English Studies Forum

Shocks to the System: Joseph McElroy’s Actress in the House

Mark Troy

“ … the shock has an effect on the spirit, it forces it to think, and to think the Whole.”

--Gilles Deleuze (Cinema 2 158)

 

Joseph McElroy’s novels are often as dense as the texts of encyclopedic maximalists (e.g., Melville, Joyce, Pynchon) who distribute in books of daunting size a surplus of specialized knowledge to overwhelm monologic discourse. McElroy, however, deploys a series of sudden jolts or seeming detours, unexpected deterritorializations of narrative and perceptual conventions, to free or clear a cognitive space.

 Inside that fictive space, we may find ourselves abruptly considering—or stymied by—leaky fractures or unsuspected folds in what were assumed to be conventions or norms of the narrative subject. And since McElroy’s probes are uncompromising (No word in a McElroy text is there solely to ease the reader’s path.), the writerly demands are extreme; but so are the rewards of what Tim Keane calls McElroy’s “poetry of noesis,” or cognition. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari teach us to distinguish between “to trace,” which is to reproduce, and “to map,” which is to create—to conceptualize the unconceptualized (1987, 12-15).   It is in this sense that McElroy surveys or maps a textual space.

            Like Lookout Cartridge, Ancient History, The Letter Left to Me,  Plus, and Women and Men, McElroy’s most recent novel Actress in the House starts with a sudden, disorienting event. The actress Becca Lang has been slapped by her on-stage “brother” (in the play’s story), jolted by a sudden smack, sharply enough to impress the lawyer Bill Daley, seated in the eighth row of the house.[1] The violent blow seems spontaneous enough to have been a real one; the line between actor and character seems to have been violated (15).[2] “A shock, that’s all it was, in the darkened house,” the novel begins (7). A singular event, that initial sentence, with no assertion of cause, or motivation, or, for a moment, which house. That the house is “darkened” emphasizes and prepares the semantic fluidity of “house,” the theatrical house comprising shifting, flowing voices, acted and acting, arguing and agreeing from differing standpoints, of a lighted stage seen by the audience in the dark—until it “utters” sounds as relational entity.

            Brian Massumi, inspired by Deleuze, speculates on how a thought might be created, unimpeded by directive antecedents; how “establishing the discrete singularity of the shock, allows for developing expression as relation, rather than subject” (xxiv).  House here is like that described by Deleuze and Guattari as the elusive HwR (House without Rooms), even BwO (Body without Organs) (1987  149-67). [3]

            Reached by the violence, Daley wonders if Becca’s own retinal corneas may have been loosened.  “One blow like that, and it all goes to pieces” (7). Congruent with the violence done in the play and outside the play—and the uncertainty— narrational progress has itself been severely jolted—deterritorialized in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of destabilized and moving between hierarchal striations (reterritorializing meaning the inevitable solidification of new striations) (16).

            “A blow like that,” Daley thinks, “it says it all. But what?” (7). McElroy ponders that question, among others in the midst of narrative opening; self blurs, subjectivity overflows, new relations form, often from unexpected directions.   Possibilities of self-contained identity seriously eroded, consciousness is envisioned in McElroy as a “between” space—a “betweenness,” in John Johnston’s description—as consciousness becomes a “site of displacements and substitutions, where an attempted narrative (ful)filling remains forever incomplete because it can never be fully occupied or accounted for by any individual subject” (99).  Thus, Actress frees the formation of dialogic relationship, as Bakhtin imagined it in “The Problem of Speech Genres”—a network of persons, utterances rather than sentences.

            Dialogic indeed. McElroy’s vocabulary embraces (in an odd American parallel with Walt Whitman) specialized terminologies limited by other constraints than those of conventionally realistic prose. Like Lookout Cartridge, with its mechanically different, graphically incisive media, Actress is an aesthetically engineered version of a heterogeneous assemblage embracing diverse idioms of discourse, such as geology, physics, and aviation. Reading for assemblage finds emphasis in heterogeneous terms and functions that work together in symbiosis:

            In contrast to a structure, which defines relations among homogeneous

terms and functions, an assemblage is composed of relations, liaisons and affiliations . . . across an array of different elements and processes. . . . [It is] not a structural unity or totality but only a functional consistency . . . of diverse

parts and processes. . . . a functional arrangement of material and semiotic flows . . . . (Johnston 14)

His habit an extraordinary narratological curiosity, a snoopiness into narrated consciousness, McElroy envisions us as “multiple field[s] of impinging informations” (qtd. in Strecker 173).  The term “assemblage” is apt, since McElroy’s poetics as exfoliated in Actress are a poetics of relation (to use Glissant’s phrase [Poetics 169-82])  rather than of controlling metaphor, or strict linearity; various specialized discourses—like characters—transversely reinforce and support each other in a rhizomatically free field (rhizome in the botanical sense of largely horizontal and underground stems widely reproductive).  Like a meta-island, I am suggesting, in McElroy’s work, particularly Actress, is (to appropriate Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s phrase) a meta-archipelago (4): “That is, a discontinuous conjunction . . . : unstable condensations, turbulences, whirlpools, clumps of bubbles, frayed seaweed, sunken galleons … a new way of reading . . . chance and necessity . . . particularity and universality” (2-3).

            That the phenomenal context of this mysteriously nomadic and domestic love story is affected by shock is strikingly shown in the third chapter. Daley waits for (and expects) a phone call from his difficult client Lotta, who some time earlier had called about antique artifacts of hers damaged during an earthquake (originating in the state of Connecticut, which she would like to sue). This “largely unnoticed” (44) “temblor” and “aftershock” transversely extend the jolt shivering the material context of the narrative itself: a geological line of flight,  exemplifying McElroy’s own perception that he often will get away with his perhaps unfamiliar abstractions:  "By tying them as closely, even at times fanatically, as I can to phenomena…" ( qtd. in LeClair 248).

 In Actress the composition of the island (of narrative and of Manhattan) is chipped away, as the narrative accompanies and comments on the shifting temporal scene and the overflowingly ambiguous subject references. Instead of the traditional granite, the island is specifically confirmed as being composed of sliding tectonic plates, escaping trickles of water, slurry and ground-fill that could in future be reduced by a quake to mud. (McElroy has described Actress as “a book of explosions, evictions, earthquakes past and future” [unpublished note].) I would argue that the power of the initial jolt has so shocked the narrative that its effect moves out, like a disturbance in a still pool; hence a certain relational fluidity is maintained, since the decentering shock flows through and permeates the narrative.

            Reading Actress’s shifting voices, I have found myself  drifting across latitudes, encountering aspects of certain Caribbean theorists who have developed sometimes Deleuzian approaches that similarly to McElroy (yet with rich differences) have moved through or around the strata of occupied fictional space to map territories they inhabit. These writers, among them Edouard Glissant, Maryse Conde (Martinique), Antonio Benitez Rojo (Cuba), Derek Walcott (St. Lucia),  and Wilson Harris (Guyana),  work from a multi-lingual, culturally hybrid meta-archipelago allowing a creative vision liberating from and seeing beyond the trauma of the Middle Passage, beyond the imperial enclosure of realism, beyond the panoptical perspective of the omniscient narrator.

            Moving from that socio-historical perspective, then, but similarly intent on redefining without the strictures of received subjectivity, related by association between the different subjects, their memories and emotions are often not immediate but relayed traces of emotion, intent, ideological aims. By transversely portraying the environment itself as shaken, an object of curiosity, Actress follows Derek Walcott in continually and repeatedly refusing to allow the island a transcendent firmness of rock. Rather, all aspects of Manhattan—like other islands in the Americas—can be regarded as an area of motion, of development and change: a smooth intellectual and imaginative liminal zone; a meta-island.  Actress—like McElroy’s other novels—evolves an aesthetic of relationship based on movement, constellations in a usually granite environment through, first of all, a cunningly distributed array of shocks. These liberating abuses of narrative seamlessness generate motion reverberating through various views of the assemblage.

            The shifting temporality of events in Actress—starting with the shock, moving to Becca’s unanticipated phone conversation with Daley flagging the shock, moving to a recollected situation brought to mind by an expected phone call not the expected caller—is not difficult to follow, if one reads closely. The same is true of the spatial moves, centering on Manhattan yet with brief excursus to outback Australia or a jazz session in Haarlem (Holland!): once one get used to the rhizomatic patterning, it becomes possible to navigate the interactive fields.[4]

            It is more likely that a sense of unfamiliarity will loom, though, if one reads for a unitary idea of narrative subject or self. Most immediately, this grows out of the fact that the main narrative conduit, Bill Daley, continually revises himself, or moves on from one judgment, feeling, or datum to its doubt or retraction. Now, since the narrative presence will usually convey these things without comment (“he was stunned and amazed, he was honestly thrilled, not stunned at all”), the narrative site tends toward indeterminacy, to overflow. Daley (to his own discomfort) is occasionally multiple, fractal, with ambiguous boundaries generating a natural befuddlement the unaccustomed reader shares.

            Not, apparently, the mysterious, nomadic Ruley Duymens, who seems to know and relay elsewhere information about everyone (especially Daley) to everyone else. He is more comfortable moving around and between conventional societal striations: Becca has called Daley, since he had been recommended to her by Duymens though not as a lawyer. Duymens may seem to embody the relational movements of the novel itself – this traveling relay man, a “developer” (124), ethnic hybrid half Dutch and one-third Lenape (342) since his mother (half Native American) had dual citizenship. Thus, he and the novel call into question the biological roots of ethnicity; neither Jew nor Christian, Duymens has been a peyote roadman, free to wander the psychic roads of, it may seem, an alternative ontology.[5]

            More than earthquakes, mistaken calls, chemicals, or passion de-situate narrative event, blur situations, smooth space, and thus engender unexpected relationships. This increasing flow is another aspect of the unfixity that can puzzle the reader’s attempt to right the narrative, and also Daley, who is involved in a sort of meta-confusion, a strange empathy which climaxes when, his intuitions leashed to Becca’s old boyfriend, the overweight young swimmer Leander, he is enfolded in perhaps the most decisively set piece in Actress. Swamping his individual—originary, enclosed—self in a fluidity of movement, he swims into and walks out of Leander. Daley and Leander are thus less—and more—than unitized subjects, when they are both and separately experiencing (Leander’s) underwater humming (208-9). Daley himself finds perturbing this gift that he does not control, the opacity of which, as post-colonial theorists have argued, leaves areas beyond the power of the unitary individual.

            As these strangenesses indicate, Actress comprises many transverse relays. What I mean is that not only very different life strategies—those of Becca, Lotta, Daley—are conveyed by others—especially by Ruley, or Daley’s brother Wolf, relaying or linking with other stories, directly or on other occasions: also, different discourses interact like this.

            An unsettling example of multiple relay is the earthquake registered by the eccentric client Lotta. Some time after the late-night call to his home about the earthquake but shortly before the theatrical shock has disjoined Daley’s psychic defenses, he picks up the phone in his office, his intelligence prepared for dialogue with Lotta only to hear a voice who will turn out to be Becca: not only a different person but perhaps doing a “voice job” on him (21) and thus in a certain sense may not be who she is. Anticipating a call from Lotta, Becca’s conversation recalls that earlier call, when Lotta claims the precious figurines in her home have been damaged by the earthquake epicentered somewhere in Connecticut. Thus, the time and space coordinates loosen, and as the “meta” aspects of New York become unavoidable, the slurried composition of Manhattan becomes definitive.

            Thus, beginnings in moments of shock, it’s only towards the end of the novel, a few days after Bill Daley has admitted Becca Lang to his house, that they drift into a zone of his past that “she couldn’t have known” (370) and the reader is probably unprepared for.[6] What was Daley’s role in the jettisoning of Viet Cong prisoners from an old Alouette (a French-model helicopter) some twenty years earlier? Now, with recollection—rereading—tthe text has prepared us for the question, since Daley is indeed a licensed helicopter pilot and in earlier chapters has attended to the flight of helicopters.

            However, at the time of the incident Becca wants to know about, Bill was unqualified to fly a chopper. More mysteriously important, there seems no way young, Canadian Becca could remember events just before her birth. Who could have told her? And what is the relation of Becca’s hearsay to Daley’s memories? An aesthetic of memory evolves which echoes and illustrates Glissant’s views of dialogic relay: Becca knows about Daley’s probable role in this crime through her half-brother—a newly reconciled Vietnam resister, deeply affected by it and other such events years before. Becca’s mother has filled her in as well.

            Now, the interrelated path of these memories through to Becca is obscure; it is not clear what gossip came from her brother, what from her mother. Britton’s general comments on “relay” clarify the effect of this multiple, hazy origin: “The process is compounded by the way in which the relation works over time, so that the origins of the individual utterances are lost; no one knows for sure if the reported words are in fact the individual’s own words or not …” (Britton 176). There is no monologic sense of true or original recollection to generate traumatic remembrance.

            Not only what is going on in Actress, but the larger moment of McElroy’s art, may be seen in the opening sequence of what initially seems to be his most accessible text, Lookout Cartridge. It starts with the protagonist imaginatively struggling to stably perceive an almost out-of-control helicopter; attempting a coherent view from the airborne machinery (later an escalator, a bus, a train) congruent with the protagonist’s attempt to make sense of certain violently mysterious events sending him in strange and widespread directions. Frederick Karl finds that “everything [in LC] … involves uncertainty trying to find coordinates. At the opening a helicopter hovering in space as a contrast with the demarcated areas beneath indicates a novel which will hover between consciousness and preconsciousness, between detail and sensibility … the line between science and humanism … blurred” (184).  Karl might be speaking of Actress (almost thirty years later), but importantly the placement and role of the chopper(s) are more an ambiguously enunciated echo here than in LC.

            As with Becca’s created “one woman show” of childhood abuse, the narrator refuses a panoptical discipline.[7] Still, the story is so strong that it affects—has affected—her: she has been traumatized in part by a narrative related before her birth. And when Daley is virtually coerced by her into tracing long-past memories in personal and public accounts, his perspective differs from hers in the possibility of originary fact.  His memories of the event (his event, his recollections) are nonetheless blurred by the half-understood, swift actions of the others involved – merging with public memories accessible to him and Becca. Drawing on Michael Herr’s indispensable account of the Vietnam war, Dispatches, for the image of a “metachopper,” Frederic Jameson  argues that thus “invokes …the essential ‘motion’ of the war and of covering it [to suggest] ‘the breakdown of all previous [narrative] paradigms of s shared language … through which that war might be expressed” (44-5). However, as William Spanos points out, Jameson does not deal with the remembering or retrieval of the forgotten (253), a lack powerfully supplied in Actress. When Daley dives into his own memory, recollecting the struggle and death of those five prisoners, especially the perhaps self-willed death of his probably beloved acquaintance the woman Than, he finds no absolute answer, as deeply as he looks. The eyes of Than in her last moments were opaque, giving him nothing, holding no answer, no question (377).

            Crucial to seeing how relationships work in this novel is that the chopper story Becca has carried – been abused by – turns out (her evidently loving, probably improperly or even abusively, pedophilically loving brother tells her) to be events experienced and enacted by Daley: yet the traumatic story as story is related by her not as persecution or interrogation of Daley: the narrative she draws from him, the interlinked account, is to confirm hers.[8] To liberate Becca. So the story of those events comprises different relayed accounts and emotions and recollections existing in an errant set of relationships, of interactions and reactions drawn together more by the node of emotion than by occasional cause-effect.

            As I have tried to indicate, this shocking (or shocked) tale of Becca and Bill transversely relates to other stories in Actress.  (Witness the design of the abalone in one vignette, which is described as being bits held together by a mysterious glue which is stronger than the bits held together; when the links (composing the abalone) are fractured, they will heal in different relations.) Notable is Bill’s caring relationship to his construction-engineer brother, the daredevil Wolf, who is an “actor” participating in rather than relaying stories. His body echoes the text: he suffers first a near-mortal “shock” to his body, then a “quake” to his ear (352)—but he is not vulnerable in the same way as his brother, and seems to absorb serious jolts. In fact, though he works with explosives, they are often shock-insensitive (307); and Wolf’s effect on the plot is not direct but the result of Bill’s closeness to him, which draws Bill on journeys to Europe, Asia, and, perhaps pivotally (not to say mysteriously), Australia.

            There Daley encounters a blond, attractive girl pumping petrol (possibly the age Becca would have been at that time). This slight brush has – like most slight brushes in (at least) this McElroy text, centrally peripheral significance: especially the girl’s gift of what McElroy calls “joint foresight” (74).  Here is yet another unfolding example of mise en abyme, its extent resonating in the activity within the macrocosmic craw of the inspiring young woman’s huge, powerful, one-legged turkey (one quarter wild; thus, like Ruley Duymens, of hybrid internationality) distinguished by its ability to digest anything, grinding together a heterogeneous conglomerate of bits, some even metal, to powder: “(a grinding and grating going on in there, believe it or not gravel, pebbles, glass …bits of machinery” (69-70).

            Now, as Daley tells Becca about it, he draws attention to the significant turkey “shock-gobble” (216), which might recall the first line of the novel. Indeed, “the turkey girl,” who so cherishes her bird, is associated in Daley’s mind with Becca (314). I tentatively propose an unexpected intertextuality here, since this turkey girl is positioned in the same radiant way as is Stephen Dedalus’s chosen muse, by the strand. A desert in this instance, but a girl with eyes of “a captain’s blue-green bottle glass” (70) who is appropriatively transformed by Daley’s narrative imagination: “like the iridescence of starling feathers …” (70). Indeed, her eyes resemble the huge turkey “along the shingled layers of throat plumage” (71). This link – turkey as hinge between Daley and Dedalus (to say nothing of turkey and Bec’s charming “cluck of recognition” [302]) exfoliates when memories of the turkey girl and her turkey enable an inspired embodiment of the dialogic meta-city as it “heaved and sighed and hummed like gravel and ground glass …”: in sum, portrait of the novel as a one-legged turkey.

            Moved by his bird girl, Daley enunciates what seems to be McElroy’s stubbornly affirmative aesthetic of relation, incorporating multiple discourses. The girl and her turkey – and especially, if vaguely, her tummy – inspire Daley to whisper what he knows “about quartz and other insertions, crystalloblastic insertions, where through metamorphic mix any of the minerals may be found inserted in any other” (70)—the uncreated conscience of Manhattan, this novel, a hybrid version of Ben Franklin’s large, wild turkey symbol of America.

Works Cited

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Benitez-Rojo, Antonio.  The Repeating Island. Trans. Jema E. Maraniss. London: Duke UP, 1992.

Bernstein, Richard J.  The New Constellation.  Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

Booker, M. Keith. Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature. Gainsville: U of Florida P, 1991.

Britton, Celia M.  Edward Glissant and Postcolonial Theory. London: UP of Virginia, 1999.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans Robert Hurley, et.al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.

Deleuze, Giles.  Cinema : The Movement Image.  Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone, 1986.

---. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone, 1987.

---. Cinema 2: The Time-Image.  Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Athlone, 1989.

---. The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

D'haen’s Theo. "Deleuze,Guattari, Glissant and Post-‘American’ Narratives.”   REAL 13 (1997):387-99.

Franklin, Benjamin.  “Letter to his Daughter, Sarah Bache, January 26, 1784.”  The Writings of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 10. Ed. Albert Henry Smyth. New York: Macmillan, 1905-7. http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin2.html.

Glissant, Edouard.  Caribbean Discourse.  Trans. J. Michael Dash.  Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989.

---.  The Poetics of Relation.  Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor:  U of Michigan P, 1990.

Hantke, Steffan.  “McElroy’s Metropolitan Constructs.”  Electronic Book Review.  Modified 28 Sep. 2004.  www.electronicbookreview.com. 

Henry, Paget.  Caliban’s Reason.  London: Routledge, 2000.

Johnston, John. Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.

Karl, Frederick R.  “Women and Men: More than a Novel.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 10.1 (Spring 1990): 181-198.

LeClair,Tom. “An Interview with Joseph McElroy.”  Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988.  235-51.

Rajchman, John.  The Deleuze Connections. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000.