"We fill pre-existing forms": The anxiety of curating and communicating origin in 'A Visit From The Goon Squad' and 'The Pale King'

“To break an idea up into its original elements is to return to its moments, which at least do not have the form of the given idea, but rather constitute the immediate property of the self.” 

- G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Sprit.

Recent American fiction’s preoccupation with the instability of origin seems to directly reflect anxieties around the impossibility of self-definition in conditions of uncertain authenticity. Though we associate authenticity with “properties of genuineness, realness, and at times even originality” authenticity remains nebulous and coherent origin remains ungraspable beyond these three factors (Vannini 2006, 236). In this context of its relationship to a nebulous authenticity, origin is not being defined as something as fixed as nationality or early social/familial environment (Lindholm 2008, 2), or as the established precedent of cause and effect explicated in a national literature embedded in self-fashioning and the conceit of the self-made man. To define origin in these terms would be to falsely describe it as having “a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself” rather than being “inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of difference” (Derrida 1982, 11). Instead, it is being defined as the location of sites for originality within a constructed identity, with origin existing as part of an insufficient system for self-justification. The recognition of sites of origin as the locus of existential meaning and the cause of internalised behaviours and ideologies is revealed through processes of externalisation. Interaction with these externalisations reveals more about what is miscommunicated than what is known in both David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), where this focus on meaning is essential to the treatment of origin and originality. This resistance of a previously hegemonic attribution of value to the unity implicit in a linear temporal relationship with origin is dispelled in the novels structurally, with their connection to time being fragile and codependent, as with novels like JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) which similarly represent America as a system of interrelating and repetitious fragments. Both novels are composed of interrelated stories and fragments reflecting the problematic creation of a whole in conditions of malformed origin, and are important texts for the “remaking of the modern literary system at the end of the twentieth century” (Hesse 1996, 29). Both novels consider relationship with origin to be part of a narrative of renovative self-actualisation, involving a troubled aspiration to meaning and a refutation of the search for origin as laying a claim to identity. As interconnected polyphonous compositions, they resist the obvious congruity of the single narrative novel, mirroring the characters’ struggle to form legible identities. The novels involve confrontations of the self that engage in distinguishing subjecthood and objecthood, and force female characters to engage with the liminal space in which their self-definition is out of their hands, complicit with Hegelian dialectics around individuality. In A Visit from the Goon Squad, found objects act as a manifestations of ambivalent origin/originality crucial to self-justification. For Sasha, one of the novel’s main characters, the objects occupy a space of high and low culture, significance and insignificance, interrelating mundanity and artistry, and problematising the relationship between origin and objectivity, while male characters in the novel objectify women through with a similar strategy. The Sisyphean narrative of The Pale King reflects Foster Wallace’s concern with identity development within prescribed limitations to challenge the stability of performed reality as Meredith Rand and Shane Drinion's chapter of The Pale King (Forty-Six) exemplifies the mutable communication of origin as simultaneously establishing and undermining self-definition, while Egan’s narrative structure does more to reflect instances and experiences anterior to their form of representation; things they are separate from and prior to. 

Psychoanalytic and revelatory spaces in the novels function as sites of curated and dissected origin/originality: the dialogic and often oppositional interactions therein doomed to a circularity of definition, reflecting the problems inherent to the curation of identity. Both novels use analogies from characters’ personal histories to explain and refute their current circumstances in such a way that defines origin and self-justification as reciprocal and self-defeating concepts complicit in an existential search for authenticity. Issues of corporeality and physical demonstrations of these identities are treated as symptomatic of problematised origins and reflective of toxic gender dynamics. The conscious representation of these sites, or their misrepresentation and manipulation by others, creates resistant narratives as their origins are made as refractory as their futures. Their compulsion to define themselves by moments of origination and actualisation are revealed to be fragile or compromising to their sense of self. These self-generations and regenerations are marred by a specific anxiety around communications of origin as self-defeating and entropic where origin performs as explanation. In attempts to resist and possess origins, the novels demonstrate the problematics of expressing and controlling identity and selfhood, specifically in industries backgrounding the subsumption of individualism (the IRS and the music industry). The relationship between text, context, and subtext demonstrates language acquisition is an important part of the drama where characters attain a language of self-aestheticisation. Language performs as commodity and a source for self-justification and control, while the curation and expression of so-called truths around these texts assert liminality rather than stability. The novels consider the inefficacy of representation, the inevitability of misrepresentation where origin plays a role in alienation, and the preservation and conservation of origin as inherently entropic. The possession of origin is a false definite in an uncertain existence, the value of which is consistently challenged in the novels by the criticising the process of interpretation and valuation.

The uncertainty of origin is made physical in Sasha’s “found objects”, the stolen items that function both as a symptom of her kleptomania and as signifiers of an ambivalent construction of identity. In art history the objet trouvé constituted a departure from nineteenth century aesthetics, most memorably in Marcel Duchamp’s subversive ‘Fountain’ (1917), a urinal he submitted for an exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists (Tate, ‘Found Object'). The complication of authorship, originality, and value in found object artworks endured a cultural transformation from radicalism to institutionalisation in art throughout modernism and into postmodernism, with stock images presenting the most contemporary iteration of the found object. Egan’s handling of found objects participates in a wider narrative of intermediality - the idea that all texts exist as a constellation of media and texts as opposed to a constellation of texts alone (Bruhn 2016, 15). The novel itself functions like its characters, as neither can be reduced to a single point of origin and both exist as part of a constellation of moments and origins. While the music industry foregrounds concerns of authenticity, defined as a reference that subjectively accounts for the degree to which a person feels they are fulfilling commitments they have to self (Erickson 1995, 123), Sasha’s object-focussed narrative presents a more self-reflexive study of origin and mediation, a kind of curation that resists being derivative through self-reference and through re-significance (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 12).

It also arouses the discourse of affective identification (Zappen 2016, 301), both in the online relationship Sasha begins with Alex and in the relationship Sasha has to the identifier objects she comes to possess. She returns wallets both because of their value and the fact that they hold ID cards, emphasising the issues of reducibility and failure of comprehensive representation of a person, as information about origin and identity cannot be reconciled for Sasha, but should not be removed from other people. Her sexual excitement at Alex assigning value to her objects wears off quickly and is replaced by a sadness that leaves her feeling “gouged” (Egan, 16). Her premature disappointment with how she imagines Alex will remember her disregards and misinterprets both their experience and her nature: “It jarred Sasha to think of herself as a glint in the hazy memories that Alex would struggle to organize a year or two from now: Where was that place with the bathtub? Who was that girl?” (14). This reaction and other reactions to misrepresentation by Sasha reflect a deeply postmodern anxiety identified by Kristeva as “the inability to represent” (New Maladies, 9), and Sasha’s reaction to the note that falls out of Alex’s wallet, which reads “I BELIEVE IN YOU”, performs a similar reduction and crystallisation. The “flush of embarrassment” (Egan, 18) she feels for Alex and herself at the discovery of this note of affirmation removes it from any potential origin under his control through conjecture and a refusal to engage with it, opposite to Drinion’s persistence of inquiry in The Pale King. As a psychoanalytic document, the affirmative aphorism of the note without specific origin is so revealing that it disquiets Sasha. It is presented as a document of authenticity: intimate, significant, and evaluating despite its mediation by Sasha. Alex’s insecurity anterior to her experience of him and the origin of their relationship undermines the date for Sasha as it involves her reinterpretation of Alex, the note breaking the social contract of gender performance. Her insistence that he “probably doesn’t even remember it’s there” (ibid) is a negation of the gesture of sincerity contained in the note and its disconcerting vulnerability; as is her assumption that he would deny that the note is even his, subliminally negating the existence of his emotional interiority before connection with her. Despite the ambiguous origin of the aphorism (to him from him, to him from a lover, to him from a parent, from him to someone but undelivered), her failure to return it stresses her lack of self-belief and her continued accumulation of identity through collage, though possession cannot compensate for an inadequate sense of identity. Sasha interprets the reality of the situation based on projection of unstable acts of becoming in insecure contexts. The aspiration for self-transformation she expresses her therapist when describing this incident emphasises that she cannot synthesise with the world around her because of her ideology around possession and the relationship between objects and her interiority. The failure to materialise origin and therefore a cogent sense of identity is insufficiently embodied in objects of identity which delineate origin through their possession and interpretation by other bodies.

Chapter Two foregrounds the social implications of reworking origin through interpretation and the cultural production of identity as a scrap of paper instigates another misunderstanding with Sasha’s boss, Bennie Salazar, a record executive who eventually fires her for stealing. Bennie has condensed his shameful memories into a list of words and phrases which are mistakenly read as song titles by Sasha, inadvertently relieving him of his shame through her unwitting acceptance of him. He has been reworked through her misunderstanding, the origin of his shame made productive and artistic through a process of repossession and reconstruction by Sasha, alleviating the anxiety of being dispossessed while highlighting the nebulousness of origin. Sasha was also responsible for his “first erection for months” prompting him to “really see her” (31) as he apparently could not until she was sexually exciting to him. Sasha reworks her objects without the ability to rework herself, though she has a physical reaction to the thefts, which make “her body glow” (199) and provide a psychical and physical flush similar to the one Bennie experiences. Just as Sasha re-signifies and re-evaluates her stolen/found objects to engage in self-realisation, the rhetoric of production and reworking is applied to her by Bennie, with the process of specifically sexual objectification participating in culturally imbued misogyny. Hegel discusses this synthetic and social production of individuality in his chapter on ‘Observation of self-consciousness in its purity and its relation to external actuality’:

Since the individual is at the same time only what he has done, his body is also the expression of himself which he has himself produced; it is at the same time a sign, which has not remained an immediate fact, but something through which the individual only makes known what he really is, when he sets his original nature to work. (221)

Bennie’s dramatisation of an attempt to produce authentic feeling and selfhood with its origin in unreciprocated sexuality is identified as part of a romance novel culture Bennie has internalised, despite reading the nineteenth century novels in secret so as not to compromise his masculinity (Egan, 31). These formative or original moments of clandestine and shameful behaviour are intrinsic to Bennie’s sense of masculinity, anxiety, and unworthiness become reworked through disavowal of and objectification of femaleness.

In terms of masculine psychoanalytic performance in The Pale King, Drinion’s characterisation is jarringly unfamiliar. As an asexual man of what would be considered unsatisfying origin he is separate from the aggressive and insecure masculinities presented in both texts, apparently satisfied in mundanity without the need for self-justification or definition. Rather than accounting for himself, or feeling the need to, he performs as an evaluator, analysing the patterns of behaviour in his colleagues with precision and comprehension without imparting judgement or superiority. Even in his “tête-à-tête” with Meredith about her origin story, his opinions are indefinite because they have no bearing on his sense of self; everything existing as subjective and fundamentally changeable. His thoughts and feelings and their origins are continuously under evaluation and advisement and therefore offer no explanation. Unlike Bennie or other characters in The Pale King (Chris Fogle, the interviewed men in Chapter Fourteen), Drinion cannot be reduced to his moments because he has already evaluated them and their elements require no synthesis or extra significance. His characterisation of his self is the most revealing of the entropic nature of self-definition without the Lacanian “desire for recognition dominates the desire that is to be recognised, preserving it as such until it is recognised” (Lacan 2006, 431). This indifference to recognition exists in stark contrast to Meredith’s anxiety around authentically revealing herself and the communication of revelation (“sexy but crazy and a serious bore, just won’t shut up if you get her started” (Wallace, 491)). As a former “cutter”, Meredith’s explanation of her origin and therefore of her identity is characterised by a sense of revealing violence towards the self: “I thought of the scars and the cutting as letting the unbeautiful inside truth come out” (488). Drinion’s reaction - “putting cuts on your face would have externalised the situation too much” (474) - emphasises the curated communication of that unbeautiful truth and Meredith’s problematic self-revelation. 

Control of her mental health and therefore her sense of self is handled by the intervention of the Zeller psychiatric hospital janitor, Ed, who started dating her she was just seventeen and in the midst of a nervous breakdown and eventually became her husband. In his editing of her behaviour he provided her with contradictory advice that seemingly stopped her from self-harming and regulated her language, telling her both what and what not to say. Stephen Burn writes of Infinite Jest, "no matter how expansive your vocabulary, or how careful your description, a list of words is not enough to make a self” (Burn, 40) and the control of Meredith’s vocabulary by Ed identifies him as her curator and further reduces her ability for self-definition. He undermines the Zeller institution by destroying its validity on the basis of terminology, even undermining the phrase “mental-health system”, and creating an unstable environment that facilitates his absolute control over Meredith. She can recognise that Ed’s behaviour could be interpreted as sexually predatory but is less worried than she would have been because he brought that issue up with her, extending his control over her formative narrative. While trying to communicate that she is a complete person to Drinion and not just a pretty face, this revelation of control identifies the malformation of her identity and the disjunction between origin and insisted experience. Even what Meredith calls their “tête-à-tête”, a phrase taught to her by Ed (488), creates a space in the novel where Drinion performs as psychoanalyst - decontextualising and remodelling Meredith’s own experience of her past. Meredith managed that threat with the value he possessed for her, in that he could see “what’s really going on inside [her]” (489); but Ed, in his own words, “didn’t understand and care but only understood [her] the way a mechanic understands a machine” (490). This is evidenced by his refusal to reciprocate intimacy with his life and his illness, as Meredith tells Drinion, “when I asked him about it all he’d say is that it’s his own private business and we weren’t in here talking about him, it didn’t matter about him because all he really was was a kind of mirror for me.” (492) when in actual fact she is a mirror for him. That her husband has created this imbalanced psychoanalytic space for her prevents synthesis in the same way Sasha’s kleptomania does, both existing in accordance with cultural prescriptions in spite of the mutual resistances and attempts at integration they make. Where Sasha accumulates and repossesses, Meredith cuts and dispossesses in ways that reflect their unstable existential and psychological conditions. 

  Drinion’s complicity in the tête-à-tête is a further machination of contemporary cultural pyschologisation as he facilitates a site for recognition (Parker 2010, 66). The dialogue between Drinion and Meredith presents its engagement with “the opposition between life and death enclosed and informed by a struggle for recognition that constitutes lord and bondsman, ‘master and slave’” (Green 2005, 39, citing Hegel 1807 from Kojeve 1969). This site of recognition signifies the problematic nature of origin as an explanation for identity issues, as Meredith has to work to convince Drinion of her validity and value because her origins are not self-evident for him in the way they are for other people: he can recognise her beauty but puts very little stock by it, enacting a chain of sequential revelations about Meredith. Her expectation that Drinion will engage in sexually objectifying her is mitigated by Drinion’s passive engagement in relation to identifying Meredith’s origin as manipulated. Kostova writes on trauma theory, “In the background remains the postmodern anxiety motivated by the belief in the ideologically constructed character of reality,” (48) and in this instance, Drinion’s failure to respond in typically societally structured ways reveals the construction of their conversation and the construction of Meredith’s reality. Even in asking why Drinion is not sorry to hear about her husband dying immediately after a discussion of her attractiveness, her reaction of frustration is against his refusal to take responsibility for or possess her narrative in any way, as his version of maleness is antithetical to any previous experience she has had with masculinity (467). Meredith’s resulting frustration does not derive from the objectification she has become accustomed to, but the problems evidenced in Drinion’s questioning of her subjective reality and origin without the typical overtures of objectification where value is implicit.

An antithetical version of this interaction is presented in Chapter Nine of A Visit from the Goon Squad, in which celebrity journalist Jules Jones sexually assaults the nineteen-year-old actor Kitty Jackson during an interview, in order to get to know and therefore possess the real her through extreme violence:

I want to rub [her blood] onto my raw ‘scrofulous’ (ibid.), parched skin in hopes that it will finally be healed. I want to fuck her (obviously) and then kill her or possibly kill her in the act of fucking her […] What I have no interest in doing her is killing her and then fucking her, because it’s her life - the inner life of Kitty Jackson - that I so desperately long to reach.(187)

His determination to “insert” himself in her story and insert his body in hers attests to the consistent perception of female characters as sites for male development, as opposed to characters with antecedent origin worthwhile to the men who are determined to possess them. She defends herself by macing and stabbing him (violently subverting his gaze and inserting a weapon in him) and escapes from him, with her fame being amplified by press coverage of the attack she survived. This coverage reconstructs Kitty’s image, but is constituted by mutation rather than self-originated career development. This is exacerbated by the fact that Jules Jones accredits the origin of this positive press coverage to himself: since his violence is the reason for her success he is the arbiter and originator of her life as it is in spite of his failure to viscerally access her interiority. This is worsened by various factors: Kitty apologises for playing a part in his emotional breakdown and ‘stabing’ him (189) - Jones including her misspelling of stabbing as an extended effort to devalue her; she stops getting work in the aftermath of the attack (153); and begins to self-harm (158). The relationship between the text itself, what he perceives as subtext (footnotes providing an attempt at narrative congruity from Jones’s perspective), and the context of his need for self-legitimisation cannot synthesise because of its malformed origin - the violence of the attack and its nature bursting through the solipsism of the rest of the chapter. Hegel addresses this production of the self and duality of individuality and self-production in his treatment of antithesis in the rest of the subchapter previously cited:

The individual exists in and for himself: but he has also an intrinsic being or has an original determinate being of his own - a determinateness which is in principle the same as what psychology thought to find outside of him. In his own self, therefore, there emerges the antithesis, this duality of being, the movement of consciousness, and the fixed being of an appearing actuality, an actuality which in the individual is immediately his own.

Meredith’s persistence in trying to establish her original determinate of legitimacy performs a different kind of interior access to Jones’s. When Meredith is as self-deprecating as Jones or as Chris Fogle is about her origin story, she diminishes its already precarious value because of the issues of aestheticization this creates in an already inconsistent narrative. Meredith does not have the luxury of uncertainty without corresponding it to inadequacy, and when her origin and her existence has its value questioned by Drinion, this is worsened by the loss of certainty in her possession her own narrative. In failing to recognise the means of her production by her husband, Meredith’s conception of her worth and her sense of existential meaning is corrupted. The conclusion of her origin story is anti-climactic and resists typical origin revelation narrative styles because of the complications of possession that have been revealed, her origin story’s value mitigated by her own contradictions and the loss of faith in her own subjective reality. 

Sasha’s framing of the sun in a coat-hanger while she is alone and miserable in Naples performs possession differently. She claims the sun, announcing “it’s mine” (240), in such a way that evokes possession and handles the imbuing of significance without the violence of theft, symbolic of the malleability of origin. The explosante-fixe of such moments of affect are less about aesthetic composition than about possessing the sublime in the mode of the personally subliminal. Where Meredith concludes by disregarding her own story as hysterical, Sasha’s engagement with momentary but repetitious authenticity in the coat hanger sun emphasises the role of origin in the lattice of characterisation, as a means of identifying the self in the past, of resisting the present, as complicity in the future, and as a source of validation in these sites, bound up in the process of existential and artistic valuation. The pursuit of origin in an attempt for validation becomes a performance designed to reinstate self-identity which reveals its failure of originality in terms of the American ideal and the artistic ideal of absolute subjecthood.

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