THE INTERMEDIALITY

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

ISBN 978-1-137-57840-2 ISBN 978-1-137-57841-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57841-9

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

Henriette Thune (University of Stavanger) have thoughtfully reviewed

either the entire draft or parts of it, and have given me invaluable cri-
tiques, hundreds of brilliant suggestions, and warm encouragement when
needed. The anonymous reviewer at Palgrave MacMillan who reviewed
the text twice was thorough and very just.
Thank you—tusind tak!
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1

2 What is Mediality, and (How) does it Matter? Theoretical

Terms and Methodology 13

3 Speak, Memory? Vladimir Nabokov, “Spring in Fialta” 41

4 “This Beats Tapes, Doesn’t It?”: Women, Cathedrals,

and Other Medialities in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” 61

5 “Great script, eh?”: Medialities, Metafiction,

and Non-meaning in Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” 83

6 Between Punk and PowerPoint: Authenticity Versus

Medialities in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad 103

7 Afterthoughts 123

References 127

Index 131

vii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract What I hope to demonstrate in Intermediality of Narrative

Literature: Medialities Matter is that narrative literary texts very often,
if not always, include significant amounts of what appears to be extra-
literary material—formally and in content—and that we too often ignore
this dimension of literature. It is as simple, but also as complicated, as that.
Consequently, the pragmatic thesis behind this book is that we can
gain new understanding of central areas of narrative literature by using an
approach focused on what I prefer to call medialities, which may be briefly
defined as tools of communicative action inside or outside the arts (which
I shall define more in detail in the next chapter). Media (or medialities) is
a central term in intermediality studies, which concerns the study of the
combination and transformation of art forms and medialities. What is new
in my approach may be summed up in three points:

(1) I offer what I believe to be an efficient as well as manageable work-

ing concept of medialities and intermediality.
(2) Therefore, I am expanding the perspective of what is normally con-
sidered to be within the scope of intermedial studies and literary
studies—in particular by understanding mediality and intermedial-
ity in a broader sense, meaning that much more than conventional
art forms or medialities will be included in my analytical
framework.
(3) As a consequence of this, I modestly suggest a methodology of
intermedial analysis that can be applied to narrative literary texts.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

J. Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57841-9_1
2 J. BRUHN

My proposed methodology is a result of teaching introductory and

advanced courses in intermediality, as well as literary history with an inter-
medial focus. When teaching these courses, I have been struck by the
fact that my students are able to grasp the basics of intermediality theory,
and that many of them have a relatively clear idea about how to analyze
a literary text from earlier training. However, I have found it difficult to
explain to my students how to combine these two competencies and apply
intermedial theory while performing literary analysis. So whereas textual
analysis is well founded in earlier learning for my students, the analysis
of texts from an intermedial point of view seems to fit poorly into my
students’ cognitive frameworks. This is why I have decided to develop a
working method for combining the theoretical field of intermediality with
the specific field of literary analysis.
Needless to say, I am not the first to combine theories of intermediality
and textual analysis. To a certain extent, the very field of intermedial-
ity studies—developed from earlier interart studies and philosophical and
aesthetic ideas on the relations between the arts—has been created and
further developed more or less in order to be able to analyze complex
aesthetic texts. Innumerable valuable case studies exist, as well as more
systematic investigations of particular intermedial relations in literature,
but as yet, to my knowledge, no attempt has specifically combined theo-
ries of intermediality with a more well-defined and comprehensive model
of textual analysis.
Commentators interested in contemporary culture, the arts, poetry, or
fiction often notice that the occurrence of more than one mediality in
artistic objects, as well as in non-artistic products such as ads or mass
media news, is more the rule than the exception, and that thus has been
the case for quite some time. In “New and Novelty in Contemporary
Media Cultures,” for example, German media theorist Yvonne Spielmann
(2010) discusses the veritable invasion of mixed-media phenomena, pri-
marily transmitted by digital technology, into the art world, as well as into
our everyday lives. According to Spielmann, the mixing and transforma-
tion of conventional, distinct media forms characterize the massive inputs
of contemporary mass media and technology, with the result that these
intermedial products stupefy and alienate media consumers and media
users. As a suggested antidote, Spielmann introduces and discusses con-
temporary visual artists who create “pockets of resistance” around, beside,
or beyond what she sees as the attempt from global communication net-
works to monopolize human life.
 INTRODUCTION 3

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

subversive medium is now a spectacle playground” (Galloway 2012, 2).

However, the understanding of our contemporary moment as a time for
mixed medialities prevails.
In this book I am, however, less interested in attempting to describe,
let  alone explain, our contemporary medial situation that has been
described with terms such as the “society of spectacle” (Guy Débord),
partly producing a pictorial turn in thinking and the arts (W.J.T. Mitchell).
Socially, descriptions of post-Fordist capitalist economy and network orga-
nizations are sometimes lumped into the even more comprehensive late-
Marxist diagnoses of the cultural destiny of late- or postmodern Western
society by Rosalind Krauss and in particular Fredric Jameson.
Media theorist Friedrich Kittler famously opened his influential
book on the history of media, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, by stat-
ing: “Media determine our situation” (Kittler 1999, xxxix). However,
as Kittler himself stressed, our media-determined situation is not a new
thing, and his analysis of a much wider historical material—going at least
as far back as the French Revolution and the German Romantic move-
ment—is meant to demonstrate a more accurate way of understanding
our contemporaneity. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen’s anthol-
ogy Critical Terms for Media Studies has taken up Kittler’s baton, and
shows that our reflections on medialities may extend back to the early
history of the human species and the tools used by these people as the
necessary and essential mediations between subject and object, body and
surrounding world. One of the contributors to Critical Terms for Media
Studies even states the following: “C[c]onsciousness—and consciousness
of medium—is born through friction and difference, through forcible
estrangement from the media to which mammalian senses adapted and
evolved” (Jones 2010, 94).
That is probably correct, but I won’t go that far back in this book. What I
do want to challenge is the idea that literature has only recently been over-
run by numerous non-literary forms and content. Intermediality, inter-
art, or mixed media—or whatever the combination and transformation of
medialities have been called historically—have always been a focal point of
discussion and strategic debates. On this point, the reader will find that
my argument partly differs from influential theories of “mediatization”
discussed by Stig Hjarvard (2013) and other sociologically inclined media
and communication scholars. There is, from my point of view, no doubt
that this invasion of medialities in everyday life has resulted in changes of
the form and content of what we call “literature”—but I want to suggest
 INTRODUCTION 5

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.

CHOSEN CASE STUDIES

Finally, I present some thoughts on the selected literary material. I have
in this study chosen to restrict my field to the study of so-called realistic
narrative texts in prose. This is not because I believe that poetic or dra-
matic texts do not have any mediality aspects that ought to be highlighted
and interpreted, quite the contrary. The reason is, instead, that I find that
realistic prose texts offer certain challenges that demand certain medial
analytical devices to reveal these aspects. Furthermore, narrative prose is
probably the literary form which is, at least on the surface, only marginally
subjected to medial influence, which makes it even more stimulating to
demonstrate the presence and function of medialities in this type of texts.
Due to technological and consequently medial changes, contemporary lit-
erature, whether prose or not, clearly demonstrates that the print book as
the sole medium for distributing literature was (always) a historical solution
and never a natural fact. Literature, including narrative literature, therefore
tends to put pressure on the borders of the conventional book format and
to try out new forms—either in book-born forms like the graphic novel,
or in more radical experiments, which may be characterized as attempts to
investigate the physical materiality of literature as meaning-bearing devices.
However, I have chosen to focus my interest on the representation of
medialities in relatively conventional narrative texts, instead of looking
at the many contemporary examples of narratives in, for instance, digi-
talized literary forms. Again, this is because my selling point in this book,
first and foremost, is that mediality is present in texts that seem to be
conventionally monomedial; and second, I save my intermedial analysis
of more radically medialized texts for future studies, where I intend to
demonstrate a more comprehensive interpretation of a text that includes
both the material mediality of the given text and the represented mediali-
ties of the text.
When it comes to the period from which I have chosen my examples, I
have limited myself to texts from the era spanning from the first half of the
twentieth century to the second decade of the twenty-first, and all of my
examples have been written in (or translated by the author himself) English.
In terms of epoch, this choice mainly reflects my wish to do textual analy-
8 J. BRUHN

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

list of medialities. Furthermore, Egan’s novel is distinguished by the way

in which it does not transgress the generic conventions of the novel, and
therefore mobilizes at least a handful of different forms and discursive
styles; this in a sense puts the question of mediation at the foreground, but
at the same time makes the task of establishing a relatively simple mediality
structure quite demanding. The main reason why I selected Egan’s novel
is because it challenges the method of my first three cases, as the analysis
of Goon Squad necessitates an understanding of not only the represented
medialities but also the more radical medial aspects of the text. Hence, my
fourth case study challenges my own method and hopefully opens new
perspectives for future readings.
Taken together, the four case studies are meant to offer a relatively broad
testing material for my three-step method, but as mentioned above, each
case also demands different approaches, and this is also how the method
is meant to be used. In some cases, the critical reception of the works
provides a useful entry to the discussions; in other cases, a more general
question (memory, or representation, for instance) provides a gateway to
the more detailed discussions. All in all, I hope my chosen texts will prove
useful for my attempt to smooth out the difficult road between, on the
one hand, media theory and intermediality studies, and on the other hand
literary criticism and textual analysis.
In the first chapter after this Introduction, I offer a presentation of
the theoretical concepts and traditions that I feel are necessary for the
main project of this book, namely, to construct a method of analysis and
to exemplify this method’s use. The first chapter will therefore introduce
basic terms like the three dimensions of medium, the modalities of media,
and the combination and the transformation perspectives on medial mix.
The chapter introduces my two main terms—“mediality” and “heterome-
diality”—and it offers a brief historical overview on the different ways of
approaching the question of medial mixes.
The method and my theoretical basis are described in Chap. 2, and the
outline is meant to be simple enough to be of immediate use for teachers
and students to apply, but still sufficiently complex to be of use also when
discussing sophisticated literary texts in a research context. As I will return
to and discuss more in detail in the methodology part of Chap. 2, I con-
sider my method to be an extension of conventional methods used for cul-
tural analysis throughout the humanities, exemplified by Erwin Panofsky’s
iconology—but with the key distinction that the main focus of interest is
the presence and function of medialities in narrative literary texts.
10 J. BRUHN

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

Higgins, Dick. 1997. Modernism since postmodernism: Essays on intermedia. San

Diego: San Diego State University Press.
Hjarvard, Stig. 2013. The mediatization of culture and society. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Jones, Caroline. 2010. Senses. In Critical terms for media studies, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell
and M.B.N. Hansen, 88–100. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, film, typewriter/Friedrich A. Kittler. Trans.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University
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Pethő, Ágnes. 2011. Cinema and intermediality: The passion for the in-between.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Schröter, Jens. 2010. The politics of intermediality. Acta Univ. Sapientia. Film and
Media Studies 2: 107–124.
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Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
 CHAPTER 2

What is Mediality, and (How) does it

Matter? Theoretical Terms
and Methodology

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.

THE FIELD OF INTERMEDIALITY

The scholarly study of “media” or “intermediality” encompasses very
broad fields, and it includes approaches as diverse as quantitative media
analysis of communication scholars of mass communication (often in
Communication or Media departments) or the multimodal analyti-
cal perspective proposed by, among others, Charles Forceville, Gunther

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 13

J. Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57841-9_2
14 J. BRUHN

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

As opposed to the conventional idea of intermediality as a mix between

otherwise autonomous medialities, my theoretical point of departure is
the claim that all texts, including literary texts, inevitably reflect a mixed
constellation. As a superordinate term for these a priori mixed conditions,
I have proposed the concept of “heteromediality” (see Bruhn 2010a, b).
In contrast to the term intermediality, my term heteromediality (hetero:
other, or mixed) emphasizes that blending is an a priori condition in all
texts, and that the blending aspects consequently do not constitute a
marginal phenomenon or a marginal subgroup: Mixedness characterizes
all medialities and all specific texts. Mixedness comes first, so to speak;
the monomedial purity of any specific medial object is the result of an
active purification—instead of the other way round. My proposal of a new
term for the mixed character of all medialities is inspired by both Mikhail
Bakhtin’s ideas of the internal stratification and non-identity of national
languages; for instance, in his essay “Discourse in the Novel,” where the
translators suggest “heteroglossia” as the English version of the original
Russian concept.1 The term heteromediality is, furthermore, an attempt
to specify and put to work W.J.T. Mitchell’s idea that “all media are mixed
media,” a dictum that he explains in the following way:

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)

This I take to be the central claim for my version of intermediality

studies—that all media are mixed, but in infinitely differentiated ways.
Moreover, this should also define the aim for intermedial studies, namely,
to be able first of all to be aware of this mixedness, and furthermore to
describe this presence and function of intermediality in specific texts,
inside or outside of what we choose to define as the aesthetic domain.

FROM MEDIUM TO MEDIATION AND MEDIALITY

My understanding of mediality and medialities takes as its starting point
the observation that human beings live in a mediating relation to our
surroundings and to other people. We produce and receive representa-
16 J. BRUHN

tions of the world; that is, we communicate by structured constellations

of meaningful signs. Below, I will designate these structured constellations
“media products.” The media products that we receive and produce tend
to cluster in groups that have, among other things, been called art forms,
communicative forms, or, more recently, been collected under the broad
term media (singular: medium). Historically, most discussions in interme-
diality studies have used the concept “medium”/“media,” but the term is
much debated; a central commentator in the field, Werner Wolf, ironically
notices that “[c]uriously, problems of definition and typology have not
hindered intermediality research. The most obvious among these is the
problem of defining ‘medium’ itself” (Wolf 2005, 253).
I follow attempts in recent years where modified terms and ideas of
medium have cropped up. In the anthology Mediality/Intermediality,
Werner Wolf and others opened the possibility of using the term mediality
as a more open form of the “medium” concept (Wolf 2008, 16). I see the
same trend in Mitchell and Hansen’s anthology Critical Terms for Media
Studies, where “mediation” plays an important role and where there is
a tendency to avoid the question of what a medium is and instead there
is an attempt to understand either what media do—or rather, what the
process of mediation involves. Mitchell and Hansen showed that media-
tion not only designates a philosophical concept but also an activity—the
process of mediating which per definition also includes, I would stress, a
media product—instead of the objectified existence of a medium/media.
Therefore, in this book instead of the term medium (with the implied
conceptual connotations of object-hood) I suggest the term “mediality,”
in particular, because I find it more closely related to the process of media-
tion in communicative situations.
Media theory and intermedial studies have, for decades, been engaged
in rich and highly refined debates concerning abstract terms and theo-
retical questions. When it comes to the terms and concepts I am using
herein, my terms are meant to do a specific job in the arguments and
specific construction of a more general methodology in this book. I am
inspired, via a discussion by Toril Moi, by the Wittgensteinian tradition of
so-called Ordinary Language Philosophy, where words and concepts are
seen as pragmatic working tools; in other words, not as “ideal concepts”
with exact boundaries, and not having an existence beyond the objects to
which the term refers (Moi 2009). My terms will be put to work in my
specific analyses, and their usefulness should be judged from the results
 WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 17

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:

By installing mediality at these “points” in the simplified communi-

cation model, I simply want to stress that medialities comprise a crucial
part of any communicative process, since they make possible the sender’s
production of utterances—and, on the receiver’s side of the conversation,
medialities are also indispensible aspects of the reception of the utterance.
Here, again, my thinking is influenced by Bakhtin and his longstanding
interest in the idea of speech genres of everyday communication as well
18 J. BRUHN

as of literary genres in the literary system (see Bakhtin, 1986). In prag-

matic terms, the sender’s ability to construct a media product from his or
her knowledge about and interest in specific medialities, is subsequently
matched by the receiver’s knowledge about the medialities that enables
him or her to recognize and process the media product in a way that “fits”
the sender’s intentions.
My understanding of medialities as part of a process of communica-
tion may give the impression that I employ an outdated idea of “par-
cels of information” being sent and received linearly, by means of a direct
and undisturbed process of transmission—which is definitely not the case.
On the contrary, I agree with Marie-Laure Ryan, who programmatically
stated that “media matter” (thus suggesting the title of my book), and
continued, “Even when they seek to make themselves invisible, media are
not hollow conduits for the transmission of messages but material sup-
ports of information whose materiality, precisely, ‘matters’ for the type of
meanings that can be encoded” (Ryan 2004, 1–2). As a consequence of
this, the medialities aspect cannot be separated from the message, which
Marshall McLuhan, in so many ways a fundamental source of contempo-
rary media studies, famously framed with his dictum, “The medium is the
message.” However, senders and receivers may very well have divergent
interpretive agendas—the unstable interpretive status of any text being
a well-established fact—not to mention that the purpose of art and lit-
erature is very often to blur the very communicative messages a media
product apparently sends. Nevertheless, I persist in seeing artistic mediali-
ties as parts of a communicative milieu.4
Therefore, what Ryan and McLuhan for instance call media, and I pre-
fer to name medialities, are never neutral channels. They “open up pos-
sibilities and impose constraints” (Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, quoted in
Ryan 2004, 2), a fact that is often abbreviated into the useful term “affor-
dances” (Gibson 1977; also discussed in Kress 2005). This is one of the
main reasons for investigating literature from a mediality point of view; it
forces us to recognize the “affordances” of any communicative relation.
This means that any model of communication necessitates a working the-
sis about the mediating nexus—and vice versa.
Given my remarks above on the topological “position” of medialities
in the communicative situation, it is necessary to posit a working concept
of mediality. I find an approach developed by Lars Elleström helpful for
my analytical purposes, because his definition offers a precise—but at the
same time, relatively flexible—definition of medium as a mixture of media
 WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 19

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

However, a mediality is never present as a physical entity, the term

“designate phenomena which cannot be observed in themselves but only
with reference to certain manifestations” (Wolf 2011, 2; see also Rajewsky
2010). The qualified mediality of, for instance, literature (and more spe-
cifically narrative, written literature) is only present in concrete, specific
examples, such as a copy of Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace or Joyce’s short
story “The Dead,” or the Jennifer Egan novel. These specific examples I
call media products, not to be confused with the categories they exem-
plify. Medialities as such are a useful categorizing tool that enables us to
understand the historical development and the affordances of groups of
texts. My mediality model enables me to describe as well as differentiate
among a wide spectrum of aspects that otherwise might be rather con-
fusing. It does so while stressing in its very basis the mixed nature of all
medial expressions as an a priori characteristic, as well as acknowledging
the very basic but often overlooked fact that literature is by definition a
mediated form.

ASPECTS OF EXTERNAL MEDIALITIES

Up until now, intermediality studies have by and large not explored the
question of materiality of literature as much as warranted. However, recent
studies have continued to consider earlier perspectives (certain traditions
of comparative literature, book history, and media archaeology) concern-
ing what could be called the material mediality of the literary text (not to
be confused with the material modality). N. Katherine Hayles is a leading
figure in discussions that have recently led to discourses about a transdis-
ciplinary field called “comparative textual media.”7 The field is based on
Hayles’ argument, which stated that the

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

counter) to other thematic or formal dimensions of the media product

(in this case, literary texts) that are more typically the focus. In the sec-
ond part of this theoretical–methodological chapter, I will put forth my
suggestions for an analytical method in more detail; but first, a few more
theoretical notions must be introduced.

HISTORICITY OF MEDIAL RELATIONS

Returning for a short while to the realm of relatively abstract mediality ter-
minology, we must face the fact that medial relations have a historical side
as well. A description of the historical forms of the relations of medialities,
as supported by historical institutions or as aspects of specific works of art,
could easily develop into a comprehensive cultural history. To avoid this,
certain simplifications must be made. For introductory purposes here, I
merely sketch some of the most basic historical discussions in intermedial-
ity studies that I believe are present in numerous contemporary discus-
sions, and that are sometimes fruitful entrances to the medial discussion
concerning literary texts. The issues I want to introduce very briefly are,
on the one hand, the paragone debate between art forms, and on the
other hand, the question of mixed versus pure medialities.
The idea of a paragone (roughly corresponding to “comparison”)
originates in Renaissance art theory and relates to a ranking competi-
tion among the arts concerning which was the best and most valuable art
form. Famously, Leonardo da Vinci argued, in his treatise on painting,
that painting was the highest example of artistic form, and this contention
was refuted by, among others, Michelangelo, who counter-argued for the
primacy of sculpture. The Renaissance concept of paragone has been an
perennial discussion in Western cultural history; recently, a German col-
lection of essays reinvigorated the idea of the “competition” (Wettstreit)
between the arts and media by analyzing not only the classical art forms
but also TV, advertising, graphic novels, and computer games in a frame-
work inspired by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Degner and Wolf
2010). According to this anthology, we are currently witnessing a new or
renewed competition among the arts, and I will argue, in my analyses of
narrative texts, that it is often possible to trace a paragone debate in the
modern media products I am analyzing.
Another useful way to understand the complicated history of the blend-
ing of medialities and its imprints on modern literature is to follow the
contrast between the tradition that points out the benefits of the meeting
 WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 25

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

COMBINATION AND TRANSFORMATION AS THE TWO MAJOR

INTERMEDIAL RELATIONS
However, I think it is safe to say that according to contemporary the-
ory, the arts are indeed mixed. I don’t see any defenders of the idea of
well-defined, pure medialities (in a classical, Lessing-inspired sense of the
26 J. BRUHN

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

depending on analytical interest, you can choose to perceive a media prod-

uct as either a relation of combination or a process of transformation; both
dimensions are aspects of the text. To get the fullest possible description
and interpretation, one might combine the two approaches, but in many
specific analyses the student or scholar will typically focus on one of the
two aspects.

REFERENCE, FORMAL IMITATION, AND MEDIAL

PROJECTION
Before I move to the analytical questions that I address directly in the case
studies, I need to introduce some further distinctions all of which are parts
of the media transformation perspective mentioned above. One of these is
the distinction between representations of medialities as mere mentioning
and representations of a mediality that entails a thorough interference in
the compositional form of the work that contains such a representation.
A first distinction is between reference on the one hand and formal
imitation on the other. The creator of a media product may, consciously
or unconsciously, evoke or insert a mediality reference to another real or
fictional media product (Mann’s narrator’s references to Beethoven’s late
works in Doktor Faustus, for instance, or Proust’s narrator’s references to
the fictional painter Elstir’s paintings in A la recherche du temps perdu) or
parts of it (a specific, musical aspect of a real Beethoven sonata or the col-
ors of a fictional Elstir painting) or to another mediality in a broader sense
(music or painting as such, discussed by Mann or Proust). But a media
product may also be formed entirely by miming the formal attributes of
another mediality; in that case I will talk about “formal imitation” (Wolf
2008, 2011). Mentioning a rock ballad in a short story does not need to
be interpreted as much more than a detail in the description of the set-
ting, typically a “reality effect,” as Barthes called it (Barthes 1986), to
enhance the realistic rhetoric of the text, and consequently, the song is
only represented as a specific mediality reference in the short story. The
use of the musical Chinese box motif determines the entire structure of
David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas from 2004, which means that the
musical compositional principle structures the form of the novel, which is
therefore a clear case of “formal imitation.” Of course, there are no rigid
boundaries between reference versus formal imitation, but a rule of thumb
could be that if we are dealing with a specific reference of a media product,
28 J. BRUHN

the particular example is interchangeable (the rock song could perhaps be

a Doors song as well as a Rolling Stones song), whereas David Mitchell’s
sextet motif (as an example of formal imitation) cannot be substituted
with another musical genre or form without changing the entire structure
and meaning of the novel Cloud Atlas.
Intermediality studies have described another way that “non-literary”
form or content can enter into the literary texts, namely by way of char-
acters in the fiction, or the narrator of the fiction, who frames the reality
they perceive or describe as if it was a work of art. Seeing the world as if
it was a painting has been productively named and theorized under the
term “iconic projection” by Swedish scholar Hans Lund (Lund 1992, see
also Tornborg 2014). I would like, however, to propose the broader term
“medial projection” which may include a much wider array of medial phe-
nomena. Perceiving and describing particular aspects of the world as if it
was, or could have been, either a qualified mediality (like “music” or more
specific “a symphony”), or a technical mediality (a TV screen, a canvas)
is a common literary device, which is, actually, an intermedial phenom-
enon. I will in the following name this “medial projection,” sometimes
using a more specific term depending on which specific mediality struc-
tures the element in the narrative. Medial projection plays a certain role
in my analyses, and it is a central part in my attempt to establish a general
intermedial analytical model for analyzing literary texts. In my fourth case
study, I try to strengthen the value of the term by stressing the distinction
between the medial projection produced by characters or the narrator as
opposed to the structuring of the entire text, beyond the capacity of any
diegetic figures.
Until now I have tried to offer an overview of the basic theoretical
choices underlying both my suggested method (that I present below) and
based on my analyses of literary texts in Chaps. 3, 4, 5, and 6 I have pro-
vided a brief background concerning the field of intermediality studies,
and sketched the theoretical backgrounds for some of the terms that will
be recurrent in the analytical chapters: mediality as a broad term, techni-
cal medium, qualified medium, and basic medium, and I have made a
provisional division between medial combination and medial transforma-
tion, mediality reference versus formal imitation and finally introduced
medial projection as yet another way that literature comes in close contact
with other aesthetic or non-aesthetic medialities.
The question at this point, and the problem that this book aims at solv-
ing, is how to transform the theoretical categories of intermedial theory
 WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 29

into a productive analytical strategy. The theoretical terminology needs,

in other words, to be concretized into a methodology for reading and
analyzing narrative texts.

MEDIALITY ANALYSIS OF LITERARY TEXTS:

A METHODOLOGY
It is, I believe, noticeable that the question of “method” or “methodol-
ogy” is and has been remarkably unpopular in literary studies for quite
a while. For two of the central figures of post-war literary criticism and
theory, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, method became more or less
anathema to their engagement with literature and art, a position Susan
Sontag expressed via her attack on “interpretation”:

By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates

a certain code, certain ‘rules’ of interpretation.
Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X,
the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation
is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, ‘Look, don’t you see
that X is really - or, really means - A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?’
(Sontag, 1966, 5)

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

of “post-theory” (After Theory is the title of Terry Eagleton’s fierce 2003

attack on theory; see also Carroll and Bordwell 1996) or “new theory,”
one thing seems relatively clear: Practically nobody wants to return to
“interpretation,” in Sontag’s understanding of the word. When critical
or analytical engagement with art is conceptualized as “encounter, expe-
rience, or presentation,” it is, in fact, directed against any repeatable
method of analysis.10
Nevertheless, what I try to achieve in this book is exactly to suggest
a relatively simple set of rules that may be used, with a certain measure
of openness and creativity, in order to analyze narrative fictional texts. I
want to suggest a method of analyzing narrative written literature that is
at the same time sufficiently open toward improvisation and creativity to
be useful when analyzing the individual complexities of specific narrative
texts. I am not creating a method for the sake of the method itself, but
instead I attempt to facilitate traffic between theory and textual analysis,
by suggesting a method to open up the texts of my case studies via close
reading. The method is therefore meant to lead to the truly interesting
individual results, and not just to a demonstration of the usefulness of a
theory—and in the analytical process, the method as well as the theoretical
terms should of course be critically investigated and consequently modi-
fied and improved.
My method is based on the theoretical terms of intermediality studies
presented above, as well as a handful of more general ideas concerning the
basic notions of the literary text I intend to suggest in this book. The basic
notions underlying my analyses are “the case study,” “the multiplicity of
possible readings,” and “mediality as motif”: I aim to move “beyond com-
parison,” and I am interested in finding “the meta-aspects of combined
and transformed medialities.” I shall now briefly introduce each and every
one of them.

BASIC ANALYTICAL FOUNDATION

The Case Study

I apply my analytical method on specific texts (media products), which I
regard as relatively autonomous entities, despite the fact that the notion
of the autonomous work has been criticized and deconstructed more
than once in literary theory since the advent of New Criticism. In the
words of Mieke Bal, “the case study has acquired a dubious reputation
 WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 31

as a facile entrance into theoretical generalization and speculation” (Bal

2010, 4). Nevertheless she argues that, well aware of the dangers of “over-
generalizing,” her analysis (dealing with the work of a sculptor) is, “if
anything, over-singularizing” (Bal 2010, 5). Using singular texts as case
studies, of course, runs two obvious risks: Either the critic may “cherry-
pick” results from the texts that all too easily exemplify some preconceived
theoretical ideas or the case studies may end up illustrating nothing but
atomistic, isolated insights that cannot be generalized. I will not go as far
as Bal, who prefers the term “theoretical object” for her material, mean-
ing that her material, counter-intuitively, produces the theoretical terms
she employs in the understanding of the artistic material; however, I do
find that my four cases encourage me to stretch my methodological and
theoretical terms, and in particular exert pressure on the three-step model
I present below. For me, this is not a sign that methodology ought to be
avoided; rather, it shows the limits of any interpretative method when
confronted with artistic material, which is, I guess, exactly why we want to
engage with art and literature in the first place.

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

In this particular sense, I feel closer to the influential texts by media

historian Friedrich Kittler (1997), who offers inspiring and surprising
re-readings of the history of literature—most famously, perhaps, in his
interpretation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Kittler does not, as is customary,
see this novel as the predecessor of contemporary horror novels; instead,
he views it as a novel about bureaucracy and communication technolo-
gies. Like Kittler, I try to read literary texts that don’t necessarily have an
explicit relation to questions of mediality, in order to first tease out and
then understand the implications of the mediality aspects of the text. After
having read Kittler’s analysis, I find it difficult not to regard Dracula as a
novel about media technologies, and attaining a similar effect is, of course,
the goal of my readings, too.

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.

The Meta-Aspects of Combined and Transformed Medialities

Narrative literary texts very often exhibit a predilection for letting mediali-
ties expose a double dimension of the text. First, the presented medialities
relate to larger contextual relations outside the text, and the medialities
are very often involved in paragone-related debates based on ideological
 WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 33

constellations linked either to the historical context the text is represent-

ing or to the contemporaneity of the time in which the text was written.
This will become particularly clear in the Carver and Egan texts, where the
represented medialities function as a kind of metonymic representations
of the historical contexts. On the other hand, and seemingly as a kind of
contradiction to the relations pointing “outside” the text, the presented
medialities often offer a kind of medial “mise en abyme” inside the text;
that is, the medial constellation of the text offers a metafictional perspec-
tive on the text itself, a kind of genomic code present inside the text that
gives away the entire mediality constellation of the text of which it is a
part. In other words, the stories I work with contain not only an “objec-
tive level” concerning the plot and other aspects but also a “meta-level”
in which the story reflects upon itself, following the useful terminology
suggested by Werner Wolf (2007).

The Multiplicity of Possible Readings

Finally, and following from my points above, I should stress that I am well
aware that my method produces a certain type of readings (focused on
mediality), and that my readings constitute only singular readings among
many possible interpretations and entrances to the texts. The rich plurality,
not to mention a possible totality of interpretative meanings, can of course
never be attained through my analyses.
To sum up my general analytical choices concerning textual analysis,
by means of close readings, I analyze and interpret narrative literary texts
that work as my case studies. Based on this, I will propose one out of
many possible interpretations, not primarily in order to show the texts’
medial relations with genre, author, or period, but rather to tease out the
presence and function of medialities inside the text that often create self-
referential textual effects that can be related to contexts outside the text.

THE MEDIALITY ANALYSIS OF NARRATIVE LITERARY TEXTS:

A THREE-STEP MODEL
Founded on the overview of basic terms of mediality and intermediality,
and based in the general methodological ideas concerning my approach, I
will now, as the last effort before offering my specific analysis, finally pro-
pose a three-step model constructed in order to analyze narrative literary
texts from a mediality perspective.
34 J. BRUHN

The specific method I propose is a three-step model moving from con-

structing a list of mediality presences to a winnowing and structuring of
this list, which further leads to an interpretation of the work, often, but
not always, by way of a contextualization outside the text. The model
has been developed as a result of my experiences with teaching interme-
diality and comparative literature, as well as of my own attempts to write
intermedial analyses of literary texts. I find, as mentioned previously, that
there is an unproductive distance between the rich theoritization in media
studies and intermedial studies on the one hand, and specific, hands-on
analytical practice on the other. It is this gap my model specifically aims
to overcome.
As mentioned several times above, the method consists of three steps.
The first step consists of a comprehensive and fairly loose registration
of the representations of media products, mediality types, and mediality
aspects in the given text. Once again, it is important to stress that my focus
in this study is the representation of medialities in literature, as opposed to
readings of literature as material objects, or understanding of the distribu-
tion and production of literature. This first step is intended to generate
a register of medially interesting phenomena in the text. In this opening
phase, it becomes clear why I suggest employing as broad a concept of
medialities as possible, taking into account a large number of aspects con-
nected directly or indirectly to any mediating devices in communicative
situations. This first step may be characterized, in comparison with the
two steps that follow, as the least creative and almost rote-like dimen-
sion of the analysis. Ideally, different readers with different interpretational
agendas should be able to agree upon most of the items on this list, but
it is nevertheless not a list that may be generated without any interpretive
considerations. To take an obvious example, language is a mediality whose
function and presence need to be analyzed in any literary text, but that
does not mean that all instances of language in a short story should be
put on the list (which would mean, basically, that the entire text would be
reproduced word for word in the list). So even if the list resulting from the
first step is supposed to be constructed in compliance with relatively objec-
tive standards, the list is, of course, following pragmatic considerations.
As the second step of the analysis, I suggest that the reader organizes
the large and often incoherent material collected and registered in step 1.
From my experience, I know that this second step demands rigor, because
it is all too easy to “slip” ahead into step 3’s contextualizing and more
interpretive activity. The second step is, however, meant to construct a
preliminary order or structure, to provide interpretative suggestions based
 WHAT IS MEDIALITY, AND (HOW) DOES IT MATTER? … 35

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.

PRESENTATION OF THE ANALYTICAL RESULTS

The structure of my method shares certain likenesses with art historian
Erwin Panofsky’s (1939) well-known three-level analysis of meaning in
(mainly older) art. Panofsky’s method consists of a pre-iconographic iden-
36 J. BRUHN

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

9. For a general discussion of medium specificity, see Carroll (1996); for a

discussion of the ideas of medium specificity and visual arts, see Mitchell
(2005), whereas Chatman (1980) offers a classical discussion of film versus
literature from a specificity perspective.
10. Derrida’s consistent denial that “deconstruction” should be regarded as a
method is another example, and so is, more recently, Hans-Ulrich
Gumbrecht’s attempt to deprive interpretation from being the only episte-
mological goal of the humanities in his influential Production of Presence
(2004). There are, perhaps, two recent, and partly related, approaches to
literary criticism that are more methodologically than theoretically inclined
(if this crude dichotomy can be permitted for a moment). Franco Moretti’s
(2013) idea about “distant reading” as opposed to the conventional close
reading is one strong position in contemporary thinking about the possi-
bilities of comparative literature. Related to this are aspects of so-called
Digital Humanities, in particular when it comes to Digital Humanities’
attempts to mine data from large cultural archives in a kind of “digital-
distant” reading.
11. See Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History,
wherein she quotes Panofsky’s discussion of a “circulus methodicus” (182).

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Bal, Mieke. 2010. Of what one cannot speak: Doris Salcedo’s political art. Chicago:
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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
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Bruhn, Jørgen. 2010a. Heteromediality. In Media borders, multimodality and
intermediality, ed. L. Elleström. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.
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 CHAPTER 3

Speak, Memory? Vladimir Nabokov,

“Spring in Fialta”1

Abstract In this first case study—on Vladimir Nabokov’s “Spring in

Fialta”—the problematic love affair between two post-Russian exiles turns
out to be deal with the difficult relationship between art and remem-
brance. The methodological argument underlying my analysis is that this
thematic can only be revealed by way of an intermedial perspective on
the text. I discuss visual medialities, literature, cinema, and finally music
as ways of comprehending the story as a kind of metaphor for its own
representation., Consequently, the case study clearly illustrates the meth-
odological point—that despite the fact that the basic three-step model is
useful, it also needs to be applied with a certain sense of respect for the
text’s unique setup, which demands, in each and every reading, a creative
reframing of the method.

Do we need literature, or art in general, in order to remember? And if so;

how does this relate to questions of mediality? These are the overarch-
ing questions in this chapter discussing Vladimir Nabokov’s (1899–1977)
short story “Spring in Fialta”—and I hope to show that in order to answer
them, an intermedial approach is necessary.
Famously, Marcel Proust, in À la recherche du temps perdu, described
how a sensory experience, the taste of the famous petite madeleine, led
to intense childhood memories that could later be turned into a great
work of literature. Thus, the French author offered an artistic answer to
the question, “How do memory and literature relate to one another?”

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 41

J. Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57841-9_3
42 J. BRUHN

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.

“TIGHTLY WOVEN, BEAUTIFULLY COMPOSED,

ELABORATELY INTRICATE”: PRESENTATION OF “SPRING
IN FIALTA”

Victor is the name of the narrating protagonist in “Spring in Fialta,” con-

sidered to be one of the very best stories in Nabokov’s impressive nar-
rative oeuvre. Victor admits, at one point, to shortcomings concerning
choices from his past, his own storytelling capabilities, and probably also
his lack of presence in the world. Quoting a popular source, “[s]chol-
ars generally agree that Spring in Fialta is […] tightly woven, beautifully
composed, elaborately intricate, and an all-round humbling experience to
read” (Shmoop Editorial Team 2008), and according to one critic, this
was also Nabokov’s own favorite short story (Foster 1989, 78).
 SPEAK, MEMORY? VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “SPRING IN FIALTA” 43

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

of the academic journal Nabokov Studies, generously open to a host of the-

oretical discourses, no articles discuss the “intermedial” Nabokov, either
in terms of intermedial or interartial terminology, or by way of focusing on
the relations between the arts or media in the text.
There are exceptions, though, to this rule in other works on
Nabokov. One of them is Nabokov’s Dark Cinema by Alfred Appel Jr.
(1974), offering a rather idiosyncratic cultural context intermingled
with biographical anecdotes centered around Nabokov as a writer and
Nabokov’s relationship with American pop culture. Another, and more
important, exception to the rule will serve as an introduction to my
own reflections—namely, the valuable Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of
Painting by de Vries and Johnson (2006). The authors stress that, while
“Nabokov’s passion for butterflies and its impact on his writing are well
known,” they wish to examine the “less familiar […] deep love of the
visual arts and their ubiquitous influence on his verbal art” (ibid., 11).
De Vries and Johnson believe that Nabokov’s lifelong passion for art was
conceived when he was trained by professional painters as a child, and
they mention the Nabokov family’s significant collection of mostly older
art (ibid., 98). I shall argue that the general conflict between artistic
representation and life itself is condensed into the more specific problem
of how to recall and represent memory traces in “Spring in Fialta.” In
this chapter, I wish to demonstrate how it relates directly to questions
of medialities.
In de Vries and Johnson’s introductory chapter, “Nabokov and the two
sister arts,” and by way of a brief reference to the ut pictura poesis, they
place Nabokov in the tradition that considers the two contrasting artistic
types, literature and painting, as being capable of representing each other’s
subject matters (ibid., 11). Implicitly referring to the age-old discussions
on the possible relationship between the arts through history, where a basic
distinction is between position that, respectively deny or value the mixing
of artistic medialities (sketched in the theoretical chapter), de Vries and
Johnson even claim that, at least as far as Nabokov’s prose is concerned,
generally “[p] ainting and prose, pen and pencil become interchangeable”
(ibid., 18) which posits “Nabokov […] as a painter with words” (ibid.,
19). When the authors discuss specific texts, the strategy changes how-
ever, and concerning “Spring in Fialta,” they follow already established
interpretations of the work related to the importance of a literary source
(Chekhov’s “Lady with the Dog”) as well as the biographical details of
Nabokov’s love affair.2
 SPEAK, MEMORY? VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “SPRING IN FIALTA” 45

Such keys to the work focus on relatively direct connections between

Nabokov’s expatriate life and the characters in his text. However, when it
comes to aspects that do not directly include biography but rather relate
to textual signs referring to art or literature, they establish other important
clues. De Vries and Johnson argue that the visuality and thus intermedial-
ity of the text should be seen in light of a major painterly work, Leonardo
da Vinci’s The Last Supper. This interpretation offers insights into the the-
matic structure of the text. By showing Nabokov’s continuous interest in
and reference to da Vinci, the authors demonstrate the importance of The
Last Supper in particular, and of painting in general, for the text.
Nevertheless, a literature-painting interpretation without a method-
ologically founded intermedial basis presents certain difficulties that point
to the even bigger problem of reading literature without a sufficiently
developed and theorized framework attuned to what we could refer to
as “heteromedial effects.” This is where contemporary intermediality
research offers a number of helpful tools, and in this context I shall make
use of the distinction between medial transformation and medial com-
bination, as well as the two categories of reference and formal imitation
defined in the previous chapter. My three-step methodology will guide me
through the short story.

Step 1: Registering Medialities in “Spring in Fialta”

It would take up far too much space to list all the occurrences of basic,
technical, or qualified medialities—not to mention mediating instances
or media-symbolic elements—in “Spring in Fialta.” However, to exem-
plify the kind of register I find it necessary to establish, I shall thor-
oughly process the first paragraphs of the short story, which is neither
more nor less “mediality-crowded” than other excerpts of the story.
Later on in my interpretation, I will of course also need to take into
account the basic narratological levels of the story; that is, I will need
to consider whether the medialities are represented by an author, a nar-
rator, or a character in the text. The value of the first step is to incor-
porate as closely as possible all representations of medialities, allowing
a qualified selection to be made, and subsequently to perform an inter-
pretation of the material.
Direct examples of medialities in the first paragraph would include: “the
watery vista” and Mount St. George, which is described as “more than
ever remote from its likeness in the picture postcard” and “the amethyst-
toothed lumps of rock and the mantelpiece dreams of seashells.” Examples
46 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.

Step 2: Structuring Medialities in “Spring in Fialta”

Such a list must be processed and ordered in some way; for instance,
by dividing the findings into groups of qualified medialities that stand
against each other (narrative literature, visual arts, music)—or perhaps
other dichotomies such as visuality and audibility, older media and con-
temporary media. The second step in the process comprises ordering the
observations into suitable groups and then trying out—and here the inter-
pretation moves from mechanical notes to creative interpretation—pro-
ductive relationships that may structure the observations. In this first case
study, I have chosen to present the different possible entrances more in
detail, until I—after quite a lengthy discussion—decide on one particular
mediality structure inherent in the text that I find to be the most produc-
tive. This means, in my context, pinpointing the one interpretation with
the best chance of explaining the highest number of aspects of the short
story.
 SPEAK, MEMORY? VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “SPRING IN FIALTA” 47

WORD AND IMAGE AS STRUCTURING PRINCIPLE?

An initial working hypothesis in “Spring in Fialta” might be that the story
divides medialities into one of the most common intermedial dichotomies,
namely word and image. To follow this lead, I shall begin by investigating
the function of medialities related to visuality in the short story, followed
by a discussion of the role of literature in the text.
It is obvious that the narrator is a highly perceptive person, and the
short story is flooded with stunning visual representations of townscapes,
nature, and human beings. Using the first page, once again, as an example,
we notice that the narrator is a keen beholder of his surroundings, see-
ing and describing all sorts of sensuous details, such as “jagged edges,”
“amethyst-toothed,” and the “drenched paper” (ibid., 413). These obser-
vations are at one point “framed” not as if the surroundings are reality,
but as if they were a picture, in “iconic projections” to use the intermedial
term: “[i]n a watery vista.” Later, in a comparable scene with totally dif-
ferent content, Victor is “in a grotesque and nightmarish way” reminded
by the sight of Ferdinand and his companions, of something that he “did
not quite grasp, but when [he] did so in retrospect” found “sacrilegious”
(ibid., 421). The scene reminded him, forcing him again to see the world
through an iconic projection, of Leonardo’s painting of The Last Supper.
In yet another comparable scene, he metaphorically describes his life with
his family as “the world in which I sat for a portrait, with my wife, my young
daughters, the Doberman pinscher (idyllic garlands, a signet ring, a slender
cane), between that happy, wise, and good world … and what?” (ibid.,
425). In this last description, the painting ascends to an almost Apollonian
harmony and beauty, as compared to the unnamable and unrepresentable
chaos signified by the three ominous dots ending the description. This
might symbolize his real but reluctantly admitted passion for Nina—what
he describes a few lines before as “those few meetings of which a short,
supposedly frivolous life was thus artificially formed” (ibid., 425).
To sum up, Victor, the narrator of the story, notices even the slightest
visual details of his surroundings, and he is furthermore able to render
them accurately in writing. He often aestheticizes his life situation or his
surroundings visually, by transforming them, via voluntary or involuntary
iconic projections, into mental images referred to in the narration, or by
comparing them with a specific painting or the field of painting in general.
At the same time, he seems acutely aware of the risks of such visual fram-
ings of the real world, specifically in the elegant but poignant passage that
48 J. BRUHN

reflects upon the postcards’ relationship to reality, a passage that includes

several of the fragments previously mentioned:

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)

This description of Fialta closely resembles the pictures on the outdated

postcards, partly because of the time that has passed, but also as a result
of the obstructed view of the mountain being “blurred.” The mountain
being blurred corresponds with several other significant visually degraded
details of the story. In the opening sentence, for instance, Fialta is “cloudy
and dull,” probably indicating that the sun cannot, until the remarkable
and dramatic end of the story, shed light upon—and thus illuminate—life.
The above-cited passage is, furthermore, typical of Nabokov’s way of
installing his explicit narrator, Victor, who is magnificently well equipped to
describe his surroundings, while at the same time both the implicit narrator
and Nabokov himself are all too keenly aware of the problems of describ-
ing the world as it appears to be. The truth about the world, in this pas-
sage, seems to be placed at the center of a triangle consisting of the written
description, the photographic postcards (symbolizing the visual arts), and
the sensory impressions. We often tend to think that sensory impressions
exist intrinsically, in themselves, but in fact, and I will return to this later, in
this short story they are never encountered in any pure state, either for us
as readers or for Victor. Victor tends to see the world either through visual
genres like the “vista” or through metaphoric patterns such as the postcards
“courting the tourists” or the “amethyst-toothed lumps,” to mention a few
examples from the quotation above. As a consequence, all sensory impres-
sions are actually filtered through human remembrance and vice versa,
which forces the reader to question every single detail or fact that is being
related in the text.
The visual medialities relating to painting and the frequent and strate-
gically placed posters3 are important, but they stand against the presence
of literature to some extent, and therefore the presence and function of
literature needs to be discussed more in detail.
 SPEAK, MEMORY? VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “SPRING IN FIALTA” 49

“What Was the Good of Thinking Up Books”: The Function

of Literature in “Spring in Fialta”
The presence and function of literature in “Spring in Fialta” is of course
complicated by the fact that literature is the mediality in which the short
story is presented. Consequently, there is an inherent dual aspect of the
literature in the short story that distinguishes it from the represented
medialities. Contained within the story, literature is first of all the métier
of Nina’s husband, and as such it is generally evaluated very negatively.
In a few important places in the text, we learn more about this particular
qualified mediality, as well as more about Ferdinand, the representative of
the craft. It begins with this introduction, provided by the jealous Victor:
“I would rather not dwell upon him [Ferdinand], but I cannot help it – he
is surging up from under my pen” (ibid., 420). A series of very negative
descriptions follows, not only depictions of the lifestyle, the companions,
and even the writer’s looks, but in particular a disparagement of his literary
works. The ad hominem attack is followed by a no less brutal denigration
of his work:

At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish

some human landscape, some old garden, some dream-familiar disposition
of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose… but with every
new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more
ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that bla-
zoned, ghastly rich glass and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but
a perfectly black void would face one’s shivering soul. (Ibid., 420)

The reader—but apparently not Victor, whose ability to see himself

critically from the outside is very limited—notices that the representa-
tional problems that Victor admitted in his description of the postcard
quoted above, are suddenly, when met in the opaque style of his rival
Ferdinand, considered an unforgivable flaw.
Apart from criticizing the opportunistic character traits of his rival, who
moves from aestheticism to Catholicism to communism (“After a brief
period of fashionable religious conversion […] he had turned his eyes
toward barbarous Moscow” (ibid., 427)). Victor offers a statement about
Ferdinand’s work that conveys his own ideas about trends and politics
in literature. In a slightly disguised attack on high modernist literature,
Victor does not find
50 J. BRUHN

that a ripple of stream of consciousness, a few healthy obscenities, and a

dash of communism in any old slop pail will alchemically and automatically
produce ultramodern literature; and I will contend until I am shot that art
as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level
of any ideological trash. (Ibid., 427)

In another context, Victor expresses an even more radical critique, not

only of contemporary art, but of fiction in general:

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

a richer and more gratifying view of the world, in contrast to literature

which, symbolized and incarnated by the life and work of Ferdinand,
seems doomed to fail in this respect. However, such a dichotomy would
quickly break down, because the medial economy of the short story does
not allow either side of the dichotomy to prevail over the other. Nabokov,
as the author behind Victor the narrator, seems to taint the brilliant visual
descriptions with insecurity in the form of blurredness and obscurity, while
at the same time stressing the failure of Ferdinand’s literary projects, and
perhaps also of literature as a whole.
Paradoxically, it turns out that two almost concealed medialities, cinema
and music, offer the most promising openings to the mediality questions
of the text. I shall now proceed to present and discuss the two mediali-
ties in question, and I will have to deal with the three central, interrelated
themes of the narrative: love, remembrance, and representation.

“All Dissolved”: Cinematic Aspects

It is worth remarking that, even though Victor obviously, through hav-
ing supposedly written “Spring in Fialta,” has quite a talent for writing,
he does not write for a living. Instead he works in film, not writing or
directing films, but, as far as we can ascertain, on the administrative side of
the film industry. Because of his work, he gets in touch with Nina’s hus-
band, Ferdinand, concerning “the film rights of one of his [Ferdinand’s]
more intelligible stories” (ibid., 422)—and we might suspect that working
with Ferdinand gives Victor the occasion to meet Nina from time to time.
However, the text also discloses signs referring to cinema that are perhaps
not conscious notions of Victor himself, but ought instead to be seen as
Nabokov’s characterization of Victor.
This may be the case regarding a number of metaphors used by Victor.
One example is when he comments upon his first meeting with Nina,
saying that “[m]y introductory scene with Nina had been laid in Russia”
(ibid., 415; my italics). This metaphor is an example of the particular form
of medial projection which may be called a “cinematic projection”: seeing
or describing the world as if it was a film.
Another, and more important, example is when, after an erotic encoun-
ter in a hotel room, Victor refers to the classic, codified Hollywood style
of indirectly referring to sexual relations, namely the famous fluttering
curtains:
52 J. BRUHN

[B]ecause of our sudden draft, a wave of muslin embroidered with white

dahlias got sucked in, with a shudder and knock, between the responsive
halves of the French window, and only when the door had been locked did
they let go that curtain with something like a blissful sigh. (Ibid., 419)

As if Nabokov is satirizing the puritanical restrictions, he has added sev-

eral erotic details like the “dahlias sucked in, with a shudder and knock,”
the “responsive halves,” and of course, finally, the “blissful sigh.”
In another scene, Victor asks Nina what would happen if he loved her:
“Look here – what if I love you?” and later withdraws the question, or
rather his proposition: “Never mind, I was only joking” (ibid., 429). This,
I suggest, may echo the hard-boiled fiction and film noir of the forties and
fifties. Perhaps the most important reference to film, though difficult to
establish with certainty, comes directly after this noncommittal declaration
of love, when only half a page of the story remains. Reality seems to be
slightly out of joint, and life appears to obey new rules following the sud-
den declaration, “[f]rom somewhere” a bouquet of violets “appeared in
her hands” (ibid., 429). This sudden appearance of flowers is less dramatic
and unexpected than the final sensual and cognitive experience:

Suddenly I understood something I had been seeing without understand-

ing – why a piece of tinfoil had sparkled so on the pavement, why the gleam
of a glass had trembled on a tablecloth, why the sea was ashimmer: some-
how, by imperceptible degrees, the white sky above Fialta had got saturated
with sunshine, and now it was sun-pervaded throughout, and this brimming
white radiance grew broader and broader, all dissolved in it, all vanished, all
passed, and I stood on the station platform of Mlech with a freshly bought
newspaper. (Ibid., 429)

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

the flowers suddenly materialize. The second and more comprehensive

change of time and space—from the final meeting with Nina in Fialta to
the train station in Mlech—seems to be produced incomprehensibly by
way of the sunlight turning all into “white radiance,” which causes the first
scene to “vanish” and to “pass,” leading on to the next moment “with a
freshly bought newspaper” (ibid., 429). One reason to interpret this as
a formal attribution of cinematic structure, is that Nabokov himself has
employed a particular word in the context, namely the verb “dissolved.”
In the narrative, it refers to the “all-pervading sunlight,” but read in the
context of the plot structure it may also refer to the film term “dissolve,” a
cinematic blending effect that is perfectly exemplified in this literary scene.
A dissolve in film may serve several functions. As part of the narrative,
a dissolve may move the action from one place to another: It may “shut
down” a scene, bring it to a halt and possibly to a closure, or it may work
as a gateway between different aspects of reality—for instance from reality
to dream, or from present to past. However, the function of the dissolve
in “Spring in Fialta” is not clear (see one definition in Katz 1992), and
this feels highly frustrating since this sudden and underexplained change
of time and space is placed at such a paramount position in the story.
In the three-step model, the third step should enable us to explain at
least the most significant parts of the medial presence and function of
the narrative—and in the case of the cinematic structuring of “Spring in
Fialta,” Nabokov criticism actually has something useful to offer. Alfred
Appel Jr. opened the investigation into Nabokov’s personal interest in and
inspiration from cinema in Nabokov’s Dark Cinema (1974). More recently,
Barbara Wyllie has offered a well-researched and convincingly structured
argument demonstrating that Nabokov’s work, from beginning to end,
is structured from cinematic inspiration: “Film exists in Nabokov’s fic-
tion as an overt and explicit parodic dynamic – evident particularly in spe-
cific characterizations – but also, and more fundamentally, discreetly and
implicitly as a pivotal aspect of his creative aesthetic” (Wyllie 2003, 3). In
intermedial terms, and following Werner Wolf’s (2008) terminology, we
can say that the cinematic presence detected and described by Appel and
Wyllie takes the forms of “reference” as well as “formal imitation” and,
as such, play a pivotal role in the short story. However, despite the fact
that the historical and biographical evidence support the perhaps relatively
veiled presence of cinema, I will argue that we need to take a look at an
even more submerged mediality of the text to get to the deepest possible
reading of the story.
54 J. BRUHN

Step 3: Contextualizing the Mediality Structure in “Spring in Fialta”

“Audible and Real”: Music as the Comprehensive Metaphor

for the Interpretation

Up to a point, sound and music are almost nonexistent in the story,

despite the presence of a memorable, and strange, characterization relat-
ing to music in the form of an all-female orchestra:

[H]alf a dozen weary-looking, self-conscious ladies interlacing mild har-

monies on a crammed platform and not knowing, as he [Ferdinand] put it,
what to do with their motherly bosoms, quite superfluous in the world of
music. (Nabokov 1995, 421)

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)

In this eminently Proustian sentence, Nabokov’s narrator and pro-

tagonist, Victor, not only manages to cram in tremendous amounts of
information, sentiments, and sensations by means of a complex interplay
of metaphors and metonymies, but also—and this is what interests me
here—by means of an important heteromedial presence. The sentence
expresses both the theme of the story—the relationship between “hymen
and death”; that is, Victor’s understanding that marriage not only kills
his relationship to Nina but even kills Nina literally, on her drive with her
husband—and the even more comprehensive, philosophical dimension of
the text. The sentence is a lamentation on the fluid and unstable character
of life, of love, and memories thereof, and their depictions in language. In
my preceding analyses, I have tried to show how the “process of remem-
bering is a process of visualization, activated and realized either as film or
a photograph” (Wyllie 2003, 131). For Wyllie, the visualization and the
ordering of the past are combined with, but not totally replaced by, what
might be called a “temporal auralization” of memory. However, the idea
is the same, specifically the fundamental distortion of our perception of
our past reality.
56 J. BRUHN

In the first part of the sentence, visual imagery abounds: Victor

sees Nina “through the glass,” and along with the other spectators he
is “spying” on her through the “windowpane,” which constitutes a
“frame” and thus produces a classical instance of Hans Lund’s (1992)
“iconic projection.” However, the medial thematic is suddenly trans-
formed via the key mention of Nina as being “audible and real” (my
italics) compared to what we might infer as the unreality of only seeing
her. From here, the sentence moves on to investigate the function of
aural memory.
The sounds harken back to a pre-Nina period in Victor’s life, and per-
haps even a pre-exile, pre-revolutionary Russia. The French song fragment
also supports the main theme of the scene, the relation between marriage
and death (despite the fact that it is unclear in the fragment exactly who
dies from being married). Nina’s marriage with Ferdinand will lead to her
death when Ferdinand, who drives the car, gets them into an accident,
but although he escapes with minor injuries, Nina “had turned out after
all to be mortal” (Nabokov 1995, 425). The text produces a complicated
provenance of the musical fragment. A series of medial transformations
have associated a French love affair with a popular song that Victor heard
sung “by an old maiden aunt of mine,” and the sound—imagined, of
course, only in the mind of Victor—changes into memory traces long
after Nina’s departure that “kept ringing and ringing in my head.” The
song is metaphorically compared to “flat little waves sent to the beach by
a passing ship,” and finally to “the bronze agony of a vibrating belfry.”
Consequently, the future life of the French melodic fragment is at least
as important as its history, and in a curious transformation, the “maiden
aunt” singing a French ditty is likened and metaphorically turned into the
“bell ringer.”
The crux of this sentence is the way that Victor, hearing about Nina’s
marriage and seeing her depart, repeatedly relives, and emotionally re-
experiences, the pain of the interrupted love affair, by means of a substi-
tutional object and stand-in producers: first the original song, later the
maiden aunt, and lastly the bell ringer. The ersatz objects are substitutes
for Nina, and after the affair is over and Nina has died, Victor, like the
bell ringer, will agonizingly “reseat” himself among his own settled family.
The “music box of memory,” therefore, becomes the ultimate producer
of meaning in this short story, even if the meaning generated turns out to
be utterly unedifying and tragic.
 SPEAK, MEMORY? VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “SPRING IN FIALTA” 57

SPEAK, MEMORY: CONCLUDING REMARKS

As stressed in the introductory chapters, the method I suggest for
approaching narrative literature as heteromedial texts is, of course, not
the only possible strategy of literary analysis, but in this particular case it
has proven productive. The act of teasing out the heterogeneous medial
aspects of the short story clearly adds to our understanding of the formal
as well as the thematic strategy in this text, and, I would argue, also in
other texts written by Nabokov or other authors.
By means of my methodology, I have been able to show how the love
affair of Nabokov’s narrator, the un-victorious Victor, can hypotheti-
cally be explained by Nabokov’s personal life and his love affair with Irina
Gaudanini—and of course other productive readings of the short story
can be suggested. However, instead I have demonstrated how Nabokov’s
short story about the love story of Victor and Nina is packed with ref-
erences to and discussions of medialities—both artistic ones, which are
prevalent, and also non-artistic references. Consequently, I have discussed
the presence and function of visuality (sight as sense, painting and post-
ers as medialities), literature (both writing style and subject matter, partly
personified in Ferdinand), cinematic devices, and finally sound and music.
The complicated, and immensely long, Proustian sentence, while in itself
showcasing a massive presence of medialities, offers the best reading
guidelines for understanding the entire text, I argue.
At almost every momentous juncture in the text, Nabokov’s narrator,
Victor, makes his philosophical, existential, or aesthetical points using
medial references to media products or medialities, or as formal imitations
with a wider significance. These media products and medialities function,
first of all, as metaphors for several more abstract themes, such as art, love,
and death. However, they also work as vectors in the narrative economy
of the text. Finally, and what is perhaps most interesting, is the fact that
medialities occupy the argumentational core of the short story’s inten-
sive questioning of the nature of writing and memory, using Victor as
Nabokov’s in-novel representative. Memory and literature are two sides
of the same coin in this short story.
I read the “music box” sentence as a microcosmic version of the entire
text, not only because of the numerous mediality elements included in it,
but also because the sentence so precisely exemplifies the paradox of the
short story. This paradox, I argue, is embedded in the way that Nabokov,
with all available aesthetic—and thus medial—means at his disposal, rep-
58 J. BRUHN

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

mediality of “poster,” we find the representation of yet another qualified

medium, namely circus, whereas the technical mediality dimension of poster
is defined simply by its ability to represent a given content.
4. But when we read the only sample text quoted by Victor, things get compli-
cated. The sample of Ferdinand’s novelistic writing is a portrait of a servant
girl, which according to Victor is actually depicting Nina:“Her face,” he
[Ferdinand] wrote, “was rather nature’s snapshot than a meticulous por-
trait, so that when…tried to imagine it, all he could visualize were fleeting
glimpses of disconnected features: the downy outline of her pommettes in
the sun, the amber-tinted brown darkness of quick eyes, lips shaped into a
friendly smile which was always ready to change into an ardent kiss.”
(Nabokov 1995, 424)

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

“This Beats Tapes, Doesn’t It?”: Women,

Cathedrals, and Other Medialities
in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”

Abstract In this second case study, focused on Raymond Carver’s short

story “Cathedral,” attention is focused on the apparent contradiction
between Carver and his critics’ argument that his style is “hyperrealist,”
as opposed to the fact that at least this short story engages in complex
representations and discussions of medialities. The blatant improbability
of the final and crucial scene also testifies against the idea of Carver’s “real-
ism.” This chapter also argues that the theme of blindness, which is well
established in studies of the short story, actually covers other and more
important dimensions, leading to, for instance, an interpretation stating
that the idea of the mature Carver’s writing as being more “humanist”
and optimistic than the younger writer; however, this is definitely not the
only possible interpretation. In order to show this, both a real woman and
a cathedral as depicted in a TV show must be taken into consideration as
possible mediating instances, in addition to the rather obvious role of the
epiphany in the final part of the text. My main argument, however, is that
“Cathedral” is first and foremost expressing anxiety toward mediation in
itself.

A well-known theme in dystopian science fiction is a rambling, general

technophobia, often morphing into a somewhat more specified mediapho-
bia. Unexpectedly, the term mediaphobia has not yet been popularized,1
so I take the liberty to construct the term for my own analytical needs in
this particular, if perhaps also slightly surprising, context. Consequently,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 61

J. Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57841-9_4
62 J. BRUHN

in this chapter mediaphobia covers specifically anxieties related to mediali-

ties. Here, of course, I do not offer any history of fictional, aesthetic, or
philosophical mediaphobia (which would require a cultural history from
antiquity onwards), but an early and partly originating example in Western
thought would obviously have to be Plato’s fear of the technology and
mediation of writing in Phaedrus and his mistrust of the indirect shadows
or copies as opposed to the true knowledge of direct apprehension in the
allegory of the cave in The Republic.
Contemporary mediaphobic narratives frequently tend to demonstrate
how the ubiquity of digital medialities—in examples from mass media
influences all the way down to our personal gadgets—works as an effi-
cient surveillance of everything from our cultural tastes and work ethics
to our health and sex lives: This monitoring creates the risk of a soci-
ety of surveillance, or even dictatorship. The seminal pre-digital example
is of course George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but mediaphobia is
still highly present in American literature from Thomas Pynchon to more
recent examples like Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story from
a detached future, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (which
is also the subject of my final case study) depicting a less remote future,
and Dave Eggers’ The Circle describing, more or less, a fictional world of
2014.
However, if we understand medialities as a wide array of communicative
and aesthetic high- or low-tech technologies ranging from the Internet to
a pencil, which my concept of mediality allows us to do, then a less obvi-
ous but nevertheless important form of mediaphobia narratives may come
to light. Instead of feeling suppressed by commercial hegemony or state
dictatorship, an individual may instead feel threatened and in the grip of
any mediating forms that he or she considers distancing and inauthen-
tic—and therefore, the individual may try to move or escape into some
form of non- or pre-mediated situation. Such a mediaphobic position can
be found, I contend, in the supposedly (hyper)realist work of Raymond
Carver (1937–1988), and in this chapter, I intend to investigate what
I would like to call a low-tech mediaphobia that I see in “Cathedral,” a
facet of the text that has not yet, to my knowledge, been noted in Carver
criticism.2
In two interviews late in his life, Raymond Carver admiringly quoted
Hemingway as saying that “prose is architecture and the Baroque age is
over” (Carver quoted in Grimal 1995–1996, no page). From the immedi-
ate context, we learn that when comparing prose to architecture, Carver
 “THIS BEATS TAPES, DOESN’T IT?”: WOMEN, CATHEDRALS… 63

means carefully building a lasting structure. Prose as architecture includes

“words as building stones” (ibid.) and it suggests something real, solid,
and substantial. The claim that “the Baroque age is over” is more enig-
matic, but should probably be seen in the context of the Dirty Realist or
Minimalist schools of the 1980s: Carver considered himself opposed to the
postmodern style of American fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, a style that
may very well be implied in the “Baroque age” of his Hemingway quote.
“Cathedral” is often considered among Carver’s best work (and, as is the
case with Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta,” is also very highly regarded by the
author himself). Below I intend to show that what has often been seen as
a relatively clear-cut conflict between realist and postmodernist aesthetics,
in terms of style and genre, may be rethought and reformulated in terms
of medialities. Consequently, a fundamental theme of “Cathedral” is not
only the rather obvious opposition between blindness and insight, which
has of course been remarked upon and discussed in Carver criticism, but
also the inherent problems of mediation, including a deep-rooted vision
of a non-mediated presence, perhaps related to a feeling of freedom as
opposed to the anxieties of mediation.
Even if I do think that “Cathedral”—exactly like the other texts ana-
lyzed in this book—is highly structured and exhibits a symbolic underly-
ing form, I pursue a set of structural forms quite different from the ones
suggested by Daniel W. Lehman (2006) and other Carver commentators.
I will demonstrate that there is, rather remarkably for a short story deal-
ing with blindness and insight, a blind spot in major parts of the Carver
criticism, whose proponents continue to read his work without taking into
account the more or less obviously present non-literary instances in his
texts. “Cathedral” is, as I will demonstrate below, organized through a
net of mediality references and representations leading to key questions
concerning medialities, the senses, the role of women, and in particu-
lar mediaphobia; that is, the narrating protagonist’s hope of escaping any
mediating constraints.
I intend to counter this mediality blindness by means of my theoreti-
cal notion of “heteromediality” and my three-stage methodology, which
is designed not only to capture the often somewhat hidden presence of
medialities but also to interpret the function of the present medialities.
After a brief synopsis of the short story, I will open my analysis with a
stylistic description of the first paragraph of the story. This will lead into
three major sections structured by the three stages of my analysis. I first
offer a list of the presence of medialities (the register), then I produce a
64 J. BRUHN

structured profile of the register, and I finally discuss possible contexts

within which to interpret these. These contexts are technology (briefly),
Christian liturgy, and finally—and most productively—I suggest that in
particular the ending of the text can be read in the context of an (arrested)
epiphany, which is in turn I suggest, a sign of the narrator’s mediaphobia.

SYNOPSIS AND STYLISTIC CHARACTERIZATION

Let us start with a synopsis. While waiting for his wife to get home,
the narrator describes his worries about having a blind man, Robert,
an old friend of his wife, as an overnight guest in his house. The narra-
tor expresses prejudices about blind people, perhaps as a result of jeal-
ousy toward this man’s relationship to his wife’s difficult past life with
her ex-husband, which included a failed suicide attempt. However, a few
awkward moments after his wife and Robert arrive, the evening takes an
unexpected turn. After a heavy dinner, generous alcohol consumption,
and even smoking cannabis, the narrator’s suspicion slowly gives way to
sympathy. When his wife falls asleep, Robert and the narrator watch a TV
program about “the church and the Middle Ages,” and Robert asks if the
narrator can describe a cathedral for him. After trying this without success,
Robert suggests that the narrator instead draw a cathedral, with Robert’s
hand on top of his own, which the narrator begins with his eyes open and
later attempts with his eyes closed. “It was like nothing else in my life up
to now,” the narrator exclaims, and continuing this line of thought and
feeling are the final words of the short story:

“Well?” [Robert] said. “Are you looking?”

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that.
But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.
“It’s really something,” I said.

A short paraphrase of the 20 pages offers, as usual, only a crude out-

line of the complex text, but it does suggest the main theme that Carver
commentators have focused heavily on: the initially problematic relation-
ship—or rather the ratio—between vision and knowledge (the insight of
the blind man, and the blindness of the seeing man). At the end of the
short story, this dichotomy seems to be reconciled, when anxiety gives way
to a communal feeling between Robert and the narrator, or, perhaps more
correctly, the narrator and his surrounding world. In the formulaic words
of the Carver critic Robert Clark, “‘Cathedral’ chronicles the unnamed
 “THIS BEATS TAPES, DOESN’T IT?”: WOMEN, CATHEDRALS… 65

narrator’s metamorphosis from prejudice to understanding” (Clark 2012,

108). Or, in a little more elaborate description from a critic who relates
this reading to her teaching experiences:

In sum, “Cathedral” tells a story about insight and personal change. At

least this is the way the plot is conventionally told, particularly by my stu-
dents who, when asked to write about the significance of the end, say some-
thing like: “The narrator, a man of many prejudices, learns a lesson from
Robert and comes to see that it was he (the narrator) who has been blind.”
(Wiederhold 2009, 5)

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)

The unnamed narrator is speaking in first person, on an undefined tem-

poral distance from the events. Instead of a hypotactic organization—that
is, logically subordinating things—the reader senses a paratactic struc-
ture; that is, one thing after another, without any aesthetic or stylistic
guiding lines. This is, at least, what we are led to believe. The style may,
in other words, be characterized as skaz: written narrative with a strong
oral imprint (discussed by, among others, Eichenbaum 1963 and Bakhtin
1981). This style, characterized by short, uncomplicated sentences and
simple vocabulary, bears the dialogical marks of some kind of conversation
66 J. BRUHN

(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.

STEP 1: REGISTERING MEDIALITIES IN “CATHEDRAL”

Instead of a prolonged narratological or stylistic analysis, I intend to read
the text in terms of medialities, and one way of exemplifying such a read-
ing is, as I did in the first chapter on Nabokov, to browse the opening
 “THIS BEATS TAPES, DOESN’T IT?”: WOMEN, CATHEDRALS… 67

paragraph. Underlining all the (relevant) mediality-related instances in the

paragraph gives an impression of the presence of 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)

This results in the following list or register, where I refer to my clas-

sification of medialities in parentheses:

Blind man (senses: sight)

was on his way (“communication”, sending material from one point to another)
I wonder if it looks better to divide this list into columns in stead of this model?
Called (technical mediality: phone)
By train (“communication,” sending material from one point to another)
Trip (“communication”: moving a body by train)
Seen him (senses: sight)
Blind man (senses: sight)
Kept in touch (communicational medialities, preferably the phone)
Tapes (technical [sound] medium)
Mailed them back and forth (communication: mail)
Blind (senses: sight)
My idea of blindness (senses: sight)
Movies (qualified aesthetic mediality: movies/cinema)
In the movies (qualified aesthetic mediality: movies/cinema)
Blind (senses: sight)
Led by seeing-eye dogs (communication/the senses)
Blind (senses: sight)
Looked forward to (metaphor based on sight)

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

Taken together, this list of the presence of medialities establishes an

impression of a text that is not only about a sighted man learning an
existential lesson from a blind man but also represents a wide, differenti-
ated, and internally conflicting field of medialities—with the implications
this has on the meaning of the story. However, it is nevertheless still just
a formless register that needs to be interpreted and structured for us to
see how this short story, by way of its impressive arsenal of represented,
debated, and related medialities, establishes a meaningful pattern.

STEP 2: STRUCTURING MEDIALITIES IN “CATHEDRAL”

Through the second step of the analysis, step 1’s more or less mechanical
listing of the register gives way to constructing an interpretation. Possible
ways of organizing the material—and here I recapitulate my remarks on
methodology in Chap. 2—naturally depends upon the analytical, ideo-
logical, or aesthetic goal of the analysis, and the material may be organized
more or less efficiently according to questions related to other dimensions
of the text as well. However, the point is, of course, that the mere accumu-
lation of medialities is interpreted and formed into manageable structures
so that the mediality analysis can illuminate the dark spots of other analyti-
cal approaches.
Many readings of the short story follow what Carver himself consid-
ered to be the “generous” feeling of the short story, being part of what
Brown (1990) calls the “humanistic” optimism of the later texts. This
means, basically, that a real understanding and a deeper communication
connects Robert and the narrator. But this reading leaves out three impor-
tant (and for the idea of realism, potentially disturbing) aspects that may
be formulated as structured medialities. First, and very briefly, I shall men-
tion the possibility of reading the text as exhibiting medialities in a kind
of historical microcosm of the media landscape in the late 1970s. Second,
I need to say a few words about the role of the cathedral, which remains
unexplained in the text. Then, finally, I reach the disturbing question of
the role of the woman as medium (which, in this particular case, simply
means “middle”) in “Cathedral.”
The most immediate, but also the most superficial, mediality structure
to establish is the technological one. The short story opens a historical
window into a mid-1970s technological context that already seems far
away; no computers or mobile phones, and instead a technical mediality
such as magnetic recording tape (which is now, literally, a defunct techni-
 “THIS BEATS TAPES, DOESN’T IT?”: WOMEN, CATHEDRALS… 69

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.

The ` and Function of the Cathedral

Let me continue with the question of the eponymous cathedral of the
short story. Robert’s and the narrator’s knowledge about actual historical
cathedrals is vague, if not hazy. What they do know is, as far as we know,
what we as readers can deduce from their troubles in following the TV
show’s representation of the history and form of the cathedral.
Peter Middleton (1998) has argued that Carver in “Cathedral” was
referring directly to the British art historian Kenneth Clark’s ambitious
documentary TV series Civilization, produced by BBC in the late 1960s
and later broadcasted many times all over the world.3 Middleton estab-
lished a connection to the opening of the first episode, where Kenneth
Clark rhetorically asks which civilization is “Standing in Paris,” Clark
directs the gaze of the viewers to Notre Dame Cathedral, saying, “I think
I can recognize it when I see it, and I am looking at it now.” This is a
phrase possibly echoing Augustine talking about the problem of defining
time (Middleton 1990, 331).
Following Middleton, we can therefore assume that the basic source
behind the media transformation concerning the TV show on the cathe-
dral in the text is one or more existing cathedrals in Europe represented
on TV in a program on “the church and the Middle Ages” (Carver 1985,
223).
The art historical notions are present as undefined and incomprehensible
termini technici: “frescoes” or “flying buttresses” are terms that the narra-
tor passes on without any apparent sense of their content. Consequently,
the aesthetically demanding and spiritually rewarding aspects of the cathe-
drals, being the defining trait of Kenneth Clark’s version of the cathedrals
in the TV series, is absent for the two men in front of the TV set. They
seem to have as little connection to the Christian cathedrals as they would
have had with a show depicting the wildlife of the Kalahari Desert. Their
sociological understanding is as limited as their aesthetic knowledge—that
70 J. BRUHN

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

her earlier questions and comments to the narrator seem reasonable—to

the extent that we choose her side in what is definitely a longstanding,
low-intensity marital battle—her drowsy comments here are ridiculed, and
consequently the two men do not deem her question worthy of an answer.
Therefore, the role of the woman changes: from having had a possible
flirt with Robert (and thus opening the clearly jealous train of thoughts
dominating the first page’s comments on the “blind man”), she initiates
the present union between the two men, until she finally passes into sleep
after too much food and drink, which results in her being the object of
desire and evokes sexual comments and jokes. The woman becomes part
of a rather comprehensive subplot whose most important function is to
frame and effectively underline the importance of the drawing episode.
Everything base and body-related (which in this text relates to the female)
is rejected in favor of the males-only project of representing art—however,
even though Carver’s story seems focused on the male bonding, and also
has an eye for masculine vulnerability, the short story does not really know
what to “do” with this small male community.7
Without pressing the analogy too far, we might say that the wife, who
is in the beginning deeply involved in several medialities of different
kinds (the qualified mediality of poems, the technical mediality of the
recorded tapes, acting as a translator of the written records into a human
voice when she worked8 for Robert) is turned into a medium herself.
Through her body and talk, she has facilitated a communication between
the narrator and Robert: She has prepared and served the meal, but hav-
ing served her mediating functions, she is no longer of any real interest
to the two men.
My interpretation of the roles of the cathedral and the woman can be
summarized crudely (and only slightly ironically): real communication can
take place only between men, unseen by others, provided that they don’t know
what they are talking about. I suggest substituting this negative descrip-
tion in place of the conventional version offered by commentators, who
conclude that the short story is about a prejudiced man’s existential awak-
ening after meeting a blind man.

“This Beats Tapes, Doesn’t It?”

In the universe represented in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” medialities
play several roles throughout the text, but in the concluding paragraphs
they, almost abruptly, seem absent. Thus, the development of medialities
in the text follows a pattern revealing that the more distanced people are
 “THIS BEATS TAPES, DOESN’T IT?”: WOMEN, CATHEDRALS… 73

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.

“Close your eyes now,” the blind man said to me.

I did it. I closed them just like he said.
“Are they closed?” he said. “Don’t fudge.”
“They’re closed,” I said.
“Keep them that way,” he said. He said, “Don’t stop now. Draw.”
So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over
the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.
Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a look.
What do you think?”
But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little
longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.
“Well?” he said. “Are you looking?”
My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t
feel like I was inside anything.
“It’s really something,” I said. (Carver 1985, 228)

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?

STEP 3: CONTEXTUALIZING THE STRUCTURED

MEDIALITIES IN “CATHEDRAL”
Technology, Christianity, Epiphany
In the third step of my analysis, I will, by means of contextualizations
outside the text itself, try to better understand the short story and in
particular the peculiar ending, which I believe has often been read far
too hopefully. Above, I have suggested some interpretative moves that
lead to the not-so-optimistic conclusion that the ending seems to suggest
that a man can only reach some kind of elated feeling of presence (“this
was something”) with the aid of another man, after having excluded the
woman, and only when communicating about something neither of them
know anything about (medieval cathedrals).
I tried to show above that after the media transformations in the draw-
ing scene, the cathedral seems to move from the imagined spaces of media
transformations to a substantive transformation instead—which is another
way of saying that we move towards the domain of religion. The text’s pre-
sentation of the cathedral and the transforming meal can be understood in
a Christian context, and the question of “presence versus mediation” relates
to the idea of transubstantiation, that is, the Catholic and orthodox belief
that the bread and wine given at Communion become the body and blood
of Jesus Christ. It is therefore possible to read the short story as a parody of
Kenneth Clark’s conventional aestheticizing of Christianity in the TV series,
where Christianity, beauty, and progress are intimately linked in the concept
of civilization. As opposed to this, the text offers a carnivalized (in Bakhtin’s
sense of the word) version of a Christian ritual. More specifically, a mock
transubstantiation where the hearty meal and alcohol represents the body
and blood of Christ, and where the marijuana is the incense that instantly
 “THIS BEATS TAPES, DOESN’T IT?”: WOMEN, CATHEDRALS… 75

transforms the humble American house into a cathedral—a cathedral that

also creates a new man. The narrator feels at home without feeling any
spatial constraints, thereby being changed into another being, in another
space. Historically, this brings forth an earlier idea of mediation, one con-
nected to premodern—for instance, medieval—ideas of mediation. This is a
tradition where mediation is not representing (in the meaning of standing
for something else), but where instead the medium is the mediated object
(or affect or concept) itself. The food is the body of Christ, the house is the
spiritual cathedral, and the narrator really is transformed into another man.
It is a moment where, magically, mediation and presence are one.
Therefore, the text suggests that the strange space occupied by the
narrator is symbolically transformed into a cathedral, imagined inside the
ordinary house, which makes his final remarks relatively meaningful: He is
in his house without feeling that he is inside anything. His mundane house
is turned into a sacred building, and he feels elevated. It is a strange if also
attractive feeling that creates the singular tone of the ending that critics
and readers have often taken to be unmistakable signs of hope and future
harmony. However, the freedom of feeling secure in one’s house without
being trapped comes at the highest possible price. The narrator has cut
all bonds: to his wife, to Robert, and possibly also to his own life. The
text constructs an epistemological model where mediations stand opposed
to presence and freedom. “To live utterly without media suggests a sup-
posedly heavenly state in which the need for means has been filled,” says
John Durham Peters (2015, 88) in his brilliant discussion of the essen-
tially mediated character of our human existence, and seen in this light the
mediaphobic ending to Carver’s text is in a sense a logical, if also destruc-
tive, conclusion of the narrator’s troubled life. Before I delve further into
the problematic nature of mediaphobia, I need to suggest a third way of
understanding the final elevation of the narrator.
“Cathedral,” with its possibly parodic gestures towards Christian lit-
urgy, is not, however, a conventionally Christian text9; rather, it hints at
and borrows from Christian models for understanding human develop-
ment and human existential needs. Another way of approaching the eleva-
tion at the end of the story in a partly Christian framework is to consider
the concept of epiphany.
The concept of epiphany was transplanted from the religious dogma
and liturgical calendar to the aesthetic regime and has, at least since
Joyce, occupied an important role in the theory and practice of modern-
ist literature. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines epiphany as a
76 J. BRUHN

“manifestation or appearance of a divine or superhuman being” (quoted

in Sheu 2014, 238), therefore retaining the theological aspect. However,
in his influential study Epiphany in the modern novel (1971), Morris Beja
defined epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether from some
object, scene, event, or memorable phase of the mind – the manifestation
being out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of
whatever produces it” (Beja quoted in Sheu 2014, 238). Recently, Sheu
has suggested “epiphany to mean the sudden original recognition of an
authentic truth” (Sheu 2014, 238; italics in original). Epiphany has gone
from the manifestation of “divine or superhuman” presence to a “spiritual
manifestation” to Sheu’s “authentic truth”—and continuing this secular
movement, I suggest a working definition of epiphany as the sudden rec-
ognition of an authentic truth by way of a specific mediality constellation.
From the literature on epiphanies in modernist literature we learn,
according to Leyrpoldt, that epiphanies in fiction tends to create “hints
of revelation” for the protagonist that may “lead to a gaining of self-
awareness that can be put into words, and that can therefore be presented
to the reader as a certified window on reality revealing a more or less
tangible ‘truth’ behind the ‘appearances’” (2001, 533). According to the
same commentator, this makes epiphanies a “seminal narrative device with
which not only to structure plot but also to provide it with a narrative
climax” (ibid., 533).
Amir (2010) has pointed to the fact that the epiphanic ending in
“Cathedral” is very uncommon in Carver’s work, and she sees it as the
conclusion of Carver’s entire work. All prior texts “lead […] to this end,
which can be seen as the essence of his poetics, or better, its aim” (97).
Leypoldt, who has investigated the epiphanies in Carver’s work, stated
that “[m]ost of Carver’s work, however, evades this unrefracted type
of resolution and instead features a variation that I would like to call an
‘arrested epiphany’” (2001, 535). Surprisingly, Leypoldt did not mention
“Cathedral” in his article, but “arrested epiphany” fits “Cathedral” nicely,
too—in particular because the arrested character has to do with the pres-
ence and function of medialities.
To understand the epiphany in “Cathedral,” I must return to my analy-
sis above, where I showed the dichotomy between mediated absence and
an immediate presence in the text. The medialities have made it possible
for the narrator to reach the point where he suddenly experiences or finds
the “something” that is so meaningful to him, but in the end he resolutely
pushes away these supportive mediating structures anyway.
 “THIS BEATS TAPES, DOESN’T IT?”: WOMEN, CATHEDRALS… 77

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

revelations that part of the radical sparseness of Carver’s early, minimalist

style was the result of the heavy editing of Gordon Lish (and later on the
possible inspiration from his wife Tess Gallagher).10 Archival material has
suggested that the mature style connected to the less cut-down (and less
pessimistic) style is the one most true to Carver’s own wishes concerning
his stylistic and existential vision.
However, the change of form and the complexity in “Cathedral” as seen
in relation to earlier work can also be described in terms of medialities. As
compared to almost any other text in his oeuvre, “Cathedral” engages
in such a prolonged and rich discussion of another non-verbal mediality
(the TV show) that it tends to jeopardize the real-life, anti-postmodernist
stance so often taken by Carver. The conclusion of my mediality analysis
will therefore be that “Cathedral” exhibits a complex position; Carver
includes numerous and central medialities and possible metafictional rep-
resentations on the formal level of the short story, but thematically, for the
narrator in “Cathedral,” the final aim is to reach an unmediated epiphany,
which has the unfortunate side-effect that all social connections, even to
his wife, are burned away.
In other words, when Carver late in his life argued, for instance, in
interviews, via Hemingway’s dichotomy of the prose of architecture and
a Baroque age, he was, perhaps, actually debating his own aesthetic posi-
tions and choices. The result is “Cathedral” which builds a sophisticated
and complex, not to mention Baroque, system of medialities and offers
a well-prepared epiphany while still trying to remain “realist” and non-
postmodern in style.
Despite the fact that the relationships among the three characters in the
story follow a patriarchal pattern that naturalizes and normalizes a situa-
tion which, in reality, objectifies and excludes the woman, it is neverthe-
less a comment by Robert to the wife that most succinctly sums up what
I believe is the major theme of mediaphobia, when he says, apparently
offhand, “This beats tapes, doesn’t it?”—meaning that a conversation face
to face is clearly preferable to sending recorded tapes back and forth (even
when one of the parties is blind).
“Tapes,” here, works as a stand-in for all distancing medialities, and the
casual remark of Robert expresses a mediaphobic position that the narra-
tor takes to its extreme, logical endpoint. As I showed above, the narrator
aims to limit the mediating processes to an absolute minimum and when
he closes his eyes at the end of the text, it may perplex the reader. It is
 “THIS BEATS TAPES, DOESN’T IT?”: WOMEN, CATHEDRALS… 79

probably a kind of acceptance of the blindness of Robert that he volun-

tarily makes his own, as a response to his earlier misconceptions of blind
people in particular and his entire life in general.
I do suggest, however, that the narrator closing his eyes can also be seen
as his attempt to avoid the confusing and disturbing multiplicity of differ-
ent (but equally) vague notions of what a cathedral is, which is a stand-in
for a much more general anxiety about the complexity of the world as
such. This, I argue, is why he wants to limit his individual realm of con-
ceptual knowledge. We could possibly say also that the narrator escapes
the confusion of the Platonic copy of the copy of the copy and instead
retreats into the ideal, non-mediatized haven of his mind. Either way, this
act should make us aware that this is possibly not so much a stable, lasting
position of self-confident, epiphanic presence, but rather a precarious and
short-lived experience. To use the innocuous phrasing of Carver’s text, the
“something” may all too soon turn back into “not anything.”
That is why I SUGGEST to read “Cathedral” as an allegory of the way
that the fear of mediations—at least in some cases—results in a precarious
non-mediated position that lacks any humane and social meaning. When
Friedrich Kittler, a mediaphobic thinker if ever there was one, famously
claimed that “media is our condition,” he probably meant it as a descrip-
tion, a warning, and a threat. Hopefully, I have shown that reading
Carver’s short story “Cathedral” in mediality terms is in a dual sense
conditioned by medialities—on the level of outer form and genre in the
mediality of literature and on the inner level of style and thematics—and
therefore THE SHORT STORY may make us understand how medialities
and mediation is not only the condition of the activity of reading and the
institution that we call literature but also the very condition for us being
(able to be) human in the first place.

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

ing up between politicians and news media as an example of mediaphobia

(Mukhopadhyay 2012).
2. There has been much debate (see below, note 10) about the authorial sta-
tus of in particular Carver’s early texts; whereas, it is generally agreed upon
that Carver’s later work—including the short story “Cathedral,” published
in the anthology of the same name in 1983 (the short story was first pub-
lished in 1981 in a literary journal)—is less problematical in terms of inten-
tion and editorial influences. In the discussion that follows, I refer to the
version published in Cathedral: Stories (1983). References to this version
will appear within parentheses in the text.
3. Carver may very well either refer to or has been inspired by Clark’s series,
but the references can definitely not be derived exclusively from the first
episode of Civilization (as Middleton seems to assert): Carver has clearly
used poetic liberty in his description of the series to distill several episodes
into one unity and has added material to the fictional TV show that is not
present in Clark’s Civilization.
4. This conversation is comically prefigured in the narrator’s carnivalesque
mock prayer before dinner, where he wishes that “the phone won’t ring
and the food doesn’t get cold” (Carver 1985, 217).
5. However, it is unclear to me, what the final “result” of the media transfor-
mations is: Do either of the two men reach a clearer understanding of what
a cathedral is? Is the function of the activity of drawing rather to get the
narrator to understand what it means to be blind? Or do they just want to
hold hands?
6. For an unconventional discussion of the Proustian objectification of his
female protagonist, see Anne Carson (2014). See also Laura Mulvey’s
influential “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” (1975), and, more
directly connected to Carver, Kleppe (2006).
7. Possibly the scene exhibits repressed homosexual tendencies, too: Two
men holding hands is hardly standard fare in mainstream American culture.
In The Raymond Carver Review 2 (Spring 2009), two articles deal explic-
itly with these questions of gender and male bonding in “Cathedral,”
authored by Wiederhold (2009) and Benson (2009).
8. Another possible theological interpretation is to interpret the narrator’s
development towards an apophatic (negative theological) position of a
non-specified knowledge of a divine presence.
9. Even though some commentators (e.g., Stull 1985; Facknitz 1986; Brown
1990) have read the text as related to a deeply humanistic and possibly
religious hopefulness.
10. For a brief overview, see Stull and Carroll (2006). On the influence of
Gordon Lish, see the article in The New York Times by Max (1998). See
also Powers (2009) and Hemmingson (2011).
 “THIS BEATS TAPES, DOESN’T IT?”: WOMEN, CATHEDRALS… 81

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

“Great script, eh?”: Medialities, Metafiction,

and Non-meaning in Tobias Wolff ’s “Bullet
in the Brain”

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.

According to the website of the Near-Death Experience Research

Foundation, for some of us, our entire life passes before our inner eye at
the moment of death. Whether scientifically trustworthy or not, the con-
cept holds a dual promise. The first promise is that, in the moment when
it is literally too late, we will be presented with a coherent and meaningful
version of our lives, one which we were deprived of when we were in the
midst of events. The second, more implicit promise is that, without having

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 83

J. Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57841-9_5
84 J. BRUHN

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.

THE “QUINTESSENTIAL WOLFF STORY”: PRESENTATION

In the words of one critic, Tobias Wolff has been “the most revered and read
American short story writer besides Raymond Carver, and he has attained
that position through a constant attention to the dark, private aspects of
his characters – their lies, their ethical missteps, and their attempts to hide
them” (Lingan, no date). The same critic calls “Bullet in the Brain” the
“quintessential Wolff story.” The short story, consisting of just slightly
fewer than 2000 words, was first published in The New Yorker’s renowned
fiction section in September 1995, and later reprinted as the very last piece
in Wolff’s 1996 short story collection The Night in Question, which is
the version I refer to in this analysis. To my knowledge, nothing really
substantial has been written about the story except for blog comments
and shorter analyses and paraphrases aimed at high school and college
students.
The text opens in an utterly mundane register: “Anders couldn’t get to
the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and
he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him
in a murderous temper” (Wolff 1996, 200). Anders, the protagonist of the
short story, is a literary critic, and as we may infer from the first sentence,
86 J. BRUHN

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

minimalist, its cynicism is tempered by ultimate sentimentality, and its moral

is unmistakable. (Lingan, no date)

Even if this description might be correct, Lingan nevertheless makes

the mistake, I think, of reading the text more or less literally instead of dig-
ging deeper into the formal, thematic, and medial intricacies of the story.
Because of their relatively straightforward style, as well as their brevity
and concentration, Wolff’s short stories have been compared to Ernest
Hemingway’s short fiction.1 As a matter of fact, “Bullet in the Brain”
incorporates a direct reference to one of Hemingway’s most famous short
stories, “The Killers,” first published in 1927.
Anders’ misguided and poorly scheduled act of literary criticism, con-
ducted during an armed bank robbery, relates to the fact that Anders sees the
real-life robbery as a lousy copy of Hemingway’s more powerful original in
“The Killers.” When comparing the two stories, we notice that Anders,2 like
Nick Adams in Hemingway’s story, is confronted by two armed men, one
of whom carries a sawed-off shotgun, in a place that is normally a safe envi-
ronment—a bank, instead of Hemingway’s lunchtime café. Hemingway’s
killers threaten to blow off the heads of the guests, a threat that Wolff makes
very real in his story, and Hemingway’s killer asks Nick what he is looking
at, and later what he is laughing at, in exactly the same way as Wolff’s rob-
ber does. Anders says that the robbers in the bank make a lousy imitation of
Hemingway: “Did you hear that?” Anders said. “Bright boy. Right out of
The Killers” (Wolff 1996, 202), Following this, we might infer that Wolff,
while acknowledging the anxiety of influence from Hemingway, neverthe-
less wants to demonstrate his own mastery of the inevitable heritage by
creating an up-to-date version of the classic text.3 Wolff’s way of rewrit-
ing Hemingway’s original relates to a large degree on his representation of
medialities that taken together create interesting effects.
As mentioned earlier, in the few available commentaries on the text,
most of the attention is directed toward either the craft of fiction trans-
forming a conventional bank robbery incident into an existential tale,
or the complex and highly condensed characterization of Anders, who
changes from an unreasonable, bitter book critic to a sympathetic indi-
vidual; that is, either formal or psychological questions. These are inter-
esting questions, but they partially ignore a more deeply woven fabric
underlying these two themes. In order to investigate what I think is the
most important fabric of “Bullet in the Brain,” I shall now move forward
to my mediality analysis. Understanding the presence and nature of the
medialities that compose this fabric leads to an interpretation that not only
88 J. BRUHN

incorporates and specifies the formal and psychological reading of the text,
but also offers new interpretative possibilities.

STEP 1: REGISTERING MEDIALITIES IN “BULLET

IN THE BRAIN”

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)

As I have repeated several times already, as raw, collected data in itself,

such a register comprising more than 30 items that covers just seven
pages, does not produce much new analytical insight, even though it does
function as an immediate and simple exemplar of “baring the device” or
“defamiliarizing” the text, in the Russian formalist sense of the term. The
list makes clear, simply, that medialities obviously play a role in the text.
However, even a brief glance at the register does show that, with more
than 20 instances, references to language and literature clearly dominate.

STEP 2: STRUCTURING MEDIALITIES IN “BULLET

IN THE BRAIN”

In the second step, the register needs to be structured as a discussion of

one or more meaningful relationships. In this particular case, I find it
useful to pursue the presence and function of medialities by describing
the way that the plot develops in a prolonged synopsis, focused on the
medialities of the plot.4 As mentioned in my initial presentation, the text
is at first sight split into two parts, divided at the moment when Anders is
shot. However, tracking the medialities of the text offers another possible
division, and therefore a richer understanding of the text. This ordering
90 J. BRUHN

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.

When interpreted like this using mediality-related terms, the story

changes from being one that exemplifies the glories of the well-wrought
short story (and/or the sentimentalist psychology described by Lingan)
into being a narrative focused upon medialities. This makes it possible, in
other words, to rephrase and condense the plot in terms of medialities.
In one sense, it is predictable that “Bullet in the Brain”—a literary
text about a literary critic, written by a writer who has been a writing
teacher most of his life—favors literature over the other arts. However,
even if literature and language are over-represented numerically, literature
is nevertheless represented in a very negative way. In fact, this short story
assembles an arsenal of different medialities inside the mediality of nar-
rative literature, only to reject and even humiliate (if this anthropomor-
phization of medialities can be excused) literature and critical language
as being cynical, negative misapprehensions, with no positive outcomes
whatsoever—and the result is Anders, the cynical critic. The short story
makes us feel that the critical, if also cynical, discursive abilities of Anders
enable him to “dispatch” (Wolff 1996, 200) not only the books he is
reviewing, but also the naïve painting on the ceiling of the bank and the
hackneyed language of the robbers. Nevertheless, at the end of his life he
“dispatches” his own entire adult existence by deeming unworthy several
memories that would, conventionally, be considered central: his first car-
nal love, his wife, the witnessing of a suicide, his daughter. And finally,
he dismisses his various memories intimately related to his identity as a
literary critic: learning poems by heart, and “seeing a college classmate’s
name on the jacket of a novel not long after they graduated” (ibid., 205).
Even the radical instance of literature as a lifesaving device articulated by
“Professor Josephs telling his class how Athenian prisoners in Sicily had
been released if they could recite Aeschylus” (ibid., 205) is one of the
memories Anders does not remember.
At some point, life has turned out wrong for Anders, and what we can
reconstruct as the chronologically earliest mistake is that Anders learns
poetry by heart in a highly effective but also highly utilitarian way:
92 J. BRUHN

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

text to argue, by means of music, and to prepare, and finally to dem-

onstrate the importance of a decisive, formational moment in the life of
Anders. This, in turn, is a moment that gives meaning to the rest of the
life we hear about, even though the rest of his life in a sense belies this
moment. This is what I mean when I say that this reading “saves” litera-
ture, despite the critique being raised against it. The critique is exemplified
by the endless bitterness of the mature Anders, which we can trace back
in time to the younger Anders’ attempts to use literature in his life—for
instance, by learning poetry by heart—only to succumb to base narcis-
sistic and hedonistic desires. The meaningful relationship between “They
is” and music, shows that, despite the vilification of literature and literary
criticism, a short story like “Bullet in the Brain” can still mount a powerful
objection; it can, despite every obstacle, show that another exemplification
and use of literature is possible—literature as music, as an elevating, rous-
ing meaning of unexpectedness.
With reference to ideas, I will explain in the final section of this essay,
such a reading is in the spirit of Hermes; it is in the spirit of making things
mean something—both inside the fictional world, and for us as readers,
ontologically remote from the things being told. A connection is estab-
lished between the dying Anders and his former self—showing that, had
he known how to apply and learn from his initial experience of the musi-
cal, or simply the aural aspects of language, life could have been different.
However, there is more to the question of music and literature than
the above in the short story, and to demonstrate that I need to go deeper
into the roles of music and chant in the final page of “Bullet in the Brain.”
First, a longish quote from the last pages of the story:

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)

Literary and aesthetic theories offer different entrances to this passage.

Following Roman Jakobson (1960), we could conceptualize the ending
via his understanding of the poetic function: “They is,” at least for Anders
as a child, transforms the meaning of the two words from the predomi-
nantly referential meaning to the predominantly poetic function. Anders is
intensely interested in the form but not the content or message of the two
simple words. Anders discovers an abyss in the midst of an utterly mundane
dialogue, and the effect is surprising, shocking, and violent. This rift in the
well-functioning fabric of meaningful structures of everyday language cor-
responds metaphorically to the—admittedly much more dangerous—rift
in the fabric of the human brain tissue. The work of Jakobson and his for-
malist colleagues often involved theorizing contemporary artistic, avant-
garde movements, and this perhaps fits this example, since what the little
boy is actually doing is creating a work of art out of two ordinary words.
Or to be more precise, Anders is able to see the aesthetic possibility of
what would normally be regarded as incorrect speech. Anders is turning
the little boy with the faulty grammar into an avant-garde artist.
Another effect of the two words working in the same direction but by
different means should be noted; specifically, the aural aspect of it, there-
fore getting closer to the “music” and “chant” mentioned in the text.
The change from “There is” to the boy’s “They is” and finally, “They is,
they is, they is,” transforms the aural form, but in particular it addresses
the question of singularity and iterability. Anders refrains from asking the
boy to repeat his words—“He wants to hear Coyle’s cousin repeat what
he just said” (ibid., 205)—but instead, Anders tries to trade his epiph-
anic experience of “pure unexpectedness” for a repetition of the words,
which is, chronologically, an omen of Anders’ later attempts in life to trade
art for instant kicks. However, pure repetition, in language or in life, is
impossible, and it would of course destroy the very impact of unexpected-
ness itself. Paradoxically, Wolff, or his narrator, actually repeats the words
twice: First, Anders is “repeating them to himself,” during the baseball
game; and, secondly, “the boy,” which we may presume is Anders refer-
ring to himself in the third person, is said to “softly chant, They is, they is,
they is.” In other words, the shock of the erroneous grammar, which is in
essence unrepeatable, is repeated twice, probably as a result of the extreme
situation of the dying Anders who can “still make time” (ibid., 206)
 “GREAT SCRIPT, EH?”: MEDIALITIES, METAFICTION… 95

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.

STEP 3: CONTEXTUALIZING THE MEDIALITY STRUCTURE

IN “BULLET IN THE BRAIN”

In the final step of my three-step mediality analysis, the readings of step 2

need to be rephrased and contextualized. I will suggest two fundamentally
different contexts that may explain the presence and function of music and
sound and how they stand more or less opposed to literature in this short
story. First, I will investigate the more immediate literary background of
Wolff’s text, which explains at least some of the stylistic features of the
96 J. BRUHN

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

Buford projected dirty realism as a direct opponent to more or less

anyone else writing North American fiction at that time, saying, “the epic
ambitions of Norman Mailer or Saul Bellow seem, in contrast, inflated,
strange, even false” and “[it] makes the more traditional realistic novels of,
say, Updike or Styron seem ornate, even baroque in comparison.” In par-
ticular, dirty realism, also called “Kmart realism”—and even more often,
simply minimalism—was often set up, as in Granta 8, as an opponent
to writers of the 1960s who allegedly failed to address real-life issues in
American society. To quote Buford again: “It [dirty realism] is not self-
consciously experimental like so much of the writing –variously described
 “GREAT SCRIPT, EH?”: MEDIALITIES, METAFICTION… 97

as ‘postmodern,’ ‘postcontemporary’ or ‘deconstructionist’  – that was

published in the sixties and seventies” (Buford 1983, 4).7
“Bullet in the Brain” was published at least ten years after the high point
of dirty realism, but not very much later than Wolff’s remarkable com-
ments in his introduction to the Picador Book of Contemporary American
Stories, which he also edited. In the anthology, and in the introduction
from 1993, he constructs two extremes he aims to avoid in his own writ-
ing as well as in the anthology: “I can’t imagine anything more quaint
than a scatological retelling of some nursery tale, or a fiction about a
writer writing the fiction you are reading” (Wolff 1993, x–xi). It is unclear
exactly what he means by “scatology” in this context, but when abhor-
ring “fiction about a writer writing the fiction” he is covering well-known
ground; this was the fundamental idea underlying, for instance, Carver’s
and Wolff’s recurring attacks on “postmodern,” “academic,” “scholastic,”
and “specialist” fiction as being unable to address the real problems of real
people.8
From this background of sometimes fierce attacks on metafictional
tendencies, “Bullet in the Brain” seems like a surprising and even rather
unique presence in Wolff’s oeuvre. However, the dichotomy between the
realism and the metafictional postmodernism is untenable. Questions of
disguises, lies, deceit, oral narratives, and consequently fiction play impor-
tant roles in several of Wolff’s short stories. Therefore, it probably makes
sense to consult the work of Paul March-Russell, who understands writ-
ers’ and critics’ attempts to define dirty realism, as opposed to an earlier
dominant style, as less a description of a genre and “more like a marketing
slogan” (March-Russell 2009, 235).
Accordingly, my attempt in the analysis above—to gently push the sup-
posedly realist Wolff in a metafictional direction by showing that his short
story builds upon a foundation of heteromedialities—is perhaps not so far
fetched after all. This has previously been noticed by March-Russell, who
mentions the formalistic aspects of “Bullet in the Brain,” and demon-
strates the similarities instead of the differences in American fiction from
the 1960s onward: “[T]heir [the dirty realists’] fiction often unsettles
what is meant by literary realism in ways not dissimilar to their postmod-
ern counterparts” (ibid., 235). March-Russell, however, only notes this
in passing, and in the discussion below I want to pursue this further by
developing my analysis into a more philosophical and speculative, and a
less literary historical, direction.
98 J. BRUHN

Above, I briefly mentioned the dichotomy between a ‘meaningful’ and

a ‘non-meaning’ reading of “Bullet in the Brain.” By doing this, I follow a
train of thought presented by Galloway et al. (2014), who argue for noth-
ing less than a new beginning for media theory that would focus on not
only all that can be mediated by way of different communicative means,
but also investigate the often neglected, or perhaps repressed, existence of
that which is unmediated or even unmediable. The authors reveal and cel-
ebrate heretic traditions, in the literal sense of the word, of not wanting to
enter the hermeneutic circuits of communicative actions and messages. In
their joint introduction, they claim that “there exist modes of mediation
that refuse bi-directionality, that obviate determinacy, and that dissolve
devices entirely”—and they continue, “[t]here are mediative situations in
which heresy, exile or banishment carry the day, not repetition, commu-
nion, or integration” (2014, 10).
Alexander Galloway detailed this position in his own essay in the book,
in which he operates using two traditions of mediation, which I read as
being largely the same as “communication” in Western thinking, and
he roots his dichotomy in the mythological figures of Hermes and Iris.
Hermes, according to Galloway, established our conventional notions of
mediation as communication: “mediation as extension, transit, representa-
tion, reflection, mimicry, and alienation. It includes both circulation and
exchange and the dangers they provoke such as disenchantment, fraud,
and deception” (28–29). Iris, on the other hand, exemplified “pure and
true communication or the kind of communication found in communion,
immediacy, and immanence” (29).
Seen in this light, the fictional argument about music saving litera-
ture in the short story’s final words warrants serious fine-tuning. There
is, indeed, something about the interpretation of “Bullet in the Brain”
sketched above that makes it seem almost idyllic—the story, I think,
strongly encourages the reader to follow the positive turn of the plot, pro-
viding a final hope for the bitter Anders by resurrecting the real Anders in
the final moment of death. As opposed to this, I will present the counter-
argument that “Bullet in the Brain” in fact undercuts this interpretational
script with a less edifying—but perhaps more interesting and definitely
rather surprising—argument, given the self-pronounced context of real-
ism and non-avant-garde that I sketched above. Below, I intend to show
that the text demonstrates that the meaning of art lies beyond not only
literature and criticism, but also beyond music. The short story holds,
in other words, a fascination of an absolute, non-hermeneutic presence,
 “GREAT SCRIPT, EH?”: MEDIALITIES, METAFICTION… 99

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.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: ARTIST, CRITIC, OR LITTLE BOY?

The descriptions of near-death experiences attract scientists, spiritual seek-
ers, filmmakers (Sunset Boulevard and American Beauty both play with
this convention), and, of course, writers. This is, for example, how Paul
Simms chooses to describe a near-death experience:

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

4. This is in contrast to my reading of Nabokov’s short story, where the tem-

poral order of the plot is much more complicated and deliberately confuses
the reader, and where I chose to read the systematic representation of medi-
alities with little consideration of the representations in the plot.
5. For instance, in the Paris Review interview of Wolff conducted by Livings
(2004).
6. For a thorough discussion of the history, form, and critical potentials of
Dirty Realism, see Tamas Dobozy, Towards a definition of dirty realism,
Ph.D. dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2000.
7. Mason notes Wolff’s failure to include even a single story written in the
postmodern manner in a large anthology consisting of 42 stories, where, as
he puts it, “[I]t is interesting now, writing in 2004, ten years after the
anthology, to see how ‘unrepresentative’ the anthology turned out to be.
Neither Lydia Davies, Robert Coover, John Barth or David Foster Wallace –
who have all reached, or already had, important positions in contemporary
American writing – were found worthy to enter Wolff’s Picador selection”
(Mason 2004, 19).
8. For a brief, but very useful, overview of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford,
and Tobias Wolff’s attempts to distance themselves from postmodern fic-
tion, see March-Russell (2009, 235–245).

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

Between Punk and PowerPoint: Authenticity

Versus Medialities in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit
from the Goon Squad

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 Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 103

J. Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57841-9_6
104 J. BRUHN

a trend of anglophone “neo-liberal novels” (Williams 2013, 93–97), while

the novel, in more specific, generic terms has been placed in the category
of “music-saturated fiction” (Hertz and Roessner 2014, 10) or simply in
the subgenre of the “rock novel” (Moorey 2014).
Stylistically, Egan has chosen to multiply the number of narrating and
focalizing characters and styles, which is not in itself an original feature:
In 1922, James Joyce had already used multiple literary styles to maxi-
mal effect in Ulysses; and contemporary literature, as one example, David
Mitchell’s work (whose multi-narrative structure shares some formal simi-
larities with Goon Squad) continues and elaborates the multi-style/focal-
ization/temporalities tradition.1
Most of the reviews and critical work has agreed, however, that the 13
chapters with different narrators and different styles set in different epochs
is difficult to grasp as a whole, and this richness of plots and timelines must
be the reason why one web author has found it necessary to offer (very
helpful) timelines and descriptions of the main characters of the book for
the confused reader.2 Goon Squad is, in other words, a novel that is almost
impossible to synopsize; however, a reviewer for the New York Times nev-
ertheless gave it a heroic, one-sentence try:

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

This (mock?)synopsis gives the reader an impression of the internally

connected, if also semi-chaotic, plot of the novel, but I leave it to others
to sort out in detail the narratological subtleties of the complex plot struc-
ture—and in contrast to most of the Egan criticism I have come across,
I want to offer a reading that does not characterize the novel in terms of
epoch, genre, thematic, or plot. Instead, I want to offer a reading focused
on the function and thematic and historical structure of represented as
well as structuring medialities in the novel.
Following my argument from the earlier chapters, I intend to dem-
onstrate that the remarkable multiplicity of the novel is more or less a
surface sign of a deeper theme of the novel, which relates to the question
of literature and medialities. To be more specific, I find that the mediality
constellation in Goon Squad consists of a dichotomy between two different
ways to approach human understanding and communication. So, as in the
earlier chapters, looking for medialities in narrative literature leads to more
general discussions. In this case, we have what I choose to call a “punk”
position. A critic notes that in temporal terms, “punk music is based on
an ethos that seeks to simultaneously annihilate the past and disavow the
future” (van de Velde 2014, 128), but I would add that regarding per-
ception and consequently representation of the world, the punk attitude
cherishes directness, liveliness, and unmediated authenticity.
In the medial system of the novel, this punk position stands opposed
to a position that understands qualified medialities, technical or aesthetic,
as enabling forms that let human beings access the world and allow
them to represent the complexities of the world in creative communica-
tive forms. One instance of such forms is the PowerPoint, which plays a
major role in Chap. 12 of the novel. Being an originally digital form (as
compared to the analog overhead transparencies or 35 mm slides for the
carousel), PowerPoint was of course primarily developed for application
as a pedagogical or management tool, but Egan powerfully re-functions
this pragmatic tool into an aesthetic mediality.3 Punk on the one hand,
and PowerPoint on the other—and yet another of the mediating creative
forms is Jennifer Egan’s own novelistic work.4 The mediality analysis of
a novel demands a modified strategy as compared to analyzing a shorter
text, in particular when it comes to the expository dimensions of present-
ing the “list” in a useful way (meaning: sufficiently detailed without being
too lengthy and cumbersome). In this particular case, one problem is the
sheer amount of represented medialities, and another is that the medial
presence branches into different dimensions—the latter being one of the
106 J. BRUHN

aspects that makes this novel a particularly enriching object of intermedial

analysis. As in my earlier cases, the medial presence in Goon Squad needs
to be registered, structured, and contextualized in the same way as the
represented medialities in the examples I have discussed earlier. This I will
present in Part One of the chapter. In Part Two, I will deal with the fact
that Goon Squad—in a much more direct and elaborated way than my
earlier examples—foregrounds the medialities by means of radical formal
imitation and by the use of pre- and post-texts, which forces me to engage
in new analytical practices in the last part of this case study.

PART ONE

Step 1: Registering Medialities in A Visit from the Goon Squad

Let me, in step 1 of the three-step model, give a commented medialities
overview (instead of the usual list or register) of the novel’s representation
of artistic qualified medialities. This will be the novel’s representation of,
in particular, music, the arts, and finally some minor qualified medialities
on the margins of artistic creation, but nevertheless influenced by it—
magazine writing and public relations work. After the qualified medialities
presentation, I shall give an overview of represented technical medialities.
Music is by far the dominant represented aesthetic mediality in the
novel. It is present in both descriptions of rehearsing and performing
punk music (in Chap. 3), in discussions of the history and forms of rock
and punk music (for instance, in Bennie’s reflections and discussions with
both Sasha and his son in Chap. 2), and in Bennie’s remembrance of the
“waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet sound” of nuns (Egan 2011, 23),
as opposed to the music of the two sisters in the “Stop/Go” indie group,
which no longer holds the promises of their youth. Music occupies a cen-
tral place in Chap. 12, where Sasha’s son Lincoln is engaged in analyzing
the presence of pauses in pop and rock music: This has even provided
the chapter’s name, by mimicking a kind of high-school report format—
“Great Rock and Roll Pauses. By Alison Blake.” The music industry is
discussed on numerous occasions, both as seen from the perspective of the
outsider Scotty (in Chap. 6), or via the insider Bennie’s many reflections
on the decay of musical taste and the possibilities of digitalization (in both
producing and distributing music) as well as the destructive tendencies of
the music industry (in both Chaps. 2 and 13).
 BETWEEN PUNK AND POWERPOINT: AUTHENTICITY VERSUS… 107

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

inhumane heart. This former film star is a main character in Chap. 9,

“Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame and
Nixon,” in the form of a 21-page, hyperconscious narrative about a celeb-
rity interview that goes tragically wrong (the interviewer, Jules, abducts
the young actress and is sentenced to prison). Film, then, is present mostly
in the parodied form of the b-films the young actress appears in, and later
in her role as an ex-celebrity serving as support system for a dictator. We
find “written narration” in the rhetorically well-wrought and humorous
form of the interview with the young actress by Jules.
Probably the most spectacular narration in the novel appears in Chap.
12: In the same way that the novel gives the impression of reprinting Jules
Jones’ celebrity article in its entirety (Chap. 9), Chap. 12 consists of the
fictional diary of Alison Blake presented in the form of PowerPoint slides.
I shall return to the meaning and function of this PowerPoint narration
below, but on the level of represented medialities, it occupies—despite
its apparently radical “non-literary” aspects—exactly the same ontological
space as Jules’s article: it is a “quoted” narrative in a specific verbal form,
incorporated into the larger framework of the novel Goon Squad.
As the final represented mediality, I want to mention an order example
that seems to exemplify a mixture of media in a contemporary, dystopic
Gesamtkunstwerk—the idea represented in Chap. 7, “A to B.” In this
chapter, Bosco, the spastic, acting-out guitarist, has fallen ill and believes
he is dying: As a final punk gesture, which combines the conventional
rock tour, the reality show, and a performance whose direct objective is
dying on stage, he imagines a grand Gesamtkunstwerk that he asks Jules,
just released from prison, to document in a book (of which we hear later
in the novel).
A relatively distanced overview shows the presence, but not yet the
function, of represented qualified artistic medialities in the novel; in addi-
tion, technical medialities and technological changes also play an impor-
tant role in the novel.
According to the punk musician, and later producer and record com-
pany man Bennie Salazar, all post-punk music is seen as an effect of the
new recording styles in rock music opened up by digitization, which he
sees not as a technological enhancement and new possibilities, but as a
aesthetic disaster: “The problem was precision, perfection; the problem
was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared
through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aes-
 BETWEEN PUNK AND POWERPOINT: AUTHENTICITY VERSUS… 109

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

Other significant medial details add to the epochal demarcations: In

one of the prolepses in Chap. 11, we learn that Ted, the art professor,
and his niece Sasha reconnect 20 years later via Facebook, while the rest
of the chapter reminds the reader of a time (around 1990) when commu-
nications between Italy and the USA were exchanged via expensive hotel
telephones.

Step 2: Structuring Medialities in Goon Squad

Earlier in this book, in my analysis of Carver’s “Cathedral,” I suggested
that the represented medialities may be interpreted as relatively systematic
representations of an historical epoch. The same holds true in this case,
despite the obvious differences in form and content between Carver and
Egan. Scattered throughout the novel, the reader finds represented medi-
alities as well as exclamations from characters that, taken together, weave
a historical image of the technological medial, and consequently cultural
changes that have taken place in the USA between the late 1970s and the
imagined third decade of the twenty-first century. The changes in tech-
nical and qualified mediality functions, in other words, as a metonymic
representation of the more comprehensive historical development, and
the novel seems almost eager to let different characters express statements
that read as epochal characterizations.
All these details provide the reader with fragmentary bits and pieces
that, in combination, offer an overview of the time span, partly by discuss-
ing and exemplifying, and in particular by changing the role of qualified
medialities (music, in particular). However, as the novel demonstrates,
technological changes constitute the background for the development of
new mass media and the intrusion of digital aspects on everyday lives. Seen
from this perspective, the novel exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s dictum
that the medium is the message, and consequently that an efficient repre-
sentation of four decades of American history can actually be achieved by
way of an abundance of represented technological and aesthetic medi-
alities; Tore Rye Andersen (2014), by following the specific function of
the telephone in Goon Squad, demonstrates how this technological device
becomes a “synecdoche of society” (27).6
The question is this: Is it possible to interpret this complex web of
represented medialities as something other than a mimetic sociohistoric
representation?
 BETWEEN PUNK AND POWERPOINT: AUTHENTICITY VERSUS… 111

Step 3: Contextualizing the Mediality Structure in Goon Squad

It is tempting to read the string of descriptions and events as adding up
to a comprehensive dichotomic structure that lies behind all the repre-
sented medialities, a dichotomy related to the struggle between authentic-
ity and mediation, between punk and PowerPoint. This would mean that
the novel favors authenticity and presence, represented for instance by
the punk music and punk attitudes of Bennie and his friends in the past,
and on the other hand the present (or future) situation characterized by
the fact that medial and technological developments have distanced artists
and non-artists alike from real values and true life. This dichotomy offers
a suitable explanation of the move from punk music to the dominance
of the commercialized focus on the “preverbal,” with Scotty’s concert as
only a brief and ineffectual resistance against unstoppable technological
and cultural development.
The above understanding of the novel is supported by Danica van de
Velde (2014) in an anthology chapter that combines a gender studies
approach with an acute consciousness of the role of represented medi-
alities in the novel. Van de Velde argued that Egan’s novel expresses a
pronounced nostalgia for the past, symbolized by the authenticity of punk
music, and she further stated that the novel distributes the nostalgia for
the authenticity of the past to the male protagonists, in particular Bennie
Salazar, whereas the female characters are more oriented toward the future.
Van de Velde convincingly showed the presence of gendered nostalgia and
she also pointed to important relations between music (musical references
and musical form) in Egan’s novel, and the nostalgia thematic.
In several ways, I sympathize with van de Velde’s point of view: Her
focus of analysis lies relatively close to my own, and her interpretation can
be read into a repeated dichotomy in the case studies in this book. This
dichotomy encompasses what I have earlier called mediaphobia (a longing
for authenticity and an avoidance of mediation), and it goes against my
fundamental theoretical idea, which I also find in literary texts; specifi-
cally, the ubiquity of mediation (this dichotomy was discussed indirectly
in the “Spring in Fialta” case study and more directly in the “Cathedral”
chapter).
However, the methods and results of van de Velde’s and my own
analyses at the same time demonstrate the borders of the methodology
proposed in my first three case studies. In particular, my conscious and
explicit focus on the represented medialities in those studies has sidelined
112 J. BRUHN

questions concerning medialities and literature on other levels. That is

why I intend—in the second half of this final case study—to open a new
mediality perspective on narrative literature, which is perhaps particularly
fitting at our current moment, when production and distribution chan-
nels (and consequently reading experiences and interpretative communi-
ties and analytical possibilities) are appearing to change, a shift probably
connected to ideas about books and ideas of “bookishness” (N. Katherine
Hayles). The starting point for my reading in the second main part of this
case study is therefore, that Jennifer Egan is one of many authors and art-
ists in recent years whose works address what is often considered a threat
to the printed book. Jessica Pressman took note of the “status of the book
as a reading technology” and she also discussed “how the changing role
of the book inspires a literary and, indeed, an aesthetic response” (2009,
467). To read Egan’s novel in this light is of course a question of vast
scope that I can only address in rather vague terms here.

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.

Beyond Represented Medialities in A Visit from the Goon Squad

What I intend to do in this second part of this chapter is to argue that in
some cases, the three-step reading of represented medialities is not enough
to understand literary texts fully. In the particular case of Goon Squad, my
argument is that despite the fact—demonstrated by van de Velde—that
the surface level of the novel may give the impression that it expresses
 BETWEEN PUNK AND POWERPOINT: AUTHENTICITY VERSUS… 113

a longing for authenticity and presence, something else is at stake when

reading the text in other ways. When including a wider context around the
novel, in particular concerning some of the more comprehensive ordering
processes beyond the diegetic universe of the text, another possible read-
ing of the novel occurs.
Jennifer Egan’s novel exemplifies mediality aspects that lie on the bor-
der between represented and representing medialities, which we haven’t
really encountered in the first three texts analyzed. Goon Squad exhibits a
presence of medialities, not as represented medialities in the diegetic realm,
but nevertheless very important structuring medialities that organize the
entire text or parts of the text. We can say that these aspects concern
the aspects of the text that are not part of the medial projection of the
narrator or characters in the text. Instead, we now move one level “up”
in abstraction—to the main organizing principles behind the diegesis, so
to speak. In Goon Squad, this relates to two crucial features; a decidedly
formal imitation of the entire novel, with which I will begin, and further-
more, a number of what I will call “external mediality aspects” that also
needs to be taken into consideration.

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.

External Medialities Aspects: Pre-texts and Post-texts

I now move on to the aspects, mentioned only briefly in the introductory
theoretical chapters, that surround what is normally considered the text
itself, but which ought to have a bearing on our understanding of the text.
An influential attempt to systematize the rich flora of texts surrounding
what was considered to be the text in itself—basically the running text of a
novel or the words of a poem—was made by Gerard Genette. In Paratexts
(1997, but published originally in French in 1987), Genette established
“paratexts” as the plethora of texts that constitute the thresholds (“seuils,”
in French) that the reader has to cross before reaching the work: title,
chapter titles, and so on, and including other entrances to the work pro-
vided by the editor, interviews, and other material. Egan’s novel exhibits
texts that I would not directly classify as paratexts, but rather (and here
I do not follow Genette’s detailed terminology) what I simply choose to
call pre-texts and post-texts. Related to Egan’s published novel a number
of pre-texts exist, which were later incorporated into the novel. After the
publication of the novel, and as a result of its success, a number of post-
texts taking the form of specific media products, based either in parts of
the novel or the novel in its entirety, have been created and distributed.
By pre-texts here I refer to a very limited part of a potentially enormous
body of intertextual material (for instance, Egan’s literary sources of inspi-
ration, her notes for the book, and intentions expressed around her ear-
lier work but related to Goon Squad); this material is not germane to my
analytical purposes here. Instead it is important to reiterate that Egan had
116 J. BRUHN

published 8 of her 13 chapters as autonomous texts (consumed by readers

as individual short stories) before the texts were collected in Goon Squad.
Generally speaking, many (but not all) texts have a rich and compli-
cated afterlife as post-texts to the main work as originally published. A
text, or parts of it, may be reprinted, translated, anthologized, and adapted
into other media—as well as quoted in or out of context. By “post-text”
in Egan’s case, I refer to texts that she authored, designed, or adapted
directly from Goon Squad. Tore Rye Andersen has remarked that as “a
continuation of Egan’s experiments with various formats and media forms
[of and in Goon Squad, JB], the novel has since been published as an inter-
active app for IOS, as an e-book and as an audiobook” (2015, 84).
The app version of the text, in particular, makes for an interesting post-
text. It features an e-book version and an audio version, the latter featur-
ing parts of the novel read aloud by Egan herself. It also includes a number
of so-called liner notes (again referring to the idea of the novel as a musi-
cal album with comments), describing the background for some of the
chapters; it includes the PowerPoint chapter in lively colors and includes
musical fragments (available now on Jennifer Egan’s official homepage).
Interestingly and unusually, the chapters, symbolized by different icons,
can be moved so that the reader can generate a customized sequence.7 A
final post-text worth mentioning is Egan’s own succinct explanations of
the major plotlines of the work.
The post-texts together with the pre-texts are signs of the concept of
the artistic work inherent in A Visit from the Goon Squad that should be
taken into consideration in the overall interpretation of the work. First
of all, they show some of the major changes in contemporary print cul-
ture—and consequently in literature, the arts, and criticism—that are tak-
ing place at this point in the history of literature and the book, where
writers’ investigative explorations at least point to some of the aspects of
our medial situation. Egan’s next work after Goon Squad, Black Box, was
originally published via The New Yorker’s Twitter account. Only later was
it published in The New Yorker before being finally published as a book,
which is one among many possible future distribution solutions. The
fact that the IOS Goon Squad app is now more or less impossible to use
because it uses an outdated operating system is, in itself, a telling example
of the technical possibilities, but also restraints, of the digital solutions as
compared to the conventional codex book format.
In addition, the way the novel has initially been distributed in parts, via
different publication venues, actually mirrors a major concern in the novel
 BETWEEN PUNK AND POWERPOINT: AUTHENTICITY VERSUS… 117

in which Bennie witnesses the changes in musical distribution, beginning

with the LP and CD formats and moving on to electronically distributed
single tracks. But whereas Bennie sees this definitively as a loss, as well as
a significant step toward the infantilized epoch of the “preverbal,” Egan’s
own work seems to eat the cake and have it too: first distributing the “sin-
gles” (chapters or tracks that are attractive and easy to follow and enjoy)
and later on collecting the single stories into a more or less organic whole
in the form of a novel.
As opposed to my three preceding case studies, where I did not conduct
this “external” level of analysis, I now need to stitch together the results
of my three-step model with the external factors surrounding the printed
novel. If I switch register from technical medialities related to distribution
and publication and move ahead to more aesthetic considerations, I would
argue that the external medialities demonstrate how Egan, in Goon Squad,
has created the novel as a work with open boundaries back in time (Egan
published parts of what later became the novel in different contexts) and
forward in time into explanations, post-texts, and new versions. The novel
offers its own meta-descriptions of the nature of its work, and to use a
rather obvious metaphor from the novel itself, we could say that Jennifer
Egan, like the sculptor Sasha in the science fiction chapter, collects the
components of her novel as individual parts that together create a different
impression than the constituent stories or chapters.
Alternatively, I could repeat another dominant metaphor discussed in
detail above, that the novel’s chapters resemble the individual tracks on a
concept album. Taken together, this points to an idea of a work of art that
is considerably more on the side of the new possibilities of PowerPoint
than the authentic and unmediated energy of punk music culture. Jennifer
Egan does not pretend that her work was a full-blown masterpiece from
the beginning (with parts being published along the way), and she is not
afraid of offering new versions of the whole and parts of the text that also
disrupt the more romantic idea of an authentic work of art being pro-
duced fully in the presence of the artist.
Everything in Egan’s work as a writer is mediated, as opposed to imme-
diate, which becomes even more clear when one considers the fact that
Egan’s next project, Black Box, radically took a step away from codex to
another new form, the Twitter novel.
The novel abhors the rather conservative position of seeing the past
as good and authentic, thus demonizing a dehumanized future, which,
translated into the aesthetic system proposed in the novel itself, would
118 J. BRUHN

be symbolized by the authentic punk culture on the one hand and an

inauthentic, digitalized, mediated post-punk condition on the other. It is
worth noting that, even on the level of represented medialities, we detect
signs indicating that punk is probably not the attitude the novel as a whole
favors. This is pointed out in the final words of the quote on the audi-
ence’s experience of Scotty and his performance in the final chapter men-
tioned above: “in a way that now registered as pure” (Egan 2011, 347).
With this telling—if also easy to overlook—qualification, I will argue that
Jennifer Egan, speaking through one of the characters inside the diegesis,
demonstrates how the category of “purity” or “authenticity” is a relational
quality, not an absolute essence. That is exactly why it is necessary to inves-
tigate the presence of medialities as not restricted to being metonymical
signs of epochal shifts, nor as the medialities, in particular of music, sup-
porting a nostalgic, or for that matter, an anti-nostalgic, position. Instead,
I suggest that we see the nostalgia and the presence of media as part of a
larger medial dynamic of the novel between what I called, in my discus-
sion of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” the relation between mediaphobia
and medialities, which in Goon Squad divides into the dichotomy between
punk and PowerPoint.
So I argue that the main opposition in the novel is between the punk
attitude of Bennie and his friends (including all of the thoughts and dis-
cussions concerning how to be a “real” punk) and the mediating instances
of producing meaning, where technological medialities of communication
such as PowerPoint are seen as enabling tools instead of hindrances to
direct, immediate expression, and communication. Immediacy—the punk
attitude—is a myth, often a nostalgic myth, and in Goon Squad probably
also a myth particularly cherished by men like Bennie who feel that their
privileges and status are not as enduring and stable as they imagined them
to be. It may be no coincidence, perhaps, that it is a female author who
succeeds in taking the step beyond the (predominantly male) myths of
the immediate authenticities of punk music and culture represented by
Bennie; some of the real “heroes” of the book is a teenage girl with a
flair for PowerPoint expressivity and her mother, who expresses herself
through “found objects,” which is the ironic title of the first chapter of
the novel.
Consequently, I cannot agree with van de Velde, who reads the
PowerPoint chapter as an heir to the punk music of Allison Blake’s par-
ents’ generation. A Visit from the Goon Squad as a mediality system estab-
lishes immediacy and punk music—and culture—on the one hand, and the
 BETWEEN PUNK AND POWERPOINT: AUTHENTICITY VERSUS… 119

technologically mediated expressions of PowerPoint—or the novel—on

the other. The exceptional thing about Goon Squad is, I would argue,
that Egan is able to demonstrate the precariousness of conventional, and
highly praised aesthetic medialities like punk music or the novel, in a novel
that is related to punk culture but nevertheless manages to stay a healthy
distance away from the utopian belief that the authentic, even primitive
outbursts of energy are the only ways of creating authenticity. Thirteen
different styles in a highly elaborate aesthetic complex of enunciations,
pre-published in parts and post-published in new versions and commen-
taries, comprise Egan’s powerful demonstration that despite the undeni-
ably positive (according to characters in the book) aspects of punk, which
may lead the characters, or the readers of the novel, to a nostalgia for the
unmediated directness of authenticity, other aesthetic systems and medial-
ities are at least as productive. Narrative prose and the novel, even though
it is regularly being put to rest by critics or even writers—old-fashioned
and endangered as it might seem at first sight—is alive and kicking 400
years after Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Parts of it may now be published,
Egan’s work demonstrates, as pre-texts and adapted into post-texts but,
as is the case for any literary text, the typical novel has been—and still
remains—stuffed with 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

tem administration to data gathering of the control and verification of all

sorts of qualities and attributes,” see Fuller and Goffey, (2012, 12).
4. My main point countering van de Velde’s in many ways brilliant analysis of
Goon Squad is that she sees the PowerPoint as an aesthetic form that contin-
ues the attitudes of punk music (2014, 132), whereas I argue that PowerPoint
and the punk attitude toward representation stand against each other in the
novel.
5. Which echoes Bennie Salazar’s fear of losing his sexual virility in an earlier
chapter.
6. A development that could be anchored even more specifically, perhaps, in
technological and societal developments related to, for instance, the wide-
spread use of new musical distribution forms such as Spotify or ITunes,
which both tend to break up the idea and necessity of the album as the
“natural” distribution and reception format for new music releases.
7. Parts of the original app material can now be found at jenniferegan.com.

REFERENCES
Blythe, Will. 2010. To their own beat. New York Times, July 8, no page indications.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/books/review/Blythe-t.
html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Accessed 28 Aug 2015.
Byrne, David. 2003. Envisioning emotional epistemological information. Göttingen:
Steidel.
DeRosa, Aaron. 2014. The end of futurity: Proleptic nostalgia and the war on ter-
ror. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 25: 88–107.
Egan, Jennifer. 2011. A visit from the goon squad. New York: Anchor Books. For
background material, see Egan’s official homepage, Jenniferegan.com. The
timeline and character list mentioned in Chapter 6 may be viewed at http://
goonsquadtimelines.weebly.com/.
Fuller, Matthew, and Andrew Goffey. 2012. Evil media. Cambridge, MA/London:
The MIT Press.
Hertz, Eddie, and Jeffrey Roessner. 2014. Introduction. In Write in tune:
Contemporary music in fiction, ed. Eddie Hertz and Jeffrey Roessner, 1–16.
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Hunt Gram, Margaret. 2014. Freedom’s limits: Jonathan Franzen, the realist novel,
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Moorey, Gerard. 2014. Aging, death, and revival: Representations of the music
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Pressman, Jessica. 2009. The aesthetic of bookishness in twenty-first-century lit-
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02;g=mqrg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1. Accessed 22 Aug 2015.
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Rye Andersen, Tore. 2014. Hallo. Passage 72: 7–32.

Rye Andersen, Tore. 2015. Black Box in flux: Locating the literary work between
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Solwitz, Sharon. 2014. Pauses in Visit from the goon squad: Aberration takes
charge, or, literature hijinks with the notion of time. Forum for World Literature
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van de Velde, Danica. 2014. Every song ends: Musical pauses, gendered nostalgia,
and loss in Jennifer Egan’s A visit from the goon squad. In Write in tune:
Contemporary music in fiction, ed. Erich Hertz and Jeffrey Roessner, 122–135.
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Williams, Jeffrey J. 2013. The plutocratic imagination. Dissent 60: 93–97.
 CHAPTER 7

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

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 123

J. Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57841-9_7
124 J. BRUHN

but hopefully also productive. Second, my book is intended for college or

university students looking for inspiration to cover the gap between theo-
ries of media and intermediality on the one hand, and methods of literary
analysis on the other. And third, it is my hope that researchers interested
in either the case studies specifically, or in intermediality studies in general,
will benefit from my analyses, since I have deliberately avoided cases where
my method is all too easily applied. Instead, I have chosen texts that fasci-
nate me as literary works in themselves, and that I feel need to be read in
new and productive ways. I hope, as I stated in the Introduction, not only
to present clear-cut didactic examples but also to contribute to the ongo-
ing, critical discussion concerning my chosen literary texts. It is my hope
that this triple mode of address—to teachers, students, and researchers—
will not be problematic, but will turn out to offer possibilities and rewards
to different readers of this book.
My four case studies, a selected compilation of a larger corpus of texts
I have taught or researched over the past years, have shown, I hope, not
only the usefulness of my method but also its limitations. Registering,
structuring, and contextualizing the represented medialities in the shorter
works of Nabokov, Carver, and Wolff has demonstrated that represented
medialities, at least in these cases—as different as they are in style, content,
and thematics—tend to point to more comprehensive and challenging
questions, beyond the restrictions and the surface qualities of the specific
texts.
At the same time, I hope my readings have also demonstrated that
I do not see the three-step method as an end in itself: The three-step
model is, instead, a maieutic model that is meant to stimulate readings
of well-known or unknown texts from a relatively new perspective. In
other words, even if the three steps may be stimulating and enlighten-
ing, no method of literary analysis can ever (nor should it) replace a
certain element of creativity, resourcefulness, and personal engagement.
The usefulness of the method lies in the relative repeatability and the
transparency of the three steps; however, one of its limitations is the
fact that the method is in fact only a stepping stone meant to stimulate
personal, creative, and engaged readings. In my opinion, this is not a
surprising or controversial position for any teacher of literature or the
arts. Consequently, the interpretations I offer here not only are stimu-
lated by the three-step method but are also deeply rooted in my personal
interests and idiosyncrasies, and this is the way I hope that the book will
be used, in teaching or in research.
 AFTERTHOUGHTS 125

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.

• A mediality perspective on other literary genres (thus widening the

perspective in this book on narrative texts) would be interesting.
Which literary genres are dependent on which technical mediali-
ties? Which genres have disappeared or materialized as a more or less
direct result of historical and technological developments in mediali-
ties? Included in this line of questioning is the emergence of “new“
genres; for instance, new technical medialities that alter conventional
literary medialities. The novels as mediated by means of technical
medialities into partly new forms like the e-book or audio book are
obvious contemporary cases of this.
• Closely related is the already well-developed study of adaptation, for
example, the adaptations of novels into films, where the three-step
method could be applied to the adaptation process as well as the
adapted result, and subsequently compared and analyzed.
• I also believe that a mediality perspective on the entire oeuvre of an
author may prove valuable. Such studies could investigate in which
126 J. BRUHN

ways the works of an author can be said to rely on certain techni-

cal and/or artistic medialities, and combine some medialities while
rejecting or ignoring others.
• On a more general level, historical analyses of particularly dominat-
ing medialities in different epochs in history could possibly lead to
a better understanding of changes in the forms and institutions of
literature under transformed medial and technological conditions.
• Still on a general level, the interrelationships between ideology and
medialities ought to be taken into consideration. Are some medi-
alities particularly prone to succumbing to authoritarian simplifica-
tions? Are certain ideas of purity of medialities less liberating than
others, or are such considerations just the reminiscences of outdated,
normative media-specificity claims?
• Finally, I believe that applying the three-step model on media
products outside conventional literature (not only as participants
of adaptation processes) should be tested: narrative forms like TV
series, theater, and computer games, of course, but perhaps our
understanding of less obviously narrative forms could gain from the
method—art exhibitions, or even the Olympic ceremonies as sug-
gested by Claus Clüver (2007, 34).

There are, in other words, myriad possibilities and openings in the

vital—and, until now, far from well defined—field of intermediality, mul-
timodality, and media studies. Medialities (or modalities or media) indeed
matter, as I sought to communicate in my title; medialities matter as
crucial aspects of the modern world, and as new and fruitful potential
entrances to literary texts.

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Matterson, S. 1993. Sprung from the music box of memory: Spring in Fialta. In A
small Alpine form: Studies in Nabokov’s short fiction, ed. C.  Nicol and
G. Barabtarlo, 99–110. New York: Garland Publishing.
Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. 1998. Literary theory: An anthology. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Stull, William L. 1985. Beyond Hopelessville: Another side of Raymond Carver.
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Wolf, W. 1999. The musicalization of fiction: A study in the theory and history of
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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

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 131

J. Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57841-9
132 INDEX
Dirty Realism, 8, 63, 95–9
dissolve (in cinema), 51–4
Durham Peters, John, 37, 75
E Iris, 85, 95–100
Eagleton, Terry, 5, 30
Egan, Jennifer, 22, 33, 104–6, 110,
112–19
Elleström, Lars, 14, 17–20, 23
epiphany, 64, 74–8, 100
external medialities, 22–4, 113,
115–19, 125
F
film studies, 10
formal imitation, 27–9, 45, 52, 53, 57,
106, 113–15
G LP (music), 113, 114, 117
Galloway, Alexander R., 4, 85, 98,
99, 100
Genette, Gerard, 115
Gesamtkunstwerk, 3, 25, 108
Greenberg, Clement, 3, 25
Grønstad, Asbjørn, 29
H McLuhan, Marshall, 18, 110
Hansen, Mark B.N., 4, 16, 26
Hayles, N. Katherine, 22, 23, 37, 112
Hemingway, Ernest, 62, 63, 78, 85,
87, 90, 100
Hermes, 85, 93, 95–100
heteromediality, 9, 15, 31, 42, 45, 55,
57, 63, 97
Higgins, Dick, 3
Hjarvard, Stig, 5
Homer, 8
Hutcheon, Linda, 26
I
interart studies, 2, 5, 6, 14, 32
intermedia, 3
intermediality studies, 1, 2, 5–7, 9,
13–16, 19, 22, 24, 28, 30, 124
J
Jakobson, Roman, 17, 94
K
Kittler, Friedrich, 4, 14, 32, 79
L
Laokoon, 40
Lessing, G.E., 25
Lingan, John, 85–7, 91
literary theory, 5, 6, 22, 29, 30
Lund, Hans, 28, 56
M
March-Russell, Paul, 97
mass media, 2–4, 14, 62, 110
material mediality, 8, 22, 23, 103
McGann, Jerome J., 22, 23
media, 1–5, 7, 9, 13–16, 18–27, 29,
30, 32, 34, 43–6, 57, 62, 68–75,
77, 79, 98, 100, 108, 110,
114–16, 118, 124, 126
medialities, 1–10, 14, 15, 17–20,
22–8, 30–6, 42, 44–9, 51, 54, 57,
61–79, 83–100, 103–19, 123–6
medial projection, 27–9, 51, 107, 113
medial transformation, 28, 45, 56
mediaphobia, 61–4, 75, 77, 78, 111,
118

media product, 16, 18–22, 24–7, 30,
34, 57, 114, 115, 126
media theory, 9, 16, 98, 100
mediating, 15–18, 34, 45, 46, 58, 61–3,
66, 72, 73, 76, 78, 100, 105, 118
mediation, 4, 8, 9, 15–17, 35, 61–3,
73–5, 77, 79, 98, 111
medium, 3, 4, 7, 9, 14–22, 25, 28, 68,
69, 72, 73, 77, 110, 114, 115
medium-specific, 3, 25
memory, 3, 4, 7, 9, 14–16, 18–21,
25, 28, 68, 69, 72, 73, 75, 77,
110, 114, 115
methodology, 2, 6, 10, 13–37, 42, 45,
57, 63, 68, 84, 111
Middleton, Peter, 69
Mitchell, David, 27, 28, 104
Mitchell, W.J.T., 4, 15, 16, 21, 32
mixed media, 2, 4, 5, 15, 20, 21
modality, 9, 19–22
Moi, Toril, 16
monomedial, 7, 14, 15, 19, 21, 42
multimodal, 13, 19, 20
Mulvey, Laura, 71
music, 5, 8, 14, 20, 21, 26–8, 31, 43,
46, 51, 54–8, 92–6, 98–100,
104–11, 113, 114, 117–19
N 103, 105–8, 110–19, 124, 125
Nabokov, Vladimir, 8, 9, 35, 41–58,
63, 66, 84, 124, 125
narrative literature, 1, 7, 9, 20, 31,
46, 57, 91, 103, 105, 112,
123, 124
near-death experience, 83, 84, 99
New Yorker, The, 85, 116
P Sontag, Susan, 29, 30
Panofsky, Erwin, 10, 35, 36
paragone, 24, 32, 35
INDEX 133
performance art, 3, 14
Pethő Agnès, 10
Plato, 62
poetry, poems, 2, 14, 21, 23, 25, 90,
91, 93
post-texts, 106, 115–19
PowerPoint, 103–19
pre-texts, 115–19
Proust, Marcel, 27, 41, 42
punk (music), 103–19
Q
qualified media, 19–22, 28, 45, 46, 49,
58, 70, 72, 105–7, 110, 114, 115
R
Rajewsky, Irina, 14, 22, 23
realism (in literature), 8, 68, 95–9
reference, 44, 45, 52, 53, 87, 93
register (in three-step model), 10, 34,
36, 37, 45, 54, 63, 64, 67, 68,
85, 89, 92, 95, 106, 117
relation (in three-step model), 31,
33–5, 53, 106, 117, 125, 126
representations, 7–9, 21, 27, 33–6,
42–5, 47, 49, 51, 63, 69,
71, 78, 87, 90, 96, 98, 105–7,
110, 112
represented medialities, 8, 9, 33, 49, 54,
Ryan, Marie-Laure, 18
Rye Andersen, Tore, 22, 23, 110, 116
S
Schröter, Jens, 3
semiotic, 5, 15, 19, 20, 85
Shannon, Claude, 17
Simms, Paul, 99
sound, 19, 20, 26, 54, 56–8, 92, 95,
100, 106, 109, 114
134 INDEX

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