The Post-Theory Theory Novel

Contemporary Literature 56, 2 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/15/0002-0280� 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

M I T C H U M H U E H L S

The Post-Theory Theory Novel

D escribing the apartment of the allusively named Mad-eleine Hannah, an undergraduate English major atBrown University in 1982, the narrator of Jeffrey Eugen-ides’s The Marriage Plot invites us to “look at all the

books” (3). In what is primarily an exercise in character develop-ment, we are meant to understand that the nineteenth-century nov-els artfully adorning Madeleine’s bedroom—Austen, Dickens,Eliot, and the Bronte sisters—effectively bespeak both her senseand her sensibility. Counterposed to these novels heavy on plotand character, we find the canon of High Theory—Derrida,Barthes, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Foucault—linked to LeonardBankhead and the semiotics class where he and Madeleine meetand fall in love.1 Mitchell Grammaticus, the religious studies majorwho stands as the third vertex in The Marriage Plot’s rather scalenelove triangle (he never stands a chance against the darkly broodingLeonard), carries an entirely different library in his backpack: Wil-liam James, Thomas Merton, Saint Teresa, and Paul Tillich. Havingpegged each character to a distinct reading list, Eugenides tweaksthe generic conventions of the nineteenth-century marriage plot tostage a three-way conversation among Enlightenment humanism(Madeleine), poststructural epistemology (Leonard), and religious

1. As will become clear, “theory,” both in Eugenides and throughout this essay, namesthe particular version of deconstruction popularized and institutionalized in U.S. Englishdepartments after 1970—a particular understanding of theory that birthed what we nowrefer to as the linguistic turn in literary and cultural studies.

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belief (Mitchell). While Derrida, Barthes, and Baudrillard unmoorMadeleine’s literary assumptions in the classroom, Leonard’seccentricity and passion challenge her normative thinking in thebedroom. Or, Leonard’s seduction of Madeleine allegorizes The-ory’s late-twentieth-century seduction of conventional humanisticinquiry, and Mitchell isn’t even enrolled in the class.

Before The Marriage Plot ends, however, Leonard’s corrosivedepression unravels his marriage to Madeleine and he disappearsinto the Oregon outback. Madeleine and Mitchell do get together,but their single sexual encounter signals Madeleine’s decision to letLeonard go more than it does any feelings she has for Mitchell.Perhaps most revelatory of all, we learn that Leonard once took areligious studies course with Mitchell and actually takes Mitchell’sfaith quite seriously. Or, to crudely allegorize once more, Theoryand Religion acknowledge that they have more in common thanthey initially imagined, but the Novel realizes that it doesn’t needeither of them to thrive.

Consequently, despite being a book filled with books, The Mar-riage Plot never becomes a book about books. The Novel never suc-cumbs to Theory’s blandishments. Eugenides populates his novelwith the foundational theoretical texts of poststructuralist theory,but The Marriage Plot refuses to consider the ramifications thoseworks have for its own production of meaning and value. Thenovel’s many books thicken our understanding of character andsetting, metonymically indexing particular types of students at aspecific moment in intellectual history, but they never implicate thenovel itself. Eugenides investigates textuality symptomatically, notreflexively.

On the rare occasion when textual reflexivity threatens to impli-cate The Marriage Plot, the effects remain internal to the text. Allpotential recursivity is suppressed. Struggling to live withLeonard’s depression, for example, Madeleine observes: “The expe-rience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain dif-ficult books. It was like plowing through late James, or the pagesabout agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got toa good part again, which kept on getting better and better until youwere so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previousdull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure” (345–46).

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Because The Marriage Plot lacks any such arduous passages of itsown, however, it’s difficult to parse the relationship between thisreflection on novels and the novel we’re reading. The Marriage Plotnever achieves the self-consciousness required for its fictions tobecome metafictions. Just as Leonard, institutionalized for depres-sion, realizes that “[t]he smarter you were, the worse it was” (254),The Marriage Plot indicates that the contemporary novel might bebetter off not spending too much time thinking about itself.

Eugenides’s novel represents an initial example of what I call “thepost-theory theory novel”: those contemporary works of fiction,written in the wake of theory’s decline, that use well-known theo-retical concepts—for example, the death of the author, the materi-ality of the signifier, the textuality of the world, the recursivity ofreference—without reflexively applying those concepts to the fic-tional text itself. The Marriage Plot, however, typifies just one partic-ular version of the post-theory theory novel (probably the leastinteresting version), which simply incorporates theory into a gen-erally realist representational mode. Nicholas Dames reviews anarray of such novels—Teju Cole’s Open City, Jennifer Egan’s A Visitfrom the Goon Squad, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, SamLipsyte’s The Ask, Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, along with TheMarriage Plot—and observes that these books describe but do notreproduce “the slippery nature of signs” (165). Theory spentdecades revealing the indeterminacy of realism’s ostensibly stablerepresentations, but now, according to Dames, realism is fightingback, capturing and describing theory’s slippery signifiers in thefixed and forthright prose of the conventional novel form. Damesthus sees the incorporation of poststructural themes and conceptsinto novelistic content as realism’s ultimate defanging of theory. Theresult—a “strangely conservative and undialectical postmodernutopia”—renders theory “just another thing-in-the-world,” “nolonger the key to all the world’s things” (163–64).2

2. This version of the post-theory theory novel might thus be seen as participating inwhat several scholars have described as the realist turn in contemporary fiction. See themanifestos from Franzen and Wolfe for two initial calls for such a turn. See McLaughlin,Dubey, Elliott, Leypoldt, Green, and Shonkwiler and La Berge for various takes on thisturn. Representative novels include Franzen’s The Corrections and Freedom, Joseph

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But neutering theory with realism is not the only way the post-theory theory novel approaches the legacy of the twentieth cen-tury’s linguistic turn. In addition to the realist texts Damesdescribes, we also find a body of contemporary fiction that deployspoststructural concepts to innovate new, more experimental literaryforms, all while refusing to turn those concepts against the fictionaltexts themselves. In what follows, I examine three such post-theorytheory novels—Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, Ben Mar-cus’s Notable American Women, and Percival Everett’s Percival Everettby Virgil Russell—in an effort to distinguish some of the ways inwhich today’s books about books (for example, Dave Eggers’s AHeartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Percival Everett’s Erasure,Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Treeof Codes, Laird Hunt’s The Impossibly, Mat Johnson’s Pym, NicoleKrauss’s The History of Love, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Ben Marcus’s TheFlame Alphabet, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King) are differentfrom an earlier generation’s books about books (for example, KathyAcker’s Great Expectations, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, A. S.Byatt’s Possession, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, J. M. Coet-zee’s Foe, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Trey Ellis’s Platitudes,Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo,Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children). At first glance, today’s booksabout books look quite similar to those of old. After all, post-theorytheory novels are rife with opaque signifiers, textually mediatedworlds, ephemeral authors, deferred meanings, and empoweredreaders. And yet we would be incorrect to think that Plascencia,Marcus, Everett, and their contemporaries bear the same relation totheory as their postmodern forebears did. Instead, authors of post-theory theory novels use the well-known tropes of poststructuraltheory as the tools and building blocks for various forms of unrealrealism, for speculative fictions that contribute to the compositionrather than the deconstruction of the world.

O’Neill’s Netherland, Susan Choi’s American Woman and A Person of Interest, Eugenides’sVirgin Suicides and Middlesex, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Rachel Kushner’s Telex from Cubaand The Flamethrowers, and Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor.


Theory Novels?

In her recent study The Novel after Theory, Judith Ryan suggests thatthese older books about books not only “incorporate theory” butalso “reflect on it, complicate it, and sometimes go beyond it” (7).3

These are the late-twentieth-century theory novels from which thecontemporary post-theory theory novel departs. To better under-stand the nature of that departure, we should begin by clarifyingtheory’s influence on the theory novel.

First, we should appreciate that the theoretical concepts populat-ing these novels bear little resemblance to theory as it was actuallypracticed by scholars participating in a complex discipline built ongranular conceptual distinctions, decades of intellectual debate, andthe long history of Western philosophy. Instead, the theory thatmakes its way into fiction is much more akin to the version of theorypopularized by university English departments in the concludingdecades of the twentieth century, a reductive version of theory trad-ing in simplified concepts that accrue “sufficiently widespread cul-tural currency to bubble up in myriad unexpected locales,” as Ben-jamin Widiss puts it (110). Eugenides quite humorously capturessuch effervescence at the scene of theory as the undergrads at Brownspend much more time worshipping theory than they do under-standing it. Madeleine’s initial exposure, for example, arrives withthe incantatory repetition of theory’s most hallowed propernames—students all around campus murmuring “Derrida,”“Lyotard,” “Foucault,” “Deleuze,” and “Baudrillard” (23). Next,Madeleine’s roommate introduces her to Of Grammatology, avowingthat Derrida is her “absolute God” (24). As the narrator explains,“Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheeveror Updike,” and Madeleine immediately intuits that “the hipstersdown the hall reading Maurice Blanchot” have become the newarbiters of cool.

The theory that Ryan finds in theory novels is not quite so super-ficial, but as the tidy organization of her book indicates, it does

3. Ryan’s title, The Novel after Theory, is a bit confusing. It might sound like she’s dis-cussing the status of the novel in the wake of theory’s decline, but she’s actually describ-ing the status of the novel once theory came on the scene earlier in the twentieth century.That is, her focus is on the effect that theory has had on novelizing.

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manifest as a set of basic concepts easily linked in the cultural imagi-nary to single theorists whose names function as metonyms for aset of oversimplified theoretical ideas. I say “Death of the Author”;you say Barthes! I say “Structure, Sign, and Play”; you say Derrida!I say “Mirror Stage”; you say Lacan! And so on.4 Just as Madeleine,Leonard, and Mitchell stand in for broad intellectual formations inThe Marriage Plot, the theory in theory novels—dropped names,digestible concepts, a limited number of primary texts—is mostlytheory as synecdoche. We need not have studied theory at thegraduate level to know the names lurking behind the concepts orga-nizing Ryan’s book. We don’t even need to thoroughly grasp theconcepts to speculate about their general significance, or to write anovel that susses out their literary implications. All that’s reallyrequired is a connection to a university English department or abroader awareness of the institutionalized culture of the humanitiesat some point in the seventies, eighties, or nineties.

I in no way mean this as an indictment of the theory novel. I’mnot suggesting that theory novels get theory all wrong and soshouldn’t be appreciated as such. After all, as Eugenides’s depictionof theory’s heyday at Brown helps us see, theory’s influence on thehumanities might have been fashionable, but it was also profound.(So profound that we might even read The Marriage Plot as Eugen-ides’s attempt to exorcise the theoretical demons that have pos-sessed him since his own early–1980s education at Brown.) Even ifthe theory novel never really does theory very well, its awareness oftheory’s key concepts compels the theory novel to self-consciouslyconsider and reveal its own conditions of possibility. That is, the-ory’s most basic demand, that thought think itself—a reflexive, criti-cal self-consciousness underpinning the project of theory as awhole—emerges in literature as a requirement that texts implicatethemselves in the limits of their own language. Thus the most dis-tinguishing feature of the theory novel is its adherence to the man-date that texts reflexively think their own conditions of possibilityand then perform the results of that thinking in and through the

4. The other chapters in Ryan’s book are “Women’s Time” (Kristeva); “Systems ofConstraint” (Foucault); “Simulacra and Simulation” (Baudrillard); and “Lines of Flight”(Deleuze and Guattari).


text itself. For as Barthes instructs, “Text is Text for the very reasonthat it knows itself as text” (1327).5

As The Marriage Plot also helps us to see, the theory novel’s the-oretically motivated reflexivity should be distinguished from thereflexivity of earlier authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett,or John Barth. Whereas Barth’s metafictional gymnastics representan attempt to innovate literary aesthetics beyond a moment of per-ceived exhaustion, the theory novel’s insistent reflexivity stemsmore from a desire to be one of the cool kids down the hall readingBlanchot.6 After theory, language must be smarter about language;authors must display a sufficiently sophisticated theory of signifi-cation or risk appearing naive, stuck in the past with the false trans-parencies of realism. But the window of opportunity for such workdidn’t stay open long. In 1993, David Foster Wallace famously reg-istered his own exhaustion with theoretically motivated metafiction,indicting its reflexivity as little more than a wry, hip pose perfectlycomplicit with consumer culture.7 At this point, theory’s earlyadopters (authors of theory novels) slowly gave way to a youngergeneration of writers (authors of post-theory theory novels) whowere just as exposed to theory, but only after it had lost its cachetas the one true faith. Indeed, this was the same moment whenhumanities scholars, increasingly disillusioned with the power andutility of critical reflexivity, began discussing the decline of theorymore broadly. Or, to repeat Dames’s felicitous phrasing, theory

5. I intend this focus on thought’s reflexivity as another kind of correction to Ryan’stake on the theory novel. I am skeptical that the novels she reads intentionally engagethe theoretical questions she finds in them (for example, Derridean play in MarilynneRobinson’s Housekeeping; Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs in William Gib-son’s Neuromancer; or their notion of territorialization in Infinite Jest). More plausible, I’dsuggest, is using the pervasive presence of theory to explain the consistently reflexiveimpulse one finds in theory novels.

6. Hence Mark McGurl, for instance, views Barth’s work, which some take to be quin-tessential postmodern literature, as merely an extension of the modernist drive to inno-vate and experiment aesthetically. The term McGurl uses to establish that continuity is“technomodernism.”

7. I am referring to Wallace’s oft-cited and ever-influential “E Unibus Pluram: Televisionand U.S. Fiction.”

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gradually became “just another thing-in-the-world” rather than“the key to all the world’s things” (163–64).8

Post-theory theory novelists are thus free to ignore theory’s reflex-ive demands in favor of an emphasis on its historically situated use-value. This approach mirrors the account of theory’s reflexivity thatIan Hunter provided in a testy 2008 exchange with Fredric Jamesonin Critical Inquiry. Countering theory’s demand that thought thinkitself and incorporate its conditions of possibility into its very sub-stance, Hunter proposes a nondialectical, contextual historiographythat interprets theory’s insistent reflexivity as a contingent historicalphenomenon, not as the requisite precondition of thought itself.Rather than viewing “the program of thought thinking its own con-ditions . . . [as] something required of reason by history,” Huntercontends that it’s actually just “something required of universitystudents undergoing a certain kind of intellectual formation” (as atBrown in 1982) (“History” 86). Such a distinction helpfully demar-cates a key difference between the theory novel and the post-theorytheory novel: while the theory novel must “incorporate the dilemmaof oppositions and binaries into its very structure and method”(Jameson 575), the post-theory theory novel displays no such com-pulsion. Instead, refusing theory’s reflexive turn, the post-theorytheory novel views “the philosophical dualisms” that theory locatesin the foundational structures of human thought as little more than“contingent scholastic teachings” (Hunter, “Talking” 593).

Approaching theory in this way allows the realist post-theory the-ory novel (for example, The Marriage Plot and the other texts Damesdiscusses) to describe and deploy theory as a symptomatic historicalphenomenon. Even more interestingly, however, it allows the exper-

8. See Elliott and Attridge, Levinson, and Chow for mutually reinforcing accounts ofthis turn away from theory’s insistent reflexivity. Others describing theory’s generaldecline include Bevir, Hargis, and Rushing; Docherty; Eagleton; Harris; McQuillan, Pur-ves, and Macdonald; and Rajan and O’ Driscoll. Theory doesn’t actually die, of course;it’s always adopting new forms and moving into new domains, including the environ-ment, things, affect, belief, and bodies. That’s why I’m emphasizing the specific form oflinguistic reflexivity that poststructuralism popularized. When we talk about the end oftheory, I think we’re just talking about the decline of a very specific kind of mandatedreflexivity.


imental post-theory theory novel to construct entirely new literaryand aesthetic forms out of the conceptual components of theory.These novels treat theory’s concepts in a way that’s almost perfectlyopposed to how theory novels of old engaged those same concepts.For example, rather than emphasizing the word’s inevitable medi-ation of the world—a mediation that in theory novels indicates ourinsuperable alienation from the real—post-theory theory novelsincorporate the word into the world, using language to build new,idiosyncratic notions of the real. Consistently declining theory’sinvitation to turn their conditions of possibility against themselves,these texts use theory’s concepts to build, rather than undermine,the world. They speak the language of theory without necessarilygiving themselves over to it. In the readings of Plascencia, Marcus,and Everett that follow, I will taxonomize the distinguishing fea-tures of the experimental post-theory theory novel, identifying it asa unique aesthetic formation of our contemporary literary moment.

Il n’y a pas de hors-texte (?)

The famous assertion from Derrida’s Of Grammatology tells us that“there is nothing outside of the text” (1692). As the editors’ intro-duction to the Derrida selection in The Norton Anthology of Theoryand Criticism points out, however, this translation is imprecise, sinceit “maintains the inside/outside opposition that the statement infact aims to overturn” (1682). But as my earlier discussion of theinstitutional popularization of theory should make clear, I don’tthink that the authors of post-theory theory novels read Of Gram-matology with an eye for such subtle distinctions. In fact, they don’tneed to have read Of Grammatology at all to incorporate its basicideas into their writing. Rather, as with other concepts, such as thedeath of the author and the materiality of the signifier, this idea thatnothing exists outside the text has so suffused the institutional cul-ture of the humanities that it’s not hard to imagine contemporaryauthors being generally acquainted with the concept in a way thatwould allow them to deploy it in their writing.

This is most certainly the case for Salvador Plascencia. Althoughby the conclusion of Plascencia’s The People of Paper such broad post-structural concepts will appear incorrect, no longer germane to the

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living of a life, some of theory’s most popular notions clearlyground the novel’s premise and predicate its action. The novelstages its conflicts in poststructural terms, deploys formal tech-niques that embody key poststructural concepts, but ultimately con-cludes that little is gained from doing so. In effect, Plascencia writesan allegory of thought thinking itself only to contend that thoughtdoesn’t need to. It’s like The Marriage Plot, but without the realism.Far from there being no outside-the-text, Plascencia’s characters(and his readers) discover that there is in fact always somethingexternal to and bigger than the text.

In The People of Paper, a gang of flower-pickers from El Monte,California, goes to war. Led into battle by Federico de la Fe, achronic bed wetter who arrives in El Monte’s carnation fields aftertraveling from rural Mexico with his daughter, Little Merced, theyare not fighting over disputed turf or exploitative labor conditions.They are fighting a “war on omniscient narration,” otherwiseknown as “the war against the commodification of sadness” (218).They battle a figure named Saturn, a presence La Fe first encountersas “a distant force looking down on him” (18) which graduallygrows Napoleonic in its desire to “wipe out whole cultures, wholetowns of imaginary flower people” (238). La Fe sends one of histroops, Smiley, to kill Saturn and liberate the flower-pickers fromSaturn’s omniscience, but when Smiley cuts a hole in California’spapier-mache sky and lifts himself into Saturn’s house, he doesn’tfind the evil tyrant whom La Fe had described. Instead, he finds amopey, lovelorn Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper,mourning the loss of his girlfriend, Liz, who has left him for a whiteman. This introduces a second plot to the novel, as Saturn/Plascen-cia ramps up his omniscient manipulation of The People of Paper’scharacters in an effort to prove his potency to Liz and win her back.When she responds negatively, Saturn/Plascencia turns his author-ial powers against her, reducing her to text and purging her fromthe pages of The People of Paper.

Collapsing the author and his relations into the novel’s fictionalworld, The People of Paper presents itself as paradigmatic metafiction,a dizzying conflation of form and content, reality and fiction. In thisway, everyone inside and outside The People of Paper is a person ofpaper, no character more so than Merced de Papel (not to be con-


fused with Merced, La Fe’s wife, or Little Merced, his daughter).The most literal example of a person of paper, Merced de Papel isconstructed entirely of paper scraps, and because water makes hersoggy and pulpy, she constantly replaces herself with new text. Asdifferance personified, she “chronicle[s] everything” (162) but “neverallow[s] history to accumulate, her skin changing with the news ofthe world” (164). Thus The People of Paper demonstrates a keenawareness of its conditions of possibility, the pure textuality fromwhich it is built.

And yet indicating just how easily theory’s insights can be usedfor both liberation and oppression, the novel also exhibits a coreambivalence about the political value of its reflexive textuality. Onthe one hand, La Fe, bent on reclaiming his own conditions of pos-sibility from Saturn/Plascencia’s authorship, strives to make his cir-cumstances more textual, but on his own terms. He wants the authordead, and should Smiley fail to kill him, Smiley should “steal theplot lines and the hundred and five pages that have been written,”“leav[ing] nothing behind but the title page and table of contents,”on which he should write, “You are not so powerful” (105). But evenas La Fe fights for a textual world closed off from Saturn/Plascen-cia’s outside authorship, the closed textual world of the Saturn/Plascencia plot reveals the equally oppressive nature of textualreflexivity. In retribution for Liz’s perfidy, for example, Saturn/Plas-cencia writes her into The People of Paper as a treacherous Malinchefigure complicit with white colonialism. And when his next girl-friend, Cami, also runs off with a white man, Saturn/Plascenciaabruptly changes her story, killing her with bee stings and throwingher off a cliff into the sea, where sharks devour her. Texts with nooutsides, populated entirely with paper people, can be dangerousplaces.

So what does it mean that the closed space of textuality is poten-tially as violent as it is liberating? Plascencia seems to suggest thatwhat theory so frequently peddles as a playful, freeing indetermi-nacy within the text is always embedded within a more rigidlydetermining outside. Far from being dead, maybe authors are inev-itable. Isn’t someone always determining the indeterminacy? Thisidea arises most conspicuously when Smiley, always La Fe’s mostreluctant soldier, points out to La Fe that his “war for volition”

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against Saturn/Plascencia requires the battalion of carnation pickersto relinquish their own volition to La Fe (46). Recognizing his hypoc-risy, La Fe lets Smiley out of the war (163). Similarly, Liz asksSaturn/Plascencia to remember that she “exist(s) beyond the pagesof this book” (138). She might one day have children, she says, andshe doesn’t “want them finding a book in which their mother isfaithless and cruel and insults the hero” (138). Although he’s notparticularly nice about it, Saturn/Plascencia discharges Liz from hiswar, just as he decommissions Smiley. Later, he even reprieves Camifrom the bee stings and shark attacks. A few pages after she dies,she’s granted her own space “beyond the pages of this book” as weread about her discovering The People of Paper, along with the pas-sage describing her death, in a used bookstore (227). The ostensiblyall-powerful text now lies in the remainder pile.

Of course, because Cami’s existence beyond the pages of the bookremains inside the book, we could read The People of Paper as para-digmatic metafiction, as an embodiment of Derrida’s “Il n’y a pas dehors-texte.” But that interpretation is too easy, and it also ignores thenegative affective resonance such poststructural conceits carry inthe novel’s plot. Not only do La Fe’s and Saturn/Plascencia’s textualtactics not work, they also annoy almost everyone in the novel. LaFe and Saturn/Plascencia are insensitive egomaniacs, and nearlyeveryone disapproves of their poststructural approach to love, free-dom, and power. The People of Paper thus wears its poststructuralismon its sleeve, but only to suggest the alienating, narcissistic empti-ness of that particular approach to meaning and value. The novelacknowledges its textual conditions of production, in other words,but it doesn’t want to make too much of them. Yes, Cami discoversherself in the book in the book, but that discovery also occurs in theworld—that is, in the real world as it’s represented in the book. Weshouldn’t read Cami reading The People of Paper in a bookstore inThe People of Paper as textual recursion; we should read it as aninjection of literary realism. It’s a realism that beats back and cutsthrough the metafiction, a representation of theoretically motivatedmetafiction, not a performance of it. The novel allegorizes theory’sdemand for reflexive thinking, but because such demands are sofrequently misguided, it ultimately concludes that we need not nec-essarily follow orders.


Emphasizing this point, The People of Paper consistently directsreaders’ attention to the space and time beyond the contours of thenovel, to a world beyond the text. It does so primarily through BabyNostradamus, a mute infant whose thoughts remain opaque toSaturn/Plascencia throughout the novel. Blessed with a totalizingknowledge that “extended beyond the plot and details of this book,reaching not only into the future but beyond it, circling fully around,intersecting with the past and resting wherever he wished” (160),Baby Nostradamus knows everything about La Fe’s war, everythingabout Saturn/Plascencia’s war, and even everything about us. Heknows, for example, “the different grips of the readers, how somecradled the open covers while others set the book on a table, lickingtheir fingers before turning each page, saliva soaking into the mar-gins” (166). As with the Cami example, we could describe Baby Nos-tradamus as yet another layer of textuality. He authors the authors;his book contains their books. And while that layering certainlyexists, we should also once again listen to the novel’s plot, becauseeven as his capacious vision gives him “the power to undercutSaturn by prematurely disclosing information and sabotaging thewhole of the novel,” he never uses his uber-textuality to do so (167).Even though he has the capacity to think reflexively, he is boundby the soothsayers’ “Laws of Comportment” not to; despite the“epic proportions” of his thought (161), he never betrays “the codesof his profession” (167). Containing the totality of all textual pos-sibility, Baby Nostradamus has more power than anyone in thenovel, but he refuses to close the text off to the world and insteadallows the world to proceed whichever way it wants. And The Peopleof Paper eventually does so as well, concluding with La Fe and hisdaughter walking “south and off the page, leaving no footprintsthat Saturn could track” (245). Having thoroughly deployed manyof the key ideas behind theory’s linguistic turn, the novel ultimatelyturns against language, sending its characters beyond the text andinto the world.

Silencing Theory

While the theoretical concepts in The People of Paper self-destruct,pointing us away from textuality out to the world, theory in Ben

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Marcus’s Notable American Women provides the building blocks ofan entirely new, but equally nonreflexive, reality. As with those ofEugenides and Plascencia, Marcus’s novel displays a keen aware-ness of itself as a textual artifact even as it refuses the recursivitysuch self-consciousness so frequently begets. In this way, the novelcannot be mistaken for contemporary realism, but it also bears littleresemblance to those forms of experimental fiction motivated bypoststructuralist insight.9 In fact, Notable American Women doesn’tmerely refuse to think its conditions of possibility reflexively; itactually does the opposite, deploying language in a way thatdirectly countervails the novel’s underpinning assumptions aboutlanguage.

Notable American Women details the various silencing technologiespursued by a cult of women who believe that human language andmovement do violence to the weather. The Silentists move into BenMarcus’s house (Ben Marcus is not just the author but also the pro-tagonist and first-person narrator for much of the book), and thenovel chronicles his family’s gradual conversion to increasinglyhushed modes of being.10 The Silentists’ impulse to quiet derivesfrom a poststructural understanding of language as simultaneouslyover- and underdetermined (an idea we also saw in Plascencia’snovel, where textuality proved both oppressive and liberating). Themateriality of signifiers has the power to physically injure andwound, but those same signifiers struggle to connect accurately tothe world. These ideas come together in Ben’s comments on nam-ing: “Spelling a person’s name is the first step toward killing him.It takes him apart and empties him of meaning” (56). Here, theabsence of referential value only heightens the penetrating materi-ality of language; words are potent but hollow tools. This quasi-Lacanian take on language (elsewhere Ben reports, “To speak is togrieve” [94]) grounds the Silentists’ commitment to quiet. Ratherthan repairing and reconnecting language to the world or fetishiz-

9. See Marcus’s “Experimental Fiction” for a lengthy attack on contemporary realismin general and Jonathan Franzen in particular.

10. I will use “Ben Marcus” or “Marcus” to refer to the living author of Notable Amer-ican Women and “Ben” to refer to the novel’s protagonist and narrator.


ing the structures of absence and deferral lying at its heart, theyabandon language altogether.

In the novel’s opening chapter, however, Ben’s father, writingfrom an underground prison in the backyard of the Silentists’ com-pound, ostensibly steers the novel away from silence and towardconventional literary realism. The father criticizes Notable AmericanWomen for “fractur[ing] a reality that must in every way be pre-served” (7), and he yearns for Ben “to believe once again in [Ben’s]power to exhibit frank statements about the world and its secrethistories” (6). Even as he calls for a more realistic account of theSilentist invasion of the Marcus homestead, however, the fatherdeploys metafictional devices that wrest authorial control awayfrom Ben. For example, the father radically questions Ben’s reli-ability, implying that Ben is biased, resentful (4), mediocre (11), andmildly retarded (10). Although they are launched in the service ofrealism and greater transparency, these attacks on Ben’s authorshipultimately bring a metafictional reflexivity to the text. As readersparse Ben’s authorship of a novel authored by Ben Marcus, a novelthat contains not just Ben’s father’s indictment of Ben’s authorshipbut also his father’s own claim on that authorship, reality gets leftfar behind. At one point, for instance, the father claims primaryauthorship of Notable American Women, insisting to readers, in italics:“It should never be forgotten that Benjamin Marcus is being commandedat this and all moments by the person [the father] whose words you arereading” (9). Yet “caution[ing] the careful and fair-minded reader tobe ever vigilant against [Ben’s] manipulations” (4), the father else-where implies that Ben has absolute control over Notable AmericanWomen. “I fully expect even this statement to be omitted, given howit might contradict the heroic role he will no doubt claim for him-self,” the father reports. So did the father “command” Ben to writethe father writing “this statement,” or is Ben “manipulating” thefather’s manipulation of Ben’s authorship? It’s an undecidablequestion opened up by the metafictional reflexivity that the fatherintroduces into the novel’s opening pages. Like the “language poi-son” unleashed against the father in his subterranean cell, thefather’s metafictional tricks infect the novel itself with language’sown tendency toward poisonous, reflexive self-destruction.

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But the father’s early intrusions into the novel do not faze Ben.Once Ben assumes responsibility for the narrative, the novel movesin an entirely different direction—not toward realism or reflexivemetafiction, but toward silence. Thus a section titled “Blueprint”functions as a user’s manual for those ideal readers who share thenovel’s broader devotion to silence and stillness. Fully aware of thedangers that the text’s language might pose for readers—apparentlyfour readers have already died (80)—Ben suggests that anyone com-mitted to “bringing a New Stillness upon their persons . . . shouldread no further, for even reading is an embarrassing spasm of thebody” (46). Just as the father earlier encouraged readers to “forgowhatever follows in this book . . . and burn the thing to cinders withthe greatest haste” (8), Ben here urges us to stop reading. (Elsewherehe describes various prophylaxes which, should we insist on read-ing, will buffer us from the deleterious powers of the word.) ButBen’s call to cease reading differs markedly from his father’s. Thefather wants us to ignore the text because it’s unreliable and inde-terminate, while Ben hopes to prevent readers from injury or death.

Of course, we keep reading either way, but these competing inter-ventions have very different effects on our reading experience. Thefather’s intervention distances and alienates us from the text; it useslanguage’s conditions of possibility—its simultaneous hollownessand potency—against the novel itself. Ben’s intervention protects usfrom the text, using those same threatening conditions of possibilityto build a new world through and within the novel. Unlike thefather’s suggestions, Ben’s recommendations are not intendedreflexively. He doesn’t use the indeterminacies of language toundermine the novel and sabotage the reading experience. Thenovel is not compelled to silence; it doesn’t have to apply Silentisttenets to itself. Instead, it uses language’s failure as the ground foran entirely new, speculative reality, an unreal realism that managesto convey the very emotions and feelings that the Silentists hushand repress. In this way, the novel countervails its conditions ofpossibility rather than succumbing to them.

Put differently, rather than considering and following through ontheory’s implications for the novel, Notable American Women liter-alizes and materializes the theoretical concepts for use as novelistic


content. The novel isn’t exactly an allegory of theoretical concepts,but more like one of Joseph Cornell’s boxed assemblages: it lendsphysical shape to theory’s major concepts, constructing its realityout of them. Peering into the box we find several concepts: deadauthors (“I should still be alive in this book. I should not have diedso young, or died at all, or ever been alive” [52]); ecriture feminine(“Finland proposes a separate language for women, becoming thefirst European nation to do so” [81]); archi-writing (“breathing itselfwas considered the first language” [62]); the pleasure of the text (“Ifyou wish to fondle the author, I should take off my clothes for youand sit on a bed to the tune of a funeral march” [50]); the waningof affect (“If the head’s hollow space (chub) is filled with materialslike cloth . . . then less life can enter and, perhaps, fewer emotionswill result” [116]); posthumanism (“At the time of this writing, thehead probably cannot be omitted from the person pursuing thefemale life project” [121]); constructed subjectivity (“you haddecreasing access to the physical territory we will refer to as ‘me’”[239]); becoming animal (“There are so many animals in the worldnow, and the history of behavior has become so vast, that a womanshould have no trouble finding a creature that corresponds to heremotion surplus” [129]); and signifying chains (“No one . . . wassure what to call her [Ben’s sister]. . . . I have to admit that I’m notsure what name she began with” [95]). None of these conceptsinfects the novel, corroding it from the inside. Instead, they populatethe novel, determining the conditions and parameters of the liveslived inside the text. Theory doesn’t undermine, but it’s also not justanother thing in the world, as it is in Eugenides. Rather, it providesthe material basis for an entirely new world altogether.

Notable American Women, in other words, transforms theory’seroding absences into substantive presences. We find an example ofthis in the novel’s discussion of typographical errors and misspell-ings. Here Marcus plays with a classic trope of postmodern meta-fiction—intentionally including typos and misspellings in a text.Because we’re all accustomed to reading books with unintentionalerrors, the inclusion of intentional errors makes it impossible todetermine the foundational truth of the text. How can a reader dis-tinguish between intentional and unintentional typos? Worse, ifmany of the mistakes are intentional, then a word spelled correctly

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might actually be a mistake. Maybe it was supposed to be a typo.For earlier authors like Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Andy Warhol,these reflexive tricks forced readers to acknowledge the fundamen-tal indeterminacy of any text, the constitutive absence at the heartof language.11 But for Marcus, they do the opposite; they result inperfectly legible texts. Whether something is other than what it’ssupposed to be is beside the point; it still is:

If all the words of this book are misspelled, but accidentally spell otherwords correctly, and also accidentally fall into a grammatically coherentarrangement, where coherency is defined as whatever doesn’t upset peo-ple, it means this book is legally another book. Likewise, if another bookis comprised entirely of misspelled words that, through accident ordesign, happen to spell correctly and in the proper order the so-calledwords of this book, which in fact will be proven not to be words at all,but birdcalls, then that book might be regarded as a camouflage enterpriseor double for this book, though it would be impossible to detect whetherthis were ever the case, in which case something is always a decoy forsomething else, and the word “camouflage” simply means “to have afamily.”

(55)

This passage acknowledges the slippery impermanence and ulti-mate undecidability of language. It recognizes that chance and con-tingency can never be purged from the sign systems a novel com-prises. Yet indeterminacy is not the result. Some other thing is. Thisnovel might not be this novel, but if it’s not, then it’s another novel.“Camouflage” might not mean “disguise,” but that doesn’t renderits meaning undecidable. Instead, it means “to have a family.” Suchstabilizing substitution happens throughout Notable AmericanWomen. Rather than playing with the differance within and betweensignifiers and signifieds, the narrative simply pegs language to adifferent reality. “Heart,” for example, means “wind” (54); “to raise”means “to flay off skin and insert another body inside the pelt”(218); and intercourse is called “stitching” (131).

11. Pynchon does this in The Crying of Lot 49, Barth in Lost in the Funhouse, and Warholin a. For an argument that links this technique to the fact that authors at the time wrotewith typewriters, see Benzon.


The novel overflows with such redefinitions until it describes anentirely new (and remarkably bizarre) world devoted to producingand maintaining silence. Like good science fiction, that world con-sistently adheres to its own internal logic. Unlike science fiction,readers are not asked to determine what that world represents, alle-gorizes, or critiques. We are not required to find analogues fromSilentism back to our own life-world. Instead, Marcus assembles thecontents of that unreal reality to produce a certain feeling, to trans-mit a particularly affecting intensity that conveys the text’s quali-tative value to its readers, a value that is not representational orreferential. Marcus builds a world that produces “the way it feelsto be alive,” and he demonstrates “the way language can be shapedinto contours that surround and illuminate that feeling” (Marcus,“Experimental Fiction” 41). In this way, despite its formal innova-tions, the novel is remarkably conventional: it’s about love, and thelack thereof, in a typical American family. But these ideas are notrepresented as much as they are produced as an effect of readingabout the curious demands and structures of Silentism.

Committed to affective production rather than representationalmeaning, Notable American Women is not particularly interested inwhether words speak adequately about the world. For Marcus, lan-guage’s inability to mean does not preclude its capacity to affect.Immersed in Silentism, the novel’s characters model this affectiveform of meaning-making for us. The Silentists, for example, encour-age Ben to “drink the liquid that had been near [his] own copula-tion” as a way to increase future sexual potency (106). A “thoughtrag” absorbs the language spoken into it, and exchanging thoughtrags with others serves as “a shortcut to intimacy” (120). “Actionbutter” is “[t]he residue a person leaves behind after performingcertain tasks,” and it “can then [be] used as a topical ointment toprevent that action in others” (124). And a “Storm Needle” is anantenna that picks up “person sounds” that travel through the airlike radio waves (214). In all of these examples, meaning is trans-mitted physically, almost osmotically, and not depicted represen-tationally.12 The value of a life is not to be described, explained, or

12. For an extended discussion of the difference between represented and transmittedmeaning, see Lash.

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spoken about; it’s to be touched, felt, and absorbed. Building andconveying these gestural, expressive emotions from theory’s repur-posed concepts, Ben invites us to engage his text similarly: “It wouldbe foolish to simplify the role of the skin in reading, thinking, andeating. . . . You are training your body to be a full-scale receiver oflanguage, to feed on the noise of words as it does with so-calledfood” (77). If we agree to think of language as something that weeat, absorb, or transmit rather than as a site of communication, sig-nification, and interpretation, we substantially defuse theory’s abil-ity to erode textual value. In turn, as we find in Notable AmericanWomen, theory becomes available as a literary device—call it theo-retical literalism—capable of building worlds and transmittingfeelings.

The Word as World

Percival Everett has long subscribed to a similar view of languagethat downplays its referential function in favor of its capacity tobuild and construct. Rather than pointing to the world, languageaccretes worlds that in turn become part of the world. “Given theexistence of the story,” Everett explains, “the story is a fact and theelements of the story are in fact not fiction at all, not only withinthe context of the story but in the totality of reality” (“Modality”154). Seeing no gap between text and world, fiction and reality, con-tent and form, Everett encourages us to “refocus our gaze from thetranscendental connections of meaning(s) toward the obscure andindeterminate surface of fiction.” Everett has little interest in thereferential relationship between word and world and the meaning,or lack thereof, that relationship produces. His writing does notreflexively query the conditions of its own production; it simply isthose conditions. The resulting fiction is equivalent to the tools,materials, and processes involved in building it. One of Everett’sfavorite tools is theory, although he deploys it in a way that directlycounters theory’s tendency to deconstruct meaning and value.

The cover of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell provides an apt exam-ple. There we find an Escheresque image of two hands, each writingpart of the novel’s title on a sheet of paper. The hands are acrossfrom each other, so one part of the title, Percival Everett, is upside


down, while the other half, by Virgil Russell, is right side up. Wemight see this image, along with the inclusion of the author’s namein the novel’s title, as a typically reflexive move: the image revealsthe always already writtenness of the world, which here includesthe author himself. Folding in on itself, the text ungrounds readers,setting them adrift in a world of pure language. But that interpre-tation isn’t quite right. Yes, the world is language, but that doesn’tnecessarily entail that there is no world. In fact, Everett learns theopposite lesson from this textualized world-view: the word isworld. The novel’s self-reflexive cover does not speak to language’sinadequacy and indeterminacy, to its failure to touch the world;rather, it depicts the creation of reality. Word and world are notseparate spheres, struggling to connect; they do not define distinctontological modes. Instead, just as a hammer and nails do notoccupy an order of reality separate from the house that they areused to build, words do not occupy an order of reality separate fromthe world they name. Everett thus deploys theory’s troubling of theword-world relation only to supersede it and imagine novels not aslinguistic approximations of the world but as coextensive with it.

In Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Everett’s post-poststructuralproject tangles with analytic philosophy, particularly with the long-standing distinction that tradition draws between the sense and ref-erence of language. As I’ll explain in greater detail, Everett uses hisidiosyncratic, post-theory thinking about poststructuralism to col-lapse the sense/reference distinction. And that collapse in turnallows Everett to produce a novel whose fictional surface exists asa fact in the world rather than referring realistically to it. Differen-tiating between the sense and reference of language derives fromGottlob Frege, who argues that a word’s meaning entails more thanits referent—that is, the object which it designates—and must alsoinclude its sense. To illustrate this, Frege observes that Cicero andTully designate the same person, but the meaning of “Cicero isTully” differs from the meaning of “Cicero is Cicero.” Another, morefamous example notes that both “morning star” and “evening star”refer to Venus, despite connoting very different senses. Everett sig-nals his interest in this question as he titles the first half of his novelHesperus (the name in Greek myth for the evening star) and thesecond half Phosphorous (the name in Greek myth for the morning

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star), suggesting that the two halves of the novel, perhaps like thetwo hands co-writing the book’s title on its cover, refer to the samething but in different ways, with different senses. Everett introducesthis distinction into the novel, however, because he wants to over-come it. Thus the novel consistently emphasizes the identity andsameness of the referent, not the discrepancies of sense. The novelrejects the sense/reference distinction in an effort to demonstratethat referents and their multiple senses are coextensive parts of thesame fabric, called the world. Or as the novel’s indeterminate nar-rative voice asks, “[W]hen do two things that are in fact the samething converge and negate any notion of their ever having beenanything but one thing? When does Cicero become Tully?” (170).When and how can things that would seem to be separate, thingslike word and world, be seen to be identical?

The answer to this question seems to be (and here is where Ever-ett’s post-theory take on poststructuralism comes in), when lan-guage makes it so. When authors construct and deploy language ina way that makes the distinction between sense and reference super-fluous, language becomes just another thing in the world. When anovel contains as much nonsense as sense, for example, when itsreferential acts all designate the same thing, language begins to con-stitute a world. Quite counterintuitively, then, Everett uses languageitself to show that the distinction between linguistic sense and ref-erence is really just a distraction from the unified singularity ofbeing. The novel’s narrator calls this “entification,” which hedescribes as the process by which story becomes world, the waylanguage becomes the thing that there is (62). Even though every-thing we “utter is a metaphor,” metaphors are also “essential facts”(66–67). In this way, Everett’s theory of language is Leibnizian, notNietzschean. Language’s inevitable lapse into metaphor is not afoundational lie against the world; it’s the beginning of the world:“metaphor did not derive out of an extension of some thought andso relied on nothing really for actuality, substance, or even tenor,but appeared, arrived complete, like one of Leibniz’s monads andlike a universe unto itself the metaphor was forever collapsing inon itself while giving the appearance of expansion” (130). Althoughlanguage is always already metaphorical, there’s no indeterminacyor slipperiness. It’s just what there is.


Crucially, Everett’s desire to supersede the sense/reference dis-tinction, his attempt to make two things the same thing in language,is not an indulgent exercise in literary experiment. Rather, the novelis motivated by Everett’s desire to reconnect with his father, alsonamed Percival Everett, who died in 2010. In fact, Everett dedicatesthe novel to his father, Percival Leonard Everett, thereby literalizingin its opening pages the sense/reference problem: how can twonames point to the same thing? The problem here is even morecomplicated because Everett wants the same name, Percival Everett,to point to the same thing even as the same name designates twodistinct entities, father and son. To overcome the distance that thesense/reference distinction places between a thing and its meaning,between Everett and his father, Everett must not only show that thetwo names point to the same thing; he must also render himself andhis father as the same thing. He faces not just a linguistic problembut an ontological one. But Everett’s post-theory take on the inde-terminacy of language ultimately provides him the means to effectthat ontological union in novel form.

The literary suturing begins on the opening page, where a fathertells his son, “I’ve written something for you. . . . Not to you, butfor you. It’s sort of something you would write, if you wrote. Hereit is:” (3). After the colon, the characters stay the same—there is an“I” and someone the “I” refers to as “my father”—and a narrativecommences about a son visiting his aging father in an assisted livingfacility in Philadelphia. Until, that is, it’s interrupted several pageslater with the son telling his father, “You don’t live in Philadelphia. . . we’re both here in California” (6). As the father explains: “It’scalled fiction, son. This is the story you would be writing if youwere a fiction writer.” Of course, the referent of “this” is unclear.Which parts are written by the father as if he were the son writinga novel, and which are written by the son? The narrative soon col-lapses into a game of “Pin the Tail on the Narrator” (6). The sameproblem arises elsewhere, in the novel’s second section, “Phospho-rous,” which tells a relatively unified story about a group of elderlypatients staging an insurrection against their mistreatment in anassisted living facility. In the middle of that plot, however, the nar-rator acknowledges “the complete absence of clarity regarding onepressing and nagging matter, that being: just who the fuck is telling

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this story?” “Is it an old man or the old man’s son.” Assuring usthat he “will clear up the matter forthwith, directly, tout de suite,”he reports, “I am telling this story” (107).

As with the other novels treated here, such metafictional trickerydoes not spin readers outward into epistemological indeterminacy.Percival Everett is not a lesson about the interpretive impossibilityresulting from linguistic ambivalence, about the way permanentlyopen structures produce permanently undecidable worlds. Becauseonce again, despite the novel’s explicit consideration of its own con-ditions of production (“These pages that I would have you write, ifyou wrote, or that you are writing because I wrote . . .” [45]), Everettdoesn’t allow that reflexivity to puncture a hole in the center of histext. He’s not dropping poststructural bombs that rupture the pos-sibility of meaning and value. Instead, he’s using this classicallypoststructural premise—“Writing is that neutral, composite, obliquespace where our subject slips away, the negative where all identityis lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Barthes1322)—to produce the presence and wholeness of identity, the con-nection and union of bodies. He uses this poststructural premise toobviate the separation and difference that the sense/reference dis-tinction institutes. Once the poststructural premise of the novel col-lapses sense and reference, Everett becomes free to produce a worldin which he and his father are one: “Your old man posing as you ina voice that is at once yours and at once mine and at once neither”(29). Here the radical indeterminacy of the narrative voice allowseach to occupy the position of narrator, thereby allowing each tobecome the other as well.

Like “two keys hopefully capable of opening the same lock,” thenovel writes the father and son increasingly closer together untilthey become indistinguishable. Eventually, it even seems plausiblethat both father and son are dead. Early in the novel, for example,the son says to the father, “Dad, you realize that I’m dead.” Andthe father replies, “Yes, son, I do. But I wasn’t aware that you knewit” (14). The exchange is reversed at the novel’s conclusion, wherethe father tells the son, “I’m dead, son.” And the son replies, “I knowthat, Dad. But I didn’t know you knew it” (227). Thus the narratorelsewhere reports: “I could be writing you could be writing mecould be writing you. I am a comatose old man writing here now


and again what my dead or living son might write if he wrote or Iam a dead or living son writing what my dying father might writefor me to have written” (216). The novel’s linguistic loops make itsimultaneously true that each has lost the other and that each iswriting in an effort to heal that loss. Both father and son write boththe life and the death of the other.

The novel’s many competing plots similarly use poststructuraltechniques to collapse the sense/reference distinction and achievecounter-poststructural ends. Textual evidence suggests, for exam-ple, that both father and son have brothers married to sexuallyattractive French women. Another instance of treacherous referenceimplies that both father and son were chased by the KKK while outdriving with their respective fathers. Other plots narrated in thethird person contain equally mutable characters, although even thethird-person characters are frequently avatars of the father and son,but it’s never clear which. A character named Murphy, for example,is a handyman, but then a horse trainer, living in Riverside. He laterappears as a doctor living in Washington, D.C. But this isn’t toosurprising, as everyone in the novel has multiple identities. Onecharacter, Gregory Lang, is married to Claire, but just pages laterher name is Sylvia; a woman, Meg Caro, claiming to be Gregory’sdaughter is twenty-two years old when he meets her, but weekslater she’s twenty-seven; a nurse at the assisted living center has atleast three different names over the course of her plot; and a teen-ager working at a mall “key-osk” (they make keys) has three dif-ferent names on the same page. Again, it might seem that languageis getting the better of these people, that the world has been reducedto word. But the effect is precisely the opposite. Rather than prolif-erating difference, the novel moves toward sameness. The point isnot that meaning and subjectivity are indeterminate, but that mul-tiplicity is still just identity. I might have three names, but I’m stillme. Sense and reference, Everett seems to suggest, are beside thepoint. The many are one. The poststructural features of languagemake it possible for everyone, not just Cicero, to be Tully. Whattheory views as a difference that spreads, Everett sees as a singu-larity that unifies.

If theory contends that language can never catch up with theworld, Everett works from the opposite premise: the world can

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never catch up with language. The first case produces indeterminatemeaning and value: we only know the world through language, andlanguage is inadequate. The second approach, however, results ina new and different world. Unconcerned with the representationalgap between word and world, refusing to treat language as a matterof reference, the second approach produces connections—like theontological overlap between Everett and his father—that the firstapproach precludes. In what we might take as Everett’s own arspoetica, the dying father explains it like this:

[O]ur groping always lags behind language, far enough that there is noth-ing to say about language itself, as we cannot look directly upon its mag-nificence . . . all we ever do is circle where we think language might reside,guessing like we guess about the locations of electrons . . . knowing thatwe cannot live without it, that we define ourselves with it and by it, butit is not ours . . . we cannot account for it, explain it, find the egg of it,because it is, in short, god, the only god that we know or will know orhave known . . . and it is all-powerful and without judgment and it canstate its own apparent inadequacy and then overcome it . . . [it] creates away for us to talk about the unknown, about language itself and yet doesnot create itself, is not created, just is, and we cannot imagine ourselveswithout it, cannot imagine without it, because it is god and it lets us knowthat god is just a word, that god is just a grammar, that its grammar isjust our feeble construct to approach its radiance, it has nothing to dowith texts, it has nothing to do with words, and probably has nothing todo with our thoughts and the things we think when we know we knownothing when we know there is nothing when nothing is our last safecave of language.

(222–23)

The world does not come first for Everett; language does. That’s thepoststructural premise: we circle around language, define ourselvesby it, make guesses as we might about electrons. Because of that,however, there is no reality for us to lament our distance from, nosignified that our slippery signifiers never reach, no referentialmeaning or epistemological certitude that the project of readingmust work its way toward. That’s the post-poststructural turn: thereis nothing to say about language; it overcomes its own inadequacy,helps us think the unknown, and has little concern for texts orwords. “There are no realities that are more real than others, onlymore privileged,” the unidentifiable narrator instructs, and it’s this


monadic approach to the world and all possible worlds that “enti-fies” the world of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (31). Free to ignorequestions of sense and reference, it’s a world where “all meaningmust collapse under the weight of its own being” (59). By Everett’saccount, there is no longer any ground that allows us to evaluate orjudge the referential truth content, the aesthetic significance, or anyother form of meaning and value that a work of art might imply.But again, that’s not because the ground has a hole in it that makesall meaning and value inevitably partial and incomplete. Instead,it’s because there is just the material (an admittedly linguistic mate-rial) out of which the world and all possible worlds are made. Being,not meaning, is the most relevant feature of language and its worlds.

A Different Kind of Theory Novel

Save for The Marriage Plot, which exemplifies the realist version ofthe post-theory theory novel, the texts discussed here bear the mark-ings of prototypical metafiction. The authors appear in the novelsas characters; the novels themselves appear in the texts of their ownnarratives; the novels expose and discuss the conditions groundingtheir composition; language in each text consistently raises ques-tions about its own interpretive (im)possibilities. And yet none ofthese novels revels in the epistemological indeterminacy and recur-sive ontology of classic metafiction as practiced by postmodernistsunder the sway of theory. That’s because these novels and theirrespective engagements with theory are categorically different froman earlier generation of postmodern theory novels. These are notjust theory novels written in a post-theory age. We’re not just seeingold forms in a new light; we’re actually seeing new forms. The post-theory theory novel has taken the theory novel’s flattened caricatureof theory and repurposed it, even revitalized it, for newly aestheticends.

Historicizing that formal change—from the theory novel to thepost-theory theory novel—is beyond the purview of this essay,although I suspect much can be said about the role that technology,neoliberalism, and globalization have played in the shift. For now,I hope that an initial taxonomy of the post-theory theory novel willcrystallize some of its formal departures from the theory novel and

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lay the groundwork for future investigations of the novel’s relation-ship to theory.13 Based on an admittedly circumscribed analysis ofthe three novels discussed here from Plascencia, Marcus, and Ever-ett, I propose the following list of the experimental post-theory the-ory novel’s defining features:

⋅ Reflexive Reluctance. Regardless of the theoretical conceptsthe novel contains, the post-theory theory novel avoidsdirectly applying those concepts to itself and discouragesreaders from doing so as well.

⋅ Unreal Realism. Although the post-theory theory novel doesnot depict a real world or the way the world is, the unrealworld that the novel depicts is to be understood as real insome way. In short, some form of realism intrudes into thenovel’s unreality. (In Plascencia this is the world beyond thepage; in Marcus it is the literality of the theoretical concepts;and in Everett it is the surface of a text refusing to distinguishsense and reference.)

⋅ Meaning as Transmission. The post-theory theory noveldoes not refer to the world; it communicates a world. Withthis turn away from standard forms of representation comesa similar resistance to interpretation. Meaning is not corre-lated from text to world but is the result or effect of whateverthe novel injects into the world.

⋅ Words That Build. If words in the post-theory theory novelno longer mediate or represent the world, language becomesa real object in its own right. Words are facts and presencesrather than illusions and absences. They do not alienate ordisconnect us from reality; they simply are real. Existencetrumps reference as the source of linguistic value.

This list is neither exhaustive nor prescriptive. Instead, in an effortto distinguish a new generation of experimental writers from theirpostmodern forebears, it describes what I see as the key distinctionsbetween older, postmodern books about books and more contem-porary books about books.

13. Katie Muth has already laid some important groundwork with her study of post-modern fiction’s poststructural commitments.


Because post-theory theory novels look so much like metafic-tional theory novels of old, scholars of contemporary fiction havetended to overlook the innovations the novel has recently under-gone, particularly in its relationship to theory. The field has tendedto cast twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction alike as a Mani-chean struggle between realist and experimental modes, which hasallowed the realist turn in contemporary literature to create a falsesense of experimentalism’s decline.14 In fact, literary experimental-ism is alive and well, and perhaps more interesting than everbecause it has relinquished its theoretically motivated hostility torealism. For much of the twentieth century, in other words, exper-imentalism was preoccupied with proving that realism couldn’t dowhat it claimed to do, that language could never give us the world.But contemporary experimentalism does not fight that battlebecause it no longer accepts theory’s basic premises. Instead, thepost-theory theory novel freely incorporates different realisms intoits more innovative forms and techniques without worrying aboutbetraying all that theory ever taught us. The result is an array oftexts that look nothing like realism but that also depart substantiallyfrom the theoretically motivated experimentalisms of old. The post-theory theory novel is deceptively similar to the theory novels ofthe second half of the twentieth century, but we should not bedeceived. Treating theory as a contingent historical phenomenonrather than as the truth of the world, contemporary novelists aredoing new and exciting things with theory’s old ideas.

University of California, Los Angeles

14. On the one hand, I’m thinking here of those scholars who see an increasing turnto realism growing out of David Foster Wallace’s decades-old call for affecting sincerity.(Strong and varied treatments of the realist turn can be found in Shonkwiler and LaBerge, McLaughlin, and Dubey.) On the other hand, there’s also a tendency to viewcontemporary experimentalism as more or less continuous with the experimentation ofhigh postmodernism. (Jeffrey Nealon associates this approach with anyone who, “cling-ing to the life raft of the hermeneutics of suspicion,” interprets innovative literary formsthrough a lens of “linguistic nostalgia” [150].) In the literary world, the ongoing debatebetween Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus—an argument nicely chronicled by Lee Kon-stantinou—also perpetuates this false dichotomy between contemporary realism andexperimentalism.

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