Passbook Mark Robert Brand University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
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University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations May 2017 Passbook Mark Robert Brand University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Brand, Mark Robert, "Passbook" (2017). Theses and Dissertations. 1448. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/1448 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PASSBOOK by Mark R. Brand A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee May 2017 ABSTRACT PASSBOOK by Mark R. Brand The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2017 Under the Supervision of Associate Professor Liam Callanan Passbook is a nostalgic novel that considers the meaning of love and family on the edge of a post-mortal near future. As the era of austerity enters its third decade, a social media platform—the eponymous Passbook—allows the living to interact with the dead, and changes the landscape of longevity forever. Wyatt Simmons, a young underemployed college graduate, finds himself locked out of the American Dream by suppressed wages, strangled career opportunities, and overwhelming debt. While coping with the un-deaths of his mother and sister, and estrangement from his financially-comfortable careerist father, Wyatt perseveres in a dissatisfying relationship of necessity with his long-time girlfriend Sara Grayson, and uses what little money he can scrounge to try and catapult himself into the spotlight of the Lego Corporation, his dream employer. At work, he meets Pepper Boswick, a wisecracking children’s clothing store salesperson by day and a legendary professional gamer by night, and the two of them hatch a plan to bust Wyatt, and his grand Lego project, out of Sara’s apartment. Meanwhile, a shadowy figure named Kilroy—half internet-age demagogue, half mad-genius—has his own plans for Wyatt’s generation and the gridlocked gerontocracy of Passbook. ii The novel operates in a tragic-comedic mode, with elements of both satirical- nostalgic humor and profound disillusionment. Rather than make the easy jab at generational conflict and us-vs.-them thinking, Passbook enmires Wyatt in a shifting tangle of duty to his family (many of whom are “Posterity” users of Passbook, meaning they are deceased and therefore functionally immortal), to his own generation (friends, coworkers, and girlfriends, who he most relates to) and to himself (in the form of a hopeless struggle to grow up in a world of work that seems not to need or want him). Wyatt’s relationship with his father takes center-stage in the novel’s second half, as his work- and love-lives collapse around him, and force him to confront his grievances, some real and some imagined, with the man, the family, and to an extent the larger era that raised him. iii © Copyright by Mark R. Brand, 2017 All Rights Reserved iv To Beth and John v TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii 1. Introduction 1 Tweets of the Living Dead: Christian Metz, Visual Metonymy, and Metonymic (Im)mortality 2. Bibliography 30 3. Passbook 33 4. Curriculum Vitae 254 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Photograph of Child 11 Figure 2. Weakly Substitutive Syntagm 13 Figure 3. Visual Metonymy 14 Figure 4. Generic Facebook Profile Format 20 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In completing this novel and the research surrounding it, I am very grateful to have had the guidance of three of the finest scholars I could hope to meet: my advisor and dissertation Chair, Liam Callanan; my supportive and encouraging guide to the world of utopian studies, Peter Sands; and my friend and mentor in both Frankfurt School theory and the academic life, Patrice Petro. They are joined in their generous support by Peter Paik and Maurico Kilwein Guevara, whose critical and creative approaches I deeply admire, and who I am grateful to have had the chance to know and work with. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Patrice Petro for her early guidance in the doctorate, for inviting me to work and teach with the terrific Academic Programs team at the Center for International Education, for hours of stories and thought-provoking conversation, and for taking a chance on a fiction writer who didn’t want to be boxed in by disciplinary boundaries. It’s been an absolute honor. I would also like to thank the following people who have influenced my writing, scholarship, and teaching, and who I am proud to call colleagues and friends: Dan Stolar, Rebecca Johns Trissler, Miles Harvey, Amina Gautier, and Hannah Pittard, for the very best of fiction workshops; Annie McLanahan, Ted Martin, and Jason Puskar for fantastic critical seminars; Darsie Bowden, Carolyn Goffman, Vincent Bruckert, Lauri Dietz, and Tim Doherty, for teaching me how to handle a classroom; Davis Schneiderman and Kathleen Rooney, for their welcome encouragement and help when I was first getting started with all of this; and Elizabeth Stuckey-French, for reading possibly the worst undergraduate novel attempt in history, and nevertheless responding with unforgettable kindness and encouragement. Most of the best things I can do I’ve stolen from all of you, and I hope I’ve done you all proud. viii Finally, I want to express my endless gratitude to my wife Beth and my son John, to whom this is dedicated, and our families: My father and mother, Mark and Robin Brand, my sister Brooke Brand, my mother and father-in-law Mary Lu and Dennis O’Malley, and my brothers- and sisters-in-law, Max, Bonnie, Kevin, Jen, Dennis, and Sue. They, and my lifelong scholar-friends Jeramy Gee, Sara LePine, and Paul Hughes, have provided tireless support and confidence in me for the past six years. ix INTRODUCTION Tweets of the Living Dead: Christian Metz, Visual Metonymy, and Metonymic (Im)mortality 1. In February of 2012, I wrote a 7-page treatment of the story that would eventually become this novel. I’d just finished reading Katsuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and was struck by the way the narrator spoke toward the end about her friends as though they might care, long after their deaths, what she thought of them. Ruth and Tommy, you will recall, are born, raised, and destined to be harvested for their organs, which then blurs the line between life and death for the narrator, whose friends merit a kind of deferred grief discrete from the death of their bodies: death as distended, fractured, incomplete, and interminable. The conceit of Passbook emerged from a particularly vulnerable moment in my life. Three years earlier, in 2009, I was laid off from a well-paying job in the medical field and was unemployed for nearly six months during the worst phase of the joblessness of the Great Recession. I found work eventually, but only hourly and contract work at about half of my former income. I had a two-year-old child in expensive daycare at the time and my overpriced condo, like every other overpriced condo in the Chicago suburbs, was suddenly worth far less than my wife and I owed for it. By November 2011, the fight we staged to keep our home was hopeless; with our last $1000 we hired a lawyer to file bankruptcy. Passbook was born four months later in the weird post-bankruptcy-filing limbo, while a series of court documents slowly described the process to us of our home being foreclosed 1 on. Until the day we filed, neither my wife nor I had ever missed a payment on a loan, credit card, car note, or our mortgage. Now we looked frantically for an apartment that would rent to a family in bankruptcy, and contended with especially-humbling new sanctions like finding a bank that would deign to let us have checking accounts and cataloging our furniture and wedding bands in a list of things a court-appointed agent might try to repossess from us. During all of this, social media was becoming a prominent feature in our lives. My extended family and friends were more available than ever on the internet, but further away physically and emotionally. Text messages, tweets, and Facebook updates were inadequate replacements for the presence of actual family and friends during these hard months and years. My friends were spread around the country fighting their own battles; my family in New York where I grew up might as well have been on the moon. My parents were nearing 60, working in Recession-proof jobs protected by seniority and largely oblivious to the challenges my generation endured. They and others in their age cohort used Facebook to proudly share their home improvements, vacations, cresting career achievements, and strategies for rich retirement payouts anticipated when they finally decided to stop working. Meanwhile my generation—friends and family my age, writer colleagues, and even co- workers in the supposedly stable medical field—lived in an alternate universe of precarity, suffering layoffs, foreclosures, bankruptcies, divorces, broken families, and in the worst cases, depression, addiction, and suicide. It was in the middle of all of this that the interminable loss I sensed in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and the backdrop of this age-keyed class-war broadcast on Facebook sparked the idea of Passbook. What if, I considered, horrified, the groups who escaped all of this by virtue of being older and more financially secure, or otherwise just being in the right place at the right 2 time, then somehow figured out how to make this last for decades? By 2009, we were already hearing about how the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 would have long-term and potentially permanent consequences for people my age, and demographic think-pieces and op-eds about “aging Baby Boomers” and “screwed Millennials” had begun to proliferate around that time.