DRAG - Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English

Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English offers an engaging,
ambitious, and comprehensive survey of American and British collage lit-

erature in the new century. Focusing primarily on the experimental novel,
with some detours through experimental writers and poets who turned to
creative non-fiction projects, Wojciech Dra˛g’s excellent critical account of
collage shows it to be a surprisingly vibrant literary technique for writers
responding to the emerging crises of the new millennium.
David Banash, Professor of Contemporary Literature,
Film, and Popular Culture, Western Illinois University
This book is a valuable and original contribution to the fields of twenty-

first-century literature, collage, and the legacies of modernism and post-
modernism. By surveying a range of related but divergent texts by authors
with a demonstrable interest in the collage practice, the author moves to
create an identifiable twenty-first-century collage canon, with clear roots
in 20th-century collage and avant-garde practices.
Rona Cran, Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American
Literature, University of Birmingham
In Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English, Wojciech Dra˛g

convincingly demonstrates that collage remains a poignant aesthetic in
the twenty-first century. Through techniques such as juxtaposition and
thematic joints, the poetics of collage enable contemporary writers to
engage with the personal and political crises of the contemporary.
Alison Gibbons, Reader in Contemporary Stylistics,
Sheffield Hallam University
Collage in Twenty-First-Century
Literature in English
Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English: Art of Crisis

considers the phenomenon of the continued relevance of collage, a
form established over a hundred years ago, to contemporary literature.
It argues that collage is a perfect artistic vehicle to represent the crisis-
ridden reality of the twenty-first century. Being a mixture of fragmentary
incompatible voices, collage embodies the chaos of the media-dominated
world. Examining the artistic, sociopolitical and personal crises addressed
in contemporary collage literature, the book argues that the twenty-first
century has brought a revival of collage-like novels and essays.
Wojciech Drąg (PhD) is an assistant professor at the Institute of English

Studies at the University of Wrocław in Poland.
Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change

Lessons from the Underground Presses of the Late Sixties
Matthew T. Pifer
Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English

Art of Crisis
Wojciech Dra˛g
Patrick McGrath and his Worlds

Madness and the Transnational Gothic
Edited by Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan
The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction

The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction
Phil O’Brien
Reading Contingency
The Accident in Contemporary Fiction
David Wylot
Death-Facing Ecology in Contemporary British and North American

Environmental Crisis Fiction
Louise Squire
Poetry and the Question of Modernity

From Heidegger to the Present
Ian Cooper
Apocalyptic Territories
Setting and Revelation in Contemporary American Fiction
Anna Hellén
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.

routledge.com
Collage in Twenty-First-
Century Literature
in English
Art of Crisis
Wojciech Drąg
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Wojciech Drąg to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-43742-8 (hbk)
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Contents
List of Figuresx
Acknowledgementsxi
List of Abbreviationsxiii
Introduction: Madly in Love With Crisis:

Collage Literature Today 1
1 Theory and Practice of Collage 10

Historical Outline 13
Poetics 18
Politics 22
Literary Collages in the Twentieth Century 27
Analyzing Collages 34
Multimodality 34
Rhetorical Structure Theory 37
PART I
Art in Crisis45
2 “Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?”:

David Markson’s Late Novels 47
Collage Structure 48
Death, Senility and Anti-Semitism 61
Novel(ist) in Crisis 63
Conclusion 68
3 Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art: David Shields’s

Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life 73
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto 75
How Literature Saved My Life 79
viii Contents
The Novel’s Obsolete Apparatus 83
Blueprint for a New Literature 87
Conclusion 90
PART II
Society in Crisis97
4 It’s the End of the World as We Know It: Lance Olsen’s

Sewing Shut My Eyes, Head in Flames and
Dreamlives of Debris 99
Sewing Shut My Eyes 102
Head in Flames 108
Dreamlives of Debris 115
World in Flames – Crises Present, Past and Future 118
Conclusion 126
5 When We Were Human: Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An

Opera in Flatland and The Book of Portraiture 131
VAS: An Opera in Flatland 134
The Book of Portraiture 140
All That Is Solid Melts Into Pixels 145
Conclusion 152
PART III
The Self in Crisis157
6 I’m Every Wo/man, Guaranteed One Hundred Per Cent

Genuine!: Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World 159
Everything Must Go! – The Empty Self and Other Selves
in Crisis 170
Conclusion 178
7 Diaries of Bad Years: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and

Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation 183
Bluets 185
Dept. of Speculation 190
Contents ix
Things Fall Apart 195
Conclusion 201
Conclusion: Collage Is Here to Stay 205
Index212
Figures
4.1 Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, “Telegenesicide” (in Lance

Olsen and Andi Olsen, Sewing Shut My Eyes,
U of Alabama P, 2000), p. 15. 105
4.2 Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, “Telegenesicide” (in Lance
Olsen and Andi Olsen, Sewing Shut My Eyes,
U of Alabama P, 2000), p. 13. 107
5.1 Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell, VAS: An Opera
in Flatland (U of Chicago P, 2004), pp. 86–87. 136
5.2 Steve Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture (FC2, 2006),
p. 297. 144
6.1 Graham Rawle, Woman’s World (Atlantic, 2006), p. 142. 163
Acknowledgements
I must begin by expressing my gratitude to the authorities of the Depart-

ment of English and Comparative Studies, the Institute of English Stud-
ies and the Faculty of Letters at the University of Wrocław – Prof. Ewa
Kębłowska-Ławniczak, Prof. Marek Kuźniak and Prof. Marcin Cieński –
for the institutional support of my project and for all their advice and
encouragement.
I am much obliged to The Kosciuszko Foundation for awarding me
a research fellowship which enabled me to spend three months at the
University of Utah in 2018. During that time, I was able to meet several
novelists and critics whose work was of crucial importance to my project,
and I wrote a considerable part of this book.
I am very grateful to the said authors – Andi and Lance Olsen, Graham
Rawle, David Shields and Steve Tomasula – for being very generous with
time and attention. Their insights into collage and their feedback on the
relevant chapters of this book have been very helpful.
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to David Banash, Rona Cran, Alison
Gibbons, Marjorie Perloff and Joseph Tabbi for agreeing to consult my
ideas. I am particularly thankful to Alison, David and Rona for their
invaluable feedback on the entire manuscript.
My thanks go to Grzegorz Maziarczyk, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill
and Laura Sims for reading parts of my book and responding to my aca-
demic queries.
I remain grateful to my friends and colleagues – Craig Dworkin,
Dominika Ferens, Vanessa Guignery, Robert Kusek, Maciej Masłowski,
Lisa McAfee, Rod Mengham, Merritt Moseley, Katarzyna Nowak-
McNeice, Joseph Plowman, Marcin Tereszewski and Travis Vick – for
assisting me in various ways during the last four years I spent developing
this project.
Thank you to my late friend Wiktor Jakubczyc for helping me acquire
some of my research material and for devising a remarkable electronic
dictionary, which I have used throughout the writing process.
A number of ideas that contributed to this book originated during
my elective courses at the University of Wrocław’s Institute of English
xii Acknowledgements
Studies. I would like to express my gratitude to some of my best and
most dedicated students – Mathias Foit, Alina Hanusiak, Eleonora Imbi-
erowicz, Joanna Kluga, Radosław Siewierski, Martyna Szot and Lech
Zdunkiewicz – for their enthusiasm about experimental literature and for
the many ways in which I benefitted from their kindness and generosity.
I wrote most of the book in two cafes: Starbucks Coffee at Grun-
waldzki Center in Wrocław and Coffee Garden in Salt Lake City. I am
very indebted to their friendly and welcoming staffs.
Finally, I wish to thank Kacper Podrygajło for being the best possible
companion.
*
Earlier versions of small parts of Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 appeared in the
form of journal articles and edited chapters, and I am grateful for permis-
sion to include them here:
Drąg, Wojciech. “Collage and Crisis in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flat-
land and Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames.” Notre Dame Review, no. 48, Sum-
mer–Fall 2019.
———. “Collage Manifestos: Fragmentation and Appropriation in David Mark-
son’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger.” The Poetics
of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, edited by
Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drąg. Vernon, 2018, pp. 107–22.
———. “Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and the Revival of Fragmentary
Writing.” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 56,
2017, pp. 57–72.
———. “ ‘A Novel Against the Novel’: David Markson’s Antinovelistic Tetral-
ogy’.” Polish Journal of English Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 11–26.
I am much obliged to Andi and Lance Olsen, Graham Rawle and Steve
Tomasula for their permission to reproduce figures 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1,
6.2 and 6.3.
Abbreviations
BP The Book of Portraiture

DS Dept. of Speculation
HF Head in Flames
HLSML How Literature Saved My Life
LN The Last Novel
RB Reader’s Block
RH Reality Hunger
SSME Sewing Shut My Eyes
TINN This Is Not a Novel
VAS VAS: An Opera in Flatland
VP Vanishing Point
WW Woman’s World
Introduction
Madly in Love With Crisis:
Collage Literature Today
Although it emerged over a century ago, collage continues to be a reso-

nant artistic form – attractive, evolving and amenable to multiple media.
The world of today resembles little the world of 1912 – when Pablo
Picasso produced Still Life with Chair Caning – yet collage has retained
its capacity for responding to contemporary concerns. In Collage Culture
(2013), David Banash describes it as an apt and popular metaphor for
the “phenomenal experience of everyday life,” which is marked by frag-
mentation, overproduction and media saturation (14). Collage remains
relevant also because it requires the same kind of attention as the real-
ity of the twenty-first century, with its proliferation of media stimuli
that need to be integrated by the individual for meaning to consolidate
(Banash, Collage Culture 200). Budd Hopkins notices that, because of
their immersion in the mediascape, contemporary viewers of collage have
been better trained to “grasp a sequence that has missing parts” and to
“make connections between seemingly disjunctive units” than the audi-
ence of the Cubists, Surrealists and Dadaists (12). As fluent users of the
Internet and digital media, the twenty-first-century audience has also
become adept at processing complex juxtapositions of text and image.
Despite the ubiquity of multimodal and appropriative strategies in
mainstream culture, collage has retained an avant-garde dimension.
Many of its twenty-first-century practitioners – such as the visual artist
Christian Marclay, novelists Lance Olsen and Steve Tomasula and film-
maker György Pálfi – are regarded as experimentalists. In 1948, Clem-
ent Greenberg called collage “the most succinct and direct single clue to
the aesthetic of genuinely modern art” (259).1 Seventy years later, that
statement has not lost its relevance. Steve Tomasula notes that although
“collage has been called the most important organizing principle for art
during the twentieth century,” an examination of twenty-first-century
“music, video, and visual arts” demonstrates that it is “even more promi-
nent today” (“Electricians” 5). Literary works are not exempt from this
phenomenon: on the opening page of David Shields’s Reality Hunger
(2010), the collage novel is listed as one of the most important vehicles
for “breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ ” into a work of art (1).
2 Introduction
The craved fragments of “reality” are assimilated in the form of appropri-
ated material, in accordance with Robert Rauschenberg’s dictum that a
work is “more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world” (qtd.
in Hodge 186). Such texts are not standard literary practice: in contempo-
rary fiction, collage is far more popular as a “metaphor for experience of
modernity” than as a “formal principle” (Banash, “Collage as Practice”
264). The formal criteria adopted in my study are relatively strict and
involve the following characteristics: extensive appropriation, fragmenta-
tion, heterogeneity of material, multimodality and reliance on juxtaposi-
tion. Although, admittedly, the body of texts whose structure incorporates
all or most of the above formal principles is not vast, I believe we can still
speak of a recent resurgence of interest in literary collage.2
Its most important Anglophone representatives are the authors exam-
ined in this book: David Markson, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, Lance
Olsen, Graham Rawle, David Shields and Steve Tomasula. Except for
Markson, all of them are alive; except for Rawle, all are American and
have a literary background (Rawle’s is in the visual arts).3 As mentioned
before, Olsen and Tomasula are associated with innovative literature:
they are both connected with the independent publisher Fiction Collec-
tive Two and the biennial &Now Festival; they both contributed to, and
were discussed in, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature
(2012). The experimental tag has also been applied to Markson (whose
Wittgenstein’s Mistress was called “the high point of experimental fic-
tion” in the United States by David Foster Wallace) and Nelson (also
an occasional guest of the &Now Festival). Markson’s late work was
credited as a considerable influence by most authors considered here –
Nelson, Offill, Olsen, Shields and Tomasula – and can thus be seen as the
genesis of the literary phenomenon examined in this volume (Personal
interviews).4
Despite their adherence to the outlined formal principles (and the
Marksonian influence), twenty-first-century collages vary substantially
as regards genre. Out of the fourteen works under consideration, ten
were released as novels, although five of them – Markson’s last four
novels (1996–2007) and Olsen’s Dreamlives of Debris (2017) – chal-
lenge most expectations that readers may have of novels. Paradoxically,
of the remaining ones, it is Rawle’s Woman’s World (2005), a book
assembled out of forty thousand cut-ups from women’s magazines, that
reads most like a traditional novel. Nelson’s Bluets (2009) and Shields’s
How Literature Saved My Life (2013) have been classified as memoirs
or extended essays, while the previously mentioned Reality Hunger is
subtitled “A Manifesto.” Finally, Olsen’s Sewing Shut My Eyes (2000) is
a collection of mostly multimodal short stories (co-authored with Andi
Olsen), which invites an analogy with Tomasula’s The Book of Portrai-
ture (2006) – a highly visual novel in which each chapter has a different
setting and a different cast of characters.
Introduction 3
For all their thematic and generic variety, collage works are informed
by two desires which Banash sees as the quintessence of collage: the cri-
tique or protest embodied in the process of cutting and the conservative
nostalgia that underlies the act of gathering and pasting (Collage Culture
31–32). The “progressive” and “regressive” impulses are thus made to
function simultaneously in a given image or text, which accounts for
the inherent tension at the heart of collage. The coexistence of multiple
voices representing the sources juxtaposed by the collagist further unset-
tles the work’s inner disunity. Thomas P. Brockelman, who calls collage
“a technique whose existence depends upon a contradiction,” declares
that it is “in some sense, an art of crisis – an art in perpetual crisis” (35,
emphasis original). Reflecting on the content of collage, Shields arrives
at a similar conclusion; he argues that at the heart of collage books lies
“the animating cataclysm” and proposes that “they’re all madly in love
with their own crises” (HLSML 177). I wish to develop Brockelman’s
and Shields’s critical insights and demonstrate that the link between col-
lage and crisis is particularly strong in twenty-first-century literature. The
works by the seven considered authors can be interpreted as testimonies
to the crises afflicting the new millennium and as (quintessentially hetero-
glot) sites of confrontation of competing voices and ideologies.
In Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (2013), Peter
Boxall speaks of literature after postmodernism as marked by “a strange
sense of disconnection, in response to a world that is more closely con-
nected” (17). As shown by the example of Olsen’s Sewing Shut My Eyes
and Dreamlives of Debris, the epistemological chaos of media-dominated
society can be effectively evoked by collage. Boxall adds that at the begin-
ning of the new millennium “we have entered into a new sense of our
age, in which our conception of late culture comes into a difficult contact
with the apprehension of a youthful time” (12). Because of its structure,
collage is well suited to represent a collision of two epochs or value sys-
tems and the crisis of their uneasy coexistence. The tension between the
old and the new is particularly apparent in the works by Markson and
Shields, which confront the exhaustion of conventional fiction with a
hunger for literature which – similarly to the antinovel of the nouveaux
romanciers – is free from the restraints of plot, character and genre. Box-
all also diagnoses in twenty-first-century fiction “a new kind of hybrid-
ity, a new category of being that emerges from the failed connection . . .
between the human and the non-human” (101). The anxiety prompted
by the prospect of a post-human future is addressed most forcefully by
Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) and The Book of Por-
traiture. Hybridity, singled out by Rachel Greenwald Smith as the most
salient characteristic feature of the literature of the 2000s (388), is rep-
resented by those (and several other) works also through multimodal
means – by combining text and image and employing audacious typo-
graphical experiments.
4 Introduction
Most collage works considered in this volume meet some of the criteria
of “crisis art” as laid out in Harold Jaffe’s article “Picketing the Zeit-
geist” (2011).5 A form of “cultural activism,” crisis art is described by
Jaffe as aiming “to effect social change or a wider social awareness” (3).
That motivation is particularly visible in the works of Olsen, Shields and
Tomasula, who are committed to engaging with artistic, sociopolitical
and technological crises of their day. A case in point is Shields’s Nobody
Hates Trump More Than Trump (2018), subtitled “An Intervention,”
which offers an incisive diagnosis of American society under Donald
Trump. It serves as the quintessential example of contemporary collage’s
capacity for engaging with the here and now – exercised in the previous
century most memorably by the Berlin Dadaists. Shields’s text also best
exemplifies Jaffe’s notion that crisis art is “situational” and thus tends to
be “created rapidly rather than painstakingly revised and refined” (3).
(On the other hand, Offill, Nelson and Rawle have taken many years to
execute and polish their works.) The claim that crisis art is “dialogic”
invites a clear parallel with the essentially polyphonic structure of col-
lage. Jaffe’s closing statement, that crisis art’s “primary obligation is to
not avert your eyes” and “to bear witness,” is particularly relevant to the
works relating the experience of a grave personal crisis – Nelson’s Bluets
and Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014).
Will Jackson and Bob Jeffery open their interdisciplinary volume Crisis,
Rupture and Anxiety (2012) by diagnosing the near ubiquity of the con-
cept in the new millennium. “We are seemingly faced with crises in every
aspect of our lives,” they add, “and as academics working across the arts,
media and the social sciences a confrontation with events and phenom-
ena labelled as ‘crises’ is inescapable” (1). In the United States, the new
century is marked by crisis right from the outset – the immediate after-
math of the disputed election of George W. Bush, followed by the collec-
tive trauma of 9/11. Consecutive years have seen Hurricane Katrina, the
financial crisis, the BP oil spill and the election of Trump (perceived by
many involved in the artistic and academic worlds as no less of a national
disaster than the Great Recession). The collapse of Lehman Brothers and
its aftershocks, together with the international Occupy movement, can
be called a crisis of capitalism (though, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, capi-
talism is a mode sustained by the condition of permanent tension and
crisis [Pervert’s Guide]). In the global perspective, the fear of climate
change, the refugee crisis and the unrest in the European Union must
be added to the equation. The new millennium has also had its share of
wars – from the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan to the ongoing bloody
conflicts in Syria and Yemen. While the concentration of wars has not
necessarily been higher than before (the 1990s was not a peaceful decade
either), the continual threat of terrorism since the fall of the Twin Tow-
ers – and exacerbated by the arrival of ISIS – could be regarded as a crisis
peculiar to the new century. Likewise, while the laments of the death of
Introduction 5
the novel (Will Self) and of serious literature (Federman) are nothing new,
the digital revolution and the danger of the print book being displaced
by electronic literature, e-books and audiobooks have posed a new chal-
lenge to literature. Seven years before the advent of the new millennium,
Sven Birkerts declared that literature was “in the midst of an epoch-
making transition” – “as consequential for culture as was the shift insti-
gated by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type” (192).
Among the most resonant analyses of the current times as an era of
crisis are Lauren Berlant’s “Thinking about Feeling Historical” (2008)
and Cruel Optimism (2011). In those two texts, Berlant examines the
present as a “disturbed time” involving a “shift of historic proportions in
the terms and processes of the conditions of continuity of life” (“Think-
ing” 5). The traditional “norms and intuitions” are no longer applicable;
without their protection, the contemporary is marked by great vulner-
ability (“Thinking” 5, Cruel 62). In the social and economic spheres,
that vulnerability assumes the name of precarity, understood as a lack of
control over one’s own future, which is dependent on the “dictates and
whims” of the capitalist system (Cruel 192). That condition results in
the gradual abandonment of such “fantasies” as “upward mobility, job
security, political and social equality . . . meritocracy” and the overarch-
ing illusion of “life as a project of adding up to something” (3). Ber-
lant argues that contemporary crisis is not experienced as an exceptional
state; rather, she speaks of “crisis ordinariness” (10) and “lower case
drama” (“Thinking” 6). She traces in the contemporary the “waning of
genre,” manifest in the inapplicability of genres such as melodrama and
tragedy and the loss of a “predictable arc” of human experience (7). The
absence of drama and the impossibility of tragedy result in a “sense of
flatness” and a weakening of affect – in a “post-vital” life, devoid of prior
intensities, “exhausted but not dead” (7–9).6
In this book, I do not wish to determine if Berlant’s diagnosis is accu-
rate or whether the twenty-first century has indeed been marked by
graver crises than any other. When considering the matter, it is worth
bearing in mind Michel Foucault’s assessment of the conviction that the
present moment is “the break, the climax, the fulfillment” as “one of
the most destructive habits of modern thought” and a symptom of the
deluded belief that “the time of one’s own life” is a unique “moment of
history” (359). In his commentary on the rhetoric of crisis in literary
criticism, Paul de Man expresses equally strong disapproval of the critical
practice, which he sees as misguided and erroneous. However, he makes
an important concession: “It remains relevant . . . that these people are
experiencing it as a crisis and that they are constantly using the language
of crisis in referring to what is taking place” (6). Whether the rhetoric
of crisis is justifiable and logically defensible, the fact remains that it has
been consistently employed in the new century to refer to many socio-
political, economic, ecological and artistic developments. My argument
6 Introduction
is that crisis has also found its way into contemporary collage literature,
where it is present both as content and as form.
As illustrated earlier, crisis tends to be invoked in such varied con-
texts that the word’s denotation has become somewhat fuzzy, while the
attempts to define the notion differ depending on the discipline. In my
analysis of personal crisis, I will follow the definition provided by psy-
chiatrist Gerald Caplan, who sees crisis as “an upset in the steady state
of the individual” – “a reactive state provoked by hazardous events
that threaten important life goals.” The “obstacle” that triggers the
state appears “insurmountable,” which results in a prolonged “disor-
ganization” or disequilibrium (qtd. in Janosik 3, 18). The aftermath of
the crisis-inducing event is pervaded by anxiety, a factor emphasized
in accounts of crisis in the context of literature (Horton 3), culture
(Wilde 45), counselling (Janosik 46) and social science (Jackson and
Jeffery 2–3). I shall also draw on Berlant’s definition of crisis as having
to “bear an extended burden of vulnerability for an undetermined dura-
tion” (Cruel 62). In my discussion of artistic and sociopolitical crises,
I shall work with the conceptualization of crisis as “an unstable condi-
tion seeking change” (Egan 5) – a disturbance of order and a threat to
accepted values, such as liberalism, democracy or environmental sus-
tainability. Crisis is a condition, it is worth remembering, whose name
is derived from the Greek word krisis, meaning “decision.” The situ-
ations and experiences represented in many of the said works are set
during “critical” (another word etymologically connected with “crisis”)
moments for art, society and the individual – at times when decision and
action are imperative.
In the three parts of this book, I examine the aesthetic, sociopolitical
and personal crises addressed in contemporary collage works. The first
part is devoted to texts diagnosing the crisis of the novel on the eve of
the new century: Markson’s late novelistic tetralogy and Shields’s Real-
ity Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life, each of which forcefully
asserts the obsolescence of the novel and calls for a radically new litera-
ture, freed from the burden of conventional fictionality. The second part
offers an analysis of the pernicious influence of television and celebrity
culture as outlined in Olsen’s Sewing Shut My Eyes, of the crisis of lib-
eral society in confrontation with religious extremism (Head in Flames)
and of the dystopian vision of the digital world conjured up in Olsen’s
Dreamlives of Debris (2017). The other author discussed in this part is
Tomasula, whose VAS: An Opera in Flatland and The Book of Portrai-
ture are testimonies to the destabilization of the notion of the human by
the latest advances in science and technology. The last part focuses on
the crisis of gender identity and of the self in consumer society as evoked
in Rawle’s Woman’s World. Finally, I examine Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation as accounts of personal crisis pre-
cipitated by the experience of a breakup or marital rupture. The point of
Introduction 7
departure for the analysis of every text is an examination of its formal
composition: the kind of ready-made material used and the way in which
the original and the appropriated elements have been interwoven. In the
formal analysis, I use the tools afforded by William C. Mann and Sandra
A. Thompson’s Rhetorical Structure Theory (particularly Joint, Contrast
and Sequence relations) and the burgeoning field of literary multimo-
dality studies, represented by Alison Gibbons, in order to examine the
interactions between text and image, as well as to interpret variations in
the use of colour, typography and layout. The book begins with a chap-
ter outlining the history, poetics and politics of collage since its inception
and closes with a concluding section, which, besides offering a synthesis
of the relationship between collage and crisis, considers the reasons for
the continued relevance of collage in the new century.
Notes
1. Greenberg’s words come from a review of an exhibition held at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York, which featured collage works by Pablo Picasso,
Georges Braque, Jean Arp and Kurt Schwitters (Cottington 188).
2. In Collage in Twentieth‑Century Art, Literature, and Culture (2015), Rona
Cran observes that while the legacy of collage in the visual arts has been suffi-
ciently documented, the role it has played in literature is still under-researched
(37). The few publications that exist tend to focus on twentieth-century col-
lagists such as T.S. Eliot and Kathy Acker. The most important critical books
about literary collage published in the new century have been the earlier
mentioned works by Banash and Cran, Thomas P. Brockelman’s The Frame
and the Mirror: On Collage and Postmodernism (2001) and Scarlett Hig-
gins’s Collage and Literature: The Persistence of Vision (2019), none of which
discusses any of the authors considered in my book. Edward S. Robinson’s
Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present
(2011) only offers a two-page commentary on one of them. While the novels
by Rawle and Tomasula have elicited a fair number of academic articles (the
latter being the only author whose output has been the focus of an edited
collection – Banash’s Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media
Fiction [2015]), the remaining works have been paid less critical attention
than they deserve. One of the aims of this book is to remedy that situation.
3. Although this project was not originally conceived as US-centred, the domi-
nance of American authors is very conspicuous. It can be argued that collage
played a more important role in American poetry and fiction than in other
Anglophone literatures, which can be attested by the work of such authors as
Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, as well as the
poets associated with the New York School and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poets. That special significance of collage to American literature has been car-
ried over into the new century.
4. While working on this project, I met or corresponded with all the authors
except the late David Markson. Their feedback regarding the chapters devoted
to their work has been taken into account in the final version of the book.
5. Parallels can also be found between some of the fourteen texts and Emily Hor-
ton’s notion of the crisis novel as outlined in Contemporary Crisis Fictions:
Affect and Ethics in the Modern British Novel (2014). Among its formal char-
acteristics Horton numbers “genre subversion,” “temporal digression and
8 Introduction
fragmentation,” as well as a “subversive appropriation of popular genres and
intertexts” (5, 32).
6. Besides the notion of crisis, Berlant makes use of the related categories of
“impasse” and “trauma” in her analysis of the present. The former is con-
ceptualized as a figure of irresolution, indecision and anxiety, while the latter
as a violent disturbance of a state guaranteeing constancy and security (Cruel
9–10, 199–200).
Works Cited
Banash, David. “Collage as Practice and Metaphor in Popular Culture.” Cutting
Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law,
edited by Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli. Duke UP, 2011, pp. 264–75.
———. Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption.
Rodopi, 2013.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011.
———. “Thinking About Feeling Historical.” Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 1,
2008, pp. 4–9.
Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge
UP, 2013.
Brockelman, Thomas P. The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Post-
modern. Northwestern UP, 2001.
Cottington, David. Cubism and Its Histories. Manchester UP, 2004.
Cran, Rona. Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph
Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan. Ashgate, 2014.
de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism. Routledge, 1983.
Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography.
U of North Carolina P, 1999.
Federman, Raymond. “Critfictional Reflections on the Pathetic Condition of
the Novel in Our Time.” Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative
Innovation, edited by R. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo. State U of New York
P, 2008, pp. 213–29.
Foucault, Michel. “How Much Does It Cost for Reason to Tell the Truth.” Fou-
cault Live: Collected Interviews, 1861–1984. Semiotext(e), 1996, pp. 248–362.
Greenberg, Clement. “Review of the Exhibition Collage.” The Collected Essays
and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, edited by John
O’Brian. U of Chicago P, 1986, pp. 259–62.
Hodge, A. N. The History of Art. Rosen, 2017.
Hopkins, Budd. “Modernism and the Collage Aesthetic.” New England Review,
vol. 18, no. 2, 1997, pp. 5–12.
Horton, Emily. Contemporary Crisis Fictions: Affect and Ethics in the Modern
British Novel. Palgrave, 2014.
Jackson, Will, and Bob Jeffery. “Introduction.” Crisis, Rupture and Anxiety: An
Interdisciplinary Examination of Contemporary and Historical Human Chal-
lenges, edited by Bob Jeffery et al. Cambridge Scholars, 2011, pp. 1–13.
Introduction 9
Jaffe, Harold. “Picketing the Zeitgeist: Crisis Art.” American Book Review,
vol. 32, no. 6, 2011, pp. 3–4.
Janosik, Ellen Hastings. Crisis Counseling: A Contemporary Approach. Jones &
Bartlett, 2014.
Nelson, Maggie. “Re: An Academic Inquiry Regarding Bluets.” Received by
Wojciech Drąg, 20 Feb. 2019.
Offill, Jenny. “Re: An Academic Inquiry Regarding Dept. of Speculation.”
Received by Wojciech Drąg, 19 Feb. 2019.
Olsen, Lance. Personal interview. 5 Sept. 2018.
The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Directed by Sophie Fiennes, performance by
Slavoj Žižek. Zeitgeist Films, 2012.
Rawle, Graham. Personal interview. 18 Aug. 2017.
Self, Will. “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real).” The Guardian, Guard-
ian Media, 2 May 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-
novel-dead-literary-fiction. Accessed 3 Apr. 2019.
Shields, David. How Literature Saved My Life. Knopf, 2013.
———. Personal interview. 7 Aug. 2018.
———. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Vintage, 2011.
Smith, Rachel Greenwald. “Afterword: The 2000s After 2016.” American Lit-
erature in Transition: 2000–2010, edited by Rachel Greenwald Smith. Cam-
bridge UP, 2018.
Tomasula, Steve. “Electricians, Wig Makers, and Staging the New Novel.” Amer-
ican Book Review, vol. 32, no. 6, 2011, pp. 5–6.
———. Personal interview. 13 Oct. 2018.
Wilde, Alan. “Modernism and the Aesthetics of Crisis.” Contemporary Litera-
ture, vol. 20, no. 1, 1979, pp. 13–50.
1 Theory and Practice of Collage
Although collage is widely regarded as an invention of Cubist paint-

ers Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it was the Surrealist poet Guil-
laume Apollinaire who used the term for the first time – in reference
to his own play Les mamelles de Tirésias (1903) (Cran 1, 21). “Col-
lage” is derived from the French verb coller, whose primary meaning
is to “paste,” “glue” or “adhere.” However, in colloquial French the
word can also mean “having an affair” or “living in sin,” which sug-
gests a parallel with Cubist collages based on a daring cohabitation of
words and images (Frascina). Among the coexisting elements one usually
finds “photographs, pieces of paper, newspaper cuttings [and] string,”
which are all “placed in juxtaposition and glued to the pictorial surface”
(Montgomery et al. 177). As Scarlett Higgins observes, collage denotes
both a “process of working with textual materials,” which is a “formal
strategy,” and a “presentational mode that invites specific reader/viewer
expectations,” which makes it akin to “genre” (2).
One of the earliest and most often cited definitions of collage was
formulated by another Surrealist, Max Ernst, who called it “the noble
conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable
in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them” (qtd.
in Cureton 106). The incongruity of constitutive elements has been
emphasized by a number of critics. Budd Hopkins defines the “collage
aesthetic” as “the presence of several contradictory systems in a work of
art, and the absence of a single controlling system” (7), whereas David
Antin argues that the absence of “explicit syntactical relations” between
the work’s “disparate materials” is the key characteristic of collage (106).
Beata Śniecikowska stresses that a collage-like juxtaposition is not merely
a combination of different elements; it needs to generate some tension
(115), which, according to Ryszard Nycz, can appear on the syntactical,
stylistic or semantic level (257). Lance Olsen states boldly that “collage is
the quintessential art of the non-sequitur” (Architectures 89).
An aspect of collage which is not mentioned by any of the above defini-
tions but which nonetheless remains central to this study is the incorpo-
ration of appropriated material. From the very beginning, collages – such
Theory and Practice of Collage 11
as Picasso’s Bottle, Glass and Violin (1912–13) and Braque’s Glass Carafe
and Newspapers (1914) – employed “real objects, such as bits of news-
paper or other mass-produced images” (Kostelanetz 124). Such objects
are called ready-mades and can take the form of any external material –
two- or three-dimensional, verbal or visual – which the artist chooses to
include in their work. In literary texts, the ready-made usually takes the
form of an unintegrated and often unacknowledged quotation or a pho-
tograph.1 Since collage is based on appropriation, it is always vulnerable
to the accusations of copyright infringement and plagiarism. As Joshua
Clover pithily remarks, there is “no collage without theft” (93).
As noted before, the use of appropriated material is not considered a
necessary condition by all critics. In Collage in Twentieth‑Century Art,
Literature, and Culture (2014), Rona Cran proposes a very accommo-
dating understanding of collage as “the experimentation with and the
linking of disparate phenomena: democratically, arbitrarily, even unin-
tentionally” (4). She cites Marjorie Perloff’s observation that there is
more to collage than merely cut and paste, which is “only the beginning”
(Cran 3). A similarly open conception of literary collage – retaining the
need for a ready-made, yet understanding it very liberally – has been
adopted by Agnieszka Karpowicz in Kolaż: Awangardowy gest kreacji
(2007). In this book, however, I shall adhere to a stricter idea of collage,
which requires the following criteria to be met: the use of heterogeneous,
fragmentary and conflicting components; the absence (or serious disrup-
tion) of linear plot development; and the incorporation of a sizeable pro-
portion of appropriated material. In the essay “Fourteen Notes Toward
the Musicality of Creative Disjunction, Or: Fiction by Collage,” Lance
Olsen distinguishes between two understandings of collage in literature –
the narrower and the broader:
The notion of collage can be used literally or it can be used meta-

phorically in fiction composition. That is . . . collage fiction can be
deeply appropriative in nature, cutting up previous texts to create
new ones, as in, say, the work of Eliot and William S. Burroughs. But
it also can be used as a structuring principle for new textual units –
not only as a juxtapositional combination of ready-mades, then, but
of justmades, as in, say, the work of Milorad Pavíc or Julio Cortázar.
(Olsen, “Fourteen” 187)
In this book, I shall use the term “literary collage” in the first meaning.
I agree with Śniecikowska that it is often used too broadly as a critical
tool and that it is important to be precise in its application so that its
scope does not overlap with that of several other related concepts such as
mosaic, assemblage and montage (112).
Mosaic has been defined as a composition of “a multitude of small
(usually multicoloured) pieces of glass, marble or other suitable materials
in a bed of cement or plaster” (“Mosaic” 425). Although its origins
date back to antiquity, it was most extensively practised in the Mid-
dle Ages, particularly in Italy, the Byzantine Empire and Mexico (425).
Despite evident similarities with collage – assembling a picture out of
smaller components, using materials not necessarily manufactured by the
artist – mosaic remains a distinct technique. In Collage Culture (2013),
David Banash argues that “the brutal difference” between collage and
earlier mosaic-like practices is that “twentieth-century fragments come
readymade” – they have been “worked over, shaped, formed, completed”
by “human hands” and cannot be taken directly from nature (like pieces
of rock) (18–19).
“Assemblage” is a term coined by Jean Dubuffet to account for two-
and three-dimensional compositions of “natural or preformed materials,
such as household debris” (Seitz 150). Like collage, it is a technique rely-
ing on the juxtaposition of incongruous material, including ready-made
objects. Whereas The Oxford Dictionary of Art notes that the category
is rarely “employed with any precision” (“Assemblage” 29), William
Seitz and Thomas P. Brockelman see it as a master term for all kinds of
composite art, such as collage, montage and photomontage (Seitz 150,
Brockelman 190).
Ultimately, montage – a method deriving from film and first theorized
by Sergei Eisenstein in 1929 – is a notion which, nowadays, is frequently
used interchangeably with collage. However, even those critics who insist
on treating them as distinct categories differ in their understanding of
what they denote. Perloff, Nycz and Banash consider “montage” as a nar-
rower term than “collage,” while Karpowicz sees it as broader. Perloff
regards “collage” as “the master term” and “montage” as an “offshoot”
(Futurist Moment 246). Nycz, in turn, accords “the superior status of
a method of constructing an artistic expression” to collage; montage
is viewed as a “technique” (11). For Banash, collage is a wider notion
because it may incorporate “all sorts of readymade material,” whereas
the latter usually concentrates on the photograph (132–33). Conversely,
Karpowicz sees montage as the superior category, insofar as it combines
“any heterogeneous or non-heterogeneous elements” and does not need to
employ ready-mades (63). The idea that montage does not require the use
of appropriated material is not shared by all critics. On the contrary, The
Oxford Dictionary of Art defines it as a “pictorial technique” in which
“ready-made images alone are used” (“Montage” 338–39, italics added).
A common way of differentiating between collage and montage is
using the former to refer to spatial relationships and the latter – to tem-
poral ones (Perloff, Futurist Moment 246). Brockelman observes that
“whereas collages demand that the viewer relate elements spatially next
to or in front of each other, montage demands a reading of images pre-
sented sequentially,” particularly in the case of watching a film (190).
The last difference frequently noted by critics lies in the compatibility
of constituents parts. According to Jean-Jacques Thomas, collage tends
to emphasize the “heterogeneous nature of diverse components,” while
montage “aims at the integration of the diverse combinatory constituents
and, as such, provides unity” (85). Perloff agrees with Thomas that col-
lage highlights “fragmentation” rather than “continuity,” which is the
domain of montage (Futurist Moment 246). Monica Tavares, likewise,
pits the former – understood as a “dissemination of texts in conflict of
meanings” – against the latter’s “assimilat[ing]” and “centralizing pro-
ject” (194).
In this study the notions of mosaic and assemblage will not be used, as
their scope, I believe, should be restricted to the visual arts. Both collage
and montage, on the other hand, can easily be applied to literary texts
and will be used here: collage, as a category meeting the earlier outlined
criteria of a non-harmonious arrangement of heterogeneous material,
non-linear plot and the use of appropriation, and montage, as a similar
yet distinct technique, involving a smoother organization of various com-
ponents and the lack, or scarcity, of appropriated elements.
Historical Outline
Collage is regarded, by many artists and critics, as one of the quintes-
sential art forms of the twentieth century. American painter Robert
Motherwell announced, somewhat bombastically, that “collage [was]
the twentieth century’s greatest innovation” (qtd. in Judkins). Hal Foster,
similarly, argued, in 1983, that it was “the single most revolutionary for-
mal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century” (84).
American authors Donald Barthelme and Pierre Joris went so far as to
assert that all of twentieth-century art was to some degree inspired or
affected by the principle of collage (Hoffmann 203, Cran 40).
Although it is generally acknowledged that collage emerged in France
at the beginning of the previous century, critics indicate its numerous
antecedents. Whereas Foster calls it an “ancient technique” (without
providing any examples), others tend to attribute its origins to the late
Middle Ages. Among the many precursors of collage scholars list Italian
mosaics, Japanese calligraphic poems, Persian leather-bound books of
images, paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, silva rerum chronicles and
Comte de Lautréamont’s Les chants de Maldoror (1869) (Cran 11–12,
Karpowicz 46–50). The credit for composing the first collage proper is
usually given to Picasso and his 1912 work Still Life with Chair Caning,
an oval Cubist still life incorporating a scrap of oilcloth and framed by a
piece of rope (Hopkins 5). Other Cubist practitioners of collage around
that time were Braque and Juan Gris, the former being occasionally seen
as the actual founder of the method, who should have received more
recognition for his contribution (Harris and Zucker). Their interest in
collage hinged on its “hybridization of painting and sculpture” and its
liminal status between a two- and a three-dimensional work (Jennifer
A.E. Shields 2), as well as on its inherently non-figurative orientation
(Brockelman 4). Brockelman argues that what clearly distinguishes Cub-
ist collage from all the earlier listed antecedents (and justifies the idea of
the “invention” of collage in the twentieth century) is its primary aim to
“represent the intersection of multiple discourses” rather than to build
an artwork out of various components (2). Banash examines the novelty
of collage through the prism of its use of fragmentation. He contends
that although “material cultures have always produced a flotsam and
jetsam of fragments,” collage is the first method of reusing those frag-
ments while exposing them as “ripped, torn, and broken readymades”
and underlining “the seams equally with the glue” (42).
According to A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, collage was introduced
by the Cubists but “extended” by the Surrealists, Dadaists and Futurists
(Kostelanetz 43). The Surrealists, who were keen to explore Freudian ter-
ritories such as dreams and the unconscious, embraced collage as a vehi-
cle for conveying what Max Ernst called an “eruption of the irrational”
(Banash 25). Even though they did not invent the method as such (only
its name), the Surrealists today are more closely associated with collage
than the Cubists (or any other group) because their engagement with it
was more “ostentatious” and “controversial” (Cran 21). Besides coining
the term, their most notable contribution to the development of collage
was applying its principle to literature. Ernst’s La femme 100 têtes (1929)
was the first collage novel – a book-length narrative composed of nonsen-
sical woodcuts accompanied by scant subtitles. The emerging pictures,
characteristically Surrealist in their poetics, were seamlessly arranged
juxtapositions of arbitrary objects, such as human figures, birds, butter-
flies, bottles, severed limbs and cacti. Among the practitioners of Surreal-
ist collage were the representatives of the so-called Young Group (later
known as the Independent Group), which flourished in post-war Britain:
Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull and Richard Hamilton. The latter
is the author of possibly the most iconic British collage Just What Is It
That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) (Taylor
133–34).
The last of the modernist groups which were instrumental in the rise of
collage were the Futurists and the Dadaists. The former saw in collage a
potential for launching an “attack on tradition and the museum status of
works of art” by incorporating various “nonaesthetic materials” (Poggi
xii). John Heartfield, Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann contributed
to the development of collage by artfully combining manipulated photo-
graphs (which had been in use for almost a hundred years) with words.
The Berlin Dadaists, as they came to be known, were the first to sub-
ject collage – or photomontage, as they preferred to call it – to politi-
cal uses.2 They believed in the “supremacy of the message” rather than
in the primacy of the aesthetic (Ades 19). Heartfield became the most
important Dada propagandist and agitator against capitalism, militarism
and Nazism. Among his best known, and most bluntly political, works
are Adolf the Superman Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk (1932), show-
ing Hitler’s spine as made of gold, and Through Light to Night (1933),
which juxtaposes the figure of Joseph Goebbels, the Reichstag and a
stake of burning books. Dadaists, such as Marcel Duchamp and Kurt
Schwitters, also introduced the use of ready-mades in their works, includ-
ing discarded objects found in the street. The earliest and most iconic of
them – Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Fountain (1917) – are not
collages as such but their role in establishing this art form is indisputable.
By putting forward the ready-made, they lay the foundation for what
Banash calls “collage culture” (29).
In many ways, collage was the product of the social, economic, aes-
thetic and philosophical context of the early twentieth century. For
Banash the socio-economic grounding of collage is essential to grasp-
ing its politics and poetics. He sees it as an artistic method inspired by
the transition from local to mass production (epitomized by Fordism),
commodification and the rise of consumer culture (11). Karpowicz, like-
wise, regards it as a product of the contemporary industrial reality and
of the experience of mass copying (60). The link with mass production
finds its clearest expression in the characteristically extensive use of frag-
ments of newspapers in the earliest collages of Picasso, Braque and Gris.
The newspaper, apart from serving as a ready-made, is meant to “define
their work as modern” and convey the “vast amplification of informa-
tion volume and speed” (86). Banash calls the newspaper “the ur-form
of the historical avant-garde and of modernism itself” (83) and argues
that, alongside cinema, it had a tremendous influence on the emergence
of such modernist techniques as “juxtaposition, montage, fragmenta-
tion, simultaneity” (119–20). It was also a common vehicle of circulating
advertisements, whose picture-slogan structure induced the coexistence
of images and words in the collages and photomontages of the time.
Among the other formative influences on the birth of collage Banash sin-
gles out the epoch’s “new emphasis on a divided self” – a consequence of
Sigmund Freud’s exploration of the split subject as well as of the political
and philosophical writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche (43). In
addition, Karpowicz argues that collage was a symptom of the rejected
mimetic potential of artistic representation and of the waning belief in
language’s capacity to signify reality (20). Cran, in turn, points to the two
world wars as the most important context for the emergence of collage.
She quotes Antin’s remark that post-war Europe resembled “a ready-
made rubble heap (a collage)” and Kurt Schwitters’s invocation of the
sense that the war-ravaged world needed “new things . . . to be made out
of the fragments” (qtd. in Cran 129).
Banash proposes that collage is “an uncanny mirror of both the Fordist
production that characterized the first half of the [twentieth] century and
the consumerist ethos that defined the postwar years” (14–15). Collage’s
vast temporal scope complicates its perception as a specifically modern-
ist practice despite its evidently modernist origins. As a result, there is
little critical consensus as regards the classification of collage as a pri-
marily modernist or postmodernist method. Thomas P. Brockelman, the
author of The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and Postmodernism
(2001), muses on the challenging task of his study – to assert the strong
ties between postmodernism and the method which, among others, John
Golding, Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg pronounced to be “the quin-
tessential modernist art” (Brockelman 1). In the end, Brockelman situates
collage as central to both movements and sees it as an “intertwining” of
the modern and postmodern – an expression of “a postmodern as crisis
of the modern announced from within modernity” (6).3 The close rela-
tionship between collage and postmodernism has been attributed to the
former’s opposition to the “principal modernist aesthetic tenets of auton-
omy and unity” (Raaberg), its outright rejection of “totalization” and
“synthesis” (Hassan 19) and to its “deconstructionist impulse . . . to look
inside one text for another, dissolve one text into another” (Harvey 51).
Conversely, the idea that collage is far more rooted in the modernist
rather than postmodernist aesthetic has been advanced by Karpowicz,
who ascribes its commitment to experimentation as well as its iconoclas-
tic and progressive orientation to the politics of the avant-garde (or the
neo-avant-garde). She argues that the basic tenets of postmodernism –
including repetition and the commodification of art – are not applicable
to collage (316–17), even though both of them could be related to the
quintessential collage practice of cutting and pasting.
A major milestone in the history of twentieth-century art was the
“Exhibition of Collage” held in New York City by Max Ernst’s wife,
Peggy Guggenheim. The rich collection of artworks included pre-war
works by Ernst himself, Picasso, Braque, Schwitters and Joseph Cornell,
as well as new commissions by Motherwell and Jackson Pollock. Since
then, as Cran demonstrates in her book on Cornell, William S. Bur-
roughs, Frank O’Hara and Bob Dylan, collage and New York City have
enjoyed a special relationship (27). Other notable practitioners of collage
in the two decades following the end of the Second World War were
other Americans: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Willem de Koon-
ing; British artist Richard Hamilton; and the Czech Jiří Kolář. The two
significant groups which practised collage at the time were the abstract
expressionists and the pop artists (Jennifer A.E. Shields 8). In the 1960s
collage is considered to have lost some of its revolutionary edge. Koste-
lanetz calls it “dead” by the end of the decade, whereas Cran maintains
that it “continu[ed] to flourish” despite the slump (Kostelanetz 124, Cran
214). Among the most prominent (yet unmentioned) visual artists who
practised collage in the last decades of the twentieth century were Joe
Brainard (also the author of a collage-like autobiography I Remember
[1970]), David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, John Stezaker, Lee Krasner
and Jeff Koons. In Collage: The Making of Modern Art (2004), Brandon
Taylor notes that on the eve of the new millennium – “in a culture where
eclecticism is the norm” – collage has become generic and ubiquitous
(208). The physical process of cutting and pasting with scissors and glue
has been replaced with “cut” and “paste” commands on the computer
(212). The most important computer collagists include Sarah Lucas and
Joseph Nechvatal.
The collage aesthetic, although primarily associated with the visual
arts, can be traced to other arts, such as music, film, architecture and
literature. A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes credits John Cage, Morton
Feldman and German-Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel as the key
collage musicians. Bob Dylan and David Bowie are also recognized as
having followed the principles of collage in their songwriting (Kostelanetz
43, Cran 214). Although the term itself is rarely used in musicology, its
basic tenet – appropriation – is central to much of twentieth- and twenty-
first-century music and is referred to as sampling or remix. It underlies
the conception of pieces from Steve Reich’s experimental Different Trains
(1988), which appropriates audio recordings of Holocaust survivors, to
popular mash-ups, such as Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (2004),
a blend of sound elements from the Beatles’ White Album (1968) with
tracks from Jay Z’s The Black Album (2003).
Because of its “permanence” and “preconceived order,” architecture
is rarely associated with collage. Nevertheless, as Juhani Pallasmaa
argues in the foreword to Jennifer A.E. Shields’s Collage and Architec-
ture (2014), collage has been a “conscious and deliberate artistic method
in architecture” ever since Giulio Romano’s design of Palazzo Te in the
sixteenth century (ix–x). Among the most often cited examples of col-
lage architecture are Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (1929),
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kaufman House (1937) and Le Corbusier’s Casa
Curutchet (1953), as well as, more recently, the works of Jean Nouvel,
David Chipperfield and Frank Gehry (Hopkins 10, Pallasmaa x, Jen-
nifer A.E. Shields 12). Although collage was an important inspiration
for early twentieth-century architects in their “experiment[s] with spatial
and material juxtapositions,” the concept had not gained wide currency
in theoretical discussions until the publication of Colin Rowe and Fred
Koetter’s Collage City (1978) – a postmodernist call for replacing the
modernist, utopian “total-design” approach with the idea of a “city of
fragments,” citing existing places from various epochs and cities (Jennifer
A.E. Shields 9, Cutler).
In film studies, collage is not a frequently used critical category either.
The closely related (and essential) notion of montage is used instead
when different camera shots or subplots are interspersed. The term “col-
lage film” is applied mostly to short experimental films which juxtapose
found-footage material from different sources. Early examples of the
genre include Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) – a surrealist rework-
ing of George Melford’s East of Borneo (1931) – Bruce Conner’s A
Movie (1958) and Stan VanDerBeek’s Breathdeath (1964). Among the
contemporary film-makers who use collage are György Pálfi (the director
of Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen, a feature film narrative assembled
from iconic scenes from cinema history, which premiered at the Cannes
Film Festival in 2012), Daisy Asquith (the author of Queerama [2017] –
an examination of the lives of homosexuals as presented in BBC pro-
ductions) and Christian Marclay, who won great acclaim for The Clock
(2010) – a twenty-four-hour collage of short scenes from several thou-
sand films, each of which shows real-time references to the clock, from
midnight to midnight. The film, which had a budget of over one hun-
dred thousand dollars and took five years to complete, was awarded the
Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2011.
Poetics
The collage method can be reduced to the simple actions of cutting
and pasting: Silke Krohn speaks of “taking apart” and “putting back
together” (3), whereas Banash prefers to use the terms “selection” and
“arrangement” (14). The selected elements are cut out of their original
context and juxtaposed with other, similarly decontextualized, materials.
The combination may be seamless if the cutting is performed meticulously
and the appropriated part is integrated with the rest. Such is the case with
Ernst’s collage novels, in which the contours are so fine that they can
only be detected during a close examination of the original images. On
the other end of the spectrum are works which deliberately expose the
stitches. Several contemporary collagists favour the latter strategy: Sergei
Sviatchenko makes seemingly hasty or careless cuttings, while Andrew
Lundwall and Nicholas Lockyer occasionally do not use scissors at all
and tear out certain elements (Krohn 4). Banash notes that, as a result
of the technical simplicity of cutting and pasting, the collage artist is
“deskilled,” since the process of creating art does not require a talented
craftsman and could be performed by an “assembly line worker” (63).
Harold Rosenberg argues that collage’s removal of the need to “know
how to paint” or even make the “effort of painting” imbues it with an
“element of mockery” (64).
Because, by definition, collage does not combine the cut-out material
into an organic and logical whole (which can be the case with mosaic
or montage), the “negation of synthesis” is its “structural principle”
(Bürger 82). Cran argues that the “inherent” property of collage practice
is “a defence against singularity and wholeness” (127). That defining lack
of cohesion, according to Perloff, stems from the “dual function” of each
component, which “refers to an external reality even as its compositional
thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it seems to assert” (Futurist
Moment 49). When identifying the formal characteristics of the method –
the poetics of collage – critics tend to use adjectives containing negative
prefixes such as “incoherent,” “discontinuous,” “nonrepresentational,”
“antimimetic,” “antinarrative” and “anti-utopian” (Antin 108, Karpow-
icz 10, 56; Brockelman 165). Since collage emphasizes “the cut, ripped,
and fragmented,” it can be seen as a “violent” artistic method (Banash
41). Invoking the example of The Waste Land, poet and critic David
Antin emphasizes the method’s dynamic aspect visible in the poem’s “sav-
age collage cuts” (121). Among the other properties highlighted in col-
lage criticism are ambiguity, ambivalence, self-referentiality and openness
to multiple interpretations (Nycz 11, Brockelman 185). Several authors
also point to irony and humour as traits resulting from the coexistence
in every collage of two or more incongruous voices (Bell, Brockelman 2).
In place of synthesis, collage offers juxtaposition. The complex,
although tenuous, logical connections between its components have also
been outlined by Antin:
Collage involves suppression of the ordering signs that would specify

the “stronger logical relations” among the presented elements. By
“stronger logical relations” I mean relations of implication, entail-
ment, negation, subordination and so on. Among logical relations
that may still be present are relations of similarity, equivalence, iden-
tity, their negative forms, dissimilarity, nonequivalence, nonidentity,
and some kind of image of concatenation, grouping or association.
(211)
In a similar vein, Perloff sees the principle of collage as based on the

replacement of “subordination” by “coordination” and of “logic [and]
sequence” by “likeness and difference” (“Collage” 386). In more general
terms, she argues that collage renounces any structural “hierarchy” of its
parts and organizes them according to the logic of parataxis – a rhetori-
cal strategy of placing phrases, clauses or sentences alongside one another
without the use of any conjunctions (Perloff, Futurist Moment 75). The
example “I was angry. I punched him. The sun came out” juxtaposes
three clauses but leaves out the implicit connectives (“because, “and
then”) which indicate the relations between them. In collage poetry, Per-
loff declares that “the things described exist: the poet puts them before us
without explicit comment or explanation” (“Collage” 386).4
Besides parataxis, other notions which could be invoked here as denot-
ing a similar organization are Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopia,
defined by Harvey as the “coexistence . . . [of] incommensurable spaces
that are juxtaposed or superimposed upon each other” (48), and – in a
strictly literary context – the lesser-known concepts of the spatial form
by Joseph Frank and of the architectonic novel by Sharon Spencer. In
“Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945), Frank proposes a spatial
approach to literature in response to the narrative discontinuity of mod-
ernist fiction (particularly in the works of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
and Djuna Barnes). He postulates a non-sequential reading of novels as
if they were imagist poems in which the flow of time is arrested and all
the elements are to be experienced simultaneously. Drawing on Frank’s
method, Spencer introduced the notion of the architectonic novel to
account for the structure of, among others, the nouveaux romans by
Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor. Such texts are “constructed from
prose fragments of diverse types and lengths and arranged by means of
the principle of juxtaposition” (xx–xxi). The diverse fragments – like
“bricks, stones, steel rods, and concrete blocks” (174) – are combined
and amount to an architectonic structure.
The egalitarian, antihierarchical structure of collage is underlined by
Lance Olsen in his already quoted essay “Notes Toward the Musicality
of Creative Disjunction, Or: Fiction by Collage.” He observes in many
contemporary literary collages a commitment to “effacing, or at least
deeply and richly complicating, the accepted difference between privi-
leged and subordinate discourses,” such as fiction and literary criticism
(130). The underlying strategy of collage, according to Olsen, is to wel-
come diverse material, both humble and noble in origin, and thus to cele-
brate “conflation, fusion and confusion, Frankensteinian fictions, cyborg
scripts, centaur texts, and the narratologically amphibious writings that
embrace a poetics of beautiful monstrosity” (130). What emerges out of
this juxtaposition is inevitably a highly fragmented whole which does
not constitute a linear narrative. In order to account for this property of
most collage fictions, Olsen cites Serbian writer Milorad Pavić’s distinc-
tion between “nonreversible” and “reversible” art. Whereas the former –
traditionally the domain of literature and music – is “unidirectional” and
needs to be experienced in a prearranged order, the latter – a category
including most visual arts – is “multidirectional and rhizomic” (131).
Both Pavić and Olsen regard reversibility as one of the aspirations of
literary collage. Of course, the specificity of print books makes complete
reversibility impossible since the structure of the bound book predeter-
mines the order of reading. However, such publishing solutions as releas-
ing texts as collections of loose pages or including notes that encourage
the reader to experience the work in the order of their choice are some of
the ways of distancing literature from the pole of non-reversibility.
Pavić’s distinction echoes that between the organic and non-organic
work of art as introduced in Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde
(1984). The former rests on the “assumption of a necessary congru-
ence between the meaning of the individual parts and the meaning of
the whole” (Bürger 80). In the latter kind, the overall meaning of the
work is not a synthesis of the meanings of its components.5 Therefore
the individual parts are no longer necessary and may be omitted without
the work being materially changed (80).6 Bürger argues that even such
a work yields to interpretation, as it is possible to detect some mini-
mal degree of unity to it. Nycz indicates that collage’s minimum of unity
includes drawing space and time boundaries as well as determining a cer-
tain thematic scope. He sees those properties as characteristic of Umberto
Eco’s notion of the open work (12). Brockelman, in turn, states that even
though collage is a “composition,” it is “difficult indeed to ascribe to it
a sense of ‘totality’ ” (29–30). The emerging whole is created out of the
“contradictory relationship of heterogeneous elements” rather than out
of harmony (Bürger 82). However, that complex whole does not become
immediately apparent – the initial reaction to the avant-garde work’s
“refusal to provide meaning” is most often that of “shock.” Some recipi-
ents, Bürger points out, will not progress beyond that response; others
will invest more effort to comprehend the work’s “enigmatic quality.” In
order to gain a richer understanding of it, they must shift their attention
to its formal construction (80–81).
Whereas Bürger’s considerations apply to avant-garde works in gen-
eral, Nycz outlines a very similar interpretive process in the context of
literary collage – he speaks of the passage from the sense of being lost,
from perceiving the text as “strange” and incomprehensible, to the need
to examine the text more closely and concentrate on its organization.
The initial feeling of incomprehension can, therefore, be regarded as a
“unique rhetorical device” whose aim is to motivate the reader to become
more active and “inventive” (27). In that respect, collage fictions belong
to the Barthesian category of “writerly” (scriptible), rather than “read-
erly” (lisible), works (S/Z 4). Their formal complexity and reluctance to
yield meaning encourage the reader to increase their engagement with the
work: to focus maximum attention, to reread the text and to become a
virtual co-author of its meaning. “In collage,” argues Brockelman, “sense
is something to be made rather than secured” (37, emphasis original).
Cran stresses that the reader’s engagement in collage is not exclusively
intellectual but also emotional (4). Because collage involves an “invita-
tion to participate” as well as an “assault” on the recipient, it is meant to
be not only interpreted but also “experienced” (223–24, 136).
One of the most influential examinations of the poetics of collage is
Rosalind Krauss’s essay “In the Name of Picasso,” in which she proposes
that the “absent origin” – the discarded context – of each appropriated
component plays a crucial role in the practice of collage.7 “It is this eradi-
cation of the original surface,” Krauss argues, “and the reconstitution
of it through the figure of its own absence that is the master term of the
entire condition of collage as a system of signifiers” (19). This results in
the necessity of what the avant-garde Group Mu refer to in their mani-
festo as the “double reading” of every collage – “that of the fragment
perceived in relation to its text of origin” and “that of the same fragment
as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality” (qtd. in Brock-
elman 2). The multiple contexts submerged in every collage make it a
highly demanding art form to interpret, requiring both expertise and time
to reconstruct its buried origins.
Krauss draws a parallel in her essay between the “absent origin” in
collage and the absence as a prerequisite for the Saussurean sign. She
also points to the analogy between the equivocality of the components
of Cubist collage with the diacritical nature of the sign. On that basis,
Krauss suggests that the meanings of both sign and collage are “never
an absolute, but rather a choice from a set of possibilities, with meaning
determined by the very terms not chosen” (16–17, emphasis original).
The lack of a single fixed meaning of any collage has been asserted most
forcibly by Brockelman, who contends that any interpretive “key” to its
meaning is “by definition, missing.” “The point is,” he states, “rather, to
fiddle indefinitely with the lock” (67). Each attempt to pinpoint its ulti-
mate meaning is doomed to failure and can only lead to a reduction of
its complexity and a limited understanding. In order to avoid that pitfall,
collage should be examined from a variety of perspectives and with a
wide range of methods (Cran 223). The impossibility of arriving at any
solid truth in the process of interpreting a collage means that this art
is – willfully – incapable of serving the ethical function of “showing us
our place in the universe” (Harries qtd. in Brockelman 38). Brockelman
coins the term “collage hermeneutics” to account for the outlook on the
world inherent in collage practice. Its foundations are “radical ambiva-
lence,” undecidability, the rejection of “totalization” and the refusal to
privilege any form of knowledge (184–85). In that respect, collage is,
according to Brockelman, a “deconstructive” and essentially postmod-
ern practice (184).
In the light of the formal characteristics outlined in this section, the
poetics of collage could be defined by means of the following qualities:
incongruity and discontinuity, lack of narrative coherence, fragmenta-
tion, parataxis and antihierarchical structure. A combination of those
traits necessitates a greater commitment from the reader to process the
non-organic amalgam of components, which frequently results in inter-
pretive ambiguity and imbues the work with a capacity to puzzle, alienate
or shock the audience. The poetics of collage is by no means homogene-
ous; as Stephen Fredman notes, works of assemblage and collage greatly
depend for their effect on the ready-mades they incorporate, “objects
which bear traces of time and association with prior functions,” and on
the “rhetorical interchange [they] set up between objects” (15).
Politics
The politics of collage can be derived from the two essential practices of
cutting and pasting. In an earlier cited passage, David Banash argues that
they represent two opposing “desires” which fuel each collage: “the cut-
ting edge of critique that seeks the differential frisson of new contexts to
explode possible meanings of any fragment and the conservative desire of
nostalgia that persists in any collage that calls out to the earlier contexts
of its fragments” (31–32). The progressive and regressive impulses coex-
ist and “form the dialectic of the technique” but not necessarily in equal
measure: some collagists choose to foreground the deconstructive ele-
ment by exposing the seams, while others emphasize the reconstruction
by meticulously integrating the components (246). The former strategy
can be a vehicle of critique, social, political or artistic, and the latter – of
resistance to change and of the nostalgic idealization of the past.
Cutting is a violent act, and such are often the practices of collage:
“opening the sutures,” “revealing the seams and hidden contexts”
(Banash 165), challenging established norms and conventions and
“breaking down perceptual habits” (Karpowicz 135). The deconstruc-
tive gesture of cutting has been, since the advent of collage, used as a
tool of exposing the “fragile nature of ideologies,” such as nationalism,
fascism and capitalism, particularly by the Surrealists and the Dadaists
(Banash 25–26). Brockelman proposes that collage-as-critique can have
a vast scope and function as “an aesthetic weapon for resisting the estab-
lishment of any utopian totality” (165). The irreverent refusal to respect
the integrity of any material, including scriptures, and the anarchic readi-
ness to mix the high and the low make collage a radically sceptical artistic
strategy. An example of that kind of writing is found poetry, also referred
to as flarf – a poetic genre dependent on Google-sculpting, which gained
popularity during George W. Bush’s presidency and ridiculed the vacuity
of public statements by Bush and other members of his administration –
for example, Hart Seely’s Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry
of Donald H. Rumsfeld (2003). The collagist of the first, deconstructive,
kind does not recognize authority, challenges received ideas and (to quote
Michel de Montaigne) “sleeps on the pillow of doubt.”
Pasting, on the other hand, is motivated by the nostalgic desire to
“gather together” and “make a new whole” (Banash 173). Rather than
celebrating fragmentation, which is implicit in the act of cutting up, it
attempts to collect the shards and integrate them. Banash perceives that
wish to “redeem” fragments as symbolic of the hope that “the flood of
words, images, and objects that make up our chaotic modern lives could
be put together and made whole” (173). The reconstructive side of col-
lage has also been noted by Karpowicz, who regards it as an expression
of the rupture of reality as well as an effort to “darn” or repair it. She
cites Jean-Ives Bosseur’s remark that collage may operate as a “dress-
ing of the void” (40). Among the collage artists who emphasize gather-
ing over fragmenting are T.S. Eliot, Joseph Cornell and Andy Warhol;
the opposing camp includes Tristan Tzara and other Dadaists (Banash
173, 245).
Although collage may at first glance appear an escapist art, the
above remarks point to its capacity for an intense engagement with the
contemporary world. The following oft-quoted statement by Picasso can
afford an insight into collage’s subtle ways of commenting on reality:
If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something

to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too.
This displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not
made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this
strangeness was what we wanted to make people think about because
we were quite aware that the world was becoming very strange and
not exactly reassuring.
(qtd. in Brockelman 31)
Instead of explicitly naming its concerns by using mimetic means, col-

lage may employ displacement or an objective correlative (an element
whose function is to stir a specific emotion) to evoke a given response
in the reader. The idea of conveying the “strangeness” of reality and of
encouraging the recipient to see it afresh is also known as defamiliari-
zation. Although Viktor Shklovsky’s notion is rarely applied to collage,
there is a significant overlap between their politics. Both rely on the initial
effect of shock, whose purpose is to stun the audience into attention and
shake them out of their perceptual lethargy.8 Cran states that the recipi-
ent of a collage is often confronted with the inner question “What the
fuck is going on?” in response to the work’s refusal to conform to their
expectations of art (222).9 That gesture can be symbolic of reality’s non-
compliance with people’s expectations of it.
William S. Burroughs made the boldest assertion of collage’s potential
to represent reality. In a manifesto for the “cut-up” technique, which he
devised with Brion Gysin, Burroughs announces that collage is a form of
realism whose capacity to convey the substance of modern reality is, par-
adoxically, greater than that of ostensibly realist art (Nicol 70). Since the
contemporary experience of fragmentation resists realist representation,
it needs to be expressed by other means: “Take a walk down a city street
and put down what you have just seen on canvas. You have seen a person
cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements,
reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments” (Burroughs,
“Fall” 76). Burroughs goes so far as to say that human consciousness is
itself a cut-up rather than the steady and ongoing “stream,” from Wil-
liam James’s famous coinage (76). The idea that a special affinity between
collage and contemporary reality springs from their use and experience,
respectively, of fragmentation continues to be advanced by twenty-first-
century critics (Banash 14; Brockelman 183).
Another foundation of the close relationship between collage and real-
ity is the method’s commitment to transcending “the borders between
literature and reality, art and life, the world and the text” (Karpow-
icz 53). Collage achieves that aim through incorporating elements of
reality – ready-mades – in the form of quotations and objects of everyday
use.10 By juxtaposing them with originally created elements, and thus
placing them on the same level, the distinction between reality and art
collapses. Bürger indicates the far-reaching implications of that process
in Theory of the Avant-Garde: “The insertion of reality fragments into
the work of art fundamentally transforms that work. The artist not only
renounces shaping a whole but gives the painting a different status, since
parts of it no longer have the relationship to reality characteristic of the
organic work of art. They are no longer signs pointing to reality, they are
reality” (78, emphasis original).
Collage’s engagement in reality is also discernible in its political com-
mitment, which was inaugurated by the Dadaists. The earlier mentioned
anti-Nazi photomontages of John Heartfield are among the most openly
and radically political works of art. Collage, however, is rarely unam-
biguous in its political statements, as that requires a straightforward mes-
sage, which is at odds with the poetics of this art. Karpowicz sees its
political potential not so much in taking sides and demonstrating specific
sympathies but rather in its enactment of agency – fueled by the “belief
that one can rearrange their reality,” as one reorganizes materials by cut-
ting and pasting, and “create it anew” (297). Yet since the avant-garde
is often associated with left-wing politics, some critics (including Theo-
dor Adorno) wanted to see collage as an inherently anti-capitalist and
progressive practice. Indeed, many collage artists, such as the Russian
avant-gardists, Burroughs and the members of the New York School,
had distinctly leftist views. On the other hand, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
are notorious for their fascist and anti-Semitic sympathies, respectively.
Bürger concludes his discussion of the political entanglements of modern-
ist collagists (or “montagists,” as he prefers to call them) by stating that it
is “fundamentally problematic to assign a fixed meaning to a procedure”
(78). Banash, likewise, notes that collage may serve as a “transgressive
force” as well as a tool of “the most reactionary and conservative desires”
(122). Bürger’s overall assessment of the political influence of collage is
mixed: although it contributed to subverting the modernist idea of auton-
omous art, which abstains from social and political engagement, it failed
as an avant-garde project of a politically oppositional art (Raaberg).
Although collage is not a natural ally of any political stance, it has
undoubtedly been used in the service of specific ideas and political move-
ments more often than of others. In her article “Beyond Fragmenta-
tion: Collage as Feminist Strategy in the Arts,” Gwen Raaberg asserts
the privileged position of collage in feminist literature and visual arts.
Lucy Lippard, who views it as the dominant aesthetic of feminist art,
explains this phenomenon by pointing to collage’s method of “putting
things together without divesting them of their own identities” and, as
such, serving as “a metaphor for cultural democracy” (209). Lippard
argues that feminist collage, unlike its postmodern variety, demonstrates
“positive fragmentation,” where the “political consciousness” functions
as a “glue” that ties the pieces into a “new order,” if not a “new whole”
(136). Feminist identity itself, she proposes, can be called a “collage of
disparate, not yet fully compatible parts” (168). Among the most impor-
tant representatives of feminist collage are, according to Raaberg, Kathy
Acker and Barbara Kruger. Although the former was a writer and the
latter is a visual artist, their strategies of violently or humorously appro-
priating and confronting fragments of mainstream culture are alike.
Such are also their political aims: to shock the audience out of politi-
cal indifference, to subvert “monological discourses” and deconstruct
“hegemonic cultural representations” (Raaberg). The lasting symbiosis
of feminism and collage has been recognized in Miriam Schapiro’s coin-
age “femmage,” which has been a productive label applied to the works
of such artists as Betye Saar, Mimi Smith, Harmony Hammond and Scha-
piro herself.
Owing to its reliance on the practices of cutting and pasting and on the
appropriation of ready-made objects, collage has been particularly well
positioned to respond to the rise of consumerism, which coincided with
the latter’s own development. Banash, whose book on collage is subti-
tled “Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption,” advances
the thesis that, throughout the twentieth century, collage was the most
important vehicle for representatives of all arts to comment critically
on various aspects of the pervasive commodity culture (12). He dis-
tinguishes between two major artistic approaches to mass production:
“direct resistance” and conformity – “becoming the very thing the system
demands.” Among those who opposed the dictates of consumer culture
Banash includes the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock,
Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. The group of wilful conformists,
who embraced the idea of the artwork as a commodity, features Marcel
Duchamp and Andy Warhol (12–13). Whatever the individual artist’s
stance towards consumerism, Banash believes that each collage formally
emerges from, and is complicit in, the culture built on consumption:
The process of assembling a collage . . . mirrors the consumer wan-

dering through a vast mall, selecting this and then that, bringing it
all together in a new arrangement. . . . Like the consumer speaking a
code of identity by assembling particular elements, the collage artist
assembles a work from readymade materials to make an individual
statement that nonetheless speaks the universal code of capitalism.
(16)
The above is not the only parallel that can be drawn between the con-
struction of collage and mass production. In his study, Banash invokes
Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the “technique of fragmenta-
tion,” which is the “essence of machine technology,” exerted a profound
influence on the human disposition and activity in the twentieth century
(McLuhan 8). He concludes that, as both Karl Marx and McLuhan would
concur, “we become the reflections of our modes and means of produc-
tion” (50). This remark could be extended to include collage, which, like
machine technology, relies on the practice of assembling fragments.
Literary Collages in the Twentieth Century

Collage is not a frequently used category in literary studies. Most diction-
aries of literary terms, including the classical ones by Joseph T. Shipley
and M.H. Abrams, omit it altogether. Those which do feature an entry
discuss it briefly: J.A. Cuddon’s A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Lit-
erary Theory offers an explanation of its etymology, an indication of
its visual provenance, a very short description of its structure (“a work
which contains a mixture of allusions, references, quotations, and foreign
expressions”) and an enumeration of authors associated with collage:
James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and David Jones, as well as “modern
anti-novelists” (“Collage” 133).
More in-depth discussions of literary collage can only be found in spe-
cialized publications either on collage at large or on experimental writing.
Alison Gibbons, in The Routledge Companion to Experimental Litera-
ture (2012), notes that there is a critical consensus that the founder of the
collage novel was Max Ernst (430–31), whose three consecutive book-
length narratives – La femme 100 têtes (1929), Rêve d’une petite fille
qui voulut entrer au carmel (1930) and Une semaine de bonté (1934) –
interspersed cut-outs of images appropriated from nineteenth-century
pulp books with short, and often ironic, subtitles. Even though Ernst’s
invention of the collage novel did not attract many followers – the term
is usually applied either to Ernst’s works or to homages to them, such as
Two Women and a Nightengale: A Novel in Collage (2004, sic) and Arte-
mis: A Tragedy of Collage (2004) by Michael Betancourt – it is credited
by some critics with influencing the emergence of the graphic novel genre
(Madden, Bane and Flory 43). Among other modernist novels whose
structure is occasionally considered collage-like (although I would clas-
sify most of them as montage, since they rarely appropriate external con-
tent) are Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936),
as well as the works of Leonora Carrington and Raymond Queneau.
Modernist poetry depended on collage to a far greater extent than
the novel – collage is considered by some critics to have been one of its
central principles from the beginning of modernism (Antin 107). It was
embraced as a vehicle for “more accurately evok[ing] the strangeness of
life” and “shrug[ging] off and destabiliz[ing] the established structures of
Western literature” (Cran 24). The landmark collage poems of the time
are Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) and The Waste
Land (1922), Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and The Cantos
(1917–1962), and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946). Among
the most important practitioners of collage poetry in other languages
were Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti (Seitz 13–15).
The most often cited passage of modernist collage poetry is the closing
eight lines of The Waste Land, in which Eliot juxtaposes excerpts from
seven sources – a children’s song (line 1); the Upanishads (7–8); poems
by Algernon Swinburne (3b), Alfred Lord Tennyson (3b) and Gérard
de Nerval (4); an ancient Latin poet (3a); Dante’s The Divine Comedy
(2); and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (6) – all of them in their
original language (English, Italian, French, Latin and Sanskrit):
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon – O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins (5)
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
Having been cut out of the contexts in which they carried their original
meaning, the fragments are “virtually meaningless” and their arrange-
ment is “of no consequence” – they “simply coexist” (Brooker and Bent-
ley 201). The relationship between the consecutive appropriated lines
is best understood as governed by parataxis – a juxtaposition without
explicit transitions or discernible logical relations. According to Jay
Parini, the collage method of the poem serves a “mimetic” function – its
many fragments resemble “a heap of broken images” and evoke the “des-
iccated ruin that Eliot sees as the condition of postwar Anglo-American
civilization” (538). The fragmentariness of The Waste Land was radically
reinforced by its dedicatee – Ezra Pound, whose heavy revision of Eliot’s
poem involved considerable cuts, such as the deletion of over 70 lines
from the opening parts of “The Fire Sermon” and “Death by Water”
(Beach 43–44).
As mentioned before, Pound’s most important contribution to col-
lage – besides his work on The Waste Land – were his long poems Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley and The Cantos, though harbingers of a collage-
like structure can already be detected in his earlier poem Homage to
Sextus Propertius (1919), which combines quotations and references to
high culture with colloquial passages. The Cantos, Pound’s unfinished
magnum opus of approximately twenty-three thousand lines, is gener-
ally regarded as particularly indebted to the collage principle. Like The
Waste Land, it draws on literature, myth and history (its wide range
of reference includes such figures as Confucius, Thomas Jefferson and
Benito Mussolini) and liberally appropriates passages from, among oth-
ers, Homer’s “Hymn to Aphrodite” and The Odyssey (excerpts from
both are featured in Canto I) (Beach 32). Among the many intertextual
allusions is an address to Eliot – “These fragments you have shelved
(shored)” – followed by two vulgar interjections, “ ‘Slut!’ ‘Bitch!’ ”
Parini sees that passage as Pound’s recognition of “overlap, as well as
divergence, between his allusive collage method and Eliot’s.” In place of
structural mimesis, Pound favours “synecdochic” fragmentation – the
function of parts is to point to a whole (539). In Collage and Literature:
The Persistence of Vision (2019), Scarlett Higgins analyzes The Cantos
as the embodiment of Pound’s “ideogrammic method” (conceived on the
basis of Ernest Fenollosa’s writings about Chinese poetry), which relies
on a collage-like juxtaposition of “two or more concrete images without
conventional syntactic connectives” (27).
Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s collage was an impor-
tant inspiration for the New York School of poets. Most of their main
representatives – John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Barbara Guest, Kenneth
Koch, Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, James Schuyler and Anne Waldman –
applied the principles of collage in their own writing and drew inspi-
ration from such artists as Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning, Jasper
Johns, Robert Motherwell and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of them,
like Ashbery, O’Hara and, in particular, Brainard, composed visual col-
lages themselves.11 The New York poets frequently appropriated lines
from newspapers, which either serve as the sole material of the poem
(Schuyler’s “The Times: A Collage”) or as a trigger for original content,
as in O’Hara’s famous “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed).” Even so,
appropriation is not always the main criterion of the collage-like struc-
ture of their works. Cran argues that collage in O’Hara’s poetry “oper-
ates conceptually” and that instances of actual cutting and pasting are
not very common (138). Instead, his texts – particularly the so-called
“I do this, I do that” poems – interweave multiple fragmentary glimpses
of urban life, producing a “remarkable collage of ideas, moments, quo-
tations, emotions, thoughts, and situations” (135).12 Cran emphasizes
that O’Hara’s collage poems, despite their fragmentation and resistance
to “overarching meaning or poetic universality,” succeed in evoking an
emotional response from the reader thanks to their candid, personal
tone (comparable to Brainard’s earlier mentioned collage-like memoir I
Remember) (183). Other notable poetic collages by the representatives
of the school are Ashbery’s collection The Tennis Court Oath (1962),
Schuyler’s “Freely Espousing” and Koch’s long poem “When the Sun
Tries to Go On.”13
Another American writer to use collage in the 1960s was Donald Bar-
thelme, the author of the much-quoted dictum that collage was “the
central principle of all art in the twentieth century.” The method was par-
ticularly important to his early works, such as his first novel Snow White
(1967) – a multimodal, metafictional and quintessentially postmodern
retelling of the popular fairy tale set in contemporary New York City –
and a number of short stories (Barthelme’s favourite literary form) such as
“The Rise of Capitalism” and “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning.”
The novel is composed of an array of heterogeneous, fragmentary pieces
including pictures, textual graphics, parodic advertisement slogans, pas-
sages of mock literary criticism and a famous questionnaire, asking the
reader increasingly nonsensical questions. Actual ready-mades, however,
are rare and usually take the form of literary quotations, for instance from
Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Barthelme has described
his method as a “mosaic” and a “collage” – a juxtaposition of “one little
piece of noise to another little piece of noise” and “mak[ing] music out
of noise” (qtd. in Sloboda). In his later work “The Rise of Capitalism,”
collage serves a different end. In this nine-paragraph mixture of prose
fragments, Barthelme intersperses Marxist slogans (“Cultural underde-
velopment of the worker, as a technique of domination, is found every-
where under late capitalism”) with Biblical lines (“It is better to marry
than to burn”), everyday clichés (“Another day, another dollar”) and
disconnected statements (“Strands of raven hair floating on the surface
of the Ganges”). This time the aim, according to Luisa María González
Rodríguez, is to subvert “dominant cultural discourses,” such as capital-
ism, Marxism and religion, whose fragments are interspersed with trivial
and meaningless content and thus deprived of their privileged status and
ultimately “turn[ed] into verbal waste.” Other notable American meta-
fictionists of the 1960s and 1970s who should be mentioned in this con-
text are John Barth, Robert Coover and Ronald Sukenick, all of whom
were to some degree influenced by the principles of collage and montage.
The latter called collage “one of the mind’s most formidable methods of
organizing the disparities of experience” (Sukenick 14).
Using collage as a means of opposing hegemonic systems was one of
the strategies of yet another American writer of the time – William S. Bur-
roughs. Born in the same city as Eliot (St Louis, Missouri) and taught by
him at Harvard, Burroughs was a great admirer of Eliot’s poetry, particu-
larly The Waste Land, whose structure inspired him to invent the cut-up
method.14 Another influence was British multimedia artist Brion Gysin,
who persuaded Burroughs that literature in the 1960s was five decades
behind the visual arts because of its resistance to adopting collage as
its governing formal principle (Burroughs, “Cut-Up Method” 268). In
his manifesto essay from 1961, Burroughs offers instructions on how to
practise the technique, which he sees as open to all, artists and non-artists
alike (269):
The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like
this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have
four sections: 1 2 3 4. . . . Now rearrange the sections placing section
four with section one and section two with section three. And you
have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes
something quite different.
(268)
Burroughs used the cut-up method, as well as its slightly modified ver-
sion called the fold-in method, in his three consecutive novels: The Soft
Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express
(1964).15 The middle one is formally the most experimental and radical
in its use of collage. In the below passage, Burroughs cuts up lines from
“Auld Lang Syne” and several popular songs of the time, such as “Do
You Love Me” and “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” to create com-
pletely non-linear and non-narrative parataxis:
Do you love me? – But i exploded in cosmic laughter – Old acquaint-

ance be forgot? – Oh darling, just a photograph? – Mary i love you
i do do you know i love you through? – On my knees i hoped you’d
love me too – I would run till i feel the thrill of long ago – Now my
inspiration but it won’t last and we’ll be just a photograph – i’ve
forgotten you then? i can’t sleep, Blue Eyes, if i don’t have you – Do
i love her? i love you i love you many splendored thing.
(Ticket 179)
In his book-length reassessment of Burroughs and his legacy Shift Lin-

guals: Cut-Up Narratives from Burroughs to the Present (2011), Edward
S. Robinson argues that in the years following Naked Lunch “collage . . .
would inform Burroughs’ work” and lead him to “developing experi-
mental techniques beyond anything hitherto seen in literature” (38).
Robinson shows how the cut-up has transformed across decades from
“splicing together random phrases cut from newspapers, through the use
of word and image in collage combination, to the application of modern
word processing and other digital technologies” in the twenty-first cen-
tury (1–2). As for Burroughs’s writing, although he continued to write
novels until the 1980s, his belief in cut-ups and fold-ins gradually waned.
In a later interview, he reflected on some of the pitfalls of formal experi-
mentation: “writers get carried away by a technique and what they can
do with it and carry it so far that they lose their readers” (Miles 124).
Whereas Eliot was the literary role model for Burroughs, Burroughs
himself was the first significant influence on Kathy Acker – American
novelist, poet, playwright, essayist and feminist critic. Both of them also
regarded themselves as outcasts – in their personal life, their artistic
choices and their political allegiances (Winterson ix). As Rob Latham
argues in “Collage as Critique and Invention in the Fiction of William S.
Burroughs and Kathy Acker,” they were also both wary of “conventional
systems of literary representation,” which they saw as ideologically
normative and harmful (47–48). Their use of formal experimentation,
together with shocking imagery (such as graphic depictions – verbal or
visual – of outlawed sexual encounters involving incest and paedophilia),
may be viewed as fuelled by the wish to scandalize the conservative audi-
ence and challenge hegemonic normativity. Gwen Raaberg describes the
politics of Acker’s work as confronting the reader and “jolt[ing them] out
of comfortable patterns of reading.” Acker explained her rationale for
adopting collage in the following way: “To copy down, to appropriate, to
deconstruct other texts is to break down those perceptual habits the cul-
ture doesn’t want to be broken.” Her radical appropriation, or “merciless
raiding,” of such writers as Marquis de Sade, Charles Dickens, Nathan-
iel Hawthorne, John Keats, Arthur Rimbaud, William Faulkner, Eliot,
Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze is interpreted by Jeanette Winterson
as “revenge on a male literary tradition” and by Susan E. Hawkins – as
“textual piracy” and an act of “feminist guerrilla warfare” (Winterson
ix, Hawkins 637).
Acker’s most collage-like novels, both highly appropriative and employ-
ing the cut-up method, are The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri
Toulouse Lautrec (1975) and the partly autobiographical Blood and
Guts in High School (1978). The latter incorporates drawings, handwrit-
ten fragments and diagrams, some of which bear no evident relation to
the book’s narrative focus. Robinson sees Blood and Guts as particularly
indebted to Burroughs’s later multimedia works such as White Subway
(1973), The Book of Breeething (1975) and The Third Mind (1977, co-
written with Gysin). Its arbitrary structure – making it possible to read
the book’s short sections in any chosen order – is viewed by Robinson as
a parallel with Naked Lunch (165–66).
The vast majority of writers discussed so far come from the United
States, which reflects America’s position at the forefront of formal experi-
mentation in the second part of the twentieth century. Despite Britain’s
substantial contribution to the modernist avant-garde, it showed rela-
tively little interest in literary experiments after the Second World War.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when the nouveau roman flourished across the
English Channel and Burroughs published his cut-up novels and manifes-
tos, most British authors embraced social realism and renounced formal
innovation. Among the few British novelists who adopted some of the
principles of collage in their work were Alan Burns, B.S. Johnson, Tom
Phillips, Ann Quin and J.G. Ballard. Except for the latter, none of those
authors managed to receive wide acclaim at the time. The best known
British work influenced by the cut-up method,16 Ballard’s The Atroc-
ity Exhibition (1970), is a highly fragmentary mixture of short discon-
nected texts, classified either as a novel or a collection of stories. Andrzej
Gasiorek calls it “a literary collage, a Surrealist potpourri assembled out
of found objects taken from popular culture,” whose diverse material,
through “suggestions, resonances, echoes,” enables the reader to form
“speculative patterns” but resists “overarching synthesis” (58). Jeanette
Baxter also suggests the book’s indebtedness to Surrealist collage, while
Roger Luckhurst sees it as more influenced by the Cubist method (Baxter;
Luckhurst 90). Baxter argues that the full extent of Ballard’s intention
to engage with collage in The Atrocity Exhibition can be traced in sto-
ries – such as “The Summer Cannibals” (1969) – whose modified ver-
sions became part of the book. She calls that piece “Surrealist collage at
its most heretical” – a chaotic, anarchic even, “multi-media spectacle,”
composed of text and images appropriated from road safety manuals,
films with Brigitte Bardot and urban-planning materials.
The post-war British author who most persistently followed the col-
lage method was Alan Burns. Influenced by Ernst and Burroughs alike,
he adopted a very similar technique to the cut-up as early as in 1965.
His novel Europe After the Rain was even accused of plagiarizing Bur-
roughs’s innovation, although he claimed not to be aware of it until sev-
eral years later (Darlington 167). His later novels are collage-like in the
sense that they eschew plot and character (Babel [1969]); appropriate,
cut up and intersperse recorded voices of various people (The Angry
Brigade: A Documentary Novel [1973]); and mix – without semanti-
cally integrating – original text with images by another artist (The Day
the Daddy Died [1981]). Burns’s friend and artistic ally, B.S. Johnson
experimented with a montage of perspectives in House Mother Normal
(1971) and tested the aleatory potential of the novel-in-the-box format
in The Unfortunates (1969). His most collage-like novel is Albert Angelo
(1964), which is composed of sections using different points of view and
contains appropriated adverts, posters and teacher assessment forms
as well as typographic and material experiments (including the famous
holes in two consecutive pages). Though primarily associated with the
pop art movement in the visual arts, Eduardo Paolozzi also contributed
to British collage literature in the 1960s. Titled like a Swedish choco-
late bar, Kex (1966) is a seamlessly arranged and laid out (by Richard
Hamilton) structure consisting of “passages of text culled from thrill-
ers, film reviews, advertisements for electronic equipment and articles on
history, physics, interior decoration, ornithology and atomic weapons,”
which reads like a “surrealistic embrace of the random, the disconnected
and the revelatory non sequitur” (“Kex”). The book’s extreme reliance
on appropriation became the model for such works as Sally Alatalo’s A
Rearranged Affair (1996) and Joseph Kosuth’s Purloined (2000).
A vital aspect of the history of twentieth-century collage literature is the
unprecedented commercial success, popular appeal and social resonance
of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
(1991). Hailed as a voice of the post–baby boomer generation and an
expression of the zeitgeist, Coupland’s book was originally contracted as
a non-fiction guidebook, but in the course of writing the author decided
that fiction would better suit his purposes (Doody 11). The design of the
final product, nonetheless, retains the look of a textbook or a magazine
article with its unusually wide external margins occasionally filled with
slogans in rectangular squares (e.g., “Dead at 30 buried at 70” and “Our
parents had more”), dictionary entries of neologisms (e.g., of “McJob”
and “Brazilification”), comics and other images. All of those multimodal
components look as if they were appropriated but, in fact, most of them
were created or commissioned by Coupland (Doody 24). The only purely
appropriative part of the book is the “Numbers” appendix, which con-
sists of a three-page compilation of various statistics and data about
demographics and economics culled from the press, polls and reports.
Alongside its composite structure and multimodality, including experi-
ments with the layout and typography, Generation X has a very non-
linear and episodic plot, which positions it between a novel and a
collection of short stories (David Shields, RH 61). Its intense social
engagement anticipates the politics of many of the twenty-first-century
literary collages which will be the subject of the ensuing chapters.
Analyzing Collages
This section aims to introduce several methodological tools which can be
used in the formal analysis of literary collages. The two main sources of
critical terms which will be employed in the subsequent parts are multi-
modal studies and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Following a brief
introduction to the emergence of academic interest in multimodality and
an outline of multimodal literature since the 1960s, I shall introduce Ali-
son Gibbons’s taxonomy of literary texts that employ multiple modes
and then present the tools afforded by multimodal studies to the analy-
sis of images, typography and the layout of a given text. The next part
aims to introduce the main principles of William C. Mann and Sandra
A. Thompson’s RST model, focusing on Joint, Contrast and Sequence
relations. I shall also advocate the inclusion of a relationship based on
Confrontation, which will be of particular relevance to my analysis of
literary collages.
Multimodality
Multimodality is a study of texts which communicate their meanings
through more than one semiotic mode (Gibbons, Multimodality 4). The
“mode” has been defined by Gunther Kress as “a socially shaped and
culturally given semiotic resource for making meaning,” such as “image,
writing, layout, gesture, speech, moving image, soundtrack and 3D
objects” (Kress, Multimodality 79). Narrative and colour are also possi-
bilities (Kress and Leuwen, Multimodal Discourse 51). Multimodality is
a notion connected, but not synonymous, with multimediality. Whereas
the “mode” is a semiotic category, concerned with the production of
meaning, the “medium” is a technological notion denoting the material
resources involved in its production. Also, the “mode” is a broader term,
since a single mode may be realized by several media (Maziarczyk, Novel
24). One of the underlying assumptions of multimodal literary studies is
that the verbal mode is one of many semiotic modes participating in the
construction of a narrative (Page 3). Visuality and materiality are among
the other significant, and previously overlooked, dimensions of literary
texts examined by multimodal critics.
Although the multimodal novel is a new critical label, the practice can
be said to be almost as old as the novel itself – the famous blank and
black pages in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) could be cited
as evidence. Throughout the next two hundred years, individual authors
such as William Blake and Wyndham Lewis paid meticulous attention
to the visual as well as verbal qualities of their works, but it was not
until the 1960s that writers began to use multimodal means program-
matically to contest the received ideas about literature. B.S. Johnson’s
The Unfortunates, William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife
(1968) and Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1971) are some of
the most exuberant multimodal experiments from that period. Most of
them are strongly associated with postmodernism because of their radi-
cal self-reflexivity and playfulness. Other examples of twentieth-century
works which relied on the coexistence of the verbal and visual modes
were comics, graphic novels and picture books (Gibbons, “Multimodal
Literature” 421).
The next resurgence of multimodal texts at the beginning of the twenty-
first century coincided with the emergence of multimodal literary studies.
Gibbons locates one of the reasons for the rise of multimodality in the
“paradigm shift” occasioned by the fall of the Twin Towers (Multimo-
dality 3). She also observes that multimodality tends to gain popularity
at times of “significant communicative and technological development”
(3). The fact that the production and publication of images has become
cheaper has also contributed to the increase in the number of literary texts
offering rich visuals (Gibbons, “Multimodal Literature” 421). Another
factor was the wide critical acclaim garnered by the multimodal novels
of such authors as Mark Z. Danielewski and Steve Tomasula. Danielews-
ki’s House of Leaves (2001) has even developed a cult following. On
the other hand, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close (2005) featured in the New York Times bestseller list and was made
into a Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock. His 9/11
novel combining many visuals (including a series of photographs of the
“falling man”) and typographic manoeuvres with a sentimental and con-
trived plot is a perfect example of the multimodal novel’s entry into the
mainstream. Emphasizing the contrast with the reception of the avant-
garde experiments of authors like Federman four decades earlier, Grze-
gorz Maziarczyk argues that the contemporary multimodal novelists have
appealed to a broad reading public because most of them are used to the
“multimedia environment of print, film [and] computer” (“Print” 184).
Maziarczyk also points to contemporary literature’s paradoxical
engagement with the materiality of the book at the time of the increas-
ing marginalization of print, evidenced by, among others, the popularity
of the e-book and the audiobook. “In response to the challenge of other
media, especially digital,” Maziarczyk observes, “many contemporary
writers self-consciously exploit the potential of the printed novel in a
manner allowing it to retain its unique identity in the media system”
(“Print” 169). This demonstration of the print novel’s rarely recognized
possibilities, which may be fraught with anxiety over its extinction, is
an example of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call hyper-
mediacy – “a style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the
viewer of the medium” (272).17 Another paradox lies in the fact that such
a process of reminding the reader of the unique status and vast poten-
tial of the print novel – a medium generally associated with the verbal
mode – relies on lending it certain attributes of other media, mostly visual
(Maziarczyk, “Print” 176).
Multimodality is a productive framework for the analysis of collage
literature. It provides many tools for examining text-image as well as
text-text relationships between multiple components of collage works.
Although there is a significant overlap between the two categories, it
needs to be stressed that there are literary collages which are primar-
ily monomodal (such as David Markson’s last four novels) as well as
multimodal works which are not collages, since they do not incorporate
any foreign material (such as Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! [2012]).18 The
most significant overlapping properties of literary collages and typical
multimodal works are the following: the use of heterogeneous material,
fragmentary structure and non-linear narration. The frequent coexist-
ence of verbal, visual and tactile components in both categories demands
a greater interpretive effort on the part of the reader, who needs to “cog-
nize and integrate meaning from the creative synthesis of word, image,
and tactility” (Gibbons, “Multimodal Literature” 433). The reader of a
multimodal collage may thus more accurately be described as an active
“user” or a “hybrid reader,” whose task is not only to read the text but
also to turn the book around, examine its visuals and feel its texture
(Maziarczyk, Novel 45).
In more specific terms, the “user” of multimodal collages needs to
be alert to the following properties listed by Gibbons as the distinctive
features of multimodal novels (besides the inclusion of images, which is
taken for granted):
1. Unusual textual layouts and page design.

2. Varied typography.
3. Use of colour in both type and imagistic content.
4. Concrete realisation of text to create images as in concrete poetry.
5. Devices that draw attention to the text’s materiality, including meta-
fictive writing.
6. Footnotes and self-interrogating critical voices.
7. Flipbook sections.
8. Mixing of genres, both in literary terms, such as horror, and in terms
of visual effect, such as newspaper clipping and play dialogue.
(Multimodality 2)
In the collage texts to be discussed in the following parts of this book,

particular attention will be paid to the use of images, typographical vari-
ation and the layout of the page.
Rhetorical Structure Theory

Devised by William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson, Rhetorical
Structure Theory (RST) is “one of the most explicitly developed and fre-
quently used of currently available linguistic approaches to explaining
textual coherence” (Bateman 144). Its formulation was preceded by a
meticulous examination of several hundred documents including for-
mal and informal letters, scientific and press articles, advertisements and
travel brochures (Mann, Matthiessen and Thompson 42). RST relies on
the observation that consecutive textual units – from individual clauses
to larger segments, such as paragraphs – convey information about their
relationship which is not explicitly stated (Bateman 145–47; Mann, Mat-
thiessen and Thompson 47). In the passage “He explains things well.
He’ll make a good teacher,” the first sentence provides evidence for the
second despite the absence of any connective discourse marker (such as
“because” or “since”) (Bateman 146–47). Taking into account the hier-
archical organization of many text spans, RST differentiates between
nuclear (more important) and satellite units (dependent on the former).
All kinds of rhetorical relations between a nucleus and a satellite are
called “asymmetric,” whereas those between equally significant units are
referred to as “symmetric” relations (147).
In “Rhetorical Structure Theory and Text Analysis,” Mann, Thomp-
son and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen distinguish between as many as
twenty-one types of symmetric relations.19 Symmetric relations allow
for fewer varieties – Mann, Matthiessen and Thompson indicate only
three: Sequence, Contrast and Joint (52). Owing to the democratic, non-
hierarchical structure of collage texts, the symmetric relations, where nei-
ther element is superior, will be of more import in my analysis. I shall,
therefore, discuss them in greater detail. Sequence and Contrast relations
are self-explanatory: whereas the former expresses a relationship of suc-
cession (as in a recipe or an anecdote), the latter asserts a degree of simi-
larity between the two elements – their “comparability” – in order to
emphasize the differing aspect (Mann, Matthiessen and Thompson 74).
Joint, on the other hand, “represents the lack of a rhetorical relation”
between the elements despite their commitment to the same subject mat-
ter (“Relation Definitions”). Mann, Matthiessen and Thompson provide
the following example:
Employees are urged to complete new beneficiary designation forms

for retirement or life insurance benefits whenever there is a change in
marital or family status.
...
Employees who are not sure of who is listed as their beneficiary
should complete new forms since the retirement system and the
insurance carrier use the most current form to disburse benefits.
Joint comes closest to the quintessentially collage-like relationship of jux-

taposition – elements are placed next to one another because they have
some, largely elusive, common denominator while resisting a harmoni-
ous symbiosis. When the juxtaposition is visibly confrontational, a com-
bination of opposites, I propose – for lack of a corresponding relation in
the RST model – to call it Confrontation. The following passage from
David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel (2001) could serve as an example:
Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants.

There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega.
(10)
The lack of the above rhetorical relation is not an oversight on the part
of its authors but rather a consequence of the origins and the intended
application of the RST model. As has been noted, it was devised to pro-
vide tools for examining the rhetorical coherence of functional written
texts. Evidently, such texts serve different purposes from literary ones
and are therefore governed by a different set of principles. The RST
model is, for instance, heavily focused on authorial intention, which is no
longer recognized as an important consideration in the analysis of liter-
ary texts. Also, it relies on the assumption of the rhetorical coherence of
each text, which, particularly in the case of collage literature, applies to
a limited degree. Nonetheless, I believe that this framework can be a use-
ful instrument for assessing the semiotic relationships between the juxta-
posed elements in collage fictions. Following Bateman, who has extended
the scope of RST to encompass rhetorical relations in multimodal texts,
I shall use it also to examine the coexistence of verbal and visual mate-
rial. In Multimodality and Genre, Bateman concedes that the application
of the RST model to multimodal texts is problematic in that the original
assumption of sequentiality in verbal texts becomes complicated by the
difficulty of predicting the exact reading path in a multimodal document.
For that reason, Bateman decides to “restrict RST relations to pairs (sets)
of document parts (segments/spans) which are adjacent in any direction”
(158). In my analysis, I shall adhere to this limitation.
The proposed combination of methodological tools afforded by mul-
timodal studies and Rhetorical Structure Theory is an original approach,
which, to the best of my knowledge, has not yet been used in literary criti-
cism. Also, the application of RST to monomodal literary texts, such as
those by David Markson, Maggie Nelson and Jenny Offill, is a relatively
novel interpretive strategy, particularly in the context of collage literature.
Given the formal variety of the capacious category of literary collage,
whose history, poetics and politics have been the subject of this chapter,
certain texts will be shown as more conducive to being examined through
the RST model and some through the tools derived from multimodal stud-
ies, while the others – through a combination of both. In each case, after
a discussion of the given work’s collage structure, the focus will be placed
on the ways in which the text exploits its formal potential to respond to
one or several kinds of the new millennium’s multifarious crises.
Notes
1. Karpowicz specifies that, in order to function as a ready-made, the quota-
tion needs to be distinctly separated from the rest of the text rather than
submerged in it (61). All ensuing quotations from Karpowicz and Nycz are
given in my translation from Polish.
2. The term “photomontage” was coined by Dadaists in order to differentiate
their new method from the Cubist collage, which did not incorporate pho-
tographic images (Ades 15). The claim to founding photomontage has also
been made by Russian Constructivists (Jennifer A.E. Shields 8).
3. Brockelman cites Christine Poggi’s argument that Cubist collage can be
interpreted as the birth of an “alternative to the modernist tradition in
twentieth-century art,” paving the way to postmodernism (Poggi xiii).
4. Scarlett Higgins regards juxtaposition as “the primary identifying factor of
collage” (1).
5. Emily Bell suggests that the suspension of “strict structural restrictions” in
collage allows for some degree of “randomness,” which may manifest itself
in the inclusion of whimsical or zany material.
6. Bürger notes that changing the order of successive parts is also possible in a
non-organic work, such as André Breton’s Nadja (1928) (80).
7. The persistent presence of the absent in every collage has been compared by
Cran to the influence of the absent parent on the appearance and personality
of their child (8).
8. Scarlett Higgins considers the unprecedented reaction of the audience to Ken-
neth Goldsmith’s infamous reading performance of “The Body of Michael
Brown” on 13 March 2015 at Brown University as “visceral” evidence of
collage’s capacity to evoke shock through appropriation and juxtaposition
(12–14).
9. The question cited by Cran was formulated by Alfred Leslie as the audience’s
expected reaction to his experimental short film The Last Clean Shirt (1964).
10. Margaret Millar notes that collage is “the means through which the artist
incorporates reality . . . without imitating it” (qtd. in Seitz 6).
11. In the last decade of his life, Ashbery had several exhibitions of his visual
collages, many of which were assembled out of ready-mades presented to
him by Brainard. In 2008, New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery organized a
solo exhibition of his works. O’Hara and Brainard collaborated on several
collages including I Grew This Beard . . . and I’m Not Really Flying I’m
Thinking (both 1964). The latter was, at the time, better known as a visual
artist than a writer. Among Brainard’s best known works are collages featur-
ing Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip character Nancy and assemblages incor-
porating images of the Virgin Mary, the packaging of consumer products
and cigarette butts. Following Library of America’s 2012 publication of his
collected writings, Brainard’s critical standing has been on the rise, culminat-
ing in Yasmine Shamma’s edited volume Joe Brainard’s Art (2019), to which
the afterword was written by Marjorie Perloff.
12. In her discussion of the poetry of Polish author Miron Białoszewski,
Agnieszka Karpowicz proposes the term “situational collage” for this kind
of account of various events and impressions as experienced by the speaker
(232). Their personal associations become the only principle of organizing
the disparate and fragmentary parts of the poem (267).
13. Another poetic group which emerged in the United States in the second half
of the twentieth century and embraced collage as a vital formal principle was
the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets – Bruce Andrews, Charles Bern-
stein, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe and Robert Grenier. For
those authors, in Bernstein’s words, “the poem was imagined not as the fixed
voice of a self-contained ego conveying a predetermined, or paraphrasable,
message but a collage or constellation of textual elements: not voice, but
voicings” (288).
14. Burroughs paid homage to The Waste Land by cutting up several lines from
sections two and five of the poem and inserting them into his novel Nova
Express (1964) (Robinson 52–53).
15. Burroughs’s most famous novel, Naked Lunch (1959), was written before
he devised the cut-up method, although the book does share a number of
formal qualities with that technique: a sense of structural randomness, the
accidental order of components and the use of epistolary fragments.
16. Burroughs even wrote a preface for the first edition of the book, which he
called “profound and disquieting.” He praised its undercurrent of perverse
sexuality and compared its artistic strategy to that of Robert Rauschenberg.
17. A related notion is “technological metareference,” which Maziarczyk defines
as the “elicit[ation of] the recipient’s awareness of the technological form of
a given medium” (“Print” 169).
18. In her taxonomy, Gibbons considers “collage fictions” as one of seven cate-
gories of multimodal literature. The others are illustrated works (exemplified
by Lance Olsen’s Girl Imagined by Chance [2002]); multimodal (re)visions
(the illustrated rerelease of Tristram Shandy by Visual Editions in 2010); tac-
tile fictions – subdivided into epistolary multimodal novels (Nick Bantock’s
The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy [1994]), card-shuffle novels (Johnson’s The
Unfortunates) and cut-outs (Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes [2010]); “altered
books” (also Tree of Codes); concrete fictions – the most popular category
comprising novels by Tomasula, Danielewski and Safran Foer; and “onto-
logical hoaxes” (William Boyd’s Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960
[1998]) (“Multimodal Literature” 426–33).
19. The open set includes relations of Evidence, Justify, Antithesis, Conces-
sion, Circumstance, Solutionhood, Elaboration, Background, Enablement,
Motivation, Volitional Cause, Non-Volitional Cause, Volitional Result,
Non-Volitional Result, Purpose, Condition, Otherwise, Interpretation, Eval-
uation, Restatement and Summary.
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Part I
Art in Crisis
2 “Why Is Author So
Damnably Tired?”
David Markson’s Late Novels
This chapter aims to assert the collage structure of David Markson’s last
four works and to examine their representation of the novel in crisis.1
After introducing the author and his novelistic cycle, I shall investigate
Markson’s unique method of composition and his reliance on parataxis,
appropriation and fragmentation. In my analysis of the relations between
consecutive components of the text, I will draw on Rhetorical Structure
Theory. I shall then consider several of the tetralogy’s recurrent themes,
focusing primarily on advancing senility and the crisis of art. Finally,
I will propose a reading of Markson’s text, particularly the second book
in the series, as a manifesto for a new form of writing – a manifesto
which is collage-like in its structure and which advocates collage as an
artistic strategy.
Despite his considerable and varied literary output, Markson did not,
in his lifetime, gain wider recognition outside a circle of fellow authors
(including Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith) and
critics (particularly, Françoise Palleau-Papin, the author of the only
book-length critical study of his work). However, his death at the age of
82 in 2010 was reported by both The New York Times, who called him
a “postmodern experimental novelist” (Weber), and The Guardian, who
referred to him as “one of the most original of US novelists” (Dempsey).
Both obituaries emphasize Markson’s renunciation of the standard ele-
ments of the novel such as plot and character in the last three decades
of his literary career. They also cite his most famous champion David
Foster Wallace, who devoted a long and enthusiastic article to Markson’s
most acclaimed work Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) and called it “pretty
much the high point of experimental fiction [in America].” His current
reputation as an experimental writer rests on his last five works, even
though much of his earlier output was not formally innovative. Among
his more traditional works are hardboiled crime novels featuring a New
York City detective and the anti-Western The Ballad of Dingus Magee
(1965), which was made into a film with Frank Sinatra.
Against Markson’s supposed wish,2 his last four books – Reader’s
Block (1996), This Is Not a Novel (2001), Vanishing Point (2004)
48 Art in Crisis
and The Last Novel (2007) – tend to be regarded by critics as form-
ing a tetralogy. They are so different from any work that Markson or
any other writer has produced and, at the same time, so similar to one
another that it would be unreasonable not to consider them as parts of
a larger artistic project. Rather than call them a “tetralogy,” however,
I shall follow Anne Beattie and Tyler Malone’s proposition of referring
to those books as a “quartet,” which emphasizes their lack of narra-
tive drive, their “high-literary” feel and their musical qualities (Malone
78, Moore 99). Each work is a 150- to 200-page-long arrangement of
snippets, whose bulk conveys facts and anecdotes about the lives of
well-known artists, philosophers, scientists and historical figures. Those
erudite trivia are in each case interspersed with metafictional passages
commenting on the properties of the book in hand and on its narra-
tor, who is called differently in every consecutive book: Reader, Writer,
Author and Novelist, respectively. The length of a single passage ranges
from one word (such as “Wanhope”) to six lines. Each chunk of text is
separated by a space, which makes the layout reminiscent of a collec-
tion of aphorisms. That analogy is strengthened by the fact that many
featured quotations are followed by the phrase “said X” or “wrote X,”
in the example above.
Although such form, eschewing plot and characterization, may run
the risk of monotony and tedium, Markson succeeds in sustaining the
interest of the knowledgeable and art-savvy reader. James Gibbons exag-
gerates only slightly when he remarks that This Is Not a Novel “reads as
addictively as an airport thriller” (27). Laura Sims, in turn, calls the series
a “remarkable hybrid” of formal experimentation and “fiction that is
emotionally satisfying, intellectually rewarding, formally distinctive, and
compulsively readable all at once” (“David Markson” 59). Markson’s
“exceptional accomplishment” was recognized in 2007 by the Ameri-
can Academy of Arts and Letters. In the same year, the members of the
National Book Critics Circle included Vanishing Point and The Last
Novel on the list of the best underrated works of the previous decade
(Palleau-Papin xxvii).
Collage Structure
The main reasons why Markson’s quartet can be regarded as a collage are
the nature of its components – heterogeneous, fragmentary and appro-
priative – and the character of their arrangement: startling, disharmoni-
ous and occasionally purely arbitrary. Besides, the narrator alone hints
at collage as a possible category for his experiment in the refrain which
recurs in every book of the series:
Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

(RB 14, 140; TINN 128; VP 12, 180; LN 8)
“Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?” 49
Two of its occurrences are followed by narratorial statements emphasiz-
ing the relevance of the four formal properties to the structure of the
quartet:
As is already more than self-evident.

(VP 12)
Self-evident enough to scarcely need Writer’s say-so.

(TINN 128)
The collage-like character of the series is also signalled in a list of possible

generic classifications scattered across This Is Not a Novel, among which
is “an ersatz prose alternative to The Waste Land” (101). However,
other entries suggest altogether different formal parallels: “a sequence
of cantos” (23), “a mural of sorts” (36), “an autobiography” (53), “a
polyphonic opera” (73), “a disquisition on the maladies of the life of
art” (86), “a classic tragedy” (171) and a “synthetic personal Finnegans
Wake” (185).
Critics such as Palleau-Papin (209), Joanna Scott (229) and Arnaud
Schmitt (Phenomenology 42) accept collage as a fitting formal category
and use it without explicitly considering its applicability. Lance Olsen
cites Vanishing Point as an example of a text “near the middle of [the col-
lage] continuum,” occupied by “particulate fictions that assume but do
not require a reading strategy that arcs from beginning to end” (“Four-
teen Notes” 189). The only critic who has contested the collage struc-
ture of Markson’s series is Camelia Elias, the author of The Fragment:
Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre (2004). Elias
declares that for all its non-linearity, fragmentation, intertextuality and
formal similarities with works of William S. Burroughs, Markson’s pro-
ject “cannot be contextualized as a work of collage” (340). In support
of her claim, she misquotes the above-cited refrain as “Nonlinear? Dis-
continuous? Collage-like? An assemblage?,” adding four question marks
where Markson in its ten occurrences across the series uses none, calls it a
“repeated question” rather than a statement and interprets it as “simply
a dismissal of all those attributes” (341). She thus implies that the nar-
rator himself rejects the four characteristics even though in the ensuing
passages, which she omits, he refers to them as “self-evident.”
The present section is the first critical attempt to examine methodically
the collage features of Markson’s quartet.3 It will begin by considering
the specific components, or building blocks, of each book in the series.
I will then demonstrate the project’s reliance on parataxis and propose a
classification of the rhetorical relations between the juxtaposed elements
which are indebted to the poetics of collage.
From Reader’s Block to The Last Novel, the elements out of which
Markson weaves his books are heterogeneous, but their variety lends
50 Art in Crisis
itself to categorization. As there appears to be no apt word for those
components, I shall refer to them interchangeably as passages and snip-
pets. Each book consists of approximately two thousand passages, whose
length usually oscillates between one and three lines, never exceeding
six. They can take the form of words, phrases, statements, questions,
quotations – acknowledged and not, as exemplified by the below samples
from This Is Not a Novel:
1. Dizzy Dean died of a heart attack (190).

2. Writer is weary unto death of making up stories (1).
3. What is Hamlet reading, in Act II Scene ii, when Polonius inquires
and Hamlet says Words, words, words? (27).
4. The greatest lesbian poet since Sappho, Auden called Rilke (29).
5. Tell all the Truth but tell it slant (11).
6. Ludwig Geyer (17).
7. Timor mortis conturbat me (148, 163).
The first passage is an example of the most numerous category con-

stituted by curiosities about widely known public figures. Françoise
Palleau-Papin observes that the quartet focuses on “famous creators” –
“in their whole lives, from birth to death, with a predilection for the
end of a life” (248).4 Indeed, the first example is also one of close to five
hundred snippets contained in This Is Not a Novel which concentrate
on the cause and circumstances of the deaths of public figures – in this
case, an American baseball player. The recurrence of anecdotes focus-
ing on certain aspects of the lives of renowned individuals as well as the
choice of those characters enable the reader to notice emerging themes,
which are going to be discussed in a later section of this chapter. To
an impatient reader, however, the text might seem a random mixture
of trivia. Disappointed readers of This Is Not a Novel (who awarded
it, respectively, one and two stars out of five) called the book in their
review on Google Books “just a grocery list of anecdotes” and a “mish-
mash of historical/literary details.” In The Last Novel, Markson incor-
porates a nonplussed response to Vanishing Point by a schoolmate,
who phoned him to say, “Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit
after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?” (LN 155;
Sims, Fare 140).
The second passage is an example of a metafictional comment on the
process of writing. It is the vehicle through which, in This Is Not a Novel,
Markson formulates charges against the traditional novel and postu-
lates for its resuscitation, which will all be discussed later. In Reader’s
Block that metafictional strand is far more developed than in the ensuing
parts of the series. According to Markson’s own estimate, it occupies
20% of the first book and only up to 1,5% of the others (Sims, Fare
132). Whereas the latter parts make continuous reference to only one
metafictional figure – Writer, Author and Novelist, respectively – Reader’s
Block features both Reader (who stands for the author) and Protagonist
(the character in the novel written by Reader), alongside the voice of
the first-person narrator, who also sounds like Markson. Throughout
the quartet, the metafictional comments often address the author-figure’s
advancing age and the resulting health problems, which, as Markson
admitted, are entirely autobiographical (Palleau-Papin xxvi).5
The third passage represents one of many questions which apparently
nag the nameless narrator and which are likely to arouse the curios-
ity of Markson’s bookish reader as well. Many of them are concerned
with literature – either with fictional worlds (“Is Macbeth impotent?”
[TINN 76]) or with literary reputation (“If Stephen Crane had in fact
lived on an additional forty-plus years, how different might the hierar-
chy of American letters have been in that period?” [TINN 42]). There
are also many evaluative questions regarding the visual arts or music
(“Was Liszt the greatest pianist who ever lived?” [TINN 46]). Other
questions frequently focus on religion (“Where was Jesus between the
ages of twelve and twenty-nine?” [RB 82]) and history (“Could Richard
the Lion-Hearted speak English?” [TINN 28]).
The fourth example – W.H. Auden’s humorous assessment of Rainer
Maria Rilke – represents one of several hundred quotations, which
despite not being enclosed in quotation marks are accurate and whose
attribution is signalled, albeit laconically. The sources of those snip-
pets are multiple and include mostly biographies and encyclopaedias, as
acknowledged by Markson in interviews. Its authors are largely the same
as the heroes of the earlier noted anecdotes – writers, other artists, critics,
philosophers and historical figures. The fifth passage exemplifies one of
several hundred unacknowledged quotations – in this case, a line from
a poem by Emily Dickinson. Their provenance ranges from highly rec-
ognizable texts such as the Bible, The Illiad and Shakespearian plays to
lesser-known sources (such as Wisława Szymborska’s poem “The Terror-
ist, He’s Watching”), which readers can identify with the help of a search
engine. Although most of those quotations come from books, essays and
poems, Markson also uses passages from popular songs (“The Cherry
Tree Carol” by Joan Baez), statements by celebrities (Marilyn Monroe’s
“Sure I posed. I was hungry” [TINN 32]) and advertising slogans (Abe
Stark’s “Hit Sign Win Suit” [TINN 39]).
“Ludwig Geyer” (6) is an example of a short cryptic snippet consisting
of a proper name. Most of them are composed of the names of historical
figures, such as Geyer – a German artist and the stepfather of Richard
Wagner – or literary figures like Salathiel Pavy and Pechorin. Other com-
mon categories are titles (Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe), foreign phrases (No
pasarán!), dates (June 16, 1904), addresses (26 Piazza di Spagna) and
names of towns (Jedwabne). As the meaning of those elliptical snippets
is not articulated, they appeal either to the reader’s erudition or their
52 Art in Crisis
diligence, which – as with the previous category – consists in looking up
the entry in a reference book or a search engine.
The last example represents one of several recurrent lines, or refrains, to
be found across individual books or the entire quartet. The Latin passage
from a Catholic prayer, meaning “fear of death distresses me,” appears
three times in This Is Not a Novel, twice accompanied by its English
translation. The citation, popularized by William Dunbar’s “Lament for
the Makers” (1505), reappears both in Vanishing Point and The Last
Novel. Among other refrains to be found across the series are “Nobody
comes. Nobody calls,” “Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo” (the
opening words of the Kaddish), “Met him pike hoses” (Molly Bloom’s
truncated version of “metempsychosis”) and the earlier mentioned “Non-
linear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.” The use of recurrent
lines and motifs prompts Laura Sims to compare the structure of the
quartet to that of the fugue.6 This kind of composition poses a challenge
for the reader, who must “remain attentive and active . . . constantly
connecting the lines/fragments/quotations not only with their immediate
neighbors, but also with lines from previous books” (“David Markson”
65). In his study Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in
the Twentieth-Century Novel (2009), Alan Shockley also cites the recur-
rent passages as an indication that Markson’s series “works much more
like a work of music than a novel” (156).
The last four types of passages can be regarded as the quintessential
components of collage – ready-mades, defined in the opening chapter as
any external material, two- or three-dimensional, verbal or visual, which
the artist chooses to incorporate in their work. In literary texts, as has
been asserted, appropriation often takes the form of unintegrated and
unacknowledged quotations. In Markson, no passages are seamlessly
integrated with the rest of the text as they are all spatially set apart from
the preceding and succeeding ones. However, one may determine differ-
ent levels of semantic integration. Whereas the Auden quotation is fol-
lowed by a three-word commentary indicating its context, and therefore
has its ready-made quality diminished, the last three examples offer no
interpretive hint – either within the passage itself or in the immediate
surroundings.
As I argued in the opening chapter, citing David Antin and Budd Hop-
kins, the lack of a semantic (or narrative) coherence resulting from the
incongruity of constitutive elements is, besides the inclusion of appropri-
ated content, a crucial characteristic of collage. Most parts of Markson’s
text are marked by what Marjorie Perloff calls a replacement of “subor-
dination” by “coordination” and of “logic [and] sequence” by “likeness
and difference” (“Collage” 386). In other words, it is governed by the
principle of parataxis, or juxtaposition of elements without the use of
conjunctions, which can be illustrated by the following excerpt from This
Is Not a Novel:
Gammer Guiton’s Needle.
Goldengrove unleaving.
It took Eliot forty years to allow that the word Jew in Gerontion
might be capitalized.
Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed.
June 16, 1904.
Stephen Dedalus has not had a bath since October 1903.

(TINN 65)
In the six consecutive passages, Markson juxtaposes the title of a sixteenth-

century English comedy, a fragment of the second line of Gerard Manley
Hopkins’s poem “Spring and Fall,” a fact about T.S. Eliot, the beginning
of a line from the Book of Genesis (17:17), the date on which James Joyce’s
Ulysses is set and a commentary on the protagonist of Ulysses. None of
those elements is connected by a conjunction which would account for
the logic of this sequence. Instead, the reader may only observe the looser
relation of thematic analogy, the common denominators being the child
(the addressee of Hopkins’s poem and the prophesied heir to Abraham,
whose birth is announced in the previous line of Genesis) and Jewishness
(of the character in Eliot’s poem, of Abraham and of Leopold Bloom,
the protagonist of Ulysses). The arrangement of the six snippets also
exemplifies the lack of “teleology or any temporal development,” or, in
other words, the “flattened-out presentation of the past and present,” as
a result of which Abraham, Eliot and Writer function on the same “time-
less” plane (Palleau-Papin 297–98).
Furthermore, the above excerpt illustrates the radical fragmentariness
of Marksonian snippets. The only self-contained passages are the com-
ments on Eliot and Dedalus. The opening title and the date in line five,
while not technically fragments of any larger whole, are devoid of any
explanatory note, which may render them incomprehensible to many non-
scholarly readers. The passage on Abraham begins with the word “then,”
which emphasizes the elimination of the earlier part – a sentence offering
the reason for Abraham’s surprised reaction. Markson also cuts the rest
of the Biblical line, which continues, “and said in his heart, Shall a child
be born unto him who is one hundred years old?” (“Genesis”). The most
fragmentary element in the above excerpt is the passage from “Spring
and Fall” – the last two words of the poem’s opening question: “Már-
garét, áre you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?” The fragmentari-
ness of Markson’s work and the programmatic absence of clear relations
between successive components prompt the attentive reader to become a
54 Art in Crisis
virtual co-author of its meaning. It is therefore a “writerly” (scriptible)
text, which conforms to Thomas P. Brockelman’s earlier-cited argument
that in collage “sense is something to be made rather than secured” (37).
The need for reader involvement in Markson’s “interactive” fiction
is also stressed by Joseph Tabbi, who argues that “for a narrative to
develop at all, significant connections need to form in a reader’s mind”
(“Solitary Inventions” 766–67). The critic sees Markson’s “nonsequen-
tial method” of fragmented units that touch on a given subject only to
proceed to another and then return from a different angle as indebted to
the style of Ludwig Wittgenstein.7 The reliance of Markson’s method on
“connectivity” – the capacity for establishing links between numerous
fragments8 – is regarded by Tabbi as a signum temporis, “appropriate
to an era committed to virtuality” (“Solitary Inventions” 768). Stephen
Burn regards the structure of the quartet as a response to the modern
information overload and an invitation to consider the mechanisms of
perceiving and synthesizing the abundance of data (34–35). Tabbi high-
lights the paradox that despite using highly traditional methods of com-
position, such as handwritten notecards later typed on an old machine,9
Markson is “among the forebearers of electronic literature” due to his
renunciation of characteristic elements of print fiction, such as plot, char-
acter and narrative (Tabbi, “David Markson” 685).10
Although parataxis is the dominant organizing principle of Markson’s
series, throughout its eight hundred pages, one can find instances of sev-
eral kinds of rhetorical relations. In my attempt to classify them, I shall
make use of the terms afforded by the Rhetorical Structure Theory, as
outlined in Chapter One. As I argued earlier, collage tends to employ
multinuclear rather than nucleus-satellite relations between consecutive
units; in other words, those governed by the logic of parataxis or jux-
taposition, where none of the units is privileged. The kinds of relations
I wish to consider are Contrast, Sequence, List and, the most paratactic
of them all, Joint.
Among the examples of Contrast, indicating the comparability of two
elements in order to emphasize the differing aspect (Mann, Matthiessen
and Thompson 74), are the following excerpts from Vanishing Point and
The Last Novel, respectively:
Our first aim is to serve God and spread the Christian faith.
Said Cortes.
I have come to take away their gold.

Said Pizarro.
(VP 154)
A real good guy.

William Carlos Williams called Emily Dickinson.
A bitchy little spinster.
Denise Levertov saw her as instead.
(LN 56)
In both cases the juxtaposed quotations have a clear common denomina-

tor, which ensures their comparability: in the first set, the authors of quo-
tations are alike (they are both conquistadors); in the second, the object
of the comment is the same. Besides, the contrasting passages employ a
degree of repetition (the opening “said” in the second line of the first pair
and the opening “a” in the first line of the second extract) and syntactic
parallelism (the article-adverb-adjective-noun structure of “A real good
guy” and “A bitchy little spinster”). Their role is to reinforce the sense of
formal similarity the better to highlight the element conveying semantic
difference. In the above passages, both quotations in each set convey con-
trasting messages and could thus be connected by means of a conjunction
such as “whereas.” The former is devoid of any explicit indication of
contrast, which grants it a more paratactic – and collage-like – quality,
while the latter points at the divergence by using the word “instead.”
Sequence, which conveys a relationship of succession between adja-
cent elements, is most often exemplified by instructions (such as recipes),
anecdotes and introductory metastatements using words like “firstly”
and “secondly.” Although no such instances can be found in Markson,
one may note several consecutive passages which have been arranged
into a chronological sequence, such as the following:
Jan van Eyck died in Bruges in 1441.
Petrus Christus died in Bruges in 1472 or 1473.
Hans Memling died in Bruges in 1494.
Gerard David died in Bruges in 1523.

(TINN 120–21)
Despite the chronological order, the excerpt retains a paratactic quality

owing to the lack of discourse markers, the repeated use of “died in” and
the employment of a distinct parallelism. A different kind of sequence
can be traced by an attentive reader who keeps track of references to the
consecutive sightings of the mythical wandering Jew, which are scattered
throughout Vanishing Point. Beginning with a snippet on his supposed
apparition in Hamburg in 1542 and ending with one in Salt Lake City
over three hundred years later, each successive reference is made at a
fairly regular interval of approximately twenty-five pages. Both exam-
ples are very rare instances of temporal continuity in Markson’s books –
exceptions rather than the rule.
56 Art in Crisis
One of the two most common rhetorical relations in the quartet is List,
which relies on the enumeration of comparable items. Characteristically,
Markson prefers using a fixed formula for each listed element:
Gluck’s face was pitted from smallpox.

Haydn’s face was pitted from smallpox.
Mozart’s face was pitted from smallpox.
(TINN 11)
Dante quotes The Consolation of Philosophy.

Chaucer quotes The Consolation of Philosophy.
Milton quotes The Consolation of Philosophy.
(TINN 27)
Although most often parataxis favours anaphora (Lanham 31), most

Marksonian examples are epistrophic – with only the first word differ-
ing – which results in numerous repetitions.11 In the later books in the
series, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel, Markson employs more
elliptic parallelisms, such as the following:
Wordsworth’s illegitimate daughter.

Byron’s.
Shelley’s.
Schopenhauer’s.
(VP 71)
A quack, Vladimir Nabokov called Thomas Mann.

A complete mediocrity – D. H. Lawrence.
That total fake – Ezra Pound.
Despicable, loathsome, sick, third-rate – Dostoievsky.
(LN 91)
One of the characteristic features of Vanishing Point is the frequent use

of single snippets listing numerous individuals (separated by commas
or periods) and followed by a succinct explanation for their grouping,
usually introduced by a statement beginning with the word “all” or
“who”:
Johnson. Boswell. Gibbon. Walpole. Goldsmith. Sterne. Garrick.

Edmund Burke. Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Sarah Siddons.
All of whom sat for Joshua Reynolds.
(VP 53)
The above is a clear instance of asyndetic listing – the kind which favours
commas in place of conjunctions, as it refuses to use a single “and.”
Although grouping the multiple persons in one line is a step towards
greater integration of the items (compared to a series of statements based
on the formula “X sat for Joshua Reynolds”) and therefore away from a
collage-like jumble, the choice of the period rather than the comma and
the lack of conjunctions accentuate their separateness.
The last and the most common multinuclear relation used in the series
is Joint, which represents the lack of any specific rhetorical relationship
between consecutive elements. Examples of Joint can be divided into
groups of passages which are related to a common topic and those that
are not marked by any noticeable thematic unity. Two examples of the
former arrangement can be found below:
Tolstoy, asked if he had read a recent play by Maurice Maeterlinck:

Why should I? Have I committed a crime?
They who write ill, and they who ne’er durst wrote,
Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.
– Said Dryden.
Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss.

– Added Pope.
(TINN 45–46)
Emotion recollected in tranquility.
The best words in the best order.

(TINN 82)
Whereas the theme of bad writing is readily identifiable in the first exam-
ple, the unifying element of the second one – English Romantic poetry –
becomes apparent only if one recognizes that the authors of both statements
are William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Despite the the-
matic unity to both sets, their succeeding statements appear to have been
arranged arbitrarily and are thus interchangeable.
One of the multiple examples of random Joint which can be found in
This Is Not a Novel is the following:
How beautiful yellow is!

Says a van Gogh letter.
Sortes Virgilianae.
58 Art in Crisis
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.
Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.

(TINN 92–93)
It is a grouping of four cryptic snippets which incorporate, respectively,

Vincent van Gogh’s statement from a letter to his brother Theo, the Latin
name of an ancient method of bibliomancy and the titles of poems by
Robert Browning and Rose Hartwick. Besides their connection with art,
which in Markson’s highly bookish quartet is a very tenuous thematic
link, there is no evident reason why the four elements should be juxta-
posed with one another. Alongside being an excellent example of Joint
and parataxis, the above passage relies entirely on appropriated content,
which further enhances its collage quality.
The last kind of rhetorical relation that I wish to discuss is what I pro-
pose to call Confrontation – a juxtaposition of statements expressing
antithetical or highly differing positions. In addition to the example given
in Chapter Two (a clash of statements on art and subject matter by Writer
and Ortega y Gasset in This Is Not a Novel), the following excerpts fit
into this rhetorical category:
Fra Angelico. Who never painted without first offering a brief prayer.
Bach. Who would not compose without doing so also.
Thanks to God, I have always remained an atheist.

Said Luis Bunuel.
(VP 40)
It is the business of the novelist to create characters.

Said Alphonse Daudet.
Action and plot may play a minor part in a modern novel, but they
cannot be entirely dispensed with.
Said Ortega.
If you can do it, it ain’t bragging.

(TINN 166)
In both cases, the third statement is antithetical to the previous two –

devout religiosity is confronted with atheism, and conservative state-
ments regarding literary theory are pitted against a sporting remark by
the American baseball player Dizzy Dean.12 Even though the statements
in the latter set are not strictly antithetical, as they initially concerned dif-
ferent topics, Markson has created a context in which they engage with
one another. The sportsman’s statement, not followed by the “said X”
formula, reads like a metafictional comment by Writer on the present
book, which aims to demonstrate that a novel without character, action
and plot is possible.
Other instances of Confrontation include the juxtaposition of two con-
tradictory remarks by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (TINN 69) and of
one-word lines reading “Dasein” and “Einsatzgruppen” (VP 160), which
enacts a sarcastic confrontation of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical con-
cept with his political support for the Nazi regime. The Heidegger exam-
ple is one of many instances of juxtaposition through which the implied
author seems to be commenting on the author of the cited statement –
usually an expression of disapproval or mockery:
Eliot was not a very experienced writer, he didn’t write very much,
he didn’t write very much poetry.
Said Allen Ginsberg.
Every poet is a fool. Which is not to say that every fool is a poet.
Said Coleridge.
(VP 65)
In or about December 1910 human character changed.
Yes, Virginia.
(TINN 56)
Whereas the former set indicates quite clearly that the implied author
regards Ginsberg’s remarks about Eliot as foolish, the latter is more
subtle. Virginia Woolf’s oft-cited announcement of the symbolic inau-
guration of modernism from her essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” is
juxtaposed with the beginning of The Sun’s famous editorial from 1897
written in response to a young girl’s enquiry about the existence of a
Santa Claus. (“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” is the first sentence
of the article.) As a result, the former statement is patronized – perhaps
on account of the overly grand claim that it wants to make or because
of the undeservedly (in the narrator’s opinion) iconic status that it now
enjoys.
Whatever their specific functions in a given instance, Contradiction
and Joint are the rhetorical relations most suited to collage, as a result
of their reliance on parataxis and the denial of synthesis, and because
they frequently produce the effect of confusion, surprise or shock. List,
with its commitment to the same theme and the resulting sense of unity,
may not be inherently collage-like, but the way Markson uses it – repeti-
tive, unintegrated and formulaic – accentuates its paratactic quality and
makes it compatible with the poetics of collage.
60 Art in Crisis
Besides the above-examined statements, Markson juxtaposes numer-
ous proper names and noun phrases whose referents – people, places
and objects – could also be said to constitute a collage. Such an exten-
sion of the notion of collage has been proposed by Agnieszka Karpow-
icz in her analysis of the works of Polish twentieth-century poet Miron
Białoszewski, which abound in short descriptions of many objects found
in the poet’s room or of his daily routines (232). Rona Cran, likewise,
refers to Frank O’Hara’s poetry as a “collage of ideas, moments . . .
emotions, thoughts, and situations” (135). Although I object to stretch-
ing the category of collage to include texts which are not composed of
any ready-mades, or appropriated elements, and so I would be hesitant
about applying the term to certain works by Białoszewski and O’Hara,
I accept the idea of a collage of referents, on condition that they refer to
known (and hence, in a sense, appropriated) rather than generic objects.
An example of this kind of juxtaposition is the following passage from
The Last Novel:
Turner’s eternal stovepipe hat.

Eliot’s bowler.
Saul Bellow’s fedora.

(LN 78)
Each component is the given artist’s distinguishing attribute, which can

be found in their numerous portrait photographs.
Markson’s quartet contains many instances of collage groupings of art-
works and literary texts, such as the following:
Piero della Francesca’s St. Agatha. Tiepolo’s. Zurbaran’s.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s.
(TINN 114)
The George Grosz drawing of Jesus, crucified, wearing a mask and

combat boots, and captioned Shut up and carry out your orders.
Dated 1928.
The Max Ernst painting of the Virgin Mary spanking the infant
Jesus.
(VP 167)
1922. Ulysses.
1922. The Waste Land.
1922. Reader’s Digest.

(LN 88)
While the first two sets juxtapose thematically similar artworks, the last
one confronts two milestones of modernist literature with a popular
magazine offering abridged versions of bestselling books.
The two other most common types of such groupings are people and
places. Markson brings together – by merely listing their first names –
three members of the Florentine Gaddi family and three members of the
Bolognese Carracci family (TINN 47). Besides confronting the historical
figures, he also invites a juxtaposition of their respective family portraits:
Self-Portrait and Portraits of Taddeo and Gaddo Gaddi and Portrait of
Annibale, Ludovico and Agostino Carracci, which present them in the
same configuration. Other instances of similar groupings include “Maria
Caniglia. Magda Olivero. Renata Tebaldi” (TINN 102) and “Benoit
Mandelbrot./Benoit de Sainte-Maure” (LN 81). The former set con-
sists of famous Italian operatic sopranos while the latter of individuals
from different epochs and fields whose only apparent link is their first
name. Markson’s juxtapositions of places are mostly endowed with a
greater degree of unity: “Manolete. Islero. Linares” – all bullfighting are-
nas (TINN 131); “Katyn./Nanking” – sites of mass murders committed
in 1940 and 1938, respectively (TINN 132); and “Café Guerbois. The
Bateau-Lavoir” – meeting places of Parisian artists (TINN 151).
Death, Senility and Anti-Semitism

My analysis of the quartet has so far concentrated on its formal proper-
ties, which was aimed to substantiate the claim that collage is the central
structural principle of the text. In the two final sections, in turn, I wish to
examine the thematic concerns of Markson’s series. A work so fragmen-
tary, discontinuous and appropriative may not seem a natural vehicle for
carrying themes. However, as David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman
argue in Life Is Short – Art Is Shorter (2015), the structure of collage
does in no way preclude thematic engagement: “collage depends upon
the orchestration of variegated materials – separated by white space and
unconnected by plot – into theme” (161). In the quartet, the dominant
concerns can be identified by investigating refrains, recurring references
and specific blocks of text. The purpose of this section is to introduce
three of the four most prevalent themes that run through the quartet –
death, anti-Semitism and literary criticism – while saving the discussion
of art in crisis (and the connected theme of senility) for the final section.
The prospect of the impending death looms large from Reader’s Block
to The Last Novel, whose very title accentuates the imminence of demise.
The author-figure appears intensely preoccupied with mortality, which
is signalled by the earlier considered refrain – “Timor mortis conturbat
me.”13 What is more, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel conclude with
a suggestion of Author’s natural death and Novelist’s suicide, respectively;
in Reader’s Block, it is Protagonist who commits suicide. The terminal
62 Art in Crisis
resolutions of Markson’s books illustrate Ernest Hemingway’s claim –
cited in This Is Not a Novel – that “all stories, if continued far enough,
end in death” (TINN 181). Besides making numerous references to liter-
ary accounts of death (from King Arthur’s in Thomas Malory’s canonical
romance to Snowden’s in Catch 22 by Joseph Heller), individual works in
the quartet are focused on a particular aspect or kind of death. Markson
explained this engagement in an interview: “In Reader’s Block I got hung
up on the suicides and listed all those suicides.14 Then in This Is Not a
Novel, how people died. Vanishing Point was where they died” (Palleau-
Papin 254). In the (then yet unwritten) last book, the emphasis is placed
on when artists died.
Markson admitted that he was fascinated by great artists, such as
Céline, Eliot and Pound, turning out to be “rotten human beings” (qtd.
in Palleau-Papin 251). Among the unpalatable facts about famous indi-
viduals which are highlighted by the quartet are their professions of
anti-Semitism and misogyny. Evidence of the former can be found in the
following excerpt from The Last Novel:
Be informed, Christian, that after the devil thou hast no enemy

more cruel, more venomous, more violent, than the Jew.
Pronounced Luther.
World War II – started by sixty kikes.

Pronounced Ezra Pound.
Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God.
Pronounced the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – well before a State of
Israel existed.
While also citing Adolf Eichmann as both gallant and noble.

(LN 42)
The theme of anti-Semitism is particularly prominent in Reader’s Block,

which contains as many as eighty-six snippets following the format, “X
was an anti-Semite.” The misogyny of famous men is asserted by their
attributed remarks, such as Thucydides’s claim that “the greatest achieve-
ment for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of” (LN 107)
and Schopenhauer’s conclusion that “it is only the man whose intellect is
clouded by his sexual impulses who could give the name of the fair sex
to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged
race” (RB 138). All such statements are quoted without any commentary,
which enhances their status as collage-like ready-mades.
Another theme running through the quartet is the narrow-mindedness
of literary critics and their failure to recognize genius. The series abounds
in more or less direct charges formulated against critics, mostly targeting
their laziness, carelessness, small-mindedness and prudery. In Reader’s
Block alone, critics are called “lice in the locks of literature” (Tennyson),
“little envious Prigs, snarling, bastard, puny” (Rabelais), “horseflies that
keep the horse from plowing” (Chekhov) and “the leprosy of letters”
(Flaubert) (RB 24, 29, 66, 146). The utter lack of critical foresight is
exemplified by Samuel Johnson’s remark, “Nothing odd will do long;
Tristram Shandy did not last” (RB 161). The catalogue of critics’ chronic
fallibility feels tinged with Markson’s personal resentment and the fear
that his own works will also fall prey to their misjudgement, as in the
following excerpt from The Last Novel:
Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing

the same book over and over.
Like their grandly perspicacious uncles – who groused that Monet
had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also.
(LN 104)
The reader of the quartet is also presented with numerous statements

indicating that artists themselves are often equally mistaken in their
initial responses to works currently regarded as highly important, as
evidenced by Virginia Woolf’s notorious assessment of Ulysses as “an
illiterate, underbred book” (RB 26). The imagined incomprehension of
artists far apart in time is humorously suggested by two ruminations
from Vanishing Point: “What Giotto would make of a Gerhard Rich-
ter canvas” and “What Balzac would make of a novel like Author’s”
(VP 145, 147).
Novel(ist) in Crisis
As implied by the persistence of the refrain “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone.
Broke” (LN 2, 3, 93, 190),15 the theme of old age is central to The Last
Novel. The combination of references to Novelist’s senility; to “near
mythic figures of aging” such as Socrates, Diogenes and King Lear;
and to the late style of artists from Michelangelo to Picasso makes the
final book in the quartet, in the words of Andrea Charise, “a stark, yet
improbably lively, memento senescere” (165). Old age, however, is a
major theme in the entire series. The main characteristics of the author-
figure’s advancing senility are indicated by the adjectives listed in the
above refrain: general fatigue, health problems, loneliness and pov-
erty. In Vanishing Point, Author frequently complains about his tired-
ness, which stands in the way of his writing. He realizes that “much
of his lack of energy is simply a matter of age” but still he finds “it’s
been excessive, most recently” (VP 6). Increasingly frustrated, he asks,
“Why . . . is Author so often so damnably tired?” (VP 114). On the last
page of This Is Not a Novel, after fifty-two snippets enumerating famous
people who died of various kinds of cancer – from Plotinus throat can-
cer to Anais Nin’s “cardiorespiratory arrest while enduring metastatic
64 Art in Crisis
vaginal cancer” – comes the cryptic note: “Writer’s cancer” (TINN 60,
125, 166). The author-figure’s loneliness is marked by the recurrence of
the lines “Nobody comes. Nobody calls” (RB 11; TINN 186; VP 162;
LN 56, 58) and “The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day
before./Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come” (RB 180, VP
168, LN 172) from Reader’s Block to The Last Novel. In the final book,
Novelist admits to his “isolation – ever increasing as the years pass,” as
a result of which on many days he finds himself “speaking to no one”
except a clerk, a postman or an anonymous neighbour (LN 28).16 All
the above-listed ills of old age inspire Novelist to contemplate suicide,
which – the reader may infer – he ultimately commits by jumping from
the roof on the last page of Markson’s series. That outcome is suggested
by The Last Novel’s framing reference (on the first and last page) to the
roof in Novelist’s building. The final instance of the “Old. Tired. Sick.
Alone. Broke” refrain is directly preceded by the snippets “Access to
Roof for Emergency Only./Alarm Will Sound if Door Opened,” which
may be interpreted as the last inscriptions that appeared to Novelist on
his way to his suicide spot (LN 190).
Author’s previously cited grievance about being “damnably tired” is
followed by the opening line of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Brise Marine”:
“La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres” (VP 114).17 The
connection between the tiredness of old age and the sense of literary
exhaustion (suggested by the reference to all books having already been
read) creates a bridge between the themes of senility and the crisis of
the novel (or, to some degree, of art at large). The ailing protagonist of
the quartet is, after all, not referred to as an individual (by his name
or surname) but rather by their function – Reader, Writer, Author and
Novelist. Despite certain autobiographical characteristics attributed to
the author-figure, he appears to stand for more than only Markson,
which is indicated by the capital letter and the lack of the definitive
article. His condition can thus be interpreted as mirroring the crisis of
contemporary literature, as perceived by Markson. That sense is accen-
tuated by hundreds of references – in each book – to the circumstances
of great artists’ deaths.
Furthermore, one can trace in the quartet the manifestations of a weak-
ening faith in art’s capacity to survive. Works of art, particularly paint-
ings, are described as prone to annihilation – by the artist themselves
(such as Georges Rouault, who burnt 315 of his canvases at the age of 77)
or by their hypothetical owner in desperate need of combustible material:
If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Writer were

to burn a Roy Lichtenstein – qualms?
Qualmless.
(TINN 86)
If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Author were
to burn a Julian Schnabel, qualms?
Qualmless.
(VP 104)
If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth, Novelist were

to burn an Andy Warhol, qualms?
Qualmless.
(LN 86)
The above almost-refrain (alluding to the title of Italo Calvino’s If on a

Winter’s Night A Traveller [1979]) is tinged by what sounds like the cyni-
cism of a disillusioned artist – aware of art’s limitations and distrustful of
its pompous eulogies, such as the three ancient assertions of literature’s
immortality (by Pindar, Horace and Ovid) at the end of This Is Not a
Novel, which Markson confronts with the opening line of the Kaddish,
thus humorously – and somewhat cynically – mocking the notion of non
omnis moriar (TINN 165).
The author-figure also appears to have lost faith in the purposefulness of
his own literary endeavours. This Is Not a Novel opens with two snippets
announcing Writer’s “tempt[ation] to quit writing” and his “wear[iness]
unto death of making up stories.” Four passages down comes the admis-
sion that he is “equally tired of inventing characters” (TINN 1). A similar
aversion to the basic attributes of the novel – character and plot – is hinted
at in the following snippet in Reader’s Block: “Valéry said he could never
write a novel for one insurmountable reason. He would have to include
sentences like ‘The Marquise went out at five’ ” (RB 128). Palleau-Papin
describes the cited sentence as “a fake event, a fake past, the fake beginning
of a story that inaugurates a chronology, a description set in time when
the artifice is blatant” (300). In conversation with Sims, Markson implies
that the renunciation of plot and character in the quartet may be linked
with his own disappointment with novels – even his once favourite ones,
by Dostoevsky, Joyce and Malcolm Lowry, which “in recent years . . .
stopped evoking that sort of resonance for [him]” (Sims, Fare 131).18
Despite the scattered intimations of disenchantment with the novel and
the apparent rejection of the form as an apt generic category for Mark-
son’s project expressed in the title of This Is Not a Novel, the author
ensured that each book in the series contains the contentious word
“novel” either in the title (as is the case with This Is Not a Novel and
The Last Novel) or the subtitle (both Reader’s Block and Vanishing Point
are subtitled “A Novel”). Furthermore, This Is Not a Novel includes
what might be regarded as Markson’s literary manifesto (or rather mini-
manifesto), which consists of postulates regarding the novel, even though
66 Art in Crisis
most attributes of the form that the narrator wishes to conceive may be
called antinovelistic (a term never mentioned in the quartet). What Mark-
son proposes, both in the programmatic strand of snippets and through
the construction of the book, is the novel stretched beyond recognition –
the novel composed through a consistent elimination of devices tradition-
ally associated with the form.
The earlier cited admissions of weariness of “writing,” “making up
stories” and “inventing characters” prepare the ground for a series of
passages scattered across the ensuing seven pages. It begins with the pas-
sage “A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like
to contrive./And with no characters. None” (TINN 2). The consecutive
snippets prescribe the following characteristics: “Plotless. Characterless”
(2); “Actionless . . . with no sequence of events . . . with no indicated
passage of time” (3, emphasis original); “with no setting./With no so-
called furniture . . . without description” (5, emphasis original); “with
no social themes, i.e., no picture of society./No depiction of contempo-
rary manners and/or morals” (6); “Categorically, with no politics” (7);
“entirely without symbols”; and “without even a subject” (8). The last
passages echo the book’s epigraph from Jonathan Swift: “I am now try-
ing an Experiment very frequent among Modern Authors, which is, to
write upon Nothing.” It also ties in with Gustave Flaubert’s famous
declaration (made in a letter to Louise Colet) about wanting to “create
a book about nothing” and with Mark Rothko’s remark, “There is no
such thing as a good painting about nothing,” which Markson uses in
Reader’s Block (183).
The passage announcing the renunciation of “subject” is directly fol-
lowed by the following three snippets:
There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega.
A novel tells a story, said E. M. Forster.
If you can do it, it ain’t bragging, said Dizzy Dean.

(TINN 8–9)
Besides being another example of the collage technique of juxtaposing

appropriated material, the sequence is the culmination of Markson’s
manifesto. Ironically, it is a remark by a baseball player, rather than
one of the ubiquitously cited artists, that affords the most direct insight
into Markson’s strategy in This Is Not a Novel – to formulate a mani-
festo for a new novel and to embody its radical claims in the selfsame
book.19 Despite the opening expression of exhaustion by the novel and
the repeated references to death, Markson’s work is not defeatist, or at
least not consistently pessimistic. Writer experiences a surge of faith in
his project by comparing it to the works of Monet, Picasso and Joyce.20
One of the nine references to the Spanish painter is the following
exchange:
You can actually draw so beautifully. Why do you spend your time
making all these queer things?
Picasso: That’s why.
(TINN 137)21
Several pages later, a parallel passage appears:
Writer has actually written some relatively traditional novels. Why

is he spending his time doing this sort of thing?
That’s why.
(TINN 144)
Writer’s statement offers a clear autobiographical analogy with Mark-

son’s own career – specifically, having written several formally conven-
tional novels such as The Ballad of Dingus Magee (1965) before turning
to experimental fiction in the 1980s. Markson’s gesture of discarding
“traditional novels” in favour of “this sort of thing” arises from his ear-
lier professed weariness of the standard safety nets of plot and charac-
ter. Once the art of constructing elaborate fictions, or the art of realist
painting in Picasso’s case, has been mastered, a new direction needs to
be pointed out. The direction is forward, as suggested by the words of
the hockey player Wayne Gretzky quoted in The Last Novel: “I skate to
where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been” (155).22
Rather than emulating a tired, three-hundred-year-old literary form –
still misleadingly called a “novel” – Markson wishes to propose a genu-
inely novel form. That ambition is indicated by the epigraph for Vanishing
Point, by Willem de Kooning, which reads:
Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it.

Picasso did it with cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea
of a picture all to hell.
Once more implying a link between his own work and that of the author
of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Markson wants to see himself as the
Picasso of contemporary literature – a destroyer of “our idea” of a novel.
Although Markson, unlike David Shields, Will Self, Lars Iyer and sev-
eral other contemporary writers, does not explicitly announce the death
of the novel, the sense of its exhaustion pervades his quartet. The series
could therefore be numbered among the twenty-first-century texts which,
as Pieter Vermeulen’s argues in Contemporary Literature and the End of
the Novel (2015), “stage” the “dissolution” of the novel as genre and
its replacement by the novel as form. That act, Vermeulen maintains,
68 Art in Crisis
constantly oscillates between “creativity and destruction” (2–4). That
dialectic applies very much to Markson’s method of undermining the pil-
lars of conventional fiction while postulating a novel form – “nonlinear,”
“discontinuous,” “collage-like.”
Markson’s project can also be regarded as a fine example of what
Peter Boxall refers to in Twenty-First-Century Fiction as the “fin de siècle
mood” resulting from the transition from one century to the next – the
“collision between the old and the new” (4). The quartet, whose publica-
tion dates range from the end of one millennium to the beginning of the
next (1996–2007), is marked by “a sense at once of being extraordinarily
old, and impossibly young, stranded somewhere between the end of one
world order and the beginning of a new one, bereft of a clear sense of
our own age” (Boxall 23). Stephen Burn argues that Markson’s quartet
appears to “absorb the crepuscular backdrop of the millennium’s end
and lets that larger cultural sense of proximate endtimes diffuse into the
melancholy air of a self-reflexive work whose reflexivity insistently points
to the author’s own bodily decline” (32).23 The Marksonian author-
figure – on the verge of death throughout the series and presumed to die
on the final pages of all books except the first – can certainly be referred
to as “extraordinarily old.” That impression is accentuated also by his
consummate erudition and the world-wise sadness of one who, like the
speaker of Mallarmé’s “Brise Marine,” has read “all the books.”24 The
sense of being “impossibly young” is not immediately apparent in Mark-
son’s works but can be detected in the avant-garde and forward-looking
disposition of his artistic project – as articulated in his manifesto in This
Is Not a Novel, the ambition to “destroy” the novel as we know it (as
implied by the epigraph from de Kooning) and his earlier quoted credo
about heading “where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.”
Conclusion
Little over a decade after the last book in the series, it is too early to make
a definitive assessment of the extent to which the unique literary strategy
devised by Markson has anticipated, or pointed out, the direction of the
puck of literary innovation. However, as the structures of Maggie Nel-
son’s Bluets, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and Lance Olsen’s Head
in Flames demonstrate, as well as those of Evan Lavender-Smith’s From
Old Notebooks (2010) and Rachel Zucker’s Mothers (2014), Markson’s
combination of appropriated content, parataxis and fragmentation – as
well as the diminished role of plot and character – have been embraced
by some of the most notable and promising experimental authors in the
United States. As I signalled in the introduction, the unique form devised
by Markson in the last decade of his career (between the publication of
Wittgenstein’s Mistress and the arrival of The Last Novel) exerted a sig-
nificant influence on all the American authors discussed in this study. In
that light, David Foster Wallace’s description of one of Markson’s novels
as “the high point of experimental fiction” in the United States may be
accepted as fully justified.
Notes
1. An earlier version of small parts of this chapter appeared in two articles
of mine entitled “Collage Manifestos: Fragmentation and Appropriation in
David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger”
and “ ‘A Novel Against the Novel’: David Markson’s Antinovelistic Tetral-
ogy’,” which were published in the edited volume The Poetics of Fragmenta-
tion in Contemporary British and American Fiction and in Polish Journal of
English Studies, respectively.
2. A passage in The Last Novel reads, “Wondering if there is any viable way
to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that
each volume can be readily read by itself?” (161).
3. My article “Collage Manifestos: Fragmentation and Appropriation in David
Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger” con-
siders several aspects of collage structure with reference only to the second
novel in the series. Several passages from that article have been incorporated
into this chapter.
4. In an interview by Tayt Harlin, Markson describes his choice of material
in this way: “I know in the end that there’s going to be more literature, but
I try to make sure I have as much about art and music, too. There’s always
a certain amount of the classics and philosophy. With the historical stuff,
it just depends upon its significance or irony.” In the same conversation,
he discusses the process of accumulating the anecdotes, which come from
his extensive reading on art, philosophy, the classics and the lives of art-
ists. Markson admits to relying mostly on his vast personal library, which
included about twenty-five hundred volumes, and on nearby public libraries.
He also insists that none of the anecdotes were invented.
5. Palleau-Papin considers Markson’s project in the light of Roland Barthes’s
unconventional autobiography Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Martin
Winckler’s notion of autolexicography (defined in his unpublished corre-
spondence with Palleau-Papin as a “novel in which a character close to the
author defines himself through list-making”) and Louis Marin’s category of
the self-ptych (a self-critical fragmentary and discontinuous self-portrait)
(249, 261).
6. Palleau-Papin draws a similar comparison in her discussion of Markson’s
previous novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which she calls “a hypernovel in the
form of a fugue” (xxxvi).
7. Tabbi proposes that in Wittgenstein and Markson alike one may find har-
bingers of a “hypertext aesthetic” (“Solitary Inventions” 749). Palleau-
Papin, in turn, finds an analogy between Markson and Italo Calvino’s idea
of the hypernovel – a “space open to a multitude of stories” (277). She also
regards the tetralogy’s narrator as similar to that of If on a Winter’s Night
a Traveller (1979), in that the reader only “get[s] glimpses [of him] in the
network of images that conveys a kaleidoscopic portrait as in the many
fragments of a broken mirror, its shards constituting a puzzle for a patient
reader” (280).
8. In an interview by Laura Sims, Markson talks about his efforts to locate
related passages at a distance which would enable the reader to notice the
subtle connections. He admits, however, that he is “aware that a fairly
70 Art in Crisis
high percentage of [his] readers are conscious of very little of it at all” (Sims,
Fare 126).
9. Markson’s use of notecards to assemble the factoids that constitute much
of his cycle has led critic Tyler Malone to propose the title “The Notecard
Quartet,” which is used consistently in the first issue of The Scofield maga-
zine, almost entirely devoted to Markson’s oeuvre.
10. Several critics have recently pointed out the quartet’s anticipation of the
poetics of Twitter and observed the popularity of its excerpts when posted
individually by fans in social media (Bucher 106; Sims, “David Markson
Dominates” 44).
11. Markson’s use of epistrophic parataxis echoes the structure of certain pages
in Heimrad Bäcker’s transcript (1986) – a collage constructed out of frag-
ments of historical documents about the Holocaust. For instance, page 91
of transcript contains twenty-six lines consisting of a date, a number and the
immutable passage “prisoners in hartheim reported as having died.”
12. A similar contrast between high art and sport, with the added humorous
effect, is achieved by employing the words of another sportsman, Muham-
mad Ali, in Vanishing Point:
I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.
Said Muhammad Ali.
What cause have I to war at thy decree?
The distant Trojans never injured me.
Says Achilles, in Pope’s translation of the Iliad.
(VP 10)
13. When asked by Laura Sims about the omnipresence of death in his quartet,
Markson replied humorously, “Hey, Sims, I’m a hundred and nine years old”
(Sims, Fare 133).
14. Near the end of the book comes a list of fifty-four literary suicides, which includes
characters from Alcestis and Jocasta to Septimus Smith and Willy Loman.
15. Markson used the phrase “Old tired sick broke” for the first time in a per-
sonal letter to poet, critic and friend Laura Sims in 2006. It was meant to
encapsulate the condition of his own life at the age of 79 (Sims, Fare 64).
16. That passage, as well as many others regarding the loneliness of old age,
mirrors Markson’s own complaints as signalled in his personal correspond-
ence with Sims anthologized in Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson
(2014).
17. In Arthur Symons’s version, the line translates as “The flesh is sad, alas! and
all the books are read” (Mallarmé).
18. In one of his letters to Sims, Markson writes about being “bored” by the
most acclaimed novels of the recent years, including those by José Saramago
and W.G. Sebald. He wonders if the reason for this might be that he has
simply “read enough novels” in his life (Sims, Fare 82).
19. Dizzy Dean’s words – this time without any attribution – reappear on the last
page of the book, confirming their importance.
20. Among numerous labels (some of them ironic) that Writer considers for his
book is that of a “synthetic personal Finnegans Wake” (TINN 185).
21. This passage echoes an earlier one from This Is Not a Novel: “When I was
their age I could draw like Raphael. But it took me a lifetime to learn to draw
like they do. Said Picasso at an exhibition of children’s art” (TINN 2).
22. A similar note is struck in the following statement by Sergei Prokofiev: “To
write only according to the rules laid down by previous classics signifies that
one is not a master but a pupil” (VP 30).
23. Burn situates Markson’s invocation of the end times within the context of
the late works of John Barth, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo and Philip Roth,
and points to the quartet’s formal and thematic affinities with Carole Maso’s
AVA (1991) (32–33).
24. Boxall’s observations mostly refer to authors such as Philip Roth, Don
DeLillo and J.M. Coetzee, whom he calls a “generation of writers . . . who
find themselves unattuned to the time in which they only partly live.” He
notes that they appear to be possessed of the sense – articulated by René
Chateaubriand – of having “lived too long” (38).
Works Cited
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UP, 2013.
Bucher, Matt. “David Markson as the Original Tweeter?” The Scofield, vol. 1,
no. 1, 2015, pp. 106–8.
Burn, Stephen. “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-Like. An Assemblage: The
Architecture of David Markson’s Last Works.” The Scofield, vol. 1, no. 1,
2015, pp. 32–36.
Dempsey, Peter. “David Markson Obituary.” The Guardian, Guardian News and
Media, 14 June 2010, www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/14/david-mark
son-obituary. Accessed 22 Jan. 2018.
Drąg, Wojciech. “Collage Manifestos: Fragmentation and Appropriation in
David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger.”
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edited by Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drąg. Vernon, 2018, pp. 107–22.
———. “ ‘A Novel Against the Novel’: David Markson’s Antinovelistic Tetral-
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Elias, Camelia. The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative
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Gibbons, James. “This Is Not a Novel.” Bookforum: The Book Review for Art
and Culture, vol. 8, 2001, p. 27.
Karpowicz, Agnieszka. Kolaż: Awangardowy gest kreacji: Themerson, Bucz-
kowski, Białoszewski. Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2007.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. “Sea-Wind.” Translated by Arthur Symons, Poetry Archive,
2003, www.poetry-archive.com/m/sea-wind.html. Accessed 21 Jan. 2018.
Malone, Tyler. “In the Beginning, Sometimes He Left Messages in the Books.”
The Scofield, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 67–83.
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“Rhetorical Structure Theory and Text Analysis.” Discourse Description:
Diverse Linguistic Analyses of a Fund-Raising Text, edited by William C.
Mann and Sandra A. Thompson. John Benjamins, 1992, pp. 39–78.
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Markson, David. “Fourteen Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunc-
tion, or: Fiction by Collage.” Symploke, vol. 12, no. 1, 2005, pp. 130–35.
———. Interview by Tedd Haylin. Conjunctions, 21 June 2007, www.conjunc
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———. The Last Novel. Counterpoint, 2007.
———. Reader’s Block. Dalkey Archive, 1996.
———. This Is Not a Novel. CB Editions, 2010.
———. Vanishing Point. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004.
Moore, Steven. Interview by Tyler Malone. “Keeping the Novel Novel.” The
Scofield, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 93–101.
Palleau-Papin, Françoise. This Is Not a Tragedy: The Works of David Markson.
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3 Manifestos for
“Reality-Based” Art
David Shields’s Reality Hunger and
How Literature Saved My Life
This chapter aims to examine the poetics and politics of collage in David
Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010) and How Literature Saved
My Life (2013).1 Although collage has been the default formal principle
of Shields’s writing since the early 1990s, I shall discuss only those two
texts, because – alongside their structural indebtedness to collage – they
directly engage with it on the level of ideas, by critiquing the conven-
tional novel and presenting collage literature as the desired alternative.
The validity of such a comparative analysis has been asserted by Arnaud
Schmitt, who regards them both as “manifestos” which “should primar-
ily be read as a theoretical diptych” (144). Following a presentation of
the collage structure of both texts, I shall outline the numerous charges
that Shields, particularly in Reality Hunger, levels against the traditional
novel. That critique will serve as the basis for my discussion of Shields’s
postulates of fragmentariness, free appropriation and the obliteration of
the fiction/non-fiction divide, all of which can be combined in collage
literature.
Among the writers considered in this study, Shields is undoubtedly one
of the most popular. Several of his more recent books – including The
Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (2008) and Reality
Hunger – have achieved the status of bestsellers and have been translated
into over twenty languages.2 With over twenty books to his name, Shields
is also among the most prolific and versatile contemporary American
authors. He has written novels, collections of essays, short stories and
several autobiographical books. Shields is also a co-author of a biogra-
phy of J.D. Salinger and a co-editor of Life Is Short, Art Is Shorter: In
Praise of Brevity (2015), a manifesto-cum-anthology celebrating radi-
cally short literary forms. His most acclaimed work to date has been
Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999) – an extended
essay in the form of a diary, which was a finalist for the National Book
Critics Circle Award and for the PEN USA Award. Shields has also taught
creative writing in several academic institutions, including the University
of Washington.
74 Art in Crisis
Shields’s tenth book, Reality Hunger attracted much critical attention
and was reviewed by many leading newspapers. Its reception, however,
was somewhat mixed. Luc Sante praised its “complex and multifaceted
argument” and the way it successfully taps into the zeitgeist, while Laura
Miller saw it as a self-important celebration of the author’s own “offbeat
preference” masking as a series of postulates made in the name of many.
Several reviewers, including Zadie Smith and Lincoln Michel, claimed to
appreciate aspects of Shields’s book while remaining sceptical about its
main theses. James Wood found Shields’s critique of the novel convincing
but had reservations about his simplistic privileging of “reality” over fic-
tion and the general instability of his argument (“Keeping”). Blake Mor-
rison called Reality Hunger a “spirited polemic on behalf of non-fiction”
as well as a “provocative and entertaining manifesto,” while express-
ing doubts as to the soundness of Shields’s thesis, which, he felt, was as
“smart” and “stimulating” as it was “dodgy.” Finally, Sean O’Hagan
found fault with the book’s debt to a “certain kind of endlessly referen-
tial, post-modernist lit-crit theory from the 1980s” but conceded that
much of Reality Hunger was “thought-provoking.”
Some of the same objections were raised three years later against How
Literature Saved My Life. Most reviewers stressed the parallels between
the two books: Mark O’Connell called it “as much a manifesto as its
predecessor,” John Williams – “in many ways, a sequel,” while Lowen
Liu noted that the new book “continues the crusade . . . against narrative
fiction, but less effectively.” All three critics complained about Shields’s
susceptibility to narcissism, manifest in his interest in other works only
insofar as he can see in them a reflection of his own self. Another com-
mon criticism has been of his tendency to shift from one quotation or idea
to another so quickly that he rarely manages to say anything revealing
about them. That appears to be a potential pitfall of the collage technique,
which privileges confrontation and juxtaposition over analysis. Williams
criticizes Shields’s use of collage by stating bluntly that he is “not very
good at the form he likes most,” whereas O’Connell concludes that How
is a “thwarted exercise in technique and artful self-display.” New States-
man’s Leo Robson, however, found the book “consistently enjoyable”
but only “occasionally convincing.” His discussion of Shields’s strategy
of cutting up quotations (in this case by J.M. Coetzee) so that they appear
to support his argument ends with a hint that How may be liable to the
charge of “formless garrulity.”
Collage Structure
As Shields asserts in How, collage has been the formal principle of all
his books since Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity
(1996). While working on Remote, he claims to have had his “Natalie-
down-the-rabbit-hole moment,” as a result of which he has never resorted
Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art 75
again to any orderly structure (HLSML 124). Since Shields understands
collage very broadly and applies the notion to texts which do not always
meet the formal requirements adopted in the present study, the collage
structure of Reality Hunger and How will not be taken for granted but
carefully tested in this section. Following a general description of their
form, I shall assert the books’ reliance on appropriation, heterogeneity,
fragmentation and parataxis.
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

Reality Hunger is composed of 618 numbered passages, which have been
arranged into 26 chapters titled from “a” to “z.” Apart from the con-
secutive letter of the alphabet, the title of each section contains a word
or phrase which corresponds to the thematic engagement of a given seg-
ment. The three opening ones are “overture,” “mimesis” and “books
for people who find television too slow.” Although the book’s length
(two hundred pages) is unusual for a manifesto (which Reality Hunger
claims to be in its subtitle), the layout – snippets surrounded by a lot of
space – and the use of numbering are common in the genre.3 The length
of passages varies from two words (“I exaggerate” [80])4 to two pages,
which makes the average snippet considerably longer than in David
Markson’s quartet. Over two-thirds of Shields’s passages are either direct
or slightly modified quotations from multiple sources. Among the most
commonly cited authors are Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.G. Sebald, John
D’Agata, Jonathan Raban, Vivian Gornick, Ross McElwee and Geoff
Dyer.5 Shields, like Markson, never uses quotation marks to set off origi-
nal from appropriated content. Neither does he credit the author in the
text, except in the endnotes contained in an appendix at the back of the
book, which – as Shields admits – he was forced to attach by the lawyers
of his publisher.6 In order to dissuade the reader from looking up the
origin of each passage, he advises them to cut the section off along the
indicated dotted line (p. 209).
Reality Hunger is also a generically hybrid text, mixing the conventions
of the critical essay, the autobiography and the manifesto. In line with its
first epigraph, by Walter Benjamin, it oscillates between the ambition to
“dissolve” and to “invent” a genre. In that respect, it should be viewed
in the context of Benjamin’s own The Arcades Project (1927–1940, pub-
lished in 1982) – a genre-defying homage to nineteenth-century Paris
assembled out of archival material accessed in Bibliothèque Nationale
in Paris. Benjamin’s rationale for his work is quoted verbatim on the
opening page of Reality Hunger: “Method of this project: literary mon-
tage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables,
appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these
I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their
own: by making use of them” (6). The new genre in whose parameters
76 Art in Crisis
Shields writes and whose rationale he celebrates is, in the words of critic
Cathy Alter, “one that doesn’t draw distinctions between fiction and non-
fiction, originality and plagiarism, memoir and fabrication.” Shields’s
favoured label for that generic hybrid is the lyric essay, whose defining
characteristics – eclecticism, heterogeneity and fragmentation – overlap
with the poetics of collage.
The composition of Reality Hunger is very much indebted to Jonathan
Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” (2007). Pub-
lished in Harper’s Magazine, Lethem’s piece is woven out of numerous
quotations by, among others, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau and
David Foster Wallace. What is more, Lethem has also included at the
end – in this case voluntarily – the key to his text, where he explains
the origins of all the plagiarized passages. Both authors admit to having
edited certain passages in the appropriated parts in order to grant their
texts a greater coherence in terms of style as well as content. Such prac-
tices of smoothing out appropriated texts are common in collage litera-
ture and were implemented quite frequently by, among others, William
S. Burroughs. To hide the seams between consecutive borrowed passages,
Lethem integrates all of them into a continuous, fluid text divided into
standard paragraphs. As a result, “The Anxiety of Influence” reads like a
sustained argument in favour of plagiarism as an artistic strategy. Accord-
ing to Zara Dinnen, Lethem “fully reconfigures others’ words within his
own framework” and “stifles the differences between the discrete materi-
als,” while Shields presents them as “distinct fragments” (219–20, 226).
Besides the use of numbering and blank space between consecutive pas-
sages and the incorporation of a variety of sources, Shields enhances the
fragmentariness of the text by occasionally employing snippets which do
not constitute self-contained semantic elements. An example of that is
passage 345: “– the singular obsessions endlessly revised,” which, as the
appendix explains, is taken from Thomas Lux’s “Triptych, Middle Panel
Burning.” Even when the passage takes the form of an extremely short but
complete sentence, as is the case with the earlier cited “I exaggerate” from
Lauren Slater’s Lying or the cryptic “And I shall essay to be” (478) from
Emerson, the eradication of the original context heightens the sense of its
incompletion. The resulting disorientation is a common feature of collage.
The paratactic and appropriative composition of Shields’s book can be
exemplified by the following excerpt:
121
These are the facts, my friend, and I must have faith in them.
122
What is a fact? What’s a lie, for that matter? What, exactly, con-
stitutes an essay or a story or a poem or even an experience? What
happens when we can no longer freeze the shifting phantasmagoria
which is our actual experience?
123
During the middle of a gig, Sonny Rollins sometimes used to wander
outside and add the sound of his horn to the cacophony of passing cabs.
124
Have you ever heard a song that makes you feel as good as Stevie
Wonder’s “Fingertips – Part 2”? I haven’t. It’s so real. When you lis-
ten to the song, you can hear a guy in the band yelling, “What key?
What key?” He’s lost. But then he finds the key, and boom. Every
time I hear that guy yelling, “What key?” I get excited.
In the passages 121 and 122, Shields juxtaposes a quotation from Cic-
ero with that of John D’Agata’s The Next American Essay. Although
both are concerned with the notion of fact, they differ radically in their
assessment of the accessibility of facts. Passage 123 is an original text,
whereas the last snippet is by John Mellencamp; both regard music. As
soon becomes evident, the excerpt is not marked by what David Antin
calls “explicit syntactical relations.” Instead of logic and sequence, one
can observe relations of likeness and difference. The common denomina-
tor for all the passages is their interest in authenticity, but there is little
sense of a coherent arrangement of parts that would unify the multiple
voices. On the contrary, the distinctness of the passages is emphasized –
both by their physical distance from one another and by the lack of logi-
cal consistency between them.
The above cluster, like many others in Reality Hunger, is governed by
the Joint relation. Since, as has been noted, the juxtaposed passages focus
on the same subject, we can speak of what I called Joint with thematic
unity (as opposed to random Joint) in the previous chapter. Compared to
Markson’s tetralogy, Shields’s book is more disciplined in its treatment of
specific issues thanks to the earlier indicated division into content-based
chapters or sections. That appears to be a consequence of the explicit
agenda of Reality Hunger – to make a set of specific points about art and
reality, which will be discussed in the next section. Whereas Markson’s
tetralogy is playful and flippant and proceeds by association, Shields’s
manifesto takes itself seriously and selects its ready-mades with a view to
demonstrating evidence for its claims.
As a result, certain parts contain expository passages from different
sources which make very similar, if not identical, points. A case in point
is the “f” chapter, which is composed of short assertions, mostly by con-
temporary authors, of the unreliability of memory, as in the following
cluster of quotations by Patrick Duff and David Carr:
166
Anything processed by memory is fiction.
167
When memory is called to answer, it often answers back with deception.
78 Art in Crisis
168
Consciously or unconsciously, we manipulate our memories to
include or omit certain aspects. Are our memories therefore fictions?
The effect is somewhat tautological, and certain passages may seem

redundant. The potential benefit of juxtaposing such analogous state-
ments would be in revealing the names of their often eminent authors
(like Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.M. Coetzee), which would lend them
gravity and create connections between writers otherwise not consid-
ered together. Shields, however, remains reluctant to signal the sources,
including the bibliographic appendix, which enables the most persever-
ing readers to look up most sources except those the author “couldn’t
find or forgot along the way” (p. 209).
The decision to withhold information about the source in the main
text seems more effective in Lethem’s plagiarism, as his text aims to cre-
ate the illusion of a consistent argument by covering the seams between
consecutive quotations. Shields, on the other hand, flaunts the fragmen-
tariness of his building blocks – particularly through the use of numbered
snippets rather than a continuous text broken down into conventional
paragraphs – which suggests but does not determine their appropriated
status. Even if Shields’s method is at times less effective than Lethem’s, it
is certainly more in line with the poetics of collage, which programmati-
cally resists coherence and exposes its seams.
If Reality Hunger is less coherent than “The Ecstasy of Influence,” it
is considerably more so than Markson’s tetralogy. The consistency of the
manifesto agenda prevents Shields from frequently juxtaposing contra-
dictory statements, of which Markson is very fond. One of the very few
instances of the Contradiction relation is the following cluster:
184
. . .“Fiction”/“nonfiction” is an utterly useless distinction.
185
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.
186
Genre mingling is responsible in no small measure for the moral
debility of intellect and character and will.
187
These categories are plastic.
But they aren’t.
Ah, but they are.
Shields constructs the cluster by juxtaposing his own assertion about the
futility of certain generic labels, a line from a poem by Emily Dickinson
(also quoted in This Is Not a Novel), Irving Babbitt’s statement about
generic hybridity and an apparent snatch of dialogue (not appropriated)
between a proponent and an opponent of the malleability of the notions
of fiction and non-fiction. Passage 187 stands in contrast to the state-
ment in 184. The two clash in 187, where Shields’s position triumphs,
as he appears to have the last word (“Ah, but they are”). The above
confrontation inaugurates the “g” chapter, the rest of which is composed
of multiple statements (from T.S. Eliot to Werner Herzog) supporting
Shields’s insistence on the need to escape the constraints of genre, defined
(by Shields himself) as “a minimum-security prison” (RH 210).
Another characteristically collage-like rhetorical relation which can be
discerned in Reality Hunger is List. Shields frequently resorts to enumer-
ating titles of books which exemplify a critical point which has just been
made. For instance, directly after a remark (appropriated from Dyer)
about his preference to “write stuff that’s only an inch from life” comes
an enumeration of nine titles, including David Foster Wallace’s A Suppos-
edly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster, Kurt Von-
negut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey
Falcon (188–89). The context suggests that the consecutive titles are to
be understood as examples of highly autobiographical texts which, how-
ever, deviate from straight autobiography. Other similar passages bring
together works which – in the manner reminiscent of the speaker of The
Waste Land – consist of “fragments . . . shored against [one’s] ruins”
(368) and of texts that “dissolve a genre or invent one” (590).
How Literature Saved My Life

The general structure of How Literature Saved My Life is substantially
different from that of Reality Hunger. It appears to be a more conven-
tional text in the way it fills the entire page (renouncing the radical chop-
piness of the latter) and divides its parts – a prologue and nine titled
chapters. Some of the titles – such as “Love is a long, close scrutiny”
(appropriated from a novel by John Hawkes)7 and “Life v. art” – recur
several times across the book as headings of smaller sections. The fre-
quent recurrence of titles (“Love is illusion,” for instance, being used as
the heading of four consecutive sections) is one of the most prominent
and unusual structural characteristics of How. The arbitrary relations
between the title and the content of given sections, as well as the fact that
many of the headings have been appropriated, are the first noticeable
collage-like features of Shields’s book.
In the first critical response to How, more concerned with the content
rather than the form of Shields’s book, Arnaud Schmitt notes parentheti-
cally that it “resembles a collage . . . despite its formal regularity (short
subparts) and its overall question: has literature saved Shields’s life?”
(143–44). Another important collage-like aspect of How – its generic
hybridity – is also signalled by Schmitt, though not in connection with
80 Art in Crisis
the poetics of collage. The critic gathers a number of generic tags which
Shields considers in reference to the book in hand, including “antimem-
oir” (HLSML 29), “wayward nonfiction” (50), “mediation” (130),
“essay” (134), “cultural autobiography” (141) and “collage” (111).8
While none of those labels is applicable to all the sections of How, each
is an apt category for specific parts of the book. Their uneasy coexistence,
however, resembles at times a paratactic juxtaposition of genres, which
is redolent of collage.
Although How’s reliance on appropriated material is not as strong and
comprehensive as in the case of Reality Hunger, there are several sections
in the book which are almost exclusively composed of quotations. How
is far more forthcoming about its borrowed elements, most of which are
enclosed in quotation marks and preceded by a brief indication of their
source.9 An example of this strategy is the microsection entitled “Other
people,” which consists of a single quotation:
E. M. CIORAN: “The universe is a solitary space, and all its creatures

do nothing but reinforce its solitude. In it, I have never met anyone,
I have only stumbled across ghosts.”
(HLSML 111)
On the following page, Shields places – in the same way – solitary cita-
tions from Arthur Schopenhauer and Vladimir Nabokov. The only com-
mentary that the author supplies is included in the section title. In the
case of Schopenhauer and Nabokov, it is “A day like any other” – an
intertextual reference to death, which is the subject of both statements.
In certain sections, Shields enters into a dialogue with the quoted frag-
ments, as is the case in the following passage from “Our ground time
here will be brief”:
Tolstoy: “The meaning of life is life” – for which much thanks. Ice-
T’s answer: “A human being is just another animal in the big jungle.
Life is really short and you’re going to die. We’re here to stick our
heads above the water for just a minute, look around, and go back
under.” Burt Reynolds: “First, it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reynolds?’ Then it’s
‘Get me Burt Reynolds.’ Then ‘Get me a Burt Reynolds type.’ Then
‘Get me a young Burt Reynolds.’ And then it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reyn-
olds?’ ” Beckett’s mantra: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Okay, you’re
going to go on, I hope and assume. Congratulations. Why, though?
What carries you through the day, not to mention the night? Beck-
ett’s own answer: he liked to read Dante, watch soccer, and fart.
(99–100)
What intensifies the collage-like effect of the passage is the incongruity

of the confronted speakers: Leo Tolstoy and Samuel Beckett, on the one
hand, and Ice-T with Burt Reynolds, on the other. Becket’s juxtaposition
of Dante, football and farting further enhances the sense of an amusing
collision.
As can be seen in the above passage, Shields does not provide exten-
sive commentary on the quoted parts. The only authorial contribution
besides the selection and weaving of the cited material are the tersely
ironic “much thanks” and “congratulations” (followed by two ques-
tions) in response to Tolstoy’s and Beckett’s remarks. O’Connell posits
that Shields’s method of broaching important issues consists in finding
quotations from other writers, which “reliev[es] him of the need to con-
sider [them] in any kind of penetrating way himself.” That strategy, he
adds, is “not a lapse; it’s the foundation of [his] collage method of writ-
ing.” O’Connell appears to call into question the effectiveness of the
collage technique in essayistic texts that advance arguments and put for-
ward ideas. His doubts could be substantiated by Lance Olsen’s earlier
cited definition of collage as “the quintessential art of the non-sequitur”
(Architectures 89), which proposes that the foundation of collage writing
is what academic discourse condemns as a logical fallacy. Shields puts
forward his counterarguments in the almost exclusively appropriated
section titled “A day like any other, only shorter,” which begins with the
following series of quotations:
ROYAL AIR FORCE (RAF) MEDICAL CHIEF: “All war pilots will inevita-
bly break down in time if not relieved.”
BEN SHEPHARD: “In the Battle of Britain, a stage was reached when it
became clear that pilots would end up ‘Crackers or Coffins.’ There-
after, their time in the air was rationed.”
DICTIONARY OF RAF SLANG: “ ‘Frozen on the stick’: paralyzed with
fear.”
PAUL FUSSELL: “The letterpress correspondents, radio broadcasters,
and film people who perceived these horrors kept quiet about them
on behalf of the War Effort.”
(89)
He closes the section with the only original passage serving as the rationale
for his method of argumentation: “In Human Smoke, [Nicholson Baker]
takes hundreds of passages from innumerable sources and positions them
in such a way that an argument clearly emerges.” Unlike O’Connell, Shields
declares his faith in collage as a vehicle of argumentation. However, the
simplicity of the argument which the section appears to advance – “War,
even WWII, is never justified” (91) – may serve to undermine the belief in
collage as an effective tool of substantiating complex claims.
Shields’s use of collage is more convincing when its aim is to rep-
resent the variety of discussed material. A case in point is the section
“All great books wind up with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.”
82 Art in Crisis
Following the heading “Fifty-five works I swear by,” Shields lists, in
alphabetical order – from Renata Adler’s Speedboat to Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five – his favourite books, essays and short stories. The
text’s author and title are accompanied by a very brief description of its
form, content or personal response. Although the section does not meet
all the criteria of collage proper, it has a collage-like quality owing to
its juxtaposition of external heterogeneous elements in alphabetical, and
hence not entirely logical, order. There is also a collage feel to the account
of numerous books that Shields praises in various sections of How – such
as Markson’s This Is Not a Novel,10 Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams and Lance
Olsen’s Calendar of Regrets – without clearly integrating them with the
previous (or ensuing) sections.
How uses images to illustrate the opening pages of each chapter. The
book’s multimodal potential, however, remains undeveloped. The pic-
tures used are in most cases bland and purely illustrative. They revolve
around the subject of books and resemble images taken from repositories
of stock photographs. Rather than meaningfully engage with the title of
each chapter, they most often provide a banal visual accessory. A case
in point is page 41, on which the chapter heading “Love is a long, close
scrutiny” is accompanied by a photo of several lines of a book page pre-
senting in focus the word “love” – a trite combination of literature (the
main theme of How) and love (signalled by the title of the chapter). In
order to determine the role of all the employed images, it is useful to
invoke a distinction introduced by Belgian scholar Jan Baetens. Baetens
proposes the term “picture of the text” to account for illustrations or
“visual synopses” of what is also expressed verbally and the notion of
“picture as text” (or “picture in itself”) to denote images independent of,
or not subordinate to, the adjacent text (Baetens 187; Maziarczyk, Novel
199).11 The images in How are subservient to the text, which they only
echo without entering into a dialogue with the neighbouring verbal com-
ponents. Although a mixture of images and text is a familiar harbinger
of a literary collage, their flatly harmonious coexistence in How is barely
rooted in the poetics of collage.
Whereas Reality Hunger’s employment of collage is comprehen-
sive, How could be said to use it only locally. That difference could be
accounted for by the books’ distinct rationales. While the iconoclastic zest
and determination of Reality Hunger invite the politics of collage, How’s
more meditative tone, a consequence of its autobiographical foundation,
makes it a less obvious site of collage-like confrontation. It is, however,
its fusion of collage technique and life-writing content that, according to
Schmitt, remains How’s greatest achievement. The critic announces that
Shields’s book is “the autobiographical equivalent of what David Mark-
son tried to achieve with his novels”: while Markson prefers to keep his
distance as a narrator, Shields “infuses” the book “with his own psyche”
(Schmitt 144).
The Novel’s Obsolete Apparatus
“Valéry said he could never write a novel for one insurmountable reason.
He would have to include sentences like ‘The Marquise went out at five’ ”
(RB 128). This snippet from Reader’s Block, although not appropriated
by Shields, encapsulates Shields’s deep-seated distrust of the novel. For
the author of Reality Hunger, its traditional tools – plot, character and
genre, which are indicated by the germ of the Marquis narrative – are
artificial and obsolete conventions. A product of their time, they are no
longer capable of resonating with a contemporary audience: genre is a
“prison”; plot is for “dead people,” while characters are “puppets in
which [authors] themselves have ceased to believe” (RH 210, 326, 50).
Shields particularly denounces, in the words of Malcolm Gladwell, “nov-
els based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of char-
acter and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before” (RH 101).
As a result, such texts are “unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and
essentially purposeless” (RH 347). Their reliance on formulas also makes
them artistically null – after all, the mark of a successful work, according
to Shields (echoing Richard Serra), is “how much [their authors] are able
to rid themselves of convention” (591). An equally important reason for
the novel’s incompatibility with the appetites (or “hunger,” as Shields
would put it) of a contemporary audience is its programmatic inability to
deliver “the ‘real’,” or at least the “semblances of the real” as an antidote
to the proliferation of “fabrication” in the “manufactured and artificial
world” (239).
As a relic of a bygone era, the novel and its attempts, sincere as they
may be, to breathe life into the Marquis narrative are doomed to failure.
In an interview accompanying the publication of Reality Hunger, Shields
dismissed some of the most acclaimed literary novels of the turn of the
century – Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Jonathan Franzen’s The Correc-
tions (both 2001) – as “antediluvian texts that are essentially still working
in the Flaubertian novel mode” and as “works of nostalgic entertain-
ment,” which are unable to “convey what it feels like to live in the 21st
century.” “I read these books,” he added, “and my overwhelming feeling
is, you’ve got to be kidding” (O’Hagan). The novel’s considerable length,
solid narrative structure and general preference for cohesion12 are at odds
with the dynamic, protean, media-saturated and fragmentary dawn of
the third millennium.13
For Shields, the “apparatus of the novel” is a “huge, elaborate, over-
built stage set” which makes the reader plough through “seven hundred
pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was
written” (RH 379). Why not strip it from all the unnecessary machinery
and convey only the gist, Shields is asking. His is the principle of divest-
ment, formulated using the words of David Mamet: “How much can one
remove and still have the composition be intelligible? This understanding,
84 Art in Crisis
or its lack, divides those who can write from those who can really write.
Chekhov removed the plot. Pinter, elaborating, removed the history, the
narration; Beckett, the characterization. We hear it anyway. Omission is a
form of creation” (RH 357). A similar elimination of successive elements
of the novel is what Markson proposes in the metafictional passages at
the beginning of This Is Not a Novel. While Markson’s Writer admits to
being tired of the novel, Shields goes so far as to pronounce it defunct:
“The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps” (327).
Hence Shields’s decision to renounce the category altogether rather
than continue to situate himself within it, as was the case with Markson
and his tetralogy. Shields can pinpoint the moment when he resolved to
abandon the novel, which he calls his “conversion” (RH 515). First came
an epiphany in the shower, which brought the realization that it was
possible to “take various fragments of things – aborted stories, outtakes
from novels, journal entries, lit crit – and build a story out of them”
(514). Several years later, in the mid-1990s, the rejection of the novel was
sealed by Shields’s recognition that he was no longer able to “commit the
requisite resources to character and scene and plot” (515).
The fact that Shields’s theses about the condition of the novel in the
twenty-first century are heavily rooted in his own experience and are
occasionally supported by opinions and statements of personal prefer-
ence rather than arguments might be invoked to undermine the validity
of some of his observations, as was the case with the earlier cited criti-
cism by Laura Miller. An instance of such a general claim being made on
the basis (at least partly) of idiosyncrasy is the following passage: “I can
never remember characters’ names, plot developments, lines of dialogue,
details of setting. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly
revealing about the human condition” (RH 347). Several times Shields
openly admits to the subjective underpinnings of his position, as when he
states, “something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer
yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form” (594).14 Blake Morri-
son, in his review of Reality Hunger, facetiously notes that the name for
Shields’s malady is “fiction fatigue” – a condition experienced at some
point by most readers and one which “usually passes.”
In Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel, Pieter Vermeu-
len gives a somewhat muted response to Reality Hunger, whose motiva-
tion, he argues, is to “frame a personal sense of ennui with the inherited
forms of the novel as a diagnosis of a broader cultural malaise” (38).
According to Vermeulen, Shields chooses to make his own “readerly sen-
sibility” the arbiter of literary taste and the basis for his theses, which is
meant to justify what he regards as “the book’s indulgence in repeated
confessional passages” (39). His main charge is that Reality Hunger –
for all its rhetorical attacks on the novel – “ends up reanimating the
form it wishes to bury” (22). However, Vermeulen’s evidence for this
claim – “the teasing sentimentality of its title,” the length of the book and
the “overt presence of a continuous consciousness that guides the reader”
(41) – is debatable, as none of those elements, bar the last one perhaps,
is peculiar to the novel.
The personal anchoring of Reality Hunger’s postulates is emphasized
by Georgia Christinidis, who aligns Shields’s position with the claims
made by James Wood in “Tell Me How Does It Feel?” – his much-quoted
response to the crisis of 9/11, published in The Guardian less than a
month after the event. Christinidis cites Wood’s argument that in the
aftermath of the collapse of the Twin Towers the Stendhalian mirror car-
ried along any of Manhattan’s high roads would “explode” (33). The
impossibility of ignoring 9/11’s legacy may, Wood announces, “allow
a space for the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell us
not ‘how the world works’ but ‘how somebody felt about something’ ”
(“Tell Me”). The focus, therefore, will be shifted from literature-seeking
to make objective assertions to that concerned with “subjective truth
claims” (Christinidis 33). Christinidis argues that Wood and Shields
question the relevance of the realist novel for essentially the same reason.
They believe that since external reality is not reducible to any “order” or
“pattern,” the “only reality that can be represented is that of subjective
experience” (34). She adds that their claims can be regarded in the con-
text of the “crisis of representation” that has afflicted realism since the
advent of modernism (34).
Writing almost a decade after the attack on the World Trade Center,
Shields does not explicitly situate his diagnosis of the crisis of the novel
in the post-9/11 context. While the two passing references he makes
to this event in Reality Hunger do not merit closer attention, in How
he twice addresses the question of the most effective ways to respond
to such an experience. First, he discusses Annie Dillard’s “This Is the
Life” – an investigation of the relativity of cultural convictions, which
he finds “by far the best essay yet written about 9/11.” Shields uses the
preposition “about,” even though the author “doesn’t come even close
to mentioning” the calamity (104). He then mentions Markson’s Van-
ishing Point, which he calls “the best book . . . about 9/11, because it’s
barely about it” (150). Following Shields’s logic – which is occasionally
liable to the charge of sacrificing clarity for the sake of extravagance –
his books’ lack of direct engagement with 9/11 can serve as best proof of
their commitment to it.
Leaving aside the question of the context of the Twin Towers attack, the
crisis of the novel continues to be a prominent theme in How, although
Shields does not devote to it as much space as in Reality Hunger. The
reason for this might be the fear of restating the points that have already
been made.15 Several times he refers to the controversy sparked by Real-
ity Hunger, mostly to clarify that book’s rationale and halt misreadings.
86 Art in Crisis
In particular, Shields protests against regarding his work as “anti-novel
jihad” (Geoff Dyer’s humorous phrase used in The Guardian) or seeing it
as a “brief for the memoir.” Rather, it should be interpreted as an “argu-
ment for the poetic essay and the book-length essay,” and as a call for
works of non-fiction that investigate “our shifting, unstable, multiform,
evanescent experience in and of the world” (37).16 In a different section,
he calls Reality Hunger his “blue life raft” (a notion reminiscent of the
title of How Literature Saved My Life) which enabled him to “articu-
late . . . the aesthetic tradition out of which [he] was writing” – n either
that of the novel nor the memoir but rather the tradition of formal exper-
iment and of readiness to “break the forms” (126–27). At times, a note
of bitterness, even the sense of having become a martyr to his cause, can
be detected in How. Such is the case when he complains about being
regarded by some as “the Antichrist,” because he refused to “genuflect at
the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property” (117).
How does not offer any new arguments to Shields’s earlier discussion of
the ills of the novel. It remains a relic of a time long past – an “artifact,”
a form cherished by “antiquarians,” one that – unlike science – refuses to
“progress” (117). He asserts the novel’s obsolescence by pointing to its
reliance on devices associated with the nineteenth-century novel (Balza-
cian descriptions of setting) and twentieth-century cinema (Hitchcock-
ian climaxes) (177). How also reiterates Shields’s critique of the “tidy
coherence of most novels,” with its presuppositions of divine order
and a meaningful existence, which falsifies “the chaos and entropy that
surround and inhabit and overwhelm us” (178). Schmitt dismisses the
last point as “highly refutable” and symptomatic of Shields’s ignorance
about “our cognitive modus operandi.” Although people may indeed be
enveloped by entropy, their brains, Schmitt explains, are “programmed”
not to perceive it, as a result of which entropy remains an abstraction
as regards one’s subjective experience of the world (141). Schmitt also
levels a more general charge against Shields’s argumentation, which, in
his view, exposes the author’s “lack of knowledge of the history of the
novel.” He finds fault with Shields’s refusal to acknowledge the tradition
of the avant-garde novel, which has been able to engage meaningfully
with, if not predict, the myriad developments of the contemporary world
(141). It is true that Shields does not engage with the earlier announce-
ments of the “death of the novel,” which may create the impression that
he sees himself as the first one to diagnose its decline. The recognition of
that broader context could alert him to the existence of a pattern within
which Vermeulen locates Reality Hunger – one that makes “declarations
of the end of the novel” coincide with “moments of productivity and
innovation,” as a result of which “the history of the end of the novel
becomes almost coextensive with modern literary history as such” (Ver-
meulen 2).
Blueprint for a New Literature
As was noted at the beginning of the chapter, both Reality Hunger and
How Literature Saved My Life can be regarded as manifestos. Besides
asserting the inadequacy of the novel, they call for the emergence of
a new literary form that would embrace the zeitgeist and satisfy what
Shields has dubbed “reality hunger.” This section aims to examine the
propositions advanced in both books, particularly those which converge
with the poetics and politics of collage.
Shields’s ambition is to “write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group
of interrelated but unconnected artists in a multitude of forms and
media . . . who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into
their work” (RH 1).17 Although the exact make-up of that group is never
specified, from the repeated references to their works it may be inferred
that Shields has in mind such authors as, among others, John D’Agata,
Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Raban and Dave Eggers. The characteris-
tic traits of the movement which they are meant to constitute are the
following:
A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed,

unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. . . . Randomness, open-
ness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional
urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal
tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of
form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-
ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the
point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfic-
tion: the lure and blur of the real.
(RH 3)
Many of the myriad tags listed above could be subsumed under the notion
of the pursuit of greater authenticity, which – consistently with the title of
the manifesto – remains Shields’s central proposition. Among the ways of
incorporating “reality” into a literary work are appropriation, hybridity
and the renunciation of structural coherence, all of which are going to be
examined below.
At the heart of Shields’s manifesto is an account of the earlier noted
artistic epiphany, during which he realized it was possible to construct
a book out of “fragments of things” by setting “shards in juxtaposition
to other shards” (RH 514). “Fragments” and “shards” are the build-
ing blocks of the literature which Shields postulates and celebrates –
fragmentary, appropriative and hybrid. His rationale for advocating these
three properties is that they allow for “smuggling” more of reality into
the work (1). Fragmentation, Shields suggests, results from candour and
88 Art in Crisis
the rejection of the idea of life as “prepackaged along narrative lines.”
“Reality-based art” cannot bear the straitjacket of narrative and inevita-
bly “splinters and explodes” (70). Appropriation and plagiarism, in turn,
are discussed in Reality Hunger as woven into the fabric of all creativity
and art. One of the epigraphs to the book is Picasso’s statement that “art
is theft,” on which Shields later elaborates and notes that “all of culture is
an appropriation game” (261, 289).18 His advice for contemporary art-
ists echoes Burroughs’s manifesto for the cut-up published five decades
earlier: “Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest.
Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual
doing the editing” (RH 350).
Shields’s postulate of a hybrid literature springs from his earlier noted
distrust of generic conventions, which is highlighted in the earlier refer-
enced epigraph by Benjamin: “All great works of literature either dissolve
a genre or invent one” (590). In the course of the book, Shields quotes
various authors – from Emerson to Terry Gilliam – asserting the need for
art that combines multiple sources, disciplines and genre conventions.
Otherwise, the categories (such as “novel,” “memoir” or “Hollywood
movie”) adopted by a given work impose on them a set of limitations
which drain them of their potential to affect the audience on the intel-
lectual or emotional level (208). Another combination which Shields
considers unavoidable is that of fiction and non-fiction.19 Both notions
are tinged with the other: all that is ostensibly fiction is in some way
anchored in reality while all apparent non-fiction (of which the memoir is
Shields’s favourite example) resorts, deliberately or not, to fictional tools.
Shields’s literary forms of choice, which accommodate fragmentari-
ness, appropriation and hybridity, are the lyric essay and collage. The for-
mer is a recently coined notion used to refer to writing which draws on
the conventions of poetry, autobiography and criticism. Shields embraces
it as a fresh conflation of “art and fact . . . imagination and observation,
rumination and argumentation, human faith and human perception”
(72). Its poetics – admittedly consistent, for the most part, with that of
Reality Hunger – involves “gaps,” mosaic-like fragments, abrupt shifts of
focus, suggestiveness rather than exhaustiveness and “advancing by jux-
taposition or sidewinding poetic logic” (384). Several of those proposed
characteristics, interestingly, have been numbered by critics among the
shortcomings of Shields’s texts. Among the authors most often associated
with the lyric essay are writers frequently cited in Reality Hunger: John
D’Agata, Anne Carson and Annie Dillard.
The second form postulated by Shields is collage, to which he
devotes an entire 63-passage-long section. In it, he juxtaposes state-
ments about its poetics and politics by authors such as Walter Benja-
min, James Joyce, Ronald Sukenick, W.G. Sebald and Lance Olsen.20
What Shields appreciates most about collage is the renunciation of plot
and its teleology – the sense that “life is a coherent, fathomable whole”
and “everything happens for a reason” (319, 321).21 Released from
the obligation to impose order on the surrounding world, collage can
convey how modern “life . . . flies at us in bright splinters” (319).
Echoing Burroughs, Shields points to collage as the artistic strategy
most suited to realist representation of the contemporary world. What
collage gains by shedding the “apparatus of the novel” is the unlimited
space to explore directly the subjects in which the author is genuinely
interested. Shields likens “linear fiction” to a heavy rocket that needs to
drop its components at regular intervals in order to accelerate and, ulti-
mately, reach its climax as a lone capsule. In collage, on the other hand,
the narrative ballast is dropped from the start, and “every fragment is
a capsule.” As a result, the reader is “on [their] way to the moon on
every page” (348).
Collage embodies most aspects of the idea of art advocated in Shields’s
manifesto, including the central proposition of drawing on “reality” in
the form of “raw,” unprocessed material. As he explains in the collage
section, borrowing the words of the poet Charles Simic, “found objects
[and] ready-mades . . . abolish the separation between art and life” (340).
Their familiarity helps create “an immediate identification . . . between
the viewer and the work of art” (364). By flaunting its composition out
of multiple appropriated elements, whose source texts belong to differ-
ent genres of fiction and non-fiction alike, collage answers perfectly to
Shields’s proposition of a heterogeneous, hybrid literature. Although
Shields often uses the word “mosaic” as a synonym for collage,22 he
stresses that no ultimate consolidation of varied components is expected
to occur (314). Among the other propositions formulated on the open-
ing page of Reality Hunger which are fulfilled by collage are a degree of
“randomness” involved in the construction, the need for “reader/viewer
participation” in synthesizing the meanings of the work, and the propen-
sity for “self-reflexive” commentary.
In How Literature Saved My Life Shields also devotes a separate sec-
tion to the politics and poetics of collage. Its title – “Collage is not a
refuge for the compositionally disabled” – creates a bridge with the
equivalent section in Reality Hunger, as it appropriates one of its state-
ments (HLSML 176, RH 328). Shields begins by contrasting collage and
the “classic” plot-driven fictional narrative, which only gradually reveals
its theme. Instead of this “slow burn,” collage favours an immediate –
and undisguised – confrontation with its subject (HLSML 176). Another
difference singled out by Shields is that between conventional fiction’s
“seamless fluency” and collage’s “stutter[ing]” quality, which mani-
fests itself in its embrace of white space, ellipsis and “deliberate silence”
(177–78). Shields also emphasizes the potential of collage for “enter-
ing the author’s mind” and confronting it with the reader’s. It enables a
“transfer of consciousness,” which besides offering intellectual stimula-
tion can be “loneliness-assuaging” (177).
90 Art in Crisis
An important idea about collage, and one unexamined in Reality Hun-
ger, is its natural connection with the theme of crisis. Shields notes that
“the collage-narrator, who has the audacity to stage his or her own psy-
chic crisis as emblematic of a larger cultural crux and general human
dilemma, is virtually by definition in some sort of emotional trouble.”
He then adds that all collage books are “madly in love with their own
crises” (177). The phrase “their own crises” could be interpreted as both
a reference to the subject matter of literary collages as well as to their
construction – a non-hierarchical juxtaposition of heterogeneous, often
conflicting, elements.23 The earlier statement about a “personal crisis”
pointing to a “larger cultural crux” suggests collage’s synecdochic dis-
position and its capacity to address themes of broader sociopolitical
significance while remaining ostensibly confined to the personal. Shields
reaffirms this idea by ending the section with the statement that for him
collage “convey[s] . . . what it feels like for one human being to be alive,
and by implication, all human beings” (178).
Conclusion
Both of Shields’s books give a similar diagnosis of the crisis of contem-
porary fiction as that formulated in Markson’s tetralogy. What they all
see as its greatest burden is the excessive reliance on the “apparatus of
the novel” – the demands of plot, character and genre. In place of metic-
ulously crafted narratives, they advocate heterogeneous structures that
incorporate “shards” of seemingly incompatible materials and flaunt
their borrowings from multiple sources. In other words, they point to
collage as one the most accommodating forms for literary experimenta-
tion in the twenty-first century. Whereas Markson’s propositions did not
provoke much critical debate, Shields has been very successful in attract-
ing attention to his ideas. Vermeulen, despite his reservations about their
soundness, concedes that Reality Hunger “has become an almost compul-
sory point of reference in discussions of contemporary literature” (21).
In the years following its publication, other writers expressed a similar
dose of scepticism about the novel’s future. In the second volume of My
Struggle (2009–2011), Karl Ove Knausgård echoes Shields’s words when
he confesses that “just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fab-
ricated character in a fabricated plot made [him] feel nauseous” (505).
Lars Iyer’s “Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss (A Literary Mani-
festo After the End of Literature and Manifestos)” (2011) gives different
reasons for the demise of the novel (and literature at large), yet reflects
Shields’s insights in its insistence on “unliterary plainness,” “writ[ing]
about this world” and “resist[ing] closed forms” (Iyer; Vermeulen 44).
Among the best known and most consistent spokesmen for the death of
the novel in the last decade has been Will Self. His position, however, as
demonstrated in “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s For Real)” (2014),
is radically different from Shields’s, since for Self the crisis of the novel is
a cause for mourning rather than celebration.
The extent to which Shields’s predictions have been accurate and his
propositions accepted will become known in the next years. Critics have
been divided in assessing their prospective influence. Concerned with its
significance to autobiographical literature, Schmitt is not sure if Real-
ity Hunger and How will become “the blueprint for ‘end-of-the-genre
texts’ ” and thus stir a “revolution heralding a no-genre land” or have
“no impact whatsoever on the evolution of life writing” (144–45). Sean
O’Hagan, in turn, is rather sceptical about Reality Hunger’s influence
“beyond the rarefied world of literary culture.” Susan H. Greenberg and
Luc Sante are among the critics with the greatest confidence in Shields’s
literary intuitions. Greenberg wonders if the author is “simply ahead of
the rest of us, mapping out the literary future of the next generation,”
while Sante predicts that Reality Hunger “may not presage sweeping
changes in the immediate future, but it probably heralds what will be the
dominant modes in years and decades to come.”
Notes
1. An earlier version of small parts of this chapter appeared in an article of
mine entitled “Collage Manifestos: Fragmentation and Appropriation in
David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger,”
published in the edited volume The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contempo-
rary British and American Fiction.
2. One of Shields’s books, I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel (2014,
co-authored with Caleb Powell), was adapted to screen by Hollywood star
James Franco in 2017. Interestingly enough, Shields is not the only collage
author discussed in this study whose work Franco wanted to make into a
film. The other one is Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World, for which Franco
put in an unsuccessful bid.
3. In her study of the poetics of avant-garde manifestos, Marjorie Perloff notes
that enumeration is practised in order to hold the reader’s attention and
endow the text with a sense of practicality – each consecutive passage serves
as another goal to be attained (Futurist Moment 96). Shields’s avoidance
of blocks of continuous text and his favoured structure – a compilation of
short, often elliptical, statements set apart by empty spaces – also forges
a strong link with the poetics of the manifesto. As Laura Winkiel argues
in “Manifestos and Ars Poetica,” the connection between the genre and
fragmentation is “striking and apposite” (255). In adopting the form of the
fragment with its inherent incompletion, the manifesto fashions itself as a
project – a “fragment of the future” – to be realized, or completed, when
the advocated ideas are implemented and the utopia is achieved (Winkiel
255–56).
4. When referring to Reality Hunger, I shall offer the number of the passage
rather than that of the page, as it is a more precise indicator of location (also
applicable to the electronic version of the text). For quotations from the
appendix, I shall give the page number (preceded by “p.”).
92 Art in Crisis
5. In his blurb for Reality Hunger, Dyer makes a humorous comment on his
experience of the book: “Reading it, I kept thinking, ‘Yes, exactly, I wish I’d
said that, and then I realised I had’.”
6. A rare exception to both rules is the following passage, which reads like
a pastiche of the typical Markson snippet: “ ‘The author has not given his
effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazet-
teer, or fantasy,’ said the New York Globe in 1851 about Moby-Dick” (40).
7. Among the other recurring titles of chapters and sections which have been
borrowed from other sources are “Our ground time here will be brief” (the
title of a book of poems by Maxine Kumin), “A day like any other, only
shorter” (Samuel Beckett’s description of one’s death day) and “The wound
and the bow” (the title of a book of literary criticism by Edmund Wilson).
8. How’s vocal and frequently asserted resistance to simple generic classifica-
tion leads Schmitt to call it curiously “obsessed with genre.” He also notes
that Reality Hunger and How could both be classified as paradigms of a new
genre that could be named “genre-bashing” (140).
9. Even so, Shields does not occasionally refrain from using submerged
quotations – such as “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” from The Sun Also Rises
and Wittgenstein’s “the world is everything that is the case” (HLSML 111,
124) – without any form of acknowledging their appropriated status.
10. Shields notes that despite Markson’s frequent practice of “mashing up”
other writers’ texts, he “insisted upon verbatim quotation of his ‘own’
work in Reality Hunger.” He goes on to call the book a “bibliophile’s wet
dream” (103).
11. Both terms are related to Roland Barthes’s distinction between the two func-
tions of the text accompanying images – “anchorage” and “relay.” The for-
mer kind aims to “elucidate” the visuals by narrowing down their range of
signifieds, while the latter’s role is to “complement” them (Barthes 156–57).
12. Shields argues that the politics of the novel is also obsolete, as the form
“tends to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal,
entirely decipherable universe” (39).
13. In Life Is Short: Art Is Shorter, Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman appropri-
ate Charles Baxter’s association of the novel with “expansionism, empire-
building, and the contemplation of the heroic individual” (22). Against the
novel Shields and Cooper pit “short short stories” as “products of mass
societies in which crowding is an inescapable part of life” (23).
14. In How, Shields confesses, “I find that I almost literally can’t read a book
if it’s unbroken text. . . . Whereas the moment I see the text broken up into
brief fragments, I’m intellectually and aesthetically and almost erotically
alert” (177).
15. Even so, Schmitt observes that How demonstrates Shields’s “proclivity to
repeat himself” (142).
16. The quoted passages originally appeared in Shields’s “harrumphing” letter
to the New York Review of Books, whose fragment is copied verbatim in
How (37).
17. In The Age of Distraction: Reading, Writing, and Politics in a High-Speed
Networked Economy (2011), Robert Hassan argues that despite Shields’s
stated aim and his insistence on Reality Hunger’s status as a manifesto, his
book is actually an “antithesis” of the genre’s political program, which offers
“an ordered and structured and rational and reasoned basis for promoting
reconstruction” (141).
18. Like Lethem in “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Shields condemns those who
attempt to staunch appropriation through the appeal to copyright laws. In
the appendix to Reality Hunger, when he urges the reader to cut off the
ensuing bibliography, he argues that “reality cannot be copyrighted” (209).
19. Schmitt situates Shields’s position in the context of the French tradition of
auto-fiction and the postmodernist principle of panfictionalism (135–36).
20. One of the passages in this section is a direct quotation from Markson:
“Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. As is already more
than self-evident” (RH 359). Other quotations from the tetralogy which are
incorporated by Shields are “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (185) and “In
the end one experiences only oneself” (532), originally by Emily Dickinson
and Friedrich Nietzsche, respectively.
21. According to Morrison, in this passage (appropriated from Olsen’s 10:01),
which he calls “patronising to novelist and reader alike,” Shields “sells fic-
tion short,” claiming that the fragmentariness of life can only be conveyed
in fragmentary form. In his review of How, Lowen Liu attacks the same idea
by calling it “the imitative fallacy.”
22. Shields does not draw a sharp distinction between the two terms and
understands the mosaic as a work composed of numerous elements which
“flaunts” its compositional heterogeneity (333). He notes that in literary
mosaic “momentum . . . derives not from narrative but from the subtle,
progressive buildup of thematic resonances” (334).
23. According to Vermeulen, Reality Hunger is animated by the ongoing confron-
tation of “the old and the new” – “the form it dismisses and the new poetics
it does not quite manage to articulate without this confrontation” (38).
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its of the American Novel.” New Statesman, New Statesman, 22 Aug. 2013,
www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/03/list-life-richard-avedon-one-
americas-great-post-war-photographers. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018.
Sante, Luc. “The Fiction of Memory.” New York Times, The New York Times
Company, 12 Mar. 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/books/review/Sante-t.
html. Accessed 12 Nov. 2017.
Schmitt, Arnaud. “David Shields’s Lyrical Essay: The Dream of a Genre-Free
Memoir, or Beyond the Paradox.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 31, no. 1,
pp. 133–46.
Shields, David. How Literature Saved My Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.
———. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Vintage, 2011.
Shields, David, and Elizabeth Cooperman. Life Is Short – Art Is Shorter: In Praise
of Brevity. Hawthorne, 2015.
Smith, Zadie. “On the Rise of the Essay.” The Guardian, Guardian News and
Media, 21 Nov. 2009, www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/21/zadie-smith-
essay-guardian-review. Accessed 21 Sept. 2017.
Vermeulen, Pieter. Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature,
Affect, Form. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Williams, John. “More Literary Remixes from a Mash-Up Artist: ‘How Litera-
ture Saved My Life,’ by David Shields.” New York Times, The New York Times
Company, 3 Feb. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/books/how-literature-
saved-my-life-by-david-shields.html. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018.
Winkiel, Laura. “Manifestos and Ars Poetica.” The Routledge Companion
to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian
McHale. Routledge, 2012, pp. 253–66.
Wood, James. “Keeping It Real.” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 7 March 2010,
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2019.
———. “Tell Me How Does It Feel?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media,
6 Oct. 2001, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct/06/fiction. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018.
Part II
Society in Crisis
4 It’s the End of the World
as We Know It
Lance Olsen’s Sewing Shut My Eyes,
Head in Flames and Dreamlives
of Debris
After examining how collage has been used in contemporary literature to

represent the experience of artistic crisis, I now wish to turn to a discus-
sion of texts that employ collage in order to comment on situations of
social and political turmoil. This chapter is devoted to the analysis of fic-
tion works by Lance Olsen: two multimodal short stories (co-authored
with Andi Olsen) from the collection Sewing Shut My Eyes (2000) and two
novels – Head in Flames (2009) and Dreamlives of Debris (2017).1 Fol-
lowing an overview of Olsen’s oeuvre and a brief presentation of the works
in question, I shall consider the indebtedness of their formal properties
to the poetics of collage, focusing in particular on their use of appropria-
tion, juxtaposition and multimodality. The last section will focus on the
content of Olsen’s works and examine the numerous contemporary crises
which they address, including the damaging social effects of television and
celebrity culture in Sewing Shut My Eyes, the violent clash of Western lib-
eralism with Islamist fundamentalism in Head in Flames and the anxieties
of digital culture in Dreamlives of Debris. The final part will also consider
the suitability of collage to represent those phenomena while referring to
Olsen’s own theoretical pronouncements on collage as a literary form.
Olsen is the author of fourteen novels and four collections of shorter
fiction, as well as author, co-author or editor of eight works of non-fiction.
Besides being an extraordinarily prolific novelist, he has also been a pro-
fessor of creative writing (himself a graduate of the famous Iowa Writing
Center, which he attended together with David Shields) at the University
of Idaho and, since 2007, at the University of Utah. His teaching experi-
ence gave rise to the publication of two “anti-textbooks,” the latest of
which is called Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing (in
collaboration with Trevor Dodge, 2012). Olsen is also the author of the
first book-length critical study of William Gibson’s work. From 2002 to
2018, he was in charge of Fiction Collective Two – a not-for-profit pub-
lishing house of experimental literature (which released Steve Tomasula’s
The Book of Portraiture – to be discussed in the next chapter).
On account of the style and thematic interests of his novels from
the 1990s – including Tonguing the Zeitgeist (1994), a finalist for the
100 Society in Crisis
Philip K. Dick Award – Olsen came to be associated with speculative
fiction and the literary movement called Avant-Pop, which announced
the death of postmodernism and advocated non-linear, “pla(y)giarist”
and “writerly” (to use terms introduced by Raymond Federman and
Roland Barthes, respectively) fiction influenced by cyberpunk and chaos
theory and drawing on the legacy of authors such as William S. Bur-
roughs, Federman and Kathy Acker (Nettles; Olsen, “Avant-Pop” 204).
Around the turn of the century, Olsen’s works began to assume very
noticeably collage-like characteristics thanks to the more frequent use of
quotations and computer-generated images. Rather than employing the
latter as mere illustrations, Olsen, together with his wife, collaborator
and assemblage artist, Andi Olsen, developed a method of combining
the textual and visual so that they interact with each other on an equal
footing. Out of this “ambiguous, suggestive, lyrical zone that exists when
words and images kiss” came Sewing Shut My Eyes, Hideous Beauties
(2003) and Theories of Forgetting (2014) (Olsen, “Hideous Beauties”).
Alongside those richly multimodal works, Olsen has also created many
works which can be thought of as collages in the sense that they refuse a
linear narrative, meld literary genres and intensely employ appropriation.
Among them is his critically acclaimed unofficial trilogy – constituted
by Nietzsche’s Kisses (2006), Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka
(2007) and Head in Flames – of novels devoted to three modern geniuses:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka and Vincent van Gogh, respectively.
The three works chosen for analysis in this chapter offer a representa-
tive sample of Olsen’s engagement with the poetics and politics of col-
lage. The first of them, Sewing Shut My Eyes, is a collection of nine
fictions couched in the eccentrically flamboyant aesthetics of Avant-Pop,
as apparent in the titles such as “Cybermorphic Beat-Up Get-Down Sub-
terranean Homesick Reality-Sandwich Blues” and “Kamikaze Motives of
the Immaculate Deconstruction in the Data-Sucking Rust-Age of Insectile
Hackers.” Reviewer John G. Nettles notes that they give the reader a
foretaste of a book that “crackles with attitude” and has “the ghosts of
Dick and Burroughs . . . shoot it out in the atrium of MoMA while David
Cronenberg films it.” The epigraph from Jean Baudrillard’s “The Preces-
sion of Simulacra” introduces the volume’s dystopic engagement with
the themes of simulation, technology and the media. Of the five dark and
quirky multimodal fictions in the volume (the remaining ones involve
text only) I have chosen the two most overtly concerned with experiences
of crisis: “Telegenesicide” and the titular “Sewing Shut My Eyes.” Only
several pages long, both pieces resemble actual visual collages in their
creative conjunctions of original and borrowed images, individual words,
commercial slogans and longer quotations. The little critical attention
garnered by the collection has focused primarily on those collaborative
multimodal pieces, which Bob Riedel described as “truly disturbing” at
It’s the End of the World as We Know It 101
their best and J.R. Foley as “unique . . . funny but also quite disturbing”
(Olsen, “Hideous Beauties”).
Olsen’s tenth novel, Head in Flames was inspired by the widely pub-
licized murder of the controversial Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh
by Muslim fundamentalist of Moroccan origin Mohammed Bouyeri in
Amsterdam on 2 November 2004. The reason for the attack was van
Gogh’s unceremonious critique of Islam articulated in his televised inter-
views, on his website The Healthy Smoker and in his recent film Sub-
mission (2004). That ten-minute feature targeting Islam’s treatment of
women was the result of his collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the first
Muslim member of the Dutch parliament, who was the addressee of a
violent letter that Bouyeri affixed with a kitchen knife to van Gogh’s
body after shooting at him multiple times (Burke). Olsen’s novel is told
through three alternating perspectives – those of Bouyeri, van Gogh and
the brother of his great-grandfather – Vincent van Gogh. Broken down
into brief, often one-line snippets, Head in Flames witnesses its three
ill-fated protagonists on the last day of their lives or – in Bouyeri’s case –
freedom. The novel received very favourable reviews: John Madera
praised its “inventive, playful form and . . . evocative content”; Review
of Contemporary Fiction called it “a tour de force of formal innovation”
reminiscent of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch; Scott Esposito compared Ols-
en’s spare, economical style to that of Don DeLillo and J.M. Coetzee;
while John Domini argued that Head in Flames “set a new standard for
the social consciousness of postmodern narratives” (“Head in Flames”).
Dreamlives of Debris is a retelling of the Minotaur myth whose large
cast of characters (or voices) includes Theseus, Ariadne and Daedalus,
as well as Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. The
protagonist and principal voice are the illicit child of Pasiphaë and the
bull, who in Olsen’s version is a disfigured girl calling herself Debris.
A shunned and deeply insecure creature, Debris has a curious ability to
channel various voices from the future, which are presented in the novel
as “songs” or “choruses” formatted as if their speakers were characters in
a play. The recurrent motif and underlying structural concept in Dream-
lives is the maze, which Olsen addresses using textual and graphic means.
The conventional rectangular shape of the book has thus been replaced
by a perfect square. In order to evoke the mazelike sense of disorienta-
tion, Olsen – who laid out the book with the use of the software applica-
tion InDesign – has withheld any location markers such as chapters or
even page numbers. Again, critical reception was very positive: Kirkus
Reviews applauded the novel’s broad thematic scope, “deeper emotional
truth” and the ability to remain “experimental” and “accessible” at the
same time (“Dreamlives”); Jon Cone called it “a machine to think with”
and a challenge to “received notions about what constitutes story and
storytelling”; and Aimee Parkison described it as a “rare and brilliant
novel” which “break[s] boundaries of horror, science fiction, nonfiction,
love story, and myth” (“Dreamlives”).
Collage Structure
Of all the authors considered in this study, Olsen is among the ones fol-
lowing the poetics of collage most closely and consistently. The majority
of works discussed in this chapter enact minimal narrative progression,
whereas their reliance on appropriated material, paratactic arrangement
of text and generic eclecticism is much greater than in works like Shields’s
How Literature Saved My Life. Furthermore, Olsen is one of the three
discussed authors – besides Graham Rawle and Steve Tomasula – who
acknowledge their debt to visual collage by incorporating images and
experimenting with the font and layout of the page. Owing to the signifi-
cant formal differences between their employment of collage properties,
Sewing Shut My Eyes, Head in Flames and Dreamlives of Debris will be
examined separately.
Sewing Shut My Eyes

“Telegenesicide,” “Pentapod Freak Nest” and “Sewing Shut My Eyes”
are the most exuberantly visual – and collage-like – works in the collec-
tion. Although scattered across the volume, the three fictions appear to
be companion pieces on account of the various formal parallels between
them. Each of them is the result of the earlier mentioned collaboration
between Lance and Andi Olsen, which, as the former explained in an
interview by J.R. Foley, was a multistage process:
Andi began to create a given number of panels – seven, say – com-

prised of computer-generated collaged visuals, without any narra-
tive in mind. She then gave me the panels, which I arranged in an
order that appealed to me. I came up with words, phrases, quotes,
and other bits of language that somehow seemed appropriate to each
panel, gave everything back to Andi, and she then wed text and visu-
als. Only after that would we come together and edit each panel.
(Olsen, “Hideous Beauties”)
The visuals, as becomes evident from Olsen’s report on the creative pro-
cess, are by no means a mere addition or illustration of the text but con-
stitute an integral part of the entire composition – exactly like in a visual
collage. The images employed in Sewing Shut My Eyes could, therefore,
be said to function as “pictures as text,” to use Jan Baetens’s earlier intro-
duced notion. They are, in other words, equal partners in the production
of the overall meaning of the piece.
It is symptomatic that Olsen speaks of the works being divided into
“panels” rather than “pages,” which emphasizes their distinctness from
one another (as well as alludes to the tradition of comics and graphic
novels). Indeed, each page – there are between five and seven of them – of
the three works could be displayed in an art gallery on its own (as indeed
they have been) in the same way as individual pages of Tom Phillips’s A
Humument. What makes this possible is the fact that the arrangement of
pages, or panels, does not impose a strong sequential order. Except for
the titles on their initial page and a dictionary definition of “pain” which
is broken down into four numbered parts that appear on the consecutive
odd pages of “Telegenesicide,” the three pieces are perfectly reversible.
Interestingly, reversibility is for Olsen an important criterion for literary
collage. In his earlier quoted critical article “Fourteen Notes Toward the
Musicality of Creative Disjunction, Or: Fiction by Collage,” he discusses
Milorad Pavić’s ambition, realized in Dictionary of the Khazars (1984),
to “make literature, which is a nonreversible art, a reversible one” (Pavić
in Olsen, “Fourteen Notes” 186). Granting the reader the possibility to
ignore the way the book has been bound and to read the text in any
chosen order makes their experience more similar to that of a viewer
confronted with a visual collage, whose investigation can begin in any
place of the picture.
In the case of “Telegenesicide” and “Sewing Shut My Eyes,” the reader
will first be drawn to the large human (or humanoid) figures which appear
in most panels. Their salience2 is the result of their size and central posi-
tion (210); in one panel in “Telegenesicide,” the prominence of the image
is further enhanced by the layout of the surrounding text, which appears
to radiate from it (SSME 15). The most important image in the first work
is a black-and-white photograph (colour is not used at all in the collec-
tion) of an old woman with her mouth wide open, which suggests that
she may be screaming, singing or yawning; or else, she may be in ecstasy
and serve as the embodiment of what Baudrillard calls in his essay under
the same title “the ecstasy of communication” (150). On her head, Andi
Olsen has put oversized earphones and in her arms – an equally dispro-
portional image of a foetus. Besides appearing in the first panel, the wom-
an’s characteristic (and disturbing) grimace recurs on two further pages,
in both cases embedded in a television set (15, 16). The second recurrent
visual motif is the foetus, which in later panels is attached to an old man’s
back (13) and floats in limbo with a tiny TV set in its belly and a large
remote control in its hands (16). The images of both the old woman and
the old man, as well as of another man on panel seven, are taken from
nineteenth-century medical textbooks, where they served as illustrations
of patients with psychiatric issues (Olsen, Personal interview).
In “Sewing Shut,” the foetus is replaced by a small baby, who – in the
opening panel – appears desiccated, either partly burnt or prematurely
wrinkled, with an open mouth, an earring in one ear and a necklace (79).
Two panels later the baby reappears – looking more alive this time but
with an enormously swollen forehead – holding a portable phone (81).
The second visual motif in common with “Telegenesicide” is the multiple
TV sets, which in this piece tend to contain zombie-like faces (of Claudia
Schiffer in one instance) and other body parts (82, 83). The piece also
features images of other high-profile models such as Cindy Crawford and
Kate Moss.
The rich multimodality of those works is not confined to their intense
use of images. In her earlier cited list of eight most common formal prop-
erties of multimodal texts, Alison Gibbons includes four features which
can be traced in the pieces under discussion: “unusual textual layouts and
page design,” “varied typography,” “concrete realisation of text to create
images as in concrete poetry” and “mixing of genres . . . in terms of visual
effect, such as newspaper clipping” (Multimodality 2). The best example
of the Olsens’ use of all of the above devices is panel five of “Telegenesi-
cide.” First of all, seven out of eight portions of text that appear on the
page are laid out at a different angle. The exuberant play with angles is
reminiscent of Raymond Federman’s experiments in Double or Nothing
(1971); therefore, it is only fitting that “Telegenesicide” is dedicated to
him. Second, the textual fragments in the panel are rendered in various
sizes of the Times New Roman typeface, including variations of shade,
italics and bold lettering.3 The three blocks of text in the upper part of the
page (bar the quote attribution in the top left corner) are broken down
into 21 lines, each of which is tilted at a different angle in order for all
the lines to look as if they were radiating from the television set. That
feature, third on Gibbons’s list, pays tribute to the tradition of concrete
poetry, which uses words as building blocks of figurative images. Finally,
the little snippet underneath the feet of the central creature – a fragment
of the dictionary definition of “pain” – has been designed to look like a
cut-out. That effect, exemplifying Gibbons’s notion of mixing visual gen-
res, is achieved through superimposing on the text an irregular rectangu-
lar patch, which is slightly darker than the panel’s background.
Besides their multimodality and the resulting structural heterogeneity,
“Telegenesicide” and “Sewing Shut” meet the other criteria for collage
texts such as the intense use of appropriation, juxtaposition and – to a
lesser extent – fragmentation. As regards the employment of borrowed
content, each piece relies heavily on quotations and photographs. While
textual appropriations are, for the most part, enclosed in quotation
marks and accompanied by the name of the author and, in several cases,
the title of the source, images – as is customary in visual collage – come
without any indication of origin. Among the acknowledged quotations in
“Telegenesicide” are passages from Baudrillard’s “The Ecstasy of Com-
munication,” Arthur Kroker and David Cook’s Television and the Tri-
umph of Culture (15) and David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram:
Figure 4.1 Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, “Telegenesicide” (in Lance Olsen and
Andi Olsen, Sewing Shut My Eyes, U of Alabama P, 2000), p. 15.
Television and U.S. Fiction” (16). The ones without acknowledgement
vary from easily recognizable (“NASA, WE HAVE A PROBLEM HERE”
[17]) to rather obscure, as is the case with a Barbie quote featured in
the American Postcard Company’s series called Nostalgic Barbie (11).
Whereas “Telegenesicide” appropriates mostly critical statements about
the influence of television on American society, “Sewing Shut” targets
the vacuity of celebrity culture by citing trivial remarks – about money,
clothes and physical appearance – by seven female top models of the turn
of the century, including Tyra Banks, Cindy Crawford (two photographs
of whom are also featured) and Brooke Shields.
The use of fragmented language, which is a signature characteristic
of Lance Olsen’s style, is marginally present in the multimodal pieces in
the collection. Portions of original text offered on every page are self-
contained and invariably end with a full stop. The earlier referenced
appropriated passages are also given in their complete form. Among the
few instances of verbal incompletion is the design of the word “FEED-
BACK” running across panel five of “Telegenesicide” – seven out of its
eight letters have either been cut by the page margin or hidden behind
the central image of an embryo (16). Also, all the consecutive sections of
the dictionary definition of “pain” have been partly obliterated – most
visibly in the opening panel, where the middle part of the entry is con-
cealed behind the central figure. The last panel of “Telegenesicide” has
the most fragmentary look in the collection.4 In addition to the partly
obscured dictionary snippet, it incorporates four barely legible segments
of identical statistics concerning the incidence of various kinds of cancer
in men and women. Each of them is only visible in fragments as large
parts are covered by images and slogans in the foreground. The panel
also includes instances of three layers of text being superimposed on one
another, which makes them impossible to decode (17).
The juxtapositional structure of the Olsens’ multimodal collages can
be best illustrated by examining panel three of “Telegenesicide.” The
panel confronts two pictures, each of which is a combination of two
separate images, with seven pieces of text. The latter includes three com-
mercial slogans – by Coca-Cola, Pepsi and the US Army – a fragment of
the definition of “pain,” the phrase “remote control,” and two original
sentences – one at the top and one at the bottom of the page. Melding
the recurrent image of a television with an open mouth displaying white
teeth (which, incidentally, resemble plastic bags packed with cocaine)5
addresses the notion of the destructive voice of television, which, in an
embedded microfiction on the following page, prompts a girl to “kill dad”
(14). The second visual blend, involving an old man coupled antitheti-
cally with an embryo, employs the Confrontation relation and functions
as a suggestion of the cradle-to-grave hold that television has over its
audience. “Remote control” is a phrase that assumes ironic connotations
in this context, since it appears to suggest that it is television that controls
Figure 4.2 Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, “Telegenesicide” (in Lance Olsen and
Andi Olsen, Sewing Shut My Eyes, U of Alabama P, 2000), p. 13.
those who watch it rather than the other way round. Among the mani-
festations of its pervasive influence are the commercial slogans, whose
recognizability to the reader serves as evidence of television’s success in
permanently implanting them in one’s consciousness. The prominence
of commercial catchphrases can also be interpreted as an illustration of
Baudrillard’s point in “The Ecstasy of Communication” that “advertis-
ing . . . invades everything as public space . . . disappears” (149).
What this brief examination of the chosen panel of “Telegenesicide”
also illustrates is the surprising compatibility of its multiple and varied
components in contributing to a comprehensive indictment of television
and a spirited assertion of its damaging social effects. Beginning with the
title, which melds “television,” “genesis” and “-cide” (a suffix conveying
an act of killing), each panel advances the same argument while offering
a different unsettling composition and highlighting a different aspect of
television’s social repercussions – for instance, its analogy with brain-
washing (panel two) and its status as a global disease (panel seven).6 In
“Sewing Shut” a similar mechanism occurs – despite the use of the myriad
textual and verbal means, most panels could be described as monologic.
The polyphony of voices by seven famous models is only apparent as they
speak virtually the same voice – that of an ignorant celebrity addressing
the audience of a glossy magazine.
A rare example of a dialogic confrontation is panel three’s juxtaposi-
tion of Cindy Crawford’s and Linda Evangelista’s narcissistic remarks
(such as “I don’t wake up for less than $10,000.00 a day”) with Amer-
ican cultural critic Steve Shaviro’s assertion of the Barbie doll figure’s
unrealistic demands imposed on women. Shaviro, however, is evidently
pitted against the models as the scientific voice of reason, which grants
his words authority. The inanity of Crawford’s and Evangelista’s remarks,
on the other hand, serves as proof that the fashion industry deserves to
be ridiculed. Such one-sided treatment of the issue need not be seen as a
weakness. Although collage at its best often confronts opposing positions
without privileging any of them (as is the case in Head in Flames), it has
also been successfully used as a political tool where the author’s attitude
towards a given ideology (e.g., the Berlin Dadaists’s towards Nazism) or
politician (as in Peter Kennard’s Thatcher Cuts Healthcare [1985]) was
unambiguous. As the examples of Burroughs and Acker demonstrate,
collage can also be a means of shocking and disturbing the reader, both
of which Sewing Shut My Eyes succeeds in doing.
Head in Flames
Olsen’s tenth novel grew out of the author’s intense preoccupation with
the form of collage, as he explained in an interview by John Madera:
I’d been reading, thinking about, and teaching collage around the
time the premise for Head in Flames arrived. I stumbled across an
observation by Robert Motherwell (“Collage is the 20th century’s
greatest innovation”) and one by Donald Barthelme (“The principle
of collage is the central principle of all art in the 20th century”) that
wouldn’t leave me alone.
(Olsen, “O for a Muse”)
To a greater degree than any of Olsen’s previous works, Head in Flames

is a collage on the formal as well as thematic level. The author has admit-
ted that while searching for a literary form to represent the relationship
between Vincent van Gogh, Theo van Gogh and Mohammed Bouyeri he
realized that collage would be the best tool to “bring together such radi-
cally different consciousnesses, perspectives, and time periods in a single
text while actively refusing to privilege any” (“O for a Muse”).
Indeed, the three protagonists have very distinct personalities and hold
radically different beliefs, as a result of which placing them alongside one
another could be called a collage in itself. Portrayed on the day when
he will commit suicide, Vincent revisits memorable events, numerous
debates with fellow painters – Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro, Henri
Toulouse-Lautrec – and his evolving views on painting. He emerges as
introspective and a “dreamer” – consumed by his art and oblivious of the
external world, which makes him a “foil” to the other, intensely politi-
cal, characters (“O for a Muse”). Despite his family connection with
Vincent and his artistic ambitions, Theo is an entirely different person –
arrogant, extrovert and seeking public attention. In one of the snippets,
he is described as “the sort of person who had the compulsive urge to
goad and insult even his closest friends, preferably on TV” (HF 34).
Olsen described the original Theo as “crass,” “unpleasant” and at times
“embarrassing” in similar ways to Michael Moore but conceded that,
at the same time, he finds him “lovably mischievous” and admires his
“will toward iconoclasm” (Olsen, “Complexities”).7 Theo’s mind is pre-
occupied throughout the novel by the dangers posed by the toleration
of Islam’s social doctrine, the recent murder of right-wing politician Pim
Fortuyn, his recent art projects and his sexual exploits. Bouyeri’s radical-
ism and complete dedication to his beliefs aligns him with Theo, but the
substance of their views could not be more contrasting. The former’s
orthodox adoption of strict religious mores, coupled with a total con-
viction that any form of criticism of Islam deserves capital punishment,
is confronted with the latter’s atheism, liberalism and commitment to
unconditional freedom of speech. Bouyeri’s voice focuses on Theo’s and
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s transgressions and the punishment he will mete out; it
also goes over his many daily humiliations suffered in Holland as a result
of his ethnicity and offers an insight into his conversion from a person
aspiring to be accepted by the West to its militant enemy.8
Such different voices call for different styles and means of representation.
Olsen decided to offer Vincent’s account in a predominantly first-person
perspective following the “lush, lyrical style” of his correspondence with
his brother Theo, whose fragments are frequently incorporated (“O for
a Muse”). The latter-day Theo, in turn, is presented from a third-person
point of view, occasionally resembling free indirect discourse, which often
accommodates actual or imagined quotations from his frequent public
pronouncements regarding religion and immigration. The vocabulary
in Theo’s section attempts to mirror the uncompromising and divisive
style of his real-life counterpart: “On the next episode of his talk show,
A Nice Chat, Theo called Jahjah the Prophet’s Pimp and told his goril-
las to go fuck themselves” (HF 39). For Bouyeri’s perspective, Olsen has
chosen the stream-of-consciousness technique, whose lack of organiza-
tion (including the complete disregard of punctuation and capitalization)
conveys the character’s disregard for the rules of Western civilization and
the intensity of his passion, unmitigated by any external constraints.
The collage of personalities and styles is accompanied in Head in
Flames by a collage of fonts allotted to each protagonist. Olsen explained
the typographic arrangement of the novel in an interview by Madera:
[M]y imagination came to associate a gentle, graceful Times font

with Vincent van Gogh. The brash bold version of that font seemed
quintessentially Theo. And a font from an entirely different dimen-
sion – elementary, brutal, even – felt right for Mohammed: a Courier
for the courier delivering a message that the western world doesn’t
want to listen to; you can’t see that font, I don’t think, without hear-
ing the loud, unsettling clacks of a manual typewriter.9
(“O for a Muse”)
Olsen’s individualization of the font is a very effective device not only

because of the added visual insight into the three protagonists’ person-
alities but also for practical reasons. Thanks to this typographic solu-
tion, the three voices appear visually distinct and enable the reader to
differentiate more easily between the regularly interspersed minuscule
passages, or “narraticules,” as Olsen prefers to calls them. That creates
the opportunity, seized by many actual readers of the novel, to follow
the text on each double-page in three separate sequences – first all of
Vincent’s narraticules, then all of Theo’s and so on. The fact that Head
in Flames offers at least two reading paths, in a manner reminiscent of
J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007), makes it an interactive and
“writerly” text by granting its readers the chance to assume an active role
in its perception.10 That, in turn, brings the experience of reading a page
closer to that of examining a visual collage.
The arguably most significant collage feature of Head in Flames is its
heavy dependence on appropriation. Of the many texts which Olsen used
to source exact or slightly edited quotations the most important are Vin-
cent van Gogh’s letters to his brother; Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s script for Submis-
sion and her autobiography Infidel: My Life (2006); imam Saifu Deen
al Muwahhied’s letter to Hirsi Ali, which was knifed by Bouyeri into
Theo van Gogh’s chest; and Ian Buruma’s book Murder in Amsterdam:
The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006). Bouy-
eri’s part also employs salient passages from the Quran, such as the calls
to “strike [unbelievers] in the neck” (38) and “flog [fornicators] with a
hundred stripes” (115). Those cruel words of religious sanction are coun-
terbalanced in Theo’s part by quotations attacking or mocking religion,
such as the following – by Steve Weinberg and Voltaire:
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good
things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do
evil things, that takes religion.11
(HF 29)
If God created us in his own image, Voltaire proposing, we have more

than reciprocated.
(87)
Voltaire is a frequent point of reference for Theo, four other quotations

from his works appearing at different moments of the film-maker’s part,
as well as a narraticule informing that on Sunday mornings his family
would gather in the living room and “read aloud, not from the Bible, but
from Voltaire” (78).
Olsen also delights in interspersing quotations from established
authors, such as Heinrich Heine, August Strindberg and Julian Barnes,
with lines of popular songs by the likes of Cher and Britney Spears. Pas-
sages from Spears’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time” appear six times
throughout Theo’s part, who seems to be humming this radio hit from
1998 as he is cycling towards the scene of his murder. Not all lyrics are
offered in their correct form. For instance, a passage from Arcade Fire’s
“Wake Up” – “Children don’t grow up – our bodies get bigger but our
hearts get torn up” – is quoted with two minor modifications: “but” is
replaced with “and,” while “hearts” is swapped for “minds” (HF 105).
This and the many other inconsistencies that can be identified by a
meticulous reader of the novel are not evidence of Olsen’s sloppiness but
manifestations of his artistic strategy, which he pursues in Dreamlives of
Debris as well. In an interview, Olsen talks about being “drawn to the
concentrated, epigrammatic power of a rich quotation,” which can serve
in literary texts as an “insight-compression,” but concedes that he likes
“misbehaving with them.” He calls those approximate quotations “slant
quotes” – a neologism which evokes connotations with slant rhymes
(“O for a Muse”). Olsen’s “misbehaviour” is often confined to minor
alterations which are meant to eliminate certain irrelevant traces of the
original context. For example, Vincent van Gogh’s sentence from a letter
to his brother – “After all, if I fail, what does my loss mean?” – turns into
“If I fail here, what does my loss mean?” (HF 10). The opening “after all”
is dropped, as it refers to previous sentences which Olsen does not retain.
Other modifications are governed by economy: Vincent’s answer to the
question “How does one become mediocre?,” which the original letter
puts this way, “by going along with this today and conforming to that
tomorrow, as the world wants,” is paraphrased as “by compromising
with the world” (122). On many occasions, the changes are restricted to
individual words: “convene” instead of “meet” (115), “matters” instead
of “things” (118), “bolted” instead of “left” (22). Some of those altera-
tions, as noted by one reviewer, seem motivated by the wish to enhance
the original text’s “dramatic effect” (“Head in Flames”).
Olsen does not follow a consistent system of signposting cited mate-
rial. Whereas in Sewing Shut My Eyes most of it is enclosed in quotation
marks and accompanied by a short bibliographic note, Head in Flames
rarely indicates a borrowed passage or reveals its source. If it does, only
the surname of its author is offered, usually in a manner strongly reminis-
cent of David Markson’s peculiar syntax developed in his quartet. One of
several examples of the characteristically Marksonian usage of the clos-
ing “as” (discussed in Chapter Two) is the following narraticule referring
to Toulouse-Lautrec: “The syphilitic dwarf with hypertrophied geni-
tals, Gauguin referring to him as” (65). In a personal interview, Olsen
acknowledged this stylistic practice as a subtle homage to the author of
This Is Not a Novel.
Another important element of the collage poetics of Head in Flames is
how Olsen confronts the three voices at the level of individual adjacent
narraticules.12 Madera notes that the “coupling of these three distinctive
characters and voices never coheres . . . into a single silent conscious-
ness,” which results in “juxtapositional tensions” between the neigh-
bouring lines (Olsen, “O for a Muse”). Kelly Cherry points out that
those passages are often “diametrically opposed or cacophonous.” Such
diametric oppositions are examples of the typically collage-like Confron-
tation relation, which can be exemplified by the following excerpt from
an early part of the novel:
The culture of consumption they call it.
Please don’t think too hard, the still lifes say. It will only get you into
trouble.
Theo’s middle-of-the-night note to himself: It’s not my fault that

some citizens hang on to the fundamentally uncivilized faith of a
little-girl-fucker who roamed the desert in 666.
Because it consumes them.

In French: nature morte.
Ayaan in the Q&A after a public lecture: They froze the moral out-
look of billions in the amber of the seventh century – brutal, big-
oted, fixated on controlling women.
It eats them up spits them out.

(HF 26–27)
The above sequence brings together, or rather clashes, Vincent’s silent

meditation on the art genre of still life, Theo’s and Hirsi Ali’s fervent con-
demnations of Islam and Bouyeri’s expression of contempt for Western
consumerism. On the one hand, Olsen confronts three extreme positions
on Islam: an outsider’s witty and vulgar mockery, an ex-follower’s bitter
critique and an ardent neophyte’s complete submission. On the other,
he clashes all three radical stances with Vincent’s ponderous and seem-
ingly otherworldly aesthetic considerations of the inner voice of a still life
painting and the genre’s connotations with mortality.
Vincent’s consistent immersion in art throughout the novel situates
him as the antithesis of the other – intensely political and highly emo-
tional – voices, not only of Theo and Bouyeri but also of those whose
words are channelled by their sections. An example of such disharmoni-
ous polyphony is the following block:
It smelled like chicken shit.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI YOU WILL SMASH YOURSELF TO BITS

AGAINST ISLAM!
Monsieur Vincent leaving behind patches of quick thick paint wher-

ever they fell among patches of uncovered fabric.
(93)
The first is one of the concluding narraticules reporting on the painful

ritual of female genital mutilation to which Hirsi Ali was subjected at the
age of five. It conveys her memory of the breath of her male mutilator.
The middle passage is the culmination of the already mentioned threaten-
ing letter to Hirsi Ali penned by an imam. The religiously sanctioned vio-
lence of the first two passages is confronted with the serenity of artistic
composition. Referring to van Gogh as “monsieur Vincent” evokes the
elegant style of a nineteenth-century novel, which further distances the
passage from the vulgarity of “shit” and block capitals.
Despite incorporating some very harsh pronouncements by Bouyeri, al
Muwahhied and Abu Khaled, which are bound to meet with the Western
reader’s instant resistance, Olsen is careful not to demonize Bouyeri’s
position. On the contrary, his background and gradual radicalization are
embedded in the context of the socio-economic alienation of the Mus-
lim minority in Holland. There are glimpses of Bouyeri’s humiliation
at school and his realization of the Dutch state’s systematic economic
discrimination against immigrants. Olsen also includes an account of a
scene witnessed by Bouyeri which seems a spur to the hardening of his
stance against the West. Sitting at a café run by a Muslim man, Bouyeri
saw five drunk teenagers asking the owner, “Hey mate you eat cats and
dogs?” (29). They then burst into laughter, while the man “smil[ed] so
broadly his eyes almost disappeared” (30). The teenagers’ jolly provoca-
tion – “as if it were a joke as if his life were a simple joke” – as well as
the owner’s calculatingly submissive reaction, conveyed by the implicit
“come and drink my fucking coffee you fucks,”13 fills Bouyeri with dis-
gust and pushes him towards adopting a more assertive attitude towards
endemic racism (29, 31). The inclusion of this evocative scene and the
larger context for Bouyeri’s frustration grants him a roundedness and
psychological depth, which contributes to the genuine dialogism of the
novel. In a similar vein, Theo’s anti-Muslim rants are interspersed with
statements showing his greater insight, such as the following rhetorical
question, “Why should we accept such racist notions as the one presum-
ing Westerners are the only people capable of dissenting from their tradi-
tions, Muslims somehow too backward to think for themselves?” (81).
As a result of the novel’s confrontation of arguments held by both oppos-
ing sides, reviewer Davis Schneiderman concludes that Head in Flames
is “not a one-dimensional portrayal of either fundamentalist Islam or its
critics.”
The last characteristically collage-like quality of the novel which needs
to be addressed is its heavy dependence on fragmentation. The sense of
fragmentariness, created by the dismemberment of each perspective into
over six hundred narraticules, is reinforced by Olsen’s frequent use of
interrupted and incomplete passages, which end mid-sentence – as in the
case of “Is that –” (54) and “I am –” (59) – or even mid-word: “Oh baby,
ba –” (71), “fi –” (136) and “nev –” (165). The closing dash suggests
that the abruptly cut passage will be continued in the next correspond-
ing narraticule but that usually does not occur. The sense of reading a
highly disjointed text is accentuated by the great number of single-word
passages, such as “Gezellig” (5, 6, 7), “Hoping” (61, 74) and “You”
(102).14 The last contributing factor is the use of blank space – a device
frequently practised by such postmodernist experimentalists as B.S. John-
son and Ronald Sukenick. In Head in Flames, a typographic gap in place
of a given protagonist’s narraticule communicates their passing. The first
blank space appears on page 140, right after Theo has received his ninth
bullet. For another twenty pages gaps alternate with narraticules report-
ing on his agony until the former finally take over. Vincent’s act of dying
is conveyed in the same way – occasional blanks giving way to permanent
silence. As a result, the last nine pages of the novel only contain passages
conveying the voice of Bouyeri – the sole survivor of the deathly confron-
tations enacted in the novel.
Dreamlives of Debris
In an interview accompanying the publication of his most recent novel,
Olsen said, “we’re all, essentially, collages – amalgams of texts. . . . Our
writing is always archival, although usually unconsciously so. In Dream-
lives, I simply literalize the metaphor” (“Choreography”). Olsen’s novel
can indeed be viewed as an archive of a great number and variety of
texts. The main vehicle for presenting appropriated material are the forty
figures who channel their so-called “songs” (Olsen’s another subtle nod
towards the musicality of collage) through the consciousness of Debris –
the protagonist and principal voice of Dreamlives. Among this extensive
cast of characters are writers (from Sophocles to Denis Diderot to J.G.
Ballard), philosophers (such as Plato, Saint Augustine and Slavoj Žižek),
contemporary professors (including Anne P. Chapin, Robert Herman and
Robert Fagles), activists (Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward
Snowden), mythical heroes (Ariadne, Daedalus and Odysseus) and the
author’s alter ego, Celan Solen (anagram of “Lance Olsen”). Not all
texts of “songs” involve appropriations: “:::: Danielle Steele Song,”15 for
instance, is a pastiche of her literary style, while several others are crea-
tive inventions.
As with Head in Flames, Olsen uses both verbatim and “slant” quo-
tations, whose fidelity to the original varies considerably. Although
their thematic range is also wide, close to a half of all “songs” are con-
cerned with various conceptions, examples and philosophical implica-
tions of labyrinths and mazes – a distinction that Olsen is careful not to
blur. “Labyrinths are unicursal; they possess only one way in and one
way out,” he explains, echoing the interpretation offered in “:::: Leon-
ardo da Vinci Song.” “Mazes, on the other hand, have many entrances
and exits.” It is the maze, he adds, that is the underlying metaphor in
Dreamlives (“Choreography”). Other recurrent themes addressed in the
appropriated passages are ancient Greece (particularly the figure of the
Minotaur and the Minoan civilization), disease, cataclysm and chaos.
How the maze and labyrinth, as well as the other thematic interests, feed
into the novel’s representation of contemporary crises will be examined
in the next section.
A unique form of appropriation occurs in two sections, placed fifty
pages apart, of “:::: Catastrophe Chorus.” Both are examples of altered
fiction – a niche experimental genre which erases most parts of an origi-
nal, often canonical work, as in Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (1977), a
“treated” version of Paradise Lost, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of
Codes (2010), a reworking of Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles (1934).
Olsen chooses to alter individual passages from “The House of Asterion”
(1946) by Jorge Luis Borges and Seneca’s tragedy Phaedra. The reason
for the selection, as with many other quoted fragments, are the texts’
connections with the story of the Minotaur. Like Johnson and Safran
Foer, Olsen retains words and phrases which correspond with each other
grammatically, but, unlike both of them, he ignores most punctuation
marks. The Borgesian sequence, created out of several phrases from the
opening paragraph of the short story, reads “accuse me/It is/true/but it is
also true/Shall I repeat.”16 The retained elements are barely the most sali-
ent in the opening part of Borges’s text, as a result of which it is improb-
able that the reader will be able to identify the source. The passage culled
from Seneca reads, “of mind/incest?/Why do monsters cease?/love?” The
puzzling mid-sentence opening appears to invite reading it as a continu-
ation of the passage from Borges, which is grammatically possible. In
defiance of chronology, a text from the first century thus completes a
twentieth-century one.17
Atemporal juxtapositions are necessary in a novel whose character list
includes imaginary and real figures, ranging from ancient and contempo-
rary, such as Athena, Saint Augustine and Julian Assange. The fact that
the majority of textual chunks (the word “narraticules” seems less appli-
cable here, as most of them do not advance the narrative in any way)
are laid out separately on consecutive pages creates a lot of white space.
That could be said to soften the confrontations of adjacent passages and
thus weaken the novel’s collage-like quality. There are, however, pages
where three distinct voices are paratactically placed next to one another,
as exemplified by the following block:
:::: THE TERRIBLE ANGELS SONG

Jump and it’s exemption all the way down.
:::: DIODORUS SICULUS SONG

– as the myth relates, a beast called Minotaur; yet, be that as it may –
:::: JULIAN ASSANGE SONG

I never had a mentor, so I was forced to make myself up as I went along.
It can be classified as what in previous chapters was referred to as a

thematic Joint, since the three elements do not constitute a clear, logical
entity beyond having a certain thematic common denominator, which in
this case is their relatability to the figure of Debris.
The second passage is one of the numerous examples of fragmentary
constructions in the novel. Although this particular middle element of
a sentence is both preceded and succeeded (on neighbouring pages) by
passages which enable the reader to create a comprehensible sequence,
many other instances of interrupted sentences (such as the twice appear-
ing “One step and –”) are never continued. What is more, Olsen follows
the practice adopted in Head in Flames of using broken sentences as
well as severed words (for instance, “a mere two y –”). Reviewer Jacob
Singer concludes that “[w]ith its fragments that don’t necessarily match
up, Dreamlives forces readers to crash into walls and dead ends.” In a
foreword to the novel, Lidia Yuknavitch, likewise, calls it “a journey . . .
through the fragmentation and displacement of all meaning” and goes on
to draw a comparison between the protagonist’s name and Walter Ben-
jamin’s concept of “history as a pile of debris.”18 The notion of debris,
however, could as well be interpreted in the context of the novel’s com-
position, which could be described as – to paraphrase Eliot’s famous
phrasing – a heap of broken voices.
The many interruptions to be found in Dreamlives are marked by an
em dash, which is the most prominent punctuation mark in the novel.
A sample of its usage is offered in the following passage of Debris’s
monologue:
The walls around me exploded into shocked Icarus dropping through

luminous blueness — hands raking sunlight — shredded wings com-
ing apart in mid-flight — a miniature cloud of gray-white commas —
and I watched as daddy locked Daedalus and son deep inside my
nightnothing — watched them stumbling forward — scouring my
heart for an outlet.
Despite the possible associations that reader may have with Emily Dick-
inson’s poetry, Olsen notes that his use of the em dash is a nod to Tris-
tram Shandy, where it functions as a mark “between a comma and a
white space and an ellipsis” and is elevated to the status of “a mode of
thinking,” communicating “hesitation that leads to new thought” (Per-
sonal interview). Not surprisingly, Olsen chooses to end the novel on an
elliptical note, having Debris declare puzzlingly, “I squat, raise [a twine
line with a large stone attached to it], snip the thread with my restless
teeth, stand, and begin to follow, curious to see where it leads, what new
toy lies at the –.”
*
A formal analysis of Sewing Shut My Eyes, Head in Flames and Dream-
lives of Debris warrants the conclusion that Lance Olsen is a paradig-
matic collage writer. Besides meeting all the criteria that I have adopted
in this study – the employment of fragmentation and appropriation being
particularly extensive and effective – Olsen’s work recognizes its debt
to visual collage by incorporating numerous multimodal means – from
introducing original and recycled images to experimenting with font
and layout. Those features are also present in works which could not
be discussed in this chapter, most importantly in Theories of Forgetting,
which mingles text – rendered in different-colour fonts – with close to
two hundred images, including over forty photographs of Robert Smith-
son’s land-art work Spiral Jetty (1970) taken by Andi Olsen.19 By offering
the reader two equally legitimate ways of reading the novel – from either
end of the codex – it takes one step further Olsen’s ambition of enhanc-
ing the reversibility of literary texts, also noticeable in Sewing Shut My
Eyes and Dreamlives, whose unnumbered pages invite a non-sequential
reading. Theories, as well as all the texts discussed in this chapter, is
also characteristically hybrid as regards its generic markers, adopting “a
poetics of beautiful monstrosity,” which Olsen sees as the quintessence of
collage (“Complexities”).
World in Flames – Crises Present, Past and Future

Despite the ancient costume of Dreamlives of Debris and Olsen’s fre-
quent references to canonical figures from Sophocles and Plato, his works
remain intensely contemporary. The firm embedding of his texts in the
context of Western culture is meant better to illuminate the current cri-
ses which each of them addresses. The focus of Olsen’s examination of
the twenty-first century’s anxieties, traumas and discontents is, I wish to
argue, on social concerns – the influence of the media, celebrity culture
and digital culture, as well as the arrival of the post-human, immigration
and terrorism. The representation of social crises is often accompanied,
or interwoven, in these texts with an exploration of a self in crisis. This
section aims to outline the multiple aspects of the works’ bleak diagnosis
of contemporaneity in order to consider the suitability of the form of col-
lage for addressing such thematic concerns.
The grim assessment of a society enslaved by television is highlighted
as early as in the titles of “Telegenesicide” and “Sewing Shut My Eyes.”
As previously noted, television’s deathly impact is hinted at by the ety-
mology of the former neologism. The connection between television and
death is further emphasized through the analogy with cancer in the clos-
ing panel and in a microfiction occupying the entire panel five. In it,
television speaks through the medium of a 7-year-old boy who tells his
mother to “kill dad,” which she obediently does the same night (SSME
14). The notion of television having a sinister voice is reinforced in panel
three, where the screen of a TV set is filled with a gigantic mouth spewing
slogans, including that of the US Army, whose implicit message to “kill
enemy” corresponds to the boy’s call to violence. That, in turn, could be
related to the second panel’s juxtaposition of images showing an electro-
cuted man and a rat being subject to experimental testing, which implies
television’s capacity to brainwash and manipulate its audience. The word
“VIDEORAPE” looming large in the opening panel also indicates televi-
sion’s invasive and violent designs (11).
In confrontation with the wiles of television, the human subject is
shown to be completely vulnerable and incapacitated, as exemplified by
the reaction of a girl lured by television to “come into [her] body” – “she
tried to scream but couldn’t” (11–12). Television’s power to hypnotize, if
not paralyze, its viewers is also implied by the appropriation of David Fos-
ter Wallace’s passage describing people who “sit and face the same direc-
tion and stare at the same thing and then structure commercial-length
conversations around the sorts of questions myopic car-crash witnesses
might ask each other – ‘Did you just see what I just saw?’ ” (SSME 16).
While the self is hijacked by television, reality is replaced by hyperreality.
The applicability of Baudrillard’s theory to Sewing Shut My Eyes is sug-
gested on several occasions, including the volume’s epigraph from “The
Precession of Simulacra” and a quotation in “Telegenesicide” from “The
Ecstasy of Communication.” The latter defines the schizophrenic self as
one which “can no longer produce the limits of his own being” and has
been reduced to “a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of
influence” (SSME 15). The renunciation of agency reduces the subject to
the status of an externally governed instrument, or, to quote Baudrillard’s
phrase from the same essay, “a computer at the wheel” (146). Such is the
case with the girl killing her father at television’s behest. Olsen ironically
indicates the schizophrenic subject’s lack of self-awareness by having
the 13-year-old girl comment on her deed using Baudrillard’s own dense
words from “The Precession”: “The second-order simulacrum simplifies
the problem by the absorption of appearances, or by the liquidation of
the real” (14).20
Another schizophrenic product of the media-generated reality is the
barely literate crazed admirer of Cindy Crawford, whose fan letter to
her, broken into five parts, occupies all the panels of “Sewing Shut My
Eyes.” In it, she admits to having literally “sewed shut [her] eyes” when
the model “looked at [her] from the tv” and “said its inner beauty whats
important” (79, sic). The girl describes her complete alienation from her
parents and peers at school and finishes the letter with a plea to her idol
to “come hold [her] in [her] arms” (81). Her immersion in the media-
generated reality prevents her from fostering any healthy relationships
and pushes her to embrace a simulation reality, which results in an act of
self-mutilation. She is the embodiment of the Baudrillardian schizo – a
subject “living in the greatest confusion,” deprived of “interiority” and
unable to “produce the limits of his own being” (Baudrillard 153).
Another social phenomenon addressed in “Sewing Shut” which could
be examined through the lens of “The Ecstasy of Communication” is
what Baudrillard calls “obscenity.” It is an obliteration of the distinc-
tion between private and public space, as a result of which “the most
intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the
media,” and thus all secrets and intimacy are annihilated (150–51). The
Olsens’ work could be said to confront the obscenity of celebrity culture,
focusing in particular on the world of fashion. The seven female models
whose quotations are included in the text were at the time the stars of
tabloids and glossy magazines, which are notorious for their unhealthy
interest in celebrities’ private lives. The deranged fan’s reference to Craw-
ford’s recent divorce from Richard Gere is a subtle manifestation of this
collapse of the private sphere, as a consequence of which – to quote Sew-
ing Shut’s blurb – “pain has become home theater and given enough
channels, watching would beat sex.” The idea of sex being outstripped
by television is also indebted to Baudrillard’s essay, in which the philoso-
pher diagnoses the replacement of “hot, sexual obscenity” by its “cold,
communicational” equivalent and of “carnal promiscuity” by that of
“superficial saturation” (150–51).
Olsen resumes his exploration of the schizophrenic subject in Dream-
lives of Debris, whose eponymous character embodies the idea of the
self as “a pure screen” and “a switching center for all the networks of
influence.” One of the manifestations of that sense of “switching” is the
instability of her identity, which makes her oscillate between speaking
of herself in the first and the third person.21 Her consciousness becomes
the site of a chaotic confrontation of multiple texts. Olsen sees Debris’s
textual construction as emblematic of the textuality of human con-
sciousness – its reducibility to Barthes’s definition of the text as a space
where various writings (and consciousnesses, Olsen adds) clash with one
another (Interview by Tedesco).
The result of this ongoing confrontation of a wide array of texts is con-
fusion, to which Debris admits on numerous occasions: “I don’t know
what any of those words mean”; “I don’t understand myself”; “I’m never
sure.” Her sense of bewilderment and experience of being lost are con-
veyed through the novel’s central metaphor of the maze. Olsen elabo-
rated on that idea in an interview by Alex Behr:
In our post-facts contemporary, one could argue it’s become that

sort of maze all the way down. I imagine it, therefore, not just as a
structure, then, but as a method of knowing, a method of being, an
extended and dense metaphor for our current sense of presentness –
the impression, for instance, that we are always awash in massive,
contradictory, networked, centerless data fields that may lead every-
where and nowhere at once.
(“Choreography”)
Olsen went on to specify that he had in mind a particular kind of maze –

“an impossible liquid architecture that bears no center and hence no dis-
cernible perimeter” (“Choreography”). Rather than having one way in,
one way out and a firm middle, as is the case with the traditional codex,
the World Wide Web, and digital culture at large, has multiple points
of ingress and egress. The variety of hyperlinks allowing for constant
detours turn the pursuit of information into a rhizomatic path, which
offers no guarantee that one will reach their destination.
Olsen’s portrayal of the hyperconnected world is highly dystopian.
References to the malicious computer worm called Stuxnet as well as to
the viral pandemic caused by email messages ironically entitled “I Love
You” emphasize the vulnerability of all interconnected networks. A brief
account of how “a forkful of infected chimpanzee meat” eaten by a teen-
ager in Kinshasa developed into the global pandemic of AIDS throughout
sixty years indicates that viral dangers are not confined to the virtual
world and can claim the lives of thirty-five million people. The inclusion
of fragments of correspondence between Brigitte Reimann and Susan
Sontag, both of whom went on to die of cancer, reinforces the sense of
anxiety and vulnerability, which the continued advance of medicine is
unable to allay.
Debris’s early mention of her doll named Catastrophe prefigures the
novel’s preoccupation with cataclysms past and future. The catalogue of
real and imagined catastrophic events includes references to the Minoan
eruption of Thera from the mid-second millennium bce, Plato’s myth of
Atlantis, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 (by invoking the writ-
ings of Pliny the Elder, who died in the aftermath of the blast), the Black
Death pandemic in the fourteenth century and the terrorist attacks of
9/11. There is an acute sense in Dreamlives that the not too distant future
will bring equally, if not more, cataclysmic events. One of the dystopic
scenarios considered in Dreamlives is the aftermath of global warming,
which is the subject of “:::: JUSTIN BIEBER SONG.”22 The novel’s con-
cern with ecology – one of the central issues in Theories of Forgetting23 –
situates Olsen within what Peter Boxall calls in Twenty-First-Century
Fiction “[t]he contemporary imagination,” which is “haunted by the
prospect of planetary death, of irreversible environmental disaster” (14).
Both Dreamlives and Theories could also be numbered among twenty-
first-century “apocalyptic fictions,” which Andrew Tate defines as texts
“characterized by a certain kind of pre-apocalyptic anxiety,” “haunted
by dreams of a future that is a place of ruin” and featuring characters
(often narrators) who “fear that their societies exist on the brink, for
better or worse, of an imminent, radical change” (2, 8).24 The two nov-
els also share some of the concerns of the emerging genres of cli-fi and
anthropocene fiction.25
The mixture of fear, anxiety and false reassurance about humanity’s
prospects are evoked in a Beckettian litany delivered by Debris: “Mean-
ing the worst is still to come, was still to come, will still be to come, has
come, had come, is coming, has been coming, might come, will have
come, would have come, but not today, and already.” The novel’s “sense
of an ending” pervades the companion soundtrack which Olsen has
chosen for Dreamlives. In the selection elicited by the Largehearted Boy
online magazine can be found songs entitled “It’s the End of the World
as We Know It” (R.E.M.), “Exit Music” (Radiohead) and “The Future”
(Leonard Cohen), whose lines “I’ve seen the future, brother/It is murder/
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions/Won’t be nothing/Nothing
you can measure anymore” sound as if they could be spoken by Debris
herself (“Book Notes”).
Several bleak visions of the future are conveyed through fragments
of the Swedish philosopher Nick Bolstrom’s TED talk, in which he for-
mulates the hypothesis that “the human species will go extinct before
reaching a posthuman stage,” suggesting that the end of humanity may
be closer than generally assumed. An echo of angst about the prospect
of post-humanism can be read into Debris’s mention of her “next dona-
tion,” which besides being a reference to the custom of offering sacrificial
victims to propitiate the Minotaur can be interpreted as an intertextual
allusion to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) – a dystopic vision
of a reality where clones are bred and reared for the sole purpose of giv-
ing “donations” of their vital organs to humans. In his earlier referenced
commentary on Ishiguro’s novel, Boxall asserts the emergence in twenty-
first-century literature of “a new kind of hybridity, a new category of
being that emerges from the failed connection . . . between the human
and the non-human” (101). Olsen’s Debris, who came into being from
the union of Pasiphaë and a bull, could perhaps also be seen as symbolic
of the bleak prospect of post-humanism, indicated by her Frankenstein-
ian desolate alienation culminating in what can be interpreted as a sui-
cidal jump into the abyss.
Head in Flames addresses very different concerns to those articulated
in Dreamlives of Debris and Sewing Shut My Eyes, but its social diagno-
sis is no less pessimistic. Its engagement with crisis could be examined on
the level of the social context and of individual characters, which will be
discussed first. Notably, each of the novel’s three focalizers is shown at a
critical point of their life. For Vincent, 29 July 1890 – the day when he
commits suicide – is the culmination of his most intense period, marked
by deteriorating mental health and an unprecedented outpouring of crea-
tivity accompanied by the growing anxiety about the decline of his talent.
His last moments show little of the “lust for life” with which he has come
to be associated in popular culture. Olsen shows his departure not as a
passionate act of a deranged genius but as a gradual fading, marked by
quiet despair.
For Theo, 2 November 2004 was supposed to be an ordinary working
day, but it came amid an anxious and emotionally trying time. Before
making Submission, he is quoted as making light of Hirsi Ali’s concern
about the danger of associating his name with the project and remarks
that “no one shoots the village idiot” (HF 109). However, following the
broadcast of the film on national television Theo received many death
threats, as a result of which his public appearances had to be accompanied
by increased security. Also, his friends reported that he was apprehensive
about his safety during the upcoming flight to the United States. Olsen
illustrates that sense of foreboding in Theo by making him review in his
consciousness the gory details of the assassination of his friend and politi-
cal ally Pim Fortuyn while cycling to his death down the Linnaeusstraat.
This passage foreshadows the painfully precise thirty-page sequence
reporting on his own agony while receiving consecutive bullets from
Bouyeri. His long struggle, marked by bewilderment – manifest in van
Gogh’s reputedly last words, “Can’t we talk about this?” (125) – and
sustained by “[t]he fierce desire to always be here” (129), ends with the
ninth bullet.
Of the three protagonists, Bouyeri appears the one most in control of
his life, for the most part of the novel methodically realizing his plan to
assassinate Theo. In that respect, he is not in a state of crisis; on the con-
trary, he feels elated and hopes “these minutes will last forever” (131).
The murder is not an act of desperation, but the culmination of the most
purposeful period of his otherwise desultory life. And yet his thoughts on
that day go over several painful rifts experienced as a consequence of his
radicalization: the row with his father concluding in his “disgusted” look
conveying that he wants “nothing to do with his son anymore” (13) and
the last meeting with his sister, whose confession of premarital sex made
him slap her “across her filthy mouth” and call her a “fucking whore”
(75–76). It is unclear, however, if Bouyeri regards those scenes with regret
or self-congratulation. The note of confusion and anxiety only comes
into his voice after the execution is over and, to his amazement, he finds
himself still alive. He appears utterly unprepared for the prospect of fac-
ing any kind of afterlife, which signifies the indefinite deferral of his glori-
ous ascension to reunite with Allah and which is to bring upon him life
imprisonment without parole.
The idea that Olsen’s novel is a portrayal of a self, or selves, in crisis is
implied by the title phrase. A “head in flames”26 evokes associations with
an individual whose equilibrium is disturbed as a result of emotional
upheaval. Besides that general meaning, as John Madera perceptively
notes, the title refers to different aspects of the personality or appear-
ance of the main characters. Vincent is once described wearing “his hat
rimmed with shivering candles,” in which he is said to look like “a flam-
ing sunflower in the night” (HF 170). In Theo’s case, the flames stand
figuratively for his “burn[ing] . . . indignation about religious intoler-
ance” (Madera) and can be related to his “wild blond head” (HF 129).
Bouyeri, Madera argues, has his “head in flames” in the sense that he is
“a hothead,” since “his mind burns with hatred, prejudice, and bitter-
ness, as well as his own confusion” (Olsen, “O for a Muse”).
Besides the earlier observations of a strictly personal nature, Bouyeri
can be regarded both as a victim and a catalyst of social crisis in Holland.
Following the first interpretation, it is possible to see his radicalization
as primarily determined by the continued humiliation since his school
days, which he has only recently learnt to notice, name and rebel against.
Among the several insights which Olsen provides into the socio-economic
status of Muslim immigrants in Holland are the following narraticules:
How you could neither blame your parents and their friends nor
rely on them as they swept the Netherlands’ streets hauled away its
rubbish cut its grass scrubbed its toilets mopped its floors cooked its
food filled its potholes hosed its busses squeegeed its shop windows.
(15)
Almost forty years in this country eight children a cramped flat a dish-
washer’s salary and your father has to sit in a chair when he prays.
(25)
There is a strong sense that an affluent country like Holland could afford
to offer better economic prospects to immigrants who have lived in the
country for decades. Bouyeri grows to be disgusted at the hypocrisy of
the Dutch “boasting about their long history of tolerance while willfully
forgetting the opportunism wrapped up inside it” – their sense of racial
superiority implicit in the statement “Welcome to our country now shut
the fuck up and scour our fucking toilets you fucking muzzies” (62). The
reality of tacit social discrimination strikes Bouyeri also when he tries
to court “braless Dutch girls,” who consistently rejected his advances
regardless of what he said and how kind he was to them (27). All of
those aspects amount to a portrait of the turn-of-the-century Holland as
a society wrought by quiet prejudice and discrimination.
The sobering realization of socio-economic exclusion, aggravated by
the rise of the political right represented by outspoken critics of Islam
such as Fortuyn and van Gogh, is indicated by the novel as the genesis
for Bouyeri’s act, which was to deepen the social divisions in Holland
to an alarming degree. The wordless violence of Bouyeri’s gratuitously
brutal murder confronted with van Gogh’s agonized plea to “talk about
this” offered itself as a graphic illustration of Samuel P. Huntington’s
thesis (formulated a decade earlier) about the upcoming “clash of civili-
zations.” The fact that in the relationship between van Gogh and Bouy-
eri sharing Dutch nationality and language was of far less importance
than their experience of coming from radically different religious tradi-
tions could be regarded as a confirmation of Huntington’s intuition that,
following the end of Cold War, cultural and religious allegiances were
going to replace political ones as “the flash points for crisis and blood-
shed.” Huntington closes his famous 1993 article with the prediction
that shortly “there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world
of different civilizations” and that each of them “will have to learn to
coexist with the others.” In view of that statement, Bouyeri’s act can be
interpreted as a severe blow to the left-wing belief in the possibility of
creating a harmonious multicultural state and as evidence of the potential
consequences of failed intercultural coexistence.
Although no critic has invoked his name, one could trace Huntingto-
nian echoes in the reception of Head in Flames. One reviewer praised the
novel for its “great power” resulting from its “unflinching confronta-
tion with painful salients in the conflict of civilizations commonly called
the clash of Islam and the West” (Foley). Another critic invoked Theo’s
“ridiculous final words” as the evidence that he “died not understand-
ing” in the final act of “a tragedy beyond words” caused by the “cul-
tural and ideological fissures between the West and Islam” (“Head in
Flames”). Olsen himself sees the irreconcilable conflict between Bouy-
eri and van Gogh as rooted less in religion than in the attitude towards
relativism. He refers to Jean-François Lyotard’s notions of the demise of
grand narratives and the related idea of communication as a network of
language games as the context for postmodernity’s shift from the belief in
a single truth to the acceptance of a multiplicity of meanings and possible
perspectives. Despite his rhetorical radicalism, Theo grows out of that
tradition, which Bouyeri rightly sees as a threat to religious orthodoxy.
His decision to murder his adversary – in Olsen’s words – “violently ter-
minates the possibility of language, the possibility of play, the possibility
of conversation that is and should be unresolvable” (“O for a Muse”).
The social aftermath of Bouyeri’s act, which could be called the crisis
of tolerance or of faith in a multicultural society, is left for the reader to
imagine, as the novel ends with the assassin’s capture. The social unrest
triggered in reality was acute and made the headlines of international
newspapers for weeks. Five days after van Gogh’s assassination, The
Guardian referred to it as “the murder that shattered Holland’s liberal
dream” and reported that the Dutch were “gripped by tension, anger and
insecurity.” The situation was escalating and the prospects were “grim,”
as the event seemed to have “catalysed a steady erosion of the Dutch tradi-
tion of moderation and self-censorship on race and religion” (Burke). Ian
Buruma’s book-length account of the murder and its repercussions, pub-
lished in 2006, notes numerous incidents of retaliation (arson attempts
in mosques and Muslim schools across Holland) and counter-retaliation
(attacks on Christian churches) (7). The media added to the mood of
hysteria by using phrases such as “the country is burning” and giving
disproportionate coverage to petty incidents, such as the imam from Til-
burg’s refusal to shake hands with the Dutch minister for the integration
of minorities. The latter image, Buruma observes, was taken as “a prime
symbol of the Dutch crisis, of the collapse of multiculturalism, the end of
a sweet dream of tolerance and light in the most progressive little enclave
of Europe” (8). There is a trace of irony in Buruma’s use of such grand
words but perhaps they were not such a great exaggeration since Olsen,
speaking from the vantage point of 2010, maintained that Dutch society
perceived van Gogh’s assassination as “its own 9/11 in miniature” and
“a crisis of the Enlightenment tradition of secular reason that their cul-
ture champions.”
Conclusion
Olsen’s consistent engagement with the form of collage and the theme
of crisis is not an accidental pairing. By confronting numerous incom-
patible images and opinions, his works convey the sense of the contem-
porary as riven by social, political and religious difference, as well as
disoriented by the abundance of media stimuli. Their construction out
of fragmented textual and visual components, on the other hand, evokes
a sense of urgency and restlessness and points to the experiences of loss
and lack. Alongside the myriad crises addressed in Olsen’s fiction, there
is also what he calls the “crisis of reading” – one which is not so much
represented as enacted, or imposed on the reader by the form of the
work. The a-maze-ment and alienation of Debris are conjured up in the
reader through the novel’s pagelessness and the dominance of empty
space. Each consecutive chunk of Dreamlives is meant to “feel a little
like every click of our mouse on the web: a moment of disorientation fol-
lowed by a moment of orientation followed, unfailingly, by a moment of
disorientation, forever” (“Choreography”).27 That experience of being
buffeted from orientation to disorientation, from comprehension to
incomprehension is vital to all of Olsen’s works and, in fact, to all effec-
tive collage.
Notes
1. An earlier version of small parts of this chapter appeared in an article of mine
entitled “Collage and Crisis in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland
and Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames,” published in Notre Dame Review.
2. A notion introduced by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen in Multi-
modal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication
(2001) and defined as “the degree to which an element draws attention to
itself” through one or a combination of factors including “its size, its place
in the foreground or its overlapping of other elements, its colour, its tonal
values [and] its sharpness or definition” (210).
3. Apart from Times New Roman, “Telegenesicide” uses Helvetica and Type-
writer typefaces.
4. The only other panel which features a considerable degree of fragmentary
text is panel three in “Pentapod Freak Nest,” whose entire background
consists of a thirty-one-line enumeration of synonyms for “penis.” Each
line begins and ends with a cut word, like “LITTL –,” “ROLL –,” and
“SWE –” (39).
5. The similarity between teeth and drugs could be interpreted as an indication
of television’s addictive influence.
6. Nettles mocks this recurrent thematic concern throughout the collection by
stating, “TV bad. Got it.”
7. Madera calls him “a maverick and outsider always sharpshooting from the
hip” (Olsen, “O for a Muse”).
8. Olsen noted that yet another contrast between the three protagonists is their
“radically different view of what art was, why it was, how it functioned and
should function.” Theo treats art as an instrument of “political critique,”
Bouyeri sees it as a “monologic polemic,” while Vincent – as “existential and
aesthetic exploration” (“O for a Muse”).
9. Olsen’s remarks on the connotations of the bold typeface are consistent
with those contained in Theo van Leeuwen’s article “Towards a Semiotics
of Typography.” Van Leeuwen notes that bold can either evoke associations
of “daring” and “solid” or of “domineering” and “overbearing” (148). All of
those qualities are applicable to Theo’s personality. Olsen’s use of three dis-
tinct fonts mirrors Mark Z. Danielewski’s employment of three typefaces –
Times New Roman, Courier and Bookman – to distinguish between the
layers of narrative in House of Leaves (Gibbons, Multimodality 47–48).
10. When asked about this dilemma and his preferred order of reading, Olsen
first pointed to the chronological sequence of interspersed narraticules,
which brings out the consonances and dissonances between the adjacent pas-
sages, but then added, “I like that being a problem” (Personal interview).
11. A position similar to Weinberg’s is expressed in a remark inconclusively
attributed to Denis Diderot and Émile Zola: “Civilization will not attain
perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest”
(76). Surprisingly, it is channeled not by Theo but Vincent, whose attitude
towards Christianity did fluctuate throughout his life but at no point was
decidedly hostile.
12. Although rare, there are also juxtapositions occurring within a given pas-
sage, especially in Bouyeri’s part. Examples of such paratactic structures,
following the Joint relation, include the two following complete narraticules:
“Backstreet Boys Ricky Martin Sugar Ray Cher” (23) and “Daniel Pearl
Nicholas Berg Kim Sun-il” (46). The former contains some of Bouyeri’s
favourite Western singers and bands, while the latter enumerates victims of
Islamist terrorism.
13. Both this statement and the earlier quoted question asked of the owner func-
tion as the novel’s recurrent lines or refrains. Among several more passages
that appear more than once across Head in Flames are Vincent’s opening
words, “I am standing inside the color yellow” (1, 180). The use of refrains,
as well as other connecting motifs, is a manifestation of the novel’s indebted-
ness to musical composition. For Olsen, it is a characteristic feature of all
collage fiction, which in the title of his essay he refers to as the “musicality
of creative disjunction.”
14. The general brevity of narraticules has been noted by Schneiderman, who
has called Head in Flames “the first or at least the most interesting twitter/
facebook novel” (original spelling), observing that most passages are under
140 characters, which constituted Twitter’s space limit at the time.
15. The title of each “song” is preceded by a quadruple colon, which in his non-
fiction work [[there.]] (2014) Olsen defines as “what cannot be accurately
articulated” (qtd. in Gibbons, “Fragments” 198). Another unconventional
punctuation mark used in Dreamlives are double brackets – [[]] – which
stand for “what must be removed from the chronic to be experienced”
(Brunvand).
16. As noted before, Dreamlives of Debris is unpaginated, hence no page num-
bers are given in parenthetical references.
17. “:::: Catastrophe Chorus” is dominated by white space, as the retained
words are very few. Blank space takes over completely in the “choruses” of
Athena, Poseidon, Bull of Heaven and Minos. When asked about the sig-
nificance of their silence, Olsen replied that gods’ words cannot be heard by
humans (Personal interview). That explanation, however, accounts only for
the blank space in Athena’s and Poseidon’s “choruses.”
18. The foreword to Dreamlives, entitled “how to lose your breath,” is not
paginated.
19. In “Entropology and the End of Nature in Lance Olsen’s Theories of For-
getting,” Alison Gibbons discusses the significance of the Spiral Jetty to the
novel’s discussion of the vulnerability of life on earth, which is subtly sig-
nalled by the fading saturation of Andi Olsen’s photographs as the novel
progresses (288).
20. Olsen has asserted the importance of Baudrillard’s theory to Avant-Pop art-
ists in his critical article for The Routledge Companion to Experimental Lit-
erature, where he outlines two possible responses to Baudrillard’s diagnosis:
“to embrace . . . an array of neo-realisms for a hyper-mediated, late-stage
capitalist ‘reality’ that is no longer perceived to be real” or to “create compo-
sitions that focus on the very problematics of representation itself” (“Avant-
Pop” 206). Sewing Shut, with its disturbing imagery and the focus on media
representation, could be regarded as combining the two approaches.
21. Another symptom of that general instability of identity is the fluid nature
of gender illustrated by Bradley Manning’s transition into Chelsea Man-
ning (announced in the ex-soldier’s post-sentence statement, which is quoted
verbatim in two sections of “:::: BRADLEY MANNING SONG”). It is
reinforced by Olsen’s decision to change the gender of two mythical figures –
Tiresias (who is consistently referred to as Lady Tiresias) and the Minotaur.
The fluidity of gender is important for Olsen as one of the aspects of the
Heraclitian, or protean, notion of existence, which conceives of the self as
constantly metamorphosing (Personal interview).
22. The section begins with the young pop star’s imagined remark – “who gives
a fuck about global warming anyway?” – and goes on to include a pastiche
of the arguments delivered by its deniers.
23. An incisive reading of the novel through the lens of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
notion of entropology is offered in Gibbons’s earlier noted article “Entropol-
ogy and the End of Nature in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting.”
24. Among the examples considered in Tate’s book are Cormac McCarthy’s The
Road (2006), Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2007) and Margaret Atwood’s
MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13).
25. As outlined, most notably, in Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions: The
Novel in a Time of Climate Change (2015).
26. Schneiderman observes that the phrase predates Olsen’s novel and can be
found in Shelley Jackson’s short story “Nerve” (2002).
27. What Olsen calls the “crisis of reading” could be related to Wolfgang Hal-
let’s critical discussion of the contemporary multimodal novel as enacting
a conceptual shift “from reading to transmodal construction of narrative
meaning.” Rather than merely turning pages, the reader is “engaged in con-
structing a holistic mental model of the textual world in which she/he incor-
porates data from different semiotic sources and modes” (150).
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2017, www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2017/04/book_notes_lanc_2.
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Brunvand, Amy. “Threads of Mythology in Lance Olsen’s Dreamlives of
Debris.” Artists of Utah, Artists of Utah, 28 Jan. 2018, http://artistsofutah.
org/15Bytes/index.php/threads-of-mythology-in-lance-olsens-dreamlives-of-
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Burke, Jason. “The Murder That Shattered Holland’s Liberal Dream.” The
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its of Tolerance. Penguin, 2006.
Cherry, Kelly. “Lance Olsen: The Art of the New.” Hollins Critic, vol. 50, no. 5,
2013, pp. 1+.
Cone, Jon. Review of Dreamlives of Debris, by Lance Olsen. Entropy Magazine,
Accomplices LLC, 9 Oct. 2017, https://entropymag.org/review-dreamlives-of-
debris-by-lance-olsen/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.
Drąg, Wojciech. “Collage and Crisis in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flat-
land and Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames.” Notre Dame Review, no. 48, Sum-
mer–Fall 2019, forthcoming.
“Dreamlives of Debris.” Lance Olsen, n.d., www.lanceolsen.com/dod.html.
Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.
Foley, J. R. “Van Gogh in Flames.” Review of Head in Flames, by Lance Olsen.
Flashpoint Magazine, n.d., www.flashpointmag.com/headinflames.htm.
Accessed 8 Aug. 2019.
Gibbons, Alison. “Entropology and the End of Nature in Lance Olsen’s Theories
of Forgetting.” Textual Practice, vol. 33, 2019, pp. 280–99.
———. “Fragments of a Postscript.” The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contempo-
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in Novelistic Narration.” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narra-
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5 When We Were Human
Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera
in Flatland and The Book
of Portraiture
This chapter aims to continue the examination of the use of collage as a

response to twenty-first-century social crises.1 The term “social” will be
understood very broadly and will also include the changes induced by the
advances in science, technology and the media. The texts under analysis
are two early novels of Steve Tomasula – VAS: An Opera in Flatland
(2002) and The Book of Portraiture (2006). The organization will be
analogous to that of the previous chapters: a brief introduction to the
author and the considered works followed by a discussion of their collage
properties and an exploration of their engagement with crisis. Both nov-
els lend themselves to a joint analysis owing to their formal similarities
and their shared thematic interests, which prompted Tomasula to declare
that they could, in fact, be called “two volumes of the same book” (Che-
vaillier 118).
Tomasula is the author of five novels, a collection of short stories and
many academic essays and shorter fictions. Alongside Lance Olsen, he is
among the most important and most acclaimed authors of contemporary
experimental fiction in the United States. In a recent report on the ninth
edition of the &NOW Festival of innovative writing, founded by Toma-
sula in 2004, The Guardian referred to him as a “cult novelist” (Thom-
linson). The characteristic qualities of Tomasula’s writing are intense
visuality and multimodality, generic hybridity and an abiding interest in
science, philosophy and the arts. His formal audacity is arguably most
apparent in TOC: A New-Media Novel (2009), which was published
first as a DVD and five years later – as an iPad app. A large collaborative
enterprise involving designers, programmers, animators and composers,
TOC investigates various conceptions of time through a multimedia col-
lage of text, image, animation and sound. That work earned Tomasula
the Mary Shelley Award for Excellence in Fiction and the eLit Award for
Best Book of the Year.
Tomasula obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois
at Chicago, where he was also a faculty member. Since the turn of the
century, he has been a professor at the University of Notre Dame, where
he teaches creative writing and contemporary literature. Although he is
primarily known as a novelist, Tomasula is also the author of a number
of academic articles focusing on post-humanism, bioart, the new media
and various aspects of formally innovative fiction, including texts on the
most important representatives of American postmodernism, such as
Robert Coover, Raymond Federman and Ronald Sukenick. Out of all
the authors considered in this book, Tomasula has attracted the most
critical attention. Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media
Fiction (2015), an edited volume by David Banash, offers a selection of
comprehensive readings of all of Tomasula’s novels as well as of his col-
lection of short fiction Once Human: Stories (2014). Banash and Andrea
Spain begin their introduction to the volume by positing that Tomasula
is the writer whose arrival was long awaited by J.G. Ballard – an author
whose work would “engage the unprecedented changes in human per-
ceptions and experiences of everyday life that science was inevitably pro-
ducing” (1). They also argue that his output, in which “the biological and
the cultural are enmeshed,” cannot be understood without taking into
consideration the myriad contexts of hypertexts, video games, digital net-
works and bioart (4, 14).
Tomasula’s literary debut, VAS: An Opera in Flatland is a 370-page-
long collage novel addressing the dilemmas, anxieties and discontents
of humanity on the brink of entering a post-human phase. The book
borrows its setting and cast of characters from the nineteenth-century
science fiction classic Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)
by Edwin A. Abbott – a novella set in a two-dimensional world popu-
lated by geometrical figures and narrated by a square named A Square.
In VAS, Square is faced with the task of undergoing voluntary vasectomy
in order to free his wife, Circle, from further complications of becoming
pregnant. What initially appears to him as a short and painless procedure
assumes increasing gravity and raises serious doubts, which he ultimately
suppresses to fulfil his promise. Whereas one of Abbott’s aims was to sat-
irize the narrow-mindedness of Victorian England, symbolized by Flat-
land’s residents’ militant opposition to the idea of the possible existence
of a third dimension, Tomasula targets the broader myopia of human-
ity, focusing on the pitfalls of the naïve beliefs in the idea of progress
and in the certitudes of science. According to Grzegorz Maziarczyk, VAS
could be read as “an allegorical story about a (post)modern everyman
living at the turn of the twenty-first century” (Novel 145). Despite the
novel’s universal scope, it is very closely tied to the contemporary. The
fragmentation, chaos and media-saturation of the turn-of-the-century
experience is rendered in the form of an exuberant multimodal collage,
which Olsen has called “an unforgettably unique reading experience”
(“Fourteen Notes” 188) and which Paweł Frelik has referred to as “one
of the most challenging-looking novels of the last fifty years” (“Book”
233). VAS, which was originally conceived as one of the chapters of The
Book of Portraiture, remains Tomasula’s most critically acclaimed and
commercially successful work to date. Its multimodal richness – to be
When We Were Human 133
examined in a separate section – is the result of collaboration with art
designer Stephen Farrell.
His third novel, a “historical book,” as Tomasula calls it in the acknowl-
edgements section (BP 328), has a much greater chronological and generic
span, which extends from an ancient parable to a present-day dystopia.
It begins with a short chapter recounting the story of a nomad trader
who invents the phonetic alphabet and renames himself “Moses.” The
second chapter is, for the most part, narrated by Diego Velázquez and
focuses on the circumstances of his arrival and service at the court of King
Philip IV, particularly on his brush with the Inquisition. Like several other
parts, it contains deliberate anachronisms, which include the painter’s
reference to Harold Bloom’s notion of the “anxiety of influence” and
the Inquisition’s allusion to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (71, 75). Chap-
ter three is a pastiche of a psychoanalytic report about the case of a
young woman diagnosed as suffering the symptoms of sexual depriva-
tion. Offered in the form of a diary, the psychoanalyst’s account abounds
in subtly sexist and racist remarks as well as archaic convictions suggest-
ing the general misguidedness of psychoanalysis and its implication in
the prejudices of the day despite the pretence of independent scientific
inquiry. The fourth chapter, by far the longest and the most disorienting
in the novel, assembles the stories of nine professionals – from a phar-
macy cashier to a digital photograph retoucher – who fall victim of, or
exploit, the dangers and possibilities afforded by the world on the verge
of a digital revolution. In the final chapter, Tomasula juxtaposes the story
of laboratory workers Mary and Paul, who devise a bioart project remi-
niscent of the works of Eduardo Kac, and the tale of Saroush and his
dying daughter Fatima set in an Arab country.
In an interview, Tomasula notes that the “controlling idea” of much of
his fiction is “the relationship between our world and the representations
we make of it” (Banash, Afterword 289). That statement is most evidently
applicable to The Book of Portraiture, whose title attracts attention to
the importance of acts of representation. The reader is thus invited to
interpret each chapter as an account of a different stage or medium in the
evolution of the human conceptualization of the portrait: “the alphabet,
painting, dreams, digital imaging and spliced DNA” (Frelik, “Reading”).
The novel received very favourable reviews praising its “breathtaking”
“historical sweep” (Moore 16) and its zestful “reimagin[ing of] what the
novel, particularly the historical novel, might mean in the digital world”
(Wark 55), as well as Tomasula’s continued effort, inaugurated by the
publication of VAS, “to reshape the novel to accommodate technology,
artistic, social, and sexual history” (Barrett).
Collage Structure
As regards layout, typography and visual qualities, VAS: An Opera in Flat-
land and The Book of Portraiture are among the most experimental and
varied works discussed in this book. Consequently, much of the ensuing
analysis will be concerned with those aspects of Tomasula’s work. Owing
to significant formal differences between the two texts (and despite cer-
tain similarities), their collage structure – far more evident in the case of
VAS – will be considered separately. Although Tomasula sees his works
as more indebted to the organizing principle of emergence – understood
as “the process by which lower-level conditions and interactions give rise
to higher-order behaviors, patterns, formations, meanings” – than col-
lage (Tomasula, “Emergence” 13–14), I will argue that collage remains a
productive category for interpreting his works, which meet most, if not
all, of the formal criteria adopted in my study. Among the numerous crit-
ics who have used the collage label towards one or both novels in ques-
tion are David Banash, Erin Frauenhofer, Grzegorz Maziarczyk, Lance
Olsen, Françoise Sammarcelli and Anthony Enns, who called VAS “one
of the most ambitious collage novels ever created” (51).
VAS: An Opera in Flatland

Tomasula’s novelistic debut is a compendium of multimodal possibilities –
offering seven out of eight features of multimodal texts specified by
Alison Gibbons (2) – which include experiments in page design, layout
and typography; the extensive use of images; and generic hybridity. For
that reason, the multimodal richness of VAS will be discussed as the first
and most important collage quality of the work. I shall then outline the
novel’s reliance on the related notion of heterogeneity and the uses of
appropriation and juxtaposition – the book’s organizing formal princi-
ple. The fragmentariness and reversibility of VAS will be noted briefly at
the end of the section.
There is not a single page in VAS which follows the conventional layout
of the novel – a continuous block of text with a consistent typeface and
incidental paragraph indentation. In an interview by Sandra Bettencourt,
Tomasula speaks of the significance he attaches to laying out his books:
“[it] is part of writing for me, as it would be for a poet, thinking about
how lines work together, or how the text will work on the page as a
whole, or how an image can carry narrative weight” (Tomasula, “Novel”
156).2 One of the most characteristic formal traits of VAS is its extensive
use of images – over 150 pages contain graphs, diagrams, stamps, draw-
ings, print screens, scans, X-rays and photographs. The vast majority of
pages that do not feature any images (and some that do) contain vertical
lines on the outer side, which look a little like “margin identifiers” (Gib-
bons 86). Their number ranges from one to five and, according to Toma-
sula, reflects the number of voices, and fonts, incorporated on the page
(Personal interview). The correspondence between them, however, is far
from regular. The stencilled lines, which remain “the most consistent fea-
ture of the novel’s design” (Gibbons 86), appear to have been devised to
evoke the musical scale (gesturing towards the operatic theme, signalled
by the novel’s subtitle) and the double helix (echoing the book’s interest
in genetics) (Tomasula, Personal interview).
Several critics have pointed out analogies between the layout of indi-
vidual pages in VAS and that of websites (Maziarczyk, Novel 250; Sam-
marcelli 88) and digital works (Olsen, “Ontological Metalepses” 218).
Pages 253–77, for instance, employ many graphically edited print screens
of turn-of-the-century web pages as well as scattered Internet icons
with inscriptions such as “Begin Search” (253), “click here” (258) and
“Reset” (276). Maziarczyk notes that the structure of Tomasula’s novel
“resembles very much that of hypertext with its web of links” (Novel
250), while Sammarcelli makes a more general observation about VAS’s
employment of “internet aesthetics” in its pastiche of “information over-
load” (88).3 That strategy can be regarded as an instance of “intermedial
evocation” – a notion introduced by Werner Wolf to account for the phe-
nomenon of a medium “imitat[ing] the effects of another medium” (255).
Although individual layouts are occasionally governed by radical
economy,4 the sense of overload can indeed be experienced in confron-
tation with most pages. It is achieved through saturating the page with
numerous textual and visual chunks and withholding any clues as to the
method according to which they should be perceived and assimilated.
Tomasula intensifies the experience of information overload by incorpo-
rating unintelligible strings of binary digits, which form the background
of page 265, and letters, like As, Cs, Gs and Ts, occupying the most
part of pages 340–41. The most extreme instance of such an alienating
mixture of incomprehensible data is a 22-page-long section offering the
whole code of the gene sequence SHGC-110205 from chromosome 12
(Enns 64), with the embedded word “THE FACTS” towards its end.
The sense of chaos created by the coexistence of diverse material on
the same page is heightened by the novel’s typography. There are many
pages which feature textual fragments in three different fonts. Besides,
Tomasula consistently experiments with boldface – in most pages the
letters contiguous to one of the vertical lines (either first or last in every
horizontal line) are printed in bold type. Although the dominant font
colour is black, VAS makes occasional use of brown and red in order to
single out a specific phrase, such as the refrain “For the good of society,”
which frequently appears in red. Apart from the several conventional
fonts used interchangeably to mark intermixing voices, Tomasula spo-
radically employs unique typefaces, such as a barely legible Gothic font
on page 51 (reminiscent of that used in William H. Gass’s amalgam of
typographic possibilities – Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife [1968]) and
the block capitals embedded in balloons, which recall the typographic
conventions of comics.5
The extent of multimodal play in VAS can be illustrated by the
double spread on pages 86–87. Near its centre lies a caption with the
Figure 5.1 Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (U of

Chicago P, 2004), pp. 86–87.
recurrent phrase “A LINEAR PLOT” combined with the onomatopoeic

“BTANNG!” – both elements strongly gesturing towards the visual poet-
ics of the comics. The caption appears to announce the ensuing sequence
of nine three-letter words in block capitals, which begins with “APE”
and ends with “MAN” (both printed in black), offering seven intermedi-
ate stages of “evolution” composed of words differing from the neigh-
bouring ones by a single letter (all in brown). The sequence evokes the
gradual mutation of DNA, which is suggested both by the background
of page 86 and the snippets of text on page 87. The former, which at first
glance looks merely like a backdrop for the caption in the foreground, on
closer inspection resembles the shape of a Greek column and the body of
a woman (Tomasula, “Novel” 156). The concrete object is created out
of the repetition of the chemical formula for salt. The shape of the col-
umn combined with the notion of salt and the phrase “PILLAR (NAME
UNKNOWN)” at the top of the page are meant to create an associa-
tion with Lot’s wife. Her transformation serves as the Biblical context
for the metamorphosis of ape to man, which is invoked on the adjacent
page. The allusion to Lot’s wife is evoked through multimodal means and
requires that the reader should integrate textual and visual stimuli.
The aim of many multimodal strategies in VAS is the construction of
the “fleshy presence of book” (Enns 67). In the novel’s design, Toma-
sula is committed to creating visual analogies between the book and the
human body. An in-depth analysis of VAS’s realization of the conceptual
metaphor “people are books” is offered by Gibbons:
The cover is a dappled peach colour, added to which are lines of

greyish-blue. Undoubtedly, this is representative of skin and underly-
ing veins. Additionally, the pages are printed in the colours of flesh
and blood; they are an off-white shade, while text and image are
presented in black, beige, or red. Furthermore, just like a human
body, this book will age: as it is read, the spine will crease and it will
effectively develop “wrinkles.”
(98)
Farrell adds that the red title on the cover is presented in such a way as to
resemble a “scar” and that the intense red of the inside covers is meant to
make the reader feel as if they were “peel[ing] back the skin to the blood”
(qtd. in Enns 67). The rationale for pursuing the book-body analogy is
described by Tomasula as rooted in the observation that with the advent
of the “biotech revolution” genes have become as easily editable and
manipulable as text (“Novel” 158). The implications of this shift will be
discussed in the last section of this chapter.
Most of the fleshy aspects of the novel’s design could scarcely be
achieved in any other than the print form. Despite its earlier noted visual
allusions to digital media, VAS remains firmly committed to the idea of
the book as a physical object. Tomasula once noted that if the novel
were to have “a palindrome relationship to the human body, it had to
have a body, body text, and a spine,” and, for that reason, it was delib-
erately designed in a way that “couldn’t exist online” (“Novel” 163).
This strategy of fully exploiting the possibilities afforded by the material
page can be viewed in the context of hypermediacy – a notion introduced
in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding
New Media (1999) and defined as a “style of visual representation whose
goal is to remind the viewer of the medium” (272). Maziarczyk suggests
that VAS, together with novels such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves,
may be seen as a reaction to the increasing marginalization of print and
the challenges posed by digital media (“Print” 169).
Related to multimodality is another collage aspect of Tomasula’s
novel – the heterogeneity of its components. Besides the already asserted
formal diversity, VAS is a generically hybrid work, as its myriad parts
appear to follow the conventions of the novel, the essay, poetry and the
comics. According to Maziarczyk, VAS integrates a multitude of generic
codes because it “aspires to the condition of opera,” which is an amal-
gam of different art forms (Novel 252). Also, its thematic engagement
comprises several fields of scientific inquiry including biology, philos-
ophy, mathematics and logic, as well as literature and the visual arts.
Among the novel’s recurring components are page-long descriptions of
kid projects entitled “Science Rocks,” family trees, elaborate question-
naires and commercial ads, all of which enhance the book’s complex and
protean character. The disorienting coexistence of distinct material is fur-
ther accentuated in the so-called “cyborg edition” (2009), which includes
an audio CD featuring significant portions of VAS being presented by the
author, his wife and three other readers. When asked about the hybrid-
ity of the book, Tomasula replied that “writing a hybrid novel” was not
his conscious resolution; rather, this choice felt “natural, given the times
we live in, i.e., given all the graphics, collaged video etc. in something as
pedestrian as the nightly news.” “This just seemed to be plain old real-
ism to me,” he added, “the way we communicate today” (Gibbons 97).6
The next formal criterion of collage which is unambiguously met by
VAS is its employment of appropriation. Although Tomasula’s facetious
statement that he “made up almost nothing in this novel” is not entirely
accurate (Personal interview), it is true that a significant percentage of
its material comes from external sources. Apart from incorporating a
great number of images, such as a picture from Time magazine on page
257 and print screens of “Rons Angels” website on pages 264–65, VAS
makes use of over fifty acknowledged quotations – by figures from Gali-
leo to Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler. Most of them endorse various
aspects of eugenics or genetic manipulation and appear shockingly mis-
guided – for instance, Knut Hamsun’s statement that “[n]o one has writ-
ten more idealistically about mankind than Dr. Goebbels” (132) – or
disturbingly recent, as is the case with a proposal made in the 1969 issue
of the Harvard Educational Review to establish a “more lavish version
of the Indian reservation” for certain groups of America’s population to
stop them from breeding (245). In his quoting strategy, Tomasula high-
lights the contrast between the fine reputation of its authors – Nobel
Prize winners and presidents of the United States are prominent groups
here – and their unsound, frequently racist, opinions.7 VAS occasionally
uses quotations without any indication of their source;8 those include the
entire poem by Byron entitled “She Walks in Beauty,” whose three stan-
zas are embedded in separate speech balloons in the closing, “operatic,”
section of the novel.
In his discussion of Tomasula’s formal “departure from the canonical
form of the novel,” Maziarczyk notes the following paradox: by incorpo-
rating many stand-alone quotations, Tomasula deviates from the struc-
tural cohesiveness of the novel while at the same time radically enacting
heteroglossia, which Mikhail Bakhtin saw as the foundation of the novel
(Novel 253).9 In VAS, heteroglossia also takes the form of juxtaposing
dubious quotations with ironic comments. For instance, an appropriated
phrenological table from 1858, which places “Negroes” one slot above
“Chimpanzee,” is followed by the statement “Statistics are a wonder-
ful tool to reveal untold histories” and, on the side and in fine print, a
remark on the lack of any mention in American court convictions until
1957 about a white man ever having raped a black woman (65). Toma-
sula also introduces dialogization by adding ironic statements such as
“for the good of the patients” (120, 122) and “for the good of soci-
ety” (122, 128, 129, 195, 234, 252), as well as brief comments like “no
doubt” and “obviously” (233).
The structural principle that the novel follows in arranging its many
quotations, images and other components is juxtaposition rather than
narrative sequence. Although VAS succeeds in conveying the story of
Square’s mental preparation for a vasectomy, it is not driven by plot
development, since over two-thirds of its pages make no reference to
Flatland or any of its characters. As a result, its form is largely reversible,
and most of its pages do not seem tied to their location in the codex. For
that reason, Eugene Thacker calls VAS “a novel to sort, sift and wander
through” – rather than a book to be read in a necessarily linear way
(Frelik, “Book” 233). Kass Fleisher, in turn, commends it for “tak[ing]
juxtaposition and digression to new heights” (4).
The most common rhetorical relation between the elements juxtaposed
on any given page is that of Joint. Of its two varieties which I have distin-
guished – thematic and random – the former is far more common. Except
for those that advance Square’s story, most pages in VAS are composed
of unintegrated textual (and occasionally visual) elements which riff on
one of the novel’s thematic interests, such as eugenics or genetics. The
relation which, as I argued in previous chapters, is most symptomatic of
the poetics of collage is that of Contradiction – a juxtaposition of ele-
ments aiming to pit them against one another. An example of this strat-
egy is a double spread on pages 36–37, which places nineteenth-century
attributes of phrenology – a seemingly sophisticated device for measuring
the size and angles of the skull above a specialized form with a list of
its multiple anatomical varieties – next to a form resembling an answer
sheet for a multiple-choice test. The juxtaposition of an archaic method
of gauging intelligence on the left with its modern equivalent creates the
sense of a great gap between fake and sound science. However, given the
novel’s scepticism about scientific certainties, the confrontation may be
interpreted as a suggestion that both methods are contingent products of
their time and, in the long run, equally misguided. Tomasula noted that
sixteen years after the publication of VAS it was evident that both ways
of measuring intelligence were “just as absurd” (Personal interview).
A similar example of Confrontation which questions the received
conviction of an enormous gap between elements in some ways alike
is the juxtaposition of statements about eugenics made by the leading
politicians of the rival camps during World War Two. Page 96, other-
wise almost entirely blank, contains the following quotation by Winston
Churchill: “The rapid growth of the feebleminded classes coupled as it is
with steady reduction among all superior stocks constitutes a race danger
which should be cut off before another year has passed.” The next page
features an identically laid out statement by Adolf Hitler: “Whoever is
not bodily and spiritually healthy and worthy shall not have the right to
pass on his suffering in the body of his children.” Banash sees this as one
of the novel’s many “shocking juxtapositions.” “This critical collage,”
he observes, “collapses the differences between the seemingly clear cut
‘sides’ represented by would-be Anglo freedom fighters and evil Nazis,
reminding us . . . that the terrible specter of genocide and eugenics was
no German monopoly” (Collage Culture 252–53).10
The last collage aspect of VAS that needs to be examined is the novel’s
disposition to fragment its multiple and varied components, textual as
well as visual. Whereas most appropriated sources are quoted in self-
contained portions, a great percentage of original content is broken
down into tiny pieces. The earlier mentioned page with a quotation from
Whitman begins with the following words being offered one per each
consecutive line: “Economic,” “Man,” “Sexual Male,” “Person,” “African-
American,” “Hero” (298). Sammarcelli argues that “the numerous noun
phrases and paratactic statements scattered throughout the book draw
our attention to the page as (dis)organized space” (87). Besides the novel’s
reliance on sentence fragments, it occasionally features cut words. For
instance, the interrupted phrase “By delet –” appearing in the middle of
page 98 is followed by three-and-a-half pages of blank space. Many of
the visual appropriations are also presented in a way that emphasizes
their cut status, such as the scan of a book titled Inheritance of Personal
Traits, which contains the entire page 119 together with an illegible quar-
ter of the previous page (115). This recurrent gesture could be read as an
acknowledgement of VAS’s status as a collage – a form originating from
the physical gestures of cutting and pasting.
The Book of Portraiture

Although Tomasula’s third novel does not draw on the poetics of col-
lage to such an extent as VAS, I will argue that it meets all the collage
criteria adopted in my study except for that of reversibility. Despite its
division into self-contained chapters (reminiscent of David Mitchell’s
Cloud Atlas), the novel is constructed in such a way as to benefit from
a linear reading, which yields multiple subtle references to the previous
parts. Also, most chapters enact a narrative development, which emerges
from sequential assimilation of the text. The Book of Portraiture’s most
apparent collage feature is its rich multimodality; for that reason, my
discussion of the novel’s formal structure will begin with an account of its
experiments with layout, typography, page colour and the use of images.
The Book of Portraiture was co-designed by Robert P. Sedlack, Jr., whose
work is credited on the copyright page, rather than on the cover, as was
the case with Stephen Farrell’s contribution to VAS.
The multimodal variety of the book can be noted even before opening
it. When examining its edge, the reader may observe several layers of
colour, which Tomasula compares to “layers in an archaeological dig”
(“Novel” 159). The two colours of pages used throughout the novel are
white and tan, the latter appearing in three – increasingly dark – shades.
Whereas white is reserved for chapter four (by far the longest in the
novel) and for parts of chapter five, the darkest shade of tan is used in the
opening chapter, where it is meant to evoke sand, and parts of the closing
one, in which it is intended to trigger associations with human skin (Che-
vaillier 121). The concept of constructing a book out of different colour
pages appears to be yet another multimodal allusion in Tomasula’s work
to Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (a book, incidentally, also very
much dedicated to pursuing the book-body analogy),11 whose original
edition combined sections in four distinct hues.
The numerous departures from the standard layout and typography
must be examined in relation to the specific chapters in which they occur,
as the design of the novel is closely tied to the subject matter of consecu-
tive parts. The opening story of Moses is designed in such a way as to
resemble an ancient manuscript, which is achieved through the use of
dark-tan paper and a disproportionately large opening word. It is also
consistently double spaced and – like chapter two and parts of chap-
ter five – uses a brown font. The second chapter pretends to be a man-
uscript originally belonging to Velázquez, which contains the painter’s
textual account of his career, as well as eighteen drafts for some of his
most famous works (all of them drawn by the author’s wife – visual art-
ist Maria Tomasula). Besides the colour of the pages, its status as an old
document is achieved through peppering the text with highlighted com-
ments such as “pages lost,” “later altered” and “unintelligible erasures”
(18, 19, 27). The psychoanalytic report in chapter three is laid out like
a diary and accompanied by copious footnotes, numerous illustrations
and several inserts, such as scans of contemporary leaflets and embedded
mini-articles, which resemble curiosity sections in course books. All of
those multimodal means support the scientific and educational aspira-
tions of the self-important narrator.
The first of the two contemporary chapters experiment with the top
margin of the page, which is consistently occupied by horizontal lines
marking the appearances and disappearances of each of the nine char-
acters of the chapter. Tomasula calls them “data streams” and compares
them to the outlines of people walking in and out of view from sur-
veillance cameras (Personal interview). Another formal characteristic of
chapter four are over seventy inserts in the form of tan-coloured boxes
which contain various kinds of twenty-first-century data, such as web-
sites, TV listings, prices, fashion tips (accompanied by pixelated images)
and various instalments of the ongoing string of binary digits – zeros and
ones, which are referred to as a “choreography of bytes to and from mas-
sive data banks” (156). Frelik argues that the excess of “manifestations
of electronic media . . . strengthens the sense of contemporary life awash
in the electromagnetic soup and information overload” and “reflects the
inherent chaos of the world,” which is addressed by the content of the
chapter (“Book”).
In the last chapter, the two interwoven stories are rendered very dif-
ferently. The biogenetic section features few multimodal elements except
for a highly experimental page 297 (to be discussed later) and the con-
sistent tan-coloured margin frame. The section set in an Arab country
is printed against the dark-tan background and contains several news
inserts, two earlier used images from Velázquez and multiple empty por-
trait frames, which reference the title of the book, as well as banks of
surveillance monitors. According to Frelik, all multimodal elements in
The Book of Portraiture are “not merely ornamental or decorative, but
construct highly complex subtexts to the verbal narrative” and there-
fore play a “crucial part” in the novel – an observation which could be
applied to VAS, as well as to all of Tomasula’s later works. The critic also
posits that The Book of Portraiture, similarly to Danielewski’s House of
Leaves, “re-establishes codex-based literary texts as capable of conveying
modes of story-telling and sense-making which one tends to exclusively
associate with new media” (“Book”). Part of that achievement consists
in demonstrating that the codex is also capable of conveying the sense of
information overload, created by filling the pages of the two contempo-
rary chapters with shards of online content that actively compete for the
reader’s attention.
Since the heterogeneity of material used in The Book of Portraiture is
a matter of course, I wish to turn to the novel’s employment of appropri-
ated content, which, it needs to be conceded, is not as frequent as in the
case of VAS. Although the list of sources on which Tomasula relied when
writing the novel occupies the most part of his three-page acknowledge-
ments at the end of the book, their influence appears to have been limited
to facts and ideas, and rarely involves borrowed text. Some of the most
significant textual appropriations are adapted fragments from Charles
Darwin’s The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
and William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1917). Other sources include
The Book of Job, Socrates and two advertisements from the beginning
of the twentieth century promoting “The Timely Warning,” an appli-
ance devised to stop erections and nocturnal emissions, and a vibrator
marketed as “The Belbout Electric-Powered Vibro-Wand” (107, 148).
The ads, however, have been reworked by Tomasula, who admits in the
acknowledgements section that while he extensively relied on “historical
documents,” he took “many liberties” with them (325).
Among the unambiguous cases of straightforward appropriation are
a number of images: from reproductions of iconic paintings (Sandro
Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Titian’s Venus of Urbino) to early
twentieth-century photographs of the native inhabitants of Haiti. It needs
to be noted that whereas in VAS images frequently carry meanings not
conveyed by the neighbouring text (and can thus be called pictures-as-
text), The Book of Portraiture often uses them as illustrations, which
makes them subservient to text (pictures of the text). In the psychoana-
lytic chapter, for instance, most images are accompanied by short explan-
atory captions, such as “Curing a Hysteric, 1889” (125).
The principle of juxtaposition – another collage feature of The Book
of Portraiture – operates most visibly in chapter four, where the earlier
mentioned seventy inserts are in most instances randomly combined with
the stories of the nine characters. The relations of random Joint contrib-
ute to the chapter’s evocation of the sense of a world overloaded with
persistently flowing but often incomprehensible data. The most radical
example of parataxis occurs on page 297 in chapter five, which combines
two lines from The Book of Job (19:23–24), formulaic expressions used
during funeral services, genetic data, a string of zeros and ones, the earlier
mentioned blank portraits and cryptic phrases such as “knight/damsel”
and “Music in Her Soul.” Frelik interprets the page as an indication of
“the collapse of all time frames” (“Reading”), while N. Katherine Hayles
notes that those “fragments from diverse contexts [are] tossed together
as if they were body fragments,” which she sees as a possible form of
“commemorat[ion]” of the 9/11 attack (“Beyond” 143–44). Although
she herself does not make that connection, the alteration of meaning-
ful and meaningless elements (particularly, the recurring sequences of
binary digits) on the page may serve as an illustration of the argument
Hayles makes in her seminal How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bod-
ies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999) about the modern
systems of information technology relying on a “complex dialectic” of
“pattern and randomness” (25). The logic of juxtaposition operates also
in the second chapter, where the autobiographical story recounted by
Velázquez is accompanied by many drafts of his oil paintings, which, in
most cases, stand in no apparent relation towards the content of the page
on which they appear.12
Page 297 also offers an example of the novel’s occasional use of frag-
mentation. It contains as many as sixteen instances of ellipsis, which
indicate passages being cut off or started in mid-sentence. The many
disconnected paratactic noun phrases – such as “white hat/black cat”
and “General (Version A)” – enhance the sense of incompletion. Other
instances of fragmentation in the novel include suspended sentences,
portions of text obliterated by little blank squares and the already
Figure 5.2 Steve Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture (FC2, 2006), p. 297.
mentioned meta-comments signalling lost pages and cut off passages in
the Velázquez manuscript. Despite numerous gestures towards fragmen-
tation, The Book of Portraiture is characterized by a higher degree of
cohesion than VAS owing to its division into chapters, some of which
could stand on their own. The latter, as has been mentioned, was initially
conceived by Tomasula as one of the chapters of The Book of Portrai-
ture, whose growth came to the point of warranting a separate novel.
Both works, as should be evident from my analysis, are highly uncon-
ventional novels meriting the labels of “experimental” and “innovative”
literature. Their multimodal richness (particularly the numerous fusions
of text and image) and use of appropriation, alongside their formal as
well as thematic heterogeneity, fragmentariness and reliance on juxtapo-
sition (local in The Book of Portraiture and global in VAS), are the main
arguments in favour of considering them as works of collage.
All That Is Solid Melts Into Pixels

Despite their heavy dependence on historical sources, VAS and The Book
of Portraiture are keenly interested in the challenges of the contemporary
world, which they address by embedding them in the context of relevant
turning points in the previous centuries. Both novels conceive of their
historical moment as being on the brink of a significant and irreversible
change, anticipating what Lauren Berlant has called, in an earlier quoted
passage, “a shift of historic proportions in the terms and processes of
the conditions of continuity of life” (“Thinking” 5). Although Tomasula
is very far from damning the developments that have led to the present
anxiety and from viewing past times with nostalgia, there is a strong
sense of crisis permeating his works. That crisis does not necessarily need
to be understood as a lamentable situation but rather as a time of recon-
sideration, or redefinition, of certain fundamental notions regarding the
human body, ethics, science and capitalism.
Of the many crises represented in Tomasula’s novels, as well as in the
symptomatically titled collection Once Human, the most prominent is
the crisis of the received concept of the human in the light of the millen-
nial advancements in medicine and science. The epistemological chaos
and distress occasioned by the premonition of that change is portrayed
in VAS from the perspective of Square. The previously asserted sense of
disorientation emanating from the pages of the novel corresponds to the
turmoil experienced by its protagonist. VAS begins with Square hold-
ing the hospital form needed to sign up for vasectomy and ends with
an account of that procedure. In the meantime, he struggles with the
implications of the decision which turns out to be much harder to make
than he expected. Prevented from withdrawing the application only by
his wife’s continued insistence and the wish to spare her the suffering of
further miscarriages, Square fears the far-reaching implications of his act:
“He could see what was happening, this transubstantiation of being his
body into having his body” (315). That may sound like an overly dra-
matic description of a vasectomy; in VAS, however, according to Cristina
Iuli, the operation assumes the symbolic importance of “the final act of a
history (and concept) of evolution based on natural selection” and of an
irreversible intervention which alters the “contingent, individualized out-
come” of human evolution (77). Square’s unease about any technological
intervention in the body is also reflected in his reaction to his mother-in-
law’s surgical implant of “a synthetic sponginess” to eliminate her prob-
lems with blood circulation (146). As a result of it, in Square’s view, she
has now become “part machine,” and hence a “cyborg” (145, 146).
Both instances of human enhancement can be interpreted through the
lens of Hayles’s notion of the post-human subject, defined as “an amal-
gam . . . of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity
whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction”
(How 3). The two medical procedures function as initial but critical steps
towards turning the human body into an endlessly alterable object. In the
light of that development, Anthony Enns argues that VAS “vividly illus-
trates the dangers of a world in which bodies are reducible to texts and
humans are manipulable as information” (56). He adds that the conclud-
ing scene in the novel – that of Square’s vasectomy – enacts his “trans-
formation from a natural body to a rewritable text, signalling the loss of
his autonomy and integrity” (73). Enns’s remark about the body’s transi-
tion into information should be read in the context of Hayles’s argument
about post-humanism’s shift of emphasis from “material instantiation”
to “informational pattern” (How 2). Hayles argues that human bodies,
previously conceptualized as material entities, are “constituted as infor-
mation,” which, in a capitalist system, makes them vulnerable to being
reshaped “in response to market pressures” (42). In the fourth chap-
ter of The Book of Portraiture, digital retouchers manipulate the images
of female bodies according to social expectations, while fashion design-
ers maintain a “library of Virtual People . . . developed as folders of
digital information,” which the narrator also calls “re-arrangeable” and
“collage-able” (205).
With that theoretical background in mind, it is possible to interpret
VAS – or rather both novels, as I shall later demonstrate – as addressing
the crisis of human embodiment. Among its causes is the already men-
tioned crisis of materiality, encapsulated in Hans Moravec’s idea that
human consciousness may soon become downloadable into a computer
(Hayles, How 54). As a result, the human subject stands on the verge
of disembodiment, their body an expendable costume for the informa-
tion pattern contained within. Besides the discomfort experienced by
Square, as well as Paul in the last chapter of The Book of Portraiture,
the anxiety about the human body being reduced to a code is conveyed
by the recurrence – in both novels – of the previously noted random
strings of zeros and ones, which stand for the binary notation of modern
computer systems. Their significance becomes apparent in the context
of Hayles’s question, “If we can capture the form of ones and zeros in a
non-biological medium – say, on a computer disk – why do we need the
body’s superfluous flesh?” (How 13). The binary digits can thus be read
as insistent portents of the human body’s approaching redundancy.
Finding his attachment to the old body “irrational” and the availa-
ble alternatives to vasectomy –“sentimental and absurd,” Square does
not rebel against the inevitable. Only he longs for a reassurance “that
it was okay to feel like you owed your body a fond farewell” (178–81).
Moments before that parting, he feels “his own body take on the function
of the microscopes: passé except as philosophy.” It becomes a Heideg-
gerian “broken hammer,” whose rupture is the reminder of its “hammer-
ness” (365). The understanding or consolation he craves is not offered by
his wife or anyone else. Ultimately, he is even denied a fitting musical set-
ting for his transformation. The tragic pathos of a Wagner opera, which
his doctor was inclined to play during the operation, is replaced by the
banality of David Cassidy’s 1970s pop hit “I Think I Love You.” Square’s
failure to secure a fitting accompaniment to his vasectomy can be read
through Berlant’s notion of the waning of genre, according to which “life
can no longer be lived even phantasmatically as melodrama” or “Aris-
totelian tragedy.” Marked by exhaustion and flatness, the contemporary
experience “begins not with drama but its absence”; at most, it can offer
what Berlant calls “lower case drama” (Cruel 6–7).
The personal crisis experienced by Square is matched by that of Paul,
whose struggle with similar bioethical dilemmas exemplifies The Book
of Portraiture’s interest in the darker prospects and corollaries of the
post-human, which also involve – in Hayles’s own assessment of the
novel – “surveillance, data mining, the war against/with terror, genetic
engineering, massive data collection” (“Beyond” 144). A lab worker
experienced in “euthanizing” mice, Paul is casually asked by his boss
and domestic partner, Mary, to help him “make an embryo” of a rat, to
which he readily agrees (BP 285). Her idea is to create a work of bio-
art, inspired by Eduardo Kac’s Alba and tentatively titled Trinity, whose
ingredients are supposed to be his sperm, her eggs and an addition of
another person’s DNA – a genuine genetic collage. A lapsed Catholic, he
does not have any firm ideological objections to the project, but he, nev-
ertheless, “[feels] himself squirm, thinking of his own protonucleus semi-
fused with hers under the light of the microinjector” (294). He is too
embarrassed to confront Mary with his conservative second thoughts,
but when she appears to broach the subject, he is relieved to confess, “at
first I didn’t think it was any big deal but now that it’s starting to seem
more real,” at which point he trails off, uncertain what it is exactly that
he feels (302). Like Square, he fails to win any sympathy for his doubts;
his awkward attempt at articulation is met with Mary’s “Would you give
it a rest!” uttered in “mock disbelief” (303). Similarly to Square, he lacks
the will to act according to his ethical impulse but, to his surprise, finds
himself seized with an equally elusive nostalgia for religion. What he
rejected years ago on account of its untenable beliefs “that a man could
simultaneously be a dove” now – given his own genetic interventions,
which include designing “mice with tobacco genes” – does not appear
to him “so farfetched anymore” (315). Paul’s sudden longing for a set of
beliefs which insists on rigid ontological categories can be interpreted as
a faint intrusion of a world already replaced by one which is no longer
concerned with bioethical qualms.
The extent to which the human body has become the material of
manipulation under the reign of capitalism is illustrated by chapter four
of The Book of Portraiture. Populated by characters who contribute to
creating and perpetuating the image of a desirable body – a model, a
photo/digital retoucher and a videographic designer – the chapter con-
ceptualizes the modern female body as a collage of social notions of
physical attractiveness. In that dystopian world, models on the covers
of fashion magazines are “often composites of several women, or dif-
ferent shots of the same woman: separate photos of hair, face and body,
all seamlessly combined.” In a clear invocation of the post-human, the
narrator calls them “Frankensteins without the stitches” (195). A similar
mechanism operates in the case of pornography, which relies on “seam-
lessly adding” the face or another body part of a chosen woman into a
ready-made video. Lured by the advertising slogan “BE THE DIREC-
TOR OF YOUR OWN INTERACTIVE PORN” (172), men like the
character named X_ are constantly on the lookout for a “perfect shot” of
a female body which they can insert into their own digital fantasies (271).
The digital body enhancement industry includes the retoucher, referred
to as a “digital plastic-surgeon,”13 whose job is to airbrush images of
“surreally beautiful women,” whom, even in private situations, he can-
not help but view as “infinitely re-arrangeable, highly . . . ‘tweakable’ ”
(168).14 All of the above instances point to the link between collage and
consumerism asserted by Banash, who compares the process of assem-
bling a collage to “the consumer wandering through a vast mall, selecting
this and then that” and “bringing it all together in a new arrangement”
(Collage Culture 16). The side effect of the technique is wastefulness –
“buying what is not needed, discarding what is not broken, and engaging
in an unprecedented relationship to abundance” (57) – which is evoked
in The Book of Portraiture by the practice of maintaining numerous vir-
tual personalities for various possible purposes: “one self that was more
or less permanent, others that could be ditched” (BP 212).
The novel envisages the social and psychological consequences of a
reality where bodies have become as easily rewritable as texts. The crisis
of embodiment entails a crisis of identity, exemplified by a female model
who discovers online that some of her numerous digital personas (legally
owned by fashion agencies) have been reworked. The fact that “some-
body was molding her into something other than her self” produces the
sense that her “ ‘real’ self, i.e., the fashion persona she had worked hard
to project” appears to “evaporate before her very eyes” (198). The loss
of control over one’s own body – including its virtual image – leads to
the loss of a broader sense of autonomy. The latter phenomenon is illus-
trated by the characters’ renunciation of names as markers of individual-
ity and their replacement by arbitrarily imposed letters. Those letters are
arranged on the opening page of the chapter into the word “PIXELS”
(149), which can be read as a suggestion that its characters have been
reduced to the status of mere components of digital technology, which, as
Chevaillier observes, are “controllable elements” (125). The connection
between characters and pixels also emphasizes their disembodiment on
account of the earlier discussed shift from materiality to information pat-
tern. In the light of those phenomena, the chapter’s closing words – a pas-
sage of free indirect discourse focalized by the model named U_ – assume
a sadly ironic tinge: “No matter how [her body] was photographed or
digitally manipulated, she knew, her self had kept company with her
body. And always will” (284). The subtly mournful effect of her deluded
certainty echoes Hayles’s reminder that “as we rush to explore the new
vistas that cyberspace has made available,” we need to “remember the
fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced” (How 49).
Hayles’s statement is underwritten by a lack of confidence in the direc-
tion of scientific development, which is conceptualized as a “rush” rather
than a process marked by careful consideration. Tomasula’s novels, VAS
in particular, represent the development of science far more harshly. Sci-
ence emerges as completely devoid of any ethical foresight and consist-
ently failing to learn from its past mistakes. Conceiving of science as “a
history of failed theories,” VAS is a catalogue of its many embarrassing
misjudgements – ethnic and gender prejudices masquerading as objective
findings (VAS 73). Tomasula mercilessly quotes various scientific authori-
ties in their time – including a host of Nobel Prize winners – who voiced
their support for various eugenic policies, such as the forced sterilization
of undesired social groups. In her critical discussion of VAS, Mary K.
Holland proposes that the novel views science as “an evolving collection
of stories, a narrative whose facts change as surely as do its forms.” Its
status, she argues, is “reduced to the status of culture and religion, com-
posed of irrational conviction and mass opinion” (38). Furthermore, Iuli
interprets the recurrent insertions of US Patent stamps across VAS as an
indication of the “collapse of science” under the pressure of “the market-
able, the usable, and the fashionable” (65).
Tomasula appears to suggest that the failures of science can be blamed
on social ignorance and amnesia – on society’s resistance to facts and
reluctance to learn from the past. The refusal of the residents of Flat-
land – in Abbott’s novel – to accept the existence of the third dimension
became for Tomasula the point of departure for his twentieth-century
travesty of the nineteenth-century science fiction classic. Then as now,
Tomasula points out, humanity finds itself on the brink of a new era
and fails to recognize its challenges (Personal interview). The inability to
realize the implications of present scientific trends is encapsulated in the
following passage of VAS:
[C]aressing its epidermis, to all appearances unchanged, [Square]

couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t hold in his mind a change from wine to
water any more than the moment message becomes material, mate-
rial becomes man, man becomes patient, patient becomes material
and a heart, cradled by latex fingers from ice chest to some other’s
needy cavity, drinks in and starts a new life, servant to some other
emperor with no clothes.
(315)
As long as the “appearances” are “unchanged,” the abstract conse-

quences of actions are hard to “hold in . . . mind.” That general obtuse-
ness of humanity and its shortage of foresight are asserted as early as in
the novel’s epigraph, in which Goethe calls people “the organs of their
century, which operate mainly unconsciously” (VAS 5). Contrary to the
principle formulated in the opening lines of the novel – “first pain, then
knowledge” (9–10) – no actual accumulation of experience and wis-
dom is shown to take place. That phenomenon is exemplified in VAS
by the shifting attitude towards “chemical companies releasing new life
forms into the ocean.” While, initially, the prospect “scared people” and
inspired “doomsday movies,” soon Square and “everyone else” ignored
it or forgot all about it (40).
Whereas VAS could be read as a reflection of a crisis of faith in the
idea of scientific progress, The Book of Portraiture, especially its contem-
porary chapters, expresses unease about various aspects of a globalized
information society. The adverse effects of multinational capitalism are
indicated in the strand of chapter four concerned with the character of
a sales representative – a “girl in a third-world country,” trained to neu-
tralize her Bombay accent while serving on the phone American custom-
ers ordering lingerie which she will never be able to afford (180–81).
However, the economic repercussions of capitalism are of less interest
to Tomasula than the information society, which, according to Robert
Hassan – the author of The Information Society: Cyber Dreams and Dig-
ital Nightmares (2008) – “seems to have been originated for and devel-
oped for the interests of capital first” (65). Among the many assertions of
the reign of data is the earlier discussed recurrence of streams of binary
digits, news snippets, commercial ads, website addresses and disorient-
ing paratactic fragments. Through those inserts, Tomasula illustrates the
sense that “we are drowning in information, the production of which has
no objective limits” and represents what David Shenk has dubbed “data
smog” (Hassan 115).
The most sinister aspect of information society to be highlighted in
The Book of Portraiture is the ubiquity of surveillance. “Wherever you
go, whatever you do, no matter what you say, your digital shadow will
always be there,” remarks one of the characters (277). The annoyance
at the sense of being constantly monitored by CCTV cameras, and the
conviction that surveillance is commercially driven, is articulated in a
passage focalized by the computer programmer: “The fuckers would
jam a telescope up your ass if they thought they could make a dime by
examining what you had for lunch” (237). However, surveillance is also
represented as a tool designed to guarantee order based on the fear of
punishment. The fourth chapter’s refrain – “If you don’t have anything
to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of” – encapsulates the twisted logic
of the surveillance ideology. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant emphasizes the
dubious status of contemporary surveillance industry as one of the pil-
lars of the “society of control” and its disingenuous combination of “the
idiom of disciplinary security with the protective language of care” (239–
40). In Tomasula’s novel, its reach is not restricted to the public sphere:
couples are shown to spy on each other’s hard drives and send furtively
cut strands of each other’s hair for DNA testing. According to Tomasula,
the chapter offers “a portrait of people being videotaped, but also a por-
trait of society and how we relate to one another, what’s become of the
idea of a private individual” (Chevaillier 127).
If VAS and The Book of Portraiture can indeed be read as “two volumes
of the same book,” their overriding concern may be subsumed under the
notion of an ontological and epistemological crisis precipitated by the
social and scientific changes which have undermined the rigid boundaries
between “the natural, the human, and the technological” (Iuli 65). As a
result, the instability of the category of the human becomes readily appar-
ent. The discovery that “[t]he 3,000 million letters of the DNA lexicon
that is a human” are “made of the same letters used to compose a tree”
(VAS 62) cannot be without consequences for how humanity conceives of
itself in reference to the world. In his article “Visualization, Scale, and the
Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” Tomasula cites Michel Foucault’s
idea that “man is an invention of recent date” and “one perhaps nearing
its end.” He also invokes Gerald Bruns’s observation that “the human
has never been a stable, much less determinate, homogeneous concept.”
Both remarks emphasize the contingency of the received notions of the
human – their rootedness in social contexts, whose radical change must
necessitate a radical rethinking of what constitutes and differentiates
them. In another article, Tomasula references Burke’s statement that “a
conception of man as that being who stole fire from the gods is going to
result in very different works of literature than will a conception that sees
man as a link in an evolutionary chain” (Tomasula, “Emergence” 11).
Tomasula’s own novels should be read in the context of that remark – as
attempts to fashion a literary form that addresses the challenges to the
humanist ideas of the self.
Conclusion
That form, as I argued in the earlier sections, shares many characteristics
with collage. Its suitability to Tomasula’s project can be summed up as
depending on three central analogies. First, collage functions as a meta-
phor for the genetic interventions and manipulations addressed in both
novels. Rearranging DNA and combining the genes of various organ-
isms are actions parallel to cutting, pasting and appropriating. Second,
collage – with its hybrid structure – is a perfect vehicle for evoking the
sense of information overload, which Tomasula aims to convey in VAS
and the later chapters of The Book of Portraiture. Finally, the crisis of
the physical book, metaphorically paralleled by the crisis of the human
body (and of the human at large), is confronted in both novels through
hypermediacy – a reminder of the uniqueness of a given medium. Thanks
to its intense multimodality, in particular the materiality of the cut and
paste, collage is one of the most fitting forms to flaunt the physical book’s
advantages over its hopeful successors – e-books and digital texts. The
concern about the crisis of both kinds of flesh – human and literary – is
echoed in How We Became Posthuman, where Hayles articulates the
following warning: “Because they have bodies, books and humans have
something to lose if they are regarded solely as informational patterns,
namely the resistant materiality that has traditionally marked the durable
inscription of books no less than it has marked our experiences of living
as embodied creatures” (29).
Notes
mine entitled “Collage and Crisis in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flat-
land and Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames,” published in Notre Dame Review.
2. In the same interview, Tomasula explains that he usually produces the rough
draft of his novels in Microsoft Word and then continues his work in Adobe
InDesign, where he fine-tunes the layout and adds images. The final version
of VAS, however, was created in Quark, a software which has since become
obsolete (Tomasula, “Novel” 157).
3. The frequent visual evocations of modern technologies are interspersed in VAS
with throwbacks to earlier periods, such as handwritten passages and the con-
sistent use of the thumb index on all pages containing acknowledged quotations.
4. VAS contains five blank pages, including three in a row, and three entirely
black ones. There are also several pages that include very small chunks of
text, which can be as short as the passage “Sometimes silence is the most
eloquent” on the otherwise blank page 102.
5. The significance of typography and layout is suggested by the double use of
the same quotation by co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick on consecutive
pages (125–27): the first time – in standard typeface and laid out in a way
to command respect – and the second – in block capitals, inside a speech
bubble and embedded in a scene reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam!
(Sammarcelli 85).
6. A metafictional indication of the novel’s heterogeneity is the appropriation
of Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” on a page with an excess of dis-
connected textual fragments (VAS 298).
7. Among the many instances of such quotations is President George Washing-
ton’s statement about his “immediate objectives” being the “total destruc-
tion and devastation of [Indian] settlements,” as well as “ruin[ing their]
crops” (VAS 108).
8. A recurrent allusion in VAS is an unacknowledged reference to the so-called
infinite monkey theorem as mentioned in Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote.”
9. Bakhtin coins this term in “Discourse in the Novel” (1982) and defines it as
the novel’s essential inclination to accommodate multiple and diverse lan-
guages and voices. Among them are “the languages of social groups and
classes, of professional groups, of generations, the different languages for
different occasions” (Dentith 35). Heteroglossia is meant to be a marker
of the novel’s “stylistic and linguistic variety, its openness to the world-in-
process of the present” as opposed to the monologic structure of epic poetry
(Dentith 46–47). Crucially, the voices embedded in the novel are to be dem-
ocratically arranged; Bakhtin asserts that in genuinely polyphonic novels
the voices are “independent” and “fully valid” – not subordinated to the
author’s restrictive jurisdiction (Bakhtin 6). The autonomous languages spo-
ken by individual characters affect – often “powerfully so,” Bakhtin adds –
the “authorial speech,” or, in other words, the voice of the narrator (315).
10. In an interview by Flore Chevaillier, Tomasula speaks of that juxtaposition
as illustrative of a broader theme in the novel:
One of the ideas that circulates through VAS is the way that we demonize
Hitler, and rightfully so, but the danger in demonizing Hitler is to not rec-
ognize how “natural” it was for him to put the extermination of “unde-
sirables” into play. The novel asks us to remember that Germany was
only like the eleventh industrialized nation to legalize the elimination of
“undesirables” – it took twenty years before the Nazis got around to it. So
I put a quote by Hitler next to one by Winston Churchill – both of which
basically make the same claim – in the hope that a third thing will emerge:
the commonness of the assumptions that much of the industrial world was
operating under, the banality of it all.
(207–8)
11. See Grzegorz Maziarczyk’s chapter titled “The Book as Multimodal (Dis)
Embodiment” in The Novel as Book.
12. In a personal exchange, Tomasula clarifies that whereas there may often not
be a clear relationship between the drafts and the corresponding pages, he
wanted to relate the former to the themes addressed by the entire chapter.
Among such links is the drawings’ status as drafts, which emphasizes “the
constructed nature of the histories they depict” (Personal interview).
13. Actual plastic surgeons are also needed – to “shape the body to the Carnival
Ideal: a breast that can be cupped by one hand, a buttock by two” (BP 191).
14. Although he is in a relationship, the object of his deepest admiration appears
to be the “Venus of Photoshop icon,” which he has created out of multiple
fragments of “perfect bodies” and which he stores on his hard drive. Look-
ing at prints of that woman, his partner feels she is in “a temple to a single
goddess that her boyfriend ha[s] constructed” (BP 266).
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination, edited by
Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson, U of Texas P, 1982, pp. 259–422.
Banash, David. “Afterword: An Interview with Steve Tomasula.” Steve Toma-
sula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash.
Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 285–303.
———. Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption.
Rodopi, 2013.
Banash, David, and Andrea Spain. “Introduction: Composition, Emergence,
Sensation: Science and New Media in the Novels of Steve Tomasula.” Steve
Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash.
Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 51–74.
Barrett, Mike. “Seeing the Novel in the 21st Century.” Electronic Book Review,
15 Nov. 2008, www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/histori
cized. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.
———. “Thinking About Feeling Historical.” Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 1,
2008, pp. 4–9.
Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. Routledge, 1996.
Enns, Anthony. “The Material Is the Message: Body as Text/Text as Body in Steve
Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science
of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015,
pp. 51–74.
Fleisher, Kass. “Word Made Flesh and Blood.” American Book Review, vol. 25,
no. 2, 2004, pp. 3–4.
Frelik, Paweł. “A Book, an Atlas, and an Opera: Steve Tomasula’s Fictions of Sci-
ence as Science Fiction.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media
Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 227–39.
———. “Reading the Background: The Textual and the Visual in Steve Tomasula’s
The Book of Portraiture.” Sillages Critiques, vol. 17, 2014, http://journals.
openedition.org/sillagescritiques/3582. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.
Gibbons, Alison. Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. Rout-
ledge, 2012.
Hassan, Robert. The Information Society: Cyber Dreams and Digital Night-
mares. Polity, 2008.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Beyond Human Scale: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Por-
traiture.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited
by David Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 133–46.
———. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,
and Informatics. U of Chicago P, 1999.
Holland, Mary K. “The Work of Art After the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Nar-
rative, and the Real in the Work of Steve Tomasula.” Steve Tomasula: The
Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury
Academic, 2015, pp. 27–49.
Iuli, Cristina. “Playing with Codes: Steve Tomasula’s VAS, an Opera in Flat-
land.” Writing Technologies, vol. 3, 2010, pp. 64–85.
———. “Print Strikes Back: Typographic Experimentation in Contemporary Fic-
tion as a Contribution to the Metareferential Turn.” The Metareferential Turn
in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation,
edited by Werner Wolf. Rodopi, 2011, pp. 169–94.
Moore, Steven. “Brilliant Stretch of Time Travel.” American Book Review,
vol. 28, no. 1, 2006, p. 16.
Olsen, Lance. “Fourteen Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction,
or: Fiction by Collage.” Symploke, vol. 12, no. 1, 2005, pp. 130–35.
———. “Ontological Metalepses, Unnatural Narratology, and Locality: A Poli-
tics of the [[Page]] in Tomasula’s VAS & TOC.” Steve Tomasula: The Art
and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash. Bloomsbury Aca-
demic, 2015, pp. 209–23.
Sammarcelli, Françoise. “Encoding the Body, Questioning Legacy: Reflections on
Intersemiotic Experiments in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland.”
Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David
Banash. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 75–98.
Tomasula, Steve. The Book of Portraiture. FC2, 2006.
———. “Electricians, Wig Makers, and Staging the New Novel.” American
Book Review, vol. 32, no. 6, 2011, pp. 5–6.
———. “Emergence and Posthuman Narrative.” Flusser Studies, vol. 9, 2009,
pp. 1–18.
———. Interview by Flore Chevaillier. Divergent Trajectories: Interviews with
Innovative Fiction Writers. Ohio State UP, 2017, pp. 197–214.
———. “The Novel as Multimedia, Networked Book.” Interview by Sandra
Bettencourt. Entrevista, 2016, http://impactum-journals.uc.pt/matlit/article/
view/2657/1985. Accessed 29 Oct. 2018.
———. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. U of Chicago P, 2002.
———. “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative.”
Open Editions, 2014, https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/3562.
Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.
Wark, McKenzie. “The Book of Portraiture by Steve Tomasula.” Bookforum,
vol. 12, no. 2, 2006, p. 55.
Part III
The Self in Crisis

6 I’m Every Wo/man, Guaranteed
One Hundred Per Cent Genuine!
Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World
Formally, Woman’s World is the quintessence of collage literature. Its

sustained narrative unity, however, makes it a highly paradoxical text –
fragmentary and appropriative as well as curiously coherent. Before a
discussion of the ambiguities of Graham Rawle’s second novel, I shall
offer a brief introduction to the author. Then the formal properties of
Woman’s World will be examined, especially those enhancing its status
as a literary collage. Finally, I shall consider how the novel can be read as
a representation of myriad crises of the self – particularly in the context
of gender and consumerism.
Rawle is the only writer discussed in this book who has produced
numerous works of visual collage.1 Coming from the visual arts and design
background, Rawle rose to prominence on account of his non-literary
achievements. His “Lost Consonants” series2 appeared every week in
The Guardian between 1990 and 2005 and gave rise to other regular
series in The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine and The Times.
In the 1990s, Rawle published several anthologies of “Lost Consonants,”
as well as comic art books, such as Wonder Book of Fun (1994) and
Lying Doggo: He Sometimes Tells a Fib (1995). His first novel was The
Diary of an Amateur Photographer (1998) – an exuberantly multimodal
murder mystery containing numerous images and newspaper cuttings, as
well as a piece of cut-up text placed in an envelope at the end of the book.
Rawle’s latest novels were The Card (2012) and Overland (2018) – both
of which employ multimodal means but cannot be regarded as collages.
Rawle has also worked as an illustrator; his visual interpretation of The
Wizard of Oz (2008) won the Best Illustrated Trade Book Award and
was chosen Book of the Year at the British Book Design Awards.
Woman’s World (2005) is the outcome of five years of strenuous work –
seven days a week, seventeen hours a day (Phillips) – which involved
drafting a hefty novel and then cutting up an enormous collection of
women’s magazines from the 1960s3 in search of chunks of text, from
individual words to entire paragraphs, to substitute his own writing. In
order to achieve this, Rawle developed a very complex system of cata-
loguing his cut-outs into thematic and linguistic sections. He also created
160 The Self in Crisis
an electronic database of over one million words included in his cut-
tings, which made it easier to locate the fragments needed (Gibbons 170).
The result is an unprecedented feat of collage literature – a 437-page
cut-up consisting of approximately forty thousand textual fragments –
which earned Rawle the reputation as a “Stakhanovite of the scissors
and paste” (Phillips). The collage form of Woman’s World cannot be dis-
missed as a mere gimmick since the textual assemblage artfully mirrors
the constructed nature of its narrator-protagonist’s identity.
The novel is a first-person narrative focalized by Norma – the feminine
self of transvestite Roy Little, who appears to speak the voice of his tragi-
cally deceased younger sister. Grzegorz Maziarczyk notes that the pro-
tagonist’s continual wavering between the two personalities is marked by
an oscillation between homodiegetic (when Norma is in control) and het-
erodiegetic narration (when Roy prevails) (81). The fact that Norma and
Roy are one person becomes evident to the reader only halfway through
the novel. Until then, the narrator consistently refers to Roy as her
brother and to his mother as a housekeeper named Mary. Despite claim-
ing to be a different person, Norma focalizes all situations involving Roy,
such as his activities as a laundry delivery man and his romantic engage-
ments with Eve. Although she is mostly confined to the home, where she
obsessively reads women’s magazines, Norma occasionally goes out in
female clothes, invariably attracting the attention of the residents of a
drab 1960s English town. During one such outing, she is approached by
Mr Hands, who invites her to his place for a professional photo shoot,
which greatly flatters her vanity. When she realizes his ignoble intentions,
she hits him in the head with a high-heeled shoe, as a result of which he
loses consciousness, and Norma panics that she has killed him. Days
later, it becomes apparent that Mr. Hands has survived and wants to take
revenge by breaking the news about Roy’s transvestism to his girlfriend,
Eve. In the last chapter, Norma is coming home in a very agitated state
when she is badly hit by a van. The novel ends with Norma’s confused
reverie about Roy and Eve’s happy future together, as she appears to be
dying as a result of the collision.4
Woman’s World was released in 2005 with the subtitle “A Novel” and
then reissued in paperback in 2006 as “A Graphic Novel,” which the
publisher considered a better marketing label (Personal interview). The
book won unanimous critical acclaim. In The Guardian, Tom Phillips
praised its combination of unparalleled formal invention and compelling
readability, which, he predicted, might make it “metafiction’s first best-
seller.” That enthusiastic review ends with the following image: “I once
saw the virtuosic John Tilbury play, recognizably, the opening movement
of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with his back to the keyboard.
It was a feat I never thought to see equalled, but this, as Rawle him-
self might say, eats everything.” Rick Poynor also emphasized the novel’s
success in delivering a gripping narrative despite its “unconventional
I’m Every Wo/man 161
and perhaps initially daunting appearance” and concluded that its “tri-
umph is that it works on every level.” Fellow novelist Neel Mukherjee
announced in The Times that Woman’s World was “a work of genius”
and “the most wildly original novel produced in [Britain] in the past
decade” (“Woman’s World Book”). Besides praising the uniqueness of
the book’s form, other critics stressed the darkness of the novel’s overall
effect despite its comic tone.
Over a decade later, Woman’s World continues to be Rawle’s best
known, most critically acclaimed and most studied work. It has been
presented at numerous artist book and graphic design exhibitions mostly
in Europe and the United States, and has become part of the perma-
nent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp and the
National Art Library at Victoria and Albert Museum (“Woman’s World
Book”). Soon after the American premiere, the option to make a film
adaptation was bought by Diana Napper, who then partnered with Jean
Doumanian (the executive producer of many of Woody Allen’s films).
Despite their efforts, the film was not made (Bigge; Rawle, Personal inter-
view). Among the artists who expressed interest in adapting Woman’s
World to the big screen is the Hollywood actor James Franco, who even
commissioned a photo shoot of himself dressed as Norma. Rawle, how-
ever, ultimately decided that he wished to create the film on his own
terms (Personal interview). On his official website, he states that he is “in
the early stages” of work on a film adaptation, which will be “montaged
from thousands of clips,” including “feature films, commercials, public
information shorts and television shows from the late 1950s and early
’60s” (“Woman’s World Film”).
Collage Structure
That Woman’s World is a work of collage is not a statement requiring
much substantiation. Its strong reliance on appropriation and fragmenta-
tion, as well as its visual richness, are so evident that no critic has, to my
knowledge, disputed that formal categorization. Variously referred to as
a “cut-up” (Vivera), a “paste-up” (Poyner) and a “typographical roller-
coaster” (Phillips), Rawle’s novel has been situated in the tradition of lit-
erary experiments from Tristan Tzara to William S. Burroughs, Eduardo
Paolozzi and Tom Phillips. Anna Gerber and Teal Triggs regard Tzara –
the Romanian-born Dadaist, who used to cut individual letters and then
randomly reassemble them – as the precursor of Rawle’s method (66). In
Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Pre-
sent (2011), Edward S. Robinson argues that the principle of Woman’s
World is “almost identical to Burroughs’ cut-ups” except “the use of tex-
tual fragments is anything but random, but is, in fact, a system of careful
selection” (257). He also concedes that, unlike Burroughs (or Tzara),
Rawle exposes the visual aspect of the cut-up by retaining its typographic
distinctness. Despite those rather important differences, Robinson sees
Rawle as a direct descendant of the cut-up tradition and applauds Pat-
rick McCabe’s description of him as “Burroughs let loose with dressmak-
er’s scissors” (257). Finally, in his search for the novel’s closest artistic
relatives, Mikko Keskinen points to limited-edition artists’ books such
as Joseph Kosuth’s Purloined (2000) and Sally Alatalo’s A Rearranged
Affair (1996), which are entirely made up of fragments of earlier pub-
lished works and presented in facsimile reproductions (87). An earlier
important antecedent was Joe Brainard’s The Friendly Way (1972) – a
short collage of cut-up fragments (transcribed sentences and short para-
graphs) from American “homemaking” magazine Women’s Household.
Although significant formal similarities can be traced between Woman’s
World and the works of each author mentioned above, Rawle’s novel
deserves to be treated as a unique artistic experiment – in both its employ-
ment of collage to literary means and its fusion of form and content. This
section aims to examine the collage poetics of Rawle’s book, focusing on
its use of fragmentation (and its interplay with continuity), multimodal-
ity and appropriation.
I shall base my discussion of the collage structure of Woman’s World
on page 142, as it displays many key formal properties of the entire
work. What becomes immediately apparent when looking at the page is
the coexistence of numerous chunks of text (58 in total), whose distinct-
ness is noticeable on account of their typographic variety and the visible
contours of the cuttings. For example, the second sentence on the page
consists of as many as thirteen cut-outs and features six fonts. The con-
stituent elements of the sentence are the following textual fragments:
Like me,/Roy/abhor/s/thoughtless/littering, and besides,/Mary/LIKES

HIM TO/save/the paper so it can/be used for next day’s/SANDWICHES/.
(142)
The multiplicity of parts and the typographical variety (including the

indicated use of italics and bold font) pose a serious challenge: as Gib-
bons asserts, the potential readers of the novel, when confronted with
a different sample on the Jezebel.com literary blog, regarded the text
as straining for the eyesight and “requiring greater reading processing
effort” (173).
Page 142 provides examples of both extremely short cut-outs – such
as the third-person “-s” in “abhors,” the full stop after “sandwiches”
and the plural “-s” in “parcels” – and very long ones, like the eighty-
word-long paragraph in the middle of the page, which is reproduced with
very few alterations. While the need to modify inflected forms by add-
ing or replacing a letter is a perfectly understandable motivation, Wom-
an’s World contains numerous instances of harder to explain fusions of
words common enough for Rawle not to be forced to assemble them
Figure 6.1 Graham Rawle, Woman’s World (Atlantic, 2006), p. 142.
from individual letters. Among such surprising melds are “my/self” (30),
“foo/d” (126), “othe/r” (128), “M/y” (198), “m/oney” (228), “wo/man,”
“her/self” (both 251), “t/ook” (394), “r/ed” (412), “wom/e/n’s” (428)
and “wa/s” (431). While in the case of words such as “k/ron/king” (196)
a recourse to a blend may be inevitable, the construction of “smoked”
out of a lower-case “smoke” and a capital “D” (337) deliberately attracts
attention to the fragmented quality of the novel.5
That sense is further accentuated by Rawle’s occasional use of words
whose enormous size disrupts the continuity of the sentence of which
they make part. On page 142, the word “Roy” in the opening line could
be cited as a case in point.6 While in that instance the word’s prominence
could be explained by the fact that it marks the first reference to the pro-
tagonist on the page, in many other examples exceptionally large words
seem to be used rather arbitrarily. The almost two-inch-tall “I WAS” (in
“I was hunched over the sink, washing the make-up from my face when
a knock on the door startled me” [244]) and the even larger “HAIR” (in
“She lifted her hair while his deft fingers set to work on it” [377]) are
not used for semantic or dramatic emphasis; rather, their aim appears to
be aesthetic. In his explanation of specific typographic choices on page
209, Rawle admits to placing a disproportionately large version of the
word “forty” because it “happened to be sitting on the top of [his] num-
bers file” and “added a nice graphic element to the page” (Interview by
Kachka). The graphic variety is thus privileged over the coherence of a
reading experience. Rather than smoothing out the seams, Rawle regu-
larly disrupts narrative immersion and reminds the increasingly collage-
accustomed reader of the text’s constructedness.7 The oscillation between
regular and incommensurately large fonts could thus be regarded as a
metafictional gesture.8
The visibility of the seams makes most sentences in the novel resemble
Frankenstein’s monster – a creature sewn together out of fragments of
long-dead texts, as noted by Paul Matwychuk (qtd. in Gibbons 171).
The fragments, adds Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, remain “alien bodies,
stubbornly retaining a visible connection to an anterior site and time.”
Woman’s World is, for Wurth, never “its own” but a consistently “pros-
thetic text” (Between 85). Even so, it successfully conveys a sequential
and fairly linear narrative, which grants the text unity and cements it
as a novel. Wurth calls this paradoxical coexistence of fragmentation
and coherence a “discontinuous continuity” (“Posthumanities” 127).
Another related paradox is the fact that, as a general rule, a greater num-
ber of constituent elements in a given sentence usually guarantees greater
continuity. The highlighted sentence on page 142 is a case in point:
although composed of thirteen elements, it is both syntactically and logi-
cally structured. Logical connections are often more tenuous in sentences
containing longer one-piece phrases such as “tablecloth of plain and sim-
ple design” in “He stared back at her blankly, his face a tablecloth of
plain and simple design” (WW 322). In such cases, the availability of a
specific quirky cut-out appears to dictate the development of the passage.
When each word comes from a different source, the cut-out serves as a
mere visual realization of a preconceived word. The former arrangement
is far more in tune with the poetics of collage.
Among the examples of eccentric and disharmonious blends are the
following sentences (the length of the idiosyncratic cut-out or cut-outs is
marked by underlining):
He sat with his slim hands knotted between his knees, his boyish
complexion pale and sickly, like Wall’s ice cream.
(17)
The rain had stopped now, but for a few heavy drops that were
bouncing intermittently off the van’s roof like chocolate-covered
Payne’s Poppets thrown from the branches above them by playful
confectioners.
(175)
Humiliation bubbled in the pan as the heat was turned up to gas

mark six.
(269)
The van moved slowly, as if being pushed by two teenage boys from
Dagenham.
(295)
A recipe book might suggest that a casserole is really nothing more

than stew, but to Roy it was a symphony conducted by Mantovani.
(379)
In each case, the peculiarity, or absurdity, of the underlined passage – in

confrontation with the rest of the sentence – is an example of the quintes-
sentially collage-like clash of incompatible components. Rawle’s inclina-
tion to produce sentences such as “His face wore the quizzical look of a
monkey with a lemon squeezer” (54) is rooted, according to Maziarczyk,
in the “the principle of surreal juxtaposition” (80).9 Rick Poyner, like-
wise, sees Rawle as a descendant of André Breton, calling him a “kitchen-
sink surrealist.” The pairing of raindrops with Payne’s Poppets and lips
with “Batchelors peas” (340) are indeed no less idiosyncratic than Comte
de Lautréamont’s idea of a “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a
sewing machine and an umbrella” (qtd. in Cran 21) or Salvador Dalí’s
fusion of a lobster and a telephone.
Collage-like collisions in Woman’s World are not restricted to surreal
similes. Arguably, the most frequent kind of discordant combinations
contains advertising slogans. The climax of an intimate scene between
Roy and Eve is rendered in the following way: “Overwhelmed by their
feelings, they practically fell into each other’s arms. This was the genuine
article. 100% pure” (169). The romantic description is thus interrupted
by a lapse into blatant commercial speak. That is also the case when Roy
explains to his mother their rather hasty decision to marry: “Two weeks is
long enough, if you’re certain about someone. This is the real thing, Mum.
Guaranteed one hundred per cent genuine!” (395). Besides clashing the
discourses of the romance and the commercial, Rawle exploits the irony of
advertisement slogans celebrating authenticity. A longer discussion of the
novel’s representation of consumerism will be provided in the next section.
Another essential component of the collage poetics of Woman’s World
is its multimodal richness. Page 142 alone contains three features of mul-
timodal texts as specified by Gibbons: the use of images (a small parcel
next to the word “parcels”), an unconventional layout (lack of right-
justification at the top and bottom of the page as well as a sudden nar-
rowing of the text in the middle) and varied typography (four different
fonts in the opening sentence). As regards the first characteristic, Rawle
employs images on approximately half of the pages, which amounts to
just over two hundred throughout the book. Most of them serve as illus-
trations of objects referred to on the page, usually right next to them, as
is the case with the parcel image. The opening five pages of the novel, for
instance, contain four images: that of a house, a clothing top, a lipstick
and a human head. In two cases, the illustrations appear directly below
corresponding passages. On the opening page, a drawing of a house
appears on the same level as the capitalized word “home” (3). Finally, a
simple sketch of a head comes right above the word “head” – both ele-
ments protruding from the otherwise left-justified text (7). The straight-
forwardness of the relationship between the word and image, as well as
the complete redundancy of the latter, generate a mildly humorous effect.
Most images in the novel create the sense of being placed there rather
arbitrarily: although they are tied to specific words in their vicinity, they
do not seem motivated by the wish to bring out new meanings from the
text. In that way, they are subservient to the verbal content and should be
regarded – to reference Jan Baetens’s distinction – as pictures-of-the-text.
Among the examples of images whose status transcends that of mere
illustrations is a large surreal drawing of a coffee-drinking man whose
head has been replaced by the letter “O” (162). There are also several
pages in Woman’s World where the coexistence of text and image is such
as one would expect to see in an autonomous visual collage: on page
287, for example, the image of five headless beauty contest participants
occupies half of the page and dominates the textual layer, which is usu-
ally given pride of place.
Whereas the varied typography of Woman’s World is a matter of course,
its page design requires closer attention. While the default arrangement
of text on the page takes the shape of a tall and narrow rectangle (6
inches by 2,5), leaving a lot of empty space (well over an inch each) for
side margins, Rawle occasionally introduces substantial alterations. The
most common variety involves the exploitation of the blank space of
one of the margins by a protruding individual line of text or an image.
While such occasional textual chunks rarely stick out by more than 0,8
inch from the rest of the rectangular block of text, some images (such as
the two large photos of lipstick on pages 204 and 205) occupy the entire
top margin. Among other unusual layouts throughout the book is a page
opening with a six-inch-tall capital-letter “P” (125), a rhombus-shaped
block of text on page 332 and a nine-line chunk of text divided by an
invisible strip across the bottom of page 349. The last two examples can
be classified as what Gibbons calls a “concrete realisation of text,” since
the arrangement of words is aimed to evoke a specific shape. Other con-
crete units involve words scattered on the page rather than neatly placed
in straight lines. One of several instances of such experiments with lay-
out is the bottom part of page 234, where the dramatic moment of the
plot (Norma’s conviction that she has killed Mr Hands) is rendered by
means of falling lines of text, in accordance with the conceptual meta-
phor DEATH IS DOWN, as described by George Lakoff and Mark John-
son (15). Other instances of scattered letters – such as “a/m/u/s/e/m/e/n/t”
(21) – or words – “it/was/nothing/to get/sentimental/about” (180) – are
confined to the top or bottom edge of the page and lack a clear semantic
motivation.
The last but arguably most important collage quality of Woman’s
World is its radical reliance on appropriation. Rawle’s novel is the only
text considered in this study to be composed in its entirety of external
elements. What is more, it is the only work which so clearly highlights
the appropriated status of its constituent parts – in this case, of forty
thousand “facsimile snippets,” to use Keskinen’s phrase (99). In order
for the edges of each snippet to be visible, Rawle adjusted the saturation
levels of the facsimile and chose to paste the cut-outs onto a markedly
lighter coloured paper. By employing black-and-white reproductions of
the original artwork (which is, naturally, as colourful as women’s maga-
zines tend to be), Rawle alludes to the tradition of cutting up the newspa-
per, which David Banash calls the “ur-form of the historical avant-garde
and of modernism itself” (Collage Culture 83) and which has been the
classic component of collage since Picasso and Braque.
As for the textual aspects of appropriation, Rawle rarely uses well-
known quotations. The few exceptions to that rule are fragments of reli-
gious prayers – such as “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us
from evil” (262) and “Ashes to ashes; dust to dust” (366) – embedded
in incongruous contexts. A reference to a “Hovis van” is, for instance,
followed by the sentence “Hovis – give us this day our daily bread”
(12), whose invocation of the Lord’s Prayer in conjunction with the
British bread company produces a comic effect. Many of the appropri-
ated phrases that are recognizable to the reader are staple ingredients
of advertisements, as exemplified by “Everything must go!” (289) and
“apply now while stocks last” (the latter discordantly followed by “True
love conquers all”) (395). Occasionally, Rawle incorporates longer
advertisements, whose banality and utter dispensability from the narra-
tive point of view can be a source of amusement: “A glass of Lucozade
might have helped. Lucozade is a very delightful way of giving glucose,
a rapid source of energy. It does not upset the most delicate stomach.
Invalids take Lucozade willingly because it is so delicious and refreshing”
(277).10 Rawle also achieves humorous effects by incorporating commer-
cial speak in ill-matched contexts, as when he follows a mention of Roy’s
mother’s “thread of tenderness” by the uniformly typefaced and much
larger sentence: “Crunchy nut coating on the outside; soft, creamy filling
on the inside” (396). A chocolate bar thus appears to become a vehicle
for tenderness in a bizarre metaphor.
Besides mocking the vacuity of the advertising rhetoric permeating
women’s magazines, Rawle ridicules their reliance on clichés and plati-
tudes by appropriating the former and creating pastiches of the latter.
Among the instances of clichéd expressions employed in the novel (and
offered, as a rule, in one piece) are phrases such as “until the coast was
clear” – used four times, including the eccentric variation “until the coast
was crystal clear” (326) – “as white as a sheet,” “putting two and two
together” and “one thing leads to another.” Some examples of what Rawle
calls women’s magazines’ “breathless platitudes” (Interview by Barry
Lynch) are the following sentences: “Painters have been trying to define
beauty of face and form since the dawn of art” (WW 219), “A mother
who stands by you in crisis is worth a thousand rubies” (250) and “Tel-
evision is an excellent medium of entertainment, and in the long win-
ter months, helps to while away the time most pleasurably” (389–90).11
Poyner credits Rawle for “transform[ing] the linguistic clichés peddled by
[women’s] magazines into something fresh, subtly subversive and often
laugh-out-loud funny.” Keskinen, in turn, traces the lineage of Rawle’s
practice to Gustave Flaubert’s The Dictionary of Received Ideas (1911)
and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977). While those
texts expose the language of “the aspiring petty bourgeois and the ear-
nestly amorous as being similarly clichéd” or at least highly “formulaic,”
Rawle makes the same point about the discourse of the women’s maga-
zines of the time (91). Another critic who has commented on the novel’s
appropriation of clichés is Tania Mary Vivera, who interprets Woman’s
World as a parody of the “peppy wisdom and inane optimism” promoted
by the magazine industry. Her remark is a response to Rawle’s frequent
inclusion of upbeat statements about stereotypically female topics, such
as “Housekeeping is, after all, the most thrilling work in the world” (5)
and “As a woman, you must never look less than your loveliest” (5–6).
The above passages exemplify Rawle’s strategy of constructing state-
ments that retain the unique rhetoric of his source material. Norma’s
frequent use of direct address, Gibbons argues, springs from the pre-
scriptivism of women’s magazines in the 1960s, manifest most vividly in
advice columns and editorials (170). Their zeal to educate is so conspicu-
ous that Rawle has compared them to “an instruction manual for how
to be a woman” (Gibbons 199). Indeed, Norma admits that magazines
were “an invaluable source of advice” during her long journey towards
“the fulsome splendour of womanhood” (WW 415). The suffusion of
Norma’s voice with their language and ideology has prompted Michael
Leong to call her “the collective unconscious of the women’s magazines
personified,” while Banash has labelled her rhetoric as rooted in the
“aggressive discourse of normative femininity” (Personal interview).12
Of all the collages discussed in this study, Woman’s World is the one
which displays its reliance on found text most ostentatiously. The per-
sistence of what Rosalind Krauss calls the “absent origin” of collage –
the discarded context of the source material – is particularly manifest in
the situations when a specific cut-out appears to hijack the passage and
trumps narrative coherence. In an interview by Mark Wigan, Rawle has
admitted that what he “love[s] about collage” is the fact that “both visu-
ally and in terms of the content” words can “retain the essence of their
original context” (qtd. in Gibbons 170).
Everything Must Go! – The Empty Self

and Other Selves in Crisis
Despite its predominantly humorous tone – an effect of the continued
presence of the source material’s amusing absurdities – Woman’s World is
a grimmer novel than it may first appear and one concerned with several
aspects of individual and social crises. I shall begin my analysis by a brief
discussion of the narrator-protagonist’s crisis-ridden experience, which
is marked by increasing disorganization and anxiety. I will then consider
the crisis of a split self as represented by the uneasy coexistence of Norma
and Roy, which will lead to an examination of the crisis of gender as a
stable category, indicated by the novel’s illustration of its constructed
status and by the portrayed acts of transvestism. The most important cri-
sis which Woman’s World represents is that of the self immersed in, and
defined by, consumer practices. A detailed analysis of that notion, with
reference to critical frameworks formulated by Jean Baudrillard, Kenneth
J. Gergen and Erving Goffman, will conclude the section.
The novel covers the span of several days during which the protago-
nist Roy Little experiences events leading up to the disintegration of his
life, which, until that point, has rested on the fragile balance between
his two competing selves. Roy’s inability to confine Norma to the home
leads to her increasingly daring outings, which culminate in a visit to the
flat of Mr Hands. Lured by the promise of a professional photo shoot,
Norma becomes prey to his sexual assault. Their physical confrontation
leaves Hands lying motionlessly on the ground and Norma convinced
that she has killed him. The encounter with the obnoxious man, result-
ing in the double trauma of attempted rape and manslaughter, catalyzes
further emotional turmoil. To use Ellen Hastings Janosik’s terminology,
the ordeal at Mr Hands’s is a “hazard” – an “event that endangers the
adaptation or adjustment of an individual” and has the capacity for pre-
cipitating crisis (4). The ensuing period, until Roy’s presumed death, is
marked by what Janosik calls “disequilibrium” and “disorganization”
(3, 9). The balance between the private/domestic (Norma) and the pro-
fessional/external (Roy) is disrupted, and Norma’s exploits threaten to
shatter Roy’s budding romance with Eve.
The burden of Hands provokes anxiety, whose continued presence
is “a major factor in the disequilibrium of crisis” (Janosik 46). Out of
fear of being arrested, Roy decides to dispose of Norma’s clothes from
a bridge. However, he is so paralyzed with indecision that he cannot
drop the suitcase into the freight train passing underneath. Instead, he
attracts the attention of two patrolling policemen, who, upon discover-
ing the contents of his suitcase, brutally tease Roy and make him put
on Norma’s clothes and smear lipstick over his lips. His embarrassment
is described as boundless: “Roy’s eyes were closed now and he could
not open them. The humiliation had for ever stripped him of all dig-
nity. He felt the tears form under his eyelids and fought to staunch the
flow” (272). The “defilement of his spiritual selfdom” makes him realize
that his transvestism, when acted out outside the home, can only meet
with social ridicule (Vivera). Roy is unable to shake the distress of both
humiliations endured during that one night. Even while kissing Eve the
next day, in otherwise idyllic circumstances, he is seized with terror on
spotting a trace of lipstick on her shoulder. Although he “scrubbed his
mouth thoroughly clean with a soapy flannel” after the police interview
(WW 304), Roy finds himself obsessed with the idea of his lips still being
covered with lipstick forced on his mouth by the policemen. The turmoil
reaches its apogee when, walking home dressed as Norma after discover-
ing that Hands has compromised him in Eve’s eyes, she is so bewildered
and distracted that she fails to notice an oncoming car when crossing the
street. That failure can be read as an illustration of Janosik’s point that
“a person in crisis” is vulnerable to “cognitive errors” in the aftermath
of an “extreme emotional reaction” (8).
At the heart of Woman’s World is the crisis of the split self, whose
culmination Gibbons locates in the scene of Roy’s momentary switch to
Norma’s personality occurring in the bathroom of Eve’s flat on the day
of the tragic denouement (200–1). When Roy sees his reflection in the
mirror,13 he is instantly aware that he is looking at Norma: “ ‘Oh, hello,’
he said with surprise. ‘I thought you were in Scotland’.” Norma, always
the narrator regardless of whose self is in control, clarifies that “it was
not himself he was talking to, it was me” (WW 416). Gibbons offers a
cognitive analysis of that passage, focusing on the linguistic indicators of
Roy and Norma’s split subjectivity (202). Her reference point is Cath-
erine Emmott’s article about the theme of the split self in fiction, which,
according to Emmott, “commonly occurs at times of personal crisis” and
serves to evoke “the sense of fragmentation of identity in postmodern
society” (Emmott 153). In Emmott’s tentative classification of various
literary instances of the split self, Woman’s World would most likely be
included among the narratives whose characters “go as far as to apply
different names to different aspects of their personality, as perceived by
and/or presented to others around them” (165).
The origin of Roy’s condition dates back to the death of his younger
sister, Norma. According to Vivera, Roy’s invention of his female self
is an act of atonement for failing to hold her hand while she was cross-
ing the street and got hit by a car. Although their mother “never actu-
ally said it was his fault,” he has always known that that was how she
has felt about it (WW 265). When ordered by her soon afterward to
hand over her clothes to the Salvation Army, Roy, only 8 years old at the
time, had a strong sense that it was “somehow wrong . . . to remove all
trace of someone’s existence” (266). Having kept the clothes, one day
he put them on and imagined he was looking at Norma in the mirror.
That was the beginning of Roy and Norma’s coexistence, which appears
to have been, for the most part, fairly peaceful and harmonious. In the
earlier parts of the novel, Norma speaks of them as though they were
remarkably alike: once she even refers to herself as “being pretty much
the same as Roy” (192). However, Roy’s relationship with Eve – leading
to their spontaneous engagement and the prospect of a hasty marriage –
is a source of concern for Norma, whose privileged status in Roy’s con-
sciousness comes under threat. “Eve’s a lovely girl, don’t get me wrong,”
she explains, “but the more time Roy spends with her, the less time he
has for me.” Norma resents his plan to spend a Saturday with Eve, as a
result of which she “will be left in limbo” (201). The incompatibility of
their priorities results in what Maziarczyk calls a “clash between these
two aspects of the protagonist’s psyche” (77).
That it is impossible for Roy and Norma to continue co-inhabiting
his consciousness becomes apparent to Roy after the disastrous scene at
Hands’s flat. With a firm resolve to bid Norma a symbolic farewell, he
attempts to drop the suitcase with all of her attributes to an open freight
train carriage. As was mentioned before, at the crucial moment he fails
to do so, seized with “shilly-shallying hesitation” (264). Roy’s indecision
about how to act in that situation as well as the broader theme of a rift
within his self are represented through multimodal means. Page 264 –
one of the most distinctive and commented on pages in the novel – is
divided into two triangular parts by a long and narrow bird’s-eye view
drawing of a railway track and a train. While Leong sees the multimodal
design as an illustration of the “psychological split of the protagonist,”
Vivera interprets it as a reflection of the “crisis of gendered identity” and
of Roy’s “begrudged struggle to chalk out the boundaries of space levied
by the society.” At the bottom of the second triangular column of text,
Norma explains that even to Roy the symbolic significance of his failure
to dispose of the suitcase is evident – “it was about not being able to let
go” of Norma (WW 264).
Nonetheless, Roy perseveres in his resolution never to allow Norma
to return and decides to leave her clothes with Eve. Yet when he finds
himself alone in Eve’s room several days later and opens the door to
her wardrobe, it becomes apparent that he is not immune to Norma’s
hold over him: “He touched the dresses one by one, his hands shak-
ing a little in their clumsiness. It was all too much to take in” (381).
Although at that moment Roy manages to contain the impulse, Norma
is bound to resurface at the next moment of weakness. She does, as has
been noted, return in the final chapter. At first determined to stay and
be “very happy” (418), she recognizes her “overexcite[ment]” as a com-
mon symptom and resolves to make room for Roy: “Au revoir, Norma;
bonjour, Roy, full-time husband” (420). For Roy to marry Eve, Norma
realizes she needs to “be out of the picture once and for all, no hiding at
the back of the wardrobe, no turning up unexpectedly, like an uninvited
guest” (421). Soon after that shift, however, she begins to make plans for
the future and entertains the idea of “starting a scrapbook” composed
out of cut-outs from her vast collection of women’s magazines, which,
after publication, would serve as “a guide to womanhood, dealing with
all the things that matter to the average woman” (429).14 A moment later,
Norma concludes that after all the disappointments with the “outside
world” she is “better off at home” (431). The inner conflict played out in
the final chapter – the “crisis of gendered identity,” in Vivera’s words – is
also conveyed by typographical means. Two of the larger cut-outs with
the capitalized word “women’s” are assembled out of two and three
components, the letter “e” being in each case cast in a different typeface
from the remaining letters (428–29).15 In consequence, the reader’s atten-
tion is drawn to the make-up of the word “women” and its inclusion of
the word “men,” which, in turn, emphasizes the interpenetration of the
male and female.
Maziarczyk notes that “the constructedness of Woman’s World as a
book, signalled via its typography, reflects the constructedness of the
woman’s world it depicts on the verbal level” (79). The notion of the
woman as a construct evokes Judith Butler’s conception of gender iden-
tity as fluid and performative. Indeed, Vivera calls Norma a “product of
gender performativity,” as well as an agent of “gender perpetuation.”
She is a model product insofar as she is eager to be moulded by women’s
magazines – her sole educator about the “splendour of womanhood”
(WW 415). Being a woman, for Norma, is an ongoing task, at which she
dreams of excelling: it is a “challenge to be met with careful preparation
and planning” (6) and a “demanding role” (217). Besides readily assimi-
lating gender norms, Norma is keen to promote them – most notably by
the planned scrapbook “guide to womanhood.” She perpetuates gender
stereotypes also by adopting a judgmental attitude towards those who
fail to live up to the standards set out by the magazines. A receptionist
is criticized for not using any make-up and wearing a “cheap” dress,
while Roy’s boss disappoints Norma by not having “dark crisp hair” or
“piercing blue eyes” (41, 48). Although Norma seems at home with the
feminine self she has diligently constructed and does not see herself as
experiencing a crisis of gender identity, the notion of crisis is inherent in
Butler’s conception of performativity, which destabilizes and undermines
rigid gender categories.
Woman’s World further unsettles fixed gender boundaries by introduc-
ing the theme of transvestism. As Marjorie Garber argues in Vested Inter-
ests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety (1992), the transvestite figure
is a marker of “category crisis” precipitated by the process of “calling
attention to cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances,” as well as by the
commitment to “disrupt, expose, and challenge . . . the very notion of
the ‘original’ and . . . stable identity.” The “category crisis” results from
the “failure of definitional distinction” and the opening up of an imper-
meable borderline, which begins to allow “border crossings” between
the male and the female (16). In The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress
and Social Theory (2015), Joanne Entwistle argues that cross-dressing
undermines gender norms by exposing their “arbitrary nature” and can
thus be seen as aiming for the “diminution or disappearance of gender”
(175, 11). However, she insists on retaining a distinction between the
practices of transvestism and cross-dressing, which Garber treats as syno-
nyms. Citing other scholars, Entwistle notes that transvestites tend to be
motivated by sexual pleasure and the wish to “pass off” as a woman,
whereas cross-dressers rarely seek sexual arousal and often flaunt the
“artificiality of their appearance” (177).
According to Entwistle’s differentiation, Roy appears to fit into the
former category, even though both Keskinen and Vivera make passing
reference to his “cross-dressing” practices (Keskinen 91).16 While Norma
never explicitly mentions sexual pleasure, she frequently gushes over
her delight at looking feminine and wearing beautiful clothes. She cer-
tainly aspires to be regarded by strangers as a woman. What is more,
she expresses contempt for cross-dressing as portrayed in a film Roy and
Eve are watching in the cinema. The policemen dressed as women to
foil shoplifters are described as a “grotesque caricature of womanliness.”
She criticizes their crude representation of femininity (reduced to high-
heeled shoes, red lips and flowery hats) and concludes that “not one of
them would pass as a woman in real life” (344). Passing, the ambition
of transvestism, is her aspiration too.17 Also, in her motives there is no
sense of a social or political transgression, which often underlies acts
of cross-dressing. On the other hand, Norma’s conviction that she is a
woman and her wish to act accordingly characterize neither transvestites
nor cross-dressers. Woman’s World, after all, is clearly not a work of psy-
chological realism but a collage novel, its treatment of a crisis of gender
categories (and other crises) a mixture of the earnest and the tongue-in-
cheek, of the credible and the absurd.
The figure of Norma can also be read as an illustration of a crisis
of what Kenneth J. Gergen calls “a palpable self.” In his article “The
Self: Death by Technology” (1999), the American psychologist examines
“polyvocality, plasticity, repetition, and transience” as symptoms point-
ing to the decline of a belief in “the individual self as an originary source
of moral action” (32). Of the four tendencies, the first two are particu-
larly relevant to Norma. Polyvocality is understood as the self’s suscep-
tibility to many voices, especially that of the media. The result of the
constant bombardment of various stimuli, enabled by the rise of informa-
tion technology, is chaos and cacophony. Norma’s uncritical espousal of
women’s magazines and their gender prescriptions, accompanied by the
absence of any non-textual foundation to her being, exemplifies a poly-
vocal self. The utter dependence of her identity on external sources and
the lack of any immutable core are symptomatic of the plasticity of mod-
ern subjectivity. Gergen also proposes the notion of the “pastiche per-
sonality” to account for the mechanism of “borrowing bits and pieces of
identity” from the available material (Saturated Self 150). The idea of an
appropriated identity creates an obvious analogy with the collage form of
the novel. The correspondence between collage-as-form and collage-as-
content will be examined in the concluding section of this chapter.
The idea of the self as a collage-like construct deprived of any solid
foundation is explored in David J. Burns’s “Self-Construction Through
Consumption Activities” (2006). The consumerist self, he argues, draws
on “material possessions” as its basis and attaches great importance to
the activity of shopping, whose primary role is no longer to secure the
products necessary for regular functioning, or even to find bargains, but
rather to acquire goods that will forge and reforge the consumer’s iden-
tity (151). In Woman’s World, the lack of sufficient means to indulge in
shopping makes Norma settle for its substitute – selecting and compar-
ing products advertised in magazines and displayed in shop windows.
“Like most modern ladies,” she once declares, “I have very strong
ideas about shopping and think the women of this country, particularly
the working-class women, need to be educated in the art of window-
shopping. It doesn’t take a minute and it can be fun for a woman to gaze
longingly at something she will never be able to afford” (61). The second
sentence suggests an ironic critique of the wiles of capitalism and con-
sumerism, but the irony is Rawle’s rather than Norma’s. She creates the
impression of being a natural product of the consumer system and hence
perfectly attuned to its demands.
The consumerist self is consolidated and reinforced by “presentation” –
the activity of displaying “one’s chosen self” to others and to oneself
(Burns 150). Norma satisfies her need for presentation by fantasizing
about a professional photo shoot and by spending hours in the window,
hoping to be noticed by passersby. “Being a woman, I do have a dream,”
she explains, “I would love just once to model a glamorous evening
gown and have it on film to always look back on to prove that I could
look feminine and alluring” (WW 63). The photograph functions here as
tangible evidence of one’s existence (and gender identity) in a consumer
world. The consumerist self, however, also requires the fuel of external
gaze. For that reason, Norma locates the most exposed window in the
house to pose and hope to “provoke a second glance.” There is a specific
impression she wishes to evoke in the viewer – that of “a modern woman
attending to her daily duties.”18 An uncomprehending gaze is unsatisfac-
tory: “Dogs sometimes look up, but they don’t know what they’re look-
ing at” (9). This kind of subjectivity can present itself in alternative ways
and thus be “easily adapted or changed at will”; like the customer in a
supermarket, the individual is free to “choose between a number of dif-
ferent possible selves” (Burns 153). Many characteristics of the consum-
erist self – the emphasis on appearance and clothes, the need to be seen
and the freedom to alternate between available selves – invite an analogy
not only with Norma but with the figure of the transvestite as a whole.
Another conception applicable to Norma is Philip Cushman’s idea of
the empty self, understood as one that “seeks the experience of being
continually filled up” with “food, consumer products, and celebrities.”19
In its pursuit of momentary satisfaction, the self becomes vulnerable
to manipulation by politicians and advertisers alike (599–600). Black
Hawk Hancock and Roberta Garner speak of a “new form of subjectiv-
ity of images and events” – a self constructed “without an inner life,”
“transparent and exterior,” reminiscent of Jean Baudrillard’s notion of
the schizophrenic self (175). In the earlier cited essay “The Ecstasy of
Communication,” Baudrillard defines the “schizo” as a subject “living
in the greatest confusion” and incapable of drawing the “limits of [their]
own being” (153). Norma’s radically uncertain ontological status serves
as a marker of that kind of confusion. Baudrillard’s characterization of
the schizo as “a pure screen” and “a switching center for all the networks
of influence” corresponds to Norma’s radically constructed status – her
absolute dependence on media content (153).
Norma’s habit of using commercial speak – incorporating advertis-
ing slogans and adopting a vacuously enthusiastic style when describing
products – can also be interpreted in the light of Baudrillard’s diagnosis
of the full-scale invasion of advertising coupled with the complete disap-
pearance of public space (149). Woman’s World, after all, abounds in
references to commercial products (such as Lux, Omo and Ovaltine),20
facsimiles of logotypes (including those of Hovis, Maltesers and Mur-
raymints) and images of various items on sale.21 Norma’s narrative is
also frequently punctured by promotional remarks such as “Sugar Puffs
are the tasty breakfast treat made from crisp wheat puffs glistening with
sugar and golden honey. Energising honey to give kids extra go! No need
to add sugar” (319). As noted by Poyner, Norma’s (and Roy’s) lapses
into commercial speak sound “quaint” and are marked by “deliberate
awkwardness.” One example is Norma’s peculiar expansion on the idi-
omatic phrase “to work oneself into a lather” by preceding the noun by
the adjectives “rich” and “creamy.” In consequence, the passage strongly
evokes an advertisement for cosmetics, which is humorously at odds
with the description of a poodle dog (WW 209). Rawle has admitted
that the original phrase “a rich, creamy lather” has been cut out from
“an advertisement for beauty soap” (Interview by Kachka). In an earlier
scene, Roy’s bemusing eulogy to Omo’s “active whitening ingredient that
can actually get your clothes whiter than the day they were bought” is
met with Eve’s sober reaction, “You sound like one of those adverts off
the television” (177).
The infiltration of advertising into everyday language and the resulting
crisis of the private are also comically signalled in Norma’s earlier cited
effusive description of Roy and Eve’s love as “the genuine article” and
“100% pure” – both clusters of words visibly cut from an advertisement
(169). “The real thing” and “one hundred per cent genuine!,” in turn,
are the phrases used by Roy to convince his mother of the authentic-
ity of their feeling (395). That paradoxical insistence on the “genuine”
and “real” in advertisements can be interpreted in the context of Erv-
ing Goffman’s notion of commercial realism – a mechanism of replac-
ing the real by “faithful copies of reality” in the form of “the polished
ideal without defects or flaws.” The imperfections of everyday life are
thus “edit[ed] out,” while the constructed ideal is promoted in the media
and “become[s] the basis of social interaction” (Hancock and Garner
175–76). It is this kind of ideal to which Norma aspires throughout the
novel, “perfect” and “perfectly” being among Norma’s favourite words,
used fifty-one times throughout her narrative.22
Conclusion
The correspondence of the consumer theme and the collage form has
been most persuasively asserted by Banash, who has called collage “one
of the most widespread and perceptive metaphors for the phenomenal
experience of everyday life in consumer culture characterized by overpro-
duction and media” (Collage Culture 16). In an already cited passage, he
compares the process of composing a collage to the wanderings (down
supermarket aisles) of a consumer who speaks “a code of identity by
assembling particular elements.” Despite the collagist’s and the consumer’s
conviction of the uniqueness of their choices, they both, according to
Banash, speak “the universal code of capitalism” (16). His reference to
the consumer “shopping (or sometimes scavenging, stealing, or faking)
new identities” “out of an infinite number of individual fragments” reads
like a statement about Woman’s World – about its construction out of
thousands of minuscule textual chunks and its concern with the themes
of consumer acts, authenticity and identity formation (58).
The form-content correlation in Woman’s World is so strong that
Maziarczyk suggests it is the perfect literary embodiment of the McLu-
hanian principle, according to which the medium is the message (82). Its
“typographic exuberance,” fragmentation and other multimodal eccen-
tricities serve the purpose of reflecting the “singularity” and the “pro-
jected/constructed status” of the novel’s narrator (76–77, 82). Wurth
also points out the “evident, and almost inevitable, interaction between
the identity of Norma/Roy and the materiality of the text,” which are
equally “patched” (“Posthumanities” 135). Keskinen, in turn, observes
the close correspondence between the novel’s illustration of the “sarto-
rial and cosmetic formation of gender and identity” and its collage-like
composition (98).
The formal crisis at the heart of collage, stemming from the incompat-
ibility of assembled fragments, reinforces in Woman’s World the repre-
sentation of the many thematic crises, ranging from an account of the
protagonist’s ordeal to a comic denunciation of the social effects of con-
sumerism. “The cutting edge of critique,” however, is accompanied in
collage by a “conservative desire of nostalgia” (Banash, Collage Culture
31–32). In Rawle’s text, the nostalgic impulse is arguably more manifest
than in any other twenty-first-century literary collage. The setting of Roy/
Norma’s story in the 1960s, the decade of the author’s childhood, as
well as the choice of a print book as a medium (at the time of the digital
turn)23 can be viewed as a nostalgic gesture, parallelled by the collagist’s
desire to assemble the fragments that they have just cut into pieces.
Notes
1. His individual works were acquired by, among others, Roger Ebert, Melvyn
Bragg, Will Self and Peter Gabriel (Rawle, Personal interview).
2. The idea of the series was to extract humour from the deletion of a single con-
sonant in an insipid sentence – such as “Every time the doorbell rang, the dog
started barking” – which transforms it into its surreal counterpart – “Every
time the doorbell rang, the dog started baking” (emphasis added). The cap-
tion was always accompanied by an illustration (and, occasionally, a speech
balloon); in this case, of a dog wearing an apron and holding a tray of tarts.
3. Rawle’s corpus was composed of weeklies such as Woman, Woman’s Own,
Woman’s Realm, Woman’s Journal, Wife and House Beautiful (Gibbons 169).
4. Alison Gibbons offers a detailed discussion of the ambiguous ending of the
novel (92–93).
5. On the other end of the spectrum are very long textual chunks amounting
to entire paragraphs of magazine articles or even entire columns – such as
the problem page complaint by a reader concerned with couples kissing una-
shamedly in the front rows of the cinema on page 337.
6. That cut-out also exemplifies Rawle’s method of acquiring the necessary
number of Christian names for his novel. When Rawle realized that he
would not be able to find the required several hundred instances of any com-
mon first name in his collection of women’s magazines, he decided to use
names that could be cut out from popular words. Hence he settled for “Roy”
(acquired from the numerous references to the Royal Family), “Eve” (taken
from “Every” and words beginning with “Every –”) and “Norma” (out of
“normal”) (Rawle, Personal interview). As can be noticed, the first cut-out
with “Roy” on page 142 is cut along the right-hand edge of the “y” – at an
angle which obliterates the succeeding “– al.”
7. As proved by Gibbons’s reading experiment, most of those questioned found
the “forty” cut-out “undeniably eye-catching” and admitted to wondering
about its prominence (186).
8. Rawle also attracts the reader’s attention to certain, otherwise completely
transparent, conventions of book design. Rather than introduce automatic
pagination, he favours page numbers individually collated from magazine
cut-outs. In an interview by Kachka, he declares that it was “fun trying
to find a printed number for every page of the book” and informs that “a
bit of tinkering was often required.” However, many of his choices go far
beyond the “tinkering” involved in assembling “157” out of “15” and “7”
but exhibit the wish to poke fun at traditional pagination, in a manner
reminiscent of Laurence Sterne’s metaliterary gestures in Tristram Shandy.
Among the quirkiest page numbers in Woman’s World are “unlucky thir-
teen?,” “only 39?,” “No. 46,” “one ‘Four-Two’,” “Over 150” (for 151),
“265,” “28/3rd” and “FOUR0two.”
9. Maziarczyk also notes that every page in Woman’s World is – in the words
of Roland Barthes – “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writ-
ings, none of them original, blend and clash” and that Rawle’s function,
like that of the Barthesian scriptor, is “to mix writings, to counter the ones
with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them” (Barthes,
“The Death” 146). Wurth makes a similar assertion about the novel’s radical
intertextuality and calls it a “prosthetic” work which operates as a “verbal-
visual conjunction defined by [its] connections and interactions with other
texts” (“Posthumanities” 126).
10. The reader may notice that the entire passage is assembled from longer frag-
ments of the same source text, which suggests it could be an unmodified
authentic advertisement of the popular soft drink.
11. Such platitudes and banal observations can also be found in Brainard’s ear-
lier mentioned The Friendly Way, which contains such statements as “I have
many memories of the old pump – some good, and some bad – but that is
the way of life” and “I wish I had a home on the ocean, where I could watch
the ocean wash the beach” (Brainard 398, 401).
12. The contemporary women’s magazines’ promotion of capitalism, patriarchy
and the ideology of homebound femininity was critiqued, most famously,
in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Among the more recent
accounts of their gender politics are Ellen McCracken’s Decoding Women’s
Magazines (1993) and Anna Gough-Yates’s Understanding Women’s Maga-
zines (2003).
13. Vivera notes that the recurrent mirror motif in the novel “reflect[s] the self-
obsessiveness” and “the perturbing duality of the protagonist.”
14. Maziarczyk reads that passage as a metafictional hint that Woman’s World
might be the very “scrapbook” Norma has conceived at that moment (78–79).
15. Keskinen comments on the fact that the word “woman” appears in the
novel in diverse fonts and sizes, often in bold or ornamental script, which
he interprets as an indication of “the inner variability of a seemingly uni-
form category, or, reversely, the inevitable categorization of variation into
given possibilities, be they typefaces or gender roles” (91). Vivera, like-
wise, sees that device as a suggestion of the “multifarious character of a
woman.”
16. Keskinen likens Roy to Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (91).
17. Leong suggests the term “linguistic transvestism” to account for the novel’s
“creative employment of found material to ‘dress up’ the book in new attire.”
18. Elsewhere, Norma tries to visualize how she would come across to some-
body passing by the window at that very moment. She is pleased to think
that they “would probably catch sight of [her] legs, perfectly framed in the
window.” She is hoping her position is such as “to create the image of a styl-
ish young woman, as seen from the waist down, like an advert for a skirt in
a mail order catalogue” (30–31).
19. Norma is, in fact, a great admirer of popular actresses such as Joan Fontaine
and Sylvia Syms. She even adopts the former celebrity’s surname, introduc-
ing herself during a job interview as “Miss Norma Fontaine” (42).
20. Wurth calls Norma “a patch-worked version” of Patrick Bateman – the anti-
hero of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) – owing to “her fascination
with brands, stylistic prescriptions, and cosmetics” (“Posthumanities”123).
21. Gibbons observes that Rawle’s use of the original typography of such pro-
motional content reinforces the “readers’ imaginative visualisations and the
strength of their associations with brands and product types” (190–91).
22. The opening sentence of the novel is Norma’s question, “What is your idea
of a perfect home?” (1, emphasis added). Later, she uses the adjective “per-
fect” mostly in reference to clothes, women and her own outlook.
23. An illuminating analysis of Woman’s World – in conjunction with Ste-
ven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007) – as a work which uses the “ ‘old’
medium of paper” to address “ ‘new’ posthuman subjectivities” is offered
in Wurth’s “Posthumanities and Post-Textualities: Reading The Raw Shark
Texts and Woman’s World” (120).
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” Translated by John John-
ston. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster.
Bay Press, 1983, pp. 145–54.
Bigge, Ryan. “Using Disconnection to Invent Meaning.” The Star, 16 Mar. 2008,
www.thestar.com/news/2008/03/16/using_disconnection_to_invent_meaning.
html. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019.
Brainard, Joe. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. Edited by Ron Padgett.
Library of America, 2012.
Burns, David J. “Self-Construction Through Consumption Activities: An Anal-
ysis and Review of Alternatives.” The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis,
edited by Paul C. Vitz and Susan M. Felch. ISI Books, 2006, pp. 149–67.
Cushman, Philip. “Why the Self Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psy-
chology.” American Psychologist, vol. 45, no. 5, 1990, pp. 599–611.
Emmott, Catherine. “ ‘Split Selves’ in Fiction and in Medical ‘Life Stories’.” Cog-
nitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, edited by Elena
Semino and Jonathan Culpeper. John Benjamins, pp. 153–81.
Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Social Theory. Pol-
ity, 2000.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. Psychol-
ogy Press, 1992.
Gerber, Anna, and Teal Triggs. “Acrobat Reader.” Print, vol. 60, no. 4, 2006,
pp. 62–67.
Gergen, Kenneth J. The Saturated Self. Basic Books, 1991.
———. “The Self: Death by Technology.” Hedgehog Review, vol. 1, 1999, pp. 25–33.
Gibbons, Alison. Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. Rout-
ledge, 2012.
Hancock, Black Hawk, and Roberta Garner. “Erving Goffman: Theorizing the
Self in the Age of Advanced Consumer Capitalism.” Journal for the Theory of
Social Behaviour, vol. 45, no. 2, 2015, pp. 163–87.
Bartlett, 2014.
Keskinen, Mikko. “Facsimile: The Makings of the Similar in Graham Rawle’s Collage
Novel Woman’s World.” Image and Narrative, vol. 17, no. 1, 2016, pp. 86–100.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live by, U of Chicago P, 1980.
Leong, Michael. “ ‘Writing with Scissors’: Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World.”
Hyperallergic, 6 May 2012, https://hyperallergic.com/51070/graham-rawle-
womans-world/. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019.
Phillips, Tom. “Powder and Paste.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media,
15 Oct. 2005, www.theguardian.com/books/2005/oct/15/featuresreviews.
guardianreview15. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019.
Poynor, Rick. “Paste-Up Ladies.” Eye Magazine, 31 Oct. 2005, www.eyemaga
zine.com/opinion/article/paste-up-ladies-web-only. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019.
Rawle, Graham. Interview by Barry Lynch. The Georgia Straight, 4 Feb. 2009,
www.straight.com/article-199803/womans-world-qa-author-graham-rawle.
Accessed 26 Jan. 2019.
———. Interview by Boris Kachka. New York Magazine, 24 Mar. 2008, http://
nymag.com/arts/process/45309/. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019.
———. Personal interview. London. 18 Aug. 2017.
———. Woman’s World. Atlantic Books, 2005.
Robinson, Edward S. Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from William S. Bur-
roughs to the Present. Rodopi, 2011.
Vivera, Tania Mary. “Cut-Up Voices in Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World.” The
IUP Journal of English Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2015, pp. 31–36.
Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg. Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature
Through Cinema and Cyberspace. Fordham UP, 2012.
———. “Posthumanities and Post-Textualities: Reading The Raw Shark Texts and
Woman’s World.” Comparative Literature, vol. 63, no. 2, 2011, pp. 119–41.
7 Diaries of Bad Years
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and
Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation
This chapter will address the relationship between collage and personal
crisis in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009) and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Spec-
ulation (2014).1 The two works will be examined alongside one another
owing to many formal and thematic parallels between them – from their
reliance on short paragraphs and appropriation to their concern with
depression and thwarted love. Bluets and Dept. of Speculation shall be
discussed in chronological order; each part will outline the context of
the book’s publication and critical reception, investigate its indebted-
ness to the poetics of collage and analyze the work’s representation of
personal crisis.
Bluets is a hybrid work composed of 240 numbered meditations (or
“propositions,” as Nelson refers to them in interviews) on loss, heart-
break, depression and the colour blue. The title – the French word for
cornflowers – pays tribute to the painting Les Bluets (1973) by the Amer-
ican abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell. On account of its fragmentari-
ness and preoccupation with colour, Nelson’s book has been compared
by reviewers with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
and Remarks on Colour (Als, Dicinoski 6, Francis). In an interview,
Nelson admitted to Wittgenstein’s influence on Bluets and indicated Sei
Shōnagon’s tenth-century classic The Pillow Book, Peter Handke’s Sor-
row Beyond Dreams (1972), as well as Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Dis-
course (1977) and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), as other
texts which she kept rereading while working on her book (Nelson,
“Fragment”). The bulk of Bluets was written between 2003 and 2006,
when Nelson struggled with depression in the aftermath of heartbreak
and looked after a quadriplegic friend (Francis). Published in the United
States – to great acclaim – in 2009, Bluets attracted more attention2 fol-
lowing the success of Nelson’s next work The Argonauts (2015), which
won the National Books Critics Circle award for criticism.
There is no critical consensus over the generic classification of the
book, but the most commonly attributed category has been that of the
memoir (Dicinoski 6, Graham, O’Rourke 17). Acknowledging Nelson’s
use of autobiographical content, Jocelyn Parr argues that Bluets has been
written “against the traditional autobiography,” the generic domain of
a “white, straight male.” Instead, she situates it alongside Chris Kraus’s
I Love Dick (1997) and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?
(2010) – works which eschew autobiography’s “prescriptive presenta-
tion of selfhood” and infuse it with a dose of literary criticism. Sev-
eral critics have stressed the book’s fusion of numerous categories.
Michelle Dicinoski cites the term “cross-genre” as applicable to both
Bluets and The Argonauts, given their employment of “memoir, essay,
philosophy and cultural theory” (6). She also examines the former as a
typical example of the lyric essay – a genre whose structure and affin-
ity with collage are discussed in the previous chapter. Among other
critical labels that have been attributed to Bluets are creative nonfic-
tion (Singer and Walker 2), the paraliterary3 (Tsitsovits) and the prose
poem (Francis).
There has been much less disagreement about classifying Jenny Offill’s
Dept. of Speculation, which tends to be read as her second novel, released
fifteen years after her celebrated debut Last Things (1999). The book was
highly acclaimed and made the shortlists of the Folio Prize and the PEN/
Faulkner Award. Its narrator is – to a considerable degree – an alter ego
of the author: a married woman in her 30s, with a child, who works as
a creative writing instructor in a Brooklyn College and struggles with
writer’s block. Despite the clear autobiographical parallels, the narrator
(who in the middle of the novel becomes merely a focalizer referred to as
“the wife”) remains nameless like other major characters (“the husband”
and “the daughter”). For the first half, Dept. of Speculation portrays a
reasonably happy couple facing various problems (from sleep depriva-
tion to a plague of lice in their apartment). Near the middle, it turns
into an account of a severe marriage crisis, occasioned by the husband’s
infidelity. The marriage is on the verge of collapse, but by the end that
danger seems to have been averted. In the New York Review of Books,
Elaine Blair calls the book an unusual adultery novel, since it adopts the
rare perspective of the “wronged” wife, rather than the betrayed hus-
band or the “adulterous partner.”4
However, the word “unusual” is even more suited to describing the
form of Dept. of Speculation. This short novel is composed of forty-
six chapters and around eight hundred separated one-paragraph (often
one-sentence) fragments. The narrative of the marriage crisis (with all
its accompanying strands restricted to the narrative present) is conveyed
through about a third of the paragraphs. The remaining majority offer
various insights into the narrator’s memory and intellect, her state of
mind, erudite associations and her current reading. On account of the
thematic and formal parallels between Dept. of Speculation and Nelson’s
book, Offill has been asked about its influence. She admitted to having
read Bluets when she was “halfway through” her novel and “freak[ing]
Diaries of Bad Years 185
out that maybe [Nelson] had already done what [she] was trying to do.”
She also called it a “great book, jagged and dark and expansive” (Offill,
“Subterranean Lives”).
Collage Structure
If, as Lance Olsen proposes in “Notes Toward the Musicality of Crea-
tive Disjunction,” literary collage can be conceived of as a “narratologi-
cal continuum” (188), then Bluets and Dept. of Speculation need to be
placed further from the pole of radical appropriation, fragmentariness
and parataxis than Markson’s quartet, perhaps further also than Real-
ity Hunger. What situates Nelson’s and Offill’s works nearer the pole
of non-collage is their greater sense of cohesion, achieved by the degree
of thematic and narrative unity, as well as their strategy of embedding
appropriated content. Nonetheless, as I will argue, both Bluets and Dept.
of Speculation are sufficiently dependent on quotation, the fragment and
juxtaposition to be regarded as texts from within the poetics of collage.
The respective sections on the collage-like aspects of the works by Nelson
and Offill will examine the types and characteristics of their minuscule
components, their use of cited material and how the different snippets
have been arranged.
Bluets
The basic unit of Nelson’s book is a numbered paragraph, whose length
varies from a short sentence (“46. Disavowal, says the silence”) to an
almost two-page-long block of text (205).5 There are on average two or
three such paragraphs on every page, which makes them similar in length
to the earlier mentioned Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein – a
text that Bluets “structurally echoes” and “leans against” (Dicinoski 6).
According to Jocelyn Parr, Nelson follows Wittgenstein’s strategy of
promising order through numbering the passages while “subvert[ing]
that order” by contradicting the arguments that have just been formu-
lated. The effect of this method, for Wittgenstein and Nelson alike, is
“destabilizing but also intimate,” as it creates the sense that the reader is
invited to think aloud together with the author (Parr).
As regards the content of the passages, or “propositions,” an apter
point of reference and a strong influence is the Marksonian quartet. Gina
Myers points out that both Markson and Nelson create a “collection of
quotes and facts” – a wealth of erudite content addressed to a bookish
reader. In both cases, the recurrence of a certain kind of material devel-
ops into a theme – whereas Markson is particularly interested in the lives
and reputations of fellow artists, old age, mortality and anti-Semitism,
Nelson shows preference for what she calls the “major categories” of
themes in Bluets: “love, language, sex, divinity, alcohol, pain, death, and
problems of veracity/perception” (“Fragment”). Also, in Nelson’s book,
quotations and other cultural references are not as prominent as in the
quartet, which consists primarily of them. Bluets places the emphasis
on the narrator – identifiable with Nelson herself – and her meditations
and experiences regarding loss, heartbreak and the colour blue. External
material is appropriated only when it supports, or enters into a dialogue,
with the narrator’s own remarks.
The variety of sources employed by Nelson is as wide as in Reader’s
Block and ranges from the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood”
and the philosophical tracts by Goethe, Wittgenstein and Simone Weil
to the lyrics of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. As well as Markson,
Nelson tends to acknowledge the origin of the cited fragments. Some-
times she does so in a typically essayistic manner, by providing an aca-
demic lead-in (complete with the name of the author and the context in
which the remark was made) and following it with a commentary on the
quotation’s significance. Usually, the embedding is rather scarce, and the
quote’s relation to the rest of the text is left for the reader to determine,
as is the case with the paragraph below:
32. When I say “hope,” I don’t mean hope for anything in particular.
I guess I just mean thinking that it’s worth it to keep one’s eyes open.
“What are all those/fuzzy-looking things out there?/Trees? Well, I’m
tired/of them”: the last words of William Carlos Williams’s English
grandmother.
The most collage-like employment of cited matter in Bluets occurs when

Nelson creates a paragraph out of a single bare quotation followed only
by the name of its author in parentheses:
58. “Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if
lovers could see what they were doing” (Leonardo da Vinci).
77. “Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?”
(Thoreau).
In both instances the ready-made is placed in between unappropriated

passages, and its function, as is often the case in visual collages, is con-
frontational. The bare quotation serves here as an intrusion of an incon-
gruous voice. Da Vinci’s remark on the “ugliness” of love appears in the
context of the narrator’s discussion of lust and female sexuality – topics
which she clearly does not regard as “ugly.” The feeble consolation of
Thoreau’s passage, in turn, is sandwiched between evocations of the nar-
rator’s prolonged struggle with depression.
Several times Nelson indicates an incorporated passage only by enclos-
ing it in quotation marks or by italicizing it, as is the case with the fol-
lowing paragraph:
83. I tried to go with the theme: I bought a yellow journal. On its
cover sheet I wrote a slogan of penetration: Do not tell lies and do not
do what you hate, for all things are manifest in the sight of heaven.
A Google search of the italicized part reveals it as coming from The Gos-
pel of Thomas, but the attribution is withheld by Nelson. As a general
rule, from which the passage above is an exception, Nelson uses italics
when she quotes herself or her friends and quotation marks when the
source is a published text.
Besides the use of heterogeneous and appropriated material, another
feature of collage poetics which is present in Bluets is the reliance on the
fragment. The composition of the book out of short, numbered para-
graphs set apart from each other by a space evokes the sense of a list,
catalogue or inventory rather than of a tightly woven cohesive whole.
Incorporating brief passages cut from other sources further accentuates
the fragmentary feel of the text. In the following entry, Nelson includes
a disconnected fragment of an exchange between two actors from Andy
Warhol’s erotic film from 1969:
175. Viva to Louis Waldon, the other fucker in Blue Movie:

“We don’t want to see your ugly cock and balls. . . . It should be
hidden.”
Louis: “You can’t see it.”
Viva: “Well, it should be hidden.”
Another common strategy of collage literature – the use of unfinished or

incomplete sentences – is not pursued by Nelson. The closest she comes
to highlighting incompletion is in one-sentence paragraphs whose mean-
ings are partial and predicated on previous paragraphs, even though their
separate number suggests a degree of self-sufficiency:
89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
115. In which case seeking itself is a spiritual error.
237. In any case, I am no longer counting the days.
The opening phrases – “as if,” “in which case” and “in any case” – are clear
indications that the entries which they begin are not self-contained entities
and need to be read in relation to earlier passages. The radical brevity of
those entries – surrounded as each numbered passage in Bluets by a large
space both above and below – enhances the visual dispersion of the text.
Nelson has acknowledged her book’s debt to the poetics of fragmenta-
tion; in one interview she even proposes her own taxonomy of fragment
varieties, which are all “put . . . into play” in Bluets. Out of the many
categories (exemplified by works of Sappho, Edgar Degas, Sigmund Freud
and T.S. Eliot), the most important ones to her work are, in Nelson’s own
estimation, “the fragment as fetish, as catastrophe, as leftover, as sample
or citation [and] as memory” (“Fragment”). Among the categories con-
sidered by Nelson is also the “contemporary fragment,” understood as
a snippet whose format is reminiscent of that of social media messages
(“Fragment”). Although Nelson concedes that there are “possible simi-
larities” between Bluets and “Tumblr et al,” she stresses that the actual
models for her poetics – such as Wittgenstein and Barthes – lived long
before the advent of the Internet (Nelson, “Sort” 93–94).
Nelson weaves her fragments together more meticulously than any of
the authors considered so far, although collage-like juxtaposition remains
an important compositional principle for Bluets. The connections
between successive paragraphs rest on their logical or thematic continu-
ity accentuated by the use of discourse markers, such as “and so” (which
opens the second paragraph of the book) and “however.” As many as
eleven numbered paragraphs begin with “but,” which situates them in
opposition to the ideas presented in the preceding paragraph. Nelson
admits that “some of the propositions are very much in dialogue with
the ones that have come before it, acting as rebuffs, or conclusions, or
swerves” (“Fragment”). Another way of ensuring a degree of continuity
is placing the passages in a specific order. Nelson has complained about
her frustrating struggle with the “almost endless” ways of rearranging
the components of both Bluets and The Argonauts (Interview by Quinn).
A meta-commentary on the arduous editing process is even included in a
passage of Bluets, where the narrator remarks that her “propositions . . .
have been shuffled around countless times” and “have been made to
appear, at long last, running forward as one river” (184). Gavin Francis
notes that the arrangement, however complex, is not governed by chro-
nology or theme but rather by “a poetic, bittersweet logic.”
The word used by Marie O’Rourke and Michelle Dicinoski to describe
Nelson’s strategy of interweaving consecutive paragraphs is “associa-
tive” (O’Rourke 17, Dicinoski 7). One of many blocks of text in Bluets
which exemplify this method is the sequence of propositions from 196 to
198. The first of them opens with an address to Nelson’s ex-lover and is
followed by a reflection on making one’s intimate experiences public. The
sense that such an act might be “foolish” is supported by the remarks of
other artists, Goethe and Sei Shōnagon, who have expressed regret about
their literary confessions. Then Nelson returns to the lover and ponders
the possibility of a future reunion devoid of any trace of the present pain.
Again, a literary reference is invoked – this time a passage from Wil-
liam Carlos Williams’s poem “The Descent.” Williams’s meditation on
memory triggers a remark by Leonard Cohen about his failure to remem-
ber the details of the autobiographical experience which inspired one of
his songs. Sequences like this appear to be governed by the associative
properties of the mind, which accounts for the mixture of a qualified
thematic unity and a tendency to digress. O’Rourke argues that the com-
position of Bluets imitates the “structure of neural pathways” and illus-
trates “the power of involuntary memories” (17, 20).
Besides the many meticulously constructed connections between
consecutive passages, Bluets contains many blocks which resist a clear
pattern of logical progression. In an interview by Jess Cotton, Nelson
explains that readers of the book are “forced to leap from thing to thing”
and “make the bridge” between adjacent fragments. She adds that her
experience of being a poet makes her “invested in what juxtaposition is
as a tool.” The importance of juxtaposition to Bluets is also asserted by
Dicinoski, who observes that it is a common structural principle of the
lyric essay, alongside what she calls a “sidewinding poetic logic” (2).
As I argued in the earlier chapters, the two most collage-like rhetorical
relations based on juxtaposition are Joint and Confrontation. Below is
an example of the former type, a paratactic and interchangeable arrange-
ment of consecutive components:
207. I can remember a time when I took Henry James’s advice – “Try
to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” – deeply to heart.
I think I was then imagining that the net effect of becoming one of
those people would always be one of accretion. Whereas if you truly
become someone on whom nothing is lost, then loss will not be lost
upon you, either.
208. Cornell’s diary entry for February 28, 1947: “Resolve this day
as before to transcend in my work the overwhelming sense of sadness
that has been so binding and wasteful in past.”
209. Duras did not think of alcohol as a false god, but rather as a
kind of placeholder, a squatter in the space made by God’s absence.
“Alcohol doesn’t console,” she wrote. “All it replaces is the lack of
God.” It does not necessarily follow, however, that if and when a
substance vacates the spot (renunciation), God rushes in to fill it.
For some, the emptiness itself is God; for others, the space must stay
empty. “Lots of space, nothing holy”: one Zen master’s definition of
enlightenment (Bodhidharma).
Although a thematic link – the notions of loss and absence as theorized

by, in most cases, artists – between propositions 207–9 can easily be
traced, there is a degree of arbitrariness to the order in which they have
been placed. In other words, there is little sense of a logical progression,
but rather a sense of – to use Nelson’s word – accretion.
Confrontation, understood as a juxtaposition of antithetical state-
ments, can be exemplified across propositions 217–21. The sequence
begins with a series of clichés that the narrator’s quadriplegic friend has
heard from friends and acquaintances: “we’re only given as much as the
heart can endure,” “what does not kill you makes you stronger,” “our
sorrows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn” and “there
must be a reason for it.” This “religious or quasi-religious” advice, which
the friend sees as “another form of violence” (217), is confronted by
Nelson with the narrator’s own assessment: “As her witness, I can testify
to no reason, no lesson” (218). Nelson further accentuates the disparity
between the two positions by asking the reader first to “imagine someone
saying, ‘Our fundamental situation is joyful’,” then to imagine “believ-
ing” it or “feeling, even if for a moment, that it were true” (220–21,
emphasis original). The benevolent vision of a purposeful world, epito-
mized by a quotation (unacknowledged) from the self-help book When
Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, is shown as anti-
thetical to the non-religious world view represented by the narrator, her
disabled friend and – Nelson assumes – the reader of Bluets.
The idea of clashing conflicting statements or quoting sources in order
to contradict or take issue with them is a common strategy in the book.
Nelson refers to this method of incorporating other texts into her work
as “leaning against” rather than “leaning on” them (“Sort” 123). The
preposition “against” implies that Nelson does not wish to blend other
voices with her own and obscure their distinctness, which would result in
the emergence of a montage or mosaic rather than a collage. O’Rourke
argues that Bluets abounds in contradictions and dualities which are made
to coexist on its pages: “sight and blindness; dark and light; pleasure and
pain; remembering and forgetting” (19). The overall effect is a collage-as-
form – fragmentary, heterogeneous, appropriative, paratactic – but also a
collage of ideas and sentiments.
Dept. of Speculation
Like Bluets, Offill’s novel is a slender volume (of just under 180 pages)
composed of short, mostly one-paragraph units, whose number exceeds
eight hundred. Many of them consist of a single sentence; the shortest
are composed of a single word (“Loneliness?” [18]; “Nothing” [37]).
The small chunks of text surrounded by a lot of blank space on the page
grant the book a fragmentary feel, which has been noted by reviewers
referring to Dept. of Speculation as “fragmented,” “fractured” (Beth
Jones) and “shattered” (John Self). Offill’s style is highly economical – it
relies on ellipsis and short sentences. She favours sparing descriptions
and pithy meditations. When a narrative progression is suggested, Offill
prefers to show rather than tell, sometimes resorting to haiku-like conci-
sion. For instance, in order to suggest a gradual recovery after the mari-
tal crisis, the narrator offers the following self-contained passage: “The
leaves are nearly gone now. The daughter is pressing them into a book.
The husband is outside chopping wood” (174). Offill provides the reader
with momentary glimpses, or snapshots, leaving out the days or weeks
in between, which enables her to relate the narrative developments of six
or seven years in twenty-five thousand words. In an interview, she has
admitted that her ambition in Dept. of Speculation was to renounce a
linear plot in favour of “something stranger, something that captured the
quicksilver of thought and was radically distilled in form” (Offill, “Emo-
tional Recalibrations”).
The most distinct building blocks of Offill’s novel which are not essen-
tial to narrative progression are quotations, anecdotes and curiosities.
The book contains a high number of acknowledged quotations and prov-
erbs (which function as self-contained paragraphs) – mostly by writers
and philosophers – from Hesiod and Ovid to John Keats and T.S. Eliot.
Many of them are preceded by the “What X said:” formula, as in the fol-
lowing microscopic entries:
What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form

of prayer.
(54)
What Wittgenstein said: What you say, you say in a body; you can
say nothing outside of this body.
(78)
What John Berryman said: Goodbye, sir, & fare well. You’re in the clear.
(113)
Moreover, there are at least as many quotations whose source is not pro-
vided. Some of them are singled out as quotes by the use of italics (“Here
lies one whose name was writ in water,6 I thought pleasingly” [18]),
while others take the form of submerged intertextual references, as exem-
plified by the sentence “His father was from another country so maybe
that was how they did things over there” (19), which alludes to an oft-
cited maxim from L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) – “The past is
a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The length of appro-
priated passages varies from a single clause to a 133-word-long excerpt
from the epilogue to Carl Sagan’s book Billions & Billions (1997).
An example of the most collage-like use of appropriation is a page-long
paragraph (one of the longest in the novel) – an amalgam of fragments of
various songs and literary texts – which ends with the following passage:
A my name is Alice and I want to play the game of looooove.

Lightning bugs, falling stars, sea horses, goldfish, gerbils eat their
young, please, no peanut butter, parental signature required, #1
Mom, show-and-tell, truth or dare, hide-and-seek, red light, green
light, please put your own mask on before assisting, ashes, ashes, we
all fall down, how to keep the home fires burning, date night, family
night, night-night, May came home with a smooth round stone as
small as the world and as big as alone. Stop, Drop, Roll. Salutations,
Wilbur’s heart brimmed with happiness. Paper valentines, rubber
cement, please be mine, chicken 100 ways, the sky is falling. Monop-
oly, Monopoly, Monopoly, you be the thimble, Mama, I’ll be the car.
(72–73, italics original)
The borrowed passages are from the lyrics of the Osmonds’ song “My
Name Is Alice,” an airplane security announcement, the nursery rhyme
“Ring Around the Rosie,” e.e. cummings’s poem “maggie and milly and
molly and may,” E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and the children’s folk tale
“Henny Penny.” The manner of juxtaposing the passages is reminiscent
of the closing lines of The Waste Land and of William S. Burroughs’s cut-
ups in The Ticket That Exploded. The intertextual parallels with Eliot
are further reinforced by the reference to “falling,” the use of a nurs-
ery rhyme and the use of repetition (“Monopoly, Monopoly, Monopoly”
possibly echoing “Shantih shantih shantih”).
There are also numerous passages which convey anecdotal refer-
ences to a variety of writers, religious leaders and thinkers from Thales
to Vladimir Nabokov. One of the passages focuses on Anaxagoras,
an Athenian philosopher who believed that everything is composed of
small particles designed by eternal intelligence. Although the particle
claim is not mentioned, the reference itself may be interpreted as a sub-
tle self-reflexive comment on the novel’s own fragmentariness. Many
snippets are devoted to scientific trivia concerning psychology (mostly
coming from divorce self-help literature) and astronomy (inspired by
the narrator-protagonist’s experience of ghostwriting a book by a rich
would-be astronomer). Other standard components of Dept. of Specula-
tion are lists and question-and-answer sequences, often preceded by an
organizing heading, such as “Personal Questionnaire,” “Three things no
one has ever said to me” and “Three questions from my daughter” (DS
43–44, 68, 74). In a section headed “Student Evaluations,” Offill appears
to include – like B.S. Johnson in Albert Angelo (1963) – pieces of original
feedback on her teaching:
She is a good teacher but VERY anecdotal.

No one would call her organized.
She seems to care about her students.
She acts as if writing has no rules.
(45, italics original)
The first, second and fourth statements could be interpreted as meta-

fictional, since they may correspond with some readers’ impressions of
Offill’s highly digressive, if not anarchic, style. Other blocks organized
by the List relation enumerate such incidental elements as the sounds
that NASA recorded for the aliens and the narrator’s “really American”
slogan ideas for fortune cookies (83–84, 52).
Unlike Markson, Offill does not use refrains and very rarely employs the
same passage twice. If certain lines are repeated (such as “Why would you
ruin my best thing?” [59, 102]) or reappear in a modified form (“I CAN
HAS CHEEZBURGER?” [sic, 69] and “I CAN HAS BOYFRIEND?”
[111]), their reoccurrence is not aleatory – as is usually the case in the
quartet – but tied to a specific narrative situation, in the light of which
it gains a new significance. The words “Why would you ruin my best
thing?,” for instance, are quoted first as an expression of the narrator’s
daughter’s annoyance at having her favourite blanket shrunk in a laundro-
mat and the second time as a manifestation of the narrator’s own resent-
ment towards her husband over having an affair with another woman.
Although the arrangement of the eight hundred separate passages that
constitute the novel may at times seem arbitrary, Offill has admitted to
putting much effort into the process of organizing the fragments. Her
method consisted in writing the minuscule passages on index cards fol-
lowed by “shuffl[ing] and reshuffl[ing]” them. Although she feared that
such an arrangement would “make no sense to anyone” except her, she
was encouraged by the advantages of this strategy, which involve the
possibility to “play with all sorts of odd and surprising juxtapositions”
(Offill, “Emotional Recalibrations”).
One of many such juxtapositions occurs at the end of chapter 24, which
gives an account of a scuffle between the narrator and her husband. The
wife’s demands that he admit what kind of video he has recently sent his
lover culminate in his anticlimactic confession: “Of guinea pigs eating a
watermelon.” Two brief snippets follow that statement: “What Kant said:
What causes laughter is the sudden transformation of a tense expectation
into nothing” and “What the Girl said: Hey, I really like you” (105). Offill
places alongside one another a transcript of marital discord, a quotation from
Critique of Judgement (1790) and the imagined words of the husband’s lover.
Other benefits of the fragmentary, paratactic method are, in Offill’s
own words, the opportunities to “capture how emotion moves through
a person” and to combine “quiet, self-contained moments” with those
“when the world rushes in again” (“Emotional Recalibrations”). An
intrusion into the private and homely by the exterior can be exemplified
by the following clash of an intimate scene of family idyll with a proverb
portending an infestation of the narrator’s flat with lice:
I find a cheap piano and surprise my husband with it. Sometimes he

composes songs for us after dinner. Beautiful little things. If it is after
eight, the neighbors complain. Anyway, the bugs get in it.
An Arabic proverb: One insect is enough to fell a country.

(56–57)
The above excerpt could also be interpreted as a subtle instance of the
Confrontation relation, which Offill frequently employs – more so than
Joint, the other common strategy in parataxis and collage. In the below
sequence, the mawkish opening quotation mistakenly attributed to W.B.
Yeats (rather than Robert Browning) is confronted with Yeats’s much
bleaker passages:
Grow old with me. The best is yet to be, say the cards in the anni-
versary section.
But there are other lines from Yeats the wife keeps remembering.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal
Things fall apart.

(136)
The last two quotations – from “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Sec-
ond Coming,” respectively – are in stark contrast with the glibness and
false reassurance of the opening rhymed cliché. The idea of incorporating
statements rooted in an ideological position very distant from the narra-
tor’s own is a strategy used in Dept. of Speculation as well as Bluets. In
Nelson’s book, the cited words of religious comfort offered by the visi-
tors of the narrator’s quadriplegic friend serve the same purpose. Other
instances in Offill’s novel are the following: a line from the Gospel of
Matthew (“If your eyes are sound, your whole body will be filled with
light”) in the context of buying glasses in a particularly dark hour of the
narrator’s life (68), a nineteenth-century warning against wives reading
novels (“one of the most injurious habits,” which may lead to an “indif-
ference to the performance of domestic duties” [49]) and examples of
banal advice from self-help publications such as Thriving Not Surviving
and a “horribly titled adultery book” (6–7, 124).
Characteristically for Offill, she rarely articulates the disparities,
incongruities or connections between the juxtaposed elements. Although
James Wood observes that many of Offill’s “paragraphs link with their
successors, so that a continuous narrative is not hard to construct,” he
adds that others are “opaque” and “eccentric,” which causes the reader
to “experience deliberate discontinuities and obstructions.” It is thanks
to the latter group of components that Dept. of Speculation can be con-
sidered a collage. While the novel’s partial reliance on narrative progres-
sion undoubtedly diminishes its collage effect, the fulfilment of the other
criteria – multiple and varied components, fragmentation and appro-
priation – sufficiently justifies the use of this category. If Offill’s novel
achieves a degree of coherence through its plot-dependence, it is – in
Wood’s words – a “randomized coherence.” As Roxane Gay argues in
her review, the book poses a challenge to the reader by compelling them
to consider “the why of each fragment and how it fits with the others.”
The same could be said about each collage work, visual or literary. It is
because the collagist – “instead of building dutiful bridges” – has the
freedom to “leap into space” (Offill, “Emotional Recalibrations”).
Things Fall Apart

Both Bluets and Dept. of Speculation use the form of collage to represent
an experience of personal crisis, understood – after Gerald Caplan – as
a “reactive state provoked by hazardous events that threaten important
life goals or values” (qtd. in Janosik 3). As Ellen Hastings Janosik argues
in Crisis Counseling: A Contemporary Approach (1994), the trigger for
crisis, referred to as “hazard,” often takes the form of “interpersonal
change such as loss of a significant person through death or divorce” (4).
Loss is the main cause of the crisis suffered by the narrator of Bluets, who
mourns the separation from her lover. In Dept. of Speculation it is the
threat of loss – the fear of divorce instilled by the husband’s infidelity –
that serves as the major hazard. Both texts address several other crisis-
inducing factors, all of which are going to be discussed in this section.
According to Janosik, the individual in crisis is confronted with a long-
term “disorganization” and “disequilibrium,” marked by the presence
of intense anxiety (3, 46). That sense of disorganization is conveyed in
both works through their form as well as content. Formally, it is evoked
through the use of the collage-like anarchy of parataxis and the confron-
tation of opposing statements. The fragmentation of both works could
also be interpreted as indicating the disintegration of the narrators’ lives.
In her review of Bluets, Dinty W. Moore has suggested that the “splin-
tering” of its material into 240 “lyrical prose entries” illustrates “how
grave personal losses can shatter us into pieces” (184). The disturbance
of the narrators’ daily existence is also, directly and indirectly, conveyed
through the accounts of their struggle with grief, resentment and anxiety,
which are going to be examined in the ensuing part of this section.
On the opening page of Bluets, the narrator cautiously confesses her
loneliness, which she knows is capable of “produc[ing] bolts of hot
pain” (4). Seventy entries later, she speaks of her emotional state more
openly when she admits to “becoming a servant of sadness” (75). Soon
afterwards, she announces, “Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for
some time. I wept until I aged myself” (90). Although she never explicitly
diagnoses herself as depressive, it is implicit in her choice of reading. At
one time she admits that eight months after discovering a book subtitled
“How Women Face and Overcome Depression” she finally overcomes
her embarrassment and orders it online (85).7 She is inclined to address
her own condition through the examples of other figures. For instance,
she quotes one of the most famous depressives, Vincent van Gogh, as say-
ing, “The sadness will last forever,”8 to which she only adds, “I imagine
he was right” (98).
Right from the start, she declares that her love for the colour blue does
not make her inclined to wallow in “blueness.” On the contrary, she
wishes to put an end to her dejection. “Above all,” she states, “I want to
stop missing you,”9 the “you” referring to the lover who abandoned her
for the sake of another woman (8). The process of working through the
experience is the subject of her therapy, which is mentioned in passing on
two occasions – each time a different therapist is involved. The second
one reassures the narrator that a year on she will not feel the same about
her situation anymore. “The truth is,” she adds with hindsight, her “feel-
ings haven’t really changed” although she has learnt to behave as if they
have (44). Although the narrator declares that she “can hardly remem-
ber” the lover’s face (188), the memories of their lovemaking still carry a
great emotional charge. It seems to her that, regardless of her attempts to
come to terms with the loss, the lover is “etched into [her] heart” (206).
It soon becomes apparent that the book’s combination of subjects –
grief and the colour blue – is far from arbitrary. Nelson demonstrates
that the relevance of blue to personal crisis extends beyond its tradi-
tional association with sadness. She points to artists and philosophers
who became intrigued by colour in general and blue in particular during
“a particularly fraught moment” of their lives: Goethe at the mysterious
time of inner disequilibrium, Wittgenstein while struggling with stomach
cancer and Derek Jarman – the author of the film Blue (1993), inspired
by Yves Klein’s monochrome painting IKB 79 – in the final stages of
AIDS (23). Nelson considers Goethe’s claim that blue is a colour of “dis-
turbance” and confesses to feeling comfort at the thought of blue as “the
color of death” (36, 134).10 When reflecting on the lyrics of Billie Hol-
liday’s “Lady Sings the Blues,” she concludes that “to see blue in deeper
and deeper saturation is eventually to move toward darkness” (135).
Some of Nelson’s considerations about the colour blue could be inter-
preted as symptomatic of an epistemological crisis. Her meditation on
what is known as the “illusion of color” – the fallacy of treating the col-
our’s “experiential quality” as its “intrinsic” property – leads her to con-
sider a more radical scepticism about the reliability of human perception
(53). She wonders if, by analogy, the subjective experience of love is also
illusory. During therapy, she is confronted with the idea that although
she used to be convinced that she loved the man “completely for exactly
who he was,” she was deceived about his nature (44). That inability to
distinguish with confidence between truth and falsity, and, consequently,
between love and not-love “pains [her] enormously.” If it follows that
what she felt for the man was not love, she is resigned to admitting that
she does not “know what love is.” The arduous process of examining the
causes of her feelings strips love of its “blue” – this time a synonym of
beauty – and turns it into “an ugly, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting
board” (45).
Bluets can be read as an account of yet another crisis – graver than the
ones already examined although experienced vicariously by the narrator.
It concerns one of her closest friends, who in the aftermath of an accident
has been rendered quadriplegic. Nelson’s meditations on blue and loss
are interspersed with brief insights into her condition from the shock of
the first hours in hospital, through the years of intense daily pain and
the ongoing struggle to accept the irreversibility of her loss, to a degree
of equanimity about her situation. Although the chronological account
of the friend’s condition imposes a narrative of gradual acceptance, Nel-
son is careful not to slip into a tone of false optimism. She emphasizes
that several years after the accident the friend is still “busy asking, in
this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it”
(217). In the last passage devoted to her, Nelson acknowledges the posi-
tive changes in her condition but stresses her continued “intense” and
“bottomless” “grief for all she has lost” (228).
In How Literature Saved My Life, David Shields includes Bluets in
the section headed “fifty-five works I swear by,” where he describes it
as a “cri de coeur about Nelson’s inability to get over the end of a love
affair” and a “grievous contemplation of a close friend’s paralysis.” He
adds, however, that the book’s scope extends much further so that, in the
end, Bluets addresses “nothing less than the melancholy of the human
animal” and “wrestl[es] with existence at the most fundamental level”
(151). The same could be said about Dept. of Speculation, whose exami-
nation of a personal crisis is embedded in the larger context of philosoph-
ical reflection – signalled by the title of Offill’s novel. One of its narrator’s
first “speculations” asks whether her “mental anguish” is a permanent
or temporary condition (7). That remark is later confronted with the
observation that, despite the Buddhist belief in the existence of as many
as 121 states of consciousness, most people oscillate between the only
three which entail “misery or suffering” (11). The narrator ventures the
bleakest (and angriest) assessment of the human condition and the fragil-
ity of any human constructs when she marvels at her husband’s capacity
not to lament how “unbearable it is that things keep breaking” and that
“you can never fucking outrun entropy” (37).
Even though the major crisis-inducing event, or the main hazard, as
Janosik would call it, occurs only in the middle of Dept. of Speculation,
the book is tinged with crisis right from the beginning. On the opening
page, the narrator declares that she is “so weary of all of it” (3). Soon
afterwards, she discloses her miscarriage, which is, however, described in
a rather affectless manner. The loss is mentioned in the context of a new
apartment: “by the time we moved in, we had found out that the baby’s
heart had stopped and now it just made us sad to look out the window
at it.” That understated confession, reminiscent of the voice of Kazuo
Ishiguro’s first-person narrators, continues for a single paragraph and
conveys the sense of pained resignation rather than despair. “We had told
people. We had to untell them,” the narrator announces flatly (20–21).
That frequently adopted tone evokes what Berlant has diagnosed as the
“sense of flatness in the world, as though affects and emotion them-
selves are exhausted from adjusting to all the intensities.” What might
have been represented as tragedy Offill renders as “lower case drama”
(“Thinking” 6–7).
When the next pregnancy succeeds and the long-awaited baby is born,
the narrator is plunged into a cycle of constant apprehension, exhaustion
and sleep deprivation. Her immersion in the role of the mother exacer-
bates her professional anxiety and her sense of failure about not having
produced her second novel for much too long. The pressure to write
is accentuated, deliberately or not, by the people around her: the head
of the department where she teaches creative writing asks her bluntly,
“Where is that second novel? . . . Tick tock, tick tock” (38), while a
friend whom the narrator has not seen for many years notes apologeti-
cally, “I think I must have missed your second book” (51).11 After the
birth of the child, however, there is no time for any creative work, as the
narrator can barely fulfil her teaching obligations. An insight into the dif-
ficulty of maintaining a professional facade at a time like that is offered
by a passing reference to the narrator’s alarmed realization, a moment
before her class, that she has a “chunk of vomit” in her hair (36).12
The routine imposed by the child results in the narrator’s days being
“cut . . . up into little scraps” (26), which can be interpreted as a metafic-
tional allusion to the composition of the book. As with Bluets, the disinte-
gration of the narrator’s experience is echoed in the formal fragmentation
of the text and its hybrid, collage-like structure. The best example of
the representation of crisis through collage and fragment is afforded by
Chapter 22, which marks a turning point in terms of both form and con-
tent, as it signals the onset of the marriage crisis and represents a shift
from a consistent first-person to a third-person narrative (in which the
former narrator begins to be referred to as “the wife” and her husband
as “he” or “the husband,” instead of “you”). The chapter opens with
the heading “How Are You?” followed by an eighteen-line sequence of
“soscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredso” (94), which constitutes a
solid rectangular block of text reminiscent of a concrete poem. This lit-
any of fear is followed by a short statement about “the wife praying . . .
to Rilke” and a longer passage warning the reader against answering
unthinkingly the question about their happiest memory: before replying,
the reader is advised, they should consider the questioner and be careful
not to hurt them by describing a time that did not involve them (95). The
next passage is a note about Hipparchus’s discovery of a new star in 134
bc, which made him realize that stars were impermanent entities capable
of appearing and disappearing.
The ten consecutive paragraphs describe the consequences of the wife’s
failure to include the husband in her happiest memory: the look on his
face, his absence at home one of the subsequent evenings, their ensuing
bitter conversations, whose cryptic fragments function as three distinct
paragraphs. The last of them – “That’s not what I asked you” – is fol-
lowed by one-sentence paragraphs reporting on Thales’s belief that the
earth was flat and Anaxagoras’s conviction that there were people living
on the moon (97). After a note that the narrator’s sister is coming from
Pennsylvania to help look after the daughter comes a piece of advice from
Ovid on what to do when one has been caught in the wrong. The penul-
timate section contains what seems a snippet of a conversation between
the wife and the husband about the woman with whom he has begun an
affair:
Taller?
Thinner?
Quieter?
Easier, he says.
(98)
The chapter ends with another scientific fact – the note that in 2159 bc
astronomers Hi and Ho were killed for failing to foresee an eclipse.
The quotations and anecdotes recounted in Chapter 22 exemplify
cases of famous thinkers and scientists being wrong about the universe or
failing to predict a crisis. Although none of them makes any reference to
the narrative situation, the notion of misjudgement clearly corresponds
to the wife’s inability to assess the effect of the fateful conversation with
her husband and her general disregard of their strained relationship. The
coexistence of the plot-driven paragraphs with erudite analogies in the
novel does not come across as contrived or pretentious, as the bookish-
ness of the narrator – a writer and writing teacher herself – justifies her
resort to the knowledge that she has at hand at the time of emotional
upheaval. The novel’s resort to intense intertextuality in the context
of personal tragedy is reminiscent of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot
(1984), whose narrator relies on the author of Madame Bovary to make
sense of his wife’s infidelity and suicide.5 Offill’s narrator, in turn, chooses
to “pray” to Rainer Maria Rilke and seek analogies in astronomy.
The earlier mentioned sudden shift that occurs in Chapter 22 – the
transition from an intense first-person narration to a third-person
account focalized by the wife – has been interpreted by Elaine Blair as
“a kind of dissociation, perhaps brought on by a crisis.” It may also be
interpreted as a response to being reduced to a cliché, which involves
“the wife” despairing over “the husband’s” affair with “the girl” and
desperately attempting to make him stay with her and “the child.” That
alone causes her great distress and precipitates what might be seen as a
crisis of identity – a period of intense reconsideration of what she has
become as a result of the husband’s infidelity and the threat of separation.
At one point she reproaches the husband for having “made [her] into a
cartoon wife,” which she finds undeserved and humiliating (138). Her
embarrassment about turning into a stereotypical wronged woman is
also reflected in a description of the measures she takes in order not to be
caught buying or reading the earlier mentioned “horribly titled adultery
book” (125). The awareness of repeating certain conventional patterns
of behaviour – such as laughing sarcastically whenever the husband uses
a lighthearted word like “nice” or “fun” – occasionally makes her feel
sorry for herself: “She has seen this rhetorical strategy used before by a
soon-to-be ex-wife talking to her soon-to-be ex-husband. Poor creature,
she thought then” (123).
The focalizer’s crisis of identity also manifests itself in the confu-
sion about her provisional and highly uncertain position, described by
the deliberately awkward label of a “soon-to-be ex-wife.” “If the wife
becomes unwived,” she wonders in a different entry, “what should she
be called?” The focalizer notes that there is no accurate word describing
the status of a woman who is no longer a wife and not yet a divorcée and
concludes that what she is can be best captured by the phrase “stateless
person” (121). Her statelessness, understood as the lack of foundation,
finds its expression also in her emotional volatility – the newly discov-
ered propensity to fall in love on an impulse, with friends, students and
strangers (111).
The danger of divorce, however, seems ultimately averted, which atten-
uates the state of permanent crisis. The last chapters of Dept. of Specula-
tion offer a narrative of gradual reconciliation between the wife and the
husband until, on the final page, the third person switches to the first.
That enables the use of the form “we,” which was absent for the previous
twenty-four chapters. In order to describe a peaceful winter scene – the
parents waiting for their daughter at a school bus stop – Offill renounces
collage and fragmentation and resorts to traditional paragraphs, free
from any appropriated content. The novel thus ends on a serene note,
which seems to herald the end of crisis and the advent of better times.
However, in personal correspondence, Offill suggests that the novel
concludes with an evocation of “a fragile peace, brittle even,” as the
daughter, now older, may not keep the parents together very much longer.
When they are standing in the icy wind in the closing scene, they, Offill
notes, “don’t know the name for what they are” (“Re:”). Whereas the
resolution of marital problems may not be definitive, another source of
anxiety does recede from view: the completion of the novel, although not
accompanied by any metafictional commentary, may be felt by the reader
as putting an end to the narrator’s struggle with writer’s block. After all,
Dept. of Speculation can be associated with the frequently mentioned
“second novel,” which Offill produced fifteen years after her debut.
In Bluets, on the contrary, the final pages do not bring anything even
vaguely resembling a happy ending. While Nelson also creates a sense
of closure, her resolution is far more pessimistic about the possibility of
coming to terms with loss. “I learned my lesson,” the narrator announces,
“I stopped hoping” (231). The last two quotations in Bluets note that
“there ain’t no bottom” to “the blues when you got ’em” and that Paul
Cézanne spent his last days acutely aware of “the wretchedness of his
empirical life and of his unsuccessful attempts” (235–36). The closing
passages contain an address to the ex-lover which brings together for the
last time the book’s two chief concerns – loss and the colour blue:
238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time
when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these
words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in
the world.
239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone
Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is
light.”
240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed
to be a student not of longing but of light.
Through the use of the past tense (“there was a time,” “I was alive”),
Nelson imbues the last lines with a sense of finality which seals the earlier
asserted loss of hope.13 Her tone matches the sentiment of contemporary
crisis – “flat, post-vital, exhausted” (Berlant, “Thinking” 8). The last
sentence augurs a future enveloped by death and darkness, the only alter-
natives to what the narrator claims to have renounced – life and light.
Sadness, it feels, will indeed last forever.
Conclusion
Towards the end of Dept. of Speculation, Offill includes the following
quotation from Rilke: “Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in
danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to
where no one can go any further” (171). Both books considered in this
chapter appear to have been born out of their authors’ immersion in a
grave and prolonged personal crisis. As I have aimed to demonstrate,
both seek to render that experience employing the formal principle of
collage, whose reliance on fragmentation and inner conflict corresponds
to the sense of personal disintegration and the disturbance of emotional
equilibrium. The correlation of form and content is also evident in the
resolution of both texts: the abandonment of fragmentary structure and
appropriation in Dept. of Speculation signals the overcoming of crisis,
while their persistence in Bluets conveys the failure to work through the
pain of loss. In the end, Bluets proves to be the bluer book, its mournful
heart manifest in the publisher’s choice of a darker hue for its cover than
that of the blue on the binding of Dept. of Speculation.14
Notes
mine entitled “Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and the Revival of Frag-
mentary Writing,” published in Miscelánea: A Journal of English and Ameri-
can Studies.
2. Due to the high sales figures of The Argonauts, Bluets was finally released
(and widely reviewed) in Britain in 2017.
3. Paraliterature is a notion introduced by Rosalind Krauss in reference to
Roland Barthes’s act of “blur[ring] the distinction between literature and
criticism” in such works as The Pleasure of the Text (1973), A Lover’s Dis-
course and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (282).
4. Examples of the much commoner perspective of the betrayed husband can
be found in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Alain Robbe-
Grillet’s Jealousy (1957) and Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) (Blair).
5. As with Reality Hunger, the figure in parenthesis represents the number of
the section rather than that of the page on which it can be found.
6. The epitaph on John Keats’s grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
7. In a parallel scene in Dept. of Speculation, the narrator cannot bear the
humiliation of buying a “horribly titled divorce book” and chooses to travel
to a bookshop in a different neighbourhood to purchase it (124).
8. This line is also the epigraph to Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames.
9. Another formal similarity between Bluets and Dept. of Speculation is the
narrator’s frequent use of “you.” Whereas Offill makes it refer exclusively to
the husband, Nelson employs a wider range of referents. In the author’s own
commentary on this narrative device, she suggests that in Bluets the second
person can designate “the ‘you’ that’s actually ‘me,’ the ‘you’ that’s ‘you, the
reader,’ the ‘you’ that’s a particular other (a beloved in absentia), the ‘you’
that’s rhetorical, as in ‘one’ ” (Nelson, “Sort” 101).
10. The connection with death returns near the end of Bluets when the narrator
confesses that if she were on her deathbed, she would indicate her love of
blue and having sex with her ex-lover as being among “the sweetest sensa-
tions [she] knew on this earth” (212).
11. In a later section – a bitter summary of a particularly bad year in the form
of an imagined Christmas card to be sent to the family – the narrator also
stresses the non-occurrence of her novel: “It is the year of the bugs. It is the
year of the pig. It is the year of losing money. It is the year of getting sick. It
is the year of no book. It is the year of no music. It is the year of turning 5
and 39 and 37. It is the year of Wrong Living. That is how we will remember
it if it ever passes” (64, italics original). This passage can also be read as an
encapsulation of the prolonged and multifaceted crisis experienced by the
narrator of Dept. of Speculation.
12. In a corresponding scene in Bluets, right before beginning a class on prosody,
the narrator bursts into tears upon seeing the word “heartbreak” (an exam-
ple of a spondee) in her lecture notes (42).
13. In personal correspondence, Nelson pointed to the possibility of interpret-
ing the narrator of Bluets as “already dead,” which accounts for the words
“when I was alive,” as well as for the opening passage – “suppose I were to
begin.” The latter, she noted, “places the book in a speculative space.” Nel-
son credited the voice of the focalizer of Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress
as an inspiration for this idea (“Re:”).
14. I am referring to the paperback editions by Wave Books and Vintage Con-
temporaries, respectively.
Works Cited
Als, Hilton. “Immediate Family.” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 18 Apr. 2016,
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/maggie-nelsons-many-selves.
Accessed 16 July 2018.
Berlant, Lauren. “Thinking About Feeling Historical.” Emotion, Space and Soci-
ety, vol. 1, 2008, pp. 4–9.
Blair, Elaine. “The Smallest Possible Disaster.” The New York Review of Books,
NYREV Inc., 24 Apr. 2014, www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/04/24/jenny-offill-
smallest-possible-disaster/. Accessed 29 May 2016.
Dicinoski, Michelle. “Wild Associations: Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson and the
Lyric Essay.” TEXT, no. 39, 2017, pp. 1–12.
Drąg, Wojciech. “Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and the Revival of Fragmen-
tary Writing.” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 56,
2017, pp. 57–72.
Francis, Gavin. “Heartbreak and Sex in 240 Turbocharged Prose Poems.” Review
of Bluets, by Maggie Nelson. The Guardian, Guardian News and Media,
8 June 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/08/bluets-maggie-nelson-
review-heartbreak-sex. Accessed 16 July 2018.
Gay, Roxane. “Bridled Vows.” Review of Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill.
The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 9 Feb. 2014, www.
nytimes.com/2014/02/09/books/review/jenny-offills-dept-of-speculation.html.
Accessed 29 May 2016.
Graham, Tom. “Short Review: Bluets by Maggie Nelson.” The Financial Times,
The Financial Times Ltd., 9 June 2017, www.ft.com/content/28742468-49ef-
11e7-a3f4-c742b9791d43. Accessed 16 July 2018.
Bartlett, 2014.
Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.
MIT Press, 1986.
Moore, Dinty W. “Positively Negative.” Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction,
edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, pp. 181–88.
Myers, Gina. Review of Bluets, by Maggie Nelson. Bookslut, Dec. 2006, www.
bookslut.com/nonfiction/2009_12_015550.php. Accessed 16 July 2018.
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. 2009. Jonathan Cape, 2017.
———. “The Fragment as a Unit of Prose Composition.” Interview by Ben Segal.
Continent, vol. 1, no. 3, 2011, pp. 158–70.
———. Interview by Jess Cotton. The White Review, May 2015, www.thewhite
review.org/feature/interview-with-maggie-nelson/. Accessed 16 July 2018.
———. Interview by Molly Rose Quinn. The Atlas Review, no. 4, 2014, www.
theatlasreview.com/maggie-nelson/. Accessed 16 July 2018.
———. “Re: An Academic Inquiry Regarding Bluets.” Received by Wojciech
Drąg, 20 Feb. 2019.
———. “ ‘A Sort of Leaning Against’: Writing with, from and for Others.” The
Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House, edited by Christopher
Beha. Tin House Books, 2012, pp. 83–103.
Offill, Jenny. Dept. of Speculation. 2014. Granta, 2015.
———. “Emotional Recalibrations: PW Talks with Jenny Offill.” Interview by
Seth Satterlee. Publishers Weekly, 3 Jan. 2014, www.publishersweekly.com/
pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/60520-emotional-recalibrations-pw-
talks-with-jenny-offill.html. Accessed 16 July 2018.
———. “Subterranean Lives.” Interview by Anjali Enjeti. Los Angeles Review
of Books, 29 June 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/subterranean-
lives/#!. Accessed 16 July 2018.
O’Rourke, Marie. “Memory’s Fracture: Instability in the Contemporary Mem-
oir.” Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir, edited by Bunty Avie-
son, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph. Routledge, 2018, pp. 13–28.
Parr, Jocelyn. Review of Bluets, by Maggie Nelson. Brick: A Literary Journal,
26 Nov. 2015, https://brickmag.com/review-bluets-maggie-nelson/. Accessed
16 July 2018.
Self, John. “Intense Vignettes of Domestic Life.” Review of Dept. of Speculation,
by Jenny Offill. The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Mar. 2014,
www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/14/dept-speculation-review-jenny-offill.
Shields, David. How Literature Saved My Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.
Singer, Margot, and Nicole Walker. “Introduction.” Bending Genre: Essays on
Creative Nonfiction, edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. Bloomsbury
Academic, 2014, pp. 1–7.
Stein, Bob. “Reading and Writing in the Digital Era.” Discovering Digital Dimen-
sions, Computers and Writing Conference, 23 May 2003, Union Club Hotel,
West Lafayette, IN. Keynote Address.
Tsitsovits, Ioannnis. “The Afterlife of Theory in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.” Frag-
mentary Writing in Contemporary British and American Fiction. U of Wrocław,
23 Sept. 2017. Conference Presentation.
Wood, James. “Mother Courage.” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 31 March 2014,
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/31/mother-courage-3. Accessed 29 May
2016.
Conclusion
Collage Is Here to Stay
Collage is a formal principle operating in works as distinct as Wom-

an’s World and Bluets. Among the fourteen texts examined in the entire
study are works spanning a broad spectrum of contemporary literature –
classified as fiction and non-fiction and representing genres from the
short story, manifesto and the essay to memoir and the novel. It is note-
worthy – and paradoxical – that the latter label has been applied to as
many as ten of those works, even though, according to Marjorie Perloff,
“collage goes against the very idea of the novel” (Personal interview).
Although Woman’s World meets all the common criteria of the novel,
while Head in Flames and Dept. of Speculation satisfy most of them,
the term “collage novel” can, admittedly, be viewed as an oxymoron.
The most evidently collage-like works – such as Markson’s quartet and
Dreamlives of Debris – could only fit a most lenient definition whose
main criterion is considerable length. Their authors’ and publishers’
adherence to the generic label should be viewed in the context of the
ever-widening range of the novel as the hegemonic literary form.
Despite their partial or complete fulfilment of the adopted formal cri-
teria, the fourteen works have been shown to vary in their incorporation
of the collage principle. As regards appropriation, the sine qua non of all
collage, several variables should be noted: the reliance on borrowed con-
tent (from rather limited in Dept. of Speculation to complete in Woman’s
World), the accuracy of its presentation (from precise citations in VAS to
“slant quotes” in Olsen’s and Shields’s works), the acknowledgement of
the source (clear indications in VAS versus the lack of quotation marks
in Markson and Reality Hunger) and its function (from the object of
pastiche in Woman’s World to argumentative material in Shields and
Nelson to the evidence of the heteroglot noise of contemporary world in
Dreamlives of Debris). Much emphasis has been placed on what Olsen
has called “a poetics of beautiful monstrosity” – the heterogeneity of
collage works, which results from the multiplicity and diversity of appro-
priated elements (Markson’s quartet is a case in point); the construction
of distinct narrative voices (Head in Flames); and the incorporation of
other semantic modes than text (Sewing Shut My Eyes). The latter kind
206 Conclusion
was discussed as multimodality in chapters referring to Shields, Olsen,
Tomasula and Rawle, where focus was turned to the use of images (over
two hundred in Woman’s World) and the experiments with typography
(most exuberant in Rawle’s cut-up novel), layout and page design (most
daring and varied in VAS). Through multimodal means, several works, it
was suggested, close the gap between collage in literature and the visual
arts: all pages (or panels, as the author has referred to them) in Olsen’s
“Telegenesicide” and many from VAS and Woman’s World could be dis-
played as individual exhibits in an art gallery.
It has also been argued that all the considered works rely on the
principle of juxtaposition, which renounces synthesis and what David
Antin calls “stronger logical relations” (211). Markson’s enumerations
of related names, dates and places; paratactic joints of facts and situa-
tions; as well as confrontations of conflicting statements are the most
characteristic examples of that formal trait of collage literature. In the
absence of explicit logical connections, the reader is compelled to reflect
on “the why of each fragment and how it fits with the others” (Gay).
The examined motivations for placing appropriated elements one next
to another range from evoking shock (as in Tomasula’s juxtapositions of
unsettling statements about eugenics) to provoking laughter (the surreal
lexical constructs in Woman’s World). One of the effects of the replace-
ment of “subordination” by “coordination” (Perloff, “Collage” 386) is
collage’s potential for reversibility, which was asserted in the discussion
of Olsen’s and Tomasula’s work. While Reality Hunger could also be read
in other sequences than that imposed by the bound book, Rawle’s novel,
which relies on its meaning for plot development, could not. Bluets, in
turn, is an interesting case of collage which appears to have a capacity
for non-linear reading, although Nelson admits to having struggled with
the endless urge to rearrange its “propositions.” Unlike a visual collage,
literary texts (especially in print form) are composed with a view to being
experienced in a given sequence, which in certain works may be diso-
beyed by the reader without severe disruption to its reception. Finally,
all the texts have been examined with reference to their employment of
fragmentation, which has been achieved by numbering the components
(Reality Hunger and Bluets), incorporating minuscule passages – such
as single words and unfinished sentences (in Olsen and Tomasula), con-
structing words and sentences out of individual letters and words (Wom-
an’s World), and using a lot of blank space (a strategy followed by most
works, particularly noticeable in Dreamlives of Debris).
In twenty-first-century collages, differences in poetics entail differences
in politics. The competition between the critique embodied in the act of
cutting and the nostalgia inherent in the practice of gathering and past-
ing results in texts situated near either end of the spectrum. The former
strategy, fuelled by the ambition to “explode possible meanings” and
undermine ideological positions prevails in the works of Markson, Olsen
Conclusion 207
and Tomasula (Banash 31). Their texts are visually and structurally more
fragmented than those of the other authors, while their representation of
the aesthetic and sociopolitical crises shows greater readiness for sharp
criticism, sarcasm and parody. For Offill, Rawle and, to a lesser extent,
Nelson and Shields, gathering appears more important than dismem-
bering. What David Banash calls “the conservative desire of nostalgia”
rooted in the act of “calling out” to the original context of the collage’s
appropriated elements is nowhere more visible than in Woman’s World
(32), which is steeped in the poetics of post-war British women’s maga-
zines. Although Bluets, Dept. of Speculation and Reality Hunger are con-
structed out of fragmentary entries, their composition seeks a qualified
unity – signalled by Nelson’s thematic discipline, Offill’s narrative arc and
the driving argument of Shields’s manifesto.
The latter group of texts could be said to show greater serenity in the
face of the represented crisis. The comic tone of Woman’s World, the
ultimate reconciliation between the narrator and her husband in Dept.
of Speculation and the passionate defence of authors offering to revive
contemporary literature in Reality Hunger convey the sense that crisis
can be overcome, alleviated or, at the very least, spoken of without alarm.
The last statement also applies to Bluets, whose narrator makes it clear
that her wounds have not healed (and never will) but appears reconciled
to the sadness which will “last forever” (Nelson 98). Works by Mark-
son, Olsen and Tomasula, on the other hand, are strongly marked, from
beginning to end, by the repercussions of unresolved crisis: “incompre-
hension, disorientation, perplexity (aporia), revolutionary violence, dis-
order, interpersonal conflict, and ontological uncertainty” (Hollahan 22).
The sense of exhaustion and the anxiety triggered by the imminence of
death (evoked by the recurrent line “Timor mortis conturbat me”) are
never assuaged in Markson’s quartet, which culminates in the suicide
of the destitute and abandoned author-figure. Dreamlives of Debris and
VAS end on an equally bleak and dystopian note, which can be encap-
sulated by the feeling that “it’s the end of the world as we know it” and
by the Beckettian mantra (quoted by Debris) “the worst is still to come,
was still to come, will still be to come, has come, had come, is coming”
(Olsen, Dreamlives). They do not indicate (or even believe in the possibil-
ity of) a way out of the “impasse” – the condition which Lauren Berlant
compares to a “cul-de-sac . . . a holding station that doesn’t hold securely
but opens out into anxiety” and sees as intrinsic to the experience of
contemporary crisis (199).
The angst and gloom about the political, ecological and technological
developments is more prevalent in twenty-first-century collage than at the
time of Barthelme, Burroughs and Acker. Whereas many of the American
collagists of the 1960s and 1970s were committed to opposing hegem-
onic systems, such as capitalism, patriarchy and social normativity, Olsen
and Tomasula have aimed to evoke the epistemological and ontological
208 Conclusion
chaos of the new millennium and to indicate its potential repercussions.
Capitalism continues to be a thematic interest of contemporary collage
but – except for Woman’s World, where it is a central concern – mostly
as a context for other sociopolitical and aesthetic phenomena. Acker’s
fierce attacks on the male literary canon find no equivalent in recent lit-
erary collage; on the contrary, Nelson and Offill have no qualms about
“leaning against” (to use Nelson’s phrase) the work of such towering
figures as Goethe, Wittgenstein and W.B. Yeats. Whereas much of collage
in the second half of the twentieth century wished to shock and scan-
dalize its readership, for example, through explicit descriptions of non-
normative sexuality in Naked Lunch, that ambition is less prominent in
contemporary collage. The only work discussed in the present volume
which adopts a similar aesthetic is Sewing Shut My Eyes, which, having
been released in 2000, technically belongs to the previous century. When
Markson, Olsen and Tomasula appropriate shocking statements – racist,
anti-Semitic, misogynistic – their aim is not to outrage the reader but
rather to demonstrate how recently such opinions were tolerated. Col-
lage enables them to juxtapose and confront multiple voices, past as well
as present, as a result of which their works are radically polyphonic and
adopt a broader historical perspective. Both of those characteristics align
their authors with Eliot and Pound rather than Burroughs and Acker.
The abundance of appropriated voices in twenty-first-century collage
may be attributed to the rise of the Internet, which grants access to a vir-
tually infinite and chaotic archive of texts and standpoints, clashing like
the words of Vincent, Theo and Mohammed Bouyeri in Head in Flames.
Almost all the discussed authors play with incongruous juxtapositions –
achieved by placing passages from canonical texts alongside references to
the likes of Britney Spears and Justin Bieber. “One minute he’s quoting
Dostoevsky, the next he’s asking his wife if he can share her vibrator,”
writes Blake Morrison of Shields’s collage method. “High/low, private/
public: the demarcations disappear.” Although the mixing of high and
low sources is not new to collage (it can be found in The Waste Land),
the frequency with which it is employed is a recent development and,
most likely, an influence of the anti-hierarchical information structure of
the Web and the social media.
In Cognitive Fictions (2002), Joseph Tabbi points out that “arrange-
ments of visual, verbal, and aural media . . . take on a new proximity and
an expanded potential for recombination in the age of the Internet, when
for the first time in history all media can exist on a single digital plat-
form” (ix–x). In that respect, collage literature has also followed suit and
exploited its multimodal potential more than ever before. Even the richly
visual works of Acker and the material innovations of B.S. Johnson pale
in comparison with the exuberance of typography and page design in
works such as Woman’s World and VAS. Whereas experiments with font
and the appropriation of images are not practised by all the examined
Conclusion 209
authors, each of them makes use of blank space in order to separate tex-
tual chunks. As a result, contemporary collages have a much more frag-
mentary look than texts such as Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded,
Paolozzi’s Kex and Acker’s The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri
Toulouse Lautrec. Burroughs’s dominant method of seamlessly merging
appropriated passages has been replaced by a more overtly plagiaristic
strategy of laying bare the borrowings and, more frequently than before,
acknowledging their status.
The more daring multimodality of twenty-first-century collage can also
be attributed to the rise of electronic literature and the e-book. As Adam
Hammond argues in Literature in the Digital Age (2015), we live in a
“hybrid moment,” with “one foot in the print world and the other in
the digital” (20). For the contemporary collagist, the print book is no
longer the default medium but a medium of choice. What lies behind that
creative decision is often the wish to achieve an effect which cannot be
produced by electronic means. VAS, whose visual and material qualities
are designed to evoke associations with the human body, and Woman’s
World, which constantly draws attention to its status as a material cut-
and-paste text, are among the quintessential examples of hypermediacy –
the practice of “remind[ing] the viewer of the medium” (Bolter and
Grusin 272) – and of what Jessica Pressman has labelled “the aesthetic of
bookishness.” The authors’ exploitation of the potential of print technol-
ogy presents a challenge to the patterns of online and e-book cognition;
like Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, their works are defiantly “inert” and
“unclickable” – conceived as “anti-Kindle[s]” (Kachka). The adherence
to the print medium by the authors1 discussed in this study, combined
with the commitment to explore the potential afforded by visuality and
materiality, may be regarded as a position “hover[ing] between futurism
and nostalgia” – represented by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth’s category of
“current cutting-edge paper-based writing,” which “re-invigorates” con-
temporary literature (138).
The examples of such formally reinvigorating collage works are more
numerous than this book has been able to reference. Among them are
Carole Maso’s AVA (1991), Michael Betancourt’s Artemis: A Tragedy
of Collage and Two Women and a Nightengale: A Novel in Collage (both
2004, sic), Stewart Home’s 69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess (2002)
and Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (2004), and Steven Hall’s
Raw Shark Texts (2007).2 Last years have seen the publication of new
collage works by Shields, whose Nobody Hates Trump More Than
Trump (2018) embodies the poetics and politics of collage as under-
stood in my study. Jeremy Gavron’s collage novel Felix Culpa (2018) has
recently attracted a fair deal of critical attention by its incorporation of
lines from over a hundred literary works and the construction of almost
half of its chapters from entirely appropriated content. The formal influ-
ence of collage can also be traced in the highly acclaimed novels of Max
210 Conclusion
Porter – Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015) and Lanny (2019). Most
remarkably, collaged fragments of historical sources constitute a sizeable
proportion of George Saunders’s Man Booker Prize–winning novel Lin-
coln in the Bardo (2017). Time will show if Saunders’s Booker will spur
greater domestication of collage techniques and ensure their entry into
the mainstream of literary fiction.
The authors of Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity
Crisis (2011) blame the ubiquity of collage as a cultural practice – a once
“daring” method which is used today so often that “nobody notices”
(Khan 19) – for the loss of originality and the demise of youth subcul-
tures (Rose 72). “The age of collage should finally come to a close,”
announces Aaron Rose in the closing essay of the book (92). On the other
hand, Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying (2010) celebrates the wider
cultural consequences of a perspective afforded by montage and collage,
namely “openness” and “the freedom toward which we are heading”
(175). While the assessments of the artistic and sociopolitical legacy of
collage vary, it is safe to venture the opinion that collage is here to stay,
at least for a long while. Among the reasons for its continued relevance
are its strong relationship with capitalism and mass production and its
capacity for political engagement, rooted in the act of gathering the frag-
ments, which shows “an intuitive grasp of how the world might be put
together” (Perloff, Futurist Moment 72). Its democratic propensity to
incorporate an array of conflicting voices and convey the resulting sense
of epistemological crisis proves particularly useful in the media-saturated
reality of the new millennium. Finally, collage’s commitment not just
to represent the modern world but to insert “reality fragments,” to use
Peter Bürger’s phrase (78), or “the thing itself” endows it with greater
authenticity, so desired in our reality-hungry times. Over a century after
its invention, collage – in Olsen’s words – “is still the realism that best
captures much of our culture’s sense of the world” (“Complexities”).
Notes
1. Tomasula’s loyalty to print is not absolute, as his TOC: A New-Media Novel
(2009) is a hybrid electronic work – an assemblage of text, photography,
painting, film, animation, voice-over and music.
2. A number of works critically labelled as “conceptual writing” – including
Kenneth Goldsmith’s famous Day (2003) and his American Trilogy, composed
of The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007) and Sports (2008) – share an essential
formal affinity with collage (its heavy reliance on appropriation) but have been
omitted because they do not fulfil the other formal criteria I have adopted.
Works Cited
Antin, David. Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to
2005. U of Chicago P, 2011.
Conclusion 211
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.
MIT Press, 2000.
Boon, Marcus. In Praise of Copying. Harvard UP, 2010.
Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. U of
Minnesota P, 1984.
Gay, Roxane. “Bridled Vows.” Review of Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill.
The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 9 Feb. 2014, www.
nytimes.com/2014/02/09/books/review/jenny-offills-dept-of-speculation.html.
Hammond, Adam. Literature in the Digital Age: An Introduction. Cambridge
UP, 2015.
Hollahan, Eugene. Crisis-Consciousness and the Novel. U of Delaware P, 1992.
Kachka, Boris. “Reinventing the Book: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Object of Anti-
Technology.” New York Magazine, New York Media, 21 Nov. 2010, http://
nymag.com/arts/books/features/69635/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2019.
Khan, Mandy. “Living in the Mess.” Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Cen-
tury’s Identity Crisis, edited by Mandy Khan, Brian Roettinger, and Aaron
Rose. JRP Ringier, 2011, pp. 5–45.
Morrison, Blake. “The Trouble with Men by David Shields Review – Reflec-
tions on Porn and Power.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 23 Feb.
2019, www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/23/the-trouble-with-men-david-
shields-review. Accessed 2 Mar. 2019.
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. 2009. Jonathan Cape, 2017.
Olsen, Lance. “The Complexities of a Moment Felt.” Interview by Scott Espos-
ito. The Quarterly Conversation, 5 Apr. 2010, http://quarterlyconversation.
com/the-complexities-of-a-moment-felt-the-lance-olsen-interview. Accessed
21 Apr. 2017.
———. Dreamlives of Debris. Dzanc, 2017.
———. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of
Rupture. U of Chicago P, 2003.
———. Personal interview. 2 Dec. 2018.
Pressman, Jessica. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Litera-
ture.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 48, no. 4, 2009, http://quod.lib.umich.
edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0048.402;
rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg. Accessed 4 Mar. 2019.
Rose, Aaron. “The Death of Subculture.” Collage Culture: Examining the
21st Century’s Identity Crisis, edited by Mandy Khan, Brian Roettinger, and
Aaron Rose. JRP Ringier, 2011, pp. 67–112.
Tabbi, Joseph. Cognitive Fictions. U of Minnesota P, 2002.
Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg. “Posthumanities and Post-Textualities: Reading The
Raw Shark Texts and Woman’s World.” Comparative Literature, vol. 63,
no. 2, 2011, pp. 119–41.
Index
Abbott, Edwin A. 132, 149 – 50 Boxall, Peter 3, 67 – 8, 70n24,

Acker, Kathy 26, 31 – 2, 207 – 9 121, 122
Adler, Renata 82 Brainard, Joe 16 – 17, 29, 40n11,
Alatalo, Sally 33, 162 180n11
Antin, David 10, 15, 19 Braque, Georges 7n1, 10, 11, 13,
appropriation 10 – 11, 29, 32, 52, 88, 15, 16
92n18, 104, 115 – 16, 138, 142, Breton, André 39n6, 165
167, 191 – 2, 205 Brockelman, Thomas P. 3, 7n2, 12,
Ashbery, John 29, 40n11 14, 16, 19, 21 – 4, 39n3, 54
assemblage 12, 40n11 Bürger, Peter 20 – 1, 25, 39n6, 210
Burns, Alan 32, 33
Bäcker, Heimrad 70n11 Burns, David J. 176 – 7
Baetens, Jan 82, 102, 166 Burroughs, William S. 7n3, 11, 16,
Bakhtin, Mikhail 138 – 9, 153n9 24, 25, 30 – 1, 40n14, 40n16, 76,
Ballard, J.G. 32 – 3, 115, 132 100, 161 – 2, 209; Naked Lunch 31,
Banash, David 1, 3, 7n2, 12, 14 – 15, 32, 40n15, 208; The Ticket That
18, 22 – 3, 26, 132, 140, 148, 167, Exploded 31, 192, 209
170, 178 – 9, 207 Buruma, Ian 111, 125
Barnes, Djuna 20, 27
Barnes, Julian 111, 199 Calvino, Italo 65, 69n7
Barthelme, Donald 13, 29 – 30, 109 Coetzee, J.M. 70n24, 74, 78, 101,
Barthes, Roland 21, 69n5, 92n11, 110
120, 169, 180n9, 183, 202n3 Cohen, Leonard 122, 186, 188
Bateman, John A. 37 – 9 collage: in architecture 17; in film 1,
Baudrillard, Jean 100, 104, 108, 17 – 18, 161; future of 210; history
119 – 20, 128n20, 177 of 10, 13 – 18, 27 – 34; in music
Beckett, Samuel 80 – 1, 84, 92n7, 121, 17; poetics of 10 – 13, 18 – 22, 27;
207 politics of 22 – 7, 82, 87 – 90, 206 – 7,
Benjamin, Walter 75, 88, 117 209; in visual arts 1, 7n1, 10 – 17,
Berlant, Lauren 5, 6, 8n6, 145, 147, 21 – 6
151, 198, 201, 207 conceptual writing 210n2
Betancourt, Michael 27, 209 Coover, Robert 30, 132
Białoszewski, Miron 40n12, 60 Cornell, Joseph 16, 18, 23, 29, 189
Birkerts, Sven 5 Coupland, Douglas 33 – 4
Bolter, Jay David 36, 137, 201 Cran, Rona 7n2, 15, 16, 18, 21, 24,
Boon, Marcus 210 29, 39n7, 39n9, 60
Bouyeri, Mohammed 101, 109 – 15, crisis 3, 63 – 8, 90, 118 – 26, 179,
123 – 5 198 – 201, 207, 210; 9/11 attacks
Index 213
4, 35, 85, 121, 125, 143; and Gibbons, Alison 7, 27, 34 – 7, 40n18,
capitalism 2, 5, 150 – 1, 177 – 8; 104, 128n19, 128n23, 134, 137,
“crisis art” 4; “crisis novel” 7n5; 162, 164, 166, 167, 170, 171 – 2,
of the human 145 – 52; of identity/ 180n7, 181n21
self 148 – 9, 170 – 8, 199 – 200; of Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 150,
the novel 3 – 4, 83 – 6; political 188, 196, 208
4, 85, 124 – 6; psychological 6, Gogh, Theo van 101, 109 – 14, 122,
171, 195 – 7; of reading 128n27; 123 – 5
rhetoric of 5 Gogh, Vincent van 101, 108,
Cubism 10, 13 – 14, 22, 33, 39n2, 109 – 14, 196
39n3 Goldsmith, Kenneth 39n8, 210n2
Cushman, Philip 177 Grusin, Richard 36, 137, 209
cut-up 24, 30 – 3, 88, 161 – 2 Gysin, Brion 24, 30, 32
Dadaism 1, 4, 14 – 15, 23, 35, 39n2 Hall, Steven 181n23, 209

D’Agata, John 75, 77, 87, 88 Hammond, Adam 209
Danielewski, Mark Z. 35, 127n9, 137 Hassan, Robert 92n17, 150 – 1
Dickinson, Emily 51, 55, 78, 93n20, 117 Hayles, N. Katherine 143, 146 – 7,
digital literature see electronic 149, 152
literature Heartfield, John 14, 25
Duchamp, Marcel 15, 26, 133 Higgins, Scarlett 7n2, 10, 29, 39n4,
Dyer, Geoff 75, 86, 92n5 39n8
Dylan, Bob 16, 17 Hirsi Ali, Ayaan 101, 110, 113
Hollahan, Eugene 207
electronic literature 5, 131, 209, 210 Home, Stewart 209
Elias, Camelia 49 Hopkins, Budd 1, 10
Eliot, T.S. 7n2, 7n3, 23, 25, 27, 30, Horton, Emily 7n5
53, 188, 191; The Waste Land Huntington, Samuel P. 124 – 5
19, 27 – 8, 30, 40n14, 49, 60, 79,
192, 208 Ishiguro, Kazuo 122, 197 – 8
Ernst, Max 10, 14, 16, 18, 27, 60 Iyer, Lars 67, 90
Farrell, Stephen 133, 137, 141 Janosik, Ellen Hastings 171, 195, 197
Federman, Raymond 35, 100, Johns, Jasper 16, 29
104, 132 Johnson, B.S. 32, 33, 35, 40n18, 192
flarf see found poetry Joyce, James 20, 27, 53, 66, 88
Foer, Jonathan Safran 35, 40n18,
115 – 16, 137, 209 Karpowicz, Agnieszka 11 – 13, 15, 16,
Foster, Hal 13 23, 25, 39n1, 40n12, 60
Foucault, Michel 5, 19, 151 Keskinen, Mikko 162, 169, 175, 179,
found poetry 23 181n15, 181n16
fragmentation 2, 8n5, 11 – 15, 19 – 30, Kooning, Willem de 16, 26, 29,
53 – 4, 76, 86 – 9, 92n14, 93n21, 67 – 8
104 – 6, 114 – 15, 161 – 4, 179, Kosuth, Joseph 33, 162
185 – 9, 193 – 5, 206 – 7, 210 Krauss, Rosalind 21 – 2, 170, 202n3
Frank, Joseph 19 – 20 Kress, Gunther 34, 126n2
Frelik, Paweł 132, 133, 142, 143
Futurism 14, 209 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets 7n3,
40n13
Gass, William H., Willie Masters’ Lavender-Smith, Evan 68
Lonesome Wife 35, 135, 141 Leeuwen, Theo van 126n2, 127n9
Gavron, Jeremy 209 Lethem, Jonathan 76, 78, 87, 92n18
Gergen, Kenneth J. 170, 176 Lippard, Lucy 25 – 6
214 Index
Mallarmé, Stéphane 28, 64, 68 102 – 8, 118 – 20, 126, 206, 208;
Man, Paul de 5 Theories of Forgetting 100, 118,
Mann, William C. 7, 34, 37 – 8 121, 128n19, 128n23
Marclay, Christian 1, 18
Markson, David 2, 3, 6, 36, 47 – 8, 75, Pálfi, György 1, 18
77, 78, 82, 84, 90, 92n6, 92n10, Palleau-Papin, Françoise 47, 49, 50,
93n20, 112, 185 – 6, 205 – 8; The 65, 69nn5 – 7
Last Novel 48 – 50, 52, 54, 56, 60, Paolozzi, Eduardo 14, 33, 161, 209
61 – 5, 67, 69n2; Reader’s Block parataxis 19, 22, 28, 31, 52 – 61,
47, 49 – 51, 61 – 2, 65 – 6, 83; This Is 70n11, 76 – 7, 80, 116, 127n12,
Not a Novel 38, 47 – 50, 52, 57 – 8, 140, 143, 189, 193 – 4, 195
61 – 70, 79, 82, 84; Vanishing Point Pavić, Milorad 11, 20, 103
47 – 50, 52, 54 – 6, 61 – 3, 65, 67, Perloff, Marjorie 11 – 13, 18 – 19,
70n12, 85; Wittgenstein’s Mistress 40n11, 52, 91n3, 205, 210
2, 47, 69n6, 202n13 Phillips, Tom 32, 103, 160, 161
Maso, Carole 70n23, 209 photomontage 14, 15, 25, 39n2
Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. 37 – 8 Picasso, Pablo 1, 7n1, 10, 13, 15, 16,
McLuhan, Marshall 26 – 7, 179 21, 24, 63, 66 – 7, 70n21, 167
Mitchell, David 140 plagiarism 11, 76, 78, 88; see also
montage 12 – 13, 15, 17, 27, 33, 75, appropriation
210 Poggi, Christina 39n3
Morrison, Blake 74, 84, 93n21, 208 Porter, Max 209 – 10
mosaic 11 – 13, 30, 89, 93n22 postmodernism 3, 16, 17, 35, 39n3,
Motherwell, Robert 13, 16, 29, 109 93n19, 100
multimodality 1 – 2, 3, 7, 34 – 40, 82, Pound, Ezra 7n3, 25, 27–9, 56, 62, 208
99 – 100, 104 – 6, 126n2, 127n9, Pressman, Jessica 209
128n27, 132 – 7, 140 – 2, 166 – 7,
172 – 4, 179, 206, 208 – 9 Rauschenberg, Robert 2, 16, 29, 40n16
Rawle, Graham 2, 159, 179n1,
Nelson, Maggie 2, 4, 183; The 179n2; Woman’s World 2, 7n2,
Argonauts 183, 184, 188, 202n2; 91n2, 159 – 81, 206, 207
Bluets 2, 4, 68, 183 – 90, 194, ready-made see appropriation
196 – 7, 200 – 2, 205 – 8 Rhetorical Structure Theory 37 – 9,
New York School 7n3, 25, 29 54 – 61, 77 – 9, 116, 127n12,
Nycz, Ryszard 10, 12, 21 139 – 40, 143, 189 – 90, 192 – 4
Robinson, Edward S. 7n2, 31, 32, 161–2
Offill, Jenny 2, 184 – 5; Dept. of
Speculation 4, 68, 184 – 5, 190 – 5, Saunders, George 210
197 – 202, 207, 208 Schapiro, Miriam 26
O’Hara, Frank 16, 29, 40n11, 60 Schmitt, Arnaud 49, 73, 79 – 80, 82,
Olsen, Andi 2, 99, 100, 102, 103, 86, 91, 92n8, 92n15, 93n19
118, 128n19; Sewing Shut My Eyes Schwitters, Kurt 7n1, 15, 16
2, 3, 6, 100, 102 – 8, 118 – 20, 126, Seely, Hart 23
206, 208 Seitz, William 12
Olsen, Lance 1, 2, 10, 11, 20, 40n18, Self, Will 4 – 5, 67, 90
49, 81, 82, 88, 93, 99 – 100, 126n7, Shields, David 2, 3, 4, 61, 73, 99, 205–9;
132, 134, 185, 202n8, 205, 208, How Literature Saved My Life 2, 6,
210; Dreamlives of Debris 2, 3, 6, 79–82, 86, 87, 89–93, 197; Nobody
101 – 2, 115 – 18, 120 – 2, 126 – 8, Hates Trump More Than Trump 4,
205 – 7; Head in Flames 6, 68, 209; Reality Hunger: A Manifesto 1,
99 – 101, 108 – 15, 117, 122 – 7, 208; 2, 6, 73 – 9, 83 – 93, 205 – 7
Sewing Shut My Eyes 2, 3, 6, 100, Shockley, Alan 52
Index 215
Sims, Laura 48, 52, 65, 69n8, 70 Vermeulen, Pieter 67, 84 – 5, 86,
Smith, Rachel Greenwald 3 90, 93n23
Śniecikowska, Beata 10, 11
Spencer, Sharon 19 – 20 Wallace, David Foster 2, 47, 68, 76,
Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy 35, 79, 104 – 6, 119
40n18, 63, 117, 180n8 Williams, William Carlos 28, 55,
Sukenick, Ronald 30, 88, 114, 132 186, 188
Surrealism 1, 10, 14, 23, 33 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 54, 69n7, 78,
92n9, 183, 185, 186, 188, 191,
Tabbi, Joseph 54, 69n7, 208 196, 208
Taylor, Brandon 17 Wood, James 74, 85, 194
Thompson, Sandra A. 7, 34, 37 – 8 Woolf, Virginia 20, 59, 63
Tomasula, Steve 1, 2, 4, 7n2, 35, Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg 164, 179,
40n18, 131 – 2, 206 – 8; The Book 180n9, 181n20, 181n23, 209
of Portraiture 2, 3, 6, 133, 140 – 54;
Once Human: Stories 132, 145; Yeats, W.B. 194, 208
TOC: A New-Media Novel 131,
210; VAS: An Opera in Flatland 3, Žižek, Slavoj 4, 115
6, 132 – 40, 145 – 53, 205 – 9 Zucker, Rachel 68

DRAG - Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English

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Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English offers an engaging,

ambitious, and comprehensive survey of American and British collage lit-

This book is a valuable and original contribution to the fields of twenty-

In Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English, Wojciech Dra˛g

Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English: Art of Crisis

Wojciech Drąg (PhD) is an assistant professor at the Institute of English

Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change

Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English

Patrick McGrath and his Worlds

The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction

Death-Facing Ecology in Contemporary British and North American

Poetry and the Question of Modernity

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.

Introduction: Madly in Love With Crisis:

1 Theory and Practice of Collage 10

2 “Why Is Author So Damnably Tired?”:

3 Manifestos for “Reality-Based” Art: David Shields’s

4 It’s the End of the World as We Know It: Lance Olsen’s

5 When We Were Human: Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An

6 I’m Every Wo/man, Guaranteed One Hundred Per Cent

7 Diaries of Bad Years: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and

Conclusion: Collage Is Here to Stay 205

4.1 Lance Olsen and Andi Olsen, “Telegenesicide” (in Lance

I must begin by expressing my gratitude to the authorities of the Depart-

BP The Book of Portraiture

Although it emerged over a century ago, collage continues to be a reso-

Although collage is widely regarded as an invention of Cubist paint-

The notion of collage can be used literally or it can be used meta-

Collage involves suppression of the ordering signs that would specify

In a similar vein, Perloff sees the principle of collage as based on the

If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something

Instead of explicitly naming its concerns by using mimetic means, col-

The process of assembling a collage . . . mirrors the consumer wan-

Literary Collages in the Twentieth Century

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Do you love me? – But i exploded in cosmic laughter – Old acquaint-

In his book-length reassessment of Burroughs and his legacy Shift Lin-

1. Unusual textual layouts and page design.

In the collage texts to be discussed in the following parts of this book,

Rhetorical Structure Theory

Employees are urged to complete new beneficiary designation forms

Joint comes closest to the quintessentially collage-like relationship of jux-

Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

As is already more than self-evident.

Self-evident enough to scarcely need Writer’s say-so.

The collage-like character of the series is also signalled in a list of possible

1. Dizzy Dean died of a heart attack (190).

The first passage is an example of the most numerous category con-

Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed.

June 16, 1904.

Stephen Dedalus has not had a bath since October 1903.

In the six consecutive passages, Markson juxtaposes the title of a sixteenth-

I have come to take away their gold.

A real good guy.

In both cases the juxtaposed quotations have a clear common denomina-

Jan van Eyck died in Bruges in 1441.

Petrus Christus died in Bruges in 1472 or 1473.

Hans Memling died in Bruges in 1494.

Gerard David died in Bruges in 1523.

Despite the chronological order, the excerpt retains a paratactic quality

Gluck’s face was pitted from smallpox.

Dante quotes The Consolation of Philosophy.

1 Theory and Practice of Collage 10

Conclusion: Collage Is Here to Stay 205