Escaping the Postmodern:
Dave Eggers, Connectivism and
Contemporary Literature
A Note From The Author
In 2009, I was contacted by a German-based publisher who seemed to express genuine interest in my brief exercise in academic exploration of the first literary works by
Dave Eggers, one of the most energetic and ambitious authors writing today. What I
did not know was that this German-based publisher would be selling this short group
of essays for a ridiculous amount of money. Rest assured, if you have seen this “book”
on Amazon and have been as sticker shocked as I have, just know that I have not received a dime, a cent, a penny, a nickel nor an expired Deutsche Mark for these works.
And, to be frank, I do not wish to make any sort of income off of these short essays.
Needless to say, the ethics behind this German-based publisher are questionable and
thus my reason to provide this .pdf free of charge.
Which brings me directly to 826 National, an organization whose ethics are unquestionably sound. If you don’t know about 826 National, this is a really great organization doing wonderful things for students throughout the U.S. that don’t necessarily
have the resources in their communities, homes or schools. 826 National is a direct result of the work Dave Eggers has done outside of the realm of literature and promotes
reading, writing and storytelling while also helping teachers that are often at the wrong
end of the budget cuts. While I was living in San Francisco, I had the privilege of volunteering with 826 Valencia (the area branch of 826 National and flagship center)
from 2007 - 09.
If you are reading this and have downloaded this via the wonderful Internet (for
free!!!) and think you might not mind spending a few Dollars, Euros, Dirhams or even a
Deutsche Mark for this short collection, please consider donating to 826 National. You
can find their website here: http://826valencia.org/get-involved/donate/
Now, about what follows...
i
I originally wrote this series of essays while doing my graduate degree, between the
years 2006 and 2007, to help me understand the direction in which I thought literature
was heading. It was my feeling that the books I had been reading weren’t necessarily
“Postmodern.” At least, I didn’t think they were Postmodern in the way that I had
learned what Postmodernism was. There was something different about these novels.
Something definite and definitely hard to put my finger on. Given my limited understanding of literary theory and philosophical thought with regards to the “novel,” as
we have come to know it, I figured that I was missing something.
Maybe like you, I was scared of theory. Literary theory, it seemed to me, took the
heart and soul out of literature. However, during the course of my graduate studies I
found myself adopting the philosophical trait generally attributed to the Chinese military general, Sun Tzu: Know your enemy. Thus, throughout the course of my graduate studies I found myself applying theories from diverse schools of literary and philosophical thought to whatever text we happened to be reading in class. Some of these
theoretical applications were more successful than others. But what all of these theoretical applications had in common was the amount of ridiculousness I attributed to them.
I tried as hard as possible to footnote, endnote, quote, paraphrase extensively and, in
one essay, provide as many untranslated quotations as possible so that my final essay
was littered with half a dozen languages. Sure, I had written these essays, but it didn’t
necessarily follow that I had to believe them. What I was doing was participating in
what I thought was the general ridiculousness of “ivory tower” academia.
To give you an idea of some of my more “successful” essays that I managed to either deliver at a conference or get published, here is an example of a few of their titles:
• “Dialogic Sphere and the Grotesque Body of Beloved: Establishing Bakhtin’s Folkloric Carnival in Afrocentric Feminism”
• “Wonderful Nightmares: An Examination of the Carnival Within A Sun Also Rises”
• “Beyond Theatrical Boundaries: The Echoing Carnivalesque of The Roaring Girl”
One of the things you may notice, beyond the absurd scope of their titles, is the
repetition of the idea of “carnival.” The idea of the carnivalesque was first put forth
by a semi-obscure Russian philosopher by the name of Mikhail Bakhtin in a book of
his by the name of Rabelais in His World. Throughout the course of my graduate studies
I found myself continually intrigued by Bakhtin’s idea of, not only the carnivalesque,
but the involvement of common (or, in Bakhtin’s terminology, “folk”) culture to create
language and the novel’s ability to participate in the dissemination of this language.
ii
Admittedly, most of the essays I wrote were written as a sort of Bakhtinian “joke”
because I really felt that literary theory, concepts like “the decentered center” and the
inherently oppressive nature of “patriarchal language,” were, frankly, absurd. And Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” made me momentarily want to tear my hair out in
frustration. I mean, if you separate a writer from a text, isn’t that the equivalent of
separating a speaker from what he or she is saying? It would be akin to removing my
father from the room every time he yelled at me for coming home late as a teenage. As
much as I might have wished for my screaming father to physically not be there in the
room with me so I only had to listen to his bellowing voice lecturing me on the responsibilities of keeping my curfew, it just was not possible. He was still there, with me, in the
room, booming voice echoing off of the walls.
And there is something to having that author there with you, in the room - be it
with a booming voice, soft speech or flamboyant expression. There is something about
being able to interact with a text on its surface as a reader, but there is something else
to be learned from the author, as well. The two don’t interact separately, but they are
intertwined, involved in a process of understanding.
This is also what these essays basically are: a series of attempts to process understanding.
I didn’t write these essays as an attempt to argue against Roland Barthes, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Terry Eagleton or
whomever else you might find my point of view opposing. In short, these essays aren’t
an attempt to argue against literature or literary theory of the past. What these essays
are is an attempt to understand the contemporary literature of “right now” and to put
my finger on where this “right now” is heading.
Where exactly the literature of “right now” began is anyone’s guess. But, in 1999,
if you were one of the millions of people reading a postmodern memoir with one of
the most incredibly ostentatious titles in recent memory, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, then you will know what I mean when I pose the question: Who would have
thought that Dave Eggers would be writing something, anything without a zillion and
one footnotes, endnotes, multiple fonts, doodled pictures and all the other addenda we
have come to associate with postmodern literature?
I had a professor at the University of Washington who once pointed to Eggers’
memoir and told the class that whatever was coming next in the postmodern literary
movement would probably be done by this writer.
iii
I believe my professor, in part, was right. Whatever was coming next, Dave Eggers
was going to do. However, it didn’t necessarily follow that what he was doing next
would be postmodern. In part, I believe this is why I have centered the bulk of these essays on the work of Dave Eggers. Eggers is an author who has his roots clearly planted
in the culture of the Postmodern, however, he has somehow escaped the postmodern
trap and I believe what he is writing and how he is using his writer-celebrity status is indicative of a shift in the tone of contemporary literature.
However, to get to what I believe is happening right now in contemporary literature, I found myself having to wade through everything that is postmodern about literature and authorship and that ostentatiously titled memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Thus, these essays are roughly divided into two halves. In the first half, I attempt to come to some sort of understanding of what contemporary literature is, what
it means to be an author at the turn of the 21st century and how Eggers attempts to
navigate this complex relationship between text, author and reader. In the second half,
I introduce the idea of connectivism and how this can be reflected in Eggers’ works after his memoir and the various ways in which connectivism is really defining the literature being written today.
Unfortunately (perhaps for both me and you), it follows that the first half of these
essays are necessarily interacting with a lot of the theory concerning authorship and literature, and thus are a continued part of the “ivory tower” tradition of scholarship
that I have come to love and hate. If ivory towers are not of interest to you, or if you
are only interested in the ways in which literature has moved beyond the postmodern, I
encourage you to turn to the very short essay titled, “Connectivism,” and begin reading from there. The last half of these essays are, I feel, a heck of a lot easier to read
and, it is my hope, lack any sort of ivory towerness.
I wish you a good day.
Sincerely,
Lucas M. Peters
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone and anyone who has been a part
of this lengthy process. What follows is a culmination of my thoughts derived from the
various seminars I have attended both at the University of Washington and Central
Washington University. Individually, from the University of Washington, I would like
to thank Dr. Malcolm Griffith who made literature enjoyable again and Dr. Brian Reed
who introduced me to the world of McSweeney’s. From Central Washington University, I would like to thank Dr. Laila Abdalla for her consistent challenge to my scholarship and writing, Dr. Paulus Pimomo on behalf of his relentless encouragement and interest in the world beyond literature, and Joe Powell, whose invaluable reading shaped
this work. Shannon Wilson, Eric Benson, Jennifer Settle, Jason Nickels, Jacob Linder,
Brittany Peterson, and Jeff Lane all deserve a giant thanks for their eyes and ears—
they helped immensely to mold my thoughts concerning contemporary literature
through their attentive reading and enlightening conversation. I would also like to
give a warm thanks to Dave Eggers and Valentino Deng for allowing me to see how
the world of literature can relate to the world of reality. Lastly, I would like to thank
Dr. Christopher Schedler from Central Washington University for his willingness to
discourage me when my ideas became too big for my own good and, conversely, his encouragement and engaging thought, which allowed my scholarship to reach its potential. Thank you all. Any faults within are mine and mine alone.
v
Literature and Atomization at the
Turn of the 21st Century
Defining a period of literature is a difficult task. It requires one to pick and
choose what is and is not literature according to a certain criteria. The criteria used
to define this literature is, more likely than not, filled with some ambiguous, largely
subjective logic put forth as truth by whomever feels that he or she has the right to
define what literature is. Needless to say, the categorization and definition of literature and its corresponding literary period or epoch is a challenge beset by, and littered with, relativism.
But it seems to me that relativism has gotten a bad reputation as of late. Persons looking for absolutes disdain its open-endedness, its lack of permanent truths.
After all, if any one truth is only a relative truth, subject to change at any moment,
then why bother trying to find any truth at all? It is this sort of thinking that ideas
of relativism both encourage and challenge. It is also this sort of thinking that current literature is attempting to turn on its head.
Since Einstein penned his famous paper theorizing relativity in 1905, the idea
of the only absolute truth being the absence of any absolute truths has been largely
accepted. This idea is reflected in the literatures of the modern and postmodern.
Where modern literature can be seen, generally, to lament the loss of any absolutes, postmodern literature became increasingly skeptical of any truths and celebrated a sort of discontinued, pluralistic reality based solely on one’s point of
view.1
In short, throughout the course of the 20th century, literature reflected the increasing atomization of society. The idea of fragmentation, of wholes being dismantled and looked at for their individual parts, took hold early in this century, its
6
relevance hastened by the technological and economic developments which encouraged persons to interact less directly. It was the automation of the marketplace society. Over the course of the century, careers became increasingly specialized and compartmentalized, making meaningful dialogue across various specializations nearly impossible.
At the turn of the 21st century, this seems to have been the major cultural crisis Dave Eggers, and other authors, are interested in examining. How can we—if
anything and everything is relative, and everything we know is specialized and
codified—sustain any meaningful relationships with the world and its inhabitants
surrounding us?
This is the problem of the relativity of literature.
As Michael Holquist notes, “literary texts are utterances, words that cannot
be divorced from particular subjects in specific situations” (68). The utterance has
two very specific parts from which it may not be divorced. In the case of literature,
it must be both written and read. It is from these two specific situations, with their
corresponding specific writer and reader, that literature is unable to abstract itself.
However, with the atomization of society, the textual utterance of the writer is increasingly at risk of being completely misunderstood by the reader. I short, it has become increasingly difficult for the writer and the reader to be on the same page
(bad pun intended).
In an interview published in 2003, author David Foster Wallace declared, “It
might be that one of the really significant problems of today’s culture involves finding ways for educated people to talk meaningfully with one another across the divides of radical specialization,” thus highlighting the problem of specialization
and the utterance (93).
The ability to have a cross-pollinating, meaningful dialogue is, we will come
to see, at the heart of this era’s literature. As Wallace contends:
We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public
policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract
and technically complex and context-dependent that it’s next to im7
possible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments)
have much relevance to her actual life. (93)
Thus, living in this sort of specialized world wherein a dialogue concerning the
large developments is not possible, many authors of literature are attempting to
reach a type of meaningful dialogue across various specializations. David Foster
Wallace has attempted to do this with his nonfiction piece of literature, Everything
& More, a book which attempts to unpack the mathematics behind celebrated
mathematician, George Cantor’s, famous theories concerning ∞ (the mathematical symbol for infinity).
Turn-of-the-century literature does seem to want to transgress many, if not
all, boundaries.
Like Wallace, author Heidi Julavits has found literature and the world surrounding it to be problematically atomized. In her essay, also published in 2003,
Julavits uses an examination regarding the state of book reviewing and its effect on
literature to highlight what she perceives as literature’s competition with popular
culture (namely television and movies) and its competition with the growing popularity of the memoir and nonfiction books, which, as she states, “put a premium
on actual, rather than literary truths, or those more obscure truths of pure language” (8). Therefore, it seems that in this competition, literature has found itself
divided from some of the traditional “usefulness” that previous generations had
turned to it for.
The question of morality has been raised, once again, in the debate of literature and literary value, during this period at the turn of the century; perhaps in response to the question of “usefulness” coupled with the rising popularity of the
memoir and nonfiction.
George Saunders, in an interview published in 2005, stated that “all good fiction is moral, in that it is imbued with the world, and powered by our real concerns: love, death, how-should-I-live” (327). He went on to state that the highest aspiration for which art can reach is “to show that nothing is true and everything is
true” (331). For some scholars, this opinion of literature—the slippery slope of
8
moralism and the lack of any absolutes—is problematic. If anything and everything is a possibility, then how can any lessons, morals, truths, et cetera, be derived?
It is a question of relativism. The answer lies, not with the work of literature
itself, but within the interaction of literature and the world outside of it. That is,
the meaning of literature is found in its dialogue with its reader and that dialogue,
although as varied as the reader reading the literature, will still have a deep, overarching feeling transgressing time. “First love in 1830, in Russia, beneath swaying
pines,” Saunders states, “is neurologically identical to first love in 1975, back of a
Camaro, Foghat blaring. That’s why that wonderful cross-firing occurs when we
read” (315).
A part of the literary trend at the turn of the century has been to engage with
this question of morality.
In 1996, Jonathan Franzen published an essay in Harper’s titled, “Perchance to
Dream.”2 This essay questioned the ability of authors to be able to write a truly
moral, socially relevant novel, and its argument against the possibility of a socially
relevant novel reverberated throughout the literary community. Building on the
decades-old argument put forth by Philip Roth, Franzen writes, “Just as the camera drove a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the
novel of social reportage” (67). Because of the ability of television to report immediately (think of the imbedded reporters with platoons in the second Gulf War), it
is nearly impossible for the modern social novel to exist. Even if it could exist,
Franzen argues that no individual novel could possibly reflect this relativist society.
“Perhaps ten novels from ten different cultural perspectives are required now,” he
writes (80). Franzen acknowledges the rare niche that might appear from time to
time, the novelist that might write the socially relevant novel that deals with morality (or, in Franzen’s terms, “manners”).
In the middle of the 90s, Franzen saw what novelists would be moving to, in
terms of ideology, over the next decade. In his words, “novelists are preserving a
tradition of precise, expressive language; a habit of looking past surfaces into interiors; maybe an understanding of private experience and public context as distinct
but interpenetrating; maybe mystery, maybe manners” (90).3 Novelists of this age
9
are preserving a complexity of thought discouraged by the economic and political
forces that be.
In 1994, the French author Michel Houellebecq published his first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte.4 It would be translated into English and titled, Whatever—an echo of the early 90’s mentality. However, it becomes clear in his following novels that Houellebecq’s work is an example of this shift toward an idea of
novelization as preserving complex modes of thinking.
In his next two novels, Les particules élémentaires and Plateforme (Atomised5 and Platform, respectively), Houellebecq establishes himself as an author concerned with
contemporary society. His characters reflect the division of society into compartmentalized subjects, and his writing, as Sam Lipsyte notes, is a part of the contemporary school of fiction noticeably wary of the “content vs. form” debate that has
taken hold of the literary community for the better part of the last century (36).
“The first group [supporting content] is suspect for proceeding as though the
world hasn’t changed enough to necessitate new modes of fiction,” Lipsyte writes;
while the “second group [supporting form] is a little heavy-handed in its determination to remind us that we are reading a text and not, say, playing foosball” (36).
Houellebecq’s work is a work that is very much interested in interacting, not only
with the categorical atomization of society, but in dissolving this dualistic mode of
literary thought.
Novelistic discourse, it seems, is the method actually best suited to examine
this divisive mode of thought and culture. Acclaimed novelist Ian McEwan states
that the novel allows for instances of true “human investigation” (212). Interestingly, his argument follows a sort of machinistic view of novelism wherein the
novel is the best used method for society to reflect on itself. Science, he claims, is
unable to do this, “religion’s not credible, metaphysics is too intellectually repellent
on its surface—this [the novel] is our best machine, as it were” (212). To view the
creation of novels as a sort of machine geared for the investigation of what it
means to be human is, perhaps, somewhat calculating and cold; but in this era
where machines rule the majority of our communications, it is perhaps not an entirely unwarranted claim.
10
If we are to view the novel as a sort of machine with moving, working parts,
we may then be able to see how these parts work and, given the right sort of understanding, come to understand how the parts of this machine might work for us, as
a society, as we struggle to find connection in this atomized age. If we generally understand that we are systematically made subjects through a rather Foucauldian,
panoptic method made possible through advancing technologies and the capitalist
system and that through this systematic subjectivity we have become increasingly
self-subjugating, we can then understand that, as a society, we have arrived at moment when we are intensified separated, or complete atomized, from one another.
However, to blame technology for this atomization would be a mistake.
There are a few scholars dedicated to exploring literature at the turn of the century and, generally, they seem to abhor the way in which technology has marginalized the function the novel. But again, to blame technology as one scholar, Mark
William Roche has, would be a mistake. Roche identifies (blames?) technology as a
force capable of subjecting individuals—isolating, individuating, separating, atomizing—in his critical study, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (123-31). It is not
the technology that does this. As of yet, technology is incapable of independent action, which is precisely what it would take to subject individuals. Technology is an
enabler. Nothing else. It would be a mistake (although perhaps a comforting one)
to blame something faceless and inanimate for the current condition of our society. However, one can find little disagreeable with Roche's assertion that, “Literature should address the great problems of the age and help orient us toward the
ideal; it should regenerate—all of this follows from its dependence on truth in the
broadest sense of the word” (135).
Literature, if nothing else, serves as a function, a machine, if you will, that allows us to address social, political and numerous other problems besetting humanity. It then follows that through its addressing of problems, some orientation toward an "ideal" may be provided. And while technology may be used as a means
with which to separate and atomize society, so it may be that technology can provide a means with which to unite and form connections among the individual
members of society.
11
I am thinking of software programs such as Facebook, Twitter or Skype
here... or even the ability to comment at the end of a New York Times article online
and respond not only to the article, but to other readers' comments. These are just
a few ways in which technology is being used to provide a forum for crosspollination between previously atomized sections of society.
But technology, as great as it may be, is not a solution, in and of itself, to the
relativization of an atomized society. In fact, some people, like Roche, continue to
see technology as a divisive tool and it is my contention that, although technology
has been historically utilized as a divisive tool, technology as we are using it today,
is progressing toward a tool of unification rather than division.
So, in attempting to describe the social forces that Eggers’ generation of writers find problematic at this time, there is another contemporary scholar, Daniel
Grassian, who turns to the notion of “hybrids” because he finds that this is a time
of literature that “cannot be classified by time or era” (2). Unlike Franzen, he feels
the literature of this age is able to have “important social ramification” (5). Because of its ability to engage in complex thought processes and explore complex
issues, literature is necessarily socially relevant. However, Grassian abruptly ends
his argument of the social relevance of the novel with the conclusion that it may
awake an awareness within a reader and dismisses the social-relevance of literature as being unable to be “directly gauged” (6). It is actually the ability of literature to be unequivocally social relevant in today's society that I believe marks today's literature as inherently different from its preceding literatures.
In the following essays, I argue that Dave Eggers is a creator of literature that
moves beyond the postmodern notions of authorship, literature, and literary culture. An examination of his critically acclaimed memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of
Staggering Genius (A.H.W.O.S.G.), and his subsequent literary works, followed by an
exploration of his literary and social involvement in various philanthropic communities, will establish a continuing trend in literary culture at the turn of the 21st century that begins with social relevance and ends in effecting societal change
12
Selling out Celebrity
After highlighting the ways in which most writers, throughout their necessarily solitary careers, truly care about what happens in the world outside of their own and
recognize how disparate this outside world can be from their comparatively luxurious world of enforced solitude, Tobias Wolff poses this question: “Writing alone,
and most often on subjects that don’t directly confront the scandal of our neighbors’ hunger, how can we make our work part of the struggle against it?” (ix).
The answer, it seems, is giving back time, money, and resources to the community—to those hungry neighbors. Authors have been doing this sort of work for
years, from the well-known social services Charles Dickens was instrumental in providing, to the perhaps less well-known efforts put forth by contemporary authors
such as Jonathan Safran-Foer, Arundhati Roy, Nick Hornby, and, of course, the
aforementioned Tobias Wolff.6 Jonathan Safran Foer is involved in fundraising for
Downtown for Democracy. Arundhati Roy moved to New Delhi after winning the
Booker Prize for The God of Small Things. In New Delhi, Roy has opposed the government on several human rights and environmental issues, even spending a night
in jail at one point. Nick Hornby founded, with other parents of autistic children,
the educational supplement, Treehouse. The collection of short stories, Speaking
With the Angel, which he edited and provided an introduction and short story for,
raised money for Treehouse.
The point is not just to say that there are authors giving back time, money
and resources to their communities, but it is to highlight that, within the current celebrity culture, one part of contemporary authorship involves the politicization or
socialization (in most cases, both) of whatever celebrity an author has obtain13
ed—all in the name of alleviating some cause the author deems worthy of championing. We see this type of championing across the arts, from music to movies,
from Bono to Angelina Jolie. However, within our surveillance culture, the celebrity of authorship becomes problematic for various reasons.
Authors, like any other public figures, are now scrutinized in ways that reach
far beyond their work and their bibliography. Keith Gessen’s article, “Eggers, Teen
Idol,” traces the problems Eggers has had in relation to his celebrity and the inevitable public scrutinizing involved in celebrity. Particularly, the question of whether
or not Eggers has “sold out” becomes a focus of the study of Eggers’ celebrity. Successful authors of previous generations did not have to cope with the idea of “selling out.” This is a relatively new phenomenon, one encouraged by the constant
surveillance and basic economics of today’s authorship.
In an interview with Saadi Soudavar of the Harvard Advocate in 2000, Dave Eggers delivers a rant against the culture of selling out. In this interview, he draws
comparisons among such unlikely figures as Kurt Vonnegut, Spike Jonze, and Bob
Dylan to highlight exactly how ridiculous the idea of selling out has become.
“What kind of niggardly imbecile would call Dylan Judas when he plugged into
an amp? What kind of small-hearted person wants an artist to adhere to a set of
rules, to stay forever within a narrow envelope which we’ve created for them?” (6).
This antidisestablishmentarian stance against those who oppose what is largely
termed, “selling out,” marked one of the first, but certainly not the last, time Eggers would address this issue.
Although this rant was, as Eggers admits, something he had wanted to do for
some time and had been further prompted by the success of his best-selling memoir, A.H.W.O.S.G., the rant is also directed toward the very cultural mentality stemming from the end of the early 90s and the public’s hyper-awareness of the economic market’s ability to commodify anything — including everything and anything that questioned the basic consumerism this market was based upon.7 In this
interview, Eggers attacks the very notion of selling out and how this notion was
running rampant throughout the culture, but he does not stop there.
14
Eggers’ notion of being a celebrity author clearly moves beyond the penning
of rants against a cultural trend he finds disconcerting.
In the following exploration of authorship at the turn of the 21st century, I
will be briefly covering some much-written-about territory concerning the historical issue of authorship before uncovering the ways in which one might discuss
authorship. Then, I will explore how Dave Eggers navigates our contemporary celebrity culture in his memoir and has managed to avoid the authorial binary postmodernism imposed upon the previous generation of writers, forcing them to either try to affect their own sort of death through a public disappearance (à la Thomas Pynchon or J. D. Salinger) or embark on their own sort of self-publicity crusades (think: Norman Mailer).
Perhaps in a way unintended by Michel Foucault, later in this series of essays
I will be examining not only the discourse penned by Eggers, but also the “modes
of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation” of his discourse
(“What Is An Author?” 389). These are all issues Eggers attempts to make as transparent as possible in the construction of his celebrity and his use of that celebrity
to tackle the question posed by Tobias Wolff: How can writing fight the disparity
existing between the rich and the poor, the happy and the hungry?However, before we are able to examine these qualities of discourse proposed by Foucault, it is
first necessary to examine how Eggers moves beyond the postmodern tradition of
authorship via a hyper-awareness of his present, past, and future relative situation,
or, chronotope, and its relation with whomever happens to be reading his memoir.
15
A Brief History of Late 20thCentury Authorship
In 1968, Roland Barthes published his subversive article, “The Death of the
Author.” In this article, Barthes champions the notion that authorship is figuratively dead. The author, he argues, “is a modern figure, a figure produced without
doubt by our society in as much, at the end of the Middle Ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual . . . ” (1466). Barthes’ argument follows that the
figure of the author ceases to exist, affects his or her own death, the moment the
author figure transforms utterance to the written word.
Barthes’ essay was groundbreaking in that it enabled the writing, or the text,
to take center stage in literary studies while denouncing the notion of authorial intention and biography as the one meaning to be found within any one text. As Antoine Compagnon notes, “The notion of intertextual dissemination was thus implied by the thesis of the death of the author” (220). The displacing of authorial
intention gave way to the new textual sciences, perhaps most notably, the various
branches of structuralism that have influenced literary theory so much over the
course of the last fifty years.
One year after Barthes published his article, Michel Foucault delivered a lecture titled, “What is an Author?” as a means to exact a method for an examination
of what he terms, “the author-function.”
In Foucault’s terms, the writer does not figuratively die, so much as he or she
disappears. Echoing the structuralist/poststructuralist notion that “Writing unfolds
like a game (jeu) that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits,” Foucault sets the stage for ultimate transgression writing performs, the crea16
tion of “a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears” (378). This
extension of Barthes’ view of the author, from a figuratively dead subject to a disappeared subject, creates a vacuum of meaning for Foucault to examine.
In his examination of the author, Foucault defines the meaning of the
author’s proper name as a classifier, something constantly present, “marking off
the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The
author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates
the status of this discourse within a society and a culture” (382). The author may
die, or disappear, but the signifier of that author’s name remains to define, in some
sense, a text. If we follow Foucault’s argument, we find that the rise of the author
figure has historically coincided with the advancement of technologies and the
various legalities involved with writing and publishing.8 Foucault, however, did not
make this direct link to technology and legality so much as parallel the rise of capitalism with the rise of the author figure.
In his essay, “A World Without Authors,” Compagnon finds Barthes and Foucault’s questioning basically “ideological,” but “little concerned with the actual history of the book and of publishing, or of reading, variants of history that have
fully expanded since then” (222). Instead, what Compagnon finds is that the death
of the author of the text gave rise to the authorship of the reader. He poses the
question: “was it [the death of the author] not . . . a way of promoting the reader
as a substitute of the author, of replacing the author with the reader?” (221).
With postmodernism then, the reader becomes the authority of any given
text. Through the authority of the reader, new historicism, deconstruction, post
structuralism, reader-response theory, and various other schools of thought that favored contextualization and intertextual studies became favored. Authorial intention was dismissed as a romantic, bourgeoisie notion. In essence, with the author
no longer present, the author no longer owned a text, neither in the ideological
nor legal sense of the term.9
Although Barthes and Foucault died in the early 1980s, well before the expansion of the Internet and the rising public awareness of copyright infringement,
Compagnon finds their “outrageous theoretical pronouncements . . . prophetic of
17
the actual world of the book” (221). Compagnon’s argument follows the rise of the
Internet culture wherein Internet users, to subvert the author’s legality concerning
intellectual property, cited “free speech as protected by the First Amendment of
the American Constitution, or freedom of information as protected by the European Convention of the Rights of Man . . . ” and “presented authorship as a form
of censure and tyranny mounted against the freedom to access (freely) any and all
information” (223-49). However, the freedoms allowed by the Internet to exploit
intellectual property rights would come under public scrutiny, most notably with
music servers such as Napster.
Authorship, copyrights and their infringements are discussed in the
media, both conventional and electronic, much more than a generation ago, before the Internet. Thus, ironically, the digital world has
made society more sensitive than in the past to intellectual property
and authorship, including in the paper universe. (Compagnon 22728)
What Compagnon does not note, though, is that with the increased public sensitivity to intellectual property and authorship comes the increased public interest to
whom this intellectual property and authorship belong.
With an increase in public interest and the ability of the Internet, television,
and traditional print media to make themselves available to whomever was interested, a new form of critical public had been born. It is this critical public that has
given rise to the contemporary author celebrity and that is capable of questioning
the motives, intentions, and factuality of the author through the Internet. The critical public can now read an author's webpage, Facebook posting, Twitter account
and double-check any information they might find against a seemingly infinite
number of newspapers, blogs, encyclopedias, wikis and various other "factorientated" text on the web.
So what ends up differentiating contemporary authorship from the modes of
authorship existing prior to Barthes’ authorial death is that both the author and
the reader are participating in an awareness of the histories of philosophical discourse concerning their relation. Even though the average contemporary reader
18
may not have read Barthes and Foucault, or even Arnold, Pope, or Wordsworth,
the thoughts and philosophies of these thinkers concerning author/reader relations has permeated public thought and helped shape the cultural mindset.
If the absolute relativity of the postmodern helped continually define smaller
and smaller sects of the population, moving from the fragmentation expounded by
early modernists to the utter atomization of postmodern society, then today’s atomized individual has a grasp of the relativity of absolute meanings (whether they
stem from the author or the reader) and is searching for ways in which to maintain, among other things, the importance and meaning obviously existent in both
the writing and reading of literature.
Which is to say that the contemporary reader can, today, use technology found
on the Internet to figuratively "connect the dots."
So the writers know their relative positions in the world. And the readers know
their relative positions in the world. In Bakhtin's terms, we might refer to this as
"chronotopic10 awareness." However, it seems that literary criticism is suffering
most because of this relativity.
Relativity is problematic. This is especially so for criticism because it allows
for multiple meanings and truths to occur simultaneously and, for the most part,
criticism is interested in finding a singular truth or meaning. However, relativity is
extremely important when discussing the novel, especially the contemporary
novel, as the contemporary novel of today reflects the relative atomization of society. In fact, the only way to explain any meaning through such a completely individualized society is through the understanding of relativity, the various chronotopes it allows, and the connectivism involved in maintaining relations between
these chronotopes. The chronotope operates much in the manner Eggers finds in
his metaphor of a lattice:
The lattice [is something] that we are either a part of or apart from.
The lattice is the connective tissue. The lattice is everyone else, the
lattice is my people, collective youth, people like me, hearts ripe,
brains aglow. The lattice is everyone I have ever known . . . I see us
as one, as a vast matrix, an army, a whole, each one of us responsi19
ble to one another . . . a human ocean moving as one, the undulating, the wave-making . . . the connections between people, the people you know, and that know you, and know your situation and your
story and your troubles . . . (A.H.W.O.S.G. 184-85)
Eggers’ lattice, like Bakhtin’s chronotope, serves to explain how it is that people,
from their individual, confining, time/space, have the ability to connect. The chronotope really is a four-dimensional matrix linking people through time and space.
As Mikhail Bakhtin states, “The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic”
(“Forms of Time” 85).
If we take literature to be, in essence, a way in which to reflect on what it
means to be human, to be a man or woman, then we must take into account the
various relativities this reflection necessitates and the fact that these reflections are
grounded in four-dimensional occurrences–one occurring at the moment of writing, the other occurring at the moment of reading.
In his essay, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” Bakhtin traces
various time/space related patterns which, he argues, are the base construct forming genres. “It can even be said,” he states, “that it is precisely the chronotope that
defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the
chronotope is time” (“Forms of Time” 85). Throughout the various examples Bakhtin relates—from the Greek Romance to the Rabelaisian novel—he traces the
significant chronotopes necessary for each novel to truly be considered a part of
any singular genre, such as the adventure romance.
Within the adventure romance, Bakhtin finds a “subtle and highly developed
type of adventure-time” (87, original emphasis). Within this certain genre, Bakhtin
traces the time/space moments, the chronotopes, that make this story possible and
are, in fact, necessary for this genre to achieve its completion. Bakhtin finds that:
There is a boy and a girl of marriageable age. Their lineage is unknown, mysterious. . . . They are remarkable for their exceptional beauty.
They are also exceptionally chaste. They meet each other unexpectedly,
usually during some festive holiday. A sudden and instantaneous passion
flares up between them. . . . They are confronted with obstacles that
20
retard and delay their union. The lovers are parted, they seek one another, find one another; again they lose each other, again they find
each other . . . (87-88, original emphasis)
Bakhtin continues finding time and place markers within the adventure romance, finding various characters and themes that play an indispensable part of
achieving an adventure romance story. In the case of the adventure romance, the
story inevitably concludes with the lovers being happily married. Bakhtin repeatedly finds these time and space necessities within Greek romance, Chivalric romance, English realism, French realism, ancient biography, and other codified genres until the effect of constructing a genre via finding that genre’s necessary chronotopes is achieved.
Bakhtin openly bases his argument of the importance of chronotope in literature on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity because Einstein had proved the inseparability of space from time. This inseparability of each space from its corresponding
time provides Bakhtin with a means to trace environments, characters, and any
other piece within a story that occupies space, and link these space-occupying
pieces of a story with the corresponding moment or event inextricably linked to
them so as to prove how genres are chronotopically constructed11. Bakhtin ends his
essay by briefly explaining the ways in which the author and reader function from
their different time/space relations, finding that the author, even if that author
were writing an autobiography, exists chronotopically outside the world he/she is
depicting. Thus, the author produces texts necessarily constructed with the anticipation of a reader/listener, making the text itself aware of possible reactions to
itself.12
Where Bakhtin tends to dismiss the chronotopic relationship between the
reader and writer, Michael Holquist finds the chronotopes of the reader/writer of
utmost importance when discussing literature. This is especially important if we
are discussing literature of an age when every person within the society is hyperaware of the relativity of each person’s situation—the individual chronotopes accorded each individual, living or dead, writing or reading. Although Bakhtin never
elaborates on his vision of the chronotope to either the author or the reader, he
was clearly concerned with the idea of authorship. “For the novel the issue of
21
authorship is not therefore just one issue among others, as it is for the other genres:
it is a formal and generic concern as well” (“Forms of Time” 161). Because all
other genres of writing are formalized, Bakhtin argues, the position of the author
is “dictated by the genre itself ” (161).
With the work of novel, however, there is a problem because the novel is undefinable and constantly transgressing whatever borders and boundaries appear.13
This is the reason chronotopes become extremely important when discussing novel
writing.
“Chronotope, like situation, always combines spatial and temporal factors
with an evaluation of their significance as judged from a particular point of view”
(Holquist 152). Chronotopes allow for an exploration of relativity that brings together, “not just two concepts, but four: a time, plus its value; and a space, plus its
value” (Holquist 155). In discussing authorship, then, it is just as important to explore the authorial chronotope as it is to explore the chronotope accorded the
reader.
In essence, dialogism in literature is the interaction between the author, the
reader, the characters (if they exist) and the world outside of each of them. Dialogism being “a philosophy of the trees as opposed to a philosophy of the forest,”
conceives of “society as a simultaneity of uniqueness” (Holquist 153):
Unlike some Reader Reception theories, dialogism does not assume
that either the author or the reader is absolutely free to construct his
or her own relation between a pattern and its distortion. It argues
that the time/space relation of any particular text will always be perceived in the context of a larger set of time/space relations that obtain in the social and historical environments in which it is read.
This emphasis on the text’s groundedness in a social and historical
context at every point of its existence is one of dialogism’s distinctive features. (Holquist 141, original emphasis)
This ability of chronotopes to axiologically meet one another, explain the ways
in which any text will have various shades of meaning in accordance with any
given set of chronotopes, and to explain how contextualization functions, is the
22
foundation for dialogism. Furthermore, it is the chronotope that provides the environment for dialogism to exist, allowing for the simultaneous existence of a myriad
of voices, utterances, inflections, meanings, and truths—the simultaneous existence of which creates the dialogic sphere, a sphere, he argues, which exists in
each and every novel.
23
Dave Eggers, Chronotopically
Aware and Dialogically
Dynamic
Thus far, we have been discussing authorship and writing primarily in regards to
novel creation. Semi-problematically, Eggers’ A.H.W.O.S.G., is marked as a memoir
“Based on a True Story.” However, one should take into account recent critical approaches regarding the memoir; Eggers’ own acknowledgment that A.H.W.O.S.G.
is not purely nonfiction and that much of it is “fictionalized in varying degrees, for
various purposes” (A.H.W.O.S.G. ii); and Eggers’ own proclivity toward dismissing
the distinctions made between literary nonfiction (under whose umbrella
A.H.W.O.S.G. may clearly be placed) and fiction as meaningless (Sullivan 2). Additionally, Grassian finds, Eggers’ memoir blurs any distinctions that may be made
regarding fiction and nonfiction: thus it may be viewed through critical lenses often reserved for critical studies regarding novel creation (6).14 After all, if the novel
is the only genre as-yet unestablished, uncodified, and if part of the novel’s nature
is to adapt various established genres to infect them “with its [the novel’s] spirit of
process and inconclusiveness,” it would be difficult to argue for A.H.W.O.S.G. not
being included in the pantheon of novels which have historically adapted various
other genres only to permeate these genres with “laughter, irony, humor, elements
of self-parody and . . . an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary present (the openended
present)” (“Epic and Novel” 7).15
Prototypically, for the turn-of-the-21st century generation, Eggers is extremely
interested in the individual chronotopes and the relativities afforded each individual. Within A.H.W.O.S.G. the attention Eggers pays to the relationships between
chronotopes begins, fittingly, with himself and his story. The main narrative of
Eggers’ memoir opens with a scene of him and his mother. His mother lies on the
24
couch, suffering from stomach cancer. She is having a nosebleed. Because of her
low white blood cell count, any bleeding could be life ending. Eggers takes this moment to intermittently give details about the tragedy that has befallen his family.
Like the cancer that has infected both of his parents, Eggers fears that it has
grown outward and spread to the rest of his family (namely, his siblings, Beth, Bill,
and Toph). Because of his critical eye, he is continually aware of what it is other
people must be thinking about him and his family:
But the last time she went upstairs was weeks ago. Now she is on the
couch, not moving from the couch, reclining on the couch during
the day and sleeping there at night, in her nightgown, with the TV
on until dawn, a comforter over her, toe to neck. People know.
(A.H.W.O.S.G. 2)
These last two words, “People know,” are what will play an incredibly large role
in the formation of Eggers’ psyche throughout the memoir. It is truly amazing, the
power of these two words. Eggers allows us to feel this power as it is, and has been,
felt throughout this turn of the century. Oddly, these words have, at once, a comforting and oppressive feeling.
On one hand, it is scary, strange, and possibly oppressive that people would
know (or that you would even think that they would know or assume) the most personal and tragic events of your life. This form of knowing, of assuming knowledge, is related to the idea articulated in Foucault’s famous essay, “Panopticism,”
that persons become self-subjugating because of the fear of surveillance.16
This self-subjugating fear is exemplified by another passage from
A.H.W.O.S.G. in which Eggers is again hyper-conscious of people having information about him to which they should not be privy: “A family walks by outside, two
parents, a small child in snowpants and a parka, a stroller. They do not look
through our window. It is hard to tell if they know. They might know but are being
polite. People know” (13). The people of this passage are harmless—two parents
and “a small child in snowpants and a parka, a stroller.” There is nothing threatening about them. They are benign. Yet, Eggers’ paranoia continues:
Some people know. Of course they know.
25
People know.
Everyone knows.
Everyone is talking. Waiting. (14)
Eggers’ paranoia of everyone knowing is the reflection of his unique chronotope, reflecting back on his life in the early 1990’s from the latter half of the same
decade. Eggers reacts violently to this form of knowing, this form of voyeurism he
imagines from benign neighbors. In the paragraph following the above passage,
Eggers imagines various deaths for people that know, that would consider his family’s situation as “pathetique, grotesque . . . gossip fodder” (14). He fantasizes strangling, choking, breaking the necks and backs of people he and his family disdain.
For others, such as the non-threatening family with the stroller, he reserves fantasies of running over them with an automobile.
Eggers’ personal chronotope, both as author and subject, are part of the reason he is a prototypical figure for this generation of writers. He is part of the violence, the rebellion, that was prevalent throughout the early part of the decade,
but his growth moves beyond this into a more contemporary realm wherein he realizes the possible benefits of people knowing.
The knowledge that “people know” can also be a comforting notion in that so
many people do share with you the knowledge of your successes and the heartbreak of your tragedies. This is the other side of this generation's interaction with
panoptic surveillance. Not all is the bleak, oppressiveness of Foucault’s panopticon.
Eggers understands the possibilities of communicating, of having people
know, being somehow comforting as well, “because telling as many people as possible about it helps, he [the author] thinks, to dilute the pain and bitterness and thus
facilitate its flushing from his soul . . . ” (A.H.W.O.S.G. xxiiv).17 For this very same
reason, Eggers attempted to become a cast member of MTV’s hit television show,
The Real World.
In a mock interview with Laura Folger, a producer or casting director, that
takes place about midway through Eggers’ memoir, he returns to this idea of com26
municating hurt. Folger asks, “Why do you want to share your suffering?” and Eggers responds, “By sharing it I will dilute it” (183). This idea, the idea of sharing
your hurt with other people, becomes a way in which a member of society is able
to reclaim part of the panoptic surveillance for personal means.
This—the oppressiveness of shared knowledge versus the comfort of people
actually sharing knowledge—is the overarching dialectic Eggers struggles with
throughout his memoir. Because of this constant dialogue Eggers allows himself to
have, he is able to strike at the very heart of a main component of this cultural period’s character. Like the character of this period, Eggers remembers being violent
and violently wanting to protect his privacy; however, at the point of the memoir
when he is its author, he has transformed into a person also reflective of the cultural character, a person recognizing that, behind the obvious ridiculousness surrounding the reality television craze and cultural want for memoirs and for reallife stories, there remained, at heart, a larger need—a need to communicate human things, like “pain and bitterness”—so that one might be able to move beyond
the privacy of one’s own private hells.
In internalizing this primary, culturally reflective dialectic, Eggers is able to engage directly with the reader; which is to say, because he is incredibly aware of the
construct of his own chronotope, he is able to imagine the possible chronotopes of
his imagined reader. This is present in the aforementioned lattice, but it is sprinkled throughout his memoir.
When discussing his own reservations about the title of his memoir, Eggers
manages to have a brief discussion of what potential readers might have thought
upon reading the title. But of course, this discussion is taking place twenty-five
pages into the elaborate preface of his memoir, long after anyone who had reservations enough about the title to put it down, had most likely done just that. Eggers
ends this short discussion with a typical (for Eggers) means in which to draw the
reader closer, to make a chronotopic connections between the different times and
spaces he, as the author, and we, as the reader, are forced to occupy. “Oh,
pshaw—does it even matter now?,” he writes, “Hells no. You’re here, you’re in,
we’re havin’ a party!” (A.H.W.O.S.G. xxvi).18 His use of contemporary colloquial
27
speech (i.e. “Hells no”), along with his maintaining a mutual, festive atmosphere,
allows us to enter a dialogic sphere with Eggers.
This writer/reader dialogic sphere is reinforced throughout the elaborate preface with all of its various digressions.
After disclosing the money he was paid to write this book, Eggers offers to give
the first two hundred readers of the book who send in evidence of their having
purchased and read the book, a check for five dollars. As a footnote to this, Eggers
writes:
It should go without saying that if you’ve checked this book out
from the library, or are reading it in paperback, you are much, much
too late. Come to think of it, you may be reading this far, far in the
future—it’s probably being taught in all the schools! Do tell: What’s
it like in the future? Is everyone wearing robes? Are the cars
rounder, or less round? Is there a women’s soccer league yet?
(A.H.W.O.S.G. xxvii)
These questions, put forth by the author directly to the reader, reinforce the dialogue of the reader/writer and stretch across the individual chronotopes of the
reader and writer. The writer, in this case, is seeking from his chronotope to connect, to have a dialogue, with the reader in whatever chronotope (from Eggers-aswriter’s perspective, some chronotope of the indistinct future) the reader is currently inhabiting. The reader here, of course, being entirely unknown by Eggers.
In some respects, this is reminiscent of the involvement of the reader in Italo
Calvino’s postmodern classic, If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveller, in that the function
of the novel is recognized as incomplete without the involvement of the reader. In
Calvino’s novel, however, he dictates the action of the reader and the reader, in effect, becomes another character within a novel; whereas Eggers leaves the action
of the reader open and un-prescribed. Eggers’ reader can choose to enter or exit
the dialogic sphere of the text at any time and is able to choose, or not choose, to
reply to the various interactions Eggers prods.
28
Unlike reader involvement in a work such as Calvino's, what this shared
knowledge of each person’s inherent relativity does is open the forum of Eggers’
memoir to distinguish it from other types of chronotopic interaction.
During a school function, Eggers again points to the unique status he and his
brother share because of their mutual orphanage and his assumed role as Toph’s
father. Eggers continually points to how he is looked at and judged by the other
parents—parents that he finds “interesting only in their prototypical Berkeleyness” (A.H.W.O.S.G. 98). The open house is anything but open in Eggers’ view. Besides the paranoid judging by other parents he intuits, he realizes the scripted nature of their (his and his brother’s) situation. The script they follow highlights the
pre-scripted nature of the conversations they are privy to among the “normal”
families of Berkeley. When the person (in this case, a mother) is told that their parents are dead, the person (grabbing Eggers’ forearm) says, “Oh, I’m sorry”
(A.H.W.O.S.G. 100, original emphasis). Later in this scripted conversation, when Eggers is forced to disclose the nature of his parents’ death from cancer just five
weeks apart, the “Oh my god” response feels sincere (102). By the end of this
script, Eggers draws attention, once again, to the feelings of his being watched, being on stage (as if being an actor in a script was not enough):
(MOTHER smiles and squeezes BROTHER’s forearm one more time, then
pats it. BROTHERs look to AUDIENCE, wink, and then break into a fabulous Fossean dance number, lots of kicks and high-stepping, a few throws and
catches, a big sliding-across-the-stage-on-their-knees thing, then some more jumping, some strutting, and finally, a crossing-in-midair front flip via hidden trampoline, with both of them landing perfectly, just before the orchestra, on one knee,
hands extended toward audience, grinning while breathing heavily. The crowd
stands and thunders. The curtain falls. They thunder still.) (A.H.W.O.S.G.
103, original emphasis)
What is, perhaps, most disconcerting about the scripted nature of this conversation is how real it does feel—how much of this conversation is, in fact, what would
(and probably did) happen. Once more, the need for Eggers to continually address
the performance of his situation because of those two words—“people know”—is
brought to the forefront of his narrative.
29
Shortly after this script follows a passage in which Toph breaks out of his
“narrative time-space continuum [his narrative chronotope] to cloyingly talk
about the book itself ” (A.H.W.O.S.G. ix). Eggers has Toph say: “what I see is less a
problem with form, all that garbage, and more a problem of conscience. You’re
completely paralyzed with guilt about relating all this in the first place, especially
the stuff earlier on,” (the “stuff earlier on” presumably being the accounts of his
parents’ demise) (A.H.W.O.S.G. 115). What this accomplishes within the midst of
Eggers’ memoir is allow him to confront the problem of content over form.
In continuing to address and dismiss the constant gimmickry involved in the
construction of his memoir (thus, of course, giving a larger commentary on the inherent gimmickry of all writing), Eggers allows himself the freedom to focus on
the content of his narrative and the central problems complicating it. That is, his
awareness of the individuated chronotopes accorded each individual allows him to
address the main dialectic (the possible oppressiveness of shared knowledge versus
the possible comfort of people actually sharing in your personal knowledge) which
complicates and informs the majority of his narrative.
30
Ironization
“This {book} may be the bridge from the Age of Irony to Some Other As Yet Unnamed Age that we’ve been waiting for.”
from The Christian Science Monitor review located in the beginning of the paperback version of A.H.W.O.S.G.
If the overarching argument of these essays is that Dave Eggers’ work (beginning with A.H.W.O.S.G.) is indicative of a cultural move beyond the postmodern,
then it would be a horrible mistake to dismiss the postmodern proclivities amply
apparent within A.H.W.O.S.G. After all, many of the reviews that appeared at the
time A.H.W.O.S.G. hit the bookshelves echoed Sarah Lyall’s opinion, that the story
is a “story about storytelling itself, about being self-consciously ironic in the particular, cynical way of Mr. Eggers’ skittish, self-referential generation . . . ” (2). Lyall, like most other critics at the time of A.H.W.O.S.G.’s publication, continues on,
noting how the memoir is also about, “being young and idealistic and funny and
full of life even as the world falls apart around you” (2). Part of the appeal of
A.H.W.O.S.G. is its literary playfulness, its understanding of being a story about storytelling, its postmodern self-referentiality and self-consciousness. However, to label it a cynical or ironic work would be a mistake. Within A.H.W.O.S.G., Eggers acknowledges the “gimmickry inherent in all this [‘this’ being anything related to
‘The Knowingness About The Book’s Self-Consciousness Aspect’]” (xxvi-xxvii).
Gimmickry there is in abundance (and we will be discussing this shortly). The two
markers—cynicism and ironization—Terry Eagleton might relate to the postmod-
31
ern mentality, which gave rise to postmodernism’s skeptical nature, are truly absent throughout the majority of Eggers’ story (Eagleton 13).
About eight months after the first publication of A.H.W.O.S.G., the hardback
version, Eggers finished an appendix to the book, Mistakes We Knew We Were Making, printed on the reverse of the paperback edition. This appendix addresses,
among other things, the issue of irony within A.H.W.O.S.G. In reading this appendix, it is apparent how much Eggers wishes to distance himself from the cold irony
of the postmodern mentality. The following passage originally appeared in small
font on the copyright page of the appendix:
The author wishes to reserve the right to use spaces like this, and to
work within them, for no other reason than it entertains him and a
small coterie of readers. It does not mean that anything ironic is happening. It does not mean that someone is being pomo or meta or cute.
It simply means that someone is writing in small type, in a space usually devoted to copyright information, because doing so is fun. (original emphasis)
Because much of what critics refer to as the “irony” of A.H.W.O.S.G. is in direct
response the instance of postmodern happening within it, it is necessary to see
that—if by using the word “irony,” we are referring to one’s use of language to signify some sort of opposite effect, this effect of ironization is rarely reached within
A.H.W.O.S.G.—especially throughout the instances of postmodern playfulness. If
anything, what Eggers has retained from the postmodern is the desire, or ability, to
go beyond the confines of the “traditional” narrative while forsaking the cold detachment, the skepticism generally correlated with the use of postmodern irony.
Later in the appendix, Eggers clarifies his stance on his lack of irony usage in
three pages of lengthy, small-type in which he finds that “what confuses some people is the use of a device here or there, a formal trick or innovation that this sort
of reader finds bothersome” (34). This “sort of reader” Eggers might have in
mind are those who look upon anything using the devices made popular within
the period of modernism and postmodernism as non-essential to the central meaning of a text19.
32
Many of the “tricks” Eggers employs involve the use of the paratextual. Gerard Genette, in his discussion of paratexts, finds that there are two types of paratexts that accompany books in contemporary society: epitexts and paritexts.
Epitexts exist outside of the world of the book and are comprised of anything
which refers to the book in the media, marketplace, and generally, in society.
Paritexts are the parts of the book not comprising the main narrative–the dust
jacket, binding, copyright page, author’s blurb, author’s photo, preface, forward,
title, et cetera. While Genette argues these paratexts exist to support the main narrative, in the text of A.H.W.O.S.G., Eggers has created, as Brouillette notes, an “elision between these separate fields” (5). In essence, through his elevation of the paratextual and his authorial involvement with its creation, Eggers has acknowledged
the postmodern mentality while maintaining a literary straightforwardness which
is capable of carrying him beyond postmodern.
33
The Acceptance of
Gimmickry
At the beginning of Howards End, E. M. Forster foregrounds his novel with the oftquoted phrase, “Only Connect.” It is this very idea that does, in fact, permeate the
majority of all written works—the desire to connect. Within Eggers’ work, it is often central to the desire of his text. The documentation of real events, as Eggers
explains, even though they might be fictionalized to some extent, can be used “as a
tool for simple connectivity for its own sake, a testing of waters, a stab at engagement with a mass of strangers . . . ” (Mistakes We Knew We Were Making 10).
To connect, though, it is implied that some things are disconnected, detached,
or somehow unnaturally apart; and that some thing, some distance or space must
be crossed, regardless of borders or lines, so that these things that need connecting
may be reconciled. It is this desire to connect, to leap from the confinement of the
written word, that permeates A.H.W.O.S.G. However, as Eggers’ book is problematically informed as to the various methods of critically “reading” a text, it becomes
necessary to define the many figurative (and, in some cases, literal) borders which
Eggers attempts to cross, and, perhaps more importantly, answer the questions:
How are these borders created?
Why does Eggers feel these borders need crossing?
Thus, we may understand the ways in which he seeks to “connect” with his
readers. To answer these questions of connectivity, an exploration of the power
structures creating the confinements Eggers is forced to work within must take
place. Then, an examination of how Eggers’ exploitation of the aesthetic subverts
34
these various power structures—questioning their claim to authenticity—may take
place.
In discussing the imposition of borders, we must discuss the forces that have created these borders. Michel Foucault, in discussing the penal code in the advent of
modern penitentiaries writes, “the penalty must be nothing more than the deprivation of liberty; like our present rulers, but with all the freshness of his language . . .
” (Discipline and Punish 248). Foucault might just as well have been discussing the
problem of colonialism or the modern empiricism of anglo-capitalism as a form
of authority, which imposes a punishment consisting not only of “deprivation,”
but also the enforcement of the authoritative “language.” If we were to go one
step further and read Foucault’s prison as a “publishing house” with all the “criminal authors” inside, it would not be hard to see how “the prison makes possible,
even encourages, the organization of a milieu of delinquents” or how “being on
the loose, being unable to find work, leading the life of a vagabond” would necessarily lead to a sort of “recidivism” against the prison of publishing, a consistent
relapse into a rebellious, undesirable type of behavior (Discipline and Punish 267). It
is this Foucauldian definition of an authoritative and oppressive structure that
marks the 39-page preface to A.H.W.O.S.G.; indeed, it is the idea of the book itself
as an imposed form, thus a “deprivation of liberty,” which leads Eggers into the acknowledgment and consequent playful subversion of this very same imposed
authority throughout his text.
One of the many known ways a subversion of power occurs is when the language of the oppressor (in this case, the publishing company) is appropriated by a
subaltern person or group (in this case, the author) and then used by the oppressed
in a manner consistent with that individual’s mores. The Nigerian novelist,
Chinua Achebe (among many other notable proponents for multicultural readings
of texts) upholds the appropriation of language as one of the most important tools
minorities have available to them in the struggle to be heard in, or rebel against,
the traditionally white male academy. However, where some discuss adopting the
codified language of the academy, others, such as Randall Kennedy, propose
adopting what Bakhtin would identify as the folk language of the dominant culture.
35
In Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, a book concerning the history
and appropriation of folk language, Randall Kennedy asserts that blacks “have
added a positive meaning to nigger, just as women, gays, lesbians, poor whites, and
children born out of wedlock have defiantly appropriated and revalued such
words as bitch, cunt, queer, dyke, redneck, cracker and bastard” (38, original emphasis). This method of appropriating the quotidian, plebian language of the
dominant culture (in this case, racist, white, slave-owning culture) is another available to marginalized groups, though not the same method generally discussed by
Achebe et al. However, in noting a history of linguistic appropriation taking
place, an assertion of Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic is being made.
Throughout history, minority cultural groups have used language as a subversive force against the dominant cultural group. Bakhtin finds the dialogic as “a
struggle among socio-linguistic points of view” (“Discourse in the Novel” 273).
The question here, within the context of Eggers’ memoir, is not so much a question of race or culture (though unfortunately that is where many of the lines of history have been drawn), but, like post-colonialism, it is a question of imposed
power or imposed governance, and, more specifically, what “language” to use to
undermine the compelling power of the publishing house. I am making this parallel between a method of post-colonial linguistic appropriation and Eggers because,
as a subject, he finds himself colonized by capitalist culture and, as an author, he is
non-existent according to most postmodern criticisms. Thus, he is seeking a way in
which to reclaim his authority as a subject and author. Eggers finds a partial answer in his subsequent appropriation of the corporate language,20 the language of
his suppressor.
On the copyright page—the page in a text traditionally given over entirely to
the assertion of capitalism, property, and all things corporate—Eggers, rather
untraditionally, begins prefacing his text.21 His copyright page begins inconspicuously enough with the rote, “All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form,” before launching into short missive on the
influence of big business:
Published in the United States by Simon & Schuster, a division of a
larger and more powerful company called Viacom Inc., which is
36
wealthier and more populous than eighteen of the fifty states of
America, all of Central America, and all of the former Soviet Republics combined and tripled. That said, no matter how big such
companies are, and how many things they own, or how much
money they have or make or control, their influence over the daily
lives and hearts of individuals, and thus, like ninety-nine percent of
what is done by official people in cities like Washington, or Moscow,
or Sao Paulo or Auckland, their effect on the short, fraught lives of
human beings who limp around and sleep and dream of flying
through bloodstreams, who love the smell of rubber cement and
think of space travel while having intercourse, is very very small,
and so hardly worth worrying about.
Clearly, part of this quote is conscientiously embedded in the notion of “play,”
and this idea of “play” should not be preemptively dismissed as it illuminates the
construction of the sandbox (if you will) that Eggers is playing in and makes what
he is saying that much more poignant. The acknowledgment of Viacom Inc. as a
controlling source of power on par with the governing of states and countries calls
attention to the borders of the sandbox he must work within; and the refusal to
fully succumb to that power,22 the throwing sand from the box, the ability to play
within the commercially imposed construction, makes “their effect on the short,
fraught lives of human beings . . . very very small,” and, “hardly worth worrying
about.” This controlled acknowledgment and dismissal is crucial to the understanding of Eggers’ text as a work attempting to define and defy the imposition of
commercially imposed borders—and discounting them as often as possible—in an
effort to “break down the wall not only between himself and the reader, but between himself and his entire generation” (Grassian 43).
As Sodonie Smith and Julia Watson note in, “The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography: Extravagant Lives, Extravagant Questions,” an essay discussing the contemporary autobiography, “if Eggers’ narrative marks out a public-private boundary,
his flamboyant framing and publication clearly transgress it” (11). It is the idea of
reaching beyond the commercially imposed border, while attempting to maintain
a sense of private self that we may see as another framing of this text. In the mid37
dle of his narrative, Eggers marks with astounding clarity his idea of the public/
private boundary through the metaphor of a snake shedding skin, wherein he
views stories and personal anecdotes as being the skin of a snake that must be shed
and left behind. After the story is related or the anecdote told, “The skin is no
longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off
and he and everyone could look at it” (188-89). He does not see the relation of his
personal life as problematic in that he maintains himself currently, “in the now,”
like the snake looking back on its shed skin; but the relation and exploitation of his
personal life as a means of financial/commercial gain is problematic23 and is the
reason behind his consistent acknowledgment of all things subjecting him to this
predicament.
If we can understand the boundary dividing public and private as being twofold, that is, if we can understand that while the public airing of one’s private
story is problematic in that it creates an impersonal commercial border while one
is trying to be personal, yet also, conveniently, creates an untranscendable publicprivate boundary, then we may be able to understand the powers that are at work
within the construction of this text. Eggers, in the writing of his memoir, maintains a hyper-sensitivity to the powers that are subjecting him to inhabit, both personally and textually, a certain construction.
Foucault defines the word, subject, as having two meanings: “subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience
or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and
makes subject to” (“The Subject and Power” 130). Eggers’ hyper-sensitivity to all
things subjecting him is, in essence, his self-awareness, his conscientious identity. It
is through the definition of the borders framing this other form of power “which
subjugates and makes subject to”—the controlling force of and/or dependence on
a third party—that we are able to identify the aesthetic constraints as commercially imposed. Furthermore, we may glimpse at how Eggers begins his assault on
this commercial imposition through his exploration and exploitation of the aesthetic surface of the written word.
If the surface of a text, “is made up of items concretely represented and temporally arranged (the temporal arrangement includes plot and other kinds of pat38
tern),” which enable us, the readers, to “perceive the immediately felt qualities of
a human ‘world,’ experiences in the imagination, not through any one sense”
(Baker 100), then, as this is a work aware of meta-nonfiction forms, it would seem
logical that Eggers would draw attention to this aesthetic construction, this perceived simulacra, which creates the surface of a text, so that he may point to yet
another border he must breach to connect with his reader.
Richard Shusterman writes that the aesthetic experience relies on many
things, not least of which is its “vital phenomenological vividness, through which
not only art’s pleasures but its other values (cognitive, ethical, etc.) can emerge
with more intensity and life” (52). The very notion of aesthetics implies a qualitative judgment in which a person makes a decision as to what is or is not beautiful
or sublime. The beautiful and sublime (or melancholic and sad) are what Shusterman refers to as “art’s pleasures.” However, within the novel, as Baker has noted,
it is the relation of “plot and other kinds of pattern” to “concretely represented”
people, places and things from which a reader traditionally draws an aesthetic appreciation. Or, as Goldman writes, “The structure of a novel is defined not by relations among phenomenal elements . . . but rather by elements of plot and character depiction as these develop and interrelate” (27). The aesthetic appreciation of
the written word has not traditionally been a phenomenological one in the sense
that what is written is observed by one (or more) of the five senses, but rather, that
what is written is intuited by the mind. It is where the mind intuits the relationships between “elements of plot and character depiction” that Shusterman’s
“other values” may be determined.
Eggers is aware of the aesthetics and “other values” found within the constructed narrative. He is endlessly self-conscious of this awareness (at one point
writing that he “plans to be clearly, obviously aware of his knowingness about his
self-consciousness of self-referentiality”) and, as we have noted, displays a near textbook awareness of how narratives are told and reconstructed to achieve an aesthetically pleasurable experience (A.H.W.O.S.G. xxvi-xxvii). Thus, he attempts to
draw as much attention to the reconstruction of his history as often as possible
within his memoir. Although it may not have been their intended point, Smith and
Watson note that Eggers, through “highlighting its [his memoir’s] rearrangements
39
and masking of experiential history,” manages to assert a greater critically authentic and uncontrived truth. Smith and Watson then find, “The apparent lack of contrivance in most memoirs, by contrast . . . to be a deeper kind of contrivance” (7).
It is exactly this “deeper kind of contrivance” that Eggers seeks to thwart. Not
only a type of narrative contrivance, but a contrivance within the power of the
publishing system. So when Eggers writes, “For all the author’s bluster elsewhere,
this is not, actually, a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been fictionalized
in varying degrees, for various purposes” (ix), not only is he attempting to pierce
the confinements of nonfiction, he challenges the historic authenticity of the publishing system; for if “the crucial distinction between biography (or history) and
the novel lies not in the nature of the aesthetic surface but in the relation of that
surface to facts” (Baker 103), then wherever the fact-fiction relationship has been
left unexamined in a narrative, there remains a place for scrutiny and doubt as to
the authenticity of the text. It then stands to reason these other unquestioned
texts, unwillingly or otherwise, have taken part in the contrivance of the narrative
form as it has been historically and commercially represented. “Conceivably,”
Baker argues, “there could be all degrees of accuracy, from pure fact to pure fancy.
But few if any literary masterpieces stand at either extreme” (103).24
As a means to illustrate the uncomfortableness inherent in the virtually imperceptible border separating fact from fiction, Eggers offers this advice, “if you are
bothered by the idea of this being real, you are invited to do what the author
should have done, and what authors and readers have been doing since the beginning of time: PRETEND IT’S FICTION,” as a blatant attempt to further blur
the fact/fiction border (xxi). Eggers continues arguing for the obscuration of the
fact/fiction border in offering to mail a complete digital manuscript of his book—
with all the names and locations changed so that the entire work may then be a
“complete” work of fiction—to anyone requesting it25. How Eggers questions this
border is illuminating on another level, as well. Using some of Eggers’ original language, Smith and Watson find that “Eggers reminds us of the memoir’s theme of
‘weirdly terrible’ deaths as a way of being ‘chose’ and its relation to the ‘search for
support, a sense of community’” (8). It is these last two things, the search for support and communal sense, that provide a purpose behind Eggers’ literal offerings26
40
to his readership and reasons for his reach beyond the borders of the book itself
and into a sort of interaction with the life of the reader, subverting yet another border—this one between reader and writer.
Of course, it is one thing to talk about the textual surface structure of a narrative as a form of subversion, and quite another to look at the surface of the book
itself.27 Stein Haugom Olsen writes, “the imaginative reconstruction of the literary
work by help of a set of general concepts enabling the reader to refer to and interrelate the textual features of the work, constitutes his [or her] understanding and
appreciation of the text as a literary work of art” (529). But if an observer reconstructs a written work in his or her imagination and the textual features of the
work are fragmented, appearing in places other than what is traditionally expected—such as on the aforementioned copyright page—then how does this narrative
intricacy effect the imaginative reconstruction? How do we, as readers, go about
the process of re-imagining this scattered text with excerpted parts of chapters
here, copyright blurbs there, a picture of a stapler here, factual dialogue somewhere else with its fictional counterpart alongside it? How do we get beyond the
surface of the textual challenge imposed by the author? Is it enough to identify the
borders of the book, look at the ways in which they are challenged or broken, and
then take all this “play” as the author suggests—as “simply a device, a defense, to
obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole
story” (A.H.W.O.S.G. xxvii)? If we do look at all this “gimmickry” as “simply a device” or “a defense,” an implication as to another construction, the construction
of a metaphorical shield around the “black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow
at the core of this whole story” is made.
However, it is necessary to take this “reconstruction of the literary work” a step
further than Olsen (or most aestheticians, for that matter) would traditionally take
it, as this is what Eggers has done with the idea of the aesthetic in the construction
of his metaphoric shield. Where the disassembling and recasting of the narrative
structure is part of the appeal of the A.H.W.O.S.G.’s story, Eggers goes beyond the
construction of narrative and explores the actual structure of a book in a manner
popularly unseen until the publication of A.H.W.O.S.G.
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Eggers was given more creative control of the actual, physical look of his book
than is traditionally given to an author. Because of this near-complete control over
the physicality of his book, it is necessary to take a brief look beyond the print and
to the book’s paratexts. As Smith and Watson have noticed, “The book is complexly framed, beginning with its cover and end flaps,” and this framing does, in
fact, have a bearing on our understanding of Eggers’ work as a constructed whole
(6, original emphasis). From the author’s photo on the end flap to the section literally removed from chapter five on the front flap, Eggers has entirely reconstructed
his memoir to reflect his desire to cross borders, to step outside the sandbox of tradition. Even the choice of his jacket illustration becomes fodder for play.
Smith and Watson describe the Komad and Melamid piece used as art on the
dust jacket as an “illustration of a red theatrical curtain half-drawn back to reveal
the last rays of the setting sun, a worn cliché of Romantic genius” (6-7). In his essay, “The Opening of the American Mind,” William Chaloupka contrasts
A.H.W.O.S.G. with the neoconservative Allan Bloom’s, The Closing of the American
Mind, with interesting results—the most notable of which may be Chaloupka’s
seemingly off-handed remark, “Eggers, whose cover art Bloom might have loved,
not getting the joke . . . ” that recasts the book as a framed construction through
which a larger critique of neoconservatist values is being made (5).28 The illustration, like much of Eggers’ work, is satirical and shows a truth in its satire.29 Notably, this would be only a truth that only those “in the know” would be able to understand, similar to Eggers' notion of the lattice quotes earlier in “A Brief History
of 20th-Century Authorship.”
The use of satire, the use of the Komad and Melamid illustration on the dust
jacket, creates a clear division between those among the dominant culture (those
who would not understand the satire) and those among the suppressed culture
(those who understand the satire).30 If the larger argument being posed by this thesis is that Eggers’ is reaching beyond the postmodern in search of a way to connect the atomized individuals of the postmodern age, it should be noted that this
search does not include the Allan Blooms of the world (nor, probably, the Harold
Blooms, for that matter). Eggers’ reach for connection includes those in some way
marginalized or opposed to established, codified culture. This, his use of satire, as
42
is the case with the dust jacket, is one of the ways in which he creates a dialogue
with an anticipated reader. Thus, a dialogic sphere between these anticipated readers and himself, as the author of the text, is created. The dialogic sphere, as Bakhtin notes, is a linguistic sphere existing outside of dominant society–the society
that creates subjects–and is a place where subversion necessarily occurs.31
Alan Goldman discusses how the relationship between works of satire and
other works relate. He writes, “Satirical literature . . . can represent nonsatirical
counterparts in the literary tradition,” and that it is within works of satire that,
“self-conscious historical relations help to determine representation” (33). It is precisely here—where the awareness of one’s historical relation is found—that the
writing of Eggers proves exceptionally, though complexly, lucid. It is within the
borders of this complex lucidity, this hyper-self-awareness, that A.H.W.O.S.G. delineates a semblance of a representative and authentic whole. Without the address
and consequent subversion of all the “internal mechanisms of repression” found
in published texts, the book would ring false (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 236).
Without this acknowledgment of the boundaries of the written word and its relation to the rearrangement of his experiential history, Eggers’ work would fall short
of critiquing the construction of fact-based narratives and the industry that promotes them.
Once the myriad ways in which Eggers has challenged the historic confinement
of text have been examined, the challenge then put forth to us, as readers, is to reassemble this fragmented text. “If fragmentation through informational overflow
makes traditional aesthetic experiences of unity more difficult to achieve, it compensates in other ways, even aesthetically . . . by contributing to some of today’s
‘most exciting, rewarding artistic encounters’” (Shusterman 52). Once we reassemble, then we may find ourselves with Eggers, within the dialogic sphere he has created, so that we may connect in an authentic world now insulated from, but engaging with, everything commercial.
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Defining Connectivism
Connectionism: (noun) an artificial intelligence approach to cognition in which multiple connections between nodes (equivalent to brain cells) form a massive interaction network in which many processes take place simultaneously. Certain processes
in this network, operating in parallel, are grouped together in hierarchies that
bring about results such as thought or action.
(New Oxford American Dictionary)
Connectivism differs from the definition of connectionism, defined above, in that it
is organic and has, above all, the desire to establish connections throughout the human nodes of society. Connectivism understands the relative situation of individuals and the inability to completely inhabit another person’s relative situation. In
spite of this, or, more precisely, because of this, connectivism is the conscious, active
seeking out of ways in which to form connections between persons born into a society fragmented, and subsequently atomized, throughout the 20th century.
Furthermore, connectivism implies a motive: the desire to establish meaningful relations with other persons.
It is an individualized action which is not necessarily a direct product of a person's immediate environment, which is to say that it is not occurring from a prescribed natural process; rather, connectivism stems from an individualistic, relativized desire, want, or need to create a social network.
It is my contention that we see connectivism at work every time we post a
status update on Facebook or comment to an article posted on the New York Times
44
website. Through posting a status update or commenting on someone's blog, we
are participating in connectivism. By that, I mean that we are participating in the
active desire to create communities and networks. Humans are social animals and
one of our base desires is to seek out and create connections and form communities with other human beings.
Eggers’ works since A.H.W.O.S.G. all point to Eggers’ desire to reach beyond
the boundaries of textual intercourse and connect the society surrounding him at
the turn of the 21st century. His literature isn't exactly a tweet or a status update,
but it's not as far removed from that as one might think. How and what Eggers has
continue to write about has displayed a continual desire to establish connections
with his readers and the communities both he, and his readers, are inhabiting.
When looking at contemporary literature, one is almost forced to note the
various ways in which authors are attempting to create this connection between
author, reader and community. Connectivism is little more than an explanation for
this phenomenon.
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Gaining Velocity
“The story, when we lived it, was about economics, and
about desperation, and about inequity brought to levels
that are untenable. More than that . . . it was about what
we called, in Sunday school, a sacrament.”
Hand
Eggers first published You Shall Know Our Velocity32 (Y.S.K.O.V.) in 2002 through
his newly established independent publishing company, McSweeney’s, where he
would continue to first publish his works from then on. Y.S.K.O.V. was Eggers’ first
novel, as well. The story centers around two young men (Will and Hand) who
want to travel the world within a week, see as much of the world as they possibly
can, and disseminate $32,000 to various people who they feel could utilize it more
than they possibly could. The narrative is primarily from Will’s first-person perspective where we, as readers, gain an insight into his consciousness. Many of the
basic themes and characteristics that made A.H.W.O.S.G. such a success are apparent within this novel, as well. However, instead of couching the novel within an
elaborate preface, Eggers chooses to begin the story on the dust-jacket-free front
cover and continue it immediately there on, bypassing any copyright information,
title page, or any other page that might get between the reader and the telling of
the story. This lends a feeling of being immediately drawn into the story. But, like
A.H.W.O.S.G., this is a story framed by death.
While, in his memoir, the deaths of his parents might be viewed as the catalyst for the rest of the narrative and the indeed the telling of the narrative in the
first place, the death of Will’s childhood friend, Jack, and the future deaths of Will
46
and his mother are what frame this novel. We learn this in the first sentence of the
first paragraph on the cover of the novel. “Everything within takes place after Jack
died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry . . .” (1). This story is a
story surrounded by death. However, narratively, there is a problem in that the supposed author of this narrative is literally dead. It would be impossible for Will to
write this story from the grave. Thus, during Hand’s interruption about three quarters into the book, we learn that there must have been a ghostwriter involved in
the construction of the text. This awkward postmodernist construct does little
more than draw attention back to the fact that the novel has been written by a person who is a alive (or, at least, must have been alive) while writing the text of the
novel. Again, through emphasizing the very being of the author, Eggers is displaying his understanding of chronotopic relations within the construct of his narrative—the fact that an author must have a time and place from which he or she exists.
To underscore the author’s existence, there is ample evidence supplied
throughout the novel that suggests the novel does have a basis in the material
world. In essence, where A.H.W.O.S.G. brought attention to its fictions, Y.S.K.O.V.
draws attention to its factuality. One way in which Eggers highlights the possibility
of the chronic presence of the author having actually experienced some of the
events recounted is through his use of pictures. Throughout the text, various reallife pictures are inserted into the text, which give the events unfolding throughout
the novel a feel of actually having taken place. On page 229, while explaining how
he is attempting to jump into a donkey-pulled cart in Morocco, Will, the narrator,
simply inserts a picture of a donkey-pulled cart in Morocco. “We drove up and
down the airport road seven times, trying to time it with a series of different carts.
Here’s one: — .” Then, a blurry, amateur photograph of a man atop a cart pulled
by a donkey is included. Perhaps, because Eggers has infused the character of
Hand as the more pragmatic of the two primary characters, Hand’s interruption
of the narrative is full of these types of pictures.
Hand and his pragmatism,33 it should be noted, provide both a clarification of
Eggers’ notion of connection and further clarifies how Eggers will come to understand the pro-activeness involved in connectivism. First, the notion of an ethereal,
47
non-active connection, a sort of karmic connection, if you will, is dismissed by
Hand as a youthful dream.
I had pictured, as a younger man, that the things I knew and would
know were bricks in something that would, effortlessly, eventually,
shape itself into something recognizable, meaningful. A massive and
spiritual sort of geometry—a ziggurat, a pyramid. But here I am
now, so many years on, and if there is a shape to all this, it hasn’t revealed itself. But no, thus far the things I know grow out, not up,
and what might connect all these things, connective tissue or synapses, or just some sense of order, doesn’t exist, or isn’t functioning,
and what I knew at twenty-seven can’t be found now. (276)
It would seem that the idea of something connecting various individuals together, accordingly, would not exist. But this is not necessarily the case. It is the
case, however, that the sort of inactive, organic connection Hand describes is what
is being rebutted. Instead, what Hand argues for is the ability to be able to describe a moment in time and have that moment recreated and able to reverberate
fully throughout society in a meaningful, material way.
I believe in fact, and I believe in the plain truth told wholly—that
the truth retold can be a net thrown around life at a certain time
and place, encompassing all within, and that people can go out
there, live as actors, work within their staging ground, do so with a
soft heart; I want others to go out in the world with an idea, with intentions and means, and come back with a story about how their actions affected the world and how they themselves were shaped by
the results. I have a belief that such endeavors can improve the
world, however recklessly, especially when these people go forward
and interact, give, solve, change the situations they encounter—and
also, even those with no intentions of recording their actions.
There’s nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple
documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one
has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being
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told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn’t be reiterated. (297)
The case is not that everything is not connected or that events and lives cannot
be altered, but that this connection requires pro-activeness. Passivity is frowned
upon. Awareness may be raised through the sharing of stories, but the interactions, the intentions, the means, that Hand describes are what separate active connectivism from inactive, spiritual connection.
Throughout the course of the narrative, money is used to try to alleviate the
problems Will and Hand identify in each place they travel. In each of these circumstances, the money is given away without really having formed a connection with
any one person. They bury money in Estonia and make a treasure map, which
they tape to the inside of a large tire on a playground. They tape money to the
side of a house in Senegal. They give money to taxi drivers and people who give
them directions to places they already have directions for. As Aliki Varvogli notes,
the people they meet on their journey largely exist in the narrative to “reinforce
the notion of displacement” (87). This displacement is caused by “national identity, politics, and history” (87). These become the cultural markers Will and Hand
must interact with to make connection.
It is not until the end of the novel that Will begins making real connections to
people. The first is with a Russian prostitute named Katya who simply lies atop
Will’s naked body, enveloping it, while he falls asleep. “You couldn't measure it,”
Will states, “You could say it was worth nothing—that it should have been free—
or you could say millions and both would make sense” (381). The second time is
when Will arrives in Mexico and meets a family who is helping their daughter, Tiffany María Cervantes, with a social studies project. Interestingly, Hand and Will
have been unable to communicate in any other language than English until this encounter. Will, here, uses the little Spanish he knows to help the young girl with the
interview she conducts with him for her social studies class. After the interview,
Will is so touched that he signs nine of his remaining ten travelers’ checks out to
Tiffany, writes a note of explanation, and then Tiffany’s family sees him off to his
bus bound for Cuernevaca. Fittingly, the story ends at a bicultural wedding in Cuernevaca where Will witnesses the wedding of two friends, one American and one
49
Mexican, and participates fully in the reception activities afterward. Here, where
Will and Hand had been struggling to make meaningful connections with people
around the world, Will finally does through participating in the entire festival of
the reception.
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How Are We Hungry?
How We Are Hungry is Eggers’ first collection of short stories. The original hardback version of this collection is presented as a black, leather bound journal—much like a journal one might purchase at a stationary store to jot down
memories of a vacation or elucidate memories through the keeping of a diary.
This framework gives the collection a very personal feel. About three-quarters of
the way through this collection, this feeling is reiterated in the story titled, “There
Are Some Things He Should Keep To Himself,” which is followed by a series of
blank pages. Again, a crossing from the textual is attempting to be made here.34
This time, though, Eggers is drawing attention directly to himself as an author. It
is understood that each of these stories is a snippet of something personal, a momentary instance of his sharing of himself, and this story is an instance of raising
the question of whether or not some things are truly too private and too personal
to share. This idea is especially interesting given that Eggers’ first two books were
national bestsellers and that the first of them was intensely personal and intensely
aware of how personal it was. This is the world we enter with this short story collection: the world of the intensely personal. The stories are varied, told from many
points of view and from many different locations, but the tone these stories carry
can be traced back to some of the themes present in Y.S.K.O.V. and A.H.W.O.S.G.
There is still a repressed angst in some of the stories, similar to Will and Dave, respectively. There is still an interest in continually moving fast and making progress
and this progress making the characters feel accomplished, like some of the scenes
between Dave and Toph or Will and Hand. For the interest of the overall argument of this thesis, I will focus on two of the longer stories within this collection,
“Another” and “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly,” which highlight the re51
alization of cultural and economic inequalities/disparities and the proactive interaction necessary to achieve connectivism.
The simply titled story, “Another,” is the story of an American traveler who
has gone to Cairo to see the pyramids35 and pays for a guide, Hesham, to take him
out across the desert on horseback. Continually, the American is suspicious of the
motives of the Egyptian he has hired to take him out to the pyramids. “I wanted
to see if this man—slight, with brown teeth, wide-set eyes, a cop mustache—would try to kill me. There were plenty of Egyptians who would love to
kill me, I was sure, and I was ready to engage in any way with someone who
wanted me dead” (9). More than the belief that people are out to do him wrong,
reminiscent of the paranoia established in A.H.W.O.S.G. and Y.S.K.O.V., this passage also reveals another layer of character assumption in that this American assumes that there are a lot of Egyptians wanting to murder him. This assumption is
based, early in the narrative, on the “poor state of relations between our nation
and the entire region” (7). The idea of being American had appeared in obvious
form within both of Eggers’ previous works, generally as a question of deservedness. This, however, is different in that this is a character obviously aware of his nation’s influence on how he might be perceived by someone not of his nation. As
such, he is a character partially indivisible from the actions his country makes because he is of that country. Thus, a concrete connectedness is formed with the
makeup of his American-ness and those of that same nation.
The connection between the action of his nation and himself is not the only
connection provided this character within “Another.” As the title of this story implies, there is another. Hesham, the horse guide, provides the narrator with, not
only a person with whom he may personify the angst he perceives the Egyptian nation having against him, but also a person to challenge him as he learns to ride his
horse over the sand dunes. Hesham becomes a loved enemy. “I loved the man I followed in the way you love only those you’ve wanted to kill” (13). This angry love is
what is born out of their travels across the desert to the Red Pyramid. It is a more
visceral connection than Eggers’ previous work, and it is a connection based on
the condition of nation relations and the challenge put forth, the narrator imag-
52
ines, by Hesham, to continually move forward over the sand dunes to the next
pyramid.
“Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly” is a more complex story; however,
it still involves the collision of cultures. Rita, a thirty-eight year-old American
women, has paid to travel to Moshi, Tanzania to make the four day climb to the
top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. An immediate line is drawn between the five hikers who
have paid to climb the mountain and the thirty-two porters they have hired. The
hikers who have paid all have modern, expensive gear to help them make the
climb. The porters make do with much less. At first, this is not problematic. Everyone has a job, and it is clear what each person’s function is, but as they gain elevation and a cold rain settles in, the disparity between the hikers and porters widens.
Grant, an experienced hiker from Montana, is the character who provides the
most connection between the two groups. Like the porters, he doesn’t have the
best equipment. His poncho is a garbage sack, he uses his father’s old canvas
Army-issue tent, and, notably, he chooses to carry his own gear up as opposed to
having the porters carry it for him. Also, Grant knows some Swahili, the local language. This, more than anything, seems to impress Rita in that his knowledge of
Swahili serves to bridge the cultural gap between the two parties.
Now a porter is walking down the path, in jeans, a sweater, and tennis shoes. Rita and Grant stop and step to one side to allow him to
pass.
“Jambo,” Grant says.
“Jambo,” the man says, and continues down the trail.
The exchange was quick but extraordinary. Grant had lowered
his voice to a basso profundo, stretching the second syllable for a few
seconds in an almost musical way. The porter had said the word
back with identical inflection. It was like a greeting between teammates, doubles partners—simple, warm, understated but understood. (159)
53
Rita had not taken the time to learn any Swahili, but Grant has. Grant, it becomes clear, wants a more authentic experience; thus, he has taken the time to
learn some of the local language and feels the need to bring his own equipment
up the mountain. Here, Eggers makes a division between travelers who have monetary means, and travelers who have monetary means with intention. To Jerry, one
of the paying hikers, Grant becomes a source of sarcasm. Rita sees Grant, surrounded by porters, playing a “tennislike game” with one of the porters (177).
“Grant is barefoot and grinning” (177). Jerry draws attention to Grant and calls
him, “‘Saint Grant of the Porters!’” (177). There is a constant tension between
Grant, who is seeking to connect with these people of a culture far removed from
Montana, and Jerry, a person who feels the right of privilege.
Tensions mount as Mike, Jerry’s son and one of the paying hikers, becomes
ill. It is clear that he will not make it up the mountain. Rita, when she sees Mike,
sees death. “Mike is lying on the ground, on his backpack, and he looks to Rita
much like what a new corpse would look like. Mike is almost blue, and is breathing
in a hollow way that she hasn’t heard before” (177). Jerry wants his son to persevere and finish the climb to the top of Kilimanjaro. Grant, though, understands
that Mike must descend because he is too sick to finish the climb. Mike continues
on, though, for another day. His condition worsens in the rain and the cold. When
Rita wakes up on the morning before the final hike to the summit, she is told that
something has happened. She thinks that Mike has died. She finds out later, at the
summit of Kilimanjaro, that it was not Mike, but three young porters who had
passed away in the night. They had been sleeping in the mess tent, which had a
hole, and froze to death. The fact that they did not have the best gear to make the
ascent is reiterated. Shelly, one of the paying hikers, tells Rita this and then says,
“I didn’t want to spoil this for you. We’ve all worked so hard to get up here. I’m
glad everyone decided to push through, because this is worth it, don’t you think?
Imagine coming all the way out here and not making it all the way up for whatever reason” (198). It is the question of worth that hangs heavy in the air. Rita
learns that Grant has descended the mountain, helping to carry the deceased porters. Through Rita’s reaction it becomes clear that, no, the ascent was not worth
the lives of those porters. “She never would have come this far had she known it
54
would be like this, all wrong, so cold and with the rain coming through the tents
on those men” (198). Rita had not done enough. Grant had not done enough. Nobody had done enough to stop the death of those men, the cause of their deaths
being economic disparity and the privilege accorded to those able to afford material goods. Despite Grant’s obvious good intention toward making a connection
with the porters, too much was left undone and there was not enough pro-action.
Thus, here, Eggers portrays a failed striving for connectivism. This story remains a
more passive recording of cultural interaction and is the negative example of striving for connection that Hand discusses in Y.S.K.O.V. It serves as a warning to the
reader about the pitfalls of economic privilege, exploitation, and inaction.
55
From What to What?
“We live in a time when even the most horrific events
in this book could occur, and in most cases did occur.”
Valentino Achak Deng
What is the What:The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng represents Eggers’ near
complete crossing out of the postmodern mentality and into the realm of the new
connectivist mentality permeating contemporary culture. The outer framework of
the story is not couched—like A.H.W.O.S.G.—in an elaborate preface addressing
the shortcomings of the work. Nor does the story house any pictures or drawings
or implement any other narrative devices commonly used in much postmodern literature. David Amsden notes that, although there is an notable absence of any of
the postmodernist proclivities apparent within Eggers’ previous work, “one finishes this wrenching account and remarkable book with the impression that it’s precisely what the author’s past work . . . has been building up to” (1-2). Of course,
what Eggers' previous work has been has a powerful undercurrent striving for honest, active connection. Although there is nothing much of the postmodern within
What is the What, there is a preface, however—a short, one-page letter from the
novel’s real-life counterpart, Valentino Deng, addressing the novelization of his
life. In this preface, Deng states that the novel was “born out of the desire on the
part of [himself] and the author [Eggers] to reach out to others to help them understand the atrocities many successive governments of Sudan committed before
and during the civil war” (5). The novel begins with this note from Deng, in which
he addresses the approximation of his life and expresses his desire that this story
56
not be taken as a “definitive history.” Though, he notes, this story “is not so different from the one depicted within these pages” (5). Thus couched, in the simple, straight-forward preface of Deng, What is the
What begins its narrative of a refugee from Sudan, struggling to assimilate to life in
the United States and struggling, actively, to find connection while ruminating on
how far he has traveled since, while a small boy, he was forced to leave his home village of Marial Bai and separated from his family for sixteen years by an unending
civil war.
The story opens with Deng living in Atlanta and being robbed. As an act of
charity, he allows a woman to use his cellular phone. Shortly thereafter, the
woman’s accomplice joins her, beats Deng, binds him, and leaves him on the floor
while they steal all of the possessions that Deng had received as gifts from the
Peachtree United Methodist Church. Throughout the robbery, Deng has memories of Kakuma, the refugee camp in Kenya he had spent much time at before
coming to Atlanta. Poignantly, he wishes he were back in this refugee camp and
not in America, not because of the robbery, but because of the disappointments
he and his fellow so-called “Lost Boys” had experienced since trying to assimilate
to America and American culture. “I am tired of this country. I am thankful for it,
yes, I have cherished many aspects of it for the three years I have been here, but I
am tired of the promises” (13). It is the resilience of his character and the profound forgiveness and thankfulness he possesses that compose Deng’s character
throughout the novel. Unlike his previous work, Eggers does not have a protagonist full of angst. The closest Deng comes to angst is the recounting of how he
used to tell his story silently to those who did not listen. While bound on the floor
of his apartment, the two intruders enlist the help of a small boy to watch Deng as
they leave with goods they have stolen. It is here, while on the floor, that Deng begins recounting his story to the young boy.
When I first came to this country, I would tell silent stories. I would
tell them to people who had wronged me. If someone cut in front of
me in line, ignored me, bumped or pushed me, I would glare at
them, staring, silently hissing a story to them. You do not understand, I
57
would tell them. You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have
seen. (32, original emphasis)
His previous self is what Deng is reflecting upon here, realizing that people
would continue adding to his suffering, making his already tumultuous assimilation
to America that much more difficult. Instead of anger, though, it is compassion
that propels Deng’s character forward. He notices that this boy is “not so different
than I was at his age. . . . Surely his years have not been idyllic; he is currently an
accomplice to an armed robbery . . . ” (33). Instead of angst, there is an attempt at
understanding. TV Boy, and then Michael, as Deng comes to refer to the boy
watching over him as he is being robbed, provides the first of a few people Deng
silently tells his story to while he reminisces. With each of these people Deng directs his narrative toward a familiarity is bred. With TV Boy/Michael, Deng remembers his childhood in Marial Bai, his subsequent escape from the murahaleen,36
and his youth spent between refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. Deng attempts to find ways in which these people remind him of himself at some point in
his life. Through this internalization of the people around him, Deng discovers
how these people remind him of people in other places and times and how, like
TV Boy/Michael, not everyone has led the idyllic life he might have thought otherwise. Similar to A.H.W.O.S.G., it is the sharing of suffering that is the reason for the
story. The sharing of pain alleviates, dilutes, and creates understanding and,
through understanding, connection. This continues with the attendant at the hospital Deng visits after being freed from his binds at his apartment, and at the country
club he works at in the morning. With each person he fixates on, we are told more
of Deng’s incredible story until, at the end, it is clear that this story is meant for
whomever is reading this story.
This story begins, as previously mentioned, with a brief preface by Deng. At
the end of this preface, Deng writes:
Even when my hours were darkest, I believed that some day I could
share my experiences with readers, so as to prevent the same horrors
from repeating themselves. This book is a form of struggle, and it
keeps my spirit alive to struggle. To struggle is to strengthen my
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faith, my hope, and my belief in humanity. Thank you for reading
this book, and I wish you a blessed day. (7)
The story ends in a similar address to the reader. Throughout the story, the second person has been used to refer to the various characters Deng has fixated on to
tell his story. However, at the very end of the narrative, the second person reaches
out again, to the reader.
I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it.
It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you
are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between
us . . . I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who
don’t want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who
run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend
that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist. (474-75)
The story ends with this social critique on the inaction often taken by Americans, and others, who wish—instead of proactively, intentionally, involving themselves with difficult, tragic events unfolding in the world—to ignore the larger,
more often tragic, world. If nothing else, Valentino Deng understands that these
types of events are easily dismissed, forgotten, and ignored in the economically
privileged world and understands that, through forging an open, honest, proactive
connection with people, events unfolding in the material world may be altered for
the better.
59
Timothy McSweeney is
Changing the World
Literature, contrary to popular belief, has the ability to move beyond the realm of
academia and pervade the general consciousness. During the reign of postmodernism, literature has been driven further away from common, quotidian experience
and into the infamous “ivory tower” of academic scholarship. However, the realization of moving beyond the written page and into the everyday culture is something that has visibly driven the literary work of Dave Eggers. From the desire to
create a connection with his readers that transcended the physicality of the book
with A.H.W.O.S.G. to the photography included in Y.S.K.O.V. which lent the novel
an a priori immediateness, to the nationalized interaction with people of other nations within How We Are Hungry, and, finally, to the microcosm of contemporary
tragedy related in the biography of Valentino Achak Deng in What is the What, the
desire to effect real changes in the real world presents itself as the underlying
theme connecting Eggers’ work. Where most authors have donated their time and
money to various causes they have deemed worthy of support, the actual industry
of book creation was left untouched—meaning that, in the book world, the money
made from the sales of books stayed within the world of books, within that infamous ivory tower of literature. Largely, authors are still underpaid and large companies are still attempting to function within a capitalist economy; which is to say
that these large companies are making as much money as they possibly can
through the selling of various books and these books’ subsequent addenda.37 However, with the relative success of his literary endeavors, Eggers has been able to
physically transcend literary academia and effect real change, beyond the limited
realm of colleges and universities and into the world at large. What follows is a
brief history of McSweeney’s publishing, the McSweeney’s Quarterly,38 and an explo60
ration of how, through the negotiation between the realm of the literary and the
realm of the material world, Eggers has been able to accomplish a socialistic alteration of the traditional economy of publication.
The McSweeney’s Quarterly was not Eggers’ first foray into the world of editing
magazines. He had previously worked on Might magazine, a magazine that he
helped found and edit. Might magazine fell neatly within the realm of a sort of
early-to-mid-nineties mentality that continually attempted to exist outside of the
cultural mainstream. After the demise of Might, Eggers then became an editor at
Esquire for a time. After receiving an advance from Simon and Schuster for the
rights to A.H.W.O.S.G. Eggers then began the McSweeney’s Quarterly. The
McSweeney’s Quarterly, it would turn out, existed for a much different purpose than
Might. When posed a question which asked him to compare Might and the
McSweeney’s Quarterly, Eggers responded that “McSweeney’s has less edge. At Might
we were sneering, and everything had this gnashing tone—because we were angry.
McSweeney’s is more banal” (Goldberg 9).
The first issue of Timothy McSweeney’s39 Quarterly Concern had a print run of
2,500 and was published in 1998. It would be known shorthand as
“McSweeney’s” by the turn of the century. The first few issues of the quarterly
contain a variety of stories by relative unknowns and articles killed by other magazines. The first three issues of the literary magazine were produced on white paper
with, for the most part, words serving as the decor on the cover of the magazine,
and served as the first few publications of McSweeney’s publishing. Most independent publishing companies, such as McSweeney’s (let alone most quarterly magazines) are miserable financial adventures. Where many have failed, though,
McSweeney’s publishing and the McSweeney’s Quarterly have been a success. Part of
this is due to an uncanny marketing and, perhaps incongruently, a lack of visibility
in the mainstream. McSweeney’s publications are largely unavailable in the large
chain bookstores. The publications are only available online and through independently owned bookstores. On the one hand, the constrained ability to obtain
the publications lends a sort of authenticity to the overall project in that
McSweeney’s publishing is staying consistent in its contempt for big business. On
the other hand, it makes business sense because, as a company, they are not forced
61
to sell their publications at a discount price to large chains. Instead, they can sell
fewer publications for a higher sticker price.
This also allows the freedom for the creation of beautiful books, relatively unconstrained by price. “I like the scaffolding as much as I like the building . . . especially if that scaffolding is beautiful, in its way” (A.H.W.O.S.G. xii). It is the desire to
create the beautiful scaffolding that encases the house of a story that has helped
maintain the underground popularity of McSweeney’s publications. With each issue of the quarterly, the “central drama,” as NY Times reviewer Judith Shulevitz
notes, is the packaging of the quarterly. Typically, a McSweeney’s publication not
only exploits areas of a book typically left alone (such as the copyright page, or, in
the case of the third issue, publishing a short story on the book’s spine), but the actual form of the book is continually questioned. The fourth issue featured a collection of stories, each individually bound and held together in a white box. The fifth
issue was the first hardcover, though it featured four different covers with four different dust jackets. The sixth issue was oblong and included a compact disc soundtrack composed by the popular band, They Might Be Giants.
With the McSweeney’s Quarterly, as well as Might and his other ventures, Eggers
has consistently attempted to push the proverbial envelope. As Sarah Brouilette
has noted about his work as an author, editor, and publisher, it is his constant challenge to the publishing companies and the tradition of how written words can be
disseminated that provided a definition or thread weaving the various projects Eggers involves himself in (6). In the beginning, this challenge was primarily one of
form and content. Mcsweeney’s Quarterly would continue to publish relatively unknown authors and experiment with form over its first nine issues. Always, the
funds received from the selling of one issue would turn to fund another. In fact, it
is trademark of McSweeney’s publishing, and really, much of Eggers’ interaction
with capitalist culture in general, to be entirely open about the exact amounts of
money either expected to be made or actually made, and where these funds would
be diverted to. In the first few issues of the McSweeney’s Quarterly, the copyright
page extends to a few pages, much of the space devoted to the financial breakdown of the cost of printing, publishing, and postage. In a now somewhat famous
interview with the Harvard Advocate, Eggers continues at length on his interaction
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with capitalist culture and how he, as Brouilette notes with regards to Y.S.K.O.V., is
less concerned with the “divide between the subcultural authority and the mainstreams, and more with a direct interrogation and disavowal of any interest in economic capital” (10).
A few months ago I wrote an article for Time magazine and was
paid $12,000 for it [sic] I am about to write something, 1,000 words,
3 pages or so, for something called Forbes ASAP, and for that I will
be paid $6,000. For two years, until five months ago, I was on the
payroll of ESPN magazine, as a consultant and sometime contributor. I was paid handsomely for doing very little. Same with my stint
at Esquire. One year I spent there, with little to no duties. I wore
khakis every day. Another Might editor and I, for almost a year, contributed to Details magazine, under pseudonyms, and we were paid
$2,000 each for what never amounted to more than 10 minutes
work—honestly never more than that. People from Hollywood want
to make my book into a movie, and I am probably going to let them
do so, and they will likely pay me a great deal of money for the privilege. (Soudavar 10)
Eggers continues on, highlighting some of the various things he does with the
money he receives from his writing and publishing:
Do I care about this money? I do. Will I keep this money? Very little
of it. Within the year I will have given away almost a million dollars
to about 100 charities and individuals benefiting everything from
hospice care to an artist who makes sculptures from Burger King
bags. And the rest will be going into publishing books through
McSweeney’s. Would I have been able to publish McSweeney’s if I
had not worked at Esquire? Probably not. Where is the $6,000 from
Forbes going? To a guy named Joe Polevy, who wants to write a
book about the effects of radiator noise on children in New England. (10)
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It is this interest in what can be accomplished with the capital earned from his
publications that has driven much of Eggers’ work. What began as an incredibly
small venture into the realm of literature with the first issue of the McSweeney’s
Quarterly, has become a small, independent publishing success. Although the issues
of McSweeney’s Quarterly have maintained an, often times, costly experimental nature, it is the experiment with using literature to fund other causes which has
added an overt socialist bent to other McSweeney publications, including the quarterly.
The tenth issue of the McSweeney’s Quarterly was the first (and to this date, the
only) issue published by a large publishing house, Vintage. This was possible because of a few reasons. First, the McSweeney’s Quarterly, had become a relatively big
name in the world of publishing due, mostly, to the approach used with its publications. Second, the authors contributing to this issue included such big names as Michael Chabon, Michael Crichton, Nick Hornby, Elmore Leanord, and Stephen
King. Lastly, the tenth issue was a genre issue, where each author was encouraged
to submit a story in a particular genre. This was the first time the magazine had
been available in large chain bookstores, such as Barnes and Noble. It was even
available at Costco. With his reputation within the realm of contemporary writers,
Eggers, along with Chabon (the guest editor for issue ten), had the ability to involve all of these well-known authors in this project, which had the double effect
of raising awareness of the world of literary productions such as McSweeney’s Quarterly, and the ability for literature to openly raise funds for social causes—the cause
here being 826 Valencia. All of the proceeds from the sale of the tenth issue went
to support 826 Valencia, the beginning of 826 National.
The idea behind 826 Valencia was to provide support to the neighboring public schools whose teachers had been (and continue to be) stressed in every way
imaginable by the challenges of teaching in the California’s public school system.
Given the dense population of successful writers who had the time to volunteer,
but lacked a structured system bendable to their various schedules, Eggers helped
create such a system with 826 Valencia. 826 National officially began at 826 Valencia, the flagship branch in San Francisco. However, it is the financial viability of
this now-national system that is an innovative idea.
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Financially, 826 Valencia is dependent on a number of seemingly unrelated
sources. First, a pirate-themed store was implemented as a front to sell, obviously,
pirate-related gear and all the proceeds from the store are applied to provide rent
for the rest of the building, which is used to house dozens of computers and other
areas for students to study and receive one-on-one tutoring. Second, as a nonprofit
organization, some government grants and endowments are awarded to the 826
centers. Lastly, the proceeds from many McSweeney’s publications are used to pay
(if applicable) a staff member, provide technology, and fund field trips for the students. After a few short years, 826 Valencia has morphed into 826 National, with
tutoring centers in New York City, Seattle, Boston, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Los
Angeles. Each of these centers have a thematically different store front which
helps to generate rent money, and each of these centers, although nationally connected, are primarily invested in the communities in which they are established.
In the conclusion of his book, After Theory, Terry Eagleton finds admirable the
“millions of Americans who . . . continue steadfastly to speak up for humane values, with the spirit of independence, moral seriousness, sense of dedication and devotion to human liberty for which they are renowned among the nations” (227).
Eggers is easily one of these millions of Americans, having established 826 National as a community-based tutoring facility helping under-funded schools and unprivileged children in urban areas. In this respect, if we take Eagleton’s definition
of what a socialist society may be like, cooperating “for material purposes, just like
any other,” but also regarding, “human solidarity as an estimable end in itself,” Eggers has achieved with the advent of 826 National (172-73). In the environment of
the various 826 National branches, the achievement of education is a goal shared
by all involved, whether they are a student or tutor. In this way, solidarity is
achieved.
Eggers’ altruism does not end with 826 National. Prior to the 2004 presidential election, much of the United States was discontent with its current Republican
leadership. In an effort to raise awareness to and to urge persons to vote,
McSweeney’s publishing released The Future Dictionary of America. In a brief introductory note, the reader learns that the dictionary serves as a forum for a myriad
of American writers, artists, and musicians to “voice their displeasure with their
65
current political leadership, and to collectively imagine a brighter future” (vii). The
dictionary houses over 170 writers and artists, including Michael Cunningham,
Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, Stephen King, ZZ Packer, Joyce Carol
Oates, Art Spiegelman, Kurt Vonnegut, Chris Ware, and a CD is packaged with
the dictionary with tracks from many popular contemporary musicians. Similarly
to the tenth issue of the McSweeney’s Quarterly, this project was devised as a fundraiser. The funds raised, this time, were devoted to groups such as the Sierra Club
and Common Assets. Specifically, the introduction states that:
All proceeds from the sales of this dictionary go directly to groups
devoted to expressing their outrage over the Bush Administration’s
assault on free speech, overtime, drinking water, truth, the rule of
law, humility, the separation of Church and State, a woman’s right
to choose, clean air, and every other good idea this country has ever
had. (vii)
In this way, the McSweeney’s publications have moved beyond effecting small,
community change with 826 National, and has attempted to effect a larger
change, national in scope.
Although The Future Dictionary of America might be seen as a failure, in that
George Bush, Jr. was elected to a second term in office, this has not discouraged
Eggers from continuing to create change through the proceeds of his literary endeavors. Two of his larger works published after his best-selling memoir have continued to openly engage with the potentially positive qualities the commodification
of literature allows. However, where he first used an elaborate preface which
served, in part, as a platform for him to address the money earned from the commercialization of his autobiography, in the last two books he has published, a
much simpler staging has appeared which addresses the issue of monetary exchange and, more importantly, exactly what those moneys are being used for.
On the copyright page of his short story collection, How We Are Hungry, a simple statement precedes the stories that follow: “Net proceeds from the sales of this
hardcover edition go to 826 Valencia, an educational nonprofit in San Francisco,
66
and to 826NYC/The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., an educational nonprofit
in New York” (2).
Similarly, What is the What ends noting that:
All the proceeds from this book will go to The Valentino Achak
Deng Foundation, which distributes funds to Sudanese refugees in
America; to rebuilding southern Sudan, beginning with Marial Bai;
to organizations working for peace and humanitarian relief in Darfur; and to the college education of Valentino Achak Deng. (478)
The need to engage with and disavow any personal financial interest with the
actual selling of his works within our capitalist society underscores much of the Eggers’ work, beginning with A.H.W.O.S.G. In this vein, Eggers has continued financially investing in a socialist structure wherein he is acting toward an “active, positive form of co-operation,” framed within a capitalist-structured economy (Eagleton 172). Where previously this co-operation was limited to, first, the small communities based around the various 826 branches, and, second, to the national election, this new co-operation transgresses national borders and finds communities
within the world community that overlap each other.
The dynamic crossing of both socioeconomic and national borders Eggers
has achieved, largely through the force of literature, has ushered in a new era of
conscientiousness with regards to the abilities of literature to effect real change. In
this new era, the capitalist economic forces at work in our society can, as Eggers
has shown, be exploited for humanitarian, philanthropic purposes. It is this desire
to create change and become positive forces in others’ lives in our relativistic society that defines the central preoccupation of this new literary consciousness. This
is connectivism in practice and how Eggers and his generation of writers are crossing the borders of relativism enforced by postmodernist thinking. Eggers will be remembered as an author of this generation who has greatly changed the world of
books, not only in the authorial sense, but also in the business sense.
67
End Notes
1
“If modernists looked for new epistemological foundations, their literary descendants, postmodern-
ists, rejected the supposed benefits of or even philosophical basis for this sort of search, reveling instead in multiple forms of narrative and competing, equally valid theories and perspectives” (Grassian 10).
2
This essay would be eventually edited down and retitled, “Why Bother.” The following quotations
are from the edited, retitled essay released as part of a collection of Franzen’s essays in 2002.
3
Ironically, Franzen would publish, what many readers found to be, an incredibly socially relevant
novel, The Corrections, to great acclaim a few years after this essay originally appeared. In a muchpublicized account, Franzen’s book would be chosen for Oprah’s book club.
4
This can be translated roughly as either: Extension of the Battlefield or Extension of the Domain of Battle.
5
Atomised was released in The United States under the more accurately translated title, The Elemen-
tary Particles.
6
There are many other authors, too numerous to mention here, who are all doing good, important
work to assuage large, important worldwide dilemmas.
7
In the same interview, Eggers paints an accurate portrayal of how the idea of selling out in our cul-
ture is one that stems directly from the ability of people to monitor the very culture they are part of.
“I was always monitoring,” he writes, “with the most sensitive and well-calibrated apparatus, the degree of selloutitude exemplified by any given artist—musical, visual, theatrical, whatever. I was vigilant and merciless and knew it was my job to be so” (7).
8
Foucault identifies these as: “author’s rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and
related matters,” something Eggers has continuously remained hyper aware of (383).
9
See Compagnon’s “A World Without Authors” for a fuller account of the legality of authorial owner-
ship in history. His presentation details the legal history of authorship and discusses the problems inherent in legally “owning” writing today—especially Internet blogs and other forms of anonymous,
“authorless,” writing.
10
Chronotope literally means time/space.
68
11
“Even had he [the writer] created an autobiography of a confession of the most astonishing truthful-
ness, all the same he, as its creator, remains outside the world he has represented in his work”
(“Forms of Time” 256).
12
Much of the preface to Eggers’ autobiography can be read as an open-ended dialogue with this
very notion of an anticipated, future reader in mind while his openness about the reconstruction of
his autobiographical narrative obviously sets him, as the author, chronotopically distant from himself
as the subject of the text.
13
In his essay, “Epic and Novel,” Bakhtin traces the history of canonicity, arguing that the novel, be-
cause it is “a genre that is ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to
review,” and, “structures itself in a zone of direct contact with developing reality,” will never be defined as poetry and formal epics can, and are, defined (39).
14
Furthermore, A.H.W.O.S.G. obviously adheres to the three observations Bakhtin makes in regards
to the basic characteristics that “fundamentally distinguish the novel in principle from other genres:
(1) It’s stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized
in the novel; (2) the radical change it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image; (3) the
new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images, namely, the zone of maximal contact
with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness” (“Epic and Novel” 11).
15
One might think of Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, among countless others, which fit well
within this category of novels that have participated in genre adaptation.
16
Holquist takes note of the subjective-ness of perspective. “As experienced by subjects, time and
space are always tied up with judgments about whether a particular time or a particular place is
good or bad, in all the infinite shadings those terms can comprehend. Perception is never pure; it is
always accomplished in terms of evaluating what is perceived” (152). The recognition of the impurity
of perception and evaluation, the recognition of a value attached to a time/space, dovetails nicely
with Foucault’s notion of the judgmental panoptic.
17
Joyce Carol Oates finds that the contemporary memoir differs substantially from the traditional
memoir in that the contemporary memoir “is frequently written by the young or relatively young,
the traditional memoir is usually the province of the older” (128). The motive of the new memoir is
not to tell a life story, as Oates notes, or written because a person is of some notable stature. Oates describes this new genre of novel as the following (keep in mind the chronotopes Bakhtin discusses in
relation to genre formation, certain time/places of objects, persons, and events): As a story “set forth
out of relative anonymity the terms of one’s physical/psychological ordeal; in most cases, the ordeal
is survived, so that the memoirist moves through trauma into coping and eventual recovery” (128).
In this way, Eggers’ memoir functions as a method through which he may cope and recover from the
trauma of losing his parents.
69
18
The hint of carnival exists within Eggers’ memoir. As he takes his mother to the car in the garage so
that they can seek medical attention for her bleeding nose, he thinks of, “honeymoons, the threshold,” and continues in this vein stating, “She is pregnant. She is a knocked-up bride. The tumor is a
balloon” (A.H.W.O.S.G. 31).
19
This is not to mean that there is one central meaning to a text, but to argue that a reader immedi-
ately dismissive of the various addenda and paratextual pyrotechnics Eggers employs as a site where
mere gimmickry, and not any form of meaning, is occurring, would be a reader preoccupied with a
text’s central meaning—when, as has been discussed, a specific, all-encompassing meaning is impossible given Bakhtin’s notion of novelization.
20
It should be noted that this linguistic subversion does not oppose the idea of Eggers’ proclivity for
exposing the various formalisms traditionally bordering a text as a source of humor. If we keep in
mind Bakhtin’s notion that laughter at the expense of an authoritative figure is subversive, the correlation between subversiveness and humor is maintained.
21
Smith and Watson point out that Eggers’ elaborate prefatory section, “both draws readers in, and
warns about the traps of sincerity and authenticity in personal narrative” (6).
22
In one the many guises in which the idea of power rears its head, perhaps one of the most univer-
sally common is money. Where many memoirists may shy away from discussing how much of an advance they received for writing such-and-such a memoir or autobiography, Eggers walks out from
the page of his memoir, money in hand. He does not shy away from the challenge of power money
represents. The “acknowledgments” section of Eggers’ memoir concludes with his acknowledgment
of how much money he has netted from this memoir; an essential “aspect of autobiographical writing
in our postmodern times,” as Smith and Watson see it (6). More than the acknowledgment and proclamation of the receiving of this money, Eggers also promises to give a five-dollar check to the first 200
readers who “write with proof that they have read and absorbed the many lesson herein,” (xxxv). It
is this attempted dissemination of power/money that also proves subversive.
23
“There’s no getting around the exploitative dimension of a book about personal tragedy, no matter
how distant and superior a pose the author might try to strike.” Thus, Chaloupka states, “every exploitation is an invitation to think about culture” (5).
24
“Biography and history move in a medium of facts, but their aesthetic surface is the same as that of
the novel” (Baker 103).
25
This is another example of a way in which technology is able to form connective bridges between
individuals. Twenty years ago, e-mailing someone a digital copy of a manuscript was an unheard of
idea.
70
26
Besides offering to mail a digital manuscript, Eggers also offers to mail a five dollar check to the
first 200 readers of his book and the manner of his writing, the jocular inclusivity of it, has been noted
in the previous chapter.
27
Perhaps it would be best to think of Eggers’ subversion having two metaphoric parts as described
in his preface; “I like the scaffolding as much as I like the building . . . especially if that scaffolding is
beautiful, in its way” (xii), in that the narrative of the book may be viewed as the building and the
rest (preface, jacket, cover, et cetera.) as scaffolding.
28
It may also be telling that when the dust jacket is removed from the book, the inscription, “Mercy is
not a cure/Quiet has its own set of problems,” is revealed, thus exposing yet another paratextual occurence of Eggers’ work. In this, he addresses the problem of silence and mercy, two passive instances of nondialogic interaction.
29
Notably, not ironic.
30
“Somebody who did not share this institutional background would not be able to identify aesthetic
features in it because he [or she] did not know the concepts and conventions which define these features” (Olsen 533).
31
See Bakhtin’s, “Discourse in the Novel,” for a more complete account on how linguistic systems
within a novel, as well as daily life, become separated linguistic sphere interacting with, but existing
separately from, the dominant culture.
32
The origin of the novel’s title is related to Will by Hand. Hand describes an indigenous people who
wanted to fly, but they were weighted down like mountains from souls and voices of their thousands
of ancestors. These people were eventually forced from their lands by the Spanish Conquistadors but
left a message on a cliff above their village. The message read, “YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY!” (373-77).
33
Hand’s pragmatism is perhaps best highlighted in his short rant against fiction. “But the strange
thing about this business is that nonfiction, when written well, is unequivocally more powerful than
fiction, because if all details and evocations are equal—meaning, if the writing brings alive the people
and places described with equal skill, then the story that is true will evoke a stronger response in the
reader, for the same reasons that we feel stronger about a real person than a fictional person, or a person we’ve met in person, versus a person we haven’t.” (276).
34
Similarly, after describing the feeling of a boat skipping across water in Y.S.K.O.V., Eggers follows
with a series of blank pages meant to give the reader the textual feeling of skipping across water.
35
Interestingly, something Will and Hand continually attempt and never achieve.
36
Sudanese, primarily Arab, militiamen, known now as the janjaweed.
71
37
Typically, publishing houses make large profits from books optioned for movie or stage produc-
tion.
38
To alleviate confusion, the literary quarterly, McSweeney’s, will be referred to as McSweeney’s Quar-
terly, and the publishing house will be referred to as McSweeney’s publishing.
39
Eggers named the journal after a man, Timothy McSweeney, who used to send Eggers and his
mother bizarre letters in which McSweeney claimed they were relatives. It was a few years after the
McSweeney’s Quarterly first appeared that Eggers discovered, through an intern, that Timothy
McSweeney was, in fact, a real person. “Timothy was a talented young man who attended art school
and even got an MFA, spending some time after that teaching art. But thereafter his life was troubled,
and eventually he was hospitalized” (The Better of McSweeney’s 4). While he was in mental institutions, Timothy McSweeney wrote various letters to various McSweeney families, “perhaps to answer
questions about his life and provenance” (4).
72
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