The Performative Novel

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The Performative Novel

Barbara Browning

In our current moment of political anxiety, it’s been observed (with more than a little surprise) that many people are turning to fiction in order to deal with their fears — but not with the intention of escapism. On the contrary, some of the books that people are reading most vora- ciously right now are dystopian novels written decades ago, novels that seemed to foresee some of the threats to civil rights and personal liberties that we’re now experiencing. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) — and perhaps most aptly, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Talents (1998).¹ No one seems to be blaming these authors for what we’re experiencing. That is, no one is suggesting that these works of fiction had the performative force to make their narratives come true all these years after they were written. (Maybe that suggestion rings even more paranoid than the dystopias that these books depict — although I’ll go on to suggest a slightly more nuanced, and potentially encouraging, version of this idea.) But it’s possible that readers intuit, or even believe, that by placing themselves in those fictional scenarios, they’re rehearsing the ways in which they’ll respond if the worst of our fears are realized.

Literature Embodied, Performed

Reading isn’t passive, and seeing it as an opportunity for rehearsal isn’t such a stretch. It also isn’t such a stretch to see it as an act of performance. Peter Kivy wrote an entire treatise com- paring silent reading to what musicians do when they interpret a musical score (2006). And indeed, Kurt Vonnegut once suggested that the reader of a novel is not actually analogous to the audience member attending an orchestral, theatrical, or choreographic event, but to the fea- tured performer him- or herself: “To expect somebody to read a book,” he said, “is like having someone arrive at a concert hall and be immediately handed a violin and told to go up onstage”

(in Barsamian 2003).²

If one puts this suggestion in cultural and historical context, there are plenty of ways to understand it literally. When Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Nobel

Barbara Browning is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She is the author of three scholarly books: Samba:

Resistance in Motion (1995); Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (1998); and Caetano Veloso: A Foreign Sound (2017); as well as three fictocritical novels:

The Correspondence Artist (2011); I’m Trying to Reach You (2012); and The Gift (or, Techniques of the Body) (2017). She also makes dances, videos, and ukulele cover tunes. [email protected] 1. For a few accounts of this trend, see: Alter (2017); Locke (2017); Tuttle (2017); and Wheeler (2017).

2. In The Life of Henry Brulard, Stendhal had put the relation slightly differently: “A novel is like a violin-bow, the box which gives off the sounds is the soul of the reader” ([1890] 2002:184). The instrumentality of the reader in relation to the text is configured inversely by Vonnegut and Stendhal, but in either case, the interdependence in performance is marked.

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committee preemptively coun- tered rigid distinctions between literature and performance by invoking Sappho and Homer.

And yet the choice managed to irk plenty of people — including some who felt that the prize might more effectively be direct- ing readers to authors whose works don’t enjoy the kinds of exposure habitually granted to popular music. Ironically, one of the authors championed by those arguing for a more strictly “literary” awardee was the great Kenyan novelist, activist, and performance theorist Ngu˜gı˜

wa Thiong’o. I say “ironically”

because in fact Ngu˜gı˜ has long argued that orature in ostensibly

“nonliterate” societies constitutes embodied, performed, enacted literature,³ and one can see ways in which he’s harnessed some of the force of embodied performance in the writing of his literary fiction.⁴ I confess to my own partiality at the moment when Dylan was awarded the Nobel — I would have been delighted to see my friend and former colleague Ngu˜gı˜’s astonishing body of work acknowledged in this way (and I hold out hope for this happening sooner rather than later) — but not because his work is more “literary” than Dylan’s.

On the contrary, it’s an extreme example of the ways in which performance and performativity operate in fictional texts. If oral narrative is understood as a modality of literature writ large (as it were), embodied performance, with all of its sonic, gestural, and spectacular possibilities, can be understood as existing both beside and within textual narrative, narrowly construed.

A specific example reveals just how difficult it can be to differentiate between a book and a living body. In 1986, during the period of his exile in the UK, Ngu˜gı˜ published a novel in Gı˜ku˜yu˜, the most prevalent of the nonofficial languages spoken in Kenya (the official national languages are Swahili and English). He’d already achieved renown for his English-language publications, but this time the pain of exile compelled him to write in a language that would reinforce his sense of connection to Kenya. Matigari was titled after its fictional hero, a messi- anic figure rising up to oppose a repressive government. Ngu˜gı˜ prefaced that book with the following lines of direct address to his audience:

This story is imaginary.

The actions are imaginary.

The characters are imaginary.

The country is imaginary — it has no name even.

Reader/listener: may the story take place in the country of your choice!

(Ngu˜gı˜ [1986] 1998:n.p.)

Figure 1. “Bathtub Dance (harvest moon).” Dance video by Barbara Browning referenced in her novel I’m Trying to Reach You. YouTube, 28 May 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4frxx2YeEdY. (Screengrab by TDR, courtesy of Barbara Browning)

3. See, for example, his “Notes towards a Performance Theory of Orature” (Ngu˜gı˜ 2007).

4. The larger bibliography on the evocation of oral narrative in African literature is extensive, but on Ngu˜gı˜’s spe- cific innovations, particularly in Matigari which I reference below, see Lewis Nkosi, “Reading Matigari: The New Novel of Post-Independence” (1995).

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The Performative Novel But for those living under the rule of Daniel Arap Moi, the setting of the story seemed all

too familiar. It was (and still is) something of a rarity for a novel to be published in a nonofficial African language,⁵ which meant that the text wasn’t only being consumed by solitary readers in Kenya. It was also circulating through live communal readings. Public performances lent the novel the aesthetic power of live interpretation, and they also evidenced the novel’s debt to the cultural tradition of orature. The relevance of the text to the lives of its “reader/listeners”

led a lot of them to talk about — and take inspiration from — the title character, which means, of course, that the book was spilling outside of its covers in more ways than one. So was the title character. Kenya’s president Daniel Arap Moi himself, like the rest of the book’s audience, found direct and highly charged implications in the pronouncements of the novel’s hero. In fact, Matigari was so threatening, Moi issued a warrant for his arrest.

Matigari was a fictional character. Moi wanted him in prison. You could think of this as ignorance or naïveté, or you could think of it as an extraordinary acknowledgment of a fictional character’s performative force. In the preface to the US edition of the English translation, Ngu˜gı˜ explains that when “the hardworking loyal policemen found out that the man they had come to arrest was only a fictional character in a book by the same title,” Moi “reacted to this information by calling for the arrest of the book itself.” Security forces removed all cop- ies of the novel from bookstores, “presumably to burn it or let it rot to death in a police garri- son” (Ngu˜gı˜ [1986] 1998:n.p.). The figure of the book as a body — either brutally immolated or slowly decomposing — was now Ngu˜gı˜’s own.

The personification of a novel and the acknowledgment of its performative force are part of this narrative of censorship and political resistance. And the resistant counterperformance of books embodied is part of yet another signal dystopian narrative currently experiencing a renaissance: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). In recent years, there’s been a spate of live performances inspired by or at least superficially resembling that narrative. In 2010, the Brussels-based Norwegian dance artist Mette Edvardsen initiated an ongoing series of events featuring “living books” — performers, each of whom has memorized a book of his or her choice (see Edvardsen n.d.). They “hang out” at libraries waiting to be “picked up.” A “reader”

can request one of these books, and then take it to a quiet place in or near the library where the book recites itself. Edvardsen has said that in this work she’s exploring the temporality of liveness — the ephemerality of performance in relation to the seeming fixity of a written text (see Simpson 2016). Edvardsen titled her piece Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.

That’s a line from Fahrenheit 451, but the tranquil lyricism of the title belies the threat of cen- sorship in the source text (and, of course, in the current moment).

It’s notable that Edvardsen came to this project from dance, an area of performance that we associate with technique and virtuosic skill — but rarely with the specific skill of memorizing text.

The virtuosic memory required to embody an entire novel was also staged in a theatrical con- text, in Elevator Repair Service’s celebrated Gatz, which debuted in 2006. The text of the produc- tion was The Great Gatsby in its entirety. The actor Scott Shepherd was identified as “Nick” in the cast list, and yet that’s misleading: in the production, Shepherd enters the scene as an unnamed worker in a nondescript office, and proceeds to read aloud from a paperback copy of Fitzgerald’s novel. But he soon comes “off the page,”⁶ narrating from memory, and other actors (ostensibly his coworkers in that nondescript office) begin to animate the book’s characters. Still, the production is not so much an enactment of the plot of the text as it is an enactment of the very drama of reading itself — the way in which a fictional narrative can so infuse a reader’s sense of reality that

5. Ngu˜gı˜’s 1980 Caitaani mu˜tharaba-Inı˜ (written in detainment, and later translated as Devil on the Cross) is widely referenced, as it is on Wikipedia, as “the first modern novel in Gikuyu” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C5

%A9g%C4%A9_wa_Thiong%27o, accessed 21 May 2017).

6. I place the phrase in scare quotes in order to signal its commonplace use in the theatre, as well as in contexts marking the moment that fiction appears to merge with reality.

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“real” life merges with fiction. Gatz was eight hours long, and showcased not merely Shepherd’s virtuosic memory and physical, vocal, and mental endurance, but also his capacity to con- vey, precisely, the drama of a reader’s cathexis with a text — a cathexis as charged as Nick’s with Gatsby — or Gatsby’s with Daisy. Gatz wasn’t addressing censorship, but its obsessive quality got at something else about the stakes of a reader’s relationship to the worldmaking force of a novel.

A more attenuated, and perhaps banal, staging of embodied, “human books” can be seen in the expansive and ongoing project of humanlibrary.org, which bills itself as “a worldwide movement for social change.” According to the project’s website, “The Human Library or

‘Menneskebiblioteket’ as it is called in Danish, was developed in Copenhagen in the spring of 2000 as a project for Roskilde Festival by Ronni Abergel and his brother Dany and colleagues Asma Mouna and Christoffer Erichsen” (Human Library n.d.). In response to what they viewed as unnecessary social aggression and violence, the organizers determined that a lack of empathy and understanding could be mitigated by “reading” across categories of identity, experience, and political proclivities. When the project was staged by Human Library in Rochester, New York, the Daily News quoted one of the “Human Books,” Ellen Koskoff: “the reason it tickles me so much is because as a child I used books as a way to escape things that weren’t so pleas- ant, and I often wanted to live in a book. Eventually I came to want to be a book” (in Caters News 2014). “To be a book,” in the conception of the humanlibrary.org, is to tell one’s story.⁷ If I say this is a perhaps more banal understanding of the relationship between a book and its Figure 2. Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz at The Public Theater, New York, NY, 2010. Performers (from left):

Gary Wilmes, Laurena Allen, Annie McNamara, Kate Scelsa, Scott Shepherd. (Photo © Paula Court)

7. The “Meet Our Books” section of the website lists (with smiling headshots) the following volumes: Naturist;

Unemployed; Muslim; Sexually Abused; Homeless; Brain-Damaged; Alcoholic; Autism (ASD); Convert;

Molested; Soldier (PTSD); Polyamorous; Deaf-Blind; ADHD; Young Single Mother; Body Mod Extreme;

Refugee; Bipolar; and HIV. It’s perhaps needless to point out that the notion that these categoric identities could be narrated definitively by individuals troubles the very premise of the project, which would seem to hope for a more nuanced encounter.

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The Performative Novel human embodiment, it’s not to disparage the goal of increasing empathy, but to note that such

an understanding perhaps naïvely assumes the capacity — or even the desirability — of an individual to be a reliable narrator of him- or herself. It also assumes a certain kind of receptivity on the part of the “reader/listener.” But Koskoff’s quotation actually suggests something perhaps stranger and more interesting than that — “to want to be a book.”

What might that mean?

A similar project was staged by the choreographer Fanny de Chaillé as part of the Crossing the Line 2013 Festival in New York. The Library was presented first at French Institute Alliance Française’s Haskell Library, and later at the Jefferson Market Branch of the New York Public Library (she had staged a similar performance in France in 2010⁸). At these performances, in her words:

Fanny de Chaillé works with a group of volunteers with the aim that they “become books and be consulted” by the public. A[t] meetings with the artist, the content of the book is revealed: it is a point of view of someone on a topic/a theme, a story. Those who embody the library are the actors of society as we all are, whatever role we play in it and regard- less of its importance. For twenty minutes, the book tells a story about him. The reader has at its disposal a varied selection of books. (2014a)⁹

The oddity of a personal pronoun (him) for a book and an impersonal, objectifying pronoun (it) for a reader might be attributable to the fact that Fanny de Chaillé originally described her work in French, and yet it resonates curiously with the very questions raised by Daniel Arap Moi and Ellen Koskoff: Why might we understand a book as a person? Why might a human actor (whether this term is understood in its theatrical or agential sense) want to be construed as a book? Could it be that we know or at least intuit our Foucault and our Lacan a little better than we think we do, understanding that both our political and affective relationships are effectively structured by the grammar of the discourse of the Other?

Fanny de Chaillé’s project differs from that of humanlibrary.org in one significant way: “the artist” (de Chaillé) developed the “books” in her performances through a collaborative process with her performers. Her press release elaborates: “The books-to-be choose and struc- ture their story through half a dozen hours of discussion with the artist, even though one does not always tell the same thing according to the reader-listener which is sitting in front” (2014b).

Her intervention as “the artist” might be construed as editorial, dramaturgical, or directorial, but it’s significant, again, that her primary artistic identification throughout her career has been as a choreographer. She notes that her “books” are “actors,” but only in the sense that we all play social roles.¹⁰ The identification of de Chaillé herself as “the artist” is complex. The claim she stakes with this term confounds one’s sense of the authorship of a book in a way that pushes further at the question of “the death of the author” announced in Roland Barthes’s celebrated essay of this name ([1967] 1978). And yet even if “the author” (as we knew him¹¹) has died, de Chaillé retains the mark of “the artist.”

8. According to her website, “La Bibliothèque was created on Saturday 26th June 2010 and Sunday 27th June 2010 during ‘Week-end à la Cité,’ in the library of La Maison Heinrich-Heine and La Maison internationale, in Paris”

(de Chaillé 2014a).

9. As with humanlibrary.org, the project raises some questions, among them, how nuanced can such an encounter be in 20 minutes?

10. While the observation that all the world’s a stage is hardly novel, the seminal text on the matter in the field of performance studies (and in the sense in which de Chaillé seems to invoke it) is, of course, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956).

11. The gendering here of “the author” is intentional, and while I won’t fully elaborate on it here, suffice it to say that the historical weighting of male authorship in canon formation is part of the significance of both Barthes’s pro- nouncement, and possibly also de Chaillé’s self-assertion as “the artist.”

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In contemporary dance, the notion of a choreographic artist giving final form to the individual qualities (physical appearance and abilities, technical skill, affective capacities, impro- visational expressions) of his or her dancers is both commonly assumed and questionable.

Collaboration is often elided, denied, or ignored in ostensibly single-authored performances.

And personal narrative, the choreographer’s and the dancers’, is not exceptional in the “mate- rial” taken up by dance artists. But aside from the elision of the authorial contributions of de Chaillé’s books (in this case, the lack of credit is all too obvious, so the irony becomes marked), I’m more concerned with that other form of performance participation that so often goes unmarked — one I’ve already pointed to: reading. In the constellation of bookish perfor- mances I’ve just described, it was, perhaps paradoxically, the seemingly most theatrical of these events — Gatz — that came closest to evidencing the relational process of reading that actualizes a narrative. That is, while the “human books” of The Library and humanlibrary.org are ostensi- bly exploring the relational sensibility that reading can encourage, and while these encounters were ostensibly between “real” people, it was a professional actor’s portrayal of the act of reading that acknowledged the performative force of that act. Vonnegut’s figure of the reader as a musi- cian realizing a score makes a similar acknowledgement.

Breaching the Private/Public Divide

Epistolary Fiction and Performance Art

There are certain literary genres that can be understood to demand a particular kind of participation on the part of the reader — notably epistolary fiction, in which the incorporation of fictional correspondence effectively places the reader in the role of the recipient of a letter. Even if a letter in such fiction is represented as “purloined,”¹² diverted, or undelivered — even if (or maybe especially if) it’s configured as a message in a bottle — the event of its being read is inherently performative. It’s also inherently embodied. Because epistolary fiction attempts to reproduce the affective and often erotic contact established through text, it has the potential to enfold the reader in an erotic act.¹³ That’s a form of audience participation that, in a theatrical context, would be understood as quite extreme.¹⁴ I’m suggesting something possibly radical about the performative demands on the reader of epistolary fiction — despite the fact that it’s often construed as a genre that reached its peak of popularity (rapidly succumbing to parody) in the 18th century. But the form appears to be seeing something of a resurgence with the advent of social media reliant on text-based communication.¹⁵ With so much of contemporary affective and erotic life being enacted through text, it’s perhaps not surprising that literary forms that demand the corporeal self-implication of readers would be finding renewed interest.

Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997) predated ubiquitous text messaging (its references to fax machines seem almost as quaint as the lettres pneumatiques represented in French New Wave cin- ema). Still, the perversely triangulated correspondence of the narrator, assisted by her husband, aimed at the object of her amorous obsession, was a harbinger of a slew of often autobiographical

12. My reference here to the “purloined” letter is, of course, to Lacan’s famous “Seminar on The Purloined Letter”

(1972), later critiqued by Derrida in “The Purveyor of Truth” ([1975] 1999), and defended by Zizek in “Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?” (2013).

13. I’ve written a much more extended meditation on the performativity and eroticism of epistolary fiction in “Dear Reader: The Novel’s Call to Perform” (2015:125–31).

14. One comparable invitation in live performance that springs to mind is Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 — a theatrical watershed that continues, nearly 50 years later, to seem revolutionary.

15. A representative (early) history of the form in Europe is Thomas O. Beebee’s Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 1500–

1850 (1999). Linda Kauffman has written on the specificities of women’s epistolary fiction in Discourses of Desire:

Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (1988), and on the form’s later offshoots in Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (1992). Sunka Simon focuses on the implications of electronic communication for the form in Mail-Orders: The Fiction of Letters in Postmodern Culture (2002).

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The Performative Novel fictions or semi-fictions incorporating personal communications.¹⁶ Some of these either emulated

or integrated not only personal correspondence, but also blog dispatches. The blog emerged as a mode of publication in the late ’90s, expressly smudging the boundaries of public and private. A diaristic mode, the blog nonetheless addresses (a) potential reader(s), often with great intimacy — and in its transition to print, as a boundary-shifting form with ill-defined goals regarding its read- ership, it seems to have appealed in particular to feminist and/or queer-identified writers.¹⁷

But one could also posit that the way was paved for such “oversharing” storytelling strategies in the world of performance — and specifically in the work of performance artists who rose to prominence in the ’80s. Before the advent of the blog, in live performance venues, monolo- gists like Spalding Gray and Karen Finley were already radically shifting our notions of appro- priateness in terms of both self-exposure and narrative technique. (And it’s worth pointing out that before she achieved notoriety as a writer, Chris Kraus was herself a part of that scene: Eileen Myles recalls Kraus staging a “quasi-strip-theory performance” at the Poetry Project in those heady days, and another in which Kraus and her then-lover narrated from offstage the slow col- lapse of their relationship [in Miller 2012].) The term “autofiction” was coined in France in the

’70s,¹⁸ but only gained traction in the US somewhat later — precisely, in the wake of performance art’s diaristic/confessional turn. Of course, part of the point of such performance was not merely to test the limits of the artist’s willingness, desire, or capacity to expose him or herself, but also to test the audience’s capacity to participate in such intimate encounters. If one of the goals of performance art is to make audiences aware of their own complicity in the event, this confessional mode of performative fiction, often incorporating direct address, similarly puts a demand on a reader to contemplate his or her own performative force in the encounter on the page. But another part of the implicit contract with the reader/listener is his or her acceptance of the possible unreliability of the narrator — an acknowledgment that whether addressing us from the stage or from the page, the narrator speaks simultaneously as “not me” and “not not me.”¹⁹

Performance and Collaboration in the Construction of Narrative

Beyond acknowledging the reader’s role in actualizing, performing, or extending a narrative, certain writers of novels have explicitly taken the notion of collaboration with a performer into account in their authorial process. One of the more notorious examples is Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992), which based a character named “Maria” on the conceptual/performance artist

16. Of the explicitly epistolary, I’ll give but three recent examples: Amélie Nothomb’s Une Forme de vie (2010) was based on the correspondence of a writer, “Amélie Nothomb,” and her obsessive reader, a US soldier stationed in Iraq; my own The Correspondence Artist (2011) was structured around a digital correspondence, one half of it undisclosed; S.D. Chrostowska’s Permission (2013) was composed of not merely undisclosed but unanswered emails (the lack of answer constituting, precisely, the permission for the book to be written, and for the reader to play the role of recipient).

17. Among them, Dodie Bellamy’s The Buddhist (2011), which originated as oversharing blog posts; Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things about Me Too (2012), which was initiated as a response to a Facebook meme;

Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012), which “incubated” on the author’s blog; Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life (2013), which was preceded by a thinly veiled confessional web-based work of autofiction;

and Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge (2013), which, in the words of its press, “siphons the remix culture of social media into the binge and purge cycle” of blog comments and unsent love letters (Kenning Editions 2013).

18. Serge Doubrovsky is widely credited with introducing the term in regard to his novel Fils (1977), though of course precursors abound — most obviously, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu ([1913–1927] 1999).

Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ([1933] 1990) dislocated things, triangulating the contract with the reader through the ostensibly willing foil of Alice.

19. Of course the reference here is to Richard Schechner’s observation (extending Winnicottian psychoanalytic theory) that in the act of performing, one “no longer has a ‘me’ but has a ‘not not me’” (1985:112).

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Sophie Calle. In the preface, Auster thanks Calle for her “permission to mingle fact with fiction.”

And indeed, a number of Maria’s performances are immediately recognizable to those familiar with Calle’s work. But Auster also imagined a few performances for Maria — which, after the publication of Leviathan, Sophie Calle decided to perform herself. Calle also took it upon herself to publish her own book, Sophie Calle: Double Game (2007), which opens with a facsimile of eight pages from Auster’s text in which Calle has handwritten notations (“corrections” is her term for them) identifying the places where Auster took poetic license — or, in her view, simply got things wrong. Her performance of the fictional art pieces credited to Maria could also be understood as “corrections” — that is, a manner of further approximating the fiction to the “real” catalogue of Calle’s own body of work. Pushing further, Calle requested that Auster write a novel invent- ing “a fictive character which I would attempt to resemble.” Auster resisted the demand, appar- ently cautious of the responsibility he’d be assuming once his narrative seeped beyond the covers of his book. But he did send Calle a sort of performance score, some instructions on “How to Improve Life in New York City” by offering smiles, sandwiches, and cigarettes to passing strang- ers. Sophie Calle: Double Game documents Calle’s efforts to follow the score, but also registers her dissatisfaction with Auster’s unwillingness to fully submit to her cannibalization²⁰ of his process.

One might see an earlier work, André Breton’s 1928 Nadja, as a precursor of Auster’s incor- poration of a “real” female visual/conceptual/performance artist into a novelistic text.²¹ Nadja recounts Breton’s meetings, over a short but intense period, with a young woman he encounters by chance on the streets of Paris. At their first meeting, she calls herself Nadja, though she explains that this is an assumed name, taken from “the beginning of the word hope” in Russian.

After she gives her fictional name, she asks Breton, as a kind of afterthought, who he is. “I tell her,” he says, without specifying what he says. At their parting, he feels compelled to ask, beyond the name she’s given him, “Who are you?” and she answers, opaquely, “I am the soul in limbo.”

Evidently his account of himself was somewhat more literal, since she asks him to bring some of his books to their next meeting. He obliges, but urges her not to read them, saying, “Life is other than what one writes” — which might or might not be understood as a counter-argument to the confounding of people and books we’ve already seen. As for this book, Nadja, Breton would go on to say that its composition involved “aucune affabulation romanesque ni déguisement du reel.”²² And yet I’ve already called Nadja’s name — that is, not only the name of the woman nar- rated in the book, but the name of the book itself — a fiction. If “life” is romanesque, replete with fabulation,²³ then how is it that its incorporation into a book can be in any way otherwise?²⁴

20. The figure invoked by performance theorist Anna Watkins Fisher for Calle’s maneuver is a related but different — and interesting — one: parasitism (see Fisher 2012).

21. The genre of the book is disputed. The jacket notes on Richard Howard’s translation calls it “the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written” (Breton [1928] 1960). “Romance” as a literary term in English is oddly imprecise, implying anything from medieval chivalric tales to a fully fictional, often implausible, narrative, and carrying possible resonances of a love story. It seems likely that the publishers (or perhaps Howard) hoped to maintain the openness of the French term roman, usually translated as “novel” but carrying some of these res- onances. Etymologically, the term derives from writing in the vernacular, i.e., in a romance language. The col- loquial understanding of romance as a love affair, that is, rests on the literary history of popular (and unlikely) fictions — which is one (fairly Lacanian) way of thinking about the psychic processes of all kinds of cathexis.

22. “not any novelistic invention nor any disguising of reality” (Breton 1988:1559).

23. I hesitated over this term. Affabulation in French carries resonances of fable, of invention, and of lying. In the previous note, I chose the middle road of “invention,” which suspends judgment of either artistry or deception. Another possi- bility here would be “confabulation,” which is a term used in psychiatric contexts to denote the invention of false mem- ories, which are taken by the patient to be true. As a psychiatric diagnosis, of course, the term identifies not a moral lapse, but a pathology — precisely the one that will ultimately be attributed to the woman who calls herself Nadja.

24. Again, I insert a suspect reference to a possible feminist counternarrative to Breton’s: my own The Gift (or, Techniques of the Body) (2017a), based on the author/narrator’s extended collaboration with two artists: one, an ostensibly autis- tic, virtuosic male musician living in Germany; the other, a New York–based, trans conceptual/performance artist.

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The Performative Novel It’s complicated to draw a parallel

between Leviathan and Nadja for a num- ber of reasons, the most obvious being that unlike Sophie Calle, Nadja never claimed for herself the status of “conceptual/performance artist,” but neither, of course, did she claim for herself the status of psychotic — the diagnosis she received shortly after her brief but intense period of meetings with Breton.

The “real” Nadja, Léona Camile Ghislaine Delacourt, was forcibly confined to a psychiatric asylum in 1927, and remained under psychiatric care until her death in 1941. But the digital archive of Breton’s correspondence and memorabilia displays an enor- mous number of items — letters, drawings, lyrical ruminations — created by her, a few of which were incorporated by Breton into his published text,²⁵ alongside accounts of what might be characterized as her dissocia- tive behavior, or her attempts to play a role that Breton, perhaps implicitly, was scoring for her.

But another project derived from the collaboration of a novelist and a conceptual/performance artist offers a very different model for the possibilities of such collusion: The Uncomfortable Dead, first published as Muertos

incómodos by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos of the EZLN, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (2006).²⁶ The project was proposed by Marcos to Taibo, in a letter that outlined the “rules and regulations” that would govern the collaboration. It would be writ- ten in alternating chapters, a cuatro manos, which is a commonplace expression in romance lan- guages, though not in English, to describe a writing process that emulates the playing of a piano duet — a return to the figure of musical performance, but here to configure authorial collaboration. Taibo was a well-known writer of mysteries, and a leftist. Marcos was...at least as complicated a figure to refer to as a conceptual/performance artist as Nadja. And yet he was arguably the revolutionary figure who taught us the most about art’s political performativity.²⁷ I’m speak- ing of him here in the past tense because he no longer exists, but in this case, we’re not actually talking about the death of the author (though Marcos did author many texts), but the death of the character. Which is to say, on 25 May 2014, the EZLN website announced: “Marcos, the character is no longer necessary... His character was created and now his creators, the

Figure 3. “The lovers’ flower” sketched by Breton’s Nadja, Léona Camile Ghislaine Delacourt, on a scrap of paper at a café — tattooed on Barbara Browning’s left arm. (Photo courtesy of Barbara Browning)

The Gift, of course — like I Love Dick — inverts and complicates the usual gender assumptions about an author’s muse, and also seeks to acknowledge the collaborative process in complicit works between novelists and performers.

25. One is a drawing of “the lovers’ flower” which Delacourt sketched on a scrap of paper at a café. I encountered that drawing when I was 17, at the time of my first reading of Nadja, and over 30 years later I had it tattooed on my left shoulder, which goes to show, I guess, how much that booked marked me.

26. Muertos incómodos was published serially in La Jornada, a Mexico City newspaper, between November 2004 and February 2005, collected in book form in 2006. The English version, translated by Carlos Lopez, was published by Akashic Books in the same year, and reissued in 2010 by the same press.

27. I’m certainly not the first to make this assertion. Guillermo Gómez-Peña has expressly called Marcos a performance artist (see Wagley 2012).

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Zapatistas, are destroying him” (EZLN 2014). The former Marcos signed off this announce- ment under the name of a new character, Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano, divesting himself of the responsibility or the authority to narrate further the story of the EZLN.

But to return to The Uncomfortable Dead: almost 20 years after Matigari the character was hunted down by the government’s henchmen, Subcomandante Marcos, an outlaw character wanted by the State, was hiding out in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, plotting a collusion with a well-known creator of hard-boiled detective fiction. Marcos’s chapters are narrated through the voice of Elías Contreras, an indigenous sleuth working for the EZLN, while Marcos himself appears, precisely, as the mysterious, self-satirizing character he’d already pop- ularized through his ostensibly “nonfictional” — but fabulous, highly figurative, and incisively allegorical — political writings. Taibo’s chapters of detective fiction, narrated by his stock protagonist, a hard-drinking, one-eyed Mexico City gumshoe named Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, alternated with Marcos’s indigenized version of the same to get at the real mystery of the novel:

not how to catch a thief or a killer in the mundane sense of these terms, but truly, how to respond to the structural violences of neoliberalism. And the very form in which this question was posed gave us the answer: we need to recognize the narratives of capitalist “progress” for what they are — dangerous and manipulative fictions. And despite his own virtuosity at the art of spinning yarns, Marcos insisted that our counternarratives should always be polyphonic, het- eroglot, collaborative, collusive. Performative.

Parafiction and Worldmaking

The lessons of Subcomandante Marcos were taken up by both political activists and artists — and of course often this distinction itself is specious. The Electronic Disturbance Theatre, founded by Ricardo Dominguez in 1997, wasn’t merely inspired by Marcos’s incursions, but actively supported them by mobilizing “micronetworks” to spread the message of the EZLN (see Fusco 1999). But the influence of “el Sup” can also be seen in the work of various other politically engaged conceptual artists, such as the Yes Men — artists who create fictions that, at least for a time, are construed as a truth, lived as though they were real. Cultural theorist Carrie Lambert-Beatty has dubbed such work “parafiction” (2009:54), and while she includes some conceptual art under this rubric that is not so obviously oriented toward a political goal, she finds all of it to have political ramifications — though her reading of the work is ambiva- lent. Citing Caroline Jones’s argument (2005), written “at the height of the Bush-Cheney era,”

that spreading “critical doubt” is the most effective counter-action to the “atavistic fearmongering that has characterized the ‘war on terror,’” Lambert-Beatty largely concurs: “the expe- riences of deception and doubt we are put through by parafictional experiments prepare us to be better, more critical information consumers, and therefore citizens” (2009:77). But she adds a note of doubt-on-doubt: “the problem may be less how to remember to be skepti- cal, than how to decide when one has been sufficiently so. What is due epistemological dili- gence? When does one decide that something is — in the epistemologists’ phrase now codified as Wikipedia’s primary criterion — true enough?” (77–78). Lambert-Beatty wrote this in 2009. It has even more resonance in today’s season of alternative facts leveraged for, precisely, the goal of atavistic fearmongering.

And yet ultimately Lambert-Beatty leans toward the redemptive possibilities of plausible yet undecidable fictions and their capacity to keep us, as we now say, woke. But they also help us exercise our capacity to sleep — to sleep, perchance to dream. And fictions that make implausible realities seem plausible are important as well, and shouldn’t be surrendered to the exclusive cause of fearmongering. The worldmaking potential of performance, so beautifully championed by my dearly missed colleague José Esteban Muñoz,²⁸ teaches us the performative possibilities

28. “[W]e must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (Muñoz 2009:1).

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The Performative Novel of living, at least provisionally, some of our constructed, utopian worlds as though they were

real — and maybe by exercising these muscles of our political (as well as erotic) imaginations, we ready ourselves to make the world more as it should be.

These are grand designs, of course, but sometimes they’re enacted through more (seemingly) modest acts — acts that may seem eccentric or even mildly delusional in their embrace of play. There are novelists who have embraced parafictional performance techniques to push, again, against the limits of what a book might be or do in the world. The first of Lambert- Beatty’s case studies in her treatment of parafictional art is a 2005 installation by Michael Blum dedicated to an ostensible Turkish historical figure, Safiye Behar, who, we later learn, was the product of Blum’s lively imagination. Blum created a “house museum,” “forfeiting” his space for artmaking at the Istanbul Biennial in order to “document” Behar’s existence (Lambert-Beatty 2009:51–54). It took a while for people to figure this out. In 2008, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk published Masumiyet Müzesi (translated as The Museum of Innocence [2008] 2009), and four years later he opened a museum of the same name in a 19th-century house in the Istanbul neighborhood of Çukurcuma.²⁹ The museum houses, according to its website, “what the novel’s characters used, wore, heard, saw, collected and dreamed of, all meticulously arranged in boxes and display cabinets” (Masumiyet Müzesi 2014). Pamuk explains that it’s not necessary to read the novel in order to appreciate the museum’s displays, nor is it necessary to visit the museum to appreciate the novel, but he suggests that encountering both the novel and the belongings of its characters might amplify one’s experience of both. In a “manifesto” posted on the same website, Pamuk expresses a preference for less monumental, more personal museums — the archiving of individual experience, which, in his view, is the realm of the novel.

But the spilling of characters’ lives outside the covers of a book doesn’t need to take physical form. And while I’ve spoken of novels that began with digital chatter, sometimes the novel comes first, and the digital spillover comes after. In 2011, the Filipino American writer R. Zamora Linmark published Leche, the story of Vince De Los Reyes, a Filipino character who had previously appeared in another work of Linmark’s. Leche has been described as “sprawling”

(Boggs 2011), “lively,” “satiric,” and “postmodern” (Kirkus Reviews 2011), as well as “oddball”

and “quirky” (Publisher’s Weekly 2011). Aside from its energetic storytelling, it’s filled with postcards — a touristic turn on the epistolary call to the reader of which I’ve already spoken. But further: when he published the novel, Linmark let his protagonist loose on Twitter. Vince’s pro- file, established in April of 2011, reads: “I am the lead in R. Zamora Linmark’s Leche. Hobbies include writing postcards, making lists, getting lost, labyrinths, insomnia, and nightmares.”

On 14 April 2011, he tweeted: “I ask Linmark if he wants me to read from his book, which is my book since it’s my story he’s borrowed. He said NO!” On 16 April 2011, he tweeted, “Just because he is the author — what does that mean, anyway? — doesn’t mean he was in charge the entire time. In honesty maybe 5 percent” (De Los Reyes 2011). That’s not far from Linmark’s own description of his writerly process, which he claims amounted mostly to “listening” to his characters: “I eavesdropped on their soliloquies and conversations. I explored their desires and nightmares. It sounds schizoid, but it wouldn’t be writing otherwise” (in Robillos 2013). Letting Vince De Los Reyes loose to tweet on his own seems, under the circumstances, only fair.

My own published fiction has always had online overflow, though in my case, the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, is always suspended. That is to say, it’s unclear even to me whether my characters’ performances hors-texte have provoked my narratives, or if the narratives provoked their performances. And of course, I’d prefer to make the Derridean claim: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (there is nothing outside of/beyond the text). Or even better,

29. Pamuk had hoped to stage his collection at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the year the book was first published, but the exhibition was canceled, and the Istanbul museum was delayed. He has said, however, that he began collect- ing and organizing the elements of the collection at the same time he began writing the novel (2012:15).

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Barbara Browning

to turn it around to claim: “Il n’y a pas de hors-performance.”

In The Correspondence Artist, each of my narrator’s four fictional lovers has his or her own YouTube channel.³⁰ The mys- tery in I’m Trying to Reach You is solved through a series of clues posted in the form of dance videos by one of the characters.³¹ And the dances created by the narrator of The Gift are simi- larly housed online.³² As a final note to the question of the way my characters sometimes slop out of — or even onto — the covers of my novels: I have thus far been able to maintain a policy of requesting blurbs only from people who actually appear as characters in my books. In the first case, this rendered what I considered to be a match made in heaven: Harry Mathews and DJ Spooky. In the second, it rendered Karen Finley and Vaginal Crème Davis — ’nuff said.

And in the third case, another dream team: Chris Kraus and Fred Moten. As I later wrote,

“I sort of felt I’d scored Wonder Woman and Captain America...

But feeling just a little greedy right before we went to press, I wrote [my editors] one more time about one of the characters in my book, who I thought could say something interesting about it. I said, ‘Surely nobody will go for this but. The character called Lun-Yu Wolf is, in reality, a really great conceptual poet. But she asked to maintain her anonymity in the novel. But I love the idea of asking her for a blurb. But attributing it to Lun-Yu Wolf. The character. I know, I know’” (2017b). Needless to say, they wouldn’t give in on that one. My editors just politely ignored that message.

Figure 4. From the YouTube channel of Tzipi Honigan, one of the narrator’s four fictional lovers in Barbara Browning’s The Correspondence Artist.

“Radio Interview with Asher Honigmman.” YouTube, 28 April 2010. https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT4AEagu71A. (Screengrab by TDR, courtesy of Barbara Browning)

Figure 5. “lent.” Dance video by Barbara Browning referenced in her novel I’m Trying to Reach You. YouTube, 21 November 2011. https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=By1nry2yIZc. (Screengrab by TDR, courtesy of Barbara Browning)

30. For illustrative purposes I give but one link here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT4AEagu71A (accessed 21 May 2017).

31. Again, I indicate a single example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=By1nry2yIZc (accessed 21 May 2017).

32. For example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=altc85BZ_iY (accessed 21 May 2017).

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The Performative Novel

Fictocriticism and Performance

I’ve invoked two relative neolo- gisms in this essay — autofiction and parafiction — in probing the relationship between the genre of the novel and performance. But there’s a third I’d like to introduce here: fictocriticism, a genre of writing typically understood to merge storytelling, theory, and cultural analy- sis. The term is often invoked in reference to the work of the anthropologist and performance theorist Michael Taussig, and in the 1980s, the larger field of anthropology in this country came to a kind of moment of disciplinary self-reckoning,

acknowledging that ethnographic writing perhaps inevitably rests on modes of storytelling that are often hard to distinguish from novelistic strategies. The watershed text, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986), forced the conversation by pointing to the literary strategies inherent in the seminal texts in the field.

A subsequent feminist critique, Women Writing Culture, edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah A.

Gordon (1996), provided a necessary corrective, noting that there had long existed a strain of writing by women (they also account for race and class) that employed and acknowledged literary constructions in writing about culture, but they had largely been excluded from the scholarly canon, ostensibly on the basis of stylistic choices — although the exclusion could also be understood as determined by gender, race, and class.

Lambert-Beatty’s consideration of parafiction as a tactic in conceptual and performance art ends by considering its significance not only to artists, but also to art scholars. Scholars, she argues, have something to learn about recognizing their own writings as ongoing, always provisional, efforts at establishing plausibility. This isn’t to say that she’s espousing scholarly duplicity, but she urges us to own up to the fact that scholarly writing is complicit in creating narratives that in fact “can function performatively, shaping our subjects’ future work, and being shaped by them in turn.” This acknowledgement leads her to suggest that we, as scholars, “find ways to research, write, and advise collaboratively. Admitting and even valuing the provisionality of our knowledge [...] we might find ways for artists to speak within or against our texts” (2009:84).

Lambert-Beatty is not the first scholar to own up to the provisional nature of academic writing, and as I’ve said, she’s not the first to look to fictional constructions as models for experiments in academic writing. Her disciplinary training is in the field of art history, a field that, despite its perceived conservatism, has seen fit to honor and recognize the work of novelists whose work enfolds and contains art criticism, including Lynne Tillman and, of all people, Chris Kraus.³³ In fact, in I Love Dick, Chris Kraus’s (the narrator’s? the author’s?) husband, Sylvère Lotringer, calls her writing “a new genre, something in between cultural criticism and

33. Novelist Tillman teaches on the faculty of the Art Criticism and Writing MFA program of the School of Visual Arts. Chris Kraus was the 2008 recipient of the College Art Association’s prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinguished writing in the field of art criticism.

Figure 6. A dance created by the narrator of The Gift by Barbara Browning,

“gold hand.” YouTube, 15 May 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v

=altc85BZ_iY (Screengrab by TDR, courtesy of Barbara Browning)

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Barbara Browning

fiction” (1997:258). In her afterword to the novel, Joan Hawkins prefers to call Kraus’s technique “theoretical fiction [...] in which theory becomes an intrinsic part of the ‘plot,’ a mover and shaker in the fictional universe created by the author” (263). This assertion would place the work of Kraus in line with Derrida’s call, in Acts of Literature, for “‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits” (1992:53).

Performance studies, and the related fields of musicology and dance scholarship, have also been, unsurprisingly, fertile sites for scholarly writing that has espoused, if not explicitly novelistic, at least highly voiced personal narrative, which is often configured as “performative.”³⁴ Performative writing, the hope has been, might not merely bring the aesthetic arsenal of performance to the page, but might be performative in the other sense of the term: that is, performa- tive writing hopes to actually do something — perform an action — in the world. Which brings us, finally, back to the question with which I began: what can a novel perform, and how are we all — as scholars, as artists, as readers/listeners, as citizens — implicated in that question?

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