic efforts. His wife Rachel wryly tells him, “Don’t even think about getting off that lightly” (20). Hans attempts to reconcile with his spouse, offering to relocate to London with her and their son, Jake. However, Rachel recognizes the dire circumstances of their situation and location: “Hans, this isn’t a question of geography. You can’t geographize this” (28). Rachel’s deictic “this,” used to describe the state of their marriage in terms of place-deixis, adumbrates the problem of inexpression at the base of their partnership. Hans says, “What ‘this’? What’s this ‘this’? There is no ‘this.’ This is just us. Our family. To hell with everything else” (28). Hans’s double deixis, “this ‘this,’” stresses the looming struggle of connection and communication at the root of Hans’s marriage and O’Neill’s novel. Hans confesses, “we had lost the ability to speak to each other. The attack on New York had removed any doubt about this,”

The M/other Tongues  155 and even the possibility of speech is flattened by the state of their domestic insecurity and disconnection (29). Hans repeatedly finds himself disoriented and, Rachel, too, relays the vagrancy that characterizes the present narrative of their marriage: “She’d never sensed herself so alone, so comfortless, so far from home, as during these last weeks” (29). When the two embark upon a trial separation and Rachel moves from New York to London, Hans realizes his shame stems from the fact that “it was me, not terror, she was fleeing” (30). Distanced from his family, Hans distinguishes how “[l]ife itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time” (30). This twisted spine of Hans’s family correlates to the poetic spine of O’Neill’s literary form itself. O’Neill metafictively asks whether Hans’s voice can reach beyond the realism of the domestic plot to recalibrate a postnational identity in a novel post-9/11. In the words of American poet Howard Nemerov’s “Epigrams” VII (1958), “A twist along the spine begins the form / And hides itself inside a twisted house” (64). Searching within the twisted spine of Hans’s narration and lost home, O’Neill strives for authenticity within imitation: Hans identifies the couple’s fatigue as unanswerable silence, acknowledging that “[i]t is truly a terrible thing when questions of love and family and home are no longer answerable” (23). And Hans’s fleeting lyricism further emphasizes his non/ existence at the Hotel Chelsea with “looming and shadowy hotel folk” (33). With Rachel and Jake in London, Hans describes the paralysis: “On my own, it was as if I were hospitalized at the Chelsea Hotel,” a “phantasmagoric and newly indistinct world” (31, 33). Surrounded by those adrift in the hotel and seemingly etherized by a modernist impersonality, Hans ossifies a homeless characterization: he is “noticeably lost,” drifting among the residents of the hotel in New York (72). Images of loss dwell in Hans’s memory, and the city’s geography takes on an elegiac and aesthetic persona which blurs any sense of linear time. Hans thinks: “Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day” (63). O’Neill’s evocation of surreal painter René Magritte reinforces the uneven circadian images of night and day evident in O’Neill’s New York, situating the global scale of the city as suitable to Hans’s lyric proportions while underscoring a crisis of representation.17 The novel captures Hans’s narrative tension through the dark infrastructures of a New York that takes on “a fearsome, monstrous nature whose reality might have befuddled Plato himself” (24). Hans’s Platonic distrust of the world is developed during a central subway scene, and mirroring Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), the subway’s denizens travel in “[t]hrongs who endlessly climbed and descended the passages and walkways like Escher’s tramping figures,” stressing “a hidden and incalculable process of construction or ruination” (20). Reminiscent of Ezra Pound’s image of the Parisian underground or T.S. Eliot’s timeless London cityscape which “murder[s] and create[s]” Prufrock’s overwhelming questions (Eliot,

156  The M/other Tongues Wasteland 4), the subway’s “unfathomable and catastrophic atmosphere” captures the poetic tension at the heart of the novel (20): a tension which, to use the words of Katherine V. Snyder, “celebrates and critiques, remembers and misremembers, identifies and refuses identification with [Hans’s] significant, lost other” (471). At a substantively linguistic loss, Hans moves across the subway marked by elegiac images and the city’s gothic undertones which stress the gothic current of a global stage when Hans and Rachel discuss the Bush administration and the possibility of a US war with Iraq. Hans’s narrative voice proper signifies a threat, more grandly, that characterizes an apathy central to global capitalist domination, for, as Hans puts it, he is “a political-ethical idiot” (100). Speaking about the prospects of an Iraq War, and what Rachel calls George W. Bush’s need “to destroy international law and order” and impose “the global rule of American force” (96), Hans finds himself indifferent to Rachel’s argument against America’s right-winged politics: My orientation was poor. I could not tell where I stood. If pressed to state my position, I would confess the truth: that I had not succeeded in arriving at a position. I lacked necessary powers of perception and certainty and, above all, foresight. (100) Hans is unable to counter or contribute to Rachel’s political suppositions; he drifts to another moment in time, recollecting about viewing Iraq while traveling to Hong Kong by plane: I looked out of my window and saw lights, in small glittering webs, on the placeless darkness miles below. I pointed them out to Rachel. I wanted to say something about these creaturely cosmical glows, which made me feel, I wanted to say, as if we had been moved by translation into another world. (97) Lost in reverie, Hans’s perspective of Iraq and Bush’s plan for “military and economic domination” appear as a “placeless darkness” that also underlines a sense of political indifference that he is unable to translate (95, 96). To add to this, he seems to become further lost in translation when remembering his homeland in Holland and the skirmishes within and around New York’s cricket scene. Thinking of his mother in his motherland, Hans’s reminiscences of cricket underline a visual domain of his Dutch past that nostalgically appears as a dream. His grief after the death of his mother signifies a casting away of his boyhood cricket friends to further solidify his original dislocation from Holland and what he later describes as his “dealings with the dead” (89). After his mother’s death, he identifies an acute loss of language, “a

The M/other Tongues  157 distractedness” from his own mother tongue per se: “I became subject to the distractedness that further damaged me and, of course, my family. It is tempting, here, to make a link—to say that one thing led to another. I’ve never found such connections easy” (89). And yet, in the novel, the characters of his past appear muddled as “figures of [his] dreaming” (89). As a result, when trying to assuage the “New York confusion” that he admits is “a murk of my own making” (90), Hans has no past markers by which to orient himself. When he recalls a lighthouse he has seen while visiting his mother right before her death, the items he catalogues—dunes, night clouds, rays of light—are no “longer in [his] possession.” And “if not these things—the question expressed itself as a movement of emotion—then what things?” (88). Still unable to name the unnamable, Hans tries to reconcile his past in New York and The Hague but is incapable of locating his sense of loss. Even before Rachel leaves, Hans’s long walks with his son evoke a peripatetic melancholia, and the flickering images of his mother that appear to him in New York’s streets “abet desire even in the strangest patterns” and further push him into elegiac reverie (93). The sport of cricket in New York not only nostalgically reminds Hans of his childhood in The Hague but also notably associates Hans with a history of colonialism made apparent by a gift Hans receives from IndoTrinidadian Chuck Ramkissoon. Traveling along the Hudson River by train, Hans opens the gift and finds the book, Dutch Nursery Rhymes in Colonial Times. Nostalgic for the literal and figurative mother of his homeland, Hans experiences the rhymes mustering up a longing that reveals his connection to America’s colonial history, later marked by his visit to a Brooklyn graveyard. Looking at the graves of original Dutch settlers who had “repelled the Canarsie and Rockaway Indians, and developed the pasturelands of Vlackebos and Midwout and Amersfoort,” Hans thinks: What was one supposed to do with such information? I had no idea what to think, no idea, in short, of what I might do to discharge the obligation of remembrance that fixed itself to one in this anomalous place, which offered so little shade from the incomprehensible rays of the past. (154) Hans’s obligation to remember Holland’s imperial past is blurred by his complicity within a world-capitalist system that he assumes controls him more than he controls it. Describing his job at the bank, he says, “I’m an analyst—a bystander” (103). Yet Hans’s occupation as an equities analyst delineates what he himself calls his affinity to global and economic encounters through his banker’s neologisms, and of course, a mother tongue signified by his “Double Dutch.” Discussing stock trades with colleagues, Hans explains his own nationalistic connotations in popular usage within the discourse network of the bank: “To my disproportionate credit, this informal catchphrase of

158  The M/other Tongues mine—‘Dutch’ described an ordinary recommendation, ‘Double Dutch’ a strong recommendation—had entered the language of the bank and, from there, of certain parts of the industry” (52). These punning coinages, and specifically his “Double Dutch,” signify gibberish and an uncertainty of meaning in language that associates the tensions of Hans’s discourse within the economic agency that later, and ironically, manifests in Chuck’s dreams of the cricket field. Hans’s complicity within the economic networks of the bank reinforces the invisible and imperial power of globalization. And his lack of global agency and responsibility also draws attention to the lack of narrative point of view able to bridge the relationship between stark nationalistic tropes and their authenticity in a global milieu. Intrinsically, the colonizing nature of cricket plays out through the nationalistic discourse of Chuck Ramkissoon. Chuck literally and figuratively narrates a dark past within a violent present in America, muddling the lines between the aesthetics and economics associated with cricket.18 On the one hand, cricket motivates Chuck’s capital gains and American exceptionalism. Imagining the creation of a New York Cricket Club and its global lure, Chuck tells Hans: Ready? Global TV rights. A game between India and Pakistan in New York City? In a state-of-the-art arena with Liberty Tower in the background? Can you imagine the panning shots? We’re thinking a TV and Internet viewership of seventy million in India alone. Seventy million. Do you have any idea how much money this would bring in? CocaCola, Nike, they’re all desperate to get at the South Asian market. (80) On the other hand, Chuck’s keen business sense does indeed imagine an international and ecstatic cricket playground that represents a sense of solidarity much in line with Whitman’s city “where all men were like brothers” (Portable 209). This internationality can most readily be seen on the cricket field, “a patch of America sprinkled with the foreign-born strangely at play” (120), and on the streets of “the real Brooklyn” where O’Neill colors “assorted small businesses proclaiming provenances from Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Armenia, Ghana, the Jewry, Christendom, Islam” (146). It is here that O’Neill seeks to parallel Whitman’s commitment to inclusivity and community. However, creating a subcommunity of immigrants in the text, O’Neill identifies cricket as a binding force that, in fact, unifies at the same time that it exploits New York’s immigrant subcommunities. Chuck’s life motto to “think fantastic” (80) refashions cricket as an equalizer among Americans while he seeks to capitalize upon the economic differences of the world, telling Hans: Americans cannot really see the world. They think they can, but they can’t. I don’t need to tell you about that. Look at the problems we’re

The M/other Tongues  159 having. It’s a mess and it’s going to get worse. I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. (211) Explaining cricket as “an ancient national sport, with new leagues, new franchises, new horizons,” Chuck depends on inflated national myths and democratic rhetoric to pursue his American Dream on an international stage. Hans recognizes the rhetorical nature of Chuck’s discourse: “From time to time, Chuck actually spoke like this,” he admits, when listening to Chuck describe the “noble bald eagle [that] represents the spirit of freedom” (75). The indexical references or place-deixis to Chuck’s overstated notions of the nation underlines the “no-man’s land of frozen bushes and scrubland” of Floyd Bennet Field in Brooklyn which Chuck plans to transform into the newly created Bald Eagle cricket field (80): “Jesus,” Hans asks, “where are we?” … Chuck said, “This is it. This is where it’s going to be.” (81) Chuck’s plan to build the cricket arena further distinguishes the sport within a deictic ambiguity colored in mystery. The identification that “This is it. This is where it’s going to be” then also points out Chuck’s association between American nationalism and big business. Chuck tells Hans, This cricket thing, this is a different deal. This is the big time. I don’t need Abelsky [his business partner] for this. I don’t want him involved. What does Abelsky know about the cricket market? No, this is my project, this has got my name in it. (135) Chuck’s deixis that explains “this cricket thing” further marks his ambiguous intents motivated by a material world: his capital enterprises that give voice to the immigrant sport of cricket in America as a “lesson in civility” (15), at the same time, occludes empty corruption at the core of his national philosophy. Chuck’s affiliation with weh-weh gambling, real estate, and kosher sushi celebrate colonial authority, and just like Fitzgerald, O’Neill highlights a dark narrative mimesis at the heart of his character’s intents. Chuck situates himself within the peculiar place of American mimicry and men, idealizing nationalistic discourse and the emblems of America’s forefathers to underpin cricket as a floating signifier that acknowledges America as a vicious colonial power while speaking with a “surprising readiness” (202) that correlates him with the “romantic readiness” of Jay Gatsby (Fitzgerald 6).

160  The M/other Tongues Through this ambiguity, it is evident that even Chuck cannot quite discern where “this” cricket means: In this country, we’re nowhere. We’re a joke. Cricket? How funny. So we play as a matter of indulgence. And if we step out of line, believe me, this indulgence disappears. What this means what this means is, we have an extra responsibility to play the game right. (15) Playing the game right underlines a deep-seated injustice and xenophobia that juxtaposes black versus white: “You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of a cricketer. Put of white to feel black,” Chuck tells the players (16). The tensions that situate Chuck on the threshold of black/white colonial violence are figuratively addressed through a standoff between Indo-Trinidadian Chuck and Kittian Tino, another player on the cricket field in the opening of the novel. Chuck’s national principles face-off against “this unreal dawdling gunman” (13), and Chuck and Tino illustrate a violence within the immigrant community that excludes Hans’s white, Dutch provincialism. After all, Hans “experience[s] the occasion as a kind of emptiness” (13), revealing his white indifference to the violence inherent in a Manichean divide that typifies Chuck’s mimetic American exceptionalism. Chuck’s complicity in the colonial past highlights a tired national narrative accentuated through his discourse, for as Hans tells him, “[t]here’s a difference between grandiosity and thinking big” (212). Yet despite Hans’s underlined apathy, he is also drawn to Chuck: I had him down as a lover of contingencies and hypotheses, a man cheerfully operating in the subjunctive mood. The business world is densely margined by dreamers, men almost invariably, whose longing selves willingly submit to the enchantment of projections and pie charts and crisply totted numbers, who toy and toy for years, like novelists, with the same sheaf of documents. (103) The longing at the base of Chuck’s persistent dreaming and aesthetic creation of a New York Cricket Club, however, also characterizes Chuck’s downfall. Hans notes that [i]t’s the incompleteness of reverie that brings trouble—that, one might argue, brought Chuck Ramkissoon the worst trouble of all. His head wasn’t sufficiently in the clouds. He had a clear enough view of the gap between where he stood and where he wished to be, and he was determined to find a way across. (104)

The M/other Tongues  161 Chuck endeavors to gain a capital means of cohabitation and coexistence, believing that through cricket one can spur the other. However, Chuck never finds a way to enmesh his fantastic discourse with his life’s recourse, and his tragic death is foreshadowed by O’Neill’s satirical critique of the 2003 Thanksgiving Day Parade, once more eliding the capitalistic violence at the center of our personal, national, and global networks. Allegorically underscoring America’s uncontrollable corruption within the global capitalism of a fast-food chain, a Ronald McDonald float in the parade magnifies a frenzied violence at the base of Chuck’s business transactions. After the parade, Hans never sees Chuck again and, only later, when he hears of Chuck’s body turning up dead in the Gowanus Canal, does Hans retrospectively reflect over the loss. The loss at the heart of Chuck’s endeavors is emphasized when Chuck’s partner, Abelsky, notes: He was a nobody. A nothing. But I saw something in this guy. He was a great guy, a terrific guy. If I find out the fuck who gone and did this, I’m going to kill him with my hands. That’s a promise I make to his wife. (231) The end to Chuck’s story tragically remains unspoken in Abelsky’s words, for “who gone and did this” to “this guy” persists as an untold story of another immigrant searching for the American Dream in New York. The mystery shrouding Chuck’s death, however, sheds light on the resolution of Hans’s story, underlining the irony at the heart of the global novel itself. For O’Neill critiques the circulation and expression of a diverse multinational identity which, ironically, is negated through the unspoken death of Indo-Trinidadian Chuck and the final thoughts and experiences of Hollander Hans. And so Hans, and perhaps O’Neill, has the last words on the loss of the great American novel at home in the world. And yet, Hans’s final memory of his own mother, as he stands atop the London Eye Ferris Wheel, situates readers in a common faith located within a dream of New York. Hans remembers New York as a young boy with his mother: “an extraordinary promise in what we saw—the tall approaching cape, a people risen in light” (256). Looking at his own son and wife while riding the Ferris wheel, Hans perceives the uplifted faces of his family and their future. With a memory of his own mother brought to feeling by the promise of New York, Hans reflects her face within his own while, as he recounts it, he comes “to face [his] family with the same smile” (256). Hans calls for us to reterritorialize a perception of our world through a dream of the people who live there while moved by the cosmic wonder and memory of New York City.

Spinning Voices and Poems on the High Wires of Colum McCann Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) gives agency to the spinning power of poetry in a world where, seemingly, to use the words of

162  The M/other Tongues William Butler Yeats, “[t]hings fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” McCann imagines the voices of New York denizens creating a connective mother tongue. Despite the novel’s emphasis on the public loss of 9/11 through the personal losses of its characters, McCann’s voices regenerate the words of the world within the city: the characters’ wounds, in a sense, evoke their words. Through interlocking patterns that enact the gap of silence amid the drive of expression, McCann creates a rhythmic poetic narrative in Let the Great World Spin that also coincides with what Eóin Flannery contends is an empathic democratization of storytelling, one that is also shown in McCann’s novel Zoli (2006).19 He shifts through diverse voices, creating repetitive refrains that evoke what McCann himself refers to as “a Whitmanesque song of the city” (368). As Stacey Olster has shown, Whitman’s presence in McCann’s novel resonates within turning phrases of slang which reveal “shared language and speech acts that McCann offers as facilitating consolidation” (19).20 To add to this, the poetic structure of the novel muddles binary tensions to celebrate a Whitmanesque creed of regeneration: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,” the poet tells us in “Song of Myself” (67). Let the Great World Spin’s poetic conventions celebrate a tension between circular and linear patterns that, much like the sonnet, resolves within an act of love: what Brian McHale calls the measure versus countermeasure of poetry, otherwise known as its spin versus its drive, to evoke change through the material segments and parallel turns of language (17). Unlike Yeats, McCann intertextually embraces a sense of poiesis to show how “[t]hings don’t fall apart” (325). Poetry’s spin, otherwise known as its turn and structurally celebrated in a sonnet’s volta, celebrates the shift of the poem. And by creating a palimpsestic turn and return of language through episodic gaps and caesuras, poetic repetition “marks the collective in language, revealing a polypony and taking poetic expression beyond a single voice” (Greene 1169). McCann’s voices regenerate, showing each voice as contributing to a larger whole. The voices of a dozen or so characters in Let the Great World Spin both perform and spin language to its varied uses through a network of echoes that begins by stressing the heights of traumatic memory and an unbalanced allocation of American freedom. Finding sameness within difference, poetic discourse reveals the patterns of quotidian life. As the Upper East Side mother Claire thinks, “[a] logic in every living thing. The patterns you get in flowers. In people. In water buffalo. In the air” (83). Democratizing language among the patterns of New York denizens, the city itself occupies the most totalizing viewpoint, allowing McCann to individuate histories while underlining the patterns of a collective body through language, which Bronx mother Gloria remembers her own mother referring to as “justful” (287). Fittingly, the city itself takes on a larger-than-life characterization, allowing McCann to bridge gaps among characters for one day. Notably, McCann begins with a sublime, poetic metaphor that elides mortality with regeneration. The rattle of New York City’s sounds and

The M/other Tongues  163 voices merges before descending upon an extended caesura that draws attention to “a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful” (3). A convergence of New Yorkers sets their sights on the high-wire performance of French tightrope walker Philippe Petit (3). Beginning with Petit’s historic walk across the World Trade Center Towers in 1974, McCann celebrates the aesthetics of an awe-inspiring feat while also uncannily evoking the sublime violence of September 11, 2001. The tension of Petit’s high-wire line underscores a poetic tension—between death and life, past and present. McCann’s depiction of Petit’s performance evokes Paul Auster’s intrigue with Petit’s aesthetic acrobatics: “High-wire walking is not an art of death but an art of life—and life lived to the very extreme of life. Which is to say, life that does not hide from death, but stares it straight in the face” (258). Situating his novel in the 1970s while echoing post-9/11 sociopolitical polemics, McCann reveals a historicity that colors a sense of renewal amid violence, or as Judge Soderberg’s friend Harry reminds him: “To not falling To being able to get back up” (264). The movement of the tightrope walker among variegated voices structurally drives the entangled narratives of the novel. In particular, his careful balance and movements evoke the act of poetic creation: Petit embodies a living poetry that writes the city, allowing him to be “inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air, no future, no past carrying his life from one side to the other” (164). Floating on the wire, Petit marks the rhythmic feet of poetry and the possibilities of the balanced perception of McCann’s characters: One foot on the wire—his better foot, the balancing foot. First he slid his toes, then his sole, then his heel. He paused there a moment, pulled the line tighter by the strength of his eyes. (163–4) United by Petit’s embodied form, which “held them there,” New Yorkers become a communal form, “their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary” (3). Bringing the city together, Petit moves the crowd’s voices through the metropolis, for the “air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before,” stressing how “[e]verything had purpose, signal, meaning” (7, 162). Capturing the poetic feet and embodied voices of the city, the high-wire man characterizes a cohesive community. The world of New York moves among the poetic feet of McCann’s characters, allowing them to glance at the imminence of death while walking, as he puts it in an accompanying essay, on a wire “an inch off the ground” (357). Significantly this rewriting of the city is performed while underlining “a whole new language of trauma” (72) spoken through diverse maternal voices, from a 38-year-old prostitute living in the South Bronx to a 52-yearold housewife living on Park Avenue. Characterizing Whitman’s m/other

164  The M/other Tongues tongues, the maternal voices illustrate New York’s crowds by describing the women’s sense of belonging in a global city. Beginning with the voice of his own motherland, Ireland, McCann uses the storytelling of an Irish mother to enact the recursive flow of the many diverse voices of his text: Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn’t have been there, and if I had been there, I could not be here, but I am here, and I wasn’t there, but I’ll tell you anyway: Once upon a time and long ago. (68) The mother of Irish brothers Ciaran and John Andrew Corrigan (known as Corrigan) transports the boys through stories of diverse places and people. Ciaran and Corrigan’s memory of their mother is associated with her affiliation with music and specifically a sea tide that later becomes manifest through Corrigan’s search for a radical faith in New York, stressing the idea that “[w]e bring home with us even when we leave” (59). Looking at Corrigan in his youth, Ciaran reflects, “I should have known even then that the sea was written in him, that there would be some sort of leaving. The tide crept in and the water swelled at his feet” (12). The swelling water distinguishes a circular language which reverberates through Corrigan’s circular prayers even as a child: “The closer he got to sleep the more rhythmic the prayers got, a sort of jazz, though sometimes in the middle of it all I could hear him curse, and they’d be lifted away from the sacred” (13). Simultaneously cursing and praying, Corrigan’s “quick, sharp rhythms” delineate a secular divinity linked to the sea itself as a symbolic mother (13). By calling out to another Irish exilic writer, McCann evokes James Joyce’s Ulysses through Corrigan’s walks by the sea past Martello Tower, underlining the symbolic sea as a representation of his motherland. In the opening of Ulysses, Buck Mulligan associates the sea with “a great sweet mother” as per “Algy” (or Swinburne), while evoking the death of Stephen Dedalus’s mother (4). As in Ulysses, the sea represents Corrigan’s own maternal sentiments and a secular faith that links him to other mothers in the novel. Indeed, images of the sea convey a poetic rhythm for both McCann and Joyce, as per this section in Ulysses: “White breast of the dim sea. The twinning stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twinning chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide” (8). Like the seamother in Joyce’s Ulysses, the ebb and flow of the sea typifies Corrigan’s sense of Ireland in America, where he searches for what Walt Whitman might call the ebb and flow of the “ocean of life.” Whitman’s poem, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” finds the world at home in the shores of Paumanok, where the poet is electrified by the sea and the poetry of his home: As I ebb’d with the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know,

The M/other Tongues  165 As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok, Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways, I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems, Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe. (Portable 184) Crying for his own castaways, Corrigan embodies “a fierce old mother,” and later connects a great many characters through his vernacular language and secular faith. He prays for “the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,” finding a sense of universality born through a unity of faith in the voicings of his language. As a monk in the Catholic Order, Corrigan is sent to America, where he becomes “some bright hallelujah in the shitbox of what the world really was” (15). He takes care of the misfits of society in the South Bronx— the homeless drunks, the delinquents, the elderly—along with the prostitutes who are “stretched in a line along the block,” calling to him “in their singsong [which] hit the scale on about three different notes. Corr—i-gan, Cor—rig-gan. Caw-rig-gun” (38). Corrigan offers the prostitutes a refuge at his apartment in the South Bronx: “leave the door open for them, will ya?” he tells Ciaran (38). Dedicated to the Order, Corrigan provides a place of belonging for others while he discovers a faith at “the edge of the world here” that defines the very fabric of his life in New York (37). Becoming a sacrificial figure, Corrigan spins his verses, paradoxically speaking of the love and loss that dwells in his relationship with another mother, Adelita—a Guatemalan nurse who evokes feelings in him prohibited by the celibacy rules of the Order. After Corrigan loses his virginity, Adelita speaks of a love that allows us to “come alive in bodies not our own” (275). And Corrigan describes feeling alive and at home with Adelita in her clapboard house: “I wanted nothing but the here and now, and nowhere else. On earth as it is in heaven. That one moment. And then after a few days, I started going to her house” (55). Despite their connection, Corrigan’s love for Adelita later resolves in an unexpected and spinning death. After Corrigan tries to help motherdaughter prostitutes Tillie and Jazzlyn in the Tombs and courtrooms of lower Manhattan, his car whips “into a spin across all three lanes, like some big brown dancing thing” (69). The spinning fate of Corrigan and Jazzlyn connects and binds the characters through bereavement from hereafter, and McCann emphasizes the spinning fates, or Greek Moirai, that centrifugally drive all the characters’ lives—weaving within and without each other’s destinies: “Perhaps it’s chance,” Ciaran notes, “[o]r perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are all

166  The M/other Tongues valuable” (68). The deaths of Corrigan and Jazzlyn act as an apex, creating interconnections between the many voices of citizens who are rhythmized to the beats of Corrigan’s “heart machine blipping. The line like water. Not returning to any original place. The city wore it now, the swirls, the whorls. Fumes of the fresh” (71). Belonging to the turns of the city, the deaths of Corrigan and Jazzlyn counterpoint the other voices, globalizing a sense of belonging through local loss—a gap in the narrative of their lives. Adelita remembers Corrigan through her memories of him on her couch in the morning, thinking, “I know already I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive,” reflecting how “[the memory] fits in the space of every other morning I wake into” (284). Corrigan dwells within the gaps of memory wherever Adelita goes, providing an irony that evokes the memory of Corrigan even after his passing. Even through his last words which speak of “a moment of beauty” when Corrigan mumbles “a jumble of words, a man, a building” (284), Adelita remembers the imminence of mortality through the uncertain balance of the high-wire man and the transience of her relationship. The voices of bereavement cross to the memories of a different mother. Claire Soderberg’s voice illuminates paratactic lines and disjointed thoughts to reflect a disordered interiority at odds with an ordered reality in her New York home on Park Avenue: “From outside, the sounds of Park Avenue. Quiet. Ordered. Controlled. Still the nerves jangle in her” (73). Claire’s jangled thoughts move from imagining the perils of the high-wire man to remembering her dead son, Joshua, who lost his life while serving as a computer hacker for the government during the Vietnam War. Appropriating a language of loss through memory, Claire thinks of Joshua writing to her from Saigon: “Mama, this place is a nothing place, take all the places in the world and give me nothing instead” (107). Ironically, Joshua’s language brings something to nothing for Claire, literally and figuratively: his code as a computer hacker is described as “a Walt Whitman poem” because, as he writes his mother, “you can put in it everything you want” (89). And thinking of his transience, Claire evokes Joshua’s life through his own poetic code that describes his work while at war. The “Death Hack” is Joshua’s main project (88), and he steadily inputs the names of dead soldiers, “punch[ing] the buttons alive” amid “[t]he web of wires. The whirl of switches. The purr of fans” (87). The dead soldiers are animated in Joshua’s virtual database, and he describes his work as ossifying “[a] poem in a rock. A theorem in a slice of stone,” recognizing how “[t]he programmers were the artisans of the future” (88–89). The codes of Joshua’s language are repeated not only through Claire’s memories, but later in the novel through the computer hackers who hear of the high-wire performance in Palo Alto. Hackers such as Sam and Compton appropriate Joshua’s language, in a sense, bringing him alive again as if “opening up a field. One gate led to another, and another, over the hill, and soon he was on a river and away, rafting down the wires” (87). Machines

The M/other Tongues  167 become part of a natural continuum, which, too, resounds within Claire’s thoughts by conjuring the man on the wire “like a hack in her morning” with her women’s support group: “How dare he do that with his own body? Throwing his life in everyone’s face? Making her own son’s look so cheap?” (113). Thinking of personal loss within a communal performance, Claire is taken by death as a democratizing force in a Whitmanesque catalogue: Death by drowning, death by snakebite, death by mortar, death by bullet wound, death by wooden stake, death by tunnel rat, death by bazooka, death by poison arrow, death by pipe bomb, death by piranha, death by food poisoning, death by. (113) The catalogue adumbrates Claire’s trauma, and the inability to come to terms with her own son’s mortality: “I will not take this jar of ashes. This jar of ashes is not what my son is” (108). Unlike Wallace Stevens’s own jar, which sprawls to life in the landscape of Tennessee, the anecdotal jar of Joshua’s ashes evokes loss while Joshua remains vivid in Claire’s mind, resounding a democratic and patriotic refrain that connects to the unknown fate of the walker: Claire’s women’s group thinks, “this was now and real, and the worst thing was that they didn’t know the walker’s fate” (99). Claire and her support group conjure the “man in the air, walking,” wondering whether “he had jumped or had fallen or had gotten down safely” (92, 99). Through the man’s gamble with existence, Claire recognizes how their lost sons “are brought together. Even here. On Park Avenue. We hurt and have one another for healing” (114). Like her son’s connective code, Claire spins the memories of death to create a communal drive that pushes toward life. The lyrical and fragmented meditation of Tillie Henderson, Jazzlyn’s mother, becomes the most notable and poignant maternal voice of the novel, and Tillie’s suicide regenerates a new life for her family. Tillie vocalizes an epic poetics describing “[t]he house that Horse built” (236). By paralleling the cumulative tale and British nursery rhyme, “The House that Jack Built,” Tillie weaves stanzas that recount the cyclical traumas that define her life as a prostitute in New York in a nearly 40-page dramatic monologue. The very structure of her narration illustrates an entrapped existence, reaffirming, as she satirically notes, that she doesn’t attain the balance of democracy, for she is “[t]oo old to be an acrobat, too young to die” (29). Thoughts of home for Tillie stem from dreams of “a big house with a fireplace and deck out the back with lots of nice furniture” (202). However, instead of speaking from the room of that house, Tillie’s displaced memories of home and family speak from a prison cell at Rikers Island among the roaches, which, like her, “rattle across the floor” (212). Tillie’s longing for home resonates in her poetic and maternal feelings. In fact, after Tillie and her daughter, Jazzlyn, are arrested, motherhood is on both of their minds. Thinking of her own two daughters, Jazzlyn wonders, “Who’s gonna look after the babies?”

168  The M/other Tongues and Tillie takes the blame so that Jazzlyn can go free (199). After Jazzlyn’s sudden death, the refrain of Tillie’s narration repeatedly expresses maternal longing, emphasizing a matriarchal mourning: “you’re your mother and her mother before you and her mother before her, a long line of mothers stretching way before Eve, french and nigger and dutch and whatever else came before them” (219). Redressing a sense of motherly loss, Tillie evokes her maternal experience as a cycle of emptiness: “I am the mother and my daughter is no more,” and later repeating, “[t]his is the house that Horse built. This is the house that Horse built” (211, 219). In so doing, Tillie also emphasizes that she has “been thinking about the noose” and how she’ll hang it in “[t]he shower stall [which] is the best place,” to further associate her present incarceration with a trauma of black lynching (210, 212). Through Tillie and her daughter’s Jazzlyn’s motherdaughter union, McCann illustrates intergenerational violence and a connective refrain. When Tillie first hears of Jazzlyn’s accident, she tells us, “I just stood there beating my head against the cage like a bird” (212). The beats that Tillie creates against the bars of the cage echo the futility of the songs of Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird” (1983), who “sings / with fearful trill / of things unknown / but longed for still” (Angelou 17). Following her daughter Jazzlyn, Tillie never makes it home: “There ain’t no such thing as getting home. That’s the law of living far as I can see” (236), and her voice illustrates the law of the unliving through displacement. Speaking through a disjointed mosaic, Tillie’s narration adumbrates her experiences living on the streets of New York City where “[s]ome guy stepped right over me without looking down” (198, 201). Tillie’s voice takes readers on a journey where “hooking” and “strolling” stress, like Petit’s walk, an embodied performance which relies on “a hundred little stupid sayings like I was singing an old song” (199, 203). Recalling the dropping of her lines and body upon her male clients, Tillie remembers one client she refers to, at times, as her father or husband, even though “[she] never even had a father or husband” (214). Imagining home as otherwise and elsewhere, Tillie expresses the fractured lines of the city, weaving a faith that aligns with Ciaran and Corrigan’s own search for home through the lines of Rumi: “Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home” (60, 62). Rumi’s line, first recited by Tillie and later ruminated on by Ciaran, links motifs that underline the prominence of the verse for all the characters. The last stanza of the poem reads: I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whosoever brought me here, will have to take me home. This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say. I don’t plan it. When I’m outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all. (Rūmī 2)

The M/other Tongues  169 Rumi’s poem suggests the silence inherent in Tillie’s discourse, and Tillie’s narration ends with a stark finality through suicide: “I’d say good-bye, except I don’t know who to say it to,” she says (236). Despite the melancholic tone and structure of “the house that Horse built,” Tillie’s maternal bereavement reverberates through the voices of mothers who reclaim Tillie’s loss through her granddaughters. Both Gloria and Claire, two disparate mothers, possess McCann’s claim that “in others the ongoing of ourselves” (349); they keep Tillie’s dream of a home for her granddaughters a reality. In essence, the mothers bring the girls home. Gloria and Claire spin the spirit of Tillie, and despite their different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, the women’s own connection allows for Gloria to become a mother to Jazzlyn (later changed to Jaslyn) and her sister Janice after the loss of their biological mother and grandmother. Gloria says: Them two babies need looking after. It was a deep-down feeling that must’ve come from long ago. Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots and touches everything in sight. (284) Gloria’s voice speaks of resiliency amid despair, and she parallels the circular refrain of Tillie’s own story through a background defined by her African American ancestry and her mother’s singsong from Africa which “tied her to a home she had never seen” (287): “My grandmother was a slave. Her mother too,” Gloria thinks (299). Despite experiencing the Great Depression as a child in Missouri, the deaths of her two brothers in the Second World War, and the deaths of her three sons in the Vietnam War, Gloria grasps the interconnections within an ever-changing world in New York: “everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last and connected” (306). The strange connection which brings Gloria and Claire together stems from Claire’s own inherent prejudice as she begs Gloria to stay in her apartment out of loneliness when the grieving mothers are about to depart: “You know, I’d be happy to pay you, Gloria” (299). Claire’s racist remark historicizes their relationship. Yet it later resolves itself in a new connection between the women. After Gloria is mugged while returning to the South Bronx, Claire bathes and, in a sense, mothers Gloria. Taking Gloria back to her Bronx home, the women cross physical and mental boundaries that separate them. Crossing the Triborough Bridge into the Bronx, the women find Jazzlyn’s daughters, described by Gloria as “two darling little girls coming through the globes of lamplight,” being taken away by social workers (321). Gloria becomes a mother again, creating a bridge to the children, which also ends the novel through the narration of grown-up Jaslyn, who eloquently summarizes the relations between the women: “The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last” (349).

170  The M/other Tongues While sitting at the edge of her Aunt Claire’s deathbed, Jaslyn imagines [t]he world spinning” (349). Jaslyn thinks at this moment of both of her mothers: She likes the word mother and all the complications it brings. She isn’t interested in true or birth or adoptive or whatever other series of mothers there are in the world. Gloria was her mother. Jazzlyn was too. They were like strangers on a porch, Gloria and Jazzlyn, with the evening sun going down: they just sat there together and neither could say what the other one knew, so they just kept quiet, and watched the day descend. (346–7) The voices of many mothers bring to the city an understanding of the mother tongues that delineate its languages and lyrics. Opening the window of Claire’s room, Jaslyn looks out and feels the sensory atmosphere of New York City alive at her feet: “The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough” (349). The spinning characters endure amid tragedy, and McCann’s sonnet to New York City turns and returns within the voices of his characters, evoking unity amid tragedy. Let the Great World Spin seeks forward progress that indeed embodies the titular line that McCann derives from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall” (1842): “Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range, / Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.” McCann’s “grooves of change” create gaps between voices while binding them together, ringing a rhythmic reciprocity among a miasma of traumatic experiences. The poetic character of New York City yields to Tennyson’s “Federation of the world,” and the voices of regeneration ring in the present while evoking Whitman’s city of the past. Weaving the global voices of an American creed, Cunningham, O’Neill, and McCann recognize the potential renewal of the voices and poetics of the city. Amid the hierarchical inequities spurred by the onslaught of globalization, the novels seek to regain a sense of democracy through the language of poetry. The mothers and mother tongues of New York City perform the rhythms of a language at home in the world. And by evoking Whitman, the novels revive New York, renaming its changing registers while listening to the expressions of, to use Whitman’s words, “[a] million people—manners free and superb—open voices” which characterize a “city of hurried and sparkling waters! City of spires and masts! City nested in bays! My city! (Portable 229). A sense of belonging scales among the masses, resetting poetry itself as a regenerative force that crosses boundaries.

Notes 1 This recognition comes from past critical scholarship which presents Whitman’s city as both national place and international space as recognized by Malcolm Andrews’s “Walt Whitman and the American City” (1988), Alan Trachtenberg’s “Whitman’s Lesson of the City” (1996), and Walter Grünzweig’s “‘For America—

The M/other Tongues  171 For all the Earth’: Walt Whitman as an International(ist) Poet” (1996). Recent critics like Edward Whitley recognize the critical foundation of Whitman’s city, arguing that Whitman’s “A Broadway Pageant” (1860) situates the poet’s local and global framework specifically within New York (452). 2 Interestingly, the shifting mother tongues in this project redress the m/others of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855–1871) which shift within his varied editions. As Beth Jensen’s study shows, Whitman’s mother is a somewhat protean figure, and her gender identity can be associated with a presence-absence and Julia Kristeva’s theory of subject formation which, as Jensen notes, shows the “suppression of the M/other in cultural and subject formation” (17). The contemporary authors in this study recognize Whitman’s contradictions while stressing the voice of Whitman’s poetry which describes his m/others through binary abjections and his relationship to the maternal ocean. 3 See Whitman, Leaves of Grass 1856. 4 Blasing describes the ways the sounds of language become apparent through poetic form because “the prescriptive shape of the language itself becomes audible, and the ‘voice’—an individuating emotional inflection and rhythm, a voiceprint of the speaker—is heard in and as its manner of submission to the constraints of a prescriptive code” (5). Different from rhetoric because the lyric subject must both speak the words and be spoken by them, lyrical language accounts for “the experienced effect of an individuated speaker [that] lies in an experience of linguistic materials that are in excess of what can be categorically processed—an experience guaranteed by the formality of poetry” (27). Blasing cites an obliviousness to meaning that is the “inhumanity of the linguistic code” (7), which gives speakers an experience of both the empty meanings of language and the feelings attached to language’s material elements. 5 Of course, my chapter also underlines the hybrid nature of my argument, and the ways in which writers muddle the well-known divisions between poetry and prose. As Dino Franco Felluga notes, “the future calls for perverse crossings,” and the comingling of poetic discourse within prose allows for complex cultural critiques, scrutinizing the status quo through the renderings of knotty verbal intensities and codes of enunciation (490–91). Lyric discourse, too, as Rei Terada would have it, conjoins within a larger generic network, normalizing a grander dialogue among literary expressions (195–6). Creating a common discourse within an urban milieu, poetic expression binds people together while looking outside of a monolingual cultural history as well as Platonic and Aristotelian generic paradigms. 6 See Blanche Housman Gelfant’s The American City Novel (1954), Arnold L. Goldsmith’s The Modern American Urban Novel (1991), Hana Wirth-Nesher’s City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (1996), and Ted L. Clontz’s Wilderness City: The Post World War II American Urban Novel from Algren to Wideman (2005). 7 De Certeau’s well-known “Walking in the City” (1984) describes peripatetic city dwellers and a network of “these moving, intersecting writings [which] compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other” (93). The democratic process is underscored in De Certeau’s “chorus of idle footsteps” (97), and walking is described to be “a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation” (97). De Certeau explains how walkers expose fluctuating structures of power to appropriate urban topography while also recognizing the city as a place of “transformations and appropriations” (95). 8 Like De Certeau, Williams and Lefebvre theorize the double city. In The Country and the City (1973), Williams identifies the city’s twofold condition, recognizing the contrast between “the systematic and the random, the visible and obscured”

172  The M/other Tongues as the dominant social form (154). Capturing the capital city in writing requires, as Williams analyzes Charles Dickens, “a continual dramatization”: “The spirit of the city is the fictional method,” he says, “or the fictional method is the experience of the city” (154). In The Urban Revolution (1970), Lefebvre, too, discerns a fictional dramatization by differentiating between what he calls the habitat and habiting in the city. Noticing a poetry of the city, what he calls “habiting” or lived experience, Lefebvre points out its repression by what he calls “habitat,” or a set of basic functions (81–83). The dialectical tension between the two reveals urban dynamics and globalism (85). 9 See Hughson, “In Search of the True America” (1973); Weeks, “The Novel as Poem” (1980); and Price, “Whitman, Dos Passos, and ‘Our Storybook Democracy’” (1994). 10 Whitman’s experiences in Specimen Days (1882) are self-described as capturing “the wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary” experience (8). However, as Erkkila has shown, the design and balance of Specimen Days uncover more of a conscious effort at Whitman’s sense of balance and recursion (303), and Whitman admits that his “negative book” indeed highlights the “living touches and contact points” which culminate in a panoramic collation of his critique and myth of American experience (Corr. 315). 11 The characters Anna, Melanctha, and Lena, in Three Lives, at once are at odds while absorbed within modern society. The three immigrant women, and thereby “three lives” which Stein reveals, circulate among a continuum of swirling connotations—nuances of Stein’s words redefine consciousness through repetition and motif. 12 Raymond Williams’s analysis of Joyce’s Ulysses in The Country and the City (1993) stresses how the aggregate relationship of Bloom, Molly, and Stephen manifests the loss of the city and the loss of relationships: “It is abstracted or more strictly an immanent pattern of man and woman, father and son; a family but not a family, out of touch and searching for each other through a myth and a history” (245). Williams argues that their “knowable community” is the desire of “racing and separated forms of consciousness” (245), which also situates a human community through language itself: “[t]he greatest of Ulysses is this community of speech” (245). Likewise, in Cunningham, narrative strands that eventually merge indeed create a community of speech amid individuated histories, regenerating the history and the myth in a new form of poetic consciousness while historicizing the poetry of the city through Whitman. 13 Cunningham takes liberty with dates, and while the setting of “In the Machine” is set in the nineteenth century, Cat’s evocation of the fire in the second novella when she asks the Whitman scholar “[i]s this where that fire was, the one that killed all those women?” allows for the novel to echo the event in both the first and second novellas (161). Because the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911 has come to symbolize the destructive working conditions of Italian and Jewish women immigrants, the event historicizes some of the themes of Cunningham’s novel while temporally muddling distinctions between past and present. 14 Speaking about Walt Whitman’s poetic prose, Gertrude Stein recognizes Whitman’s need to passionately catalogue names without naming: “He really wanted to express the thing and not call it by its name. He worked very hard at that, and he called it Leaves of Grass because he wanted it to be as little a well-known name to be called upon passionately as possible” (“Poetry” 213). Through her own recursive discourse which undoes normative functions of language, Stein recognizes how Whitman’s inability to know poetry also assumes an inability to know America. In Leaves of Grass, Whitman questions with childlike curiosity, “What is grass?” and the grasses of his poetry are based on a conscious breakdown of traditional poetic form that, in Whitman’s words, “can

The M/other Tongues  173 never again, in English language, be express’d in arbitrary and rhyming meter, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion” (qtd. in Erkkila 89). 15 Zadie Smith’s well-known polemic “Two Paths for the Novel” in The New York Review of Books (2008) critiques O’Neill’s formal and political authenticity. Comparing Netherland to Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Smith focuses on two views of realism in the contemporary novel. In her analysis of Netherland, she argues that O’Neill throws fiction into a sort of “existential crisis,” metafictively searching for literary identity while portraying an “anxiety of excess” stressed by baroque language which tarnishes the novel’s political underpinnings (6). Smith argues for a realism that looks for new forms to imagine the world, combining what she calls O’Neill’s “Balzac-Flaubert” model with the knowledge inherited from the modernists (2). Smith’s essay has stirred much controversy, and David Haglund’s article in The New Yorker (2015) recognizes the essay’s influence on contemporary literary criticism. 16 O’Neill’s novel has been qualified as crossing generic constraints, generating much critical polemics. Katherine V. Snyder argues that Netherland “can and must be read as a post-9/11 novel” but also as a postcolonial reading of The Great Gatsby (462), while James Wood has called the novel “one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read,” due to its central characterization of cricket. 17 Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images” (1929) illustrates the painter’s affinity to the word-play of poetry over painting. Viewed through the lens of Michel Foucault, Magritte, like Foucault, becomes a “cartographer of heterotopia,” visually critiquing and displacing language (Foucault, This 5). In The Order of Things, Foucault delineates heterotopia from utopia, saying, “heterotopias desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of language at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences” (xviii). Interestingly, Hans’s lyrical language approaches the scrutiny of representation, what Foucault calls “similitude,” to uncover an ineffable past that always only disorients the present. 18 For further analysis of the economic, racial, and political tensions associated with cricket, see Westall (2016) and Duvall (2014). 19 See Flannery, “Embracing the Other: Zoli,” 165–98 for an extended discussion of this point. 20 Olster’s argument reveals how McCann’s ability to situate New York in a broader geographical context in a post-9/11 world combines the personal and the global through “Whitman’s patois of the street—slang—as a shared language that levels spatial, social and aesthetic barriers” (31). Her analysis of McCann’s revision of what we know to be Whitman’s “circuitous styles of expression” (qtd. in Olster 19) further reveals how McCann creates a community of language manifest through the high and low stratifications that extend spatially and culturally in the novel.

Conclusion One Final Voice on Voice

There is no more disconcerting voice I can think of to illustrate a metafictive critique of the digital age than the voice of Jarett Kobek’s satirical and cynical twitter novel I Hate the Internet (2016). The novel’s voice forms by conjoining episodic fragments that resemble that of twitter culture to indicate formally and thematically that this novel is not a neutral representation of twenty-first-century media culture. Kobek’s portrayal of social media platforms and their well-heeled CEOs plainly emphasizes information overload through sentences brimming with conversational drift as well as polysyndeton, ironizing our need to discover existential answers in a slapdash way online: “why we eat our stupid dinners and why we have names and why we own idiotic cars and why we try to impress our friends” (13–4). In his own search for answers, however, the narrator tells us himself that “all technology was the product of its creators’ spoken and unspoken ideologies,” affirming that “[t]he Internet was not a neutral environment dedicated to freedom of speech” (150). The novel, too, shares in this critique, and, relatedly, part of my argument in this book has been that the novel’s ideological reflection of media culture continues to make it a valuable social medium in the twenty-first century. Kobek strikes an uncomfortable tenor by means of his narrator’s voice to focus on an offscreen analysis of what creates onscreen culture. I Hate the Internet evaluates the computer screen as a series of interlocking and inequitable scenes, situating readers in the racism and sexism of varied moments strung together which “resolves into nothing and features emotional suffering without meaning” (23). Kobek’s circular novel establishes an eddying vortex that plainly highlights our own “Descent Into the Maelstrom,” to cite Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story, as Marshall McLuhan notably did when describing media culture of the mid-twentieth century.1 Kobek’s voice reminds us of the inherent violence of information society and the necessity of rearticulating the ways in which our voices sound within the technological devices of our media surround. Kobek’s narrator projects the systemic inequities of the digital world transferred from the physical world, and through the emerging genre of the techlash novel, Kobek starkly speaks from within and without Internet culture. He sends an unsettling message

176 Conclusion about the permeation of technocratic culture into his (and our) habitual discourse. Like Kobek’s bleak admonition, an analysis of literary voice in this book further reaffirms that the novel is born from a critique of the sociohistorical and technological dynamics of its time. For twenty-first-century readers, the novel importantly absorbs mixed media, and therefore expresses how voices negotiate and mediate the terms of media culture in a neoliberal society. To think of the novel’s voice in terms of virality foregrounds the prominence of aesthetic construction while also leaving that construction open to the mutable networks of our global world. Voice, then, influences and is influenced, while readers, too, are exposed to a flow of media in which they discern based on forms of sociality and patterns of sharing. As shown throughout this argument, the novel examples given do not present a definitive deterministic viewpoint of media culture. Yet, they also do not uphold the terms of a nostalgic humanism. Instead, the contemporary novel stresses the tensions and struggles inherent within our technological world while also pointing to a history of media studies that corresponds to a history of literary studies. The viral aesthetics underlined through the voices of this study further reinforce that the innovative verve of the novel continues to manifest within its variable forms, aligning with the changing terms of the digital communications of globalization. Not to be outdone by the technological executives who advance the innovative drive of new media and technologies, the novel is a narrative of disruption which consistently creates originality while also evaluating the terms of our participatory culture. Looking back to the past while looking forward to the future, the diversity of authors also requires that we consider the viability of novelistic practice in digital culture. As Jessica Pressman has shown, “the Aesthetic of Bookishness” continues to thrive in the twenty-first-century novel, and authors manipulate print to further remind us how the novel remains an inventive form. By highlighting mixed modes of media such as image, sound, comics, etc., the novel extends representations of expression while allowing us to reflect on those expressions in a scaled structure. Listening to a mixture of images, silences, and sounds, readers not only hear the novel’s voice but think about that voice as it interacts within a digital milieu. It seems apropos, then, that the literary works analyzed in this book also metafictively evaluate the very act of aesthetic creation. Destroying the knowledge work of informationalism, a sense of destruction enacts vocal creation within the terms of the novel, making an appeal to the creativity of the future. Intrinsically, Claudia Rankine’s counter-memory in Citizen absorbs and resists the racialization of the image through her speaker’s second-person voice. Rankine’s speaker finds an “I” in her “you” by the end of the imagetext by listening to the found voices of African American aesthetics and digital art. In addition, David Foster Wallace, while warning of a bleak technological determinism, centers The Pale King around a human disgust

Conclusion  177 enabled by the individual choices and voices of his proletariat workers. Wallace’s democracy listens to the silences hidden by a neoliberal society and proposes a radical unrest, which grows against neoliberal boredom. Jennifer Egan creates harmony from the voices of traumatic memory through the structural call and response of characters in Goon Squad. She reminds readers of an innately human resistance that allows us to respond to the sounds of voices and silences despite the goons of passing time. The creativity of Michael Chabon and Junot Díaz also allows diaspora and comics to conjoin through the imaginative loss of a homeland and the creative poiesis of the comic creator. Readers are invited into the ways in which voices express the difficult creation of diasporic history through the marginalized world of mid-twentieth-century comics. And, finally, the global novel absorbs the sounds of the city through a lyrical prose that turns and returns through a network of voices. For Michael Cunningham, Joseph O’Neill, and Colum McCann, that also signals a collective sense of Whitmanian hope in a post9/11 world. Pointedly, I have historically situated each chapter through past literature to further establish the novel as a way to connect to a literary past while forging ahead to the future. In this way, I situate the project by analyzing the periodizing impulse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to convey the ways in which the contemporary novel moves away from a periodizing framework. Glancing back to a literary past, this study also delineates the authorial effects reflected within the voices of the novel: a covert authorial consciousness can be traced amid a polyphony of voices while readers wonder how the tension of an authorial presence is indicated through the novel’s formulation. The unity created by Bakhtin’s novelistic world again creates opportunities for a surplus of vision while also exploring an ethics of reading and listening. The novel exposes systems of privilege and hegemony while scaling those systems so that we can read and hear the changing inflections of our global world. Creating a network that voices the subcultures of society, the literature in this book exposes the ways in which the novel consistently and self-reflexively engages in acts of poiesis through dialogic voices that attune themselves to a sense of vocal interiority. The variance of speech and silence creates subjective forms of expression that mingle with the novel itself as a media system, as I have previously shown through Friedrich Kittler’s work. With that said, I will close by addressing two final novels which relate the prominence of vocal virality—both its destruction and creativity. In this, I look to Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet (2012) and later to Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Concerned with the pressing issues of our time, both Marcus and Lerner illustrate why our voices still matter even as we become ever more engrossed with the changing media of our culture. In a speculative vein, Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet (2012) imagines a dystopic consequence of the viral nature of digital language. With a reach for the superlative, The Flame Alphabet conceives the ultimate consequence

178 Conclusion of a viral and violent digital culture. Set in Rochester, New York, in the near-future, Marcus literalizes the virality of voice and speech through the toxicity of language carried by the voices of children. Inherently, a pandemic discerned to be a “speech fever” afflicts the adult population of the novel (4). The transformative power of the language virus diminishes the physical and psychological processes of people, metonymically pointing to the embodied nature of language itself. The tormented adults in the novel return to the most fundamental and primitive rendering of their physicality: they are “dark lumps of flesh moving through plasma” (18). Becoming further isolated and alone, people afflicted and sickened by the virus are increasingly aphasic because “to build any speech into that heavy breathing, would bring them to their knees” (5). Sam, Claire, and Esther are the focal family in Marcus’s novel, and Sam recounts the slow violence that Esther’s voice wreaks on him and his wife. They are physically and mentally sickened by Esther’s voice and language: The sickness washed over us when we saw it, when we heard it, when we thought of it later. We feasted on the putrid material because our daughter made it. We gorged on it and inside it steamed, rotted, turned rank. (10) Undone by their own kin, Sam and Claire struggle with a virus that makes them choose to be without what is within their family unit. Still, the virus manifests not only through Esther’s actual language but also through an inherent anti-Semitic undertone that recalls the atrocities of the Holocaust. Marcus, too, embeds the past into his future, once again recalling a dark narrative mimesis explored through the literal and figurative implications of the virus. The condemnation of the Jewish population further allegorizes the ways in which the virus of language provokes the virus of discrimination. Sam recognizes the anti-Semitic sentiment of the enigmatic character Murphy, later known as LeBov, an extremist scientist who directly indicts Jewish children and families as primary carriers of the virus: “The discussion was wrapped in the vocabulary of viral infection,” Sam tells us while listening to LeBov on his portable radio. “There was no reason for alarm because this crisis appeared to be genetic in nature, a problem only for certain people, whoever they were” (30). Anti-Semitism itself erupts because of the physical pandemic, further correlating the violent spread of misinformation and its consequences with the violent spread of a fatal virus. Murphy/LeBov menaces Jewish characters, “cornering, manipulating, extracting,” as Sam puts it (32). And because Sam and Claire are what is known as “Reconstructionist Jews,” their underground observance becomes explained by way of LeBov’s dark rhetoric and “the dark electronics of such messaging” by the public (41, 46). While Sam spends most of the novel searching for gnostic and alchemic antidotes to the sickness, the “smallwork” he refers to in order to “keep

Conclusion  179 Esther close to us” (50), he is left at the end of the novel with a warning from the future. Through a narrative turn, Sam’s parabasis addresses the reader after he has been separated from his wife and child. Sending a prominent message about the viral nature of communication and disease, Sam is left finally waiting for his family to return in forced silence. It is a return that he and readers will long wait for and, with no sense of closure, Sam’s dreams of the return of Claire and Esther resound in an uncanny picnic setting that conjures a brave new world where people can only conceive of “a residue of everything that’s ever been said” (289). Settled into the residue of his own dreams from the past, Sam conjures a moment from the future with his family in a disquieting silence. Marcus’s speculative fiction has recently seemed to touch on more than speculation during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have seen the coronavirus ravage our population and our political rhetoric. An increasingly divided society reminds us that we have to find a sense of logic in the dissension, renewing the ways in which we understand and humanize our discourse and twitterverse. As Marcus reminds us, the virus calls for a new language, “a new code, new lettering, a way to pass on messages that would bypass the toxic alphabet, the chemically foul speech we now used” (Marcus 64). The voices of the literature in my project, then, also remind us of this sense of fictional poiesis—what it means, exactly, to “call for a new code.” For this, I look to one novel which ties us to the very act of aesthetic creation: Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Lerner’s aspiring poet Adam Gordon, who is on a poetry fellowship in Spain, claims to promise “never [to] write a novel” (65). Yet Adam’s writer’s voice ironically mimics that of a novelist while it conjures the aesthetics of poetry, painting, and music. Preoccupied with questioning the essence of “a profound experience of art” (8), Adam creates a novelistic assemblage of varying aesthetic experiences to underline the miscommunications at the core of the novel’s formation. In essence, Adam forms what he formulates, and Lerner’s poet-novelist stands to create a self-reflexive dialogue from writer to reader. To complement the major action and complication of the novel, Lerner creates an original work and, in a sense, awaits its translation. Lerner’s novel self-reflexively questions the role of literature in both transcribing and transcending a historical present while it exemplifies its own novelistic theory performed on a world stage. Lerner grandly questions the role of literary voice in recording what Adam’s friend Arturo calls “history in the making” (129), and the novel examines its own agency of narrating the 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid. Taking his poetic license to a global platform, Lerner attempts to illustrate the mediacy which can be poignantly captured through Adam’s voice. Adam can never exactly say what happens, for as he revises W.H. Auden’s dictum, he affirms that “it’s not poetry that makes things happen” (143). However, through the varied shifts and doublings of persons, places, and languages, readers sense “a structure of feeling, not an idea, which made it harder to dismiss” (102). The

180 Conclusion feeling of Adam’s voice transcribes his translation of the event—both literally and figuratively—and we follow his voice until we are left with the voices of the writer and reader. Adam’s voice performs exactly what it enacts, for as he tells us, “the translations would become the originals as we read” (181). Between English and Spanish, the protean shifts in voice also allegorically relate to the transitory juncture of the Atocha Train Station in Madrid. Adam’s writer’s voice shifts through other voices while showing their variable agencies in different contexts, which Lerner associates with a technological malleability. Adam illustrates this through a tongue-in-cheek allusion to a well-known train scene in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), despite the fact that Adam is actually reading Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) while he is on the train. Adam relates how “[i]t didn’t matter; every sentence, regardless of its subject, became mimetic of the action of the train, and the train mimetic of the sentence, and I suddenly felt coeval with its syntax” (89). The memories of literary voices merge in his head in real time, and, as he continues to read Tolstoy, he meditates upon the ways in which “real time and the time of prose began to merge, and reading, instead of removing me from the world, intensified my experience of the present” (89). The intensification of the present becomes our own present, and the novel magnifies the experiences that surround the 2004 train bombings, the Spanish general elections, and the Bush administration’s response to these world events. Lerner plays with repeated doublings, conjuring the uncanny ways in which the novel helps us recognize how history here repeats itself, preserving its memory through his prose. The fleeting nature of Adam’s voice then deems it to be both familiar and strange. Lerner captures a historical present that creates a continual linking, and Adam’s voice manifests and moves among media. He appears to be within and without, and his poetry performance early on in the novel captures the agency that is also performed by the literary voices of the novel. While reciting a poem in Spanish at a local gallery in Madrid, Adam conveys the sensation of hearing the sounds of his voice while he is speaking, and he brings himself to the reader’s own subjectivity: I slowly began to recognize something like my voice, if that’s the word, a recognition made all the more strange in that I’d never recognized my voice before. Something in the arrangement of the lines, not the words themselves or what they denoted, indicated a ghostly presence behind the Spanish, and that presence was my own, or maybe it was my absence; it was like walking in a room where I was sure I’d never been, but seeing in the furniture or roaches in the ashtray or the coffee cup on the window ledge beside the shower signs that I had only recently left. (41) The ghostwriter that haunts Adam at this moment illustrates the voice that indeed stresses the value of Lerner’s novel. The strange familiarity of Adam’s voice celebrates a writer’s voice within the novel; he gauges his

Conclusion  181 own emotions from far away. For here, while traveling through the Atocha Station, Lerner attempts to immerse his reader from both here and there, moving through the passages of his prose while conjuring the affective intensity of poetic feelings. Like Adam’s voice, literary voices allow us to become strange to ourselves and, in this book, they defamiliarize the ways in which we communicate so that perhaps we can perceive our digital world more clearly. The novel immerses us in its voices while simultaneously creating critical distance so that we can reflect on the ways in which we hear and speak along with the voices and mixed media of our surround. In this way, like Lerner’s own reach toward his readers, my analysis asks whether the voices within the literature that I study relate an independent expressivity that communicates an ethics attributed to the reader and also to the writer. In a world of persistent technological innovation, my project foregrounds how we express and write our current world—what we share or don’t share, and what we deem as remarkable or not. The changing voices and faces of the novels in my project stress fluid literacies and a way to think about novel forms of reading in the twenty-first century. And while virality has tragically upended the world with the coronavirus pandemic, it has also accentuated a moment when all voices must be heard so that we can reach what may be reformed for the future. The novel’s voices will continue to enact literary change, and we must listen to them.

Note 1 See McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951).

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Adorno, Theodor 105 African American literature: calland-response in 33, 42n10; documentation in 13; optics and public perception in 18; racism of American life in 25; slave narratives and 25, 42n10 African Americans: Black anger stereotypes and 33–7; body stereotypes 34–6; documentary texts and 13, 19–20, 23, 25–6; double-consciousness and 18, 41n2; heavy waters imagery and 23, 42n9; Hurricane Katrina and 23–5; invisibility and 42n13; life as postmortem event and 19, 41n6; lynching and 30–2, 32, 42n13, 42n14, 168; media and 21, 35–7; racist media coverage and 35–7; rememory and 20, 41n7; voices of resiliency and 169; wake of slavery and 21; see also Black women; racism Agamben, Giorgio 8 Alexie, Sherman 133n2 Allen, James 42n13 Altman, Rick 7 Alves, Mariana 35 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The (Chabon): collective memory and 108; deformance and 100–1; diasporic consciousness and 15, 100–3, 107–8, 115, 133n2; genre mixing in 102, 133n4; golem myth in 109, 111, 134n8; historiography and 104–8; imaginary homeland and 101, 105, 107, 112, 115–16; Jewish history and 100, 103–9, 111–14, 116, 134n8; mediating

role of voice in 102; radio voices in 113–15; sociopolitical dynamics in 101; surrealism in 108–9, 134n5; use of comics in 15, 100–9, 111–16; writer’s voice and 100–1 America (Baudrillard) 45 Ames, Fisher 68n12 Andrews, Malcolm 170n1 Angelou, Maya 168 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 180 Anzaldúa, Gloria 128 Apel, Dora 105 apostrophe 19, 28, 41n3 Appadurai, Arjun 87, 90, 126 Arbery, Ahmaud 18 Aristotle 61, 67n4 Armstrong, Nancy 8 Art of Poetry, The (Rankine) 21 Art Thoughtz (Youngman) 33, 35 “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (Whitman) 164 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) 2 “At the Threshold of the Book” (Jabés) 116 Atwood, Margaret 133n2 Auden, W.H. 179 auditory imagination 76–7, 98n11 “August 29, 2005/Hurricane Katrina” (Rankine) 23 Back Yard of Alley Dwelling (Mydans) 27 Baer, Elizabeth Roberts 134n8 Bakhtin, Mikhail 3, 10–11, 16n1, 44, 177 Balaguer, Joaquín 128, 136n18 Baldwin, James 19, 37 Barbrook, Richard 82

198 Index Barr, Alfred 134n7 Barry, Lynda 127 Barthes, Roland 3, 12, 15, 20, 42n8, 140 “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Melville) 6–7 Baudrillard, Jean 45–6, 97n3 Bautista, Daniel 133n2, 136n16 Behind the Veil (Stepto) 42n10 Beitler, Lawrence 31 Beloved (Morrison) 14, 41n7, 129 Benito, Jesus 128 Benjamin, Walter 11, 113, 148 Bennet, Andy 99n16 Berger, Alan L. 134n8 Bergson, Henri 75 Between the Acts (Woolf) 78 Between the World and Me (Coates) 41n6 Bhabha, Homi 37 Bibb, Henry 42n10 Big Money, The (Dos Passos) 144 Birdsall, Carolyn 72 Birth of a Nation 25 Black Lives Matter 13, 19 Black Voices, Twelve Million (Wright) 26 Black women 33–7; see also African Americans Blair, Sara 26, 42n11 Blanchot, Maurice 37 Blasing, Mutlu 138, 171n4 Blue Black Boy (Weems) 22, 22 Boswell, Marshall 67n9 Bourke-Wright, Margaret 42n11 Boxall, Peter 10–11 Brabner, Joyce 127 Brenkman, John 11, 13 Breton, André 108–9, 111, 113, 134n6, 135n10 Brief History of Neoliberalism, A (Harvey) 46 Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The (Díaz): collective memory and 128, 131; colonized/colonizing voice in 100, 121, 124–5, 129, 136n20; comic fandom and 121; corporeality and 128–9; deformance and 100–1, 117; diasporic voice and 15, 100–3, 116–19, 121–3, 125–32; Dominican American identity in 124–6, 130–1, 136n21; Dominican history and 100, 102, 117–18, 121, 124–32, 136n17; embodiment of comic genre 126; on gendered national narratives 119,

121; genre mixing in 102, 133n4; mediating role of voice in 102; mise en abyme trope in 127, 136n17; in Oscar Wao 126; overlapping voice in 118; second-person narration in 130–1; sociopolitical dynamics in 101; use of comics in 15, 100–3, 117–19, 121–2, 126–7, 132, 136n16; use of footnotes in 124; use of The Fantastic Four 102, 118–19, 121–2; verbal/nonverbal exchange in 126–7; white/black racial binaries in 129–30, 136n20; writer’s voice and 100–1, 123–5 Brod, Henry 133n2, 134n5 Brooks, David 23 Broom of the System, The (Wallace) 68n9 Brown, Michael 18 Brown, Wendy 46, 89 Brown, William Wells 42n10 Bryan, William Jennings 143 Burgess, Jean 4 Burke, Edmund 68n12 Burroughs, William 68n10 Bush, George W. 156 Butler, Judith 67n4, 74, 130 “Caged Bird” (Angelou) 168 Caldwell, Erskine 42n11 Callahan, John F. 33 Camera Eyes (Dos Passos) 142–4 Camera Lucida (Barthes) 20, 42n8 Cameron, James 42n14 Capital (Marx) 48 capitalism: American globalism and 156, 161; colonialism and 153; creative destruction and 4–6; cricket and 158–9; criminality and 153; dehumanization in 43; disease and disorder in 47, 69n15; information 47, 55; labor process and 48, 55; music industry and 83, 99n14; New York and 141–2; technologized bureaucracy and 45–6, 60, 67n8; see also neoliberalism Caruth, Cathy 97n5, 128 Casarino, Cesare 68n13 Castells, Manuel 97n3 Cavarero, Adriana 12 Century’s Ebb (Dos Passos) 141 Chabon, Michael: comic medium and 15, 100, 112, 115–16, 132–3, 133n2; diasporic imaginary and

Index  199 115, 133, 177; as Holocaust author 116, 134n8; use of comics as comix 133n2; use of Jewish immigrants as superheroes 133n2; writer’s voice and 100–1; see also Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The (Chabon) Chaney, Michael A. 127 Circle, The (Eggers) 9 cities: American novel and 140–1; Dos Passos and 139; double 171n8; globalization and 137–40, 144, 153, 172n8; global novel and 140, 153, 177; habiting/habitat of 172n8; historicization of 153; knowable community in 146; textual/social pluralism and 140; walking and 171n7; Whitman and 137; see also New York Citizen (Rankine): African American rememory in 20; apostrophe in 19, 28; Black anger stereotypes and 33–7; on Black participation in white world 33–6; call-and-response in 33, 35, 37; counter-memory in 176; on depictions of Serena Williams 33–6; document use in 19–21, 23, 25–6, 32; drowning waters imagery 23–5, 40; faceless hood image and 18–19, 42n12; Hurricane Katrina victim voices in 23–5; Jena Six in 21–3; Jim Crow Road in 26–8; noises of voice in 37–8; passing gaze and 40–1; performative nature of voice in 13– 14; racial in/justice and 18–41; racial memory and 13, 40; self and other in 28–30; silenced voice in 31–3, 35; speaker voice and 37–40; trees and lynching in 30–2, 42n13; on 2006 World Cup 37; visual aesthetics in 13–14, 20–41; visual voices in 20–5; voice and 18–19, 26–8 Citizen Kane 113 Clare, Ralph 55, 69n15 Clark, Kate 29, 30 Clifford, James 117 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 41n6, 133n2 Cobbett, William 68n12 Cole, Teju 1–2 colonialism: America and 136n20, 153–4, 157; capitalism and 153; cricket and 157–8, 173n16; diasporic consciousness and 100, 102, 117; patriarchy and 87; racism and 20,

117, 121; remembrance and 103, 131; role of voice in narratives of 102; tourism industry and 87; violence and 116, 124, 136n17 Columbus, Christopher 124 comics: collective memory and 108, 128; communal expression and 107–8; deformance and 100–1; diasporic consciousness and 15, 100–3, 118–19, 133n2, 136n16, 177; fan communities of 121; genre mixing in 102, 133n4; historiography and 104–8; intertextual use of 133n2; metaleptic narrative and 100; mise en abyme trope in 127; performative nature of voice in 100–1, 105–6; political themes in 104; postwar identity politics of 118–19; reclaiming of marginalized history and 116; Superman 103–4, 109; surrealism in 108–9; testimony in 100; as visual voice 121; writer’s voice and 133; see also Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The (Chabon); Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The (Díaz); Fantastic Four, The Co-Mix (Spiegelman) 134n5 Conley, Katherine 109 Connor, Steven 38 Conrad, Joseph 132 contagion theory 6 Convergence Culture (Jenkins) 16n4 Corban, Alain 97n2 Couldry, Nick 16n4, 47, 67n4 Country and the City, The (Williams) 171n8, 172n12 Cowart, David 98n10 creative destruction 4–6, 16n5 Culler, Jonathan 19, 41n3, 139, 153 cultural memory 4, 13, 75 Cunningham, Michael: generic modes and 145; global novel and 140, 177; lyrical discourse and 138–9; poetic renewal and 138; poetics of New York and 15, 138–9, 144–5, 170; urban consciousness and 146–7; see also Specimen Days (Cunningham) “Daddy” (Plath) 90 Dalí, Salvador 108–9 Dalkey Archive Press 44 Davis, Miles 31

200 Index Death in the Afternoon (Hemingway) 68n11 DeBord, Guy 71, 97n3 de Certeau, Michel 140, 171n7 deformance 100–1, 117, 133n1 Deleuze, Gilles 51, 67n8 DeLillo, Don 155 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 23, 42n9 de Man, Paul 79 democracy: biopolitical concerns and 44; circular paradox of 57, 68n13; consumption model of 48; Derrida on 68n14; de Tocqueville on 56–7; disgust and disease associations 56–9, 68n12; neoliberalism and 46–8, 51, 57; racial inequality and 23 Democracy in America (Tocqueville) 56 Democratic Personality (Ruttenberg) 68n13 Derrida, Jacques 11–12, 68n9, 68n14, 76, 87 “Descent Into the Maelstrom” (Poe) 175 diaspora: contradictory space and 136n21; decolonization and 15, 101; deforming voice and 101, 117; discourse of 117; Indian 133n3; marginalized identity and 118–19; use of comics in retelling 15, 100–3, 115, 118–19, 133n2, 136n16, 177; use of term 103; verbal/nonverbal exchange in 127 diasporic identity 113 diasporic imaginary 101, 115, 133n3 Díaz, Junot: comic medium and 15, 100, 117–18, 132–3, 133n2, 136n16; diasporic voice and 116–17, 121–2, 126, 133, 177; manipulation of voice 118; narrative eclecticism of 133n2; readers and cultural transmission 117, 135n15; use of genre 133n2, 136n16; writer’s voice and 100–1, 125; see also Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The (Díaz) Dick, Philip K. 133n4 Dickens, Charles 172n8 digital culture 177–9, 181 digital music: capitalism and 82; corrupt economies of 86; fetishistic qualities of 84; file-sharing 82–3, 98n13, 98n14; gift economy and 99n14, 99n15, 99n16; history of file-sharing and 70; lifelessness of 81;

masculinized agency and 83; see also music industry digital technologies: human-machine simulacra 50, 67n6; interiority and 44, 46–7; media and 7–8, 12; metafictive critique of 175–6; music industry and 81–4, 98n13, 99n16; neoliberalism and 46–7, 67n4; protocol and 51, 67n7; psychological effects of 43; society of spectacle and 97n3; systemic inequalities and 175; techne of the unconscious and 67n6; see also technological innovation Dimock, Wai Chee 68n13, 127 Dinnen, Zara 80 Disney, Walt 109 Divius, Andreas 77 Doctorow, E.L. 125, 133n4 documentary texts: African American lives and 13, 19–20, 23, 25–6; Black gaze and 26, 42n11; mediation of 32; slave narratives as 25 Dolar, Mladen 12, 47 Dominican Republic: African/Haitian heritage of 128, 136n18; Balaguer and 128, 136n18; colonial past and 100; diasporic voice and 102, 117, 121, 124–5; hypermasculinity and 129; misogyny and 117, 119, 129–30; in Oscar Wao 100, 102, 117–18, 121, 124–32; Trujillo regime in 102, 117, 128–30; U.S. occupation of 136n20; white/black racial binaries in 128–30, 136n18 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Rankine) 20 Doolittle, Hilda 14, 77 Dos Passos, John: antagonism of New York and 141; interlacing of narrative and 142; lyrical discourse and 142–4; urban consciousness and 15, 139–44; Whitman and 141–2 Dos Passos, John, Works by: 42nd Parallel , The 142; Big Money, The 144; Camera Eyes 142–4; Century’s Ebb 141; Manhattan Transfer 139–42; USA trilogy 139–42 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 16n1 Douglas, Mary 59 Douglass, Frederick 13, 42n10 Dreiser, Theodore 140 Du Bois, W.E.B. 13, 18, 25 earwitnessing 72 Edison, Thomas 75–6

Index  201 Edwards, Brent Hayes 117, 127 Egan, Jennifer: Invisible Circus, The 73; Keep, The 73; on listening and speaking 14; literary remixing and 72; Look at Me 73; on memory and trauma 71–2; modernism and 98n10; primacy of voice and 70, 73; punk aesthetics of 98n12; sound of voices and 70–1; see also Visit from the Goon Squad, A (Egan) Eggers, Dave 9–10 Eisner, Will 104 Elderon, Shannon 44 Eliot, T.S. 6, 45, 76–9, 98n11, 155 Ellison, Ralph 18 Emerson, Ralph W. 57, 138 Empire for Liberty (Dimock) 68n13 End of the Alphabet, The (Rankine) 20 “Epigrams” (Nemerov) 155 Epimenides 125 Erikson, Kai 55 Erkkila, Betsy 145, 172n10 Ette, Ottmar 136n17 exformation 53, 68n11 Exorcist, The 43 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Foer) 9 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (exhibit) 109, 134n7 Fantastic Four, The 102, 118–19, 119–20, 121–2, 122, 123 Faulkner, William 2 Fawaz, Ramzi 118 “February 26, 2016/In Memory of Trayvon Martin” (Rankine) 30 Felluga, Dino Franco 171n5 Felman, Shoshana 89 Fertig, Mark 104 First Manifesto of Surrealism (Breton) 108–9 First Papers of Surrealism (exhibition) 109 Fishelson, David 135n9 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 81, 154, 159, 173n16 Flame Alphabet, The (Marcus) 177–9 Flannery, Eóin 162 Floyd, George 18 Fludernik, Monika 101 Foer, Jonathan Safran 9–10 “‘For America— The M/other Tongues 171 For all the Earth’“ (Grünzweig) 170n1

Ford, Richard Thompson 21 For More Than One Voice (Cavarero) 12 42nd Parallel , The (Dos Passos) 142 Foucault, Michel 17n9, 66, 66n3, 128, 173n17 Four Quartets (Eliot) 77–8, 98n11 Frank, Jason 68n12 Freud, Sigmund 146 Fukuyama, Francis 7 Future Shock (Toffler) 99n17 Galloway, Alexander 9, 51, 67n5, 67n7 Ganteau, Jean-Michel 21 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 133n4 Garde-Hansen, Joanne 72 Garner, Eric 18 Gelfant, Blanche Housman 140 Gibson, Ross 12 Giroux, Henry A. 23, 48 Gitelman, Lisa 7, 75–6 Gladwell, Malcolm 98n13 globalization 15, 137–40, 144, 153 global novel 140, 153, 161, 177 global pandemic 5, 179 Goldsmith, Arnold 134n8 Golem (Idel) 134n8 Golem, The (Leivick) 135n9 Golem, The (Meyrink) 112, 135n9 “Golem, The” (Peretz) 111, 135n9 Golem, The (Wiesel) 135n9 Golem Legend, The (Sherwin) 134n8 golem myth 109, 111, 134n8, 134n9 Golem Remembered 1909–1980, The (Goldsmith) 134n8 “Good People” (Wallace) 53 Gray, Freddie 18 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald) 154, 173n16 Greiman, Jennifer 57, 68n13 Grossman, Austin 133n2 Grünzweig, Walter 170n1 Grusin, Richard 10 Hadler, Mona 109 Haglund, David 173n15 Hall, Stuart 21, 113 Hamilton, Alexander 68n12 Hanna, Monica 136n16 Hare, David 109 Hart, William David 19, 41n6 Hartnell, Anna 24–5 Harvey, David 46 Hausmann, Raoul 67n6

202 Index Hay, James 16n4 Hayles, N. Katherine 52, 68n10, 98n10 Hebdige, Dick 98n12 Helyer, Nigel 46–7 Hemingway, Ernest 14, 53, 68n11 Hemsley, Jeff 7 Henry, Patrick 143 Hering, David 44 “Hills Like White Elephants” (Hemingway) 53 Historia de la literatura Dominicana (Balaguer) 136n18 Hock, Stephen 133n2 Holiday, Billie 31 Homer 77 Houdini, Harry 104 “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (Hurston) 34 How to Be a Successful Artist (Youngman) 35 Huehls, Mitchum 57, 65, 66n3 Hughson, Lois 141 Hurricane Katrina 23–5 Hurston, Zora Neale 34 Huyssen, Andreas 70 Iceberg Theory 53, 68n11 “Idea of the Golem, The” (Scholem) 134n8 Idel, Moshe 134n8 I Hate the Internet (Kobek) 175 Ihde, Don 98n11 Imus, Don 36 Infinite Jest (Wallace) 49, 69n15 informationalism 4, 16n5 information capitalism 47, 55 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 2, 76, 78 Interior Landscape, The (McLuhan) 76 Internet: money economy and 82–3, 99n14; music consumer promiscuity and 84, 99n16; music exchange and 82–3, 98n13, 99n14, 99n16; music industry and 82–3; violence of information society and 175–6 Invisible Circus, The (Egan) 73 Iser, Wolfgang 131 Jabés, Edmond 115–16 James, Henry 77 Jena Six 21–3 Jenkins, Henry 10, 16n4, 17n7 Jensen, Beth 171n2 Jim Crow Road (Murphy) 28

Johnson, Barbara 19 Johnson, Mat 2 Johnston, Katherine D. 87 Joyce, James 164, 172n12 Karine, Nahon 7 Karmodi, Ostap 57 Keats, John 45, 66n2 Keep, The (Egan) 73 Kelley, Joyce E. 78 Kesey, Ken 14, 55 Kind of Blue (Davis) 31 King, Geoff 97n3 Kirsch, Adam 44, 138 Kittler, Friedrich 8, 17n9, 75, 77, 177 Kobek, Jarett 175–6 Kral, Françoise 102 Kramer, Lawrence 73 Kreutzer Sonata, The (Tolstoy) 180 Kristeva, Julia 171n2 Lacan, Jacques 133n3 Lamberti, Elena 76, 79, 98n10 language: abstraction and 34, 37; corporeality and 128; embodied restriction and 27, 29; interior voices and 68n10; lyrical discourse and 138–9, 171n4, 171n5; mother tongue and 138–9, 146; musical signifying and 73, 78; poetic repetition in 145–6; self-referentiality of 153; shifting yaw of 52; sociality and 51, 67n9; sonic memory and 76–7; visual voice and 101, 117, 121 Latour, Bruno 66n3 Laub, Dori 71–2, 89, 97n4 Laws of Cool, The (Liu) 16n5 Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 42n12, 139, 145, 171n2, 172n14 Leaving the Atocha Station (Lerner) 177, 179–81 Lefebvre, Henri 140, 171n8 Leivick, H. 135n9 Lerner, Ben 2, 177, 179–81 Letham, Jonathan 133n2 Let the Great World Spin (McCann): entangled narratives in 163–9; multisensory interculturality and 15; poetics of New York and 138, 161–70; public loss of 9/11 in 162; voices of bereavement in 166–9; voices of mothers in 169–70; voices of resiliency in 169; Whitman’s poetry and 162, 165–7, 170

Index  203 Lewis, Sinclair 142 Leyshon, Andrew 82–3, 98n13 Ligon, Glenn 34, 34, 35 Lipsky, David 67n9 listening: aesthetic creation and 176; memory and trauma 70; passing of time and 75; poetics of 79; politics of 5, 71; racialized polemics of 20; subvocalization and 65; tensions in 6, 14; turning to the self and 46–7; witnessing and 97n4 literary history 2, 6, 132–3, 134n9, 136n20 literature: auditory imagination and 76–7, 98n11; authorial identity and 177; cultural memory and 4, 76; discourse networks in 8; empathic democratization of storytelling in 162; globalization and 138; historicity and 2; information networks and 8, 17n9; innovation and 8; media literacy and 3–4; as media system 8; mixed media and 176; modernism and 76, 79–80, 98n10; multi-voicedness of 3, 16n1; musical narrative and 73, 76, 78; poetic discourse within 171n5; realism in contemporary 173n15; reflection of media culture in 175; role of voice in historical present 179–81; sonic memory and 77–8; speculative 179; subjective becoming and 11; viral aesthetics of 7, 176; voice and 2–7, 10–16, 16n1; see also poetry Little Girl (Clark) 29, 30 Liu, Alan 4–5, 16n5 Liu, Lydia 50–1, 67n6 “Locksley Hall” (Tennyson) 170 Lolita (Nabokov) 63 Look at Me (Egan) 73 Lorde, Audre 37 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot) 6 Lucas, John 23, 30–1, 32, 37, 42n13 Luckhurst, Roger 41n7, 85, 99n17 Lukács, Georg 11, 142 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 55, 59, 97n3 lyrical discourse 138–9, 171n5, 173n17 MacPherson, Ben 13 Magritte, René 109, 110, 155, 173n17 Malabou, Catherine 49 Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos) 139–42 Manifesto of Surrealism (Breton) 135n10

Mannahatta (Whitman) 137 Manzanas, Ana Ma 128 Maran, René 127 Marcus, Ben 177–9 Marsh, Stephen Taylor 65 Marshall, P. David 89–90 Martin, Trayvon 18, 30–2, 41n6 Marx, John 8 Marx, Karl 48, 99n16 masculinity 83, 87–9, 119, 128–9 “Mathematical Theory of Communication, The” (Shannon and Weaver) 67n5 Maus (Spiegelman) 134n5 Mauss, Marcel 98n14 Max, D.T. 61, 66n2, 67n9 McCaffery, Larry 44–5 McCann, Colum: community of language and 173n20; global novel and 140, 177; lyrical discourse and 138–9; on New York as global city 173n20; poetic renewal and 138; poetics of New York and 15, 138–9, 170; Whitman’s poetry and 162; Zoli 162; see also Let the Great World Spin (McCann) McCarthy, Tom 173n15 McCloud, Scott 112, 121 McGann, Jerome 100 McHale, Brian 162 McIlvanney, Liam 8 McLuhan, Marshall 12, 76, 87, 92, 175 media: Black athletes and 33–5; celebrity culture and 89–90; digital technologies and 7–8, 12; global influence of 86–91; historicity and 7; literature and 8, 176; migration and 87; racism in 35–7; technical/ sociocultural change and 4; violence in 89; voice and 3, 5, 7–8, 13; white athletes and 35 media convergence 4, 16n4 media images: Black anger stereotypes and 33–4; racism in 13–14, 20–2; racist stereotypes in 23–6, 33–5 media literacy 3–4 Meeropol, Abel 31 Melville, Herman 6, 9, 14, 49, 57, 68n13, 136n20 memory: as act of imagination 78; collective voices and 10; cultural 4, 13, 75; diasporic imaginary and 101; music and 75, 78–9; public 7, 21, 75; racial 13, 30, 40; rememory

204 Index and 20, 41n7; sensory experiences and 1, 78–9; silence and 20, 27, 32, 35; sonic 14, 70–4, 77–82, 85–9; technologies of 70; traumatic 31–2, 71–5, 85–6 Meyrink, Gustav 112, 135n9 Miley, Mike 63 Miller, Adam S. 44 Miller, Paul D. 72 Miller, T.S. 136n16 Mirowski, Philip 48 mise en abyme trope 127, 136n17 Mishra, Vijay 101, 133n3, 136n21 Mitchell, W.J.T. 20 Moby-Dick (Melville) 49, 57, 68n13, 136n20 modernism 76, 79, 98n10 Modernity at Sea (Casarino) 68n13 Morris, Jeremy Wade 99n15 Morris, Leslie 76, 98n8 Morrison, Toni 13–14, 20, 38, 41n7, 129 “Mots et les Images, Les” (Magritte) 110 Mousoutzanis, Aris 146 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) 78 Munster, Anna 5 Murphy, Michael David 26, 28 Museum of Modern Art 109, 134n7 music: exchange value of 84, 99n15; intersections of technologies 80; memory and 75, 78–9; social value of 82, 98n13; sonic memory and 73; sound and voice in 78; see also digital music musical narrative 73, 76, 78 music industry: digital technologies and 81–4, 86, 99n16; economies of 80, 82–3, 86, 98n13; in Goon Squad 14, 70–3, 80–5; internet piracy and 98n13; technologies of 80–3; see also digital music Musson, Jayson 33 Mutu, Wangechi 38, 39 Mydans, Carl 26, 27 Nabokov, Vladimir 63, 89 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, The (Poe) 2 “Negro as He Really Is, The” (Du Bois) 25 Nemerov, Howard 155 neoliberalism: biopolitical concerns and 48; circular disorders and 56; corporate

conscience and 57; democracy and 46–8, 51, 57; digital technologies and 46–7, 67n4; economic policy and 46; entrepreneurial values in 57; hegemonic discourse and 46; infantile citizenship and 58; inner voices and 47; loss of vocal expression 47, 67n4; multimedia and 126; psychological disarray and 51; solutions to 69n15; subvocalization in 51; totalizing effect of 46, 66n3; workplace boredom and 55–6 Netherland (O’Neill): cricket and 157– 61, 173n16; crisis of representation and 155, 173n17; critique of realism in 173n15; elegiac realism and 153– 4, 156–7; historicization of global city in 153; individual consciousness and 152; loss of language in 156–7; lyrical discourse and 173n17; mother tongue and 153, 157–8; multisensory interculturality and 15; poetics of New York and 138, 153–5; poetic tension in 156; political indifference in 156; postcolonial reading of 173n16; subcommunity of immigrants in 158–9; Whitman’s invincible city and 152, 158 network culture 5, 8–11, 17n7 Neumark, Norie 12 New Negro for a New Century, A (Washington) 25 New York: antagonism of 141; capitalism and 141–2; cricket in 157; as global city 15, 137, 155, 171n1; global novel and 15, 137, 140; mother tongues of 138–9, 144, 146, 153, 157, 162, 170; multisensory interculturality and 15; 9/11 attacks and 9, 14, 86, 138, 154; poetics of 137–9, 144–51, 153–5, 161–70; post-9/11 138–9, 145, 149, 152, 154; production/consumption in 140; Whitman and 15, 137, 144, 152, 170, 170n1 Ngai, Sianne 6, 58 Night and Day (Woolf) 78 9/11 see World Trade Center attacks Nord Sud (Breton) 109 Northrup, Solomon 42n10 novels see literature Oates, Joyce Carol 133n2 Oblivion (Wallace) 56

Index  205 O’Brien, Susie 138 “October 10, 2006/World Cup” (Rankine) 37 Odutola, Toyin Ojih 24, 24 Odyssey (Homer) 77 Olster, Stacey 162, 173n20 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey) 55 O’Neill, Joseph: elegiac realism and 153–4; global novel and 140, 153, 161, 177; lyrical discourse and 138–9; multinational identity and 161; narrative mimesis and 159; poetic renewal and 138; poetics of New York and 15, 138–9, 170; Zadie Smith critique of 173n15; see also Netherland (O’Neill) Ong, Walter 3, 16n2 Open City (Cole) 1–2 Orality and Literacy (Ong) 16n2 Order of Things, The (Foucault) 173n17 Othello (Shakespeare) 143 Ozeki, Ruth 2 “Ozymandias” (Shelley) 63–4 Pale King, The (Wallace): agency of voice in 60–2; authorial identity in 62–3, 65–6; biopolitical concerns in 48; choosing meaning in 51; circular disorders and 56; critique of techno-capital culture in 43–4, 46–7, 49–53, 59–60, 69n15; democratic decay in 56–9; demonic voice in 43; disease and disorder in 44, 47–8, 52; exformation and 53, 68n11; human connection and 61–2; human disgust and 47–8, 176–7; IRS workers in 43–65; junk text in 49–50; mediation/ meditation in 43–4, 63–4; metafiction and 64–5; neoliberal critique in 43–51, 55–8, 60, 62, 65, 69n15; purging of political waste in 59–60; speechlessness and 47–8, 54–6, 62, 66; subvocalization in 14, 43–5, 47–8, 54–5, 63; temporality and 55; vocal anxiety and 44; workplace boredom and 55–6 Parikka, Jussi 5, 9 Pekar, Harvey 127 Peretz, I. L. 111, 135n9 Petit, Philippe 163 Philip, M. NourbeSe 20

Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 67n9 phonocentric bias 12 phonograph/gramophone 75–6, 98n8 Pietsch, Michael 49, 66 Pisan Cantos, The (Pound) 76 Pizer, Donald 142 Plath, Sylvia 90 Plot (Rankine) 20 Poe, Edgar Allen 2, 63, 175 poetry: Holocaust representation and 105; internationality and 152; measure versus countermeasure in 162; modernism and 77–8; New York and 137–9, 144–51, 163–70; as regenerative force 170; spinning power of 161–2; urban consciousness and 137–8, 152; see also literature poiesis 138, 147, 162, 177, 179 Politics (Aristotle) 61 Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard) 97n3 Pound, Ezra 14, 76–7, 155 Pratt, Henry John 112 Pressman, Jessica 176 Price, Kenneth 141–2 Prieto, Eric 73, 76 Problem of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, The (Bakhtin) 16n1 Proust, Marcel 2, 14, 76, 78–9, 82 Public Lynching (Lucas) 31, 32 public memory 7, 21, 75 Purity and Danger (Douglas) 59 Pursuit of Signs, The (Culler) 41n3 Pym (Johnson) 2 racism: African American literature on 25; anger and 35–7; animalism associations with 29; documentation and 19; faceless hood image and 18; media images and 13–14, 20–2, 24–6, 34–7; as mutual encounter 30; neoliberal agenda and 23–4; personal and public histories of 21; political contestation of 20; silence of 20–1; systemic 20; use of apostrophe and 19 radical mediation 10 Radstone, Susannah 70 Ramazani, Jahan 153 Rankine, Claudia: interpretations of race 18; phonophenomenology and 38; poetic voice and 13, 18–19; recreation of sociopolitical history by

206 Index 20, 25; use of apostrophe 19; use of documentation 13–14, 19–21, 25–6; see also Citizen (Rankine) Rankine, Claudia, Works by: Art of Poetry, The 21; “August 29, 2005/ Hurricane Katrina” 23; Don’t Let Me Be Lonely 20; End of the Alphabet, The 20; “February 26, 2016/In Memory of Trayvon Martin” 30; “October 10, 2006/ World Cup” 37; Plot 20 Reagan, Ronald 46 Realidad Dominicana, La (Balaguer) 136n18 Reilly, Charles 73 Remainder (McCarthy) 173n15 rememory 20, 41n7 Reverdy, Pierre 109 Révolution Surréaliste, La 108, 134n6 Reynier, Christine 21 Rice, Tamir 18 Richardson, Brian 13 Rogers, Jim 98n13 Rogues (Derrida) 68n14 Routes of Contagion (Siegfried) 11 Roy, Elodie A. 80 Rumi 168 Rushdie, Salmon 125, 133n2 Rutgers women’s basketball team 36–7 Ruttenberg, Nancy 68n13 Ryan, Ray 8 Sáez, Elena Machado 136n16 Safran, William 103 Said, Edward W. 73 Salvage the Bones (Ward) 2 Sampson, Tony D. 5–6, 17n7 Samuel, Lisa 100 San Miguel, Pedro 136n18 Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 125 Schafer, R. Murray 97n2 Scholem, Gershom 134n8 “Schooner Flight, The” (Walcott) 121 Schumpeter, Joseph 5, 16n5 Scott, A.O. 133n2 Seltzer, Mark 89 Semisonic 95 Severs, Jeffrey 52, 69n15 Shakespeare, William 143 Shannon, Claude 50–1, 67n5 Sharpe, Christina 21 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 63–4 Shenk, Barry 99n16 Sherwin, Byron 134n8

Shipp, Thomas 32, 42n14 Shuster, Joe 103 Siegel, Jerry 103 Siegfried, André 11 Sikes, Alan 135n9 Simon, Roger 105 Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard) 97n3 Sister Carrie (Dreiser) 140 slave narratives 25, 42n10 Sleeping Heads (Mutu) 38, 39 Smith, Abram 32, 42n14 Smith, Hazel 73 Smith, Zadie 173n15 Snyder, Katherine V. 156, 173n16 social media 175 Society of the Spectacle, The (DeBord) 97n3 “Song of Exposition” (Whitman) 152 “Song of Myself” (Whitman) 26, 42n12, 52, 162 Sontag, Susan 20 “Soul is Not a Smithy, The” (Wallace) 56 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois) 18, 41n2 sound: commodification of 80; as form of signification 71; impossibility of speech and 98n8; language and 73; memory and 14; music and 78; 9/11 attacks and 14, 85; physical presence of 78; silence and 14–15; sociocultural change and 97n2; visual/linear 71; voice and 14–15, 38, 70–1 Specimen Days (Cunningham): childterrorists in 149–50; generic modes and 145; on historical progress 148; mother tongue and 144; multisensory interculturality and 15; poetic consciousness and 172n12; poetic repetition in 145–6; poetics of New York and 138–9, 144–51; sense of belonging and 149–50, 152; Whitman’s poetry and 144–52, 172n10, 172n12, 172n13 Spiegelman, Art 108, 121, 134n5 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 130 Spreadable Media (Jenkins) 16n4 Stein, Gertrude 16, 145–6, 172n11, 172n14 Stepto, Robert 42n10 Sterne, Jonathan 71, 83, 98n14, 99n16 Stevens, Wallace 167

Index  207 Stonecipher, Donna 140 “Strange Fruit” (Meeropol) 31 Strate, Lance 3 structures of feeling 73, 97n6 subvocalization: Burroughs and 68n10; circular disorders and 56; listening and 65; in The Pale King 14, 43–5, 47–8, 54–6, 63 Superman 103–4, 109 Superstitions of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday, The (Stein) 16 “Surhomme, Le” (Breton) 111 surrealism 108–9, 134n7 Swann’s Way (Proust) 78 Szeman, Imre 138 Tale for the Time Being, A (Ozeki) 2 Taylor, Breonna 18 technological innovation: acoustic hallucinations and 75–6; creative destruction and 4; cultural memory and 75; human connectivity and 86, 99n17; loss of intimacy and discourse amid 14; society of control and 51, 67n8; sonic language and 77; see also digital technologies technological literacy 3, 16n2 temporality see time 10:04 (Lerner) 2 Tennis-Brazil-Wozniacki-Exhibition 36 Tennyson, Alfred 170 Terada, Rei 171n5 Thacker, Eugene 9 Thatcher, Margaret 46 Theory of the Novel, The (Lukács) 11 This Is Water (Wallace) 51 Thomaidis, Konstantinos 13 Thompson, Emily 97n2 Three Lives (Stein) 146, 172n11 Thurber, James 109 Ticket That Exploded, The (Burroughs) 68n10 time: Katrina Time 24; mediality and 70; memory and 14, 71, 76; modernism and 75; neoliberal workplace and 55; Proust and 78; racial unconscious and 19; sensory memory and 78; sonic memory and 71, 74; traumatic memory and 72–5; Woolf and 78 Time of Terror, A (Cameron) 42n14 Tocqueville, Alexis de 56–7, 68n13, 68n14 Toffler, Alvin 99n17

Tolstoy, Leo 180 Toynbee, Jason 99n16 Trachtenberg, Alan 170n1 trauma: comics and 15; communal 55; memory and 31–2, 41n7, 70–5; network culture and 9; post-Katrina 24; racial 19, 27, 40; sounds of 14, 71–2, 85–6, 91–2; technological mediation and 80; witnessing and 97n4, 97n5 Trauma Question, The (Luckhurst) 41n7 “Treachery of Images, The” (Magritte) 173n17 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire 172n13 Trilogy (Doolittle) 77 Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leónidas 102, 117, 128–30 Turkle, Sherry 3 Turner, Joseph M.W. 40 “Two Paths for the Novel” (Smith) 173n15 Ulysses (Joyce) 164, 172n12 Uncertain, yet Reserved (Adeola. Abuja Airport, Nigeria) (Odutola) 24, 24 Understanding David Foster Wallace (Boswell) 67n9 Underworld (DeLillo) 155 Unnatural Voices (Richardson) 13 Untitled: Four Etchings (Ligon) 34, 34 Urban Revolution, The (Lefebvre) 172n8 USA (Dos Passos) 139–42 Value of the Novel, The (Boxall) 10 van de Velde, Danica 98n12 Van Dijck, José 9, 70 Van Leeuwen, Theo 12 virality: contagion and 6, 11, 17n7; creative destruction and 4–5; global pandemic and 5; literary voice and 4–8; networked culture and 5, 9, 11, 17n7; voice and 5–8, 11, 176 Virilio, Paul 47, 49 Visit from the Goon Squad, A (Egan): celebrity culture and 89–90; earwitnessing in 72; on global influence of mass media 86–91; iPod release and 80–2; masculinity and 87–9; modernist influence on 76, 79–80; music industry in 14, 70–3, 80–5; 9/11 attacks and 80–1, 85–6; passing of time and 75, 92, 96–7;

208 Index perceptions of time and 71; politics of listening and 71; PowerPoint chapter in 14, 71, 92, 92, 93, 93, 94, 94, 95, 95, 96, 96; punk aesthetics and 81, 98n12; safari as surveillance in 87–9, 99n18; shame memories in 80–2; silence and 90–1, 94; sonic memory in 14, 70–3, 79–82, 85–9, 96–7; speechlessness and 74–5; temporality and 75; traumatic memory and 73–4, 79, 85, 89, 91–3, 96, 177; traumatic sounds in 71–5, 79, 85–6, 91–2, 97n5 voice: apostrophe and 19; in colonial narratives 102; creative destruction and 6; cultural memory and 4; deformance and 100, 117, 133n1; dialogism and 44; inner 47; interdisciplinary study in 12–13; literature and 2–7, 10–16, 16n1; media and 3, 5, 7–8, 13; mediality and 70; mediation and 63–4, 66; neoliberalism and 47; networked culture and 10; 9/11 attacks and 14, 154–5; noises of 37–8; participatory culture and 10; performative 13–14, 100–1, 105–6; phonocentric bias and 12; poetic 13, 41n3, 141, 152; polyphonic 3, 44; racialized polemics of 20; radical mediation and 10; relationalism and 12; silencing of Black 33, 35; sound and 14–15, 38, 70–1; speech and 47; subvocalization and 14, 43–5, 47, 51, 68n10; temporality and 70; virality and 5–8, 11, 176; visual 20–5; vocal anxiety and 44 Voice (Neumark, et al.) 12 Voice Studies (Thomaidis and MacPherson) 13 Volcker, Paul 46 Voyage Out, The (Woolf) 78 Walcott, Derek 121 “Walking in the City” (de Certeau) 171n7 Walkowitz, Rebecca 135n15 Wallace, David Foster: authorial identity and 62–3, 65–6; on choosing meaning 51; on corporate conscience 57–8; on human suffering 61; ineffability and 62; influence of Hemingway on 53; influence of Wittgenstein on 67n9; literary

manipulation and 89; metafiction and 65; postmodern moralism and 69n15; on realistic fiction 45; struggles of 49; on techno-capital society 43–4; on terror of silence 14, 44; voice and 44; see also Pale King, The (Wallace) Wallace, David Foster, Works by: Broom of the System, The 68n9; “Good People” 53; Infinite Jest 49, 69n15; Oblivion 56; “Soul is Not a Smithy, The” 56; This Is Water 51; Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way 65 Walpole, Christy 44 “Walt Whitman and the American City” (Andrews) 170n1 Ward, Jesmyn 2 Washington, Booker T. 25 Wasteland, The (Eliot) 79 Watchman 132 Waters, William 28 Waugh, Patricia 64 Waves, The (Woolf) 78 Weaver, Warren 50, 67n5 Weeks, Robert P. 141 Weems, Carrie Mae 22, 22 Wessells, Henry 133n2 Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (Wallace) 65 White, Hayden 134n5 Whitley, Edward 171n1 Whitman, Walt: on American experience 26, 145; “barbaric yawp” and 42n12, 52; on belonging amid displacement 138; critique of industrial progress 146; influence on Dos Passos 141–2; in Let the Great World Spin 162, 165–7, 170; mother tongue and 138, 171n2; in Netherland 152, 158; New York and 15, 137, 144, 152, 170, 170n1; poetry in Specimen Days 144–52, 172n10, 172n12, 172n13; regeneration and 162; shared language of the street and 162, 173n20; tension with naming 152, 172n14; urban consciousness of 137, 141 Whitman, Walt, Works by: “Broadway Pageant, A” 171n1; “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” 164; Leaves of Grass 42n12, 139, 145, 171n2, 172n14; “Poem for Procreation”

Index  209 137; “Song of Exposition” 152; “Song of Myself” 26, 52, 162; “Woman Waits for Me, A” 137 “Whitman’s Lesson of the City” (Trachtenberg) 170n1 Wiesel, Elie 135n9 Williams, Raymond 3, 8, 73, 97n6, 140, 146, 171n8, 172n12 Williams, Serena 33–5, 37 Williams, Venus 33 Winant, Howard 18 Without Sanctuary (Allen) 42n13 witnessing 42n11, 72, 90, 97n4, 97n5, 117 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 51, 67n9 Wood, James 173n16 Woolf, Virginia 14, 78 World Trade Center attacks: collective memory and 86; in Goon Squad 80–1, 85–6; in Let the Great World Spin 162; in Netherland 154; post9/11 literature and 138–9, 145, 152, 154–5, 163, 177; postnational

identity and 155; public loss of 162; sound and voice 14, 85, 154–5; in Specimen Days 149 Wouters, Conley 50, 69n15 Wozniacki, Caroline 35 Wright, Richard 13, 26, 42n11 Xiaoping, Deng 46 X-Men 118 Yancy, George 41n6 Yang, Gene Luen 127 Yeats, William Butler 162 You Have Seen Their Faces (BourkeWright and Caldwell) 42n11 Youngman, Hennessy 33, 35 Zidane, Zinedine 37 Zimmerman, George 18, 41n6 Žižek, Slavoj 133n3 Zoli (McCann) 162 Zong (Philip) 20