Zona: (a discussion of) a book about a film about a journey to a room

The great irony of Geoff Dyer's Zona--purportedly a book-length discussion of Tarkovsky’s Stalker--is that it is almost never interesting when focusing on the subject at hand. The bulk of the book reads like an exhaustive plot synopsis written by an overeager fan on Wikipedia, or a sophomoric book report that keeps drifting away from its topic to discuss the author’s great desire to have back a knapsack he once lost, or behave differently the next time the possibility of a threesome presents itself to him. Those are both actual examples of the sorts of things Dyer digresses into, by the way, but it’s in some of the digressions that the book’s pleasures are to be found.

The book is organized such that the footnotes running beneath almost every page--and sometimes taking over whole pages in a row--are of the same size and font as the main text, reinforcing the idea that one is not more important than the other. Which parts get relegated to the footnotes, which put in parentheses, and which left in the body of the text, however, can seem entirely random. For the most part the main body is given over to the interminable, shot-by-shot recitation of the film’s plot, but then we get pointless bits like “For a long time I thought that American men always slept in their underwear.” (11) Typically, discussions of other films or novels will go into the footnotes, unless we’re suddenly treated to, in parentheses, a tidbit like this one: “For Strike, a character in Richard Price’s novel Clockers, a movie, any movie, is just ‘ninety minutes of sitting there’...” (15)

Often the book seems to be about Dyer’s struggles with writing the book (“I had intended breaking this little book into 142 sections… corresponding to the 142 shots of the film. …[but] I kept losing track of where one shot ended and another began.”) or with which book to write (“...in a sense this book is a catalogue or compendium of proposals for potentially interesting studies…”). (31, 49) This wouldn’t be a problem--I myself am not allergic to postmodernism--if Dyer didn’t tell us, in that same passage on pg. 49, that a study of quotation within film “wouldn’t be that interesting after all [because] one wouldn’t get that far without the word meta cropping up and turning everything to dust.” This seems an odd attitude to take considering the form of the book itself, and at one point he seems to equate self-reflexivity with poor quality when writing off another of Tarkovsky’s films, calling Nostalghia “so bad--so far up itself…” (146)

At other times, he seems to reverse himself and offer something like a half-hearted apology for just such a formal approach: “It’s the one part of the film that seems to lack conviction and momentum, as if Tarkovsky is trying to make up his mind what to do and where to go next. This is not necessarily a bad thing, strengthening the impression that film is in some way about itself, a reflection of the journey it describes.” (123) But why would it be a good thing for the film (or the book) to be about itself? And how would it be possible for a work of art to be a “reflection” of its own subject--wouldn’t that actually make it the opposite of itself? It wouldn’t matter so much that these types of ideas are introduced without being thought through and worked out if this weren’t a text strewn with references to Merleau-Ponty, William James, Slavoj Zizek, Milan Kundera, et al. Just as the flippant tone and references to threesomes wouldn’t be so striking if the subject of the book weren’t such a serious, reverent work of art--one that the author claims to have for many years seen only in visits to a theater, like “a cinematic pilgrimage.” (143) Could you imagine making a pilgrimage to a work of art you revere, only to stand before it grousing about how you hate the smell of burnt matches and can’t see someone drink a beer in a movie without wanting a beer yourself?

More insulting than the strangely offhand tone chosen to discuss such a self-serious work (that the author himself ostensibly takes very seriously) is the occasional revelation of a willful ignorance on Dyer’s part. After briefly discussing how his subject is an art film version of The Wizard of Oz, he abandons this fruitful comparison, writing, “I’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz, not even as a kid, and obviously have no intention on making good that lack now.” (57) How is that obvious? If I were undertaking a book-length discussion of a film I’d probably get around to watching one of it’s “much-discussed” forerunners. Just as I would also take the two or three minutes required to Google something I had brought up, e.g.: “Przewalski’s horse (whatever that is).” (77)

Maybe it’s simply that Stalker’s charms are ineffable--so much of what we find beautiful is--but Dyer doesn’t seem to know what it is about the film that has kept him thinking about it for thirty years. He constantly makes hyperbolic assertions on its behalf and then makes no attempt to justify them at all. As if it were enough to simply say, “There follows one of the great sequences in the history of cinema” (44) and then move on from an uninflected description of the shots without telling us what exactly it is about the sequence that would make it particularly interesting to us--or even to him--let alone great. That Dyer seems to understand he’s failing doesn’t make it any easier for us to watch him doing so. He writes, “So what kind of writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?” (149) But there is no vindication in this, we don’t cheer at his admission. We merely nod our heads sadly in recognition that much of what has gone before has been little more than summary, synopsis.

And yet… as to the matter of those constant digressions. They can be fascinating, whether the topic is a personal one--like the discussion, beginning on pg. 35, of Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris that digs into the book’s essential themes of how a work of art changes for a viewer over time, or can have odd, extratextual personal resonance--or a critical one, like the discussion of boredom on pgs. 20 and 21. Dyer writes:

“...one wonder[s] how quickly a film can become boring. Which film holds the record in that particular regard? And wouldn’t that film automatically qualify as exciting and fast-moving if it had been able to enfold the viewer so rapidly in the itchy blanket of tedium? (Or perhaps one of the novelties of our era is the possibility of instant boredom… as opposed to a feeling that has to unfold gradually, suffocatingly, over time.)”

Passages like these prove Dyer’s reputation as an interesting thinker, a writer whom you would happily follow down the rabbit-hole. So provocative are these ideas on boredom, tossed off one after the other, that I’m tempted to abandon this review of Zona and begin to engage with them on their own terms, digressing off onto a whole new topic. And this is the real worth of the book. If a great piece of criticism is one that makes you want to immediately return to the work under discussion, then this one is an utter failure. I have no desire to see Stalker again in light of what Dyer has written. If, however, a great piece of criticism is one that makes you want to get into an argument--either for or against a particular assertion being made--then Zona is great many times over.

On that note, I’ll end with a long and strong assertion that I’ve been mulling over, and may just go and write a whole ‘nother piece in response to:

“I suspect it is rare for anyone to see their--what they consider to be the--greatest film after the age of thirty. After forty it is extremely unlikely. After fifty impossible. The films you see as a child and in your early teens… have such a special place in your affections that it’s all but impossible to consider them objectively… To try and disentangle their individual merits or shortcomings, to see them as a disinterested adult, is like trying to come to a definitive assessment of your own childhood: impossible because what you are contemplating and trying to gauge is a formative part of the person attempting the assessment.” (124-125)

All page references are to the first U.S. edition of Zona by Geoff Dyer, published by Pantheon Books, 2012.

Stalker (1979); dir. Andrei Tarkovsky; starring Alexander Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko, Alisa Freindlich

Interpreting Foucault's Author Function through "House of Leaves"

House of Leaves¹ is a novel that constantly reminds us it is being written, and, further, constantly reminding us of “who” is doing the writing. It presents a document called “The Navidson Record,” a critical commentary on a documentary film with the same title, which we are told was written by Zampanò. This Zampanò has died, and the manuscript was found by a fellow named Johnny Truant, who includes his own introduction and notes—which are mainly concerned with his inability to finish reading/stop being obsessed with the book. A final level of mediation is that of “the Editors,” who make occasional comments in a neutral tone. The limit point of the mediation—the essential story that we are being told—is that of the Navidson family, the characters in the “documentary” made by the family’s patriarch who move into a new house and find that it is infinitely larger inside than outside. But there are three authorial mediators between that story and us. 

Foucault begins and ends his discussion of the author function, “What is an Author?,” by quoting Beckett: “What does it matter who is speaking?” (Foucault 101) Considering the proliferation of names authorizing portions of the text in House of Leaves, we are evidently meant to consider this question in relation to it. The title page is traditionally where one would go to find author information. The one in this book is spread across two pages, pgs. ii-iii. Pg. ii has the words “Mark Z. Danielewski’s” and nothing else. The following page features the information “House of Leaves by Zampanò with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant.” (Danielewski, iii) The author’s identity has become multiple before we’ve even entered the book. This multiplicity of voices serves to constantly make us consider “who is speaking” as we’re reading. 

House of Leaves differs from a conventional novel with multiple first-person narrators in the way it attempts to have its fictions intrude on “our reality.” As I Lay Dying, for instance, is credited to William Faulkner; its title page doesn’t read “by Darl, with additional material by Dewey Dell, Vardaman, et al.” Additionally, the various styles in House of Leaves aren’t meant to replicate voices but texts; but this differs still from a classic epistolary novel. In, say, Dracula, the collection of letters, journal entries, and newspaper clippings are all presented on the same level of fictional discourse. But the texts in House of Leaves are layered in a chain of associations, each referring back to another.

We know which “author” is responsible for which text simply from the look of the words, before we’ve even parsed them for content, because each is presented in its own font, making explicit and literal Foucault’s observation that “the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text…” (Foucault 107) The text insists, visually and otherwise, that we constantly consider which of the fictional authors’ discourses we’re currently experiencing. “Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality.” (Foucault 102) The author puts on mask after mask. This book is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, but is by one of its fictional characters (Zampanò), with remarks by another (Johnny Truant). It is precisely not Danielewski’s

identity that undersigns each constituent part of the text. 

However, turning from the title page to the copyright info on the following one,² we see that Mark Z. Danielewski holds the copyright to this novel. This proper name/historical personage, then, is performing the first of the “characteristic traits of the author function” pointed out by Foucault: “the author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses.” (Foucault 113) Danielewski is legally responsible for the text, he owns the intellectual rights to it, and it is he who will take the

 blame for its transgressions. In a process that “one might call penal appropriation,” Foucault writes, texts “really began to have authors… to the extent that authors became subject to punishment.” (Foucault 108) But this cuts two ways: the author both “owns” and can be “blamed” for the text. Foucault argues that, in rejection of “a system of ownership for texts”—and the rights and privileges being an “author” afford—transgression became “an imperative peculiar to literature. It as if the author… compensated for the status that he thus acquired by systematically… practicing transgression and thereby restoring danger to a writing which was now guaranteed the benefits of ownership.” (Foucault 108-109) 

One of the transgressions Danielewski attempts to enact is the dissolving of his identity behind a multiplicity of fictional mediators. Foucault writes that “today’s writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression… it is a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.”  (Foucault 102) Danielewski’s book is made up of parodies of other types of discourses, each performing different characteristics of the author function at different times, and the relationship between them serving to illuminate that “in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly either to the writer or to the moment in which he writes, but rather to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work.” (Foucault 112) Zampanò’s voice is a parody of critical discourse, and we can see him acting on Navidson, the protagonist/maker of “The Navidson Record,” in the role of critic described by Foucault: “try[ing] to give this intelligible being a realistic status…a ‘deep’ motive, a ‘creative’ power…” (Foucault 110) That we see this role performed is important, as it highlights the normally obscured fact that “these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection… of the operations that we force texts to undergo.” (Foucault 110) Johnny Truant, as well as narrating his own story in a freewheeling grammar-challenged parody of first-person narrative, also performs a readership of Zampanò’s text, and in this he is closer to the example Foucault gives of “the self that speaks in the preface to a treatise on mathematics… one that speaks to tell the work’s meaning, the obstacles encountered, and the remaining problems.” (Foucault 112) 

The final level of mediation, “the Editors,” enacts an even deeper form of connection to critical discourse than Zampanò does—to criticism as an institution. Foucault discusses “the four modalities according to which modern criticism brings the author function into play,” defining the author as, variously, “a constant level of value,” “conceptual or theoretical coherence,” “stylistic unity,” and “a historical figure.” (Foucault 111) By organizing the text, marking out different portions of it to be authorized by different voices, even stamping the voices visually, the Editors are performing as modern criticism, fixing the author in place. That they ultimately fail to unify the texts they present, to “neutralize thecontradictions,” demonstrates Foucault’s point that modern criticism needs to move beyond “Saint Jerome’s four criteria of authenticity.” (Foucault 111)

The Editors fail because the contradictions built into “The Navidson Record” are impossible to rectify. They’re more like paradoxes—trying to make sense of them would make you crazy. Johnny Truant is put in this position as he tries to read it, just as the main character in it, Navidson himself, is driven crazy trying to make sense of the spatial anomaly in his house. As readers we wallow in the interpretation of the text. Truant points out that Zampanò has the position of the anomalous hallway in the Navidson house changing: “Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe there’s some underlying logic to the shift. Fuck if I know. Your guess is as good as mine.” (Danielewski 57) This lackadaisical approach to the material seems to be endorsed by Zampanò as a defense against the obsessive need to reconcile paradox. He offers the Navidson children’s response to the anomalous hallway haunting their parents as a positive example: “The children, however, just accepted it. They raced through the closet. They played in it. They inhabited it. They denied the paradox by swallowing it whole. …children do not know the laws of the world well enough yet to fear the ramifications of the irreconcilable. There are certainly no primal associations with spatial anomalies.” (Danielewski 39) This fear is new. It’s a product of the desire to unify everything, a product of rational thought. Paradox disappears if we “swallow it whole”; attempting to take it apart and reconcile the parts with each other is how to let the text devour you. Each of the “four modalities by which modern criticism brings the author function into play” is concerned with wholeness: it conceives of the author as a totality that “serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge…” (Foucault 111) I believe that Foucault is arguing that because criticism is still based on these criteria, the same old questions will continue to proliferate: “Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?” (Foucault 119) Danielewski’s multi-layered text serves to illustrate assorted characteristics of the author function, his consistent attempt to disappear into his text perhaps helping to point the way towards Foucault’s “form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author.” (Foucault 119) 

Foucault writes that “manifested in the effacement of the writing subject’s individual characteristics” is a “relationship between writing and death…” (Foucault 102) Even the fictional creators within the world of House of Leaves are put into the position described by Foucault: “reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.” (Foucault 102-103) Both versions of “The Navidson Record”—Zampanò’s book and Navidson’s film—are left behind by dead men, but they are not

 representative of the “old tradition exemplified by the Greek epic, which was intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero.” (Foucault 102) These records do not make their creators immortal. Navidson dies shooting his film, and it is one of the central paradoxes of the text that there is no way for the tapes to have been edited by him or indeed recovered at all; Zampanò includes a note to possible publishers of his work implying that only if readers “dismiss this enterprise out of hand” will you “know… you truly are prosperous” (Danielewski xix); an unattributed note rendered in Truant’s font which is placed between the foreword and introduction reads “This is not for you,” on an otherwise blank page. (Danielewski ix) On every level we are told to turn away from the text; part of the game is daring you not to play it. 

“Writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its own limits.” (Foucault 102) House of Leaves’ multiple texts are layered: each author is also a reader of a prior version of the text and thus performs a readership by presenting and commenting on that prior text. The Editors are telling us not to trust Truant: “we have never actually met Mr. Truant…” (Danielewski 4). Truant is constantly telling us that Zampanò is making all this up—after all, how could a blind man write so descriptively about a film?; Zampanò is merely describing a supposedly documentary film he says might be “a hoax of exceptional quality.” (Danielewski 3) Each narrator in turn is pointing to another more primary text.³ This hallway being endless, though, the chain eventually stretches all the way back around: Navidson, who we have understood as the fictional limit point at the end of the chain, is revealed to be in possession of a book called House of Leaves. (Danielewski 465) He burns it, first for reading light, then just for light. Navidson’s burning of the book—which is both the book we’re reading and a book-within-a-film-within-the-text that makes up that book—represents the final transgression of Danielewski’s game. He attempts to burn the text itself, to negate it, make it disappear. Navidson says, “I have nothing left… I’m no longer sitting on anything… whatever it was is gone. I’m floating or falling or I don’t know what.” (Danielewski 468) This text is printed upside down. All foundations have been removed. All limits transgressed. Navidson soon dies, making the recovery of his tapes, and thus the existence of our text, impossible. 

The major irony in using House of Leaves to illustrate the ideas in “What is an Author?” is that I’ve had to construct the authors of those texts in order to discuss them. I have frequently used the name “Foucault” to represent the concepts discussed in “What is an Author?” and have painstakingly unified the multiplicity of texts in House of Leaves under the sign “Danielewski.” I have seemingly done just what Foucault accuses modern criticism of doing, falling back on the fact that “the author provides the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions and diverse modifications…” (Foucault 111) I have used the name Foucault to represent “a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence” and the name Danielewski to “neutralize the contradictions that…emerge in a series of texts.” (Foucault 111) These names, though, are only representations of the texts, just as within House of Leaves Johnny Truant and Zampanò are only personas constructed to mobilize different forms of discourse. We must remember that: “It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance.” (Foucault 112) I would like to consider my inability to move outside the deployment of the author function not a failure, but only an illustration of how imperative the message in “What is an Author?” still is. We obviously still do not have a form of culture in which fiction is not limited by the figure of the author. 

¹ All references are to Random House’s ISBN 0-375-70376-4 (paperback) 2-Color edition of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Pantheon Books, New York: 2000. 

² The copyright page contains another example of the fictional world intruding into the real one. Just as the title page features the names of fictional characters, the standard warning about the fictional contents of the text is highly personalized and signed by “the Editors,” one of the fictional voices in the text.

³ In fact, this may be true of the book as a whole. The sales pitch on the inside front-cover flap begins: “Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the internet.”   

Acknowledgement to Laura Yim at SFSU, in whose Theory of Lit. course I was prompted to use a work of art to elucidate an aspect of critical theory. 

Please comment on the savage inaccuracy of my ideas, my overall lack of intellectual rigor, fundamental misunderstanding of Foucault's ideas, etc. 

Recuperating Frankenstein's Creature as a Drag Icon

(Note: This essay discusses the text of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus as it was revised by Mary Shelley in 1831 and published by Random House in 1993. It does not consider other versions of the story, filmed or otherwise.)

Immediately after the moment of his ‘birth,’ Frankenstein’s Creature is abandoned by his creator. The Creature wanders about, attempting to make his way in the world with no education or socialization save that which is stored in the recycled human tissue used to construct his body. He observes the daily activities of a family living at a cottage in the forest, but is able to make little sense of their comings and goings until he finds “on the ground a leathern portmanteau, containing… some books. …They consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter” (Shelley 167). From these few texts—and from his purely specular fascination with the cottagers—Frankenstein’s Creature culls his entire personality. In this way he is like the modern day drag queens that, in Juan A. Suárez’s words, “…acquire their identity through mimesis of pre-existent images and icons, emerging from the already-seen, the already-read, the already-done” (Suárez 192). (See footnote 1.)


Frankenstein made his creature out of disparate parts, and so it contains within its physique multiple identities. It was then assigned a gender, though it was provided no corresponding partner, no completion to the binary implied by the designation of Frankenstein’s Creature as a ‘he.’ Perhaps these attributes suggest a more appropriate comparison with transgender or transsexual individuals. I don’t reject the potency of this metaphor; however, it is the performativity of the Creature’s identity assumption that holds the greater interest for me, and leads me to situate him within the same cultural space as the drag queen.

The books Frankenstein’s Creature finds in the portmanteau (an interesting word choice in retrospect, now that the term has come to mean a fusing together of two words to create something new) teach him everything he comes to know of humanity’s vices, virtues, and laws, its passions, emotions, and customs. “I learned from Werter’s imaginations despondency and gloom: but Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections to admire and love the heroes of past ages” (Shelley 169). The Creature begins to conduct himself in what he imagines to be the manner of these “heroes of past ages” in order to become closer to humans because “I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read, and to whose conversation I was a listener” (Shelley 168). He characterizes himself as “miserable beyond all living things” (126) and learns from Paradise Lost that “I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence” (170). Finding himself to be in limbo—a border-crosser, between life and death, between identities— and thus an outcast of the first order, he begins to simulate humanity, finding a role and playing it.

Steven Shaviro calls the body “a flat surface of inscription and reflection, comprising all the image layers that are incised or overlaid upon it” (Shaviro 227). This is true of the body of Frankenstein’s Creature both metaphorically and, in the literal sense, it refers to Victor Frankenstein’s intentions at the act of creating this body. Victor says, “I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler organisation… I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make a being of gigantic stature” (Shelley 61). Victor seems to equate the complexity of the being’s physical organization with it’s greatness—the comparison hinging on the double meaning of the word ‘stature.’ He rejects the notion of making a being equal or lesser to himself, instead planning to make one greater. His creature’s body thus serves as Victor Frankenstein’s commentary on humanity, “a flat surface of inscription and reflection.” But it is the Creature himself who uses his identity to reflect—or attempt to mirror—humanity.


Severo Sarduy writes, “The transvestite does not imitate woman… [he] does not copy; he simulates, since there is no norm to invite and magnetize his transformation, to determine his metaphor; instead it is the non-existence of the worshipped being that constitutes… the support of his simulation…” (Sarduy 93). The relationship between the drag queen and womanhood is analogous to that of Frankenstein’s Creature and humanity. The personality he constructs for himself is derived from textual sources and distant observation. He seeks to assume the persona of the “heroes of past ages” just as the drag queen enacts a perpetual recycling of “quotes and images that most often emanate from the stock of Hollywood fantasies” (Suárez 192). Even the original source is a fantasy, a romanticization. Goethe’s (sort of) romance may be of different conception than classic Hollywood’s, but as utopian representatives of lost ideals, their effects are similar. (See note 2.) Meanwhile, Plutarch and Milton dramatize everything from the historical to the spiritual in terms of great battles.

Frankenstein’s Creature is himself somewhat aware of his position as an identity-under-construction. Like “drag queens [who] grasp the fictiveness of this ‘want to be’… [who] understand the constructivist nature of the body better than anybody else,” Frankenstein’s Creature is conscious of himself as a simulacrum (Shaviro 227). He knows that humans consider him other than themselves, so he investigates further into the meaning of humanity. He is deeply disillusioned when the actual actions of men don’t match up to his impressions of “peaceable lawgivers, [like] Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus” (Shelley 170). He mocks humanity, though he ultimately desires to participate in it: “You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!” (Shelley 129). It is not only his manner, and his words here, that mock humanity—it is the Creature’s mere existence.

Because he has ‘played God,’ and brought about something new and somehow unintended, even the Creature’s creator views him as somehow outside of nature, an abomination. When Victor Frankenstein contemplates the possibility of his creature’s ‘species’ populating the earth, he is repulsed and driven to violence. His response strikes me as similar to the conservative viewpoint of transsexual or transgender people, where one is paradoxically repelled by the ‘unnatural’ space occupied by a supposedly non-procreating human and terrified that they will somehow multiply and spread across the world. Drag queens, for all their presumption of femininity, leave out of their interpretation the intrinsic element of womanhood: the ability to bear a child. Thus, they mock child-bearers by their very existence, just as Frankenstein’s Creature mocks humanity.


Drag queens are all too aware that, as Judith Butler says, gender—and thus human—“reality is created through sustained social performances.” Butler has written that drag “imitate[s] the myth of originality itself” and “dramatize[s] the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established” (qtd. in Storey 125). The assumption of a ‘human’ identity by Frankenstein’s creature similarly dramatizes the way that “Personality… is a pure image, the most transitory and superficial layer of the body: it is something that needs to be put on each day, just like clothing and make-up” (Shaviro 226). Physically, the Creature is essentially an outsized, over-the-top human, and his assumption of a gentlemanly manner is equally grotesque. His response to the old blind cottager’s extension of simple hospitality is thus: “You raise me from the dust by this kindness; and I trust that, by your aid, I shall not be driven from the society and sympathy of your fellow-creatures” (Shelley 170). The drag queen affects the manner and being of a woman in the way Frankenstein’s Creature here acts the gentleman: too much, too big, too in-your-face, over-the-top. Perhaps his formality would have seemed less exaggerated in the era the novel was written, but there is something theatrical and unnatural in his performance of normality which is detected by both the blind cottager and the reader.

“Drag is so spectacular and so immediate that it cannot pretend to the authenticity of a ‘true’ representation: it ruins the very notion of representation” (Shaviro 226). A human confronted with the exaggerated display of supposed humanity enacted by Frankenstein’s Creature sees himself in a funhouse mirror. The only possible reactions are bemusement or horror. It is not his distance from us that so terrifies: it is his closeness. Besides the obviously larger amount of self-consciousness about his physical form, the only difference between Frankenstein’s Creature and most of us is that he is conscious of his performance. Of Judith Butler’s ideas, John Storey writes, “Gender performativity is not a voluntary practice, it is a continual process of almost disciplinary reiteration” (Storey 125). Both the drag queen and Frankenstein’s Creature are intensely aware of this “continual process,” but the former turns it into play and camp, while the latter is exhausted by it and comes to see it as futile.


Much like Frankenstein’s Creature, “drag queens… carry the logic of pure appearance, of self-hood as artifice…” (Shaviro 226). They ‘put on’ a persona, using the external elements interpolated into their images as icons of nostalgia and for their value as cultural referents. This act is conscious, apparent, and dramatic, and it disrupts “the very notion of representation.” Because of their seeming inability to play the roles assigned to them, or even to inconspicuously play the ones they have chosen for themselves, drag queens and other transgender or transsexual people are set apart from a society divided by a traditional binary gender code. The performative processes of identity (in general) and gender (in particular) made apparent by the textual and cultural recycling enacted by the drag queen are the same ones illuminated when humanity is confronted with the specter of Frankenstein’s Creature. The drag identity that Frankenstein’s Creature assumes is that of a human being. The conscious attempt on the part of the drag queen or the Creature to play these roles shows us what it might be like every day as we play them.


Notes

1 Credit must be given to Suárez, in whose Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars I initially found the juxtaposition of Frankenstein/drag queen: “…they are collages made up, like Frankenstein’s body, of pre-existing fragments…” (192)

2 Extratextual note on Goethe and Shelley: The Sorrows of Young Werther is presented as a collection of letters, similar to the construction of Frankenstein, so Shelley’s use of it in the novel is somewhat cheeky. Also, the use of Werther continues the chain of associations related to the fusing together of different parts to make a new whole. Werther contains Goethe’s translations of the “Ossian” poems contemporarily popularized by James Macpherson. It was soon revealed that Macpherson hadn’t discovered and translated an ancient text, as he had claimed—he had found fragments of an epic poem and adapted it into his own work.


Works Cited.

Sarduy, Severo. Written on a Body, Trans. Carol Meier. New York: Lumen, 1992.

Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. New York: Random House, 1993.

Storey, John. An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993.

Suárez, Juan A. Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture and Gay Identities in the 1960’s Underground Cinema. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996.


Special thanks to Dr. Ellen Peel, Ph.D., whose course at SFSU, "The Constructed Body," was the venue for the first draft of this paper and whose notes were invaluable.

All images by Nan Goldin.

Repetitionalism: a stylistic analysis of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”

One cannot discuss the style of a Raymond Carver story without confronting the issue of minimalism. Carver was a perhaps unwitting poster boy for the literary school when it was first hyped by editors and publishers in the late 70’s. In Marshall Gentry and William L. Stull’s Conversations with Raymond Carver, Carver credits his editor Gordon Lish with instilling in him “that if you could say it in five words instead of fifteen, use five words.” (183) “Cathedral,” as it is anthologized in the Norton Introduction to Literature, is certainly pared down in certain ways. It has been pruned of nearly any introspection, psychological motivation, or extraneous detail. But what remains doesn’t bear out the idea that Carver has chosen to say what he has to say in five rather than fifteen words. In fact, a good deal of repetition is taking place here.

Consider the following passage:

“She called him up one night from an Air Force base in Alabama. She wanted to talk. They talked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell him about her life. She did this. She sent the tape. On the tape, she told the blind man about her husband and about their life together in the military.” (21)

Carver repeats words such as “tape” throughout—it’s used five more times in this paragraph and at one point on the following page it appears no less than eleven times in one paragraph—and juxtaposes short sentences with recurring words: “She wanted to talk. They talked.” He also describes the same action in several ways: “She did this. She sent the tape.” In addition, the next three sentences all begin with the clause “she told the blind man,” a phrase already introduced in the preceding sentence. This is but one of many uses in the story of anaphora—a scheme based on repetition. Surely if Carver’s intent was “to say what I wanted to say… us[ing] the minimum number of words to do so” (32)—as he claims in the title essay of his book Fires—he would eschew this repetition and yoke some of his short sentences together with conjunctions. Using significantly less words, the last three sentences of the above quoted passage could be rendered as, “She did this, telling him about her husband and their life together in the military.”

I’m not trying to suggest that the tendency towards minimal representation of events isn’t present in the style Carver employs in “Cathedral.” For instance, other than the blind man, whose exotic quality elicits a bit of commentary, we’re never told what anything or anybody looks like. We know that there is a man, his wife, their house, and a television set. Even the slightest descriptive detail about the household—the fact that it’s a color T.V.—is revealed only in the dialogue, where it serves to strike a colorful, bizarre note: “‘This is a color TV,’ the blind man said. ‘Don’t ask me how. But I can tell.’” (25) Ellipsis is an oft-used tactic in service of brevity throughout “Cathedral.” And at other times the descriptive shortcutting is done in a totally blatant manner: twice on pg. 21 “etc.” is inserted in lieu of finishing a thought, once at the end of a sentence describing the clichéd beginnings of a love affair, and the other time here: “I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said goodbye to him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle.” Here the “etc.” is used, apparently, to replace but a single word—an example of Carver using a technique that appears to lean towards minimalism, but is actually stylistically idiosyncratic. The finely tuned narrative that Carver has trimmed all the fat from is overwhelmed by instances of repetition and it, not minimalism, seems to be the organizing principle at work here. Call it “repetitionalism.”



Repetition of a single word in successive sentences is taken to absurd heights on page 21, where the word “poem” appears in seven straight sentences. The repetition employed in the narration seeps into the story itself, as well. The character of the wife has the tic of habitually repeating herself, using mostly different words to express the same sentiment two or three times consecutively: “‘Same here,’ she said. ‘Ditto. Me too.’” (26) “Are you crazy? … Have you just flipped or something? … What’s wrong with you? … Are you drunk?” (22) Strangely, when his wife falls asleep, the narrator starts to exhibit the same speech pattern: “Are you tired? Do you want me to make up your bed? Are you ready to hit the hay?” (27) The repetition of bland, mundane sentiments serves to reinforce the banality of the domestic scene—but it also creates a rhythm, a rhythm that is nicely in sync with the attitude of our narrator and erstwhile protagonist.

Emphasizing and maintaining this rhythm in another way is the scheme of anaphora. In addition to the example of anaphora on pg. 21 previously alluded to, it appears in a pure form, with the phrase “A woman who…” repeated three times at the beginning of successive clauses, on pg. 23. Many other times throughout “Cathedral,” two successive sentences begin with the same phrase (some interesting ones: “Now and then,” pg. 27, “In those olden days,” pg. 29.) And even more frequently, groups of sentences will all begin with the same pronoun. Five sentences in a row on pg. 21 begin with “She,” four in a row on pg. 23 begin with “I,” eight in a row on pg. 25 begin with “We,” and so on.

Another scheme, frequently employed in the first half of the story, is parenthesis. It is most often used between two sets of dashes to slightly modify or throw a different angle on the main clause. Occasionally, though, it used for increased emphasis—and more repetition—as on pg. 25: “They talked of things that had happened to them—to them!—these past ten years.” Taking advantage of the opportunity to use extra punctuation is typical of the way parenthesis is used throughout “Cathedral,” as on pg. 22: “It was a little wedding—who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place?—just the two of them…” The same type of structure is used a page earlier in this wondrous sentence: “Her officer—why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?—came from somewhere, found her, and called the ambulance.” (21) Interestingly, the use of parenthesis is curtailed once the thrust of the story switches from backstory to exposition of action. This is, perhaps, indicative of a narrator’s tendency to double back and spiral into further explanation when trying to represent the intricacies of the past, while charging forward and giving mostly external, action-oriented details for the present.

The story is divided into two parts in another much more obvious way as well. At the bottom of the seventh of ten pages, the structure is interrupted by a section break. Carver wants us to know that what comes below that break is different than what comes above it, but he isn’t willing to sacrifice any of the rhythmic momentum he’s built up throughout the first section, so the actual narrative flow isn’t disturbed in the slightest. Although the first seven pages have been full of digressions into backstory and slight shifts in time and location, this new section begins on the same scene the other one ended on. The first two sentences after the break are both in service of continuity with the scene of the two men watching T.V. that has come directly before: “We didn’t say anything for a time. He was leaning forward with his head turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set.” (27) Because of this total continuity with what has immediately preceded it, and the extraordinary rhythmic movement of the writing, the break between the two sections is barely noticeable on first read. It isn’t until closer inspection that its obvious that Carver is signaling to us that there is to be a shift in the narrative. The stark banality of what has come before is going to give way to an epiphanic profundity at the conclusion.

One final reason for the repetition Carver insists on in “Cathedral” is the theme of learning that runs through it. Repetition is a fundamental tool used in teaching, and this fact sometimes comes into play in narratives—although these are most often aimed towards children (think Blue’s Clues or Dora the Explorer.) But “Cathedral” doesn’t aim to teach as these children’s entertainments do. It, instead, takes learning as a theme. The last few sentences before the section break introduce the idea, and the entirety of the second section is dependent on it. Here are those last few sentences:

"Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the TV… I turned to the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either… “Bub, it’s all right,” the blind man said. “It’s fine with me. Whatever you want to watch is okay. I’m always learning something. Learning
never ends. It won’t hurt me to learn something tonight.” … (27)

And this, of course, is what our narrator learns from the blind man in the end.




Works cited.

Carver, Raymond. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989.

Gentry, Marshall and William L. Stull. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990.

Norton Introduction to Literature, 9th edition, ed.’s: Allison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, Kelly J. Mays. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.

24 WORDS PER FILM (#25)

Choose your own adventure.

version A: Less than Zero grafts a moral onto the decidedly amoral source novel, throws in some great tunes and occasionally employs weirdly expressive visual sequences.

version B: In 1987, with this performance and The Pick-Up Artist, Robert Downey, Jr. laid the groundwork for the persona he has been mining ever since.

Postmodernism in Robert Kolker's "CINEMA OF LONELINESS" (3rd edition)

Robert Kolker’s A Cinema of Loneliness (3rd edition) is haunted by three things: Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, and the ghost of the postmodernist present. Much like the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, Kolker treats these concepts as three separate entities but really believes they are all manifestations of the same thing. In the introduction to the 3rd edition of his book, Kolker immediately distinguishes the modernist filmmakers he is discussing from the postmodern ones that sprang up in the dozen years between editions. Modernists (like Scorsese, Kubrick, Altman) “cared deeply about film: reacted, alluded, parodied, embraced, and learned from it. Film was a way of articulating the world and their responses to it…” whereas the postmodernist recent filmmakers display an “indiscriminate embrace of pop-cultural images” and “seem to have less a view of the world than simply a view of film” (xiii-xiv). This is, of course, a common complaint about Quentin Tarantino, whose Pulp Fiction is identified here as “the acme of postmodern nineties filmmaking” (249).

Here Kolker is trying to justify why Pulp Fiction was successful while other roughly contemporaneous attempts at bringing postmodern techniques to genre films were not:

“The postmodern insouciance, violence, homophobia, and racism of Pulp Fiction were perfectly acceptable because the film didn’t pretend seriousness and therefore didn’t mock it… But those films that simply mocked or suggested that they were smarter than the audience suffered a postmodern implosion. The audience maintained an independent subjectivity, refused to be shifted into an entirely sarcastic mode, and ignored the films” (281).

The films he cites, Hudson Hawk and Last Action Hero, just weren’t very good, and that is probably the real reason for their failure. However, his comparison of such films to Pulp Fiction reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of postmodernism. Hudson Hawk and Last Action Hero are both merely arch, ironic parodies of the action genre, produced for comedic intent. Pulp Fiction is attempting an altogether more complex proposition.

Pulp Fiction doesn’t ask you to keep your tongue firmly in cheek but rather to give yourself over to its passionate convulsions. As a viewer, we both know that we are in movieland—are able to joke about that fact and allude to the work’s place within film history—and find ourselves lost within the fictional world we are presented. We can know that Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace are recycled archetypes from film noir and yet still be charmed by their not-quite-romance, because it reminds us of ourselves, of situations we’ve been in. Contemporary theorist Steven Shaviro writes in Doom Patrols, “To a postmodern sensibility, there’s no contradiction between cool and hot, irony and passion, playfulness and commitment… or camp distancing and involvement to the point of delirious obsession.” It’s not that postmodernism has overthrown the sincerity of the modernist project for unserious play. The postmodern artist takes modernism at its word and continues the metatextual investigation into the nature of his/her medium, and how fictions interact with each other and the world. The fact that the form these investigations take often become unmoored from the possibility of such designations as ‘realistic’ or ‘believable’ can be scary and threatening to viewers (and critics) who are invested in “the thematics of modernism,” defined by Kolker as “the expression of lost order, a vision of a diminished human subjectivity and agency, a sense of history as loss and melancholia…” (17).

In that same first chapter of Doom Patrols, his “theoretical fiction” about postmodern culture, Shaviro writes, “Postmodernism is distinguished, then, not by any tendency to meditate on ruins and to allegorize its own disappointments; but by a propensity to invent new organs of perception and action.” When Tarantino—as a postmodernist—looks at the past, he doesn’t see a supposed utopia of canonical high art, he sees history for what it is: a series of ruins whose secondhand influence we are still feeling in the present. That’s the real reason why Kolker is so upset with Tarantino, why he continually brings him up in order to criticize him throughout his book. Kolker’s beloved modernists (the subjects of the book) are crying out in loss and trying to make the culture whole again through their films. Tarantino is grabbing things from everywhere and juxtaposing them to show how they are different, how culture is not singular but a multiplicity.

Kolker misinterprets other important elements of postmodern theory when he writes, “The popularity of Pulp Fiction was based on its simulacrum of novelty, and simulacrum, the imitation of something that never existed in the first place, is a beloved quality of the postmodern” (249). The concept of simulacra as it being used here was widely popularized by Jean Baudrillard in his Simulacra and Simulations. As anyone familiar with Baudrillard knows, his work is highly critical of the cultural movements referred to as postmodern, and a simulacrum—which he terms a copy of a copy which “bears no relation to reality whatsoever”—would hardly be “beloved” by him. Baudrillard is filled with the same sort of modernist paranoia that Kolker studies (and is afflicted by), so it’s strange that Kolker would use Baudrillard’s terminology while misinterpreting its intent. Even when he cites a theorist whose work he would do well to absorb, he misinterprets its meaning: he mentions Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers to support his slagging of Tarantino’s whole oeuvre wherein “Pastiche becomes a kind of poaching, and a poaching of surfaces at that” (249). Jenkins’ book is largely about fan fiction and its main thrust is how plagiarism can be an art form.

In the preceding paragraph, Kolker similarly uses the term “pastiche” to suggest that Tarantino is somewhere between unoriginal and plagiarist: “[In Pulp Fiction] The flourishes, the apparent witty banality of the dialogue, the goofy fracturing of temporality are a patina over a pastiche…essentially made of…Mean Streets and The Killing” (249). Strangely, this quote works beautifully as a critique of Tarantino’s earlier film Reservoir Dogs, which is too much a part of a particular genre (the heist film) to engage in the type of textual play Pulp Fiction does. The characters in Reservoir Dogs are all participating in the creation of a closed fictive world, whereas the ones in Pulp Fiction are drawn from a wide pool of genres. The boxing film, the blaxploitation film, the Vietnam veteran film, the hitman and gangster films—all of these are sources for the characters in Pulp Fiction, and the fun comes in watching them bounce off of each other. In setting archetypal characters from different genres off and against each other, the conventions of those genres are exploded. The characters, free from their usual formulas, are set adrift, and through this accumulation and piling-on of simulacra, begin to once again behave sort of like real people.


When Jules tells Vincent, “Let’s get into character”—ending their foot massage conversation so they can go work—he is acknowledging not only that they are hitmen in a movie and that they must now stop talking like Seinfeld characters and start talking like gangsters, but also going beyond metatextual play to make a point about life: most of us, everyday when we go to work, must play the role we are assigned. We aren’t really ourselves when we’re there, and when we walk into our place of work we must “get into character.” Which is why Kolker is wrong when he writes, “That’s why Pulp Fiction was so popular…because the narrative and spatial structure of the film never threatened to go beyond themselves into signification” (250). And he goes too far when he says that because Tarantino is essentially “doing” Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing throughout his first trilogy as a director, “we learn little about a Tarantino aesthetic…and don’t learn much about his three films” (249). Every frame of every Tarantino film is filtered through his aesthetic, that’s how you can tell he’s the one who made it. Kolker is complaining more about the fact that what is revealed about Tarantino by his films is a certain blankness of character—he is a cynical person with a dark sense of humor who experiences life mostly through films—than that nothing at all is revealed by them. Which brings us back to Kolker’s original complaint about postmodernists, that they “seem to have less a view of the world than simply a view of film.”

Throughout Cinema of Loneliness, Kolker has invoked Oliver Stone as a proper and good postmodernist alternative to Tarantino. I believe this assertion is incorrect. Stone is not “[Arthur] Penn’s postmodern double,” (63) which is essentially the premise of the first chapter. Stone is a modernist—he’s just younger than the other ones studied here. In his discussion of Stone’s film of Tarantino’s script Natural Born Killers, Kolker incorrectly credits Stone with “going in directions that leave his sources behind” (65) when he uses a pastiche of film stocks and employs a shot from the point-of-view of a bullet that is very cartoon-like. This is all in Tarantino’s script. The difference is that in his script it is only a celebration of different film stocks and of cartoony camera angles: a riff on form for its own sake, indulging in the propensity for “poaching of surfaces” bemoaned by Kolker. Stone, however, takes the technique back to its roots in modernism, “anchoring it to the body of cinema of which it is a part and by so doing foregrounding its existence as a film, an artifact with a history” (32).

The only other Stone film to consistently use pastiche as a visual technique is JFK, a film whose premise owes a massive debt to postmodern novelist extraordinaire Don Delillo’s Libra. In David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram,” he writes about a movement in postmodern fiction which “uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about ‘real,’ albeit pop-mediated, characters.” Wallace lists Libra, which is a fantasy-version biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, among the chief examples of this form. By taking the concept of Libra—a refraction of the JFK assassination into, in Kolker’s words “an interrogation of the images and narratives of politics… It invites us to imagine alternative fictions” (69)—and then grafting it onto the real world story of Jim Garrison, a man whose head was filled with “alternative fictions,” Stone again takes a postmodern text and drags it back into a modernist sensibility. The point of Libra was that the Warren Report, the Zapruder film, and any other account of JFK’s assassination are just as fictional as a novel. Either Stone missed the point, or Kolker’s interpretation of it does.

Kolker’s complaint about a certain “premise of postmodernism, that the images and narratives of popular culture gather meaning only within the contexts and the reception of popular culture, without the need to test them against any other reality” (69) is moot in this context. The idea is that in a world where a President’s death is experienced as television, there is no reality, only popular culture. This theme is expressed intrinsically in Tarantino’s work. Stone, maybe despite himself, expressed it in Natural Born Killers and in JFK. Kolker does understand it, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it, or let go of his modernist worldview and accept it as a valid artistic statement.



Works cited.

Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988): pg. 166.
Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness, 3rd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Shaviro, Steven. Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism (Serpent’s Tail High Risk Books, 1997).
Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997): pg. 50