The Most Inconspicuous Marks Theodor Adorno

The Most Inconspicuous Marks Kristina Lee Podesva Theodor Adorno once argued that commas make for the “most inconspicuous marks.” 1 Yet in Antonia Hirsch’s Komma, which reprints Dalton Trumbo’s anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun (1939) and inserts as well as illuminates these previously missing marks, commas are, by splendid contrast, marquee attractions. Set in white against a black background, they act as signals in a dark and obscure landscape. But they are not merely a matter of space, they are also a matter of time, punctuating a metric rhythm that spans the volume’s pages to suggest an abstract, visual score. They form alto- gether a code of alternate legibility, requiring, much like Braille, another sense of language for the perception and comprehension of meaning. Grammatically, the significance of commas lies in their integrative function, which pairs i speakers with dialogue, Charting an improb- unlikely routes forward. “do anything” are the un- 1. Theodor Adorno, “Punctua- compiles inventories of able course through the The nihilistic urges that appetizing items on offer. tion Marks,” trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, The Antioch Review 48 items, and joins clauses timeless, placeless void of underlie militarism leave Who is there? Whom is (1990), 300. to one another. Commas Joe’s existence, Komma without a doubt a legacy there? Of Whom to who of 7 2. Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His do this paradoxically by could be read as a map, its of immovable agony. who to whom. Gun (New York, Philadelphia, and cutting off texts (in writing) commas acting as critical This is a war and war is Through Komma, Hirsch Toronto: J. B. Lippincott, 1939), 163. where pauses suspend signposts that facilitate hell and what the hell and so appears to circumvent 3. Ibid., 181. utterances (in speech). navigation through an to hell with it. Come on boys these limitations. Although Thus, as binding and ominous and totalizing watch this.4 the subject of war and 4. Ibid., 40. isolating agents, they can dark. The gaps between Strikingly, these nihil- the subjectivity of Joe, a 5. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cam- anchor and simultaneously these marks make pos- istic urges are the same critically wounded soldier, bridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008), maroon. sible a kind of measure- impulses that inform the suggest case studies for 122. No matter how far you ment and comparison, gestures and goals of consideration, no one 6. Ibid. are separated from other which lend themselves to the last century’s artistic subject overrides another. people if you have an idea reference and, by exten- avant-garde.5 Boris Groys Rather, it is through an 7. Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, 159. of time why then you are in sion, relationship. This is observes in avant-garde articulation of location and 8. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The the same world with them to say that without shared discourse and practices of duration that relationships Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson you are part of them but if points of reference, there modern art an appropria- emerge, which in actual- and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), you lose time the others go can be no relationships, tion of military language ity constitute a continuous 82–83. ahead of you and you are as Joe himself determines and an advocacy of in-between space that left alone hanging in air lost during his permanent rev- destruction in the name links countless particular Kristina Lee Podesva is Editor at Fillip. to everything forever. 2 erie. Here, an absolute and of producing radically subjectivities: soldier to Limbless, faceless, and cruel autonomy presides new forms that annihilate lover to artist to mother nearly senseless, Joe that renders everything, previous iterations. The to co-worker and so on. Bonham, the protagonist apart from ego, into noth- avant-garde (in this re- While these links extend in in Trumbo’s novel, contem- ing. spect at least) overreaches, countless, complex direc- plates how he is time-less, No confetti no champagne moving beyond the task tions, they cohere around too. In a small, forsaken bottles no yelling no noise at of producing new forms to points in space and time corner of a World War I all.3 “illustrate, laud, or criticize that endow life with military hospital, he lies A less-than-zero-sum war as it did earlier” and meaning. In Cinema 2: The incommunicado, grappling game, war and its tenden- instead becomes an actor Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze with survival, isolation, cies and conditions lead to that “wages war itself.”6 declares that “[s]ubjectivity and sanity by working out invariably Pyrrhic victo- Today, artists no longer is never ours,”8 but what measures of time, piece- ries. For the soldiers and merely “illustrate, laud, or we share is duration, the meal, through painstaking citizens it entangles, dying criticize” war. Unable to experience of time. It is observations. Although represents war’s most compete with the media perhaps by connecting he ultimately succeeds peaceful conclusion, while machine that relays war’s Komma’s most inconspicu- in realizing a provisional surviving pronounces the documents and theatrics ous marks that we are chronometry, it is a lonely grimmest of sentences— to all available audiences, reminded to knit together system, known by no one a limbo in which joining artists are given a kind of a net of relationships wide other than himself, a man the dead and returning to restricted, prix fixe menu enough to catch us in our out of time. the living are remote and where “do nothing” or universal freefall. ii iii Christ Has Come Up From Tucson Maria Muhle The title of Dalton Trumbo’s anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun (1939)1 is derived from the rallying call “Johnny get your gun,” which was meant to encourage young men to enlist in the US army in the late nineteenth and early twen- tieth centuries. The novel itself was directly inspired by a news report about a visit by the Prince of Wales to a soldier who, having lost all of his senses and limbs during World War I, was lying in a Canadian veterans’ hospital. The book tells the story of the young American soldier Joe Bonham, who volunteers for war, leaves his girlfriend behind, and is severely wounded in combat. The narration starts with Joe’s memories of his father’s death, which he associates with the rhythm of a telephone ringing insistently. His inability to get up and an- swer the phone, like in a nightmare, gives way to Joe’s realization of his own present situation: vii “He was a sick man and he would destroy this dream of tions. The lack of commas Within this frame, the won the Special Jury Prize. 1. Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His was remembering things. having no legs. Steamships in the novel emphasizes history of the book and its But unlike the novel, the Gun (New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto: J. B. Lippincott, 1939). All Like coming out of ether. loaves of bread girls Kareen the lack of rhythm in Joe circulation become signifi- film does not formally ad- quotations in the text are from this But you’d think the tele- machine guns books chew- Bonham’s life (“he was cant. Inspired by the story dress the problematics of edition. phone would stop ringing ing gum pieces of wood stone deaf”—that is, he of the Canadian soldier, how to reflect the “point of 2. Ibid., 16. sometime. It couldn’t just go Kareen but thinking of real could not even hear the Trumbo wrote the book view” of someone who is on forever.”2 The narrative things didn’t help because pulse of his own heartbeat) in 1938 and published it reduced to haptic percep- 3. Ibid., 80. unfolds in order to docu- it wasn’t a dream. It was the and therefore marks his the following year, two tion. It is filmed in a rather 4. Only one comma appears in the ment this very fact: that the truth.”3 necessary dependence days after the beginning traditional way, presenting book: “Thanks Rudy, I’ll let you telephone, which is part of The formal peculiarity on the outside world. The of World War II.7 While Joe’s interior monologue know when everything’s finished.” Ibid., 11–12. a dream, will actually go of the narration becomes commas are a metaphor pursuing fiction writing, through voice-over and the on ringing forever, and that plainly visible in these for rhythm—a metaphor Trumbo was also success- exchanges of the medi- 5. Ibid., 233. nobody can stop it pre- enumerations of memo- for the fact that Joe’s fully working as a screen- cal staff through common 6. Ibid., 83. cisely because it belongs ries from Joe’s former life: life among the dead is writer for the film industry dialogues, a narrative to Joe’s imagination and the absence of commas reduced to questions of in Los Angeles and was a strategy that is completely 7. Even though the text was openly 4 against American involvement not to reality, the sounds throughout the novel. This rhythm and structure: of member of the left-wing absent from the novel. in any type of warfare, it won the of which he will never stylistic device has often chasing time as it goes Screen Writers Guild, the These formal concessions American Booksellers Award in hear again. The process of been interpreted as reflect- by, of daily routines precursor to the Writers to the film’s narration fail 1940, a year before the United States finally entered World War II.

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