Alistair Brown

An editorial in the twentieth anniversary issue of the journal Postmodern Culture in 2010 added another voice to mark the gradual retreat of the postmodern. Somewhat defensively, the editors suggested that the journal’s mission had always been “to cultivate theoretical and critical cultural studies of the contemporary period” in general rather than a group of artworks or objects denoted by particular aesthetic attributes. Indeed, postmodernism itself “cannot be understood as a set of stylistic or formal features or attitudes” (Amiran, n. pag.). Postmodernism, then, turns out to be little more than a broad synonym for the present and a pseudonym for the patchwork character of contemporary culture.

The imprecision of the postmodern concept – not itself a new observation, of course, but one given added prominence by being acknowledged in one of its leading journals – is evidenced by the way in which the term continues to be used in relation to video games which, even as they offer fundamentally new models of narrative, are still described as postmodernism’s technological apotheosis. The reasons for this are partly historical, stemming from the high-theoretical moment of the 1980s. Fredric Jameson’s landmark essay "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" noted that “the most influential interpretive option” available to critics at that time was “to grasp the text as a game” (Jameson 143). As Espen Aarseth has observed, it is for this reason that as they grew to prominence video games were not accorded the status of being a new genre in their own right, but merely supplied a confirmatory metaphor for a view of printed texts that pre-existed them (Aarseth 3–5). As long as it talked in Barthesian terms about the death of the author and licensed the reader to act as co-producer of the text, literary theory could situate games within a model that stressed narrative variability.

A patchwork of contemporary culture: can postmodernism be theorised any more precisely than in terms of pastiche and intertextuality?
[Image by ragesoss under a CC BY-SA license]

Such a model is not wholly incorrect, although ludological theory would rightly stress that it is insufficient to give a complete account of how game narrative, unlike written narrative, functions. However, it is important not to presume that games must be always already postmodern simply because their structural features – variability and unpredictability, the blurring of subjectivities between embodied player and virtual avatar – seem to slot within an extant framework. For before we even ask the question “is a particular game postmodern?” it is not at all clear that when we talk about “games” in general we know precisely what it is we are referring to. Perhaps uniquely among media objects, games challenge our attempts to adjudicate between different stylistic and formal qualities so that we can, say, judge one artefact as modernist, another as realist, and another as postmodernist.

When criticism looks at more conventional forms of art and tries to distinguish one aesthetic movement (such as realism) from another (such as modernism or postmodernism), the necessary presumption is that they also have much in common. Robinson Crusoe may have a very different narrative method to Ulysses, but they are both novels or, to use the more elastic term, narratives; thus the same analytical approach can be brought to bear, and through the same approach we are able to discern more granular differences in style. Or in relation to visual art, John Constable’s oil painting Hay Wain may little resemble Jeff Wall’s photograph Destroyed Room, and clearly one belongs to the tradition of realism and the other to surreal postmodernism. However, we can identify such generic shifts only if we first acknowledge that painting and photography are two sides of the same coin, two efforts to strike at or ironically undermine representation through essentially comparable media (a point made in a recent exhibition at the National Gallery).

Similarly, if we sweepingly assert that all video games are postmodern then this implies that running beneath different examples of games there is a common substrate based on which we can judge finer aesthetic differences between examples, or from which we conclude that games are, in general, examples of postmodernist “texts.” However, just how much ground is shared between different video game specimens? A game of bowling on the Nintendo Wii might best be understood in terms of its real-life counterpart, as a sport that coincidentally happens to be digital rather than embodied. But if Wii bowling is best understood in this way, why is it that Call of Duty, which is also a simulation of a real-life activity, cannot be understood as a straightforward replication of actual war? When thinking about game styles, we must acknowledge that different games, though superficially similar, may be better understood according to different models, sometimes from outside the field of video games entirely. Even as we do this, though, we should not impose metaphors from other fields unreflectively. In particular, we need to be especially cautious not to over-extend terms like “narrative” or “text.” A game like Mass Effect, with 250,000 words of dialogue, might well be studied narratologically, but if so it offers a very different type of “narrative” to that of Minecraft in which the only story is that which the player writes for themselves through their own methods of creation.

Spot the difference: whilst different in tone and compsition, John Constable's Hay Wain and Jeff Wall's Destroyed Room both undermine mimetic representation
[Images used under fair dealings provisions]

This is not to say that video games cannot be postmodern, just to stress that we should not unreflectively assume all games are so simply because of the way we engage with them, interactively. The importance of stylistic discernment is best exemplified by considering the development of the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series. Across 15 years (the first game was launched in 1997) different stylistic elements and cultural contexts have come into play at different intervals, with varying postmodern values attending throughout.

Fredric Jameson suggested that whilst modernist artists consciously alienated themselves from the capitalist world in order to posit a more utopian alternative, postmodern art unselfconsciously works with the same economic codes as the society in which it is produced. This particular way of defining the postmodern certainly seems to apply to GTA. The series is produced by a Scottish developer, Rockstar, but is set in America, whilst running on hardware made predominantly in the Far East. At a material level, GTA is an unashamed product of global capitalism even as it seems narratively to critique it (for example, San Andreas implies that crime provides the only way for an African-American to achieve the material success demanded by the advertising, Hollywood-esque culture in which he is saturated). Yet just because the material distribution and manufacture of a game like GTA is globalised and ironically conflicted, it is not particularly useful to say, pace Jameson, that it is postmodern by definition. Indeed, one could argue that the series demonstrates an increasing self-awareness with regards to its own postmodernity, which in turn implies that the earlier iterations are less straightforwardly canonised as such.

The 1997 game gave players the opportunity to recreate, in a cartoonishly hyperbolised way, moments from iconic gangster films. Famously, commentators and politicians accused the early GTA games of inculcating violence in players. They failed to notice that the early games simply replicated representations of violence which were already out there in American cinema, but here legitimated as the work of geniuses such as Quentin Tarantino or Francis Ford Coppola. However, as the games became accused of causing the violence that they merely reflected back at society, GTA – particularly San Andreas (2004) and GTA IV (2008) – took this up in an anarchistic spirit. By parodying chat radio and hyperbolic Republican politicians on the in-car stereo, GTA showed that discussions of violence have become commercialised, a selling point for shock-jock DJs and the right-wing media. If anything it is the trivialising of politics, not the objects like GTA that politicians cheaply criticise, which is to blame for a moral malaise. In this Baudrillardian feedback loop, moral values are not merely represented in fiction, but are shown to be always already constructed as a capitalised discourse. Rather than being a homogenous, catch-all definition, the emphasis of the postmodern shifts to become increasingly conscious: firstly the game is postmodern mainly because of the economic base from which it arises, and latterly because it becomes ironically aware of that base, in particular the commodification of politics which it both exemplifies and critiques.

Should we assume all video games are postmodern because of our interaction with them? Grand Theft Auto demonstrates an increasing self-awareness of its own status as "postmodern"
[Image by Silvio Sousa Cabral under a CC BY license]

Despite this subtle flow even within a single series of games, efforts to hegemonise the medium in general persist. Recently, in order to deal with the rise of interactive culture, and in an essay which declares postmodernism dead as a consequence of it, Alan Kirby has suggested that we should develop the idea of the pseudo-modern:

Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised…Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all “texts,” whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener…Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular player (Kirby, n. pag.).

Kirby argues that the essential feature of the pseudo-modern text is that it is non-reproducible because it is affected by the audience. Yet far from escaping the postmodern, such a definition rehearses the same old problem. Video games are by definition pseudo-modern because they are interactive, and because the same narrative can never be replayed twice. By contrast, only certain examples of other media are pseudo-modern: X-Factor, responding to the direction of an audience, may be, but a conventional radio drama is not. Surely, though, if any definition of an aesthetic is to be discerning it needs to apply selectively. To imply that by virtue of the medium on which they run all games are pseudo-modern but only some works of television are is clearly problematic.

It is not my aim here to construct an alternative taxonomy of game styles or sub-genres. It is indeed not at all clear where one would begin with such a system of classification. Again this is because unlike the novel, music or most visual art, the medium upon which games run is so variable, and the medium uniquely predetermines the kinds of messages that are available. Should games be classified first according to their platform? Mobile games, for example, have specific technical possibilities and presume different audience needs which substantially determine the types of graphical presentation and experiences they aim to portray. Should games be classified according to their period? This would seem to be unhelpful. After all, it is quite natural that any game on the ZX Spectrum will be less “realistic” (should we wish to apply this term as part of our attempt to categorise style) than that on an Xbox but this does not necessarily mean that an Xbox game (such as a platformer) is generically different to its Spectrum counterpart; by contrast two Xbox games chosen at random from the same period may be wildly different to each other. It is therefore inadequate to assume that video games are postmodern by virtue of something innate in the medium (namely, interactivity) when the types of interactive experiences vary so much, sometimes dependent on hardware and at other times on conscious design decisions.

Narratively-driven games like L.A. Noire blur easy distinctions between cinema and conventionally interactive videogames
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]

Yet dealing with these challenges and offering some finer-tuned judgements of game style will become increasingly important as, weirdly, games start to turn full cycle and return more closely, and genuinely, to resemble models of previous media such as text and film. Narratively-driven games such as Heavy Rain, L.A. Noire, and the forthcoming Beyond: Two Souls sit somewhere between passively observed movies and conventionally interactive videogames. The player shapes the path of the narrative, acted by very convincing digital models, and it is narrative and not unrestrained violence, points scoring, or level completion which is central to the player’s experience as in a film. By the postmodern or pseudo-modern definition something like L.A. Noire would be seen as a radical and ironic pastiche of cinematic noir principally because it is (but what else could it hope to be as a game?) interactive. The medium predominates the message. However, arguably the best way to situate L.A. Noire is not as a parody of noir but as a natural continuity that just happens to be instantiated on a different platform. Of course, as ludological theorists would point out, we cannot simply study games as if they are another form of “flat” narrative like a film but rather as structured programs designed to encourage our involvement. Nevertheless, we have to be prepared to ally games to established forms of aesthetic discourse; LA Noire could be seen as retrogressively noir in an aesthetic sense before it is proleptically postmodern or pseudo-modern in its interactive structure.

This, I would suggest, is why those of us emerging from the cult of the postmodern need to return to the basic work of analysing “stylistic or formal features or attitudes” of individual aesthetic objects – something the Postmodern Culture editorial claims was not the interest of postmodern theory, even though to speak of postmodern culture implies that all artefacts of modernity (such as video games) are potentially postmodern due to some shared style. At some early evolutionary point, periodic or generic labels offer a generative power, denoting and thereby inspiring a genuinely new movement; yet as the avant garde becomes mainstream, the label starts to suffer from a predictive fallacy so that everything of the present is assumed to belong to it. This is what is happening now – perhaps has been happening almost as soon as postmodernism began. In video games, however, we have a genuinely new departure. Studies of game culture are returning to the aesthetic, to formal features, to figure out what differentiates one game from another. As the new discipline emerges, as theorists attempt to define and understand the variety of game narratives and methods, this work will best be done outside of the looming shadow of postmodernism.

CITATION: Alistair Brown, "Are Video Game Narratives Postmodern?," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2013): n. pag. Web. 13 May 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.3.01

Dr Alistair Brown is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, teaching courses on the arts and literature, and a Postdoctoral Teaching Assistant in English at Durham University, where he also edits the impact blog Research in English At Durham. His PhD on Demonic Fictions: Cybernetics and Postmodernism was completed in 2009. 

Works Cited:

Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Print.

Amiran, Eyal. “Preface: PMC at 20.” Postmodern Culture 21.1 (2010): n. pag. Web. 26 Mar. 2013.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Print.

Kirby, Alan. “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond.” Philosophy Now (2006): n. pag.: http://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond (accessed 11 May 2013).

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Deborah Lilley

In Edgelands (2011), Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts explain their intention to ‘put aside our nostalgia for places we’ve never really known’ and instead seek out ‘complicated, unexamined places’ and ‘see them afresh’ (10). Their collection of nature essays forms part of a recent proliferation of contemporary nature writing in Britain that is being written and read in conjunction with environmental concerns and in contrast to conventional interpretations of the form. As Jason Cowley suggests in his introduction to a 2008 Granta issue devoted to the topic, new nature writers ‘share a sense that we are devouring our world … but they don’t simply want to walk into the wild, to rhapsodise and commune: they aspire to see with a scientific eye and write with literary effect’ (9).

Farley and Symmons Roberts attempt to highlight ‘an overlooked England’ that exists ‘between our carefully managed wildernesses’ ‘with no obvious artistic or literary analogue’ (10). Resisting prescribed and pristine versions of nature, in chapters that run from ‘Paths’ to ‘Landfill’, ‘Wasteland’ to ‘Woodland’, they explore, as Marion Shoard discusses, the ‘interfacial landscape’  between the urban and the rural (Shoard 2002: 1). However, despite the post-pastoral character of their locations, idealising and idyllizing tendencies can be picked up in the celebratory style of their explorations.

Understood as the ‘acute longing for familiar surroundings’ ("nostalgia, n.". OED Online), a sense of nostalgia can be detected in the seemingly unquestioning transplantation of pastoral’s effects onto a determinedly un-pastoral landscape. As Robert Macfarlane comments in a review for the Guardian, in their efforts to negotiate the ‘routine prejudices’ that inform conceptions and representations of natural landscapes, Farley and Symmons Roberts appear to ‘also install replacement biases and nostalgias of their own’ (2011). Is their depiction of these post-pastoral landscapes limited by their celebratory approach, relocating the pastoral idyll and effectively reinstating the nostalgia they seek to avoid by celebrating and still not really knowing the places they describe?

Representing nature: nostalgia is frequently considered to be sentimental and escapist
[Image by Mary.Do under a CC BY-NC-ND license]

Described variously as ‘sentimental’ (Lasch 1984: 65), ‘elitist’ and ‘escapist’ (Lowenthal 1989: 25), nostalgia has been understood to ‘palliate present inequities and sanctify traditional privileges’ (Tannock 1995: 454): as the editors of a special issue of the journal Memory Studies on the topic introduce it, ‘nostalgia is always suspect’ (Atia and Davies, 2010: 181). However, does nostalgia always signify ‘withdrawal from any full response to an existing society’ (Williams 1973: 140)? In a recent interview for Green Letters, Macfarlane identifies elsewhere in contemporary nature writing ‘a keen cognisance of the dangers, but also the opportunities of nostalgia’ (2013: 80).

Nostalgia’s multiple and contradictory interpretations emerge from what Linda Hutcheon refers to as its ‘semantic slippage’ (Hutcheon 2000) away from its original usage in medical terminology. As innumerable commentators on the topic have noted, ‘nostalgia’ was coined by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in 1688 to describe a potentially fatal mental and physical malaise associated with homesickness, deriving from the Greek ‘nostos’: ‘a homecoming or homeward journey’ and ‘algos’, ‘denoting types of pain’ ("nostalgia, n.". OED Online). Subsequently the uses of the term have become abstracted from the ‘spatial/geographical separation’ of homesickness, referring instead towards a ‘temporal one’ (Rubenstein 2001: 7). Without the possibility of the remedy of relocation available to Hofer’s patients, nostalgia has been reinterpreted as an ‘incurable condition’ (Boym 2007: 8):  the ‘familiar surroundings’ sought after belonging to an imagined past.

Accordingly, the unbridgeable gap between perspective and object in nostalgia means that the representation of the past depicted is irrevocably tied to the present. On the one hand, this is potentially obfuscatory: turning away from the present towards an imagined past and using that past to reframe the present. While Davis suggests that ‘the past thus conjured up is, to be sure, largely an artefact of the present’ (Davis 1989: xvi), Boym’s description of nostalgia as a ‘double exposure … of home and abroad, past and present’ perhaps more accurately conveys the illusionary nature of its practices (2007: 7). Rather than blurring together past and present, nostalgia focuses the version of the past captured according to the specifications of the present. Emphasising the blinkered viewpoint of nostalgically adjusted images of the past, Sales suggests that ‘reflection breeds selection’ (Sales 1983: 16), a process that Hutcheon refines as ‘sanitiz[ing] as it selects’ (Hutcheon 1998: n. pag.).

Christmas Pastoral: can a futural dimension to nostalgia be unearthed, recovering the desire for home?
[Image by Puzzler4879 under a CC BY-NC license]

Yet, compelled by environmental concerns in the present, does a backward look towards the past in contemporary nature writing necessarily exclude consideration of the future? Can a futural dimension to nostalgia be uncovered, or even exploited? Tannock suggests on the other hand that ‘nostalgia [...] can equally function as retrieval [...] Nostalgia here works to retrieve the past for support in building the future’ (1995: 458), and Boym has written that ‘nostalgia, in my view, is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well. The fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the future’ (2007: 9). In her influential differentiation between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia, Boym identifies in the latter a stronger focus upon the ‘algia’ or longing component of the form; rather than emphasising the concept of a ‘nostos’ or home, this version of nostalgia addresses the desire for that home, and the form and effects of such longing. (2007: 13) Within ‘reflective’ nostalgia, for Boym it is possible to explore ‘ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones … taking time out of time and [...] grasping the fleeing present.’ (2007: 13-14)

Contemporary nature writing presents an opportunity to reconnect some of the meanings of nostalgia, addressing a perceived estrangement from our environment through examination of our surroundings in search of new or renewed ways of understanding and relating to nature. Discussing the limitations of Edgelands, Marion Shoard suggests that ‘the edgelands now need something beyond a merely subjective celebration of their identity’ (2011). The importance of ‘learn[ing] to see these zones’, and to ‘see them afresh’ stressed by Farley and Symmons Roberts must be complimented by the importance of examining the ways that we see them.

Expected landscapes: Kathleen Jamie places "familiar surroundings" alongside social and ecological changes to the Hebridean island of Coll 
[Image by blmiers under a CC BY-NC-SA license]

Addressing edgelands of a different kind, in Findings (2005) Kathleen Jamie contrasts her expectations of the apparently wild landscape of the Central Highlands with the realisation that its present composition betrays the traces of previous human activity. Gazing upon a deserted hillside, Jamie attributes ‘piles of grey stones’ to the glacial shaping of the land. Looking more closely, though, she comes to find the piles connected by a path, leading between ‘green knolls’ and not stones but the ‘gable-ends’ of the remains of ancient shepherd’s ‘shielings’ (2005: 120). Neither the imagined wild of the island or the imagined lives of its former inhabitants are emphasised here: the ‘familiar surroundings’ of an expected landscape are placed alongside the social, political and ecological changes that have shaped the island’s past and influence its future. The desire to see the landscape and the past a certain way is open to question, as is the relationship of such desires to the land itself.

Closer to home, in Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain (1999) Roger Deakin contrasts the redirected River Lark with an imagined version of its previous state: ‘I stood outside the Bury St Edmunds Tesco. Here, the Lark had been treated with something less than reverence as it flowed through the forecourt car park [...] The hapless Lark, which once meandered gently through water meadows here, had been neatly packaged in an outsized concrete canyon. No water vole would dream of venturing here, nor otter, purple loosestrife or figwort’ (2000: 67). Questioning the adaption of the watercourse, Deakin works around a straightforward nostalgic contrast between then-and-now, lamenting not the loss of the ancient river but instead opening up considerations of its consequences.

Can nostalgic representations of the natural environment address our relationship with the environment or act as agents of change? 
[Image by Orin Zebest under a CC BY license]

In these examples, nostalgia is invoked to address our relationship to our environment, rather than simply to alleviate its effects. Here, it is used to question both our conception of ‘familiar surroundings’ and the ‘longing’ that conjures them. Further, the analytical approaches to the use of nostalgia allow the unfolding of the landscape in spatial and temporal senses. A version of the ‘opportunities of nostalgia’ proposed by Macfarlane can be found here. Both the invocation of nostalgia and its intended effects in this case appear to be active rather than passive; the intention is not to restore or simply make visible the connections between the past and the present, but to explore them.

In a similar way, Davies and Atia redefine nostalgia as ‘a force that complicates, rather than one that simplifies’ (2010: 181); a desire framed by Nicholas Dames as a critical switch towards a ‘purposeful functionalism’, revealing ‘the therapeutics, rather than the diagnostics, of nostalgia.’ (2010: 274). Fredric Jameson has argued that when coupled with self-awareness, nostalgia can act as an agent for change: ‘there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other’ (1971: 82). Understood in these senses, the appearance of nostalgia in new nature writing illustrates the different ways that places can come to be known.

CITATION: Deborah Lilley, "Recovering Nostalgia in Nature Writing," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2013): n. pag. Web. 13 May 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.3.03

Deborah Lilley is a final year PhD Candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London working in the field of contemporary literature and theory. Deborah co-convenes the Literary and Critical Theory Seminar series at the Institute of English Studies, University of London and is a member of the Editorial Board for Royal Holloway's new ejournal Exegesis. 

Works Cited:

Atia, Nadia and Jeremy Davies. ‘Nostalgia and the Shape of History.’ Memory Studies 3 (3) (2010): 181-186, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750698010364806

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

Boym, Svetlana. ‘Nostalgia and its Discontents.’ The Hedgehog Review, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).

Cowley, Jason. Granta: The Magazine of New Writing 102: The New Nature Writing (London: Granta, 2008).

Dames, Nicholas. ‘Nostalgia and its Disciplines: A Response.’ Memory Studies 3 (3) (2010):  269-275, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750698010364820

Davies, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday (New York: Macmillan, 1979).

Deakin, Roger. Waterlog (London: Vintage, 2000).

Farley, Paul and Michael Symmons Roberts. Edgelands (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011).

Hutcheon, Linda. ‘Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern,' University of Toronto English Library, 19 January 1998: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html [accessed 11 may 2013].

Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).

Jamie, Kathleen. Findings (London: Sort Of Books, 2005).

Lasch, Christopher. ‘The Politics of Nostalgia,’ Harper's Magazine (November 1984): 65-70

Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Macfarlane, Robert. ‘Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts: A Review,’ The Guardian, 19 February 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/19/edgelands-farley-symmons-roberts-review [accessed 11 May 2013].

Rubenstein, Roberta. Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2001).

Shoard, Marion. ‘Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wildernesses: A Review,’ The Guardian, 6 March 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/06/edgelands-england-farley-roberts-review [accessed 11 May 2013].

Shoard, Marion. ‘Edgelands’ in Jennifer Jenkins, ed. Remaking the Landscape (London: Profile Books, 2002).

Stenning, Anna. ‘Interview with Robert Macfarlane.’ Green Letters 17 (1) (2013): 77-83, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2012.750849

Tannock, Stuart. ‘Nostalgia Critique’, Cultural Studies 9 (3) (1995): 453-64, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502389500490511

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

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Christina Scholz

[Caption] “Gaze long into an abyss… the abyss also gazes into you.”

Squid: “Poor Nietzsche. Everyone always quotes that bit. But they always leave off what comes just before. ’He’ – or she – ‘who fights with monsters should look to it that he doesn’t become a monster.’ (Miéville & Santolouco: Dial H #4)

With DC’s “New 52” reboot of Dial H China Miéville has re-entered the genre of comics after a guest episode of Hellblazer and a much-discussed but ultimately rejected pitch for Swamp Thing (cf. Narcisse). The original series Dial H for Hero followed the escapades of a series of ordinary humans who were granted temporary superpowers by dialling the letters H-E-R-O in sequence on a mysterious Dial (cf. Sunu). The challenge for Miéville consists in working with an already established universe and taking the narrative to new and unexpected places while staying faithful to what’s already there (cf. Narcisse). Moreover, superhero comics have long predominated the genre, and while they enable the writers and artists to explore extreme scenarios like war or natural disaster, superheroism has often been used as a deus ex machina device, which implies a view of superhero comics as inherently escapist. Various graphic novels such as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen have challenged and critiqued this notion from within the medium. Erich Origen and Gan Golan’s The Adventures of Unemployed Man, which features heroes like Everyman and Wonder Mother and such villains as the Just Us League and the Invisible Hand, depicts paranormal characters as overt political metaphors. However, it is being advertised as comic relief, which poses the question whether it even aims at providing an anti-escapist alternative.

Jeffrey J. Kripal defends comicbook superhumans to some extent. He speaks of superpowers and the metamorphosis of the human form as tropes taking up mythical themes from the religious imagination (Kripal 1). Underneath the mythical layers, he implies, elemental truths can be found. Additionally, we must take into account that religious imagery is directly related to the sublime. As China Miéville explains, the ecstatic element of the encounter with the sublime comprises both joy and fear. There is always a chance that the awe experienced by the viewer or protagonist can tip over into horror (cf. VanderMeer). Superhero comics featuring a protagonist who has acquired superhuman powers rather than being born with them enter a special relationship with this notion of the sublime. In Dial H the hero faces the challenge of never completely surrendering to the supernatural element in order to not let it usurp or erase his identity (cf. van ‘t Zelfde). Furthermore, Kripal argues, superpowers can be understood as “a dramatic physical manifestation of the meaning and force of consciousness itself” (Kripal 2). Consciousness and popular culture are deeply interconnected (Kripal 5). Thus, the ways in which ordinary humans interact with the supernatural, the Weird sublime, impart information about (the limits of) human consciousness and human possibilities. In Dial H Miéville introduces an interesting new take on superheroism, implying that there is a risk of developing an addiction to superpowers and of losing one's own identity in the process. This notion is reinforced by the complex interplay between the storyline and corresponding page design and panel composition, directing or deliberately breaking up the page flow.

Boy Chimney: China Miéville's reboot of DC's Dial H injects superheroism with the Weird sublime 
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]

Comic panels can to some degree be analysed like frames of film (cf. Kripal ix). However, while film is a temporal medium, comic books are a spatial medium. Temporal effects must therefore be dealt with using page design and panel composition. Establishing the genre (and reading process) of comicbooks as related to Umberto Eco’s concept of the Open Work, Levin and Albright explain: "Comics, at every moment, ask the reader to contribute meaning and interpretation. [I]n that white gutter between panels, the comic reader switches from passive viewer to active participant in the construction of meaning" (Levin/Albright, n. pag.). Every time there is an indicator that interaction between characters is taking place outside the physical page, this interaction exists only in the imagination of the reader. “The reader is asked to become the performer of the strip” (Levin/Albright, n. pag.).

Page design and panel composition is prominently about directing the reader’s eyes and attention (cf. Czap). A related effect is the pacing of a story by pacing the reading process. For example, cause and effect can both be depicted in a single panel to convey the idea of witnessing time pass through action in a single unmoving image. Thus, a whole fight between two or more comicbook characters can take place within a single panel. Ed Piskor illustrates this with a panel from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, explaining that “the action would probably take as much time to occur as reading the image from left to right” (Piskor). Similarly, the breaking up of panels results in a breaking up of the page flow. This technique can be used to deliberately cause a sense of confusion and disorientation in the reader. In the context of the interrelation of popular culture and human consciousness, the establishing or dissolution of framed panels gains additional implications. One of the basic functions of the human mind and of the categorising mechanisms we subsume under the term of “culture” is imposing order on the world in order to be able to deal with its unknowability and incalculable chaos. In comicbooks, the individual frames bordering panels impose order and keep things in place. When the mind goes, when human consciousness gives way (at times to other, alien forms), frames vanish.

In The Courtyard Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows use rigid programmatic framing to illustrate the protagonist’s psychotic break. Especially the last pages’ echoing of the beginning in a new horrific context conveys a bleak inescapability. Most significantly, the frames cut off above the atrocities mentioned in the captions, and the reader’s imagination must fill in those lacunae. In contrast to this, the hallucination scenes consist of images running into each other without any borders or frames.

Filling in the gaps: Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows' use of rigid framing in The Courtyard invites the reader to imagine what has happened 
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]

Neil Gaiman, in collaboration with various graphic artists, uses a similar technique in Sandman to hint at the traumatic backstory of the character of Delirium (who used to be Delight). One key scene, clearly reveals an undercurrent of sexual violence, implying that the chocolate people, treated as objects, are capable of experiencing “fear” in a sexualized content (Gaiman et al: Brief Lives). Again, as long as Delirium imposes mental control, the panels are repetitively and rigidly framed. When her backstory is revealed, in the moment of trauma, mental breakdown and the retreat of logic, panels are broken up, invade other panels, everything looks broken and scribbled, all styles intermingle in a chaotic burst. Nothing makes sense anymore. Finally, in the last bit of empty black space before the story ends, Delirium, now transformed, reinstalls frames – and an order that speaks of trauma and the inadequacy of representation: “I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence” (Gaiman et al: Endless Nights).

The moment of trauma: Neil Gaiman's Sandman series reveals Delirium's mental breakdown in vivid, multi-stylstic graphic form
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]

The first page of Dial H #1 serves to orient us. “Littleville,” the captions say, “Gotta love it. It’s had better days. But who hasn’t?” (Miéville & Santolouco, Dial H #1), thus establishing a meta-discourse relating to the subgenre of superhero comics as well as positioning the character of Nelson Jent, our “most unlikely hero”, in the larger context of a failing economy. So far, he has had little control over events, if any. He is depicted as an overweight, unemployed, chain-smoking wreck of a man who has recently suffered a heart-attack and who claims (with a maniacal look on his face) that all that he wants is a distraction (Miéville & Santolouco, Dial H #1). This suggestion reinforces the notion that superhero comics are often escapist fantasies, even before the main plotline is established. In the moment of Nelson’s first transformation, the theme of control is firmly established. Suddenly he has an arsenal of random superpowers that he can call up whenever a problem presents itself. Simultaneously he runs the danger of developing an addiction to them, and of losing his own identity in the process. In order to stress the destabilizing experience of trading in one's identity for a series of bizarre alter egos that range from composite monsters to the abstract and decidedly non-human, the story is told in sudden chaotic bursts and flashbacks rather than chronologically. In the beginning the reader only knows what Nelson knows, which means that his superpowers and their source remain a complete mystery. Mateus Santolouco’s visuals add to the sense of confusion and destabilisation. Nelson’s first metamorphosis is marked by an extreme disruption of the page flow. Orderly panels are replaced by a mosaic of fragments, like a chaotic stained glass window or a weird spiderweb. Nelson’s alter ego, Boy Chimney, is depicted from multiple angles (including axis-jumps between frames, to use another film analogy). The spiderweb reference becomes especially important when Boy Chimney invokes his special power, speaking in a disjointed, grammarless stream of consciousness that recalls the utterly alien character of the Weaver from China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station. He is also able to see everything happening in the city, as in the Weaver’s World Web.

Stream of consciousness: speaking in disjointed, grammarless speech Dial H's Boy Chimney is depicted from multiple angles and recalls Miéville's literary character of the Weaver [Image used under fair dealings provisions]

The breakdown of the panels was mentioned in his script, Miéville says, but “the (terrific) artist took it to a much greater degree than even I'd imagined. That's one of the great pleasures of this medium, is that the collaboration ends up making things further and better than one originally imagines” (China Miéville, private correspondence).

In issue #3 Nelson meets his future mentoress Roxie, who always dresses in the cloak and mirror-mask of “Manteau”, regardless of what powers the dials give her.

[illustration: “Who are you this time, anyway? Extinguishess?” - “No. No. I’m Manteau. That’s important. You better learn how important that is.”]

At Roxie’s we learn that Nelson retains some memories that are not his own but belong to the superheroes whose identities he borrowed. Roxie explains: “The cloak, the mask… It’s not just disguise. This is what keeps me here. No matter what each new memory in my head tells me. I know my name already. Manteau” (Miéville & Santolouco, Dial H #3). Nelson would profit from using the same method: “Listen. You have to get this in your head. It was… always you. And if you’re going to do this… you have to remember that. Otherwise… you’ll be lost” (Miéville & Santolouco, Dial H #3).

When Nelson unexpectedly changes into a female superheroine, he realizes that his random transformations are not necessarily restricted to his own gender. The way Miéville chose to treat this topic is an illustration of his opinion that gender bending is nothing new in comics (cf. Narcisse) as well as a commentary on misogyny in general:

Gender Bending: Miéville's recurring metacommentary on the broken Dials allows the reader to question superhero myths
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]

Manteau goes on to explain something about the Dials, introducing Miéville’s interpretation of their mechanism (that was never before even hinted at):

“You think these things were designed to turn us into crazy stuff like this? Like a damned twig woman? Newsflash – the Dials are always broken. Yours is extra messed up right now, true, so I don’t know how long She-Nelson’s going to last. But we have someone to rescue. So woman up.” (Miéville & Santolouco, Dial H #3)

In accordance with the recurring meta-commentary established by Miéville, the assumption that the Dials have always been broken also lets us question superhero myths in general. Moreover, as we learn more about the origins and nature of the Dials in a special issue numbered #0, the moral question of possible identity theft is raised. The tentative backstory is based upon a many-worlds theory; superpowers are taken from beings from another dimension without their permission or knowledge (cf. Miéville & Burchielli, Dial H #0). This contextualisation redefines the acquisition of superpowers as an act of theft, or rather of “choice-theft” (another possible reference to Perdido Street Station). It shows us once more that comics are a unique form of literature that can be used for self-referential and anti-escapist approaches towards literature and culture and raise important questions concerning humanity and ethics. If superpowers represent tools or weapons we humans should not wield – they can, for example, be read as weapons of Mass Destruction – we have to ask ourselves what cause, if any, justifies their use – and ultimately, whether we are authorized to use them at all, and if so, at what cost.

CITATION: Christina Scholz, "Identity and Consciousness in Dial H," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2013): n. pag. Web. 13 May 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.3.02

Christina Scholz is currently writing her PhD thesis on China Miéville’s fiction. Her Master’s thesis, Thanateros: (De)Konstruktion von männlichen Heldenbildern im Mainstream-Film, has been published by AV Akademikerverlag in 2012. 

Works Cited:

Czap, K. “Art of Comics Issue #3: Page Design” Art of Comics, URL (9 July 9th 2010): http://kevinczap.com/artofcomics/2010/07/art-of-comics-issue-3-page-design/

Irvine, A. “We Are Not Alone: Storytelling and Comic Books.” Works In Progress, URL (Summer 1997): http://www.alanirvine.com/wip/types/notalone.htm

Gaiman, N. & J. Thompson & V. Locke and D. Giordano & D. Vozzo & T. Klein & D. McKean. The Sandman: Brief Lives. The Sandman Vol. 7 (New York: Vertigo, 1994).

Gaiman, N. & B. Sienkiewicz. “Chapter 5: Delirium. Going Inside.” The Sandman: Endless Nights (New York: Vertigo, 2003).

Kripal, J. J. Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Levin/Albright: “The Open Panel.” Levin/Albright: Comics and Tele Vision, URL (27 November 2011): http://levinalbright.com/category/comic-theory/

Miéville, C. Perdido Street Station (London: Macmillan, 2000).

Miéville, C. & M. Santolouco. Dial H #1: “A Most Unlikely Hero!” (New York: DC Comics,  Jul 2012).

Miéville, C. & M. Santolouco. Dial H #2: “Power Up?” (New York: DC Comics, Aug 2012).

Miéville, C. & M. Santolouco. Dial H #3: “Disconnected!” (New York: DC Comics, Sept 2012).

Miéville, C. & M. Santolouco. Dial H #4: “Hollow Inside!” (New York: DC Comics, Oct 2012).

Miéville, C. & R. Burchielli. Dial H #0. (New York: DC Comics, Nov 2012).

Miller, F. & K. Janson & L. Varley. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 2002).

Moore, A. & D. Gibbons & J. Higgins. Watchmen (New York: DC Comics, 2008).

Moore, A. & J. Burrows. The Courtyard. Neonomicon Collected (Rantoul, IL: Avatar Press, 2011).

Narcisse, E. “Fantasy Author China Miéville Discusses Random Superpowers, DC Comics’ Dial H for Hero and Video-Game God Mode.” Kotaku, URL (17 April 2012): http://kotaku.com/5902776/fantasy-author-china-mieville-discusses-random-superpowers-dc-comics-dial-h-for-hero-and-video+game-god-mode

Origen, E. & G. Golan. The Adventures of Unemployed Man (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010).

Piskor, E. “The Art Of Cause and Effect In A Solitary Comic Panel.” Wizzywig Comics, URL (27 June 2010): http://www.wizzywigcomics.com/?p=91

Sunu, S. “China Miéville Revives ‘Dial H’ for DC Comics.” Comic Book Resources, URL (12 Jan 2012): http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=36381

VanderMeer, J. “China Miéville and Monsters: ‘Unsatisfy me, frustrate me, I beg you.’” Weird  Fiction  Review,  URL  (20  March  2012): http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/china-mieville-and-monsters-unsatisfy-me-frustrate-me-i-beg-you/

van ‘t Zelfde, J. "The Politics Of Dread – an interview with China Miéville." The Continuous Partial Everywhere, URL (04 Feb 2013): http://juhavantzelfde.com/post/41946337964/the-politics-of-dread-an-interview-with-china

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CITATION: Martin Paul Eve, "DeLillo, Aesthetics, The Cold Iraq War," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2013): n. pag. Web. 13 May 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.3.04

Dr Martin Paul Eve is Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. He is a Project Director of the Open Library of Humanities, a member of the steering committee for JISC's OAPEN-UK project, Chief Editor of Orbit, the open-access peer-reviewed e-journal on the writings of Thomas Pynchon, and is Online Editor of Alluvium.

Works Cited:

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Marianne Corrigan and Ash Ogden

As our lives become more networked, people are engaging more and more with structures. But they are not merely inhabiting these structures – they are playing with them. […] Systems only become meaningful as they are inhabited, explored and manipulated by people. In the coming century, what will become important will not be just systems, but human systems (Zimmerman 2009: 27). 

In his essay ‘Gaming Literacy’, Eric Zimmerman registers the complex interplay between the organic human subject and the cybernetic machine, which has come to characterise culture in the developed world in the twenty-first century. His argument that individuals are engaging to a greater extent with digital media highlights the multi-faceted merging of the cybernetic and organic self, which has emerged as the social and cultural norm in our contemporary climate. Such culture results in an epistemological duality: a hybridization of identity in which the subject, comprised of the human self and its digital simulacrum, simultaneously inhabit two realms. Such apparently polarised realms, the space beyond the screen and the ‘real’ world, are becoming increasingly more interactive: as Donna Haraway argued: ‘by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs' (Haraway 150).

How then, have literary texts sought to engage with this cultural shift towards cybernetic subjectivity? Whilst Marianne Corrigan's previous article for Alluvium ("Gaming and the Novel") focused on the ways in which the twenty-first century novel frequently engages on a thematic level with digital culture, this article seeks to specifically examine the ways in which literary texts engage with the participatory element of cybernetic spaces, through attention to the form of what Espen J Aarseth has termed ‘ergodic literature' (Aarseth 1).

The multi-faceted merging of the cybernetic and organic self: 21st-century digital interactions force us to reconsider cybernetic subjectivity in literary texts [Image by runran under a CC BY-SA license]

When evaluating twenty-first century fiction, it is interesting to note that authors such as Jonathan Lethem, Salman Rushdie, Mark Danielewski, Indra Sinha and Haruki Murakami have all produced novels which engage aesthetically and thematically with other virtual worlds, thus probing the malleable boundary which supposedly separates the digital and the organic, as well as registering the spaces in between such binaries. In The Cybergypsies, Sinha registers thematically how the digital cartographies of the virtual world transfer to the fluid aesthetics of the novel:

Sometimes it seems as if all the connections on the net are alive to one another and that information flows through regardless of how you try to dam it up. It finds its own way, leaks along the wires and out onto the airwaves. Information, as would-be hackers never tire of telling us, wants to be free (Sinha 4).

Whilst Sinha’s prose seeks to highlight the digital and inter-connective channels which have come to characterize globalization, in terms of the ergodic what Sinha and Lethem fail to register is the interactive and participatory role of the reader in the ‘experiencing’ or consuming of a novel. Danielewski’s text House of Leaves is an example of what Espen J. Aarseth terms ‘ergodic’ literature, due to the fact that ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’ (Aarseth 1997: 1). House of Leaves is a complex and intricate arrangement of footnotes, varying text size and font, and non-linear typography, meaning that its rhizomatic aesthetics strongly engage with the digital cartographies of the online world as a result of their hypertextual and intertextual links. Similarly, in accordance with Aarseth’s theories on ergodic literature, and the ‘nontrivial’ effort required by the reader to engage actually in the process of reading the text, the novel maintains significant links with digital media and online gaming as a result of its non-linear and interactive aesthetics.

To refer back to Zimmerman’s argument, then, what is particularly interesting about ergodic forms of textuality is the ways in which they seek to register the living human subject as inhabiting the realm of cybernetic culture in the more ‘conventional’ spaces of the novel or play. Ergodic literature seeks to interrogate the rhizomatic channels of connectivity which unite the seemingly polarised worlds of the digital and the textual, thus raising questions regarding the subject suspended in between the two spaces.

Participatory literature: House of Leaves promotes feedback between the printed copy and the ongoing digital commentary that surrounds it, as well as inspiring numerous expressions of fandom [Image by jbhalper under a CC BY-NC-SA license]

How then, have more ‘conventional’ forms of literature sought to engage with this participatory impulse? Ayn Rand’s play Night of January 16th (1933) is set in a court room and takes the form of a murder trial. The form of the play is significant given that it represents the participatory aspect of the ergodic. On the night of each performance, members of the audience are selected to adopt the role of jury members. In order to inform their decision, the jury debate the information delivered to them through character testimony, which in turn results in their verdict on whether the defendant is guilty or not. Notably, different endings occur in accordance with the opinions and experiences of the jury selected during each respective performance.

Whilst Rand’s play was written in twentieth century, a twenty-first century reading of the text highlights it ergodic and participatory aspects. The manner in which social media networks, such as Twitter, have directly influenced public opinion regarding the supposed culpability of individuals in cases relating to, for example, child sex offences, highlights the role of interactive mass-media in shaping concepts of subjectivity. It is therefore vital, as critics, that we turn our attention towards a critical evaluation of the ways in which literary texts may register the convergence of the ‘real’ and the virtual through forms which characterise the interactive and inter-connective aspects of society in the twenty first century. 

Consequently, the second half of this article seeks to examine in more depth the ways in which twenty-first century fiction has sought to register such issues. Fiction is not only beginning to be presented through digital systems such as Kindles, but also to structurally mimic the participatory aspects of digital media networks and, indeed, video games. House of Leaves features extremely alienating textual layouts as a means of achieving ergodicity: cross-referenced appendices that lead to nowhere, fake-footnotes, and hidden codes that reward the reader for breaking the conventional rhythm of reading.

This aesthetic shift creates a tension in the reader: a convincing and fully-fleshed fictional world requires that the physical aspects of a book fade into the background, the printed matter of words serving as a springboard for the reader’s imaginative construction. House of Leaves actually incentivises the exact opposite of this conventional reading process, asking readers to 'use the first letter of each word to build subsequent words and phrases' (Danielewski 619).

This instruction applies to a coded letter penned by the protagonist’s institutionalised mother, Pelafina, found in one of the many appendices of House of Leaves. Yet as readers, we are guided towards applying this acrostic to the text of the main narrative. A hint is provided by a Flagstaff band with an extradiegetic awareness of an earlier version of House of Leaves:

             Apparently they wondered a lot about Johnny Truant. [...] Did he at long last      find the woman who would love his ironies? Which shocked the hell out of        me. I mean it takes some pretty impressive back-on-page-117 close-reading to       catch that one (Danieleswki 514).

A state of hybrid subjectivity: the increasing popularity of videogaming and digital media marks a shift towards a public desire for active participation with media [Image by Christine and Eric Mahler under a CC BY-NC-ND license]

The reader flicks back to page 117 and cannot immediately find the reference point. Those, however, who have chosen to follow an earlier footnote and read Pelafina’s letter, are able to apply the acrostic code to 'a wild ode mentioned at New West hotel over wine infusions, light, lit, lofted on very entertaining moods, yawning in return, open nights, inviting everyone’s song' exhuming the confirmatory message: 'A woman who will love my ironies' (Danielewski 117).

Thus, the reader’s ability to exhaustively explore and navigate a network is rewarded with additional narrative content. The passive rule of Pelafina’s letter is turned into an active tool, for similar hidden acrostics are riddled through House of Leaves; some clearly authored and embedded by Danielewski himself, whilst others are of more dubious authorship. This creates an ergodic awareness within the reader, lifting them out of a passive mode of meaning-apprehension, and into the role of game-player, attempting to make Danielewski’s text submit to an arbitrary game rule.

This practice has been taken up so fanatically that it has countless threads devoted to it on House of Leaves online forum. The forum exists alongside the novel as a digital paratext, that promises to interact with subsequent editions of the novel. As ‘the Editors’ remark of an unreferenced poetic verse in Chapter V, 'Anyone who can provide legitimate proof of authorship will be credited in future editions. – Ed.' (Danielewski 45). Alongside the inclusion of numerous ‘reader’s emails,’ House of Leaves promotes feedback between the printed copy and the ongoing digital commentary that surrounds it.

One House of Leaves forum user has decoded 'A fat fit' from the first line of Pelafina’s letter dated August 30, 1982, but concedes that 'most three letter words found this way aren't deserving of mention, because it's inevitable that a LOT will show up' (Katatonic n. pag.) The code however can potentially be validated by a narrative resonance within the letter; 'I’m told you worked yourself up into quite a fit,' pitting Danielewski’s intention against the role of coincidence in the text (Danielewski 587). The authorship of these exhumed sentences is, in essence, contested between Danielewski and the novel’s user. The reader performs a scripted action in order to generate new interpretive possibilities from a static text.

What differentiates this approach from late twentieth century reader-response tenets, is that this process is a physical rather than a hermeneutic one. Due to the length of the codes, readers have to physically engage with the systems that they are playing with. As Johnny states, 'you might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book' (Danielewski xxiii). Combined with all of the twisting, turning, and even the need to use a magnifying glass for some sections, interacting with House of Leaves becomes a profoundly physical activity. Since this physical interaction is required to unlock narrative content, it follows that Danielewski has factored room for the reader’s body into his textual structure.

Mimicking digital media networks? Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves presents alienating textual layouts as a means of achieving ergodicity: cross-referenced appendices that lead to nowhere, fake-footnotes and hidden codes [Image by Alan Trotter under a CC BY-NC license]

This is the ‘human system’ of which Zimmerman speaks, and how it comes to be represented in the non-digital medium of print. Systemic game rules govern the reader’s physical interaction with the novel, creating space for the hybrid subjectivity of which Haraway speaks. The user follows prescribed rules (in the case of applying an acrostic or following a footnote) but also uses the system to generate new ludic possibilities. The reader in this contested used/user position is best conceived of as a game-player, for as Zimmerman states in an earlier article, '[p]lay is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure. Play exists both because of and also despite the more rigid structures of a system' (Zimmerman 2004: 159). Thus, play is posited as an activity that allows for the reader’s manipulations within an authorial design; creating a hermeneutic framework in which agency is not contested, but co-existent.

Importantly, play conceptualised in this way, is non-medium specific, which helps us to understand the digital as a function rather than a platform. Any pre-twentieth century novel can now be displayed on a screen and rebranded as ‘digital,’ despite being operationally similar to a typical codex book. Novels such as House of Leaves embody the zeitgeist of the digital age far more readily despite their analogue form. In such works, the user’s ability to selectively navigate through a profusion of content is rewarded; a skill which is transferable to the use of search engines and digitised databases.  

The increasing popularity of videogaming and digital media marks a shift away from the ‘passive’ mode of apprehension engendered by television and non-ergodic literature, and towards a public desire for active participation with media. Within the contemporary media environment, the ludic approach engendered by ergodic texts bolsters the reader’s ability to find self-expression in a state of hybrid-subjectivity. By engendering skills that aid the individual in navigating digital environments, the ergodic smoothes over the commonly-perceived rift between the digital and the textual, suggesting that both platforms can reconcile human agency with systemic design.

 

CITATION: Marianne Corrigan and Ash Ogden, "Explorations in the Ergodic," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2013): n. pag. Web. 25 March 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.2.01.

 

 Marianne Corrigan is a final year PhD student under the supervision of Dr Nick Bentley at Keele University. Marianne's research examines globalization, discourses of inter-connectivity and narrative migrancy in the later novels of Salman Rushdie. 

 Ash Ogden is a postgraduate student in the department of English Studies at Durham University. He is currently in the process of writing a dissertation on interactivity in experimental literature and videogames and is the television editor of The Bubble online magazine. 

 

 

Works Cited:

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (London: The John Hopins University Press, 1997).

Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves (London: Doubleday, 2001).

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

Katatonic, “Codes for Dummies – *Spoilers Galore*.” 3^rd May 2005, House of Leaves Forum, <http://www.houseofleaves.com/forum/showthread.php?2985-Codes-for-Dummies-*SPOILERS-GALORE*> [accessed 25 March 2013].

Sinha, Indra. The Cybergypsies (London: Povket Books: 1999).

Zimmerman, Eric (2009). ‘Gaming Literacy’, in The Video Game Theory Reader 2, ed. by Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 23-31.

Zimmerman, Eric (2004). ‘Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games: Four Naughty Concepts in Need of Discipline’ in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game ed. By Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 154-164.

 

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Robert W. Jones II

As literary scholars we are often bending and stretching our frame of reference looking for a new lens with which to examine texts to provide fresh insight and unique views. We beg, borrow and steal ideas from across the academy in order to give ourselves the best available set of tools for our research. In that tradition, this article will examine the burgeoning field of somaesthetics, developed by Richard Shusterman, as a possible way to inform our current views of how the body-mind and literature interact. My primary research consists of an intellectual history of William S. Burroughs and the examination of his writings and artistic experiments as a philosophy. In so doing I plot the course of his interests in the work of Wilhelm Reich, Alfred Korzybski, and W. Grey Walter. 

While each of these authors come from vastly different intellectual backgrounds (psychology for Reich, semantics for Korzybski, and cybernetics and neuroscience for Walter) each has a very compelling view on the role of the body with relation to their discipline. Having been somewhat familiar with Richard Shusterman’s research I decided that somaesthetics could have great value when applied to the work of William S. Burroughs and other writers and thinkers whose work demonstrates an interest in the role of the body. One of the aims of somaesthetics is to examine the body’s role in the aesthetic experience, or as Shusterman puts it: 'Somaesthetics is devoted to the critical, ameliorative study of one's experience and use of one's body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-fashioning' (Shusterman, 1997:  34). To that end, this article series employs Shusterman’s theory to examine the work of William S. Burroughs, an author whose work represents an excellent proving ground for a theory that is concerned with the body as a coequal partner with the mind creating aistheisis and setting the stage for transcendence.

Somaesthetics: resituating the body and bodily experience within pragmatist philosophy [Image by Robert Harwig under a CC BY-NC-SA license]

Three disciplines – Pragmatist philosophy, Feldenkrais method, and Zen meditation – influenced Shusterman's thoughts on the body's role in aesthetic perception and in removing the conditioning that society inflicts on us through our bodies. In addition, Shusterman conceives somaesthetics as having three broad, complimentary, and overlapping subdivisions. The first, ‘analytic somaesthetics’ examines theories from a broad swathe of continental, feminist, and other post-World War II philosophical currents. This shows 'how the body is both shaped by power and employed as an instrument to maintain it' and 'examines traditional topics in philosophy of mind, ontology, and epistemology that relate to the mind-body issue and the role of somatic factors in consciousness' (Shusterman, 2008: 23). These concerns link closely with Burroughs' project of using the body – in its capacity as subject – as the locus of change and transformation in the individual.

The second category of Shusterman's theory is ‘pragmatic somaesthetics.’ The pragmatic aspect naturally has a philosophical kinship with the early twentieth-century philosophy of American Pragmatism and functions under many of the dictates of pragmatism. To that end pragmatic somaesthetics engages in 'proposing specific methods of somatic improvement and engaging in their comparative critique' (Shusterman, 2008: 24). While it presupposes an 'analytic dimension,' pragmatic somaesthetics is interested in 'transcending it not only by evaluation but also by meliorative efforts to change certain facts by remaking the body and society' (Shusterman, 2008:  24). Shusterman argues that this kind of creative self-fashioning (to use a Foucauldian term) has been around for much of human history. He notes that 'a variety of pragmatic methods have been designed to improve our experience and use of our body'; of special note he points out 'body piercing and scarification' as well as 'yoga…martial and erotic arts, and modern psychosomatic disciplines such as the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method' as some prominent examples (Shusterman, 2008: 24). Regarding an examination of Burroughs and his relationship to the body-mind-language issue and his conceptualization of the body in his work, it is clear that a philosophical approach that is interested in methods that will 'change certain facts by remaking the body and society' is useful in its consideration (Shusterman, 2008: 24). The pragmatic dimension of somaesthetics is designed to point out the body's dual role in image creation: that is to say, that the body as 'external representation is inescapably dominated and deployed by society's corrupt masters of the image (advertising and propaganda),' and yet it is also through bodily centered practices that one can hope to achieve transcendence, such as in 'First-Cups' dated September 1959 (published in Minutes to Go, Beach Books, 1968), where the epigraph states: 'A collage from The Paris Herald Tribune, The London Observer, The London Daily Mail, Life Magazine advertisements' (6). Burroughs often deliberately cut-up and folded in texts from advertisements as a way of showing the underlying messages of control that are aimed at subjugating the body.

Can William S. Burroughs' techniques of collage and cut-up texts help us rethink bodily-centred practices? [Image by Henrik Chulu under a CC BYlicense]

The third category ‘practical somaesthetics’ is not concerned with 'producing texts, not even texts that offer pragmatic methods of somatic care; it is instead about actually pursuing such care through intelligently disciplined practice' (Shusterman, 2008: 29). In this way, practical somaesthetics is not dissimilar to Burroughs’ own somatic project. Burroughs was concerned with the practical application of the knowledge he gained through using his body as a laboratory for his ideas. It is also clear that he was concerned with producing texts to serve numerous purposes, among them to expose control mechanisms; enlighten his audience; and map out a way of conduct. Clearly, for my examination of Burroughs I must give equal weight to the analytic and pragmatic components due to the fact that in truly understanding Burroughs' philosophical project we must be willing to consider the totality of his somatic practices. While this article is not intended to lay out a Burroughsian plan for transcendence it seeks to evaluate his work through specific theoretical constructs. However, much like Michel Foucault, we can examine the ways in which Burroughs uses the body in his own life and his related literary works to investigate certain extreme body practices. When we consider that Shusterman's own experience as a Feldenkrais instructor informs his somaesthetic project, we can utilize his description of its aims and benefits primarily in that they seek to 'improve the acuity, health and control of our senses … while also freeing us from bodily habits and defects that impair sensory performance' (Shusterman, 2000: 268). It is the liberation from certain socially inscribed bodily habits that is the aim of not only Shusterman's somaesthetics but also Foucault and Burroughs, who both become experiencers as well as observers. In a sentence that I feel would not be out of place in either Burroughs or Foucault's work Shusterman notes: 'knowledge of the world is improved not by denying our bodily senses but by perfecting them' (Shusterman, 2000: 268). Burroughs, through his cut-up projects and bodily-centered language and imagery guides his reader to a place where his senses are heightened and honed in an effort to reveal the control mechanisms that surround us.

Additionally, we must consider the links between the evolution of Burroughs' thoughts on the body-mind problem and the roots of somaesthetics. As noted earlier, somaesthetics is informed by Shusterman's training in and practice of the Feldenkrais Method. This somatic system was developed by Moshe Feldenkrais and put forth in his first publication Body and Mature Behavior: A Study of Anxiety, Sex, Gravitation and Learning (1949). One of the major points of connection between Burroughs' somatic philosophy and Shusterman's somaesthetics is the relation or familiarity of Moshé Feldenkrais with the work of Korzybski. In an interview with Edward Rosenfeld (1973) that focused primarily on awareness and consciousness he notes:

Cold and warm are not opposite. Cold is just a little less warm than warm, and that there is less  mobility of atoms and electrons when it is cold. This is not an opposition. Korzybski has already pointed out that this is infantile thinking. This comes from that structure of ours which demands simple opposition (194).

This minor, almost casual, reference to Korzybski is important in that it indicates that Feldenkrais was incredibly familiar with Korzybski. This familiarity comes both from the fact that Feldenkrais effortlessly moves from a question about consciousness into the realm of semantics and he felt that his interviewer would have known who Korzybski was and have a familiarity with his semantic theories on language and thought control that are largely based on opposition to the '"is" of identity' which in Korzybski’s general semantics leads to 'false evaluation' (Korzybski 374). In addition, Feldenkrais does in these brief few sentences distill some of the key points of Korzybski's theory as it relates to his arguments that Aristotelian views of language structures are fundamentally incomplete. More importantly, however, is how this can be linked to both Korzybski's view of the body and of certain somatic practices.

The experimental writing of Beat Generation authors Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg lend themselves to a somaesthetic literary criticism, which addresses the body in perception, aesthetic experience, and transcendence [Image by Pamela Vieyra under a CC BY-NC-ND license]

It is no surprise that Burroughs would find common philosophical and linguistic ground with Alfred Korzybski. Burroughs took a course in general semantics from Korzybski while he was living in Chicago. Korzybski's attack on conventional thinking (mostly described as Aristotelian) would have certainly appealed to Burroughs' own sense that modern Western society was based on a series of debilitating ideas and his notion that language itself could be a hindrance to a persons ability to live a full and authentic life. However, I will contend that it was also Korzybski's focus on the body as key in how an individual processes information that informed Burroughs' work. Burroughs notes that Korzybski stated: 'you think as much with your big toe as with your mind' (Morgan 357). Burroughs built much of his writing on the idea that in order to communicate totally with the reader one must figure out ways to make language have an equal (or greater) impact on the body as on the mind. Korzybski's theories gave voice to these ideas.

The role of the body in literature is not new nor is an examination of how the body-mind continuum functions in relation to aesthetic experience. However, with respect to Shusterman’s research on somaesthetics we have a finely honed tool with which to investigate this key relationship. Further, somaesthetics provides key background information on the philosophical debates over the importance of the body in perception, aesthetic experience, and transcendence. In addition, somaesthetics provides an established framework for working in a cross-disciplinary fashion. By this I mean that Shusterman’s explorations and writing, while firmly grounded in philosophy, have been applied (by himself and others) to music, architecture, dance, neuroscience and psychology. This demonstrates that good sound theoretical approaches can and should have resonance beyond their native academic territory. My next Alluvium article will bring somaesthetics into conversation with selections from William S. Burroughs’ post-Naked Lunch period as well as with the the thinkers who most directly influenced Burroughs’ views.

CITATION: Robert W. Jones II, "Somaesthetics and Literary Criticism," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2013): n. pag. Web. 25 March 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.2.04.

Robert W. Jones II is a third year PhD student at the University of Leicester. He has written book reviews for the Journal of American Studies and is an occasional contributor to The Poetry Show on KUSP NPR Santa Cruz. 

Works Cited:

Beiles, Sinclair Simon Maurice, et al. Minutes to Go (San Francisco: Beach Books; distributed by City Lights Books).

Feldenkrais, Moshé, and Elizabeth Beringer. Embodied Wisdom: The Collected Papers of Moshé Feldenkrais (San Diego, CA: Somatic Resources, 2010).

Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity; an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Lakeville, Conn.: International Non-Aristotelian Library Pub. Co.; distributed by Institute of General Semantics, 1958).

Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (London: Pimlico, 1991).

Shusterman, R. "Somaesthetics and the Body/Media Issue." Body & Society 3 (3) (1997): 33-50, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1357034X97003003002

Shusterman, Richard. Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008).

Shusterman, Richard. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

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Caroline Magennis

In April 2012, the Northern Irish writer Glenn Patterson published his eighth novel, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, with Faber. The book is the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s first ever selection for One City, One Book for Belfast. In this time of 'post'-conflict civic regeneration, the Literary Belfast project has, in vacant storefronts and other city-wide locations, displayed quotations from Belfast authors. Patterson features prominently. If Patterson is Belfast’s novelist of choice, what does that say about how the contemporary city understands itself? What does this tell us about how culture interacts with conflict resolution and the debates over a conflictual past and a 'shared future'? The dominant discourse around conflict resolution is that the past must somehow be ‘dealt with’ although, naturally, that relies on an agreement as to what the past actually constitutes. Organisations such Healing through Remembering, the Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity, and the Transitional Justice Institute at the University of Ulster are engaged with this process. Writing specifically about the Northern Irish context, Stefanie Lehner terms this ‘the onerous ethical presence of the past that continues to haunt the Northern Irish peace process, impeding its prospects for positive and lasting peace and reconciliation’. Graham Dawson contends ‘there is never any single meaning, but rather a plurality constructed through the telling of different stories that make different interpretations and draw differing conclusions’ (13). It is the role fiction plays in the contestation of meaning in ‘post’-conflict Northern Ireland that this essay seeks to explore.

How does contemporary Belfast understand itself? The Northern Irish peace process continues to draw on a plurality of shared narrative constructions of the city [Image by PLACE Architecture Centre under a CC BY-NC ND license]

These debates over the role of history, symbolism and identity are current in the political climate of Northern Ireland, as the recent City Hall flag protests have shown. This decade will see a raft of centenary anniversaries of hugely important political events. Already we have seen the centenary of the Ulster Covenant, where just under half a million of Unionists promised to use 'all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present calamity to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland', commemorated by 30,000 marchers in September 2012. Joe Lee notes that, in 1966, 'Raucous nationalist celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising offered  [Ian] Paisley further opportunities for high-profile protests' (427). Academic conferences and state-sponsored events are being considered for the centenary in 2016. 1916 also saw the Battle of the Somme, where the 36th Ulster Division suffered particularly high casualties. This event has become particularly important to Unionist culture and heritage. But, one of the most important historical commemorations for this essay will be the maritime fever of 2012 when, it seemed, the world became re-obsessed with the tragedy of the Titanic, built in the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. As tour guides insist on informing tourists: ‘It was alright when it left here’. There was a lurid Titanic mini-series on ITV, while cinema audiences steeled themselves for a re-release of James Cameron’s Titanic, now in 3D. In Belfast’s landmark ‘Titanic Quarter’ development by the docklands, a prominent museum to the ill-fated ship has been opened.

However, Glenn Patterson’s 2012 novel, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, does not directly address the Titanic but engages with Belfast’s maritime past more generally. Patterson chooses to focus on the other ‘big boat’ (11), the RMS Oceanic which was, for three years, the largest ship the world and was commissioned by the Royal Navy in 1914. Exactly one month after the ship was commissioned, on 8th September, the boat ran aground on a hidden reef on Foula in the Shetland Islands. The protagonist, Gilbert Rice gains employment as a Clerk at the Ballast Board, at the Port and Harbour of Belfast. There has been, however, critical work on the sectarianism of Belfast's nineteenth century industries including Alvin Jackson's comment that 'The shipyards and linen firms had been effectively Unionist preserves' (361). However, this novel is doing something more interesting than white-washing a problematic industrial past, and this chimes with Patterson's fictional project.

White-washing a problematic industrial past? Belfast's recent regeneration of the Titanic Quarter signals the significance of the centennary anniversaries of political events in the city's history [Image by Titanic Belfast under a CC BY license]

Patterson is the author of eight novels and a collection of non-fiction, Lapsed Protestant (2006). He is also a regular contributor to the local and national press, a documentary maker for the BBC and he co-wrote the screenplay to the film Good Vibrations (2013). At the beginning of his writing career, Eve Patten labelled him, together with Robert McLiam Wilson, as one of Northern Ireland's 'prodigal novelists': ‘a new generation of writers who have come of age since the beginning of the Troubles and whose reconstructions of childhood experience effectively undercut the moral baggage and creative paralysis of their predecessors’ (129). During the tumultuous 1990s, with the early stages of a ‘Peace Process’ occurring at the same time as continued violence, Patterson considers the state of the novel: ‘…the fictional representations of Northern Ireland got stuck [in] about 1972; and it doesn’t look like that anymore [...] It’s never the same story; it’s changing. At any one time it’s not one story, it’s at least a million and a half. And these stories are changing all the time and you’ve got to keep up with that. It’s got to be updated’ (Patterson 1995: 50). These early fictions and, in particular, the important and recently reprinted Fat Lad (1988) are purposefully and distinctively anti-sectarian, showing characters who choose to engage with the outside world and alternative identity markers. A significant example of this is Danny in The International (1999), whose voracious bisexuality in the pre-Troubles era corresponds to an ambivalent relationship to religious and national identity. Peter Mahon has contended that 'Patterson's novels [...] tend to deal with issues relating to the difficult interface between the Troubles and domesticity from a Unionist perspective' (47), however, to align Patterson with a totalising viewpoint is a limiting analysis. In Lapsed Protestant Patterson has ironically referred to his background and middle-age with the sobriquet 'Garden Centre Prod' (24) but also, in the same collection, describes to his pride when his father refuses to contribute to Loyalist paramilitaries and refers to the 'fucking foul murder' (61) of the UVF. In interview, Patterson was more concerned with the redemptive power of romantic relationships ('fumbly sex', the anti-sectarian power of punk and Slaughterhouse 5 (Magennis 152-157).

The novel takes us back to 1897 and introduces us to Gilbert Rice, a Belfast manufacturer and philanthropist, and it consists of his recollections of his youth and young manhood in the 1830s. The title of mill of the novel comes from a lecture, 'Belfast Sixty Years Ago,' given by the Rev Narcissus G Batt in 1875, published by the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1896. The Proprietress, Peggy Barclay, also owned a tavern in which the United Irishmen met in the 1790s. The first chapter introduces us to some of the key historical contexts and ways of understanding the novel. The older Rice, in 1897, thinks on the popularity of ‘Mr Wells’s “scientific romance” The Time Machine’ (5). The novel’s own historical trajectory will move from 1897 to the 1830s, with the consequences of the United Irish rebellion of 1798 and the Act of Union of 1801 looming large. Secondly, Rice ‘was of the firm opinion that the city was on the brink of a new Golden Age. The genius of our manufacturers, the skill of our workforce, had made Belfast a byword for quality and innovation’ (9). This is somewhat ironic as the shipbuilding and linen industries at the heart of the Belfast’s relationship with the Victorian Empire went into steady decline in the 20th century. Thirdly, Rice engages with developments in psychoanalysis and, in particular, the method first cited in Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria in 1893: ‘The “talking cure”, the young woman called it. Perhaps one day the experiment will be extended, to men as well as women, old as well as young, and all will be enable to understand the inner logic of the stimuli that caused them to act as they did at any given moment in their lives. It has come too late for me’ (18). Shortly after this admission, Rice's narration of his youth begins, suggesting Patterson values the cathartic power of re-telling certain Ulster stories (as advocated in Simpson 2009). Graham Dawson discusses the rhetoric surrounding the ambivalent relationship to the past in contemporary Northern Ireland: 'We talk of reconciliation with the past and of healing it's wounds; of coming to terms with it; of drawing a line in the sand in order to leave the past behind; of stepping out of its shadow, laying it to rest, letting it go; of moving on, or forward' (6).

In interview Patterson said that, once one has decided to write historical fiction ‘certain things come towards you’, such as the parallel story of the architect John Millar, a historical figure who becomes a friend of Rice's. He drew parallels between the transformation of the Cathedral Quarter and Waterfront districts of Belfast during Rice’s time and the debates about civic space in the city today, which focuses on these areas. The novel is meticulously researched, and Patterson relishes the descriptions of the city as his characters explore it on foot. The literary tradition of Belfast flanerie is visible most clearly in the novels of Robert McLiam Wilson and, through the politics of mapping, in the poetry and prose of Ciaran Carson. Rice meets a young Polish woman, Maria, who recalls her father’s meeting with Wolfe Tone. According to Maria, Tone had said of Belfast: ‘A town more committed to the cause of Liberty was not to be imagined. The Rights of Man was its holy book, its Qur’an. On one memorable occasion he had climbed, with a handful of the leading Qur’anites, to the summit of the Cave Hill, and there sworn a solemn oath never to rest until Ireland was free.’ (121) Henry Joy McCracken fulfils a similar role in Stewart Parker’s play, Northern Star (1984) to revive the idea of Belfast as the 'Athens of the North'. For Patterson and Parker, the use of a Protestant yet Republican past offers a useful creative space to complicate and critique the sectarian binary. This allows these authors to align their heritage with Enlightenment and anti-imperialist thought, 'Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter'. The novel represents a decadent aristocracy, in the guise of the cruel anti-Reform Lord Belfast, set against this proud traditional of liberal intellectualism in Belfast. The conflict between Rice and Lord Belfast is clearly Oedipal: he feels he cannot fulfil his destiny, whatever that is, until he has killed the bully patriarch of the city. He is inspired by his friend’s building, his love for the displaced daughter of a Polish aristocrat and Wolfe Tone’s act of resistance. He is, however, saved from this act of foolish heroism by his grandfather, the benign patriarch hiding an acquaintance with Belfast's radical past. This mixture of idealism and pragmatism inspires him to become a benevolent and philanthropic industrialist, much like in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South.

Glenn Patterson's latest novel The Mill for Grinding Old People Young raises vital and difficult questions concerning the narrative of identity in contemporary Northern Ireland [Image by Titanic Belfast under a CC BY license]

This novel, despite being the Belfast City Council book for Belfast, opens up some vital and difficult questions around the narrative of identity in contemporary Northern Ireland. Through the continued interest in commemoration and historically focused fiction, it is clear the past is still present in Northern Irish culture. Lehner argues that, in the case of recent drama, an 'intense and complicated engagement that sits in vexed opposition to the restorative conception of reconciliation and both a politics and a political context of ameliorative forgetting that dominates Northern Irish society'. Patterson's in an attempt to reclaim a liberal, Euro-centric Protestant heritage, complicates the overly deterministic binaries on which the Good Friday Agreement was based. We are at a critical point in Northern Irish fiction in this 'post'-conflict moment. Should novelists aim to participate in a homogenising vision that squares with the narrative of ‘post’-conflict peace-building? Or, as Patterson said in 1995, and this novel demonstrates, there may well be other stories to be told.

CITATION: Caroline Magennis, "Re-Writing Belfast," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2013): n. pag. Web. 25 March 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.2.03.

Caroline Magennis teaches British literature, culture and history at Harlaxton College, a study abroad campus for US students. She is a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast (BA, MA, PhD). She has held post-doctoral research fellowships at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s and University College Dublin. Caroline publishes in the area of modern and contemporary Irish literature and culture, and is the author of Sons of Ulster: Masculinities in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel and co-editor of Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture. 

Works Cited:

Dawson, Graham. Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007

Jackson, Alvin. Ireland 1798-1998: Politics and War. Oxford: OUP, 2010.

Lee, Joe. Ireland 1912-1985: Politics. Cambridge: CUP, 1989.

Lehner, Stefanie. ‘Transformative Aesthetics? Between Remembrance and Reconciliation in Contemporary Northern Irish Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre Review 23.4 (forthcoming 2013).

Magennis, Caroline. Sons of Ulster: Masculinities in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010.

Mahon, Peter. Violence, Politics and Textual Interventions in Northern Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010.

Patten, Eve. ‘Fiction in conflict: Northern Ireland’s prodigal novelists’. Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. I. Bell. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995. 128-148

Patterson, Glenn.  ‘I am a Northern Irish Novelist’. Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. I. Bell. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995. 149-152.

Patterson, Glenn. Fat Lad. London: Chatto and Windus, 1992.

Patterson, Glenn. Lapsed Protestant. Lisburn: New Island, 2006.

Patterson, Glenn. The Mill for Grinding Old People Young. ILondon: Faber, 2012.

Patterson, Glenn. In conversation with Marie-Louise Muir, Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, May 2012.

Simpson, Kirk. Unionist Voices: The Politics of Remembering the Past in Northern Ireland. Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2009.

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Jacob Murphy

2009 saw the release of the first mainstream literary mashup - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Graeme-Smith. This particular book has produced a prequel (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, published in 2010) and a sequel (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After, published in 2011), effectively turning Austen's classic into a commercialised franchise opportunity. All of this raises the question as to whether this particular genre of fiction can be classed as serious, or whether it is just another excuse to create a profit. Indeed, some sources have stated that ‘Quirk Books is planning to capitalise on the popularity of the genre’ (Flood par. 6). In this article, I am taking the term “literary mashup” to refer to a piece of fiction which has combined with a completely different literary genre to create a new narrative – essentially a hybrid text.

The Zombies Strike Back: Seth Graeme-Smith's popular literary mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is rewriting the canon in new, hybrid ways [Image used under fair dealings provisions for the purpose of scholarly discussion]

Marketed in the press and on the front cover as 'The Classic Regency Romance - Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem' (Austen and Grahame-Smith, n. pag), the novel makes an admirable attempt to follow the original plot of Pride and Prejudice whilst adding the staple fanboy tropes of zombies and ninjas. For example, the infamous visit of Lady Catherine de Burgh gets spliced together with a Samurai fight to the death (seen below in its original form, and then followed by the Zombies version):

‘“Miss Bennet,” replied her ladyship, in an angry tone, “you ought to know that I am not to be trifled with. But however insincere you may chuse to be, you shall not find me so. My character has ever been celebrated for its sincerity and frankness, and in a cause of such moment as this I shall certainly not depart from it. […]”’ (Austen 272).

‘“Miss Bennet,” replied her ladyship, in an angry tone, “you ought to know, that I am not to be trifled with. But however insincere you may choose to be, you shall not find me so. My character has ever been celebrated for it sincerity and frankness, just as my killing powers have been celebrated as having no equal”’ (Austen and Grahame-Smith 285; my emphasis).

As is apparent from the above extracts, Zombies shares a large amount of text with the original – around 80 per cent according to one Washington Post review (Hesse par. 9). However, does this mean that Grahame-Smith can be rewarded for writing around 20 per cent of an original work? For Grahame-Smith, it appears to be a resounding “Yes” as he seems to have assumed the role of editor, stating that he ‘had to start on Page 1 and edit her work and weave in the zombie subplot that she had so carelessly forgotten’ (Memmott par. 3).

In the UK, an author’s copyright extends for 70 years after the author’s death. Therefore, there appears to be some scope to argue whether or not Roland Barthes’ concept of the death of the author still stands true with these revitalised narratives. By this, I mean that the introduction of a secondary author-figure such as Grahame-Smith allows both the reader and the literary critic to attach both contemporary and classical discourses to the new narrative. For example, the introduction of ninja tropes to Pride and Prejudice arguably gives the critic scope to engage in a “fan-service” reading of Zombies centred around the interests of the Western male. As a result of this, it is possible that the literary mashup is working against Barthes’ advice and ‘[attaching] the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author’ (Barthes 143).

How do literary adaptations such as Coleridge Cook's Meowmorphosis complicate our understanding of originality? [Source: YouTube]

In effect, the process of “mashing together” two literary forms creates a hybrid narrative that is both ground-breaking yet familiar. For example, Zombies arguably departs from the “hallowed ground” of Austen’s Meryton, to a version of Regency England where:

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.’ (Austen and Grahame-Smith 7)

This metamorphosis of the classic opening line from Pride and Prejudice signals a departure from the normal narrative, and lays down in stark terms what the reader can expect from Zombies. As a result of these two simple sentences, the restrictive perception of who should read Austen is destroyed, potentially making it more accessible to a wider readership. This is further demonstrated through the rise of the costume drama in television. Costume dramas appear to be a staple of the British Christmas television schedule, Dickens’ Great Expectations in 2011, and the parody The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, allowing more highbrow narratives to be received by a larger than “normal” audience – a phenomenon noted by both the national press and booksellers alike. A January 2012 article for The Daily Mail quotes a Waterstones employee as saying that ‘The feast of Dickens themed TV over Christmas […] has got people talking about Dickens again’ (Cooper par. 9).

Likewise, the shift in tone brings a comedic element to the plot. This is best seen in the juxtaposition of the genres: Austen’s social satire against the ultimate horror epic. Whilst it could be argued that these two genres wouldn’t normally combine effectively, in Zombies, there are genuine moments of hilarity stemming from events which are quite dark. For example, Mrs Bennet somehow becomes even more annoying in Zombies than in Pride and Prejudice. Though she is living in an age where every member of society is in danger of being attacked by the undead, she still manages to focus more on marrying her daughters off. The narrative voice goes as far as to say that ‘The business of Mr. Bennet’s life was to keep his daughters alive. The business of Mrs. Bennet’s was to get them married’ (Austen and Grahame-Smith 9). Perhaps it is the use of comedic devices that gives the novel its appeal to a wider readership, particularly through their deadpan delivery. Grahame-Smith supports this stance on Austen’s comedy, noting that ‘she had a wicked sense of humour’ and that ‘Not only was she funny, […] her early writing was very dark […]’ (Memmott par. 7).

The dominant cultural symbol of the internet: have cat memes influenced literary mashups such as The Meowmorphosis? [Image by Buzz Andersen under a CC BY-NC license]

Perhaps it would be more suitable to refer to this particular genre as the modern parody, or see it as a new direction in the field of literary adaptation. The latter, The Meowmorphosis by Franz Kafka and Coleridge Cook, arguably has its roots in such 21st-century cyberculture phenomena as the popular internet meme Lolcatz. Essentially an appropriation of another narrative, these types of novels draw attention to whether or not they can be seen as original. One could see the possibilities for a paradigm shift in adaptation studies as in an increasingly digital age, new media will appear, and act in both complimentary and antagonistic ways against traditional forms such as the novel. Stijn Joye foreshadows this by claiming that in a similar manner, ‘the film industry has never hesitated to recycle its own ‘history’ as well’ (Joye 56). Surely then, it makes sense to allow the literary mashup into the canon if it draws attention to the original texts that already have an established place?

In some cases, the mashup and parody novel industries are managing to keep apace with releases of newer novels. This can be best seen in the major supermarkets and bookstores in the United Kingdom through the example of J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. Prior to the novel’s publication, a parody was released entitled The Vacant Casualty by Patty O’Furniture. This practice, however, is not perhaps as new as it seems. Parodies of the Harry Potter literary franchise, such as Michael Gerber's Barry Trotter, have been popular since at least 2002. Meanwhile, authors such as Adam Roberts are releasing parody books that could be seen as  exemplary texts within the popular genre category of mashup fiction. For example, 2009 saw the release of I Am Scrooge, a mashup of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and tropes from the BBC’s Doctor Who. Again, the drawing together of two literary genres is acknowledged on the book’s back cover: ‘It’s the Dickensian Zombie Apocalypse – God Bless Us, Every One!’ (Roberts n. pag). As a result of this, it seems possible that creators of fiction that is classed as a mashup or a parody are trying to entice readers with popular texts and authors.

All hail the Dickensian Zombie Apocalypse: writers such as Adam Roberts are expanding the boundaries of the literary mashup by combining literary, filmic and TV texts within parodic form [Images used under fair dealings provision for the purpose of scholarly discussion] 

The BBC have reported China Miéville as saying that ‘just as music fans remix albums and post them online, so readers will recut the novel’ (BBC par. 2): a bold statement concerning literature’s future to say the least, as it highlights the nature of the creative arts, and indeed the notion of originality. This is probably best demonstrated in the Classics line-up of Quirk Books which currently consists of The Meowmorphosis (by Franz Kafka and Coleridge Cooke) and Android Karenina (by Leo Tolstoy and Ben. H Winters), to name but a few. For some, this could also put the traditional novel form in a threatened position; they could either be lost amongst all the mashups or they could be seen as “boring” when compared to their remixed counterparts. It is also possible that this kind of veneration of classic texts through the upwards trend in mashups may be particularly useful in persuading readers to read the original novels. As a result of this, the Academy may very well neglect these literary forms, but in this age of new hypertexts and narrative structures they should be regarded as more than a passing trend.

So what does this new trend in narrative form intend to do? And also, do they actually want to be taken seriously? Particularly in the case of texts such as The Meowmorphosis, there has to be a tongue-in-cheek approach to reading as the subject matter doesn’t expect seriousness. For those who aren’t familiar, it is a novel which adapts the original storyline of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and adds a 21st century twist. The transformation is modified, and Gregor Samsa instead changes into a cat, one of the dominant cultural symbols of the internet. For example, the text states that ‘He could not abide his tail being squashed, most of all. This disaster also revealed to Gregor Samsa that he was quite a large kitten, for his upper parts were still curled up sweetly in bed’ (Kafka and Cook 15). Potentially this change in the transformation can be seen as reflective of modern digital trends, whereby whole online communities come together to enjoy image macros hosted on sites like the Cheezburger network, and as such, could be seen as a wider acceptance of internet culture into the literary canon. Dinnen provides a valuable metaphor for this type of transformation, acknowledging that new digital media and to an extent, literary criticism, is ‘[comprised of] procedural code that is itself a mix, a mash-up, a version of a version’ (Dinnen 2012a: 212). This allows us to see the associated problems with Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ concept, as Dinnen notes further on in the essay (Dinnen 2012a: 216-218).

Texts like Android Karenina remind us that 21st-century literary criticism is also, itself, a mashup or "version of a version" [Image by Eugene Smith under a CC BY-NC-ND license]

In conclusion, I hope this study has provided enough food for thought to continue the dialogue surrounding the literary mashup and the future of the novel in the 21st Century. Through the proliferation of both instances of narrative, I am assuming that prose fiction is still a highly popular form of expression. There will of course be those who question whether or not anything is added to the narrative when mashing classic texts up with newer discourses – the answer of which still remains in the domain of the readership. Personally, however, I feel that the literary mashup is a legitimate art form which brings fresh perspectives to classic narratives.

CITATION: Jacob Murphy, "Remix Culture and the Literary Mashup," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2013): n. pag. Web. 25 March 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.2.02.

Jacob Murphy is currently studying for the MA in 21st Century Literature at the University of Lincoln. His research interests include existentialism and the portrayal of existential tropes in contemporary narratives, contemporary trauma theory, the videogame as a legitimate narrative form, the literary mashup and post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives. Jacob is a member of the 21st Century Research Group at the University of Lincoln. 

Works Cited:

Anon. ‘Are literary mashups the next big thing?’, BBC [online] 23 August 2012 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19359570 [Accessed 05 November 2012].

Anon. ‘Quirk Classics’, Quirk Books [online] http://www.quirkbooks.com/book-categories/quirk-classics [Accessed 05 November 2012].

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice (London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994).

Austen, Jane and Seth Grahame-Smith. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2009).

Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp.142-148.

Beaton, Kate. ‘Austen Mania’, Hark! A vagrant [online] http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=263 [Accessed 08 November].

Burke, Seán. The Death & Return of the Author (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992).

Cooper, Rob. ‘Sales of Dickens’ novels soar thanks to TV adaptations such as BBC’s Great Expectations’, MailOnline [online] 16 January 2012 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2087225/Sales-Dickens-novels-soar-thanks-TV-adaptations-BBCs-Great-Expectations.html [Accessed 20 January 2012].

Dinnen, Zara (2012a). ‘In the Mix: The Potential Convergence of Literature and New Media in Jonathan Lethem’s ‘The Ecstasy of Influence.’ Journal of Narrative Theory 42 (2) (2012): 212-230, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2012.0009

Dinnen, Zara (2012b). ‘Technotexts’, Teaching post-millenial literature symposium. Brighton University, Brighton. 02 July 2012. Conference paper.

Flood, Alison. ‘Jane Austen in zombie rampage up the book charts’, The Guardian [online] 09 April 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/09/austen-zombie-pride-prejudice?INTCMP=SRCH [Accessed 05 November 2012].

Hesse, Monica. ‘Seth Grahame-Smith Repurposes Jane Austen in ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’, The Washington Post [online] 17 April 2009 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/16/AR2009041604348.html [Accessed 05 November].

Joye, Stijn. ‘Novelty through Repetition: Exploring the Success of Artistic Imitation in the Contemporary Film Industry, 1983-2007’ in Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, ed. Iain Robert Smith (Nottingham: Scope, 2009), pp.56-73.

Kafka, Franz and Coleridge Cook. The Meowmorphosis (Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2011).

Memmott, Carol. ‘Q&A with Seth Grahame-Smith, master of the mashup’, USA Today [online] 05 March 2010 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-03-04-grahamesmith04_ST_N.htm [Accessed 19 January 2013].

Merritt, Stephanie. ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’, The Observer [online] 06 December 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/dec/06/pride-prejudice-zombies-grahame-smith?INTCMP=SRCH [Accessed 05 November 2012].

Moon, Brad. ‘GeekDad Interviews Vampire Author Seth Grahame-Smith’, WIRED.com [online] 17 March 2010 http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/03/geekdad-interviews-vampire-author-seth-grahame-smith/ [Accessed 19 January 2013].

Roberts, Adam. I Am Scrooge (London: Gollancz, 2009).

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Christopher Daley

Railways are news. On the one hand, they are the source of consternation as above inflation fare rises couple with the perceived drudgery of commuting to characterise the railways as a site of soaring ticket prices and overcrowded, invariably late trains. But this sentiment lives alongside whimsy and romanticism, be it through preservation lines or the restoration of ageing steam engines. This paradoxical image of the railway system is, however, nothing new within the British popular imagination and as Ian Carter (2000) points out, this may have something to do with the railways’ historical link to contested areas of modern everyday life:

So much that we take for granted today was invented or perfected in the nineteenth century to facilitate railways’ development, or to limit their potential for political, fiscal or physical mayhem: standardised time, a disciplined and uniform labour force, large-scale bureaucratic organisation, joint-stock industrial corporations, close State regulation of private capitalists’ activities. (118)

Similarly, British fiction has maintained an ambivalent relationship with railways. Confronted with a new revolutionary transport system, Victorian novelists offered the most sustained exploration of the potentialities of trains, yet by being, as Nicholas Daly (1999) puts it, ‘the agent and icon of the acceleration of the pace of everyday life’ (463) in the mid-nineteenth century, the railways were also a source for the countless anxieties of industrialisation. Contemporary fiction, in Britain at least, is curiously quiet on the railways, with their appearance often limited to neo-Victorian narratives that attempt to reignite the energy of the steam age. However, to mark the 150 year anniversary of the London Underground, Penguin will release, in March, a series of railway writings [1] that could, perhaps, ignite an imaginative investigation of a transport system that is often seen as mundane, yet is simultaneously a potent symbol of transformation. It is therefore apt to briefly map the terrain of railways in fiction and popular culture in order to anticipate where any future speculation may venture.

Whimsy and romanticism: our contemporary relationship with trains is informed in complex ways by nineteenth-century industrialisation [Image by urbanworkbench under a CC BY-NC-ND license]

Of the canonical Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens is probably a pertinent starting point for such a historical overview, especially as Dombey and Son (1846-48) is often cited as the first railway novel. While the experience of train travel is not interrogated majorly in Dickens’ work – Carter (2000) notes that the railway occupies ‘no more than eight, of 833, pages’ (119) – what Dickens successfully achieves is an evocation of the immense change facilitated by this new technology. Indeed, following the completion of the London and Birmingham Railway the narrator notes that the ‘crowds of people and mountains of goods, departing and arriving scores upon scores of times in every four-and-twenty hours, produced a fermentation in the place that was always in action’ (245). In analysing Dickens’ representation of London in the novel Raymond Williams (1973) explains that the city and the railway exist in symbiosis, with the speed and efficiency of the railway in turn feeding the restless city:

In seeing the city, as he here sees the railway, as at once the exciting and the threatening consequence of a new mobility, as not only an alien and indifferent system but as the unknown, perhaps unknowable, sum of so many lives, jostling, colliding, disrupting, adjusting, recognising, settling, moving again to new spaces, Dickens went to the centre, the dynamic centre, of this transforming social experience. (164)

Of course, this broad recording of the railways’ role in social and cultural change features alongside more macabre representations such as the death of Mr Carker later in the novel or in Dickens’ subsequent stories, notably ‘The Signal-Man’ (1866), which was published a year after Dickens’ own experience of a railway disaster at Staplehurst in Kent. With this in mind it’s worth noting Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873-77) and Émile Zola’s La Bête Humaine (1890) as canonical works that represent the railway as not merely a revolutionary mechanical tool of industrialisation, but as a mode of transport that also contributes to profound psychological change. [2]

Interestingly, since these Victorian explorations, British fiction in particularly has been caught in a bind when attempting to represent the railways. While this is not aimed as a wholly representative statement, it is fair to note that British railway writing has struggled to go beyond the energies of the steam age. The success of crime fiction set in the enclosed carriages of steam locomotives – notably Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and 4.50 from Paddington (1957) or contemporaneous neo-Edwardian murder mysteries such as Andrew Martin’s Jim Stringer series –  has helped feed the popular notion that the era of railway’s being central to life and death passed with the eradication of steam engines from the national railway in 1968.

19th-century writers like Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and Émile Zola and painters such as Édouard Manet explore the profound psychological change inaugurated by railways [Image by Steven Zucker under a CC BY-NC-SA license]

Even so, at the beginning of the twentieth century, H.G. Wells in Anticipations ([1901] 1902) looked to go beyond the steam engine, describing the Victorian network as ‘really only a vast system of trains of horse-waggons and coaches drawn along rails by pumping-engines upon wheels’ (12) and gazed upon the emergence of the motorcar along with a fascinating system of escalators underground as more efficient forms of mobility. Furthermore, in mid-twentieth century Europe Herman Sörgel’s gigantic Atlantropa project envisioned a complimentary road and railway connection traversing a huge bridge between southern Europe and Africa, while Kraftwerk’s 1977 album Trans-Europe Express contained a single of the same name, which imagined a European high speed service capable of travelling between Paris and Vienna in a matter of hours.

In Britain, Wells’ prediction was half-realised as after the Second World War the shift from railways to automobiles was emphasised by the opening of the first section of the M1 in 1959. As investment and belief in the railways subsided, popular representation also charted their demise. Released a year after Kraftwerk’s celebration of high-speed train travel, The Jam’s single ‘Down in a Tube Station at Midnight’ (1978) characterises a train station as analogous with urban decay. Beaten and robbed by a gang of thugs the narrator looks up at the walls of the station to see British Rail advertising mingled with graffiti:

The last thing that I saw
As I lay there on the floor
Was “Jesus Saves” painted by an atheist nutter
And a British Rail poster read “Have an Awayday – a cheap holiday -
Do it today!”

As British Rail was prepared for privatisation in the 1980s the concept of train travel as a source of social and personal transformation appeared, naturally, antiquated. However, as Carter (2001) argues, trains are key to understanding modernity: ‘transport by rail might have been largely superseded by cars, trucks and aircraft today, but the railway age laid tracks along which our world still runs’ (4).

Contemporary climate change necessitates a re-engagement with thinking about the railways in bold, utopian terms [Image by Pravesvuth Uparanukraw under a CC BY-NC-SA license]

Indeed, while contemporary debates about the railways often centre on ticket prices, industrial action and engineering work, the future may well require a reengagement with thinking about the railways in bold, utopian terms, particularly as climate change becomes a potentially restrictive factor in the expansion of airports and roads. A recent article by John Armstrong and John Preston (2011) used government research to assess how Britain’s transport infrastructure may look in the coming years. They touch on a number of near-future scenarios, with one being especially striking:

It is envisaged that, by 2055, the UK has changed enormously since the early 21st century, with cities, especially, benefitting from mixed-use development and improved, sustainable transport links. In addition to walking and cycling facilities, intra-urban light rail schemes are widespread, complemented by high-speed intercity services. Longer-distance travel is more difficult than previously, and expensive, with emphasis on energy conservation rather than on speed. (1573)

They conclude by stating that the pressures of climate change coupled with the rising cost of road and air travel make investment in railways essential, explaining that while ‘the past 50 years have seen a nadir in rail’s fortunes’ (1579) they speculate that ‘the continued expansion of high-speed rail services is likely’ (1579) in the future.

With this in mind, contemporary creative writers may therefore set their sights on the growth of high-speed rail as the facilitator of social change. A useful inspiration for this may reside in the current controversies over the new proposed line between London and the West Midlands. The route of High Speed 2 (HS2) through the Chilterns has provoked noisy protests from local residents and the Stop HS2 campaign, who object to the environmental impact of the route and question the wisdom of government research. Yet, there is a wider social aspect to this debate which can be found in the language used by some protestors. The actor, Geoffrey Palmer, recently added his support to the campaign against the new line by appearing on a video for the BBC’s Daily Politics programme where he strolled through picturesque countryside and rural villages whilst calling for the Prime Minister to ‘leave our countryside alone’.

Will the growth of high-speed rail inspire writers in the 21st Century? [Image by Monika under a CC BY-SA license]

Similarly, the Campaign to Protect Rural England released a report in 2011 entitled Getting Back on Track: Why New Thinking is Needed about High Speed Rail, which makes a revealing comment about the design of any new line: ‘Although design is at the bottom of this hierarchy for landscape impacts, world class design should be a hallmark of HS2 to make the line an asset wherever possible and follow the example of the great Victorian engineers such as Brunel’ (20). The organisation’s mention of a prominent nineteenth century engineer touches upon earlier railway development to reflect on contemporary expansion, whereas Palmer’s polemic evokes what George Orwell ([1941] 2000) calls ‘the privateness of English life’ (141) away from the clutches of centralised social organisation. HS2 has therefore seen the clashing of traditional concepts of Englishness with large-scale state planning centred around speculative research into demographic, environmental and mobility needs in the twenty-first century. Railways are accordingly becoming, once again, the catalysts for change. In the long term, high speed rail may shift temporal and spatial relationships a step further than it did in the nineteenth century, yet this also produces anxieties about the cultures that may be eradicated in this ceaseless march. The task of the contemporary creative railway writer is to tap into these new conditions and speculate on their technological, cultural and political implications.                                  

CITATION: Christopher Daley, "Railways and Fiction," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2013): n. pag. Web. 12 January 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.1.04

 Christopher Daley is a final year PhD student and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Westminster. His PhD thesis examinines the influence of the Cold War on British science fiction between 1945 and 1969. Christopher co-organised the international conference "The Apocalypse and Its Discontents" at the University of Westminster in December 2010, and is currently joint organiser of the research seminar series held at Westminster. 

Works Cited:

Armstrong, J. and Preston, J. ‘Alternative Railway Futures: Growth and/or Specialisation?’ Journal of Transport Geography. 19 (6) (November 2011): 1570 – 1579, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2011.03.012.

BBC. ‘HS2: Actor Geoffrey Palmer Against High Speed Rail Plan’ (9th January 2013) [online video]. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20958307 [accessed 10th January 2013].

Campaign to Protect Rural England. Getting Back on Track: Why New Thinking is Needed about High Speed Rail. (London, February 2011). Available online at: http://www.cpre.org.uk/resources/transport/rail/item/1868-getting-back-on-track [accessed 10th January 2013].

Carter, Ian. ‘“The lost idea of a train”: Looking for Britain’s Railway Novel’, The Journal of Transport History, 21 (2) (September 2000): 117 – 139.

Carter, Ian. Railways and Culture in Britain: the Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).

Daly, Nicholas. ‘Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses’, ELH, 66 (2) (Summer 1999): 461 – 487, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/elh.1999.0013.

Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son (London and New York: Penguin, 2002).

Orwell, George. ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,’ in George Orwell: Essays (London and New York: Penguin, 2000): 138 – 188.

Weller, Paul. ‘Down in a Tube Station at Midnight’ [audio on MP3] from The Jam, All Mod Cons (UK: Polydor, 1978).  

Wells, H.G. Anticipations: of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific upon Human Life and Thought (London: Chapman and Hall, 1902).

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1973).

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Rowena Clarke

Since the nineteen fifties, when suburban living began to establish itself as the new norm, representations of suburbia in American culture have been dominated by a particular set of characteristic tropes. Responding, in part, to the mass-produced nature of suburban landscapes and buildings, with their uniform housing designs and pre-planned street layouts, fiction imagined suburbia as a place of oppressive homogeneity. Popular fiction such as Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (1955) transmuted cultural fears about suburbia’s repressive uniformity, and the concomitant loss of individuality that brings, into the story of a community being controlled by alien parasites. We can see the very same fears driving the story of much later works like Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972) or Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, which illustrates just how entrenched these paradigmatic representations of suburban life have become. 

In the 20th century fiction has imagined suburbia as a place of oppressive homogeneity, responding to the mass-produced nature of suburban landscapes and buildings [Image by Alex Weimer under a CC BY-NC license] 

In fiction based in a more realist tradition, these anxieties find form in narratives that trace the (inevitable and often perverted) release of oppressed sexuality, emotion, and individuality within a suburban setting: these are the stories of what really goes on behind the white picket fence – for example, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm (1994). As Marc C. Jurng writes in his 2010 article “Nowhere in Particular: Perceiving Race, Chang-rae Lee's Aloft, and the Question of Asian American Fiction”:

Artists and critics alike have framed suburbia as a landscape that is at once pastoral and gothic. Cul-de-sacs of proper houses and families, the standard-bearers of a national nostalgia, all give up their secrets of violence, adultery, sexual repression, and bourgeois estrangement (618).

As Catherine Jurca has traced in her book White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel, for the majority of the second half of the twentieth century, the suburbs were predominantly made up of ethnically white populations. This demographic bias was reflected in the literature and culture of suburbia during its foundational phase in the nineteen fifties and sixties. As a result, whiteness, too, has become an established characteristic of the literary suburb. However, beginning in the nineteen nineties, the United States began to see a huge shift in the demographics of suburban populations. A study by the Brookings Institution, titled Twenty-First-Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America, has shown the dramatic changes that have taken place throughout the 1990s and the 2000s to the geographic distribution of both domestic and international migrants within the US. The study focuses on the shift away from immigration to central urban areas, and towards the migration of international immigrants and second generation migrant populations to suburban areas. As a result of this shift, as well as a number of other factors, the reality of suburban population demographics is quite different to the image of white suburbia that still persists in the popular imagination. Throughout the nineties and early two thousands, television was full of depictions of suburban America that, for the most part, re-enforced the dominant representation of the suburbs: Desperate Housewives, Weeds, The Sopranos, and Six Feet Under. Recent fiction, too, has perpetuated the standard tropes: Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993), A. M. Homes's Music for Torching (1999) and Tom Perotta’s Little Children (2004), for example, reinforce cultural ideas of white suburban angst and repressive suburban living.

Writers of the New Suburbs: Gary Shteyngart, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri and Chang-Rae Lee [Images used under fair dealings provisions for the purpose of scholarly discussion]

There are, however, a number of American writers of suburban fiction whose work challenges the dominant paradigm. Beginning in the late 1990s and approaching critical mass in the 2000s a new generation of writers, themselves predominately foreign born but American raised, have begun to re-write the suburban image in the American imagination. Writers like Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri and Gary Shteyngart complicate the idea of the suburbs as a stifling and homogeneous community of self-policing WASPs. Instead, we get the suburban New Jersey of Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), dotted with Dominican culture and viewed through the eyes of the apocalyptically minded Oscar, or Lahiri’s Boston and Cambridge exurbs populated by Asian immigrant families negotiating the complex intersections of American and Asian culture.

One of the earliest fiction writers to explore the changing face of the suburbs in the nineties and two thousands was Chang-rae Lee. The attention his work pays to the geographic distribution and division of immigrant communities makes it especially important to establishing a new kind of suburban writing. Lee’s attention to the spatial dynamics of immigrant settlement and his status as an early responder to the shift in suburban demographics marks him as one of the central players in the move towards a break from the traditional paradigm of American suburban fiction. Tracing the representation of immigrant communities in the suburbs through three of Lee’s novels, as we will see below, offers a way of tracking the development of the move towards a less hidebound conception of the American suburbs in fiction.

Lee’s first novel Native Speaker was published in 1995 and tells the story of Henry Park, the son of Korean immigrants, whose work as an industrial spy places him in the position of observer and traitor to the immigrant businesses and communities he monitors. The novel is deeply concerned with identity and belonging and this interest is, in part, played out on the landscape of Manhattan, the Outer Boroughs, and the suburbs. The novel begins and ends in the city, in a reaffirmation of the traditional centrality of city life for immigrant culture. The final scene of the novel depicts Henry, having left his position as a spy, assisting his wife as she teaches English to groups of immigrant children. The diversity of languages and cultures, and Henry’s commitment to uniting them without obliterating them, is a source of strength and hope for the viability of multi-ethnic life in the city. Before it gets to this point, though, the novel tries out the suitability of the suburbs for such a project. 

A new kind of suburban writing? Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker explores the geographic division of immigrant communities in Manhattan and The Bronx [Image by Steve McNicholas under a CC BY-NC-ND license]

Perhaps responding to the changes in suburban demographics taking place during the nineties, Native Speaker explores the possibility of a suburban life for immigrant communities. First Henry’s father, then Henry himself (along with his wife Lelia, and son, Mitt), move to Westchester County, New York. Westchester was America’s first suburb (as well as being where Lee himself was raised) and, as such, it seems a symbolic choice for this exploratory foray into depictions of literary immigrant suburbia. Henry is ethnically Korean but seems to stand outside both the immigrant cultures that he spies on as part of his work, and the predominantly white communities that he attempts to live among in the suburbs. When Henry’s son, Mitt, is killed – literally smothered to death by the (white) suburban children of their neighborhood – Lee seems to be suggesting that the kind of complex negotiations of identity required of immigrant (and second generation) inhabitants of predominantly white suburbia are not yet possible, despite the demographic changes happening around him.

Lee’s second novel, A Gesture Life, written just before the millennium and first published in the UK in 2000, offers a slightly more optimistic vision of suburban immigrant life. Here, Doc Hata is firmly established within the community of Bedley Run, but (for the majority of the novel) his suburban way of life recapitulates the dominant suburban paradigm rather than truly shifting it. Although Doc Hata’s dark past and diverted desires and emotions are firmly situated in a Korean and Japanese setting, the repression of these fits so neatly into the suburban paradigm that his status as an immigrant can never really disturb that essential correspondence as Doc Hata himself says in the novel’s opening line: “People know me here” (1). Despite Hata’s ease within this dominant version of suburbia, his daughter Sunny represents a challenge to the appearance-obsessed, and coldly unemotional norm. Sunny, adopted by Hata from Korea, despises Bedley Run and horrifies her father with her open displays of sexuality. Sunny runs away from home as a teenager and her reappearance, in the latter half of the novel, challenges Hata’s satisfaction with his version of the suburban norm and pushes the novel to establishing alternative models of suburban living. Sunny’s young son, whose father is African American, represents a hybrid of ethnicities and identities. Hata’s embrace of this child, and his and Sunny’s life in Ebbington – a neighbouring suburb less bound by the nineteen fifties suburban ideal—establishes the possibility of a less racially divisive suburban existence.

Lee’s 2004 novel, Aloft, fully embraces a new vision of suburban life. The novel begins with an aerial image of the suburbs:

The town directly ahead, which is nothing special when you’re on foot looks pretty magnificent now […] There is a mysterious, runelike cipher to the newer, larger homes wagoning in their cul-de-sac hoops […] From up here, all the trees seem ideally formed and arranged […] I know, too, from up here, that I can’t see the messy rest, none of the pedestrian sea-level flotsam that surely blemishes our good scene (1-2).

This opening image recalls the ideals of suburban planners in the nineteen fifties, and also hints at the disappointment that has emerged from suburban towns whose messy, complicated, day-to-day existences have failed to live up to those ideals. Rather than lambast the suburbs for their complex reality, Lee’s novel becomes a protracted exploration of the ways in which that complexity, which in itself begins to undo the suburban paradigm, is something to be celebrated. 

Lee's construction of a less racially divisive suburban imaginary critiques the ideals of 1950s suburban planners [Image by James Vaughan under a CC BY-NC-SA license]

A part of this celebration of complicatedness is Lee’s description of a multi-ethnic suburbia that contains multiple waves of ethnically diverse immigrants. Jerry, the main protagonist, is a second generation Italian American, his dead wife was a Korean immigrant and his current lover is Puerto Rican. When, at the end of the novel, we see Jerry’s suburban home become a haven for his extended family and friends (of different ethnicities and ages) there is a suggestion that the suburb has become a place in which diversity is not only present, but essential. The novel’s final image of Jerry, deeply grounded in the soil of his garden, stands as a counterpoint to the opening aerial vista and suggests that the novel is concerned with the need to represent suburban America in ways that disrupt those long established paradigms of homogeneity and banality that the opening of the novel alludes to.

Read alongside the shifting demographics of suburban migration, then, Lee’s three novels chart his progress towards a new suburban imaginary, one that offers a broader, less homogeneous and more vital representation of American suburbia. This movement within Lee’s work, although its details are specific to Lee’s fiction, acts as a microcosm of the broader, but more dispersed, changes which have been taking place in contemporary suburban fiction in the twenty-first century. Lee’s work, along with fiction by writers like Diaz and Lahiri, alters the established norms of suburban fiction, moving it away from tropes of white middle class angst and cultural anxieties about conformity towards a more complex portrayal of the kinds of diverse suburban communities that exist in twenty-first century America.

CITATION: Rowena Clarke, "Diverse Suburbias," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2013): n. pag. Web. 12 January 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.1.03

 Rowena Clarke is a PhD student in the English Department at Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of post-war Britain and America. Rowena co-convenes the Contemporary Literature and Globalization research group at Boston College,and has served as a teaching assistant and section leader for the undergraduate course The City in Film and Literature. 

Works Cited:

Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Jurng, Marc C. “Nowhere in Particular: Perceiving Race, Chang-rae Lee's Aloft, and the Question of Asian American Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 56 (1) (2010): 183-204

Lee, Chang-rae. Native Speaker (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995).

Lee, Chang-rae. A Gesture Life (London: Granta Books, 2000).

Lee, Chang-rae. Aloft (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004).

Singer, Audrey and Susan W. Hardwick. Twenty-First-Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2008).

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