Symbolism 15: [Special Focus – Headnotes, Footnotes, Endnotes] 9783110449075, 9783110447439

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Symbolism An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Editorial Board Ackbar Abbas ‧ Heinz Antor ‧ Susan Bassnett ‧ Wilhelm Benning ‧ Roy Boyne ‧ Daniela Carpi Marc Chénetier ‧ Kevin L. Cope ‧ René Gallet ‧ Cristina Giorcelli ‧ Yasmine Gooneratne Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht ‧ Ihab Hassan ‧ Maria Herrera-Sobek ‧ Linda Hutcheon Christopher Innes ‧ Eva-Marie Kroeller ‧ Francisco A. Lomelí ‧ M. Mukherjee ‧ Susana Onega Andrew Parkin ‧ Clive T. Probyn ‧ Eric S. Rabkin ‧ Frédéric Regard ‧ Kiernan Ryan Ronald Shusterman ‧ Barbara Stafford ‧ Franz K. Stanzel ‧ Stefanos Stefanides Toshiyuki Takamiya ‧ Kwok-kan Tam ‧ Qing Sheng Tong ‧ Robert Weimann ‧ Richard H. Weisberg Walther Chr. Zimmerli

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Volume 15 Edited by Rüdiger Ahrens and Klaus Stierstorfer Assistant Editor Florian Kläger

DE GRUYTER

ISBN 978-3-11-044743-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-044907-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-044781-1 ISSN 1528-3623 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Konrad Triltsch, Print und digitale Medien GmbH, Ochsenfurt Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Foreword from the Editors The National Gallery in London currently (April to September 2015) has a muchnoted exhibition on “Frames in Focus. Sansovino Frames.” It centers on the work of the architect and sculptor Jacopo Sansovino (1486 – 1570) whose elaborate, early-baroque frames later made his name eponymous for this period and type of picture frames worldwide. The National Gallery exhibition is a timely reminder of the importance of what are often perceived as the paraphernalia of a work of art which, on closer scrutiny, turn out to be not only works of art in their own right, but emerge as forming an integral part of the way the piece of art in the ‘center’ is perceived. Whether the frames are celebrating exuberance as Sansovino’s certainly do, in the flourish of their gold-leaved cornucopian ornaments, or whether the frames become thin and inconspicuous in self-denial, they always carry a meaning of their own and at the same time enrich and tincture the work of art they ‘support’ in several meanings of the word. By exploring the margins of the literary text, notably headnotes, footnotes and endnotes, the guest editors of the focus in this issue of Symbolism, Heide Ziegler and Patrick O’Donnell, achieve a similarly radical change of perspective, this time on the literary text as the work of art under consideration. Compared to picture frames, the paratext in question here is, however, even more ambiguously set in a transition zone between text and context, between literature and ‘the world’, or between fiction and ‘reality’. While frames in painting are more generally seen as delimiting and confining the canvas they hold, footnotes and their like in literature are generally set to gesture beyond the work they ‘frame’, to make it porous to the world beyond its own confines and open it up to a wider network of meanings. The essays collected here are an invitation to ponder the richness of these complications of meaning on the many levels of textual signification. As always, this is the place for the editors to express their gratitude to the guest editors as much as to the editorial team under Florian Kläger’s expert coordination and the always reliable collaboration of Chris Wahlig, this time supported by Svenja Pauly and Laura Schmitz-Justen at the University of Münster, and by Angelika Hermann at De Gruyter. Rüdiger Ahrens University of Würzburg

Klaus Stierstorfer University of Münster

Table of Contents Foreword from the Editors

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Special Focus: Headnotes, Footnotes, Endnotes. Reflections on the Margins of the Literary Text Corresponding editors: Patrick O’Donnell and Heide Ziegler Patrick O’Donnell and Heide Ziegler Introduction: Headnotes, Footnotes, Endnotes. Reflections on the Margins of the Literary Text 3

I Undermining Authority, Power, and Dominance Stephen Rachman Poe, Annotation, and the Other

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Timo Müller Headnotes and Endnotes in the African American Sonnet

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John Morán González Páginas en blanco, Footnotes, and the Authority of the Archive in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 57

II Diluting Mainstream Constraints Eva Dolo Too Much Fun – Endnotes in Infinite Jest

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Johanna Hartmann Paratextualized Forms of Fictional Self-Narration: Footnotes, Headnotes and Endnotes in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad 101

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Laura B. McGrath “Only a Book”: Reading the Footnotes in House of Leaves

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III Creating Another Voice for the Self Patrick O’Donnell The Novel as Note: Pale Fire and its Aftermath

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Heide Ziegler Headnotes, Footnotes, Subliminal Notes in “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” and The Kraus Project 155

General Section Patrick O’Donnell The Visible Remainder: Curtis White’s Memories of My Father 181 Watching TV Christopher Schliephake Classicism, Cultural Mobility, Hybridity, and the Transnational Imagination in 193 the Works of Reginald Shepherd List of Contributors Index

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Special Focus: Headnotes, Footnotes, Endnotes. Reflections on the Margins of the Literary Text Corresponding editors: Patrick O’Donnell and Heide Ziegler

Patrick O’Donnell and Heide Ziegler

Introduction: Headnotes, Footnotes, Endnotes. Reflections on the Margins of the Literary Text Is it too fanciful to claim that footnotes and marginalia are among the earliest forms of writing, or that writing began as a process of annotation? Certainly if we consider headnotes, footnotes, and endnotes in their traditional uses as providing information that is supplementary or incidental to the primary work – thus forms of contextualization – then it does not seem too far-fetched to think of this “secondary” writing as having a history that stretches back to the beginnings of writing per se. According to Piotar Michalowski, the author of the chapter on “Early Mesopotamia” that serves as the very first in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, [t]he first-known Mesopotamian writings [considered to be one of the earliest-known writing systems] are preserved on approximately five thousand clay tablets discovered in the city of Urak, dating from around 3200 B.C. The writing system, known to moderns as proto-cuneiform, was invented exclusively for accounting purposes, although roughly 15 per cent of the tablets consist of word lists; that is, of materials that were used for teaching purposes so that the system had a built-in form of instruction to ensure its survival over more than one generation.¹

The qualities of the writing contained in this description mirror several of those attributable to the traditional footnote or endnote: the writing is purely informative, the writing-system a form of accountancy or keeping track of the flow of goods or information; it is pedagogical, a way of teaching the reader how to understand the information provided so that this information can be correctly communicated to future readers; it is contextual, in that it maps the linguistic terrain surrounding and undergirding the main text; it is mnemonic, in that it serves as a means of remembering the information conveyed, literally building a language of memory in its word lists.

 Piotar Michalowski, “Early Mesopotamia,” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume : Beginnings to AD , ed. Andrew Feldherr, Grant Hardy (New York: Oxford UP, ):  – .

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As writing developed over time, and as the multiple genres of writing evolved, these systematic functions of early writing become increasingly relegated to the margins of the texts as scholarly apparatuses supplementing the main text, philosophical, historical, or scientific. The purpose of footnotes, headnotes, and endnotes in such works remains primarily informational, contextual, and referential, directing the reader to further information, other resources, or additional commentary that, if inserted in the primary text, would distract the reader too much from the main focus or argument. The different forms of headnote, footnote, and endnote are indicative of varying relationships between the primary and secondary texts that the author wishes to impose upon the reader: a headnote or epigraph, coming before the main text, serves as an anecdotal indication of what is to come, not unlike the grand marshal of a parade, a metonymic figure of authority signifying what follows; a footnote, coming at the bottom of each page upon which the note is referenced, demands that the reader move vertically between primary and supplementary texts, visually imposing a textual hierarchy; an endnote, coming at the end of a chapter or an entire book, tends to be infuriating for the reader who wants to track the flow of information page by page without too much interruption, but for the more casual reader who does not want to be distracted from the main text, it offers a convenient parallel text that can be accessed at will “horizontally.” What happens, then, to marginalia as we have described them when they are employed for “literary” purposes, when they appear in an imaginative work? Do their traditional qualities – informational, contextual, referential, pedagogical, mnemonic – somehow change, as well as work to transform the relationship both formally and semiotically between the primary and supplementary or secondary text? Why would authors of novels and poems footnote their own literary projects, as if the world as imagined needed grounding in some kind of extra-textual authority? Indeed why, in an abundance of literary works extending over four centuries from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), can we observe multiple instances of what Gérard Genette has famously defined as “paratextual” activity? For Genette, the paratext is anything that exists on the borders of the main text, “a heterogeneous group of practices and discourses” that operate as a textual “threshold,” or an “ ‘ undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard or fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text), an edge, or as Philippe Lejeune put it, ‘a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls

Introduction: Headnotes, Footnotes, Endnotes

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one’s reading of the text.’ ”² While, on the one hand, the specific textual examples of headnotes, footnotes, and endnotes would hardly seem to be “undefined zones” in their formal positioning in the text, wherever they are placed, the acts of attention they impose upon the reader are far from determinate: they exist, indeed, as thresholds that the reader may cross over patiently or rapidly, and at different points in time, but which cannot be visually ignored as they exert control over the reader’s progress from the “inside” to the margins of the text. The notion of headnote, footnote or endnote as “paratext” thus offers the possibility, for literature, of the text challenging itself from within, as if it wanted to both establish and subvert its own authority along with the relationship between the primary and the secondary. In this Special Focus devoted to “Headnotes, Footnotes, Endnotes,” the corresponding editors have assembled a group of essays that pursue the questions raised above when these specific forms of marginalia are considered as paratexts. What thresholds are exposed, for example, when a literary work employs a sequential succession of footnotes that divert the reader from the main story, or indeed, that can be seen in such contemporary instances as Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) or Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (1988) to usurp the primary text altogether at certain points? What questions about authority, reading, hierarchy, supplementarity, digression, inside and outside are raised when literary marginalia transgress their discursive boundaries, especially as vehicles of self-conscious reflexivity, or counter-narrative, or the ironic subversion from “below” of what is manifested “above”? Footnotes, for example, sitting at the feet of the master primary text, can gesture reverentially to the author’s scholarly acumen, expanding its range and complexity, but they may also, like a bad conscience, collectively formulate an invested counter-narrative that qualifies this authority and, occasionally, reveals authorial anxieties about the originality and reach of the author’s thought. They can be marvels of specificity that reveal the ways in which the primary text enters and networks with intricate disciplinary matrices, or they can (when badly done) be wretchedly abstract, mere occasions for name-dropping (such as one we came across in an essay that will mercifully remain unnamed: “For a discussion of ‘difference’ as this concept changes from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, see Hegel, Freud, and Derrida”).

 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (New York: Cambridge UP, ): .

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A footnote in the hands of one such as Edgar Allan Poe, as Stephen Rachman suggests in this volume, can be used to indicate an awareness of cultural strangeness or alterity in a poem on Tamerlane (Timur), the fourteenth century Asian ruler – the “interruption” of the note reveals “the transcultural premise of [Poe’s] poem.” As Rachman develops the theme of Poe’s footnotes or endnotes further in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837), it becomes obvious that Poe uses the endnote to substantiate his own American voice. While Poe was much influenced by gothic fiction’s German variant, for instance the “phantasy-pieces” (Fantasiestücke) of E.T. A. Hoffmann, he self-consciously fuses the author’s and the editor’s voice in the final symbolic image of Pym by describing a superhuman Antarctic figure with skin the “perfect whiteness of the snow” to create what Greil Marcus has called “the American as a creature of disguise and self-invention, each one an embodiment of his or her own country, fated to act out its whole drama in his or her own skin.”³ Or – Melville’s encyclopedic Moby-Dick (1851) provides the most familiar and elaborate example – footnotes, epigraphs, and headnotes can articulate the matrix of scientific, anthropological, and theological relations of humans to the natural world that underlies the story of Ahab’s calamitous pursuit of an idée fixe. In some American literary works, notes continue to identify the tradition out of which the work is born. In, perhaps, the most well-known modern example, T. S. Eliot’s endnotes to The Waste Land (1922), the poet references his sources (Jesse L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough) and influences (Les Fleur du Mal, Hermann Hesse, Dante, Virgil, Ovid’s Metamorphoses), notes direct citations from the Bible, Tristan and Isolde, Spenser, Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Verlaine, Wagner, and St. Augustine, offers explanations for his use of the Tarot, provides a reading of the figure of Tiresias, discusses exchange rates in London, interjects an opinion on the interior of St. Magnus Martyr church (“to my mind one of the finest among Wren’s interiors”), and recollects hearing a hermit thrush in Quebec County, Canada. In the spirit of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1921) – its concluding words attesting that the great poet “is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living” – The Waste Land’s endnotes comprise a running commentary on the living tradition from which the poem proceeds and which it catalyzes in its making.⁴  Greil Marcus, “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale,” in A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus, Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA, London: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, ): .  T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Waste Land and Other Poems (Toronto: Broadview P, ): .

Introduction: Headnotes, Footnotes, Endnotes

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For Eliot, “notes” enunciate a poetics that relies upon “a continual extinction of personality” and complete immersion into pure textuality.⁵ For David Foster Wallace, as Heide Ziegler comments in her essay for this volume on Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project and Wallace’s “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, footnotes have the capacity to articulate the form of authorial identity that emerges as the result of a post-oedipal conversation with a literary predecessor: this is a different notion of “tradition” than that of Eliot’s “impersonality,” which Wallace would consider as a deeply American tradition that collates the relation between society and the individual as collective and intersubjective, but one that relies equally upon the work of the “note” to manifest itself. The note in the literary text, in other words, has the capacity to instantiate the author, and the reader, as entities conspiring with predecessors in the production of the living work, within and beyond the margins of the text, as a collective force. In an illuminating essay called, “Consider the Footnote,” Ira B. Nadel makes the claim that David Foster Wallace, as he was rejecting postmodernism, relied on footnotes as “metanarratives, employing footnotes for commentary, criticism, cultural history, autobiography, formulas, digressions, bibliographies, and humor.”⁶ On his arm was a footnoted tattoo – a fact that Eva Dolo calls attention to in her essay. Wallace claimed that footnotes (or endnotes, as in Infinite Jest) made his writing more like reality, asking the reader to accept a disorienting, nonlinear world. By insisting that the reader go back and forth in the text, like Nabokov before him, Wallace was demanding that she not just read, but conscientiously re-read his texts from the beginning. Negotiating between reality and fiction, the note, for him, called for a kind of “loopy” thinking, and many writers have followed Wallace since, employing this kind of loopy thinking to a consideration and re-consideration, a reading and re-reading of reality and fiction. Nadel names, as Wallace’s disciples, Mark Danielewski in House of Leaves (2000), Mark Dunn in Ibid: A Life (2004, a novel told entirely in footnotes), Junot Diáz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and Miguel Syjuco in Illustrado (2010). Our relation to culture, nature, literary tradition, worlds seen and unseen, the collectivity of writing and reading – there are many other ways that “notes” can and have operated in literary texts, and many other claims have been made about their purposes and efficacy. Different as they may be in

 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” .  Ira B. Nadel, “Consider the Footnote,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen, Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, ): .

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form and content, however, they all share one trait in common. No matter how factual and direct (Eliot’s citation of Spenser’s Prothalamion in the note to l. 176 of The Waste Land) or peripatetic (Wallace’s footnotes within footnotes within footnotes), notes, when they appear in a pronouncedly literary work, are reflexive in varying ways, precisely because they occur within a text that is, by its nature, a poiésis – in its root etymological sense, a work that extends and transforms the world.⁷ A note, as well as other marginalia occurring in a text explicitly identified as a narrative or poem that markedly “extends and transforms” the world in imaginative projections, inevitably functions above or below as an implicit or explicit commentary on how this extension and transformation takes place. To be sure, the reflexive capacities of the note exist in scales, ranging from the referential to the parodic, but even the barest citation within a literary text (again, Eliot’s reference to Spenser provides an example) tends to illuminate the ways in which the artifice of the so-called primary text formally and thematically evolves as a new textual reality and as an extension of what comes before.⁸ But perhaps as a result of the influence of writers such as Melville and Eliot, as many of the essays in this special section do, we can note a tendency in writing across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first to deepen and expand the reflexive capacities of the note and to deploy it as a textual supplement that becomes increasingly “paratextual” in the aforementioned senses of the word. That is, one of our guiding assumptions is that in the array of modern and contemporary literature works discussed here, “notes” begin to exceed their limited nature as citation and supplement, moving toward the role – always im-

 Here, we rely on The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which states that poiésis “can only be grasped in a performative vein. The energy of poiésis is dramatic: literally, to form is to make form happen, to change form – including one’s own” (“Poiésis,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, fourth ed. [Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, ]: ).  In this instance, Eliot’s noted citation to the Spenserian line from the Prothalamion, “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” is an ironic commentary on how far the river, the city of London, and western civilization have declined since Spenser’s pastoral proclamations in his ode to the twin marriages of the daughters of the Earl of Worcester in , and on poetry’s transformative capacities. In Spenser’s poem, nature, city, and the human are conjoined in a celebration of nation, reproduction, and the continuities of art; in The Waste Land, the Thames in its contaminated state serves as a symbol of the alienation of nature and culture; it may continue to “run softly” for some time to come, but that is not guarantor of the continuance of civilization or artifice in a poem that inscribes the waste land of modernity. Eliot’s foregrounding of his citation of Spenser in the note thus reflects as well on the capacity or incapacity of poiésis to change anything at this moment in time: “On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing” (ll.  – ). See Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

Introduction: Headnotes, Footnotes, Endnotes

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plicit in their nature – of co-partner with the main text in extending and transforming the reality to which they refer. Part of this transformation involves the appositional centrifugal energies of the note – the turning “toward the world’s discourse about the text” that Genette pairs with its inward, reflexive turn in his definition of the paratext. The definition of poiésis that applies to the literary work writ large also applies to its marginalia, especially when such elements as notes, in their referential capacities, supplement and enlarge “the social and political substance of poiésis […] signified not only by its constitutively transformative powers […] but by the fact that, since its ancient Greek meaning, it pertains to humanity’s immanent (even if perpetually self-altering) encounter with the world.”⁹ Several of the essays in this special section speak to the capacity of the footnote to amplify the “outwork” of the literary text and to effect crossings of the boundaries between the purely “literary” (which is never pure in the first place) and the social and political dimensions within which it occurs and which it takes part in shaping. John Morán González’s essay on Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) is a strong case in point. This tragicomic novel, recounting the adventures of its youthful protagonist as he grows up absurd in pop-cult America and discovers his family’s catastrophic past in the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo regime contains thirty-three footnotes that, for González, “link the ready legibility of the main narrative with the digressive and expository turns of secondary ones, serving as a kind of dumbwaiter shuttling the reader’s attention between the diegetic world of the narrative above and the exegetic demimonde of the archive below.” The “archive below,” in González’s sense, is the registry of history and its consequences. The outward trajectories of the footnote in this instance, as is the case with Poe for Stephen Rachman and the African American sonnet for Timo Müller, demarcate in visible ways the literary text’s imaginative engagement and contribution to a social order that, itself, is always a work in progress. In gathering a group of essays that focus on the work of the note in the literary text, we have purposefully limited ourselves to discussions that consider examples in American literature from the nineteenth century forward. Without making exaggerated claims for this limitation beyond the necessity of providing some temporal and geographical frameworks around a focused section on a topic as broad as “headnotes, footnotes, and endnotes,” we can say that our work on this project began with the observation that in a number of prominent contemporary American novels, footnotes and endnotes were being put to various interesting uses, sometimes claiming a weight, seriousness (or serious play-

 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, .

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fulness), and “literariness” of their own. This tendency, observable in highly popular writers such as Wallace, Díaz, Danielewski, or Jennifer Egan (all manifesting the encyclopedic propensities of Poe and Melville, as well as those of the “high metafictionists” – John Barth, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, etc. – in the previous generation), seems to run counter to David Shields’ contention, in one of many recent entries into the ongoing “death of the novel” debate, that the novel is an irrelevant form: “Why is the traditional novel c. 2013 no longer germane (and the postmodern novel shroud upon shroud)? Most novels’ glacial pace isn’t congruous with the speed of our lives.”¹⁰ To be fair, Shields’ discussion is more complex than this rather simplistic assertion makes it sound. But the notion that the novel is a dying form because it is too long, slow, or digressive for sped-up contemporary people whose reading time is entirely taken up in surfing the internet and texting each other is surely challenged by the high sales of the contemporary novels mentioned above and considered in this focus group that make significant use of notes, in all of their supplementarity and digressiveness, their performative reflexivity and referential particularity, to tell the story.¹¹ Perhaps some contemporary readers want accessibility and transparency in their “reality hunger,” to invoke the title of Shields’ first book on this subject, but others seem to continue to want densely-imagined narrative worlds that, with all of the interruptions, digressions, and information load of the note, conspire to slow the reader down, to work horizontally and vertically in alinear fashion with the text, and to register its reflexive and referential capacities. Our focus in this volume began with a question about why so many contemporary novels (these postmodern “shrouds upon shrouds”) would make use – often, excessive or parodic use – of the device of the note. We then wanted to consider how this tendency might look from a larger perspective – one embedded in the history of American literature with the example of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville looming large in the background, and the ongoing pursuit of the “great American novel” with all of the largesse and devotion to externalities that it entails. Finally, we wanted to extend our consideration to poetry to see how the visibility of the note might play in the lyric and other poetic forms. Our assemblage is heterogeneous – there is no pretence to “coverage” here – but the assortment of essays, we believe, reveal-

 David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life (New York: Knopf, ): .  We cannot fail to note here the remarkable contemporary phenomenon of the proliferation of Roberto Bolaño’s novels in the US, which has generated something of a mania for this novelist whose most well-known works in English translation, such as The Savage Detectives () and  (), insert extensive documentary footnoting into the projection of internecine literary universes.

Introduction: Headnotes, Footnotes, Endnotes

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ingly addresses the many questions about notes and their use in literary texts raised thus far. We have organized the essays into three sections. In the first section, under the rubric of “Undermining Authority, Power and Dominance,” we have placed three essays that consider the work of the note particularly in light of its extradiegetical capacities and its marking of the text’s engagement with the socio-political order. Stephen Rachman’s “Poe, Annotation, and Other” surveys the use of Edgar Allan Poe’s footnotes, from the first in his first-published work, the epic poem Tamerlane (1827) to his last, “cosmic” footnote in Eureka (1848). In considering Poe’s footnotes to Tamerlane, Rachman argues that his “intrusions” upon the dramatic movements of the epic with notes that provide historical background figure forth a relationship between literature and history that moves well beyond that of sheer reference or the grounding of the imaginary in the real. For Rachman, these “interruptions” reveal Poe’s “contrarian strain”: his desire to convert the “eighteenth and nineteenth century historical footnote” that “typically indulged in a species of niggling historically factitious minutia, a display of learning and conversance, unfurling lengthy concatenated strands of authority,” into a counter-discourse or “linguistic sign of the other within Poe’s own language.” The example of Tamerlane leads Rachman into a revisionary look at The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), especially its annotations and supplementary apparatus as they offer, within the margins, a displacement of “authorial power” with “editorial power.” This displacement or death of the author at the hands of the editorial “other” opens up the narrative to a host of questions about cultural authority, identificatory singularity, and the racial politics that subtend them. Rachman concludes with a philosophical reflection on what Poe’s narrative strategies – including those of the note and marginalia – portend for Poe’s own notions of a “self” that ceases to exist in the act of writing. In “Headnotes and Endnotes in the African American Sonnet,” Timo Müller considers the work of paratextual notes in the little-studied form of the African American sonnet. “Drawing upon a database of over a thousand sonnets assembled in the course of a larger research project,” Müller develops a typology of notes in the African American sonnet that includes the five forms to be found in this vast array: “the general headnote, the subtitle, the epigraph, the general endnote, and the keyed endnote referring to a specific passage in the poem, most often the title.” Making use of a variety of theoretical views that consider the paratextual qualities of the note developed by Pierre Bourdieu, Gérard Genette, Wolfgang Iser, J. Hillis Miller, and Jacques Derrida, Müller discusses the annotations of African American sonnets as a series of “position-takings” or emplacements of poetic discourse within the interacting and, often, contesting cultural

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traditions of which African American literature inevitably partakes. The capacious database that Müller has assembled allows him to describe the recurrent functions of notes in the African American sonnet throughout its history: these include the capacity of notes “to mark a sonnet as occasional verse, as authentic self-expression unconcerned with political implications”; or, in a second function, “to claim a certain position in the literary field for the author of the sonnet, for example by referencing influential writers or other artistic figures”; or finally, in a third function, “to support direct political position-takings, for example by explaining the events, concerns, or persons referenced in the sonnet.” Through his close reading of a handful of compelling examples from his database, Müller convincingly demonstrates the ways in which the “African American sonnet […] is particularly attuned to the potential” of notes in such a way that enables their “writers to extend the narrow boundaries of the sonnet form and to negotiate their position in the literary and political fields,” thus allowing for the identity and growth of an African American literary tradition that is at once distinct and responsive to those of the dominant culture in which it is produced. John Morán González’s essay, “Páginas en blanco, Footnotes, and the Authority of the Archive in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” considers the footnotes of the Dominican American’s first novel as evidence of the novel’s attempts to reconstruct a destroyed history in the margins, and as indicative of an “archival impulse behind such reconstructive efforts [that] generates its own páginas en blanco, or epistemological voids created by the coloniality of power still operational throughout the Americas.” Such “pages” reveal the unacknowledged history of postcolonial violence existing in the interstices of the official or authorized national histories of the Dominican Republic and the United States. Yunior, the narrator who tells the story of Oscar Wao’s sad odyssey and the generational history that contextualizes his journey, is “[s]elf-aware of his status as a vernacular historian situated in the diaspora,” and thus, in the footnotes, provides an ongoing commentary on his documentation of the official histories that foreclose any knowledge – in the form of the blank page – of alternative stories that contest the national narrative. At stake here is the notion of the archive, as a means of curating and preserving colonial history, but as also the site where the hidden or erased postcolonial history of violence might be discerned, precisely in the margins below the text that the footnote occupies. The footnotes of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, like those of Poe and the African American sonnet, serve to question narrative sources of authority, as well as interrogate “narrative’s relationship to conventional historiography.” González concludes by suggesting that archival counter-narratives such as those provided in Díaz’s novel and other postcolonial narratives, written within the con-

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text of colonialist violence, cannot hope to fill in all of the blank pages of a history that has been forgotten or erased by state authorities that seek to keep the national narrative firmly in place. However, by strategically filling in some of those blanks on the margins of the text, the reconstruction of this partial, other history can commence. The second grouping of essays, “Diluting Mainstream Constraints,” brings together three essays that consider three key contemporary American novels as they open up possibilities for narrative innovation through the use of notes that both instantiate and transgress “the tradition.” In “Too Much Fun: Endnotes in Infinite Jest,” Eva Dolo considers a novel that, in the views of many, vies with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) as the “big” novel of the post-1945 era. Dolo notes that Wallace added 388 endnotes to the 981 pages of the novel’s primary text, “three achronological and fragmented main narratives [that] unfold in an elaborately designed, near-future North American society,” thereby challenging the notion, by sheer force of weight, what is primary and what is secondary in the text. The “tiny print [of] the 96 extra pages” that comprise the “Notes and Errata” to Infinite Jest, Dolo suggests, compels a reflection on the “physical work” of reading itself as the reader must constantly shift between the bulk of the main text and the diminutive text of the novel’s last fifth.¹² Dolo discusses how, for Wallace, the note occupies a special place in his writing, allowing him to expand his toolkit of narrative strategies in his fiction as well as his essays in such a way as to make them hybrid assemblages of multiple discourses and narrative trajectories. Dolo’s list of over thirty different ways in which the 388 notes of Infinite Jest are deployed is impressive and suggests Wallace’s encyclopedic interest in languages, dialects, etymology, puns, jokes, riddles, intertextuality, narrative reliability, acronyms, portmanteaux, linguistic mistakes, and linguistic events of all possible kinds. The culminating effect of these proliferate elaborations is not just entertainment or “fun” for the Wallace reader who loves linguistic wit and play, but also what might be called subtextual seriousness which questions the assumptions and worldviews of the novel’s characters, its author, and its readership. Working between the crazy-quilt of notes and the novel’s fragmented main text, Dolo shows how these assumptions are interrogated in terms of politics, aesthetics, and ontology. While the novel transforms

 A particular challenge for the aging reader, whose ability to quickly shift focus is usually far less than that of the young, and gives to the notion of narrative focalization in Wallace’s novel of shifting foci an evident visual and material dimension. In the age of the e-reader, however, Wallace’s novel demands a different kind of material readerly work when read electronically, since the text can be continuously resized according to need and taste, and the links to the notes take place by clicking a mouse rather than turning a page.

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the traditional relation between the primary and secondary text, it also transforms the relation between the reader and the text from that of “passive consumerism” or ironic distancing to active engagement and the obligation to pierce through irony to sincerity. For Dolo, the power of Wallace’s writing lies in its capacity to make readerly work and readerly pleasure the same thing. In “Paratextualized Forms of Fictional Self-Narration: Footnotes, Headnotes and Endnotes in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad,” Johanna Hartmann connects the thematics of Egan’s novel about the American music industry in scattered time periods ranging from the 1970s to the near future with its paratextual narrative strategies. For Hartmann, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a narrative hybrid, both a novel and a loosely-connected assemblage of stories that generate a work in which “narrative linearity is interrupted and the text acquires a hypertextual quality that is hallmarked by proleptic, analeptic, and metaleptic references which contribute to the narrative cohesion and figurative structure of the novel.” Taking a taxonomic approach inspired by Genette’s paratextual theories, Hartmann conducts a close reading of two key chapters in the novel in order to demonstrate how understanding their paratextual qualities illuminates their status as “self-narratives” reliant upon “mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, memory and processes of forgetting, and the literary staging of absence and presence.” These mechanisms and strategies are intertwined with the novel’s autobiographical themes, which include an emphasis on narrative cognition and the capacity to link memories as one would hyperlink a text in order to construct identity in the age of the internet. The prolific use of notes in Egan’s novel, along with its deployment of such devices as the conversion of its twelfth chapter into a Power Point presentation that works as an infographic for the entire novel, has consequences for an emergent sense of narrative form in the digital age as “radically question[ing] the boundaries and finality of the literary text” as well as our concept of textuality as such. In her essay, “ ‘ Only a Book’: Reading the Footnotes in House of Leaves,” Laura B. McGrath equally considers Mark Z. Danielewski’s groundbreaking, palimpsestic novel, which rapidly became a cult favorite following its publication, as a novel of the digital age. McGrath is particularly interested in reading the novel’s multiple textualities, signified by its abundant use of notes as well as its multiple frames and changes in typography, as evidence of its engagement in a contemporary discursive matrix where the verbal and the visual constantly interact in the production of information and knowledge. Her characterization of a novel that has been categorized as one of the leading “networked narratives” of the new century is that it is “a particularly bibliophilic text. It is obsessed with writing, writing instruments, and writing surfaces. It is a book that is about books: not only the books found, compiled, and published therein, but also

Introduction: Headnotes, Footnotes, Endnotes

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about the book, the material object whose existence, supposedly, is in an internet-induced limbo.” McGrath argues that through its engagement with multiple genres, typographies, and visual elements (amongst these, hyperlinked words and phrases, rotating textual alignments, and nearly-blank pages with a single word printed on them), House of Leaves “stages a confrontation between a variety of media.” She suggests the ways in which the materiality of the novel causes the reader to physically engage with it in various ways, including having to position the book at different angles in order to read it (a demand that would only increase in Danielewski’s second novel, Only Revolutions [2006], where the text on some pages is printed upside down or in a circle). Along with all of its other intermedial elements, the novel’s footnotes, she explains, are examples of “media in transition, representing at once a literary and textual history and also a form central to contemporary digital writing.” In discussing the ways in which the footnote, historically, can be considered as containing the seeds of hypertextuality and linked texts in the digital age, she shows how Danielewski’s intensive representation of their textual materiality in House of Leaves has tangible consequences for the reader who encounters the text as an uncanny object and is jarred loose from “automatic” reading habits and assumptions. As a “multivocal” novel that represents a “confluence between old and new media,” McGrath concludes, House of Leaves not only reflects upon its own status as an assemblage but also compels its readers to participate independently in the construction of the novel as an animate experience of intermediality. The final grouping of essays in this special section, entitled “Creating Another Voice for the Self,” are focused on viewing the literary note as a means of founding authorial multiplicity in the text, and in the transformative interactions between author, reader, and text that the “other” text of the notes instigates. In “The Novel as Note: Pale Fire and its Aftermath,” Patrick O’Donnell discusses Nabokov’s elaborate parody of annotation as a work that continuously and in multiple ways transgresses the boundaries between author, reader, and text, and between art and life. The status of the “primary” and “secondary” are put into question in a novel where one author, by means of annotation and commentary, converts the art of another author into a coded transcription of his own biography. Charles Kinbote’s prose annotations to John Shade’s poetic elegy both radically depart from the contexts and meanings of Shade’s poem, and echo its obsessions: the relation between life and art; the alienation of the artist; the capacities of narrative to make sensible order out of the chaos of experience. To the extent that Charles Kinbote is an editor and annotator, the conundrums of his authorial takeover are replicated to some degree in two remarkable works published in the wake of Pale Fire (1962), Alfred Appel’s The Annotated Lolita (1970) and Nabokov’s final, fragmentary novel, The Original of Laura (2008), organized,

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edited, and introduced by his son Dmitri. Both of these works bear Kinbotian earmarks containing paratextual marginalia, notes and commentary upon a “primary” text upon which they intrude and over which they attempt to exert forms of editorial and hermeneutic authority. Taken together, Pale Fire, The Annotated Lolita, and The Original of Laura compel both internal and extra-diegetical reflections on the nature of writing per se, as supplementary and parasitical in a transformation of life into art that confers a paradoxical primary upon the latter. In “Headnotes, Footnotes, Subliminal Notes in ‘Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky’ and The Kraus Project,” Heide Ziegler discusses two American writers and friends who have risen to prominence as among the most significant novelists of their generation – David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, the former also in contention as the premier essayist of his time. Ziegler considers Wallace’s review-essay of Joseph Frank’s magisterial, multi-volume critical biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky in comparison to Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project, a collaborative bilingual edition and annotation of selected essays written by the iconoclastic Austrian critic Karl Kraus in the early part of the twentieth century. Ziegler suggests that both of these works, written by high-profile contemporary writers about literary forerunners, articulate in their notes (unusually for the genre, Wallace’s review-essay is heavily footnoted) quite different relationships between an author and a literary predecessor. Wallace, Ziegler writes, uses the additional device of what she terms the “subliminal footnote” (paragraph-long notes in his review-essay offset by double asterisks, thus clearly proclaiming their status as “sublime notes from the underground”), in order to develop a productive relationship as a reader with Dostoevsky and his biographer – one that neither seeks to definitively grasp Dostoevsky’s intentions nor to entirely empathize with his convictions. Instead, a dialogue takes place in the notes that raises questions about “existential fears and doubts about the ultimate fate of humanity” that concerned Dostoevsky in the nineteenth century and Wallace, quite differently, in postmodernity. In his voluminous notes to The Kraus Project (written in conjunction with Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann), Franzen is primarily concerned with articulating Kraus as a literary father-figure, focusing in his commentary on Kraus as the paternal author rather than Kraus’s actual text. Using Harold Bloom’s notion of the “anxiety of influence,” Ziegler demonstrates how Franzen in the notes attempts to position Kraus as a “strong precursor” in ways that only an author who has achieved Franzen’s visibility could possibly do, and how different this is in its limitations from Wallace’s positioning of Dostoevsky, across time and space, as an interlocutory equal. Ziegler concludes by showing how Franzen may have been searching for, and finding, a further influence in Wallace himself, by incorporating Wallace’s preceding notion of the sub-

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liminal footnote into many of the notes of the The Kraus Project, written many years after “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.” Out of such notes, she suggests, authorial relations are born. It is our hope that these various reflections on headnotes, footnotes, and endnotes will inspire further reflection on a literary “genre” that has been present from the beginning, and that continues to change and evolve as a transformative element of multiple narrative and poetic forms, adding a special timbre to American literature. Collectively, the essays included here provide evidence of the paradoxical centrality of the marginality of notes, and of their importance to the téchne, texture, and semiosis of literary texts in general. A note, it seems, is no small thing, even if printed in small type, somewhere on the periphery of the text.

I Undermining Authority, Power, and Dominance

Stephen Rachman

Poe, Annotation, and the Other The following consideration of the work of Edgar Allan Poe seeks to establish a pattern of literary preoccupation respecting his use of footnotes and annotation in general. If the footnote possesses a fundamentally indexical nature, pointing outside the text, beyond to some other work, phenomenon, or authority, then Poe in his inimitable fashion deployed the footnote to call into question this form of reference. In conventional terms, the footnote affords the opportunity to acknowledge the work, influence, or authority of others; for Poe, the footnote was a mechanism through which he could engage with, address, and incorporate the voice of the other into his own. Like Auguste Dupin at the end of “The Purloined Letter” (1845) referring his antagonist and double Minister D____ to a line from a revenge tragedy by the eighteenth-century French dramatist Prosper Jolyot, sieur de Crébillon, Poe’s annotations tend to create an aura of rivalry, contestation and mystification. Rather than tracing the provenance of an obscure allusion or glossing a sidelight, footnotes crop up in Poe’s work around questions of aesthetic, literary or cultural authority. In this essay, I trace the abiding instrumentality of Poe’s notes, through signal moments from the beginning (Tamerlane), middle (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket), and end (Eureka) of his literary career. In each example, I wish to demonstrate how the note creates a space around and within the text for the voice and the figure of the other in cultural, literary, and, even cosmic forms; through the strange operations of Poe’s notes the play of literary and cultural authority circulates.

Good Authority In his first published work, Tamerlane (1827), Edgar Allan Poe managed to traverse a few metrical feet, just one line of the title poem before interrupting his poetic flow with a footnote. The line, as given in the original reads: “I have sent for thee, holy friar; [1].”¹ This dramatic opening of the poem, the voice of Tamerlane on his deathbed, calling for an ordained authority to take his confession, is interrupted by a second, decidedly anti-dramatic voice. “Of the history of

 Edgar Allan Poe, Tamerlane, in The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbot (Urbana, Chicago: U of Illinois P, ) :, l. .

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Tamerlane,” the footnote commences with a mixture of scholarly caution and apology for the poetic license that undergirds the dramatic premise of the poem, little is known; and with that little, I have taken the full liberty of a poet. – That he was descended from the family of Zinghis Khan is more than probable – but he is vulgarly supposed to have been the son of a shepherd, and to have raised himself to the throne by his own address. He died in the year 1405, in the time of Pope Innocent VII.²

With little more than coordinates of uncertain biographical data about the supposedly obscure central Asian ruler, Poe’s entrée into the literary world begins on a curious note. Rather than providing any compelling rationale for the selection of Tamerlane as his principal figure, the scant information Poe provides elicits wonder at the motive for the choice. And yet, the historical thrust of Poe’s note does serve to delimit, after a fashion, the relationship between literature and history. If the eighteenth and nineteenth century historical footnote typically indulged in a species of niggling, factitious minutiae, a display of learning and conversance, unfurling lengthy concatenated strands of authority, then Poe’s first note takes up a contrarian strain.³ In taking up the historical background of Tamerlane, Poe’s note alludes to the transcultural premise of his poem, justified, it would seem by the putative obscurity (that is from an Occidental point of view) of Tamerlane’s origins, compounded by “the full liberty” of poetic license to alter historical figures for his own mytho-poetic purposes. Into this posited historical vacuum, Poe reduces the figure of Tamerlane to three elements: 1) possible descent from Genghis Khan; 2) a perhaps dubious popular legend that he was descended from shepherds (the “Scythian Shepherd”); and 3) his death in 1405 concurrent with the schismatic papacy of Innocent VII. The first two elements point to conflicting, conjectural reports. His descent from Asian warlord nobility is challenged by his rumored humble origins among drovers, but that is in turn weakened by Poe’s assessment of the “probable” and the “vulgar.” While Tamerlane emerges as a sketchy figure, the equally elusive voice behind this figure expresses itself even more faintly, announcing its

 Poe, “Tamerlane,” l. .  On the general literary history of the footnote during the Enlightenment, see Anthony Grafton, The Footnote : A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, ):  – . Grafton observes that in the eighteenth century, “literary footnotes burgeoned and propagated like branches and leaves in William Morris wallpaper.” In England, the literary footnote was the site of contestation over cultural authority and precedence in which “tradition and philosophy, erudition and philology, solid learning and its counterfeit double met in sharp conflicts waged on the bottom margins” (); it is in this tradition that Poe’s career as a practiced literary controversialist and a perpetrator and exposer of literary hoaxes and offenses chiefly derives itself.

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own genteel distrust of the vulgar, and, once established, offers a challenge to the dramatic premise he has just barely laid out for the reader: How I shall account for giving him “a friar,” as a death-bed confessor – I cannot exactly determine. He wanted some one to listen to his tale – and why not a friar? It does not pass the bounds of possibility – quite sufficient for my purpose – and I have at least good authority on my side for such innovations.⁴

Thomas Ollive Mabbott speculates that Nicholas Rowe’s drama Tamerlane (1702) may have been a source for Poe’s poem, given that Rowe’s Tamerlane is reproached for his friendships with Christians.⁵ But what is most salient about Poe’s note is its absence of citation of any authorities as precedents for this imaginative license – a feature that would become a signature of Poe’s engagement with history and fact and many other correlative aspects of his work. In the act of citing an authority for his work and its practices, the nominally “good authority” becomes an ambiguous form of compromised self-authorization in which unspecified others offer a vague chain of precedent. Through its tonal shift and opaque referentiality, the footnote is the scholarly device and linguistic sign of the other within Poe’s own language. Effectively, Poe uses the note to articulate the multiple dynamics of “othering” implicit in his premise. He can neither account for his own strategies of identification with figures outside his culture nor can he account for the ways in which he has “othered” that character by having him identify with Western cultural signifiers. He makes reference to a good authority for the historical improbability of a Tartar mogul feeling the need to unburden his soul to the Christian monk, a creative cultural conflation that anticipates Poe’s use of what he would come to call “the grotesque and arabesque.”⁶ As I have argued elsewhere, while not what might be termed a conventional romantic “Orientalist,” Poe regularly made use of Near Eastern, Arabic, and Asiatic materials, often in ways that indicate a form of identification or aesthetic positioning that is at once powerful and peripheral. His use of the Orient to mark the liminal imaginative space he sought to occupy made Poe not so much an ori Poe, “Tamerlane,” . .  For Mabbott’s comments on Rowe’s play, see The Complete Poems,  – ; Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (ca. ) was unknown to Poe; its currency largely dates to . However, Poe appears to have been aware of the notion of Tamerlane as the “Scythian shepherd” upon which Marlowe’s play is premised.  Poe’s first published collection of stories, entitled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (), makes the case for these titular aesthetic categories and for the aesthetics of horror or terror as being distinct from the gothic.

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entalist as an orientationalist: he uses the motifs and elements of the Romantic orient as a means to orient his own hybrid, medial relationship to his art and culture.⁷ Thus, in appropriating the figure of Tamerlane and placing his confession in a Western tradition, what Poe hints at but will not state directly is that he is participating in a Western tradition of appropriating and distorting Eastern figures and that this practice is of long standing. In this fashion, the belated romanticism of Poe’s first footnote acquires the power of a veiled questioning of the tradition it participates in. As it undermines its own authority by exposing it as a pose, it nonetheless moves to assert a more generalized literary authority for poetic intervention as a whole. Another footnote in Tamerlane worries an analogous point in the same manner – how is it that a “Tartar Mogul” speaks in the manner of a “Nineteenth century Boston Gentleman”? In this way, the most interesting aspect of Poe’s Tamerlane consists neither of the lines of poetry that comprise the verse (which has been usually read as a quasi-biographical, neo-Byronic cri de coeur to his estranged stepfather John Allan), nor in the vagaries that comprise the notes which seem to draw on sources just beyond bibliographic reach, but in the curious dynamic between them.⁸ The footnote enables the full arc of Poe’s literary sensibility, not merely the expression of his incipient romanticism (“the full liberty of the poet”), but the interrogation of the slippery authority upon which the romantic intervention takes place. For Poe, this initial exercise in poetic annotation delineates its own problems of authority in the interstices of historical fact and fiction, the oriental and the occidental, the probable and the possible, and the defensible imaginative act and that for which he can offer no account. The note ends with an unspecified reference to “good authority” for such a literary position, and as such, Poe has introduced the idea that the author has no definite authority over his imaginative gambits but nonetheless has literary precedent for this,

 For fuller treatment of this subject see Stephen Rachman, “From Al Aaraaf to the Universe of Stars: Poe, the Arabesque, and Cosmology,” in The Edgar Allan Poe Review . ():  – ; besides “Tamerlane,” a short list of important works by Poe that make significant use of Eastern/Arabic/Oriental materials would include “Al Aaraaf,” “Israfel,” “The City in the Sea,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, “A Descent into the Maelström,” “Some Words with a Mummy,” “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Sheherazade,” and “The Philosophy of Furniture.” For an overview of Poe’s use of these materials, see Brian Yothers, “Poe’s Poetry of the Exotic,” in Critical Insights: The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Steven Frye (Pasedena, Califonia: Salem Press, ):  – .  Two years after the first publication of Tamerlane, Poe wrote to his stepfather Allan that he had “long given up Byron as a model” (Edgar Allan Poe, The Collected Letters of the Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J.W. Ostrom, B. R. Pollin, J. A. Savoye [New York: Gordian Press, ]: ).

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non-authoritative position. In an albeit tentative fashion, Poe uses the note to produce a self-authorizing annotation that calls into question the concept of authority as much as any specific precedents for his own literary operations. In a sense, before he would embark on making the gothic his own privileged literary terrain, he had carved out – by way of the footnote – a space and voice for the other.

Editorial Annotation and Racial Politics As Poe’s career developed from an eighteen-year old with poetic ambitions into a magazine editor, caustic critic and author of shocking short fiction, the role of annotation would grow more elaborate, but as in his beginnings with Tamerlane, he would remain preoccupied with the ambiguities of literary and cultural authority. As with his earlier usage, annotation would serve to de-authorize as much as authorize the creative work at hand. The prime example of strategic annotation in this phase of his career derives from his only longer form prose fiction, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), which is framed by an editorial preface and an endnote designed ostensibly to present the work as a documentary account of the title character’s adventures as a stowaway on a whaling vessel (The Grampus) that is subject to mutiny, privation and is followed by a second voyage on another ship (the Jane Guy) culminating in a disastrous exploration of Antarctic regions. Thematically, Pym offers readers a dizzying inquiry into signification and meaning amid a sequence of increasingly grotesque horrors (alcohol-induced mania, confinement, sensory deprivation, cannibalism) culminating in a massacre in which a party of largely white explorers are attacked by dark-complexioned natives (even their teeth are black) on a mysterious uncharted island in the remotest southern latitudes of the globe. In making his escape, Pym and the last of the surviving mutineers, Dirk Peters, escape into the interior of the island (Tsalal), making their way through a black granite canyon whose walls seem to be carved out in the form of hieroglyphic or alphabetic characters. In a final diary entry, we learn that the two men travel via canoe with a dying native held captive, further south into a “region of novelty and wonder” where they encounter an enormous human figure shrouded but with skin the “perfect whiteness of the snow.”⁹ Its grotesque descriptions and series of violent encounters have led many critics to associate

 Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Natucket (New York: The Modern Library, ): .

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the book with the racial tensions of the 1830s, in particular the slave revolt led by Nat Turner at the beginning of the decade. While some critics have used Pym as evidence to indict the racial views of its author, some going so far as to use the novel to make Poe into an apologist for slavery and the South, others have read in it an ambiguous exposure rather than a defense of prevailing racial attitudes.¹⁰ The provocative gothic elements of Poe’s racial/racist nightmare have proliferated a rich critical literature that has, without arriving at any easy critical consensus, come in the last twenty years to recognize the centrality of Poe’s work for understanding nineteenth-century American racial discourse. In making the case for this centrality, Toni Morrison pointed to the end of Pym with its visible but “somehow closed and unknowable white form that rises from the mists.”¹¹ Morrison attends to these “figurations of impenetrable whiteness”¹² of which Poe is the prime exemplar because she finds them inevitably and inextricably linked to the presence of blackness, of dark-skinned peoples. In Morrison’s analysis, the two elements of the final diary entry are linked; the expiration of the dark native Nu-Nu is connected to the mute, implacable snowy form. While Poe undoubtedly indulges in racial caricature it is presented in such complex and contradictory ways that make it difficult to assess. In Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses, Terence Whalen examines the racial rhetoric of Pym in the context of the scant other documents that may provide direct evidence of Poe’s personal views on the topics of slavery and race, concluding that Poe cannily engaged with an “average racism” for his time and region.¹³ However, Poe’s fictional inventions were such that all forms of supremacy (white or otherwise) found in their initial premises were destined to be overthrown or undermined. In a sense, the ambiguity of Poe’s racially charged fiction arises from its insistence on deriving horror from both white and black imagery – a “teratological racism,” in Geoffrey Sanborn’s terms, “an agapeness before the phenomenon of [black

 The American critical history of reading Pym as being reflective of Poe’s attitudes to race and slavery dates to the s, Harry Levin and Leslie Fiedler being the most prominent examples. More sustained analysis dates to the work of Joan Dayan, John Carlos Rowe, Dana Nelson, and Toni Morrison. Important contributions to this critical thread can be found in J. Gerald Kennedy’s  collection, Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race. For a useful overview of these debates, see Scott Peeples, The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, ):  – .  Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, ): .  Morrison, Playing in the Dark, .  Cf. Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton: Princeton UP, ):  – .

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and white] monstrosity” distinguishes Pym. ¹⁴ Perhaps, rather than looking for Poe’s white supremacist tendencies in his rhetoric we would do better to think of him as a “Red Death” supremacist, as in his 1842 plague tale “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which the quasi-human title figure holds, in the final line, “illimitable dominion over all.”¹⁵ As Teresa Goddhu points out, “Pym reproduces racial fantasy even while pointing out that it is merely a representation,”¹⁶ and for all the critical energy devoted to this text, the only thing that critics might agree upon about it is that it, in Scott Peeples assessment, “both embraces and undermines racial hierarchies.”¹⁷ Furthermore, the devices through which Pym achieves this kind of ambiguity with respect to race have to do with the ways its imagery is entangled with its annotations – a metanarrative about the textual production of the work. The framing device of prefatory and post-script annotation operationalizes this discourse as potentially documentary – raising the possibility that this account of an apocalyptic racial nightmare-fantasy could be taken for fact, calling into question what, if anything, it may or may not reveal about the author’s views on the vexed subjects of race and slavery in the 1830s. If the footnote flourished as a device of the Enlightenment, as an etymological and genealogical trace of reason and reasoning,¹⁸ Poe’s notes use the pose of giving a definitive account in order to disturb the principle of accounting. The operational fiction of Pym as printed by Harper Brothers of New York in 1838 – that the novel is a non-fictional work by Arthur Gordon Pym – begins on its title page (Figure 1). The use of the term “narrative” to connote a non-fiction account, the elaborate detailing of the work’s contents, the breathless, all-caps headline “STILL FURTHER SOUTH,” and the absence of any name on the copyright page, all serve to advertise the work as an account of actual events, and moreover, a sensationalized account of reality of a kind familiar to readers of the emergent penny press and print culture of the 1830s. It loudly emphasizes its commercial intentions replete with a preface signed and dated by A.G. Pym describing the

 Geoffrey Sanborn, “A Confused Beginning: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: CUP, ):  – , .  Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Urbana, Chicago: U of Illinois P, ) :.  Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia UP, ): .  Peeples, The Afterlife, .  Cf. Grafton, The Footnote, .

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Figure 1. The original title page to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. New York: Harper & Brothers (1838).

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narrative’s provenance that included two “fictionalized” installments that appeared in the early months of 1837 in The Southern Literary Messenger in connection with the name of Edgar A. Poe.¹⁹ In the most remarkable act of authorial destabilization that nineteenth-century literature produced, the prefatory note begins in this manner: UPON my return to the United States a few months ago, after the extraordinary series of adventure in the South Seas and elsewhere, of which an account is given in the following pages, accident threw me into the society of several gentlemen in Richmond, Va., who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the regions I had visited, and who were constantly urging it upon me, as a duty, to give my narrative to the public. […] Among those gentlemen in Virginia who expressed the greatest interest in my statement, more particularly in regard to that portion of it which related to the Antarctic Ocean, was Mr. Poe, lately editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, a monthly magazine, published by Mr. Thomas W. White, in the city of Richmond. He strongly advised me, among others, to prepare at once a full account of what I had seen and undergone, and trust to the shrewdness and common sense of the public – insisting, with great plausibility, that however roughly, as regards mere authorship, my book should be got up, its very uncouthness, if there were any, would give it all the better chance of being received as truth. Notwithstanding this representation, I did not make up my mind to do as he suggested. He afterward proposed (finding that I would not stir in the matter) that I should allow him to draw up, in his own words, a narrative of the earlier portion of my adventures, from facts afforded by myself, publishing it in the Southern Messenger under the garb of fiction. To this, perceiving no objection, I consented, stipulating only that my real name should be retained. Two numbers of the pretended fiction appeared, consequently, in the Messenger for January and February (1837), and, in order that it might certainly be regarded as fiction, the name of Mr. Poe was affixed to the articles in the table of contents of the magazine.²⁰

Kenneth Silverman refers to Poe’s “trompe l’oeil preface,”²¹ but the vertigo induced in the play of authenticity and credulity between Pym and Poe is more like a print-culture house of mirrors. The wholly fictional Pym has engaged in debate with the quasi-fictional gentleman-editor “Mr. Poe” as to what elements make a story believable – or more to the point, likely to be believed by the magazine-reading public. The origin story of Pym’s narrative focuses on the stakes of representation and a struggle for editorial control; Pym is reluctant to publish  On the general discourse of sensationalism fact and fiction in the s with attention to newspapers, see Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, ):  – ; on personal non-fiction accounts, sensationalism and authorization, see Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: U of California P, ):  – .  Poe, The Narrative of Pym,  – .  Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Collins, ): .

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because he fears his work will not have “the appearance of that truth it would really possess.”²² “Mr. P” unsuccessfully attempts to persuade him otherwise, that uncouth artlessness will be the hallmark of authenticity, and failing that, resorts to the “ruse” of fiction, which having been taken for fact by the reading public, coerces Pym into his hesitant authorship. It scarcely matters how dubious it might appear that the notion that a person who is deeply concerned that the public should believe his story has no objection to it appearing in the garb of fiction with the name of an editor affixed to it in the table of contents. Once the principle of editorial coercion is introduced – the fictional Pym gives in to his editorial other, the fictional Mr. P. – every inconsistency takes on a kind of plausible implausibility. It is just the kind of thing an artless person who wants to capitalize on his work might do. In this way, Poe has “othered” or de-authorized his own text. For Jerome McGann, the case of Pym, with its “hoaxing and bizarre ‘Preface’ and closing editorial Note,” and multiple textual versions and inconsistencies is indicative of the extent to which Poe is part and parcel of dislocated socio-literary contexts in a de-centered literary culture.²³ McGann points to this multiplicity and he calls for readings of Pym that would resist organizing it “in a stable hierarchy of relations.”²⁴ I would suggest that Pym lends itself to such an approach because the annotative materials with which Poe surrounds it facilitate this proliferation through its de-authorizing strategy, in this case its embrace of editorial authority. By 1838, Poe had already gained and lost some standing in Richmond, Virginia during his two-year stint with Thomas H. White as a contributing editor and reviewer at The Southern Literary Messenger. Indeed, Poe’s editorial career was marked by a series of posts he would hold with volatile bravura only to lose them, often over difficulties with his alcoholism and his aggressive critical positions.²⁵ As an editor, Poe saw himself as a would-be tastemaker, mediator for the reading public, as well as a regulatory figure with respect to authors and authorship. His negative reviews – famous or notorious for their level of critical evisceration – scored their most searing points through a near microscopic attention to plot and style, typically serving as a form of critical annotation. Indeed, the January 1837 issue of The Southern Literary Messenger that contains the first install-

 Poe, The Narrative of Pym, .  Jerome McGann, “Poe, Decentered Culture, and Critical Method,” in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy, Jerome McGann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, ):  – , .  McGann, “Poe, Decentered Culture, and Critical Method,” .  Cf. Stephen Rachman, “Poe’s Drinking, Poe’s Delirium: The Privacy of Imps,” The Edgar Allan Poe Review . ():  – ,  – .

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ment of what would become The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket concludes with a notice to readers from White about Poe’s departure with a promise of future “effusions from his vigorous and popular pen” and a list of the pieces in the present issue for which he was responsible (these included “Arthur Gordon Pym, a sea story” and a review of “Reynolds’s Address on the South Sea Expedition”).²⁶ While the critical literature has always emphasized the pseudo-documentary strategy of the Preface to Pym as if the primary effect were to blur the line between fact and fiction, to gull the reader into mistaking one for another, or merely to account for the prior publication of Pym’s earlier chapters, these are more accurately symptoms – secondary effects of its operation. Indeed, in 1838, the veracity of Pym as a work of non-fiction was (with some important exceptions) not widely accepted. The majority of reviewers – whether positive or negative – voiced skepticism as to the accuracy of its contents, frequently mentioning Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jane Porter’s Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative (1831), and “The Great Moon Hoax” (1835) of Richard Adams Locke. Some were fooled in some respect, some were skeptical; “We cannot pretend to subscribe,” wrote a reviewer for the Sunday Morning News of New York, “to the truth of all the wonders therein related but the lovers of the marvellous [sic] will have a fine treat for a summer’s day in its perusal.”²⁷ All of this indicates that a convincing hoax was not the primary goal of the Pym’s preface; rather, the first effect is to make authorship a matter of inference as editorial power emerges as the prime regulatory force. The literary drama of the preface and concluding note to Pym stages the displacement of authorial power by editorial power, of authorship with editorship. In the end of the preface, Pym informs us that “it will be unnecessary to point out where [Mr. Poe’s] portion ends and my own commences; the difference in point of style will be readily perceived.”²⁸ As readers and critics alike have long observed, no such stylistic differentiation can be made; Pym’s vain assertion of authorial distinction – style – is subsumed under a broader editorial power. This power coalesces in Pym’s concluding note, which appears in the text directly after the final journal entry breaks off and commences this way: NOTE. ———————

 Thomas W. White, “To the Patrons of The Southern Literary Messenger,” in Southern Literary Messenger . (): .  White, “To the Patrons,” .  Poe, The Narrative of Pym, .

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THE circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press. It is feared that the few remaining chapters which were to have completed his narrative, and which were retained by him, while the above were in type, for the purpose of revision, have been irrecoverably lost through the accident by which he perished himself. This, however, may prove not to be the case, and the papers, if ultimately found, will be given to the public.²⁹

One hundred and thirty years prior to Roland Barthes’s pronouncements on “the death of the author,” Pym offers a footnote to stage the author’s death as a means to reframe the foregoing narrative in all its inconsistencies and to “open a wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture”³⁰ on the possible racial and philological implications of the discoveries on Tsalal. This re-framing consists, in the end, of a literal de-authorization of the narrative – it no longer has an author. His demise, too, has been papered over and hidden from view by the “medium of the daily press.” Many interpretations of this note view it as Poe attempting to contain the wild, intensely subjective history that precedes with a different voice – a voice of “the universal human subject of the Enlightenment, that extrapolated intellect,” in Geoffrey Sanborn’s analysis “whose ‘aggregate of useful knowledge … is the common property of all’.”³¹ But as Anthony Grafton has observed, “the curious history” of the footnote indicates that they often served contradictory purposes – models of universal erudition and evidence, personal vendettas, and fictive playfulness.³² It is equally significant that the fictive editor of the preface, “Mr. Poe,” returns only to be summarily dismissed. The curious series of quasi-hieroglyphic figures and the facts surrounding them, we are informed, “have, beyond doubt, escaped the attention of Mr. Poe.”³³ John Irwin has remarked that, “Arthur Gordon Pym dies some ten years after his journey during the writing of his narrative, dies precisely at that point in the narrative at which he should have died in the journey […] but which he had survived in some unexplained manner. The displacement of the main character’s death from the voyage of exploration to the act of writing makes clear the journey’s metaphoric status.”³⁴ This statement is as close as we may get to interpretive certainty with respect to Poe’s Pym; it proliferates metaphoricity. Pym’s jour-

 Poe, The Narrative of Pym,  – .  Poe, The Narrative of Pym, .  Sanborn, “A Confused Beginning,” .  Grafton, The Footnote, .  Poe, The Narrative of Pym, .  John Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ): .

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ney takes place in June 1827 – the exact month in which Tamerlane was published. And yet, it is not merely the displacement of voyage to text that has been metaphorized; it is a metaphor of magazine prison-house that Poe would occupy for the bulk of his literary career, a place in which the death of the author comes to stand for the terms on which writerly authority will be displaced by editorial authority. Poe would famously spend the bulk of the 1840s trying (in vain) to obtain funding for the Penn or Stylus Magazine, to acquire the editorial and publishing power he recognized as delimiting forces in his literary activities. In the end of Pym, we are left with an unruly narrative under the control of a disembodied and unnamed editor. Like the looming and humanoid figure – white – the name of the publisher and editor of the journal Poe had departed – the book and its authors are subsumed by a larger editorial power, the editorial other that seems unbounded as a regulator of culture. The figure of editorial power that I have discerned in Pym approaches the novel’s racial conundrums through the strategies of othering that the device of annotation provides. “Language, for the individual consciousness,” Mikhail Bakhtin asserts, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.³⁵

Bakhtin imagines the negotiation of socio-linguistic difference as a form of taking possession and the inflections that come with that expropriation. Poe’s strategy appears as an ironic inversion of Bakhtin’s notion. Pym speaks its own language by wedding that language to the expressive intentions of the other, incorporating an otherness into it, by entertaining it and raising the possibility of its renunciation.

The End … Note It was a matter of time-honored lore for New York City newspapermen that on April 13, 1844, Edgar Allan Poe stood outside the offices of the New York Sun in a state of inebriation telling people not to purchase the latest extra edition of the paper containing an article reporting that an English flying machine  Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, ):  – .

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had crossed the Atlantic in three days and landed at Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston, South Carolina. The reason: he had written the report. The article has come down to us with the posthumous (and stabilizing) title of “The BalloonHoax,” but the public spectacle of Poe personally discrediting the “hoax,” serves as a kind of living footnote that simultaneous asserts his authorship of and authority over the material while de-authenticating its content.³⁶ This incident reflects the abiding strategy, as I have traced it here, in Poe’s usage of actual notes; authorized de-authentication runs through all genres in which he works (lyric poetry, the tale, the essay) and is paradigmatic of Poe’s use of annotation and documentation. Indeed, in the last phase of his career Poe began to produce Marginalia, which read, like notes without a text – not unlike its eighteenth-century German forbearer, satirist Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener’s Hinkmars von Repkow Noten ohne Text (1782). In the introduction, Poe explains the genesis of Marginalia precisely as a form of othering, or in this instance a desire for the other: Perhaps it was what the Germans call the “brain scattering” humor of the moment; but, while the picturesqueness of the numerous pencil scratches arrested my attention, their helter-skelter-iness of commentary amused me. I found myself at length forming a wish that it had been some other hand than my own which had so bedevilled the books, and fancying that, in such case, I might have derived no inconsiderable pleasure from turning them over.³⁷

Since evidence from Poe’s library indicates that he left his books largely unmarked, we can infer yet again an abiding fictionality to this origin story, but what it does reveal in Poe is the way in which annotation repeatedly serves as a principle mechanism of disruption, an othering, within his overall authorial strategies and it is productive of the conditions that underlie debates about signification, representation, fictionality and authorship. For evidence that this sense of othering would literally comprise a central tenet of his worldview, we need only turn to the closing words of Eureka (1848), his cosmological prose poem. After Poe has described the absorption of the Universe into a terminal unity, he appends a note. The ultimate footnote to our obliteration, Poe offers this quantum of solace: Note—

 Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbot (Urbana, Chicago: U of Illinois P, ): .  Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, ):  – .

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The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity, ceases at once when we reflect that the process, as above described, is, neither more nor less than that of the absorption, by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God.³⁸

The loss of the individual self is compensated for by transformation into divinity itself. Our ultimate reward is not to reside with God but to become God. If Eureka means I found it, in Poe’s cosmology what he has found is that the “I” will cease to exist, as each is absorbed into the final all. In this fashion, Poe attempts to annotate our ultimate end – to become other.

 Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka (New York: Prometheus Books, ): .

Timo Müller

Headnotes and Endnotes in the African American Sonnet Strictly circumscribed poetic forms often resort to paratextual elements – primarily headnotes and endnotes – to convey additional information about the title, content, or purpose of the text. At the same time, such elements often serve as “position-takings” – a concept developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to describe the social function of textual strategies. Every formal or semantic choice, Bourdieu argues, positions the author of a text with respect to other actors in the literary field and, depending on the content of the text, in other fields as well. The African American sonnet, I suggest, is particularly illustrative of these dynamics because the brevity of the sonnet form leads to a proliferation of paratextual elements – mostly headnotes and endnotes – while the precarious position of African American writers in the literary and political fields charges these elements with strategic significance. Drawing on a large corpus of African American sonnets, my essay sketches a brief typology of paratextual elements in the genre, the most common types being dedications, epigraphs, references to time or setting, and ekphrastic references to an inspirational figure. My main focus, however, is on the political implications of these elements, which I approach by examining them as position-takings in the literary and political field. This approach shows that headnotes and endnotes serve a wide range of functions in the African American sonnet. At one end of the scale is the attempt to elide racial politics altogether by marking the sonnet as occasional verse; at the other end, paratextual elements may serve to emphasize the immediate political relevance of the sonnet by identifying the persons, events, or concerns referenced in the text. In between these poles are strategies of indirect political articulation that may be oriented at the literary field (as when the poet claims a certain position by referencing other writers) or the political field (place names signaling national belonging or cosmopolitan elusiveness). In the beginning was the note. The first book published by an African American, Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), opened with no less than four prefatory notes, the most famous of which is the last one: a declaration by eighteen leading citizens of Boston that Phillis, a teenage slave girl, had been “examined by some of the best judges, and is thought qualified to write” the poems that follow. Together with the three other notes – a dedication by Phillis to the Countess of Huntingdon, which the Countess had demanded for footing the publication costs; a publisher’s preface highlighting the “Disadvan-

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tages” Phillis had “laboured under, with Regard to Learning”; and a short biographical sketch by her owner emphasizing her intellectual capabilities – this declaration foreshadows the range of social and political implications paratextual elements have had in African American literature.¹ These implications are perhaps most obvious in early documents such as slave narratives, which often came with prefatory notes by whites aiming to bolster the writer’s authority and clarify the political agenda behind the work. The fact that the very first note in Phillis Wheatley’s collection was written by herself, however, shows that African American writers recognized and utilized the potential of paratextual elements from the very beginning – despite the outside pressures that continued to obtain. While some paratextual elements, especially prefaces and prominently placed epigraphs like those in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), have received considerable scholarly attention, the headnotes and endnotes surrounding individual poems have rarely been discussed, and never in a systematic way. This is unfortunate, I suggest, because such notes provide valuable insights into the politics of form in African American poetry. In an extremely condensed way, they illustrate not only the limitations imposed on such poetry by racialized literary discourses and practices but also the numerous strategies of subversion, transgression, and self-assertion inspired by these limitations. In the following I will examine these strategies in a specific corpus of African American poetry: the African American sonnet. While few scholars are aware of the very existence of a continuous sonnet tradition in African American literature, the genre is of particular interest for such analysis because its strict formal limitations intensify the use of subversive, transgressive, and self-assertive strategies. I will approach the social and political implications of paratextual notes by way of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory of literature, and specifically of his claim that a writer’s formal choices function as “position-takings” in the literary field. Drawing on a database of over a thousand sonnets assembled in the course of a larger research project, I will then propose a typology of headnotes and endnotes in the African American sonnet.² The focus of this typology will be on the different functions such

 Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: A. Bell, ): iii – vii.  Research for this database was supported by scholarships from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the British Association for American Studies, and Beincke Library (Yale University). I am grateful for their assistance. I would also like to thank Christa Buschendorf (Frankfurt) and the members of her relational sociology research group for their insightful comments and suggestions on this essay.

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notes have served for African American self-positioning in the literary and political fields. Five types of notes can be found in the African American sonnet: the general headnote, the subtitle, the epigraph, the general endnote, and the keyed endnote referring to a specific passage in the poem, most often the title. The most common types are the general headnote and the epigraph, both of which occasionally double as subtitles, so that no strict distinction can be maintained between the five types. In Gérard Genette’s terminology, all of these notes can be classified as peritextual, in that they were published together with the original text, and as authorial, in that they have been added by the author and operate on the first level of diegesis (epigraphs, of course, contain what Genette calls an “embedded enunciation” by the person quoted).³ While authorial notes – unlike editorial or critical notes, for example – integrally belong to the poem, their position is nevertheless a marginal one. They are set off from the core text not only by their location but, more importantly, by their mode of enunciation: in principle, they provide pragmatic information supplementary to an otherwise “depragmatized” text.⁴ The dynamic engendered by this marginality is reflected in the very term “paratext,” which Genette introduces with a quotation from J. Hillis Miller. “Para,” Miller writes, is a double antithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority, […] something simultaneously this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it, equivalent in status and also secondary or subsidiary.⁵

 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation [], trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ):  – ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “PT.” In Genette’s typology, epigraphs and notes are distinct categories. Genette tends to define notes in a more strictly editorial sense, as “connected to a more or less definite segment of the text and either placed opposite or keyed to this segment” (), though at one point he says that notes can refer to the entire text as well (). These occasional blurs presumably occur because his typology is predicated on book-length texts. While he briefly addresses poetry in his chapter on “Notes,” his argument seems to presuppose book-length poems or volumes of poetry rather than short individual texts. Genette emphasizes the marginal status of notes and epigraphs in very similar terms, however (; ).  Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response [] (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ): ; cf. PT, .  J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Seabury P, ):  – , ; cf. PT, .

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The interplay of limitation and transgression that has characterized much African American writing – especially its approach to European poetic forms – is thus prefigured in and intensified by the formal device of the note. As a conductor of transgressive energies, the note holds considerable potential for social and political agency. In Genette’s words, it is a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that – whether well or poorly understood and achieved – is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies). (PT, 2)

This pragmatic function – the strategic manipulation of reader reception – can usefully be conceptualized in terms of Bourdieu’s literary sociology. Every social field, Bourdieu argues, is made up of “positions” to which actors aspire by means of direct or indirect discursive signals. Bourdieu calls these signals “position-takings” and argues that a literary text, for instance, inevitably functions as a position-taking in the literary field: even if it does not comment explicitly on literary matters, its “aesthetic choices” will signal the author’s position relative to the various groups, schools, or movements that structure the literary field at the time of publication.⁶ While Bourdieu offers very few examples for such “aesthetic” position-takings, let alone systematic analyses, his followers have pointed out that a wide range of formal aspects can fulfill this function, including the “genre [a writer] chooses, the techniques he employs, the aesthetic he claims, the writing he displays.”⁷ Peritextual elements are perhaps the most obvious kind of formal positiontaking.⁸ Set off from the main body of the text, they are positioned to catch the reader’s eye and to provide implicit or explicit commentary on the text as a whole. Genette briefly notes that such commentary often has an “illocutionary” function, such as providing additional information, announcing the genre of the text, or committing the author to a certain degree of factuality (PT, 10 – 11). It is

 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford UP, ):  – ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “RA”.  Jacques Dubois, “Pierre Bourdieu and Literature,” SubStance  ():  – , ; cf. Timo Müller, The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, ):  – ; John R.W. Speller, Bourdieu and Literature (Cambridge: Open Book, ): .  The only analysis of a peritextual element as position-taking so far is Jérôme Meizoz, “Ce que prefacer veut dire,” in Bourdieu et la littérature: Suivi d’un entretien avec Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Jean-Pierre Martin (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, ):  – .

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this performative quality, in the vocabulary of Austin and Searle’s speech act theory, that makes peritextual elements so effective for position-takings. While their impact on the reception process has been noted by Bourdieuan critics, no systematic study of peritextual elements as position-takings has been undertaken so far.⁹ The African American sonnet furnishes a useful case study, I would argue, not only because its strict formal boundaries cause the peritext to proliferate, but also because it generically positions itself in at least two different literary fields.¹⁰ After all, the very act of appropriating a form and genre central to the “white” literary tradition constitutes a political position-taking as well as a literary one, and while neither of these trajectories can be subsumed under the other, we will see that they almost inevitably interact. The fact that African American writers acted in a different “space of possibilities” than their white counterparts points to the importance of avoiding the sort of broad, deductive approach to which the Bourdieuan model is prone, and which becomes particularly problematic in intercultural and interethnic contexts (RA, 237).¹¹ In the following I attempt to avoid this approach by proceeding inductively.¹² Instead of construing a social field or an authorial habitus and then tracing its manifestation in the text, I will identify types of formal

 Gisèle Sapiro, “Autonomy Revisited: The Question of Mediations and Its Methodological Implications,” in Bourdieu and the Literary Field, ed. Jeremy Ahearne, John Speller, Paragraph . ():  – , .  The applicability of Bourdieu’s model to literary fields other than the French one has been a main point of contention among his critics; see Jeffrey C. Alexander, Fin de Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (London: Verso, ):  – ; Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, ); Michael Einfalt, “Pierre Bourdieus Konzept des literarischen Feldes und das Problem des frankophonen Literaturraums,” in Willkürliche Grenzen: Das Werk Pierre Bourdieus in interdisziplinärer Anwendung, ed. Mark Hillebrand et al. (Bielefeld: transcript, ):  – ; John R. W. Speller, Bourdieu and Literature (Cambridge: Open Book, ):  – ; Alain Viala, “The Theory of the Literary Field and the Situation of the First Modernity,” Paragraph . ():  – , . While his argument is certainly more specific to nineteenth-century France than Bourdieu is prepared to admit, this essay operates on the assumption that the methodological and ideological problems cited by his critics can be avoided by means of inductive analysis, that is, by identifying textual phenomena and then strategically selecting and adapting Bourdieuan concepts to elucidate these phenomena.  Cf. Jens Martin Gurr, “Bourdieu, Capital, and the Postcolonial Marketplace,” in Commodifying (Post)Colonialism: Othering, Reification, Commodification and the New Literatures and Cultures in English, ed. Rainer Emig, Oliver Lindner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ):  – .  Bourdieu himself points out that his model allows for either a deductive or an inductive approach. As he says in The Rules of Art, a “stylistic strategy” may “furnish the starting point of a search for its author’s trajectory” (RA, ).

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choices and ask how they might function as position-takings in specific literary and political contexts. My goal, then, is not an overarching sociological analysis but a close reading of these formal choices and the social positions and relationships they indicate. This approach is open to criticism from a sociological perspective, of course, since the Bourdieuan approach seems to presuppose the sort of painstaking reconstruction of a specific historical field that Bourdieu undertakes in many of his works, including his examination of the literary field of mid-nineteenth-century France in The Rules of Art (1992). Bourdieu also makes general statements about the structure of modern literary fields, however, and three of these statements in particular provide guidelines for my analysis because they apply to African American literature since the nineteenth century as well. One is the observation that the literary field has a “paradoxical economy” in that financial success usually diminishes a writer’s cultural capital and vice versa (RA, 83).¹³ In the American scene this observation can be extended to another set of poles, namely the orthodoxies of white and black aesthetics: recognition by one of these orthodoxies almost inevitably diminishes a writer’s prestige with the other. The second observation relevant in our context is that the literary field is also structured by a political hierarchy. There is a “dominant” section that associates with social, political, and economic leaders and a “dominated” one largely deprived of such external sources of power (see for example RA, 124). While this hierarchy is arguably better conceptualized as a scale than as a dichotomy, it usefully captures the structural disadvantages African American writers have had in the literary field until very recently as they did not have access to these sources of power. The third observation is that such deprivation is likely to result in politically engaged art (l’art engagée), whereas writers in the dominant section of the field – or with an independent income – have the option of pursuing art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art) and thus amassing more cultural capital. Given the structurally dominated situation of black writers far into the twentieth century, one might assume that African American literature has invariably been of the “engaged” kind, but we will see that the option of emphatically non-political writing was explored as well. Against this background, the following discussion of headnotes and endnotes in the African American sonnet will focus on the recurrent functions such notes have served rather than on specific historical field configurations.

 Cf. Bernard Lahire, “Le Champ et le jeu: la spécificité de l’univers littéraire en question,” in Bourdieu et la littérature: Suivi d’un entretien avec Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Jean-Pierre Martin (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, ):  – , .

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It will identify three main functions that cover the entire range of the literary field, from the emphatically literary to the emphatically political. At the literary end of this scale, notes serve to mark a sonnet as occasional verse, as authentic self-expression unconcerned with political implications. In between these poles, a second function of notes is to claim a certain position in the literary field for the author of the sonnet, for example by referencing influential writers or other artistic figures. At the other end of the scale, a third function of notes is to support direct political position-takings, for example by explaining the events, concerns, or persons referenced in the sonnet. The first function – to mark the poem as an occasional, authentic, personal speech act – can be observed throughout the history of the African American sonnet, from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. The headnote or endnote in this case serves to mention the occasion that inspired the poem. This is particularly common in amateur poetry, which is often genuinely occasional in that it is written to commemorate events in the poet’s family or circle of friends.¹⁴ Such occasions include weddings, anniversaries, retirement, and death – events that structure both daily lives and individual biographies, thus drawing attention to the personal nature of such poems. The personal aspect is especially pronounced when the occasion itself is a mundane everyday scene: Gerald Early’s sonnet “The Art of Chess,” for example, includes a headnote stating that the poem was inspired by watching two friends play chess, while Angelina Grimké’s “Two Sonnets to Mrs. Hemenway” are subtitled “On Seeing Her Picture.”¹⁵ The sonnet has long been used for occasional poetry of this sort. Classic examples include the love sonnets of the Renaissance inspired by an encounter with the beloved; Milton’s “Methought I saw my late espoused saint,” which announces the occasion in the first line; and Keats’s “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” where the occasion provides the title. Many African American poets draw on this generic tradition of the sonnet as well. Angelina Grimké’s “Two Sonnets to Mrs. Hemenway,” for example, inscribe themselves into the Miltonic-Wordsworthian tradition of the tribute sonnet, while Early undergirds his description of the chess game with an allusive metapoetic layer: the strict definition of the sonnet form mirrors the “order,” the “Rule of having rules,” he sees at work in chess, but Early’s poem turns these rules on their

 For example Ruth Roseman Dease, Scan-Spans (New York: Vantage P, ):  – , , ,  – , ; Octave Lilly, Jr., Cathedral in the Ghetto and Other Poems (New York: Vantage P, ): .  Anglina W. Grimké, Selected Works, ed. Carolivia Herron (New York: Oxford UP, ): ; Gerald Early, How the War in the Streets Is Won: Poems on the Quest of Love and Faith (St. Louis, MO: Time Being Books, ): .

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head by switching the order of octave and sestet, thus mirroring his observation that the “symmetry of order” in the game is “Undone by the capers of capricious minds” (ll. 3, 7– 8). A distinct variant of the “occasional” note in the African American sonnet is the endnote giving the date, and sometimes the place, of composition. This technique is used by some contemporary poets to enhance the authenticity of the poem in a manner reminiscent of the “I do this, I do that” poems of the New York School.¹⁶ Rather fittingly, the purest manifestation of this type of note in the African American sonnet comes in a self-published volume by a littleknown amateur poet, Conrad Webley of New Jersey. Entitled Love Is a Two Letter Word … Us (1978), the volume assembles clumsily sketched meditations on love, some of which take the form of Shakespearean sonnets in free verse. An endnote gives the exact date of composition of each poem, often including a precise time stamp (“4– 13 – 78: 1:30 am”).¹⁷ What all notes of the first type have in common is that they mark the poem as a private space, a space for the poet to reflect on everyday life and express personal concerns. In a sociological perspective, of course, this very announcement of privacy constitutes a position-taking in the literary field. Recent scholarship has shown that African American poetry was long confined to public expression, first because writers needed to present a carefully controlled persona in the face of white supremacism, later because the struggle for civil rights and black power demanded public speech and action.¹⁸ It was not until the late twentieth century that poets consciously began to explore privacy and interiority as a means of extending the range of African American poetic expression.¹⁹ Both the sonnet, with its tradition of voicing interiority, and the “occasional” note are formal choices that poets like Early and Webley use to delineate this new position in the field of African American literature. The second function of notes in the African American sonnet is the most common one: to associate the author with other writers or artists and thus to clarify the author’s position in the literary field. Various textual strategies are

 Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (New York: Braziller, ):  – . Examples in the African American sonnet include Conrad Webley, Love Is a Two Letter Word … Us (Orange, NJ: WebCon, ):  – , ,  – , ; Rohan B. Preston, Dreams in Soy Sauce (Chicago: Tia Chucha P, ): ; Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq’s Ophelia (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf P, ):  – .  Webley, Love Is a Two Letter Word … Us, .  Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, ):  – .  Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf P, ); Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet.

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at the author’s disposal to signal proximity with other figures in the field, and notes can be used in support of several of these strategies. If the author chooses the time-honored genre of the tribute sonnet, for example, headnotes can provide supplementary information either on the addressee or on the author’s intentions in paying tribute.²⁰ More commonly, headnotes are used for dedications, either to a peer in the contemporary literary field or to a precursor whose legacy the author is claiming. As Genette notes, dedications often conflate the private and the public: they signal intimacy between author and dedicatee but at the same time proclaim this intimacy to the reading public (PT, 131– 135). This ambiguity makes them a perfect fit for what Bourdieu calls the “paradoxical economy” of the literary field (RA, 237).²¹ Just as actors in the literary field enhance their chances for success and prestige by seeming disinterested in such worldly matters, dedications serve to “veil” the author’s strategy of associating with the addressee by foregrounding the seemingly private, disinterested act of paying homage (RA, 33). These strategic considerations are highlighted when the dedication is to a historical figure, as for example in Michael S. Weaver’s “Choir Robes” (1989). Weaver dedicates his sonnet to Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance writer rediscovered as a significant figure by African American women writers. Weaver has no personal relationship with Hurston but uses the dedication to declare his spiritual and artistic proximity to this precursor. The more common type, however, is the dedication to contemporary peers. While these dedications allow for occasional insight into the allegiances that structure the African American literary field (as any field), they are not widespread enough to reconstruct the field as a whole.²² Their value for literary scholarship seems to lie less in such sociological considerations than in poetological ones: they illuminate the dynamics of proximity and distance, of appropriation and rejection, at work between writers. These dynamics, I would argue, are enhanced by the relative neutrality of the dedication. Unlike notes signaling inspiration or imitation, which are also a popular means of position-taking in the African American sonnet, the dedica-

 Alvin Aubert, Harlem Wrestler and Other Poems (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, ): ; Colleen J. McElroy, Travelling Music (Ashland, OR: Story Line P, ): .  Cf. Gurr, “Bourdieu, Capital, and the Postcolonial Marketplace,”  – .  Michael S. Weaver, “Choir Robes,” in Some Days It’s a Slow Walk to Evening (Providence, RI: Paradigm P, ): n. pag. For examples from contemporary literature, see Quincey Troupe, Embryo (New York: Barlenmir House, ): ; Wanda Coleman, Bathwater Wine (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow P, ): ; Major Jackson, Leaving Saturn (Athens: U of Georgia P, ): . A classic example is Countee Cullen’s dedication of “From the Dark Tower” to his mentor Charles S. Johnson in Copper Sun (New York: Harper’s, ): .

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tion remains equivocal about the author’s relationship to the dedicatee.²³ The difference between the two is signaled by the prepositions “for” and “after,” respectively. By announcing a sonnet as written “after” Blake, Borges, or Baraka, the intertextual note tends to solidify the writer’s association with the precursor figure on both the poetological and the sociological levels.²⁴ Such associations are of course revealing in themselves, and especially so in African American literature, where a white European precursor like Blake carries very different implications from a Black Arts figure like Baraka. Nevertheless, it seems that the unequivocal allegiance signaled by the preposition “after” does not engender the same productive tension as the more ambiguous relationship signaled by the preposition “for.” Consider the following dedicated sonnet from Eugene B. Redmond’s collection Songs From an Afro/Phone (1972):²⁵

 Under the rubric of intertextual notes I group notes signaling imitation (written “after” or “in the manner of” another writer), inspiration (written “after reading” or with reference to another text), or source material (as in endnotes referring to bible verses). Many examples for the first type can be found in Wanda Coleman, American Sonnets (Milwaukee: Woodland, ). Examples for the second type include Countee Cullen, Color (New York: Harper, ):  and June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, ed. Jan Heller Levi, Sara Miles (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, ): . For the third type, see Countee Cullen, The Black Christ and Other Poems (New York: Harper, ): . To some extent, epigraphs can be regarded as intertextual notes as well, although they span a much larger range of position-taking and functions, including in the African American sonnet the first and third functions discussed in this essay. For epigraphs in the first category – the “occasional” note – see Gerald W. Barrax, Epigraphs (Chapel Hill, NC: Mud Puppy P, ); a rare example in the African American sonnet for a political epigraph, and hence for the third function, is the Frederick Douglass quotation heading Natasha Trethewey’s sequence “Native Guard,” in Native Guard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ):  – . The most common type is the intertextual epigraph, however; see for example Sterling A. Brown, The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, ed. Michael S. Harper (New York: Harper & Row, ): ; Dudley Randall, More to Remember: Poems of Four Decades (Chicago: Third World P, ): ; Colleen J. McElroy, Sleeping With the Moon (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, ): ; Evie Shockley, The New Black (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, ): . For a general typology of the pragmatic functions of epigraphs see PT,  – .  For Blake and Baraka see Wanda Coleman, Bathwater Wine (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow P, ): , ; for Borges see Carl Phillips, From the Devotions (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf P, ): .  Eugene B. Redmond, Songs From an Afro/Phone (East St. Louis, IL: Black River Writers, ): . In a  interview, Redmond stated that “jungles” (l. ) was a typographical error and was meant to read “jungle.” See Howard Rambsy II, Mary Rose, “Eugene B. Redmond Oral History Interview : March , ,” The Eugene B. Redmond Interviews (acc.  August ).

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Sonnet Serenade/Soulo Beauty (For Gwendolyn Brooks) Behold! the forms and rhythms of my face: Choral trees and soulos limbly bowing; Greenhiss/grasslow and moanful in sparkspace, Caught crying/caroling and know-howing; Sometimes in gusty soulsoliloquys Within vastvalleys and mountainous songs; Or much/iterated with ah’s and me’s, Short/circuited or shattered against gongs. A lord-length voice invades these jungles sparks: Neoning/drumscripting a passion-rain Which seeds tear-tunes and in the drumpath marks: A cool/mellow maid of song and a main Squeeze close-held in sound-arms, in hip song-rap; Whose love, buttoned in gold, is your lyre-lap.

From the double title to the many compound words that sustain its style and tune, Redmond’s poem feeds off the tensions engendered by the meeting of incongruous elements. The dedication to Gwendolyn Brooks stands somewhat prosaically in between the ambiguous title and the playfully experimental poem. On the one hand, the dedication presents Brooks as an admired precursor and possible recipient of the “serenade” that is the poem. On the other hand, the hierarchical praise implied in serenading is undercut from the first line of the poem, which directs its admiration and praise at the speaker himself rather than the female beloved familiar from the sonnet tradition. This ambivalence is at work on several levels in the poem. The style, for example, evokes the condensed, experimental language that Brooks introduced into post-war African American poetry, but at the same time the sheer exuberance of its wordplay subverts the high-modernist seriousness of Brooks’s early collections. In a way, Redmond remixes Brooks’s language with a style of his own, which he takes from more recent avant-garde movements such as beat and spoken word. The double title also announces the poem’s revision of the fairly traditional, European concepts of sonnet and serenade. It replaces these concepts with African American concepts that might be seen as analogues: soul music and the vernacular. The shift from European to African American models, and specifically from the sonnet to the vernacular, characterizes Gwendolyn Brooks’s oeuvre as well. When Redmond published his poem, Brooks had just completed her transformation from high modernist to Black Arts poet, or in Bourdieu’s terms, from an art predominantly for art’s sake to a politically engaged and culturally “heretic” art that constituted a subfield at the extreme pole of both the American

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and the African American literary fields around 1970.²⁶ Redmond, himself associated with the Black Arts movement, positions himself with respect to several actors and coordinates in the field. The perfect Shakespearean rhyme scheme of his sonnet signals his claim to the cultural capital associated with the Western poetic tradition, epitomized by the venerated figure of Shakespeare. It also evokes Brooks’s early poetry, both in its indebtedness to white models like the sonnet – which Brooks did use heavily in her breakthrough collections A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Annie Allen (1949) – and as representative of what had become the “orthodox” position in African American literature by the 1960s: a modernist style and liberal-humanist program that secured mainstream acceptance for a few outstanding black writers.²⁷ While these elements grant Redmond access to the orthodox area of the literary field, the dominant vernacular voice of the poem aligns him with the “heretics” of the Black Arts movement; in fact, it positions him as the gatekeeper of that movement as he effectively welcomes Brooks into it. The headnote of the poem thus aligns its author with the dedicatee but presents the dedicatee as a stylistic and political contrast in order to define and solidify the author’s own position in the literary field. In African American literature such position-takings inevitably have political implications since the literary field has traditionally taken over some of the functions of the political field in which African Americans have been denied sustained representation. This sociological shift explains the high ratio of explicitly political statements in the literature: in Bourdieu’s terms, most African American writing tends toward the pole of l’art engagée rather than l’art pour l’art. While the sonnet is often associated with the latter pole, it has been affected by this tendency as well, and some of the best-known African American poems are highly political sonnets. Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” (1919) and “America” (1921), Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel” (1925), and Robert Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass” (1947/1962) all fall into this category. In many political sonnets, notes have had an important function in that they identify and contextualize the  The most comprehensive history of the politics and ideology of Black Arts is James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the s and s (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, ). On Brooks’s transformation into a Black Arts poet see Marva Furman, “Gwendolyn Brooks: The ‘Unconditioned’ Poet,” CLA Journal  ():  – ; George Kent, A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, ):  – .  On liberal humanism in general see John Gray, Liberalism (Buckingham: Open UP, ): . On its influence in the African American literary field see Robert E. Washington, The Ideologies of African American Literature: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Nationalist Revolt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, ):  – ; Lawrence P. Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics,  –  (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, ):  – ,  – .

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events to which the sonnet refers. Some sonnets, in fact, rely entirely on the note to establish their intervention as a specifically political one. The various functions of the political note can best be distinguished in amateur poetry, where the sonnet is often used for meditative reflection in a genteel vein. Considerable poetic skill is required to weave explicit political statements into the abstract language of such poetry without sounding either stilted or burlesque. Amateur poets often avoid this problem by outsourcing the political reference to a note, which allows them to keep the sonnet in the conventional, allegorical mode they are familiar with and still turn it into a statement on current events such as Brown v. Board of Education or the Rodney King scandal.²⁸ Some sonnets in this vein even made it into the major African American journals of the time. Lucian B. Watkins’s “Go!” is a typical example. Published in the January 1916 issue of The Crisis, it honors in conventionally allegorical terms a successful athlete who is identified as “Drew” toward the end. A headnote explains that the reference is to Howard P. Drew, an African American track-and-field athlete who set a new world record for the 100-yard dash in 1914 and was the only black athlete of the time whose participation in the Olympic Games was mentioned by national sports commentators.²⁹ Given that The Crisis had been campaigning for public recognition of Drew’s achievement, the headnote clarifies the racial subtext of Watkins’s poem and gives a political edge to its genteel didacticism: “Let us each take heed and run / Run with our gifts eternal and make known […] / The faith we find in many a midnight moan.”³⁰ The history of the African American sonnet also includes a striking case of denied position-taking. When, during the race struggles of the 1960s, an editorial in the New Orleans Times Picayune opined that African Americans had no past,

 Ruth Roseman Dease, Scan-Spans (New York: Vantage P, ): ; Mendi Lewis Obadike, Armor and Flesh (Detroit: Lotus P, ): . Examples that reference racial issues in general include Walter G. Arnold, In Quest of Gold: The Negro in America and Other Poems (New York: William Frederick P, ): ; Carrie Williams Clifford, The Widening Light (Boston: Reid, ): ix; Mary Bohanon, Strictly Personal: Black Vignettes (Reseda, CA: Mojave Books, ): .  Steven W. Pope, “American Muscles and Minds: Public Discourse and the Shaping of National Identity During Early Olympiads,  – ,” Journal of American Culture . ():  – , .  Other examples from widely available journals include Arthur Tunnell, “On Segregation,” The Crisis  (): ; P. J. White, Jr., “Vestis Virumque Cano,” Opportunity  (): . See also Booker T. Jackson, God Looks Down (Fort Smith, AZ: South and West, ): ; and on international politics Beatrice Murphy, “Go Down, Moses!”, in Ebony Rhythm: An Anthology of Contemporary Negro Verse, ed. Beatrice Murphy (New York: Exposition P, ): ; J. Harvey L. Baxter, Sonnets to the Ethiopians (Roanoke, VA: Magic City P, ): .

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local amateur poet Octave Lilly submitted a sonnet entitled “Black Heritage Miniature” in response to this claim.³¹ The sonnet begins by taking on the paper’s editors and then presents an array of historical figures from Crispus Attucks to P. B. S. Pinchback, the first African American to become governor of a US state, to refute their allegation. When the Times Picayune rejected the sonnet, Lilly included it in his collection Cathedral in the Ghetto (1970) and added two footnotes, one explaining the story behind the poem, the other detailing at some length the role of African Americans in local history. This makes “Black Heritage Miniature” both the most heavily annotated sonnet in African American literature and one of its most immediate political interventions. At its most effective, this sort of intervention draws additional force from the interplay between note and sonnet. Leslie Pinckney Hill, an educator and occasional poet from the Harlem Renaissance period, explored the possibilities of such integrated political commentary in many of his poems, most effectively perhaps in “So Quietly,” his response to a 1919 lynching. As African American soldiers were returning from World War I with new confidence, the number of lynchings increased steeply in the American South. The protest against lynching, and especially the effort to get Congress to pass an anti-lynching bill, was the first public movement since abolitionism in which large numbers of African Americans participated; it foreshadowed the emergence of an African American public sphere and cultural field in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.³² Hill’s sonnet takes a specific position in that debate, and it clarifies this position-taking by quoting from a newspaper report on lynching in the epigraph and then commenting on the report in the sonnet:³³ So Quietly News item from the New York Times on the lynching of a Negro at Smithville, Ga., December 21, 1919 “The train was boarded so quietly … that members of the train crew did not know that the mob had seized the Negro until informed by the prisoner’s guard after the train had left the town. … A coroner’s inquest held immediately returned the verdict that West came to his death at the hands of unidentified men.” So quietly they stole upon their prey And dragged him out to death, so without flaw

 Lilly, Cathedral in the Ghetto and Other Poems,  – .  Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching,  –  (Philadelphia: Temple UP, ):  – .  Leslie Pinckney Hill, The Wings of Oppression (Boston: Stratford, ):  – . See also Hill, The Wings of Oppression,  –  and Leslie Pinckney Hill, “Vision of a Lyncher,” The Crisis  (): .

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Their black design that they to whom the law Gave him in keeping, in the broad, bright day, Were not aware when he was snatched away; And when the people, with a shrinking awe, The horror of that mangled body saw, “By unknown hands!” was all that they could say. So, too, my country, stealeth on apace The soul-blight of a nation. Not with drums Or trumpet blare is that corruption sown, But quietly—now in the open face Of day, now in the dark—and when it comes, Stern truth will never write, “By hands unknown.”

At first glance, the epigraph serves the same purpose as in the sonnets discussed above: it provides context for the poem and thus reinforces its political criticism. Hill’s sonnet could stand on its own, without the epigraph, but it would be a very different kind of poem: an abstract, allegorical warning against “corruption” and moral indifference, with lynchings and their underlying racism as one of several possible referents. The epigraph turns the sonnet into a forthright political intervention, a piece of “engaged literature” with a highly specific referent. Hill goes further than the poets cited above in that he sets up the epigraph to be parsed, discussed, and ultimately refuted in the sonnet. The pseudo-truth of the epigraph – that the case had to be closed because the lynchers could not be identified – is supplanted by the higher truth of divine judgment. It is sonnet that expresses this truth, asserting its position of moral superiority over the official version of events expressed by the epigraph. This revisionary thrust is palpable in the language as well. The epigraph is written in a convoluted, passive style that betrays the newspaper’s complicity in obfuscating the causes and perpetrators of the crime. The sonnet, by contrast, addresses the crime directly, describes it in gory detail, and assigns responsibility not only to the perpetrators but to the entire nation whose indifference enables such deeds. Moreover, the sonnet forces the epigraph into the argument, as it were, by taking up the leitmotifs of “hands” and “quiet” in both the octave and the sestet, so that the epigraph effectively becomes the first stanza of the poem and is exposed to correction and judgment. From a sociological perspective, the dynamics between sonnet and epigraph in Hill’s poem enact in miniature the relationship between a work of art and the social environment from which it emerges. On the one hand, the sonnet is motivated and influenced by its environment, more specifically by the way other actors position themselves on the question of racially motivated lynching. On the other hand, the sonnet is itself a position-taking in both the literary and the political field, thus influencing other actors and motivating new position-takings in

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its turn. In this process, the work of art offers what Bourdieu calls a “refraction” of its social environment (RA, 220 – 221). The sonnet is not determined by the events and positions summarized by the epigraph but selectively responds to them, thus giving a partial, modified, but all the more powerful account of public debate at the time. While the octave-sestet division of the Petrarchan sonnet contributes to the impression of continuity between epigraph and poem in “So Quietly,” the political interventions examined so far seldom draw on specific generic attributes of the sonnet apart from the general promise of cultural capital associated with the form. There is one type of political intervention, however, that does make decisive use of the sonnet tradition: the praise sonnet dedicated to a political figure. We have seen that the dedicatory note signals a certain distance in the literary field in that it associates the author with the dedicatee but does not necessarily acknowledge the dedicatee as a stylistic influence. In the political field, by contrast, the stylistic aspect rarely feeds into the position-taking at all, whereas the prominent reference to the dedicatee firmly associates the author with the dedicatee’s political position. As in the case of the epigraph, the political function of the dedicatory note stands out most clearly where an otherwise abstract, conventional praise sonnet acquires political topicality because the dedicatee is known for representing a certain cause. The main effect of such a dedication is not to support the political cause – which is not mentioned in the sonnet itself – but to position the author of the poem near the dedicatee in the political field. The typical political dedicatees in the African American sonnet are leading black activists, from Martin Luther King to local figures like the nineteenth-century New Orleans abolitionist Louis A. Martinet. Some dedications are to celebrities indirectly connected with the political struggle, such as the singer Marian Anderson, whose openair concert on the Washington Mall galvanized the racial integration movement in 1939.³⁴ Amateur poets in particular were drawn to such dedications, which promised access to the political field even for poets whose publications did not garner enough attention to have any political effect of themselves. Dedications also raised a modest amount of political capital for writers who did not otherwise engage in the struggle and remained tamely conventional in their choice of style and subject matter.

 For King see Octave Lilly, Cathedral in the Ghetto and Other Poems (New York: Vantage P, ): ; for Martinet see Eloise Bibb, Poems [], in Collected Black Women’s Poetry , ed. Joan R. Sherman (New York: Oxford UP, ): ; for Anderson see Beatrice Wright, Color Scheme: Selected Poems (New York: Pageant P, ): .

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Those who did publish activist poetry, on the other hand, rarely resorted to a mere dedication but made the addressee of their praise the central and eponymous figure of the sonnet. Many of the best-known African American sonnets opt for this direct, unequivocal mode, including Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Robert Gould Shaw” (1903), Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass” (1947/1962), and Margaret Walker’s “Malcolm X” (1969).³⁵ One of the few poets who used the dedicatory note to similarly radical effect is the Barbadian-born J. Ashton Brathwaite, who settled in New York City at the time of the Black Arts movement and adopted the name Odimumba Kwamdela. His 1977 tribute to Marcus Garvey, the controversial activist of the Harlem Renaissance period, adopts the fourteen-line structure and the emphatic concluding couplet of the Shakespearean sonnet but revises the form to suit his unequivocal position-taking in the field of black activism:³⁶ Dead Must be the Black Hero (For Marcus Garvey) Your own folks ridiculed you They feared and despised you Wishing you would die; Your bold truths and unpalatable facts Your dedicated and uncompromising stand Reminded them of that they’d deny. Your folks now claim they love you They read and quote you always Wishing you did not go; But rest forever in peace Return never to fight their battles again Less [sic] they abuse you as they did before. In life truth often stands alone A fact, brother, you must’ve known.

Brathwaite does away with the structural imbalance that is generally regarded as characteristic of the sonnet and splits the first twelve lines into two stanzas of equal length. The strict parallelization reinforces the binary outlook of the poem – the sense of “us vs. them” that sustained much black activism of the period. In both stanzas, the first three lines indict the falsity of those activists who

 Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, ): ; Robert Hayden, A Ballad of Remembrance (London: Paul Breman, ): ; Margaret Walker, Prophets for a New Day (Detroit: Broadside P, ): .  Odimumba Kwamdela, The Grassroots Philosopher (Toronto: Third World Books, ): .

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merely follow fashions and act with one eye on (white) public approval; the next two lines address Garvey, the uncompromising “Black Hero” of the title; and the last line returns to his detractors and summarizes Brathwaite’s position. Tellingly, this position is defined not by a certain political stance, but exclusively by its proximity to Garvey, which underscores the relational quality of position-takings in general and of such references as dedicatory notes in particular. Instead of merely inserting a dedicatory note in an otherwise apolitical poem, however, Brathwaite makes the dedicatee the dominant figure in the poem. This allows him not only to define his own position by association with the dedicatee but also to assert the superiority of this position: he first exalts Garvey to almost Messianic status (he will be abused on his return to mankind) and in the last line claims that status for himself as well by ostentatiously addressing Garvey as “brother.” Like other examples discussed in this essay, Brathwaite’s poem shows that beyond the general distinction between occasional, literary, and political notes, peritextual elements can serve various functions even within the same poem. The African American sonnet, I want to suggest in conclusion, is particularly attuned to the potential of such elements because they allow writers to extend the narrow boundaries of the sonnet form and to negotiate their position in the literary and political fields. This last aspect was the more important as African Americans were often denied membership in the literary field or were restricted to certain devalued positions (“dialect writing,” “exotic writing,” “propagandistic writing,” etc.). They were also forced to position themselves toward the imaginary but enormously consequential poles of “white” and “black” art, and were liable to attacks for not conforming to the orthodoxies of either pole. In this situation, the formal choice of the annotated sonnet promised both stability and innovation. It could stabilize a poet’s in-between position in that the sonnet form signals membership in the white tradition of “high art” while the note gestures toward various black aesthetic elements: it breaks open the strict rules of the white form, can “signify” on these rules or on the white tradition evoked by them and introduces an element of call and response in that the sonnet, as we have seen, can often be read as a response to the note.³⁷ These new strategies were highly innovative when the African American sonnet emerged around the turn of the twentieth century in that they contributed to the “mastery of form” that Houston Baker has identified as the modernizing impulse in African Amer-

 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, ).

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ican writing.³⁸ Ever since, they have asserted the right and ability of African American poets to appropriate traditionally white forms and turn them into polyphonic expressions of their specific personal, cultural, and political concerns. In this respect, peritextual elements in the African American sonnet are a paradigmatic example for the creative processes triggered when the boundaries of texts, cultures, and ideologies are punctured by that inconspicuous but transgressive device: the note.

 Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ): .

John Morán González

Páginas en blanco, Footnotes, and the Authority of the Archive in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao My essay examines the quandary faced by contemporary Dominican American writers such as Junot Díaz, whose novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) confronts the ongoing cultural legacies of postcolonial state violence in the Americas. Relating the story of the Cabral-de Leon family’s persecution in the Dominican Republic by dictator Rafael Trujillo and the family’s subsequent exile to the United States in the decades afterward, Yunior, the narrator of Díaz’s novel, characterizes the difficulty in reconstructing the truth of personal, familial, and national histories when state repression has become permanent aspect of all social relations, even in the diaspora. Like Yunior, Díaz confronts the difficulties of writing against what the narrative terms “páginas en blanco,” or the blank pages of the Dominican archive that create a profound epistemological void in communal histories. But, as the novel demonstrates, the process of writing Dominican history from the vantage point of diaspora must necessarily become an examination of the very limits of representation under postcolonial state violence as a manifestation of the continuing coloniality of power in the Americas. A key formal strategy in this endeavor, the novel’s numerous footnotes serve as a metacritical commentary upon the possibilities of filling in state-sponsored páginas en blanco as well as the limits of counter-histories from the Dominican diaspora. The footnotes of Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao have that subterranean quality common to all footnotes, yet more resonant with the sepulchral and spectral than the germinal or hibernal. Redolent of the dark, cool spaces of the archive, footnotes link the ready legibility of the main narrative with the digressive and expository turns of secondary ones, serving as a kind of dumbwaiter shuttling the reader’s attention between the diegetic world of the narrative above and the exegetic demimonde of the archive below.¹ Given that the novel, in both form and content, invites readers to investigate the  Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (), another postmodern novel noted for its extensive use of footnotes, characterizes the lowly footnote as the vital link between a specific work and the sum totality of knowledge as represented by the archive: “Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library” (Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine [New York: Weidenfeld, ]: ).

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complex relationships of diasporic fiction to national history, of painful personal and familial recollections to authoritative, archival-based historiography, the 33 footnotes of Oscar Wao suggest a specifically postcolonial direction regarding the presence of footnotes in contemporary fiction. Even as the main narrative strives to restore the stories and memories of lives lost due to state violence, the footnotes of Oscar Wao underscore the limits of such projects when they too are informed by the cultural legacies of state violence. Underscoring the problem of narrative authority in diasporic fiction’s reconstructive historical projects, particularly those seeking to address the enduring impact of dictatorial regimes upon diasporic communities, the footnotes of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao indicate not only the highly provisional nature of fictional recreations of shattered communal histories, but also how the archival impulse behind such reconstructive efforts itself generates its own páginas en blanco, or epistemological voids created by the coloniality of power still operational throughout the Americas. Diasporic Latina/o fiction has gained new attention in the wake of the widespread critical and commercial success of Díaz’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, particularly since its wide-ranging play of genres and allusions – from high modernist classics, contemporary Japanese manga and anime, and marginalized Anglophone popular culture (science fiction and fantasy literature as well as superhero comics) – mesh seamlessly with the bilingual expressiveness and the cultural vernacular of its Dominican American characters as they travel back and forth between the Dominican Republic and the United States. Focusing less upon the dominant US paradigm of the migrant story as one centered upon the triumphant or problematic integration into US social life, the novel more saliently depicts the profound determinations of colonial and postcolonial history that inform the exilic presence of the Dominican diaspora in the United States. Refusing to relegate the migrant’s past to some obscure and easily discarded nostalgia for the old homeland, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao instead dwells upon the continuities of postcolonial state violence impossible to dispel in the translation from the Dominican Republic to the United States. Set within these two nations but outside their official national histories, the novel, like much migrant fiction, makes visible the cultural diffusion of state violence throughout the diaspora, against the grain of nationalist histories and archives that would deny or legitimate that violence. Yet even while refusing the official story, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao also exhibits how state violence extends to every level of narration, personal as well as national and diasporic, in its jumbled and fragmented temporalities and echoed in its multiple generic frameworks and disparate allusive cultural contexts. The problem of writing personal and communal histories in the shad-

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ow of state violence has long been a central concern of Latin American and diasporic Latina/o writers.² Postcolonial state violence in the Americas is a central legacy of what José Davíd Saldívar, following Aníbel Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, terms “the coloniality of power” in the Americas. Given that colonial regimes were organized around new classifications of “race” upon which a global capitalism was subsequently built, successor postcolonial states would likewise operate according to the remapping of racial hierarchies as “ethnicity.”³ In essence, key epistemological aspects of the Spanish colonial order were constitutive of the postcolonial state in the Americas, ensuring that the violence of the colonial regime would be extended, not repudiated, after national liberation. As the late-nineteenth-century Cuban exile José Martí would memorably phrase this Latin American dilemma in his landmark 1891 essay “Nuestra América,” “La colonia continuó viviendo en la república” [the colony lived on in the republic].⁴ This is of course not the narrative that nations produce about themselves through national histories, as their legitimacy depends upon a clear distinction, disjuncture, or discontinuity with the colonial regime that preceded it. Nationalisms in the Americas deal in postcolonial regimes of representation that seemingly trade entrenched imperial hierarchies of race (and occasionally class and gender) for the abstract formal equality of citizenship. If colonial histories and archives created colonial difference as the basis of social hierarchies, then postcolonial national histories and archives would seem to function, when considered on their own terms, as the negation of colonial knowledges. Rather than conjure the abject colonized subject that cannot speak, nationalist archives posit an empowered citizenry for whom “speaking,” within the parameters of what constitutes proper political agency, is essential to its legitimacy. Whereas colonial difference formed the central narrative of empire, national history rele-

 While a thorough examination of the genre of the dictator novel is beyond the scope of this essay, some prominent titles include Miguel Ángel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente (), Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método (), Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del partriarca (), Luisa Valenzuela’s Cola de lagartija (), and Mario Vargas Llosa’s La fiesta del chivo (); this last novel is excoriated by Yunior in Footnote . Latina/o texts dealing with the legacy of dictatorships in a diasporic context include Julia Alvarez’s novels (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents; In the Time of the Butterflies) and Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir Antes que anochezca.  Cf. José David Saldívar, Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke UP, ): xi; for a thorough explication of the phrase see Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South . ():  – .  José Martí, “Nuestra América,” Obras completas  ():  – , ; unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

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gated the question of invidious difference to the category of the non-citizen, ensuring that social conflict could either be displaced into confrontations with other nation-states or resolved through internal consensus-generating institutional mechanisms (which themselves often disenfranchised, via racialization, heterosexism, or other processes of group subordination, those formally included within the category of “citizens”). Ultimately, as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao brilliantly demonstrates, the making of postcolonial difference was not so much the negation of colonial difference as the nationalist transformation of its operative terms through state violence. What the novel characterizes as the “fukú americanus,” the curse of the Americas otherwise known as the colonial structure of knowledge, power, and practice initiated by Spanish colonialism in the sixteenth century and augmented by US colonialism in the twentieth, underlays the postcolonial experiences of the Dominican people (OW, 1, italics in original). While Spanish colonialism, with its genocidal pursuit of capital through the creation of racialized slave labor, laid the conceptual groundwork for the normalization of state violence in everyday life, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao focuses upon the postcolonial Dominican Republic of the mid- to late twentieth century, when the fukú not only doesn’t fade but rather finds its fullest expression in the US-backed Trujillato, the infamously brutal reign (1930 – 1961) of dictator Rafael Leónides Trujillo Molina, and its diasporic aftermath.⁵ Mobilizing the operational categories of race, language, and culture forged by the coloniality of power, Trujillo forcefully established the imagined territoriality of the Dominican Republic in 1937 by ordering his military forces to conduct an ethnic cleansing of the borderlands with Haiti, the neighboring republic sharing the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Some 12,000 Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans, deemed “too African” for inclusion in Trujillo’s vision of a Europeanized Dominican Republic, were murdered during the Parsley Massacre (known as El Corte [the Cutting] in Spanish and Kuoto-a [the Knife] in Kreyòl because many of the victims were killed with machetes).⁶

 The United States either overtly or tacitly supported many other dictatorships in Latin America and the Caribbean during this period, including those of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in El Salvador ( – ), Jorge Ubico in Guatemala ( – ), Flugencio Batista in Cuba ( – ,  – ), and Anastacio Somoza in Nicaragua ( – ).  The event is termed the Parsley Massacre in English because those suspected of being Haitian were told to utter the Spanish word for “parsley” – perejil – to determine their national identities. If Kreyòl-speakers substituted an “l” sound for the “r,” they were killed for being “Haitian,” whether they were or not. For casualty estimates and a more detailed history of the massacre, see Eric Paul Roorda, “Genocide Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy, the Trujillo Regime, and the Haitian Massacre of ,” Diplomatic History . ():  – .

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This massive instance of organized state violence firmly established the racial, linguistic, and cultural boundaries of Dominican nationalism in the era of Trujillo and continues to define both Dominican and Haitian nationalisms to this day.⁷ This event would seem to be a particularly vivid illustration of what Ernest Renan, echoed a century later by Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, strikingly identified as a nation’s obligation to forget the violence of its own establishment.⁸ While Renan argued that this obligation to forget is the necessary foundational act of every nation, the specific circumstances of the Dominican Republic during the twentieth century suggest that state violence does not simply function to define the outer limits of which communities may be included within the nation but also to discipline the kind of economic and political subjects its citizens can be. Yunior, the narrator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and only friend of titular ghetto nerd Oscar de Leon, caustically acknowledges in Footnote 1 that one of Trujillo’s “[o]utstanding accomplishments” was “last but not least, the forging of the Dominican peoples into a modern state” through state violence directed “inward” as well as “outward”;⁹ indeed, the implication throughout the novel is that the nationalist imperatives at work in the Parsley Massacre laid the foundation for Trujillo’s equally-savage repression of the Dominican Republic’s own citizenry. Under these circumstances, the formation of nation-states through official violence incurs a permanent national deficit of social justice that the nation can neither acknowledge nor provide restitution for; as Achille Mbembe writes, “[t]he constitutive violence of the state rests, in the end, on the possibility, which can never be dismissed, of refusing to recognize (or to settle) one or another debt” to citizens and non-citizens alike.¹⁰ The national obligation to forget past and ongoing state violence becomes constitutive of national history and

 A discussion of some later cultural and linguistic repercussions of the Parsley Massacre in Dominican American diasporic fiction can be found in my “ ‘ Trying to get the accents right’: Censorship, Exile, and Linguistic Difference in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents,” in Censorship and Exile, ed. Johanna Hartmann, Hubert Zapf (Göttingen: V&R unipress, ):  – .  See Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, ):  – ; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, ); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, ).  Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead, ): , n. . Further references in the text, abbreviated as “OW”.  Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al., trans. Judith Inggs (Boston: Kluwer Academic, ):  – , .

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postcolonial subjectivities to such a degree that mere recognition of this debt becomes tantamount to treason. Writing from the Dominican American diaspora at the edge of Dominican nationalism, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao turns explicitly to the question of this national debt and how, under conditions of state violence, Dominican archives and official histories create epistemological voids that perpetuate state impunity under the guise of national history.

I Haunted by the circumstances surrounding Oscar’s murder in the cane fields of the Dominican Republic, Yunior attempts to reconstruct the ill-starred fates of three generations of the Cabral-de Leon family during and after the Trujillato.¹¹ Piecing together personal, familial, and communal histories scattered by state violence much as a historian might, Yunior’s resulting narrative is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao itself, a partial and fragmentary reconstruction of a specific event of state violence (Oscar’s murder) as it fits into a larger pattern of state violence seemingly endemic to the Dominican Republic since the first days of Spanish colonialism but somehow intensified during the era of Trujillo. Recalling what has been forgotten, lost, or silenced, Yunior’s narrative instantiates what art historian Hal Foster has termed “the archival impulse,” the utopian desire “to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.”¹² Often felt as an urgent need to document historical experiences that have been prohibited, suppressed, or otherwise marginalized, the archival impulse creates informal archives “in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private.”¹³ The counter-archives created by the archival impulse must always be viewed in relation to the official state archives to which they are a response, and particularly to the operations of authority involved in their creation. As Mbembe re-

 For histories of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, see: Eugenio Matibag, Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint: Nation, State, and Race on Hispaniola (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ); Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History, third ed. (Princeton: Markus Wiener, ); Richard Lee Turits, Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford: Stanford UP, ); Bernardo Vega, Trujillo y Haiti (Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, ): ; Lauren Derby, The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (Durham, NC: Duke UP, ).  Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October  ():  – , .  Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” .

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minds us, the archive “is primarily the product of a judgment, the result of the exercise of a specific power and authority, which involves placing certain documents in an archive at the same time as others are discarded.”¹⁴ The central implication of such a process of selection is that the archive is not solely a collection of documents but more fundamentally the material manifestation of relations of power: “The archive is, therefore, not a piece of data, but a status.”¹⁵ The connection between archival authority and postcolonial state violence runs throughout The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao but is perhaps most fully elaborated in a lengthy footnote (where else?) about Joaquín Balaguer, a close associate of Trujillo who served as president of the Dominican Republic for three terms in the decades after the dictator’s assassination.¹⁶ Detailing Balaguer’s atrocities while in office and the utter lack of accountability for them, Footnote 9 highlights the limits of nationalist knowledge as constituted within the current historiographic production of the Dominican Republic. Self-aware of his status as a vernacular historian situated in the diaspora, Yunior references Balaguer’s 1988 memoir Memorias de un cortesano en la “era de Trujillo” [Memories of a courtier during the “era of Trujillo”] as a prime example of the Dominican archive’s legitimization of state violence as practiced by Trujillo and his successors. In this memoir, Balaguer claimed to know who assassinated opposition journalist Orlando Martínez in 1975, and, as Yunior observes, “left a blank page, a página en blanco, in the text to be filled in with the truth upon his death” (OW, 90). The referenced passage from Memorias de un cortesano en la “era de Trujillo” is worth quoting at length: Esta página se inserta en blanco. Durante muchos años permancerá muda, pero un día hablará, para que su voz sea recogida por la historia. Callada, como una tumba cuyo secreto a voces se levantará, acusador, cuando el tiempo permita levantar la losa bajo la cual permanece yacente la verdad. (333) [The next page is blank. For many years it will remain mute, but one day will speak, so that its voice will be heard by History. Silent for now, the page will, like a tomb that yields its secret when conjured, reveal the dormant truth when the moment permits for the tombstone to be lifted.]

 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” .  Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” .  Despite the formal distinction between “president” and “dictator,” Balaguer governed much like his former boss. For more information, see Ana S.Q. Liberato, Joaquín Balaguer, Memory, and Diaspora: The Lasting Political Legacies of an American Protégé (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, ).

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Balaguer’s characterization of the página en blanco as a tomb of “the dormant truth” that rises, like a specter, when summoned resonates with Mbembe’s image of the archival document as a cadaverous oracle to be consulted “if woken from sleep and returned to life” at the proper time and by the proper authorities.¹⁷ Writing in the context of postcolonial state violence in contemporary Africa, Mbembe theorizes state archival practices as “a kind of interment, laying something in a coffin, if not to rest, then to at least to consign elements of that life which could not be destroyed purely and simply.” For Mbembe, the function of the state archive is not simply to foster the preservation of national history but also “to thwart the dispersion of these traces and the possibility, always there, that left to themselves, they might eventually acquire a life of their own,” particularly those experiences of state violence that could resurface, thus corroborated, from the depths of communal memory.¹⁸ Balaguer’s otherwise risible attempt to suggest that responsibility for Martínez’s death lay elsewhere other than his own doorstep, as many are convinced, emphasizes with unusual clarity the complicity of the state archive in granting immunity to state violence. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, those who attempt to write unauthorized narratives of the nation, such as Oscar or his grandfather Abelard Cabral, are killed as enemies of the state not for any security threat that they represent but for their representational challenges to the established order of power. As Mbembe suggests, the state has a vested interest in controlling the historical narrative that the documentary fragments of history can tell if left outside the curatorial control of the state: Fundamentally, the dead should be formally prohibited from stirring up disorder in the present […]. Assigning them to this place makes it possible to establish an unquestionable authority over them and to tame the violence and cruelty of which the ‘remains’ are capable, especially when these are abandoned to their own devices.¹⁹

Footnote 9 of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao highlights the way the official archive is used to forestall any repayment of the national debt of state violence by foregrounding its representation. The idea that somehow Balaguer, widely suspected of having ordered the murder of Martínez and many other political opponents, would reveal a self-incriminating truth behind just one instance of state violence during his infamous “Twelve Years” (1966 – 1978) as president draws a sarcastic “Can you say impunity?” from Yunior, who notes that “[t]

 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” .  Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” .  Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” .

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he página is still blanca” five years (in 2007) after Balaguer’s death (OW, 90).²⁰ Delivering neither national self-knowledge nor the justice supposedly guaranteed to citizens, Balaguer’s página en blanco highlights for Yunior how the national history of the Dominican Republic has become an official epistemological void created to dispense with the very idea of accountability for officials. This seemingly intractable coloniality of power and language manifests itself in the páginas en blanco of Dominican history and official memoirs such as Balaguer’s, where accountability is invoked only to be perpetually deferred in such a way as to highlight the limitless impunity of state actors. In this sense, the curation of the archive is even more efficacious, from the state’s point of view, in controlling the nation’s narrative than its outright destruction. While Yunior’s comment that “Trujillo and Company didn’t leave a paper trail – they didn’t share their German contemporaries’ lust for documentation” hints at the possibility of building counter-state narratives of accountability from the state archive itself, the destruction or prohibition of such archives nonetheless allows for the reinscription in public memory of the state violence that its presence would otherwise never disclose (OW, 243).²¹ As Mbembe writes, the physical destruction of actual documents by the state results in the proliferation of imaginary ones within the general population: Material destruction has only succeeded in inscribing the memory of the archive and its contents in a double register. On the one hand, in fantasy, inasmuch as destroying or prohibiting the archive has only provided it with additional content […] all the more unreal because it has been removed from sight and interred once and for all in the sphere of

 In , three years after the publication of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the Listin Diario of Santo Domingo reported that, according to Balaguer’s longtime personal secretary Rafael Bello Andino, the notorious página en blanco would be filled twenty years (in ) after Balaguer’s death, revealing the true killers of Martínez; Bello Andino confirmed this information in an interview with El Caribe in . Impunity, as Yunior might say, has the luxury of time.  A good example of this possibility is the digitalization and Internet hosting of the -million page Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional [Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive] through the Nettie Lee Benson Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Its existence long denied by the Guatemalan authorities, this archive was accidentally discovered by the Procuraduría de los Derechos Humanos de Guatemala [Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office] in . Covering the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this archive has been used to document US medical experiments upon unsuspecting Guatemalans during the s as well as the Guatemalan government’s own atrocities during the long Guatemalan Civil War ( – ). See Del Silencio a la Memoria: Revelaciones del Archive Histórico de la Policía Nacional (Guatemala: Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, ). Available in English translation as From Silence to Memory: Revelations of the AHPN, (Eugene, OR: U of Oregon Libraries, ).

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that which shall remain unknown, therefore allowing space for all manner of imaginary thoughts. On the other hand, the destroyed archive haunts the state in the form of a spectre, an object that had no objective substance, but which, because it is touched by death, is transformed into a demon, the receptacle of all utopian ideals and of all anger, the authority of a future judgement.²²

Confronting the production of páginas en blanco within Dominican historiography and archives, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao suggests how Dominican diasporic fiction becomes that demonic specter for Dominican nationalist narratives, demanding a full accounting of the national debt of state violence.

II Foregrounding páginas en blanco as constructed lacunae of the state, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao serves precisely as such an unofficial counter-archive for the Dominican diaspora, contesting the accounts of state actors who form (both in the sense of writing and in the sense of curating) the official archive. This contestation is by no means conducted on equal grounds, as state violence has effectively established self-censorship out of fear as normative behavior for Dominicans, even in the diaspora and decades after Trujillo’s death. Nevertheless, the novel itself is Yunior’s attempt at narrative reconstruction of Dominican history through Cabral-de Leon family history, his “zafa” [counter spell] to the fukú of the coloniality of power (OW, 7). Páginas en blanco rhetorically raise the issue of state accountability only to better circumscribe the realization of justice in its performative demonstration of power, yet equally clear from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is that these constructed gaps in knowledge are themselves the metacritical subject of the novel, serving as entry points into an examination of the conventions of historiography and the power relations they embody. The novel’s copious footnotes are case in point, invoking the conventions of official historiography only to undermine its fetishization of the archive as complete, and completely truthful, and the authority of the historian as chronicler of truth. Given that the primary discussions of historiographic conventions and páginas en blanco occur within the literally marginal space of the footnotes, the novel employs the footnote itself, as a formal element of historiography that explicitly raises the question of historical authority, as a key narrative strategy.

 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,”  – .

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Writing of the footnote’s emergence as an essential feature of modern historiography, Anthony Grafton assigns to it the critical function of making primary sources visible to the reader, positing “that is the only ground we have to trust” any statement about the past.²³ In conventional historiography, footnotes elaborate upon knowledge missing from the main narrative but nonetheless crucial for establishing the legitimacy of the narration as history per se; as Grafton points out, footnotes formally identify the historical archive that the historian has consulted as guaranty of the narration’s veracity and completeness.²⁴ The emergence of the footnote as a historiographic convention during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was itself due to a widespread crisis of faith in traditional sources of institutional authority such as the monarchy, the ancients, and the various Christian denominations, creating the need for writers to “devise protocols for providing assurances that could quell the doubts of skeptical readers.”²⁵ By making possible the simultaneous narration of historical events and the scholarship used to reconstruct those events, the footnote enables historiography to tell “a distinctly modern, double-voiced story,” joining in synchronic fashion two narratives – one above, the other below – that mostly complement, and at times contradict, the assertions made in the other.²⁶ For Grafton, the duet of text and footnote in modern historiography resists monological narratives produced elsewhere, particularly those of the state: “Only the use of footnotes and the research techniques associated with them makes it possible to resist the efforts of modern governments, tyrannical and democratic alike, to conceal the compromises they have made, the deaths they have caused, the tortures they or their allies have inflicted.”²⁷ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is fiction, but nonetheless a necessary fiction whose concern is not only Dominican history per se but also Dominican historiography. Mixed-genre narratives such as Díaz’s novel invite such considerations of the authority of genre-making precisely because “the authorial annotation of a text of fiction or poetry, by dint of its discursive nature, unavoidably marks a break in the enunciative regime” in

    

Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, ): . Grafton, The Footnote, . Grafton, The Footnote, . Grafton, The Footnote, . Grafton, The Footnote, .

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texts whose fictionality is very ‘impure,’ very conspicuous for its historical references or sometimes for its philosophical reflections: novels or poems whose notes for the most part bear precisely on the nonfictional aspect of the narrative.²⁸

This speculation about textual or narrative authority is inherent in the duality of the footnote, as it is what Gérard Genette identified as a formal metaleptic device, breaking down distinct levels of narration in a double-move that both self-reflexively highlights the status of text as fiction and the genre conventions that police the boundaries between “history” and “fiction.”²⁹ The footnotes of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as written by Yunior, critically examine the use of footnotes in historiography, providing mediations upon the process of writing history as well as historical, biographical, and other information that frames the main narrative. Footnotes in the novel, in other words, raise the question of narrative authority even when the discussion therein is not, strictly speaking, derived from outside the narrative itself. As Shari Benstock comments, “[f]ootnotes in a literary work highlight the interplay between author and subject, text and reader, that is always at work in fiction, giving us occasion to speculate on self-reflective narration as an aspect of textual authority.”³⁰ A central element of the novel’s self-reflexivity, the footnotes of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao fall into four loose categories: 1) allusions to popular culture or literary antecedents; 2) historical sketches of prominent Dominicans, mostly Trujillo’s minions; 3) local place knowledge derived from Yunior’s personal experience or those of relatives and friends; and 4) Yunior’s self-reflexive meditations on the process of writing the narrative. As other scholars have thoroughly discussed how the first category of allusion contexualizes the novel within various histories of expressive production, I

 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ): .  As Monica Hanna points out, the imaginative dimensions of fiction enable the questioning of the supposed objectivity of historiography (Monica Hanna, “ ‘ Reassembling the Fragments’: Battling Historiographies, Caribbean Discourse, and Nerd Genres in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Callaloo . []:  – , ).  Shari Benstock, “At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text,” PMLA . ():  – , .

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will focus my discussion upon the last three and the specific ways that their paratextual presence generate the alternative historiography that is the novel.³¹ The most numerous type of footnote, the biographical sketches of historically important Dominicans, continues the reader’s education beyond the pathetically inadequate “mandatory two seconds of Dominican history” known to most North Americans (OW, 2 n. 1). These footnotes identify key figures in Dominican history whose lives were associated with the unfolding of the fukú americanus. A number deal with those who fought Spanish colonialism on the island of Hispanola (OW, Hatüey, 212 n. 23; Anacaona, 244 n. 29) or who resisted Trujillo’s regime (OW, the Mirabel sisters, 83 n. 7; Jesús de Galíndez, 96 – 97 n. 11). But most of the footnotes in this category deal with the rogues’ gallery of Trujillo and his henchmen, starting with Footnote 1, which outlines the historical importance of Trujillo as a peculiar singularity of the coloniality of power in the Greater Antilles (OW, 2 n. 1). Others detail the criminal roles of prominent Trujillo associates, such as Porfirio Rubirosa (OW, 12 n. 4), Joaquín Balaguer (OW, 90 n. 9), Ramfis Trujillo (OW, 99 n. 13), Johnny Abbes (OW, 110 n. 14), and Felix Bernardino (OW, 120 n. 16). If the main narrative relates the impact of state violence upon the everyday lives of ordinary Dominicans, both on the island and in the diaspora, then these footnotes, taken as a whole, make known the state actors who normalized such violence throughout Dominican civil society and whose place in Dominican history can be potentially subject to corrective action in Dominican and US histories alike. In this sense, these footnotes hint at the US complicity in not only supporting the Trujillo dictatorship but also in erasing any reference to that complicity through the teaching of history. Other footnotes of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao take up the question of authoritative sources, an aspect of modern historiography directly linked to the question of cultural authority in general. In Footnote 17, Yunior makes two noteworthy and scarcely scholarly admissions: firstly, that “my girl Leonie,” correcting him about a topographical feature in the Dominican Republic, served as his “resident expert in all things Domo” rather than conventionally authoritative sources; secondly, that he decided to retain the inclusion of the perrito, a dance not popularized until the late 1980s but depicted in a scene set in 1974, despite Leonie’s objection to the anachronism (OW, 132 n. 17). In this case, narrative aesthetics trumps historical accuracy; as Yunior comments, “that was one detail I  For instance, see Hanna, “ ‘ Reassembling the Fragments’ ” ; Efrain Barradas, “El Realismo Cómico de Junot Díaz: Notas sobre The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” The Latin Americanist  ():  – ; Elena Machado Sáez, “Dictating Desire, Dictating Diaspora: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Foundational Romance,” Contemporary Literature . ():  – .

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couldn’t change, just liked the image too much.” Yunior’s direct address to scholars in this footnote – “Forgive me, historians of popular dance, forgive me!” – indicates an awareness of the difference between authoritative, if not authoritarian, historiography and the less authoritarian, convention-defying narrative that is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (OW, 132 n. 17). In the final category of footnotes, Yunior again raises the question of the relation of the narrative’s relationship to conventional historiography, but this time through a discussion of the history writer’s narrative authority versus that of his or her living sources, the very family whose history he wishes to restore. Eschewing the chronological imperative in the narration of the Cabral-de Leon family history, Yunior relates the earliest events in their downward spiral – the story from the mid-1940s of “Abelard and the Bad Thing he said about Trujillo” – at the midpoint of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In the footnote associated with this sentence, Yunior disputes the choice of family relatives to begin the story there, remarking, “[t]here are other beginnings certainly, better ones, to be sure.” While adding that “if you ask me I would have started when the Spaniards ‘discovered’ the New World—or when the US invaded Santo Domingo in 1916,” Yunior seemingly defers to his subjects’ wishes by continuing the main narrative from their preferred point of departure: “if this was the opening that the de Leóns chose for themselves, then who am I to question their historiography?” (OW, 211 n. 22). The archival impulse to create a counter-archive sets Yunior in direct confrontation with Trujillo’s statist legacy of páginas en blanco, but the ceding of narrative control is posed in the form of a rhetorical question whose implied answer has already been given by the novel’s start, on Yunior’s preferred terms, as a “fukú story” (OW, 6) that began with “the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola” (OW, 1). As Mbembe reminds us, the power of historical narration lies in “the ability to craft links between the beginning and the end,” forging “a montage of fragments” in a process of composition that “creates an illusion of totality and continuity.”³² In this sense, Yunior’s desire to control the narration of the story contra the preferences of the Cabral-de Leon family is not unlike Trujillo’s aspiration to become “an architect of history” (a phrase that recalls the institutional dimensions of the archive), a reflection of an authoritarian will-to-power and the necessity of composition to the achievement of that goal (OW, 225 n. 27). Noting this apparent parallel, Yunior muses in Footnote 11: What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? [… T]hey seemed to be destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural

 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” .

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antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like. (OW, 97 n. 11; emphasis in original)

Dictators, like writers, realize that the power to narrate is the power to rule through representation, and both attempt to monopolize the world-making power of representation for themselves. In this sense, Trujillo’s changing of “ALL THE NAMES of ALL THE LANDMARKS in the Dominican Republic to honor himself” was less the vainglorious gesture of a megalomaniac (although he was undoubtedly that as well) as much as the instantiation of his power to remake the Dominican Republic in his own image, an act that displaces even as it mimics the colonial making of “Santo Domingo” (the Spanish name for both the colony and its capital) through the erasure of the indigenous Taino name for the Island, “Quisqueya” (OW, 2 n. 1; capitalization as in original). Yet what differentiates dictator from writer, at least in the case of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is the writer’s self-reflexive attempt to formally raise the question of authority in all its dimensions. While the novel accomplishes this task in a number of ways (including the spotlighting of genre conventions, the jumbling of narrative temporalities, and the mixing of high and popular cultures), the footnote remains the most productive grounds for staging this examination.

III Novels from the Dominican diaspora cannot completely fill in the páginas en blanco, given that these remain the ongoing legacies of the coloniality of power and language. As Yunior comments self-reflexively: “But hey, it’s only a story, with no solid evidence, the kind of shit only a nerd could love” (OW, 247). Indeed, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao suggests that to narrate from the diaspora is to confront the limits of the archival impulse. Unable to fully reconstruct the Cabral-de Leon family history, much less Dominican history, Yunior acknowledges that “[w]hat’s certain is that nothing’s certain. We are trawling in silences here” (OW, 243). The destruction of the historical record – not one book of Abelard Cabral’s library nor one example of his handwriting escaped Trujillo’s reach – is doubled by the collective silence of Cabral-de Leon family members in this matter. Imposed by the state but continued by civil society, the cultural of silence “sphinxes all attempts at narrative reconstruction” despite the passage of decades and the diasporic separation from the Dominican Republic (OW, 243). As a result, Yunior muses, “Even your Watcher has his silences, his páginas en blanco” (OW, 149). Páginas en blanco are not only silent and

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silencing acts of power but also the radically unknowable spaces upon the cognitive mapping of the nation and its diasporas. The diasporic writer faces the dilemma of demanding full accountability under conditions of partial knowledge that may never be lifted. Thus constrained, Díaz’s novel underscores the problem of the historical reconstruction of communal experiences as narrated from the diaspora against the grain of the nationalist archive. Simultaneously, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao examines how that state violence has become constitutive of Dominican postcolonial subjectivity itself, reproducing Trujillo’s regime of terror down through the decades since and throughout the diaspora. Lola de Leon’s despondent comment that “[t]en million Trujillos is all we are” suggests that Dominicans, whether on the island or in the diaspora, embody the Trujillato’s legacy of violence as the dictator’s personal archive of brutalized, and brutalizing, subjectivities (OW, 324). In this sense, the tragedy of the novel is not simply that Trujillo, his “witchkings” (OW, 121) and “SIMians” (OW, 237) terrorized ordinary Dominicans for decades, but rather that contemporary Dominicans, whether on the Island or in the diaspora, extend the Trujillato to this day in their quotidian interactions. Yet if the likes of Trujillo and Balaguer would write the national history of the Dominican Republic in blood and dare anyone to say differently, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao shows how the archival impulse to create alternative histories and counter-archives can begin to challenge the production of official histories from national archives. If the national archive perpetuates the impunity of state actors through páginas en blanco and phantom documents that dance at their command, then the counter-archive of diasporic fiction, like the lowly footnote, injects a second, contestatory voice to the narrative of national history. That such efforts can only partially redress the legacies of state violence indicates the powerful extent to which the coloniality of power remains operative in postcolonial states and civil society alike. As The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao demonstrates, the ongoing complicity of ordinary Dominicans and Dominican Americans regarding the extension of state violence into everyday life, even in the diaspora, points to a critical element of any decolonial project: the necessity of addressing how the colony lives on not only in the republic but also in the people. Acknowledging that such a project requires as close an examination of postcolonial subjectivities as of postcolonial states, the novel offers, as the luminous Golden Mongoose does to Beli Cabral as she lay near death in the cane fields, the coraje [anger] needed to rise from the dead and the hope to survive wherever migration may lead.

II Diluting Mainstream Constraints

Eva Dolo

Too Much Fun – Endnotes in Infinite Jest In 1996 David Foster Wallace published his opus magnum, Infinite Jest, a gargantuan novel to whose 981 pages of primary text he had added a challenging total of 388 endnotes. Contrary to the criticism levelled in some early reviews, the interdependent endnotes and sub-notes are not just a self-indulgent megalomaniac’s method to make a big novel even bigger. As a close reading of some of the endnotes of Infinite Jest (e. g., endnote 24, Incandenza’s filmography) shows, they rather serve important narrative functions. Primarily, the endnotes slow down the reading process by forcing the reader to skip back and forth between the main text and the appendix, thus questioning a linear concept of text and expressing Wallace’s feeling that reality is fragmented. Other endnotes, in turn, enable the reader to connect plot lines by cross-referencing information from the endnotes and the main text respectively, thereby helping the reader to find orientation in the disrupted narrative. Additionally, some endnotes serve as a metaphor for Infinite Jest’s self-similar structure and take up important themes of the novel, thereby developing the main narrative. And yet other endnotes illustrate on a meta-level Wallace’s aesthetic criticism of contemporary US fiction. In his Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov claims that: one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.¹

The idea or necessity of rereading holds especially true for David Foster Wallace’s epic 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which challenges the perceptiveness of its readers in several ways: within 981 pages of primary text, three achronological and fragmented main narratives unfold in an elaborately designed, near-future North American society, including a myriad of different characters and subplots. Taking it to the extreme, Wallace attached an appendix (“Notes and Errata”) to the novel, where he placed in tiny print on 96 extra pages a challenging total of 388 endnotes, thereby adding to the “physical work” of reading, since they

 Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ): .

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constantly force the readers to stop, leave the main text, look up an endnote, and return to the main text.² This extra work probably explains early reviews, such as the much-quoted example by New York Times’ critic Michiko Kakutani, who had the feeling that Wallace’s book “seems to have been written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better.”³ Even though in her article she appreciates Wallace “as one of the big talents of his generation,” she disapproves of the novel’s structure because Wallace’s method “results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.”⁴ However, contrary to this kind of criticism, this essay claims that the interdependent endnotes and sub-notes of Infinite Jest are not just a means to make a big novel even bigger, but instead serve important narrative functions.

David Foster Wallace and the revival of the note While mourning the death of the academic footnote in her essay, “Elegy for Excursus: The Descent of the Footnote,”⁵ Betsy Hilbert at the same time observes

 Wallace was very well aware of the strain he put on his readers and that Infinite Jest required the Nabokovian “rereader.” In a letter to his editor, Michael Pietsch, Wallace admits: “I guess, […] maybe I have an arrogance problem – I think I’d presumed in some of this stuff that it was OK to make a reader read the book twice” (qtd. in Daniel T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace [New York: Viking Penguin, ]: ).  When asked by Rick Moody in  about the time when Infinite Jest first got published, Michael Pietsch, the editor of Infinite Jest, still remembered this part of Kakutani’s criticism vividly: “The day M. Kakutani’s review ran in the Times I wore a sticker reading OUCH! (She’d lambasted the editor, an attack that I still feel reveals a patronizing view of writers which I hope to discuss with her one day.)” In his interview with Moody, Pietsch therefore was eager to point out that in the process of editing “[e]very decision was David’s. I made suggestions and recommendations and tried to make the reasons for them as clear as possible. But every change was his” (Michael Pietsch, “Editing Wallace: An Interview with Michael Pietsch by Rick Moody,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen, Lee Konstantinou [Iowa City: U of Iowa P, ]: ).  Michiko Kakutani, “A Country Dying of Laughter: In , Pages” ( February ), New York Times (acc.  December ).  “Debilitated by disuse and misunderstanding, and finally euthanized in  by the Modern Language Association, footnotes in scholarly prose are gone with the breezes that blow through English departments these days” (Betsy Hilbert, “Elegy for Excursus: The Descent of the Footnote,” College English . []: ). For Hilbert, the essay on hand would undoubtedly be an example of those “tiny pockets of retrograde activity,” in which, according to her, the foot-

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that the “footnote is being reborn in another medium, learning to thrive in contemporary fiction.”⁶ Annotations have been used for quite some time in literary texts, though, with writers focusing on different functions and utilizing them for different reasons in each century.⁷ In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, notes were preferably used to satirize the (pseudo)scholarly discourse of their time, or to make fun of the bloated literary marketplace (EFK, 21– 42). However,

note still manages to survive – otherwise being “[e]xterminated from its territory” (Hilbert, “Elegy for Excursus,” ). However, the abundance of footnotes the reader will encounter during the course of this essay might very well be considered a tribute to David Foster Wallace himself, who was dubbed “the self-appointed president-for-life of the American Subscript Society” by Robert McCrum for obvious reasons (Robert McCrum, “A Cult above the Rest” [ December ], The Observer [acc.  February ].) Then again, the footnotes could also simply be read as proof for the academic training at German universities. As Anthony Grafton points out in his history of the footnote, “citations in scientific works […] do far more than identify the originators of ideas and the sources of data. They reflect the intellectual styles of different national scientific communities” (Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, ]:  – .) Even though the German enthusiasm for footnotes was already ridiculed in  by Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener with his satiric dissertation Hinkmars von Repkow Noten ohne Text, the reader can be assured that the footnotes of this essay have been added for a reason and the effort of reading them will therefore prove worthwhile.  Hilbert, “Elegy for Excursus,” .  As you can see in the volume at hand, of course. To add some more examples from different centuries, genres, and national literatures: Sebastian Brant, Narrenschiff [Ship of Fools] (), William Baldwin, Beware the Cat (), Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (), Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (), Laurence Stern, Tristram Shandy ( – ), Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Werther (), Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses [Dangerous Liaisons] (), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (, published with Coleridge’s scholarly glosses in ), Jean Paul, Des Feldpredigers Schmelzle Reise nach Flätz [Army Chaplain Schmelzle’s Voyage to Flätz] (), Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus ( – ), Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (), T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (), James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (), Carlo Emilio Gadda, L’Adalgisa: Disegni milanesi [Adalgisa: Milanese Sketches] (), Samuel Beckett, Watt (), Arno Schmidt, Die Gelehrtenrepublik [The Egghead Republic] (), Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (), John Updike, A Month of Sundays (), Fabrizia Ramondino, Althénopis [Althenopis] (), Alain Robbe-Grillet, La Reprise [Repetition] (), Paul Auster, Oracle Night (), John Barth, The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (), Ingo Schulze, Neue Leben [New Lives] (). See Harald Stang, Einleitung – Fußnote – Kommentar: Fingierte Formen wissenschaftlicher Darstellung als Gestaltungselemente moderner Erzählkunst (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, ):  – ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “EFK.” Cf. also Bernhard Metz, Sabine Zubarik, “Einleitung,” in Am Rande bemerkt: Anmerkungspraktiken in literarischen Texten, ed. Bernhard Metz, Sabine Zubarik (Berlin: Kadmos, ):  – .

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only in the twentieth century the practice of annotating the literary text gained its real momentum; struggling with questions of epistemology and rejecting the tradition of aesthetic illusion, the note in the first half of the twentieth century helped writers to undercut a linear narrative mode which supposedly depicted reality objectively (cf. EFK, 98).⁸ Next, in the wake of post-structuralism and deconstruction, binary oppositions such as “center” and “margin” were put under critical scrutiny (EFK, 102). Referring to Jacques Derrida’s essays “Hors livre” (1972) and “Living On: Border Lines” (1979), Shari Benstock illustrates in his essay, “At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text,” that even though notes are inherently marginal, they are “fully capable of wrenching away the inherent supremacy of the text.”⁹ By detracting the reader’s attention from the main text to the bottom of the page or the back of a book, or by including more important information than the main text, notes were now discovered as a convenient means to question, dissolve, or even reverse the distinction between the marginal and central in literary texts (EFK, 102– 103).¹⁰ Endnotes in Infinite Jest both continue along those lines and present something new. To Wallace, the note was an essential narrative element for which he felt a fascination that started as early as his college days, when he worked on philosophical and mathematical problems, and continues on posthumously in the novel fragment The Pale King. ¹¹ Notes not only appear in the majority of his fictional and non-fictional writing, but they also marked changes in Wallace’s personal life – on his very skin, in fact – as a tattooed asterisk.¹²

 The endnotes to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for example, no longer clarify or explain the main text but contribute to the poem’s mysteriousness, adding yet “another layer to the poem” (Hilbert, “Elegy for Excursus,” ).  Shari Benstock, “At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text,” PMLA . (): , n. .  According to Stang, the structure of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (), for example, dissolves the whole notion of primary and secondary textual layer. The question whether John Shade, the poet, or Charles Kinbote, his neighbor who publishes Shade’s poem with a lengthy commentary, is the main character cannot be answered. Similarly, the problem whether the autobiographic poem or Kinbote’s commentary is more important for an understanding of the novel must remain unresolved. Additionally, even appendages such as the foreword or register are anything but secondary, since they disclose themes and motives which are relevant for the novel as such (EFK, ).  Cf. Ira B. Nadel, “Consider the Footnote,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen, Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, ):  – ,  ff.  “[I]n early [,] Wallace had a strikeout drawn through the fading word ‘Mary’ [i. e., Mary Karr] on his tattoo and placed an asterisk under the heart symbol; farther down he added another asterisk and ‘Karen’ [i. e., Karen Green, whom he married in ] turning his arm into a living footnote” (Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, ).

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Working on Infinite Jest, Wallace introduced the note early on, first adding notes as footnotes at the bottom of the page and later changing them into endnotes.¹³ Michael Pietsch, the editor of Infinite Jest, considered them “by definition secondary” and wanted to cut as many as he could because he felt the novel was complex enough without the annotations.¹⁴ Yet, Wallace insisted on keeping the notes – specifically as endnotes –, willing to “fight w/all 20 claws to preserve [his strategy]”¹⁵ and making Pietsch realize that to him, they “[o]f course […] were not secondary. They were further evidence of the many separate levels of life and thought we’re all carrying on at all times.”¹⁶ In a letter to Pietsch, Wallace explained that he felt the endnotes made it easier for the reader to take in the text, while at the same time they allowed him: 1) […] a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence, 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically ‘back and forth’ in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns […] 5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.¹⁷

The 388 endnotes – the culmination of the excruciating editing process¹⁸ – include, to a large extent, information on the chemical makeup of drugs, their slang names or trade names,¹⁹ and the effect on their respective users (IJ, 1038, n. 232). Moreover, the endnotes contain narrator comments (often in a mocking tone, for example, “no clue” [IJ, 1036, n. 216]), add facts which remain unmentioned in the main text (IJ, 985, n. 17), and give background information on characters (IJ, 999, n. 80) and cultural phenomena of the novel’s present

 Cf. Nadel, “Consider the Footnote,” .  Cf. Pietsch, “Editing Wallace,” .  Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, .  Pietsch, “Editing Wallace,” .  Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,  – .  In his interview with Moody, Pietsch showed some of Wallace’s responses to his requests for cuts to Moody to give him “a sense of how engaged [Wallace] was in this process and of how much fun it was to work with him[:] [P].  – This is one of my personal favorite Swiftian lines in the whole manuscript, which I will cut, you rotter. [P].  – I cut this and have now come back an hour later and put it back. p.  – Poor old FN  about the grammar exam is cut. I’ll also erase it from the back-up disc so I can’t come back in an hour and put it back in (an enduring hazard, I’m finding). […] P.  ff – I can give you  words of theoretico-structural arguments for this, but let’s spare one another, shall we?” (Pietsch, “Editing Wallace,” ).  David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest – A Novel [] (London: Abacus, ): , n. ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “IJ”.

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(IJ, 1055, n. 304). The endnotes also often deal with language in a variety of ways: they explain terminology (IJ, 983, n. 4), jargon (IJ, 1062, n. 310), slang (IJ, 1076, n. 343) and acronyms (IJ, 985, n. 19); they give translations of foreign words used in the main text (IJ, 994, n. 31) and offer etymological information (IJ, 1053, n. 280). Furthermore, the endnotes exhibit a character’s idiosyncratic use of language (IJ, 1054, n. 293) and point out his or her language mistakes (IJ, 1046, n. 264). Then again, the endnotes correct the main narrative (IJ, 994, n. 25), refer to other endnotes (IJ, 985, n. 21), include footnotes (IJ, 994, n. 39), contain additional narratives (IJ, 1004, n. 110), reproduce transcripts (IJ, 1038, n. 234), give bibliographical information (IJ, 985, n. 24), list examples (IJ, 1044, n. 237), make deductions (IJ, 1032, n. 79), quote from literature (IJ, 1033, n. 198), list brand names of products used in the main narrative (for example, as trivial as plastic bags [IJ, 1037, n. 225]), support a character’s interpretation (IJ, 1044, n. 245), interpret (IJ, 1076, n. 337), and indirectly question the narrator’s reliability (IJ, 1062, n. 307). The list could easily be expanded. However, the aim of this essay is not to provide an exhaustive survey of all of Infinite Jest’s endnotes, which – given the scope of the essay – would turn out cursory at best. Instead, a close reading of some selected endnotes – most importantly endnote 24 – will allow for a much more substantial analysis, for the understanding of which a short summary of the novel’s most important events and characters proves indispensable. Infinite Jest is set in a future dystopian North American federation, consisting of Canada, Mexico and the USA – the so-called Organization of North American Nations (in short: O.N.A.N.). The story takes place at the beginning of the twenty-first century, after the introduction of “Subsidized Time,” meaning that years in the novel’s present are no longer indicated by Arabic numbers but by the brand name of the company submitting the highest bid to the US government at the end of the year. For instance, the year in which most of the novel’s events take place is the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” which refers to a diaper for adults suffering from incontinence.²⁰ Yet, “Subsidized Time” and its manifestation of the ultimate product placement and corporate profit maximization is not the only grotesque exaggeration of contemporary developments which Wallace criticizes in this near-future North America. Due to the ecologically

 Scatological elements such as the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” which refers to human excrement, or O.N.A.N., which refers to the biblical Onan and onanism respectively, are a recurring stylistic device in Infinite Jest. For an analysis of further grotesque elements in Infinite Jest see Tom LeClair, “The Prodigious Fiction,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction . ():  –  and Catherine Nichols, “Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction . ():  – .

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harmful lifestyle of US citizens and the engineering of a new type of energy-generating fusion (annular fusion), the northeastern states of the USA have been rendered uninhabitable. In order to abdicate America’s responsibility to deal with their self-made environmental problems, President Johnny Gentle (a former entertainer and obsessive germophobe) simply ceded the contaminated northern New England states to Canada. It is this political maneuver that is mostly accountable for the severe US-Canadian tensions in the novel and the emergence of a multitude of Canadian anti-O.N.A.N. separatist groups. Among these, the Quebecois wheelchair terrorists (A.F.R., short for Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents) are the most aggressive opponents of the Canadian-American union and Gentle’s “gift.” Against this political backdrop and among numerous subplots, three fragmented and achronological main narrative strands take form. The first and most important is the story of Hal Incandenza, which according to Marshall Boswell “constitutes a more or less traditional bildungsroman.”²¹ Hal is the athletic and academic overachieving youngest son of James Incandenza, the founder of the elitist Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.), science genius, and self-taught filmmaker, who killed himself by putting his head into a microwave oven. The plot line follows Hal’s life at E.T.A. in Boston, focusing on his marijuana addiction and athletic development, his dysfunctional family (e. g., his mother, Avril, is a notorious adulteress, his late father was a chronic alcoholic), and his friendship with Michael Pemulis, a fellow student and drug user. The second narrative strand is Don Gately’s underdog story of addiction, crime and recovery, resem-

 Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, ):  – . Stephen Burn on the other hand reads Infinite Jest as the opposite of a conventional bildungsroman: “[A]t a formal level the movement of the novel is actually away from fully realized selfhood, charting the progressive erasure of identity by the pressures of family and academy” (Stephen J. Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide [London, New York: Continuum, ]: .) Burn argues that while the first episode of the novel is told by Hal as a first-person narrator, the last episode is communicated through a third-person narrator. Furthermore, he points out that by considering the endnotes, “the last of which is ‘Talwin-NX®Sanofi Winthrop U.S.’ (, n. ), the movement traced by the novel is from the personal, to the impersonal, to the corporation, receding circles of alienation from the self” (Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, ). NB: Essentially, what allows for these two opposing interpretations of Infinite Jest is the way the novel is approached: in contrast to Burn, Boswell ignores the actual arrangement of episodes and focuses only on the chronological unfolding of events. Thus, the first episode of the book – Hal’s admissions interview at the University of Arizona – comes last, for which reason one can argue that the novel ends with Hal finally having found his own personal voice.

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bling – according to Frank Cioffi – the archetypal situation of metamorphosis.²² The former burglar and ex-convict Don Gately, who started drinking as a child and abusing pain killers as a teenager, finally managed to become sober at the drug and alcohol rehabilitation center Ennet House, where he now works as a live-in staffer. Ennet House is also situated in Boston, in fact and rather tellingly, just down the hill from E.T.A. As different as both worlds may seem, they are connected in several ways, the most important connection between these two worlds being cocaine addict Joelle van Dyne. Joelle, who during her cocaine withdrawal at Ennet House begins to fall in love with Gately, is the ex-girlfriend of Hal’s oldest and estranged brother Orin, and James Incandenza’s favored actress during his last year of filmmaking. The third narrative strand is “the ‘linking plot’ [and] quest narrative.”²³ It is set around the search by Quebecois terrorist groups and O.N.A.N.’s secret service for the potentially lethal film “Infinite Jest” – the final work of James Incandenza, starring Joelle van Dyne as Madame Psychosis. The so-called “entertainment” is said to be highly addictive, turning its viewers into mindless, drooling creatures, whose only living wish it is to watch the film over and over again. Since now only one major company, InterLace TelEntertainment, delivers films via “Spontaneous Disseminations” to every American household, such a powerful movie poses a severe threat to the USA. Therefore, O.N.A.N.’s secret service tries hard to find the film’s “master cartridge” before Quebecois terrorists can get hold of it and use it as a “weapon […] to see the U.S. addiction to entertainment literalized and lethalized.”²⁴ Consequently, agents of the secret service and Quebecois terrorists alike start to infiltrate the Incandenza family, Ennet House, and E.T.A. to gather information on the whereabouts of “Infinite Jest.”

J. Incandenza’s filmography: “Too Much Fun,” or how to supercharge endnotes In his essay, “Consider the Footnote,” Ira B. Nadel points out that the endnotes in Infinite Jest serve mainly three functions: “the informative, the interpretative,

 Cf. Frank Louis Cioffi, “An Anguish Become Thing: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” Narrative . (): .  Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, .  Cohen, Samuel, “To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jest’s History,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen, Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, ): .

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and the narrative”²⁵ – admitting that none of these categories dominate any of the 388 individual endnotes. The consequent complexity of the novel’s endnotes can be illustrated excellently with endnote 24, to which the idea or necessity of rereading especially applies. Endnote 24 is placed early on in a section that introduces James Orin Incandenza, the father of the protagonist, Hal Incandenza, in more detail. The endnote is added after the narrator’s claim that Incandenza’s films were “just plain pretentious and unengaging and bad” (IJ, 64). The first impression, therefore, is that the filmography to which the endnote refers the reader, serves as proof for the critical judgment of Incandenza’s artistic work. However, when looking at the endnote more closely (and during a second or further reading) one realizes that the eight-page filmography is connected to the main narrative in a number of ways, for example, by adding an additional narrative level. On pages 27 to 31 of the main text, Hal is talking to someone who introduces himself as a “professional conversationalist” (IJ, 28). In the course of the conversation, though, Hal starts to believe that the person he is talking to is his father.²⁶ However, since the passage is pure dialogue and therefore lacking a narrator’s guidance, the reader cannot be sure about this.²⁷ It is endnote 24, then, which  Nadel, “Consider the Footnote,” .  At the beginning of the dialogue he does not recognize his father yet: “You’re a professional conversationalist? […] Don’t start looking at your watch, as if I’m taking up valuable time of yours. If Himself [i. e., Hal’s father] made the appointment and paid for it the time’s supposed to be mine, right?” (IJ, ). At the end though, when the disguise of James Incandenza literally starts falling off of his face (“Would it be rude to tell you your mustache is askew? […] As a matter of fact I’ll go ahead and tell you your whole face is kind of running, sort of, if you want to check. Your nose is pointing at your lap” [IJ, ]), ten-year-old Hal puts together the little hints and confronts the “professional conversationalist” with his suspicion: “And it strikes me I’ve definitely seen that argyle sweater-vest before. That’s Himself’s special Interdependence-Daycelebratory-dinner argyle sweater-vest […]. Is this April Fools, Dad, or do I need to call the Moms and C.T.?” (IJ, , emphasis added). The dialogue then ends with the “professional conversationalist” calling Hal “Son?” (IJ, ) – who either stopped talking to him or left (“…” [IJ, ]).  The idea of a reliable narrator, who is actually able and willing to answer the reader’s questions or untangle contradictory characters’ accounts of the same incident, is questioned on several occasions. See, for example, endnote , where the notorious liar Orin (Hal’s oldest brother) is revealed as an unreliable narrator. One of the many subplots of the novel is about secret agent Hugh Steeply trying to get information on Orin’s mother, Avril, which might confirm the Secret Service’s suspicion that Avril Incandenza is connected to Canadian terrorist cells in some way. Under the pretense of writing a “soft profile” about Orin, the football star, Steeply approaches Orin in the disguise of a female reporter, “Helen.” Endnote  comprises transcript fragments from one of the interviews “Helen” Steeply conducted with Orin. The transcript shows that Orin tends to contradict himself when relating his family history, for example, when trying

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first confirms Hal’s suspicion: James Incandenza’s filmography lists a film (“It Was A Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him” [IJ, 992]), the synopsis of which exactly matches the “professional conversationalist”-episode of the main text: “A father (Watt), suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son (Smothergill) is pretending to be mute, poses as a ‘professional conversationalist’ in order to draw the boy out” (IJ, 993). Therefore, Hal’s father is obviously connected to the events of this episode in some way. And since many of James Incandenza’s other films also show strong autobiographical references, the reader now can safely infer that the “professional conversationalist” is, in fact, Hal’s father.²⁸ However, “It Was A Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him” is not the only film which is narrated in the main text at length; many of Incandenza’s other listed films are either narrated or described in great detail in the main text as well.²⁹ Considering the structural makeup of the novel, it becomes clear that endnote 24 not only serves as an additional narrative level which helps to confirm a character’s assumptions but also represents one of the novel’s structural building blocks. In his 1996 interview with Michael Silverblatt, Wallace explained that the pattern of the Sierpinski gasket, a type of selfsimilar fractal set, i. e., a set that consists of a (possibly) infinite number of cop-

to date certain events: “I think I was maybe twelve. […] Call me age ten. […] So then I’m let’s say thirteen, which means Hallie’s four” (IJ, ). The unreliability of the narrative also becomes evident in endnote , where the narrator gives the “presumabl[e]” (IJ, ) and not the definitive meaning of a French word, or endnote , where the narrator obviously is unable to give an objective account of how Orin and his ex-girlfriend Joelle approached each other: “Joelle van Dyne and Orin Incandenza each remember themselves as the original approachee. It’s unclear which if either’s memory is accurate, though it’s noteworthy that this is one of only two total times Orin has perceived himself as the approachee […]” (IJ, , emphasis added). Consequently, the endnotes force the reader to accept that some of the main text’s gaps cannot be filled and must therefore remain ambivalent.  At this point in the narration this reassurance of course only lasts for so long since technically the episode could also be the film’s script. Later on in the main narrative though, the reader finds hints that this admittedly strange meeting between Hal and his father could have taken place when Hal remembers “Himself, for two years before his death, had had this delusion of silence when I spoke: I believed I was speaking and he believed I was not speaking” (IJ, ).  For example: “The Medusa v. the Odalisque” (IJ,  – ), “The Joke” (IJ,  – ), “Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat” (IJ,  ff.), “Blood Sister: One Tough Nun” (IJ,  ff.), “As of Yore” (IJ,  ff.).

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ies of itself,³⁰ was one of the structures he had in mind when working on Infinite Jest. ³¹

Figure 1: Sierpiński gasket with four levels of recursion

In the main text, this recursive structure surfaces, for instance, in the circulation of the potentially lethal entertainment, “Infinite Jest,” which “is a true circle, as the film that began in the Incandenza family, and was unleashed by Gately, ends up back with them.”³² In addition, the novel itself “is circular, beginning with its ending and ending with its beginning.”³³ Within the appendix, then, it clearly is endnote 24 which metaphorically reflects this self-similarity of fractal sets because it includes episodes of the main narrative in miniature.³⁴ Moreover, the film “Infinite Jest” operates on this recursive principle. Because of its alluring qualities (which are never explicitly described in the novel), the viewer cannot stop watching the film – no matter what. The ArabCanadian medical attaché, for instance, with whom the mesmerizing effect of the entertainment is first introduced, plays the film in “a recursive loop” (empha “Sierpiński gasket” ( March ), Encyclopedia of Mathematics , web version adapted from a lemma by Michel L. Lapidus (acc.  June ).  “It’s actually structured like something called a Sierpinski gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski gasket was the […] draft that I delivered to Michael [i. e., Michael Pietsch, editor of IJ] in ’, and it went through some I think ‘mercy cuts,’ so it’s probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now” (David Foster Wallace, “Infinite Jest” [ April ], KCRW: Bookworm [acc.  November ]).  Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, .  Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, .  For further mathematical patterns that can be found in Infinite Jest see Roberto Natalini, “David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Infinity,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell, Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ):  – .

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sis added), so that he can just sit there, constantly watching, “wet[ting] both his pants and the special recliner” (IJ, 54).³⁵ Ironically, only the reader who is willing to interrupt her reading of the main narrative and turn to endnote 24 discovers from the filmography that it is James Incandenza who created the entertainment which is given here for the first time with its title, “Infinite Jest.”³⁶ One of the reasons Wallace used endnotes in Infinite Jest was his feeling “that reality’s fractured.” Accordingly, to his mind, the classical structure of a text – which is “very linear and […] very unified” – was no longer fit to capture this kind of reality. Endnotes, in turn, allowed him to fragment the text without making it too difficult for the reader to follow the narrative.³⁷ And yet, besides disrupting reality, the endnotes are what enables the reader to date the novel’s action. Burn convincingly argues that by cross-referencing the information endnotes 24 and 60 offer on the fictional M.I.T. Language Riots, “we can deduce that Y.D.A.U. [i. e., Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment], the eighth year of subsidized time, is 2009.”³⁸ Additionally, cross-referencing endnotes helps the reader to connect the different plot lines, which can again be demonstrated with the help of endnote 24: gathering the above-mentioned information from the filmography (i. e., the fact that James Incandenza is Hal’s father and produced the entertainment “Infinite Jest”), the reader has a piece of the plot puzzle that helps her to connect the novel’s three main narrative strands: the stories set around Enfield Tennis Academy, Ennet House, and the terrorist

 Yet another example is Michael Pemulis’s answering machine, whose recursive message Daniel T. Max suitably describes as “one of those infinite man-holding-a-book-whose-cover-isthe-man-holding-a-book visual regressions” (Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, ): “ ‘ This is Mike Pemulis’s answering machine’s answering machine; Mike Pemulis’s answering machine regrets being unavailable to take a first-order message for Mike Pemulis, but if you’ll have a second-order message at the sound of the clapping hand, Mike Pemulis’s answering machine will […],’ and so on” (IJ, ). The general effect this kind of recursivity implies for the characters is “to emphasize the characters’ isolation, their lives in a funhouse that isn’t at all fun” (Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, ). Particularly in Pemulis’s case, it emphasizes the spiral of addiction and paranoia in which he eventually loses himself. For more on this connection between drug abuse and the novel’s recursive structure see below.  The filmography lists a total of five attempts starting as early as before Subsidized Time with “Infinite Jest (I),” a black and white silent movie which is specified as “Incandenza’s unfinished and unseen first attempt at commercial entertainment” (IJ, ). It ends with “Infinite Jest (V?),” on which there is no other definitive data but that it was shot in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, released (rather tellingly) by “Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited,” and stars “Madame Psychosis” (cf. IJ, ).  Cf. David Foster Wallace, “David Foster Wallace” ( March ), PBS Television: The Charlie Rose Show (acc.  December ).  Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, .

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groups and O.N.A.N.’s secret service, respectively. The connection between these plot lines can be made by cross-referencing information from endnotes 13, 16, 18, and 24. Just a little after the section on James Incandenza, in which endnote 24 is placed (IJ, 64), Hugh Steeply, a US secret agent, and Remy Marathe, a double agent and member of the anti-O.N.A.N. Canadian terrorist cell “Assassins des Fauteuil Rollents,” are introduced (IJ, 87– 93).³⁹ During the meeting of the two, agent Steeply speculates about Boston being the “supposed Entertainment’s origin” (IJ, 126) and tries to find out whether Marathe knows anything about the film, which – if it fell into the wrong hands – could pose a severe threat to the USA. The introduction of Canadian terrorism and Steeply’s guess that Boston is, in some way, connected to the film, are important hints for the attentive (re) reader.⁴⁰ On pages 55 – 60, Don Gately’s past as a burglar and his accidental murder of Guillaume DuPlessis,⁴¹ resident of Greater Boston and “the right hand man to probably the most infamous anti-O.N.A.N. organizer” (IJ, 58), is described – and the connection made between Gately and French Canadian resistance. Furthermore, the reader learns that back then, Gately was not operating alone but working with an associate, who is identified as Trent Kite in endnotes 13 and 16 respectively.⁴² It is through this character that the link between  Here again recursivity comes to play: endnote  points out that Marathe is “functioning as a kind of ‘triple agent’ or duplicitous ‘double agent’ ” (IJ, ). M. Fortier, the A.F.R. terrorist cell’s leader, ordered Marathe “to approach B.S.S. [the Bureau des Services sans Spécifité, i. e., the Office of Unspecified Services, O.N.A.N.’s secret service] seeking to trade knowledge of the A.F.R.’s anti-O.N.A.N. activities” (IJ, ). However, Marathe now works for the Office of Unspecified Services and therefore – to M. Fortier – “is now only pretending to pretend to betray” (IJ, ).  It should be clear by now that contrary to the mesmerizing and paralyzing effect of the film “Infinite Jest,” the novel Infinite Jest forces its readers to remain active and alert in order to make sense of the seemingly incoherent story. The fragmentation of the narrative, consequently, not only resembles a fractured reality but also ensures “that the story not be so amusing that it re-create the disease [Wallace] was diagnosing. [That is why] Infinite Jest had to be, as he subtitled it, ‘a failed entertainment’ ” (Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,  – ). In this context, “failed,” of course, does not mean “bad” but the opposite of “potted amusement” (Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, ). Taking the attentiveness of the (re)reader therefore for granted, she will, at this point, remember or eventually return during a second reading to a section a little before James Incandenza and his filmography are introduced.  NB: With respect to Gately, it becomes clear that within the novel the margin pushes itself into the center in two ways: Firstly, within the narrative, Gately, who, as a former drug addict and burglar, lives on the margins of society, becomes more important as the story unfolds until he dominates the main narrative in the end. Secondly, the endnotes, which traditionally comprise marginal textual information, often contain central information as the analysis of endnote  shows.  Interestingly, the name of Gately’s associate gets mentioned as early as endnote , which is indicated on page . However, within the main text, the name Trent Kite is mentioned as late as

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Gately, Kite, Incandenza, and Québecois terrorists becomes clear. While endnote 16 suggests that Kite is, at the very least, threatened by Québecois terrorists because of undefined film cartridges, endnote 18 specifies the possible origin of the latter. Apparently, during the burglary of DuPlessis’s house, Kite is excited to find “several shelves crammed tight with upscale arty-looking film cartridges [italics mine]” (IJ, 985, n. 18) and already anticipating their “potential discriminatingtype-fence-value” (IJ, 985, n. 18). By then cross-referencing endnotes 16, 18, and 24, the reader can connect several narrative dots: first of all, the “arty” look of the film cartridges indicates a connection to James Incandenza. Furthermore, since DuPlessis is connected to anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist groups and since these terrorists are searching for Incandenza’s “Infinite Jest,” he most likely was in possession of the film. Hence, the reader can assume that Gately and Kite unknowingly stole and released the entertainment “Infinite Jest.” Yet another function of endnote 24 is to give the reader socio-political information about the situation of North America in the novel’s near-future time and how it has changed during Subsidized Time. From the filmography’s introduction and synopses of films such as “Annular Fusion Is Our Friend” (IJ, 986), “Annular Amplified Light: Some Reflections” (IJ, 986), “The American Century as Seen Through a Brick” (IJ, 989), “The ONANtiad” (IJ, 989), “The Universe Lashes Out” (IJ, 989), “Poultry in Motion” (IJ, 990), “No Troy” (IJ, 990), “Stand Behind the Men Behind the Wire” (IJ, 991), and “(The) Desire to Desire” (IJ, 991) – of which all but three are labelled as “documentaries” and therefore suggest factual truth –, the reader is able to deduce the following: in the novel’s near-future North America, there is a new calendar (“Subsidized Time” [IJ, 985]), a new source of energy (“annular fusion” [IJ, 986]), and new ideas of waste management (“E.W.D. catapult” [IJ, 989], “Waste Displacement Vehicles” [IJ, 990]). Furthermore, she learns about “F.L.Q.-incited anti-O.N.A.N. riots” (IJ, 989), that some sort of “Continental Reconfiguration” (IJ, 989) seems to have changed the shape of and the international relations between North American countries (“North American Interdependence”, “New Québec” [IJ, 989]), and that possibly

page . Even then the name still only comes up in Gately’s mind while he is lying deliriously in a hospital bed, semi-consciously recalling drug-related events from the past. This shows that the use of endnotes helps to reflect Gately’s loyalty on a textual level: just like Gately “never once [had] given up or named” (IJ, , n. ) his associate to anyone, the main text refuses to identify his partner in crime. The reader can only access the information by entering the subconscious of the main text so to speak. Buried deeply under massive layers of primary text, the name Trent Kite remains as hidden as in Gately’s massive head. Only in the end, when having lost the control over his bodily functions, the name leaks from Gately’s head into the main narrative.

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the northeastern part of the former USA has suffered an environmentally disastrous event which is toxic for animals and human beings alike (“toxification of Thanksgiving crop” [IJ, 990], “outsized feral infant” [IJ, 991]). Here, it is interesting to point out the way in which Wallace introduces the reader to the novel’s present. Instead of calling attention to and explaining the innovations and changes, the reader has to plunge right into the story and has to find her way through strange-sounding acronyms and snippets on her own. The narrator is often not of any help because most of the time he focalizes on one of the characters in the given episode – and since the characters, of course, are familiar with their surroundings, there is no need to explain day-to-day acronyms such as O.N.A.N. Wallace’s method to make the reader familiar with the novel’s world is to create authentic situations which allow for a plausible reason to give the necessary information. Sometimes he does so within the main text itself; the Arab-Canadian medical attaché, for instance, is a foreigner to the novel’s world himself and therefore can view his surroundings with an outsider’s eyes. Thus, he is allowed to make clear the chapter headings, such as “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” when explaining that the legation he works for “find the promotional subsidy of the North American calendar hilariously vulgar. To say nothing of the arresting image of the […] colossal Libertine Statue, wearing some type of enormous adult-design diaper” (IJ, 33).⁴³ But most often it is the

 Another example of this technique can be found starting on page . The reader has to wait until then to learn about the actual idea behind annular fusion, the physical process by which energy is generated in the novel’s present. Here, again, a circular structure manifests itself, both in the process of generating energy and the context in which it is introduced. Using the image of a right-angled triangle, Michael Pemulis, one of the older E.T.A. students, explains annular fusion as “a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion” (IJ, ). This knowledge, in turn, is imparted by Pemulis within a triangular scenario: Pemulis tells Arslanian, one of the academy’s younger students, about another student, Anton Doucette, who has trouble understanding annular fusion. Because Pemulis cannot understand Doucette’s problem, he ends up explaining the whole process to Arslanian to prove how easy it is to comprehend. His explanation, then, enables the reader to finally understand the context of O.N.A.N.’s environmental issues and consequent politics. Initially, annular fusion obviously was engineered in order to overcome the waste problem of nuclear power. However, the idea to use highly toxic waste as raw material for annular fusion ultimately turned against itself. The fusion is so powerful that it destabilizes the ecosystem by absorbing not only the toxic waste but anything toxic in the area around the fusion facility. Therefore “[y]ou end up with a surrounding environment so fertilely lush it’s practically unlivable” (IJ, ). This explains, first of all, phenomena such as feral hamsters, which are introduced early on and described as “thundering” herds roaming the Great Concavity with “tornadic, locomotival” (IJ, ) noise. Second, it is obviously due to this process and its ecological consequences that the Northern New England states have been rendered uninhabitable and therefore were ceded to Canada by Johnny Gentle,

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endnotes which allow the space to introduce the necessary hints to make the story for the reader coherent: be it documentaries on certain historical events, such as those contained in endnote 24, or be it students who have to write term papers on certain socio-cultural phenomena, such as the additional narrative in endnote 304, in which the wheelchair terrorists are introduced at length (cf. IJ, 1055).⁴⁴ However, endnote 24 not only on a narrative level confirms the reader’s assumptions, serves as a fractal metaphor for the novel’s recursive structure, helps fragment and defragment plotlines by cross-referencing endnotes, or gives crucial socio-political background information. On a meta-level, the filmography, moreover, serves as Wallace’s reckoning with postmodernist art: [James Incandenza’s] films […] are, to a piece, self-reflexive and postmodern, so much so that the lengthy ‘filmography’ included among the book’s endnotes reads like an extended parody of the postmodern canon. A number of films are named Cage, a clear reference to John Cage’s music. […] [There is] a clear invocation of poet John Ashbery’s postmodern poem of self-examination and self-reflexivity, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.’ […] Other films parody […] John Updike and Sam Peckinpah (Fun with Teeth) […] and John Barth and Thomas Pynchon (Möbius Strip [sic]).⁴⁵

To make the target of his criticism an experimental filmmaker is only consistent when considering Wallace’s early media criticism and his call for sincerity in contemporary fiction in the 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.”⁴⁶ In the essay, he criticizes and warns of the negative consequences that the interplay of contemporary US television’s mechanisms and US fiction en-

the current President of the USA. Third, it is also due to this process that the USA have to catapult their waste into the area (a practice mentioned as early as page  of the main narrative) in order “to keep the uninhibited ecosystem from spreading and overrunning more ecological stable areas” (IJ, ).  With respect to  it is interesting to note that the aspect of rereading is repeatedly called for in the novel itself because endnotes , , , and  all direct the reader to endnote . Thus, already during the first reading of Infinite Jest, the reader gets offered a taste of Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle since she is invited multiple times to return to endnote  – each time with yet more knowledge on the terrorist group.  Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace,  – .  David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” [], in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (London: Abacus, ):  – : further references in the text, abbreviated as “EUP.” The essay originally appeared in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in  before it was reprinted in the essay-collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again in .

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tails: “the tyranny of irony.”⁴⁷ Wallace explains that while early postmodern fiction in the 1960s was still able to successfully make use of irony to unmask society’s hypocrisy and initiate social change (cf. EUP, 66), contemporary fiction writers should no longer draw on this narrative technique because it has been rendered ineffective by television. According to Wallace, television picked up irony for its own purely revenue-oriented interests, when discovering that it proved to be an effective strategy to deceive viewers into thinking that they – unlike the rest of the audience – are not passively consuming but actively and critically participating in something more than an essentially lonely and unambitious activity. Wallace reveals that the self-referential irony of TV commercials and shows “flatter[s] Joe [i. e., the average viewer] about ‘seeing through’ the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, [so that] it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught him to crave” (EUP, 63) – a feeling which of course ensures that he will keep watching TV. Wallace then points out the disastrous effect that this has on society: because the average TV-trained viewer accepts irony as the only tolerable mode to perceive and interact with others, “irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive features of contemporary U.S. culture” (EUP, 49).⁴⁸ The resulting problem is that even though (self-conscious) irony as a literary mode of protest has been rendered ineffective by television, contemporary US fiction (which Wallace calls “image fiction”⁴⁹) seems to lack an appropriate alternative to critically deal with and comment upon cultural phenomena such as TV: “How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business?” (EUP, 68). Wallace argues that “mordant sendups of television,” “mocking self-reference,” and “hip identitylessness” (EUP, 77) cannot resolve anything because the resulting literature is “doomed to shallowness by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose mockery of itself and all value already ab-

 A. O. Scott, “The Panic of Influence” ( February ), New York Review of Books (acc.  November ).  Within Infinite Jest it is – and only can be – Mario Incandenza, who diagnoses his peers’ inability of dealing with “stuff that’s really real” (IJ, ). The grotesquely disfigured outsider and middle-son of Avril and (very likely) her half-brother, Charles Tavis, repeatedly wonders why “[i]t’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy” (IJ, ).  “[O]r post-postmodernism, or Hyperrealism” (EUP, ).

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sorbs all ridicule” (EUP, 81).⁵⁰ For writers of his generation, Wallace sees only one option: in order to find their way out of this ironic stalemate, they have to work up the courage to reject the ironist’s pose and risk sincerity: The next literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of antirebels, [… w]ho treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. […] The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ (EUP, 81)

There is no doubt that in Infinite Jest Wallace successfully meets his own call for a more sincere literature that is not afraid to deal with the fears and struggles of (post‐)modern society.⁵¹ The filmography in endnote 24 alone abounds with “untrendy human troubles,” which manifest themselves in the synopses of James Incandenza’s films as addiction, lack of communication, dysfunctional families and relationships, isolation, and loss of identity, to name but a few. Yet, contrary to what one might expect after reading “E Unibus Pluram,” the filmography is anything but anti-ironic. Instead of abandoning irony altogether, Wallace opted for a “meta-ironic” strategy,⁵² meaning that in Infinite Jest, Wallace  Essentially, cultural criticism in this vein can be traced back to Walter Benjamin’s essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” [“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”] ( – ) and the Frankfurt School’s critique of pop culture – a critique that was later picked up, for example, by Fredric Jameson in his essay, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (first published in the journal New Left Review in ). Wallace’s essay, in turn, adds the perspective of a novelist struggling to find a voice of his own and a viable solution to the postmodern dilemma. Rejecting the playful postmodernist game of deception, Wallace – as the sad clown – sneaks in a humanist concept of truth through the back door and turns to “sincerity,” as noted below. For a discussion of Wallace’s revival of sincerity see Adam Kelly, “Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace” ( October ) (acc.  February ).  According to D. T. Max, at the time when Wallace was working on Infinite Jest “earnest storytelling seemed to nearly everyone but Wallace antithetical to proving oneself worthy of taking on questions of societal unease” (Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,  – ).  Scott, “The Panic of Influence.” Another example of the meta-ironic tendencies in Wallace’s writing can be found in David Foster Wallace’s essay “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” [] in Consider the Lobster (London: Abacus, ):  –  (further references in the text, abbreviated as “JFD”). In the essay, these meta-ironic tendencies are juxtaposed by his call for more sincerity and passion in contemporary literature. Wallace argues that Dostoevsky’s novels are of value especially for contemporary American readers because Dostoevsky “appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we – here, today – cannot or do not permit ourselves” (JFD, ). Wallace explains that for American writers only two options are left to deal with “deep convictions or desperate questions” (JFD, ): one, mak-

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“uses irony to disclose what irony has been hiding.”⁵³ Within endnote 24, it is James Incandenza’s purely formalistic and self-consciously ironic filmic oeuvre, that Wallace uses to meta-ironically criticize the “dilute and malign” (EUP, 68) mechanisms of avant-garde irony and postmodernist story-telling. The silent film “Kinds of Light,” for example, illustrates that James Incandenza is a mere technician, who is only interested in form and negligent of content or character. The film has no cast but merely consists of “4,444 individual frames, each of which photo depicts lights of different source, wavelength, and candle power, each reflected off the same unpolished tin plate” (IJ, 986). Moreover, at conventional projection speeds, the photos cannot even be seen by the viewer because of “the hyperretinal speed at which they pass” (IJ, 986). Obviously, Incandenza’s focus on technical shenanigans has to be seen as a manifestation of his utter disregard of the audience’s real needs. This disregard grows into blunt aggression in the film “The Joke,” which makes its audience “increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile” (IJ, 989). Presenting a real-time replay of the actual audience, “The Joke” illustrates the hyperreflective nature and meta-fictional focus of Incandenza’s work – a hyper-narrative mode Wallace devalues in “E Unibus Pluram” as “deeply informed by the emergence of television and the metastasis of self-conscious watching” (EUP, 34). Then again many of Incandenza’s films are cataloged as parodies of other films, for instance, “Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat,” which is described as a “[p]ossible parody/homage to B.S. public-service-announcement cycle of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” (IJ, 990). This entry is again annotated by a footnote referring the reader to an essay with the critically telling title: “Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?” (IJ, 990) – the footnote serving both as a parody of academic writing and an explicit reference to the creative sterility of postmodernist art. Yet, Wallace’s criticism of using the wrong means to communicate one’s ideas goes even further: because James Incandenza is so entrapped in the postmodern static state of hyperreflexivity, he not only fails at making films, but he himself is a broken character. Many of the films listed in endnote 24 trace bio-

ing jokes, two, hiding the urgent issues behind some formal gimmick. Obviously, in his essay, Wallace chose option number two because the exemplary “incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit” (JFD, ) is exactly what he is doing himself throughout the essay.  Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, .

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graphical key moments of Incandenza’s life and his most pressing problems,⁵⁴ fears and struggles, thereby giving this character additional depth and elaborating on major thematic concerns of the novel. Issues of communication, fatherson relationships, and identity are frequently examined in James Incandenza’s films, which repeatedly feature an actor with the telling name “Watt.” Even though Watt’s name echoes the interrogative pronoun “what,” the characters he plays seem unable to successfully communicate with others and to find the answers, they are looking for. Just like his filmic alter egos, James Incandenza has no idea how to decode the world or how to communicate with others, especially his sons.⁵⁵ While the disturbed relationship between Hal and his father is depicted in the afore-mentioned film “It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him” (IJ, 992), the film “Cage II” quite plainly portrays how isolated, helpless and misunderstood Incandenza feels in general. In the film, “[s]adistic penal authorities place a blind convict (Watt) and a deaf-mute convict (Leith) together in ‘solitary confinement,’ and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other” (IJ, 987). Lacking sight, hearing, and the power of speech, the two prisoners are denied the most basic requirements for an effective communication. Any attempt to communicate with each

 E.g., his connection to tennis can be seen in films such as “Tennis, Everyone?” (IJ, ), “There Are No Losers Here” (IJ, ), “Flux in a Box” (IJ, ), “As of Yore” (IJ, ), and, of course, in one of Incandenza’s production company’s names, “Meniscus Films” (cf. IJ,  – ). His status as a cuckold who has to suffer the numerous affairs of his unfaithful wife are portrayed for example in “Fun With Teeth” (IJ, ), “Various Small Flames” (IJ, ), and “(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect” (IJ, ).  Joelle van Dyne remembers James Incandenza telling her “that he simply didn’t know how to speak with either of his undamaged sons without their mother’s presence and mediation. Orin could not be made to shut up, and Hal was so completely shut down in Jim’s presence that the silences were excruciating” (IJ, ). It doesn’t come as a surprise that James Incandenza himself had to suffer under a defective father-son relationship when he was growing up. This is, for instance, depicted in the film “As of Yore,” where “[a] middle-aged tennis instructor [i. e., James Incandenza sr.], preparing to instruct his son in tennis, becomes intoxicated in the family’s garage and subjects his son to a rambling monologue while the son weeps and perspires” (IJ, ). The monologue of James Incandenza sr. is again echoed in the main story from page  onwards. Unfortunately, James Jr. not only passed on his inability to communicate to his sons but also a predisposition to addiction. While his addiction to alcohol renders him unable to break free from the vicious circle of inter-generational miscommunication, Hal – as the representative of the next generation – is addicted to marijuana, which slowly makes him lose his very own self. For a detailed analysis of Hal’s crisis of identity see Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,  – .

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other is therefore doomed to fail and consequently, the prisoners’ feeling of loneliness and isolation is intensified.⁵⁶ As the films show, James Incandenza obviously is very much aware of his own defects, but apparently unable to do anything to repair them. Boswell points out that “Incandenza’s intentions are sound; it’s his methods that are the problem. The result is a body of work that, like so much postmodern fiction in Wallace’s view, exacerbates the very problems it seeks to overcome.”⁵⁷ In fact, Incandenza’s one major attempt at repairing a broken relationship turns out to be a most damaging potential weapon in the hands of terrorists: his film “Infinite Jest.” Towards the end of the novel, James Incandenza – reappearing to Don Gately as a ghost – explains that “Infinite Jest” was his last and desperate effort to finally be able to communicate with his son, Hal: “The wraith says […] he spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse” (IJ, 838). But, as Boswell points out, the film is unable to fulfill its purpose “for it does not love, it is not open: it is self-alienated and so contributes to the alienation, anhedonia, and solipsism that it seeks to overcome.”⁵⁸

“Too Much Fun,” or the (vicious) circle of addiction The fact that Infinite Jest “is at once a meditation on […] the pleasures of intoxication, the perils of addiction, the price of isolation, and the precariousness of sanity,”⁵⁹ is reflected in the endnotes of which a large part refer to drugs. Roughly one-eighth of the 388 endnotes provide detailed information on the chemical makeup of drugs, describe their effects, list manufacturers, give examples of certain types of drugs, or categorize drugs and characterize their respective users. Moreover, the “Notes and Errata” even start and end with a drug-related endnote, thereby underlining the novel’s circular structure and resembling the vicious cir-

 Another example of this feeling of alienation is “Insubstantial Country,” where “[a]n unpopular après-garde filmmaker (Watt) either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else’s delusion that his (Watt’s) temporal lobe seizure has left him mute” (IJ, ).  Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, .  Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, . The failure of James Incandenza’s artistic ambitions becomes also apparent in the fact that “scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain” (IJ, ).  Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, .

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cle of drug abuse and addiction. According to Max, though, Infinite Jest “is redemptive, as modern novels rarely are” because “Gately abides, taking on, almost in a Christlike way, the sins of his flock, and Christ implies a God”⁶⁰ – all of which indicates a development to the positive. However, considering the circular structures that can be found on many levels within the novel, the arrangement of the endnotes suggests a different reading: instead of being granted a second chance and defeating his addiction to narcotic substances for good, Gately, who by the end of the novel is lying in a hospital bed delirious with pain from a gunshot wound, very probably is about to relapse and accept the pain killers he has bravely denied himself for so long. This reading is also supported in consideration of the fact that, in his comatose state, Gately is still very much able to exactly understand the drug-related information the nurse is sharing with one of his doctors, while having trouble to make out the rest of the conversation.⁶¹ Moreover, in the novel’s final section, Gately not only remembers his rock bottom experience, consuming unimaginable doses of Dilaudid, but all of the section’s endnotes also refer to drugs. This shows that not only on the character level but also on the level of the narrator, the section is focused on drugs. The circularity that drugs imply is also an allusion to the self-reflective and self-involved state of the modern American society that Wallace diagnoses in “E Unibus Pluram.” In his analysis of Wallace’s short story, “The Depressed Person,” Iannis Goerlandt points out that the story’s footnotes constitute an elaborate narrative equivalent to the hyperreflective language of the protagonist, laying bare the self-involved and self-centred nature of the depressed person.⁶² Even though the endnotes in Infinite Jest do not serve one single main narrative function, hyperreflexivity is definitely one of the major concerns of the novel and therefore also reflected on the level of the endnotes. Just like hyperreflective postmodern brain-twisting makes it impossible for James Incandenza to achieve his artistic goals (see above), hyperreflexivity, in connection with drug abuse, is one of the main reasons for many of the characters’ problems, especially for those “with some education [because t]hey identify their whole selves with

 Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, .  What Gately can discern from what the nurse says to Dr. Pressburger is “that […] since there’d been trauma to his Something-with-six-syllables-that-started-with-Sterno, she said the radiology results were indefinite but suspicious, and somebody called Pendleton had wanted a  mm. siphuncular nebulizer dispensing  ml. of  % Mucomyst  [italics mine] q.  h. on the off-chance of hemorrhage or mucoidal flux, like just in case” (IJ, ).  Iannis Goerlandt, “Fußnoten und Performativität bei David Foster Wallace: Fallstudien,” in Am Rande bemerkt. Anmerkungspraktiken in literarischen Texten, ed. Bernhard Metz, Sabine Zubarik (Berlin: Kadmos, ): .

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their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head” (IJ, 272).⁶³ In the novel, the hyperreflective thought helix of drug addicts is described as “Marijuana Thinking,” a phenomenon which is explained in a footnote to endnote 269, i. e., two layers below the main narrative. This textual double layer, in turn, not only mimics the addicts’ twisted mindset but also their ability to hide the addiction from themselves, burying it deep down in their subconscious: This tendency to involuted abstraction is sometimes called ‘Marijuana Thinking’; and by the way, the so-called ‘Amotivational Syndrome’ consequent to massive Bob Hope-consumption is a misnomer, for it is not that Bob Hope-smokers lose interest in practical functioning, but rather Marijuana-Think themselves into labyrinths of reflexive abstraction that seem to cast doubt on the very possibility of practical functioning, and the mental labor of finding one’s way out consumes all available attention and makes the Bob Hope-smoker look physically torpid and apathetic and amotivated sitting there, when really he is trying to claw his way out of a labyrinth. (IJ, 1048)

This kind of suppression can also be found in the main narrative: Hal’s character provides a prime example of the psychological disintegrating effect which goes along with marijuana consumption, and being the family’s “lexical prodigy” (IJ, 155), he is especially prone to the drug’s accompanying way of thinking.⁶⁴ Caught in a double bind of secrecy (“Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he’s as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high” [IJ, 49]), Hal is not able to recognize the real secret that he is not only hiding from others, but more especially from himself: his addiction. Just as the definition of “Marijuana Thinking” is buried under notes, Hal likes to get high in the maze-like tunnel system underneath the academy’s tennis courts in “E.T.A.’s Lung-Storage and -Pump Rooms” (IJ, 51). The fact that Hal can only access these rooms by crawling “on all fours” through a “crude little rough-sided tunnel” (IJ, 51– 52) is an apt image for

 Following Cohen’s reading of Infinite Jest as a Künstlerroman (cf. Cohen, Samuel, “To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation,”  – ), this quote can also be read as a personal self-disclosure of Wallace, commenting on his own drug abuse and his problems of letting go – be it drugs or material for his essays, stories, or novels. For a Nietzschean reading of Wallace’s excess of consciousness see Josh Roiland, “Getting Away from It All: The Literary Journalism of David Foster Wallace and Nietzsche’s Concept of Oblivion,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace. ed. Samuel Cohen, Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, ):  – .  A harmless example being Hal’s pondering of class issues while under the influence of marijuana: “Hal wonders, not for the first time, whether he might deep down be a secret snob about collar-color issues and Pemulis, then whether the fact that he’s capable of wondering whether he’s a snob attenuates the possibility that he’s really a snob. Though Hal hasn’t had more than four or five total very small hits off the public duBois, this is a prime example of what’s sometimes called ‘marijuana thinking’ ” (IJ, ).

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the effort it takes Hal to suppress his acknowledgement of his addiction and for the dead-end of a hyper-self-conscious mindset in general: “What such thinking [i. e., Marijuana Thinking] should lead to, of course, is self-discovery, yet, the very style of Hal’s brooding, like much of Wallace’s inimitable prose, is designed to obfuscate what it is actually determined to reveal.”⁶⁵ Another example of this metaphorical layering of information can be found in endnote 8, which gives examples of the “Mild Designer class” (IJ, 53) of drugs mentioned in the main text. Additionally, a footnote lists information on one of the drugs specified in endnote 8, giving yet more examples. This second layer of explanation metaphorically reflects how thoroughly drugs have saturated society in general, a fact that is represented in the main text by the juxtaposition of Enfield Tennis Academy and Ennet House. While the elitist academy is located way up on a hill and educating overachieving young athletes, the halfway house crouches at the bottom of the academy’s hill, accommodating former drug addicts who mostly come from a socially deprived background. Despite all these differences, though, the two worlds have a strong nexus: drugs. It is important to note that as much as the endnotes in Infinite Jest subvert the long-established distinction of primary and secondary textual levels, with regard to the novel’s central drug, DMZ, they abide the traditional privileging of the main text over the appendix. Two complete sections of the novel’s main text are dedicated to the thorough introduction of the drug, the first being Pemulis’s successful purchase of and library research on the drug (IJ, 169 – 171) and the second being Pemulis’s report on his findings to his fellow drug users, Trevor Axford and Hal Incandenza (IJ, 211– 219). In contrast, there are only two short endnotes on DMZ, which just add additional, but nonessential information: endnote 56 simply continues the main text’s list of drugs in comparison to which DMZ is much more powerful (cf. IJ, 996) and endnote 57 only specifies the drug’s effect on its users with an example (cf. IJ, 996). The general effect of DMZ and the crucial information on the drug, however, is described in the main text and its significance thereby highlighted. With respect to the fragmentation of the narrative and the simultaneous interdependence of its elements it is interesting to see that the “incredibly potent DMZ” (IJ, 170) is the chemical equivalent to Incandenza’s film “Infinite Jest.” Just like the film “Infinite Jest,” DMZ has an “almost ontological” (IJ, 170) effect on its users and possibly can make them lose their mind (cf. IJ, 214). Moreover, DMZ goes by the street name of “Madame Psychosis, after a popular very-early-morning cult radio personality on M.I.T.’s student-run radio station WYYY-109” (IJ, 170)

 Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, .

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– a name mentioned as early as in endnote 24, the filmography, which lists Madame Psychosis as the actress of the final version of “Infinite Jest,” and making the wheel of addiction come full circle. Paradoxical as it may seem, luckily for its readers, the novel Infinite Jest “is willing to be cruel.”⁶⁶ Eager not to get caught in Image Fiction’s ironic trap and trying to avoid the mistakes of the contemporary US fiction writers whom he criticizes in “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace was careful to make Infinite Jest do more than just “to wow, to ensure that the reader is pleased and continues to read” (EUP, 79). Trying to make the reader aware of the negative consequences that the focus on constant entertainment and passive consumption has for modern American society, Wallace decided to make Infinite Jest the opposite of “potted amusement.”⁶⁷ The endnotes, in particular, proved a suitable technique to oppose passive consumerism. By constantly disrupting the reading process, they force the reader to become active and work her way through the thick layers of primary and secondary text. This might – at first – feel like an annoying exercise, but in the course of the reading of Infinite Jest, it becomes clear that the endnotes are worth the effort, as the analysis of some of the novel’s endnotes has shown. For readers who are willing to (re)read the “Notes and Errata”-section, the endnotes open up new narrative levels which help the story to unfold as well as fragment the novel’s world. At the same time, they enable the readers to put together the pieces – at least in part – by cross-referencing particulars from endnotes and main text. Furthermore, the endnotes provide information, which helps the reader to learn more about the characters and find orientation in the novel’s futuristic society. Then again endnotes in Infinite Jest help Wallace to express his critique of entertainment on a meta-level. Finally, the endnotes metaphorically mirror the novel’s overall structure and allow for different interpretations; in short, they are anything but secondary: The text and the notes have, like torso and extremities, a collaborative and reciprocal relation. The only ‘errata’ in the final section are those of readers who do not switch back and forth between the two sections and who, therefore, do not appreciate how Wal-

 Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, . However, contrary to James Incandenza, who disregards his audience’s real needs and whose final film, “Infinite Jest,” has a lethally mesmerizing and paralyzing effect, Boswell rightly points out that Wallace’s novel is cruel to its readers “for the readers’ own good” (Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, ).  Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, .

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lace has deformed his novel to be a gigantic analogue of the monsters – hateful and hopeful – within it.⁶⁸

 Tom LeClair, “The Prodigious Fiction,” .

Johanna Hartmann

Paratextualized Forms of Fictional Self-Narration: Footnotes, Headnotes and Endnotes in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad This article explores the functional potential of footnotes and endnotes in Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. This contemporary American novel, set in the New York music scene between the 1970s and the near future, consists of loosely interconnected chapters with changing narrative perspectives. Within the scope of this article I look at and contrast two chapters of this novel which I interpret as contemporary actualizations of footnotes, headnotes and endnotes. In chapter nine, “Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon! Jules Jones reports,” the self-narrating journalist Jules Jones recounts his attempted rape of the young actress Kitty Jackson. In extensive footnotes he comments on and explains his motivations and by doing so rationalizes and attempts to justify his actions. These footnotes paradoxically complement, contradict and support the main text. In the chapter “Great Rock and Roll Pauses. By Alison Blake,” the paratextual dimension is manifest in a sequence of PowerPoint slides that can be interpreted as the visual combination of headnotes and endnotes. These two chapters are indicative of the structure of the novel in that narrative linearity is being interrupted and the text gains a hypertextual quality that is hallmarked by proleptic, analeptic, and metaleptic references which contribute to the narrative cohesion and poetological structure of the novel. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a prime example of contemporary prose literature that employs the use of footnotes, headnotes, and endnotes and at the same time extends these techniques by integrating contemporary modes of communication which have been developed in the age of digitization and are intricately connected to techniques of self-narration. With A Visit from the Goon Squad Jennifer Egan has produced a work of fiction that is conspicuously hard to describe in terms of genre classifications. On the cover, the book claims to be “a novel.”¹ However, A Visit from the Goon Squad could also be read as a collection of short stories since the book consists of thir Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (New York: Knopf, ); further references in the text, abbreviated as “GS”.

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teen loosely interconnected chapters that are set in the US between the 1970s and the 2020s. These thirteen chapters form a fictional collage, a complex matrix resulting from the achronological order of the individual chapters. All chapters are unique in style, narrative perspective, and atmosphere, but interconnected through the theme of music and the recurring protagonists Bennie Salazar, a music producer, and his assistant Sasha. The novel presents in an episodic manner significant events in the lives of Bennie and Sasha, and also of numerous other characters which eventuates in a kaleidoscopic view on the portrayed fictional universe. During the act of reading the novel acquires a palimpsestic character through overlaying and overlapping descriptions of the fictional world. Egan’s novel can be described as an example of a “renewed maximalism,”² as it is a work of fiction that, in the tradition of David Foster Wallace’s work, “reside[s] at the tipping point of a major shift not in experimental fiction but in realism.” It is moreover an example of “a revival of the large-scale, sprawling, multicharacter novel”³ that reconnects to the realistic novel of the late nineteenth century, but is informed and centrally influenced by modernist and postmodernist traditions of writing. Hoberek thus aptly claims that the novel “combines an interest in genre models with a more traditionally realistic bent.”⁴ Egan’s novel can be placed in a post-postmodernist tradition of writing in which concrete life realities of individuals return to the center of fictional attention.⁵ Nevertheless, her writing is clearly influenced by postmodernist insights into the relativity of experience and the “fickle nature of the sign”⁶ that allows for ambiguous and contradictory ways of interpretation and the potential semiotic dissolution of the fictional text. In terms of the boundaries of the fictional text, an analysis of paratextuality in A Visit from the Goon Squad allows for significant insights into the structure and poetics of the novel, dimensions that are interconnected with its central themes. The analysis of two chapters which rely on paratextuality in the form of footnotes and PowerPoint slides are instructive in this respect as in both cases paratextuality destabilizes and thus raises ques-

 Andrew Hoberek, “The Novel after David Foster Wallace,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell, Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ):  – , .  Hoberek, “The Novel after David Foster Wallace,” .  Hoberek, “The Novel after David Foster Wallace,” .  Cf. Alfred Hornung, “Postmoderne bis zur Gegenwart,” in Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Hubert Zapf (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, ):  – , .  Peter Wagner, “Introduction: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality – the State(s) of the Art(s),” in Icons, Texts, Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality, ed. Peter Wagner (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, ): – , .

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tions concerning the limitations and boundaries of the fictional text. Chapters nine and twelve – which both draw on techniques of self-narration – are indicative of the structure of the novel in that narrative linearity is interrupted and the text acquires a hypertextual quality that is hallmarked by proleptic, analeptic, and metaleptic references which contribute to the narrative cohesion and figurative structure of the novel. Genette’s concept of the paratext is instructive in order to analyze paratextuality in A Visit from the Goon Squad and will thus be presented first. This theoretical part will be followed by the analysis of chapters nine and twelve. In chapter nine, “Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon! Jules Jones reports,” the self-narrating journalist Jules Jones recounts his attempted rape of the young actress Kitty Jackson. In extensive footnotes he explains and comments on his motivations and by doing so self-ironically rationalizes and attempts to justify his actions. The four rather long footnotes in this chapter paradoxically complement, contradict, and support the main text. In chapter twelve, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses. By Alison Blake,” the paratextual dimension manifests itself in the chapter’s composition as a sequence of PowerPoint slides. This chapter can be interpreted as visual combination of headnotes and endnotes which draw on contemporary modes of communication that have been developed in the age of digitalization and determine the chapter in its structural and thematic dimensions. Although A Visit from the Goon Squad can be located in a tradition of the postmodernist utilization of footnotes, headnotes, and endnotes – prototypically exemplified by David Foster Wallace in whose works paratextual elements becomes a central fictional device –, paratextuality is implemented in innovative ways. In chapters nine and twelve of Egan’s novel, these paratextual elements rely on complementary strategies: paratextuality in chapter nine relies on mechanisms of supplementation in the form of footnotes. Paratextuality in chapter twelve relies on visualized forms of minimization and reduction which is implemented in the form of visual depictions of pauses in music – a theme which integrally determines the aesthetics of Egan’s novel. Genette’s taxonomy of paratextuality allows for a productive reading of Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. For Genette “the paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public.”⁷ He famously conceptualized paratextuality in

 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ): ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “PT”. At a later point in the book Genette claims that “[n]ow the paratext is neither on the interior nor on the exterior: it is both; it is on the

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his book Seuils, which was translated as Paratexts: Threshold of Interpretation. In accordance with the title, Genette conceptualized the paratext as inherently spatial, arguing that “[m]ore than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold […] that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back” (PT, 1– 2). By describing paratextuality as opening up and creating liminal and unstable spaces that mediate between the text and its audience and thus determine the reading of a text, what is situated at the margins of a text becomes the center of attention. The concept of paratextuality thus raises questions concerning the “boundaries of the text”⁸ and the possibility for the text to transcend its own limitations. Genette defined the paratext as “empirically made up of a heterogeneous group of practices and discourses of all kinds and dating from all periods” (PT, 2). Within his taxonomy, he differentiates between epitexts and peritexts, the former being “the external presentation of a book – name of author, title, and the rest – just as it is offered to a docile reader, which certainly does not mean every reader” (PT, 3). The latter concept, peritext, refers to “elements inserted into the interstices of the text, such as chapter titles or certain notes” (PT, 5). Both categories are crucial for an interpretation of Egan’s novel as epitextual and peritextual elements are intricately interrelated. This interrelation radically questions the boundary of the literary text, transforming it into a fuzzy border region that is – remaining within the metaphor of spatiality – potentially expandable or reducible. Genette further categorizes paratextual elements according to their “temporal situation” (PT, 5), referring to the point in time when they are added to the text, their “substantial status,” designating their concrete material and/or ephemeral realization, and most importantly the “pragmatic status of a paratextual element,” meaning “the nature of the sender and addressee, the sender’s degree of authority and responsibility, the illocutionary force of the sender’s message” (PT, 8).⁹ This differentiation, especially Genette’s thoughts on “notes” as peritextual elements, and the public epitext, allowing for interconnections between the novel and its possible extensions, are instructive for the interpretation of Egan’s novel.

threshold; and it is on this very site that we must study it, because essentially, perhaps, its being depends upon its site” (PT, ).  Dorothee Birke, Birte Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field,” Narrative . ():  – , .  Zerby claims as main function of the footnote to “interrupt” but also to install a certain “human” dimension into the text as the text “whispers” from the bottom of the page that the main text should be complemented. Cf. Chuck Zerby, The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes (Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities P, ):  – .

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Genette claims that “with notes we doubtless reach one – indeed, several – of the borders, or absences of borders, that surround the eminently transitional field of the paratext” (PT, 319). He defined notes in a very general sense as a statement of variable length […] connected to a more or less definite segment of text and either placed opposite or keyed to this segment. The always partial character of the text being referred to, and therefore the always local character of the statement conveyed in a note, seems to me the most distinctive formal feature of this paratextual element. (PT, 319)

Although this definition holds true for non-fictional and fictional footnotes in terms of their formal properties, Genette questions the status of fictional footnotes: I have little to say about fictive actorial notes, generally attributed to a narrator-character […]. […] [A]re we really dealing there with a paratext? Here again, the semblance of notes obviously is part of the fiction – and therefore, indirectly of the text. (PT, 342– 343)

The function that Genette vaguely assigns to them is “contribut[ing] to the fiction of the text [under cover of a more or less satirical simulation of a paratext]” (PT, 343). In postmodernist and post-postmodernist literature peritextual paratextuality in the form of footnotes and endnotes has undergone a form of renaissance, most notably in the fictional and non-fictional works of David Foster Wallace,¹⁰ who utilized footnotes as a narrative strategy that allowed for a realistic literary depiction of the thought process. Wallace claimed that the footnotes were an intentional, programmatic part of Infinite Jest, and […] you get sort of addicted to ’em. [… I]t’s a kind of loopy way of thinking, that it seems to me is in some ways mimetic. […] [T]he way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it’s not orderly, and it’s not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops. […] And in a way, the footnotes, I think, are better representations of, not really stream-of-consciousness, but thought patterns and fact patterns.¹¹

 David Foster Wallace is just the most influential example of the utilization of paratextuality in contemporary fiction. Cf., e. g., Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo, Paul Auster’s Oracle Night, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Junot Diaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, etc.  David Foster Wallace, Tom Scoccia, “There Can Be No Spokesman: Interview by Tom Scoccia,” in David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, ):  – , .

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In another interview he described footnotes as a result of “trying to do something that feels real to me” giving expression to “feel[ing] very fragmented, and as if […] hav[ing] a symphony of different voices, and voice-overs, and factoids, going on all the time and digressions on digressions on digressions.”¹² Wallace, although not primarily interested in “every reader’s reaction”¹³ is here acutely aware that footnotes interrupt the reading process in significant ways: “[T]hey are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.”¹⁴ Wallace’s obsessive utilization of paratextuality in the form of footnotes has shaped the style of the works of contemporary writers of prose fiction. As a consequence, foremost chapter nine but also chapter twelve of Egan’s novel have been interpreted as an homage to Wallace’s work. As pointed out by Burn the “variegated impact of his [Wallace’s] work upon other writers” is clearly noticeable in Egan’s work as she “carries out a brilliant stylistic and thematic parody of Wallace’s signature obsessions.”¹⁵ According to Burn, “the chapter performs a Wallacian anatomy of celebrity and emphasizes his characteristic focus on vision – tracing what it means to be constantly watched by people ‘swiveling, craning, straining and contorting.’”¹⁶ Paratextual elements in both chapters can be interpreted as fictional strategies that provide these chapters with a hypertextual quality that significantly determines the reading process. Both chapters can be interpreted as fictional self-narratives. Chapter twelve constitutes a form of futuristic diary by Alison Blake, the daughter of Sasha. Chapter nine is a fictional reportage in which Jules Jones, Bennie Salazar’s brother-in-law, “reports” about his interview with the movie starlet Kitty Jackson, which ends in his attempt to rape her in New York’s Central Park. Although the text claims to be a reportage, the autobiographical dimension is central to the narrative. This chapter is confessional in tone but also includes numerous references to editorial practices, e. g., in references to Jones’ communication with his editor. Both chapters – read as forms of fictional self-narratives that are embedded in the wider context of the novel – contribute to what Burn describes as the phenomenon that

 David Foster Wallace, Steve Paulson, “Some Kind of Terrible Burden: Interview by Steve Paulson,” in David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, ):  – , .  David Foster Wallace, Tom Scoccia, “Spokesman,” .  David Foster Wallace, Tom Scoccia, “Spokesman,” .  Stephen J. Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum, ): .  Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, .

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[w]ithin post-postmodern fiction […] time and historical progress have returned to the center of the contemporary novel’s mind in many ways, but especially in the form of the multigenerational family saga, which […] seems to be emerging as the dominant form of mainstream literary fiction today.¹⁷

Especially the connection between paratextuality and fictional self-narration is significant. Paratextuality establishes a juxtaposition between the text and its surroundings, its center and its periphery. Both dimensions, however, have to be seen as co-dependent as they mutually constitute each other. In self-narratives this pertains to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, memory and processes of forgetting, and the literary staging of absence and presence. Through the implementation of footnotes, these juxtaposed dimensions are thematized and at the same time constitute a metapoetic strategy. Self-narratives, be they fictional or non-fictional, always raise the question of authorship, authorial responsibility and authority. Through the contrapuntal construction of main text and footnotes, the text acquires the character of a double-narrative in which processes of identity construction through self-narration are subverted. The juxtaposition of the main text with footnotes results in voids and blanks, textual polyphony, ambiguities, and openness to interpretation. In this respect, the two analyzed chapters epitomize the figurative principle of the novel as a whole. At the same time the inevitable incompleteness of all self-narratives is being thematized. Chapters nine and twelve of Egan’s novel are equipped with unique forms of fictional paratextuality that result in oscillating movements between the main text and its margins. Both chapters are symmetrically structured in that they consist of juxtaposing elements. At the same time they rely on two diametrically opposed poetological approaches. In chapter nine, the integration of footnotes can be considered as a strategy of supplementation, subversion, and accompaniment of the main text; in chapter twelve, the use of PowerPoint slides can be read as strategy of almost minimalist reduction and also as replacement of a text through the visualization of stillness that result in the narratives’ blanks and voids. In both chapters of Egan’s novel, the utilization of footnotes on the one hand and PowerPoint slides on the other hand constitutes a creative appropriation of what Genette described as “notes.” The main text of chapter nine, “Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!” is preceded by the generic marker “Jules Jones reports” which labels the text as fictionalized form of journalistic text and includes what Genette calls “fictive actorial notes” by “narrator-characters” that are located at the bottom of the page (PT, 323). Chapter nine, as Will Blythe re Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, .

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marks, “[p]arod[ies] celebrity journalism and David Foster Wallace at the same time.”¹⁸ It consists of a main text that is complemented with four footnotes which have in relation to the main text supplementary, contradictory, explanatory, and extending functions. Footnotes are integral to the interpretation of this chapter which can be characterized as Jules Jones’ attempt to legitimize his attempt to rape Kitty Jackson. Especially in the footnotes, the narrator’s awareness of his readership becomes apparent. Reading this chapter as fictional reportage, two main functions of paratextuality can be identified: on the one hand what Birke and Christ term “interpretive function,” the paratext’s function to “suggest to the reader specific ways of understanding, reading, interpreting the text,”¹⁹ and a “commercial function,” meaning the paratextual elements’ function to “advertise a text, label it with a price […] and promote the book’s sale.”²⁰ The commercial aspect that underlies Jules Jones’ interview with Kitty Jackson is especially pronounced in the parentheses that include quotes by his editor. The chapter opens with a brief expository paragraph that foregrounds the “exceptional[ity]” of Kitty Jackson, a movie star who meets the reporter Jules Jones for a lunch interview. While she spends the first minutes of the interview talking on the phone, Jules Jones observes her outward appearance and habitus, comparing her to his ex-fiancée Janet Green – a reference which is only elucidated in the third footnote which is situated later in the chapter. He continues to point out the extraordinary but inexplicable quality and effect of Kitty Jackson on her environment and categorizes her as “nice star,” in opposition to “difficult stars” (GS, 167). Already in these opening paragraphs the understanding of the main text relies on supplementation in the form of parentheses. These parentheses have the function to clarify the meaning of allusions, e. g., when he states that “[h]er face (Kitty’s) is one you can imagine merely pretty among the other faces” (GS, 166 – 167). A further function of these parentheses is to give examples: Matt Damon is named as an example of a “nice star,” Ralph Fiennes as an example of a “difficult star” (GS, 167). Furthermore, parentheses have the function to concretize a generalized statement to the present act of communication: “Stars in the nice category act as if they’re just like you (i. e., me) so that you will like them and write flattering things about them” (GS, 167). Although parentheses – in opposition to footnotes – are integrated into the main text, they foreshadow the text’s reliance on mechanisms of supplementation.

 Will Blythe, “To Their Own Beat,” The New York Times ( July ): Arts and Entertainment sect., .  Birke, Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative,” .  Birke, Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative,” .

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Departing from the assumption that the fictional character Jules Jones is the author of the fictional reportage that is integrated into the novel as chapter nine, the footnotes can be categorized as (fictional) “authorial note[s]” (PT, 328). Genette claims in relation to this phenomenon that “[t]he original note is a local detour or a momentary fork in the text, and as such it belongs to the text almost as much as a simple parenthesis does” (PT, 328). Here, it is important to differentiate between different systems of communication and between fictional and non-fictional authors and addressed readers, which means between Jules Jones as author of a (fictional) reportage and his (fictional) readership, and A Visit from the Goon Squad as literary text written by Jennifer Egan and its readership. Taking into account this differentiation, footnotes and parentheses can be interpreted as inserted forms of paratextuality that mediate the interpretation of the text for Jules Jones’ fictional readership and simultaneously mediate the fictional reportage to the reader of the text as chapter in the novel. Both footnotes and parentheses – in both communicatory systems – differ in terms of their illocutionary force. The interpretation of Jules Jones’ narrative as fictional reportage relies on assuming the factitiousness, reliability, and trustworthiness of the writer of a journalistic text. However, these presumptions are subverted as the text – notwithstanding its journalistic mark-up – is inherently autobiographical in nature: Jones tells his audience how and why he has attempted to rape Kitty Jackson, an assault she can prevent by stabbing him with a Swiss Army knife. In the remainder of the chapter, both, parentheses and footnotes, modify, extend, and explain his narrative. The text’s peritextual paratextuality in the form of actorial footnotes is introduced in a highly self-reflexive way, for instance when Jules Jones claims that he will omit what he regards as unworthy for recounting and instead comments on – “(in the footnote-ish fashion that injects a whiff of cracked leather bindings into popcultural observation)” – why he, as a “balding, stoop-shouldered, slightly eczematous guy” (GS, 168), is being treated differently than the young woman sitting opposite him and also his observation that every guest in the restaurant must have simultaneously realized that Kitty Jackson is among them. In order to explain why everybody in the restaurant seems to simultaneously recognize who is sitting in their midst, he “us[es] principles of quantum mechanics, specifically, the properties of so-called entangled particles” (GS, 168). The futility and unscientific character of his endeavors to explain Kitty Jackson’s effect on her environment is already hinted at in the introductory parenthesis, in which he calls his attempt adding a “whiff of cracked leather bindings” (GS, 168) and “a bit of sophistry” (GS, 168)

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– self-ironic remarks that stand in opposition to the utilization of footnotes, which are an integral part of scholarly discourse.²¹ In a long first footnote he applies attempts to explain the phenomenon of entangled particles in physics to the concrete situation in the restaurant in the knowledge that it is naïve to “suggest […] that entangled particles can explain anything when, to date, they themselves have not been satisfactorily explained.” Nevertheless, he continues to delve into describing the theoretical problem of entangled particles, describing them as “subatomic ‘twins’: photons created by splitting a single photon in half with a crystal, which still react identically to stimuli applied to only one of them, even when separated from each other by many miles” (GS, 168). At this point it becomes clear that the application of the theoretical proposed solutions must necessarily fail as the analogy presumes that the arbitrary selection of guests in a restaurant belong or have belonged to the same entity. Jones continues to describe two possible solutions to the problem of entangled particles, the first implying that “[t]he particles are communicating,” and the second proposing that “[t]he two photons are responding to ‘local’ factors engendered by their former status as a single photon” (GS, 169). Both ‘solutions’ are being applied to the concrete context of the restaurant but immediately rejected, just to come to the conclusion that “[i]t’s one of those quantum mechanical mysteries” (GS, 169). Only here the phenomenon of entangled particles develops its heuristic potential as it allows for a differentiation between Kitty Jackson or people being regarded as famous, and people who are neither Kitty Jackson nor famous. According to Jules Jones, the effect famous people have on their environment is analogous to entangled particles. In the context of the novel, Kitty Jackson constitutes a stimulus for every guest in the restaurant to respond in a similar way – as if they were particles of a formerly unified whole. The footnote ends with “when one of us sees her, the rest simultaneously react[s]” (GS, 169), a sentence that leads back to and is explicated in the main text: “Everywhere, people are swiveling, craning, straining and contorting, levitating inadvertently from chairs as they grapple with the urge to lunge at Kitty and pluck off tufts of her hair and clothing” (GS, 168 – 169). This leads over to Jules Jones’ question in the main text of what it feels like to stand at “the center of attention” (GS, 169). This passage marks the transition of Jones’ sophistry into the banality of table talk. Already this first footnote is significant in that it simultaneously interrupts the main

 Cf. Shari Benstock, “At the Margins of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text,” PMLA . ():  – . Benstock analyzes the functional potential of fictional footnotes in works by Fielding, Sterne, and Joyce.

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text but at the same time continues and complements its narrative argument. This first footnote draws on a scholarly discourse and thus raises the reader’s expectations to be provided with further explanations of the phenomenon, which however remain unfulfilled. The play with readerly expectations is a phenomenon that not only holds for the footnote but also other dimensions of the text, such as in the sensationalist heading of Jules Jones’ text “Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!” (GS, 166). Jules Jones’ and Kitty Jackson’s meeting ends up being considerably longer than forty minutes; her remarks on fame downplay its significance for her own life and the effect on her personality; her talking about love is restricted to the comment that she would like to have love in her life; finally the reference to Nixon is elucidated, however in ways that must be contrary to the reader’s expectations as Nixon turns out to be the name of Kitty Jackson’s horse, not the president of the same name. The function of the second long footnote in chapter nine differs significantly from the previous one. Whereas the excursus on entangled particles constitutes an attempt to explain Kitty Jackson’s effect on her environment, the second footnote can be read as Jules Jones’ attempt to retrace the course of events that lead to his attempt to rape Kitty Jackson. Still in the restaurant, Jules Jones tries to disgust and thereby provoke Kitty Jackson to deviate from her professional habitus in order to raise the market value of his text and also mark a change in the course of his lately unsuccessful career. The chapter continues with observations of her eating habits, her ordering the dressing of her salad on the side and her “suck[ing] the dressing off [her index finger]” (GS, 173), a remark that is being complemented and elucidated by another long footnote in which – for the first time in this chapter – the reader learns about Jules Jones’s impending felony. In this second footnote Jules Jones traces his situation of being imprisoned in the Rikers Island Correctional Facility back to Kitty Jackson’s dipping her index finger into her dressing and sucking it off. In Jules Jones’ evaluation, this moment becomes not only the tipping point of this concrete situation but also of his life. Initially he interprets her act as sexual advancement. However, in this second footnote Jules Jones in a self-ironic attempt to reconstruct his thought process at the time comes to the conclusion that her actions are the result of him “not register[ing] as a ‘man’ to Kitty Jackson” (GS, 173). Here, in opposition to the preceding footnote, Jones presents a sequence of “[t]hought[s]” that in a dialectic manner follow and build upon each other. Jules Jones presents what he thinks is a reconstruction of his then line of thoughts, resulting in the conclusion that despite his insight into the fact that he knew she was not interested in him as a man – or rather because of that – he eventually sexually assaults her. This footnote complements the main text in

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that it adds information to the main text, allowing for a more in-depth characterization of the characters Jules Jones and Kitty Jackson. The supplementation of the main text with long footnotes ties in with the autobiographical dimension of the text. In this respect the question of paratextuality is interrelated with concepts that are connected to autobiographical selfnarratives: genre, authorship, and the act of writing. Jules Jones’ drawing on his own life, the description of his reaction to Kitty Jackson and her effect on him are thus closely related to the utilization of footnotes. He asks the fictional audience “[w]hy do I keep mentioning – ‘inserting,’ as it may seem – myself into the story?” (GS, 174) only to explain that it is the blandness of the person Kitty Jackson that makes it necessary to draw on his own experiences. He thereby turns her into a projection surface that “require[s]” him to analyze “[t]he most interesting thing about her,” “the effect she has upon others” (GS, 174) and upon himself. The third footnote in this chapter sheds light on Jules Jones’ psychological and emotional state and thus again narrows the scope of the subject matter. Kitty Jackson’s glance at her watch evokes in Jules Jones the emotional responses of “anger, fear, and lust” (GS, 176), a combination of emotions that leads to the fantasies of murder and rape. In the main text he provides the reader in an analytical way that is reminiscent of the previous footnotes reasons for his feeling “anger, fear, and lust” (GS, 176): firstly, anger about the power difference between them, secondly fear of not being able to write an interesting piece, and thirdly lust due to her physical appearance. His trying to explain why she evokes lust in him, he delves into cannibalistic fantasies of “pulling apart all those little bones and sucking the meat off them one by one” (GS, 176), a remark that is complemented by a third, long footnote in which he remembers his first meeting with and affection for Janet Green. The function of this third footnote is to shed a positive light on his character. However, the awareness of the futility of his endeavor to convince his readership that he is not “ ‘ a numb nuts,’ a ‘creepazoid,’ or a ‘sick puppy’” (GS, 176) are integrated in the form of the apologetic disclaimer “I can offer only the following” (GS, 177) that precedes his story of his first meeting with Janet Green. This footnote that is supposed to underline his humane character paradoxically ends with Janet Green’s question “[a]re you insane?” and thus casts doubt on whether his endeavors were successful (GS, 177). Kitty Jackson’s sucking her salad dressing off her index finger and Jones’ observing her “[very long] neck” (GS, 176) alongside with the awareness that he is no potential sexual or romantic partner for Kitty Jackson lead to the escalation of events. In an attempt to divert her attention away from him and his professional and personal failures, he asks her to go for a walk in Central Park, wanting to see her “erect and in motion” (GS, 179). Only during their walk through Central Park,

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Jules Jones by asking an irritating question manages to establish a form of connection to Kitty Jackson: “It’s done. I’ve reached behind or around or within – I’ve touched the real Kitty” (GS, 181). This development constitutes a turn of events that he had thought to be impossible during their lunch: “But the best I can hope for is to conceal from Kitty Jackson the bald impossibility of any real communion between us” (GS, 174). This unexpected connection leads Jules Jones to push her into the grass and attempt to rape her. His actions are accompanied by fantasies of rape and murder that are again supposed to establish contact to “her life – the inner life of Kitty Jackson – that I so desperately long to reach” (GS, 181). It is eventually his sexual frustration, incompetence and unattractiveness that results in his failing relationship to his fiancée and his attempt to rape Kitty Jackson. In the remainder of the chapter Jules Jones writes about his imprisonment and the effect his felony has had on the public discourse on safety in Central Park which is ironically accompanied with another result: Kitty Jackson’s profiting from the resulting public relations coup. The chapter closes with a fourth and last footnote in which Jones, in the form of a letter to the editor, ironically remarks on the suggested measures of public profiling in order to increase public safety. This final footnote has the function of a cultural-critical comment that highlights the absurdity of a questionable profiling system that supposedly would have led to his own identification as a potential rapist. Especially this last footnote bears a dystopian tone, foremost in regard to already commonplace practices of digital profiling and surveillance. The cultural-critical dimension of this footnote ties back to the preceding elaborations of Kitty Jackson’s status as a star and the exceptional behavior she receives as a result of that. Chapter nine eventually ends with this last footnote and another reference to its author: “Respectfully Jules Jones.” This aligns with the conventions of a letter to the editor but subverts generic expectations that are raised by the chapter’s paratext which marks it as a journalistic reportage. Thus, this last footnote integrates a further communicatory system into this chapter and the novel as such. Chapter nine has to be regarded as a fictional reportage within a fictional work of contemporary prose literature that, within a footnote, integrates a letter to the editor. The text thus addresses on the one hand the fictional readership Jules Jones addresses, but also the readership of the novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. In this last footnote that is a fictional letter to the editor, a subcategory of the fictional readership of Jules Jones’ article is being addressed and therefore a further level of communication established: The communication between Jules Jones and a fictive journalistic article that addresses practices of public surveillance. Ironically, the cultural-critical dimension of both content and form of the last footnote is

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juxtaposed with the ending of the chapter which thematizes the economic success of Kitty Jackson’s new film. The integration of footnotes in this ninth chapter of Egan’s novel fulfills a variety of functions that pertain to the poetological, aesthetic and meta-aesthetic dimensions of the literary text. Chapter nine epitomizes the poetics of the novel as the contrapuntal composition of main text and footnotes, which results in a hypertextual structure that epitomizes the poetological principle of the novel. In terms of textual poetics, this chapter – in its juxtaposing a main text with typographically marginalized footnotes – encapsulates the novel’s polyphony and hypertextual character. The contrapuntal composition of the text raises questions of the text’s center and its margins, what is present and what is absent. Furthermore, the integration of footnotes determines the reading process as these footnotes interrupt but simultaneously continue the narrative of the main text. This results in a continuing oscillating movement between the main text and its periphery which is crucial for an understanding of the narrative. In both Wallace’s works and Egan’s novel footnotes are a means to realistically and mimetically stage mental processes. In this way through footnotes the text transcends its textual boundaries and calls attention to the potential of self-narratives to be indefinitely extended and supplemented. Chapter twelve of Egan’s novel, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” is – similarly to chapter nine – subtitled with “By Alison Blake” as a reference to the fictional author of the chapter (GS, 234). The chapter is later identified as “slide journal” – a self-narrative in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. The software PowerPoint determines the poetics and aesthetics of the chapter in both structural and visual terms as the structure, outline, and poetics draw on and integrate features that the software offers. From a reader-response point of view, the understanding of the chapter relies on the reader’s familiarity with the conventions of PowerPoint. The writing of a diary utilizing the software PowerPoint can be interpreted as a form of “remediation,”²² a creative appropriation of pre-existing conventions and modes of writing in a new, medial form. Every slide contains visually arranged elements that contains fragments of speech, exclamations, phrases, and statements. Hoberek characterizes chapter twelve as “homage” to Wallace’s Infinite Jest but interprets Egan’s approach as more radical than Wallace’s. Alice’s self-narrative in the form of a PowerPoint presentation is thus the result of “processes of

 David J. Bolter, Richard A. Grusin, Remediation (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, ): . Bolter and Grusin use the term “remediation” in order to describe the integration of one medium into another.

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digitization, that is, […] the shifts that take place when originally analogue texts are rendered in digital formats.”²³ Traditionally, the function of PowerPoint presentations is to visualize a talk, a presentation, or a lecture. Chapter twelve of Egan’s novel, however, does not accompany or visualize a text in its verbal form but constitutes a text in its own right. As such the sequence of slides can be looked at as being surrounded and interspersed with paratextual elements that organize the communication between the text and its readers. In the following, the sequence of slides will be interpreted as combination of headnotes and endnotes which complement each other. Headnotes can be understood as units of meaning that encapsulate, summarize and foreshadow the following text. Endnotes, in opposition to footnotes, are located at the end of a text and thus do not necessarily interrupt the process of reading – unless the reader decides to simultaneously consult the pieces of information that were appended by the author or editor. In regard to the unusual and innovative make-up of the text, I suggest that an interpretation of chapter twelve as combination of headnotes and endnotes allows for a description of the interrelation between the single slides and thus the figurative character of the chapter which is – similarly to chapter nine – hypertextual in nature, a figurative principle that pervades the novel as such. Similarly to chapter nine, chapter twelve constitutes a fictional self-narrative. The arrangement of slides that are made up of visual arrangements of meaningful entities – despite their sequential order – allows for a variety of different readings and interpretations. As a self-narrative that consists of visualized fragments of information, Alison’s slide journal necessarily results in blanks that, although qualitatively different from the blanks in a verbal, literary text, result in ambiguities of meaning.²⁴ Thus, the arbitrariness and ambiguities which are inherent to self-narratives are thematized. The formal appropriation of PowerPoint for a self-narrative is particularly interesting as the meaning of both – self-narratives and projection technologies – are “discursively constituted through cultural understandings of vision, knowledge, and subjectivity.”²⁵ The make-up of chapter twelve encapsulates the figurative principle of the novel as a whole. Ambiguities that result from the structure of the PowerPoint presentation and the only loose interconnection between the individual chapters of the novel necessitate alternative cohesive strategies that allow for the construction of meaning.  Birke, Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative,”  – .  Cf. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ): .  Jennifer F. Eisenhauer, “Next Slide Please: The Magical, Scientific, and Corporate Discourses of Visual Projection Technologies,” Studies in Art Education . ():  – , .

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Looking at the novel as a whole, the individual chapters are connected through the themes of music, the passing of time, the process of aging, memory, art and love. For example, the eponymic “goon squad” is the inevitable passing of time. “Time is a goon, right?”, a character named Bosco claims during a meeting with Jules Jones (GS, 127). The title of chapter twelve, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” epitomizes the cohesive strategy of this chapter in which Alison Blake, the daughter of Sasha, keeps a journal of her family life, including her parents and her older brother Lincoln who has difficulties engaging in interpersonal relationships and possibly suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome. The chapter is set in the near future and thus – similarly to the following and last chapter – explores how the characters Sasha and Drew, which were introduced as young adults in an earlier chapter, live at later stages in their lives. The chapter opens with what may be considered a title page, providing the reader with the number of the chapter, the title “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” and the name of its (fictional) author, Alison Blake. The eponymic pauses in music turn out to be Lincoln’s passion that constitutes a form of mediating force between Lincoln and the other family members. When Alison and Lincoln are alone, she shares his passion, his father however cannot understand his son’s fascination with musical pauses. Lincoln’s “obsess[ion]” (GS, 243) with pauses in music is visualized in the fictional text in various ways that acquire an intermedial dimension. In the context of the novel, musical pauses constitute meaningful voids and absences that are surrounded by music and are either referred to by naming their position and length in a specific song, or the remaining length of the song until its ending. Blanks and voids are thus not only crucial for this chapter as a result of the aesthetics that derive from the possibilities of the software PowerPoint, but also in terms of musical pauses as the chapter’s central symbol. What Lincoln identifies as great pauses in rock music is visually staged as blank spaces that are surrounded by rectangular borders but are also the foundation for more complex graphics at the end of the chapter. The use of digital technology is shown as “acquir[ing] meaning through a complex series of relations rather than having an innate, predetermined, or fixed meaning.”²⁶ The visualization of musical pauses constitutes an attempt to depict stillness in a graphic form and is intricately related to the visualization of the desert which is visualized in the same way. The desert as the setting of chapter twelve is conceptualized as a space that predominantly consists of absence, hinting at the crucial importance of the relationship between absence and presence in Egan’s novel.

 Eisenhauer, “Next Slide Please,”  – .

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The second and third slide of the chapter can be interpreted as headnotes. The former summarizes and simultaneously foreshadows the structure and spatio-temporal dimension of the remainder of the chapter: “1. After Lincoln’s Game,” “2. In My Room,” “3. One Night Later,” and “4. The Desert” (GS, 235). The chapter is set on the evening of May 14 and May 15 of an unspecified year in the 2020s. Chapter twelve is then subdivided into four parts, the headings of which are given on the second slide. This slide functions similarly to a visualized table of contents for the remainder of the chapter that consists of 76 slides. By inserting this structure, Alice employs the paratext’s function “to organize a text’s ‘relation with the public.’”²⁷ Four more slides function as subheadings that refer back to the second slide by bearing the title of one of the four parts of the PowerPoint presentation. What functions like a table of contents and the corresponding running heads can be described as having a “navigational function,” in that they “guide the reader’s reception in a more mechanical sense, both when approaching the text and when orienting herself within the text.”²⁸ The third slide can also be interpreted as form of headnote as it visually represents the character constellation of the Blakes’ nuclear family. A centrally positioned circular ellipsis contains the word “US” and is surrounded by smaller circular ellipses containing the first and last name of each family member, their relationship to Alison (e. g., “Brother,” “Mom,” “Dad,” and the deictic “Me” in Alison’s circle) and their ages. The word “US” in the central circle is ambiguous as it allows on the one hand for an interpretation as referring to the Blake family but also to the United States with the nuclear family as crucial constituent. Only after this slide the first section “After Lincoln’s Game” (GS, 237) begins, a section in which the emotional constellation within the Blake family is elucidated from Alison’s perspective. In the fourth part of the chapter Drew promises Alison to help Lincoln “graphing the pauses” (GS, 288), the result of which is depicted on four slides that precede the final slide titled “The End.” On those four slides the “Relationship of Pause-Length to Haunting Power,” the “Proof of the Necessity of Pauses,” “Discoveries About Pause Timing (in Bubble Form),” and “The Persistence of Pauses over Time” (GS, 305 – 308). In this final content-based section of the chapter, the slides fulfill what Eisenhauer describes as “scientific vision” in “represent[ing] metaphors of illustration, dissection, and discovery.”²⁹  Birke, Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative,” .  Birke, Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative,” .  Eisenhauer, “Next Slide Please,” . Eisenhauer claims that the change from the slide projector to PowerPoint has resulted in a shift from “scientific vision” to “corporate vision” as it “marks a discursive shift […] from the th-century scientific visual epistemology of illustration,

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The very last slide says “The End” (GS, 309) and offers a formulaic ending of the depicted two day long episode in Alison Blake’s and her family’s life. Chapter twelve thus contains seven slides that can be interpreted as paratextual in nature as they constitute ordering principles that are featured by the PowerPoint software and – as integrated into the novel – become structuring principles of the literary text. Chapter twelve is also intricately related to the paratextual reference to Egan’s website that precedes the main text. On her personal webpage, it is possible to look at a version of the PowerPoint presentation that is not only in color but also accompanied by an audio track that features the referenced “Great Rock and Roll Pauses.” The PowerPoint presentation that can be looked at either in the form of individual navigation or as a slide show which is qualitatively different from the version in the novel. Not only is the audio track an addendum that the readers of the novel has to research themselves, but also, the online version features differences in contrast that deviate from the print version, and it actually inserts new forms of meaning by suggesting certain ways of reading that are absent in the novel. Egan’s website also includes a section titled “RIP” with brief synopses of chapters that are not included in the novel but supposedly conceived of as ideas for potential chapters. This epitextual form of paratextuality highlights processes of editorial reworking, hints at the possibility of a potential expansion of the novel and thus raises the “question of authorization,”³⁰ in that the fictional author Alison Blake is being overlaid with the author Jennifer Egan and possibly her publishers as authoritative or at least authorizing instances of the contents on the author’s personal webpage.³¹ Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad can be interpreted as an example of contemporary writing that focuses on the depiction of family structures and concrete life realities but in doing so draws on a variety of strategies that are influenced by postmodernism. Analyzing Egan’s implementation of paratextuality is an instructive case in point as this perspective offers crucial insights into the structuring principles of the novel but also theoretical insights into the nature of the paratext. This holds especially for contemporary modes of narration that draw on or are the result of processes of digitalization. Egan’s novel, of which chapters nine and twelve have been interpreted as homages and parodies of Wallace’s work, can be read as a contemporary actualidissection, and discovery to a corporate visual epistemology of persuasion, management, and entertainment” (Eisenhauer, “Next Slide Please,” ).  Birke, Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative,” .  Cf. Birke, Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative,”  – . The authors here elaborate on the difficulty to define the boundaries of a text in the age of digitization.

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zation and appropriation of the postmodernist implementation of footnotes in fictional texts. Moreover, in the age of digitization, possibilities of epitextual expansion of the literary text are being created that radically question the boundaries and finality of the literary text and also our concept of textuality. In this respect, Jennifer Egan’s novel manages to establish a narrative rhetoric that in its hypertextual nature stages mental processes, and simultaneously constitutes the narrative principles of the contemporary fictional text and its highly self-reflexive and metapoetic character.

Laura B. McGrath

“Only a Book”: Reading the Footnotes in House of Leaves This article examines the role of the footnotes in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). Footnotes are both a traditional literary and critical form, and a feature remediated by innovative, digital writing. This article places House of Leaves in dialog with theories of media change and transition by reading the footnotes as an example of an intermedia form, reflecting on the book’s construction as a material object, its position within a paratextual network, and its potential to verify. Through this, House of Leaves reflects on the changing nature of mediation, proposing a transformation of and a future for the book. A young man inherits a mysterious trunk, containing sheets upon sheets of paper, all covered in nearly-illegible scrawl: this is the life’s work of a recluse who died under mysterious circumstances. The young man takes it upon himself to complete the work that this hermit began, dedicating his days to deciphering, re-assembling, annotating, and publishing the work of the deceased. He is at once writer, editor, historian, and archivist: he checks sources, he hires translators, he writes annotations and commentary, he restores the original document. Like many a bibliophile before him, he succumbs to a sort of archive fever; his work becomes so consuming that his rent goes unpaid, his meals go uneaten, and his life goes unlived. Even as he slowly descends into insanity, the text expands, documenting his laborious process inasmuch as completing the work begun by his predecessor. He sees the book through to its publication, for the book has become his life’s work, as well. This is House of Leaves, when read from the perspective of the footnotes.¹ It may be Pale Fire;² it may also be Infinite Jest. ³ But most certainly, it is a different House of Leaves than that which prioritizes the narrative that Johnny Truant – our young tattoo artist-turned-archivist – reassembles, the narrative written by Zampanò – our Borgesian hermit. This central narrative is the story of Will Navidson, a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, who moves his family to an old farmhouse in an attempt to save his marriage to Karen Green. Not long after

 Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (New York: Pantheon, ); further references in the text, abbreviated as “HL”.  Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage, ).  David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay, ).

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their move, Navidson makes a startling discovery: the house is larger on the inside than it is on the outside, and continues to expand. Along with seasoned explorers, Navidson stages multiple expeditions into the depths of the house, all of which he documents in his film, The Navidson Record. The house becomes malicious as it changes and expands; an invisible beast lives in the house, claiming the lives of two explorers and Navidson’s brother, Tom. The mystery of the house remains unsolved; Johnny Truant is never able to find it or The Navidson Record. Yet, the story of Navidson’s house – and what lives inside it – continues to haunt Johnny. He feels that the mysterious beast is always just behind him, ready to lash out; he suspects this same invisible monster may have killed Zampanò. Like the cavernous house, the narratives of House of Leaves seem to expand before the reader’s eyes. House of Leaves is not one book, but many: we read House of Leaves by Zampanò, telling the story of The Navidson Record, the film that documents the exploration of the house. We read House of Leaves by Johnny Truant, his reassembled version of Zampanò’s original, complete with his own Nabokovian commentary. This House of Leaves was further edited by the mysterious “Eds.,” who leave their mark on the text as well. And finally, we read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, the novel that encompasses all of these framing narratives. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a particularly bibliophilic text. It is obsessed with writing, writing instruments, and writing surfaces. It is a book that is about books: not only the books found, compiled, and published therein, but also about the book, the material object whose existence, supposedly, is in an internet-induced limbo. Yet, originally published online and a part of a vast network of digitally-produced texts, House of Leaves does not belong to any one medium. While House of Leaves has been called a “networked novel,” I read House of Leaves as an example of what I call an intermedia novel. Through the collision of textual and digital media, House of Leaves imagines a future for the book through its visual and aesthetic experimentation. I invoke the term “intermedia” not only because House of Leaves has been published across platforms and media, but also because House of Leaves shows us media in intermediate stages, in the process of transforming. Furthermore, shifting mentally from the prefix “inter-” to the verb “to inter” suggests that an “inter media” novel is also concerned with media life cycles: how media are born, become autonomous, mature, and die. House of Leaves – part horror, part science fiction, part realist novel – spookily calls the finality of that “death” into question by reanimating the book even on the brink of its extinction through reconfiguring its relationship with the reader as a material object. Much as Victor Frankenstein tends to his creature, Johnny Truant pieces together the once-dead limbs of The Navidson Record. “I’m its source, the one who

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feeds it, nurses it back to health – but not life, I fear” (HL, 362 n. 276). In Johnny’s reassembly, we see the book being brought from death – or something resembling death – to an uncanny lifelikeness. As Johnny edits The Navidson Record, his physical and mental states decline. He comes to believe, “there’s only one choice now: finish what Zampanò himself failed to finish. Re-inter the thing in a binding tomb. Make it only a book” (HL, 327 n. 276). The book that Johnny has reanimated has become a monster, refusing to lose its hold on his mind. The solution, then, is to kill his darling – by making it only a book, that is, “no more than, simply, merely.”⁴ This final solution suggests that in the process of animation, the book has become something more than just a book, and that familiarity is key in the book’s interment. Much as Johnny tries, he fails: House of Leaves remains something more than the book, reanimating the book as a form through its confrontation with other media. As an intermedia novel, House of Leaves stages the confrontation between a variety of media. Formally, House of Leaves resembles a hypertext novel in its multivocality and refusal of a linear or hierarchical narrative.⁵ The word “house,” appearing always in blue, invokes a hyperlink, comparing the interface of the page to digital writing interfaces. Typographically, the novel’s extreme spatial and textual experimentation attests to a production system made possible only with the aid of digital technologies.⁶ Thematically, it addresses the (im) possibilities for knowledge in the age of technological reproducibility and intense mediation. And yet it does all of this by insisting on and directing our attention to the medial properties of the book, demanding a haptic or kinaesthetic reading practice of its readers.⁷ Readers are asked to touch the text, to move it, to turn it, inspect it. While many of the pages are thick and dense with footnotes of academic prose, many also contain but one word, drastically altering the rhythms of reading the text. Many of the pages rotate the text alignment and/ or direction, requiring the reader to physically rotate the book in order to read the prose, mirroring Navidson’s vertiginous explorations of his house. Often the only way to tell the difference from the narrative sections is the font style:

 “only, adv., conj., and prep” (June ), OED Online (acc.  January ).  Cf. N. Katherine Hayles, “Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves,” American Literary History . ():  – .  Cf. Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory, “Haunted House – An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski,” Critique . ():  – .  Cf. Jesse Stommel, “Toward an Interactive Criticism: House of Leaves as Haptic Interface” ( February ), Hybrid Pedagogy (acc.  February ).

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Johnny Truant’s account (in Courier font) of finding Zampanò’s meticulouslyfootnoted book (in Times font). For as much as House of Leaves is concerned with other media processes, it skillfully draws our attention to the physical properties of the book through its exploitation of material forms, shocking the reader out of her habituated reading practices and making the book more than only a book. While the introduction of new media might produce an initial sense of awe, wonder, or astonishment, gradually – through use, familiarity, institutionalization, and aesthetic tradition – media become banal, habituated, automatic. In The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell suggests that with the birth of a new media comes the creation of automatisms – the conventions, habits, forms, or traditions that correspond to a given medium.⁸ In the rehearsal of these automatisms, Cavell argues that media are constantly in the process of self-creation.⁹ Social, cultural, and mechanical, these automatisms are often invisible, or labeled simply “tradition,” so inscribed into a medium’s definition that they often remain unremarked upon, unseen, unconsidered. The confrontation with other media, once a central component of media birth, prompts a reconsideration and a redrawing of medial boundaries; in other words, media confrontation and competition throw automatisms into high relief. No longer unspoken codes, automatisms are now the very formal, material, and instrumental markers that prove a medium’s autonomy, definition, and specificity. This is a negotiated intermediality, to borrow a phrase from Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Marion.¹⁰ Intermedia novels bring automatisms into focus as the primary site of experimental engagement; no longer invisible, intermedia novels ask readers to see the automatisms that they traditionally overlook. There are many paths that one could take when charting the media confrontations in House of Leaves. One might follow the path of the photograph, leapfrogging from Zampanò to Navidson’s “Delial” to Barthes to Chapter IX to the appendix. Alternatively, one might consider the question of inscriptive technologies, or the relationship between classical montage and the novel’s spa-

 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, ).  In drawing on critics from film studies, I am taking a leaf out of Danielewski’s book. In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, Danielewski stated that the visual experiments of House of Leaves are “mostly based on the grammar of film and the enormous foundation of theory established over the last century […]. I wanted to create scenes and scenarios that verge on the edge of specificity without crossing into identification” (McCaffery, Gregory, “Haunted House,” ).  André Gaudreault, Philippe Marion, “A Medium Is Always Born Twice …,” Early Popular Visual Culture . ():  – .

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tial play. Along with Zampanò, one might read the central story of the novel, the tale of Will Navidson and his expanding house. Yet, I intend to read House of Leaves by way of the footnotes, recognizing in the notes not only a major source of the novel’s narrative play, but also one of its primary interactions with new media. To address a novel’s footnotes is to address its means and methods of mediation. In Paratexts, Gerard Genette includes the footnote, along with many other textual markers, as part of the apparatus that shapes the reception and experience of a text, illustrated most saliently through the title of Ulysses – how would we read the book by another title?¹¹ Footnotes stand in between readers and the text, offering commentary and interpretation, shaping the ways in which readers understand the narrative. But if footnotes mediate, then footnotes are also media in transition, representing at once a literary and textual history and also a form central to contemporary digital writing. Traditionally, footnotes perform a supportive function in academic and scholarly discourse. Footnotes testify to the process of constructing an argument, and the process of doing research. Anthony Grafton has shown that footnotes arose when archives and libraries were contained, unavailable to the public; the footnote demonstrated that the author was a credible source precisely because she had access to other credible sources. The historical footnote was, in this way, bound up in the bodily and material demands of the archive, indicating that documents had been seen, touched, and examined in order for an original argument to be constructed.¹² Footnotes are thus tied to an embodied, physical and material experience for the author, as much as they signal the physical and conceptual construction of the book. Additionally, footnotes serve a performative function by locating the author in a scholarly and professional community. As Stevens and Williams observe, “The reader goes to footnotes to find out who is talking to whom, who is being listened to, and who is being ignored.”¹³ In addition to engaging with material sources and a scholarly community, the footnote’s basic scholarly function is evidentiary. Footnotes offer empirical support, validating scholarly argument; “[w]ithout them, historical theses can be admired or resented, but they cannot be verified or disproved.”¹⁴ Footnotes are thus bound up in verifiability, credibility, and proof.

 Gerard Genette, Paratexts (New York: Cambridge UP, ).  Anthony Grafton, The Footnote, A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, ):  – .  A. H. Stevens, J. Williams, “The Footnote, In Theory,” Critical Inquiry . ():  – , .  Grafton, The Footnote, A Curious History, vii.

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Yet, digital writers have also seized upon the footnote (in both its critical and literary modes) as a form instrumental to the development of early hypertexts, recognizing in the footnote a form well suited for addressing media change in a contemporary discourse network. In a New York Times editorial entitled “Old Media, Meet New Media: Forget the Footnotes. Hyperlink,” Jenny Lyn Bader claimed that footnotes, a dying form, had been saved by the internet: Indeed, the Web has not only revived the footnote, it has spawned a cross-referencing craze that renders the formerly complete media event into a reference-laden, link-dependent, link-spewing wallflower waiting to be courted by the next available annotator.¹⁵

While Bader’s claims may be hyperbolic, the footnote is deeply embedded in the grammar of the Web. Footnotes are, at base, a link: they constitute an invisible network within the text, though the links themselves are omnipresent and invisible.¹⁶ Hypertexts have capitalized upon this linking form; the footnote form has been remediated, that is, the representation of one medium in another, what Richard Bolter and Jay David Grusin have called the “defining characteristic of new digital media.”¹⁷ It is no small wonder, then, that novels invested in media transition should turn to a media that has undergone – indeed, prompted – such a change. Danielewski summons both the digital, remediating form of the hypertext, and the material, remediated form of the footnote. N. Katherine Hayles likens House of Leaves’ footnotes to the hypertext based on both form and function, arguing that the simultaneity and multivocality presented in the footnotes is characteristic of the hypertext, “a rhetorical form having multiple reading paths, chunked text, and a linking mechanism connecting the chunks.”¹⁸ Shari Benstock has argued, “footnotes in a literary work highlight the interplay between author and subject, text and reader, that is always at work in fiction, giving us occasion to speculate on self-reflective narration as an aspect of textual

 Jenny Lyn Bader, “Old Media, Meet New Media,” ( July ) The New York Times (acc.  February ).  In The Devil’s Details, Chuck Zerby questions whether or not hyperlinks might rightly be called footnotes. “The footnote either becomes so new an entity on the Web that it ceases to be a footnote or stays so much the same old footnote that it is likely to be overlooked amid the digital glitter” (Chuck Zerby, The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes [Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities P, ]: ).  Richard Bolter, Jay David Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, ): .  N. Katherine Hayles, “Saving the Subject,” .

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authority.”¹⁹ Literary footnotes maintain a high degree of self-reflexivity, always drawing attention to the text’s construction and mediation. House of Leaves, equally self-reflexive, also adds the book to the interplay in question. Drawing on both the traditional scholarly footnote and the hypertextual functions of footnotes, House of Leaves challenges many of the automatisms of textual media and reading practices. In emphasizing the footnotes’ narrative, spatial, and aesthetic functions, Danielewski draws the reader’s attention to the formal, material, and instrumental functions of media. The footnotes use a bookish form to show us ways in which the book is – or could be – transformed by digital media. In revealing and challenging media automatisms, the intermedia novel participates in what Tom Gunning has called the “re-enchantment” of media. The uncanny pervades the entire system of astonishment to automaticity, Gunning argues. Even as Freud’s uncanny experience occurs when the repressed has been revived, so too can media’s initial effects of astonishment, repressed through the development of automaticity, be revived. Gunning argues that the reception of technology allows re-enchantment through aesthetic de-familiarization, the traumatic surfacing of allayed fears and anxieties, as well as the uncanny re-emergence of earlier stages of magical thinking [about media].²⁰

House of Leaves makes the familiar, or the automatic, unfamiliar through dizzying experimentation and the extreme demand placed on the reader through its dramatic use of footnotes. Translated to “un-home-like,” Freud’s unheimlich is the central affective register in which House of Leaves operates, the primary feeling the text evokes through the central problem of an un-home-like house – a physical impossibility, larger on the inside than it is on the outside, ever expanding in relation to its inhabitants’ mental states.²¹ The uncanny nature of the house is transferred to the novel itself: for all its bibliophilia, House of Leaves is very often un-book-like. It is never only a book. As an intermedia novel, House of Leaves participates in the book’s re-enchantment. In what follows, I read the footnotes of House of Leaves, paying particular attention to the ways in which, through this confrontation of “old” and “new”  Shari Benstock, “At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text,” PMLA . ():  – , .  Tom Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn of the Century,” in Rethinking Media Change, ed. Henry Jenkins, David Thorburn (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, ):  – , .  This argument is put forth by Michael Hemmingson in “What’s Beneath the Floorboards: Three Competing Metavoices in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction : ():  – .

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media, Danielewski highlights the book’s flexibility in the digital age. I turn, first, to the ways in which Johnny Truant’s footnotes highlight the text’s constructedness, drawing our attention to the book as an assembled, material object. Secondly, I consider the ways in which the multivocal community in the footnotes draws our attention to the book’s often overlooked paratextual network. Finally, I turn briefly to the footnotes’ evidentiary and instrumental functions, considering ways in which House of Leaves envelops readers in its expansive network, inviting them to participate in the book’s continual construction (and reconstruction). In this way, I argue that House of Leaves offers a paradigm for the intermedia novel, reconfiguring the book’s material future through the confrontation of old and new media – all beneath the floorboards. Johnny Truant plays many roles in House of Leaves: reader, editor, executor, author. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the footnotes is the way that Truant details his process constructing Zamanò’s manuscript, much as his literary predecessor Charles Kinbote meticulously describes his own editorial methods. Johnny’s footnotes chart the path between his initial contact with the book, his editorial assemblage of the book, and his ultimate quest to verify the book’s central claims. In outlining his process of construction, Johnny draws attention to the material constructedness of the book by showing what it is made of and how it is made. Johnny constantly reminds us that the footnote, unlike digital hyperlinks, is made of ink and paper. While it may link, it must do so materially rather than virtually, an occasionally painstaking process: First you must fix in your mind the number of the footnote, say 27, then you have to remember the page number on which footnote 27 appears, say page 85. Then you must turn to the back of the book, trying to keep your place with an inserted finger […]. By this time, you have forgotten the footnote number so you must scramble back to the original page and seek it out again, sitting small and sulkily, in the text.²²

A tattoo artist, Johnny’s professional life is consumed with the act of inking, transcribing on the most physical of surfaces. House of Leaves is no different. House of Leaves’ footnotes demand that we read the substrate of the text – the “bones of bond paper, transfusions of ink, genetic encryption in Xerox” (HL, 326 n. 276) – turning our attention to the processes of inscription and assemblage that so occupy Johnny Truant. We are asked to see ink and paper anew, rather than habitually. Johnny shows us not only the materials and construction of House of Leaves, but foregrounds the ways in which the text is embodied – it has a physical impact on him, and makes physical demands of his readers.

 Chuck Zerby, The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes, .

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The novel’s constructedness is perhaps the chief preoccupation of Johnny Truant’s footnotes. Johnny Truant is meticulous in detailing his process of construction and re-construction of The Navidson Record: while Kinbote had his index cards, Johnny Truant has his trunk full of paper, with writing on all sorts of scraps – including the back of a postage stamp. Stanitzek has noted that paratexts are also internal to the text, including such phenomena as “typeface, paragraphing, the presence or absence of footnotes, and so on [which] mean that no text ever has a truly paratext‐free moment.”²³ In drawing our attention to these features of the text, House of Leaves emphasizes the ways in which all texts are so internally mediated by the very features we merely look at, shaping our reception of the textual narrative. At first glance, Johnny Truant maintains a great deal of respect for the “sacred text” that is Zampanò’s The Navidson Record, attempting to faithfully record and decipher his original notes. He meticulously reassembles, attempting to accurately represent Zampanò’s intentions by incorporating (what he believes are) Zampanò’s corrections. Johnny flags his own editorial misgivings and processes, alerting the reader to the changes he has made. We also see that Johnny’s editorial experience is highly tactile and sensory. He draws attention to his source material in a literal sense, via Zampanò’s inscriptions and inscriptive surfaces. When discussing a character’s paralysis, Zampanò had ostensibly written, “Reston had paid a high price for that disbelief: he would never walk up stairs again and he would never make love.” Yet, the text actually printed on page 99 reads, “Reston had paid a high price for that disbelief: he would never walk up stairs again and he would never fuck.” Johnny Truant tells us that he’s changed the original text, writing, “Though this chapter was originally typed, there were also a number of handwritten corrections. ‘make love’ wasn’t crossed out but ‘FUCK’ was still scratched in above it” (HL, 99 n. 117). Not only does Johnny indicate his own involvement with the text, but that his change is based on the physicality of The Navidson Record. Truant draws on the indexical properties of handwriting – that Zampanò was there, in Barthes’s terms – when he states that “FUCK” was “scratched in” – not merely written, but physically and aggressively carved into the paper. Johnny did not simply read the words for their communicative value, but reads the substrate for its material value, and the inscription for its indexical value. More than a material process, Johnny describes assembling House of Leaves as a multisensory process. At times, Johnny leaves blank what he cannot decipher or uncover – “Zampanò left the rest of this footnote buried beneath a par-

 Georg Stanitzek, “Texts and Paratext in Media,” Critical Inquiry . ():  – , .

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ticularly dark spill of ink. At least I’m assuming it’s ink. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s something else” (HL, 38 n. 45) – and in other instances, he goes through great pains to resurrect missing or lost text – “Struck through passages indicate what Zampanò tried to get rid of, but which I, with a little bit of turpentine and a good old magnifying glass, managed to resurrect” (HL, 111 n. 123). Johnny employs his entire sensorium – his hands hold the paper, his eyes look through a magnifying glass, his nose smells the turpentine – in his engagement with the text. Johnny has made that which is often dismissed with “only” into an active, affective dimension of the text – ink and paper are likened to a body being resurrected. It is precisely the banality of his materials that makes this “resurrection” so remarkable. In showing us the ways in which he has constructed the book – as a physical object that makes physical demands upon him – Johnny foregrounds what the book is made of and how it is made. In insisting on the physical properties of his source material, Johnny Truant directs our attention to the material properties of the book, fully manipulated and challenged spatially and typographically. Even as Johnny Truant’s interaction with the manuscript is a highly tactile one, so too does House of Leaves demand a haptic, embodied reading experience in its demands that we turn the page to read words upside down, employ a hand-mirror to read text written backwards, and flip back and forth to read competing footnotes and stories. Johnny Truant’s ponderous footnotes, often acting contrapuntally to the fast pace of Navidson’s explorations, demand different paces and rhythms from the reader. N. Katherine Hayles has argued that the materiality of the page is mobilized to create a cybernetic loop that runs from the page through the reader’s body and back to the page, a process that links the temporality of reading with the emotional pacing of the narrative.²⁴

Through such heightened attention to the process of assembly and the material properties of the book, House of Leaves demands a haptic, tactile engagement from its readers. We do not only look at the ink and paper, but we read the ink and paper. The attention to the book’s automatisms is brought to light not only through Johnny’s attention to these materials, but also through re-enchanting the act of reading through tactile engagement. In addition to revealing the book to be a constructed object House of Leaves emphasizes the ways in which the book is a networked object through the experimentation with the footnotes as a paratextual apparatus. It is impossible to tell where one book ends and another begins – indeed, even challenging to deter Hayles, “Saving the Subject,” .

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mine where the House of Leaves ends and reality begins. The Navidson Record coalesces with Johnny’s life, just as Johnny’s mediation is interwoven throughout all of the different layers of the text, and ensconced by the notes from the fictional editors. Stantizek argues: Paratexts have the effect of promoting the unity of a text, but they can only accomplish this without hindrance when they are not read in the strict sense of the word as such, that is, when no questions are asked about details, when there are no inquiries into how they function, how they make references to circumstances of production or distribution or to other aspects.²⁵

House of Leaves demands that readers do ask questions about the details and inquire about the function of the text by including them in the novel’s fictional world; the unity of the text breaks down, as Stantizek suggests, because House of Leaves demands that we read the paratext, rather than simply glossing over them. Through fictionalizing the processes of production, distribution, and mediation, all playing with the book’s boundaries, House of Leaves foregrounds the paratextual network that surrounds the book, drawing our attention to the network of circulation and production often left unseen. Paratexts, Genette argues, do not merely present the book to the public and therefore govern its reception; they also make it present in the world. They give the book its shape and definition, not only defining it as a book, but also clarifying what class of book it is. The paratext, he argues, is the threshold between the text and the non-text; mediating between the text and the world, establishing the relationships between diegesis and extradiegesis. House of Leaves disrupts the traditional paratextual apparatus of the novel – that which almost always remains unread by the average and habituated pleasure reader – provoking questions about mediation and reality. In including the paratext in the novel’s fiction, House of Leaves provokes questions about what a book is, and its instrumental function for readers. House of Leaves challenges paratextual conventions before the narrative begins in earnest, subjecting the book’s editorial front matter to the same sorts of textual manipulation that reach an apex in Chapter 9. The book’s title page blurs the boundaries between the diegetic and extradiegetic worlds of the novel through a series of paratextual notations made by the fictional Editors, foregrounding the way that the novel operates within a network of production, circulation, and commodification, often left unseen and invisible. Jessica Pressman has called House of Leaves a “networked novel,” just one node of many in a vast

 Stanitzek, “Texts and Paratext in Media,” .

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narrative web that includes another novel (The Whalestoe Letters), an incredibly active message-board community on a companion website (to say nothing of the “unofficial” message boards), an EP by the band Poe (Danielewski’s sister fronts the band), the “real” literature and criticism cited, the Fellini film from which Zampanò may or may not come, and the early self-published versions of House of Leaves that Danielewski released online. Yet, there is another network in House of Leaves, the paratextual network – both established and implied – through the Editors’ notes. House of Leaves does not only sprawl outward; a text of many layers, it multiplies internally through its use of footnotes and paratextual annotations. The paratextual influence of the Eds. extends beyond the footnotes to the title and copyright pages, as well as the back matter acknowledgments. The title page attributes this second edition of House of Leaves to Zampanò, “with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant.” House of Leaves follows standard procedure: immediately following the title page is the copyright page; though the novel is attributed to Danielewski in the copyright information, even the formal Library of Congress information has been tampered with, as “First Edition,” is struck-through. No separately published first edition has been found. Danielewski did, in fact, release portions of House of Leaves online at www.houseofleaves.com prior to its publication in book form, and later in the novel, Johnny stumbles upon a “first edition” of “House of Leaves with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant,” though he has no knowledge of publishing his text. It is unclear if this is the “private distribution” that the Editors mention. Regardless, this discrepancy between first and second editions, between fiction and verifiable fact, emphasizes a network of distribution, sales, and reprinting – a network in which we, the readers, are directly involved. In addition to their implied, typographical presence on the title page, the Eds. also make an explicit appearance, writing: This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. Other names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, as are those fictionalized events and incidents which involve real persons and did not occur or are set in the future. –Ed.

The confusion and manipulation of the copyright page has thus expanded the network externally by implicating the Library of Congress in the novel’s experimental play. In this note from the Editors, the network expands internally: readers certainly recognize the legal jargon of this disclaimer, and so we must presume that the Eds. operate at the behest of a legal department, expanding the novel’s scope with such a marker of corporate bureaucracy. The acknowledg-

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ments pages further contribute to this internal-external networking. On the one hand, the editors acknowledge Farrar, Straus, and Girous [sic] for permission to reprint an Elizabeth Bishop poem, and HarperCollins for a poem by Sylvia Plath, expanding the novel’s network to include well-known publishing houses. Here, the fictional Eds. blend, in form and function, with the editors at Pantheon Books, the publisher of the novel, in acknowledging the permissions acquired. Lest we think that our Eds. have given way to the editorial staff at Pantheon and that we’ve left the world of House of Leaves safely behind us, we read just a few short lines later, “Special thanks to the Talmor Zedactur Depositary for providing a VHS copy of ‘Exploration #4’” (HL, 708). That is, an acknowledgment of a film that does not exist. Johnny Truant was unable to find a copy of “Exploration #4”; the critics that Zampanò quoted, who had supposedly analyzed the film “Exploration #4” deny all knowledge of the film and of Navidson when Johnny turns to them for verification. Thus, even these markers of editorial solidity are called into question, never fully fictional and never fully the standard marks of publication. In addition to the network of circulation embedded in House of Leaves, the footnotes also place Johnny Truant and Zampanò within scholarly and critical networks, thus conforming to the traditional standard of the footnote. Zampanò’s citations, Johnny’s annotations, and the Editors’ commentary build on a tradition of the footnote which seeks to place the book in a broader, networked conversation. The footnotes feature a parallel conversation, marked out by a distinct space, tempo, and very often, voice. As Stevens and Williams note, the footnote is written by an individual whose own voice has been rendered into a collective voice of similarly educated authors. That is, in the footnote the individual author purposefully loses his or her writerly voice to become part of this professional collective.²⁶

The footnotes engage with a variety of scholarly voices, but also vary substantially – Johnny’s voice as a critic changes depending on the subject matter, and Zampanò’s is strikingly different from both Johnny and the Editors. Many critics of House of Leaves have pointed to this multivocality as a marker of the novel’s embeddedness in a digital media landscape. Mark Z. Danielewski has remarked on the multivocality of House of Leaves, saying that he conceived of the novel, early on, as a sort of theatrical conversation. Because of this, “[t]here are many ways to enter House of Leaves. Do you want to go by way of Johnny Truant, or do you want to go by way of Johnny Truant’s mother?”²⁷ Danielewski is doubt Stevens, Williams, “The Footnote, In Theory,” .  McCaffery, Gregory, “Haunted House,” .

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ful that many readers will begin with Johnny Truant’s narrative. Indeed, how readers wind their way through House of Leaves has become somewhat of a critical preoccupation. Larry McCaffery recounts following the footnotes’ instructions, looping through the appendix, at the Eds.’ suggestion, before continuing on with the novel. Because of this, McCaffery has argued, “I was quite literally reading a different book from the one most other readers would be reading.”²⁸ It is the multivocality of the novel that suggests these varieties of paths, and the varieties of reading. Yet, this spatial and aural distinction is a primary formal characteristic of the footnote in its oldest literary variations; the footnote introduces opposing views and voices, opening the threshold of the text to an expanding, external network. While the footnotes’ introduction of a scholarly network through multivocality and aural distinction might be a foundational function of the footnote, House of Leaves engages this network to a dizzying and vertiginous degree. It foregrounds the footnotes’ form and function – indeed, expanding beyond the footnote to include the editorial paratext – to emphasize the ways in which all books are networks, constantly expanding internally and externally. The Editorial, paratextual markers ask us to see what always exists, and mediates our reading experiences; they rely on the book’s fundamental nature in order to resist the idea that the book might be only – or just, or merely – a book. Instead, it is a vast multivocal network, always mediated and mediating. Finally, House of Leaves challenges the evidentiary status of the footnote, and as such, prompts a reconsideration of the instrumental function of the book through reading. According to Anthony Grafton, providing evidence is the footnote’s chief function. Footnotes are “the humanist’s rough equivalent to the scientist’s report on data: they offer the empirical support for stories told and arguments presented.”²⁹ Yet, House of Leaves refuses this sort of evidentiary support in that Johnny Truant remains unable to actually verify the existence of The Navidson Record, the scholarship Zampanò cites, or the house on Ash Tree Lane itself through his footnotes. His footnotes always direct the reader to an absent referent. Genette argued that, in some cases, we may have paratext without text – in instances in which the text is lost to history yet there remains a striking body of evidence to support its existence, for instance. House of Leaves reveals itself, finally, to be a text of this nature: all paratext, no text, so long as the house on Ash Tree Lane cannot be found. Given this absence of a central text, Johnny Truant is left to substitute himself, his own life, as a central text.

 McCaffery, Gregory, “Haunted House,” .  Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, viv.

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The majority of his notes are not about the manuscript at all, but are about his childhood, about his morning shower, about his drunken storytelling. And this reading practice extends outward, deliberately involving the reader in the act of constructing the novel. The blurring of the novel’s diegesis asks the reader to incorporate the novel into her life and vice versa, even as the novel’s construction asks her to assemble her own version of House of Leaves by choosing a reading path, and the multivocality invites her to add her voice to the fray. Towards the conclusion of his assembly of The Navidson Record, Johnny embarks on a road trip to verify the existence of the house on Ash Tree Lane. Of course, Johnny finds nothing. On the way back to Los Angeles, he hears a band play a song entitled “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway” [sic] – a place and a phrase that Johnny and Zampanò both reflect upon at length. Johnny strikes up a conversation with the band, and is presented with a book – “a big brick of tattered paper” – whose title page reproduces the title page readers find at the beginning of their own copy of House of Leaves: “House of Leaves by Zampanò with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant” (HL, 513). The title page of this version is labeled “First Edition.” Johnny is awestruck to find that “not only had all three of them read it but every now and then in some new city someone in the audience would hear the song about the hallway and come up to talk to them after the show” (HL, 513). Aside from the eerie appearance of a book that Johnny has not, to his knowledge, published, we see in the band’s tattered brick a reader response to House of Leaves, one that mirrors Johnny’s and prescribes a way of reading the novel. Johnny reflects, I thumbed through the pages, virtually every one marked, stained and read lined with inquiring and I thought frequently inspired comments. In a few of the margins, there were even some pretty stunning personal riffs about the lives of the musicians themselves. (HL, 514)

Footnotes and annotations, as in the case of Johnny Truant and the eerily similar case of the band, are not to provide evidence of an external case, but to prompt a reflection upon the reader’s life. Danielewski has argued for something similar of his readers, saying that the form of the novel allows the reader to “project his or her own histories and anxieties.”³⁰ The reader is thus invited to participate in the act of constructing the novel; alongside Johnny Truant, she can examine her histories and anxieties through the creation of her own path through the novel, adding her own voice to the text’s multivocal network. House of Leaves not only emphasizes the material, constructed, and networked aspects of the book, but also  McCaffery, Gregory, “Haunted House,” .

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its instrumental functions – that is, the way in which it is to be read and written. In the absence of a verifiable source-text, the reader is encouraged to build her own paratext, filling the margins with her own “inspired comments” and “personal riffs.” Far from evidentiary, Johnny Truant’s notes are autocritical, offering a model of the way in which the text is to be read and interacted with. The footnotes of House of Leaves represent a confluence between old and new media, and thus offer the opportunity for a reflection upon media definition and media automatisms. Johnny Truant and the Editors thus reveal to us what the book is and what it can do. Through embracing and challenging the traditional forms of the footnotes, they draw attention to the book as a material object, emphasizing the ways in which it is constructed, networked, and always mediating. As a transmedia novel, House of Leaves is consequently participating in a re-animation, a re-enchantment of the book: to see the medium for what it is, and for what it might be – for how it might be transformed, and for how it might transform.

III Creating Another Voice for the Self

Patrick O’Donnell

The Novel as Note: Pale Fire and its Aftermath The essay discusses Nabokov’s elaborate parody of annotation in Pale Fire (1962) as a work that continuously and in multiple ways transgresses the boundaries between author, reader, and text, and between art and life. The status of the “primary” and “secondary” are put into question in a novel where one author, by means of annotation and commentary, converts the art of another author into a coded transcription of his own biography. Charles Kinbote’s prose annotations to John Shade’s poetic elegy both radically depart from the contexts and meanings of Shade’s poem, and echo its obsessions: the relation between life and art; the alienation of the artist; the capacities of narrative to make sensible order out of the chaos of experience. To the extent that Charles Kinbote is an editor and annotator, the conundrums of his authorial takeover are replicated to some degree in two remarkable works published in the wake of Pale Fire, Alfred Appel’s The Annotated Lolita (1970) and Nabokov’s final, fragmentary novel, The Original of Laura (2008), organized, edited, and introduced by his son Dmitri. Both of these works bear Kinbotian earmarks containing paratextual marginalia, notes and commentary upon a “primary” text upon which they intrude and over which they attempt to exert forms of editorial and hermeneutic authority. Taken together, Pale Fire, The Annotated Lolita, and The Original of Laura compel both internal and extra-diegetical reflections on the nature of writing per se, as supplementary and parasitical in a transformation of life into art that confers a paradoxical primary upon the latter. As in all things literary, Vladimir Nabokov had strong opinions about footnotes. Of these complex devices, about which Noel Coward famously remarked that having to read them “resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love,” Nabokov stated in an article on the challenges of translating Eugene Onegin: “I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity.”¹ In Pale Fire, Nabokov’s mad parody of the parasitical relation between author and critic, and between text and commentary, Charles Kinbote – either a lunatic  Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” Partisan Review  ():  – , .

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or the exiled monarch of the fabled kingdom of Zembla (or both) – interprets a line of John Shade’s “Pale Fire,” 999-line elegy in four cantos as referring to the poet’s sense that “human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”² Elsewhere, the commentator himself, mockingly echoing Nabokov’s sublimation of footnotes as the translator of Pushkin’s novel in verse, writes that future translators of Shade’s last masterpiece will have trouble with Shade’s recognition that what he thought was evidence of the afterlife – the vision of a fountain in the newspaper account of the near-death experience of one “Mrs. Z” that seems to match an image he has seen during his own closecall heart attack – is based on a typo that converted “fountain” to “mountain”: “Life Everlasting – based on a misprint!” (PF, 62). Kinbote’s gloss on the line reads: “Translators of Shade’s poem are bound to have trouble with the transformation, at one stroke, of ‘mountain’ into ‘fountain’ […] so the translator will have to put it into one of those footnotes that are the rogue’s galleries of words” (PF, 260). Footnotes as the skyscrapers in the city of words, as the signifiers of one’s progress through existence, as textual criminals: for Nabokov, they seem to exist as mutable texts that are neither substitutive nor supplementary, both interruptive or digressive, and the main game, the primary text of book and life. Pale Fire can be considered Nabokov’s most elaborate reflection on the variable status of the footnote, and by extension, all textual elements usually considered to be marginal and supplementary: commentary, annotation, epigraph, headnote, preface, postface, introduction, index, and marginalia – those sidebar scribblings that occur in the always too-narrow space between the last letter of a printed line and the edge of the book. Formally, the novel exists in two parts. Constituting roughly twenty percent of the novel is the incomplete autobiographical elegy of a minor academic poet who has been murdered by a mysterious gunman in a case of mistaken identity, and whose work is something of a cross between that of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. Constituting the remaining eighty percent is an Epigraph (from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson), Foreword, Commentary, and Index to “Pale Fire” penned by Shade’s next-door neighbor, the sycophantic Charles Kinbote, who, in a series of increasingly digressive annotations and footnotes to scattered lines of the poem, extrapolates his own fantastic autobiography as the exiled king of “distant dim Zembla” (PF, 78). In effect, on a structural level, the novel inverts the relation between text and note, transforming the supplementary into the primary text, and trumping the poet’s rendition of his poetic vocation, his obsession with death, and his struggle

 Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage, ): ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “PF”.

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over the loss of his daughter, who has committed suicide by drowning herself in the local lake, with the commentator/critic’s baroque invocation of his former life in Zembla, the loneliness of exile, and the memory of a royal father. This narrative inversion in which the “secondary” text overwhelms the “primary” text to the degree that, indeed, there is often but “one textual line between commentary and eternity,” has led to a bevy of metatextual questions about the triangular relationship between author, text, and reader.³ Has Kinbote authored both poem and text, in effect stealing the name of the famous poet in order to authenticate his own existence between the lines and to register the loneliness of exile? Has Shade authored both poem and commentary as a way of deploying, in Brian Boyd’s terms, “the magic mirror of art” to “somehow resolve the mystery of death that must remain impenetrable in life” and to “cope with the apparent waste of his daughter’s life,” just as Nabokov, the novel’s architect, may be structuring the inverse, parodic relation between the eulogistic and the fabulistic in order “to cope with […] the loss of Russia, and his father’s pointless murder”?⁴ To what degree do these questions give rise to further conundrums about intra- and extra-textual relationships and about the muchdisputed relationship between life and art, or their conflation into the art of life-writing, autobiography? For Kinbote’s commentary, from one perspective, can be seen as the massive erasure of Shade’s art and its replacement by Kinbote’s life. Alternatively, it can be seen, as I have previously argued, as inculcating “the dethroned subject” and an instance of the “pale fire” or “magic mirror” of textuality replacing life, underscoring the fact that the text is no more (and no less) than a “linguistic pattern of sameness and difference.”⁵ However one assesses the relationship between Shade and Kinbote, poem and commentary, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand that relationship as complementary:

 The most elaborate example of the skyscraper note in Pale Fire occurs in the note to line  of “Pale Fire,” “I never bounced a ball or swung a bat” (PF, ). Kinbote’s comment on this, seemingly, innocuous line about Shade’s non-athletic childhood goes on for seventeen pages, and recounts his life (as King Charles II of Zembla) in the aftermath of a rebellion that has deposed him from the throne. This long autobiographical digression, of course, has very little to do with line  of the poem. At the beginning of the note, Kinbote lists his own athletic abilities (“a passable horseman, a vigorous though unorthodox skier, a good skater, a tricky wrestler, and an enthusiastic rock-climber” [PF, ]), and then goes on to claim that a discarded draft of four verses following l. , a “false start,” encodes the story of Charles’s experiences during the rebellion which he proceeds to unpack at length in the many pages to follow.  Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov. The American Years:  –  (Princeton: Princeton UP, ):  – .  Patrick O’Donnell, Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary American Fiction (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, ): , .

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either we view the novel as an example of the text divided against itself in terms of which autobiographical fabulation takes precedence, or we consider it as an example of both the authorial and critical functions gone somewhat haywire since we cannot firmly locate the source of authority in the novel’s inversions either in the authorial autobiographical subject or the critical autobiographical subject. In expanding the reach of these quandaries, we might consider the materiality of Pale Fire and a handful of occurrences that come in the wake of its publication, and that might be considered as ancillary or accidental footnotes to its place in Nabokov’s canon. There is the example of Alfred Appel Jr.’s massive The Annotated Lolita, first published in 1970, eight years after the publication of Pale Fire and fifteen years after the first publication of Lolita in 1955 by the avantgarde Olympia Press in Paris. While the Preface, Introduction and Notes of Appel’s undertaking, in comparison to Pale Fire, run to a mere 203 pages in relation to the novel’s (reprinted) 317, thus constituting, relatively speaking, a mid-rise skyscraper of notes, the collation most certainly exists as a visible nod and wink to Pale Fire’s re-prioritization of the relation between author and critic, even if, for one critic, Appel, “in his feeble cleverness,” is to be roundly chastised for not maintaining a clear dividing line between himself and Kinbote by paralleling “himself with the parody scholar […] [a] devious and egomaniac pedant” in the Introduction.⁶ While this may seem an unjust criticism, I wish to suggest that The Annotated Lolita, occurring as it does in the wake of Pale Fire,⁷ can be viewed as a privileging of the critic over the author by virtue of the sheer bulk of the commentary. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Nabokov’s novel positively inspired a scholar such as Appel – a devout critic of the author-centered school – to undertake a project that exists as much as an “interpretation” of the Lolita reinforcing “the dull idea that everything in the novel is artifice and puppet show” as it is, strictly speaking, scholarly commentary.⁸ We take it as a given that any notation, no matter how putatively referential and objective, con Dean Flower, “Review of The Annotated Lolita,” Massachusetts Review  ():  – , .  Clearly, Nabokov sees Pale Fire as occurring in the wake of Lolita chronologically, but also figuratively, in the wake of “Hurricane Lolita,” which barrels through Shade’s life in the year that he has his near-fatal heart attack: “It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane / Lolita swept from Florida to Maine / Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied” (PF, ). There were no hurricanes named “Lolita” that hit the East Coast in the United States in , but of course Nabokov is inventing it in this poem for which he is the final authority as a reference to the notoriety that came with a novel about a man in pursuit of “nymphets,” published for the first time in the United States in .  Flower, “Review of Annotated Lolita,” .

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stitutes an act of interpretation merely by virtue of the fact that the commentator has selected a particular textual element to annotate and not some other. But in the wake of Pale Fire, especially in an annotated edition to a novel by Vladimir Nabokov in which the notes are equal to the novel both in its proliferate length, it is difficult to see how the commentary could not be anything but parodic, the relation between “primary” and “secondary” text overturned. Can one imagine an annotated edition of Pale Fire, thus doubling the stakes of such inversions? Fast forward to 2008 and the publication of one of the most controversial of literary curiosities to appear in the new millennium: The Original of Laura, Nabokov’s incomplete “novel in fragments” published thirty-one years after his death with the permission of his son, Dmitri, who wrote an Introduction to the volume.⁹ To refer to The Original of Laura as an unfinished novel published posthumously, much as one might refer to David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King or Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edward Drood as unfinished posthumous novels, is a misnomer.¹⁰ The Original of Laura is an assemblage of 138 handwritten index cards on which Nabokov had since 1975 been writing notes toward and fragmentary drafts of a new novel. The posthumous project is, in effect, a collection of working notes toward a novel never to be completed, and comes with advice to the reader in “A Note on the Text” (apparently authored by Dmitri Nabokov): “[t]he photos of the cards that accompany the text are perforated and can be removed and rearranged, as the author likely did when he was writing the novel.”¹¹ The controversy surrounding the publication of the “novel” is well-known: Nabokov had instructed his wife, Vera, that the collection of index cards be

 One of the many conundrums associated with the publication of The Original of Laura is that of its inconsistent titling: on the spine of the first edition, the title of The Original of Laura appears; on the cover, beneath the author’s name and title, which seem to be disappearing into a gray mist on the right side, there in small letters is the subtitle of “A novel in fragments.” On the title page, the title of The Original of Laura appears, and in parenthesis under the main title, another subtitle: “(Dying is Fun),” a parenthetical expression repeated on the recto and verso sides of the novel’s endpapers. There is no editorial explanation given for the doubling of subtitles for the novel. Moreover, there is publication date confusion: the title page lists the publication date of the novel as ; the publisher’s information page lists the contents as copyright in  by Dmitri Nabokov. For the purposes of this discussion, I regard the date on the title page as authoritative.  My commentary on The Original of Laura is deeply informed by conversations with Professor Heide Ziegler and with the students of the seminar we co-taught on the literary canon at the Universität Stuttgart in the  Sommersemester.  Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (New York: Knopf, ): xxi; further references in the text, abbreviated as “OL”.

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burned, but she could not bring herself to do so after his death, and the “manuscript” passed onto to Dmitri upon her death in 1991. Having struggled for years with a decision as to follow, at least, the letter of his father’s wishes and destroy it, or to place into the hands of the public the final work of, arguably, the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, Dmitri finally agreed to allow the publication of The Original of Laura after three decades of hesitation and beleaguering by Nabokov aficionados and experts who wanted to have access to every last word of “the master.” In the Introduction to Laura, Dmitri Nabokov states that he had been urged by “lesser minds among the hordes of letter writers” to publish the novel, arguing that “if an artist wished to destroy a work of his that he had deemed imperfect or incomplete, he should logically proceed to do so neatly and providentially ahead of time” (OL, xvi) – thus forwarding a rather Kinbotian notion that “art” and “life” can be integrated in such a way that the completion and perfection of the former can be made to fully conspire with the contingencies and mortal limits of the latter. We see this concept of the art as the resolution of life’s indeterminacies – the solving of its signifying puzzles – in Shade’s response to the quandaries induced by the “mountain / fountain” misprint: But all at once it dawned on me that this Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream But topsy-turvical coincidence, Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense. Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind Of correlated pattern in the game, Plexed artistry, and something of the same Pleasure in it as they who played it found. (PF, 63)

The passage confirms both Shade’s and Kinbote’s sense, whether they are two or one, that while life is full of accidents and coincidences, the function of art is to convert these into a “correlated pattern” that confers upon life closure and meaning. Thus Shade echoes the Emersonian notion that nature is full of correspondences to the vagaries of human life that can only be assimilated in language, while Kinbote takes the occasion of a textual accident to launch into a description of the glacial mountains of Zembla and the declaration that Shade is, in fact, “reassembling my Zembla!” (PF, 260). His reading of a book spontaneously conferred upon him by a neighbor in the motor court where he has gone to ground with Shade’s stolen manuscript confirms Kinbote’s sense that the life’s mishaps and the text’s typo – the latter standing for all textual incidentals, in-

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cluding notes and marginalia – are perfected, or brought into the consonance of pattern and design, in art which, like death, discloses life’s plan. In a passage from the chanced-upon book, The Letters of Franklin Lane (a real historical personage who served as US Secretary of the Interior from 1913 to 1920), Lane imagines meeting Aristotle after death as a master geometer who will take “like reins from between his fingers, the long ribbon of man’s life and trace it through the mystifying maze of all the wonderful adventure […]. The Daedalian plan simplified by a look from above – smeared out as it were by the splotch of some master thumb that made the whole involuted, boggling thing one beautiful straight line” (PF, 261). Both Shade and Kinbote seek, it appears, the “Daedalian plan” in the misprints and misprisions of life and text. Both the “primary” text of “Pale Fire” and the “secondary” text of Kinbote’s commentary are implicitly founded upon aesthetic assumptions held by those arguing for the publication of The Original of Laura, who base their claims on the notion that if an artist such as Nabokov wanted to destroy a work “he had deemed imperfect or incomplete,” he would have done so while living. While absurd, the hypothesis of these “lesser writers” exists as an extrapolation of Shade/Kinbote’s ideas about the relation between art and autobiography. If Nabokov, in life, would have himself destroyed anything that was imperfect and incomplete, and therefore, not art, then surely after death he would not want the extant manuscript he had deliberately not destroyed to remain unpublished, and, thus not allowed to come into being as the completion and perfection of his life’s work! Returning to Dmitri Nabokov’s Introduction, other advocates for the publication of Laura theorized that Nabokov, in requesting that the manuscript of the novel-in-progress be destroyed upon his demise, was implicitly following the historical parallel of Franz Kafka, who had deliberately charged Max Brod with the destruction of the reprinted Metamorphosis and other masterpieces published and unpublished, including The Castle and The Trial, knowing full well that Brod could never bring himself to carry out this task […] and that Nabokov had exercised similar reasoning when he assigned Laura’s annihilation to my mother, who was an impeccably courageous and trustworthy emissary. (OL, xvi)

Rejecting both of these theses, Dmitri opines that Vera Nabokov’s “failure to perform” the act of destroying The Original of Laura “was rooted in procrastination – procrastination due to age, weakness, and immeasurable love” (OL, xvi – xvii). And Dmitri’s own “procrastination,” knowing his father’s wishes? In the time that intervened between Dimitri’s opening of the strongbox of index cards that constitutes the manuscript of The Original of Laura and the novel’s publication – years during which he “attacked the task of ordering and preparing” the cards and dictated them to his secretary who typed the “preliminary manuscript” of

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Laura, which then “lived on in a penumbra, emerging only occasionally for my perusal and the bits of editing I dared perform” – he became “accustomed” to the “disturbing specter that seemed to be living a simultaneous twin life of its own in the stillness of a strongbox and the meanders of my own mind” (OL, xvii). In the end, Nabokov the younger avows that neither his father nor his “father’s shade would have opposed the release of Laura once Laura had survived the hum of time” (OL, xviii).¹² With this summary of his own involvement in the publication of the novel, a procrastination or meandering that produced an intersubjective “specter” existing as a communion of the dead father’s text and the living son’s critical and editorial imagination, Dmitri Nabokov signs off with the coy declaration that the real reason he allowed the novel to be published is because he is a “nice guy” and wanted to “alleviate [the] sufferings” (OL, xviii) of those who had been in suspense for years as to whether or not The Original of Laura would ever see the light of day. No reader of Pale Fire could possibly not see in Dmitri Nabokov’s description of how his father’s last novel came into being, incomplete and in fragments, anything less than an invocation of the relational dynamics informing Nabokov’s parody of autobiography and commentary. Nor can we ignore the historical irony that links Shade’s “Pale Fire” to The Original of Laura, for the manuscript of the poem comes into Kinbote’s possession in the form of an “envelope, unfastened at one end,” bulging “with stacked index cards” (PF, 288), Nabokov thus replicating in the novel’s poet the method of his own writing process. The publication of a novel is figured as coming to us from the author’s dead hand – these handwritten scribblings on notecards – the result of the joined “meanderings” and recombinant energies of the surviving son. We hear in Dmitri Nabokov’s evocative hauntology the first (and putatively last, unprinted) line of “Pale Fire,” “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane” (PF, 33), which seems to eerily correspond with Dmitri’s reference to the “penumbra” and “specter of the poem” and the prosopopoeiac gesture of addressing his father’s “shade,” not accidentally bearing in form a nominal resemblance to the author of “Pale Fire.” Manuscript, novel, poem, and poet are merged in these images of the relation between life and death figured as the mir-

 His invocation of “the hum of time” hints at the possibility that Dmitri Nabokov is up to some of his father’s old tricks by inserting a parodic, intertextual echo of the “Hum” of Lolita, Humbert Humbert, ostensibly another madman of the Kinbotian order who very likely writes the introduction to his confessions to follow from a psychiatric ward. This suggests that Dmitri may be implicitly paralleling the son-father relationship to that of the Introduction and the “original,” imitation by parody – the ventriloquy of the father’s voice – as it were, becoming in this instance a sincere form of flattery.

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rored medium of the work of art, which exists both as a form of continuance extending into the afterlife, as well as that which mediates between life and death, converting life’s catastrophes into the illusion of art’s sensible patterns and transparencies.¹³ Lurking in the interstices of the Introduction to The Original of Laura is the somewhat awkward figure of Dmitri himself, son to father, living to dead, editor to author, attempting, Hamlet-like, to understand the will of his father’s ghost – waiting, waiting, waiting, until procrastination will serve no longer to stave off the inevitable encounter with his own mortality (Dmitri was to die at the age of 78, just a few scant years after the publication of Laura).¹⁴ There seems to be much of Kinbote as well in the Introduction. On the one hand, there is the faithful editor keeping his father’s spirit alive, “ordering and preparing” the index cards for publication (but according to what intention or logic is not clear), engaging in the “bits” of light editing that he “dared perform.” This can certainly be viewed as a moving collaboration between two generations of Nabokovs, the son complementing the work of the father in assembling a novel in fragments that exists, when published, as a complete documentation of his father’s final labors, the capstone of his canon and career, even if the novel itself is incomplete. Within this contradiction, The Original of Laura fulfills the conditions of the tautology enunciated by the “lesser minds” who plagued Dmitri: with its publication, it substantiates its own perfection and totality, thus serving as the embodiment of the artist’s intention and will in life, all counter-statements to his wife to the contrary. But the Introduction to this generational assemblage also reveals the Kinbotian aspects of this effort. Dmitri solely possesses and treasures the strongbox during the years before the novel’s publication, just as Kinbote possesses Shade’s stolen manuscript; thus, both

 In a blog/news piece on Dmitri Nabokov, Matt Evans aptly characterizes what he believes to be Vladimir Nabokov’s sense of the relationship between life, death, and the work of the artist clearly applicable to Pale Fire: “When the man who dies is an author, however, there is in addition to his life’s story, a kind of amber preservation of his imaginative essence, his living oeuvre, his mind. This is something vital and real. It has the power to catalyze imaginations: to live. The intersections of an author’s life story with his works of imagination form a tessellated pattern whose shape reveals something wholly unique: the meaning of that life. Vladimir described this as ‘a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap’ ” (Matt Evans, “I Will Sing When You’re All Dead” [ November ] The Morning News [acc.  February ]). Evans’ citation of the famous phrase from “Vladimir” comes from Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Vintage, ): .  Evans, “I Will Sing When You’re All Dead” devotes much of his essay on Dmitri Nabokov’s life to his frequent brushes with death in his career as a mountain climber, race car driver, and speedboat pilot, along with his safer career as an opera singer and translator.

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are the arbiters of how and when the secreted text is seen. True, Kinbote steals “Pale Fire” while Dmitri inherits The Original of Laura (though one could argue he shouldn’t have, had his father’s orders been strictly followed); and while Kinbote overwhelms the original of Shade’s poem with an interpretation and commentary that converts Shade’s autobiography into his own, Dmitri positions himself as attempting to be as faithful as possible to the textual remainder of his father’s artistry. He physically reproduces the original of Laura by insisting on the publication of the original index cards scanned into the text precisely as they existed for all of those years in the strongbox, yet paradoxically releases all control over the structure of the text in giving readers permission to rearrange the cards at will as they sort through their own strongbox of a novel. At the same time, in the Introduction, Dmitri Nabokov uses the occasion of the novel’s publication to formulate a surprisingly intimate and revealing commentary on his relationship to both of his parents, particularly to his father, whose image and specter haunt him. In large part, the Introduction to The Original of Laura integrates Dmitri’s life with Vladimir’s art, as the son transforms the occasion of introducing the father’s text and how it came to be published into a story of his own life as the executor of his father’s will and estate. Comparatively, Dmitri converts Kinbote’s parasitical relationship to the original of “Pale Fire” into its opposite: a generational relationship that, in the ancillary work of the introduction to a novel in notes, manifests the son’s supplementation of the father, standing in the shade of the original while materializing his father’s ghost in the text. If we further compare Pale Fire, The Annotated Lolita, and The Original of Laura, we can recognize that in all three works the textual elements of notes, commentary, preface, introduction and index – usually considered to be the secondary appendages of a primary work – unfold and complicate the relationship between the text and its supplements. They reveal the supplementary nature of all writing that, in Derrida’s well-recognized characterization, is all “secondary”: “if supplementarity is a necessarily indefinite process, writing is the supplement par excellence since it proposes itself as the supplement of the supplement, sign of a sign, taking the place of a speech already significant.”¹⁵ Notes, in particular, which are, literally, textual supplements, figuratively reveal the “secondariness” of all writing, in Derrida’s view, as an act that reveals the presence to which it refers (objects, events, identities) that also registers the loss of that presence and its replacement by the signs of textual inscriptions, letters on the page. Kinbote’s commentary (though Kinbote himself would be the first to disagree with

 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ): .

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the notion), Appel’s annotations, Dmitri Nabokov’s Introduction – all can be regarded as manifesting in their secondary nature the supplementarity of the primary works or originals that they extend in, potentially, “an indefinite process”: they are supplements to a supplement. The recessive aspect of these textual elements – the mise en abyme of textuality that they open up – is hilariously revealed in Kinbote’s commentary on lines 41– 48 of Pale Fire’s Canto One, in which Shade is commenting on his youthful ability to imprint images into memory and lamenting his failing vision and eyesight in advancing age: I cannot understand why from the lake I could make out our front porch when I’d take Lake Road to school, whilst now, although no tree Has intervened, I look but fail to see Even the roof. Maybe some quirk in space Has caused some fold or furrow to displace The fragile vista, the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green. (PF, 34)

Kinbote takes the occasion of Shade’s mentioning the placement of his own domicile between that of one Judge Goldsworth, currently being rented by Kinbote, and Wordsmith University, where both men work, as both an example of the poet’s wit (“our poet is less occupied with spatial exactitude than with a witty exchange of syllables invoking the two masters of the heroic couplet, between whom he embowers his own muse” [PF, 82]) and an opportunity to voyeuristically catalogue the lives and habits of the Goldsworth family as he probes every locked drawer and closet of the domicile. The satiric portrait of a mid-twentieth century, middle-class American family in Kinbote’s hands is equal to any of Lolita’s parodies of life in the United States as Humbert relates his adventures with a teenage girl roving from motel to motel during months on the road, but Kinbote’s real aim in this ludicrously protracted note is to establish his own proximity visually and intellectually to the poet writing next door: “The itching desire to see him at work,” often foiled by Shade’s wife who closes the blinds when she sees Kinbote looking at them through the windows of the Goldsworth residence, “led me to indulge in an orgy of spying which no considerations of pride could stop” (PF, 87). The revealing characterization of his snooping tendencies is one of the primary markers of his relationship to the poet; thus his concern, in particular, revealed earlier in this implausible digression from the primary text, with the window dressings of his own house, detailed in one of the myriad instructional notes he finds left to him by the Goldsmiths:

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the funniest note concerned the manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in different ways at different hours to prevent the sun from getting at the upholstery. A description of the position of the sun, daily and seasonal, was given for the several windows, and if I had heeded all this I would have been kept as busy as a participant in a regatta. A footnote, however, generously suggested that instead of manning the curtains, I might prefer to shift and reshift out of sun range the more precious pieces of furniture (two embroidered armchairs and a heavy “royal console”) but should do it carefully lest I scratch the wall moldings. I cannot, alas, reproduce the meticulous schedule of these transposals but seem to recall that I was supposed to castle the long way before going to bed and the short way first thing in the morning. (PF, 85)

Kinbote’s commentary at this point conveys the spectacle of a footnote to a note that describes his voyeuristic and intrusive relation to the poet and the primary poetic in a note to several lines of the poem that reflect on the primacy and loss of vision that spells for the poet a form of writer’s block. In this recession of notes, Kinbote’s commentary can thus be viewed as the digressive supplement of Shade’s writing, but Shade’s writing can equally be viewed just as Kinbote wishes it to be – the supplement to the autobiography of King Charles of Zembla, screened through the blinds and windows of Shade’s poem about lives lost and fading. The forms of supplementarity that Pale Fire, The Annotated Lolita, and The Original of Laura figure forth are notable for their variability, although each registers the dominant qualities of the others. Kinbote’s reference to Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens provides the clue in Pale Fire. Commenting on what he claims to be a textual variant of the poem in lines that refer to Shade’s aforementioned ability, in youth, to replicate precisely in his mind “Whatever in my field of vision dwelt – […]. Where it would tarry for an hour or two, / And while this lasted all I had to do / Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves” (PF, 34), Kinbote attests that in draft the lines read “And while this lasted all I had to do / Was close my eyes and home would haste my thieves, / The sun with stolen ice, the moon with leaves” (PF, 79). The variant conveniently allows Kinbote to recall a passage from Shakespeare’s play that he feels “compelled for the purpose of quick citation to retranslate […] from Zemblan poetical version of Timon which, I hope, sufficiently approximates the text, or is at least faithful to its spirit”: The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon. (PF, 79 – 80)

We can observe here yet another receding textual spectacle in which a retranslation into English of a translation into Zemblan of an English text in the original

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serves as part of the note to a variant of Shade’s poem that exists (according to Kinbote) in a draft but not in the final version of the original, stolen shade as the moon steals light from the sun.¹⁶ The passage depicts an astronomy of thievery, as if all of nature was engaged in round robin of parasitism in which each heavenly body and natural element exists only to feed off of and “dissolve” the other. Like almost everything in Kinbote’s commentary, it reflects the secondariness of his text in relation to Shade’s poem that – by virtue of its very supplementarity – serves to replace the original in a seemingly endless succession of note upon note upon note. Yet the parasitical supplementary of Kinbote’s annotations are also productive of a new “original,” particularly if we decide to locate the authority and primacy of the novel’s text – as we may be encouraged to do through its sheer imaginative weight, its fabulistic richness – in the “pale fire” of the novel’s commentary. It is as if, in stealing Shade’s poem and reproducing his parasitical relation to both poem and poet in his notes and commentary, Kinbote has become the host giving new life to the dead letters of Shade’s poem. As Michel Serres has remarked of the parasite (which in French can mean “interruption” or “interference,” in addition to the English definition of an organism that lives off or in another organism), the noise or static resident any communication system, including textual systems, produces a “difference” that “is part of the thing itself, and perhaps it even produces the thing. Maybe the radical origin of things is really that difference […]. In the beginning was the noise.”¹⁷ In their parasitical supplementary, it is possible to argue that the notes to “Pale Fire” constitute the origin of Pale Fire. While The Annotated Lolita and The Original of Laura also contain elements of parasitical supplementarity, this is not the dominant mode in either. I have already mentioned generational supplementarity as the dominant mode in Laura, where the ancillary materials to a novel, literally, of notes configure a relationship between father and son, author and editor, that enables the completion of the author’s canon and career. Parasitism surely occurs in the publication of the novel to the extent that Dmitri Nabokov invokes his father’s ghost in conveying what he perceives to be the progression from the dead letter (index cards

 The original text in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens reads: “The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction / Robs the vast sea: the moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun: / The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves / The moon into salt tears” (.. – ). As many have noted, the obscuring of the title of Shade’s poem in Kinbote’s wholly unnecessary retranslation of a translation reveals the degree to which he attempts to put the original text under erasure.  Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ): .

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stored in a strongbox) to the living text (The Original of Laura), just as the son lives on as he executes the spectral father’s will, both textual and fiscal. But it cannot be said that the relation between the text (in notes) and the Introduction to the novel is one of substitution or replacement, as is the case with Pale Fire, where Kinbote’s life as an identity within the text depends entirely upon the extinction of John Shade’s life within the text. His autobiography in notes attempts to overwhelm Shade’s, transforming it, word by word, into his own story, though within Kinbote’s words the pale fire of Shade’s text continues to glimmer. The generational supplementarity of The Original of Laura relies, instead, on what Shade terms in Pale Fire “combinational delight.” Near the end of poem, as he reflects on his daughter’s death and his own approaching mortality, Shade writes these lines: I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art, In terms of combinational delight; And if my private universe scans right, So does the verse of galaxies divine Which I suspect is an iambic line. (PF, 68)

Enunciating what can only be viewed as an egregious example of the pathetic fallacy, Shade goes on to write that “somewhere” his daughter “is alive,” and that he is “reasonably sure” that he will wake “at six tomorrow, on July / The twenty-second / nineteen fifty-nine” (PF, 69). Shade is wrong about the facts: he is to die that evening at the hands of Gradus, who Kinbote claims has come to assassinate the exiled king and, bungling the execution, kills Shade instead. But he is right about the afterlife of his poem, his life-writing, which will continue on in the double life of the replicated manuscript and the parasitical commentary. In the notion of “combinational delight,” generational and parasitical supplementarity merge, the former emphasizing the paradoxical act of authorial transmission and editorial rearrangement upon which The Original of Laura depends, the latter more reflective of the parasitical work of difference as Kinbote transforms “[a]n autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style” (PF, 296) into what he conceives to be the “immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people” (PF, 288) that would result in a “romaunt about the King of Zembla” and figure forth “Zembla the fair” (PF, 295 – 96). Noting the forms of supplementary in Pale Fire and The Original of Laura, we can observe the twinned elements of Nabokov’s aesthetic: art as parasitical, an act of thievery undertaking by the living and inflicted upon the dead; art as generative and genera-

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tional, the text continuously gaining new life over time through the collective recombination of its elements. If we situate The Annotated Lolita between the original in the series, Pale Fire, and its bookend, The Original of Laura, eerily reduplicative of the materiality of the first, we can regard a more “normative” version of supplementarity in the scholastic mode, where intentionally the notes and commentary are meant to be secondary to the primary text. Yet even this example of secondary supplementarity takes on some of the aspects of the others: the critic or annotator inevitably bears a parasitical relation to the author, but one that potentially develops new significances, certainly “involutions of thought,” and perhaps even new worlds in parsing what Kinbote refers to, assessing the work of the artist, to “pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation […] see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web” (PF, 289). Substitute “text” for “world” and one has a concise description of the annotator’s, or critic’s, or even translator’s “secondary” tasks: to discern the design of the text, to notice its figurations and disfigurations, to explain both textural gap and textual reference. In Pale Fire, footnote and annotated comment take on lives of their own which, reading across the novel’s wake, reflect a relation between art and life, the primary and the marginal, writing and continuance that is both thematically and materially inscribed in Nabokov’s work writ large. Perhaps this is why Nabokov – hyperbolically, to be sure – called for a skyscraper of footnotes, the text as the sublimation of the ancillary. As interference, invention, digression, or explanation, the “note” appears to exist for him as a portal into new and renewed landscapes and revelations that may just be more compelling and have a longer life span than the main text they mark. Who would not rather read Kinbote’s autobiography – mad as he might be – compared to Shade’s? Is it not Kinbote’s Zembla that lives on in the reflected sky of the novel? Or perhaps more accurately, how could we possibly read Shade without Kinbote, their texts, combinational and combined, representing the construction of the fabulous upon the prosaic? In the slight transposition of letters involved in the difference between the words “resemblance” and “reassembly,” and with the notes of what Kinbote terms “the dim distant music” (PF, 297) of Zembla sounding in the notes to John Shade’s “Pale Fire,” we discern what Nabokov believed to be art’s labor as life’s endless supplement.

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Headnotes, Footnotes, Subliminal Notes in “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” and The Kraus Project David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen were friends, and they were both interested in paratexts, although Wallace took the lead in this respect. Wallace discovered that headnotes, footnotes, and endnotes could be of great help in structuring a written argument. And his review essay of Joseph Frank’s ambitious and intellectually demanding Dostoevsky biography not only taught him to use those traditional kinds of paratexts to great advantage but also inspired him to create an innovative category of notes that ‒ to my best knowledge ‒ cannot be found elsewhere (although they are sort of imitated by Franzen in The Kraus Project). It makes sense to call these notes subliminal notes, or perhaps sublime notes from underground, ¹ because they form a spiritual substratum for the texts dealt with in this essay that convey personal concerns and carry autobiographical features in Franzen’s case, but in the Wallace text transcend autobiography and question the very premises of religious belief. In 1996 David Foster Wallace published a remarkable review of the fourth volume of the projected five-book study of Dostoevsky’s life and times and writing by Joseph Frank, Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and Stanford University, which was published in 1995 by Princeton University Press.² The title of Frank’s book is The Miraculous Years, 1865 – 1871, and although much of the book is given over to the necessary biographical detail – especially in those sections dealing with Dostoevsky’s gambling obsession in Baden-Baden, a famous spa in Germany, where he went with his newly-wed second wife, Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevsky, and where the unhappy encounter between the well-to-do and famous Russian writer Turgenev and an unfortunate

 They were definitely inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky.  The final volume of Professor Frank’s Dostoevsky biography series, The Mantle of the Prophet,  – , was published in . Wallace wonders in his review whether the fifth volume will ever get written, since “judging by his [Frank’s] photo on The Miraculous Years’s back jacket he’s not exactly hale” – a judgment this writer cannot share. Cf. David Foster Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York, Boston, London: Little, Brown and Company, ):  – , ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “JFD”.

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and impoverished Dostoevsky took place – more than a third of this fourth volume is devoted to close readings of Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, The Eternal Husband, and Demons. Wallace is fascinated by the fact that Frank uses “Dostoevsky’s fiction as a kind of bridge between two distinct ways of interpreting literature, a purely formal aesthetic approach vs. a socialdash-ideological criticism that cares only about thematics and the philosophical assumptions behind them” (JFD, 256). He is also personally intrigued by the possibility of using the theory-adverse, exploratory and empathetic text by Joseph Frank as a bridge between his own and Dostoevsky’s concerns regarding deeply troubling moral issues on the one hand and an ideologically distant social and political context on the other hand which Wallace feels the need to illuminate before he may even address those moral issues. This is one of the reasons why Wallace deals at length with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) – despite the fact that the novella is not discussed by Frank in the volume under review, but in the earlier third installment of his Dostoevsky biography, subtitled The Stir of Liberation, 1860 – 1865. Dostoevsky’s unnamed Underground Man adheres to a philosophy of “rational egoism,” a rather simplistic belief in science and rationality as sufficient means to unravel the complexities of the human condition. His main political target in creating the figure of the Underground Man was Nikolay Chernyshevsky, one of Russia’s “new men” of the 1860s, who had written a highly influential novel called What Is to Be Done? (1863) that gripped the imagination of its young readers: All one had to do was accept a rigorous egoism as the norm of one’s behavior, and then believe that a ‘rational’ egoism compels one, by the sheer force of logic, always to identify self-interest with that of the greatest good of the greatest number.³

Dostoevsky’s Underground Man takes this belief to heart and follows it religiously, but the depiction of his life is not simply a parody of that of Chernyshevsky’s characters; instead, the Underground Man is a suffering human being who, by carrying the logical presuppositions and possibilities of rational egoism to their consistent conclusion, becomes completely self-destructive. In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky the passionate novelist overpowers Dostoevsky the able satirist; his Underground Man has not only become one of the great archetypal creations of modern literature, but a troubling figure for David Foster Wallace, who probably viewed him as the great tempter in a spiritual desert. Dosto Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation,  –  (Princeton: Princeton UP, ): .

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evsky’s combined genius and courage seem to have spoken directly to Wallace’s mind. Like Dostoevsky, he, too, was faced with an influential literature of his times, a literature that called itself postmodern, which for him had become too theory-oriented, intertextual and non-committed to be taken seriously: [W]ho is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that? How ‒ for a writer today, even a talented writer today ‒ to get up the guts to even try? There are no formulas or guarantees. There are, however, models. (JFD, 274)

Dostoevsky is such a model, and Wallace is deeply grateful to Joseph Frank for his life-long dedication to the Russian novelist, his rare academic standing, and his superb biographical and interpretative skills that put it out of the question that anyone should laugh at this particular critic, who obviously not only seems to admire but actually to revere Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. David Foster Wallace peppers his review essay with notes – headnotes and footnotes (plus what I shall call “subliminal notes”). The headnotes and footnotes establish the double ideological context which, for Dostoevsky, was supplied by the admiration of Chernyshevsky by the readers of his time and which, for Wallace, is marked by the pervasive irony of his postmodernist predecessors. With regard to headnotes, Wallace juxtaposes a quote from Dostoevsky’s era and one from his own times: Both quotes together, one from Edward Dahlberg’s “Can These Bones Live?” (1960) and one from Ivan Turgenev’s nihilistic novel, Fathers and Sons (1862), create a negative foil for Dostoevsky’s (and Wallace’s) spirituality. Dahlberg denies the influence of genius,⁴ Turgenev the value of courage.⁵ By quoting from, and only tacitly disagreeing with, these

 More precisely, Dahlberg maintains that “the citizen” secures himself against genius by turning genius into an icon. Criticizing this cowardly attitude, Wallace nevertheless agrees with Dahlberg as to its effect: “Dahlberg is mostly right, I think. To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people” (JFD, ).  Wallace notes in footnote  that “[t]he mature, postconversion Dostoevsky’s particular foes were the Nihilists, the radical progeny of the s’ yuppie socialists, whose name (i. e., the Nihilists’ name) comes from the same all-negating speech in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons that got quoted at the outset” (JFD, n. ). But while in the text proper Wallace calls Turgenev one of the “lesser lights” – as compared to Gogol or Dostoevsky – even those “lesser lights” appear to him morally superior to “many of the novelists of our own place and time [who] look so thematically shallow and lightweight, so morally impoverished” (JFD, ). It seems apparent to me that Wallace is mounting a gradual attack on postmodernist authors and postmodernism in this

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widely accepted writers, Wallace indirectly points out the dangers of siding with a writer like Dostoevsky in postmodernist times and to the possibility of being seen as a writer who “would be (and this is our own age’s truest vision of hell) laughed out of town” (JFD, 273).⁶ Wallace thus undermines the accepted function of headnotes, which tend to sum up the following argument, and replaces it with a cautionary strategy. His footnotes are also employed in non-customary fashion. In these footnotes, Wallace first names and then subtly dismisses any prejudices the reader may have formed against an author like Dostoevsky. By describing at length, in footnotes 7, 7(a) and 7(b), what the New Critics call the Intentional Fallacy (“The judging of the meaning or success of a work of art by the author’s expressed or ostensible intention in producing it” [JFD, 259]) and the Affective Fallacy (“The judging of a work of art in terms of its results, especially its emotional effect” [JFD, 259]), Wallace in fact draws the attention of the reader to the potential invalidity of these Fallacies and thus manages to praise Frank for not heeding them (JFD, n. 7a; n. 7b). Instead, Frank’s alleged project, according to Wallace, is to “trace and explain the novels’ genesis out of Dostoevsky’s own ideological engagement with Russian history and culture” (JFD, 259). Taking into account the not improbable case that the reader will find the difficulty of Dostoevsky’s style and the complexity of his argument off-putting, Wallace then embarks on a long discussion (JFD, n. 11– 13) of the intricacies of the Russian language and the either incompetent (Constance Garnett) or at any rate not completely satisfying (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) English translations of Dostoevsky’s work. The difficulty in understanding Dostoevsky is thereby blamed on the clunkiness (one of Wallace’s favorite words) of the translations of his novels. Not completely, however. In the regular text of the essay Wallace slyly admits that Dostoevsky was a contradictory character and hard to like: vain about his literary fame, insecure about what he saw as his artistic inadequacies, incompetent regarding money matters, down-trodden and full of despair, yet sometimes also strangely illuminated during his epileptic seizures – to the point of mystical insight. It does not seem surprising under those circumstances that some of the incredible suffering and drama of Dostoevsky’s life – his mock execution of 22 December 1849, “a five- or ten-minute interval

essay, although he does not mention the term very often, and when he does, he will add something like footnote : “(whatever exactly that is)” (JFD, n. ).  Wallace’s approach is thus much more oblique, considerate and complex regarding Dostoevsky’s moral values than, say, a straightforward one like that of John Gardner, who in On Moral Fiction () also championed the Russian writers of the nineteenth century, especially Tolstoy, and set them up as mentors for American readers.

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during which this weak, neurotic, self-involved young writer believed he was about to die” (JFD, 269), followed by a decade of severe imprisonment in Siberia – spills over into the life of his characters.⁷ Taking up the lead of Joseph Frank, Wallace, rather than simply dismissing the Intentional and Affective Fallacies, revises the methodology of his footnotes in order to attack Dostoevsky’s potential detractors. It seems fair to assume that Wallace was aware of the liberty he was taking, but he felt safe by this time; he knew he had gained the attention of his readers, if they had read this far, and footnotes need not exhibit a particular “style” to begin with. Thus, playfully titillating the reader, Wallace now even indulges in some juicy bits of gossip about Dostoevsky: “Dostoevsky’s disastrous passion for the bitch-goddess Appolinari [sic] Suslova,⁸ or the mental torsions he performed to justify his casino binges” (JFD, n. 22). By forcing and/or seducing the reader to read the text proper and the footnotes constantly against each other, Wallace prepares the reader for the final decisive attack on his willing suspension of disbelief: What seems most important is that Dostoevsky’s near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer – a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory – into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values […] more, into someone who believed that a life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete but depraved. (JFD, 270 – 271)

These changes were slow in coming, however, although Wallace is probably right that they originated in Dostoevsky’s near-death experience. One clear instance  And into the life of his readers. Wallace was spending four weeks at McLean, a rehab facility, in November , because at that time he was a hard-core alcohol and drug user. Shortly after arriving Wallace wrote to Dale Peterson, his former thesis advisor at Amherst, that “going from Harvard to here” was like Dostoevsky’s “House of the Dead […] with my weeks in drug treatment composing the staged execution and last minute reprieve from same” (qtd. in D.T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace [New York: Penguin Books, ]: ).  Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova was a young feminist writer with whom Dostoevsky became intimate during the winter of  – . But “after a few months, her passion for the considerably older Dostoevsky, who may well have been an unsatisfactory lover, rapidly began to wane […]. [T]hough she traveled together with Dostoevsky for several months during the summer of , she proved unwilling to restore him to his previous status as lover. But she did not break with him entirely, and, during their trip, constantly held out the hope that he might regain her favors” (Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years,  –  [Princeton: Princeton UP, ]: ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “D:”. Dostoevsky also carried on a secret correspondence with Apollinaria Suslova even while his first wife was dying (she died only in ).

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was Dostoevsky’s growing fascination with the life and sufferings of Jesus Christ. Before Anna and Fyodor settled for exile in Geneva in August 1867, for instance, in order to escape the constant harassment of Dostoevsky’s creditors in St. Petersburg, they spent a day in Basle – where they encountered a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, Dead Christ (1521– 1522), at the museum. “No greater challenge could be offered to Dostoevsky’s own faith in Christ the God-Man,” says Frank, “than such a vision of a tortured and decaying human being, whose face bore not a trace of the ‘extraordinary beauty’ with which […] Christ is usually painted” (D:4, 221). Holbein’s picture expresses the subjection of the supernatural Christ to the physical order of nature, and Dostoevsky here seems to have detected a fellow artist whose attitude was close to his own. Dostoevsky sensed an impulse, so similar to his own, to confront Christian faith with everything that negated it, and yet to surmount this confrontation with a rekindled (even if much less triumphant, indeed humanly tragic) affirmation. (D:4, 222)

Throughout his four years of European exile, Dostoevsky longed to be back in Russia, but at the same time he detested the Western-educated aristocracy of his country, the class that he more or less belonged to. He hoped that they were doomed to be swept away by an authentically Russian culture springing from the people’s faith. He would at last be vindicated when, after his famous Pushkin speech of June 1880 in Moscow, which stirred the audience into hysterical raptures, he was hailed as “a prophet” of the Russian people. What I will call Wallace’s “subliminal notes” have to be placed within this context of suffering and tragic triumph, minutely and lovingly described by Joseph Frank.⁹ Subliminal notes should thus be read as “sublime notes from underground,” and they present a kind of ‒ unsettling ‒ undertow, a current that is roiling the argument. They consist of seven paragraphs, each set off from the rest of the text by two asterisks at the beginning and the end. Wallace does not explain their presence; he only coyly alludes to them in a comment about the place Frank’s Dostoevsky biography holds for him among other contemporary texts: Frank’s bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like inter-

 Although Dostoevsky’s role as a “prophet” is described extensively only in Frank’s fifth volume, The Mantle of the Prophet, which had not been written when Wallace composed his essay, the fourth volume (the volume Wallace was reviewing) ends on a similar utopian note.

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textual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit. (JFD, 271)

Here Wallace clearly first overdetermines and then undercuts the meaning of his subliminal notes when he calls them “some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit.” There can be no doubt that time and again the subliminal notes break up the argument of the essay, yet when Wallace talks about “sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks,” the reader cannot but understand that the essence or substance of these subliminal notes is truly “sublime” in the sense of being both astounding and terrifying ‒ at least for the author of the essay. The first of these subliminal notes reads: ** Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking? ** (JFD, 257)

Whom does Wallace address? Not the reader, obviously. His own subconscious, to use a Freudian term? Yet what does it mean when we say that “Wallace” addresses his own subconscious? Is this a schizophrenic encounter between two parts of the self, comparable, say, to Darl’s final dialogue between his two selves in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying? ¹⁰ Or is Wallace assuming the role of Grand Inquisitor, as Ivan Karamazov has created him in The Brothers Karamazov (1879 – 1880) in order to question any possibility of the personal and benevolent God in whom his brother Alyosha believes? Are Ivan and Alyosha two sides of the same coin, tossed into the air by one David Foster Wallace? Perhaps we shall know if these are even the right questions to ask when we compare the first subliminal note to the final one; perhaps a development is taking place within the series of subliminal notes comparable to what we registered in the sequence of footnotes: ** Does this guy Jesus Christ’s life have something to teach me even if I don’t, or can’t, believe he was divine? What am I supposed to make of the claim that someone who was God’s relative, and so could have turned the cross into a planter or something with just a word, still voluntarily let them nail him up there, and died? Even if we suppose he was divine ‒ did he know? Did he know he could have broken the cross with just a word? Did he know in advance that death would just be temporary (because I bet I could climb up there, too, if I

 In footnote  Wallace compares Nastasya of The Idiot to Faulkner’s Caddie of The Sound and the Fury, describing them as two characters who were both “doomed and knew it” (JFD, n. ). There are many parallels between Dostoevsky’s and Faulkner’s fictions.

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knew that an eternity of right-hand bliss lay on the other side of six hours of pain)? But does any of that even really matter? Can I still believe in JC or Mohammed or Whoever even if I don’t believe they were actual relatives of God? Except what would that mean: “believe in”? ** (JFD, 269 – 270)

Wallace is clearly bothered by the question of whether moral values can be upheld without spirituality. Spirituality does not necessarily call for organized religion, and Ivan Karamazov, who has a similar problem, created the parable of the Grand Inquisitor in order to demonstrate his contempt for any organized religion, in this case the institution of the Catholic Church. Dostoevsky himself, however, firmly believed that true faith could indeed exist within the precincts of the Orthodox Christian Church of Russia, because belief in Christ had been the only redeeming feature of his fellow serf convicts in Siberia. Alyosha Karamazov is a monk novice, for that very reason.¹¹ Wallace feels and accepts the challenge that Dostoevsky’s life and work and convictions present to him, but as an American writer at the end of the twentieth century, steeped in Western thought and culture, he obviously cannot follow Dostoevsky all the way. In an interview, conducted in the same year that his review essay on Frank was published, he tells Laura Miller: I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. […] I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values.¹²

This statement clearly dovetails with the sixth subliminal note in “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky”: ** What is “an American”? Do we have something important in common, as Americans, or is it just that we all happen to live inside the same boundaries and so have to obey the same laws? How exactly is America different from other countries? Is there really something unique about it? What does that uniqueness entail? We talk a lot about our special rights and freedoms, but are there also special responsibilities that come with being an American? If so, responsibilities to whom? ** (JFD, 268)

 Dostoevsky’s conviction that only Christ fulfills the sublime demands of infinite compassion and self-sacrifice, and that therefore only Christ is a positively beautiful and infinitely good figure came fully to the fore only at the end of the writer’s life, especially in The Brothers Karamazov.  Interview by Laura Miller, “Something Real American,” first published in Salon ( March, ); rpt. in David Foster Wallace, The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, London: Melville House, ):  – .

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Two implied statements in this subliminal note deserve special notice. Wallace does not ask in the end, “If so, what kind of responsibilities?” but “If so, responsibilities to whom?” [emphasis added]. Of course, many answers are possible to Wallace’s question: responsibilities to our family, our spouse, our community, etc. But aligned to the phrase from the interview about facing “stuff about spirituality and values,” the answer: responsibilities to Christ (as our spiritual model) would not be out of the question either.¹³ The second implication is noteworthy, too. For Dostoevsky, Christ was always the Christ figure of the Orthodox Christian Church of Russia; his religious belief and his love of his country were indistinguishable. Can the same be said for Americans, or at least for this particular American? Wallace appears to be rather doubtful; yet he also seems to feel that in some way or other the question of spirituality and values has to be addressed, not just by him personally, but by his country as well. For the longest time of his life Dostoevsky had been an influential Russian writer, but only The Brothers Karamazov and his Pushkin speech turned him into the “prophet” of his people. Might such a calling be reserved for him, Wallace, too? And, perhaps more importantly, could he live with less? Wallace’s subliminal notes basically consist of questions. And these questions all concern existential fears and doubts about the ultimate fate of humanity. They are questions that were raised in Wallace’s mind during his immersion in Dostoevskynalia. Of course, neither Dostoevsky nor Frank can answer them, but both can enter into a “dialogue” with Wallace regarding some potential answers, because Wallace admires both the writer and the critic. “There are, however, models. Frank’s books make one of them concrete and alive and terribly instructive” (JFD, 274). For Wallace, Frank’s books have raised a new deep interest in Dostoevsky and they sent Wallace back to an actual rereading of Dostoevsky’s novels: There’s a relationship set up between the reader and the writer that’s very strange and very complicated and hard to talk about. […] It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone – intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.¹⁴

***

 This sentiment should not be restricted to Americans, of course. In fact it is widely shared by contemporary Western novelists, poets, or composers. See e. g., Welsh composer Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man – A Mass for Peace (). In the Mass’s final song, “Better is Peace,” we find the lines: “Ring out the darkness of the land; Ring in the Christ that is to be.” This utopian sentiment closely resembles that implied by Wallace.  Wallace, The Last Interview, .

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In 2013 Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project was published, the translations, into English, of two essays by the Austrian satirist, aphorist, poet and playwright Karl Kraus (1874– 1936). Both essays, “Heine und die Folgen” [“Heine and the Consequences”] and “Nestroy und die Nachwelt” [“Nestroy and Posterity”] were originally published in Die Fackel [The Torch],¹⁵ a Vienna magazine that the well-to-do Kraus wrote for, and that he edited and published from 1899 until his death. From 1911 onward, he was also the magazine’s sole author. Since “Heine und die Folgen” appeared in Die Fackel in 1911 and “Nestroy und die Nachwelt” in 1912, that is, at a time when Kraus and his magazine became almost indistinguishable, these essays marked the beginning of a paradoxical career: Kraus became “a farseeing prophet whose work was always focused on what was right in front of him.”¹⁶ Kraus always took a stance: He detested Heinrich Heine (1797– 1856), the famous nineteenth-century Jewish poet, who was also known for his polemical and witty travel writing and reportage, who converted to Christianity,¹⁷ and who left Germany to live in Paris as an exile; and he admired Johann Nestroy (1801– 1862), an Austrian playwright during the golden age of Viennese theater in the first half of the nineteenth century, who was widely loved at home for his comic genius and his use of dialect, but not – unlike Heine – very well known abroad. While Kraus thus took down an overrated writer in “Heine und die Folgen,” he championed an underrated playwright in “Nestroy und die Nachwelt,” often comparing Nestroy with Shakespeare. Kraus hated and attacked the Viennese press throughout his life, especially the feuilletons. ¹⁸ The term described a kind of supplement in French newspapers attached to their political sections since 1836 but quickly taken up by the Viennese press as well. By contrast to the papers’ political content, the feuilleton addressed cultural topics such as fashion, literature and art criticism, and provided a space for the publication of minor literary forms such as epigrams and charades. For Kraus, Heinrich Heine was the father of the feuilleton:

 Actually, “Heine und die Folgen” appeared as a pamphlet in  before Kraus published it in Die Fackel.  Jonathan Franzen, The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus, trans. and annotated by Jonathan Franzen, with assistance and additional notes from Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ): ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “KP”.  Karl Kraus was a Jew himself, but he hated the Jewish Viennese press, especially the Neue Freie Presse. One of Kraus’s most famous aphorisms goes: “It is known that my hatred of the Jewish press is exceeded only by my hatred of the antisemitic press, while my hatred of the antisemitic press is exceeded only by my hatred of the Jewish press” (KP,  n. ). In , Kraus secretly converted to Catholicism.  A diminutive of French: feuillet, the leaf of a book.

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Ohne Heine kein Feuilleton. Das ist die Franzosenkrankheit, die er uns eingeschleppt hat. [Without Heine, no feuilleton. This is the French disease (i. e., syphilis) he smuggled in to us.] (KP, 18 – 21)

By Kraus’s lights, Heine was a politically correct liberal and a facile poet, who also happened to be a clever businessman: Heine was the first writer who could support himself through his book sales. The internationally less successful Nestroy, on the other hand, like Shakespeare, portrays human beings as he finds them. Still, his thinking proceeds from the social status of his figures into the world at large, and his jokes shoot from the workbench to the stars. Heine’s writings had, at least according to Kraus, negative consequences for literature; Nestroy, however, wrote for posterity, and Kraus manages to rekindle a corresponding interest in the playwright. [Nestroy] hat die Welt nur in Kleingewerbetreibende und Hausherren eingeteilt, in Heraufgekommene und Heruntergekommene, in vazierende Hausknechte und Partikuliers. Dass es aber nicht der Leitartikel, sondern die Welt war, die er so eingeteilt hat, dass sein Witz immer den Weg nahm vom Stand in die Menschheit: solch unverständliches Kapitel überblättert der Hausverstand. [(Nestroy) limited his partitioning of the world to small businessmen and landlords, to the up-and-coming and the down-and-out, to pensioners and unemployed porters. But that it was the world, not the editorial page, that he partitioned like this; that his wit was forever taking the road from social standing to humanity: conventional wisdom leafs past a chapter as incomprehensible as that.] (KP, 156 – 157)

Jonathan Franzen wants to persuade the reader that there are ways in which Kraus’s work matters to the world we live in now, but the direct parallels he draws between Kraus’s world in fin de siècle Vienna and Internet-addicted America today are not very convincing.¹⁹ The Kraus Project is interesting for other reasons than what Franzen claims is its blog-like character. The Kraus Project is a bilingual edition. Kraus’s essays are translated and annotated by Jonathan Franzen, with the assistance and additional notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. In order to understand Kraus properly, the reader needs to turn to the excellent notes by Paul Reitter; in order to understand the fin de siècle Austrian atmosphere, she  Going to Germany and Austria is seen as uncool, for instance, visiting Italy or France is cool. That is a matter of taste, but is it also like the dichotomy of PC versus Mac? “Simply using a MacBook Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris,” says Franzen. “Whereas, when you’re working on some clunky, utilitarian PC, the only thing to enjoy is the quality of your work itself” (KP, ).

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needs to visit the notes by Daniel Kehlmann, as they are rendered by Jonathan Franzen. In his own footnotes, Jonathan Franzen often enters into a dialogue with Reitter or Kehlmann regarding the meaning of Kraus’s texts. But as the book proceeds, Franzen’s notes become longer and longer, extending over many pages as they become more and more self-sufficient. Franzen is not much interested in either Heine or Nestroy: he is interested in setting up Kraus as his literary father. Having studied Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, he is looking for a strong forerunner to lean on, and the financially independent, satirical and vastly influential Karl Kraus seems to correspond to all his anxious desires when, at twenty-two, he first encounters Kraus in the classroom at the Free University in Berlin. But Franzen, typically, misreads Bloom. At the center of Bloom’s theory is an act of strong misreading, but this misreading is not caused by the anxiety of a young person who wants to become a writer and is looking for a literary father; on the contrary: What writers may experience as anxiety, and what their works are compelled to manifest, are the consequence of poetic misprision, rather than the cause of it. The strong misreading comes first; there must be a profound act of reading that is a kind of falling in love with a literary work.²⁰

In other words, influence-anxiety, for Bloom, does not so much concern the precursor but rather the (poetic) text. It seems as if Kraus’s aphoristic and unremittingly satirical texts are not well-suited for poetic misprision in the first place, and they are hard to fall in love with. Kraus attacks Heine ferociously in “Heine und die Folgen,” and his attacks, in Die Fackel, on other writers than Heine are usually not lenient either. In this fashion, Kraus constantly draws attention to himself and especially to his own language, which he attempts to make more and more idiosyncratic.²¹ Kraus’s texts do not stand alone as poetic texts; they are always manifestations of the voice of Karl Kraus.²²

 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, second ed. (New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, ): xxiii.  Kraus remarked of the critic and playwright Hermann Bahr, whom he despised, but whom he nevertheless deigned to attack in an essay, “If he understands one sentence of the essay, I’ll retract the entire thing” (KP, ).  Kraus was very successful as a performer on the stage, and at the height of his fame several thousand listeners would attend his readings. Reitter draws attention to a well-known Krausian self-description: “I am perhaps the first case of an author who simultaneously experiences his writing as an actor.” Reitter also points out that an essay like “Heine and the Consequences” was heard before it could be read (KP, ).

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Consequently, Franzen often misreads Kraus rather than Kraus’s texts. In “Heine und die Folgen,” for instance, Kraus is poking fun at travel literature, because the reader can easily mistake her own interest in the subject, her fascination with a place she does not know but where she longs to go, for talent on the writer’s part: Der produktive Anteil der Entfernung vom Leser ist ja noch immer nicht zu unterschätzen, und nach wie vor ist es das fremde Milieu, was sie für Kunst halten. In den Dschungeln hat man viel Talent. [The profitable return on distance from the reader should never be underestimated, and foreign milieus continue to be what gets taken for art. People are very talented in the jungle.] (KP, 26 – 27)

Franzen’s comment in footnote 20 reads: But here I think [Kraus’s] venom is directed more at admirers of jungle writing than at its producers. The former are perpetrating bad literary values, the latter merely making the most of such talent as they have. There is, after all, a long tradition of writers venturing overseas for material. (KP, 28 n. 20).

Franzen himself is part of that long tradition. But the fact that a great number of writers went overseas for material does not prove that all they wanted to do was to make the most of their (otherwise mediocre) abilities. Nor does a reader of travel literature necessarily perpetrate bad literary values. Genre-wise, Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville wrote travel literature, after all. What Franzen does not realize, or does not want to realize, is that Kraus often behaves in an apodictic, but also facetious, manner: Here, for instance, he is talking about such travel reports as one would find in the feuilletons of the Viennese press, not about travel literature in general. In other words, Karl Kraus is much too elusive to serve as a responsible or reliable literary father for someone like Jonathan Franzen. He also did not write novels. Franzen himself does acknowledge that something like false literary paternity may in fact exist in this case: To thrive as a man, you need to find ways both to admire your father and surpass him. If the kinship is literary, which is to say metaphorical, you may also need to deny false paternity, as Kraus does in “Heine and the Consequences.” (KP, 172)

Heine may or may not have been the wrong literary father for Karl Kraus, but my present claim is that Franzen still has not surpassed Karl Kraus and will probably never surpass him, because Karl Kraus was and is the wrong literary father

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for his purposes, or, perhaps better: that Kraus can be admired, but not domesticated.²³ In the fall of 1981, Franzen went to Berlin through the aegis of the Fulbright Student Program. His secret goal even then was to get an education as a novelist: “When I went to Berlin […] I was actively seeking literary fathers” (KP, 172). Karl Kraus, he says, became his literary father in Germany. Rather ironically, a nonnegligible part of Franzen’s footnotes in The Kraus Project definitely qualifies as feuilletonistic travel literature: his encounters with his German landlady, his erotic flings, successful in Berlin, abortive in Munich, even his falling in love with Karl Kraus while at the same time venting his rising – but admittedly misdirected – anger about Germany on a platform at the Hannover train station: For all my privileges, I became an extremely angry person. Anger descended on me so near in time to when I fell in love with Kraus’s writing that the two occurrences are practically indistinguishable […]. Real anger, anger as a way of life, was foreign to me until one particular afternoon in April 1982. I was on a deserted train platform in Hannover. I’d come from Munich and was waiting for a train to Berlin, it was a dark gray German day, and I took a handful of German coins out of my pocket and started throwing them on the platform. There was an element

 Actually, Jonathan Franzen was looking for other literary fathers as well. After reading Bloom, the first writer Franzen became anxious about was Thomas Pynchon and his novel Gravity’s Rainbow (): “Gravity’s Rainbow seemed to me a novel of dizzying capabilities. Its melding of the gonzo and the literary was so effortless and brilliant it felt inevitable, and it dealt squarely with the two contemporary issues that weighed on me the most: the nuclear peril and the impenetrably complex modern System that rendered individuals powerless. Pynchon’s narrative voice was scarily authoritative the way my father’s was, and the street wisdom of his entropic proto-hippie antihero, Tyrone Slothrop, was like that of my much older brother Tom, whom I revered” (KP, ). No wonder Pynchon made Franzen ill, “both literally and figuratively” (KP, ). Pynchon is known almost exclusively through his writing; he rigorously guards his privacy. Thus, he cannot truly serve as a literary father, and Franzen indirectly acknowledges this by referring to his own father and his much older brother instead. But Franzen in fact wanted to read (or misread) Pynchon, not his novel. And he had done the same before in the early nineties when he read The Recognitions (), the first novel by William Gaddis, and consequently chose Gaddis as another literary father, only to deny this paternity strenuously later on in a  essay called “Mr. Difficult,” while at the same time acknowledging the lasting influence of The Recognitions by calling his third novel The Corrections (), clearly in homage to Gaddis’s first novel. See Jonathan Franzen, “Mr. Difficult,” in How to Be Alone: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ):  – . The reason Franzen adduces in “Mr. Difficult” for indulging in this ambivalent behavior is put forward in a rude and overbearing manner: “After The Recognitions, however, something happened to Gaddis. Something went haywire” (Franzen, “Mr. Difficult,” ). According to Franzen, Gaddis got stuck in postmodernism.

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of anti-German hostility in this, because I’d recently had a horrible experience with a penny-pinching old German woman […]. Then I boarded a train and went back to Berlin and enrolled in a class on Karl Kraus. (KP, 112– 113)

It seems unlikely that Kraus, despite his being at least as privileged as a young man as Franzen, would have indulged in this kind of behavior, and Franzen adds a little remorsefully that Paul Reitter has kindly refined his, Franzen’s, “theory”: Kraus hated his fellow German-Jewish writers for many reasons, not the least of which was that they wasted what he himself was so determined to use: privilege. Certainly many German-Jewish writers had money troubles, and Kraus, to his credit, was quite sensitive to the problem of penury. (KP, 113)

This is refinement indeed. While Kraus, Reitter tells us, helped to keep the German-Jewish poets Peter Altenberg and Else Lasker-Schüler financially afloat, Franzen here indulges in a fantasy about “penny-pinching old German women bending down to pick the coins up, as I knew they would, and thereby aggravating their knee and hip pains” (KP, 112). As a fledgling novelist, Jonathan Franzen clearly had a psychological problem, and it does him honor that he retrospectively acknowledges as much. He wanted to be a writer, but he wanted to be a successful writer from the very beginning, and being successful meant to him having a large readership and an income big enough to sustain the effort of writing your next novel. However, “it turns out that I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience” (KP, 239). The first model Franzen calls the Status model (a model his father would have approved of). It champions an elitist approach to literature: the best novels are great works of art, and they are aesthetically and historically relevant, but they normally do not command a large audience. The second model calls for a contract between the writer and the reader, a promise by the author to provide the reader with pleasure and a sense of connectedness in exchange for being read. It is anti-elitist (something Franzen’s mother would have liked) and consumer-oriented. Franzen cleverly relates his being torn between the Status model and the Contract model, first, to the problem of how to relate to both his father and his mother and, second, to the question of how much the consumer’s response should influence the attitude of the writer/producer.

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However, Franzen’s distinction seems artificial and the question whether the writer should adhere to the Status model or the Contract model moot.²⁴ Wallace, for instance, was of the opinion that reading and trying to understand Dostoevsky, even in translation, was well worth the reader’s effort, despite the difficulties the reader was going to encounter. It is worth the effort because Dostoevsky, like all great writers, manages to achieve the goals of both models at the same time: He creates important works of art that will also deeply satisfy the reader emotionally and give her pleasure. For Wallace, the distinction is between great writers and less-than-great writers. He describes the rare occurrence of meeting with a great writer very well when he says that reading a great novel sometimes feels as if one were in “a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness.”²⁵ Why did Franzen return to Kraus and the Kraus project after a lapse of thirty years? Franzen had admitted in his essay “Mr. Difficult” that in his bones he was a “Contract kind of person.”²⁶ Did he want to prove, by taking upon himself the formidable task of re-translating²⁷ “Heine und die Folgen” and “Nestroy und die Nachwelt,” plus annotating the two essays with the help of two distinguished friends, a scholar and a writer, that he did not lack the sophistication necessary for a Status kind of person? I would claim that Franzen, after looking over his former efforts to deal with this decisive literary father, was suddenly piqued into a (Bloomian) “strong” response to Kraus by the latter’s afterword to “Heine and the Consequences” that a disappointed Kraus wrote in 1911, a year after he had published “Heine und die Folgen.” At this time of Franzen’s, the

 Franzen formulates his thoughts about the Status Model versus the Contract Model in the first pages of his essay on Gaddis, “Mr. Difficult.” In a recent interview with Peter Kümmel of the German magazine Die Zeit, Franzen acknowledges that these terms are actually those of Gaddis and not his own: “Diese Begriffe stammen zwar nicht von mir, sondern von William Gaddis, aber ich habe sie auch verwendet” [These are not my own terms but those of William Gaddis, but I have employed them as well] (Peter Kümmel, “Karl Kraus: Der große Bruder” [ November ], Zeit Online [acc.  May ]).  Wallace, The Last Interview, .  Franzen, “Mr. Difficult,” .  Franzen first translated the two Kraus essays included in The Kraus Project immediately after he returned from Berlin, when he was twenty-three, and he sent drafts of the two translations to his former college German professor George Avery, to whose memory The Kraus Project is dedicated. However, when Avery returned the – annotated – drafts, remarking that he could see now how “devilishly difficult” it was to translate Kraus, Franzen abandoned the project for the time being (KP,  – ).

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novelist’s, life, Kraus’s afterword gained an important, hitherto unrecognized meaning for him: Die tiefste Bestätigung dessen, was in dieser Schrift gedacht und mit ihr getan ist, wurde ihr: sie fand keine Leser. […]– das Publikum lässt sich nicht täuschen, es hat die feinste Nase gegen die Kunst, und sicherer als es den Kitsch zu finden weiss, geht es dem Wert aus dem Wege. Nur der Roman, das Sprachwerk ausser der Sprache, das in vollkommenster Gestalt noch dem gemeinen Verstande irgend Halt und Hoffnung lässt, nährt heut seinen Mann. [The deepest confirmation of what was thought in this essay and accomplished by it is what happened to it: it found no readers. (…) – the public isn’t fooled, it has the keenest nose against art, and even more surely than it knows its way to kitsch, it steers clear of value. Today only the novel, the work of language outside of language, which even in its most perfect form grants common sense some kind of hold and hope, can earn its author a living.] (KP, 264– 265)

Before commenting on this bitter text by Kraus, however, we should turn to Franzen’s footnote 4, where he himself attempts to explain why he undertook The Kraus Project after thirty years of abstinence from any Krausian influence: I didn’t think about my project again until I met Daniel Kehlmann. I felt that I’d outgrown Kraus, felt that he was an angry young man’s kind of writer, ultimately not a novelist’s kind of writer. What’s drawn me back to him now is partly my affection for Kehlmann and my susceptibility to his enthusiasm; partly the opportunity to understand better, thanks to Paul Reitter, what the hell Kraus was talking about; and partly the beauty of Kraus’s language and humor, to which I’ve attempted to do more justice here than I did at twentythree; but also, and maybe most important, a nagging sense that apocalypse, after seeming to recede for a while, is still in the picture. (KP, 273 n. 4)

Is Franzen saying that Kraus is ultimately not a novelist’s kind of writer, because he wrote no novels? This fact was known to Franzen all along. Or is he saying that Kraus is ultimately not a novelist’s kind of writer, because all he does is to help his adepts vent their (youthful) anger? But Franzen also mentions the beauty of Kraus’s language and his humor. Imbibing and profiting from either feature would probably serve any novelist well. And it stands to reason to assume that Franzen did profit from steeping himself in Kraus’s work, because he would not have been drawn back to this work otherwise ‒ despite the feelings of sympathy and additional curiosity raised by the personalities of Kehlmann and Reitter. Of course Franzen can afford to return to Kraus now. He has become a successful novelist without the help of Karl Kraus and can definitely earn a living for himself by writing novels. He is also entitled to feel like the survivor, literally and figuratively; he can therefore indulge in something like The Kraus Project ‒ which in addition offers him the chance of working together with two

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friends whose insightfulness he appreciates. And yet a nagging sense of futility, something vaguely akin to an inferiority complex, seems to persist for Franzen. Kraus maintains in the “Afterword” that the novel, “even in its most perfect form grants common sense some kind of hold and hope.” This is not meant as a compliment. Apart from clearly betraying a certain sense of jealousy of novelists, who write works of “language outside of language,” Kraus has to admit that even perfect satire (for instance his own work) will often fail to draw the reader’s attention, whereas the novel never seems to do so. His attitude consists of a queer mix of respect and contempt for the novelist: On the one hand, even the best novel will not be able to attain to the pure realm of “value,” of truth, as far as Kraus is concerned; on the other hand, it never fails to speak to the common sense of the reader. Kraus probably means that even the best of novels contains an element of “kitsch,” or sentimentality; and in characterizing novels as being of language, yet outside of language, Kraus obviously refers to the fact that novels are fictions. He compares those who attempt to argue intelligently and truthfully, “jene, die [dem Leser] mit dem Gedanken im Wort bleiben” [the people whose words to the reader abide with thought] with those “welche ihn mit dem Wort betrügen” [who deceive him with words], that is, novelists. The former will have to wait a long time before they become as beloved as the latter, who can reap success immediately, because they know how to entertain: “Die Zeit muss erst verstinken, um jene, die das sind, was sie können, so beliebt zu machen, wie diese da, welche können, was sie nicht sind” [An age first has to rot past stinking to make the people who are what they can do as beloved as these people here, who can do what they are not] (KP, 264– 267). The issue boils down to the question who is the better and more convincing personality, the able satirist, engaged critic and devotee to language, someone like Kraus, or the novelist who utilizes language in order to ingratiate himself with his readers, in other words, the Contract kind of writer that Franzen confesses he is. It is well known that not only did Kraus not write any novels, but that he also seems not to have read them. It is therefore probably safe to say that Kraus’s point of view in this instance is one-sided. Still, it seems that Franzen does not want to battle with Kraus either on the literary or the satirical fields – despite the fact that he has written essays as well. He does not, for instance, write an introduction to the Kraus essays he has translated. Instead, he joins the ranks of Reitter and Kehlmann by writing footnotes, and many of his footnotes turn into nothing but little autobiographical essays. In an interview that the German magazine Die Zeit recently conducted with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann on the occasion of the publication of the German translation of The

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Kraus Project,²⁸ Franzen protests, however, that he does not intend to use footnotes ever again.²⁹ He probably wants to make it plain that he has no inclination to emulate David Foster Wallace. What, then, was the point of his using footnotes in The Kraus Project in the first place? Perhaps we can find the answer to this question in the interview when Franzen confesses: “Mein Kalkül war: Ich musste ihm [Kraus] nur geistig nahe genug kommen, dann würden die wütenden Pfeile, die er in die Welt schleuderte, mich verfehlen” [I calculated that I needed to get so close to him (Kraus) intellectually that the arrows of fury which he showered upon the world at large would miss me].³⁰ It seems as if Franzen still wants to get as close to Kraus as possible in order to be secure from the criticism Kraus might be aiming at him as a novelist. If Wallace, with the help of Joseph Frank, wanted to understand Dostoevsky, then Franzen, with the help of Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann, appears to have wanted to achieve the same goal by annotating Kraus’s texts. The ultimate agenda of the two friends differs vastly, however. Franzen names the depiction of political apocalypse as the main interest that Kraus’s texts have to offer. According to Franzen, the Great War was the Austrian apocalypse that Kraus had been prophesying, relentlessly satirizing the Viennese press’s complicity in it. The subsequent experience of National Socialism, however, was true apocalypse for Kraus, that left him dumbfounded and speechless – although he fortunately did not live to see the consequences of the socalled Anschluss on March 12, 1938, when Austria was annexed by the German Third Reich. (Kraus died of natural causes in 1936.) But apocalypse, says Franzen, is still around, once again threatening Western culture and civilization after the fall of Communism. Here Franzen treats Kraus not as if he were his father, but as if he were his elder brother.³¹ But after the experience of National Socialism in Germany and Austria, and after the experience of 9/11 in the United States and ISIS in Iraq and Syria – would one really want to turn to a satirist, even the best of satirists, to find the means of dealing with the apocalyptic implications of those events? Kraus himself felt that he had to give up his former role as satirist when Hitler came

 Jonathan Franzen, Das Kraus-Projekt, trans. Bettina Abarbanell (Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, ).  See Kümmel, “Karl Kraus: Der große Bruder.”  Kümmel, “Karl Kraus: Der große Bruder.”  Franzen is pleased when Kümmel asks him during the Zeit interview if, for him, Karl Kraus figured as his ideal elder brother when he was young. He agrees with Kümmel. Both Franzen and Kümmel must have been aware of the fact, however, that this idea never comes up in The Kraus Project. Cf. Kümmel, “Karl Kraus: Der große Bruder.”

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to power,³² and it does not seem fair to Kraus, who in “Heine and the Consequences” and “Nestroy and Posterity” had definitely dealt with more mundane cultural issues, to assign nothing but the exalted role of apocalyptic prophet to him. What Kraus had mainly wanted to do during the Great War was to unmask the corruption of the bourgeois Viennese press which had immense political and financial influence; he wanted to debunk Viennese myths of hero-worship while mechanized slaughter was taking place on the battlefields of France; he wanted to expose self-serving patriarchal patterns in the bureaucracy’s handling of the poor and destitute, especially prostitutes; he wanted to warn against the possibility that the Austrians and the Europeans in general would be unable to fulfill the task of becoming a responsible posterity. Kraus the satirist, aphorist, and critic wanted to change the social and political situation in Austria; he was appalled when the circumstances seemed to force him to preach apocalypse. I doubt that Kraus would have wanted to be Jonathan Franzen’s literary father at this point, or even his ideal elder brother. Whereas Jonathan Franzen in The Kraus Project is still looking for a strong precursor and still hopes to profit directly from the relationship between Kraus and himself, David Foster Wallace is simply grateful to Joseph Frank, who, like Wallace, first began to study Dostoevsky seriously in connection with Notes from Underground and proved to Wallace that Dostoevsky’s creations could not really be understood without a solid knowledge of the social-cultural environment in which he worked. Wallace admires Dostoevsky, but he does not want to be close to him: He is disturbed by Dostoevsky’s suffering, scared by his epilepsy and gambling mania, and as an American representative of twentieth-century Western culture, he cannot wholeheartedly subscribe to Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodoxy, the Russian writer’s ideal of Christian unrelenting self-sacrifice. When Wallace calls Dostoevsky a “model,” he means that the Russian writer has struggled and in the end achieved a balance between his moral values

 The Kraus Project ends with a section about Kraus’s famous poem “Man frage nicht, was all die Zeit ich machte. / Ich bleibe stumm.” [Let no one ask what I’ve been doing since I spoke. / I have nothing to say.] For the translation of this poem, Franzen enlists the help of two more translators: Damion Searls and Jonathan Galassi. The essay about the poem was written by Daniel Kehlmann. Kehlmann comments on the fact that for a long time Kraus did not react to Hitler’s seizure of power: “[I]t was simply not appropriate to take the same words and the same raging tone in which the Neue Freie Presse, Franz Lehár, and Max Reinhardt had been attacked and apply them to Goebbels, Göring, and Hitler, as if there were ultimately no difference between them” (KP, ).

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and his patriotism, an ideological balance that Wallace himself would have liked to attain. Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace were friends. But as a person, Franzen seems to be much more easygoing than his friend David ever was. He made some wrong choices when he was young, but comparable to the protagonists of his third novel, The Corrections, he has apparently managed to correct them in the meantime. Karl Kraus, whom he chose for a literary father in his early twenties, because he was an angry young man and Kraus was an interesting elitist and an able satirist, still presents something of a challenge for Franzen, but it has become an intellectual and no longer an existential challenge. Yet whatever ideal Dostoevsky represented for Wallace and Kraus for Franzen, it is interesting that both American writers chose headnotes and/or footnotes and/or subliminal notes as the fields of struggle or competition with their literary precursors while not using them in the same fashion. Admittedly, footnotes were already becoming a Wallace trademark when he first encountered Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky biography and became steeped in Dostoevskynalia as a consequence. (Wallace first started using footnotes in Infinite Jest in order to meet the demands of Michael Pietsch, his editor at Little, Brown, to cut certain parts of a novel which had come to comprise more than 1,000 pages of regular text.)³³ But nowhere else did Wallace insert into one of his essays what I am calling subliminal notes; nowhere else did he question his own beliefs as radically as when he was asked to review Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865 – 1871, for the Village Voice Literary Supplement. If one of the features of Wallace footnotes has always been their personal quality, his subliminal notes in the Dostoevsky piece are veritable exercises in soulsearching. For Wallace, any confrontation with Dostoevsky demands no less than self-sacrifice, a kind of slicing open of one’s head.³⁴ In a superficial sense, Franzen’s footnotes in The Kraus Project can also be called subliminal notes: With the help of autobiographical inserts and little “stories” that establish a kind of relationship between himself and Karl Kraus, for instance in the story about how he (Franzen), in the Kraus seminar at the Free University in Berlin, characterized the figure of the Nörgler, the Grumbler, of Die letzten Tage der Menschheit [The Last Days of Mankind] as Kraus’s alter

 Both texts, Infinite Jest and “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” were published in .  “Look, I’m not a great journalist, and I can’t interview anybody, but what I can do is kind of, I will slice my head for you. And let you see a cross-section of just a kind of average, averagely bright person’s head at this thing” (Wallace, The Last Interview, ).

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ego,³⁵ Franzen consciously creates a kind of subconscious bond between his literary father and himself. When Franzen’s professor publicly lauds the paper in which Franzen relates the figure of the Grumbler to his own reading of “Nestroy and Posterity,” defining the Grumbler as the “abstracted, ideal satirist” (KP, 260), this praise posthumously dubs the young American a member of the army of resistance against the Great War which was headed by Karl Kraus.³⁶ Headnotes and footnotes are, formally at least, paratexts; subliminal notes are not. Subliminal notes are crucial: They unveil the deeper reason why the text was written at all. First created by David Foster Wallace in “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” they indirectly may have caused Jonathan Franzen to attempt to follow suit in some of the passages of The Kraus Project. But while Franzen still seems to be under the spell of Karl Kraus, he obviously wants to overcome the influence-anxiety of David Foster Wallace’s texts. After Wallace committed suicide, Franzen delivered some memorial service remarks on October 23, 2008. But these remarks were not his last words about his friend. In 2011, Franzen published an essay called “Farther Away,” describing a trip to Más Afuera (later renamed Alejandro Selkirk), which means “farther away,” an island in the South Pacific Ocean, five hundred miles off the coast of Chile and uninhabited for most of the time, where he wanted to be completely alone for a couple of days. On the eve of his departure for Santiago, Franzen visited Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, and she asked him to take along some of David’s cremation ashes and scatter them on Más Afuera. Franzen agreed, and his trip thus turned into an occasion to reflect at length upon his friendship with Wallace, the person and the writer: David’s fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates, and yet the people who had only glancing or formal contact with him took his rather laborious hyperconsiderateness and moral wisdom at face value. […] At the level of content, he gave us the worst of himself: he laid out, with an intensity of selfscrutiny worthy of comparison to Kafka and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, the extremes of his own narcissism, misogyny, compulsiveness, self-deception, dehumanizing moralism

 The Last Days of Mankind is a very long tragedy in five acts that Kraus wrote between  and . There has never been a performance of the whole tragedy on any stage so far.  “When I was finished, I had my proudest moment in two years in Germany – one of the proudest in my life, in fact. Hindemith smiled at me, looked around the smoke-filled room, and said, ‘Here’s a lesson for us all. It took an American to explain what we’ve spent a whole semester trying to understand’ ” (KP, ).

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and theologizing, doubt in the possibility of love, and entrapment in footnotes-within-footnotes self-consciousness.³⁷

Only the term “footnotes-within-footnotes self-consciousness” deserves a final comment, but the context into which Franzen places it does not seem to bode well for a positive interpretation of the term. I would maintain, however, that Wallace’s consciousness was not entrapped when he created various textual levels on which what he wanted to say could work. On the contrary, his special strategy of layered annotating gave him the means to structure his thoughts, of differentiating between aesthetic and ethical values and allotting importance to either the one or the other, of creating separate areas of meaning that permitted playfulness alongside seriousness, ways of dealing with popular culture as well as with philosophical conundrums. The essay “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” clearly shows that neither Wallace’s nor Dostoevsky’s moralism or theologizing were in any way dehumanizing, because – as Frank has definitely shown for Dostoevsky in his outstanding biography – struggling for values and spirituality is an endeavor distinct from any personal character traits a writer might exhibit. Dostoevsky was able to portray this struggle by having his characters carry the logical presuppositions and possibilities of any given ideology to their consistent conclusion, thus becoming completely self-destructive as human beings, but at the same time achieving redemption by entering into a significant conversation with another consciousness, the consciousness of the reader. Wallace often attempts to evade this fate of self-destructiveness for himself and for his characters by structurally separating those logical presuppositions and ideological possibilities, playing them off against each other with the help of headnotes, footnotes, or endnotes (as in Infinite Jest). Personally, he ultimately may not have been able to resist the consistent conclusion, but it seems strange that Franzen, a close friend, a writer himself, was not able to read him and to fathom how much Wallace was suffering. This unbelievable friendship deserves many a further footnote or an endnote.

 Jonathan Franzen, “Farther Away,” in Farther Away: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, ):  – , .

General Section

Patrick O’Donnell

The Visible Remainder: Curtis White’s Memories of My Father Watching TV Function follows form. If this is a truism of formalist aesthetics, then the anti-formalist aesthetics of Curtis White suggest that dysfunction follows the destruction of form. In the case of Memories of My Father Watching TV, the ‘form’ that is broken down, taken apart, blown up, is television in its high Cold War phase, but not just TV: the form of the medium, the form of the father, the form of the family, the form of memory, the form of mediated identity, the totalized form of Adorno’s version of mass culture – all entities that conspire to generate the assemblage otherwise known as the social order – are disassembled in Memories. On the verge of the era that would see the development of the television shows that White skews and skewers (Highway Patrol, 1955 – 59; Bonanza, 1959 – 1973; Combat, 1962 – 67; Sea Hunt, 1958 – 61; Have Gun – Will Travel, 1957 – 63; Maverick, 1957 – 1962), Adorno wrote in 1954 that “the majority of television shows today aim at producing or at least reproducing the very smugness, intellectual passivity, and gullibility that seem to fit in with totalitarian creeds even if the explicit surface message of the shows may be antitotalitarian.” ¹ White seeks in Memories to de-totalize the massive and mutually productive entities of paterfamilias, government superpower, and the collective representation of America’s identity adventures registered in the TV westerns, cop shows, and war stories of his protagonist’s youth; moreover, he shows, dramatically, poignantly, bitterly, that at the heart of what Robert Coover once called “the monster image feed” there is a black hole, a vacuum (tube) that charges the medium which mediates – indeed, stands in the place of – the father and the state. ² Memories of My Father Watching TV is in many respects a family history in which the form and structure of the narrator’s childhood is registered by the succession of television shows that his father obsessively watches. In the “Prologue,” the narrator identifies his father as “a man (but not just a man, of course; it is my father – young, handsome, capable!) reclined on a dingy couch watching TV.”³

 Theodor W. Adorno, “How to Look at Television,” Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television . ():  – , .  Robert Coover, cover blurb for Stephen Wright, Going Native (New York: Delta, ).  Curtis White, Memories of My Father Watching TV (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives, ): . Further references in the text, abbreviated as “M”.

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Arrayed around this silent figure are the narrator’s two sisters, Winny, who “might as well have been the infinitesimal black strip of celluloid that separates discreet images on film” (M, 3), and Janey, “sister number two,” standing “obliquely to Dad’s side, posed like a Roman orator, holding forth endlessly on nothing in particular” (M, 3). The narrator himself, stands directly behind the father, “completely out of view. Thus my unique strategy: I didn’t need to be seen in order to be. But if, dear Father, you would happen to turn around, what a feat you’d witness! A true spectacle! Your own son flipping Kraft’s miniature marshmallows into the air and catching them in his mouth” (M, 3 – 4). The complex inversions of the mediated family are evident in this scenario: the television, as conveyance of multiple virtual and visual realities, is channeled and reflected via the steady gaze of the father, located at the focal point of an assemblage of siblings whose identities are framed as forms of transparency, noise, and spectacle. And while the son is present by virtue of his position behind the periphery of his father’s gaze, and his sisters present by virtue of their invisibility or inaudibility, the mother is nowhere to be seen. We might consider this the primal scene of mediation in White’s novel, where the constructed memory of identity’s simultaneous generation and separation is located not in the act of procreation, but in the arrangement of children as appurtenances to the father’s view of the television set. And what is it that he sees, and that the narrator sees, standing unseen behind him? For the father, in Memories of My Father Watching TV, is constructed, as are his children, by what he sees screened on the vacuum (tube) of the TV set. White’s hilarious rendition of the father watching Bonanza serves as a case in point. A “Western” surviving for a remarkable fourteen seasons and 431 episodes, Bonanza portrayed the adventures of a gentrified, widowed cattle rancher and his three sons on the thousand-square mile Ponderosa ranch located near Virginia City, Nevada during and after the Civil War. Ben Cartwright, the family patriarch, has been thrice-married and thrice-widowed; his offspring, each from a different wife, include the stern, studious, black-clad Adam, the intelligent one; the powerful but gentle, bull-in-a-China-shop middle son, Hoss; and the rebellious third son, Little Joe, the kind-hearted lover and gambler who must be perennially saved from the fixes into which he gets himself by his elder brothers. Rounding out this family of males is Hop Sing, a Chinese immigrant who serves as cook, man Friday (with all of the racial implications entirely intact), and nagging housewife. The parodic opportunities enabled by this narrative setup had been realized before White’s elaborations by Barry Levinson in the screenplay of Tin Men (1987), where the following dialogue occurs between three aluminum siding salesmen:

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SAM: Did ya see Bonanza last night? Can you tell me why Ben Cartwright had a colored guy stay over? […] GIL: Ben Cartwright had a colored guy stay overnight at the Ponderosa? […] SAM: No . . . he was just passing through, asked if he could stay over, and Ben Cartwright said “sure thing.” It doesn’t make any sense . . . he invites a strange colored guy in . . . Invites him in to stay. Is that crazy or what? If a colored guy came to my door and said “can I stay the night?”, I’d tell him “get the fuck out of here!” It’s nothing personal, mind you. MOUSE: You’re not a bigot, is that what you’re telling us? SAM: Me? No, I’m not a bigot. GIL: If you’re not a bigot, how come you make such a big thing out of it? SAM: It’s the fact that Ben Cartwright’s on the Ponderosa . . . he’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s not like he’s living on Reisterstown Road with houses all around. We’re talking about the West here. It’s the idea that a strange guy comes to the door in the middle of the West. It doesn’t make sense, that’s all I’m saying. MOUSE: Come on . . . you’re a bigot, that’s what you are. SAM: Listen, I’ll sell tin to anybody … I don’t care who he is. A mark’s a mark’s a mark, whether he’s Chinese, Indian, or from Mars. I’m thoroughly integrated. Makes no difference to me. I just wouldn’t have one of those guys sleep in my house. … I just don’t believe Bonanza is an accurate description of the West. I say no more.⁴

For Levinson’s Sam, the episode of Bonanza that depicts Ben Cartwright inviting a black stranger to stay overnight isn’t “an accurate description of the West” because it doesn’t fit in with what the series otherwise depicts as a landscape populated primarily by white men living together. For Curtis White, Bonanza, skewered for its inherent assumptions about paternity, race, family, and sexuality is, precisely, “an accurate description of the West,” if we consider “the West” to be an assemblage mediated by television and by the son’s memories of the father watching it. White’s rendition of Bonanza begins with the rhythmic beat of the series’ instrumental theme played while the screen shows a map of the Ponderosa burning away to reveal the Cartwright’s riding en masse into the foreground: “dum da da dum dada duddle duddle dum da da DUM DUM / dum da da dum dada duddle duddle dum dum dada dum dum dum” (47). This opening play on theme music reflecting the stupidity of the father (paired with the children’s playing dumb before the father or the father’s deafness to their voices) is followed by an episode in which a character named “The Wild Father” jumps out of the stan Barry Levinson, Tin Men, scene  (acc. June , ).

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dard Bonanza script to relate the story of “The Bridegroom”: the figure of “the wild father” (the dada daddy) is but one of many avatars projected from the figure of the “young, capable, handsome man” reclining on the dingy living room couch. Projecting himself into the ongoing narrative he is watching, the figure of The Wild Father is an outcast, a “garbage man” who cleans up the set of the Ponderosa, an “extra” whom the fantasy Cartwright family never acknowledges and (in an intertextual repartee with Tin Men) never invites into the house: The Cartwrights never took me to their house. I guess I just wasn’t good enough for the likes of them or I was so bad they saw no hope for making me an American. Bloody hell, I AM AMERICA. I take out America’s garbage every Tuesday night. Don’t that make me America. Hell, I am the damned ozone hole. I fart plutonium out of a sense of national responsibility. I keep toxic waste incinerators burning round the clock with my nose pickings. (M, 58)

The rhetoric of The Wild Father is Rabelaisian, Bunyanesque; the weekly screening of Bonanza, he proclaims, is a screening of the nation itself, a narrativization of its paternalistic, homophobic, exclusionary orders, its racial and imperial investments. Imagining an (impossible) episode in which the Cartwrights take him in, The Wild Father envisages being tended to by Doc and fed by Hop Sing: “And Hop Sing would smile and move from toe to toe and squint in his glee, and say ‘Oh Hop Sing can makee vely fine food for Wide Fatha.’ And then everyone would laugh because Chinese is some funny little shits” (M, 57). He projects a conversation with Ben Cartwright (following the theft of a gravy boat or being “caught in the barn playing with the horses’ doodads” [M, 57]) in which Ben proselytizes: Now, Wild Father, we’re your friends. You know that. And we’re just trying to help you. Don’t you want to be like us? Even the ferocious Indians, who leave their own kind for dead served up in the grasses for wolves want to be like us. To wear our hats. To eat our potatoes when they are mashed. (M, 57)

In this unmasking of “TV reality,” the role of the father on the American frontier is thus split between that of the patriarch of a symbolic order in which everyone wants to be ‘like us’ and his abject other, the residue or waste product of the advances of ‘civilization,’ and the voice of its manifest logic. Taking revenge for his exclusion, The Wild Father retells an episode of Bonanza interrupted with a rant on his lifestyle as a father/hermit in TV-land who consumes junk food in mythic proportions and, ensconced in his recliner, watches endless reruns and sleeps:

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Perry Mason. Doze. Streets of San Francisco. Doze. Hawaii Five-O. Doze. Mannix. Doze. Kojack. Doze. Cannon. Doze. Rockford Files. Doze. The Untouchables. Doze. It’s midnight. Your long meditation has achieved Wild Father nirvana. If Robert Stack sat on your face you couldn’t be happier. (M, 65)⁵

The story of “The Bridegroom” appears on the surface to be a typical episode in which Little Joe, like all of the Cartwrights, ever helpful and patronizing, pretends to be courting a young woman who is just a friend, so that Jarrod, the real object of her pursuit, will be made jealous and offer to marry her. In The Wild Father’s hands, “The Bridegroom” becomes a series of rants and asides that reveal the underpinnings of a “normal” Bonanza episode, or a reflexive televisual construct that produces for the viewing audience an American normality and an American past – a ‘normal’ that can exist for us only on TV, and nowhere else. Thus a plainly dressed, plain-looking Maggie, the object of Jarrod’s affections, is depicted in one scene by her father as having “the spinster habit”; asked to fetch and carry by Ben (“Maggie, I seem to have forgotten the cream. Would you be a good girl and get it?”), her father interjects, “Well, Maggie, there’s your moral universe. You can be a spinster or a good girl. It’s your choice. Lots of luck” (M, 59). Yet alongside this delimitation of the options available to the stereotype of the thirtyish daughter of a wealthy rancher in a TV Western (the norm for this particular version of televisual ‘reality’), there is the fourth-wall recognition that Maggie “ wasn’t so stinkin’ plain. Anyone could see she was a Hollywood actress with her hair tied back in matching buns over each ear like stereo headphones. Hair buns=homely in TV sign language. Soon as she lets her hair down, you watch, wham, she’ll be a beauty. (M, 59)

And later, as The Wild Father’s version of “The Bridegroom” progresses from a satirical, if obvious reflection on the coding of TV reality to a Rabelaisian send-up of its conventions, Maggie is depicted chained to the hearth of the family fireplace while her father pitches her to a shy, reluctant Jarrod: ‘Chains, Jarrod. It’s chains. I’ve got Maggie chained to the hearth! […] What do you think about that?’ ‘I don’t know what to think,’ replies Jarrod, a little sheepish. ‘I’ll tell you somethin’ else you might not know about. Now, Maggie looks very proper to-

 Robert Stack was an actor known primarily for his film roles until he starred in the ABC television series, The Untouchables ( – ), in which he developed a hallmark straight arrow persona that he later parodied in such films as Airplane!, Caddyshack II, and Beavis and Butthead Do America.

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night, don’t she. Hair in that tight spinster’s bun. Nice long calico dress that she sewed herself—she’s fine with a needle, Jarrod. But guess what? Turn around, Maggie honey, that’s a good girl. Look she ain’t got no underthings on. Put your hand there on her shank, son. That’s good, ain’t it? Soft and warm.’ ‘Do you really like this, Miss Maggie?’ ‘Sure she does, don’t you girl?’ ‘Yes. I like it Pa.’ ‘Now how many women you know, pretty or plain, that really likes this kinda thing? Tell me that.’ ‘Not many I know of,’ replies Jarrod. […] This does put things in a brand new light.’ […] ‘That’s it! I knew you’d come around. Let’s sit over here and talk this out over a glass of Maggie’s fine plume wine.’ (M, 62– 63)

Coming hard upon a scene in which Jarrod and Little Joe are shown “feeling up” horses for sale (and agreeing to meet later in the evening for “further talk”), this Sadean interlude reveals the degree to which the norms of the televisual reality that the narrator of Memories of My Father Watching TV grew up with (which, implicitly, is ‘reality’ – all of it – as he knows it) are founded upon the objectification/animalization of women, racism, homoerotism screened as homophobia. The novel’s insistent point, especially in the hyper-constructedness of its mash-up scenarios, is that television does not so much screen the imaginary order of a perceptibly consensual reality as it constitutes that order, precisely to the degree that we assign any kind of representational authority to the medium. Indeed, throughout Memories of My Father Watching TV, the mutable, parodic figure of the father is inextricably linked with the legitimation, or de-legitimation, of representational authority located in the body of the father as it is merged with “the box.” In the prefatory chapter, “TV Scandal,” where the narrator’s father is described as “the moral metaphysician of all postwar cynicism and national self-defeat” (M, 9), the quiz show scandals of the 50s – the most spectacular being that of the show Twenty One which involved Carl Van Doren, the son of the Pulitzer prize-winning literary critic and Columbia professor, Mark Van Doren – are set as the backdrop to American political history up to the point of the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, an event that has left the narrator’s father “in a cataleptic trance before the TV” (M, 21) ever since. The scandals, the “kitchen cabinet debate” between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev’s visit to Disneyland – all witnessed by the father on TV – lead to a representational crisis, and the father’s growing sense that the reality inside the tube, which he joins in a fantasy dialogue with Khrushchev in Disneyland, has entirely replaced the reality outside the

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tube at a moment when Khrushchev bears witness to omnipresence of the televisual order: We have grown lost in the fall and rise of day. The outside has disappeared. See there, nothing in the distance but a flat buzzing. That is not life you hear, that’s just heavy breathing. So let us gather where the TV broke down. Shards of our family assemble there. Your burnt legs. My heart. We arrange the pieces in a way that makes us happy. (M, 27– 28)

Destined to replace an anachronistic sense of the TV as a representation factory around which the family gathers behind the soon-to-be cataleptic father, the conversation with Khrushchev leads to a new televisual order in which the relation between inside and outside, fantasy and reality, are collapsed, and where “TV” is transformed from a meditational device to an assemblage of paternal body parts, the “shards of family,” the dislocated pieces of fantasies dispersed across the airwaves. Much of the remainder of Memories of My Father Watching TV is given over to tracking this series of wrenched, rhizomic fantasies as they dissolve and merge, all circulating around the figure of the father in his many TV roles. In “Highway Patrol,” the narrator’s father becomes an officer in the California Highway Patrol, and a colleague of Chief Dan Matthews, the burly, chain-smoking head honcho played in the actual TV series by an overweight, gruff Broderick Crawford. As the narrator informs us, his father has been killed in the line of duty by an escaped convict who has a paternal identification with Matthews: It is also remarkable and ironic that the criminal Neal killed my father not as an Oedipal slaying full of the pomp and circumstance of patricides timeless, but as a gesture of respect and admiration for Matthews, Neal’s own father figure. (M, 34)

The TV character, Dan Matthews, thus comes to replace the dead father in the White family, and in the embedded episode script that tells the story of patriarchal stewardship, he is portrayed as a brutal, fascistic figure from which the boy, “Chris,” unsuccessfully attempts to escape in “his mother’s Plymouth […] Symbolically, his mother returns from beyond the grave to assist in his struggle against patriarchal authority” (M, 42). The parodic oedipalism of the novel continues in “Combat,” where the father suffers from delusions (as he watches a series devoted to GI’s in World War II fire zones) that “he was a pontoon bridge for the Nazis” (M, 69), and where the logic of paternal authority (passed onto the figure of “Sarge,” the squad leader in the TV show) is signified in as part of a syllogism: “a) when authority is most brutal and indifferent, it is then that it loves and cares for us most” (M, 76). In the hallucinatory “Sea Hunt” (the title of the TV series about the adventures of an ex-Navy frogman and freelance

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scuba diver, Mike Nelson, played by Lloyd Bridges), the narrator recalls a period in his youth when he “lived with his mother in a single room at the Nassau Trauma Center” (M, 84). Memories of his mother undergoing treatment for some undefined trauma, and of the absent father who appears to be “underwater,” submerged in guilt, sadness, and depression, are interspersed with the script and filming of a fragmented episode of Sea Hunt (in selfsame Nassau) in which we witness, among other things, Mike Nelson as a fetishist dancing before his bedroom mirror in full frogman gear or engaging in an underwater chase that involves catching a canister of nitroglycerin just before it reaches the rocky sea floor and explodes. At the end of “Sea Hunt,” the narrator views his father emerging from the sea, bearing as a gift a dark canister of nitro, signifying the return/rebirth of the absent father as alternatively threatening and heroic. In “Have Gun – Will Travel,” titled after the TV series of a roving mercenary whom we only know as “Paladin” in the West of the early 1900s, the masterslave dialectic, represented in the show by the relationship between Paladin and his Chinese manservant, is screened against the backdrop of the narrator’s alienation from his father over disagreements about the Vietnam War. Various projected scenes from series, cast under the aegis of Aristotelian rhetorical strategies, portray the deficits of paternity and its logic in the putative progression of the social order from the “Primitive” to the “Civil.” If we consider the narrative shards that White provides in Memories of My Father Watching TV – verging on the encyclopedic in their array as autobiographical instances, scenes from TV shows real and projected, absurdist vignettes, bits and pieces of American history during the Cold War, philosophical asides – as a “collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements” on the discursive axis,⁶ then (to extend the Deleuzian logic) on the vertical or “machinic” axis White maps out the regime of the father which is conflated, in the novel, with the regime of television’s representational authority.⁷ Perhaps the most visible sign of the convergence of “father” and “TV” occurs in the narrator’s description of the recliner upon which his father has sat for decades watching TV, growing increasingly cataleptic, the primary mnemonic embodiment of childhood memories:

 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ): .  For a crucial discussion of the connections to be considered between television as machine and its representational authority see Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television (Durham: Duke University Press, ): especially  – .

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My father spent so much of his life in his green recliner that it broke down subtly under its weight (my father was 6′4″, 220 pounds) never completely breaking but rather bending, collapsing earthward under his shape until, after twenty years of use, the chair itself resembled my father, as if it were an exoskeleton he’d left behind. (M, 76 – 77)

This entropic image suggests the degree to which the father (or, more specifically, the body of the father), watching television, has become identified in memory with the medium itself, portrayed as an endless, hybrid flow of dialogue and images with which the viewer – whose consciousness is gradually being replaced by the ‘consciousness’ of television – not so much interacts as becomes one. In this sense, paternal authority (the authority exerted by the ‘weight’ of the father watching TV, around whom the children gather as witnesses to the fusion of his singularity with the totality of television) is zeroed out in its transformation into televisual authority (that authority exerted by the TV in its paradoxically dispersed totality as the sole purveyor of a set of representations that become the “all” of an indivisible reality). This is what the narrator remembers. Memories of My Father Watching TV thus stages the replacement of the classic, castrating, oedipal authority (whose vestiges remain as supplements or ‘extras’ in figures such as The Wild Father of the Bonanza chapter) with ‘TV,’ which exists not so much as a paternal authority or a mediator of reality as a timeless discursive entity without boundaries (an endless stream of images), a hybridization composed of the bits and pieces of a reality that remain after the fragmentation and collapse of a symbolic order premised upon the presence of the (oedipal) father. It is interesting, then, that the novel is cast in the mode of a memoir of the father, though not of the father per se, but of the father episodically watching episodes from TV. The episodic extends to the narrator as well, the son who appears in multiple guises across time as well, and whose ‘life,’ like the father’s, becomes pixelated into the flow of sequences and images that emerge from the box. The father-son relation at the heart of the novel is one of observation doubled (the son watching the father watching TV) in a process that moves erratically between identification and dis-identification. The flood of images, jagged narrative sequences, outlandish scenarios, absurdist characters, and entropic objects that make up the details of the novel defamiliarize in a double sense, as they both explode the notion of paternal authority and the familial configurations it entails, as well as offer scattered, dispersed, and partial reconfigurations of that authority as registered in the father-son relationship. These reconfigurations are what exists in the form of memory for the narrator. Memories of My Father Watching TV concludes with a memory of the father and son watching a rerun of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) together on TV, a rescreening of an artifact from an older visual regime that offers nostalgic oppor-

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tunities for recollecting a representational past ‘before’ TV. Interestingly, this final chapter in the novel is the only one in which an extended conversation or, indeed, any real interaction between the father and son occurs, as if watching a movie on TV enables a different relationality than watching an episode of Bonanza or Highway Patrol. The narrator comments that this is the first time in memory that his father has spoken with him: Now this may all seem like just another evening in your average, damaged middle-class household. Not so! Remember, my father had not spoken to me since I was an infant. This was like wanting to know who had killed your best friend and then being given the extraordinary opportunity to ask questions of the victim himself. […] at just that moment I realized what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity stood before me. I was speaking with my father. We were having a chat. I could ask him a question if I dared. (M, 142)

What ensues is a series of questions from son to father: is he happy? Why does he watch TV all of the time? Why does he never say anything? Why does he drink? The responses are iconoclastic expressions of paternal jouissance: he watches TV and drinks because he enjoys doing so. He is happy because he can watch TV with his family gathered around him. He says nothing because he has nothing to say. Clearly, there is nothing in the father’s discourse that will reveal anything about his identity to the son, so they turn to the film, and the father’s claim that is ‘in’ the movie. The viewing of the film on TV is represented by a rehearsal of crucial scenes taking place in post-war Vienna, where Reed’s noir tale of espionage and existential gloom is set (at one point, the narrator, assuming the role of film critic, states that Reed “[i]nadvertently […] documented not only the place and time, but the metaphysical process by which the dislocations of WWII moved the West from the modern to the postmodern” [M, 146]). Summarizing a climactic scene in the film, the narrator depicts the film’s protagonist, Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles) failing in his attempt to escape a pursuer in the sewers of Vienna and coming to a dead end as he thrusts his hands through an immovable hatch that prevents access to the street above. “Abruptly,” the narrator relates, “Reed moves the perspective to the street. We are looking at Harry’s fingers emerging through the grill, cut off from the rest of his body” (M, 154). At this instance, his father exclaims excitedly, “That’s it! […] Those fingers are my fingers! Orson Welles filmed the scene in the sewer weeks before and had returned to Italy where he was working on Othello. Mr. Reed needed fingers and I had some. Son, I played Harry Lime’s fingers in The Third Man. There’s something to tell your punk friends” (M, 154– 155). This final image of the father caught – made static – within the matrix of images that constitute the film on the box serves as a parodic coda to the novel that unearths in memory the father’s re-

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mains (what remains of the father, what reminds one of the father) from the dispersed totality of TV. What remains are body parts, the visibility of the father as movie extra/body double reduced to fingers clutching the air representing the final signs of life before the death of Harry Lime. The father, in White’s sendup of paternal authority and the omnipresence of TV as a replacement for lived experience, is corporally delimited in this scene to phallic substitutes, his ‘place’ in the history of the medium and in memory that of metonymic extra in the mode of repetition (the film rescreened in “Saturday Night at the Movies” on TV). White’s purpose doubles back on itself in Memories of My Father Watching TV as an autobiography of the son’s relation to what remains of the father after the son’s deconstruction – precisely through memory – of the father’s presence and visibility. The novel thus maps out what has happened to the father, collectively, in the wake of TV. It is not so much a question of one totality being replaced by another, which is partially what concerned Adorno, as it is our capacity to look twice at “the monster image feed” (it is not going to go away) long enough to notice its pixilated logics, its makeup, the contradictions of its hybridic, dispersed representations when totaled up. White’s journey through 50s TV-land insists that you must remember this: we are all watching our fathers watching TV.

Christopher Schliephake

Classicism, Cultural Mobility, Hybridity, and the Transnational Imagination in the Works of Reginald Shepherd The essay deals with the works of the American poet Reginald Shepherd. In his poetic and theoretical writings, Shepherd has repeatedly drawn on the classical canon to problematize cultural models of identity and origin. His work can be seen as an example of what, in academic circles, has been referred to as “black classicism,” as the reception of the classical tradition by African American or Caribbean authors. Studying Shepherd’s classicism cannot only help us in interpreting his complex oeuvre, but also in thinking about the aesthetic and sociopolitical implications of black classicism in general. Starting from an overview over Shepherd’s own biographical background and theoretical reflections, the essay discusses the cultural mobility of Shepherd’s classicism as well as the transnational imagination and the model of cultural hybridity that it inspires. “Greek mythology,” Reginald Shepherd wrote in his autobiographical sketch that opened his essay collection Orpheus in the Bronx, published only shortly before his death, “represented an elsewhere to my uninterestingly unhappy life, a realm where ordinary misery was ennobled […], where things need not be pleasant but they mattered.”¹ In September 2008 Shepherd died after a long battle with cancer. Although he was one of the most productive American poets of the last two decades – he wrote five collections of poems, two volumes of critical essays and edited two anthologies of postmodern poetry – his complex oeuvre has yet to be recognized and analyzed in academic venues. During his life, he grappled with issues of social marginalization, depravation, and identity formation – subjects that would resurface again and again in his writings and that made up the core of his creative work. As a homosexual, African-American writer who was HIV positive,² Shepherd repeatedly translated and transformed his life experiences

 Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, ): . Further references in the text, abbreviated as “OB”.  Cf. Robert Philen, “Introduction,” in A Martian Muse: Further Readings on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, ed. Robert Philen (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, ):  – ; Robert Archambeau, “A Portrait of Reginald Shepherd as Philoctetes,” Pleiades . ():  – ,  – .

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into the de-pragmatized discourse of poetic speech and world-making – a realm that would allow him to transcend the narrow social categories which established his outsider status and that helped him to make sense of his “otherness” in American society. The category of the ‘other’ is, in fact, central to his (poetic and theoretical) writings and to the experiential status that he attributes to poetic language. While he repeatedly stressed the importance of language for constructing social identities, gender roles etc., he also highlighted their permeability and instability in the “event” of poetry.³ Poetic speech was for Shepherd one way of undermining social identity formations and constructions, of breaking up enclosed world views. Poetry, Shepherd made clear, could de-familiarize established concepts and re-negotiate their meaning within an imaginative framework. It was a space where his outsider status could be valorized and “misery” could be made meaningful. As I want to show, the classical tradition played a fundamental role in his writings in exactly this way: as a cultural archive that he could draw on, improvising on canonized motifs and characters, and as an imaginary back cloth on which he could weave ever new configurations of identity and creative expression. I want to look at the role that the classics play in Shepherd’s oeuvre, how they function as a cultural foil that can at once be seen as familiar and as ‘other’: how their intertextual evocations raise expectations and images, stored in the cultural memory, and how their re-working in the framework of postmodern poetry questions the stable notions on which these canonized notions rest. Classical reception takes place, in Shepherd’s poetry, in an imaginative framework of cultural contact and exchange, where a seemingly Western elitist tradition of ancient motifs meets (post‐)modern configurations of cultural hybridity. Ancient, mythical heroes or figures like Achilles, Orpheus, or Eros are incorporated in a sociopolitical setting of depravation, disorientation and marginalization. Repeatedly, they are viewed through the perspective of an African American ghetto and voiced by a lyric I that both knows high learning and the degraded experience of poverty and overt racism. Against this background, Shepherd’s poetry can be seen as an example of what, in academic circles, has been referred to as “black classicism,” as the reception of the classical tradition by African American or Caribbean authors. Studying Shepherd’s classicism cannot only help us in interpreting his complex oeuvre, but also in thinking about the aesthetic and sociopolitical implications of black classicism in general. In the following, I will firstly discuss the cultural mobility of Shepherd’s classicism,

 Brian M. Reed, Phenomenal Reading: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics (Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, ):  – .

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before I will turn to the transnational imagination that can be found in his poetry and the model of cultural hybridity that it inspires.

The cultural mobility of Shepherd’s classicism Over the last decade, classical reception studies have blossomed into a vibrant field of scholarly analysis in which many disciplines, including ancient history, philology, and various literatures, have become involved.⁴ Against the background of postcolonial theory and sociopolitical developments of migration and movement, it is especially the reception of the classical tradition by African (American) and Caribbean authors that has received increasing attention.⁵ What has been commonly referred to as ‘black classicism’ can, in many ways, be seen as a provocation: On the one hand, the term brings the ancient tradition together with social groups that had, culturally speaking, been excluded from its contents and transmission for a long time. Since the Renaissance, the classical canon has very much been associated with white class distinction and elitist learning.⁶ For the colonial powers of early modern Europe, the classics became a cultural model upon which to base their imperial ideologies and with which to literally interpret the ‘other’ people and worlds they encountered on their voyages of discovery and conquest.⁷ As Simon Goldhill has put it in his monograph study Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity:

 Cf., for a good overview of the field, Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (eds.), A Companion to Classical Receptions (Malden, MA: Blackwell, ).  For examples, see Emily Greenwood, Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Classics and Anglophone Caribbean Literature in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: OUP, ); Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie (eds.), Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (Oxford: OUP, ); Goff, Barbara and Michael Simpson, “Introduction: Answering Another Sphinx,” in Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora, eds. Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson (Oxford: OUP, ):  – ; Barbara Goff, “Your Secret Language”. Classics in the British Colonies of West Africa (London: Bloomsbury Academic, Bristol Classical P, ); Martin McKinsey, Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination. Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott (Madison: Fairleigh UP, ); Michelle R. Warren, “Classicism, Medievalism, and the Postcolonial,” Exemplaria . ():  – . Christopher Schliephake, “Die Blendung des Kyklopen – Antikenrezeption und postkolonialer Diskurs,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Europäische Kulturgeschichte  ():  – , offers a comprehensive survey of the field and discusses black classicism in the light of postcolonial theory.  Cf. Edith Hall, “Putting the Class into Classical Reception,” in A Companion to Classical Receptions, eds. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (Malden, MA: Blackwell, ):  – .  For a detailed analysis of this process see François Hartog, Anciens, Modernes, Sauvages (Paris: Galaade, ). Cf. also Christopher Schliephake, “Ithaca Revisited – Homer’s Odyssey

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Classics has a reputation of being the imperial subject par excellence […]. Part of the justification of the continuing study of Classics was that it formed, as well as informed, the mind, and formed the mind not just for a gentleman but for a figure of authority. A training in how to rule.⁸

In the New World, for indigenous people as well as slaves or freedmen of African ancestry, classical learning was not an option. In the United States, it was only after the Civil War that African Americans gained access to institutions where they could get a humanist education. While the classical tradition was seen as a source for emancipatory thinking and “contained,” as Eric Hairston has shown in his brilliant study, The Ebony Column, “philosophical, intellectual, literary, and moral understandings that did not presume black inferiority but could provide a substantive foundation for black cultural and intellectual growth”,⁹ it was nevertheless associated with a sphere of white hegemonic politics which used classical images for ‘monumental’ political representation and the negotiation of national identities after the breakdown of slavery.¹⁰ On the other hand, the culture of the African diaspora has long been seen as one of oral traditions – as opposed to written ones – as well as of embodied cultural practices that found their expressions in dances and Jazz music.¹¹ While these cultural forms and techniques were seen (and celebrated) as practices that re-valorized and articulated repressed life energies, black classicism calls attention to the fact that African American culture, too, has played an integral part in written culture and continues to actively partake in a literary re-working of the Western canon. More than a study of mere influence or intertextual relationships between modern and ancient works of literature, black classicism is thus about re-negotiating the cultural foundations upon which the classical canon rests in our present times. This does not entail an inversion of a sort of hierarchical access to its contents, so that African Americans suddenly have a better claim to interpretational sovereignty when it comes to ancient texts. Nor is it an invitation to an arbitrary, postmodern play with ancient motifs without having their long

and the (Other) Mediterranean Imagination,” in The Mediterranean Other – the Other Mediterranean, eds. Mihran Dabag and Andreas Eckl (Paderborn: Fink/Schöningh, forthcoming).  Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity. Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton UP, ):  – .  Eric Ashley Hairston, The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West (Knoxville, TN: U of Tennessee P, ): .  John Levi Barnard, “Ruins amidst Ruins: Black Classicism and the Empire of Slavery,” American Literature  ():  – ,  – .  Cf. Herny Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (London: OUP, ).

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tradition and multiple ideological instrumentalizations in mind. Black classicism seems to be exactly about uncovering the sociopolitical and cultural historic undercurrents that have accompanied classical receptions over the centuries and about showing how classics could be used as instruments of power and as tools for identity formation. The latter aspect is underlined by the use of the adjective “black” that points to the racist ideology that had long determined access to (and inclusion in) the ‘Western’ canon. It also presupposes that there is a different form of classicism at play once its contents circulate within social groups or geographic regions that were colonized by hegemonic European powers. While African American or Caribbean authors have been dealing with ancient texts for at least two centuries now, the recent interest in the contact zones that are opened up and the transformations that take place between an allegedly uniform cultural canon and groups that had been exempt from it attests to the heightened sensitivity for cultural transfer processes in our time. They take their main impetus from cultural models of hybridity that have taken on a new political immediacy in the wake of post-colonial theory, de-colonization, and globalization.¹² Black classicism can itself be seen as a reaction to these processes as well as a framework for thinking about the fluidity, permeability, and inherent dynamic of identity concepts – rather than presupposing stable cultural entities or borders, it challenges dichotomies and political models of exclusionary thinking. This agenda can be seen in many of black classicism’s finest theoretical and scholarly explorations, from Barbara Goff’s and Michael Simpson’s edited volume Crossroads in the Black Aegean to Emily Greenwood’s monograph study Afro-Greeks. As these studies show, the reception of classical texts by African (American) and Caribbean authors takes place in a “ ‘ fluid and multi-directional’ zone of linked or networked sites which trade in [classical] representations.”¹³ Thereby, “a conjuncture between spheres of culture that are seemingly incommensurable” is opened up and “the simultaneous tension and mutuality at the heart of this relationship” is made apparent.¹⁴ The century-old Eurocentric claim to the classical canon is thus questioned and challenged. This has an emancipatory quality insofar as new layers of meaning are uncovered in ancient texts. It includes a creative encounter with them that entails a new reading practice as well as a re-working and adaption of its contents in new cultural contexts characterized by a high degree of hybridity. In this sense, black classicism does

 Cf. Schliephake, “Blendung.”  Goff, Language, .  Greenwood, Afro-Greeks, .

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not deal so much with questions of origin or difference, but rather focuses on what Homi Bhabha has referred to as “the inbetween space” between seemingly separate cultures, where “the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity” takes place.¹⁵ It is also characterized by a high degree of cultural mobility. ‘Cultural mobility’ is a relatively recent paradigm in cultural theory developed by Stephen Greenblatt and others. It criticizes old models of culture that highlighted their “stability” or conceptualized them as “virtually motionless.”¹⁶ In the light of recent migrations and a heightened mobility on a global level, cultural mobility renders the “restless process through which texts, images, artifacts, and ideas are moved, disguised, translated, transformed, adapted, and reimagined in the ceaseless, resourceful work of culture.”¹⁷ It has to do both with questions of transmission and influence as well as with the material and spatio-political processes that allowed the circulation of cultural texts and norms over the centuries. This aspect makes clear why the notion of cultural mobility can be brought together with classical reception studies and with what has been termed black classicism. Black classicism is a perfect example for cultural mobility and for what happens when specific cultural texts are re-imagined in cultural contexts far removed from the particular times and places that produced them. Reginald Shepherd, it seems, was very much aware of the manifold exchange processes and cultural transfers that condition and enable cultural self-renewal and creativity. As he writes in his foreword to his collection of essays, Orpheus in the Bronx, literature (and especially poetry) can be seen as a central medium that enables mobility. Rather than being an indicator of “social conditions and social identity,” literature’s “potential” lay, for Shepherd, “in the degree to which it exceeds social determinations and definitions, bringing together the strange and the familiar, combining otherness and brotherhood. I have been oppressed by many things in my life, but not by literature, which enacts possibility rather than closure” (OB, 1). His autobiographical essay, “To Make Me Who I Am,” which follows his introductory note, makes clear why Shepherd saw literature as a medium that opened up possibilities and other worlds for him. Raised in the narrow spaces of ghetto tenements and housing projects in the Bronx, he felt constraint and social marginalization from a very early age. Born to a single mother who set all of her hopes on her only son, but who was to die when Reginald was fourteen years old (he moved to his aunt in Georgia afterwards), his  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, ): .  Stephen Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction,” in Cultural Mobility. A Manifesto, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (Cambridge: CUP, ):  – , .  Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility,” .

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childhood was dominated by a feeling of estrangement and isolation. The many books that his mother kept in their home were the only escape from a world marked by abject poverty. At first, the books offered imaginative escapes from the daily misery, later, when Shepherd became an aspiring writer, they did so in a material sense as well. It is interesting to note the huge importance Shepherd attributes to his early contact with handbooks and novels of Greek myth. To him, they presented a “world” where “suffering and death were made beautiful and important: mundane experience underwent a sea change into something rich and strange” (OB, 14). The world of Greek mythical heroes and gods became a moral and ethical grid which presented a different set of rules and explanations than the social and Christian belief systems that surrounded him. As Shepherd puts it, their “insistence on a world ruled by law and justice and a moral order bore no resemblance to the world I suffered every day, except in the harshness and rigidity of its proscriptions” (OB, 14– 15). Accordingly, the Greek heroes that he read about became, for him, archetypal figures and models, whose actions and being resonated more with his experience of the narrow world of the ghetto than the cultural projections of America in the 1960s or 1970s. It is this sense of identification with ancient motifs and norms that characterize the cultural mobility of Shepherd’s classicism and that are recurring subjects all through his work. In the end, it led to identification with the ancients: “Greek mythology played the role for me that it played for the Greeks, as a means to channel, order, and give shape to feelings and forces that would otherwise be completely overwhelming” (OB, 14). In his essay “The Other’s Other. Against Identity Poetry, for Possibility,” Shepherd formulates an aesthetic and programmatic statement on poetry that can be read as the ultimate reflection of the cultural mobility of his classicism: In my work I wish to make Sappho and the South Bronx, the myth of Hyacinth and the homeless black men ubiquitous in the cities of the decaying American empire, AIDS and all the beautiful, dead cultures, speak to and acknowledge one another. (OB, 44)

This can also be read as a characterization of the cultural mode of black classicism in general, the meeting and contact of cultural expressions and contexts that are, at first sight, completely different, but that somehow interact, comment on and transform one another. A very distinct socio-cultural background, the African American ghetto life and the diagnosis of the “decay” of the American empire, is read against the classical tradition and the world of Greek myth. This has

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the curious effect of questioning identities¹⁸ and the social rendering of them. Outsiders and outcasts appear, in the vocabulary and motifs of Greek myth, as archetypal figures themselves, as culturally valorized versions that have a value (and virtue) in and for themselves. Shepherd’s black classicism is about interpreting and reading American (ghetto) life through the lens of classical texts and thereby about breaking up the narrow and enclosed world views which impose social identity roles on the cultures and people living there. Shepherd’s poetry, more than “an escape from the world” has to be understood then as “a challenge to that world” (OB, 32) and as a distinct mode of experience, where stable and familiar categories crumble in the face of de-familiarization and poetic speech, where an African American beggar can appear in the guise of a Greek god, and an orphaned child as a black Orpheus. The myth of Orpheus indeed looms large in Shepherd’s poetry and, as the title of his last essay collection suggests, he has repeatedly stylized himself as a mythological figure. “Orpheus in the Bronx” is another way of phrasing Shepherd’s black classicism, of fusing poetic world making and the quest for beauty with the social realities of African American inner city life. His 2007 collection of poetry, Fata Morgana, opens with two poems that evoke the myth of Orpheus in their title: “Orpheus Plays the Bronx” is a deeply personal meditation on a traumatic incident in the life of the speaker, who remembers a suicide attempt by his (or her) mother.¹⁹ From the opening line of the narrative (“When I was ten […] my mother, / tried to kill herself”),²⁰ the lyric sequence is marked by a matter-of-fact tone that can be seen as a distancing strategy at the time of remembering as well as a duplication of how the younger self of the speaker saw the situation: While the mother lay in bed “all weekend,” drunk with Gin (“Tanqueray bottles / halo the bed”) and numbed by pills, her child watched the scene with only a book of myths to keep him / her company: “In the myth book’s color / illustration, the poet turns around/inside the mouth of hell to look at her / losing him.” The colorful picture in what appears to be a collection of ancient mythical stories (supposedly for children) finds its verbal expression within the poem: blue, red, yellow, purple, black, and white are all featured in it, while the names of the singers

 As Shepherd puts it, “to be situated in and constrained by an identity is the origin of the impulse to nonidentity, the longing to be free of the obligation to be somebody, somebody everyone else knew what to call” (OB, , emphasis in original).  The poem could be autobiographical in content, since it is in line with many aspects that Shepherd has referred to in his autobiographical essay discussed above (OB,  – ). In Red Clay Weather (), the poem “My Mother Dated Otis Redding” () uses similar motifs.  Reginald Shepherd, Fata Morgana (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh UP, ): . Further references in the text, abbreviated as FM.

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Al Green and Barry White, whose songs are referred to in the scene, also evoke the impression of color. Of course, both had been African American singers and the setting, which is only named in the title of the poem, is that of a black ghetto. “Color,” in every sense of the term, matters in this world and even “death” tries to “get some color to fill out / his skin.” The dichotomy between the “bony white boy” and the “colored” community of the Bronx points to the “color line”²¹ that had dominated the political climate and racial rhetoric of American policy well into the second half of the twentieth century. While this is the social backdrop to the action of the poem, its mythological undercurrent is brought about both by the intermedial evocation of the illustration of the Orpheus myth as well as by the equation of its contents with what the lyrical I saw: “Some say / she stepped on an asp, a handful of pills / littered the floor.” The story of the Greek myth (the multiple, unnamed speakers may invoke different versions of it) with Eurydice being bit by a snake finds its equivalent in the pills that the mother spilled on the floor. The world of myth and that of a Bronx tenement are brought together, intersect and comment on one another. The death in life motif which characterizes them is both evoked as well as transcended in poetic speech. Not only does the title of the poem designate the scene as a form of “play”, as a kind of conjuring trick as it were, which invokes a child’s play, it also points, on a meta-level, to “the poet” himself, who “turns around,” looking at a past moment. The self-referential variation of the Orpheus myth, then, is one way of characterizing the poetic world-making per se, as well as of making meaning of a traumatic incident, whose full complexity is only revealed at the end: “The pictures don’t prove / anything, but one thing I remember / about the myth’s still true: / the man can’t live if she does. She survived to die for good.” The memory of the lyric I and the contents of the myth are both questioned in their stability and their meaning is only disclosed with regard to a present that is marked by absence. The fact that the last two verses are the only end-stopped lines in a poem which is otherwise characterized by its use of enjambments is an indicator that a kind of closure has been reached and that the lyrical I accepts the fate of his/her mother. “Five Fellings for Orpheus” (FM, 3 – 5) is characterized by a similar verse structure and a paratactic syntax as well as a decentered speaker and a language that melds beauty and decay, bringing together an industrial Chicago riverfront with the motifs of myth. A searching, bewildered Orpheus watches as the river flows by and drowns in his memories, while the landscape becomes a fluid ter-

 For a discussion of the “color line” and its significance for Shepherd’s poetry, see also Reed, Reading,  – .

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rain that is as instable as the identity of the person in question. Vivid environmental impressions and the landscapes of the mind, the Chicago River and the river Styx flow into one another to create the image of loss and loneliness against the background of urban nature. Here as elsewhere in his poetry, Shepherd manages to create hybrid landscapes that bring contemporary (urban) America together with the worlds of a mythical Arcadia or the historic sites in ancient Greece, Egypt, or Rome. He thus confronts the brutal realities of life in the twentieth and twenty-first century with the idealized worlds of fantasy and finds poetic beauty that attribute to the world of the outsider or other – the orphaned child, the homeless beggar, the lovesick homosexual – the status of myth. They are imaginatively re-figured in poetic speech and gain a new meaning and value in the face of social depravation, disorientation or poverty. In the following, I want to look at another effect of Shepherd’s black classicism, namely at the cultural hybridity and transnational imagination that it inspires.

Cultural hybridity and the transnational imagination in Shepherd’s poetry Cultural hybridity is one of the recurring themes and concerns in Shepherd’s writings. His classicism plays a central role in channeling the various discourses and cultural as well as poetic traditions that make up his own hybrid identity. In his 2003 volume of verse, Otherhood, he repeatedly grapples with the issues of identity politics, exclusionary world views, and how these can be questioned and challenged by poetry. As Reed has noted, Otherhood is self-conscious about the social categories of color, race, and sexuality. The forty-two freeverse poems repeatedly deal with them as realities that are hard to overcome in daily life. Yet, they also use their linguistic frameworks as tropes that can be re-written and undermined in poetic language. “Sexuality, poetics, and history – official and subcultural – collide” and “images and signifiers with a hurtful history” are countered “with an aestheticizing imagination.”²² As Reed has shown, Shepherd uses the images of two gods – a god of fire associated with blackness and a god of sea and winter associated with whiteness – to illustrate the dichotomies and binary oppositions that characterize identity formations. And although the poems in Otherhood “[establish] a powerfully, if violently, homoerotic binary between racially marked figures, it also deconstructs that vi-

 Reed, Reading, .

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sion.”²³ In the poem “Homology”, for instance, the Greek god “Apollo is black, wolf to / the moon, Sol burnt / to cinders in my blind eye / (black stones sears sky, white / shadow covers day).”²⁴ The poem goes on to paratactically fuse opposites with one another in a series of oxymora. The title not only invokes a formal equivalent between relations and structures, but can also be seen as a play on the notion of homoerotic love(‐making), which is explicitly dealt with in the second half of the poem. There is a constant interplay between attraction and repulsion and the struggle between light and darkness ends in a twilight shadow, where neither sun nor moon can claim dominance. Poetry here becomes the means of creating a hybrid space in which ancient mythological figures like Apollo or Eros are fused with the images of (homoerotic) lovemaking in urban park areas (“Eros / goes shaking the bushes / for sex”) and where the issue of appearance is tested against things that are concealed or hidden (“Sun’s / heat consumes moon, / but there is water / under earth”). The lyric thus problematizes cultural divisions and categorizations in the light of how things appear, uncovering the hidden layers of meaning and being that cannot be subsumed under any neat label. What Reed concludes from a close reading of other poems in Otherhood can be said of Shepherd’s work as a whole, namely that it “dramatizes for us the way in which a subject does not possess an identity but instead identifies, vainly, with a series of inadequate, unstable simulacra (‘dark’ things that, if possessed once and for all, would give an essential content to ‘being black’).” And although “the social circulation of racialized and racist fantasies has occurred and will continue to occur in and through the speaking subject, regardless of conscious individual intent,”²⁵ there is also the feeling that this discursive circle can be broken up by imaginative world making. As Shepherd himself has put it in his introduction to Lyric Postmodernisms, his poetry – like that of many of his contemporaries – is “engaged in exploring and interrogating the relations of conception and perception, with how mind both makes its way through a world not of its own making and how mind makes a world of its own out of the world it is given.”²⁶ More than a question of phenomenology, this is a deeply ethical undertaking, since it is concerned both with an “exploration of subjectivity” as well as with a questioning of the categories “of culture and history,” including a “skepticism toward

 Reed, Reading, .  Reginald Shepherd, Otherhood (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh UP, ): . Further references abbreviated as “OH”.  Reed, Reading, .  Reginald Shepherd, “Introduction”, in Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (Denver, CO: Counterpath P, ): xi–xvii, xii.

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grand narratives and the possibility of final answers or explanations, toward selfhood as a stable reference point, and toward language as a means by which to know the self or the world.”²⁷ The intertextual integration of and the lyric engagement with the classical canon can thereby be seen as an integral part of this poetic and aesthetic program, as a way of de-familiarizing canonized motifs and as a “return to (plural) origins.”²⁸ What Shepherd referred to, again and again in his theoretical writings, as the “freedom of poetry” has to be understood against the background of these theoretical insights. For although Shepherd was convinced of the autonomy of art, he also recognized its social contexts and cultural rootedness.²⁹ To him, poetic language offered the possibility of breaking out of the narrow confines that he experienced as a social outsider – first, as an orphaned boy from the ghetto, later as a homosexual African American poet – and of re-figuring narrow definitions of ‘self’ and ‘other’. His engagement with the classical tradition was a way of exploring questions of originality and the possibility of variations of old themes in the context of postmodern America. While Shepherd was very much aware of tradition and used explicit intertextual references in his poetic work, he can nevertheless be characterized as what has been referred to as an “American hybrid” poet. As Swensen puts it, their “poems often honor the avant-garde mandate to renew the forms and expand the boundaries of poetry, thereby increasing the expressive potential of language itself while also remaining committed to the emotional spectra of lived experience.”³⁰ This hybrid aesthetic “reconsider[s] the ethics of language, on the one hand, and redraft[s] our notions of a whole, on the other.”³¹ This can, in fact, be read as an appropriate characterization of Shepherd’s poetry in general and of his classicism in particular. His poem “In the City of Elagabal” (OH, 18 – 23) is a long meditation on death and re-birth and creates its own mythical system against the motif of the cult of the sun god Elagabal, brought to Rome during Imperial times, and the invoked geography of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean world. It is almost entirely composed of fragments  Shepherd, “Introduction,” xi – xii.  Shepherd, “Introduction,” xi.  On the notion of the “freedom of poetry,” see Shepherd’s essay collections OB and A Martian Muse: Further Readings on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, ed. Robert Philen (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, ). On the role of tradition for contemporary African American poets, see also Charles Henry Rowell, “Writing Self, Writing Community. An Introduction,” in Angels of Ascent. A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, ed. Charles H. Rowell (New York: Norton, ): xxix – liii.  Cole Swensen, “Introduction,” in American Hybrid. A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, eds. Cole Swensen and David St. John (New York: Norton, ): xvii – xxvi, xxi.  Swensen, “Introduction,” xvi.

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and quotes taken from such diverse sources as the King James Bible, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as well as other books on ancient history and myth. In Archambeau’s words, this poem in particular creates a “synthetic mythology” as it “combines elements of the dying and reborn god […] with a suggestion of gender transgression […]. One element of Shepherd’s richly evocative myth is the transcending of individuality.”³² The latter aspect both refers to the lyric contents of the poem as well as to its free composition of various sources. The ancient myth is re-assembled from modern fragments and interpretations, which not only points to the instability of historical sense making, but also questions the status of poetry as one of original creation. This poem is hybrid in every form of the word as it incorporates various sources, styles, and linguistic registers and re-casts the history of Elagabal as an open-ended quest for meaning. It also brings the Western tradition of the study of antiquity together with the space of the Eastern Mediterranean and a lost, oriental world (“His idol taken from a town of Egypt / also called Heliopolis” [18]; “a sprig of cypress, a tree / consecrated to the Sun” [23]). The hybridization of form and content finds its linguistic expression in a heteroglossia, characterized by the incorporation of ancient languages, including Latin, in the sequence of the poem that invokes the Ancient traditions on which the modern images are based. Even in Antiquity, Elagabal had been “other,” a stranger, imported to the Western Mediterranean, from where he travelled a long way further West. In highlighting this diachronic and global perspective, Shepherd’s poem can also be said to open up an imaginative space in which the transnational relations between cultural images, topics, and people become apparent. His poem is not rooted in any clear location, but rather finds itself in an in-between “third space,”³³ where the hybridity of trans-historical, cultural receptions is articulated. The cultural mobility that is thereby illustrated challenges any claims to origin or cultural possession and articulates a dynamic, open-ended model of the exchange and negotiation of meaning. In the words of Jahan Ramazani, Reginald Shepherd can be said to belong to the many contemporary poets who “[conceive] the poetic imagination as transnational, a nation-crossing force that exceeds the limits of the territorial and juridical norm.”³⁴ The “cross-cultural dynamics”³⁵ of Shepherd’s poetry reflects his own reservation toward models of identity based on exclusion and national rhetoric. The cosmopolitan imagination that it inspires can rather be seen as a mode of    

Archambeau, “Portrait,” . Cf. Bhabha, Location. Ramazani, Jahan, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, ): . Ramazani, Transnational, .

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language that can mediate seemingly irresolvable contradictions between the local and global, native and foreign, suspending the sometimes exclusivist truth claims of the discrepant religious and cultural systems it puts into play, systems forced together by colonialism and modernity.³⁶

The history of colonialism is, in many ways, written into his poem. Not only because he alludes to Western historiography, archaeology, and relics that were taken into museums, but also because, already in Antiquity, the cult of Elagabal had been engrained in colonial enterprises. Ancient Syria had repeatedly been subject to imperial forces from the outside. Yet, the cult of the local sun god spread, in consequence, all over the Mediterranean world, from where it changed the colonial center itself. “In language, form, and subject matter,” Shepherd’s poem can be said to “articulate and imaginatively remake the contending forces of globalization and localization, alien influx and indigenizing resistance”³⁷ and to open up a dialogical encounter between the present and the past. The mobility of cultural concepts and ideas is repeatedly equated, in Shepherd’s poetry, with the flow of physical substances, especially of water. Both in “Periplus” (OH, 27– 29) and “At Weep” (FM, 25 – 26) the American geography is fused with the ancient world and it becomes clear that a faraway past is a constant presence even in places where it has never occurred. “Song litters upstate New York maps / with classical towns, Attica, Utica, Syracuse, / Troy, lining the throughways with Latin / and Greek” (FM, 26). America, it appears, has itself been colonized with ideas and an imaginary map is placed upon a real geography so that the landscapes of modern America and those of fantasy constantly merge with one another. This “displacement” of classical concepts into the “New World” can also be seen as a challenge to “monoculturalist assumptions” and “can help define an alternative to nationalist and even to civilizational ideologies.”³⁸ The trajectories and intersections that are made apparent in Shepherd’s writings transcend national and mono-cultural models of hegemony and dominance, “revealing the web of dialogic interconnections that belie them,” in turn, “pluralizing and creolizing our models of culture and citizenship.”³⁹ In his last collection of poetry, Red Clay Weather, published posthumously, they even include nature and the transnational flow of toxic substances and global warming.

   

Ramazani, Ramazani, Ramazani, Ramazani,

Transnational, Transnational, Transnational, Transnational,

. .  – . .

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“A Parking Lot Just Outside the Ruins of Babylon”⁴⁰ dramatizes the decline of nature against the background of the ruins of an ancient metropolis, which are further deteriorating since “fertilizer residues” and “pesticides” have nested in their “crumbling” mortar. And while the “Euphrates is a toxic fire” and “the hanging gardens / dangle from a frayed and double-knotted / nylon rope”, a “storm of chaff and shrapnel” surrounds the ancient city and “body / bag winds score the bare ruined walls of Susa with no song.” With these lines, Shepherd once again points to the discourse of binary conflicts and imperial undertakings that have gained a new relevance since the war in Iraq. As he makes clear, they are situated within an age-old network of intersections and (violent) interactions. And although they cannot be overcome by poetic language alone, his transnational imagination invites us to re-consider our models of culture and identity and the (storied) world(s) in which we live. In my essay, I have dealt with one of the most interesting American poets of the last two decades. Reginald Shepherd’s writings show many parallels with the work of his contemporaries,⁴¹ including a cosmopolitan outlook, a suspicion of cultural identity formations and a self-reflective questioning of the power of language to describe reality. In his lyric mode of black classicism, he has created a distinct imaginative take on how cultural ideas about origin, identity, and hegemony circulate and come into being. He has repeatedly fused the world of modern America with that of myth and fantasy, creating third spaces of the imagination where monocultural and mononational images are undermined by the open-ended circulation of signifiers and signs and an unresolved quest for meaning. His black classicism underlines the dialogic modes of cultural interaction and the manifold, often heterogeneous elements and intersections upon which models of identity are formed. In doing so, he has fused myth and imagination in Orphic songs that resonate deeply in the landscapes of Arcadia and the back alleys of the Bronx alike.

 Reginald Shepherd, Red Clay Weather, ed. R. Philen (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh UP, ): .  See Timo Müller, “Transnationalism in Contemporary Black Poetry: Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, and the Sonnet Form,” in Transnational American Studies, ed. Udo J. Hebel (Heidelberg: Winter, ):  – .

List of Contributors Eva Dolo is a PhD candidate at the University of Stuttgart. She is interested in English modernist and contemporary American literature, with a particular focus on James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and David Foster Wallace. John Morán González attended Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude with an A.B. in English literature in 1988. At Stanford University, he earned an M.A. degree in 1991 and a Ph.D. in 1998, both in English and American literature. He currently teaches as an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He is on the Advisory Board of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, and formerly chaired the Modern Languages Association (MLA) Division for Chicano/a Literature. He has published in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, Aztlán, Western American Literature, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. His study of the origins of Mexican American literature during the 1930s, titled Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican-American Literature, was published in 2009. His study of the late nineteenth-century US historical romance, titled The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels, was published in 2010. He is currently working on a new monograph about the transnational dimensions of contemporary Latina/o novels. He is also editing The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o Literature and co-editing (with Laura Lomas) The Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature. Johanna Hartmann is a scholar of American literature at the Chair of American Literature at the University of Augsburg. In her research she focuses on intermediality and the study of literary visuality and ekphrasis in contemporary American literature. She is furthermore interested in the American drama of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the interrelation between literature and politics. Forthcoming publications are the monograph Literary Visuality in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Phenomenological Perspectives (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann) and the collected volumes Censorship and Exile (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) and Zones of Focused Ambiguities in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter). Laura B. McGrath is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University, specializing in modernism, media theory, and digital humanities. Her dissertation, “Modernish: Modernism and Literary Distinction in the Twenty-first Century,” uses traditional, ethnographic, and digital methods to explore modernism’s cultural

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capital in the field of contemporary publishing. “Modernish” tracks the ways in which modernism is deployed by contemporary authors and publishers— and received by critics and scholars— to re-define literary engagement in the twentyfirst century. She is also Project Manager in Michigan State University’s Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab. McGrath has participated in several collaborative digital projects, including a literary GIS of Americans literature in Paris, “Digital Flânerie.” She is currently at work on a large-scale text analysis project on the Armed Services Editions, a series of books produced during World War II to help “fight the war of ideas.” Timo Müller teaches American Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany. His research areas include modernism, ecocriticism, and African American literature. He is author of The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway (2010), which won the Bavarian American Academy Prize for best dissertation of the year, and co-editor of English and American Studies: Theory and Practice (2012) and Literature, Ecology, Ethics: Recent Trends in Ecocriticism (2012). Other publications include articles in Anglia, Arizona Quarterly, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He was an Erasmus visiting instructor at Ege University (Izmir, Turkey) in 2011 and a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2012/13. He is currently completing a book-length history of the African American sonnet. Patrick O’Donnell is Professor of English and American Literature at Michigan State University. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on modern and contemporary fiction, most recently, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell (Bloomsbury, 2015), The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Fiction, co-edited with Justus Nieland and David W. Madden (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and The American Novel Now: Reading American Fiction Since 1980 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Currently, he is completing a book on Henry James and contemporary cinema. He has taught at several universities in the United States and Europe, including Purdue University (where he edited Modern Fiction Studies), West Virginia University (where he was Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of American Literature), the University of Arizona, Radboud University Nijmegen (as Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair of American Literature), Universität Stuttgart (as Senior Fulbright Scholar/Lecturer), Universität Tübingen, and the Université de Bordeaux III. He served as a faculty participant in two sessions of the Stuttgart Seminar in Cultural Studies, directed by Heide Ziegler, and five sessions of the International Summer Seminar in Contemporary Literature at the University of Louisville, directed by Thomas Byers. He chaired the

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Michigan State University English Department from 1997– 2007 and from 2012– 2014. Stephen Rachman is Director of the American Studies Program and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Literary Cognition Laboratory at Michigan State University. He is the editor of The Hasheesh Eater by Fitz-Hugh Ludlow (Rutgers University Press). He is a co-author of the award-winning Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow (Oxford University Press) and the co-editor of The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press). He has written numerous articles on Poe, literature and medicine, cities, popular culture, and an award-winning Web site on Sunday school books for the Library of Congress American Memory Project. He is a past president of the Poe Studies Association and currently completing a study of Poe entitled The Jingle Man: Edgar Allan Poe and the Problems of Culture. Christopher Schliephake teaches Ancient History at the University of Augsburg. He is the author of Urban Ecologies – City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014) and of numerous essays on environmental humanities, memory, spatiality, and post-humanism. His current research focuses on “black classicism” and commemorations of antiquity in African American and British culture. Heide Ziegler is Professor of English and American Literature Emerita at the University of Stuttgart. Her special literary interest is the novel, and she is currently writing a study, The American Novel: Modernity in Flux. She has published widely on modern and postmodernist American novels and short stories. Her book John Barth has just been re-issued as a Routledge Revival. She has also served as president of two German universities, the University of Stuttgart and the International University in Germany.

Index Adorno, Theodor W. 181, 191 affective fallacy 158 African American 11–12, 37–55, 193–207 Anderson, Benedict 61 Anderson, Marian 52 Appel, Alfred 142, 149 The Annotated Lolita 16, 142–143, 150– 151, 153 archive 12, 57–72, 125 Attucks, Crispus 50 Austin, J. L. 41

Coward, Noel 139 Cullen, Countee, “Yet Do I Marvel” 46, 48 cultural mobility 193–207 Dahlberg, Edward 157 Danielewski, Mark Z. 5, 10, 14–15, 121–124, 126–128, 132–133, 135 dedication 45, 47, 52–53 Deleuze, Gilles 188 Díaz, Junot 5, 7, 9, 12, 57–72 Die Fackel 164, 166 Dienst, Richard 188 Dominican Republic 9, 12, 58, 60–63, 65, 69, 71–72 Dostoevsky, Anna Grigoryevna 155 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 16, 92, 161 The Brothers Karamazov 161–163 Underground Man 156 Drew, Howard P. 49 Du Bois, W. E. B. ,The Souls of Black Folk 38 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, “Robert Gould Shaw” 53

Baker, Houston 54 Balaguer, Joaquín 63–65, 69, 72 Memorias de un cortesano en la “era de Trujillo” 63 Baraka, Amiri 46 Benstock, Shari 68, 78, 110, 126–127 Bhabha, Homi K. 61, 198 Black Arts movement 46–48, 53 black classicism 193–207 Blake, William 46 Bloom, Alison 103, 106, 114, 116–118 Bloom, Harold 166, 168 The Anxiety of Influence 166 Bonanza (TV series) 182–185, 189–190 Borges, Jorge Luis 46 Bourdieu, Pierre 37–38, 40–42, 45, 47–48, 52 cultural capital 42, 48, 52 The Rules of Art 42 Boyd, Brian 141–142 Brathwaite, J. Ashton 53–54 Brooks, Gwendolyn 47–48 A Street in Bronzeville 48 Annie Allen 48 Brown v. Board of Education 49 Burton, Robert 4

Early, Gerald 43 Egan, Jennifer 10, 14, 101–109, 114–119 Eliot, T. S. 6–8, 78 endnote (see also note, footnote, epigraph, headnote, marginalia, paratext, Grafton, A.) in Infinite Jest (D. Foster Wallace) 75–100 in Pale Fire (V. Nabokov) 139–153 in The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) 6, 8, 78 epigraph (see also headnote, marginalia, paratext) 4, 38–39, 46, 50–52 epitext (see also paratext, peritext) 104, 118–119 Evans, Matt 147

call and response 54 canon 194–197, 204 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay 156 circular(ity) 84–86, 89, 95–96, 117 classicism, classical reception 193–207 Coover, Robert 181

feuilleton 164–165, 167–168 footnote (see also note, endnote, epigraph, headnote, marginalia, paratext, Grafton, A.) in A Visit from the Goon Squad (J. Egan) 103–114

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in E. A. Poe 21–35 in House of Leaves (M. Danielewski) 121– 136 in “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” (D. Foster Wallace) 155–163, 175–177 in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (J. Díaz) 57–72 in The Kraus Project (J. Franzen) 164–177 in the eighteenth century 22 Foster, Hal 62 fragment(ation) 81, 83, 86–87, 90, 98–99, 115, 143, 146–147, 189 Frank, Joseph 16, 155–163, 173–177 Gaddis, William 168, 170 The Recognitions 168 Gardner, John 158 Garvey, Marcus 53–54 Genette, Gérard 4, 9, 11, 14, 39–40, 45, 68, 103–105, 107, 109, 125, 131, 134 genre 4, 15–17, 34, 37–38, 40, 45, 58–59, 67–68, 71, 101–102, 112 Goff, Barbara 195, 197 Goldhill, Simon 195–196 Grafton, Anthony 22, 27, 32, 67, 77, 125, 134 Greek myth 193, 199–201 Greenblatt, Stephen 198 Greenwood, Emily 195, 197 Grimke, Angelina 43 Guattari, Félix 188 Hairston, Eric 196 Harlem Renaissance 45, 50, 53 Have Gun – Will Travel (TV series) 181, 188 Hayden, Robert, “Frederick Douglass” 48, 53 headnote (see also note, endnote, epigraph, footnote, Genette, G., Grafton, A., marginalia, paratext) in African American sonnets 37–55 in A Visit from the Goon Squad (J. Egan) 103–114 in “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” (D. Foster Wallace) 157–158, 175–177 Highway Patrol (TV series) 187, 190 Hill, Leslie Pinckney, “So Quietly” 50–51 Hispanola 69 Holbein the Younger, Hans, Dead Christ 160

Huntingdon, Countess 37 Hurston, Zora Neale 45 hybrid(ity) 14, 189, 191, 193–207 hyperreflexivity 93, 96 hypertext(uality) 14–15, 101, 103, 106, 114– 115, 119, 123, 126–127 identity 7, 12, 14, 35, 91–92, 94, 152, 181– 182, 193–194, 197–200, 202–207 illocution 40, 104, 109 intentional fallacy 158 irony 91–93, 146, 157 Kafka, Franz 145 Keats, John, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” 43 Kehlmann, Daniel 16, 166, 172–174 King, Martin Luther 52 King, Rodney 49 Kraus, Karl 16, 164–176 “Heine und die Folgen” 164, 166–167, 170–171 “Nestroy und die Nachwelt” 164, 170 Kwamdela, Odimumba 53 l’art pour l’art 42, 48 Latina/o fiction 57–72 Lilly, Octave, Cathedral in the Ghetto 50, 52 literary field 12, 37–38, 40–45, 48, 52, 54 lynching 50–51 marginalia (see also note, endnote, epigraph, footnote, Genette, G., Grafton, A., headnote, paratext) 3–5, 8–9, 11, 15–16, 139–140 Martí, José 59 Martinet, Louis A. 52 Más Afuera 176 material(ity) 15, 121–122, 124–130, 135–136, 142, 153 Mbembe, Achille 61–66, 70 McKay, Claude “If We Must Die” 48 “America” 48 media 15, 121–136 digital media 122, 126–127, 133 intermediality 121–124, 127–128

Index

mediation 131, 134, 182–183 new media 124–128, 136 remediation 114, 121, 126 Melville, Hermann 6, 8, 10, 167 memory 3, 14, 65, 107, 116, 181–182, 189– 191 meta-irony 92–93 metatextuality 141 Miller, J. Hillis 39 Milton, John, “Methought I saw my late espoused saint” 43 Morrison, Toni 26, 38 Beloved 38 Nabokov, Vladimir 7, 15–16, 75–76, 78, 139– 153 Eugene Onegin 139 Lolita 142, 149 The Original of Laura 15–16, 78, 143–148, 150–153 Pale Fire 15–16, 78, 139–153 network 121–122, 126, 128, 130–136 New York School 44 note (see also endnote, epigraph, footnote, Genette, G., Grafton, A., headnote, marginalia, paratext) as cross-reference 86–88, 90, 99, 126 scholarly and pseudo-scholarly 23, 67, 67–70, 76–77, 93, 110, 123, 125, 133– 134, 142, 166 recursiveness in 85, 87–88, 90, 99 subliminal n. 155, 160–161, 163, 175–176 subversive function 5, 32, 38, 58, 63–72, 107, 134–136 typology of 4, 5, 8, 11, 39, 44, 57–58, 67–72, 79–80, 87n., 99, 105–107, 115, 125–127, 129, 134, 157–158 oral tradition 196 oriental(ism) 23–24 Orpheus 194, 200–201 páginas en blanco 12, 57–72 parasitism/parasitical 139, 148, 151–153 paratext (see also note, endnote, epigraph, footnote, Genette, G., Grafton, A., headnote, marginalia) 4–5, 8–9, 11, 14, 37–

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39, 101–119, 128–132, 134, 136, 155, 176 Parsley Massacre 60–61 paternity 167–168, 183, 188 peritext (see also epitext, Genette, G., note, paratext) 39–41, 54–55, 104–105, 109 Petrarch, Francesco 52 Pietsch, Michael 76, 79, 175 Poe, Edgar Allan 6, 10–12, 21–35 Eureka 34–35 Marginalia 34 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket 11, 25–31 Tamerlane 11, 21–25 “The Balloon Hoax” 34 poetry 10, 38–39, 43, 48–49, 193–207 African American 37–55, 193–207 poiesis 8–9 postmodernism 90–96, 102–103, 105, 118– 119, 157–158, 193–194, 196 PowerPoint 101–102, 107, 114–118 Pynchon, Thomas 13, 168 Gravity’s Rainbow 168 Quashie, Kevin 44 Quijano, Aníbel 59 Rabener, Gottlieb Wilhelm Hinkmars von Repkow Noten ohne Text 34, 77 Ramazani, Jahan 205–206 rational egoism 156 recursiveness 85, 90 Redmond, Eugene B. 46–48 Songs from an Afro/Phone 46 Renan, Ernest 61 Saldívar, José Davíd 59 Sea Hunt (TV series) 187–188 Searle, John R. 41 self-narration 103, 106–107, 114–115 self-similarity 85 Selkirk, Alejandro 176 serenade 47 Serres, Michel 151

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Shakespeare, William 44, 48, 53, 150–151, 165 Timon of Athens 150–151 Shepherd, Reginald 193–207 Shields, David 10 Sierpiński gasket 84–85 Simpson, Michael 197 sincerity 90, 92 slave narratives 38 sonnet 11–12, 37–55 Speech Act Theory 41, 43 Stack, Robert (actor) 185 state violence 57–66, 69, 72 subtitle 11, 39, 143 supplementarity 140, 148–153 Suslova, Apollinaria (Polina) 159 television 90–91, 93, 181–183, 185–189 The Third Man (film) 189–190 transnational imagination 193–207 Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leónides 60–63, 65– 66, 68–72 Turgenev, Ivan 155, 157

Twenty One (TV quiz show) 186 Walker, Margaret, 53 “Malcolm X” 53 Wallace, David Foster 4, 7, 8, 10, 13–14, 16, 75–108, 114, 118, 143, 155–164, 170, 173–177 Infinite Jest 7, 13, 75–99, 106, 114, 175, 177 “E Unibus Pluram” 90–93, 96, 99 Wallerstein, Immanuel 59 Watkins, Lucian B. 49 Weaver, Michael S. 45 Webley, Conrad, Love is a Two-Letter Word… Us 44 Wheatley, Phillis, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral 37–38 White, Curtis, Memories of My Father Watching TV 181–191 writing 3–4, 7–8, 14–16, 32, 40, 42, 54, 57, 62, 64, 67–68, 93, 102, 114, 121–123, 125, 129, 132, 139, 148, 150, 153