Near the end of Steve Tomasula’s 2006 novel The Book of Portraiture, a chance encounter takes place in a local pharmacy story between an advertising model and the digital retoucher responsible for photo-shopping so many of her globally circulating images. While standing in front of a rack with condoms that all bear the model’s picture as “the female half of a romantically perfect couple in a passionate embrace,” the photo retoucher asks the real-life model to autograph one of the condom boxes. It is a defining, or better still, high-definition, image for the paragone, the agonizing conflict between word and image, whose centuries-long tradition Tomasula’s novel meticulously traces and unpacks. Mandatory stops in this tradition include the invention of writing, where iconic symbols are turned into arbitrary signifiers; post-Renaissance Spain where Simonides’ well-known statement of painting as mute poetry begets a new relevance in the paintings (and writings) of Diego Velásquez; the founding of psychoanalysis with its understanding of “dreams as language” (BP 1); the contemporary aesthetic appeal of transgenic art, which turns DNA code into live sculptures; and, as is the case in the pharmacy thread, the challenge to maintain a sense of self within an image-driven cybernetic society of avatars and  virtual identities.

Time and again in these historical face-offs, which each beget a separate chapter, the desire of words and images to, respectively, carry out each other’s work (and thus outdo the other on its own terrain), or to wipe themselves clean of the other’s influence altogether, are exposed as illusory and doomed attempts to undo a dialectic of intermediality that is as deeply rooted historically as it is tenacious in the present. The vaunted promise of ekphrasis to turn text into images and thus “still” the temporal flow of words by congealing them into spatial form is betrayed by the extra-referential nature of words, that is by their inability to not point beyond themselves. Murray Krieger, in a seminal study of ekphrasis, speaks in this regard of the “illusion of the natural sign,” the utopian desire of words to act as their own referents, that is, to evoke themselves as distinct, material objects rather than as signifying elements within a consecutive narrative chain. 

According to Krieger, this displacement from temporality to spatiality is frustrated at once structurally and affectively, by, respectively, the “incapacity of words to come together at an instant”—i.e. de Saussure’s insight about the “linear” nature of the signifier—and by the poet’s own ambivalence to let go off the “freedom” that temporal flow affords. If stillness in movement is what gives the ekphrastic poem solidity and weight, it is also, paradoxically, what undoes ekphrasis’s very claim to vivacity, losing the patient on the table as it were even if the operation may be called a success technically speaking. Ekphrasis may in this regard appear as an example of the poet trying too hard, a pedantic if not in fact ethically questionable attempt to “overcome” the “otherness” of images by assimilating them into text. In his foundational essay on the “limits” [Grenze] of poetry and painting, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing thus accuses the ekphrastic poet of “Schilderungssucht” or “picturitis”: “In every word I hear the labor of the poet,” Lessing writes, “but the thing itself [i.e. the image] I am far from seeing” (Laokoon 886). 

From the opposite end, the painter’s aspiration to coopt the narrative logic of words finds itself similarly thwarted by that medium’s structural constraints. Called on by the Inquisition to account for his having juxtaposed temporally disparate scenes from the lives of the Saints in one and the same painting, Tomasula’s Velásquez explains that this historical distortion follows directly from painting’s inability to represent temporal sequences. Yet, so he defends his art, the resulting artificiality of his composition is purposive in that it urges viewers question their secular perception of time, which is linear and “immediate,” in favor of “God’s always-ever-present” (BP 66-7):

My Modern handling of paint … captures exactly what the eye sees —without mediation—yet shows it to be artifice. Without mediation, then, we learn what words cannot express: the gap between word and image that we unveil each time we attempt to depict one by the other. (BP 67)

Painting’s immediacy, its inability to coopt either the extra-referentiality or temporality of words or, more precisely, its ability to only do so clumsily by rendering simultaneous that which exists sequentially in language, here becomes an ideological vehicle in the service of the Church by making present a divinely eternal present that otherwise remains hidden.

Yet this reasoning also implies that it is images rather than words that are the seat of divinity, or, to put it more provocatively, that in translating Biblical stories unto the canvass, Velásquez is effectively purifying Scripture, a heresy that is not lost on the members of the Inquisition. Indeed, the next step in Velásquez’ art, as Tomasula’s artistic genealogy shows, is to create paintings that do away with referentiality altogether and that no longer point to anything besides themselves. Such  auto-referentiality is at the heart of one of Velasquez’ most famous (and most mundane) paintings, his portrait of the Meninas family. Although every family portrait inevitably will have a narrative quality to it if only for the fact that the different generations it depicts tell the story of a blood line—Velásquez duly notes, for instance, that the infanta in the painting’s foreground passed away shortly after he finished the painting—Tomasula’s protagonist also cunningly obfuscates any such concerns with finitude by evoking a dazzling display of mirrors and frames that perpetually reflect each other not to mention the inclusion of his own persona in the family portrait. 

Such auto-referentiality is what Velásquez, in the chapter’s closing lines, refers to as

the deepest secret of portraiture, the answer I did not make the Inquisition—every portrait tells more of its creator than its subject; every portrait  is and can only be a self-portrait; a portrait of its viewer; its author; a portrait of the I (nosotros). (BP 84)

Within psychoanalysis—the topic of the chapter that immediately follows these words —the term for such auto-referentiality is of of course narcissism, a pre-verbal state of holism and integration which Jacques Lacan famously associates with the order of the image and which he opposes to language-mediated realm of the Symbolic. Within the pre-verbal universe of Las Meninas, then, the gap between word and image still appears as absolute because there is as of yet no gap. Hence it is a pure painting devoid of any verbal tampering in a way that Lessing might have approved of it. Yet this does not mean that Tomasula buys into the territorialist purism of his Neoclassicist precursor, who, in his eagerness to render unto Ceasar what is Caesar’s and unto Christ what is Christ’s, effectively sets up a border patrol to police the boundaries between the spatial and the temporal arts. Instead, part of the relevance and appeal of The Book of Portraiture lies precisely in the way which it self-consciously situates itself on the gap between words and image (the book is saturated with images including reproductions of paintings by Velásquez; pixelated computer images; as well as a single fingerprint [the author’s?]; and different color fonts) even as it holds on to the traditional literary notions of authorship, book, and novel as well as a classical structural division into chapters.  Why this attachment to a seemingly dated nomenclature and method even as The Book of Portraiture rather obviously exhibits a more hybrid approach? What does it mean for a multimedia writer like Tomasula to identify so exclusively with the genre of the novel, including with one of its foundational texts, Don Quixote, when so many of his contemporary peers—both fictional and non-fictional—have abandoned the genre in a favor of other modes of expression including hypertext; electronic literature; flash fiction; or, as in the case of Don DeLillo’s author-character Bill Gray, have embraced silence as the only viable alternative left for words in an image-driven society?

Because its setting effectively raises the issues of agony and (sterile) desire, the condom scene in the pharmacy may serve as a privileged vantage point from which to explore these questions and thus help us chart the political and aesthetic stakes behind the word-image dialectic in the present as Tomasula sees them. On the one hand, the act of writing, of writing the self more precisely, is here evoked, as a salvaging attempt to regain authenticity and identity within an image-driven society of artificiality and pretense. The photo retoucher’s obvious pleasure in seeing the model “[in] the flesh” (BP 271) triggers in him a desire to preserve this moment of real presence, a desire that can apparently only be fulfilled through the act of writing.

Yet, for the model, too, it is a liberating moment that allows her to regain a long lost sense of bodily authenticity. By marking one of the condom boxes with her signature, she sets it apart from the “doctored image repeated on box after box” (BP 270), thus breaking the cycle of endlessly repeated mechanical substitutions for her real self. When reflecting on the “anniversary of that weird day at the pharmacy” one year later, she refers to it as “that time that she got her body back—that is, since that day the ads she posed for showed photos of her as she was, her face, her eye shape, her skin tone, not those digitally manipulated ones” (BP 284). It is the palimpsestic act of writing over the image of her own body that allows her to regain the latter, thus reversing the paragone’s traditional gender dichotomy, which associates images with femininity and words with men. Here, by contrast, it is the female hand writing over the male-manipulated image of her, that allows her to regain, maintain, and sustain her body. Indeed, one might say that is the very object that she is holding in her hands—a condom, or, as it is called in French, a préservatif—that signals this logic of preservation as it pushes back against the male carrier of information—i.e semen—that would otherwise transform her body. Put differently, it is the palimpsestic sterility of the word and image encounter, its substituting one for the other (rather than merging), that allows her to reclaim her body. 

Yet such a close association of writing and bodily presence goes against one of the central tenets of poststructuralist criticism, for whom the act of writing is predicated upon corporeal absence.  As Roland Barthes famously puts it at the beginning of “The Death of the Author”: “Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” In Tomasula’s pharmacy scene, by contrast, writing appears as a preservative measure, one that puts the lost body back into its author, thus undoing the damage that images wreak on our selves. But then the autograph is of course a very curious form of discourse, one that, particularly as it is here evoked, belongs to the category of performative statements. For in order for the autograph to be “felicitous”—in Austin and Searle’s sense of that term—in order for it to play its role as safeguard of authenticity and identity, both the autographing agent and the recipient need to be present during the act of signing. It is only this co-presence that guarantees that it is indeed the model’s autograph, and not somebody else’s, that the photo retoucher takes home with him, a certitude that is lost when one purchases an autographed copy from a third party. 

Moreover, as Derrida has shown, as a form of discourse, the signature is itself contingent upon the very structure of iterability that the model seeks to undo. For it is only the signature’s repeatability, the fact that the model would be able to sign other boxes in exactly the same fashion, that makes it possible for the autograph to stand in for identity. It follows, then, that the interaction between word and image, as it is here evoked, may be less sterile than initially thought; and that the link between bodily identity on the one hand and writing and painting on the other cannot be reduced to being one of antithesis or equivalence. Nor has it ever been different. Commenting on the invention of writing as it grew out of the cave paintings in Altamira and Lascaux, Tomasula speaks of a “something” that informs both the acts of writing and painting alike:

[Long before] men and women everywhere proclaimed their bodies to be, after all, their most potent weapons, their poems, their canvas, something powerful had been straining to come into the world. Its silent efforts were there in the bloodstains aborigines made on boulders—perfect prints of human hands—first portraits that were repeated and repeated as if out of the sheer awe that they could be repeated, and wonder at what that might mean. This something was there in cave paintings—stick figures wielding stick spears as if to shout I! I was! I did! (BP 1-2)

The “something powerful” that induces “sheer awe,” the “weaponry” that bolsters the belief in our own bodies, is none other than the perpetual wonder of representation, not the representation of reality of traditional mimesis, but the capability—or more precisely, the inability not to—capture oneself in images and words (“I! I was! I did!”), to see our selves reflected in the words or images we create. If the pleasure that primitive man derived from such doublings may be attributed to what Freud, in “The Uncanny” essay, identifies as the primordial narcissism of this primitive stage, when such doublings had not yet acquired the threatening (i.e. self-destructive) qualities associated with them in the modern era of individualism, then the model’s elated response indicates that some of that wonder obviously persists even in the present.

Writing may indeed be that space where the subject slips away but it is also the space where that loss is recovered by the text’s internalization of the author’s foreign body, transforming and working through it so that the latter may be incorporated symbolically within the fabric of the text. If the terminology I am using recalls that of Freud’s theory of mourning—according to which the mourner symbolically “incorporates” (einverleibet) the deceased so that he/she may live on in a psychological sense—then this is no coincidence. Every text bemoans the author it so necessarily removes, working through that loss and recalling the author in precisely that which is most foreign—or defamiliarizing—about it, i.e. its imagery or style.  Writing in The Book of Portraiture, then, acts like a pharmakon, as both that which kills and cures at the same time, as both a toxin and a palliative. This is of course how writing is described in that other great pharmacy scene of postmodern writing, the one presided over by Plato in Derrida’s 1972 essay. Unlike Plato, however, for whom the wonder and detriment of writing reside in its cursed ability to serve as a mnemonic device—recalling for us what the philosopher would much rather have our minds to retain actively —Tomasula is interested in how writing both removes the author and recovers (and thus mourns) him/her via precisely that which distinguishes him/her from others, i.e. style. 

What we call poetic style is essentially the attempt to craft imagery out of words, to stall the flow of words by congealing it into spatial form. To put it in the terms of Roman Jakobson, it is to “project” the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination; it is, as Jakobson’s very use of the term “projection” implies, to impose a visual order on the temporal order of language. Signifiers which otherwise link up with each other in a sequential fashion suddenly call attention to themselves due to either repetitive patterning that suggests substitutability (anaphora, alliteration, chiasmus) or due to description (i.e. ekphrasis, metaphor, simile) which upholds the narrative progression.

One thus arrives at the curious paradox that the literariness of a text hinges on its ability to be non-verbal, i.e. visual; and that what is most foreign or defamilarizing in a literary text is at the same time that which is most proper (or proprietary) about it because such stylizations always implicitly bear the mark of its author. By autographing the condom box Tomasula’s model defamialiarizes it, turning it into an objet trouv**é seemingly devoid of intention, yet her signature is also what claims it, setting the objet apart from the dozens of other boxes. Given the figurative meaning of “signature” as a shorthand for style one is moreover tempted to read the gesture as a symbol for Tomasula’s poetics in general. One other way of putting this is to say that the attempt at vivacity (or enargeia) in literature, which already the ancient Greek rhetoricians associated with ekphrasis, is also always the implicit attempt to symbolically revive the author. To the extent that it constitutes an attempt to bring a visual (or plastic) work of art to life on the page, ekphrasis constitutes the external equivalent of that which the process of mourning—according to a well-known formulation by Freud—seeks to do internally: to keep the deceased alive within us. The way in which each process attains this vivacity may moreover be put in complementary terms. In the same way that ekphrasis seeks to spatialize the temporal medium of words, so the process of mourning aims a (re-)temporalization of a spatial object, i.e. the body of the deceased. As Freud points out, mourning is a cannibalistic measure that aims at a piecemeal interiorization of the deceased so that the latter may be “continued in a psychological sense” (T&M 5). As with ekphrasis, therefore, where words try to act as their own referents, mourning constitutes a domestic economy—Freud speaks of it as “inner work” [innere Arbeit] (T&M 7)—whose seeming self-sufficiency further highlights its complementarity to ekphrasis. For neither the stilling of movement associated with ekphrasis nor the “un-stilling” that characterizes mourning (the deceased living on within us) can ever be fully realized: mourning cannot reanimate the corpse; the textual corpus cannot help but be animated. In this fashion, the close integration of ekphrasis and mourning, as Tomasula evokes it in The Book of Portraiture, plays off against each other the similarly unsustainable economies of its two constituents at the same time as it highlights crucial differences between the malleability of textual and actual bodies.

Yet to realize the contiguity and complementarity of the processes of mourning and ekphrasis is also to acknowledge the significance of tradition and of history more generally, which may be one reason for Tomasula’s attachment to the notions of novel, book and authorship. Both the definite categorization of Tomasula’s title (“the book”) and the generic categorization of its subtitle (“a novel”) suggest a belief in the continued relevance of such generic markers, as does Tomasula’s  self-identification as “the author” (325) of the work on the acknowledgments pages that close The Book of Portraiture. That the novel closes with such a section is part of the counter-Barthesian and counter-Lessingesque logic that structures it for it is by employing and endorsing these terms that Tomasula very self-consciously assigns himself a place within a larger literary and artistic tradition. Also the novel’s classical division into five self-styled “chapters,” perhaps recalling the five sections of Greek tragedy, should be looked at in this fashion.

To mourn in writing is not only to recover the author via style, it is also to work through the literary tradition that produced this author and to revisit the primal scenes of his connection to others. In short, it is to bear witness to what T.S. Eliot, in his essay on tradition, calls the **“**historical sense.” Only through this “historical sense,” which starts with the identification of oneself as author, may one hope to maintain a transformed presence within the writing one leaves behind. To assign an author to a text is indeed, as Barthes correctly asserts, “to impose a limit on [it], to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (DA 147) yet is also a measure to stave off the textual equivalent of melancholia that Barthes ends up in (and indeed celebrates), a textual universe whose

structure can be followed, “run” (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing  ceaselessly posits meaning to ceaselessly evaporate it. (DA 147)

Within such a universe there can be no mourning for, as Freud writes, within melancholia there is no longer a central agency to steer the process: “the self itself that has become empty” (T&M 7).

If the stocking reference is meant to give Barthes’s poetics an aura of eroticism and thrill, it should be noted that this is the death-wish eroticism of Thanatos, the sterile desire exemplified by the “castrato disguised as a woman” (DA 142) passage from Balzac that opens his essay:**“This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.” (DA 142*).* What is scandalous about this passage is neither its implied misogyny nor the apparent inability to decide who is speaking these words (and thus hold the speaker accountable), but rather the implications it carries for the word and image dialectic. For Balzac’s woman is of course an image, one that is summoned up by words, just as the castrato it disguises is a figure whose singing ties him to words.  The significance of her disguise, then, is twofold: first of all, it registers the familiar point that words may at best pretend to coopt the corporeality of the images; more unforgivingly, it posits that the very summoning of such imagery “castrates” the verbal text, thus removing the very “pleasure” of the text which Barthes’s poetics is otherwise known for. In this logic Barthes shows himself a late descendant of Lessing who similarly (and tellingly) compares the ekphrastic poet to mutes in seraglio.  In both Barthes and Lessing, the interaction between (female) image and (male) word produces no legacy or offspring; there is no internalization of the author’s body; writing forecloses the mourning of the very body it removes.

If Tomasula’s condom scene intuits the potential sterility of the word and image encounter, it also shrieks back for the radical effacement of authorial presence that it implies. His advertising model, as we have seen, recovers her sense of self by writing on her image representation. In her case, it is the endless proliferation of the un-marked mass-marketed condom boxes that acts as the textual equivalent of melancholia, one that she brings to a halt through the act of writing. In contrast with Barthes’s aesthetic development from work to text, then, Tomasula’s poetics is one of working through, which means that it occupies a midway position somewhere between work and text, holding on to a notion of authorship even as it acknowledges the scattering and transformation to which images and texts submit their creators. As Pawel Frelik notes in his analysis of the novel:

While postmodern historiographic fictions, or postmodern fictions in general, often dethrone or even bury the author as the voice behind narratives, The Book of Portraiture appears to resolutely mark his presence.

If for all its experimental fervor, The Book of Portraiture remains a remarkably structured and traditional novel, then, this orthodoxy should be directly related to the way in which it is haunted by death, and is therefore anxious to recover the losses of meaning and origin that writing incurs with every mark that it makes.

Given this deep concern with finitude and loss it is no coincidence that Tomasula’s novel closes with a reference to the Eucharist, the great Catholic ritual of mourning, whose symbolic ingestion of the body and blood of Christ is here evoked as an artwork of sorts, presided over by word and image. This, at least, is how it is perceived by Paul, the Polish-American protagonist of Tomasula’s last chapter, 

“This is my blood,” the priest said, raising the chalice of wine above his head.  A Mexican altar girl in dingy tennis shoes and a surplice as white as a lab coat rang the chimes, just as he had as a kid, to mark the moment of the wine’s transformation. It was about words, but also about bodies. Always the body. Even if bodies were becoming as permeable as words: him standing there because twenty-six years ago his forty-year-old parents, good Catholics to the end, bet rhythm against chemistry. (BP 315)

Paul’s musings are in part triggered by the “religious art” of his girlfriend cum colleague Mary with whom he works in an FBI-controlled DNA lab that analyzes scraps of human flesh from blast sites in order to identify victims. If this professional work already suggests a link with mourning (the identification of remains being one of the necessary conditions for survivors to be able to mourn), then it is in Mary’s art project—for which she uses the lab’s equipment on the sly—that the theme of mourning is specifically connected to the loss and recovery of identity, as it is elsewhere in Tomasula’s novel. 

Like the bio art works of contemporary artist Eduardo Kac, Mary’s is a transgenic art project, one that, in her case, aims to have one of her eggs merge with Paul’s sperm and “some junk DNA from a third person” (BP 294) on a petri dish and then put the resulting  on display in liquid nitrogen. For Mary, whose adoption as a child was kept a secret from her by her foster parents until she presented them with hard DNA evidence, the “poly-parentage” (BP 319) of this transgenic art project affords her a way of working through the loss of her own identity and to recover, if only symbolically, a pre-embryonic state at which she had not yet been separated from her biological parents. This urge to translate her lost identity into her artworks is already evident from an earlier bio sculpture named “Self Portrait” which consists of “an egg … encapsulated beneath a bubble that functioned as a magnifying glass, placed in the frame that used to house her baby portrait” (BP 294).   

What distinguishes the new art project from its predecessor is the apparent need to frame it in religious terms. After a visit to Paul’s parents’ Roman Catholic church prompts her to photograph a rose window (because “its shape reminded her of a petri dish” [BP 314]), Mary starts to wonder about her own art’s contiguity to religion, something that is reflected in the subsequent titles she considers for it: “Trinity,” “Resurrection,” and, eventually, “Self Portrait(s).” Before anything else it is the corporeality of Roman Catholicism—as opposed to the cerebral nature of a Protestant upbringing which forbade her to major in art—that appeals to Mary: its iconology and its statues (the church features a copy of the Moses of Michelangelo famously interpreted by Freud) but, particularly, the bodily nature of the Eucharist: “[Paul had] never noticed how much body stuff there was in the church till Mary started asking about the cannibalism of their rituals: ‘This is my body, take and eat?’ ” (BP 314).  

As Paul later on comes to realize—in the passage cited above—both the Eucharistic ritual and Mary’s art project hinge on a belief in the transmutability of matter, something which not only connects them to mourning (as Freud defines it) but also to the very strategy which Tomasula relies on in order to make Mary’s artworks visible to the reader: ekphrasis. On a metatextual level, then, both the Eucharist’s transubstantiation of wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ (and its subsequent consumption by the believer) and Mary’s “Self Portrait(s)” may be read as figures for the similarly transformative mechanism of ekphrasis, which turns words into images, and then folds the resulting foreign element (which, as we have seen above, is really the transformed presence of the author) back into the text. 

It follows that both the Eucharist and Mary’s artwork share a refusal to accept bodies for what they constitute in the science lab where Mary and Paul work, i.e. mere objects. It is precisely such a refusal that opens Tomasula’s chapter with Paul objecting to Mary’s quipping that “the neck of a mouse is easier to snap than a pencil” (BP 285). Put differently, it is the phenomenological distinction between Körper and Leib, between the body as a scientific object and the body as it is lived, that is at stake here. Even if, on a scientific level, the wine and bread that the priest holds up are just mere food items, this is not how they are perceived by the believer just as Mary’s artwork his an object that has meaning beyond its instrumental value.  In Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work Art,” still the best introduction to the phenomenological account of the work of art, this meaning is identified as the very “work” that artworks carry out.

This is not to say that the instrumental value of Mary’s harvested egg—i.e. its usefulness to the reproduction of the species—is irrelevant to the artwork. But this use value only gains in importance as a result of the artwork’s own phenomenological status. Even though Mary does not intend to implant the fertilized egg in a womb, it should have that “potential, at least for a while” (BP 294), as she tells Paul. Without such “Integrity of materials” (BP 294), the artwork could not be a success: “it wouldn’t get anyone’s attention if she only faked it” (BP 294). It is only because the embryo can still be allowed to follow its “natural” function that the audience will perceive its non-instrumental, i.e. artistic, value. Aesthetic value has here effectively become a function of use value, thus suggesting a logic of interchangeability between the two that is brought to its breaking point as Mary’s piece acquires its final form. 

As her conception of the art piece develops, she starts to fantasize about obtaining the third party DNA “from someone important …  Like the president. Or Christ” (BP 294) After researching the thirteen churches that claim to possess a part of Christ’s foreskin tissue, and not finding any “that wasn’t totally iffy” (BP 295), she settles on the idea of using a relic from “any garden-variety saint with good provenance” (BP 295). It is Paul who eventually provides here with such a relic as the two of them get ready, at novel’s end, to “borrow” (BP 320) a silver heart containing the dried blood of his namesake, Saint Paul, from his parents’ church. “Borrow” here presumably means that the silver heart will be used as a petri dish on which the poly-parented merging of Mary’s egg, Paul’s sperm and, symbolically at least, the Saint’s blood, will take place.  It is therefore the very object that is meant to add aura to the work that is being instrumentalized whereas the modern artwork itself ends up enhancing the relic’s aura in turn. As Paul puts it, referring to Mary’s newfound fame after she has won a major prize for techno art in Tokyo—and justifying the theft—“After you amplify the DNA, they’ll be enough relics for a million churches” (BP 320).

This final image of the relic as petri dish offers an interesting counterpart to the earlier scene of the model autographing the condom box. Here, too, an image—in this case a silver plate relic—is being written over by “text”—the joint DNA material of Paul, Mary, and Paul—in order to recover (and thus also mourn) a loss of identity. Yet this time the mourning that is enacted by the word-image encounter is one that is multiple, as can be gathered from the plurality evoked in the artwork’s title. What is being mourned and recovered in “Self Portrait(s),” in contrast with the earlier “Self Portrait” piece, is at once the adoption-induced loss of Mary’s own identity and the losses of the artwork’s other (pseudo-)genetic constituents: Paul’s parents on the one hand and his Saintly namesake on the other. Such a communal or cultural form of mourning is already implicit in Paul’s reflections on the Eucharist, which occur during his attendance at a remembrance mass for his parents. His attendance at the mass (as a non-believer) not only indicates the need to mourn together—“he had paid to have their names said at mass, if for not other reason than to remember” (BP 313)—but it also shows how such forms of cultural mourning may be directed at more objects than one.  For the church service is in fact a remembrance mass for all recently bereaved families, who paid their dues, whereas the altar girl ringing the chimes triggers in Paul a reminiscence of his own lost childhood when he performed that task (BP 315). Most significantly, the Eucharistic ritual folds these individual pockets of grief into the overall mourning for Christ now that their subjects have all been “[born] into Christ” (313). 

If mourning is here shown to be “multidirectional”—in Michael Rothberg’s sense of that term—then it is only because such cooptability is either institutionally enforced (the church service cramming these individual losses into one and the same mass memorial service) or because of the rather obvious contiguity of Paul’s childhood to the loss of his parents; but not, so I would argue, because of a presumed spill-over logic at the heart of commemoration itself. While it is true that Tomasula’s final chapter juxtaposes the story thread of Paul and Mary with a (presumably) contemporaneous mourning narrative, set in the Middle East, where a Muslim father mourns the loss of his daughter; the two stories are also kept apart from each other thus highlighting the privacy of loss rather than its cooptability across cultural or historical borders. Neither does The Book of Portraiture evoke the artwork as a privileged site for facilitating such empathetic transfers of mourning, as it has been in some recent critical work. Rather the cultural mourning that the artwork fosters is, as with Paul’s experience of the Eucharist, one that extends the individual experience of mourning towards a communal horizon that is homogenous with it: in mourning the loss of his parents, Paul also mourns the loss of his childhood as a whole.

Such homogeneity is also what characterizes the communal extension of the strategic link between ekphrasis and individual mourning as The Book of Portraiture evokes it. If, on the individual level, Tomasula’s deployment of ekphrasis serves as a measure for the mourning of authorial loss, then its communal equivalent zooms in on the passing of the literary movement of whom the author forms a part. Put differently, it is the relative lateness of Tomasula as a postmodern author that provides a cultural horizon for the link between mourning and ekphrasis in The Book of Portraiture. To the extent that it marks an attempt to still the movement of time, ekphrasis may be regarded as the master trope for lateness in literature. The awareness of being latecomers to a movement (or century) already on its way out often prompts in writers the desire to stall (and thus prolong) the historical moment through the spatiality of form, something for which ekphrasis is the most representative expression. The aestheticism of the Decadentists of the late nineteenth century, with theircultivation of art for art’s sake, is the most obvious example of this kind of logic with Dorian Gray’s never-changing picture representing the symbolist writer’s utopian desire for stasis even as the century sped to its predestined end. But it would be as easy to show how the “millennial writers” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, writers whose own sense of lateness is superimposed upon that of the economic system within which they wrote (and write),  employ the trope of ekphrasis to similar ends. 

What makes this condition of postmodern lateness particularly conspicuous in an author like Tomasula is that he has made no secret of his identification with founding postmodern authors like Charles Bernstein and Robert Coover on the one hand and with theorist like Derrida and Foucault on the other. Like the late modernist works discussed by Fredric Jameson in A Singular Modernity, a late work like The Book of Portraiture inevitably has something formulaic about it if only for a fact that it “practices” postmodernism after that aesthetic has been duly codified and institutionalized as ideology. Indeed, in many ways, the issues broached by Tomasula as I have explored them here (the question of authorship, the link between writing and the body, even the question of mourning itself) cannot help but strike us as somewhat dated: in many ways it all feels like the ground it covers has been covered before, by the likes of Gaddis, Coover, and DeLillo. Yet to dismiss The Book of Portraiture on these grounds is to misrecognize the fact that there might be value in lateness, that to bring a movement or literary period to conclusion may require as much artistic skill and insight as it does to break new ground, that to “make it late” may carry as much merit as the (still prevalent) Poundian imperative to make it new. 

This is the case even if Tomasula’s is not the lateness of willed irreconcilability that Edward Saïd ascribes to the late works of Beethoven, works that “do not fit any scheme, and they cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and unsynthesized fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else.” Even though scholars have pointed out that The Book of Portraiture marks in some way a return to a more traditional literary form after the experimental VAS: An opera in Flatland (2002), its central themes are all too easily reconciled with the broader issues of Tomasula’s oeuvre: the concern with the body, with mortality, and with art. The challenge, then, for those of us writing literary history is to understand what “sense of an ending” (BP 293) Tomasula’s novel provides to the postmodern project. The latter phrase of course refers to Frank Kermode’s classical study by this same title; and the fact that Tomasula employs it here highlights his awareness that to be a latecomer is to be saddled with the question of meaning, both the meaning of the movement itself and of its passing. 

What complicates the question of meaning in Tomasula’s case is the fact that postmodernism itself has to a large extent been centered around the idea of the irrelevance or unavailability of meaning—the above-cited Barthes passage on the “ceaseless evaporation of meaning” may stand as a case in point—so that Tomasula’s hermeneutics inevitably risks placing him beyond the movement rather than as its rear guard. Hence, so I would argue, the particular strategic appeal of ekphrasis which allows him to simultaneously stall the mo(ve)ment and to mourn its passing in advance. The following description of Mary’s prize-winning artwork, In a Beginning, may serve as a case in point,

Mary had contracted a lab to infuse [E.coli bacteria cells] with a synthetic gene whose sequence of amino acids carried a message: LET MAN HAVE DOMINION OVER ALL THE PLANTS AND ANIMALS OF THE EARTH. The actual petri dish was set up in a Tokyo gallery, but anyone could see the same view of it that he and Mary were looking at by going to her website. Once there, they could use their mouse to trigger an ultraviolet flash on the bacteria. When they did, the projected circle flashed whitish, then returned to its deep blue glow, the blue of the rose window in the church Paul’s parents had been buried in. The idea was that each flash of the UV light would cause the bacteria to mutate a little, corrupting the message in a way no one would know until she translated the genetic code back into English (BP 318)

If the gradual corruption of the artwork’s initial message may serve as a figure for the postmodern assault on meaning more generally, then Mary’s retroactive “translation” attributes intentionality to it and thus articulates a belief in the recovery of its meaning. That her translation would in fact only render gibberish does not invalidate this claim for the artwork’s meaning is already implicit in the obvious irony of the opening message’s distortion by bacterial corruption: rather than confirming man’s position at the top of the food chain, the artwork becomes a measure of our frailty in the face of an eventual bacterial hegemony. 

Such a loss, however, is still being deferred momentarily by what is really the ekphrastic heart of this passage, that is the permanent “deep blue glow” of the petri dish that marks a stilled continuum between past and present in spite of the occasional light flashes that indicate a decay in process. I would argue that it is in a similar fashion that The Book of Portraiture both expresses its belated status as a postmodern novel and always already mourns the movement’s passing in advance. “In a Beginning,” both the title of Mary’s artwork and also of the first chapter of The Book of Portraiture, indicates that such an aesthetic of lateness necessitates a return to basics: in the case of Mary’s bio works, to the bacterial organisms that first emerged and will outlive us; in the case of Tomasula, to the discovery of art and writing, the focus of his first chapter. Tomasula’s interest in art, and in the word-image dialectic more generally, are thus ultimately a function of this concern with meaning as if by writing a history of art—from Lascaux to Kac—The Book of Portraiture is also trying to make sense of its own place within (recent) literary history. 

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