BROKEN NOVELS: REFLEXIVITY, AUTHORSHIP, AND NEW ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAS
As A thesis submitted to the faculty of 3G San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of -2oR- The Requirements for The Degree HUMM •AU Master of Arts in Humanities
by
Spencer Gregory Armada
San Francisco, California
May 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read Broken Novels: Reflexivity, Authorship, and New Ethics in Contemporary Literature o f the Americas by Spencer Gregory Armada, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Arts in Humanities.
Professor and Chair, School of Humanities and Liberal Studies
Laura Garcia Moreno Assistant Professor, Humanities
Christopher Weinberger Assistant Professor, Comparative and World Literatures BROKEN NOVELS: REFLEXIVITY, AUTHORSHIP, AND NEW ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAS
Spencer Gregory Armada San Francisco 2017
This thesis examines the narrative techniques and representational strategies of four “experimental” novels published in the last decade by Ben Lemer, Valeria Luiselli, and Alejandro Zambra. I argue that these texts, which self-consciously raise concerns of their own efficacy in contemporary media landscapes, negotiate various formal authorities in order to elucidate spaces for ethical attentions within the cracks of dominant discursive modes. I take up Pieter Vermeulen’s notion of the “end of the novel” and Shameem Black’s notion of “border-crossing” fiction to push beyond the insights of “the ethical turn” in literary studies, which tend to suggest that the ethical value of literary adhere either to the demands liberal pluralism or the recognition of an unknowable alterity. “Broken authenticity” refers to a narrative possibility in which alterity remains an organizing principle in new forms of potential, collective or otherwise, relationships. I propose that these novels theorize the role of the author as one that initiates and mediates this oscillatory relationship between optimistic participation and detachment. Furthermore, I suggest that this relationship may constitute a way of bearing oneself in the world sincerely without becoming subsumed by totalizing discourses of moral or political responsibility.
I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis
Chair, Thesis Committee Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to begin by thanking two lecturers in the Humanities department who have, without any professional obligation to do so, took it upon themselves to nurture my curiosity in world literature and critical theory beyond the scope of their undergraduate courses: Dr. Rob Thomas and Dr. Sean Connelly, thank you for going out of your way to help me experience firsthand certain aspects of academia one does not see in the classroom. I would also like to thank the faculty, emeritus faculty, and staff of the College of Humanities and Liberal Studies for their tireless support, with special thanks to Professor Mary Scott for agreeing to read my lackluster first attempts at cover letters, statements of purpose, and so on. The department of Comparative and World Literatures was a home away from home, so to speak, and I will be forever grateful for the many hours, unyielding patience, and scintillating passion of Professor Dane Johnson. I’d also like to thank Professor Ellen Peel for giving me the grammar lessons I somehow missed in secondary school and for pointing me in the direction of current discussions in narrative theory that pertained to my interests. I owe a special gratitude to the Kauffman and Magalios Foundation scholarships for giving me the time and space to amplify my scholarly pursuits in the last year and a half. I would like to thank all of the musicians I have had to opportunity to play with over the years, as well as the booksellers, writers, and very patient coffee-shop patrons for giving me a chance to construct a world-view that relates to, but is not bound to, the lessons learned in books. There will always be a special place in my heart and in my thinking for Professors Laura Garcia Moreno, Cristina Ruotolo, and Christopher Weinberger. I have not the space to detail the many contributions you have each made to who I am today, but I will say here that the thesis writing process was edifying and enjoyable, and I believe that to be in no small part a result of your being my committee. Finally, I’d like to thank my parents, who somehow predicated—many years ago— that this is where I would want to be and have stopped at nothing to help me find my way here. My brother also deserves recognition here, for he was the first to demand that my arguments, both about literature and otherwise, be grounded in facts. Last, but by no means least, I owe a great deal of gratitude to Miranda Saenz and our little pup who, among other things, have had to suffer my constant quotation from the texts of Ben Lemer more than anyone should ever have to.
IV TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part One:...... 1
Part Two...... 41
Conclusion...... 79
Works Cited...... 81
v 1 Part I: Contemporary Literature and “New Ethics”
“It’s the motion that stays with you, not a stable set of meanings.” -Ben Lemer, “Robert Walser’s Disappearing Acts”, 2013
I. Productive Anxieties in Contemporary Writing
Shameem Black opens her first monograph, published in 2010 and entitled Fiction
Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels, by asking: “at the turn of the millennium, might it be possible to imagine an other without doing violence to one’s object of description?” (Black 1). This question is, in my view, paradigmatic of urgent concerns for both contemporary novelistic practice and theory, if not the humanist enterprise writ large. It is an understatement to describe the condition of literary and theoretical engagement in the historical present as anxiomatic, Lauren Berlant writes about how this anxiety compels her to be dissatisfied with current modes of writing as follows:
The problem of detaching from the normal applies to writing criticism as much
as it does to any object that coordinates intensities of projection into the
historical present... in relating animating events to analytic generalization, I
become progressively less clear about how best rhetorically to manage the
problems as they crystallize, and more certain o f the need to invent new genres
for the kinds of speculative work we call “theory” (Berlant 21, emphasis
mine).
At this moment literary and theoretical discourses are reflexively re-defining their legitimacy within a fractured social and political world by self-consciously exploring 2 new formal horizons they might take up. A brief gloss of recent titles in literary criticism— Wolfgang Iser’s “Why Literature Matters (1999), Deleuze’s Literature and Life (1997), Rita Felski’s Uses o f Literature (2008)— reveal this anxiety as being not only a condition of study, but an object of study as well. Two recently published monographs polemicize this anxiety paradigmatic of contemporary writing about the arts with their explicitly denunciatory titles: Ben Lemer’s The Hatred of Poetry (2016) and Pascal Quignard’s The Hatred of Music (1996/2016). Both texts meditate on the state of their respective crafts at or just beyond the turn of the new century to suggest radical practices of reception to rethink the efficacy of each form in light of their near total appropriation into the capitalist market. It isn’t that poetry or music have failed to open spaces for new types of living historically or in the present, but that a poem or a composition will never constitute “Poetry” or “Music”. In the gaps between artistic impulses and their articulation exist potentials that may, if attended to, open or gesture toward new orientations in our moment.
At the vanguard of contemporary modes of address, writers and theorists are experimenting with new forms of writing—often across generic borders—to respond to and participate in the present by self-consciously occupying those gaps between discursive gaps. Maggie Nelson’s groundbreaking work, often described as
“autotheory”—a term borrowed from Beatriz Preciado—typifies this longing for new forms, as it blends elements of queer memoir, critical theory, and poetry to situate contemporary creative writing between “free expression” and theoretical “negotiation” 3 to balance both the creative impulse and the very real but often imprecisely articulated demands of the present. (Nelson qtd in McCrary 2015). As this thesis goes on to address questions I feel are important when considering “contemporary” literature it is this anxious preoccupation with formal legitimacy that serves as my metric for contemporaneity. Though each of the novels studied here are published no more than one decade ago, contemporary also signifies herein a formal and thematic concern with how literature corresponds with, or perhaps responds to, the demands of its present. My primary end is to work through how each work studied manipulates or transcends novel form to create reading experiences of ethical import that go beyond the insights of the “ethical turn in literary studies”.
The critical reception of the literary works of Ben Lemer, Alejandro Zambra, and
Valeria Luiselli have largely focused on their innovative forms and perceived self absorption. Though I will return to those specific elements of the critical response to these author’s works in my conclusion, my argument throughout this thesis is that the inward turn both registers a formal anxiety, as described above, and enables a self- consciousness that opens a space for re-thinking how literature mediates conceptions of self and other and might thus re-distribute ethical energies in the present. I am interested in how current trends in the reading and writing of literature feel and reply to the demands of a moment “in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen-yet” with challenges to novel form without necessarily abandoning literature, or the novel, outright (Haraway 55). 4 We can get a sense of this tension, which we might productively organize as a concomitant avowal and disavowal of literature’s efficacy in one of the final scenes of
Ben Lemer’s 2011 novel Leaving the Atocha Station. The novel, to which a majority of this thesis is dedicated to studying, consists of the highly-reflexive homodiagetic narration of Adam Gordon, an American poet and academic on a fellowship in Madrid that closely resembles the author’s own Fulbright to Spain a few years before. Adam’s investment in the literary is complicated by his own skepticism of its efficacy in a moment characterized by the twenty-first century’s wars on terror and the novel’s thematized uneasiness with border-crossings. Leaving the Atocha Station ends with
Adam attending, in a terror-stricken state that he attempts to pass off as critical diffidence, a panel discussion of “literature now”. His first contribution to the discussion channels the modernist poet Ortega y Gasset before re-directing his response toward recuperating the positive potential of a contemporary literature:
Ortega y Gasset wrote ‘By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify
things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them.
Every concept is in itself an exaggeration’. I paused, and could feel the silence
tighten, as the audience attempted to take the quotation in. I was encouraged
enough by my own prefabricated fluency and by the fact that I did not sound
nervous or crazy, to add: ‘My fear about this panel is that we are in a hurry to
define a period, to speak of literature now, every period, like every concept, is
itself an exaggeration. I hope to hear from others what changed on March 11 5 that permits we to speak’, my grammar faltered, but I could see the sentence’s
end, ‘of a new now, of a new period, without dislocation’ (Lemer 2011, 174;
emphasis in original).
This passage allows us to tease out the troubled embrace of the literary that in part
organize the contemporary texts I will study. One central thematic found in each of
these texts is the tension between the limits of the critical metanarratives that these
contemporary authors were trained with and their desire for literature to serve a
positive political project. In addition to the urgency of the crises glossed above, these
writers are caught between the modernist ambition of literature’s capacity to demystify
and reorient relationships to the structures of the present and the post-modernist
skepticism of an “outside” of these metanarratives. Timotheus Vermuelan and Robin van den Akker, authors of “Notes on Metamodemism” describe this tension as a
“double-bind”: this double-bind ironically vitiates literature’s ability to speak from and to the present while demanding the types of imaginative alternatives literature can
provide (Vermuelan and Van den Akker).
The texts that I study herein exemplify this concern with the contemporary in
literature precisely because they are invested in exploring the capacity of literature,
especially of novel form, to rework relationships between the self, other, and
contemporary literary production. I allude to these texts in this project’s title as
“broken novels” because of the complicated relationship they forge with the tradition of the novel as it is articulated by Anglo-American writers and critics over the course 6 of the genre’s development. In 1884, to cite one example, Henry James wrote that “the only reason for the existence of a novel is that is does attempt to represent life... as the picture is reality, so the novel is history” (James 25).
Major contributions to novel theory posit a value for novels precisely because they produce a sort of portable alternative consciousness beyond the prejudices and experiences of one’s own life, or what Daniel R. Schwarz refers to as “surrogate experiences” (Schwarz 4). Novels and prose fictions are valued by ethical theorists of the novel for their constitutive intersubjectivity; Christopher Weinberger argues that theorists of the novel “since the twenty-first century... rehearse, knowingly or otherwise, arguments made for the genre at the time of its first blossoming... that the novel has a unique capacity for situating readers in cultural, social, and linguistic contexts that require acknowledging or adopting different values and perspectives” (Weinberger 2015,259).
These “broken novels” acknowledge the role novels play in forming a sense of being in the world that is also occupied by others. But this acknowledgement is ambivalent rather than optimistic; these texts seem uncomfortable with what Nancy
Armstrong, Frederic Jameson, and other theorists of the novel in the last three decades have stressed: that the formation of the novel and that of the modem subject are “one and the same” (Armstrong 3). In his recent monograph, Contemporary Literature and the End o f the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form, Pieter Vermeulen brings these critical and aesthetic anxieties regarding the politics of novel form together under the rubric of 7 the “end of the novel”, which I will return to momentarily. He begins by summarizing certain critical trends in recent novel theory by drawing on Mario Ortiz-Robles economical contention that “we now quite commonly hold that the novel participates in all sorts of social processes, helping to found the modem nation, to consolidate overseas empires, to advance industrial capitalism, to enforce sexual difference, and, more generally, to produce and police the subject” (Ortiz-Robles qtd in Vermeulen 2).
Although the concept does not originate with myself, either of the authors above, or the authors I cite and study below, the critical impetus of this study is that novel form is in some way predisposed to those regimes of power that regulate instantiated forms of social order. My particular focus here will be to examine how new approaches to novel and prose fiction writing —that nevertheless retain various degrees of investment in the novel form as such—“activate generic expectations only to frustrate them”, becoming spaces for the emergence of “unexpected feelings” and ethical sensibilities (Vermeulen 7).
A few months after the publication of Leaving the Atocha Station Lemer accounts for his shift in medium (from poetry and academic essay to the novel), in a way that suggests a shared concern with Vermeulen by suggesting that:
“what a critical essay can't really do is dramatize how these ideas infect or
animate other areas of experience. The novel can build a character and a world
in which a concept ramifies into a life, into the social... Maybe writing a novel
about art is a way to have it both ways: to make the reader forget the materiality o f language as it dissolves into narrative but then to make them
remember that they're forgetting via artifice as theme (Lemer qtd in Pancrazi;
emphasis mine).
Lemer, not unlike the Nelson quotation discussed earlier, sees in manipulations of novel forman opportunity to produce and then work within the intrinsic tensions of a given form. As Russian theorist Mikahil Bahktin emphasized, the novel distinguishes itself from other forms of (literary) writing by its fundamentally heteroglossic nature, or its ability to organize a plurality of languages into a single representational frame.
Lerner stresses, in multiple interviews online and in print, his interest in putting pressure on this capacity of the novel by not only representing voices other than those of his self-conscious American narrators, but to pressurize other generic forms by incorporating them into his novels. His novels are “broken” insofar as they utilize its capacity to organize affects in and represent concrete social situations while drawing attention to how the language of literary fiction itself is insufficient. The novel here simultaneously creates an alternative world while undoing itself at the next turn, leaving readers someplace between the fiction and the concrete social world they themselves live and read books in, as well between the various socialities and claims to truth across the range of embedded generic discourses.
This space, created by the foregrounded failure of novelistic aesthetic dramatized and illuminated formally by contemporary novels is where Pieter Vermeulen sees an opportunity for new purchases on both affect and ethics. He points out that the novel 9 has always been uneasy about both its origins and its future, often trying to push itself off of its low-culture beginnings and problematizing the effects it may have on readers in the future. It is paradoxically the moments that witness the reemergence of a concern about the novel’s end—he draws a line from Cerventes to Sterne to Lawrence to Barth and onward— that Vermeulen argues are the most productive for the novelists working within them. Drawing on Sianne Ngai, who argues that “bourgeois art’s reflexive preoccupation with its own powerlessness and superfluity in the empirical world is precisely what makes it capable of theorizing social powerlessness in a manner unrivaled by other forms of cultural praxis”, Vermeulen contends that novels which negotiate their own end or irrelevancy can: [Dismantle the “’strong’ affective scenarios that have allowed the novel to exercise its cultural power” , elaborate “less robust assemblages of life, affect, and form in their wake”, and “explore the notorious elasticity of the novel form in order to move beyond a particular hegemonic instantiation of that form” (3). The “perceived impotence of the novel” becomes a
“resource for figuring forms of life that cut across the distinctions between individuals and communities, between the self and the social” (2-3).
By dramatizing their reflexive anxiety about the novel itself, the contemporary novels discussed in this study develop and then depart from a “particular, and partly fictional, conception of the novel as a homogeneous, clearly codified genre in order to explore what... “new—and less epistemically robust—ethical and political possibilities... emerge after the dissolution of that genre (4-5). If we agree with Lauren 10 Berlant that traditional novels serve as “an aesthetic structure of affective expectation” then broken novels permit a freer flow of affective and ethical investments (Berlant qtd in Vermeulen 7). Noting how affect theorists characterize affect as what is not captured by language and subjectivity, the unruly affects he describes as being possible in this failed generic space are placeholders for “unreadability” (9). This unreadability is what underwrites, for Vermeulen and myself, Peter BoxalPs claim that
“contemporary writing prepares the narrative condition in which the new, the future, might come to expression” (13).
Whereas Vermeulen argues that by refusing psychological depth and codified emotional responses—in part an effect of the various forms of flat or inaccessible interiority of a novel’s characters and in part an effect of denying linguistic and plot norms to which the reader might identify or identify with and thus respond to accordingly—the novel ceases to be a “uniquely authoritative genre” and instead opens a space for new forms of affect to emerge (5). However, my interest in the texts
I study, which also participate in the aesthetic strategies just named, is in the uniquely ethical space opened by these practices in self-consciously “border-crossing” situations. By reflexively challenging the authoritative disposition of the novel, self authoring and representations of alterity become spaces where the codified hegemonic practices of authentic identification and novel apprehension are de-formed to make ways for new modes of writing and relating about the self and others. 11 Black argues in Fiction Across Border that there are roughly two oppositional
responses to the problem of representations of alterity in contemporary fiction writing: to “write what you know” and thus resist reproducing structures of hegemonic violence—“invasive imagination” and “cultural appropriation” that have underwritten
Western-colonialist attitudes, or to assert “unlimited authorial-right” and insist that the
imaginative labor performed in writing imaginative fiction is itself of ethical or political efficacy as it has the potential to push beyond normative identities. As she mentions only briefly, there is a post-structuralist response that would maintain that every verbal enunciation always already subverts its intended meaning, thus obviating the binary categories of this debate altogether in order to attend to how the text signifies as a system. This last position distances itself from the possibility of the novel making any claim to truth or insight into concrete social realities, even if those claims break or reconceive of what statements that gesture toward social truth might look like. Broken novels, however, think about how reflexive narrative structures might call attention to how narrative organizes notions of self and other, and also disorganize them in meaningful ways, or ways that ramify into social life before undoing themselves as facets of textuality. In the two passages that follow both Lemer and Luiselli position a self-writing homodiagetic narrator trying to account for themselves within larger social realities.
I don’t think there were any fuses in that apartment, in that other city. I
never saw a meter, the electricity never cut out, I never changed a lightbulb. 12 They were all fluorescent: they lasted forever. A Chinese student lived out his happy life on the opposite window. He used to study until very late at night under his dim light; I also used to stay up reading. At three in the morning, with oriental precision, he turned out the light in his room. He would switch on the bathroom light and, four minutes later, turn it off again. He never switched on the one in the bedroom. He performed his private rituals in the dark. I liked to wonder about him: did he get completely undressed before getting into bed; did he play with himself; did he do it under the covers or standing by the bed; what was the eye of his cock like; was he thinking about something or watching me, wondering about him, through my kitchen window? (Luiselli
2014, 5).
As night fell La Plaza Santa Ana began to fill with tourists, and one could also seem some Madrilenos meeting up, kisses on both cheeks, although the locals weren’t out in force until much later. You could hear several languages,
American or Australian English to me the most grating, chairs scraping the pavement and cutlery scraping, glasses being collected from the metal tables or places there, and usually a violinist, inoffensively unskilled. In the distance airlines made their way to Barajas, lights flashing slowly on the wing, the contrails vaguely pink until it was completely dark. I imagined I could see me, imagined I was a passenger that could see me looking up at myself looking down (Lemer 2011,21) 13 The most overt motif these passages share is the dissolution of the narrating voices into multiple subject positions—in the case of the second passage, even the term
“subject position” is overdetermined: the narrative perspective gestures toward the dissolution of the one perspective into many perspectives, each rooted in its place but not trapped in it, as it includes the possibility of other perspectives in its very formation. By this I mean to suggest that these novels can create contingent, fragile selves which initially make readerly identification possible (a narrator accounting for their position in complicated social worlds) only to undo the verifiability of that self which underwrites the identification. The effect of this oscillation between a self authorized “I” located precisely in a social context and the loss of that “I” back into that social context stresses the potential value of readerly identification and a socially conscious ethics while undermining the basis of either process.
Faces in the Crowd is, as Hector Tobar formulates, a “time-bending menage-a- multitudes involving Owen, Garcia Lorca, several other poets and artists, real and imagined, from the past and present” (Tobar 2014). It is the story of a writer, told through the interwoven accounts of her younger self, which reads as a bohemian coming-of-age wherein a young translator yearns for the real as it might manifest in an encounter with the long since passed Gilberto Owen, and her present, which consists of her feeling the weight of a world laden with the ghosts of past and present possibilities. The present alone seems to speak to her only in muted tones, and her written relationship with the past activates some of what the present seems to silence. 14 Taken from this novella, the first passage above iterates an understanding of the self as being rooted in narrative, to include how both the narrator and the “Chinese student” are situated in—or only possible because of their place in— a number of stories: their quotidian habits and patters, the mythology of New York city, their maleness, their womanhood. The repeated patterns of their lives takes place within the magic of the city: New York is a fantastical place where lights stay on forever and the infrastructural organization permits or invites both the unfolding of these micro narratives of the quotidian and their observation by others. Laden with history, the city and acts of writing within it allow the narrator to write herself partially out of her present to open spaces for other voices and temporalities to become themselves present simultaneous with hers.
That this opening occurs, in each text studied, within the city—Harlem and Madrid
— is central to the politics of my claim. Given the close relationship between the social and technological revolutions that led both to the ascendance of the modem bourgeoisie and the rise of the novel, the concentration of civic life in and novel representations of the city as the “principle theatre of bourgeois life” allow readers to see, as does Robert Alter, the “experiential realism of the novel as a searching response to the new felt reality” of the present at the epicenter of political and economic developments (Alter 2005, xi). These urban novels register the turbulence of contemporary life as it challenges conceptions of self, other, and literary writing by reimagining city life and reimagining the form of the novel positions the interface 15 between characters in the texts, as well as between writer and reader as both highly mediated and still laden with ethical responsibility.
The relationship between the city and the novel suggests that a significant element of the contemporary is accessible only multiple levels of mediation. The violence or invasiveness of imagining others is simultaneous to the vulnerability of being imagined, a point that ethical critics of the novel have long referred to as thickness of moral decision making and ethical judgement. The city accomplishes in each discrete diegetic level what the novel’s structure does for interaction of the various strands of narration in presents: limits their interaction to brief, highly mediated encounters that require “readers” to manage their limited access to others in a way that takes their lives seriously without treating them as fabricated, imagined characters. The narrator can hardly observe, and thus has little knowledge of, the content of the student’s routine or his “identity”. The Chinese student is only legible to the narrator through the interaction with the formal structures through which he comes into being for her: which lights he turns on and off and when, how he moves around his room across from hers. This confounds such considerations of the novel’s value, often founded on what we would describe now as the ethical value of novel reading and writing, as articulated by George Eliot in the middle of the nineteenth century, where she argues that novels allow readers to “imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves” (Eliot qtd in Weiberger 2015,260). The nascent erotic fantasy of the narrator is crucial, as its unfolding—or more precisely that it doesn’t unfold— is 16 central to my claim that the passage has different effects than those that might arise from more verisimilar novel representation, as described by Eliot above. There is nothing about feeling, neither pain nor joy, that the narrator is concerned with, nor is there any recognition that they indulge themselves, or allows readers to vicariously indulge in. Instead, the intimacy of his “private acts” can only be imagined from a distant remove, bringing the imagined other into the initial stages of a sexual fantasy without allowing that fantasy to develop, which would require the narrator to fill in those aspects of his character that she doesn’t have access to. As Other, he is not treated as totally inaccessible, absolutely other, nor is he appropriated into a fantasy in which he is complete only insofar as he is part of the narrator’s imaginary (despite the problematic reference to his “oriental” precision).
The attempt to generate proximity, in which the self is necessarily related to the other, is seen clearly later in the novella, where its central image of “parallel tracks” emerges. The narrative structure of the novella, consisting of four narrators from distinct temporalities, alternates between each of the four narratives in dizzyingly unpredictable ways, often picking-up or foreshadowing syntactic or thematic traces from the other diegetic spheres. There is an irresolvable tension between the slippage between diegetic spheres and the incommensurability of each whenever their separate trajectories come close:
The doors of the train in which I was traveling had got stuck and we’d been
stranded in the station for more than ten minutes. Then another train 17 approached from behind on the adjoining track and stopped next to ours. In the
opposite carriage, her head resting against the window, was the woman,
wearing an olive-green cloth hat and a red coat, buttoned up to the neck. She
was reading a hardcover book. By leaning forward a little, I managed to see the
title, which, to my surprise, was a Spanish word: Obras. The woman felt
herself being watched and raised her head—the enormous shadows under her
eyes, her enormous eyes. We stared at each other like two animals dazzled by a
strong beam of artificial light until her train pulled out (Luiselli 2014,108).
Leaving the Atocha Station thematizes the possibility of sincere connections with others, or what I described above as a proximity while preserving the distance between
self and other by foregrounding the mediated nature of social and literary encounters with others. Though I explore the novelistic techniques Lemer uses in greater depth in the second part of this thesis, it is important to note how, like in Faces in the Crowd, the moments of greatest intimacy in the novel—those encounters given the highest value—are thoroughly mediated and replete with references to the types of technology which organize them.
In the closing scene of the novel’s first part Teresa, a poet, translator, and art curator who hosts Adam, describes how she come to finally discuss and begin to cope with the death of her father.
In Fluent English she described how one night she went alone to a movie
somewhere in the Village, a boring movie, she couldn’t even remember which, 18 but when she left the movie and was debating whether to take a train or a cab
back uptown the full reality of her father’s death, it had been around a year,
was suddenly and for the first time upon her, and she began to cry and found a
payphone and called her mother and cried and cried and eventually her calling
card ran out and she went and bought another from a kiosk and returned to the
phone and called her mother and cried into the phone until the second calling
card ran out. She said she often wondered if that pay phone was still there, now
that everyone uses cell phones, and then faced me smiling and said that when I
was back home in New York I could look for it and if it was still there I could
buy a calling card and call her and we could cry... (30).
The technological organization of modernity and the modem city, as they do in Faces in the Crowd, distribute the types of access to others and intimacy that, as in this case, significantly anchor one’s sense of themselves and one’s relationship with others
(Teresa’s sense of her own “history”, her shared history with her mother, and now her shared history with Adam across natural and national borders). In one of the few times
Adam, and therefore readers, are able to glimpse into the past of the novel’s characters that view is obfuscated by a narrativity which accounts for the banalities of interactions with technology and city infrastructure; most of narrated action of the haunting moment in Teresa’s life and an intimate one in her relationship with Adam consists of her working a pay phone, finding a kiosk to purchase more time with the pay phone, returning to the pay phone, and so on. Our access to her interior experience 19 of her grief is strikingly limited: she and her mother cry. That this scene not only depicts, as “well” as this novel can, one of the major character’s emotional life and a turning point in Adam’s journey, but also serves as the climax to the novels first part, readers might expect that these final sentences would provide some sense of emotional excitement and subsequent closure, or within them an orientation to the new world before them. In a way they do provide those things; we do know more about Teresa,
Adam, and their relationship and would be rewarded later if we decided to remain attentive to future developments in the novel’s depiction of those characters.
Significantly, however, Leaving the Atocha Station flattens what we as readers
“know”; we learn about these characters in what feels like emotionally profound moments but what are, perhaps in a second reading, banal snapshots of those activities which suggest emotional activity. Like the depicted cities, the structures of the novel prompt the affective responses of proximity while preserving the mediated distances through which we encounter others.
Being sensitive to the lives of others and thus responsible to their singularity—an ethical relationship—does not come as the result of mining others for details about their lives. In Leaving the Atocha Sation, these relationships do not even require
“truth”, per se. For example, in the scene preceding that which was quoted above,
Adam is punched in the face for misunderstanding Teresa’s story as she recounts it to
Spanish friends at a party. Embarrassed, wounded, and with watery eyes, Adam decides to add insult to injury by telling a lie: explaining that his laughter was only an 20 attempt to cover nascent tears, Adam suggests that he not only understood Teresa’s
Spanish but also her experience as he had just lost his mother. When Teresa discovers, weeks later, that he had been dishonest she is both upset and supportive. Considering
Adam a “poet” who had “[...] lied. To see. If I could even say the words” their relationships continue (63). Though on the one hand Adam flagrantly manipulated
Teresa in order to get closer to her, within the novel’s commitment to thinking through mediation and the failings of language, this exchange is both an example of manipulative fraudulence and how characters might occupy a virtual space where an affective intimacy might be possible between people despite the incommensurable distance between them.
As texts that themselves thematize literary production—in Faces the young narrator is a translator, her older iteration a novelist writing the pages that we read, and her primary interlocutor is the Mexican Modernist poet Gilberto Owen, who is
“speaking” in the above passage; in Leaving the Atocha Station we witness Adam’s process of poetic composition and instances of reflexive self-reading—these texts invite readings that consider how literature and acts that produce literature fit into everyday life. In this scene, the developing relationship between Owen and the narrator is bound to the traces of self that are found in their literary discourse.
Luiselli’s novella initiates relationships, like the one between the Gilberto Owen and the young narrator, that can only form across a number of borders: temporal, spatial, state, diegetic, et cetera. Their relationship is mutually meaningful; many of their 21 actions throughout the novel are in the service of following, for reasons that do not always disclose themselves explicitly to the internal readers or to actual readers, that they intuit as the trace of the presence of the other, without demanding prima facie recognition of their presence.
More than just representing a story of radical border crossing, the novella actively enlists readers to participate in the vertiginous and disorienting task of keeping straight, or attending to the meaning from the disorder of the tessellating story levels and multiple narrators. The book entitled “Obras” that is being read by the narrator in her “red coat” refers to Owen’s collected works, published in 1979 (Luiselli 2014,2).
The narrator literally reads her way to Owen, yet when they meet, their discursive locations remain irreconcilably removed, and their gaze becomes fixed on that which blinds them. Her “perpetual state of communion with the dead”—an infinite relationship across the ultimate border—binds her to another. Within the diegetic frame of her narrated section of the novella, Owen is both real and unreal, however within the overall frame of the novel, both characters are simultaneously real and the work of another’s fiction. As we might identify with the young narrator who invests affect and ethical resources in a fictional character, which we might perceive as a novelistic exercise in empathy, the fictionality which underwrites its provisionally is doubled, in effect undermining the logic of affective and ethical distribution which begins with a “real” subject (a real reader of the novel or an embedded reader within in) and passes through a fictional creation only to return to enrich the original subject. 22 Otherness is here imagined in a way that opens a new space for ethics, in which affective and ethical energies might be distributed across national, temporal, and diegetic borders without underwriting totalizing regimes or being appropriated into the service of the self This is because every “self’ in the novella ultimately dissolves into another, or back into the larger social context at some point in the novella; this is also true of the second passage, which comes from Lemer’s Leaving theAtocha Station.
The very perspective from which Adam organizes his apprehension of his surroundings, which very much includes an awareness of his difference from the local
Madrilenos and his being situated in a matrix of “several languages” and other cultural productions, dissolves back into the setting so that he is both observer and observed.
The positionings of self/other is both acknowledged and undone by the very destabilization of selves who are in the process of authoring their own stories. Both the
Faces in the Crowd and Leaving the Atocha Station efface the presence of the self- authors and foreground the technologies of mediation through which they encounter their social worlds, to displace the rhetorical privilege their narrative account would have as the origin of the encounters and opening a new space for bringing oneself to bear in their social context with a responsibility not tied to totalizing moral systems or verifiably “authentic” encounters.
We might note how the strategies employed in both texts can be read as an opening to ethics as opposed to moralizing systems by adopting the lens of French philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas, a key figure not only in philosophical accounts of ethics but one 23 who also had a major influence in “the ethical turn” in literary studies. In Ethics and
Infinity Levinas remarks that “I think rather that access to the face is straightaway ethical. You turn yourself toward the other as toward an object when you see a nose, eyes, forehead, a chin, and you can describe them... face and discourse are tied. The face speaks” (Levinas 87-8). He continues to suggest that it is not merely the vision of the face that demands or constitutes an ethics, but in the act of “saying” in response to the face that initiates this first relationship of responsibility to the Other. In the first passage, from Faces in the Crowd, the narrator seems to manifest such a relationship: she may impose herself onto her assumptions about him, but she is also opening herself to a life lived with and for the other that is otherwise foreclosed by the forms and structures they inhabit. In the second passage though, there is an explicit vitiation of the sense of sight, their mutual gaze toward each other is infelicitous and also blinding. This however, does not prevent that gaze from being binding: each character intuits the proximity of the Other without the demand that that proximity disclose itself in any recognizable way, and continue to long for, follow, and even write for the other. Owen and the narrator take on a relationship of sustained attention, or responsibility, to one another “without” as Levinas formulates, “waiting for reciprocity” (Levinas 98).
One must act as-if the Other were legible or present, without demanding that they become either. The narration, across the many levels which constitute it, are replete with pseudo-gnostic phrases which, besides frustrating attempts to identify precisely 24 which narrator they come from, interrupt the mimetic illusion each narrative account might have produced to abstract, or denaturalize, novel form: “a dense, porous novel.
Like a baby’s heart” (22); “a horizontal novel, told vertically. A novel that has to be told from the outside to be read from within” (61); “Or a horizontal novel, told vertically. A horizontal vertigo” (126). If we agree that the types of social positioning dramatized within and also occasioned by novels, then the “conflated”—to borrow a term from Brian Richardson—spatial orientations and temporalities of these texts suggest a continuity of ethical responsibility and narrative possibility as an effect of their broken form. As I have shown, this “broken” form possesses a special ethical import in that it allows the representation of fear for the Other that does not collapse into fear o f the other as a fundamental condition of “unruly life”, or a life that pushes against its formal restrictions to take seriously its relationship to others.
The portions of both Leaving the Atocha Station and Faces in the Crowd quoted above explore the ethical potential of collapsing the very perspectives from which notions of self and other are momentarily discreet positions by putting immense pressure on those positions at the level of the sentence and by disorganizing the types of spatial and temporal ordering novels can accomplish to foreground how that very ordering can construct, or reify, the distance of those perspectives. By drawing attention to capacity of the novel and then folding it over onto itself, the neat lines between fictional spheres, narrator and character, and self and other no longer function to organize ethical and affective attention. 25 The concerns that Black articulates in Fiction Across Borders, which describes a certain impasse between the felt need to write fiction about others and the fear of reproducing hegemonic structures of power vis-a-vis cultural appropriation or invasive
imagination, are raised in the texts studied here—although as I will argue later, manifest themselves in more radical and radically open formulations. First, however, it
would be useful give a brief overview of her position and describe the investment in contemporary prose fiction we share.
Black sees border-crossing fiction in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries as an opportunity to “foster ethically resonant identifications with others” and “revitalize
[the] legacy of expansive engagement for the turn of the millennium” (Black 9). She defines border-crossing fictions as prose fiction which “embraces the challenge of representation with an intensity that surpasses the general concern with alterity that preoccupies fiction at large” by “calling attention to their own representational dilemmas, inviting their readers to question assumptions about identity and
imaginative projection that underlie calcified forms of discursive domination” (4).
Black immediately distances her work from what we might call political or ideological
critique, though she remains interested in those categories, by acknowledging that
literature doesn’t directly operate on social circumstances, and instead posits that literature might be written in such a way that opens new positions and evokes new insight which might amplify the emancipatory effect future ideological critique. These positions and insights, then, are about how acts of reading and writing novels might 26 change fundamental conceptions of “self’ and “other” by calling attention to and re
shaping how each category is projected via representational modes. Additionally, these
works can then reshape the larger “metanarrative of imaginative border crossing” in
literature production, literary criticism, politics, law, and so on, by providing an
“interpretive lens that helps us see a productive ethics of representational border crossing defined by its resistance to established patterns of hegemonic violence” (34;
4).
The lenses she develops-—which she terms “crowded self’ and “crowded style”— as a result of these observations attempt to explain, or simply make visible, how some contemporary novels engage their representational project by gesturing toward senses of selfhood and senses of the literary in light of decades of increased globalization often accompanied by violence. She builds her way to these concepts in three major steps. First, she argues that any ethics of border-crossing must recognize that
“selfhood and language [are] socially shaped”, and as I would add, mutually informing
(36). Given that self-knowledge is an “often frail and unreliable construct”, notions of selfhood expressed in a language which reifies the very concept is more reflective of social codes in which the expression take place. She contends that since the very language and historical knowledge by which one would account for oneself is socially mediated, “many of the acts that constitute personal experience are thus acquisitions of exterior knowledge” and thus the “boundaries between selfhood and otherness begin to blur” (35). 27 Her second point centers on the relationship between language and history. Without denying the importance of heritage, cultural background, and one’s linguistic background, Black notes with other critics that “no history except the things that had actually happened to us would be truly ours at all” and, in a gesture to both the postcolonial scholars she cites and to Deleuze and Guatarri’s notion of “minor languages” (which she doesn’t), notes that “writers from immigrant and postcolonial communities frequently reshape the tone and texture of English” (we might think also of Kafka’s German, Chamoiseau’s French, and so on) to powerfully “[interweave] new vocabularies and linguistic structures while transforming grammatical mistakes into sources of aesthetic power” (38). The very terms and linguistic rules with which selfhood coordinates itself in relation to its historical past is already an act of appropriation, which, when enacted self-consciously can make new expressions and models of selfhood that challenge codified historical constructions of self and other.
Finally, Black argues that “productive border crossing requires self and style to abandon aspects of privilege and to embrace capacity to be vulnerable” in order to
“push against this generic contract” and “[encourage] readers to take risky ethical and political actions” which make “identification with compromised characters feel distinctly uncomfortable” but nevertheless, I might add, a central affective process of novel reading. As the closest to Levinasian ethics that Black gets, this final point suggests that border-crossing fiction must deny both the privileges of selfhood and of novel empathy (as formulated by Susan Keen, for example) in order to skirt the safety 28 of reading novels about others. Without effacing the privileges of selfhood, novel characters and readers of novels alike risk appropriating the experience of others as
“knowledge” without serious reflection on their own social context, essentially enriching their own position at little to no cost, thus paradoxically reproducing colonizing notions of self/other or center/periphery.
These notions of border-crossing manifest in contemporary fiction writing, according to Black, in what she calls, “crowded self’ and “crowded style”. In the former “metaphor for subjectivity, the borders of the self jostle against the edges of others, and this mediating position allows for the contours of each to become porous and flexible” (47). The latter refers to the “struggle toward an ethics of border-crossing
[... ] most evident in how they write: their works invite us to meditate on how the process of conceptualizing social difference affects and is affected by the texture, tone, and patterning of their language” (51). Taken together, these terms refer to a novel aesthetic which foregrounds the risk and speculates as to the rewards of imagining others by first acknowledging the vulnerability to and possible complicity with structures of hegemonic violence that inheres to one’s own position. Conveyed in a style which interrupts the flows of power from self/center to other/periphery undoes the political power of each set of terms without denying how they structure the discursive environment from which the emanate. Using a language which “emphasizes the importance of mistakes over authoritative knowledge” in acts of both linguistic and cultural translation, these aesthetic rubrics avoid “celebrat[ing] the transgression 29 of social borders” only to “unwittingly restrict imaginative authority to personal experience” (54-5).
II. Border-Crossing after the Ethical Turn in Literary Studies
Black’s “crowded” frameworks gesture toward how contemporary novel reading and writing can break the frames of self and other that either foreclose ethics or which attend to it while still clinging to structures of political normativity which obviate the potential of ethical insight by risking the reproduction of political violence. This contemporary investment in ethics and literature shares an impulse with those theorists mentioned earlier, chiefly Rita Felski and Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, who yearn to think about how literature might be mobilized to meet the demands of the present. To do so requires that ethical theorists learn from only to then push off of the earlier insights of the “ethical turn in literary studies”.
Daniel Schwarz generalizes the major concerns of the ethical turn as follows:
What unites ethical critics...is the premise of a strong connection between
art and life. Rather than being divorced from life, our reading experience—
if we read actively and with intelligence—is central to life and contributes
to the development of the mature personality. Literature provides surrogate
experiences for the reader, experiences that, because they are embodied
within artistically shaped ontologies, heighten our awareness of moral
discriminations. Yet, I suggest, what distinguishes moral philosophy from 30 literature is its specificity, its nominalism, and its dramatized particularity
(emphasis added; Schwarz 5).
Most critical accounts describe the body of literature that corresponds with the impetus described above as being divided in two wings. Namwali Serpell, whose summary is worth quoting at length, points out both the similarities and differences between the two wings.
In metacritical accounts, the field of ethical criticism is often divided into two
camps, humanistic and poststructuralist. Broadly speaking, critics like Lionel
Trilling, Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, and others invested in Aristotelian
ethics are said to be of the humanist camo, invested in models of liberalism,
democracy, and positive ethical relations like friendship and love. [...] Critics
in the camp inspired by structuralism focus more on the value of the alterity
they see as endemic to the literary. This camp is affiliated with Robert
Eaglestone, Derek Attridge, and others inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida
and Emmanuel Levinas. For these critics, the literary encounter, in Judith
Butler’s words, “honors what cannot be fully known or captured about the
other.” [...] Most pertinent...is their shared commitment to the “self
consciously unverifiable status of the alterity that the ethical subject seeks to
produce—and unverifiability that retains the post-structuralist’s skepticism
about knowledge as a tool of hegemony while bestowing upon epistemological
uncertainty a positive ethical content (Serpell 293). 31 Despite the veracity of what Serpell, following closely in the footsteps of Dorothy
Hale, whose work is discussed at greater length in the next part of this study, claims to be the similarities of the two wings, there are salient details of each wing’s perspective, or, interpretive priorities, which call for further discussion.
Nussbaum and those in the “first wing” of ethical criticism emphasize the potential edification resulting from serious and empathetic reading practices: for Wayne Booth the model of friendship describes the possible adjustment to a reader’s sense of ethos that develops from a serious encounter with good artworks; Nussbaum parrots Henry
James when she suggests that “we need to be aroused from our ethical torpor” to
“wake up democracy”, as if democracy were a “noble but sluggish horse” (Nussbaum
60). Later, she casts herself as not so distant from Booth, as she remarks “many distinguished works of literature nourish the ascription of humanity and the prospect of friendship” (71), again reiterating how artworks as divergent in subject matter as the novels of Henry James and Mark Twain, and even the operas of Wagner, might each engage readers in profoundly edifying ways.
I will suggest that a few aspects of the above—though there are many more aspects of this “wing” not accounted for here—indicate that this approach to the ethical in literature is not suited for our purposes. First, this type of ethical criticism is deeply invested in the political economy of the contemporary capitalist democracy. Nussbaum herself describes her work on ethics in literature as elucidating a mode of attention to literary works that might provide a “curriculum for citizenship” (Nussbaum 70).
Charles Altieri describes Nussbaum’s criticism as fitting squarely into the liberal 32 tradition by pointing out and elucidating her reliance on the precedence of Adam
Smith’s notion of the “judicious spectator” (Altieri 43). Altieri continues: “Focus,
then, is not on how we come to desire to desire but on how we attach ourselves to the particular forms of idealizable desire that constitute ethical lives” (43). Nussbaumian ethics requires reader’s continued investment in the values of liberal pluralism, especially as they coalesce around the collective animation of the modem democratic nation state. By positing that the purview of ethics is to render correctives to subjects who are inspired to read by their sense of commitment to the politics of the state, this conception of ethics in literature necessarily excludes those who cannot or choose not to make such an investment, thus re-mapping hegemonic values onto ethics in literature. This failure to think in a worlding way does not speak to the complications of contemporary fiction writing, and certainly does not help us read contemporary fictions, especially those interested in “border-crossing” or any other charged discursive migration, let alone those fictions that might be described as wanting to re- imagine the foundation of social relations themselves. In these accounts, difference is something which ought to be accounted for but ultimately overcome, as the privileged subject position is that of a citizen, and thus by extension bound to contributing their difference to one overarching sameness; we are “Americans” or “Europeans”, and so on.
Additionally, I follow Eaglestone’s criticism of the “strong mimeticist position” of
Nussbaumian literary ethics (Eaglestone 602). He draws on a long history of critique aimed at the ideological work of realism, but situates his attack specifically to discuss 33 the appropriation of elements of novel writing that Nussbaum and others take for granted. He says:
[The mimeticist position suggests that] “we” and art are, in deep ways, the
same—that art refers directly to our experience and not (for example) to other
art. Of course, this is the illusion created (or better, perhaps, assumed) by the
traditional view of the realist novel (ibid).
As I have discussed above, the types of ethical responses evinced by the works of
Luiselli and Lemer call for a sustained effort to maintain ethical relationships prior to any recognition of sameness. Each begins by formally and thematically exploring how the novel can create selves that are unlike those outside of the text, not as an excersise in developing empathy but in order to diminish the privileged role of the authentic self, citizen, and author in discussions of ethics.
Candace Vogler makes a similarly aimed attack, though on different grounds. She too notes with some uneasiness the uncomplicated relationship between literary works, philosophical principles, and “real life” that ethical critics, especially those in this first camp, assume. One of her first concerns is the epistemological confidence reading fiction endows these ethical meditations: “the most obvious moral risk centers on one aspect of the ‘central cardinal distinction’ between people and imaginary people: everything that there is to know about an imaginary person is available in the literary corpus that produces and sustains the imaginary person” (Volger 14). What troubles her is that this confidence reinforces the formula for efficacy insinuated in the work of critics like Nussbaum: since novel characters can be somehow apprehended fully by 34 readers, the most sensitive of which will contemplate their understanding of the given character and the concrete social positions they are in in order to re-think moral decision making and judgement all together. The efficacy of this practice relies on a logic that I would paraphrase like so: by feeling and then reflecting on how these characters react to their dynamic social situations, I will carefully reorient my approach to similar situations and to judgement in general.
Dorothy Hale and Christopher Weinberger home in on the phenomenological aspect of this logic, suggesting that the “oscillation” between affective immersion in the story world of a given literary text and a distanced, critical or moral reflection on the experience of that reading have been central to accounts of the ethics of reading, especially with regard to the novel. Noting the problematic philosophical assumptions, and thus implying a problematic approach to one’s encounter with a text, Vogler remarks: “With any luck, no human being will be knowable in the way that any literary character worth repeated readings is knowable (Vogler 15).
The second wing of ethical criticism departs from the first, in one of many ways, in how they respond to this notion of unknowability, or as Serpell formulates it: to bestow “upon epistemological uncertainty a positive ethical content”. The work of
Derek Attridge suggests how epistemological uncertainty is fundamental to our conceptions of literary reading and writing, and thus how both inaugurate relationships that are ethically charged. Published in 1999, Derek Attridge’s “Innovation, Literature,
Ethics: Relating to the Other” begins by asserting a fundamental relationship between art works and obligation, as well as between creating and responding to cultural 35 productions, that situate the discussion under the rubric of ethics. He opens with the following questions:
How does the obligation to be innovative in artistic creation relate to the
obligation to be inventive in one’s responses to cultural productions? What is
the relation between the latter obligation and the apparently contradictory
obligation to respond to cultural artifacts with fidelity and justness? Do any of
these obligations have the force of ethical responsibility, and if so, how do they
relate to ethical demand in the realm of personal and social interaction?
(Attridge 1999, 20).
Innovation, for Attridge, includes both “creativity” and “invention” (22), and is a term that he deploys to link artistic activity to commitment. For Attridge, and the other critics in the deconstructionist school of literary ethics, literature—especially novels— that refuses to present readers with psychological richness and social realism and instead foreground opacity, frustration, and incompleteness are fertile grounds for discussions of ethics. Adapting Levinasian ethics for literary studies, Attridge remarks that:
All creative shapings of language (and any other cultural materials) make
demands that can, in this extended sense, be called ethical. To find oneself
reading an inventive work is to find oneself subject to certain obligations—to
respect its otherness, to respond to its singularity, to avoid reducing it to the
familiar and utilitarian even while attempting to comprehend it by relating to
these (Attridge 2004, 130). 36 To read, for Attridge, in a way that adequately responds to the demands of the text before you, is to enter into an ethically loaded relationship. Attending to the singularity of a particular literary text, responding to its fundamental otherness, is to attune to what its “formal elaboration” does, or, as Adam Zachary Newton might say, to attend to the “said” and the “saying” for what relationships or possibilities the latter opens or imposes (Attridge 2004, 130; Newton find btw3-12).
This attention, as Adam Zachary Newton elaborates in Narrative Ethics, “refers to the radicality and uniqueness of the moral situation itself, a binding claim exercises upon the self by a concrete and singular other whose moral appeal precedes both decision and understanding (Newton 12). For Attridge and Newton both, the fundamental inability of language to capture a given present, or the capacity to violate the laws that make it meaningful, the formulation of an utterance—the location of the author, the location of the receiver, their relationship, et cetera—suggests that the
“there there” is infinitely inaccessible, and interpretation is then a “ceaseless movement toward a light which always remains hidden” (Hillis Miller qtd in Newton,
20). Any readerly attempt to claim to “know” is a violation of the formulation and runs the risk of overwriting what one is reading. As Newton describes it, ethical criticism elucidates a space between the “moral recipe book” of ethics in the western tradition of moral philosophy and deconstructions “indifference to answerability”; ethics in literature is at best a “scrupulous hesitation, an extreme care occasioned by the treachery of words and the dangers of easy answers” or a recasting of deconstruction’s 37 “suspended discourse” as Levinasian “interrupted” or de Manian “disarticulated” discourse (Newton 37-8).
Returning to Attridge allows us to begin to see a way into an ethical lens through which we might interrogate the types of “contemporary” texts I study. I have focused above on how the “ethical turn” lays out, or attempts to complicate, an ethical theory of literature vis-a-vis an ethics of reading. A central concern of my argument about ethics and literary form in contemporary “experimental” novels is how the writing self is represented and functions in these texts, serving to locate critical concerns about literary ethics and representation as a conceptual frame but also as interventions in those discussions. Each of the texts mentioned intervene on the level of story; by this I mean that characters as imagined projections of authorial consciousness interact with others in urban landscapes of the present in ways that illuminate or invite certain ethical responses. They also intervene in formal ways; as self-reflexive texts in some way about the writing of literary texts, these invitations or illuminations challenge or develop the complications and stakes of ethical theories of literature. Specifically, and this will be the major concern of the rest of this study, these texts constantly question, toy with, and often efface the presence of the author in ways that not only amplify the verbs—challenge, develop, etc—of the previous sentence, but make take provocatice stances vis-a-vis literary value in their overt manipulation of authorial presence on both levels of story and discourse.
The “creative act”, for Attridge, is an effect of a similar response one is compelled toward when confronted by a literary work. When Derek Attridge sets out to write, as 38 he imagines in “Innovation”, he is drawn toward an idea that is “other”, which comes from both the “materials” the mind “happens to have” and a “close engagement with the circumambient cultural matrix” (Attridge 23). This idea, or creative impulse, is
“other” precisely because it does not blend into either his cultural surroundings nor his already articulated expression. As “other”, it is constantly in a state of emergence: writing thus becomes task of indefinite openness to the idea, dismissing the idea would be an act of violent erasure and assimilating it to easily into pre-existing expressions would efface this quality of emergence. This understanding of writing recalls Gertrude
Stein’s notion, from How to Write, that: “A sentence is a duplicate. An exact duplicate is depreciated. Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness.
No witnesses are without value” (Stein qtd in Winkler). Stein’s punctuation reflects an intentional imperfection in the unfolding of a sentence: in an almost Benjaminian sense, even a written question is also a bold statement of the infelicity of writing to capture a thought, an expression, an other. Caught in chains of discourse, though, writers might seize the ethical efficacy of writings in-efficacy, that is, to in an attempt to do justice to an other simultaneously express the limitations of their doing so. Or as
Attridge writes, to find and express “not just material but gaps in the material, strains and tensions that suggest the pressure of the other, of the hitherto unthought and unthinkable” (Attridge 1999,23).
New ethical theories of literature, then, do more than posit an interpretive lens for reading how ethics or politics of projected otherness—or representations of others— but also a framework through which we might attend to the relationship of text, author, and language. An ethics of reading must be complicated by an understanding of the ethics of writings. Self-reflexive literature is germaine for this type of attention precisely because, as Patricia Waugh formulates: “language is an independent, self- contained system which generates its own meanings”, and such a notion is centered when metafiction “systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 3). She continues to suggest how metafictional novels situate their “resistance... within the form of the novel itself’ by “turning inwards to their own medium of expression, in order to examine the relationship between fictional form and social reality” (11). The new ethical perspectives developed by literary theorists after Waugh’s monograph get us out of the “world as a book” template, which suggests that we might expose the hidden textuality of our social lives and therefore apprehend those social realities from a new perspective, and into a more nuanced attention to the intricacies and stakes of literary writing.
What the fresh frameworks of ethical and affective attention developed by Black and Vermeulen attempt to do is reorganize the sense of alterity maintained by the
Attridge, Newtown, and others above as a type of energy which dyanmizes the various highly mediated relationships that exist in contemporary social contexts. I refer to them as ethical economies precisely because they are concerned with how limited
(affective and ethical resources) might be produced and redistributed as counters to global capitalism and the legacies of colonization. Lemer and Luiselli’s turn to the 40 novel, as do the attentions of Black and Vermeulen, because the imperative to world vis-a-vis the distribution of affective and ethical energies remains despite the complications presented by their novel’s experimental forms. In other words, these texts maintain the importance of conceiving of the task of reformulating ethical responsibilities within a social context, without restricting their vision of those contexts to static representations of such a context. What follows is an investigation of how formal and thematic experiments in the work of Ben Lemer and Alejandro
Zambra reformulate ethical and affective economies and how those experiments might interact with the historical and social contexts to which they respond. 41 Part II: Denaturing Genre: Ethics, Reflexivity, and the Broken Novel
“Truth is not a process of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation which does justice to it” -Walter Benjamin The Origin o f German Tragic Drama, 31
I. An Ethics of Inauthenticity in the Novels of Ben Lerner
In an interview with Griffin Brown at Yale University in February of this year, Ben
Lemer made the following remarks:
I grew up with this kind of avant-garde, disjunctive poetics notion, which was
that you had to break the smooth functioning of sense. But all of those
techniques have basically been recuperated by this political class. And these
democratic officials who get in there and are like, “Well, you know, you can’t
really change much, you can’t really offend anybody, you can’t rock the boat”
—[Steve] Bannon just doesn’t give a shit. It’s like a nightmarish version of
what I would want for the left, which would be for people to get up there and
use presidential power and Supreme Court appointments to make it a more just
world as opposed to one based on race hatred. Even though intellectually I
thought I was fully disgusted by the American political system and its
ideologies, I’ve realized that I was telling myself stories, even subliminally,
about the security of certain discursive norms or certain kinds of “sanity” (even 42 if they were the humane face of neoliberalism) (Lemer qtd in Brown; emphasis
added).
As an incredibly well-celebrated author of three volumes of poetry, two novels, numerous essays and articles, and editor of No: A Journal o f the Arts, Critical
Quarterly, and the poetry editor of Harper’s Magazine, Lemer occupies an increasingly prominent position in contemporary literary production, especially in the
United States. This interview comes after the publication of his most recent work of fiction, 10:04, and non-fiction, The Hatred of Poetry, both of which persistently interrogate the way literary writing shapes our experience of the present, and vice versa. As I discussed in the previous section, this is one of the anxiomatic concerns for contemporary writers, critics, and readers; the critical priorities of the last century no longer speak to the political demands of the moment, and avant-garde aesthetics have been appropriated by the right and absorbed into the status quo. What forms of writing remain for the artist who wishes to respond to the call of their moment that might distinguish that work from the vast sums of information that contribute to that status quo?
Lerner’s work features a consistent preoccupation with the failure of writing to ever successfully cross that threshold—to manifest the impulse from which it was created.
In his second book of poems, Angle o f Yaw, Lemer writes: “but a poem may prefigure its own irrelevance, thereby staying relevant/despite the transpiration of extraneous events” (Lemer No Art, 124). Central to Lemer’s poetics is a poem’s capacity not to 43 just express the unexpressed, but also to speak to the unknown challenges of some future society; by resisting assimilation into the literary and political desires of an imagined present or future audience, these works might structure alternative literary and political desires of some future audience. As Maureen McLane said recently in a talk at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, entitled “The Uses of Poetry”, poems aren’t so much “equipment for living”—as Kenneth Burke suggests—but instead might work against the very notion of “prematurely legislated equipment” (McLane). In an ad-hoc critique of both Burke and Shelly’s 1821 ^4
Defense o f Poetry—which she praises for the complications it poses to, but nevertheless criticizes for its participation in what she calls “high utility”—she says we often “don’t know what [... ] equipment we need in advance” and suggests that poems might work against the notion of poetry’s instrumental value implicit in
“prematurely legislated equipment” and inaugurate new forms, perhaps unexpected forms, of value. For McLane—in this talk and elsewhere, including her own genre- defying work, entitled Mz. N: The Serial— and Lerner both a poetics of “sustained ambiguity and ambivalence” function to deny the type of sense making imperative to temporal, generic, and diegetic order.
This functional ambivalence might open a space wherein new ethical energies might be invested or redistributed. Below I will discuss the cephalopod trope that runs through Lemer’s second novel, 10:04. The novel’s discussion of cephalopod physiology emphasizes how the image of the octopus, an organism with poor 44 proprioception (defined in the novel as the inability of an octopus to determine the position of its body in the current), can be linked to the narrator’s discussion of asterognosis (the inability to form a mental image of what one contacts) to create a framework that might reaffirm the enigmatic (Lemer 2014, 6-7). This discussion needs to be developed in a few ways that illuminate the relationship between Lemer’s trope, contemporary authorship, and ethics.
Propriopcetion comes from both the Latin proprius and capere. The first means roughly “one’s own” or individual; the second, “to grasp”. The aproprioceptive figure is one who is unable to maintain a grasp on themselves, unable to coordinate one’s self as an individual. Whereas astereognosis corresponds with readerly ambivalence, or an inability, as the narrator formulates, to “read the realistic fiction the world appears to be”, aproprioception corresponds to an incoherence of being, and ambivalence in what is brought to bear on, and thus what must endure, one’s environment (7). The
“current” that describes cephalopod’s environment is just one homonymic slide from referring to the temporal “present”, and thus functions as an image in the novel to refer to both a spatial and temporal disruption. This polyvalent image intimates a fundamental re-working of the phenomena of authorship within the novel as being out of place and out of time.
Not only are the rigid lines between space and time superimposed in this narrated image, but ontological distinctions are also blurred. As I mention in part one, the narrator syntactically blurs his own “story”—the story of an “I”—with his exegesis of 45 this obscure biological phenomenon rendered in scientific prose, both expanding the generic frame of the novel beyond that of aestheticized prose and also partially breaking that frame; the novel now absorbs, to play into and off of, the language of scientific discourse. The narrator challenges readers to grasp onto the plot as is it buried beneath the narrative of an “I” that becomes the narrative of an octopus, a story that involves first spatial, temporal, and even ontological anxieties. Readers can follow that a continuous unfolding of a homodiegetic narrative is before them, but must labor to keep the strands of that story separate or intelligible in relief of the other strands. As the cephalopod “cannot integrate that information into a larger picture”, readers first struggle to integrate the various stories in Lemer’s dense and variegated prose only to realize, perhaps frustrated, that the lines and stories only make sense in their proximity to each other. We might conceive of this textual complication as being, rather than manifesting overlapping and competing claims to privileged status within the ordering of the novel’s discourse—the working out of which resembles something that we might call politics—as overlapping and completing, in the sense that the heterogeneity of possible meanings increase as we let each discursive strand and possible meaning lay claim on our experience as readers—thus opening a space of listening and not ordering, ethics instead of politics.
This type of close reading might seem to lend itself to an ethical reading of the novel not dissimilar to Dorothy Hale’s conception of “new ethics”. In a 2007 article 46 entitled “Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical theories of the Novel”,
Hale claims that the tasks of new ethicists (in literary studies) is to
theorize a readerly emotion that would serve as an authentic basis of social
bonding and also serve as a means of self-binding, that would limit the self,
and through this limitation, produce the Other...[to retain] the post
structuralisms’ skepticism about knowledge as a tool of hegemony while
bestowing upon epistemological uncertainty a positive ethical content (Hale
2007,190; emphasis added).
Hale argues that, rather than formulate a practice of reading that seeks to overcome or smooth over difference in the name of ethics, ethical reading might instead attend to moments of frustration, obscurity, and obfuscation. Inasmuch she traces what I have referred to —following the major theorists working in the field today—as the post structuralist wing of ethical criticism to note the ethical efficacy Miller and others find in their re-conception of Althusserian hailing, which generates “readerly freedom out of a textual necessity. The call to the reader is a call to something outside of the self’ (Hale 191). For Geoffrey Harpham, the ethical import of narrative uncertainty (in the novel) is to center or agentize the reader as the producer of the “social conditions for alterity (Harpham qtd in Hale 193); this quality of the novel, in Miller’s later work, not only makes the reader aware of her responsibility while reading, as might claim
Nussbaum, but inaugurates an experience of being “put in the pickle of being made responsible for judgement when the grounds for judgement are not entirely 47 certain” (Miller qtd in Hale 193). Drawing on the work of Lynne Huffer, Hale claims for the ethical efficacy of the novel its fundamental foregrounding of social binding:
[Huffer] terms “narrative” the limit set by a text to readerly identity, the barrier
to self-projection that enables the text to be imagined as Other and as the law
of Otherness: “the ethics of narrative performance can never be anchored in a
discourse of freedom alone, for its grounding assumption is that we are never
free from the other who binds us... the speaking subject, the reader, and the
discursive traces themselves remain linked but porous, interdependent, and
open to change” (Hale 194).
This interdependence, or experience of voluntary self-binding that novel reading evokes is what distinguishes new ethical theories of the novel from earlier conceptions of novel value, a la Geroge Eliot as quoted in the first part of this thesis, as they are rooted in not the mimetic power of novel writing to produce socially transformative dispositions, which itself a reproduction of the colonizing impulse that makes “social others first the object of pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our correction” (Trilling qtd in Hale 195).
Moving beyond totalizing moral principles, which Trilling and so many others see as underwriting violent social practices, Hale describes new ethical criticism’s investment in novel value as an investment in readings that “produc[e] not false ideology but a true experience of how possibility is produced in and through the operation of social constraint” (Hale 2009, 903). Her return to Trilling emphasizes the 48 troubling liberal politics of an otherwise laudable and useful justification for novel reading on ethical grounds, for alterity is produced, theorized, and encountered in service of some other finality—as discussed in the previous section as being a
“curriculum of citizenship”, or the nation-state.
For Hale, it is not the exploration of a taken-for-granted richly textured personal interiority that lends the novel its privileged status in ethical criticism, or as Nussbaum describes it: literature is a “valuable source of deliberative enrichment” (Nussbaum
2001,65). It is, rather, the novel’s capacity to reflexively foreground the ways that discourse and genre, construct social identities. In particular, Hale claims that this staging lends affective insight into how the novel itself structures the rise of the liberal subject, as Jameson and others articulated in the second half of the twentieth century.
Obscurity, obfuscation, and frustrations resulting from a novel’s inability to represent perfectly legible characters produce an encounter with alterity that “troubles certainty”—which Hale attributes to Butler’s reading of Washington Square Park— and marks the limits of knowledge as such. This epistemoglogical challenge binds readers to characters as they recognize themselves as also bound, or subject to generic and discursive rubrics, which leads to a dual movement effect, for Hale, of new ethics:
The disavowal of social positionality entailed by reading “for life” is countered
by the avowal of social positionality necessitated by reading for life “as it
were”. The psychological necessity of oscillating between disavowal and 49 avowal is, for both Butler and Nussbaum and in new ethical theory generally,
what makes possibility possible (Hale 2009,901-902).
Novels can, according to Butler and Hale, bring readers to the limit point of social knowledge and thus to the felt failure of the grounds upon which judgement might be elicited and made; thus “[readers] experience as well the anxiety and the promise of what is different, what is possible, what is waiting for us if we do not foreclose it in advance” (Butler 208-9).
The aesthetic frames of these “broken novels” differs from the realism of that of someone like Henry James, whose work is a constant referent for literary ethicists, and thus call for different types of attention to the emergent ethical possibilities within them. These are not novels of “aggrandized agency”, as Amanda Anderson would put it, or of the impactful feelings of lost agency that Butler and Hale link to certain ethical insights; more is at stake than the principle that things might be seen, or remain unable to be seen, from multiple perspectives. Instead, these novels explore how self and other might be represented, or written into the novel form, when any coincidence between fiction and real life might be rendered problematic and incomplete; to exaggerate Hale’s claim about alterity and new ethics, in these texts everything is unverifiable. Above simply foregrounding this challenge, these novels struggle to illuminate the possibilities of ethics in what remains of those failures.
In Seven Modes o f Uncertainty, Namwali Serpell follows other contemporary literary critics—she also characterizes present criticism by pointing to Uses of 50 Literature—in attending to Harphams immanent imperativity of literature’s otherness in ways that go beyond the monolithic suspension of judgement and fundamental recognition of otherness that has dominated the field since (Serpell 15-6). Her preoccupation with “how we read now” is contemplated through an adaptation of
James Gibson’s notion of “affordance”, which describes how animals relate to their environment, for novel studies (19-21; emphasis mine). Noting that so much Anglo-
American novel theory metaphorizes literary form as architecture—de Man’s chair,
James’ House, Woolf’s room and thirty-two chapter building— Serpell asks might might the contemporary novel self-consciously bias its own utility, or better yet, relevance as a charged space, in our moment. As a chair “affords support and therefore affords sitting”, she maintains that “narrative structures” afford certain uses, or openings, that move beyond that of the “encounter” with alterity; literary works are a space where multiple encounters, of different types and of varied duration, take place over time(19, 23).
Much of Lemer’s creative work—both his poetry and his prose—are focused on the reflecting back on the conditions of (im)possibility of their own formation. In other words, his work mediates the relationship between text, reader, and writer by thematizing questions of form, politics, and authenticity. The relationship between text and ideology becomes shifted significantly, and therefore complicates our reading of ethics in contemporary texts away from those performed by Hale and others on the novels of Henry James. The highly self-involved and formally anxious reflexivity of 51 his work manifest an amplification of reflexivity in novel aesthetics that Nadine Fefiler points out as being an aesthetic protocol in the work of A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and other contemporary novelists in an attempt to push-off from the confines—but not the insights—of postmodernist writing. She remarks:
The shift in sensibility has major consequences, e.g. for the choice of topics
and the strategies employed... [to]... explore one area postmodernism
struggled to engage with and was criticized most for: ethical issues... As
McEwan does in Atonement, A.S. Byatt in Possession or Margaret Atwood
in The Blind Assassin, [contemporary authors] installs fiction as a powerful
instrument that is used strategically by the protagonists rather than the
protagonists being subjected to the overpowering nature of language and
contextualization (FeBler 2012).
With protagonists who are writers and plots that are (in part) concerned with the production of literary texts, an awareness of social-binding is a point of departure and not simply an effect of the novel. Reflexivity becomes a way of framing a different problematic; as Lemer puts it when discussing Leaving theAtocha Station: “does
[Adam] have to leave the poem to enter the world or the world to enter the poem?
“(Lerner qtd in Bush 37). Rather than explore how discourse, especially novelistic discourse, fractures or limits knowledges, Lemer’s work chases the effects of those fractures. 52 It is difficult to find terms for the structure of feeling manifested or produced by these texts which shuffle between irony and sincerity, authenticity and inauthenticity.
Provisionally, I call this broken authenticity. As I discussed in the previous section, much of Lemer’s work is concerned with making contact with the real, or the authentic, without investing in the possibility of unmediated encounters with others.
Rather, the novel imagines scenarios that increase the distance between individuals, cultures, truth and fiction in order to locate a space for earnest ethical attention within highly mediated and often incommensurable social worlds. The possibilities of broken authenticity as a critical aesthetic framework becomes clearer when we turn to the opening vignette of Leaving the Atocha Station.
In the novel’s opening vignette Adam enters the national museum of the Prado and finds his way to Weyden’s Decent from the Cross. On this particular occasion his daily routine is interrupted, prompting a hashish driven meditation on the experience of art.
As another man takes Adam’s preferred place in front of the painting (which real readers will notice is printed on the opposite page), his weeping causes Adam to wonder whether he was “just facing the wall to hide his face as he dealt with whatever grief he had brought into the museum” or “having a profound experience of art” (Lemer 2011,8). The moment’s ambiguity foregrounds Adam’s troubling of authenticity and his fixation on mediation.
“I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art
and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was 53 intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of
music “changed their life”, especially since I had often known these people
before and after their experience and could register no change. Although I
claimed to be a poet... I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I
encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in
college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was
communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.
Insofar was I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect
between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf;
the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the
experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of
profundity” (8-9).
As a reader, Adam is not only interested in the initial illegibility or fractured expression found in a work of art—a work of visual art or a poem—but in the effects of the space created by that fracture. Having the type of “profound experience” in the face of a work is to not only accept the metaphysical grounds of the cultural myth of genius but also to enshrine an assumed inexpressible metaphysical element of the self in the articulation of the work; the work breaches the limit of the self and speaks what could not otherwise be spoken. The work is seen as providing an opportunity to locate a coincidence between one’s notion of oneself and whatever aspect of the “human condition” it explores in concrete, particular, formal expressions. In this register, the 54 particular formal elements of a work of art convene to produce something which transcends the work itself, as well as the viewer, even if that transcendent value is
“alterity”.
Approaching the work of art from within a framework of broken authenticity provides an opportunity for readers to do more than validate or invalidate their investment in the metaphysical, in the authentic or the genuine. The particulars of the painting catalyze critical responses that at first attend to the ways the painting works only to push off from the work itself and attend to the social context in which it is apprehended.
Violence done to the form can anticipate this effect and pre-figure the efficacy of that response into its aesthetic project. For example, the virgule described in the passage above dislodges the poem from its actuality, or the limits of the “finitude of its terms” (Lemer Hatred 8). As Lemer argues in Harted o f Poetry:
The poem is always a record of failure. There is an “undecidable conflict”
between the poet’s desire to sing an alternative world and, as Grossman puts it,
the “resistance to alternative making inherent in the materials of which any
world must be composed. In an essay on Hart Crane, Grossman develops his
notion of a “virtual poem”—which we might call poetry with a capital “P”, the
abstract potential of the medium as felt by the poet when called upon to sing—
and opposes it to the “actual poem,” which necessarily betrays that impulse
when it joins to world of representation (8-9). 55 Central to Lemer’s refurbishing of Grossman’s conception of the virtual is the concept of a gap between “actual” representation and the multiplicity it necessarily mutes in its printed, spoken, painted, form. Whereas Grossman uses the notion of a poetic impulse felt by the bard, Lemer appropriates it to serve as a heuristic to point to the gap between actuality and virtual possibilities that poems—works of art—are endlessly pointing to in their failure to actualize their originating “impulse”. “Poetry isn’t hard”
Lemer remarks, “it is impossible”; “only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable us to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine” (9).
Denouncing poems is, paradoxically perhaps, an investment in the Noetic, which has the potential to not only decenter rubrics of meaning making established by social mores or genre conventions, but to multiply them (some of Lemer’s examples of this are the impossibility of Claudia Rankine’s second person lyrics in Citizen, the long disruptive dashes of Emily Dickinson, the seemingly infinitely long lines of
Whitman). Denunciation disturbs notions of poetic truth and a poem’s ostensible fidelity to authorial intent to amplify the aesthetic and political potential of a work of art. What we might call inauthentic profundity allows Adam to not only appreciate the heteroglossia of a work of art, to not only recognize the limits of artistic expression and thus step away from those regimes of truth and withhold judgements, but also to occupy those gaps—provisionally—and create anew within them. For example: the ending of the scene quoted above displays how reading in this register might re 56 position readers to make aesthetic and political use of the virtual, or how a work of art might produce new ways of seeing that are meaningful in the present without claims of its transcendence or immediate political utility.
[The transition of the man’s tears into sobs] “startled the guard into alertness
and our eyes met, mine saying that this had happened in the other gallery, the
guard’s communicating his struggles to determine whether the man was crazy
—perhaps the kind of man who would damage a painting, spit on it or tear it
from the wall or scratch it with a key—or if the man was having a profound
experience of art. Out came the handkerchief and the man walked calmly, then
totally lost his shit... there was a certain pathos in the indecision of the guards,
guards who spend much of their lives in front of timeless paintings but are only
ever asked what time it is, when does the museum close, donde esta el bano. I
could not share the man’s rapture, if that’s what it was, but I found myself
moved by the dilemma of the guards... I found their mute performance of
these tensions more moving than any Piet a Deposition, or Annunciation, and I
felt like one of their company as we trailed the man from gallery to gallery.
Maybe this man is an artist” (9-10).
The narrator’s “inauthentic” appreciation of the work of art functionally decenters various forms of generic authority or expectation; its failure to transmit essential content to Adam unsettles the concepts of artist or viewer as coherent subjects in the art work’s failure to produce a “truth” that moves Adam. Crucial, though, is the fact 57 that the painting magnetizes a collective experience; Adam’s reading of the perceived critical failure of the painting undermines the authority of social roles to organize the reception of art works, piercing phantasmic understandings of reality and opening possibilities within this particular reception of the Descent. This radically open framework crystallizes the overlapping discourses that over-determine the identities of the guards: the commonplace “guard” is re-read kaleidoscopically as both the protector of the experience of art—which assumes interpellation and its profundity— and as the protector of private capital—which reinforces bourgeois ideology. Reading in-authentically, or out of context, “shatters the clean articulation” of the quotidian, as it frames the act of reading, and renders the guards as performers and the tearful tourist as an artist, animating their routine activities with the critical potential for the viewer (Benjamin Arcades 325). Additionally, for real readers, the presence of a visual artifact within the prose—on the next page—fractures the experience of reading itself, prompting an attention to the materiality of the book—turning pages back and forth— and the competing claims to truth presented and simultaneously deconstructed as they encounter disarticulated representation on the level of the story. Here, however, the work of art is capable of mounting a powerful, if fleeting, ideological critique of the social context within which it is received (in this case the museum) by garnering creative re-readings, or eliciting a type of attention that re-contextualizes the quotidian as performance. Artworks are valued as frameworks through which scenes of reading 58 proliferate, capable of ironizing the social but also of creating new social relationships centered on the radically pluripotent space they engender.
In this sense a reading of a work of art’s “failure” does more than merely expose the ideological underpinnings of a work and indict them as being complicit with political violence. An “inauthentic”, or perhaps virtual, reading of a “poem” or of the
Descent positively registers what the work, in its failure, affords the reader. Adam’s particular reading moves beyond the subjective experience of a work of art without erasing that its first effects are located in the highly subjective space of reading. The highly mediated sense of self, the work of art, and art’s social context of his reading, thus, becomes a place for the genuine.
This place is opened, perhaps rendered visible, by aspects of art works that point to their own failings in order to comment directly on the structures of production and reception that otherwise encode and reproduce certain ideological values. As I argue in the first part of this thesis, one way Lemer’s novels address this concern is by illustrating the role “technologies of mediation” play in constructing the modes in which apprehension of the self and of social contexts is possible. Midway through the novel is a conversation between Adam and a friend Cyrus, who like Adam and Ben’s
(the narrator of 10:04) relationship with Lemer, both is and is not the real poet Cyrus
Console, which takes place over online instant messaging and is rendered as such, interrupting the representational mode of the novel and the visual formatting of the text, not unlike the photographic image of the Descent described above. Being offset 59 almost an additional inch from the far margin and construed with the addition of a new typeface, this “chat” is the most concentrated representation of a “technology of mediation” in the novel, and yet it contains its most moving passages. Cryus recalls for Adam a tragic episode that occurred days ago while he and his partner are vacationing in Mexico. They and a small crowd of locals convene around a river, daring each other to swim. While the men from the former group and Cyrus’s girlfriend are eager to jump in, Cyrus and one of the local girls are not. Convinced by her boyfriend, the girl jumps in, only to be immediately caught in the rapids. She sustains injuries that despite Cyrus’s attempt to resuscitate her, cause her death.
Cyrus: Neither do I, really. I tried. She kind of, I don’t know, threw up in
my mouth.
Me: you mean was revived—spit out water—so she was alive
Cyrus: No. There was vomit in her mouth I guess. And then I threw up on
the bank. She was Dead.
Me: jesus. i am so sorry for you
Cyrus: I tried again. I didn’t know what I was doing. Our teeth, I can’t get
this out of my mind, I accidently clicked my teeth against her teeth at some
point, like
Cyrus: like in a clumsy kiss or something. Prom... (75)
The novel’s most intimate point of contact between characters—the accidental clicking of teeth—is not only a failure, but also one relayed vis-a-vis a highly 60 impersonal medium. The novel itself becomes visible as another technology of mediation—the richest pathos and closest bodily contact are frustratingly mediated by
Cryus’s storytelling, which is mediated by the electronic protocols of instant messages and its unique grammar, mediated again by Adam. This display of mediation is discussed by Lemer as being a combination of the novel’s epistolary past and a re working of one of its central modes, dialogue (Lemer qtd in Bush 34).
Conventional dialogue is so unrealistic: you can only process it serially, it’s
really hard for characters to interrupt each other, characters speak too
grammatically... All the major emotional moments in the novel are mediated.
The question is, What’s the difference between a medium that preserves
distance, so that there’s still death, and other media that is a flattened spectacle
(34-5).
By breaking the novel form, or perhaps amplifying its elastic potential, Lemer doesn’t mitigate the mediatory effects of the form. Instead, the novel self-consciously heightens these effects to generate a place for contact, intimacy, the genuine might occur without spectacularizing the encounter or sublimating difference into social and representational norms.
The primary vector of mediation thematized by Leaving the Atocha Station is translation. Adam’s fellowship to Madrid—awarded so that he might complete a
“long, research driven poem about the Spanish Civil War”—requires his proficiency in
Spanish although the local poets, curators, and activists he spends his time constantly 61 reassure Adam that his Spanish is good, Adam remains anxious about his fluency. As
Lemer remarks in an interview, “Adam is convinced that the only appeal he can hold for people is through their not really knowing what he’s saying, so they project all these different meaning that he can’t actually articulate” (Lemer qtd in Bush 34). One could produce a reading of his willingness to “play a game of projection” in order to gamer the attraction and affection of Teresa and Isabel, two Spanish women he “dates” intermittently throughout the novel that renders Adam’s attitude toward language, women, and dishonesty as problematic, edging on an exoticization of the other.
However, within the frame of the novel and its concern with media that “preserve distance”, and specifically a poetics that dissolves authorship to open a space for ethics, translation becomes an important mpture in language’s capacity to codify social roles and legislate meaning.
In a conversation with Isabel near the opening of the novel Adam’s intoxication and embrace of the difficulties of translation (both technologies of mediation) dislodge her expression from being rooted in an original meaning, or authorial intent, and open a space for Adam to “[form] several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand that I understood in chords... ” (Lemer
2011,14). Because the novel’s narration is so completely saturated with Adam’s inward-facing self-doubt and literary-critical concerns, Lemer is able to write a representational novel that doesn’t simply depict the other, and thus run the risk of invasive imagination, or refuse to do so, and tell only the story of a white American 62 intellectual abroad, thus appropriate other cultures into the experience of
Americanness, but instead pays close attention to both the concreteness of the other and their multiplicity. As a contingent other, Isabel makes claims on both the reader and Adam to understand her, but to do so in a way that doesn’t endow her with a metaphysical truth, a restricting “self’ to be uncovered and then mapped with precision. As FeBler argues in the passage I quoted earlier, language and contextualization don’t overpower Adam and Isabel and the narrative prose their embedded in, but are used strategically to recuperate ethical and affective energies otherwise foreclosed.
Representations of love, of nations abroad, of others, of the love of poetry, et cetera are possible in the registers of inauthenticity and the virtual without ontological or political violence precisely because these registers maintain a “capacity to dwell among contradictions without any violent will to resolution formally modeled” by
“utopian possibility”—the novel will never be a finished product in a finished society
(43). Imbuing the novel with the values of virtual poetics is what allows Lemer to write about the encounter with alterity and to write about what that might feel like without being guilty of appropriation as his novel admits its distance from those it represents. In fact, it insists on preserving that distance while nevertheless attempting to represent the self and other within the proximity of the novel. The characters, their dialogue, and Adam’s response are never complete; the novel remains open along the axis of each equivocation and mistranslation, both of which call attention to what 63 Russell Reising calls “shadow narratives”. Shadow narratives bear the trace of those stories not told but that nevertheless condition the structure of a narrative, and represent the infinite alternatives contained within concrete novelistic discourse, thus
“eliciting counterreadings” to “problematize the very assumptions brought to the aesthetic experience and to reimagine the entire world of the work of art, especially those gestures beyond the works that often disappear as quickly as they catch our attention” (Resising 323). Understanding the other in “chords” does justice to their alterity without refusing to engage in attempts to provisionally represent them. The proximity of the novel gestures toward a contingent social coherence without flattening the other in the service of a closed, totalizing system.
The “pure grammar” (23) of virtual poetics insists that the space of poems or novel structure remain open to the dissolution of order as incomplete architectures that afford the blurring of otherwise neat oppositions: presence/absence, self/other.
Under the arc o f the cello
I open the Lorca at random
I turn my head and watch
The lights slide by, a clearing
Among possible referents
Among the people perusing
The gallery walls, dull glow
O f orange and purple, child 64 Behind glass, adult retreating
I bit hard to deepen the cut
I imagined the passengers
Could see me, imagined I was
A passenger that could see me
Looking up... (Lemer, Atocha, 40).
In this poem, which Adam is convinced to read publicly, “the sonnet” is transformed: stripped of its usual form and expressive capacity, it becomes an instrument of re description that remediates Adam’s experience of his present—readers will recognize that the scenes of translation, of biting his lip to bleed for sympathy, of imagining himself looking at himself on the ground from the fuselage of an airliner from earlier moments in the novel not unlike his “reading” of the tearful tourists performance above. The generic transgression (a broken sonnet within prose fiction) formally reorganizes the experience of novel reading. The poem reflects back on and reorganizes both Adam’s experience in Madrid and the readers experience of the content of the novel. As Adam himself ruminates:
The best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words,
describe what it’s like to read an Ashbery poem; his poems refer to how
their references evanesce. And when you read about reading in the time
of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately. It is as if the
actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other 65 side of a mirrored surface, and you only saw the reflection of your
reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to
attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby
enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the
virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains
beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: “You have it but
you don’t have it./You miss it, it misses you./You miss each
other.” (Lemer 91).
Virtual poetics register literary value and the affective experience of reading poetry that is just beyond reach, indefinitely mediated and illegible on the far side of the mirror. The particularity of its gestures beyond the threshold of apprehension, though, reflects the degree to which art isn’t beautiful or politically emancipating, but how those categories are mutually informing and structure desire. Those poems that best fail—to appropriate Beckett for my own purposes—to manifest the lyrical impulse foreground the threshold of mediation that reader nor writer can cross, but can attend to anyway. Because apprehension is always mediated, one never has access to the real, to the completed poem, to the authentic other. This conception of poetry suggests that meaningful affective and ethical relationships might be made in the encounter with the unreal, the virtual, and the inauthentic. The irruption of these poems within novelistic discourse displaces the efficacy of heteroglossic representation not in order to criticize it, but to amplify its potential. Active readers form relationships with the text that are 66 meaningful, but contingent, as Adam forms relationships with Isabel and Teresa in ways that are meaningful and intimate without demanding their authoritative legibility.
Leaving the Atocha Station is replete with verbal motifs that de-authorize Adam’s narration, heightening the sense of contingency within the novel and further eroding legibility. As the dramatized encounters with art discussed earlier in this section express a divestiture from notions of beauty and authenticity, the narrator self consciously deflates the veracity and expressive facility of his narration with parenthetical comments, such as: “of its symphonic receptivity, ridiculous phrase” or
“felicitous phrase (47; 162). The narrator is always “mumbling verbs [he doesn’t] really know” (143). With less subtly the narrator displays a degree of classic unreliability: “I left the hotel and walked into the sun. Or was it cloudy?” (117). The reflexive and metafictional moments in the novel are not merely recapitulations of post-modernist techniques that expose the textuality of narrative and reality alike, but rather become methods for engendering a space of possibility for infinite re-narration, for new truths and realities; When the narration slides into the third person (as it does multiple times) and modulates from the indicitave to the subjunctive mid-sentence, it is not dissociation as an end that Lemer hopes to achieve, but something de- authorizing: dissociation as pure means; the “dissolved body” is the dissolution of authority and closure (17;47). The dissolved body, or displaced author breaks the self involved and highly reflexive narration—of both his lyric poetry and the homodiegetic 67 first-person kunstlerroman—to make space for ethical and affective relationships with others outside of typical representational modes:
[S]he imbued my body thus, finding every touch enhanced by ambiguity of
intention, as if it too required translation, and so each touch branched out,
became a variety of touches. Her experience of my body, I though, was more
her experience of her experience of her body, of its symphonic receptivity,
ridiculous phrase, and my experience of my body was her experience once
removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever wanted
from my body, such as it was (47).
Whereas Dorothy Hale and Judith Butler read equivocation in Washington Square
Park as a demarcation of the limits of the representability of selves overwritten by discursive and social commands, the corresponding equivocal narration in Leaving the
Atocha Station is a point of departure for reimagining the possible relationship between self and other in the face of those limitations. The “ghostly presence behind my Spanish”, behind all language and conceptions of identity affords a “clearing among possible referents/among the people perusing” for new ethical and affective attachments to be made across languages, across borders, across selves.
II. De-Centered (Authority in Facsimil
Where Leaving the Atocha asks readers to contemplate the role of literature in regard to the individual and in regard to the social, Multiple Choice asks us first, “how 68 and why do we think in terms of the literary?” Alejandro Zambra’s 2014 Facsimil,
translated as Multiple Choice by Megan McDowell in 2016, pulverizes the notion of
genre itself, positioning itself as speaking from and speaking to this radical re-thinking
of generic order. A reading of its English edition cover makes this clear: underneath
the title in bold is an image of a multiple-choice exam answer section with the
following possibilities “Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, All of the above, None of the
above”. Like Leaving the Atocha Station, which exploits the novel’s ability to absorb
other modes and put them into tension, Multiple Choice circumvents traditional
literary forms such that when they appear in the text (we might read some of the
lengthier question and answer sets as poems, perhaps, as we might read the “reading
comprehension” sections as flash or even more straightforward short stories) they
always already subvert generic expectations for reading and thus the apparent power
of genre to determine the reading and meaning-making experience of the text. These
texts are not simply “poems” or “not-poems” but “not not-poems”; they are literary
utterances that necessarily contain their negation, acknowledging their imminent
failure while nevertheless asking readers to attempt to make sense of them.
Furthermore, as it is formatted as a multiple choice examination, readers become physically involved in the meaning making process of reading as they—at least
initially—take up a pencil to “fill out” the exam (deciding which term does not relate
to the group, which word best completes the sentence, et cetera). Reading from a
distance is incommensurate with Multiple Choice’s formal demands, though close 69 reading does not result in “closeness” or knowing the other. The haptic meaning making endeavors of the reader, who crosses out wrong answers, re-writes sentences, et cetera, often go unrewarded. On one hand many of Zambra’s “questions” are ironically unanswerable with the given answer set (see question #9, page 5); on the other, the reader’s desire for author-like control over the meaning of (a question) the text is immediately frustrated as the possible construction of the (correct answer) most meaningful text is transient—alternative textual configurations pulsate in the background challenging the closure any “correct answer” may seem to provide.
In Multiple Choice textual authority itself becomes an object of critique: at first the desire for authority over the text’s meaning literally moves the reader through pages only to reveal itself quite quickly as the impetus for reader’s violent relationship to the text and complicity in a compromised mode of knowledge. By presenting “literature” as an examination, and vice versa, each becomes the undoing of the other as a privileged form of knowledge creation: reading the examination as poetry complicates the rationality and repeatability of the former; reading poetry as an examination reveals readerly desire for dominance over an open form, a desire to actualize what poetry indefinitely defers.
Reading multiple choice, then, becomes less of an exercise in knowing and more a demand to resist the will to knowledge while reading. Rather than—to borrow terms from Felksi’s Uses of Literature—“dig in” and reproduce the kind authoritarianism the text overtly rejects, or “stand back” and concede to meaninglessness that is ultimately 70 disempowering, readers instead are compelled to proceed with what the authors of
“Notes on Metamodernism” call “informed naivete”, to construct possible meanings with full knowledge of those meaning’s contingency and awareness of the problematic power they exert on the text in order to feel their failure and, more importantly, to be attentive to what speaks to them from the interstices, from the flux of failed attempts to come to know what is before them.
The self-consciousness of Multiple Choice draws attention to the relationships between form and desire, and between reading and the social. However, it is not always clear how these relationships, drawn into tension, may contribute to readers’ understanding of their world or to their navigating through it. Christopher Weinberger posits in “Critical Desire and the Novel: Ethics of Self-Consciousness in Cervantes and Nabakov” that: “one of the contributions literature in general makes to ethical theory is that is structures the relationships of ideology, power, subjectivity, and ethics as one of interpretation” (Weinberger 295). In his discussion of how self-conscious novels dramatize the interpretative challenges they themselves pose to readers,
Weinberger claims that critics can make claims about a work’s ethical force on its own terms and suggests that self-conscious fictions “model and invite ethical inquiry”.
Multiple Choice, however, with its tenuous claim to the status of “literature” puts tension on the interpretive act itself. It is a work that refuses to demonstrate the values and limitation of various interpretative strategies, instead demanding of readers a more fundamental reorientation—to not think about how literature might contribute to their 71 sense of ethics or the processes of healing or the development of a politics (what we make of literature) but rather to imagine how re-formulating experience as literature may contribute to their sense of the present (why we make literature/what we make literature of). In ways not entirely dissimilar to Leaving the Atocha Station, Multiple
Choice frustrates the relationships described above, producing a space between discourses, between texts, from which meaning—though not any type of meaning we might be already aware of—may be made.
“You can tell he’s trying to do something. It’s unclear what, but he’s definitely trying to do something” (Zambra 98). This reflexive gesture, made near the end of the work, again typifies the metamodemist notion of reading, of “informed naivete”; readers are aware that something significant is afoot, yet equally aware that that significance is ultimately illegible. They must sustain their efforts to make meaning of this bizarre text with full knowledge that their efforts will never amount to a sense of finality. On the level of the “story”—within the ontology of the exam as such— this possible answer refers to a question regarding the characterization of a father-figure in the incredibly moving prose piece that proceeds it; the line directly calls for the possibility of a sympathetic reading of an authority that has provided nothing but disappointment and proven incapable of anchoring meaning. As it briefly breaks through the level of story and registers as an authorial interruption—where the implied author comments on his work as though he were a reader— it asks the reader to reflect 72 on the type of literary production and reception that might create a sustained condition
of possibility where there was before extreme violence and erasure.
Multiple Choice sees literature as an imperfect, but indispensable, tool for
addressing the violence of dictatorship. Pinochet’s reign is infamous for its insistent
censorship and political disappearances. Memory is an especially complicated notion
in Chilean history, Pinochet’s famously ridiculous remarks in self-defense: “No me
acuerdo, pero no es cierto. No es cierto y si fue cierto, no me acuerdo”. Nevertheless,
Multiple Choice interrogates the authority of memory in an attempt to reinvest it with
a liberatory liberating potential. For example: test question twenty-five prompts the
reader to order five memories—“— “Your father argues with your mother; Your
mother argued with your brother; Your brother argued with your father; It was almost
always cold; That is all you remember”—under the prompt “Nineteen eighty-
something” (Zambra 13). Seemingly glib in its failure to render the prompt with a
degree of specificity ( as in: the 1980’s, or 1984, et cetera), the sentences that follow
fittingly put tension on the nature of memory itself. Does memory have to be specific,
as it would need to be in a court setting, for it to be valid? Need memory necessarily
be temporally ordered? The ahistorical “always cold” and triviality of order of the
many arguments suggest that memory is something more than an ordering of the past
mimetically, but rather a reformulation of one’s past that includes uncertainty and those feelings that might persist in the present. Memory is not a record of the past, here, but an assertion of one’s having a past in the present. 73 Multiple Choice is not only sensitive to how memory, or history, may be important
to overcoming political and personal traumas, but to how memory can reiterate past
trauma. The most moving moment of the “Text #3” the final “reading comprehension
text”. It begins:
Pay no mind, my son, to what I tell you; pay no mind at all. I hope that time, in
your memory, will mitigate my shouting, my inappropriate remarks, and my
stupid jokes. I hope that time will erase almost all of my words, and preserve
only the warm, still murmur of love... And you could even decide, for example,
if it were necessary, to erase me. I don’t mean erase these words, which in and
of themselves are liquid, perishable. Rather, erase me completely, as if I’d
never existed... that’s what life consists of, I’m afraid: erasing and being erased
(Zambra 89).
The prose piece consists of a father’s address to his son in which he apologizes for his
insufficiencies and wrongdoing, and explains why he and his son’s mother separated.
The conversation between father and mother reached the point of no return when they
both, in different instances, declined to accept their son’s new pet dog because they
“already have one”, a reference to the son, ostensibly the “narrator” or Multiple
Choice. It is a story that complicates readers’ assumptions about the nature of
Zambra’s recuperative historical project: to “try to go from the general to the specific,
even if the general is General Pinochet” (Zambra 24). The recovery of history can
serve as the basis of collective healing, though it also presents a different problem: 74 how to break free or work through the historical legacy of violence and repression. “I know that you’ve tried to erase me, and you couldn’t” says the narrator’s father.“I know I have existed for you, in excess. That I have also existed in absence” (Zambra
91). History is a felt experience in this text, full of excessive presence and oppressive absences, and presents a crisis from which any experience of the present must first work through. Multiple Choice offers a number of different responses: text question eighty-eight asks “In your opinion, which email folder would be the most appropriate for a text like this one” and the answer set reads “ Sent messages; Drafts; Inbox;
Spam; Unsent messages” initially trivializing the story—especially as it might be received within contemporary communicative modes, such as email or instant messaging—but also subsequently interrogating the relationship between atonement and texts, between history and the present. Literature’s capacity to contribute to healing is incomplete, insufficient, impossible, but also serves as germane ground for a collective experience, where one could imagine “if only my father were still alive.
Maybe if he were still alive and he told me all of that, I’d be happy. I would think: he’s an asshole, but he’s alive” or, conversely “I would give my father a parrot, but first I would teach it to say: fucking asshole, fucking asshole, fucking asshole” (Zambra 99;
101).
Readers of Multiple Choice are required to consider the latent pain and sincere heartbreak that lie quietly behind the banalities of the quotidian. Question twenty- seven, “A Child” (in the sentence ordering section) asks the examinee to order “You 75 dream that you lose a child; You wake up; You cry; You lose a child; You cry” (Zambra 15). It positions readers in an uncomfortable position: regardless of how they exercise their authority, of how they reorder the text, they cannot wrench themselves free of the trauma before them. Simply turning away, in this case, may be even worse, as turning away turns the death of child into an abstraction, into a game played on the level of narrative discourse, and not a loss on the level of the human.
Authorial control over the sjuzet confines readers to the horrors of the fabula just as control over history, in the section discussed above, offers little relief. This aspect of
Zambra’s project in Mulitple Choice is where is amasses its critical potential: Multiple
Choice indicts any effort undertaken, whether to feel in the present, recuperate a lost history, initiate healing, or any of the minor elements of the text, that partakes in the same dialectic as the oppressors (fathers, Pinochet, et cetera): that is, to satiate desire by enacting power. As means, erasure and violence can only, obviously, reproduce problematic ends. Zambra presents readers with literature that approaches tender subjects with a lyrical facility that is not only moving, but sensitive enough to engender, for a moment, a willingness to concede, to imagine working through and recapturing the past as an instrument toward healing and feeling in the present, only to deflate such moments with triviality, vulgarity, and seeming capitulation to cycles of meaninglessness and violence. Multiple Choice suggests, instead, that readers abandon that impulse and read for the spaces of possibility in the blank spaces and interstices of the text. 76 [Y]ou can erase all of the bad ones, you can erase everyone who has hurt you.
And you can manipulate and distort and freeze the images of us, the ones who
have hurt you but whom you can’t erase. So you can watch us in slow motion,
or normal or sped up. Or maybe you won’t see us at all, but you’ll know we are
there, dragging out ever longer the absurd film of life” (Zambra 95).
Traditionally authored history offers only the illusion of empowerment and as the text reflects and demonstrates, offers, among other things, disappointment, alienation, and one’s complicity with the forces that have determined the present. Rendering the past as a work of art, as is done above, provides for endless re-narrating and re viewing. Metaphorizing life as film, similar to life as poetry or literary criticism or narrative discourse in Leaving the Atocha Station, gives the viewer the power to
“shatter the clean articulation” of those stories that determine experience, to break them apart and manipulate them, to be free to see or not see how their content can be rearranged and put to different use. Question numbers twenty-three and twenty-four are both titled “Silence”, though they have significantly different answer sets. The first reads: “fidelity; complicity; loyalty; conspiracy; cowardice” (Zambra 10). This set certainly partakes in the dictatorial dialect, where something is voiced or not voiced, there is only power and the absence of power. The set seems to confer responsibility for atrocities onto those who fail to participate in such a system, or participate poorly; their inability to voice opposition signifies there, voluntary or involuntary, support of who holds power. The second set, number twenty-four, reads: “silence; silence; 77 silence; silence; silence” (Zambra 10). Here the assumptions of the first are laid bare: voicing opposition still codifies power to those who can speak at the expense of other voices, shifting where power exists, perhaps, but failing to subvert power as an organizing principle. The repetition of silence not only communicates the shared experience of historical violence, but (as the last question in the excluded term/word choice section) undermines the role of the author, and her capacity to dominate a narrative, as central to generative meaning making. Instead, readers must oscillate between the overdetermined history of silence, recognizing the effect of its legacy, while also subverting the desire to speak, instead attuning themselves to the sound of silence and what it may offer between its quiet utterances.
Both Leaving the Atocha Station and Multiple Choice foreground the opacity ethical criticism of literature celebrates as the feature of literary aesthetics best suited to discussions of judgements, morality, and politics. However, as more contemporary philosophers and literary critics note, the novel itself will continually change to meet the sociopolitical demands of its moment. These texts shatter their own articulation— the expression of the self, of collectives, and of expressions of literary genre—to formally and thematically attend to ethical relationships across linguistic, temporal, political, and subjective borders. This attention both reflects the anxiety of our moment and responds to what that anxiety calls for most: new generic spaces for thinking through the complications of the present. These texts make significant inroads for the critic interested in thinking of ethics and politics in literature today, as 78 they not only gesture toward how literary art might illuminate or create alternative spaces, or how literary texts might magnetize our attachment to an otherwise that compels us to constantly challenge the conditions of our present, but also practice a politics that de-centers authority and democratizes literature, preparing for the day it may be used as a vehicle to an alternative future. 79 Conclusion
In 2011, the same year that Faces in the Crowd and Leaving the Atocha Station were originally published, Nancy Armstrong wrote the following statements in an introduction to an issue of Novel: A Forum on Fiction:
We are experiencing a paradigm shift in science, politics, and literature; old
worlds, scientific methods, and forms of mediation are consigned to the
dustbin as new ways of living, managing, and imagining human life seem to
emerge on a daily basis. In years to come, the novels that matter will, I believe,
be those seen as having prepared us for an epistemic shift in how we
imagine ourselves as human beings. The question we confront as scholars of
the novel is thus a straightforward one: What part does the novel play in this
change, or does this change spell the end of the novel by rendering obsolete the
terms in which novels have resolved the conflicts of modem life?
(Armstrong 2011, 8).
A proper literary history might seek to connect the particular aspects of cultural phenomena as they were unfolding during that year to the development of types of concerns I take up in the preceding pages as they manifest themselves in the narrative techniques of Luiselli, Lemer, Zambra, and many other like-minded writers. The works I have assembled and studied here, however, tell a different story. That is, they seek, each in its own way, to work through Armstrong’s final query. As examples of 80 self-conscious fiction, they take up as subject matter the stakes of aesthetic choices and ramify those stakes—to borrow a phrase from Lemer—into the conflicted social worlds of their present.
As Pieter Vermuelen argues in Contemporary Fiction and the End of the Novel, working through the very issue of the novel’s (irrelevancy in contemporary media ecologies opens a space for redescrbing how narratives relate to social life and thus redistributes the types of affective and ethical attentions bound to narrative positions.
I, following Shameem Black in Fictions Across Borders, show how new forms of selfhood and otherness might take form in the representational economies of novels which feature something of a troubled embrace with their formal lineage. By insistently writing stories of the self, representing others, and undermining the novel’s ability to do those very things, these texts suggest new ethical horizons for both contemporary media and social life. By eschewing the authorities of truth, of the author, of identity and recognition as the the basis for relationships to history and to the social, they point to a practice—and by no means a solution—of self-writing and representation that emphasizes the value of ethical responsibility that, as Lemer writes in an article about Robert Walser, “exceeds or undercuts or otherwise complicates its own demand to be disciplined” (Lemer 2013). 81 Works Cited
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