The (Literary) Special Effect: (Inter)Mediality in the Contemporary US-American Novel and the Digital Age Dissertation zur Erlangung des philosophischen Doktorgrades an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen vorgelegt von Bogna Kazur aus Lodz, Polen Göttingen 2018 Contents 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 3 2 The Question of Medium Specificity in the Digital Age .................................................. 29 3 House of Leaves (2000) and the Uncanny Dawn of the Digital........................................ 39 3.1 Digital Paranoia: Arriving on Ash Tree Lane ........................................................... 39 3.2 Writing about House of Leaves ................................................................................. 43 3.3 Intermedial Overabundance: Taming House of Leaves ............................................. 49 3.4 An “Explicit” Approach to the Digital Age ............................................................... 54 3.5 What Kind of Movie is THE NAVIDSON RECORD? ..................................................... 68 4 In the Midst of the Post-Cinematic Age: Marisha Pessl’s Night Film (2013) .................. 88 4.1 Meant for Adaptation: Night Film and the Fallacy of First Impressions ................... 88 4.2 The Post-Cinematic Reception of Film ..................................................................... 96 4.3 The Last Enigma: Cordova’s Underworld ............................................................... 111 4.4 The Digital Disillusion: Cordova’s Transmedial World ......................................... 122 4.5 Reading Marisha Pessl’s Night Film: A Reconsideration of the Intermedial Gap .. 132 4.6 (Post-)Photography in Night Film ........................................................................... 145 5 “The world’s going virtual anyway”: Verbalizing Post-Photography in Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American (2008) ............................................................................... 153 5.1 Siri Hustvedt’s Intermediality ................................................................................. 153 5.2 Two Worlds Collide: Writers Looking at Pictures .................................................. 158 5.3 Jeff Lane’s Post-Photography .................................................................................. 165 5.4 Erik’s Verbal “Counter-Exhibition” ........................................................................ 177 6 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 186 7 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 204 2 1 Introduction In his 2009 article “Digital Doctoring: Can We Trust Photography?,” Hany Farid describes how the advent of computer software has facilitated deception and made it more commonplace. As a digital forensics expert and professor in computer science, Farid introduces “some recent innovations for detecting digital tampering that have the potential to return some trust to photographs” (98). He has developed computer programs that automatically expose inconsistencies in lighting conditions typically occurring in composites of several photographs. Further, the verifying algorithm serves to reveal cases of re-touching and image cloning, which may occur both in tabloid magazines and in less expected contexts, such as the stem cell research “documentation.” 1 Most interestingly, however, Farid has also developed a program that enables him to differentiate between photographic and computer-generated images (CGI). Hence, he does not only recognize the necessity of detecting traces of digital forgery; Farid also calls for reliable strategies to distinguish between images that haven been taken by actual cameras and those that were completely fabricated inside a computer. To illustrate why such a distinction is necessary in the first place, Farid draws on examples that imply the life realities of alleged victims and perpetrators: The talk is of such notorious court cases in which video evidence of child pornography or police violence was questioned on the basis of the blurred lines between virtual, manipulated, and indexical images. An image can be said to have an indexical relation to the so-called pro-filmic event when it rests on a physical and causal connection to what has occurred in front of the camera, a connection that is traditionally triggered by a photochemical process. In contemporary cinema, this indistinguishability of non-/indexicality is brought about by the increasing occurrence of invisible special effects – digitally fabricated details, which are as realistic and “trivial” as actual recordings. What scholar Lev Manovich terms “elastic reality” and novelist Mark Z. Danielewski describes as a climate of ontological uncertainty can be considered to play a crucial role in the contemporary production and reception of film.2 One may in fact question the necessity of detecting CGI in cinematic fiction given that the latter 1 By “image cloning,” Farid means the practice of duplicating details of the respective image and arranging them in a way that exaggerates their size, volume, or scope. Adnan Hajj, a freelance photographer based in the Middle East, and his photographs of an Israeli bombing serve Farid as an example here: “In order to create more smoke in his photograph, Hajj cloned (duplicated) parts of the existing smoke using a standard tool in Photoshop, a popular photo-editing software. In this case the duplication was fairly obvious because of the nearly identical repeating patterns in the smoke. When care is taken, however, it can be very difficult to visually detect this type of duplication” (Farid 5). 2 See Manovich, „What Is Digital Cinema?“ 8, and Danielewski, House of Leaves. 3 remains fictional regardless of technological details or production circumstances. And yet, specific styles and genres attempt to shatter precisely this kind of certainty. The analog/digital shift has propelled the pseudo-documentary style and even a deliberately misleading mixing of genres and aesthetics. I will further elaborate on this development with respect to the found footage horror genre, which figures prominently in one of my case studies, Danielewski’s “filmic” novel House of Leaves. Concerned with the increasing confusion between recorded and computer-generated images, the novel entertains (future) scenarios that stress the necessity of detecting CGI in what looks like amateur recordings and, even more importantly, of detecting indexicality in what looks like digital synthesis. Hany Farid has discussed technological ways to detect cases of digital manipulation. In this study, I will discuss creative and intermedial ways to raise awareness of the increasingly elastic reality and ontological uncertainty stimulated by film and photography in the digital age. For this purpose, I will look at the films and photographs entertained, referenced, narrated, and partly depicted by contemporary US-American literature. I will thus look at cases in which “the literary medium becomes the background which reflects and exposes the altermedial system and its rules on account of the medial difference” (Rajewsky, Intermedialität 146).3 Literary references to film “raise awareness of the rules of the filmic system, be they conventional and thus valid or invalid, necessary or absurd, and most interestingly, different from or analogous to the literary system” (146).4 Intermedial literature, in other words, exposes developments of the digital age that might go unnoticed for the average viewer. In the realm of this exposure, it produces what I shall refer to as “literary special effects:” filmic evocations that break the rules of linear narrativity and other literary conventions, using the potential of the text in a rather unconventional and striking way. In the wake of developing taxonomies for “intermedial references,” Irina Rajewsky has already described some of these deviations. From her examples, which derive primarily from Italian literature, we learn that some novels act “as if” they were films by verbal evocations of dissolves (98) or simulations of hard cuts introduced by onomatopoetic accentuations such as “jag”5 (94-95). When literary special effects are to lend visibility even to these most ordinary and general aspects of filmmaking, then they become particularly intriguing with regard to the perfected invisibility of certain digital effects and 3 (“das literarische Medium wird [jedoch nach wie vor] zur Folie, die das fremdmediale System bzw. dessen Regeln reflektiert und ausstellt und aus der Mediendifferenz heraus offenlegt”) 4 (“die Regeln des filmischen Systems in ihrer Konventionalität - und damit in ihrer Gültigkeit oder Ungültigkeit, Notwendigkeit oder Absurdität und insbesondere in ihrer Differenz bzw. Analogie zum literarischen System - bewußt gemacht werden”) 5 (“zack”) 4 mechanisms. At the same time, this sort of intermedial tension puts emphasis on the mediality of the novel and its continuing printed manifestation in the digital age. The research focus of my study is thus twofold: First, I will draw on a literary perspective to shed light on photography and film in the digital age. By providing an intermedial reading of three novels – Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Marisha Pessl’s