In the past nineteen years, the place of the novel has dramatically changed. What Guy Debord and William Burroughs thought of as the society of the spectacle was shattered by Web 2.0. By 2006, the internet became a dramatically fragmenting force, destroying the shared metanarratives of the 20^th-century and diminishing the attention spans of readers, and so it dramatically dethroned the novel¹. We should be mindful that shattering the metanarratives of the 19th and 20th centuries was a deeply ethical project, taken on in particular by feminists and postcolonial critics, but their goal was not the radical displacement of the novel’s place in popular culture. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the serious novel had occupied a remarkably privileged place, judged to be the best artistic form to try and frame modern life in a way that could make it comprehensible. No more. Today, it is pop-epics (Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Hunger Games, etc.) and their dark doubles, conspiracy theories (9/11 truthers, anti-vaxxers, QAnons), that attempt to explain our contemporary experience and drive politics. In this context, the serious novel has, ironically, become perhaps the most untimely form. Most of the critical work on Steve Tomasula emphasizes and explains how his work breaks the form of the traditional novel with challenging experimentalism, but I want to write against this emphasis and argue that much of the power of his work is what is most traditional in the forms and aims of the novel. Here, I will argue that his novels draw their increasingly untimely power from the deepest tradition of the serious novel, and his work is most effective as it does what the serious novel has traditionally tried to do: provide a character-driven plot, grounded in techniques of verisimilitude, that maps the social field.

Tomasula and the characters of the novel

VAS: An Opera in Flatland: A Novel; The Book of Portraiture: A Novel; IN & OZ: A Novel; and Ascension: A Novel.² Though very different in form, all are in fact novels. They are filled with characters, mostly narrated in prose, and the events unfold in long contingent plots that propel those characters through complex worlds that they are trying to understand, contrasting their inner selves and the forces of the outer world that impinge on that self, even if that inner space of the self is, as Tomasula often points out, the creation of the outer space of historical contingency to begin with. As a novelist in the tradition, Tomasula’s main characters have, as Kurt Vonnegut memorably puts it, “come unstuck” (3). They are dislodged from the firm grasp of all those things that try to hold us in place: family, work, community, place, nation, religion, education, the good life. Tomasula’s novels trace how these characters have to go on an adventure of discovery about themselves and their world, to realize their humanness is more and different than what they thought it was, or, if they don’t realize it, the reader is urged to have that realization.

According to Thomas Pavel, the novel form was already modern in the ancient world. Unlike the characters in epic and tragedy, the characters in ancient novels strike out into the world without a secure footing in their families and communities. As Pavel put it:

The novel ponders the meaning of life and human interaction, just as epic and tragedy did before it. But whereas epic heroes belong completely to their cities and tragic characters are crushed by fate, most characters in novels are independent of the surrounding world and ready to fight against its pressures and uncertainties. By separating the protagonists from their environment, as the young Lukács knew, the novel asks whether human beings can ever be morally reconciled with the world in which they are born, and feel at home in it. (Pavel 18).

By “independent” Pavel does not mean that characters in ancient novels are totally unconstrained by circumstance. Rather, he suggests that these characters refuse to be fully defined by their prescribed social positions and roles, finding in themselves a kind of unique “inner space.” As they find themselves in alienated positions, they look first and foremost to themselves and their feelings as they take actions and cultivate their virtues. They are, in fact, strikingly modern in this respect, and as proof of this, these ancient novels are not mentioned at all in ancient philosophy, rhetoric, politics, and history, and only a few of them were fully preserved. Pavel’s prime example of this is Heliodorus’s Greek novel from around the year 300 C.E., The Aethiopica (The Ethiopian Story). This is one of the few fully extant ancient novels, and when it was translated in the 16th century, it had a massive influence on early modern European novelists, particularly Cervantes.

Briefly, the Ethiopian Story tells the story of Chariclea and Thagenes, very young people who meet at Delphi and fall instantly in love despite parental objections. They leave their families and their city, setting out on a journey that will finally bring them to Ethiopia. Along the way, they face pirates, soldiers, shipwrecks, corrupt royal courts, and more, all the while defending their chastity, which, given their youth and beauty, is always under threat. And, while the conclusion emphasizes the strong hand of providence, it turns out Chariclea is an Ethiopian princess; nonetheless, their decision to break ties with all that holds them in Greece makes them very typical characters of the novel. As Pavel reads it, “With all its freedom and respect for laws, Delphi cannot provide a refuge for the young couple’s star-crossed love. Family and civic tradition threaten them just as much as, if not more than, do the gangsters of the Nile delta” (31). For Pavel, these are not like the characters in fairy tales, for they have “a new feature: inner space, the soul” (33), and that inner space is in conflict with both the violence of lawless chance and the forces of political order. So, novels, in their earliest forms, “aim to depict the reign of fortune, that is the surrounding world’s incoherence, they have to use long series of episodes bound together by arbitrary links. The realization that life is full of random, incoherent events is a belated, noteworthy achievement of human thought” (34).

The figure of the alienated individual, caught between the stultifying forces of social order, the disruptive trauma and risk of asocial violence, and the sheer randomness of events, is at the heart of the novel, where characters reveal and develop the inner space of their own desire and virtue, trying to understand and find some kind of place to make their life in a world shot through with chance and incoherence. These characters are found in novels, from Heliodorus in the ancient world to Cervantes in the early modern, from Defoe to Dickens and Tolstoy in the modern, to Joyce’s modernist and Pynchon’s postmodernist novels. Novels widely varying in form, technique, era, and language all present such characters in a long-developing tradition. And, even here, the length of the novel is a function of this structure, for “a string of tenuously linked episodes illustrates the instability of fortune, warns the reader against the false coherence of myths, fairy tales, and epic poems, and suggests that only virtue, tacitly helped by Providence, can grant the protagonists a happy ending” (Pavel 34). This is to say that the novel refuses easy explanations and certainties.

Pavel’s points about character are affirmed in the analysis of Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau in her remarkable essay, “The Poetry of Mediocrity.” Focusing particularly on the 18th-century novel’s debt to Heliodorus’s The Aethiopica, she argues that characters in novels enact the separation between the individual and the world, opening up an inner space of subjectivity. This gap between the subject and the world is the great theme of the novel as a form: how is one to reconcile the secret inner world of the self to the outer world of history and circumstance? For Thorel-Cailleteau, this explains the focus on characters in novels as mediocre. The novel presents ordinary people with flaws and limits that constrain them. While a novel might include exemplary virtuous characters, as does Heliodorus, or might concentrate on great adventurers or aristocrats, as Madeleine de Scudéry does, the novel form will reduce all such characters to mediocrity because the novel:

takes as its object the interiority of humans in their earthly existence, and it gives rise to a poetics of mediocrity itself linked to the idea of prose. But it is necessary to refine this term. Novelists devote themselves to mediocre characters or characters envisaged in their mediocritas (whether that involves, in the seventeenth century, their dignity or honesty, the reference is simply to the public), to characters mediocre in that they do not shine on the outside (whose adventures are rather those of interior, individual experience), and this in a style that is itself mediocre, neither too elaborate, nor charged with references (Thorel-Cailleteau 75).

While Thorel-Cailleteau takes the 18th-century novel as her example here, her point about character is crucial. Characters in this tradition are not shot through with the Greek Δεινώ (deinos — fear, dread, or awe-inspiring distance) of tragic heroes, or with the superpowers of divinely chosen and aided epic heroes. Even when the characters are extraordinary in some way, the novel as a form will cut them down to size and drag them into mediocrity.

The drama of the relation of the character’s interior life to the complex and dangerous world is everywhere in Tomasula, but so is the essential character of the mediocre. Consider Tomasula’s Moses in The Book of Portraiture. While the biblical Exodus story is at pains to emphasize Moses’s ordinariness and unworthiness, in the end his face will shine with the reflected presence of God, and his identity as the inheritor and representative of God’s covenant with Israel makes him an epic character whose Jewish identity is unshakable. But Tomasula’s Moses does not see the face of God: “He was a poet or a liar, a sometime prophet, a chameleon who years ago had the audacity to merely walk out of his bondage in Egypt and yet still was the first to throw himself prostrate to proclaim the glory of whatever desert chieftain he came in contact with as he wandered the Sinai, more often lost than found” (Portraiture 4). Unlike the mythological or epic forms, this Moses we come to know from the secrets of his inner space: “Once, in the market of Skkad, he had witnessed a hand being cut from each of two farmers who had tried to forge a clay tablet of their debt, and the hairs on the back of his neck tingled. That is, if he could set his speech in stone, could not that stone carry him to the bottom of the sea? Was this what the vision meant?” (Portraiture 10). He lives by his wits, and we come to know his interior preoccupations, fears that he will forget the lies that he has told, the people he has cheated and conned, as well as his gifts as a storyteller. His invention of the phonetic alphabet is not the mark of genius but the outcome of casual observation and play, and as he stumbles towards the discovery that will change the world, the hand of contingency is everywhere evident. He invents the story of Moses, but his own life is not mythic or epic. Amazing as his discovery and his use of it may be, he remains a flawed figure of everyday mediocrity. This is the serious novel’s view of humanity as a form: chastened, cut-down-to-size, without epic grandeur. Tolstoy does much the same thing, reducing Napoleon to a vain and thoughtlessly cruel and deceived man, convinced he is shaping destiny and oblivious to the vast historical forces shaping and informing his every move, just as Joyce will put the mediocre, lower-middle-class Bloom at the center of modernity. Though the balance between the subjective interior and the informing forces of contingent circumstance will shift as the novel develops, as more and more the novel will tilt away from the autonomy of virtue and towards the force of circumstance, one can draw a line from the ancient novels of exemplary virtue through the rise of realism, naturalism, and ultimately modernism and postmodernism and see in this form as much continuity as radical innovation, a tradition in which the balance shifts, but the newly varying weights rebalance on the same scales.

We see this mediocrity as the novel’s virtue in the characters in VAS, where we encounter the upper-middle-class couple Square and Circle, midwestern professionals struggling with sex and reproduction. Confronted with his wife’s demand that he undergo a vasectomy, Square begins by incarnating the very same drama of inner space and the literalized threat of a castrating reality of outer space: “Square heard his wife coming and reshuffled the consent form behind the story he’d been trying to write” (Tomasula, VAS 13). Their domestic drama is complete with minute descriptions of voice and facial features, “an up-rush of breath through her body into a note of sadness, an octave lower than a bassoon—because she hadn’t found him filling out the consent form, he knew” (VAS 13). The free indirect discourse puts us in Square’s point-of-view: “Now stealing glances at her stealing glances back at him, he could tell she wanted to say, ‘So, have you made the appointment yet?’ And he braced himself for the cross-examination that would follow his, ‘No, not yet’” (17). VAS is filled with scenes like this. And yes, these scenes alternate with the much more fractured work of explosive image-text collages. The scale-shifting experimental work in Tomasula, as Mary Holland points out in her essay in this volume, does reframe the human scale of the character:

All of Tomasula’s fictions function as posthuman lenses, by representing time and space at scales not available to the unaided human eye and by depicting individuals coming to terms with such technologically extended points of view. Rather than the verisimilitude of a single mirror traveling down one road, Tomasula’s novels offer the overwhelming product of scores of mirrors positioned at myriad positions through space over time and reflecting reality from impossibly macro and micro perspectives that expand our sense of what the world is while reminding us of the particularity and ideology of our inescapably human ways of seeing. (Holland, “Fi about Sci”).

Yet in Holland’s reading, that human perspective of character remains, a perspective we cannot escape in these novels or in the world, and I am arguing that this is a key part of the thread of the traditional novel that runs through VAS and Tomasula’s other books. Moreover, I do not believe that his books could work without the human scale of character and narrative. Thus, the traditional novel form remains; the mirror of character continues down the road in Tomasula, and though joined by many other mirrors, character is the essential narrative architecture that connects and makes comprehensible those other mirrors we find in the explosive power of the collages and other experimental elements that Tomasula’s work always includes.³ The persistence of character grounds the experimental in the mediocre reality of prose while reframing that reality in a much larger vision of the post-human sublime, but character is essential for it is through character that we grasp and feel that sublime vision.⁴

In his reading of the early Lukács, John Brenkman posits that the novel speaks to a condition in which humanity must confront a contingent universe without transcendental meaning:

Since modern society lacks myth, religion, or theology to bind its members together, since it leaves values and ideals to the individuals’ inner psychological world, the world outside is “unable to find either the form of a totality for itself as a whole, or any form of coherence for its own relationship to its elements and their relationship to one another: in other words, the outside world cannot be represented. Both parts and the whole of such an outside defy any forms of directly sensuous representation” (Brenkman 825).

And this is why, for all of Tomasula’s innovation, he cannot do without character, for what Lukács means here by “sensuous representation” is a way of escaping the cold, fact-constrained, and isolated formulations of the sciences. The novel attempts to make the discoveries of science legible as both thought and a structure of feeling. As Brenkman puts it, “The outside world is made apparent in novelistic representation, according to Lukács, only in the jagged, contradictory, contractual, resistances that the protagonist encounters as he attempts to realize his own meanings and purposes” (826). Here, though Tomasula is making use of the discourses and images of science and social science, his novels must have the resistance of characters bumping into and stumbling through this reality in order to create the affective experience so that the reader cannot just wrestle with the facts of science and history but can experience what the novel has always made possible: making the reader feel this conflict between inner and outer space at human scale, even if Tomasula wants to rebalance those scales in ways that will also create a new vision of the human by redefining how we conceive of our inner space. Lance Olsen and others have pointed out that Tomasula’s characters “tend to act as place holders for something closer to theses than, say, modernist Freudian selfhood or conventional plot drivers” (Olsen 211). In part, I think this is because Tomasula emphasizes the influence of the outer world on the inner space of character, but one can also produce many examples in Tomasula’s books of a depth of character that stages the conflict between inner and outer space that is the mark of what E. M. Forster would call a “round” character (118), and Square is certainly that, as are most of the characters in Ascension. But the novel as a tradition has also been tracking the reinvention of the human, from the ancient novels of exemplary virtue, to the early modern picaros, to the thrifty or lucky strivers of bourgeois realism, to the fractured and faceted consciousnesses of modernism and postmodernism in which the interior space of character is no longer coherent but shot through with much of the same chaos and contingency as the outer world. Yet, across all these, we can discern a meaningful and evolving tradition as an art form attempts to wrestle with the human in the world. This complex and perplexing world needs the huge form of the novel to stage our search for meaning through character. In essence, rather than liquidating character, Tomsula’s novels absolutely depend on characters because he really is writing novels.

Realism: the novel and verisimilitude

Experimental writing and the avant-garde in general are often positioned as the antithesis of the realist novel, and realism itself is now usually seen as a kind of ideological virtual reality, a veritable matrix of bourgeois self-deception. This insight was central to the project of the historical avant-garde, in which dada and surrealism tried to invent new forms of representation that would be more open to both the sheer wonder and incoherence of the world. Their attempt to map the unconscious forces that shape both that outer world and the newly radical otherness of that inner space opened first by the novel seemed to demand new forms, like collage.⁵ Mary K. Holland, following avant-garde theorists like Hal Foster, puts it pivotally: “As a mimetic method, narrative pleases by offering the illusion of knowledge, wholeness, and immediacy, but through the mechanisms of forgetting, partiality, and construction” (Holland, “Work of Art” 29). In Holland’s reading, Tomasula uses avant-garde techniques of defamiliarization and narrative fracture to escape the illusion of realism or, as she has it, “Tomasula’s books do this by failing to perform the mimetic devices of traditionally realist fiction that offers the text as substitute for reality, as immediate, unmediated, unbiased, and true” (40). This is one of the best statements of what has become the critical consensus on Tomasula, that his novels are wildly innovative in order to break with the temptations of novelistic seduction into realism, and I think it is largely correct, but I also think it de-emphasizes just how much the older techniques of realism remain in Tomasula’s novels, and just how much his novels still provide the reader the experience of immersion in his fictional worlds, just how much his books are part of a much more recognizable tradition of novelistic realism, or, if realism is too narrow a term, the way many novels central to the tradition emphasize verisimilitude.

For the novel, it is the terrain of everyday life—mediocre life—that constitutes the core of the tradition I am tracking here. Such verisimilitude is not unique to the novel, but it is the form that has done the most to develop a detailed mimesis of everyday life mostly without recourse to the fantastic. One might look here at how novels from the early modern period develop in relation to the history of evidence. The early modern and enlightenment novels grew out of the move from hagiography to biography, the end of trial by ordeal and the institution and development of the jury system in the law, and the new discourses of journalism and the rise of the newspaper. Ian Watt describes this quite well:

These [truth] procedures are by no means confined to philosophy; they tend, in fact, to be followed whenever the relation to reality may therefore be equally well summarized in terms of the procedures of another group of specialists in epistemology, the jury in a court of law. Their expectations, and those of the novel reader coincide in many ways: both want to know “all the particulars” of a given case—the time and place of the occurrence; both must be satisfied as to the identities of the parties concerned, and will refuse to accept evidence about anyone called Sir Toby Belch or Mr. Badman—still less about a Chloe who has no surname and is “common as the air”; and they also expect the witnesses to tell the story “in his own words.” The jury, in fact, takes “the circumstantial view of life,” which T. H. Green found to be the characteristic outlook of the novel (31).

Like the mediocre character of the novel, the novel form emphasizes quotidian verisimilitude; the terrain is a representation of everyday life, and it is separated from most other popular forms by its frequent refusal of the wish-fulfilment fantasies that are fundamental to what we today call genre literature. Instead, the emphasis falls on the antagonisms between the characters and their everyday world. Using the minute and often factually accurate descriptions of everyday life and charting the reactions of the characters from the perspectives of their inner spaces, one can think here of the realist revolution in Don Quixote, where the innkeeper tells Quixote that, of course, knights in the old romances carried money; the authors just didn’t mention it. Here, the ordinary facts of 17th-century Spain, where one must pay for room and board, are set against fantastic medieval romance. The emphasis shifts to the quotidian fact, and Cervantes leverages that difference between Quixote’s archaic fantasies and the facts of everyday life in 17th-century Spain to great comic effect.

I am not claiming some total epistemological truth for the realist novel (though I would argue there is some there, and the key to it is in the history of evidence). Rather, I want to put the emphasis on the form’s attempt to grapple with the everyday reality of its characters through minute, accurate descriptions of people, places, and things, and this separates the form from the fantastic elements of ancient epic and our contemporary cinematic pop-epics, romances, and conspiracy theories. Holland surveys and analyzes the problems with realisms at length in her book, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism. For Holland, any definition of realism is partial and problematic, saying more about its time than grounding the novel in an objective technique we could easily define, but she also affirms that the explosion of critical approaches to realism testifies to it as a defining feature of the novel, where “the multiplying of realisms rather than, say, proliferating versions of ‘anti-realism,’ ‘anti-novels,’ or ‘irrealism’ likewise implies a desire to see these literary modes, so technically distinct from Realism, as new methods of making language reflect the real world and real human experience” (Holland, Moral Worlds 252). This framing supports my argument that we should see Tomasula as more deeply enmeshed in the long tradition of the novel rather than foregrounding him only as a revolutionary figure of experimental fracture and discontinuity.

We see the emphasis on verisimilitude in all of Tomasula’s novels: in the descriptions of life at the Spanish court, or the use of lab equipment in The Book of Portraiture, or in VAS we feel both the midwestern setting and the reality of the archive, a world of dusty scientific journals and shiny websites. The emphasis on realism is perhaps most pronounced in Tomasula’s most recent novel, Ascension, in which he makes the most use of immersive techniques of narration and verisimilitude combined with a plot that connects characters across centuries. The novel tracks how differently each era conceptualizes “nature” as we move from a 19th-century naturalist to a 20th-century paleontologist, to a group of 21th-century geneticists. Throughout, the narration is constantly grounded in a quotidian reality that eschews the fantastic and emphasizes the material world the characters inhabit. There is a critique of science here to be sure, a reminder of just how much each era gets wrong, but there is also a deeply nuanced recognition that even as a given era’s science has flaws and makes errors, what it gets right, what passes the test of experiment, what is accurately observed and preserved, will be confirmed, recontextualized, and used to develop a more accurate, if not ever perfectly accurate, description of the world. The process of how science thus moves from one era’s model to a different model is a key theme of the book, as a geneticist in the near future looks back to an obscure 20th-century paleontologist whose work inspired their current project to discover if bird lice might be the key to a vaccine against avian flu:

The speculation had first been proposed by another woman researching bird lice in a forest that no longer existed, and the oddity of the world came to Meadow wherever she recalled how much of her own life—where she lived, how she lived had its genesis in an insight that a woman she’d never met had had forty years ago while on a wild goose chase in Paraguay. Now here it was—just a footnote—still changing her life. And maybe, if everything went well, the lives of millions of others. Who could explain such things (209)?

The explanation for such things is the role of the novel in its attempt to hold together in a single vision some sense of how a whole world is connected. In his excellent review essay, Stuart Moulthrop sees Ascension as what Edward Mendelson calls an encyclopedic novel, an attempt to grasp the totality of a culture and its knowledge, as do books like Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, or earlier works like Moby Dick. In this sense, Moulthrop locates Tomasula in the tradition of the novel, noting that “Ascension remains recognizably a novel,” as it uses internal monologues, documentary techniques, and depends on characters. As he has it, “Ascension is in many respects a traditional undertaking; however, it ultimately raises some hard questions about what ‘tradition’ can mean in our times” (Moulthrop). This is the key question, for if Tomasula is indeed working so deeply within the tradition of the novel, what does that mean when the novel itself has become untimely? While Moulthrop emphasizes the naturalist pessimism of the conclusion of Ascension as the book’s “hard question” for its readers, I want to see the hard question the book leaves us with as its challenge to reimagine the role of the novel for a world no longer broadly understood through novels.

Providence: Tomasula’s Plots

While the role of character and description in the novel can both follow the call of verisimilitude, the problem of the plot more than anything marks the novel as still a work of art shaped by imagination. This is evident in the old critiques of the ways that protagonists in novels fortuitously encounter their antagonists, how events fall into the shapes that throw character into relief, and most of all in how the conclusions to novels try to drive home the themes of the work as a whole. For Pavel, what we see in the novel from its beginning is the hand of providence, how the characters of the ancient Greek novel oppose the chaos and chance of the world to the influence of the divine that protects and guides them through the various episodes to plot a happy ending (2-33). For Fredric Jameson, the image of providence changes as the novel develops, moving from the divine in both Heliodorus and the 17th- and 18th-century novelists to a more complex force which allows novelists to map the social collective by the 19th-century. Taking Eliot’s Middlemarch as his key example, Jameson writes, “What we have here—as compared with Dickens, for example, is a significantly enhanced proximity to the relationships between individuals, a kind of intensified and virtually photographic enlargement of those barely perceptible adjustments to the Other, which Nathalie Sarraute, long after the fact, called ‘tropismes’” (Jameson, Experiments 122). As Eliot brings her characters into contact across the social field, her readers feel the resistances and confusions that define the antagonisms of the novel’s total world. For Jameson, “The web of interrelationships is now on the one hand to be grasped as an immense and mobile concatenation of events— encounters, looks, demands, self-defenses— rather than a static table of equivalences … interconnections that fan out well beyond the reader’s field of vision and yet modified by the most minute adjustments in the ‘lives’ thereby brushing against each other” (Experiments 123). Providence here is no longer a divine plan; it is now the author’s “ethical” imagination grasping at the force of collective life and staging these necessary contacts and resolutions in an attempt to reveal the hidden organizing principles of the social and material world (123).

In The Book of Portraiture, we see Tomasula enact this ethical form of providence as the plot moves the characters in chapter four, “Pixels,” to all encounter each other at a drugstore and, for just a fleeting moment, form a chance tableau vivant of Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas in the store’s security mirror. There are nine characters in the story, but each is assigned a letter instead of a name, and we know them mostly through their occupations. Thus, we have P, the programmer, and U, the model, or T, the pharmacy technician, etc. Their occupations make a map of modern middle-class life, as unskilled cashiers, highly skilled computer programmers, a beautiful catalog model, a war veteran, a retail manager, etc., all encounter one another on the mediocre plane of everyday retail life. The chapter represents each character as a line at the top of the page, indexing the characters’ presence or absence at that moment of the narrative until providence brings all the lines together on to two pages at the center of the chapter. The characters are, however, each driven by individual desires that we learn much about. For instance, the photo retoucher is in obsessive but unrequited love with the catalog model, and the veteran has mistaken the model’s image for the figure of mother. Though the reader is asked to imagine them as empty positions whose subjective desires are created out of our society of image production, consumption, and capital in which they live, we also learn much of how each character, nonetheless, has what is to them a unique inner space, a subjective experience of this world, so the inner space has by no means disappeared, but it is redefined. By bringing them all together in a complex plot of interlacing desires motivating their actions, the narrator shows that what each takes to be uniquely individual actually emerges out of their collective interactions as a whole as they are each intimately involved in surveillance of one another or image production broadly. As N. Katherine Hayles reads it, “The reigning power in these pages is not the sovereign but diffuse and ubiquitous surveillance, carried out through camera, monitors, one-way mirrors, keystroke monitoring software, databases, computer screens, handheld devices, and a host of other digital hardware and software,” but that surveillance “structures everyday processes so thoroughly that it amounts to a worldview, a presumption that underlies decisions and subtly shapes how life is lived” (Hayles 139). Here, the novel enacts providence as collective in Jameson’s sense. While the climactic moment of the tableau vivant doesn’t quite violate the laws of verisimilitude, we feel the composing vision of the author here: the hand of a now collective providence moving the characters toward the illuminating encounter in the mirror in which all these lives come together under the collective sign of surveillance and the perplexing question of the ethical in this digitally mediated world. Moreover, the reappearance of Las Meninas of course recalls chapter two’s portrait of the painter Velazquez, linking the chapters on a long timeline, just as the traumatized veteran, Q_, is linked with terrorism figured in the final chapter, thus creating a true novel out of the leaps in time, medium, characters, and theme from chapter to chapter in The Book of Portraiture. Though the world represented here is both complex and diffuse, like most novels in the tradition, Tomasula depends on plot and the concept of providence, newly imagined in its collective dimension, to move his characters through time and create conflicts, resolutions, and reveal an analysis of the society that is his subject.

In his essay “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” Tomasula writes of the need for narratives that would reframe human experience in scales beyond the human: “What seems important is the ways in which millions of interactions made of individual movements, motives, desires and fears call into being patterns as surely as temperature, pressure and vapor form snowflakes, and snowflakes form storms, and storms create climates and other patterns—a Weltanschauung, as humans once called their cultural climate” (Tomasula, “Visualization”). To make this point, he contrasts Adolph Northen’s painting Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow with Joseph Minard’s famous statistical graph of the same event. For Tomasula, there is too much of the 19th-century vision of the human as the center of events in the painting, and a much stronger sense of the role of rivers, temperatures, and collective action in Minard. But neither Northen nor Minard presents us with a novel, and Tomasula does not mention Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the great 19th-century novel of Napoleon’s war that also makes much of the same point and shares Tomasula’s suspicion of the human at the center, seeing instead the vast, collective, and impersonal movements of history that he points to as the real. In his critiques of Napoleon, Tolstoy invokes the very forces of history and climate the emperor is subject to, cutting Napoleon down to size, but it is in his descriptions of the battles where Tolstoy offers exactly the emergent narrative that Tomasula advocates and enacts. Rather than the heroics of great men, the battles in War and Peace are emergent events, beyond the control of the generals who plan them or the individual heroics of the men who fight them. As Tolstoy himself has it in War and Peace, “Those, however, who tried to understand the general course of things and wanted to take part in it by self-sacrifice and heroism were the most useless members of society; they saw everything inside out, and everything they did to be useful turned out to be useless nonsense—like Pierre’s and Mamonov’s regiments which looted Russian villages, like the lint the young ladies plucked and that never got to the wounded, and so on” (944). For Tolstoy, “In historical events what is most obvious is the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and a man who plays a role in an historical event never understands its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness” (944). Indeed, for Tolstoy, where the individual actor in reality cannot understand what s/he is doing or what it might mean, the shaping power of fiction can provide such insight in the form of the novel. Here, Tolstoy, the 19th-century novelist, is fully aware of the narrative of emergence. In Tolstoy’s descriptions, the battles are made up of the chaotic interactions of thousands of soldiers, animals, weather, terrain, and more. His descriptions of the battles are much closer to Minard’s statistical graph than Northen’s heroic painting—the painting that provides the very image of Napoleon that Tolstoy mocks relentlessly. In this, I would argue that Tomasula and Tolstoy are far more similar than dissimilar, and by putting Tolstoy into the picture here we see how Tomasula is more inside than outside the tradition of the novel.

Tomasula’s untimely novels

What makes Tomasula’s novels, and the novel as a form in general, so necessary and urgent a form of literature today is that, in our new millennium, the novel has unexpectedly become untimely in Nietzsche’s sense. Tomasula recalls that the experimental writer Ronald Sukenick once said that “he liked all those novels with linear plots, well-defined characters, and all the rest, but they seemed to have nothing to do with the life as lived at this time” (qtd. in Banash 299). Sukenick said that when the novel was still one of the most important cultural forms. Today, like cinema, the serious novel is a decidedly minor force in popular culture, but it is precisely the distance between the form of the novel and the dominant forms of popular culture and everyday life that now gives the novel in its traditional form newly critical power within that culture. In a world fractured by the endless and corrosive flows of TikTok and Twitter, and where pop-epics and conspiracy theories provide seductive, totalizing narrative frames, the novel is newly powerful when it mostly rests on its traditional form, seeking to represent the limits of flawed humanity and map the social antagonisms that define a historical moment. Tomasula’s work is thus at its most powerful as an untimely perspective from which to frame and explain the timely frantic, fractured, and polarizing forms of new media, the poverty of genre wish-fulfilment, and the enmeshment of technologies of reproduction and capital that have produced so many new forms of social alienation and a truly frightening reactionary politics.

For Walter Benjamin, there is already some sense of this in his essay from Illuminations, “Nikolai Leskov: The Storyteller,” where he contrasts the novel with the newspaper. The information in the newspaper is an incessant daily flow, and its “prime requirement is that it appear ‘understandable in itself”’ (89). But because of how limited information is, its value “does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives on at that moment it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time” (90). The ceaseless presentation of information comes without a larger frame for analysis, reflection, or a sense of totality, and while each discreet piece is something we can understand, linking them together in a larger coherent narrative was, for Benjamin, beyond the capabilities of the newspaper. For Benjamin’s “newspaper” we might just as easily read “social media,” and indeed his description is even more fitting for something like TikTok. By contrast, for Benjamin, the novel provides a different kind of answer to the problem of information in modernity:

The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life’s fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living (87).

Benjamin’s description makes sense of characters like Square in VAS or the 19th-century naturalist in Ascension just as much as Tolstoy’s Pierre. They are all characters who find themselves trying to make sense of their worlds, who find themselves exactly in this profound perplexity of living as they try to discover what they believe and what the meaning of their actions will be.

While for Benjamin the characters in the novel are isolated and alienated, he finds the situation of the novel reader to mirror this alienation:

The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader. (For even the reader of a poem is ready to utter the words, for the benefit of the listener.) In this solitude of his, the reader of a novel seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone else. He is ready to make it completely his own, to devour it, as it were. Indeed, he destroys, he swallows up the material as the fire devours logs in the fireplace (100).

Benjamin contrasts the alienation of the reader of the novel to the organic community created by the voice of the storyteller. In contrast, the alienation of the novel reader produces a profound form of isolated concentration that blocks out the present moment and its demands. Benjamin here suggests the experience of immersion that many novel readers report. To give over to the alienated form of the novel is to be immersed in its representations of the perplexity of living, to have a form that provides a profound point of silence from which to experience the world. Though not exactly the aural, organic community that Benjamin had in mind, the contemporary experience of endlessly streaming videos, podcasts, reddit threads, TikTok videos and the like depends on something like the voice. They hold their audiences in deeply compelling simulations of community linked by the voices of content creators and their commenters. In this new mediascape, the untimely novels of Tomasula work through the perplexities of this world in a profoundly critical silence of sustained concentration.

In Ascension, the minor, untimely, and newly radical power of the novel is foregrounded in the episode of the Book People and the references to Fahrenheit 451. Distraught by the loss of her son, the scientist, Meadow, spends her time searching the virtual world for his lost traces. As the AI bots that encounter her realize they cannot monetize her desires, she is gradually driven to more isolated and unpopulated areas of the virtual world, almost as if she is being pushed out into a desert. At last, she reaches a place where the technology of virtual representation is degraded, as if journeying back to an earlier incarnation of the internet. Here, in a world without audio interface, where all is typed, she encounters a subculture of people devoted to the book, particularly to the novel, for her guides into this world are Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past, the English translation of Proust. Remembrance explains how the data of the internet sees Meadow, and how that data can be used for power and monetization, but he contrasts it with the portraits made of humanity by literature: the data “can only address the ‘what’ of a person Remembrance said. ‘It has very little to say about the why—much like science has much to say about the ‘how’ of the universe but leaves the question of why to people like us” (369). Key to the encounter is Meadow’s grief, for her emotion is what has brought her to these books, and while data and science can identify her grief, they cannot shape it and give it meaning or help her find consolation. Moreover, if we follow Lukács, not only can the precepts of science and data not console us, they cannot really frame and explain our everyday life. What Meadow needs, as indeed all the characters in this book need, is Ascension itself—the novel that will try to make sense of their perplexing lives.

There is, of course, merit to the critiques of the novel and the seductions of realism and immersion, but I believe these have been overstated. These critiques made much more sense when the realist novel broadly understood held a literary hegemony, say from circa 1740 to 2006 or so. But the power of realism, like many other modern technologies, has been waning. I would go so far as to argue that in a world defined by the endless, fracturing flows of TikTok and Twitter realism is desperately needed, The new narrative hegemon is the fantastic pop-epic, which attempts to totalize the world in in the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc. That these pop-epics now offer the most popular forms of a collective sense of totality is deeply troubling. Fantastic novels like those by Tolkien no longer function mostly as an introductory step on the way to the major novels in the tradition. Instead, as Michiko Kakutani reports in her analysis of Tolkien’s key role in the imagination of Silicon Valley technologists, capitalists, and right-wing activists, they see in the fantastic epic imagination the key to defeating progressive politics and inaugurating a new right-wing techno-authoritarianism⁶:

Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and mega donor to right-wing causes, says he’s read the trilogy at least 10 times. He has named several companies after magical objects in “Lord of the Rings.” Vice President JD Vance, whose careers in business and politics were nurtured by Thiel, followed in his steps. Vance has said that a lot of his “conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up,” and he named his venture firm Narya Capital after Gandalf’s magic ring of fire (Kakutani).

Such elite figures are not the only people to feel the seductions of the epic. For most of my students today, it is these fantastic epic quests and their dystopian cousins that most move them and define their reading lives. They long for a world of heroic action, decisive battles, righteous chosen warriors gifted by fate and the gods, surviving in fascinating worlds where the everyday is simply burned away and all has become extraordinary. We should be mindful of Richard Dyer’s arguments in “Entertainment and Utopia” that there is a critical desire articulated in such popular forms, but, as Slavoj Žižek memorably said, “I would sell my mother into slavery to see what happens the day after the revolution in V for Vendetta.”⁷. After the feel-good, wish-fulfillment fantasy of violent revolution that burns everything down, what of the mediocre everyday world, inhabited by deeply flawed people struggling with the constrained world of tradeoffs, compromises, uncertainties, and failures that is and always has been human politics? Surely, all that must be waiting for these heroes the day after? This new pop-epic literature has no vision of the mediocre every day, nor does it have the kind of deeper critical engagement with our reality that, say, Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy attempts, or the sustained vision of something like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, to say nothing of the narratives of emergence in Tolstoy or Tomasula.

Even more troublingly, the pop-epic is doubled by the conspiracy theory. Fredric Jameson, in particular, has been most sympathetic to the pull of the fantastic and paranoia as it is found in Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and William S. Burroughs, or in genre authors like William Gibson, or in film genres like spy thrillers. Here, Jameson suggests, is the kind of literature that might provide the right kind of critical perspective to map and revolutionize our postmodern sublime: “Yet conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt—through the figuration of advanced technology—to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (38). However, Jameson made these arguments well before the rise of social media. When one reads the paranoid visions of Dick, Pynchon, and Burroughs today, after Web 2.0 and the facts of Gamergate, QAnon, and Steve Bannon, they sound much different. Burroughs’ early cut-up work now looks like nothing so much as an antisemitic 4Chan poster ranting about elites and globalists while asserting a total indifference to the facts. The paranoid visions of Dick are mirrored in the wild claims of RFK Jr’s health policies and the fantasies of both his conservative evangelical and liberal new age followers. Today, conspiracy theory is not a minor, fringe literature with critical potential; it is, instead, the other side of the pop-epic coin, and the most popular and insidious form of narrative that defines our reactionary moment, providing a facile and false experience of totality. Conspiracy is now in the mainstream of popular culture, eclipsing realism and the novel. In our contemporary moment, conspiracy theories bring an epic understanding to politics, framing the faceless but demonic controlling forces of government, medicine, and finance that oppress ordinary people, keeping them from material abundance and miraculous cures. The ubiquitous “they” of conspiracies are opposed by the heroic acts of ordinary researchers who rise to the epic challenge (often aided by god, angels, or aliens) to disclose the truth and bring us closer to an apocalyptic revelation of justice. We see this imagination of epic struggle in everything from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to The X Files and, most recently, the fictional universe of QAnon and its apocalyptic desire for “the storm.” Both the pop-epic and the conspiracy theory reject the mediocrity of the novel and its ground in everyday verisimilitude and leave us with newly dominant forms of fantastic literature that see everything either in terms of the bloated epic quest undertaken by divinely chosen heroes fated not to lose, or beleaguered researchers finally pulling back the curtain on an evil and implacable “them.” One need only think of the difference between QAnon’s framing of Hillary Clinton as “Frazzle Drip,” the murderous demon-aided villain torturing children in secret government tunnels to extract elixirs of youth from their vivisected bodies, and Curtis Sittenfeld’s realist novel wrestling with Clinton as a figure of everyday American life in Rodham. While Sittenfeld’s novel is problematic, its commitment to using the freedom of fiction still firmly bound to a quotidian reality and verisimilitude is provoking, revealing, and totally grounded in the mediocre, putting her readers much more deeply in touch with the reality of American life compared with the distorting epic fantasies of “Frazzle Drip” that take one further from it and into paranoid delusion. Indeed, rather than Jameson’s hope that conspiracy might be a flawed form of critique, today the right-wing openly governs by conspiracy as one of its main tools of propaganda, and the left is hardly immune to the temptations of conspiracy either. Both the pop-epic and the conspiracy theory now unfold in the noisy worlds of online fandom, where they generate an endless stream of immediate conversations, fan-fiction variations, cons, cosplays, action figures, podcasts, and video essays. The immediacy and constant engagement offered in these deeply entertaining fandoms rhyme with Benjamin’s description of the difference between the immediate noise of the newspaper’s information and the silence demanded by the immersion of the novel. That silence is eroded by the relentless vampirizing of attention in thirty-second bursts of our new small-screen cinema of attractions. In this new moment, the serious novel again finds its cutting-edge, though today it is a decidedly minor literature that is more demanding of readers and their attention than ever before.

Thus, what is remarkable about Tomasula’s work is, for me, as much its grounding in tradition as its breaks with it. In Tomasula, we have a return to mediocre characters, faced with an incoherent everyday world, trying to carefully think through the reality of today, including its many sublime post-human dimensions, while avoiding the temptations of epic wish-fulfilment or deluded conspiratorial righteousness. In short, beyond all of Tomasula’s formidable experimentalism, we should also acknowledge that much of the power of his work also rests on its fidelity to the traditional form and function of the novel. Today, we need such novels urgently.

Works Cited

Banash, David, editor. Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2015.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, Shocken, 1988, pp. 83-110.

Berstein, Joseph. “Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?” The New York Times, 25 June 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/style/fiction-books-men-reading.html

Brenkman, John. “Innovation: Notes on Nihilism and the Aesthetics of the Novel.” The Novel, vol. 2, edited by Franco Moretti, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 808-38.

Dyer, Richard. “Entertainment and Utopia.” Only Entertainment. Routledge, 2005. 19-35.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Harcourt Brace, 1927.

Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century. MIT, 1996.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Beyond Human Scale: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture. “Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction”, edited by David Banash, Bloomsbury, 2015, pp.133-146.

—. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Holland, Mary K. The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism. Bloomsbury, 2020.

—. “The Work of Art after the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Work of Steve Tomasula.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash, Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 27-50.

Holland, Mary K.. “‘Fi about Sci, Not Sci-Fi’: The Posthuman Human in Steve Tomasula’s Ascension” electronic book review, 24 April 2026, https://doi.org/10.64773/69z6-vi96

Jameson, Fredric. “The Experiment of Time: Providence and Realism.” The Novel, vol. 2, edited by Franco Moretti, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 95-128.

—. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1992.

Kakutani, Michiko. “Why Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits.” The New York Times, 23 May 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/books/tolkien-musk-thiel-silicon-valley.html.

Moulthrop, Stuart. “Erroneous Assumptions: Steve Tomasula’s Ascension,” Electronic Book Review, 4 June 2023, https://doi.org/10.7273/qa5r-qn84.

Olsen, Lance. “Ontological Metalepses, Unnatural Narratology, and Locality: A Politics of the [[Page]] in Steve Tomasula’s VAS and TOC.” Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction, edited by David Banash, Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 183-208.

Parks, Tim. “Reading: The Struggle,” New York Review of Books, 10 June 2014, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2014/06/10/reading-struggle/.

Pavel, Thomas G. The Lives of the Novel: A History. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Thorel-Cailleteau, Sylvie. “The Poetry of Mediocrity.” The Novel 2, edited by Franco Moretti, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 64-94.

Tomasula, Steve. Ascension: A Novel. University of Alabama Press, 2022.

—. The Book of Portraiture: A Novel. FC2 and the University of Florida Press, 2006.

—. VAS: An Opera in Flatland: A Novel. University of Chicago Press, 2004.

—. “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative.” Sillages Critiques 17, 2014, https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.3562.

Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. Vintage, 2008.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five: A Novel. Modern Library, 1994.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. University of California Press, 1959.

Žižek, Slavoj. “What is Wrong with the Left Today.” Uploaded by I Would Prefer Not To, 7 Nov. 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUpa3rGrMt4.

Footnotes

1. The diminishment of the place of the novel and the loss of its attempts at mapping everyday life left a vacuum in popular culture that would be filled by many reactionary forms, as I will detail in this paper. This change was driven in part by criticism itself, but far more by technological changes that dramatically pushed aside the novel with its inherent difficulty and demands for sustained attention. See, for example, Joseph Berstein, “Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?” New York Times, 25 June 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/style/fiction-books-men-reading.html. As Berstein notes, “As more American men fill their hours with the crude talk shows of the ‘manosphere,’ online gambling and addictive multiplayer games, the humble novel—alone, requiring thought and patience—can look like a panacea.” See also Tim Parks, “Reading: The Struggle,” New York Review of Books, 10 June 2014, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2014/06/10/reading-struggle/. Parks was early to note that “What I’m talking about is the state of constant distraction we live in and how that affects the very special energies required for tackling a substantial work of fiction—for immersing oneself in it and then coming back and back to it on numerous occasions over what could be days, weeks, or months, each time picking up the threads of the story or stories, the patterning of internal reference, the positioning of the work within the context of other novels and indeed the larger world.” ↩

2. I am uncertain if TOC: A New Media Novel is actually a novel in the sense I am using it here. Tomasula tends to talk about it as the difference between the physical book and other kinds of media but sees a greater continuum of attention and interaction: “People mention games a lot, but I think in TOC the interactivity is even lower. These are slippery terms. A book is interactive; I think interaction in games is meant in a physical, immersive way. Basketball. When readers are interacting with a book, the action is happening in your head. That’s where I think it is in TOC.” Kiki Benzon, Steve Tomasula. “An Interview with Steve Tomasula,” Electronic Book Review, 3 May 2015, https://electronicbookreview.com/publications/an-interview-with-steve-tomasula/. I will leave it to another occasion to take on that question of TOC as a novel. Similarly, while cinema can also do much that I ascribe to the novel, its forms are significantly different, and the collective and technical experience of viewing cinema also impacts its meaning and place in culture. Clearly, cinema could not be well described as a novel, even though sometimes it shares similar aims, effects, and demands for attention. ↩

3. One should also note that Stendhal’s mirror is hardly a stable one, as John Brenkman points out, “When Stendhal famously said that a novel is a mirror moving down a roadway, his metaphor had nothing to do with picturing a stable reality. On the contrary, it evoked the upheaval, mobility, and uncertainty of social life and called upon the novel to find the artistic means of referring to that unstable reality” (811). ↩

4. Tomasula himself explains the post-human sublime in his essay “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Post-Human Narrative”, and it is also theorized by N. Katherine Hayles in her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. In short, we become post-human to the extent that we think the complicated ways in which the larger world, and particularly our technologies, have an active role in shaping and influencing both individuals and the human collective in ways that escape our direct control and often our knowledge. When effectively represented, as in something like the Eames’ film Powers of Ten, a key example for Tomasula, this produces the experience of the sublime, that overwhelming sensation of awe and terror accompanying the realization of this vast complexity and its role in our lives, forcing humanity to redefine itself (Tomasula, “Visualization”). ↩

5. It is notable that the historical avant-garde produced relatively few novels, mostly preferring poetry, painting, sculpture, and cinema as its major forms. ↩

6. One should note that Thiel, Vance, and Bannon have a deeply flawed reading of Tolkien, as Kakutani makes clear: “Many prominent readers of ‘Lord of the Rings’ no longer identify with the hobbits in Middle-earth but crave more magical powers (of the very sort that the dangerous Ring promises to bestow at a terrible price)” (Kakutani). Tolkien himself was extremely critical of technological innovation and the powers that it brings. Having survived the horrors of WWI, he advocated for the limited technologies and simple life of the small holding English farmer as his ideal. ↩

7. Dyer notes that the emotional intensity and transparency, as well as the abundance, community, and energy depicted in such genres, is deeply moving to audiences, and that our response to these elements is simultaneously a critique of their lack in our everyday lives: “The advantage of this analysis is that it does offer some explanation of why entertainment works. It is not just leftovers from history, it is not just what show business, or ‘they’, force on the rest of us, it is not simply the expression of eternal needs—it responds to real needs created by society” (26). Entertainment thus strives to make us feel what utopia would be without ever suggesting how we might achieve it in reality, functioning as a kind of ideological sleight-of-hand to make a passive polity, skillfully managing the critical energies it depends on. Dyer’s analysis rhymes powerfully with David Foster Wallace’s critique of entertainment in Infinite Jest, in which entertainment becomes equivalent to a kind of fatal drug that will interrupt political struggle and create a politics by entertainment. For Wallace, this will undermine the functioning of democracy, made evident in his prescient creation of an all too timely character: the obscene former entertainer who becomes president of the United States. ↩