In Canto I of Inferno, Dante the Pilgrim wakes to find himself lost in a dark wood. “I cannot clearly say how I entered the wood,” says Dante, “I was so full of sleep just at the point where I abandoned the true path” (I, 10-11 tr. Musa). These narcoleptic moments plague Dante the Pilgrim throughout Inferno, almost as frequently as Dante the Poet stops the action of the tale to address his readers directly.

We normally read these instances in Inferno as a part of the disorienting fantasy of hell, but they should also be read as a commentary on the strangeness of the situation of picking up a book–of entering with immediacy into a place of story that is completely out of the context of one’s actual life. This reading of the awakening moments in Inferno functions as a part of reading Dante’s metafictive practices, techniques that interrogate concerns of representation and authenticity based on the tension surrounding the materiality of the text in Dante’s time, a time when orality and literacy were still blurred. In a new, but similar way, novels of the new millennium use metafictive techniques to explore concerns that come out of the blurring of print culture with the digital.

One such novel is Tomasula & Farrell’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002), an “imagetext” novel that announces itself proudly as a physical book while at the same time drawing on the forms and capabilities of digital technologies to create its innovative layout. Square, the novel’s protagonist and diegetic author undergoes an infernal journey of his own, a messy trek through history and science, as he prepares to undergo (really tries to avoid) a vasectomy procedure at the request of his wife, who does not want to have more children or undergo a much more invasive hysterectomy. As Square’s melodramatic narrative unfolds it is met with a constant gathering of scientific data, intertextual and meta commentaries, and disturbing revelations about capital S science as a vehicle of racist, sexist, and inhumane ideologies under the guise of a seemingly neutral technological face. The reader takes a dizzying trek through the novel that ultimately represents texts as bodies that can be rewritten, edited, and acted upon as Square considers the meaning of his own body in these same ways when he finally submits to having the vasectomy.

Author Tomasula and Designer Farrell create a novel that cannot be read as a traditional narrative; VAS as a novel is a hypersensory object: visual, but in a multimodal way, and it is haptic, reliant on touch, motion, and feel, with emphasis on touching the novel, tilting or turning it, flipping its pages–experiences that are absent in our interaction with digital texts. In adopting digital forms onto print pages, VAS, to borrow Mary Holland’s phrase, insists on its own materiality.

VAS, and other insistently material contemporary novels, like Danielewski’s House of Leaves, plays on our conception of authenticity as created (or not created) by texts, both physical and digital. The form of VAS is unusual. As we read, we encounter lines of text divorced from each other, bits of quotes, bits of third person narration, various fonts, images, graphs, medical drawings, advertisements, the scrawling handwriting of a child, medical forms, and DNA sequences –all of which are arranged around the lines. Flore Chevaillier, among others, reads these vertical lines that run on the outer edge of the page as music staff lines that reference the opera of the novel. I read the margins as also representative of a scrolling function. The reader turns pages, but pulled along by the margin lines, the reader can also feel they are participating in something resembling a scroll, in a way that mimics the experience of scrolling through Facebook and encountering bits and pieces of information that gather and float with very little context or provenance.

Anthony Enns sums up early reviews of the novel as critiquing the “design elements” as “highly intimidating and disruptive” (51). He quotes Rick Poytner, who says the arrangement of VAS creates a “barrier to full immersion in the writing” (2). This obstruction of full immersion into the text is what makes VAS’ stubbornly material design inherently metafictive.

I argue that Tomasula and Farrell mimic a digital form (the scrolling feed) that flouts context, but then upend that form, ultimately creating a depth of context that asks the reader to reflect on questions of authenticity in art of the digital, as the form itself is trapped, static, inside the codex book, but the reader must also reflect on the nature of authenticity of written texts in general (even if they are “solid as bricks,” as Square desires his written work to be). Further still, through this consideration of bookish authenticity, Tomasula’s text asks how we deal with the anxieties of the digital age, and how contemporary fiction can try to represent and express those anxieties.

The questions that VAS asks about representation, therefore, are delicate. As much as there is an attempt here at reclaiming the meaning that might be inherent in the physicality of books as objects, there is a significant concession that physicality doesn’t equal authenticity, or The Lacanian Real, in any 1:1 manner. More significantly still, the play on these questions of representation begs for contextualization: just as VAS conjures hidden legacies to give context to modern medical phenomena, so too should we view “material realism,” and by way of this, metafiction, as a historical concern, to give context to its modern iterations in novels that draw attention to the materials of which it is made. The problems of the present are in many ways the problems of the past.

1. “Body Text Once Had Body”

The normalcy of the idea of total immersion in a work of fiction is something that has only come about in the most recent stages of modernity, now that we are so removed from oral culture and so deeply entrenched in literacy. Even into the 19th century (as seen in the novels of authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who addressed his Dear Readers directly), readers had to be slowly initiated into the world of the text. The move away from acclimating and towards immersion began with Realism (the historical term), the trend in 19th century literature that began to dissolve the vehicle in which we receive fiction, attempting to hold Stendhal’s ‘mirror’ up to the world. In a literary culture after Realism, we don’t have to become acclimated to the text any longer. This is a divergence from a long tradition of metafiction, where the form of fiction was ‘exposed,’ as a means of conceding to the limitations of fiction. Modern metafiction is a return to the questioning of what truth and authenticity is possible through fiction –questioning the belief that writing can attain any version of “fidelity to life.”

The usual sense of metafiction and materiality as a postmodern emergence, then, is entirely misleading. David James, in his exploration of the possibility of “integrity” in the wake of postmodernism, feeds into a common blunder in discussions of realism and metafiction by conflating metafictive practices with postmodernism, and suggesting that metafictive techniques belong to a certain era and not to a ubiquitous problem of representation in literature writ large. Mary Holland, in her forthcoming work on contemporary realisms avoids this mistake made by James, and identifies “metafictive realism” as “ a new kind of metafiction,” which makes for a “realism that knows any attempt to represent reality must also consider and represent the forms, conventions, and materials used to construct that representation” (74-75). I argue, however, that this is not a “new” kind of metafiction,” and that metafiction and realism have long worked together to approach anxieties of authenticity in times of newly emerging modes of information and representation.

Within the last twenty years or so, the advent of the internet has allowed for contextless information to become pervasive, prompting calls for information literacy as a way to navigate and find some semblance of truth within the mass of texts. Of course, a similar crisis occurred after the advent of the printing press, and at the start of literacy itself. CLICK In Technopoly, Neil Postman asserts that “new technologies” are not neutral as carriers of information, but rather work to “change what we mean by ‘knowing’ and ‘truth’; they. . .give to a culture its sense of what the world is like—a sense. . .of what is real.” In recognizing literature’s relationship with materiality and metafiction throughout history, we give valuable context to modern works of metafiction that respond to our particular era of literacy, an era defined like never before by technology that allows for conceiving of a new reality defined by multiplicity, simulacra, totalizing bureaucracy, and quantum reality.

Jessica Pressman has outlined what she calls an “aesthetic of bookishness” to describe the exaggerated materiality of the contemporary novel. Novels like VAS, according to Pressman, “exploit the power of the print page in ways that draw attention to the book as a multimedia format, one informed by and connected to digital technologies” (Pressman 465). Despite outcry that the novel (and the print book) will die a quick death in the face of digital advancement, the opposite has been true: physical books are still on the shelves, and are insisting (to borrow Holland’s term again) on their own materiality as a response to their digital foe. Of course, the relationship between print books and e-books is not that simple. They are not total enemies; the new forms with which these print books assert their physicality would not be possible without the advent of new printing technologies that allow for something more than just printed lines in a block on the page.

The pages of VAS are playful and cavalier in their pastiche of digital (among other) forms: the final Opera is housed in comic book form, although there are no images to be found within the panels; graphs about sex v. video game sore-loser-ship and George Washington’s family tree are cut off simply because the page ends. In the last example, when our ability to fully ‘read’ the data presented to us is impeded by the very vehicle in which it is presented, we can begin to question the novel’s ideas of what kinds of meaning we should be looking for within its pages. In these ways, VAS pokes fun at itself and at us for what is expected and what we expect from a text. These betrayals of form evoke a jovial kind of ‘thingness’ (Bill Brown’s term) that invites readers to explore the multiplicity of meanings a novel can create–as text, as body, and as object.

2. “Couldn’t It Again?”

In VAS, the protagonist, Square, wants to experience a book not only as a text, but as a physical object:

He ran a palm along its trimmed edges, breathed in the scent of its paper. He wanted to taste it, to put his ear to it like a sea shell so he could, as advised in all the books about ‘how to write stories,’ describe it by using all five senses, to make her (and you) experience the text as an object in the world, real as brick. Only more so because it was more than its materials. (284)

This sensory moment between Square and his book (Modern Art in Common Culture) reveals some of the anxieties around materiality that VAS explores. There is a human tendency to want to rely on our senses, to use our bodies to experience and interpret truth. There is a solidness to objects that at first appeases some anxiety about signification. But books have always flouted an easy definition within these terms: books certainly are objects, but as Square notes, they are also “more than [their] materials.”

Recent scholarship explores the reading of books as objects, examining the ways in which materiality has contributed to our understanding of a text’s meaning, and the ways in which materiality might create a meaning of its own. Holland asserts that a discussion of material realists texts must conceive of books as “more interactions than objects, requiring the reader’s interaction with them and observation of them to create the narrative, the meaning, even, in some cases, the physical book itself” (Holland 126). The innovative scholarship of Gillian Silverman and Allison Gibbons concur with this impetus, Silverman approaching books in general, and Gibbons specifically referring to Tomasula& Farrell’s VAS.

Silverman explores neurodiversity in conversation with book history, arguing that by looking at how different minds (for example, of autistic people) engage with books as objects, we can expand the neurotypical understanding of what books are and the ways they make meaning (Silverman 317). An “autist’s” experience of language and books, according to Silverman’s findings, is far more sensory, and less reliant on hermeneutic meaning. Those with autism may repeat words aloud not for their definitional significance, but for the “physical experience,” the pleasure of doing so (310). This sense-oriented experience of language, Silverman asserts, gestures to Michel Serres’ conception of “the hardness of language,” arguing that “autists partially remove language from the ‘soft’ realm of data processing,” and experience language instead within the realm of “physical substantiality” (312). She also notes examples of how those with autism may interact with a book: Amanda Bagg records video of herself “rubbing an open book along her face and then rapidly flipping its pages along her nose and mouth,” while Tito Mukhopadhyay usually “sniffs” his books, and notes that other autists may “tear a page or two,” but that for himself, “a torn page in a book may cause [his] whole body to itch” (318).

Here, let’s note that these examples are not autist-only ways of interacting with books, which Silverman also argues; although an autist’s experience with and around books might highlight certain distinct modes of interacting with language and books, it is more broadly a human experience. When we take these extra-textual book experiences into account, we step away from the singular emphasis on meaning that overtakes literary studies, Silverman urges, long enough to reach a new understanding of the ‘thingness’ of a book.

In her survey of VAS, Alison Gibbons takes into account neuroscience and cognitive poetics in her analysis of the multimodal reading experience of the novel. She sees “embodiment” as integral to VAS from the first line: “First Pain. Then Knowledge: a paper cut,” a moment in which begins a mediation on the concept of “mind and body as a syndicate through which conceptual information is understood” (Gibbons 114). Delving deeper into the idea that objects can create meaning through physical interactions, Gibbons deploys conceptual metaphor theory as a way to argue that the lingual world, even in its greatest abstractions, is entirely informed by our interactions with the physical world.

The metaphor of containment, for example, is “based upon the physical understanding of containment, relies on a structure of inside, outside, and boundary between,” and is used to give meaning to more abstract ideas, like “being in love” or “getting the most out of life” (115). This “demonstr[ates] the pervasive influence our bodies and bodily experience has upon conceptual thought.” She also cites the research of neuroscientists Wilson and Gibbs that found that “when reading action-related sentences, some of the same regions of the brain are activated as when performing the action” (117). Gibbons reading of the upside down “Still it Moves” on page 141 of VAS takes into account this scientifically evidenced significance that our bodily actions have over our semiotic comprehension, suggesting that in our turning of the book, we are brought to embody the place of the sun in Galileo’s universe (a physical act of meaning-making that would disappear in a book of block text).

Although there are genuinely exciting new avenues of meaning that open up to us when we consider texts as objects in these ways, the crisis of signification, of representation still remains. In her discussion of Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language, Holland acknowledges the shortcomings of the promises of materiality, saying that “the novel’s scrapbook-like composition both relies on and belies texts’ ability as artifacts of the real world to fulfill our desire for something true” (117). In a similar way, VAS asserts itself as an object of meaning, while admitting that it still cannot stand in for The Real.

The material metafiction of VAS asks us to reconsider the fallibility of any method of meaning-making. It cannot be as simple as a return to objects, to retreat from the digital. In a world that is increasingly engaged with ambient digital technologies, we might feel our sense of what is real become less and less “solid” and dream of solid books –but in a world that, because of technology, knows itself not to be made of anything solid (because of the quantum nature of atoms), the metafictional elements of VAS work to both push and recognize its limitations as a print book.

3. “What Would It Look Like If It Did?”

As Square considers how books are “shimmering portals of thought embodied,” and how “body text once had body,” facts about meaning-filled objects surround his narrative along the margin lines: “Mayan pyramids also being at once shelter, altar, and encyclopedia” (51-52). He thinks about the good old days of literature, as a medieval scribe version of his vasectomy release form also arranges itself along the margins of the page:

The world was written differently then, Creation one continuous expression of Divine Letters–Proportions–Harmony–Laws–Spheres–without separation. . . all features of a single face which You, Our God, scribes copied, wisely reveal in Your Book our firmament, so that we may discern Your Unity as the mold of all things although we perceive it yet in signs and times, in and days and years while the angels and the blessed pass their non-time reading a language without syllables, the only mystery of the world being the visible and how it revealed this design, not the design itself which was invisible. . . has anyone ever seen an ionic bond? (52)

A return to Dante and his infernal text can illuminate the ironies inherent in this “golden-age” thinking about what meaning “used to” reside in the text. There can be no doubt that Dante is preoccupied with the significance of books, and that his Commedia is in part an exploration and consideration of the tension surrounding what a book is. Books have always represented knowledge, and in the Medieval period specifically, divine knowledge (Sherman asserts that if one was reading at this time in Europe, one was almost certainly reading the Bible) (Calhoun 329). So it makes sense that at the end of his Commedia, in Canto 32 of Paradiso, Dante describes the mind of God in bookish terms, as he gazes up at the knowledge of everything “bound by love into a single volume” (line 86). But this divine image of a book is complicated by more infernal representations of books in the Commedia. In Inferno, a book plays matchmaker between two lovers, ultimately resulting in their eternal damnation:

Time and again our eyes were brought together

by the book we read; our faces flushed and paled.

To the moment of one line alone we yielded:

it was when we read about those longed-for lips

now being kissed by such a famous lover,

that this one (who shall never leave my side)

then kissed my mouth, and trembled as he did. (V, 130-136)

Here the book that Francesca, the damned lover, refers to is one that operates in the same way that more current scholarship suggests; meaning is created in a dynamic interaction between reader and text, where “the moment of one line” ultimately engenders an act of coitus. I have previously argued that Dante’s ambivalent attitude towards the written word can serve to expose concerns about literacy and texts in Europe’s Middle and Late Medieval periods.

In his book From Memory to Written Record, M.T. Clanchy documents court proceedings in 12th and 13th century England, noting the continued use (and in most cases, preference) of symbolic objects (rather than signed documents) in the courts, and also exposes the pervasiveness of forged documents (Clanchy 318). In his treatment of Clanchy’s work, Ong repeats: “documents did not immediately inspire trust” (Ong 95). In considering this long sense of mistrust in the written word and written texts, (here, I would be remiss not to mention Plato’s beef with the written word) we greet contemporary novels like VAS with the level of context about metafictive and material-minded texts that Tomasula seems to advocate for throughout the narrative of VAS; “hidden legacies” pile up along the margins so that the reader is forced to look at history beyond narrative, beyond the human scale.

In Tomasula’s own imaginings of what new novels will look like, and how they will accomplish these new (yet still old) goals, he suggests that “scale” is what must change in the contemporary novel, that a larger scale (more zoomed out, say, than your typical person-to-person interaction within a Realist novel) will allow new narratives to glimpse the “web of patterns” of modern life in an attempt to accurately represent that life (10). This, says Tomasula, is a part of recognizing what Katherine Hayles identifies as our current state of being “posthuman,” where “a person is a “‘material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’” (12-13). Because there are so many systems in which we live and participate in every moment of every day, there is no way to separate ourselves and our choices from the patterns that these systems enact, or to say that we can remain static and unchanged in the face of these systems. (Additionally, it’s quite obvious to see the ways in which VAS plays on these ideas of bodies as texts and texts as bodies.)

This is what we see, then, along the margins of VAS. This organized cacophony of information cannot have been arranged by Square in totality; that is simply not the scale at which this part of the narrative operates. Here the reader should not assume that Square has compiled all of this information; rather, we can read this as some sort of invisible patterning mechanism that exists beyond the scale of a single human mind. These bits of decontextualized, randomized datum have organized themselves around Square’s narrative, like when Facebook hears you talking about needing to shave, and spends the next four days inserting razor ads into your feed.

In contextualizing metafictive and material-minded practices, we can understand the same mechanisms present in contemporary novels like VAS, and treat them with a more delicate hand; as we traverse the pages of VAS and encounter its distracting, innovative form, looking backwards at the hidden legacies of metafiction through heightened attention to materiality can illuminate our embodied reading, our cultural crises, and the question of the truth (or lack thereof) to be found in a book.

Works Cited

Calhoun, Joshua. “The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper.” PMLA 126.2 (2011): 327-44.

Clanchy, M.T. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307. Blackwell Publishing, 1993. Initially published in 1979.

David James, “Integrity After Metafiction,” Twentieth-Century Literature 57, nos. 3–4 (2011): 492–515.

Gibbons, Alison. “Multimodal Literature ‘Moves’ Us: Dynamic Movement and Embodiment in VAS: An Opera in Flatland.” Hermes: International Journal of Language and Communication Studies, vol. 41, 2008, pp. 107–124. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2015931285&site=ehost-live.

Green, D. H. “Orality and Reading: The State of Research in Medieval Studies.” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, vol. 65, no. 2, Apr. 1990, pp. 267–80. EBSCOhost, libdatabase.newpaltz.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=0000304624&site=ehost-live.

Holland, Mary. The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism. Bloomsburg Academic. 2020.

Alighieri, Dante. “Digital Dante.” Translated by Allen Mandelbaum, Digital Dante, Columbia University, 2017, digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/paradiso/paradiso-33/.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge London and New York, 2012. Initially published in 1982.

Silverman, Gillian. “Neurodiversity and the Revision of Book History.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 131, no. 2, Mar. 2016, p. 307. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1632/pmla.2016.131.2.307.

Stallybrass, Peter. Books and Readers in Early Modern England. U of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Tomasula, Steve & Farrell, Stephen. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. U of Chicago Press. 2004.

Tomasula, Steve. “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of the Posthuman Narrative.” Sillages Critiques: Expositon/Surexposition 17 (2014). https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.3562