VAS:
An Opera in Flatland
by Steve Tomasula; art and design by Stephen
Farrell
University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
2002
370 pp., illus. Paper, $18.00
ISBN: 0-226-80740-1.
Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication, and
Culture. Georgia Institute of Technology.
Atlanta, GA
eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu
I didnt know what I was in for when
I volunteered to review this book. And
the thing is, I should have known. I had
edited a volume of experimental
fiction (read: will not sell any
copies
) called Hard_Code
a few years back, and Steve Tomasula,
whose hyperfiction work I was familiar
with, sent me a section from a work-in-progress.
What Tomasula had sent me looked like
something produced by a sleep-deprived,
delirious genetic engineer writing concrete
poetry with Adobe Illustrator and the
genome database directly hardwired into
his visual cortex filtering spam ads for
cosmetic surgery. So it fit right into
the book I was editing. But I was, and
still am, intrigued by Tomasulas
work, simply because it asks the reader
how to read. Since then Tomasula has greatly
refined his book and has teamed up with
graphic designer Stephen Farrell to produce
a unique statement on the relation between
science and fiction. That work is VAS:
An Opera in Flatlanda
hybrid of fiction, biotechnology, science
studies, the history of biology, aphorisms,
and even a touch of the comic book. We
talk a lot about books that defy category,
mix genres, and so on. But this is among
the few books that really live up to this
description. The only recent comparisons
I can come up with are Mark Danielewskis
House of Leaves, Jeff Noons
Cobralingus, and the works of Kenneth
Goldsmith.
What makes VAS intriguing as a
read is that it is a very diagrammatic
book. The text always seems to be drawing
lines, making connections, mapping loci,
deriving genealogies, aligning text, and
so on. There is, of course, several stratified
narrative layers in the book. As the subtitle
indicates, it makes reference to Edwin
Abbotts famous mathematical fiction
Flatland, in which primary geometric
shapes are the characters
of a family that inhabit a two-dimensional
world, and the adventures that follow
when three-dimensional characters such
as ourselves intervene in that world.
VAS takes up this motif and maps
it onto contemporary genetics, biotechnology,
and medicine. It makes use of Abbotts
narrative as a kind of allegory for the
way in which we are all making the dimensional
shift from human to posthuman.
Like Abbotts Flatland, VAS
also makes use of humor, mainly to point
to the hubris and the ambivalence that
much biotechnological advance brings with
it. As one drifts through VAS,
there are genealogical pedigrees, bits
of documents on eugenics policies, cranial
measurement charts, IQ tests, illustrations
of simian evolution, fragments of genetic
patents, reproductions from anatomy textbooks,
tables from natural history books, appropriated
advertisements for aesthetic surgery,
chromosome maps, medical imaging, and
of course the sprawling data of the genetic
code (VAS is most probably the
first fictional work to include a full
GenBank sequence from an entire gene,
covering some 25 pagesgeeky,
perhaps, but a noteworthy achievement
nonetheless).
VAS threads together several narrative
strata in a such a way that it is actually
very hard to read it in a linear fashion.
Now, this is of course a stock strategy
of much so-called postmodern fiction;
what makes VAS interesting is that
this tension between linear-nonlinear
in terms of narrative is played out against
the same tension in molecular biology
and genetics (gene X causes or predisposes
characteristic Y vs polygenetic
factors and systems biology).
At some points two or more text threads
occupy a single page; at other points
the narratives suddenly become a 1950s-era
comic book; and at still other points
the text becomes a natural history or
eugenics textbook, replete with footnotes.
Writing about the way that literature
always questions its own possibilities,
Maurice Blanchot has noted that the
essence of literature is to escape any
essential determination, or any affirmation
which stabilises or even realises it:
it is never already there; it is always
to be found or to be reinvented.
I wonder if the same can or should be
said of scienceor politics.
Overall, VAS is a welcome and an
innovative contribution to the ongoing
discussion and debate on biotechnology
and the posthuman, and this is principally
because it invents a unique grammar for
engaging with the complex issues that
biotechnology presents, while also eschewing
the simple moral dichotomies that often
pervade popular media representations.