Sources and Networks: The Elusive Real

            According to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, an attempt to posit source code as “the ultimate performative utterance” overlooks a network of humans and machines. Multiple entities necessarily mediate processes of computation; the reduction of software to source code obfuscates this mediation.  Combined with “the valorization of the user as agent,” the reduction of computer to code gives rise to “fantastic tales of the power of computing.” (300) I suggest that the fetishism Chun connects to the logic of “sourcery” finds its analog in a particular application of cognitive science to literary studies.  To claim that cognitive science holds the key to revealing the real of a literary text is to fetishize the relation of the textual and the mental. (300)

In moving from Chun’s argument to an engagement with a specific treatment of cognitive science’s relation to literature, I want to look at ways in which performativity provides a common ground for new media studies and neuroscience--a common ground that refuses possible readings of a literary text.

For Katherine Hayles, execution of code equals a change in machine behavior.  Where performative sentences, such as “I name this ship the ‘Queen Mary,’” depend on layers of mediation, code collapses the difference between transmission and action. (304)  As such, the performative finds its purified form not in the speech-act, but in source-code.  (Hayles, 50) Alexander Galloway moves code even further away from a relation to language. “To see code as subjectively performative or enunciative is,” according Galloway, “to anthopromorphize it, to project it into the rubric of psychology...” But Galloway’s assertion carries a possible problem.  Doesn’t “understanding voltages stored in memory as commands/code already anthropomorphize the machine?,” (305)

 The fault line separating thought and its object seems to traverse the computational/linguistic divide.  To think the object is to rip it out of objective space—to colonize it.   To cognize the machine is to erase its alterity.     

 Perhaps then, a hole emerges in the relation between cognition (a network of firing neurons) and computational coding.   But the hole is hard to see.  For example, the conversion of activity into inscription, the concept from which “source code emerges,” also lays the conceptual foundation of a neural network.   In fact, John von Neuman drew from “the conflation of neuronal activity with inscription,” to design “stored-memory digital computers." (308) Just as neuronal firing represents a set of abstract states, code represents a set of abstract operations.  This relation between software and cognition, appears as more than mere analogy.

The appearance might tempt one to think of an author’s brain, then, as a kind of source code.  Just as software can seem like “the invisible whole that generates…sensuous parts” so can the brain appear as the underlying reality grounding a literary text. (300) But this concept falls apart when one attempts to apply it to Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path. 
In a sense, Lerner’s book operates as both an extension of and meditation on its first poem, “Dedication.”  The book becomes “the recurring/ dream of waking with/ alternate endings/ she’d walk me through.” “She,” evidently, becomes the figure of “Ariana,” as the poem ends with “For Ariana./ For Ari”   Now, if one were to conflate this figure with Lerner’s neuronal network representing it, massive problems emerge when Mean Free Path begins to tilt the figure in opposing directions.  An identity of one neural net rather than another depends on a particular constellation of neural connections.  Consequently, if "Ari" operates in opposite or contradictory ways, one cannot identify the figure with any one particular neural ensemble.  To do so would be to posit a real contradiction in a physical structure.

Yet we do find an opposition within trajectories of signification once thematic properties of the text write back, or mediate, the author’s relation to his so-called figure.  Consider, “I woke/ Before I reached the ground like virga/ To find Ari gone./  The flattened stems/ Only because there was no ground/ Allow the words to tremble in the breath/ As such.  There is no way to read this/ Once, and that’s love, or aloud…” “Ari” is on the outside; she is “gone.” Consequently, the “words in the breath”  cannot be read, and Ari cannot be spoken to.  Yet, the speaker tells us “Ari removes the bobby pins/ I remove the punctuation." The repetition of the word "remove" indicates that Ari is both present and absent--not problem for poetry but disastrous for identifying the figure with the author's neural representation.   If Ari is identical with some neural articulation, then she has fallen off the cognitive map.  Ari becomes an impossible thought for cognitive science—one that in no way lodges itself within any definitive neural computation.     

Bursting Flusser's Bubble: Titus Andronicus and the Impossibility of the Third Position

No fancy pictures in mine.  Sorry, guys.  

In his discussion of conceptual versus imaginal reading, Flusser first invokes the metaphor of a theater to describe how, as subjects, we participate in the different types of thinking he outlines.  Distinguishing between dancer, actor and author, he suggests that while the dancer is simply enacting a ritual demanded by reality, and to stray from this enactment would be to sin, the actor knows that his role is determined by convention which he is at liberty to modify and that, finally, the author (depending on whose viewpoint we assume) is alternately a devil, an authority, or a puppeteer and creator of forms (32).  Flusser then reneges this metaphor, asserting that the theater “does not adequately display the third position, because this does not truly exist in the theater as yet; it is too recent” (ibid) and proceeds to hilariously imagine a future potential in which a spectator films a scene of himself and projects it to become both spectator, actor and author (i.e. a YouTube video).  I would argue, however, that Flusser was right the first time, but in a way that rather demonstrates the impossibility of “imaginal thinking [succeeding] in incorporating conceptual thinking” (34).  To demonstrate, I invoke Titus Andronicus. 

            Alas, this is not a discussion of that “crimson river of blood” I mentioned in class.  Rather, I would like to consider how Titus, the character, successfully embodies that cherished third position by both acting in a drama that he constructs and also watching it unfold before his eyes.  After Lavinia is raped, Titus plots his revenge, falling into an awfully convenient and efficiently deployed madness that persuades his enemies (Tamora and her rapist sons) to disguise themselves as the personifications of “Rape,” “Murder” and “Revenge” in an attempt to dupe the old man into his own downfall.  Titus ever the wiser enacts madness and convinces the mother (disguised as Revenge) to leave her sons in order to invite Empress Tamora to return later for a banquet: “I knew them all,” he says in an aside, “though they supposed me mad, / And will o’rreach them in their own devices” (5.2.145-6).  Once gone, he succeeds in murdering them, cooking them in a feast and serving them to Empress.  As author of his own revenge plot, he also acts a part in order to manipulate the other players.  After his plot is revealed, he then orders the other spectators as much as himself to “Witness my knife’s sharp point” (5.3.64) as he stabs the Empress.  Titus, then has become an early modern precursor to that YouTube auteur—until he, too, is killed off as a consequence of his own revenge plot.  He is quickly murdered by the Emperor, who is then murdered by Titus’s remaining son. 

           The problem here is not whether Titus can occupy that third position, but rather whether this occupation successfully subverts or improves upon the other two positions by incorporating conceptual thinking (that of the line, of history, of the actor’s role) into imaginal thinking (that of the picture, the posthistorical, the YouTube creator’s role).  As the play illuminates, such a position still falls prey to the conventions it seeks to control: Titus, as author of the revenge plot, must also succumb to the full realization of the plot, which requires his own demise—he is just as much subject to a system as are the characters in his plot.  When Flusser self-consciously admits that “the third position cannot be conceptualized; it must be imagined with the kind of imagination that is now being formed” (33) simultaneously pointing out his failure to do so through the conceptual medium of text, he points out the crux of the problem, but fears the implication that perhaps what he wishes for is simply an impossibility.  The reality of Titus and of media in general is that synthesis of linear and surface media will not result in a new civilization.  The best we may hope for is, as he urges, to learn to read imaginal fictions as we have learned to read conceptual ones, and then to move towards a type of supplementarity, rather than synthesis. 

Beyond dolls and costumes: what power structures inform performative acts?

Like Robin Bernstein in “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature,” Heartbreak House is interested in the performance of texts. For Bernstein, children’s literature is “possible” because children actively participate in materializing that literature through play; they “revise rather than only reify narratives” (163). I’ve already mentioned that I find Bernstein’s claims artificially specific: no reader is merely a passive receptacle, and Bernstein’s argument that “representational play is performative in that it produces culture” is odd insofar as the article does not acknowledge any performative acts beyond those of children playing with dolls (163). Heartbreak House explores the same fundamental concept of culture-making through the materialization of texts that Bernstein’s article does. Its product of choice is the play, but the claims made are similar.

Of course, Heartbreak House is a play, and one in which the characters are often seen taking up and discarding various roles. The strands of Feydeau-like farce; the seeming lack of permanence or import in characters’ actions; the many mentions of costume (Hector’s robe is specifically donned in order to make him look like the exotic characters he pretends to be, for example, and Hesione’s tresses—of which Ellie says, “there is nothing really strong and true about Hesione but her beautiful black hair”—are gleefully revealed to be a wig); and the fact that the Captain behaves as though his house is a ship; all of these things call attention to the performative (106). The characters might be children romping about, playing at being adults at sea.

Heartbreak House is also explicitly concerned with the reception and performance of texts. Ellie begins the play reading Othello. She and Hesione then use this text as a vehicle for discussing Ellie’s desires. Ellie’s reading, it turns out, vehemently excludes what we might argue is the most crucial component of the play (“He was jealous, wasn’t he?” asks Hesione. “Oh, not that,” Eillie replies. “I think all the part about jealousy is horrible” (46)). What Ellie likes in Shakespeare’s play, it turns out, is the part of it that resembles her relationship with Hector. Hector pretends to be an adventurer (Othello) regaling his inexperienced lover (Desdemona) with exotic tales. He is playing out, in other words, Ellie’s fantasy of romance. Thus her materialization of the play is so active as to be founded upon just a few lines of the original text that she claims to admire. She is re-writing as she plays.

Race surfaces very oddly in all of this. Many times, the women (most especially Hesione and Ariadne) are referred to as “witches” and “demons” with mysterious powers. And this is the explanation offered: “Old Shotover sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar. The devil gave him a black witch for a wife; and these two demon daughters are their mystical progeny” (100). Despite this association with the exotic and demonic, however, the women seem to use the association only to their advantage. They perform the role suggested to them in order to bewitch the assembled company. Race haunts Heartbreak House, but only as a role that can be assumed and used by the potentially marginalized in order for them to achieve power. (It is also worth noting that the race relations of Othello are entirely ignored.) The space of the house in Shaw’s play describes the boundaries of the characters’ world. They are not, it seems, subject to or influenced by any larger structures of power beyond those which exist in the myths of their home. And those—because always materialized, always performed and thereby rewritten—can be used without apparent limitation.

Bernstein’s conclusion about the materialization of texts by children is that this constant enactment “forces us to look anew at nineteenth-century white children and see not racist culture’s reflectors but its coproducers” (167). She is aware that the texts and dolls are “cultural prompts” that the child takes up; children are not authors, but coauthors. What forcing this article into an artificial specificity does, however, is erase all of the other power relations within which a child moves. Bernstein’s article narrows the world of children to their books and their dolls. Similarly, Heartbreak House narrows the world of its characters to their books and their costumes. Both must seek to understand what other structures the individual inevitably references in order to begin to perform.

Serial Fiction as a Nation-Building Medium?

Serial Fiction as a Nation-Building Medium?

Warning: this post is has very little to do with The Portrait of a Lady in particular and is instead about its form, serial fiction.

Benedict Anderson’s chapter “Census, Map, Museum” from Imagined Communities offers the three media as a mode of colonial nation-building. The census groups and identifies in ways that, at first, do not affect or reflect the populations it reports, but as the census’ designations shape policy, the realities of living within the census groups created by the bureaucracies of education, policing, courts, clinics, etc. do begin to divide and shape the population along the colonizers’ imaginings of them. The map does the same thing with drawn borders, putting “space under the same surveillance which the census makers were trying to impose on persons” (173) and creating of the country’s silhouette a brand or logo. And, the museum creates the nation through aligning artifacts and art with the newly-delineated peoples and space; it creates a visual cultural history that the nation can embrace. But these modes of nation-building are not entirely confined to the colonial enterprise: we can imagine these phenomena at work in any time period wherein it behooves the hegemonic class or system to gird the nation into thinking of itself as such: that is, England after the second French Revolution or the postbellum United States both sought security through nationalism. This offers one explanation for why, during these times, cultural production reached new heights, especially of literary media.

In the postbellum and Victorian Eras mentioned above, one particularly popular form of literature that is still identified almost exclusively with this period is serialized fiction. The serial mode’s appropriateness to the times lies in its particular ability to create community. Much like the contemporary sitcom, the serial novel would have fostered conversation and a spirit of like-mindedness that the book form or the feature film cannot. Unlike these more condensed media, the protraction of the experience through months or years (either as the narrative unfolded in a magazine or through a television season) creates a shared temporal space in which to discuss and process what we collectively find interesting in them; they provide a space in which and a topic from which may evolve comradery. This is even more true for serial fiction than for the typical episode in a sitcom, because there is an inevitable suspense in the serial installation such as we only occasionally find in the television episode that is “To Be Continued...”. Such an episode leads to rehashing and speculation that strengthens the community of viewers and which was an expected part of reading serial fiction.
In serial fiction, we speculate as to motives and as to the fiction’s actors, thereby characterizing through reading in a way that reveals and makes obvious the readerly function; as we read together, we see the traces of our reading made clear, since we do not always read what others in the community do. Through the process of articulating and speculating within the reading community, the reader becomes invested in BOTH the literature and in the community: as he considers the literature with others, he invests and is invested in both his ideas and in his identity as one of a community of producers of ideas around the work. Star Trek is perhaps the most enduring present instance of this: the viewer finds value in the series and explores the nature of this value with others; as they reinforce each other’s valuation of the series, the value increases and evolves into an identity -- the Trekkie.  While I will not attempt to argue that the production of Star Trek is a hegemonic attempt at nation-building (although one could probably say that it is), like serial fiction does, it does produce a community that complements a period of national anxiety (of space exploration and the Cold War) as much in the very fact of establishing a community as in the subject of the series itself.
The Portrait of a Lady was enormously popular on both sides of the Atlantic, speaking to its function more as a form than as a text whose content was national in character.
As with Anderson’s essay, the processes that the media (census, map, museum) enacted were as important than their contents. While these media were the means of initiating the colonizers’ imagined communities, the communities were not built until the imaginations within them self-identified as community members through engaging with the forms. Similarly, the postbellum or Victorian citizen who read serial fiction became part of a community not because of hegemonic enterprise in this direction, but he perhaps reflected through his choice of media a more generalized spirit of coming together in response to threats that would dissolve the nation.

Revising the Marriage Narrative in “The Birthmark”

For a nineteenth-century white, religious, male writer, Hawthorne imbues “The Birthmark” with what seems to be an oddly feminist agenda. We see Aylmer psychologically manipulate his wife Georgiana and lead her to happily submit to her own torture, a plot that strongly parallels Perkins Gilman’s seminal first-wave feminist fiction “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Yet it is not entirely legitimate to attribute any outward feminist program to Hawthorne. So, from whence does this anti-patriarchal message arise?

            When reading “The Birthmark” alongside Bernstein’s “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race,” a partial answer can be extrapolated. Bernstein’s argument rests in the examination of children’s literature, a genre to which “The Birthmark” clearly does not belong; however, Bernstein’s foundational concept about the performance of race as it revises narrative allows us a window through which to view Aylmer and Georgiana’s relationship. In applying Bernstein’s argument to the performance of gender rather than of race, I will argue that Aylmer attempts to “revise rather than only reify” (Bernstein 163) the narrative of marriage that society has forced upon him by reducing Georgiana to doll-like status, and thus attempting to perform the exaggerated gender hierarchy about which he fantasizes.   

            Bernstein’s use of “narrative” signifies, of course, the literature she analyzes. Yet she also considers the racial tensions of the American nineteenth and twentieth centuries a type of narrative that experiences revision through children’s play. Bernstein argues that “through these performances, nineteenth-century white children played at violence against African Americans precisely as abolition, emancipation, then freedom were eroding American white supremacy” (163). Thus the dialectic of slavery and abolition was as much a narrative implicated in children’s play as the books that were performed. In “The Birthmark,” it is a narrative of the marriage institution which Aylmer, as the “performer,” wishes to revise. The story begins with Aylmer’s somewhat resistant move to “persuad[e] a beautiful woman to become his wife” and leave his scientific profession behind (1320). His reluctance to put science on the back burner suggests that marriage was imposed upon him by societal expectations, and that had such expectations not been present, he never would have married. It soon becomes clear that matrimony does not suit Aylmer as science did, and that the only way for his marriage to work is if his love for Georgiana “intertwin[es] itself with his love of science, and unit[es] the strength of the latter to its own” (1321). Here we see a clear desire to rework the marriage institution. Instead of separating his professional and marital lives, as was expected at that time, Aylmer cannot withstand a marital love that rivals his love of science. He must, then, revise his marriage narrative; and in order to do so, he needs a doll to play with.

            In the context of slavery, Bernstein studies the “disturbing and lingering question” posed by animate dolls: “what is a person?” (163). Though women in the American nineteenth century were certainly less objectified than slaves, legislature for women that defined “all humans as humans” was still lacking (163–164). Women were required by law to submit to their husbands and had few human rights, similarly to emancipated slaves. They were, therefore, “less human” than men, especially in the marriage institution. “The Birthmark” demonstrates this well, when Aylmer only starts wanting to remove Georgiana’s birthmark “after his marriage – for he had thought little or nothing of the matter before” (1321). From the beginning, Georgiana appears as a type of “animate doll,” described by Bernstein, through her simplicity of character and submission to her husband’s manipulations. As the animate doll, however, she embodies “‘human anxieties about what it means to be real’” (Kutnetz qtd. Bernstein 164). Aylmer’s removal of the birthmark thus symbolizes Georgiana’s reduction to truly inhuman or doll-like status so that Aylmer can avoid the anxiety that Georgiana is partially “real,” despite his objectification of her. The birthmark is mostly characterized by its connection to the circulation of her blood; it appears or disappears with “every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart” (1322). Thus Aylmer’s desire to remove the birthmark signifies his desire to erase signs of her vitality, so that she will be perfectly inhuman. At the end of the story, Aylmer succeeds in removing the birthmark and kills her at the same time, thus forming her as a truly lifeless doll for Aylmer’s use in his performance of exaggerated gender hierarchy in the marriage narrative.

            It is this defamation of the marriage institution that accounts for Hawthorne’s critique of Alymer’s hyper-patriarchal actions. The story points at the flaws in the gender hierarchy by portraying a man who performs against the marriage narrative, a narrative held to be sacred in Hawthorne’s Protestant beliefs. Does Hawthorne reach the same conclusion as does Bernstein? If Bernstein’s final message is that the white children of the nineteenth century were the “coproducers” of racist culture, can we say that Hawthorne believes that elite white men are the coproducers of a wrongly sexist culture? With such a claim we may again be reaching too far into a strange, Hawthornean anachronistic feminism that does not really exist.

Revisioning Maps without Images

After spending about an hour trolling the internet for images of the Thai maps described in Benedict Anderson’s essay entitled “Essay, Map, Museum,” I found few examples of either Thai Military maps or the Buddhist Cosmographies. These two book covers (http://www.riverbooksbk.com/images/product/34.jpg, http://www.riverbooksbk.com/images/product/33.jpg) of Siamese (Thai) military/trade maps were the best that I could come up with through Google searches. Clearly, images of these artifacts are not easy to locate, which invited the question, why weren’t images of these items provided with this article? In an essay that leans so heavily on visual artifacts and sites for its argument, is it fair to ask the reader to trust to the description of the writer without the visual experience of the artifacts themselves? The lack of these important landmarks to support and direct this argument is especially glaring in an article that focuses on mapping and labeling as a strategy of empire. Surely, there is a place for reorganization when the necessity of visual support is so apparent.

            Lady Audley’s Secret’s publication history suggests the revisioning that may and should happen when the need for supporting imagery in a text is detected. This novel was serialized in 12 monthly installments in Sixpenny Magazine from January to December of 1862.  At the end of that year the serialized parts were combined into a novel and redivided into 32 chapters in three volumes. In March of 1863, the novel was republished serially in 22 weekly parts in London Journal. The reason for the republication of this already widely-read narrative was the addition of 22 woodcut illustrations. The impulse to milk whatever remaining income could be squeezed from this cash-cow may have been a motivating force in the additional release of the novel. However, there is also an implication that illustrations were somehow necessary for properly understanding the message of the narrative.

            The structure of the weekly installments re-mapped the suspenseful impact of the narrative drastically, so that they would coincide with the moments that the illustrator chose to depict. Like European revisioning of Thai maps, the contours of the novel were redrawn to reflect the agenda of these illustrations. This agenda is clearly patriarchal mapping of Lady Audley’s deterioration: at first she is a glamorous and upright young woman subject to the admiring male gaze, but gradually she becomes shrewish and severe, raging and pleading as she is denounced by male characters, and drooping when she is confronted by her doctors. The illustrated figures both literally and figuratively point to the way the narrative should be read.

            By ommiting pictures in his article, Anderson does not account for the very differences in seeing that Lady Audley’s publishers took into account and that differentiates the Eastern and Western map-making that he draws attention to. European maps rely on “the plane relationship” between “indifferently profane and sacred dots” and the “bird’s eye view” of space “situated in a larger, stable geographic context” to produce “an infinitely reproducible” “logo-map” (171-2, 5). In contrast, the Siamese “cosmograph” and diagrammatic military and shipping guides, rely either on symbolic arrangements of “supraterrestrial heavens and subterrestrial hells” along a “single vertical axis” or “a queer oblique perspective or mixture of perspectives, as if the drawer’s eyes, accustomed from daily life to see the landscape horizontally, at eye level” is attempting to render it vertically (171). These two sets of disparate maps were created looking at and attempting to represent the same visual space. Keeping this in mind, it is unreasonable to assume that any two readers of the description of visual imagery would envision the same representation without actually seeing what is represented. Thus, by omitting examples of the artifacts that are the basis of his argument, Anderson disallows the reader the ability to properly map his assertions—he cannot see what Anderson sees because he literally does not show it to him. Anderson’s topic intrinsically insists that the borders of his article must be redrawn, as was Lady Audley’s Secret, so that the imagery beneath both the Siamese “written-in notes” and the Colonial “grid” of longitudinal and latitudinal marks can guide the reader to his conclusion.

A Centre Not Its Centre

In “Line and Surface,” Vilém Flusser draws a strict distinction between “imaginal” and “conceptual” thinking, as they are realized by images and written texts respectively. The two media, he posits, impose a different “structure on thinking:” “we must follow the written text if we want to get at its message, but in pictures we may get the message first, and then try to decompose it” (23). Flusser explains that “when we translate image into concept, we decompose the image—we analyze it.” In doing so, he claims, we “throw…a conceptual point-net over the image, and capture only such meanings as did not escape through the meshes of the net” (28). The inadequacy of written lines, which “relate their symbols to their meanings point by point,” to explaining surfaces, which “relate their symbols to their meanings by two-dimensional contexts” (27-28), represents what Flusser calls “the present crisis.” What Flusser fails to recognize, it seems, is the possibility that written lines can be used in the service of “imaginal” thinking—indeed, that language can ever be used to disrupt the teleological “history” of the sentence and gesture toward new “structures of thinking.”

                Such a project plays out (of course) in Samuel Beckett’s Watt. For the sake of concision, I will focus only on the most obvious example of the intersection of imaginal and conceptual thinking in the novel, which occurs when Watt tries to articulate the strange effect that a painting has on his thought process.  Watt describes the painting, which he finds in the room of his fellow servant, Erskine, as follows:

A circle, obviously described by a compass, and broken at its lowest point, occupied the middle foreground, of this picture…In the eastern background appeared a point, or dot. The circumference was black. The point was blue, but blue! The rest was white. How the effect of perspective was obtained Watt did not know. But it was obtained…Watt wondered how long it would be before the point and the circle entered together upon the same plane. Or had they not done so already, or almost? And was it not rather the circle that was in the background, and the point that was in the foreground? (104)

Here Watt’s struggle to determine the foreground and the background of the painting are clearly presented in “conceptual” (or written) lines. This desire to translate the “conceptual” to the “imaginal” is taken to its logical extreme (as are most things in Beckett), as Watt:

wondered what the artist had intended to represent (Watt knew nothing about painting), a circle and its centre in search of each other, or a circle and its centre in search of a centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and its centre in search of its centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and its centre in search of a centre and its circle respectively, or a circle and its centre not its centre in search of its centre and its circle respectively, or a circle and a centre not its centre in search of a centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and a centre not its centre in search of its centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and a centre not its centre in search of a centre and its circle respectively, in boundless space, in endless time (Watt knew nothing about physics), and at the thought that it was perhaps this, a circle and a centre not its centre in search of a centre and its circle respectively, in boundless space, in endless time, then Watt’s eyes filled with tears that he could not stem, and they flowed down his fluted cheeks unchecked, in a steady flow, refreshing him greatly. (104-05)

Watt’s permutational logic, which is clearly composed of written (conceptual) lines, seems to become a dizzying textual surface that contains a different, “imaginal” thought. When Flusser posits that, in the future, “first there will be an image of something, then there will be an explanation of that image, and then there will be an image of that explanation” (30), I immediately thought of the many long passages in Watt in which the permutational logic is taken to its extreme, as in the passage above. I will spare you more examples (mostly because they are painstaking to transcribe but also because they get progressively longer as the novel goes on), but it seems that Beckett is effectively able to translate conceptual (written) lines, which still retain their individual "histories" in isolation, into a textual space that can best be grasped as an (imaginal) surface—one whose content is grasped more fully at first glance than by painstakingly reading each permutation.

                I wonder if Flusser’s essay (which describes poetry as an “articulation of linear thought” (30)) fails to take into account a wide range of seemingly conceptual content that is actually insisting to be understood with imaginal structures of thought.                                                 

Imagining the Colonial State in Roxana’s Turkish Costume

If the census, the map, and the museum shape the colonial state, as Benedict Anderson suggests in Imagined Communities, Roxana’s Turkish costume and her very name can be read as an extension of the “totalizing classificatory grid” that solidified “the state’s real or contemplated control” (184). Roxana’s act of clothing herself in artifacts ripped from another culture has precedent: Colonial outposts in the eighteenth century such as the British East India Company encouraged this type of appropriation as a means of advancing their commercial interests. Imperial expansion, in other words, is furthered in Roxana by just such a classificatory system as Anderson describes.

Anderson notes “the peculiarity of the new census” that “tried carefully to count the objects of its feverish imagining,” identifying, classifying, and quantifying its subjects (169). Roxana, too, is seized by a desire to enumerate the possessions acquired from a “Malthese Man of War”: a robe of “fine Persian or Indian damask,” a “Girdle five or six inches wide, after the Turkish Mode, a “Turban, or Head Dress, and finally, a “Turkish Slave” bought for the express purpose of arraying her in the foreign finery (Defoe 174). While the slave receives far less mention than the clothing purchases, she is instrumental in helping her mistress replicate the effect of a Turkish princess on many occasions. Indeed, while Roxana ostensibly buys the costume for a masquerade ball, she seems more concerned with the repeated ritual of dressing in it and gazing upon herself in the privacy of her home. The image of the Turkish princess is reproducible, a sign of the “replicable plurals” Anderson identifies as crucial to the imaginings of the colonial state (184).

The unnamed slave is instrumental to dressing Roxana because she is the original wearer of the costume, a former high-born lady enslaved on a journey from Constantinople to Alexandria. Roxana strips the woman of all remnants of her former life by calling her “my little Turk,” calling to mind how “the Cirebonese court classified people by rank and status, while the Company did so by something like ‘race.’”(Anderson 167). While the lady is diminished figuratively as a “little Turk,” the dress she once wore is elevated to the “Habit of a Turkish Princess,” thus effacing rank and prioritizing the objects produced by Turkish culture.

When Roxana finally appears in public wearing the costume, she is immediately assigned a name that recalls the infinite reproducibility of colonial power. As she performs a solo dance that is immediately (and falsely) attributed to the courts of Constantinople, “one of the Gentlemen cry’d out Roxana! Roxana! By--, with an Oath, upon which foolish Accident I had the name of Roxana presently fix’d on me…” (176). The introduction to my Oxford edition clarifies that Roxana is a name used in drama of the seventeenth century “as a generic name for an oriental queen,” and had recently been used in scandalous memoirs and as the stage name of an actress whom a Restoration aristocrat admired (xvii). The name Roxana, then, is yet another example of the “logic of quantification” established in the earlier scene with the Turkish slave (Anderson 169). Adding one more layer of complexity, Roxana’s name—appropriated from an unknown “oriental queen”—is primarily what establishes her fame and desirability among the crowds of gentlemen who flock to see her dance. She is classified in terms of her exoticism and placed in a long tradition of others “Roxanas” who similarly have made themselves available for “surveillance and infinite replication” (Anderson 185).

I will admit, Roxana’s voluntary classification (and obviously, her status as a white woman) is troubling to me. While I have argued before that Roxana is complicit with Defoe’s capitalist project, her reluctance to be gazed upon—as opposed to gazing at herself in full costume, only accompanied by the Turkish slave—introduces some ambivalence. Is it possible to both apply the “totalizing classificatory grid” and place oneself in it, or is my reading too sympathetic to Roxana?

"It could drive you wild": Media dissonance and The Member of the Wedding

Robin Bernstein, in her essay on dolls and children’s literature, highlights the necessity of considering the two together in order to “look anew at nineteenth century white children and see not racist culture’s reflectors but its coproducers” (167). In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson considers the entangled roles of the census, the map, and the museum in creating and recreating colonial and postcolonial structures of power and oppression. Vilem Flusser argues that when we “read” films, the “line thought” that we depend upon to read written text and the “surface thought” that we depend on to read images become intertwined. And when Wendy Hui Kyong Chun takes up the question of reading software, the source code and the screen, the user and the programmer, become so tied up that it is finally necessary to argue that “software can only be understood in media res” (323). If a medium can be understood as an object through which messages are constructed and conveyed, then each of these projects depends on the inextricability of different forms of media. When we analyze a book or a painting or a film to get it to tell us something about the culture in which it was made, though we may think we analyze it on its own, that culture, indeed the very fact of the thing we call “culture,” dictates that a medium never stands alone.

            Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding is a 20^th century cultural object, and as such its production and consumption takes part in what we might consider the hyper-inextricability of media characteristic of its time. The novel was first published in 1946, McCullers adapted it into a play that opened on Broadway in 1950, and in 1952 the play, rather than the original novel, was readapted into a film, with many of the Broadway production’s actors reprising their roles. Sylvia Plath, a McCullers fan, used a phrase from the novel to begin one of her poems. McCullers was a musician, and I have already discussed how her musical knowledge informed the novel’s structure. Clearly no more examples are needed to show that what Bernstein, Anderson, Flusser, and Chun all allude to (or discuss directly) is at work in this instance. But I want to argue that though it is crucial to understand the ways in which media are yoked to each other, both the content of Member and its iteration as an object I hold in my hand show us the necessity of considering dissonance. Dissonance between media is also always at work, and even when different forms of media exist within what we perceive as the same cultural object, their refusal to work in consonance is characteristic of the same age that would seem to move toward erasing media distinctions altogether.

            My edition of Member, from 1965, has some curious cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon (the image itself alludes to other media: its original was done in crewelwork embroidery). There are aspects of this cover that, to my mind, don’t quite connect it with the novel it claims to represent (either that, or the novel has trouble living up to its cover art). If this cover represents a work that understands historically specific racial distinctions as a significant aspect of its central question of what membership can mean, why are Frankie and John Henry green and blue? If the cover represents a story that is, in part, about the historically specific experiences and consequences of World War II, why does the whole thing look so psychedelic ‘60s? The book’s other extratextual content (if it can be considered extratextual) creates more dissonance. The preface by “The Editors of TIME,” for example, is written in rather clunking prose and contains a sentimentalizing narrative of McCullers’ life, both of which joltingly contrast McCullers’ careful syntax and complex depictions of subjectivity.

            All of this is not to say that I think covers of books can or should be somehow “accurate” in representing their content, or that if a book were to have a preface that tried to match the subsequent prose it would be somehow “better,” or even that the cover and the preface are somehow separate from what the book is “really about,” but to emphasize how often we experience the different media that make up a cultural object as discordant. Though these media are presented to us as attached to one another, and that they are, as Bernstein et al. show, inextricable, they can’t completely harmonize. I want to point to the dissonance that exists within the atmosphere of hyper-inextricability I mentioned earlier.

If I can be allowed, for a moment, to rip the content of the novel artificially from the media surrounding it, I’d like to mention in closing that part of Member’s work is to remind us to consider dissonance, perhaps not specifically in the way that media interact but certainly in relationships more generally. To choose one example among many, as Frankie sits in the kitchen and listens to a nearby piano-tuner “harp and insist” on one note, she considers a piano’s keys: “If you start with A and go on up to G, there is a curious thing that seems to make the difference between G and A all the difference in the world. Twice as much difference as between any other two notes in the scale. Yet they are side by side there on the piano just as close together as the other notes. Do ray me fa sol la tee. Tee. Tee. Tee. It could drive you wild” (95).