Above Board

Power, Employment-as-Prison, and the Corporate Uncanny in Severance and Control

The following is an abstract for a conference paper:

“Behind the baroqueness of images hides the éminence grise of politics.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

In both Apple TV+’s surreal television drama Severance (2022) and Remedy Entertainment’s video game Control (2019), office workers confront uncanny structures of power within labyrinthine workspaces from which they cannot escape. Overseeing these spaces is a mysterious “Board,” a governing entity that communicates only through a translator or interlocutor, when it is not communicating through silence. In Severance, The Board listens and watches and occasionally exerts its will through a smiling interpreter whose HR-rep friendliness fails to mask her sinister intentions. In Control, the PC is the unwilling Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, carrying out the will of The Board, a collective of interdimensional beings who commune with her via imprecise translations that blend corporate jargon with cosmic psychobabble. The Board, in both properties, literalize Marshall McLuhan’s contention that communicative media are messages unto themselves but these protheses extend not the bodies of common workers but the authority of unseen entities at the very top of the institutional hierarchy. They represent Lewis Mumford’s “megamachines,” subsuming human welfare beneath the rubric of power structures that are opaque and self-reinforcing. The communicative metonymies that refuse to communicate—a crackling PA system/interpreter in Severance and an inverted pyramid emitting muffled speech with inscrutable subtitles in Control—express a real-world horror of late capitalism: The complete, public, and perpetually-reinforced severance of workers from the mechanisms of power and their lack of control in what I am calling the “corporate uncanny.”

On the other side of the power divide from The Board, workers are a literal slave class—members of what Giogio Agamben terms Homo Sacer, who are simultaneously indispensable and expendable. They are stripped to bare life so their labor and bodies can be controlled, partitioned, or sacrificed without legal or moral consequence. In Severance, severed “Innies” spend their entire lives within the twisting halls of the Macrodata Refinement Division of Lumon Industries, collating data they cannot interpret. When “Outies” retire, their Innies ceases to exist, and so the half-life of work is the only reality or opportunity open to their severed identities. In Control, Jesse Faden is elevated to Director of the FBC and yet her ascension bestows obligation without any real power. Indeed, her only option is to become the policing apparatus of The Board, killing employees who have been infected by a malevolent entity called The Hiss. When she finds these workers, they hang in midair, chanting in unison, and they will attack if they are not put down. Both texts imagine a world in which abstract corporate or bureaucratic authority destroys human subjectivity by choreographing workers into ornamental patterns that, according to Seigfreid Kracauer’s “Mass Ornament,” reflect the impersonal, fragmented logic of modern bureaucratic and administrative systems. In these two works of contemporary media culture, we see that the future of institutional power is not about the individuals on either side of the power divide: It is about how organizations in the abstract become self-reinforcing megamachines—media systems that control the very conditions of reality that dictate how we understand ourselves, our jobs, and one another.                                                                             

Works Cited

Agamben, Georgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford U. P., 1998.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The precession of simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation, Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, U. of Michigan P., 1994, pp. 1–42.

Control. Remedy Entertainment, Distributed by 505 Games, PS5 Edition, 2019.

Karim, Muzaffar. “Factory or Corporation: What Severance Gets Wrong.” Inverse Journal, Inverse Praxis Foundation, 10 Mar 2023.

Kracauer, Seigfreid. “The Mass Ornament.” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard U. P., 1995.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press, 1994.

Miller, Dylan Reid. “The Grim Barbarity of Capitalist Designs: Class Conflict, Corporate Dystopia, and the Sacred Gaze in Severance.” Reintegrating Severance, edited by Nora M. Isacoff and Jennifer Dawes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, 37-59.

Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development. Harcourt Brace Jobanovich, Inc., 1967.

Severance. Created by Dan Erickson, Apple TV+, 2022.

Watch Yourself

Time, Surveillance, and the Ideology of Seamlessness 

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at. ”

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

We consult the Apple Watch for its myriad utilities. Only one of them is, incidentally, telling time. These devices serve as miniature hubs whose functions extend ever further into the nooks and crannies of our lives. The tiny pixels on its screen—its gentle vibrations—communicate unadulterated ideology. It tells us to do things we were going to do anyway—stand up, breathe, take steps, sleep, wake up—but to do these tasks in increasingly mechanized patterns, submitting the internal systems of our bodies to the rubric of machinic optimization. It does this for our own good, of course, dressing self-maintenance rituals in the language of health and wellness. To “read” the Apple Watch, we might adopt the framework Michael S. Mahoney theorizes in “Reading a Machine” (1980), which asks us to treat technological objects not as neutral instruments but as cultural texts that encode the larger economic systems, moral anxieties, and social imaginaries that inform their designs. The Ford Model T, for instance, was more than a vehicle. It was a manifestation of the industrial logics of the early 20th century. Vanadium steel, assembly-line affordances, modular simplicity indexed new systems of production: A car designed to be built by machines and mass-produced in high volume (Mahoney 7). Similarly, the Apple Watch is not simply a timepiece. It is the summation of 21st-century biopolitical capitalism, to borrow Foucault’s term, aligning bodily data with corporate ecosystems of control (Sexuality 139). By reading the Apple Watch as a text, we see how it expresses the contemporary priorities of optimization, the seamless integration of technology with biological processes, and surveillance capitalism. When we gaze into the machine, it truly gazes also into us.

Mahoney insists that we read inside and around the machine rather than blindly trusting literature written by its creators, for “the practice of science and the literature of science do not necessarily coincide” (1). His hermeneutic teaches us to trace the discrepancies between them by

determining what the artifact says about the people who designed it, the process of its design, the assumptions made about its purposes, the expectations held of its putative users, and the ways it could actually be used. Most interesting and revealing are the points at which these overlapping questions do not have coinciding answers. For it is there, rather than at the level of theory, that the dialectic of technology is carried out. (Mahoney 8)

Thus, this methodology turns the machine into a glyph, and us into its hierophants. The grammar of the machine consists of its materials, the labor practices that go into its construction, and the economic conditions into which it is received; its “syntax,” meanwhile, is the use-logic embedded in its design. Our task is to decode what the machine assumes about the world, asking questions such as, who is its ideal user? What kind of body or behavior does it assume its user has? What social system does it serve, challenge, or reproduce? The value of reading machines lies in tracing the feedback loop between human intention and material expression, exposing those processes by which societies build machines that in turn rebuild societies. To read a machine in 2025 is to awaken to the fact that their primary function is to read us, a function that is concealed behind an opaque and seamless exterior. The Apple Watch reproduces the logic of “surveillance capitalism,” which Shoshana Zuboff defines as “A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales” (2). This technology reflects and produces subjectivity in its users: It constructs subjects who are always wired, reachable, surveilled, and pressured to curate their own representation. To read the device critically is to see how it narrates a fairytale of modern life—one of convenience, human connection, creative expression—while concealing the darker forces that underwrite it.

Figure 1. “Tick-Tock to Success.” Apple Watch Advertisement, The Higher Institute of Applied Arts 2021.

Since 2015, the Apple Watch has been positioned at the intersection of luxury branding, digital networking, and health culture. The tagline of the Series 7: “The Future of Health is on Your Wrist” (fig. 1). Its form combines the classic wristwatch—itself a symbol of discipline and precision in the industrial age—and the touch-screen interface of the smartphone. The Apple Watch, says Tara Brabazon, is a wearable computer that “offers simple and everyday interfaces to connect an analogue body to digital environments” (15). It promises a new kind of self-knowledge: Users monitor their heart rates, oxygen levels, sleep patterns, and productivity metrics in real time. These features link the user’s body to the cloud through continuous connectivity. The watch as a device has always been about control over time, a preoccupation that was central to industrial capitalism’s synchronization of labor. Consumers benefitted from the wristwatch, but the true beneficiaries of the technology were industrialists who could precisely coordinate worker schedules to maximize efficiency. The Apple Watch extends this logic into the body itself. In an article for Current Affairs, Ben Lee describes the creation of this niche: Such technologies create demand by suggesting that “the unoptimized life is not worth living.” Where the Model T organized workers around the assembly line, the Apple Watch organizes attention around an algorithmic schedule of notifications. Time discipline is thus internalized: The user is no longer merely on time but inside time, monitored by a wearable device that quantifies the rhythms of everyday life and syncs them with the rhythms of industry. “Just as capitalism promises the domination of nature,” says Lee, “surveillance capitalism promises the domination of human nature via our behavior.” Mahoney might see this trend as an extension of the historical logic he identified in Ford’s machine—the integration of human action into machine logic—only now rendered continuous, intimate, vaguely judgemental, seamlessly harmonized with the cadences of our personal habits.

Like the Model T, the material design of the Apple Watch expresses a veiled ideology. Its aesthetics and materials—smooth aluminum, rounded edges, quiet haptics—both conceal and reflect the industrial processes that spawned it: Coordinated global supply chains, the violence of rare-earth extraction, precision robotics and factories that treat human laborers like robots. Like many contemporary technologies, the device hides the messy, exploitative processes that go into its construction beneath a surface purity. The clean minimalism of its surface speaks the design language of streamlining: Nothing unnecessary, no evidence of its construction. Mahoney’s interpretive praxis would insist we attend to this surface as signification—the invisibility of labor becomes part of the machine’s message. The watch is seemingly sprung whole-cloth from the mind of geniuses, not the result of vast, oppressive networks of globalized neo-colonialism. Functionally, it converts the user’s body into a data interface. Heartbeat sensors, gyroscopes, accelerometers translate motion and pulse into metrics—steps taken, calories burned, hours stood. These are not just mechanical operations but acts of writing: A phantom outline of the body reinscribed in machine language. The watch “reads” the wearer as an assemblage of data points, producing what Jean Baudrillard might define as a quantifiable, optimizable, and monetized self, a human form “produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” (Baudrillard 2). In Lee’s more prosaic words: “to call this utility ‘convenience’ is to outright deny our autonomy and consent. The age-old tradeoff between privacy and convenience thus breaks down completely.” These data are also, significantly, a product. According to Zuboff,

Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence,’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.” (Zuboff 14)

Products like the Apple Watch create an inhuman mirror-world populated by human ghosts. Tirelessly, it translates our behavioral data (or maybe our souls) into commodities that profit corporate entities.

Symbolically, the Apple Watch de- and reconstructs time. The classic watch measured and universalized external time, dividing the day and regulating each division’s sanctioned activities, as Michel Foucault teaches in Discipline and Punish. At the height of the time-table, its “three great methods—establish rhythms, impose particular occupations, regulate the cycles of repetition—were soon to be found in schools, workshops, and hospitals” (Foucault, Discipline 149). The digital watch intensifies this process by measuring personalized time—quantifying our micro-temporalities of sleep, exercise, productivity. Its “stand up” alerts and “breathe” reminders construct an economy of health with distinctly moral overtones: To be sedentary is to fail; to obey is to seek redemption. This disciplinary function urges us to manage our lives through self-surveillance: It is the very apotheosis of panopticism. “In the correct use of the body, which makes possible a correct use of time,” says Foucault, “nothing must remain idle or useless: Everything must be called upon to form the support of the act required” (Discipline 152). Mahoney’s framework makes clear that such moral coding is not accidental: it is written into the machine’s code and its surface, a grammar of virtue expressed in imperatives, optimized metrics, the completion of color-coded rings. At the same time, the Apple Watch has another symbolic function. It is expensive and glossy, an object that communicates status and sophistication. It embodies technological refinement and participation in the Apple brand’s mythos of innovation, of sleek-and-streamlined good taste. This symbolism mirrors Mahoney’s reading of the Model T as both tool and cultural sign—an object that does a job and an object through which individuals enact belonging within the socio-economic order. The Apple Watch’s design encodes not only data but identity: To wear it is to inhabit a certain ideology of progress, refinement, prestige.

To read an Apple Watch is to interpret not only its function but also the layered systems of thought, labor, and ideology that its design encodes. It offers a moral rhetoric of frictionless efficiency—an ideology of seamlessness that hides the immense complexity beneath. Artifacts embody the logic of the systems that produce them. The Apple Watch’s seamless interface masks a deeply fractured production chain that spans Congolese cobalt mines, Chinese assembly lines, Silicon Valley design labs, and global data centers. Hidden, too, is what the device assumes. The Apple Watch assumes a world of constant network access, GPS coordination, and instantaneous feedback. Though its marketing claims human flourishing as its goal, acclimatizing citizens to ever more efficient habits and schedules seems closer to its actual ends. Its default temporal logic is one of acceleration, demanding continual attention and response. It must be tended and fretted over, which trains the body into rhythms of digital labor and micro-work. Each time we tap its face is a minute gesture within a vast choreography of data extraction. Where Ford’s machine embodied the logic of industrial efficiency, Apple’s embodies the logic of algorithmic proficiency. Both naturalize their systems of production by translating them into desirable forms. In the end, the Apple Watch tells a story about the convergence of time, capital, and the fully instrumentalized body. It makes visible—and wearable—the contemporary belief that technology can harmonize life through metrics, at the same time that it strips data from its users for profit. By reading the watch as a text, we glimpse the contradictions it conceals: A seamlessness that depends on invisible labor; a false autonomy built on surveillance; and a health ideology that commodifies human thriving.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U. of Michigan P., 1994, pp. 1–42.

Brabazon, Tara. “Digital fitness: Self-Monitored Fitness and the Commodification of Movement.” Communication, Politics & Culture, vol. 48, issue 2, 2015 pp., 1-23.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, Random House, 1995. Kindle Edition.

—. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage Books, Random House, 1990. Kindle Edition.

Lee, Ben. “Putting the ‘Capitalism’ in ‘Surveillance Capitalism.’” Current Affairs: A Magazine of Technology and Culture, 15 May 2021.

Mahoney, Michael S. “Reading a Machine.” Class Handout, CMPM 201, Nathan Altice, Fall 2025, c. 1980, pp. 1-8.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. T. Y. Crowell & Company, 1899, Internet Archive, Accessed 2 Nov 2025, p. 53.

“Tick-Tock to Success.” Apple Watch Advertisement, The Higher Institute of Applied Arts, Clios Ads of the World, 2021. Accessed Nov. 1, 2025.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Hatchet Book Group, 2019.

Avatar: The Hydra in the “Allegorithm”

After Marshall McLuhan.

“I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

An American was once a “creature of four wheels,” moving in a single direction at a time along the arteries of roads that extend his circulatory system. His choices: Which route to choose. In the digital age he need not ask: He is become a hydra of a thousand simultaneous outcomes and identities, and his world explodes from the singularity of his body into a multiverse of probabilities. The linearity of his world has yielded to a radial array of avatars. He picks up a game controller or plugs himself into a VR set and is instantly someone else, a near-infinite range of “someone-elses” spreads before him. His sense of iterative time extends in so many simultaneous directions that we must now acknowledge that he lives within more dimensions than the three that limited his world for millennia. The machinery extends his body into myriad new realities. Videogames, alchemy-like, refine praxis from the primal matter of theory, and, through simulation, reveal what is hidden. Or, more precisely, they reveal the chinks in reality through which all the world’s misinformation leaks in. Videogames are legible and experiential allegories, forging the raw data of the phenomenological world into experiences that acclimate us anew to that world, reifying Felix Guattari’s insistence that “Cosmic and human praxis has only ever been a question of machines” (66). We are hydras—dynamic biological, social, and semiotic assemblages—meshing, in ever more dramatic ways, with technology.

Since at least the pre-neolithic era, man’s survival depended on his ability to imagine contrafactuals—to follow lines of reasoning down to their imagined logical conclusions. He has always lived, in Borges’ words, within a “Garden of Forking Paths,” where the lifecycle of his decisions depend on the favorable or unfavorable comparison of one potential outcome and another. Man survives because his mind can run predictive algorithms. In games and stories, he can explore choice and consequence without any risk of harm, a fact that distinguishes him from other species. In more primitive times, orally-transmitted poetry, folk tales, religious texts, and hero epics emerged and gave wings to this imaginative capacity, became “dramatic enactments of a cosmic struggle” wherein “the spectator role was plainly religious” (McLuhan 237). Stories grew through the nutritious soil of lived experience like a root system, nourishing and being nourished by it. The primitive firepit, the mead hall, the Classical stage, the colosseum, became the liminal spaces where man suspended his action-oriented prefrontal cortex and voluntarily yielded to the numinous contrafactuals that build consensus and impose order on the chaos of reality. Human beings temporarily suspended the will to action and indulged in pure identification. In Norman Holland’s words, when we hear stories:

our mirror neurons fire as if we ourselves were doing the same thing. Because we are acting (in imagination) like [the speaker/actor], we will feel the same emotions as the person in the situation we are watching. In an emotional sense, now, we are empathic. We identify. (82)

Man’s world is animated by the daemons and sprites of story, and these identifications are superimposed over lived experience so that stochastic reality becomes, at last, tamed and tolerable.

Once the linearity of writing changed the stuff of reality, what had been public, shared, and oral became private and individual. Silence descended over the meeting halls. The ethos of libraries was born. Man’s mind turned from a rhizome with messy shared branches into a nautilus shell with bespoke chambers and curving hallways for him alone to navigate and explore. The urge to find a reality shared with others was mediated by distance; and what had been instantly received in the form of images and speech became perceived through the interpretation of written signs. Man’s mind became home to his own infinity of branching possibilities. Today, this privacy is intensified by orders of magnitude. Man has outsourced the capacity of imagination to calculation machines. Man rides the machinic decision trees to a million conclusions. The computer is a human mind in extremis. Its imagined worlds are supplanting reality in increasingly complex ways, until they are more real than reality. Videogames are the apotheosis of this trend. They take data-processing computer—a black box for all but the most experienced programmers—and give it legibility by adding the material that man uses to make sense of the real: The visual, the aural, and the haptic. In games, the real world is revivified and intensified. Holland says that metafiction gives us a reality that is “known to fictional others within a fiction which is itself physically real because it is the book we are holding in our hands at that moment” (Holland 76). Videogames are engines of metafiction, suspending man between fiction and reality, and requesting him, at all times, to reappraise his lived, embodied experience. He navigates the zone between fiction and action in a fundamentally allegorical space. While absorbed in the spatiotemporal complexities of a game, man is primed for allegorical messaging. Videogames provide seeds of conjecture which are spread and propagate on the wind of his human dreams. These dreams are fast overtaking waking life. Man now lives inside a vast, manifest multiverse—a universe-sized nautilus that is an everything, everywhere, all at once. Running simulations is all he does.

Why does man submit to these transhuman experiences where his body and mind enter into a collaboration with technology for the purpose of bringing about fictional results in virtual spaces? We might note that such practice is necessary at this current moment, when the increasing gamification of the real world—in man’s work, his media, even his wars—is spinning reality into videogames all around him. Participation in digital narratives provides a momentary look beyond the hyperreal slurry of the imaginary he shares with his fellow man to the bedrock axioms upon which our postmodern world is built. As previously established, games are “collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture… extensions of social man and of the body politic” (McLuhan 235). This is no less true now that reality is fusing with games. Jacob Gaboury, in Image Objects, argues that in the contemporary world, computer images are melding with physical objects in the minds of men such that they are no longer quite separate: Modern man conflates the iWatch with the pixels on its screen; a physical desktop with a virtual one. Games become a way to negotiate this slippage, the “collapsing of the space between the digital and physical, that embody the and/both quality of our world” (195). This ontological slippage allegorizes the postmodern condition.

Videogame avatars provide trial runs for actions and identities. Alexander Galloway argues that the satisfaction of play is mastering ludic patterns and learning to turn this ergodic effort back on the wider world. The work man does playing videogames helps him navigate a reality that is increasingly gamified. Galloway calls the reciprocity between allegory and algorithm the “allegorithm” (89). In Western civilization’s key allegory, man mistakes shadows on the wall for reality. Videogames perform a system upgrade on Plato’s cave, transforming it into the “allegorithm” that teaches man not to trade in one ontological system for another but to toggle between them. All the war sims on the market highlight how war and war reporting are increasingly indistinguishable from games; the graspable rules and scripted fair play of games alerts man to their lack in the “real” world; and he feel the possibility of authentic forms in neither the ludic algorithm nor in life, but in the gap between them. Galloway argues that,

The gamer is… learning, internalizing, and becoming intimate with a massive, multipart, global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel “allegorithm”) (Galloway 90-1).

These allegorithms are all around the player in the ludic ways he is asked to navigate his life. Siri makes hands-free phone calls for him; Alexa orders goods; his cars are beginning to drive themselves; a wrist computer tells him how many steps he has taken in a given day; his child’s school uses software that doles out rewards and punishments using sounds and visuals from a casino; an app soothes him to sleep at night; another wakes him; the stock market’s caprices determine his wealth on any given day; his credit score restricts or permits access to various spaces. Videogames are built atop mechanical systems with which the player collaborates, unlike the algorithms that control him in the wider world. He can exert agency in a game that might awaken a thirst for agency outside of the game. Games change as cultures change, and we learn what cultures are becoming when we examine their games. The structure of our current games soothes the fear of being psychically murdered by our technology. When one avatar dies, another takes his place. When the head is chopped off, another one grows, and so on.

Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Ficciones, Grove Press, 1962.

Gaboury, Jacob. Image Objects: An Archeology of Computer Graphics. The MIT Press, 2021.

Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays On Algorithmic Culture. U. of Minnesota P., 2006.

Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. Continuum, 2000.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press, 1994.

Midcentury Reality Check

The Then and Now of Politics, Mechanical Reproduction, and the Arts

Art played a key role in the political ruptures that took place between 1927 and 1945, leading to unprecedented global violence and a destabilization of ideological paradigms. During the ramp-up to and aftermath of WWII, three Continental scholars wrote from ground zero, each trying to pin down the shifting definition, character, and function of art, just as it collided with, transformed, and was transformed by technology and politics. In aggregate, the methodology these thinkers posit is now more useful than ever. Siegfried Kracauer’s “The Mass Ornament” (1927), Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936) and André Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945) move well beyond aesthetics to address an ongoing crisis: At the roiling intersection of politics, technology, and culture, art had become (and remains) a contested site where political propaganda, numbing distraction, and liberatory resistance vie for control. Once art can be mechanically (or digitally) reproduced—once it sheds the ritual function to which it has, for millennia, been bound—to whom does it belong and from where does its value emanate? What does mechanically reproduced art do for us—or against us? These critics found the question urgent enough as political structures were harnessing and weaponizing art. But the question takes on new urgency today, as commercial mechanisms facilitate the acceleration of content-creation, much of it produced by the masses. Crucially, however, at the moment the masses begin to recognize their own conditions under capitalism within this work, the same mechanisms occlude recognition and forestall action. Content-generation becomes a numbing praxis that recursively imitates larger mechanisms of exchange value under capitalist rubrics. Capital thus obfuscates art’s liberatory potential, but if we apply a dialectical synthesis of the theses of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Bazin, we might see a path toward its reclamation.

These thinkers were, unsurprisingly, deeply embedded in the drama of their own time and place, but their ideas embody a paradigmatic shift taking place in the early- to mid-20th century that anticipate the media landscape of today. Kracauer begins his essay by outlining an innovative methodology that privileges the analysis of surfaces over depths: “The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself,” a principle which forms the basis of much of cultural and media studies today (75). He frames his analysis around the geometrical, coordinated movements of the Tiller Girls dance troupe and the orderly rows of anonymous spectators in tiered stands watching them, which he equates with the logic of machinery, assembly lines, and other modes of capitalist production that were gaining traction at the time of writing. In such Taylorized artforms, he argues, “the principle of the capitalist production process… must destroy the natural organisms that it regards either as means or as resistance. Community and personality perish when what is demanded is calculability” (Kracauer 78). Thus, in the words of Paul A. Taylor and Jan LI. Harris, “The fate of the individual body serves as a microcosm of the fate of the body politic,” in which individuality is abstracted into a coordinated whole (49). Kracauer draws a distinction between the anonymity of these new dance styles and older art forms that celebrate individual talent and organic forms, such as ballet. But he notes that capitalism’s core defect is not that it rationalizes too much “but rather too little. The thinking promoted by capitalism resists culminating in that reason which arises from the basis of man” (Kracauer 81). Thus we see mass culture growing toward revelation or understanding but stopping just shy of achieving it. Marx had observed that capitalism trades use value for exchange value and elevates production as end-in-itself, and Kracauer applies Marxist reasoning to art in ways that compellingly prefigure mechanical reproduction’s propulsive acceleration in the digital age: In our time, the cycle of creation and consumption grows increasingly automated—and increasingly detached from any use at all. Algorithms privilege the endless creation of content as an end-in-itself and encourages distracted consumption of this content without the salubrious benefits of contemplation and the changes that might result if we study of art and popular culture critically.

Benjamin’s 1936 essay, on the other hand, regards distraction as potentially constructive, and contemplation as elitist at best: When taken to logical extremes, the fetishization of art’s value, he warns, can serve fascism. “Contemplative immersion—” he said, “which, as the bourgeoisie degenerated, became a breeding ground for asocial behavior—is here opposed by distraction… as a variant of social behavior” (Benjamin 39). It’s no wonder he felt this way: He wrote his seminal essay as the Nazis were amassing power via the harnessing of visual rhetoric, and he knew firsthand the hazards of the “aestheticizing of political life” (Benjamin 41). Unlike Kracauer, Benjamin suggests that the loss of art’s “aura” unlocks its potential to become a mechanism for mass liberation (41). The “aura,” according to Benjamin, is the time- and location-specific essence of a work of art from which it derives cultural value: The work of the “great masters” or the work of ancient civilizations, say, are legitimated and sanctified by association with their contexts. The aura of a Renaissance painting, for example, is a sine qua non of its value, a fact which becomes apparent when a work is exposed as a forgery. Severed from its time, place, and/or artist, the artwork is instantly stripped of any intrinsic value, even if it appears identical. Given the Nazis’ worship of aura—and the anxious way they tried to distinguish art of quality from “degenerate” art—Benjamin saw a latent benefit in mechanically reproduced art created by and for the masses, which is deliberately stripped of aura. The Dadaists, for example, achieved “a ruthless annihilation of the aura in every object they produced” (39). Whereas “A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it,” he says, “...By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves” (Benjamin 40). In this configuration, distraction suggests ownership by the masses while concentration suggests ownership of the masses. While Benjamin’s work sometimes feels naïve in today’s context, wherein the restless procession of mass-produced objects seems to merely and dully align with the spirit of capitalism, his warnings at the end of the essay ring true: Society’s “self-alienation,” he argues, “has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (42). Indeed, as fascism and the threat of immanent systemic collapse rise in our current moment, we sit immobile, enervated out of the belief that we have any say in our own annihilation. But, again and again, we visit the movie theater, television set, and gaming console to indulge in an aestheticization of apocalypse. Autocorrect suggested “anesthetization.” I’ll keep it. I’ll let “aestheticization” and “anesthetization” hover in prismatic superimposition.

Benjamin’s world, at time of writing, could have gone in either direction: A fascist takeover or a reclamation by the demos, and he died before the end of the war. Not so for Bazin. Unlike Kracauer and Benjamin, Bazin wrote at a moment when fascism, thwarted, was yielding its ideology to a dewy-eyed postwar optimism. This optimism saturates his prose: He clearly sees himself poised at a moment rich with new possibilities. Like his predecessors, he is concerned with a shift in the ontology of art, but the vantage is the dawn of a new era. Bazin argues that for millennia, art’s function was similar to embalming, in that it strove to oppose time. From entombed Egyptian sculptures to the portraiture of royalty, art gave man the “last word in the argument with death” (Bazin 10). Throughout history art was anxiously shored up against annihilation, a striving to preserve life via “a representation of life” (Bazin 10). The advent of photography, Bazin argues, freed the plastic arts to recover their “aesthetic autonomy,” which had been hamstrung by their historical function (16). Today, “the making of images no longer shares an anthropocentric, utilitarian purpose. It is no longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny,” a process that took several hundred years to achieve (Bazin 10). Renaissance painting, he argues, committed the “original sin” of perspective, and thereafter art grew increasingly obsessed with rendering the world with scientific accuracy, and decreasingly concerned with its prior ritual function (namely the spiritual deployment of death-defying symbols). The appetite for illusion, Bazin remarks, little by little “consumed the plastic arts” (11-12). To Bazin, photography is the apotheosis of this trajectory. Photography is thus an agent of liberation that, finally and conclusively, represents the world’s details without man’s anxious need for immortality or mimicry. Freed from their representational shackles, the plastic arts could forge paths yet unknown:

the photograph allows us on the one hand to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love, and on the other, to admire the painting as a thing in itself whose relation to something in nature has ceased to be the justification for its existence. (Bazin 16)

Photography cleans off the “spiritual dust and grime” that human eyes apply to objects—and with which they imbue their paintings and sculptures despite themselves (Bazin 15). Unlike man, the camera is an impartial witness, producing a “hallucination that is also a fact” (Bazin 16). In an era of deep fakes and AI-generated slop, we might balk at the characterization of the camera as “impartial.” Nevertheless, Bazin’s analysis of the trajectory of the plastic arts in their collision with technology remains a useful critical framework with which to explore the arts’ ever-changing function after being liberated from its prior purposes.

While at many points these authors’ media critiques are dated, they each index cultural moments and frame discourse in ways that remain vital. Kracauer offers a methodology—an analysis of surfaces over depths—that is remarkably generative today and has served as the basis for a number of current disciplines; Benjamin proffers an alternative to aura-obsessed fascism on the one hand and the anesthetization of capitalist-controlled technologies on the other, which we should heed today as we are once again poised between these poles; and Bazin lays out a framework by which we can analyze the new functions and possibilities of art once it has been freed from its indentured servitude to psychological and aesthetic obligation. These critics extend Marxist analysis of economic systems into the aesthetic domain, and in so doing expose the deathly grip capitalism has over every global system on earth, including the arts. In Kracauer’s words, “Like the mass ornament, the capitalist production process is an end in itself. The commodities that it spews forth are not actually produced to be possessed; rather, they are made for the sake of a profit that knows no limit” (78). How prophetic of today’s endless churn of content that passes through our feeds and before our eyes, content that contains massive amounts of information but provides no principle of organization through which we might launch a critique. But as later critics such as the new historicists demonstrated, if we look critically at the media around us, we can see within the churn of meaningless content glimpses of the profane and the transcendent. If we change nothing but our critical eye, we might learn to skim over the surfaces of our world, learning about ourselves, our needs, and our fears, and determine whether our systems address them. We might begin to recognize our own conditions under capitalism within the means of communication, see who controls them, and ask ourselves—why don’t we?

Works Cited

Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Translated by Hugh Gray, U. of California P., 2005, 9-16.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Translated by Edmund Jephcott et. al., Belknap Press, 2008, 19-55.

Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard U. P., 1995.

Taylor, Paul A. and Jan Ll. Harris. Critical Theories of Mass Media: Then and Now. McGraw Hill, 2008.

Dragonborn Dalliances

A Porn Studies Exploration of X-rated Skyrim Mods

The following is an abstract for a conference paper:

This presentation explores video game modding through a porn studies lens. Game modding, like fan fiction, allows players to repurpose game assets to create their own content that can be played and shared with others in the gamespace. Like other forms of fan fiction, many mods are erotic in nature but differ in that the practice is as troubled by issues of misogyny and non-inclusivity as any other popular gaming forum, pornographic or otherwise. I’ll trace the practice of pornographic modding from its origins in early pornographic and porn-adjacent games such as Custer’s Revenge, Night Trap, and the “Hot Coffee” mini-game embedded in the code of GTA: San Andreas (as well as the troubling presentation of racialized sexuality in these games); briefly explore the history of erotic fan fiction communities in other media; and discuss the way video games, because they already evoke somatic responses (like pornography does), and because developers often allow users to modify their in-game assets, lend themselves to adaptations of this kind. Finally, I’ll focus on SexLab, a fan-created platform that facilitates the creation of X-rated content for Bethesda Softwork’s popular 2011 sword-and-sorcery game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Creators using SexLab claim it is a form of resistance and counterplay, challenging the prudish sensibilities of the vanilla game, but the mod output largely jettisons the vanilla game’s race- and gender-inclusive content in favor of heteronormative and often violently misogynistic sexual scenes and characters that border on incel wish-fulfillment. For instance, one gameplay mechanic causes (female) player characters, instead of dying and respawning when defeated, to be gang-raped by enemies, including monsters, machines, and animals. On the other side of the equation, some queer and female modders have begun to add their own more inclusive content (some of it playing with non-consent more sensitively and with greater care to context), in a way that gently challenges both the sexlessness of the base game and the misogyny of early SexLab creators, and which parallels the greater presence of diverse and female voices within the mainstream pornography industry.

The Monstrous Self

Videogame Monsters, Abjection, and the Enemy Within

The following is an abstract for a conference paper:

Videogame monsters embody a paradox: They often represent ontological evil while being inherently exploitable. Game monsters still echo Cold War-era fears of the “Other,” clear and present threats that must be identified, contained, and neutralized. But these Others also profit players, rewarding them with loot or XP upon defeat. As such, monsters become an extractable resource that makes the player into a kind of ludic colonizer. Videogame monsters prompt us to ask who the real monster is: The creature or the player? This paper uses Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection—the reflexive fear of a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between self and Other—to explore Housemarque Studio’s space horror game Returnal, which deliberately collapses this distinction. For the first 15-20 hours of gameplay, players understand themselves to be helping their avatar escape a hostile planet, only to realize that the environment is Selene’s own mind, and the automated sentries and hostile fauna are defense mechanisms and monstrous vestiges of trauma that she has externalized. I argue that the studio’s sleight of hand prompts us to question the nature of monsters, and to look within ourselves if we want to find our enemies.

Translating Empire

Stealth Gameplay as Queer Power Reframing in Hitman

The following is the abstract for a conference paper:

This presentation examines the Hitman videogame series as seen through a queer theoretical lens, focusing in particular on the way sneaking and social stealth mechanics translate the social world in new ways, reframing the operations of global power and our social roles within the mechanisms of Empire.

While the premise of the Hitman videogame franchise hardly hints at a nuanced cultural critique, the game’s aura of political and cultural paranoia conceals a surprisingly sophisticated commentary on power, predation, and state blindness to or complicity in criminal violence. The series casts players as Agent 47, a genetically-enhanced assassin who infiltrates a series of sandbox environments to accomplish tasks, one of which is invariably murder. Agent 47’s targets are the world’s wealthiest power-players, figures whom we all understand to be above the law, committing acts of extreme savagery, greed, and exploitation. These villains are not only insulated from the mechanisms of state justice, but they also often have police and military violence at their disposal to use against the powerless: There is a perverse catharsis in engineering humiliating deaths that often exploit their egos, pettiness, and paranoia. Agent 47’s tabula rasa personality is part of the reason the games are so effective as cultural critiques: He sneaks through the world, in it but not of it. He is at once victim and apex predator, infinitely dangerous but without free will, traumatized by a youth that robbed him of his humanity and connection to human systems. Embodying his unique vantage allows for a queer engagement with the systems of power that highlights the injustice inherent in the systems that surround us. While the game thrums with ironic humor and exaggerated villainy, it also provides a frank examination of neoliberalism’s very real evils, offering players a power fantasy, however provisional, of recalibrating the scales of justice and reversing assumptions about whose lives are surplus.

A Psychic Palimpsest

Using Mad Studies to Explore Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

The following is an abstract for a conference paper:

British developers Ninja Theory took a swing with their 2017 videogame Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. They combined two gaming genres that have never been artfully merged, at least not with such a deliberate eye to the ethics of the subject matter. The surface plot follows a popular hero’s-journey arc: An Orphean descent and return, in which Senua, a Pict warrior in 8th Century Scotland, enters Helheim to save the soul of her lover, slain by Vikings as an offering to their gods. So far so action-adventure. But the hero’s journey is complicated by a secondary element that, over time, becomes the game’s central dramatic locus: Senua suffers from what modern-day players will recognize as psychosis, a condition that populates her world with frightening hallucinations and a cacophony of internal voices (the player is one of the voices). Moreover, Senua is a pariah among her people, like many psychosis-sufferers throughout history, including in our own time, so the Helheim she navigates feels eerily empty. Her clan conceives of her condition as a demonic curse that brings bad luck to the community, and in the end this proves a greater obstacle to Senua’s wellbeing than the condition itself. Although Senua personifies her condition as an encroaching presence she calls “the Darkness”—a slow but relentless pursuer whom she must avoid and eventually fight—astute players will note that the creature is voiced by the same actor voicing Senua’s father, Zynbel, when he appears in flashbacks. Zynbel isolated and abused her in her youth in order to rid her of the curse. Along the way we learn that her mother, Galena, was the clan healer who, like Senua, had “the sight.” Though Galena regarded her own psychosis as a gift of insight and prophecy, the fiercely religious Zynbel had Galena burned alive to “save the village.”

Senua’s Orphean descent into Helheim operates on three distinct registers: It is at once a circular journey through one of the realms of Norse mythology, a popular stage for videogame storylines; a metaphor for processing guilt and grief over a lost loved one; and a spiraling in toward the “ground zero” of Senua’s psychosis, where she can finally face and define herself on her own terms, reframe her narrative in ways that promote stability and self-regard, and contend with the vestiges of trauma that haunt her. Though the game was made in collaboration with both healthcare professionals and psychosis sufferers, it uses its setting in the distant past to smuggle a scathing critique of the psy-sciences into the game and hide it in plain sight: The narrative and mechanical rhetorics suggest that psychosis sufferers must understand and define their lived experience themselves rather than accept psychiatric diagnoses at face value. Zynbel comes to sound like the psychiatric establishment that Senua must buck against, while Galena’s understanding of her psychosis—that it is a gift—represents an alternative reframing of the condition. Ultimately, Hellblade leverages videogames’ varied rhetorical strata, including its procedural rhetoric, to provide players with a compassionate, embodied experience of navigating a hazardous world with a neurodivergent brain. This paper uses mad studies—a discipline that privileges the word of mental health sufferers over the psychiatric field—to explore the way Hellblade, while it falls short in a number of ways, nevertheless hints at the medium’s potential to promote empathy, challenge sanist narratives, and suggest different ways to frame and treat conditions that thrust people outside the shelter of normativity. Set in the distant past, the game speaks clearly and directly to our current cultural moment.

Praxis Makes Perfect

Theory as (Virtual) Experience in Videogames

“Cosmic and human praxis has only ever been a question of machines.”

— Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies

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[NB: This is the prospectus for my thesis, a work in progress]

When we boot up a videogame, we find ourselves glimpsing, within a wholly artificial space, the merest flicker of the real. Participation in digital narratives provides a momentary look beyond the hyperreal slurry of our shared imaginary to the bedrock axioms upon which our postmodern world is built. Literary theory is one point of access to the real, supplying hermeneutics that teach us to distinguish real from simulacrum. Videogames take theory a step further, exposing players to theoretical concepts that can be emotionally experienced and felt in the body. Though videogames are often overlooked as literature, the act of participating in a narrative gives players a unique sense of game/player co-authorship. My thesis examines four videogames that demonstrate this phenomenon by concretizing a specific critical-theoretical frame, including postcolonial theory, psychoanalytic theory, and deconstruction: Through an exploration of these games, I hope to show how the medium, with its multiple rhetorical strata, rhizomatic structure, and ergodic characteristics, has the power to weave theory into a kind of praxis.

For the purposes of this thesis, I will define videogames as participatory, artificial dramas that occur in virtual space within some permutation of iterative time. As such, videogames suspend players in a liminal zone that straddles fiction and action, where the fiction is tied to player decision-making and physical input. This liminality means that games are transhuman experiences wherein our bodies and minds temporarily enter into a collaboration with technology for the purpose of bringing about specific results in virtual spaces. The zone between fiction and action is a fundamentally allegorical space, existing in two realms at once, meaning two things at once, and players are primed to interpret allegorical messaging while absorbed in the spatiotemporal complexities of a game. According to Maureen Quilligan, allegories ask us to read a text across multiple axes, and, while playing, we assume the position of both fictional interpreters and mechanical operators, developing, of necessity, “A sensitivity to the polysemy in words” which is “the basic component of the genre of allegory” (Quilligan 33). “[B]oth readers and characters,” she claims, “must learn to read the horizontal connections between words, not merely to make vertical translation of image into theme” (Quilligan 36). For players, the horizontal connections are multiform, for they not only interpret the relationships of word to word, but also to sounds, dynamic images, mechanical feedback, and contextual and environmental storytelling cues.

Often, the multimodal messaging of videogames creates conceptual paradoxes that challenge our interpretive prowess. Players put work into interpreting videogame allegories that is often quite extensive, such as with the games I investigate as part of this thesis: In Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry, players arbitrate the relationship between cultural memory and historical atrocity; Upper One Games’ Never Alone casts players as both themselves and the player character (PC), embodying Nuna but separate from her, learning about and from her culture; in Housemarque’s Returnal, an alien landscape transforms uncannily into an allegory for a disturbed human mind; and the haunted workplace in Remedy Entertainment’s Control grows into an allegory for late-capitalist alienation, forcing players to renegotiate their relationships to work, workplaces, and the structures of corporate power that contemporary capitalism reifies and lionizes.

Games, as legible allegories, forge the raw data of the phenomenological world into experiences that acclimate us anew to that world. They are like other media in this regard, but because they are undergirded by additional rhetorical layers, players experience them differently. As in other media, plot, character, setting, and dialogue are fed to players, augmented by musical scores, cinematic cut scenes, and environmental dynamics. But the narrative layer is merely the “skin” of the game, adorned with audiovisual set dressing. In Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost defines his coinage, “procedural rhetoric,” referring to videogame substrata, as “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions”: It is comprised of the interactive layers of mechanical and haptic feedback that occur beneath the narrative (ix). This substrate is continuously making its own little subliminal arguments that mesh with, complicate, or contradict the story layer. Games’ additional rhetorical frameworks mean that they can access a wider range of the human affective spectrum than traditional media. In How Games Move Us, Katherine Isbister notes that, “Because players make their own choices and experience their consequences, game designers have unique powers to evoke emotions—such as guilt and pride—that typically cannot be accessed with other media” (56). Videogames are thus perfect testing grounds to explore and experience—not just to read about—our cultural allegories as phenomenological events that occur in both real world and game-world; real time and game-time. This is due to their unique textual configurations.

Videogames are built upon rhizomatic structures, often organized around liminal nodes that players navigate with an emergent sense of agency, such as a hub, lobby, or in-game pocket dimension. Such nodes literalize the Deleuzeguattarian contention that rhizomes are where “semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding… that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status” (A Thousand Plateaus 7). Rhizomatic structures democratize frameworks that are otherwise built on hierarchies, inviting players to participate in and, in a sense, to coauthor videogame narratives. In traditional fiction, one author owns the words and gets final say on how the work is used and, to a lesser extent, how it is received. Videogame companies, of course, are built on hierarchical org charts, like most human organizations, but game structures are almost always built on rhizomatic templates that invite experimentation and emergent strategy, even when their stories are linear—or, if I may, “arborescent.” Game maps and level design schematics are both rhizomatic, for instance, and many games allow players to traverse their stories, temporalities, and spaces in bespoke ways that cut across logic and authorial intent, choosing when and on what terms they will experience and interact with the story. The “metagame,” moreover, as imagined by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s Metagaming, is inextricable from game narratives, and further democratize the medium: This refers to the discourse that surrounds games, the emergent, rhizomatic communities that animate games through online walkthroughs, lore speculation, speedruns, game modding, and streaming. Players make choices based on the metagame, and their in-game choices are interpreted by the servers of game developers: This metadata is then used in the creation of patches, expansion packs, and future franchise releases. Few other media have such a responsive feedback loop between creation and consumption.

Traversing games is often hard work, and this work is not always undertaken for pleasure. In Cybertexts, Espen Aarseth refers to videogames as “ergodic” texts whose narratives require “non-trivial effort to traverse” (2). Ergodic literature is interactive, depending on reader/player participation or enaction, embodying a tension that is “a struggle not merely for interpretative insight but also for narrative control” (Aarseth 4). Indeed, many gamers discuss actively disliking much of play—especially the tedium and frustration of repeated failure, which is an in-built component of gaming—but enjoying the sense of slow mastery over digital patterns and systems. There might be a profound reason games are so ubiquitous at this cultural moment having to do with the way our reality is increasingly mediated by machines. In Image Objects, Jacob Gaboury argues that in the contemporary world, computer images are fusing with physical objects in our minds such that they are no longer quite separate (think of the way we conflate the iWatch with the pixels on its screen; or a physical desktop with a virtual one). Games might be a way to negotiate this slippage, the “collapsing of the space between the digital and physical, that embody the and/both quality of our world” (195). This ontological slippage is an allegory for the postmodern condition.

Alexander Galloway’s Gaming and MacKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory argue that part of the satisfaction of play is mastering ludic patterns, and then learning to turn this ergodic effort back on the wider world. They argue that the work we do playing videogames helps us navigate a reality that is increasingly gamified—A neoliberal, technology-infused wasteland in which we are both product and consumer—which enmeshes us such that there is no “outside.” Wark terms this wasteland “gamespace.” Galloway and Wark argue that our allegories and our reality are, in a sense, merging, united within the digital systems that increasingly steer and monitor our lives. Galloway calls the reciprocity between allegory and algorithm the “allegorithm” (89). In Western civilization’s key allegory, we mistake shadows on the wall for reality. We might see videogames as performing a system upgrade on Plato’s cave, transforming it into the “allegorithm,” which asks us to toggle between ontological systems. But not to escape: There is no escape. Just to learn to tell the difference. All the war sims on the market, for instance, highlight how war and war reporting are increasingly indistinguishable from games; the graspable rules and scripted fair play of games alerts us to their lack in the “real” world; and we feel the possibility of authentic forms in neither the ludic algorithm nor in life, but in the gap between them. Galloway argues that,

The gamer is… learning, internalizing, and becoming intimate with a massive, multipart, global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel “allegorithm”) (Galloway 90-1).

These allegorithms are all around us in the ludic ways we are asked to navigate our lives. Wark begins her book with the provocative question, “Ever get the feeling you’re playing some vast and useless game whose goal you don’t know and whose rules you can’t remember?... Welcome to Gamespace” (1). Siri makes hands-free phone calls; Alexa orders goods for us; our cars are beginning to drive themselves; a wrist computer tells us how many steps we’ve taken in a given day; my son’s school uses software that doles out rewards and punishments using sounds and visuals from a casino; an app soothes us to sleep at night. Games are built atop mechanical systems with which the player collaborates, exerting agency that might awaken a thirst for agency outside of the game. Wark thinks we need games to show us what agency we would like to have in the wider world.

This is the game studies bedrock upon which I build this thesis. Though I employ discrete literary theoretical lenses in each chapter and hew closely to their hermeneutics, my larger goal involves the function of games in the current textual ecology, and to demonstrate their crucial role in this strange cultural moment. Games, I argue, make theory physically and emotionally legible, and they can be used accordingly. My first objects of study, to which I apply a postcolonial (and, to a lesser extent, eco-critical) lens, are Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry and Never Alone. The former takes on the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and features a formerly-enslaved black man in the 18th Century Caribbean who frees other enslaved persons from sugar plantations, prisons, and auction blocks, and orchestrates a slave revolt. While the game’s narrative and mechanical systems hint at the potential of the medium for anti-colonial resistance, it is nevertheless a game created by and for the global North, and embedded within much of its anti-slavery rhetoric is the incongruous neocapitalism that enriches its game developers. The autoethnographic game Never Alone, meanwhile, created by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, is a kind of apotheosis of the postcolonial (and autoethnographic) videogame project. Through its procedures, it endeavors to express distress about cultural and environmental degradation and to model Iñupiaq survivance in a world that has grown environmentally and culturally out of balance. Both games make us feel: The anguish of slavery on the one hand and the world-changing benefit of cooperating with the natural world on the other. Crucially, both use mechanical arguments to force players to confront toxic human systems and suggest paths of remediation. Freedom Cry offers players a power fantasy of confronting a particularly savage period of history, initially encouraging players to answer violence with violence but ultimately demonstrating the futility of violence. Never Alone likewise eschews violence, but it does so by denying players the mechanic in the first place. Its systems, moreover, offer an alternative to Western paradigms of domination. In order to win, players learn to interpret and respond to nature’s patterns, conceiving of themselves as part of an interconnected network of natural systems, each with its own soul, mood, and personality. The game mechanics require players to collaborate with the natural world to bring it back into balance.

My second object of study, to which I apply a psychoanalytic literary lens, also suggests paths toward remediation after creating intense discomfort in players, this time on the level of individual psychology. Housemarque Studio’s roguelike shooter Returnal deploys the generic tropes of science fiction and horror to force players to experience the fear and isolation of psychosis. The game plays with our double-vision as players, making a gameplay virtue of the way our brains split into two—and often more—discrete selves while playing. Most often, players are unconscious of the doubling of their bodies and identities, but Returnal, by rendering the doubling explicit (and explicitly uncanny), smuggles very sophisticated psychoanalytic literary theory into the grammar and topoi of the traditional third-person shooter. Returnal repurposes gaming tropes not merely in the service of generic convention, but, more significantly, to express the therapeutic concepts of defense mechanisms and repetition compulsions; the tripartite formulation of self as comprised of ego, id, and superego; and the role of a therapist in helping an ego strengthen itself. For 15-20 hours of gameplay, players understand themselves to be helping the player avatar escape a hostile alien planet, only to realize that the environment is Selene’s own mind and that the automated sentries and hostile fauna on the surface of the planet are defense mechanisms and the monstrous vestiges of trauma that she has externalized. The player feels her role within the game shifting from that of PC proxy to a sort of therapist, helping Selene decode her memories and strengthen her ego against monstrous internalized manifestations of her past, her guilt, and her self-poisoned narrative, until she can rewrite it on her own terms. The game is a concretization of psychoanalytic theory, for even the protagonist knows, by game’s end, where she is and what she needs to do to get better.

Finally, I examine Control, a game that is informed by and infused with postmodern deconstruction. It offers players a power fantasy of cleansing the specters of late-capitalist alienation from a modern workplace. Rather than Freud’s psychological unheimlich, we find ourselves in a site of sociological unheimlich. The game echoes its crowdsourced origins, a Creative Commons group storytelling venture called the “SCP Foundation,” which is charged with “securing, containing, protecting” paranormal phenomena. I employ Derrida’s “ellipses” and “hauntology”; Deleuze’s “rhizome theory”; Baudrillard’s “hyperreality”; and Vidler’s “architectural uncanny” to decode the authorial cacophony at the heart of the game. This Finnish game is a searing critique of American capitalist priorities, hierarchies, and systems. In “The Precession of Simulacra,” Jean Baudrillard calls our attention to “the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality” (463). Control literalizes such mise en scènes by imagining the workspace as haunted by cruel and incomprehensible manifestations of corporate greed and expressions of power. The player avatar, Jesse Faden, traverses a frightening Brutalist workspace that has been infected by an entity that warps spaces and infects office workers so that they become zombies that chant, in unison, corporate buzzwords and surreal Dadaist phrases like “A copy of a copy of a copy / the picture is you holding the picture / leave your insides by the door.” Jesse’s “bosses” are otherworldly entities from another dimension, known only as “The Board,” who control her from out of a huge, inverted pyramid. They speak in muffled voices with inscrutable, inexact translations on the screen below, in speech that conflates cosmic horror and corporate double-speak, saying such things as “you will never work/exist in this Torn/Cosmic Reality again” and referring to the office building as “the House/Prison you occupy.” Players are never sure if these entities are Jesse’s pawns or her Svengali. The game is a visual metaphor of Baudrillard’s “hyperreality,” which he conceives as “the infinity of capital folded back on its own surface” into a kind of Möbius strip (465). In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler maintains that the “alienation of the individual” is expressed in the scale differences between skyscrapers—expressions of capitalist domination—and the anonymous workers who are automatons within and around them. This difference would not be so acute without “the real economic and social estrangements experienced by the majority of [a city’s] inhabitants” (Vidler 4). Control renders corporate spaces as full of hidden hazards, including inscrutable power structures; the dehumanizing insatiability of capitalist logics; and the way modern workspaces tend to become “pathological.”

I conclude with a few other lenses I hope to use for future projects, ideally when I continue this work at the doctoral level, such as queer theory, with which I hope to explore player embodiment and the implicitly queer game metaphor of adopting different skins and trying on different subjectivities; affect theory and the way games engage more emotional layers than other media—especially exploring their potential role in pro-social endeavors; and feminist theory as applied to both the misogyny in metagaming contexts and the way female subjectivity is explored in game spaces in new and exciting ways. I hope to demonstrate the ways in which videogames are a critical subject for academic inquiry, for the alchemical way they can turn theory into praxis, and, through simulation, reveal what is most real—or at least reveal the reality that is lacking in the world around us. Such practice is critical at our current moment, when the increasing gamification of the real world—in our work, our media, even our wars—are transforming into videogames all around us.

Works Cited

• Aarseth, Espen. Cybertexts: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins U. P., 1997.

• Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation, Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U. of Michigan P., 1994, pp. 453–81.

• Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2010.

• Boluk, Stephanie and Patrick LeMieux. Metagaming. U. of Minnesota P., 2017.

• Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi, U. of Minnesota P., 1987.

• Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays On Algorithmic Culture. U. of Minnesota P., 2006.

• Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. Continuum, 2000.

• Housemarque Studios. Returnal. Playstation 5 Version, Housemarque, Climax Studios, Distributed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, 30 Apr 2021.

• Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. The MIT Press, 2017.

• Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory. Cornell U. P., 1979.

• Remedy Entertainment. Control. PS5 Edition, Distributed by 505 Games, 2019.

• SCP Foundation. “Main” by The SCP Foundation Wiki, Source: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/main. Licensed under CC-BY-SA. Accessed 29 Nov 2022.

• Ubisoft Montréal. Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry. PS4 Version, Ubisoft, Inc., 2014.

• Upper One Games. Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa). Version 4.3.7, Upper One Games, E-Line Media, iOS Platform, 2014.

• Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. MIT Press, 1999.

• Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Harvard U. P., 2007.

Playing Human

Psychological and Sociological Transhumanism in Videogames

Videogames are transhuman experiences. Our bodies and minds temporarily enter into a collaboration with technology for the purpose of bringing about specific results in virtual spaces. Two recent games explore transhumanism explicitly, removing us entirely from a human context in order to force a confrontation with what it means to be human. 2021’s Returnal and 2022’s Stray smuggle very sophisticated literary theory into the grammar and topoi of traditional third-person shooters and puzzle platformers respectively. Though videogames are often overlooked as literature, the act of participating in a narrative gives players a different orientation to the content, due to the combination of poetics and procedural rhetoric, that actually leads to a transhuman sense of game-player co-authorship.

The term “procedural rhetoric” was coined by Ian Bogost to refer to the interactive game processes that encourage certain behaviors over others; a semiotics of gameplay. Like other media, games have a narrative layer that is unidirectional: Plot, character, setting, and dialogue are fed to players and amplified by musical scores, cinematic cut scenes, and environmental dynamics. Players receive this layer passively. But, as Jesper Juul contends, we cannot understand the persuasive power of videogames unless we analyze their narratives in tandem with their rules. “The player navigates… two levels,” he says, “playing video games in the half-real zone between the fiction and the rules. (Juul 202)

Rules are communicated via the mechanical and haptic feedback that occurs beneath the narrative in a process which Bogost defines as “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions” (ix). The reciprocal relationship between action and consequence leads to an emergent sense of collaboration that is unique to the medium. Unless developers pay close attention to the synergy between the procedural and narrative rhetorics, conflicts can arise between them, causing what game developer Clint Hocking terms “ludonarrative dissonance.” If the narrative of the game insists that pacifism is a moral good, for instance, but the game’s mechanical systems make virtual murder pleasurable or rewarding in goods and XP, the player experiences a disconnect between the two rhetorical overlays.

Sometimes games leverage this dissonance. I’ll give just a brief overview of how Returnal and Stray use procedural rhetoric to generate dissonance. These games use disorientation to jolt players to experience, to “play,” psychoanalytic and Marxist theory respectively. Returnal is a shooter about an “Astroscout” who crash lands on an alien planet. The alien civilization is long gone, but Selene must fight her way through the automated defenses that remain while making an upward journey through different biomes to find a means of escape. These are all very recognizable—one might even say cliché—gaming tropes. The dissonance occurs after about 15 hours of gameplay when events lead players to realize suddenly that the alien landscape through which they have been fighting takes place entirely within the protagonist’s psyche, and this genre switch reorients them to their role in the story. We are not on an alien planet at all, and all events and characters map seamlessly onto ideas drawn from Freudian literary theory, wherein the game tropes of fighting swarms of enemies become a metaphor for battling inner demons; the three main characters become analogs of Freud’s tripartite self; and the respawning after in-game death becomes an example of the repetition compulsion.

Like Returnal, Stray is a journey upward, but it examines the sociological remnants humanity leaves behind. The game takes place in a far future after humanity has wiped itself out. The player embodies a cat that must ascend through the levels of a subterranean city, helping robot denizens who, in the absence of humans, have become self-aware and now simulate human culture, for good and ill. The game becomes a sort of escape from Plato’s cave, with revelations accompanying each level from the bottommost slum of the city to its sleek neon markets above. Interestingly, the robots in the slums are philosophers and artists, having formed strong kinship bonds and community, while the market tier demonstrates the perils of capitalism, representing the robots as mindlessly working to no end: Barbershops and clothing stores open each day even though the robots have no hair or need for clothes; each night they dance identical dances at the nightclub. They betray each other and hoard valueless wealth. The dissonance is produced by  players’ identification with hollowness of the human structures, an identification that is not shared by the cat avatar. Players realize, all at once, that they are enmeshed in a critique rather than a game and experience a similar reorientation to the content. It lays bare and savagely critiques the logic of capitalism, which we feel more acutely because it is divorced from its human context.

Returnal and Stray are very recent, and signal a potential watershed in videogame criticism, wherein the transhuman act of playing can help us not just read about but experience theory. Katherine Isbister discusses how players of videogames forge “an identification grounded in observation as well as action and experience.” So games are a form of praxis. By deploying these older critical frames in the service of speculative, posthuman works, we update these tired theories into a contemporary context. These games hint at the near limitless potential of the genre to explore and experience both theory and praxis.

The God of the Gaps

Ellipsis as the Unnamable in Thi Bui and Carmen Maria Machado

In “Memory and Narrative of Traumatic Events,” María Crespo and Violeta Fernández-Lansac explain the way trauma creates two discrete systems of memory that operate independently of and in parallel to one another. The first “comprises voluntary memories that are integrated with other autobiographical memories,” while the second contains “nonverbal information without a temporal context, whose access is automatic” (149). One system employs language and the other—received, involuntary, immediate—is silent. So how do memoir authors express aspects of trauma that are beyond speech? Thi Bui and Carmen Maria Machado, two unconventional memoirists who chronicle deeply scarring and politically-charged traumas, intentionally combine semiotic systems to give voice to memory’s silences. By weaving gaps and non-verbal expressions into their prose, they experientially represent the silence of second-tier traumatic memory. Bui combines textual and visual rhetoric in her graphic memoir The Best We Could Do, with spreads that let the gaps between the two semiotic systems express the hopes, fears, and uncertainties of immediate and involuntarily-experienced pain. Similarly, Machado’s In the Dream House layers its rhetorical structures: While the cracks in her text are marginally visual—in the form of experimentation with typography and form—her rhetorical breaks are primarily expressed in vertiginous genre shifts that recreate the instability of an abusive relationship. Both authors use narrative fracture, redoubling, and omission in the service of communicating the unnamable, and through these ellipses, they experientially render the unnamable disquiet of trauma.

Bui’s graphic memoir chronicles her family’s traumatic journey from war-torn Viêt Nam to the United States, and the consequent hauntings of postmemory that affect two generations of Vietnamese immigrants. She blends words with panels of black and white line drawings, unified by a single-color wash in brick-red that places readers within the inexact, sepia-tones of memory. The words can be understood as Crespo and Fernández-Lansac’s first-order processed memories, while the images become the fragmentary memories of the second order. The red wash flows freely between words, images, and panels in a way that unifies disparate aspects of the same psyche. For example, in one spread Bui draws herself at a writing desk, beginning the project, enclosed in a panel. Behind her are ocean waves in the red-wash of memory, flowing into the page below. Beneath the panel is a young girl, her back turned to us, her hair blowing in the wind. She disappears off the bottom of the page in a full bleed, without a bounding box. On her back, a black tattoo of Viêt Nam, echoed by a mirror image of Viêt Nam in the wash in front of her. The words, in boxes, say “if I could see Viêt Nam as a real place, and not a symbol of something lost… I would see my parents as real people… and learn to love them better” (Bui 36). Through apposition, ellipses, and visual metaphor, the book places readers in the swell of traumatic memory: In the literal swell of memory, as the swells of the sea that transported her family on a tiny boat out of war-torn Viêt Nam are a recurring motif that expresses vulnerability, migration, and the tidal forces of women’s bodies.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud provides valuable insights about the multiple semiotic overlays that activate graphic literature. The gaps between panels, for instance, are known in comics scholarship as “the gutter”—the space where the action and events of the story are implied or suggested, but not fully shown or explained, and where readers are forced to commit “closure” (McCloud 63). Closure refers to the brain’s tendency to craft conceptual links between elements in apposition, even in instances where such links are not explicated by authors. As such, closure is necessarily experiential, asking the reader to, in a sense, co-author the story. It is the space where readers’ imaginations are activated, and where the significance and implications of the story are constructed. In the spread mentioned above, readers apprehend the images instantaneously: We see a writing woman bounded in a panel, which is linked, through closure and the red background unifying them, to a young girl with her home country written, in the form of a map, on her body. These images—which aren’t connected through reason but through emotion—slowly combine with words that explicitly link the pain of the country with the ongoing pain of the family until emotion, for the reader, squares with logic. The gutter plays a crucial role in mediating between sign systems in Bui’s text. McCloud discusses the way images are instantaneously “received” while words are “perceived,” a process that takes time, specialized knowledge, and the ability to de- and recode signs (49). The lag between reception and perception causes emotion and logic to harmonize at different registers. As such, the combination of word and image is perfect for rendering both first- and second-tier traumatic memories—the verbal and the scotomized or unnamable. By leaving space for the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps, Bui harnesses closure, the gutter, and the lag between reception and perception to weave a rich and complex narrative that is both conceptually coherent and emotionally wrenching.

Machado’s In the Dream House, too, forces readers to commit closure, though her methods are more conceptual than visual, including dizzying shifts in genre that occur each chapter. Her memoir chronicles same-sex intimate partner abuse, which readers co-experience in the narrative’s constant destabilizations, diversions, and repetitions. Machado writes sudden queasy shifts, violent mood swings, and pregnant ellipses into the text, subversions of narrative expectations that mirror the gaslighting, unpredictability, and cruelty of the relationship in question. While she does not exploit the split between received images and perceived text, she does manipulate our expectations of genre: Our anticipation of generic tropes, after all, precede cognition of the complex plot. Machado names her past abusive relationship “The Dream House,” and the unnamed girlfriend as “the Woman in the Dream House.” The narrative literally takes place in a small home in Bloomington Indiana in which the two lived during the author’s early twenties; but it figuratively takes place in an increasingly isolated and atemporal dreamscape that rollercoasters from erotic heights to horror-movie lows. We can read these different narrative layers as parallel to Bui’s overlay of words and images; and both authors use these unconventional techniques to layer Crespo and Fernández-Lansac’s first- and second-order memories. Machado employs second-person narration throughout. Readers come to understand that the author is the “I” at the time of writing, apostrophizing her former self, the one trapped in time, repeatedly and eternally undergoing abuse. Each chapter resituates the Dream House in a new genre, almost like switching the channels on a television, and the chapter titles, like “Dream House as Bildungsroman”; “Dream House as Haunted Mansion”; “Dream House as Cosmic Horror,” remain the only formal constant. Many of the chapters are short and impressionistic, sometimes as short as a single sentence, with connections to the narrative that are often oblique, tenuous, associative. Thus, much of the text is blank space. The interstices between Machado’s vignettes thereby function as “gutters” of sorts, that force readers to supply the connective tissue, like they must between the panels of Bui’s graphic memoir.

In “Exploring Same-Sex Female Intimate Partner Abuse Through Literary Tropes,” Sinéad Spelman notes that Machado endeavors to “bring to light invisible, and often taboo, areas of experience through stylistic experimentation,” in which the “the autobiographical first-person interrupt[s] dynamics of erasure and silencing” (45). Like Bui, Machado paradoxically uses silence to restore her own authority over a narrative that has been hijacked. Machado must walk a fine line to tell a story that has been commandeered both by the Woman in the Dream House on the one hand and by forces that are hostile to or essentializing of LGBTQ+ experiences on the other. The textual pauses between vignettes do a lot of work, forcing readers to participate in the text by committing closure where she leaves blank spaces. Take, for instance, the gap between “Dream House as Idiom” and “Dream House as Warning”: The final lines of the former contend that “Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, [‘safe as houses’] means that the person in charge is secure; everyone else should be afraid,” which yields immediately to “A few months before your girlfriend became the Woman in the Dream House, a young… undergrad went missing in Bloomington” (Machado 78-9). While the observation about the idiom “safe as houses” and the young missing girl are literally unrelated, they are figuratively tied together, and readers cannot help but link them through closure. Thus, as happens in the ellipses between all of the vignettes—indeed one could almost take any two contiguous vignettes to make the same point—the two ideas grow together, such that even the joy of moving in with a lover becomes tinged with threat. The author is not “safe as houses” in the Dream House, since she is implicitly not the one in charge, and then she becomes the missing girl, who, it is implied, has been disappeared by a perpetrator. This perpetrator, our brains tell us, illogically, is the Woman in the Dream House.

Both authors aestheticize eloquent silences. Jacques Derrida offers insights about the deep resonances of silence. In “Ellipsis,” he notes that what is left out of texts, the absences or “ellipses,” “redouble and consecrate” the words that remain (296). Pauses pepper Bui’s and Machado’s texts, stylistically and rhetorically, and Derrida’s conception of the ellipsis helps to ground their semiotically unstable methods. Textual blind spots, he argues, contain a “fabric of traces” for readers to decode, for “all meaning is altered by this lack” (Derrida 296). By “pronouncing non-closure,” Derrida maintains, the gaps are both “infinitely open and infinitely reflecting on [themselves]” in a Möbius strip that “redoubles” meaning. Redoubling, to Derrida, disrupts the traditional hierarchy of language, highlighting its inherent instability and ambiguity (Derrida 298). Bui and Machado use negative space as a kind of redoubling, creating the outlines of trauma such that the shape of its impact is clear, even if it cannot be looked at directly. Since they are both women whose identities are already marginalized by factors other than their trauma, they use gaps to forestall the external suppression of the traumatic experiences that further marginalize them. In an interview with Aaron Burkhalter, Bui discusses cultural silence: “my people speak in pregnant silences and don't argue. So I had to figure out how to do that in comics. It turns out that comics are actually good at showing silences.” McCloud discusses the emotional impact of silence in comics; the way silences push content into eternal and unchanging spaces, remarking,

the content of a silent panel… can produce a sense of timelessness. Because of its unresolved nature, such a panel may linger in the readers’ mind… When ‘bleeds’ are used, time is no longer contained, but instead hemorrhages and escapes into timeless space. (102)

We might look once more at Bui’s older version of herself sitting inside the panel, imagining the full-bleed image of her younger self below. The self below is trapped in timeless space, even as the author ages. This, according to Crespo and Fernández-Lansac, is how second-tier trauma memories work: “Triggered by perceptual cues,” they are “dominated by vivid sensorial details” that fragment and arrest time (149). These involuntary memories return the afflicted person against and again back to the site and conditions of the trauma. In an interview with Madi Haslam, Machado, too, discusses her aesthetic choice to use second person as a negotiation between her older self and the younger self who is doomed, when triggered by external stimuli, to repeat the traumatic memory:

I talk about this first-person Carmen—that's me—and the second-person Carmen—that's like this past version of myself that can't access any of the knowledge that I have… she is constantly turning on this hamster wheel of pain, trapped in the past… She’s stuck there forever and there's nothing I can do about it, so [using second person is] sort of honoring that wall.

Thi Bui

By taking control, visiting the scenes of trauma on their own terms, these authors perform a kind of healing scriptotherapy, which Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in Reading Autobiography, refer to as “the process of speaking or writing about trauma in order to find words to give voice to previously repressed memories” (29). Both Bui and Machado create, gaze at, and empathize with these remembered selves who cannot speak, who are immobile within the amber of their distress. Both authors use silence to sanctify their timeless, full-bleed suffering.

Derrida conceives of the ellipsis as a tool to draw readers’ attention to what is missing in a text, suggesting there is always more to be said or thought in these textual gaps. Ellipses, being circular and recursive in nature, as well as pregnant with potential energy, challenge a linear philosophical telos. They open new, more rhizomatic structures of thought around familiar ideas as a part of Derrida’s broader project of deconstruction, which seeks to expose the hidden assumptions and biases that buttress Western epistemology. Both Bui and Machado are women of color with a specific positionality within mainstream culture, and thus their narratives are triply adulterated by the strains of dominant discourse: They are women on one hand; they are women of color on another; and finally, Bui is an immigrant and Machado is from the LGBTQ+ community. While everyone suffering unnamable trauma works within some form of narrative mediation that they must navigate and, if necessary, dismantle, immigrants and queer women of color must kick against tremendous undercurrents to be heard at all. Moreover, they are burdened with representing not only themselves but an entire category of people, balancing personal truth with the need to protect their group from harmful stereotypes. Ellipses can help, strategic silences that speak a language that is different from but complementary to the narrative. Through the differences between word and image for Bui and between a first-person narrator and a second-person self in Machado, these two women navigate memories that do not square with, or that fit uncomfortably among, existing narratives about immigrants and queer people.

The Viêt Nam war, for instance, has deeply entrenched narratives in the United States, and part of Bui’s project is redressing the “stereotypes and terrible cliches about Vietnamese people from bad Vietnam War movies” (Burkhalter). And so she must fight against calcified history in writing her historically-specific trauma. As Stella Oh observes in “Birthing a Graphic Archive of Memory: Re-Viewing the Refugee Experience in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do,”

Rather than dehistoricizing trauma, Bui positions trauma and the material conditions of war firmly and literally on the back of the character and engages in a political project of recuperative narrativization. The graphic novel serves as a form of cartography, mapping our ways of perceiving Vietnam and the Vietnamese War in spatial and recursive modes that intervene in dominant tropes of Vietnam and representations of the war. (81)

Carmen Maria Machado

Like Bui, Machado expresses frustration that the legal and social narratives about queer people make her leery of representing the Woman in the Dream House as “the specter of the lunatic lesbian” (126), but she is compelled to write her experience because “the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history” (138). Being in the double-bind of trauma on the one hand and cultural invisibility on the other compels both women to aestheticize silence, if only to keep their narratives out of the greedy grasp of pre-existing and limiting white Western heteronormative thought. God, as the old saying goes, can be glimpsed right there in the gaps.

In sum, ellipses run like electrical currents through both authors’ prose, and their texts use ellipses to explore trauma by mixing semiotic systems, in ways that correspond to Crespo and Fernández-Lansac’s two tiers of traumatic memory. Machado and Bui employ writerly techniques that, through silence, become powerful archives of traumatic memory and postmemory. Kelly Hurley’s “Trauma and Horror” argues that traditional modes of narration such as realism are inadequate for the abreaction of trauma, because it isn’t possible to render

a “true” representation of traumatic events, given that the very experience of trauma involves the derangement, even the shattering, of the subjective apparatus designed to process it. Traumatic events can only be understood belatedly and imperfectly; they give rise to repetitive dreams and uncontrollable flashbacks and generate this-is-what-happened stories characterized by disjunction and distortion. (2)

Bui and Machado’s grapplings thereby provide models of healing that acknowledge and honor breakages and fractures, sanctifying the gap between what can be spoken and what exists beyond words. Their fractured narratives, rather than smoothing over the jagged edges of trauma, choose to aestheticize the breakages as a way to honor their experiences and experientially convey them to readers. Both of them are doing something that becomes a source of empowerment for those who find their experiences outside of accepted reality: They queer the pitch, semiotically, a tactic that strikes me as a kind of écriture féminine, since women, when it comes to trauma, often have to fight tooth and claw to wrest their stories back from a dehumanizing hegemony that would prefer to smooth out, simplify, or simply erase their story from the archive.

Works Cited

Burkhalter, Aaron. “Thi Bui Brings Her Graphic Novel Memoir to Seattle for Four Days of Appearances.” The South Seattle Emerald, 8 April 2019.

Crespo, María and Violeta Fernández-Lansac. “Memory and Narrative of Traumatic Events: A Literature Review.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 2016, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 149–156.

Derrida, Jacques. “Ellipsis.” Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass, U. of Chicago P., 1978, pp. 294-300.

Haslam, Madi. “The House is a Space of Living Metaphor: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado.” MaisonNeuve, 20 Dec. 2019, Accessed 10 Dec 2022.

Hurley, Kelly. “Trauma and Horror: Anguish and Transfiguration.” English language Notes, Vol. 59, No. 2, Oct. 2021, pp. 2-8.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins Publishing, 1993.

Oh, Stella. “Birthing a Graphic Archive of Memory: Re-Viewing the Refugee Experience in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do.” Melus, Vol 25, No. 4, Winter 2020, pp. 72-90.

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Second Edition. U. of Minnesota P., 2010.

Spelman, Sinéad. “Carmen Maria Machado's Memoir In The Dream House: Exploring Same-Sex Female Intimate Partner Abuse Through Literary Tropes.” Journal of Gender, Globalisation and Rights, No. 3, 2022.

Of Carpets and Shrouds

The Family and the Polis in Aeschylus’ Oresteia

In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, marriage is war. In a literal rather than a metaphorical sense: The perversion of the marriages of Atreus, Menelaus, and Agamemnon form a chain of iniquity that leads directly to the Trojan War and its tragical aftermath, and the text links the failure of blood ties to the failure of the state. But the sacrifice of young unmarried women in the play—whom the text renders as especially tragic—is what delays and complicates the carrying out of justice. Or, rather, it sets one paradigm of divine justice against another, equally important one. Cassandra is one such Parthenos, and her fruitless prophesizing transforms her into a crucial audience surrogate: Like us, she is armed with foreknowledge about how the play’s action will transpire but (like us) she is unable to use her knowledge to change events and is doomed to watch them unfold with the same combination of pity and terror that the audience experiences. A figure of impossible duality, she is at once nubile and doubly-wed; at once princess and slave; and, most crucially, at once herself and an echo of another Parthenos, the unjustly sacrificed Iphigenia. She cannot be suffered to survive this duality, but without such recursion in Cassandra’s body, the story cannot be suffered to survive. In her, the plays’ warring energies collide: Cold, rational Apollo, overseer of masculine order, and the hot, feminine temper of the Furies. It takes a divine arbiter in the form of Athena to settle the dispute between the justice of the Polis and the justice of the home, and to restore equilibrium to the chaos created by the drama’s many perversions of marriage.

Cassandra personifies the state that has captured her. Like the ruling family of Argos, her life is defined—and defiled—by a curse. The curse on the house of Atreus, Aeschylus makes clear, was initiated when Atreus’ brother Thyestes seduced his wife in a prior generation. In revenge, Atreus fed Thyestes his own children. Cassandra, the play’s truth-teller, renders this curse legible for the audience when she characterizes her new home as “A house that hates the gods, a houses in  / on the wicked murder of its own, of itself, a house full of nooses” and she gets more explicit when she references “the babies wailing over the sacrifice, / and the roasted meat on which their father was fed” (Ag. 1090-1, 1096-7). This initial horror—the first mutilation of marriage and child-rearing bonds—has, by the time of the action, rippled out to subsequent generations such that the curse dooms the entire culture to violent instability. Menelaus drags his allies into the protracted Trojan war because of the abduction of his wife by her lover, Paris; Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in exchange for favorable sailing winds. In “The Marriage of Cassandra and the Oresteia,” Robin Mitchell-Boyask notes that “the color of Iphigenia's robes, ‘saffron-dyed’… suggests the appearance of the Greek bridal veil,” and thus we see that she, thinking she would be wed, was sacrificed instead (283). In turn, Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, takes ferocious revenge for Iphigenia’s murder upon her husband’s return from the Trojan War, killing him in the bath. From there, their son, Orestes, must obey Apollo by murdering his own mother in retribution for the regicide. Though that is the last human death, Orestes is so hounded by the Furies—the fierce, ancient deities who preside over kinship bonds—that he is driven mad, unable to ascend to his father’s throne. No human recourse can interrupt the endless cycle of bloodshed and suffering ensured by the curse.

In parallel to the curse on the house of Atreus, Cassandra suffers under her own curse. Apollo, at some point in the past, gave her the wooing gift of foresight, but when she spurned him, he cursed her by ensuring her prophecies would never be believed. When we meet her, she is a war prize bequeathed to Agamemnon by his army, a former princess of the conquered Troy, now a slave. A Parthenos, Cassandra must follow Agamemnon into his home in a caricature of Greek marriage rites, which, as Mitchell-Boyask notes, “cast the bride’s departure from her house as an abduction and then death” (276). By tradition, a bride is delivered by chariot from her mother’s to her mother-in-law’s household, an act that is “strongly associated with the Persephone myth that this drama evokes” (Mitchell-Boyask 276). So marriage—a girl’s forced obeisance to a new lord—is framed as a kind of death. When Cassandra arrives in Argos as war booty, the play’s staging casts her as his bride, alighting from a chariot while he marches on foot, and his wife, Clytemnestra, becomes a stand-in for her mother-in-law, greeting her at the door. The bride imagery, however, is redoubled by her entreaties to Apollo, whose bride, we learn, she should also be. The saffron of Iphigenia’s robes is reiterated in the text by the chorus, who liken the chill her words have on their blood as “the color of men who have fallen / in battle and lie in the rays of their life as it sets” (Ag. 1121-3). Though Mary Lefkowitz’ translation alludes to Apollo in evoking the color of sunbeams—he is after all the god of sunlight and patron of young ephebes in the military—Mitchell-Boyask translates the line as “saffron-dyed blood” (283). This textual echo strikes me as critical in generating a resonance between the plays’ two Parthenoi. Doubly a bride, Cassandra is no bride at all. She laments, “No father’s altar waits there, but a block— / scarlet and warm when I’m the sacrifice,” strengthening her link to Iphigenia (Ag. 1277-8). Death is her last resort, and the only way to consummate the aborted wedding to Apollo. Mitchell-Boyask notes the way Cassandra’s lot becomes metonymy for the state:

By presenting Cassandra as Apollo's bride the dramatist looks forward and prepares his audience for important aspects of the next two parts of the trilogy, including the role of Orestes as a maturing ephebe claiming his patrimony under Apollo's guidance and Apollo's extremely problematic… conduct during Orestes's trial. (271)

Through Cassandra, the play intimates that intuition cannot comfortably mate with rationality: There is no perfect union possible between rational and intuitive justice. A balance must be struck between the ancient Furies and the younger gods of the Polis if there is to be any dramatic resolution. Once inside the home, Cassandra removes her veil with the words “I’ll prophesy no longer like a new bride / timidly peering out beneath her veil” (Ag. 1178-9). Mitchell-Boyask asserts that “Her progress into clarity here, lifting the veil, stands for her as the consummation of her marriage as it accompanies her accession to death as a Bride of Apollo” (278). Cassandra can fulfill her obligation to Apollo only through death, and thus serves as a recursion of the fatal conflict between sign systems that the culture suffers: It takes a balance of the feminine and masculine principles, embodied by Athena, to provide a resolution, albeit an imperfect one.

When Apollo tells Orestes to travel to Athens to be tried by the courts, he informs us that the city’s patron goddess, Athena, will adjudicate the proceedings. This represents a yielding of ancient custom—clan justice with its cycles of never-ending carnage—to the urbane laws of the Polis. No human character in the trilogy is wise to condemn of defy Apollo, but Aeschylus does not present him as just or trustworthy either. His system of marshal justice, too, is proven insufficient, and the play demonstrates that Athens’ civic legal code is equipped to recognize and contend with such insufficiencies. Apollo serves, in the trial, as the god for the defense, and he begins inauspiciously by insulting the Furies, who are serving as the jury. He arrogantly demands that they leave the Areopagus, saying: “You should share a cave / with a blood-guzzling lion, and not wipe / your dirt on others at this oracle. / You strays, you feral goats, move off!” (Eu. 193-6). Athena, though she rules in favor of Apollo and Orestes, serves as diplomat, calming, negotiating with, and expressing reverence for the Furies so that all sides are more or less satisfied with the outcome. As a goddess begotten of Zeus’ forehead, she represents both male and female principles, announcing herself as mediator between their interests with these words:

There is no mother who gave birth to me.
With all my heart, I hold with what is male—
except through marriage. I am all my father’s,
no partisan of any woman killed
for murdering her husband, her home’s watchman. (Eu. 736-40)

The Furies are angered by Apollo, but Athena turns to them with the words “let me persuade you” (Eu. 793). She promotes them, promising them the privilege and worship due to goddesses, for “No household here could thrive apart from you” (Eu. 896). It takes a woman (Athena) to reconcile the fierceness of a lioness protecting a cub (Clytemnestra) with the impartial justice of the state (Apollo). Thus, the trilogy’s conclusion makes plain the theme of incompatible systems of justice, models a resolution to the incompatibility, and delivers Cassandra and Iphigenia vengeance, paltry but satisfactory.

Cassandra and her antecedent are keystones that communicate the trilogy’s gendered orientation to justice. The drama subtly suggests that an all-male justice schema will catch too many innocents in its crossfire. Feminine interests in the drama are represented by fabrics, as exemplified by Iphigenia’s saffron robe; Cassandra’s bridal/prophetic veil; and, as yet unmentioned, the tapestries spread out by Clytemnestra upon Agamemnon’s return. Clytemnestra welcomes him home by spreading sumptuous textiles beneath his feet. They are dyed with precious murex, too fine to be walked on, and she does it as a kind of test. Agamemnon at first demurs, saying only gods should trample such fabrics, but his ego eventually cannot hold up to the temptation, and he treads on them. This act of male hubris signals that Agamemnon has failed his wife’s test. But he also fails ours: Even after sacrificing countless soldiers in a long and bloody war, he is still willing to tread on something fine to serve himself, the way he tread on his daughter by sacrificing her to his own glory. Apollo oversees and adjudges young ephebes, and as such he is a god with a connection to the justice of war—a god whose sister demanded Iphigenia’s blood sacrifice. But he is also himself without a consort, and is thus a threat to young parthenoi, as much as human ephebes are, which we learn from his menacing of Cassandra; and from the Furies, toward whom his behavior is unforgivable. The justice of women, however, based on rage and instinct, while understandable, is also insufficient to run the state, as we see in the curse that the Furies have unleashed on the house of Atreus. Setting aside the gendered aspect of the systems of justice, the metaphor of Cassandra is as useful today as it presumably was in the time of Aeschylus. We still do not have a perfect system of justice; and we still struggle for grace and balance under the law. These plays go deeply and psychomachically into the psychology of ethics, wherein one aspect of human experience doesn’t “play nice” with other aspects. Many if not all, at times, experience the pride and hubris of Agamemnon; the rage and vengeance of Clytemnestra; the impossible choices and hounding conscience of Orestes. Many of us struggle, at the personal, familial, and state levels, to restore order and equilibrium to a kingdom that is perpetually torn asunder.

Works Cited

Aeschylus. “The Oresteia.” The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Translated by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, Modern Library, 2017, pp. 51-177.

Mitchell-Boyask, Robin. “The Marriage of Cassandra and the ‘Oresteia’: Text, Image, Performance.” The American Philological Association, Vol. 136, No. 2, Autumn 2006, pp. 269-97.

Losing Control

A Dialogic Game Derived from the Crowdsourced Imaginary

“The buildings of capitalism, hives of killer bees, honey for the few.
He served there. But in a dark tunnel, when no one watched,
he unfolded his wings and flew. He had to live his life”

— Tomas Tranströmer, “Epigram”

Fan fiction traditionally follows a radial trajectory: Beginning with a locus—an author or text—it projects outward to a loose confederacy of fans who create and compile work that orbits and extends the original. But the videogame Control reverses this trajectory, taking its inspiration from a fanbase dedicated to collective storytelling—a Creative Commons fictional universe called the “SCP Foundation” to which anyone is welcome to contribute. Both properties are haunted houses of a sort, conceived as shadowy government agencies charged with “Securing, Containing, Protecting” (SCP) paranormal phenomena. The Federal Bureau of Control, Control’s in-game analog to the SCP’s “Foundation,” is literally haunted by the phenomena contained therein, but group storytelling and universal ownership queer our expectations of the haunted house paradigm: While traditional, single-author hauntings are often centered around one idea that the author controls and which the fanbase then complicates, the hauntings in Control are networked, variegated, and compounding. The narrative, in consequence, often feels tonally chaotic, but each element is a recognizable fragment in a shared imaginary, severed from its context. Control is, compellingly, a junk drawer of free ranging, psychologically-charged symbols which deliberately shift from definitive to ambiguated authorship: The game’s diffuse provenance, centerless networks, and hauntings from the collective unconscious offer players a quixotic power fantasy of literally cleansing the specters of late-capitalist alienation from a modern workspace.

Control’s set is a chilling workplace dystopia, where players are charged with containing various phenomena, usually consumer products that have come to life due to a quorum of the population imbuing them with longing or terror. They range from mischievous to neutral—haunted jukeboxes, arcade games, and lawn flamingos—but the game’s true villain is a malignant entity called only “The Hiss,” which infects people and spaces. The player avatar is Jesse Faden, a drifter who spent her life working low-wage subsistence jobs, a fact that is relevant to the project. The game begins with Jesse, in search of her brother, inside a brutalist government building in Manhattan, a building that is seemingly empty save for the electrical hum of fluorescent lights, the whisper of shuffling paper somewhere nearby, and the clanking of distant machinery. Jesse eventually finds herself in the office of the Bureau Director where he is lying dead on the floor. Upon picking up his sidearm she becomes the new Director of the FBC. All the photographs of the former Director on the walls, the player notices with alarm, have been replaced with her face, and the few office workers that remain alive greet her as the Director without surprise when they encounter her. Jesse finds she must fight The Hiss through the various departments of the Bureau, learning on the job to cleanse nodes of its influence, and shepherd uncorrupted office workers to safety. From beginning to end we aren’t sure if she is sane or hallucinating; if she is struggling underclass or apex predator; if the mysterious janitor haunting the corridors is man, god, monster, or ghost; or if the mysterious Board, a group of enigmatic entities who advise Jesse from out of a huge, inverted pyramid, are her pawns or her Svengali.

These inversions contribute to the game’s uncanny power and offer a searing critique of capitalist priorities. In “The Precession of Simulacra,” Jean Baudrillard calls our attention to “the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality” (463). Control literalizes such mise en scènes by imagining the workspace as haunted by cruel and incomprehensible manifestations of corporate greed and expressions of power. The Hiss infection warps the building—the walls and corridors and furniture—in disturbing, unpredictable ways, mixing senseless architectural recursion with what feel like severed body parts. The game is a visual metaphor of Baudrillard’s “hyperreality,” which he conceives as “the infinity of capital folded back on its own surface” into a kind of Möbius strip (465). In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler maintains that the “alienation of the individual” is expressed in the scale differences between skyscrapers—expressions of capitalist domination—and the anonymous workers who are automatons within and around them. This difference would not be so acute without “the real economic and social estrangements experienced by the majority of [a city’s] inhabitants” (Vidler 4). In Control, where there is Hiss infection, hapless office workers hang suspended in midair. These suspended figures murmur a steady chant in unison as the player gets close to Hiss-infected areas. The words of the chant occasionally come into focus with bizarrely juxtaposed Dadaist non-sequiturs like “A copy of a copy of a copy / Leave your insides by the door / The picture is you holding the picture.” They wear office attire—the uniforms of executives, scientists, secretaries, custodians, and security guards, all rendered equal in thralldom. They are liable at any moment to drop from the ceiling and attack Jesse, for the Hiss is a malevolent hive-mind that takes over bodies and spaces for some unspecified purpose that Jesse, without understanding how or why, must stop.

The gameplay involves fighting through rooms representing “the infinity of capital folded back on its own surface.” Different Bureau divisions have their own character and commentary on the class implications of corporate structure: In “Research” the player faces the experiments-gone-wrong unleashed by scientists playing god; “Maintenance” requires players to clear toxic waste and sentient fungal infestations; and in “Executive,” players discover increasingly unhinged recordings, evidence of upper management’s insanity, in their luxurious office suites. We are Quixotic flâneurs in a crowdsourced space, and the hauntings we find here are multiform and interconnected in what Neal Kirk calls “Networked Spectrality,” a particular kind of contemporary, high-tech haunted house that is collective and rhizomatic in structure, and through which our emergent fears and longings hunt and terrorize us, the more frightening because they are “unseen technological protocols” that can “structure and use human behavior” (Kirk 64). Rather than Freud’s psychological unheimlich, we find ourselves in a site of sociological unheimlich, a contemporary workspace that is also a prison, as the mysterious Board lets slip during a weapon tutorial, saying, “The Service Weapon has many Forms, like the House/Prison you occupy.” Like its real-world analogs, the Board inhabits a space wholly separate from the Bureau, and its inscrutable language—often a hodgepodge of cosmic horror and corporate buzzwords—obfuscates and bullies. Toward game’s end, Jesse teams up with another entity, which angers the Board. It says to her, “We Apologize/Deny All Knowledge. [The Former] builds a Competition/Not Us… If you [side with it] you will be Sorry/Dead. And you will never work/exist in this Torn/Cosmic Reality again.” There is no escape from Jesse’s fate—or ours, as Baudrillard would have it—but cleansing the nodes of each sector of Hiss influence comes close. Mastering these spaces of terror—watching the walls retract into smooth, gray, innocent symmetry; watching the eerie red give way to regular fluorescent lighting, hearing the blessed cessation of the chanting—is accompanied by a heady feeling of power and release.

Because no game about hyperreality would be complete without an instance of life imitating art, I’ll leave off with a real-life story: In 2015, Russian oligarch Andrey Duskin joined the SCP Foundation as a writer and began selling art based on its logo and stories, a project that was warmly encouraged by SCP—at first. But then, after copyrighting his work, he tried to wrest control of the IP away from them, using a loophole in the Creative Commons licensing. The lawsuit failed outside of Russia—for now—but it is ongoing, and he now owns all the rights to the property, including the work he did not create, inside Russia. As I was doing research for this project, Duskin became the Hiss for me, a corrupting force that consumes everything of cultural emergence only to package it back up and sell it to its creators. For this is one of the insatiable hungers of capitalism: The endless appropriation of the communicative arts, the packaging of it into bite-sized consumables, so that even our own creations are no longer ours, but part of the Möbius strip of capital, folding back on its own surface. But playing Control, on my couch in front of my PS5, at the threshold between real world and game world I felt myself momentarily free of that. For a moment, embodying a working-class hero who fell into a position of authority, I could ask myself “Who has Control?” and think, just maybe, it could be me.

Works Cited

Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation, Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U. of Michigan P., 1994, pp. 453–81.

Control. PS5 Edition, Remedy Entertainment, Distributed by 505 Games, 2019.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, Translated by Brian Massumi, U. of Minnesota P., 1987.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Art and Literature, Translated by James Strachey, Penguin, 1990, pp. 336-75.

Joy, Reagan. “The Tragedy of the Creative Commons: An Analysis of How Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights Undermine the Use of Permissive Licensing.” Case Western Law Review, Vol. 72, Is. 4, 2022, pp. 977-1012.

Kirk, Neal. “Networked Spectrality: In Memorium, Pulse, and Beyond.” Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic, and the Found Footage Phenomenon, Edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, I.B. Tauris and Company, 2015.

Tranströmer, Tomas. “Epigram.” Inspired Notes: The Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, translated by John F. Deane, 2011.

Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. MIT Press, 1999.

Parsing a Secret History

Ann Cvetkovich’s “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”

Ann Cvetkovich situates Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home among extant criticism of other graphic memoirs—namely Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—in the way they all concern the relationship between historical and personal trauma. Like Spiegelman, Bechdel’s text concerns a kind of family archeology, in her case undertaken by a queer child attempting to trace her queerness back to her closeted father; like Satrapi, Bechdel was an actual witness to events, and is not merely responding to the “postmemory” experienced by the next generation (Cvetkovich 113). But Cvetkovich distinguishes Bechdel’s memoir from the others for its intimate scope and emphasis on queer concerns and problematics. Where Spiegelman and Satrapi pursue precision, Bechdel generates ambiguity; where Spiegelman and Satrapi situate their stories in moments of violent political rupture, Bechdel’s family drama feels deceptively small—one might even call it claustrophobic. All three texts dramatize the difference in scale between the individual caught within the machine of vast global events and the cultural memory that occludes the personal in such events. Bechdel’s cultural rupture is an invisible one, the very violence of which is in its suppression and secrecy. She seeks to be “the sympathetic witness who can make available the rich and contradictory story of [her father’s] life so that he is something more than a pedophile, suicide, or tragic homosexual” (Cvetkovich 113). Bechdel undertakes this task for the good of the queer community, excavating the violence to self and others that comes from living a closeted life: Such suppression, the text argues, is as silently dangerous as louder, more visible cataclysms.

Cvetkovich grounds her observations in a queer theoretical frame, linking queer theory to scholars of historical trauma like Marianne Hirsch, who coined the term “postmemory” to refer to the aftereffects that haunt the children of parents who have lived through trauma. Much of Cvetkovich’s evidence is built on the interplay between image and text: She observes that the combination of words and images in all three graphic novels demonstrate “the effects of growing up in the vicinity of powerful combinations of violence and secrecy, including forms of secrecy that in the interest of protecting children’s innocence seem only to harm them” (Cvetkovich 113). For Bechdel’s text especially, the images create a “visual archive” of what only existed in secret or as symptom—the way her father’s obsession with restoration is a symptom; or his fastidiousness about appearance that he projects onto his daughter in a way that violates her autonomy. Through recreating documents and photographs in a more detailed, photorealistic sketch style than the rest of the illustrations, Bechdel “draws the evidence” in a way that both concedes a subjective read of events—the drawings are not photographs or digital reproductions of documents like they are in Spiegelman—and rhetorically separates them from the rest of the art. Bechdel uses the art to “both enhance and trouble acts of witness” (Cvetkovich 114).

Cvetkovich takes as her prime exemplar the memoir’s “centerfold,” an image of the family babysitter taken during a trip the children took with their father. Bechdel painstakingly reproduces the photograph in detailed crosshatching, but also includes her cartoony style in the form of the narrator Alison’s hands holding the photograph. This produces overlays of reality that complicate rather than simplifying. The more realistic sketch gives the artifact a greater tie to the “real world” than the personal story of Alison’s interiority, while also nodding to her father’s more baroque artistic tastes in contrast to her simple line-art. But, as Cvetkovich notes, the fact that it is hand-drawn concedes that we are not seeing an “unmediated form of vision” (114). She bathes the photograph—which may have been innocent—in an erotic glow, trying to visually imagine her father’s desire when he took the photograph of the almost naked teen lying on the bed, in the hotel room next to his children. The drawn photograph’s “visual elements—its style, composition, layout, and sequencing—underscore its emotional significance” rather than its historical veracity (Cvetkovich 115). Indeed, Cvetkovich contends that the original photograph and the hand-drawn replica tell different stories, each critical to our understanding of a complex and secret history: “Despite their differences—the photograph instantaneous, the drawing laborious; the photograph apparently truthful, the drawing achieving other kinds of verisimilitude—both serve as technologies of memory” (118). This overlay of semantic systems is central to Bechdel’s project of cultural memory’s intersection with personal experience.

Bechdel’s archive interrupts the narrative of queerness in the United States. Her combination of images and text refuses to succumb to dominant trends in “queer witnessing” that idealize and simplify. The trauma of Bechdel’s illustrated world is repressed and compacted, cramped within her father’s need to sublimate and deny, and Bechdel “airs out” the family trauma by outing a parent for whom concealment was a way of life. The graphic form is appropriate to this project, comprising an “insurgent genre” that documents events in ways that hew closer to emotional than historical truth (Cvetkovich 112).  As Cvetkovich notes:

Fun Home's queer witnessing deserves to be part of its highly successful and well-deserved reception, since it provides such a compelling challenge to celebratory queer histories that threaten to erase more disturbing and unassimilable inheritances. (126)

Cvetkovich calls this challenge to the status quo a bold move. She notes that the current state of LGBTQ  rhetoric, at least in the mainstream, is “quite willing to disavow stigmatized identities that might disrupt the clean wholesome image of gay people who just want to get married and have families” (125). Queer theory itself pushes back on this recourse to normativity.

Cvetkovich draws interesting parallels and makes compelling points about Bechdel’s archive of memory and its relationship to the inherited trauma of the closet. Having read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, however, I can’t help but think she might have deepened her argument through an engagement with semiotics: Bechdel deliberately activates different sign systems in her visual and conceptual overlays. McCloud notes how variance along the continuum of realism/abstraction in comics affects reader’s experience of meaning in predictable ways:

By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts. Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without… and through the cartoon the world within. (41)

This insight deepens Cvetkovich’s observations about the Bechdel’s assorted “technologies of memory,” and could be fruitfully applied to her “centerfold,” which shows Alison’s hands (the world within) holding a photorealistic drawing of a photograph (the world without). McCloud notes that comics offer what other media can’t, in that the reader becomes, in a sense, a collaborator. He introduces the concept of the “gutter”—the space between the panels of a cartoon—as a space at once empty and pregnant with meaning. The gutter is the interstice where readers commit “closure”: “Comics panels fracture both time and space,” he says, “offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (McCloud 67). Bechdel’s medium of choice forces readers to collaborate with its author, closing the gaps in memory, both cultural and personal, that have no closure in the real world.

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. First Mariner Books, 2007.

Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly. Vol. 36, No. ½, Spring/Summer 2008, pp. 111-128.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Postmemory.” https://postmemory.net/, N.D., Accessed 20 Oct 2022.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993.

John Milton's God Problem

I remember my first reading of Paradise Lost when I was too young to “get it” but old enough to fall in love with Satan. Now that I’m older I’m less enamored of Satan (maybe of bad boys in general) but I find myself quite taken with the complex eschatology Milton outlines; with the work he makes his readers do unpacking a thesis nestled deep within the onion-layers of the text. He threads a precise needle: By throwing his ventriloquist’s voice into the mouths of various characters, who are all persuasive and argue viable philosophical schemata, he forces readers to work through conflicting worldviews. It is wonderfully disorienting to one moment be convinced by Satan’s slick, libertarian rhetoric (with its encoded hypocrisy), and the next by Raphael’s gentler but equally unstable and contradictory cosmology-lessons. The reader (this reader, anyway) struggles with these rhetorical contradictions until it becomes clear that the Socratic process itself is the point. An internal dialectic seems to be Milton's ethos. And while I’m not smart enough to truly “get” everything he lays down there is something that bothers me. I keep hitting my head against the same limitation in his theology. After finishing Book XII, the limitation is intensified rather than resolved: I think Milton has a God problem.

Pardon me for saying, but his God is awful. I do not mean to disrespect the Judeo-Christian God: I am gently agnostic in practice. But Milton’s God just—sucks. No matter how I look at it, I see a bully and a petty tyrant whose legalistic attitude about the behavior of his creations does not fit with his generous acts of creation. Nor am I the first to suggest such a thing. In “A Defense of Poetry,” from 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley writes my feelings more eloquently than I can (without once using “sucks” as a verb):

Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments (57).

It doesn’t stop there. A cursory search in Google Scholar yields the iconoclastic words of William Empson, who, in Milton’s God, likens the deity to Joseph Stalin (89). (Imagine how controversial, writing that at the height of the cold war when religion was supposed to be a bulwark against communism). God gives free will but also requires blind loyalty and His idea of loyalty feels arbitrary. I am concerned about the world Milton creates: His God seems to need the fall; else he is afraid he has created an immense puppet show. After the poem’s events, I’m not convinced he hasn’t.

I can’t stop thinking about this as I read. I haven’t cracked the case yet. I think it might come down to this: Milton is too intelligent for his scriptural sources. The Christian God is just not the same character as the Old Testament God, and Milton runs into issues when he superimposes the one on top of the other. The Old Testament God is bespoke for a specific set of people whose loyalty He must vie for with other gods. He requires sacrifices, admits to mistakes, has preferences for certain times of the day to come to earth, and frequently changes his mind. He is a very powerful but human entity. His people can negotiate their covenants with Him (I’m reminded of my mother’s friend, a man who became a rabbi late in life because he missed the “manipulative” relationship he had with God as a child). The Old Testament God is intimate with His creations. Christianity, on the other hand, imagines this deity as perfectly remote, a force of nature, a tesseract that human beings can apprehend only partially, an embodiment of the inscrutability of the universe we live in. Both ideas of God make sense to me in their contexts. What does not make sense to me is the “rational” God that Milton imagines as a fusion of the two. Milton is too smart and learned: I imagine him as like Giordano Bruno before him, telling the church, “Your God is too small!” (until they killed him for heresy). God here is, in every sense, too small. He has no subjective life outside the life of His creations. Because of this He seems to amuse himself with senseless games of chess with their lives and happiness.

The distant, unknowable Christian God is mitigated in scripture by Jesus, a semi-divine ambassador who advocates for more lenient sentencing for those who pray to Him. So far so good, and one could argue the muse is Milton’s Holy Spirit, rounding out the trinity. But The Son here is too much like God; His pre-arranged sacrifice is so meaningless as to not feel like a sacrifice at all. A God who knows what is going to happen in a world of his own creation is cruel if he doesn’t understand that the life of obedience he offers feels, to some anyway, like slavery. It’s difficult not to side with Satan, who rages and suffers and prefers evil to slavery, over a God who creates the world, the rules, the punishments for disobedience—and who bears no responsibility for His own actions.

God is not complex enough maybe. Milton's cosmology and ethics are so wonderful and nuanced and I can't stop thinking about them in my spare time. Everything here is perfect—except for this big clumsy lumbering God crashing the party.

Works Cited

Empson, William. Milton’s God. New Directions, 1961.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defense of Poetry and Other Essays. Biblioteca Virtual Universal, 2008, pg. 57.

The Bent Arrow

Heteronormativity, Negative Space, and the Color of Selfhood in Giovanni’s Room

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

— James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"

“So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.”

— Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B”

What is particularly instructive about James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room is what is left out: Baldwin is a queer black American adopting (persuasively) the voice and stance of David, a white, queer, self-hating ex-pat suffering—and making others suffer—under the conflicting pressures to live an authentic life and to hide under the mask of his privileged position within white American masculinity. The effect of the novel is therefore essentially metatextual, signifying what a black man notices about white behavior and motives, and therefore expressing what a white subject has difficulty seeing in himself and his lived experience. In this way, the novel might actually be about a black queer experience through its use of negative space: The specter of black identity haunts its pages like a film negative, springing up in David at his most vulnerable, at times a sort of shadow-self. Baldwin’s novel thereby renders, with excruciating intimacy, a reversal of the white gaze. For he has a perceptional superpower: He is a black subject who, unlike white subjects, has access to both the rhetoric of white, postwar, heterosexual normativity—since the culture is saturated with it—and black double-consciousness, inflected by the coequal marginality of mid-century queer identity.

In Baldwin’s novel, blackness is conflated with queerness, and through it we are invited into the crisis of American postwar anxiety, where the borders of race and other signifiers of alterity—poverty, foreignness, gender, etc.—are vigilantly policed. This novel is evidence for the imbrication of blackness and queerness, as Baldwin states plainly in “Go the Way Your Heart Beats”: “The sexual question and the racial question,” he avers, “have always been entwined” (178). In my argument I will amend Loredana Bercuci’s contentions that by leveraging the “troubled psyche” of a white character to call out “the post-war consensus on ideals of white masculinity,” Baldwin is actually expressing a black experience (191). He accomplishes this through metaphors: By peopling the text with shadows that “darken” the metanarrative David depends on for his identity, we see how reified blackness and whiteness operate and are dependent on one another. As such, the text is involved in “undoing whiteness,” an argument proposed by Aliyyah Abur-Rahman in “Simply a Menaced Boy.” Moreover, the text literalizes Edward Said’s theory that the West’s black and brown “Others” are really shadow-selves of its own desires and terrors. When David endeavors to project his fears and desires “outside” so he, a white man, can occupy the rarified status of “inside,” it costs him his happiness—and, in many ways, his soul. Blackness is expressed in shadows that frighten David, but the blackness, by the end, gestures the way to his liberation as well, as Emilio Amedeo suggested in Queer Tidalectics: He argues that the text’s shadows become paired with water imagery, emblematic of movement and authentic self-expression, antidotes to joyless and brittle American manhood. This metaphorical qualities of blackness—shadows and tides—corroborate Josep M. Armengol’s contention that the novel “smuggles” blackness into places we “least expect them” (674). It foregrounds white characters, but the text wears, in Mae Henderson words, a kind of “racial drag”—a costume assumed deliberately to launch a critique of the machinations of power in postwar America (298). Indeed, I argue that far from making the text a “white life” novel, this racial drag is central to the text’s project of dismantling whiteness, a sine qua non that draws an outline of black queerness in crisper lines than it can draw white heteronormativity, the boundaries of which the novel blurs beyond recognition.

Racial Drag: Contamination Fears, Cramped Spaces, and Surrogate Selves

The beginning of the novel is its end, after the lines have already been blurred. Giovanni’s Room opens on David, standing before a window inside a house as the day dies. We watch him watching himself. His white reflection is framed in increasing blackness as the sun slowly sets on the eve of a terrible day of reckoning for the actions that are about to be chronicled in flashback. Thus a metaphor of darkness and lightness—specifically the way the category “white” requires “black” to reify it in the same way light requires dark for its definition—sets the stage for the novel’s complication of racial and sexual identity. Baldwin embeds the metaphor in a moment of narcissistic contemplation. There is no ambiguity as to David’s race: The author foregrounds both the visuals that mark him as white and the complicated history of white colonialism that whiteness is dependent on for its signification:

I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as the night falls… I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the windowpane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past (Baldwin 3).

Thus we understand, however obliquely, that the story will be concerned with race and its relationship to circumscribed boundaries. Indeed, the novel goes on to explore the boundaries between many things: the genders, youth and age, heterosexual and homosexual, American and European, and predator and prey. These boundaries are being constantly, anxiously, drawn and redrawn, even as they are transgressed. The narrator seeks constantly to reassert them, but his own desires—his very personhood—keeps asserting itself, causing boundaries to bleed into one another. David sees himself everywhere, in everything. The “darkening gleam” is distinct from the gleam of his blond hair—but the same word describes both in successive sentences, conceptually linking the two. He is “darkening” metaphorically. He says he is “rather like an arrow” (as in “straight as an arrow,” perhaps) because the qualifier “rather” suggests that he isn’t. His face is a face “you have seen many times”—the historical White Man, not an individual with what Eve Sedgwick, in Epistemology of the Closet, calls a “nonce taxonomy” (23), a set of one with a uniqueness all his own. The blackness of his “darker past” dogs him so that he can’t see his reflection without the intrusion of its ghostly remains. It is difficult to read this passage and assume that the book is merely a “white life” novel: The ghosts of blackness curtail the white character’s movements, relationships, and selfhood from the book’s first image; they paralyze him and turn love and pleasure into ashes in his mouth. David is, in many ways, a slave to blackness, reliant on blackness to prop him up, give his life meaning, shape his identity. David asserts his dominance over the queer characters around him, the novel’s proxies for black characters. Without queerness/blackness as a point of contrast with his own normativity—once he can’t separate himself from the rest of le Milieu—he is left starting into the face of his own inner darkness. Such a confrontation with inner darkness, Baldwin suggests, is a component of growing up, of maturity—a way out of American innocence.

In Bercuci’s “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a Transgressive White-Life Novel,” we get the definition of a genre that has fallen out of favor: White-life novels “refer to works written by African-American writers which primarily center upon white characters,” a genre later denounced for “pandering to a white readership” (192). She notes, however, that “While most white-life novels slid into oblivion… this is not true in the case of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room” (193). We do not need to delve deep to discover why: The novel tells a white story, but it reveals more about the operations of reified “whiteness” on whites and non-whites alike than it panders to it. It exposes the corrosive power of that meaningless dividing line, shored up by fantasy and prior conquest and literary and cultural dominance. Whiteness comes at a price that is far too high for David, and by extension for all of the white Western world. It is not just the soul of the antihero at the gallows, it is his sense of joy and meaning and love, not to mention the life of his non-white Other who literally pays, in the text, for David’s sins.

 Black and queer: These describe the author, but the author’s creation, David, uses these categories to set himself against his “Others.” In Orientalism, Edward Said frames how, where there exists an asymmetry of power, the powerful group shapes and manipulates a definition of an “Other” against which to define itself. He traces how European colonial powers created a stereotyped “Other” deliberately “as a sort of surrogate and even underground self,” depending for its strategy on the “flexible positional superiority” of the colonizer but embedding its fears and desires and fetishes into the flesh and soul of the Other (7). He notes how “The nexus of knowledge and power” (a tool of white supremacy) creates sciences that establish white and black in diametric opposition to one another (Said 27). Baldwin does this with metaphor. Bercuci calls the novel’s play of light and dark a “narrative chiaroscuro effect, wherein light is associated with the status quo and darkness with marginality and otherness, but also liberation” (198). The light/dark dichotomy establishes a hierarchy of power that is conveniently visual, but we watch these binaries leach the humanity from both sides. Liberation exists only in the spaces where they bleed together. As Sedgwick notes, “A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: Gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions” (22). These categories are too cramped for comfort, and as tools they are ill-equipped for successful navigation of a complex world. While whiteness affords David a kind of shelter-in-the-open, allowing him to sneer at his fellow man from the vantage of privilege, his soul is cramped within its confines; queerness/darkness free his soul, but the sanctuary they offer is the cramped shelter of the closet. As soon as David is tempted with liberation, he grows uncomfortable in its cramped space—literalized here in the dark, dirty room in which he lives with Giovanni—and retreats back to the safety of normativity. But the power to trade these spaces for one another (a power that David has but Baldwin, being black, does not) comes at a terrible price. This is certainly the case for David in the story, but it is also the case in Baldwin’s America, and the price of normativity is what Baldwin endeavors to explicate. The novel explores the violence done to self and Others in the performance of white heteronormativity, written at a point in U.S. history where the template for the American man was at a crisis point.

The Bible, the Post-War Identity Crisis, and the Threat of Alterity

In midcentury America, Otherness of all stripes was condemned, and the fear of reprisal caused many white people to scuttle to the refuge of white heteronormativity, because alterity became associated, in the McCarthy era, with communism. The white, Christian, American family, whose structure and behavior was defined and reinforced as communism’s opposite by political rhetoric, media, and the education system, not only bought white Americans a good amount of belonging and safety—if they could but conform—but was also considered an unshirkable patriotic duty. Bercuci notes that by the midcentury, “Homosexuality became entwined with the threat of communist infiltration during the Cold War” (197), and Mae G. Henderson discusses the oppressive normativity of the Cold War era in “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: Expatriation, ‘Racial Drag,’ and Homosexual Panic”—how tinged it was with paranoia. She notes how difference was seen as infiltration, creeping in to contaminate American purity and innocence. Any flirtation with difference increased Americans’ collective vulnerability to the Red Menace:

sexual deviance or “perversion” was linked to “subversion,” and the job of the government was, in the words of the Reverend Billy Graham, to expose “the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle.” In other words, to be a “good American” meant to be “a real man”… Baldwin’s literary performance of racial passing provides for the author a position that allowed him both to explore his own sexual variance or “difference” and to critique the dominant national construction of masculinity (299-300).

And according to Stephan Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War, the era “prescribed that men were men and women were housewives” and “the overriding fear of the American parent… was that a son would become a ‘sissy’” (qtd. in Henderson 299). In Bercuci’s words, it was a time when “sociological theories were being developed that attempted to uphold the heteronormative ideal of the white American family” (195). We feel David grappling with the monolith of American normativity throughout the novel. I seek to extend Henderson’s claim that this novel is an act of “racial passing.” Indeed, I argue that Baldwin embeds American blackness within his white character—blackness in general as both a sort of creeping menace and promise of salvation, and American queer blackness as the outer edges of alterity and the moment of ultimate freedom and selfhood—against which David’s white body can only hold out for so long—though he does not reach it within the pages of the book, there is an implication that Giovanni’s death might have caused enough internal change for him to eventually get to a space where he can give up black/white and live in full color.

The frame story is concerned with reflection. At the opening and closing of the novel, David sees himself reflected in windows and mirrors, and he reflections metaphorically as well. His reflection complicates the lie of his whiteness again and again. Before finally going to bed at the narrative’s close, he stands “watching, in the windowpane, my reflection, which steadily becomes more faint. I seem to be fading away before my eyes” (Baldwin 166). Whiteness has become ghostly, a lie, increasingly replaced by a more bespoke palimpsest of selves. His final reflections (physical and mental) are linked to increased maturity. He flees the window to sleep but the bedroom mirror once again accosts him, where his disembodied whiteness rears again, this time shot through with something else:

The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation (Baldwin 168).

Giovanni has hitherto been a proxy for the text’s black body, sacrificed to white American masculinity, but we see in this passage that it is David, as well as Giovanni, who is “under sentence of death.” He now perceives the conflict between “white” and another thing that “moves” through him, as water moves. He has been resisting “revelation” but here we see it will haunt his life until he is ready to accept it. The word is no accident, revelation: David looks to a surprising source to make sense of his human complexity (the thing that “moves” in the body despite his desire to keep it “lean, hard, and cold”). The Bible, the text Americans like Billy Graham hide behind when they define normativity, becomes for David a lens through which to see his potential maturity and liberation. He quotes Corinthians 1 to himself, and the Biblical allusion becomes a subtle dig at the lie of American innocence: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: But when I became a man, I put away childish things” (KJB 1Cor. 13:11). In this, he frames a desire to grow up—to leave American “innocence” behind. “I long to make this prophecy come true,” David opines. “I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed… the key to my salvation… is hidden in my flesh” (David 168). Revelation, salvation—Biblical concepts made crucial here as a way out of the trap of American manhood.

The Bible is likewise invoked in the names of the two protagonists, David and Giovanni (King David adored his friend Jonathan, the Italian form of which is “Giovanni”). In Samuel 1, “Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul… Then said Jonathan unto David, Whatsoever thy soul desireth, I will even do it for thee” (18:3, 20:4) and in Samuel 2, after Jonathan’s death, King David laments, “very pleasant hast thou been unto me: Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (1:26). Thus Baldwin weaponizes the Bible, the text that is most often deployed to bludgeon those who threaten, by their very existence, American normativity. Similarly, he weaponizes David’s whiteness to show not only the damage its reification does on the non-normative characters in the book, but on white men themselves. Baldwin showcases what Bercuci refers to as

the notion of American manhood in the 1950s and its damaging role when it comes to me achieving full humanity as it places [white men] in an impossible relation both to women and to other men… American culture clung to a notion of innocence, which would recognize the complexity of human beings—a complexity which would include homosexuality” (196).

So in this respect, Henderson is correct in her assertion that the author’s project “necessitates a male protagonist… defined in terms of racialized whiteness” (298). But the necessity of a white protagonist does not, as Henderson argues, mean the text is “passing.” I argue that Baldwin embeds blackness everywhere as David’s shadow—as the alterity in queer desire, as literal darkness and dirt—that both generates the whiteness that is his birthright and also contaminates it and renders it unsafe.

Seeing Double: Blackness as the Long Shadow of American Identity

The shadow hounds David with threats of contamination and peril as powerfully as it lures him with the freshness of selfhood and joy. We see the first indication of this threat early in the novel, when he watches the sleeping body of the “quick and dark” Joey—Giovanni’s antecedent—after their sexual encounter (Baldwin 6). He wakes and looks at his new lover: “I awoke while Joey was still sleeping, curled like a baby on his side, toward me… Joey’s body was brown, was sweaty, the most beautiful creation I had ever seen till then” (Baldwin 8). But the intrusion of white masculine performativity sours the joy: “my own body suddenly seemed gross and crushing,” David says, “and the desire which was rising in me seemed monstrous” (Baldwin 9). It is whiteness that is monstrous here. Joey’s brown body is still beautiful. But that changes when Joey’s body

suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood… A cavern opened in my mind, black, full of rumor, suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty words. I thought I saw my future in the cavern. I was afraid (9).

A cavern is a black opening, the inverted shadow-self in which he had just experienced “great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst” and from which “came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love” (Baldwin 8). The depth of his passion is not allowed by his American alter ego, which endeavors to keep him cold, rational, unemotional. The white alter ego prompts men to adhere to the duty of wife and procreation, but not to seek, even there, the “thirsty heat” which, for the narrator, is the purview of queer love. The settings for queer love link, in Henderson’s words, “homosexuality with the alien, exotic, or outlandish,” but these spaces are also the spaces of greatest happiness and authenticity (299). After David abandons the heat he shares with Giovanni, leaving his Italian lover to the guillotine, he describes himself thus: “my body is dull and white and dry” (168). How anathema to the authentic passions that moved through him like water, animating him and pointing the way to his salvation.

David resists Giovanni at first. We are unsurprised: He has spoken with sneering heteronormativity about the queer Parisians with whom he spends his time: He remarks that the denizens of le Milieu, the gay bar in which Giovanni works, “looked like a peacock garden and sounded like a barnyard… a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them” (Baldwin 27). He is a mouthpiece for normativity here. He compares marginalized people to beasts the way American racism deploys animal imagery to describe black people. He depicts a transgender blond in the bar (using the male pronoun and the masculine form of one of the only adjectives in English that declines by gender, “blond/blonde”): “his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not—so grotesquely—resemble human beings” (Baldwin 27). Such judgments make him feel superior, but we understand he is merely externalizing his own self-disgust. He is among them, after all. His dehumanizing metaphors are expressions of the same monstrousness he felt with Joey, not accurate portrayals of the vulnerable inhabitants of the bar. Later, David describes Guillaume and Jacques in terms that evoke both blackness and contamination, as “dirty old men” whose “filthy” thoughts “bubbled upward out of them like fountain of black water”—though his assessment might, in this case, be apt (Baldwin 45). And while walking along the quay, David describes the mist as “clinging like a curse to the men who slept beneath the bridges—one of whom flashed by beneath us, very black and lone” (Baldwin 45). The curse is within: He is “very black and lone.” In “In the Dark Room: Homosexuality and/as Blackness in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room,” Josep M. Armengol  notes that “David tried to affirm his heterosexuality by projecting his own repressed homosexuality onto the homosexual demimonde of Paris, which he sees as dirty and dark” (682). The novel dramatizes how the performance of whiteness sterilizes heat and passion, winnowing David down into something “dull and white and dry.” Blackness defines him, haunts him, and tempts him..

In “‘Simply a Menaced Boy’: Analogizing Color, Undoing Dominance in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room,” Aliyyah I. Abur-Rahman decries that the “label ‘homosexual novel’ and the critical obsession with the novel’s white characters have obscured many of the novel’s underlying critiques of the machinations of power” (Abur-Rahman 478), noting that in the novel’s “superficially all-white context,” Baldwin embeds the same racial signifiers that can be found elsewhere in his writing:

It was Baldwin who gave African Americans the word “unlivable” and “unspeakable” and “unanswerable” as the terms that most approximate … the experience of being a black person in the U.S. at any point in history… [because] the African American, the woman, and the (so called) sexual deviant are doomed symbols of the U. S. cultural imagination, where the fears, fetishes, and fantasies of the straight, white bourgeois mainstream are deposited (477).

She goes on to remark that Giovanni, until the end, is a stand-in black character: “In the text, Giovanni, David’s darker, poorer, abused, and finally executed Italian lover, undergoes the classic experiences of the degraded figure of both the African American and the homosexual” (Abur-Rahman 482). The door to Giovanni’s execution, after all, is described as “the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body” (Baldwin 168). The revelation David seeks never quite comes, but at the novel’s close, we see he is getting closer to it. In describing the older man, Jacques, he remarks in passing, “I understand now that the contempt I felt for him involved my self-contempt,” a moment of rare self-awareness (Baldwin 23); and another time he notes that everyone “goes down the same dark road—and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright” (25). Blackness haunts David in the story—as shadows, impulses, tricks of light, and in the novel’s tragic denouement. By the end Giovanni is a kind of Christ figure here, dying so that David can understand his nonce taxonomy. In this final Biblical allusion, David has to potential to be a sort of Longinus, implicated in Giovanni’s death—but, if strong enough, able to learn from it.

Conclusion: Crushing Whiteness, Fluid Blackness, Full Color Life

Though there are no black characters, Giovanni’s Room is not a “white-life” novel. Instead, it shines an unflatteringly harsh light on the dominant—though ultimately suicidal—project that is midcentury white American whiteness. Normativity functions as a kind of straitjacket that keeps David suspended, unable to mature. The few character strokes he is allowed (“manly,” “Teutonic,” “cold”) must be meticulously performed and maintained with a singular vigilance that is close to self-harm. Baldwin demonstrates how the project of whiteness is a parasite that kills its host as well as its “Others.” The narrative shows him beating back each dark, errant desire that rises in him in an exhausting game of whack-a-mole, until not one but three lives lie in tatters. His love can’t survive the parasite of white masculinity. In seeking the safety of normativity, David spreads the parasite to everyone he touches. The narrator’s disavowal of alterity costs him his happiness, humanity, and lover and, by the end of the story, has paid few perceivable dividends. Blackness is smuggled into the text in the form of darkness and filth, but all along there are other metaphors for alterity, in water and cleanses and flows, signifying the potential for metamorphosis, adaptation, mature love, and liberation. David’s humanity and capacity to love are here part of the project of blackness.

Whiteness and all it represents (intensified by a Cold War “Us/Them” mentality) is the novel’s villain. The specter of blackness that haunts the book’s pages signifies, in its blank outlines, the way white Americans create and maintain the binary of white/black, throwing all kinds of other alterity on top of blackness (including queerness), such that the room for individual personhood shrinks and finally disappears. Paris is neither represented as the utopia for black and gay Americans that many of Baldwin’s contemporaries regarded it to be, nor is expatriation sufficient to cure him of the disease of normativity reinforced by family and country. His character is weak and cruel, but Baldwin evinces empathy for him, drawing a parallel between a white man’s experience of being queer and a black man’s experience of being American. The white man must occupy an impossible space—rational, asexual, strong, masculine, superior—and he needs blackness as a point of contrast; but at the same time he must continuously annihilate the blackness within as a dangerous contaminant. We get the sense, reading Giovanni’s Room, that black men like Baldwin, who have no possibility of achieving American normativity due to a physically obvious marker of alterity, are both free of the crushing pressure to conform and also menaced by that same conformity, as impoverished, foreign-born Giovanni is. Giovanni’s Room is a black book. A book without black characters can still instruct white readers about the experiences of their Others: David, in brief, “dark” moments, learns what blackness feels like—and what it could feel like—if he (if we) could only mature into it.

Works Cited

Abur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. “‘Simply a Menaced Boy’: Analogizing Color, Undoing Dominance in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.” African American Review, Vol. 41, No. 3, Fall 2007, pp. 477-86.

Amideo, Emilio. “The Sub(merged) Text in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.” Queer Tidalectics, Northwestern U. P. 2021.

Armengal, Josep M. “In the Dark Room: Homosexuality and/as Blackness in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.” Signs, Vol. 37, No. 3 Spring 2012, pp. 671-93.

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. First Vintage International, 2013.

——————. Giovanni’s Room. First Vintage International, 2013.

——————. “Go the Way Your Heart Beats.” Interview by Richard Goldstein, in James Baldwin: The Legacy, Simon & Schuster, 1989, pp. 173-85.

Bercuci, Loredana. “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a Transgressive White-Life Novel.” Philologia, Vol. 66, No. 1, 2021, pp. 191-204.

Henderson, Mae G. “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: Expatriation, ‘Racial Drag,’ and Homosexual Panic.” Black Queer Studies, Duke U.P., 2005, pp. 298-322.

Hughes, Langston. “Theme for English B.” Poetry Foundation, Accessed May 14 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47880/theme-for-english-b.

King James Bible. “1 Samuel.” University of Michigan Online, Accessed 16 May 2022.

——————. “1 Corinthians.” University of Michigan Online, Accessed 16 May 2022.

Said, Edward. “Introduction.” Orientalism, Pantheon, 1978, pp. 1-28.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 2008.

Circles of Sorrow

Considering Claude Pruitt’s “Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Sula”

Claude Pruitt’s “Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Sula” argues that the author organizes her novel as a concentric series of physical, temporal, and narrative circles, which radiate out from the book’s emotional core like the ripples that float out from Chicken Little’s disappeared body. These circles mirror (or are palimpsests that contain traces of) first a psychoanalytic concept advanced by Jacque Lacan in which he envisions the unconscious as three interlocking circles comprised of the “symbolic,” the “imaginary,” and the “real;’” next, the philosophical essay “Circles” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which imagines time as rippling circles representing a universe in flux, with individuals buffeted at their center; and finally, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, which engages directly with Emerson’s “Circles,” thrusting his narrator into the downward spiral of the midcentury black American experience. Sula is intertextual with these, but in placing black American women at the novel’s heart, she repositions the focus to a group that has been routinely scrubbed from both linear accounts of history and from earlier African American literature that, while likewise circular, have been written primarily by and about men.

The friendship between Nel and Sula is the beating heart of the novel, spatially, temporally, and conceptually. But the account of their friendship is embedded within and inextricable from other narrative circles. Physically, the story takes place in the “Bottom,” a high ground that surrounds the fecund farmland below (at least until white people covet the Bottom’s views). The friendship takes place in the central 100 pages of the book, “1922” through “1940,” and it occurs within the circular narratives of the town’s other inhabitants (Pruitt 117). Shadrack circumnavigates the text, the town, and the seasons as a kind of modern-day prophet or shaman, a symbol of both chaos and order, as exemplified by his disorganized mind and hyper-organized home. The men in town are trapped within the circles of their despair, all “grotesque embodiments of masculinity… distracted by the only group for whom they are not completely emasculated… the women of the Bottom” (Pruitt 118). The center of the girls’ story is their sexual awakening while digging and filling holes by the river, followed immediately by what becomes an unspeakable secret: Their complicity in the death of Chicken Little. The awakening and the death, tangled together, cause a rift in narrative and psyche, seeming to split the girls’ souls. Nel’s adult identity is characterized by lack: She affects a “motherly martyrdom,” and her misery is “righteous but empty” (Pruitt 115-6). Sula, meanwhile, creates a life of sensual overabundance, and she is described on more than one occasion alongside an attendant image of “overripe green things” (Morrison 108, 174). The final image of the book—Nel finally mourning Sula—reinforces the theme of circularity: Her cry “had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow” (Morrison 174). To Pruitt, this ending is the beginning of Nel’s self-actualization, suggesting that she is ready to face her own unspeakable center, to heal her split soul (121).

Pruitt contends that the circles surrounding an “unspeakable center” in the novel are explorations of Lacan’s tripartite unconscious. He explains Lacan’s “theory of mind,” where

the symbolic is the area in which language functions, the imaginary is the realm of images, and the real is that which cannot be symbolized or imagined at a particular time, the impossible or unspeakable… Healing can occur when trauma is spoken about, even indirectly: Trauma is made more clearly “symbol” and less “real” as its symptoms are explored in language (120).

The memory of Chicken Little’s death, then, is the novel’s “real,” the unutterable trauma that unites them. Nel’s healing begins only when she can acknowledge it, albeit obliquely. Part of the tragedy is that Sula tries to discuss it on her deathbed, but Nel forestalls the catharsis until many years after Nel’s death. Before their acknowledgement of the “real,” the secret takes the form, in Lacan’s words, of symptom, “for Sula as promiscuity, for Nel as first subservient wifehood and then repressed sexuality” (Pruitt 120-1). In keeping with the novel’s other circles, the end of the book is the beginning of Nel’s life.

Concentric to this Lacanian referent are the multiple evocations of Emerson’s “Circles” and Ellison’s grappling with and dramatization of Emersonian philosophy. Ellison places his unnamed narrator into the path of the “boomerang of history,” each interaction with which “moves him lower in his descent (‘and under every deep, another deep opens,’ Emerson writes in ‘Circles.’)” (Pruitt 125). Both men, however, write a world without women, and especially black women, who are already omitted from so much history and literature. Ellison is reconciled to Emerson, Pruitt contends,

through a dialectical engagement that begins with displacement, leads to confinement in a womb of historical significance for black men, minimizes the role and historical importance of black women, and replaces their generative function with a faith in modernity and technology” (125).

Emerson urges us to abandon the past for progress: “History,” he says, “the past from which we as individuals and cultures move, [are] worthless… rags and relics” (qt. in Pruitt 126) and Pruitt remarks that Emerson “takes as axiomatic the idea of self-determination” (Pruitt 126). Morrison gives Emerson and Ellison respect through references and symbols but pushes back against progress and individualism. The “joke” of the Bottom—a white man’s joke about it being the “bottom of heaven”—evokes the grandfather’s joke in Ellison; her “plague of robins” is a reference to Ellison’s folk tune, “O well they picked poor Robin clean” (qt. in Pruitt 124); her “circles and circles of sorrow” evoke Emerson’s insistence that “under every deep, another deep opens.” But her entire endeavor highlights women, community, and the unearthing of the past’s “rags and relics,” not the burying of them. Morrison wants to resurrect and mourn a vanished community. After all, “In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood” (3). The land itself is a palimpsest of untold stories: She wants to speak the unutterable.

I appreciate Pruitt’s read of Morrison’s warm, difficult, perplexing novel. If I find his views difficult to summarize, it is because he structures his essay in a circular mimesis of Morrison’s project, which reads like an act of grace and admiration. While I value his read of Sula, he did skip over an alternative read that I wish he had synthesized within his own frame instead. He mentions and then discards the argument of Vashti Crutcher Lewis, who sees trickster characters from African mythology in Sula and Shadrack. In this folkloric interpretation, Sula is a water spirit, and Nel’s eventual acceptance of their bond is a reconnection with the gods of her ancestors. Pruitt dismisses Lewis because Morrison is embedded “firmly in the European psychoanalytic tradition” (119), but is there a reason it cannot be both? Most of Pruitt’s observations see the text, like the former neighborhood, as a palimpsest, and he credits Morrison for layering semiotic systems so that they resonate together. Along with folklore, it might be beneficial to note that a circular narrative can be considered counter-hegemonic: It offers an alternative to the linear structures preferred by the West.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Sula. Vintage International, 2004.

Pruitt, Claude. “Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Sula.” African American Review. Vol. 44, No. ½, Spring/Summer 2011, pp. 115-129.

A Literary Conflagration

Inquisition as Critique in Don Quixote 

Chapter VI of Don Quixote involves a priest and a barber in the protagonist’s library, assessing his collection of books, and deciding which must be burned for the hero’s health. Miguel de Cervantes could have summarized the chapter thus: “The two men burned the books according to those they thought had infected the hero with delusions of chivalry,” but instead it goes on for five pages of careful critical assessment of several volumes. What might we make of this prolix chapter? The two ersatz literary critics, Dr. Pero Perez, a priest, and the local barber, Master Nicholas, spend the chapter delightedly condemning and pardoning various books from the collection. The chapter dramatizes the novel's relationship with both texts themselves and with the mania for chivalry that is nearly universal in its world. Chivalric romance is a genre at once lionized and reviled in the text, often at the same time. This profound ambivalence threads through the story, popping up now and again when Don Quixote’s fantasies clash too forcefully with “reality” (whatever that is). But since what befalls Don Quixote is alternately humorous, violent, and transcendent, ambivalence about the effects of literature itself forms a sort of gordian knot at the novel’s center. Far from condemning chivalric fantasy as heretical, like the priest and barber try (and perhaps fail) to do, Cervantes renders the real world as absurd and unstable—the ideal, the realist, and the “real” compete for viability in Don Quixote.

The book trial is an early example of this struggle for viability. It is staged as an inquisitional hearing, wherein the books are potential heretics, with Don Quixote’s housekeeper and niece the loudest voices for the prosecution, preferring to burn all the books as equal offenders. The niece, in fact, brings holy water and hyssop—a plant used in cleansing rituals in the Old Testament—to defang the books before destroying them, but the priest and barber insist on going through the motions of trial. Over the course of the chapter it becomes clear that their judgements are less religious than literary—for it turns out that they are as vulnerable to the lure of chivalric romance as the other characters. When the priest wants to burn the Four Books of Amadìs for being the original chivalric romance in Spanish, the barber protests that “‘it is the best of all the books of this kind ever written, and as a unique example of the art, it should be pardoned’” (Cervantes 46). Books of lesser fame and quality are criminalized. The priest sentences Felixmarte of Hyrcania to the fire not for its heretical qualities but because of “‘the harshness and dryness of his style,’” and later remarks that The Knight of the Cross should be condemned: “‘Because of the holy name this book bears,” says the priest, “one might pardon its stupidity, but as the saying goes, “The devil can hide behind the cross.” Into the fire’” (Cervantes 47). The final book saved by the priest is one whose author “had great success translating some fables by Ovid” (Cervantes 52). Far from presiding over a Christian inquisition, this priest saves and condemns books on their literary merits alone. These texts are real texts, not literary inventions. Readers are invited to laugh as Cervantes, through these men, engages in a droll send-up of others in his literary milieu, since many of these authors were contemporary to his time.  In “Don Quixote and the Neuroscience of Metafiction,” Norman Holland defines metatextuality as when “the physical medium of the story becomes part of the story” (73). Metafiction lulls us into passive reading only to jolt us aware by slipping from the hypothetical to the real. In this scene we are trapped (pleasantly, I would argue) between text and metatext—just as the novel’s characters are trapped between romance and reality.

Toward the end, Cervantes intrudes indisputably into the scene, destabilizing our suspended disbelief: One of the books they hesitantly save (though they banish it, pending further assessment) is La Galatea, Cervantes’ first work, a pastoral romance. Moreover, Cervantes is apparently friends with Dr. Pero Perez. The priest thinks little of his writing but argues for quarantine rather than immolation because its author has suffered, and “‘is better versed in misfortune than verses’” (51). The layers of artifice keep building and stripping away, leaving us, the readers (bastions of the final “real”) on unstable ground. The book’s “reality” (which is really just literary realism) competes with the chivalric fantasy that infects all the characters to a greater or lesser degree. But flourishes like Cervantes being both author and a character in the book forces artistic realism to compete with our reality. Readers are caught in the cross-fire of these competing sign systems. Book-lust infects everyone in the equation: Goatherds, innkeepers, prostitutes, the priest, Cervantes, we the readers, all are presumably enchanted by the tropes of romance, and many seem to be heroes in their own chivalric tales, especially when in proximity to Don Quixote, who lends gravitas to their fancies. When he isn’t being beaten for his mania, he becomes a kind of spiritual mediator for the force of romantic idealism. The collective fantasy (on our part as well as the characters’), is a source of both tension and humor. As Steven Jaeger notes in “Book Burning at Don Quixote’s,” a narrative trick of the book’s many layers of art, idealism, realism, and the real comprise “a consistent narrative dynamic in which the highest flights of fantasy are answered by the most humiliating and physically damaging of events, not because the latter are real, but because they thwart the ideal to comic effect” (Jaeger 213). The text is often hilarious, it’s true. But humor is far from its end goal.

Holland calls Don Quixote “perhaps the greatest of metafictions, because it not only uses, but ultimately transcends, the very brain mechanisms of metafiction” (86). Don Quixote does not just create a magical sphere around himself with the power to transform innkeepers into kings, prostitutes into chaste ladies, and windmills into giants—through metafiction, he rewires the very neural networks in his readers’ brains. Jaeger notes that though Don Quixote “is not really a chivalric knight, he is the epitome of the enchanted reader, transformed by the higher world of fiction and able in particular cases to transmit its force to the world of experience” (215). Don Quixote’s magic ushers us courteously into his world; at the same time he crosses the boundary, provisionally, into ours.

His enchantment is contagious.

Works Cited

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated by Edith Grossman, Ecco Harper Collins, 2003.

Holland, Norman. “Don Quixote and the Neuroscience of Metafiction.” Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions, U. of Texas P., 2012, pp. 73-88.

Jaeger, C. Stephen. “Book Burning at Don Quixote’s.” Enchantment, U. of Pennsylvania P., 2012, pp. 204–24, https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812206524.204.

Memento Mori

In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, It Tolls for Thee 

If a muse were invoked to call Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure into being, the muse might look a little like the gargoyle on the side of a gothic church: Ugly, ignoble, goofy, bespoke, something that mirrors the grim, grinning irony that runs through the text like a vein of ore in ordinary rock. The variegated novel, like a Medieval church’s grotesquerie, is a mashup of unlike genres, forms, allusions, and styles, and it perversely harnesses the devilish to celebrate the sacred—or perhaps reminds us, in a forbidding memento mori, that these are one and the same. Neither Jude’s noble characteristics nor his coarse ones—neither the world’s abundant beauty nor its innate cruelty—fully steer the ship of the novel or really even warrant our evaluation. They just are. They are natural phenomena as inexorable as a sunset or a famine (or an act of compassion; or a child’s murder-suicide), and critics who drove Hardy from novel-writing after its publication with their cry of Smut! (I’m looking at you, Ms. Oliphant) miss the novel’s nuanced read of a life’s meaning and consequence. But this is unsurprising, given the way the novel’s syntax is ever at odds with its semantics. Hardy uses sleight of hand to pull the rug out from beneath unsuspecting readers, and the book will alienate those who are affronted by such manipulation. Masks slip across the novel’s face, revealing new layers: Is it modernist realism? Classical melodrama? Bildungsroman? Religious allegory? Medieval morality theater? Biting satire? The answer is “yes/and”: Jude the Obscure fuses genres to speak not to its characters but directly to its readers, generating a sort of connective tissue between past and future, in the manner of Gothic cathedrals—structures that took hundreds of years and generations of artisans to build.

Jude changes nothing. His every ambition is thwarted. He is not a holy man or a political martyr or a leader of men. He is hardly even a husband or father. Like the narrative itself, Hardy’s characters have trouble deciding what they are. Jude works with his hands but longs to work with his mind—by the time of his death the books in his collection are as pieces of masonry, “roughened with stone dust where he had been in the habit of catching them up for a few minutes between his labours” (Hardy 332); his love interest, Sue Bridehead, vacillates between dynamic individuality and staid cultural normativity, perversely refusing to marry the man she loves but marrying a man whom she finds physically repellant not once but twice; and looking down on this pair from an ironical position is the diminutive but grotesquely powerful figure of Jude-the-Younger, aptly nicknamed “Little Father Time” (a bit on the nose, that), a child who is not really a child but a changeling that rips their lives asunder with an act so senselessly violent—to characters and readers alike—that, after the lavish set-piece of its enactment, it causes the entire novel to veer off the tracks of realism into the more ambiguous realm of fairy tale, allegory, or psychomachic morality play, so that the characters begin to feel more like symbols (or perhaps hieroglyphs) festooning a building’s edifice than human beings. The entire structure of the story begins to feel… architectural.

The conflict of the genres, I argue, is undertaken with intent. Hardy’s methodology is prescient, anticipating high modernity and linking ancient modes to modern ones. Like Medieval theater, modernism turns its focus on the flawed, overlooked, “obscure” Everyman. Jude the Obscure crafts a deliberate through-line between distant past and literary future, building them into a kind of Gothic cathedral of language. Hardy does not seem to see the past as a unilinear bridge between then and now, orchestrated by “Great Men” toward some idea of progress, but as an aggregate of individuals, all of them lost to obscurity, who built that past stone by stone, themselves only present now in the crumbling material vestiges of their labor. In Jude and Sue, he builds a kind of temple to the Everyman, giving life, longing, frustration, and dimension to those whom history obscures, bypassing the acts and philosophies of Great Men. More blasphemous still, the dogma that undergirds Hardy’s rhetoric is larger, wilder, more emergent, more nihilistic than religion or liberal nationalism (both of which are blasphemously dry and petty in the story—causes of sorrow and social ostracism but devoid of wisdom or even coherence). God and country are the purview of Great Men, and here they are rendered hollow and ridiculous. No wonder the Victorians took issue with the novel. But Jude’s small and insignificant life is memorialized as synecdoche for all the forgotten men who, the novel argues, are history’s true architects. The story seems to look beyond its characters to wink at future readers, the Everymen of our time and beyond.

A Cathedral of Words: Generic Semantics and Syntax

In “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism,” Frederic Jameson proposes two approaches to genre: a “semantic” read of genre concerns the essence, or core, of that genre, which proposes to reconstruct an “imaginary entity—the ‘spirit’ of comedy or tragedy, the melodramatic epic or ‘worldview,’ the pastoral ‘sensibility’ or the satiric ‘vision’—which is something like the generalized existential experience behind the individual texts” (Jameson 168). A novel, in this schema, is identifiable as tragic because it feels tragic. Alternatively, a “syntactic” read of genre concerns the surface trappings, the bells and whistles that signal to readers what kind of orientation we should have to the story we are reading, conventions to which we are highly, if unconsciously, attuned. Syntactic genre asks us to “analyze the mechanisms and structure of a genre… and to determine its laws and limits” (169). A novel is tragic because it’s hero dies. Hardy’s prose creates confusion between the text’s semantics and its syntax. His prose is sometimes funny and bijou; sometimes philosophically speculative; sometimes realist almost to the point of Marxist; sometimes deeply, heartrendingly tragic; and yet other times melodramatic to the point of maudlin. To examine the continuum of tone in the novel, we might contrast the humor in the moment Arabella seduces Jude by throwing “the characteristic part of a barrow-pig” (its penis) at him with the moment Jude finds the dead bodies of his infant children at the hands of Little Father Time, along with a note that reads, in a fierce critique of Malthusian rhetoric, “Done because we are too menny” (Hardy 34, 272). They hardly seem to belong to the same story. The reader experiences a true shock at the turn of the book’s core philosophy, a shock that these wildly different syntactic tones exist in the same text—or the same universe.

But a precedent might be found in earlier generic forms, which correspond to Hardy’s interest in Gothic architecture. In “Theory and Genres of Medieval Literature,” an exploration of Medieval generic tropes—many of which feel foreign and inscrutable today—Hans Robert Jauss notes that genre blending and genre slippage occur throughout the centuries of Medieval texts. We might also note a parallel with the public reaction to Hardy’s text and a corresponding Medieval anxiety that with each instance of slippage, profane writing would borrow and semantically pervert the syntax of sacred writing. Jauss contends that when a work is “ripped out of the context of the given literary system and transposed into another one [it] receives another coloring, clothes itself with other characteristics, enters into another genre, loses its genre; in other words, its function is shifted,” and the shift in function was often met with public alarm (Jauss 141). Moreover, when we examine Medieval work we begin to see the seismic shifts that occur as the cultural role of literature evolves. Hardy was writing at a time of paradigm shift in literature that accompanied paradigm shifts in science and technology. At key inflection points in Jude, Hardy’s text flees the scientific/technological, borrowing Medieval syntax. By the end of the book, it feels semantically Medieval as well, albeit retroactively. It is easy to imagine Little Father Time as a kind of memento mori in the corner of a medieval woodcut, a grinning skeleton holding the hourglass—just like his sobriquet. In the same woodcut, we could imagine Jude, fossilized on his deathbed (while, if you’ll indulge the visual fancy, in another room Sue gazes at a mirror, enthralled by her fatal indecision). At the moment of Jude’s death, Hardy renders the scene like a work of visual art or a theatrical tableau or masque; Jude’s body and books, in their respective death and obsolescence, have become stone:

there seemed to be a smile of some sort upon the marble features of Jude; while the old, superseded, Delphin editions of Virgil and Horace, and the dog-eared Greek Testament on the neigbouring shelf, and the few other volumes of the sort that he had not parted with, roughened with stone-dust… seemed to pale to a sickly cast… The bells struck out joyously; and their reverberations travelled around the bedroom (Hardy 331-2).

In this passage, the “joyous” auditory intrudes upon the grisly visual in a way that is disconcerting—full of a noisy energy that is downright menacing. We really feel those bells careening around Jude’s beatific body. We feel, in this final moment, that they ring for us. Jude, after all, cannot hear them, being dead. Beyond that, even, there is something metatextual in those intruding bells that exposes the story’s artificiality, rendering Jude a character, a creation. The sound is paradiegetic: It intrudes upon the scene from the outside, making us uncomfortably aware of our status as voyeurs. The reader (this reader anyway) feels suddenly that she is looking into the little tableau inside a snow globe: An arrangement of material objects that is significant enough to warrant a concluding mise-en-scène. In “The Idea of a Person in Medieval Morality Plays,” Natalie Crohn Schmitt comments on the tropes of morality plays: “the events which occur in the course of a morality play,” she says, are “not mimetic representations of life, but analogical demonstrations of what life is about” (24). Because we cannot see what life is about, she goes on to say, we must rely on artistic analogy to make “manifest the otherwise invisible and only reality of God” (Schmitt 24). Jude, in our final moments with his smiling corpse, feels like an analogy of this sort, but Hardy’s “invisible reality” is entirely decoupled from God’s mysterious logic. The sacred geometry of this story is the cold, indifferent, inscrutable pattern of Darwinian/Malthusian nature. The irony is so thick it tips toward funny.

In similar ways, Medieval conceptions of life and death bound the macabre, the ironic, and the playful together in the same sackcloth. The focus of Medieval morality plays was the Everyman, like Jude, who lives out his days in the glare of an anonymous death that could strike at any moment from any direction. But the dead were chatty in Medieval literature and art, and not without a certain severe humor, evidenced by the common grave-carving reminding passers-by that “ego quondam fui quod es, eris quod sum” (“what I am, so will you be; what you are, so I once was”), or the delighted/horrified reel of the Rota Fortunae, elevating men or casting them low on the wheel of the capricious (pagan) goddess Fortuna according to her unseen logic. Medieval genres, according to Jauss, lay bare the “elementary structure in which the socially formative and communicative power of literature has manifested itself”; and this power is evident in the building blocks of current forms (144). In Jude, Hardy exposes the inner scaffold that buttresses his literary edifice, revealing them as part of a literary (and architectural) continuum. His text urges us to search among the ruins… not for life but for what life is about. Originally an architect by trade, he advocated as well for the preservation—not the mechanical restoration—of Gothic buildings, according to Benjamin Cannon’s “The True Meaning of the Word Restoration,” which remarks that the books surroundings Jude’s body at the novel’s closing scene

materially embody the central irony of Jude’s life, being both the objects of his desire and the means of his infinitely deferred escape from work in stone. Yet here they are… finally reduced to material objects that can be marked by this same labor, their covers ‘roughened with stone dust’ (220).

Thus Hardy shores up his prose with the symbolic masonry of the previous genres in a process that preserves, not restores. To restore a building—one of Jude’s jobs in the book and a subject about which Hardy wrote extensively—is to mechanically systematize a process that, in its original construction, was collaborative, haphazard, and emergent. Over the course of sometimes three centuries, anonymous artisans added their unique flavor to the stones they hand-carved and set. Buildings restored using machine-tooling might look the same, but they do not mean the same. To preserve a building is to repair its original stonework, letting it age out of respect for the past—honoring the nameless artisans who built it. Similarly, Cannon argues, Hardy does with words what he argues we should do with buildings: In the final scene, he “inverts [the] rhetoric” of the printing press (another mechanically systematized process), “imagining printed text as a surface whose real significance lies not in the letterpress but on and around it, in the marks of stone dust and lard that damage and dirty the material text” (221). Ultimately his project suggests Jude’s books—and by extension, Jude the Obscure itself—are “material objects to which Hardy accords a status preservationist theory reserves for historical buildings” (221). Engaging varied genres to build this word-cathedral serves as a template for his preservationist philosophy. Hardy invokes the ancient as a kind of fortification against a dehumanizing future that, in his time, was already underway. He does what his modernist descendant, T. S. Eliot, explicitly says in “The Waste Land”: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

New Wine in Old Bottles: A Text Both Dated and Premature

Peggy Blin-Cordon attributes Hardy’s genre-hopping to his preoccupation with the social space he occupied: In “Hardy and Generic Liminality,” she notes that he was ever “wavering between two worlds, between the would-be image of the respectable author and the oft-categorized regionalist” and that “during most of his career as a novelist his way of exploring the centre was to remain the master, first of all, of its periphery” (44). He is definitely preoccupied with the periphery of culture, with characters who must curtail their expansive ambitions and dynamic minds to fit the demands of their social and material realities. Early in the novel, Jude expresses a sentiment similar to the one Blin-Cordon attributes to his creator:

As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it. If he would only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man (Hardy 17).

The boy is out of step with his context, and therein lies his sorrow. He is born into the wrong family, circumstances, time, and vocation. He is a sensitive soul in a boorish world—literally boorish, given what wooing gesture will be hurled at him a few pages later—as evidenced from the beginning of the narrative, when he refuses to step on earthworms, and feeds the crows he is paid to chase away from a field. Like the novel, and maybe Hardy himself, Jude is an anachronism. Sue is likewise preoccupied with the tension between her soul’s yearning and her circumstances. In a telling metaphor, she refers to the intellectual life at Christminster, the Medieval university town in Hardy’s Wessex (modelled, of course, on Oxford), as “new wine in old bottles,” later commenting that the “new wine” at Christminster “is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other” (124-5). We never know if she is correct in her assessment of Christminster, but she would certainly be correct if she were describing herself, for Sue cannot make up her mind, and in her muddled character, the reader is never sure which is new, which old—the vessel or the essence.

Sue’s intellect pushes her toward her own passions—one of which is fulfillment with Jude and the family they’ve made—while her impulse to conformity pushes her in the opposite direction. After her children die, she foregoes happiness entirely and re-marries her first husband in a kind of mortification of the flesh, a “re-enactment by the ghosts of their former selves of the similar scene which had taken place… years before” (Hardy 300). By this time all the characters are ghosts, circling the drain of their own obsolescence, waiting to shuffle off the mortal coil. Sue began the novel as a wild and spirited pagan, but, In Cannon’s words, her “religious conversion after the death of her children transforms her from a rebellious freethinker to an orthodox High Church Anglican” (213). Hardy does not, by any means, intend Sue’s religious conversion to signal her spiritual growth or for us to detect in it a moral to the story. While we might recognize the syntax of the religious bildungsroman in her final flight to the Church, we see the irony with which this generic nod is infused. Jude, too, evokes the genre in his scholarly ambitions and autodidactic impulses, which ultimately come to nothing. Frank R. Giordano Jr., in “Jude the Obscure and the Bildungsroman,” observes that these characters are archetypes of Victorian unrest for whom the Church offers few insights and the meagerest solace, victims “unable to find comfort and support in the medieval Church and equally powerless to discover outside [themselves] or create a personal, existential authority for [their] moral being” (585). In Jude, religion is not the opportunity for personal growth and fulfillment it might once have been for the population of England. If we expand “religion” to encompass all the stifling pressures of Victorian mores—their mechanizing, dehumanizing processes and compulsions—the same could be said of the novel in toto: Its harsh geometry is as a ram butting against the organic shapes of the characters in beautiful, heartbreaking cacophony—and nothing fits together neatly or even fully legibly.

The novel itself is a kind of new wine in old bottles. Blin-Cordon notes that the narrative displays “an original generic pattern, essentially based on the cohabitation of tragedy and the Sensation Novel” but also on “the unusual association of the Gothic with the realist genre” (45). Thus Jude is a kind of palimpsest, though the pits and grooves beneath the surface of the text are deliberate: We are meant to read different messages, forms, purposes, and takeaways from the faint traces of what came before. Cannon puts it best when he observes that “Instead of restoration, Jude may be understood as being guided by an aesthetic of preservation that approaches both history and story as material processes, the significance of which lies in their essential unrepeatability” (Cannon 203). The Medieval morality play was often performed, gratis, on the steps of cathedrals, to an assemblage of locals. They provided templates for life that spoke directly to citizens that were common, unknown, yet still a crucial part of God’s design. By bestowing the honor of heroism on Jude and Sue, Hardy plucks the Everyman from this earlier form and gives him pride of place within our shared literary patrimony. While in many ways the novel resembles a bildungsroman, the text doesn’t quite reveal the shape that salvation takes after the death of God. Science and technology are no substitute. Though a revelation feels close at hand at the novel’s denouement, its outlines remain half-hidden. It is a tesseract, an object with dimension that the culture does not yet have the ability to see. I submit that Jude’s spiritual brethren—those that will come after him in the procession of modernist antiheroes—may aid in the archeology (perhaps Prufrock will measure out the insights with coffee spoons). I suspect, too, that Jude has more interred revelations for future generations to exhume.

It Tolls for Thee: Little Father Time and the Beauty in Ugliness

The most brutal scene in the book is also the most ravishing. Circumstances are dire for Jude and Sue. The scandal of their unmarried status means Jude cannot find work. Sue cannot find lodging for the same reason. They have three children. They are brought low by their choices. In the tiny rooming house that they will be forced to vacate in the morning, Jude stands cooking until “a shriek from Sue suddenly caused him to start round.” He pushes into the room to find a scene of senseless death, precipitated by a misunderstanding on the part of Little Father Time. Sue has collapsed. He does not see his children:

He looked in bewilderment around the room. At the back of the door were two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the forms of the two youngest children were suspended, by a piece of box-cord round each of their necks, while from a nail a few yards off the body of little Jude was hanging in a similar manner. An overturned chair was near the elder boy, and his glazed eyes were slanted into the room; but those of the girl and the baby boy were closed (Hardy 272).

Like the tableau of Jude in stony death the novel has in store, this “triplet of little corpses” as they are called, is rendered artistically, like a woodcut or a still-life. Their bodies have become forms. But Little Father Time’s note left at the scene, “Done because we are too menny,” contrasts syntactically with the artful array of aesthetic elements. His reasoning is not pretty: Religion no longer celebrates the value of “the meek” based on their proximity to God’s love. Little Father Time echoes the newer religion of the sciences, in this case Thomas Robert Malthus’ hypothesis of overpopulation. In An Essay on the Theory of Population, Malthus argues that charity to the poor will “diminish both the power and the will to save among the common people, and thus to weaken one of the strongest incentives to sobriety and industry…” He goes even further, framing altruism as a waste of resources “that would otherwise belong to more industrious and more wealthy members” (Malthus). His argument had been taken up in Hardy’s day by social Darwinists who argued, like Malthus, that charity worsens social problems once population exceeds food supply. Hardy seems to be making a point about the replacement of religion with this kind of science: Religion might traumatize a child, sure, but no one will ever convince a child that “evolution loves you.” There is no succor in such theories. In “Hardy’s Unnecessary Lives: The Novel as Surplus,” Emily Steinlight speaks to the barbarity that his note reveals about the context in which these characters suffer: In Little Father Time’s note, she sees a “subjectless passive construction (‘done because’)” which “offers a chillingly dull syntax of a logical predicate of cause and effect: The risk of population exceeding its means of subsistence and the sacrifice of life to check this threat of scarcity” (Steinlight 224). The act is barbarous, but, within Malthusian logic, it is a selfless act of sacrifice. The irony of this—the way it is both a horrific crime and an act of generosity, depending on the vantage—dramatizes the novel’s various “butting” philosophies (the mechanical against the organic, for instance), exposing the rhetoric of the machine as incompatible with the lived experience of human beings.

Suzanne Edwards meditates on the murderous son in “A Shadow from the Past: Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure,” casting him as a symbol, a corporeal manifestation of Jude’s mistakes. She notes that the similarities between father and son are “physical, situational, and psychological,” remarking that “In his essential loneliness and isolation, his hyper-sensitivity, his pessimistic outlook, and his suicidal bent, Father Time is clearly Jude Fawley’s child” (Edwards 32). The “glaring, garish, rattling” noises from Jude’s childhood that “hit upon the little cell called… life” cause in his son even greater chaos. Little Father Time is the apotheosis of Jude’s ironic habit of making decisions that will make him miserable because he doesn’t want others to suffer (not even earthworms or pigs he must slaughter). “Little Father Time sacrifices himself and his siblings,” says Steinlight, “thinking he can thereby alleviate the sufferings of his parents” (36). His gesture is like the other occurrences of sacrifice, self-denial, and adherence to social mores that make things worse over the course of the narrative. Like the others, Father Time’s  attempt to alleviate suffering ensures that the suffering will never end. But this brutal death and Hardy’s skeptical stance on the Church doesn’t mean he sees nothing of value in seeking wisdom from ancient religious art forms. Little Father Time reads like a psychomachic character from a morality play, a little imp that represents an aspect of human experience, reminding the Everyman that death comes for us all. The death of the children is shocking—and, especially shocking, is the very real Malthusian pretext the boy gives for his actions. But mercifully, after the deaths, the novel begins to read more like allegory than realism. Schmitt discusses the didactic function of morality plays, the way they suggest that the purpose of life is to search for paradise, but, if we do not look for paradise within ourselves, we will not find it (31). She notes that a spiritual paradise is “every place where the soul is in a state of well-being or grace,” the capacity for which exists in all people of all epochs. In Everyman, for instance, the titular character, on his deathbed, undergoes “progressive abandonment by money, friend, and kinsmen—and then by beauty, strength, discretion, and five wits.” This, she says, “is a natural progression inward…” for “change can be not only developmental but transformational” (Schmitt 31). If we see the events of the novel in this light, then the smile on Jude’s face might take on a different hue. Hardy has created for us a different kind of bildungsroman. As the bells toll joyously through his room there is the merest hint, in that smile, that he might have followed the internal spiral toward salvation, finding, in the winnowing down, a small fragment of “well-being or grace.”

Of course in this grace there is also a tinge of the melodramatic. Richard Nemesvari discusses the way Hardy weaponizes genres, both the serious and the amusing, by fusing them. He is especially attuned to the weaponization of melodrama for rhetorical effect rather than sensationalism in Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode. He notes that Jude’s is a narrative that includes all the hallmarks of melodrama, “fornication, adultery, bigamy, divorce, child abandonment, two murders, two divorces, religious hysteria, and masochistic sexual self-immolation… [events that] might be expected to produce strong reactions” (Nemesvari 180). To him, the murder-suicide is “the culmination of a pattern crucial to Hardy’s rhetorical purpose, and not an incongruity,” one that speaks directly to the reader and is designed to produce an actionable response in her (Nemesvari 181). It needs must serve “as a searing commentary on the failed ethics of the Victorian world that surrounds [Jude]” (Nemesvari 207). The novel thus serves as a potent critique of Victorian social ills, and a call to action to change them. Nemesvari contends that in the murder-suicide, Hardy engages in a “relentless assault on the reader’s affective responses,” using the contrast between it and the rest of the novel to prompt readers to compassion and social reform. “The goal,” he says,

is not an abstract catharsis, but rather a very specific pity and fear laced with anger and a sense of waste, producing a desire to change the materialist structures that the novel presents as destructively oppressive, [for Little Father Time’s] act of horrific annihilation [is] an excessive response to a system in which, as the novel’s epigraph declares, “The letter killeth” (182).

Overall, I argue that the set piece of the murder-suicide forces the novel in a new direction, as the rest of its generic restlessness does. The novel’s ending, moreover, speaks directly to the reader, likening the reader to Jude and serving as a kind of memento mori that speaks both of our collective responsibility for the suffering of others and need to look for salvation not in our institutions but inside ourselves and the ones we love. Hardy does not tell us how to perform this “looking,” but he invites us to consider a new mode of seeing.

An Obscure Object; an Object of Obscurity

In one sense it is no wonder that readers were offended by Jude. The skeletal hand that, like Fortuna, metes out a random, indifferent kind of cosmic retribution for invisible or nonexistent crimes points its bony finger, ultimately, at us. It is difficult to be in the hot seat. The novel denies us the meaning for which we often go to literature, the neat and tidy wrap-up that suspends the characters forever in their denouement, and in so doing suggests the possibility of a kind of immortality. The skull and empty eye sockets that grin and gape at Jude’s obscurity, Sue’s paralysis, are manifest in our own lives. Had Jude and Sue been born into the sorrow of modernism a few decades later, rather than the sorrow of Victorianism’s last gasp, the 20th century might have invited him in to rest his weary bones next to his spiritual brethren, all the defeated Everymen of our century’s literary antiheroes. Now we feel that, in Beckett’s words, “We give birth astride the grave”; and there is no sweet hereafter in a universe of staggering size and emptiness, within which we are mere floating specks. But Hardy’s novel can also be seen as strangely uplifting: By showing us his hand—combining multiple literary modes, built in the way Gothic cathedrals were once built—he lets us see our small lives as part of a sublime patchwork whose meaning none of us will ever know. He connects us to a past that is over but not gone, and a future which is certain, but obscured.

Works Cited

Blin-Cordon, Peggy. “Hardy and Generic Liminality: The Case of The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure.” The Hardy Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 44-52.

Cannon, Benjamin. “The True Meaning of the Word Restoration.” Victorian Studies, Vol.56, No. 2, Winter 2014, pp. 201-24.

Edwards, Suzanne. “A Shadow from the Past: Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure.” Colby Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1, Mar 1987, pp. 23-38.

Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” Poetry Foundation, Accessed May 20 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure, Third Norton Critical Edition. W. W. Norton Company, 2016.

Jameson, Frederick. “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism.” Modern Genre Theory, Pearson Education Limited, 2000, pp. 167-93.

Jauss, Hans Robert. “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature.” Modern Genre Theory, Pearson Education Limited, 2000, pp. 127-66.

Malthus, Thomas Robert, 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population, Vol. 1. 6th Edition, John Murray, 1826, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4239/4239-h/4239-h.htm.

Nemesvari, Richard. Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode. Palgrave MacMillan, 2011, pp. 179-211.

Schmitt, Natalie Crohn. “The Idea of a Person in Medieval Morality Plays.” Comparative Drama, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring 1978, pp. 23-34.

Steinlight, Emily. “Hardy’s Unnecessary Lives: The Novel as Surplus.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 47, No. 2, Summer 2014, pp. 224-41.

The Transitive Property

Women’s Spaces, Lateral Violence, and Zero-Sum Approaches to Privilege

I met J— in a focus group. My community college had secured a grant to hire students to identify equity gaps in its operations and facilities and ideate solutions. The focus group participants were culled deliberately from the school’s most marginalized populations: Undocumented students, homeless students, students in the foster care system, DSPS students, and the like. J— had shoulder-length hair and dark skin with cool olive undertones; she had an attractively crooked smile and her winning sense of humor made her popular among her cohort. She was a good decade older than the rest of the recruits, in the early childhood development program with a plan to advocate for the rights of transgender children. Though she was not exactly passing as a woman, she nevertheless exuded an inborn sense of herself that brooked no argument; she seemed at ease in her skin and her identity. Which made the shock I experienced on the second week, when we made formal introductions, the more acute: When asked why she was in school, as all of the students were asked, she responded, without a hint of bitterness, “I don’t like school. But for people like me, it’s either school or prostitution.”

People like me. Her words, I admit, shook me. It’s not as though I’d considered our lived experiences to be the same. But the gulf between them was much wider than I’d considered. I became aware of an internal reorientation to privilege and alterity. My instincts and moral compass tend to nudge me toward radical acceptance of those who suffer marginalization, but I am as guilty as anyone of failing to register marginality when it is right in front of me (part of the tacit training of being white and middle class in America is learning to unsee the injustice on which privilege is built). I have, on occasion, had to fight the urge to defend the territory carved out for women: Space to breathe, free from the male voices that threaten or drown us out in public spaces. I recall an argument in the Women’s Studies Department at my school (now renamed, I am happy to say, “Women’s and Gender Studies”): In a meeting, two older feminists complained that transgender women assume male privilege in women’s spaces without realizing it, and that being with them was essentially being with men. At the time I remained agnostic, launching a lukewarm defense of trans rights without fully committing to—or even understanding—the tenets of trans discourse. J— crystalized the issue for me, indicating that I need to keep learning to see. Women (white women) have societal value, even if we don’t control the terms of our valuation: We are in every sense a protected class. Transgender folks enjoy no such protections: They are the semantic “Others” that, through contrast, define the norm. To say nothing of the intersection of trans identity and other factors like race, class, ablism. When white women like me cling to our privilege at the expense of those with less cultural capital, we replicate the systems that trap us, committing a form of lateral violence: We must seek to elevate and understand, not silence and erase, the voices and experiences of the most vulnerable in the system, else we cling to the letter of feminism at the expense of its spirit.

Setting aside the question of feminism’s spirit, can we even define the letter? No one seems to have landed on a satisfactorily static denotation for gender. In “The Ontological Woman: A History of Deauthentication, Dehumanization, and Violence,” trans-activist Cristan Williams outlines the problem of lateral violence toward trans women perpetrated by feminists, noting that “the move to root feminism in an inherent biological, psychological, or reified ontology was to endorse the very essentialism upon which patriarchy was built” (Williams 719). She observes that trans-exclusive feminists replicate patriarchal structures when they see privilege as a limited, zero-sum resource that must be horded, describing such behavior as an “enfeebled attempt to grasp at empowerment through… an animus directed against one’s peers rather than one’s oppressors” (Williams 720). What makes lateral violence so tempting is its effortlessness: It is easy to project our legitimate grievances onto those weaker than us instead of uniting all marginalized groups against the powerful—an enterprise that involves effort, risk, and the potential loss of privileges we currently enjoy. Trans-exclusive feminists squabble over taxonomy, endeavoring to delimit what constitutes “woman” to some innate biological or psychological feature. But we need only look at the circus of Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown’s recent confirmation hearing of to see the toxic, patriarchal provenance of the delimiting effort. We witnessed a room of white republican men, daring a black woman to define “woman,” and then being unable to satisfactorily do so themselves without lame recourse to wombs, vaginas, births, and chromosomes, none of which are fixed or absolute (what of women with hysterectomies; fertility problems; anatomical injury or malformation; intersex traits?). We want our categories to have clear delineations, but variation and uncertainty creep back in our despite: All definitions are semi-permeable. Besides, almost none of us are perfect specimens of femininity or masculinity to begin with, at least not in our resting state. Most of us change our bodies, behaviors, and dress, in order to construct the gender with which we identify, a fact not lost on Williams, who observes:

Most cisgender people… undertake body modifications to better embody their sexed persona and emulate what is, we are told, a natural sexed body binary. Billions are spent each year on hair care, removal, and maintenance; cosmetic surgeries; workouts; exogenous chemicals; and ‘health’ and ‘lifestyle’ products… trans feminists are… questioning systems predicated upon discrete, natural, and unconstructed body binaries. Such ontological questions threaten the moral landscape that sex essentialists depend on (720).

I might also ask just which benefits “sex essentialists” gain from denying “broken” or “unnatural” women access to women’s spaces—let alone to women’s rights and protections? J— will never need to, say, change her tampon in a women’s bathroom, it’s true. But in a few years, nor will I—menopause is on my horizon. Do I, at that point, cease to be a woman? According to the GOP senators at Justice Brown’s hearing, perhaps I do. When I reach menopause, maybe J— and I can have our own bathroom, and we can prevent menstruating women from using it—a directive as arbitrary as preventing trans women from using bathrooms now. What truly threatens the senators—what they are responding to when they ask a black woman to define “woman” on the national stage—is a profound cultural watershed occurring as I write this in regard to gender formation and trans visibility. The currents beneath the surface of American discourse are changing direction whether we like it or not.

The watershed of the current moment should not, however, obscure a 20th century full of transgender experimentation, on children no less, as Jules Gill-Peterson discusses in Histories of the Transgender Child. She acknowledges that the “seismic shift” in our contemporary understanding of trans experiences is real but cautions us not to think of trans children as a recent phenomenon. Rather, she traces the long, complex history of transgender children in the United States and the way their experiences have shaped our medical understanding of gender. She describes the book’s project as rewriting “the historical and political basis for the supposed newness of today’s generation of trans kids by uncovering more than a century of what came before” (Gill-Peterson 3). Indeed, Gill-Peterson documents decades of medical procedures on children with “ambiguous” sex organs who were “medicalized and experimented upon by doctors who sought in their unfinished, developing bodies a material foothold for altering and, eventually, changing human sex as it grew” (3). The gendering decisions were undertaken by doctors, often before the children were old enough to speak let alone give consent and were predicated on the “plasticity” of gender in early human life. But this plasticity, Gill-Peterson argues, far from being “a progressive vector of malleability or change” that allowed individual agency in asserting, defining, and living self-knowledge, instead grew into one offshoot of the “modernizing violence of medicine,” often dismissing black and trans of color as “not plastic enough for the category of transsexuality” (4). Trans of color were men and women whose self-knowledge was written off as “delusional or homosexuality” (Gill-Peterson 4). Indeed, the 20th century exemplars of trans identity are overwhelmingly white. Gill-Peterson notes that compared to white patients “Black trans and trans of color patients were much rarer because they were by design not welcome within that discourse” (27). Especially vulnerable to erasure, she argues, are transgender children of color, who have existed all through the 20th century but who are sidelined by the historical record. White transness, while often pathologized, is nevertheless visible, indicative of the body’s plasticity—its potential for metamorphosis and evolution. Black trans and trans of color, on the other hand, were perceived as degenerate, the body devolving into something less human. The plastic body, the basis on which transgender identity is medically understood, was “abstractedly racialized by medical science as a synonym for whiteness” (Gill-Peterson 27). So J—’s trans identity is not the only component of her being that winnows her future down to the stark choice of school or sex work: Her blackness has a nonlinear impact on her transness (or vice versa), and her trans identity is thus framed by the medical community in what Gill-Peterson refers to as “atavistic” terms (27).

“The Mothers of Gynecology” Monument by Michelle Browder, Mongomery, Alabama

If white transness is visible because it proves the “plasticity” of white bodies, black bodies are characterized by their “fungibility,” as C. Riley Snorton proposes in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. He traces the medical profession’s reliance on black chattel—a replaceable, mutually interchangeable resource—in the 19th and 20th century development of medical technologies and methodologies. Early gynecologists “borrowed” sick and injured slaves from their masters in order to investigate various maladies, and the conclusions they drew about black bodies were used to either explain or contrast with white ones (Snorton 18). Their bodies could be used for the development and practice of medical procedures that could then be safely performed upon “important” (white) bodies; or they could be used as evidence of white superiority. Or both. According to Snorton, the pelvis was “a critical site for producing racial hierarchies among nineteenth century anatomists and sexologists intent on finding bodily ‘proof’ of black inferiority” (19). Snorton proposes that black fungibility functions as part of “a rubric that situates blackness and transness within the order of things that produce and maintain an androcentric European ethnoclass of Man as the pinnacle of being” (6). While plasticity signifies choice and individuality, fungibility signals the foreclosure of individuality. Further complicating black physical fungibility are instances in which black slaves cross-dressed and/or pretended to be white in their attempted escapes from slavery. These gender and race deceptions speak to slaves’ status as fungible goods whose identities mattered little to and were strategically unseen by their oppressors. Slaves found they could exploit such studied unseeing on the part of white masters (Snorton 79). Black people, at times, managed to survive abuse by playing a kind of musical chairs with their own racial and gender identities, using their own erasure as human beings to fool their oppressors.

J— exists at the nexus of the historical phenomena I incompletely chronicle above, and many more besides that I don’t yet perceive. It is no wonder her future feels narrow, precarious, circumscribed by white, heteronormative, cisgender hegemony. J— is a reminder, to this feminist at least, that having some small sense what systemic alterity feels like compels us to see when we push others to the outside. Given the systematic erasure, abuse, and degradation of fungible black bodies at the hands of white authorities (including the medical establishment), there is no excuse for feminists to pile on more of the same. We claim to care about marginality but we give the marginalized very little space to maneuver. As crusaders for equal rights—feminism’s arguable charter, its “spirit” if you will—it is paramount that we fight trans-exclusion in feminist discourse. “As with any identarian movement based upon rooting out impurity of form,” Williams cautions, “instead of interrogating their ideology, they attack that which questions it” (720). Exclusionary logic always feels like watching a kind of fable play out: A disenfranchised group organizes, acquires power, and then begins to attack “impurity of form” as represented by a weaker group in a pantomime of the systems that oppressed them. It is almost as though we care more about preventing others from acquiring our privilege than expanding and universalizing access to privilege—our putative goal. There should be a transitive property to privilege: If the strong enjoy a right, it should transfer automatically to those less strong within the same system. We are not betraying feminism by welcoming trans folks into our ranks. But we are betraying our most fundamental ethos if we continue to exclude them.

Works Cited

Gill-Peterson, Julian. Histories of the Transgender Child. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, University of Minnesota Press., 2017, pp. 17-53.

Williams, Cristan. “The Ontological Woman: A History of Deauthentication, Dehumanization, and Violence.” The Sociological Review Monographs, Vol. 26, No. 4, 2020, pp. 718-34.