Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives 1609387627, 9781609387624

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Novel Subjects

The New American Canon The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture Samuel Cohen, series editor

novel subjects

Authorship as Radical

Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives

le a h a . m i l n e University of Iowa Press, Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2021 by the University of Iowa Press www.uipress.uiowa.edu Printed in the United States of America Design by Ashley Muehlbauer No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Milne, Leah A. (Leah Abuan), 1980–author. Title: Novel subjects : authorship as radical self-care in multiethnic American narratives / Leah A. Milne. Description: Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, [2021] | Series: The new American canon: the Iowa series in contemporary literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020043381 (print) | LCCN 2020043382 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609387624 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781609387631 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: American fiction—Minority authors—History and criticism. | American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | American Fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | Fiction—Technique. | Authors in literature. | Group identity in literature. | Multiculturalism in literature. | Ethnicity in literature. Classification: LCC PS153.M56 M55 2021 (print) | LCC PS153.M56 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54098—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043381 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043382

For Marc and my parents, with all my heart

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction: Vindictively American  1 1. Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship: Gina Apostol and Louise Erdrich  27 2. Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self and the Other: Carmen Maria Machado and Jonathan Safran Foer  66 3. Material Metafiction and the Life-Changing Magic of All Myriad Things: Nicole Krauss and Ruth Ozeki  102 4. “A Blank Page Rises Up”: Willful Authors in Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell and Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado  139 Epilogue: Releasing Doubles into the World . . .  179 Notes  191 Bibliography  223 Index  239

Acknowledgments

This book began as my doctoral dissertation, and its earliest readers include María Carla Sánchez, Christian Moraru, and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, as well as my Tate Street Coffee crew, Lauren Shook and Kt Leuschen, all of whom deserve my eternal gratitude. Tina Romanelli provided feedback on multiple drafts, as well as emotional support, wine, and friendship. Speaking of emotional support: Caroline Hong, Mai-Linh Hong, Audrey Wu Clark, and Mimi Khúc, you are my calming CLAMMs. Nadine and Jacquie Mattis, thank you for the respite. I am grateful to Samuel S. Cohen for believing in this project, and to Meredith T. Stabel and everyone else at the University of Iowa Press who made this possible. To my UIndy colleagues, including Rebecca McKanna, Daniel Vice, Molly Martin, Kevin McKelvey, Amanda Miller, and Jyotika Saksena, and my UNCG posse, including Erin Wedehase, Alison Johnson, Sara Boissonneau, Daniel Burns, and Scott Thomas Gibson, thank you for being there for me. This book is dedicated to Marc, without whose love and support this would not have been possible, and to my parents, Emil and Letty Tarrangco: Agyamanak, apo.

Novel Subjects

Introduction Vindictively American

In an interview with Harold Isaacs, Ralph Ellison compared himself to Richard Wright, Henry James, and other writers who exiled themselves from the United States in order to write. In contrast, Ellison remarked, “Personally, I am too vindictively American, too full of hate for the hateful aspects of this country, and too possessed by the things I love here to be too long away.”1 Through his interview, Isaacs hoped to unearth African American writers’ connection to the African continent, which some during the Harlem Renaissance considered their literary—if not also ancestral—homeland. Ellison’s response confounded the anticipated connection. “I did not—and I do not—feel a lack in my cultural heritage as an American Negro. I think a lot of time is wasted trying to find a substitute in Africa,” he told Isaacs. “The thing to do,” he adds, “is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.”2 Here Ellison was not claiming satisfaction with African Americanness as it currently stood. Instead, he conveyed an ability to define himself and his cultural history through his writing and his life, regardless of others’ expectations. The modifier “vindictive” implies vengefulness, wrapped up in the “hateful aspects” he references. However, regarding Ellison’s wish to exploit the meaning of his life, I propose that we likewise associate the term with justice and vindication. His insistent assertion of Americanness was an act of selfcare and self-preservation—of claiming membership for himself and others like him in a community that would include him, if only justice prevailed.

Opining that Richard Wright was a better writer in Chicago and Brooklyn than he ever was in Paris, Ellison further linked this justice to a unique writerly identity forged in the US, in all its paradoxical complexity. Of course, this brings up questions of nationality and ethnic identity. For instance, why choose a country that deliberately excludes you based on the color of your skin? Wouldn’t it be easier, and even healthier, if he just stayed where he felt more welcome? Sara Ahmed asks similar questions but shifts the focus away from nationality, instead associating vindictiveness with noncompliance to systems of oppression. Contemplating the “willful words” of fellow marginalized subjects, she proclaims, “We might need to intrude on a world in which we figure as intrusion. . . . Just being is willful work for those whose being is not only not supported by the general body, but deemed a threat to that body.”3 Ahmed positions Ellison’s sought-after vindication as survival, a way for her community to protect and honor their shared identities. This protection is also, however, an imposition, or what W. E. B. Du Bois called being a “problem.”4 Writers such as Ellison are burdened with the conundrum of knowing that some would construe even their most neutral words as invasive, simply because they assert their existence. Ahmed’s motivation in making these claims is the same as my own in writing this book: Both of us find inspiration and comfort in Audre Lorde’s perspective on self-care and the power that words have in shaping how we create and take care of ourselves. Lorde wrote A Burst of Light after learning that her cancer had metastasized, but the book is more than just a memoir of illness. Rather, she characterizes her fight for survival as a battle wrapped up in her identity as a Black lesbian American woman. Like Ellison and Ahmed, she sees the struggle to belong as vindictive and intrusive. She is nevertheless determined to dance with and learn from her fear, to be “a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection. A rough place on the chin of complacency.”5 In the book’s epilogue, Lorde proclaims what has become a self-care mantra: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”6 It is in the spirit of political warfare that I categorize the scenes of writing and authorship discussed in this book. While Ellison seated his authorship in nationality to defend his right to an American identity, I contend that ethnic American writers today—that is, authors of formerly hyphenated American 2 Introduction

ethnicities such as Asian Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinx Americans, Jewish Americans, and so on—practice this form of radical self-care to explicitly define the borders of their literary homelands and identities, encompassing a multitude of affiliations, histories, and cultures. What is “radical” about their self-care is also fundamental: They exercise the power to define their cultural identities in collaboration with others who they feel share and understand their experiences. Their goal, like Lorde’s, is no less than survival and preservation. Thus, as I define it, radical self-care is informed and collaborative selfdefinition, particularly as practiced by marginalized groups whose stories have become secondary to more dominant national narratives. In radical self-care, ethnicity is less dependent on outside definitions, instead emerging within storytelling relationships. This relations-based form of self-care is rooted in shared obligations within chosen communities and contingent on one’s agency to form their cultural identity based on individual experiences. In this way, this approach to ethnicity asks us to reconsider how the US regards the tolerance and celebration of diversity, a term that in its prime was known as multiculturalism. Rather than reviving a multiculturalism that has been co-opted by corporations and “firmly embedded, especially in education and the national narrative,”7 the authors discussed here reframe traditional multicultural ideologies to encompass a critical and vindictive Americanness in their work, integrating forms of ethnicity that are intersectional, dynamic, and responsive to unique needs for alliance and self-definition. The interactions in their chosen associations mirror the reading practices of these texts, which demand shared labor and responsibility among storytellers, and between writers and readers. Practitioners of this radical self-care thus share control of the stories of their ethnic identities in the forms that best suit them, regardless of what outsiders consider authentic or acceptable. In literary terms, these practitioners feature fictional versions of themselves in their texts—author-characters who collaborate with both their fictional and real-life readers. By focusing on fictionalized characters who are likewise authors and storytellers, these texts make up a specific subgenre within the broader genre of metafiction that involves, essentially, writing about writing. Metafiction’s intentional self-consciousness and reflexivity, I contend, make it particularly attuned to discussions of identity and self-care—even more so when we narrow metafiction down, as I have, to stories that feature characters who are Introduction  3

also writers in community with readers. Some of these characters narrate the story (what narratologists call homodiegetic narrators) or both narrate and star in the story (autodiegetic narrators), while others merely exist as authorcharacters populating the text. In actuality, the fiction discussed here deliberately blurs distinctions between the real-life or empirical author, the narrator, and the image of the implied author that the text projects to its reader. Though we can trace metafiction back to works such as The Canterbury Tales and Don Quixote, metafiction today is largely associated with white male postmodern authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth. All of this begs the question: What is the value of resurrecting these departed things? What use might metafiction and multiculturalism have today, particularly to multiethnic American writers? Echoing a character in Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado (discussed in chapter 4) who surmises that one’s “real home country will be that common ground your work plows between you and your reader,”8 the author-characters discussed in this book forge unique reader-writer collaborations of their choosing to confront and complicate questions of ethnic and cultural identity. These scenes of writing exemplify the kinds of negotiations needed to update the original intentions of multiculturalism and to open space for adaptable possibility. They enact ways of responding to individual and collective needs for self-definition and self-care, whether in the realm of nationality, cultural and familial history, or the form that these stories take. By embodying the struggles of both artistic production and identity formation, these self-referential works claim distinct forms of cultural self-expression while also pushing for connectivity and collectivity, recasting the spirit of Ellison’s critical yet capacious Americanness. The need for more malleable ways of defining race, ethnicity, and nationality is as urgent now as it was in Ellison’s era. Terrorist acts in major cities; protests of police brutality, racism, and structural inequalities made more widely visible by the COVID-19 pandemic; and attempts to quell the freedoms of refugees, immigrants, and their families have situated nationality and authenticity as prominent issues in the US. These and other recent events uphold the necessity of self-care that creates and promotes more inclusive, adaptable, and collaborative perspectives on identity, while also destabilizing hardened beliefs of whose lives and what stories and definitions thereof truly matter. Representing these points of connection as radical and necessary forms of self-care—“radical” especially for those who have been pushed to the margins of the multicultural 4 Introduction

picture—these texts present articulations of Americanness that capture the fluidities of selfhood in the current era.

Multiculturalism One major difference between Ellison and the writers I focus on in this project is a matter of history—specifically of the events that transpired in the US between Ellison’s obdurate claim of Americanness and the emergence of today’s writers, including the rise and fall of multiculturalism. I use “multiculturalism” in this book not as a descriptive term to denote the varied multiplicity of the US population, but as an expressly prescriptive concept designating the social, political, educational, and commercial approaches meant to positively account for cultural diversity—that is, the distinct US cultural traditions, narratives, artifacts, and values that constitute a “common citizenship.”9 During multiculturalism’s zenith in the 1980s and 1990s, a backlash emerged against what opponents perceived as excessive political correctness and the encouragement of social and even national fragmentation. Opponents largely felt that approaches such as assimilation would be more effective in integrating a society. Meanwhile, supporters of multiculturalism had wildly divergent definitions of the term, as well as opinions on how best to resist and combat unequal distributions of power and liberty in American society.10 Largely, though, advocates argued that multiculturalism “died” or became detrimentally mainstream because it didn’t go far enough: it was too exclusionary and corporate, was not intersectional enough, and policed the borders of ethnicity by privileging some ethnic performances above others. I would add that this former or “classical” version of multiculturalism did not do enough to promote and support autonomy in self-care, in some cases becoming an obscurant, dictating who does or does not belong in ways that have little relevance to lived experiences, relationships, and histories. Classical multicultural practices police the makeup of these groups, sanitizing and commodifying difference while simultaneously supporting only certain state-approved versions of history and culture, of storytelling and stories, and ultimately of ethnic identity in general. Describing practices in the US and Canada, Sneja Gunew observes that multiculturalism is “seen as a covert form of assimilationism and even of white supremacism.”11 Multiculturalism as it currently stands bases its policies and philosophy on groups being reducible Introduction  5

to essentialized ethnicities, classes, genders, nationalities, tribes, and levels of privilege. It celebrates diversity by using people of color as window dressing and embodiments of enlightenment while leaving the institutions themselves largely unchanged. While celebrations of cultural difference are not inherently corrupt, multiculturalism has whitewashed and supplanted attempts to resist oppression, erasing the lives and experiences of those who do not conform to its principles and disenfranchising people from methods of self-care that would engender feelings of belonging. This is despite Rey Chow’s proclamation that “it is precisely at the time of multiculturalism, when ‘culture’ seems to be liberalized in the absence of metanarratives [and] to have become a matter of ‘entitlement’ rather than struggle, that we need to reemphasize the questions of power and underscore at every point the institutional forces that account for the continual hierarchization of cultures.”12 Instead, this hierarchy privileges performances of ethnic identity that uphold American exceptionalism, celebrating the contained and objectified other as an aesthetically pleasing form of cultural expression validated by schools, businesses, and the media. For example, in the context of a 1990 Los Angeles diversity festival, Lisa Lowe explains, “Multiculturalism levels the important differences and contradictions within and among racial and ethnic minority groups according to the discourse of pluralism, which asserts that American culture is a democratic terrain to which every variety of constituency has equal access and in which all are represented.”13 The L.A. festival’s participants, then—including Kun Opera singers, Ecuadorian musicians, and Maori dancers—perform their nationalities within the confines of a multicultural celebration to invoke wonder and pride in their American audience. Even as they represent their heritage, they are instrumental “as evidence of a color-blind democracy” in the US.14 Such commemorations are the epitome of multicultural principles: Diversity is used to advocate nationalist beliefs, the performers representing non-American nationalities while promoting a form of tolerant American progressiveness. A similar conflict occurs in multicultural events such as Black History Month that uphold historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks as objectified exceptions in contrast to what Saidiya Hartman calls “the beauty of black ordinary.”15 Such celebrations use these figures to valorize US multicultural ideals in a way that then gets subsumed into American exceptionalism. 6 Introduction

In this way, the boundaries of “authentic” and “inauthentic” cultural expression for marginalized authors are imposed twofold. They are externally imposed by those who seek to establish manageable and—for them—comfortable categories of difference, and internally imposed by ethnic groups who delimit associations and the knowledge and characteristics required for membership. Especially in the former instance, “authentic” becomes a code for the kind of representation seen at the L.A. diversity festival—regimented, performative, and often stereotyped expressions of difference. A look on any restaurant review site of “international” cuisine can give one a sense of what this version of authenticity entails as it confirms and stays within the bounds of dominant outsider expectations. Throughout this book, I examine how the fictional author-protagonists grapple with questions of how much power is too much given these expectations and impositions: How can one claim responsibility for writing the plights of marginalized people while not overexerting one’s authority or overemphasizing limiting notions of accuracy and authenticity? Where does the balance between authorship and authority lie? And finally, how does one strike this balance when telling these stories? Some of multiculturalism’s complications begin with preoccupations over group legitimacy and which stories and social, political, and economic rights these groups should emphasize, often at the expense of individual and/or alternative experiences and distinctions. For example, many argue that the collective term “Asian American,” though useful when it first emerged in 1968 to promote panethnic civil rights, has obscured the educational needs, language, and poverty of specific Asian ethnic groups.16 Meanwhile, politics discusses the “Latino vote” as if it weren’t made up of people from different nationalities, races, and hemispheres. “African American” similarly conflates diverse individuals from varied backgrounds and affiliations, purporting that a middle-class woman whose great-grandparents hail from Haiti, for instance, shares the same values, needs, and mindsets as an upper-class Nigerian immigrant newly sworn in as a US citizen and should therefore be represented in the same way. Even the term “ethnicity”—which, due to conciseness, I depend on for most of this book—covers over fluid categories surrounding the culture, religion, and/or ethnic identities housed within, for instance, Judaism or indigeneity, the latter of which may take the form of political entities like nations, bands, tribes, pueblos, and so on, and does not account for status or whether an individual has Introduction  7

or lacks a strong tribe-level identity.17 While group distinctions can be helpful in addressing inequality on the political level, the multicultural practices that address such oppression have not been wholly effective in protecting the rights and interests of the most alienated and demoralized group members, nor has the philosophical outlook of multiculturalism fostered wholesale and lasting improvements in how we see and define ourselves. Instead, multiculturalist ideals encourage categorization and compartmentalization, even when these are unproductive, useless, or impossible. My intention to focus on contemporary texts is due to the multiculturally inspired frenzy that happened in the United States after 1989 especially regarding the literary canon and leading into multiculturalism’s so-called death or waning. While discussions of multicultural literature were on the rise since the 1960s and 1970s, most notably resulting from the San Francisco State student strikes in 1968, calls for more representative curricula did not gain sustained national attention until the late 1980s culture wars, marked by clashes over whether universities should have a canon and what it should comprise, as well as the establishment of ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, and related curricula in universities. This was paired with the rise of important collections seeking to widen American literature’s scope, including Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by Gloria Hull, Patricia Scott, and Barbara Smith. The appearance on reading lists of texts like these led to an inevitable backlash, sparking sensational and often melodramatic headlines about the decline or even the end of Western civilization as we know it. Of course, equating the diversification of the canon with a weakening of American or Western values insinuates that people of color are not part of American culture, and even presumes, as Stephen Sohn puts it, a false “unification among the author, narrative perspective, and narrative content.”18 An example would be adding Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street or Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt to the curriculum and proclaiming to have adequately captured The Latinx Experience. Or suggesting that the presence of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God alone confirms that all Black people are now represented, as if African American authenticity were an attainable and singular aspiration. 8 Introduction

The prominence of multiculturalism and the canon wars inspired Henry Louis Gates (borrowing from W. E. B. Du Bois) to declare that “the problem of the twenty-first century will be the problem of ethnic differences, as these conspire with complex differences in color, gender, and class.”19 Amid the culture wars, assumptions of fair representation displaced the urgency to address political and social inequalities. Or, as Jodi Melamed notes, “The canon wars made it easy to misrecognize literature as accomplished social and political transformation and used a preoccupation with literary culture to marginalize antiracist materialisms.”20 In other words, one need not help a population they can dismiss as no longer needing help. Superficial forms of inclusion, representation, and visibility—key goals of much of the canon discussions at the time—covered over material concerns. Rather than throwing multiculturalism out entirely, the texts discussed in Novel Subjects show the value of incorporating multiculturalism’s foundational intentions into larger conversations on equity and self-care. At a speaking event, I asked author Zadie Smith how she felt about the word “multicultural,” a descriptor that critics often apply to her work. Growing up in the UK, Smith was a direct beneficiary of local government efforts to foster multicultural communities. She emphasizes that she truly prospered from being able to check out books by authors of color at the local library and, recalling her novel White Teeth, adds, “I wasn’t exaggerating when I wrote that I went to a school that spoke a hundred languages.” She grew up believing that all communities were multicultural, and was “shocked to find all-white communities in England. Things that were considered policies,” she concludes, “were truly life-savers to me.”21 Similarly, multiculturalism in the US has led to movements advancing representation and recognition along ethnic, gender, and class lines in schools, businesses, and politics, leading to more diverse student bodies and curricula, as well as wider representation in workplaces and government policies. Being able to find oneself in a text is only a small part of the solution but remains an important foundational one for launching larger discussions. I consequently assert that reifying and limiting what ethnicity means ultimately limits what multiculturalism can actually do. The authors of these texts (both the real-life authors and the fictional ones) tell stories about their ethnic and cultural identities that critically assess the modes of representation that have become standard to multiculturalist rhetoric. Rather than allowing dominant and exceptional individuals to dictate their identities through Introduction  9

policy, phenotype, or the designation of native informants to tell their stories for everyone else, these authors choose their own contexts built on complex histories and personal relationships and negotiations. Namely, they practice radical self-care by telling their stories in their own ways, and in so doing, they practice a form of multiculturalism that critiques and revises the corporate and governmental frameworks that have come before it.

Metafiction The debate over what constitutes correct responses to diversity in US society continues even as the politically charged catchword “multiculturalism” is no longer evoked. The ongoing discussion of agency and identity in literary and cultural studies is mirrored by the large amount of multicultural postmodern American fiction since 1989 that features writing as a profession, obsession, or central plot element. These scenes of writing and authorship reflect growing preoccupations with who gets to tell these stories and in what way. Such a long list could include novels by Julia Alvarez, John Edgar Wideman, and Don Lee, just to name a few. Some, like Percival Everett and Gina Apostol (both discussed in this book), have made language, authors, and the act of authoring and authorizing texts persistent tropes in their oeuvres. The postmodern obsession with whether writers are aware of and express their presence on the page is a given in the metafiction I discuss here. In its place, the conversation has shifted to the nature of that unquestioned presence. If fiction evokes empathy by pulling the reader into its world and upsetting the comfort that allows one to read as an outsider, metafiction or self-conscious fiction (especially the texts I discuss here) does something different: With the presence of the authorial self no longer in question, the works I discuss instead focus on how we respond to that self and make explicit the hidden interactions that occur between real-life and imaginary readers and writers, even as the texts challenge the readerly impulse to equate fictional characters with empirical authors. This interstitial existence between fiction and nonfiction inspires honest and informed discussions of ethnic and cultural identity prompted by a web of interactions among readers, characters, and their real-life authorial counterparts. These metafictional works dramatize such interactions as a fundamental part of the process of racial self-care involving the collaborative reimagining of ethnic and tribal identities.22 10 Introduction

Metafiction can be broadly defined as self-conscious and even intrusive literature—or, as Linda Hutcheon describes, “fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity.”23 Nevertheless, this project seeks to revive and focus on a subgenre of metafiction that directly considers the author’s role in the reader-writer relationship: literary works that depict protagonists and other characters as authors and/or as readers, who muse on the meaning of artistic creation as it relates to the self, especially within ethnic and national contexts. In describing the impetus behind metafiction, Patricia Waugh notes that metafiction often operates “on the principle of a fundamental and sustained opposition: the construction of a fictional illusion (as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion. In other words, the lowest common denominator of metafiction is simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction.”24 The metafiction discussed here complements Waugh’s description but also includes as part of its lowest common denominator proclamations about the construction and care of the self as depicted through author-characters. By analyzing these scenes of writing and self-formation, I hope to move self-conscious fiction beyond its common domain of “Western aesthetics”25 by underscoring the genre’s ability to support a space where writerly protagonists of all backgrounds can challenge and complicate ideas such as national belonging and ethnicity. While few recent theorists focus specifically on metafiction—somewhat surprising given its proliferation in popular culture26—the subject of authors and who or what they represent continues to be a hotly contested topic in literary theory. Roland Barthes’s 1967 proclamation of the death of the author has ignited a wave of recent scholarship by Jane Gallop, Benjamin Widiss, and others. Rather than concentrating on metafiction and the implications this form can have on our understanding of subjectivity, these scholars analyze what Seán Burke describes as the author’s death and ensuing return, the latter of which he notes “takes place almost instantaneously with the declaration of authorial departure.”27 However, while absorbed with the (primarily empirical) author’s return, these critics surprisingly leave out extensive discussion of ethnic identity or, for that matter, ethnic American authors. The closest approximations, Madelyn Jablon’s Black Metafiction (1997) and Patricia Chu’s Assimilating Asians (2000), are vital studies and important precursors to this book, but the former focuses largely on intertextuality, orality, and selfconsciousness in African American texts written before 1995, while the latter Introduction  11

text limits discussion primarily to Asian American experiences of immigration, discrimination, and marginalization, particularly as described by empirical Asian American authors and/or in the pages of Asian American bildungsromane. A third—Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (2017)—brings in multicultural discussions of the author and reader exclusively through the lens of narratology. The nature of the author, an “ontologically amphibious figure, alternately present and absent,”28 demands further cross-cultural exploration, especially given the impulse of philosophies like multiculturalism to classify and compartmentalize subjectivity. By focusing on how centering self-care alters the discourse of ethnic identity, I further hope to rescue metafiction from critics like John Aldridge who dismiss contemporary metafiction as narcissistic and as a product of and reaction to postmodern malaise. I show how these texts rewrite authorship and metafiction itself as being not wholly negative, introspective, or solipsistic. Rather, the author’s ghostly, liminal presence in texts exhibits a fluidity motivated by numerous influences. As Evan Maina Mwangi explains, the power of metafiction depends “on the talents of the writer and the historical, political and social contingencies that the text seeks to signify.”29 I emphasize that the empirical author’s experiences and contexts can participate in metafiction by scrutinizing power—especially master narratives of identity and dominant forms of storytelling. In most literary texts, the author is both powerful and marginal, self-sustained and interdependent, and wielding partial and temporary control over the words on the page—all of which suggest a self in need of nurture. Self-referential authors, by deliberately highlighting this conflicted existence, can vindictively practice self-care by transgressing real and literary borders in such a way that the author’s “intrusion,” as Bakhtin writes, “destroys [the text’s] aesthetic stability.”30 In the narratives analyzed in Novel Subjects, fictional author-characters engage in conversations with their audiences, feeling out their roles in the narrative and the influences that they should have upon the text, the other characters, and readers. Their authorial interactions can reformulate multicultural constructions of ethnicity both inside and outside of the text. We may trace writing as a form of self-care to self-writings—notebooks that collect fragments of mostly private observations. Examples of this are the hupomnēmata or commentary of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the pillow books or life writings most famously done by Sei Shōnagon of the Japanese Heian period in the late 990s. Discussing the hupomnēmata, Foucault observes, 12 Introduction

“the writer constitutes his own identity through this recollection of things said. . . . Through the interplay of selected readings and assimilative writing, one should be able to form an identity through which a whole spiritual genealogy can be read.”31 The process of writing is itself formative, and even in its most private and disjointed form it is interactive, a conversation with previous texts and writers. Foucault believed that the writing of hupomnēmata, while not meant to unearth hidden truths, nevertheless can help build “a relationship of oneself with oneself ” and was vital in the process of self-discipline required to establish “rational principles of action.”32 In fact, looking at what he calls technologies of the self, Foucault notes that the Greek and Roman admonition to “know yourself ” was always paired with the idea of self-care, and that the very need for self-care mobilized the saying in the first place. And yet, “‘Know thyself ’ has obscured ‘Take care of yourself ’ because our morality, a morality of asceticism, insists that the self is that which one can reject.”33 This morality, steeped in Christian and Western ethics, rejects the “active political and erotic state” of self-care34 and assumes a subject able to actively influence politics and society in the first place. Or, as Audre Lorde might say, self-renunciation is a luxury afforded to those whose survival is not automatically deemed a problem or intrusion. Lorde’s form of self-care is “radical” partly because it deviates from the commercialized overtones that self-care has taken in today’s popular contexts. Even as she mused about decreasing her sugar intake, Lorde situated her physical body in relation to her psychic body—marked as much by illness as by others’ assumptions and biases—and in turn placed these within the broader context of the body politic and of the need for equality and solidarity. In contrast, a more typical popular example is the Radical Self Care Project, a social media challenge that inspired an online course, a podcast, and the sale of a fourteen-week Radical Self Journal to track daily goals and the lunar phases. Similarly, on the Psychology Today website, Laura Markham’s version of radical self-care includes leaving the dishes unwashed on a Sunday and taking a “Baby and Me” yoga class or a bubble bath.35 Unfortunately, what passes for “radical” self-care in this environment is often corporatized and—incidentally, not unlike metafiction—has been dismissed by conservative critics as the narcissism of self-proclaimed social justice warriors. This corporatized version of self-care is also classed and racialized. A cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement, Alicia Garza, underscores a Introduction  13

major misconception about self-care as being primarily “for white people who are rich or wealthy . . . that if you can’t afford to do that, that you are also not able to take care of yourself.” Like multiculturalism, self-care too has become corporatized, defined through capitalist policies and practices and leaving out those who lack the power to influence those practices. When Garza first started her work twenty years ago, fellow activists thus viewed self-care as a distraction from “real” work. Evoking a more vindictive definition of self-care, Garza notes that she watched movements die because they failed to “build radically new relationships with each other and with ourselves.”36 Early activists were led to believe that expending oneself completely was the only way to bring about change, and that anything less was excessive and self-indulgent. Nevertheless, building resilient relationships with oneself and with those who share one’s ethnicity and experiences is at the heart of the radical selfcare that these texts represent. The texts analyzed in this project productively mobilize self-conscious forms and writerly tropes, offering a version of American literature that asks readers to actively engage with ethnic and cultural representations. In other words, these scenes of writing enact on the page what adrienne maree brown calls a “shift from individual transactions for self-care to collective transformation,” 37 a collaborative negotiation of radical self-care. Such texts can venture outward into the world by presenting the possibilities that stem from self-authorship and self-care, updating multicultural beliefs for the current age. Rather than concentrating exclusively on the real, lived experience of ethnic American authors or on a wide spectrum of metafictional aspects, this book focuses on fictionalized scenes of writing to pursue what I posit is a refined literary reconstruction of the self—attuned to the aftermath of 1960s and 1970s assimilationist pluralism, and responsive to the subsequent institutionalization of 1980s multiculturalism and ethnic studies. To borrow a phrase from Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, the texts analyzed in this project draw attention to the “necessary fictions”38 of how we construct ourselves in connection with others, and the necessary storytelling that accompanies these acts of self-care. While treated here as a theoretical and literary or metafictional concern, this form of self-care further underscores the need to revisit the meaning, application, and execution of existing political language and practice. Consider, for instance, the now unfortunately prevalent narratives and counternarratives surrounding “Black lives matter” versus “All lives matter.” Emerging in response 14 Introduction

to the deaths of Philando Castile, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, George Floyd, and other unarmed Black people killed by excessive police force, the former is meant not as an erasure of non-Black or all (other) lives, but as a way to draw attention to how Black people have been systematically excluded from policy, nationality, and narratives of American belonging. Applying this formation to radical self-care, citizenship, and human rights in the United States exposes numerous other disparities between the language represented in law or society and the actual execution of that language in the real world. Theorizing art’s engagement with the real world, Nicolas Bourriaud refers to performance art from the 1990s and onward as exhibiting a relational aesthetics, “taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context.”39 While he glosses over aspects of human interactions that are more overtly antagonistic and political, Bourriaud’s conception of art and human interaction is nonetheless applicable to metafiction and radical self-care because he characterizes the goal of relational art as “learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution.” The responsibility of art, he asserts, is “to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real.”40 Metafiction, with its energetic presentation and direct audience interaction, functions similarly as a kind of relational performance art, a way of “doing” multiculturalism with an eye to self-care and storytelling. Its relational nature encourages readers to consider narrative and its implications on levels both within and beyond the text. Thus, rather than assuming that the “self ” of “self-conscious fiction” refers only to the text, we must consider too the selves of the fictional authors on the page and the real authors beyond it. This writerly collectivity of authors as characters and narrators allows, I submit, for a wide consideration of the ways that authorship relates to notions of agency, history, and—most vital to this project—ethnic self-construal, or how individuals situate themselves in terms of racial, tribal, or cultural identities with respect to the world around them. I further argue that these texts uncover ethnic identities in the act of becoming, with characters discovering modes of self-care and self-expression at the crossroads of differing backgrounds, languages, and experiences. My argument therefore complicates David Hollinger’s notion of postethnicity as favoring “voluntary over involuntary affiliations” as well as Werner Sollors’s differentiation between descent and consent41 in the sense that I recognize that the components characterizing certain ethnicities have become—for better Introduction  15

or worse—involuntary and nonconsensual. In contrast to the problematic assumptions of the “post-” in Hollinger’s “postethnic,” I instead underscore this dynamic development of the self within and across cultural experiences in this globalized era. The intersectional process of such a self-made subjectivity underlines how, particularly in recent times, “ethnicity” automatically activates a plurality of traditions and approaches across spatial, national, temporal, and textual borders.42 I should note, however, that this gathering of self-conscious fiction is not necessarily—or not always equally—ethnically self-conscious. Put differently, in terms of content, my main concerns in choosing these texts are their portrayals of fictional author-characters in combination with the texts’ overt considerations of self-care and the nature of identity. By focusing on metafiction as a means of exploring cross-cultural approaches to radical self-care, I attempt to avoid Mwangi’s criticism of Jablon as conflating modes of identity through a monolithic approach to the genre.43 I further seek to avoid replicating criticisms weighed against works for their content at expense of their form, as occurred with Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a text wrongly deemed not political enough in its time, but which Jablon and others identify as foundational to Black metafiction.44 Hurston’s assertions of authority and authorship in the face of literary expectations of African American political involvement become thematized in these metafictional texts, which employ marginalized forms of storytelling to reveal marginal identities. Moreover, this project’s focus on American ethnicities is not necessarily or exclusively tied to texts featuring immigration or the immigrant experience. Specifically, I consider this new subset of American literature to encompass not just what Bharati Mukherjee—in describing literature by foreign-born Americans and their children—calls the “Literature of New Arrival,”45 but also the literature of ethnic Americans even further removed from their immigrant roots and nationalities. While not intending to imply that one ethnic group is the same as another and while remaining aware of distinct centers of power and privilege, I nonetheless do not propose that we can ultimately draw definite lines circumscribing what counts as ethnic American literature and what does not. Instead, by focusing on fictional representations of authors, I work inductively to derive a theory of multicultural authorship as it relates to the formation and self-care of twenty-first-century American identities, regardless of whether these narratives fit common or stereotypical opinions 16 Introduction

of what “ethnic Americanness” is or should be. Following Ronald Takaki, Wai Chee Dimock, and others, I argue through both my analysis and methodology for the value in considering other paradigms of American literature beyond reading through single ethnic groupings or solely focusing on “typical” themes of immigration, colonialism, and racism. The nature of radical self-care emphasizes dialogue across seemingly inflexible rubrics of identity to challenge current attitudes about race in general; we can no longer study these works in isolation if we want to understand the diverse and dynamic cultures that Americans inhabit. Radical self-care eschews and critiques superficial celebrations of multiculturalism—what Tzvetan Todorov, in describing exoticism, calls “praise without knowledge”46—instead advancing self-expression through empathetic conversation and close affiliation. For instance, Kiese Laymon’s novel, Long Division—which I discuss in the epilogue—demonstrates the limitations of multiculturalism without radical self-care—that is, without having the agency to choose one’s forms of affiliation or to tell one’s cultural stories. Namely, the protagonist, City, has a school principal who, in a classic multiculturalist approach, tries to make a recent influx of Mexican students “feel accepted” by hosting taco lunches and a Mexican Awareness Week. City observes, “it made most of us respect their Mexican struggle but it didn’t do much for helping us really distinguish names from faces. We still call all five of the boys ‘Sergio’ at least twice a quarter.”47 While providing culturally marked foods evokes the “boutique multiculturalism” that Stanley Fish and others differentiate from more politically active forms of multiculturalism,48 City’s superficial connections to his Mexican classmates—dictated by his principal—expose the foundational problems inherent in many traditional multicultural practices. Like the other protagonists discussed in this project, City discovers that forging his own meaningful interactions allows him to better empathize with others and to access his stumbling attempts to define and care for himself. City’s radical approach to self-care is best illustrated by an example that details the nuances of language and uncovers his growing awareness of the power of authorship. His friend MyMy, a white and impoverished girl from his grandmother’s neighborhood, meekly asks City the meaning of the n-word, a slur applied to him by several racist locals. Rather than simply dismissing her and her question, he pauses thoughtfully before explaining that the word Introduction  17

means below human to some folks and it means superhuman to some other folks. Do you even know what I’m saying? And sometimes it means both to the same person at different times. And, I don’t know. I think ‘nigga’ can be like the word ‘bad.’ You know how bad mean a lot of things? And sometimes, ‘bad’ means ‘super good.’ Well, sometimes being called a ‘nigga’ by another person who gets treated like a ‘nigga’ is one of the top seven or eight feelings in the world. And other times, it’s in the top two or three worst feelings.49 Together, City and MyMy continue to muddle through the different ways that such slurs and categories affect them based on their gender, ethnic, and class backgrounds. MyMy’s ultimate realization—one that City brushes off at this point at the novel but recalls by the novel’s end—is that while the two of them are ostensibly powerless, they can nevertheless collectively agree that certain negative language and classifications need not apply to them. 50 City, by making the effort to cut across his and MyMy’s various differences, begins the journey toward the moment I explore in my epilogue, when City awakens to his consciousness as an author. By telling the story of his ethnic identity through fraught cross-cultural conversation and contestation, City’s self-care is also a form of self-discovery and transformation. I call this self-care radical, vindictive, willful, and intrusive, though it is fundamental in understanding self-authorship for marginalized groups and even in perceiving ethnic self-construal itself as a creative act of authorship. The freedom to create one’s stories and to define one’s affiliations through these stories is vital. It only makes sense that, given its recursive and reflective nature, metafiction is the ideal vehicle for working out this literary approach to self-care. Along these lines, in exploring contemporary works by authors such as Carmen Maria Machado, Louise Erdrich, and Ruth Ozeki, I illustrate how literature is moving the multicultural conversation forward through scenes of writing that are simultaneously scenes of self-care, embracing the fluidity and dynamic nature of the self as well as the cultural and material realities of particular ethnic identities. These works shift the focus away from monolithic, ossified, and ahistorical comprehensions of belonging and responsibility and move toward ongoing processes of contestation and personal interaction between and across individual group members. They do so in the form of writing, storytelling, and—most significantly—a constant rewriting that adapts 18 Introduction

to changing conditions and experiences. The texts discussed here challenge beliefs that certain ways of thinking and writing are more “authentic” or worthy of respect than others, instead highlighting ethnicity itself as a space of unremitting construction and negotiation inside and across communities. The works analyzed here expand what counts as legitimate self-expression and self-care, an objective often overlooked by critics focused on external prescriptions for change. Because this radical self-care embraces “unacceptable” or intrusive modes of storytelling as well as “inauthentic” and ignored subjects, it straddles the demarcating lines between ethnicities as well as other inflections of identity like gender, race, and privilege. I point to differing levels of privilege to propose that, while self-care functions best as a bottom-up practice starting with oppressed and marginalized individuals, privilege itself is not monolithic. Being able to write and to have those writings read and even published is a freedom not universally afforded—a point I return to in my epilogue. So, while many of the fictional author-protagonists in this study are endowed with the benefit of writing and the educational and socioeconomic privileges that sometimes come with this skill, I am most concerned with ways they preserve parts of their identity that nonetheless disqualify them from uncritical multicultural considerations, preventing them from freely accessing alternative, often unapproved modes of self-expression and affiliation. Unlike theories that place categories of identity into discrete and organized boxes, identity under this process is deliberately unfixed and self-conflicted, and subjectivity is constantly in transit and receptive to social and material shifts.

An Ear for the Stories: Reading beyond the Multicultural The early criticism surrounding Ceremony by Laguna author Leslie Marmon Silko provides a good example of how multicultural standards obstructed and undervalued self-care and fluid and inconstant self-fashioning. Published in 1977, Silko’s story about a half-white, half-Laguna veteran named Tayo has rightly become part of American Indian and multicultural American literary canons. Suffering from World War II–induced posttraumatic stress, the loss of his cousin Rocky in the Bataan Death March, and the death—while he was away—of his surrogate father Uncle Josiah, Tayo hopes to heal by reconnecting with his tribal heritage and partaking in traditional Pueblo ceremony. While the elder medicine man Ku’oosh’s ceremony is initially ineffective, Tayo Introduction  19

eventually finds renewal through another medicine man, Betonie, who has adapted his ceremony to changing external elements, and later through the guidance of Ts’eh, a woman modeled on Laguna cosmology and archetypes of older spiritual guides. Eventually, by abandoning the stories of fellow veterans and by distancing himself from the overly masculine, violent, and destructive peers whom Kate Cummings describes as “parodies of Western white men,”51 Tayo is able to return to the “pure” traditions of his grandmother to achieve completeness. Significantly, Tayo’s path is marked by ceremonies and their relation to language and the storytelling tradition. While not explicitly representing authorship like the more recent novels discussed in this book, Ceremony nonetheless exhibits characteristics of metafiction, including an intertextual blending of Tayo’s experiences with stories like the opening myth of the Thought-Woman, whose description doubles as a self-referential nod to Silko herself.52 Evoking the objectives of classical multiculturalism, critics largely viewed Tayo’s road to personal harmony as a success because he attains, by the novel’s conclusion, what many reviewers, such as Elaine Jahner, describe as “personal wholeness.”53 Interpretations at the time of the novel’s publication subsequently emphasize Tayo’s return to “authentic” Laguna life as the method by which he achieves wholeness and integrity—two values foundational to multiculturalism. For example, Lorelei Cederstrom characterizes Betonie’s home as a place where “true ceremonies are preserved,”54 their intermediary work together allowing Tayo’s return to the pure tradition and internal unity that Old Grandma and Ku’oosh represent. Describing Tayo’s supposed emptiness, Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna) characterizes Tayo in the first chapter as “yet unshaped, undistinguished from the mass it sprang from,” and “an empty space . . . a vapor, an outline [with] no voice.” However, while Allen attributes this state to his “separation from the ancient unity of person, ceremony, and land,” she states that he finds healing through “liv[ing] the stories—those ancient and those new.”55 The collaborative understanding Allen suggests is a nod toward Tayo’s radical self-care, acknowledging that he is not untouched by the outside world. As I argue in the upcoming chapters, multicultural ideals of wholeness, untouched purity, and authenticity are, for many, elusive goals whose unfeasibility sets those like Tayo at a disadvantage best countered by radical self-care and self-authorship. Akin to multiculturalism’s enforcement of regimented cultures, Cederstrom and Cummings read Silko’s novel as negatively contrasting the Laguna cere20 Introduction

monies and mythologies to the events and storytelling of the “outside” world that have already infiltrated both the land and its people at the novel’s opening. Cummings, for example, summarizes Tayo’s transformation as “unlearn[ing] the lessons of the dominant culture,”56 while Cederstrom points to Tayo’s need to overcome illegitimate uses of language and story from the outside world. She describes the storytelling of Tayo’s fellow veterans as “profane” and merely “a temporary respite.” What is vital to Tayo’s therapy, she posits, is “the restoration of a proper relationship to the stories.”57 This phrasing—that of Tayo’s belief in restoration only through a proper reverence for language—exposes where multicultural interpretations eventually went wrong: in the indication that there is (in this case) an a priori version of Laguna identity that he can access, specifically by keeping to a set of “correct” approaches. Ultimately, these theorists read peace and wholeness in Tayo’s return to his homeland and to his voice by contrasting this with negative influences beyond the limits of Laguna land. The impulse to isolate and protect Laguna cultural and geographical elements from the outside world is certainly reasonable; Tayo is not the only veteran to return home feeling emotionally and physically displaced, and other outside contaminants like runoff from a nearby uranium mine threaten their homes and sacred lands. Moreover, Silko’s stratification of life on and off the reservation is a deeply personal attempt to re-create a place for which she had a great deal of nostalgia. In a letter to poet James Wright, she writes, “You pointed out a very important dimension . . . when you said it was as if the land was telling the stories in the novel. . . . When I was writing Ceremony I was so terribly devastated by being away from the Laguna country that the writing was my way of re-making that place, the Laguna country, for myself.”58 Silko, then, sought a deliberate and focused representation of Laguna life in opposition to the “outside” world that, at the time of her writing, provided little comfort. Most significantly, membership along bloodlines and familial lineages in Native American and First Nations tribes has stark physical and material consequences related to sovereignty, land, access to healthcare, and more. Nonetheless, as it relates to the protagonist’s self-care, Tayo’s loss of his cousin and other formative experiences in the world beyond the reservation cannot be wholly denied or ignored, regardless of his attempts to do so. Accounting for his self-care, then, we can reframe the voice at the end of the novel as a combination of older origins with Tayo’s more recent experiences both on and off the reservation. An absolute feeling of peace and remove from Introduction  21

the outside world is not completely sustainable for him, nor can he make the past feel “like a vague dream”59 as his compatriots do: After all, the drought continues, his cousin Rocky and countless other soldiers would never return to the reservation, and the chances that Tayo could eternally avoid his traumatic memories are slim. How could Tayo shape his self-perception to include not just the healing he so badly needs, but also his “profane”60 past with his fellow Laguna veterans or even stories he keeps hidden in his private self? Critics could have emphasized the radical self-care by which Tayo forged an identity by noting a more inclusive reclamation of his voice, experiences, and associations. As Tayo says goodbye to his cousin and uncle, the narration distances itself from Tayo to describe the landscape before stating, “The ear for the story and the eye for the pattern were theirs; the feeling was theirs: we came out of this land and we are hers.”61 Though critics designate this proclamation as a sign of Tayo’s wholeness and harmony with the land and its people, the “we” here may also include a commingling of others’ stories with his own, even as he chooses to associate himself more prominently with Ku’oosh and his grandmother’s stories. In a sense, Ceremony is about whose stories dominate and whose words are proper and acceptable. In a moment that speaks as much to generational difference as it does to culture, Old Grandma claims her gossip to be superior to that of others. The narrator relates that, to Old Grandma, “The story was all that counted. If she had a better one about them, then it didn’t matter what they said.”62 Though the incident is amusing, it further illustrates that storytelling has an established hierarchy informing Tayo’s reflections and self-interpretation. Rather than assuming, as Cederstrom does, that Tayo has been so “absorbed by [the Laguna people that] he thinks with their words, and sees with their eyes”63 to the point where his prior self no longer exists, an eye to Tayo’s self-care would reveal that he has also shaped his identity based on the stories that he and his fellow veterans share as well as the other off-reservation experiences. Actually, the cross-cultural nature of this form of self-care is not unlike the “crosstextual” or intertextual incorporation of a variety of stories into a single text, just as is done with the Thought-Woman herself. Moreover, a critical approach to authenticity would more closely align what Allen calls Tayo’s “empty space” with what several of the authors I discuss refer to as the “blank page”—that is, productive moments of possibility fueled by the promise of self-authorship and the chance to construct identity through their chosen paradigms. 22 Introduction

A more recent text that also invites interpretations of self-care and selfauthorship—and even seems to anticipate and defend against the multicultural emphasis on authenticity that surrounded certain interpretations of Silko’s novel—is Toni Morrison’s Home. While significant differences exist in the narratives and cultures they portray, Morrison’s 2012 novel, like Ceremony, tells the story of a traumatized veteran returning home in the mid-twentieth century, this time to the segregated African American town of Lotus, Georgia, after having lost both of his best friends in the Korean War. The lotus blossom symbolizes purity and rebirth, though for the protagonist Frank Money, Lotus is “the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield . . . there was no future, just long stretches of killing time.”64 The thought of returning home horrifies him. Frank is further haunted by his experiences in the war and by an incident in Lotus that opens the novel, where a younger Frank and his sister Cee witness a Black man in a zoot suit being clandestinely buried, possibly while still alive. In an interview, Morrison explained, “the zoot-suit guys, postwar, in the late ’40s, early ’50s, they were outrageous—they were asserting a kind of maleness, and it agitated people. The police used to shoot them.”65 Likening the event to that of Trayvon Martin’s being killed while wearing a hoodie, Morrison, like Silko, points to the dangers of flagrant expressions of masculinity as a person of color and how US mistreatment of its veterans compounds and complicates this distress. Home also confronts the ethics of storytelling, alternating third-person accounts of Frank coming home to protect Cee with first-person conversations where Frank directly interrogates the implied author—who in this case doubles as both the omniscient heterodiegetic narrator ostensibly existing outside of the text and as a stand-in for Morrison herself. Frank’s constant address, revision, and reproach of the narrator’s words— moments of unrelenting call-and-response—embody Frank’s endeavor to practice radical self-care and to set the terms by which he can construct his identity, even as he himself hesitates to face the events shaping his life. Winking at the multicultural impulse that he believes makes the narrator “set on telling [his] story,”66 he cajoles the narrator into exhuming truth and authenticity from his experiences, even as he himself knows the futility of the enterprise. For instance, recalling the dreadfulness of poverty and the food pantry, he challenges, “Write about that, why don’t you?”67 He further disputes the writer’s presumption about his relationships with women, stating, “I think you don’t know much Introduction  23

about love. . . . Or me.”68 Finally, recounting his feelings about returning to Lotus, he tells the narrator, “Don’t paint me as some enthusiastic hero. I had to go but I dreaded it.”69 Frank’s authorial adjustments confirm that he is not the traditional romantic hero, the prototypical veteran honored during military commemorations, or one of the exceptional or “magical” African Americans highlighted during Black History Month. The exchanges between Frank and the narrator signify the inherent unknowability of others and the impossibility of placing people in discrete boxes or categories—a common preoccupation of multiculturalism. Even Home’s writing style seems to confirm Frank’s implications: While the implied author does not distance herself from Frank’s story, both the first- and third-person passages of Home are noticeably leaner and less prescribed than any of Morrison’s previous writing. Home may proffer a sense of impossible wholeness with Cee, who finds solace in the company of the Lotus women and who, at the novel’s end, helps Frank give the zoot-suited man an honorable burial. However, the ending also leaves Frank and the narrator vacillating between considering Frank’s makeshift grave marker—inscribed “Here Stands a Man”—as “wishful thinking” or an affirmation. In the novel’s final first-person passage, Frank confronts his horrific actions during the war and permits the implied author to continue narrating the novel.70 His permission, both subtle and tentative, shows that he has taken some ownership of his story. Frank and the narrator, through ongoing conversation, reach an uneasy agreement about how to portray his life. When considering this contentious form of self-care, uneasy agreements may be the ultimate goal in reclaiming identity away from multicultural limitations. This is not to say, however, that the impulse that dominates these writings is wholly pessimistic. Seeing American ethnicity as an ongoing creative undertaking opens the possibility of attaining increased social justice in a country that limits its true citizenship to only a select few. The blank page that symbolizes the authorial interactions in these texts promises hope as well as constant revision and progress. In fact, chapter 1, “Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship: Gina Apostol and Louise Erdrich,” analyzes self-authorship and self-care as dissent to the US role in imperial oppression domestically and abroad. I argue that Apostol’s Gun Dealers’ Daughter and Erdrich’s Shadow Tag emphasize the impossibility of the complete and visible subject championed by classical multiculturalism. In its place, the protagonists Sol and Irene engage in acts of silenced but subversive 24 Introduction

writing and revision—obscurity, indirection, irrationality, and subterranean or secretive writing—that they have adopted as self-care in the face of the nationstate’s willful disremembering of colonialism and imperialism. By using writing as protest and self-protection, Sol and Irene display mental states that resist closure and embrace confusion and unknowability to fight against the assimilation of legible ethnic subjects. Their indirect and unstable approaches to writing about themselves prove dissonant with the kinds of storytelling and identities valued in traditional approaches to multiculturalism and self-care, demonstrating that marginalization will persist while only certain forms of subjectivity are deemed acceptable or important. The next chapter, “Against ‘Authenticity’—Writing the Self and the Other: Carmen Maria Machado and Jonathan Safran Foer,” expands upon the idea of “acceptable” subjects and forms of storytelling by reframing certain kinds of liars, plagiarizers, and unreliable narrators as ethical and collaborative storytellers and witnesses. In turn, the author-characters emphasize metafiction’s facility with advancing self-care by exposing instabilities of truth, testimony, and power. This chapter considers how authorship can unexpectedly lead to life-changing relationships and self-reflection. Facing the impossibility of authentic representations and storytelling, the protagonists find that their roles as record-keepers implicate them in the traumatic events that they portray, giving them power over how events are told and how they unfold. These protagonists practice self-care through their increased accountability in stories in which they initially wish to remain uninvolved and even through supposedly dishonorable and unreliable forms of storytelling, challenging the existence of authentic versions of identity and storytelling. Chapter 3 delves into how ethnicity and radical self-care are shaped in relation to material objects, objectification, and the traversal of fictional and political borders. “Material Metafiction and the Life-Changing Magic of All Myriad Things: Nicole Krauss and Ruth Ozeki” places objects at the center of self-care and authorial analysis. For these author-protagonists, material things related to authorship ignite a more responsive and community-based self-care by igniting cultural memories and underscoring human intersubjectivity in order to expose nationality, American exceptionalism, and the model minority concept as isolating and counterproductive modes of self-expression. The artifacts invite the authors—and readers in turn—to evaluate ethnic identity via transnational but nevertheless personal associations. Specifically, items Introduction  25

like the desk in Krauss’s novel help us examine how belonging can emerge in relationships that complicate the national bonds and exceptional models that multiculturalism celebrates. Exploring scenes of writing as they relate to scenes of reading, this chapter emphasizes how reading through and across narrative borders and between storyworlds—a narratological practice known as metalepsis—underscores the importance of community, as well as fiction’s ability to influence real life, and vice versa. Expanding the metaleptic crossovers and connections of the previous chapter, chapter 4 makes a case for nuanced biographical readings and an expanded view of authorship to include collaborative genres like jokes, historical reimaginings, and even subversive digital genres like spam. “‘A Blank Page Rises Up’: Willful Authors in Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell and Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado” additionally focuses on how fragmentation, polyvocality, and a blurring of the roles of author and narrator call into question multicultural limitations that stem expressly from literary criticism. The forms in which these novels are presented more closely mimic the scattered ways that we tend to understand and care for each other, particularly in digital or online interactions. The blurring of authors and characters thus encourages readers to challenge “natural” categories such as nationality or nonfiction, and to subsequently confront the limitations of what constitutes multicultural writing and literary interactions in the first place. Everett and Syjuco compel readers to consider the humanity of their authorial characters alongside the real-life authors themselves, showing that writing demands labor and active participation from both reader and writer—a good model for the collaborative nature of radical self-care. The epilogue, “Releasing Doubles into the World,” returns to the idea of Ellison’s nuanced and vindictive Americanness to underscore our selfconflicted humanity. The narrators of Mat Johnson’s Pym and Laymon’s Long Division confront literal and literary ghosts, allowing for investigations of the ghostly “deaths” of the author, as well as authorial doppelgangers and literary traditions. This chapter connects these and previously discussed novels to themes of doubling and the nebulous and haunting presence of the author.

26 Introduction

1 Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship Gina Apostol and Louise Erdrich

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts features several scenes where the protagonist empowers herself by breaking silences through the oral and written word. In the opening chapter, “No Name Woman,” family members’ memories of the chapter’s namesake— the protagonist’s aunt—have been shamefully and deliberately suppressed. For the speaker, however, writing becomes a way to resurrect her aunt while simultaneously contending with the woman’s silencing. “My aunt haunts me,” she realizes, “her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her.”1 The chapter breaks the silence about her aunt and defies her mother’s directive that “you must not tell anyone . . . what I am about to tell you.”2 The protagonist upholds the power of language to revive and tell new stories of the past, helping the speaker cherish her similarities to this silenced relative. At the same time, however, Kingston’s text proves indirection and silence to be their own forms of communication, especially for powerless individuals like

her aunt. King-Kok Cheung discusses how silent Asians in the US are invariably described as “devious, timid, shrewd, and above all, ‘inscrutable’—in much the same way that women are thought to be mysterious and unknowable—or as docile, submissive, and obedient, worthy of the label ‘model minority.’”3 Similarly, in Kingston’s hands, silence and indirection become ways to both hide and empower. Referring to the “paper son” phenomenon—a rebellion enacted against the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act by falsely claiming blood relatives in the US—Kingston writes that immigrants attempted to avoid the curses of the gods by “misleading them with crooked streets and false names,” instead “guard[ing] their real names with silence.”4 In their silence and supposed inscrutability, the works of Asian American women authors such as Kingston, Anchee Min, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha signify “both a refusal to participate in the dominant narrativizing apparatuses that have excluded them and a form of resistance to the official historical record of the United States.”5 These rebellious silences are forms of protest and rewriting, what Trinh Minh-ha describes “as a will not to say or a will to unsay.”6 This chapter focuses on specific forms of silenced or subdued communication—namely indirection and secrecy—as ways of redefining and caring for the self against the prescriptions and expectations of others, especially when it comes to mental health and identity formation. Silence and a lack of directness are sometimes viewed as the opposite of self-care—ways of stifling self-expression. However, novelists such as Filipino American author7 Gina Apostol and Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) show these to be forms of rebellion and revolt most available to those whose mental states impede conformity to multicultural standards of wholeness, closure, and purity. Against the advice and admonition of family, friends, and medical professionals, Apostol’s and Erdrich’s protagonists mobilize their silenced realities to protect their sense of self, while also pushing for change in how they are treated as post/colonial subjects. Apostol’s novel Gun Dealers’ Daughter and Erdrich’s novel Shadow Tag provide a way to consider the power of controlled and precise silences, and of writing in less traditionally public ways: Apostol’s protagonist Sol relies on indirectness and the obsessive rewriting of personal and public histories, and Erdrich’s protagonist Irene composes in doubled forms—one in public and the other in secrecy. Additionally, both women defy advice from others on how to pursue self-care, instead trusting themselves to foster their own preserva28  Chapter 1

tion. While their forms of self-care—life writing, journals, and diaries—may seem conventional, Erdrich’s and Apostol’s metafictional approaches to these genres further reconfigure self-care as a response to totalizing notions of ethnic American subjects, particularly those who—like Irene and Sol—experience mental illness as a result of stifled identities. American liberal multiculturalists defend marginalized cultures under a guise of wholeness and uncomplicated nationality that would automatically exclude postcolonial subjects like Sol and Irene. After all, uncomplicated, fully assimilated, and thus “authentic” subjects do not share the conflicts of immigrants split between nations and languages, Black Americans and others who are treated as second-class citizens, or anyone else with inherent identity crises sparked by systems that do not account for contradiction. The exclusion of post/ colonial subjects is notable given the rise in early 1980s America of postcolonial multiculturalism—what we could call critics’ expansion of multiculturalism beyond classically recognized ethnic Europeans and African Americans to include ethno-racial subjects of American imperialism like American Indians and Filipino Americans. Classical multicultural theory and this postcolonial variant imply, and often outright describe, a whole subject capable of rational discourse and readily translatable behavior—that is, a coherent identity, distinguishable from other similarly coherent figures. This coherence is built into American history and its ideals of citizenship. Faced with incarceration, Japanese Americans during World War II were given a loyalty questionnaire that asked, in stark yes-or-no format, for completely acquiescent or “unqualified allegiance to the United States of America.” Similarly, the Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America, sworn by all US immigrants, concludes with the statement, “I will take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, so help me God.”8 In other words, not only should American citizens have no qualms about their allegiance regardless of how the nation treats them, but they are further asked to do so without hesitation or evasiveness—that is, without secrecy, silence, or circuitousness. In contrast, this chapter shows how Irene’s dueling diaries and Sol’s obscure and indirect writing and rewriting in her autobiography—or talambuhay—rebel against these standards of coherence and constitute forms of activist authorship. The rhetoric of multicultural inclusiveness and its denial of US imperialist history exacerbates the condition of the post/colonial subject. In fact, the ongoing effects of colonization and Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  29

imperialism make it impossible for these subjects to live outside of this history. Just as multiculturalism should account for supposedly inauthentic experiences, these protagonists push against the conventions of their genres to carve out spaces of self-authorship. The way that post/colonialism fits into the ever-changing schema of US multiculturalism is itself variable and complicated. Notably, most studies of the intersections between postcolonialism and multiculturalism focus on their contexts within Australia, France, England, and Canada,9 in part because these nations’ involvement in past colonial activities are comparatively uncontested by their residents. Brian Ascalon Roley remarks that “in France, the French know why there are so many Algerians in Paris, and in England, the British know why there are so many Indians in London. But most Americans don’t even realize that there are so many Filipinos in this country, let alone why.”10 Roley draws attention to the ways that American multicultural rhetoric has covered over US colonial history, specifically their involvement in the Philippines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And while someone like Paris-born Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf believes that those like him who “live in a sort of frontier zone crisscrossed by ethnic, religious and other fault lines . . . have a special role to play in forging links, [and] eliminating misunderstandings,”11 postcolonial subjects in the US have to work harder to share such opportunities. Within Native American contexts, the notion of post/colonialism is similarly troubled, as the prefix “post-” implies a state of decolonization not experienced by Indigenous Americans who exist in a condition of “ongoing colonialism.”12 Even today, federally recognized Native American tribes are beholden to “the colonial agenda of federal Indian law,”13 whether in the actual letter of the law or in its ongoing effects on their daily lives. American Indian tribes’ “ambiguous status as quasi nations”14 therefore finds some similarities with the indistinct Filipino presence. Sol’s and Irene’s obscure and incomprehensible authorship captures such peculiarities of living in a country whose government claims paternal dominance over one’s nation of birth.15 Authors such as Apostol and Erdrich challenge the pursuit of visibility and unqualified wholeness and transparency in their novels, proving change to be impossible when only certain forms of subjectivity are deemed acceptable or important. Sol and Irene engage in acts of subversive writing as self-care, revealing mental states that not only resist closure but embrace confusion, obscurity, and instability as protest against assimilative preferences for whole 30  Chapter 1

and rational subjects. Their indirect and obscure ways of writing about themselves and their experiences challenge the kinds of storytelling and coherent identities that multiculturalists value, such as “our status as rational agents, capable of directing our lives through principles” that undergird the “vital human need” of recognition.16 Their solipsistic and sometimes self-destructive writing further challenges an assimilation that starts with self-sufficiency and cogency as minimum requirements for participation. Focusing on US and English multiculturalism, Anne Phillips denounces the impulse toward reducible categorization as an attempt “to explain behavior in non-Western societies or among individuals from racialized minority groups, and the implied contrast with rational, autonomous (Western) individuals, whose actions are presumed to reflect moral judgments, and who can be held individually responsible for those actions and beliefs.”17 Phillips contends that the association between rational, autonomous subjects and Western multicultural ideals is so pervasive as to be invisible. Subjects who do not follow the paradigm are considered unfit for Western society and unable to partake in celebrations of tolerance characterizing multicultural policy and practice. In Woman, Native, Other, Trinh Minh-ha likens the divide between linguistic clarity and indirection to the differences separating writers from activists. Parroting the idiom of academia and the multicultural university, Trinh states, “To use the language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classic form. . . . Obscurity is an imposition on the reader.”18 While she partially concedes this point, Trinh adds, “beware when you cross railroad tracks for one train may hide another train. Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order.”19 Trinh claims that writers and activists can derive power from obscurity and dysfunction, that some authority is actually lost in outright clarity. By writing, as Trinh might say, incorrectly, Sol and Irene blur the lines between the activist and the writer, using dissonant writing to expose the limitations and unsurmountable contradictions of postcolonial multiculturalism. Trinh emphasizes that women have the power to write in order to access that which has become suppressed and devalued by patriarchal constructions of writing and identity. Irene and Sol mobilize metafictional acts of authorship that theorize ways to reimagine and protect their ethnic identities in the face of multicultural Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  31

restrictions—to complicate and reconstruct the notion of a whole subject by strategic use of obscurity and dysfunction. Such scenes of writing bare these protagonists as dissonant exceptions to those officially recognized by American multiculturalist ideologies. For instance, Sol’s attempts at narrative and mental clarity—an extension of this emphasis on uncomplicated wholeness—founder in rebellion. She realizes, “I could write, if I wished, bleak, simple sentences, many of them at a time. But then I would unravel like a wobbly top, a reeling, slow yo-yo.”20 Clear writing becomes a disorienting self-erasure, one that Sol finds herself incapable of upholding for long periods. She prioritizes self-expression over clarity and its associations in her mind with assimilation and linearity. Both novelists highlight moments of subversive and “incorrect” acts of authorship that advance subjectivities disregarded by postcolonial multiculturalism, while simultaneously defying conventions of linear genres such as the diary and the bildungsroman. Erdrich’s Ojibwe protagonist Irene keeps a secret journal—a blue notebook in which she ruminates on the abusive and invasive actions of her husband, Gil, a man haunted by historical depictions of Native Americans. Rather than attempting to appease Gil, Irene hides her conflicted feelings in her blue notebook, while in her red diary—which Gil surreptitiously reads—she writes accounts that mostly incite his anger and destructiveness. Meanwhile, Apostol’s Filipino American protagonist Sol defies doctors’ orders by telling and retelling her past in a nonlinear autobiography—a kind of anti-bildungsroman—about her time in the Philippines under the regime of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Now living in a labyrinthine retreat in New York, Sol rewrites her life story, or talambuhay, to emphasize her exclusion from what is deemed as normal life in the present. Opposing multiculturalism’s ideals of wholeness and emphasis on tidy and reducible categories of identity, these protagonists’ dissonant authorship emerges in moments of obscurity and mental breakdown. Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Camilla Griggers reinscribes mental breakdown as productively unveiling the unspeakable and the unrepresentable.21 While conventional wisdom situates mental illness as occurring solely within the body, Griggers expands this outward, showing that the “nervous system” that produces the moment of breakdown derives not from the female subject, but from the structure that orders the “abstract social organization of the feminine”22 in the first place. Griggers suggests that such moments are a larger sign of a breakdown in the social body as a whole; the problem that incites this 32  Chapter 1

breakdown stems not from the individual, but from the network of nervous systems that delimit subjectivity. Women’s bodies become a kind of canary in the coal mine, mental breakdown indicating dysfunction with the nation at large. For Sol and Irene, that problem stems from bewilderment with the social and institutional practices established by classical multiculturalism in the United States, a nation that supposedly champions cultural and ethnic diversity but ignores its imperial acts. Rather than addressing the wider problem of incongruous inclusion and imperial secrecy, Sol’s and Irene’s doctors, family, and friends view their writerly attempts to underscore these incongruities as pathological or unproductive. The unrepresentability of their lives and the lack of visibility of their stories and experiences within their homes and homelands necessitate radical self-care. It is no coincidence that both women appear trapped within the oppressive walls of their family homes; their compositions are strategic workarounds to the failure of US liberty and equality even in the safest and most sacred spaces. Trinh states, “To write is to become. Not to become a writer (or a poet), but to become, intransitively.”23 By authoring their personal narratives in defiance of conventional or “correct” beliefs of wholeness and belonging, Irene and Sol prove they exist in a constantly evolving and dynamic state of becoming.

Delusions of Memory: Unearthing American Imperialist History in Gun Dealers’ Daughter Gina Apostol won Philippine National Book Awards for her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, while Gun Dealers’ Daughter—her first book to be published in the United States—won the 2013 PEN Open Book Award. Apostol’s oeuvre, which also includes the 2018 Insurrecto, makes her one of the most renowned contemporary Filipino American authors. Nonetheless, her relative obscurity in American fiction falls in line with Martin Joseph Ponce’s characterization of Filipino American literature as “‘diasporic’ and ‘queer’—a dispersed, coreless tradition whose relation to conventional political and social histories has invariably been oblique and ex-centric to the latter’s materializing dictates.”24 The US presence of Filipino Americans is “like a disembodied shade, in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period.”25 This interstitial relationship makes Filipino American literature one of the most important forums for discussing issues Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  33

of self-care and self-authorship within complicated crossroads of nationality, ethnicity, and imperialism. One of the few groups once able to claim status as US nationals but not US citizens,26 Filipino Americans represent a challenge to pursuits of visibility and wholeness, testament to how true multicultural commemorations of diversity are not possible when only certain forms of subjectivity are deemed acceptable. Apostol’s work follows in the tradition of another Filipino American author of historiographic metafiction, Jessica Hagedorn, whose experimental mode of writing participates in the “politically self-conscious project of challenging the realist novel’s hegemonic construction of a unified national consciousness.”27 Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, the first Filipino American novel printed and distributed by a major US press, contains a rambunctious mixture of fiction and history that further connects Apostol and Hagedorn through their use of historiographic metafiction, although Apostol’s style is more explicit in its self-referentiality. Apostol’s novels—all featuring writers, filmmakers, and readers—are paragons of an emerging subgenre of self-referential Filipino American texts, such as Eric Gamalinda’s Empire of Memory and The Descartes Highlands, and Filipino novels, such as Edgar Calabia Samar’s Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog (Eight Muses of the Fall). At the center of Apostol’s Gun Dealers’ Daughter is Soledad Soliman, or Sol, an introspective university student drawn by two charismatic revolutionaries into a political conspiracy in Marcos-era Philippines. Sol writes about this time many years later in her home in New York, turning the obsessive writing and rewriting of her life story into a therapeutic exercise and penance for perceived betrayals of her fellow revolutionaries, her gun-dealing parents, and her twinned nations of the United States and the Philippines. This autobiographical composition in its most conventional form is known in the Philippine language of Tagalog as a “talambuhay” or biography,28 but Sol’s transforms it into an anti-therapy, a rebellion against the advice her counselors give her to overcome her fixation with history and to concentrate solely on the present. Echoing her doctors, Sol writes, “To remain well, I must find ways to feel at ease. Live in the moment. . . . Recovery, they say, means learning to exist in the present tense. It is a delusion of my memory that my past exists at all.”29 Despite her ability to repeat her doctor’s words, Sol spends the remainder of the novel defying them. The form itself becomes part of the problem, requiring revision to account for Sol’s insights into her history and nationality. 34  Chapter 1

While Gun Dealers’ Daughter takes the form of Sol’s talambuhay, its constant revision, nonlinearity, and indirectness subsequently reject the form of a bildungsroman or coming-of-age narrative—particularly its emphasis on one’s linear, psychological growth. The Tagalog word “talambuhay” originates from the words “buhay,” meaning “life,” and “tala,” which can translate to a “record” or anything written on a page or in a book, signifying the talambuhay as a linear (auto)biography. This etymology, however, does not do justice to the text that emerges from Sol’s unconventional approach to the genre, which starts in rebellion against those who would wish to control her writing and individuality. In fact, her talambuhay becomes her form of protest. While Sol attempts to assimilate to both Philippine and US ideals that value a stable and civilized present over the past, her ultimate failure in this regard—that is, her refusal to engage in a “correct” act of writing—shows how the outside world’s rejection of her identity incites an internal feud between her body and mind. Sol’s pathology stems from her inability to write “in the present tense,” and, because of this sickness, others deem her broken and incomprehensible. Sol’s unconventional talambuhay—her nonlinear anti-bildungsroman—represents an intricate challenge to empire both in its form and in Sol’s use of the form for self-protection and self-care. Sol embodies both the problems with this limitation and the potential responses available to US postcolonial subjects. Satya Mohanty points out that American multiculturalism exists as a “weak pluralist image of noninterference and peaceful coexistence . . . based on the abstract notion that everything about the other culture is (equally) valuable. Given the lack of understanding or knowledge of the other, however, the ascription of value (and of equality among cultures) is either meaningless or patronizing.”30 Providing for the inclusion of whole and “equal” postcolonial subjects, then, does not mean devising a kind of multiculturalism that can be applied indiscriminately onto postcolonial others. Doing so ignores the power structures at play in any postcolonial and immigrant relationship; one must negotiate a perspective that accounts for the fragmentation brought on by postcolonial and other traumatic experiences. Those affected by postcolonialism often find themselves split across geographical and ontological borders, and Sol is no exception. As her entanglement with the anti-Marcos rebellion deepens, Sol discovers disturbing connections between local Marcos supporters and American forces. Because of these discoveries, a chaotic affair, and the equally tumultuous assassination of a US colonel, Sol Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  35

suffers a mental breakdown and then refuses conventional treatment. This breakdown further contrasts her talambuhay against the bildungsroman’s focus on growth and psychological development. In writing and actions, she remains unwilling to engage with her present place and station in what others would call a “civilized” manner. For Sol, however, fragmentation is wholeness. Her writing protests the hegemony of US imperialism, crafting a counternarrative that asserts her self not as linear and teleological but as circular, cyclical, and encircling her past, her traumas, and Philippine histories of pain, dislocation, and colonization. Told to exist and write in the present tense, Sol is instead made to erase US imperialism over the Philippines and to deny the cause of her nervous condition in the first place, the denial leading to further mental strife. Jean-Paul Sartre proclaimed the state of the colonized native as a “nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.”31 He would suggest that the colonized help preserve their own mental strain, demoting them from the role of rational, autonomous beings valued in multicultural societies. Joseph Slaughter further adds that the “Bildungsroman plot and the hyperbolic promises of native development [inherent in the genre] are part of the discursive technologies that manufacture that consent.”32 However, Sol effectively refuses consent through her eccentric and uncivilized talambuhay, which makes her self-diagnosed cure part of the “problem.” For Sol, US imperialism over the Philippines is embodied by the continued military presence—most visibly in the form of Colonel Arthur Grier, whom Sol’s group assassinates—and by the Balangiga Massacre, the 1901 conquest of US Army soldiers over Filipino independence fighters in Balangiga during the Philippine-American War. Feeling like she belongs neither in the Philippines nor in the US, Sol seeks out her own history, homeland, and self-care through rewriting the massacre and her life story. In other words, she rejects a focus solely on the present tense. Activist movements promote self-care as a directive to steel oneself for the hard work ahead—whether that work is liberation, decolonization, or equality. When Angela Davis talked about “bring[ing] our entire selves” into activist work, she characterized self-care as corporeal, but also as mental and spiritual.33 Sol responds to the systemic rejection of parts of herself and her past by making room for herself in the narrative, rewriting the stories’ content and traditional forms in defiance of how others might define her mental and spiritual health. 36  Chapter 1

Specifically, Sol’s choice of the errant talambuhay as well as her narratorial and writerly revisions of personal and public history within it free her selfdefinition from two oppressive impositions. One is the monolithic, ahistorical comprehensions of belonging common to multicultural rubrics of loyalty and wholeness. The other is the narrative of socialization and self-formation known as the bildungsroman, a form whose emphasis on linear teleology is similarly dissonant with Sol’s experience. In its place, Gun Dealers’ Daughter champions ongoing processes of metafictional contestation: writing, storytelling, and—most significantly—a responsive and adaptive rewriting and revision of the narratives used to define oneself. This emphasis on dynamic composition begins on the first page where readers are instructed to “revise” a scene as Sol reveals it.34 Her ambiguous and nonlinear ways of rewriting herself and her past prove dissonant with the stories of linear self-formation that undergird both the foundations of multicultural celebrations and the bildungsroman genre. Self-authorship consequently becomes her way of protest. Ensconced in her New York home, Sol insistently tells and retells her talambuhay as a way of caring for her fractured self. In opposition to ideals of wellness, Sol’s dissonant authorship emerges in moments of obscurity and mental breakdown, reauthoring her nervous condition to protest oppressive ideas of selfhood and normality. Sol’s writing embraces her bewilderment with a nation that champions cultural and ethnic diversity while disregarding its imperial oppression. Further, Sol writes to unearth the ways that American multicultural rhetoric has covered over US colonial history, specifically its involvement in the Philippines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gun Dealers’ Daughter thus begins with a circular and repetitious death and reappearance of the author that dramatizes this ambiguity in US-Philippine relations. Because the text opens with a description of Uncle Gianni picking up a yet-to-be-named girl at an airport, readers may reasonably conjecture that Gianni must be the main character. However, in a jarring modification—one of the many metafictional interruptions that Sol, as the novel’s homodiegetic narrator, uses to preserve her sense of self—the perspective shifts to the first person as the narrator tells herself to “Revise that . . . He [that is, Gianni] held me by the sleeve, gently.”35 The announced revision and disorienting switch in narrative focus extend to the scene itself, as “the girl” or the “I” of the text is whisked past flashing camera bulbs, a film crew, and “curious onlookers.”36 Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  37

Readers begin to sense that the girl must be central not just to the text, but also to the eruption of paparazzi-like activity in the airport; the revising narrator must be a celebrity—someone talented and beautiful. Then again, Gianni disproves this assumption by remarking that the crew is filming a commercial, once again relegating the girl to the backdrop. The scene ends with the narrator Sol musing, “in a cutting room somewhere, freeze-framed, on the margins of that black-clad crowd posing to sell condoms or perfume, a girl’s stricken face—my face—looks down, denying evidence of its arrival.” This scene appears in another revision toward the end of the novel.37 This mystifying cycle of disappearance and return recurs throughout Sol’s storytelling in relation to mental breakdown, revolution, and history, signifying her thwarted attempts to perform self-care by writing herself as an independent subject. Sol narrates and composes against her marginalization, seeking corrective discourse despite historical erasures of US postcolonial subjects. Her cycle of reappearance, disappearance, revision, and rewriting mimics her ethnic group’s history—what Allan Punzalan Isaac observes as Filipino Americans’ simultaneous presence and absence in the US, not to mention postmodernism’s accounts of the author’s supposed death and return. Isaac notes that Filipino Americans “live as a testament to America’s imperial past. . . . Traces of this imperial past are indeed ‘everywhere,’ as the many pockets of Filipino communities show, and ‘nowhere,’ as American public memory and vision effectively overlook the Filipino and absentmindedly ask, ‘What American empire?’”38 Filipino Americans’ presence as one of the largest Asian American communities in the US is countered by the fact that this same population has a postcolonial relation with the United States that is ignored.39 Sol’s emergence in Apostol’s novel is consequently tentative, a spectral presence fighting, however indistinctly, for space on the page. Rather than attaining the visibility implied in the promise of multiculturalism, Sol and her writing instead remain elusive and impenetrable. Her faulty attempts at suicide further evoke her death and return as a writer, which in turn replicates the historical erasure of the Balangiga Massacre in 1901—a Filipino rebellion against US occupiers following the Philippine-American War. For Sol, the Balangiga Massacre in Samar symbolizes the existing state of US-Philippine relations, as well as her conflicting American and Filipino identities. Following her suicide attempt, Sol arrives at the airport with bandages covering her slashed wrists, and later tries to drown herself, only to realize “I am no Ophelia. I’m 38  Chapter 1

a floater.”40 Her will to live and her persistence in writing about herself and the silenced conquests in Philippine-American history underline her defiant disappearance and reemergence. Incited to mental breakdown by this historical suppression, Sol, in her impulsive and erratic writing, demonstrates the distance between composition and composure. As her doctor tells her, “Your story is a poison pill—do you understand that? And you keep eating it up—your toxic trauma. . . . You must try to move forward, instead of backward, in time.”41 Refusing to compose herself in ways that please others, Sol uses her writing to protest erasures of shared US-Philippine histories not through recuperating what is lost in that forgetting, but by reinscribing herself as a subject combating an impossible wholeness and clarity. She realizes that what she aptly referred to as “dislocation” from the Philippines “sickened me even more . . . than my lingering illness—or was it that the recidivism of my internal glands was the abject correlative of my infirmity, my incurable sense of who I am.”42 Her infirmity is the very fact that she is Filipino American: Through her family and actions, she is implicated in the trauma of her paired countries; her trauma and her nations’ traumas are intertwined. In the self-conscious term “abject correlative,” Sol combines T. S. Eliot’s notion of the objective correlative, which refers to an element conveying a character’s emotional state to the reader, with Judith Butler’s idea of the abject— the “‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject.”43 Sol therefore hints that her self-care will enact moments of vanishing and return, thriving in obscurity in order to mimic and problematize the historical whitewashing of Filipino Americans. Sol recognizes that “authentic” Americans take their colonial history against the British as a source of national pride, while simultaneously obscuring their colonial acts, effecting a collective forgetting. In contrast, her native foreignness, or foreign nativeness, prevents her from claiming a similar narrative. Viet Nguyen refers to this forgetting as disremembering, namely “the unethical and paradoxical mode of forgetting at the same time as remembering, or, from the perspective of the other who is disremembered, of being simultaneously seen and not seen.”44 This form of abjection leads Sol to assert herself through her authorship and self-care as her only means of self-expression. Placing the distressed Sol in present-day New York City further forces readers to connect these historical moments in the Philippines to 9/11 and the Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  39

US’s prolonged wars against terrorism. America’s branding of the Balangiga independence fighters as “insurgents” attacking benevolent, unsuspecting American soldiers not only echoes the essentialist treatment of Arab Americans after 9/11, but also contributes to the ways Filipino Americans are seen—or not seen—today. In an interview, Apostol hints that Americans believe racial and class divides happen elsewhere, outside of the US. “People like to talk about the corruption of the Third World, whatever that is,” she states. “Manhattan, Manila. There is a reason those are twinned in my novel.”45 It is no surprise that Bob Couttie’s book jacket for Hang the Dogs refers to the Balangiga Massacre as “the 9/11 of its day,” characterizing the Filipinos as extremist terrorists invading American soil, and not as native citizens fighting off foreign occupiers.46 The shared but unacknowledged Philippine-American history in Balangiga further exposes inadequate efforts to embrace the female ethnic American subject, particularly when that subject emerges out of decolonizing countries in political upheaval. While the category “Filipino American” appears to encompass all immigrants from the Philippines and their US descendants, the distinctions prompting Sol’s alienation from her affluent, globe-trotting parents’ native country continue to haunt her in America. Sol exists in a perpetual state of foreign exception, exemplifying what Lisa Lowe calls the “foreigner-within.”47 Lowe’s characterization hinges upon the contradictions of Asian Americans’ integration into the national polity: They often enjoy some agency in the economic workforce, for example, but are marginalized in language and law. Sol’s economic privilege paradoxically obviates her need to work, barring her from the primary sense of inclusion that Lowe would posit as most accessible to her. Sol’s fractured connections to her twinned nations represent “a knowledge of myself I have never grasped.”48 America’s refusal to acknowledge its imperial history in the Philippines prevents her from feeling as though she belongs in the US, whose dominant language is her first language, whose major metropolis she calls home, and whose rhetoric of multiculturalism advertises a welcoming call that ultimately excludes her. Jasbir Puar’s description of the “good ethnic” becomes more accurate when we consider Apostol’s emphasis on a lack of belonging specific to Filipino Americans. Puar enumerates the limits of liberal multiculturalism, stating that “what little acceptance liberal diversity proffers in the way of inclusion is highly mediated by huge realms of exclusion: the ethnic is usually straight, usually has access to material and cultural capital (both as a consumer and as 40  Chapter 1

an owner), and is in fact often male.”49 As a heterosexual female who benefits from her parents’ wealth, Sol mostly fulfills the criteria that Puar describes, but her marginalization from both Philippine and American societies nonetheless prevents her from being a “true” American, trapping her in historical moments of another country’s past. To Puar’s formation of the acceptable ethnic American subject or “good ethnic,” I add the conscious forgetting of American imperialism and oppression as part of the narrative of American exceptionalism that also glosses over slavery, Indigenous genocide, land theft, and more. As Lowe notes, the US promotes multiculturalism as “the key site for the resolution of inequalities and stratification . . . by naturalizing a universality that exempts the ‘non-American’ from its history of development or admits the ‘non-American’ only through a ‘multiculturalism’ that aestheticizes ethnic differences as if they could be separated from history.”50 Sol’s inability to accept historical omissions of US imperialist practices in both her life and her writing exposes the limits of multicultural inclusiveness. Sol’s conflicted acts of self-referential composition—exemplified in the talambuhay she writes and revises in New York—create a new culture, relying on tools less conventional than those sanctioned by her doctors, family, and friends. Rather than writing about (or fighting for visibility in) the present, Sol obsesses about the past to the point of mental breakdown. Griggers counters this concept of forgetting the past to attain wellness when she states that what the traumatized subject needs is not a chemically induced repressed memory and prosthetic personality, but the reintegration, molecularization, and group expression of her fractal memories and disconnected affects and desires, not only within the private sphere of her own individual psyche and in her direct relations to the institutional workings of the nervous system, but within the public sphere of collective representations of embodied social reality.51 Rather than repressing or inhibiting the patient, Griggers posits, American society needs to reassess its responses to its subjects. Until Sol’s memories, behaviors, and interpretations of history are acknowledged, valued, and dealt with, she will continue to be haunted by this lack of control. Forgetting America’s past militaristic presence in the Philippines, then, is a luxury that Sol cannot enjoy. Her stubborn insistence on writing about history exemplifies Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  41

what Leslie Bow calls creative activism, a rebellion juxtaposed to the failed revolutions that beset US-Philippine relations in the past and the present. Bow writes, “If women have reason to be, in terms Adrienne Rich has borrowed, ‘disloyal to civilization,’ then this betrayal of racism, patriarchy, or a repressive state constitutes a form of creative activism for Asian American women.”52 Sol recognizes that her preoccupation with obscurity (in the face of historical invisibility) and her disinclination to write her talambuhay “correctly” are socially impermissible betrayals of those around her. While Gun Dealers’ Daughter opens in present-day New York, flashbacks apprise readers of an impending crisis in the Philippines in the 1980s. President Marcos—identified only as “the Dictator”—declares martial law and orders paramilitary groups to kidnap, bomb, and mutilate so-called insurgents protesting poverty and ill government treatment. Meanwhile, in a student group opposing Marcos’s actions, Sol’s privilege and insecurity relegate her to the role of a U.F. or “Useful Fool . . . a sympathizer with dim potential.”53 Sheltered from the realities of those suffering and dying mere kilometers from her front door, Sol nonetheless longs to fit in with the revolution and its leaders—her rich, disaffected neighbor Jed de Rivera Morga and his girlfriend, the firebrand Soli, short for Solidaridad. The doubling of the protagonist Sol Soliman and the community leader Solidaridad Soledad is portentous: Sol envies Soli’s fortitude and activism but betrays her multiple times, not only having an affair with Jed but also opposing Soli’s pacifism by stealing munitions belonging to Uncle Gianni and her parents. This final act culminates in the murder of Colonel Grier, a fictional US military representative. When Sol is kicked out of the group for her sexual relationship with Jed, she realizes that the group’s definition of wholeness and visibility differs from her own and that she “was no comrade anyhow until [she] handed in the T.B., the talambuhay: my reckoning of my life.”54 Her composition, then, is compelled most immediately by a need to belong—a feeling she holds onto even after the revolutionaries have long left her life. Not unlike multicultural assumptions of rationality and clarity, the revolutionaries demand a particular identity, ethical lifestyle, and political and emotional sensibility that do not account for Sol’s uncommon subject position. (Her exile further represents a misogynist double standard, as Jed escapes any punishment.) While Sol is aware—and even ashamed—of her family’s wealth and complicity with the Dictator and his wife Imelda Marcos (whom Sol refers to only as “the Lady”), 42  Chapter 1

Sol’s relationship with Jed and her undue preoccupation with history have no place in the revolution. Before Sol’s ousting, Soli attacks Sol’s obsession with history books, demanding, “Why do history books persuade you but not the world around you? You live in a puppet totalitarian regime, propped up by guns from America, so that we are no sovereign country but a mere outpost of foreign interests in the Far East.”55 Akin to her New York doctors, Soli’s references to history assert the importance of the present as being more deserving of Sol’s creative approach to self-care and self-composition. The lasting effects of the tragedies surrounding Sol’s violent betrayals echo the state of exception that continues to control Philippine politics and US foreign relations. These effects further unveil the impetus behind Sol’s obsessive writing and the reasons why her writing intensifies after she leaves the Philippines for New York. The crises that sparked Marcos’s regime—which Sol summarizes as a period of martial law, paramilitary criminal actions, and American interventions known as “civilizing missions”56—are themselves prompted by crises related to Spanish colonization, the Philippine-American War, and finally, the Balangiga Massacre, which provokes Sol’s breakdown in New York. As Giorgio Agamben notes, “the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government.”57 In other words, the calamities that brought about these totalizing, oppressive forces have since fallen away, but the lasting governmental effects and practices brought on by these calamities become normalized so that their continued presence is nearly invisible. Sol’s experiences with these oppressive institutions plague her psyche to the point where she does not need to be physically present in the Philippines to feel their effects; Apostol places her wayward protagonist in post-9/11 New York City but keeps Sol’s mind locked in the battles of the Balangiga Massacre and the student protests of paramilitary actions. It is no wonder that this state of exception fuels her talambuhay. Her writing makes the past more visible not through common modes of historiography, but rather by embracing nonlinear storytelling. Haunted by the paired worlds of Manila and New York, Sol is herself suspended in a constant state of emergency, belonging to neither one country nor the other. These juxtaposed moments of upheaval consign Sol to a state of exception associated not with a specific place or government, but within the body—with an embodied consciousness of her inability to belong. Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  43

Sol cannot claim definitive membership in her own marginalized culture, let alone declare herself an “authentic” American subject; she is suspended in limbo between these two cultural frames. This suspension is illustrated by her inability to speak Tagalog, preventing connections with her classmates, teachers, and, most significantly, with herself and her writing. That she can sustain herself at all in a “foreign” country while speaking only English confirms US power over her cultural identity. At a funeral, Sol relates how attendees spoke “in multiple, accusing tongues—the languages I had overheard all throughout childhood, and which I understood the way I understood the weather: a code beyond my need to comprehend, a sensory mist separate from me.”58 Sol has the phenotypical traits expected of a native speaker and yet is still a foreigner. The exceptionality of her linguistic confusion in the Philippines manifests itself in New York in a confusion of language and identity. In the country where she is supposed to feel validated because of her command of the English language, she instead continues to feel marginalized. As in the Philippines, Sol’s life in the US is similarly marked by bewilderment and exclusion exacerbated by her preoccupation with the liminal ways she has been simultaneously assimilated into and excluded from American life. Sol’s insecurity about language echoes linguistic confusions that we can track throughout history: The Philippines was “unincorporated territory,” while the Filipino Americans themselves have been variably classified as noncitizen non-aliens, or “foreign in a domestic sense.”59 Filipinos were US nationals of a territory that the law deemed, like Puerto Rico, “‘appurtenant and belonging to the United States.”60 This in-betweenness further extends to assumptions that multicultural subjects are willing US immigrants, with Oscar Campomanes stating that calling the early migration of Filipinos into the country “immigration” or using the term “Filipino American” disregards the fact that Filipinos are implicitly American as a result of our shared history. He adds, “For me, the term to privilege is ‘Filipino,’ for it is the truly plastic term with the capacity to authorize a whole series of valences, historically speaking (from Spanish colonial times to the diasporic moment of the present).”61 The onomastic confusion surrounding Filipino American status echoes the incomprehension Magellan faced when first meeting the Filipinos. Sol and her uncle Gianni both relate that, not unlike Henry Hudson, whose namesake river Sol’s home overlooks and who had “sought China, but instead found Albany,” Magellan believed that he had returned to Indonesia instead of reaching the 44  Chapter 1

Philippines.62 Sol carries out this linguistic confusion of place, people, and language not only in the doubling of names and situations in her writing but also in her self-preserving attempts to revise the revisionist history of US imperialist actions in the Philippines.

Sound as a Bell: Obscurity, Whitewashing, and the Balangiga Massacre For Sol, a vital part of this revisionist history involves the Balangiga Massacre. In rewriting the meaning of the massacre, Sol revises or reenvisions her talambuhay, showing how her exclusions as a Filipino American reproduce US erasures of Filipino American history. Americans’ expurgation of their retaliation in Balangiga began almost immediately; less than a year after the conflict, Americans were already lamenting that stories about their actions in Balangiga were “fixed up and whitewashed.”63 Because of the subsequent inaccessibility of this information, the main access Sol has to the massacre and the events that followed is Joseph Schott’s 1964 book The Ordeal of Samar. Schott describes the Filipinos as “an ignorant and undisciplined mob, ranging in age from children to mature men, but armed with muskets, bolo knives and primitive bamboo cannon [sic], [who] are dangerous foes on their own ground, the densely tangled jungle.”64 Schott describes the Samareños as insurgents, enemies, or bolomen, and, while he names a host of Americans, he mentions few Filipinos by name beyond General Emilio Aguinaldo, Balangiga Police Chief Pedro Sanchez—who is a fictional character65—and two guides supposedly named Slim and Smoke. Likely recalling Schott’s characterizations, Sol writes, “our books of history were invariably in the voice of the colonist, the one who misrecognized us. We were inscrutable apes engaging in implausible insurrections against gun-wielding epic heroes who disdained our culture but wanted our land.”66 Paralleling Magellan’s misrecognition of those whom he thought were the Indonesians and the Balangiga conflict that occurs a few years after the Spanish relinquished colonial control over the Philippines, Sol connects the Philippine-American incidents at Balangiga to the first Spanish encounter with the Filipinos, the incipient moment of colonial contact. She enacts self-care by aligning the occupiers of her two nations through her own historiography, using her talambuhay to counter stories suggesting that they bestowed benevolence upon helpless Filipinos. Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  45

Sol’s first encounter with Colonel Grier is likewise the reader’s first glimpse into her writerly responses to the colonizer’s voice and her corrections to this revisionist history. Like revolutionary hero José Rizal, who in 1890 republished and annotated Spanish colonizer Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas to rectify the imperialist assumptions of the text, Sol reframes Grier’s history of Filipino mutiny as “the tail end of our revolution, the Filipino American War in 1899.”67 Revising and correcting Grier’s account, Sol insists that Filipinos were in the middle of fighting Spanish colonizers when Americans offered assistance in “the name of democracy—to free ourselves from tyrannical Spain. Instead, [the Americans] invaded. . . . Your army killed six hundred thousand Filipinos from 1899 to 1902, a war worse than Vietnam. That was no insurrection, Colonel. That was our war of independence.”68 She humanizes Filipinos defending their homeland, while simultaneously highlighting the US imperialist defeat. In another self-conscious act of authorship, Grier, who penned his thesis linking the Philippines and Vietnam, boasts that he writes from an apolitical, military standpoint. Nonetheless, his references to Asians and specifically Filipinos as “Charlie” (the US term for the opposition in the Vietnam War), “cockroaches,” and even “Oriental freaks” belie Grier’s objectivity, further confirmed by his involvement in the paramilitary groups killing those who opposed the Dictator.69 Though he had no direct stake in the US-Philippine war, Grier triumphantly reminds Sol that, despite her attempts to revise the fight for independence, the outcome remains the same: the Filipinos lost. Sol’s talambuhay nevertheless draws attention to multiple histories and perspectives, exposing the instability of historical narratives and the way these stories can symbolically erase whole populations from the past and present. Through Sol’s writing, Apostol links American colonial actions in Samar and other parts of the Philippines to the imperialist actions of Spain, the American intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, Philippine paramilitary actions by those like Grier, and even responses to the Middle East following 9/11—and then aligns her narrative against all of it. In Sol’s mind, the paramilitary-related deaths recall her research on the Balangiga conflict. In 1901, after the Filipino revolutionaries launched a surprise attack killing forty-eight men, who constituted nearly two-thirds of the American soldiers occupying Balangiga,70 General Jacob H. Smith led a counterattack (figure 1). Even today, scholars contest the extent of the American retaliatory 46  Chapter 1

Figure 1. Homer C. Davenport’s political cartoon from William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal (May 5, 1902), depicting US troops executing Filipino children. New York Journal, May 5, 1902. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/ Record?libID=o274576. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University.

measures and the number of Filipinos killed after the attack; Sharon Delmendo cites a Veterans of Foreign Wars statistic noting 250 mostly civilian Filipinos killed, five times the number of American soldiers who died. However, this number is an underestimation according to others, some of whom list Filipino deaths in the tens of thousands.71 Despite the disagreements, many historians echo the story relayed in Schott’s Ordeal of Samar, where Smith told Major Littleton Waller, “I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.” When Waller asked for clarification, Smith ordered the deaths of all who are “ten years and older,” adding that the “interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.”72 In what many historians identify as the most grisly event of the Philippine-American War, the US military killed Filipino civilians, impressed survivors into labor, and destroyed food supplies right Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  47

before Samar’s dry season. Having access to this history mainly “through the enemy’s lens,”73 Sol cannot reconcile her historical narrative with that of the colonizer. The “Balangiga Massacre” of her history books refers to the deaths of the forty-eight American soldiers, not to the hundreds and even thousands of Filipino men, women, and children killed in the massacre’s bloody aftermath. The retelling of the Balangiga Massacre becomes the biggest challenge to Sol’s efforts at self-care, at using her wayward writing to make sense of the world and her place in it. While Apostol posits a parallel between American actions during the Balangiga conflict and US complicity in Philippine paramilitary efforts, Sol’s breakdown prompted by these connections obscures the clarity of these historical equivalents. In part because these events have become invisible over time, Sol cannot fathom the disturbing parallels between the lives lost in Balangiga and the people killed by Marcos’s paramilitary groups, often with guns sold by her parents. In response, Sol’s debilitating distress forces her to excavate a new form in which she can compose her thoughts on both events, attempting in her own troubled way to speak the unspeakable and to preserve a sense of self through her writing. Sol assumes an assured historian’s perspectives about some aspects of the Philippine-American War, but—even before her hermitlike asylum in New York—she cannot find words adequate to deal with recent crises in the Philippines such as the “[f]ive young farmers and one child” shot by paramilitary forces while she and Soli marched alongside them.74 Accordingly, her description of these moments and their parallels to the Balangiga Massacre hide in ambiguity, a quality that Sol uses to her advantage in relaying her disjunctive talambuhay to her readers. Stymied by the murkiness of America’s imperialist history and caught in the throes of a breakdown from which she refuses to emerge, Sol well appreciates the power of obscurity. Her constant revisions, a metafictional practice she exercises even on the first page of the novel, suggest deliberate unreliability further exacerbated by Sol’s inability to cogently communicate the sources of her distress. While Soli urges that “obscurantism . . . does not serve change,”75 Sol instead exposes those in power as having relied on incomprehensibility to maintain control. Similarly, Apostol puts the onus on the reader to make these connections, to inspire action through active—or even activist—reading, and to interpret Sol’s uncertainty and distress as a source of authority. The oblique underlining of Sol’s writing correlates to her indirectness and mimics the US’s inability to accept contrary allegiances and 48  Chapter 1

modes of history; Sol cannot pursue visibility as a straightforward construct and finds agency in darkness. This murkiness is literalized in the scene that sets off Sol’s betrayal of her parents through the theft of their weapons. In the Philippines, Sol cannot endure photos of the paramilitary’s mutilation of a child’s severed head, so a student leader, Edwin, directs her instead to a shadow at the edge of the photograph. Pointing to the dark line, Edwin explains, “That’s a gun: an automatic. Your parents sold it to the government [in] a long chain of trade. . . . And that’s the trade’s trajectory: perfectly angled, toward that child.”76 The photo—and the shadow of her parents’ involvement—prompts Sol to rejoin the revolution, leading to Jed’s murder of Colonel Grier. Such a sentimental appeal proves especially effective with Sol, whose sheltered privilege and preoccupation with history reinforce the subtext that the photograph provides. The child in the picture is the same age as the children that Smith ordered killed in Balangiga, and the child’s ghost follows Sol to New York. Indicative of the obscurity that plagues Sol’s narrative, the haunting manifests itself most obviously in Sol’s constant misnaming of the New York houseboy Pete. Sol believes Pete’s name to be Inocentes, describing him as having been born “a week after my birthday, the winter solstice—Holy Innocents’ Day—an orphan salvaged from a pile of castaways.”77 Near the end of the novel, when Sol breaks her hermitlike state and momentarily leaves her New York home, Pete questions her readiness for such a venture. Sol replies, “You are a dwarf, Inocentes: that is why the city scares you. I am not the same as you. My health has returned. I am well now, you know.”78 Sol’s invocation of Inocentes and Holy Innocents’ Day exposes her continuing mental breakdown. Known also as the Massacre of the Innocents, Holy Innocents’ Day refers to King Herod’s biblical order for the deaths of all boys in Bethlehem under the age of two in defense of his throne from Jesus. While the gruesome story is potentially more myth than truth,79 Sol pairs the story with the retaliatory slaughter of children that General Smith ordered in Balangiga. In a moment meant to also embrace her fractured identity, Sol revises the term “Balangiga Massacre” to refer not only to the forty-eight American lives lost but also to the hundreds and maybe thousands of Filipinos—many children—who died due to Smith’s ensuing reprisal. Sol further associates these events with the revolutionaries’ attack on Grier by insisting that her theft of her parents’ guns, used in the murder of Colonel Grier, hapNovel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  49

pened on Holy Innocents’ Day. Sol’s unwillingness to make explicit mention of these connections in her writing mimics the US imperial history that hides in multiculturalism’s shadow, divulging the limitations she must overcome to tell her narrative as a postcolonial subject. Sol’s unwillingness to achieve wellness by others’ standards—that is, her self-conscious refusal to move on and to write herself into the present—evokes a different mental condition, one that many Asian American scholars, including Campomanes and Kandice Chuh, associate with American history.80 If Sol suffers from a disinclination to deal with the present, then she and these critics argue that the United States suffers from disremembering—an inability to reconcile with the past. In Apostol’s novel, this American illness is most obvious in the controversy surrounding the Balangiga bells (figure 2). Historians disagree on specifics, but the legend is that Balangiga priests sounded the bells to signal Filipinos to defend themselves against the American soldiers. Two of the bells were tucked away in an Air Force base warehouse in Cheyenne, Wyoming, taken as war trophies commemorating American lives lost at the massacre. On the other hand, Americans and Filipinos who sought the bells’ return to Balangiga view the bells as imperialist spoils of war. Despite governmental acts, compromises by Philippine governments, and numerous letters and petitions from both countries to return the bells, the US refused to hand them over. One government proposal from 1997 (that the US refused) involved keeping one bell in each country and juxtaposing each with a reproduction to “symboliz[e] a shared history, both positive and negative.”81 The US would wait 117 years, finally returning the bells in December 2018. The US’s reluctance to return the bells indicated a willful disremembering in the face of imperialism. Kimberly Alidio stated that many military and civilians she interviewed “fear[ed] that the US soldier (or the memory of US bravery against the ‘insurrecto’) would be greatly diminished by the view that the battle of Balangiga was an incident of imperial conquest.”82 The government refused to award Congressional Medals of Honor to Americans who died in the massacre since doing so required acknowledging that the war took place at all.83 The disinclination to give up or even share the bells signifies the US’s conscious revision of history that ignores colonization in favor of what President McKinley called “benevolent assimilation.”84 Even in the bells’ return, US General James Mattis spoke of courage, friendship (one that the US hopes to solidify as the Philippines warms up to China), “shared sacrifices,” and even 50  Chapter 1

Figure 2. Balangiga bells originally exhibited at Fort D. A. Russel (now F. E. Warren Air Force Base). Wikipedia, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FE_Warren_bells.jpg.

war but mentioned no specifics of the event prompting the return in the first place.85 If Sol’s doctors, family, and friends deem her mentally ill, unfit to join multicultural America because of her obsession with writing about the past, then Delmendo and Apostol propose that Americans’ refusal to recognize their history is its own kind of sickness. Sol unsurprisingly tells a fragmented tale surrounding the bells, including an intertextual depiction of her mental state as the “bell-jar cacophony of my numb sensations” and another intertextual mention of Balangiga as “the town for whom the bells do not toll.”86 Describing Soli’s dad, Sol chronicles his lifelong writing project—that of penning op-ed letters waxing on his theme of the pilfered bells housed in Cheyenne, mentioning that “‘Why Oh Why, Wyoming?’ was the title of one of his plaintive screeds.” In another self-revision, she adds, “He died young, of literary thrombosis—strike that, a congested heart.”87 Sol underscores his literary undertaking to bolster her writerly protest, using interruptions to expose the instability of privileged storylines and perspectives. Echoing the title of this letter, she asks Colonel Grier, “So why has the US Army not returned the bells of Balangiga? I mean, Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  51

why oh why, Wyoming?”88 Things that Sol reads and writes stay with her; to drop her writing obsession would be to stop breathing and being. Rather than a chronological autobiography told at a slight remove, Sol’s actual writing of the talambuhay is the journey itself. In this way and despite her university education, we can view Sol’s composition, just like the letters of Soli’s dad, as containing “the rambling sincerity of the autodidact.”89 Her writing is at once self-care and self-discovery, as she teaches herself how to reconcile various versions of history with her perceptions and experiences. More than this, Sol’s written protest proves that she is in the best position to cure herself. While her doctors state that “words are symptoms,” Sol counters, “is it not so, that it is language that will save me? This work I am doing right now could become a hesitant, crepitating—talambuhay? A reckoning. A confession.”90 In the novel’s pages are testaments to the impossible nature of these questions. Apostol’s novel ends with another letter, written by Sol’s erstwhile revolutionary friend, Sally. It is no coincidence that the name of the only other prominent woman in the group is Sally, an assimilated, Americanized version of Sol and Soli, and that their regained community hints at the possibility of Sol’s self-reflection on her past. Unlike her twinned namesakes, Sally finds herself happily integrated into American life in a way that Sol is not. Recounting the fates of the other group members, Sally laments, “There have been no more confessions. It’s horrible how we forget the past, . . . somehow, it seems to me, we are all guilty of a failure of memory.”91 Sol’s talambuhay, however, stands as both memory and confession, a testament to the ability of words to heal and to empower.

Releasing a Double into the World: Shadow Tag’s Productive Destruction Irene America, the protagonist of Erdrich’s Shadow Tag, shares Sol’s tendency toward subversive storytelling and also manifests self-care and creative activism through her writing, recording her mental breakdown in her diary while simultaneously disobeying suggestions given to her by her marriage counselor, her half-sister, and other family members to write and act more productively or “correctly.” When Irene suspects that her husband—the famous white–American Indian painter Gil—is surreptitiously reading the red notebook she hides in her office, Irene also begins writing in a clandestine blue notebook housed in a 52  Chapter 1

safety deposit box. She maintains her red diary to deter Gil’s abusive behavior toward her, their sons Florian and Stoney, and their daughter Riel, though at times this writing has the opposite effect, inciting Gil’s rage and volatility. Irene, emotionally damaged by their tempestuous marriage, occasionally appears to willfully encourage Gil’s destructiveness. In addition to defying and occasionally indulging Gil’s controlling nature through her writing, Irene willingly poses for his paintings. During their relationship, Gil has only painted Irene, the portraits suggesting “problems of exploitation, the indigenous body, the devouring momentum of history.”92 Gil replicates Irene in countless paintings, showing her “on all fours, looking beaten once, another time snarling like a dog and bleeding, menstruating. In other paintings she was a goddess, breasts tipped with golden fire. Or a creature from the Eden of this continent, covered with moss and leaves. . . . she appeared raped, dismembered, dying of smallpox in graphic medical detail.”93 Through Irene’s image and body, Gil’s art confronts the subjugation inflicted upon Indigenous people, combating the notion of the generic vanishing or bygone Indian by forcing viewers to contend with the provoking, lifelike image of his wife. Paula Gunn Allen writes, “One of the major issues facing twenty­ first ­century Native Americans is how we, multicultural by definition—either as Native American or American Indian—will retain our ‘Indianness’ while participating in global society. . . . That we do not fit easily into pre­existing officially recognized categories is the correlative of our culture of origin.” 94 The often uncomplicated, classical multicultural categories representing the homogenized Native American as our honorable, primeval American ancestor—a vanished relic—inspire both Gil’s art and Irene’s responses to his art. While Irene identifies with Gil’s message, she realizes that her husband employs only one primary mode of artistic response to native oppression, which is to re-create Irene’s image—no matter how vulgar or shocking—with the goal of reaching white audiences. Gil’s paintings of his wife often disturb Irene, for whom they are “such cruel portrayals that her eyes smarted and her cheeks burned as if she’d been slapped.”95 Nonetheless, Irene often sympathizes with Gil’s intent. After all, his focus primarily on the female form via Irene recalls Allen’s call for a “shift from warrior / brave / hunter / chief to grandmother / mother / Peacemaker / farmer.” “However he is viewed,” Allen continues, “sympathetically or with suspicion and terror—the Indian is always he.”96 Gil’s obsession with Irene’s Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  53

image therefore represents a potentially reasonable avenue for his self-care—the creation of counternarratives in opposition to other dominant portrayals of Indigenous peoples. In effect, his reaction is not unlike the impulse of early postcolonial criticism, which focused on writing back to those in power.97 In its sympathetic but gritty execution, Gil’s response further resembles Black modernist anxieties about whether African Americans should direct their art toward protesting racist oppression. Unfortunately, however, Gil’s images of Irene also reify colonial notions of Indigenous women as either virtuous goddesses or dangerous squaws. The proliferation of these binary images creates a new type of vanishing Indian, rendering someone like Irene—a complicated Ojibwe woman living in the present—as nonexistent. This binary depiction of Indigenous women as either primordial earth goddess or exotic temptress also evokes nineteenth-century American depictions of (primarily white) women as either angels or monsters. According to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the appropriate reaction to these reductive double stereotypes is outright destruction—a “killing” that leaves no trace of either type.98 This advice defies the seemingly even-keeled judgment promoted by Sol’s doctors or by Gil and Irene’s friends and marriage counselor. Actually, Gilbert and Gubar portray the male poet enclosing the female writer in self-definitions that “by reducing her to extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) drastically conflict with her own sense of self . . . and her own identity as a writer.”99 This subjugation resembles how Gil entraps Irene in severe, Indigenous doubles, with Gil unable to see how his depictions of Irene encourage the same stereotypes he hopes to contest. Notably, the numerous doubles in both Apostol’s and Erdrich’s novels are far more complex in their differences, warranting more nuanced and complicated responses. Erdrich’s novel is actually replete with intricate doublings, seen most obviously in Gil’s artistic portrayals of Irene. Irene realizes that “[b]y remaining still, in one position or another, for her husband, she had released a double into the world. It was impossible, now, to withdraw that reflection. Gil owned it. He had stepped on her shadow.”100 Invoking the complications of post/ colonial subjects, Irene realizes the difficulty in “killing” an image that is partially possessed by another. Like Apostol’s Jed, who teasingly refers to Sol as Solipsism, Irene reprimands Gil for his self-absorption, believing him in love with himself and his manufactured image of her. Juxtaposing a violent scene from the film Rashomon to her willingness to pose for Gil, Irene writes, “I was 54  Chapter 1

no victim, of course; I was passive. I was vain. But then he fell on the mirror and made love to his own image every night . . . the image he had created of a woman desired by other men.”101 Irene realizes that the symmetry constituting the earlier part of their marriage no longer exists and that through his paintings of her, Gil has since only created images of himself and his emotional experiences of post/colonial multiculturalism. This realization prompts Irene’s protest in her writings; her two notebooks—particularly the blue notebook hidden in the shadows— represent her efforts to recover parts of herself lost to her marriage and to Gil’s paintings, an extreme form of self-care that is also “a matter,” she admits, “of life and death,”102 not just because of how they affect Gil’s abusiveness, but also in how they revise Gil’s perceptions of her and other Native Americans. Gil’s failure to see Irene as she is results in the loss of her double—her husband—as well as herself. Revealing the power dynamics of their marriage, Gil’s paintings challenge Irene’s self-perception in the larger framework of the nation. Irene finds it difficult to “kill the aesthetic ideal through which [women] themselves have been ‘killed’ into art”103 by publicly opposing Gil’s violence and art. The struggle she faces in doing so manifests itself in her experience as a battered wife fending for her children’s safety, but also in being a post/colonial subject of the only country that she calls home, a state that results in a splintered self—a doubling forced upon the hybrid subject.104 While limiting in its scope, Gil’s artistic response to the vanishing Indian stereotype embodies what Irene recognizes as his messy but loving attempts to protect his home and his homeland, an attempt at selfcare that is misguided in its destructiveness. Inés Hernández-Ávila reminds us that, for Indigenous people, any idea of home “within the domestic sphere was largely and intentionally disrupted by the colonialist process. Considering how we were seen literally as the enemy by colonial and then (in the United States) federal forces, Native people were and have been forced historically to address the issue of ‘home’ in the ‘public sphere.’ ”105 In this way, Shadow Tag evokes the ultimate double: Gil and Irene’s fractured household—embodied in Gil’s world-renowned paintings of Irene as well as Irene’s alcoholism and Gil’s physical and emotional abuse—replicates a sickness in the nervous system of the nation at large. Echoing the insidiousness of classic multiculturalism’s support of American exceptionalism, Jana Sequoya Magdaleno notes how claims to tribal sovereignty are “complicated Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  55

by the paradox that the United States both suffers the tribes as testimony to its largess and exploits them as internally constituted outside.”106 Gil and Irene’s home and homeland are both broken and splintered. The dual relationship of Indigenous peoples to the United States as honored ancestors and as “obstacle” or “residue”107 manifests itself as mental distress in Gil’s paintings as well as in Irene’s dual writing in her notebooks. The tragedy that befalls the two lovers near the novel’s end is further compounded by a pursuit of unattainable wholeness. Irene feels a rare moment of healing when her friend May discloses that they share the same father and tells Irene that, instead of being her half-sister, she will “be [her] whole sister. That’s the Indian way.”108 May’s promise of a whole commitment, in fact, uncovers the only avenue for “completeness” that Irene has—in the unwavering commitment to Gil and his ferocity. Intriguingly, much of Irene’s relationship and biography appear to overlap with aspects of Louise Erdrich’s life—including, most prominently, the artisthusband (Michael Dorris was a novelist and her writing partner) and his tragic end. These similarities are deflected by the fact that early review copies of Erdrich’s novel named Irene’s sister not May, but Louise. A skeleton of the change from Louise to May remains in the publication release, with one remnant “typo” identifying May as “Louise.”109 Erdrich’s decision to change Louise to May implies several possibilities, including that Erdrich is challenging the reader to question the value of conventional biographical readings in multicultural metafictional texts. Erdrich splinters real-life connections while simultaneously winking at the reader, forcing them to question their impositions of wholeness and a happy ending onto the text. Of course, confirmation that multiculturalism should account for the splintered subject emerges most prominently in the stormy turbulence of Gil and Irene’s marriage. Erdrich’s novel describes vacillating moments of surfacing and sinking; every interaction between the two is psychologically weighted with changeability. Even their attempts to “fix” their marriage in conventional ways seem compounded by Gil and Irene’s post/colonial status as outsiders, by their inability to fit common molds of normality. At one point, they laugh at one of their many failed visits to a marriage counselor, Gil proclaiming, “We’re too sick for her.”110 One could construe Gil’s dismissal as giving up, but, as Allen states, Native Americans “never have fit the descriptions other Americans imposed . . . neither does our thought fit the categories that have been devised to organize Western intellectual enterprise.”111 The therapist misunderstands Gil 56  Chapter 1

and Irene’s inventive forms of self-care and communication, accusing them of “dithering around [and] not addressing any pertinent issues.”112 The therapist’s frustration mimics the definitions of trauma that may work to exclude those like Gil and Irene. Drawing attention to the blind spots of trauma therapy as they relate to imperialism, racism, and other systemic problems, Stef Craps highlights the deficiencies of Criterion A, a classification for what constitutes and causes trauma, noting that “many feminist and multicultural clinicians and researchers have argued that even in its current formulation Criterion A, though broad, is still narrow enough to make some important sources of trauma invisible and unknowable.”113 Whereas I am suggesting that multiculturalism as we know it has no place for subjects who have experienced trauma related to postcolonialism and imperialism, Craps argues that trauma theory itself fails to register the experience of non-Western subjects as traumatic. Illustrating the difficulty of practicing radical self-care, Irene later even begins to question the sanity of the deliberately goading fiction of her red diary, more than once wondering if she should rip out the pages before Gil can read them. The reason Irene changes her mind and leaves the pages untouched, despite her accurate belief that her sensationalized writing will incite Gil’s rage, recalls the impetus behind Gilbert and Gubar’s violent approach to images of feminine duality. Irene, in counsel with May, realizes that “she couldn’t say it, but she knew [by provoking Gil and hopefully being given an out to end her marriage] she was destroying a world. A little culture. It was the known and safe way of behaving in the family.”114 With this realization, Irene takes her self-preservation to a new level: She begins to destroy her marriage both through her writing in her journal, and in writing in a legal sense. Irene realizes that inciting Gil’s breakdown and the subsequent failure of her marriage also means demolishing a world that has on its façade only the semblance of normalcy. However, she further recognizes that this destruction is the only way to save herself and her children—and maybe even Gil, too. Unsurprisingly, Irene begins the process of healing herself and her children, not by traditional self-care methods of uniting the broken parts of her identity, but instead by splintering them further. Her more productive and fracturing writing emerges in her creation of “another Irene, someone stronger and saner.”115 This woman, whom Irene refers to as Nurse Irene, represents a willful rupture, a healing mechanism of self-care that would have surely repulsed her therapist. Finally sober and divorced, with full responsibility for her three Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  57

children, Nurse Irene adopts an efficient and tranquil semblance of wholeness that belies the “real” Irene “whimpering beneath the covers.”116 Composing with a presumably renewed honesty in her red diary, Irene realizes that the harmful lies she had penned in its earlier pages were “inevitable. Something had to happen. One of us go crazy. And as you can see from this entry, I may be cracking too.”117 Irene’s unsettled state exposes the first real moment of marital understanding she displays in her writing since Gil’s attempted suicide in response to her injunction for divorce. Still continuing to address Gil in her diary, she recalls “how you loved us. Like crazy. In a mean way. But love is love.”118 This realization allows Gil and Irene’s eventual reconciliation, though—like everything else in Erdrich’s disturbing novel—this, too, has its price. If Gil and Irene were “too sick” for their marriage counselor or for a life of normalcy, Erdrich suggests that they were also too passionate and senseless for this world in general. Like Sol, Gil and Irene find no place for them in their home country. However, Gil’s and Irene’s tragic deaths at the end of the novel inaugurate the third voice of the text—that of their daughter Riel, whose form of writing as self-care constitutes the novel as a whole.

Changing Is Not Vanishing: “Rescuing” the Disappearing Indian Beyond Gil’s oppressive abuse, Erdrich obscures the impulse behind Irene’s disappearing and reappearing resistance to both Gil and his message. Her ambiguous and indirect responses to Gil and his art stem from the violence associated with the historical narrative of the disappearing Indian. Irene, attempting to complete her doctoral thesis on the artist George Catlin, gains extensive historical knowledge about the disappearing Indian narrative through her research. Catlin, a nineteenth-century white American painter famous for his Old West portraits of the Mandan and other Indigenous tribes, became caught up in the aesthetic beauty and noble appearance of the Native Americans he encountered in the mid-1820s (see figure 3). John Hausdoerffer relates that Catlin strategically chose his subject to set himself apart from the Philadelphia art world, shifting his focus “from portraying men of power to memorializing what he deemed to be an idea of ‘Nature’ embodied in the ‘vanishing’ persons and landscapes of American Indians.”119 Hausdoerffer’s juxtaposition of powerful men and disappearing Indians presents the two in Catlin’s art, as mutually exclusive. Catlin extends this power to himself, stating that he sought 58  Chapter 1

Figure 3. George Catlin’s Indian gallery, the Grand Salon, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

to “rescu[e] from oblivion the looks and customs of the vanishing races of native man in America, to which I plainly saw they were hastening before the approach and certain progress of civilization.”120 Apparently excluded from agency and doomed to oblivion, Indigenous Americans are “liberated” by Catlin’s romanticized Indians of the Old West while simultaneously destined for a never-ending departure. Rather than confronting the nervous system that subjugates and relocates Native Americans in the name of manifest destiny, Catlin sought to uphold this system by painting them as revered representations of the fading natural world. Whereas Gil’s images of Irene show Indigenous women as goddesses and innocents, the archetypal Indian of Catlin’s paintings is a noble savage, a perpetual anachronism. Irene’s research into Catlin’s artwork and her personal experience as the subject of Gil’s paintings uncover the drawbacks of multiculturalism’s push for the visibility of marginalized groups and the protection of only certain “authentic” cultural elements. In Catlin’s work, the wrong kind of visibility circumscribes Native American tribal identities to homogenized Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  59

relics of the past, an “endangered species” more valuable as an icon of a bygone era than as the person next door to or right in front of you. He perpetuates primitive indigeneity and enacts a form of artistic cultural imperialism. Describing visibility in Asian America, David L. Eng points out that “invisibility and visibility work in tandem to configure and reconfigure the Asian immigrant as the phantasmatic screen on which the nation projects its shifting anxieties of coherence and stability.”121 While there are certainly differences in the way the issue of visibility and disappearing affects marginalized groups, Catlin’s representations are similarly indicative of apprehensions in his professional life and historical milieu—a time of Indian removal, westward expansion, and the rise of the industrial age. Gil’s paintings likewise protest the invisibility of imperial violence against Indigenous persons, though they do so at the expense of Irene’s liberty as a Native American woman and against her own personal expression of native politics. In an authorial move that Sol would undoubtedly appreciate, Irene exploits Gil’s intrusiveness by revising a story she researched about Catlin and a Mandan girl known as The Mink, connecting Gil’s and Catlin’s thefts of Indigenous images and the body (see figure 4). The verisimilitude of Catlin’s painting led the Mandan to believe that the artist had stolen The Mink’s soul. In Irene’s version of the story, Catlin refuses to return the painting to the Mandan, and The Mink dies. Gil discovers that Irene had altered the ending of the story: Catlin had actually returned the portrait. Irene’s revision makes Gil wonder if she was accusing him of “stealing something from her by painting her . . . that he was weakening or diminishing the ‘real’ Irene.”122 Nevertheless, Gil’s concern fails to dissuade him from painting her or invading her privacy. Irene likens Gil’s exploitation of her body and image to his reading of her red diary. While not directly confronting Gil about either abuse, Irene relates, “When you take away [a] person’s privacy you can control that person.”123 Gil neither endorses nor rebuffs Irene’s observation, though he later feels that the main appeal of having Irene as his model is that “she was there in front of him and he didn’t have to wonder what she was doing.”124 Gil reenacts the control that Irene likens in her writing to the theft of one’s soul. Rather than engaging directly in his marriage, family, or subject matter, he paints to keep all of these at a controllable remove. Irene’s sister May remarks on this aspect when she states that Irene “found a guy who’d keep his distance by painting [her] naked.”125 Gil admits as much when he wonders if 60  Chapter 1

Figure 4. Irene’s story refers to Catlin’s painting, Mi-néek-ee-súnk-te-ka, Mink, a Beautiful Girl (1832), at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

he deliberately sabotages his marriage to “feel [Irene’s] absence, and in turn feel an aching desire out of which he could make his art.”126 In much the same way that Catlin, regardless of his intentions, benefits from depicting American Indians to reify and combat their disappearance, Gil’s satiating his “aching desire” by connecting with the woman before him would remove the illusions he requires for his art. Irene responds accordingly, finding power in “feigned indifference” and in her revision of narratives like that of The Mink.127 Gil senses that she deliberately obscures her historical sources, not wanting him to confirm whether her stories are true. Similar to other artistic and literary forms of post/colonial resistance, Irene’s writing and revisions assert that no matter how many times Gil paints her, he can never truly know or control her. Gil himself recognizes his creative limitations when a fellow artist tells him that he was doomed to be a Native American artist, rather than simply an American one. Gil never presents Irene as mundane or commonplace; rather, as one critic said of his work, he humiliated Irene to represent “the iconic suffering of a people.” Gil characteristically displaces his responsibility for perpetuating these images, describing himself as helpless to the fact that Irene’s “blood ancestors came out in Gil’s paint as he worked.”128 He models his authorship as one of unearthing a fossil of a preexisting story, rather than creating a new one. He paints Irene in the guise of Indigenous sorrow because, after all, he seems to ask, what else is there? In confronting both Gil’s and Catlin’s work, Irene is faced with questions of control and knowability related to the postcolonial gaze. This concept, discussed extensively by Edward Said in Orientalism, relates seeing and knowing to the idea of possession. By seeing the Indigenous other, viewers of Gil’s and Catlin’s paintings (not to mention the painters themselves) can purport to know, and then own and control, this other. As a secretive form of self-care, Irene’s clandestine journal writing stands as a testament to how little Gil knows her. Against the advice of her marriage counselor, Florian’s teacher, and the rest of the world outside their home, Irene incites marital strife and goads Gil’s already erratic temper, realizing that in the breakdown of her marriage lies salvation for her and her family. In his painting, Gil seeks a romanticized, dignified depiction of Native Americans in the same way he seeks idealized visions of his early passion with Irene. Irene’s ability to deceive Gil with her outrageously fictional—and to her account, “awful”129—accounts of infidelity in the red diary further speaks to Irene’s ul62  Chapter 1

timate unknowability, her self-reflexive storytelling wresting control of herself from Gil and his art. Whereas Apostol’s protagonist Sol is caught in the past and its ability to control her emotional well-being in the present, Gil hides in his historicized paintings to deny the present. Gil refuses an honest assessment of his marriage without a canvas between them to control his perceptions. He knows that doing so would require accepting that he and Irene are emotionally damaged, both by their mutual neglect and by the nervous system that dismisses American Indians as vanishing remnants of the past. Therefore, whereas Irene attempts to incite breakdown to provoke Gil into confronting his abuse, Gil tenaciously holds on to an image of a positive family life, unable to see the present as potentially restorative. He clings doggedly to the past as a means of enacting what he feels is necessary for his survival and visibility. As the title of Carlos Montezuma’s poem states, “Changing Is Not Vanishing.” Gil is so traumatized by his changed place in life to the point of not realizing this, despite Irene’s albeit unconventional attempts to communicate this belief to him. Writing secretively in her blue notebook, Irene addresses Gil, even though she knows he will never read these words. She pleads with him not to place so much emphasis on a single definitive occurrence, to resist the attractiveness of such a moment to unmask hidden truths or life-changing self-realizations. She asks, “How many times have I described my own struggles in telling stories, relating historical occurrences, searching for the sequence of events that results in a pattern we can recognize as history? There are many moments, there is never just one.”130 Unsurprisingly, Gil’s response to this point involves a discussion of art. The most revealing paintings, he insists, are the ones that capture a moment. Irene’s retort highlights a wholeness that, for those living in the country that colonizes them, is unattainable. “The greatest paintings,” Irene maintains, “are never just one moment. Look at Rembrandt’s late self-portraits . . . every moment he ever lived is in his eyes and on his face.”131 Like Sol, Irene seeks a perspective that accounts for multiple aspects of identity, not just the past or the present. For Sol, that means starting with the acknowledgment that the Philippines had a history with the United States in the first place. And for Irene, that means moving beyond the vanishing Indian to concede that Native Americans are still here. As these two protagonists illustrate, the postcolonial multiculturalist’s preoccupation should not ultimately concern visibility or invisibility, but what is Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  63

done with the image and the narrative. Rather than simply protesting injustice, Sol and Irene create new historical perspectives. While Catlin’s and Gil’s artistic intentions are ostensibly laudable, their miscalculations lie in the belief that combating specific images of the disappearing native is enough. Meanwhile, even as their images preserve Indianness frozen in time, “the material conditions of being Indian” continue to change.132 Irene instead seeks to view the vanishing Indian as just one aspect encompassing multiple narratives of numerous Indigenous tribes throughout history. Despite her bouts with alcoholism and willful self-destruction, Irene does impart this understanding to her daughter Riel, who enacts the ultimate act of unifying authorship and readership, but also self-care—one that through collaboration, vulnerability, and interconnection pieces together as complete a picture as she can of her family while responding to limiting depictions of American Indians. Directly addressing the reader at the close of the novel, Riel divulges that she is “the third person in the writing. . . . I have put it all together, both of her diaries. The Red Diary. The Blue Notebook. Her notes on Catlin,” in addition to other notes, remembrances, interviews with May and her parents’ marital counselor, and her own imaginings. Riel, reminiscing on her unforeseen role as author, reader, and collaborator with her parents, admits, “I am angriest at you, Mom, but there is this: you trusted me with the narrative.”133 Erdrich’s focus upon Riel in the face of supposed Indigenous disappearance is not accidental. As Magdaleno notes, “Since many American Indian communities and traditions have been shattered, the young must reinvent viable conditions of being Indian.” Riel does just this, configuring herself as “a contemporary Indian. A mixture of old and new.”134 From the community of her parents and her adoptive mother May, Riel learns that self-care is about embracing all parts of oneself and one’s chosen associations across ethnic and temporal distances, realizing “the old-time Indians are us, still going to sundances, ceremonies, talking in the old language and even using the old skills if we feel like it, not making a big deal.”135 Beyond Catlin’s romanticized images of vanishing Indians, Gil’s dualistic portraits of Irene, and even Irene’s deliberately fractured modes of writing and interaction, Riel’s collaborative writing—which draws attention to the US’s limiting frameworks of multicultural self-identification—seeks, not wholeness, but a bittersweet and variable stability, as well as an imperfect sense of belonging unfortunately lost to people 64  Chapter 1

like Sol, Irene, and Gil. We can credit the difference between Riel’s form of self-care and that of her parents to her sheer willfulness, but also to Gil and Irene’s efforts to transform broader perceptions of indigeneity, leaving her a postcolonial subject one generation removed. Given her parents’ violent and dramatic attempts to respond to each other and to their post/colonial subjugation, it is not surprising that essayist Sarah Vowell likens her relationship with the United States to an abusive but alluring marriage. On a trip retracing the Trail of Tears—an event concurrent with Catlin’s paintings of vanishing Indians—Vowell recalls following the route where thousands of members of several Indigenous nations, including her Cherokee ancestors, died while being forcibly relocated in the 1830s. Listening to a Chuck Berry song while driving, Vowell muses, I feel a righteous anger and bitterness about every historical fact of what the American nation did to the Cherokee. But, at the same time, I’m an entirely American creature. I’m in love with this song and the country that gave birth to it. . . . it’s a good country, it’s a bad country . . . And, of course, it’s both. When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife: Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance.136 Part of what multicultural tenets are often unwilling to acknowledge in terms of Americanness is this very conflict of inclusion, visibility, and belonging. Erdrich and Apostol challenge these tenets, not to destroy them completely, but to revise and rewrite them, in the hopes that people like themselves would not be punished for having “a multiplicity of allegiances.”137 These protagonists illustrate the need, not for monumental displays of wholeness, but for true acceptance in numerous sites of affiliation.

Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship  65

2 Against “Authenticity”— Writing the Self and the Other Carmen Maria Machado and Jonathan Safran Foer

Torn by their multiple allegiances, Apostol’s and Erdrich’s writer-characters rewrite the genres that bind them—expanding traditional ideas of the journal, talambuhay, and diary to draw attention to the flaws in the very framework of Americanness as we know it. In the courts of popular and historical opinion, their narratives stand as rejected testimony, unreliable evidence of their membership and national belonging. This testimony further acts as protest to their exclusion—appropriate given the early uses of the word “testimony” that included disapproval and condemnation, a remonstration for how one has been wronged. This chapter looks further into this notion of testimony or self-witnessing by exploring a related idea—that of reliability. More specifically, the protagonists of Jonathan Safran Foer’s and Carmen Maria Machado’s stories represent the radical ranges of writerly reliability and authenticity, from distance and defamiliarization on one end of the spectrum to plagiarism and unoriginality on the other.

Expanding Wayne Booth’s and others’ philosophies on unreliable narrators, Greta Olson argues that unreliable narration includes fallible narrators who are mistaken, confused, or biased and untrustworthy narrators whose very temperament, self-interest, or personality leads to inconsistency. The mistakes of fallible narrators, Olson posits, are “situationally motivated. That is, external circumstances appear to cause the narrator’s misperceptions rather than inherent characteristics.” Meanwhile, untrustworthy narrators are “dispositionally unreliable. The inconsistencies these narrators demonstrate appear to be caused by ingrained behavioral traits or some current self-interest.”1 Given that both Machado’s and Foer’s protagonists experience trauma in their stories and that this trauma influences not only their mental health but also what and how they write, it is noteworthy that Olson points to the mental instability of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and his actions and responses due to this instability, as an example of untrustworthiness. Olson brings up another example of untrustworthy narration via mental instability with the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” who claims his narratorial credibility in the opening lines: “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.”2 While Olson acknowledges unreliability as existing within a spectrum, she is unequivocal about mental instability as existing on the end of the spectrum that encompasses untrustworthiness as a disposition. However, in the cases of Foer’s and Machado’s protagonists, their instability is itself situational, troubled by mental strife and sparked and/or exacerbated by external contexts and situations. Further, like Poe’s nervous narrator, these protagonists assert that the traumas they have experienced and the instability that follows are themselves proof of reliability. Marginalized people who attest to their experiences within juridical settings—the courtroom, the police station, the eyewitness news report, and so on—are often dismissed as untrustworthy or too political or biased, particularly if their credibility is compounded with mental instability, thus making reliability the purview of white Christian heterosexual males in power. The narrators of Machado’s and Foer’s texts are privileged in that their attestations are not within the settings of the law, though they do discuss artistic license and belonging, as well as the right to tell their own stories as they experience them. Given that the two texts I discuss both include writing protagonists whose names reflect those of the real-life authors, I want to deliberately conAgainst “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  67

flate the fictional and implied authors within the realm of reliability. I do so not to conduct biographical readings (though the physical body behind the writing is a theme in Machado’s work) but instead to extend narratorial reliability to study how these texts deliberately violate genre boundaries and conventions: Foer’s and Machado’s narrators knowingly break the parameters of their stories, defamiliarizing expected genre tropes in the mode of defensive and testimonial self-care. Chapter 1 established ways in which American cultural authenticity is itself not only unattainable but also problematic in its premise. Can a writer consider oneself authorized enough to tell a story that is “authentic”—or pure, complete, and unadulterated—and from which that writer is not fully or objectively removed? This involvement is further complicated by the trauma that surrounds these stories. Writers in Machado’s and Foer’s works subsequently have misgivings about authenticity as it relates to being whole, legitimate, and truthful representatives of their backgrounds and experiences, seeking out alternative roles as witnesses capable of relaying their experiences and the experiences of those around them to enact caring for oneself and for others. Their misgivings further draw attention to multiculturalist tendencies to overrely on native informants and exceptional subjects to tell the singular story of a culture or a people. Rather than the whole and “authentic” subjects embraced by multiculturalist standards, these texts instead find more truthful and ethical storytellers in the form of liars, plagiarizers, and unreliable narrators who also act as collaborative storytellers and witnesses, and who expose the connections that accepted truths have with power: namely, the narratives that often dominate, that are deemed as authentic and acceptable, are typically not told by marginalized people. One of the obscure forms of the word “testimony” relates to the notion of a “sponsor” or a stand-in, attesting to the associations and collaboration involved in witnessing. This is appropriate given that witnessing is mutual, involving both the storyteller—the person providing the narrative—and the hearer—the person who affirms and thus “sponsors” the story—communicating with a shared goal of a trustworthy and reliable story. Significantly, the texts discussed here posit that collaborations between readers and writers can sidestep master narratives of belonging and identity, encouraging readings across narratives and directly confronting the power exerted by authors and storytellers. Indeed, writing another’s story requires empathy and vulnerability, 68  Chapter 2

the willingness to reach outside of one’s self to absorb the story of another. Telling one’s story—particularly if doing so is an act of self-care—further depends on an audience willing to listen. The protagonists of Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated and Machado’s short story “The Resident” both attempt to find their writing sponsors or readerly allies, those who will hear their stories and affirm their willful right to tell them in the first place. Hoping to share her compositions at an artists’ residency, Machado’s protagonist realizes that she must bear witness to her own stories—particularly the ones that caused her trauma. Her failed attempts to seek companionship with the other residents or to contact her wife suggest she must first be the arbiter of her storytelling before she can hope to connect with others. In contrast, the protagonist of Foer’s novel—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—is initially reluctant to bridge connections with his fellow author-character Alex. However, Alex’s writing in response to Jonathan’s own allows him the vulnerability and generosity needed to open himself up, to value his associations with others through his writing. Extending this notion of collaboration and testimony as self-care, writing as witnessing, then, is often rooted in multiple stories of the past and present, deliberately intertextual out of a sense of both playfulness and social responsibility while contending with deep traumas. Those who provide testimony simultaneously attest to offering their perspective to a collective set of narratives that might constitute a “whole truth” even as we know that this wholeness is impossible. As such, Foer’s and Machado’s protagonists find comfort in alternative forms of witnessing and record-keeping, specifically concentrating on “inauthentic” storytelling forms that violate genre boundaries. Machado’s protagonist provides testimony steeped in the genre of horror and nineteenth-century literary tropes and character types, particularly Charlotte Brontë’s character Bertha Mason and the madwoman in the attic. In doing so, she draws attention to the importance of unreliable narrators and storytelling, while simultaneously pointing out the presumed heteronormativity of these tropes. Unreliability further becomes associated with repetition, mental instability, and deviance, but then how do the marginalized tell their stories in a world that moves them to madness? Meanwhile, Foer’s novel contends with the importance of witnessing and retelling Holocaust stories, defining Jewish Americanness through genre violations such as plagiarism (the unattributed use of another’s words as though they are one’s own), dishonesty, and invoking Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  69

fantasy into history—all of which may be considered supreme defilements of writing as witnessing. Ultimately, these texts argue for fiction, or what Alex throughout the novel calls “not-truths,” as valid and ethical ways of presenting history in response to institutions that would deem their storytelling methods—or even the stories themselves—inauthentic. This is notable as both Foer and Machado write in fictional and nonfictional modes, and while the authors experienced real-life versions of the events described here, they nevertheless chose to explore these experiments through metafiction.3 Metafiction’s self-reflexivity and disruptions of linearity generate the kind of witnessing necessary to embrace testimony’s imperfections, truth’s elusiveness, and ethnic identity’s highly complex and heterogeneous formation across multiple frameworks. Foer’s author-characters, Jonathan and his Ukrainian translator Alex, provide an example of this cautious, ethical form of collaborative writing. When Alex first meets Jonathan, he writes that he was initially “underwhelmed to the maximum.” Alex recalls that the writer “did not appear like either the Americans I had witnessed in magazines, with yellow hairs and muscles, or the Jews from the history books, with no hairs and prominent bones.”4 Alex is extrapolating from popular notions of what seemingly authentic American or Jewish people should be and is initially perplexed when Jonathan meets none of these expectations. While we as readers are unsure whether Jonathan had similar expectations of Alex, Jonathan’s apprehensiveness—with himself and with Alex—is clear throughout the novel. Writing to him weeks after the first meeting, Alex admits, “One part of your letter made me most melancholy. It was the part when you said that you do not know anybody, and how that encompasses even you. I understand very much what you are saying. . . . (With our writing, we are reminding each other of things. We are making one story, yes?).”5 Alex draws attention to the unknowability of his and Jonathan’s stories, as well as the impulse to share what they do know and to write together what they cannot write apart. Supporting the “single stories” of ethnic groups often means upholding a categorical and romantic notion of authenticity as being true to oneself in the face of assimilation—a kind of individualism that Charles Taylor notes potentially “flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others of society.”6 Instead, the intimate encounters discussed in Novel Subjects reveal how one must first start with the associa70  Chapter 2

tions between writers, or even with the self-reflexive writing that Taylor might characterize as narcissistic, and move outward to encompass what Édouard Glissant calls creolization, or “hybridity without limits, hybridity whose elements are multiplied, and whose end-results are impossible to foresee.”7 In a reversal of conventional writing, then, the stories start with the interaction between authorial individuals and end with the unforeseeable blank page. In this way, Machado and Foer mobilize metafiction to add nuance to the notion of authenticity, showing how this idea crosses borders and even leads to the wider outlook that those like Taylor believe may be lost in individualism. This dynamic authenticity upholds multiple stories and modes of storytelling in pursuit of more ethical histories.

Embracing the Monster in Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Resident” Shortlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in fiction and awarded the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and more, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties is a genre-defying short story and novella collection that contemplates queer Latinx and often even ethnically unmarked identity through the lenses of horror, thriller, speculative fantasy, and more. The New York Times identified the collection as one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”8 Machado’s most playfully autobiographical inclusion, “The Resident,” is a haunting short story about a writer at a remote artists’ residency who fears that her stay is deteriorating her mental and physical health. Machado pushes the boundaries of the short story genre, telling a contemporary metafictional fairy tale with nineteenth-century literary elements. The story further asks readers to contemplate the very nature of stories and storytelling with a traumatized intradiegetic narrator and character who may or may not be reliable, and who may or may not represent the implied author Machado herself. In this way, like so many of the works discussed here, “The Resident” and its inquiries into reliability gesture toward the real-life body and mind behind the text as well as the physical body of the protagonist, all in need of self-care. This idea is reinforced by the narrator’s constant discussion of her mental and physical health, including descriptions of bodily fluids, growths, and so on; her discovery of her sexuality as a lesbian; and Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  71

her desire and longing for her wife, who never quite makes an appearance. Put differently, the narrator regularly divulges the state of what Sami Schalk calls her “bodymind” or the amalgamation of the mental with the physical,9 an intersectionality often ignored by multicultural standards that assume an unqualified and unconflicted self-perception. The story defamiliarizes a couple of key narrative elements—the madwoman in the attic and the camping-in-the-wilderness horror story. Both Machado and the story’s author-protagonist use defamiliarization—a technique, coined by Viktor Shklovsky, that distances readers from their knowledge in order to invite them to rethink what they know—to draw attention to familiar storylines while simultaneously deconstructing them. The term “defamiliarization” has its roots in science fiction, with Darko Suvin calling it “cognitive estrangement” to capture how the genre alienates or distances readers from reality so as to topple their assumed familiarity with this reality.10 Schalk discusses the role that defamiliarization plays in speculative fiction by Black women, stating that it allows them “to reimagine bodyminds and change the rules of representation and interpretation” to better account for marginalized aspects of identity such as disability.11 Likewise, Machado’s acts of defamiliarization force readers to confront their assumptions about “reliable” narrators in the first place, particularly when those narrators are marginalized women—especially lesbian women and those who are perceived (or even perceive themselves) as mentally unwell. When wrapped up in discussions of trauma, self-care becomes tricky. Conventional wisdom suggests that the traumatized person must recover, and that the trauma itself necessitates the assistance of others for recovery. At the same time, the reliability of the traumatized persons to care for themselves and to access memories and tell their stories is rendered questionable. As discussed in the previous chapter, multiculturalism has had little room in the past for the stories of traumatized and conflicted individuals. Erdrich’s and Apostol’s protagonists defend their ability to tell their stories in their chosen forms, suggesting that it is the composition and the perception of the framework or genre of the narrative itself—the diary, the talambuhay—that need changing, and in that transformation lies self-care, or a way to expand the form and the framework to make room for disremembered or “inauthentic” identities and experiences. In Machado’s story, the protagonist deals similarly with responding to and expanding narrative tropes, but also works toward self-acceptance 72  Chapter 2

of her bodymind in its current state by embracing her unreliability in all its imperfection. In mock-Victorian fashion, the story identifies its protagonist only by her initials, “C—— M——,” a nod to Carmen Maria Machado herself. The use of these initials simultaneously asserts her authorial presence and points to the erasure or censoring of the protagonist’s identity, which is particularly notable if we liken the protagonist to the empirical author Machado: a queer, white-presenting author of Cuban descent whose background is rarely referred to in critiques and profiles. Of the original nineteenth-century works that Machado echoes here, theories flourish as to why only initials rather than full names were used. For instance, the narrator of John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” posits that initials allowed authors to “enhance the illusion of reality. It is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal liability.”12 Meanwhile, other writers counter that the initials were not an illusion but a necessity, meant to protect oneself against criticism and censure. Jane Austen, for instance, may have disguised town names in Pride and Prejudice with “——shire” for one or both reasons.13 A less likely theory for the use of initials in “The Resident” is that they proffer a universal character or place, one that could be easily mistaken for something close and familiar to the reader. Machado’s “The Resident” actually does the opposite: While C—— as the narrator assumes some familiarity in her direct addresses to the reader, she nevertheless emphasizes the specificity of her experiences as a married lesbian woman writer to push against universality. In defense of her narrative, C—— demands that readers read her story on her terms, even as she includes potential obstacles to doing so—through the text’s unusual form, its uncanny repetitions, and the contradictions of other characters who challenge C——’s qualifications as a writer. Machado, whose works notoriously blur the margins between fiction, nonfiction, and generic forms, likely intended the initials to advance the idea that illusion and reality can coexist on the page, further emphasizing the need for wider, more diverse takes on reliability and authenticity. After all, her short stories embrace the strange and the uncanny. For instance, in “The Resident,” C—— writes that her protagonist Lucille breaks up with her girlfriend because “she is ‘difficult at parties.’”14 “Difficult at Parties” is actually the title of the story that immediately follows “The Resident” in Machado’s collection and is about a woman who experiences sexual trauma and then finds herself gifted Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  73

or cursed with the ability to hear the unspoken thoughts of actors in porn videos. Machado never misses the opportunity for a metafictional turn that draws attention not just to storytelling but also to the body associated with that storytelling, particularly when that body belongs to a marginalized and traumatized female subject. We can thus further point to Machado’s use of her initials as claiming authorial space on the page for her author-protagonist. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar point out that women writers of the nineteenth century suffered from a debilitating “anxiety of authorship” caused by a lack of known predecessors and exacerbated by patriarchal superiority, creating the “germs of a dis-ease.”15 The critics note that contemporary women authors owe their agency and power to “foremothers [who] struggled in isolation that felt like illness, [and] alienation that felt like madness.”16 They even suggest that the earlier works’ often melodramatic characters enact a “covert authorial anger”—that is, the empirical author’s despair about their powerlessness—on the written page. 17 Notably, Machado’s protagonist appears to take issue with Gilbert and Gubar’s belief that women writers today have largely overcome this anxiety, regardless of their race and sexuality. The nineteenth-century tropes in “The Resident” hearken back to this sense of dis-ease experienced by these early writers while also putting marginalized women’s bodies and presences at the center of a fictional, fantastical text. The horror for which Machado’s stories are known appears here as a series of loops, repetitions, and—in another nineteenth-century literary trademark—one unlikely coincidence after another that deliberately unsettle readers. Examining a few moments of repetition in the story will unearth what I believe to be C——’s purpose, which is to draw attention to the impossibility of originality as well as multicultural standards of authenticity and reliability, while recognizing and embracing her seeming monstrosity as a lesbian woman and a woman writer. The metafictional loops are inherent in the text itself: The empirical author Machado writes of a protagonist who shares her initials and who in turn asserts her right to tell her story in her own way. Simply put, just like the reframing of Victorian-style use of initials, C——’s self-conscious and self-referential repetitions constitute a form of self-care for its protagonist, emphasizing a reliability and authenticity whose measure is determined by the storyteller herself. Even as I suggest that the protagonist’s intent is to destigmatize originality and expose it as an illusion, “The Resident” was nevertheless widely received 74  Chapter 2

as an innovative text, even featured in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, edited by N. K. Jemisin. “The Resident” hinges on a defining incident from C——’s childhood: She is away at camp as part of the Brownies, the preadolescent level of the Girl Scouts or Girl Guides. Standing by a lake, she kisses a girl for the first time, realizing that she “felt something unfold inside me like a morning glory.”18 Identified only as Mrs. Z——’s daughter, the recipient of C——’s kiss shares neither her pleasure nor the rapturous role the kiss plays in C——’s sexual awakening. Instead, the daughter encourages the other Brownies to join her in a prank: They lead the sleepwalking C—— out to the lake, where she eventually wakes up disoriented and freezing. She senses something monstrous approaching her, something that is “Not a girl, not an animal, but something in-between,”19 and screams. Exposing the suffering of C——’s bodymind, her trauma is enough to leave a physical mark, sparking a fever. The prank itself is neither amusing nor original, but the result—that is, C——’s discovery of her sexuality and her “monstrosity”—defamiliarizes this all-too-common scene of bullying. C——’s sexuality and mental instability are linked; her bullies see her as monstrous or inhuman, but upon unearthing this monstrousness, C—— only finds herself. The most prominent coincidence in the story appears when the lake where C—— experiences her sexual awakening and trauma as a young Brownie turns out to be the same lake that the adult version of her now walks past every day of her writers’ residency. Initially, the connection between the site of the residency and the Brownies camp does not bother her. Driving up the mountain to the retreat, C—— thinks, “If only those girls could see me now: an adult, married, magnificent in my accomplishments.”20 Her attendance, however, sets up a series of remarkable encounters both with the other residents and with her past and present self that force her to confront what happened to her at the lake so many years ago and what it means to her self-care and bodymind health now. A seemingly innocuous encounter on her way to the residency later sets up the stigma associated both with C——’s identity and with the various repetitions that C—— highlights in her story. While picking up supplies in a convenience store, she catches a scene on a gas station television where a woman in a nightgown jumps to her death from a window—a possible allusion to Brontë’s Bertha Mason. Witnessing the death, a group of girls stare at one another, one of them whispering, “Not everybody’s cut out for this, I Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  75

guess.”21 The scene, which could easily be out of a horror film or a wayward afterschool TV special on bullying, disturbs C——, even as the bored cashier dismisses it as a rerun. Later in the story, toward the premature end of C——’s residency, readers get treated to a real-life rerun when a fellow resident known only as The Painter repeats the line said on television. In this case, The Painter refers to Lydia, a musician who has abruptly left the residency and therefore might not be “cut out for this.” C——, who is thrown off by the repetition of the line but unable to place where she had previously heard it, asks The Painter where the line came from, an urgent demand that further prompts to reader to also recall where they have heard the repetition. C——’s question offends The Painter, who asks, “Are you accusing me of something?”22 The Painter is reacting not only to the peculiarity and exigency of C——’s line of questioning but also to the nature of the question itself. The Painter’s outburst is fundamental to understanding the various loops, coincidences, and repetitions that occur in the text: To be accused of plagiarism, a lack of originality, or some other seemingly uninspired repetition is to participate in a violation or a deception. To be accused of plagiarism while in the presence of other creative individuals is even worse. The Painter’s outrage is understandable; in fact, the etymology of the word “plagiary” places it in conversation with both the body and the taking of one’s property: The word was used in early cases to describe the stealing of enslaved people from their masters.23 The plagiarist, then, wrests power from another and even violates the physical body, acting like a bully and a thief. Having one of the women take offense to the accusation further draws attention to the female body in terms of originality, and even gestures to the patriarchy surrounding Gilbert and Gubar’s anxiety of authorship: For instance, after detailing the common metaphors that connect plagiarism to disease and sexual desecration of the female, Rebecca Moore Howard goes on to state that the “rape metaphor for plagiarism further establishes that women are not subjects, capable of the volition that is plagiarism. They are instead objects, property, subject to violation.” She adds that plagiarism is considered “the most loathsome form of authorship” precisely because of its association with women.24 Consequently, even though the characters are at an artists’ residency which has sharing and collaboration built within its structure, the idea that a person creates anything but original work without the help of others 76  Chapter 2

is considered a sacrilege, especially by the other women residents. Regardless of its seemingly innocuous context, The Painter reads C——’s accusation of plagiarism as a personal attack. Still, while C—— may be the only resident whose self-care has compelled her to not buy into the sanctity of originality and authenticity, many theorists would back her up. For instance, Susan Stewart notes that what she calls an “ideal originality” would lead to something too specific and ultimately incomprehensible, while “an ideal device of citation would be a full (and necessarily impossible) history of the writer’s subjectivity; and an authentic writing, necessarily a sacred text, the metaphor of metaphors, the mixture of mixtures, the word outside of time and yet perfectly merged with it—necessarily, a kind of law.”25 In other words, to achieve “real” or “authentic” originality, one would have to speak a specific and unfamiliar language while accounting for the full nature of one’s identity and history—all of which Stewart notes is impossible. Metaphors of writing and originality are themselves wrapped up in misogyny and heteronormativity. For instance, Gilbert and Gubar describe how Harold Bloom’s account of literary history is focused on “the crucial warfare of fathers and sons . . . [Bloom] metaphorically defines the poetic process as a sexual encounter between a male poet and his female muse.”26 Gilbert and Gubar go on to lament Bloom’s erasure of the female poet, showing how literature is often visible only through male writers. I posit, however, that Machado takes the metaphor of the sexual/poetic process one step further. If a male writer can only procreate with a female muse, this not only upholds literature as male but also centers heterosexual relationships. At the same time, Bloom’s formulation and others like it negate the possibility of C—— using her bodymind as a source of both self-care and inspiration. She is barred from mining her life for stories worthy of any literary merit, particularly for the purpose of highlighting and embracing her difference and exclusion from dominant narratives of multiculturalism, heteronormativity, or authorship. C——, as a lesbian writer married to another woman, is triply excluded from the configurations of what it means to be a true, reliable, and original writer. The ways in which C—— begins to become aware of these limitations and to subsequently fight them through her written and spoken words happen after she and the other residents decide to share their work midway through the residency. C—— reads her novel in progress about her protagonist Lucille discovering her sexuality by an autumn lake and falling in love with a girl. Later, Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  77

the musician and composer, Lydia (whose relationship with C—— was tense from the start), decides to confront C—— about the originality of her work. Lydia asks her, “Do you ever worry about writing the madwoman-in-the-attic story? . . . You know. That old trope. Writing a story where the female protagonist is utterly batty. It’s sort of tiresome and regressive and, well, done . . . don’t you think? And the mad lesbian, isn’t that a stereotype as well? . . . I mean, I’m not a lesbian, I’m just saying.”27 The boredom that Lydia exhibits in response to C——’s narrative represents the opposite of defamiliarization, what Shklovsky refers to as automatization, or a way of unseeing things that renders them insignificant. This unseeing, Shklovsky points out, involves paying attention only to the surface, causing both the story and “its very making” to suffer.28 Significantly, this type of thinking further requires the least amount of work and collaboration. Shklovsky does not use the word “lazy” to describe automatization, but he does note that it “save[s] the greatest amount of perceptual effort.”29 Lydia diminishes C——’s work as so unoriginal that it is not worth reading or wasting any time on it. C——, on the other hand, responds in a way that defends not only the content of her writing but also her genre, her identity, and her authority in telling a story that is hers, whether others deem that story to be worthy, original, or not. Filling the awkward silence that follows, C—— eventually explains that her character Lucille is a loose self-portrait and that she doesn’t think Lucille is crazy, only kind of nervous. Eventually gaining courage from her wine, she later counters, “Men are permitted to write concealed autobiography, but I cannot do the same? It’s ego if I do it?”30 “Concealed autobiography” on its own speaks to reliability: If one were to tell one’s own story, why hide it? On the other hand, if we trust a person to tell their own story, then how much does the actual delivery matter? The genre standards imposed on women’s narratives, C—— suggests, have unreliability and inauthenticity built into them, just as women are perceived as the deceptive and lesser sex. The first popular madwoman in the attic, Bertha Mason of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, is one of the English canon’s ultimate marginalized characters. Creole and born in the West Indies with a history of mental illness concealed to ensure a marriage, Mason is locked in an attic where she is kept prisoner by a middle-aged seamstress prone to drunkenness. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys writes an anticolonial response to Jane Eyre, describing Bertha’s loss of all that she loves and her eventual madness from the abuse of her husband, 78  Chapter 2

who has in turn been led to believe she is insane by the account of a deceptive and illegitimate half-brother. Mason is handed from one man to another, both of whom tell her narrative for her, as she is herself silenced. In its depiction of Black and white Caribbean societies, Rhys’s novel also draws attention to the abjection of mixed race and its association with impurity and lower classes, particularly in a postcolonial multicultural environment where England is the dominant center. A woman who—in Rhys’s novel—finds herself drawn to her Black Caribbean neighbors and then made unstable by white men, Mason is deemed too unreliable for her story to have a prominent place in Jane Eyre. As I mention, “The Resident” includes visual cues—like the TV show at the gas station—and other similarities that offer an homage to—if not a plagiarism and borrowing of—Bertha Mason. C—— may be said to defend not only Bertha’s right to tell her story but her right to do so in her current emotional state, which Rhys depicts through stream-of-consciousness. Focusing on Bertha allows us to question the authorial qualifications of the other characters through which she is focalized or seen: Rochester, who locks Bertha away and is compelled to win over Jane, and Jane, who knows little of Bertha besides a ghostly laugh that reminds her of a creature, beast, or demon. Of the many choices of observers in Jane Eyre, Bertha thus remains the most reliable witness to her own story. What would it matter, C—— suggests, whether Bertha’s story is authentic or original if it is ultimately hers? C——’s madness (or what Olson would call her untrustworthiness) does not disqualify her from telling her tale, even if that illness is itself unseen or met with skepticism. Another possible Bertha Mason reference emerges when C—— rediscovers and then defamiliarizes her Girl Scout experience, in opposition to the “hearty and outdoorsy” stereotypes assumed by another resident.31 Instead, C—— recalls the terror of facing her monstrosity and enslavement. The lakeside residency reminds her of girlhood Scouting experiences—most specifically, her earliest involvement as a Brownie, a name she recounts as coming from “these little house elves who supposedly lived in people’s homes and did work in exchange for gifts.”32 Contemplating the etymology of the term “Brownie,” she remembers a story about a brother and sister who refused to do chores. The sister is sent away to find one of these elves or Brownies by attempting to answer a riddle that C—— is at first unable to remember. Only after she runs into an anxious Brownie lost in the woods does she finally recollect the riddle: “Twist me and turn me and show me the elf. I looked in the water and saw . . . myself.”33 The Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  79

riddle, a chant that all Brownies repeat at their opening initiation ceremony, is meant to symbolize the beginning of a journey of belonging and community. In contrast, however, C—— revises the chant’s intent by insisting that it highlights erasure and enslavement, exacerbated by girls’ being prompted to repeat it as if it were their own narrative. She calls the chant “grotesque in the extreme—no wonder the rhyme had removed itself from my memory.”34 C—— characterizes the Brownies song and story as the ultimate horror story: Sending a child after an enslaved mythical brownie, and then providing a rhyme that—assuming the child did not fall into the pond and drown, or get lost in the night—would only serve to tell the child that she herself was the enslaved mythical brownie? And not her brother, mind you, but her? Every adult and speaking animal in that story was suspect—having either not taken proper care of the protagonist or actively sent her into harm’s blundering path.35 In this tale of fear, untrustworthiness is attributed not to the supposedly naughty sister but to everyone else who should have had her care in mind. Even worse is the way in which the recollection of her monstrosity is made, and the danger that could have been avoided had she been told in any other way. C—— repeats the rhyme to herself and looks for her reflection in the lake only to discover another horror: She finds the sky where her face should be. This view of nothingness is repeated earlier in the text when a photographer at the residency takes her portrait and C—— sees emptiness in her eyes, “as if I was seeing a premonition of my own death, or a terrible memory I’d long forgotten.”36 In the repetitions and her condemnation of the rhyme, C—— finds mounting evidence that she alone is in the best place to counter her erasure. “The Resident” further plays with reliability in presenting C——’s mental and physical state. The story is full of references to physical manifestations of her inner turmoil. The Thornfield Hall of the story is a retreat in the P— Mountains referred to as Devil’s Throat, and it first invades C——’s body as an actual thorn, a splinter on the banister where she lays her hand when she walks up the porch steps. She is unable to remove the splinter, just as she is unable to control her facial expressions that night during dinner, or to quickly overcome the fever that later manifests further into full boils on her body, what she notably refers to as abjections. Denying her bodily reactions—her terror and paranoia about the building and residency itself—and then trying 80  Chapter 2

to assimilate into a group of people who mostly are apathetic or openly hostile to her presence, her body fights for its legitimacy. Incidentally, the physical monstrosities fighting their way to the surface of C——’s body also gesture to the credibility of women reporting other “unseen” or “invisible” diseases that often befall them, whether those diseases are internal and/or related to women’s sexual organs, or overlooked and ignored because women are the most susceptible victims. While C—— and Lydia end the night in an uneasy truce, a later set of strange repeating events prompts Lydia to run screaming from the retreat and presents C——’s attitude as one that embraces repetition and seeming unreliability and unoriginality. Early in the story, as C—— is driving up to the retreat, she accidentally runs over a rabbit. Checking underneath her vehicle, she stares as “the black, lifeless eyes of a rabbit met mine. The lower half of her body was missing, as neatly as if she were a sheet of paper that had been ripped in two.” Unable to find the creature’s other half, she murmurs, “I’m sorry. . . . You deserved better than that. Better than me.”37 While she hopes the incident is not an omen of her residency experience, both the rabbit and her apology will reappear later in the text. The reader soon learns, for example, that the apology she gives to the rabbit is one that she later repeats to its second half, which mysteriously turns up outside of her residency cabin; C—— will have to metaphorically stitch together the errant parts of the halved rabbit to make herself feel a sense of wholeness. Enshrouding the partial carcass in a towel, she returns to the main hall of the residency, where she runs into Lydia and some others. C——’s distress, followed by her unveiling of the body, causes Lydia to scream about how crazy she is. The response that C—— yells in return seals her feelings about herself and her writing: “It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,” she screams.38 C——’s proclamation demonstrates her growing acceptance of the supposedly unreliable monster inside her, the unoriginal and unacceptable parts of herself that are the madwoman in the attic, the mad lesbian, and the woman writer. These connections crystallize once we learn that C——’s act of selfplagiarism—that is, the apology she gives to both the rabbit’s upper and lower portions—is actually another repetition of what she first heard herself during her girlhood fever by the lake. While the younger C——’s feverish body is at war with itself, she sees the silhouette of a person—likely one of the pranksters herself—“backlit by soft autumn light” and hears her say she is sorry. “You Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  81

deserved better than that,” the person in the doorway says to C——. “‘Better than—’ From behind her, there was a murmur, and the door swung.”39 This final apology—which is also temporally the first apology—allows readers to fully connect to C——’s supposed madness as well as to her real frustration with a society that excludes her for no real reason beyond being herself. Even one of the bullies recognizes that the prank that solidifies C——’s sexual awakening and causes her body to protest its existence is an injustice, rather than an earned punishment. C——’s declaration that she can reside in her own mind reflects her writing process. When she has a bout of writer’s block, C—— decides to lie on the floor of her cabin to make the familiar seem strange. She describes the method as an embodied form of defamiliarization, the act “of zooming in so close to something, and observing it so slowly, that it begins to warp, and change, and acquire new meaning.”40 Rather than looking to a muse, C—— credits her talent for writing to her ability to defamiliarize her world. Defamiliarization reawakens the familiar, reminding us why some people or places or objects that we’ve grown accustomed to are actually beautiful or horrific or enjoyable, and allows us to see those things again as though for the first time. The labor of readers aids in the process: Machado’s story asks readers to connect to that which is defamiliarized and choose how they wish to approach the text’s supposed strangeness. In his work on structuralist poetics, Jonathan Culler actually acclaims reading as the opposite of defamiliarization, stating that “reading naturalizes and reduces that strangeness [of defamiliarization] by recognizing and naming.”41 C——, however, embraces defamiliarization as a process of repetition through different lenses, turning an object one way and then another to embrace its strangeness. If this eventually naturalizes the strange, then this too is part of the repetition. C—— thus asserts herself as a person who is worth both reading and writing. Whether her story is original or reliable is beside the point. In her final nod to nineteenth-century literature, the narrator directly addresses the reader, asking, “What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it? . . . What is worse: writing a trope or being one? What about being more than one?”42 She then goes on to wish that readers repeat the same fortune she has had, encountering themselves at the water’s edge. By this point, we know that this wish is not a curse, but a benediction. Machado also explores the difficulty of telling one’s story as a lesbian and as a white-presenting American of Cuban descent in her memoir, In the Dream 82  Chapter 2

House. Avoiding a chronological account, Machado instead tells her experience of being in a same-sex abusive relationship in chapters composed of different genres, such as “Dream House as Murder Mystery,” “Dream House as Queer Villainy,” and “Dream House as Self-Help Bestseller.” Machado contends with not only the trauma of the abuse she experiences but also the fear that her abuser affirms a trope: the “specter of the lunatic lesbian.”43 The terror of unoriginality and of resembling a stereotype is even more ironic when Machado begins a near-futile search for stories that mirror her experiences. In this case, originality is overrated but also leads Machado to falsely and dangerously believe that she is alone. Ultimately, she finds very little besides a few obscure books and a joint trial in Massachusetts that was especially damning for the one Black woman who suffered abuse at the hands of her same-sex partner.44 Speaking of multiculturalism in Britain, Clare Beckett and Marie Macey confirm multiculturalism’s role in exacerbating domestic violence “through its creed of respect for cultural differences, its emphasis on noninterference in minority lifestyles and its insistence on community consultation (with male, self-defined community leaders). This has resulted in women being invisibilised, their needs ignored and their voices silenced.”45 Machado’s memoir confirms this silencing and noninterference, even from established structures and institutions that rail against heterosexual domestic abuse. The seeming originality of Machado’s experience and story is not because it had never happened before, but because people refuse to acknowledge it in a sustained and meaningful way. In the Dream House’s numerous genres further reflect not only the inadequacies of memoir as it currently exists but also the unreliability built into any narrative that would attempt a traditional approach in the first place. In an interview, Machado relates that experiences like hers were “so complicated that trying to describe [them] in a straightforward way would be impossible. It feels more symphonic than that. It feels more scattered.”46 Hers is a sentiment that the fictional protagonists of Apostol’s and Erdrich’s novels would certainly share. Another way to consider the limitations of the genre comes from the memoir itself, in a chapter entitled “Dream House as Unreliable Narrator,” which hints at credibility as a luxury more often afforded to abusers than to their victims. Unpacking her so-called melodramatic tendencies, Machado finds herself, just like C—— in “The Resident,” at a loss. “Why,” she rages, “do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?” And once Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  83

someone decides whether a person is an unreliable narrator or not, “what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?” 47 Within In the Dream House and “The Resident” lie Machado’s attempts to reframe that justice by placing the power of truth and testimony within the hands of those who actually experience harm.

Embracing the False Witness: Collaboration and Not-Truths in Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated When one thinks of a witness in the modern, traditional sense—for example, as a spectator to a crime—notions of collusion and corroboration replace that of collaboration. Namely, conventional wisdom sets witness testimonies against each other to purportedly get at the Truth, the solitary and “correct” account of what really happened, rather than seeing how witnesses speak to each other to reach collective, interacting, and more complex truths. Corroboration suggests a strengthening confirmation of one specific, reliable, and authentic Truth. Meanwhile, collaboration suggests different perspectives that collide, interrelate, and occasionally harmonize to provide multiple and even potentially conflicting truths. This notion of collaboration is especially true within the mode of radical self-care at the heart of Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. The chosen association and collaboration between protagonists Jonathan Safran Foer (hereafter referred to as “Jonathan” to avoid confusion with the real-life author) and Alex “Sasha” Perchov attempt to witness a truth that demands multiple ways of seeing, writing, and understanding, putting the value of reliability into question, especially as it is used to craft narratives of what constitutes “authentic” Jewish identities. I posit that Foer’s text testifies to the enduring historical impact of World War II Nazi occupation as it relates this identity formation through an intimate, collaborative perspective that reveals alternative Jewish experiences to those popularly embraced as the most authentic accounts. Reliability in this text further relates to fiction and nonfiction’s relationship to accuracy and authenticity. Whether it is the writing of Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Viktor E. Frankl, or Primo Levi, fiction is often not the most prominent choice for popular publishers and readers of Holocaust-related texts.48 This is important to note as children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are beginning to share their experiences, and as more testimonies 84  Chapter 2

from marginalized perspectives emerge. On the collecting of testimony on Jewish genocide, Annette Wieviorka writes, “No other historical event, not even World War I—when the practice of recording testimonies first became common—has given rise to such a movement, which is so vast and long-lasting that no research can pretend to master it in its entirety.”49 These numerous testimonies often come with the expectation of a specific kind of historical authenticity. Some survivors go so far as to have a “very literal take on the role of the witness—to counteract false belief and prove something to be true makes very particular demands of the survivor-writer: it demands objectivity.”50 As a result of this vital need to counteract falsity and skepticism, the sheer volume of nonfictional testimonies of the Holocaust is vast. Nonetheless, a consideration of recent Jewish American literature shows that fiction may soon become a more recurrent mode, particularly when regarding the popularity of contemporary novelists like Michael Chabon, Myla Goldberg, Dara Horn, Nathan Englander, and Nicole Krauss, some of whom constitute what David Sax calls “The New Yiddishists” and whom he designates as “[e]qually comfortable with their American and Jewish identities [and] responsible for a renaissance in Jewish storytelling that is turning the narrative of assimilation on its head.”51 Other narratives take the form of autofiction, or fictionalized memoir, such as Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther, which openly describes her attempts to trace her family’s Holocaust history. Multicultural education has traditionally demarcated lines between fiction and nonfiction authors and genres, even when—in the case of someone like Primo Levi—a prominent representative of a cultural group attempts to act as a witness within numerous genres. What, then, does fiction offer these authors, their author-protagonists, and their readers and audience members that nonfiction does not? Foer (both the empirical author and the fictional protagonist Jonathan) specifically accesses fiction to capture alternative interpretations of Jewish history that Alex repeatedly calls “not-truths.”52 In turn, in his intradiegetic writing, Jonathan not only opts for fiction, but verges into magical realism, a subgenre explicitly removed from the pragmatism and accuracy that ostensibly characterize Alex’s responses in return. In this section, I argue that Alex’s supposedly realistic accounts and Jonathan’s explicitly fictionalized ones establish their own standards of reliability based on collaboration rather than corroboration. In pursuing these not-truths, Jonathan and Alex practice radical Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  85

self-care by using their shared work to embrace multiple interpretations of Jewish American cultural identity.53 Many authors have struggled with explaining the challenges of conveying truth in and through metafiction. For example, Tim O’Brien, the empirical and implied author of The Things They Carried, differentiates between the truths of fiction and nonfiction by describing how “a thing may happen and be a total lie, another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” and that “story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth.”54 For O’Brien, story-truth is experienced emotionally, even physiologically, and often in contrast to happening-truth. And while Foer may certainly sympathize with this notion of story-truth, the way that O’Brien presents this concept is without the collaborative impulse that characterizes the radical self-care crucial to Jonathan and Alex’s writing. Instead, O’Brien is unapologetic, even suspicious of readers who perceive his dictatorial bending of the truth as trickery, betrayal, or manipulation; the author insists that his “narrative deception is in the readers’ best interests.”55 Rather than openly admitting to his silences, his reliance on others’ accounts, and even his forays into poetic license, O’Brien deceives first, and then defends the deception. Meanwhile, in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the narrator Yunior openly touts his unreliability even as he appoints himself the keeper of Oscar’s stories. For instance, Yunior points out a geographical error from a first draft that he has corrected, but admits that he chose to keep an error that appears over 100 pages earlier, explaining in a footnote that he “just liked the image too much.”56 Finally, in the introduction to the second edition of his short story cycle, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie (Spokane–Coeur d’Alene) presents the concept of reservation realism, conceding that his narratives “are the vision of one individual looking at the lives of his family and his entire tribe, so these stories are necessarily biased, incomplete, exaggerated, deluded, and often just plain wrong.”57 The notion of the reservation, while referring most obviously to lands federally mandated for certain Native American groups, additionally suggests storing or setting aside (“reserving”). If we consider realism in the most literal sense as a tendency toward accuracy and truth, then reservation realism can refer to the possibility of a single author maintaining and then setting aside conventional ideas of veracity, while also drawing attention to this different, “wrong” kind of truth. Alexie’s form of fiction becomes “artifice but not artificial.”58 86  Chapter 2

In Everything Is Illuminated, Alex and Jonathan openly negotiate and argue over what should count for truth and accuracy, as well as reliable forms of Jewish storytelling. Before the novel’s opening, Jonathan attempts to track down a woman who helped his grandfather escape the Nazis in a Ukrainian town called Trachimbrod during World War II. In what we can call a celebration of “bad” English, Jonathan’s somewhat competent translator Alex writes letters to Jonathan followed by chapters in which Alex recalls the details of Jonathan’s quest and the experiences he, Jonathan, and Alex’s grandfather had in searching for the woman, whom they call Augustine. In turn, Jonathan responds to Alex’s accounts with magical realist re-creations of the lives of his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Brod and his grandfather Safran as he imagines them taking place in the mythical Trachimbrod of the 1800s and 1940s. Juxtaposing Jonathan’s fantastical history against Alex’s memoirlike recounting, readers are led to believe that Alex is the more reliable narrator. Early in the text, Alex exposes anachronisms and cultural confusions in Jonathan’s writing, wondering, “Are you being a humorous writer here, or an uninformed one?”59 Though readers lack direct access to Jonathan’s letters, Alex himself exposes Jonathan’s willingness to bend the truth when convenient; for example, Alex assures him that he will omit, at his request, Jonathan’s fear of dogs and agrees to revise observations that Jonathan is “severely short.”60 While Alex initially emerges as the voice of reason and accuracy, the novel goes on to challenge standard associations of reliability with truthfulness and realism, exposing how Jonathan and Alex’s negotiations of not-truths provide an alternative, but nonetheless faithful, interpretation of personal Jewish history. These two authors create a writing relationship based on collaborative dissensus—that is, a collective outlook that attempts to encompass both of their troubled and contrasting perspectives of the past and of truth, as derived through their shared writing process, establishing a form of self-care and identity formation that is itself collaborative and inherently conflicted. Alex and Jonathan’s contestations within their writing relationship help them appreciate the responsibility associated with truthful witnessing. Alex is shocked to learn from Jonathan that the Ukrainian Jews initially welcomed Nazi intervention with the hopes that the latter would provide security against their countrymen, and is then shattered by knowledge of his grandfather’s complicity in exposing his best friend Herschel to the Nazis at gunpoint. ComAgainst “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  87

pounded with Jonathan’s historical insight into his family’s loss during the Holocaust, these facts distress Alex, inciting him to pursue other possibilities for truth and self-care. As Cathy Caruth writes, “For the survivor of trauma . . . the truth of the event may reside not only in its brutal facts, but also in the way that their occurrence defies simple comprehension. The flashback or traumatic reenactment conveys, that is, both the truth of an event, and the truth of its incomprehensibility.”61 As Alex learns more of his family and country’s involvement with Jewish oppression and, by extension, with Jonathan’s personal tragedies, Alex becomes ever more fearful of witnessing manifestations of the happening-truth—or what he calls truth “in the actual”62—in their writings. Alex’s early request to Jonathan that he “be truthful, but also please be benevolent”63 in his writerly feedback later evolves to a desperate appeal for Jonathan to diverge from the inevitable atrocity that will plague his magical realist tale. “If I could utter a proposal,” Alex requests, “please allow Brod to be happy. Please. Is this such an impossible thing? Perhaps she could still exist, and be proximal with your grandfather Safran.”64 The same reader and fellow writer who once called out Jonathan’s potentially anachronistic mention of a disc-blade saw in his Trachimbrod writings now requests that Jonathan combines the lives of two people—ancestors divided by a century, no less—to manufacture a sense of happiness for characters whose real-life equivalents had no such luck. Alex’s transformed attitude toward the truth derives from his inability to reconcile what counted for accuracy and authenticity in the past with what he knows and feels to be true and most helpful to his self-care in the present. For example, despite his learning about his grandfather’s coerced participation in Herschel’s death, Alex insists on his grandfather’s goodness. In one of many parenthetical remarks to Jonathan, Alex writes, “(You could alter it, Jonathan. For him, not for me. Your novel is now verging on the war. It is possible.) He is a good person, alive in a bad time. . . . I beseech you to forgive us, to make us better than we are.”65 Jonathan’s ultimate resistance to Alex’s entreaty exposes the instability of conflicting truths; he claims control over his authorship by holding fast to a form of Jewish history that makes sense out of a senseless time. Significantly, in discussions of truth and metafiction, we are really discussing aesthetics: How does one tell the truth in fiction? Jonathan’s magical realism and even Alex’s various not-truths offer their own accuracy unhampered by conventional historiography, but also not with the goal of obscuring truth to 88  Chapter 2

offer readers comfort or redemption. The collaborative story that they create is rife with these moments of truths in conflict, drawing attention to the importance of multiple stories and dynamic perspectives when determining the history of a people or an ethnic group. Rather than a corroborative form of witnessing, or one that dictates trickery or oversimplification as best for the reader, Jonathan and Alex as fellow readers and writers of each other’s words together pursue a history and self-care definitively wrought in conflict and collaboration. Psychoanalyst Dori Laub acknowledges a hierarchical privilege attached to O’Brien’s idea of “happening-truth,” which O’Brien notably refers to in various instances as the “real truth.” In contrast, Laub’s experiences of re/witnessing (or witnessing alongside the original witnesses) and recording the testimony of Holocaust survivors give insight into manifestations of truth in traumatic histories. He stated that writing down their testimony both makes and breaks the promise of the testimony as a realization of the truth. On the one hand, the process of the testimony does in fact hold out the promise of truth as the return of a sane, normal, and connected world. On the other hand, because of its very commitment to truth, the testimony enforces at least a partial breach, failure and relinquishment of this promise. . . . There is no healing reunion with those who are, and continue to be, missing, no recapture or restoration of what has been lost. . . . The testimony aspires to recapture the lost truth of that reality, but the realization of the testimony is not the fulfillment of this promise.66 Laub describes the testimony of a man who, as a child, somehow manages to reunite with his mother after liberation. He had sustained himself by sharing his experiences with his mother’s image in a photograph but is then disconcerted at his reunion to see his mother as emaciated and haggard, so unlike the vibrant woman in the photo. Like Alex confronting the conflicting images of his grandfather, the man cannot reconcile the imagined connections that kept him alive during his separation with the person who stands before him in their reunion. Laub notably refers to this former belief as a “lost truth,” invoking the idea of an alternative reality. We can describe this reality, then, as a fiction, not unlike the fantastical stories Jonathan writes in his Trachimbrod chapters. The nottruth that exists alongside the “real” truth was necessary to keep the boy alive. Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  89

While Laub is right to describe the unlikely reunion between mother and son as “miraculous,” there is a magical element in the boy’s authorship that allowed him first to care for and sustain himself by testifying to his imagined mother in the photograph, and then—so many decades later—to retell his stories to Laub, ultimately “reclaim[ing] his position as a witness.”67 Laub locates this reclamation of truth not in the child’s original act of witnessing the atrocities but in the grown man’s retelling of this childhood as an adult, elevating this meta-writing and re/witnessing of history to a level of importance with the original act itself. Subsequently, the catharsis of both storyteller and listener is strengthened by the man’s account of the two truths that existed simultaneously while he was a child. Most importantly, the catharsis is fortified by the connections wrought in retelling both the lost and “real” truth to the interviewer himself. Laub is conscious of this shared accountability, noting that “the interviewer-listener takes on the responsibility for bearing witness that previously the narrator felt he bore alone, and therefore could not carry out. It is the encounter and the coming together between the survivor and the listener, which makes possible something like a repossession of the act of witnessing.”68 A similar model of storytelling and re/witnessing pervades Alex and Jonathan’s writerly conversation. Alex tells what he feels is the reality of their shared experience, and he and Jonathan reconfigure this reality based on their differing perspectives. Jonathan then writes the Trachimbrod chapters constituted of not-truths, an alternative reality that is no longer recoverable and for which he, Alex, Alex’s grandfather, and even the real-life readers of Foer’s hybrid novel itself claim responsibility in the present. Finally, these not-truths, in turn, challenge readers’ “authentic” understanding of Jewish ethnicity and history. The impulse toward collaborative self-care and the inability to recover the various realities of Jonathan’s past fuel his writing of this substitute history. Alex—through his narration, his writing, and his readership of Jonathan’s writing—acts as Jonathan’s witness to what holds “true” to the characters’ lives for whom they are now both accountable. In one of the few moments where Jonathan explicitly portrays himself as the narrator and Brod and Safran’s descendant, he describes Safran’s promiscuity and then notes that his grandfather “was so afraid of being discovered [as having multiple lovers] that even in his journal—the only written record I have of his life before he met my grandmother, in a displaced-persons camp after the war—he never mentions 90  Chapter 2

them once.”69 So while Safran reports in his journal simply that he went to the theater, Jonathan goes on to add that this seemingly mundane outing was also the same “day he had sex with his first virgin.”70 Jonathan proceeds to describe the encounter at the theater with the woman named Lista and how she represented the first of many shtetl women with whom the precociously virile Safran interacted. Jonathan here promotes himself to Alex and to his fellow readers as a writer who witnesses, and then must record, that which did not happen—a fiction that constitutes an alternative truth that meets Alex and Jonathan’s need for self-care. Alex and Jonathan continue this fictional practice in their real lives when, at the end of their arduous quest, they find Lista, but insist on referring to her throughout their writings as Augustine. At the end of his voyage, Jonathan has found neither (the real) Augustine, Trachimbrod (which exists now only as a patch of grass and a modest historical marker), nor the means by which Brod and Safran can become real to him in the present. He is denied access to his role as a witness—in the conventional sense of passive observer—of his grandfather’s past. As Safran himself thinks, “The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.”71 Fueled mainly by inert remembrances, both Jonathan’s magical realist writings of Trachimbrod and his interactive writing with Alex constitute an attempt to establish surrogates for this perceived lack of witnesses and memories in Jewish history. This self-care constituted by a spillover of fiction into reality and of nottruths into happening-truths and vice versa culminates at the end of the novel when Alex’s grandfather writes a note to Jonathan before committing suicide. Alex’s presence in this last letter is implied by his role as Jonathan’s hired translator and witness to all that follows. Earlier in the text, Alex describes picking up Jonathan’s notebook and reading an entry. The entry describes Alex confronting his father and telling him “that he would take care of the family, that he would understand if his father had to leave and never return, and that it would not even make him less of a father.” Alex does not make any comment on Jonathan’s imagined scenario, but admits that Jonathan’s writing “made me angry, but then it made me sad, and then it made me so grateful, and then it made me angry again, and I went through these feelings hundreds of times, stopping on each for only a moment and then moving to the next.”72 His grandfather’s suicide note, which constitutes the novel’s concluding pages, is meant to have similar emotional effects. Alex’s grandfather relates Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  91

a recent encounter Alex has with his father as part of a series of events that ultimately prompts the grandfather’s suicide. In an eerie metafictional move, the account his grandfather writes matches word-for-word that which Alex had read in Jonathan’s notebook several weeks before. The magical realism of Jonathan’s Trachimbrod chapters overruns Alex and his grandfather’s writings, representing an interweaving of both Alex and Jonathan’s ideas of truth and not-truth through an act that we may call repetition or that we may even refer to as implicit plagiarism. As described in the following section, this plagiarism is another form of shared complicity that deliberately destabilizes notions of possession and power in storytelling.

Plagiarism and Likeness in Translation At one point in Foer’s novel, Alex chides Jonathan on his not-truths regarding Safran, demanding to know, “How can you do this to your grandfather, writing about his life in such a manner? Could you write in this manner if he was alive? And if not, what does that signify?”73 Echoing the often-bowdlerized versions of multicultural Jewish history, Alex initially perceives Jonathan’s writings about his grandfather as lacking respect and calls his authorship and honor into question. Alex continues, “if we are to be such nomads with the truth, why do we not make the story more premium than life? It seems to me that we are making the story even inferior. . . . I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”74 Given the fantastical elements of Jonathan’s contributions to the novel, Alex’s questions are fair. If Machado’s and Foer’s texts argue for the possibilities of other truths beyond the authentic Truth with a capital T, what stops them from presenting a truth that romanticizes and improves an imperfect world, creating other truths under the guise of self-care? Unlike Machado’s protagonist, whose relative powerlessness prompts her to claim ownership over her narrative just as a cisgender white male writer would, Jonathan relinquishes his power and his responsibility to answer Alex’s questions by omitting his responses altogether. While potentially indicative of the cowardice the character exhibits throughout the text, this rhetorical move also reveals Foer’s trust in both Alex and the reader to unearth the truths of Jonathan’s reactions in Alex’s writings. Just as Trachimbrod remains only as a quiet monument, Jonathan’s omitted responses are its own blank book whose pages are filled by his magical mean92  Chapter 2

derings and Alex’s remembrances, but also by the readers who, like Erdrich’s Riel, are empowered with interpreting the stories in tandem. Dwelling on the three concluding sections of the novel—Alex’s ultimate letter to Jonathan, followed by Jonathan’s last section of the Trachimbrod chapters, and, finally, the grandfather’s suicide note to Jonathan—tells more clearly how this notion of collaborative witnessing and self-care challenges traditional notions of authentic storytelling and ownership, exhibiting why Jonathan resists the fairy-tale ending that Alex demands and the “perfect” and authentic story to which classical multiculturalism often lays claim. This authorial arrangement further resituates the ownership of ideas; rather than plagiarism in the conventional sense, using another’s words as one’s own becomes part of the novel’s collaborative and creative mode. As Jonathan’s final Trachimbrod chapter ends in destructive bombings, Alex makes distinctions between truth and not-truth that he was, up until this point, unable to articulate. The chapter portrays the Nazis threatening to shoot survivors and a dream of Trachimbroders drowning themselves to escape the brutal chaos. Devastated by Jonathan’s gruesome conclusion, Alex protests, “I would never command you to write a story that is as it occurred in the actual, but I would command you to make your story faithful. . . . You [that is, Jonathan, Brod, and Safran] are all cowards because you live in a world that is ‘once-removed,’ if I may excerpt you.”75 Surprisingly, Alex admits that what makes Jonathan’s story unfaithful is not its infidelity to the happening-truth, but rather its detachment from the world of potential readers who would have found hope in Jonathan’s version of the story. Alex feels that the stories most capable of encouraging change in the world of readers like himself must first inspire the possibility of improvement in the first place. Alex, as a fellow reader and writer, practices self-care by taking ownership of the story and positing an approach to historical writing situated in affecting the real world toward positive action and activism. As Alex tells Jonathan, “It is true, I am certain, that you will write very many more books than I will, but it is me, not you, who was born to be the writer.”76 Alex defines writing not by its content, but by its ultimate effect and intention, especially its ability to provide care. Readers may conclude that the magical realist flourishes that Jonathan uses to recapture his lost history ultimately fail to convince Alex of the value of Jonathan’s imagined witnessing. However, hidden in the last letter of the novel written by Alex’s grandfather is an act of plagiarism that suggests yet another possibility. Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  93

As previously noted, the Latin origins of “plagiarism” lie in plagiārius, which refers to a “person who abducts the child or slave of another, kidnapper, seducer.” This history associates the word with the kidnapping or theft of someone powerless—even someone deemed a possession. When expanded to the idea of literary theft, the notion of strength still holds, as evidenced by Raymond Federman’s connection between masterpieces and masters, Barthes’s invocation of the Author-God, and Howard’s study of authorship as historically associated with masculinity, rationality, and strength.77 Jonathan (and by implication, Foer) ultimately entrusts his story to Alex, a character who speaks “imperfect” English and who lacks knowledge of Jewish oppression in his home country. In other words, like the uneasy agreement that the protagonist Frank strikes with the authorial narrator in Morrison’s Home, Foer’s conclusion presents Jonathan willingly giving up full ownership of his story to another who has managed, through conflict and dissensus, to earn his trust. In so doing, the novel complicates the importance of authenticity, originality, and self-care when dealing with traumatic events like the Holocaust. Concluding with the grandfather’s “plagiarized” letter further represents Jonathan and Alex mutually passing on their authorial powers to this older, tortured man who, in saving his wife and child, pointed his finger at his best friend, marking him for death at the hands of the Nazis. Speaking about the dynamics of possessing and controlling one’s story, Michael Berenbaum confronts notions of ownership and authorship in what he calls the “Americanization of the Holocaust.”78 As project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Berenbaum presents this phenomenon in a primarily positive light, stating that the “tide of Americanization cannot be easily avoided because in order for Israeli scholarship to move beyond its shores, it must reach out to its Western brethren. For Jews to solidify the place of the Holocaust within Jewish consciousness, they must establish its importance for the American people as a whole.”79 While we can certainly dispute Berenbaum’s monolithic characterization of the West and his potential American exceptionalism—a perspective that aligns with multicultural practices—it is important to contemplate his assertion that the Holocaust has become “integrated . . . into American culture. Today, the event is understood differently in Washington, Warsaw, Paris, and Jerusalem.”80 Berenbaum argues that acknowledging how different audiences will interpret the Holocaust and connect it to their experiences shows accessibility that is “contrary to Elie 94  Chapter 2

Wiesel’s definition of the Holocaust as a world apart, not belonging to our world.”81 Ultimately, Berenbaum is challenging notions of authentic authorship, suggesting that this and other stories like it no longer belong to one particular kind of storyteller. He echoes Alex’s idea that stories should be translatable in such a way as to provide hope and promote activism and change—arguably the purview of fictional novels. While such philosophies are certainly admirable, how can we expand Berenbaum’s ideas to contemplate the approach explored in Foer’s text? Not surprisingly, a concurrent look at Jonathan’s and Alex’s final words provides us an answer, one that further responds to the dynamic that Berenbaum (via Wiesel) mentions of the Holocaust as being “a world apart,” an observation similar to Alex’s complaint of Jonathan’s cowardice in a world “once-removed.” Berenbaum’s reference to Wiesel is actually relevant to both Jonathan’s and Alex’s forms of witnessing and its complications of authenticity and ownership. Revisiting the gas chambers at Birkenau, Wiesel asks, “When was this spellbound spot most unreal—in 1944 or today? I look at the watchtowers, the alleyways of the camp, and suddenly, as in a dream, they are filled with people. Once again I am confronting the fearful and faceless creatures of the past; they move in a world apart, a time apart, beyond life and death.”82 While Berenbaum appropriates Wiesel’s phrase to point to the need to make the story of the Holocaust more manageable and broadly relatable, the original context of the phrase is more fascinating and revolutionary: For Wiesel, no one owned the experience of the Holocaust, even those who experienced its brutality firsthand.83 Robert Fine posits a similar argument in response to Hannah Arendt’s descriptions of the senselessness of the gas chambers, writing, “It is this absence of instrumental or utilitarian rationality which not only gives totalitarian terror in general, and to the Holocaust in particular, its ‘horrible originality’ but makes it incomprehensible to a social science fixed upon rationalistic ways of thinking.”84 Paired with Wiesel’s reaction, Fine suggests that the “horrible originality” of the Holocaust’s viciousness is so unreal as to defy comprehension. At the same time, the irrationality that spawned the event cannot be completely contained within this “original” framework if we regard the present intentions of the testimonies that have followed in the Holocaust’s wake: The primary role of witness accounts since the Holocaust, embodied most obviously in the quotes and rhetoric emblazoning the walls of Berenbaum’s Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  95

Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, is to highlight and memorialize these experiences to prevent such events from ever happening again. The Holocaust Museum’s oft-quoted caption for the 20th Anniversary National Tour and Tribute to Holocaust Survivors and World War II Veterans is, quite simply, “Never Again. What You Do Matters.” In opposition to this, critics like Zoë Vania Waxman point to survivors like Wiesel, Levi, and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch as having accepted “the merging of individual experiences of suffering into a collective historical memory [that] both conceals the diversity of experiences it seeks to represent and mediates the writing of testimony.”85 Wiesel, Fine, and Berenbaum contend with the paradox of the Holocaust existing outside the framework of reality, that nonetheless should never be copied or re-created. The grandfather’s suicide note at the end of the text exists in a similarly aporetic space. Readers can assume that the grandfather wrote the text, that it represents his original creation. However, in its metafictional context, readers must additionally pay attention first to the grandfather’s opening acknowledgment of Alex as translator (“If you are reading this, it is because Sasha [i.e., Alex] found it and translated it for you. It means that I am dead, and that Sasha is alive”86) and, second, to Jonathan’s lack of response (the suicide note closes the novel) and to Foer’s act of handing off his novel to the grandfather—a man complicit in a Jewish man’s death—in the closing pages. Most significantly, readers must contend with the letter’s implied act of plagiarism. The text skillfully encloses these levels of mediation in a note that is itself presented in direct and stark intimacy, the grandfather (via Alex) attempting to express the motivations behind his impending suicide. One would assume that Alex, as translator of this final but indirect message to Jonathan, would portray himself and his grandfather in the best light, just as he wished Jonathan would have done with Safran. How then should we regard the confrontational scene between Alex and his father in Jonathan’s notebook, now re-created word for word in the grandfather’s letter? He told his father that he could care for Mother and Little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true. Finally, he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. What? he asked. What? And Sasha told him again that he would take care of the family, that he would understand if his father had to leave and never return, and that it would not even make him less 96  Chapter 2

of a father. He told his father that he would forgive. Oh, his father became so angry, so full of wrath, and he told Sasha that he would kill him, and Sasha told his father that he would kill him, and they moved at each other with violence and his father said, Say it to my face, not to the floor, and Sasha said, You are not my father.87 Whether Alex perfectly translates his grandfather’s plagiarism or deliberately enacts this plagiarism on his grandfather’s behalf is unclear. Given the collaborative space in which the story is told, we as readers are not even sure of who is plagiarizing whom. Nonetheless, that Alex both translates and sends the letter in the first place, and then lets the act of plagiarism stand, confirms that Alex has taken a page from Jonathan’s book: In addition to allowing this moment of magical realism to infiltrate the “reality” of Alex’s writing, Alex admits that writing does not always require an allegiance to what he called “faithfulness” or reliability to enact self-care or positive change. Plagiarism becomes Alex’s way of collaborating with Jonathan in a work that neither of them may have had any initial responsibility in writing. In a way, to paraphrase Jonathan’s notebook, it took Jonathan’s writing about Alex’s empowerment as a writer, and as a caretaker of his family, to make it true. Alex and Jonathan’s cooperative writing makes the account from Jonathan’s notebook both a “not-truth” and a truth “in the actual” at the same time. Critics like Barthes and Federman complicate the association of ethical or faithful writing with accuracy and originality. Barthes defines a text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists . . . the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.”88 Federman might say that he himself “pla(y)giarizes” Barthes when he observes that “the writing of a discourse always implies bringing together pieces of other discourses . . . TO WRITE would be first of all TO QUOTE.”89 These critics destabilize writing and originality to instead present authorship as a practice that inevitably spans and incorporates a multitude of eras and cultural and national divisions. Alex’s plagiarism is a deliberate attempt to speak to and collaborate with both Jonathan and his grandfather. In a way, Alex encodes a message in this letter that is both to Jonathan and written by Jonathan, a metafictional self-reflexivity that underlines the inherently and inescapably cooperative nature of all writing. Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  97

Incapable of taking on their care in isolation, their shared words speak to the power gained through collaborative writing and self-care. The act of plagiarism ironically emphasizes Alex’s authority in writing, as opposed to Jonathan’s supposed superiority in language and storytelling. Jonathan enters the text as a full-fledged, self-proclaimed author whereas Alex introduces himself by discussing his fallibility with English. Nonetheless, the only reason readers know of the account existing in Jonathan’s notebook in the first place is that Alex writes about the moment when he reads it. While I argue that Alex and Jonathan’s story is most effectively read as a collaboration between the two characters, we can also entertain the notion that Alex wrote much more than ostensibly appears in the novel, even generously attributing the Trachimbrod chapters to Jonathan himself. As Alex suggests at one point during their writing exchange, “perhaps I can continue to aid you as you write more. But not be distressed. I will not require that my name is on the cover. You may pretend that it is only yours.”90 If Foer “writes” Jonathan and Alex, this act of plagiarism proves how Alex, in turn, writes—and writes with—Jonathan. Focusing on these layers of collaboration exposes the interconnection at the heart of what, in Trachimbrod, is identified as the ultimate act of plagiarism. In the town’s collaboratively written Book of Antecedents, plagiarism is historicized in the context of biblical brothers Cain and Abel. After recounting how Cain killed his brother because of Abel’s act of plagiary, the book explains that Cain was punished because “God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, ‘God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them.’ God is the original plagiarizer. . . . When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.”91 Plagiarism is historically regarded as repugnant and defective, the assumption being that “true authorship is incompatible with plagiarism because authors are by nature— that is, ancient tradition—not only originary, but sincere, that is, authentic.”92 After all, Alex has this same expectation for sincere authenticity when he asks Jonathan for “faithful” writing about his grandfather. Nonetheless, the Book of Antecedents defines even God’s creation of humankind as a self-plagiarism, or maybe the first act of plagiarism—authorship executed by re-creating his likeness in others. Tying the idea of plagiarism to likeness opens our reading of Alex’s (or his grandfather’s) plagiarism to better appreciate Jonathan’s and Alex’s role in each other’s self-care. While Alex constantly brings up compar98  Chapter 2

isons between himself and Jonathan, these likenesses and repetitions only form part of the basis for their writing relationship. Jonathan and Alex’s most productive moments of connection—like Alex’s plea that Jonathan be faithful to his representations of him and his grandfather, or Alex’s mixed emotions after reading Jonathan’s journal—stem from a likeness wrought through contestation, rather than a replication of each other’s perspectives. Everything Is Illuminated presents Jonathan and Alex’s resemblance not as assimilation, but instead as conversation and as shared responsibility for the care of the other. While Barthes, Federman, and others draw out the paradox of plagiarism as the supposed theft of words that were never original in the first place, Alex’s plagiarism exposes how even the precise “theft” of someone’s words does not mean that they are an exact replica of what came before. Through Alex’s appropriation, Jonathan’s plagiarized notes take on new poignancy as the dying words of a regretful husband and father who is unable to forgive himself for his past actions, and a proud grandfather who sacrifices himself to allow his grandson to start life anew. The same words, then, wear a new face in the hands of a different author, a fact that should be unsurprising given Alex’s role as translator, and his and Jonathan’s transformation—a kind of translation—through their friendship. Suzy Park, the protagonist of Suki Kim’s metafictional novel, The Interpreter, echoes the idea of translation as authorship when she observes that truth “comes in different shades, different languages at times . . . an interpreter must translate word for word and yet somehow manipulate the breadth of language to bridge the gap.”93 For Suzy, the intermediaries between one word and its correlations in a different language are numerous; direct “plagiarism” is impossible as language crosses the aporia of meaning, context, and intention. Meanwhile, author Eva Hoffman, a child of Holocaust survivors, defines both newness of language and identity as translations empowered by self-care. “I have to translate myself,” she writes. “But if I’m to achieve this without becoming assimilated—that is, absorbed—by my new world, the translation has to be careful. . . . To mouth foreign terms without incorporating their meanings is to risk becoming bowdlerized. A true translation proceeds by the motions of understanding and sympathy.” 94 “True” translation, as both Kim’s protagonist and Hoffman define it, is a form of interaction that depends on an intimate knowledge of language and speakers, of both self and other. Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  99

Translation ultimately forms the foundation of Jonathan and Alex’s basis for friendship. Alex realizes that if the Nazis had not raided Trachimbrod, Jonathan—like Alex—would have been Ukrainian. While Alex, in true fashion, jests that Jonathan “would be a farmer in an unimpressive town, and I live in Odessa, which is very much like Miami,”95 he nonetheless realizes that their differences are an accident of birth. They are created in each other’s images, unified by arbitrary distances of language, religion, and nationality that they have learned to translate in order to write cooperatively. Sharing a joke with Jonathan, Alex muses, “We were like friends. For the first time that I could remember, I felt entirely good.”96 His observation of their being “like friends” mimics the simultaneous distancing and connection enacted in this imprecise translation, this uneasy agreement for both plagiarism and self-care across the language divide. Alex becomes translated by and through his friendship with Jonathan, and through what he learns of his grandfather’s role in Herschel’s death. Attempting to free himself from the chains of language that limit his comprehension of his grandfather’s actions, Alex writes in stream-of-consciousness, a textual representation of the kind of breakdown and disintegration Irene and Sol explore in the previous chapter, and a textual symptom of what Hoffman, in describing failed translations, calls “cultural schizophrenia.”97 Alex admits, “[T]he truth is that I also pointedatHerschel and I also said heisaJew and I will tell you that you also pointedatHerschel and you also said heisaJew . . . and we all pointedateachother so what is it he should have done hewouldhavebeenafooltodoanythingelse but is it forgivable what he did canheeverbeforgiven . . . he is stillguilty I am I am Iam IamI?).”98 Alex argues that his likenesses to his grandfather and to Jonathan, even while wrought in imperfection and imprecision, are translatable in such a way as to make them all responsible for the tragedies that occurred during the Holocaust. Just as God’s “original” act of plagiarism described in Jonathan’s fictionalized Book of Antecedents draws attention to the idea of otherness as likeness, Jonathan, Alex, and Machado’s C—— (not to mention Erdrich’s Irene and Gil, or Apostol’s Sol and Soli) prove this presumed act of creation is built upon human connection and shared responsibilities of authorship—characteristics of the identity formations wrought in self-care. After all, in Jonathan’s account, God appears to plagiarize himself partly to provide himself with witnesses to his ensuing acts of plagiarism. If we are just copies of each other with no 100  Chapter 2

authentic original, then the distinctions that divide us are themselves illusory. Michael Taussig writes, “To declare that writing itself is a mimetic exchange with the world also means that it involves the relatively unexplored but everyday capacity to imagine, if not become, Other.”99 These subversive acts of writing and self-care are unfaithful thefts only if we are unwilling to acknowledge the otherness within us, the ability to connect across multiple linguistic and national divides and even beyond our own expectations of faithfulness, truth, and authenticity.

Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self . . .  101

3 Material Metafiction and the LifeChanging Magic of All Myriad Things Nicole Krauss and Ruth Ozeki

Toward the end of Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Alex and Jonathan are disappointed to discover that the woman living in what was once Trachimbrod is not Augustine, the woman they had been seeking, but a fellow villager named Lista. In reality, Lista and her haphazardly labeled boxes of fragments and mementos are all that survived after the Nazis bombed Trachimbrod. Opening a box, Lista displays a wedding ring that her friend had buried before the Nazis’ arrival, telling her the ring’s location “just in case.”1 Jonathan displays a common view of human’s relations to objects, musing that her friend may have told her so “that there would be proof that she existed . . . Evidence. Documentation. Testimony. . . . Every time you see it, you think of her.” Lista, however, disagrees. She offers that her friend told her “in case someone should come searching one day.” The ring, she emphasizes, “does not exist for you. You exist for the ring. The ring is not in case of you. You are in case of the ring.”2 Lista inverts Jonathan’s beliefs that objects only confirm and uphold existing knowledge, histories, and identities. Instead, she asserts that objects inspire the

creation of meaning; what Bruno Latour refers to as “non-human actants” or agents can unlock the memories of others and redefine our self-perceptions.3 Lista’s categorizations of objects based on memory and personal associations further provide a metaphor for alternative ways to classify identity—the main goal of radical self-care. The boxes have an order that cannot be captured by the objects’ intended or conventional functions, but they are instrumental as evidence, documentation, and testimony. Trachimbrod is lost, but the connection that the place once fostered still exists in Lista’s boxes. Nicole Krauss’s Great House and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being show us how connecting with and writing about objects dynamically redefine what it means to care for the self, and how this is inseparable from creating nurturing relationships within a community, thus bringing together the two main components of radical self-care. These texts present nonhuman metafictional agents as producing and enhancing self-care and interconnection in the human protagonists. This chapter focuses on how writing about objects forces us to reckon with identity beyond a sense of exceptionalism—that is, the conviction that one possesses an extraordinary quality in comparison to others—and nationalism, which is the belief that one’s nation exhibits unique and unusually remarkable characteristics that set it above other nations.4 Both nationalism and exceptionalism—which constitute the underlying functions of multiculturalism—prove less useful than other forms of community or affiliation. The objects thus allow their author-protagonists to examine how one can practice self-care through intimate connections outside of the common categories of nationality or ethnicity. The objects in Krauss’s and Ozeki’s novels empower the protagonists to challenge the United States’ glorification of the autonomous and exceptional ethnic subject, one whose distinctiveness is nevertheless meant to uphold and honor national identity. The protagonists rethink their connection to others while mobilizing their authorship in ways that complicate nationality as a mode of self-expression. In its place, they pursue intimate connections that transcend national borders and, more significantly, divisions between storyworlds and personal borders. The objects, in turn, allow the protagonists to redefine themselves in relation to others, experiencing memories that can be collectively shared and passed on to their chosen communities. The objects in Great House and A Tale for the Time Being inspire intersubjectivity; Krauss’s writing table and Ozeki’s watch, diary, journal, lunchbox, letters, and glasses underscore acts of creation, inciting moments of connection that fuel self-care. Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  103

Analyzing Nicole Krauss’s Great House, the first half of this chapter examines the desk on which the novel centers, while also exploring objects and objectification through the lens of instrumentality or usefulness. Characters such as the writer Nadia and antiques dealer George insist upon their remarkable uniqueness and defend the isolation that they believe helps preserve their exceptional talents, despite the ill emotional effects these behaviors have on themselves and others. However, centering the writing table in their narratives propels them toward radical and responsive self-care that requires instrumental connections to others. By redefining their usefulness in pursuit of personal relationships with both human and nonhuman agents, Krauss’s protagonists overcome their exceptionalism to traverse literal and figurative boundaries. The second part of this chapter analyzes the objects inspiring the dual narratives of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. These items, belonging first to the protagonist Nao and then found washed up on a beach by the fictional character Ruth, prompt a critique of national identity that further mobilizes self-care enacted through intimate connections, specifically forged via the crossing of borders and its metafictional equivalent, the crossing of storyworlds known as metalepsis. The writerly artifacts at the center of these two texts defy assumptions of metafiction as narcissistic navel-gazing or even a mere postmodern diversion. Rather, Krauss’s desk as protagonist and Ozeki’s exploration of quantum physics and Buddhist interconnections between humans and things reveal metafiction as multilayered, vibrant, and responsive to the needs of marginalized storytellers. As this chapter will focus on how objects can complicate multicultural celebrations of exceptional ethnic performance that valorizes certain American ideals, we must first track the US’s historic relationships with objects, objectification, and identity. Many critics have lamented multiculturalism’s reduction of certain ethnic subjects to the level of objects, with humans relegated to do the representational, documentary, and testimonial work that Foer’s Jonathan demanded of the buried wedding ring. For instance, reading Chicago’s Indo-American Center as a multicultural text, Sharmila Rudrappa laments that the center’s Indian immigrant women workers have objectified themselves to represent their culture to others. The guides actively participate in a “public presentation of the racial self ” that hinges on “converting themselves into ethnic objects.”5 Similar to Shadow Tag’s Gil peddling his paintings of Irene—and consequently, Irene herself—to white buyers, the center’s guides 104  Chapter 3

adorn themselves in “racially signified” ways to become multicultural emissaries, promoting a “frozen, museum-like quality . . . instead of conveying a sense of a constantly changing, dynamic culture.”6 In this sense, the women’s mission is not unlike that of museum objects: to spark wonder about Indian national culture that also “convey[s] an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention.”7 Such amazement reinforces exceptional ethnic representation in service of American outsiders. At the same time, this wonder alienates the spectators who are not privy to such “authentic” performances. This is precisely what occurs when Rudrappa, comparing herself to the ornamented Brahmanic Hindu women, looks down at her jeans and hiking boots and wonders, “Do I feel inauthentic because I am a woman but am not clothed in racially signifying clothes?”8 The awe that the women inspire serves to privilege their exceptional performances of Indian nationality as “true” and “authentic.” The exalted attention that the women invoke as ethnic objects is not unlike the celebration of diversity and American exceptionalism characterizing multiculturalist rhetoric. Complications with this mode of celebration exist especially among the model minorities, Jewish American and then Asian American groups held up as paradigms of successful national assimilation, their ethnic and cultural differences subsumed under an idealized Americanness. The model minority stereotype was first applied to American Jews in the 1940s, when rabbis took a cue from President Roosevelt and translated and recycled religious language to fit existing rhetorics of “authentic” Americanness. As Lila Corwin Berman observes, “[f]itting Jews into emerging models of the American minority group, Jewish leaders were able to explain Jewishness in terms familiar to Americans and indispensable to the functioning of democracy.” 9 Pressured to maintain their model minority status, Jewish community members presented Jewish groups as “useful” for endorsing American principles. Simply put, they found that objectifying themselves brought them equality through assimilation. While we cannot presume full equality for all American Jews— especially given the Trump-era resurgence of anti-Semitism—the approach has become so effective that Andrew Furman proclaims Jewish writers to be in a “double bind” in that scholars “have ceased to consider them multicultural or minority writers at all.”10 These complications further point to the value of marginalized group members having more agency in choosing communities and affiliations—particMaterial Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  105

ularly as the term “model minority” has become more recently synonymous with Asian Americans. Sometimes referenced—not unproblematically—as the “New Jews,” Asian Americans were initially excluded from American membership and pressured to assimilate. Focusing on Chinese and Japanese Americans, Ellen Wu points out that the bolstering of exceptional portrayals of Asian Americans began during World War II, when the US distanced itself from Communism by promoting its racial broadmindedness, seen best in the ability of Asian Americans to act “like white Americans [especially in terms of economic success and lawful behavior] while remaining racially distinct from them”11 in terms of their physical appearance. This physical distinction further upheld the US narrative of multicultural benevolence and an equal chance at the American Dream, even as Asian Americans are used as a wedge to further objectify Black Americans. Stephen Sohn points out that the model minority narrative further conflates Asian Americans as one “docile minority . . . who does not protest and instead obeys the formulation that he or she models for others to follow. The term ‘model’ itself suggests a prototype that can be seamlessly replicated among all the different Asian American ethnic groups,”12 with the resulting objectification covering over material inequalities among these groups. Meanwhile, with the anti-Asian racism bubbling to the surface following the spread of COVID-19, it is clear to see how quickly the model minority myth can revert to nineteenth-century notions of the yellow peril.13 In both Great House and A Tale for the Time Being, characters’ transnational movements also reveal how multiculturalism needs to better account for the demands of our globalized age as it relates to choosing one’s home and associations. Akin to processed and manufactured objects no longer having one country of origin, the protagonists’ itinerancy—whether chosen or not—informs their identities. Discussing the dislocation that results from these movements, Stuart Hall notes that “globalization powerfully fractures the temporal and spatial coordination of the systems of representation for cultural identity and imagined community that are at stake in the concept of ‘ethnicity,’ with the decisive result that identity is nowadays increasingly homeless, so to speak.”14 Notably, Hall includes both time and space in his formulations of globalization’s effects on ethnicity; both also figure heavily in Ozeki’s and Krauss’s novels. Multiculturalism that accounts for the globalized movement of people and objects while also challenging American exceptionalism would better support self-definition and self-care. 106  Chapter 3

The title of this chapter “plagiarizes” Marie Kondo’s self-help book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Kondo never claimed her KonMari method of reorganization—which involves keeping only objects that spark joy—as a form of self-care, though many popular practitioners incorporate it into their self-care regimens. Kondo does, however, assert that “when you put your house in order, you put your affairs and your past in order, too.”15 Aside from a nod to her Japanese upbringing and Shinto influences, the book is devoid of discussions of nationality. However, Kondo’s nationality moved to the forefront when Netflix featured her method in a TV show. The fact that she speaks Japanese (working with a translator), combined with her gender and small stature, led to numerous comments—both in reviews and on social media—that racialize and objectify her, referring to her as doll-like and monstrous, and her methods as alien, barbaric, and un-American. The examples of Rudrappa and Kondo show that the problem lies not solely with objectification but with how objectification can demean, isolate, and exclude others. Indeed, most of the criticism about objectification connects this framework to oppression and silencing; the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition is typical, highlighting the “demotion or degrading of a person or class of people (especially women) to the status of a mere object.” 16 The wording implies that, first, objects are intrinsically separate from humans primarily because of humanity’s “inner worth” or “dignity,” 17 and, second, humans are made to lose this dignity, to be demoted and degraded, in the wake of objectification. The shift in objectification from the more common demoralizing version seen in Kondo’s case to Rudrappa’s examples of the festive ethnic mirrors how other aspects of racism have become less blatant, though not any less insidious. This subtler form of objectification parades the extraordinary, ethnic object under the rubric of multiculturalism as if they were choosing objectification from among a series of other equally agreeable choices, while simultaneously alienating those like Rudrappa, ashamed of her sweater and jeans. The performers in costume are situated at the pinnacle of representation—exceptional models within the model minority, teaching others how to properly perform ethnicity and nationality within the parameters of predominantly white spaces like the museum while refraining from challenging the white supremacy that established that space. Considering such moments of isolation and exclusion, Rey Chow claims that the concept of “Man” springs from the binary that “some humans have Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  107

been cast as objects, while other humans have been given the privilege of becoming subjects.”18 While the criteria by which persons are counted as “Man” or “subject” have certainly and deservedly become more inclusive, this subtler objectification still leaves out those relegated to inauthenticity, dehumanized object-ness, or even sheer averageness. As Chow puts it, “the concept of ‘Man’ or ‘humanity’ itself is fragmented precisely by its enthusiastic enforcement,” by the need to define man in a nonobjectual way.19 To further qualify the arguments stated, then, this chapter examines how objectification—and objects at large—complicate these enforced separations between human and object in Krauss’s and Ozeki’s texts, and it subsequently calls for a critical reassessment of multiculturalism’s focus on exceptionalism as the standard for national belonging. I argue instead for usefulness and instrumentality through personal connections as a better model for ethnic self-definition. The objects upon which Krauss’s and Ozeki’s novels center—the well-traveled desk for Krauss, and several historical and writerly objects for Ozeki—teach us that ethnic identity does not have to hinge on national identification or on exceptional, managed performances that maintain this nationalism. The texts uncover how these performances can be damaging and isolating in comparison to the personal connections fostered and inspired by writerly objects. The associations that the characters make are often accessed through a particular feature of objectification: that of usefulness or instrumentality, which Martha Nussbaum puts at the top of a list of aspects marking objectification, and which Kondo associates with her belief in objects sparking joy.20 By making themselves vessels for personal relationships, Krauss’s and Ozeki’s characters overcome their perceived exceptionalism and even traverse borders—national, theoretical, and otherwise—to strengthen these connections and bolster their self-perceptions. The characters learn that nationalism and the exceptionalism of model minority representations are no replacements for connections that share responsibility for oneself and for others. In the texts, these community connections require literal and/or metafictional international travel—the negotiations of multiple borders in relation to, or as a result of, writerly interactions with objects. Therefore, while I focus in this chapter on characters who identify demographically with those historically regarded as model minorities—Jewish Americans and Asian Americans—what is more significant is how these protagonists approach writing and writerly objects to undermine exceptional performances of ethnicity and national identity 108  Chapter 3

as isolating and counterproductive modes of self-expression. The authorprotagonists find self-care most effective in transnational and yet highly intimate human connection.

The Temple in Another Form: Nicole Krauss’s Traveling Desk in Great House Krauss’s Great House contains four major storylines connected through a desk rumored to have barely escaped Nazi destruction during World War II. The novel opens with the writer Nadia narrating her story in the present—her talambuhay, in a sense—about her willful alienation as a writer and how that relates to the table. She speaks to a man in a coma whom she addresses as “Your Honor,” explaining the reason she left New York for Jerusalem, and all that led to the accident causing his hospitalization. We later learn the man is writer-turned-judge Dovik, whom his father Aaron addresses in his mind in the novel’s second storyline. An elderly man named Arthur Bender narrates the third plotline, exploring his relationship with his now-deceased wife, a novelist named Lotte who gave the desk to a Chilean Jewish poet named Daniel Varsky (who in turn gave it to Nadia). Narrating the penultimate storyline, Isabel stops writing her thesis to take up with the peripatetic Weisz family—her boyfriend Yoav, his sister Leah, and their father George, a mysterious man who recovers Jewish family objects looted by the Nazis. George obsesses over re-creating his father’s study and unearthing his family’s items, particularly the massive table that filled the study before Nazi occupation; his story of his father and his father’s desk conclude the novel. While the narrators’ relationships to this central object differ, their perspectives on the writing table and its massive presence uncover their self-perceptions and approaches to caring (or failing to care) for themselves. For instance, Nadia relates how, in her twenty-five years with the desk, she had “physically grown around it, my posture formed by years of leaning over it and fitting myself to it.”21 She describes the object causing a bodily transformation, one that mirrors her emotional turmoil and isolation inspired by what she believes to be her exceptional writing identity. After Daniel’s mysterious death in Chile, presumably at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police, Leah Weisz shows up to claim the table from Nadia, purporting to be Daniel’s daughter. Nadia is torn between her lifelong feelings as the desk’s guardian and her sense of entitlement Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  109

as its keeper. She is further repulsed by Leah’s appraiserlike regard for the table as if it were a mere object. Nadia confesses to her comatose listener, “I found myself struggling to accept the idea that I was about to hand over the single meaningful object in my life as a writer, the lone physical representation of all that was otherwise weightless and intangible, to this waif who might sit at it from time to time as if at a paternal altar. And yet, Your Honor, what could I do?”22 Because Nadia has caused the very accident leading to Dovik lying in the hospital bed before her, she feels obliged to tell and then revise her story, explaining her desperate attempt to follow the writing table all the way to Jerusalem. Nadia comes to realize that her relationship with this one thing represents all that she has written and all that she has given up for her writing—including her marriage, other relationships, and cultural connections, instead building her life’s purpose around her exceptional writerly identity. Through retelling her story to Dovik, Nadia begins to question the self-imposed segregation that she has justified on behalf of her perceived uniqueness as a writer. Other characters in the novel describe similarly intricate attachments to the desk and how it has altered their human relationships. Arthur pictures it “bullying the other pathetic bits of furniture” in the office where his wife, Lotte, writes.23 Rather than harmlessly occupying space, the desk is “a Venus flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many little terrible drawers. . . . Sometimes I would roll over in the dark to face a sleeping Lotte: Either he goes or I do, I imagined saying.”24 For Arthur, the desk—no less gendered as male—represents Lotte’s secrecy about her past, particularly of her times in a transit camp for Jews, her work as a chaperone for Jewish children on a Kindertransport, and—most significantly—the child she furtively gives away before she and Arthur meet. Meanwhile, in the fourth storyline, Isabel learns that the writing table holds an oppressive role in the lives of the Weisz family. Even as George Weisz carts his two children across the globe in masterful pursuit of items lost by Jewish families to the Nazi pogroms, he himself is haunted by his inability to re-create his father’s ravaged office. In each storyline, the desk manipulates the characters’ actions and behaviors, the object holding the role of subject and agent in the novel. The experiences Nadia and her counterparts have in relation to the enigmatic desk reveal the volatility of cutting oneself off from a community for selfish reasons or because of perceived exceptionalism. The object exposes the characters’ alienation from others, particularly from the unattainable Jewish 110  Chapter 3

ideal that haunts their perception of themselves and their belief in an isolated self-possession, the ideal image of a writer but also of an ethnic Jew who Nadia believes to be possessed of an “exquisite understanding” and who Aaron describes as having “investigated, held forth, aired his opinion, argued, gone on and on to numbing lengths, sucked every last scrap off the bone of every question.”25 Oftentimes in justification of this alienation, characters in Great House further allude to the stereotype of Jews as extraordinarily long-suffering. As a young man who fancied himself an author, Dovik wrote a novel featuring a “shark that takes the brunt of human emotions” while remaining otherwise distant and detached.26 Contemplating his son’s creation, Aaron remarks—to Dovik’s consternation—“The Jews have been living in alienation for thousands of years. For modern man it’s a hobby. What can you learn from those books that you weren’t born knowing already?”27 The characters in Krauss’s novel feel estranged from the image that society upholds as an exceptional model of Jewishness, a model within the model minority, even as they find themselves further isolated from any other personal associations out of a sense of exceptionalism that frees them of responsibility or usefulness to others. Krauss’s novel thematizes possible approaches to this exceptionalism in the form of the writing self. How this writerly exceptionalism relates to Nadia’s Jewish American identity becomes clear as she explores her authorship and the item that haunts her. She solidifies her extraordinary authorial qualities as feeling “chosen, not protected so much as made an exception of, imbued with a gift that kept me whole but was nothing more than a potential until the day came that I would make something of it. . . . this belief transformed itself into law, and the law came to govern my life.” She continues, “In so many words, Your Honor, this is the story of how I became a writer.”28 For Nadia, then, her foremost identity is not as a woman, as an American Jew, or even as a New Yorker, but as an author. She comes to realize that she herself created this exceptional self-perception as an excuse to maintain no commitments beyond her own writing; being an exemplary writer required adopting what she described as an “a priori unwillingness to oblige.”29 While we may interpret her self-alienation as a response to her inability or refusal to assimilate, we can also describe her being “made an exception of ” as a defense mechanism against a self-image she cannot fully attain. Like Gil’s attempts at self-expression in Erdrich’s Shadow Tag, it may be right to call this approach self-care, though Nadia’s methods similarly fall Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  111

short since she practices them in isolation. The weighty presence of Daniel’s desk in her cramped apartment betrays the instability of her self-enforced exceptionalism, compelling her to renegotiate her identity in response to the object dominating her apartment. She soon questions whether her sense of duty and instrumentality as a writer were born not out of a model performance of writerly abilities, but rather out of her discomfort with human connection. Upon learning of Daniel’s disappearance “among the martyred poets silenced by Pinochet,” Nadia realizes that the object was telling her that she “was only an accidental caretaker who had foolishly imagined that she possessed something, an almost magical quality, which, in fact, she’d never had.”30 She realized that she had deliberately taken on this air of extraordinariness, that it was not something innate or essential. Instead, she had “put [her]self into storage” as though she herself were a mere object.31 The weight of Daniel’s ghost haunting the desk, combined with the threat of Dovik’s death as he lies in a coma before her, forces Nadia to contemplate the justifications for her self-imposed isolation and the ways in which she may be instrumental to others. Feeling compelled to begin with why she was in Jerusalem in the first place, Nadia revises the story of her writerly origins—and her identity in the process—to revolve around the writing object and her fleeting relationship with Daniel. Despite Nadia’s change in attitude while she was talking candidly to a potentially unhearing stranger, we cannot completely characterize her realization as humbling, in the sense of Nadia being “brought down” to the level of the lowly thing. Instead, the desk invokes part of her identity that she fears may be, like Daniel’s ghost, too far gone to retrieve. She tells her comatose listener, “The life I had chosen, a life largely absent of others, certainly emptied of the ties that keep most people tangled up in each other, only made sense when I was actually writing the sort of work I had sequestered myself in order to produce.”32 Her relationship to the writing table inspires a question that hits her “with a shock of nausea [as] it surfaced at last: What if I had been wrong?”33 Her transnational pursuit of the object after Leah takes it away prompts her to doubt her lifelong alienation, to wonder if she adopted a false identity at the expense of personal relationships that would have better nurtured her sense of self. Nadia’s self-objectification eschewed involvement with others to make herself an instrument through which words emerge on the page, but with what purpose? The way that Nadia redirects this objectification is the lesson that the comatose Dovik—himself a vessel for Nadia’s storytelling—teaches her. 112  Chapter 3

Dovik is not the only silent partner to Nadia’s changed approach to storytelling and self-care. To further unlock the depths of Nadia’s objectification, Great House demands that readers interpret the text collaboratively and cooperatively. She asks that readers read cross-textually, laboring through and across the stories to see how the desk weaves the novel’s threads together to affirm identity as more than its most exceptional and self-centered representations. Consequently, the companion pieces to Nadia’s insights lie with George Weisz and Arthur Bender, whose seemingly disparate stories intersect toward the novel’s end, culminating in a startlingly personal connection between two very reclusive men. In his pursuit, Weisz learns that the writing table belonged to Arthur’s wife, Lotte, whose death leaves Arthur helpless to retrieve her unknowable past. Sensing the item he seeks is now gone, Weisz tells Arthur the story of a first-century rabbi, Yochanan ben Zakkai. Learning that Jerusalem was burned, the temple destroyed, and the Jews sent into exile, ben Zakkai is justifiably devastated, wondering, “What is a Jew without Jerusalem? How can you be a Jew without a nation? How can you make a sacrifice to God if you don’t know where to find him?”34 Significantly, ben Zakkai wants to know how one can have culture without a nation, and an identity without a home. Ben Zakkai’s response to these questions emerges only after a lifetime of leading his students in recording centuries of oral law—what becomes known as the Talmud. Weisz credits this act of collaborative writing with bringing ben Zakkai’s solution to light: Turn Jerusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple into a book, a book as vast and holy and intricate as the city itself. Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form. Later [ben Zakkai’s] school became known as the Great House, after the phrase in Books of Kings: He burned the house of God, the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; even every great house he burned with fire. . . . every Jewish soul is built around the house that burned in that fire, so vast that we can, each one of us, only recall the tiniest fragment. . . . But if every Jewish memory were put together, every last holy fragment joined up again as one, the House would be built again.35 Mirroring Nadia’s framing of the desk in her narrative, ben Zakkai centered his story on an object-turned-subject: a temple written into a book through which a people and their cultural identities are defined. Weisz’s story shows Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  113

the need for interconnection and the sharing and writing of multiple Jewish memories to rebuild a sacred house. However, his obsession with the table and his skills as a collector—like Nadia’s initial belief in her writerly exceptionalism—hinges upon self-alienation and disengagement with others, including his own children. Weisz realizes that he has failed to learn the lessons of ben Zakkai and the object, in its place viewing Jewish identity—as well as the desk itself—as something to possess and master in isolation. Nadia’s lessons have special resonance given what Weisz tells Arthur. Nadia nears the point where she admits driving the car that hit Dovik, but rather than an outright confession, she combines the images of ben Zakkai’s Great House and the single locked drawer in Daniel’s table with her conflicted perspectives on self-expression and self-care. She predicts that “soon, maybe not tomorrow or next week, but soon enough the walls around me and roof above me will rise again, exactly as they were before, and the answer to the question that brought them down will be stuffed into a drawer and locked away. That I will go on again as I always have, with or without the desk.”36 The reference to rising again further invokes the phrase “All Rise,” alluding simultaneously to the title of Nadia’s sections in the novel, to Dovik’s occupation as a judge, and finally to Nadia’s role as witness to her failings, called upon by the narrative and the object to testify on her own behalf. While ben Zakkai sought to rebuild a people by bending them “around the shape of what they lost,” Nadia realizes that she has formed both her posture and her identity around the writing that her surrendered table represents. For Nadia, the desk does not just symbolize the temple but is the temple in another form. She relates that the object’s extraordinary arrangement of drawers “had come to signify a kind of guiding if mysterious order in my life, an order that, when my work was going well, took on an almost mystical quality. . . . Those drawers represented a singular logic deeply embedded, a pattern of consciousness that could be articulated in no other way.”37 Like the women at the Indo-American Center who set themselves apart to assert their identities in contrast to those around them, Nadia and Weisz each pursue an item to authorize specific and instrumental roles that they hope will define themselves and their legacies. Their quests, however, have put them out of touch with those both in and outside of their families and communities in potentially devastating ways. Despite Nadia’s claim that she will continue as always, it becomes evident while telling Dovik her story that she has revised 114  Chapter 3

how she perceives her writing. She no longer views storytelling as an excuse to isolate herself but instead sees it as a means to personally relate to others. Nadia’s unusual connection to Dovik re-legitimates her writing and her identity. Dovik’s nurse, thinking Nadia his lover rather than the person responsible for his accident, encourages her to talk to Dovik, initiating Nadia’s narrative journey. Toward the end of the novel, the nurse requests that Nadia continue telling Dovik her tale, suggesting her story would comfort him. Though Nadia asks the nurse how long she should speak, she realizes, “I knew I would sit by your side for as long as they let me, until your true wife or lover arrived. . . . For a thousand and one nights, I thought. More.”38 Nadia likens herself to Scheherazade, who told her stories—a Barthesian assemblage of tales—to the Persian king Shahryār for a thousand and one nights. The connection between Nadia and Scheherazade is both inexact and accurate. Despite their subject matter and rhetorical context, both women relayed stories devoid of overtly religious themes; in fact, Scheherazade’s method would have been the more esteemed version of storytelling in Islamic tradition.39 In Nadia’s case, however, it is Nadia herself rather than her infirm listener who gains insight from the storytelling—at least, as far as we readers can know. As the thought of losing her writing table inspires Nadia to see her written pages as “superfluous words lacking life and authenticity,”40 she now finds herself in Jerusalem having discovered not the desk, but her worth as a storyteller. Significantly, this worth lies with her newly chosen audience, a considerably smaller and more intimate community than any for whom she had written in the past. She tells her story for herself and for the man who we presume is listening in silence. Krauss abstains from telling her readers what is to become of Dovik and his bewildered and unlikely Scheherazade, but she does hint at a connection beyond the novel’s pages, allowing for a brief moment of real responsiveness from Dovik when he opens his eyes and regards Nadia for the first time, a moment of openness and vulnerability between storyteller and listener. After he drifts back to sleep, Nadia continues speaking: “I wanted to weep and gnash my teeth, Your Honor, to beg your forgiveness, but what came out was a story. I wanted to be judged on what I did with my life, but now I will be judged by how I described it. . . . If you could speak, perhaps you would say that is how it always is.”41 Intriguingly, Nadia’s realization is echoed by A Tale for the Time Being: Ozeki’s Jiko regards her great-granddaughter and similarly observes, “Maybe life is only stories.”42 Both declarations suggest that the stories we tell Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  115

about ourselves are as significant to the teller as they are to the listener and that the connection that emerges can be a valuable source for understanding what makes us who we are.

Facing Destruction: Using People and Trusting People By likening herself to Scheherazade, Nadia proposes an objectification inspired by usefulness and intimate connection. This relationship, one that Nussbaum would describe as “instrumentality,” has taken on negative connotations when applied to Scheherazade herself. Susan M. Darraj reminds readers that while Scheherazade was a writer in her own right, she “suffered terribly at the hands of translators,” and though she was “[a]n intelligent woman, schooled in literature, philosophy, and history, [she was] reduced to an erotic, shallow, sex-crazed body behind a veil.”43 This kind of objectification—which Darraj describes as common to many Eastern women immortalized in story form, such as Cleopatra and Muhammad’s wives Khadijah and Aisha—contrasts to Nadia’s form of instrumentality in part because she, like Scheherazade, bars herself from becoming close to anyone. This changes, of course, when Nadia meets Dovik. For Nadia, the fear that accompanies this connection has to do with vulnerability, familiarity, and facing her belief that it was “impossible to distrust one’s writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.”44 The act of honestly telling her story to Dovik and revising it to place the desk at its center shows that she regards her writerly self as an instrument not to represent a people. Rather, she hopes to make a minute but significant connection to another human being and, in the process, care for herself. Such a relationship does not diminish her identity; instead, it adds to the dynamic definition of what it means to be a people. Rather than fleeing the scene of the accident, Nadia risks her destruction, and Dovik’s too, by weaving a tale that divulges a life of privilege, protection, and isolation. While viewing someone, including oneself, as a mere object for use can be seen in a negative light, Nadia—like Scheherazade before her—discovers a mode of connection through storytelling that hinges on usefulness directed to personal means. She uses Dovik to write her story, centering it through the object that had taken over her life. In turn, the plea from Dovik’s nurse—the novel’s opening command for Nadia to “[t]alk to him”45—allows her to find a new use for herself as a writer. Considering such moments of instrumentality, 116  Chapter 3

Barbara Johnson proposes that another way to describe “using people” would be “‘trusting people,’ creating a space of play and risk that does not depend on maintaining intactness and separation.”46 Nadia’s belief in her anomalous identity as a writer and her accompanying seclusion grew out of terror in risking intimate connections, or the ability “to experience the reality of both the other and the self.”47 Nadia fears the destruction of her extraordinary sense of self as a writer and the separation accompanying such a stance. In the face of Dovik’s potential destruction at her hand, she revises her role to allow for a life filled with others. The isolation that Nadia initially feels is replicated in the experiences of other writer-protagonists in Krauss’s novel, often through the imagery of disappearing into unknown depths, exposing the risk and vulnerability required to break that isolation. Nadia describes her exceptionalism as needing “to pull myself beneath the surface, to dive down and touch the place within where this mysterious giftedness lived in me.”48 On the other hand, Arthur is more explicit, lamenting that his wife Lotte will remain unknowable to him in her death. His sections of Great House, entitled “Swimming Holes,” refer to the literal swimming holes from which Arthur often feared she would never emerge, to her body’s slow surrender to Alzheimer’s disease, and finally to her secret past and traumatic experiences in a Jewish camp. Thinking back on his wife’s swimming habits, Arthur observes, “here in this house live two different species, one on land and one in the water, one who clings to the surface and the other who lurks in the depths, and yet every night, through a loophole in the laws of physics, they share the same bed.”49 Meanwhile, reaching out to his son Dovik days before his accident, Aaron asked where he disappears at night. He remembers how Dovik replied with a “long monologue about the construction down the road, something about drainpipes and sinkholes. . . . I began to suspect that it had been a test you’d concocted for me, one for which the only possible outcome was my failure, leaving you free to curl back into yourself like a snail, to go on blaming and despising me.”50 Like many writers in the novel, Dovik retreats into himself, a behavior that Aaron likens to below-ground imagery. Finally, Daniel Varsky, the Chilean Jewish poet from whom Nadia inherits the desk, tells her in a postcard that he is going to join the Chilean Speleological Society, adding, “it won’t interfere with my poetry; if anything the two pursuits are complementary.”51 Despite his affable nature, Daniel too equates isolation and secrecy Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  117

with the gift of exceptional writing. The repetition of these images shows this isolation as subterranean. In place of crossing borders—as Nadia finds herself doing in multiple ways when she leaves New York for Jerusalem to pursue the desk—the author-characters in Great House are entrenched, cut off from the world in their cavernous seclusion. The shared imagery of secretive identities further proves that the solitary singularity Nadia and her fellow writers pursue is not as remarkable or as effective as they believe. George Weisz comes to this realization when, looking back on his life and his choices, he relates how he raised his children to isolate themselves from the rest of the world, teaching them to say, “We’re leaving tomorrow, just as my father, a scholar of history, taught me that the absence of things is more useful than their presence. Though many years later, half a century after he died, I stood on top of a sea wall watching the undertow and thought, Useful for what?”52 His question brings up the utility of his isolation, while likewise indicating the desire to redirect this instrumentality. George once defined his efficacy through his aptitude in retrieving objects, but the writing table’s uncanny ability to thwart detection precipitates a moment of candor in his conversation with Arthur. Believing that he has found with Arthur not the item he wants, but another story, George divulges that the items he recovers for his Jewish clients are not as genuine as they appear. The method by which George has come into his extraordinary talent as a retriever of lost things connects his line of work to the personal and intimate storytelling that Nadia discovers through her confession to Dovik. Sitting with Arthur and admitting, in a rare display of weakness, how the desk “hounds” him,53 George admits that even the most impossible-to-retrieve object—a long-forgotten bed or a table chopped for firewood—can always be recovered or produced. “Out of thin air, if need be,” George confesses. “And if the wood is not exactly as he remembers, or the legs are too thick or too thin, he’ll only notice for a moment . . . and then his memory will be invaded by the reality of the bed standing before him. Because he needs it to be that bed where she once lay with him more than he needs to know the truth.”54 George admits that his talent in finding objects is not so much a gift as it is a “not-truth,”55 an unspoken agreement about his usefulness. Together, he and his clients collaborate on a story about the object, without regard to “authenticity.” Significantly, then, George’s talent depends not so much on his affinity to know and find objects than it does on his and his clients’ abilities to collaborate on a narrative 118  Chapter 3

that will allow them both to persevere. Their unspoken agreements to accept George’s stories about the objects as truth forever tie them to each other in terms of instrumentality. What, however, is lost in the connection? What if fragmentation persists despite the connection? What comes of acknowledging this past or, as ben Zakkai would say, bending the shape of a people around what it has lost, and what is gained in return? One potential response to these questions is found in Krauss’s previous novel, The History of Love, which suggests that after all has seemingly vanished, what remains is the sacred object of the story. Whereas Great House revolves around a desk, The History of Love spotlights a book and the way it is forgotten, translated, passed on, and purloined by various characters in the novel. Leo Gursky, the author of the novel within the novel, justifies his isolation because he believed he was writing for his son Isaac, a novelist with whom, for reasons having to do with the Holocaust, he had never spoken. After Isaac’s death, Gursky discovers, “The world no longer looked the same. . . . Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I’d been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.”56 Fearing the potential rejection that may come from his revealing his identity to his son, Gursky is now faced with destruction of a different sort—permanent mental isolation that could overtake his distraught mind in the wake of his grief. In the midst of this breakdown, Gursky—like Nadia, George, and many other author-characters in Krauss’s novels—decides to tell a story, writing a narrative that enthralls and enchants the readers who later find the manuscript (and who—appropriately for a novel that shares themes of plagiarism with novels like Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated—wrongly attribute the text to Isaac). Ultimately, the characters in both of Krauss’s novels find solace and a renewed sense of self in explaining their identities to others and in converting their words into a narrative, something to share and pass on—a version of the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, an approach that suggests that being useful and kind can improve the world. It is no wonder that the novel’s title, Great House, takes its cue from a similar act of writing, that of ben Zakkai’s reparative instruction after the destruction of Jerusalem. Krauss describes this historic moment of composition in an interview as “taking the oral law and beginning to codify it into what will become the Talmud, a book, which can be taken anywhere. Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  119

And to me, this is so beautiful. Because the answer to catastrophic loss was absolute reimagination. It’s a Jewish story, but it’s a very universal idea.”57 In the face of destruction, ben Zakkai found a use for himself and those around him as a writer. The act of creation and reimagination, which for ben Zakkai and Krauss is synonymous with writing, does not take root in fear, but rather in hope and affiliation.

Memory Objects: The Sky Soldier and the Beached Package in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being While Nadia and her fellow protagonists struggle with the risks that come with trusting others, the two authors telling Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being deal with crises related to their identities as Japanese Americans, their isolation stemming less from deliberate attempts at separation and more from the circumstances under which they live. Specifically, as transnational individuals, they represent people who have “been marginalized precisely because they crossed so many borders that they are hard to categorize.”58 Living on an island in British Columbia, the character Ruth Ozeki (whom I will refer to as “Ruth” to avoid confusion with the real-life author) finds herself homesick for New York City after losing her mother to Alzheimer’s. In a timeline before that of Ruth’s, Nao, a transfer student from Sunnyvale, California, is bullied, unable to fit in with her classmates in Akihabara, Japan. Ruth first “meets” the teenaged Nao while walking along the British Columbia coastline with her husband, Oliver. She sees a parcel that she believes is debris from the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Japanese islands in 2011. Inside the double-wrapped plastic bag, she discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox containing what appears to be a copy of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (or In Search of Lost Time), in addition to a packet of old letters written in Japanese, a composition notebook with French writing inside, and a broken watch. The Proust novel turns out to be what Nao calls a book “hack”: Proust’s eternal prose has been replaced with blank pages, upon which Nao has written about her ostracism from her classmates and her newfound friendship with her great-grandmother, a Zen Buddhist nun named Jiko. While Americans conventionally associate Buddhism with a minimalist asceticism that attempts to transcend mere objects, Fabio Rambelli writes that “rosaries, amulets and talismans, funerary tablets, relics, images, containers of 120  Chapter 3

sacred objects, priestly and ceremonial robes, . . . registers and miscellaneous documents, ritual implements, postcards, and souvenirs—all these material entities play some role in ceremonies, devotional activities, and in a broader sense, in the way Buddhists define their identity.”59 The focus on objects in a novel that features the Zen Buddhist nun Jiko at the center of Nao and Ruth’s discussion is not so unusual once we grasp the place that objects have in Buddhist traditions. The objects Ruth finds—the lunchbox, the diary, the letters, and the watch— are fished out of the saltwater and barnacles of the Pacific to become both symbol of and testimony to Nao and Ruth’s transnational community and creation of memories that they together unearth to provide insights into their transnational identities. These objects point to the kinds of ethnic alliances that challenge the authority of national boundaries and even, more generally, the borders of time and space; they expose the potential dangers of placing too much weight on the national identities upon which multiculturalism commonly depends to define ethnicity. In fact, one of the main characteristics of the model minority stereotype is the apparent ability to inhabit an explicit and exemplary American (read: white) national identity that subsumes ethnic identity and is held up to others as proof of the US’s egalitarianism and ever-welcoming spirit. This section will focus on the text’s narrative objects as they literally cross oceans and borders, showing how Ozeki’s novel highlights the shortcomings of national identity as a replacement for, or as a more superior version of, ethnic identity. Instead, these objects draw attention to an alternative ethnic connection—or even an alternative form of multiculturalism—built on memory-based interaction and self-care, uniting characters as disparate as the emotionally distraught Nao and the older, more logical Ruth into a small community that is at once transnational and yet startlingly intimate. While housing the novel’s major objects in a Hello Kitty lunchbox may seem whimsical and frivolous, Ozeki uses the pervasive image of Hello Kitty to underscore the transnational nature of Ruth and Nao’s burgeoning connection and the difficulties they face in expressing their ethnic and national identities. Hello Kitty, a white, mouthless, and typically feminized feline girl, is the icon of the Japanese company Sanrio, a corporation that devised its flagship character as a “global product” (see figure 5).60 In her study on Hello Kitty entitled Pink Globalization, Christine R. Yano identifies the character as part of a cultural trend known as mukokuseki, which means “stateless” Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  121

Figure 5. Hello Kitty display in Washington, DC. Photograph by Christian Lau. Flickr, flic.kr/p/dr176r.

or “without nationality.”61 In the world of Japanese anime, the term refers to characters designed to be racially and ethnically ambiguous, but in the case of Sanrio, this meant creating a product that would not be associated with Japan (particularly with its reputation in the 1970s of cheap and shoddy manufacturing). Instead, Sanrio designed its star character to appear vaguely Western and hence more marketable; the dominance of an American global presence underlies even the design of a commodity meant to be “nation-less.” As global corporations became more ubiquitous and Sanrio’s profile more visible, the company has since capitalized on its association with the culture of “Japanese Cute-Cool,”62 a way of commodifying cuteness while associating it with a monolithic national identity. Notably, this culture is one that equates Japanese goods with marketable versions of adorability, while at the same time allowing Hello Kitty’s international consumers to project—through a “Zen-like technique”63—their personalities, storylines, and even ethnic and national origins onto the silent character. Such objectification recalls “boba liberalism” and other Asian American model minority ideas built on and represented by the capitalist consumerism of objects. Like the bubble (or boba) tea upon which it is based, boba liberalism is sweet, refreshing, and composed of empty calories; its practitioners advance shallow political stances that uphold whiteness under the guise of multiculturalism. It is akin to self-care that only appears radical but is really founded on “correct” beliefs and purchases, rather than on shared community and self-definition. Media celebrations of Asian Americans similarly center around these superficial object-centered ideas, such as the representation and accompanying merchandising of all things Japanese Cute-Cool and, more recently, Korean Cool, as well as the “lunchbox moment”—a scene that often appears in TV shows depicting an Asian American kid experiencing shame or bullying because of what they have (or do not have) in their lunchbox. Meanwhile, like the ever-visible but nevertheless silenced Hello Kitty on Nao’s lunchbox, Ruth and Nao similarly find themselves faced with the nature of what it means to be without a nation or an apparent nationality, challenged to forge identities for themselves while discovering that others will thrust nationalized markers of ethnicity upon them. Nao, for instance, recognizes the associations of Japanese girls with images of Hello-Kitty-like sweetness and diminution, lamenting that, in contrast to her “cute” classmates, Nao’s Americanness caused her to look and feel “like a big old stinky lump.”64 She is quick to note that her father, Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  123

now unemployed and suicidal in Japan, was happier and more self-possessed in Sunnyvale, explaining in her diary that she and her father “were American, at least in our hearts.”65 Similar to Apostol’s Sol, Nao finds nationality unhelpful in making herself apparent to others and in addressing her self-care—a particular tragedy given the violent bullying, or ijime, she experiences in school. She grasps that she was never the popular girl in Sunnyvale, nor is she able to fit in with her classmates in Japan. As Nao’s foreigner status causes her to become the victim of ijime online and in school, she finds herself associated with an Americanness that she feels more strongly in Akihabara than she ever did in California. Her lack of belonging causes her to lose a sense of herself, exacerbated by her alienation from her former friends in California, whom Nao feels can sense her reputation as a teenaged pariah “from the opposite side of the ocean.”66 Like the Hello Kitty emblazoned on her lunchbox, Nao finds herself at the intersection of various ideas of national and ethnic identities, hushed and mouthless—that is, until she begins writing in her diary. On the other hand, Ruth observes her move from Manhattan to Whaletown—a ferry town on Cortes Island in British Columbia—through an objectified distance, stating she is “just trading one island for another.”67 Nevertheless, while Ruth’s small community is more than welcoming and while her Americanness is not met with the same problems as Nao’s in Japan, Ruth is compelled to remind her Canadian neighbors that Cortes Island once housed a Japanese family who, like her mother’s family, were imprisoned in a World War II internment camp. The final destination of Nao’s seaworthy package was the end of the beach where the Japanese family lived before being forced out. Noting how multiculturalism in both the US and Canada has covered over less broad-minded aspects of the past, Ruth stresses that “it was important to not let New Age correctness erase the history of the island.”68 So while neighbors feel compelled to bring her Japanese drift from the beach as if she were the curator of such items, Ruth feels a slight detachment from these artifacts and from her Japanese identity, especially since her mother passed away. To add to this disengagement, Ruth is unable to translate the Japanese letters written by Nao’s great-uncle, the philosopher and reluctant kamikaze pilot Haruki. After opening Nao’s lunchbox and reviewing its contents, Ruth realizes that claiming a Japanese heritage comes with assumptions of linguistic, cultural, and historical knowledge that she is unable to fulfill, despite her neighbors’ well-intentioned assumptions of her ability to do so. 124  Chapter 3

Figure 6. Early 1945 image of Japanese planes preparing for a kamikaze attack. Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze#/media/File:A6M5_52c_Kyushu.jpg.

While the marketing and production history of Sanrio’s Hello Kitty points to the dynamic ways that nationality is mobilized to increase likeability, Haruki’s letters—also included in the lunchbox—unmask the dangers and the lack of agency that come when nationalist thinking supersedes individualized self-expression and self-care. Called Haruki #1 to differentiate him from Nao’s dad (his namesake and nephew Harry), Nao’s great-uncle writes these letters to his mother Jiko after he is drafted. The letters attempt to explain his choice of joining the Tokubetsu Kōgekitai (特別攻撃隊) or Special Attack Force, better known to Americans as the kamikaze pilots (see figure 6). When Nao meets Jiko and begins chronicling both her and her great-grandmother’s life in her diary, she uses her great-uncle’s letters to bridge a closer connection to her ancestors. She and Ruth (who reads the letters after they wash up on shore) do not anticipate that Haruki #1’s writing will give them a window into his struggles to care for himself as he is forced to choose between his personal philosophy and his sense of duty to his country. In the letters, he reports that his recruiter “ordered us to ‘switch off our hearts and minds completely.’ He instructed us to cut off our love and sever our attachment with our family and blood relations because from now on we were soldiers and our loyalty must lie solely with our Emperor and our homeland of Japan.”69 Haruki becomes a Special Attack Force pilot partly for practical reasons (such as passing on an increased pension to Jiko and his sisters), but further Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  125

because the death gives him a sense of agency. This is self-care at its most extreme and sacrificial: Rather than becoming the victim of a random attack, Haruki believes he will “be able to control and therefore appreciate, intimately and exactly, the moments leading up to my death. . . . I have chosen the death that will bring most benefit to the ones I love, and that will cause me the least grief in the next life to come. I will die a free man.”70 In the conflict of self over nation, Haruki can choose his self only to the extent that it leads to his death. While he does not explicitly say so, possibly because the Japanese government monitors his letters, taking charge of his death defies his recruiting officer’s orders to cut off all emotional ties in order to more effectively embrace a national identity. Instead, Haruki redefines his death as an emotional act of love not for his country, but for his family and his sense of being in the world. By affiliating himself with his family over his nation, he carves out a space for self-care. Haruki’s defiance is confirmed in his journal, a slim composition booklet in which he writes his true thoughts. Like Irene in Erdrich’s Shadow Tag, Haruki keeps two diaries, telling his mother that there is “one for show, and this hidden one for truth, for you.”71 Though Ruth is unsure how it came to be found there, she discovers his hidden journal in the packet of letters, observing that the notebook was “the kind a student might once have used in university to write an essay exam.”72 Ruth’s description is apt given that Nao later learns that Haruki was only nineteen years old, a university student studying philosophy and French literature when he was drafted. Nao adds, “[F]rom what Jiko said, besides being peaceful, [Haruki] was also a cheerful, optimistic boy who actually liked being alive, which is not at all the situation with me or my dad.”73 In the diary’s last pages, Haruki unveils his plan for his final moment of insolent nationalism, telling Jiko, “I will give my life for my country. . . . [K]nowing what I do about the depravity with which this war has been waged, I am determined to do my utmost to steer my plane away from my target and into the sea.”74 The composition book, then, discloses and symbolizes Haruki’s ultimate sacrifice—one that hides under the guise of patriotism, but protests its limitations on his actions and beliefs. Haruki’s broken watch, included in the lunchbox, becomes a physical manifestation of the limits of his individual expression and his ability to attend to his needs and desires in a military state. The watch suggests a life prematurely foreshortened, while further pointing to the urgency that Haruki places upon himself to stay faithful both to his family and to his beliefs about the govern126  Chapter 3

Figure 7. “Seikosha Watch.” Possible example of the kind of watch that may have been worn by Haruki #1. Photographs by Dirk HR Spennemann. Flickr, www.flickr.com/photos/heritagefutures/15410252378/in/album -72157648844207496/ (left) and www.flickr.com/photos/heritagefutures /15410751770/in/album-72157648844207496/ (right). © 2014 Dirk HR Spennemann (Albury, New South Wales), www.ausphoto.net.

ment’s power to define him through his nationality. Ruth reads Haruki’s military identification numbers on the watch, above which are two Japanese characters: The first she recognizes as the kanji for “sky.” She looks up the second kanji, which she learns stands for “soldier.” After some research, she realizes that the Seiko Company manufactured these watches during World War II, and that kamikaze fighters—the “sky soldiers”—preferred them (see figure 7).75 In his composition book, Haruki notes that the Japanese military will be bequeathing the watch to Jiko and his sister along with his other personal effects; in turn, Jiko bequeaths the watch to Nao, instructing her to wind it daily.76 Ruth’s discovery of the package on the beach constitutes the watch’s final bequeathal: Nao gives the watch to her imagined reader, the package “meant for only one special person.” Addressing this reader directly, Nao continues, “it feels like I’m reaching forward through time to touch you, and now that you’ve found it, you’re reaching back to touch me!”77 This imagined reader— Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  127

literalized as a metafictional version of Ozeki herself—further implicates the reader of Ozeki’s novel, who becomes part of Nao and Ruth’s border-crossing community. After floating around as drift for several years, Ruth restarts the clock. In this symbolic act of winding up the sky soldier watch, Ruth begins her life-changing journey, one that allows her to find an unlikely connection across oceans of time and space, and to cross boundaries she never thought possible. Haruki’s writings as well as his death similarly embody his attempts to traverse national limits that are physical and theoretical, in terms of his interest in other languages and philosophies but also in his belief that he can surpass national boundaries through his death, crossing over into a realm of existence that is essentially mukokuseki, or without nationality. Haruki’s experiences reflect the kind of self-care-induced border crossing that characterizes Ruth and Nao’s connections with each other through their writing. While Nao’s journal is separated from Ruth in both years and geographical distance, her writings between the covers of Proust’s hacked volume become an instruction manual for Ruth to cross over into Nao and Jiko’s narrative world—or storyworld. In essence, Ruth’s interactions with the objects become the keys to crossing storyworlds, a feat that narratologists refer to as metalepsis. The intricate and interweaving storyworlds of A Tale for the Time Being can be envisioned in concentric circles of framing narratives (see figure 8), where Ruth’s story frames Nao’s diary, which in turn encompasses the stories of her great-grandmother Jiko and her great-uncle Haruki.78 While more explicit examples of these storyworld crossings and their significance will be discussed in the next section, Nao’s choice of journal will serve for now to illustrate how the lines dividing these narrative spaces begin to bend and shift. The blurring of these worlds exemplifies the kind of boundary crossing that Nao and Ruth—and, in his own way, Haruki—accomplish in connection to the objects that Ruth finds on the shore. Not unlike the lunchbox, Nao’s journal serves to illustrate how not only is a book more than its cover, but the cover itself can be more significant than it appears. Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu may seem an odd choice for sixteen-year-old Nao, who explains that she picked it up because she knew that her classmates would find little interest in a thick book with a French title. The novel additionally represents the persona that Nao wishes to project as a writer; “French is cool and has a sophisticated feeling,” she explains.79 She purchased the book “pre-hacked” by a famous crafter who replaced the 128  Chapter 3

Ruth Ozeki, real-life novelist . . . . . . writes of “Ruth” finding a journal . . . . . . written by Nao about her greatgrandmother Jiko . . .

. . . referencing letters and a journal written by Haruki #1 . . .

Figure 8. The storyworlds of A Tale for the Time Being. Diagram by Leah Milne.

printed pages with blank pages in so skilled a fashion “you almost think that the letters just slipped off the pages and fell to the floor.”80 The weighty nature of the book, and of Nao’s impression of Proust, causes her to approach her writing with added seriousness, partly because she wants to avoid upsetting Proust’s ghost. Nao overwrites Proust’s prose, using the hacked pages as a kind of extended suicide note in response to her father’s attempted suicides and to her increasingly violent encounters with bullying at school. Nao’s ultimate authorial intention is to record her story and Jiko’s life before she dies. While Nao is unfamiliar with the original contents of Proust’s text (she conducts a web search for an English translation and is pleased that it referMaterial Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  129

ences her favorite subject: lost time), Proust’s focus on memory resonates with both Nao and Ruth. The first volume, Du côté de chez Swann (or Swann’s Way), includes one of the novel’s most famous scenes, where the narrator recalls childhood events previously inaccessible to him. Significantly, what prompts these unlocked memories is an object—specifically, the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea, which prompts a flood of unbidden remembrances or involuntary memory.81 Through the objects with which Nao and Ruth interact, Ozeki’s novel redefines involuntary memory as more interactive and collective. While Proust’s tea and cookies allow the narrator to relive memories ostensibly belonging to him, Ruth and Nao discover a more dynamic relationship to the things in their possession: namely, they find themselves haunted by objects that invoke memories that are not their own. While reading Nao’s journal, Ruth is troubled in her sleep by several dreams of Nao’s great-grandmother Jiko, who directly addresses Ruth across time and space. The ghostly dreams further invoke Ruth’s mother Masako, who recently died from Alzheimer’s disease, an illness characterized by an involuntary loss of memory. Meanwhile, Nao uses remembering as a form of self-care that redefines her ethnic and national identity. While not born in the United States, she writes in her diary that she remembers nothing of her infancy in Japan: “As far as I’m concerned, my whole life started and ended in Sunnyvale, which makes me American.”82 Later, lamenting how far removed she feels from her Americanness, she writes that her days in Sunnyvale “seem realer than my real life now, but at the same time it’s like a memory belonging to a totally different Nao Yasutani. Maybe that Nao of the past never really existed.”83 Nao’s self-identifications are intimate and relative, tied more to experience and interconnection with others than to national status. Nao’s incidental selection of Proust’s novel allows her and Ruth to contemplate the intricacies of time and remembering, making space for other involuntary memories. For example, Nao’s concealed journal acts as an inadvertent echo of Haruki’s diary, which he conceals on his person with entries in French as an added security measure. Memories in Ozeki’s texts are not only prompted by objects but take on the weight and heft of objects in their own right. For instance, Ruth’s husband Oliver identifies objects that themselves constitute memory incarnate: He relates that the flotsam of Nao’s lunchbox came to their shore via a gyre, one of several large vortexes across the oceans of the world. Oliver identifies the debris that gets caught up in the gyre as “drift,” adding that the “drift that stays 130  Chapter 3

in the orbit of the gyre is considered to be part of the gyre memory.”84 The association between these memory objects and water bleeds over into Nao’s journal when she relates that “sometimes when [Jiko] told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren’t tears. She wasn’t crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.”85 Jiko’s tears and stories, and the debris that makes up part of the gyre, act as a nationless collection of objects, revealing to us ourselves and our history, and allowing us to connect personal memories to broader perspectives on who we are.

Metalepsis, Plot Holes, and Border Crossing When Ruth first restarts Haruki’s watch, she is unaware of how the action will symbolize her metaleptic crossing of both storyworlds. Mark Currie defines metalepsis as “frame-breaking, a crossing of some uncrossable boundary between different orders of reality or being, as when a character steps out of a fiction, or an author steps into it to interact with characters.”86 While Ozeki portrays this phenomenon optimistically as aiding the goals of self-care, Marie-Laure Ryan gives an oddly negative and clinical context to such traversals, describing them as “mutual contamination.”87 Other theorists similarly describe metalepsis as “an ‘unnatural,’ physically impossible bottom-up border crossing” that occurs when “the border between . . . worlds is violated.”88 In the face of such “unnatural” violations, Ozeki insistently frames metalepsis as productive and even vital to the intimate connection that nourishes Ruth and Nao, as well as other writers, readers, and characters across storyworlds. Thus, just as Nao and her lunchbox cross national borders to connect with Ruth, Ruth herself crosses into other storyworlds to form friendships with Nao and Jiko. This section will show how Ruth’s metaleptic journeys, not unlike the ability to complicate the limitations of national borders, enact narratological negotiations that empower Ozeki’s characters to define and care for themselves in more freeing and sustaining ways. Ruth’s metaleptic powers ultimately help her save Nao’s and Harry’s lives, igniting a friendship traversing time and space. Like Kiese Laymon’s book within a book in Long Division or the antique manuscript in Mat Johnson’s Pym (both discussed in the epilogue), Ruth’s interactions with objects such as Nao’s journal and Jiko’s glasses enable her to cross worlds in metafictionally productive and radically compassionate ways. The objects themselves operate Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  131

at the crossroads of memory, producing self-caring subjects who narrate and alter their worldview in relation to them. Inciting Ruth’s world-crossing, the objects become what Latour would call mediators, things that “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.”89 Mediators then are authorial, writing their roles and meanings. Working from the idea of objects as mediators allows for multiple frames of thought—for contradiction, uncertainty, and interpretations that others would dismiss as existing outside of “the already established idiom of the social.”90 Ruth’s mediators herald her objectual metalepsis, inspiring unexpected links to Nao, Jiko, and others. Jiko, a Zen Buddhist nun capable of interacting with others in both physical and spiritual realms, can occupy multiple planes of existence. Through a series of dreams inspired by her nightly readings of Nao’s journal and empowered by her donning of Jiko’s glasses, Ruth eventually learns how to cross over into the storyworld of the journal. In the first dream, Ruth is a mere spectator—an uninvolved witness or bystander. She observes Jiko, tucked away in her remote temple of Jigenji, responding to a text from Nao.91 This first dream deliberately echoes the act of passively reading a novel. Like many readers, Ruth feels no real responsibility to the people in the scene or the actions depicted. Devoid of metafictional self-referentiality, such a removed perspective frees the reader from any implications of the shared obligation that is part of radical self-care. In this reading, the dream is what Latour might call a mere intermediary, “transport[ing] meaning or force without transformation.”92 Ruth serenely reads the scene from a distance, captivated but otherwise unaccountable and noninstrumental to the events unfolding before her. The second dream constitutes Jiko’s open invitation for Ruth to traverse storyworlds as a useful and responsive reader, an invitation Ruth must accept by taking on a literal object of vision: Jiko’s glasses as mediator. Ruth returns to the scene of her first dream. However, in this version, evoking the Japanese jungle crow that appears on Ruth’s property in the novel’s opening, Jiko “unfurl[s] the wide black wing of her sleeve,”93 summoning Ruth to her side and inviting her to don the spectacles. Jiko’s metaleptic beckoning is more than Ruth can handle: Unaccustomed to the unnatural feeling of viewing storyworlds and community through Jiko’s eyes, Ruth balks as the dream turns into a nightmare. She laments that Jiko’s “lenses were too thick and too strong, smearing and dismantling the whole world as she knew it. . . . [T]he smear of the world 132  Chapter 3

began to absorb her, swirling and howling like a whirlwind and casting her back into a place or condition that was unformed, that she couldn’t find words for.”94 Disorientation, particularly related to a skewed vision, is a trope in both Krauss’s and Ozeki’s novels, and an offshoot of the breakdown experienced by Apostol’s and Erdrich’s protagonists.95 Jiko acts as the text’s metaleptic ambassador, initiating Ruth into a self-perception whose boundaries are more fluid than she had previously believed. Ruth’s early failures to fully take on Jiko’s worldview uncover the inherent difficulty in transgressing national and historical borders, even when the goal is to care for oneself and for others. Ruth’s contemplation of a different object—Haruki’s secret composition book—inspires Ruth’s third dream, which further secures her connection and usefulness to Nao, Jiko, and their family. While the contents of Haruki’s diary spur Ruth and Nao to question nationalist identity, the very mystery of how the diary came to be included in the packet of Haruki’s letters finally ignites Ruth’s metaleptic power. Haruki pens his final entry in the clandestine diary the night before he propels his plane into the sea, and it would have been impossible to publicly mail the diary to Jiko without endangering his family’s posthumous access to his pension. Ruth thus wonders, “It’s real, but how did it get here? How did it end up in the freezer bag and here in my hands?”96 The conundrum of the diary and the mystery of why Nao—at least at this moment in the story—knows nothing of its existence is a plot hole that Ruth cannot explicate. Like many moments in the novel, Ruth’s confusion mirrors calamity in Nao’s journal, the teenager realizing that she was ready to commit suicide, that her father may have already done so, and that her beloved “old Jiko” was also experiencing her last moments on earth. In the wake of these sober realizations, Nao loses faith in her reader, proclaiming, “But the fact is, you’re a lie. You’re just another stupid story I made up out of thin air because I was lonely and needed someone to spill my guts to. . . . I knew when I started this diary that I couldn’t keep it up, because in my heart of hearts, I never believed in your existence.”97 Ruth is alarmed to realize that the pages that follow this devastating entry, once filled with Nao’s bubbly handwriting, are now empty. Ruth’s confusion washes over her in what the novel implies is a dream, the third oneiric or dream-induced metalepsis in the text. With Ruth, the philosophical impetus behind the blank pages is multiple: Every writer of every text becomes implicated in that text, and every reader and witness shares responsibility for Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  133

the tale that follows. Or, as Jiko tells Nao, “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories.”98 Consternation at the blank pages, paired with the seeming plot hole of Haruki’s secret diary, inspires Ruth’s metaleptic expedition. She witnesses the horror of Haruki #1’s life as a soldier, sees through the smearing, storyworld-shattering lenses of Jiko’s glasses, and finally decides she can no longer be a passive reader. Instead, following the path of her globally traveled jungle crow, Ruth chooses to save Nao by first saving Nao’s father, Harry. Pleading with Harry to not commit suicide, Ruth explains that Nao is “planning to kill herself, and you’re the only one who can stop her. She needs you. And we need her.”99 Ruth’s first real moment of acknowledging the dependence she has upon the brazen teenaged author further unlocks Ruth’s metaleptic abilities. After convincing Harry that Nao, cruelly bullied online and in school, needs him more than ever, Ruth then realizes she is holding Haruki #1’s composition book, which spurs her to action. Without further thought, Ruth traverses the temple grounds and places his diary in the same place where Nao previously found his watch and letters, therefore closing the contradiction surrounding that object, leaving Nao and her father to find it, and giving them a project to translate, read, and contemplate together. With her newfound ability to negotiate the divisions between storyworlds, Ruth finally realizes her strength through metalepsis, through a radical crossing of worlds, words, and borders to live up to her intimate responsibility to others. Becoming an active reader and interacting directly with objects in the physical and dream space further help Ruth overcome the writer’s block plaguing her work. Relating her dream to Oliver, and specifically her metaleptic placement of the composition book in Jiko’s study, she considers, “I felt a little bit like a superhero just then.”100 Her husband, impressed, agrees that her actions were intelligent and justified, if only to provide an explanation for how Haruki’s diary came to be found in the packet of letters and how Harry later appears at Nao’s side as she returns to the ailing Jiko. Ruth realizes that metalepsis can be a courageous literary act, unlocking what old Jiko would call her “supapawa!”101 or her facility to cross authorial and metaphysical borders she had once deemed impossible to navigate. Another possible, though equally mystifying, literary explanation for the recovered diary comes from Toni Morrison, whose concept of rememory in her novel Beloved suggests that memories can become objects occupying physical space. The protagonist Sethe tells her daughter Denver, 134  Chapter 3

Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. . . . [I]f you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again.102 Much like the drift floating in oceanic gyres, memories become agents, objects willfully persisting against the human tendency to disremember even the most shameful public and personal histories. Beloved’s polysemic closing refrain, “It was not a story to pass on,”103 exposes the difficulty in facing events such as slavery or Haruki #1’s perils during World War II. We cannot disremember, or pass on, these stories but must instead share them and pass them on. While Ruth never learns the exact circumstances under which the lunchbox and its contents appear on her shore, she nonetheless recognizes their storytelling powers, teaching her about herself and helping her overcome the physical and metaphysical isolation of her remote island to share responsibility for the fate of another. In the context of old Jiko’s practice of Zen Buddhism, the ability to “read” objects takes on the form of rituals centered on gratitude and self-care, and focused on exposing the arbitrary and false divide between self and other. Such rituals, then, lend themselves to Jiko’s ease in border and storyworld crossing. Nao relates, somewhat amusedly, that much of the routines of Jiko’s temple life involved thanking inanimate objects for their services, much like Marie Kondo advocates in her organizational self-help books. Amused, Nao writes that the nuns “bowed and thanked the toilet and offered a prayer to save all beings.”104 While Nao laments that these uncommon rituals would certainly exacerbate her bullying at school, Jiko assures her that it was the appreciative connection to the objects, rather than the rituals themselves, that mattered. Nao realizes that “it was okay just to feel grateful sometimes, even if you don’t say anything. Feeling is the important part.”105 Part of this gratitude stems from Jiko’s perception of a nondualist world, what she refers to as “the not-two nature of existence.”106 While watching waves on the beach, Jiko tells Nao, “Surfer, wave, same thing. . . . Jiko, mountain, same thing. The mountain is tall and will live a long time. Jiko is small and will not live much longer. That is all.”107 This meditation on persons and things as being “not same” and “not different, Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  135

either”108 may be what allows Jiko to pass on her metaleptic “supapawa” to Ruth in the first place. Puzzling over her newfound metaleptic abilities, Ruth remembers a quote from Dōgen, a medieval Japanese Buddhist Zen master cited by several characters in the novel (including Haruki #1, Nao, and Jiko herself): “To forget the self is to be enlightened by all myriad things. Mountains and rivers, grasses and trees, cows and cats and wolves and jellyfishes.” Ruth wonders, “Had Dōgen figured all this out?”109 In fact, Dōgen would most likely characterize the connection between the self and artifacts in terms of mujō seppō, or what Rambelli translates as “the nonsentients preach the Dharma.”110 The concept of mujō seppō argues that natural things are “capable of preaching the Law to anyone who knows how to understand it.”111 Dōgen and Jiko would consequently consider the strict divide between object and subject to be arbitrary and misguided. The philosophy of mujō seppō suggests that nonsentient beings have a special capacity to teach us how to be in the world, perceive the self, and interact with others, skills that Ruth and Nao access to uncover their histories and to nurture their philosophical and social connections to others. Meanwhile, Nao’s father, Haruki #2 or Harry, attempts to incorporate these beliefs into his programming work in Sunnyvale after learning that the US military will appropriate his video gaming interface to train soldiers in semi-autonomous weapons. Through researching Nao and her family, Ruth finds Harry’s friend, a psychology professor named Dr. Leistiko. He reveals that Harry’s suicidal inclinations worsened when he was ordered to stop programming what Harry calls a “conscience”—a fail-safe provision in his software that would have reminded soldiers of the human lives they were taking. Harry feels he has betrayed his authorial and philosophical responsibilities to others, that the program’s omission would unnecessarily cost many lives. Thinking too of Haruki #1, Harry realized, “‘If my uncle’s plane had a conscience, maybe he would not have done such a bombing. . . . I know it is a stupid idea to design a weapon that will refuse to kill,’ he said. ‘But maybe I could make the killing not so much fun.’”112 Harry laments to Leistiko that “some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children’s history textbooks so that these genocides and tortures [committed by the Japanese] are not taught to the next generation. By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase our shame.”113 Harry likens this dictatorial modification of history to a different kind of devastation, a self-erasure that he feels may explain his role 136  Chapter 3

in creating software that upholds this destructive rewriting of history, one that Harry fails to oppose when he is fired. By potentially changing the narrative of Nao and Harry’s lives in Japan, Ruth’s metalepsis represents her attempt to collaboratively rewrite history in a different direction. Unlike the government’s erasure and denial of shameful histories or Harry’s flawed, conscienceless program, Ruth breaches storyworld borders to save herself and others. She knows that Nao’s and Harry’s happiness—and maybe even their attempts to commit or not commit suicide— depends on understanding the real circumstances surrounding Haruki #1’s nationally mandated suicide, that Haruki actually acted with agency and a renewed self-respect by propelling his plane into the sea. Namely, Ruth realizes that the secret diary has the capacity to teach Nao and Harry something more about themselves and their history. The father and daughter’s discovery of Ruth’s gift has an added unintended benefit, giving the two a collaborative project and fortifying Harry’s courage to finally tell his daughter about the real grounds for his termination in Sunnyvale. He admits that his attempt to inflict his programming with a conscience, particularly in the shadow of 9/11, was the reason he, Nao, and her mother had to leave California. He laments, “A generation of young American pilots would use my interfaces to hunt and kill Afghani people and Iraqi people, too. This would be my fault. . . . I knew the American pilots would suffer, too. . . . That would also be my fault.” For the first time in her life, Nao looks at her father and sees “a total superhero.” She adds, “My dad seems to have found his superpower, and maybe I’ve started to find mine, too, which is writing to you.”114 Just as Ruth inherits the watch from Nao, who in turn inherits it from Haruki #1 and then Jiko, Ruth finds herself the authorial beneficiary of Nao’s recharged imaginative abilities. Her writerly inheritance is not just the objects, but the hope that they inspire. Like memories in the gyre, stories become objects transmitted and shared in both novels. The notion of passing on stories, and of reusing and reimagining multiple other objects, appears and reappears in both Krauss’s and Ozeki’s novels. Complementing George Weisz’s reimagining of “recovered objects” and the multiple lives touched by the desk in Great House, Ozeki’s text features several acts of reusing and re-imagination—in a sense, of object recycling. Before her death from Alzheimer’s, for example, Ruth’s mother, Masako, enacts a curious reversal of Freudian fort-da with Ruth: Unbeknownst to her mother, Ruth returns and re-returns her mother’s clothes to a recycling center store Material Metafiction and the . . . Magic of All . . .  137

called The Free Store, where Masako delights in finding them again and misrecognizing them as “new” clothes. Jiko has Nao wash and reuse plastic bags, characteristically explaining that sitting for meditation and washing freezer bags are the “same thing.”115 Finally, Harry recovers old magazines and manga out of recycling bins and recycles pages of his philosophical reading into origami insects. Both texts further deal with characters whose comprehension of who they are—their ethnic, cultural, and national selves, their shared histories, and the stories that shape their present—is a kind of recycling of what they once were. With Nao’s hope of having found her strength in writing, Ruth’s writer’s block is overcome. Reading the objects that she finds on the shore becomes a kind of authorial supapawa that she then passes on and recycles for the reader, giving the narrative new life beyond the page.

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4 “A Blank Page Rises Up” Willful Authors in Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell and Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado

Henry James envisioned the transnational characters of his novel The Ambassadors after hearing how his friend and fellow writer William Dean Howells addressed a younger colleague, Jonathan Sturges. Standing in a Parisian garden, Howells told Sturges, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do—but live.”1 In his novel, James re-created and revised the intimate exchange as a speech imparted by his protagonist Lambert Strether to Little Bilham. “Don’t forget that you’re young—blessedly young; be glad on the contrary and live up to it,” Strether tells him. “It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.”2 These mirrored encounters disclose more about the speakers than they do the listeners. In effect, a languishing but ardent older gentleman urges his younger companion to truly live his life, even as he himself failed to do so. Echoes of that garden scene appear in both Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado and

Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (hereafter referred to as Virgil Russell). However, rather than the ostensible privilege afforded to someone for whom “it doesn’t so much matter what you do,” the wistful, even desperate messages conveyed by the novels’ paternal figures are tempered by limitations of race, nationality, and class, and emphasize the need to mobilize authorship with a goal toward radical self-care. The father and son figures thus engage in collaborative self-authorship on numerous levels—even working metafictionally with the reader—to underscore writers’ and readers’ shared project of defining and caring for the self. For instance, whereas Strether speaks to Bilham to inspire in the latter an “innocent gaiety,”3 the dizzying narrative interactions between father and son in Everett’s novel are subdued by the pervading consciousness that one or the other character is facing an impending death or has already died. The presence of death underscores how self-care for African Americans begins with mere survival in the face of what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the “heritage and legacy” of the US enacting violence upon Black bodies. Accompanying this melancholy realization is the adage expressed by Coates that, for African Americans, “acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black.”4 Everett’s paternal character appears to consider these injustices when he describes a dream to his son that reads not unlike the jokes the protagonists exchange in Syjuco’s Ilustrado. In the dream, a white barkeep addresses two Black customers with a racial slur. The father relates, “one of the men points to the other and says but he’s the president and the barkeep says that’s his problem.”5 In multiple exchanges like this one, the father and son in Virgil Russell engage in acts of intimate and responsive storytelling that complicate Strether’s admonition to embrace life, exposing material and social limitations that persist among marginalized people living in a supposedly accepting, multicultural society. For Syjuco’s Crispin Salvador, the idea he wishes to confer upon his young protégé—whom I shall refer to as “Miguel” to differentiate him from the author Syjuco—is one that, like Krauss’s and Ozeki’s novels, problematizes the sentiment of national belonging. Nearly sixty years after author Carlos Bulosan claimed that “it was a crime to be Filipino” in the US,6 Crispin suggests that the single story of Filipino Americans has become entrenched in literature. He tells Miguel that Filipino or Pinoy writers and their diasporic counterparts have 140  Chapter 4

written one book, and it’s been re-bound again and again. So many re-presentations of the war, the struggle of the haves and have-nots. . . . All those Pinoy writers industriously criticizing. All those . . . domestic dramas. Or the Filipino-Americans, eagerly roosting in pigeonholes, writing about the cultural losses that come with being raised in a foreign country, or being not only brown, but a woman, and a lesbian, or halfblind, or lower-middle-class, or whatever. Oh my, what a crime against humanity that the world doesn’t read Filipino writing! This is the tradition you will inherit.7 In this passage, Crispin laments both the books that he in his advanced age will never write and the deteriorated state of Filipino and Filipino American literature, whose authors attempt to express both a colonial past and an oppressed present to an ostensibly uninterested audience. As the novels’ paternal figures, Everett’s fatherly character (Percival Everett Sr.)8 and Syjuco’s Crispin, view the inheritances they wish to bestow in literary terms, focusing on how the stories that their young charges write can intervene in destructive cycles of self-erasure not only in ethnic American writing but in American literature in general. They further lament their squandered authorship and the blank pages that haunt them. For instance, Crispin believes he wasted his writing life attempting to please readers rather than nurturing his sense of self. The Bridges Ablaze—a novel Crispin does not finish within Ilustrado’s pages—represents his “bargaining, begging, for just one last chance to bequeath a book about all the lessons I’ve learned painfully over the course of my life.”9 The father in Virgil Russell is likewise contrite about the My Lai massacres of the Vietnam War. He tells his son how, decades later, he still remembers “the way my heart broke, sank, collapsed, and the way [the massacres] sounded so familiar, so much like white men in white hoods driving dirt roads and whistling through gap-toothed grins.”10 Haunted by mass killings overseas and hate crimes in his country, he regrets not writing about the exterminations on either continent or his “disdain for my lying, bombastic, self-righteous, conceited, small-minded, imperialistic homeland. Instead, I wrote about getting high . . . all of it a sad, juvenile metaphor about the lost American spirit.”11 He says that, despite his book’s success, he stopped writing after that. Like many facts the father and son exchange in Everett’s novel, this last detail incites revision: He clarifies that he wrote other works but avoided publishing “A Blank Page Rises Up”  141

them, instead pseudonymously publishing popular genre fiction—texts that Crispin, facing a similar situation, would have described as “full of prolificacy but lacking in gravitas.”12 The father in Everett’s novel characterizes most of his career as a lamentable avoidance of “real life” both on and off the page, aimed primarily at pleasing others. In these writing choices lies the difference between practical self-care intended to pay the bills and feed the body, and the equally honorable self-care of willful intrusion, using words to assert one’s existence. While these more popular writings are plentiful and certainly practical, each popular text and fake name represents Crispin and the father’s inability to publish works that resist the US’s multinational exercises of brutality against people of color. Whereas the father in Everett’s novel avoids attaching his name to his work, Syjuco and Everett do the opposite in their novels. Like Foer and Ozeki, discussed in previous chapters, Everett and Syjuco exhibit a sweeping self-referentiality by including their names and likenesses in their texts.13 Everett actually has a history of self-referentiality in his oeuvre, verging in some instances on autofiction, or the stylistic combination of autobiography and fiction. His name makes its first titular appearance in the 2004 epistolary novel A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid, and a fictionalized version of Everett appears in name and occupation in his 2009 novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Other aspects of Everett’s biography often appear in his works, such as his proclivity for fly fishing and guitar playing, his love of ranches and deserts of the American West, and his vocations as writer, professor, and even horse trainer, an occupation of his youth. Similarly, in Ilustrado, Syjuco includes a character Miguel who, like the author, is an expatriate cosmopolitan writer born in the Philippines. Also like Syjuco, Miguel becomes a father at a young age, is the son of an upper-class political family and the sibling of two sisters and three brothers, and starts his writing career doing entry-level work for New York periodicals. In this chapter, I argue that Everett’s and Syjuco’s use of names and empirical details, as well as their attention to the writerly interactions these characters experience, challenge readers’ and literary critics’ view of the authorial self and of multicultural American literature as constitutive of disparate groups and distinct “ethnic” content. In their metafictional and self-referential natures, both novels create a heightened sense of reality, disorienting because they shatter conventions of fiction while simultaneously inciting readers to, 142  Chapter 4

for example, look up the frequent names, citations, and excerpts to confirm whether the fictional allusions are “real” or not. Within their pages, both novels also refer to the limiting ways that literary critics impose “authenticity” and limiting definitions upon ethnic American literature. Hearkening back to Ahmed’s notion of simply being as a form of willfulness, these texts thus embody willful self-care through a stubborn insistence on asserting the real person behind the words, and the lives that writing can take on beyond the page. Given the focus on authors’ bodies, it is further significant that the deaths of the author-characters hold little power over their ability to persist beyond either their physical lives or the blank page. Syjuco’s Miguel hints at the reason for this hyperreality when describing how he and his girlfriend, Madison, spoke of fictional characters as though they were real. In contrast, “real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand. We liked to believe there is an alternate world, a better world, populated entirely by characters created by the yearnings of humanity—governing and inspiring themselves with all the lucidity with which we rendered them.”14 The use of real-life details to describe the father-son-like relationships in these novels gestures to the alternative storyworlds that Miguel and Madison seek out, while asking readers to keep one foot rooted in the “real” world to confront identity beyond print. By drawing attention to the body of the empirical author, the texts force readers to consider the humanity of the fictionalized writers alongside that of the authors themselves. In true form, the writer-protagonists renegotiate their cultural identities with every new writing project. The dramatized acts of writing—such as the myriad excerpts in Ilustrado and the collaborative undertakings in Virgil Russell—show the multiplicity of selves constantly constructed and reconstructed by language. At the same time, the novels’ valences of reality and fiction spark questions of genre, asking readers to interrogate what constitutes or does not constitute, for example, what we call “ethnic American fiction.” In other words, the texts demand labor of their readers to unearth meaning—“labor” after all making up part of the word “collaboration.” The metafictional references to the author further inspire aesthetic and cultural considerations alongside the material and historical. Whereas some critics like E. San Juan Jr. and Robert Young believe that postmodern and postcolonial literature privileges the aesthetic over the material, Syjuco and Everett ask readers to confront both aspects with novels that are multimodal—employing images, diverse typography, white “A Blank Page Rises Up”  143

space, and citations and allusions to both real and fictional texts, as well as a mixture of styles and genres. Most significantly, both novels confuse the boundaries between writers in order to willfully insist upon the dynamism of the ethnic American self. “I’m an old man or his son writing an old man writing his son writing an old man,” Everett’s narrator writes. “But none of this matters and it wouldn’t matter if it did matter.”15 What does matter are both the stories and the way that knowing (or not knowing) the writers’ identities alters the narratives. Virgil Russell asks readers to follow the accounts of two characters named Murphy and Lang, the father plotting escape from an oppressive nursing home, and—at the novel’s conclusion—the father and son attempting to escape the Ku Klux Klan, while at the same time prodding readers to ponder whether the identity of the storytellers is significant at all. Meanwhile, Ilustrado calls upon readers to question the very novel they have just completed when, in the epilogue, the “real” narrator reveals himself. Rather than Miguel investigating the murder of his mentor, Crispin, and attempting to find the latter’s lost novel The Bridges Ablaze, Crispin admits that he is the surviving author who has imagined and written the experiences of a former student named Miguel. Contemplating his student’s premature passing, Crispin explains, “To make sense of what was happening to me, I obsessed on what had happened to him.”16 Focusing on the blurring of writerly selves, this chapter develops the fluidity of authorship to present what Wai Chee Dimock calls “scale enlargement” as a form of self-care in writing that benefits the author-characters and can benefit real-life readers as well. Dimock describes scale enlargement as marking “an inverse correlation . . . between the magnitude of the scale and the robustness of distinctions. On a large enough canvas,” she specifies, “distinctions can become very unrobust indeed; they can lose their claim to visibility altogether.”17 The ambiguity of the borders demarcating ethnic identity, or who does and does not belong to a particular ethnic group, further extends to the fluctuating ways that we categorize authorship—such as privileging national identities over the local and transnational, and contemplating the lines between digital versus “real” print publications. Both texts work against what Ulrich Beck calls methodological nationalism or the belief that “nation, state and society are the ‘natural’ social and political forms of the modern world.”18 The indistinctiveness from one author to the next in Everett’s and Syjuco’s works instead makes a case for collaboration and connectedness beyond such arbitrary divisions. 144  Chapter 4

Underlying these mystifying uncertainties of the storytellers is the presence of the empirical author in the not-so-camouflaged background, what Barthes calls the “Author-God.”19 Like the authorial narrator whom Frank addresses in Toni Morrison’s Home, versions of the real-life authors of Virgil Russell and Ilustrado hover behind their creations. This scalar enlargement of authorship depicts writing as collaboration by deliberately diffusing the identities of the writers and by unearthing the storyworld layers connecting reader and creator. Expanding authorship to numerous levels both inside and outside the texts, the novels draw attention to writers’ and readers’ shared responsibility in expanding the fluidity of identity in American literature, encouraging an adaptability that can benefit everyone. “Anyway,” Crispin tells Miguel as he concludes his not-quite-Jamesian speech, “your real home country will be that common ground your work plows between you and your reader.”20 So, to borrow from Paulo Freire, Crispin proposes not a banking model where readers are passive containers receiving stories, but an act of active and mutual care and collaboration between readers and authors. For Syjuco, then, collaborative authorship exists in the “home country” of what I am calling the digital diaspora, a population dispersed—often both literally from its geographical homeland as well as figuratively, in the sense of communicating in the mukokuseki (“without nationality”) space of the internet.21 This group of people is nonetheless connected through literary interactions, displaying on the one hand intimacy on a large scale, and, on the other, personal relationships between reader and writer made multiple. Ilustrado highlights this digital diaspora for its increased readership and political awareness, showing that such is the only way to improve ethnic identification and self-fashioning in the United States, the Philippines, and beyond. At the same time, this digital diaspora expands the politics of authorship to include alternative forms of expression such as blogs, comments on online posts, and—most significantly—jokes. Meanwhile, Everett’s text depicts a close writing relationship between father and son in order to speak back to ethnic American, and specifically African American, literature, historiography, and criticism. Recognizing and then problematizing the inherent power in authorship, the narrator—in a style evocative of ongoing revision—acknowledges, “This whole business of making a story, a story at all, well, it’s the edge of something, isn’t it? Forth and back and back and forth, it’s a constant shuttle movement, ostensibly looking to comply with “A Blank Page Rises Up”  145

some logic, someone’s logic, my logic, law, but subverting it the entire time.”22 The narrator, a role shared by multiple characters in Virgil Russell, highlights collaborative storytelling to expand communication and self-definition, while further dislocating the authority of any one person to dictate the parameters of that self-definition. Building on previous chapters, then, this chapter proposes that both novels promote self-care that expands the scales of the self and of authorship by showing how storytelling, meaning-making, and identity formation take place on multiple levels of collaboration, intimacy, and critique that demand, most significantly, the labor and care of readers. This chapter too makes a case for the sheer work involved in self-care. Popular sources often frame less radical forms of self-care as luxury turned into necessity—skin masks and spa days by definition demand less work in the traditional sense. However, the kind of radical self-care that appears in Audre Lorde’s writing—referenced in this book’s introduction—is radical because the person enacting it is already intruding upon a space where she is unwelcome. The labor of merely existing undergirds the work of willful self-care, a labor embodied in the novels’ demand for active reading.

“Our True Shared History”: Jokes, Spam, and the Digital Diaspora in Ilustrado Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, Ilustrado foregrounds its collaborative impulse most immediately through its structure. The novel opens in New York shortly after 9/11, with Miguel learning about the possibly suicidal drowning of his mentor and expatriate Philippine author, Crispin Salvador, and his missing novel manuscript, The Bridges Ablaze. However, what promises to be a linear mystery about Crispin’s death and his missing last book quickly evolves into an assemblage of Crispin and Miguel’s experiences alongside e-mails, comments from chatty readers of the blogosphere, jokes, Crispin’s prodigious work (that includes fiction, autobiography, travelogues, and a libretto), and Miguel’s biography-in-progress about Crispin entitled Eight Lives Lived, which Miguel anticipates will be “an indictment of my country, of time, of our forgetful, self-centered humanity.”23 Layers of fiction and nonfiction further muddy the generic waters. Beyond obvious references to Syjuco, people in Crispin’s life inspire the names and likenesses of his intradiegetic novels. 146  Chapter 4

For instance, Crispin’s grandfather, Cristo, appears in his historical novel, The Enlightened, which likewise features a fictional version of the Filipino nationalist revolutionary José Rizal. (Crisóstomo, the protagonist of Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tángere, is another possible inspiration for Cristo.) Estranged from his daughter, Dulcinea, Crispin creates a character named Dulcé, the spunky young protagonist of his Kaputol (“Piece” or “Fragment”) trilogy. Excerpts from these and other fictional novels almost crowd out Miguel’s narrative. While fragmented literary texts often confound readers, Miguel himself offers an implicit justification for the effort involved in reading works like Ilustrado. Miguel agonizes over his last shared moments with Crispin, thinking, “Days, weeks later, all the fragments still would not click together. . . . I could not understand why the world chose to take the easy way out: to write him off simply, then go home to watch TV shows with complicated plots. Maybe that’s the habit of our age.”24 A full life, Miguel suggests, requires that stories reflect this complexity. Just as self-care as mere survival is a laborious necessity of the living, the numerous connections, events, and aspirations of our lives require time and effort to piece together. This fragmentation evokes contemporary life itself, where we gather information through social media, blogs and message boards, rumors, and so on. Ilustrado, then, mimics the intricacy of modern society’s forms of communication, demanding a “unit of research” that crosses conventional author/reader barriers,25 including national borders and digital and physical spaces. Even as Miguel defends his choice to write his mentor’s biography, he simultaneously makes a case for why readers should work to comprehend narratives in their fragmented splendor. He demands, in other words, to be “read” on his terms. The fact that Crispin is Ilustrado’s “real” narrator demands even more of the reader’s labor and collaboration. The book invites a rereading of Miguel’s first-person perspective that envisions Crispin writing these accounts, therefore expanding his and Miguel’s interactions from “our classes, a few consultations in [his] office,” and some “stilted conversations over cheeseburgers” into a warm, personal connection.26 Avoiding linear character sketches, then, the text’s polyvocality, fragmentation, and metafictional ambiguity support interconnection best depicted through pastiche and agglomeration. The snippets of writing implore readers to capture an impression of both Miguel and Crispin from the novel’s scattered pieces, sealing readers’ necessary role in fulfilling the book’s collaborative charge. This section looks at how these scattered passages— “A Blank Page Rises Up”  147

particularly the jokes and digital content dispersed throughout the text—make a case for ethnic identity as forged in the labor of writer-reader relationships, where determining the structure of the telling is as significant to identity formation and interconnection as the content itself. By taking on the projects of writing Crispin’s biography and finding his missing manuscript, Miguel’s dual role as writer and reader awakens him to a framework of the self existing neither in a national nor wholly global mindset. Back in the birth country where he lost both parents as a child, Miguel is adrift: He is suspended between feelings of national belonging that characterized his early years on the one hand and, on the other, his recent breakup with Madison, a woman who represented his cosmopolitan life in New York City, complete with debates “about which country we’d rescue an orphan from.”27 The sophistication Miguel seeks is more than just freedom of movement, but a globalized vision of the way the world should work morally, economically, and culturally. As Beck notes, shifting attention away from methodological nationalism does not equate to a proclamation of the end of the nation-state. Instead, Syjuco makes a case for a methodological cosmopolitanism that replaces the national with other foci—in this case, the digital and the diasporic—while not dismissing the power of the local and the national to influence global trends and movements as well as his own self-perception and relationships with others. Hence, even during awkward reunions with friends in Manila, Miguel is preoccupied with reminiscences of Madison on the one hand and, on the other, his prepubescent childhood and the chaos that follows: his grandfather’s messy entry into politics, his older sister leaving when he was thirteen, and many of the same themes that Crispin describes in his memoir, including “enigmas, dreams, mythologies, the tyranny of absence, the shortcomings of language, deciduous memories, endings as beginnings.”28 Miguel’s retreat into Crispin’s world circumvents his spatial and temporal disorientation by forging new ground in the “real home country” of the reader-writer relationship. Ilustrado pointedly foregrounds the intense and intimate work that Miguel demands of himself to accomplish his goals for writing and radical self-care, and then constantly interrupts that narrative, as though admonishing the novel’s readers to do the same. Wrapped up in this demand is the specter of Philippine colonial history and US imperialism, portrayed in the novel as companions to the nepotism and wealth that have replaced dogged hard work in Philippine politics. It is no coincidence, then, that Miguel’s white girlfriend represents 148  Chapter 4

the opposition to this labor. As Miguel’s bond with Madison disintegrates, she complains with growing resentment of “[a]ll that time you spend in the library. With the memory of your dead friend.”29 Though Miguel intends his response to Madison—that a “Dead Crispin’s better than a living you”30—to further distance himself as he gets further involved in reading and interpreting Crispin’s work, the comment further affirms how the reader-writer relationship can surpass barriers of time, space, and life itself, an appealing prospect for the unsettled Miguel. Crispin’s supposed death in the novel’s opening pages from drowning in the Hudson River shortly after 9/11 discloses the changeable nature of selfhood in the post-9/11 era and the increasingly regimented boundaries within which ethnicities are considered “American” or not. At the same time, Philippine borders are more diffuse than ever, the republic now largely made up of emigrants and overseas Filipino workers whose migrant remittances—primarily from Filipina women separated from their families—are a major part of the country’s gross domestic product.31 An example of the novel’s readerly demands and collaborations lies in jokes, which Crispin insists are the only “true shared history” of Filipino- and English-speaking populations. Likening them to proverbs, Crispin adds that, without jokes, “we wouldn’t understand ourselves.”32 While Miguel thinks comical narratives might be “divisive,” Crispin insists that they can also be “unifying.”33 Observing Filipino and Filipino American online newsgroup forums, Emily Ignacio points out that users told jokes because they had to “situate themselves and their local problems within the context of larger, global patterns.”34 Hence, Miguel may be right that the substance of jokes, or what Lois Leveen calls the “joke text,”35 sometimes determines membership and inclusion—that is, those who “get” the joke belong to the “in” crowd, and everyone else must catch up. At the same time, the actual process of telling the joke, the “joke act,”36 can become an intimate and unifying point of connection across time and space, a way to collaboratively tell ourselves about ourselves. Crispin and Miguel’s joke text involves a series of anecdotes about the hapless Erning Isip, his wife Rocky Bastos, and their growing family, the telling of which evokes the writers’ shared cultural history and the increasing fluidity of national and ethnic identities. In an interview, Syjuco responds to Ilustrado’s commingling of fact and fiction by stating that, to him, “the most true-to-life characters in my book are Boy Bastos and his father, Erning Isip.”37 Intriguingly, aspects of the family’s narrative are similar to Miguel’s, though the Isip-Bastos “A Blank Page Rises Up”  149

stories incorporate puns and other wordplay, popular references, and narratives recycled and/or rewritten from commonplace anecdotes from the Philippines, the United States, and the global marketplace. Isip’s life begins in a substantially class-minded society that mimics Miguel’s early experiences growing up with his grandparents and ends with corrupt politics that resemble the cause for Miguel’s disillusionment with and estrangement from his family and his home country, not to mention his involvement with the like-minded Madison. Isip appears in the text as a yokel, with jokes calling to mind a famous Filipino American comedian, Rex Navarrete, whom Sarita See observes as establishing cultural authenticity by relying “on caricature that mostly has to do with class distinctions.”38 Indeed, one may refer to Isip pejoratively as “bakya,” a word denoting the wooden clogs commonly worn by Filipinos before the prominence of flip-flops. Figuratively, “bakya” suggests one who is provincial, in the connotation of both being unsophisticated and being from the countryside. The bakya is “a failed version of the urban elite . . . stranded between aesthetic sensibilities and geographies, and by extension linguistic registers, without the means with which to represent that predicament.”39 The bakya, then, is a class distinction as well as a writerly one having to do with self-expression. Echoing the divisions that separated Rizal and the rest of his educated ilustrado class from their non-European-educated counterparts, then, the Isip jokes mostly concern his social ineptness and linguistic awkwardness as a result of his poor upbringing and his attendance at the “populist” AMA Computer College instead of a more prestigious Philippine university.40 In the first joke that Miguel and Crispin exchange, Isip’s two elite compatriots seek the attention of a beautiful woman by flaunting their class status, which involves brandishing possessions and speaking in Taglish, a combination of English and the main Filipino dialect of Tagalog. For example, the Ateneo de Manila student tells the woman, “Wow, you’re so talagang [really] pretty, as in totally ganda [beautiful] gorgeous!”41 When it is Isip’s turn to speak to the woman, he looks at her fair skin in confusion and says, “Miss, please miss, give me autograph?”42 Isip’s association of white skin with celebrity is not far-fetched given that both US and Filipino celebrities are disproportionately represented by fairer-skinned people fulfilling Western standards of beauty. Additionally, his companions’ parading their material wealth and deploying Taglish underscore their superior education and their confidence in future engagement in the global marketplace, what Vicente Rafael calls the freedom 150  Chapter 4

to “mov[e] between languages and identities without fully surrendering to any one of them.”43 Isip’s encounter with the fair-skinned woman contrasts greatly with Miguel and Crispin’s later jokes about Isip’s granddaughter, Girly. Suggestive of this younger, cosmopolitan generation, Girly’s two friends—an English-speaking student from an international school and a Filipina attending a private Catholic college—are well-educated, bilingual, and high class. Seeing a large lizard, the three girls shriek. The first, from the international school, refers to the creature in English as an iguana, while the Catholic student screams in Tagalog that it is a “butiki,”44 meaning house lizard or gecko. Isip’s granddaughter, however, screeches out the one thing the lizard calls to mind—namely, Lacoste, the French clothing brand whose logo is a crocodile. Girly, keeper of the legacy of Isip’s bakya upbringing, is shallow, commercially minded, and, as we learn in the final joke that Crispin tells Miguel, destined for politics. Her eventual married name, Girly Bastos-Arrayko, is a barely disguised reference to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the president of the Philippines when Syjuco wrote Ilustrado. While still demanding readers’ labor and shared knowledge, Ilustrado’s political references are more easily recognizable in the digital age than their historical equivalents would have been during the time of the original ilustrados—that is, the Filipino educated class of the Spanish colonial era that included Rizal. The growing accessibility of political information and jokes online means that Filipinos and Filipino Americans have more opportunities to engage with each other and shape connectivity in both countries. 45 Jokes allow them to contend with shared experiences and culture across borders, even temporarily turning “the impact of colonialism and globalization on its head.”46 These jokes, then, promote interactive authorship, and the digital medium in which jokes are increasingly told and retold fosters writing relationships that can occupy multiple spaces. Investigating distinctions between jokes and more traditional forms of authorship, Leveen makes a case for jokes as democratic because they are regularly “‘re-authored’ by new tellers” who hear the joke and then have an equal authorial stake in “rewriting the text and re-authoring the characteristics of the intended audience.”47 Jokes as egalitarian forums, where the work of self-expression is shared, are bolstered by the relatively democratic access that many have to the internet in the first place, particularly when compared to other options such as world travel and participation in the global corporate marketplace. “A Blank Page Rises Up”  151

Ilustrado hints both at the epilogue’s final disclosures and at the connections possible in digital form when Miguel finds evidence early in the novel that Crispin might still be alive: Nine months after his mentor’s death, Miguel receives an e-mail that begins, “Dear Sire/Madame . . . I was informed by our lawyer, Clupea Rubra, that my daddy, who at the time was government whistleblower and head of family fortune, called him, Clupea Rubra, and conducted round his flat and show to him three black cardboard boxes.”48 While the opening sentences of this e-mail have all the appearances of spam, they foreshadow a moment in the novel’s conclusion when Miguel finds neither Dulcinea nor Crispin’s last novel, but three empty cardboard boxes. (The conclusion will be discussed in more detail in the next section.) Pointedly, the e-mail’s sender is [email protected], and the text ends with “More information TBA”49—an acronym of Crispin’s missing novel, The Bridges Ablaze. In other words, the very moment that inspires Miguel to buy his plane ticket and investigate his mentor’s life is essentially junk mail that may also be Crispin’s idea of a joke. The joke occurs via a commonly ignored and lambasted space of digital writing—the ubiquitous spam message, an appropriate genre given Crispin’s reception in the Philippines as a writer of “junk” or “garbage,” and because most spam includes deliberately obscured authors and laborious text. Several other examples of spam appear in Ilustrado, mostly in response to literary critic Marcel Avellaneda’s blog posts. While Avellaneda—an estranged friend of Crispin’s—publishes contemptuous reviews of his former comrade’s work and tongue-wagging accounts of his run-ins with the literary intelligentsia, typical posts from his blog, The Burley Raconteur, deliver sardonic reports of politics gone wrong. One post pokes fun at fictional President Estregan’s failed attempt to lead his Unanimity Party in a procession. Avellaneda gleefully recounts, “Politicians and dignitaries waited for rain to subside while photographers snapped them yawning, texting, picking their teeth, and looking at the sky. . . . [W]hile the President’s national Unanimity party does include powerful lackeys and cronies, even God and Mother Nature have cast their lot with” the opposition.50 Illustrative of Avellaneda’s posts, the account calls out the irony of a political party named Unanimity, whose robust and vocal opposition is anything but undivided. Representing the writerly interactions that the internet fosters, the post’s comments include a dismissive response that the blog is “wasting ur 152  Chapter 4

time,” unfounded concern that the opposition leader is an extremist Muslim, rumors of a scandal involving the president and a celebrity starlet, and a spam post repeated four times.51 The spammer, identified as Paulo, asks readers to “Buy cellphones at CellShocked.com.ph!,” promising that each unlocked phone includes a free “Authentic Louis Vuitton reprod belt case.”52 The sheer persistence of this commercialized post juxtaposed with the other largely inane responses to Avellaneda’s blog epitomizes the digital diaspora at its most precarious. Though Avellaneda promises his readers that the spam issue has been fixed, the CellShocked post reappears at the end of the comments, offering the final and definitive word on Philippine politics. On the one hand, Ilustrado suggests that the internet can provide an opportunity for writers of all backgrounds and nationalities to connect, to shape ethnicity and nationality, to share jokes, and even to improve the lives of those living under oppressive systems. In its place, however, the persistence of the CellShocked advertisement warns how easily we squander these collaborative spaces and forms of self-creation in the accumulation of wealth, as well as the accompanying belief that such luxury must originate in the United States and Europe (Louis Vuitton is, like Girly Bastos’s crocodilian Lacoste, based in France). The unlocked communication and authentic reproductions that “Paulo” offers thus invoke Filipino officials’ corruption and materialism in the face of their people’s poverty, as well as Filipino and Filipino Americans’ privileging of Western standpoints on class status, identity, and what constitutes “authentic” self-care. As the character Sadie says to Miguel, “Call me colonial, but I’m all about it.”53 Her captivation with US elite white culture recalls Dylan Rodríguez’s argument that the identities of Filipinos and especially Filipino Americans are constantly being (re)formulated in relation to what he refers to as “arrested raciality”—the compulsion to constantly dispute colonial, supremacist beliefs that their race and history prove them incapable of self-governance. Rodríguez argues that these subjects—primarily the “Philippine petite bourgeoisie and ‘Filipino American’ professional class”—uphold US nation-building to their detriment.54 For Rodríguez, then, the digital diaspora is itself “cellshocked,” experiencing a perpetual self-disruption in the face of prolonged exposure to commercialized globalization and cultural “coca-colonization,”55 exacerbated by digital media. Syjuco, however, does not so quickly dismiss the possibilities of authoring and shaping Filipino and Filipino American ethnic identity in the digital age. “A Blank Page Rises Up”  153

The jokes that Crispin and Miguel exchange exemplify the storytelling possibilities of web 2.0—or interactive and user-generated—contexts like social networks and blogs, sites “clearly embedded in a participatory culture which weaves together channels of text and dialogue in multiple configurations”56 and, as shown by Crispin and Miguel’s collaborative storytelling, evolves across time and geographical distances. The plight of Erning Isip and his family is hardly optimistic given that their shining legacy and punchline is the materialistic, unethical Girly Bastos-Arrayko, a woman who could certainly afford several genuine Louis Vuitton cases instead of resorting to “authentic” reproductions. Nonetheless, Miguel and Crispin’s shaping of the Isip-Bastos saga both in person and in digital spaces attests to the power of storytelling, even in the seemingly frivolous form of the joke. It is therefore not a coincidence that one of the earliest jokes in Ilustrado is the ambiguous broken English of the spam e-mail that Miguel receives from [email protected]. The e-mail’s jokester and sender—the supposed son of the lawyer Clupea Rubra’s deceased client—is embroiled in a political dilemma, not unlike Crispin himself. Government villains killed the son’s father for exposing their indecencies, then harassed the son himself. E-mails like this one often begin with promises of sincerity before soliciting personal information or cash. While discerning recipients often designate such e-mails as junk, Miguel hesitates to do so because the curiously named spammer ultimately asks for nothing material. Instead, the e-mail concludes, “Your heroic assist is required in replenishing my father’s legacy and masticating his despicable murderers.”57 Crispin, Miguel’s authorial father figure, is enlisting Miguel to become Ilustrado’s protagonist: to be a hero, to find his writerly legacy, to connect with his past, and to avenge his own mysterious death. Ultimately, as shown in Ilustrado’s epilogue, the question brought out by the spam e-mail—that is, whether Crispin is alive, murdered, or a suicide victim—is not the text’s main concern at all. In this way, Clupea Rubra gets his last laugh in the novel’s conclusion, proving that his name, which translates to “Red Herring,” holds true. The contribution solicited by the spammer is an authorial rather than a monetary one. The missing manuscript has yet to be written, and it is only through the “heroic assist” of the digital diaspora that the blank pages will be filled.

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The New Ilustrados The association of Isip’s granddaughter Girly Bastos-Arrayko with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo gestures at a larger purpose.58 The digital diaspora’s access to open and direct online communication creates a vital opportunity for revolution—or, at the least, a chance to critique government policies and practices, particularly those limiting self-expression. The novel’s insistence upon active, labor-intensive reading practices encourages commiseration among readers, who must become adept at making connections within and across print and digital spaces, not to mention genres and texts. A member of the nineteenth-century ilustrado group, Rizal applied similar logic more than a hundred years before Ilustrado. The original ilustrados constituted middle- and primarily upper-class Filipino males who were mostly educated abroad as a literate and literary class. In addition to artwork, the cultural products of their many anticolonial efforts include Rizal’s Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not, 1887) and El Filibusterismo (The Filibustering or The Subversive, 1891), and numerous other novels, poems, speeches, essays, and articles—many of which were openly didactic. Rizal wrote that disunity and feuding among provinces were more likely to occur before communication and movement between islands became easier. With innovative access to “steamers” and “telegraph-lines,” Rizal hoped that the “exchange of impressions [would] naturally increase,” allowing many to realize that they are “threatened by the same peril and wounded in the same feelings, [and should accordingly] clasp hands and make common cause.”59 Simply put, he believed that access to wider, more intimate communication would foster seeds of revolution, inspiring more meaningful interpersonal collaborations based on shared histories and values. Rizal further felt that this enhanced network would improve government policies. Referring to the Philippines of the early 1900s, he admits that the “union is not yet wholly perfected, but to this end tend the measures of good government. . . . The Islands cannot remain in the condition they are without requiring from the sovereign country more liberty. Mutatis mutandis. For new men, a new social order.”60 But does this increased liberty in policy and communications create better government? After all, even Miguel’s death while attempting to save two children on a flooded street exposes the Philippine government’s unwillingness to care for its people: The poor often steal and resell manhole covers for income, making floods even more precarious “A Blank Page Rises Up”  155

in urban areas. Nevertheless, both Miguel and Crispin have confidence that laboring over the written word improves our ability to shape our interactions and our ways of being in the world. We make our governments just as we do our cultural beliefs, they insist, and authorship—in all its configurations—is central to rewriting our ethnic, historical, and national connections. As I argue in this section, Ilustrado calls attention to comparisons between Rizal’s ilustrado compatriots from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and today’s digital diaspora—including the empirical author Syjuco himself—to make a case for the intensity of required labor in our reading and writing habits and to extend the caring connections between reader and writer across temporal and geographical lines. Crispin and Miguel’s attitudes toward literature show that rather than squandering the opportunities that our increased lines of communication have opened for us, readers and writers— fictional or otherwise—should mobilize multiple layers of authorship to analyze and deconstruct governmentally sanctioned divisions between and across classes, nations, and ethnicities. Just as the original ilustrados used their writing and art to assert their existence in the face of colonizing erasure, Miguel and Crispin present literature as potentially revolutionary, even in its most popular forms. To illustrate, one of Crispin’s works, The Enlightened, could be another version of Ilustrado, which in Tagalog translates into the cultured, the educated, or the enlightened. The text’s doubled titles, Syjuco’s Ilustrado and Crispin Salvador’s intradiegetic The Enlightened, spotlight a historical juxtaposition of the writerly Filipino ilustrados of the late 1800s with today’s more multinational and economically diverse population. Raquel Reyes emphasizes the ilustrados’ literary innovations, noting that they “were the first to craft a specific nationalist vocabulary and to create a body of work that signaled, for the first time, a self-conscious effort to speak of a common heritage and a common destiny, to depict a particular, authentic and recognizably Filipino character and identity.”61 This nationalist sentiment—ignited partly in reaction to Spanish colonization—shifts its focus in Syjuco’s text to the digital diaspora. United by their authorial interactions, they are the new ilustrados. The connection between the historic and new ilustrados is most evident in their writings. Influenced by American and European ideals and even European Orientalism and American racial sciences of the nineteenth century,62 the early ilustrados produced documents defending their sovereignty and outlining 156  Chapter 4

their national and ethnic identities. They wrote, retrieved, and revised the narratives of their people both within and separate from their colonization, generating a prolific body of writings detailing shared and separate histories and prehistories, languages, and traditions. The ilustrados additionally inscribed policies and published their own propaganda and newspapers, including the famous La Solidaridad published in Barcelona and Madrid. Recent critics have revisited the nuances of the ilustrados’ body of work by returning to the authors themselves: that is, by reading the documents through their biographies. While a policy-minded lens shows the ilustrados writing solely to push for national sovereignty and revolution in the face of Spanish colonization,63 reading the biographical lives of the authors alongside their work proves that their interests extended far beyond Spain or even Europe in general, “reveal[ing] the surprising connections and creations possible among those who travel between and among peripheries and centers, intellectual traditions, and political strategies and visions.”64 In this case, a biographical reading extends and expands our knowledge of the ilustrado’s national self-perceptions. Even members of the ilustrado class themselves recognized boundaries between biography and fiction as imprecise, calling for the kind of multiplicity of authorship that accompanies the labor of reading Ilustrado. For instance, while Noli Me Tángere is fictional, Rizal insisted that events and characters were drawn from real-life observation. In a letter, Rizal explained that through his novel, he “endeavored to answer the calumnies which for centuries had been heaped on us and our country; I have described the social condition, the life, our beliefs, our hopes, our desires, our grievances, our griefs. . . .The facts I narrate are all true and actually happened; I can prove them.”65 Thus, as Teodoro Agoncillo insists, Rizal’s “book is a novel only in the sense that the technique employed by the author is that of fiction.”66 Rizal used the form to emphasize the reality of the conditions he and his fellow countrymen experienced, and to situate real lives within broader frameworks. While not as explicitly pointing out injustices stemming from ideals like nationalism and sovereignty, Syjuco’s novel nevertheless argues that Filipino American ethnicity can incorporate even those with less traditional ties to the Philippines. The scale of what counts as “Filipino American” in Ilustrado shifts outward to encompass those whose connections to each other are virtual, as well as inward to include the “real home country” of the reader-writer relationship.67 Incorporating knowledge of the empirical author expands this “A Blank Page Rises Up”  157

scale even further. For example, whereas Crispin and Miguel are squarely presented as Filipino Americans based in New York and occasionally criticizing Philippine politics from afar, Syjuco himself is far more multinational, living in various countries as well as writing most of Ilustrado in New York and Montreal, making Eleanor Ty’s term of “Asian North American” more applicable.68 The fictional Miguel too becomes a kind of world traveler, finding himself in the final chapter flying above a set of unnamed islands, suspended both in the narrative and in space, and then landing in a ghostly, metaphysical locale: an island shack “where the beginning and end circle to meet.”69 Providing several possible endings for Miguel’s character and disclosing the details of Miguel’s death, Crispin’s epilogue brings Miguel down to earth while also leaving him deliberately adrift. Juxtaposing the real-life Syjuco against the fictional Miguel and Crispin, then, adds a more global perspective to the unhomeliness that Miguel feels during his investigations into Crispin’s death and his search for the missing manuscript, which culminates in this room with its empty boxes. The digital diaspora provides the ultimate challenge to authenticity by posing one’s “real” home country as neither the home country of one’s ancestors nor the country in which the new generations now live. Instead, removed from these limitations, the fluidity of authorship and the creative interactions found online and through other collaborative writing and suspended spaces provide alternatives to defining ethnic identity, whether it is through a blog post, social media interaction, or even a joke. In Ilustrado, Rizal’s and Miguel’s worlds meet most prominently in moments when characters defend individual rights and expression in the face of domestic or foreign governments. Crispin relates how, in January 1970, the pregnant poet Mutya Dimatahimik lay down in front of a tank to protect protesters besieging the presidential Malacañang Palace.70 When questioned about her bravery, Mutya shares Rizal’s dedication in Noli Me Tángere. His words, written in 1886 and dedicated “To My Country,” place Spanish colonization of the Philippines alongside other “human suffering” in history, concluding that he “will strive to reproduce thy condition faithfully, without prejudice; I will lift the veil hiding your ills, and sacrifice everything to the truth, even my own pride, since, as your son, I, too, suffer your defects and shortcomings.”71 Rizal frames his writing as an exposé beholden to what he calls “truth,” with the understanding that his words may require work and persistence to 158  Chapter 4

be fully heard. Both thrilled and horrified by memories of Mutya’s audacity, Crispin opines, “And yet, ‘No lyric has ever stopped a tank,’ so said Seamus Heaney. Auden said that ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ Bullshit! I reject all that wholeheartedly! What do they know about the mechanics of tanks? How can anyone estimate the ballistic qualities of words?”72 The ballistic power of words is why Ilustrado calls on the digital diaspora to continue reading and writing Filipino/American literature in multiple forms and genres, despite the danger of disinterest or critical opposition. The novel suggests that part of the opposition to crucial works of literature comes from members of the digital diaspora themselves. While this educated, transnational class of new ilustrados can “sacrifice everything to the truth” on an even wider scale than Rizal, Ilustrado instead shows how their dissatisfaction with Filipino/American literature leads to unattainable standards of wholeness and authenticity. On Crispin’s work, for example, Miguel’s friend explains, “We just wanted the most visible Filipino writer in the world to be more authentically Filipino.”73 Another friend dismisses one of Crispin’s novels as “too Manila-centric” and another as “Not authentic enough. It didn’t capture the essence of the Filipino.”74 This policing of identity extends to Miguel himself when his friends ask him, “How can you [an expatriate] write about the Philippines?”75 One way to interpret these criticisms is in terms of labor: These readers recognize the extra effort required to imagine a scenario in which someone with an openly fragmented sense of self like Miguel or Crispin could write texts that feel “authentic.” The jabs further point to how much is at stake when one chooses to write about ethnic and national identity in transnational and political contexts, struggles that were not foreign to Rizal. Many view categories of “Filipino American” and “Filipino” as mutually exclusive at the same time that they are placed along hierarchies of class and knowledge: While Sadie’s father admires Miguel’s “pure” American accent,76 for instance, his friends assert that his transnational upbringing and cosmopolitan mindset negate any credibility or authenticity readers might give him. The new ilustrados are in danger, then, not only of replicating the perils that plagued Rizal’s feelings of oppression in the 1800s but also of repeating historical shortcomings of authenticity upheld by ideas such as classical multiculturalism. Ignacio notes that in digital spaces, the weight of the US’s multicultural limitations on ethnic self-expression emerges in jokes and other interactive communications that are ostensibly less didactic and labor-intensive. Filipino “A Blank Page Rises Up”  159

American participants, even more so than their Philippine counterparts, experienced difficulties integrating “their ideas about race, gender, colonialism, citizenship, nationalism, and the rigidity and authenticity of cultural boundaries. . . . [T]he attempt to define authenticity showed them that traditional boundary making and adjudicating membership based on these traditional categories is a problem.”77 Just as Crispin’s exile in New York (a consequence of often inflammatory political statements made in his literature) allows him to write some of his most critical and influential work, the members of the digital diaspora—including those in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the Middle East—are in unique positions to redefine the borders of authorship as well as ethnic and national belonging. The challenge that I put forth as present in Ilustrado—of mobilizing authorship in service of more capacious identities and government policies—then hearkens back to the original ilustrados while further gesturing to the present digital diaspora, including the more domestic members of the literati, principally writers, readers, and critics of Filipino and Filipino American literature in the Philippines and the US. Remarkably, rumors of the literary world situate these very groups as obsolete, rare, or even nonexistent. For example, Bino Realuyo relates how a New York literary agent told a colleague that “nobody reads Filipino books.” He adds that “in the United States, publishing a Filipino author is synonymous to saving an endangered species from extinction.”78 Meanwhile, in Ilustrado, fictional critic Avellaneda writes that Crispin’s exile in New York was “a metaphor for an anonymous death.”79 The perception that Filipino American literature has no viable audience inspires Crispin’s encouragement to forge one’s own writerly home country and self-perception. Echoing Rizal’s promise to lift the veil over one’s defects and weaknesses, Crispin advises Miguel that his writing should “Quit hiding behind our strengths and stand beside our weaknesses and say, These are mine! These are what I’m working to fix! Learn to be completely honest. Then your work will transcend calendars and borders.”80 As if in response to this intimate ownership, Crispin himself writes and publishes multiple genres worldwide, compelled by the same fervor that inspired Mutya Dimatahimik to stop a tank. Our narrator asks us to comprehend the work involved in becoming an author and a Filipino American on a global scale, represented even in Ilustrado’s citations of public speeches and online dialogues alongside Crispin’s published work in popular and scholarly genres. 160  Chapter 4

In terms of audience, structure, and genre, Crispin encourages his literary ward to craft his writerly identity based on his own ideals, rather than being bogged down in the past or in market-driven notions of what should constitute Asian American or Filipino American literature. Describing the digital diaspora’s “domestic” members entrenched in the homelands, Crispin relates, Our heartache for home is so profound we can’t get over it, even when we’re home and never left. Our imaginations grow moss. So every Filipino novel has a scene about the glory of cooking rice, or the sensuality of tropical fruit. And every short story seems to end with misery or redemptive epiphanies. . . . First step, get over it, man. I forget which jazz man said that it takes a long time before you can play like yourself.81 Crispin instructs Miguel to disregard the publishers, literary critics, and others who would seek to define himself and his literature based on preconceived notions of authenticity. While Avellaneda accuses Crispin of committing “the biggest sin a Pinoy can commit” by arrogantly engaging in a “tirade against our literature,”82 Crispin’s impetus, then, is to highlight themes and genres that would normally be excluded from this literature in the first place. Without this momentum to expand the boundaries of this literature, all that would remain is akin to what Miguel has left at the novel’s closing: three empty cardboard boxes and the knowledge of a manuscript, still missing. Crispin’s missing manuscript recalls other lost ethnic American works such as Japanese American author John Okada’s oeuvre outside of his classic No-No Boy. Responsible for bringing No-No Boy to a wider audience, Lawson Fusao Inada and Frank Chin lament Okada’s lost words in heartbroken tones: Chin resorts to sheer rage at the loss, and Inada uses the phrase “it hurt” half a dozen times to describe how Okada’s wife, Dorothy, tried and failed to garner interest in her husband’s writing, resorting to burning what remained of his near-finished second novel because, as she explained to Chin, “Nobody had any use for them. Nobody wanted them.”83 Crispin’s empty boxes and missing manuscript also evoke the irrecoverable works of Filipino literature lost to history, natural disaster, political censorship, and—as Realuyo and others suggest—the sheer indifference of its potential readership. In the suspended space of the island shack amid the three cardboard boxes, however, is hope for expanding both literature and Miguel’s writerly perspective of himself. Finding the boxes empty, a disoriented Miguel realizes, “That which “A Blank Page Rises Up”  161

was missing only outlined that which was not. Their emptiness contained the entirety of what had been lived, and the certainties of how it ended, how it must end for each of us.”84 The novel argues that we have only one life to fill the pages of our identities. Or, as [email protected] might put it, our “heroic assist” to restore the legacy of lost manuscripts depends on us using all chances to connect with others through writing, to continually define and redefine our ethnic identity in response to a dynamic, transnational readership. This call to action explains the fourth ending proposed by Crispin for Ilustrado, the conclusion that he posits “will eventually make the most sense: A blank page rises up to receive black letters. . . . I transform memory into fiction. . . . The door closes. Silence. Only the cold city breath on my face. I transform fiction into memory.”85 Crispin describes an autofictional moment of writing and rewriting, an act of self-creation—or the creation of memory—inspired by the belief that every story has more than one possible ending. The one text named by title in the conclusion confirms the argument of this final scene. Beside Miguel and the three empty boxes is the metafictional Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, written by “the Bombay lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali.”86 Ali is a fictional character in another genre-bending text, “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” whose author Jorge Luis Borges described as “both a hoax and a pseudo-essay.”87 In “The Approach,” Borges’s narrator describes Ali’s “insatiable search for a soul by means of the delicate glimmerings or reflections this soul has left in others,”88 which we may read too as a lovely metaphor for how Miguel and Crispin write to and for each other. Just as Miguel seeks out Crispin’s daughter Dulcinea, Ali’s unnamed law student pursues the elusive Al-Mu’tasim via eyewitnesses whose divine natures form “an ascending progression” throughout the tale.89 Borges’s narrator suggests that the law student’s ensuing search confirms that God himself is “in search of a yet superior,”90 but we might also read this as the law student pursuing the ever-elusive missing manuscript: Writers in multiple spaces will eventually find what they seek, but only if they write in collaboration with their readers, expanding the borders of that “real home country.” Like Ilustrado, Ali’s fictional book induces deliberate metaleptic discomfort in readers. For instance, Borges rather proudly reported how a friend tried to order the fictional “Approach” from a London bookstore.91 More significantly, Borges’s essay illustrates a moment of an author finding his voice, learning, as is commonly attributed to Miles Davis, that “sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” As if contemplating this idea, Borges 162  Chapter 4

muses that “The Approach” anticipated his more famous stories, metafictional tales that Italo Calvino refers to as “potential literature.”92 For Syjuco, as for Miguel and Crispin, this literature finds its greatest potential in the elusive digital diaspora of writers who have access to the world through their keyboards. While Miguel never finds Dulcinea—evoking Miguel de Cervantes’s foiled quest—Crispin, in his Kaputol trilogy, finds her as the protagonist Dulcé, who promises to write “a book of possibilities.”93

Layers of Authorship: Everett Writes Turner Writes Styron While Percival Everett’s novels acknowledge and sometimes honor the multicultural movements that emerged in the wake of the fight for African American studies through his fictional examinations of African American identity, his novels further contend with the limitations placed upon the African American literary tradition, subsequently troubling these boundaries in productive and creative ways. His novel Percival Everett by Virgil Russell centers on the relationship of a father and son who take turns narrating the text in increasingly dizzying and overlapping ways. The father and son’s stories and their conversations about the stories are interspersed with a cast of characters both fictional and real: Historical figures such as the antislavery rebellion leader Nat Turner, author William Styron, and even Charlton Heston coexist alongside fictional characters like the ranch owner turned contractor turned doctor Murphy Lang and the painter Gregory Lang.94 As the stories and storytellers weave and intermingle, the narrator’s identity becomes ever more nebulous, as does the relationship between narrator and audience. At one point, readers are even led to believe that the son is dead and that the father is telling his stories to a ghost. At first, the multivocality and shifting perspectives smack of common postmodern gameplay. The metafictional nature of the text—first referenced even in the novel’s title—recalls the playful and introspective narcissism that characterizes works by John Barth, Italo Calvino, and others. However, embedded within this playfulness is a seriousness that in Virgil Russell emerges in this very space of metafictional ambiguity. Metafiction empowers Everett to access identity defined across textual and temporal borders and in interactions between characters, readers, and the text. Ethnicity becomes not a category of identity, but an event emerging out of intimate relationality. “A Blank Page Rises Up”  163

Stacey D’Erasmo observes that the intimacy readers feel with any text is found in both the closeness portrayed between two characters and the environment of the text itself. She points out that “the textual where of [the characters’] meetings, the meeting ground, the figurative topos—and by this I don’t mean physical locations where characters meet, but locutions, places in language that they share—actually produces not only opportunities for intimacy, but also the actual sense of intimacy: it is, sometimes, the thing itself.”95 Intimacy manifests itself both in relationships between characters and in how the text implicates readers, drawing them into the language. By deliberately emphasizing the world outside the text and pulling the reader outside of the textual environment, texts like Everett’s expand D’Erasmo’s idea of intimacy. As will be seen in this section, the very self-referential nature of metafiction is what, for Everett, allows an effective exploration of African American subjectivity. By manipulating the layers of authorship—and of history and ethnicity—in the text, Everett’s novel collapses the biographical and content-oriented characteristics that we normally depend on to define African American literature and authors, thereby allowing us to critique the critiques of the genre and have a more interconnected standpoint. Arguing for restraint against the way we regard ethnic history and its corresponding literature, Kenneth Warren provocatively asserts that African American literature was itself a product emerging in response to racial inequality and segregation that have since ended. Suggesting that the consistent logic and aims characterizing Jim Crow–era writing no longer apply, Warren argues that “with the legal demise of Jim Crow, the coherence of African American literature has been correspondingly, if sometimes imperceptibly, eroded as well.”96 He asserts that African American writing, as a response to social inequality, no longer exists as a cohesive literary practice. While Erdrich’s Shadow Tag and Apostol’s Gun Dealers’ Daughter showed that author-characters inform their ethnicity by accessing multiple histories, cultures, and nationalities, Warren posits economic class as the more distinctive and appropriate marker for literary genres. He ultimately associates African American literature with a unified, teleological sense of historical progress that Erdrich’s and Apostol’s protagonists feel to be nonexistent. This section thus returns to the temporal and the historical by connecting the instability of historical accounts to the dynamics of authorship and literary criticism. While I argue that Virgil Russell challenges Warren’s perception of 164  Chapter 4

a monolithic, historically specific body of African American literature, Warren asks similar questions to those suggested by Everett’s numerous works of fiction: Who defines authors of African American literature, and by what standards? What is Black writing now, as opposed to in the past? And given the fact that others continue to characterize African American writing as a static body of work, how can we account for its variances in content, purpose, and style over time? Everett shares Warren’s concerns about how readers and consumers place undue emphasis on limiting definitions of African American writing. And while these limits may have helped such multicultural institutions as education defend the value of retrieving, publishing, and studying these texts in addition to—or even in place of—canonical texts, each writer argues, in divergent ways, that these limitations have outgrown their helpfulness in terms of defining African American literature and ethnicity. Everett complicates the question of definitions in his most famous novel, Erasure. Not unlike Everett himself, Erasure’s protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is a writer whose experimental works often defy typical expectations of ethnicity and genre. For instance, although Monk’s novels predominantly include philosophical contemplations from Euripides to Mark Twain, his work continually faces criticism like “The novel is finely crafted, with fully developed characters, rich language and subtle play with the plot, but one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience.”97 Monk is further frustrated by the commercial success of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a novel whose story of a Black woman’s horrific experiences at the hands of Black men is touted as a marvelous representation of authentic African American life. Monk censures a literary world that would make Jenkins its darling while silencing other texts and voices deemed “inauthentic.” As Erasure exposes the danger of valorizing a monolithic African American voice that affirms Black stereotypes, the author-characters of Virgil Russell would argue that African American writing is not limited to one genre, topic, or historical movement. The novel is a hybrid text of linear and nonlinear forms and genres. Replete with literary, cultural, and philosophical allusions, Virgil Russell literalizes Barthes’s assertion that a text “is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”98 The first half of the novel is a collection of stories that seep into each other, giving way in the second half to a linear-appearing plot about the father’s exploits in a nursing home.99 “A Blank Page Rises Up”  165

At the center of the novel is the father-son writing team, at once each other’s writers and audience to the point that the two begin to blur. Virgil Russell therefore posits a relational model of authorship on the most intimate scale—the moments of connection between two people. In contrast to multicultural education presenting literary studies on the level of the nation or ethnic group (such as African American literature), Everett foregrounds this single relationship between the father and son storytellers and then expands it, demonstrating how this intimate form of writing incorporates larger temporal and generic frames that go beyond discrete considerations of ethnic American literary genres. Unlike Warren, Everett does not relegate African American literature to a specific era and announce its demise; rather, the novel focuses on form and relationality to first contract and then enlarge current views of African American literature. Rather than limiting our definitions of African American genres, he seeks to widen the characterization in broad strokes. In other words, Everett hopes to expand the classification of African American literature to the point where its very arbitrariness as a category is exposed. The novel complicates the teleological emphasis that critics like Warren have inflicted on African American literary history, primarily through Everett’s use of Nat Turner as a recurring character. The famous leader of the Virginia antislavery rebellion was executed in 1831, almost half a century before the emergence of Jim Crow laws. The enigmatic Turner was literate and devoutly Christian, directly tying biblical tenets to manumission. His revolt, the bloodiest in US history, sparked fears of more insurrections, leading to heightened rhetoric for abolition on the one hand and a tamping down of freedoms of enslaved people on the other. This increasingly widening national rift helped create the tense conditions that incited the Civil War a few decades later. Turner later reemerged in the popular consciousness with William Styron’s imagining of the rebellion in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, published soon after the legislative dismantling of Jim Crow. While Styron portrays Turner as both a terror and a victim, Everett’s novel presents Nat Turner as an author, proving the instability of Turner’s historical role through the controversy surrounding his “confessions.” In doing so, Virgil Russell confronts the idea that African American literature and ethnicity grew out of the Jim Crow era by hearkening back to a representative example of contentious storytelling that challenged racial inequality well before African American writers protested Jim Crow in their work. Everett decontextualizes 166  Chapter 4

Turner in order to challenge critical inclinations to tie African American ethnicity to particular historical periods or experiences. Everett even suggests that the genre reaches backward to an era before the term “African American” existed. The first appearance Turner makes in Virgil Russell is to defy the subjection that he experienced in real life. In a reversal of authorship and authority, the character Murphy dreams that Turner is writing The Confessions of Bill Styron, rather than the other way around. The father tells his son, “You could write that [novel for Turner], then follow it with The Truth about Natty by Chingachgook.”100 The authorship of Turner and Chingachgook, the Mohican chief who advises Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, offers instances not of writing back to the dominant powers, but of literally rewriting and decentering privilege. In his author’s note, Styron writes, “Perhaps the reader will wish to draw a moral from this narrative, but it has been my own intention to try to re-create a man and his era, and to produce a work that is less a ‘historical novel’ in conventional terms than a meditation on history.”101 Styron does not profess historical accuracy but promises to bring the character and era to life in an unprejudiced way. Even so, Styron based his novel on interview “transcriptions” taken in 1831 by a lawyer, Thomas Gray, whom many scholars contend was not simply an amanuensis who recorded Turner’s words but a partial (mis)shaper of those words. Both Gray’s and Styron’s texts are controversial, particularly regarding the fraught and, in Styron’s case, consciously distorted nature of the accounts, and the appropriation of Turner’s voice in both works.102 Critics at the time of the publication of Styron’s novel were chiefly disturbed by what they read as the novelist’s attempts to demonize Turner’s sexuality and to present him as a vacillating and timid leader.103 Whereas Styron purports to “re-create” Turner and the events leading to his death, the father-son writing team in Everett’s novel makes no claim of historical accuracy. Virgil Russell’s writers instead situate Turner in an intimate framework that intertwines Turner’s and Styron’s histories. As if in response to past biases against the insurrectionist, the father envisions Turner’s reaching forward in time to take poetic license with the story of William Styron (“Nat says, it’s only fair that I too get to tell what is true . . .”104). In this way, the father rewrites Turner to attach Turner’s story to his own. Expanding the concept of authorship and self-perception, the novel suggests that Turner is a writer whose tale can be gleaned from the surfaces of the misrepresented and mishandled stories that evoke him in the present. As Everett’s narrator writes, “There are “A Blank Page Rises Up”  167

no realities that are more real than others, only more privileged.”105 The father honors his imagined vision of Turner above what he implies are the equally imagined confessions rendered by Gray and Styron. The father’s attempt to establish an intimate connection with Turner does not, however, come easily. The novel distances Nat Turner from the protagonists’ storyworld and reality. In one scene, the father describes Murphy as a doctor accepting as payment a collection of Leica cameras, and Murphy, peering through one camera, “sees” Nat Turner—someone who had before appeared only in his dreams—smiling at him, ghostlike.106 Virgil Russell represents several layers of writing: The real-life author Everett writes the father and son, who in turn write Murphy, who in turn envisions Nat Turner, who was himself re-created by Gray and Styron. These layers of authorship mirror the layers of existence that Turner himself occupies: He is a man whose identity has been written and rewritten by history, the truth of his experiences distorted to represent a simulacrum of reality, like what one sees in a photograph or a dream. By their nature, photographs inaugurate a different version of the world at the same time they are meant to represent and even stand in for reality. Similarly, Turner is ubiquitous and unknowable, not unlike Everett himself, whose implied and constructed authorial presence haunts the pages of his novels. Everett adds a temporal element to these distortions of Nat Turner by placing the man and his poker-playing friends in the middle of the Civil Rights era. The poetic license that the father takes with Turner’s story allows the father to bridge the temporal gap between them and provide his own meditation on Turner’s history to counter Styron’s. Jess Row’s defense of Styron’s novel states that the author’s liberties with history have a deliberately artistic motivation, adding that more recent historical novels such as Morrison’s Beloved and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian “embody a radically different sensibility, one that refuses to collapse the past into the present and that makes history almost fetishistically ‘different,’ difficult to accept or assimilate.”107 Everett exposes the arbitrariness of such a literary distinction by collapsing the past and the present around Turner, a misunderstood figure whose story and history as an enslaved person were never acceptable or accessible in the first place. The novel imagines a writerly identity for Turner, one that complicates the association of authorship with authority. On the Mall on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington, Turner fumes that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee edited his speech. And in an eerie parallel, Turner views Martin 168  Chapter 4

Luther King Jr.’s consternation the next day when the latter discovers his own speech has been stolen and replaced with a different one, possibly by the FBI. The orator’s shock later matches Turner’s own when Turner realizes the FBI actually gave King “the bogus confession that had been attributed to [Turner] by that white devil Thomas Gray.”108 Turner’s “bogus” words are fed to King to infiltrate his influence over his audience. King, however, manages to speak extemporaneously. Had the defrauders succeeded, the King of Virgil Russell might not have delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, itself an assemblage of cultural allusions, quotes from the Bible and King’s colleagues, and lyrics from American folk songs. It is no coincidence that Turner, himself a figure whom we have similarly pieced together via an array of historical writings, is present to hear King’s most famous address. This fragmented biography echoes that of Everett’s author-narrators, who tell their lives piecemeal. Placing Turner’s questionable “confessions” in King’s hands further stresses how others have appropriated both men’s voices—during and after their lifetimes. Turner’s authorship has been confounded by the levels of narratives heaped upon his own, a form of erasure over which Turner had no practical control. Using many fewer pages than the major works that preceded it, Everett’s anachronistic account of Turner’s words humanizes the historical figure in a way that relates Turner’s amusement, frustrations, and fears, and ascribes to him the wry humor and honesty of a man more knowledgeable than popular history has made him out to be. Furthermore, Everett challenges Warren’s claim of a historicized African American literary genre by narrowing the temporal scale between Turner and King. Deemed by many to mark the beginning of Civil Rights and the beginning of the end of the judicial and legislative existence of Jim Crow, King’s speech is born out of a response to structural oppression that began with the systemic mistreatment of enslaved people such as Nat Turner. Michelle Alexander deliberately takes Jim Crow segregation out of its historicized context, stating, “African Americans have repeatedly been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but are then reborn in a new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.”109 Warren, responding to Alexander in PMLA, insists her use of the term “Jim Crow” is largely metaphorical, as the legislative impetus behind the laws no longer exists. We cannot, however, deny the material conditions relating to racial inequality that existed before Jim Crow and continue today, exemplifying “A Blank Page Rises Up”  169

what Alexander identifies as the moral equivalent of Jim Crow, arguably even more insidiously effective in enacting legalized systems of racial control and segregation.110 Everett places the rebellion leader Turner in conversation with the orator King, highlighting how their words and images have been distorted by others. He illustrates how, despite their having opposite philosophies of violence and protest, the two nevertheless have much in common, both with one another and with the father who connects their stories in the present. Everett productively juxtaposes their writerly responses to the limitations inflicted upon them by their skin color, showing how intimate moments of connection can occur across a historical continuum. While Everett’s version of Turner attaches him to a literary tradition of writers like Virginia Woolf, the father places himself in a tradition of authors that includes Turner, presenting them as fellow writers seeking to expand assessments of their abilities that extend beyond skin color. He explains to his son, “What I am telling you is a story about Nat Turner and William Styron. This is my way of giving you my history, on this eve of my visit to the gallows, and much of your understanding of my history, and therefore yours, relies on your acknowledgment that I am a prophet of sorts.”111 Prophecy in this temporal sense becomes a synonym for storytelling, an act the father accomplishes on his deathbed, possibly even after his death. As storyteller, prophet, and historian, the father writes his past, and in turn creates an origin story for his son as well. Everett’s novel ultimately questions the arbitrariness of ethnic categories based on historical events. As far as the father is concerned, Turner’s existence before the advent of the term “African American” or the institutionalization of Jim Crow is immaterial to the role Turner plays in his history as a Black writer. The intimacy of language opens a space to claim that which is otherwise inaccessible and incomplete. Language also, the father suggests, allows its authors to present or not present themselves and their place in time. The father relates, “[H]owever much constructed, affirmed, and validated by the very structure of the language that allows at least a pretense of making meaning, I am able to reveal my story without locating myself in the telling, at the time of the telling. Perhaps not even whether I am in fact the narrator at all.”112 The father challenges reader expectations that are simultaneously supported and confounded by the self-referential techniques of metafiction. As writer, storyteller, and prophet, he appoints himself the authority over his views of history and its power to define him. 170  Chapter 4

Confronting the Shadowers Xiomara Santamarina offers a different approach to Kenneth Warren’s study, stating that he implies that “chucking or giving up the past and its iterations of black particularity might be a more effective way of producing progressive political transformations.”113 To put it another way, Warren relegates African American literature to the time of Jim Crow with the ultimate intention of doing away with inequality, of moving literary genres away from racial politics and into other realms—most notably that of class. Black authors of the Jim Crow era, Warren argues, “were expected to produce work that exhibited or presumed black difference as a distinct and needful thing, even as they acknowledged, lamented, and sought to overcome the conditions that produced that difference.”114 He asserts that the only effective response to these restrictions is to relegate the ethnic designator to the past, allowing one to give up history’s worrisome associations with Black essentialism. In this light, it is easy to see how a novelist like Thelonious Ellison or, for that matter, Percival Everett might see problems in the “African American” literary category, similar to Crispin Salvador’s complaint that Filipino American literature seems to require mention of “the sensuality of tropical fruit.”115 Specifically, Everett and Warren challenge the intrinsic assumption that all Black writing must deal with racial oppression or a specific version of African American life, like the folk traditions privileged by critics such as Houston Baker. However, in exploring Warren’s text, Santamarina likewise exposes its limitations. “What,” she asks, would the implementation of Warren’s argument “look like in an egalitarian society?”116 The very nature of her inquiry uncovers a problem with Warren’s line of reasoning. After all, what Warren calls for is a stark and immediate transformation of how African American literary tradition has operated since its emergence as a field. He suggests, in its place, a paradigm that removes the “problematic assumption of race-group interest” from the genre altogether.117 Then again, Santamarina posits that what Warren is arguing is fully possible only in, as she puts it, an “egalitarian society” that “giv[es] up the past.”118 But would a truly egalitarian society require such dismissal of historical narratives? And is relegating African American literature to obsolescence the most effective way to enact the disciplinary ruptures needed to achieve this vision? These questions invoke David Hollinger’s argument for voluntary over involuntary affiliations, ethnic identity based not on blood but “A Blank Page Rises Up”  171

on “affiliation by revocable consent.”119 While Hollinger is correct to prefer the latter, his argument rests on the utopian assumption that voluntary affiliations are equally accessible for enactment on comprehensive scales. The worlds that would accommodate Hollinger’s and Warren’s visions, unfortunately, have yet to arrive. Virgil Russell offers an alternative response to these visions. The narrator relates an anecdote about a friend who theorized that race does not exist. The father recalls that a “low-level academic took [a friend of his] to task about his so-called theory . . . the hack academic, his name was Housetown Pastrychef or Dallas Roaster, something like that, wrote that my friend was essentially full of excrement and that, furthermore, race was not only a valid category but a necessary one. This may or may not have been true.”120 This story comes after a series of others about academics losing touch with reality, each suggesting academia’s failure to relate to the people about whom the scholars write, particularly in the context of multicultural and ethnic studies. While Everett does not excuse himself from this company, he does critique the applicability of such theories to material, lived conditions. He recognizes the value of academic pursuits to challenge closed-minded ideas of race but also underscores that these pursuits are limited. Houston Baker—the Housetown Pastrychef referenced—offers Richard Wright as an example of someone who properly rendered African Americans’ humiliation in shocking detail. Baker asserts that, unlike Wright, other authors have traded their critical memory and even their very identities to be “liked” by white America.121 Mirroring the father’s story in Virgil Russell about the academic’s critiques, Baker laments that “Ellison’s ‘ghosts’—his shadowers . . . have gladly accepted the affirmative action benefits and rewards bestowed by race in America while writing fiercely with studied hypocrisy that there is no such thing in America as race.”122 Baker derides authors such as Charles Johnson and Ernest Gaines as ungrateful for the strides that their literal and literary African American fathers have made for equality. Part of Baker’s proof of these novelists’ pursuit of white likeability is the wide acclaim Ellison and his “shadowers” have received from critics, white or otherwise. He suggests that their acceptance is fueled by the content of their works, which show none of the oppression that he feels is indicative of serious African American literature. Intriguingly, Baker’s disapproval of Ellison and his counterparts mirrors the condemnation that Wright himself expressed for Zora Neale Hurston’s novel 172  Chapter 4

Their Eyes Were Watching God. Wright surmised that “Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh.”123 While Baker and Wright have innovated our approaches to African American literary traditions, both privilege a vernacular element of protest writing that dismisses and silences voices such as Hurston’s. While not explicitly tying African American literature and ethnicity to a specific time or legislative agenda, they insinuate that some versions are more legitimate and honorable than others. Baker’s critique of Erasure speaks to this privileging of specific representations of African Americanness when he says that the novel “for all its parodic and deconstructive energy and achievement is completely clean, clear, and empty before what I believe is the signal social and political fact of its time, namely, the Ronald Reagan/George Herbert Walker Bush compromise of American decency and rights that has produced George W. Bush.”124 Thus, Baker faults Erasure for not dealing with what he feels were the most pertinent issues at the time of the book’s writing. One cannot help but wonder if Baker meant the criticism in jest. Like the critic in Erasure who is “lost to understand what [Monk’s] reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience,”125 Baker reads Everett’s Erasure—a novel about the troubled reception of African Americans in literature—and cannot believe it fails to mention Reagan’s policies in the White House.126 After Baker indicts Erasure’s failure to examine the Reagan legacy, he goes on to say that the novel’s one redeeming virtue is that its protagonist Monk brings to mind the jazz musician whom Baker identifies as the “actual” Thelonious Monk.127 In Baker’s purview, there is only room for one Thelonious Monk, and the man who writes of Aeschylus, metaphysics, and French poststructuralism is not the one. The father in Virgil Russell is in some ways just as dismissive of “Housetown Pastrychef,” claiming to be insufficiently knowledgeable about the literary controversy and stating that the debate leaves him “feeling like I was looking at a clock with three hands.”128 Meanwhile, the father’s friend dismisses the academic as having “made his living and career out of being the ethnic.”129 The friend’s accusation opens up the question of intention, an idea central to authorship. Should authors’ or critics’ intentions make their words any less valid? What is the intended effect of what Everett’s narrator calls a “big bag of . . . Immaterial words”130 to those who may not understand them? And what “A Blank Page Rises Up”  173

does someone have to gain by asserting that race is no longer a necessary consideration in personal and professional relationships? By highlighting assertions of African American authorship not directly related to Warren’s Jim Crow legislation or to Baker’s critical memory, Everett is not necessarily placing himself alongside Ellison’s “shadowers” who believe that racism or racial inequalities no longer exist. Neither, despite Baker’s criticisms, is Everett dismissing the critic’s arguments offhand. Centering Virgil Russell on the writing relationship between father and son may well be Everett’s attempt to honor his father’s memory in much the same way that Baker honors his own father in Critical Memory. Subtitled Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America, Baker’s text ties critical memory to the reverence one bestows upon Black men who navigated “American racial ‘likes’”131—that is, the careful negotiations of tolerance and compromises made for white acceptance. He relates, “None of the men from my growing-up time got rich, famous . . . or secured their sons’ futures. . . . [T]hey worked wherever and whenever they could to hasten the call and reality of a reported American meritocracy—a meritocracy renovated, or so one was told . . . by white men in charge of the American table.”132 The men of Baker’s father’s generation learned that the fights they engaged in during the Civil Rights era did not ensure a future for their sons or secure freedom from the racial anxieties they see emerging today. His reference to the “American table” of Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too, Sing America” places this generational hope for betterment before Baker’s father’s fight against Jim Crow. Despite Everett’s reference to Baker and Critical Memory, it is unclear whether Baker’s representation of Black fathers applies to the father in Virgil Russell. The latter divulges instances of ethnically based persecution,133 but the novel interrupts its circular and palimpsestic storytelling to relay instead, in common third-person narration, the father’s experiences in a nursing home. This linear storyline stands in stark contrast to all that has come before it and is inspired by the narrator’s admonition to “tell stories from now on without my interruptions.”134 In some ways a novel within a novel (not unlike the “My Pafology” section of Erasure), Virgil Russell’s nursing home plot resembles stories of raucous overthrows of institutions seen in novels such as Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Faced with staff members whose cruelty outweighs their kindness, the father teams up with his best friend and fellow 174  Chapter 4

patient/inmate Billy to gain a moment of freedom and, they hope, to have the malicious orderlies fired in the process. If hard-pressed, one might connect this attempted overthrow to Critical Memory’s conclusion, where Baker proclaims that, if we work “critically and memorially with the best of our past, there is just a chance Black fathers and sons may yet gather again in legions, genuinely about the business of redeeming ourselves.”135 After all, Everett dramatizes the destabilizing of an establishment whose oppression at first seems insurmountable, relaying a temporary victory at the end of the nursing home storyline that mimics the redemptive sentiment Baker desires. Virgil Russell’s victory, however, comes at a price: Billy is goaded into madness by one of the orderlies. Notably, the nursing home scenes are devoid of racial politics; Everett illustrates that enumerating ethnic strife is not the sole—or maybe even the most important—factor in self-identification. However hopefully Baker ends his message on the recuperation of critical memory, he aims the aforementioned call to “gather again in legions” not to people like the father in Virgil Russell, who fails to comprehend Housetown Pastrychef ’s claims, but to people who, “like Richard Wright, are literary and have social opportunity to profit from archives of Black writers, race men and race women who left examples of strategic, articulate, courageous interventions.”136 Just as Baker points to Wright as being properly respectful of African American critical memory, he concludes Critical Memory with the belief that it takes a certain level of opportunity and education to oppose the subjugation of “the majority.”137 He leaves it to the educated elite, whom W. E. B. Du Bois called the “Talented Tenth,”138 to enact change. Notably absent from Baker’s construction are people like the father in Virgil Russell, who, when asked why he insists on writing Lang as a ranch owner, responds to his son simply by saying, “The ranches are not mine.”139 He knows he lacks the opportunities of the educated class on whom those like Baker fasten their aspirations. It is here that the father reminds us, “There are no realities that are more real than others, only more privileged.”140 We can see that reality itself is a story, and that the material and cultural reality of the father’s life—not only Warren’s class and Baker’s race, but other factors as well—informs the way he reads and writes his and others’ stories. At the same time, this reality excludes him from the “majority” who Baker hopes will benefit from this change.141 However, while the father is left out of this constructed hope for future Black fathers and sons, there can be little doubt that Everett himself intends “A Blank Page Rises Up”  175

his readers to connect Virgil Russell’s fictional father to the real father whose name graces the dedication page. The novel opens with a dedication to Percival Leonard Everett, who died two years before the book’s publication. Knowing this biographical fact adds poignancy to the father and son’s scenes of collaborative storytelling. In fact, a review essay touting the pros and cons of metafiction cites Virgil Russell as a more meaningful example precisely because of the sincerity associated with the book’s dedication, noting, “Behind this satirical game of ‘Pin the Tail on the Narrator’ is Mr. Everett’s attempt . . . to find a deconstructed fictional form that matches the bewilderment and helplessness (and self-preserving impulse toward gallows humor) we feel in the presence of death.”142 The appearance in the novel’s title of the author’s and his father’s name, immediately followed by the dedication, begs for this layer of paratextual reading. The novel opens with the son visiting his father at a nursing home, the latter seemingly bedridden, and the son asks, “Why don’t you just admit that you’re working again?”143 Speculating that Everett is writing this novel in the wake of his father’s death, readers cannot help but imagine father and son—the two Percival Everetts—in conversation, or even the novel’s author Percival Everett in conversation with himself, imagining his father alive and able to respond. In this way, the reader is made aware of the conversation between father and son while they are simultaneously drawn into the drama of the grieving son, returning to his writing after his father’s death. Juxtaposing the real-life author alongside our fictional authors evokes what Eugen Simion calls the return of the author after the death knell of the author sounded by Barthes in 1967. Simion’s term is a bit misleading since he ultimately argues—as do Seán Burke, Benjamin Widiss, and others—that the author never really left the text. Similarly, by recalling the empirical author and responding to literary theorists in Virgil Russell, Everett commemorates the return of an author who remains, drawing attention to the philosophical and material registers on which authors operate in their work. Everett’s devastating portrayal of these two registers is best seen in the polyvocal storytelling of the two writer-protagonists: I could be writing you could be writing me could be writing you. I am a comatose old man writing here now and again what my dead or living son might write if he wrote or I am a dead or living son writing what 176  Chapter 4

my dying father might write for me to have written. I am a performative utterance. I carry the illocutionary ax. But imagine anyway that it is as simple as this: I lay dying. My skin used to be darker. Now, I am sallow, wan, icteric. I am not quite bloodless, but that is coming. I can hear the whistle on the tracks. I can also hear screaming, but it is no one I know.144 In the face of Baker’s proposed solution to the problems of Black fathers and sons in America, Everett offers his own startling response, one that moves beyond the abstractions of an educated and ideal literate class to instead focus on the intimate and visceral relationship between a son and his dying father. After proving how the author has never left the text, Simion observes that the failure of current forms of biographical reading stems from “the inexcusably narrow image of the creator’s life as seen in biographical criticism. The creator’s life is not a mere sum of details, it is a significant conduct, a collection of discontinuous, partly obscure facts and gestures, a line of open, ambiguous meanings.”145 In other words, biographical readings have failed precisely because critics have lost sight of actual human beings, downgrading authors to simple containable categories whose borders never traverse each other. Responding to the difficulties of containing grief and complex human relations to the printed page, Everett deliberately blurs such boundaries, challenging the notion that our identities could be so easily compartmentalized. While Simion goes on to lament how criticism has taken over literary works and has influenced literature in such a way that authors anticipate the potential theories and criticisms that will be weighed against their works,146 Everett and Syjuco’s critique of literary critics seeking to limit ethnic American fiction allows us to see how such conversations and connections can be initiated on both sides of the divide. Eventually, the only barrier that the son as narrator in Virgil Russell seems unable to cross is that which would allow him to see his father for who he is and to let go of him. In the end, he imagines his father calling roll of the people haunting his imagination—Nat Turner writing Styron’s confessions, and “Murphy and Lang, we’re all in here, in all our various time zones and dress and dementias. And I am here, too, refusing to, as my father put it, cram for finals. No holy ghost for me, no accepting this one as my lord and savior, my guide and bookie, my plumber and electrician.”147 Following this confession, Everett’s novel ends with two scenes—one an imagined tragic scenario of the father dying while saving his son from the Ku Klux Klan, and the other a scene “A Blank Page Rises Up”  177

seemingly plucked from memory: The father performs the role of victim to gain the son’s sympathy, pretending he had no responsibility for his wife’s infidelity. The scenes are paired in terms of power: The Klansmen take away their power and humanity under the mantle of white supremacy, just as his father had “usurped” his mother’s agency as a woman, a wife, and a mother.148 Describing his wife’s infidelity to his son earlier in Virgil Russell, the father recalls “being called a postmodernist,” one whose “work was about itself and process and not about objective reality and life in the world.”149 Solidifying the connection between his work and his wife’s infidelity, the father insists that she has abandoned them, knowing that returning would mean “she would be doomed to recognize her memories as constructions of a left world, necessarily fictions, necessary fictions, because in looking back, she would see a reality to which her memories might be compared and contrasted and she would know that her memories were not that world.”150 The son’s recollection—a memory of when his father learned of his mother’s infidelity and then performed a simulacrum of grief to widen the divide between himself and his mother—underscores an event in which humanity, “objective reality,” and his father’s postmodern storytelling collide. Like his mother, the son realizes that his father too creates necessary fictions, both in his writing life and in his “real” life. Both lives are part of the same continuum. Not unlike Ilustrado’s Crispin, he and his father “transform memory into fiction . . . [and] fiction into memory,”151 fostering a sense of self more in line with the way they want the world to be, a form of shared ethnic belonging. Together, they set the terms by which they define themselves and their personal and cultural histories.

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Epilogue Releasing Doubles into the World . . .

In the opening of the novel Pym, professor Chris Jaynes is shocked to learn he has been denied tenure due to his refusal to serve on the university’s multicultural diversity committee and his obsession with the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Ostensibly taking on Toni Morrison’s challenge to unearth the ghostly Black or “Africanist” presence in American literature, Jaynes seeks to discover within Poe’s prose “the intellectual source of racial Whiteness. Here, in these pages, was the very fossil record of how this odd and illogical sickness formed. Here was the twisted mythic underpinnings of modern racial thought that could never before be dismantled because we were standing on them.”1 Distraught not only at his sudden unemployment but at having lost his job to self-proclaimed “Hip-Hop Theorist” Mosaic Johnson—very likely a nod to the novel’s author, Mat Johnson—Jaynes is comforted only by his discovery of a manuscript by Dirk Peters, a supposedly fictional and presumably white character in Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Placing itself in the tradition of intertextual academic satires like Everett’s Erasure, Johnson’s Pym resembles and responds to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in both style and circumstance, with Chris Jaynes and his Dirklike companion Garth calling to mind Poe’s characters, not to mention Poe himself, in their various nautical and authorial adventures.2 The subgenre of academic satire further invokes an important distinction of metafiction: The power and ability to have one’s words read by others are a privilege that not all

can access. Chris’s job instability aside, his position nevertheless allows him freedom as a reader and writer, and his connections are what ultimately enable his story to be heard: Pym is presented as a written collaboration between the protagonist Chris Jaynes and a “Mr. Johnson” after the former has discovered and presumably returned from the very real Tsalal, the island of Black natives fictionalized in Poe’s tale. Of the island, Jaynes reports, “Whether this was Tsalal or not, however, Garth and I could make no judgments. On the shore all I could discern was a collection of brown people, and this, of course, is a planet on which such are the majority.”3 In this way, Jaynes’s story ends with a conclusion that is as mundane as it is profound. Jaynes’s argument that the problems of US racism may find solutions in the works of early American white authors is confirmed in Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, which devotes part of its inquiry to Poe’s tropes of darkness and light in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, proclaiming, “No early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe.”4 The pursuits of self-definition by authors of color via collaborative, selfconflicted, and even subversive forms of storytelling do not diverge from Jayne and Morrison’s mission, but rather add another layer to our contemplations of contemporary American identity. Morrison refers to the “dark and abiding presence” of the African American other as a “haunting,”5 a fitting metaphor for how the compulsion to reconfigure ethnicity within prescribed and unmoving lines has sparked fictional attempts to trouble those lines or even to redraw them completely in acts of self-care. Not only are the texts discussed here haunted by presences both within and beyond the books’ covers, but the driving need to historicize and contextualize Americanness has filled the literary world of the past few decades with authorial doubles, ghosts that materialize in and beyond the page to trouble existing narratives of ethnicity and identity. The spectrality in these works represents a break from categories of multicultural certainty as well as postmodern cynicism by embracing fluidity, ambiguity, and promise. In some texts, such as Everett’s or Syjuco’s novels, the ghosts are literal: otherworldly characters defying death to influence or directly author their stories alongside, in place of, or even as doubles of other authorial characters. These literal ghosts represent oppressed or forgotten beings or histories and interact with their doubles in defiance of laws about “reality” or rationality. Other presentations of ghostliness rely more on metaphor, on doubled representations of the literary and cultural histories and figures that 180 Epilogue

haunt the narrative’s form and content. For instance, in Krauss’s novel Forest Dark, a novelist (also named Nicole) begins her journey of self-discovery—what we might call a pursuit of the ghost of Franz Kafka—after she enters her home and realizes that she is already there, “moving through the rooms upstairs, or asleep in the bed; it hardly mattered what I was doing, what mattered was the certainty with which I knew that I was in the house already.”6 It is important to note that ghostliness works in multiple directions in these texts—so Krauss reads “Nicole” reading Kafka reading Krauss. Similarly, Morrison’s spectral 1992 reading of Poe haunts our contemporary and future readings of Poe’s 1838 novel, just as much as the historical Africanist presence and other prevailing literary and cultural influences of the day haunted Poe’s work.7 Pym’s use of supposedly fictional and deceased characters brought to life combines these modes of haunting. In Johnson’s novel, the ghosts become fleshly, ambulatory beings troubling the living. In the same way, Poe’s work occasions Pym’s structure and events, as Tsalal’s dark-skinned natives live on alongside Poe’s mysterious monstrous white figures. Consequently, nearly two hundred years after Poe penned his novel, the title character himself appears in Johnson’s text, “flopping like a stringless marionette.”8 When Pym finally awakens, he appraises the light-skinned Jaynes and his darker-skinned companions and asks, “[H]ave you brought these slaves for trading?”9 It is tempting to read the ghostly appearance of Pym in the traditional ways encouraged by multiculturalism: Johnson, as a Black author, is using this setup to speak back to dominant perceptions of African American males as uncivilized and uneducated, particularly in contrast to Pym, who appears well-regarded by his peers in both Poe’s and Johnson’s texts. Reading the novel through the lens of authorial self-care, however, shifts the focus away from presuming a dominant white audience while challenging the thought that Jaynes is intended to be an exceptional representation of African Americanness. An alternate look into Jaynes’s erudition could lead, for instance, to queries into how ethnic American literary scholars or even just people of color in general should best participate in academia, particularly when, in Jaynes’s case, academia is unwilling to let Jaynes participate in the first place. His solution of eschewing the academy altogether to coordinate an Arctic expedition resonates with professorial protagonists such as that of Percival Everett’s Telephone, in which, as in Pym, the protagonist’s shift away from the university job is as much an act of agency and self-care as it is the result of desperation. Epilogue  181

In a move that further encourages self-care, Pym asks writers and readers to question their obligations and responsibilities to expand the very boundaries of ethnicity, as well as the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of diversity-related discourse. (As Jaynes himself points out, “The Diversity Committee has one primary purpose: so that the school can say it has a diversity committee. . . . It’s sort of like, if you had a fire, and instead of putting it out, you formed a fire committee.”10) To suggest that Johnson’s tale, then, is merely a remonstrative reversal of Poe’s text is to oversimplify both works. The former certainly plays on the structure and content of the latter. Poe’s novel is afflicted with plot holes and inconsistencies characteristic of the serialized nature of the original work as well as the storyteller’s discomfort with the relatively new genre of the novel. Johnson, on the other hand, deliberately creates and embraces gaps by drawing attention to the willful presences that Poe’s text avoids. Those gaps tell us that the ghostly others who disturb the white page and the white American psyche are here, and have always been here. Ghostliness further draws attention to the cross-ethnic versions of the “Africanist” impulses that pervade much of American literature—that is, the “racially inflected language” from which Morrison argues there is “no escape.”11 While Morrison sought to exhume these specters in the form of literary criticism, both the imaginary and the empirical authors discussed in this book nurture and flesh out these restive spirits, demanding accountability via fiction and knowing that—even within this genre—no escape from issues of ethnicity and racism is possible. As Hari Kondabolu often proclaims in his stand-up work, “Saying that I’m obsessed with race and racism in America is like saying that I’m obsessed with swimming while I’m drowning.”12 The United States, Kondabolu implies, is defined as much by its racism as it is by its touted multicultural diversity. Or, to borrow from Haruki Murakami, “One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone.” As Americans and as humans, we are “linked deeply through [our] wounds.”13 A scalar expansion of Americanness seeks to understand the wounds of racism not just, as Jaynes would have it, at its early literary source but along a haunting historical continuum that views the present as speaking to the past and vice versa, and that recognizes history itself as personal, individual, and inconsistent. Moving both forward and backward in time, this authorial impulse provokes Nat Turner to write William Styron in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. It incites Jane and Akiko’s reimagining of Sei Shōnagon’s eleventh182 Epilogue

century lifewriting, The Pillow Book, in Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, as well as Nao’s overwriting of Proust in A Tale for the Time Being. It inspires Riel to access pastiche, amalgamation, and integration to write her family’s story, haunted by her parents’ ghosts, in Erdrich’s Shadow Tag. The literary time travel that inflects this approach to metafiction manifests itself as actual time travel in novels such as Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Kiese Laymon’s Long Division. In Yu’s novel, metafictional language gets encoded into time travel, with time travel devices like the Tense Operator indicating both a piece of machinery and a literal change in grammatical tenses. Meanwhile, Laymon’s text has two protagonists both named Citoyen “City” Coldson—one City exists in 2013, while the second, ghostlier City exists in 1985 and time travels to 1964 in the book-within-the-book (also titled Long Division). Visiting his grandmother in a small rural town in Mississippi, the City of the present is struck by how little in the local library resembles his life or experiences. Thinking about the mystical book-within-a-book containing the other City, he admits, “Even though the book was set in 1985, I didn’t know what to do with the fact that the narrator was black like me, stout like me, in the ninth grade like me, and had the same first name as me.”14 Faced with a similar version of himself on the page, City is more perplexed than relieved, unable at first to comprehend what this disturbing doubled resemblance could mean. He quickly adapts, however, admitting, “I just loved and feared so much about the first chapter of that book. For example, I loved that someone with the last name ‘Crump’ was in a book. Sounds dumb, but I knew so many Crumps in Mississippi in my real life, but I had never seen one Crump in anything I’d read.”15 Such an understanding defies the very presumptions of ethnic groups as distinct and well-defined categories that are represented and celebrated by multicultural diversity. Instead, City derives some hope from finding a mirror of himself, his friends, and his family in the novel within a novel, while knowing that many of the authors in his local library never imagined their writing might be read by someone like him. The shock of finally finding oneself in print—of recognizing your double on the printed page despite US erasures of marginalized groups—is its own kind of magical realism, one that in Laymon’s tale is as otherworldly as time travel. Writer Jacqueline Woodson sees the need for unearthing one’s double as an authorial calling, stating that her mission is “to create mirrors for the people who so rarely see themselves inside Epilogue  183

contemporary fiction, and windows for those who think we are no more than the stereotypes they’re so afraid of.”16 Woodson’s undertaking is echoed in Long Division: Like many novels discussed in this project, Laymon’s text begins as the story of a reader and ends with the birth of a writer. Both the 2013 and 1985 versions of City realize that it is their privilege and responsibility to fill at least some of the blank pages at the novel’s end in order to write all that haunts him. It is no coincidence that the hole into which the 1985 City descends to travel through time resembles a grave or, at the least, a subterranean space not unlike the underground tunnels through which Pym’s Jaynes and Garth escape to reach Tsalal, or the cavelike spaces favored by the writers in Krauss’s Great House. Realizing that “‘tomorrow’ was a word now like the thousands of other words in that hole,”17 City fumbles down into the dark space that smells of ink, sweat, and pine trees only to discover what feels like bodies: “I found their thighs, their flimsy T-shirts, and finally all of their crusty hands. . . . Hand in hand, deep in the underground of Mississippi, we all ran away to tomorrow because we finally could.”18 Through City’s submerged encounter with ethereal others, his realization that he must write himself into existence, and the characters’ foreseen spectral reemergence into tomorrow, City begins to rectify himself with his past, present, and future. His writing enables him to connect with his grandfather who dies at the hands of a Klan member, with his future daughter Baize who ceases to exist after characters’ actions alter her past, and with the other ghosts who have troubled him in multiple timelines. Both Laymon’s text and the novel-within-a-novel end in ellipses, appropriately the favorite punctuation mark of the metaleptic Baize, who explains, “The ellipsis always knows something more came before it and something more is coming after it.”19 The ellipsis, then, is the ephemeral marker of metafiction rooted in self-care, the sign—as Avery Gordon explains in describing ghosts—of “a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken” that simultaneously represents “a future possibility, a hope.”20 This momentous mark, three dots suspending both space and time, further recalls the blank pages that disturb and compel so many characters to join forces with the phantoms who haunt them in order to author and care for themselves. Akin to Jane’s “living ghosts” in My Year of Meats—that is, the mistreated women who willfully remain in an in-between state to persecute their oppressors21—ghosts of the past choose to linger among the living and compel these author-protagonists to fulfill their mutually beneficial wills. In this way, a 184 Epilogue

ghost can live among us, having “designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice. Out of a concern for justice would be the only reason one would bother.”22 The effort to offer an honorable and hospitable memory—what certainly translates in our texts to acts of writing and self-care—has the added benefit of forcing the characters to reckon with themselves. By releasing their ghostly doubles into the world, the authors reconstruct selfhood as fluid, nuanced, and duly informed by all that came before it. As suggested by this call for justice, the ghostliness that pervades these texts further draws attention to the urgent material consequences caused by the entrenched divisions demarcating ethnicity, class, and gender. Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, described by his killer as both a violent criminal and a kind of superhuman “demon” capable of running through bullets, joins Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, and others in a list of deaths and instances of police brutality sparking worldwide protests as well as discussion in legal and social circles on how to reckon with the racist stigmas that Black people face. Seen as a “what” rather than a “who,” eighteen-year-old Brown was labeled by both his killer and certain media sources in uncomplicated terms that erased so many of the experiences and influences that defined him. The rallying call of the protests that followed—that “Black lives matter”— draws attention to the humanity of African Americans, a seemingly innocuous claim that in the years since the onset of those first demonstrations has expanded to include a consideration of who truly receives the benefits of American citizenship. Contemplating the difficulties of being counted as a Latino American, for instance, Lázaro Lima connects “the juridical notion of corpus delicti (literally, body of crime) . . . to the national body politic,” noting that discussions of citizenship and national belonging “are plagued with metaphors with juridical meaning and historical weight (alien, citizen, legal, illegal, foreigner, national, immigrant, migrant).”23 These metaphors designate its subjects as deviant, forever existing outside of the concept of Americanness. This condition is what Laymon, in an essay on Blackness, describes as being “born on parole.”24 Lisa Marie Cacho notes that lower classes and people of color are not just excluded from being protected under the law but are automatically “criminalized as always already the object and target of law, never its authors or addressees.”25 Failing to perceive the fluidity of ethnic identity or gain power as its authors leads not only to disenfranchisement, but in many cases to death. Epilogue  185

Ghostliness becomes a literalized metaphor for this disempowerment, one that reframes the marginalization of persons of color as a potential platform for authorship. After all, ghosts are confined neither to death nor to the margins or borders of life, but move through them and beyond them. Acts of authorship highlight the importance of paying attention to language and behavior in even our most intimate and commonplace interactions. For instance, at Harvard and dozens of other campuses around the world, students launched photo campaigns confronting deep-rooted assumptions of “authenticity” related to race, class, nationality, and gender, resulting in the increased proliferation of the term “microaggressions” to describe the subtle affronts and insults regularly experienced by marginalized groups.26 The term “microaggression” actually echoes Jaynes’s impetus behind his obsession with Poe when he asserts, “Curing America’s racial pathology couldn’t be done with good intentions or presidential elections. Like all diseases, it had to be analyzed at a microscopic level.”27 Jaynes’s prescribed plan of action, however, is incomplete: The chasm supposedly separating smaller anti-microaggression projects from the international indignation in the wake of Brown’s and Garner’s grand jury decisions and the criminalization of American citizens without rights or access to the benefits and protections of citizenship—that is, the belief that one layer of protest has no connection to the other—leads to a failure to address the very terms under which ethnic self-expression can truly flourish. It is notable, for instance, that both Pym and Long Division discuss the circumstances of their writing in ways that suggest none of the conventional methods one might undertake to promote one’s work. For example, while Jaynes devotes his lifework to the significance of fiction, he also recognizes that his own “true life” experiences must be retold “in nonthreatening story form” and “under the guise of fiction,”28 since doing so prevents him from being sued by various corporations lambasted in the text, and allows his story to be more palatable to potential readers. While furthering Machado’s and Foer’s explorations of the sinuous nature of truth and reliability in self-defining experiences, Jaynes’s careful approach to writing further represents the limits of being taken seriously when relaying experiences that are unfamiliar to privileged readers—a worthwhile consideration in the face of all that Pym’s maligned companion Dirk Peters endured in failing to get his story published in Poe’s time. Jaynes’s act of hiding his real-life experiences behind fiction is an ironic reversal of earlier beliefs that “authentic” ethnic American 186 Epilogue

literature should take the form of the autobiography or bildungsroman. Jaynes describes his experiences as “challeng[ing] the imaginations even of those of us who experienced them firsthand.”29 The imperfect conditions under which such self-expression takes place speak to the difficulties of telling one’s story. Thus, though there is no question that Laymon’s City will do his best to write Baize back into existence, he recognizes that “making Baize really reappear was going to be harder than making her disappear, harder than anything I’d ever imagined in my life.”30 For City, the act of going underground and the act of asserting his selfhood through writing are not incongruous. When traditional methods of writing and publishing are not immediately accessible—as seen in the case of Jaynes, City, Erdrich’s Irene, Apostol’s Sol, and so many others—what alternatives exist but to go around, above, or underground? The words that trouble the creators of these metafictions are the same ones that haunt the implied author in Morrison’s Home, who is instructed by the protagonist Frank Money, “Don’t paint me as some enthusiastic hero.”31 Frank’s command reminds us that there exist those without the privilege of fully controlling their image both in real life and in print, that some are cut off from the realm of mainstream publishing as well as from the ability to simply be seen as human. The question of form, of reception, and of where and how expressive modes of self-care can take place prompts us to consider the future of American literature. Will the end of multiculturalism as we currently know it lead to a rearrangement of books in publishing catalogs and websites away from affiliations like “African American literature”? Will it spark a field of ethnic studies that does not privilege any one ethnicity or nationality over another, where scholars of ethnic American studies are known, simply, as Americanists? And, finally, will flexible self-construal erupt into the “large canvas” that Dimock expects will make cultural and generic distinctions “unrobust . . . los[ing] their claim to visibility altogether”?32 While it is difficult to foretell what such an approach to ethnicity could mean to American literature in the long term, the process in the short term might well incite something akin to what bell hooks calls “a postmodernism of resistance . . . directed towards the enhancement of black critical consciousness and the strengthening of our collective capacity to engage in meaningful resistance struggle.”33 As I mentioned in the introduction, the authors described here have moved beyond the postmodern question of whether the metaphorical Epilogue  187

or empirical author has died or has returned; the emphasis on the ghostliness of the author actually makes the question immaterial. Contending directly with that ghostly presence means explicitly sharing the role and powers of authorship with readers themselves. Many scholars and writers, including quite a few discussed in this book, are uneasy about postmodernism as an umbrella term for their art. Significantly, Jablon points out that more recent proclamations of the death of postmodernism may be due to the fact that postmodernism itself has become too pervasive and, in a sense, almost too accessible in certain modes—that postmodern traits have become too easy to spot or too pedestrian to mention, while never being too concerned over issues such as intersectionality. Alluding to perceptions, like those of Houston Baker, that metafiction like Everett’s could not be serious enough to warrant deep political inquiry, Jablon argues that postmodernism is often deemed as being only “for a select few. Theorists,” she declares, “would rather murder postmodernism than watch helplessly as it is fondled by the hands of strangers.”34 While that is possibly true, actively pursuing certain postmodern elements such as metafiction that promote open self-expression can foster contestation and conversation that may prove productive for marginalized audiences. The limitation of form lamented by Chris Jaynes in Pym is converted into a strength, a way to present and name unfamiliar ideas through recognizable vehicles and to produce mirrors that reflect wider segments of humanity. The authors in this project reconfigure both ethnic American literature and American literature not through an assimilative erasure of difference or a multicultural celebration of difference, but rather through a careful focus on the negotiations that authors and their protagonists make in defining and caring for themselves. Rather than centering critical analysis on specific and distinct ethnic groups, they also focus on relational moments between and among cultures and their various intersections within and across texts. What results from such an approach—what I contend the ghosts of literary tradition are compelling us to do—is akin to an oppositional or transgressive multiculturalism. This multiculturalism after multiculturalism gives rise to a body of works that renounce the idea of ethnic groups as inherently reducible, instead recognizing entangled backgrounds and shared experiences. In creating authorial and literary doubles, the authors discussed in this project expose the multiplicity inherent in having to constantly adapt their interactions 188 Epilogue

to ever-changing social contexts and to the historical and literary connections that often influence those contexts. In their approaches, then, these spectral doubles further ask us as consumers, educators, policymakers, and readers to consider what role language will play in shaping the circumstances under which selfhood is defined, and how we may be instrumental in contributing to these ongoing and varied formations of identity. For instance, Jaynes’s refusal in Pym to serve on his university’s diversity committee—one of the main causes of his unexpected unemployment—echoes the conflict at the heart of Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring, a novel whose fantastical elements include a reconfiguration of the protagonist’s English department, with authors like Chaucer and Milton now falling under the department of ethnic studies in the subfield of European studies, “with the same budget and faculty as the rest.”35 The fantasy of decentralizing Eurocentric studies and, as Jaynes describes in Pym, the ineffectual, token membership of the nonwhite faculty member in a university diversity committee symbolize the main problems with current institutions that tout multiculturalism as their foundation. Reed’s and Johnson’s protagonists may present different reactions to these limitations, but neither questions the existence of these apparitions of the past. Their refusal to play along with existing multicultural policies showcases the range of differences in interpreting what the ghosts are asking of us. Accounting for ghostly instability and unknowability in the foundation of multicultural policies—whether in government, the workplace, or school or curricula—would better accommodate those who are normally most vulnerable to being forgotten, ignored, or eliminated. The authors ask us to rethink the nation and whom we believe its citizens to include, and to consider the ghosts and the seemingly unnatural—those whom Mae Ngai calls, in describing illegal aliens, the “impossible subjects,” and those whom Dean Spade calls, in describing transgender individuals, “impossible people.”36 Relating supposedly unviable existences to spectrality, death, and our responsibilities as writers, interpreters, and witnesses, Derrida points out, If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they Epilogue  189

are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet.37 Occupying spaces of physical and temporal impossibility, the subjects lost to multiculturalism’s emphasis on easy categorization are demanding to be heard in their ways and on their terms. Jodey Castricano emphasizes the use of “with” in Derrida’s formation, stating that his admonition that we learn to talk with ghosts “produces a sense of simultaneity and doubleness” that leads to knowledge of how to “use [ghosts] instrumentally and, in turn, whether one knows it or not, to be used by them.”38 Working toward productive and useful conversations with these apparitions places us in the framework of time-travel and border-crossing collaborations and initiates new approaches to learning how to live. Audre Lorde’s poem “Good Mirrors Are Not Cheap” encourages readers to move away from self-loathing and negatively judging our ghostly doubles. Instead, the speaker asks us to look behind the glass, to see the glassmakers who are perpetuating the harmful messages that distort our images in the first place. “It is a waste of time,” she writes, “hating a mirror / or its reflection / instead of stopping the hand that makes glass with distortions . . . Because at the same time / down the street / a glassmaker is grinning / turning out new mirrors that lie.”39 While institutions ossify race and cultural identities and perpetuate false notions of authenticity, these works propose that one can write despite these sneering glassmakers. Invoking ghosts of the past while also creating haunting echoes of themselves, they wrest the power from these glassmakers, creating new ways to see and care for ourselves.

190 Epilogue

Notes

Introduction 1. Ralph Ellison, “Five Writers and Their African Ancestors. Part II,” Phylon 21, no. 4 (1960): 318. 2. Ellison, “Five Writers” 320. 3. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Duke UP, 2014), 160. 4. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Penguin Longman, 2002), 3. 5. Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: And Other Essays (Ixia Press, 2007), 51. 6. Lorde, A Burst of Light: And Other Essays 130. 7. Ali Rattansi, Multiculturalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2011), 148. 8. Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 208. 9. C. W. Watson, Multiculturalism (Open UP, 2007), 3. 10. For example, those who promote “critical multiculturalism” examine how to directly challenge racism and structural inequality (David Theo Goldberg, ed., “Introduction: Multicultural Conditions,” Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader [Blackwell, 1995], 26, 30), whereas “additive multiculturalism” advocates the benefit of cultural interchanges without necessarily deconstructing dominant cultures. 11. Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (Routledge, 2003), 6. 12. Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading (Indiana UP, 1998), 12. 13. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 1996), 87. 14. Stephen Hong Sohn, Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds (New York UP), 7.

15. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (Norton, 2019), 33. 16. See, for example, Janelle S. Wong et al., Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and Their Political Identities (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011). 17. In its constitution and bylaws, the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) provides a framework for multiethnic American literature that mirrors the parameters of my study and includes the following: “the literature of Asian-Americans, Afro-Americans, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Latinos, and Americans of European extraction like Italians and the Polish, and, specifically, religious ethnic groups such as Jews who have been ignored, misread, or underrepresented in the past.” Nevertheless, the complications of the term “ethnicity”—even as it exists as part of the organization’s name— cannot be overstated. For instance, Judaism refers to religious beliefs and practices but the adjective “Jewish” can refer to religion and/or ethnicity and can even be passed down generationally. On the other hand, one can practice Judaism but not be culturally or ethnically “Jewish.” Similarly, Native American tribal identities can be cultural or ethnic identities, but to lay claim to an Indigenous tribal identity is first and foremost about sovereignty and political identity, thus complicating discussions of indigeneity as ethnicity. 18. Sohn, Racial Asymmetries 5. 19. Henry Louis Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford UP, 1993), xii. 20. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (U of Minnesota P, 2011), 108. 21. Zadie Smith, speech, Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series, Butler University, Nov. 11, 2014 (Atherton Union, Reilly Room, Indianapolis). 22. We can call this reader response critique to the extent that readers are asked to play an active and responsible role in the interpreting texts, but these scenes of writing also put a great deal of power in the hands of the fictional and empirical authors themselves, who engage in multiple negotiations to shape their stories of ethnic identity. 23. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1980), 1. 24. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (Routledge, 1984), 6. 25. Gish Jen, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self (Harvard UP, 2013), 60. 26. Examples include movies like Deadpool and TV shows like Black Mirror.

192  Notes to Pages 6–11

27. Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh UP, 2008), 7. 28. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (Routledge, 1987), 202. 29. Evan M. Mwangi, Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (SUNY P, 2009), 25. 30. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom (U of Texas Press, 1990), 191. 31. Emphasis mine. Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (1983; New Press, 1998), 213–14. 32. Foucault, “Self Writing” 211, 209. 33. Foucault, “Self Writing” 226, 228. 34. Foucault, “Self Writing” 230. 35. Laura Markham, “Committing to Radical Self-Care,” Psychology Today, Jan. 19, 2014, accessed Dec. 22, 2019, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/peaceful-parents -happy-kids/201401/committing-radical-self-care. 36. Alicia Garza, “Radical Self Care: Alicia Garza,” Afropunk, Dec. 4, 2018, afropunk.com/2018/12/radical-self-care-alicia-garza/. 37. adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (AK Press, 2019), 3. 38. Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (Graywolf, 2013), 79. 39. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Les Presses du Réel, 1998), 14. 40. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics 13. 41. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America, 2nd ed. (Basic, 2006), 3; Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford UP, 1987), 6. 42. The notion of fluid self-definitions I advance here is, of course, not entirely new. For instance, Homi Bhabha’s view of hybridity evokes new cultures emerging out of the colonial encounter and is tied almost exclusively to moments of imperialism and postcolonialism. Another related concept is Gloria Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza,” in which she identifies as “cultureless” due to her opposition to patriarchal belief systems, while simultaneously “participating in the creation of yet another culture” (Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza [1987; 4th ed., Aunt Lute, 2012], 80–81) in order to skirt the extreme dualities that society often inflicts on Chicanx women. Unlike these initiatives, I show how ethnic identity itself has been made over by these author-characters as an intersectional archaeology of identity, one that declares an individual’s ethnic identity as indefinable unless considered through a personal process of continual interaction, opposition, and self-care. 43. Mwangi, Africa Writes Back to Self 25.

Notes to Pages 11–16  193

44. Madelyn Jablon, Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature (U of Iowa P, 1997), 4–5. 45. Bharati Mukherjee, “Immigrant Writing: Changing the Contours of a National Literature,” American Literary History 23, no. 3 (2011): 685. 46. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Harvard UP, 1998), 265. 47. Kiese Laymon, Long Division (Agate Bolden, 2013), 3. 48. Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (1997): 378. 49. Laymon, Long Division 96–97. 50. Laymon, Long Division 97. 51. Kate Cummings, “Reclaiming the Mother(’s) Tongue: Beloved, Ceremony, Mothers and Shadows,” College English 52, no. 5 (1990): 555, doi:10.2307/377543. 52. Jay Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory (Oxford UP, 1993), 90–92; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977; Penguin, 2006), 1–2. 53. Elaine Jahner, “All the World’s a Story: Reviewed Work: Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko,” Prairie Schooner 51, no. 4 (1977): 415. 54. Lorelei Cederstrom, “Myth and Ceremony in Contemporary North American Native Fiction,” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 2, no. 2 (1982): 295. 55. Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, 2nd ed. (Beacon Press, 1992), 124, 119–20. 56. Cummings, “Reclaiming the Mother(’s) Tongue” 568. 57. Cederstrom, “Myth and Ceremony” 294. 58. Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright, The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright, ed. Anne Wright (Graywolf, 2009), 27–28. 59. Silko, Ceremony 222. 60. Cederstrom, “Myth and Ceremony” 294. 61. Silko, Ceremony 236. 62. Silko, Ceremony 82. 63. Cederstrom, “Myth and Ceremony” 296. 64. Toni Morrison, Home (Vintage, 2012), 83. 65. Toni Morrison’s Haunting Resonance, interview conducted by Christopher Bollen, May 1, 2012, www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/toni-morrison. 66. Morrison, Home 5. 67. Morrison, Home 40. 68. Morrison, Home 69.

194  Notes to Pages 16–24

69. Morrison, Home 84. 70. Morrison, Home 115.

Chapter 1 1. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (Vintage, 1976), 17. 2. Kingston, The Woman Warrior 3. 3. King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Joy Kogawa (Cornell UP, 1993), 2. 4. Kingston, The Woman Warrior 13, 18. 5. Patti Duncan, Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech (U of Iowa P, 2003), ix. 6. Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red (Routledge, 1991), 151. 7. I use “Filipino” as a gender-neutral term, though discussions are underway to determine whether “Filipinx” is the better choice given the overlaps and shared linguistic and colonial histories between the Philippines and Latinx countries. 8. Cherstin M. Lyon, “Loyalty Questionnaire,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed July 14, 2020, encyclopedia.densho.org/Loyalty_questionnaire/; US Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America,” Apr. 23, 2020, www.uscis.gov/us-citizenship/naturalization-test /naturalization-oath-allegiance-united-states-america. 9. See, for example, Amaryll Chanady, “From Difference to Exclusion: Multiculturalism and Postcolonialism,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 8, no. 3 (1995): 419–37; John Docker, “Rethinking Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism in the Fin de Siècle,” Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (Oct. 1995): 409–26; and Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (Routledge, 2003). While I suggest a specific meaning for postcolonial multiculturalism in the context of the United States, Pacific Rim scholars like Jessica Carniel, Daniel P.S. Goh, and Philip Holden have also applied the concept to a historicized evolution of state practices specific to Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore. See Jessica Carniel, “In the Spirit of Reconciliation: Migrating Spirits and Australian Postcolonial Multiculturalism in Hoa Pham’s Vixen,” in The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities, ed. Lisa B. Kröger and Melanie Anderson (U of Delaware P, 2013), 75–90; Daniel P.S. Goh and Philip Holden, “Introduction: Postcoloniality, Race, and Multiculturalism,” in Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, ed. Matilda Gabrielpillai et al. (Routledge, 2009), 1–16. 10. Brian Ascalon Roley, “Filipinos—the Hidden Majority,” SFGate, Aug. 20,

Notes to Pages 24–30  195

2001, www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Filipinos-the-hidden -majority-2885368.php. 11. Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, trans. Barbara Bray (Arcade, 2012), 4–5. 12. Arnold Krupat, The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture, 2nd ed. (Bison, 1998), 32. Chris Bongie uses the term “post/colonial” to refer to how “two words and worlds appear uneasily as one, joined together and yet also divided in a relation of (dis)continuity”; Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/ Colonial Literature (Stanford UP, 1998), 13. The convention invokes Ania Loomba’s usage of the slash to indicate a similar relationality in her Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998). 13. Eric Cheyfitz, ed., The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945 (Columbia UP, 2004), 5. 14. Jana Sequoya Magdaleno, “How(!) Is an Indian? A Contest of Stories, Round 2,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, ed. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt (UP of Mississippi, 2000), 279. 15. Throughout this text, I refer to “nations” as applying both to countries with commonly accepted political borders—like the Philippines or the United States— and to Indigenous nations like the Ojibwe, a political entity spanning Canada and the US. Nevertheless, as mentioned in the introduction, American Indian culture also has fraught connections to terms like “ethnicity.” 16. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton UP, 1994), 41, 57, 26. 17. Anne Phillips, Multiculturalism without Culture (Princeton UP, 2009), 9. 18. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Indiana UP, 2009), 17. 19. Emphasis mine. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other 17–18. 20. Gina Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter (Norton, 2012), 9. 21. Camilla Griggers, Becoming-Woman (U of Minnesota P, 1997), 105. 22. Griggers, Becoming-Woman 106. 23. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other 18–19. 24. Martin Joseph Ponce, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (New York UP, 2012), 2. 25. Allan Punzalan Isaac, American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (U of Minnesota P, 2006), xxiv. 26. Other groups falling under the liminal status of “US nationals” include those born in American Samoa and Swains Island to non-US-citizen parents. US Virgin Islanders and residents of other unincorporated territories are citizens, but ineligible

196  Notes to Pages 30–34

to vote for the US president. Section 326 of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted previous immigration quotas for Filipinos and allowed naturalization of certain Filipino immigrants. 27. Patricia P. Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Duke UP, 2000), 198. 28. Though Tagalog speakers also use “autobiograpiya” (autobiography), Apostol and others offer the equivalent “talambuhay” to refer to both autobiographies and biographies. 29. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 25. 30. Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Cornell UP, 1997), 144. 31. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, trans. Richard Philcox, 2nd ed. (Grove Press, 2005), liv. 32. Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham UP, 2007), 235. 33. Angela Davis, “Radical Self Care: Angela Davis,” Afropunk, Dec. 7, 2018, afropunk.com/2018/12/radical-self-care-angela-davis/. 34. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 3. 35. Emphasis mine. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 3. 36. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 3. Apostol notes in an interview that the shift to first person helped her “relate to Sol—her world is alien to me, and I disliked her. When I switched to first person, I became implicated in Sol’s world: I was not just a satirist looking in. I was complicit. That’s the feeling I wished for my reader.” Gina Apostol, Interview with PEN/Open Book Award Winner Gina Apostol, Author of ‘Gun Dealer’s Daughter,’ interview conducted by Laurel Fantauzzo, Hyphen Magazine, Sept. 19, 2013, hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2013/9/19/interview-penopen-book -award-winner-gina-apostol-author-gun-dealers-daughter. 37. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 4, 277–78. 38. Isaac, American Tropics xxiii–xxiv. 39. Jessica S. Barnes and Claudette E. Bennett, The Asian Population: 2000: Census 2000 Brief (US Census Bureau, Feb. 2002). 40. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 5. 41. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 282. 42. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 83. 43. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Routledge, 2011), 3. 44. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard UP, 2016), 63.

Notes to Pages 34–39  197

45. Apostol, Interview with PEN/Open Book Award Winner Gina Apostol. 46. Most—if not all—US military archives refer to this conflict as a “Philippine Insurrection,” marking Filipino guerilla fighters as insurgents rather than colonized subjects. Wexler observes that the US practiced waterboarding (or the “water cure”; Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism [U of North Carolina P, 2000], 28) during the Philippine-American War, a procedure Massimino notes was notoriously used in connection to 9/11; Elisa Massimino, “Leading by Example? Torture Ten Years after 9/11,” Human Rights 38, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 2. Writing to Stars and Stripes, Van Hoven reads Couttie’s account of Balangiga as “very insightful material that will greatly contribute to our present counterinsurgency campaign” in Afghanistan; Michael Van Hoven, “1901 Massacre Offers Lessons,” Stars and Stripes, Aug. 3, 2009, www.stripes.com/opinion/letters-to -the-editor-for-monday-august-3-2009-1.93899. For more on the parallels between American actions in response to events such as 9/11 and US actions in Balangiga and the Philippine-American War, see Louise Barnett, Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia: Trial by Army (Routledge, 2010); Gregg Jones, Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream (Berkley, 2012); and Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (Ballantine, 1990). 47. Lowe, Immigrant Acts 5. 48. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 128. 49. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke UP, 2007), 32, 25. 50. Lowe, Immigrant Acts 9. 51. Griggers, Becoming-Woman 133. 52. Leslie Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton UP, 2001), 11. Rich attributes the phrase “disloyal to civilization” to Lillian Smith (284); Adrienne Rich, “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (Norton, 1979), 275–310. 53. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 292, 68. 54. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 134. 55. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 122. 56. Rick Bonus, Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space (Temple UP, 2000), 32. 57. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (U of Chicago P, 2005), 14. 58. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 128.

198  Notes to Pages 40–44

59. Sarita Echavez See, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (U of Minnesota P, 2009), xii. 60. Quoted in Isaac, American Tropics 35. For more on the Insular Cases, see Isaac. In addition to colonial interactions with Spain and the United States, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans share similarities in language, religion, and even experiences of political and social marginalization in the United States. Anthony Ocampo calls Puerto Ricans “the colonial siblings of the Filipinos”; Ocampo, The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race (Stanford UP, 2016), 23. 61. Oscar V. Campomanes, “On Filipinos, Filipino Americans, and US Imperialism: Interview with Oscar V. Campomanes,” in Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse, ed. Antonio Tiongson et al. (Temple UP, 2006), 42. 62. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 24, 101. 63. Kimberly Alidio, “‘When I Get Home, I Want to Forget’: Memory and Amnesia in the Occupied Philippines, 1901–1904,” Social Text, no. 59 (1999): 113. 64. Joseph L. Schott, The Ordeal of Samar (Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 4. 65. Rolando O. Borrinaga, “100 Years of Balangiga Literature,” Ichthus 2, no. 1 (2001): 59. 66. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 122. 67. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 37. Apostol’s metafictional novel, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (2009), extends the concept of Rizal’s annotations to its postmodern conclusion, piling annotation upon annotation ostensibly written by its four commentators. 68. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 38. While the US retained bases in the Philippines, both countries agreed to Philippine independence on July 4, 1946, almost fifty years after General Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed independence from Spain in 1898. Delmendo even suggests that counting 1946 as the Philippines’ independence year is problematic since this independence was awarded by the US rather than won by the Filipinos. Like Sol, she proposes September 28, 1901—the date of the Balangiga Massacre—as an alternative (Sharon Delmendo, The Star-Entangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines [Rutgers UP, 2004], 198). 69. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 156, 154, 36. 70. Jones, Honor in the Dust 235. 71. Delmendo, The Star-Entangled Banner 170–72, 209. 72. Schott, The Ordeal of Samar 71–72, 278. 73. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 122. 74. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 126. 75. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 123.

Notes to Pages 44–48  199

76. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 194. 77. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 76. 78. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 282–83. 79. Norman Gelb, Herod the Great: Statesman, Visionary, Tyrant (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 141–42. 80. Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Duke UP, 2003), 33. 81. Delmendo, The Star-Entangled Banner 180. 82. Alidio, “When I Get Home” 119. 83. Delmendo, The Star-Entangled Banner 195. 84. Alidio, “When I Get Home” 110. 85. James N. Mattis, “Ceremonial Address Marking the Return of the Bells of Balangiga to the Philippines,” speech transcript, US-Philippines Society, Nov. 14, 2018, www.usphsociety.org/2018/12/10/ceremonial-address-marking-the-return-of-the -bells-of-balangiga-to-the-philippines/. 86. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 41, 122. 87. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 119. 88. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 153. 89. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 119. 90. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 14, 15. 91. Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter 292. 92. Louise Erdrich, Shadow Tag (Harper Perennial, 2010), 11. 93. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 30. 94. Paula Gunn Allen, Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Cannons (Beacon, 1999), 6. 95. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 31. 96. Allen, The Sacred Hoop 265, 263. 97. Bill Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2002). 98. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale UP, 2000), 17. 99. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic 48. 100. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 39. 101. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 184. 102. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 47. 103. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 17. 104. Homi Bhabha describes hybridity as a “problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that

200  Notes to Pages 49–55

other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. [Routledge, 2004], 162). Thus, the conventional definition of classical multiculturalism does not apply here; hybridity is not simply a commingling of certain aspects of two different cultures, but a relationality of dynamic power. While hybridity is a state wrought from colonialism, Irene and Gil’s exclusion from post/colonial multiculturalism points to the need for less conventional approaches to extend hybridity’s influence to self-care. 105. Inés Hernández-Ávila (Nimipu/Nez Perce), “Relocations upon Relocations: Home, Language, and Native American Women’s Writings,” American Indian Quarterly 19, no. 4 (1995): 492, doi:10.2307/1185561. 106. Magdaleno, “How(!) Is an Indian?” 279. 107. Magdaleno, “How(!) Is an Indian?” 281. 108. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 71. 109. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 134. 110. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 158. 111. Allen, Off the Reservation 6. 112. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 151. 113. Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 25. 114. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 168. 115. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 233. 116. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 233. 117. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 237. 118. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 237. 119. John Hausdoerffer, Catlin’s Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature (UP of Kansas, 2009), 21. 120. William Jay Youmans, Pioneers of Science in America: Sketches of Their Lives and Scientific Work (D. Appleton, 1896), 339. 121. David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke UP, 2001), 110. 122. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 46. 123. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 34. 124. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 36. 125. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 69. 126. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 81. 127. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 21, 44. 128. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 37.

Notes to Pages 55–62  201

129. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 177. 130. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 48. 131. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 148. 132. Magdaleno, “How(!) Is an Indian?” 282. 133. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 251. 134. Magdaleno, “How(!) Is an Indian?” 287; Erdrich, Shadow Tag 119. 135. Erdrich, Shadow Tag 248–49. 136. Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World (Simon & Schuster, 2000), 152. 137. Maalouf, In the Name of Identity 160.

Chapter 2 1. Greta Olson, “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators,” Narrative 11, no. 1 (2003): 102. 2. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems (Castle, 2009), 199. 3. Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House: A Memoir (Graywolf, 2019), 240–42; Jonathan Safran Foer, “Jonathan Safran Foer on the Origins of Everything Is Illuminated,” The Guardian, Mar. 20, 2010, www.theguardian.com/books/2010 /mar/20/jonathan-safran-foer-everything-illuminated. 4. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (Harper Perennial, 2002), 32. 5. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 144. 6. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TED, July 2009, www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story; Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard UP, 1992), 4. 7. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wiig (U of Michigan P, 1997). 8. Dwight Garner et al., “The New Vanguard,” The New York Times, Mar. 5, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/books/vanguard-books-by-women-in-21st -century.html. 9. Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke UP, 2018), 8. 10. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, ed. Gerry Canavan, 2nd ed. (Peter Lang, 2016), 12. 11. Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined 134–35. 12. John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (Anchor, 1988), 69. 13. Jane Austen, The Annotated Pride and Prejudice, ed. David M. Shapard, expanded ed. (1813; Anchor, 2007), 145.

202  Notes to Pages 62–73

14. Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories (Graywolf, 2017), 186. 15. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic 51. 16. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic 51. 17. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic 77. 18. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 211. 19. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 213. 20. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 172. 21. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 171. 22. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 214. 23. “Plagiary, Adj. and n.,” in Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford UP), accessed Dec. 24, 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/144942. 24. Rebecca Moore Howard, “Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism,” College English 62, no. 4 (2000): 484, 476, doi:10.2307/378866. Machado also plays with the idea of plagiarism in her collection with “The Husband Stitch,” which rewrites horror stories like “The Velvet Ribbon,” and “Especially Heinous,” a story that recycles the characters and episode titles of Law and Order: SVU. 25. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Duke UP, 1994), 25. 26. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic 47. 27. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 203. 28. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art, as Device,” trans. Alexandra Berlina, Poetics Today 36, no. 3 (Sept. 2015): 161, doi:10.1215/03335372-3160709. 29. Shklovsky, “Art, as Device” 162. 30. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 203. 31. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 192. 32. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 192. 33. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 208. 34. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 208. 35. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 208. 36. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 202. 37. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 175. 38. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 210. 39. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 213. 40. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 198. 41. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2002), 167. 42. Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 215–16.

Notes to Pages 73–82  203

43. Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House: A Memoir (Graywolf, 2019), 126. 44. Machado, In the Dream House 138. 45. Clare Beckett and Marie Macey, “Race, Gender and Sexuality: The Oppression of Multiculturalism,” Women’s Studies International Forum 24, no. 3 (May 2001): 311, doi:10.1016/S0277-5395(01)00185-6. 46. Carmen Maria Machado, Fantasy Is the Ultimate Queer Cliché: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado, interview conducted by Noor Qasim, Nov. 5, 2019, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/11/05/fantasy-is-the-ultimate-queer-cliche-an -interview-with-carmen-maria-machado/. 47. Machado, In the Dream House 143. 48. To illustrate, a 2019 appraisal of Amazon bestsellers related specifically to the Holocaust shows that, except for the Maus series consisting of Art Spiegelman’s interviews with his father about his firsthand experience, most of the top spots are authored firsthand by Holocaust survivors. 49. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Cornell UP, 2006), xi. 50. Zoë Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (Oxford UP, 2007), 154. 51. David Sax, “Rise of the New Yiddishists,” Vanity Fair, Apr. 8, 2009, www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/04/yiddishists200904. 52. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 24, 57, etc. 53. As explained in the introduction, for purposes of this study, I focus on ethnic identity and here on Jewish heritage and culture, with the recognition that identity constitutes an assemblage of valences that may include class, nationality, gender, and other identity markers. It should be noted that early Americans viewed Jews as a separate racial category, which informed some discussions of their status as a “model minority,” a concept I discuss further in chapter 3. 54. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Mariner, 2009), 80, 171. 55. Tobey C. Herzog, “Tim O’Brien’s ‘True Lies’ (?),” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 4 (Dec. 2000): 895–96, doi:10.1353/mfs.2000.0077. 56. Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007), 132. 57. Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, 2nd ed. (Grove Press, 2013), xxi. 58. Raymond Federman, Critifiction: Postmodern Essays (SUNY P, 1993), 55. Incidentally, recent events in the #MeToo era have brought both Alexie’s and Díaz’s real-life reliability into question as they addressed accusations of sexual misconduct. 59. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 25, 142.

204  Notes to Pages 83–87

60. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 31, 53. 61. Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), 153. 62. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 240. 63. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 26. 64. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 143. 65. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 145. 66. Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), 73. 67. Laub, “Truth and Testimony” 70–71. 68. Laub, “Truth and Testimony” 69. 69. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 169. 70. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 170. 71. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 260. 72. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 160. 73. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 178–79. 74. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 179–80. 75. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 240. 76. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 145. 77. Federman, Critifiction 56; Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image–Music–Text, ed. Stephen Heath (Hill, 1967), 128; Howard, “Sexuality, Textuality” 477–78. 78. Michael Berenbaum, After Tragedy and Triumph: Essays in Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience (Cambridge UP, 1990). 79. Berenbaum, After Tragedy and Triumph 16. 80. Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness 118. 81. Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness 118. 82. Elie Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences (Schocken, 1995), 106. 83. Wiesel’s sentiment recalls Theodor Adorno’s famous statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (“Cultural Criticism and Society,” 1967, in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber [MIT P, 2007], 34), a belief he later revisited in his essay “After Auschwitz” (in Negative Dialectics, 2nd ed. [Continuum, 1981], 361–65). 84. Robert Fine, “Hannah Arendt: Politics and Understanding after the Holocaust,” in Social Theory after the Holocaust, ed. Robert Fine and Charles Turner (Liverpool UP, 2000), 22. 85. Waxman, Writing the Holocaust 152.

Notes to Pages 87–96  205

86. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 274. 87. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 160, 274. 88. Barthes, “The Death of the Author” 128. Not unlike Akaky Akakievich from Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” Gustave Flaubert’s characters from his posthumous Bouvard et Pécuchet are copy-clerks, a profession that initially suggests less artistry than labor. 89. Federman, Critifiction 49, 62. 90. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 104. 91. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 206. 92. Marilyn Randall, Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power (U of Toronto P, 2001), 82. 93. Suki Kim, The Interpreter (Picador, 2004), 16, 91. 94. Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (Penguin, 1990), 211. 95. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 59. 96. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 72. 97. Hoffman, Lost in Translation 211. 98. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 252. 99. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (Routledge, 1992), x–xi.

Chapter 3 1. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 192. 2. Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 192. 3. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (Oxford UP, 2007), 66. While Latour believes that groupings like “ethnicity” have been harmful in limiting and dictating the scope of sociological research (29), his idea of actor-network theory (ANT), which describes the collective interactions of human and nonhuman actors, shares similarities with my focus on close and intimate associations as part of a wider self-care practice, in that ANT is interested in retelling relational stories from nondominant perspectives. Latour, along with theorists such as Bill Brown, practices “thing theory,” which looks at the role that things play in the formation of our cultures, beliefs, and identity. The work of theorists such as Andrea Quinlan and John K. Young are useful companions to Latour, as they have sought to more closely rectify ANT with fields like feminism, postcolonial theory, and ethnic and literary studies. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22; Andrea Quinlan, “Imagining a Feminist Actor-Network The-

206  Notes to Pages 96–103

ory,” International Journal of Actor-Network Theory and Technological Innovation (IJANTTI) 4, no. 2 (2012): 1–9; John K. Young, “The Roots of Cane: Jean Toomer in The Double Dealer and Modernist Networks,” in Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America, ed. Cecile Cottenet (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 171–92. 4. Throughout this study, I adopt the OED differentiations between nationalism—the defense or promotion of a country especially in comparison to other nations—and nationality, which refers more generically to the state of being a citizen or subject of a country. “Nationalism, n.,” and “Nationality, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford UP), accessed Dec. 27, 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry /125289 and www.oed.com/view/Entry/125292. 5. Sharmila Rudrappa, Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures of Citizenship (Rutgers UP, 2004), 113. 6. Rudrappa, Ethnic Routes 113, 114. 7. Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Steven D. Lavine and Ivan Karp, 2nd ed. (Smithsonian, 1991), 42. 8. Rudrappa, Ethnic Routes 113. 9. Lila Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (U of California P, 2009), 73. 10. Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled (Syracuse UP, 2000), 3. 11. Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton UP, 2015), 4. 12. Sohn, Racial Asymmetries 11. 13. For more on Asian Americans as model minority and yellow peril, see Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America: A History (Simon & Schuster, 2015). Connections between COVID-19 and the yellow peril have been made by numerous sources, including Kim Usher et al., “The COVID‐19 Pandemic and Mental Health Impacts,” International Journal of Mental Health Nursing 29, no. 3 (June 2020): 315–18. 14. Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle (Harvard UP, 2017), 109. 15. Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Ten Speed Press, 2014), 4. 16. “Objectification, n.,” in Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford UP), accessed Dec. 27, 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/129623. 17. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Christine M. Korsgaard, 2nd ed. (1785; Cambridge UP, 2012), 42. 18. Chow, Ethics after Idealism 2. 19. Chow, Ethics after Idealism 4. In his The Democracy of Objects (Open Human-

Notes to Pages 103–08  207

ities Press, 2011), Levi Bryant provides a possible response to Chow’s and Foucault’s formations of Man as an invention to represent objectification. Part of a philosophical movement known as object-oriented ontology (OOO) that centers our understanding of the world on objects, Bryant attempts a “redrawing of distinctions and a decentering of the human. . . . there is only one type of being: objects” (20). In his formulation, humans are but one among many other objects, each with their own aptitudes. Some critique discussions of ontology for not adequately accounting for antiracist politics. See, for example, Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke UP, 2006), as well as her less formal but more pointed responses on Bryant’s blog Larval Subjects, particularly the 2012 post titled “War Machines and Military Logistics: Some Cards on the Table” (Sept. 15, 2012, larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/war-machines-and-military-logistics-some -cards-on-the-table/). 20. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Objectification,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 24, no. 4 (1995): 257, doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.1995.tb00032.x; Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. 21. Nicole Krauss, Great House (Norton, 2010), 17. 22. Krauss, Great House 23. 23. Krauss, Great House 83. 24. Krauss, Great House 248–49. 25. Krauss, Great House 206, 175. 26. Krauss, Great House 65. 27. Krauss, Great House 68. 28. Krauss, Great House 201. 29. Krauss, Great House 15. 30. Krauss, Great House 14, 204. 31. Krauss, Great House 211. 32. Krauss, Great House 43. 33. Krauss, Great House 200. 34. Krauss, Great House 278. 35. Krauss, Great House 278–79. 36. Krauss, Great House 237. 37. Krauss, Great House 16. 38. Krauss, Great House 238. 39. Mervat F. Hatem, “The Microdynamics of Patriarchal Change in Egypt and the Development of an Alternative Discourse on Mother-Daughter Relations: The Case of Áisha Taymur,” in Intimate Selving in Arab Families: Gender, Self, and Identity, ed. Suad Joseph (Syracuse UP, 1999), 197.

208  Notes to Pages 108–15

40. Krauss, Great House 19. 41. Krauss, Great House 237. 42. Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (Viking, 2013), 246. 43. Susan M. Darraj, Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing (Praeger, 2004), 1–2. 44. Krauss, Great House 34. 45. Krauss, Great House 3, 238. 46. Barbara E. Johnson, Persons and Things (Harvard UP, 2010), 105. 47. Johnson, Persons and Things 105. 48. Krauss, Great House 200. 49. Krauss, Great House 103. 50. Krauss, Great House 171. 51. Krauss, Great House 13. 52. Krauss, Great House 287. 53. Krauss, Great House 276. 54. Krauss, Great House 276. 55. See chapter 2. 56. Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (Norton, 2006), 80. 57. Nicole Krauss, “Nicole Krauss on Fame, Loss, and Writing About Holocaust Survivors,” interview conducted by Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, The Atlantic, Oct. 21, 2010, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/10/nicole-krauss-on-fame -loss-and-writing-about-holocaust-survivors/64869/. 58. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2005): 30. 59. Fabio Rambelli, Buddhist Materiality: A Cultural History of Objects in Japanese Buddhism (Stanford UP, 2007), 1. 60. Christine R. Yano, Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific (Duke UP, 2013), 9. 61. Yano, Pink Globalization 16. 62. Yano, Pink Globalization 9. 63. Ken Belson and Brian Bremner, Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon (Wiley, 2003). 64. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 46. Murphy-Shigematsu notes that Japan is thoroughly multiethnic in its origins, but its image as a monoethnic nation persists, causing many to conflate nationality with ethnicity when referring to the Japanese (284), and to make the kinds of generalizations that Nao is sometimes prone to making when contrasting American and Japanese differences. This conflation is not

Notes to Pages 115–23  209

helped by Japanese society’s “social conservatism and illiberalism,” which supersedes multicultural government policy (Peng-Er 225), though Japan’s immigration policy suggests that more is at play than merely a clash between government and societal practices (Yamanaka 141). For more information about multiculturalism in Japan, see Lam Peng-Er, “At the Margins of a Liberal-Democratic State: Ethnic Minorities in Japan,” in Multiculturalism in Asia, ed. Will Kymlicka and Baogang He (Oxford UP, 2005), 223–43; Keiko Yamanaka, “Citizenship, Immigration, and Ethnic Hegemony in Japan,” in Rethinking Ethnicity, ed. Eric P. Kaufmann (Routledge, 2004), 140–56; and Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, “‘The Invisible Man’ and Other Narratives of Living in the Borderlands of Race and Nation,” in Transcultural Japan: At the Borderlands of Race, Gender and Identity, ed. David Blake Willis and Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu (Routledge, 2008), 282–304. 65. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 47. 66. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 126. 67. Ozekie, A Tale for the Time Being 57. 68. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 32. Much has been written on ideals of tolerance and diversity in a specifically Canadian context. See, for example, Richard J. F. Day’s Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (U of Toronto P, 2000) as well as Will Kymlicka’s work, including Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada (Oxford UP, 1998) and his co-authored work with Janice Stein et al., Uneasy Partners: Multiculturalism and Rights in Canada (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007). 69. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 252. 70. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 257. 71. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 317. 72. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 94. 73. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 179. 74. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 328. 75. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 85. According to Katsuya Izumi, “As Ozeki explains in the novel, 空 means Sky but also means Empty or Emptiness, and it is used many times in important Buddhist sutras” (personal interview, May 26, 2014). Additional carvings on such watches may refer to the regiment or division to which the original watch owner belonged, or—in this case—the model and function. 76. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 327, 249. 77. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 26. 78. For more on metalepsis, see Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Cornell UP, 1983); H. Porter Abbott, “Narrative Worlds,” in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd ed. (Cambridge UP, 2008), 160–74; Monika

210  Notes to Pages 123–28

Fludernik, “Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode,” Style 37, no. 4 (2003): 382–400; and Debra Malina, Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject (Ohio State UP, 2002). While I present the storyworlds in the form of concentric circles, Marie-Laure Ryan explores metalepsis in digital realms and likens them to “stacks,” a programming term. The metaphor is effective in showing how the hierarchy of stories constantly shifts based on which level of the stack is more prominent in the narrative, but—as Ryan notes—it sets up a false divide when ontological levels are breached, as happens in Ozeki’s novel. Not surprisingly, Ryan uses Scheherazade’s multi-leveled storytelling as an example of her concept. Ryan, Avatars of Story (U of Minnesota P, 2006), 204–06. 79. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 22. 80. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 20. 81. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1, ed. Lydia Davis and Christopher Prendergast (1922; Penguin Classics, 2004), 50. 82. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 43. 83. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 96. 84. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 14. 85. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 248. 86. Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, 2nd ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 3. 87. Ryan, Avatars of Story 207. 88. Werner Wolf, “‘Unnatural’ Metalepsis and Immersion: Necessarily Incompatible?,” in A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, ed. Jan Alber et al. (Ohio State UP, 2016), 114; Abbott, “Narrative Worlds” 170. 89. Latour, Reassembling the Social 39. 90. Latour, Reassembling the Social 42. 91. There is a temple in Japan named Jigen-ji (慈眼時), though it is in Osaka Prefecture, several hundred miles from Miyagi Prefecture, where Ozeki places old Jiko. The name Jigen-ji is associated in Ruth’s appendix (411) with three kanji: 慈, meaning “merciful,” 眼, referring to the eye or sight, and 時, which Ruth identifies as “temple,” but which Izumi states is “time,” the kanji for “temple” being a very similar 寺. Izumi suggests that the typo, whether intentional or not, points to Ruth’s need to wait for a time when she can see things mercifully. Ruth’s donning Jiko’s glasses later in her dream supports this perspective. 92. Latour, Reassembling the Social 39. 93. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 122. 94. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 122. 95. For example, in Great House, Yoav accidentally breaks his glasses while retrieving a piece of furniture from one of George Weisz’s clients. Isabel observes that

Notes to Pages 128–33  211

“[m]aybe it was because he saw the world differently now, but after [his] glasses broke a kind of sadness seeped out of him, trailing behind him as we followed him. . . . He seemed to have forgotten why we’d come—he never mentioned the table, or maybe it was a chest of drawers, or a clock, or chair” (Krauss, Great House 149). The need to change one’s perspective—to see the world differently—often accompanies these moments of bewilderment. Ozeki’s association of glasses as an extension of one’s self and vision finds a correlation in her previous novel, My Year of Meats (Penguin, 1999), in which documentarian Jane Takagi-Little pointedly refers to her camera, and by extension her cameraman Suzuki, as “my eye” (327). 96. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 329. 97. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 340. 98. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 246. 99. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 353. 100. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 394. 101. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 190. 102. Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage, 1987), 43–44. 103. Morrison, Beloved 323–24. 104. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 167. 105. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 167. 106. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 194. 107. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 194. 108. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 194. 109. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 399. 110. Rambelli, Buddhist Materiality 48. 111. Bernard Faure, Visions of Power: Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, trans. Phyllis Brooks, 2nd ed. (Princeton UP, 2000), 193. 112. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 309. It should be noted that, at this point in the novel’s timeline, Harry and Nao have not yet discovered Haruki #1’s secret diary—ostensibly because Ruth has yet to place it in Jiko’s study. 113. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 308. 114. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 388–89. 115. Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 205.

Chapter 4 1. Laura E. Savu, Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2009), 192.

212  Notes to Pages 133–39

2. Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. Philip Horne and Adrian Poole (1903; Penguin Classics, 2008), 176. 3. James, The Ambassadors 177. 4. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 10, 79. 5. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 3. 6. Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (1946; Penguin Classics, 2019), 123. 7. Syjuco, Ilustrado 206. 8. Just as with characterization and narrative attribution, names in Virgil Russell are hard to pinpoint: For instance, Publishers Weekly lists the son’s name as “Virgil” and says that the father and writer “may be named Percival Everett”; “Fiction Book Review: Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett,” Publishers Weekly 260, no. 44 (Nov. 2013), 22. Given the novel’s auto/biographical undertones, it is more probable that both narrators are named Percival Everett—one senior and the other the junior. 9. Syjuco, Ilustrado 209. 10. Syjuco, Ilustrado 61. 11. Syjuco, Ilustrado 61–62. 12. Syjuco, Ilustrado 12. 13. Other authors who enact similar re-creations of the self in their work include Salvador Plascencia, Philip Roth, and Ishmael Reed. 14. Syjuco, Ilustrado 31. 15. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 63. 16. Syjuco, Ilustrado 302. 17. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton UP, 2008), 55. 18. Ulrich Beck, “Cosmopolitan Sociology: Outline of a Paradigm Shift,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (Routledge, 2011), 18. 19. Barthes, “The Death of the Author” 128. 20. Syjuco, Ilustrado 208. 21. See the previous chapter for more on the concept of mukokuseki. 22. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 38. 23. Syjuco, Ilustrado 32. 24. Syjuco, Ilustrado 18. 25. Beck, “Cosmopolitan Sociology” 25. 26. Syjuco, Ilustrado 301. 27. Syjuco, Ilustrado 180. 28. Syjuco, Ilustrado 47.

Notes to Pages 139–48  213

29. Syjuco, Ilustrado 146. 30. Syjuco, Ilustrado 146. 31. Rochelle Ball, “Trading Labour: Socio-Economic and Political Impacts and Dynamics of Labour Export from the Philippines, 1973–2004,” in Mobility, Labour Migration and Border Controls in Asia, ed. Amarjit Kaur and Ian Metcalfe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 130, 136. 32. Syjuco, Ilustrado 35, 36. 33. Syjuco, Ilustrado 36. 34. Emily Noelle Ignacio, Building Diaspora: Filipino Cultural Community Formation on the Internet (Rutgers UP, 2004), 132. 35. Lois Leveen, “Only When I Laugh: Textual Dynamics of Ethnic Humor,” MELUS 21, no. 4 (1996): 31, doi:10.2307/467641. 36. Leveen, “Only When I Laugh” 31. 37. Miguel Syjuco, An Interview with the Author Miguel Syjuco, fictional interview conducted by Marcel Avellaneda, accessed Nov. 21, 2020, www.miguelsyjuco.com /Bios.html. The interview itself, which first appeared on the publisher’s site and is now on a site narrated by a secondary character in Ilustrado, masquerades as both a legitimate article and a metaleptic joke: Syjuco’s interviewer is identified as another fictional character from Ilustrado, the critic Marcel Avellaneda. The interview supposedly appeared first on Avellaneda’s blog, The Burley Raconteur. 38. See, The Decolonized Eye 87. 39. Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Duke UP, 2000), 173. 40. Syjuco, Ilustrado 36, 50. 41. Syjuco, Ilustrado 36. 42. Syjuco, Ilustrado 36. 43. Rafael, White Love 173. 44. Syjuco, Ilustrado 267. 45. In contrast to the ubiquitous participation of Filipino Americans on the internet, Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (discussed in chapter 3) envisions a fantasy of disappearance: Harry manages to “erase” Nao from the internet even as Ruth searches for her. Ruth’s facility in finding Nao anyway via her magical metalepsis not only exposes the impossibility of disappearance in the internet age, but also suggests an argument against such a retreat in place of a collaborative space to define selfhood. 46. Ignacio, Building Diaspora 133. 47. Leveen, “Only When I Laugh” 31. 48. Syjuco, Ilustrado 18–19. 49. Syjuco, Ilustrado 19.

214  Notes to Pages 149–52

50. Syjuco, Ilustrado 77. 51. Syjuco, Ilustrado 78. 52. Syjuco, Ilustrado 78. 53. Syjuco, Ilustrado 178. 54. Dylan Rodríguez, Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (U of Minnesota P, 2009), 151, 34. 55. Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (Columbia UP, 1992), 217. 56. Ruth Page, “Interactivity and Interaction: Text and Talk in Online Communities,” in Intermediality and Storytelling, ed. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan (Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 208. 57. Syjuco, Ilustrado 19. 58. Syjuco links his fictional President Estregan more closely to dictator Ferdinand Marcos and former Philippine presidents Fidel V. Ramos and Joseph Estrada than he does Arroyo, telling Elizabeth Yuan that the character Estregan is “all of those and none of them” at the same time. Meanwhile, his father, Augusto Syjuco Jr., worked in Arroyo’s cabinet and served two congressional terms. In a move common to dynastic Philippine politics, that same position was subsequently held by his mother, Judy Syjuco. 59. José Rizal, The Philippines: A Century Hence (1889; Philippine Education Company, 1912), 61, www.gutenberg.org/files/35899/35899-h/35899-h.htm. 60. Rizal, The Philippines 61–62. 61. Raquel A. G. Reyes, Love, Passion and Patriotism (NUS Press, 2008), xx. 62. For more on the connection between nineteenth-century ilustrado tenets and race, see Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr., “Tracing Origins: Ilustrado Nationalism and the Racial Science of Migration Waves,” The Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 3 (Aug. 2005): 605–37. 63. For an example of such an argument, see John N. Schumacher, The Propaganda Movement, 1880–1895: The Creation of a Filipino Consciousness, the Making of the Revolution, 2nd ed. (Ateneo de Manila UP, 1997). 64. Megan Christine Thomas, Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (U of Minnesota P, 2012), 15. 65. Teodoro A. Agoncillo, History of the Filipino People, 8th ed. (C & E Publishing, 1990), 140. 66. Agoncillo, History 139. 67. Syjuco, Ilustrado 208. 68. Eleanor Ty, Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (U of Minnesota P, 2010).

Notes to Pages 152–58  215

69. Syjuco, Ilustrado 299. 70. The name Mutya roughly translates to Pearl or Talisman, while her surname invokes the phrase “hindi matahimik” or “not serene,” appropriately suggesting a refusal of complacency. A journalist—what Crispin calls the world’s only truly effective writers—Dimatahimik is stabbed outside of her office building during the Marcos dictatorship (161, 163). Several characters speculate that she is the reason for Avellaneda and Crispin’s estrangement from each other. 71. José Rizal, Noli Me Tángere, ed. Harold Augenbraum (1887; Penguin Classics, 2006). 72. Syjuco, Ilustrado 205. 73. Syjuco, Ilustrado 163. 74. Syjuco, Ilustrado 162. 75. Syjuco, Ilustrado 162. 76. Syjuco, Ilustrado 195. 77. Ignacio, Building Diaspora 132. 78. Bino Realuyo, “‘Am Here’: Am I? (I, Hope, So.),” Literary Review 43, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 299. 79. Syjuco, Ilustrado 12. 80. Syjuco, Ilustrado 208. 81. Syjuco, Ilustrado 207–08. 82. Syjuco, Ilustrado 30. 83. Frank Chin et al., eds., Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (Howard UP, 1983), 257. 84. Syjuco, Ilustrado 299. 85. Syjuco, Ilustrado 296. 86. Syjuco, Ilustrado 298. 87. Jorge Luis Borges, “An Autobiographical Essay,” in Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Jaime Alazraki (G. K. Hall, 1987), 43. 88. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Penguin, 1999), 84. 89. Borges, “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” 85. 90. Borges, “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” 85. 91. Borges, “An Autobiographical Essay” 43. 92. Borges, “An Autobiographical Essay” 43; Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creagh (Vintage, 1993), 50–51. 93. Syjuco, Ilustrado 286. 94. The novel often deliberately confuses distinctions between character names. Murphy and Gregory shift identities and occupations throughout the novel, some-

216  Notes to Pages 158–63

times even in the same telling, and the father and son often refer to the characters not as Murphy Lang and Gregory Lang, but simply as Murphy and Lang. Whether names are significant is one of the novel’s central questions, as suggested by the names of its three main sections: “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” are synonyms of the name of the third section, “Venus.” This trio of names are a nod to German philosopher Gottlob Frege, who used the planet’s descriptors to question the essence of names themselves and the information they do or do not hold. 95. Stacey D’Erasmo, The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between (Graywolf, 2013), 11–12. 96. Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Harvard UP, 2012), 2. 97. Percival Everett, Erasure (Graywolf, 2011), 2. 98. Barthes, “The Death of the Author” 128. 99. By naming the nursing home Teufelsdrockh, Everett is pulling his own version of Syjuco’s evocation of Mir Bahadur Ali in Ilustrado. Not unlike Everett’s Erasure, the reference is a poioumenon: In this case, Teufelsdrockh refers to Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, a fictional German philosopher in Thomas Carlyle’s 1836 metafictional novel Sartor Resartus (ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor [Oxford UP, 2008]). 100. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 16. 101. William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (Vintage, 1992). 102. For more on the controversies of authorship and accuracy surrounding Nat Turner, see David F. Almendinger Jr., “The Construction of The Confessions of Nat Turner,” in Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (Oxford UP, 2004), 24–42, and Daniel S. Fabricant, “Thomas R. Gray and William Styron: Finally, A Critical Look at the 1831 Confessions of Nat Turner,” American Journal of Legal History 37, no. 3 (July 1993): 332–61, doi:10.2307/845661. 103. Christopher Sieving, “The Concessions of Nat Turner,” The Velvet Light Trap 61, no. 1 (Feb. 2008): 41, doi:10.1353/vlt.2008.0002. 104. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 208. 105. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 31. 106. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 57. 107. Jess Row, “Styron’s Choice,” The New York Times, Sept. 5, 2008, www.nytimes .com/2008/09/07/books/review/Row-t.html. 108. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 85–86. 109. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2012), 21. 110. Alexander, The New Jim Crow 13.

Notes to Pages 164–70  217

111. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 87. 112. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 132. 113. Xiomara Santamarina, “The Future of the Present,” PMLA 128, no. 2 (2013): 399. 114. Warren, What Was African American Literature? 27. 115. Syjuco, Ilustrado 208. 116. Santamarina, “The Future of the Present” 399. 117. Warren, What Was African American Literature? 110. 118. Santamarina, “The Future of the Present” 399. 119. Hollinger, Postethnic America 13. 120. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 34. 121. Houston A. Baker Jr., Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America (U of Georgia Press, 2001), 15. 122. Baker, Critical Memory 39. 123. Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” New Masses, Oct. 1937, 22. 124. Houston A. Baker Jr., I Don’t Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South (Oxford UP, 2007), 149. 125. Everett, Erasure 2. 126. In fairness, the same year that Baker wrote this, Everett published his novel The Water Cure. Through the protagonist, romance novelist Ishmael Kidder, the novel forces readers to question the efficacy and ethicalness of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld’s actions in Guantanamo and the Middle East. 127. Baker, I Don’t Hate the South 150. 128. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 34. 129. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 34. 130. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 33. 131. Baker, Critical Memory 49. 132. Baker, Critical Memory 49. 133. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 60–62, 81–82. 134. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 131. 135. Baker, Critical Memory 73. 136. Baker, Critical Memory 73. 137. Baker, Critical Memory 73. 138. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 136. 139. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 31. 140. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 31. 141. Erasure parodies an educated, literate elite like the kind Baker champions, showing them as overcome by the “authenticity” of Jenkins’s We’s Lives in da Ghetto,

218  Notes to Pages 170–75

and as easily duped by Monk’s parodic and absurdist take on African American literature in My Pafology. 142. Sam Sacks, “Pin the Tail on the Narrator,” Wall Street Journal, Mar. 22, 2013, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323419104578372362312853672. 143. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 14. 144. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 216. 145. Eugen Simion, The Return of the Author, ed. James W. Newcomb, trans. Lidia Vianu (Northwestern UP, 1996), 91. 146. Simion, The Return of the Author 92–93. 147. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 208. 148. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 225. 149. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 79. 150. Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 79. 151. Syjuco, Ilustrado 296.

Epilogue 1. Mat Johnson, Pym (Spiegel & Grau, 2012), 8. 2. For instance, just as Poe’s titular character does in the earlier novel, Jaynes introduces Johnson’s novel with an explanation about his return to the United States, even though the novel ends with an announcement of Jayne’s disappearance—a narrative inconsistency that is overlooked in both authors’ texts. As Jaynes himself explains, the concluding author’s note in Poe’s novel mentioning the protagonist’s sudden death adds “more confusion than solution” (33), an observation that holds true for the mirrored inconsistencies in Johnson’s novel. 3. Johnson, Pym 322. 4. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Vintage, 1993), 32. 5. Morrison, Playing in the Dark 33. 6. Nicole Krauss, Forest Dark (Harper, 2017), 40. 7. Poe’s novel was influenced by popular travel narratives of his time. For instance, he “borrowed” very heavily from, and spoke very highly of, Jeremiah N. Reynolds’s Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas, pointing out that Reynolds’s character and “love of polite literature . . . point him out as the man of all men for the execution of the task” of recording his travels (70). Many critics highlight echoes of Melville’s Moby-Dick, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, folklore like the legend of the Flying Dutchman, and even Poe’s own personal travels in the text. The

Notes to Pages 175–81  219

novel would go on to inspire a sequel, entitled An Antarctic Mystery (1897), written by Poe admirer Jules Verne, as well as Charles Romeyn Dake’s A Strange Discovery (1899). For more on the reading and writing of earlier texts through the lens of later postmodern works and vice versa, see Robert Kiely, Reverse Tradition: Postmodern Fictions and the Nineteenth Century Novel (Harvard UP, 1993), and Christian Moraru, Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (SUNY P, 2001). 8. Johnson, Pym 134. 9. Johnson, Pym 134. 10. Johnson, Pym 18. 11. Morrison, Playing in the Dark 13. 12. Jamilah King, “Hari Kondabolu on Why You Can’t Be ‘Obsessed With Race’ in America,” Colorlines, Feb. 6, 2014, www.colorlines.com/articles/hari-kondabolu -why-you-cant-be-obsessed-race-america. 13. Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, trans. Philip Gabriel (Vintage, 2015), 320. 14. Laymon, Long Division 29. 15. Laymon, Long Division 29. 16. Jacqueline Woodson, “The Pain of the Watermelon Joke,” The New York Times, Nov. 28, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/11/29/opinion/the-pain-of-the -watermelon-joke.html. 17. Laymon, Long Division 262. 18. Laymon, Long Division 263. 19. Laymon, Long Division 245. 20. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. (U of Minnesota P, 2008), 63–64. 21. Ozeki, My Year of Meats 176. 22. Gordon, Ghostly Matters 64. 23. Lázaro Lima, The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory (New York UP, 2007), 15. 24. Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (Agate Bolden, 2013), 43. 25. Emphasis mine. Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York UP, 2012), 5. 26. I, Too, Am Harvard, accessed Jan. 23, 2020, itooamharvard.tumblr .com/?og=1. 27. Johnson, Pym 8. 28. Johnson, Pym 4.

220  Notes to Pages 181–86

29. Johnson, Pym 129. 30. Laymon, Long Division 262. 31. Morrison, Home 84. 32. Dimock, Through Other Continents 55. 33. bell hooks, “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional,” Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry 1 (1995): 517–18, doi:10.2307/4177045. 34. Jablon, Black Metafiction 176. 35. Ishmael Reed, Japanese by Spring (Penguin, 1996), 90. 36. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton UP, 2014), 5; Dean Spade, “Trans Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape,” Feb. 9, 2009, bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/dean-spade-trans-politics-on-a -neoliberal-landscape/. 37. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Routledge, 2006), 221. 38. Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003), 134. 39. Audre Lorde, From a Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Lotus Press, 1973), 15.

Notes to Pages 187–90  221

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Index

abject, 39, 79–80 actor-network theory (ANT), 103, 132, 206 Adorno, Theodor, 205 aesthetics, 11–12, 15, 41, 55, 58, 88–89, 143, 150 African American literature. See Baker, Houston A.; Ellison, Ralph; Everett, Percival; Hurston, Zora Neale; Jablon, Madelyn; Johnson, Mat; Laymon, Kiese; Morrison, Toni; Reed, Ishmael; Warren, Kenneth; Wright, Richard Agamben, Giorgio. See state of exception Agoncillo, Teodoro, 157 Aguinaldo, Emilio, 45, 199 Ahmed, Sara, 208; Willful Subjects, 2, 143 Alexander, Michelle: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 169–170 Alexie, Sherman (Spokane-Coeur d’Alene), 86, 204

Alidio, Kimberly, 50 Allen, Paula Gunn (Laguna Pueblo): Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Cannons, 53, 56; The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, 20, 22 American exceptionalism, 6, 25, 41, 55, 94, 108; and multiculturalism, 9–10, 24, 26, 67, 105, 106, 108, 181. See also exceptionalism; model minority American identity, 1–6, 48–49, 53, 65– 66, 68, 85, 94, 121, 123–124, 130, 165, 174, 180–185; American ethnicity, 7, 15–17, 24, 29, 41, 105, 149, 157, 163–164; awareness of imperialism and postcolonialism, 30, 33, 38–39, 65, 140; formation of, 16–17; and immigrants, 4, 7, 11–12, 16–17, 28, 40, 44, 185, 196–197. See also model minority; multiculturalism anime, 123 anti-Semitism, 105 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 8, 193

Apostol, Gina, 10; Bibliolepsy, 33; Gun Dealers’ Daughter, 24, 28–30, 32–52, 54, 60, 63, 72, 83, 100, 124, 133, 164, 187, 197, 199; The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, 33, 199 Asian American literature. See Apostol, Gina (Filipino American); Darraj, Susan (Palestinian American); Hagedorn, Jessica (Filipino American); Kim, Suki (Korean American); Kingston, Maxine Hong (Chinese American); Okada, John (Japanese American); Ozeki, Ruth (Japanese American Canadian); Rizal, Jose (Filipino American); Syjuco, Miguel (Filipino American) Asian North American, 158 assemblage, 115, 146, 168, 169, 204. See also hybridity; pastiche assimilation, 5, 13–14, 25, 29–32, 35, 44, 50, 52, 70, 81, 85, 99, 105–106, 111, 168, 188 Australia, 30, 160, 195 author: and Author-God, 94, 145; death of the, 11, 26, 37, 176; empirical/ real life, 4, 10–12, 71, 73–74, 85–86, 142–146, 156–157, 176, 182, 188, 192; intradiegetic, 71, 85, 146, 156; and narrator, 4, 23, 71; and power or authority, 2–3, 7, 12, 17, 25, 27–28, 31, 35, 48, 54, 68, 74, 76, 92–94, 97–98, 131, 136–137, 143, 145, 154, 159, 170, 177, 179, 185, 192; pseudonym, 142, 162. See also authorship authorship: and authenticity, 3, 7, 19, 25, 68–71, 77–78, 93–95, 98, 115, 118, 161, 165, 218; and ethical storytelling, 23, 39, 68, 70–71, 97; and narcissism,

240 Index

12–13, 70, 104, 163; as protest, 25–30, 35–39, 51–52, 54, 60, 64, 66, 126, 166, 173. See also author; exceptionalism authenticity: and culture, 7–8, 20, 22–23, 28, 30, 59, 68, 70, 72, 74, 94, 105, 108, 143, 150, 156–161, 165, 186, 190; and genre, 68–69, 71, 72, 78, 83, 85, 143, 161–162, 166–167; and history, 39, 44, 146; and truth, 66, 73–74, 77, 79, 84– 92, 118–119, 153. See also authorship autobiography, 78, 142, 146, 186–187, 197. See also talambuhay autofiction, 85, 162 automatization, 78 Baker, Houston A., 172–174, 188; Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America, 172, 174–177; I Don’t Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South, 173 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12 bakya, 150–151 Balangiga Massacre, 36, 38–40, 43, 45–52, 198, 199 Barth, John, 4, 73, 163 Barthes, Roland: “The Death of the Author,” 11, 94, 97, 99, 115, 145, 165, 176 Beck, Ulrich, 144, 148 ben Zakkai, Yochanan, 113–114, 119–120 Berenbaum, Michael, 94–96 Berman, Lila Corwin, 105 Bhabha, Homi, 193, 200–201 bildungsroman, 12, 32, 35–37, 186–187. See also autobiography Black Lives Matter, 13, 14–15, 185 blank page, 22, 24, 71, 120, 129, 133–134, 141–143, 146, 148, 154, 158, 161–162, 184

blogs, 145–147, 152–154, 158 boba liberalism, 123 bodymind (Schalk), 72–73, 75, 77 Booth, Wayne, 67 borders. See metalepsis; transnational movements Borges, Jorge Luis, 162–163 Bourriaud, Nicolas: Relational Aesthetics, 15 Bow, Leslie: Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature, 41–42 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 69, 75, 78–79 brown, adrienne maree: Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, 14 Brown, Michael, 185–186 Brownies, 75, 79–80 Buddhism, 104, 120–121, 132, 135–136, 210 Bulosan, Carlos: America is in the Heart, 140 Burke, Seán: The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 11, 176 Butler, Judith, 39 Cacho, Lisa Marie, 185 Calvino, Italo, 163 Campomanes, Oscar, 44, 50 Canada, 120, 160, 196; multiculturalism in, 5, 30, 124, 210 canon, 8–9, 19, 78, 84, 165, 187. See also publishing capitalism, 13–14, 40–41, 123, 125, 146, 161; and global marketplace, 150–151, 153

Caruth, Cathy, 88 Castricano, Jodey, 190 Catlin, George, 58–65 Cederstrom, Lorelei, 20–22 Cervantes, Miguel de, 4, 163 Cheung, King-Kok, 28 Chin, Frank, 161 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 28 Chow, Rey: Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading, 6, 107–108 Chu, Patricia, 11 citizenship, 5, 15, 24, 29–34, 40, 44, 160, 185–186, 189 Coates, Ta-Nehisi: Between the World and Me, 140 collaboration, 3–4, 14, 25–26, 64, 68–70, 76–78, 84–94, 97–98, 113, 118, 137, 140, 143–149, 153–156, 162, 176, 180, 190, 214. See also labor; reading colonialism. See postcolonialism colorism, 150–151 confession, 5, 110, 114, 118, 166–169, 177 copyist, 97, 206; amanuensis, 167 coronavirus (COVID-19), 4, 106, 207 cosmopolitanism, 40, 142, 148, 151, 159 Craps, Stef: Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, 57 creolization, 71 Culler, Jonathan, 82 Cummings, Kate, 20–21 Currie, Mark, 131 D’Erasmo, Stacey, 164 Darraj, Susan M.: Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing, 116 Davis, Angela, 36

Index  241

defamiliarization, 66, 68–72, 75, 78–79, 82 Delmendo, Sharon: The Star-Entangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines, 46–47, 51, 199 democracy, 6, 46, 105 Derrida, Jacques: Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International, 189–190 diaspora, 33, 44, 140–141; digital diaspora, 145–163 Díaz, Junot, 86, 204 Dimock, Wai Chee: Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time, 17, 144, 187 dissensus. See self-care diversity, 3, 5–10, 33–34, 37, 40, 105, 179, 182–183, 189, 210 Dōgen, Eihei, 136 doubles, 20, 26, 28, 34, 40, 42, 43, 45, 52, 54–55, 100, 156, 180, 183–185, 188–190. See also ghostliness Du Bois, W. E. B.: The Souls of Black Folk, 2, 9, 175 economy, 7, 19, 40, 106, 148, 164 education: and elitism, 150–151, 175, 177, 218; and multiculturalism, 3, 5, 7–9, 31, 85, 159, 165–166, 179–181, 189; and privilege, 19, 52, 155 elitism, 150, 153, 175, 218 ellipses, 184 Ellison, Ralph, 1–5, 26, 172, 174 Eng, David, 60 England: multiculturalism in, 9, 30–31, 78–79, 83 Erdrich, Louise (Turtle Mountain Chip-

242 Index

pewa): Shadow Tag, 18, 24–25, 28–30, 32, 52–66, 72, 83, 93, 100, 104, 111, 126, 133, 164, 183, 187 essentialism, 4–5, 18, 37, 40, 53, 59–60, 94, 123, 165, 171 ethics, 13 Eurocentrism, 150, 153, 156, 189 Everett, Percival, 10, 188; Erasure, 165, 173–174, 179, 218–219; I Am Not Sidney Poitier, 142; with James Kincaid: A History of the African-American People, 142; Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, 14, 26, 140–146, 163–178, 180, 182, 213, 218; Telephone, 181; The Water Cure, 218 exceptionalism: and authorship, 103, 104, 108, 109–112, 114–115, 117–118, 119 Federman, Raymond: Critifiction, 94, 97, 99 Filipinx, 195 Flaubert, Gustave: “Bouvard et Pécuchet,” 97 Foer, Jonathan Safran: Everything Is Illuminated, 25, 66–71, 84–102, 104, 119, 142, 186 foreignness, 16, 39–40, 44, 99, 124, 141, 185 Foucault, Michel: “What Is an Author?”, 12–13, 208 fragmentation and identity, 5, 35–36, 102, 108, 113, 147, 159; and texts, 12, 26, 51, 83, 113, 147, 169. See also hybridity Framingham Eight, 83 France, 30, 126, 128, 130, 151, 153, 173 Frank, Anne, 84 Furman, Andrew, 105

Garza, Alicia, 13–14 Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 9 genre boundaries and conventions, 10, 16, 26, 29–30, 32, 35–37, 66, 68–69, 71, 72, 78, 83, 85, 143–144, 155, 161, 162, 164–166, 171, 182. See also hybridity; metafiction ghostliness, 11, 23, 26, 27, 32, 49, 79, 110, 112, 163, 168, 172, 177, 179–190. See also doubles Gilbert, Sandra M.: and Susan Gubar: The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 53, 57, 69–70, 74, 76–78, 81 Glissant, Édouard, 71 globalization, 16, 53, 106, 121–123, 148–151, 153 Gordon, Avery, F.: Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 184, 185 Gray, Thomas, 167–169 Griggers, Camilla: Becoming-Woman, 32–33, 41 Gunew, Sneja, 5 Hagedorn, Jessica, 34 Hall, Stuart, 106 Hartman, Saidiya, 6 Hausdoerffer, John, 58 Hello Kitty, 120–125 Hernández-Ávila, Inés, 55 heteronormativity, 69, 77 Hoffman, Eva: Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, 99 Hollinger, David, 15–16, 171–172 Holocaust, 69, 84–90, 93–96, 99–100, 102, 108–110, 118–119. See also World War II

hooks, bell, 187 horror: genre of, 69, 71–72, 74, 76, 80, 203 Howard, Rebecca Moore: “Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism,” 76, 94 humor. See jokes hupomnēmata: and self-writing, 12–13 Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God, 8, 16, 172–173 Hutcheon, Linda: Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, 11 hybridity, 55, 71, 193, 200–201; and hybrid texts, 71, 82–83, 90, 143–144, 146–147, 157, 165. See also intertextuality Ignacio, Emily Noelle: Building Diaspora: Filipino Cultural Community Formation on the Internet, 149, 151, 159–160 ilustrados, 151, 155–160. See also Rizal, Jose immigration, 4, 10–11, 16–17, 28–29, 35, 40, 44, 60, 104, 185, 197, 210 imperialism, 24–25, 29–30, 33–38, 40– 48, 50, 57, 60, 141, 148, 153, 193 indigeneity, 7, 30, 41, 53–56, 59–62, 64–65, 192, 196 inequality, 4–9, 13, 33, 35–36, 41, 105–107, 164, 166, 169, 171–174, 191 Insular Cases, 44, 199 internet: and digital communication, 145, 151–153, 214 internment. See Japanese American incarceration camps intertextuality, 11, 20, 22, 51, 69, 179. See also hybridity; metafiction Isaac, Allan Punzalan, 38

Index  243

Jablon, Madelyn: Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature, 11, 16, 188 James, Henry, 1, 139–140, 145 Japan, 12, 107, 120–121, 123–127, 130, 136–137, 211; and multiculturalism, 209–210 Japanese American incarceration camps, 29, 124 Japanese Cute-Cool, 123 Jewish American literature. See Foer, Jonathan Safran; Hoffman, Eva; Judaism; Krauss, Nicole; New Yiddishists; Spiegelman, Art Jim Crow, 164, 166, 169–171, 174 Johnson, Barbara, 117 Johnson, Mat: Pym, 26, 131, 179–182, 189, 219 jokes, 26, 140, 145–154, 158–159, 169, 176, 214 Judaism, 7, 105, 113–114, 119–120, 192. See also Jewish American literature Kafka, Franz, 180 Kamikaze (Special Attack Force), 124–127, 136 Kesey, Ken, 174 Kim, Suki: The Interpreter, 99 King Jr., Martin Luther, 6, 168–170 Kingston, Maxine Hong: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, 27–28 Kondabolu, Hari, 182 Kondo, Marie, 107–108, 135 Korean Cool, 123 Krauss, Nicole, 85; Forest Dark, 181; Great House, 25–26, 103–104, 106, 108–120, 133, 137, 140, 184, 212; The History of Love, 119

244 Index

labor: and activism, 13–14, 36; and being, 2, 30, 171; and raciality, 153; and reading, 3, 4, 26, 31, 48, 72, 76, 78, 82, 90, 92–93, 96, 113, 132, 133, 141–144, 146, 147–149, 151–152, 155–157, 159, 175–176; and self-care, 33, 146–148, 182. See also collaboration; reading language and cultural identity, 7, 9, 11, 15, 21, 29, 40, 44, 64, 99, 100–112, 124, 150–151, 157, 182, 189, 195; confusion and clarity of, 31, 44–45 Latinx American literature. See Anzaldúa, Gloria (Chicana); Díaz, Junot (Dominican American); Machado, Carmen Maria (American of Cuban descent) Latour, Bruno, 103, 132, 206 Laub, Dori: “Truth and Testimony,” 89–90 Laymon, Kiese: How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, 185; Long Division, 17–18, 26, 131, 183–185, 187 Leveen, Lois, 149, 151 Levi, Primo, 85, 96 likeability, 125, 172, 174 Lima, Lázaro, 185 linearity, 31–32, 35–37, 43, 70, 146–147, 165, 174 literary criticism, 9, 11, 25, 54, 97, 142–143, 145, 164, 177, 188; of African American literature, 171–174; of Ceremony, 19–21; fictional criticism, 152, 160, 165, 214; of Filipino American literature, 160–161; of Jewish American literature, 96; of women authors, 74. See also reader response; reading Literature of New Arrival, 16 Lorde, Audre: A Burst of Light: and Oth-

er Essays, 2–3, 13, 146; From a Land Where Other People Live, 190 Lowe, Lisa: Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, 6, 40–41 Loyalty Questionnaire, 29 lunchbox moment, 123 Maalouf, Amin, 30 Machado, Carmen Maria: Her Body and Other Parties, 66–68, 71, 73, 203; In the Dream House, 81–84; “The Resident” (from Her Body and Other Parties), 18, 25, 69–84, 92, 100, 186 Magdaleno, Jana Sequoya, 55–56, 64 magical realism, 85, 87, 88, 91–93, 97, 183 Marcos, Ferdinand, 32, 34–35, 42–43, 48, 215, 216 Martin, Trayvon, 23 masculinity, 20, 23, 94 Mason, Bertha (fictional character), 69, 75, 78–79 Mattis, James, 50 mediators and storytelling, 96, 132, 168, 210–211 Melamed, Jodi, 9 memory: critical memory, 172–175; and fiction, 34, 52, 72, 118, 136, 162, 178; and history, 25, 38–39, 50, 52, 91, 96, 113, 135, 136, 185; involuntary memory, 130; and objects, 103, 121, 130–132, 135; rememory, 134–135; and trauma, 41, 79–80, 117–118, 141, 149, 177. See also self-care mental health, 2, 24, 28–33, 50–52, 56, 67, 69, 71–72, 75, 78, 80–81, 119; and trauma, 19–23, 25, 35–41 metafiction: definition, 10–11; disruptions and interruptions, 37, 70, 74,

92, 153; and genre, 29, 143, 147, 164; historiographic metafiction, 34; and narcissism, 12–13, 71, 104, 163; and power and responsibility, 12, 15, 25, 39, 74, 132, 179–180; and self-care, 3–4, 10–18, 25, 29, 37, 50, 71, 74, 139, 162–163, 166, 184–188; and truth, 46, 86, 88, 142, 176, 217. See also intertextuality; metalepsis; revision metalepsis, 26, 104, 113, 128–129, 131–138, 162, 184, 210–211, 214 Minh-ha, Trinh T.: When the Moon Waxes Red, 28; Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, 31, 33 mixed race, 19, 52, 78–79 model minority, 25, 104, 108, 121; Asian Americans as, 28, 105–107, 121, 123, 207; Jewish Americans as, 105–106, 111–112, 204 Mohanty, Satya, 35 Montezuma, Carlos, 63 Morrison, Toni: Beloved, 134–135, 168; Home, 23–24, 94, 145, 187; Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 179–182 mujō seppō (the nonsentients preach the Dharma), 136 Mukherjee, Bharati, 16 mukokuseki (without nationality), 106, 121–123, 128, 131, 145 multiculturalism: additive multiculturalism, 191; boutique multiculturalism, 17; and the canon, 8–9, 19, 78, 84, 165, 187; critical multiculturalism, 191; definition, 3, 5–6, 9–10, 20, 24, 35, 41; and education, 3, 5, 7–9, 31, 85, 159, 165–166, 179–181, 189; and

Index  245

exceptionalism, 9–10, 24–26, 55, 68, 103–114, 181; institutionalization / corporatization of, 3, 6, 8, 14, 24, 31, 85, 92–94, 123–124, 172; limitations of failure, 5–8, 20–21, 40–41, 44, 53, 55–57, 59, 68, 77, 83; and performance, 5–7, 15, 104–105, 107–108; and postcolonialism, 29, 31–32, 35, 50, 55, 57, 63, 79, 195; and self-care, 4–10, 12, 14–15, 17–19, 24, 31–34, 37–38, 50–53, 64–65, 106, 121, 188–190. See also Canada; England; Japan Murakami, Haruki, 182 Mwangi, Evan, 12, 16 narcissism: and metafiction, 12–13, 70–71, 104, 163 narratology, 4, 12, 26. See also metalepsis narrators: autodiegetic, 4; deliberate uncertainty of, 144, 146–147, 163, 170, 176, 213; fallible or unreliable, 24–25, 48, 67–69, 71–74, 83–84, 86–87, 90; heterodiegetic, 23; homodiegetic, 4, 37; intradiegetic, 71 nationality: and identity, 2, 4, 5–11, 25–26, 29, 33–34, 37, 39, 45, 55–56, 60, 65, 107–108, 113, 120–131, 133, 139– 140, 144, 147–149, 153, 156–160, 164, 185–189; and literature, 166; methodological nationalism, 144–145, 148; quasi-nationality, 30, 34, 40, 44; vs nationalism, 103–105. See also mukokuseki (without nationality) Native American literature. See Alexie, Sherman (Spokane-Coeur d’Alene); Allen, Paula Gunn (Laguna Pueblo); Erdrich, Louise (Turtle Mountain Chippewa); Silko, Leslie Marmon (Laguna Pueblo)

246 Index

Naturalization Oath, 29 New Yiddishists, The, 85 Ngai, Mae, 189 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 39 Nussbaum, Martha, 108, 116 O’Brien, Tim, 86, 89 object-oriented ontology (OOO), 208 objectification, 6–7, 25, 104–108, 112–113, 116, 123, 207–208 objective correlative, 39 Okada, John: No-No Boy, 161 Olson, Greta: “Reconsidering Unreliability,” 67, 79 One Thousand and One Nights. See Scheherazade originality, 74–83, 94, 95–101. See also plagiarism Ozeki, Ruth, 18, 140; My Year of Meats, 183, 212; A Tale for the Time Being, 25, 103–104, 106, 108, 115, 120–138, 142, 210, 211, 212, 214 pastiche, 147, 183. See also assemblage patriarchy, 31, 42, 74, 76, 193 Petrowskaja, Katja: Maybe Esther, 85 Philippines, 30, 32, 33–51, 63, 148–151, 153, 155–160, 194, 198, 199, 215 Phillips, Ann: Multiculturalism without Culture, 31 plagiarism, 25, 66, 68–69, 76–79, 81, 92–94, 96–100, 119, 203. See also originality pluralism, 6, 14, 35 Poe, Edgar Allan: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 179–182, 186, 219–220; “The Tell-Tale Heart,” 67

polyvocality, 26, 147, 176 Ponce, Martin Joseph, 33 postcolonialism (also post/colonialism), 17, 25, 28–32, 35–40, 43–47, 54–57, 62–65, 78–79, 143, 148, 151, 153, 156–158, 160, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200–201, 206; and arrested raciality, 153; and benevolent assimilation, 50; “coca-colonization,” 153; definition of “post/colonial,” 196; and multiculturalism, 35, 50, 55, 57, 63, 79 postmodernism, 4, 10, 12, 38, 104, 143, 163, 178, 180, 187–188, 199 Proust, Marcel: Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, 120, 127–130, 183 Puar, Jasbir: Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 40–41 public and private sphere, 41, 55 publishing: as freedom or privilege, 19, 160; as defining the canon, 84, 187; and recovery work, 165; and revolution, 157–158; popularity and silencing, 141–142, 159–161, 164, 183, 186–187. See also canon queerness, 33, 71–74, 77–78, 81–83, 141, 189 racism, 4, 9, 17, 42, 54, 57, 106, 107, 174, 180, 182, 184, 191, 208 Rafael, Vicente, 150–151 Rambelli, Fabio, 120–121, 136 reader response, 192 readers as characters, 11, 32, 34, 52, 57, 60, 63–64, 77, 87, 89–93, 99, 119, 125, 130, 132–134, 138, 148–149, 162, 181, 183–184

reading: biographical reading, 3, 14–15, 26, 56, 67–68, 70–71, 143, 145, 157–158, 164, 175–177; and intimacy, 70–71, 113, 115, 117, 121, 131, 145, 164, 166, 176; and narratology, 12, 26; and privilege, 19, 72, 74, 141, 179–180, 186; readers as unreliable, 86, 160; reading practices, 3, 48, 64, 72, 82; and responsibility, 3, 10, 14–15, 17, 25–26, 37–38, 39–40, 46, 48, 56, 64, 68–69, 71–73, 76, 82, 88–90, 93, 127–128, 132–135, 143–147, 188–190, 197, 218. See also collaboration; canon; labor; literary criticism; readers as characters realism, 11, 34, 86. See also magical realism; reservation realism Realuyo, Bino, 160, 161 Reed, Ishmael, 189, 213 relational aesthetics, 15 reliability. See narrators, unreliable; reading; truth repetition, 37, 69, 73, 74–76, 80–82, 92, 99, 118 reservation realism, 86 revision: as done by narrators and author-characters, 3, 23–25, 35–36, 37–38, 45–46, 48–49, 51, 55, 60–62, 65, 80, 87, 110, 112, 114–117, 141–142, 145; as done by real-life authors, 46, 56, 139, 157; and form, 34; of history, 45–46, 48, 50, 52 re/witnessing. See witnessing Reyes, Raquel, 156 Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea, 78–79 Rizal, Jose, 150–151, 155–157; El Filibusterismo, 155; Noli Me Tangere, 147, 155, 157, 158–160; Sucesos de Las Islas Filipinas, 46, 199. See also ilustrados

Index  247

Rodríguez, Dylan, 153 Roley, Brian Ascalon, 30 Rudrappa, Sharmila: Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures of Citizenship, 104–105, 107 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 131, 211 Said, Edward: Orientalism, 62, 156 Sanrio. See Hello Kitty Santamarina, Xiomara, “The Future of the Present,” 171 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 36 Schalk, Sami: Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, 72 Scheherazade (fictional character), 115, 116, 211 Schott, Joseph: The Ordeal of Samar, 45, 47 secrecy: and identity, 22, 29, 33, 110, 117–118; subterranean or underground writing, 25, 117–118, 184; and writing, 10, 25, 28, 32, 55, 62–63, 126, 133–134, 137 See, Sarita Echavez, 150 self-care: and activism, 14, 25, 28–30, 31, 34, 36, 39–41, 48, 51–52, 64, 66, 93, 95, 126, 186; commercialized, 13–14, 107, 123, 146; and cross-textual assemblage, 20–22, 26, 64, 113; definition of radical self-care, 3–5, 10, 15–17; as dissensus or negotiation, 4, 10, 14, 19, 24, 35, 64–65, 87–89, 93–94, 98–99, 103, 112, 114, 131, 142, 143, 170, 188; and form or genre, 12–13, 29, 52, 68, 72, 91, 93, 131, 187; and history, 20–22, 48, 53–55, 64, 93, 96, 114, 140, 184; as

248 Index

indirection and obscurity, 28, 30–31, 39, 41, 52, 57–58, 62, 184; as intimate community, 17, 70–71, 84, 103–104, 109, 115–118, 121, 128, 130–132, 135, 140, 144–146, 149, 155, 164; and labor, 146–148; and language, 99–100, 186; and memory, 21, 25, 39, 41, 52, 72, 103, 118, 121, 130, 132, 162, 185; as metalepsis, 26, 104, 113, 128–129, 131–138, 162, 184, 210–211, 214; and multiculturalism, 4–10, 12, 14–15, 17–19, 24, 31–34, 37–38, 50–53, 64–65, 106, 121, 180–182, 188–190, 193, 201; and nationhood, 1, 15, 34, 103, 104, 109, 125– 126, 131, 133, 153; as not-truth, 90, 91, 97–98; and power, 5–6, 13–15, 18–19, 29, 33, 35, 45, 48, 69, 86, 92, 100–101, 124–126, 146, 153, 174, 180–181, 192; as repetition, 37, 69, 74, 90; as revision, 3, 23–25, 35–36, 37–38, 45–46, 48–49, 51, 55, 60–62, 65, 80, 87, 110, 112, 114– 117, 141–142, 145; and self-knowledge, 13, 40, 103, 109; and survival, 2–3, 13, 140, 147; and trauma, 21, 36–37, 39, 63, 72, 75, 77, 83, 88–89, 94, 140. See also authorship; collaboration; willfulness self-writing. See hupomnēmata September 11 attacks. See terrorism Shklovsky, Viktor, 71, 78 Shōnagon, Sei: The Pillow Book, 12, 182–183 silencing, 24–25, 27–29, 39, 79, 83, 86, 107, 112, 113, 123, 165, 173. See also secrecy Silko, Leslie Marmon (Laguna Pueblo): Ceremony, 19–23 Simion, Eugen: The Return of the Author, 176–177

Slaughter, Joseph, 36 slavery, 41, 76, 94, 135, 163, 166–169, 181 Smith, Zadie, 9 Sohn, Stephen: Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds, 8, 106 Spade, Dean, 189 Spiegelman, Art, 204 state of exception, 43 stereotypes, 7, 16–17, 54–55, 78, 79, 83, 105, 111, 121, 165, 183–184 Stewart, Susan, 77 Styron, William: The Confessions of Nat Turner, 163, 166–168, 170, 177, 182 subjectivity, 2, 11–13, 16, 19, 24–25, 28–35, 56, 70, 76–77, 103, 107–108, 113, 164, 189–190 Suvin, Darko, 72 Syjuco, Miguel: Ilustrado, 4, 26, 139–163, 177, 180, 214, 215, 216, 217 Tagalog, 34–35, 44, 150–151, 156, 197 talambuhay, 29, 32, 34–37, 41–43, 45–46, 48, 52, 66, 72, 109, 197. See also autobiography Talmud, 113, 119 Taussig, Michael, 101 Taylor, Charles, 70–71 temporality, 16, 64, 106, 148, 156, 160, 163, 164, 166, 168–170, 190 terrorism, 4, 95; Balangiga Massacre, 39–40, 198; September 11 attacks, 39–40, 46, 137, 149, 198 testimony, 25, 55–56, 67–70, 84–85, 89–90, 95–96, 102–104, 114, 121. See also witnessing tikkun olam, 119 translation, 70, 96–97, 99–100, 116, 124, 132, 134

transnational: connections, 25, 109, 162; identity, 25, 120–121, 128, 139, 144, 159, 162; movements, 106, 108, 112, 118, 123–124, 128, 133, 157, 158. See also cosmopolitanism trauma. See self-care truth: lost truth, 89; as a negotiation, 23, 87–92, 118–119; not-truth, 69–70, 84–93, 97–98, 118; and reliability, 62, 66–68, 77–86, 97, 98, 186; and self-knowledge, 12–13, 63, 70, 77, 158; story-truth vs happening-truth (or truth “in the actual”), 86–91, 93, 97; and storytelling, 68, 96–97; as unstable or multiple, 25, 84, 86, 92, 99, 126, 168. See also narrators, unreliable; reading; self-care Turner, Nat, 162, 166–170, 177, 182 Ty, Eleanor, 158 unreliability. See narrators, unreliable; Olson, Greta; reading; truth US nationals, 34, 44, 196 vernacular writing, 173 Vowell, Sarah, 64 Warren, Kenneth, 164–166, 169, 171–172, 174–175 water cure, 198 Waugh, Patricia: Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, 11 Waxman, Zoë Vania, 96 web 2.0, 154 wholeness, 20–22, 24, 28–33, 34–39, 42, 56–58, 63–65, 68–69, 81, 111, 159 Widiss, Benjamin: Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in

Index  249

Twentieth-Century American Literature, 11, 176 Wiesel, Elie, 84, 94–96, 205 Wieviorka, Annette, 85 willfulness, 2, 18, 25, 50, 53, 57, 64–65, 69, 135, 142–146, 182, 184–185. See also self-care witnessing, 25, 68–70, 79, 91, 100, 132; and re/witnessing, 89–90, 93, 95; testimony as self-witnessing, 66, 84–85, 90, 95–96, 114; and writing, 85, 87, 89, 90–91, 189. See also testimony

250 Index

Woodson, Jacqueline, 183–184 World War II, 19, 29, 84–85, 96, 106, 124, 127, 135. See also Holocaust Wright, Richard, 1, 2, 172–193, 175 writing. See author; authorship Wu, Ellen D., 106 Yano, Christine R., 121, 123 Yu, Charles: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, 183

The New American Canon

Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella by Gina Arnold

Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry by Jim Cocola

Violet America: Regional Cosmopolitanism in U.S. Fiction since the Great Depression by Jason Arthur

The Legacy of David Foster Wallace edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou

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Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives by Leah A. Milne William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture by Mitch R. Murray and Mathias Nilges Poems of the American Empire: The Lyric Form in the Long Twentieth Century by Jen Hedler Phillis Reading Capitalist Realism edited by Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge Technomodern Poetics: The American Literary Avant-Garde at the Start of the Information Age by Todd F. Tietchen How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production by John K. Young Ecospatiality: A Place-Based Approach to American Literature by Lowell Wyse