text:
From the space of books to space in books
While the debate rumbles on between those who contend that games tell stories in ways unique to the medium (ludologists), and those who argue that games resemble literary narratives (narratologists), literary scholars have sought to ask reciprocally what games can tell us about conventional modes of storytelling in print. In the process, critics sometimes translate the trope of a player navigating a game world, and uncovering a narrative, to that of a reader navigating a printed book, and exploring the story. For Katherine Hayles books constitute material "technotexts," and new electronic media have called attention to the way in which readers pass through print (Hayles 22). For Souvik Mukherjee, the "intense physicality" with which a player experiences a game world encourages us to think about how readers are equally "plugged into" a physical text (Mukherjee 45–46). These metaphors of textual exploration are undoubtedly useful as a way of remediating games to appreciate the older format of print. However, they also risk conflating two different categories of "space": the physical space occupied by the book and its words, and the imaginary geography or story world represented by its signifiers.
How can gameworlds such as the underwater city of Rapture in Bioshock and Bioshock 2 help us to understand the geographical space of literary worlds?
[Image by Tamahikari Tammas under a cc BY-NC license]
If we wish to draw analogies between game and literary spatiality, then perhaps we need to consider the possibility that the first "players" of fictitious space are not the readers of the book which expresses it, but the characters who move through imagined environments, communicate with one another across distances, collect items from places (Brown, n. pag.), and so on. Correspondingly, thinking about how game designers construct space, and the way this affects the stories that players can experience within games, might invite us to think about how literary places are conceptualised by an author, and how the configuration of places affects the experiences of characters and the permutations of plot. In a video game a player's actions, and thus ludonarrative possibilities, are heavily conditioned by the setting: the player of Bioshock cannot use it to tell himself or herself a story about developing into a world class footballer as the player of FIFA 16 can, because the spaces mapped by the first world do not (and indeed cannot, given the technical limits of the chosen design engine) include the arenas that permit the second type of story to be told. In a similar way, the geographical layout of a literary story world, and how easily space can be navigated within the "design engine" of genre (such as realism versus science fiction) or period (the era of epistolary fiction versus that of the internet, for example), affects the types of plot that can unfold.
This might seem an obvious statement. However, literary theory has tended to emphasise the structuring effects of time rather than space on plot. As Gabriel Zoran has outlined, the influence of Russian formalism, with its sjuzhet and fabula distinction, led critics to see literature as "basically an art of time" (Zoran, 1984). Zoran was writing in the 1980s, so it is instructive that even in her 2014 contribution to the Living Handbook of Narratology, Marie Laure Ryan still agrees that "most definitions, by characterizing stories as the representation of a sequence of events, foreground time at the expense of space" even though all events must take place somewhere and thus have a spatial dimension even when it is not directly explicated (Ryan, n. pag.). While in game studies all but the most ardent narratologists accept that the setting of a game world is fundamental to the way its narrative possibilities unfold over time, it seems that in the dialectic between time and space in literary narrative, space has been relegated to second place. In acknowledging that game spaces are an a priori condition of the stories that games can tell, literary scholars might therefore be prompted to think differently about the construction of their medium. In particular, the way games exploit spatial design constraints leads us to perceive how the geography of a story world involuntarily affects characters who find themselves playing in it.
Game Worlds
Video games tell stories through different means: scripted cut scenes, visuals, interactive mechanisms. However, at the most basic level all games entail the player moving either a body representing themselves, or an object, through a world. "Typically, videogames create 'worlds', 'lands' or 'environments' for players to explore, traverse, conquer, and even dynamically manipulate and transform" (Newman 105). However, these explorations and conquests are always constrained by two factors. The first is systemic: the limitations of computer technology, the game engine adopted, and the resources of the publisher, all affect the scale and depth of world design. Even in open world games like Grand Theft Auto not every building can be entered, and while the player can carry out a remarkable array of activities and movements in the world (from driving to playing tennis) other motions are not represented (building a house, country dancing). The second constraint is ludic. Players never navigate a game world with total freedom; there has to be some element of challenge. In a football game a player cannot run excessively faster than any other opponent on the pitch, but is forced to move through the space at roughly the same speed. In a first person shooter, access to later areas may be contingent upon a player fulfilling difficult objectives in earlier areas (Hallford, N. and Hallford 158). As Aarseth identifies, this is what differentiates games from literature; games are "ergodic," requiring a player to make non-trivial effort to experience the narrative (Aarseth 1).
Successful game design gives players the perception of (challenging) freedom according to the second category, and disguises the first category of constraints imposed by the system. Doom is often cited as a seminal game that placed players in a seemingly open, three dimensional world, when in fact – because of the limitations of early PC graphics – players were restricted to movement through relatively small corridors and rooms, along a largely horizontal plane. They were cued to follow certain pathways through levels by perspectival tricks and breadcrumb trailing of objects (Saltzman). In a successfully immersive game, the first type of constraint is redirected so that it appears to serve the ludonarrative purposes of the game, rather than being seen as a limitation to its expressive potential. Doom remains an exemplar of good game design not despite its levels being relatively flat and corridor-like, but because they are. Part of the pleasure of gaming is learning the rules that regulate how a given space expects to be explored, and how space permits unique emergent narratives. The player of Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption, set in the American frontier in the early twentieth century, soon learns that it is not simply "Grand Theft Auto with horses" (The_atm, n. pag.), but a game that because of its less technologized and more open landscape rewards different behaviours like rounding up animals and exploiting natural resources. Players who expect to be able to move fast or kill large numbers of people at the scale the Grand Theft Auto world allows will be disappointed.
Grand Theft Auto with horses? The American frontier world of Red Dead Redemption offers an open landscape in which players can interact with the game space and experience flexible narrative possibilities
[Image by RodrixAP under a CC BY 2.0 license]
Game space, the specific mechanisms for interacting with it, and the expressive narratives that emerge from it, interplay in complex ways. This understanding can be mapped onto the novel, to help us to see that place forms more than merely a backdrop but has a shaping effect on the characters' experiences, and on the reader's immersion in the reality of the story being told.
Story Worlds
Similar to the contrast between Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, when an author opts to set his or her narrative within a particular space, certain possibilities for storytelling may open or close. A crime writer who puts a dead body on a yacht in the middle of the ocean has seemingly different options for causality to one who puts a body in the middle of a busy city. The difference is that, unlike game designers who work with limited technological systems, authors have free licence to break the rules if they wish. Nevertheless, thinking of constraint as a property of the system (our first category) suggests that an author's choice of genre can be considered in terms of selecting one design engine over another, which in turn affects how space conditions plot possibilities.
For instance, the form of the locked room mystery, established by Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," depends upon a space that is seemingly fully enclosed. Poe's chosen generic engine, set within a natural rather than supernatural topology, means only a monkey, not a demonic force, can be at work. Dupin's discovery of the one alternative that nobody else considers marks his genius as the first rational detective, applying the principles of science to the challenges of crime. By contrast, Greg Egan's Quarantine (1992) follows the locked room tradition, but in two directions so that characters can enter as well as escape from apparently impenetrable spaces, as well as from a solar system enclosed within an alien bubble. His application of the Copenhagen interpretation and quantum mechanics makes it seem plausible that spaces can now be transcended at will – literally so, given that movement happens through the power of the mind (Egan, n. pag.). As Egan's characters "play" with space according to the new physics, their ability to break spatial rules compared to generic antecedents like Poe establishes this novel's futurity for the reader. While both texts present a whodunit for the reader to decode across the temporal duration of plot, it is the way each works with the conventions of space that pitches the former generically as more of a detective fiction, and the latter as primarily a science fiction.
On this basis, literary realism (while by no means a simple or singular genre) can broadly be understood as a genre that has to accept the immutability of its physics engine. However, as with a successful game, these systemic constraints can be actually exploited as advantages at an experiential level. As Hilary Dannenberg has shown, even realist plots invariably involve coincidences that would be unlikely in actuality, but successful writers manage to give the impression that rather than being shaped by authored coincidence, characters are free agents who shape events around them (Dannenberg). Similar to the interaction between first and second level spatial constraints in games, effective novelists can reframe the impossibility of breaking the conventional physics of space-time (and travel and communication through space) as a means of disguising the fact that characters, like game players, lack true freedom and are subject to the whims of their predetermined plot.
Jane Eyre provides a good test case. As generations of readers have discovered, this novel seems to celebrate the heroine's independent willpower. However, rather than Jane freely driving events, spatial constraints are exploited by Brontë as a way of disguising her own authorial emplotment that, like the narrow corridors of Doom, steers Jane. Jane's limited freedom of manoeuvre is established from the outset. Abused at Gateshead, Jane expresses that "If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it; but I can never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman" (Bronte 32). Her only alternative nearby space is the poor house. She receives the promise of schooling which "would be a complete change" but which "implied a long journey, an entire separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new life" (33). The phrasing of these comments invites us to read them as a metaphor, life as a journey. The spatial triangulation between where she is now (Gateshead), where she might otherwise be (the poor house), and where she wants to be (school) connotes the psychological dimensions of who she is now (an orphan in care of the Reeds), what she risks becoming (even poorer), and who she would like to become (a mature woman). Yet if space only serves the backdrop function of expressing character psychology and symbolising the possible junctures ahead in the novel's plot, one has to ask why it matters that Bronte has chosen to specify the distance between Gateshead and Lowood at fifty miles, a distance that requires a coach at six o'clock, a change of horses, and a journey into the night to traverse (51-52).
Spatial Triangulation: Jane Eyre's movements between Gateshead, Lowood and the poor house underpin the psychological dimensions of her character development
[Image by Nuwandalice under a CC BY-NC-ND license]
One partial answer is that such a distance makes it impossible for Jane to return home during her time at Lowood. Even when she becomes a teacher she earns only £15 per annum, and the cheapest return coach trip might cost £1.25, a month's income (Barnum, n. pag.). She is restricted by the world in which she finds herself – and of course her determination to nonetheless escape is part of what readers admire.
Yet much as good game design entails giving the illusion of free choice even while the system is actually influencing how players pursue narrative, so the specific geographical relation of these two places in Jane Eyre disguises the fact that Jane's decisions to stay or leave are not entirely self-willed but fulfil the criteria of the plot Brontë has mapped out. A more significant answer for the distance between Gateshead and Lowood emerges just when Jane is about to depart Lowood for Thornfield, and receives a visit from Bessie. She reports that recently "a Mr. Eyre came to Gateshead and wanted to see you; Missis said you were at school fifty miles off; he seemed so much disappointed, for he could not stay: he was going on a voyage to a foreign country, and the ship was to sail from London in a day or two" (Brontë 107). We know coach travel takes a day, making it impossible for Mr Eyre to find Jane and return in the two days before he sails. Thus the relative distance between two places, seemingly innocuous enough, serves the ends of narrative retardation (Sternberg 161). Potential future events in the plot are hinted at – why would Mr Eyre want Jane? and why does Jane bother to tell us in the discourse now unless it will prove important in the plot later on? – but their actualisation is delayed until their significance can be revealed at fortuitous later point. What makes this temporal relation possible is the spatial relation of Gateshead to Lowood. While Brontë could of course just as easily specify Lowood as being 200 miles away, and have Mr Eyre sail in eight days (thus having the same retardative effect in the plot), it is surely the absolutely minimal timing with which Mr Eyre misses Jane – a mere day in her long life – that makes the withholding more frustrating and the eventual reconciliation more satisfying. Jane is sufficiently far from Gateshead to be unable to return herself, yet sufficiently close to ensure Mr Eyre is minimally unable to reach her. His inability to get there in time is as coincidental as it could be, but also credible.
At this point, the objection might be raised that thinking about plot and space in this way can become an exercise in counterfactuality: if a novel had been set or plotted differently, it would not be the same novel; and even if it had been spatialized differently, alternative temporal structures could have restored the plot of coincidences. Thus we return to the overarching role that time allegedly has as the arbiter of fiction. Yet this perhaps ignores the processes of writing. While novelists often tell us they "hear a voice" and want to follow its story, no character is an entirely free agent. Like players of games, characters need to experience limits to their movements, in order for them (and readers) to experience the frustrations and pleasures of overcoming these. Spatiality is an intimate part of the fiction and friction of plotting, and the a priori way in which game space conditions game narratives reminds us of the integrity of this link. So too, as this essay has outlined, spatial constraints in the story world are then "solved" in various ways in the plot depending on the genre's conventions; genre is thus a kind of design engine.
The implications of making an analogy between game worlds and story worlds are of course more than can be fully covered here. One might also justifiably pursue the differences between the two. For instance, one characteristic particular to gaming is that players are often forced to re-navigate the same space repeatedly as punishment for failure. Novels, by contrast, make use of devices such as ellipsis or summary (Bal 102) to accelerate a character's (re)progression through a space. Nevertheless, the fact that space is so foundational to the way games tell stories, and indeed to games as a genre, should at least force us back to see the importance of spaces in books, as well as that occupied by books.
CITATION: Alistair Brown, "What Game Worlds Can Teach Us About Literary Worlds," Alluvium, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2012): n. pag. Web. 31 May 2016, http://dx.doi.o
Works Cited:
Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Print.
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Print.
Barnum, Deb. "Thoughts on Travel in Sense and Sensibility." Jane Austen in Vermont. N. p., 2010. Web. 18 May 2016: https://janeausteninvermont.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/thoughts-on-travel-in-sense-a.
Brown, Alistair. "Ulysses as an RPG." Alluvium. N. p., 2012. Web. 18 May 2016: http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v1.5.02.
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York, NY: Penguin, 2003. Print.
Dannenberg, Hilary P. Coincidence and Counterfactuality [Electronic Book] : Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction. Lincoln, Neb. : University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Print.
Egan, Greg. "Quantum Mechanics and Quarantine." Greg Egan's Home Page. N. p., 2008. Web. 10 May 2016: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/QUARANTINE/QM/QM.html.
Hallford, N. and Hallford, J. Swords and Circuitry: A Designer's Guide to Computer Role Playing Games. Roseville, CA: Prime Publishing, 2001. Print.
Hayles, N Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Print.
Mukherjee, Souvik. Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015. Print.
Newman, James. Videogames. Oxon: Routledge, 2013. Print.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Space." the living handbook of narratology. N. p., 2014. Web. 10 May 2016: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/space.
Saltzman, Marc. "Secrets of the Sages: Level Design." Gamasutra: The Art and Business of Making Games. N. p., 1999.
Sternberg, Meir. "The Rhetoric of Anticipatory Caution: First Impressions in 'First Impressions' and the Poetics of Jane Austen." Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Print.
The_atm. "Is Red Dead Redemption Just GTA with Horses?" IGN. N. p., 2013. Web. 17 May 2016: http://uk.ign.com/blogs/the_atm/2013/06/26/is-red-dead-redemptio.
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Sir John Reed has stopped smiling: 'You know your history.' 'Yes,' I say. 'I know my history.'
David Peace, Nineteen Eighty (London: Serpent's Tail, 2001), p. 9
What is historical fiction? "Everyone knows what a historical novel is," Avrom Fleishman states, "perhaps that is why few have volunteered to define it in print" (Fleishman 3). However, literary prizes – those institutions of canon-making – have little, if any, qualms when it comes to advancing their own sense of what constitutes historical fiction in the 21st century. The Alfonso X the Wise Award for Historical Novels creates a certain definitional unknown by failing to establish its interpretation of the term "historical fiction." However, the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People (for Canadian writers) considers the point at which a novelistic setting may be considered historical as "one generation (i.e., 25 years)," meaning that "[r]ight now, any plot with a late 80s/early 90s setting would be considered historical fiction."[1] The Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction (for children and young adults) does not necessarily delineate a strict threshold, though currently it "recommend[s] decades beginning before the mid 70s, or at least 30-40 years in the past as a minimum era."[2] The M.M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction stipulates that, in order to be considered for the prize, "[b]ooks must be set more than fifty years in the past in any real, earthly location" (according to their submission criteria), whilst the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction's guidelines effectively fossilize 1950 as the threshold between history and the contemporary: "The dominant story line must take place prior to 1950. Split-time novels are eligible but only when the majority of the story takes place prior to 1950" (according to the prize's Readers' Guidelines). The recently founded Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction – founded in 2010 – stipulates that for a novel to be considered historical fiction "the majority of the storyline must have taken place at least 60 years ago," "[r]eflecting the subtitle 'Sixty Years Since' of Scott's most famous work Waverley" (1814) (see "About the Prize" information).
What is historical fiction? Can the submission criteria for literary prizes awarded to historical novels help us to answer this question?
[Images used under fair dealings provisions]
In this article, I will question the restrictive views held by literary awards concerning what may and what may not be regarded as historical fiction, foregrounding some of this cultural phenomenon's stunting effects on literature. I will then go on to propose that historical fiction would benefit from a much wider temporal scope, one that would include the novel of contemporary history and historiographic metafiction as some of its subgenres. Prizes for historical fiction appear, in my mind, to define the genre too narrowly, having a dual effect: they reshape the manner in which we view existing, canonical works of historical fiction, whilst also curtailing the temporal range of future historical fiction-writing. For example, published in complete form in 1869, the four volumes of Tolstoy's War and Peace span the period between 1805 and 1813 (with the epilogue taking the reader up to 1820), meaning it would not qualify as historical fiction according to the Walter Scott Award's guidelines, in spite of the fact that Tolstoy himself was born years after any of the events portrayed in the novel, in 1828. Tom Bragg uses Waverley and Scott's other works as examples to call attention to the problematic issue of a rigidly defined temporal starting point: "A range of 40 to 60 years from the novel's publication would suggest that Scott's Waverley (1814) is a historical novel but its 'sequels,' Guy Mannering (1815) and The Antiquary (1816), are not" (Bragg 5). Though not a historical novel, we may take an illustrative example of the influence of the guidelines and regulations of prizes on the production of literary works from Salman Rushdie's novel Grimus (1975). As Pavithra Narayanan puts it:
Grimus, written with the intention of competing for the Victor Gollancz Prize for Science Fiction, nearly won the award, but British publishers withdrew the book at the last minute, not wanting the novel on science-fiction shelves. (Narayanan 95)
What this example from the 1970s demonstrates is that authors do often create work with specific competitions or prizes in mind. Therefore, however immaterial the particulars of a literary prize's guidelines may seem from afar, if they bear any impact on the specific contents of the works that may be considered, they will have a direct influence on creative output and literary production. And, given the considerable heft of certain awards, in both prestige and monetary terms, their purposeful reshaping of the literary ecosystem is highly problematic. The function of literary prizes ought to be to recognize a genre and, in theory, acknowledge its value (though, in practice, they often create it), but certainly not to reconfigure the genre with its own arbitrary rules. The 50 to 60 year rule effectively creates a temporal no-man's-land. If the timespan that we consider "contemporary" comprises the last 10-20 years, and if the period that the Walter Scott Award defines as "history" has its starting point 60 years ago, it follows that there is a period of 40-50 years that remains an unperiodized wasteland; rejected by the contemporary, yet still unclaimed by history.[3] The zeitroman or period novel and the novel of contemporary history would bridge this representational gap. I am of the opinion, however, that the aforementioned genres still fall within the interstitial space between past and present and ought to be considered forms of historical fiction.
Complicating generic categorisations: David Peace's Red Riding Quartet can be considered both as contemporary history and a set of historical novels, demanding as much meticulous research as the traditional "Zeitroman"
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]
As Brian Attebery asserts, "[g]enres may be approached as 'fuzzy sets,' meaning that they are defined not by boundaries but by a center" (Attebery 12). A central essence defines each and every genre, yet all genres are permeable and their boundaries overlap. Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (2013) is a novel of contemporary history. Yet, it also falls under the categories of detective fiction —albeit in a postmodern way—, historiographic metafiction, and even science fiction. Genre categorization does not function in an exclusive fashion, but rather through porousness and concomitance: different genres are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Lukács' The Historical Novel (1937; trans. 1962) and Fleishman's The English Historical Novel (1972) both put forth specific parameters by which we may judge what constitutes historical fiction, though their focus is classical historical fiction and the scope of their studies does not account for the period that saw the rise of what I would consider to be new subgenres of the historical novel, such as historiographic metafiction. Lukács and Fleishman proposed definitional specifications that were not foundational but, rather, diagnostic. Since the publication of Lukács' and Fleishman's studies the identity of, for example, historiographic metafiction has crystallized and its status has shifted from emerging to well-established, if not dominant. When Perry Anderson states that "[n]ow, virtually every rule of the classical canon [of the historical novel], as spelled out by Lukács, is flouted or reversed" (Anderson n. pag.), he is acknowledging that these rule-breakers have at least one foot firmly planted within the tradition of historical fiction, however iconoclastically, otherwise they would not be perceived as being subject to Lukács' dicta. Anderson declares that:
[a]mong other traits, the historical novel reinvented for postmoderns may freely mix times, combining or interweaving past and present; parade the author within the narrative; take leading historical figures as central rather than marginal characters; propose counterfactuals; strew anachronisms; multiply alternative endings; traffic with apocalyptics. (Anderson n. pag.)
And suddenly the true diversity of present-day historical fiction is revealed in all its beautiful incompatibility. Why should the zeitroman or period novel, the non-fiction novel or faction, historiographic metafiction, and the novel of contemporary history not be constituent parts of what we call historical fiction? The prescient clarity with which David Peace's Red Riding Quartet (1999–2002) interweaves the Yorkshire Ripper killings with historical child abuse, 1970-80s politics, and regional idiosyncrasy is nothing short of historical. After all, according to Fleishman, "[w]hat makes a historical novel historical is the active presence of a concept of history as a shaping force" (Fleishman 3), a concept that is never in short demand in the work of Peace. The rigour of the research necessary for the creation of a serious zeitroman or a significant novel of contemporary history is not inferior to that required for a traditional historical novel. In John Hersey's words:
a definite scrupulousness and thoroughness are required of the writer [of novels of contemporary history], who must have done even more careful research than an orthodox historical novelist, since the latter has no actual witnesses to contend with. (Hersey 27)
After all, it is significantly easier to fudge, so to speak, certain facts – or take artistic license – when writing a novel set in Ancient Egypt (at least given the fact that most readers will lack the knowledge to refute inaccurate contextual claims or erroneous details) than it would to get away with accidental misrepresentations or an inexact historical background due to poor research in a novel set in early 1990s Seattle.
The novelists of contemporary history risk legal actions by the people they portray: McEwan's Atonement, for example, was accused of plagiarising Lucilla Andrews' autobiography, No Time for Romance in its depiction of Briony's wartime experience as a nurse
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]
When authors dip their toes in a past too recent, they often risk being sued by those who deem their novelistic alter egos unflattering, as was the case with David Peace's The Damned Utd. (2006). Johnny Giles successfully sued Faber & Faber, received a public apology, and the references to Giles that the court found libellous were excised from subsequent printings of the novel. Yet, orthodox historical novels are not exempt from potential legal action, as can be evidenced by the accusations of plagiarism leveled against McEwan for having employed Lucilla Andrews' autobiography No Time for Romance (1977) as one of his sources when writing Atonement (2001). Whilst working as a nurse in a London hospital during WWII, McEwan's protagonist, Briony Tallis is told to clean blood from her face to avoid shocking patients: a scene and fragment of dialogue that McEwan has been accused of lifting from Andrews' wartime autobiography (in McEwan's defence, he mentions Andrews' work by name in the acknowledgements to Atonement). In the 2007 film adaptation directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley, James McEvoy and Romola Garai (pictured above), Garai's performance in this hospital scene conveys the way in which 18-year-old Briony has to come to terms with the traumatic experience of wartime nursing, which McEwan acknowledged was informed by his reading of Andrews' own experiences at St Thomas' Hospital during WWII.
There seems to be little reason why the novel of contemporary history or the zeitroman should be quarantined from the historical novel, when that very genre fails to see any distinguishing differences between a novel set in the period from 1935 to 1999 (Atonement) and another the action of which takes place in between the years 1500 and 1535, namely Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009), winner of the inaugural Walter Scott Prize. Not to mention that McEwan's work has much more common ground with Peace's or Don DeLillo's than it shares with Mantel's.
So what is historical fiction in the 21st century? The question itself forces us to problematise the distinction between the contemporary and history. But perhaps we should let historical fiction express itself. Perhaps we should allow the genre to define itself, instead of narrowing down its scope with prescribed outlines and rigid dogmatism. In "The Novel of Contemporary History" (1949), John Hersey proclaimed that the "genre of the contemporary historical novel is indistinguishable from that of the historical novel in general" (Hersey 26). I can only hope we will rise up to meet the challenge of Hersey's expectations and that, "[i]ndeed, the superior novel of contemporary events will in time come to be regarded as a historical novel" (Hersey 26).
But the lies survived, those accepted little fictions we call history – History and lies – They survived us all.
David Peace, Nineteen Eighty Three (London: Serpent's Tail, 2002), p. 38.
CITATION: Xavier Marcó del Pont, "The Contemporary Historical Novel & the Novel of Contemporary History," Alluvium, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2016): n. pag. Web. 31 May 2016, http://dx.doi.o
[1] Personal correspondence with Meghan Howe (Canadian Children's Book Centre/CCBC).
[2] Personal correspondence with the Scott O'Dell Estate.
[3] Whilst the National Book Awards stipulates that only the work of US citizens will be considered, its guidelines do not then go on to narrowly reconfigure our understanding of 'US citizens' by adding geographical caveats and exceptions.
Works Cited:
Anderson, Perry. "From Progress to Catastrophe." London Review of Books, Vol. 33, No. 15 (28 July 2011). Available at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n15/perry-anderson/from-progress-to-catastrophe.
Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992).
Bragg, Tom. Space and Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century British Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2016).
Fleishman, Avrom. The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
Hersey, John. "The Novel of Contemporary History" in Helen Hull (ed.), The Writer's Book (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), pp. 23-30.
Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel, trans. by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962) [Originally published in Russian in 1937].
Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall (London: Fourth Estate, 2009).
McEwan, Ian. Atonement (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001).
Narayanan, Pavithra. What are You Reading?: The World Market and Indian Literary Production (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).
Peace, David. Nineteen Eighty (London: Serpent's Tail, 2001).
Peace, David. Nineteen Eighty Three (London: Serpent's Tail, 2002).
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When a priest and literary critic returns from providing secret lessons on Marxism to General Pinochet in Roberto Bolaño's By Night in Chile (2000), his friend asks him what the new Chilean leader is like. "I shrugged my shoulders, as people do in novels, but never in real life" is his response (Bolaño, 2000: 97). Bolaño's fiction displays an uncanny ability to undercut the art form at the point when it approaches the appearance of reality, to distort normative narrative and reading experiences, and to snatch from the claws of being the presence of seeming to be. He was, one could say, a writer of semblances rather than fiction. By this I mean that when his writing came together to potentially reveal meaning or to touch on a reality that extended beyond the art form of the novel itself, Bolaño often turned in the other direction. When the character of Father Urritia has the opportunity to reveal something about Pinochet, for example, he responds with a gesture that confirms his status as a fictional character, thus undermining any conclusions we may have come to from the encounter with the Chilean dictator. At the point where the narrative could point towards reality, could extend beyond itself and into the world, it turns back on itself to reveal a mere appearance of reality, a semblance.
A writer of semblances: Roberto Bolaño's fiction displays an uncanny ability to undercut the art form at the point when it approaches the appearance of reality
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Semblance has a long philosophical history [1]. While the extent of this history is well beyond the scope of this article, I want to explore Bolaño's treatment of the concept of semblance in line with elements of this history. "A semblance [Schein]," writes Hegel in Philosophy of the Right (1820/1991), "is a determinate existence inappropriate to the essence, namely an empty detachment and positing of essence […]. Semblance is therefore an untruth that disappears because it seeks to exist for itself" (Hegel, 1820/1991: 115). In this sense, semblance is a being that appears as an essence but lacks the "inner world," as Hegel describes it in Phenomenology of Spirit, that makes an appearance a "Truth" (Hegel, 1807/1977: 87-88). "This 'being' is therefore called appearance," Hegel concludes, "for we call being that is directly and in its own self a non-being, a surface show" (Hegel, 1807/1977: 87; original emphasis). Martin Heidegger similarly views semblance as an appearance that conceals its interior schema, but he elaborates on Hegel's position by arguing that all appearances conceal themselves. In Being and Time (1927/2010), Heidegger notes that a phenomenon reveals itself through appearance, or a "self-showing," but he warns that an "appearance can also turn into mere semblance." As an example, he writes that "[u]nder a certain kind of light someone can look as if he were flushed. The redness that shows itself can be taken as announcing the presence of a fever" (Heidegger, 1927/2010: 29). The appearance of the redness is not up for debate, but its appearance reveals something that it is not: a fever. "Appearance," Heidegger suggests, "does not mean that something shows itself; rather, it means that something which does not show itself announces itself through something that does show itself" (Heidegger, 1927/2010: 28; original emphasis). Appearance, therefore, is always a "surface show" that in some way hides its true intention. Crucially, as Heidegger points out, an appearance, in showing itself, can either reveal what does not show itself, or it can seem to reveal what does not show itself. In this sense, being and seeming are potential by-products of any appearance. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger devotes an entire section to the "inner connection" between "being" and "seeming" (Heidegger, 1927/2010: 107-27). He writes:
Because being consists in appearing, in the offering of a look and of views, it stands essentially, and thus necessarily and constantly, in the possibility of a look that precisely covers over or conceals what beings are in truth, that is, in unconcealment. This aspect in which beings now come to stand is seeming in the sense of semblance. (Heidegger, 1927/2010: 114; original emphasis)
For Heidegger, semblance only exists in relation to being. And since being "consists in appearing," then it is the appearance of being that enables the possibility of seeming to be. All appearances possess the ability to be semblances.
A philosophical reading of semblance: Hegel and Heidegger both provide us with an interrogation of the concept of appearance
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Being and seeming lie at the heart of Bolaño's fiction. For instance, in the final part of 2666 (2004) ("The Part about Archimboldi"), the central character Hans Reiter (or Benno Von Archimboldi) is holed up in an abandoned house during World War II, where he discovers the letters of the former inhabitant Boris Abramovich Ansky, a Ukrainian Jew. In these letters, we learn of the story of Ansky's friend Efriam Ivanov, a Russian science-fiction writer, who experiences unexpected national success with one of his novels. "Sometimes, when he was alone," the narrator tells us, "and more often when he was alone in front of a mirror, poor Ivanov pinched himself to make sure he wasn't dreaming, that it [his success] was all real. And in fact it was all real, at least in appearance" (Bolaño, 2004: 722). This caveat—"at least in appearance—undermines Ivanov's ability to enjoy his success as he fears that it actually reveals something "that does not show itself." Ansky subsequently reflects on the fears that have overcome his friend Ivanov:
Irrational fears, thought Ansky, especially when the fearful soothed their fears with semblances. As if the paradise of good writers, according to bad writers, were inhabited by semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and even the gesture muddled by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of Tolstoy and the versts travelled on horseback by Tolstoy and the women deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry by the fire of seeming. (Bolaño, 2004: 722; original emphasis)
Anksy, unlike Ivanov, finds the non-being that Hegel suggests lies at the heart of semblances, whereas his friend Ivanov tends towards the Heideggerian version of semblance, in which semblance is not only a "surface show" that eventually reveals its non-being, but lives as a possibility of the world that is revealed by the appearance of phenomena. That is, it is only through the appearance of success that Ivanov can suffer from fear that the success is not real—it is appearance that makes semblance possible.
When Reiter returns to Ansky's house later in the novel, he feels "more comfortable than he would have felt at home." Yet this realisation leads him to suffer from a fear similar to Ivanov's:
And yet the possibility that it [the feeling of comfort] was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people's souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. (Bolaño, 2004: 741)
Both Ivanov and Reiter, in these moments, live under the spectre of seeming as they have to endure the fact that every appearance could also be a semblance. "Humans must bring Being to a stand," writes Heidegger, "they must endure it in seeming and against seeming, they must tear away both seeming and Being from the abyss of not-Being" (Heidegger, 1953/2o14: 121). Naturally, such endurance manifests in radical self-doubt, as is evident in the characters of Ivanov and Reiter.
It is not simply within Bolaño's writing that we are confronted with the question of whether things are the way they seem. In the case of Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996/2008), the art form itself questions the veracity of appearance. The book appears as an academic piece in which Bolaño provides 30 short biographies of right-wing writers in North and South America. It is split into 14 thematic sections, and includes, under the title "Epilogue for Monsters," an extensive bibliography, an overview of secondary figures involved in the movement, and lists of publishers, magazines and journals, as well as meeting locations. The book, however, exists entirely in the realm of semblance; it seems to be real, and this is exactly the point: it is real, at least in appearance. Yet none of the writers, secondary figures, magazines and journals exist—they are all entirely imaginary. What we get, therefore, is "all surface and no depth, pure gesture."
Are things really the way they seem in Bolaño's fiction?
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Nazi Literature raises important questions about the relationship between aesthetics and semblance. In the early twentieth century, Walter Benjamin drew a connection between semblance and beauty in art. In an essay on Goethe, Benjamin suggests that "[t]he beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil" (Benjamin, 2004/1: 351). There is a key difference here between what Benjamin calls "mere semblance" and "beautiful semblance." The former is a form of deception in which an appearance is simply not what it seems to be: either one believes what it is not, or exposes its unreality. A beautiful semblance also appears as something that it is not, but this appearance is neither a mistake nor a deception, but precisely what creates its beauty as the object is dependent on its veil and vice versa. "There are different degrees of beautiful semblance," Benjamin claims, "a scale that is determined not by the greater or lesser degree of beauty but the extent to which a thing has more or less the character of semblance. The law governing this scale […] asserts in an artifact of beautiful semblance, the semblance is all the greater the more alive it seems" (Benjamin, 2006/3: 3: 224). A beautiful semblance incorporates semblance into the creation of its appearance, rather than evoking semblance through its appearance—the more an artwork incorporates semblance into its construction, without exposing its semblance, the more beautiful it appears. In this sense, semblance is like a scaffolding that cannot be seen.
Beautiful is rarely an adjective used to describe Bolaño's writing. In fact, Natasha Wimmer, the translator of 2666 and The Savage Detectives (1998), tells us in an interview that "[a]fter translating certain lines, I had to actively restrain myself from prettying them up." In a thought-provoking essay on the relationship of Bolaño's writing to one of his major influences, Jorge Luis Borges, Aura Estrada writes that Bolaño's "aesthetic values do not include 'writing well.' What he wanted to reveal with his narrative surpassed the limits of elegance or good taste. He sought to unmask the atrocities committed in the name of 'elegance' and 'good taste'" (Estrada n. pag.). However, Estrada suggests that Bolaño considered "elegance" and "good taste" as "pseudonyms for Civilisation and Power." She continues: "His characters were marginalized, desperate beings who, in the end, lost their style. Elegance, perfection, and correctness mattered little to him; what he found transcendent was the plot, the destiny of his characters" (Estrada n. pag.). In Bolaño's work, aesthetics does not appear on the surface, but rather in how things come to appear on the surface. That is, aesthetics occur in the process of writing, not at the end of that process.
While Bolaño's aesthetics may not be pretty on the surface, there is no doubt that they are alive, in the way that Benjamin proposes. Nazi Literature, for instance, is a beautiful semblance of the highest degree, in line with Benjamin's scale, because it is precisely through its appearance as an academic or biographical piece that it reveals its beauty. Crucially here, the semblance is only alive in the appearance because the appearance breathes life into semblance and sustains its vitality. The beautiful semblance, therefore, is a delicate balance since the more it lives in the appearance the closer it gets to revealing itself as a mere semblance. This delicateness is evident in the paratextual information that accompanies the New Directions English translation, in which we are told that Nazi Literature is "[c]omposed of short biographies of imaginary authors." The blurb subverts appearance before it has the chance to seem at all and denies the ability of the semblance to become beautiful. "No work of art," Benjamin writes, "may appear completely alive without becoming mere semblance, and ceasing to be a work of art" (Benjamin, 2006/3: 224). The blurb, by revealing the complete aliveness of Bolaño's book, transforms Nazi Literature from a beautiful semblance into a mere semblance.
"The illusion is created that there is no illusion": Adorno's analysis of semblance and trompe l'oeil deconstructs the appearance of totality that the artwork presents
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Semblance plays a central role in Theodor Adorno's theory of aesthetics. "Nature is beautiful," he writes in Aesthetic Theory (1970/2002), "in that it appears to say more than it is. To wrest this more from that more's contingency, to gain control of its semblance, to determine it as semblance as well as to negate it as unreal: This is the idea of art" (Adorno, 1970/2002: 78). Adorno posits that the truth of art lies not in its ability to reproduce nature as it appears to us, but to integrate the things that escape appearance, but are there nonetheless (the "more"), into the artwork itself; it is to bring semblance to the surface while at the same time dissolving its unreality. Adorno differentiates his theory of semblance from previous philosophical traditions, particularly Hegel. Where Hegel viewed the "spirit" of art as an objective totality, shifting away from Kant's subjective-centric approach to artistic beauty, Adorno argues that spirit is not an objective fact but a continual and evolving process. This process of development and formation opens the possibility for "aesthetic semblance":
If the immanent closure of artworks is not to be taken strictly, however, semblance overtakes them precisely at the point they imagine themselves best protected from it. They give the lie to the claim to closure by disavowing the objectivity they produce. They themselves, not just the illusion they evoke, are the aesthetic semblance. The illusory quality of artworks is condensed in their claim to wholeness. (Adorno, 1970/2002: 101)
Aesthetic semblance, according to Adorno, does not occur during an encounter with an artwork, but actually governs the entirety of this encounter. An artwork, therefore, might appear to produce an experience that is total, in the way that Hegel proposes, but it is the appearance of that totality that is illusory. "Through its appearance it lays claim to substantiality," Adorno concludes (Adorno, 1970/2002: 101).
The experience of Nazi Literature as a biography is not a perceptual mistake or deception, like seeing a ball instead of a rock, but rather the book can only be welcomed as a biography of right-wing writers in its not being so. The relationship between the being-so and not being-so is fundamentally chiastic because the book's appearance is dependent on its semblance, and its semblance can only exist in its appearance. In this way, Nazi Literature is an aesthetic semblance because its "claim to substantiality" can only be achieved through its appearance, which is obviously illusory. "[E]very element of aesthetic semblance," Adorno claims, "includes aesthetic inconsistency in the form of contradictions between what the work appears to be and what it is" (Adorno, 1970/2002: 101). There is clear contradiction between what Nazi Literature appears to be and what it really is, but this contradiction is not a result of its aesthetics, it is its aesthetics.
In the gruelling fourth part of 2666 ("The Part about the Crimes") a Tijuana cop Ramirez asks an Arizona sheriff Harry Mangaña: "Do you think things are the way they seem, as simple as that, no complicating factors, no questions asked?" (Bolaño, 2004: 442). This is a question that Bolaño also asks of his readers. Whether it is the hallucinatory first-person narrators of novellas such as By Night in Chile or Amulet (1999), the fluidity and unreliability of memory that permeates The Savage Detectives, or the aesthetic semblance of Nazi Literature itself, Bolaño continually refuses to let his reader accept appearances as totalities. A minor character in The Savage Detectives at one points tells us: "Lately I've noticed a disturbing tendency to accept things the way they are" (Bolaño, 1998: 270). Such a thought would most certainly have been "disturbing" to Bolaño, and his body of work could be viewed as a continual attempt to arrest such perturbation. In order to do so, he brought semblances to the surface of his writing and let them live amidst the world of appearances. In the case of Nazi Literature, the surface itself is a semblance. Thus, in the world of Roberto Bolaño, things are rarely what they seem. Or to put it another way, seeming is precisely what things are.
CITATION: Neil Vallelly, "The Semblances of Roberto Bolaño," Alluvium, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2016): n. pag. Web. 31 May 2016, http://dx.doi.o
[1] Emmanuel Kant used the term "semblance" in several of his works, and explores its aesthetic implications in Critique of Judgement (1790), which Friedrich Schiller then built upon in his Aesthetic Letters (1794). Both Kant and Schiller distinguished between aesthetic and non-aesthetic judgement as the difference between non-truth and truth. Schiller, however, argued that aesthetic semblance was a form of play in which one revelled in semblance because it was semblance. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), argued that empirical reality itself was a semblance that mirrored the artistic drive for semblance. In the twentieth century, semblance played a role in several distinct lines of thought, such as Husserl's phenomenology, Lacan's psychoanalysis, and Baudrillard's postmodernism. For contemporary applications of semblance, see Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) and Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
Works Cited:
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 2002). Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913-1926. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
—. Selected Writings, Vol. 3: 1935-1938. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Bolaño, Roberto. 2666. Trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Picador, 2004). Print.
—. By Night in Chile. Trans. Chris Andrews (London: Vintage, 2009). Print.
—. Nazi Literature in the Americas. Trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2008). First published in Spanish in 1996. Print.
—. The Savage Detectives. Trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Picador, 2007). Print.
Estrada, Aura. "Borges, Bolaño, and the Return of the Epic." Trans. T. G. Huntington. Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature. Oct. 2006. Web. 10 May 2016 (accessed 20 May 2016): http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/borges-bolano-and-the-return-of-the-epic.
Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). First published in German in 1820. Print.
—. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). First published in German in 1807. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010). First published in German in 1927. Print.
—. Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2014). First published in German in 1953. Print.
Massumi, Brian. Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Print.
Seel, Martin. Aesthetics of Appearing. Trans. John Farrell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). Print.
Wimmer, Natasha. "Interview: Natasha Wimmer, translator of Roberto Bolaño's 2666." By Zach Baron. The Village Voice, 25 Nov. 2009. Web. 10 May 2016 (accessed 20 May 2016): http://www.villagevoice.com/music/interview-natasha-wimmer-translator-of-roberto-bola-os-2666-6593131.
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"This is My Becoming"
When F.B.I. Forensic Profiler, Will Graham, stands before a murder scene in NBC's Hannibal, his preternatural empathy for the show's killers animates the tableau before him, restaging their crimes and allowing him access to their motivations. "This is my design," Graham whispers in early episodes, as he gleans from the swoop of a blood spatter, or the arrangement of severed limbs, a kind of artistic sympathy for the aesthetics of violence. Later, this repeated utterance evolves into "this is my becoming," as Graham himself is moved to "create" murder. Drawing on terminology from existential philosophy, the show suggests to its viewers that the murders Graham investigates and perpetrates are aesthetic objects, on par with the artistic production of fine artists. These scenes function as a moments of meta-interpretation, in which the viewer is granted privileged access to the usually internal processes by which art is engaged with on a sympathetic, sensual, and, finally, analytic level. Kierkegaard's position that "artistic production reveals ontological possibility" means that "it is an important context for critiquing the power of art to shape subjectivity" (Jethen, 2014). So, too, can Hannibal's presentation of the aestheticization of murder be understood as a comment on the ethics of television violence and the viewers it shapes, as well as the alchemy of television's so called "golden age" in which pulp sensibilities have transmogrified into "quality TV."
Hyperreal aesthetic: NBC's TV series Hannibal exemplifies "quality TV" in its stylistic reliance on filmic techniques
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These concerns are connected through Hannibal's self-aware, hyperreal aesthetic which revels in its own excesses of style and continually titillates, then frustrates, viewer desire for narrative depth by offering instead surface detail, and cryptic dialogue that imitates profundity while actually revealing very little. Hannibal's aesthetic of excess and imitation trains its viewers to think about questions of quality, originality, and the consumption of violence on television. In doing so, Hannibal offers an attentive audience valuable critical tools with which they can approach other television shows. In a cultural moment being called the new Golden Age of Television, such tools are especially useful as they can help us frame and articulate an interpretive response to shows that have become cultural touchstones, such as Game of Thrones and True Detective, both of which aestheticize violence, especially sexual violence, in a much less self-critical manner.
Quality Television and Popular Literature
The 1950's were television's original golden age: an era in which the rosters of the limited number of US commercial network channels were filled with hour-long dramas, and telecasts of canonical theatre and ballet. As the commercial possibilities of television began to become clearer, and episodic series began to dominate the ratings, TV's early focus on programming which reflected the forms and content of elite culture was remembered as the peak from which television then descended. The term "golden age of television" thus carries with it implications about popularity, commercialism and their relationship with both the content and formal features of television programming. These implications are also at play in later uses of the term, where, in Robert J. Thompson's 1996 book Television's Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER, it became connected to that other subjective notion: "quality TV." In 1996, Thompson identified a trend in television programming which he identified as "quality TV" and which was marked, according to him, by its stylistic reliance on film techniques, its use of complex, overlapping plots that suggest novelistic influences, and by its deployment of social and cultural criticism; but just as important as these formal markers was a less clear cut definition: the suggestion that quality TV was understood in terms of what it was not. As Thompson says, it was not "regular TV" (Thompson 12-16). As Jane Feuer has outlined, this notion of defining quality TV in opposition to regular television has been at the core of HBO's marketing strategy since at least their deployment of the slogan: "It's not T.V. It's HBO." But television's quality/regular division, and the aesthetic distinctions it implies, are complicated by its peculiar relationship with the forms of literary popular culture. As the title of Thompson's books suggests, a large portion of the shows that we tend to think of as quality TV draw on popular literary forms such as detective fiction, for their narrative forms, stock characters, and plot lines. Whilst certain sub-genres of crime fiction have long-since entered the literary canon, television continues to perform a kind of alchemy in the adaptation of popular genre novels to big-budget serialized TV shows. Science fiction, fantasy and horror remain niche (if profitable) markets within the publishing world, and the evaluation of such literature in both the popular and scholarly press tends to avoid formal and aesthetic criticism of such texts. However, in adaptation, the niche appeal of books such as George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series is transformed into a mass cultural event, as the recent news that U.S. President Barack Obama receives advance copies of Game of Thrones episodes attests. And the critical reception of quality TV in the popular press often hinges on analysis of a show's formal and aesthetic values. For example, in a 2014 article published on the website of the A.V. Club (the satirical newspaper, The Onion's, non-satirical arts site) the influence of framing and composition on audience perception of character's social status is explored at length (Kaufman, 2014). Through their transformation into quality television, then, George R. R. Martin's stories become fodder for aesthetic evaluation of the same type as 'elite' cultural objects.
In the current era of quality TV, there is another marker of difference that allows us to identify such shows as being not like 'regular' TV; that difference is the amount and extremity of violence, nudity and sexuality that the shows contain. Broadcast television in the U.S. follows strict regulations from the Federal Communications Commission, which restrict the use of offensive language and the depiction of sexuality and nudity on television, while the networks themselves have standards and practices departments that advise and arbitrate on matters of on-screen violence. Cable channels, seen as the progenitor of our current age of quality television, have no such restrictions, and are free to air material that could never be shown on broadcast channels. This once again, presents us with a paradox about this notion of quality TV, which is at once seen as artistically freer than conventional television, and at the same time, through this connection to the depiction of sex and violence, to the content of pulp fiction, and other 'low' culture narrative forms.
Genre mixing: "quality TV" shows such as Hannibal and Game of Thrones adapt popular literature whilst drawing on cinematic tradition
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The notion of quality TV, then, is anchored in our present moment by two central characteristics: the depiction of violence and sexuality not acceptable on regular TV (more common to popular literature) and the aesthetic transmogrification of such violence into something of stylistic and cultural value that receives critical appreciation. We can see an awareness of the centrality of this amalgam to the conception of quality TV in other shows, for example: the title of HBO's True Detective points to its understanding of the pulp elements that populate it, True Detective being a title borrowed from a true crime and crime fiction pulp magazine that began its run in 1924. However, NBC's Hannibal, a prequel to and, finally, adaptation of Thomas Harris's 1981 novel Red Dragon, takes these two characteristics of quality television as its raison d'être, constructing the narrative and form of an entire show around the aesthetic appreciation of murder. Not only that, but Hannibal is shot so as both to involve its audience in that aesthetic evaluation, and to make them aware of the techniques of artistic production that render murder into art.
Genre-mixing, Hyperreality and Hannibal's Film Form
Thomas Harris's novels, on which Hannibal is based, tend to be classified for the market as simple thrillers, but they, like the adaptations they have spawned, contain elements of various popular literary sub-genres such as the Gothic mystery and the police procedural. The various visual adaptations have tended to emphasize one element in particular. For instance, Michael Mann's 1988 Manhunter, an adaptation of Red Dragon, amps up the stylized Gothic horror but does it with a neon sensibility; while Jonathan Demme's Oscar winning Silence of the Lambs, focuses on the scientific process of forensic investigation. Bryan Fuller's television semi-adaptation combines both of these generic modes at exaggerated baroque levels, with visual and narrative elements from other popular narrative forms; in particular, the domestic melodrama.
Underlying the plot arc of all three seasons is a kind of literal family romance, in which Will Graham, the FBI's contracted criminal profiler, and Hannibal Lecter, who enters the narrative as Will's psychiatrist, are drawn to each other through their shared experience at the suburban murder site of the Hobbs' family home, during and after which, they jointly take responsibility for the surviving daughter of the Hobbs family: Abigail. Fans labelled this grouping the "murder family," and the show's visual rendering of both Will and Hannibal's relationship, as well as their relationship with Abigail, is reminiscent of the mid-century domestic melodramas of Douglas Sirk. Sirk's film-world was one of heightened emotion, and suppressed desire articulated visually through the use of conspicuous style: strict colour palettes, stylized matte paintings instead of locations shooting etc. In particular, Hannibal's first season draws on Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955), borrowing that film's suburban milieu, saturated colour schemes, and stag symbol as the key iconography of Hannibal and Will's relationship. Sirk's films were not originally received as important films; rather they were seen as disposable 'women's' films, but their stature grew as they began to be re-assessed and welcomed into the canon of classical cinema. As John Brody writes in the New Yorker:
[Sirk] perceived melodrama as a classical genre that shifted tragic passions into bourgeois settings, thus highlighting the disproportion of those passions to the intimate banality of the action. There's an element of opera in his conception of the genre—particularly the domestic operas of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Verdi to Puccini—and his images are the music. (Brody, 2015: n. pag.)
By invoking Sirk's movie, Hannibal stakes a place for its own narrative that marks it out as a form of social and cultural criticism that is expressed through the exaggerated forms of low-culture suggesting a deep self-awareness on the part of the show about the place of quality TV in the cultural landscape. Not only that, but it supports the queer subtext of the show, in which Hannibal and Will's pseudo-romance becomes the show's narrative drive. Additionally, the intertextual relationship with Sirk's film points us to the unstable nature of our conceptions of high and low culture, bringing into focus the question of television's place in the pantheon of artistic production.
Within Hannibal itself, as well as in Harris's novels, opera and other classical music forms are invoked as a marker of aesthetic sophistication. Hannibal Lecter, whose taste is denoted as especially sophisticated by his preternatural sensory abilities, is portrayed as a patron of the Baltimore opera, where in one scene of the television show he is moved to tears by a performance of an aria from Handel's Julius Caesar in Egypt. But, so too are the heightened aesthetics of opera connected to the violence portrayed in the show: Hannibal serves his friends from the opera community an extravagant dinner in which the human victims of his crimes are transformed into a feast whose sensory excess is expressed through its visual presentation, as well as the exaggerated, stylized facial expressions of the diners. Just as Sirk is said to uncover in melodrama a sensibility close to tragic opera, Hannibal suggests that its protagonists achieve something similar through violence; and, through our own enjoyment of the show's representation of murder, it asks us to engage with the morality of such a transformation.
The show reminds us again and again of the way that its murderers and investigators view the violence of murder through the lens of art: in episode eight of the show's first season, the world of classical music once more provides the backdrop as a trombonist in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is killed and displayed onstage with his throat opened to be played as if it were a cello. When Graham is called to the scene, he sits in a concert hall seat as if he were a member of the audience who had come here to see the body onstage. To drive home the point, Graham remarks that this is "murder as performance," ("Fromage", 2013). In this same scene, Graham responds to a question from his boss Jack Crawford about the effects of seeing such violence over and over again, by saying: "it's getting easier to look" ("Fromage", 2013). The narrative arc of Graham's slowly rising comfort levels with murder thus becomes a metacommentary of sorts on the same process that the show's television viewers may experience as they become accustomed to such violence.
High or low culture? NBC's Hannibal draws on classical cinema, borrowing the milieu and iconography from Douglas Sirk's film All That Heaven Allows
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But Hannibal doesn't just nod its head in acknowledgement of its own complicity in portraying violence in an attractive form: it also uses the tools of film form to sensitize its audience to the methods by which that aestheticization takes place. As Gwyn Symonds has argued in The Aesthetics of Violence in Contemporary Media (2008), the contemporary ability to render images of wounds or body parts in extraordinary detail with special effects and CGI can depersonalize the violence done to the body, and "fetishize physical damage" (Symonds 176). Shows like CSI take this ability to its extremes by focusing on the forensic recreation of what violent crime does to a body, for example by following the trajectory of a bullet into a victim. Symonds argues that this level of detail goes so far beyond what is perceptible to a human observer that shows that focus on violence in this way attain a kind of hyperreal representation: "no longer actuality, but […] its tangible transcendence" (Symonds 178).
Hannibal appears to aim for just such a hyperreal aesthetic: not through CGI, but through the manipulation of depth of field, extreme close ups and frame rates. Such techniques place the audience in a position of observing the world of Hannibal as if their own senses and perception were so heightened as to allow them to see in microscopic detail, and slowed-down time. Symonds quotes Geoff King and Tanya Kryzwinska as arguing that this kind of hyperrealism offers: "…a spectacle of realism: degrees of graphical realism that are flaunted and designed to be admired as striking or impressive images in their own right" (Symonds 179). And, Symonds suggests, it is "this emphasis on spectacle that reminds the viewer that it is not the authentically actual but the narrative illusion of it that is being observed" (Symonds 179). Alongside the visual stylization that Hannibal borrows from Sirk's melodramas, this form of hyperreal representation serves to alert the show's viewers to the methods by which the show's representations are constructed.
Perhaps it is Hannibal's status as a network show that affords it this peculiarly self-aware position: unlike the shows made by HBO or other cable networks, Hannibal must make a special effort to distinguish itself visually so as to qualify in the eyes of viewers as "not regular TV" and, unlike those cable shows, it faces greater restrictions on its content. Its network origins mean that it doesn't have direct access to the cultural capital built up by the likes of HBO, and must establish its "quality" credentials. But Hannibal doesn't just aim to replicate the amalgam of low and high culture aesthetics that populate cable's "quality TV" shows. Instead, it offers its viewers a meditation on the place of such shows in the cultural landscape: it lays bare both that amalgam of pulp and elite cultural forms that shape such shows, and the de-personalizing violence that they often contain. In short, it trains its viewers to approach other examples of "quality TV" as informed consumers, who are then better placed to locate shows like True Detective or Game of Thrones in the context of the popular genres they have emerged from, and to examine the violence they portray in a critical way.
CITATION: Rowena Clarke, "Consuming Television's Golden Age with Hannibal Lecter," Alluvium, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2016): n. pag. Web. 31 May 2016, http://dx.doi.o
Works Cited:
"Fromage". (2013, May 16). Hannibal . NBC.
Brody, R. "Movie of the Week: Written on the Wind". The New Yorker. 15 December 2015 (accessed 17 May 2016): http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/movie-of-the-week-written-on-the-wind
Jethen, P. Kierkegaard, Aesthetics and Selfhood (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014).
Kaufman, S. "Game Of Thrones Cordially Invites You to Take a Damn Seat at the Kiddie table" . The AV Club, 10 April 2014 (accessed 10 May 2016): www.avclub.com: http://www.avclub.com/article/game-thrones-cordially-invites-you-take-damn-seat–203286
Symonds, G. The Aesthetics of Violence in Contemporary Media (New York: Continuum, 2008).
Thompson, R. J. Television's Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (New York: Continuum Press, 1996).
Please feel free to comment on this article.]]>
Dedicated to Doreen Massey, with profound thanks for all she has given to the field of human geography.
Doreen Massey, writing in her visionary book, For Space, sets out a rallying cry for the building of interrelationships in the spaces of the contemporary world: 'In this other spatiality, different temporalities and different voices must work out means of accommodation. The chance of space must be responded to' (111). In her discussion of the 'chance of space', Massey envisions it as a palimpsestic interplay of chaos with order, resulting in the 'constant formation of spatial configurations, those complex mixtures of pre-planned spatiality and happenstance positionings-in-relation-to-each other … the finding of yourself next door to alterity' (116). In celebrating the importance of both chaos and order to the production of contemporary space, and thus rallying against spatial critiques which too often revel in the 'glorious random mixity of it all' without acknowledging that 'what may look to you like randomness and chaos may be someone else's order' (111), Massey argues for an intrinsically relational and ever-polyvalent understanding of space. For Massey, 'chance' must acknowledge a multiplicity of meanings and methods to be a productive tool in relating to space.
One of the most beguiling responses to Massey's paradigm in recent fiction is Gareth E. Rees's Marshland: Dreams and Nightmares on the Edge of London, published in 2013. The novel is the product of a number of years of research and writing, some of it having been published previously on Rees' blog, The Marshman Chronicles, and consists of an interlinked series of short narratives in various formats and modes. Marshland promulgates multiple strands of spatial production, eventually bringing them together in a powerful celebration of the 'chance of space' – vital to this task are Rees' own experiences and ambulations in the edgelands of Hackney Marsh, London – an area dominated since 2012 by the enormous structures of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Bringing to bear the literary taxonomy outlined in the previous article in this series, 'Towards a Taxonomy of Edgelands Literature', Marshland is exemplary as an edgelands text, combining generic flexibility, transgressive modes, and an authorial presence which does not overwrite the edgelands with its own narratives, but rather works as a relational counterpoint to the margin: both constructed from, and constructing evocations of, edgeland space.
Gareth E. Rees' depiction of Hackney Marshes in Marshland helps us to consider "the chance of space" in its mixing of fiction with reality
[Image by Adam under a CC BY-NC-SA license]
The narratives of Marshland are written in modes ranging from the purely fictional to the purely realist, arranged together in such a way that it is impossible to discern where they begin to diverge from reality. The line between fact and fiction is further blurred by Rees' use of inter- and intratextuality, with characters and events from different chapters, as well as other historical and fictional sources, appearing throughout the text; the author himself is fictionalised in his communications with these characters. In an article for The Quietus, Rees comments on this approach in constructing the work: "I could have created an unofficial guide, a history or a psychogeographical travelogue. But I felt that to express the marshes in the way it mattered to me, I needed to have all of these elements in the same book, sharing the same space, informing each other".
The textual pieces are interspersed with illustrations from Ada Jusic, while one of the narratives is presented in the form of a graphic short story, also illustrated by Jusic (63-75); other sections of the text resemble concrete poetry (33, 238). The multimedia form is further developed in the final chapter, "A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes". This section is a libretto for a musical suite composed by the band Jetsam, available online, with the text based on elements of Marshland and a short story of the same title published in the anthology Acquired for Development By….
The polyphonic approach of Marshland is addressed by Rees in an interview with 3:AM Magazine, where he traces the evolution of the book, from an early desire to "superimpose myself, turn it into a mystical place. A mythical land. The original idea was to map it, give it all my own names", through to the realisation that this former approach was a "gentrification approach to psychogeography", and that the Hackney Marshes were "a different place to different people. When I discovered the other people using the marshes for escape, or inspiration or secrets … that humbled me". What Rees realises in the course of writing Marshland is that the edgelands demand, and flourish within, a polyphonic discourse between the possible and the impossible, the present and the past, and the human and the constructed.
Multimedia form in Marshland: Rees experiments with various forms in the text, including graphic narrative and typography resembling concrete poetry (pp. 65, 238)
[Images used under fair dealings provisions]
The edgelands of Marshland are not simply a space apprehended by multiple voices – they actively take on an active, agentive role within the book, challenging prior boundaries. If Marshland were to be located within a genre – apart from the genre of edgelands literature – it would be best placed in the emerging categorisation of New Weird, defined, in the words of Roger Luckhurst, by a "rapid hybridisation between horror, Gothic, science fiction and the relatively new label 'dark fantasy'", exemplified by authors such as China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer. The hybrid form of New Weird encourages dissolutions of other boundaries, prompting a recurring motif, within these works, of "passage through strange spatial zones, weird topologies that produce anomalies, destroy category and dissolve or reconstitute identities". (22) Linking these zones of New Weird fiction to Foucault's concept of heterotopias, Luckhurst writes:
The Zones of the post-genre fantastic … are chaotic and disordered as a means of evading the dangers of a static utopian topology, fenced off and guarded from transgressors. They do not elaborate a separate order, but work to set up interference patterns with the dominated or policed space that surrounds them. (27)
In the spirit of New Weird – some exemplary authors of which, such as Neil Gaiman, Miéville, and John M. Harrison, are cited in the bibliography of Marshland – Rees constructs not only a generically and stylistically fluid work, but sees the edgelands themselves as a "chaotic and disordered" zone, both temporally and spatially heterogeneous. On the marshes, where the "state loses its power" and "traditional communication lines are severed", space, text and human lives meld together, which manifests itself "as an urge for the marshes' users to write themselves onto the landscape … Instead of 'Which of these things would you like?' the marshland asks, 'What would you like this place to be?'" (163). This writing of space is often evoked quite literally in the form of graffiti, created by "the invisible auteurs of the marshland" (110), who simultaneously write in the space, and write the space itself. "What all those who write on the marshland share is a desire not to remain a passive part of their surroundings" (114), writes Rees – the edgelands require an active, discursive engagement.
Rees' reading of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park reminds us of the history of resistance to demarcation and encroachment on the marshes from the eighteenth century until the present day
[Image by Karen Bryan under a CC BY-ND license]
The agentive nature of the edgelands is developed further in Marshland through the recurring appearance of the Unmoored Manor of Mutating Manifestation, a transient city-state located on a narrowboat. The UMMM is a space of limitless possibility, where the only law is "that your own will is the law"; it travels through time, over water and land, collecting transgressors in the Hackney Marshes, such as the dead narrator's widowed wife in "Life Between Epochs" and a man who is transformed into a bear in "Marsh Meat". Within the UMMM, these disenfranchised characters attain sanctuary as well as self-determination, being encouraged to choose the narrowboat's next destination. The UMMM is a fantastical portrayal of the politics which guide Marshland – an "independent municipality", it is an evocation of the Hackney Marshes at their most politically agentive, demonstrating that even after they are bounded by the expansion of London, their water siphoned and canalised into reservoirs and treatment plants, they remain a resistant force, in the imagination if not in reality.
In the penultimate chapters of Marshland, Rees discusses the damage done to the marshes by the Olympic Park construction, drawing out the history of resistance to demarcation and encroachment on the marshes from the eighteenth century until the present day. Despite its active political engagement, the protest movement is a failure: "A hole was torn in the shield of common law, allowing corporate money into a public space which had been denied to vested interests for centuries" (245). Nevertheless, Rees paints a hopeful picture of the ongoing battle:
But this doesn't mean that the idea of open, free, common land has been vanquished. Across the water, kestrels hover, butterflies dance and swans flock over cows, horses, and wildflower meadows. People walk dogs, chop logs, smoke joints, fly kites, kiss in the bushes, photograph wildflowers, pick berries and jog through the woodland. In pubs across Clapton, Walthamstow, Leyton and Hackney Wick, marsh lovers plan their defence strategy … They are the latest defenders of the marshes, and they are not going anywhere. (245)
The edgelands are filled with the discourse of a resistant politics, which has existed since they were first threatened, and will, by nature of its grounding in a perpetually unordered space, continue indefinitely. In the next chapter, "Naja's Ark", set in a post-apocalyptic future version of the Hackney Marshes, a teenager finds a wall of edgeland graffiti recounting the marshes' history: drawings of animals and humans interwoven with construction machinery, wartime bombs, and the UMMM. "There are words and numbers too: Lammas, Anonymous, Occupy, 1892, Whipple, Olympiad" (259). The multiple and resistant voices of the edgelands are perpetually alive in the textual space and spatial text of the Hackney Marshes – both in the protest movements of the present day, their historical predecessors, and the distant imagined future.
Marshland is an exemplary edgelands text, combining generic flexibility, transgressive modes, and an authorial presence which does not overwrite the edgelands with its own narratives
[Image by John Perivolaris under a CC BY-NC-ND license]
Throughout its spatially and temporally interwoven narratives, Marshland foregrounds a chaotic politics resistant to the systems of demarcation and mapping, embracing chaos as a tool of change, chance, and resistance. Read in this mode, Marshland is a postcolonial text, continually signalling its resistance to the spatial control of neo-Imperial London. In such works, according to Sara Upstone, "oppression seemingly becomes marvellously transformed into resistance, offering new radical perspectives, new sites of imagination and creativity, from which the colonial representation of territory can be excised and, perhaps, overcome" (13). At the apocalyptic end of "Naja's Ark", this resistance is realised fully – both by human actors and the agentive edgelands themselves – as the rivers of the world "connect with each other like re-awakening synapses until they form a single aquatic consciousness" (36), and watching the great flood, Naja says: "'All is becoming one … and when it does so, there will be no more edge, no inside, no outside, only heaven … or hell'" (268). The polyphony of the edgelands is still present even in the apocalyptic endgame, as Naja and her friend Bardu set sail across the new ocean, away from the "barricades … where all the rich folk lived … a steel wall with surveillance cameras and snipers" (227). Naja carries the powers of political resistance with her – community, polyphony, and means of transgression and mobility: "She has her raft. She has the last books in London. She has her trusted friend" (267). Slowly, hopefully, they row towards a distant horizon (268) – the eternal edge. Marshland is fully imbricated in this political project, which foregrounds "a concern for the very real violences and oppressions that exist within postcolonial contexts" even as its discourses tend to the imaginative, an "explicit political possibility situated in the real world" (17). Rees utilises the creative potentiality of the edgelands – in the freedom inherent in the UMMM, the agency of the River Lea, and the past and future visions of the Hackney Marsh which reveal the zone as a space of perpetual polyphony – to forge a fluid, adaptive, and politically engaged comprehension of marginal space.
In the epilogue of Marshland, Rees witnesses the fictional and the real flow together as he joins the ancient ritual of the Beating of the Bounds on the marshes. He sees characters from the book, while the crowd around him is "reminiscent of Ada's illustrations for my story The Raving Dead" (272). Standing by the river, Rees has an epiphany:
I had undergone a metamorphosis. I was no longer a passive chronicler but an active node of marsh consciousness, carrying out its will. I had been assimilated. The landscape was dictating my behaviour, not the other way round. … How many others like me were writing about the marshes? How many more stories were there in this place? … All these marshland tales I had discovered and invented – the secret histories, local myths, and flights of imagination – they seemed like tiny drops of rain falling onto the surface of this prehistoric river which swelled with ancient memories, each water molecule a life lived. (272, 274-5)
Recognising that he is not the agent of his edgelands narrative, but that it is the edgelands themselves which speak – in their perpetual multitude of chaotic, weird, resistant and evocative voices – through the pages of Marshland, Rees responds fully to Massey's "chance of space". At the same time, he demonstrates how far the space of the edgelands has travelled in contemporary consciousness as a spatiality apprehended best by the heterogeneous, fantastical discourses of "chance", and how much further it can travel still.
CITATION: Raphael Kabo, "Responding to the Chance of Space in Marshland," Alluvium, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2016): n. pag. Web. 31 March 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v5.1.01
Works Cited:
Luckhurst, Roger. "In the Zone: Topologies of Genre Weirdness," in Gothic Science Fiction 1890-2010, edited by Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2011), pp. 21-35.
Rees, Gareth E. "A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes," in Acquired for Development By…, edited by Gary Budden and Kit Caless (London: Influx Press, 2012).
Rees, Gareth E. "Writing a Deep Map: Non-Fiction's Challenge to the Contemporary Novel." The Quietus, 24 November, 2013 (accessed March 2016): http://thequietus.com/articles/13961-deep-map-gareth-rees-marshlands.
Rees, Gareth E. The Marshman Chronicles, n. date (accessed March 2016): http://www.marshmanchronicles.com/.
Rees, Gareth E., and Spanton, Simon. "edgeland: marshland." 3:AM Magazine. 20 March 2014 (accessed March 2016): http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/edgeland-marshland/.
Upstone, Sara. Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
Please feel free to comment on this article.]]>
This article will examine a late-thirteenth-century text, the Enfaunces de Jesu Crist [Childhood of Jesus Christ], in the context of the recently developed field of fan studies. The text was edited in 1985 by Maureen Boulton, and is written in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French spoken by the élite members of society in England following the Norman Conquest. It survives fully in one manuscript, MS Bodley Selden Supra 38, and partially in two others, and there are also related Continental French and Middle English versions (Boulton, Enfaunces 1, 9-10). The Enfaunces narrate episodes from Jesus's early life, and it is one of a group of nine texts telling similar stories focusing either on Jesus's childhood or that of his mother, which I would describe as "Jesus fan fiction."
Jesus fan fiction: how can a fan studies approach help us to rethink the relationship between medieval manuscripts and their audiences?
[Image by Waiting for the Word under a CC BY-SA license]
Although this may seem at first to be an anachronistic concept, there are many analogies to be drawn between modern-day fandom and the behaviour of the authors and audiences of medieval literature. The concept of a fan community has existed for several centuries at least even if it has not been expressed in these terms (Keller). Maureen Boulton, in the introduction to her recent study of Continental French narratives of Christ and the Virgin, identified how the authors of those texts engaged with contemporary literary forms in order to communicate religious material to audiences more fond of secular narratives (Boulton, Sacred Fictions 9). She also highlighted how those texts responded to their audience's need to explore and engage imaginatively with their faith (Boulton, Sacred Fictions 5). Emotional response and imaginative engagement are also key qualities of fan communities, as identified by Cornel Sandvoss, who describes fandom as "the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative of a text" (Sandvoss, 8). Both modern fandom and medieval texts acknowledge and reimagine canonical events in their narratives, but also expand upon them, operating outside of authorial jurisdiction and going beyond the limits of their source material. Furthermore, they both make use of recognisable characters, but also put 'their' unique spin on them, using them to explore their own concerns about contemporary social, political and sexual issues.
The desire to know or to imagine what could lie in the missing moments of the narrative leads to the production and consumption of fan fiction, as several scholars have identified (Dare, Hellekson, Jenkins, Musiani). So what kind of gap was the Enfaunces attempting to fill? I would like to suggest that it was twofold, both a chronological gap and also a thematic gap. Firstly, in terms of time, the canonical gospels do not give much information about Jesus's childhood; there is some detail in the gospel of Luke, but much of the material in the Enfaunces comes from the apocryphal infancy gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (Boulton, Enfaunces 9-10). Secondly, thematically speaking, the stories in the Enfaunces focus mostly on Jesus's relationship with his parents and also with his peers. The stories explore Jesus's dual nature as God and man, and as a child to his parents as well as their redeemer.
Some statistics will reveal the preoccupations of the Enfaunces in more detail. Of the 34 stories collected in the Enfaunces, eleven feature Jesus helping his community in a variety of ways, including healing the lame, the mute, and the blind (vv. 957-72), assisting a dyer (vv. 1233-1364), and sowing barley in a field which then grows instantly and can be harvested by the villagers (vv. 1089-1100). The presence of these stories is perhaps unsurprising, given that they anticipate Jesus's role as saviour of mankind. Seven stories focus on Jesus's supernatural powers, which frequently result in the death of those who defy, irritate, or attempt to imitate him, whether they be teachers or playfellows. Some examples include Jesus striking a boy dead for destroying some pools he has been creating (vv. 397-480), boys being transformed into pigs when their parents attempt to conceal them from Jesus so that they cannot play with him (vv. 1101-56), and a teacher who strikes Jesus when antagonised by him dropping dead (vv. 1593-1652). These episodes usually, but do not always, end with Jesus resurrecting or healing those who have been harmed as a result of his actions, usually at the behest of his parents (often because they are threatened by the parents of the dead children). The violence of these episodes gives them a disturbing undertone, particularly when viewed in the light of their virulent anti-Semitism. This may not have been surprising to a medieval audience, as the Jews were held to be responsible for Jesus's death and were persecuted in medieval England, but it is arresting for contemporary readers.
The Tring Tiles, made 1330, from Tring church in Hertfordshire. These illustrate many of the infancy miracles from the Enfaunces, and it is possible the tiles and the illustrations in the manuscript shared a common source
[Image ©Trustees of the British Museum, used with permission]
The depiction of Jesus both as the Messiah and as, to quote Monty's Python's Life of Brian, "a very naughty boy" illustrates his dual nature, and perhaps encourages contemplation of what life was like for his parents. This may have been deliberate, as the largest number of stories, thirteen in total, feature Jesus performing actions either at their behest or in order to take care of them or his wider family. These range from commanding a fruit tree give his exhausted parents food and water on their journey to Egypt (vv. 197-316), shortening their journey time by 30 days in response to Joseph suffering from heat exhaustion (vv. 317-32), rectifying a mistake made by Joseph's apprentice to ensure that a plank of wood that he has mistakenly cut too short lengthens itself to the required size (vv. 1465-1536), and responding to numerous threats to his parents which come about as a result of injury to other children who are either influenced by Jesus's hijinks or killed as a result of defying him (e.g. vv. 481-564, vv. 641-768). The narrative particularly highlights how Joseph, rather than Mary or Joseph and Mary together, is influenced by these events. The two stories to feature Jesus's extended family, including an unnamed cousin with whom Jesus gathers cabbages for dinner in a particularly domestic scene (vv. 1717-60), further emphasise his position as a member of a family and increase the paradox of Jesus as human and Jesus as God that the Enfaunces explore.
The illustrations in the one complete manuscript of the Enfaunces, further highlight this preoccupation. Boulton describes them as "extensive," (Boulton, "Text and Illustration" 3) indicating that they would probably have been time-consuming to produce and therefore expensive to commission. However, illustrations did not only indicate the value and prestige of the manuscript in which they were contained. They were also a means of making texts more accessible to readers who were not necessarily able to read written text unassisted, but who could either 'read' the illustrations or have the book read to them by someone else. Furthermore, they were an important location of narrative in their own right; like a modern-day graphic novel, illustrations could serve a variety of purposes in a medieval text. They could mirror the information in the narrative, serving to emphasise it, and they could also complement it with additional information, guiding the reader to what the illustrator saw as the most important parts of the story. The epilogue in the complete manuscript of the text evidently considered the illustrations and the text as a composite narrative: he states "Mut est bele la medlure, De la lettre e la purtreiture," [the mixture of words and illustrations is very fine, vv. 1979-80] and also states "A cel entendre est bon deliz, E ne mie tener a enviz" [to hear this text is a great delight, and should not be begrudged, vv. 1983-4]. This insistence on the importance of the illustrations and on hearing the narrative, combined with the choice of French over Latin as the language for the text, suggests that the author was aiming for an audience of mixed literatures, both visual and oral, perhaps including those who were unable to or learning to read and using the illustrations as a means of accessing the narrative; Wogan Browne et al. suggest that they could have been used for teaching purposes (Wogan-Browne, Fenster and Russell, 180). The size of the book also is an indicator of the way it was perhaps intended to be read: it is "small enough to be held easily in the hands" (Wogan-Browne et al., 179), which suggests either solo reading or reading in a small group, gathered around the book so that everyone present could see the images.
Illustrations of texts like the Enfaunces served a variety of purposes in a medieval text not dissimilar to modern-day graphic novels
[Image by 125o4 under a CC BY-NC-ND license]
As the illustrations were considered so important by the author of the text, it would be worth examining their subject matter as well. Of the 60 illustrations in the manuscript, 17 feature Jesus and at least one of his parents. A further seven illustrations depict at least one of Jesus's parents without Jesus present, meaning that just under half of the illustrations are concerned with Jesus's family. The distribution of illustrations throughout the narrative likewise seems disproportionately skewed towards the Holy Family: the episode in which Jesus commands a tree to provide his family with food and water is given five illustrations, which makes up 1/12 of the total illustrations in the text, even though the episode itself is only 100 lines long, in a text of just over 2000 lines. As in the written text, the illustrator's preoccupation seems to be with Joseph: of the seven illustrations showing Jesus and either parent, Joseph appears in four as opposed to Mary's three, and in the six illustrations of either parent without Jesus, five depict Joseph while only one depicts Mary. The text and the images appear to be determined to restore Joseph to the narrative and to encourage the audience to consider his relationship with his adoptive son. They are further pushed to consider this relationship at two separate points in the narrative in which the sole focus of the illustration is Joseph bidding Jesus farewell; once on folio f. 17v with a wave, and once on folio f. 25r in tears. The emotive quality of these illustrations may be an attempt to guide the reader's attention to contemplation of Joseph's emotions, and may also even be foreshadowing Jesus's death. There are many examples of texts that encourage their readers to identify with Mary's anguish in contemplation of her son's death, but here it seems to be Joseph whose emotional attachment to his son is being contemplated. Throughout the Enfaunces, the text and the images work together to restore Joseph to the narrative, whether by simply highlighting his presence, or more actively by encouraging emotional identification with him. In this way, the author and illustrator of the Enfaunces fulfils the same role as a fan fiction author exploring a character who is underdeveloped in canon, and, at the same time, gives a model of parenthood for their audience to follow. Jesus is respectful to his parents, looking after them when they are vulnerable and obeying their wishes as a dutiful son, and they correct him when his behaviour is inappropriate. That Jesus uses his powers not only to heal the sick and resurrect the dead but also to assist in his father's carpentry business and to fetch water for his mother gives his power a more intimate quality, emphasising his role in his family as well as mankind's saviour-to-be.
This analysis is intended to explore the benefits of reading medieval texts through the lens of fan studies. Although the approach is new, it suggests that the motivations behind the composition and consumption of texts such as the Enfaunces may have been the same as those that prompt the writing and reading of fan fiction today. Adopting the mindset of a twenty-first century fan can offer new insight into the interests, needs, and behaviour of a thirteenth-century audience.
CITATION: Katharine Handel, "Medieval Jesus Fan Fiction", Alluvium, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2016): n. pag. Web. 30 March 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v5.1.02
Works Cited:
Boulton, Maureen Barry McCann. "The Evangile de l'Enfance: Text and Illustration in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Selden supra 38. Scriptorium. 37 (1983): 54-65.
––––––. Les Enfaunces de Jesu Christ. London: Anglo-Norman Texts Society, 1985. Print.
––––––. Sacred Fictions of Medieval France: Narrative Theology in the Lives of Christ and the Virgin, 1150-1500. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015. Print.
Dare, Virginia. 2006. Pwned: Fanfiction and guerilla culture war. Blogcritics Magazine, July 7. URL http://blogcritics.org/culture/article/pwned-fanfiction-and-guerilla-culture-war/ (accessed 13 February 2016).
Hellekson, Karen. "Doctor Who fans rewrite their program: Mini-UNIT Minstrels as creative consumers of media." Popular Culture Review 8 (1997): 97–108. Print.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual poachers: television fans & participatory culture. New ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.
Keller, Vera. "The 'Lover' and Early Modern Fandom." Transformative Works and Cultures. 7 (2011). URL http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/351/222 (accessed 13 February 2016).
Musiani, Francesca. "May the Journey Continue": Earth 2 Fan Fiction, or Filling in Gaps to Revive a Cancelled Series." Transformative Works and Cultures. 5 (2010). URL http://http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2010.0206 (accessed 13 February 2016).
Sandvoss, Cornell. "The Death of the Reader? Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture." Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. Eds. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: NYU Press, 2007. 19-32. Print.
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, Thelma Fenster and Delbert Russell. Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translations, c. 1120–c. 1450. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016. Print.
Please feel free to comment on this article.]]>
I have not come across many people who don't believe that we define ourselves through actions. We are what we do; we are the sum of our actions. Whether we take an existentialist approach to subjectivity and claim that we are fully responsible for every action, whether we take a Structuralist stance and believe that our subconscious mind underpins all of our actions, or whether we are somewhere in between these two poles, it cannot be denied that whatever we do or have done in the past is, in some way, inextricably linked to the entity we call our Self.
Why is it then that in literary criticism, characters' actions and reactions to the events they participate in 'are the least investigated means of characterisation, as compared with external and internal descriptions, speech acts, or point of view' (Nikolajeva 4578)?
How can cognitive poetics enable us to rethink literary characters and their re/actions?
[Image by eltpics under a CC BY-NC-SA license]
In this article I argue for the relevance of a model of character analysis based on characters' re/actions. My reflections are inspired by cognitive poetics (e.g. Stockwell 2002) which is a relatively new discipline involving the application of cognitive linguistics and psychology to literary texts. My article specifically builds on Yuri Lotman's narratological event theory (1977), which shall act as stepping stone towards my cognitive poetical application of figure-ground theory. I have chosen to combine these two theories as they emphasise the dynamic and plot-determining nature of characters in new and, hopefully, interesting ways.
I want to show that from an intra-textual perspective, characters' re/actions have a plot-determining quality and that, from an extra-textual perspective, characters' re/actions sustain readerly interest. I argue that, effectively amounting to a story's motor, the dynamics of characters' re/actions can give us insights into what makes us keep ploughing through a book or what might make us want to throw it against the wall in frustration.
To illustrate my points, I will conclude my reflection with a very brief analysis of the dynamics of Offred's re/actions in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985).
Characters' Re/actions as Constitutive Elements of Plot
According to Yuri Lotman's event theory, 'the smallest indivisible unit of plot construction' (Lotman 232) is the literary event. Zooming in more closely, an event is 'the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field' (e.g. from poor to rich; from unknown to famous etc.) (233). Additionally, for Lotman, an event always involves 'the violation of some prohibition' (236). He gives the example of jay-walking being an event as it constitutes an act of transgression from the perspective of traffic law (236). The border demarcating the potentiality of transgression and which separates the character from a semantically opposing field constitutes a barrier, which can assume various forms:
whether it be the "adversaries" in a fairy tale, the waves and winds and currents hostile to Odysseus, the false friends in a picaresque novel or the false clues in a detective novel, for in a structural sense they all have an identical function: they make the movement from one semantic field to another extremely difficult . . . (241 f.)
In light of all this, it follows that to be able to understand a plot, one needs to identify its constitutive events. To identify an event, one needs to look at that which has the capacity to constitute a trans-semantic movement. The most obvious contender to have such a capacity within the story world is the literary character, more specifically, it is their action within or reaction to a certain situation, which can pierce through the inter-semantic barrier and transport the character into a new semantic environment. In my analysis of The Handmaid's Tale, we will see how Offred constantly transports herself from the semantic realm of (forced) obedience into the realm of rebellion/(conceptual) freedom through her thoughts, or reflective re/action if you will, which challenge the Republic of Gilead's status quo.
Understanding trans-semantic movement: narrative events need to be understood as those plot moments in which characters move into another semantic context or environment
[Image by Charis Tsevis under a CC BY-NC-ND license]
Only by looking at characters' semantically-transgressive re/actions throughout the story are we able to evaluate the eventfulness of a plot and thus identify a given plot's narratological structure. Understanding characters' re/actions equals understanding a piece of fiction's plot.
Henry James once illustrated the interdependence of characters' actions and events in a famous series of questions: "What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?" (qtd in Hochman 21). Regardless of whether we take a semiotic stance to character whereby it is a mere 'linguistic device' (Stockwell 56) and thus subordinate to plot, or whether we take a mimetic approach whereby character is understood for its individuality, to understand a story's trajectory it is indispensable to study characters' re/actions.
Characters' Re/actions Sustain Readerly Interest
We have just seen that to understand a plot's structure we need to study the dynamics of characters' re/actions. To further reflect upon the question of why we should integrate them into character analysis, we will now shift our focus from the text to the mind of the reader.
Unsurprisingly, there are a number of subconscious processes involved in the act of reading. As Peter Stockwell points out in his work Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (2002), readers often use the metaphor of transportation to comment on a good book: '"I was carried away by it", "It swept me off my feet", "It was like another world", "I can lose myself in a book", and so on' (152). Books judged to have failed to 'operate as vehicles of imaginary transportation . . . receive comments like, "I just couldn't get on with it", "It didn't seem to go anywhere"' (153). To maintain this journey-like experience and to thus keep the reader engaged in the embodied act of reading, their attention needs to be constantly captivated.
The act of reading involves a number of subconscious thought processes, in which readers' attention is captivated by different focal points within an imagined visual field
[Image by Ashton Pal under a CC BY-NC-ND license]
As readerly attention is selective, readers tend to select and focus on certain elements in a visual field whilst deselecting or neglecting others. Cognitive psychologists have also used the metaphor of the 'spotlight' as a means of understanding the focus of attention (Stockwell 18). In textual terms, attention requires an element of newness and is achieved through the constant renewal of the figure and ground relationship (Stockwell 18). The figure can be anything that stands out within the text through movement or some sort of development such as: 'a character in a fictional narrative or a building or other setting in a lyrical poem' (Stockwell 19). The reason for this is that attention in the visual field is usually caught by movement (Stockwell 18). When establishing the link between figure-ground theory and the literary character, Stockwell states that
In most narrative fiction, for example, characters are figures against the ground of their settings. They have boundaries summarised by their proper names ('Beowulf', 'Hamlet', 'Winnie the Pooh'), and they carry along or evolve specific psychological and personal traits. Stylistically they are likely to be the focus of the narrative, moving through different settings, and are likely to be associated with certain verbs of wilful action by contrast with the attributive or existential sorts of verbs used descriptively for the background.
Stockwell hints at it but doesn't spell it out: stylistically speaking, the figure can be said to be associated with the literary character and the ground with the background against which the character acts. It is the action of the character against the background of the plot, or rather, through the actions undertaken by the character (figure) against the backdrop of the narrative framework (ground) that the reader's attention is captivated. Studying characters' actions has therefore an intrinsic cognitive-psychological value as it is linked with the sustenance of readerly interest. It has the potential, if you will, to reveal why a particular piece of fiction is (or is not) captivating. This insight might explain E. M. Forster's conviction outlined in Aspects of the Novel (1927) that the study of the development of the novel implies the study of the development of humanity (Forster 153). By examining character development in popular and less popular novels, one might discover interesting correlations between particular plot patterns and the popularity of the novels they feature in.
Rebellious, Plot-Advancing Reflective Events in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
We have seen that characters' eventful actions constitute plot and that their cognitive-psychological 'figure' quality captivates and sustains readerly interest. To illustrate these points, I'd like to briefly examine reflective events and their relation to figure-ground theory in The Handmaid's Tale. I have chosen this particular novel because it takes the form of a memoir and is therefore, interestingly, mainly driven by Offred's thoughts/reflective action. I won't be able to outline all instances of reflective events in the space of this short article but I shall try to grasp some of the earliest and most striking ones in the story.
Key to reflective eventfulness in The Handmaid's Tale is the dichotomy of obedience and rebellion: Offred moves from the semantic space of obedience to that of (overt or covert) rebellion challenging Gilead's regime. I shall therefore concentrate on sifting out rebellious thoughts (figure; semantic space of rebellion) which stick out against the backdrop of the portrayal of the (mostly) conforming Republic of Gilead (static ground; semantic space of obedience).
The first thirty pages of the novel mainly constitute descriptive passages of the regime's status quo. We learn, for instance, about a certain 'decorum' (21) that must be adhered to; we encounter characters called 'Unwomen' (20) and 'Handmaid[s]' (29); we learn that in Gilead 'thought must be rationed' (17) etc. The status quo constitutes the static ground on top of which Offred acts as figure. Whilst the reader's attention is captivated by the Otherness of Offred's universe, they impatiently read on to find out whether or not Offred sides with the regime and whether or not she is willingly or unwillingly obedient. The reader is captivated by the narrative in so far as it promises culmination in the complete or, at least, partial revelation of Offred's stance regarding Gilead's regime.
The first (for the reader revealing and relieving) instance whereby Offred (figure) transcends Gilead's status quo (ground) is Offred's fantasy of touching the Guardian's face:
I think of placing my hand on it, this exposed face. . . . It's an event, a small defiance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself, like the candy I hoarded, as a child, at the back of a drawer. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes. (31, emphasis mine)
By fantasising about touching the guardian, Offred transgresses the semantic border (the supposedly accepted and internalised status quo) into the semantic space of rebellion, which, as you have seen, is literally described as an 'event' here. This sensual scene is prolonged by sexual fantasies and ultimately by frustrated thoughts of revenge such as 'I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the painted barriers, surreptitiously' (32). These scenes form an event as they are brought about by Offred's dynamic thought of rebellion which catapults her across the semantic barrier of the status quo into the semantic space of rebellion. Ultimately however, Offred plummets back down into the semantic space of obedience at the start of Chapter Five where she structurally seems to blend with the ground as she describes her surroundings impartially thus not displaying any sign of rebellion: 'Doubled, I walk the street. Though we are no longer in the Commanders' compound, there are large houses here also. In front of one of them a Guardian is mowing the lawn. The lawns are tidy, the facades are gracious, in good repair . . .' (33).
Applying figure-ground theory to a reading of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale opens up new questions concerning Offred's obedience and rebellion
[Image by Kelly Garbato under a CC BY-NC-ND license]
Offred resurfaces into the semantic space of rebellion thirty pages after the first event when she finds the subversive message 'Nolite te bastardes carborundorum (Don't let the bastards grind you down)' (62) scratched into her boudoir by one of her predecessors. Offred admits to herself that 'it pleases [her] to know that her [her predecessor's] taboo message made it through' to her (62). Its content gives her 'joy' (62). Offred subsequently internalises it and repeats the words to herself like a mantra (see 62). Between these inter-eventful thirty odd pages (pp. 31-62) the reader is captivated through doubts of whether or not the first event of rebellion (fantasy of touching the Guardian's face) was a mere oddity or indicative of Offred's rebellious core convictions. These doubts are sustained after the second event due to Offred's subsequent lack of eventful action.
The reader has to wait another 28 pages in which Offred remains static and, structurally, in tune with Gilead's regime, until Offred's sensual fantasy and identification with the taboo message finally progress into another event – the desire to 'steal something' (see 90 and 108). This desire to steal, the reader learns, derives from Offred's deep-seated feeling of powerlessness. Offred desires to replenish her deficiency of being – an existential lack within her Self infused by Gilead's totalitarian, individuality-suppressing regime – through self-affirming gestures such as stealing as 'it would make [her] feel that [she] has power' (90). By desiring selfhood and power, Offred, again, transgresses the semantic barrier of Gilead's status quo and progresses into the semantic field of rebellion.
If you continue reading, you will see that in the course of The Handmaid's Tale, the reader's attention continues being driven forward by the alternation between the (supposed) in-sync-ness of ground (Gilead's status quo) and Offred's 'obedience' and the 'ground-breaking' eventfulness of Offred's reflective (and later externalised) rebellion.
Characters' eventful re/actions can be said to be the driving force of narrative. When looking into the internal structure of a piece of fiction, we can see how pertinent the study of characters' re/actions is for the identification of the eventfulness of a story's plot. When turning our eye to the reader, we can see that the sustenance of readerly interest is inextricably linked with the dynamics of characters' re/actions. Studying them can therefore lead to new and interesting insights into both the dynamics of character development as well as the internal and external workings of a piece of fiction at large.
CITATION: Andrea Dietrich, "Crossing the Line: Characters' Re/actions As Driving Force of Narrative", Alluvium, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2016): n. pag. Web. 30 March 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v5.1.03
Works Cited:
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. London: Vintage, 1996. Print.
Bridgeman, Teresa. "Time and Space." The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Ed. David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 52-65. Print.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. London: Penguin Classics, 2005. Print.
Hochman, Baruch. Character in Literature. London: Cornell University Press, 1985. Print.
Lotman, Jurij. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Trans. Ronald Vroon. Michigan: Michigan University Press, 1977. Print.
Nikolajeva, Maria. The Rhetoric of Character in Children's Literature. Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2002. Kindle AZW file.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Why Write?" in Literature and Existentialism (Original title: What is Literature?). Trans. Bernard Frechtman. Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1949. Print.
Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.
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What are Metadata?
In the twenty-first century, the term "metadata" has appeared in the popular news press with increasing frequency. For instance, recent arguments made by proponents of mass surveillance have focused on the fact that the content of messages may be irrelevant for spy agencies; such organizations are instead more interested in knowing who spoke to whom, a type of metadata, rather than the full description of what was said. What is clearly of greater import to them is that which can be inferred by the blank spaces of content when one knows the circumstances of transmission and reception. It may be that these structures are "just metadata," as Senator Feinstein defensively claimed in 2014, but it is also clear that metadata alone provide sufficient clues to profile individuals, often with chilling consequences.
The term "metadata" first arose in the 1960s but came to prominence in the 1970s context of Database Management Systems (DBMSs) (Vellucci). In the usual definitions, the term refers to "structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource". It is meta- (beyond) data (from datum; a given thing). Furthermore, "metadata is often called data about data or information about information" and can be subdivided into structural and descriptive metadata (NISO 1). This difference between descriptive and structural metadata might be schematised as the difference between a row in a table that describes another object (descriptive) and a definition of what each column in this descriptive table means (structural). Descriptive metadata pertains to specific objects: the copyright that applies to a book, the ISBN of the object in question etc. Structural metadata refers to the formats of data containers: the layout on the page of a copyright declaration, the numerical format structure of an ISBN.
Yet this only takes us so far. In order to fully conceptualise metadata, we must also have an understanding of what is meant by "data". For metadata are themselves "just" data. Data are sometimes taken to be opposed to information, its unstructured counterpart. So data + metadata = information. The format of descriptive metadata, however, can be described by structural metadata. It is also possible to conceive of a further level of description for structural metadata. And so on to an infinite regress. As Martin Mueller and John Unsworth put it with respect to data and metadata: "what counts as second-order, depends on the boundaries of the first order" (Mueller and Unsworth, n. pag.). This leads to the paradox that in order to define metadata as "information", rather than as "data", will require an infinite number of metadata elements, each to define the other. Data, on the other hand, can refer to a variety of things. In fact, in many conversations it is the case that the word "data" can safely be replaced by the term "stuff" and still retain the same degree of specificity. Data can range from a few lines in a spreadsheet up to petabytes of quantitative material.
Information about information: in order to fully conceptualise metadata, we must also have an understanding of what is meant by "data"
[Image by gabitogol under a CC BY-SA licence]
Perhaps more relevantly for the context here, though, data can point, in some ways, to cultural artefacts. Those like Matt Jockers and Franco Moretti – conducting computational analyses of literature through methods ranging from stylometrics to visualisations and mapping techniques – process literary texts through an intermediate quantitative phase in the same way as other scientists. This results in analyses that can encompass corpora larger than it is possible for people to read while also noting trends in fiction that often go unremarked upon, such as the use of punctuation. Librarians cataloguing works of fiction can also perceive of novels as data; objects to be filed under the correct location according to the description in its metadata. Those responsible for the production of books – which, even in print, is a process that has long been defined and conditioned by the digital, even while thereby repressing new digital possibilities, as N. Katherine Hayles tells us – must think of paragraphs as a type of data to be inserted into structured, semantic XML markup (Hayles 6). Even our acts of normal (or critical) reading are a type of processing that involve contextualising the raw material of fiction, treating it as a kind of sensory input data that is then put through a series of interpretative moves. Of course, the term "data" when applied to fiction can provoke strong reactions. Those opposed to the quantification of artforms question whether novels really are "data" or whether works of art possess elements that elude analysis. Yet, at the same time, we can see, at the broadest level, how the term can apply.
Indeed, aesthetic forms themselves are surrounded by and represent metadata-like phenomena in ways with which any reader – either academic or lay – is implicitly familiar and from which much can be inferred. In this piece I want to argue for metadata as a form of inter-data reference that can be read/interpreted and that carries with it a type of "involuntary viral semantics" that can be said, in certain circumstances, to be political. Indeed, I will briefly here show what a literary approach can bring to the study of metadata and also what thinking about metadata can bring to literary studies. In fact, I would also argue that even when not analysing the explicit types of metadata that surround literature, there are many metaphorical applications of "metadata" that can profitably intersect with the methods of literary criticism.
What lies beneath: form and content
To begin this explanation and before reading any further, take a look at Figure 1. Most readers will instantly recognise this document, although it has no visible language. It is, of course, the copyright page to the frontage of a book with the textual elements obliterated.[1] Yet before we even move beyond this, most viewers will have accurately recognised that the blocks separated by commas and obliterated by larger chunks are text. Without seeing any of the content or individual characters, the outline shape, flow and kerning here imply words, even without access to the actual language. The direction of the commas that I have left visible, along with the placement of the © sign may also allow a reader to infer that this is a European alphabet with a left-to-right reading pattern.
Figure 1. Erasing copyright
Some of the characters can be inferred to be numbers, rather than text, however. This is because, as readers, we recognise certain structural and contextual features of metadata and infer the valid character sets and data types that must lurk below. For instance, take the lines that contain the © symbol. We know that that standard syntax for a copyright declaration in the English language is "© Firstname Lastname date" where "date" is a four-character numeric string representing the year A.D. of the claimed copyright. Given that both of these lines end with a roughly uniform block size that appears to be able to accommodate a Gregorian calendar date signifier, it is logical to assume that this block is a date and that the text's contents are numerical.
We can also do some character-type deduction on the ISBN lines of this page (these are the lines two thirds of the way down the page that contain a block, then a space, then five blocks separated by hyphens, then a space, then a block). I recognise this as an ISBN line because I know that any book publication is likely to have one and, in this case, there are two lines that contain ISBN-13-style formatting (e.g. 978-1-107-09789-6) with a block before that looks like it might say "ISBN" (four character length) and a block after that might specify a publication type ("Hardback"/"Paperback" etc.). We can also infer some of the digits in this ISBN. For instance, it is highly probable that the first three digits are 978, since the vast majority of ISBN-13 identifiers start with this EAN-13 identifier, although some have now moved to the 979 prefix. The most likely remains 978, however. The next digit appears to be a single number, probably either a 1 or 0 (most likely a 1 given the spacing here), indicating that the book comes from an English-speaking area and validating my earlier assumption about the textual language/alphabet. The final checksum digit after the last hyphen appears to be a moderate width character, wider than a 1, so perhaps a 6 or an 8.
As the opponents of mass surveillance argue, then, and as the above trivial example shows, we can deduce a great deal about the actual content of a message from its metadata. In the instance I have just given, I took a set of information that was itself metadata (the frontispiece to a book is an item of metadata, describing the volume's contents, its cataloguing information, its legal status etc.) and treated this as a message in its own right. When I erased the bulk of the content here so that just the structure was visible it was still possible to recover many parts of the object, or at least to identify the constituent parts. It was possible to infer the form and some of the contents because of the social conventions of language, structure, and genre within which every instance of communication must operate. We are all used, as readers, to navigating these conventions and to making inferences based upon them; they form a crucial part of interpretation. Indeed, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith has put it, "no judgement is or could be objective in the classic sense of justified on totally context-transcendent and subject-independent grounds" (Herrnstein Smith 6). No piece of fiction, for example, that depicts a future world can be read independently of the generic field of comparator works that we call "science" or "speculative" fiction; there is a metadata element called "genre" that conditions reception. These conventions are anticipated by authors who wish to create specific literary effects. Indeed, even a synchronic understanding of a literary text is one in which external social conventions provide contexts for every passage, even while other portions of the same work likewise inflect the meanings of preceding and following passages. In some senses, due to the unending and metaphorical chain of signification implied in language, every sentence, every word, of a literary text is an item of metadata for another grapheme, structuring our understanding and provisionally conditioning reception.
Primarily, though, what I want to draw out here is that metadata, like a paratext and like other types of formal structuration (such as a codex's materiality, which itself can be encoded as a form of metadata), provide semantic contexts for reading works.[2] Some works of art also play with these forms (especially forms of "found poetry" but also those novels that deploy redaction), subverting their usual formal purpose. In the case of found/erasure poetry, it is clear that meaning comes from the obliteration of the original context, although the reader will usually want to reconstruct the primary work so that the poem can stand apart by its difference. For another example, in literary works where text has been redacted (seen frequently in the nineteenth-century novel with respect to place and person names, supposedly for reasons of libel/decorum) it is often possible for readers to nonetheless decode what lies beneath the redaction – and in its coyness the text proffers a challenge to undertake such sleuthing.
Interdata References and Involuntary Viral Semantics: the case of XUL
Metadata, though, even when not being used by political entities, are political and I want to unpack the ways in which metadata, even in their formal and non-literary variants, can be seen as semantic and intertextual (or interdata), in functional, cultural and political ways. The example that I will use in this article comes from the software-development world: Mozilla's XML User Interface Language (XUL). By way of background, "XUL (pronounced 'zool') is Mozilla's XML-based user interface language that lets [one] build feature rich cross-platform applications that can run connected to or disconnected from the Internet" (Mozilla, 'The Joy of XUL').
Among the core design principles of XUL, as with other forms of markup language is the desire to separate the process of creating a user interface from that of programming; the "ideology of strict division between content and presentation—the very religion, as it were, of text encoding and databases", as Alan Liu puts it (Liu 62). This form/content dichotomy is controversial in many ways for those who study aesthetics. For one, there has been much debate about whether, in works of art, this type of split is even valid. For another, it contributes, in part, to increasing specialisation and separation of labour, perhaps furthering Fordist principles of factory-line production in spaces that are otherwise creative.
XML documents, though, usually have unique namespaces that identify the type of content that falls under their jurisdiction (a namespace is, naturally, a kind of metadata attribute of an XML node). In the case of XUL the unique namespace URL can be found at: https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul. The most basic example of a XUL interface that implements a blank window would, therefore, look like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="chrome://global/skin/" type="text/css"?>
title="Find Files"
<!– Other elements go here –>
</window> (Mozilla, 'Creating a Window')
We can clearly see the XML namespace ("xmlns") attribute is here set to the XUL URL. This component of metadata tells both interpretative software and also me as a human reader that this is a XUL document and that, therefore, it is likely to describe a user interface.
However, canny readers and connoisseurs of 1980s pop-culture will have already spotted the joke/reference in the above. For, in the 1984 film, Ghostbusters, there are characters called "the keymaster" and "the gatekeeper". There is also a character called Dana and a paranormal villain called Zuul (pronounced "XUL") who possesses Dana. In the case of the XUL namespace, this pun is completed. In the film, following Dana's possession by the malevolent spirit, she speaks the line in a deep demonic voice: "there is no Dana. There is only Zuul". For the user interface description language called XUL, which aims to thoroughly decouple application logic (which is perhaps analogous to some limited extent to data/content) from the description of that interface (metadata): there is no data. There is only XUL (Mozilla, 'Mozilla XML Namespace').
Geek humour: XUL's developers have literalised the content/form separation with reference to the popular cult film Ghostbusters
[Image by Shannon Hayward under a CC BY-SA license]
This reading makes functional sense and it is a good example of geek humour. The joke works by literalising the description of XUL's content/form separation and then contextualising it within the framework of a cult film. The namespace URL provides a piece of actual information (that this is a XUL document) as well as additional semantic contexts: the developers are probably good natured people who enjoy the humour of Ghostbusters and are also working in a corporate environment that is flexible enough to allow them to release publicly facing documents that make such jokes.
There is, however, a potentially darker reading here. Ghostbusters was, indeed, recently ranked as number 10 in the National Review's list of the "Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years". As the National Review puts it:
you have to like a movie in which the bad guy (William Atherton at his loathsome best) is a regulation-happy buffoon from the EPA, and the solution to a public menace comes from the private sector. This last fact is the other reason to love Ghostbusters: When Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) gets kicked out of the university lab and ponders pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities, a nervous Dr. Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) replies: "I don't know about that. I've worked in the private sector. They expect results!" (Hayward, n. pag.).
Indeed, others have explicitly read Ghostbusters as a film that harbours a strong conservative narrative. John DeVore points out that "[a]cademia is an indisputable pillar of the liberal establishment, and they [Columbia University] fire our heroes [the Ghostbusters]. This proves that the Ghostbusters are not elites or swells. It also strengthens the conservative notion that academia is an intellectual racket that punishes free-thinkers and innovators" (DeVore, n. pag.). As Amanda Ann Klein puts it, Ghostbusters can be read as a "neoliberal AltAc [alternative academic career] fantasy" (Klein, n. pag.). Ghostbusters is, indeed, the tale of the university postgraduate dropouts who go on to make it through private enterprise, thwarting the meddling regulators of the Environmental Protection Agency in the process.
But this is now one of the contexts that surrounds the XUL framework and therefore applies to any work created with this framework. It is undoubtedly the case that this intertextual resonance and interpretation was not meant. Someone at Mozilla just liked Ghostbusters. However, as Roland Barthes noted, we cannot control how intertexts reflexively modify our own writings and computational cultures are not exempt from these contexts. Every intertextual and inter-data reference is a gamble on the future's verdict on the present's cultural norms.
Yet, by embedding cultural references, which must come with commensurate norms of interpretation, within a metadata format, the reach is much wider than elsewhere, since metadata enclose and describe other data. The reflexive modifications to meaning that we know to be a feature of intertextuality virally spread to other entities that interact with the metadata. Every interface created in XUL contains a hard-coded reference to Ghostbusters. This may sound far-fetched in terms of having any kind of inflection on real perceptions of such code but a reducto ad absurdum hypothetical historical analogy can bring this sobering truth to light. A librarian who might have decided, in 1915, to embed a reference to D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation in an emergent metadata standard, despite the controversy among right-thinking people over the film's racism at even that time, would by now have caused outrage among any users: xmlns="http://www.an-organisation.nodomain/defense.of.their.Aryan.birthright".
As metadata purport to sit above and beyond data, I argue that the contamination of inter-data references and contexts creates a kind of involuntary viral semantics for data and texts that sit under a metadata format's jurisdiction. As the standardisation of a metadata format becomes embedded, works cannot opt out from their affiliation. References in metadata, like those in XUL, to dynamically interpretable artefacts have knock-on effects upon the objects they describe. In other words, it is one thing to make a reference in one's work. It is quite another to place a reference within every work of a specific type. It is this contagion of metadata that gives them their power, it is their attachment and super-positioning that spreads their politics to the works over which they hold jurisdiction. To embed reference within metadata is to impose constraint and contexts on all works that such metadata might describe.
CITATION: Martin Paul Eve, "On the Political Aesthetics of Metadata", Alluvium, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2016): n. pag. Web. 30 March 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v5.1.04
[1] This entire game is something I owe to Geoffrey Bilder.
[2] For more on how diverse aspects such as metadata might be considered forms, see Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Works Cited:
John DeVore. 'Why The Ghostbusters Are Conservative Icons', Medium (2013) [accessed 12 December 2015]: <https://medium.com/@johndevore/why-the-ghostbusters-are-conservative-icons-9d6d8e159485#.2tyls579y>
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Hayward, Steven F. 'The Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years', National Review Online (2009) [accessed 12 December 2015]: <http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/177234/10-best-conservative-movies-last-25-years-steven-f-hayward>
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Klein, Amanda Ann. 'GHOSTBUSTERS as Neoliberal AltAc Fantasy', Judgmental Observer (2013) [accessed 12 December 2015]: <http://judgmentalobserver.com/2013/10/16/ghostbusters-as-neoliberal-altac-fantasy/>
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What does it mean to care about things? The Blindfold, Siri Hustvedt's first novel, dangles this question in a series of set-pieces, moments of glimpsing into the weirdness of the everyday, the objects that fill it and the ways in which these objects are, might, should or shouldn't be handled. The Blindfold's objects are animate or border on animation – a photograph breaks free of its owner and 'proliferates' throughout New York (66); a single grubby glove, lying in a box, makes a woman so anxious that she has to move it into another room before she can go to sleep (16). And the word "object" itself circulates, cryptically, in the novel; a couple at a dinner party, Jonathan and Rita, are a performance team and 'work with objects' (149); a woman, Iris, watches as her lover, Michael 'glance[s] at objects in my apartment in a way that made me think he was looking for something' (196). Objects seem to hold out a meaning in The Blindfold and yet they cruelly resist this meaning's extraction; the glove remains 'a stranded and empty, thing' and, later, a mirror is 'at the same time a full and empty thing, dense with images in one place, vacant in another' (33). What do these objects want? And what do we want from them?
According to Bill Brown, objects only become 'thingly' to us when they stop working.
[Image by Curtis Perry under a CC BY NC ND licence]
I want to think about things in this article: what they mean, what they don't, why we want them to mean, or not, what happens when we want them to mean and they resist us. The objects I want to think about assemble at the beginning of The Blindfold: a single glove, a used cotton ball, and a mirror. These are everyday objects, objects that, with the exception of the mirror, have either exhausted their function (the used cotton ball) or are failing to fulfil it (the single glove). And yet these are objects that demand our attention in the novel, placed, deliberately, for us to care about them – to touch them, turn them over, look at them from all angles, listen to them, sniff them. The Blindfold is a novel that, in the words of Sherry Turkle 'bend[s] to the inanimate with new solicitude' (xii). But it is also a novel about what happens when one bends too far towards the inanimate, when one gets lost in objects, consumed by them, swallowed up.
At the beginning of The Blindfold, a man, Mr Morning, requests a research assistant. Iris Vegan, a graduate student, sees the ad and applies. When she arrives at Mr Morning's house, he tells her that he needs an assistant: '"For a project about life's paraphernalia, its bits and pieces, treasures and refuse."' Mr Morning has '"found [himself] in possession of a number of […] things"' belonging to a girl who died three years ago. After initially having these objects, '"this and that"', around the apartment, he decided to box them (13). Now, because these objects are '"turning cold"', he wants Iris to take them home, in their boxes, one at a time, and record herself, describing the object:
"Do it at home alone. The object must be kept wrapped and in the box unless you are working. Study it. Describe it. Let it speak to you. […] Oh yes, and you should begin your description with the words, 'This belonged to the deceased'" (16).
Mr Morning needs "someone like Iris" to "respond freely to the objects in question" (12). He tells her: "I'm in the process of prying open the very essence of the inanimate world. You might say that it's an anthropology of the present" (13).
Mr Morning wants to map out an 'anthropology of the present'. And yet, the objects of study that he wants Iris to describe are objects from the past – objects belonging to a girl who died three years ago. These are souvenirs of a life that contain meaning, or at least the promise of meaning, congealed within them, long after the woman they belonged to has passed away. The souvenir, according to Susan Stewart:
Involves the displacement of attention into the past. The souvenir is not simply an object appearing out of context, an object from the past incongruously surviving in the present; rather its function is to envelop the present within the past (151).
There's some clue here as to why Mr Morning describes his as an 'anthropology of the present'. The objects he has collected exist, as souvenirs, to undo the distance between past and present. For Mr Morning, these objects' past-lives remains present– these things are '"lost, abandoned, speechless, but not dead"'. And yet, he tells Iris, his project is an urgent one: these objects are rapidly growing cold. Initially, the things '"seemed charged with a kind of power. At times I almost felt them move with it"'. But, after several weeks of having the dead girl's things around his apartment, '"I noticed that they seemed to lose that vivacity, seemed to retreat into their thingness. So I boxed them"' (13).
'The Blindfold' is a novel about getting lost in objects, consumed by them, swallowed up.
[Image by Holly Hayes under a CC BY NC licence]
Recent work in 'thing theory', following from Heidegger, has distinguished between "objects" and "things". Objects are things with meaning attached, things which signify: the chair, the apple, the hat. But, according to Bill Brown, objects only become 'thingly' to us when they stop working, when they lose their functionality for us, when they fail to signify in the way we would expect them to. Your tights develop a ladder, rendering them unwearable, the chair loses three of its legs, or, to use Brown's examples: 'when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy' (4). As a term, the word 'things' denotes items at the edge of meaning; 'at its most banal', Brown muses, the 'thing' 'index[es] a certain limit or liminality, to hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable' (5). There are obvious correlations here with Lacan's order of the Real – a place beyond the Symbolic, beyond signification and, thus, beyond meaning. Things, rather than objects, reside in this order. The question, with regards Mr Morning, is whether he really wants Iris to bring these things back into language, hence back into life or whether he wants her to somehow fully experience their thingness. Does Mr Morning want these things to become objects again? Or to stay as things but things animated by Iris' handling of them? And is that animation possible within language? What kind of care is this?
Certainly, Mr Morning wants to circumscribe and police the ways in which Iris describes these objects. She must whisper her descriptions of each object into the tape recorder. The whisper, he tells her,
is essential, because the full human voice is too idiosyncratic, too marked with its own history. I'm looking for anonymity so the purity of the object won't be blocked from coming through, from displaying itself in its nakedness. A whisper has no character. (15)
Mr Morning is a high modernist in the mode of Eliot, squeamish about the imprinting of the subjective onto the art object, valorising this object's "purity". But I'd also like to trace a perhaps unexpected move here from a modernist aesthetic of objectivity to a contemporary investment in sincerity. With this moment in The Blindfold and the way the novel cares towards objects more generally, we can feel the nascent stirrings of a turn towards sincerity, the new sincerity, as it has been termed, which is propelled by an urge and its frustration to grasp things 'as they are', to say what one means, avowedly and unadorned by any buffering, anaesthetising irony. Whilst the new sincerity has most frequently been summoned as a way to think about human relationships in contemporary American fiction, it is as apposite here. These are sincere objects for Mr Morning, objects that mean. However, this meaning is dependent for its "coming through" on human mediation – there needs to be a "living presence […] to prompt an awakening", he tells Iris (15).
In part, then, this transaction between Mr Morning and Iris is dependent on Iris' ability to describe these objects sincerely. Fantasising about the kinds of descriptions she is going to produce, when she receives the first object, the 'rather dirty white glove', Iris is caught up in a dream where things mean essentially and where this meaning can be signified. She imagines her descriptions 'as pithy, elegant compositions, small literary exercises based on a kind of belated nineteenth-century positivism. Just for the moment, I decided to pretend that the thing really can be captured by the word.' (16) The fantasy here is of a perfect match between signifier and object. And yet, Iris' fantasy of capturing the thing by the word is undone by the objects themselves which are resistant and mean beyond Iris' ability to signify them. The glove which had seemed so promising, withholds, retains its thingness the more that Iris describes it:
The more specific I was about the glove's characteristics, the more remote it became. Rather than fixing it in the light of scientific exactitude, the abundance of details made the glove disappear. In fact, my minute description of its discolorations, snags, and pills, its loosened threads and stretched palm seemed alien to the sad little thing before me (18).
Language becomes untethered from the glove – the glove, stretched as it is, shrinks from description. One is reminded here of another moment of frustrated sincerity – in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, where Lulu remarks to Alex: 'There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing' (321). Despite Mr Morning's modernist dream of the pure object, unmarked by subjective feeling or narration, it is feeling that is left as the object retreats. Trying to match words to object, turning over the phrase '"woman's hand"', Iris is left with nothing but a 'feeling akin to guilt' (18).
Caring about objects, one might find oneself sickened, shut out, undone, disintegrated.
[Image by Maureen Barlin under a CC BY NC ND licence]
Guilt, and its close bedfellow, shame, returns again and again as Iris handles the objects that Mr Morning presents her with, one by one: the glove, the used cotton ball and the mirror. Listening back to her first recording, Iris 'blush[es] with a shame' she still doesn't 'understand' (18). Apprehending the used cotton ball, she feels 'as if I had intruded on a shameful secret, that I had seen what I should not have seen' (25). And when trying to extract from Mr Morning why he cares about these objects and the woman they belonged to so much, Iris is embarrassed by the depth of Mr Morning's feeling, the fervency of his investment in his 'anthropology of the present' seems 'intimate, unseemly. I could feel the heat in my face' (28).
It is productive, here, to turn to Silvan Tomkin's theorisation of shame as the failure to totally inhibit one's interest. Shame, he says, 'is the incomplete reduction of interest and joy' when that interest and joy has not been reciprocated (134). These objects shame Iris precisely because she is so interested in them and they are not interested in her back. That is, her incursion on these objects, an incursion that is not rewarded with any revelation of meaning on the objects' part, reveals objects' profound exteriority, both to us, their presumed owners, and to meaning itself. These are objects that border on their 'thingliness'.
Throughout the novel, characters hurl themselves at objects and are undone by their interest in these objects whilst the objects remain beyond total signification, cryptic in their thingness. But there's also a sense in which the novel rewards and privileges this care towards objects – as with Mr Morning's anthropology of the present, there is an urgency about this care that reveals both a longing to put things and sensations into words and this project's ultimate impossibility. The novel bashes against its own desire to feel, to care – caring too much, as does Mr Morning, as does Iris, might lead to your own disintegration, whilst the objects of your affection remain intact and stubbornly out of reach. Caring about objects, one might find oneself sickened, shut out, undone, left feeling, like Iris: 'Why these things? […] I don't know what to do with them' (35).
CITATION: Ruth Charnock, "Caring about things in Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold," Alluvium, Vol. 4, No. 6 (2016): n. pag. Web. 5 January 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v4.6.02
Works Cited:
Brown, Bill. 'Thing Theory.' Critical Inquiry 28.1 (Autumn, 2001): pp. 1-22. Electronic.
Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. New York: Anchor Books, 2011. Print.
Hustvedt, Siri. The Blindfold. London: Sceptre, 1993 (1992). Print.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1993. Print.
Tomkins, Silvan. Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995. Print.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Print.
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'There is a bitter and dark struggle around time and the use of time'. Thus wrote Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier in an 1985 article later collected in Lefebvre's final set of essays, Rhythmanalysis, posthumously published in 1992 (Lefebvre 83). As if the day is not long enough for all our repetitive tasks, the couple noted with some weariness, 'social practice eats bit by bit into the night' (Lefebvre 83). Elsewhere in Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre outlined specific criticism of what he called the 'media day', which 'has neither beginning nor end' and which occupies our time 'Without respite!' (Lefebvre 55). In the context of today's 24-hour demands that we fill our time with activity, that we are always creating, consuming and critiquing media, what other ways of being are being neglected? What forms of attention and distraction now prevail? And how might certain spaces alter these conditions?
In 'Rhythmanalysis', Lefebvre criticises what he calls the 'media day', which has neither beginning nor end.
[Image by Darren Tunnicliff under a CC BY NC licence]
Such concerns can be sensed across a range of recent cultural texts. In particular, there has been a notable tendency for contemporary novelists to position film and moving image artworks as battlefields for the bitter and dark struggle around time. Don DeLillo's Point Omega (2010) begins with a character encountering Douglas Gordon's video installation 24 Hour Psycho (1993), in which the Hitchcock thriller is extended into a day-long sequence of images, while the title of Ben Lerner's novel 10:04 (2014) pays tribute to the key temporal junction of Back to the Future (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1985). Moreover, Lerner's narrator is especially taken with a much-celebrated artwork that seems to bridge the times and spaces of the cinema and gallery – Christian Marclay's 24-hour video The Clock (2010): 'Marclay had formed a supragenre that made visible our collective, unconscious sense of the rhythms of the day – when we expect to kill or fall in love or clean ourselves or eat or fuck or check our watch and yawn' (Lerner 53). The Clock also caught Zadie Smith's attention.
This article assesses The Clock alongside Steve McQueen's feature film Shame (2011), another recent work that raises important questions about our current daily rhythms and about what a logic of relentless 24-hour digital consumption might be doing to us. These two figures – Marclay and McQueen – not only demonstrate a complex engagement with the role of digital consumption in shaping contemporary notions of time; they also exemplify the on-going negotiation between the gallery space and the cinema over the location of moving images. This is a negotiation which provokes its own questions about modes of attention, distraction and participation.
Before looking at The Clock and Shame, however, we should turn to a provocative recent account of contemporary time. The title of this article – 'duration without breaks' – is a phrase taken from Jonathan Crary's 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013). Crary explores the effects of the non-stop processes of financial markets and contemporary neoliberal capitalism more broadly. He finds 'a generalized inscription of human life into duration without breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning' (Crary 8). If Lefebvre and Régulier warned that night-time was being eroded by the demands of the day, then Crary concludes that in the contemporary moment, 'there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life' (Crary 30).
Why does Crary call our '24/7' culture a 'non-time', creating a temporal companion to Marc Augé's notion of the contemporary 'non-place'? Because for Crary we now inhabit a time without shadows or otherness, without alternate temporalities or clear demarcations, without respite. We live in a time of permanent availability, but also a time of ceaseless non-fulfilment. Contemporary time is monotonous, producing 'a switched-on universe for which no off-switch exists' (Crary 30). Waiting – a time when boredom or dreaming might come about – is now intolerable. A logic of efficiency and speed means that anything resembling reverie has become impossible.
One of the many consequences that Crary identifies as a result of 24/7 culture is what he calls 'an immense incapacitation of visual experience' (Crary 33). He suggests that our vision has been disabled through processes of 'homogenization' and 'acceleration' (Crary 33). As a result, we are failing to see the world.
Crary's argument has distinct implications for the analysis of moving images. Film, of course, has historically involved the projection of 24 frames a second. Or, we might say, film involves the projection of 24 breaks a second, 24 moments of blackness, 24 chances for the eyes to rest momentarily. This is a form of recuperation that the digital abhors. In digital screenings, there is no reprieve, no pause between frames, epitomising a form of life which must be constantly flowing: 'duration without breaks'. While we often think of the digital in terms of speed and flow, it might also be thought of, as Crary thinks of it, in terms of fatigue, as a single relentless, sleep-deprived rhythm. Without these breaks – moments of boredom, intervals of rest, the chance for reverie – Crary argues that it becomes impossible for 'any kind of counter-projects or streams of thought' to be 'nurtured and sustained' (Crary 75). This is the politics of time that governs our present condition.
Lefebvre and Régulier warn that night-time is being eroded by the demands of the day.
[Image by rbreve under a CC BY licence]
In light of Crary's argument, how might we approach Marclay's The Clock? With its own 24-hour duration, does The Clock critique or merely affirm the kind of monstrous '24/7' culture that Crary outlines? Why might this work have become so popular at this moment in time?
It is important to establish exactly what The Clock is – a more complicated task than it initially appears. The Clock is a single-channel video projection, a 24-hour assemblage of film clips referencing time that is synchronised to its local setting. It brings together over 10,000 film clips, mostly taken from Hollywood and European cinema – a very narrow geography and history of cinema. These clips were assembled by Marclay's team of assistants, who were recruited after the artist placed an advert in a video store in east London called, appropriately enough, 'Today is Boring'.
Ultimately, though, The Clock is a digital file, programmed by Dr Mick Grierson at Goldsmiths, University of London. Once the digital file is booted, it locks into the local time and is programmed to loop continuously. While The Clock seems to be composed entirely of breaks – a constantly shifting collage – it also operates under a logic of continuous functioning, a relentless succession of clips, a permanently switched-on universe.
The space in which The Clock is experienced is also important to note. The Clock comes with a 24-page instruction manual regarding its screening conditions. After initially considering the idea that the work could be projected into public spaces, Marclay decided that it had to be experienced without distractions. He now insists that The Clock is shown in a dark space accessed via a dark corridor, in a room in which soft Ikea couches are set out in rows.
Many claims have been made by critics regarding the supposedly 'active' mode of spectatorship that is created by moving image installations, as opposed to an apparently 'passive' mode of traditional cinematic spectatorship. How interesting, then, that Marclay, in seeking concentrated attention for his work, seeks to replicate as much as possible the conditions of the cinema within the gallery. Yve-Alain Bois has asked, 'Can an artwork rebel against the fast flow of art tourism? Can an artwork force us to alter our viewing habits?' (Bois 146) Crary also argues that in a world of constant feedback and interruption, 'the idea of long blocks of time spent exclusively as a spectator is outmoded' (Crary 53).
By offering immersive, comfortable screening conditions, by turning back to the architecture of the cinema, it seems that Marclay wants to rebel against a certain speed and inattention that characterises the contemporary gallery experience. He wants us to slow down, to spend long blocks of time as a spectator and, via the relentless progression of clips he has assembled, he wants those long blocks of time to be spent thinking about the passage of time. Yet, as Amelia Groom has pointed out, The Clock prohibits escapism 'by endlessly pointing out how much of our own time we are spending in front of the screen' (Groom 20).
In one sense, then, the content as well as the screening conditions of The Clock might be seen as resisting the notion of '24/7' culture that Crary critiques. In marking the multiple ways in which humans have filled their time – making visible 'our collective, unconscious sense of the rhythms of the day', as Lerner's narrator observes – The Clock is full of alternate temporalities, different rhythms and modes of being. Its form stresses temporal demarcations and it maintains distinct changes in rhythm. As many critics have noted, the clips that appear just before the top of the hour are full of people rushing to appointments, excited about meeting someone or anxious about catching a train. The clips that appear just after the hour has struck are more melancholic and involve a certain slackening of time – moments of regret at missed opportunities or absent lovers. Night-time in The Clock is full of drinking and dreaming, while the rhythms of the workplace occupy the day. Other temporalities break the conventional structures of clock time: throughout the 24 hours, the same famous faces appear, disappear and reappear, sometimes emerging from the same film, sometimes from another decade of their career.
Contemporary time is monotonous, producing 'a switched-on universe for which no off-switch exists.'
[Image by erika dot net under a CC BY NC licence]
However, there are also more problematic ways in which The Clock affirms, rather uncritically, our contemporary '24/7' situation, and crucially this seems to have contributed to its status as a defining work of contemporary art. From early in its exhibition history, The Clock has been widely regarded as an essential spectacle, and as Richard Misek has recently argued, 'Like a timed rerelease of a Disney classic, each time The Clock comes round, it becomes a media event all over again' (Misek 145). Erika Balsom has also discussed the major marketing and publicity campaigns that have accompanied The Clock's exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other institutions – the urgent exhortations to see it, the constant updates on queue lengths, a dedicated Twitter account for the work run by the gallery, and an 'attendant aura of exclusivity' (Balsom 186). Ironically, seeing The Clock has often involved highly pressurised conceptions of time and leisure – a heightened sense of 'missing out' that has been explored by Adam Phillips, amongst other theorists. Similarly, while The Clock's duration might seem to challenge the conventional hours of a museum or gallery, it also makes possible the kind of event, involving extended opening times and an attendant media buzz, that is so beloved by marketers. As Marclay himself has observed, when exhibiting The Clock museums and galleries want 'a hit' above all else (Zalewski).
As Lefebvre and Régulier remind us, 'Every study of rhythms is necessarily comparative' (Lefebvre 97). In thinking about the critical tensions that the rhythms of The Clock provoke, we can compare it with another contemporary work that negotiates similar terrain – Shame, directed by another figure who straddles the gallery and the cinema: Steve McQueen. If, in one sense, The Clock seems to literalise 24-hour digital culture, Shame is a narrative drama about the consequences of living within this logic.
In both his video installations and his feature films, McQueen's work is characterised by its striking temporal rhythms and its particular attention to bodily rhythms. Each of his three feature films – Hunger (2008), Shame and 12 Years a Slave (2013) – feature a bitter and dark struggle around time, and especially the effects of time on the body. Bodily rhythms, of course, were where Lefebvre suggested that the work of rhythmanalysis should begin (Lefebvre 29).
Shame appears to exemplify Crary's concerns about the permanent availability and ceaseless non-fulfilment of our 24/7 digital world. The film begins with the sound of a buzzing alarm clock and the sight of a man already lying awake in his bed. Indeed, the intricate sound design – one of the film's most impressive features – incorporates ticking clocks throughout, contributing to a growing sense of desperation.
Shame's protagonist, Brandon (Michael Fassbinder), is a kind of corporate everyman – a man who even has 'brand' inscribed in his name. In a grey and alienating vision of New York, which becomes under McQueen's gaze a perfectly homogenous 'non-place', Brandon's 24-hour, continuously-functioning digital life involves conversations about YouTube and computer viruses at work, laptops for watching porn at home and a desktop for downloading porn at the office, an IPod for night-time jogs and an IPhone for calling prostitutes. This, it seems, is what it means for a life to be lived as duration without breaks. When does Brandon sleep?
'Shame' appears to exemplify Crary's concerns about the permanent availability and ceaseless non-fulfilment of our 24/7 digital world.
[Image by Mark © Blue Boy ® TBB under a CC BY licence]
It is in this context that we should analyse Shame's key scene – a section often derided in reviews of the film. It features Brandon's sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a young woman who in many ways disrupts Brandon's rhythms. (Sissy/sister/incest: little work is needed to see what her name might suggest, either.) In a Manhattan bar, Sissy sings a slowed version of 'New York, New York' – a song written by Fred Ebb and John Kander for Martin Scorsese's 1977 film of the same name and initially performed by Liza Minnelli. Why might Shame place such emphasis on such an obvious song? Why is it performed so slowly by Sissy, painfully so for Brandon, who cries in response? This sudden temporal shift in the film – a song slowed almost to a stop, a collection of lengthy pauses in the midst of a digital life accelerating to breaking point – provokes remarkable affect. It is almost the only moment of real connection in the film.
Why does Brandon cry? McQueen claims it is because, 'He's forced to sit down and listen' (James). And, without distractions or electronic companions, what does this spectator hear? The mournful performance of the lyrics, 'I want to wake up in a city that doesn't sleep'. This is no celebration of 24-hour urban life and the endless opportunities it affords. Sissy's performance feels like a sad condemnation of the relentless rhythms of her brother's life in New York – a life lived without respite, duration without breaks – as well, perhaps, as a plea for her, for Brandon and for all of us to 'make a brand new start of it'.
Rather, then, than simply positioning Shame, as many observers have done, as a film about contemporary sex addiction, we might be better served in considering what its temporal rhythms have to say about much broader notions of contemporary life. Start spreading the news, McQueen suggests: in the on-going struggles over 24-hour digital culture, being forced to sit and listen now holds new importance.
CITATION: Richard Martin, "Duration Without Breaks: Marclay and McQueen Against the Clock," Alluvium, Vol. 4, No. 6 (2016): n. pag. Web. 5 January 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v4.6.03
Works Cited:
Balsom, Erika. 'Around The Clock: Museum and Market', Framework, vol.54, no.2 (Fall 2013), pp.177–191.
Bois, Yve-Alain. 'Slow (Fast) Modern', in Time, ed. Amelia Groom (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2013), pp.145–149.
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).
Groom, Amelia. 'Introduction: We're Five Hundred Years Before the Man We Just Robbed Was Born', in Time, ed. Amelia Groom (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2013), pp.12–25.
James, Nick. 'Interview with Steve McQueen', Sight and Sound, vol.22, no.2 (February 2012), pp.33–38.
Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004).
Lerner, Ben. 10:04 (London: Granta, 2014).
Misek, Richard. 'Trespassing Hollywood: Property, Space, and the "Appropriation Film"', October, no.153, Summer 2015, pp.132–148.
Shame. Dir. Steve McQueen. 2011.
Smith, Zadie. 'Killing Orson Welles at Midnight', New York Review of Books, vol.58, no.7, 28 April 2011: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/28/killing-orson-welles-midnight/ [accessed 24 November 2015].
Zalewski, Daniel. 'The Hours: How Christian Marclay Created the Ultimate Digital Mosaic', The New Yorker, 12 March 2012: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/12/the-hours-daniel-zalewski [accessed 24 November 2015].
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