Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
OF NARRATIVE
LITERATURE
Medialities Matter
Jørgen Bruhn
The Intermediality of Narrative Literature
Jørgen Bruhn
The Intermediality of
Narrative Literature
Medialities Matter
Jørgen Bruhn
Department of Film and Literature
Linnæus University
Växjö, Sweden
Many debts have been incurred during my work on this book. The book
is, in many ways, the product of the support of the Faculty of Arts and
Humanities, Linnæus University in Växjö. My department has not only
given me the opportunity to pursue my research and teaching interests
but also granted me two sabbaticals, in 2012 and 2014, spent in the
USA. These sabbaticals were generously funded and supported respec-
tively by STINT (Stiftelsen för internationalisering av högre utbildning
och forskning) and by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Students, in particular in Växjö but also at Williams College,
Massachusetts, and Aarhus University, have tested the method demon-
strated in this book, mostly (!) with good humor and energy, and there-
fore have provided me with critical insights and new adjustments to my
method.
Friends and colleagues in Lund, Växjö, Aarhus, and Kristiansand have
stimulated and constructively criticized my thoughts and ideas; special
gratitude goes out not only to attendees of the research seminar in Växjö
(Högre Seminariet) but also to my friends and colleagues in more special-
ized working groups: the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal stud-
ies at Linnæus University, the Literature between Media group at Aarhus
University, and the newly established Nordic Network of Intermedial
Studies of Literature.
Tore Rye Andersen (Aarhus University) provided me with important
background information on Jennifer Egan’s work, and Lars Elleström
(Linnæus University), Anne Gjelsvik (Norwegian University of Science
and Technology in Trondheim), Heidi Hart (Duke University), and
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 Introduction 1
7 Afterthoughts 123
References 127
Index 131
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In a related, recent article, which also takes as its starting point the
contemporary mixedness of medialities in the arts and in mass media,
German media theorist and film scholar Jens Schröter (2010) frames
the current situation via the well-known dichotomy of a Laocoonism or
medium specificity position, represented by art critic Clement Greenberg,
versus a Gesamtkunstwerk tradition, represented by artist and theoreti-
cian Dick Higgins. Higgins (1997) argued that medium-specific art forms
were signs of old-fashioned authoritarian societies: “intermedia” was, for
Higgins, the only artistic answer to the democratic politics and culture of
contemporary Western societies. This dichotomy constitutes, according
to Schröter, a “politics of intermediality” in twentieth-century thought.
Schröter quotes Higgins’ ideological opponent Clement Greenberg who
found that “intermedia” should definitely be avoided, and as late as 1981,
Greenberg, quoted by Schröter, stated: “What’s ominous is that the decline
of taste now, for the first time, threatens to overtake art itself.” Greenberg
continued, “I see ‘intermedia’ and the permissiveness that goes with it as
symptom of this. […] Good art can come from anywhere, but it hasn’t
yet come from intermedia or anything like it” (Greenberg 1981, quoted
in Schröter 2010, 110; for a more substantial version of his position, see
Greenberg 1993). For Greenberg, then, the mixing of media tends to
limit art’s ability to go against the grain of commercialism and kitsch; it
is art’s capitulation to “capitalist spectacle culture” (Schröter 2010, 112).
One might object that Higgins and Greenberg are discussing different
phenomena: The art critic Greenberg was interested in (and even worried
about) the future of the arts, whereas Higgins himself was an artist and
editor who created performance art and published works in the avant-
garde tradition. Nevertheless, Schröter’s examination clarifies that medial
mixedness is a central aspect of modern and postmodern art and criti-
cal thinking, here represented by Greenberg and Higgins. Furthermore,
and equally importantly, Schröter demonstrates the ideological implica-
tions of the mixing of media.1 So, according to these two commentators
who represent a much larger tendency, the development of contemporary,
digital medialities—as well as the supposedly growing influence of mass
media—necessitates a discipline to study this intermediality in an appropri-
ate way. However, the utopian hopes of the new media studies from 20
years ago have largely been replaced by a political skepticism toward the
underlying, ever-present, and global consumerism and surveillance aspects
of the Internet, meaning that the Internet has, in the words of one noted
commentator, turned out to be just another medium: “What was once a
4 J. BRUHN
that this has been a gradual process, and that literature has always been
under the influence of other medialities, even well before the digital era.
Literary theory and comparative literature have asked important ques-
tions related to the interrelationships between literature and medialities,
and renowned literature research disciplines have focused upon creative
pairs such as word and music studies, word and image studies—and these
have also resulted in a number of interdisciplinary fora all over the Western
world and in Latin America. Literary theory and comparative literature
have asked how we can describe literature in terms of medial material-
ity and medial form(s). They have described at least parts of the relation
between literature and the other arts, including music, visual arts, film,
theater, and other communication medialities, and they have discussed
the appropriate analytical and theoretical tools for describing the relations
between literature and other arts or medialities.
Sophisticated theoretical thinking on these questions has been devel-
oped, discussed, and published since at least the 1950s, when a disci-
pline called interart studies, which later would become intermediality
studies, began having a growing influence in many Western countries’
teaching and research (see Clüver 2007). But even if brilliant research
is being and has been published, and important teaching is being con-
ducted almost all over the (at least Western) world, intermediality is
still largely invisible to the general field of literary theory and thus also
to students of literature, as well as the “general reader.” A brief look at
some of the better-known Anglophone2 introductions to literary theory,
which are at the same time very often entrances for students trying to
find their way into analyzing literature, illustrates this curious lack. Terry
Eagleton’s widely read Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983, reprinted
several times), for instance, discusses “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics,
Reception Theory,” “Structuralism and Semiotics,” “Post-structuralism,”
and “Psychoanalysis.”
The same usual suspects are basically covered by Frank Lentricchia and
Thomas McLaughlin in Critical Terms for Literary Study from 1990 (spec-
ifying terms like gender, race, and cultural studies); the same is the case
with Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan’s Literary Theory: An Anthology (from
1998 with reprints), where “Colonial, Post-colonial, and Transnational
Studies,” as well as “Ethnic Literary and Cultural Studies, Critical Race
Theory,” are among the newer chapters. There is, however, basically noth-
ing about interart or intermediality perspectives in any of these works.3
Curiously, these influential overviews of literary theory have ignored and
6 J. BRUHN
still tend to overlook the lively—and for literary studies very useful—
theoretical and methodological field of intermediality or interart studies.
Only in 2015 was I able to find a chapter on “Interartistic Comparison”
in César Domínguez, Haun Saussy, and Darío Villanueva’s Introducing
Comparative Literature, where the mediality and interart perspectives
receive a useful historical introduction, even if the discussion of contem-
porary research is highly selective.4
My own book is born, apart from the didactic problems described
above, from a wish to place the mediality aspects of literature and inter-
mediality studies in a stronger position in the broad area of literary theory
and literary analysis. I do so, not so much by offering a deeper theoreti-
cal critique of other theoretical positions (which could be the subject of
another study), but rather by demonstrating in specific case studies how
mediality analysis is able to provide valuable interpretations of literary
texts. Furthermore, I aim to show that it is possible to construct a work-
ing model for literary analysis from the heterogenous, and often inter-
nally divergent, field of intermediality studies. In the division between
the research discussing and slowly establishing the basic concepts of the
field on the one hand, and the rich harvest of detailed case studies of
isolated phenomena or concepts on the other, I want to place myself in
the middle. I intend to do that by offering a model that is based on con-
temporary, updated theoretical positions of intermediality studies, while
at the same time using this model to exemplify the usefulness in specific
analyses that eventually will add up to a methodology for analyzing nar-
rative texts.
I have in mind three major groups of readers for my book: First of all,
teachers of literature at colleges and universities who seek access to didac-
tic tools and useful terminology capable of opening up often well-known
or new narrative texts by way of a method that is relatively simple while all
the same also effective and productive. Second, my book can be read by
college or university students looking for inspiration for bridging the gap
between theories of media or intermediality on the one hand, and meth-
ods of literary analysis on the other. The third target group comprises
researchers interested in the four case studies specifically, or in interme-
diality studies in more general terms, who may benefit from reading the
texts utilizing my method, since I have not attempted to find cases where
my method is easily applicable (the conventional approach in too many
works of didactic orientation), but rather texts that fascinate me as liter-
ary works in themselves, and literary texts that need to be read in new
INTRODUCTION 7
and productive ways. I hope, in other words, not only to present didactic
examples but also to contribute to the critical discussion concerning the
texts I have chosen.
sis without having to sketch for the reader unknown and therefore com-
plicated historical contexts. In terms of language, I wanted in this study
to work with texts that needed no (further) translation. That means, that
even though the question of mediality in narrative texts goes all the way
back to Homer’s sophisticated ekphrastic description of Achilles’ shield
in the eighteenth book of the Iliad, and could definitely also be found
in eighteenth-century Asian literature or in European medial romances,
I have never the less chosen to work with relatively modern Anglophone
texts, because my aim is analytical rather than historical.
Nevertheless, my four chosen texts exhibit a number of crucial differ-
ences, while also being examples of the fact that all narrative texts seem
to be utterly impregnated with the representation and consequently the
thematization of medialities.
My first test case discusses a short story written by a much studied and
highly admired (and debated) author, whose texts have been only sporadi-
cally discussed from an intermedial point of view. In analyzing Vladimir
Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta,” I demonstrate how the surface features of
an apparently Proustian literary poetic is in fact hiding a very strong reli-
ance on not only painting but also cinema and music, which turn out to
be the most efficient gateways for the protagonist to get in touch with
lost time.
After analyzing the highly refined and complex psychological narrative
symbolism of Nabokov, I turn to two texts that, in very different ways, are
often regarded as being directly opposed to the rich and sophisticated style
of Nabokov, namely the so-called Dirty Realism of Raymond Carver and
Tobias Wolff. However, the two short stories that I discuss differ widely
from each other in both form and content, but—perhaps surprisingly—
both texts share a profound and deeply troubled relation to mediation and
medialities that I try to pull forth from underneath their surface realism.
“Dirty realism” turns out, in my reading at least, to depend strongly on
extra-literary medial reflections, which partly go against their explicit aim
of describing a real and recognizable world in the simplest possible, acces-
sible form.
With my final case study, I move forward in time to our immediate and
most proximate past. Compared with Nabokov’s, Carver’s, and Wolff’s
texts, Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad poses new chal-
lenges to my attempt to conduct relatively comprehensive mediality analy-
ses of narrative literature. First of all, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a
novel, which makes it problematic to establish a more or less exhaustive
INTRODUCTION 9
The method, in short, consists of three steps: first, searching for and
then writing a register of medial presences; second, structuring this regis-
ter into a meaningful mediality relation; and third, interpreting the pos-
sible causes, often relating to text-external discussions, behind the medial
presence and relations.
NOTES
1. For an exemplification of these trends in contemporary Scandinavian litera-
ture, see Bruhn 2014.
2. It seems to be slightly different in at least the German context, according to
Werner Wolf’s brief remarks in Wolf 2008, 16.
3. We find a comparable if not identical situation in film studies, according to
Agnès Pethő: “[M]ost mainstream theoretical writings, (almost all the Film
Studies or Film Analysis handbooks available, for instance) treat film as a
monomedial entity, without taking into account its intermedial aspects even
in newer works which deal with cinema’s transition from the analogue to the
digital” (2011, 46).
4. Domínguez et al. (2015, 107–124), followed by a chapter on the technol-
ogy of literature. This question—the materiality and technology of media—
has a history of its own, going back to, for instance, Walter Benjamin’s
(2008) reflections concerning the ontological and social status of the art
work in the “age of mechanical reproduction.”
REFERENCES
Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Trans. J. A. Underwood. London: Penguin.
Bruhn, Jørgen. 2014. Post-medium literature? Two examples of contemporary
Scandinavian “literature”. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica 5(1):
79–94.
Clüver, C. 2007. Intermediality and interart studies. In Changing borders:
Contemporary positions in intermediality, ed. J. Arvidson, M. Askander,
J. Bruhn, and H. Führer, 19–38. Lund: Intermedia Studies Press.
Domínguez, César, Haun Saussy, and Darío Villanueva. 2015. Introducing com-
parative literature: New trends and applications. New York: Routledge.
Galloway, Alexander R. 2012. The interface effect. London: Polity.
Greenberg, Clement. 1981. Intermedia. Arts Magazine 56(2): 92–93.
Greenberg, Clement. 1993 [1960]. Modernist painting. In The collected essays and
criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a vengeance: 1957–1969, ed. Clement
Greenberg, 85–94. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
INTRODUCTION 11
Abstract In the first, and longest, part of this chapter I offer an introduc-
tion to the field of intermediality studies, as well as major concepts in the
field such as the concepts of medium/media and mediality/medialities;
basic, technical, and qualified artistic medialities; and media combination
and media transformation. Furthermore, I describe some of the crucial
terms necessary for conducting a mediality analysis of narrative litera-
ture. I even delimit my study toward other media-sensitive approaches to
literatur.
In the second and shorter part of the chapter, I refer to basic analytical
ideas behind my interpretation of literary texts (the use of case studies, the
question of medialities as motif, and other questions), and finally describe
my three-step model of mediality analysis, consisting of a register, a sug-
gested structure, and a contextualization.
Kress, and Theo van Leuwen. Friedrich Kittler and other philosophically
inclined scholars conduct a media history with intermedial aspects that
have been important among philosophers and literary scholars. However,
even though I am in certain ways inspired by all these forerunners, and in
contrast to these approaches that medially speaking aim very broadly, in
this book I am first of all interested in analyzing and interpreting aesthetic
phenomena, and even more specifically, I take a closer look at narrative
literary texts from an intermedial point of view.
The ideas inherent in the branch of intermediality studies with which I
am most familiar, and to which I feel the strongest intellectual ties, have
a long history. It emerges from an interest in inter-aesthetic phenomena
and analytical methods to which I will return below. The term intermedi-
ality gains in popularity and influence despite the sometimes disconcerting
confusion of whether intermediality is an object of study, a method of study,
or a theory of a category of objects—a distinction that I want to maintain
throughout this work. This confusion notwithstanding, the word “inter-
mediality” is still used more or less synonymously with inter-aesthetic
research or “interart” studies. As compared to interart studies, the term
intermediality designates a broader aesthetic and technological field of
investigation, instead of focusing only on the conventional arts (music,
the arts, literature), thus opening the investigation to other contemporary
aesthetic forms like performance art, digital poetry, or non-aesthetic medi-
alities such as advertising, political campaigns, or mass media content. A
very useful and short overview of the field is presented by Clüver (2007),
but Rajewsky (2002) and Elleström (2010) also offer helpful descriptions
of the field.
Intermediality is undoubtedly a more suitable term to cover the field
than interart, but I nevertheless have reservations concerning the word.
Intermediality seems to imply that the object of study is relations “between”
(inter) media or medialities: The prefix “inter” restricts the object of study
to a specific, limited group of texts, as opposed to the “normal,” “pure,”
or “monomedial” phenomena; that is, texts that do not move between
medialities or cross any mediality borders. Consequently, the term seems
to apply to a relationship between (inter) texts or medialities, rather than
emphasizing that the merging of media occurs within a single medium or
a single artifact. In other words, the term intermediality, probably unin-
tendedly, tends to include extraneous conceptual ideas on intermediality
that I wish to avoid.
WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 15
That is, the very notion of a medium and of mediation already entails some
mixture of sensory, perceptual and semiotic elements. There are no purely
auditory, tactile or olfactory media either. However, this conclusion does
not lead to the impossibility of distinguishing one medium from another.
What it makes possible is a more precise differentiation of mixtures. If all
media are mixed media, they are not all mixed in the same way, with the
same proportions of elements. (Mitchell 2005, 260)
they can yield in my own analyses, as well as their potential for being effec-
tive tools in mediality analysis of narrative texts in general.
As previously mentioned, I understand mediality as an abstract cate-
gory, whereas medialities are specified clusters of communicative forms.
This is seen in relation to the fact that human beings exist in a fundamen-
tally mediating and communicating relationship with the world and other
human beings. I refer to everyday and commonsensical understandings of
mediation and mediality as something that we find between two or more
instances. Furthermore, I want to posit from the outset that a mediality
is basically something that mediates between a sender and a receiver in
the rudimentary basic communication model first suggested by Claude
Shannon, and further developed by, among others, Roman Jakobson,
Tzvetan Todorov, Stuart Hall, and recently Lars Elleström into models
for linguistic, aesthetic, or cultural analysis.2 Accordingly, I take as a start-
ing point the broad definition of Bohn, Müller, and Ruppert, who some
years ago defined what I call mediality as “that which mediates for and
between humans a (meaningful) sign (or combination of signs) with the
aid of suitable transmitters across temporal and/or spatial distances.”3
This definition opens up an immense field of investigations of communi-
cative actions, and it is exactly this broad perspective that will prove useful
in my analysis.
Speaking in (metaphorically) spatial terms, I follow earlier suggestions
to “install” mediality at two specific passages or “places” in the basic com-
munication model; namely, between producer and message and between
message and receiver, which may be represented in a basic diagram:
and modalities. Elleström (2010; see also Elleström 2014) has used the
term media instead of my preferred mediality/medialities, and in my ref-
erences to his work below, I retain his own term, while often substituting
it with mediality/medialities in my own argumentation. Elleström com-
bined, as mentioned above, two often overlapping theoretical frameworks.
On the one hand, he tried to combine the intermediality and interart
research tradition (which has traditionally been interested in dealing with
aesthetic artifacts), and on the other hand, the so-called multimodality or
social semiotics tradition (traditionally more focused on communication
outside the aesthetic realm). These are two traditions that, often with-
out really acknowledging the respective achievements of the other, work
from more or less the same assumptions; namely, that all communicative
action takes place by way of devices that mix media (often understood as
communicative channels or art forms) or modalities (often understood as
more basic aspects of communicative action, like sound, images or other
sensual signs). By means of Elleström’s productive cross-fertilization of
intermediality studies and multimodality/social semiotics, it becomes pos-
sible to construct an understanding of how all media are in reality modally
mixed—and consequently that there is no such thing as a monomedial or
“monomodal” (two terms used more or less synonymously in this book)
communicative situation or media product.5
Elleström’s model attempts to avoid some of the confusing discussions
surrounding the different concepts of medium, where a Picasso painting,
a television set, and the genre of opera may all in given contexts exemplify
“medium.” Instead, he defined any medium by way of a three-dimensional
model consisting of a basic, a qualified, and a technical media dimen-
sion. The main idea is that what we normally call a medium, a mediality,
or an art form in actual fact needs to be broken down into three inter-
related dimensions that are very often confused and conflated. In every
specific media product—that is, anything being “sent” between the sender
and the receiver positions of the communication model that I adopt—
Elleström distinguished between this media product’s three dimensions:
“basic media,” “qualified media,” and “technical media.” It is easy to mis-
take these three terms as mediality types, but any specific media product in
itself has these three media dimensions.
The basic media dimension may be exemplified by written words, mov-
ing images, or rhythmic sound patterns, and these particular basic media
dimensions may, under certain conditions, be part of qualified media such
as narrative written literature, a newspaper article, a documentary film, or
20 J. BRUHN
symphonic music. Thus, qualified media in the arts are more or less syn-
onymous with art forms. Cinema, written narrative literature, and sculp-
ture, for instance, are examples of qualified media, but not all qualified
media are aesthetic. Qualified media outside the arts could be exemplified
by the verbal language of the sports page in a newspaper, by advertising
jingles, or by non-aesthetic verbal language in legal prose. The third media
dimension, technical media, is the material-technological projection sur-
face, which makes qualified media perceptible in the first place; say, a TV
screen, a piece of paper, or a mobile phone interface. In short, technical
media display basic or qualified media. This division of all media products
into three media dimensions makes it possible to include anything from
the mobile phone interface to a Renaissance poem into the investigation
of medialities (the first being a technical medium, the second an example
of the qualified medium of written literature)—but also makes it possible
to differentiate among them in analytical terms.
Elleström avoided questions of the essence of certain medialities and
focused instead upon the common features of all medialities. By estab-
lishing a set of common traits of all media, Elleström’s model offered
new understandings of the art forms that we think we are familiar with
already. Elleström defined medialities bottom-up instead of top-down,
and instead of first defining each mediality and then defining how it may
mix with other medialities, his concepts showed that all medialities share
a limited number of traits that are combined in numerous constellations,
exactly as in Mitchell’s idea concerning mixed media. Only after having
established these traits does it become meaningful to describe the singular
forms known as art forms or medialities.
The main thrust of Elleström’s model is the idea that every medial-
ity consists of basic types of elements (called modalities) shared by other
medialities. For my methodological and analytical purposes in this book,
it is not necessary to discuss in detail Elleström’s entire model; suffice to
say that all basic media, which may be turned into, for instance, artistic
media as a form of qualified media, consist of a specific constellation of
four different modalities—a material, a sensorial, a spatio-temporal, and a
semiotic modality. The idea is that all conceivable media products are the
result of a particular and specific constellation of these four modalities.6
Consequently, multimodality is a characteristic of any conceivable text
in any conceivable mediality. The idea that all texts are mixed is, of course,
banal when dealing with openly mixed medialities such as the mixture
of sound, image, words, and music in a feature film, or the pictures and
WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 21
words in a picture book. The point is that the mixed character of texts is
also a fact in texts that have traditionally been considered monomedial.
Considering Elleström’s model and Mitchell’s well-known ideas about
mixed media, it becomes clear that the pure, distinct mediality is an his-
torical as well as an ontological illusion. Such a pure mediality has never
existed, and it even appears to be a logical impossibility. This may be the
meaning of Mitchell’s oft-quoted claim that “all media are mixed media,”
and we can now fully appreciate another Mitchell explanation about the
impossibility of pure media: “[T]he attempt to grasp the unitary, homo-
geneous essences of painting, photography, sculpture, poetry, etc., is the
real aberration.” This is why, Mitchell continued, the conception of purity
of media “is both impossible and utopian” (Mitchell 1994, 107, 96). The
model proposed here leads to a claim that, for instance, literature always
contains “musical” traces (to be precise, modalities typical of what we nor-
mally identify as the qualified mediality often referred to as “music”), in
the form of, for example, rhythmic structure, music terminology, or rep-
resentations of musical media products in text—or by the almost hidden
but perceptible inner tension between literature and music. In addition,
despite the fact that we tend to forget it—or suppress it because of philo-
sophical notions of the incorporeality of language—all literary texts have a
highly specific visual element attached to them, simply by the selections of
particular typefaces and page layouts.
To exemplify the usefulness of my chosen terminology, let’s take a look
at a specific novel, such as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad,
regarding which I will offer an analysis as the final chapter in my book.
Egan’s book was first published in 2010, but my copy is a 2011 paper-
back version from Anchor Books. According to Elleström’s systematiza-
tion, what we would normally simply call a novel by definition comprises
three interconnected mediality dimensions. The physical object made up
of printed pages held together by a cover is the book or technical medium.
The technical medium allows the qualified medium, which in this case
may be defined as narrative, written literature, to emerge. The qualified
medium of “narrative prose fiction” is an aestheticized version of the third
dimension of Egan’s novel, namely a basic medium, in this case, the writ-
ing. Writing appears in a number of different qualified media: aesthetic
(like literature), or non-aesthetic (for instance, in journalistic writing), or
in the written instructions of how to assemble an IKEA bed; but in this
particular case, writing is part of a literary work.
22 J. BRUHN
long reign of print made it easy for literary criticism to ignore the speci-
ficities of the codex book when discussing literary texts. With significant
exceptions, print literature was widely regarded as not having a body, only a
speaking mind. […] Rather, digital media have given us an opportunity we
have not had for the last several hundred years: the chance to see print with
new eyes, and with it, the possibility of understanding how deeply literary
theory and criticism have been imbued with assumptions specific to print.
(Hayles, quoted in Rye Andersen 2015, 82)
Her ideas relate closely to the work of Jerome J. McGann, who stressed,
early on, the need for a widened approach to textual studies, specifying
that
WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 23
[w]e must turn our attention to much more than the formal and linguistic
features of poems and other imaginative fictions. We must attend to textual
materials which are not regularly studied by those interested in ‘poetry’: to
typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format, and all those textual phenom-
ena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to ‘poetry’ or ‘the text as such’.
(McGann 1991, 13)
This is what Tore Rye Andersen, with a nice metaphor, calls Hayles’
attempt to “address literature’s hitherto neglected body language,” mean-
ing that a media-oriented analysis needs to understand that literature is by
definition “embodied” (Rye Andersen 2015, 82). I see many similarities
between an intermedial approach to literature and Hayles and Pressman’s
idea of Comparative Textual Media, as well as McGann’s (1991, 15) idea
of “materialist hermeneutics,” but it is also clear that the connections
between, say, the approaches of intermedialists like Elleström, Wolf, or
Rajewsky need some readjustment in order to align with the more materi-
alist and technological approaches in the Hayles tradition. This is a ques-
tion I will return to in the final case study.
However, for the bulk of this book, I employ Elleström’s understand-
ing of media, which does not really take into account the possibilities of
combining his thoughts with a more materialist approach. I do not, for
instance, engage in a medial description of the material level of the literary
works as such, partly because my overall description on the levels above the
medial characteristics of narrative written literature is more or less identical
for my chosen texts; therefore, this would make such a description a banal
theoretical statement (even though an analysis of the materialities of any
given text offers a certain amount of information). However, the stronger
reason behind my neglect of the material mediality of my texts is that my
specific goal in this context is to read the texts as conventional literary
texts in order to demonstrate my specific mediality approach on the level
that Hayles would call the “content level.” In my three first case studies,
at least, I focus exclusively on the function of the technical and artistic
medialities represented.
It is therefore crucial to stress that the mediality dimension that I am
interested in works less on a directly material level (the publishing/distri-
bution form, the graphic design of the text, etc.) and more on a diegetic
level, inside the virtual world of the characters and on the symbolic level
of the constructed text. I analyze the presence and function of medialities
in order to establish a symbolic economy that runs parallel (and sometimes
24 J. BRUHN
and merging of art forms versus the tradition that delivers dire warnings
about the consequences of such mixing. Utilizing terms taken from widely
different periods, we can contrast the Roman writer Horace’s dictum
“ut pictura poesis” (“as in painting, so in poetry”) with G.E. Lessing’s
ideas from his essay on the monumental sculpture known as the Laocoon
Group, subtitled “On the limits of painting and poetry,” and dating back
to the mid-eighteenth century.8
The struggle of ut pictura poesis versus Laocoon can be traced back and
forth through cultural history and depending on the academic discipline
and historical context, the contrast can focus on art history, musicology, or
literature as key concepts. Needless to say, there are huge differences con-
cerning whether these aesthetic ideas are seen as descriptive or prescrip-
tive (or—often—both). Richard Wagner’s late Romantic and politically
utopian concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, for instance, is
a typical version of the ut pictura tradition. Several of the so-called histori-
cal avant-gardes in the beginning of the twentieth century, following Peter
Bürger’s (1984) categorization, believed that the mixing of art forms was
not only possible but even necessary in order to achieve the highest artistic
and political/spiritual goals. The numerous attempts at specifying the dif-
ferent art forms (sometimes called media), as well as limiting them to their
own formal investigation (e.g., in Clement Greenberg’s work), led to the
influential notion of “medium specificity,” which is a twentieth-century
version of Lessing’s idea of establishing strict formal and normative bor-
ders between the arts. This is, of course, the debate I briefly sketched
earlier in the Introduction.
Therefore, Lessing stands behind one of the problematic, but often
repeated, “truths” of aesthetic theory concerning the relations between
the arts: the claim that literature deals with and represents time, whereas
painting should stick to spatial, or non-temporal, presentation. Lessing’s
thinking has inspired numerous debates about so-called medium specific-
ity, either as descriptive formats or as normative dogma, from his own day
to the present, across the fields of literature, painting, and film.9
word) in current thinking. That does not, and I repeat this, mean that all
medialities are the same, nor that they are mixed in the same way. On the
contrary, there are unlimited numbers of different medialities (which we
may divide into relatively stable groups for pragmatic reasons, like, for
instance, different literary genres), but they all share a limited number
of basic components, and the medialities will change due to transforma-
tions in the aesthetic, societal, and technological fields (see Mitchell and
Hansen 2010).
For practical reasons, we may divide medial mixes into two different
groups. One large group has to do with the transformation of medialities
in a more or less pronounced temporal perspective. First there is a theater
play, then it is turned into a film; first there is an amusement park, then
there is a computer game; first there is a painting, then there is a poem
representing this painting, and so on. In this large corpus, introduced and
discussed in Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006; see also
Bruhn et al. 2013), the medial mix lies, so to speak, in the procedure;
certain aspects of the novel (typically parts of the plot, certain characters,
etc.) are transported into a film, but certain aspects of the adapted work
are necessarily left out. The process is transferring certain aspects while
also transforming everything into a new media product. Media transfor-
mations are, coining a neologism, transfermations.
In the other large group, we have the combination of otherwise distinct
medialities “inside” the same media product; in a pop song, the verbal,
sung text is combined with music; on a Facebook page, photographs are
combined with text and graphic design, and sometimes moving images
and sound; on a poster, images exist side by side with words, and so on. In
this group, aspects of different medialities exist synchronously, as opposed
to the temporal process of transformation in the first group.
From a practical point of view, it is helpful to divide all medialities into
“temporal transformation” or “synchronous combination,” but it should
not be forgotten that such a distinction is pragmatic rather than essen-
tial. Given the condition that all medialities are medially mixed, it follows
that all media products are in fact a combination of mediality aspects. In
addition, given the fundamental idea of intertextuality, which states that
all texts are versions of earlier texts, we may conclude that all medialities
are, basically, the result of a transformation. However, when employing a
mediality analysis on a literary text, one may look for either mixes (com-
bination) or traces (transformation), and thus the literary text, from a
mediality perspective, is comparable to the famous duck–rabbit illusion:
WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 27
However, in the vacuum of the collapsing and more and more unpopu-
lar “method” (in the following I loosely define method as interpretation
based on a set of repeatable analytic rules), the phenomenon of literary
theory, or simply “theory,” took the center place in the humanities for
decades. Theory dealt with sophisticated discussions and speculations on
language, consciousness, interpretation, and institutions. Seen from one
perspective, the pervasive and dominating activity of theory can indeed be
understood as an extended questioning of analytical methods and inter-
pretation, but one common trait in most of the different camps was the
reluctance to rely on any one repeatable analytical “method” that could be
applied to a large number of different texts.
Media theorist Asbjørn Grønstad found that theory is today in a state
of transition: “Although theory has not exactly disappeared from the
scene, it seems to have abandoned the logocentrism of its poststructuralist
incarnation, transmuting into a kind of neo-phenomenology defined […]
by notions of encounter, experience, or presentation” (Grønstad 2011,
36). So despite all the differences between theory and the present state
30 J. BRUHN
Mediality as Motif
I analyze narrative texts by focusing on “mediality”; consequently, it is
tempting to characterize my approach as a motif analysis (the motif being
the process of mediality and the function and literary meaning of mediali-
ties). This is, to a certain extent, correct. However, the way that I conduct
the motif analysis is somewhat different as compared to the approach of,
for instance, Werner Wolf, who analyzed the function of music in relation
to literature in his seminal The Musicalization of Fiction (1999). Wolf’s
method is first and foremost a categorization and a systematization of dif-
ferent types of relationships between narrative literature and music, where
the motif of music (and the structuring of literature according to musical
form) is the fundamental question. In this investigation, I intend to regard
literary texts as medially mixed per se (following my heteromedial point
of departure). I am therefore interested in teasing out the inevitable pres-
ence of medialities inside the apparently “pure” literary work, even when
the extra-literary medialities have not been indicated in the text. Instead of
proposing a general categorization of the presence and function of music
in literary works, which is the purpose in Wolf’s book, I am interested in
seeing how far a general model can allow for specific interpretations of
singular texts.
32 J. BRUHN
Beyond Comparison
With my method, however, I try to avoid creating yet another version in
the tradition of art comparisons (which has been most often the underly-
ing method of interart studies). I agree with the critique of W.J.T. Mitchell
(1994), who argued that to demonstrate comparisons, similarities, or con-
trasts between arts and media is not interesting effort in itself—all com-
parisons must be interpreted and contextualized in order to make sense,
and consequently to be interesting. I will, therefore, avoid aesthetic com-
parisons on a more or less coincidental background (in order to illuminate
or exemplify an aesthetic system of a given historical epoch or an author’s
style or psychological habitus). Instead, I attempt to establish the system-
atic presence and function of medialities “inside” the particular text. So
even when I propose a method for analyzing literary texts from a medi-
ality point of view, I only consider this method meaningful if I feel that
the result of analysis is “necessary and unavoidable” (Mitchell 1994, 88).
Or, to formulate it differently: My method is worthwhile only if what it
discloses could not have been demonstrated by other theoretical or meth-
odological means.
on the list of medialities collected in step 1. In step 2, the chaos of the list
is made into some kind of comprehensible and coherent structure.
In some cases, the structuring and later contextualization in steps 2 and
3 may follow one of the historical dichotomies presented above between,
for instance, medial mixedness and medial purity—or follow in the para-
gone tradition of competing to be the “best” art form according to either
the text as a whole or specific positions in the text. In other cases, the
abstract paragone discussion is concretized or “translated” into a hierarchy
of representatives of the various artistic disciplines (e.g., a painter vs. an
author), and sometimes the paragone may be detectable on the level of
style which may express a schism between a descriptive, “painterly” style
versus a more literary, discursive style.
These dichotomies, or whichever structure is produced in step 2, are
now ready to be contextualized into some larger context, which may fall
into numerous and very different categories. The structures of step 2 may
now, in the third step, be related to a biographical or psychological context
of the author, or may refer to more comprehensive aesthetic, theoretical,
or art-sociological patterns or formations. Of course, the requisite context
may also relate to a technological context, or an ideological formation in
the society in which the author lived, as well as the society represented in
the work. In some cases—for instance, in Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta”—
the text itself offers a comprehensive interpretative tool, which makes it
unnecessary to move outside the text in search of a contextual framework.
However, this is a rather unusual case, and in the three other case studies,
I suggest more “classic” contexts.
As will hopefully become clear in my exploratory case studies in the fol-
lowing chapters, my aim is to show that when you focus on registering and
ordering the medialities of a given text, your attention is almost invariably
drawn to larger contexts beyond the question of mediation or representa-
tion itself. My method of analyzing the mediality aspects of literary texts
is, in other words, a maieutic method; it focuses our attention toward a
certain “dimension” of the text, thereby offering access to aspects that
would otherwise have remained undetected.
tification level of primary or natural subject matter, which is, on the next
iconographic level, interpreted by including conventional cultural and his-
torical knowledge. On the third, iconological level, the meaning or content
of the work as a whole (including its basic form and its cultural refer-
ences) is formulated, often by focusing on the way that the individual
artist expresses certain theoretical and historical aims, which by the way
may not necessarily coincide with the personal beliefs of the artist. The
third level of the analysis “uncovers the hidden attitudinal contents that
generate the ‘need’ for a ‘form’ to give shape to an ‘idea’ in the first place”
(Holly 1984, 167). Panofsky himself was well aware that this apparent
step-by-step movement was more or less an illusion; he thought about
his model as “cyclical” rather than “sequential,”11 according to Michael
Ann Holly. Concerning the impossibility of understanding any isolated
phenomena, as well as my own drive to formulate a repeatable method, I
find Panofsky’s method close to my own interests. I am also well aware of
the illusory character of the linearity of the method, but I do find it to be
a very useful maieutic process—and, at least as importantly, I find that it
works as a tool for demonstrating to students of literature the usefulness
of focusing on medialities in literary analysis.
The remarks on Panofsky also have a bearing on the problem of how
to present the results of the analysis conducted via the three-step method.
Basically, this involves two questions: How much of the preparational
material of the analysis should be included in a presentation, and in what
sequence? The question of quantity is of paramount importance in the first
step of the analysis: In a student’s assignment as well as in a published
research article, it is very boring—and impossible for practical dimensional
reasons—to include all the mediality instances of a text when preparing
the register. In rare cases—and this will be exemplified in my analysis of
Tobias Wolff’s very short story “Bullet in the Brain”—it is actually fairly
manageable to reproduce a list of all the instances (of a certain relevance!)
of medialities in the text. However, normally, the writer of the analysis
could either add a list in an appendix to the running text or, as I typically
prefer to do, reproduce and analyze a fragment of the entire text that can
exemplify the larger trend of the short story or novel in question. More
than once, and also in the writing of this book, I have found it helpful to
reproduce the presence of medialities by analyzing either the first page or
the first few sections of a text, but the different choices of representation
in my book are meant to illustrate the fact that there are several ways of
demonstrating or even visualizing the presence of medialities.
WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 37
When it comes to the sequence in which the results of the three ana-
lytical steps are being presented, it is for reasons of clarity preferable—
while not absolutely necessary in terms of analytical results—to follow the
sequence of register–structure–context/interpretation. This is the main
reason why I prefer to talk about “steps” of the analysis instead of “stages”
or “levels,” which implies an already fixed sequence. In this study, I more
or less follow the three-step structure and sequence for didactic reasons
and in order to make my method both intelligible and as easy as possible
to apply; however, divergent ways may occur—and suffice—as well. I fol-
low the sequence because it follows a movement from detail to wholeness
and from the particulars of the individual mediality findings to the general
dimension of a comprehensive understanding. However, I generally see
no reason why the analytical work would take on one form or structure
(concerning quantity and sequence) while the presentation of the results
would adopt another.
NOTES
1. As specified by Nina Møller Andersen (private correspondence),
“Heteroglossia is a term made up by the translators Holquist and Emerson
on the background of two (or three) Russian terms (Bakhtin 1981) con-
nected to three different language levels […]: the linguistic level (raznoia-
zychie), the pragmatic level (speech act level) (raznorechie) and the level of
voice, positioning and ideology (raznogolositsa).”
2. For a thorough discussion of the communicative basis of intermedial stud-
ies (or the intermedial basis of communication), see the productive per-
spectives discussed by Lars Elleström in his unpublished manuscript A
Medium-Centred Model of Communication, with numerous references.
3. Quoted in and translated by Clüver 2007, 30f.
4. Durham Peters (2015) offers a comprehensive critique of communicative
media theories, but for my analytical purposes in this particular context I
nevertheless remain inside this paradigm. See Krämer (2008) for a philoso-
phy of mediality and communication.
5. As a recent example of a multimodal approach (focused on literacy), I here
refer to Maagerø and Seip Tønnessen (2014, 41).
6. For a detailed explanation and exemplification of this, see Elleström (2010,
2014).
7. Discussed, for instance, in Hayles and Pressman (2013).
8. For a discussion of the history of the ut pictura concept, see Henryk
Markiewicz and Uliana Gabara (1987). Concerning Lessing’s Laocoon,
see Sternberg (1999).
38 J. BRUHN
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. Discourse in the novel. In The dialogic imagination,
ed. Michael Holquist, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1986. Speech genres. In Speech genres and other late essays,
eds. Caryl Emerson, and Michael Holquist, 60–102 (trans: McGee, Vern W.).
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bal, Mieke. 2010. Of what one cannot speak: Doris Salcedo’s political art. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1986. The reality effect. In The rustle of language, ed. Roland
Barthes, 141–148 (trans: Howard, Richard). Oxford: Blackwell.
Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll (eds.). 1996. Post-theory: Reconstructing film
studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bruhn, Jørgen. 2010a. Heteromediality. In Media borders, multimodality and
intermediality, ed. L. Elleström. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.
Bruhn, Jørgen. 2010b. Medium, intermedialitet, heteromedialitet. Kritik 198:
77–87.
Bruhn, Jørgen, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (eds.). 2013. Adaptation
studies: New challenges, new directions. London: Bloomsbury.
Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the avant-garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 39
Vladimir Nabokov, who read and lectured on Proust for many years (see
Nabokov 1980), offered a comparable but nevertheless quite different
literary answer to the same question in his short story “Spring in Fialta.”
Even if it is, of course, very possible to read Nabokov’s short story by way
of a psychological interpretation or a narratological textual analysis, my
approach following the methodology in this book will of course be quite
different. I shall focus on the presence and function of medialities in the
short story, in order to circumscribe the relationship between medialities,
literature, and human memory.
Following my idea of preconditional heteromediality, in which all
literary expressions are medially mixed, I shall consequently argue that
Nabokov’s formally exquisite and existentially moving “Spring in Fialta,”
which I analyze in Nabokov’s own English translation from Russian
(1995), needs to be read as a heteromedial text. Apart from my more
specific analytic targets in this particular text, I also hope, in this first case
study, to demonstrate the more general idea that when a literary text, per-
haps conventionally understood as a monomedial phenomenon, is being
analyzed as a heteromedial text, the presence and function of the disclosed
medialities become central for understanding the text as a whole.
After a presentation of the background and critical reception of the
short story, I proceed to the three-step analysis, where my basic argument
will be—as already mentioned—that “Spring in Fialta” articulates a schism
between artistic representation and life itself, condensed into the problem
of how to represent and recall memory traces.
The short story is about Victor’s amorous relationship with Nina, a love
affair that spans the 15 years from 1917 to 1932. The text hints at both
having fled the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, as Nabokov’s own family
had also done. Nina and Victor have met at different locations in Europe,
both before and after their marriages. Victor is genuinely in love with
Nina, but, for Nina, Victor is merely one among many men with whom
she has had intimate relations. “Spring in Fialta” includes a description of
Nina’s marriage to the author Ferdinand, whose work Victor despises, as
well as details surrounding their meetings all over Europe. Shortly after
having hesitatingly and unsuccessfully declared his love to Nina in the
fictional town of Fialta—the name likely combines the real cities of Fiume
and Yalta on the Mediterranean Riviera (Boyd 1990, 426)—Victor learns
of her death. She is traveling with her husband, Ferdinand, and another
friend, but without Victor, who has declined to join them. Their car col-
lides with a circus wagon, but only Nina is killed in the accident. Victor
recalls and recounts his version of their love story at an unspecified date
sometime after Nina’s death.
When summarized in a few lines like those above, this short story
may appear simple. However, everything becomes complicated when
we take a closer look at the text. We then discover that even the small-
est details are often charged with potent symbolic meaning, and that
the narrative, at the same time it describes a love affair, also functions
as a complicated reflection on abstract questions of art, memory, and
representation.
Critical Reception
De Vries and Johnson (2006) stated that the short story closely follows
Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” while Akiko Nakata convinc-
ingly argued that “Spring in Fialta” must be understood in a dialogical
relationship with Nabokov’s later novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
(1959). This because these two texts, sharing the same protagonist called
Victor in the short story and V in the novel, seem to represent the prob-
lem and the solution, respectively, in Victor’s or V’s understanding of their
own lives (Nakata 2007).
However, in critical commentaries on the short story, the presence of
art, music, and film has not been sufficiently developed. I am not the first
critic to make the observation that non-literary media play an important
role for Nabokov, but when browsing, for instance, the first ten volumes
44 J. BRUHN
from the next paragraph include “marine rococo on a stand,” the “coral
crucifixes in a shop window,” the “dejected poster of a visiting circus,” and
a “fading memory of ancient mosaic design,” as well as the town’s “alto-
like name” (Nabokov 1995, 413).
My broad concept of mediality enables me to include mentionings or
discussions of sensorial aspects, a central component in Elleström’s defi-
nition of medialities. This permits me to collect—almost like Nabokov
hunting his beloved butterflies—the instances where represented sense
impressions are related to mediating functions. Starting with the first para-
graph once again, I would then include the “cloudy” spring, the “cypress
indicating the way,” the “blurred” Mount St. George, the sea where the
“salt [is] drowned in a solution of rain” and is, therefore, “less glaucous
than gray.” In the following paragraph, I would be interested in phrases
such as: “all my senses wide open,” “drenched paper,” and the long syn-
esthetic phrase where the narrator feels in “the hollow of those violaceous
syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers,
and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its
viola.”
As is clear from this example, a comprehensive account of all such
instances in a short story—not to mention in longer works—will quickly
add up to a very long list that, unless it is developed and interpreted, will
not be of any particular value.
Far away, in a watery vista between the jagged edges of pale bluish houses,
which have tottered up from their knees to climb the slope (a cypress indi-
cating the way), the blurred Mount St. George is more than ever remote
from its likeness on the picture postcards which since 1910, say (those straw
hats, those youthful cabmen), have been courting the tourist from the
sorry- go-round of their prop, among amethyst-toothed lumps of rock and
the mantelpiece dreams of seashells. (ibid., 413)
I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of pen-
ning things that had not really happened in some way or another; and I
remember once saying to him [Ferdinand] as I braved the mockery of his
encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have
imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset
shadow of one’s personal truth. (Ibid., 420)
In short, Victor hates Ferdinand the man and Ferdinand the writer.
Everything he dislikes in his writing, and in literature in general, adds
up to a rather comprehensive list of defects. Victor loathes the reli-
gious—and in particular the political—content of Ferdinand’s work,
his incomprehensible style, and even the fictitiousness of it, the latter
trait making his literary work a falsity, a lie. Such a lie cannot hope to
grasp what Victor considers the truth about life, which for him is the
“imagination of the heart” (ibid., 416) and must “for the rest rely upon
memory” (ibid., 416). Victor’s recipe for literature includes true feelings
and personal memory.4 Paradoxically, Victor cannot help using literary
metaphors when referring to the structure and nature of his own life and
Nina’s. At one point, he states, “Again and again she hurriedly appeared
in the margins of my life, without influencing in the least its basic text”
(ibid., 424), and the metaphor of life as a book appears to be “a perfect
ex libris for the book of our two lives” (ibid., 416). He even describes his
relationship with Nina as “the whole accumulation of the plot from the
very beginning up to the last increment – thus in Russian fairy tales the
already told is bunched up again at every new turn of the story” (ibid.,
415).
It is tempting to develop a dichotomy crossing two different levels of
the mediality system of the text; namely, the relationship between “litera-
ture” as an artistic mediality and “visuality” as a sensory mode, meaning
that the visual descriptions and the references to visuality appear to offer
SPEAK, MEMORY? VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “SPRING IN FIALTA” 51
This, incidentally, is the newspaper that informs him that Nina has died
in a car accident.
Film is not mentioned in these passages, but by using the above-
introduced intermedial concept of “formal imitation”—meaning that a
mediality not necessarily directly present in the text can nevertheless exert
an influence by means of an underlying structure—I propose that the end
of the short story makes use of devices strongly related to cinematic form
in general, and more specifically to the dissolve process used in film. The
violets appearing “from nowhere” are comparable to a cinematic mon-
tage—first there are no flowers, and then, after what resembles a “cut,”
SPEAK, MEMORY? VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “SPRING IN FIALTA” 53
This description of the female orchestra offers a prosaic and ironic fram-
ing of the sacrilegious impression of Leonardo’s last supper scene men-
tioned earlier, and it accentuates the bad taste and poor moral judgment of
Ferdinand. However, there is a much more important musical presence in
the text that may finally—following this rather protracted review and discus-
sion of the presence and function of medialities in “Spring in Fialta”—offer
a comprehensive key metaphor explaining (or rather, suggesting a reading
of) the entire text. Therefore, the third contextual step in this example is
rather special; I will try to demonstrate that the explicatory context con-
cluding the two first steps of my suggested model of analysis (the register
and the possible structures of the represented medialities) should not be
established utilizing references outside the text. Instead, the text itself offers
an explanation of the rather complicated system of medialities in the story.
Recalling his impressions of one of several train platforms in his past,
Victor presents the short story’s longest and probably also most complex
sentence, stretching to almost a full page:
I learned with a ridiculous pang that she was about to marry him. Doors
were beginning to slam; she quickly but piously kissed her friends, climbed
into the vestibule, disappeared; and then I saw her through the glass settling
herself in her compartment, having suddenly forgotten about us or passed
into another world, and we all, our hands in our pockets, seemed to be
spying upon an utterly unsuspecting life moving in that aquarium dimness,
until she grew aware of us and drummed on the windowpane, then raised
her eyes, fumbling at the frame as if hanging a picture, but nothing hap-
pened; some fellow passenger helped her, and she leaned out, audible and
SPEAK, MEMORY? VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “SPRING IN FIALTA” 55
real, beaming with pleasure; one of us, keeping up with the stealthily gliding
car, handed her a magazine and a Tauchnitz (she read English only when
traveling); all was slipping away with beautiful smoothness, and I held a plat-
form ticket crumpled beyond recognition, while a song of the last century
(connected, it has been rumored, with some Parisian drama of love) kept
ringing and ringing in my head, having emerged, God knows why, from the
music box of memory, a sobbing ballad which often used to be sung by an
old maiden aunt of mine, with a face as yellow as Russian church wax, but
whom nature had given such a powerful, ecstatically full voice that it seemed
to swallow her up in the glory of a fiery cloud as soon as she would begin:
On dit que tu te maries,
tu sais que j’en vais mourir
and that melody, the pain, the offense, the link between hymen and
death evoked by the rhythm, and the voice itself of the dead singer, which
accompanied the recollection as the sole owner of the song, gave me no rest
for several hours after Nina’s departure and even later arose at increasing
intervals like the last flat little waves sent to the beach by a passing ship,
lapping ever more infrequently and dreamily, or like the bronze agony of a
vibrating belfry after the bell ringer has already reseated himself in the cheer-
ful circle of his family. (Ibid., 418–419)
resents his narrator, Victor, as one who mistrusts, but perhaps also envies,
the means that enable him, in the fiction, to “speak his memory.” Speak,
Memory was the title of one of Nabokov’s volumes of sophisticated auto-
biographical writings, and when Victor argues that literature is mere fic-
tion and lies—as opposed to his “poetics” of “imagination of the heart”
and “memory”—he proposes an unmediated presentation of the past.
Nabokov, for his part, seems to argue that we desperately need the arts,
including literature, to be able to understand and to represent life. “The
key to the problem of re-establishing the past turns out,” writes Nabokov
in one of notes for his lectures on Proust given at Princeton University,
“to be the key of art. The treasure hunt comes to a happy end in a cave full
of music, in a temple rich with stained glass” (Nabokov 1980, 208–209).
Memory and the experience of life itself need mediating support, and
Nabokov, but not Victor, knows that “artifice is an unavoidable part of
remembering and counts as much as fact,” as one Nabokov critic suc-
cinctly put it (Foster 1989, 80). The artifice of memory is exactly what
is exhibited and discussed in this short story, where literature uses sound,
music, painting, and cinematic devices to produce and reproduce fictive
memories.
NOTES
1. An earlier version of this chapter, “‘Seeing without Understanding’:
Mediality Aspects of Literature and Memory in Vladiir Nabokov’s “Spring
in Fialta”” have been published in Orbis Litterarum, Volume 70, Issue 5,
pages 380–404, 2015.
2. The historical–biographical context offers different keys to the text. For
instance, the fact that Victor and Nina meet in 1917, the year of the
Bolshevik revolution, and from then onwards only meet coincidentally, may
suggest that Nina symbolizes the pre-Soviet Russia that is now gone. In
addition, the name Nina, and the date when Nabokov wrote the story, may
give reason to believe that “Spring in Fialta” relates to Nabokov’s own amo-
rous wishes directed toward his mistress, Irina Gaudanini. Based on
Nabokov’s description of Ferdinand’s literary style and Nabokov’s well-
known contempt for literary criticism, the acrid depiction of Nina’s husband
could be interpreted as a very critical self-portrait. For biographical interpre-
tations of the story, see de Vries and Johnson (2006, 96–97) and Nicol
(1991).
3. The example of the posters shows the necessity of distinguishing between
different dimensions in the representation of media. In the qualified
SPEAK, MEMORY? VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “SPRING IN FIALTA” 59
REFERENCES
Appel Jr., A. 1974. Nabokov’s dark cinema. New York: Oxford University Press.
Boyd, B. 1990. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian years. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
de Vries, G., D.B. Johnson, and L. Ashenden. 2006. Vladimir Nabokov and the
art of painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Foster Jr., J. 1989. Nabokov before Proust: The paradox of anticipatory memory.
The Slavic and East European Journal 33: 78–94.
Katz, E. 1992. The film encyclopedia, 2nd ed. New York: Harper Perennial.
Lund, Hans. 1992. Text as picture: Studies in the literary transformation of pictures.
Trans. Kacke Götrick. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1980. The walk by Swann’s place. In Lectures on literature, ed.
F. Bower, 207–250. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1995. Spring in Fialta in the stories by Vladimir Nabokov,
413–429. Trans. Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Vintage Books.
Nakata, A. 2007. A failed reader redeemed: “Spring in Fialta” and the real life of
Sebastian Knight. Nabokov Studies 11 available at http://muse.jhu.edu/jour-
nals/nabokov_studies/v011/11.nakata.html
Nicol, C. 1991. Ghastly rich glass: A double essay on “Spring in Fialta”. Russian
Literature Triquarterly: A Journal of Translation and Criticism 24: 173–184.
Shmoop Editorial Team. 2008. Spring in Fialta. http://www.shmoop. Accessed
25 Aug 2015.
Wolf, W. 2008. The relevance of mediality and intermediality to academic studies
of English literature. In Mediality/intermediality, ed. M. Heusser, 15–43.
Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Wyllie, B. 2003. Nabokov at the movies: Film perspectives in fiction. Jefferson:
McFarland & Co.
CHAPTER 4
Via my analysis, I wish to define, refine, and question these rather over-
optimistic readings of Carver’s own favorite short narrative. The narrator’s
feeling of relief on the final page is authentic, but also problematic and
potentially destructive, and it is intricately connected to the possibilities
and the anxieties produced by medialities.
Let me, from the vantage point of the very first paragraph of the text,
establish some of the basic stylistic and narratological facts upon which I
will build my mediality analysis:
This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend
the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in
Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-laws. Arrangements were made.
He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at
the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in
Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They
made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his
visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of
blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and
never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man
in my house was not something I looked forward to. (Carver 1985, 209)
(of which we only see the narrator’s part). Perhaps the reader is meant to
read the text as if the narrator, untrained in the art of writing and narrat-
ing, is writing down this remarkable event at some temporal distance? Or
perhaps the narrator records his memories and impressions on a tape, in
the same way that Robert and his wife used to do, only for it to be written
down later? As is typical for Carver’s minimalist aesthetics, the text leaves
plenty of details for the reader to fill in, resulting in a host of possible
psychological traits peculiar to the narrating character—and by engaging
ourselves in some kind of dialogue with the narrator, we are also forced
to take into account in what ways we sympathize, agree, or disagree with
him, for instance, when it comes to his prejudices concerning blind people.
The repetitive phrase “This blind man” […] “he was on his way to spend
the night” (my italics) is an example of the somewhat clumsy skaz style of
the text. The narrator discloses his negative prejudices about blind people—
and his way of referring uninhibitedly to his sources of information, and the
sources being “the movies,” gives a clear impression of a man not used to
conventional ideas of suitable and/or reliable references and information,
while also producing a comical effect. All this, and much more, is hinted
at but also directly stated in Carver’s exquisite prose, which is not without
humor, as in the narrator’s blunt and naïve utterance: “And his being blind
bothered me,” or in the final words of the quote’s awkward phrasing—pro-
ducing a clash between the visual metaphor and its target—when he says
that he is “not looking forward to” having a blind man in the house.
Actually, much of what I want to discuss in my analysis is compressed
into this final sentence of the first paragraph—“A blind man in my house
was not something I looked forward to”—which seems innocent, ordi-
nary, and casually immediate. It almost makes us ignore the general
dichotomy imbedded in the sentence, not only between physical blind-
ness and existential insight but also between being present and being part
of a mediating process. Furthermore, the passage offers a foreboding of
the end of the text where the mentioning of “my house” will be intricately
related to the narrator’s sense of “being in the world”—with or without
other people, with or without medialities.
This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend
the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in
Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-laws’. Arrangements were made.
He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at
the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in
Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They
made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his
visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of
blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and
never laughed. Sometimes seeing-eye dogs led them. A blind man in my
house was not something I looked forward to.” (Carver 1985, 209)
My analysis of the entire short story shows that the instances of mediali-
ties in this first paragraph are slightly more intense than in the rest of the
20-page story: However, every page of the story contains several mediali-
ties, isolated, described by characters or interrelated.
68 J. BRUHN
cal medium) and landline phone calls establish the human communica-
tion, whereas pre-programmed TV is the nightly entertainment of the
narrator. But even if these medialities do have a function in the text, and
contribute to the structure of the thematics, they are nevertheless subor-
dinated aspects of the realist strategy of text; they provide background,
reality effects, and interesting links, but they do not infer in-depth mean-
ings regarding the final pages’ enigmatic and crucial discussion of art and
existence.
it took a long time to build the medieval cathedrals is, basically, all they
know. It is important, of course, that the cathedral is part of a religious
system, but whereas Kenneth Clark establishes clear (and rather problem-
atic) parallels between Christian religion, the progress of human civiliza-
tion, and the grand cathedrals, even this edifying connection seems to be
cut short in the story when Robert asks the narrator if he is “‘in any way
religious?’ I shook my head. […] ‘I guess I don’t believe it. In anything.
Sometimes it’s hard. You know what I’m saying?’” (Carver 1985, 225).4
What could have been an opening to a mutual understanding is shot down
in the negative description of atheism as not believing in anything (as
opposed to defining it as being liberated from dogma, for instance). Later,
I will return to what this “something” versus “anything” distinction might
be about.
The text, I argue, tempts the reader to see the cathedral as an inter-
changeable object whose sole function is to move Robert and the nar-
rator closer together. The confusion and vagueness may once again be
phrased in mediality terms, stressing the distinct, and very fundamen-
tal, steps that separate the two men from the object they are discussing:
Historical cathedrals are filmed—and thus represented as well as described
by Kenneth Clark on TV—before being processed by the two men and
partly described by the narrator who is the only one actually able to see
the TV set. Based on the narrator’s vague impressions—and without any
training in drawing—he further tries to draw a cathedral, first on his own,
later with Robert’s hand upon his, at which point the narrator closes his
eyes. It is, speaking in Platonic terms, copies of copies of copies of copies;
an extremely indirect and over-mediated phenomenon, where the “origi-
nal” behind the copies tends to disappear.
In more technical terms, the historical cathedral (a specific example of
the larger category of the aesthetic qualified form “cathedral”) is medi-
ated by the technical mediality of TV, in the aesthetic qualified mediality
of a documentary TV show that includes speech, images, probably verbal
written signs, and so on. The narrator’s verbal description (in the qualified
mediality of descriptive verbal language) is, we could say, a failed ekph-
rasis or failed media transformation (Robert does not understand what a
cathedral is) until the final point, where the drawing (with the technical
medialities of pen and the rough material of a paper bag) of the narrator is
first followed by Robert’s hand, Robert even later following by hand the
traces in the rough paper.5
“THIS BEATS TAPES, DOESN’T IT?”: WOMEN, CATHEDRALS… 71
I also need to discuss the gender relation in the short story. This may
be phrased as a question of the woman as mediality; that is, the woman as
a communicative tool between men.
One crucial aspect of feminist studies of culture and fiction is the criti-
cal investigation of the objectification of women in cultural artifacts. The
representation of women as objects has, needless to say, its own long and
comprehensive tradition in modern culture, ranging from Proust’s name-
less narrator enjoying his fiancée Albertine most intensely when she is
asleep to the objectified women of Hollywood cinema diagnosed by Laura
Mulvey and later scholars.6 Even if the woman in “Cathedral” is partly
absent in some of the scenes, and is definitely the least present of the
three main characters, she is far from being a one-dimensional figure. Via
Carver’s sparse style, we learn in the opening pages not only about her
ex-husband, her suicide attempt, and her early meeting with Robert (who
is therefore, in some sense, symbolically connected to the past and the
former marriage), we also learn that she occasionally writes a poem and
exchanges tapes with Robert. Still, even though she’s the one bringing
Robert to the house, and she and Robert do most of the conversation
before and during dinner, Carver gently but unhesitatingly pushes her out
of the final and essential part of the story. After dinner, she gets more and
more tired, she leaves the room or nods off, and following the entire text’s
logic of translating general questions into registers related to sight and
blindness, she “can’t keep her eyes open” and goes to sleep.
Not only is she increasingly ignored as the night progresses, but the two
men, arguably, engage in a kind of symbolic sexual act with her, hidden
behind their male-bonding project: Just before Robert and the narrator
together draw a cathedral, Robert says, “All right, let’s do her”—presum-
ably referring to the cathedral, but having first run his fingers sensually
over the paper on which the two men will draw the cathedral. It is, in
other words, a statement by which the cathedral and the woman possibly
blend together. “My wife opened up her eyes her eyes and gazed at us.
She sat up on the sofa, her robe hanging open” (Carver 1985, 227). This
is almost as if a sexual encounter has occurred or is about to take place,
and several erotically ambiguous comments follow: “Press hard […] you
didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you? We’re going to really have
us something here in a minute. How’s the old arm?” (Carver 1985, 227).
Finally, she resurfaces on the final page with an incomprehensive and per-
haps slightly confused or worried question: “‘What’s going on? Robert,
what are you doing? What’s going on?’” (Carver 1985, 228). Whereas
72 J. BRUHN
from each other, the more they use medialities to get closer to each other,
to communicate, or to consume mediating substances (food, alcohol).
Distance equals mediation. This is probably what prompts critics to detect
an optimistic feeling of community, presence, and bonding between the
two men. Even though the program on TV stimulates the two men’s proj-
ect, they produce proximity (thus, overcoming distanced mediation), with
the result that an intense feeling of meaning is created by the simplest
possible means: a (phallic?) pen, paper, and two hands. Even though the
TV show is what creates the two men’s wish to recreate a cathedral, TV
as a technical medium slowly but clearly withdraws and vanishes in the
final pages. On the last page, the narrator closes his eyes, thus mimick-
ing the blindness of Robert, even when the blind Robert asks the seeing
protagonist to review, meaning seeing and describing, the result of their
joint efforts. By closing his eyes, the narrator seems to shut off even more
radically any mediating instances, and folds totally in on himself: He cuts
off any Platonic copies of the real and exists in a presence almost unknown
to him.
Robert and the narrator reach an almost wordless (or should we say
worldless?), non-mediated understanding, and when the narrator says,
“It’s really something,” we read it as the echo of his negative statement
concerning his faith: “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything. Sometimes
it’s hard” (Carver 1985, 225). Finally, “anything” has turned into “some-
thing.” But we also need to read it as his gradual withdrawal into a highly
74 J. BRUHN
isolated but still very rewarding space. When he chooses not to look at
the drawing, he withdraws from the joint project, I believe, supported by
the slightly enigmatic remark that “I was in my house. I knew that. But I
didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” With closed eyes, in his house but
not inside anything, the narrator occupies a paradoxical space and posi-
tion, which seems to suggest that it is indeed not the case that the two
men could have watched a documentary on wildlife in order to reach the
same effect. This space is, as the title says, clearly connected to the idea of
a cathedral, but the question is how, and why?
This makes the ending not only hopeful but also threatening. In the
final analysis, the narrator is brought to his strange epiphany by way of
mediation processes (in particular, the media transformations of the ekph-
rasis leading to the drawing), but after that, he seeks to escape into an
unmediated, semi-mystical position where he can be at peace with his dif-
ficult mediaphobia. Even though the text suggests the possibility of eleva-
tion in the end, the text “arrests” (to use Leypoldt’s term) the epiphany.
Mediation is inescapable.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
I began this chapter with Carver’s comments in interviews, and I want to
conclude with a general comment on Carver’s work. The final scene with
its metafictional and philosophical implications is relatively unusual in the
work of Carver—not because of the metafictional element, but because
the metafictional discussion focuses upon such an obviously estranged
and non-quotidian situation as two men holding hands while trying to
draw a cathedral they encountered via late-night TV. This situation, to
say the least, does not correspond to the self-declared, realist poetics of
Carver that I referred to in my opening remarks. Carver’s literary essays,
Amir stated, “declare his preference for life over art, for the concrete and
clear over the abstract and sophisticated, and for content over technique”
(2010, xi), and Amir continues by warning that some might be led to
believe “that Carver’s work, with its seemingly unsophisticated use of lan-
guage and plot, offers no insights into the nature of literature” (ibid., xii).
I have tried to show that this is definitely not the case, and though I
have followed a somewhat different path than Amir, I definitely agree
with her contention that “Carver’s writing confronts itself, questioning
the very medium it chose” (ibid., 19), and that “[h]is writing therefore
demands an exploration of its relationships to other media” (ibid., xv, xvi).
When critics discuss the existence of different periods in Carver’s work,
a division is generally made between an early, more minimalist, pessimis-
tic period giving way to a later, more optimistic, and stylistically fuller
period marked by the publication of the short stories in the 1983 collec-
tion Cathedral. Carver supported such a periodization of his work, and
believed that his earlier style had come to a point where it could not be
developed any further, so that new, and richer and fuller forms, had to be
developed. Our knowledge of Carver’s work in general—and his stylistic
choices in particular—has been changed by the more or less sensationalist
78 J. BRUHN
NOTES
1. An Internet search—as well as library investigations—confirms that the
term “mediaphobia” hasn’t stabilized itself in contemporary culture, and
therefore diverges into a wide array of associations. To mention a few tell-
ing examples: One article, “How to conquer media phobia” (Rosenbaum
1988), describes, from a hands-on perspective, how business executives
should interact with news media. Elsewhere, a film industry blogger advises
film directors and producers how to use and interact with new digital
media (Grove 2013), and an Indian journalist chronicles the anxiety build-
80 J. BRUHN
REFERENCES
Amir, Ayala. 2010. The visual poetics of Raymond Carver. Lanham: Lexington
Books.
Benson, Josef. 2009. Masculinity as homosocial enactment in three stories by
Raymond Carver. The Raymond Carver Review 2: 81–95. http://dept.kent.
edu/english/rcr/issues/02/index.html. Accessed 13 Aug 2015.
Brown, Arthur A. 1990. Raymond Carver and postmodern humanism. Critique:
Studies in Contemporary Fiction 31: 125–136.
Carson, Anne. 2014. The Albertine workout. New York: New Directions Books.
Carver, Raymond. 1983. Cathedral. In Cathedral: Stories, 209–228. New York:
Random House.
Clark, Robert C. 2012. Keeping the reader in the house: American minimalism,
literary impressionism, and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”. Journal of Modern
Literature 36: 104–118.
Grimal, Pierre. 1995–1996. Stories don’t come out of thin air. http://sun.iwu.
edu/~jplath/carver.html. Accessed 25 Aug 2015.
Grove, Elliot. 2013. 4 ways to lose your new media phobia. http://www.rain-
dance.org/4-ways-to-lose-the-new-media-phobia/. Accessed 28 Aug 2015.
Hemmingson, Michael. 2011. Saying more without trying to say more: On
Gordon Lish reshaping the body of Raymond Carver and saving Barry Hannah.
Critique 52: 479–498.
Kleppe, Sandra Lee. 2006. Women and violence in the stories of Raymond Carver.
Journal of the Short Story in English 46: 107–127. http://jsse.revues.org/497.
Accessed 28 Aug 2015.
Lehmann, Daniel W. 2006. Symbolic significance in the stories of Raymond
Carver. Journal of the Short Story in English 46: 75–88. http://jsse.revues.
org/493. Accessed 29 Aug 2015.
Leypoldt, Günter. 2001. Raymond Carver’s epiphanic moments. Style 35(3):
531–547.
Max, T. D. 1998. The Carver chronicles. The New York Times, August 9. http://
www.nytimes.com/1998/08/09/magazine/the-carver-chronicles.html .
Accessed 18 Sept 2015.
Middleton, Peter. 1998. High visibility: Images of ethical life in The Tragic Muse
and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”. Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory
and Practice 2: 331–338.
Mukhopadhyay, Amitabh. 2012. At the crossroads of mediaphobia. The Hindu,
January 30. http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/at-the-crossroads-of-
mediaphobia/article2842921.ece?ref=relatedNews. Accessed 28 Aug 2015.
Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16: 6–18.
Peters, John Durham. 2015. The marvelous clouds. Toward a philosophy of elemental
media. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press.
82 J. BRUHN
Powers, Michael A. 2009. Double visions – Separating Gordon Lish’s edits from
Raymond Carver’s original authorship in three stories. Ph.D. diss., Purdue
University. https://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/handle/1805/1856. Accessed 17
Sep 2015.
Rosenbaum, M. 1988. How to conquer media phobia. Management Review 77:
41.
Sheu, Chingshun J. 2014. When love becomes necessity: The role of epiphany in
William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary
Fiction 55: 237–259.
Stull, William L., and Maureen P. Carroll. 2006. Prolegomena to any future
Carver studies. Journal of the Short Story in English 46: 2–5.
Wiederhold, Eve. 2009. A feminist revision of the work of interpretation in
Raymond Carver’s “cathedral.” The Raymond Carver Review 2: 96–115.
http://dept.kent.edu/english/rcr/issues/02/index.html. Accessed 25 Aug
2015.
CHAPTER 5
Abstract Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain,” a deeply ironic
version of a near-death experience, can be read as a modernized version
of Hemingway’s “The Killers,” and it has also been read as an optimis-
tic—but at the same time sentimental—tale about the unspoiled roots of
a cynical critic. However, when focusing on the presence and function
of medialities in the text, another plot becomes visible. In this chapter,
I attempt to demonstrate that sound and music (surprisingly perhaps, in
a short story about a literary critic), actually play the leading roles in the
text. The strange musicality inherent in the faulty grammar of a child in
the critic’s childhood carries the symbolic weight of the story. In order to
try to offer a plausible contextual background to the presence of mediali-
ties, I mention Wolff’s engagement in an attempt to revive realist poetics
(what has been termed “Dirty Realism”), but end up suggesting that a
deeper meaning of the protagonist’s childhood memory has to do with
the unexpectedness of unmediated presence.
to reason with our more or less faulty and emotionally charged memory,
we are immediately able to recreate a vision or narration of our lives. This
model of our memory, including the model of our lives, is built upon the
idea of our lives as coherent narratives. But what if our lives, particularly
the way in which we are able to both conceptualize and to fashion them
into a narrative, are structured along other lines? And, if so, how could life
be represented in narrative form?
Having demonstrated the ways that medialities not only influence, but
even form, the memories of Nabokov’s protagonist in “Spring in Fialta,”
I now intend to discuss the American writer Tobias Wolff’s (born 1945)
“Bullet in the Brain,” a short story published in the 1996 collection The
Night in Question. I take my cue from a related but also divergent perspec-
tive that includes memory and medialities, arguing that Wolff’s text poses
the general question of the relationship between memory, narration, and
life in a very specific setting.
The story is about Anders, a bitter literary critic, who visits his bank
on an afternoon just like any other. However, when we leave Wolff’s pro-
tagonist just a few pages later, the narration has turned him into a sensual,
elated young boy. In order for Anders to go from one existential state to
another requires a bullet in the brain, and this offers Tobias Wolff the pos-
sibility of reviving, but perhaps also slightly ridiculing, the idea of our life’s
narrative fulfillment at the very end, or the near-death experience referred
to above. Among other things, Wolff’s version of the idea, or perhaps
myth, of one’s entire life flashing before one’s eyes includes a bank robber,
a mock-scientific depiction of our neurological setup, and a complicated
web of represented and internally interrelating medialities.
In this chapter, I want to suggest at least one possible explanation,
anchored in my theory of mediality and my three-step methodology, for
the dramatic change of personality and mood taking place in Wolff’s stun-
ning short story. I intend, therefore, to show how the change cannot be
understood without taking into account the presence and function and
the internal relationship of medialities in the text.
Most commentaries on this short story argue that the formally well-
wrought text demonstrates the existence of another Anders, which is
also supported by the linguistic hint that the name Anders is a pun based
on the German adjective “anders” (meaning “different”). The strategy
behind such an interpretation is to take the text itself for granted, to more
or less follow the prompts of the text (and possibly also its author’s inten-
tions), in order to establish its meaning. However, this position might be
“GREAT SCRIPT, EH?”: MEDIALITIES, METAFICTION… 85
too trusting, not to say naïve. My thesis in this analysis is that the presence
of literature tends to hide the fact that the deepest longing manifested in
the text is the urge to escape verbal and indeed any other form of conven-
tionally meaningful communication. I will, at the very end of this chap-
ter, following the intermedial analysis, try to conceptualize this notion of
non-communication via a distinction between what may be seen as two
semiotic traditions of Iris and Hermes respectively, at least according to
Alexander R. Galloway.
After an initial presentation of the short story, I will, still as part of the
background presentation of the story, move back in time to an important
predecessor to the text, Ernest Hemingway’s famous short story “The
Killers.” After this rather lengthy prelude, I will engage in the three-step
mediality analysis of the text, consisting of a register, a proposed struc-
ture, and a contextualization. These three steps will help me answer the
question of how Anders is able to transform from the bitter critic to the
surprised and energized little boy; and, in particular, what such a psy-
chological and existential transformation has to do with the presence of
medialities in the text.
his mood is often bleak: “He was never in the best of tempers anyway,
Anders – a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which
he dispatched almost everything he reviewed” (ibid., 200).
Anders enters a bank to attend to trivial affairs, but involuntarily becomes
embroiled in an armed robbery. Under these circumstances, Anders can’t
help but imitate and irritate one of the robbers who, without further ado,
shoots Anders in the head. This marks the end of the first half of the story.
In the second half, we follow the thoughts and memories swirling through
Anders’ head. In the extremely short moment between being shot and
dying, we read about a number of important incidents from Anders’ life,
starting with what he does not remember, and then what he does remem-
ber. The reader of the short story, but not Anders himself, is presented
with both the remembered and the not-remembered facts. Anders ends
up focusing on a childhood memory that strangely moved him, a memory
concerning the intense pleasure and shock of a boy on a baseball field who
made a surprising error in grammar by saying, “They is.” Even the final
words of the short story are, “They is, they is, they is.”
In terms of genre, “Bullet in the Brain” is more or less a textbook exam-
ple of a short story. Like the typical short story, “Bullet in the Brain” is brief,
with only a few characters, and it centers, at least on the surface, around
one dramatic event that has life-changing significance for the protagonist.
It is, furthermore, the protagonist’s perspective that dominates the plot in
voice and viewpoint. From a narratological or stylistic point of view, “Bullet
in the Brain” exemplifies several refined formal devices, and one such read-
ing of the story could emphasize the different narrative speeds of the two
halves. In contrast to the relatively quick speed of the first half of the story,
the second half, in terms of represented time, slows down to a near halt:
A whole life, or at least crucial aspects of it, are described for the reader in
what is supposed to be the split second it takes for a bullet to hit the skull
and to eclipse any brain activity. A reader more interested in psychology or
psychoanalysis might focus on the fact that the author has chosen to let the
protagonist’s final thoughts, consciously or unconsciously, return to child-
hood memories in order to find a suitable direction and meaning in his life.
Such a reading may well fall under the spell of what the critic John Lingan
has unkindly described as the “sentimentality” of Wolff’s fiction:
Formally, [“Bullet in the brain”] breaks slightly from Wolff’s typical reliance
on more traditional linear structures, but in every other regard, both good
and bad, it exemplifies Wolff’s work. It concerns a man who’s unaware of
what a definitive crossroads he’s in, its prose is lean and clear without being
“GREAT SCRIPT, EH?”: MEDIALITIES, METAFICTION… 87
incorporates and specifies the formal and psychological reading of the text,
but also offers new interpretative possibilities.
Being an unusually short text, “Bullet in the Brain” actually offers the
possibility for me to produce a more or less comprehensive list of all the
instances of mediality present in the short story; that is, as defined in the
introductory chapter, everything that possibly relates to a broad concept
of mediality, while excluding the most obviously irrelevant aspects of the
text, like the language per se. Below, I list the instances of the text that
relate to questions of medialities, with a brief categorization of the medial
relevance of each and/or its affiliation given in parentheses.
Page 200
“conversation” (verbal language)
“book critic” (literature)
“everything he reviewed” (literature)
“POSITION CLOSED” (a represented verbal sign)
Page 201
“tragic” (like a dramatic genre or literary style)
“heaven will take note” (metaphor of writing)
“dead meat” (cliché, gangster film style)
“Great script, eh?” (film/drama)
“the stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes” (poetry—the expression
seems to refer to a typical sociolinguistic style)
Page 202
“‘Bright boy.’ Right out of The Killers” (reference to literature, Hemingway)
“playing games?” (games as a possible medium)
Page 203
“pompous old building” (architectural style)
Page 203
“mythological figures” (mythology, part of literary and art historical heritage)
“painter’s work” (painting)
“a few tricks up his sleeve” (painting style and technique)
“cupids and fauns” (mythological figures)
“drama” (art form)
“comical” (style or genre)
“clown” (artistic figure)
“Capiche?” (reference to gangster films?)
“Capiche – oh God, capiche” (reference to gangster films?)
“GREAT SCRIPT, EH?”: MEDIALITIES, METAFICTION… 89
Page 204
“brain”/“memory” (the brain is, in this context, a kind of mediality from which
memories can be represented, partly by way of (in)voluntary functions of memory)
“hundreds of poems” (literature)
direct quotes of literary classics
Page 205
“released if they could recite Aeschylus” (literature)
“those sounds” (aural aspects of literature)
“classmate’s name on a jacket of a novel” (literature)
“book” (literature)
“heap of books” (literature)
“writers for writing them” (literature, writers)
“the relative genius of Mantle and Mays” (the import of the idea of geniality from the
arts into sports)
Page 206
“grammar” (verbal language)
“music” (art form)
“comet’s tail of memory” (memory and brain as medialities)
“chant” (music)
of the text based on medialities results in dividing the text into six parts
rather than two:
(1) The first of these six parts focuses on Anders as a cynical and con-
temptuous book critic, who is as indifferent to the books that he
reads as he is toward the women with whom he talks in the bank
queue. (Wolff 1996, p. 200-second paragraph on p. 201).
(2) The second part begins when the book critic uses his professional
skills in an inappropriate manner, by criticizing the robber for his
vulgar language (201– bottom of 203), including references to
Hemingway’s “The Killers” and the use of the Italian word “capi-
che,” a more general inspiration from popular cinema’s representa-
tion of Italian–American gangsters. Mediality-wise, we find another
shorter but notable passage typifying Anders’ misplaced critical
activity, when the robber, annoyed by Anders’ demeanor, forces
him to regard and critically evaluate a tawdry painting on the ceil-
ing, this critique delivered to the reader by means of a verbal
ekphrasis.
(3) The third part is when Anders smiles from his own interpretation of
the painting, and from his reaction to the vulgar language. This is
followed by the fatal shot, which occurs at the bottom of page 203
and leads to the second main part of the text per the conventional
division described above.
(4) The fourth part consists of the neuro-clinical discourse on the first
half of page 204, characterized by the narrator, who is now dis-
tanced from the brain of Anders.
(5) The fifth part is the scene that occupies most of the remainder of
the short story, following the narrative subgenre of one’s life pass-
ing before one’s eyes in the moments before death. However, in this
case, this event is portrayed in an unusual manner, consisting of the
narrator’s description of both what Anders remembers and what he
does not remember at this critical moment. This stylistic technique
brings the narrative situation of distancing into the foreground,
while immersing the reader into the touching and recognizable
themes, making the reader quickly abandon the distance and plung-
ing him or her into the fictional memories and non-memories. This
part is divided, almost rhythmically, into intimate personal non-
memories of a girlfriend and his former wife, alternating with non-
memories from his career in literature, regarding his poetry reading,
“GREAT SCRIPT, EH?”: MEDIALITIES, METAFICTION… 91
his literature teacher, and his college friend, who published a book
(204–205).
(6) This leads into the sixth part, which comes down to what Anders
actually does remember; namely, a particular sensual and sensorial,
richly described verbal experience on a baseball field during his
childhood.
He did not remember a single line of the hundreds of poems he had com-
mitted to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at
will – not “Silent, upon a peak in Darien,” or “My God, I heard this day,” or
“All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?” (ibid., 204)
This is one of the many betrayals of the exalting final words of the text,
upon which the story puts such an immense psychological, symbolical,
and existential weight. However, it is a major aim of my interpretation to
critically investigate this tie. Although the relationship between present
and past has affinities with the Proustian mémoire involontaire—the sound
of the gunshot prompts the memory of the baseball—and, despite the fact
that the text wants to at least suggest this interpretative path, something
completely different is going on.
The question I am trying to pose as well as answer is, of course: How
can we understand this ending of the short story? There are, I would
argue, two basic ways of interpreting the final words, as well as the story in
its entirety, focused on the medialities: one optimistic and “meaningful,”
and one focused on “non-meaning.” The meaningful mediality interpre-
tation folds the story upon itself and emphasizes that the story offers a
convincing preparation for the final words. The way the final words are
depicted is very important; the register being used is not one of youth,
sincerity, truth, or memory. The story offers a mediality-based explana-
tion to the question of the meaningfulness of the final words: “The others
will think he’s being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn’t
it, not at all – it’s that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final
two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music” (ibid., 206). It
is of course possible to read this passage as an encapsulation of aesthetic
elation and meaningfulness within an extended, but nevertheless recog-
nizable, aesthetic regime. This means that in the life story of Anders, the
chance encounter with a music-like, unexpected mistake, shows him—in
the future, as a grown-up—how he might dedicate his life to finding those
kinds of elevating experiences in literature. Unfortunately, Anders did not.
Continuing this line of thinking, we can say that “music,” and, a little
later on, “chant,” are used as metaphors, symbolizing rather paradoxically
the non-semantic meaning of language that authors, writing teachers, and
critics often dedicate their lives to create or discuss. To put it bluntly,
music and chant save literature.
This is a convincing and even a rather exquisite interpretation of the
text. Firstly, because this interpretation demonstrates the necessity for the
“GREAT SCRIPT, EH?”: MEDIALITIES, METAFICTION… 93
Anders has never met Coyle’s cousin before and will never see him again.
He says hi with the rest but takes no further notice of him until they’ve
chosen sides and someone asks the cousin what position he wants to play.
“Shortstop,” the boy says, “Short’s the best position they is.” Anders turns
and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle’s cousin repeat what he’s just
said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he’s being a
jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn’t it, not at all – it’s that
Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unex-
pectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them
to himself.
[…] But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to
lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball,
94 J. BRUHN
time for the boy in right field to smack at his sweat-blackened mitt and softly
chant, “They is, they is, they is.” (Ibid., 206)
What seems like a reversal and retrieval of lost time à la Proust has
turned out to be exactly the opposite—by desperately repeating the unre-
peatable, Anders hopes to “make” more time. Anders, for the first and
final time, identifies himself as “the boy” who is playing the lowly base-
ball position of right field as opposed to, I assume, the boy who wins
the much-preferred shortstop position. Anders, in his moment of death,
externalizes his former self and lets him repeat “they is”—this could in
principle go on indefinitely, but will not. The singularity and the “pure
unexpectedness” cannot be stabilized by being repeated: Coincidence
can turn into an aesthetic experience of joy and elatedness, but it can-
not stop time. The aesthetically sounding “music” is therefore replaced
with “chant” in the end, signaling a more austere, somber, perhaps even
religiously tainted idea of word and music or perhaps the music of words,
since chant is a generic form of verbal language that may be recited or
sung; that is, language on the border between words focused on meaning
and sound.
This may not be a suitable conclusion for a full understanding of this
text, but it might provide a ground for the third step in my mediality
analysis. This second step has structured the raw material of the mediali-
ties register of the first step: First, by reworking the synopsis of the short
story in terms of medialities; secondly, by working through, in particular,
the discussion of literature in the text; and thirdly, by suggesting how the
notion of music works as an introduction to several very complex prob-
lems that extend beyond the most apparent, optimistic understanding of
the text. It can be viewed as a kind of late twentieth-century American
take on Proust’s Belle Époque version of the possibility of retrieving not
only past memories, but also past sensations, and therefore a certain kind
of eternity provided by way of the arts.
short story. However, this generic and historical context does not provide
an answer to the most urgent problem of the short story—namely, the
short story’s psychological transformation—which will be my focus in the
second half of this section. I read the transformation as an expression of an
attempt to reach out, symbolically, toward a representation of music and
literature that has no meaning.
Regarding the historical context of the author of “Bullet in the Brain,”
Tobias Wolff has been regarded as a key figure of the so-called Dirty
Realism movement in American literature of the late 1970s and 1980s.
However, he has been reluctant to use this term himself, and instead has
stressed the lack of homogeneity of the writers subsumed under that label.5
Regardless, central strategies of Wolff’s work, both in his fictional writing
and in important prefaces and comments he has written for anthologies
he has edited, definitely link him with this trend. As I will briefly argue,
though, the term “dirty realism” is not the most, or at least not the only,
suitable term covering this particular example of his fiction.
Dirty Realism was invented by Bill Buford to serve as a common
denominator for a number of writers—Wolff, Raymond Carver, Richard
Ford, and Jayne Anne Phillips, among others—who were all represented
with short fiction in the literary magazine Granta 8 (1983) and intro-
duced via Buford’s much-quoted preface to the magazine in this way:
[A] new generation of American writers [who] write about the belly-side
of contemporary life – a deserted husband, an unwed mother, a car thief,
a pickpocket, a drug addict – but they write about it with a disturbing
detachment, at times verging on comedy. Understated, ironic, sometimes
savage, but insistently compassionate, these stories constitute a new voice
in fiction.6
relating to what Galloway calls the tradition of Iris, according to which the
meaning of art is its non-communication.
Perhaps the most significant memory of Anders turns out to be a
moment without a future history, in the sense that it does not point for-
ward toward a meaningful career for Anders. “Music” in this particular
text is, perhaps, that which is defined as non-literary—a non-referential
event. Possibly the reason why Anders chooses this particular memory—
or rather, why this memory chooses to stay with him at his moment of
death—is that it does not stand for a future, even if this future ends up
being forgotten.
At this point, I realized that I was about to die, and that’s when my whole
life flashed before my eyes. It seemed to go chronologically, but super-sped
up. I saw my first dog, Steven, when he was just a puppy. He was also fall-
ing through the air at a hundred and thirty-five miles per hour next to me,
which seemed an unnecessarily cruel trick of the mind, considering that
Steven had died a peaceful death of barking-induced throat cancer back
around the time that my stepdad got wrongfully arrested for dog-kicking.
(2007, no page)
By opening this article with the popular idea that we review our lives at
the moment of death—and by emphasizing that this is a story about the
spectacular change of a bitter critic into an elated boy—I wanted to stress
what I find to be the most stylistically innovative and memorable aspect
of the short story, but also what I consider to be the most significant and
perhaps most often misunderstood aspect of the text. As noted in my
introduction, near-death experiences also change in terms of mediality.
Premodern experiences focused on static images of one’s life passing by;
this was later changed into film-like sequences of moving images; and now
we hear reports about 3D or holographic experiences. Tobias Wolff chose,
in 1996, a mock neuroscientific approach, which is probably already a
little outdated now in terms of state-of-the-art science. However, even
100 J. BRUHN
though the transformation in the final part of the text takes place via the
well-known and generic flashback form, its most crucial actual prompt is
created by means of aspects on the borders of our conventional under-
standing of literature—specifically, sound and music—which made me
reinvestigate the ending of the story in terms of medialities.
The ending appears at first reading to present a deeply meaningful, and
even sentimental, return to the protagonist’s childhood, where we not only
learn that the bitter critic was once different, but we are also encouraged to
believe that the adult Anders remains identical in some way to the little boy.
However, when I read the last page of the short story from a more skepti-
cal point of view, the finale turns out to represent a less sentimental situa-
tion. In this chapter, I have therefore tried to demonstrate that the deepest
meaning of the story is that we long for the unexpected, and by employing
Alexander Galloway’s distinction between Iris and Hermes, we can distin-
guish between the sudden epiphany and the communicatively supported
narrative meaning. In this dichotomy, I have found that the short story leans
more toward Iris than Hermes. So, the short story seems to say, we long for
the unexpected—exemplified by the trivial mistake in grammar by the boy at
the baseball field—but not because the unexpected explains the rest of our
lives or communicates with us in any conventional sense of the word. On
the contrary, the grammar error glimmers with a powerful presence. We are
yearning, the story shows, for anything that does not stand for something
else, but which instead exists in a non-mediated and non-mediating pres-
ence—which, remarkably in a literary text, is defined as “music” or “chant.”
What at first glance may look like a straightforward homage to
Hemingway’s literary heritage can therefore, in the light of contempo-
rary speculative media theory, be understood as a radical aesthetic gesture,
far from the aesthetics expressed in Wolff’s own discourses regarding the
worthy ideals of literary realism.
NOTES
1. For instance, Paul March-Russell notes that “Bullet in the Brain” seems to
borrow, probably unconsciously, traits from William Sansom’s 1944 short
story “The wall.” See Paul March-Russell, The short story (2009, 243).
2. Whose name has a Scandinavian ring to it, like Hemingway’s Swedish boxer
Ole Andreson in “The Killers.”
3. A classic example, in other words, of Harold Bloom’s (1973) ideas of the
compulsory structure of admiration and anxiety. For the reader not familiar
with Hemingway or “The Killers,” the scene nevertheless feels utterly famil-
iar due to the scores of bank robbery scenes in cinema and television.
“GREAT SCRIPT, EH?”: MEDIALITIES, METAFICTION… 101
REFERENCES
Bloom, Harold. 1973. Anxiety of influence: A theory of poetry. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Buford, Bill. 1983. ‘Editorial’ in Granta 8.
Galloway, Alexander R., Thacker, Eugene & Wark, McKenzie. 2014.
Excommunication: three inquiries in media and mediation.
Jakobson, R. 1960. Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In Style in lan-
guage, ed. Thomas Sebeok. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Livings, Jack. 2004. Tobias Wolff, the art of fiction no 183, (interview). Paris
Review 183. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5391/the-art-of-
fiction-no-183-tobias-wolff. Accessed 28 August 2015.
March-Russell, Paul. 2009. The short story. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Mason, Wyatt. 2004. Stifled truth. London Review of Books 26: 19–20.
Simms, Paul. 2007. My near-death experience: Life flashes before the author’s
eyes. The New Yorker, August 20. http://www.newyorker.com/maga-
zine/2007/08/20/my-near-death-experience. Accessed 28 August 2015.
Wolff, Tobias. 1993. Introduction. In Picador book of contemporary American sto-
ries, ed. Tobias Wolff, vii–xii. London: Picador.
Wolff, Tobias. 1996. Bullet in the brain. In The night in question, ed. Tobias Wolff,
200–206. New York: Vintage.
CHAPTER 6
Abstract Jennifer Egan’s 2011 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad is my
concluding, but also most problematizing, case study. The novel presents
aspects of 50 years of US history by means of an intricate web of rep-
resented technical and artistic medialities. Despite being a novel, which
poses some quantitative challenges to my analytic model, my proposed
three-step analysis does work for Goon Squad—but only to a certain point.
This will be discussed in the opening section of the chapter.
Goon Squad’s material form and distribution points to material medial
affordances, which I—in the second section of this chapter—analyze
under the rather preliminary term “external medialities.” This constitutes
an additional level, as compared to my first three case studies, where I
limited my analysis to the level of represented medialities. This last case
study, therefore, shows the possibilities of analyzing narrative literature,
and also the longer format of the novel, by way of the three-step model,
while at the same time pointing to a wider understanding of what could be
included in a mediality-based analysis of narrative literature.
Jennifer Egan’s (b. 1962) Pulitzer Prize novel A Visit from the Goon
Squad (2011) has been described in terms of theme as “eco-futurism”
(Hunt Gram 2014), and in terms of genre as part of an “emerging genre
that foregrounds America’s nostalgia for the future, a hybrid genre that
anchors speculative projections of the future within traditional mimetic
fiction” (DeRosa 2014, 96–97). The novel has been read as an example of
The book starts with Sasha, a kleptomaniac, who works for Bennie, a record
executive, who is a protégé of Lou who seduced Jocelyn who was loved by
Scotty who played guitar for the Flaming Dildos, a San Francisco punk band
for which Bennie once played bass guitar (none too well), before marrying
Stephanie who is charged with trying to resurrect the career of the bloated
rock legend Bosco who grants the sole rights for covering his farewell “sui-
cide tour” to Stephanie’s brother, Jules Jones, a celebrity journalist who
attempted to rape the starlet Kitty Jackson, who one day will be forced
to take a job from Stephanie’s publicity mentor, La Doll, who is trying to
soften the image of a genocidal tyrant because her career collapsed in spec-
tacular fashion around the same time that Sasha in the years before going
to work for Bennie was perhaps working as a prostitute in Naples where
she was discovered by her Uncle Ted who was on holiday from a bad mar-
riage, and while not much more will be heard from him, Sasha will come to
New York and attend N.Y.U. and work for Bennie before disappearing into
the desert to sculpture and raise a family with her college boyfriend, Drew,
while Bennie, assisted by Alex, a former date of Sasha’s from whom she
lifted a wallet, soldiers on in New York, producing musicians (including the
rediscovered guitarist Scotty) as the artistic world changes around him with
the vertiginous speed of Moore’s Law. (Blythe 2010, no page)
BETWEEN PUNK AND POWERPOINT: AUTHENTICITY VERSUS… 105
PART ONE
The visual arts are present in the novel too, as qualified medialities,
while not at all as frequently and as prominently as is music. When Sasha’s
uncle Ted, an art historian, is looking for Sasha in Naples, Italy, his search
for her is implicitly compared to Orpheus’ unfortunate search for Euridice,
a representation of which mesmerizes him at the Museo Nazionale: A rela-
tively brief ekphrasis of the relief gives way to his experience of encounter-
ing the art work: “a fibrillating excitement such as he hadn’t felt for years
in response to a work of art, compounded by further excitement that such
excitement was still possible” (ibid., 247).5 We also learn that Ted tends to
frame his visual impressions into iconic projections (one specific instance
of the broader notion of medial projection), and when he watches the
world around him he sees it “through” his knowledge of the masters of
painting: He sees Sasha’s face “like a face painted by Lucian Freud” (ibid.,
249) and it is partly the same process taking place in another scene. Ted
looks “through the window at the riot of dusty color. Turner, he thought.
O’Keeffe. Paul Klee” (ibid., 267). It is here left to the reader of the novel
to “trace back,” so to speak, our knowledge of the painters on the visual
perception of “the riot of dusty color.”
A more important art presentation relates to Sasha. We learn, late in
the book, that as an adult woman living in the desert, she has begun cre-
ating art works out of found objects, complicated structures represented
in Alison’s PowerPoint presentations—and rereading the book, this
makes sense, since the first chapter is called “Found Objects,” the English
name of the aesthetic avant-garde practice of “objets trouvés” (French
for “found objects”). In the first chapter, Sasha suffers from kleptomania,
which eventually becomes the reason why Bennie must fire her. In other
words, her art practice can be said to change her temptation of stealing
apparently random objects from people into finding and keeping other
people’s defunct things or even garbage, thus transforming them into art.
On this level of represented medialities, film and literature are more
or less absent, and instead the subgenres of narrative celebrity journalism
and commercial public relations occupy two entire chapters. Chapter 8,
“Selling the General,” narrates the story of La Dolly, a failed publicity
and entertainment organizer, who receives a very generous offer from a
third-world genocidal dictator to reinvent his public image. Her way of
doing this is by adding human touches to his image, in the form of photos
of the dictator wearing a new hat that is meant to make him look more
human, and by connecting him to a former film star, which is meant to
demonstrate the possible presence of amorous feelings in his supposedly
108 J. BRUHN
thetic holocaust!” (ibid. 26). Bennie’s friend from his punk past, Jocelyn,
offers another epochal diagnosis when she reflects upon the past: “Kids
I remember from high school are making movies, making computers [as
compared to making punk music]. Making movies on computers. A revo-
lution, I keep hearing people say. I’m trying to learn Spanish. At night,
my mother tests me with flash cards” (ibid., 100) The quote counters the
digital “revolution” with Jocelyn’s much more basic—and in a sense old-
fashioned—need to learn a language by means of simple “flash cards.” The
non-simultaneity of epochal changes is condensed into one sentence: Two
people of the same age in the same country experience and take advantage
of technological developments in very different ways.
Another character, Jules, who has been in prison for a while, offers
yet another firsthand description of the epochal shift, again focused on
technological and medial aspects: “Buildings are missing [referring to the
World Trade Center in New York City]. You get strip-searched every time
you go to someone’s office. Everybody sounds stoned, because they’re
e-mailing people the whole time they’re talking to you” (ibid., 141). The
Twin Towers attack of September 2001 and these new communication
possibilities point to changes on different levels, and are related as signs
of the end times as Jules knows them. But when he is engaged in a new
project—a reality show about a punk artist’s coming death on stage—he
reaches a more hopeful diagnosis: “‘Sure, everything is ending,’ Jules said,
‘but not yet’” (ibid., 151).
In the final chapter, in a recognizable (if also dystopic) near future,
we learn that all bands “had no choice but to reinvent themselves for
the preverbal” (ibid., 347), “preverbal” referring to the pre-verbal chil-
dren who dominate music consumption in this future society. Children are
nicknamed “pointers” because of their instant access to and power over
the all-pervasive mobile handsets dominating most people’s lives. These
preparatory descriptions in technology and culture culminate in the final
epiphanic lo-fi concert of aging punk icon Scotty. His music is described
as follows:
ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you
knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a
handset, who was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks
all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as
pure. (ibid., 347)
110 J. BRUHN
PART TWO
Consequently, in the remaining part of the chapter, I want to ask whether
it is plausible, as proposed by van de Velde, to read Goon Squad as a nos-
talgic portrait of an authentic past? This question is interesting given the
fact that Egan is obviously intent on producing literature that is—in lit-
erary form and content as well as in formats and distribution—eagerly
investigating the limits of the idea of the conventional “book”—and also
by doing this in ways that are clearly using particular, extremely medi-
ated forms. My answer is, I can disclose from the outset, negative; Egan
consciously and effectively opens new possibilities for literary discourse,
not only in her subject matter and style, but by trying out several dis-
tributional channels and formats that do not seem to appear in any way
nostalgic toward any idea of non-mediated presence and representation á
la the immediacy of punk aesthetics.
Formal Imitation
First, the overall structure of the novel is a clear-cut example of formal
imitation. The entire novel is structured in a form that imitates a particu-
lar form of organizing music. More specifically, it mimes the form of a
pop/rock “concept album”: Part “A” (Chaps. 1–6) and part “B” (Chaps.
7–13) correspond to sides A and B of a long-playing album, meaning
that the 13 chapters of the novel can be understood as an LP comprising
13 differentiated tracks. Egan herself has claimed, on different occasions,
that among the inspirations for the form of the novel were the so-called
concept albums of The Who, Pink Floyd, and other bands of the 1970s
era; concept albums comprise a number of tracks under a certain thematic
or narrative umbrella. The—in the first reading—rather confusing shifts in
style, point of view, and thematics of the 13 chapters may be seen, in the
light of the LP as a form, as 13 tracks, each of which can stand on its own.
This is an analogy that Egan has stressed, and the contention is supported
by the fact that eight of the chapters were published individually as short
stories in magazines and anthologies before being collected in the novel.
Jennifer Egan’s novel therefore exemplifies what may be called “formal
imitation on a large scale”; that is, not on the level of isolated aspects or
114 J. BRUHN
fragments of a text, but on the level of the work as a whole. As will become
clear later on, this feature plays a key role in my interpretation of the novel.
Again, Elleström’s three dimensions of any media product are useful
to describe in technical terms this mediality phenomenon. As mentioned
already, Egan’s novel, like any media product, has three mediality dimen-
sions. The technical mediality is the codex book that allows us to meet
the work in the first place; the basic mediality is verbal language, which
is used in a particular way so that we can recognize the qualified, artistic
mediality of the novel. Now, saying that the form of the novel imitates a
conceptual album means that it is able to reproduce certain parts of the
concept album. Again, the technical mediality of concept albums is the LP
record: this is what delivers the content of, say, an album by The Who.
Logically, Egan’s novel cannot reproduce this technical level in a novel.
The basic medium is sound; again, Egan’s novel cannot reproduce sound,
it can only represent aspects of sound, and that is not the interesting part
here. The central point is instead the qualified aesthetic mediality of the
concept album. This is a particular form of pop or rock music with a par-
ticular organizing principle that distinguishes it from most other rhythmic
popular music works, making it possible to state quite accurately that Goon
Squad imitates the qualified mediality dimension of the relatively impre-
cise notion of a “concept album.”
Still, on a relatively large scale below the level of the entire work, exist
two particularly interesting chapters that (probably without the general
reader really noticing it) challenge the diegetic levels of the novel. I am
referring to two chapters in the novel that stand out as being not only nar-
rated by different characters, in different literary styles and from different
viewpoints (nicely paraphrased by Solwitz 2014), but also by being the
only two chapters of the novel that mimic other forms beyond the conven-
tional form of novelistic discourse. I am referring to chapter (or is it more
accurate to say track?) 9, “Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up
About Love, Fame and Nixon!” followed by “Jules Jones reports,” and
chapter/track 12, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” again with the author-
specifying subtitle “By Alison Blake.” In these two cases, the chapters are
written (in the fiction) by characters on the diegetic level, but Egan has
also chosen in these chapters to reproduce the mediality in which they are
written.
As opposed to what I focused upon in earlier case studies, the overall
formal imitation of the work and these two chapters are not represented
medialities—here we are instead dealing with a metalevel. Jules Jones and
BETWEEN PUNK AND POWERPOINT: AUTHENTICITY VERSUS… 115
Alison Blake are explicit, if of course still fictional, narrators of texts that
are reproduced in the novel, and they choose to represent their content
by way of specific qualified medialities. We’re talking about journalistic
style in the case of Jules Jones, whereas Alison Blake, surprisingly, uses the
qualified medium of PowerPoint, normally connected to presentations in
business or education, to provide a highly personal account of her family
life.
We see, then, in Egan’s novel, an important level that goes beyond the
presence and function of represented medialities, and this forces me to
take other levels of the text into account, to be combined with my obser-
vations in the three-step analysis. Before I interpret this level of the text,
I will consider other aspects of the text that go even further beyond the
diegetic level and the represented medialities.
NOTES
1. Therefore, the summary above could be supplemented with a style- or focal-
ization rewording of the 13 chapters which gives a supplementary impres-
sion of the complexity of the novel. Sharon Solwitz (2014, 603–604) offers
such stylistic version.
2. See http://goonsquadtimelines.weebly.com/index.html
3. Until now, not much research has been done on the aesthetic possibilities of
PowerPoint, but musician and artist David Byrne published a remarkable
book investigating the mediality. E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional
Epistemological Information) mixes images, text, PowerPoint presentations,
and music in a wonderful Gesamtkunstwerk. The book is, “about taking
subjective, even emotional, information and presenting it in a familiar audio-
visual form – using a medium in a way that is different, and possibly better,
than what was intended. It is about appropriating a contemporary, corpo-
rate staple and making something critical, beautiful and humorous with it”
(Byrne 2003, on the back of the box protecting the book)—which seems to
be quite close to the efforts of Egan. Concerning PowerPoint as an example
of the “unobtrusive grayness of so many types of media practice, from sys-
120 J. BRUHN
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Egan, Jennifer. 2011. A visit from the goon squad. New York: Anchor Books. For
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Fuller, Matthew, and Andrew Goffey. 2012. Evil media. Cambridge, MA/London:
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Hertz, Eddie, and Jeffrey Roessner. 2014. Introduction. In Write in tune:
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Hunt Gram, Margaret. 2014. Freedom’s limits: Jonathan Franzen, the realist novel,
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BETWEEN PUNK AND POWERPOINT: AUTHENTICITY VERSUS… 121
Afterthoughts
The aim of this book has been, first of all, to make us more aware that
written narrative literature, routinely considered the most “natural” and
uncomplicated literary form, is on the contrary an artistic form consist-
ing of a complex and highly engrossing system of medialities. Second, I
have argued that we should try to find ways of analyzing at least some of
the ways that narrative literature interacts with other medialities and try
to understand the effects of such aspects as we approach these texts. The
ambition behind this book is, therefore, both ambitious and humble. I
say ambitious because I venture to suggest a method of analyzing nar-
rative literature that I hope can add new perspectives to our already rich
and well-developed ideas about the form and content of narratives. I say
humble because I am well aware that my work stands on the shoulders of
earlier accomplishments, and that my method is not altogether new, even
if aspects of it are indeed meant to gently disrupt the perspective of how
we read, teach, and research narrative literature.
The first-person “us” or “we” references in the sentences above per-
haps merit some explanation, since this address is perhaps not altogether
clear at all points in the book. The “us” and “we” refer, as mentioned in
the Introduction, to what I hope will be three typical groups of readers
of this book. I am targeting professors of literature at colleges and uni-
versities who need pedagogical tools and useful terminology to open up
well-known or new narrative texts, via a method that is relatively simple
However, after having discussed Nabokov, Carver, and Wolff from the
perspective of the presence and function of represented medialities, I chose,
with my study of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, to widen
the field of my analysis, so that my analysis would not only include repre-
sented medialities in the diegetic level of the narratives but also include the
more comprehensive formal and distributional forms of the text. In this
way, I tried to reflect upon the limitations of the first three case studies:
that medialities only exist as represented entities “inside” narrative texts,
even though the truth is, of course, that since all meaning is mediated, the
“external mediality” aspects of literary texts are often highly interesting
and important to take into consideration. I chose, therefore, Goon Squad
as a challenge to my understanding of the three-step analysis of the first
three cases, and working through some of the aspects of Goon Squad from
an extended perspective demonstrated, I believe, the ways in which the
three-step analysis can be combined and even refined with other perspec-
tives. This should indeed be done whenever the specific texts in question
call for such measures.
Now, lifting my eyes from the special problems I set for myself in
this study leads me, as the final point of the book, to briefly outline
other possibly productive areas for future studies of mediality in litera-
ture, both conceived as didactic possibilities and as productive research
areas.
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INDEX
A C
adaptation, 26, 126 Carver, Raymond, 85, 96, 97, 110,
affordances, 18, 22, 103 118, 124, 125
Amir, Asala, 76, 77 case study, 2, 6–10, 13, 23, 27, 28,
Appel Jr, Alfred, 44, 53 30–1, 33, 35, 42, 46, 62, 106,
art forms, 1–3, 16, 19, 20, 24, 111, 112, 114, 117, 124, 125
25, 35 “Cathedral,” 80, 110, 111, 118
A Visit from the Goon Squad, 9, 21, 62, chant, 92–5, 98, 100
103–19, 125 Christianity, Christian context, Christian
liturgy, 64, 69, 70, 74, 75
cinema, 8, 20, 51, 53, 71
B Clark, Robert, 64, 69, 70
Bakhtin, Mikhail, M., 15, 17, 18, Clüver, Claus, 5, 14, 126
65, 74 combination, 1, 5, 9, 17, 26, 27, 28,
Bal, Mieke, 30, 31 45, 110
Barthes, Roland, 27, 29 communication model, 17, 19
Basic medium and basic mediality, 21, communicative forms, 16, 17, 105
28, 114 Comparative Textual Media, 22, 23
Beja, Morris, 76 context (in three-step model), 9, 31,
Benjamin, Walter, 10 33–6, 53, 106, 117, 125, 126
Bloom, Harold, 100
Bruhn, Jørgen, 10, 15, 26
Buford, Bill, 96, 97 D
“Bullet in the Brain,” 36, Débord, Guy, 4
83–100 De Vries and Johnson, 43–5
Byrne, David, 119 digital poetry, 14
F
film studies, 10 L
formal imitation, 27–9, 45, 52, 53, 57, Laokoon, 40
106, 113–15 Lessing, G.E., 25
Lingan, John, 85–7, 91
literary theory, 5, 6, 22, 29, 30
G LP (music), 113, 114, 117
Galloway, Alexander R., 4, 85, 98, Lund, Hans, 28, 56
99, 100
Genette, Gerard, 115
Gesamtkunstwerk, 3, 25, 108 M
Greenberg, Clement, 3, 25 March-Russell, Paul, 97
Grønstad, Asbjørn, 29 mass media, 2–4, 14, 62, 110
material mediality, 8, 22, 23, 103
McGann, Jerome J., 22, 23
H McLuhan, Marshall, 18, 110
Hansen, Mark B.N., 4, 16, 26 media, 1–5, 7, 9, 13–16, 18–27, 29,
Hayles, N. Katherine, 22, 23, 37, 112 30, 32, 34, 43–6, 57, 62, 68–75,
Hemingway, Ernest, 62, 63, 78, 85, 77, 79, 98, 100, 108, 110,
87, 90, 100 114–16, 118, 124, 126
Hermes, 85, 93, 95–100 medialities, 1–10, 14, 15, 17–20,
heteromediality, 9, 15, 31, 42, 45, 55, 22–8, 30–6, 42, 44–9, 51, 54, 57,
57, 63, 97 61–79, 83–100, 103–19, 123–6
Higgins, Dick, 3 medial projection, 27–9, 51, 107, 113
Hjarvard, Stig, 5 medial transformation, 28, 45, 56
Homer, 8 mediaphobia, 61–4, 75, 77, 78, 111,
Hutcheon, Linda, 26 118
INDEX 133
Spielmann, Yvonne, 2, 3 TV, 20, 24, 28, 64, 69, 70, 73, 74,
“Spring in Fialta,” 8, 35, 41–58, 63, 77, 78, 126
84, 111
structuring (in three-step analysis),
42, 115, 125 U
ut pictura poesis, 25, 44
T
technical media, 19, 20, 28, 68, 70, V
72, 106, 108, 114, 117, 126 van de Velde, Danica, 105, 111,
technophobia, 61 112, 118
the arts, 1–4, 14, 20, 24, 25, 44, 58,
95, 106, 116, 125
theater, 5, 26, 126 W
“The Killers” (Hemingway), 85, 87, 90 Wolff, Tobias, 8, 9, 36, 83–100,
Tornborg, Emma, 28 124, 125
transformation, 1, 3, 5, 9, 25–8, 45, Wolf, Werner, 16, 31, 33, 53
56, 69, 70, 74, 85, 96, 100 Wyllie, Barbara, 53, 55