Truth and Metafiction: Plasticity and Renewal in American Narrative 9781501351723, 9781501351730, 9781501351761, 9781501351754

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Truth and Metafiction

ii

Truth and Metafiction Plasticity and Renewal in American Narrative Josh Toth

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Josh Toth, 2021 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Namkwan Cho Cover image © Mark Tansey. Courtesy Gagosian All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Toth, Josh, author. Title: Truth and metafiction: plasticity and renewal in American narrative / Josh Toth. Description: New York City : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “Explores the changing relationship of fiction to truth, politics, and ethics by picking through the bones of postmodernism and by looking at the state of metafiction today (in novels, films, and television series)”–Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020034148 | ISBN 9781501351723 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501351747 (epub) | ISBN 9781501351754 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Postmodernism–United States. | Fiction–Technique. | Arts, American–21st century–Themes, motives. Classification: LCC NX456.5.P66 T68 2021 | DDC 700.973/0905–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034148 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5172-3  PB: 978-1-5013-5173-0  ePDF: 978-1-5013-5175-4  eBook: 978-1-5013-5174-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.



For my plastic fantastic children: Maude and Marlow, and even . . . Steve (who lives in the attic) That’s a lie

Spirit necessarily appears in Time, and it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure Notion, i.e. has not annulled Time. —G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit Rise, Sally, rise, put your hand on your hips Cover your eyes and move (move) With the spirit (with the spirit) go on and move (Move) move with the spirit (with the spirit) oh, move (move) Move with the spirit, now, now, now, (move with the spirit) move with the spirit —Aretha Franklin, “Spirit in the Dark” But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late —Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Part I  Theory

1

Metafiction Contra Postmodernity 3 Meta after Meta 3 Irony and the Unpostmodern 10 From Oscillation to Sublation 19 Historioplastic Metafiction 27 One Last Time, Again 33

2

Speculative Plasticity 41 Divine Plasticity 41 Metafictional Subjects 51 Neomaterialism, or Reading Poorly 57 Writing Well, or the Ethics of Speculation 69

Part II  Text

3

The Time of Plascencia and Egan (and Others) 81 Grasping the Future 81 Textual Reality 87 Irony’s Ghosts 95 The Time of EA 105

4

Undoing Wounds in Danielewski’s House of Leaves 116 Spiraling Closure 116 Traumatic Absence 123 Returning “the Real” 130 “A Snail’s Place” 136 Recovery without Scars 142

viii Contents Part III  Screen

5

Affective Debts in Contemporary Film 151 Forming History 151 Affective Interruption 161 Economimetic Collapse 170 The Other Account 180

6

Historioplasticity in Tarantino (and Nolan) 188 History’s Suture 188 Performance . . . en Abyme 195 “Facts, not [Dreams]” 202 Once Upon a Time . . . in Conclusion 209

Works Cited Index

223 236

Acknowledgments This book draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, so I had the good fortune to hire and work with several wonderful research assistants. Much thanks goes first, therefore, to (in order of appearance) Attena Keeler, Courtney Krentz, Jaz Ramage, Amy St. Amand, and Zachary Schauer. While working together to create an impressive database of American metafictional forms—across media and time—these students patiently combed through various drafts of this book, catching and correcting all manner of errors. Most I will never admit; but let’s say I’ve learned a thing or (maybe) two. Next, let me thank Haaris Naqvi, Amy Martin, and Rachel Moore (at Bloomsbury). In no way do I exaggerate when I say that without Haaris (and then Amy and Rachel) this book would not have appeared in time. Along similar lines, I should thank Bryce Wicks and Nicole Zastawny (in MacEwan University’s Office of Research Services); without their patient help none of the aforementioned students would have been paid, nor would I have made it to a single conference. And to a large degree this book began life as a scarred, patched-together monster of conference papers—the delivery of which preceded the initial stitch work. The book owes its present, coherent state to some remarkable peers who were willing to listen, share, and argue. In this regard, I would like to thank (especially) Tim Lanzendörfer and Mathias Nilges for joining me in Amsterdam and (then) inviting me to Mainz; Luca Malavasi and Elisa Bricco for inviting me to Genoa; Ralph Clare and Jeffery Severs for including me in LA; and, finally, Alison Gibbons and Matt Mullins for joining me in New Orleans. (Matt deserves some additional gratitude, though—as he had the true wisdom to look beyond the highest self; and he endured, with me, the strenuous effort of the Philosopher’s Way.) As the book moved from conference papers to more cohesive chapters, several (other) colleagues supplied additional guidance and support—whether indirectly or directly (and, sometimes, without even knowing it). I am indebted to them all: Sam B. Girgus, Brian McHale, Todd McGowan, David Reddall, Alain Beauclair, Daniel Martin, Mike Perschon, Jack Skeffington, and (finally) David Rudrum (who, somehow, keeps making me feel like I may have something useful to say). Finally, my family: my daughter (Maude), for being a perpetual rainbow and for watching Star Trek with me; my son (Marlow), for introducing me to Teen Titans Go! and for telling me everything about video games. My wife (Danica), I’m told, helps immeasurably. I would have to say that’s true.

x

Acknowledgments

Portions of this book are derived from earlier publications. Specifically, Chapters 3, 4, and 6 contain versions, respectively, of “The Ends of Metafiction, or, The Romantic Time of Egan’s Goon Squad” (in the essay collection New Directions in Philosophy and Literature [Edinburgh UP]), “Healing Postmodern America: Plasticity and Renewal in Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (in Critique), and “Historioplastic Metafiction: Tarantino, Nolan, and the ‘Return to Hegel’” (in Cultural Critique). The publisher is grateful to reprint excerpts from the following works: Phenomenology of Spirit By G. W. F. Hegel; translation by A. V. Miller © 1977 Oxford University Press Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear “Spirit In The Dark” Music by Aretha Franklin Lyrics by Aretha Franklin © 1970 Springtime Music Inc. Used by Permission / All Rights Reserved “All Along the Watchtower” Music and Lyrics by Bob Dylan © 1968 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1996 by Dwarf Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

Part I

Theory

2

1

Metafiction Contra Postmodernity CYBORG: “That’s real meta” BEAST BOY: “I once met a dog!” RAVEN: “No, Beast Boy, ‘meta’ means . . . ugh, never mind” —Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, Teen Titans Go!

Meta after Meta The first chapter of Patricia Waugh’s 1984 study of metafiction—Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction—is titled “What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?” Today, some thirty-five years along, a book on metafiction (not this one, however) might open with a somewhat self-conscious parody: something like “What’s with the persistence of metafiction and why are they saying some okay things about it?”1 Such a parody might seem forced, yet it would neatly exemplify the difference between a study of metafiction’s omnipresence in the peak years of postmodernism and a study of metafiction’s somewhat inexplicable tenacity since postmodernism ostensibly conceded its position as the cultural dominant in the United States and much of the West. Inexplicable: because To a certain degree, critics have been oddly silent about metafiction’s curious persistence at the end of postmodernism. That said, and while few seem interested in taking it up directly (or in full), a sizable number of books and articles touch on the issue while attending more directly or generally to the problem of postmodernism’s demise. A few notable or representative examples might be my own The Passing of Postmodernism (2010), Mary Holland’s Succeeding Postmodernism (2013), Irmtraud Huber’s Literature after Postmodernism (2014), and Wolfgang Funk’s The Literature of Reconstruction (2015). Somewhat more direct accounts of post-postmodern metafiction include articles like Alison Gibbons’s “Contemporary Autofiction and Metamodern Affect” (2017) and Ralph Clare’s “Metaffective Fiction” (2018). We might point, also, to The European Journal of English Studies’ special issue on “Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives” (2019). Indeed: in their introduction to the issue, Jan Alber and Alice Bell effectively summarize what is arguably the most common (if somewhat diffuse) take on self-reflexivity in contemporary narrative: “these new narratives do not use these techniques to expose the artificiality of all narratives like their postmodernist predecessors. Instead, they engage with very specific moral, ethical and/or political issues that they consider to be relevant to the real world” (125).

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metafiction has, since (at least) Waugh, been viewed as the postmodern modus operandi par excellence. Ostensibly: because postmodernism’s demise, along with the cause and subsequent ramifications of that demise, has yet to be determined with any real certainty, any real consensus. I want to focus primarily, in this introductory chapter, on the latter problem. However, it might be useful to set the stage by first addressing, if relatively briefly, the former—which is, of course, the central concern of this book (even if we won’t approach it directly until Chapter 3). Perhaps most exemplary, in terms of metafiction’s intimate connection to postmodernism, is the work of Waugh, Brian McHale, and Linda Hutcheon.2 Beginning in the mid-1980s and extending into the 1990s, these three critics most effectively drew our attention to the fact that “postmodernist fiction” could be, by and large, defined by its pervasive tendency toward self-reflexivity. Moreover, that self-reflexivity (manifesting, variously, as intertextuality, pastiche, or playfully fictionalized historiographies) paralleled, or directly conversed with, a series of developments in continental philosophy—French poststructuralism, most specifically (i.e., the then still radical work of Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, JeanFrançois Lyotard, etc.). As Waugh put it in 1984, “Over the last twenty years, novelists have tended to become much more aware of the theoretical issues involved in constructing fictions. In consequence, their novels have tended to embody dimensions of self-reflexivity and formal uncertainty” (2). For such (postmodern) writers, “The simple notion that language passively reflects a coherent, meaningful and ‘objective’ world is no longer tenable” (3). As a result, and somewhat paradoxically, metafiction gets celebrated by Waugh (and then McHale and Hutcheon, in their own specific ways) for its ability to “offer[] extremely accurate models of understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artifice, a web of interconnected semiotic systems” (9, my emphasis). This sense of “accuracy” eventually came to buttress the impulse to write self-reflexive fiction. By the time Waugh published her seminal work on such fiction, and the “paranoia that permeate[d] the metafictional writings of the sixties and the seventies . . . [had given] way to celebration, to the discovery of new forms of the fantastic” (9), the list of writers one might associate with postmodern metafiction was long indeed. Yet the work of certain usual suspects tended (or tends, still) to be offered as paradigmatic. In America, a list of “arche-metafictionists” will almost invariably include John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, William Gass, Kathy Acker, Philip K. Dick, Along with Waugh’s book on metafiction, I am thinking here of McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and Hutcheon’s two most influential works: The Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism (1989).

2

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Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Woody Allen, Vladimir Nabokov, E. L. Doctorow, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston, and so on. As, however, Waugh’s whimsical chapter title suggests, the work of such writers was often met (even during its heyday) with some hostility. It was viewed, she notes, as untenably paranoid. Sublimely bottomless conspiracies (as in the work of Pynchon or DeLillo) and the inescapability of fatalistic “scripts” (as in the work of Barth or Vonnegut) are, after all, hallmarks of the form. Metafiction and/as postmodernism tended to be admonished, and continues to be admonished, for its seemingly nihilistic, corrosive, and irresponsible attitude toward reality itself—toward, that is, the possibility of truth claims, free will, and an objectively determinable moral code. I want, though, to avoid (as much as possible in a book such as this) meandering too far backward into a debate about postmodern metafiction. To some degree, I have dealt with this debate already. My goal here, in these first few pages, is simply to set up the fact that the metafiction of postmodernism continued to be admonished by many of its consumers, even as critics initiated a celebration of its ability to “flaunt[] what is true of all novels: their ‘outstanding freedom to choose’” (Waugh 9–10). By the 1990s, then, and as (in large part) an effect of a celebratory push within academia, writers were almost ethically bound to be self-reflexive, to be ironic, to refuse the mendacious oversimplifications of premodern realism or the arrogances of modernist experimentation—as either could be associated with the assumption that true, or truer, modes of representation are possible. Of course, as I have noted elsewhere, a certain paradox haunts this ascension into what Hal Foster once termed (by way of a title for his seminal collection of essays on postmodernism) “the anti-aesthetic”:3 in the end, and necessarily, postmodern metafiction becomes the truest form of representation. We need look no further than Waugh’s 1984 phrasing to glean the spectacular nature of this paradox. Nevertheless, and not surprisingly, metafiction exploded in the latter portion of the twentieth century. From the late 1970s onward, forms of metafiction appear everywhere—in cultural production both elite and popular. In America (specifically) we see it deployed in all manner of novels (obviously), a broad range of films (Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail [1975], Jim Henson’s The Muppet Movie [1979], Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man [1980], Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo [1985], Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs [1987], Penelope Spheeris’s Wayne’s World [1992], Robert Altman’s The Player [1992], John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness [1995], etc.), and various television programs (Jim Henson’s

See Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture.

3

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Truth and Metafiction

The Muppet Show [1976–81], Glenn Gordon Caron’s Moonlighting [1985– 89], Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s Seinfeld [1989–98], David Lynch’s Twin Peaks [1990–1], Matt Groening’s The Simpsons [1989–], Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy [1999–], etc.). Children’s literature, popular song, comics, and videogames are yet other sites rife with examples. Think of Jon Stone’s The Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable Furry Old Grover (1971), Tom Waits’s “Swordfishtrombone” (1983), Grant Morrison’s run of DC’s Animal Man (1988–90), or Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001). Somewhat more surprising is the fact that this late-century spread of metafictional forms and devices eventually becomes backdrop to a critical discussion about the waning, or failing efficacy, of postmodernism. By the early 2000s, postmodernism was, according to many, a dead episteme—and the proliferation of metafiction (especially in popular media) simply stands as the most obvious symptom of a cultural moment that has become, like Yeats’s spiraling falcon, too distant or too dispersed from its roots to be of critical or political use. (More on this later.) And yet the production of metafiction continued, and continues, undaunted. In terms of textual fiction, a list of “new” metafictionists would certainly include (for instance) Mark Z. Danielewski, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Foster Wallace, Mark Leyner, Gary Shteyngart, Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Salvador Plascencia, and so on. And today’s metafictional films and television shows are almost too numerous and varied to count, though a representative sampling would surely include films such as Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015) alongside television shows as diverse as Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–), Mitchell Hurwitz’s Arrested Development (2003–19), Hart Hanson’s Bones (2005–17), Eric Kripke’s Supernatural (2005–20), Matthew Carnahan’s House of Lies (2012–16), and Beau Willimon’s House of Cards (2013–18). Perhaps, though, the best and most edifying example of metafiction’s veritable omnipresence in today’s (American) cultural production is Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath’s Teen Titans Go! (2013–), an extremely popular animated program for children. Presented in a bright and simplistic style that might best be described as a parody of America’s co-option of anime, Teen Titans Go! offers short segments (two per twenty-minute episode) detailing the exploits of the Teen Titans, a group of young superheroes first introduced in the pages of DC comics. In many respects, the show is a follow-up to the earlier Teen Titans (2003–6)—a serious, if also animated, take on the DC heroes. Teen Titans Go!, however, is never anything other than a parody. The teenaged Titans— inclusive of Robin (Scott Menville), Starfire (Hynden Walch), Beast Boy (Greg Cipes), Raven (Tara Strong), and Cyborg (Khary Payton)—live free

Metafiction Contra Postmodernity

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of parental supervision in a giant T-shaped tower on a small island outside “Jump City.” They spend the vast bulk of their time eating pizza, making fart jokes, making jokes about making fart jokes, and annoying one another. They often, also, break into song or musical numbers—with any number of absurd montages intruding upon the virtually nonexistent narratives. Consider, for instance, songs such as “Waffles, Waffles, Waffles,” “Booty,” or “Awesome America.” A running joke is that the Titans rarely, if ever, fight crime. Alongside these more implicit metafictional conceits (including, also, frequent references to a larger and often contradictory DC universe and previous adaptations of the Titan characters), the series often takes overtly metafictional turns. One of the segments in season 3 is, in fact, titled “The Fourth Wall” (2015). This segment begins with the Titans sitting on their couch watching television. A supervillain named Control Freak (Alexander Polinsky) soon appears on the screen and prevents the Titans from changing the channel. Frustrated, Robin tells Control Freak that his “evil pop culture references aren’t welcome here.” Ignoring Robin, Control Freak proceeds to inform the Titans that he has “the perfect show for [them] to watch.” Then, on the Titans’s TV screen, the intro to Teen Titans Go! begins to play—the exact same intro we just watched. After realizing that they are the (fictional) show they are now watching, the Titans respond in typically humorous and absurd ways. They rush over to the “fourth wall” (which just happens to be fixed to the left of the couch they were sitting on) and stare out at their viewers. While looking at us, Raven reflects on the voyeuristic nature of both television and film: “People are watching us without our permission? Ew! What a bunch of creeps.” Control Freak, from their TV, then tells them that their show is garbage and that they will soon be rebooted—just as the old Teen Titans was rebooted as Teen Titans Go! A central complaint, Control Freak asserts, is the bad acting. Starfire, though, asserts (in her ostentatious alien accent) that “we are not the acting. This is how we are.” Nevertheless, after being shown images of their earlier, more sophisticated, rendering (in Teen Titans), the Titans accept their fictional status and commit themselves to becoming less infantile. They convince their animators to redraw them (on a computer that briefly takes over our screen) in a neo-Victorian style, and they adopt outrageously cliché English accents. At the very moment they think they have “won,” though, Control Freak reappears to inform them that, as per his plan, they have rebooted themselves. Disgusted with his trickery and their own willingness to sacrifice their integrity, the Titans decide that they “have to be true to [them]selves, even if it means being rebooted.” Robin then commands the Titans to “toot”—and a Victorian-esque title card with the word “TOOT” appears on screen. After directing a “fart song” at their TV, the Titans reappear in their previous form

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and Robin announces that the Titans are “proud of . . . what [they] represent” and that, if they are to preserve their “truth,” they must stop their broadcast by physically “break[ing] the fourth wall.” To do so, Beast Boy transforms into a ram and runs at our screen. Once the other Titans join his attack, the screen breaks and the segment abruptly ends—only to be immediately replaced by the next segment (“40%, 40%, 20%”), in which we learn that Cyborg’s strength is derived from a 1990s-esque ambient love song that he plays on his internal speakers. After the other Titans are convinced of the song’s power, they all transform into overly sexualized, or “serious,” versions of themselves. They are also transported to a desert-like plain. Here, they ride a five-person motorcycle, the wind blows dramatically through their hair, a robotic hawk and horse travel alongside them, and an impossibly full moon (with the face of a wolf) looks down upon their adventures. The “lesson,” as Cyborg puts it, is that “music can transform you” (even into the famous Transformer, Optimus Prime)—and that “music is its own reality.” Other explicitly metafictional segments include season 3’s “History Lesson” (2016), in which the Titans tell each other increasingly absurd versions of historical events; season 3’s “The Art of Ninjutsu” (2016), in which the Titans must use their Ninja skills to locate the “McGuffin,” which turns out to be an Egg McMuffin; and, perhaps most notably, season 4’s “The Self-Indulgent 200th Episode Spectacular—Part 1” and “Part 2” (2017), in which the Titans must locate and reanimate their own creators and animators after being confronted by encroaching nothingness (which is the result of production that has halted under the weight of “a very aggressive schedule”). These latter segments end— after the Titans, with “real-life” photos in hand, track down and reprimand animated versions of Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath, learn the lesson that “make-believe becomes real if you believe in it enough,” and wonder if “any of this matter[s]”—with a montage of Jelenic, Horvath, and the rest of the show’s crew dancing and working on new episodes. Over the montage is the song “Work on an Episode.” A portion of the lyrics is worth quoting: “Work on an episode / Everyday / Piling on your plate / Like a work buffet . . . / Get that money for your 401(k) / Invest in rental property then . . . / Work on an episode.” It would be easy to disregard Teen Titans Go! as nothing other than a popular and diluted (to the point of infantilism) take on more rigorous forms of postmodern metafiction. In this sense, the show is merely a startling example of how a certain strain, or spirit, of postmodernism has infected our everyday thinking. Its irresponsible lessons—in the form of contradictory messages about the infinite pliability of identity and the importance of fighting for one’s integrity to the idea that “make-believe becomes real if you believe in it enough” and that history is never anterior to the form of its telling— now circulate, unchecked, before the eyes of our children. We can certainly,

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if too easily, draw a direct line between such messaging and the political consequences of on ongoing “post-truth” crisis. In this specific sense, the show is best viewed as the apotheosis of David Foster Wallace’s nightmare (just think of all that flatulence!)—a nightmare he outlines in his most influential essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993). As Wallace puts it, “Television [along with, we might add, books and films and comics, etc.] used to point beyond itself. Those of us born in like the sixties were trained to look where it pointed, usually at versions of ‘real life’ made prettier, sweeter, better by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today’s Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what’s not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger” (160).4 Thus, Wallace concludes, Metafictionists may have had aesthetic theories out the bazoo, but they were also sentient citizens of a community that was exchanging an old idea of itself as a nation of do-ers and be-ers for a new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers. Metafiction, for its time, was nothing more than a poignant hybrid of its theoretical foe, realism: if realism called it like it saw it, metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it. (160–1)

Metafiction, for Wallace, is little more than the natural outgrowth of a society that has lost itself to the wonders of televisation, to watching and being watched. We know everything is a self-conscious performance, even if (or when) we “pretend” it’s not. “What,” then, Wallace asks, “do we do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution?” (184). His answer, of course, has become as influential as it is problematic: we must become “anti-rebels, born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue” (192–3). Such “anti-rebels” would, in short, rebel against rebellion—and, in so doing, risk the mockery of “gifted ironists.” Yet Wallace’s own fictional work never completely disentangles itself from irony, or any number of useful metafictional devices (such as elaborate and intrusive footnotes). Let’s not disregard this ostensible failure—as it provides us with another way of

Wallace is actually mistaken, as McHale was quick to note (upon reading a draft of this chapter). Unlike many other nonhuman animals, a dog will often look away from a pointing finger to the location such a finger indicates. Perhaps my implicit thesis (here and throughout) is that something similar can be said of humans and the point of metafiction.

4

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approaching a type of television program that might appear, on the surface, to be precisely what Wallace laments.

Irony and the Unpostmodern I discuss, briefly, some of Wallace’s fiction in Chapter 3. Briefly: because Wallace’s work is often too readily held up as the Rosetta Stone for understanding all things post-postmodern. It is, I think, more interesting to look at works that are not so clearly, or so earnestly, opposed to postmodernism en masse. For now, anyway, the essay just cited is useful enough. In an essay that condemns so as to transcend a certain contemporary malaise—associated with feckless irony and now boringly familiar acts of self-reflexivity—Wallace is oddly ironic and self-reflexive. One might even say he is overtly, or strategically, disingenuous. Not only does the essay end with a caustic and obviously ironic line—“Are you immensely pleased” (193), which is then immediately followed by a note that self-reflexively introduces the essay’s endnotes—but a large portion of Wallace’s entire argument also hangs upon a series of happy, or perfectly necessary, coincidences. Take the first lines of the final paragraph on page 157: “A.M., 8/05/90, as I was scanning and sneering at the sneering tone of the prenominate Times articles, a syndicated episode of St. Elsewhere was on TV.” Thus, a perfect example of televised selfreflexivity appears on TV at precisely the moment he is reviewing perfectly exemplary forms of television criticism (for his argument) in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the very first issue of The New York Times he decided to open. It’s hard not to “sneer” a bit at this perfect confluence of events. Indeed, Wallace will go on to offer a detailed description of St. Elsewhere’s perfectly caustic self-awareness, a self-awareness made even more overt by the fact that the episode in question just happened to follow two back-to-back episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show; for, in the St. Elsewhere episode, a “mental patient” believes he is Mary Richards from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and, at one point, mistakes a character played by Betty White for “Sue Ann” (who White once played on The Mary Tyler Show). Wallace, of course, unpacks all manner of other self-reflexive layers as well. While it might seem plausible that Wallace once saw this episode of St. Elsewhere on the heels of two episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, how likely is it that a rerun of this perfectly representative episode appeared before his uninterested “sneer” the very day he opened an issue of The New York Times to find a perfect example of derisive TV criticism? Sure, it’s possible. It’s also possible that he “pluck[ed] from [his] bookshelves almost at random . . . poet James Cummins’s 1986 The Whole Truth, a cycle of sestinas deconstructing Perry

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Mason” (168–9, my emphasis)—at the very moment he was intent on proving that “treating of the pop as its own reservoir of mythopoeia fast metastasized and has transcended both school and genre [of postmodernist black humor and/or metafiction]” (168). On a certain level, Wallace’s troublingly masculinist nostalgia for “sincerity,” “reverence,” “authority,” and “conviction”—predicated, as they are, on a dismissal of feckless “appearers” and a privileging of “do-ers” and “be-ers” and those artists who might heroically reverse “television’s power to jettison connection and castrate protest” (161, my emphasis)—relies upon a potentially strategic confusion of “irony” and contemporary America’s tendency and willingness to vacillate between belief and skeptical incredulity. Irony, in its strictest sense, as someone like Donna Haraway or Richard Rorty might use the term5 (while echoing a thinker like Søren Kierkegaard6), See Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” and Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. As Haraway puts it, “Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg” (149). Though Haraway here makes the somewhat typical mistake of confusing dialectics with synthesis, her point should not be overlooked: irony is a matter of sustaining difference because two (or more) contrary positions are necessary (or valid) at the same time. Rorty’s position is not dissimilar. For Rorty, irony entails perceiving all vocabularies, including (or most importantly) one’s own, as contingent, or as justifiable as any other. For Rorty, then, “The opposite of irony is common sense. For that is the watchword of those who unselfconsciously describe everything important in terms of the final vocabulary to which they and those around them are habituated” (74). For Rorty, though—and somewhat contrary to my position here and throughout— irony has no sublative function: “ironists who are also liberals think that . . . [political] freedoms require no consensus on any topic more basic than their desirability” (84). Rorty refuses to imagine the possibility of an irony that might sustain while negating contradictory positions, that might lay claim to a universal and transphenomenal reality by paradoxically signaling the impossibility of permanently ossifying (what I will begin to call) its infinite plasticity. Even as he strives to employ irony as a tool for ensuring the most inclusive and nonviolent of societies, Rorty risks advocating the kind of solipsistic irony Hegel associates with German romantics like Schlegel. For Hegel, this is the irony of artistic “genius”: “this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it” (Aesthetics 1: 66). It’s worth noting here, too, that in attacking this “one tendency of irony” (1: 64, my emphasis), Hegel anticipates the “anti-correlationist” position of speculative realists from Quentin Meillassoux forward—that is, the very thinkers who desperately struggle to (mis)read Hegel as (merely) a “correlationist.” 6 See, for instance, Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony, in which he tracks the function of irony in Socrates’s life and work while “correcting” (but also redeploying) a specifically Hegelian concept of negativity and (thus, ironically) irony. For Kierkegaard, irony denotes a “negativity” that is “absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a 5

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denotes the sustainment and (via that sustainment) the radical sublation of contradictory positions. Sublation should not be confused with synthesis here. As an English translation of Hegel’s Aufhebung, “sublation” denotes a “holding to” and a “letting go,” “preservation” and “abolishment.” Synthesis is simply the effacement of difference, a return to depthlessness and indifference, a flattening of ethical distance. Synthesis is not, in fact, dissimilar from sincerity. Whenever I make it possible for my audience to assume that what I say, or describe, is exactly the same as what I mean, or what is represented via my description, I am offering the illusion of erasure. A troubling sense of depth or distance is negated, and the radical otherness of my meaning, or of the thing in question, is laminated onto (or as) a given surface. Sincerity, like synthesis, is tantamount to a flat affect. However, irony holds together what is “real” and what is offered as its representation while, or by, keeping them at a distance. Or better, and as we will see more clearly in the following chapter, irony can draw us toward an engagement with the irony of reality itself, with the in-itself as a radically split Thing. Uncanny irony, when taken as indissoluble from a Žižekian Real (which gives by barring access), sustains a connection to reality because it entails contradiction in the most philosophical of senses; its very nature frustrates Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction (a law we will need to come back to in the following chapter). Wallace’s problem is, in this sense, not irony (deployed with care, or in those texts he calls “complicated ironies” [170]), but a tendency to eschew responsibility via recourse to the impossibility of laying claim to stable referents. Irony, sensu stricto, makes both sincerity and insincerity impossible; the truly ironic claim necessarily bears the unmistakable traces of its own dissembling. Donald Trump, after all, is rarely (if ever) “ironic.” He lies effectively because he speaks with sincerity. In the wake of postmodernism—or rather, in the face of postmodernity’s ongoing intensification—today’s “new sincerity” (to recall Adam Kelly’s influential essay on Wallace) cannot possibly bring us safely to the other side of postmodern irony. Nor should we aim for such refuge. In most cases, in fact, recent efforts to return to “sincerity” simply and problematically encourage us to acquiesce to false belief, to the necessity of “pretend.” Is not, to some degree, Wallace’s call for renewed sincerity unsurprisingly echoed in the (white-male) hipster set of the early 2000s? Here we see higher something that still is not” (261). While ironists must certainly risk becoming “intoxicated” with—and losing themselves to—“the infinity of possibilities,” irony (at its most ethical) “let[s] the abstract become visible through the immediately concrete” (267). Thus, for Kierkegaard, the irony of a figure like Socrates functioned to expose “established actuality [as] unactual” (270–1) while, simultaneously, “demanding . . . the actuality of subjectivity, of ideality” (271). As we will see (and as I’ve already implied), this take on irony almost precisely aligns with a certain reading of Hegelian sublation.

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“sincerity” expressed via any number of oversimplified registers: vintage apparel, tight slacks, large beards, leather, craft beer, and so on. As we will see, this trend toward faith in false authenticity is most overt in Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s account of “metamodernism,” as well as in Raoul Eshelman’s theorization of “performatism”—both of which essentially offer “acts of pretend” as viable alternatives to postmodernism. My position, however, aligns somewhat more readily with Lee Konstantinou’s take on things—insofar as Konstantinou’s concept of “postirony” (which is also, in part, derived from a reading of Wallace) encourages us to accept the necessity of retaining a certain form of irony.7 Indeed, I want to suggest that, to Wallace’s central question (posed some fifteen years ago)—“If even the president lies to you, whom are you supposed to trust to deliver the real?” (162)—we might very well respond, today, and somewhat counterintuitively, “the ironist!” Such an answer will surely require further support; but let’s, for the moment, assume that irony is far more complicated and far more politically and ethically efficacious than the ability “to acquiesce for hours daily to the illusion that the people on the TV don’t know they’re being looked at, to the fantasy that we’re transcending privacy and feeding on unselfconscious human activity” (Wallace, “E Unibus Plurum” 154). In doing this—in doing it with the full, if repressed, knowledge that nothing is “real” (any longer), that all representation and truth claims are merely a matter of subjective and mutable faith—we are not behaving as ironists. We are simply acquiescing to a pattern of easy and irresponsible oscillation, toggling between belief and skepticism and thus circumventing the troubling manner in which something real must arrive as the consequence of its corruption, of its essential and perpetual misplacement. What Wallace calls “postmodern cool” (178) should not be

A reading of Konstantinou’s introduction to Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction is here recommended. While providing a wonderfully nuanced and well-researched history of irony, Konstantinou demonstrates that sincerity should not be (easily or simply) opposed to irony. As he puts it, “Analyses of New Sincerity seem to imagine sincerity as the opposite term to irony, but the precise relation between sincerity and irony remains unclear. Why, after all, would sincerity be the aspired state one might want to attain if one was concerned about irony? Why not commitment, or passion, or emotion, or decision?” (39). My position on the purported tension between sincerity and irony is, though, somewhat at odds with Konstantinou’s. Consequently, I would like to retain some (slight) distance from Konstantinou’s concept of “postirony.” My goal, in fact, is to redeploy irony in its purest sense—and thus move toward a strictly Hegelian understanding of aesthetic form, or ethical acts of narrative “sublation.” In other words, my use of irony follows as rigorous a translation of the Greek eirōneia as possible. As Konstantinou explains, while discussing debates about translating Plato, “translators [often] mistake the eirōn (a liar or a deceiver), whose purpose is to ‘conceal what is not said,’ for the ironist, whose purpose is to ‘convey what is not said’” (15, my emphasis). Another useful and certainly related rendering of irony can be found, of course, in Hutcheon’s Irony’s Edge.

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confused with a properly ironic position; it’s a position of pure detachment from the real. It’s the position, as we’ll see in Chapter 3, of a character like Lulu in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad: “if I believe, I believe. Who are you to judge my reasons?” (320). Let’s be clear, though: Wallace is, for the most part, correct in his assessment of late-1990s American culture. Imagine, indeed, how much stronger his essay would be had he wrote it just a few years later—in the peak years of “reality TV.” With the arrival of reality TV we see, beyond any doubt, a society’s profound and troubling willingness to confuse sincerity with a barely believable lie. And, of course, in the case of reality TV, the viewers who watch in rapturous belief are always ready to tell you, at any moment (with eyes rolled), that they know it’s not “real.” Reality TV is thus the ultimate sign that anything we might call rigorous and sustained irony has slowly if surely transmuted (or been co-opted) into feckless oscillations or perverse confusions of belief and truth. This makes things much easier for both those critics seeking an easy reason to reject (outright) a now reified postmodernism and those politicians and pundits who have long sought freedom from the shackles of consistency and empirical evidence. But is a show like Teen Titans Go! the logical outgrowth of this slow and sure transmutation and co-option? How does its metafiction work? On some level it’s difficult, if not impossible, to claim that Teen Titans Go! is not caught up in the kind of “irony” Wallace rails against—which is also, surely, that “one tendency of irony” (1: 64, my emphasis) Hegel associates, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, with the solipsistic “genius” of German romanticism. Nothing is to be taken seriously; viewers are allowed, only, to invest themselves in the very lowest of narrative stakes. Moreover, its various metafictional flourishes often seem repetitive—to, at least, a viewer armed with a fair knowledge of postmodern media. The transition from the profound existential implications of a finally shattered fourth wall to yet another episode about the infinite mutability of one’s (fictional) reality might surely remind some of the line that connects Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973) to his later Jailbird (1979). The former ends with Vonnegut, as both the author of and a character in his own book, “freeing” the much abused Kilgore Trout; the latter, though, begins by informing us that Trout “is back again” because “He could not make it on the outside” (1). It is, in other words, somewhat difficult to align Teen Titans Go! with those recent (post-postmodern) forms of metafiction Konstantinou and Ralph Clare have termed “credulous” and “metaffective,” respectively.8 There is nothing we might construe as “credulous” in Teen Titans Go!, and

See Konstantinou’s “Four Faces of Postirony” and Clare’s “Metaffective Fiction.” I return to both in Chapter 3.

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the show is hardly (if ever) interested in rupturing its narrative frame so as to produce true affects or to call “attention to the ways in which emotion and affect are represented in order to interrogate the relationship between them” (Clare 4).9 Unless, of course, we count laughter? To a certain extent, then, we must take Teen Titans Go! as an overt symptom of a still powerful strain of postmodernism. In popular culture, at least, postmodernism appears to be alive and well. However, and at the same time, we would be remiss if we simply conflated the metafiction of Teen Titans Go! with every other form of postmodern metafiction—just as we would be remiss to assume that all postmodern metafiction functions in precisely the same manner. Let’s not forget that a novel like Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions is far more aligned with Wallace’s lament than what Wallace is lamenting. A famous scene in the novel involves Trout reflecting on contemporary America’s tragic disregard for stable meaning, a disregard he sees exemplified in a moving company that has decided to use the image of an immobile pyramid as its logo. Moreover, the main character—Dwyane Hoover—engages in a violent rampage at the end of the novel because he has convinced himself that he is the only “real” person on the planet, that everyone else is merely a fiction. Likewise, in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Alvy Singer’s tendency to reimagine and restructure the historical facts of his life (and, by extension, the film’s entire metafictional structure) is implicitly mocked whenever we are confronted with Singer’s utter distaste for the inauthentic—a distaste we see most overtly when Alvy’s Hollywood friend shows him how a sitcom’s laugh track gets manipulated in postproduction. A similar (and truly ironic) inversion occurs, also, in DeLillo’s White Noise—when the main character, Jack Gladney (a professor of a field he invented, “Hitler studies”), and his friend, Murray Jay Siskind (who hopes to create a comparable field of “Elvis studies”), go to see “THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA” (12). This scene, which overtly satirizes our irrational willingness to fixate upon and worship simulacra,10 While I employ the concept of “affect” throughout (to denote that which is radically nonthematizable, an uncanny and genotextual intrusion within the coherence of form), I attend (specifically) to the distinction between emotion and affect in Chapter 5. 10 The scene obviously recalls Jean Baudrillard’s famous claim, in “The Precession of the Simulacra,” that the contemporary (postmodern) moment is defined by the complete evisceration of a distant, or notional, real: 9

By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials— worse: with their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalence, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor reduplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say an operation to deterring every

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becomes a type of mise en abyme, echoing and mocking the manner in which the novel’s characters and its very form (as a postmodern work) are tragically caught up in a pervasive flattening—or, to follow Jameson’s famous phrasing, “waning” (Postmodernism 10)—of affect, a pervasive flattening of the space between (or within) the real and (or as) its representation. While it may still align more readily with our conception of a now stereotyped postmodernism, the metafiction of Teen Titans Go! also exemplifies the manner in which the function of metafiction can change from one text to another. Teen Titans Go! is never particularly interested in proving that reality is merely the effect of intersubjective and endlessly intersecting discourses—what we might call, following Lyotard, petits récits. It doesn’t function in the same manner as, say, shows like Seinfeld or The Simpsons, which work primarily to frustrate our ability to assert a clear line between actual reality and its subjectification. In The Simpsons this blurring is overt and absurd, yet so unrelenting that we are never allowed “to hold a position” permanently anterior to the show’s caustic ridicule. In Seinfeld, the blurring is far less overt (until, of course, the show begins to fold in on itself in season 4); but it is always evident via each character’s profound solipsism and adherence to always arbitrary, because self-determined, codes of conduct.11 In Teen Titans Go!, however, the metafictional negation of a “real” anterior to its representation tends to be, itself, negated. In large part, this is due to the extreme absurdity of the show. The Titans may decide that “make-believe

real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself—such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences. (3) Baudrillard is describing what I call in this chapter a “flattening of affect,” a flattening (moreover) that cannot be overcome via recourse to “sincerity” or surface-level description. The latter, of course, largely defines the ambitions of both object-oriented ontology and the various expressions of “postcriticism” that have positioned themselves in an irregular orbit around such ontology. I discuss the former in Chapter 2. A discussion of the latter, however, is beyond the scope of this project. Nevertheless, a look at one of its more representative examples (say, Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique [2015]) will, I think, confirm my suspicion that a mandate to describe what is merely apparent in a text (or about a thing)—so as to remain open to the affect of what is superficially given—ultimately replicates and reinforces the more mendacious consequences of the socioeconomic moment Baudrillard laments. 11 For a more nuanced discussion of Seinfeld, see my Stranger America (chapter 8, specifically). Apropos of my interests here, I look at the way in which Larry David (cocreator of and writer for Seinfeld) manages to sublate the postmodern elements of Seinfeld—and thus renew its more ethical dimensions—in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

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becomes real if you believe in it enough,” but this trite assertion is sustained as possible only insofar as it is refused. The assertion, in fact, is associated with a sequence in which the Titans meet Aaron Horvath’s son—who, since his dad is having a “poop,” decides to fight the Titans by transforming himself (literally) into a giant dinosaur. Likewise, music may be able to “transform” you, but the sheer absurdity of the transformations that ensue (including a scene in which Cyborg transforms into Optimus Prime) stress the pure metaphoricity, and thus real-life limits, of such transformation. Finally, the Titans’s freestyling rewrites of history point, à la postmodernism, to the manner in which historical accounts are invariably the consequence of bias, but their particular accounts cannot be likened to the slippery accounts we see in canonical works of historiographic metafiction—works like Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) or Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975) or Allen’s Zelig (1983) or Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997). In these canonically postmodern texts, a reader or viewer is forced to accept the fact that actual and fictional history are impossible to disentangle. In Teen Titans Go!, however, even the youngest viewer is unlikely to believe Starfire when she explains that “President Abraham and Turkey Sandwich Lincoln” and “John Milks Booth” became good friends and eventually “purchased a small cabin of the logs together, and there they live to this day”; nor will even the youngest viewers believe Beast Boy when he claims that the moon is covered in “cheese oceans” and that, after flying to the moon in the “Apollo Creed,” some “some space dudes” needed to be rescued by an old man named “Sticky Joe” because their “toots [were] too strong for the moon’s low gravity.” While such stories ostentatiously highlight the fact that historiography should never be taken as pure or purely objective, they also stress the fact that something (more) true has been irresponsibly obfuscated. In its own childish way, then, the metafiction employed in Teen Titans Go!—which is often more of a parody of postmodern metafiction than postmodern metafiction proper—might in fact stand as a subtle sublation of postmodernism, something unpostmodern—with the “un” functioning here like the “un” in uncanny or undead. It both negates and sustains, ironically, what it precedes. Such a sublation of postmodernism would be, in this sense, neither a simple and nostalgic return to something naively pre-postmodern nor a matter of irresponsibly “oscillating” between untenable extremes.12 This particular mode of “overcoming” postmodernism makes possible a certain experience of the real—and, indeed, what we might call a kind of Of course, this is not to suggest that what is unpostmodern is (by default, or always) an ethically efficacious sublation. The very term recalls, also, the mindless, amoral, and unrelenting hordes that populate the most horrifying of zombie films. A dangerously metastasizing postmodernism is also unpostmodern.

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affective rupture. In Teen Titans Go! these “affects” are certainly not (as we noted earlier) the bodily or emotional affects a critic like Clare might have in mind, but they nevertheless denote an intuition of the real—an “intuition,” that is, in the most Kantian of senses.13 By holding open a traumatic fissure between the possibility of saying something in truth and the always corruptive nature of what is actually said, the fissure is paradoxically closed, or sutured. Or, by redeploying the terms of Emmanuel Levinas, we can say that the “saying” of a truth is gleaned because it is allowed to persist as the sublime excess of what is “said.”14 In such moments we intuit, or experience, the “signifying [of] the uncontained par excellence” (Levinas, “God and Philosophy” 63). If we are willing to risk saying a bit too much about a show like Teen Titans Go!, we might even hazard the suggestion that a certain rupture of the unsaid is signaled in those moments when the veil of fiction is allowed to seem semi-transparent—when “real-life” images appear inside the animated frames, when Horvath laments that his work on Teen Titans Go! prevents him from spending time with his kids, when we see the tension between creative individuals and an entertainment industry that demands drones forever “work[ing] on another episode.” These oddly mundane

As Kant states,

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In whatever manner and whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed. But intuition takes place only in so far as the object is given to us. This again is only possible, to man at least, in so far as the mind is affected in a certain way. (65) “Intuition,” in other words, denotes the most “immediate relation” possible between a subject and a Thing-in-itself—which is only ever given via “sensibility.” “[I]n no other way,” Kant insists, “can an object be given to us” (65). This does not mean, however—as the speculative realists (inclusive of object-oriented ontologists) would have us believe— that Kant in any way denies the absolute reality of what is anterior to a subject’s senses and, thus, intuition. As Kant insists, If knowledge is to have objective reality, that is, to relate to an object, and is to acquire meaning and significance in respect to it, the object must be capable of being in some manner given. Otherwise concepts are empty; through them we have indeed thought, but in this thinking we have really known nothing; we have merely played with representations. (193, my emphasis) 14 My phrasing here—“saying” versus “said”—is a play upon, and a development of, language used by Levinas. As Levinas puts it in Otherwise than Being, “Being, its cognition and the said in which it shows itself signify in a saying which, relative to being, forms an exception; but it is in the said that both this exception and the birth of cognition [la naissance de la connaissance] show themselves” (Otherwise 6). Levinas thus tends to suggest that the very possibility of a pure act of saying, anterior to the corruptive influence of an intersubjective order, is only ever gleanable from within such an order— or, that is, as the consequence of what is actually and necessarily said.

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moments remain caught up in the inescapability of the fictional even as they allow us to grasp certain ineffable truths anterior to the fictional. By following a recent and still developing “return to Hegel,” I want to call such double-negating metafiction “historioplastic”—and, in so doing, link it to Hegel’s very specific understanding of “romantic” art, a form of representation capable of sublating the tension between (what Hegel defines in his Aesthetics as) the impossibly perfect forms of “classical” realism and the utterly skeptical deformities of “symbolic” pre-art. While we might view nineteenth-century realisms as a repetition of the former; the twentieth-century return to experimentation and deformation (which begins with the modernists and subtly transmutes into the metafictions of postmodernism) is tantamount to the latter. This will, of course, entail a rethinking of the connection between modernism and postmodernism; but such a rethinking will allow us to better understand how a particular representational form (in this case, metafiction) might perform a sublation, or an overcoming, of its previous function. However, before we can begin to unpack and thus defend such claims—and, in the process, approach more “sophisticated” versions of metafiction’s postpostmodern redeployment—we need, finally, to return to the issue we left hanging: the still contestable fact of postmodernism’s end. This issue will carry us into the problem of periodizing our contemporary and, in turn, to Chapter 2’s focus on “speculative realism’s” troubled efforts to overcome (post)modern skepticism—a mode of skepticism that can be traced as far back as Kant.

From Oscillation to Sublation In the first two decades of the new millennium we have seen an explosion of critical works (academic books and articles, all manner of online blogs and works of popular journalism) announcing and reflecting upon the end of postmodernism. Many are direct consequences of Wallace’s essay, along with Jonathan Franzen’s equally influential “Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books” (2002). In almost every case, these works are marked by an effort to get over postmodernism—and, in getting over it, to name the new. This is an effort, as David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris suggest (by way of a title for their 2015 anthology cataloging such efforts), toward Supplanting the Postmodern.15 And yet the bulk of these This explosion of critical work on the end of postmodernism should be viewed less as the start of a debate than as the sign of critical mass. As Christian Moraru notes (in his introduction to American Book Review’s special issue on “Metamodernism” [2013]), “disputes around postmodernism’s limitations and obsolescence started, significantly

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various attempts—seen from a distance, and as a group—largely suggest that there is nothing particularly new at the end of the postmodern road, just a cul-de-sac bringing us back the way we came. Consider the contents for the “Coming to Terms with the New” section of Rudrum and Stavris’s anthology. Each chapter corresponds to an “-ism” that has been mooted as a name for the post-postmodern. Of the eight Rudrum and Stavris include in the anthology, six are “-modernisms”: Billy Childish and Charles Thomson’s “remodernism,” Gilles Lipovetsky’s “hypermodernism,” Robert Samuels’s “automodernism,” Nicolas Bourriaud’s “altermodernism,” Alan Kirby’s “digimodernism,” and Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s “metamodernism.” We could add to the list, also, Christian Moraru’s “cosmodernism” (which he defines in his 2010 book, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary). I deal with many of these “modernisms” as I proceed (here and in subsequent chapters), but for now I simply want to stress the following: while it is important to note that the meaning and function of “-modernism” (as suffix) tends to differ from one critic to another, the prevalent sense we get when grouping them together is hard to dismiss. On some level we seem stuck between the certainty of an end and the impossibility of a future; trapped enough, at the end of the Cold War, probably with John Frow’s 1990 landmark contribution ‘What Was Postmodernism?’ to Ian Adams and Helen Tiffin’s collection Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism” (3). This sense of an end only became more acute as the twentieth century closed and the new millennium opened with its own series of seismic events—political, cultural, and environmental. As Irmtraud Huber suggests, one may point . . . to the change in the political climate after the end of the Cold War, to the rise of fundamentalism, to 9/11 and its aftermath, to the technical advances and life-changing influences of globalisation, to a neo-liberal hypercapitalism gone rampant and the dissolution of economic optimism in the course of global financial crisis, to the spreading awareness of the finiteness of resources and the global challenge of climate change, and surmise that the circumstances under which postmodernism arose have seen quite radical change. (5) What remains in dispute, however, is the cultural and social consequences of this shift in circumstances. Hence the rapid proliferation of publications concerned with the end of postmodernism and/or its radical reappraisal—for instance, and along with the various critical works mentioned at the outset (in note 1), Gilles Lipovetsky’s Hypermodern Times (2004), Raoul Eshelman’s Performatism (2008), Alan Kirby’s Digimodernism (2009), Nicolas Bourriaud’s Altermodern (2009), Jeffery T. Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism (2012), Moraru’s Cosmodernism (2011), and Matthew Mullins’s Postmodernism in Pieces (2016). In terms of more popular venues, a simple Google search of “post-postmodernism” will yield all manner of results, from Gibbons’s 2017 article in the Times Literary Supplement (i.e., “Postmodernism Is dead. What Comes Next?”) to a 2015 Huffpost​.c​om article (by Don Truong) titled “Post-Postmodernism: Where Does It End?,” and a “What Is PostPostmodernism” thread on Quora. A search for “metamodernism” will open up an even deeper (and perhaps darker) rabbit hole.

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in this limbo of the in-between, we seem doomed to suffer what Rudrum ironically terms a “polymodern condition”—a point in time “when our culture remains so fragmented and so protean that it is strikingly modern, while being so fragmented and so protean that its modernity is impossible adequately to characterize” (“Polymodern” 35). Postmodernism threatens to be the last “post.” Indeed, Vermeulen and van den Akker explain that the “meta-” of metamodernism (which certainly appears to be the most enduring and widely deployed of the aforementioned terms) “means three things: with or among, between and after” (“Periodising” 8). Ultimately, though, the “after” ends up being little more than a consequence of the “among” and the “between,” upon which Vermeulen and van den Akker lay most of the stress. “Metamodernism,” they assert, is primarily defined by “oscillation” or “metataxis,” by a shuttle-like movement between “various extremes . . .: between irony and enthusiasm, between sarcasm and sincerity, between eclecticism and purity, between deconstruction and construction and so forth” (“Periodising” 11).16 I will add here, too, by way of anticipating things to come, that these “various extremes” must implicitly include one of the most enduring binaries in philosophy: the binary between the many and the one, the particular and the universal. That said, there are, of course, a number of problems with Vermeulen and van den Akker’s emphasis on oscillation— many of which we will need to deal with as we go along. My point here is that Vermeulen and van den Akker’s characterization of metamodern oscillation largely encompasses, or best exemplifies, the problem of demarcating the new, a future finally removed from a (post)modern past. After all, the most common thread in related discussions is the suggestion that recent

I am quoting here from Vermeulen and van den Akker’s introduction to the 2015 collection they coedited with Alison Gibbons—Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism. As (largely) a repetition or rewriting of their earlier 2010 article on “Metamodernism,” this introduction employs some subtle shifts in phrasing, with “pre-postmodern” often replacing “modern.” One assumes this is because Vermeulen and van den Akker have, since 2010, been charged with oversimplifying the aesthetic and political characteristics associated with modernism—and, perhaps, postmodernism as well. As Rudrum and Stavris note, Vermeulen and van den Akker largely fail (in their 2010 essay) to justify “a clear opposition between modernism and postmodernism” (307)—an opposition that, for the most part, is necessary to buttress their claims regarding metamodern oscillation. As Vermeulen and van den Akker put it in their earlier article (as reproduced in Rudrum and Stavris’s anthology), “by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern. . . . Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings toward fanaticism, gravity pulls it back toward irony; the moment its irony sways toward apathy, gravity pulls it back toward enthusiasm” (“Notes” 316). But is this not (somewhat) like suggesting that there is just as much gravity in space as on Earth?

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cultural production is marked by a renewed interest in narrative efficacy and social responsibility, what Kelly has termed a “New Sincerity” (136) and Konstantinou calls “postirony” (Cool Characters 8). At the same time, and as the work of both Kelly and Konstantinou attests, this “post” and/or this “new” is little more than a type of laminate, glued to and largely indissociable from a previous, decidedly postmodern, whole. New sincerity is not simply sincerity, but “a sincerity . . . made possible by the impossibility of its certain identification” (140). It is almost, we might say, an ironic sincerity. And, in the same vein, Konstantinou notes that “postironists don’t advocate a simple return to sincerity—they’re not anti-ironists—but rather wish to preserve postmodernism’s critical insights (in various domains) while overcoming its disturbing dimensions” (“Four Faces” 88). Put somewhat crudely, then, what comes after postmodernism is simply postmodernism . . . lite: the epistemic equivalent of a bad beer. A further complication is the rift between the social and the aesthetic ends of postmodernism. Is the end of postmodernism tantamount to the end of postmodernity? In more rigorous discussions of the late twentieth century, the former is typically associated with a certain “cultural logic” (in Fredric Jameson’s terms). The latter, on the other hand, is often used to reference a more concrete, or material, socioeconomic infrastructure, inclusive of any number of systemic attributes (such as planned obsolescence, fictious capital, flexible accumulation, neoliberal politics, and so on).17 Linda Hutcheon is, perhaps, one of the most vocal proponents of constantly parsing this often-subtle divide—even if her own efforts to do so have a tendency to muddy the waters: Much of the confusion surrounding the usage of postmodernism is due to the conflation of the cultural notion of postmodernism (and its inherent relationship to modernism) and postmodernity as a designation of a social and philosophical period or “condition.” The latter has been variously defined in terms of the relationship between intellectual and state discourses; as a condition determined by universal, diffuse cynicism, by a panic sense of the hyperreal and simulacrum. (Politics 23)

This is, itself, of course, a hard passage to parse. It is not at all clear if Hutcheon is asserting or challenging a notion of postmodernity that encompasses both “a social and a philosophical period or ‘condition.’” While we would be wise to assert more clearly that philosophical discourse is a cultural effect (and not a See Jameson’s massively influential Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (1991), as well as David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989).

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social or material condition), we should not overlook Hutcheon’s central point, that “to assume an equation of the culture and its ground, rather than allowing for at least the possibility of a relation of contestation and subversion, is to forget the lesson of postmodernism’s complex relation to modernism: its retention of modernism’s initial oppositional impulses, both ideological and aesthetic, and its equally strong rejection of its founding notion of formalist autonomy” (25–6). By refusing such an equation, Hutcheon is able to stress a “politics of postmodernism,” a politically subversive mode of “complicitous critique” (in, primarily, the form of “historiographic metafiction”); postmodernism “critiques [the socioeconomic effects of postmodernity] while never pretending to be able to operate outside them” (25). As a result, postmodern cultural production “de-doxifies” any sense we might have of a reified or wholly uncompromised (politically, socially, economically) account of events and things. That said, and before we move on to examine the manner in which a careful negotiation of aesthetic production entails an equally careful parsing of the social and the cultural, let’s not overlook the fact that Hutcheon’s account of postmodernism is almost indistinguishable from any number of attempts to describe what follows postmodernism. Postmodernism, for Hutcheon, retains and rejects certain distinctly modernist features: it’s ironic but still sincere in its politics. Its sincerity is thus already “new”; its irony, already “sincere.” We might even say it oscillates. If we are then to imagine a beyond to the postmodern, we must first envision how a new (or renewed) aesthetic form might satisfactorily engage or critique whatever it is that has supplanted postmodernity—which might simply be, as many critics have already suggested, a profound intensification of what already was. Jeffery Nealon calls this intensification “post-postmodernism”; Gilles Lipovetsky, “hypermodernism.” As Lipovetsky puts it, “The heroic will to create a ‘radiant future’ has been replaced by managerial activism: a vast enthusiasm for change, reform and adaptation that is deprived of any confident horizon or grand historical vision” (34). The suggestion here is that postmodernism has won and, in winning, lost whatever efficacy it once had as an aesthetic movement. Its once radical appeals to fragmentation, moral relativity, and endless narrative play now seem “vaguely old-fashioned” (30). But both Lipovetsky and Nealon seem oddly uninterested in maintaining Hutcheon’s—or, for that matter, Jürgen Habermas’s18—careful efforts to maintain a line between the social and the cultural. Such a line, as I’ve already suggested, allows us to make sense of

On his efforts to sustain a line between “cultural modernity” and “societal modernization,” see Habermas’s “Modernity—An Incomplete Project.”

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the seemingly contrary approaches to postmodernism’s end, or apparent transmutation. How, after all, might we square Nealon and Lipovetsky’s sense of societal (post)modernity gone rampant with the claim that we are now seeing (in Eshelman’s terms) an aesthetic return to “monism”—as in a renewed faith in a “unified concept of sign and strategies of closure” (1)? Given these apparently opposed claims, we surely must concede that postmodernism’s (aesthetic) death is paradoxically tied to its (societal) victory, to its omnipresence as contemporary society’s ideological backdrop. We no longer need a Vonnegut or a Barth (or, for that matter, a Derrida or a Foucault) because the notion that identity is merely an arbitrary discursive effect,19 or that one truth claim is just as contingent as any other, is simply ubiquitous (and endlessly confirmed every time we engage with a world that is now unapproachable except via unstable databases, anticipatory search engines, and digital profiles). On YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or the most recent reality TV competition, we endlessly remake ourselves. For (our) truth is always only a matter of perspective. This is not to suggest that society (en masse) finally “gets” postmodernism, that concepts like deconstruction, discursive power, performativity, schizoanalysis, objet petit a, the death of the author, and so on are being employed in popular culture and politics with nuance and care; it is to suggest, rather, that the more corrosive implications of postmodernism have come to buttress a societal trend toward irresponsibility, hyperindividualism, and market-empowering uncertainty. The victory as death of postmodernism has come at the cost of its more subtle implications—its ethical efficacy, its effort to “politicize [the historical and the factual] through [a] metafictional rethinking of the epistemological and ontological relations between history and fiction” (Hutcheon, Poetics 121). At their most nuanced, the metafictional strategies of postmodernism were never about endorsing perverse and

Consider, in this sense, Judith Butler reminiscing about how, one sleepless night, she found herself watching Elizabeth Fox-Genovese on C-Span. Fox-Genovese, Butler recalls, was explaining the problem with “certain radical strains in feminist thinking . . . [including] the feminist view that no stable distinction between the sexes could be drawn or known, a view that suggests the difference between the sexes is itself culturally variable, or, worse, discursively fabricated, as if it is all a matter of language” (Senses 17). Butler’s sleeplessness is thus exacerbated, as she begins to feel that she is being accused, “at least obliquely, with having made the body less, rather than more relevant” (17). The point here, however, is that Butler is only “obliquely” connected to this obvious oversimplification; her earlier work (while certainly focused on the problem of discursive fabrications) never simply denied the limits of our real bodies. Nevertheless, Butler’s more recent interest in ethics and self-narration surely speaks to her sense that a certain theoretical shift in emphasis is now necessary—if, that is, we are to counter the problematic pervasiveness of the thinking Fox-Genovese laments.

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unfettered play. For confirmation, we need only reread with care the works of Vonnegut, Barth, Dick, Acker, or even Pynchon (in terms of literature) and Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva, or Rorty (in terms of theory). For writers and theorists of the period, the emphasis is most certainly on the instability between reference and referent, signifier and signified—and, therefore, the impossibility of articulating or sustaining a universal claim about the past or the real; yet the purpose of such an emphasis was almost invariably political, always tied to “dedoxification” (as Hutcheon would say) and the destabilization of those narrative constructs that functioned to restrict possibility and “play” in the name of hegemonic and oppressive systems of control. As Derrida assures us, “Deconstruction is justice” (“Force of Law” 243); for, even in his earliest works (i.e., in his earliest efforts to expose the inescapable nature of supplementarity, the paradoxical strain of corruption that buttresses while endlessly undoing every effort toward coherence and closure), a certain responsibility is mandated. Were we in our constructions of the self, in our interpretations of the other, in our representations of the past, to simply “add any old thing . . . the seam would not hold” (Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” 64). The potential of play for postmodernists at their most rigorous is infinite, but only within a fixed horizon of possibility. The real, plastic-like, can yield (to) an infinite number of symbolic formations, or formulations; but some forms are simply incorrect, simply irresponsible, selfserving. The representation of the real (of the self, of the past, of meaning) must always entail responsibility for two interrelated tasks: (1) it must remain true to the outside limits of what cannot be denied and (2) it must signal, in a finite and always contingent construction, that the Thing (as in Kant’s das Ding) represented necessarily exceeds the formative moment of its expression. It must signal, as Levinas would suggest, that the infinite is only ever accessible in the finite, that the infinite is always infinite.20 Without fiction, as Žižek reminds us, “reality itself dissolves” (Tarrying 91). But this does not mean that we can simply deny or ignore the real. Instead, the very experience, or trauma, of an epistemological failure signals a form of contact, a mode of knowing: “what at first appeared to be an epistemological obstacle turns out to be the very index of the fact that we have ‘touched the Truth,’ we are in the heart of the Thing-in-itself by the very trait which appeared to bar access to it” (Sublime Object 177). What is lost on (or willfully overlooked by) any (post)postmodernist who would hope to weaponize postmodern irony as self-serving skepticism is the fact that there is an end to interpretative play,

For Levinas’s most accessible take on the infinite, see “God and Philosophy”—in which he suggests that “the in of the Infinite signifie[s] at once the non- and the within” (63).

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a point at which the real cannot be denied, or symbolically evaded—even if it must always be in excess of the frame that momentarily relates it. To counter the intensification of postmodernity (and thus the exhaustion of its aesthetic efficacy) we must then shift the emphasis from the utter inescapability of the symbolic (as stressed by Lacan and others) to the inescapability of a certain ontological gravity—that which necessarily governs, even as it is affected by, our endless failures to grasp it. This is not a matter of simply going back, as even critics like Eshelman and Vermeulen and van den Akker seem willing to admit. We now understand the danger of assuming the possibility of a universally applicable and (thus) “radiant future,” or a “‘noisefree,’ transparent, fully communicational society” (Jameson, “Foreword” vii). But does this mean, to counter the intensification of postmodernism as a social trend, that our only recourse is to “pretend”? A game of pretend is certainly what critics like Eshelman seem to see and advocate on the horizon. While considering a recent wave of what he terms “performatist” works, Eshelman uncovers an apparent “revi[val] of theists myths” and a concurrent refusal to endlessly “track[] signs in their feminine formlessness” (13). This odd appeal to a type of tongue-in-cheek phallogocentrism suggests (while echoing Wallace’s own implicit deference to a “masculinist” approach to “real things”) that art now counters postmodern excess by “forc[ing] readers or viewers to make a choice between the untrue beauty of the closed work or the open, banal truth of its endless contextualization” (37). In so doing, “performatist” works shut down or close off the infinite regresses of postmodernism (what Eshelman somewhat reductively associates with Derridean “undecidability”21), effecting something akin to a simple suspension of disbelief. Thus, we get another problematic mode of sincerity, another flattening of affect: we know it’s not real, but we believe it anyway (at least within the restricted conceptual “frame” of the given work). That is, we are given to pretend, in the moment, that a sense of closure or unity or harmony (or whatever) is true. Not surprisingly, Eshelman’s reading of contemporary aesthetics aligns neatly with Vermeulen and van den Akker’s. Via unrelenting acts of oscillation, metamodernism (in its cultural manifestations) rejuvenates what It’s worth noting that Eshelman’s performatism often seems indistinguishable from a certain ethics of undecidability. While Eshelman works to demonstrate how performativist works leave us “no choice” (2), he often finds himself negotiating significant moments of uncertainty. In the introductory pages, “no choice” quickly mutates into “little choice” (3) and then a “specific choice” (4). Such shifts in phrasing are perhaps indicative of the fact that post-postmodern aesthetics are less interested in revitalizing “monism” or absolutism (pretend or not) than they are in shifting the emphasis of postmodernism (via a redeployment of its most striking aesthetic strategies).

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Vermeulen and van den Akker understand as Kant’s “‘negative’ idealism,” which exposes us to the fact that humans are “not really going toward a natural but unknown goal, but they [must] pretend they do so that they progress morally as well as politically” (“Notes” 315).22 Likewise, as Eshelman puts it, “Performatist works of art attempt to make readers believe rather than convince them with cognitive judgements. This, in turn, may enable them to assume moral or ideological positions that they otherwise would not have” (37). But surely we must ask what this “progress” or what these “judgments” might (or should) look like? If this is all just a matter of belief, if this is all just a matter of pretend—of contingent truth claims that are always about to oscillate back into (a Wallacean version of) irony—then what could possibly distinguish good progress and good judgments from bad?

Historioplastic Metafiction Still, as I say, there are good reasons for the arguments Eshelman and Vermeulen and van den Akker advance. The post-postmodern and/as the hypermodern undoubtedly effects forms of cultural production that “oscillate,” that compel willful moments of pretend. Take the examples discussed earlier of social media and reality TV. Twitter, like the televised “reality” of a “Real Housewife” or a Hollywood family, is filled with moments of abject authenticity, and yet these moments are utterly stripped of any long-term implications or consistency; they are endlessly undermined in or forgotten by the next (always new) authentic moment. The ostensible transparency of either medium is perpetually offered even as we are perpetually reminded that there is nothing “permanent” to see. We all know everything is scripted, staged, or “spun” anyway. Trump’s campaign and presidency is again instructive—especially the role of Twitter in both. Even though he frequently claims that he uses Twitter because the media is not “spreading [his] word accurately” (Trump 2017), Trump clearly understands that he can tweet or say anything. Whatever is said only matters in the moment. The complete opposite will easily outweigh a previous claim a few weeks (or even a few moments) later. Claims about the crowd size at

While privileging Kant’s “negative” idealism, Vermeulen and van den Akker repeat a specifically Kojèvian (or, perhaps, Marxist) reading of Hegel’s “positive” idealism— thereby reducing Hegel’s entire project to the “notion of history dialectically progressing toward some predetermined Telos.” They thus overlook the Hegelian imperative to “[tarry] with the negative” (Phenomenology 19) while problematically fixating on the purely speculative implications of a Kantian “as if.”

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his inauguration to the wiretapping of his offices in Trump Tower can be forced into the realm of truth while other claims—such as the claim that “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (Trump 2012)—can simply be ignored or denied (even as they are left to linger, in some social circles, as “fact”). The obvious point is that such oscillations can not be the modus operandi of a new and viable aesthetic movement—not if such a movement is to resist the intensifications both Nealon and Lipovetsky identify. In other words, Vermeulen and van den Akker’s perception of oscillation is most certainly a good start—but only insofar as oscillation characterizes a socioeconomic development in the West that has grown naturally out of late-capitalism (with all its concomitant characteristics) while also being reciprocally affected and defined by the cultural production it effected. I am here, of course, referring to the inevitable affects any superstructure will have on the (always still semiautonomous) infrastructure that effects it—a form of reciprocity most famously explicated by Louis Althusser.23 If, though, oscillation—or, more simply, an ongoing interplay between those various binaries that tend to be neatly listed under the headings “modern” and “postmodern”—defines both our socioeconomic moment and our aesthetic and cultural production, it is very hard to claim anything we might call forward movement, or a beyond to what was. Thus, the central problem with anything like Vermeulen and van den Akker’s conception of metamodernism is that its defining characteristic (“oscillation”) encompasses and explains the rise of troubling politics and economic crises while being offered (simultaneously) as the most avant-garde and efficacious attitude in today’s cultural production. We can most certainly say that the politics of Donald Trump are defined by vertiginous oscillations between sincerity and lies, direct talk and strategic obfuscation, a focus on real people and purely imagined threats, truth and alternative facts. And we might certainly call such oscillations the consequence of both an intensified postmodernity and a troublingly co-opted and metastasized postmodernism—even, to follow Wallace, postmodern irony. But, if this is the case, we should certainly be wary of artistic endeavors that simply replicate such behavior, or attitudes. And yet much work on the end of postmodernism (with Vermeulen and van den Akker’s being only the most widespread and overt) leads quite directly to documents like Luke Turner’s “Metamodernist Manifesto”—which concludes with the startling assertion that “We must go forth and oscillate!” See Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”—in which he states that “(1) there is a ‘relative autonomy’ of the superstructure with respect to the base; (2) there is a ‘reciprocal action’ of the superstructure on the base” (91).

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One of my central assumptions in this book is, therefore, that we need to think beyond oscillation, or what Wallace calls irony, if we are to think beyond postmodernism—and thus think toward a type of aesthetic production that might counter the social and economic realities of our post-postmodern times. My sense is that metafiction offers us one of the most efficacious (if subtle) ways of overcoming problematic and ethically slippery oscillations— even if metafiction can be viewed, simultaneously, as one of postmodernism’s most infamous and frustrating tools. But, as we have already begun to see, metafiction can in fact serve multiple functions—and that, as a consequence, its function in postmodernism was already twofold; it worked equally for (1) a spirit of postmodernism bent (somewhat recklessly, and uncritically) on a nihilistic evisceration of grounded action and the possibility of truth claims and (2) a spirit of postmodernism dedicated to undermining the biases and structures of power inherent in any representational activity. The latter, however, is not necessarily at odds with the former. As I have argued elsewhere (while insisting that a certain spirit of postmodernism must necessarily “pass on” via various aesthetic forms of “renewal”), we might think of the difference between these two functions as simply a matter of emphasis, with the emphasis of the latter being much more overtly stressed—recuperated or renewed—in more recent cultural production. Contra postmodernism, metafiction is suddenly and unexpectedly redeployed as a form, alongside other more overt expressions, of (what is often termed) “neorealism.” This shift in emphasis, I argued, defined a period of aesthetic/cultural renewal, a period of “renewalism.” I want, now, though, to complicate further this idea of a shift in emphasis—especially since I am not convinced my earlier work managed to anticipate or overcome (in full, at least) many of the problems we are just beginning to consider here. More precisely, I want to suggest that metafiction (as a narrative or aesthetic form) is capable of both inflicting and healing a type of epistemological wound—a wound we might say, even more paradoxically, that must remain a wound if it is to heal. This paradox allows us, significantly, to make sense of metafiction’s odd persistence in (or at) the ostensible wake of postmodernism. Or rather, it allows us to see how the way out of a now omnipresent “postmodern state”—inclusive of an intensified postmodernity and a seemingly inescapable, maligned and misused, postmodernism—is to be even more postmodern than postmodernism. I am, then, far less interested in finding a common thread (or stylistic tendency) that runs through and unites contemporary narrative forms than I am in locating a certain thread or form capable of fostering, or renewing, an ethical relationship with the truth. Moreover, I am focusing specifically on American cultural production, as it is (arguably) in America that we can see most easily, or clearly, a troubling intensification of postmodernity

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and a concomitant bastardization of ideas we once thought of as radically postmodern. This is, perhaps, hardly surprising. As Jameson asserted thirty years ago, postmodernism is “global, yet American” (Postmodernism 5). In large part, the goal here is to read—or, in some cases, reread—relatively recent works of American metafiction, works that specifically display a paradoxical, or ironic, commitment to the truth and to the possibility of actually recovering that truth in a nondogmatic (or distinctly postmodern) fashion. Framed differently, the animating question of the book might be this: Can certain types of metafiction manage the task recent strains of speculative realism (from Quentin Meillassoux’s to Ian Bogost’s) have assumed for themselves, and can they do it more effectively? The answer, I want to argue, is yes. My position is that certain forms of metafiction are best suited to countering the perilous intensification of postmodernism because they reengage a type of Hegelian dialectics. But such a “return to Hegel” (Žižek, Sublime Object 7)—which, perhaps, begins with Žižek’s 1988 Le plus sublime des hystériques: Hegel passe24—is not a return to the “‘positive’ idealism” Vermeulen and van den Akker associate with the “notion of history dialectically progressing toward some predetermined Telos” (“Notes” 315). As Žižek has shown repeatedly since Le plus sublime, Hegel’s is not a closed system—even if it can allow us to escape a number of “‘post-modernist’ traps” (Žižek, Sublime Object 7). Hegel’s is a system that compels us to “tarry[] with the negative” (Hegel, Phenomenology 19), to perpetually endure the “strenuous effort of the Notion” (35)—the notion, that is, of a divine or infinite reality (what Hegel calls “spirit”), the notion of Absolute unity. Of course, “notion” in Hegel can be easily and accurately replaced with “concept,”25 but Hegel clearly distinguishes his use of notion from more traditional uses of concept. Concepts are typically viewed as mere containers or forms, tools that denote A translated portion of this dissertation—titled “The Most Sublime of Hysterics: Hegel with Lacan”—can be found in Interrogating the Real. While sketching out many of the ideas he unpacks more fully in The Sublime Object of Ideology and Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek works to expose

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the fundamental wager of the Hegelian strategy: ‘inappropriateness as such’ (in our case, that of opposing definitions) ‘gives away the secret’ [‘l’inappropriation comme telle fait tomber le secret’]—whatever presents itself initially as an obstacle becomes, in the dialectical turn, the very proof that we have made contact with the truth. We are thus thrust into the thing by that which appears to obscure it, that which suggests that ‘the thing itself ’ is hidden, constituted around some lack. (49–50) Both “concept” and “notion” are viable translations of the German Begriff. A. V. Miller, of course, translates Begriff as Notion—with, almost invariably, a capital. George di Giovanni, however, uses concept (without a capital). For the sake of consistency, I use notion throughout; but I do not impose a capital outside direct quotations.

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the essential by subtracting the particular from the common: “as mere forms, as distinct from the content, such concepts and their moments are taken in a determination that stamps them as finite and makes them unfit to hold the truth which is in itself infinite” (Hegel, Logic 18).26 But Hegel insists that “what in ordinary reflection is . . . at first separated from the form cannot in fact be in itself formless, . . . that it rather possesses form in it; indeed that it receives soul and substance from the form” (18–19). For this reason, and while we tend to associate concepts with the mere “correctness of knowledge” (18), the Hegelian notion entails a “strenuous effort” to resist the “rhetoric of trivial truths,” or “ultimate truths to which no exception can be taken” (Phenomenology 42). At the same time, the notion has nothing to do with “common vagueness [or] the inadequacy of ordinary common sense” (43). The concept of the Hegelian notion is thus tied to the paradoxical manner in which the infinite Real is grasped or apprehended in (or as) the traumatic failure to do so. It is the experience of such a failure that, finally, signals the ethical sustainment of what cannot—not with justice, at least— be contained in the finite, in the coherence of a momentary and contingent form of representation, or in any given plurality of relations. The dialectical movement of spirit does not end, for Hegel, in closure; it is sublated the moment its paradoxically infinite end is signaled and sustained in a coherent expression or experience—for “The being of Spirit cannot in any case be taken as something fixed and immovable” (Phenomenology 204). As a logical consequence of this mobility or plasticity (which we might understand as endless potential within a limited field), “the being of Spirit” can only know or express itself in what it isn’t. Only in “utter dismemberment . . . [does spirit] find[] itself ” (19). In other words, and for Hegel, the “evanescent itself must . . . be regarded as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the True, and left lying who knows where outside it, any more than the True is to be regarded as something on the other side, positive and dead” (27). The “strenuous effort of the Notion” entails grasping, by simultaneously remaining open to the impossibility of ossifying, the infinite plasticity of the Real—“plasticity” being (as Catherine Malabou has demonstrated27) the central concept that haunts Hegel’s entire project. In no way is this a matter of pretending, sustaining unjustifiable beliefs, or engaging in impulsive oscillations. It’s not about ignoring or suppressing dialectical tension, or

For this reason, suggests Hegel, “healthy common sense instinctively felt that it had the upper hand . . . and it contemptuously relinquished acquaintanceship with [concepts] to the domain of school logic and school metaphysics” (18). 27 See, especially, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. I refer to this text throughout. 26

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swinging about between two poles. The impossible is made possible because its necessary negation (in the finite limitation of sensory experience or expression) is itself negated. More specifically, the ethical potential of a certain “return to Hegel” can be seen in a shift from the historiographic metafiction of postmodernism to what I want to call here the historioplastic metafiction of postpostmodernism. While the former maintains an often perverse emphasis on the instability and contingency of the graphic/symbolic, the latter (even as it sustains many of the conceits of its predecessor) shifts our attention to the infinite Real that perpetually escapes its symbolization. Chapters 3 and 4 will track this shift in America’s novelistic practice; Chapters 5 and 6, in television and film. Throughout, the goal will be to demonstrate how certain forms of contemporary narrative work to inflict a type of metafictional diremption (which negates the possibility of mimetic closure) while simultaneously exposing such diremptions as the very condition of mimetic efficacy. Certainly, this is a very deconstructive move (and certainly tied to what I call in The Passing of Postmodernism [2010] an “ethics of indecision”28), but one that is far more overt in returning deconstruction to its often suppressed Hegelian origins.29 It is, in this sense, post-deconstructive—as Malabou might understand the phrase. Nevertheless, this negation of what is negated sublates (i.e., holds to by letting go of) what is lost. Within the confines of each specific text, what is lost and carried over is the Real of a (historical) thing, or that which is anterior to a purely subjective present; within the broader horizon of American cultural production, what is lost and carried over is postmodernism itself. An investment in historioplasticity overcomes postmodernism by enacting a type of double negation. The antithetical relation of a “universal symbolic

See pp. 89–106 of The Passing of Postmodernism. While I do not employ the concept of historioplastic metafiction in this earlier monograph, the argument remains largely the same. What I associate here with a type of metafictional plasticity can be included in the range of texts I call “neo-realist” or “renewalist.” As I use it, the term “neo-realist” in no way excludes the metafictional or the fantastic; it indicates, instead, a renewed willingness (inflected by the lessons of postmodernism) to endure the trauma of the Real, to negotiate and sustain its inherent spectrality (aka. plasticity). 29 As Jameson says in his Hegel Variations (2010), the Hegelian dialectic’s 28

kinship with deconstruction . . . is to be found not so much in simple failure or incapacity as rather in the way in which language sets an intention which it is constitutively incapable of keeping: in other words, it declares its own standard—what it means to say, indeed, what it is actually saying, its vouloir-dire, to use the Derridean phrase—and can therefore be measured internally by its failure to achieve the very standard it has set for itself and for which it has taken responsibility. (40)

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network” (Žižek, Tarrying 217) to the traumatic Real it negates is itself negated, emerging as the very condition of knowledge. What remains absent is paradoxically sustained as infinitely plastic, as infinitely mutable within the absolute limitations of a fixed horizon of possibility, a true end. We are encouraged to respect and endure the very Thing that historiography cannot help but efface through the deployment of mimetic forms. The very best metafiction of post-postmodernism is, therefore, neoromantic (as Vermeulen and van den Akker suggest)—but only in the most Hegelian of senses. As such, and as I suggested earlier, it must be understood in relation to what Hegel (in his Aesthetics) defines as the “symbolic” and the “classical.” Or rather, the persistence of metafiction in the post-postmodern era begins to make sense if we associate both modernism and postmodernism with the “symbolic” tendency to preserve reality through acts of representational distortion, and the social realism of the nineteenth century with those works of “classicism” that tend to negate the difference between a given form and the notion it embodies. “Historioplastic metafiction” functions—or moves us beyond the failures of cultural postmodernism (while simultaneously challenging postmodernity’s persistent hegemony)—by “romantically” renewing a classical mode via the redeployment of a symbolic one. The result is what David James has recently called, in his own study of metafiction, an “occasion for consolidating the integrity of content and form” (“Integrity” 502).

One Last Time, Again Here again, then, is my central claim: through a reengagement with Hegel’s “labour of the Notion” (Phenomenology 43) it is possible to be more postmodern than postmodernism—and, in so doing, counter the now metastatic progress of postmodernization. At the heart of our post-truth crisis is the withered husk of history, of temporal distance—what Baudrillard anticipated forty years ago as a contemporary “space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth” (2). Or rather, the phrase “post-truth” surely signals (if it signals anything useful at all) a pervasive inability, or refusal, to accept that a reality anterior to its subjective present can be related in truth. In this sense, the intensification of postmodernity—along with the reciprocal bastardization of postmodernism—surely explains our profound inability to get over our postmodern moment. We cannot periodize a present subsequent to our past because we are no longer willing to consent to a version of that past. The past is only its varied appearances in our subjective present(s), as is our future. If, then, metafiction’s function has shifted—if it has become a tool for reigniting once more ethical and efficacious (because ironic) dialectical play—

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then that shift must be understood in the context of our failure to periodize it. Such a shift signals and responds precisely to that failure. To understand fully why the function of metafiction has shifted, and why that shift must be embraced, we must then first understand why our efforts to periodize the end of postmodernism have stalled, or simply resulted in a kind of “polymodern condition.” Of course, in suggesting that it is only via a return to Hegel that we might begin to renew history—and, in turn, the possibility of imagining a future anterior to that history—I am, as I suggest earlier, taking for granted a basic Žižekian assumption: “far from being a story of its progressive overcoming, dialectics is for Hegel a systematic notation of the failure of all such attempts[, one which] finally accepts ‘contradiction’ as an internal condition of every identity.” Hegel, in other words, “opened up the field of a certain fissure subsequently ‘sutured’ by Marxism” (Sublime Object xxix). The paradox is that historical closure must remain a wound that perpetually undoes its healing sutures, a wound that heals via its perpetual dehiscence. Let’s try to make better sense of this claim by backing up somewhat. One of postmodernism’s most basic, and perhaps most unimpeachable, lessons is that historiography—and thus efforts toward periodization— typically reflect the very will to suture Žižek has in mind. A desire for almost surgical closure persistently haunts the activity of historiography and periodization, compelling its practitioners to “always historicize” (as Jameson would say) in the most finite and “material” of senses. At its most possessed, the will to narrate historical events and to periodize is the will to remain blind to the possibility of a certain irritating autonomy, a fissure between the cultural and the economic, a description and what is described. The will to periodize is, therefore, almost always doomed, off the start, to be attenuated by the very state of finality it aims to grasp, the trap of an unthinkable closure. In this regard, a relevant point of focus for our purposes might be Jameson’s 1984 essay “Periodizing the 60s.” Jameson famously begins with a peculiar defense of (or articulated anxiety about) the very task he intends to take up. The goal of the essay—which, in microcosm, reflects the goal of Jameson’s career generally—is to identify and map “a determinate historical situation” (178). The problem, Jameson notes, is that “One sometimes feels . . . that an infinite number of narrative interpretations of history are possible” (179). We are, though, reassured—or our efforts justified— whenever we invariably find “the regularities hypothetically proposed for one field of activity (e.g., the cognitive, or the aesthetic, or the revolutionary) dramatically and surprisingly ‘confirmed’ by the reappearance of just such regularities in a widely different and seemingly unrelated field” (179). The will, then, toward the fixed and determinable “structural limits” of a given

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“situation” (and we might say, also, “thing” or “event”) is validated by the inevitable, if not predictable, realization or decoding of continuity—some innate sense, or notion, of kinship or unity across limited space and limited time. And yet, at the same time (and in the same space), Jameson assures us that this reassuring sense of “homogeneity,” of a certain “conception of what is historically dominant or hegemonic,” merely brings into relief “the full value of the exceptional—[what is] ‘residual’ or ‘emergent’” (178). What then appears to be “some omnipresent and uniform shared style or way of thinking and acting” is merely the tenuous outline of “a common objective situation, to which a whole range of varied responses and creative innovations is then possible” (178). The tension between these two assertions—between a celebration of the “reassuring” confirmation of a totalizing claim or narrative and the inevitable “froth” (residual or emergent) that must necessarily spill over the imposed  temporo-spatial field of contaminant—exposes the possibility of outlining and justifying a notion of structural limits as paradoxically entailing, in a certainly Derridean manner, irritating features or irregularities which invariably persist as the very condition of anything like homogeneity, or closure. The proposal and narrative mapping of structural limits, of “a determinate historical situation,” is therefore justified, if not animated, by the impossibility of fully containing the various discreet pieces, or particulars, that nevertheless make up the universal field. The exception makes possible the rule—just as those things and events which abide by the rules must necessarily abide by other rules as well. A thing described (event, or person, or period) is not, in other words, unlike a molecule of salt—if, that is, we follow Hegel (while anticipating our discussion, in the following chapter, of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology). Salt, in this example, stands in for a description: the structural limits, the notional whole of a universal grouping. The molecule in-itself is the particular “moment” (or “artifact”) defined by while defining the notional grouping to which it ostensibly belongs. But each of the specific characteristics that allow us to group a salt molecule within the notional whole of “salt” would allow us also to include it within other notional groupings: for it is also “white, also cubical, and also tart, and so on. But in so far as it is white, it is not cubical, and in so far as it is cubical and also white, it is not tart, and so on” (73). Here it is the Thing’s refusal, or inability, to be wholly subsumed within that which defines it that allows it to exist in any sort of defining relation with other things: “for this relation establishes rather its continuity with others, and for it to be connected with others is to cease to exist on its own account. It is just through the absolute character of the Thing and its opposition that it relates itself to others, and is essentially only this relating” (75).

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With this very specific phrasing in mind, we might advance the claim that the possibility of historiography—as, in the broadest of senses, the narrativization of a Thing that precedes its subjective apprehension in a given present— necessarily entails the semiautonomy of the Thing that is being narrated or described. On some level, this is what speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists mean when they insist that all being is equally “withdrawn,” or “withheld.”30 This necessity of semiautonomous withdrawal applies also if we zoom outward to speak of the dialectical relation, or tension, between things (as events or people or whatever). Relation (and thus any grouping) entails semiautonomy, a ghostly (dis)connect, the possibility of a sublative perception that leaves in play the very thing it ostensibly abolishes—the corruptive trace of (what Derrida calls) differance. Any historia (of a Thing) requires the sustainment of a notional whole, which can never be the whole itself (finally realized) nor can it be any particular it might legitimately subsume. The twist is that, according to Jameson, any effort to historicize the 1960s, to trace out the topography of a unified postmodern moment, hinges upon recognizing the withering possibility of the semiautonomous in the 1960s (as made visible in the 1980s). Jameson sees in the 1960s (from the 1980s) the still nascent atomization of cultural interests and economic activities—or what Wallace perceives, in 1994, as “a new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers.” In terms of cultural politics, Jameson points to the rise of “black cultural nationalism and (later on) lesbian separatism . . . [etc.]” as unifiable, or periodizable, efforts to assert a “conquest of collective identity” (190) that simultaneously expose the very “limit” of a certain “‘politics of otherness’” (189). Given the inescapable necessity of “outside enemies to survive as a group, to produce and perpetuate a sense of collective cohesion and identity,” such acts of “hard-won collective selfdefinition . . . [must] necessarily break up into smaller and more comfortable unities of face-to-face microgroups (of which the official political sects are only an example)” (190). Thus is inaugurated a distinctly postmodern “world of microgroups and micropoltitics” (192)—a perpetual fracturing of, or zooming ever inward toward, the infinite points possible within an ever more totalizing (because increasingly ungraspable yet hegemonically finite) structural limitation, an inexhaustible space between point A and point B.

See, for instance, the work of Graham Harman generally. More specifically, though, we might point to The Quadruple Object, in which Harman asserts that “Objects need not be natural, simple, or indestructible. Instead, objects will be defined only by their autonomous reality. They must be autonomous in two separate directions: emerging as something over and above their pieces, while also partly withholding themselves from relations with other entities” (19). I come back to Harman’s work in the next chapter.

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But such inward movement finally implies the very futility of any delimiting points. The structure increasingly fails to hold, to convince, to settle, because noThing can any longer escape it. Obviously, this marks the end of the possibility of a revolutionary politics. Concurrently and reassuringly (from a periodizing perspective), philosophy, like anything resembling a material basis for global economics, also begins to “wither”: “since there is no longer a tradition of philosophical problems in terms of which new positions and new statements can meaningfully be proposed, . . . [only the] coordinating [of] a series of pregiven, already constituted codes or systems of signifiers” (193). Today, this absence of subvertable tradition is even more profound. As Mark Fisher puts it, What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled “alternative” or “independent” cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. (9)

We can think of this as the postmodern end of dialectics—not dialectics as a totalizing move, certainly; but dialectics as the possibility of relation, of sublating the part within a greater, notional, whole. The whole, or the annulment of time, becomes inescapable because its notional potential is abandoned as a mere hallucination of idealism. We thus find ourselves trapped in Habermas’s legitimation crisis, the metastasizing “little narratives” of a now purely “symbolic universe” (as Žižek would say). All of this is signified most overtly, for Jameson, in the poststructuralist evisceration of signification—an evisceration that is easily linked to the function of postmodern metafiction. Take, for instance, Donald Barthelme’s absurdist rewriting of “The Glass Mountain.” In this distinctly postmodern fairytale, the central character conquers the illusory authority of an American skyscraper “to disenchant a symbol” (180). And, after succeeding in his endeavor, concludes that not even “eagles [are] plausible, not at all, not for a moment” (182). Such a work fixates on exposing the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified (between what points to a concept and the concept itself), and thereby contributes to the autonomous hegemony of the “sign” in late twentieth-century thought—and, in turn, our growing sense that we are no longer responsible to anterior referents. As Jameson explains, the contingent nature of the signified as mere concept (which, along with the signifier, constitutes the two-sided structure of a sign for Saussure) gets

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confused with a sign’s material referent. Suddenly there is nothing but the sign and, therefore, nothing like a Thing-in-itself. But The paradox is that the Sign, as an “autonomous” unity in its own right, as a realm divorced from the referent, can preserve [its] initial autonomy, and the unity and coherence demanded by it, only at the price of keeping a phantom of reference alive, as the ghostly reminder of its own outside or exterior, since this allows it closure, self-definition and an essential boundary line. (197)

Ultimately, though, the possibility of an ideal or notional truth, linked to (but forever in excess of) a linguistic particular, is abandoned as nothing but the effect of that particular. This loss, of course, runs parallel to the rise of Baudrillardian simulacra; the absolute automonization of the micro, the particular, the momentary (in economics, politics, aesthetics, linguistics, philosophy, whatever) makes impossible a notional grouping by relation. Such a grouping entails a connection to difference, to what the particular, or a sign, is and is not: the ghostly. And just as the complete absence of the ghostly (its exorcism) is no different than its absolute materialization (its conjuration), the hegemony of entropic and inescapable sameness is no different from an infinite set of purely autonomous particulars. The possibility of a true Thing can persist only as the dialectical effect of a semiautonomous relation. Jameson’s periodizing of the 1960s—and of, more famously, postmodernism in general—can thus be read as the periodizing of the end of periodization, the periodizing of a period marked by an explosion of dispossessed particles which are only unto themselves a meaning and, in turn, the absolute “suturing” of an inexhaustible and thus absent whole, the spirit of an age. The particular no longer signals a potential move beyond or outside the universal because there is no longer any difference between the particular and the universal. This particularized resistance to what frustrates present knowing and expectation and comfort is of course tied to and exacerbated by search engines that track our every query so as to predict our interests and create an insulated field of perception, the ultimate ideological niche. In this timeless time of increasing atomization, and of ever more desperate efforts to establish authentic difference, our ability and desire to experience radically affective otherness wanes. What is lost is therefore akin to grace in a Flannery O’Connor story (along with the violence to ideology or narrative coherence such grace both follows and precipitates). One obvious consequence, as Joan Scott notes, is the pressure (felt by professors, especially) to approach the classroom as a space where students come “to reject ideas they do not like as ‘indoctrination’ and . . . listen only to those viewpoints they agree with, thus comfortably

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confirming what they already believe rather than subjecting it to illuminating doubt” (126). The postmodern explosion of, what seem on the surface like, Lyotardian micro narratives turns out to be an implosion of internarrative play. And cliché-ridden pronouncements (in 280 characters, or less) begin to mirror, just a bit too perfectly, Newspeak in Orwell. What becomes increasing impossible, or untenable, is (in Hegel’s terms) a “law which leaves out [the] specific character [of its particular instances]” (91)—and such a law is “of great importance in so far as it is directed against the thoughtless way in which everything is pictured as contingent, and for which determinateness has the form of sensuous independence” (91–2). To return to Jameson’s phrasing, such a law makes possible a “history of attempts to conceptualize a historical and social substance itself in constant dialectical transformation, whose aporias and contradictions mark all of [the] successive philosophies as determinate failures, yet failures from which we can read off something of the nature of the object on which they themselves came to grief ” (186). This problem of the always already identifiable brings us back, of course, to the current proliferation of periodizing terms we discussed earlier: terms that merely signal a desperate desire to renew the possibility of a time that has broken with the past, a “period” that signals the restoration of history. This proliferation of terms, yet another symptom of a postmodern culde-sac, speaks directly to the apparent impossibility of locating anything that might unify ever more atomized communities of knowledge. Indeed, academics have largely responded to the increasingly untenable practice of historicizing by getting increasingly specific, increasingly localized. As McHale points out (while both justifying and, necessarily, undermining) his effort to claim 1966 as the start of postmodernism, there has been an almost troubling onslaught of books dedicated to identifying the synchrony of a single, watershed, year—with Michael North’s Reading 1922 being only the most famous.31 No longer capable of imagining a grand (historical) narrative, or any true account of that which is not subjectively present—for they cannot overcome our very postmodern realization that any such narrative would be anything but a beguiling illusion—academics find themselves retreating (also) into the micro, into ever more isolated islands of inquiry and understanding. But this only exasperates the problem because “grandness” has nothing to do with longer or shorter spans of time, larger or smaller objects of intuition. No matter how micro we get, we still must endure the necessity—and the inevitable failure—of a grand historical narrative. What we must do, then, is rethink such failures as the very condition of success. See McHale’s “1966 Nervous Breakdown; or, When Did Postmodernism Begin?”—p. 394, specifically.

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Indeed, Hegel tells us that “Spirit necessarily appears in Time, and it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure Notion, i.e. has not annulled Time” (Phenomenology 487). The task, then, now, is to reboot time, to effect a new sense of distance, to open up the possibility of grasping that which perpetually escapes totalization. But what would such a reboot entail? First, we must entertain the possibility that the ongoing effort to periodize the postpostmodern has largely failed to grasp its subject. Or, as Hegel might say: “A table of contents is all that it offers, the content itself it does not offer at all” (32). The larger point is that simply assuming content is no better than eviscerating its very possibility (which is, maybe, from a spectrological position, hardly any different). By positing historioplastic metafiction as a form of narrative that allows us to overcome these equally unhelpful alternatives or extremes, I am not advocating for a simple, reductive, or hegemonically delimiting return to grand narrativization. Instead, the historioplastic potential of metafiction— with history (from historia) denoting the telling of stories and an effort to “find out”—insists upon a renewed willingness to risk an almost romantic, or neoromantic, gesture of broad inclusion. Again, I mean romantic here in the most Hegelian of senses. What is romantic (as art, as representation) frustrates while expressing closure, confronting us with its spaces of dehiscence, its revelatory failures. To get at the content of a thing is, in other words (or in the somewhat more oblique sense of Hegelian philosophy), to endure the fact that the particular can never be taken as the whole yet the whole is, only, the consequence of its particulars, the notion of its semiautonomous relation to what it is not. Any whole Thing is defined by the spacing, middle ground, or term, that sustains (while simultaneously overcoming) the essential distinctiveness of its particulars. In teaching us to grasp this paradox, or in opening up the space for its grasping, historioplastic metafiction offers a way to resist both “material thinking . . . absorbed only in material stuff . . . [and sheer] argumentation . . . free[] from all content” (35). The effervescent (in) completeness of historia is allowed to appear as that which is necessarily excluded and distinct from the separated, actual existence of [its extremes]. . . . It is thus the middle term which presupposes those extremes and is created by their existence—but equally it is the spiritual whole issuing forth between them, which sunders itself into them and only by means of this contact creates each into the whole in terms of its own principle. (309)

In the space of this “middle term,” this completion which is never complete, we grasp something true—even as, or because, we are left exposed to that which is yet to be grasped: the promise of a future, a time to come, the Thing itself.

2

Speculative Plasticity But the other side of the phenomenon is as important—that through intentions our presence in the world is across a distance, that we are separated from objects by a distance, which can indeed be traversed, but remains a distance. —Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents

Divine Plasticity In his seminar of March 30, 1955, Jacques Lacan asks his participants to play a game of “even and odd,” a version of the game Dupin describes to the narrator in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1844). The session of play begins (as the seminar proper ends) with one of Lacan’s more striking commandments: “Do it at random. Show us your symbolic inertia” (Book II, 190). The participants are thus commanded to act randomly so as to confirm the impossibility of doing so. And, indeed, the ensuing demonstration of “symbolic inertia” opens up the possibility that “The human subject doesn’t foment this game, he takes his place in it. . . . He is himself an element in this chain which, as soon as it is unwound, organises itself in accordance with laws. Hence the subject is always . . . caught up in crisscrossing networks” (192–3). Lacan’s point of emphasis is clearly the inescapable “play” of a constructed (or artificial) reality, a “symbolic order” that precedes and defines a subject’s involvement in it. For this reason, he repeatedly stresses (in the seminar that follows the session of “play”) the metafictional implications of Poe’s story, the fact that each character “plays [a] role” (194), that each role has a “destiny” (195), that the story stages and reduplicates a “human drama . . . founded on the existence of established bonds, ties, pacts” (197), and so on. He also, notably, refers to the letter itself as a “character” (196)—a fact that will become increasingly relevant as we go along. Almost fifty years later—in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime (2000), an essay on David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997)—the preeminently Lacanian (yet adamantly post-postmodern) Žižek explains that “the pervert’s universe is the universe of the pure symbolic order, of the signifier’s game running

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its course” (Ridiculous 36). Like cyberspace, it is “a universe without closure, unencumbered by the inertia of the Real, constrained only by its self-imposed rules” (36, my emphasis). This obvious inversion is certainly remarkable— encouraging us to hear in Lacan’s imperative something like the sound of a postmodern starting pistol; in Žižek’s declarative, something like that first moment of silence in a game of musical chairs. The former seems to call for a frenzy of reckless activity, while the latter reminds us that certain possibilities are simply unavailable, that a certain governing and traumatic absence cannot be outdone by fantasy. Yet we must avoid the temptation to view the latter as a repudiation. While Lacan places the emphasis on the inescapable nature or inertia of the symbolic, Žižek places it on the fact that the symbolic order never exists independent of a Real that both defines and disfigures it. This argument is repeated and developed in each of Žižek’s many works. It is the engine that drives his entire project. Significantly, though, by the time we get from his essay on Lynch (in 2000) to his epic Less than Nothing (in 2012), Žižek’s concept of the Real has been even more explicitly disassociated, or unassociated, from “reality itself.” As he states in Less than Nothing, “the Real . . . is not simply the inaccessible In-itself, it is simultaneously the Thing-in-itself and the obstacle which prevents our access to the Thing-in-itself ” (959). Thus in Hegel, as in (Žižek is quick to stress) Christianity, the trauma of experiencing the impossibility of contact paradoxically signals contact; the Real is the essence of a thing insofar as it is the absence of its complete, or final, givenness. While our first impulse might be to track and then conjure the tenacious ghost of Derridean supplementarity (or differance) haunting such remarks, we should begin by first clarifying Žižek’s position in relation to Hegel. This will help us to see three things simultaneously: (1) Žižek’s critique of a perverse or postmodern ideology is already implicit in both Lacan’s seminar and Poe’s implicitly metafictional story; (2) the metafictional qualities of Poe’s story, especially as they pertain to a letter that perpetually escapes apprehension, antedate the historioplastic metafictions we hope to track in the following chapters; and (3) such metafiction outwardly and rigorously respects the ghost of Derridean supplementarity, which is itself a ghost of Hegelian dialectics. (The recent work of both Jameson and Catherine Malabou confirms this spectral kinship.) The full apprehension of these points will, however, entail a Žižekean-inflected detour through speculative realism and its various kin.1 As we noted in the previous chapter, recent philosophical efforts to revive an accessible “real” anterior to human perception and concern—what Matthew

I make a similar detour in Stranger America—see chapter 8 (specifically, the section titled “Realism’s Detour”).

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Mullins bundles together under the term “neomaterialisms”—precisely parallel a shift away from canonical, or reified, postmodernism.2 We cannot hope to understand the manner in which metafiction’s function has shifted in the last twenty to thirty years if we do not first come to grips with the goals that define these “new materialist” endeavors. Let’s begin slowly, making our way back to Lacan’s seminar via a look at Žižek’s take on Christianity’s innate Hegelianism. “[I]n Christianity,” Žižek reminds us, “the very gap that separates a believer from God is what ensures his identity with God, since, in the figure of the abandoned Christ on the Cross, God is separated from himself ” (Less Than 959). This separation is what Hegel stresses most overtly in his discussions of religion, seeing in Christ the most exemplary instance of an infinite divinity that is made graspable insofar as it is both apparent in and corrupted by the mortal and finite body that gives it temporary, or temporal, form. In Judaism, the face of divinity is utterly beyond our grasp, and law forbids its false reduction in idolatrous representation; in Christianity, however, the face of God is given to be seen. In Christ, however and quite significantly, the face of God is given to be seen because it is and is not the face of God simultaneously, or ironically. Christ’s face (and especially Christ’s suffering face) is a human and mortal face. We glean the infinite divinity of Christ because we glean its negation in what is human and finite. The inverse is then also implicit: the human individual as divine, as infinitely self-contained and unfixable. This inversion is most implicit in Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait at the Age of Twenty-Eight (1500). Since Dürer ostentatiously presents himself in the form, or guise, of Christ, the painting offers us a decidedly metafictional (because overt) confusion of painter, painting, and subject. Not surprisingly, Dürer is bundled into Hegel’s

Mullins, of course, would disagree. His provocative position is that postmodernism is best defined by its neomaterialist attitude toward ideology as the consequence of an infinitely complex network of things. In other words, Mullins inverts the standard reading of postmodernism. Rather than fixating on the way ideology and/as language and representation “constructs” material reality, postmodernism is actually more concerned with material objects in relation (from humans to trees to yarn), how these objects and their relations precede and make possible their apprehension in discourse, and so on. On a certain level, Mullins wants to relocate “the inertia of the Real” in those texts that have become famous for their apparent fixation on “symbolic inertia.” And yet, insofar as it cleaves to a distinctly neomaterialist take on “real” things and what Quentin Meillassoux calls “the great outdoors” (7), Mullins’s position runs the risk of underemphasizing the manner in which postmodern texts typically frustrate the possibility of knowing—often so as to stress an ethics of describing—that which is anterior to (human) perception and knowledge. Nevertheless, Mullins’s daring effort to “reassemble” postmodernism allows us to see how, at their best, certain postmodern narrative strategies can function as access points to something real while, or by, insisting upon our perpetual distance from—or the necessary distortion of—what is absolute, what is in-itself.

2

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pantheon of great “romantic” painters. In their paintings—especially their paintings of Christ—we see negated the negation of the ungraspable infinite. The Absolute becomes its appearance in form. Or, with some degree of irony, we might redeploy the phrasing of Levinas and say that Christ’s face (like all faces) reveals, or reveils, “forsaken nakedness, which glimmers through the fissures that crack the mask of the personage or his wrinkled skin, in his ‘without recourse,’ . . . without voice or thematization. There the resonance of silence—the Geläut der Stille—certainly resounds” (Levinas, “God and Philosophy” 71–2). In Christ’s body, or face, is the infinite, the abyss of the Real—with, if we continue to recall Levinas, “in” meaning both “not” and “within.” As Hegel puts it in his Aesthetics, “The immediate existence of Christ, as this one individual man who is God, is posited as superseded, i.e. what comes to light in the very appearance of God as man is the fact that the true reality of God is not immediate existence but spirit” (1: 543). This distinctly Christian paradox is the axis around which Hegel’s entire discussion of aesthetics, and thus representation, turns—a discussion, moreover, which clearly echoes his work in The Phenomenology and The Science of Logic. For Hegel, the Hebrew idea of an “imageless Lord of heaven” (1: 321) must necessarily effect a form of “symbolic” art, what Hegel also calls “pre-art.” While, for Hegel, Hebrew poetry is not exactly the same as “affirmative” or “positive” forms of such art (which he associates with the pantheistic aesthetics of ancient India and Persia), it nevertheless functions negatively as an aesthetic form in which “the substance is raised above the single phenomenon in which it is to acquire representation” (1: 364). In “this poetry of sublimity” (1: 321), the Absolute “can be expressed only in [negative] relation to the phenomenal in general, because as substance and essentiality it is in itself without shape and inaccessible to concrete vision” (1: 364, my emphasis). As we will see, the frustrations and distortions of pre-art—in which the absolute is merely signaled as that which is impossible to grasp or contain in representation—are negated by the naïve selfassurance of classical art, especially the perfectly divine form of the human body in Greek and Roman sculpture. But this naivety, which needs to be understood as the ossification of the Absolute in the illusory completeness of representational form, is itself negated in (what Hegel calls) “romantic art”— or rather, art proper. Such art, which we must distinguish from German or British (or post-Kantian) “romanticism” (especially since such art could be said to swing back toward a focus on the inaccessible sublime), sublates the sublimity of symbolic obscurity and confusion by refining, or reapproaching, the naïve unity (monism, or pure communicability) of the classical. In Hegel’s romantic art, the “content, thus won, is on this account not tied to [its] sensuous presentation, as if that corresponded to it, but is freed from

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this immediate existence which must be set down as negative, overcome, and reflected into the spiritual unity” (1: 80). Or rather, and “although neither side is there without the other, both sides preserve in this loose connection their individual and mutual independence; or at least, if a deeper unification is actually achieved, the spirit becomes a centre essentially shining out as the inner life transcending its fusion with what is objective and external” (2: 794). A certain semiautonomous relation is brought to life, and the effect is always double: (1) the given representations resist becoming an ossified truth or concept, for “such concepts and their moments are taken in a determination that stamps them as finite and makes them unfit to hold the truth which is in itself infinite” (Hegel, Logic 18); and (2) representation of divine unity (like Hegel’s very specific sense of the “notion”) is approached as a “strenuous effort,” one that actively resists the “rhetoric of trivial truths,” or “ultimate truths to which no exception can be taken” (Phenomenology 42). In terms of literary modes of representation, Hegel argues that (romantic) poetry is far more likely than prose to manage this unity of separation.3 This is because prose is compelled to remain as literal as possible: while prose has to . . . preserve abstract accuracy, poetry must conduct us into a different element, i.e. into the appearance of the subject-matter itself or into other analogous appearances. For it is precisely this real appearance which must come on the scene on its own account and, while portraying the subject-matter, is yet to be free from it as mere subjectmatter, since attention is drawn precisely to the existent appearance; and the living shape is made the essential object of the contemplative interest. (Aesthetics 2: 1005)

Given Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novelistic in The Dialogic Imagination, we might certainly question this impulse to conflate prose with the preservation of “abstract accuracy”; but Hegel’s central point is nevertheless applicable to a contemporary reappraisal of fiction—especially since, or inasmuch as, his understanding of the “romantic” transcends any one of its particular expressions in a given form. For this reason alone I want to focus on Hegel’s general understanding of romantic art, irrespective of the forms in which he sees it at work. After all, Hegel’s discussions of painting tend to function much better as analogues for a discussion of contemporary literature than do his discussions of poetry and prose. In painting, we see most

Or, following Habermas, we might call it a “fractured continuity” (“Unity of Reason” 130).

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clearly how the Hegelian romantic is tied to a specifically Christian paradox. Visual depictions of Christ’s human childhood and human suffering— from the Middle Ages through to the eighteenth century—thus tend to be most exemplary of the aesthetic mode Hegel privileges. A particularly representative work is Guido Reni’s Christ Crowned with Thorns (1622–3). The form of such a work, which we might associate with imperfect yet sincere sensuousness, conveys the spirit of its subject matter by maintaining our focus on its appearance. In such a painting, Hegel suggests, we see that God is not an individual merely humanly shaped, but an actual single individual, wholly God and wholly an actual man, drawn into all the conditions of existence, and no merely humanly shaped ideal of beauty and art. If our idea of the Absolute were only an idea of an abstract innerly undifferentiated being, then it is true that every sort of configuration vanishes; but for God to be spirit he must appear as man, as an individual subject—not as ideal humanity, but as actual progress into the temporal and complete externality of immediate and natural existence. (Aesthetics 1: 435, my emphasis)

Most significantly, especially for our purposes here, such paintings exemplify the way in which the relationship between the individual subject (as particular or finite form) and the absolute (as infinite, divine, or impossible unity) informs the relationship between an aesthetic representation as form and its perpetually inaccessible subject, its always infinite referent. Tied as they are to a “Christian view,” romantic forms of art (in a strictly Hegelian sense) “impl[y] an endless movement and drive into an extreme opposition and into an inner reversion to absolute unity only by cancelling this separation” (1: 435, my emphasis). An endlessly traversable distance—the infinite itself—is sustained through, or in the moment of, its negation. The wound is healed because, ironically, the sutures that bind it paradoxically leave it open. The inapproachable sublimity of the symbolic is sublated, pulled through, and left behind the naïve closure or ossifying effects of classical realism. Not surprisingly, then, art serves as prelude to what Hegel calls “absolute knowing”—what Žižek convincingly defines, against the almost inescapable inertia of philosophical tradition, as an acceptance of (or willingness to perpetually negotiate) the Real as inescapable limitation, as the essential distortion of access.4 Indeed, the final chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit— See, especially, Žižek’s take on absolute knowing in Less Than Nothing, in which he asserts that “the Real . . . is the obstacle or impossibility which makes representations flawed, inconsistent. The Real is not the In-itself but the very obstacle which distorts our

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the relatively brief “Absolute Knowing”—is preceded by a much lengthier chapter on “Religion,” the core of which concerns “Religion in the form of Art.” The implication is that the “end” of art—or better, its “dissolution” (which Hegel famously and troublingly asserts at the end of his Aesthetics)— marks the arrival of philosophy proper as “absolute knowing.” Of course, it makes far more sense, as commentators like Malabou and Žižek and Jameson suggest, to think of this end, along with the Hegelian “end” of history—as an end, not the end. Is not, after all, the central gesture of the Phenomenology to arrive constantly and frustratingly at a conclusion and then undermine that conclusion with yet another inversion, another overcoming of a previous success? And the famous preface only begins to make sense once we return to it via the filter of the book it prefaces. “Absolute knowing” is, in this sense, and in light of Žižek’s various assertions, best understood as perpetual overcoming, sublation without rest; the end of history, the possibility of history without end. The tenuousness of this endless end, of absolute knowing, thus entails recurrent and laborious stages of approach, as the certainty of any given success dooms it to failure—whenever, that is, the semiautonomous movement of the Absolute is ossified in dogmatism. Todd McGowan puts it like this: “The absolute represents Hegel’s attempt to sustain the trauma of the real, to bring knowledge up against its own failure. Rather than elide or incorporate this trauma, the absolute attempts to make it felt” (“Condemned” 126).5 access to the In-itself, and this paradox provides the key for what Hegel calls ‘Absolute Knowing’” (389). To a certain degree, Jameson echoes Žižek’s position when, in the very first paragraph of The Hegel Variations, he asserts that “Absolute Spirit cannot be considered as a terminus of any kind, without transforming the whole Phenomenology of Spirit into a developmental narrative, one that can be characterized variously as teleological or cyclical, but which in either case is to be vigorously repudiated by modern, or at least by contemporary thought of whatever persuasion” (1). 5 Like Žižek, and particularly as a result of his effort to maintain a rigid line between Derridean deconstruction and the Hegelian Absolute, McGowan struggles to differentiate between an absolute claim and a hegemonic and decidedly fascist claim, a purely “synchronic” language act. But Hegel does not actually invite us (as Žižek often suggests) to avoid dogmatism and fascist ossification by appropriating “without reserve” (McGowan, “Condemned” 122), or “fully assuming authority” (125). As McGowan’s own analysis suggests—especially insofar as it relies upon Gillian Rose’s claim that “To read a proposition ‘speculatively’ means that the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate” (as qtd in McGowan 125)—“appropriation,” in Hegel, means “not qualifying our interpretation, but exaggerating it and over-identifying with it” (125, my emphasis). As is most apparent in his Aesthetics, any given form of the Absolute must somehow betray its failure—otherwise it’s not Absolute. We can in fact say, both with and against McGowan (and Žižek), that the Absolute signals, in Hegel, a notional overcoming of the undecidable—but an overcoming that (à la Derrida) sustains the spectral trace of what is overcome. To be fair, though, this is precisely what Derrida misses in his own reading of

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Thus, for Hegel (in both his Phenomenology and Aesthetics), the efficacy of art “dissolves” the moment it achieves its apotheosis in dramatic comedy and “the actual self of the actor coincides with what he impersonates, just as the spectator is completely at home in the drama performed before him and sees himself playing in it” (Phenomenology 452). In the perfect union of comedy, which is certainly akin to the types of ontological confusion critics such as McHale associate with postmodern metafiction, a type of solipsism reasserts itself, and “all essentially is submerged” (Hegel, Phenomenology 453).6 We are therefore called upon to continually renegotiate the possibility of sustaining while traversing distance. This is always a matter of protracting history, even if we can understand such protraction (ironically) as the end of history. Surely this is why Hegel concludes his introduction to the Aesthetics by asserting that the task of art—the task of “rising” up the “self-unfolding Idea of beauty” to “external actualization”—“will need the history of the world in its development through thousands of years” (1: 90). The larger implication, to recall our discussion in the previous chapter, is that “Spirit necessarily appears in Time, and it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure Notion, i.e. has not annulled Time” (Hegel, Phenomenology 487). Time—history itself—is what “set[s] in motion the immediacy of the in-itself, which is the form in which substance is present in consciousness; or conversely, to realize and reveal what is at first only inward (the in-itself being taken as what is inward)” (487). Here again we encounter the theme of “motion,” of “endless movement.” What is grasped, what is “realize[d] and reveal[ed]” as inward is what is given as moving free of such revelation and realization. The inward Absolute is given through movement, even when held.7 What holds must always hold by letting slip—or it doesn’t hold any Thing at all. Hegel. See, for instance, Derrida’s “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve”—which is one of McGowan’s main reference points in the essay just quoted. 6 As McHale asserts, postmodernist fiction can be defined by the manner in which it stresses (absolutely) “the ineluctable writtenness of character” (105). And, of course, as McHale goes on to stress, this “ineluctable writtenness” does not apply only to human subjects: characters, of course, are not the only elusive existents in the worlds projected by narrative texts. Such worlds are also “peopled” by nonhuman organisms, man-made artifacts, landscapes, interiors, and so on; by, in other words, objects of description. And all these existents, too, are like character susceptible of erasure” (105–6). In these moments, we might say (following Hegel), the ambiguity of an “excluded middle” comes to dominate over the semiautonomy of dialectical poles, and the poles themselves fold in on themselves completely. 7 As Barthes says, in a somewhat different (or inappropriate) context, a “plastic” thing is “ubiquity made visible . . . less a thing than the trace of its movement” (“Plastic” 97). Moreover, “the movement here is almost infinite” (97). This certainly fits the idea of

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This allows us to better understand why, for Malabou, the core concept in Hegel’s entire project is plasticity. For Malabou, “Plasticity appears [in Hegel] as a process where the universal and the particular mutually inform one another” (Future 11). The innate plasticity of the Absolute allows it to be given in a plastic and particularized form while implying the possibility and necessity of yet another (re)formation. The spiritual truth of a given thing (we might say “divinity” at this point) is thus its innate plasticity—with plasticity defined as “a capacity to receive form and a capacity to produce form” (9). It is also, Malabou notes, the ability to explode form utterly (as do plastic explosives).8 Consider, as Malabou does, the following passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: “and so in spirit every character under which it appears is a stage in a process of specification and development, a step forward (Vorwärtsgehen) towards its goal (seinem Ziele), in order to make itself into, and to realize in itself, what it implicitly is” (as qtd in Future 19). The deployment of mimetic art toward its end, toward the final apprehension of what is before it (in time, in history), is made possible by the plasticity of that end (which is always also the point of its origin). In this sense, we can redefine or clarify Hegel’s concept of romantic art by saying that it signals the possibility of an aesthetic temporalization that maintains a future to come (a future, for instance, when the trauma of the past is finally cast aside). Since, for Malabou’s Hegel, “God ‘transplants (verstzt) himself into the world of time’ . . . and thus appears in time before himself ” (119), temporalization is the very possibility of representation, “the becoming accidental of essence” (119). Representation is thus the articulation (or recasting) of what perpetually “sees (itself) coming” (118)—or, that is, “the process through which individual subjectivity repeats the moments of the divine alienation” (112). plasticity we have been tracking throughout. But Barthes is talking (quite specifically) about actual plastics—cups, or toys, or artificial aortas. For Barthes, then, plastics are on the verge of supplanting nature as that which is a “pure Substance to be regained or imitated” (98). Plastics signal the end of mimesis because they are their own origin, their own self-producing substance. But what happens if we simply apply Barthes’s description of plastics to nature as Substance? 8 Malabou’s larger point is that the very term “plasticity” is plastic—like Derrida’s “pharmakon.” In terms of its destructive potential, see (especially) Malabou’s The Ontology of the Accident—in which she focuses on the manner in which traumatic injuries can utterly destroy a thing, or person. In the place of what was, or in the guise of the exact same materials, something absolutely new manifests. If only in brief, we might suggest here that the Hegelian concept of plasticity endorsed by Malabou both supports and confounds Graham Harman’s “object-oriented” claim that all objects have “unvarying inner cores” (Quadruple 31). What Malabou shows is that a “core” of a thing is “unvarying” only insofar as it is infinitely plastic: both finitely limited in terms of “real” material and infinitely pliable in terms of modality, understanding, or relationality.

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But we do not—and, perhaps, should not—misconstrue these claims as purely theological, or even as reductively humanist. “Individual subjectivity” is at the core of being itself. All reality is frustrated or distorted by it: “the particularity and universality of the external shape departs from that plastic unification into a predominance of the individual and therefore of what is rather accidental and indifferent in the same way that in empirical reality too this [contingency] is already the dominant character of all phenomena” (Hegel, Aesthetics 2: 803, my emphasis). This is in fact McGowan’s central point in his polemic against speculative realism, or what I call (following Mullins) neomaterialism: “Hegel . . . extends speculation beyond the subject to objects in themselves. In doing so, he . . . brings transcendentalism and realism together in an inseparable knot. . . . Our inability to think the world as a whole, as recounted in Kant’s first antinomy, informs us that the being of the world itself is contradictory” (“Contradiction” 106). Our failure to apprehend an object in its opaque fullness signals the fact that it is, itself, another subject, or what Derrida calls a “subjectile” (“Eating Well” 275). What defines any object as subject is the fact that it comes into being by cutting itself off from otherness, from (more specifically) its otherness or relationality to itself and all other things. “If objects were self-identical,” McGowan goes on to assert, “we could never have gained the capacity for speaking about them, and the fact that we do speak about them—a fact that testifies to the subject’s self-division—testifies to their self-division at the same time” (107). Thus, if we shift Malabou’s (and/or Hegel’s) apparent focus from the individual subject and from God as theological entity to any other Thing as divine subject, the implication is largely the same: the Thing as plastic, as “the giver and recipient of its own form” (Malabou, Future 118), makes possible the articulation of its truth in the form of what is always still to come—the end of its plastic ability to be other than it is. Divine alienation is both every other’s perpetual disconnect from every other and the Absolute inwardness of every other thing. Or, in Derrida’s terms, “each other is infinitely other in its absolute singularity, inaccessible, solitary, transcendent, nonmanifest, originarily nonpresent to my ego” (Gift 78)—or better, to every other subject. If this is indeed the case, “then what can be said about Abraham’s relation to God can be said about my relation without relation to every other (one) as every (bit) other [tout autre comme tout autre]” (78). Before we carry this further—through the various neomaterialisms of the last few decades and into a more viable theory of a neoromantic, or historioplastic, aesthetic—let’s begin to make our way back to Žižek’s Lacan and Lacan’s Poe, as it is precisely this issue of divine alienation that Žižek shifts from Hegel to the far more overtly secular Lacan.

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Metafictional Subjects As in Christianity, “an epistemological obstacle becomes [in Hegel] an ontological feature of the Thing” (Žižek, Less Than 959). Or rather, “the limitation of our knowledge brings us in contact with the [limitation of the] Thing itself ” (959). Žižek’s point here can be clarified if we graft it onto Jean-Luc Nancy’s claim that, to understand the possibility of touching upon real objects, we must first accept the fact that thought is no less an “object” than the infinite plurality of objects it thinks. The heart of thought, like the heart of all things, is “immobile”; it “does not even beat” (Nancy, “Heart of Things” 167). Such a claim seems to run contrary to the position explored earlier: that thingness, or the spirit of being, is defined by plastic motility. However, the immobility that Nancy has in mind “has nothing to do with death” (167), with fixity or ossification. It is “innumerable,” a density (origin and destiny) that can never be exhausted, a finality that exceeds all grasp. It signals the immobile, impassive gravity of the “there is” of things. There, the “there” offers being and/or offers itself, there, to being. It offers itself to be being: it is the place of the taking-place, the statement of place insofar as it is the simple place of the statement “there is.” A statement that remains unarticulated (no one speaks there), an articulation that remains without statement (nothing is said there but the there). (170)

This “impassive gravity” is surely comparable to Žižek’s “inertia of the real.” While permanently tethered to this black hole of deictic (dis)placement, all things (including the thought of things) come into presence—or they come into the present—as “A punctual, naked, impassive conflagration of being. An imploding explosion of being-there” (170). This is because “the thing itself, the thinghood of the thing, does not cease being there and coming from there.. . . . A coming into presence that has not taken place, that will not take place, that only comes, and forever comes before taking place. Being before, without taking: the coming of presence, into presence. Thing” (170). The heart of things “remains unmoved” even if it is also “a concentration of all motion” (171). It is a “spacing,” an ungraspable “measure of space . . . that gives time its origin, before time. Movements, histories, process, all times of succession, of loss, of discovery, of return, of recovery, of anticipation—all this time essentially depends on the space opened at the heart of things, on this spacing that is the heart of things” (172).

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Some thing is therefore made possible only through relation, and this relation entails that some (specific) thing is also always “whatever”: “Some thing” is whatever. The “whatever” of each thing would be, approximately, in Husserlian terms, the non-presentified, non-evaluated thing, the thing that is not the correlate of an intention: “a transcendence of the world,” but insofar as the world remains in its immanence. But this would not be worn-out banality, nor would it be the insignificance of what ends up on the trash heap. This would precede all usage and all wear, and it would have the common characteristic of the “banal.” It is common to all things to be, and in this way, being is their “whatever.” But it is common to each one to be some thing, this particular thing here. There is no “common” thing that is not singular. A Multiplicity of singular things is therefore, as has already been said, a principle. (185)

In saying this, Nancy repeats a move that defines his entire corpus of work— suggesting, once again, that nothing, or no thing, can “be alone being alone” (“Inoperative” 4). To be a thing, to be present, to be knowable, is to be “in common, to remain within this ‘in’” (“Heart of Things” 186).9 All presence is the consequence of a relation that entails a perpetual coming, an othering, a perpetual coming into presence. All singular objects, like all subjects—or rather, as we suggested earlier, all objects as subjects—are the consequence of community. In this sense, (human) thought never actually inscribes itself onto or into a thing. Instead, for Nancy, things “exscribe”10 thought—and, in turn, speech, writing, representation, and so on. Things and thought “are exscribed in each other as the same thing, for here it is a question of the sameness of the thing. The thing takes place in the infinitely different unity of a ‘there is’ that is what it enounces, but only as a denounced and exscribed statement” (176). The “true gravity” (171) of thought is therefore the very limitation that it confronts in the thing that is thought—in any thing that is thought, including thought itself. Nancy’s concept of “exscription” is, in this sense, something like a kind of mirroring, perhaps even (we might risk saying here) the kind of mirroring Hegel has in mind when he asserts that “It is the inner life of the spirit which undertakes to express itself as inner in the mirror of externality” (Aesthetics 2: 801–2).

For another significant take on Nancy’s relevance to an understanding of contemporary literature and its efforts to expose the perpetual contingencies (or “clinamen”) of things in-common, see (again) Mullins’s Postmodernism in Pieces—chapter 4, especially. 10 Nancy elaborates further (if indirectly) on the concept “exscription” in his earlier “Exscription.” 9

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And surely it is, also, something like this mirroring that Žižek has in mind when he insists that the Real is the effect of the failure of the symbolic to reach (not the In-itself, but) itself, to fully realize itself, but this failure occurs because the symbolic is thwarted in itself. It is in this sense that, for Lacan, the subject itself is an “answer of the real”: a subject wants to say something, it fails, and this failure is the subject—a “subject of the signifier” is literally the result of the failure to become itself. (Less Than 959)

What this means, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, is that Lacan [like Hegel] is not a discourse-idealist who claims that we are forever caught in the web of symbolic practices, unable to reach the In-itself. However, we do not touch the Real by way of breaking out of the “prison-house of language” and gaining access to the external transcendent referent. . . . We touch the real-in-itself in our failure to touch it, since the Real is, at its most radical, the gap, the “minimal difference,” that separates the One from itself. (959)

This brings us back to Lacan’s seminar on “The Purloined Letter”—and, in turn, to the story itself. For it is in this seminar that Lacan’s fixation on “symbolic inertia” exposes us, simultaneously, to the fact that the innate insufficiency of the symbolic (of conceptual thought, or representation, language, etc.) is an exscription of the Real itself. At the core of Lacan’s seminar is the fact that, in Poe’s story, the police cannot find the stolen letter—that they are, as Lacan puts it, destined not to find it. This is because the police, like the figure Lacan identifies as “King,” blindly mistake reality for the laws that govern it, the very laws they insist upon and enforce. They do not and cannot see—as Dupin and the Minister see—that the presence of the letter is an effect of intersubjectivity, even if (at the same time) the letter, as a material and singular object, is always necessarily somewhere: “Why don’t the policemen find it? They don’t find it because they do not know what a letter is. They don’t know that because they are the police. . . . Believing in force, and by the same token in the real, the police search for the letter. . . . [But] for them there is only reality, and that is why they do not find anything” (Lacan, Book II 201–2). The police, or “the law,” cannot fathom the radical contingency, or inexhaustible “thereness,” of a thing. They confuse the typical placement of the thing within intersubjective relations with a finally exhausted “there,” a “there” that cannot always still relate, or become present, differently—a “there” without spiritual plasticity. The letter, the police think, is important and what is

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important must be hidden or protected. It is not simply that the police confuse the symbolic with reality; they fail to understand, more problematically, that a material and real thing is only ever present in the moment it is not itself, in the moment it remains still to come. To glean properly a thing’s notional unity, or oneness, is to register that unity as a paradoxical consequence of its necessary dispersal within innumerable relations.11 “Symbolic inertia” for Lacan is thus tantamount to the illusion of closure, a flattening of affect, of intrusive coming, that allows human subjects to carry on like the police. Dupin’s heroism is, after all, tied (in Lacan’s seminar, as it is in Poe’s story) to his willingness and ability to locate and then re-conceal or re-suture the hole in the symbolic that the Minister de-sutures by displacing the letter. By receiving a fixed payment for the letter he recovers, Dupin reasserts the illusion of its “true” and fixed value in the order of things. The consequence of this symbolic re-fixation is twofold: (1) it allows those of us like the police or the overly committed realist to luxuriate again in the flat affect of the symbolic and of law; (2) it allows those mystics among us to reimagine the Real as some ineffable thing that exists full and pure in opposition to our always flawed knowledge of it. If there is an essential difference between Žižek and Lacan it is, therefore, tied to this twofold consequence. While the apolitical Lacan identifies the psychoanalyst with the heroic Dupin—a visionary detective who “heals” by sewing traumatized subjects back into the prevailing order of things—Žižek tends to be partial also to the Minister, the revolutionary disruptor, the Hitchcock who lets everyone in on the secret, the abyssal or “immobile” hole at the heart of everything. But let’s not move away from Poe too quickly. Of some significance is the fact that Poe’s story relates this confusion of the Real and its symbolic distortion via its implicitly metafictional attributes. Many of these attributes Lacan seems to impose—just as he imposes the reasonable assumption that the individuals of “most exalted station” (Poe, “Purloined” 251)—are the king

This necessity of sustaining tension between unity (or a notion of the whole) and particularization is, we should note, the driving assumption behind Habermas’s critique of “postmetaphysical thinking,” including Lyotard’s privileging of unchecked “language games.” The moment particularization overtakes the possibility of a notional unity (as a background or horizon in which to understand or place particulars) we begin to see a postmodern “contextualism that confines all truth claims to the scope of local language games and conventionally accepted rules of discourse and assimilates all standards of rationality to habits or to conventions that are only valid in situ” (“Themes” 49). But Habermas is just as insistent that “the unity of reason only remains perceptible in the plurality of its voices—as the possibility in principle of passing from one language into another—a passage that, no matter how occasional, is still comprehensible” (“Unity of Reason” 117). In Poe, the police think only within the horizon of a notional unity, or truth. The Minister, on the other hand, wantonly “assimilates all standards of rationality to habits or to conventions that are only valid in situ.”

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and queen of France. Lacan’s stress on the metafictional implications of the story are, however, largely justified by the manner in which Poe folds the story as Thing into the story of the letter: “The Purloined Letter” (as story) is, itself, a “letter” destined to be purloined, displaced, lost and found, and found again. It too is a thing with an immobile heart that is forever coming into presence as the plasticity of spirit. But this means, too, and necessarily, that the story itself has a notional unity, an immobile heart, that must be attended to with rigor, with strenuous effort. The story can’t be stolen and then taken anywhere; it has a certain gravity, a certain “thereness.” It is something and not just anything “whatever.” And yet keeping it hidden, or out of circulation, will not preserve its truth. We seem, of course, to be moving (again) toward Derrida here, and his very early assertion that There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the “object,” without risking— which is the only chance of entering the game, by getting a few fingers caught—the addition of some new thread. (Derrida, “Pharmacy” 63)

But, of course, to go back to Derrida is to begin rethinking the object—any object, or any thing—as text, as a weave of particulars perpetually undoing the notion of unity (truth or final meaning) by perpetually intertwining and confusing themselves with other things. Are we now then in danger of slipping back into postmodern extremism, of mistaking the assertion that “there is nothing outside the text” (Derrida, Grammatology 158) with the “fact” that there is no Thing anterior to, or before, (human) perception and representation? Yes. Most certainly. But only if we willfully misread, only if we refuse to endure the “strenuous effort of the notion.” As Derrida puts it, the fact that everything must corrupt itself by coming into presence, by being in-common, by enduring a supplementary excess, does not “authorize[]” us “merely to add on; that is, to add any old thing” (“Pharmacy” 64); “the seam,” he assures us, “wouldn’t hold” (64). In this sense, Derrida’s point has always been more Hegelian then it was meant to seem. There is, in early Derrida, a certain effort to overcome or outdo Hegel that must be kept in mind even as it is overlooked.12 Indeed, this effort is not really all that dissimilar from Lacan’s—and so it is somewhat odd that Žižek is always so much more It is worth stressing here that Malabou was Derrida’s student, and thus her “return to Hegel” can be read as the apotheosis of a kind of Derridean project, another “end of history.”

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inclined to look more favorably on the effect of Lacan’s misreading of Hegel than he is of Derrida’s. But if we are open to tracking a ghost of Hegel in Derrida, then Derrida’s discussion of writing as supplementarity is always already a discussion of being itself, of ontology or thingness: What we have tried to show by following the guiding line of the “dangerous supplement” is that in what one calls the real life of these existences “of flesh and bone,” . . . there has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the “real” supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement, etc. And thus to infinity, for we have read, in the text, that the absolute present, Nature, that which words like “real mother” name, have always already escaped, have never existed; that what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence. (Grammatology 158–9)

The point here is not that material reality has “never existed”; the point is that “the absolute present” as Nature “never existed.” It never existed because no Thing can be absolutely present, right here and right now—all at once. As Nancy puts it in “Corpus,” “There is no ‘intact matter’; if there were, there would be nothing, not one single thing” (203). This is why “there is no such thing as the body” (207). Any body as absolute presence—including but most certainly not exclusive to “Ribs, skulls, pelvises, irritations, shells, diamonds, drops, foams, mosses, excavations, fingernail, moons, minerals, acids, feathers, thoughts, claws, slates, . . . bellowing, smashing, burrowing, spoiling, . . . flowing—” (207)—would have to remain outside all relation, and not just relation as human perception or interaction; any absolute body would have to “be alone being alone.” What we can say, however, is that the heart of a thing—a sort of notional unity—exists before its coming into presence, before its coming “forth in a chain of differential references,” a chain of relations, a community of things. Yet this “before” must also be understood as the effect of a coming into presence, a consequence of relation, the moment of (divine) manifestation. On some level, this is precisely what Poe’s story, especially given its implicitly metafictional register, shows us. In the story everything—from the ambiguous personages of “most exalted station” (251) to Dupin and his oddly “green spectacles” (262), the “trumpery filigree card-rack of paste board” (263), the “mantel-piece” (263), the strategically abandoned “snuff-box” (264), the “loud report” (264) that distracts the Minster, the Minister himself, the narrator, and finally (by

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metafictional implication) the story itself—circulates and comes into being through the infinite contingencies of relation and withdrawal, the infinite contingencies of being in-common. Each and every thing is offered, that is, as a text, and “There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte]” (Derrida, Grammatology 158). Each thing is thus a subject(ile), constantly being (re)born in the moments of relation.13 We might even say they are all implicitly exposed as (meta)fictional subjects— insofar as their fictionalization (relationality, or in-commonness) entails their absolute realness, their immobile hearts or notional unity. To do all these various purloined14 things justice, we must read them all as carefully as possible. Again and again.

Neomaterialism, or Reading Poorly We should not be surprised that we are coming upon an ethics of reading at the very moment we seem to be articulating a position that is strikingly similar to the position that defines any number of neomaterialisms. Does not the reading of Poe’s story just articulated—which sees it as a “thing” that metafictionally folds itself into its own story about innumerable things “incommon” (all of them perpetually purloined, or “placed” at a distance)— evoke Graham Harman’s various efforts to “put object-object relations on exactly the same footing as subject-object relations” (Quadruple 140); Levi Bryant’s conception of “flat ontology” or a “democracy of objects” (39); Bruno Latour’s conception of “actor networks,” in which “all the actors . . . might be associated in such a way that they make others do things” (107); Ian Bogost’s “alien phenomenology” (34); or Timothy Morton’s assumption that there is “a universe of trillions of finitudes, as many as there are things—because a thing is a rift between what is and how it appears, for any entity whatsoever, not simply that special entity called the (human) subject” (18); and so on? Yes, of course; but also, most certainly, no. So the better question would be this: How is it possible that we arrived at such a reading of Poe through Hegel, Lacan, Derrida, Nancy, and Žižek? If it is possible to arrive at such a reading via this philosophical lineage, does not the apparent radicalness of the positions just listed (described, variously, as the positions of object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, or actornetwork theory, etc.) begin to dissipate altogether? And what does the I am referring here to Nancy’s claim that a subject “is not, in it is born, in the movement, the delay, and the incompletion of being born” (“Identity and Trembling” 13). Keep in mind that “purloin” comes from middle English, meaning “to put at a distance.”

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possibility of such dissipation imply about these projects more generally? Let’s back up a bit. I do not intend, here, to offer a sustained critique of any specific neomaterialist position. Excellent critiques already abound.15 My goal is, rather, to position this “neomaterialist turn” as another symptom of an ongoing effort (philosophical and aesthetic) to escape the apparent culde-sac of our current postmodern state, and thus to place it in relation to metafiction’s apparent renewal, or shift in function. What this will allow us to see is that, in their effort to overcome the specter of what every neomaterialist calls “correlationism,” the various practitioners of this philosophical return to “realism”—which is certainly, at times, admirable and philosophically efficacious—must necessarily oversimplify the enemy in question. They must, in other words, read poorly. Rather than extending and radicalizing a mode of criticism that comes before them, neomaterialists tend to impose untenable “readings” upon their philosophical ancestors.16 These readings allow them, in turn, to position their own objects of knowledge (books, essays, and blogs) as radical advancements of a previously unconceived, or inconceivable, ontology. This paucity of detailed reading and engagement then infects, quite

A representative few of the more nuanced might include Simon Critchley’s review of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude in the Times Literary Supplement, the “Correlationism and Its Discontents” section of Žižek’s Less Than Nothing, Justin Clemens’s “Vomit Apocalypse” (which anticipates my own efforts to redeploy certain elements of deconstruction as solutions to neomaterialist “problems”), Todd McGowan’s “On the Necessity of Contradiction in Hegel,” Christopher Norris’s “Speculative Realism: Interim Report with Just a Few Caveats,” and David Golumbia’s “‘Correlationism’: The Dogma that Never Was.” Some of these I have referenced already; others are discussed in the following sections. 16 As Golumbia puts it, 15

given the enormous differences in philosophical outlook of such figures as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, A. J. Ayer, Wilfrid Sellars, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein (early and late), W. V. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, Saul Kripke, David Armstrong, David Lewis, Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, Paul Guyer, and Bas van Fraassen—just to name some of the most prominent analytic philosophers whose work touches on issues raised by Meillassoux—how can one take seriously the claim that they are all correlationist, especially where the only attempt to demonstrate this error is made by analyzing not their own works but positions (and not even, for the most part, actual writings) of Kant? (3) This failure to read carefully what comes before has resulted, Golumbia goes on to note, in “a philosophical discourse that repeatedly fails to respect most of the methods of that practice: to state clearly its contentions, to define its terms, to distinguish between philosophical issues (particularly epistemology and metaphysics), or to demonstrate textually its historical-philosophical assessments” (4).

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necessarily, their efforts to read and describe a world of things outside its “correlation” to the human subject that perceives it.17 In most neomaterialisms, philosophy is suddenly liberated from the complex nuances and rigor embedded in several centuries worth of phenomenology, ontology, existentialism, pragmatism, deconstruction, and so on. And just as suddenly a world of things is unveiled, ready to be known as it really is. Thus, while someone like Bryant holds to the position that all objects (human or otherwise) are equally “withdrawn” from the relations in which they become manifest to each other, he is equally “committed to the thesis that it is possible to know something of beings independent of their being-for-thought” (37). Such a thesis—that a person can, or should, simply overcome the impossibility of access—is echoed in Morton’s claim that “there are real things for sure, just not as we know them or knew them, so some metaphors are better than others” (4). While I have already expressed (if only implicitly) a certain sympathy for the claim that “some metaphors are better than others,” the problem is that this assumption then sanctions Morton to say “real things about real things” (15, my emphasis). He even assumes the uncanny ability to know what “things” want: “A hammer ‘wants’ to be held a certain way. A forest path issues directives to my body to walk at a particular pace, listen for animals, avoid obstacles. A cigarette butt demands that I put it out” (141, my emphasis). And while someone like Bogost makes great strides in acknowledging that “moves like these feel dangerously selfish”

“Surface reading” and “postcritique” can, in this sense, be viewed as movements in literary criticism that run parallel to the rise of neomaterialism. If correlationism is the enemy for neomaterialists, something called “critique” bears that burden in postcritique. For instance, Rita Felski appeals directly to a concept of actor-network theory when she articulates her plan to treat “critique” with respect, as an “actor in its own right” (121). The problem is that this respect is offered by way of an exemplary “surface reading,” one that clearly embraces Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s assertion that “Simply paraphrasing a text or understanding its verbal meaning is a demanding ‘craft’” (10). Felski, that is, attends to “surface as a practice of critical description” (Best and Marcus 11). What ensues is, consequently, as superficial as possible, a forest without any trees. “Critique” is offered as a kind of phantasmatic objet a (like the shark in Jaws or the alien in Alien). It is (or has been) omnipresent. It is always negative, always fixated on wrongdoing. It is always about subjecting the text to its theoretical proclivities. Yet it’s never clear—when, for instance, Felski evokes the “annals of recent theory” (74) or claims that critique “rails against authority” (140) and focuses on nothing but the “political picture” (141) and a (now) feckless “history of causality” (87)—whose particular voice is being respected, or heard. Who or what is being allowed to act? As in any number of neomaterialist works, an odd sense of debt haunts the proceedings, the true respect for which would necessitate traversing the distance between the casual paraphrasing Felski employs and the specific words (of the critics and theorists) she endeavors to treat justly. McGowan anticipates this very problem when, in 1997, he counters a proto-postcritique movement (i.e., “local or immanent criticism” [“Condemned” 114]) with Hegelian absolutism.

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(64)—especially since we (humans) can never escape metaphor and analogy insofar as all “object encounters are caricatures”—his “alien phenomenology” is finally offered as little more than random descriptions of random things that always risk seeming transparent. Often, in fact, we get the sense that simply listing or describing random things (like tacos or belly-button lint or the skin on gravy) is a radically unselfish and thus ethical activity. Yet a certain lack of ethics, a certain refusal to endure the trauma of otherness, a certain violence is implicitly mandated. Indeed, Bogost thinks of his more “hands-on approach” to alien phenomenology as “manipulating or vivisecting the objects to be analyzed, mad-scientist like, in hopes of discovering their secrets” (103, my emphasis). Let’s not just skim past this metaphor: neomaterialism or neorealism as vivisection, as a most specifically human act of violence, as the assumption that I have the right to know the “secrets” of another thing and that this right sanctions violence. What if, we might very well ask Bogost (and only somewhat blithely), some things don’t “want” to be described at all? At their worst, then, these neomaterialisms (which paradoxically hinge on the “fact” of ontological “withdrawal”) simply offer us the hallucination, or fantasy, of access—encouraging us, in the name of a radical democracy of things, to assume (in the most solipsistic of ways) that what we humans think we know is the thing itself. Happily detached from the legacy of Kant, and feeling smugly postanthropocentric, this self-assured “knowing” simply bypasses (also) any critique of its own judgment. Lost in the miasma of a fantasy without critique or doubt—without, that is, the “the test and ordeal of the undecidable” (Derrida, “Force of Law” 253)18—how can we possibly hope to treat the other, or to conceive of anything before us, with justice? In large part this problem of assuming access in the face of its impossibility is most overtly reflected in the conceptualization and reification of “correlationism”—which we might think of as the mise en abyme of neomaterialisms en masse. To escape “correlationism” is to escape (as Bogost It might be worth turning, for just a moment, to Avital Ronell’s reflections on “stupidity”— specifically, the relation between stupidity and properly Kantian judgment:

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stupidity has failed to submit judgment to the crucible of undecidability. Judgment is not properly judgment if it has not encountered the abyssal demand to which it is summoned. Stupidity involves a judgment that, having arrived at its conclusion, passes itself off stubbornly as a truth. The judgment passed by this type of stupidity poses, among other things, a number of temporal problems, the most prevalent of which concerns its speed. Even though it is consistently associated with slowness, the endless frustration of nonattainment, stupidity in fact moves too fast; fast-paced and in haste, it is always (already) a rush . . . to judgment. (70) Ronell is here, of course, evoking the wonderful footnote Kant added to the second edition of the first critique—in Book II of the “Transcendental Analytic.”

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puts it) “the tradition of human access that seeps from the rot of Kant” (4). What is somewhat obviously repressed in Bogost’s poetic phrasing is the absurdity of the position advanced: we must get over the hubristic assumption that the world is only known through (and indeed determined by) human perception while at the same time we must finally realize that there is a world outside ourselves, the reality and effects of which we can and should claim to know, describe, quantify, and so on. While the former assumption is a form of “correlationism,” the latter is, apparently, not? This of course begs another question: What is correlationism and who is a correlationist? This may seem like an odd, or naïve question, since the term “correlationism” already has the feel of a well-worn coin (as Nietzsche might say). We could certainly just go ahead and “google” it. But let’s try to read better than that—especially since I want to suggest that the origin and reification of this term speaks to a problem at the very core of the movement that depends upon it. The term “correlationism” was, of course, first advanced by Quentin Meillassoux in his incredibly influential first book: After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2008).19 Meillassoux begins this book, or essay, by advancing two related arguments: (1) that we need, finally, to return to the philosophical distinction between primary and secondary qualities (i.e., the attributes of a thing that exist regardless of their experience by a subject, like extension or mass, and the attributes of a thing that exist only in the moment they are experienced, like flavor or the sensation of burning); and (2) that philosophy since Kant is utterly incapable of accounting for the fact that science can “prove” that certain fossils existed millions of years before the appearance of human-like animals. Both arguments are offered as a rejoinder to correlationism—which is then positioned as the assumption (implicit in all philosophical discourse and, perhaps, aesthetics since Kant) that there is nothing outside human perception, nothing that is not merely a “correlate” of a human experience or concept. The world either “correlates” with human perception or it does not exist. Or, rather (maybe), the world exists because it correlates with human perception and understanding. In any event, correlationism entails or assumes the impossibility of what Meillassoux calls the “great outdoors.” “Generally speaking,” Meillassoux asserts, the modern philosopher’s “two-step” consists in [a] belief in the primacy of the relation over the related terms; a belief in the constitutive power of reciprocal relation. The “co-” (of co-givenness, of co-relation, of

The year 2008 refers to the English translation. The original French—Après la Finitude— was published in 2006.

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Truth and Metafiction the co-originary, of co-presence, etc.) is the grammatical particle that dominates modern philosophy, its veritable “chemical formula.” Thus, one could say that up until Kant, one of the principal problems of philosophy was to think substance, while ever since Kant, it has consisted in trying to think the correlation. (5–6)

Given our discussion earlier, it is certainly difficult (perhaps impossible) to dispute such a claim. The arc of philosophy—up until the “linguistic” turn, poststructuralism, and thus postmodernism—has been the arc of an ever-rising fixation on the “co-,” on the manner in which what is known or knowable is always the product of relationality, context, language, and so on. There is no Absolute presence because the Absolute is always corrupted, or supplemented, by its relation to something else, a relation that is the very condition of its possibility. For Derrida, these constitutive corruptions are matters of “differance.” There is a good reason, as Meillassoux convincingly demonstrates, for insisting that this ever-rising arc should begin to curve back downward (and resubmit to the gravitational pull of the Real). As Simon Critchley suggests in his concise review of After Finitude, Meillassoux is at his most persuasive when he demonstrates how, by “denying thought any rational access to primary qualities or things in themselves, correlationism allows the space to be filled by any number of irrational discourses, such as religion” (28). Correlationism, in other words, leads directly to our contemporary legitimation crisis; it is in fact indistinguishable from what we might call “post-truth”: the condemnation of fanaticism [today] is carried out solely in the name of its practical (ethico-political) consequences, never in the name of the ultimate falsity of its contents. On this point, the contemporary philosopher has completely capitulated to the man of faith. For thought supplies the latter with resources that support his initial decision: if there is an ultimate truth, only piety can provide it, not thought. . . . [T]here is no reason why the worst forms of violence could not claim to have been sanctioned by a transcendence that is only accessible to the elect few. (Meillassoux 47)

We thus find ourselves back where we started in the previous chapter: at a point when the intensification of a kind of postmodern thinking has made any claim to the truth impossible, or naively and hegemonically reductive. Correlationism is, it seems, just another word for postmodernism, but a postmodernism that is at least as old as Kant. And yet as we have

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already seen (I hope), the intensification of a postmodern state must be understood as both an intensification of postmodernity (as certain specific socioeconomic conditions) and a failure to attend to the complexities of postmodern thinking (in art and philosophy) that ultimately sanctions the co-option of such thinking in the name of irresponsible and self-serving relativism. So, while we can say that a strain of “correlationism” is certainly tied to the manner in which “the worst forms of violence . . . have been sanctioned by a transcendence that is only accessible to the elect few [of faith],” this strain of correlationism is extremely hard, if not impossible, to locate in any one serious thinker, from Kant forward. Thus, to prove his point—and clear the space necessary to position his “speculative materialism” as a radically new and justified development—Meillassoux must employ the slipperiest of language. Simultaneously, he must also sidestep detailed engagements with the philosophers he implicates as correlationists. Most specifically and overtly, Meillassoux must slip between the problem of access and the problem of existence, finally encouraging readers to conflate the two: if we are encouraged to think that it is impossible to access the Absolute (world, or thing) outside our perception then we have been encouraged to think the world or thing outside our perception does not exist. “How,” Meillassoux asks at one point, “is one to legitimate the assertion that something subsists beyond our representations when one has already insisted that this beyond is radically inaccessible to thought?” (38). Notice the subtle phrasing here; in correlationism nothing in thought has anything to do with the “outside” of thought. This is no longer the correlationism Meillassoux defines at the outset—the correlationism that entails a “correlate,” or even just an over-fixation on the “co-”; instead it is outright solipsism, or radical skepticism. Every correlationist is suddenly the Red King asleep under the tree or Alice in tears—because (after all) everything is her dream, not his. Consider (again) Meillassoux’s second opening move: the claim that the correlationist cannot accept or make sense of an “archefossil”—the origin of which can be scientifically dated to millions or even billions of years before human existence. Which specific correlationist— or strain of correlationism—cannot think or accept this? It’s hard to tell, since Meillassoux tends to escape the necessity of sustained engagements with his predecessors by creating purely hypothetical correlationists who struggle yet always fail to counter his various arguments. But whomever he has in mind does not know what Meillassoux knows, that “there is indeed a constant link between real things and their sensations: if there were no thing capable of giving rise to the sensation of redness, there would be no perception of a red thing” (2).

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But, again, let’s ask the question: Who doesn’t know this? Is it Kant, whose “rot . . . seeps”? Kant is, without doubt, a problematic humanist. For Kant, human “understanding is something more than the power of formulating rules through comparison of appearances; it is itself the lawgiver of nature” (Pure Reason 148). But let’s be clear: understanding—in so far as it entails a filtering and ordering of intuited reality through fixed a priori “categories”— is the lawgiver of nature for humans. Humans can only know the world according to the categories available to us, or in us, for its apprehension. This is not solipsism. In fact, there is something profoundly humble about it. We must recognize our limits as humans and the very real possibility that “Things in themselves . . . conform to laws of their own” (173). What, then, is Meillassoux saying that Kant is not? In both editions of his first critique, Kant is quite clear: sensation corresponds to the “real” of an object, and that sensation has an “intensive magnitude, that is, a degree” (201). Moreover, the sensation effected by real objects can never be “anticipated” because it precedes and exceeds (even as it is eventually enveloped and understood by) anticipatable modes of experience. Thus the fact of experience, stemming from sensation, disproves the possibility of “an empty space or an empty time” (205). This fact then becomes a central component in Kant’s efforts to “undo” his third antimony: the contradiction that freedom is and is not possible in the context of natural law. Kant’s solution is tied directly to his insistence that we must utterly forgo “the fallacious presupposition of absolute reality of appearances. . . . For if appearances are things in themselves freedom cannot be upheld” (466). However, “If . . . appearances are not taken for more than they actually are; if they are viewed not as things in themselves, but merely as representations, connected to empirical laws, they must themselves have grounds which are not appearances” (466–7, my emphasis). This “outside” thing—this, let’s just go ahead and say, thing of the “great outdoors”—has, Kant goes on to insist quite emphatically, an “intelligible character (though we can only have a general concept of that character) [that] must be considered to be free from all influence of sensibility and from determination through appearances” (469). Some element or “grounds” of a thing must necessarily remain semiautonomous (to recall Jameson) in relation to the effects it causes. This semiautonomous ground is, Kant suggests, the condition of freedom—and not just for humans. Faced with this condition of freedom, “we are constrained to think a transcendental object as underlying appearances, though we know nothing of what it is in itself ” (468, my emphasis). We might in fact say that, in Kant, we are repeatedly faced with the strenuous effort of thinking the abyssal, or sublime, gap between the coherence provided by the understanding and the noumenal reality that

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forever escapes that coherence.20 Read alongside The Critique of Judgement, this articulation of a “minimal” gap (as Žižek is so fond of saying21), this condition of freedom, entails that any element in the “manifold” of experience which comes to occupy my understanding has the capacity to provoke a sublime or vertiginous or uncanny experience. All things could, in this sense, be thought of as “what is beyond all comparison great” (Kant, Judgement 94)—insofar as they exceed all comparison or correlation with something else, insofar as they exceed the appearances in which they are momentarily, or relationally, grasped. There is always and necessarily “progress ad infinitum” for the imagination to fixate upon, no matter how strenuously or dogmatically “reason demand[s] absolute totality, as a real Idea” (97, my emphasis). Symbolic inertia, or the re-fixation of whatever might expose us to this distance, could then be thought of as the possibility of a phantasmatic beauty, the beguiling depthlessness of pure symmetry. But perhaps this is pushing Kant too far? What we can confirm much more simply is that, in Kant, “if we were speaking of a thing in itself, we could indeed say that it exists in itself apart from relation to our senses and possible experience. But we are here speaking only of an appearance in space and time” (Pure Reason 441, my emphasis). That “we could say it exists” is everywhere necessarily assumed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, even if that critique maintains a focus on that which appears to humans in space and time. Such an assumption is the very reason Kant provides us with the Critique’s most famous section: “The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in general into Phenomena and Noumena.” However, as Žižek assumes, Meillassoux “is well aware of the finesse of the transcendental approach; that is, he is well aware that Kant’s transcendental constitution is not the same as the pre-transcendental Berkeleyian notion of the observer who directly (ontically) ‘creates’ what it observes” (Less Than 625–6). And yet, for one reason or another, Meillassoux must make of Kant (and all who might be said to follow in his footsteps) a kind of Berkeleyian. This “making” of Kant and his successors then tends to get repeated in the various new realisms and materialisms that flow directly from Meillassoux. Consequently, or more specifically, neomaterialists willfully misread their ancestors, or the ancestrality that haunts their projects. And not only Kant. The result, as Deleuze puts it, is a kind of perpetual “torment”: “In many ways understanding and reason are deeply tormented by the ambition to make things in themselves known to us” (24, my emphasis). 21 Yet another applicable instance of this phrasing can be found in Tarrying with the Negative. We must, Žižek asserts, “gain a minimal distance toward [our fantasy], by way of rendering visible the void (the lack in the Other) covered up by the fantasyscenario” (72). 20

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Neomaterialists must also on some level avoid the manner in which the object outside human perception is granted a kind of subjectivity, or spirituality, in Hegel. They must overlook or brush aside the fact that a thinker like Nietzsche once offered us the satirical parable of a planet in which some “clever beasts invented knowing” (“On Truth and Lies” 79). Such a parable, Nietzsche assures us, could never “adequately illustrate[] how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened” (79, my emphasis). We could of course spend some considerable time generating similar examples of necessary exclusions; we might even turn to Sartre, and the complex manner in which nothingness is the condition of all being, insofar as every singularity is both effected and corrupted by négatités. Thus, in Nausea (1938), Roquentin’s radical contingency as a human subject is directly reflected by (and not into) the tree root that descends beneath the ground under his feet. And is it not this radical contingency—the endless likelihood that something could change or cease to exist, or the simple fact that nothing is ever “necessary”—that Meillassoux rediscovers as the fundamental or essential attribute of the “great outdoors”? The question we arrive at, then, is this: Why are such misreadings or strategic omissions typical, or typically necessary? Why is correlationism repeatedly forced to be both correlationism and solipsism? Let’s approach this question by noting that nothing we have said so far (following Hegel through Nancy to Žižek) contradicts Meillassoux’s claim that contingency is a necessary condition of existence, that only the absolute impossibility of necessity is necessary. The problem with Meillassoux’s position is that he also abandons the possibility of contradiction. For Meillassoux, contradiction and contingency are mutually exclusive: “And this for the precise reason that such an entity could never become other than it is because there would be no alterity for it in which to become” (69). This is Meillassoux’s most anti-correlationist claim. By forbidding the possibility of contradiction, or insisting adamantly upon the law of noncontradiction, Meillassoux seemingly overcomes the problem of relation altogether, the problem of the “co-,” the problem of being that is only because it is perpetually negating itself via its endless relations with/in otherness. A thing is what it is until, as a result of its innate contingency, it isn’t. Thus, as long as it is what it is, I can know it absolutely. Or, more specifically, for Meillassoux, I can mathematically ascertain its primary qualities. Meillassoux thereby puts a firm end to the necessity of “tarrying with the negative.” He bypasses the problem of the semiautonomous so as to offer autonomous unity as the condition of access. In this specific sense, Meillassoux’s rejection of

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contradiction is inextricably tied to the oddly omissive rhetoric he and his various progeny must employ. Correlationism must be dismissed as solipsism if we are to make claims about a noncontradictory reality anterior to those claims. If correlationism is or entails solipsism, then all of its problems (i.e., all of the problems associated with contradiction, with the impossibility of “intact matter”) are the problems of solipsism. Thus, once I reassert the fact of an anterior reality, I can dispense with the problems correlationism (as a fixation on contradiction, on self-relating things) entails and begin, finally, saying things “like they really are.” I can finally talk about things that are, suddenly, outside correlation, utterly free of internal contradiction and therefore spiritual plasticity. This in turn becomes a matter of recovering a form or modality of “common sense.”22 By misreading correlationism I am in a much better position to ignore the traumatic responsibility that reading— and thus describing or writing—a world of “wholly others” entails. To put it another way: if correlationism is solipsism, then (once I claim that a stable “outside” exists prior to any human knowledge of it) I don’t need to worry so very much about the problems and ethics of correlation. Everything becomes quite simple.23 To get to this point, though, Meillassoux must leave all manner of questions unanswered. Why would a contradictory entity have no potential for change? If a thing were a square and a circle could it not then potentially become a triangle, or even nothing at all? Must contradiction only mean everything and nothing at the same time? Even if mathematics is as perfect as Meillassoux must assume it is, does it not necessarily become another (very human) correlate to that which is fundamentally before its application? Does not the ability to think the “arche-fossil” (along with the primacy of mathematics) place humans once again in a uniquely privileged position— since only humans have the tools necessary to ascertain what is real? Or A review of §69 of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology is here encouraged. For, as Hegel assures us,

22

when philosophizing by the light of nature flows along the more even course of sound common sense, it offers at its very best only a rhetoric of trivial truths. . . . But it would be better by far to spare oneself the effort of bringing forth ultimate truths of that kind; for they have long since been available in catechisms or in popular sayings, etc.—It is not difficult to grasp such vague and misleading truths, or even to show that the mind in believing them is also aware of their very opposite. (42) I mean “simple” here (also) in its most philosophical of senses, as that which (in Kant’s terms) is “absolutely inward” (Pure Reason 286). What is “simple” is not, in anyway “manifold,” or susceptible to “any effective connection whatever” (285). Kant, of course, explores the problem of simplicity most thoroughly when he critiques the necessarily static nature of “Leibniz’s monadology” and when he speculates on the soul as “a simple substance” (338).

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finally: How, as Critchley asks, are we to think of and deal with the secondary qualities of a thing? Critchley’s question is, perhaps, the most important, for it leads us to an even larger one: How do any of the various neomaterialisms (including Meillassoux’s) help us in our efforts to apprehend and describe as justly as possible the infinite variety of things before us? What kind of narrative modality best holds to the reality of the Holocaust as Thing? What phrasing, what structural design, what color most truly captures the tidal swell and force of an ocean? Does the experience of slavery yield its truth to a mathematic formula? These are questions of correlation. They do not imply that slavery, or the ocean, or the Holocaust, or ancient fossils, or stars that died long before their light affected even a single human retina never existed. They imply, instead, that none of them existed or exist except in relation—relation to something, to something else, to something they are not. For this reason, their absoluteness, their unity, is a tenuous thing made manifest only in its perpetual coming and thus withdrawal. The moment I go beyond claiming anything but a notion (of its unity) I inflict an injustice upon what I describe. I imprison the heart of the matter in the illusive transparency of a single case, like a tiger in a cage at a perfectly mapped and navigable zoo. Surely this is nothing but simulacra, the consequence of an inverted solipsism? To be clear, or fair, many neomaterialists implicitly—even, at times, explicitly—find it necessary to return to the problems and ethics of “correlation.” Bogost stresses the necessity of “metaphorism” and Harman talks of “caricature.” We might even say that Harman’s object-oriented philosophy is essentially a kind of correlationism; it merely extends the problem of correlation beyond the human and into the very heart of all things—in a manner, we should stress, that is not too distant from the neoHegelian position I’ve been advancing.24 Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory is closer yet, and therefore largely dismissed by many of those who take Meillassoux and his account of correlationism as their start point.25 But in its virtually unified effort to confuse “correlationism” (or the last 250 years of philosophy) with solipsism, and its concurrent tendency to overlook or For Harman, all things (inclusive of thoughts and mythical creatures) are objects and all objects are both real and sensual—with, therefore, both real and sensual “qualities.” Such “quadruple objects” relate to themselves and to other objects in a variety of potential (yet finite) ways. Harman’s goal is to enumerate and track these relations. 25 Bogost, for instance, tells us that 24

Latour allows for the uncontroversial existence of things at all scales. But in the networks of actor-network theory, things remain in motion far more than they do at rest. As a result, entities are de-emphasized in favor of their couplings and decouplings. Alliances take center stage, and things move to the wings. As Latour says, “Actors do not stand still long enough to take a group photo.” But yet they do. (7)

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misread its complexities, neomaterialism largely fails to endure or impose upon itself an ethics of judgment, “the test and ordeal of the undecidable.” The ethical efficacy of the entire project stalls the moment it convinces itself and others that it “can say real things about real things,” or that it is in the privileged position to always know which metaphors “are better than others.” Nevertheless, we can certainly say that the neomaterialist valiantly fends against perversion, if (following Žižek) we understand perversion as a willingness to acquiesce utterly and knowingly to sheer play, to symbolic inertia, the unreal desire of a purely interhuman Other. No neomaterialist can be likened to the Minister in Poe’s story. In this regard, the project in all its manifold expressions is an admirable effort to wake us from an ever more pronounced and consequential relativism, a weaponized (because bastardized) postmodernism—a dangerous fixation on contradiction. At the same time, and if we keep in mind the typicality of its willingness to overlook or reduce the complexity of what comes before, it’s hard to imagine how any neomaterialism—through “‘methodological prudence,’ ‘norms of objectivity,’ or ‘safe-guards of knowledge’” (Derrida, “Pharmacy” 64)—could ever manage to grasp or cope with even a single purloined Thing.

Writing Well, or the Ethics of Speculation In the same sense that the only way of countering the intensification of postmodernism is to be more postmodern than postmodernism, the only way to overcome the problems of correlation is to tarry with correlationism. The work of neomaterialists like Harman and (even) Bogost proves this very point. We frequently see such thinkers coming up against and then repeating much of the thinking that defines “correlationism.” But they tend to do so as if in a vacuum, as if they are not simply repeating that which they claim to be overcoming. The result is an untenable tension between a pronounced effort to speak of true things and an equally pronounced inability to shake the problem of correlation. Indeed, Harman’s “realism” is almost too Kantian. Like Meillassoux, then, Bogost is opposed to any theory of “thingness” that does not allow us to hold a thing at rest, outside movement, outside contradiction and perpetually shifting relations. He wants desperately to get some real photos of some real things, failing (all the while) to attend to the fact that (as Lacan tells us) “what one looks at is what cannot be seen” (Book XI 182). But Latour’s account of things is more sophisticated, and thus more ethical. As he tells us, we need to “learn how to feed off uncertainties, instead of deciding in advance what the furniture of the world should look like” (115, my emphasis). This is because, for Latour, “translation” takes on the “somewhat more specialized meaning . . . [of] a relation that . . . induces two mediators into coexisting” (108)—a suggestion that clearly echoes the work of Nancy.

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As we saw, Kant insists upon a thing’s “intelligible character,” that which is before its appearance: “Inasmuch it is noumenon, nothing happens to it; there can be no change requiring dynamical determinations in time, and therefore no causal dependence upon appearances” (496). Likewise, Harman tells us, “The only way to do justice to objects is to consider that their reality is free of all relation, deeper than all reciprocity. The object is a dark crystal veiled in a private vacuum: irreducible to its own pieces, and equally irreducible to its outward relations with other things” (47). And yet, “This reality slips from view into a perpetually veiled underworld, leaving me with only the most frivolous simulacra of these entities” (39). Again, only if we accept correlationism as solipsism—as the assumption that “objects have no autonomy from consciousness . . . [and that] [t]heir existence is . . . threatened if I shift my attention, fall asleep or die” (22)—can we read the above argument as anything other than an essentially inconsequential repetition. What is particularly odd is the manner in which it repeats the problem of Kant’s latent realism, not his correlationism. After all, the oddly neo-Kantian assertion that a thing is complete and completely anterior to all relation fails to account for Nancy’s most basic point: “There is no ‘intact matter’; if there were, there would be nothing, not one single thing” (203).26 This is not so much a problem in Kant because he essentially refuses the possibility of direct contact with noumenal things. But Harman (like others such as Bogost) insists upon a thing’s absolute autonomy (as a pure or utterly noncontradictory unity) while asserting the possibility of some type of contact (through “metaphorism,” or “caricature,” or whatever). The paradox is that the pure unity upon which they build their concept of realism entails the possibility of a thing that is “alone being alone”—wholly unknowable, utterly incorruptible, radically uncommon, unrelatable.27 The consequence, as McGowan suggests, is that “speculative realists are not speculative enough and accept an empirical account of objects. Some aspect of the object is simply there and has an identity distinct from what surrounds it. But on the other hand, they are too speculative and assert unsupported philosophical claims about the true nature of reality” (“Contradiction” 107). Thus, if we are to account for the fact that no Thing—from the infinitely large to the infinitely small—is without relation we must reassert a kind of correlationism that insists upon the plasticity of all objects as subjects, that This is in fact how Nancy radicalizes Kant’s notion of freedom—as we see in “Corpus” as well as his various essays in The Experience of Freedom. 27 In this sense, some kind of Kantian realism is the problem haunting both nonmaterialism and metamodernism (discussed in the previous chapter). In the former, the “monadesque” quality of a Thing contradicts all claims of knowledge, or access; in the latter, the inaccessibility of an “unrelatable” Thing entails the necessity of feckless oscillation and acts of “pretend”—or “progress” that is built (solely) upon the illusory stability of an “as if.” 26

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which is both finite and infinitely mutable, that which is capable of being given (in relation) while remaining before relation (“there” to be given). Rather than an object-oriented ontology we need a profoundly subject-oriented ontology. Instead of speculative realism or materialism, we need a form of speculation that remains plastic in its speculation upon plasticity. Such an ontology and such speculation would eschew the manner in which any number of neomaterialisms lead us back toward the depthless forms of classical realism. It would also entail, on the part of the human subject, a form of reading and writing the other that is as respectful as possible, that gambles upon the possibility of adequate formation while always drawing attention to the potential for endless other reformations. This cannot be a matter of succumbing to the illusive and ossifying transparency of documentary or journalistic realism, nor can it be a matter of preserving some ineffable beyond by resorting to nonsensical distortions and impenetrable phenotexts. As Derrida would say, “The same foolishness, the same sterility, obtains in the ‘not serious’ as in the ‘serious.’ The reading and writing supplement must be rigorously prescribed, but by the necessities of a game, by the logic of play, signs to which the system of all textual powers must be accorded and attuned” (“Pharmacy” 64). The trick, of course, is to forestall becoming, in the play of such a game, a pervert. Of course, perversion is always a risk when dealing with metafiction. The metafictional gesture of attributing a textual nature to real things can function to suggest, perversely, that all reality is the consequence of fiction. But it can also function (more radically), and as we have already begun to see, to demonstrate that all things exist absolutely and “for real” within and as a text-like structure, a perpetually mobile community of particulars. The latter would never give itself over to the ease of simply “making things up,” of adding “any old thing” (Derrida, “Pharmacy” 64). We are infinitely responsible to what is “before” our representations, to the immobile heart of the thing in-itself. At the same time we risk ossifying whatever is before us whenever we succumb to the beguiling illusion of a transparent realism, the nefariousness of mimetic closure. Such ossification effects the blindness of Poe’s police, the blindness of the law—just as it risks blinding the “discontents” (to follow Žižek) of correlationism. And yet the other side of this ossification is the extreme perversity of the Minister, who exposes just to revel in the impossibility of any foundation that might justify moral law, who “dares all things, those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man” (Poe, “Purloined” 251). What we have seen, however, is that Žižek’s articulation of a shift in emphasis—from “symbolic inertia” to the “inertia of the Real”—does not justify the rejection of a past (metafictional) model. Rather, and especially if read alongside Malabou’s own return to Hegel, this shift functions as a reminder that the coming of a thing into presence—or into the present as history—entails a type of spiritual plasticity: “a capacity

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to receive form and a capacity to produce form” (Future 9). Viewed in this way, Žižek’s shift in focus returns us to the fact that the symbolic—as an inescapable narrative in which we all play our “parts”—is no less restricted than the hand of a sculptor before a piece of clay. With this in mind, we might begin to clarify our terms. The Real, as Žižek uses the term (while pulling it from Lacan yet through Hegel) is the absolute limit that forbids access: the minimal distance, the gap, the self-negating feature of every Thing. Spirit, on the other hand, can be understood as the coming into presence of being, the movement that traverses this gap, the infinite motility of an “immobile heart,” that which allows a thing to be incommon yet always still antithetical to its particulars. The notion of plasticity, then—or the notion of the historioplastic—speaks to the paradoxical nature of this immobile movement, this gap or limit that is also an endless bridge. To respect the other (as human, animal, environment, or historical event) is, therefore, to endure its plasticity. As regards an ethics of mimesis and narrative apprehension, we must maintain a sense of the plastic by risking a form that always tends toward an excess of play, a type of perversity. It is a dangerous game, but the alternative is always a form of dogmatism. To a certain degree, I am suggesting that we can forestall such dogmatism in the same way that Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno circumnavigate the realist imperative to “embod[y] style in its least fractured, most perfect form” (103). In condemning such “style”—while bemoaning an emergent postmodern state and (or as) consumer-based cultural production— Horkheimer and Adorno gesture somewhat surprisingly (if momentarily) to the revolutionary potential of representational art. More specifically, they suggest “The great artists . . . adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth” (103). Their point is this: it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering. The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality cannot, indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. (103)

This “discrepancy,” this self-negating impulse to direct the observer to its own “necessary failure,” is the very raison d’être of style. The failure mirrors and exposes the truth (or notion) of a content that is perpetually severed from its form, a content that is itself defined by a perpetual lack of unity, or mythic fixity. Any effort to erase style, to “embod[y] style in its least fractured,

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most perfect form” will most certainly erase by ossifying the very truth such transparency aims to expose. Yet a perverse (or postmodern) acquiescence to style alone is certainly no better. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, “the style of the culture industry, which has no resistant material to overcome, is at the same time the negation of style” (102). This insistence on the “negative truth” style has the potential to effect is implicitly Hegelian. It is most obvious in Hegel’s fondness for post-Christian painting—especially since, for Hegel, painting can convey a “negative truth” even when it has nothing to do with Christ: “art [even landscape or still life art] has the task of working out . . . ideal subjects into actuality, of making visible to sense what is withdrawn from sense, and bringing into the present, and humanizing, topics drawn from scenes that are far off and past” (Aesthetics 2: 833). What is humanized—brought into the present, or into presence—is quite precisely what remains inhuman, inward, “withdrawn from [human] sense.” Thus, as Žižek puts it, painting functions best as a mimetic form when it draws our attention to the “painting itself ”: “such paintings are really paintings about painting itself, a visual counterpart to poems or novels about writing about literature” (Less Than 388). What we are given is a paradoxically transparent mirror, an “uncanny” imago; the thing is made accessible while being barred from view or kept in reserve. A (divine) gap in the subject depicted is signaled and given to resonate, uncannily, with the subject who looks. What then occurs is a troubling yet affective “doubling, dividing, and interchanging of the self ” (Freud, “Uncanny” 234), the traumatic resonance of something true in spirit. This resonance, I want to suggest, is the defining feature of historioplastic metafiction—which we can now begin to define in full. By way of approach, a useful analogue might be one of Mark Tansey’s many self-reflexive paintings, A Short History of Modernist Painting (1982):

Mark Tansey, A Short History of Modern Painting (Triptych), 1982.

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This painting is offered as a kind of pseudo-triptych—one which fully repeats the title of an earlier work and then more loosely echoes many of its themes.28 As is typical of a Tansey painting, the three framed images that constitute A Short History are both monochromatic and photorealistic, the effect of carefully subtracting different depths of paint so as to expose the whiteness beneath. In the first panel, Tansey offers us the image of a woman washing a window with a garden hose. Her effort to make the window more transparent is frustrated by the fact that, inside the house, the blinds have been drawn. Moreover, the forceful rush of water hitting the window obscures its limited capacity to reflect the outside world. The woman cannot even see herself. In the second image a man rams his head into a freestanding brick wall. His fist is clenched, and the placement of his feet suggests that he has stubbornly hit the wall mid-sprint. In the final image, a chicken stands atop a short ramp and looks at its own reflection in a mirror. Our first impulse might be to read these three historical “moments” as pre-twentieth-century realism, modernism, and postmodernism, respectively. Such a reading is certainly warranted, and perhaps impossible to dismiss altogether. Just as the futility of trying to make art purely transparent is mocked in the first panel, the stubborn effort to reach an ineffable outside by breaking (through) form and the feckless stupidity of solipsistic self-reflexivity are (respectively) the targets of the latter two. Significantly, though, the first two panels display certain commonalities that are absent from the third. Both are “set,” somewhat ironically, outdoors. The woman washes her windows presumably to see the outdoors better, yet she is outside and choosing to gaze only at a window that has been intentionally blocked from the inside. Likewise, the man rushes at a freestanding wall as if to get to the other side; but, of course, the “other side” already surrounds him. As is the woman, he’s already in-common with the outside. The chicken, however, is inside. And hers (or its) is the only face we see clearly—the left side of which is offered twice (if we count its inverted reflection in the mirror). Could we say, then, that, in not trying to get to the other side of things, the chicken attains a more elevated position? (Her mirror is literally elevated, positioned where we might expect to find the door to a coop.) Even though she is presumably trapped indoors—yet paradoxically facing what should be her coop’s entry point—the chicken sees far more than either of the two humans. She openly confronts what is profoundly inhuman—even if it is reflected in a construct that is just as human as a window or a brick wall. She sees herself and her surroundings. Or rather, she sees that she cannot extract herself from a vision of her surroundings. The earlier “version” of A Short History of Modernist Painting (1979/80) consists of fiftytwo (rather than three) images.

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The two things, or all things, are always intertwined. The chicken thus makes her way to an outside by progressing further inside. In the final image, then, Tansey seems to speculate on how meaning can collapse, as Mark C. Taylor puts it, “in the tautology of self-referential objects” (The Picture 41)—but also on how it can be relocated in a different form of self-reflexivity, a “third way between” (41) the phantasmagoria of realism and the impossibility of overcoming the distortions or walls of correlation. This possibility is signaled most overtly in Tansey’s deployment of monochromatic and etched (both flat and deep) photo-realism that is clearly not photographic, nor transparent. As in Hegel’s favorite paintings, we are provided the uncanny view of real things that cannot be mistaken as “real” things. We are not allowed entirely to “suspend our disbelief,” or go too far beyond the “framings” that always preoccupy Tansey. Instead we must endure the fact that “what is left out is not necessarily absent, even though it is not exactly present” (Taylor, The Picture 57). The function of Tansey’s painting is therefore reflected in the framed image of a chicken reflected in a mirror—its function, that is, as a type of mimetic suture, “‘a seamless joint or line of articulation,’ which, while joining two surfaces, leaves the trace of their separation” (61).29 From another perspective, Tansey’s painting brings us back to Hegel’s triad of aesthetic modes, or stages: the symbolic, the classical, and the romantic. In so doing, it invites us to reconceive the triad of realism, modernism, and postmodernism. As we already saw (in brief), symbolic or “primitive” forms expose us to “the foreignness of the Idea to natural phenomena” (Hegel, Aesthetics 1: 76). Unable to find its satisfactory articulation in any of the forms to which it is ascribed, “the Idea [comes to] exaggerate[] natural shapes and the phenomena of reality itself into indefiniteness and extravagance; it staggers round in them, it bubbles and ferments in them, does violence to them, distorts and stretches them unnaturally. . . . For the Idea is here still more or less indeterminate and unshapable” (76). Is it not possible to associate this symbolic failure with both the modern and the postmodern? This possibility is suggested by the connections we can trace between Tansey’s latter two panels. The simple difference is that, in modernism, the impulse to break through form—via distortions such as streams of consciousness, cubism, primitivism, nonlinear storytelling, and so on—is still motivated by a desire to “elevate . . . phenomenal appearance to the Idea by the diffuseness, immensity, and splendour . . . deployed” (76). Thus, in Tansey, we get the image of a man futilely striving to push his way through a brick

Taylor is here, of course, echoing Derrida’s concept of the “parergonal” frame—as expounded most fully in his The Truth in Painting.

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wall. In postmodernism, though, this “indefiniteness and extravagance” tends to become mere parody (or pastiche), pessimistic extremes that function to hollow out the very possibility of an Idea, or subject; the Idea no longer “persists sublime above all this multiplicity of shapes which do not correspond with it” (77). Hence we get the tautology and flatness of selfreflexivity, the collapse (if we recall Jameson) of the sign and the referent’s semiautonomous relationship. The difference between the modern and the postmodern is thus one of intent, of emphasis. Modern “distortions” must ultimately be viewed as the extension, or obverse, of (residual) nineteenthcentury social realism—and thus, if we can “redeploy” and “reorder” Hegel’s terms further yet, the “classical” claim to a wholly “adequate embodiment of the Idea in the shape peculiarly appropriate to the Idea itself in its essential nature” (77). But such “vision[s] of the completed Ideal,” Hegel insists, finally undermine their own naïve certainty, or finality, since “[in them] the spirit is at once determined as particular and human, not as purely absolute and eternal” (79). That this “defect” necessarily leads to “the dissolution of the classical art-form” (79) explains both the continuity and the disparity of the modern and the postmodern. While the former still clings somewhat desperately to the “classical” assumptions that precede it, the latter eschews those impulses altogether. In this sense, the postmodern can be viewed as yet another period of dissolution, the period in which a realization of the “spirit” (or the true) as “merely human and particular” begins to set in, or even to fester. Everything becomes a mere matter of “correlation.” What we see, then—in the move out of the ostensible reemergence of classicism in the nineteenth century— is a progressive reemergence of the symbolic, one that has transmuted or metastasized into our contemporary “post-truth” (post-postmodern or hypermodern) moment. One response to this metastasization has been the emergence of certain neomaterialisms. But insofar as they can be viewed as a return to the dogmatism and beguiling symmetry of classical realism, these neomaterialisms are both anticipated and preemptively admonished by Hegel. However, in following a certain return to Hegel, we can glean the possibility of short-circuiting this swingback to the naivety of realism (both philosophical and aesthetic). We can short-circuit, also, the concurrent tendency to “oscillate” between such naivety and the nihilistic assumption that it is wholly unfounded. At its most efficacious, metafiction can function as this short circuit. What I want to show in the following chapters is, therefore, how certain recent works of metafiction counter the perversions of the present by sublating postmodernism through the goals of realism. This is the

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kind of metafiction toward which Tansey seems to gesture. As a neoromantic form of narrative, it “cancels again the completed unification of the Idea and its reality, and reverts, even if in a higher way, to that difference and opposition of the two sides which in symbolic art remained unconquered” (Hegel, Aesthetics 1: 79). In these neoromantic forms, the Idea (as truth, as subject, as Thing in-itself) is finally exposed as the failure to expose it; it is “the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society” (Horkheimer and Adorno 103). Or as Hegel puts it, “The new content, thus won, is on this account not tied to sensuous presentation, as if that corresponded to it, but is freed from this immediate existence which must be set down as negative, overcome, and reflected into the spiritual unity” (Aesthetics 1: 80, my emphasis). We are, consequently, provided the renewed possibility of touching the Real, the Idea, the Truth itself. But this possibility is no longer caught up in the illusion of unity, or of “style in its least fractured, most perfect form.” It is instead offered via our exposure to “discrepancy,” to “questionable unity,” to discontinuity, to contradiction. As we will see in the following chapters, works of historioplastic metafiction ask us to endure the speculative notion of a thing (another person, group, object, event, etc.). As notion, this Thing only appears in the failure to make it seen. The narrative form becomes neither window nor wall. Instead we get certain reflective sutures, sutures that reflect back the particulars they hold together. These sutures close the gap between representation and represented, between fiction and truth. They do this by paradoxically persisting as mimetic diremptions, diremptions that ultimately function to renew the “goal of plasticity” (Hegel, Phenomenology 39).

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Part II

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The Time of Plascencia and Egan (and Others) What I am telling you is a story about Nat Turner and William Styron. This is my way of giving you my history, on this eve of my visit to the gallows, and much of your understanding of my history, and therefore yours, relies on your acknowledgement that I am a prophet of sorts. Like Nat Turner. No, not like Nat Turner. Turner was a slave. Don’t take that away from him. —Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Grasping the Future Let’s begin again with Malabou’s suggestion that, for Hegel, “God ‘transplants (verstzt) himself into the world of time’ . . . and thus appears in time before himself ” (Future 119). If a similar divine activity, a similar “becoming accidental of essence” (119), defines the most efficacious (or ethical) of mimetic arts, then we might say that “speculation” in fiction (or as fiction) must always entail the risk of a prophetic utterance, the risk of grasping that which must remain before us, or (as Derrida would say) “still to come.” Representation is always a matter of casting what is past (in history), what is “before” our perception of it in time, as it could be. “Before” implies both what necessarily predates my experience and what remains to be grasped. Representation, in this very Hegelian sense, is always a gamble on the future; it anticipates the arrival of what cannot cease coming or being given in relation—what (like God) remains to be seen before its expression in a coherent or sensical form. Hegel’s romantic arts aim to hold what must exceed their grasp; but this failure is sustained and stressed as a form of success. A failure to wholly conceal the plastic motility of particulars in contingent and contradictory relation negates our grasp of a final and fixed unity; but this negation is itself negated insofar as we are encouraged to view infinite motility as the very condition of a thing’s appearance or presence. We can make things present in

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truth because our ironically sincere narrative gambles on the future (of a final and complete mimetic act) are always destined to fail. Significantly, and as we saw in Chapter 2, this essential and generative function of failure is the very thing that defines deconstruction (as it applies to ontology, epistemology, and linguistics). In this sense, we must approach skeptically any effort to oppose deconstruction (as the dominant philosophical “mode” of postmodernism) to “construction” or “reconstruction.” Strictly speaking, it makes no sense whatsoever to say that we can, or should, oscillate “between deconstruction and construction” (Vermeulen and van den Akker, “Metamodernism” 11). One of the most obvious signs of postmodernism’s bastardization in popular discourse is the fact that, even in academic writing, deconstruction is typically employed as a synonym for destruction, or as a term that too easily denotes a nihilistic effort to take things apart. But any careful reading of Derrida’s work confirms the fact that deconstruction denotes the manner in which any instance of meaning, sense, or unified coherence (any “construction”) is predicated upon a constitutive impossibility, a constitutive unraveling, a supplementary excess. Deconstruction is, in other words, the very possibility of anything we might call, or understand to be, a “construction.” Derrida’s various efforts, toward the end of his career, to make plain the essential and ethical nature of this paradox are best exemplified in his assertion that “the possibility itself of deconstruction” is “undeconstructable” (Specters 59).1 For this very reason—or, rather, because it is tantamount to a crucible of undecidability or a gamble of “the perhaps”—“Deconstruction is justice” (“Force of Law” 243): “Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructable. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists” (243). And if we extend the concept of justice here to include a form of “mimetic justice” (and the undecidability of a finally correct mimetic act), then Derrida’s larger point becomes all that more germane to the issue at hand. Indeed, and especially given our discussions in previous chapters, the essential connections between the undeconstructability of the undecidable, justice, and deconstruction itself cannot be overstressed. As Derrida insists,

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One often associates the theme of undecidability with deconstruction. Yet, the undecidable is not merely the oscillation between two significations or two contradictory and very determinate rules, each equally imperative (for example, respect for equity and universal right, but also for the always heterogeneous and unique singularity of the unsubsumable example). The undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between two decisions. Undecidable—this is the experience of that which, though foreign and heterogeneous to the order of the calculable and the rule, must [doit] nonetheless—it is of duty [devoir] that one must speak—deliver itself over to the impossible decision while taking account of law and rules. (252) For more extended discussions on undecidability as it relates to post-postmodern mimetic arts, see my discussion of Derrida in Chapter 2 of The Passing of Postmodernism as well as Wolfgang Funk’s in The Literature of Reconstruction (pp. 55–8, specifically). Funk also usefully and effectively (if very briefly) relates “undecidability” and irony to

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I want to stress again this echo of Hegel in Derrida because the contemporary misreading of Derrida (and deconstruction)—or the possibility of that misreading—speaks to a problem of emphasis, a problem that recent works of metafiction seem intent on obviating.2 Rather than simply denying a postmodern tendency to overemphasize the artificial and always contingent nature of reality (from concepts of race and gender to matters of historical “fact”), contemporary forms of metafiction tend to sublate that emphasis—and, in so doing, renew its more positive implications. The shift in metafiction’s function (from postmodernism to post-postmodernism, or what I call in The Passing of Postmodernism “renewalism”) is, therefore, very much akin to Malabou’s post-deconstructive turn to Hegelian plasticity. In many respects, Malabou merely redeploys or renews deconstruction by the Hegelian process of sublation. And while I am resistant to Funk’s efforts to offer “reconstruction” as the post-postmodern cure for “deconstruction,” his argument (focused on irony and “metareference” in contemporary literature) is often in line with my own. That said, I do not think it necessary to draw a distinction between older works of metafiction and newer ones of “metareference.” I find it more useful to exploit the broadest meaning of “metafiction”—as this allows us to see how even the most postmodern works of metafiction have certain “romantic” attributes, even if those attributes tend to be underemphasized. 2 This problem of “misreading” is central to the argument I am proposing, as I suggested in Chapter 2. While it is certainly useful to look at the ways in which new expressions of metafiction and self-reflexivity (more broadly) imply a move away from postmodernism, we need always to approach what has come before as carefully as possible. In our desire to articulate an antithetical relationship between past and present, we must resist the temptation to oversimplify postmodernism—its often complex goals and contradictory functions. Wallace’s oversimplification and dismissal of metafiction (an oversimplification that largely seems intentional, the move of a young writer attempting to clear a space for himself) is, as we saw in Chapter 1, a useful example. Of course, as Nicoline Timmer notes, Wallace is largely responding to “a conventionalised form of postmodernism”— and, thus, the manner in which “metafiction . . . lends itself very well to . . . exploitation” (106, my emphasis). Yet the effort to reject that which is easily exploited becomes, itself, a problem—a matter of throwing out the baby with the bath water. We might very well argue that Wallace’s often satirical approaches to metafiction (from “E Unibus Pluram” through to Infinite Jest [1996] and “Octet” [1999]) problematically function to reify a tendency to read all metafiction as nothing but “solipsistic solipsism” (Timmer, “Defenselessness” 105). And, of course, Wallace’s reification of metafiction is very much echoed in Meillassoux’s imposition of “correlationism” as a singular (misreading) of phenomenology and its long and complex line of philosophical successors. But could we not suggest, if only very tentatively in this not-so-brief note, that Wallace struggles (as Timmer suggests) to reclaim a radical sense of Levinasian “receptiveness” (Timmer 113)—or a way out of emotional states “captured in a thematization” (113)—because he has closed himself off to the romantic potential of the very thing he feels he must eschew? Indeed, is not someone like Mark Leyner (who Wallace famously derides in “E Unibus Pluram”) most affective whenever he is at his most ironic and metafictional? (See my reading of Leyner’s Tetherballs of Bougainville [1997] in The Passing of Postmodernism, Chapter 3. A similar reading could be applied to Leyner’s more recent Gone with the Mind [2016], an ironically heartfelt yet metafictional autobiography.)

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accenting its indebtedness to Hegel. Or, inversely, Malabou conjures, in Hegel, a specter of deconstruction. Either way: the difference between the two becomes much more a matter of emphasis than stark contrast, or outright disagreement. The post-deconstructive “return to Hegel” (Malabou’s, Žižek’s, McGowan’s, Jameson’s, etc.) thus runs parallel to, and resonates with, a contemporary renewal and redeployment of metafiction.3 Like Derrida’s strategically labyrinthine explications of deconstruction at work, much postmodern metafiction is easily misread as ontologically corrosive and nihilistic. This is not to suggest, however, that some works of metafiction are not in fact nihilist or solipsistic. The endless games and recursive loops that define the works of, say, Jorge Luis Borges, Barth, or Nabokov might come to mind as tentative examples. Often, in such works, the only point we can glean is that there is no point, that there is no “outside” and that everything is simply “made up.” Defined loosely (yet functionally) as any mimetic act that draws attention to itself as a contingent artifice, metafiction is uniquely capable of undermining the very possibility of foundational claims or essential truths. And yet, as a narrative mode capable of exposing us to an essential process of deconstruction sensu stricto, metafiction can also function romantically to overcome its negation of foundational claims or essential truths. It can do this At the same time, we should approach cautiously efforts to confuse (wholly) theory and aesthetics—or, more specifically (in this context), Derridean deconstruction and postmodern fiction. Consider, for instance, Mitchum Huehls’s effort to define recent works of (print) metafiction as “post-theory theory novels.” These are novels, he argues, that “use the well-known tropes of poststructural theory as the tools and building blocks for various forms of unreal realism, for speculative fictions that contribute to the composition rather than the deconstruction of the world” (283). Such a claim assumes that the bulk of postmodern writers were responding, or deploying, a reductive form of “theory.” While it is true that postmodern literature often echoes or parallels strands of “poststructuralism,” only very select works deal with poststructuralism directly or intentionally. From the works of Borges, to Barth, to Vonnegut, to Pynchon, to DeLillo, to Kingston, and even (typically) to Acker, postmodern literature simply runs parallel to poststructuralism. In most cases, postmodern novels are “theory novels” in the same way your standard romantic poems are “phenomenology poems”; they simply negotiate the same philosophical and aesthetic history that is being negotiated, concurrently (and within the context of a very specific socioeconomic infrastructure), by philosophers. However, the postmodern writer is concerned with a different form, and (thus) somewhat different goals. There is, in other words, good reason to maintain a partial line between postmodernism and poststructuralism (or, at the very least, to view the former as a subcategory of the latter). Indeed, for Huehls to move his argument forward—and thus justify his sense that post-postmodern novels typically employ, or wantonly cast aside, theory as “just another thing-in-the world” (Dames as qtd in Huehls 282)—he must perpetuate a very shallow reading of Derridean deconstruction. I find it far more useful, or reasonable, to argue—while keeping in mind some of the most compelling arguments on periodization (from Marx through to Foucault and Jameson)—that the work of contemporary writers unsurprisingly parallels certain trends in theory: in particular, as I’m suggesting here, a “post-deconstructive” renewal of speculative idealism.

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by stressing the manner in which its self-declared inadequacies as a mimetic act provide access to a truth that can only be known (truly) in the failure to grasp it. Or rather, metafiction can encourage us to see how the notional unity of a thing emerges because of (not despite) its antithetical relation to the contingent and contradictory relations that make it possible. We touch upon a truth because that truth remains pregnant with the potential of being, also and perpetually, otherwise. This does not mean, however, that a truth can be any other thing, or “any old thing.” Its infinite potential to be otherwise is also limited, like the number of points possible in a fixed line segment4 or the number of different forms a specific unit of plasticine might take. Let’s take Salvador Plascencia’s explicitly metafictional first novel, The People of Paper (2005), as an example. At the beginning of “Part Two,” on page 103, a character named Smiley tells us how—by locating, tearing open, and then pulling himself through a “rough spot” in the blue-glazed “papier-mâché” sky—he finally encountered the mysterious entity known as “Saturn.” The planet Saturn, according to the novel’s central character (Federico de la Fe), is an oppressive tyrant who watches over and controls all the people living in El Monte, a California town “fifteen miles East of Rita Hayworth’s Hollywood mansion” (33). The town is populated primarily by disenfranchised immigrants who work as “flower pickers” (34), many of whom have come together to form a gang called EMF (i.e., “El Monte Flores”). Upon arriving in El Monte with his daughter, Little Merced, Federico convinces the EMF to join him in a full-scale battle against Saturn. “Saturn,” Federico claims, “wants to move us into the peaks and into denouement. And we must stop before our lives are destroyed” (43). “Every third week,” to stress his point, Federico updates a “diagram signifying EMF’s position in the battle” (43). This diagram is then reproduced on page 43 as a rising emplotment line that is disrupted by several small dips before it concludes in a sharp and final fall, or “denouement.” Federico marks EMF’s current “position” in the battle with a small dot that roughly coincides with page 43 in a 247-page novel. Federico is convinced that Saturn, in an effort to “commodify sadness,” is responsible for his suffering (and, by implication, the enuresis that finally I am, of course, evoking Borges’s vertiginous introductory paragraph to “The Book of Sand” (1975): “The line is made up of an infinite number of points; the plane of an infinite number of lines; the volume of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume of an infinite number of volumes. . . . No, unquestionably this is not—more geometrico—the best way of beginning my story” (89). Borges’s emphasis, though (here and throughout the entire story), is on that which is terrifyingly infinite, not on the fact that what is infinite can be contained in-the-finite (i.e., between two points, or within a specific volume, etc.).

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compelled his wife, Merced, to leave him): “Saturn drove her away, just so there would be this story” (95). Smiley, however, “ignored everything Federico de la Fe said” (101). He does not “want to look up at the sky and think nothing is up there” (87). Thus, when he finally manages to locate Saturn, he has no intention of following Federico’s orders. He does not plan to kill Saturn or “steal the plot lines and the hundred and five pages that have been written” (105); he knows, after all, that “the defeat of Saturn would bring our own end” (101). And, of course, as the “curandero” Apolonio tells Smiley (for a “fee” of roses, eggs, and lead), the name “Saturn” is merely a “pseudonym. A name to hide behind . . . Saturn’s real name is Salvador Plascencia” (102). Insofar as we overlook various specifics—from the theme of seeing, hiding, and being seen to the significance of Rita Hayworth as a “real” historical figure, the novel’s tendency to collapse the distinction between characters (e.g., Merced, Little Merced, and Merced de Papel or Federico de la Fe and Plascencia himself), and its unique layout (i.e., a series of individual accounts, in first and third person, that often run in parallel, and occasionally perpendicular, columns)—we can read Smiley’s anti-climactic encounter with his author-god as simply and functionally akin to any number of similar encounters or “appearances” in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and film. Some notable American examples include Juliana Frink’s encounter with the man in the High Castle (Hawthorne Abendsen) at the end of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962);5 Woody Allen’s sudden interruption of, and then refusal to explain, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966); Kurt Vonnegut as author and character in both Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Breakfast of Champions (1972); John Barth’s appearance as a genie—and then interactions with his characters, Scheherazade and Dunyazade—in “Dunyazadiad” (1972); Grant Morrison’s encounter with Animal Man in issue 26 of Animal Man (1988–90); Roland Deschain’s various efforts, in the Dark Tower cycle, to keep Stephen King writing the Dark Tower cycle (cf. Song of Susannah [2004] and The Dark Tower [2004], specifically); the author-esque role of the prophet (Chuck Shurley) and then Micah A. Hauptman’s eventual appearance as Eric Kripke in Eric Kripke’s television series, Supernatural Abendsen, of course, is not the author of The Man in the High Castle, which Dick offers as an alternate history in which Germany and Japan won the Second World War. Instead, Abendsen is the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a different alternative history (in which Germany and Japan did not win the war) that many of the characters in Dick’s novel read in secret. Dick, though, collapses the distinction between Abendsen and himself the moment he has Abendsen tell Juliana that he used the I Ching to write his novel. As Dick asserted in an interview, he also “used it [in the plotting of] The Man in the High Castle” (Dick, Interview).

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(2005–20).6 Of these various examples, Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions might seem most analogous to Plascencia’s The People of Paper. In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut appears and interacts as author with his various characters. He also, like Plascencia, seems oddly feckless, unable to control his own creations effectively. And, just as Vonnegut finally frees Kilgore Trout from the cruelties that define his fictional existence, Plascencia finally lets Federico and Little Merced walk off the page, “leaving no footprints that Saturn could track” (245). In terms of this latter similarity, we should note (before moving on) that the act of “freeing” characters is, in both novels, subtly duplicitous. In Vonnegut, Trout doesn’t want to be free; he simply and desperately wants Vonnegut to “make [him] young” (302). Moreover, his freedom is, at best, momentary—for, as I noted in Chapter 1, he almost immediately reappears in Vonnegut’s Jailbird. Likewise, in The People of Paper, Federico and Little Merced’s freedom comes only after the novel makes it clear that pure freedom is tantamount to ontological annihilation, or the end of presence. We experience freedom only insofar as we are never “alone being alone” (to recall Nancy). Thus, the freedom Federico and Little Merced attain is only possible insofar as it remains corrupted by their ongoing communion with each other and themselves, and by our ability to speculate upon a time “Many years after the Saturn War”—or rather, upon “an unwritten afterword to [Plascencia’s] book” (41).7

Textual Reality That said, and while Breakfast of Champions may seem like the more obvious point of comparison, I want to focus for a moment on the way in which Plascencia’s novel echoes and then overcomes the specifically postmodern implications of Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut, of course, only appears in brief moments as a character in this earlier novel—most famously when Chuck Shurley (Rob Benedict), who later turns out to be God, writes sensational novels that align perfectly with the real-life exploits of the show’s central characters, Sam and Dean Winchester (Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, respectively). He first appears in episode 18 of season 4: “The Monster at the End of This Book” (2009); Micah A. Hauptman appears as Eric Kripke in episode 15 of season 6: “The French Mistake” (2011). 7 This is again an echo of Vonnegut—as Vonnegut tells us that, in the aftermath of his violent rampage, Dwayne Hoover (the novel’s central character) succumbs to the fantasy that he lives on the planet promised to the “Man” in Trout’s Now It Can Be Told. On this impossible planet, “The Creator never knew what he was going to yell, since The Creator had no control over him. The Man himself got to decide what he was going to do next— and why” (179). 6

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he identifies himself as the man suffering from violent diarrhea: “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” (125). The implication of these appearances is that Vonnegut is (like the novel’s central character, Billy Pilgrim) “stuck” in the text. He is thus likewise “stuck” as the author of the book. Both events (Vonnegut as soldier in the 1940s and Vonnegut as author in the 1960s) are fixed in an all-inclusive and synchronic volume of time—or time as text. The general conceit of Slaughterhouse-Five is, after all, that Pilgrim has come “unstuck in time”; he has gained the ability to move from any one moment in his life to any other moment (past, present, or future). He can do this because, as Billy comes to learn, all moments in time are happening at the same time. The future is just as present as the present and just as set as the past. Everything in time is now; so everything in time has always already happened. Time cannot be altered because whatever will happen is already happening. Pilgrim learns this truth about time from an absurd alien species: the Tralfamadorians, who abduct him and place him in a zoo on their home planet. For Pilgrim, the consequence of this revelation—combined with his ability to move (albeit, uncontrollably) through time—is apathy. For Pilgrim, there is no way to change anything. We might say that Pilgrim’s apathy is about as postmodern as it gets. And while we must attend to the various ways in which Vonnegut undermines Pilgrim’s irresponsible belief in a concept of time that frees him utterly from any sense of culpability—the fact that the novel’s epigraph (from a famous Christmas song, “Away in a Manger”) functions to satirize Christian fatalism, that Vonnegut uses his preface to position the novel as an effort to resist the apparent inevitability of war, that Pilgrim’s experience of the Tralfamadorians (who look like plungers with hands for heads) is ostensibly “induced” by Trout’s carelessness as a writer of science fiction, that Pilgrim’s time on Tralfamadore can be read as mere fantasy (in which Pilgrim is “forced” to mate with a beautiful adult film star, Montana Wildhack), and so on—we must also acknowledge the fact that the structure of Slaughterhouse-Five compels readers to embrace Tralfamadorian stoicism. Vonnegut’s novel actively disrupts our ability to claim Pilgrim’s present. No one scene is offered as the past, the present, or the future. The Tralfamadorian concept of time wholly echoes Vonnegut’s particularly postmodern efforts to disrupt our naïve tendency to assume a clear distinction between fact and fiction, content and form. Just as Pilgrim can reexperience any moment in his life (yet never change it), we can turn to any page in Vonnegut’s novel and find the same event playing out, and always the same way. We are compelled to accept that the end of the book is set before we even begin the first page, and that this narrative-like “structure

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of things” applies to reality itself. What makes Vonnegut’s metafiction so distinctly postmodern, then, is its tendency to flatten time. Our sense of (and willingness to speculate upon) an unknowable future to come weakens the more we are convinced that reality is merely the consequence of its representation. As we see in Vonnegut (and, perhaps, in each of the examples of “authorial intrusion” listed above) not even authors can escape or exceed the scripts they are compelled to play out.8 The paradox is that the more a postmodern author seems to “deconstruct” reality—to show us the manner in which it is an artificial and social/linguistic construct—the less fragmented and chaotic it becomes. Reality becomes fixed, and the possibility of the undecidable (of deconstruction itself) withers away. Yet we can certainly argue that Vonnegut’s larger point is anything but quietist. Is he not in fact suggesting that, in terms of war and suffering, we find ourselves in an endless temporal loop because we are so very willing to let reality play out as if it were a coherent fictional narrative?9 In this sense the novel is a parodic critique of our inability or refusal to endure the undecidable. The novel itself is not a deconstruction but a horrifying example of logocentric closure, an example that Vonnegut subtly invites us to look beyond. Time collapses for Pilgrim because everything is (to recall our discussion in Chapter 1) “precorporated” into narrative structures— narratives, moreover, that are increasingly determined by socioeconomic forces that require our ever deeper entrenchment in very specific fantasies (from individualism, to nationalism, to freedom, to religion, etc.). Again: symbolic inertia. Vonnegut’s metafiction is postmodern, then, insofar as it lays its stress on the inertia of predictable narrative structures—and, in so doing, opens itself up to accusations of solipsism and nihilism. How, then, is Plascencia’s novel any different? As in Vonnegut, Plascencia’s characters are “trapped” in text, in specific and predictable plots. The novel opens, in fact, with a “fable-like” tale, in which we learn how a man named Antonio—after learning how to make living things out of paper— constructed a woman by “split[ing] the spines of books, spilling leaves of Austen and Cervantes, sheets of Leviticus and Judges, all mixing with pages of The Book of Incandescent Light” (15). Thus is born a woman (eventually named Merced de Papel) with “cardboard legs, cellophane appendix, and

Vonnegut, of course, often (also) critiques the irresponsibility a sense of “timelessness” tends to effect—see, most obviously, his much later Timequake (1997). 9 This is of course precisely what he suggests in Breakfast of Champions—when, that is, he claims to understand “how innocent and natural it was for [people] to behave abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books” (215). 8

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paper breasts” (15). It is hard not to recall, in reading this fable of a woman’s textual construction, Barthes’s famous assertion that, if an author hopes “to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely” (“Death of the Author” 146). And although we are told that Merced de Papel eventually becomes the last of her kind, Plascencia makes it clear that her textual nature is simply more overt than the textual nature of others. Both her creator, Antonio, and the novel’s author, Saturn/Plascencia, bleed “ink” (15, 104). Everyone and everything in the novel is, in other words, a thing “of paper.” And in this specific sense, Plascencia repeats a very postmodern gesture, leading us to see or to assume that reality is a mere effect of its representation—or that, more subtly, nothing that is anterior to its conceptual apprehension or phenomenological appearance can be known. In Vonnegut, this problem of textual precorporation is tied directly to the inevitability of war and the apparent futility of moral action; in Plascencia, it is tied to the very real consequences of racialized identities, colonial efforts to control the narratives of marginalized others, and a US economy that is utterly dependent upon racial hierarchies, immigrant labor, and (thus) “the commodification of sadness” (53). The story of Rita Hayworth’s betrayal of her racial/cultural roots is, in fact, employed as a foil for Saturn/Plascencia’s overtly misogynistic efforts to use The People of Paper as a tool to exact revenge upon his two lovers: first, Liz (to whom the first “version” of the book is dedicated10), then Cameroon. Because of his obsession with The People of Paper, the former eventually leaves Plascencia for a “white” man. The latter (who Plascencia clearly views as a “replacement”) leaves because she feels compelled to travel—to Cameroon, specifically. Once there she discovers a copy of The People of Paper and learns that Plascencia retaliated

The People of Paper is offered twice in the novel. In the first instance, it comes with a dedication to Liz and is largely focused on Federico’s war up to the point when Smiley discovers Saturn is Plascencia. From this point onward Plascencia becomes more focused on the departure of Liz than the war against Federico. However, Liz eventually interrupts the story to remind Plascencia that she “exist[s] beyond the pages of this book. One day, I don’t know when, I will have children, and I don’t want them finding a book in which their mother is faithless and cruel and insults the hero” (138). Plascencia thus restarts the book without its dedication to Liz—but not before adding one final, cruel page—a page that contains nothing but the word “cunt” (139). Thus, at the very moment Plascencia stresses the manner in which the textual Liz is purely an effect of his misogyny and vindictiveness, some one (or some Thing) necessarily exists before, and suffers because of, that vindictiveness.

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by killing her off and having her body thrown into the sea by random “bus drivers” (224), where it was immediately devoured by fish. And, as it is in Vonnegut, this sense of a textual “trap” is overtly associated with the problem of fatalism and/as temporal collapse. Time is a central theme throughout The People of Paper. Early on, as they make their way to El Monte, Federico and Little Merced encounter “Baby Nostradamus,” who looks to be “as dumb as a turnip” (23) but is actually a powerful seer. Little Merced’s description of Baby Nostradamus, which comes in a fixed column on the right side of page 23, ends with her attempting to catch a “glimpse of the future” by “star[ing] into his eyes.” On the left of the page we then get a column dedicated to Baby Nostradamus. This column is simply a black rectangle, not unlike the monadic monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968). As we come to realize, this opaque rectangle signals the sheer opacity of Baby Nostradamus’s thoughts, thoughts so opaque not even Saturn can see them. In other words, Baby Nostradamus is the only one who seems capable of doing what Federico desperately wishes he could do: exist in an utterly private space. To exist in such a space is, for Federico, to be free. This ideal or fantasy of a private space (free, specifically, of Saturn’s controlling gaze) is associated throughout with liberation from sadness. However, and at the same time, liberation from sadness is invariably tied to the infliction of pain, or other intense feelings. Almost all the characters in the novel partake in forms of self-mutilation as a way to combat sadness: Federico burns himself, Little Merced rots her teeth and body by overeating limes, Cameroon uses bees to sting herself, and the “Glue Sniffers” sniff glue until Federico shows them how sadness can be momentarily “replaced by blisters and pus” (29). Along with burning himself, Federico also strips the “lead” from “mechanical tortoises” to line all the houses in El Monte and block the gaze of Saturn. But like the burnings, and the limes, and the bees, and the glue, the lead slowly begins to kill the people it protects. They begin to fall apart, vomiting and collapsing on the ground: “EMF was vulnerable, sprawled out on their lawns, their throats and ribs sore, no longer protected by lead. The vomiting and sickness was so consuming that they thought of nothing but their stomach cramps” (182). The very possibility of pure freedom is repeatedly associated with dissipation—to the point of death. The characters’ various expressions of a Freudian repetition compulsion, or death drive—their efforts, that is, to experience the “quiescence of the inorganic world” (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 62)—is, of course, signaled most overtly by Baby Nostradamus’s utterly opaque, or closed off, understanding of a universe that is utterly complete, utterly unified. Significantly, this state of omniscience (which is also associated with an ability to hide one’s thoughts

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absolutely) is indissoluble from its obverse: the state of the infans,11 the state of vegetal-like simplicity.12 This state of simplicity—represented on the page by various die cuts that can be likened to burn marks—is no less death-like than a state of absolute privation:13 “The weight of knowledge weakened [Baby Nostradamus’s] muscles and divinations battered his limbs, leaving him unable to lift his bruised and welted arms” (166). This problem of “looking” as a corruptive necessity (and as a metaphor for the constitutive yet corruptive experience of relation) is stressed throughout the text. Saturn is just one of many “lookers.” Merced, for instance, tells us that she is only “obedient while under [Federico’s] watch” (35), and Saturn’s control over the text falters (overtly) the moment Smiley sees him as Plascencia, and so on. Ultimately, the novel’s suggestion that reality is an effect of its mimetic representations becomes less important than the fact that all things in reality are structured like text—that relational difference makes understanding, feeling, and experience possible (even if it is also the very thing that blocks our desire for satisfaction and completion). The novel is a mimetic construct, and as unreliable as any other, but through its form and outward acknowledgment of this fact, the emphasis shifts to the way its failure as a mimetic act signals our contact with something true. Most overtly, the novel shows us that “to be” is “to be in-common,” that only in community does any Thing exist. The refrain that runs throughout the novel—various versions of “Someone has to watch over us” (87)—is, therefore, echoed in the very structure of the novel: a series of interrelated accounts that constantly move toward, yet always forestall, the “terrorism of summation” (167). Often provided as concurrent columns running on either side of a given page, these columns are invariably identified

Recall that, for Lacan, the infans is what precedes a subject’s entry and corruption in a world of imperfect relations (first in the imaginary space of a reflection, and then in the intersubjective reality of the symbolic). See Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage.” This coming into being as a loss of the (pure) self is, of course, echoed in Nancy’s various discussions of freedom: “relation happens only in the withdrawal of what would unite or necessarily communicate me to others and to myself, in the withdrawal of the community of the being of existence, without which there would be no singularity but only being’s immanence to itself ” (Freedom 69). 12 I am evoking (again) a specifically philosophical notion of simplicity here, of what is irreducibly “simple.” My goal is to stress—or set up—the manner in which the “simplicity” of Baby Nostradamus’s omniscience is, throughout The People of Paper, offered as the obverse of complete absence, or that which eschews any form of commonality. The pure whiteness of a page is no different than a page that has been inked to the point of utter opacity. Likewise, silence is no less meaningful than complete cacophony. 13 For an extended discussion of the various formatting and typographical oddities Plascencia employs, see N. Katherine Hayles’s “The Future of Literature.” In this same article, Hayles discusses (yet again) Danielewski’s House of Leaves (which will occupy our attention in the following chapter). 11

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with a particular “perspective”: “Little Merced,” “Saturn,” “Smiley,” and so on.14 Notably, when in the form of columns, the perspective is always limited to the length of the page. No column spills over into the next. The columns—or, when not columns, the distinct passages—also tend to overlap one another in terms of “coverage.” In a manner that is somewhat reminiscent of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) or As I Lay Dying (1930), an event related from one perspective will be recounted from another. Generally, though, each account moves the narrative along, or works toward a cohesive structure, even though no one account responds directly to any other. The sense we get is that each “account”—and the specific identity associated with it—is always necessarily contained, or defined, by another. Each column, in fact, appears visually as a kind of geometrical plane, one whose demarcation (and thus visibility) is dependent upon its intersection with another. Through this “manifold” structure, we get the notional unity of the novel itself. The alternative to this always shifting interplay of textual being(s) is the end of time—represented in the novel as sections of white space (the state of an impossibly private monad) or the completely black effacement of text (the state of everything all at once). The central concern of The People of Paper emerges as the insoluble tension between love and sadness. The former is associated with touching, feelings of wholeness, and the dream of a final and pure truth; the latter, with the pain of loss, the impossibility of completion, and the commodification of all things. This tension is represented most overtly by the paper cuts—the scars and the never healing wounds—lovers of Merced de Papel must endure, the very same type of scars (we are reminded) that books inflect upon readers. After Merced de Papel dies (and becomes mere “pulp” without identity), Her history [is to be found] on the lips of her lovers, the scars that parted their mouths. But that was the history of Merced de Papel the lover, the loved one, the history of the pain of touching her. Merced de Papel was cautious of a legacy left as scar tissue, and for this reason she kept her own account, written on the scraps that she shed. She compiled her own book, which she titled in her native Spanish: Los Doleres y Amores de la Gente de Papel. (198)15 One exception is “Chapter Fourteen”—which is presumably from Liz, but after Plascencia has promised to keep her out of his novel. Also, a more extended reading of the novel (not possible here) might consider the fact that some accounts are offered in first person while others are offered in third. Saturn’s sections, for instance, are never offered in first person—which we might (quite briefly) suggest signals a radical distance between Plascencia and Saturn, or Plascencia and Plascencia. Or, particularly in the case of Saturn, we might say that instances of free-indirect discourse function to sustain a distance that is simultaneously traversed. 15 That is, “The Pains and the Loves of Paper People.” 14

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The larger implication is that love (even self-love) is always a type of wound, the possibility of sustained connection, the pain of separation, the experience of an always incomplete account. Love is therefore the willingness to resist “crumbling into gray ash” (60), or “the ability to long indefinitely” (69), to endure the fact that we will never know “the whole story” (135).16 Only in the absence of the wound—only in the absence of relation—is it possible to experience “nothing festering, no remnants of love incubating” (147). All things are commodities because all things are made possible by and circulate as endless exchanges. To experience a thing in truth is to experience the trauma (but also the pleasure) of an endless deficit, a deficit to which we are (as per Levinas) infinitely responsible. Sadness, like love—or sadness as love—is the endless experience of debt.17 Plascencia sublates the postmodern by insisting upon the relational plasticity of being while also satirizing his perverse (postmodern) willingness, as author, to exploit that plasticity, to punish his own past lovers and to forget that even what is plastic has an outside limit, a point at which it misaligns with and even maligns a given form. This outside limit is signaled whenever Plascencia’s lovers intrude upon the text to remind Plascencia of their existence outside his particular text. It is also signaled in the various “doublings”: the fact that, for instance, Merced left Federico (as Liz left Plascencia) for a “white man.” Merced’s new lover is ironically and comically named “Jonathan Smith.” But this name is clearly another “jab” on Plascencia’s part, a jab (moreover) that merely functions to remind the reader that, in this specific instance, Plascencia is the colonial tyrant (not the white men who love Liz and/as Merced); he is the one who is willing to rewrite or even erase history. Yet this effort at rewriting and erasure always fails insofar as Plascencia is unable to control the repetition, or inertia, of certain inescapable events, or “facts.” Hence all the doubling. These facts become the anchor points around which the novel constantly circles (while ostentatiously distorting them). Along with a very specific experience of romantic betrayal, they include the life story of Rita Hayworth, Napoleon’s obsession with Marie Louise, and Plascencia’s own childhood in El Monte, California.18

Notably, the novel frequently reminds us that what is literally plastic resists falling apart, or “crumbling into ash.” See, for instance, the “Julieta” section on page 45. 17 I return more fully to this problem of accounts and exchanges and debts (as it relates to mimesis) in Chapter 5. 18 Hayworth and Louise are, of course, also used as doubles; both function as foils for Liz (and/or Merced). Indeed, in the unattributed fourteenth chapter, the speaker (presumably Liz) tells “Sal” that she will not let him turn “the readers into lettuce pickers and me into your Rita Hayworth” (137). 16

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Irony’s Ghosts Only when the people of El Monte allow themselves to coexist with Saturn—only, that is, when they stop hiding behind lead, or stop thinking arbitrary and nonsensical thoughts, or stop bombarding Saturn with a cacophony of conflicting “columns”—are they able to enjoy the possibility of speculating upon other possibilities, on a future still to come, on unwritten narrative threads: “those quiet and reflective moments when we pondered the alternatives, the could-have-beens, those paths that might have lead elsewhere” (149). Put differently, or in short, Plascencia’s novel returns us to the limits of reality, to the gravity of material and affective things, while (or by) linking freedom (and thus the very possibility of connection, representation, and understanding) to the possibility of a “social bond, a contemporaneity, but in the common affirmation of being unbounded, an untimely being-alone and, simultaneously, in joint acquiescence to disjunction” (Derrida, Politics 55). It is precisely this “in joint acquiescence to disjunction” that allows us to grasp something real across an infinitely “minimal distance,” the gap of difference, the plastic potential of another (future) understanding. This is not to suggest that Plascencia offers us a finally “credulous metafiction”—which would not, according to Konstantinou, “cultivate incredulity or irony but . . . foster faith, conviction, immersion and emotional connection. Dissociated from irony, [such] metafiction becomes a means of returning to ‘old-fashioned content’” (“Four Faces” 93).19 My position is that Plascencia—and any number of other contemporary writers who manage to effectively redeploy metafiction as a tool for combating a postmodern flattening of affect—is entirely ironic. How is it possible, after all, to dissociate metafiction from irony? And if it is, why employ metafictional devices at all? If Plascencia simply wants to expose us to the manner in which “sadness [gets] commodified” by writers (presumably since writing began), why not just write a novel about a writer who exploits sadness—something like a contemporary version of George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891)? Why all the “tricks”? The obvious answer is that Plascencia finds it necessary to keep irony in play, to keep it overt. Indeed, as Konstantinou himself makes clear (in the article just cited and in Cool Characters), the efficacy of a “postironic” aesthetic is indissociably tied to a willingness to be ironic.20 Irony cannot be The somewhat jarring phrase “old-fashioned content”—suggestive, as it is, of a once better world of “do-ers” and “be-ers,” of a time when the possibility of “protest” had not yet been “castrat[ed]” (Wallace, “E Unibus Plurum” 161)—comes, of course, from Wallace. 20 See the discussion of irony and postirony in Chapter 1. 19

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dissociated from the possibility of truth claims, not without slipping into dogmatism (on the one hand) or perversity (on the other). This is surely why Ramón Saldívar—who suggests that a work like Plascencia’s seeks to “claim sincerely the utopian vision of achieved freedom and justice all the while not believing in their attainability” (582)21—insists upon the ironic nature of post-postmodern metafiction. Saldívar turns, in fact, to Friedrich Schlegel’s very specific conception of irony: “‘eine permanente Parekbase,’ a permanent parabasis, where the turn from illusion to reality and back again is not stilled but revolves perpetually” (579). The problem with Saldívar’s reading is that such extreme irony (as Hegel insists and as Saldívar ends up confirming) leads, at best, to a mere game of pretend: a “utopian vision” that is never anything but a vision. As Hegel states, the Schlegelian “artist” is utterly and problematically “disengaged and free from everything,” for everything “is only an unsubstantial creature . . . he is just as able to destroy . . . as to create” (Aesthetics 1: 66). My point is that, for a work like Plascencia’s to function effectively as a response to our hypermodern or post-postmodern state, it cannot be perversely ironic, nor can it be without irony. What I am suggesting, therefore, is that its irony is irony in the strictest of senses. Its irony is sublative. The understanding of freedom it grasps is, for this precise reason, real—insofar as it is the freedom of an “in joint acquiescence to disjunction.” Through its insistence upon irony—its refusal to present itself as either pure artifice or dogmatic realism, as either a series of contradictory particulars or a hermetically sealed whole—Plascencia’s novel touches upon the Real. It thereby offers us a way to move beyond merely “contingent belief ” (Konstantinou, “Four Faces” 102), which surely cannot help us to defend against the most damning criticisms contemporary philosophers like Meillassoux lay against “correlationism” (or a state in which any belief is, or can be, valid).22 Not surprisingly, we can say something similar about any number of texts that might fall within Saldívar’s concept of “postrace” narrative forms.23 Somewhat surprisingly, Konstantinou employs this very quote in support of his argument regarding Plascencia’s “postironic” tendencies. 22 For a discussion of these criticisms, as well as Meillassoux’s concept of “correlationsism,” see Chapter 2. 23 For Saldívar, “postrace” is largely synonymous with “post-postmodernism,” or twentyfirst-century aesthetics. The term is not meant to suggest a time after the problems of race and racism have been overcome. Instead, the term refers to a time when race is at the forefront of our thinking and “a new racial imaginary is required to account for the persistence of race as a key element of contemporary American social and cultural politics” (575). The “post” in “postrace” thus “refers to the logic of something having been ‘shaped as a consequence of ’ imperialism and racism” (575). His central examples of a postrace aesthetic are Plascencia’s The People of Paper and Junot Díaz’s 21

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Insofar as we keep it connected to very specific issues of racial identity (while also sustaining its ostensible link to post-postmodern forms of metafiction and fabulism24), we might even include a number of late-twentieth-century works. Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)25 readily come to mind. Both are early examples of postmodern metafiction redeployed. Taken beyond the confined interests of a largely white-male elite concerned (primarily) with joyously and irreverently debunking all that might be mistaken as essential or normative, metafiction often becomes (in the hands of more marginalized writers) a tool for interrogating dominant and “fixed” assumptions about race, gender, and history while simultaneously insisting upon the very real consequences of those assumptions. Two other notable, though much more recent examples, might be Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2013). The former, narrated by a Dominican American man named Yunior, tells the story of Oscar Wao (Yunior’s deceased brother-in-law). Wao, as described by Yunior, is a nerdy, severely overweight Dominican American who dreams of being the “Dominican Tolkien” (192); he also dreams, desperately, of one day having sex. As Yunior tells Wao’s story—along with the complex tale of Wao’s ill-fated Dominican ancestors—he also relates (often via extended footnotes) the “true” story of Rafael Trujillo’s rise to power as a Dominican dictator in the 1930s. While leading up to Trujillo’s CIA-assisted assignation in 1961, Díaz (via Yunior) blends the mid-twentieth-century history of the Dominican Republic with the overtly The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). He also offers a list of other likely candidates—inclusive of “Marta Acosta, Michael Chabon, Percival L. Everett, Sesshu Foster, Dexter Clarence Palmer, Colson Whitehead, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Charles Yu” (596, n1). 24 The line between metafiction and fabulism (or magic realism) is, of course, a slippery one. While Saldívar views Plascencia’s novel as metafictional he calls Díaz’s novel both “‘historical fantasy’ and ‘speculative realism’ to signify the odd amalgam of historical novel, bildungsroman, postmagical realism, sci-fi, fantasy, and super-hero comic romance that structures the story” (585). And yet Díaz’s novel has a number of distinctly metafictional qualities, qualities that function to trouble any clear distinction between speculative fantasies and reality itself. For this reason, I do not want to place it simply in a “fabulist” bin, or in anything similar. I use “metafiction” here and throughout to denote any fictional artifact that draws attention to its fictiveness. For this reason, while metafiction can include works of fabulism, or magic realism—or even, more generally, what Jan Alber has recently termed “unnatural narratives”—not all such works are necessarily metafictions. Alber makes this very point (see his discussion of metafiction in Unnatural Narrative, p. 8 specifically). 25 See, for instance, my earlier effort to define historioplastic metafiction: “Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Rise of Historioplastic Metafiction.”

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fictional story of Wao and Wao’s family. At the same time, Yunior employs an almost hyperactive narrative voice—one that jumps indiscriminately, and often humorously, from descriptions of extreme brutality and Wao’s bouts of crippling depression to discussions of Marvel superheroes, Tolkien’s Balrogs, Star Trek, and “getting ass” (37). However, rather than functioning (primarily) to expose the fictional structure of history (Trujillo’s, specifically), Yunior’s narrative functions more often to stress the manner in which Wao’s fictional existence speaks to very real Dominican American experiences—while reminding us, also, that some horrors (like those perpetuated by Trujillo, or those experienced by Wao when he is brutally murdered) necessarily exceed the form of their relation. To suggest otherwise is to lose, or to betray, their truth. Thus, to express the fact that “Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be [easily] dispelled” (156), Yunior tells us that even Sauron’s evil in Tolkien’s Middle Earth was more easily “blown away.” He then resorts to an unexplained footnote, which simply reproduces the relevant passage from The Return of the King (1955). Moreover, Yunior reminds us again and again that this is simply how his “story goes” (233), that there are other ways to speak of the events in question, other fictional frames from which to view it. By keeping our focus, throughout, on the mirror-like surface of “his story,” Yunior invites us to see that which remains impossible to show. Everett does something comparable in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell— as, we might say, he does in most of his books. The novel, dedicated to Everett’s deceased father (also named Percival Everett), tells the story of what is, ostensibly, a conversation between a father (living in a nursing home) and a son (who is visiting). The father and the son are presumably Percival Everett and Percival Everett. This conflation of identity is central to the story, or stories, that make up the novel. Indeed, the novel begins with the author’s “father” telling him about a dream he had. After he briefly relates this dream—about a black president who is refused service at a bar— the father tells his son that he has been writing: “I’ve written something for you. He looked at my face. Not to you, but for you. It’s sort of something you would write, if you wrote. Here it is:” (3). Everything that follows this line is presumably what the author’s father wrote—but it is offered as if the father has written the biography he thinks his son would have written about him, if his son “wrote.” With this layering in mind, consider the very next line: “And yet I live. That was how my father put it, sitting in his wheelchair” (3). This line was written by Percival Everett (the son), but it is offered to us as a line written by Percival Everett (the father), writing as if he were writing

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as his son.26 Consequently, the opening claim—“And yet I live”—takes on multiple meanings: it refers to the author (who continued to live without his father); it refers to the father of the past (who continued to live while ill); it refers to the son who “lives” as the narrator of his father’s work; it refers to the posthumous “life” of Everett’s father in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. That none of these meanings can be settled (finally) suggests that the very possibility of living—and of touching upon the life of another—entails a complex network of relations, the disassembly of which would efface the very possibility of access. In this sense, the various stories that follow (along with the numerous “theoretical” digressions), and the various ways in which the identity of the narrative voice is allowed to slip or comingle, signals the manner in which Everett’s efforts to know and write his father must circumscribe (also) his efforts to know himself, the history and stories that affected his father’s life, and the manner in which words change the very things we aim to know. Just as the three sections of the book (“Hesperus,” “Phosphorus,” and “Venus”) name the same thing while denoting that thing’s capacity to take multiple forms, the various stories in the book all tell the same story: the story of Everett’s father. This is not to suggest, as Huehls does, that Everett’s central goal is to show us how “language” comes before the “world”—and that, therefore, “there is no reality for us to lament our distance from, no signified that our slippery signifiers never reach, no referential meaning or epistemological certitude that the project of reading must work its way toward” (305). While such a reading does little to support Huehls’s broader suggestion that Everett’s work partakes of a “post-poststructural turn” (305), it also overlooks the fact that Everett is clearly and consistently interested in both language as thing and the various other Things language gives us to know. In telling various stories—in which son and father take turns “playing” multiple roles (from a rancher named Murphy and a doctor named Murphy to Nat Turner and a visual artist named Lang)—Everett stresses how “meaning” (à la deconstruction) must always “collapse under the weight of its own being” (59); but, in showing us this, he stresses the manner in which being itself (and thus his very real father) is like meaning, like language. Coherent representation merely masks, or belies, the innate instability of any given referent. That Nat Turner and William Styron haunt the entire work suggests this very thing; this “haunting” encourages us to view Everett’s (auto) This becomes even more complicated if we assume that the “father” is speaking from the very start, or before he says “I’ve written something for you.”

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biography of his father as a rigorous and touching effort to be true to his father, to grasp the notion of his living motility—to avoid doing to his father what William Styron did to Nat Turner.27 As a whole, the novel suggests that grasping the true is always a matter of attending, as responsibly as possible, to “necessary fictions” (79). Consider just one of the many humorous and typically non sequitur passages that reflects this complex suggestion: What was the thing in your career that irked you the most? Funny you should have me have you ask me that question. Strange. Son, it was being called a postmodernist. I don’t even know what the fuck that is! Some asshole tried to explain it to me once, said that my work was about itself and process and not about objective reality and life in the world. What did you say to him? After I told him to fuck himself and the horse he rode in on, I asked him what he thought objective reality was. Then I punched him. That’s why I had to leave my job in Iowa. (79)

At the very moment such a passage metafictionally undoes the possibility of a mimetic account that is both ethical and dogmatic (who, after all, is speaking?), it utterly refuses the assumption that language (or representation) is somehow a world onto itself, that it is somehow disconnected from very real experiences of pain and racism and love and the loss of beloved fathers. To claim otherwise is to risk getting punched in one’s very real face. As a historioplastic form, Everett’s novel (like Plascencia’s and Díaz’s) offers the notion of a unified picture of an anterior and real thing by stressing the fact that its unity is only ever the consequence of unreconcilable particulars held in-common, of relations that corrupt and confuse the very thing they set apart. To be faced with such a picture is to be faced with the spiritual motility of a thing (person, event, emotion, etc.), a kind of divine plasticity capable of both receiving and effecting form. What is historioplastic grasps what is left to remain before it, always still to come. Or rather, it renews the act of speculative representation as a matter of perpetual temporalization: “the becoming accidental of essence.” So as to grasp a thing, it lets it flee; what is past arrives while remaining (also) yet to come. Even more so than in the novels already discussed, this tension between holding and letting go, between staying and fleeing—or, in Plascencia’s novel, between love See, of course, William Styron’s infamous and extremely problematic retelling of Nat Turner’s life and death: The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967).

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and sadness—is overtly reflected in both the structure and the content of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). Consequently, and though (to a degree) it begins to move us away from Saldívar’s concept of a “postrace” novel, Saunders’s work neatly exemplifies, and even helps to clarify, the way in which historioplastic metafiction touches upon the past by compiling and reflecting its contradictions, by exposing its in-common essence. The most strictly “historical” of the texts discussed thus far, Lincoln in the Bardo speculates upon the reality of an apocryphal tale: that, on at least two occasions, Abraham Lincoln reopened the casket of his dead son, Willie. Saunders approaches, or circles around, these “visits” via a series of disjointed voices. In most cases the various narrative strands are never more than a few lines long, though several span multiple pages. Each is offered as a kind of isolated epigraph, followed by an attribution. The first (just over two pages) is attributed to “hans vollman.”28 The second—consisting of the word “Efficacious”—is attributed to “roger bevins iii.” In these first pages, the novel seems to be written as a kind of script: vollman seems to be telling a story—what we soon realize is the story of his death—to bevins. “Efficacious” comes, it would seem, as bevins’s response to this story, offered at the moment vollman is struggling to describe what he calls his “sick-box” (5). Via, then, a form that initially appears to be simple dialogue, we quickly learn that vollman and bevins (along with “the reverend everly thomas”) are dead, that their “sick-boxes” are coffins (to which they return in the day), and that they are (in these opening pages) witnessing the arrival of a new ghost: “willie lincoln.” The setting is, therefore, Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown—where Willie Lincoln was first interred. The cemetery, however, is a “bardo”29 insofar as it is a place between life and death, or (more precisely) between death and rebirth. The dead remain as ghosts in the bardo if they refuse to move on, or if they believe, as most in the bardo do, that they are simply too ill to leave their “sick-boxes.” As the novel progresses, the chapters switch between the voices of various ghosts in the bardo (though vollman, bevins, and thomas are the central characters) and snippets from various letters and journalistic accounts of events leading up to and following Willie’s death. Some of these accounts are “real” (such as those sourced from With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860-1865) and some are not (such as those sourced from Tyron Philian’s Reckoning: An Insider’s

Saunders forgoes the use of uppercase letters when attributing passages to the speaking dead. Since it seems to imply an overtly diminished subjectivity, I preserve that formatting throughout—when referring to the novel’s ghosts. 29 In Buddhist/Tibetan mythology, “bardo” refers to a state of existence between life and rebirth. 28

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Memories of Difficult Times). As with the voices of the ghosts, these historical extracts give the impression of dialogue. For instance, chapter XVII begins in the following manner: Willie Lincoln was wasting away. Epstein, op. cit.

The days dragged wearily by, and he grew weaker and more shadow-like. Keckley, op. cit.

Lincoln’s secretary, William Stoddard, recalled the question on everyone’s lips: “Is there hope? Not any. So the doctors say.” In “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” by Dorris Kearns Goodwin. (48)

And yet the novel encourages us to see—first with the historical documents, and then with the ghosts—that this sense of dialogue, of intersubjective understanding or agreement, is largely illusory, that each “snippet” is as distinct as it is communal. It becomes more and more apparent that each ghost is simply narrating its own story and perceptions—often, it seems, in complete isolation. Their various accounts just tend to line up. Consider, for instance, a portion that relates vollman, bevins, and thomas’s first encounter with willie: No doubt you are feeling a certain pull? Mr. Vollman said. An urge? To go? Somewhere? More comfortable? I feel I am to wait, the boy said. It speaks! Said Mr. Bevins. the reverend everly thomas

Wait for what? Mr. Sheep-Dumpling said. My mother, I said. My father. They will come shortly. To collect me Mr. Sheep-Dumpling shook his head sadly His member also shook Sadly willie lincoln (29)

To whom is thomas or willie speaking? They both appear to be narrating (for someone) the same story—telling their assumed addressees who “said” what—but each is clearly telling the story alone, or without any awareness of the other’s efforts. (“Mr. Sheep-Dumpling” is the name willie gives to thomas.) The novel as a whole thus consists of various pieces of different wholes, each placed alongside others so as to give the impression of a linear and interrelated progression. This progression appears natural in those moments when the

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characters seem to be in actual dialogue with one another. But, as the novel progresses, these moments of “dialogue” become increasingly suspect, as we get the sense that what defines the ghosts in the bardo is their inability, or refusal, to escape fixed and unbroachable perspectives. The impression of dialogue is merely the effect of these perspectives, or endlessly rehearsed accounts, falling in line. Or, alternatively, it is the effect of ghosts simply supplying, or interjecting, lines or phrases they have heard innumerable times already in innumerable repetitions of another’s story. Nevertheless: in the bardo, no one actually communes. Indeed: all the various ghosts seem “set” in their individual perspectives of themselves; they are unable to imagine a different self or a different past than the one they relate over and over again. These pasts manifest physically: vollman (an old man who died moments before finally consummating his marriage to a very young and attractive wife) forever carries around an enormous penis; bevins (who committed suicide after his male lover decided to “henceforth ‘live correctly’” [25]) manifests with multiple eyes and ears; and thomas (whose fear of the afterlife and the sins he may or may not have committed) floats about with “hair sticking straight up, mouth in a perfect O of terror” (28). As bevins asserts toward the end of the novel, and not long before his departure to what lies beyond the bardo, “To stay, one must deeply and continually dwell upon one’s primary reason for staying; even to the exclusion of all else” (255). To dwell in such a way is, as vollman realizes, to remain “so alone. / Fighting to stay. / Afraid to err” (254). As a direct consequence of their “stuckness” in a singular past the ghosts are unable to accept a future beyond their eternal presents. They refuse to “move on.” Yet, through the undialogic form he employs, Saunders stresses the very contradictions and contingencies, the very undecidables, the ghosts refuse. These undecidables are stressed in various ways. In chapter LXII, for instance, the historical extracts move through various contradictory descriptions of Lincoln’s features: he has “bright, keen” eyes; he has the “saddest eyes”; he has “dark brown hair”; he has “black” hair; his smile was “most lovely”; he had “large and malformed” ears; he was the “ugliest man”; he had the “stamp of intellectual beauty”; you could “almost fancy him good looking.” These recorded contradictions are then echoed, most overtly, in the “fixed” story of “litzie wright”—“a young mulatto woman . . . of . . . startling beauty” (221) who has lost the ability to speak. A “mrs. francis hodge,” who always accompanies wright and always tells the same story, speaks for her: What was done to her was done and done. Or just done once. What was done to her affected her not at all, affected her very much. . . . What was

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done to her was done on a regular schedule, like some sort of sinister church-going; was done to her at random times; was never done at all, never once, but only constantly threatened: looming and sanctioned; what was done was straightforward missionary fucking; what was done was anal fucking. (222)

Trapped by her inability to tell her own story, wright must abide by the speculation of others. But this speculation remains fixated on its own uncertainty, on its refusal to gamble on the truth, on the fear of “erring.” As a whole, the novel therefore stands in antithetical relation to the solipsism of its ghosts. We might in fact say that the novel, insofar as its notional unity sublates the various contradictions and conflicting voices it sustains, represents the “beyond” most of the ghosts have long since refused. This is suggested by the fact that, when the ghosts do finally relent and embrace what they repeatedly call “the matterlightblooming phenomenon,” they momentarily appear in innumerable forms of being (both past and future): they regain, in other words—or in terms of the language I have been advancing—their infinite plasticity, their potential to be otherwise, to reimagine their stories. But this is not a perverse potential; it is plastic insofar as it remains both infinite and limited. It is plastic like the historical truth Saunders’s novel, as a unified series of particulars, gives us to grasp: the truth of Lincoln’s sorrow, his love, his endless doubts, the trauma of deciding to fight a cruel and vicious war, and so on. Thus, in the novel, to leave (to be reborn or to live again) is to move forward or to renew a capacity to receive other forms. But it is not to move indiscriminately and irresponsibly. This ethics of movement is signaled by the fact that the most problematic ghosts are either “so severely infected with doubt that locomotion [becomes] impossible” or so insistent on continually moving that they are (like the “Three Bachelors”) perpetually and irresponsibly “safe, separate, & Free” (340). That the former is merely the obverse of the latter becomes clear when we learn what happens to children in the bardo: after being pinned down by numerous tendrils that ossify into a stone-like substance, they begin to endlessly mutate into various monstrous forms populated (presumably) by demons. The main plot of the novel, in fact, concerns vollman, bevins, and thomas’s efforts to save willie from this fate. Once they manage this—by, significantly, daring to commune with Lincoln and thus achieve something like a unified perspective30—Willie “passes over” and comes to realize that he is “Willie / Not Willie but somehow / Less / More / All is Allowed now  All is allowed me now  All is allowed Notably, the ghosts ensure willie’s transition to the beyond by convincing Lincoln to let his son go, or to let go his own fixation on willie’s now immobile corpse.

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lightlightlight me now” (301). Likewise, when Vollman decides to overcome his fear of the unknown and use his own “matterlightblooming” explosion to free the “Traynor girl” (who the three ghosts were too solipsistically fixated to save before), she suddenly sheds her perverse mutations and appears as “A spinning young girl. . . . In a summer frock of continually spinning color” (332). Such descriptions suggest that—in finally accepting that nothing of their fixed lives “was real” and that “Everything was real, inconceivably real, infinitely dear” (335, my emphasis)—the ghosts paradoxically embrace their living spectrality, their capacity to be and to be otherwise at the same time. As we (like they) come to realize, their innate spectrality is what makes possible the limited experiences of communication they do manage; it allows them to touch and to share each other. Given its connection to the possibility of temporal movement, this very specific condition of spectrality entails plasticity. It is the infinite capacity to give and to receive form. The specter, to recall Derrida, is what arrives by remaining still to come. What is spectral, like what is plastic, is always as hospitable and as understandable as it is traumatic and intrusive. The ethics of representation are, in this sense, a matter of accepting that “the specter must be respected” (Derrida, Politics 288)—respected, that is, as that which is both limited and perpetually arriving. To confirm: let’s consider one last, somewhat more extended, example—one, moreover, that will allow us to return (more directly) to the various problems we began approaching in Chapter 1.

The Time of EA Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) concludes in a relatively dystopian (and seemingly “post-postmodern”) New York. After a series of nonlinear chapters marked by discordant voices and styles—a self-reflexive and fake entertainment article (chapter 9), a second-person account focalized through a character who eventually drowns (chapter 10), a PowerPoint presentation (chapter 12), and so on—the novel culminates in the mid2020s. Handheld devices and social media are even more ubiquitous than they are today; helicopters offer round-the-clock surveillance; and most infants are equipped with “Starfish” devices that aid their efforts to walk (via an included GPS system) while allowing them to download music with the point of a finger. Significantly (if not flagrantly) titled “Pure Language,” this final chapter details a meeting between Lulu, a young millennial publicist (who works for the once famous music producer, Bennie Salazar), and Alex, an “ageing music freak who [can’t] earn his keep” (323). Alex has agreed to help Bennie promote his newest discovery—Scotty Hausmann, a guitarist

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who once fronted Bennie’s high school punk band (The Flaming Dildos). For the past forty or so years, Scotty has lived on the margins of society. Having abandoned his musical aspirations, he has been content to work as an elementary school janitor and (when not working) fish in the “East River near Williamsburg Bridge” (93). However, Bennie has now pulled Scotty back onto the music scene, hoping that his palpable “authenticity” will translate into major sales and the revival of Bennie’s career. And in an effort to assist the man he once idolized, Alex has somewhat begrudgingly agreed to supply Lulu with a list of people who might be willing to work as “authentic” fans (or “parrots”), using their social media accounts to praise Scotty “sincerely” and generate interest in his upcoming free concert. When Lulu describes him as the anonymous “captain” of a “blind team” (318), Alex wonders if Bennie had used those terms himself. Lulu laughs and tells him, in an ostensibly condescending manner, that those are “marketing terms.” Alex, though, informs Lulu that they are, in fact, “sports terms. From . . . sports” (318). Alex’s disgust—with Lulu (whose millennial and market-driven indifference to linguistic usage and stable meaning clearly signals the moral vacuity of this future moment) and himself (for partaking in and enabling what is effectively a sincerity scam)—seems to anticipate a potential response to the novel’s own overt tendency to approach the possibility of meaning and authenticity via a self-reflexive and rhizomatic (and therefore postmodern) form. The novel might be “our reward for living through the self-conscious gimmicks and ironic claptrap of postmodernism” (Charles); but, like the various novels already discussed, its overtly fragmented and disparate perspectives and styles signal the very apotheosis of a postmodern aesthetic—an aesthetic governed by an almost perverse need to “question notions of closure, totalization, and universality” (Hutcheon, Politics 67). Yet the novel presents Lulu as a parody, a career-driven millennial who has discovered the marketing power of such questioning. We are, in other words, given to sympathize with Alex’s almost nostalgic disgust—especially once Lulu starts to define (bombastically) several other marketing terms and concepts. All have been reduced to initialisms, the meanings of which are ostentatiously dependent upon a fleeting and utterly restricted field of discourse. “BTs” are “blind teams” that “work especially well with older people”—people who (Alex surmises) “can’t be bought” (319). “DMs” are “disingenuous metaphor[s]” (like “being bought”) that function “like descriptions, but [are] really judgements” (319). And “AP” stands for “atavistic purism . . . [which] implies the existence of an ethically perfect state, which not only doesn’t exist and never existed, but it is usually used to shore up the prejudices of whoever’s making the judgments” (319). Faced with Alex’s despair and bewilderment, Lulu concludes by mocking his

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“calcified morality” and championing “Ethical ambivalence—we call it EA— in the face of a strong marketing action” (320). For Lulu, Alex’s insistence that some things can be “inherently wrong” is simply judgmental and colonial: “if I believe, I believe. Who are you to judge my reasons?” (320). As I suggested briefly in Chapter 1, this conversation echoes and anticipates recent political appropriations and reductions of poststructural and/or postmodern conceits: mercurial and self-serving repudiations of “fake news,” appeals to “alternative facts,” anti-intellectual rejections of climate science, neoliberal claims that all perspectives are equal, and so on. As Egan suggests, such manipulations cannot be dissociated from the rising necessity of (what Alex’s academic wife, Rebecca, calls) “word casings”: “a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words—‘friend’ and ‘real’ and ‘story’ and ‘change’—words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks” (323–4). We need no longer take responsibility for what we claim because any claim is always already removed from our intended meaning. I may have said it; but it’s not what I “meant.” One imagines that Rebecca’s study of word casings involves, also, a look at the contemporary overuse of the word “like” (as everything is a mere metaphor) and the concurrent necessity of imposing “literally” before statements of “real” truth. The grand irony, of course, is that the tools Lulu (like Donald Trump and his “team”) employs are the bastardized tools of a postmodern intelligentsia. As Lulu asserts, in an overt parroting of a calcified poststructuralism, “All we’ve got are metaphors; and they’re never exactly right. You can’t ever just Say. The. Thing” (321). Moreover, Lulu’s DMs and APs clearly echo Lyotard’s various efforts to champion “a theory of games which accepts agnostics as its founding principle” (16). Everything is, in this sense (and certainly for Lulu), a matter of “arranging data in a new way” (Lyotard 51). In other words, Lulu confirms and wantonly revels in Habermas’s “legitimation crisis.” In this sense, the final chapter of Egan’s book (which, in playing with its own series of “little narratives,” delegitimizes any superficial appeals to certainty, authenticity, or moral certitude)—and especially via the parody that is Lulu—stresses a troubling intensification of postmodernism. Not surprisingly, then, Lulu “oscillates.” After exposing his “calcified morality,” Lulu (whose generation, we are told, paradoxically embraces authenticity by shunning the corruption of tattoos and refusing to swear31) suddenly asks Alex if she can “just T [him] . . . Now” (321)—“T-ing” being, in the future, a

The suggestion being that Lulu’s abject insincerity and Alex’s naïve desire for “authenticity” are simply two sides of the same coin.

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form of (hyper)texting. Before Alex can respond, Lulu begins “working her handset.” The result is a vibration in Alex’s pocket which forces him to jostle his daughter (Cara-Ann), who he has brought to the meeting and who he and his wife have adamantly refused to introduce to social media. Via “T,” Lulu short-circuits Alex’s moral unease, asking (directly) if he has some names for her: “U hav sum nAms 4 me?” Alex quickly and impulsively T’s a reply: “hEr thA r.” “GrAt[,]” Lulu tells him: “Il gt 2 wrk” (321). The meeting, to Alex’s surprise, is suddenly brought to a successful conclusion: They looked up at each other. “That was easy,” Alex said. “I know,” Lulu said. She looked almost sleepy with relief. “It’s pure— no philosophy, no metaphors, no judgements.” “Unt dat,” Cara-Ann said. She was pointing at Alex’s handset, which he had been using, unthinkingly, mere inches from her face. (321)

The apparent irony of the scene—Lulu’s sudden appeal to transparency and authentic communication (via a mode of communication that is almost too truncated and garbled to follow)—is oddly undermined by Cara-Ann’s intrusion of some “baby talk.” Her “unt dat” clearly mimics (or parodies) the T-ing to which Lulu and Alex have just resorted, marking the very process as infantile. But it marks it, also, as something prelinguistic, or translinguistic—as if to suggest that Lulu is actually correct: T-ing does somehow short-circuit the ideological, the inevitable bias of common usage. Indeed, Egan’s depiction of T-ing—especially its overt association with Cara-Ann and that which borders on the prelinguistic—recalls, or can be easily read alongside, Kristeva’s claim that a certain inexpressible truth is intimated whenever an otherwise coherent (and rule-abiding) “phenotext” is disrupted by a troublingly and unpredictable “genotext,” a troubling “explosion of the semiotic [chora] in the symbolic” (Revolution 69).32 Consequently, T-ing suggests the possibility of grasping something real in the moment of its most overt distortion. In T-ing—in abandoning the illusion of phenotextual transparence—Lulu and Alex paradoxically give over to the impossibility of full, or (in Jameson’s terms) “noisefree” (Foreword vii), communication. And Kristeva, of course, assumes that Hegel’s “negation of the negation” is opposed to the type of revolutionary discourse she advocates, that it ultimately functions to “suppress the contradiction generated by the thetic [or identificatory separation] and establish in its place an ideal positivity, the restorer of pre-symbolic immediacy” (69). If, though, we look beyond the standardized reading of Hegel (as the philosopher of “positive idealism” par excellence) then it is possible to see that the Aufhebung ends (and maintains itself) in the very moment of explosion Kristeva celebrates—even if Hegel’s sense of an “explosion” is somewhat more subtle, less overt, and far more tied to the necessity of coherent forms.

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yet, in its radically fragmented, ungrammatical, and simplified expression, the ineffable contours of Alex’s desire to give Lulu his list of names (like the purely intuitive, or “agitated,” desire of a baby to touch and manipulate a parent’s phone) is seemingly registered. It is registered via its profound absence, the utter impossibility of its coherent communication. This is not to suggest that Egan is offering T-ing as a finally ethical mode of communication. Especially for Lulu, its illusion of simplicity (as well as its paradoxically concurrent tendency toward cacophonous distortion) can be a tool for manipulation, an excuse for foregoing responsibility. We should not forget that Kristeva locates the best semiotic explosions in works of modernist experimentation—works by Joyce or Mallarmé. This is because the effort toward revolutionary acts of authentic expression must risk eviscerating the very possibility of communication. Such modernist experimentation therefore perpetually risks (and typically succumbs to) the evasive and ethically fraught uncertainties that largely define, for Hegel, works of symbolic pre-art. Hegel’s various descriptions of “symbolic” art (with its fixation on “defective unification”) can in fact be applied, perhaps obviously, to Egan’s depiction of T-ing—just as, of course, they can be applied to the most overtly alienating works of high modernism. What, after all, marks modernism more than anything is the absence of the Thing. The problem with postmodernism (as Egan suggests via her parodic depiction of Lulu) is that it simply replicated (and, at its worst, irresponsibly reveled in) this fixation on absence. This is precisely what Žižek means to show when he effectively collapses the distinction between modernism and postmodernism.33 Lulu’s appeal to the false purity of T-ing can, therefore, help us to trace modernism’s resonance in postmodernism—even if, at the same time, T-ing (like Egan’s seemingly postmodern novel) finally indicates (also) the possibility of aesthetically overcoming the fecklessness of a now intensified postmodernism. Or rather, T-ing—which seems so very like (or can be easily deployed by Lulu as) a “symbolic” form—can be said to exemplify the goal of Egan’s novel and contemporary metafiction more generally. This is because T-ing exposes See Žižek’s Looking Awry—in which he suggests that the radical “illegibility” of modernism “functions precisely as an invitation to an unending process of reading, of interpretation” (151). My point, though (in line with Žižek’s), is that postmodernism’s distortions are no less identifiable as “symbolic” (in a strictly Hegelian sense). They’re merely the “obverse” of modernism’s engagement with sublime absence. Instead of a profound and irretrievable absence, a void around which the text organizes itself (while always risking unification through increasingly incredible forms of obscurity), the absent Thing in postmodernism becomes utterly banal, nothing but a signifier that has come to occupy the place of the Thing. We are forced to confront the nauseating truth that “there is nothing behind this mask of simulation” (Žižek, Awry 149). Divine reality, the infinite, is presented (merely) as finite, arbitrary, garish simulacrum.

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us to the risk and the necessity of traversing the delicate line that connects modern and postmodern forms. It points to the possibility of romantically satisfying and overcoming a desire for mimetic hegemony (and stifling closure) by carefully reinvesting in, or sublatively renewing, the symbolic. This sublation of the symbolic (mediated by the impulse toward closure that defined the classical and/as realism) marks, for Hegel (as we have seen), the triumph of romantic art. Egan’s depiction of T-ing thus opens us to the possibility of, and the dangers involved in, sublating a distinctly postmodern (symbolic) form.34 The full significance of this possibility becomes overt when Alex, Rebecca, and Cara-Ann finally find themselves at Scotty’s concert and Egan encourages us to parallel the oddly revelatory aspects of Alex’s infantile T-ing with the shared moment of authentic communion Scotty’s performance effects. Located somewhere near the reflecting pools that now mark “the footprint” (and therefore the traumatic absence) of the World Trade Center, Scotty’s venue is (by the time Alex and his family arrive) a “sea of slings and sacs and babypacks, older children carrying younger ones” (330). It is filled, as Alex notes to himself, with an “army of children: the incarnation of faith in those who weren’t aware of having any left” (330). In an effort to capture this thought in its essence and to make some sense of it, he reconceives it in T: “if thr r children, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?” (331). The mass of children is, as we are told earlier, the result of a recent baby boom: the response to a recent and prolonged war. They signal a form of renewal, as do “the new buildings [that] spiral[] gorgeously against the sky, so much nicer than the old ones (which Alex had only seen in pictures)” (331). Such renewal, though, is (for Alex) only articulable in T, in the failure to apprehend it. And, when Scotty finally appears on stage—after Alex is called away from his family to help Bennie and Lulu coerce the reticent musician (who “has a hard time with conversation” [326], never mind performance)—it is the most infantile of responses that takes hold of the audience and legitimizes the false parroting that generated the crowd in the first place: “the pointers, who already knew [Scotty’s kid-oriented] songs, clapped and screeched their approval, and the adults seemed intrigued, attuned to the double meanings and hidden layers, which were easy to find” (335). In a moment that soon “enter[s] the realm of myth” (336), the audience discovers

For relevant and more extended accounts of how digital technologies, and forms of social media, have precipitated our current post-postmodern state, see Alan Kirby’s Digimodernism and Robert Samuels’s New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after Postmodernism. For the former, the digital revolution has propelled us into a world of the “apparently real”; for the latter, new technologies have returned us to the problematic ideal of the autonomous self.

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“the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar” (335, my emphasis). Scotty’s is, in other words, the intrusive expression of (what Kristeva calls) an “agitated body.” He moves the audience (filled with “the rapt, sometimes tear-stained faces of adults [and] the elated, scant-toothed grins of toddlers” [336]), infant-like, “toward the instinctual, material, and social process[es]” (Kristeva, 1985 101) which invariably exceed their expression. While the moment is “registered as pure” (336), its authenticity survives only in the vagaries of “myth” (336). A profound distance is left open even as it is (or so that it can be) momentarily traversed—a fact that is stressed when Alex uses the zoom function on his handset to recover Rachel and Cara-Ann in the crowd. Feeling a profound sense of separation, he T’s Rachel: “pls wAt 4 me, my bUtiful wyf” (336). The result is an overcoming and a sustainment of physical and emotional distance: she “pause[s] in her dancing” (337) to reach for her handset. In this moment, the infinite potential of an authentic connection is experienced through its preservation, and we are again reminded that the anti-mimetic and epistemologically corrosive elements of technology can paradoxically effect eruptions of the authentic within the inertial frame of coherent and market-regulated discourse. Moreover, the concert functions as a type of mise en abyme, metonymically echoing or mirroring the way in which the novel’s various chapters effect experiences of the ungraspable. As Wolfgang Funk puts it, “such moments of unstructured revelation, where the formless abyss of experience and memory encroaches on the fabricated narrative of the self, present instances of an intrusion of the authentic” (174). Given the primacy of his concert, though— as well as the details he provides in chapter 6 (i.e., “X’s and O’s”)—Scotty is the most overt architect of such intrusions, or genotextual disruptions. For instance, Scotty tells of how, sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s, he made the impromptu decision to reconnect with the then famous Bennie and bring to his swank high-rise office a freshly caught bass. As with his decision to stand outside “the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street during a gala benefit for heart disease” (97)—so as, that is, to prove to himself that the experience of exclusion is merely a matter of how information is processed—he makes his “choice randomly” (97). Scotty therefore presents himself as a quintessential outsider, what Nancy might call an “intrus”—a stranger (or specter) who can never be “naturalized,” whose “coming will not cease; nor will it cease being in some respect an intrusion: [. . .] that is to say, being without right, familiarity, accustomedness, or habit” (“L’intrus” 1–2). L’intrus spectrally undermines the very possibility of sustaining the difference between inside and outside, the very possibility of intrusion. Thus, in bringing his fish to Bennie’s office—and especially by “slapp[ing] [it] . . . on the marble reception desk” (95)—Scotty manages to effect “a disturbance

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and perturbation of intimacy” (Nancy, “L’intrus” 2). His goal, which he only realizes in retrospect (and which is tied to his conviction that reality and lived experience is simply a matter of processing the available “X’s and O’s” [97]), is to force Bennie to reject him, to exclude him: “It was the reason I had come to see him” (101). Such a response, we are given to assume, would be a true affect, like the sound of the fish’s “hard wet thwack . . . [which] sounded like nothing so much as a fish” (95). It would entail an experience of that which a system of X’s and O’s functions to obscure: the unstructured Real of being in-common. Or rather, this radical encounter, this thwack of an interruption, disrupts Bennie’s inertia as an “information processing machine[]” (96); it induces revelatory “fear,” fear that (like the fish) is visceral and “smell[s]” (103). The consequences of this moment are far reaching, as Bennie eventually decides to sabotage his career by “serving his corporate controllers a boardroom lunch of cow pies” (312). Since they were asking him “to feed the people shit” he decides to show them “how it tastes” (312). Undoubtedly, he “made this choice randomly.” A similar appeal to intrusiveness occurs in Alison Blake’s PowerPoint (i.e., chapter 12). The daughter of Sasha (Bennie’s one-time assistant and a recovered kleptomaniac) and Drew Blake (who was, in years past, unable to prevent the drowning of Sasha’s “fake” boyfriend, Robert Freeman, Jr), Alison spends her spare time writing a “slide journal” (253). In the entry we are provided—titled “Great Rock and Roll Pauses”—Alison details her family dynamics and the way in which Robert’s death continues to haunt them. Concurrently, she explains and justifies her socially awkward brother’s obsession with songs that are marked by moments of silence. These pauses, Alison explains (by quoting her brother), interrupt the flow or inertia of a song, provoking a type of momentary dread, a fear that the end has arrived: “The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL” (281). Likewise, Alison works “to make people uncomfortable” (262)—as does the PowerPoint itself. The PowerPoint chapter functions, after all, as a type of uncomfortable pause in the narrative, an abrupt and somewhat disconcerting shift. Yet Egan is careful to make the PowerPoint one of the most affective moments in the book.35 As with T-ing, the

For a sustained discussion of affectivity in Egan’s novel, see James P. Zappen’s “Affective Identification in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.” Zappen also stresses the fact that the intrusive “pauses” discussed in Alison’s PowerPoint are echoed in “Silent pauses . . . throughout the novel.” As Zappen demonstrates, such pauses “appear at critical moments” (300).

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strikingly reductive (yet potentially evocative) digital format offers the possibility of expressing what it must fail to contain: the emotional consequences of Robert’s death, Alison’s strained (yet loving) relationship with her mother, her touching yet problematic idolization of her father, and her father’s inability to understand his son (especially his obsession with musical pauses). Alison’s PowerPoint thus functions to negotiate (while highlighting) the promise and terror of a Real and ungraspable end, a promise and terror that largely haunts the entire novel. The space between every chapter is, after all, a type of pause, another reminder that the novel itself must end, that (as Žižek puts it) “[every] story has to end at some point” (Ridiculous Sublime 37). This recurrent sense of an end, which is the effect of each chapter’s relative discreetness and stylistic distinctiveness, forces us to acknowledge the limits of narrative play as well as the fact that (in Funk’s terms) “only death can collapse the crevasse between experience and its aesthetic representation” (176, my emphasis). In other words, and as we saw in our discussion of Plascencia’s novel, the drive toward mimetic closure is nothing other than the death drive, as attractive as it is repulsive. In Goon Squad, however, we are given (again and again) this terrifyingly attractive experience of an end, of true connection, of closure, of that which is perpetually antithetical to its momentary forms (in time)—but we are given it, paradoxically, through its refusal, or delay. Precisely like Hegel’s spirit, the mimetic “end” in Egan’s novel “necessarily appears in Time, and it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure Notion, i.e. has not annulled Time” (Phenomenology 487). Presumably for this very reason, the novel ends in a manner that echoes (while shifting the function of) postmodernism at its most recursive—by bringing us back to its beginning. In doing so, the novel once again evokes the possibility—as dangerous as it is potentially effective/affective—of sublating the postmodern. After Scotty’s concert, Bennie and Alex find themselves walking past Sasha’s old apartment, and Alex finally remembers an ill-fated date (long ago), one which was detailed from Sasha’s perspective in chapter 1. But this almost postmodern loop does not end up functioning as a perverse effort to deny “our finitude,” the inevitability of death, the outside limits of the plastic. Instead, it exposes us to the gravity of the Thing by leaving us open to its infinite capacity to effect and to be effected by forms of apprehension. We are immersed (à la postmodernism) within a rhizomatic and confusing “complexity of multiple referrals and connections” (Žižek, Ridiculous Sublime 37), but this infinite complexity remains consistent. This is the central difference between the perversity and fecklessness of the postmodern hypertext (which, as Žižek notes, comes to infect social responsibility in the digital era of video-game immortality) and the romantic renewal of the

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metafictional form—which counters postmodernism’s social intensification. In this new metafiction, and as we have seen, the emphasis falls on the limits of what can be changed, on a traumatic and unavoidable Real. At the same time, that which cannot be denied is given (only) as that which, in its fullness, remains outside its momentary form, its moment in time. In specifically Hegelian terms: the clear, or pure, communication of the classical is reconfigured so as to sustain the limiting, yet ungraspable, absence upon which symbolic forms fixate. Nowhere is this sublation of the symbolic negotiation of a sublime end more evident than in chapter 4 (i.e., “Safari”), which tells a story of Bennie’s womanizing mentor, Lou. While relating the specifics of a family vacation Lou once took with his two children (Rolph and Charlene) and grad-school lover (Mindy), the omniscient narrator frequently interrupts—or intrudes upon—the dialogue and free-indirect discourse of the characters. These interruptions tend to confirm or deny a given claim or assumption while also providing “glimpses” of the future. At one point, for instance, the narrator intrudes upon a conversation between “Charlie” and Rolph: “[Mindy’s] not so bad,” Charlie says. “I don’t like her. And why are you the world’s expert?” Charlie shrugs. “I Know Dad.” Charlie doesn’t know herself. Four years from now, at eighteen, she’ll join a cult across the Mexican border whose charismatic leader promotes a diet of raw eggs; she’ll nearly die from salmonella poisoning before Lou rescues her. A cocaine habit will require partial reconstruction of her nose, changing her appearance, and a series of feckless, domineering men will leave her solitary in her late twenties, trying to broker peace between Rolph and Lou, who will have stopped speaking. But Charlie does know her father. (80)

On the one hand, such narrative intrusions have the very postmodern function of confirming the textual and temporal prison in which the characters find themselves. Reality (to go back again to Vonnegut) is only ever a discursive effect, our scripts are always already written, time is already complete and therefore fixed. On the other hand, Egan’s specific intrusions (especially within the context of the novel as a whole) expose the mutability of such scripts as no less limited. We are faced with an outside limit to the forms experience might take, with the fact that a certain inertial flow is for real and essential. Charlene’s cocaine habit, like Rolph’s eventual suicide (which we learn about in subsequent chapters), can be apprehended endlessly, coherently, and responsibly—as the notion of either can never be

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fixed—but both events mark the limit of narrative possibility; Charlene’s cocaine habit, like Rolph’s suicide, is simply undeniable, real.36 To treat them with responsibility is to endure the strenuous effort of the notion, to negate a certain postmodern negation of experiential finitude. The full field of a Thing’s potential (in this case, suicide or the experience of addiction) can never be grasped in time, but the infinite nature of such a field is necessarily governed by an end. For this very reason they are forever apprehendable in a moment of sincere expression, a moment of true communication.

An obvious analogue is the death of Curt Lemon in Tim O’Brien’s overtly metafictional The Things They Carried (1990).

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Undoing Wounds in Danielewski’s House of Leaves By contrast, there will be new codes of love in those regions where a new map of the particular without property is being drawn, where new, eternally temporary idealizations (yet indisputable in the present instant) captivate us. —Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love

Spiraling Closure And so: all metafiction is caught up in the promise and the danger of circular movement. Images of circles and spirals—ouroboros, mirrors and infinite regresses, temporal loops, stories within stories and plays within plays, and so on—appear in all manner of postmodern texts. Perhaps most notable, or emblematic, is the first story in Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968). Titled “Frame-Tale,” this story is both a set of instructions and a story that is not a story. Nothing more than a single page (front and back), the story consists of a title on the centre of the first side of the page: “FRAME-TALE.” This title is then followed by instructions: “Cut on dotted line. / Twist end once and fasten / AB to ab, CD to cd” (1). Below this, in parentheses, is the word “continued.” To the right, and running perpendicular to the title and instructions, is a series of elliptical dots and a single incomplete phrase that can only be read if the reader turns the book 90° clockwise: “ONCE UPON A TIME THERE.” At the bottom we see the letters “A” and “B”; at the top, and running backward, “D” and “C.” On the back of the page the phrase continues (running from bottom to top on the far left): “WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN.” Lower case letters mirror the letters on the first side and the word “continued” (again in parentheses) appears in the bottom right. We are thus invited to construct our very own Möbius strip, an infinite loop that perfectly conveys Barth’s assumption that postmodern storytelling is a matter of endlessly retelling the same stories, and that this process of retelling is (paradoxically) the very possibility of overcoming the dead end

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it simultaneously signals.1 Caught up in this paradox, a story (any story) always begins by being “continued.” As metaphor for Barth’s distinctly postmodern perspective, the Möbius strip is perfectly apropos. It signals both endless movement and stifling closure. Or rather, its endless movement entails stifling closure. Its infinity is absolutely finite—fixed, ossified. A Möbius strip confronts us with the impossibility of sustaining a semiautonomous relation between inside and outside, content and form, referent and sign, object and representation. Its infinity (as our discussions in the previous chapters have primed us to see) is tantamount to the end of time. This is because there is only one side: the appearance of a “back,” of an obverse, is merely an illusion of perpetually traversing a single repetitive course. While the other side may be our goal, this other side can only remain an illusive lure. For the postmodern Barth, then, the best we can do is embrace the fact that there is no other side, that the very illusion of an other side is a product of the journey itself. Or, as Scheherazade comes to realize in the first of the three novellas that make up Barth’s Chimera (1972), “the key to the treasure is the treasure” (16). This truism is then echoed by the artist Jerome B. Bray in the third (and most chaotic) novella. As Bray puts it, “Art is as necessary an artifice as Nature; the truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world” (256). This theme of the Möbius strip—echoed in both Scheherazade’s revelation and Bray’s assertion that there is no difference between fiction and nature—is exemplified in the very structure of Chimera, a novel that ostentatiously celebrates the “magical” power of the “as if ” (57).2 The novel itself is a kind of loop. Or, as Patricia Warrick put it—writing in 1976 (and in a manner that certainly anticipated critics like Waugh and Hutcheon)—the novel “is written in the form of a Moebius strip” (75). While As Barth says in his oft quoted “Literature of Exhaustion,” “an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into materials and means for his work—paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends what had appeared to be his refutation” (71). For Barth, Borges is the best example of such an artist. This is because Borges victoriously “confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it to accomplish new human work” (69–70). Borges, that is, uses the impossibility or futility (or “unnecessity”) of writing as his subject—and thus his reason for writing. 2 It’s worth recalling here that “as if ” becomes a central feature of “pure reason” in Kant’s first critique. Consequently, Vermeulen and van den Akker pick it up (somewhat uncritically) as a defining characteristic of their “metamodernism”—which “takes toward [a historical telos] as if it does exist” (“Notes” 315, my emphasis). That this “problem” reappears in one of the highest of high-postmodern texts should not, then, be overlooked too quickly—as it certainly suggests that one of the most troubling features of Kant’s idealism (which is tied directly to the monad-like inaccessibility of the thing in-itself) lurks at the core of postmodernism. We should therefore be wary of mistaking yet another repetition of this problem as some kind of post-postmodern success. 1

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its circular nature is not as overt as the circular nature of, say, Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (1974)—in which the midsentence opening line is overtly “sutured” by the incomplete final line3—it is nevertheless tied to the manner in which we are encouraged to read the three novellas that make up the whole. More specifically, the first novella (“Dunyazadiad”) begins with an interruption: “At this point I interrupt my sister as usual to say, ‘You have a way with words, Scheherazade’” (3). Dunyazade’s interruption of her sister functions (uncannily) to interrupt a story we have only just begun. As we learn, Dunyazade is telling the story of Scheherazade’s “1001 Nights”—the story of her death-defying stories—to Shah Zaman, the king’s brother and Dunyazade’s future husband. Like her sister, Dunyazade tells her story so as to forestall death—both her own and Shah Zaman’s. As she assumes that Shah Zaman intends to kill her just as his brother planned to kill her sister, she has come to Shah Zaman armed with a razor. Her plan is to tell her story of Scheherazade’s stories and then turn the razor on both Shah Zaman and herself. In Dunyazade’s retelling, however, Scheherazade does not invent or even “remember” her stories; she gets them from a magical genie. This genie, who is clearly John Barth, comes from the future and gives Scheherazade the stories recorded in his copy of One Thousand and One Nights. Barth thus retells Scheherazade’s stories so that she can then retell them, herself, for the first time. At the same time, Barth advances his own career as a writer by retelling the story of Scheherazade’s retelling of his retelling. The hermetic seal of this storytelling loop is (at least initially) irritated by the fact that we never learn the “point” at which Dunyazade interrupts her sister. Or rather, we never learn what precedes the interruption. This “openness” seems to imply infinite possibility, a mode of storytelling finally liberated from the restrictions of ontological gravity, or finite ends. Since there is no treasure but the key to the treasure—or since there is no content but the form that conveys it—the endless task of rewriting the world has no limits. There is never any Thing before the act of rewriting. Not surprisingly, the circular or spiral nature of the “Dunyazadiad” is echoed, or repeated, in the next two novellas: the “Persied” and “Bellerophoniad,” respectively. The former is close to double the length of the “Dunyazadiad”;

This act of “suturing” makes the novel indissociable from the mysterious journal that the main character finds and uses throughout, and which we read in the final section. At the same time, it folds the unnamed protagonist (who is called both “Kid and “Kidd” by the other characters in the novel) into the reflection of Delany he momentarily and uncannily glimpses in a mirror. The larger point—especially since Kid/Kidd only ever seems capable of knowing or remembering what is written about his experiences (and is thus condemned to have no knowledge of what happened to him during the elliptical gaps that are common to all narrative forms)—is that Kidd is only the book/journal we read, just as the mysterious city he navigates is merely a reflection of the novel’s narrative architecture.

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the latter, more than double the length of the former. An image or theme of ever-widening concentric circles, or spirals, is therefore stressed. This image is significantly repeated in the second novella—in which Perseus tells the story of navigating an outward spiraling chamber that displays his youthful adventures in seven “panels.” Each panel is “half again and more its predecessor’s breadth” (69). After the seventh, the spiral turns “from view” and a new series begins (executed, as were the first seven, by a nymph named Calyxa). This second series depicts Perseus’s life after his youthful exploits and marriage to Andromeda— after, that is, his “happily ever after.” As an outward expanding echo of what comes before, this second series is both a repetition and a rewriting of the first seven. Now, for instance, an older Perseus struggles to love (rather than kill) Medusa—who, in this second adventure, has been revived by Athena. With a newly reattached and safely covered head, she brings to Perseus the promise of immortality. Barth presents this promise as the precise antithesis of ossification, of being turned to stone and fixed forever. Immortality is tantamount to infinite mutability. To live forever, Perseus need only love Medusa enough to uncover her head. If, though, he uncovers her head for selfish reasons she will once again become a gorgon and he will be turned into stone. The broader implication is that the mythic life of Perseus can be fixed forever in a single ossified form or it can live forever in the perpetual unfolding of new stories, new acts of creation. Perseus is encouraged to embrace the latter when he comes to the second “panelet” of the massive sixth panel in the second set. Unable to continue a story that Perseus has yet to recall (or tell himself), Calyxa has simply written “PERSEUS LOVES.” Perseus must, therefore, complete the sixth and seventh panels himself. The panels—which Perseus desperately hopes will represent a “second tale,” and “not a mere replication of the first” (121, my emphasis)—end as outright revisions of their “doubles” (in the first series).4 Now, instead of holding high Medusa’s severed head, Perseus uncovers and kisses it. In her eyes he sees endless possibilities, stars “reflected . . . and reflected into infinity” (141). “As the story closes,” Warrick points out, “imagination is born. Perseus finds he now can imagine boundless beauty from his experience of boundless love. Author of his own story, he has become the tale he tells” (80, my emphasis). We are presented Barth discusses his use of the spiral-form in a 1977 speech “Algebra and Fire: A Chat with Doctors.” Here Barth further explains the function of the “logarithmic spiral” that defines the content and narrative structure of Chimera:

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the specific Fibonaccian instance of the logarithmic spiral—as embodied in the chambered nautilus, for example, and as contrasted with a closed circle—appealed to me and Perseus metaphorically, because . . . a ground theme . . . of Chimera . . . is reenactment versus mere repetition. The spiral reenacts the circle, but opens out—if you’re going in the right direction. The nautilus’s latest chamber echoes its predecessors, but does not merely repeat them. (169–70)

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with another spiral of “human consciousness”—insofar as that spiral repeats Barth’s “phenomenological” position that “man exists only as he creates himself ” (Warrick 74). Like Scheherazade and Dunyazade, Perseus must “tell stories or die” (76). This liberating fact is most explicit when we are finally given to realize that the “Persied” we just read is simply a “moment” in an ongoing story the immortal constellations of Perseus and Medusa spin and spin and spin. The problem, in retrospect—or some forty years after Warrick’s reading— is that the “imagination” Barth celebrates is an imagination utterly free from restraint, from the pull of the Real. It has no “other side.” This is the “ironic” imagination, in Hegel’s view, of romantics like Schlegel (and thus, too, in part, as Warrick’s analysis intimates, British romantics like Wordsworth). Barth, though, is not unaware of the problem—nor is a critic like Warrick. Indeed, as Warrick suggests, the final novella can be read as a problematically self-reflexive critique—or in Hutcheon’s terms, a “complicitous critique”—of the very imaginative process the novel simultaneously celebrates: The third novella is enormously complex and almost beyond comprehension—perhaps deliberately so. Barth is portraying the modern imagination, which fell into present time fertile with three thousand years of accumulated culture. The possibilities it sees are so innumerable that it keeps toying with various ones, unable to focus on any one long enough to impregnate it and give birth to a new fiction. The human imagination becomes lost in its self-created labyrinth. (Warrick 80)

The “Bellerophoniad” is, in many respects, modeled around the figure of Proteus (who Barth famously associates with the imaginative process in “The Literature of Exhaustion”). Oddly, though, the mutability of proteus (who is not a figure in Bellerophon’s tale) is associated with the seer Polyeidus. In a manner that recalls our discussion of Plascencia’s work (in the previous chapter), the fixity of destiny becomes indistinguishable from the infinite contingency of the protean. Polyeidus’s prophetic powers entail the weight of unfettered possibility. Polyeidus—who, we are told, “is the story” (246)— sees too much. He is (and the story is), as a consequence, unstable and unpredictable, too plural or multifarious to follow. This fact is confirmed in the opening lines of the novella’s third chapter: Polyeidus here: shape-shifting, general prophecy. No one who sees the entire scope and variety of the world can rest content in a single form. (307)

Polyeidus struggles, we might say, with the kind of “schizophrenia” Philip K. Dick laments in his speech on “Schizophrenia and The Book of Changes.”

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This awareness or acceptance of all possibilities “would be,” Dick asserts, “a greater loss than gain; . . . To understand the future totally would be to have it now. Try that, and see how it feels. Because once the future is gone, the possibility of free effective action of any kind is abolished” (181). This problem of seeing too much can be tied to the paradox of indecision. On the one hand, indecision (as in “no decision” necessary) is the effect of no options, of a hegemonic truth or reality that forestalls the very necessity of a decision. On the other hand, indecision is the effect of suffocating doubt, of an infinite number of potentially correct possibilities: either paralysis or an endless series of evasions and inconsequential revisions. In all its forms indecision refuses the burden of the Derridean undecidable— or, to recall Hegel’s phrasing, the “strenuous effort of the Notion.” And so, with too many possibilities, Barth’s Chimera gets increasingly “noisy”; it twists and it turns. As various digressions and awkwardly self-reflexive intrusions take over—from letters addressed to other Barthian characters (such as Todd Andrews in The Floating Opera [1956]) to complex graphs, indecipherable depictions of the “precious Pattern” (271), and random “Q&As” that allow Barth (as both Bellerophon and the author) to comment on his own process and previous works (including the “Perseid”)—the entire novella risks collapsing into complete cacophony. As Barth is surely aware, such cacophony is hardly any better (and only nominally different) than the pure Beckettian silence he hopes always to evade. Like (or as) the narrator Bellerophon, Barth therefore finds himself running the very clear risk (to extend Warrick’s claims somewhat) of “produc[ing] only irony and parody” (82, my emphasis). Unable to resolve itself, the final novella ends—during a conversation between Polyeidus and Bellerophon (as Barth)—in midsentence: P.: Done. Heh. Any last word to the world at large? Quickly. B.: I hate this, World! It’s not at all what I had in mind for Bellerophon. It’s a beastly fiction, ill-proportioned, full of longueurs, lumps, lacunae, a kind of monstrous mixed metaphor— P.: Five more. B.: It’s no Bellerophoniad. It’s a (319–20)

But Barth refuses to let this ending signal silence, or the end—a dismal acquiescence to the impossibility of meaning, or the mimetic apprehension of an anterior truth. This end is not akin to the end of the tape in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). Since, for the postmodern Barth, the story is its own end—since the story endlessly recreates its own content, its own anterior— the cacophony of “Bellerophoniad” merely signals the necessity of a “reboot.” The incomplete sentence with which it ends is merely an invitation to begin

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again, a sign that “nothing ever ends” (to quote Dr. Manhattan).5 Or, more precisely, the incomplete sentence can be read as the very “point” at which Dunyazade interrupts her own story to explain, again, that she “interrupt[s] . . . as usual.”6 Barth’s artistic magic trick is, therefore, to turn an ever-widening spiral into a closed loop. But this trick ultimately signals the very problem it means to obviate. Barth’s celebration of the storytelling process—of the endless potential to rewrite (or reenact) what has been written, to remake the world and to remake the self (and thus to view the world and the self as mere effects of their constructions)—is offered as a repudiation of narrative ossification, of the hegemony of any static claim or mimetic truth. However: loosed from anything like an ontological anchor, this process of retelling leads necessarily to a cacophony of possibilities, a state in which every retelling must be granted an “equal” position, an equal claim to the truth. A sort of bad Nietzscheanism is suddenly sanctioned, one that is unsurprisingly masculine. In Barth’s (meta)fictional universe, a white male can simply appropriate Scheherazade’s stories and then beneficently hand them back to her so as to save her life. Moreover, a figure like Shah Zaman can demand sex with a female virgin every night—yet be “rewritten” (when he tells his own story to Dunyazade) as a heroic figure who “actually” freed his endless victims and encouraged them to form the feminist utopia of Amazon. And Perseus is permitted, without much trouble at all, to undo his misogynistic and colonial acts of violence. Male virility—or, more ostentatiously, the flexible “stone” of a male sex organ—becomes the sine qua non of a symbolic order that creates the world ex nihilo, a symbolic order wholly liberated from the “inertia of the Real.” It takes, after all, a certain phallic power (if we recall Warrick’s startling phrasing) “to impregnate [endless possibilities] and give birth to a new fiction.” In response to the Medusa of logocentrism (which seeks to “fix” everything it lays eyes upon) we get (as Mark C. Taylor might suggest) the

Significantly, of course, for Dr. Manhattan (in Alan Moore’s Watchmen [1986–7]) the impossibility of an end is tantamount to the fact that everything is always already complete—and thus, à la Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, ethical ambivalence. 6 The other possibility, of course, as McHale notes, is that the incomplete sentence fuses to the actual beginning of the novel (i.e., the title itself). In this sense, the book is “no Bellerophoniad. It’s a Chimera” (McHale 111). Because, for McHale, this link to the title of the novel (and not to the story itself) draws us to a new level of discourse (i.e., the level of “metalanguage”), it manages to escape the closure of repetition and induces, instead, a new “reenactment” (to recall Barth’s terms). Surely this is Barth’s goal, or intention. But let’s not overlook the fact that the “interrupted” line that ends the third novella clearly aligns (also) with the uncanny interruption that opens the first. What appears to be an ever-expanding and unfettered series of reenactments turns out to be no less closed than the most dogmatic of utterances, a Möbius strip that can never take us higher or lower than its single, endless surface. 5

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postmodern Medusa of “logo centrism”: “While logocentrism struggles to erase signifiers in order to arrive at the pure transcendental signified, logo centrism attempts to extend the sign to infinity by collapsing the signified in the signifier. Union with the real—regardless of how the real is understood— holds out the promise of overcoming alienation and achieving reconciliation” (Disfiguring 222–3). For this precise reason Barth’s gesture toward narrative infinity (signaled in the final novella’s mad progress into cacophony) must necessarily end in the closure of a perfect suture, an undifferentiated loop bereft of sides—a loop that is endless only insofar as it refuses anything but itself, anything truly other. This is the paradoxical “wound” of postmodern logo centrism, of “symbolic art” in the late-twentieth century. It’s not that the wound has been left open, left to gap, left unsealed. The wound is a wound that has been denied altogether. There is no wound. Or rather, the wound has no edge, no other side, nothing to which the side of fiction might be sutured. The semiautonomous relationship between sign and referent is abandoned— or wholly de-emphasized, given to be so slight as to be inconsequential. Nothing restricts the play of the symbolic, of the graphic, the advance of a rewriting that always begins as a repetition, a simulacrum. The paradox of this wound that isn’t even a wound is that it is no different than a perfect “closing” (in the strictest medical speak). Again: this is the paradox of the Möbius strip, postmodernism’s most extreme response to logocentrism—to both a realist imperative to close all wounds absolutely and a “modern” effort to hold them open, to preserve an ineffable or ungraspable truth. In a work like Barth’s (or, as we saw in the previous chapter, Vonnegut’s), the possibility of “healing” is ostensibly negated because we are given to assume that there is no longer anything to heal, no separation to overcome. Other than itself, there is no Thing from which the mimetic act cleaves. But this infinite openness is absolute closure, an ahistorical (i.e., Tralfamadorian) present without anterior states—just as utter cacophony is no more meaningful than complete silence.

Traumatic Absence However: historioplastic metafiction must risk repeating this same depthless trajectory, this same (silent) cacophony. But as we have seen (already) there is a very fine line between a narrative work that allows us to assume that reality is merely the effect of its narrativization (or its appearance in mimetic forms) and a narrative work that grasps what is before it by “holding to” its infinite relatability, its a priori in-commonness. Either form of narrative must

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risk the problem of circles and spirals, of mirrors and infinite regresses. To avoid this risk would be to return naively to the least ethical forms of realism or modernist experimentation. To avoid this risk would be to eschew the “strenuous effort of the Notion,” the ethical trauma of “tarrying with the negative.” Therefore: to overcome the most mendacious implications of postmodern metafiction, the historioplastic must reopen the mimetic wound at the very moment it closes it—in all (ironic) sincerity. The wound must be given to persist in the form of its healing. There is, perhaps, no better example of this paradoxical act of healing than Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000)—especially since it repeats the various themes Barth employs: the spiral, the snail, the persistence of mythic figures (e.g., the Minotaur), selfreflexive commentaries, the labyrinth, the vacuum of abyssal absence, and so on. And yet, even at its most playful (or ostentatiously “postmodern”), Danielewski’s novel is far less invested in the repudiation of teleological truth claims than it is in recovering, or returning to, the possibility of such claims. Like the works of metafiction discussed in the previous chapter, House of Leaves does not simply negate, or repudiate, the defining strategies or assumptions of postmodernism; it sublates them. It “holds to” postmodernism by pulling its central features through the very assumptions (concerning teleology, mimesis, truth, etc.) they initially opposed. This “strenuous effort” is significantly most apparent in the various moments of return and acts of repetition that occur throughout. Indeed: the novel can be defined as a series of interpretative returns—or, as Hayles puts it, acts of “remediation.”7 But these returns are not exactly circular—nor do they signal a “Möbius-type” flattening of difference. Evoked in the pattern on the back of a snail (or the stairwell pattern shimmering beneath the otherwise black cover of “The Remastered Full-Color Edition”), these returns are spirals that close while or by remaining open. They do not yield to the metaphor of a perpetually widening spiral or its obverse (i.e., a totalizing circle). Instead, these spirals are more akin to a kind of fixed orbit. They sustain the possibility of “closure” insofar as a certain gravity (of the Real) keeps them both roughly concentric and roughly fixed in terms of diameter, but their repetitions are never perfectly the same. Another (new) revolution is always possible, always necessary, but each new (re)turn submits to gravity. In this sense, the various returns that define House of Leaves are returns that never return, interpretative loops that constantly defer or deflect closure. While each failure to maintain a sense of closure or achieve See Hayles’s “Saving the Subject: Remediation on House of Leaves.” I discuss this article (as well as Hayles’s follow-up article—“Mood Swings: The Aesthetics of Ambient Emergence”) later in this chapter.

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absolute communion (on either the part of the characters who inhabit the novel’s multiple layers or on the part of the reader as interpreter) signals an acceptance of postmodern lessons about the futility of mimetic projects and universal truth claims, each return marks a shift away from postmodern didacticism and signals a renewed and very sincere investment in the defining limits of the plastic and the possibility of redemption. These returns thus signal a renewed faith in the promise of a future yet to come; but this faith entails the very “strenuous effort of the Notion” (Hegel, Phenomenology 35). It is a matter of grasping an always deferred promise, a future gleaming always just ahead (always there, some Thing just on the horizon), the possibility of apprehending the very ideals postmodernism and poststructuralism worked to debunk as symptoms of the logocentric and dangerously hegemonic project of the enlightenment: humanism and mimesis. Made possible, then, by the various “leaves,” or leavings, enacted and encouraged throughout, the returns of House of Leaves can be understood as so many notional (non)returns to the subject, the family, the novel, and (by implication) to that which is wholly other—the infinitely plastic Real (of that which is always still before us). This theme of returns without return, of closures without closure, is signaled most obviously in the two striking moments of “self-return” that occur toward the end of the novel. In each of these moments, a central character (Will Navidson and Johnny Truant, respectively) finds himself faced with the very text that “houses” him as a fictional construct: House of Leaves itself. On the one hand, both moments echo the solipsistic and corrosively self-reflexive stylings of canonical postmodern metafiction; on the other, they serve as preludes to profound (if only momentary) moments of insight, redemption, and communion. Given these dual and (perhaps) paradoxical functions, these two moments stand out as useful locus points for a discussion of how House of Leaves works to recover the efficacy of American metafiction—and the possibility of a narrative mode that might grasp an ineffable past while refusing (simultaneously) to ossify its infinite plasticity. In other words, Danielewski’s novel—via its strategic deployment of a series of often frustrating delays, deferrals, or interruptive “leaves”—stands as a particularly exemplary, if relatively early, example of historioplastic metafiction. As opposed to distinctly postmodern works of metafiction (such as Barth’s Chimera), Danielewski’s novel shifts our attention to the infinite (because plastic) Real that effects (even as it is affected by) the graphic, that both limits and permits a perpetual orbit of forms. At the heart of the novel is the story of a famous photographer (Will Navidson), his long-time partner (Karen), and their two children (Chad and Daisy). Rather than giving us Navidson’s story directly, though, Danielewski

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presents us with an unfinished, fragmentary, and typographically playful pseudo-academic monograph. Written by a blind scholar (Zampanò) and edited and annotated by a young miscreant (Johnny Truant, who found Zampanò’s notes after the scholar died under mysterious circumstances), the monograph summarizes and analyzes an autobiographical film photographed and edited by both Navidson and Karen. Piled on top of these already labyrinthine layers of mediation is a “foreword,” two “additional appendixes,” corrections, comments, and an index provided by external and unnamed “editors” (presumably at Pantheon) who somehow received Truant’s edited and annotated version of Zampanò’s The Navidson Record and then published the entire collection of “leaves” as the “2nd Edition”8 of

House of Leaves by

Zampanò with introduction and notes by

Johnny Truant Ultimately, the spuriously “real” documentary at the heart of the text is largely indistinct from now standard mystery/horror films like The Blair Witch Project (1999) or Cloverfield (2008). As such, Zampanò’s oddly and unacademically descriptive9 summations of the film often provoke feelings of suspense akin to those felt during a Hollywood thriller. The novel employs very traditional and thus engaging plot devices, devices we tend to associate with Hollywood and that tend to provide us with the illusion of representational accuracy. However, the central plot—the story of the Navidson family’s new house and a mysterious room in that house that constantly changes size and is significantly and impossibly larger inside than the entire house is outside— is frequently interrupted and frustrated (à la postmodernism) by Zampanò’s In the “Foreword,” the “editors” tell us that “The first edition of House of Leaves was privately distributed and did not contain Chapter 21, Appendix II, Appendix III, or the index.” We are even told, on the inside cover advertisement (a place a reader assumes to be “outside” the fictional reality of the novel enclosed) that, “YEARS AGO, WHEN HOUSE OF LEAVES was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet.” As we venture into the novel proper, though, we realize that nothing in (or on) this book can be trusted. In short, and as I discuss later, the fact that this is a 2nd edition is as spurious as the reality of the documentary film described throughout. 9 Odder yet if we recall that he is blind. 8

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analysis, Truant’s “notes” (which often span pages and, in Pale Fire-style, concern Truant’s daily activities, thoughts, and experiences while editing The Navidson Record), and the editors’ various “corrections” and “comments.”10 Given all of these interruptive layers, or “leaves”—leaves which function as, or necessitate, so many “returns” to the meaning of the mysterious “space” at the heart of house—by the time we reach the first moment of “self-return” mentioned above we are primed to read it as just one more example of postmodern solipsism, a textual trick designed to remind us that reality is always only fiction and that both text and subject are always only, as Roland Barthes would have it, a “tissue of quotations” (“Death of the Author” 146). More specifically, this first moment of self-return occurs toward the end of The Navidson Record—or rather, toward the end of the novel proper. At this point, and after the numerous “interruptions” or “leaves” mentioned above, the reader is finally returned to Zampanò’s description of the documentary. The text is now clearly poised to explain how “it all turned out.” And Zampanò does just that: the film ends with Navidson back at the house. He has, by this point, suffered greatly as a result of his desire to photograph—which is to say his desire to “map,” to “make sense of ” finally—the house and its mysterious “space.” The house, though, has consistently resisted representation—“It’s impossible to photograph” (86)—and Navidson is now well aware of the fact that this resistance may mark something that is dangerous and best left alone. After all, the transphenomenal nature of the mysterious space transformed Holloway (the man employed to help Navidson explore the room) into an insane and suicidal murderer; its shifting and unpredictable spaces literally consumed Navidson’s brother (Tom); and its unexplainable impossibility sparked an obsession in Navidson that finally destroyed his already strained relationship with both his partner and his children. Yet Navidson feels compelled to return. This is because, as Zampanò suggests, Navidson associates the abyss at the heart of house with his traumatic relationship to the subject of a photo that made him famous. Navidson refuses to name this photo until he writes a letter to Karen attempting to explain his reasons for returning to the house one last time. As Navidson tells Karen in the letter, the photo was of “a little girl squatting in a field of rock dangling a bone between her fingers . . . with [a] vulture in the background” (392). As the girl (i.e., “Delial”) was on the verge of death, Navidson cannot help but feel that “the real vulture was the guy with the camera” (392). The suggestion All of these layers are distinguished by different fonts: Times for Zampanò, Courier for Truant, Dante for Pelafina (Truant’s mother), and Bookman for the unnamed editors. While Zampanò’s font has been altered to match the font used in this book, I replicate the other three fonts whenever appropriate.

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we get via Zampanò (and, in turn, via Zampanò’s various and very spurious “sources”) is that the utterly ungraspable and nonsensical space at the heart of the Navidson home (and thus family) is a direct embodiment of this past event, the unforgettable and nonnegotiable trauma that Navidson endured the moment he pulled his (photographic) “trigger.” Consider, for instance, Zampanò’s summary of the criticism on this particular topic: Tokiko Dudek commented on how “Delial is to Navidson what the albatross is to Coleridge’s mariner. In both cases, both men shot their mark only to be haunted by the accomplishment, even though Navidson did not actually kill Delial.” Caroline Fillopino recognized intrinsic elements of penance in Navidson’s return to the house but she preferred Dante to Coleridge: “Delial serves the same role as Beatrice. Her whispers lead Navidson back to the house. She is all he needs to find. After locating (literally) the souls of the dead = safety in loss.” (394-5)

Zampanò concludes this “summary of criticism” by stating that, although Navidson does indeed return to the house in (symbolic) search of Delial, “Navidson never encountered his Beatrice again” (395). However, the point, as Zampanò makes clear after going on to quote “Sandy Beale of The New Criticism,” remains: “If The Navidson Record had been a Hollywood creation, Delial would have appeared at the heart of the house.” Zampanò, though, cannot help but stress the futility of Navidson’s project, the futility of his “return”: “The Navidson Record is not a Hollywood creation and through the course of the film Delial appears only once, in Karen’s piece [about Navidson], bordered in black, frozen in place without music or commentary, just Delial: a memory, a photograph, an artifact” (395). In stressing the anti-Hollywood nature of Navidson’s film, Zampanò seems to betray the basic impulse motivating his writing; he seems desperate to stress the postmodern aspects of the film, to highlight the fact that (at base) the film is concerned with absence and the impossibility of closure, not kitschy, or Disney-esque themes of redemption and truth. Zampanò often seems cast as the quintessential postmodern artist, an artist who managed to leave behind a truly corrosive self-reflexive puzzle: an academic monograph that uses obviously real (e.g., Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading [115], John Hollander’s The Figure of Echo [43], etc.) and obviously fictional (e.g., Ivan Largo Stilets’s Greek Mythology Again [41], Sandy Beale’s “No Horizon,” etc.)11 sources so as to provide an exegesis and a critical analysis of This confusion of real and fictitious “sources” obviously anticipates—and is echoed in— Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (discussed in the previous chapter).

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a “real” documentary film that, as Truant comes to realize, “doesn’t even exist” (xix). In other words, Zampanò’s insistence that Navidson’s past trauma (embodied in the figure of Delial) is utterly unapproachable outside of necessarily corruptive mediation—she is just “a memory, a photograph, an artifact”—tempts us to consider the possibility that the mysterious room “at the heart of the house” is simply, as Will Slocombe suggests, an expression of some type of Sartrean “negation [that] works to obliterate reality itself ” (103).12 In this way, the text seems intent on encouraging us to view The Navidson Record (and, in turn, House of Leaves itself) as yet another text that works to identify the reality and necessity of some eternal “absence upon which every presence is founded” (Slocombe 106). This is, of course, not far from the Hegelian reading I am here proposing.13 The problem is that Slocombe does not account fully enough for the fact that House of Leaves somehow manages to employ (like those texts discussed in Chapter 3) metafictional strategies while also moving beyond the very ideologies that informed those strategies during the peak years of postmodernism. Slocombe goes to great lengths in order to distinguish the stress on absence he sees in House of Leaves from the stress on absence he sees in deconstruction and postmodernism.14 However, his suggestion that House of Leaves goes beyond deconstruction and postmodernism ultimately reads like a willful misreading of Derrida as well as a necessarily revisionist take on postmodernism. The consequence is that a critic like Slocombe ends up aligning House of Leaves with the types of negative theology Derrida uncovers and critiques in existential thinkers like Sartre, thinkers who (if only inadvertently) deified absence by making it hegemonically “essential.”15 As I suggest later in this chapter, we may in fact argue that Zampanò’s insistence on “absence”—on the impossibility of meaning, or interpretive closure—results in his inability to “heal” and is thus the cause of his mysterious death, or “erasure.” 13 Recall that, in Hegel, we must always be “looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it” (Phenomenology 19). However, while Sartrean (and/or existential, or postmodern) negativity (or nothingness) often threatens to overtake the very possibility of reality, the “negative” in Hegel (and, we might say, in Derrida) is consistently a matter of productive contradiction, the relationality of being itself. 14 For Slocombe, the text only “seems to be characterized by the sense of poststructuralist or postmodern play” (100, my emphasis). 15 For Derrida’s attack on Sartre (and existentialism in general), see “The Ends of Man.” Derrida’s seminal essay, “Differance,” also sees Derrida carefully distancing his project (which, contrary to Slocombe’s claims, does indeed see him identifying a type of “absence upon which every presence is founded”) from the pitfalls of negative theology. As, though, I suggest in other chapters (especially Chapter 2), we need to recover (as Malabou—and even the latter Derrida—does) the implicitly Hegelian movements that animate deconstruction if we are to see, fully, how the Derridean project never entirely slipped into “postmodernism.” As Malabou in fact suggests, deconstruction was, from the very beginning, haunted by a post-deconstructive goal. 12

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And, of course, Derrida’s attack on Sartre is comparable to the most damaging attacks on postmodernism—which is to say that, by reading House of Leaves as a revival of negative theology, Slocombe ultimately identifies it as a very postmodern text. Or rather he encourages us to see it as just another instance of what Taylor identifies as postmodern “logo centrism.” But if House of Leaves simply reenacts this type of logo centric project, then there is little room left to defend the claim—which is either explicit or implicit in the majority of existing criticism on the novel16—that it marks a clear move away from the no longer efficacious (or relevant) narrative gestures of postmodernism.

Returning “the Real” Still: the sense that House of Leaves ultimately insists on the utter lack of a foundational and therefore accessible “reality” is compounded by the fact that the novel constantly frustrates our ability to view any one character as any more “real” than another. Zampanò and Truant are particularly problematic. Initially, we are encouraged to assume that both Zampanò and Truant are “real” within the reality of the novel’s fictional universe. However, as Hayles points out in “Saving the Subject,” such an assumption is frequently undermined as the text proceeds. Truant, at one point (and in a manner that clearly echoes the internal doubts of Bellerophon in Barth’s Chimera or Kid/ Kidd in Delany’s Dhalgren), even questions his own reality and thus suggests that he may in fact be nothing more than one of Zampanò’s creations: A moment comes where suddenly everything becomes impossibly far and confused, my sense of self derealized and depersonalized, the disorientation so severe I actually believe—and let me tell you it is an intensely strange instance of belief—that this terrible sense of relatedness to Zampanò’s work implies something that just can’t be, namely that this thing has created me; not me unto it, but now it unto me, where I am nothing more than the matter of some other voice, intruding through the folds of whatever even Along with the works of criticism discussed throughout, consider (also) Holland’s take on the novel in Succeeding Postmodernism as well as David Cowart’s in The Tribe of Pyn. Both readings parallel, yet (in their own ways) resist efforts to identify the book as wholly removed from poststructuralist and/or postmodern concerns.

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now lies agape, possessing me with histories I should recognize as my own; inventing me, defining me, directing me until finally every association I can claim as my own—from Raymond to Thumper, Kyrie to Ashley, all the women, even the Shop and my studio and everything else—is relegated to nothing[.] (326)

The sense we get here, at least initially, is that Truant (in typical metafictional fashion) is sensing his own fictionality—and, in so doing, acknowledging the possibility that Zampanò is the author of everything, from title page to appendixes to glossary. The editors, after all, have “never actually met Mr. Truant” (4). However, Truant concludes this passage by opening up the possibility that even Zampanò is fictional, that “all of this has been made up and what’s worse, not made up by me or even for that matter Zampanò” (326). As Hayles notes, this final “admission” opens up yet another layer of “remediation”: “Johnny’s intuition that he is ‘made up’ by someone he cannot see opens up onto the higher ontological level of Danielewski, the creator of this fictional world” (800). Significantly, though, for Hayles, this seemingly “final” level of remediation is not permitted to persist as such; while it seems clear that Truant is here gesturing past Zampanò to Danielewski, the text avoids settling on any one ultimate “reality” (in the guise of Zampanò or any other “Author-God”17 beyond him). Subjects in the novel are only ever momentarily “stabilized,” Danielewski included.18 We are never allowed to remain certain about the The term “Author-God” comes, of course, from Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” in which he argues that “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of some Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146). 18 Because every part of the novel—from the cover to the plot description on the inside cover flap to the copyright page—is complicit in the novel’s overall frustration of any permanent sense of ontological and/or epistemological certainly, there is an implicit warning throughout that we would be wise to suspect Danielewski himself and thus Danielewski’s relationship to his “creation.” For instance, as I noted already, the inside cover flap states that “YEARS AGO, WHEN HOUSE OF LEAVES was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of papers, parts of which would occasionally appear on the internet.” This “bundle of papers,” though, shows up in House of Leaves itself as the first edition of Truant’s annotated version of The Navidson Record. As a result, the reader’s initial certainty that they are indeed reading the “2nd edition” of House of Leaves is frustrated while never being fully undermined. My central point here is this: If we can’t even trust the inside cover flap (which we have been conditioned to “trust” always exists outside the fictional universe of the book it describes), how can we depend upon Danielewski’s ontological stability as authorial subject? If Danielewski’s point is to avoid “provid[ing] 17

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ontological priority of a given character even though we are often encouraged to feel such certainty. For instance, the text often returns to the possibility (if not the fact) that this is all just Zampanò. Consider, for instance (as Hayles does), the section of “Bits” in the first Appendix. In the December 15, 1974, entry, Zampanò (whose “bits” we’re led to believe these are) writes that “in the margins of darkness, I could create a son who is not missing; who lives beyond even my own imagination and invention; whose lusts, stupidities, and strengths carry him farther than even he or I can anticipate; who sees the world for what it is” (543). It is hard not to associate this possible “son” who would exist in Zampanò’s “margins of darkness” as Truant: Truant’s text runs in (or along) the margins of Zampanò’s own and he seems to exist outside Zampanò’s fictional creation, or “imagination.” Still, if we are constantly returned to the possibility that Zampanò is the only “real” writer in this novel, we are also (and perhaps just as often) forced to leave it and return to the opposite possibility—the possibility that this is all Truant. Truant is an atypical “editor” (to say the least). A promiscuous drugusing apprentice tattoo artist whose companions include a stripper named “Thumper” and a hairstyling night-clubber named “Lude,” Truant does not have the background one assumes goes hand in hand with the ability to annotate obscure academic references—from Milton’s Paradise Lost to Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading. Yet Truant somehow manages to locate all manner of sources while writing extended chunks of autobiographical prose that often rival the apparently professional text they annotate. Moreover, Truant himself tells us that he has a knack for storytelling, for exploiting “the rhythm of [a] story” (13), and this ability is highlighted further when his mentally unstable mother (Pelafina), in the “The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute Letters” of “Appendix II,” reminds him of a time when his “tale-telling stilled wind and bird as if nature herself had ordered it” (605). Coupled with this seemingly accidental “clue” about Truant’s storytelling abilities, Pelafina’s claim that she “live[s] at the end of some interminable corridor” (624) is particularly suggestive. Can we simply pass this off as coincidence? How is it possible that almost ten years before Truant found Zampanò’s “leaves”19 his mother anticipated the image and theme of an endless hallway or room—or, more specifically, and if we recall the title of Navidson’s first “short” about the any definitive answers” (“Interview” 122), then we are forced to take all such “answers” with caution. The novel works to fictionalize (or place in doubt) everything that has to do with the novel, even Danielewski’s ostensibly nonfictional “interview”—even if most critics continue to employ it as if it is wholly outside the text and therefore absolute. Danielewski (in interview or elsewhere) is just one more level of “remediation.” 19 His mother’s letter is dated August 13, 1987, and Truant claims to have found The Navidson Record in 1996 (xii).

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house, a “Five and Half Minute Hallway”? Lurking behind this coincidence is the possibility that both Zampanò and “mommy” are Truant’s creations (or even that Zampanò and Truant are Pelafina’s creations). This “encoded” suggestion is highlighted further by several other “clues”: Truant’s mother’s constant reference and need for “codes” as well as the typographical oddities of her letters;20 the encoded line “My Dear Zampanò what did you lose?” in Pelafina’s letter dated April 5, 1986;21 the recurrent paralleling of Truant with the Minotaur at the heart of the Navidson house;22 the various “quotes” in “Section F” of “Appendix II” (i.e., the appendix that ostensibly provides documents written by, or associated with, Truant) that echo the themes of The Navidson Record; the fact that both Zampanò and Truant write poetry; and, finally, Truant’s startling claim that “Zampanò is trapped . . . inside me” (338).23 What all this amounts to for Hayles is the fact that the text forces us to move endlessly from one remediation to another; we are never allowed to rest assured that one mediating source is more ontologically stable than another. Nothing exists outside of these remediations, outside this house of leaves. As a result, we are left (only) with “multiple remediations of the supposedly original moment, recorded on a film that does not exist in a house that cannot be because it violates the fundamental laws of physics. Thus subjects . . . are evacuated as originary objects of representation but reconstituted through multiple layers of remediation” (“Saving” 782–3). The text works toward “saving the subject,” then, by “recover[ing] in its place a mediated subjectivity” (785).24 Mark B. N. Hansen makes a similar argument in “The Digital Typography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.”

As Hansen points out, Pelafina, in the letter from January 3, 1988, “could not have typeset the complex overlay of the word ‘forgive’ on the typewriter available to her” (619, n16). 21 For a discussion of how this code works, see Hayles’s “Saving the Subject,” page 802. Hayles convincingly suggests that this encoded message signals the possibility that Pelafina herself could be the author of both Truant and Zampanò. 22 See, for instance, as Hayles notes, page 404 (where Truant describes a dream in which he finds himself placed in a labyrinth by an old man). See also page 601 (where Pelafina likens Truant to a “beast”), and page 607 (where Pelafina wishes she didn’t have to “hear the rattle and roar and scream that is your silence”). 23 Again, see Hayles’s “Saving the Subject” (p. 801) for a more elaborate discussion of this passage. 24 Hayles both furthers and complicates her argument in a more recent article which she coauthored with Todd Gannon—“Mood Swings: The Aesthetics of Ambient Emergence.” Here, Hayles and Gannon suggest that House of Leaves (among other contemporary cultural objects) represents a shift away from postmodernism to (something Hayles and Gannon term) “ambient emergence.” The suggestion is that the proliferation of media and mediation in contemporary society has become so complex, ungraspable, and prevalent as to be “banal” (125). It no longer signals a postmodern disintegration of the 20

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Like Hayles, Hansen suggests that the novel moves away from “the tired postmodern agonies bound up with the figure of simulation” (601) and, in so doing, speaks to the growing sense that “mediation has become so ubiquitous and inexorable in the world of the novel (which is, after all, our world too) as simply to be reality, to be the bedrock upon which our investment and belief in the real can be built” (601). In this way, the novel works “to generate belief without objective basis” (602). This would make it very “metamodern”—in the sense that (as we saw in Chapter 1) Vermeulen and van den Akker use the term. That is, the novel encourages us to “oscillate” between a state of belief (or “pretend”) and a state of postmodern irony. The problem here is that both Hayles and Hansen notice and work to theorize the prevalent theme of return in House of Leaves—return to the subject, return to belief, return to mimesis—yet neither manages to extricate the novel from a larger postmodern project. Or rather, the novel manages to escape postmodernism (and its corrosive deployment of metafictional devices) by moving us (à la “metamodernism”) into a largely feckless state of willful “pretend,” a wholly ungrounded “as if” (which, as we saw, is already the modus operandi in Barth’s very postmodern Chimera). Hayles ultimately settles on the fairly innocuous conclusion that House of Leaves demonstrates that “our subjectivities do not preexist the writing that already defines us even before we learn to read” (803). Isn’t a conclusion like this a conclusion we could make about almost any canonical postmodern text that furthers distinctly poststructuralist ideologies? Indeed: if House of Leaves simply works to demonstrate that reality is only ever the effect of remediation (or simulation) and that subjectivity is only an effect of the body’s entry into a world of language, what exactly does it do that is distinct

subject and of meaning but rather now marks the very possibility of both subjectivity and meaning; both now seem to emerge (as they do in House of Leaves) as an effect of an unfathomable layering of mediations, or digital codes: Like the nothingness infecting the text’s signifiers, a similar nothingness would confront us if we could take an impossible journey and zoom into a computer’s interior while it is running code. We would find that there is no there there, only alternating voltages that nevertheless produce meaning through a layered architecture correlating ones and zeros with human language. From the nothingness of alternating voltages emerges the complexities of digital culture, including effects that shift us away from postmodernism and toward ambient emergence. In this sense House of Leaves performs within its fictional world the banal miracle that produced it as a material artefact and that also produces us as readers of the complex surfaces of contemporary literature. (124–5) While certainly more nuanced in its emphasis of a shift away from postmodernism, this later article still fails to account fully for the problems (discussed later) in Hayles’s “Saving the Subject.”

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from postmodern/poststructural texts like, say, Baudrillard’s “The Precession of the Simulacra” (which theorizes the “hyperreal” as a form of simulated reality), Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I in Psychoanalytic Experience” (which suggests, as do most Lacanian texts, that the subject is effected by its entry into the “symbolic”), or Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (which identifies the subject as nothing more than an intersection of various preexisting “texts”)? Hansen’s argument stumbles along similar lines. His conclusion is that, like the work of the American postmodern writer par excellence (i.e., Thomas Pynchon), House of Leaves “asserts the nongeneralizability (or nonrepeatability) of experience—the resistance of the singular to orthography, to technical inscription of any sort” (606). Well, sure. But then again, so does Barth’s The Floating Opera, Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, Kathy Acker’s In Memoriam to Identity, and so forth. For all the sophistication of their respective readings, both Hayles and Hansen seem to return us to the possibility that House of Leaves is simply and undeniably “logo centric”— or, in other words, postmodern, another work we might categorize as historiographic metafiction (even if it is not, directly, concerned with an actual historical record). The novel, in this sense, simply and perversely stresses (along with a vast majority of postmodern metafictional texts) the primacy of the graphic, or the symbolic—the impossibility of a past or a real that is not always already the effect of text. But why, then, like those works discussed in the previous chapter, does the novel seem so clearly to be something else? After all, and as Hansen points out, Danielewski himself has stated that there is “no sacred text” in House of Leaves: “That notion of authenticity or originality is constantly refuted” (121).25 How is this not postmodern? A possible answer emerges, I am arguing, and in light of the narrative procedures we began to track in the previous chapter, if we focus on the novel’s repetitions—on the implication that House of Leaves is both a house of leaves and (necessarily) a house of returns. House of Leaves insists upon the possibility of an absolute and final return (or act of repetition) while always also frustrating the sustained fulfillment of that possibility. Its stress on “remediation” is a stress of relationality itself—the relation, gap, or “minimal distance” that necessarily defines all that is (ontologically) before us, all that is accessible through forms of (re)mediation. The novel, in this sense, returns to postmodernism via its rejection of closure; however, it leaves postmodernism because it leaves behind postmodernism’s impulse And there is, of course, no definitive edition of House of Leaves, just variant “versions.” For more on this, see the interesting (though nonacademic) summary of these variants at the forum titled “Comprehensive Guide to Printings/Editions/ISBN’s etc.”

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to deny the possibility, or promise, of apprehension. In so doing, it escapes the “perverse” nature of canonical postmodern texts, texts (like Chimera) in which characters can return from death to rewrite, or “transcend,” their pasts. The problem with such perversion—which, as we already noted, Žižek associates specifically with a “cyberspace notion of hypertext” (“Ridiculous” 36)—is that the “very lack of a final point of closure serves as a kind of denial which protects us from confronting the trauma of our finitude, of the fact that our story has to come to an end at some point” (Žižek, “Ridiculous” 37). It is, in this sense, the simple obverse of closure, the other side of the death drive—which is equally a desire for irresponsible “quiescence.” For this very reason Barth’s ever-expanding spiral must necessarily fold in on itself and (in so doing) announce the fact that it is no less “closed” than a perfectly sutured loop. Unlike House of Leaves, such “perverse” texts endorse the problematic fantasy of a universe “unencumbered by the Real of human finitude . . . a universe without closure, unencumbered by the inertia of the Real” (36). That House of Leaves is invested in a certain repudiation of postmodern “perversity” is apparent whenever the text encourages us to rest assured, to assume (if only for a moment) that a real author and/or an original and meaningful text exists (in the fictional universe of the novel or outside it). In these moments of certainty, in these moments of promise, the novel no longer seems interested in simply spiraling around some deified absence, some absent real, some hyperreal that only exists as the effect of a bottomless layering of mediation. Instead, the novel spirals around without ever moving away from “The Real” itself, the absolute presence (as “subject” or “subjectile”) that (while absolutely unknowable, absolutely infinite, absolutely plastic) defines the limit or finitude of the text’s interpretative possibilities. For this reason, the novel is neither logocentric nor logo centric.26

“A Snail’s Place” When Navidson returns to the house he returns armed with a bike, a trailer full of supplies, and cameras capable of capturing images in absolute darkness. But he also comes armed, Zampanò tells us, with “dreams.” While reviewing the three most prevalent theories about why Navidson returned to the house, Zampanò provides us with descriptions of two of these three

26

As I suggest in The Passing of Postmodernism, “neither logocentric nor logo centric” is a particularly apt way of describing the most efficacious post-postmodern (or “renewalist”) texts.

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dreams.27 In the first, Navidson finds himself in an “enormous concrete chamber” where “Everywhere people wander aimlessly” (398). Occasionally, though, individuals step into a well at the center of the room. Whenever this happens, the individual either sinks down into nothingness or disappears in a flash of blue light. Navidson eventually comes to the conclusion that, like all the others around him, he too can step into the well: “If he has lived a good life, a blue light will carry him to some ethereal and gentle place. If, however, he has lived an ‘inappropriate life,’ (Navidson’s words) no light will visit him and he will sink into the horrible blackness below where he will fall forever” (399). In the second dream, Navidson participates in a communal feast that ends with the community in question leading him to an immense dead snail upon which the town feeds: “As they enter the enormous wind (as in ‘to wind something up’), their candlelight illuminates walls that are white as pearl and as opalescent as sea shells. Laughter and joy echoes up the twisting path and Navidson recognizes that everyone has come to honor and thank the snail” (399). While Zampanò encourages us to see the infinite fall in the first dream as a mirror of Tom Navidson’s fall and death earlier in the Navidson Record—an endless fall into the apparent infinity of the house—we are also encouraged (if only implicitly) to associate this dream fall with a type of interpretive fall: as if the house, like House of Leaves itself, threatens us with its refusal to “make sense,” as if we run the very real risk here (as does Navidson and Truant) of “sink[ing] into” an obsession that will lead to an interpretive free fall into nothing(ness). At the same time, though, the redemptive power of the blue light (as well as the fulfilling nature of the upward spiraling snail) promises something else entirely. This promise is articulated best when Zampanò summarizes “Lance Slocum’s” argument about the dreams: Slocum contends that the dream planted the seed in Navidson’s mind to try a different path, which is exactly what he did do in Exploration #5. Or more accurately: “The dream was the flowering of a seed previously planted by the house in his unconscious.” When bringing to a conclusion “A Snail’s Place,” Slocum further opens up his analysis to the notion that both dreams, “The Wishing Well” and “The Snail,” suggested to Zampanò introduces the third dream as “the more troubling and by far the most terrifying” (402), but the description that we expect to follow this introduction is “missing” (403). It is also worth mentioning that Zampanò’s descriptions of these dreams are really summaries of preexisting critical discussions, discussions that Zampanò must summarize in full because they are “difficult to find” (398), “impossible to locate” (399), and/or extremely long. Once again, then, we are faced with seemingly foundationless remediation.

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Navidson the possibility that he could locate either within himself or “within that vast missing” some emancipatory sense to put to rest his confusions and troubles, even put to rest the confusions and troubles of others, a curative symmetry to last the ages. (402)

What drives Navidson’s return, then, is the suggestion—or rather, the promise—that he will come to terms with the confusion at the heart of his house, that he will heal the trauma that is Delial, that he will (even) make present “the maternal absence he endured throughout his life” (397). And to a certain extent, and in very unpostmodern fashion, this promise is fulfilled. Moreover, this moment of fulfillment or closure is not limited to Navidson. As Zampanò notes (via Slocum), Navidson’s return to the house effects a widespread moment of healing, or recovery. Almost everyone who suffered as a result of being exposed to the house begins to improve: Daisy’s fever subsides, Karen begins to sleep again, Chad becomes “more goal directed,” and so on.28 Zampanò even entertains the possibility that “People not . . . directly associated with the events of Ash Tree Lane have been affected” (407). The only people who do not seem to recover (at least not initially) are those who “have read and written, in some cases extensively, about the film” (407). Zampanò is perhaps the most obvious example of such a person; there is in fact good reason to view his mysterious death as a direct result of his postmodern convictions and (thus) his obsession with the film he ostensibly created via a process of remediation. The other example is, of course, Truant. As Truant tells us, his time with The Navidson Record and his various attempts to get to the bottom of its spurious claims leads him to the brink of madness, to the brink of some infinite fall: he begins to measure his apartment obsessively; he decides to buy guns to protect (or perhaps kill) himself; he even (by the end) finds himself homeless and wandering America in search of Navidson’s house on Ash Tree Lane. The suggestion we get is that, as with Zampanò, Truant’s obsession with the possibility of nothingness threatens him with destruction. However, while Zampanò fails to leave this obsession behind (except perhaps in death), Truant’s lingering belief (or hope in) something real leads to his own moment of self-recovery and stabilization, a moment that sees him come to terms with the threat of “absence” that haunted him and ostensibly killed Zampanò. This brings me back, spiral fashion, to the beginning. Both Navidson and Truant seem to recover the possibility of fulfillment via a process of outwardly postmodern self-return. After descending for days (regardless

These widespread improvements are charted in Slocum’s “PEER table” on page 406.

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of which direction he turns), and then climbing a stairwell that spirals sideways and then upward, Navidson finds himself on a ledge outside the only “window” he has ever seen inside the mysterious and endless room. Because the window (and even the wall that framed the window) disappears the moment he turns to go back through, he is forced to stand on the ledge (with only a book and a book of matches) and wait for something, anything, to happen: “All that remains is the ashblack slab upon which he is standing, now apparently supported by nothing: darkness below, above, and of course darkness beyond” (464). With nothing to do, he considers reading the book he has managed to retain after losing his trailer of supplies. And it is only at this point that Zampanò names the book: House of Leaves. However, after noting this and then mentioning that Navidson cannot read the book because he only has a single pack of matches for light, Zampanò claims that “the tape cuts off ” (465). This momentary “absence” allows Zampanò to review the various theories about what happened next. The most likely theory is that Navidson read the book—which is, we are told, exactly 736 pages (i.e., the exact length of the House of Leaves we are reading)—by lighting a page on fire and then reading that page as it is consumed. Not surprisingly, this moment of self-consumption—of, perhaps, absolute self-recognition (or what we might associate with a reductive version of Hegel’s “absolute knowledge”)—is followed by a period of sustained introspection: “‘I have no sense of anything other than myself,’ he mumbles” (471). Eventually, even the slab disappears and Navidson begins falling down—although it also feels, he notes, like “floating up” (473)—into the void. Navidson now begins to suspect (like perhaps any other reader of House of Leaves) that there “is no bottom” (472). It would seem, then—given that this overt articulation of absolute absence follows close on the heels of the strikingly postmodern and self-reflexive moment in which Navidson reads his own book—House of Leaves clinches its nihilistic and (in an age marked by postmodernism’s social intensification and concomitant political revelry in a “post-truth” world) redundant message. However, Navidson’s “experience” does not end here. It does not end because, paradoxically, while falling/floating through what seems to be infinity, his experience becomes (regardless of that apparent infinity) an experience of an end, his end: “‘So there is no bottom. It does not exist for me. Only my end exists.’ And in a whisper: ‘Maybe that is the something here. The only thing here. My end’” (472). With this revelation in mind, Navidson continues to fall/float. And, when he is near dead from exposure and starvation, “the final frames of [his] film capture in the upper right-hand corner a tiny fleck of blue crying light into the void. Enough to see but not enough to see by” (489). This blue light—the color of which, we must note, marks the word

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“house”29 throughout as well as the possibility of redemption in Navidson’s dream—is, in all likelihood, light streaming in from a room in the house on Ash Tree Lane where Karen has taken up residence after returning “because of Navy” (408). At, it would seem, precisely the point when Navidson has his revelation, the house begins to open up to Karen, allowing her to recover the man she loves: “in less than a blink, the whitewall along with the [children’s] drawings secured with yellowing scotch tape [behind Karen] vanishes into an inky black” (417). The suggestion is that Navidson’s re-cognition of (or re-encounter with) himself allows him to accept the reality of his own (and, in turn, the possibility of the house’s) finitude. His salvation is paradoxically tied to the reopening of a type of wound, a point of access. And thus, along with his own end, the possibility of a “bottom” is not denied in Navidson’s revelation; it simply “does not exist for [him].” While the house (and House of Leaves) is certainly sublime in its immensity—and, as a result, most certainly beyond apprehension or final representation—it (like Navidson, like House of Leaves itself) has (because it must have) an end. This end is its interpretative limit, its horizon of possibility. For all its fluidity and layers of remediation House of Leaves has a static and foundational core. It’s about a house and a blind scholar and a photographer and a young miscreant. It is not, for instance, about motorcycle gangs. Such an interpretation exceeds its limit. Likewise, the space at the heart of House of Leaves has its own limits: ash-gray walls, hallways and rooms, a staircase, and so on. It has absolutes. What keeps us going, though, what keeps us returning, is the fact that these absolutes simply mark the end points of an otherwise transphenomenal space, the full apprehension of which is always out of reach, always capable of being apprehended otherwise. Navidson’s apparent realization and acceptance of this fact leads to the end of his obsession and allows him to return to his house as house—or rather, it allows him to return to his house as a home, as a space of family, as a space of possible communion, the space of the in-common itself. In the end, Navidson’s recovery—his recovery of self as well as his recovery by Karen (or, we might even say, his sublation of self)—signals House of Leaves’s more general sublation of postmodernism. Navidson’s recovery aligns the novel (as a whole) with a Žižekian aesthetics of the “ridiculous sublime.” For Žižek, such an aesthetics is particularly apparent in the films of David Lynch—specifically Lost Highway (1997),30 a film that involves a In the other editions of the book, the word “house” appears in grayscale—as it does throughout this chapter. 30 For an extended discussion of Žižek’s take on Lost Highway as it relates to the end of postmodernism, see (again) The Passing of Postmodernism—“Chapter Three,” specifically. I return, in a related manner, to Lynch’s films in Chapter 6 (of this book). 29

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moment of self-return akin to Navidson’s (and, as we’ll see, Truant’s). What these expressions of self-return suggest for Žižek is the fact that the traumatic “kernel” of “the Real” is only accessible via a fictional symbolic order; however, that symbolic order is necessarily governed by the Real it mediates. In the films of Lynch, the Real is only ever “glimpsed” or “experienced” in the form of horrifying and frustrating “symptoms,” monstrous “hiccups” in the otherwise smooth and satisfying illusion of a coherent symbolic order. Thus, just as Žižek points to the random and inexplicable appearances of the Wicked Witch of the East in Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) as manifestations of such “symptoms,” we might very well point to the monstrous space in House of Leaves. Rather than being a representation of absolutely nothing, the space is (in this sense) a representation of the absolutely “Real,” the infinitely “minimal gap” that makes presence possible, that defines existence because it allows for the very possibility of definition, of in-commonness, relationality. This gap, this essential and unclosable distance, is nauseatingly and terrifyingly unfathomable—the condition of infinite contingency and contradiction.31 The disappearance or “curing” of this symptom is therefore akin (also) to the moments of redemption we see in Lynch’s films. Like the appearance of the Good Witch Glinda at the end of Wild at Heart (1990), the moments of self-recognition in House of Leaves stand in for the moment when a sublative experience of the Real is achieved; the symbolic is given to align with the past, with experience, with the Thing-in-itself because it is given, itself, as incomplete, as inadequate. The end, or truth, is grasped because it is grasped in a form that lets go, that accepts and embraces its distance from the Thing as the very sign that it has approached it in truth. This “curing” is not quite what we get at the end of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (which occupied our attention in Chapter 2)—which is to suggest that a historioplastic act of redemption is always somewhat more Žižekian (or more Hegelian) than Lacanian. Insofar as Dupin might be said to function as a psychoanalytical “healer,” his return of the purloined letter to the hands of the law reinstates pure fantasy (i.e., a reality that seems to be sewn shut and no longer irritated by a constitutive absence).32 The historioplasticity of House of Leaves, however, sustains the Real in the moment of its symbolic effacement,

This connection between the mysterious space at the heart of House of Leaves and the absolutely “Real” is made particularly clear in William G. Little’s discussion of the theme of hospitality in House of Leaves—cf. pp. 181–2. 32 Of course, insofar as the story itself is implicitly metafictional, the “secret” knowledge of the psychoanalyst is given to be grasped by the reader—if not the story’s police or “king.” In other words, the metafictional qualities of “The Purloined Letter” sustain the letter’s “distance” (the fact that it can never not be “purloined”) at the very moment it is reinscribed within an illusively transparent symbolic order. 31

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or overcoming. It brings us back to an often overlooked or denied refusal (in Hegel) to abide a “classical” suturing of the Thing and its representation, of the self and its self-knowledge. In Hegel, as in House of Leaves, the trauma of the Real (rather than being denied outright) is made sensible and manageable via a process of narrative and interpretive returns, or “remediations.” In a text like House of Leaves—or in any text that metafictionally echoes the romantic art Hegel valorizes in his Aesthetics—“neither side is there without the other, both sides preserve in this loose connection their individual and mutual independence; or at least, if a deeper unification is actually achieved, the spirit becomes a centre essentially shining out as the inner life transcending its fusion with what is objective and external” (2: 794). The inner is given inthe-finite. A moment of remediation, or self-recognition, abides by certain undeniable or absolute ends while also stressing its own inadequacy to contain the space between those ends (like the infinite space in Navidson’s finite house); it therefore grasps what it cannot capture, or close off. In this strictly paradoxical manner it achieves closure, true healing. Or rather, in Danielewski’s novel, moments of self-recognition work to justify Pelafina’s assertion that “Your words and only your words will heal your heart” (598).

Recovery without Scars This brings me back to Malabou’s recovery of Derrida via her very specific return to Hegel—in particular, a paper she originally delivered at a conference titled “Following Derrida.” In this paper, Malabou circles around one of Hegel’s most striking and problematic sentences in The Phenomenology: “The wounds of the spirit heal, and leave no scars behind” (as qtd in Malabou, “Again” 31). How, Malabou asks, is this possible? Isn’t the “scar” the sign of meaning itself? Isn’t the scar a reminder of the wound of absence that is only ever covered over? Isn’t the scar a symptom of the absence at the heart of meaning itself? In this sense, the spiritual recovery implied by Hegel must surely imply a “process of erasing the trace” (“Again” 29), the remainder, the space (always left over) for more: “To heal, for example, implies a reconstitution of presence from that which lacks, a cancellation of defects or of absence” (“Again” 31). What Derrida seems to show, though— throughout, that is, his repetitive returns to Hegel (and others)—is that any attempt to heal a text (or subject), to locate its final and pure meaning, only ever results in “The tissue of the text spread(ing) itself out, becom(ing) more complex . . . without ever achieving the clarity of a form. Regeneration here is not the repetition of the eternal youth of the phoenix, but the indefinite

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mending of the textiles or webs . . .[,] the graft” (“Again” 33). In a manner that seems to accent the development of the perversely postmodern text, Derrida’s “graphic différance ‘abandons the assurance of repetition or of redemption’ and ‘refuses all assurances of salvation’” (33). Malabou, though, is not convinced. She sees the possibility of Hegelian recovery lurking and then finally emerging fully in Derrida’s own texts. Indeed, for Malabou, this “spiritual recovery,” or “healing,” only makes sense if we think it through the filter of Derrida’s larger deconstructive project, if we see it (in other words) as “post-deconstructive” (“Again” 29). While pointing us to Derrida’s concept of the “undeconstructable,”33 Malabou suggests that we have come to a point when we need to shift our focus from or through deconstruction (and, I am suggesting here, postmodernism more generally) to what Hegel articulates as the “plastic,” that which is infinitely malleable yet absolutely fixed. As we have seen (in Chapter 2, specifically), such plasticity “bring[s] the possible to actuality[; it] manifest[s] a virtuality already inscribed in the essence itself. This virtuality authorizes essence in its free ‘interpretations’ in the same way the ‘type’ legitimates the sculptor’s improvisations” (The Future of Hegel 74). Plasticity ensures the possibility of a type of healing and regeneration that is—while not the mythical, perfect, and immortal regeneration of the phoenix—akin to the regeneration we see in the very mortal salamander: “Recovery here is a finite survival, a momentary resource. The regrowth does not void finitude, it is an expression of it. In this sense, regeneration is therefore of the order Derrida calls a supplement, a stranger to the value of presence” (“Again” 34, my emphasis). Plastic forms of recovery are then forms of recovery repeatedly effected and restrained by (but never wholly inclusive of) that which is undeconstructable—or rather, if we can redeploy Žižek’s phrasing, “the inertia of the Real.” With this in mind, let’s approach Truant’s own moment of recovery—a moment, moreover (and it shouldn’t be surprising at this point), that is directly associated with very real physical scars and the very real possibility of a final and regenerative moment of healing. Before we get Zampanò’s final chapters (which describe Karen and Navidson’s miraculous reunion), we are given a “twenty-first chapter,” a chapter we are told (in the editors’ opening note) that was not included in the first edition of House of Leaves. It was not included, we soon realize, because it details (in diary fashion) the events that transpired after Truant gave up on Zampanò’s text and began a cross-country journey in search of some (or any) verifiable fact about the film itself. At this point, Truant wants As discussed in the previous chapter.

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only “to burn” the leaves he has found and “Turn every fucking word to ash” (493). Of course, this desire to burn the book (and thus bring it to an end) mirrors Navidson’s own burning of House of Leaves, but it also signals Truant’s (and perhaps the reader’s) desire and need to find closure.34 Rather than entering the empty space in the house itself (as does Navidson), Truant enters the seemingly vast emptiness of America, a country that ostensibly “houses” the house on Ash Tree Lane and (as Truant has gleaned from Zampanò’s text) is likely the source of the mysterious space itself. As Zampanò claims, records from the Jamestown colony refer to the discovery of a set of mysterious stairs: “Ftaires! We haue found ftaires!” (414). This discovery of “ftaires” suggests that “Navidson’s extraordinary property existed almost four hundred years ago” (414)—somewhere (we are led to assume) near the traumatic events that haunted the Jamestown colony. Like Truant and Navidson, America itself has always been haunted and indeed effected from the beginning by some traumatic and transphenomenal Thing or event. In initiating what is likely to be a futile trek across America, then, Truant initiates two cycles of recovery: his own as well as America’s. Moreover, and as with Navidson’s return to the house, Truant’s return to the origins of America is initiated by a dream, a dream in which he seems to transform into the minotaur at the heart of Navidson’s house via a process of scarring that “mak[es] the scars [he] knows [he] has when he is not dreaming seem childish in comparison” (404). By emphasizing the physical scars his mother gave him when she spilt hot oil on his outstretched arms—and, in turn, the emotional scars he received from his mother (when she tried to strangle him) and stepfather (whenever he was at his most abusive)—Truant’s dream leads him to the conclusion that he (and, perhaps, by extension, America) may very well be “beyond repair” (405). Seemingly because of his dream, Truant leaves Zampanò’s book behind; however, this departure—which is Truant’s attempt to find the origin of the book itself—is ultimately and necessarily cast as just one more return to (in Nancy’s phrasing) “the heart of things.” Truant’s journey ends, finally (and after becoming increasingly desperate), when he finds himself in a dingy bar without a reason or the means to go on. While listening to the band that serves as the bar’s entertainment, Truant hears a strange “lyric”: “I live at the end of a Five and a Half Minute Hallway” (512). Startled, Truant approaches the band The image or theme of ash that runs throughout Danielewski’s text anticipates the same image/theme in Plascencia’s The People of Paper. In both texts “ash” is associated with a desire for a radical conflagration capable of purifying all meaning, all sense, reducing the world to a state of entropic indifference—as in “ashes to ashes.”

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members and cautiously suggests that the line refers to an obscure film. The drummer, though, “shak[es] his head and explain[s] that the lyrics were inspired by a book he’d found on the internet some time ago” (513). The drummer then hands Truant a bundle of papers which Truant is surprised to recognize as the first edition of “House of Leaves,” an edition published by “Circle Round a Stone Publications” and (or so the title page claims) containing “introduction and notes by Johnny Truant.” And just as Navidson is utterly altered by the process of reading and burning his own book, this moment of self-return—Truant here is literally returned to himself—marks a decisive change in Truant: I cherished the substance of those pages, however imperfect, however incomplete. Though in that respect they were absolutely complete, every error and unfinished gesture and all the inaudible discourse, preserved and intact. Here now, resting in the palms of my hands, an echo from across the years. (514, my emphasis)

With this (completely incomplete) “echo” recovered and in his own hands, Truant wanders out of the bar and, while the music “heal[s] his fatigue” (514), comes to dream again beneath an ash tree; this time he dreams of “soaring far above the clouds, bathed in light, flying higher and higher, until finally [he falls] into a sleep no longer disturbed by [his] past” (514). After sleeping, Truant awakens with the cold ground beneath him, a “gentle breeze filling in from the south” (515), and a renewed desire to eat something warm. At the same time, he realizes that, despite his hunger (or, perhaps, his desire to begin again), he has found a type of momentary peace, that he is (in some way) no longer scarred: “I don’t need to leave yet. Not yet. There’s time now. Plenty of Time. And somehow I know it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be alright. It’s going to be alright” (515). This moment of temporary healing—which certainly seems, as Kristeva might say, “indisputable in the present instant” (Tales 7)—is followed by a line that runs across the entire page. We then get a new “entry”; but this entry is from October 31, 1998, almost a full year before the entry in which Truant describes his encounter with the band. We are thus returned to the start of Truant’s journey across America. However, this return is not the result of Truant

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simply “rearranging” his entries. Instead, we get the sense that, following his moment of self-return, Truant returns to his past and begins to re-form (or “re-sculpt”) it. In this version, there are “no more guns” (515) and he can now clearly imagine that his mother “hadn’t tried to strangle [him]” (517). In this way, and as with Navidson, “The book [begins] burning” (518) and Truant is able to forget (via a process of remembering, or returning, or “memorializing” [518]) the very real trauma that he can never deny outright—“the five and half minutes” (517) when his mother did try to strangle him. These final entries clearly mark the “plastic” activity in which House of Leaves as a whole participates. The text, that is, constantly employs and redeploys “virtualities,” or screens of remediation, screens that “authorize . . . essence in its free ‘interpretations’ in the same way the ‘type’ legitimates the sculptor’s improvisations” (Malabou, The Future of Hegel 74). Each virtuality, or remediation, is cast as having the potential to be a momentary cure, a final and fixed manifestation of meaning, an act of recovery free of scars. In this sense, House of Leaves, as a novel, is defined by a project of “plastic” recovery, a project of recovering not only the subject and the possibility of meaning (in America specifically) but also (more generally) the possibility of once more committing to the truth, to better or worse accounts of the past, to responsibility. Or rather, the novel opens us to the possibility of a specifically Hegelian—or neoromantic—mode of metafiction. It is, therefore, a mistake to read House of Leaves (along with much contemporary metafiction) as a text that works to do little more than take the project of a now reified postmodernism one step further. Although they may seem to, works like House of Leaves do not revel even more gleefully in the postmodern conviction that all has been lost in an infinite maze (or labyrinth) of sliding signifiers. Rather, works like Danielewski’s (and those discussed in the previous chapter) signal contemporary aesthetic efforts to forestall the societal intensification of postmodernism. To escape (or recover) from our current descent into a post-truth world, we cannot simply return to hegemonic and all-encompassing truth claims. Something of postmodernism must be retained—even as we resist exploiting, in Hegel’s phrasing, “common vagueness [or] the inadequacy of ordinary common sense” (Phenomenology 43). The romantic sublation of postmodernism—the possibility of which is so overtly exploited in the neo-metafictional form of House of Leaves—entails, as Levinas might say, a radical and always intrusive “placing of the Infinite in thought, but wholly other than thought” (“God and Philosophy” 63). To function as an effective rejoinder to our hypermodern or post-postmodern condition, contemporary works of metafiction must insist upon aesthetic responsibility; but they must do so while (or by) exposing us to the fact that the opaque or infinite Thingness of being and experience is

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only ever expressible in or as the mediating point, the “gap,” that differentiates its finite forms from its always infinite truth. To merely oscillate (between unjustified belief and the utter impossibility of a truth claim) is, surely, to evade (shuttle-like) the profound effort of grasping this diremptive point of mediation, this always vanishing space of mediation. Like the works of historioplastic metafiction discussed in the previous chapter, the success of House of Leaves is tied to its ability to signal the possibility of mimetic or aesthetic recovery, but recovery marked by the persistence of a wound. It succeeds by initiating a very sincere process of recovery that (because it sublates the metafictional tendencies of postmodernism) entails sustained dehiscence, a certain form of irony. In this strictly paradoxical sense, House of Leaves, and the aesthetic movement it exemplifies, insists that (as Malabou puts it) “The deconstruction of presence is today a completed procedure” (“Again” 36)—or rather, perhaps, that the activity of deconstructing presence is a completed procedure. Insofar as deconstruction is the very possibility of being, of presence itself, it can never be “complete.” However, we can certainly hold to deconstruction while shifting our emphasis, while refocusing upon deconstruction as the experience of the Thing itself. To refocus in such a way would be to “admit that a type of substance exists that, without being parousia, is no longer confused with the incessant mobility of graphic difference” (Malabou, “Again” 36–7). House of Leaves, or what is historioplastic, admits just this. Yet, and at the same time, it constantly drives us forward, forcing us to acknowledge (as does the quintessential postmodern text) that another reading is always in order, that our sense of presence or meaning will always and inevitably slip away—that, in fact, it can only be held if it slips away. Indeed, even when Truant seems to be whole (and returned to himself), he sends us scrambling to return to the text once again and seek out what we missed—that is, in this case, an allusion to some “woman” that would have taken “some pretty impressive back-on-page-117 closereading to catch” (514). But for all of its clues and lures and deadends, House of Leaves constantly returns to the possibility of closure, always suggesting that (while it may be out of sight) there is always a limit, an end, a “‘type’ [that] legitimates [Danielewski’s] improvisations.” House of Leaves always returns (just as its characters are able to return to and find redemption with themselves) to that which is undeconstructable, the Real that (however ungraspable) defines (or is) the limits of any possible “remediation.” Through its sublation of postmodernism—or through its romantic redeployment of metafiction—a text like House of Leaves allows “the wounds of the spirit [to] heal and leave no scars” because it eschews the illusion of some perfect and eternal parousia, some final arrival.

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Affective Debts in Contemporary Film MARK HANNA: Nobody knows if the stock is going to go up, down, sidewise, or in fucking circles. Least of all stockbrokers. It’s all a fugazi. You know what a fugazi is? JORDAN BELFORT: Uh. Fugayzi. It’s a fake. MARK HANNA: Fugayzi, fugazi, it’s a whazy, it’s a whoozy, it’s . . . [whistles] Fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not fucking real. Right? JORDAN BELFORT: Right. —Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

Forming History Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) begins in silence, with an all-black screen. Before long raucous music plays: Gang of Four’s 1979 post-punk classic, “Nature’s Not in It.” Loosely timed to the song, credits abruptly appear and disappear on the screen. The font is ostentatiously modern; the color, hot pink. Following the initial few credits, the film cuts suddenly to a shot of Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) in her boudoir at Versailles. For the next several seconds—and as it does for much the film—the camera remains static. It passively captures Antoinette as she reclines, eyes closed, in a chaise lounge. Her hair, makeup, and clothing are perfect. A maid places a shoe on her slightly raised foot, the pink of which matches both her petticoats and the icing that covers the various decadent cakes sitting on trays in the foreground and the background. The rest of the room is, like the chaise upon which Antoinette reclines, pastel blue with white trim. This homogeneity of colorful excess is interrupted, only, by the maid’s simple black dress. The somewhat odd or surprising implication is that this dress—or the maid herself (who faces away from the screen)—is a visual echo of the song that continues over from the credits. Both are disruptive. While the maid’s self-effacing garment paradoxically functions as an irritant of negative space, the song jars against (or forces open) the mimetic closure of the scene. Given the static and passive

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camera, the use of an actual room in Versailles, the meticulous costumes and cakes, the deep focus, the relatively muted and naturalistic lighting—the scene is offered as an ostensibly perfect depiction of royalty in eighteenthcentury France. And yet, while song and maid effect a sense of latent or residual disjointedness (or supplementary excess), both also fit perfectly (if uncannily) into the scene: the maid, obviously, as an essential character in royal life; the song as both the sound of teenage exuberance and an overt indictment of the leisure class. Indeed, as the credits flash across the screen and the shot of a lounging Antoinette appears, the song’s lyrics anticipate or establish the film’s more obvious themes: “The problem of leisure / What to do for pleasure / Ideal love, a new purchase / A market of the senses.” As the scene progresses, Antoinette slowly turns her head toward the camera and lazily swipes the icing off the cake to her right (in the foreground). While eating the icing off her finger she lifts her head and turns toward the camera. As her gaze fixes upon the viewer and she seems suddenly to recognize the presence of a camera, surprise quickly transforms into sardonic resignation, or ironic indifference. She offers us a slight—defiant, or even smug—smile and then rolls her head back into a full and indulgent recline. Another cut takes us back to black and the remainder of the credits, beginning with the film’s title as a large pink and slanted banner. The music continues to play. Combined with the song, the aesthetic “stain” of the maid’s black dress, and the jarringly modern and brightly colored credits, Antoinette’s strikingly selfreflexive gaze and smile signals a troubling sense of debt (moral, economic, and mimetic). What makes this sense of debt uncanny is that it is offered as oddly constitutive, or apropos—as if it makes possible the very thing it undoes or disrupts. In terms of the film’s focus on the moral naivety of youth and the blindness of a royal elite, the dialectical tension between impoverishment and wealth, and the possibility of mimetic accuracy (as the apprehension of a past truth)—this debt is precisely unheimlich, that which has always been present and necessary yet necessarily unseen or denied. As we will see, this residual and uncanny sense of debt is radically affective, an expression of what cannot be apprehended, or what can only be grasped by letting go. For now, let’s simply note that in these first few frames the possibility and desire for mimetic closure is tied to both moral vacuity and a type of economic blindness: a self-induced fantasy, a refusal to see what must be sidelined or ignored if wealth (in the form of goods, beauty, or a sense of complete satisfaction) is to be claimed. What is lost in the ennui or sterility of such closure is, as the lyrics of the song go on to suggest, “interest”—the possibility of consequential movement in anticipation of what is still owed, still to come, yet to be paid in full. In pairing the mimetic sincerity of the mise-en-scène with a series of thematically linked disruptions, this initial scene establishes the modus

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operandi of the entire film: an effort toward historical accuracy that achieves “closure” (i.e., grasps what is anterior to both the present and its mediation in form) by exposing us (in an ironically sincere manner) to a “sense” of what it can never recuperate or apprehend in full. We are directed toward a strictly “obtuse” or “filmic” meaning, what Barthes likens to an “expenditure without exchange” (“Third Meaning” 62): unrecoverable debt. The film’s historical accuracy is thereby confirmed insofar as it is also frustrated, insofar as the sense of closure or mimetic sincerity is predicated upon its radical openness to what could always still be otherwise. Or, again, as Barthes might put it: “it shows its fissure and [or as] its suture” (58). After the song and credits abruptly end, we are taken to “Austria 1768.” A young Antoinette prepares for travel to (and for marriage in) France, where “All eyes will be on [her].” Throughout the following scenes—as Antoinette prepares to leave Austria and meet the dauphin in a forest that borders France—the camera’s primarily motivated movements remain slight and largely unnoticeable (unless it’s shaking in sympathy with a carriage or horse ride), the depth of field is typically expansive, the nondiegetic score is simple and “classical-sounding” piano, and the lighting is predominately natural (and reminiscent of a film like Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon [1975]). In other words, the film resolves itself into a mimetically accurate biopic and period drama: a stripped down (naturalistic, unfiltered, unromanticized) depiction of Antoinette’s life—from her marriage (at fourteen) to the events that precipitated her death by guillotine in 1793. Few elements intrude as overtly cinematic; mediation is reduced to the point of apparent transparency. What follows the odd credits and brief opening scene is asserted as a straightforward “costume drama”—one that clearly aims to recover (in truth) a historical subject who has been largely lost to oversimplified or over-romanticized historiography and legend. Antoinette is, after all, depicted as a young and sympathetic character, one who is caught up in political machinations and stringent traditions largely (if not wholly) outside her control. Dunst plays her as clever, playful, and dutiful—yet, to a certain degree, understandably naïve and disconnected from the world outside the protocols and concerns of a profligate aristocracy. Until the very end, when the mob arrives at Versailles, the film mirrors Antoinette’s lack of interest in or concern about an “outside” world; its focalization rarely seems entirely disconnected from (or even external to) Antoinette. There are no cuts to impoverished citizens, bread shortages, or side plots about revolutionaries and clandestine meetings—even if this other reality frequently haunts the film’s depictions of court life (as when we see the young king being pressured to send troops and money to America or Antoinette deciding to plant young and cheaper oak trees in the garden, etc.). Even outside the various POV

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shots, the focus remains almost invariably Antoinette’s: her perception of navigating life at court, a sexless marriage, and unrelenting demands for an heir. A central and repeated image in the film is, in fact, the “undressing” and “dressing” of Antoinette. This seemingly endless ritual begins at the border of France. After being forced to remove all items of Austrian origin, a completely nude Antoinette is redressed in specifically French garments. Even her Austrian dog is taken away. The formality of this event and Antoinette’s laborious and ritual-inflected journey to the French border is contrasted with shots of her future husband, Louis-Auguste (Jason Schwartzman), and a group of his friends talking casually in the woods and playing with swords. The obvious point is that the restrictive role in which Antoinette is placed (or “dressed”) serves a symbolic order that is overtly patriarchal. At the same time, though, the return of (slightly) more modern-sounding music—“The Melody of a Fallen Tree” (2004), a whimsical and guitardriven song by Windsor for the Derby—stresses the fact that this scene of young men (or boys) “playing” in the woods and talking about girls, while costumed in their military finery, is largely incongruous with the very order they represent and enforce. As the film progresses, this tension between overtly restrictive court traditions (evoked primarily through costuming, the unavoidable and intensely voyeuristic presence of courtiers, and the gilded confinement of Versailles itself) and the latent potential of a subject position anterior to such traditions or norms is echoed by the manner in which the film juxtaposes its naturalistic realism and illusion of mimetic accuracy (as a “costume drama”) with incongruous outbursts of modern music and moments of discontinuous editing and camera work—such as sudden zooms or abrupt cuts from extreme close-ups to extreme long shots. Moreover, the claustrophobia-inducing immobility of court life is clearly associated with Louis’s inexplicable discomfort with sexual activity. A central problem in the film is Antoinette’s inability to consummate her marriage with the dauphin, who is more comfortable hunting with his “boys” than engaging in ritualized, or mandated, sex. Thus the fixity and confinement of symbolic and patriarchal norms (inclusive of “bedding” rituals) are implicitly associated with a lack of “issue,” a form of sterility. Since it is presented as the problem of producing something new in a state of oppressive confinement and ritualized expectation, the ongoing lack of physical issue becomes indissociable from the subject of the film itself— the implication being that a certain sterility “obtains in” (to recall Derrida’s phrasing) any form of historiography that (dis)ingenuously offers itself as the “completed unification of the Idea and its reality” (Hegel, Aesthetics 1: 79). The oppressive nature of such historiography/norms is made overtly visual

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when, upon receiving a letter from her mother telling of her sister’s pregnancy and her brother’s impending marriage, Antoinette is shown leaning and sliding down a papered wall in Versailles. Since her dress matches (exactly, if inexplicably) the floral print behind her, the scene signals the possibility that Antoinette’s otherness, her infinite Thingness (what Giorgio Agamben might call her radical “potential”1) is in danger of being erased or swallowed utterly by both court life and historiographic form. This scene is immediately followed by another failed effort to sexually engage her husband; a repetition of an absurdly public and ornate breakfast ritual; and, finally, the birth of her French sister-in-law’s son. After showing Antoinette once again collapsing, alone, in yet another ornately decorated room—with, this time, her balled up and elegantly gowned form echoing (and being lost to) the shape of a curtain to her left—the tone of the film abruptly changes. Or rather, we are brought full circle to the explicitly metafictional nature of the credits and the opening scene. Following the shot of Antoinette balled up and weeping—and at almost precisely the film’s midpoint—a sudden cut takes us to a close-up of various delicate and brightly colored female shoes. The camera tracks slowly to the right and more shoes come into frame. A remix of Bow Wow Wow’s version of “I Want Candy” (1982) begins to play. As the camera passes by a pair of shoes that look to be made of sable fur, a subtle but noticeable jump cut brings us back to the furred shoes and a hand coming into frame to pick them up. In a series of extremely short cuts, more shoes are likewise selected. We then see a pair of feet swinging back and forth, as someone (presumably Antoinette) admires the fit and look of light turquoise footwear. Strewn about the floor are other eighteenth-century shoes, along with an obviously and disruptively anachronistic pair of purple and well-worn Converse high tops. From this point on, the montage speeds up while following the rhythm of the non-diegetic rock song; and we get a series of brief scenes (many of which arrive via discontinuous jump cuts) depicting Antoinette and her friends eating, gambling, trying on jewelry, selecting fabrics, having dresses fitted, and clothing their pets. The sense we get is that both Antoinette and the film that holds or defines her have completely burst their seams, that the In his extended reading of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Agamben associates potentiality with what is radically contingent—and which, contra a thinker like Meillassoux, he adamantly ties to contradiction: the possibility of “a being that can both be and not be” (261). Agamben’s speculations are thus directly applicable to the concept of historioplasticity I am here advancing. We might in fact say that the central “issue” of a film like Marie Antoinette can be “formulated in” the very question Agamben locates at the heart of Melville’s story: “Under what conditions can something occur and (that is, at the same time) not occur, be true no more than not be true?” (260).

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ever-tightening corset of the French court (which the film has subtly linked to the conventions of historical drama) has simply and quite suddenly broke apart. The seam, to lightly paraphrase Derrida, no longer holds. Rather than the naturalism of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon or something like Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), the film seems to default quite suddenly to the absurd historiographic metafiction of, say, Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) or Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part 1 (1981). In the latter films, the emphasis is clearly and comically placed on the artifice of historiography, on the fact that all history is merely an expression or effect of the present, of the form of its mediation. Men walk about ancient Rome with “ghetto blasters” and Leonardo da Vinci shows up to paint the actual Last Supper (in Brooks’s film) while police track a group of medieval knights who ride imaginary horses and use coconuts for sound effects (in Gilliam’s film). Given, however, its otherwise overt commitment to historical verisimilitude and the known “facts” of Antoinette’s life, this sudden and momentarily complete shift to metafiction (via discontinuous editing, montage, anachronistic objects and music, etc.) does not function to suggest that the historical thing is always lost to its apprehension in form, or that (more corrosively) the past is nothing but its simulacrum, the hyperreal. Instead, and if we recall our discussion of Kristeva in the previous chapter, this mid-film montage suggests the possibility of sustaining a “genotextual” eruption within, or as the always latent condition of, historiographic form. This genotextual (i.e., ungrammatical) eruption of a pre-symbolic chora is of course easily associated with Antoinette’s nude body and material physicality, and thus the issue of her womb. Since, for Kristeva, the semiotic chora is a site of infinitely contingent and womb-like production—that which “precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality . . . [and] can never be definitively posited” (Kristeva, Revolution 26)—we should not overlook the fact that Coppola resorts to a metafictional outburst or an explosion of plasticity (via the genotextual nonsense of montage, jump cuts, and anachronisms) at the very moment Antoinette is most frustrated and depressed about her inability to become pregnant. At the same time, this outburst and this frustration interrupts the sterility of the phenotextual/cinematic genre (what Stanley Cavell might call a “medium”2) that has been employed to deliver the It would surely be too much of a digression to turn here to Cavell’s complex efforts to redefine “medium” as a kind of “autonomism” that risks the sterilities of “tradition” while also functioning to “generate[] new instances” (World Viewed 107). After all, such a digression would need to consider the manner in which Cavell locates in instances of abstract expressionism an effort “to annul our spiritual-biological-political accommodations and attachments to enclosure . . . [and] reassert[] that however we may choose to parcel or not to parcel nature among ourselves, nature is held—we are

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truth of its historical subject. And yet, while the film begins to “move”—and something anterior to the rigid corset of historiography and costumed identity begins to emerge—it does so by paradoxically risking the loss of its formal coherence and thus its actual subject. As do the experimental modernisms Kristeva favors as radically genotextual, it risks slipping into yet another form of the Hegelian symbolic, a form of formlessness that abandons—or leaves “lying who knows where” (Hegel, Phenomenology 27)—the very Thing it desires to express. In modernism, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, such symbolic formlessness claims truth in its recourse to impenetrable stylistics and ambiguity; in postmodernism, disruptions of formal coherence and transparency signal the inevitable artificiality of form while moments of recursivity expose the “truth” of the sign’s profound emptiness. Either way, truth becomes the condition of obscurity, impenetrability, or (worst of all) pure subjective transference; we find ourselves trapped in endless or atemporal subjective immediacy. In this specific sense, the appearance of a pair of Converse high tops would simply or only suggest the rather inconsequential “fact” that Antoinette’s excess, exuberance, and obsessions with fashion are no different from the excess, exuberance, and obsessions of today’s teenager; and the jarring cinematic techniques would merely expose us to the artificiality of what is before us: nothing but a film. However, Coppola manages to redeploy these metafictional devices so as to bring us into contact with affective contingency, a sense of relationality at the heart of both the subject and its representation in form. This perpetually dehiscing wound—of infinitely contingent potential, the trauma of endless debt—is overcome, or traversed, because it is allowed to persist as both antithetical to and a necessary condition of formal coherence. We are given to understand that the possibility of grasping the past in truth entails enduring the infinitely “minimal gap” that makes its pure apprehension a constitutive impossibility—and that symbolic or avant-garde incoherence, like the illusory and mendacious “accuracy” of most biopics and period pieces, only or merely absconds loss. The radical incomprehensibility, newness, or “issue” of l’intrus (to recall Nancy) can only arrive if it arrives affectively as that which is necessarily lodged within the

held by it—only in common” (114, my emphasis). Nevertheless, Cavell’s “Excursus” into modernist painting relates directly to our discussion here (and to the possibility that extremes of nonrepresentational art may actually lose what they aim to let loose in the “wholly open” [111])—especially since Cavell moves directly from his consideration of nonrepresentational artists like Morris Louis to a discussion of “Exhibition and SelfReference” in early-twentieth-century film and thus the oddity of metafictional moments in films such as George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940), Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940), or H. C. Potter’s Hellzapoppin (1941).

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comprehensible, within the coherence of form itself. Its arrival must always be, in this specific sense, a form of dialectic sublation. As a work of historioplastic metafiction, Marie Antoinette must therefore tarry with the risk of perversity—or, rather, the risk of losing its subject in comedic extremes, the point (as Hegel puts it) when “the actual self of the actor coincides with what he impersonates” (Phenomenology 452). This is the point when the ontological is utterly overcome, lost to its performative expression(s). Again, this is a matter of implying that there is no Antoinette anterior to Dunst’s performance, or Coppola’s depiction of eighteenthcentury France. Peak comedy (as the collapse of the signified in its signifier, the withering of dialectical proximity) is always, on some level, peak postmodernism.3 However, the genotextual outburst that occurs midway through Coppola’s otherwise constrained period piece echoes, or renews, the potential efficacy of the “romantically” comedic. As outburst, the scene signals both the possibility of apprehending its infinitely plastic subject (by sustaining its plasticity within the notional unity of the most suitable or accurate of forms) and the possibility of losing that subject to a form of “logo centric” nonsense.4 The latter danger is, not surprisingly (and especially if we think of the law-governing role Lacan ascribes to the “king” in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”), associated with the sudden death of the king—that is, Louis’s grandfather. Immediately following the “I Want Candy” montage (but before the king has died), Antoinette and her friends, along with Louis, secretly attend a masquerade party. The metafiction of the montage is now clearly reflected in (or extended by) the perverse inclinations of the characters—in particular, Antoinette’s increasingly overt tendency to revel in, and exploit, the necessity of “performing” herself. The danger that she will lose herself within the roles she plays is signaled by yet another non-diegetic song—one that, significantly, begins to blend into the diegesis. The song is, once again, overtly anachronistic—the post-punk “Hong Kong Garden” (1978) by Siouxsie and the Banshees. As the scene progresses, and Antoinette and company join the For a useful discussion of comedy as it relates to Hegelian dialectics and the necessity of sustaining a relation between the finite and the infinite, lack and excess, see McGowan’s Only a Joke Can Save Us—chapter 4, especially. While my argument here certainly echoes McGowan’s assertion that the best or most ethical philosophical mode is comedic in nature—insofar as it negotiates or “posits the possibility of the intersection between finitude and the infinite” (86)—I do not want to gloss over the fact that the comedic necessarily dissolves (or reaches an unproductive peak) the moment what is finite and what is infinite become indistinguishable, or (more specifically) when the latter is no longer sustained in proximate relation to the former. 4 Recall Taylor’s effort to distinguish between logo centrism and logocentrism—as discussed in Chapter 4. 3

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dancing guests, a cut takes us to a high-angle shot of the dance floor. The song, which at first sounds orchestral and therefore temporally appropriate, changes abruptly into modern punk, and the camera slowly begins to zoom into the dancing couples. At first the dancing appears formal, and slightly out of time with the obviously non-diegetic song. However, as the camera slowly approaches the floor, the various eighteenth-century guests seemingly forgo formality and begin to bounce and jump in time to the song (not unlike teenagers at a rave). In the heat of this perversely performative evening, this flattening of time, Antoinette meets her future lover: Count Axel Fersen (Jamie Dornan). The freedom of performance, of play, thus comes to signal (also) the possibility of fertility in (or as) unbridled sexuality. Indeed, soon after this night of revelry and masks, the king dies. And not long after his death Louis finally musters the ability to consummate his marriage—the suggestion being that, as newly anointed king (yet, as he bemoans, still “too young to reign”), he has, on some level, escaped the sterilizing “law of the father.” Anything and everything suddenly becomes possible: parties and gambling and glutinous excess, particularly. But from the masquerade onward, the form of the film begins to diverge (if only gradually) from the actions and behaviors of its characters—especially Antoinette, who is depicted as both a loving mother and a queen who has little restraint or interest in a reality outside Versailles and her “humble” hermitage (i.e., Hameau de la Reine). In other words, as Antoinette becomes increasingly intent on escaping reality by losing herself in her various performances—as mother, as adulterous lover, as humble dairymaid at Hameau de la Reine, as lip-syncing opera singer, and so on—the film begins to move inexorably toward an end it cannot evade, or deny. A tendency toward naturalistic realism reasserts itself. By the time we witness a late-night garden dinner party—in which Antoinette, Fersen, and others play a game that has them attempting to guess the identity that has been pasted on their foreheads—the film’s subtle critique of a social order that trades hegemonic law for teenage indifference (or, at best, oscillates between the two) functions to negate its own tendency toward the sterility of mimetic closure (on the one hand) and the metastasizing productivity of unfettered play or style (on the other), logocentrism and logo centrism. Of course, certain metafictional flourishes nevertheless persist. We get an odd moment in which Antoinette’s daughter speaks in French (as her mother continues to speak in American English). We also get a scene in which a reproduction of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s famous portrait of Marie Antoinette and Her Children (1787) is placed on a wall of the palace. Not only is the painting an obvious simulacrum of the original—as clearly modern technique presents Antoinette in blue instead of red, and the child who sits on Antoinette’s lap in the original is missing—a

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baby has been inserted into the crib to which Antoinette’s son gestures. While the camera passively lingers on this painting, it is eventually removed and replaced by a “corrected” version; the baby in the crib, who was stillborn, has been erased. Ultimately, though, what we get is a kind of double negation—or what Hegel famously calls a “negation of negation” (Logic 89). While the film’s metafictional devices denaturalize its otherwise natural and realistic conceits (imbuing even its most coherent and seemingly transparent representations of the past with a sense of absence), its subtle but increasingly overt critique of a social order more intent upon play and perverse acts of wanton selfcreation sublates (i.e., holds to while also letting go, or undoing) its negation of mimetic efficacy. Especially insofar as the perverse elements of the film’s form mimetically echo the characters and their moment in history, the sense of absence we are forced to endure becomes increasingly uncanny. Such absence is not, therefore, offered so as to legitimize the utterly unrestricted play that typically defines postmodern metafiction—as when, for instance, a character like Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) manages to escape punishment for murder because his wealthy existence as a Hollywood producer is just as contrived as the existence of any other Hollywood protagonist. The absence in Marie Antoinette is exposed as that which lingers at the heart of the Real itself. The uncanniness of this absence, the sense that it is a repressed yet constitutive attribute of the historical subject (and not a denial of an ontological anterior that might sanction cancerous explosions of form, or additions of “any old thing”), is offered as an expression of the Real. For this precise reason the final lingering shot is so particularly affective. During this shot of Antoinette’s completely ransacked and vandalized bedroom, the camera remains static and disconnected, cinematically desutured5 insofar as its focalization is effectively null and never (subsequently) reasserted. Who or what is possibly looking? Certainly not Antoinette, whose absence is glaring. The ostensible point of the shot is that the entire palace is vacant, effectively abandoned. The only light is the sunlight that streams

My use of the term “suture” here evokes a rather complex and troubled theory of cinema— one that essentially echoes Lacan’s theory of subject formation (from the “mirror stage” to the moment of constitutive separation that defines one’s entry into the symbolic) so as to explain the way in which film manages to establish and sustain a comforting sense of subjectivity in viewers. The basic point is that film moves us from a disruptively traumatic sense that there is no subject (via shots that seem to have no subjective viewpoint) to a reassuring sense that what we see aligns with what someone else (in the diegesis) might be seeing. The alternative to suturing (which is often associated with continuity editing and the shot/countershot technique) is to leave a viewer untethered from any sense of coherent meaning or subjectivity.

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in through the windows; the only sound is diegetic, a kind of white noise mixed with the sounds of nature outside. Once again, an issue of form is suggested—as the violent effort to destroy the room ostensibly stands in for the explosive assertion of an other (e.g., the French citizenry or unfathomable expressions of love or loneliness) that the narrative has necessarily elided in its efforts to paint a coherent portrait of Antoinette (whose own tendency to exceed representational form has been no less explosive). But here the explosive violence of what can never be accounted for in full is registered in the coherence of form—even as (or because) that form reflects or recalls a troubling disconnect, a type of dehiscence or fissure that signals an unaccountable debt that is only grasped in the moment it slips away. As a microcosm of the entire film, this final “still”6 suggests the possibility of apprehending an infinitely plastic subject (of sustaining its generative movement or motility in the fixity of form). This is because it sustains a sense of relational disjuncture by sublating it. The effect is an uncanny echo of the disjuncture at the heart of the subject itself—a heart (to recall, again, Nancy) that is defined by “impassive gravity” (Nancy, “Heart of Things” 170) and that “does not even beat” (167).7 This disjuncture is, therefore, what paradoxically grounds the film and ensures its mimetic efficacy. Juxtaposed, then, to this final shot, the opening shot can be read as a kind of warning. While the negative space of the maid’s dress signals the constitutive lack that gives meaningful shape to (yet undermines the always asymptotic progress toward closure in) representational accounts, Antoinette’s smug and self-reflexive gesture toward the camera can be read as the evasive if also protective smile of a pervert who has learned to exploit such lack, who only ever plays a role, plays at being who they really are for the Other. Such a pervert revels in and manipulates what they are for the Other so as to expose the artificiality of everyone and everything else. But to revel in such a way is to refuse the revolutionary—or, perhaps, revelationary—shock of an affective debt.

Affective Interruption To clarify further how films like Coppola’s metafictionally grasp (while sustaining the ungraspable affect of) otherness, it might be wise to consider The extreme stillness of this final shot seems, in fact, to take seriously Barthes’s suggestion that “to a certain extent . . . the filmic, very paradoxically, cannot be grasped in the film ‘in situation,’ ‘in movement,’ ‘in its natural state,’ but only in that major artefact, the still” (“Third Meaning” 65). 7 See Chapter 2. 6

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a more recent and somewhat more overt example. I am thinking specifically of Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya (2017). But I want to move toward this example slowly. While a careful look at Gillespie’s film will return us to many of the problems Marie Antoinette negotiates via a form of historioplasticity, it seems necessary (at this point) to attend directly to the concept of affect—a concept that’s haunted our discussion since the outset and that’s become largely indissociable from contemporary efforts to define a post-postmodern aesthetic sensibility.8 As, however, I have suggested throughout, I am not interested in employing “affect” as a synonym for emotion, or as a way of describing a work’s ability to make “emotional connections.” As is hopefully clear in the preceding discussion of Coppola’s film (and in the preceding chapters), I understand affect to be the experience of an uncanny debt, the radical and ungraspable motility of a Thing in-common. In other words, my use of affect is (perhaps) most akin to Jameson’s. But such an assertion requires some explaining, and thus a digression of sorts. Fortunately, such a digression will allow us to attend (if somewhat cursorily) to several other germane examples while circling back to the “ethics of otherness” that largely defines Coppola’s film—and, in turn, Gillespie’s. Let’s begin, then (again), with Jameson. In his essay on “Wagner as Dramatist and Allegorist,” Jameson questions the tendency of “affect theorists” to “concentrate their descriptions on this or that allegedly fundamental affect, such as shame (Silvan Tomkins) or in a more general way melancholia” (30).9 Jameson’s point is that theories of affect run aground the moment they begin to perseverate on namable or thematizable emotions, on that which is already contained within the given possibilities of narrative and discourse, or of perhaps (more broadly, more simply) “symbolic inertia.” As Eugenie Brinkema points out (and as Jameson seems implicitly to suggest), any tendency to fixate on conceptual emotions risks fomenting a critical obsession with subjective experience, on those various namable or describable emotions or physiological responses a work of art might induce: “However thrilling it may be to write and even read the personal accounts of As is perhaps most evident in the work of, say, Gibbons, Clare, and Pieter Vermeulen. I have discussed the former two critics in the preceding chapters. For the latter, see (specifically) his Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel. And, of course, an entire section of van den Akker, Gibbons, and Vermeulen’s Metamodernism collection is dedicated to “Affect.” 9 Melancholia and mourning are, of course, central concepts in discussions of affect. A broad sampling of this discussion can be found in Loss: The Politics of Mourning—a collection of essays edited by David Eng and David Kazanjian. At the same time, and as Brinkema demonstrates at some length, such a work largely justifies Jameson’s brief suggestion that themes and discussions of melancholia (as a productive “affect”) slip into problems of “fundamental” or reductively “named” emotions. 8

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any theorist’s tremulous pleasures and shudderings, it is a signature of work on affectivity that must be resisted, for it tells us far more about being affected than about affects” (32). More significantly, and in terms of the relationship between affect and film (Brinkema’s central concern), “the greatest danger of this approach is that it emphasizes the successful consumption of affect and thus makes theoretical accounts of each private feeling experience complicit with the explicit marketing of feeling from the commercial side of film production” (32, my emphasis).10 As Brinkema goes on to suggest, this trajectory toward a kind of critical solipsism—a trajectory upon which, we should certainly take a moment to note, the so-called innovations of “surface reading” and “postcriticism” can be mapped—brings us, full circle, to the problems W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley outlined in their 1949 (and now largely ignored) indictment of the “affective fallacy”: “that a poem or story induces . . . vivid images, intense feelings, or heightened consciousness is neither anything which can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic to take into account. The purely affective report is either too physiological or it is too vague” (Wimsatt as qtd in Brinkema 34). Quite clearly, Jameson’s goal is to identify a theory of affect that escapes this “fallacy”—even if, at the same time, he has little interest in returning us to New Criticism’s naïve appeals to “objectivity.” To do so, Jameson recalls Kant’s efforts to distinguish between “feelings and emotions.” With this distinction in mind, and while largely echoing (as we will see) the work of Brian Massumi, Jameson asserts the following: “as bodily states affects are nameless” (30). They are not, in this sense, “essentializable,” but rather This specific problem (albeit, as it relates to literature not film) is the very point from which Clare begins his analysis of “metaffective fiction”—which, he argues, resists what Rachel Greenwald Smith (in her Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism) identifies as a problematic effort to employ “formal innovation” as a way of establishing “emotional connections [that] merely conform to the demands of a neoliberal market” (2). Clare thus follows Smith (while turning, also, to the work of Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual and Michael Hardt in his foreword to The Affective Turn) so as to find a balance between certain naïve “post-postmodern” returns to emotional connectivity or “sincerity” and the more radical (or unconceptualizable) “affect” of “intensity, vitality, [or what] ‘arises in the midst of in-between-ness’” (3). In the end, though, what Clare calls “metaffective fiction” seems to abandon (à la postmodernism) any possibility of apprehending or finally touching upon a past thing (truth, person, reality) so as to evoke (only) the possibility of “potentially new forms of feeling and being (together) that escape hegemonic, or even postmodern counterhegemonic, discourse” (13). What is historioplastic differs from what is metaffective, then, insofar as the former effects an experience of what is radically anterior, or other; we are confronted with an infinite truth that nevertheless remains perpetually before its expression in form—before, that is, its paradoxical arrival or apprehension or affect in the present. It is, I am suggesting, precisely this present anterior that makes anything like “new forms of feeling” possible.

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“multiple and perpetually variable: they shimmer like [an] orchestra . . . in constant mutability” (30). Affects, in other words, are never “meanings” (31). The larger suggestion is that meaning is never affective. There is, therefore, for Jameson, no affectiveness in the Italian tradition of the aria because the aria “wishes to express one thing powerfully and completely, and then stop” (32). In contrast, “the Wagner ideal of the so-called-endless melody” entails “extraordinary variability . . . as it ceaselessly develops its musical language, like an endless Proustian or Faulknerian sentence” (32). The effect of an affective art form—which Jameson encourages us to associate with various other modern innovations, from “Flaubertian crosscutting to Eisenstein’s montage” (33)—is, therefore and not surprisingly (for Jameson), temporal in nature. As Jameson puts it, his theory of affect is a theory of “two temporalities: the temporality of the named, that is the reified, emotion, will be that of past and future, of time as destiny that can be narrated. The temporality of affect, on the other hand, will be that of a perpetual present, a kind of eternal present if you will—a temporal perspective calculated to destroy narrative as such” (31). This “eternal present” is tantamount to whatever is infinite, in endless excess of temporal structure, or form. It is antithetical to narrative form in the same way that God (or the divine, more generally) is antithetical to the human. (Jameson will, after all, eventually arrive in this essay at a Hegelian understanding of the Christian dialectic— which he will then associate with certain “autoreferential” [46] devices.) We would in fact have to think of this eternal present as antithetical to any given present, to any particular moment caught up or grasped within a linear progress from past to future—which is, of course, always indicative of time as a mappable field, a destiny, a fate. Mimesis, in this sense, always risks a form of destiny, a stifling enclosure; or, it risks a “sense of system [associated with] capitalism itself ” (48). Affect breaks this enclosure, disrupts or shakes up this “sense of system.” The problem for Jameson, then (in his efforts to position Wagner as the quintessential modernist), is twofold: “how the pull of affect is registered in the musical fabric, and how it inflects the plot as such” (33). This is worth stressing: Affect is registered insofar as it inflects. Speaking specifically about opera: it occurs within, or sustains a kind of symbiotic relationship with, the “fabric” (i.e., the “stitched-togetherness”) of coherent or meaningful musical form. To return to film, we could say affect is necessarily “registered” in the cinematic suture, the otherwise transparent piecing together of shots, perspectives, and sounds (i.e., the creation of meaning and/ as “subjectivity”). In the preceding discussion of Marie Antoinette, did we not in fact see how a certain form of metafiction might effect such a registering? The larger point is that—whether it registers in music, film, or literature—

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affect inflects (bends, or reforms) sense.11 It is not simply without or outside sense; it’s anteriority is necessarily in the present, or not at all. To make this clear, let’s turn (for a moment) to the possibility of thinking affect as disgust— or, better, the possibility of thinking disgust as the consequence of affect. As Derrida suggests in “Economimesis”—an interrogation of Kant’s discussion of beauty and fine art in the third critique—disgust (as what undoes or corrupts “taste,” as what is “inedible”) signals a violent and unreconcilable interruption of an otherwise “beautiful” aesthetic economy, the perfect product of a “genius” who produces ex nihilo. In a state of pure play and thus free of any economic pressures or mechanistic constraints, such a genius produces the beauty of nature itself: “Art,” for Kant (Derrida asserts), “is beautiful to the degree that it is productive like productive nature, that it reproduces the production and not the product of nature” (10). While drawing our attention to the fact that Kant’s entire discussion of fine art and genius is located “between . . . two remarks on salary” (4), Derrida troubles this ideal of a mimetic act that is more poesis12 than mimesis: a pure transparency without any residual debts, wholly “disinterested” or without interest. Derrida’s central point (if we can risk oversimplifying things) is that the divine freedom Kant attributes to the artist as genius—who is capable of producing the pure pleasure, or universal communicability, of the beautiful— is necessarily tied (throughout Kant’s “Analytic”) to a restriction of form that undermines its very possibility: “Something compulsory . . . must intervene as a ‘mechanism’ [Mechanismus]. Without this coercive constriction, this tight corset [corsage], the spirit which must be free in art ‘would have no

This take on affect—and, indeed, the entire essay in which it is developed—should be read as a supplement to Jameson’s (slightly) earlier arguments concerning affect in The Antimonies of Realism (which even includes a useful “table” contrasting emotion with affect [see page 44]). The very fact that Jameson manages to expose the affective in works of nineteenth-century realism (or opera) seems, of course, to undermine the claim, made here, that works of nineteenth-century realism are comparable to the forms of classicism Hegel critiques in his Aesthetics. My point, though, is simply that Hegelian “classicism” is the central danger or defining tendency of such realism, and that today’s forms of metafiction work to eschew (while simultaneously entertaining) such danger. In other words, historioplasticity can most certainly be uncovered in all manner of stylistic modes—from nineteenth-century realism through to modern and postmodern experimentation. It is therefore understandable that we may indeed experience “affect” in Zola “as a kind of invisible figuration, which doubles the literal invisibly; a convex that shows through, as though reality itself blushed imperceptibly, and some strange new optical illusion separated the trees from one another stereoscopically, allowing their three dimensions to be visible three-dimensionally” (47). 12 Derrida associates Kant’s impossible mimesis with physis (nature itself), not poesis. However, the latter term works well here to denote the possibility of pure production, and not reproduction. 11

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body and would evaporate altogether’” (7).13 What is so particularly odd in Kant is the fact that this delimiting and corruptive corset is both necessary and utterly inimical to the pleasurable and universal experience of artistic beauty. Disgust in Kant is associated with both the moment when the arbitrariness and unsuitability of formal constraint is registered (i.e., we lose faith in a “feeling of freedom in the play of our cognitive faculties” [Kant as qtd in Derrida 9, my emphasis]) and the moment when we are bereft of any sense of constraint. In the latter moment “the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and thus it is impossible that it can be regarded as beautiful” (Kant as qtd in Derrida 22). Disgust is therefore a response to the vomitus excess that “abolishes representative distance” (22) as well as a response to the moment in which we register the constitutive and corruptive “frame” that keeps such excess safely corralled. The pleasure of artistic beauty is therefore tied to the fantasy of a closed economic system, without debt or interest or any sense of artificial or unnatural law. The moment this fantasy is disrupted, or exposed as fantasy, a trauma of bodily “enjoyment” (what Derrida links to the excess of jouissance) explodes upon/within us—something that cannot be swallowed or metabolized into sense.14 As we saw, this connection between the “coercive constriction” of a “corset” (as it relates to the expression of a material body, or what “gives body to things” [7]) and a mimetic form that gives shape to that which exists before it is everywhere implied in Marie Antoinette. The film echoes Derrida’s critique of Kant insofar as it shows us how this sense of a “closed economy remains threatened from within by disgust, and [a certain conception] of the beautiful falls apart when it reaches the point of disgust and vomiting—a point at which the economy reaches its limit in terms of what is absolutely inassimilable” (Derrida, “Interview”). Or rather, the film’s metafictional ruptures signal, if we continue to follow Derrida, a kind of affective vomit, an inexplicable registering of “some other unrepresentable, unnameable, unintelligible, insensible, unassimilable, obscene other which forces enjoyment and whose irrepressible violence would undo the hierarchizing authority of logocentric analogy—its power of identification” (“Economimesis” 25). In this specific Or, as Levinas assures us, the “fallacious frivolity of [such] play” is never “free of interest” (Otherwise 6). 14 For a related (and somewhat more extended discussion) of Derrida’s reading of Kantian disgust as it relates to cinematic affect, see Brinkema’s thoughtful take on the function of “vomit” in Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Of particular interest is the way in which Brinkema’s analysis of a particular (and infamous) scene in the film buttresses her specifically Barthesian take on affect, and thus the possibility of registering a “third” or “obtuse” meaning in film. 13

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sense, we might say that the aim of Antoinette as a work of historioplastic metafiction is to “respect . . . [what] cannot be assimilated . . . a remainder that cannot be read, that must remain alien. This residue can never be interrogated as the same, but must be constantly sought out anew, and must continue to be written” (Derrida, “Interview”). This brings us back to Jameson’s idea of Wagner’s “endless melody.” Jameson’s somewhat surprising point is that this endless melody is only endless insofar as it is interrupted, or attenuated by, an expression of unified or teleological temporality. This expression is, in Wagner, the “leitmotif ”— which, for someone like Adorno, seems directly linked to “the emergence of mass culture, kitsch, and movie music” (Jameson, “Wagner” 34). Kant, presumably, would associate it with the “agreeableness” or “enjoyment” of handicraft, of mercenary art. But Jameson, while invoking Adorno’s own arguments about modern art, dismisses the possibility that the leitmotif is merely a “symptom of swiftly spreading and intensifying commodification” (34). Rather, he suggests that it functions like “the scar left by destiny on the musical present” (34). More specifically: “the leitmotif is what destiny gives the new musical language of affect to absorb, to draw into itself, to assimilate into its wondrous new fabric; in that sense . . . leitmotifs are little more than the indigestible bones and gristle an affective music has to spit out” (34). The odd sense of inversion here is, of course, striking. It is not affect that is spit out, or that causes one to spit, but affect itself that does the spitting, spitting out elements of a reductive coherence that does not (quite) suit. Nevertheless, the point fully echoes one of the more interesting implications in Derrida’s reading of Kantian aesthetics: that the affect of the work, its ability to produce disgust (its disgustingness), necessarily entails the very formalities or Levinasian thematics that paradoxically forestall such disgust. Affect is effected by the experience of an uncanny incongruity, the unresolvability or necessity of “contradiction itself ” (Jameson, “Wagner” 37). Or, as Brian Massumi puts it, affect (as experiential “intensity” or movement) is akin to the “bifurcation point . . . at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually exclusive potentials, only one of which is ‘selected’” (32–3). Affect is the experience in form, in the singular theme of what is selected (i.e., “always in it but not of it” [33]) “of the unclassifiable, the unassimilable, the never-yet-felt, the felt for less than a half a second, again for the first time—the new” (33). To be confronted with the inescapable nature of mimetic debt is, then, to experience a kind of disgust. But this experience of disgust remains contingent upon, or the necessary effect of, a frame that endeavors to draw our attention elsewhere. The disgusting is not experienced unless it breaches the border of pleasurable taste, an otherwise closed system; it must somehow

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arrive along with, or as, what is palatable and fully digestible. Perhaps another way of putting this is that its unrecognizability must be lodged in the recognizable. Otherwise it would be nothing at all, nothing we would notice anyway—nothing we would accidently try to take in, try to metabolize.15 Or, perhaps, in more specifically Kantian terms, if the understanding and reason are not in some sense engaged, what is disgusting will simply pass by unnoticed, unregistered. After all, as Nancy assures us, l’intrus always “arrives”—it’s just that “his coming will not cease” (l’intrus 1). This is why Brinkema is most certainly correct to assert that “it is only because we must read for it that affect has any force at all” (38).16 What this implies is that affect is both antithetical to and the consequence of form. In this sense, as Brinkema assumes (and while echoing Derrida’s suggestion that vomitus is what cannot be mourned or finally idealized17), the sustainment of affect is always a refusal of “appropriative dialectics” (70)—grief without the possibility of mourning. But we must untangle this assumption from Derrida’s early to mid-career assertions that Hegelian dialectics recuperate “everything negated” and thus resort to expressions of “unity and totality” so as to fend against the “anxiety of the infinite” (Brinkema 70).18 What I have been attempting to demonstrate (throughout) is that it is Hegel who insists most radically upon the necessity of form to the production of affect, to the production and experience of something that is radically other to what we can conceive in our pregiven or “precorporative” vocabularies. In other words, the possibility of sustaining an incongruous yet symbiotic relationship between form and affect, between full accounts and residual debts, between the finite and the infinite, entails an ongoing

Is this not, on some level, what Hegel suggests when he asserts that “It is soon evident that what in ordinary reflection is, as content, at first separated from the form cannot in fact be in itself formless, devoid of determination (in that case it would be a vacuity, the abstraction of the thing-in-itself)” (Logic 18)? 16 It’s worth noting here that both Brinkema and Massumi take time to insist that the turn to affect cannot be a simple turn away from poststructuralism, or its various philosophical antecedents. Both in fact stress the manner in which many of the theories that are quickly dismissed (and thus not even “read”) by theorists of affect anticipate and help to resolve the problems inherent in affect theory. For Brinkema, especially—and in a manner that anticipates our discussion of neomaterialist reading practices in Chapter 2—what gets lost is a practice of reading that cannot be dissociated from experiences of affect. 17 See, for instance, Derrida’s description of vomit and the “work of mourning” on page 22 of “Economimesis.” 18 Brinkema is referring here to (and quoting from) Derrida’s very early “Structure, Sign, and Play.” Of course, Derrida persists (until at least the late 1990s) to reject Hegel’s system as all consuming. As he says in a much latter interview (which I quote as a supplement to “Economimesis”), “nothing is inedible in Hegel’s infinite metabolism.” 15

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commitment to dialectics—but in the specific sense of a sublative proximity that is never a hallucinatory or classical synthesis (i.e., the fully recuperative work of mourning). Sublation, instead—as that which grasps and lets go, that holds by letting slip—is what makes possible an experience of the infinite; it makes it possible because it makes possible its arrival and sustainment (as that which continues to arrive) in the finite. It fixes the thing while keeping its infinite plasticity, its explosive potential, in play. In the moment of its formal recuperation, what is grasped remains in flight. Sublation, in this sense, expresses in time what is forever anterior to the present.19 What is chronicled is atemporality itself. As Jameson puts it, “To unify [such] incommensurable dimensions is to underscore their difference; to identify them with each other is to heighten our perception of their distance from each other” (“Wagner” 27). The paradox is this: the more we attempt to loosen the constriction of form the less likely we are to grasp or experience what form necessarily elides. This refusal to gamble on any notion of unity by expressing only the impossibility of a final account defines the Hegelian symbolic—and, as we have seen, cannot be dissociated from a tendency toward perversion. Nevertheless, we lose the Thing altogether the moment we give over to the hallucinatory assumption that form can ever “square” the circle of the Thing.20 This is the problem of the classical in Hegel—or, we might say, of documentary realism and/or the absolutism of science. As a return to the symbolic through the classical (or as a negation of a negation) what is romantic (in Hegel) suggests a model for what Massumi likens to the ideal of a “vocabulary . . . for that which is imperceptible but whose escape from perception cannot but be perceived” (36). What we are talking about, of course (or again), is a vocabulary that means, that communicates some Thing, while simultaneously leaving us exposed to what is meaningless or in excess of its communication. This is an act of closure that sustains distance. But this distance cannot be given (as it often seems to be given in postmodern metafiction) as a symptom of a Thing’s impossibility, of its lack of existence outside its construction/constriction in form. To present it in this way is to mandate play without restraint, metastasizing forms of perversity. A romantically affective form of representation must thus resist We can certainly say (along with Brinkema) that dialectics, as sublation, “purloins grief ”—but we must also recall that, as we saw in Chapter 2, “to purloin” means to steal and to place at a distance. To sublate is, then, most certainly to purloin, to pick up by keeping what is held far away, to experience grief in the accomplishment of mourning. 20 I’m alluding here to Lacan’s reference to “the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego’s verifications” (“Mirror Stage” 4). Or, as Žižek puts it, “The Real is that X on whose account this ‘squaring of the circle’ ultimately is doomed to fail” (Tarrying 43). 19

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(to turn again to Žižek’s phrasing) expressions of debt that merely “confirm[] the impossibility of knowing something in truth” (Sublime Object 177). It must instead register the experience of “an epistemological obstacle [that is] the very index of the fact that we have ‘touched the Truth’; we are in the heart of the ‘Thing-in-itself ’ by the very trait which appeared to bar our access to it. The implication, of course, is that this ‘Thing-in-itself ’ is already mutilated, split, marked by a radical lack, structured around an antagonistic kernel” (177). To a certain degree, of course, film is already more suited to this task than is literary fiction. Film necessarily struggles to erase the distance between the apparatus that captures (and screens) a thing and the Thing itself. Perhaps this is why, for Barthes, film has a greater tendency to register a “third meaning”—an “obtuse” or “supplementary meaning” that accompanies what is purely informational and what is overtly symbolic and that “seems to open the field of meaning totally” (“Third Meaning” 55). What we are tracking here, though, is the possibility or mode of ethically accenting such a meaning—not to insist upon and consequently exploit the purely fictional nature of knowledge (and, even, of reality itself) but rather to register the affective truth of the Real.

Economimetic Collapse Perhaps we should not be surprised, given our discussion thus far—or given the possibility of stitching together arguments about the death of postmodernism, the sociopolitical consequences of a “post-truth” crisis, the seemingly unstoppable trajectory of neoliberal economics, and the relationship between debt and affective narrative forms—that we see a veritable explosion of metafiction (in film, especially) in the years following the traumatic collapse of the stock market on September 29, 2008. For instance, Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015) and Vice (2018) employ metafictional devices as a way of understanding the event itself, or the types of political actors, activity, and thinking that made it possible. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) likewise employs selfreflexive moments so as to depict and critique a contemporary economic order that is fundamentally tied to the vagaries of fictious capital—and that, as a consequence, can be exploited with ease and a certain amoral joy. Television shows like Matthew Carnahan’s House of Lies (2013) and Beau Willimon’s American remake of House of Cards (2013) take similar approaches. The former thematizes the attitudes that lead to the housing crisis in 2007 and 2008 by frequently depicting its central character, a single father and unscrupulous broker named Marty Khan (Don Cheadle),

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“freezing time” and “playing” with elements of the mise-en-scène while speaking directly to his “audience.”21 In the latter, the main character’s various fourth-wall breaks function to stress the line between a specifically “economic” conception of reality and an utterly unrestrained politics of perversity. On our way to Gillespie’s I, Tonya—and thus back to a specifically historioplastic ethics of otherness—we would do well to consider (if only in brief) a sampling of such works. This will allow us to further accentuate the somewhat fraught relationship between self-reflexivity and economimetic (or affective) debt. A good starting point—as it is one of the most recent and exemplary attempts to redeploy metafiction as a tool for critiquing and overcoming a contemporary reality of economics—is Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat (2019). Soderbergh’s film is narrated by Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Antonio Banderas)—the “real” cofounders of Mossack Fonseca, the notorious law firm in Panama whose “papers” were released in 2016. As the story unfolds, and we are shown the “real-life” consequences of market manipulation and outright money laundering (including a story about a tragic boating accident involving a tourist company that unwittingly purchased unviable insurance from a “shell corporation”), we get scenes of Mossack and Fonesca speaking directly to the camera. Occasionally they are shown sitting somewhere wholly outside the film’s diegesis; at other times, they walk casually in or out of a scene. They also, of course, play “parts” in the narrative itself. Somewhat simplistically, then, Mossack and Fonesca’s efforts to control the “fictional” diegesis—and our understanding of their roles in the narratives that unfold—parody their far more successful efforts to “play” a market almost entirely loosed from functional regulations, constraints, or the gravity of material existence. Their metafictional efforts to (as the pseudo-academics of popular media are fond of saying) “flip the narrative” is mirrored by their perverse revelry in an economy that is structured around debt, a financial system that grows because it grows out of nothing at all—and, thus, a world that is increasingly defined, as they suggest in their extended “introduction” of the film, by the “invention of credit.” The film plays with the apparent and troubling possibility that no form of time, or narrative of consequence, can hold such men—at least not for long. (As we are told via subtitle, and as the always ostentatiously dressed duo walk casually out of a clearly artificial “jail set,” Mossack and Fonesca spent “approximately three months” in prison.) That the film uses the two men as representatives of a Significantly, Khan never seems capable of changing the situations he temporarily freezes. In other words, while we get the (postmodern) illusion that he is in control of the narrative and its various interrelated “things,” that illusion is undermined by the suggestion that these “things” have an inexorable trajectory all their own.

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social elite no longer governed by, or no longer concerned with, the material consequences of their “play” is most overt when Mossack’s secretary informs him that one of the firm’s employees has been arrested—a man who has two wives and two families in two countries and who is listed as the “director of 46 different Mossack Fonseca companies.” Mossack simply declares that “We will want to change that.” The secretary is understandably confused: “Change that now? Can’t really go back in time. He’s all over the books.” Mossack’s reply wholly encapsulates a distinctly “hypermodern” or “postpostmodern” worldview: “some people believe that time is just an illusion. That all moments are the same moment.” Mossack’s absurd recourse to something like a theory of the atemporal is most certainly not some sophisticated acceptance of the affective tension Jameson celebrates between a synchronic infinite and a diachronic, or “fated,” narrative order. His point is far more obvious: what we do today can easily be (re)framed as what we did yesterday, or even what we did years in the past. Time is merely the illusion of the narrative that orders it. And since all narrative is simply a “story of credit” (to borrow Mossack and Fonseca’s phrasing)—a placeholder for what is never present in the moment of its telling—we are utterly free to invent or reinvent whatever might be said to exist in time. Of course, as we have seen, this perverse effort to exist outside the illusive structures of “past-present-future” (Jameson, “Wagner” 38) leads to a state of timelessness that is no less restrictive or closed off: the false infinity of the Möbius strip, Tralfamadorian nowness. Mossack’s perversity is therefore little different than Bill and Ted’s—who, in Stephen Herek’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), manage to escape jail by simply deciding that, once they are out of jail, they will go back in time, steal the keys to the jail and place them inside their cell. However, while a film like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is easily cast as an example of postmodernism’s apotheosis in popular culture, a film like The Laundromat clearly functions as a critique of the perverts it depicts. And yet, and at the same time, the film does not simply counter Mossack and Fonseca’s metafictional perversity by providing touchingly (or “sincere”) accounts of its “real-life” consequences. While the film does indeed relate stories that reflect the manner in which Mossack Fonseca’s various dealings changed (and even ended) lives, these stories are not offered as explicitly true—even if we are encouraged to assume that they yield to certain verifiable events.22 We are never encouraged to view the diegetic narrative as anything other than what Mossack and Fonseca call

For instance, we get a fictionalized version of Gu Kailai’s murder of Neil Heywood in 2012. In this version, however, Heywood is “Maywood” (Matthias Schoenaerts).

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“fairytales that actually happened.” This refusal to counter perversity with naïve sincerity comes to a head in the final frames of the film: a mysterious employee at Mossack Fonseca (i.e., Elena) breaks the fourth wall to reveal herself as the person who “leaked” the infamous papers (i.e., the real “John Doe”). As she explains her reasoning (by quoting from the actual manifesto John Doe released to the public23), she walks slowly toward the camera and “off set.” While doing so, she alters her accent and removes a wig and other various prosthetics to reveal the film’s central “protagonist” (an elderly woman named Ellen Martin) who then also proceeds to remove a wig and alter elements of her costume and speaking patterns—this time to reveal the “true” Meryl Streep (who plays both women) and who continues to recite John Doe’s manifesto about tax finance laws and the importance of voting while re-costuming herself as the Statue of Liberty. The film’s central irony is, in this moment, tied to the implication that even its actors (including Meryl Streep) are characters; even the sincerest of manifestos or lectures, a kind of script. The moment reality ruptures its fictional frame, the coherence of its rupture entails another frame. There is no escaping the kinds of deficits people like Mossack and Fonseca exploit. The larger implication is that all forms of accounting are necessarily forms of exploitation—especially if we recall the close tie between “exploitation” and “explicitum” (meaning variously “to display,” “to unfold,” “to arrange,” or “to settle”). The film, in fact, outwardly stresses the impossibility of escaping both financial and narrative exploitation when Mossack and Fonseca merrily inform us that, to avoid taxes, “the director of this movie has five” shell corporations in Delaware and that “even [the] writer has one.” The far more implicit suggestion is that all mimetic accounts entail a form of commodification—in the specifically Marxian sense of that which “abound[s] in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” and invariably “changes the forms of the materials furnished by nature” (Capital 81). And yet, in the end, this suggestion is accentuated so as to renew the possibility of overcoming or traversing a production of value (as, that is, the “minimal gap” of sense or meaning) that exploits the Thing itself. The paradox is that the film manages this renewal by largely undermining Mossack and Fonesca’s assertion that “credit” is an “invention.” In the tension between Mossack and Fonesca’s self-reflexive efforts to sustain and manipulate “a universe without closure” and the film’s clearly fictionalized accounts of real material consequences, we are confronted with the prospect that “credit” lies

During her speech a subtitle appears to tell us that “All of the following words are taken from John Doe’s manifesto.”

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at the root, or heart, of being itself.24 Being—the Thing-in-itself, the Real— only appears in time, in relation, in narrative form, on credit. All Things are indebted to what they are not. Credit is necessary to hold the place of what is still yet to come, still in process, always too plastic for a full or final account. In this specific sense, the “ethics” of credit must always entail infinite responsibility, or responsibility to the infinite other; such ethics must entail Hegel’s “strenuous effort of the Notion,” an effort toward a full and accurate account, the unity of the Thing. At the same time this “effort” cannot be unburdened via recourse to the simple conviction or “belief ” that one day (as Socrates says to Glaucon) we will “receive the payment, and not merely as now the interest” (as qtd in Derrida, “Pharmacy” 81). Such an ethics must endlessly negotiate the debt it can never overcome, even as it strives toward the best, fullest, or most accurate account possible—in the moment. In large part, then, The Laundromat redeploys metafictional devices in a manner that clearly builds upon the historioplastic ambitions of McKay’s The Big Short and Vice, as well as Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. The former two films are, of course, intimately connected. Both maintain an ironic distance to/from the truth while satirizing the manner in which contemporary American society finds itself lost in a miasma of uninformed opinion and idiosyncratic beliefs—unable or unwilling to struggle with the plasticity of truth. Both films thus begin with ironically self-reflexive intertitles. We are assured at the outset of The Big Short (which attempts to explain the sublimely

A useful point of comparison might be one of Soderbergh’s other “minor” films: Full Frontal (2002). Like The Laundromat, Full Frontal is explicitly metafictional, or selfaware—as it concerns a film within the film, and a group of characters living out ostentatiously “Hollywood” dramas in Hollywood. But this earlier film is notably more postmodern than The Laundromat. Consider Full Frontal’s final scene—in which we see two characters meet for the first time in an airport cafeteria and then, coincidently, find that their seats are next to each other on a plane. As the “naturalism” of handheld camera movements and grainy digital footage functions to depict an intimate scene of two characters (Linda [Mary McCormack] and Arty [Enrico Colantoni]) getting comfortable and clearly realizing that they enjoy each other’s company, we hear Linda and then Arty speaking in voiceover. As the two explain (to some unknown addressee) how wonderful and unexpected the encounter was (and how it led to an “amazing” weekend together), the camera slowly tracks backward to reveal that the two characters are simply sitting on the “set” of a plane while various crew members stand outside the set watching the scene play out. The final words of the film, which wholly clinch the vertiginous and corrosive recursivity of the scene, are Linda’s: “It was like out of a movie.” While I don’t have the space here to consider the full implications of Soderbergh’s production style, it’s worth noting that the entire film was designed around “rules” of minimalism: digital cameras, a fast shooting schedule, no sets (or at least no expensive sets), low pay, the expectation of improvisation, and so on. Rather than functioning as a way to ensure realism, these “rules” seem to have been imposed so as to undo any (Hollywood) pretense of real life, the “unscripted.”

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complex economics behind the 2008 housing crash) that the following film is “Based on a true story” (my emphasis). Then, as black fades to the first scenes of the film, we are offered a quote from Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Vice, which tells the story of Dick Cheney’s rise in politics to become George W. Bush’s vice president (and ostensible puppet master), begins in a similar fashion: “The following is a true story.” This claim is immediately undermined by what follows: “Or as true as it can be given that Dick Cheney is known as one of the most secretive leaders in the world . . . But we did our fucking best.” After its opening intertitles, The Big Short moves from the late 1970s (when, we are told, “banking wasn’t a job you went into to make large sums of money”) to 2008 (when mortgage practices and bond trading had become so opaque and detached from reality as to be pure and unmappable fugazi). Throughout, the film is narrated by the semi-fictional Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling)25—who constantly breaks the fourth wall, appears in both the 1970s and the 2000s, and tries to explain concepts like “mortgage-backed security” or stock “shorting” (i.e., financial practices that Vennett ultimately exploits so as to make millions by betting against subprime mortgages). Often, Vennett will try to make the concepts in question more palatable or understandable by “inviting” a celebrity (outside the film’s diegesis) to do the explaining. We’ll thus get a random cut to, say, Anthony Bourdain (in one of his kitchens) explaining “collateralized debt obligation.” But there are also moments when other characters wrest narrative control from Vennett. For instance, when Vennett struggles to convince a group of hedge fund managers (who are also semi-fictional) about the impending housing crash, he appeals to the fact that his “math” was confirmed by an Asian man named “Yang” who won “a national math competition in China” and “doesn’t even speak English.” After he asserts these “facts,” the so-called Yang turns to the camera to set the record straight: “Actually my name’s Jiang and I do speak English. . . . Jared likes to say I don’t because he thinks it makes me seem more authentic.” Just as it does in The Laundromat, then, it quickly becomes clear in The Big Short that the narrative is largely “controlled” by a veritable pervert who wantonly manipulates both economic and narrative instability, or doubt—while, at the same time, the film itself (through its depiction of “corrective” fourth-wall breaks, wholly abandoned suburbs, and families packing up SUVs and leaving homes, etc.) resists the manner in which the

Vennett’s character is based on hedge fund manager, Greg Lippmann—as depicted in Michael’s Lewis nonfictional account of the 2008 crisis, also called The Big Short (2010).

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ever-increasing complexity of facts, alongside an unchecked proliferation of conflicting opinions in mainstream and social media, has become an excuse for abandoning anything like reality. Vice, of course, functions similarly as a type of “intervention,” but its structure is essentially the inverse of The Big Short’s. In Vice, the fourth-wall breaking narrator is a “sincere” (if fictional) dead man whose donated heart now beats in Cheney’s chest, while the film’s subject (Cheney himself) is the pervert—a man who manipulated the American public by, for instance, changing “global warming” into far less frightening or consequential “climate change” and insisting that, since America does not engage in torture, “if the US does it, by definition—it can’t be torture.” As in The Big Short, though, the use of self-reflexive “breaks”— inclusive of Cheney (Christian Bale) and his wife (Amy Adams) momentarily speaking in Shakespearean iambic pentameter, a false “happy” ending (inclusive of swelling music, absurdly uplifting intertitles about a future that never happened, and credits), and a post-credits scene in which the people screening the film we just watched are, inexplicably, the same people we saw earlier in one of Cheney’s “focus groups”—overtly satirize a social order that has come to embrace and mendaciously exploit the “postmodern” lesson that truth is only the matter of its telling. At precisely the same time, these breaks forestall the viewer’s desire to “rest easy” in the mimetic authority of the narrative itself (an “authority” that is risked in moments of biopic-like realism and Bale’s almost maniacal commitment to verisimilitude). In other words, both deploy metafiction so as to critique their respective subjects while also placing an ethical burden on viewers. While The Big Short asks us to resist our desire for simplistic “authority”—for clear instructions on “how to value things”—Vice complements this request by chastising and stressing the consequences of our “tend[ency] to focus on the things that are right there in front of us. While ignoring the massive forces that actually change and shape our lives.” While such films certainly maintain a clear focus on hypermodern economic practices and regulatory systems, they also (and perhaps more significantly) struggle to negotiate and counter the withering efficacy of mimetic acts in the face of ever more prevalent and unconscionable forms of debt exploitation (i.e., a post-truth crisis). What is of particular interest here, then, is the manner in which such exploitation gets overtly tied to an absolute and absolutely irresponsible unmooring of subject and history, present and past: a flattening of affect. Insofar as they depict precisely this unmooring— and attempt to counter its progress—films like Soderbergh’s and McKay’s can be viewed as participating in a much larger move out of postmodernism. These films, in fact, map neatly onto a trajectory of historioplastic metafiction that could be said to begin as early as Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) and which

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includes (along with those already mentioned) films and television shows as diverse as Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999–), Mitchel Hurwitz’s Arrested Development (2003–2019), Gillespie’s I, Tonya (2017), and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood (2019).26 Although they do not link the activity of mimesis and economies of debt as explicitly as they are linked in the work of Soderbergh and McKay, these other historioplastic works nevertheless employ metafiction in similarly affective ways—signaling the uncanny nature of constitutive debt (i.e., the intrusive sense of a plastic potential to be otherwise, of a Thing’s tendency to perpetually move in relation) while simultaneously forestalling or satirizing efforts to invoke the impossibility of debt recovery as an excuse for unfettered and irresponsible play. Indeed, an obvious line connects the films of Soderbergh and McKay to Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, which is humorously narrated by and focalized through the fourth-wall breaking and “real” Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio)—a man who often tries, halfheartedly, to explain the complex financial law and stock-market practices he flouts, who successfully forces the film to change his Ferrari from red to white, who seems to perceive his “story” as a blues-inflected struggle against the “man,” and who eventually tries to “outperform” the FBI on a yacht “fit for a bond villain.” But the same line that connects Wolf to Soderbergh and McKay’s films can be traced all the way back to Goodfellas, which is only remotely connected to complex and easily exploited financial law and the rapid spread of neoliberalism. And yet the point of this earlier film is largely the same as Wolf, as is the structure. Goodfellas tells the story of the real-life gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). As with Belfort in Wolf, Hill’s sense of both external reality and his “role” in that reality is overtly tied to the form of the film in which he is depicted. While Hill only breaks the fourth wall once (in the final scene), the film constantly stresses the artificiality or “forced nature” of his narrative (which is often “guided” by his frequent voiceovers). The film begins in medias res with Hill and his gangster compatriots driving at night on the highway. Surprised by a sudden noise coming from their trunk, the men pull over to “discover” the half-dead man (we eventually learn) they’d placed there earlier. When Hill finally recloses the trunk—after watching the other two men savagely stab and then shoot the man—the scene suddenly freezes on Hill’s disconcerted face and we hear his extradiegetic voice for the first time: “As far back as I While an extended discussion of I, Tonya occupies the final section of this chapter and Tarantino’s penchant for self-reflexivity is a central topic of the next, I have discussed both Adaptation and Curb Your Enthusiasm in previous publications: the former, in The Passing of Postmodernism; the latter, in Stranger America.

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can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” The film then moves back in time to Hill’s childhood (and then forward to eventually repeat and move beyond the opening scene) while continuing to employ various disruptive devices, including several more freeze frames. These disruptions clearly register Hill’s desperate efforts to control a narrative that is ultimately too fractured and too imbued with violence and vengeance to ever “fit” within the specific form of fantasy he has in mind. Freeze frames, in fact, tend to register moments of pain or doubt that Hill cannot reconcile—like the savage murder in the opening scene or the moments when his father beat him as a child. Confronted with such events, the narrative literally freezes, allowing Hill to move onto something better or more suited to the fantasy he hopes to relate. This desire for (yet failure to maintain) control is particularly apparent in two of the film’s most famous scenes. In the first, which occurs shortly after Hill is fully accepted into the “family,” an extended tracking shot moves us through a bar while various “characters” say hello to the camera and Hill (in voiceover) introduces them. At first, the sense we get is that this is a POV shot, that the camera is Hill and that everyone now knows and respects him. However, the camera continues to track (without a cut) into the backroom of the bar where we discover a largely anonymous and ignored Hill doing menial work. Hill’s surprising appearance at the end of the shot (in a narrow hallway) functions as a kind of narrative obstacle—as well as, more literally, a physical obstacle that prevents the smoothly tracking camera from continuing. A sudden disconnect—a rupture in our expectation, an interruption in symbolic inertia—thus desutures27 Hill’s cinematic fantasy. Hill’s inability to sustain a clear line between reality and performance (or

For a useful (and connected) discussion of the cinematic suture—as it relates to the problems and potential of experiencing the artificiality of its process (and thus its undoing), and as it relates also to concepts like Levinasian ethics—see Seung-hoon Jeong’s Cinematic Interfaces. While suggesting that “Desuture . . . occurs when the cinematic effect of slick motion is debunked by the onscreen surfacing of the filmic trace” (36), Jeong usefully contrasts “desuture” in nonsensical avant-garde films (i.e., those “extreme[s]” that “might only lead to a dead end of the cinema” [37]) and the various kinds of “desurture” Garrett Stewart seems to endorse—insofar as he “persistently looks into more ‘commercial’ films whose suture is more airtight, and thereby minutely digs out how their narrative crises are expressed through stylistic effects entailing mediumspecific desuture” (38). In a similar vein, see also Žižek’s The Fright of Real Tears—in which he exposes a tendency in narrative film to sustain its coherence (as the fiction of the “big Other”) while also registering the suture that effects the illusion of such coherence. To register this effect is, for Žižek, to “see how . . . suture is the exact opposite of the illusory, self-enclosed totality that successfully erases the decentered traces of its production process: suture means that, precisely, such self-enclosure is a priori impossible” (58).

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fantasy)—or to transform the former wholly or consistently into the latter— is even more pronounced in the second scene.28 While listening to his friend, Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), tell a humorous story, Hill begins to laugh in a raucous and ostentatiously forced manner—a laugh that we are encouraged to view as nothing but pure performance. Eventually he calms down enough to tell DeVito that he’s “funny . . . a funny guy.” DeVito’s attitude suddenly and completely shifts, and he begins to interrogate Hill: “Funny how? How am I funny? . . . What the fuck is so funny about me?” The scene drags on for an uncomfortably long time, and neither the viewer nor Hill has any idea if DeVito is serious or not. Eventually, and after an extended moment of heavy silence, Hill gambles on the possibility that DeVito is joking; and DeVito, who decides to relent, begins to laugh and mock Hill’s naivety. But, by this point, it’s clear that neither DeVito nor Hill have any idea if their feelings of anger, fear, or amusement are real or merely performed. As with the other scenes and devices that subtly destabilize the film’s narrative and draw our attention to certain elided elements, this moment of troubling doubt confronts viewers with an affective sense of debt, a sense that begins to pervade the entire film. Because the actors in this scene are overtly performing their characters performing—and, in so doing, depicting men who seem unwilling or unable to face what is anterior to their respective “acts”—the experience of viewing the film itself gets tied to an experience of pervasive doubt, or undecidability. But this doubt does not justify Hill’s narrative perversions; instead, it induces a kind of affective eruption, confronting us with the fact that something in the performances (of masculinity, control, friendship, family, honor, etc.) is missing or intentionally hidden via a hallucinatory or Freudian act of “displacement,” that some traumatic and real (if persistently plastic) Thing haunts the very forms of play to which we are witness. The paradoxical result: we touch upon Hill’s truth as infinite Thing. Nevertheless, we could certainly argue that self-reflexivity in Goodfellas leans slightly more toward the historiographic than the historioplastic. This is because its various metafictional elements function primarily to undermine the fantasy of a narrativized reality. What is less obvious in the film is the manner in which its moments of desuture recuperate or grasp that which remains anterior to its narrativization. What primarily defines the shift from Another scene, or shot, worth mentioning is the famous Copacabana tracking shot. This shot, over which the Crystals’s “Then He Kissed Me” (1963) plays—and which brings the film’s focalization squarely in line with Hill’s perception of things—is the momentary “solution” to the earlier tracking shot that ends with Hill himself as obstruction. In this latter shot, Hill’s fantasy seems as cohesive as it will get, as fiction and reality become perfectly entwined (with even the real Henny Youngman playing the real Henny Youngman).

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historiographic metafiction to historioplastic metafiction is the manner in which the latter brings us in contact with the Thing before it by transposing its necessary failures as a mimetic act onto (or into) the Thing as subject, as “subjectile.” The economimetic debt of the narrative, its propinquitous distance from what it relates, mirrors the affective debt (to its other) at the heart of the Thing-in-itself. While such mirroring can certainly be located or teased out in a film like Goodfellas, it is certainly more overt in a film like Marie Antoinette. To clarify or confirm this somewhat tenuous distinction, let’s turn (finally) to I, Tonya.

The Other Account Gillespie’s film recounts the life of American figure skater Tonya Harding— up to (and slightly beyond) her involvement in the January 6, 1994, attack on her Olympic rival, Nancy Kerrigan. After a practice in Detroit, a man named Shane Stant struck Kerrigan with a police baton on the back of her right leg, near her knee. Stant (along with a man named Derrick Smith) had been hired to “take out” Kerrigan by Shawn Ekhardt, Harding’s ostensible bodyguard and a friend of her husband, Jeff Gillooly. Although the injury prevented Kerrigan from competing at the US Nationals, she was granted a spot on the US Olympic team. She thus went on to compete against Harding in Lillehammer. Kerrigan came in 2nd; Harding, 8th—after being granted a re-skate (due to a “problem” with her laces). All of these events are well documented. You can look them up. Insofar as it echoes (as, indeed, all the films considered earlier echo) the stylings of a standard Hollywood biopic—and, therefore, the troubling transparency of films like Barry Levinson’s Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001), Taylor Hackford’s Ray (2004), or Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game (2015)—Gillespie’s film begins predictably with an intertitle, a statement that orients viewers to the factual nature of what follows. However, this intertitle (like the intertitles McKay employs) immediately frustrates the very expectations its appearance, and typical function in other biopics, is likely to provoke. Against a black screen, the title explains that what follows is “Based on irony free / wildly contradictory, / totally true interviews / with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly.” This somewhat disconcerting claim (which appeals to truth and sincerity while embracing contradiction) prepares us for what is ostensibly the film’s central point: if we are to traverse—by sustaining—the distance between an event and its representation, between the other and our apprehension of that other, we must risk an ironic point of relation to and from that event

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or other. Or rather, this outwardly “postironic” intertitle prepares us for the twofold manner in which Gillespie employs metafictional devices. On the one hand, the devices function—as they do in all the films discussed so far—to expose or critique a contemporary tendency to let reality dissolve in(to) its narrative forms (and thus, also, to expose the fundamental fiction of conceptual reality); on the other, these same devices expose us to an affective distance between the film’s subject and the form of its telling. As a result, the film’s various self-reflexive disruptions imbue the coherent sincerity of the narrative with an experience of proximity, proximity that paradoxically allows us to touch upon the very Thing that must slip our grasp. The first image to appear after the intertitle is an image of Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding. This initial footage is connected to the intertitle via a sound bridge (of Harding coughing and then using an inhaler). Harding sports clothes and a hairstyle reminiscent of the American Midwest in the 1990s. She sits at a table in a fairly nondescript, yet clearly middle-American, kitchen. Facing the camera, she lights a cigarette and prepares to speak. At the bottom of the frame subtitles confirm that this is “Tonya Harding / Former Olympic figure skater.” The footage is offered in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Combined with the lighting, the immobile camera, and the subtitles, this aspect ratio encourages us to assume that we are viewing documentary footage, a real interview—or, at the very least (if we recognize Robbie), its faithful and precise replication. But before Harding can speak the scene cuts, and similarly styled footage of Sebastian Stan as Jeff Gillooly is presented. “That’s, that’s very close,” he says (gesturing to a boom mic that has encroached into the frame). Another cut brings us to Allison Janney as an elderly LaVona Harding—presented, also, in interview or documentary format. She tells us (or the unseen interviewer) that “Tonya is [her] fifth child from husband number four.” As she says this the film cuts away to what appears to be homemade footage of Tonya playing in a yard with her father. The footage is presumably from the 1970s—the color is muted, there is evidence of scratches, and the edges are blurred; there is no reason to think this footage is not real. However, as the film cuts between this footage and footage of an elderly LaVona explaining how difficult and spoiled Tonya was, Janney (as a young LaVona) suddenly appears in frame. She is watching father and daughter play while smoking on the stoop of a small, rundown home. We are then given interview footage of and some comments from “Diane Rawlinson / Tonya Harding’s coach,” a brief excerpt from an ostensibly real “evidence tape” of Shawn Eckardt, and then interview footage of and introductory comments from “Martin Maddox / Hard Copy reporter 1989–98.” After another cut back to the interview with Gillooly— in which he comments on how “cool” it was when his name became a verb (as in “to Gillooly” someone)—we get back to Harding, who is finally allowed to speak. She tells us that she is “a real person” and not some “old-timey version of what

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a woman’s supposed to be.” Her point is that she was never the type of woman the figure skating community was inclined to accept, but she was “the first U.S. woman to land a triple axel.” “So,” she says, “fuck ’em.” All of this, of course, is prologue to the actual film. Another sound bridge carries us from Harding’s somewhat smug “fuck ’em” to another intertitle: “Portland, Oregon / 40 years earlier.” This time the bridge is a purely nondiegetic song: Cliff Richards’s “Devil Woman.” When images return, the aspect ratio has changed to 2.39:1, and the camera moves fluidly around LaVona and a young Harding. Mother and daughter are standing on an ice rink waiting to meet and speak for the first time with Rawlinson. As LaVona gets increasingly aggressive and crudely insistent about Rawlinson taking on the six-year-old Tonya, the musical cue is carefully synced with the editing—so that the phrase “She’s just a devil woman” is ostentatiously coupled with images of LaVona smoking and discarding ash on the ice. Everything about this scene (like the vast bulk of the film in widescreen) is cast as overtly fictional—the non-diegetic and pointedly apropos music, the elegant tracking shots, the precise yet noticeable editing, the lighting and/ or filtering. The fictionality of the scene is doubly accentuated, of course, by the documentary footage that precedes it. At the same time, a strange inversion continues to play out. Since the actors in the overtly fictional diegesis are also the subjects in the documentary footage (even in the apparently homemade footage and the “evidence tapes”), the undeniable fiction of the Hollywoodized film slowly begins to dissolve the apparent verisimilitude of the opening interviews and “real-life” footage, and the fact that Harding’s interview is initially cut off becomes that much more pointed. Her voice, her very identity, has been, as the film will go on to stress, defined by and then largely buried in a complex layering of fiction—other voices and physical impositions (her mother’s, her husband’s, the media’s, her fans’ and detractors,’ the law’s, the U.S. Figure Skating Association’s, etc.). Viewed (backward) through the lens of the fictional film, the opening accounts (which serve, also, to remind viewers of the two Tonya Harding documentaries that were released just a few years before I, Tonya29) are given to be both empirically valid and epistemologically suspect. They are, after all, “wildly contradictory.” More pointedly, though, their odd relationship to the fictional diegesis (even at the outset) reminds us that interviewed speakers are never more than actors; the instances of their confessions, never more than a staging. The initial illusion of extreme verisimilitude is, then (and if only implicitly), disparaged—or at least troubled. Or rather, the mendacious That is, Nancy & Tonya (2014) and The Price of Gold (2014), which was episode 16 of season 2 of ESPN Film’s 30 for 30 series.

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lie of mimetic closure is almost immediately placed in antithetical relation to a more ethical negotiation of mimetic distance; and Gillooly’s odd first line—“That’s very close”—takes on a totally different meaning. Indeed: as the film moves into Tonya’s teen years (and her first romantic encounters with Gillooly), we are encouraged to accept the overt fictionization of Harding’s life as a more sincere access point to the Real and its constitutive affects—more sincere, that is, than the irony-less interviews and media soundbites that Gillespie frequently cuts back to or overlays. This inversion of fact and fiction—or this sublation of the real through fiction— occurs most overtly the first time Gillespie cuts back to the LaVona interview. “To hear her tell it,” LaVona complains, “I would operate on her daily without anesthesia. Please. One fuckin’ time. I hit her one time with a hairbrush.” As she says “hairbrush,” we are brought back to the “fictional” film. A low angle shot reveals LaVona towering over Harding and beating her repeatedly and savagely with a hairbrush. A subsequent cut to a two-shot offers us a better view of the beating, as well as LaVona telling Harding that she is a “terrible, scum-sucking loser!” In such moments the film does not encourage us to take its fictional elements as more real or more objective than its replication of documentary evidence. Nor, though, does it simply reenact a postmodern dismantling of truth claims per se. It works, rather, to demonstrate that a Thing’s plastic potential to be otherwise must slip the grasp that holds it—if, that is, the Thing (itself) is to be held at all in form. Frequent scenes of Harding being beaten are thus offered as true—but only in their affective contingency. That Harding was beaten—by her mother and, then, by her husband—is not to be taken as a matter of discursive construction. The film is clear on this: Harding’s experience of abuse (as well as her reciprocal acts of violence) cannot be cast aside as mere invention, or as a simple matter of perspective. And yet the specifics of these beatings, the real affects of these moments of violence—must, however, be apprehended ironically, or negotiated across a mimetic distance. Otherwise their devastating affects as events will be drained to nothing, mortified utterly. Fixed. The film is, for this very reason, careful to stress its fictionalized nature even as it works to effect the sense that its form can provide a sincere approach to, or the chance to glean, the truth of Harding’s life and the events that have come to define it (particularly in America’s cultural memory). For instance, the numerous musical cues repeatedly function to suggest that the various moments we are seeing are, on some level, performances of a pregiven and popular American script.30 Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the We might say that Scorsese’s use of various blues standards in The Wolf of Wall Street have a similar (if not identical) function.

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Sky” (1969) plays over a scene in which a prepubescent Tonya begs her father not to leave—clearly (and falsely) associating him with a utopian escape from her painful life and abusive mother. As his car pulls away, a deep focus shot shows us LaVona on the porch (in the background) watching Tonya (in the foreground) tearfully watching her father leave forever. The song stresses the possibility that the scene is problematically focalized through Harding’s romanticized (and song-inflected) memory, just as the deep focus suggests that LaVona saw something else altogether—such as the fact that Harding has naively idolized a father whose willingness to abandon her is hardly any better than LaVona’s cruelty and violence. When Harding and Gillooly first kiss, Dire Straits’s overtly metafictional “Romeo and Juliet” (1980) plays, and then continues over a montage that establishes the defining pattern of their relationship: passionate sex, Gillooly’s violence (along with Harding’s willingness and ability to return that violence), and imprudent moments of reconciliation. And when we first see Harding skate competitively, she skates to ZZ Top’s “Sleeping Bag” (1985). Significantly, though, this latter song is presented as both diegetic and non-diegetic (insofar as it clearly plays over, while occurring within, the scene). Tied, then, to the other musical cues, “Sleeping Bag” further highlights the manner in which Harding’s life is rooted in a specific cultural milieu, a time and a place—defined by hardrock depictions of passionate and often violent love affairs and hard-won underdog victories. We even later see Harding train (as Harding herself explains by breaking the fourth wall) like “Rocky trained when he had to fight the Russian.” And, as Heart’s “Barracuda” (1977) plays over a montage of Harding carrying giant bags of dog food and water jugs and flipping logs in a forest, the camera repeatedly pans or tracks to locate Rawlinson, who then also breaks the fourth wall to insist that “She actually did this,” “And this,” “And this.” Of course, such breaks are employed throughout the film. But, in most cases, they differ quite dramatically from the kinds of breaks we see in the films of McKay or Scorsese—and to which we have become accustomed thanks to more overtly postmodern films like Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) or John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). The first occurs during the dating montage. As Dire Straits plays over Harding and Gillooly kissing for the first time, Harding’s extradiegetic voice (carried over from her interview) explains that “He was really sweet in the beginning.” The next cut brings us to a fight in a truck and Gillooly striking her across the face. As Harding rubs her cheek, her voiceover resumes: “But then . . .” In the slight pause after “then,” the fictionalized Harding (in the truck) turns to the camera and continues: “He started hitting me a few months in.” She then turns and punches Gillooly in the face, and the line between what is inside and outside

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the diegesis becomes utterly unstable. The technique is frequently redeployed from this point on (especially during the montage in question). For instance, a voiceover transitions into a fourth-wall break as Gillooly chases Harding through a house, smashes her face into a mirror, and then gets Harding’s elbow in his face. As Gillooly savagely presses the side of her face into glass— and before he gets elbowed—the diegetic Harding takes over the voiceover to explain that “he beat the living hell out of me.” This break is followed by a cut back to the interview footage: the adult Harding laughs after telling us how she “thought it was [her] fault.” She goes on to contemplate the absurdity of her story: “Nancy gets hit one time . . . and the world shits. For me it’s an all-the-time occurrence.” Inserted between the word “time” and the word “and” is a momentary piece of precisely replicated footage of Nancy Kerrigan screaming (famously) “Why! Why!” Significantly, however (and so as, we must assume, to stress the performative nature of Kerrigan’s screams), this footage is not presented in 4:3 aspect ratio. The next cut brings us back to the Gillooly interview. “I never hit her,” he insists, “That’s not me . . . Um, she hit me, though.” The next scene shows Harding chasing Gillooly out of a room while cocking a shotgun. Gillooly (in voiceover) explains that “she fired a gun at me too.” After firing, Harding turns to the camera to claim that “This is bullshit. I never did this.” She then cocks the gun again. But if the possibility of a non-(or extra)diegetic space is negated in these moments (in which a documentary reality is pulled into and undermined by an overtly fictional diegesis), this negation is (itself) negated by the suggestion, established throughout, that the apparent transparency of this documentary reality is simply the fiction that precedes the film. Not surprisingly, then, the interviews become more and more entangled in the film’s diegesis. This entanglement is most overt when we get a sudden midsentence cut away from Martin Maddox (in interview) explaining how crazy it was that the classless Harding completed the triple axel and became America’s premier figure skater. The cut brings us back to Harding (in interview) at the precise moment we begin to hear her: “Could I,” she asks the camera, “just interrupt with a quick word about Nancy Kerrigan? It’ll just take a sec.” This overt reference to the film itself (inclusive of Maddox’s interview) is then mirrored, later, by Gillooly and then even more strikingly by LaVona, who suddenly returns (in interview) to chastise the entire film: “Well my storyline is disappearing right now. What . . . the . . . fuck.” At this point, the interviews and voiceovers could hardly even be called extradiegetic. But these overtly metafictional moments do not function, as they would in a particularly bombastic postmodern text, to corrode the possibility of an ethical and sincere account of the events and the others in question; instead, the film’s careful and progressive dissolution of an ontological

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distinction most viewers are likely to assume—viewers who might in fact go online to look up “real” footage or “real” facts—ultimately reopens the possibility of a radically non-diegetic (or genotextual) space, an ineffable real that is affectively approached via the film’s necessarily fictional depictions of violence, abuse, victory, and loss. Ultimately, then, the film largely eschews the fairly simple postmodern task of undermining the possibility of mimetic efficacy. Instead, the film opens up (even more acutely than does a film like Marie Antoinette) an ironically ethical distance between itself and the events or others it narrates. At the same time, and just as significantly, it never abandons a sincere commitment to fidelity. Narrative distance is wrenched open so that it might be traversed in all sincerity, and so that the plastic motility of the subject itself can be both given and sustained. Indeed—and as they are, particularly, in Marie Antoinette, The Big Short, and Vice—the costuming, hairstyles, sets, and makeup in I, Tonya are almost invariably near perfect. This tendency toward uncanny material verisimilitude becomes overt (or, for most viewers, particularly undeniable) when we finally get to (what the characters call) “the incident” and, in turn, Harding’s final Olympic skate. For the first time, too, original footage is inserted—of, specifically, journalists like Connie Cheng. When, then, Harding is shown tearfully approaching the panel of judges to explain (famously) that there is, inexplicably, a problem with her laces, the film seems as close to Socrates’s mimetic lie as its ever going to get. A quick cut to people in a bar watching the event on a small television—that may or may not be displaying original footage of the event— even further undermines our ability to distinguish between the “actual” event and its cinematic reenactment. And yet we are not encouraged to take this moment as a true and accurate rendition of a historical and traumatically affective event (of a particular individual’s sublime crisis); we have been positioned instead—by everything that precedes this scene—to reconsider the original mediation of the event as itself a form of tragic mortification, the moment when Harding’s profound and infinite otherness was fixed forever in the lie of a transparent representation. As Harding tells us, the experience of these final events—the media circus that obsessively tracked and framed them, the responses (to that circus and those frames) of fans and detractors, friends, enemies, and strangers—felt “like being abused all over; only this time it was by you. All of you. You’re all my attackers too.” Coming, as it does, toward the end of such a film, this accusation pulls to the surface an overreaching and specifically historioplastic mandate—a mandate to endure, if we recall Derrida’s phrasing, our profound “obligation to protect the other’s otherness” (“Eating” 276). Such a mandate is though (as we have seen) largely indissociable from a broader philosophical impulse to reinvigorate Hegelian dialectics. Implied in this connection is the fact that historioplastic

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metafiction renews an ethical and strenuous commitment to that which must perpetually and affectively escape its symbolization if it is to be grasped, or experienced, in truth. It invites us to approach sincerely the unaccountable debt of what is other while never for a moment sanctioning the feckless ease of the incomprehensible or the mortifying violence of transparency.

6

Historioplasticity in Tarantino (and Nolan) But the image of Apollo must also contain that delicate line which the dream-image may not overstep if its effect is not to become pathological, so that, in the worst case, the semblance would deceive us as if it were crude reality. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

History’s Suture Let’s try to stitch things together, with a few closing examples. Of particular note are the films of Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan. Popular to an extreme, the films of these two directors are (typically, if not always) outwardly postmodern. Yet their inclination toward formal play, revisionism, and ostentatiously self-reflexive devices is almost invariably undermined, often via subtle critiques of the characters depicted. The result is a fastidious overcoming of both perverse (symbolic) and mortifying (classical) mimetics, an overcoming that clearly echoes the specific dialectical inversions a philosophical “return to Hegel” strives to recuperate, or renew. Insofar as they enact something like a return to Hegel (in the popular realm), these films sublate the exhausted efficacy of a postmodern “symbolic” by strenuously enduring the perpetual and essential “play” of a Hegelian middle term, a vanishing mediator, a dehiscing suture. In this play of differences, as we have seen, the antithetical relation “of a universal symbolic network” (Žižek, Tarrying 217) to the traumatic Real it negates is itself negated, emerging as the very condition of both knowledge and being, the “minimal gap” that ensures a Thing’s apprehension while simultaneously reflecting or echoing the “relationality” at the “heart” of every Thing. To stitch open such a gap, such a wound, is necessarily to renew a vital sense of artistic responsibility, a profoundly ethical relation to otherness. The burden of mimetic authenticity is endured even as the infinite “plasticity” of a given subject is exposed and embraced. Rather than fixating on the primacy of the

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signifier, on exposing the (historio)graphic and/or symbolic production of reality, Tarantino and Nolan (at their most metafictional) shift our attention to a plastic Real that is lost to the form it necessarily effects. But this experience of loss is given as an affective moment of true contact. The wound that any mimetic act must necessarily risk becomes, paradoxically (and as we saw most overtly in our discussion of Danielewski’s House of Leaves), the form of its healing. This brings us full circle to our start point (in Chapter 1); for a perpetually dehiscing suture sustains the “evanescent itself . . . as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the True, and left lying who knows where outside it” (Hegel, Phenomenology 27). At precisely the same time it forestalls our tendency to regard the “True . . . as something on the other side, positive and dead” (27). Since we are speaking (again) of wounds, a suitable start point is most certainly Tarantino’s Second World War epic, Inglourious Basterds (2009). The film concludes with a strikingly subjective shot, what we might call an oddly discomfiting (because self-aware) suture. The camera suddenly takes the point of view of Nazi colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). By this point in the film, Hitler has been shot repeatedly in the face, burned in a celluloidfueled fire, and then absurdly obliterated (along with the bulk of the Nazi high command) in an explosion Landa helped orchestrate. Historical fact has been flagrantly effaced and a gratuitous and self-congratulatory revenge fantasy has taken its place. Yet in this final shot we are oddly and uncomfortably trapped by the camera, stitched right in, left to peer out helplessly through the eyes of Landa, the infamous “Jew Hunter.” As we look on, the leader of the Nazi-hunting “Basterds,” Aldo “The Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt), along with one of the last surviving Basterds1—Private Smithson Utivich (B. J. Novak)— take a moment to admire the swastika Raine has just carved into Landa’s forehead. Raine and Utivich gaze steadily and contentedly into the camera. The final lines of the film are Raine’s: “You know somethin’ Utivich? I think this just might be my masterpiece.” The self-reflexive nature of the scene is obvious, if not ostentatious. Perhaps equally obvious is the fact that this final POV shot functions to implicate the audience: like Landa, we’ve been justifiably branded. Given our naïve enjoyment of the pointless violence of the vengeful Basterds (e.g., their scalpings, their gleeful beatings, etc.), we have exposed our own Naziesque impulses, our own willingness to stereotype, to refuse the possibility of complex motivations and unique situations. But surely our complicity runs Within the specific context of the film’s theatrical version, it might be fair to assume that Utivich is the last surviving Basterd. However, the fate of several Basterds is never confirmed.

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deeper than this? After all, it is specifically Landa with whom we are finally linked. Like Landa, we have exposed our perverse inclination to revel in and abuse the possibility of rewriting history, of rewriting our very identity. Raine, we must recall, does not get the chance to “brand” Landa until Landa turns himself over to the Americans, denies his allegiance to the Nazis, and renounces the “silly” title of “Jew Hunter” as a misnomer. Raine’s final act, then—his “masterpiece”—is clearly motivated by a desire to check Landa’s perverse mutability, to fix the man in his truth, to anchor him to a past he can never deny. Raine explains his motivation earlier in the film, as he prepares to inflict one of his “tattoos” on a different German soldier: “I’m gonna give you a little somethin’ you can’t take off.” Raine assumes that, after the war, the bulk of German soldiers will simply remove and destroy their uniforms and in turn their complicity in the horrors of Hitler’s reign. Thus, at the very moment the film seems to celebrate its clever manipulation of history, Raine works to forestall the very possibility of such a manipulation. What, though, is so particularly odd about this scene is the fact that the POV shot should close things up, yet it draws our attention to the manipulative artifice of the device itself. Likewise, and as an obvious echo of this inversion, Raine’s “tattoo” should close off the very possibility of historical revisionism, yet it quite literally and graphically opens things up. What we get is something like a doubled (or even, perhaps, “stereoscopic”) sense of closure without closure. By linking the audience to Landa, by “fixing” the audience in an overtly restricted point of view, the film undergoes a surprising dialectical inversion—one that is certainly akin to the double negations we began tracking in the previous chapter. On the one hand, the film clearly revels in a type of perversity, the very perversity that defines Landa’s villainy—the abject willingness to be whatever the Other desires, to be whatever the audience wants to see, to be the Second World War movie we wish were true. On the other hand, the film turns its ostensibly irresponsible/ postmodern playfulness against both itself and its viewers, using it to stress a certain responsibility to the very Thing it simultaneously identifies as out of reach, always too contingent to grasp in full: the Real of any particular historical event. In this sense, the “open” wound Raine inflicts (like the infinite space at the heart of the house in Danielewski’s novel) parallels, or metonymically stands in for, the film’s paradoxical attitude toward mimetic closure. While Raine literally opens up a wound that (in its perpetual openness, in its anticipated persistence as scar tissue) promises to check— finally close off, shut down, fix—Landa’s irresponsible abuse of symbolic and performative mutability, the film itself offers us a moment of apparent closure so as to stress the inevitable antagonism, the constitutive gap, between truth and appearance, historical fact and its representation.

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Of course, like every other Tarantino film, Basterds is an ostensibly postmodern pastiche of various genres and cinematic allusions. It is also a film about film. A central plot line concerns Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish woman who witnessed the slaughter of her family at the hands of Landa. As we eventually learn, Shosanna moved to Paris and began passing as a gentile cinema owner. When offered the opportunity to host the premiere of Goebbels’s latest propaganda film (the fictional Nation’s Pride), Shosanna devises a plan to burn her theater (and thus the Nazi high command, along with Hitler) to the ground. Since she fuels the fire with extremely volatile celluloid, Shosanna literally uses film to destroy the Nazis. The metafictional conceit is difficult to ignore. Are we not to take the burning celluloid as a commentary on film’s innate power, on its ability to efface or burn away history’s atrocities? Perhaps. After all, the drinking game which links the first portion of the film to its dramatic conclusion—and which, somewhat strikingly (in this context) links Basterds to Coppola’s Marie Antoinette— certainly functions as a type of mise en abyme, a metonymic reminder of the film’s apparent willingness to revel in play and cinematic self-reflexivity. As it does in Marie Antoinette, the game sees each character attempting to guess the identity they have been assigned by a fellow player (and which is obvious to everyone else via a card stuck onto their forehead). At this point in the film, the Basterds are fully engaged in “Operation Kino,” an operation that sees them working side by side with Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), a famous German actress, and Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), a British film critic, to infiltrate Goebbels’s premiere and assassinate the Nazi high command. That the Basterds get caught up in this identity game while planning the assassination—a plan which, in the end, will become absurdly confused with Shosanna’s—only highlights the film’s own problematic willingness to play at representing the very real trauma of Nazi occupation in France and elsewhere, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the actual events of the Second World War. Yet the identity game exposes rather than endorses the film’s apparent desire to revel in the infinite mutability of an arbitrary symbolic universe—a universe in which any truth can be reformed (or rescreened) to suit our pleasure, where identity is solely contingent upon our efforts to guess what the Other sees. Such a scene, in fact, asks us to reapproach the precise function of the film’s “cavalier revisionism” (Walters 19), revisionism that seems “morally akin to Holocaust denial” (Rosenbaum as qtd in Walters 19). There is certainly no denying this revisionism, yet Tarantino rarely if ever allows us to enjoy the film’s revisions as simple truth. At every turn, we are reminded of the film’s largely futile dishonesty even as that dishonesty announces a certain underlying, inescapable (yet plastic) Real. For instance,

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in yet another overtly metafictional flourish, Tarantino presents Goebbels’s film—an ostensibly true account of a single German sniper slaying several hundred American troops—as a disturbingly inverted image of his own. Like Basterds, Nation’s Pride is clearly designed for the gruesome satisfaction of its audience. Private Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who plays himself in Goebbels’s film, gleefully shoots down soldier after soldier from the relative safety of a castle tower. And, at one point, he patriotically carves a swastika into the wooden floor of the tower. While his engraving links him obviously and problematically to Raine, his role as a sniper from above links him to Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) and Private First Class Omar Ulmer (Omar Doom), two Basterds who eventually find themselves standing on a balcony, shooting down gleefully at several hundred trapped Nazi moviegoers. Goebbels’s film thus becomes yet another mise en abyme, carefully framed as a film in a theater (embedded in yet another film in a theater). As Ben Walters notes, “only a thoughtless viewer will not see him or herself reflected in shots of Hitler cackling as he watches Americans being slaughtered in Nation’s Pride” (22). Responding to David Denby’s scathing attack of Tarantino in The New Yorker, Joseph Natoli argues that Basterds somehow manages to overcome “our postmodern climate where reason is under suspicion and history itself collapses into a narrative told from a certain perspective.” This is, of course, a surprising claim, given the historical revisions that define the film. Natoli’s point, though, is that Tarantino’s film approaches the trauma of the Holocaust (and our present-day understanding of that event) by refusing to acquiesce to the illusion of moral clarity. The film, Natoli asserts, does not take a moral stand but rather repeatedly, in scene after scene, lays bare what transpires to [sic] a moral review instead of immediately closing it down as if we were a culture that had a commonly shared moral sense, or, one that wasn’t a front for our “moral callousness,” our deeply divided moral views, or a moral apathy that is not limited to the Millennials.

We might clarify and extend Natoli’s position by recalling Hegel’s notion of the notion. As Hegel repeatedly insists, and as we have seen throughout, the notion of something as notion is to be endured; it is a “strenuous effort” (Phenomenology 35). What is necessary, then, and what a film like Basterds ultimately seems intent on accomplishing, is to align the truth (of an event, of evil, of a historical trauma) with its notion as its appearance in form. At the same time, this form (and thus the truth it manifests) must not yield to a desire for absolutes, for the weak and illusive fixity of mimetic verisimilitude. And in those moments when Basterds actively reflects back its own playful

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revisionism as revisionism, when the perversity of the Nazis is conflated with the potential perversity of Tarantino’s own audience, we find ourselves exposed to a certain yet plastic Real. This Real is presented to us as precisely that which is not captured (finally), an essential excess that we must ponder and endure in its infinite flexibility in-the-finite. The film exposes the residue effected by any narrative effort to “square the circle.” In this specific sense, we might say that the film fully embraces the fact that “it is not poetic fiction but prosaic documentary which is impossible after Auschwitz” while (simultaneously) forestalling the very real possibility that “the aesthetic pleasure generated by fiction will obliterate [its] proper trauma” (Žižek, Less Than 23). Or rather, the film insists that “The horror of the Holocaust cannot be represented” (25). Quite significantly, in fact, Tarantino never attempts to depict the more obvious or famous horrors of Nazism. We never get pity-inducing shots of concentration camps or heroic sequences in which the Basterds liberate hundreds of interned Jews. Instead (and to borrow, again, Žižek’s phrasing), the “excess of represented content over its aesthetic representation . . . infect[s] the aesthetic form itself. What cannot be described [is] inscribed into the artistic form as its uncanny distortion” (25).2 And yet viewers are compelled to face the traumatic ambiguities of the past in those moments when the film’s amoral revisionism is most overt—when, that is, the film seems to revel ostentatiously in its formal play. Consider the introduction and depiction of Sergeant Rachtman (Richard Sammel) and Master Sergeant Wilhelm (Alexander Fehling)—both Nazi soldiers. Rachtman is introduced and then beaten with a baseball bat by Donowitz in one of the most self-reflexive scenes of the film. The scene finds the Basterds loitering in the woods, trying to convince Rachtman to give up the position of his men. During his interrogation, Raine asks Rachtman if he’s ever heard of Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger). After Rachtman assures him that “Everybody in the German army has heard of Hugo Stiglitz,” the rest of the Basterds begin to laugh raucously and the scene cuts to Stiglitz. On cue with overpowering electric guitar chords, Stiglitz’s name suddenly fills the screen (in giant, yellowembossed letters). A brief montage concerning Stiglitz’s defection from the

We might take this as Žižek’s solution to the problem (which he outlines in “Camp Comedy”) of navigating the Scylla of feckless comedy and the Charybdis of authentic tragedy. While the latter invariably resorts to false realism and mendacious psychologizing (as in, say, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List [1993]), the former accepts the fact that a past trauma/event like “The holocaust cannot be explained, visualised, represented or transmitted.” The problem is that the purely comedic—which, in a manner akin to Hegel’s symbolic, refuses the very possibility of a Thing’s apprehension—opens up the possibility of perverse manipulations, of unfettered rewritings, “a privileged space” that is problematically “unencumbered by the constraints of biological reality.”

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Nazis ensues, absurdly narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. Our inclination to enjoy the fantastic excess of this scene is oddly countered by Rachtman’s stoicism, his willingness to protect his men rather than escape Donowitz’s bat. Raine, of course, takes a moment to remind Rachtman (with wry humor) that Donowitz is better known as “The Bear Jew.” But the inevitable and explicit beating that concludes the scene withholds the very pleasure such self-reflexivity typically prefaces. As Raine asserts, “Frankly, watchin’ Donny beat Nazis to death is the closest we ever get to goin’ to the movies.” If this is indeed the case, then the scene we’ve just watched is in some way equivalent to (or even worse than) the beating Rachtman willingly endures. The scene is, in this sense, an excellent example of Tarantino’s “new brutality,” what Paul Gormley associates with cinematic “language [that] expresses something of the desire—seen for instance in Reservoir Dogs (1991)—to produce a Hollywood action-cinema that can provoke an affective, physical shock, rather than a habitually perceptive and ritualistic response generated by most blockbuster movies of the 1980s and 1990s” (155).3 Wilhelm’s disruption of the perverse excess (or even “inertia”) of the identity game functions in a similar manner. Wilhelm intrudes upon the game as well as the film’s tendency to suggest that identity is solely a matter of performance. Motivated by an alcohol-induced plan to get his newly born son an autograph from von Hammersmark, Wilhelm’s incursion as a sincerely doting and excited (and drunk) new father is the catalyst that finally breaks down the game, reducing it to a series of violent and ethically suspect acts. It is Wilhelm, after all, who first draws attention to the performative nature of Hicox’s German accent. Such moments (in which the necessity of form is paired with the traumatically ambiguous notion of the Real) speak to the film’s overall tendency toward ironic inversion. It quickly becomes clear that, for all their joyously excessive violence, the Basterds do little or nothing to prevent loss of life, or any other wartime horrors. Operation Kino is certainly successful, but it alters the war’s real timeline by (at best) weeks; at worst, days. “The Americans,” as Hitler (Martin Wuttke) notes midway through the narrative, “are on the beach.” There is little in the way of moral certitude here. To a large degree, in fact, the film simply twists or inverts a seemingly playful Gormley goes on to discuss the ambiguous glow that emanates from the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The “curiosity” this glow provokes “suggests the possibility of depth and meaning, as the viewer strains to see the object producing the golden light” (160). Thus, “The imagined bottom of the briefcase suggests that, beyond the surface play of references to other images, lies a depth that is impossible for the viewer to see (which does not stop him or her from trying)” (160). We might very well relocate this glow in Basterds as the truth of the Second World War and the Holocaust, a glow that “breaks through” every time the film turns its overt playfulness against itself.

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revenge fantasy into a fairly overt commentary on America’s treatment of others, and its tendency to ignore the ambiguous “details” of its own past. This commentary becomes explicit when the Gestapo agent, Major Hellstrom (August Diehl), joins the Basterds’s identity game. Hellstrom’s card reads “King Kong,” but Hellstrom quickly comes to the very logical conclusion that he must be “the story of the Negro in America.” In a manner that clearly reflects the film’s own relationship to the events of the Second World War, the absurdity of a film like King Kong is offered as one of the best (if not the only) means of approaching (via misrecognition) the subtle contours of a traumatic and traumatically plastic past.

Performance . . . en Abyme All the more significant is the fact that the truth of King Kong’s ridiculous fiction comes up at the very moment the fate of the Basterds (along with their mission) is tied to the efficacy of their respective performances—as it will be, again, at the end of the film (when Raine and several of his Basterds must pretend to be Italian filmmakers at Goebbels’s premiere of Nation’s Pride). The problematic necessity of performance is, in fact, a defining theme in much of Tarantino’s work. At times it is implicit—as it is in, say, Pulp Fiction (1994), which concerns various violent men playing out purely fictional conceptions of masculinity (inclusive of two central characters who do their “hit-man” work by “get[ting] into character”). In other instances, it is far more explicit— as it is in the earlier Reservoir Dogs (1992), in which an undercover police officer, Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), must convincingly play and risk becoming a violent bank robber. However, in his later and generally more metafictional films Tarantino begins to clarify or more rigorously establish what we might call his “ethics of performance,” an ethics that becomes indissociably linked to the formal devices he tends to deploy. Consider Death Proof (2007). The first half of the film—which masquerades as an old and scratched up “drive-in” print (absent an entire “reel”4)—subtly announces its fictionality5 and then repeats various predictable horror I’m referring here to the theatrical release, which was presented as the second film in a B-movie “double feature” called Grindhouse. The film was subsequently released for home consumption with the “missing reel”—a relatively lengthy striptease—restored. 5 A series of shots in the opening sequence clearly links one of the women—Jungle Julia (Sydney Poitier)—to the various “mediated” versions of femininity that appear throughout her apartment. The numerous musical cues in the first half of the film are also telling, or “replicated” within the logic of the plot and the types of characterizations we get. 4

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conventions. This initial sequence ends with all the central women (including the character we are led to believe is the “final girl”6) getting murdered by Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a serial killer who uses his “death-proof ” stunt car to attack unsuspecting “girls” on the highway. That we should view this first set of women as purely fictional constructs who passively and unwitting acquiesce to their horror-film roles is confirmed once we move into the second half of the film. No longer bearing any signs of an aged or outdated print, the latter half of the film introduces a new set of women—two of whom are stunt performers. One of them is in fact a “real” stunt performer who plays herself (i.e., Zoë Bell). After engaging in a hyper-realistic car chase—and after performing a series of incredible and “real” stunts—these “new” women manage to run Stuntman Mike off the road, make him cry like a baby, and finally beat him to death. On the one hand, the implication is that survival often entails performance. Once Stuntman Mike is no longer able to sustain his role as a sadistic and hypermasculine serial killer, he is as good as dead. On the other hand, a certain excess of performance is clearly critiqued. While the first group of women are depicted as mere performances of horror clichés and stereotypes (entirely trapped, as Jameson might say, in the diachronicity of fate), Stuntman Mike is clearly less a stuntman than a comedic actor, a man who has no sense of identity anterior to his role as “Stuntman Mike.” Indeed, when one of the characters asks a bartender to confirm Stuntman Mike’s identity—“Hey, Warren. Who is this guy?”—the bartender (Tarantino himself) tells her that “He’s Stuntman Mike.” Pressed for more information— “And who the hell is Stuntman Mike?”—the bartender/Tarantino explains tautologically that, well, “He’s a stuntman.” But if Stuntman Mike’s “reality” (as the antithesis of the various actors he “doubles”) is exposed as, itself, a fiction, then so too is Bell’s ostensible “reality” in the film. As a result, the final and excessively cathartic scene—of Bell and company using their boots to smash in Mike’s face as April Spring’s perfectly apropos “Chick Habit” (1995) begins to play—becomes oddly disconcerting. In what ways has this new set of women unreflectively taken on the role of the monster they are slaying? Or, given the implications of the film’s first half and the overt shift in style and format that defines the second, we might ask the following: In what ways is this final act of excessive violence tied to the manner in which both characters and viewers have overlooked the fictionality of that which is apparently real? For a more robust discussion of Tarantino’s strategic redeployment of the “Final Girl” (as theorized by Carol Clover in Men, Women, and Chain Saws)—and especially as it relates to Tarantino’s subversion of viewer expectations and the cinematic gaze—see Jeremi Szaniawski’s “Laisse tomber les filles: (Post)feminism in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof.”

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Put differently, a film like Death Proof encourages us to reflect upon the problem of performance slipping into, or mendaciously overtaking and mortifying, reality—even as it stresses the impossibility of living outside the fiction of our realities. The possibility of ethically negotiating this problem is even more apparent in Django Unchained (2012), which is clearly linked to Basterds via the identity game sequence and Hellstrom’s unexpected reference to “the story of the Negro in America.” This connection is further confirmed by the fact that the film’s German bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz, is played by the same actor who plays Landa in Basterds: Christoph Waltz. Here, though, Waltz (as Schultz) is clearly the “good guy,” and his goodness— as well as, significantly, his ineffectiveness—is directly tied to his inability to sustain a “false” performance. When he and Django (Jamie Foxx) finally convince the despicable Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) to sell them Django’s wife—Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington)—Schultz cannot stop thinking about a man he recently saw ripped to pieces by dogs. As Schultz struggles with the memory of this gruesome scene, Candie begins to finalize the sale of Broomhilda, and a woman in the corner of the room begins to play Beethoven’s “Für Elise” on a harp—the very same song, we are surely encouraged to note, that plays as prelude to Landa’s interrogation of a French farmer at the beginning of Basterds (and which therefore works retrospectively, in this context, to evoke Hellstrom’s surprising “guess” and further stress the hypocrisy of America’s self-righteousness in the Second World War). Unable to abide the sound of a German masterpiece as backdrop to the inhuman cruelties of American slavery, Schultz angrily and abruptly demands that the harpist stop playing. As a result of this impulsive act, both Candie and Schultz end up dead, and Django finds himself strung up nude and upside down in a barn. In this moment, Django’s apparent willingness to lose himself in his own performance (of, specifically, a black “mandingo” scout who callously encourages Candie to let a runaway slave/fighter get ripped apart by dogs) seems suddenly, if troublingly, justified. And yet, at the same time, the apparent ease with which Django manages to forgo his allegiance to or sympathy for those others who suffer at the hands of American slavers is ominously reflected in the character Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson)—Candie’s “house slave” who is clearly, if not ostentatiously, positioned as the film’s most amoral and sinister pervert. In the scenes that immediately precede Schultz’s imprudent act of truth, Stephen appears as an elderly and subservient slave who needs a cane to move his bent body around the house. This appearance of “brokenness” is quickly frustrated, however, when Stephen suddenly and surprisingly compels Candie to meet him (alone) in the parlor. There Candie finds Stephen sitting by a fire, enjoying (what looks to be) a glass of brandy. He quickly begins to

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speak impertinently to Candie, warning him of Schultz and Django’s hidden intentions—and we suddenly get the impression that Candie’s various actions and behaviors have been largely orchestrated by a man who has assumed the role of his surrogate father. Stephen’s perverse mutability is further confirmed when, after Schultz fails to sustain his performance and Django’s troubling refusal to “break” from his own is subsequently justified, he comes to Django in the barn. After making certain that no one outside the barn can see him, Stephen straightens his body and begins walking about easily and casually while reflecting on all he has learned about torturing and killing slaves. Jackson is careful, too, to alter Stephen’s speaking patterns—aligning them less with the performative affectation of a stereotyped “field dialect” and more with the performative affectation of, say, a character like Jules in Pulp Fiction. As a result, the oddly visible nature of Jackson’s makeup becomes that much more glaring. His skin tone has clearly been darkened; his hair is an apparent parody of “Uncle Ben”;7 and the inflexible age lines around his mouth look unnatural (and unnecessary, since Jackson was already in his mid-fifties). This revelation of—and sinister revelry in—performance as a tool for manipulating others and exposing all convictions and all morality as purely arbitrary fictions suddenly shifts the suspense away from the more obvious danger in which Django finds himself. The real danger is more troubling, and twofold: (1) Django’s nudity suddenly seems to represent his current inability to take control of his identity and thus his situation, to make choices about how he might wish to perform himself; (2) Stephen’s overt perversity is largely and strikingly indistinguishable from Django’s tendency toward the same, as his survival (like Django’s) is obviously predicated upon an ability to “know[] perfectly what he is doing, what the Other wants from him, since he conceives of himself as an instrument-object of the Other’s Will-to-Enjoy” (Žižek, Tarrying 71). The implication is this: if Django is to emerge victorious, he must break free from the expectations and regulative codes mandated by an unreal and arbitrary Other while paradoxically acquiescing to (and strategically manipulating) those very regulations and codes. This tension between the helplessness of authentic nudity (on the one hand) and the groundless machinations of abject performativity (on the other) is doubly reflected in the film’s form—a reflection that is made all the more apparent via Tarantino’s choice to foreground the artificiality of Jackson’s performance, to allow Jackson’s legendary status as a twenty-first-century American actor to shine through,

Jackson suggests this very parody in an interview with Entertainment Weekly—published December 20, 2012.

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or “infect,” his depiction of a nineteenth-century house slave. The sense we finally get is that it is the very unreality of performance and not its guileless antithesis—just as it is the very unreality of the film’s excessive efforts to tell the truth about slave-holding America (inclusive of blaxploitation-inflected depictions of enslaved men fighting in gladiatoresque arenas, Klan members who are more concerned with the fit of their hoods than the accomplishment of their planned raid, and a final scene in which a purple-suited Django blows up Candie’s entire mansion and then has his horse perform a little dance for the pleasure of a finally liberated Broomhilda)—that signals something like the ethical apprehension of history’s most unimaginable traumas. Truth disappears the very moment any sense of performance, of fiction, is effaced; yet it is wholly and unethically shirked in the perversity of unfettered play. Tarantino tends to evoke, or touch upon, the danger of these two extremes by placing characters at either pole. In Django, Stephen’s perversity is clearly juxtaposed with Schultz’s final inability to withhold (what we might call) his sense of “moral authenticity.” In Basterds, however, this juxtaposing is far starker. Even more overtly than Stephen in Django, Landa is the pervert in Basterds. He is never not playing a role, playing at being who he really is for the Other. We might in fact say that Landa’s perversity exceeds Stephen’s because it is decidedly more postmodern. While the distinctly postmodern subject maintains “a proper distance toward the dispersed plurality of subjectpositions,” remaining identifiable (only) as a “dispersed, plural, constructed subject” (Žižek, Tarrying 216), the pervert par excellence seems to do just the opposite. The latter, as we said, “knows perfectly what he is doing” (71). But of course the former is just as perverse as the latter, if not more so. The postmodern subject “fears to lose . . . doubt as such, the uncertainty, the open state where everything is still possible” (70); rather than act decisively, such a subject favors being perpetually “acted upon,” perpetually without responsibility. Thus the abject deferment of a fixed identity is hardly different from the acquiescent performance of a self that is wholly for the Other. Both function as perverse forms of self-objectification. At either pole I risk nothing of myself or the truth. Insofar as he clearly seems to lurk closer to the postmodern side of things, Landa is clearly juxtaposed to those characters (like Raine or Zoller) who imagine there is no difference between who they perform and who they are. Raine of course is paradoxically lost to performance because he is wholly unwilling or unable to “perform” at all. This lack of ability and/or willingness is most overt when, toward the end of the film, he is required to “play” an Italian filmmaker. His atrocious accent and clearly skeptical attitude about the necessity of doing so eventually endangers the entire mission. While humorously portrayed, Raine’s abjectly anterior position to “play” is

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eventually and troublingly confused with Zoller’s—who also has a penchant for carving swastikas. This odd and surprising alignment of ideological positions comes to a head when the violence of Raine’s Basterds becomes (in the theater scene) utterly indissociable from Zollar’s. In both cases, a form of absolutism (which, via Zollar’s role in a movie about his heroic exploits, is clearly tied to the mortifying nature of “prosaic documentary”) buttresses acts of violence that are morally indefensible. This immoral absolutism is then foregrounded against its obvious foil: Landa’s perversity, which is already apparent in the film’s opening scene. In this initial sequence, Landa interviews a French farmer named Perrier LaPadite (Denis Ménochet). It quickly becomes clear that Landa is not simply seeking information about local Jewish families, as he initially suggests; he is confirming his suspicion that the LaPadites are harboring Shosanna and her family. As he explains to the clearly anxious farmer, he is a great “Jew Hunter” because, unlike other Germans who think only as hawks, he is capable of thinking like a rat, and thus like a Jew. In a manner that is (again) comparable to the Minister in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”—a character “who dares all things, those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man” (251) and who, with his “lynx eye” (251), is capable of mimicking (if not becoming) his prey8—Landa stresses his perverse willingness to become whatever the situation and/or the other expects or requires. In doing so, Landa (like a Žižekean pervert) “literally ‘steals the kernel of our being,’ the object small a, the secret treasure, agalma, what we consider most precious in ourselves, denouncing it as a mere semblance” (Žižek, Tarrying 48). Or, as Tarantino puts it in his screenplay, “Landa’s power and/or charm, depending on the side one’s on, lies in his ability to convince you he’s privy to your secrets” (66). In this sense, Landa confirms the Lacanian notion that “the position of the pervert is uncannily close to that of the analyst” (Žižek, Tarrying 71). And indeed, while exploiting his “power/charm,” while performing awkward French and then suddenly switching languages, while playing the sympathetic friend, Landa finally steals LaPadite’s honor and (thus) identity, “denouncing it as a mere semblance.” Yet the pervert’s reckless efforts to reveal the symbolic as symbolic, to revel in the possibility of unchecked play, is not entirely the same as the analyst’s Of course, such a comparison might carry more weight if we recall our discussion (in Chapter 2) of Lacan’s seminar on Poe’s story. Lacan explains that “the minister is . . . a monster, a man devoid of principles . . . [because] [h]e suspends the power conferred on him by the letter in indeterminacy, he gives it no symbolic meaning, all he plays on is the fact that this mirage, this reciprocal fascination is established between himself and the Queen” (200). In other words, the Minister refuses to acquiesce to a desire for symbolic closure. He merely prolongs the game for his own pleasure.

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(or, if we can extend the comparison to Poe, Dupin’s), for “the position of the masochist pervert is ultimately an attempt to elude . . . [the] uncertainty [which defines the subject], which is why it involves the loss of the status of the subject, i.e., a radical self-objectivization: the pervert knows what he is for the Other, since he posits himself as the object-instrument of the Other’s jouissance” (Žižek, Tarrying 71). Certainly, Landa is no masochist—at least not in any conventional sense; yet his willingness to become whatever the other expects, wants, or needs—his eventual willingness, for instance, to abandon his pride in the title “Jew Hunter,” to define himself as nothing other than a great detective, to rewrite his history and self again and again— suggests a profound irresponsibility, an irresponsibility inextricably tied to an abject refusal to grapple sincerely with the very ambiguity that defines his being. Or rather, Landa plays with, or manipulates, the other’s fantasy as fantasy; yet (unlike the moral analyst) he does not do so to effect a positive traversal of that fantasy. He merely “confirms [or exacerbates] the subject’s fantasy” (72), exposing the absence it disguises as a negative and traumatic void at the heart of being. While Raine justifies his violence by neurotically9 fixating upon the unyielding or inflexible scars of past truths, Landa justifies his endless and unconstrained revisions by arrogating the unsuturable. His perversity therefore mirrors and finally exposes the film’s own—its own overt and potentially self-satisfying rewriting of history, its apparent willingness to abandon the impossible Real, the past itself, the traumatically complex notion of what really happened. This brings us back to the final POV shot. This shot clearly challenges our own postmodern tendency toward perversion, a tendency that has been largely fostered (if not instilled) by the historiographic metafiction that dominated the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges our desire to abandon the traumatic impossibility of the Real and to give over uncritically to the comforting inertia of yet another symbolic trajectory. Yet Basterds (like, in its own way, Django—and, as we’ll see, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood) finally sublates this perversity by mirroring its own cinematic play in Landa’s villainy. This inversion that moves us (subtly) from perversion to analysis—or from “the inadequacy of ordinary common sense” (Hegel, Phenomenology 43) to the plastic notion of the past as plastic, as radically contingent in its innate relationality—is Speaking on the manner in which a subject’s sense of reality is largely dependent upon the normalized sense of a “gaze”—the sense, that is, “that ‘we are characters in someone else’s dream’” (Less Than 700)—Žižek notes that, while the “pervert uses the voice or gaze as an instrument,” the neurotic willfully “incapacitat[es] . . . the voice or gaze” (701). Raine, then, is obsessively neurotic insofar as he insists upon (and employs a ritualized act to sustain his sense of) a subject position that is in no way indebted to a “viewing” Other/other.

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perhaps “managed” most clearly by the film’s insistence on its very specific historical moment: the real and inevitable end of the war. Everything, the film certainly suggests, is a matter of perspective; reality is only ever a fiction. We “forever lack any measuring-rod which would guarantee our contact with the Thing itself ” (Žižek, Tarrying 20). Yet this fact does not sanction some “delirious solipsism” (20) or neurotic blindness to that which will always remain in excess of a full account. The film’s fiction is exposed as fiction so as to renew the strenuous effort of traversing the void that dirempts fiction and Thing, and which uncannily mirrors or echoes (in) the infinite canyon at the “heart of [all] Things.” This space of diremption is exposed as the very point of access, the space of an impossible truth that is lost in (or that necessarily exceeds) its translation—the very thing to which we are forever indebted, forever responsible.

“Facts, not [Dreams]” Like Tarantino’s films (Basterds, especially), Nolan’s Inception (2010) struggles to traverse (by sustaining) this essential space of diremption—even if, at the same time, it does not take as its subject a “real” historical event. Concerned with the adventures of Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an “extractor” of the secrets hidden in dreams, the film is largely or wholly set within the world of dreams. It is also careful to stress the manner in which cinematic constructions mirror the artificial nature of a dreamscape, or the process of what Freud terms the “dream work.”10 Early on, Cobb tells Ariadne (Ellen Page)—his new dream “architect”—that a person “never really remember[s] the beginning of a dream.” He tells her this after an abrupt elliptical cut to Cobb and Ariadne sitting at an outdoor café; how they got there is not immediately clear, though we eventually learn they are both dreaming. A similar cut occurs in the opening sequence. After Cobb discovers that his dead wife—Mal (Marion Cotillard)—has once again invaded one of his team’s dream constructions, the film suddenly and inexplicably cuts to Mal and Cobb speaking in a hotel room. Like the cut to the café scene, this cut exposes the dream as construct. Of course, such cuts are employed throughout (as they are in most films). Given their function in the dream sequences, though, even the most mundane of cuts become problematic once the film begins to depict Cobb’s ostensible (waking) reality. In other words, the film constantly highlights the connection between dreams and film by See Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—chapter 6, specifically.

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pointing toward the sleight of hand that both necessarily employ. As Cobb goes on to tell Ariadne, being a good architect means finding ways to make what isn’t real seem real—like, we are encouraged to assume, a Hollywood set designer or film editor. Constructing dreams, like making movies, is—as Cobb tells his father (Michael Caine)—“the chance to build cathedrals, entire cities.” All of this largely amounts to the fact that Inception is yet another work struggling (à la postmodernism) to dedoxify our sense of certainty. Our reality, like the reality of dreams, like the reality of film (or literature), is a manipulated and manipulatable construct, a product of endless filters, ellipses, and misdirection; or, as Hutcheon assures us, “we can only know the world through ‘a network of socially established meaning systems, the discourses of our culture’” (Politics 7). The final scene ostensibly solidifies this fact. After successfully entering the mind of a young business mogul and planting the “idea” that he should break up his dead father’s empire, Cobb is finally allowed to return home to his children in America. He is allowed to do so because the man who hired him to plant the idea expunges his criminal record, a record he received after being convicted for his wife’s murder. However, we are led to believe (via Cobb’s own dreams, which Ariadne invades) that Cobb’s wife committed suicide so as to frame Cobb. After living a “lifetime” with Mal in dream “limbo”—after, that is, constructing a reality based on both “fantasy” and “memory”—Cobb found he was unable to convince Mal that what they had created was not real. He was thus forced to “plant” (via an act of “inception”) the idea that their world was not real. Once that idea grew, Mal finally agreed to join him in a joint act of suicide, an act that finally woke them to the “real” world. The problem, as Cobb explains, is that “Once an idea has taken hold in the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.” Mal continued to believe her world was not real. Desperate to force Cobb to undergo another (truly final) suicide, Mal kills herself again in an effort to make his life unlivable. For this reason, Cobb is haunted by both Mal and his children. Like Mal, his children repeatedly appear whenever he is working in a dream. They always appear as he remembers seeing them last: his daughter in a pink dress; his son in a yellow plaid shirt. When he enters his home for the first time since fleeing America, he sees his children playing just outside his backdoor. As always, they are in pink and plaid, their backs to the camera. This time, though, they turn to face the camera, and as Cobb walks out to embrace them, he stops briefly to spin his totem one last time—a spinning top he uses to determine if he is dreaming. If the top continues to spin indefinitely, he is dreaming; if it falls, he is in reality. Cobb spins the top, but he does not wait to see the result. However, as he walks off toward his children, the camera lingers on the spinning object. It continues to spin, then

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it begins to wobble. But before it falls or reasserts its spin the camera cuts to black; the credits roll, and we are encouraged to reassess the entire film. What is real? Is it possible to make any claim about what is real and what we merely present to ourselves as reality?11 As does Tarantino in Basterds (and, to an extent, Django), Nolan returns us to the very postmodern possibility that the past, because unknowable, is simply up for grabs, open to endless and infinite interpretation. Both directors, after all, offer us happy endings as dreams, as pasts that have been consciously rewritten. Yet they simultaneously negate these rewritings as negations (of the truth) by exposing the irresponsibility their possibility and/or necessity might in fact authorize. We can clarify this process further yet if we reapproach Cobb’s function in Inception via the filter of Nolan’s earlier film: Memento (2000). In many respects, and as McGowan makes clear, Cobb is a more subtle reimaging of Memento’s central protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce).12 When Memento opens, Shelby has just finished murdering a man. The scene plays out in reverse. We see Shelby holding a picture of the dead man, a picture that is slowly fading. The picture soon returns to the Polaroid camera Shelby holds; the man rises up as a bullet leaves his body and returns to Shelby’s gun. At this point there is an abrupt cut, and we are offered black-and-white footage of Shelby in an anonymous hotel room; he is speaking in voiceover: So where are you? You’re in some motel room. You just—you just wake up, and you’re in . . . in a motel room. There’s the key. It feels like maybe it’s the first time you’ve been there, but . . . perhaps you’ve been there for a week, three months. It’s . . . it’s kind of hard to say.

These are, of course, hackneyed questions. McGowan—whose own Hegelian reading of Nolan’s films predates and certainly anticipates my own—makes just this point. As McGowan puts it, while countering Robert Samuel’s suggestion that Inception merely reflects and exasperates our contemporary “inability to differentiate between fantasy and reality” (147), Nolan’s film ultimately “deceives the spectator . . . by making it seem that reality has a privileged status relative to fantasy or the dream” (151). In other words, the film encourages us to ask a question (“What is real?”) that assumes a static reality anterior to the dream as fiction. But such a reality is always already contingent upon, and thus inseparable from, the dream. McGowan thus suggests that Cobb “wants the image and certainty of paternity more than he wants reality, though he believes that the latter will provide a vehicle for the former” (170). We might wonder, though, if Cobb is this naïve. If he is, then he is (perhaps) simply and tragically caught up in the fantasy of reality as the law of the father; he does not choose this fantasy as fantasy. If, though, Cobb’s are the intentional and irresponsible choices of a pervert, then the film’s ethics become that much more profound. 12 In Memento, McGowan notes, Nolan “establishes Leonard as a character seemingly in pursuit of knowledge and then reveals that pursuit as disingenuous. The case is less clear with Cobb in Inception, but the procedure parallels that of Memento” (149). 11

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The film then unfolds by cutting back and forth from black-and-white scenes of Shelby in the motel room—speaking, as we come to realize, on a phone to some unidentified man—and color scenes of Shelby attempting to locate the man who killed and raped his wife (Jorja Fox) and left Shelby with brain damage, capable of remembering everything up to the murder of his wife but unable to remember anything since for more than a few minutes. As we come to realize these apparent facts, or “truths,” we also come to realize that the black-and-white scenes are moving forward in time while the color scenes are jumping backward in time—each scene returning to the point immediately before the last. With each jump back, we see Shelby beginning anew without any sense of what he was doing previously. As with the Polaroid in the first scene, Shelby’s realizations and actions are immediately erased moments after they are learned or performed. In order to combat this “condition,” Shelby relies on a series of mnemonic devices: tattoos, Polaroids, notes, and so on. At the beginning of the film (which is, of course, the ostensible end), we see that Shelby has tattooed “the facts” on this body, including the fact that the man who killed his wife has the initials “J” and “G.” But these recorded facts are almost immediately problematized; they’ve clearly been amended on one or more occasions. At one time Shelby thought that “J” stood for James, but (immediately before the murder that opens the film) he comes to the conclusion that he’s looking for a “John.” Quite quickly, we come to question Shelby’s various assurances that memory is irrelevant “if you have the facts.” Thus, as with Basterds and Inception (or as with metafiction more generally), Memento appears to be interested in exposing the inherent unknowability of any constant, of the impossibility of reality itself. In this sense, as critics like Rosalind Sibielski have suggested, the film positions Shelby (a former insurance investigator) as a person whose desperate need for facts and truth, for the rationalism of Enlightenment teleologies, leads to desperate acts of violence—acts that provide some sense of temporary order in an otherwise chaotic and unfixable (or “postmodern”) world.13 As Sibielski notes, “Leonard’s belief in his photographs as transparent signifying facts associates him with Enlightenment modernity’s unconditional faith in the infallibility of scientific investigation and empirical research” (88). For this reason, “the ultimate failure of rationality as an ordering principle in the film results, at least in part, from the photos being subject to shifting interpretations which complicate any transparent or mimetic relationship between the photographs and their referents” (88). The film, in other words (in its very form as well as its content), stresses the futility of desiring “the facts”; only “strategies of discursive subversion” are effective (if, also, potentially dangerous) in our postmodern times (99). This tends to be the standard reading of the film—cf. Peter Thomas’s “Victimage and Violence” and Christopher Williams’s “Factualizing the Tattoo.” Unlike Sibielski or Thomas, though, Williams suggests that

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Such readings suggest that the film is postmodern, not Shelby. In having the film unfold in reverse, Nolan forces the viewer to sympathize (at least initially) with Shelby’s condition; like Shelby, we have no idea when a scene is beginning, where it is beginning, or why. Moreover, as the film progresses, the black-and-white portions begin to destabilize another apparent “fact.” As he tells the man on the phone (as well as a number of other people throughout the film), Shelby investigated an insurance case that involved a man name Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky). Jankis had lost his short-term memory in an accident, but Shelby managed to prove that Jankis’s memory loss was psychological, not physical. As a result, Jankis was denied coverage. Pushed into thinking that her husband was simply faking, Jankis’s diabetic wife tried to make him snap out of it by getting him to inject her with insulin every few minutes. Jankis, though, did not snap out of it, and his wife went into a coma. But, Shelby insists, unlike Jankis, he has “a system”: “I know who I am.” However, as we move further back in time, we are led to believe that Jankis’s story may very well be Shelby’s, and that Shelby’s wife survived the accident that caused Shelby’s brain damage only to die because she could not trick her husband into remembering that he had already administered her insulin. As the film approaches its end/beginning, we are even given flashes of Shelby pinching his wife’s thigh, preparing it for an injection. Of course, these flashes are as unreliable as anything else Shelby knows or remembers. As Sibielski puts it, “it is impossible for either Leonard within the film’s narrative or the film’s spectators examining it, to ever achieve a definitive accounting of Leonard’s past” (99). In this sense, the film frustrates our desire for constants by inducing a type of cinematic “memory loss” while ambiguously conflating “Sammy” and “Lenny” (a nickname Shelby hates and which, as he tells people on various occasions, he associates with his wife). By buttressing its backward and “misleading” movement toward some “redemptive temporal and casual origin” with a “quasi-confessional” phone conversation, the film (as William G. Little suggests) negotiates both “the desire for, and impossibility of, perfect interpretive redress” (71). And while Shelby persists in repeating the various gestures of a traumatized man whose desire for “a new, redemptive story about himself . . . fail[s] to entertain the missing that structures traumatic experience” (83), we are encouraged to abandon our own desire for totalizing

Nolan ultimately fails to destroy the “concept of factuality” (33) because he fails to realize that the problem of “unreliable information due to misinformation and deception . . . is not an ontological one in which the death of the real is at stake” (33). But the problem with all such readings is that they assume the “intent” of the film is to endorse a certain acceptance of postmodern skepticism/perversity.

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truth claims, or absolute mimetic recall. We are, rather, “[woken] up to the impossibility of a fully redemptive redress” (83). There is little doubt that Shelby’s reliance on “facts,” his insistence that some absolute truth lurks in the redacted police “case file” he compulsively reads and rereads (even though he may have wrote and/or redacted it himself), is ethically problematic. Seemingly unwilling to embrace doubt, or the “missing,” Shelby perpetuates unjust and violent acts in the name of an illusory justice. As we learn in the end/beginning, the man we saw shot in the opening sequence—a cop Shelby initially knows as Teddy but who he learns is really named John Gammell, or “J. G.” (Joe Pantoliano)—is not the first man Shelby has killed. Shelby, we are finally led to believe, has no idea when his wife died, nor does he know how many people he’s already identified and killed as “J. G.” Finally, and perhaps most significantly, he apparently does not know that each of the pictures he’s taken—pictures that seem to him to be mimetically accurate at any given moment—take on new meaning each time he forgets them. Because he is unaware of these facts, his various “friends” have been able to use him, shaping his perception of reality from one moment to the next. From this angle, the film clearly endorses the very thing Shelby futilely struggles to deny: a certain postmodern perversity, a type of unchecked textual play. However, and in a manner that echoes and helps us to make sense of the procedures we have been tracking in Tarantino’s work, the film undergoes a subtle yet striking inversion, a certain negation of its largely overt negation of “redemptive redress.” Most obviously, the film induces in the viewer a type of memory loss by moving backward in time while inexorably negating that memory loss. Shelby may not remember how he finds himself in various moments, but the viewer always gains this information eventually (to some extent). Our sense of certainty increases as the film unfolds. For instance, after Shelby hits Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss)—a woman with whom he has become involved—she simply leaves him alone for a few minutes and then returns, claiming that she was struck by an associate of her boyfriend, a man she’d like Shelby to “get rid of.” We come to know, too, and without doubt, that Shelby has killed at least two men in the name of revenge (Teddy in the beginning/end and the man Teddy convinces him to kill at the end/ beginning). At least one must be the wrong man. As a consequence of our increasingly stable notion of Shelby’s truth, we are eventually positioned to notice the manner in which Shelby abuses (and maybe even performs) his condition. He frequently neglects to make important notes about his current situation. After he beats and ties up the man Natalie sent him to find, he simply lies down to forget what he just did. His range of memory also expands and contracts in oddly useful ways, and he frequently seems to remember more than he admits. He knows that Polaroids can’t be torn in two, that “you

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have to burn them.” Since we are led to assume that Shelby (in the late 1990s) has come to employ a Polaroid camera because of his condition, this is a particularly telling “memory”—even more so if we note that we eventually see Shelby burning a Polaroid so as to set up a very specific narrative. In the end/beginning, Shelby kills Natalie’s drug dealing boyfriend, “Jimmy Grantz” (Larry Holden), only to realize that Teddy has been getting him to kill all manner of men with the initials “J. G.” Rather than making a note of this, Shelby simply burns the photographic evidence of his last kill, puts on Jimmy’s clothes (which leads to his encounter with Natalie), and notes beneath his Polaroid of Teddy that Teddy cannot be trusted, thus willingly setting in motion the events we’ve already witnessed in reverse. By the end, then, we see (as do both Teddy and Natalie) that Shelby lies to himself “to be happy,” that he is “blissfully ignorant,” that he “can’t get scared” because he refuses to accept the very possibility of “redemptive redress.” And so the film finally counters its own postmodern perversity with a critique of Shelby’s, negating (in turn) the very claim it simultaneously and necessarily endorses: “the impossibility of a fully redemptive redress” (Little, 83, my emphasis). Shelby refuses to endure any notion of the Real. He desperately wants to lose himself in the contingency of representation, in the decedent perversity of the postmodern condition. This is most obvious when Shelby hires a prostitute to perform and therefore help him to establish his memory (or, better, version) of what happened the night he and his wife were attacked. That he “wakes up” from this exercise in memory formation and systematically burns all of the items he associates with his wife (including, we can assume, her diabetes) only serves to highlight further his intense desire to exist outside the confines of reality’s limits. In stressing this aspect of Shelby, the film provides us with yet another certainty: regardless of the reason, Shelby blames himself for what happened to his wife. He’d rather engage in an endless series of revenge acts than endure the ambiguous trauma of what cannot possibly be changed (even if it can never be apprehended fully and finally either). The film therefore demands that we struggle to engage the truths at its core via the only point of access possible: fragmented and unreliable fiction(s). This demand is finally apparent in the film’s critique of Shelby as a dangerous and reckless pervert, a man whose violence is tied directly to a fear of losing “doubt as such, the uncertainty, the open state where everything is still possible” (Žižek, Tarrying 70). This brings us back to Cobb. Like Shelby, Cobb repeatedly claims to be interested in the truth, in reality. He also outwardly distrusts dreams, just as Shelby outwardly distrusts memories. As Shelby puts it, “Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories

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can be distorted. They’re just an interpretation, they’re not a record, and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts.” Inception, though, is somewhat more ambiguous than Memento. We are never given concrete reasons to doubt Cobb’s story or his memories; we are never given a Jankis-like alternative to his ostensibly self-induced master narrative. However, the film is littered with clues: the static clothing of Cobb’s children; the fact that Cobb’s “totem” is actually his wife’s (and Ariadne is informed that a totem will not work if it is touched by another person); Mal’s very direct suggestion that “[Cobb’s] world is not real,” that there is something obviously suspicious and fictional about his persecution, of a reality in which he is “chased around the globe by anonymous corporations and police forces.” Ultimately, then, the final shot of a top that is continuing to spin and about to fall places us in a position comparable to the position in which we find ourselves at the end of Basterds. We are tempted to give in to the suggestion that, as Mal puts it, reality is merely something we “choose.” Yet the film suggests also that to do so—to walk away (like Cobb) as if we don’t care what is real and what is not—is to fall dangerously in line with Cobb’s perverse refusal to endure the traumatic notion of his loss(es). We certainly cannot lay claim to the entirety of Cobb’s real story, but we can be quite certain that his return home as a heroic and doting father (after a thrilling and self-gratifying adventure) is nothing but a dream. Like Basterds (like Memento), Inception thus effaces the possibility of the truth so as to expose the notion of the truth in its effacement.

Once Upon a Time . . . in Conclusion Let’s perseverate just a little while longer on the possibility of holding to the truth by rigorously attending to its loss in the dream-like distortions of form. But let’s do so by (or while) returning, once last time, to Tarantino. Even more dramatically than he does in Basterds (or Django), Tarantino offers us a beguiling yet disconcerting dream of historical revisionism in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood. The film spans three days in 1969. The specific dates are announced via subtitles. The first two days are consecutive (“Saturday February 8th” and “Sunday February 9th”). The final day occurs “SIX MONTHS LATER,” on “Friday August 8th”—the day three members of the Manson Family invaded the Polanski-Tate residence in Hollywood and brutally murdered the then pregnant Sharon Tate and her three friends (i.e., Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and Abigail Folger), along with a young man named Steven Parent. The film’s outrageous conclusion in fact begins with four Manson Family members—“Sadie” (Mikey Madison), “Flowerchild” (Maya Hawke), “Katie” (Madisen Beaty), and “Tex Watson”

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(Austin Butler)—arriving, on “Charlie’s” (Damon Herriman) instructions, at Tate’s home.14 However, in Tarantino’s film, the noise of Watson’s idling car quickly catches the ear of the drunk and purely fictional Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio): a struggling but once famous Western TV star who lives next to Tate. Because Dalton strolls out onto the road to berate the “dirty fucking hippies,” the Family members (after deciding that they should “kill the people that taught [them] to kill”) invade his home—where his new Italian wife is currently sleeping and his best friend and stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), is feeding his dog and inexplicably experiencing the hallucinogenic effects of an “acid dipped” cigarette.15 As in “real life,” one of the four Family members stays behind (in this case, Flowerchild); but in Tarantino’s increasingly fictional revision of things the reticent Flowerchild simply drives off with the car, refusing to have any part in the events. Once in the house, and as Dalton listens to music on his headphones and floats about in his outdoor pool, the film provides the Family members with a few moments to drag Dalton’s wife out of the bedroom and to play the role of menacing, would-be murderers. Watson even gets some screen time to say his famous lines: “I’m the devil. And I’m here to do the devil’s business.” An intoxicated and mostly bemused Booth simply lets the scene unfold. Before long, however, any lingering sense of historical fact explodes. Booth commands his perfectly trained dog to attack Watson and then Sadie (whose nose and mouth he first shatters with an unopened can of dog food), stabs Watson and then savagely crushes his face, and finally (after she stabs him in the hip) takes Katie’s head and smashes it repeatedly into a phone, a poster of Dalton, a stone mantel, and a tabletop. The scene concludes with Booth finally passing out while a crazed and brutalized Sadie runs outside to the pool, Watson’s gun in hand. After she eventually stumbles blindly into the pool, a surprised Dalton climbs out and retrieves a flamethrower from his shed—the very same flamethrower he uses to kill Nazis in The 14 Fists of McCluskey. From the edge of the pool (and in a ridiculously framed long shot that follows on the heels of an equally ridiculous fast zoom) he torches the impotently flailing Sadie. In the aftermath, as police cars and ambulances drive the dead and injured away—and as the somewhat melancholy theme from John Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) begins to Tarantino, of course, plays somewhat loosely with the “real” names of the members involved. While “Sadie” and “Katie” were the actual nicknames of Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel (respectively), “Flowerchild” is only apparently the “real” Linda Kasabian—who kept watch in the car during the actual murders and did not, as she does in the film, drive off. Tex Watson was otherwise known as Charles Denton Watson, Jr. 15 LSD, of course, breaks down in high heat—so Booth’s apparent hallucinations are somewhat suspect, or simply (like the rest of the scene) “unreal.” 14

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play—Dalton finds himself getting invited by Tate and her curious friends into the home of the famous movie director Roman Polanski. As he is warmly greeted by Tate and company, and immediately before the credits roll, the title of the film finally appears on screen. First, “Once Upon a Time,” then an ellipsis. Finally: “in Hollywood.” Detached from the rest of the film, the scene is inescapably perverse in its complete disregard for historical fact. We might even say it is troublingly dismissive—and thus a direct and explosive echo of the oddly silent function Tate (Margot Robbie) plays throughout. The horrific trauma Tate and her friends suffered is simply ignored, cast off as inconsequential, unworthy of due diligence. In place of a careful and sincere effort to represent the events that actually transpired, we get a masculine and sexualized Brad Pitt (playing a hypermasculine stuntman who was once a Green Beret and who most likely murdered his own wife) heroically dispatching three of the most notorious and cruel murderers in America’s long history of notorious and cruel murderers. And let’s not forget that wonderfully gratuitous flamethrower scene. Immediately and obviously there are links to be made between this film and Inglourious Basterds. But if the gratuitousness of its violent revisionism links Once Upon a Time to this earlier film, so too does its often subtle use of metafictional devices. Indeed: the deployment of these very devices in the first two hours of the film’s runtime subtly prepare viewers to register the peculiarly affective nature of its conclusion. On its own, the scene most certainly functions to provoke any number of emotional responses—conventional, or “thematic,” emotions of (say) disgust, contempt, joy, or excitement. Maybe even fear. But, as we’ve seen, to approach affect as a synonym for thematizable emotion is to risk slipping problematically into reductive, purely subjective or even solipsistic, concerns. In any case, such “affects” (insofar as they might confirm, through what Kant calls “sensation,” the fact of an anterior reality) have no bearing on the historical validity of a particular representation, its notional relation to the actual Thing that lies before it. Emotions might be “true,” but they help very little in our efforts to approach the truth of things. If, then, this scene (and the movie itself) is not simply another postmodern rending of the infinitely thin tissue connecting sign and referent, representation and Thing, it must affect disgust in the most radical of senses—as what is unassimilable, unswallowable, unaccountable yet nevertheless registered in the moment of its coherence and thus consumption, its form. To recall Nancy, such disgust is a matter of intrusiveness that never ceases because it never ceases arriving, never ceases intruding as other. In this very specific sense, the scene’s historioplastic function (if it has one) must be tied to its ability or effort to register the infinite as in-the-finite. And insofar as such an affect must necessarily be a provocation of form, this final

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scene only functions—as does the surprisingly similar, yet inverted, scene at the end of Death Proof—as a condition of the film’s overreaching or notional “unity,” its singular (as Poe might say) effect. So, again: let’s back up. While the film is, on some level, another “Manson movie,” Manson is almost entirely sidelined. The film instead maintains its focus on Dalton and Booth and their various efforts to remain relevant in a rapidly changing Hollywood. Manson only appears once, and for only a brief moment, in the theatrical version. But he appears, perhaps significantly, in one of the film’s most consequential and troubling (yet seemingly random and mundane) sequences. While fixing the antennae on Dalton’s roof—and taking a few moments to pull off his shirt, smoke a cigarette, and listen to the music Tate is playing in her bedroom—Booth sees Manson drive up to the Polanski-Tate residence in an ice-cream truck. Manson is looking for the record producer Terry Melcher, with whom Manson hopes to record an album.16 While Melcher had previously rented the place, Tate and Polanski are (in the film’s present) the current tenants. So, as Booth watches, Manson is sent on his way. But immediately before Manson arrives, Booth takes a moment to reflect on the fact that, instead of working as Dalton’s stunt double (on the episode of Lancer Dalton is currently shooting), he has been tasked with menial repairs. A flashback ensues. As Booth lounges outside Dalton’s trailer on the set of The Green Hornet, Dalton (inside) tries to convince the stunt coordinator—Randy (Kurt Russell)—to allow Booth to work as his double. Randy is resistant because he doesn’t want to trouble the wardrobe assistant (who, he asserts, is “a fucking bitch”) and because, more pointedly, Booth “killed his fucking wife.” After Dalton asks Randy if he really “believe[s] that old shit,” another flashback brings us to Booth on the deck of a small yacht (in full snorkeling attire, speargun in hand). His wife, Billie Booth (Rebecca Gayheart), is complaining about the “shittiest weather on the shittiest boat with the shittiest person.” As Billie stands up from her lounger and continues to berate her “loser” husband, a wide shot shows the speargun pointing directly at her stomach. Booth, in his snorkel mask, stares blankly forward. As the sound of a large wave comes to dominate the soundtrack, the scene cuts back to Dalton’s trailer. And Randy, who is reminded that Booth is a “war hero,” relents. In the next scene, a cool and bemused Booth (who now finds himself loitering on an outdoor lot with a relatively large group of crew members) Tarantino’s scene can be viewed as a largely accurate depiction of Manson’s arrival at the property in March of 1969, as reported by the property owner (who spoke with him): Rudolph Altobelli. Altobelli’s account is recorded in the October 22, 1970, issue of The New York Times. Tarantino’s scene, however, occurs in February—and Sebring (rather than the photographer Shahrokh Hatami) greets Manson.

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provokes a fight with an ostentatiously pompous Bruce Lee (Mike Moh)—a Bruce Lee whose hair is (notably) at its more recognizable or famous length, not as he wore it while filming The Green Hornet.17 Surrounded by a large group of intrigued crewmembers—or “in front of,” as he says, “all [his] friends”—Lee takes off his “Kato” jacket to reveal his legendary black pants and white tank top, and one of the crew members comes over to tell him that Booth is “kinda famous . . . [because he] killed his wife and got away with it.” Heedless of this “warning,” Lee faces off against Booth; and his legendary status is immediately shattered. Booth easily throws him into the side of a car—so powerfully that (impossibly) the entire door collapses inward, as might the door of a prop. The absurdity of the scene is highlighted by its peculiar structure. To the extreme left of the frame, and as Lee falls from the door to the ground, one of the crewmembers begins to walk further to the left. Lee, in a tight shot, and after a cut (that is almost a jump cut), begins to stand up. Then a wide shot shows Lee ready to go once again. But the entire lot is now empty. Not a single crew member remains in frame. Of course, this continuity error is likely to be overlooked by most—especially given the surprising events that continue to unfold. Indeed, oblivious to the strange disappearance of their audience, Booth and Lee face off once again—and Booth proves to be no less a master of martial arts. But as they move to the left of the frame, the crew person we last saw walking in that direction can be seen talking on a phone. Randy and his wife, Janet (Zoë Bell), then appear to kick Booth off the set, and Lee finds it necessary to assert (comically) that “nobody beat the shit out of Bruce.” This extended flashback, or series of flashbacks, ends with a cut back to Booth on Dalton’s roof. He says to himself (regarding the fact that that he is now barred from working with Dalton on Lancer) “fair enough.” Insofar as it reflects upon the facts of the Manson murders, and what Booth may have seen while standing on Dalton’s roof in February, the entire sequence is of some note. It seems safe to assume, even, that the continuity error is intentional—or, if not intentional, perfectly apropos. It has

This depiction of Lee caused no small amount of controversy. Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, famously derided Tarantino’s depiction of her father as “an arrogant a–hole who was full of hot air” (as qtd in Molloy). She also pointed out several inaccuracies in his clothing and hair style. Tarantino, though, was provocatively unapologetic, expounding on how the scene could be taken as an accurate depiction of both Lee and Booth (as a Green Beret). Yet, at the very same time, Tarantino stresses the fact that Booth “maybe could . . . beat up” Lee because Booth is a fictional character (as is, he suggests, “Dracula”). Ultimately, however, he implies that, within the context of a formal tournament or competition, Booth wouldn’t stand a chance against Lee. Cf. Tarantino’s press conference in Moscow, August 7, 2019.

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a profoundly uncanny affect, an affect that (given the very slight possibility that viewers will notice it) is likely to imbue, or haunt, the entire scene. It works, in this sense, like the Mystery Man’s missing eyebrows in Lynch’s Lost Highway (1992) or Kubrick’s use of a mirror in The Shining (1980) to cross (without actually crossing) the stage line. We cannot say what, or why, but something suddenly seems to be missing, incomplete, wrong. And something is, quite obviously, wrong. Since the entire sequence is presented as Booth’s flashback, we are encouraged to assume that Booth heard Dalton and Randy’s conversation in the trailer—and what we see of that conversation is, therefore, his reconstruction of events. Even if he didn’t hear them, he clearly seems to know what people say, or know, about him. When (in front of Booth) Janet angrily tells Randy to get his “wife-killing buddy” off the set, Booth just sheepishly smirks. It is therefore of some significance that, when Booth attempts to make sense of his current situation on Dalton’s roof, he associates it far less with the fact that everyone in Hollywood thinks he murdered his wife and far more with the “fact” that he once utterly crushed Bruce Lee— who he calls a “little prick”—in hand-to-hand combat. In this sense, the continuity error (which, of course, is oddly obscured by that one remaining crew person who maintains continuity) draws our attention to a series of other easily overlooked problems: the impossible door dent; Lee’s outrageous, if not improbable, behavior; the perfect coincidence that Lee’s entire look conforms to his legend; and so on. We get something like a retrospective cataract of the uncanny, leading all the way back to the flashback within the flashback: the scene of Booth pointing a spear gun at his wife. Whose perspective or memory is it? Is it Randy’s imagining of things? Is it Booth’s actual memory? Nothing in the film confirms Booth’s innocence, and the inertia of the scene certainly implies a very clear outcome. Yet the abrupt cut—along with the possibility that the entire scene is Randy’s imagined reconstruction, or even Booth’s idea of what Randy might think—forces us to admit that we can’t be sure. What, though, the entire sequence does confirm is this: Booth’s identity is in some way contingent upon his ability to manipulate ambiguity, to make the past align with his perfectly cool and in-control persona. This fact is further implied when we get two other depictions of Lee—first, as he trains Tate for her role in Phil Karlson’s The Wrecking Crew (1968), and second, when he spars with Sebring. In both brief scenes, he is presented as affable and without pretense.18 But it would be a mistake, I think, to confuse (too completely) this uncanny moment of disappearance, this desuturing break in continuity, with

His costuming, too, is far more temporally accurate—almost exactly so.

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the very ambiguity Booth seems to exploit. Instead, this tear in the fabric of the film signals the gravity of some traumatic obstacle, an obtruding piece of the Real no amount of daydreaming can cover up: the gap at the “heart of the matter” that is also the plastic limit of the Thing-in-itself. And if this uncanny resonance effects a kind of backward moving cataract (i.e., a striking fall within or from the film’s structural clarity), it is also carried forward and redoubled in at least two other major scenes—until, that is, it comes to infect the final scene and the film’s most perverse effort to exploit openness as the complete absence of limitation. Rather than the tight seal of verisimilitude or mimetic collapse, some uncanny Thing is consequently inscribed within the no less counterfeit seal of an openness without bounds, without a without. That said, let’s consider the first of these two scenes which carry forward the discontinuity in question, and which therefore ensure the “exscripted” affect of the film’s conclusion. This scene occurs concurrently with and then extends beyond Booth’s time on the roof—during, that is, Dalton’s efforts to film his guest-starring role as “the heavy” on Lancer. On set, Dalton—who associates himself with a washed up “bronco buster”—is unable to conceal his tendency to stutter or to tear up about the present state of his career. Yet once he is behind the camera and in character he immediately becomes (in Booth’s words) “Rick Fuckin’ Dalton.” As is consistently the case throughout the film, he loses any trace of a stutter when in character. Significantly, then, Tarantino does not show Dalton being filmed. He instead cuts directly to the Lancer episode itself, as if we are seeing it after postproduction—with traditional continuity editing and no trace of production equipment. Even more notable is the fact that Tarantino offers us Dalton’s Lancer scenes with modern color and filters and in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio—not the 4:3 aspect ratio that frames the various black-and-white scenes we get from the fictional TV show that made Dalton famous (i.e., Bounty Law). The Lancer episode thus blends perfectly into the diegesis of Tarantino’s film, sustaining its fictional inertia. However, as we watch Dalton’s character try to intimidate James Stacey’s character—Johnny Madrid Lancer (played, in Tarantino’s version, by Timothy Olyphant)—Dalton suddenly freezes and calls out for his “line.” Someone “off camera” then shouts it out and the nondiegetic score stops, as does the camera (which has been smoothly tracking around the two men). After a few seconds both music and camera restart and Dalton tries to proceed. But after he forgets his line again, he demands (in frustration) that they restart the entire scene, and we hear the squeak of a crank as we experience the camera slowly rotating back to its starting position. This peculiar intrusion of production elements in a postproduction artifact is then repeated in the following Lancer scene—which sees Dalton’s character threatening Johnny’s brother while holding the two men’s young

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sister “hostage.” A traditional two-shot structure toggles between each man’s viewpoint until Dalton finally and dramatically throws the young girl to the ground. Suddenly, off screen, we hear the director (Nicholas Hammond) shouting: “Give me evil, sexy Hamlet. Settle into it.” The next cut brings us (again) to Dalton’s point of view, but the man he’s been threatening is now missing. In his place is the director, camera operator, and crew. Quite overtly, the structure of this entire sequence echoes the structure of Rush’s The Stunt Man—which opens with a clapper board and frequently confuses both its viewer and its central character, Cameron (Steve Railsback), by offering dramatic action sequences (from the film that is getting filmed in the film) as long takes that almost invariably become indistinguishable from the film’s “actual” diegesis. Once we are as convinced as Cameron (i.e., a Vietnam veteran running from the law while masquerading as a stunt actor) that an extended sequence has become actual reality, the god-like director (Peter O’Toole) will suddenly appear and shout “cut.” Nicholas Hammond seems, in fact, to perform Lancer’s director (i.e., the real Sam Wannamaker19) with O’Toole’s performance in mind.20 However while Rush’s far more postmodern film repeatedly joins and disjoins its fictional layers so as to merge our viewing experience with the experiences of a man who has lost the ability to sustain a clear line between the reality of his present and the effort to fictionalize his traumatic past, Tarantino employs the same technique so as to confront viewers with Dalton’s inability (yet desire) to sustain his fiction. As a result, the odd and disorienting disruptions in the Lancer sequence lead us back to Booth: Dalton’s literal and metaphoric double. If, in the Lee sequence, we are confronted with a rupture in Booth’s imaginary cool and immaculate masculinity, the Lancer sequence largely implies (if indirectly) that Booth’s reality is tantamount to Dalton’s in performance. In this sense, Tarantino’s film is, quite simply, about two men struggling to evade death, the inevitable end point or outward limit of a fictional existence. Yet another allusion suddenly becomes apparent—this time to George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Hill’s film, of course—which Roger Ebert somewhat famously derided because of its incessant chase sequence and the fact that, by the end, “we don’t believe it”21—concerns the exploits of two playful and affable and “real life” outlaws at the turn of the century. Before long, the two men find

Wannamaker did, in fact, direct an episode of Lancer—the very first episode (i.e., “The High Riders” [1968]). 20 Nicholas Hammond plays Wannamaker as outrageously flamboyant and aggressively intrusive, or controlling. 21 See Ebert’s October 16, 1969, review, reprinted on Rogerebert​.co​m. 19

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themselves on the run, chased by a faceless lawman and his posse. While repeatedly asking each other a single simple question—“Who are those guys?”—the thoughtful Butch (Paul Newman) and the physical Sundance (Robert Redford) are endlessly and impossibly tracked by day, by night, over rock, across water, and so on. No deception or amount of running works; the faceless posse is inexorable. After the two outlaws begin to suspect that the mysterious posse will never “get tired” and never “get hungry,” they finally appeal to an old friend (now a lawman himself). Their plan is to enlist as soldiers in the Spanish-American War. However, their friend simply mocks their dream of escape: “There’s something out there that scares ya?” He then goes on to spoil the film’s inevitable end: “It’s over, don’t you get that? Your times is over and you’re gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where.” The film then ends with the two men, after fleeing to Bolivia, bloody and holed up in a small building as (what absurdly appears to be) every soldier in the Bolivian army takes up a position around them. Guns at the ready, the two men rush out of the building and toward their horses. But before they are hit by a single bullet, the frame freezes. As the sounds of yelling and endlessly firing guns carry on, color fades to sepia and the credits roll. The suggestion is that only artifice keeps these characters alive, only the fiction of an increasingly untenable American genre (or imaginary). Hill’s entire film, in fact, mocks the pretense and idealizations of the Western, telling a story that is only “mostly true.” This fact is offered via introductory intertitles that appear over the projection of ostensibly authentic footage of the subjects in question. This self-reflexive gesture is then echoed in the various “ruptures” that define the film and culminate in the final freeze frame: an effort to raise a posse that comically turns into a bicycle sales pitch; anachronistic music by Burt Bacharach; the use of lighting effects and then a spinning bicycle wheel to mimic the movement of film through a projector; and so on. And, of course, Hill’s film arrives (in 1969) just as “spaghetti westerns” begin parodying their source material—and just as Dalton (in Tarantino’s film) is lamenting the fact that he might have to move to Italy if he is to salvage his career. The sense of an inexorable end in Hill’s film, a real limit that cannot be evaded or even effaced via its perverse rewriting, is (I am suggesting) subtly echoed in Tarantino’s film. This echo becomes particularly obvious and frightening when, after finishing on Dalton’s roof (and as Dalton continues his work on Lancer), Booth finds himself at “Spahn Movie Ranch.” He gets there after he picks up a young hippie named Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), a girl he’s been licentiously eyeing on the Hollywood streets since the film began. After refusing her offer of oral sex (because she doesn’t have any ID and he’s not willing to go to jail for “poontang”), he learns that she

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lives with a group of young people (i.e., the Manson Family22) at the very Ranch where he used to shoot Bounty Law with Dalton. Once there, Booth immediately asks to speak with his “old friend” George Spahn (Bruce Dern). As he becomes increasingly insistent, more Family members enter the scene. They begin streaming inexplicably from broken-down buses and small shacks, responding like a single organism to a threat. By the time Booth is finally allowed to enter George’s broken-down house, a relatively large group of Family members loiter just behind him, having gathered like the terrifying birds in Hitchcock’s 1963 film—and which, for Žižek, “play a direct part in the story as something inexplicable, as something outside the rational chain of events, as a lawless impossible real” (Awry 105). We thus get the disconcerting sense that Manson and his followers haunt the film’s fiction like some unaccountable Thing. When Booth enters George’s home and looks around, the camera shows us dead rats, a TV on top of another (broken) TV, rotting food, and so on. The shots are particularly disconcerting because they clearly echo earlier shots of Booth’s own home: a trailer parked in the shadow of a giant drive-in movie screen that is no less filthy. The larger implication is that Booth is approaching his own end, the truth of his imaginary existence— as does, say, the central character in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), who eventually comes upon her own corpse. That Booth is approaching a kind of “dead end” becomes that much more evident when George insists that he has met neither Booth nor the famous Dalton. In George’s reality—as the “real” man who let the Manson Family live on his ranch—Booth and Dalton simply do not exist. They never did. Booth’s only option is, therefore, to leave. But to get out (or, perhaps, to get back into his film) Booth must traverse a gauntlet of yelling hippies and then violently force a Family member named Steve Grogon (James Landry Hébert) to replace the tire he slashed on Dalton’s car. By the time the other family members get Watson to come back and deal with the crisis, Booth is gone. All of these sequences—Booth’s flashback(s) on the roof, Dalton’s experiences shooting Lancer, Booth at Spahn Ranch—are crosscut with scenes of Tate going about her day. First, she picks up a copy of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (as a gift for her husband), then she decides to attend a screening of her most recent film: The Wrecking Crew. As with all scenes involving Tate in the film, these sequences offer while oddly withholding any sense of subjectivity. Most often in the film, Tate is shown dancing or accomplishing some mundane activity while listening to music. She speaks Manson, though, is absent—apparently in Santa Barbara with a handful of other Family members. This “fact” is yet another “problem,” as it does not necessarily or entirely track with the scene Booth recently witnessed while on Dalton’s roof.

22

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few lines, even if she is invariably presented as both warm and radiant. The film almost seems hesitant about her presence, about the impossibility of bringing her (back) to life. This impossibility is signaled first when we see her dancing at the Playboy Mansion—and as Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) looks on and laments that, given the shifting aesthetics of masculinity, “[he] never stood a chance.” It is signaled again when we see her watching herself on screen. The first scene is impossible because, quite simply, the mansion in question was not yet the “Playboy Mansion” in 1969; the latter, because we are offered the disconcerting regress of Robbie (as Tate) watching the actual Tate play Freya Carlson. The larger implication is that the actual Tate is nowhere present in the film, or she is present only insofar as she remains absent—a kind of spectral figure. This sense is then compounded when the movie begins to lead up to the moment of Tate’s actual murder. As Booth and Dalton arrive home after shooting a series of movies in Italy and Spain and decide to embark on one final “good-ole-fashion drunk,” we get parallel scenes of an eight-month pregnant Tate going out for supper and then hanging out at home with her friends. As we move from scene to scene, a narrator (Kurt Russell) begins to relay facts about the events in question and impossibly specific timestamps appear on screen. Since Booth and Dalton are obviously fictional, these details (which include very specific thoughts, feelings, and motivations) are perfectly feasible. The problem is that the narrator (or the film itself) suddenly suggests it knows just as much, if not more, about Tate. We learn that her friend Joanne (Rumer Willis) arrived at her house at exactly 12:30; that, at exactly 7:00, Tate and company arrived at the restaurant El Coyote where, we are told, “Sharon [began] experiencing a touch of pregnancy-induced melancholy”; that the heat made her “feel especially pregnant in all the worst ways”; that she returned home at exactly 10:16; and so on. On the one hand—and since, presumably, we do not know (or cannot anticipate) how the film is going to end—this narration effects a certain amount of suspense, leading us to believe that we are now caught within the trajectory of certain inescapable facts. The film suddenly seems to be hurtling toward what will be its most overt and horrific dead end. On the other hand, the film’s sudden appeal to abject certainty is disconcerting, functioning to remind us of its absolute impossibility. There is simply no way to know what happened that night. Everyone involved died. The larger implication is that there is really no way to represent a figure like Tate (or, for that matter, Manson), to dislodge such a figure from their place in a now mythic past. This brings us back to the ridiculous finale. Primed to see a Tarantinoesque depiction of one of the most famous and traumatic murders in American history, we suddenly and unexpectedly get a comic (if certainly

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grotesque) parody, something like an inverted image of what really happened. Tarantino carefully stresses certain parallels, keeping certain facts in play: Watson’s famous line, for instance—or the fact that the Family member who is finally and gratuitously “torched” in Dalton’s pool is Susan Atkins, the most vicious of the attackers. We should also note that Atkins later claimed to be just as high on acid as Booth appears to be.23 Ultimately, then, and as the culminating moment in a film that repeatedly stumbles upon certain Real limits, this scene accomplishes the very inversion, or double negation, that defines a historioplastic affect. Faced with the impossibility of knowing its complex subject—the truth of Tate, her murder, Manson and his “Family,” even Hollywood in the late 1960s—the film finally acquiesces to absolute and perverse revelry in a gratifying fantasy. Yet the film has, by this point, primed us to acknowledge (also) the hallucinatory and irresponsible nature of such a fantasy. While confirming and even critiquing the perversity of its masculine dreamers, the film finally negates its own. It negates its negation of the very Thing it refuses to mortify in form. And the troubling and motile echo of what really happened—lodged and writhing, disconcertingly, in the outrageous form of what absolutely did not—confirms our contact with the truth. The melancholy theme from Huston’s Roy Bean, a film about a man who perversely and violently imposes his sense of law on an entire town, thus strikes a perfectly haunting final cord. As with any of the other works of historioplastic metafiction we’ve considered, Once Upon a Time stresses the manner in which its own representation of the past—the past’s appearance in form—negates itself as mere appearance; or rather, “appearance” becomes a “judgment [of the past] that suspends itself ” (Hegel, Phenomenology 209). The film continually tarries with the undecidable, the fact that all “symbolic debt is constitutive and as such unredeemable . . . [that] . . . sense . . . [must always be viewed as] truncated, marked by a stain of non-sense” (Žižek, Tarrying 92). The sense we get is that reality can only be recovered via its symbolic representation, and thus (paradoxically) via its effacement. For, again, “if we renounce fictions, reality itself dissolves” (91).24 Consequently, any claim to trivial and/or absolute truths is just as problematic as postmodern relativism. The latter sees us perversely evading a Thing’s infinite plasticity by fixating solely

Portions of Atkins’s original testimony were recorded in the February 10, 1971, issue of The New York Times. 24 Žižek seems to be evoking or repeating here the section on “Force and the Understanding” in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Here Hegel asserts that “The inner world, or supersensible beyond [of Things] . . . come[s] into being . . . from the world of appearance which has mediated it; in other words, appearance is its essence and, in fact, its filling” (89). 23

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on the historiographic; the former, though, sees us yielding to the illusion of “a commonly shared moral sense,” a moral sense that is never anything more than “a front for our ‘moral callousness’” (Natoli). In the latter we find ourselves clinging to latent classicism, a classicism threatened by the postmodern dissolution of its naïve assumptions regarding the unity of form and content, experience and representation—trying to convince ourselves (along with a character like Nolan’s Leonard Shelby) that “The world doesn’t just disappear when you close your eyes.” In the former, we find ourselves acting as if it most certainly does. In either position we find ourselves hiding from the strenuous effort required to negotiate the absolute itself, the “fact” of whatever Thing lies before our apprehension. To approach any Thing honestly, to project it in the most ethical manner possible, is to accept that what lies at its heart is “the very gap which separates phenomena from the Thing” (Tarrying 21). To call a particular act of representation historioplastic is then to claim that it confronts us with the fact that “Our very epistemological failure . . . throws us into the ‘thing itself,’ since it registers an antagonism that pertains to the very kernel of the object itself ” (242 n.19). Such texts romantically reengage or “renew” a form of dialectical play that resolves by radicalizing an ambiguity that begins with Kant and that so often results in a tendency to “oscillate . . . between conceiving of [the transcendental object] as a Thing and as something which is neither phenomenal nor noumenal” (18). Rather than oscillation, rather than some feckless game of pretend, what we get in works of historioplastic metafiction are disgustingly affective moments of sublation, moments in which we touch upon that which nevertheless remains free from the mortifying violence of form. The Thing-in-itself emerges in the necessary failure of its purely notional presence. Or, it emerges as that which all “versions” or stylistically inflected models necessarily lack; yet, for this very reason, it is the very “transcendental object” of their unification. The fact of the Thing becomes undeniable. The Thing is, absolutely—but it is only insofar as it is a no-Thing: “already mutilated, split, marked by a radical lack, structured around an antagonistic kernel” (Žižek, Sublime Object 177). The larger point is that, to apprehend such a Thing, we must endure an endlessly strenuous approach; we must continually strive to grasp what is perpetually incomplete via a notion of its completion, a sense of closure in what cannot be closed. All we can know for sure is that any such approach, if it is to reach its goal, “will need the history of the world in its development through thousands of years” (Hegel, Aesthetics 90).

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Index Acker, Kathy  4, 25, 135 actor-network theory. See under Latour, Bruno affect  15, 18, 73, 112, 162–5, 211, 220 and debt  152, 157, 160–1, 167–8, 170, 177, 179 flattening of  12, 16, 26, 54, 95, 176 and I, Tonya  181, 183, 186–7 Agamben, Giorgio  155 Alber, Jan  3 n.1 and unnatural narratives  97 n.24 Allen, Woody  5, 15, 17, 86, 184 Althusser, Louis and infrastructure vs. superstructure  28 Altman, Robert and The Player  5, 160 Aristotle. See law of noncontradiction Bakhtin, Mikhail  45 Barth, John  4, 24, 25, 84, 124, 136 and “Algebra and Fire”  119 n. 4 and Chimera  86, 117–23, 125, 130, 134 and The Floating Opera  121, 135 and “The Literature of Exhaustion”  120 and Lost in the Funhouse  116–17 Barthelme, Donald  5 and “The Glass Mountain”  37 Barthes, Roland  4 and “The Death of the Author”  90, 127, 131 n.17, 135 and “Plastic”  48 n.7

and “The Third Meaning”  153, 161 n.6, 170 Baudrillard, Jean “The Precession of the Simulacra”  15, 33, 38, 68, 70, 135 Beckett, Samuel and Krapp’s Last Tape  121 Bell, Alice  3 n.1. See also Alber, Jan Best, Stephen. See also Marcus, Sharon and surface reading  59 n. 17, 163 biopic  153, 157, 176, 180. See also realism Bogost, Ian  30, 70 and alien phenomenology  57, 60 and correlationism  59–61, 68, 69 Borges, Jorge Luis  84, 117 n.1 and “The Book of Sand”  85 n.4 Brinkema, Eugenie and affect  162–3, 166 n.14, 168 and sublation  169 n.19 Brooks, Mel and History of the World: Part 1, 156 and Spaceballs  5 Bryant, Levi  59 and flat ontology  57 Butler, Judith  24 n.19 cacophony silence vs.  92 n.12, 95, 121, 123 capitalism late form of  19 n.15, 28, 37, 164 Carnahan, Matthew and House of Lies  6, 170 Cavell, Stanley  156, 157 n.2

Index Christianity  42–6, 51, 73, 88, 164 Judaism vs.  43 Clare, Ralph and metaffective fiction  3 n.1, 14–15, 18, 163 n.10 classical art. See under Hegel, G. W. F. Clemens, Justin  58 n.15 Clover, Carol  196 n.6 consumption  139, 163, 211 content and form  33, 88, 117 Coover, Robert  5 Coppola, Sofia and Marie Antoinette  151–62, 191 correlationism  58–63, 66–71, 83 n.2, 96. See also speculative realism Critchley, Simon  62, 68 Danielewski, Mark Z. See also remediation and House of Leaves  6, 124–47 and Inglourious Basterds  189, 190 David, Larry. See also Seinfeld, Jerry and Curb Your Enthusiasm  6, 16 n.11, 177 and Seinfeld  6, 16 n.11 debt  94, 152–3, 157, 175, 176, 187, 220 and affect  161, 162, 170, 171, 179–80 and economic  166, 171, 174, 177, 180 and mimetic  167, 177, 180 deconstruction  24, 25, 32, 47 n.5, 59, 82–4, 143. See also Derrida, Jacques and construction  21, 82 and House of Leaves  129, 147 and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell  99 and reconstruction  82 and Slaughterhouse-Five  89 dehiscence  34, 40, 147, 157, 161, 188, 189

237

Delany, Samuel R. and Dhalgren  118, 130 DeLillo, Don  5, 84 n.3 and White Noise  15 Derrida, Jacques. See also deconstruction; spectrality; supplementarity and conjuration  38 and differance  36, 42, 62, 129 n.15, 143 and disgust  165–8, 211, 221 and “Eating Well”  50, 186 and “Economimesis”  165–6, 168 n.17, 168 n.18, 171, 180 and enjoyment  166, 167 and ethics  105 and The Gift of Death  50 and the pharmakon  49 n.8 and “Plato’s Pharmacy”  25, 55, 69, 71, 174 and Politics of Friendship  95, 105 and subjectiles  50, 136, 180 and undecidability  26, 47 n.5, 60, 69, 82 n.1, 89, 121, 179 Díaz, Junot  6 and The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao  96 n.23, 97–8, 100 Dick, Philip K.  4, 25 and The Man in the High Castle  86 and “Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes”  120, 121 digimodernism  20, 110 n.34. See also Kirby, Alan Doctorow, E. L.  5 and Ragtime  17 Dürer, Albrecht  43 Ebert, Roger  216 economics  28–9, 34, 36–8, 152, 165–6, 170–1, 175–6 Egan, Jennifer  6 and A Visit from the Goon Squad  14, 105–15 Eshelman, Raoul

238 and performatism  13, 19 n.15, 24, 26, 27 ethics. See also silence of correlation  67, 68 of indecision  21, 32 and lack of  60 Levinasian  178 n.2 of narrative  43, 72 of performance  195 of the postmodern novel  43 n.2 of reading  57 of sublation  13 n.7, 17 n.12 Everett, Percival and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell  97–100 existentialism  59, 129 n.15 face-to-face, the  36. See also Levinas, Emmanuel; Žižek, Slavoj Felski, Rita  59 n.17. See also postcritique Fisher, Mark  37 Foster, Hal and the anti-aesthetic  5 Foucault, Michel  4, 24, 25, 84 n.3. See also poststructuralism Franzen, Jonathan  19 free-indirect discourse  93 n.14, 114 Freud, Sigmund and the death drive  91, 113, 136 and displacement  179 and the dream work  202 and the repetition compulsion  91 and the uncanny  17, 65, 73, 122 n.6, 152, 160–2, 167, 177, 214–15 Funk, Wolfgang  3 n.1, 82 n.1, 111, 113 Gass, William  4 genotext. See under Kristeva, Julia Gibbons, Alison  3 n.1, 21 n.16

Index Gillespie, Craig and I, Tonya  162, 171, 177, 180–7 Gilliam, Terry and Monty Python and the Holy Grail  5, 156 Gissing, George and New Grub Street  95 Golumbia, David  58 n.16 Gormley, Paul  194 Groening, Matt and The Simpsons  6, 16 Habermas, Jürgen  23, 37, 45 n.3, 54 n.11, 107 Hackford, Taylor and Ray  180 Hansen, Mark B. N. and House of Leaves  133–5 Hanson, Hart and Bones  6 Haraway, Donna and “A Cyborg Manifesto”  11 n.5 Hardt, Michael  163 n.10 Hayles, N. Katherine and “The Future of Literature”  92 n.13 and “Saving the Subject”  124, 130–5 Hegel, G. W. F.  35, 42, 55, 57, 66, 168, 188. See also diremption; ethics; sublation; Žižek, Slavoj and absolute knowledge  46–7, 139 and Aesthetics  33, 50, 52, 75, 77, 96, 142, 154, 165 n.11, 221 and the Aufhebung  12, 108 n.32 and Christianity  42–4, 46, 51, 73 and classical art  19, 33, 44, 46, 71, 75–6, 110, 114, 142, 169, 188

Index Derrida on  56, 83, 142 and irony  11 n.5, 14, 96 Malabou on  71, 81, 84, 142, 146 and the negation of the negation  20, 32, 44, 108 n.32, 129 n.13, 160, 169 and the notion  30–1, 33, 40, 48, 77, 113, 121, 124–5, 174, 192, 201 and Phenomenology of Spirit  30–1, 40, 157–8, 189, 220 and plasticity  49, 77, 143 and the Real  76–7, 142 and romantic art  19, 33, 40, 44–6, 49, 75, 81, 83 n.1, 110, 142 and Science of Logic, The  31, 44–5 and symbolic art  19, 33, 44, 46, 75–7, 109–10, 114, 123, 157, 169, 188, 193 n.2 and synthesis  11–12, 169 and time  40, 48, 113 Henson, Jim  5–6 Herek, Stephen and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure  172 historiographic metafiction  4, 17, 23, 32, 123, 135, 156, 179, 180, 201, 221. See also Hutcheon, Linda historioplastic metafiction  6, 32, 33, 40, 42, 50, 72–7, 176–7, 221. See also Toth, Josh and House of Leaves  124, 125, 147 and Inglourious Basterds  191, 211 and I, Tonya  186–7 and Marie Antoinette  158, 167 and Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood  220 and otherness  171 and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell  100–1

239

and “The Purloined Letter”  141 Hitchcock, Alfred  54 and The Birds  218 Holland, Mary K.  3 n.1, 130 n.16 Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno and Dialectic of Enlightenment  72–3, 77, 167 Horvath, Aaron and Michael Jelenic and Teen Titans Go!, 6–8, 14–19 hospitality  105, 141 n.31. See also Little, William G.; Nancy, Jean Luc, l’intrus Howard, Ron and A Beautiful Mind  180 Huber, Irmtraud  3 n.1, 19 n.15 Huehls, Mitchum  84 n.3, 99 Hughes, John and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off  184 humor  7, 11, 98, 100, 177, 179, 194, 199. See also irony; parody Hurwitz, Mitchell and Arrested Development  6, 177 Huston, John and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean  210, 220 Hutcheon, Linda and irony  13 n.7, 120 and The Poetics of Postmodernism  24 and The Poetics of Postmodernism  22, 106, 203 and postmodernism  4, 22–5 hypermodernism  20, 23, 27, 76, 96, 146, 172, 176. See also Lipovetsky, Gilles imaginary, the  15 n.10, 92 n.11, 96 n.23. See also Lacan, Jacques infinite, the  25, 26, 31, 32, 36, 51, 72, 174. See also Levinas, Emmanuel and Christianity  44, 46 and House of Leaves  125, 190

240

Index

and Lincoln in the Bardo  105 and Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood  211 and “The Purloined Letter”  57 and A Visit from the Goon Squad  111, 115 intertextuality  4 irony  21, 27, 44, 82 n.1, 108, 121, 147. See also Schlegel, Friedrich and I, Tonya  180, 183 and The Laundromat  173 and metafiction  95–6 and postmodernism  9–14, 12, 23, 25, 28–9, 134 Jackson, Samuel L. and Django Unchained  197–8 and Inglourious Basterds  194 James, David  33 Jameson, Fredric  26, 37–9, 42, 47, 64, 76, 108, 196. See also affect; semiautonomous, the and The Hegel Variations  32 n.29, 46 n.4, 84 and “Periodizing the 60s”  34–6, 38 and postmodernism  37 and Postmodernism  16, 22, 30 and “Wagner as Dramatist and Allegorist”  162–5, 167, 169, 172 Jeong, Seung-Hoon and desuturing  178 n.27, 179 Jonze, Spike and Adaptation  6, 177 jouissance  166, 201 Kant, Immanuel  18, 19, 50, 69, 70, 163, 168, 211. See also sublime, the and the as if  27 n.22, 70 n.27, 117, 134

and the beautiful  165 Critique of Judgement  65 Critique of Pure Reason  60–1, 64–5, 67 n.23, 70, 117 n.2 and das Ding  25 Derrida on  165–7 and judgment  60 n.18 and oscillation  221 Kelly, Adam and “New Sincerity”  12, 13 n.7, 22 Kierkegaard, Søren and irony  11 n.6 Kingston, Maxine Hong  5, 84 n.3, 97 Kirby, Alan and digimodernism  20, 110 n.34 Kojima, Hideo and Metal Gear Solid  6 Konstantinou, Lee  14, 96 and postirony  13 n.7, 22, 95, 181 Kripke, Eric and Supernatural  6, 86, 87 n.6 Kristeva, Julia  4, 25 and genotext vs. phenotext  15 n.9, 108, 111, 156–8, 186 and Hegelian negation  108 n.32 and Revolution in Poetic Language  108, 156 and the semiotic chora  108, 109, 156 and the symbolic  108 and Tales of Love  145 Kubrick, Stanley and Barry Lyndon  153, 156 and The Shining  214 and 2001: A Space Odyssey  91 Lacan, Jacques  4, 26, 57. See also imaginary, the; Other, the; Real, the; symbolic, the

Index and das Ding  68 and “The Mirror Stage”  92 n.11, 135, 160 n.5 and the objet petit a  24, 59 n.27 on “The Purloined Letter”  50, 53–5, 158, 200 n.8, 169 n.20 and symbolic inertia  41–2, 53, 54, 65, 69, 71, 89, 162, 178 Latour, Bruno and actor-network theory  57, 59 n.17, 68 law of noncontradiction  12, 66 legitimation crisis  37, 62, 107. See also Habermas, Jürgen Levinas, Emmanuel. See also hospitality and bad silence  44 and the infinite  25, 44, 94, 146 and responsibility  174 and saying vs. the said  18 and thematization  167 Levinson, Barry and Good Morning, Vietnam  180 Leyner, Mark  6, 83 n.2 Lipovetsky, Gilles and hypermodernism  20, 23–4, 27, 76, 96, 146 Little, William G.  141 n.31, 206, 208 logocentrism  89, 122–3, 125, 136, 159, 166 logo centrism vs.  123, 130, 135, 136, 158, 159 Lynch, David and Lost Highway  41, 140, 214 and Mulholland Drive  218 and Twin Peaks  6 and Wild at Heart  141, 166 n.14 Lyotard, Jean-François  4, 25, 39, 107. See also poststructuralism and petits récits  16 MacFarlane, Seth and Family Guy  6 McGowan, Todd  59

241

and comedy  158 n.3 and the Hegelian absolute  47 and Inception  204 and speculative realism  50, 58 n.15, 70 McHale, Brian  9 n.4 and postmodernism  4, 39, 48, 122 n.6 McKay, Adam  176, 177, 180, 184 and The Big Short  6, 170, 174 and Vice  170, 174 Malabou, Catherine  42, 47, 81 and deconstruction  32, 83–4, 129 n.15, 142–3, 146–7 and plasticity  31, 49–50, 71 Marcus, Sharon  59 n.17. See also Best, Stephen Marx, Karl  27 n.22, 34, 173 Massumi, Brian  163, 167–9. See also affect medium  156. See also Cavell, Stanley Meillassoux, Quentin  155 n.1 and correlationism  58 n.16, 61–8, 96 and postmodernism  43 n.2 and speculative realism  30 metaffective fiction. See under Clare, Ralph metafiction  3–6, 9, 19, 29, 30, 33–4, 43, 58, 71, 83–5, 97. See also historiographic metafiction; historioplastic metafiction; postmodern metafiction and Annie Hall  15 and authority  176 and circular movement  116 and diremption  32 and economics  170–2 and fabulism  97 n.24 and House of Leaves  124–5, 129, 131, 134, 146–7 and irony  9, 95 and I, Tonya  181, 184–5 and Marie Antoinette  155–61, 164, 166

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and mimesis  100 and neorealism  29, 32 n.28, 33, 76–7 and The People of Paper  95 and “The Purloined Letter”  41–2, 55–7, 141 n.32 and Quentin Tarantino  195, 211 and the Real  54, 189, 205 and romanticism  14, 114, 142, 146–7 and speculative realism  30 and supplementarity  42 and Teen Titans Go!  7, 8, 14–17 and A Visit From the Goon Squad  109 metamodernism  13, 20–1, 26, 28, 134. See also van den Akker, Robin; Vermeulen, Timotheus metataxis  21. See also metamodernism; oscillation mimesis  48 n.7, 72, 124–5, 134, 165, 177 Möbius strip  116–17, 123. See also Barth, John modernism  20, 33, 74–5, 157 postmodernism vs.  19–23, 109 Molloy, Tim  213 n.17 Moore, Alan and Watchmen  122 Moraru, Christian  19 n.15 and cosmodernism  20 Morrison, Grant and Animal Man  6, 86 Morrison, Toni. See also historioplastic metafiction and Beloved  97 Morton, Timothy  57, 59 Mullins, Matthew  20 n.15 and neomaterialism  43, 50 Nabokov, Vladimir  5, 84 Nancy, Jean-Luc  51–2, 57, 66, 211 and being alone  52, 56, 70, 87, 95 and “Corpus”  56, 70 n.26 and exscription  52–3

and “Heart of Things”  51–2, 144, 161 and l’intrus  111–12, 157, 168 Natoli, Joseph  192, 221 Nealon, Jeffrey T. and post-postmodernism  20 n.15, 23–4, 28 negative theology  129, 130. See also Sartre, Jean Paul neoromantic  33, 40, 50, 77, 146. See also Hegel, G. W. F. new sincerity  12, 13 n.7, 22–3 Nicolay, John G.  101 Nietzsche, Friedrich  61, 66, 122, 188 Nolan, Christopher  188–9 and Inception  202–5, 208–9 and Memento  6, 204–9 Norris, Christopher  58 n.15 North, Michael  39 object-oriented ontology  15 n.10, 18 n.13, 35–6, 49, 57, 68. See also actor-network theory; speculative realism subject-oriented ontology vs.  71 O’Brien, Tim and The Things They Carried  115 n.36 oscillation  13–14, 19, 21, 26, 28–9, 31, 70 n.27, 82 n.1, 221. See also metamodernism; metataxis Other, the  65 n.21, 69, 161, 178 n.27, 190, 191, 198, 199, 201 parody  6, 76, 106–7, 171, 198, 220 and irony  121 and metafiction  3, 7 pastiche  4, 76, 191 performatism  13, 19 n.15, 26 n.21. See also Eshelman, Raoul performativity  24, 198. See also Butler, Judith

Index perversity  96, 158, 171–2, 190, 193, 198–201, 215, 220. See also hysteria; Žižek, Slavoj and excess  194 and history  160, 172, 188, 211, 217 and plasticity  94, 104–5 and play  71–2, 169 and postmodernism  24, 32, 42, 73, 113, 136, 207–8 sincerity vs.  173 and truth  14 phallogocentrism  26 phenotext. See under Kristeva, Julia Plascencia, Salvador  6 and The People of Paper  85–7, 89–96, 97 n.24, 100, 113, 120, 122 n.34 plasticity  70–2, 94, 105, 156, 158. See also Malabou, Catherine Hegelian concept of  31, 49–50, 77, 83, 143 and the infinite  33, 104, 125, 136, 158, 169, 188, 220 spiritual  53, 55, 67, 71, 100 and truth  174 Poe, Edgar Allan  212 and “The Purloined Letter”  41–2, 50, 54–7, 69, 71, 141, 158, 200 polymodern condition, the  21, 34. See also Rudrum, David postcritique  15 n.10, 59 n.17, 163. See also Felski, Rita postirony  13, 14 n.8, 22, 95 n.20. See also Konstantinou, Lee postmodernism  6, 10, 12–17, 19–29, 32–4, 42–3, 62, 69, 143, 170. See also poststructuralism and comedy  158 and correlationism  62 and deconstruction  82 and House of Leaves  124–6, 129–30, 133 n.24, 134–5, 140, 146–7

243

and modernism  21 n.16, 33, 74–5, 109, 157 and parody  76, 107 and periodization  38–9 and realism  74–6 and renewalism  83 unpostmodern vs.  17, 138 and A Visit From the Goon Squad  106–9, 113 postmodern metafiction  3–5, 19, 24, 29, 37, 48, 84, 89, 97 and comedy  48 and distance  169 the function of  83 and “The Glass Mountain”  37 and the infinite  124 and neoromanticism  33 and The Player  160 and Slaughterhouse-Five  89 and the symbolic  135 post-postmodernism  10, 20, 23, 26 n.21, 29, 105 and the hypermodern  27, 76, 146 and metafiction  3 n.2, 14, 19, 33, 83, 96–7, 162 and Žižek  41. See also Nealon, Jeffrey T. poststructuralism  4, 37, 62, 84 n.3, 107, 125, 134, 168 n.16. See also Barthes, Roland; Derrida, Jacques; Foucault, Michel; Kristeva, Julia; Lacan, Jacques; Lyotard, Jean-François; postmodernism post-truth  9, 33, 62, 76, 139, 146, 170, 176 Pynchon, Thomas  5, 25, 84 n.3, 135 and The Crying of Lot 49  135 and Mason and Dixon  17 Real, the  62, 77, 96, 120, 170, 174, 188–9. See also Lacan, Jacques and Barth  122, 124 and Christianity  44

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and history  190–1, 193 and House of Leaves  125, 136, 141–2, 147 and Inglourious Basterds  193–4, 201 and Marie Antoinette  160 and Memento  208 and Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood  215, 220 and “The Purloined Letter”  54 and A Visit From the Goon Squad  112–14 Žižek on  42, 46, 53, 71–2, 141, 143 realism  5, 33, 58, 65, 69, 74–6, 96, 124, 154, 176 as classical  46, 71, 76, 110, 165 n.11, 169 and Kant  70 and metafiction  9 and renewalism  29 recursivity  84, 113, 157, 174 n.24 Reed, Ishmael and Yellow Back Radio BrokeDown  5, 17 remediation  124, 131, 133–8, 140, 142, 146, 147. See also Hayles, Katherine N. renewalism  29, 32 n.28, 83. See also Toth, Josh Reni, Guido and Christ Crowned with Thorns  46 romantic art. See under Hegel, G. W. F. Ronell, Avital  60 n.18 Rorty, Richard  11, 25 Rudrum, David  19, 20–1 Rush, Richard and The Stunt Man  5, 216 Saldívar, Ramón  96 and The People of Paper  97 n.24 and postrace aesthetics  96 n.23, 101 Samuels, Robert  110 n.34

and automodernism  20 Sartre, Jean-Paul  66, 129–30 Saunders, George. See also historioplastic metafiction and Lincoln in the Bardo  101–5, 128 n.11 Schlegel, Friedrich  11 n. 5, 96, 120 Scorsese, Martin and Goodfellas  176–80 and Raging Bull  156 and The Wolf of Wall Street  6, 151, 170, 174, 177, 183 n.30 Scott, Joan  38 Seinfeld, Jerry. See also David, Larry and Seinfeld  6, 16 self-reflexivity  4–5, 10, 74–5, 173–4, 179, 191, 194. See also metafiction and Butch Cassidy  217 and debt  171 and House of Leaves  139 and Inglourious Basterds  188–9, 193 and I, Tonya  181 and Marie Antoinette  161 and metafiction  83 and Vice  176 and The Wolf of Wall Street  170 semiautonomous, the  28, 36, 38, 40, 45, 47, 64, 66, 76, 117, 123 Sibielski, Rosalind  205–6 silence  42, 44, 112, 121, 123, 151, 179 simulacra  15, 38, 68, 70, 123, 135, 156, 159. See also Baudrillard, Jean sincerity  11–14, 28, 106, 124, 163 n.10, 173, 176, 186. See also new sincerity and affect  15 n.10, 26 and Inglourious Basterds  211 and I, Tonya  180, 181, 183, 185–6

Index and Marie Antoinette  153 and metamodernism  21 and mimesis  82, 152–3 and postmodernism  23, 125, 147 and synthesis  12 skepticism  11, 13, 19, 25, 63, 205 n.13 Slocombe, Will  129–30 Soderbergh, Steven  176–7 and Full Frontal  174 n.24 and The Laundromat  171–4 solipsism  16, 60, 89, 104–5, 127, 163, 202, 211 and comedy  48 and correlationism  63–4, 66–8, 70 and irony  11 n.5, 14 and metafiction  83 n.2, 84, 125 and postmodernism  74 spectrality  32 n.28, 42, 47 n.5, 105, 111 speculative realism  30, 35–6, 42, 50, 57, 70–1, 97 n.24 Spheeris, Penelope and Wayne’s World  5 Spielberg, Steven and Schindler’s List  193 n.2 Stavris, Nicholas  19–20, 21 n.16. See also Rudrum, David sterility  71, 152, 154, 156, 159 Stone, Jon and The Monster at the End of This Book  6 Styron, William  81, 99, 100 sublation  11 n.6, 12, 13 n.7, 32, 44, 82 n.1, 104, 160–1, 169 and absolute knowing  47 and affect  221 dialectic  31, 158, 169 n.19 and Inglourious Basterds  201 and I, Tonya  183 and metafiction  83 of postmodernism  16 n.11, 17, 19, 37, 75, 94, 113, 124, 140, 146–7

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of the symbolic  46, 110, 114, 188 sublime, the  18, 44, 64–5, 76, 109 n.33, 114, 140, 174, 186 supplementarity  25, 42, 55–6, 71, 82, 143, 152, 170. See also Derrida, Jacques surface reading  59 n.17, 163 suture  18, 34, 46, 77, 118, 123, 136, 153, 188–9. See also dehiscence desuture vs.  54, 179, 214 as film technique  160, 164, 178 mimetic  75 symbolic, the  37, 72, 92 n.11, 108, 123, 135, 141, 154, 160 n.5, 188–91, 220. See also Lacan, Jacques inertia of  41–2, 43 n.2, 53–4, 65, 69, 71, 89, 162, 178 inertia of the Real vs.  42, 43 n.2, 71, 122, 136 and perversity  200–1 and postmodernism  26, 32 and “The Purloined Letter”  53–4 symbolic art. See under Hegel, G. W. F. synthesis. See under Hegel, G. W. F. Szaniawski, Jeremi  196 n.6 Tansey, Mark and A Short History of Modern Painting  73–5, 77 Tarantino, Quentin  188–9, 207 and Death Proof  195–7, 212 and Django Unchained  197–9, 201, 204, 209 and Inglourious Basterds  189–95, 197, 199–202, 204, 205, 209 and Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood  177, 201, 209–20 and Pulp Fiction  194 n.3, 195, 198 and performance (of identity), 194–9, 216 and Reservoir Dogs  194, 195

246 Taylor, Mark C.  75, 122, 130, 158 n.4. See also logocentrism Teen Titans Go!  3, 6–8, 14–18. See also Horvath, Aaron and Michael Jelenic Thomas, Peter  205 n.13 Timmer, Nicoline  83 n.2 Toth, Josh and The Passing of Postmodernism  3 n.1, 32, 82 n.1, 83, 136 n.26, 140 n.30, 177 n.26 and Stranger America  16 n.11, 42 n.1, 177 n.26 Trump, Donald J.  12, 27–8, 107 Truong, Dan  20 n.15 truth  13–14, 18, 25, 27, 38, 68, 121, 123, 141, 187. See also posttruth and art  72–3, 77, 117 and Django Unchained  197, 199 and Donald Trump  28 and House of Leaves  124–5, 128, 146–7 and Inception  209 and the infinite  82, 163 n.10, 179 and Inglourious Basterds  190–2, 194 n.3, 195 and irony  96, 174 and I, Tonya  180, 183 and Lincoln in the Bardo  104 and Marie Antoinette  152–3, 157 and Memento  205–7 and metafiction  5, 85 mimetic  122 and Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood  211, 220 and The People of Paper  93–4 and perception  24 and postmodernism  29–31, 176 and “The Purloined Letter”  54 n.11, 55 and the Real  170

Index spiritual  45, 49–50 and A Visit From the Goon Squad  107–9 Turner, Luke. See also metamodernism and Metamodernist Manifesto  28 Tyldum, Morten and The Imitation Game  180 uncanny, the  17, 59, 65, 73, 75, 122 n.6, 160–1, 167, 186. See also Freud, Sigmund and affect  15 n.9, 214–15 and debt  152, 162, 177 and irony  12 van den Akker, Robin  13, 20–1, 26–8, 30, 33, 82, 117 n.2, 134, 162 n.8. See also metamodernism; Vermeulen, Timotheus Vermeulen, Timotheus  13, 20–1, 26–8, 30, 33, 82, 117 n.2, 134, 162 n.8. See also metamodernism; van den Akker, Robin Vonnegut, Kurt  4–5, 24–5, 84 n.3, 123 and authorial intrusion  14, 86–9 and Breakfast of Champions  14– 15, 86–7, 135 and fatalism  5, 88–91, 114 and Jailbird  14, 87 and Slaughterhouse-Five  86–90, 122 n.5 and Timequake  89 n.8 Waits, Tom  6 Wallace, David Foster  6, 9–12, 19, 26, 36 and “E Unibus Pluram”  9, 13, 83 n.2, 95 n.19 and Infinite Jest  83 n.2 and irony  12–15, 28–9, 31 and “Octet”  83 n.2

Index Walters, Ben  191–2 Warrick, Patricia and Chimera  117, 119–22 Waugh, Patricia  3–5, 117 Williams, Christopher G.  205–6 n.13 Willimon, Beau and House of Cards  6, 170 Zappen, James P.  112 n.35 Žižek, Slavoj  34, 47, 50, 65–6, 84, 109. See also Hegel, G. W. F.; Lacan, Jacques and absolute knowing  46–7 and The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime  41, 113, 136, 140 and Christianity  42–3, 51 and The Fright of Real Tears  178 n.27

247 and Hegel  30, 41, 46 and Less Than Nothing  42–3, 46 n.4, 51, 53, 58 n.15, 65, 73, 193, 201 n.9 and perversion  69 and “The Purloined Letter”  54–5, 57, 71, 141 and the Real  12, 42, 53, 71–2, 136, 141, 143, 169 n.20, 218 and The Sublime Object of Ideology  25, 30, 34, 170, 221 and the symbolic  33, 37, 41–2 and Tarrying with the Negative  25, 30 n.24, 32–3, 169 n.20, 188, 198–202, 208, 220–1 and the Thing-in-itself  25, 38, 42, 141, 168 n.15, 170, 174, 180, 215, 221

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