Special Topics in Calamity Physics as a Closed Text

This essay was written for WRRH 227: Writing and the Culture of Reading, a reading theory course, in the spring of 2021.

Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics easily differentiates itself from other contemporary young adult novels in several regards—its instinctual, unerring prose and its characters as irresistibly developed as living human beings—but one of the chief ways the novel distinguishes itself from its peers is its ability to engage with readers in what Louise M. Rosenblatt, a literary theorist of the book The Reader, the Text, the Poem calls the “literary transaction.” Rosenblatt writes that “we do not…take the organism and environment as if we could know about them separately in advance of our special inquiry, but we take their interaction itself as subject matter of study” (Rosenblatt 17); it is this interaction, an ongoing process of the reader interpreting and shaping the text within their own imaginative construction, that we define as the literary transaction, and it is this that we study through the lens of Special Topics in Calamity Physics because its prose forces us into what Rosenblatt calls “aesthetic reading,” even for the unliterary person, and through this we compare the openness and closeness of the text as it functions amongst different genres. With its wholly original descriptive language and its deceptively-woven plot structure, Special Topics in Calamity Physics presents itself as the perfect experiment grounds for studying reader response theory in practice

One idea that spearheads the early chapters of The Reader, the Text, the Poem is the ongoing discourse about language as perception, language as socially performative behavior, and the scrutinized focus that is paid attention to the relationship between the text and the reader. Rosenblatt asserts that the reader takes more of a role in the creation of literature than we give them credit for; without the reader, once the book leaves the author’s hands it is a mere text, and unlike other disciplines of art, does not assert is role as art until a reader interacts with it and imaginatively constructs abstract concepts and images out of words; she writes “the relation between the reader and the text is not linear…it is a situation, an event at a particular time and place in which each element conditions the other” (16). Thus, the artistic creation of literature would not be possible without each individual reader arriving to the text with different backgrounds, experiences, and psyches, which is how texts are able to produce endless variations of poetry and meaning. Rosenblatt writes that reading is functionally similar to a musical performance, and that a reader produces the abstract, artistic constructions as a result of interaction with the text in the process of reading, which 

Another theory important to understanding a certain individual reader’s relationship with a text is the theory of the literary versus the unliterary person, laid out in C.S. Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism. Though not the focus of this study, the idea is indispensable to understanding. The unliterary crowd is one that Lewis describes as people who don’t take reading seriously, who consider reading an activity to be done simultaneously with the radio on or those who couldn’t dream of reading a book more than once. The unliterary demand swift-moving stories that are linguistically stripped of unnecessary words, who want only the Event, readers who entirely unconscious of style. It is difficult for the unliterary reader to read anything without a narrative, and the most unliterary find it difficult to read anything fiction—Lewis specifies “the most unliterary of all sticks to ‘the news’” (Lewis 28). It is then easy to imagine that the unliterary reader will interact differently with a text than a literary reader, and find it more difficult to engage with what Rosenblatt calls “aesthetic reading;” in “aesthetic reading, the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text. Imagine that the unliterary reader is not distracted by the radio during the reading event, and it is easy to imagine that the literary transaction with an unliterary versus a literary person will be very different. 

Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics is unique among its contemporaries because it challenges the tropes of the unliterary reader. Lewis writes that the reader wants to see the forest, not each individual tree, and thus literary cliche and bad writing are actually preferred by the unliterary reader. Suppose we had two readers of Special Topics in Calamity Physics side by side, with their focus centered on the book alone. Pessl employs a series of tactics that force any reader into the perspective of aesthetic reading and crafts a text that makes the literary transaction open to imaginative construction in a deceptive way.

As indicated by the list of cross-genre texts in the table of contents, Special Topics in Calamity Physics evades genre categorization: it is a coming-of-age novel for protagonist, Blue; it is a tragedy, a mystery, a romance, and an epic. Pessl’s prose completely defies literary cliche, with lines like “I was forgotten like Line 2 on a Corporate Headquarters Switchboard” (Pessl 122). Descriptive language like this strengthens the literary transaction; the reader is more emotionally invested in the text the more they have to interact with it, and Pessl’s prose requires a lot of heavy investment and attention—this is not a text one could read to fall asleep at night and still understand the plot line. This language forces us into aesthetic reading; because the exposition of the novel lasts just under a third of the novel with its Dostoyevskyian prose, the unliterary reader (if they have not already put down the book and waled away) will be forced into reading the novel aesthetically; it is up to them to take Pessl’s literary pyrotechnics and construct abstract concepts and images from them. No singular reading of Special Topics in Calamity Physics could be efferent because descriptive language like this requires textual animation outside of the physical; a reader must convert the aesthetic, non-visual metaphor into sensory construction, which lies outside of the simple conveyance of information.

Like other discourse theorists of the twentieth century, Rosenblatt notes that reading is a socially performative behavior, and the literary transaction evokes a reader’s “internalized culture in order to elicit from the text this world which may differ from their own in many respects…moreover, the text may yield glimpses of the personality and codes of the author” (56). The transaction will always yield an interplay between at least two sets of codes, two sets of values; this is what a reader assumes when they participate in the literary transaction with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, that they are not only constructing abstract poetry from text, but that they are also trusting Pessl as an author because there is a residue of her in her text. This explains the concept of what Rosenblatt refers to as an “open text”: we trust the author to tell us the truth because as readers we are entrusted with the responsibility of constructing her text, and as we lengthen our relationship with the text, we are creating an emotional and psychological bond with the plot. Like all relationships, a reader’s relationship with the text—and with Pessl—is based on trust and truth-telling.

But because of its genre-bending code-switching, Special Topics in Calamity Physics cannot be called an open text—it heavily borrows literary tactics and rhetorical devices from the mystery genre and the epic drama genre, which call for a certain level of author deception in the literary transaction. Pessl reels readers in, literary and unliterary alike, in the ambling exposition of Part One, which unfurls the last chapter of her protagonist’s childhood and lays the narrative groundwork for an epic hefty as The Odyssey. Particularly observant readers may not trust Blue as a narrator because it is obvious that she is too reliant on her flaky father for her world view, but they will trust Pessl as an author—her prose and storytelling thus far give her credibility, and readers trust her to navigate them through the rest of the novel.

But by borrowing from the mystery genre in particular, Pessl writes a closed text, and deception of the reader is a key part of the literary transaction that makes the finale of the book a satisfying conclusion—because it had an ending the readers didn’t expect, because they didn’t realize they could not trust their author. Here, the literary transaction differs because authors rely on readers to construct their text into abstract images and ideas, and readers do so wholeheartedly because they believe Pessl and the text. It is critical in the construction of a closed text to have readers buy in fully to the notion that they are participating in a literary transaction with an open text in order for the author to truly pull the wool over their readers’ eyes—in a book like an Agatha Christie mystery, readers don’t trust Christie because they expect a twist ending, and thus don’t fully engage in the imaginative construction required of the reader in a literary transaction. Pessl is able to pull off the total deception because, by working across genres in Special Topics in Calamity Physics, readers will not completely expect the twist ending of a mystery and thus fully participate in their task of constructing the novel out of total abstraction.

Introduction: Salut Modernistes! The Riviera Portfolio

This is the academic introduction to my ekphrastic novel, Salut Modernistes! The Riviera Portfolio, which I completed as an honors candidate in Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Through the completion of my novel and honors project, Salut Modernistes! The Riviera Portfolio, I have written on many different works of art as I explain museum exhibitions, curatorial practices, and write on different movements throughout the period of Modern Art. In the contemporary era, it might be easier to simply include a photo or copy of a work of art in the text rather than write about it, but legal logistics impede this—often, with Modernist works that have families still living, a hefty royalty to a copyright must be paid to use this image. 

This isn’t a new problem—leading art critic of the Victorian era John Ruskin also found it difficult to get art to the masses in the nineteenth century, when reproductions of works in color were often costly. Authors such as Ruskin and me (and a plethora of others throughout history) have employed ekphrasis, a description of a work of art used as a literary device, not just as a way to sidestep copyright laws but to use different kinds of storytelling that employs both a reader’s abstract construction of a narrative as well as a reader’s abstract construction of a visual scene. Ekphrasis is often my favorite part of my own writing, allowing me to construct a scene that will connect readers with all of their senses rather than just the visual.

I believe that due to the nature of her early work at the Sorbonne, literary theorist Louise M. Rosenblatt would have varied opinions on the different aspects of ekphrasis: its place in the act of aesthetic reading, the blurred boundaries of art disciplines that ekphrasis creates, how it affects the unique value of art disciplines as well as how ekphrasis aids in the creation of the poetic experience. Rosenblatt’s first book, L’Idée de l’art pour l’art dans la littérature anglaise is a study in the theories of art for art’s sake developed by English and French writers “to combat the pressures of an uncomprehending or hostile society,” (Rosenblatt xi), and it is here that we see the development of her ideas arguing for a nurturing, free environment within a reader for poets and other artists of the world. 

Let me first begin with ekphrasis, starting in Homer’s Odyssey with the description of Achilles’ shield. Ekphrasis isn’t the mere description of the action in the painting, though that could certainly be part of it, but the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a work of visual art. This takes the one-sided act of viewing a work of visual art and levels the experience with the literary event; in order to “view” the work through ekphrasis, an author makes a reader engage in the same mechanisms of abstract construction that a reader would have to enact in order to read a text. In the same way that a reader makes a text a poem or a work of literature, through an author’s use of ekphrasis, a reader  makes a work of visual art into the same poetic event; classically, ekphrasis is employed by authors to consciously show the superiority of literary art to the visual, and I argue that while this point is debatable, a reader makes more of an emotional and psychological connection with a work of visual art when it is first experienced through an abstract literary construction.

Through the use of ekphrasis, authors force readers into an act of what Rosenblatt calls “aesthetic reading.” Whereas in her theory of efferent reading involves reading for a certain purpose, so that only the “residue”or purpose of the text remains, “aesthetic reading” concerns the reader during the actual reading event;  a reader will engage all of his senses and “pay attention to the associations, feelings, attitudes, and ideas that these words and their referents arouse within him. Listening to himself, he synthesizes these elements into a meaningful structure…In aesthetic reading, the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text” (25).

But what is the author’s purpose of engaging a reader in aesthetic reading? If an author could pay the royalty (or perhaps use for free an image of a work of visual art), what could be the benefits of using ekphrasis instead? In the case of John Ruskin, the purpose of using ekphrasis to defend painter J.M.W Turner’s works was to allow more people to be affected by the purpose and narrative of the painting than could physically be moved by its image, and to prove to readers that Turner’s work was the precipice for a major modern art movement. In the case of Ruskin, many fewer people could physically see a painting in a gallery or museum during the Victorian Era, and a reproduction in a book cannot convey the same narrative, action, or themes that the original work can, nor can it invoke the same emotions within a viewer. In order to make Turner’s message and depictions of subjects more widespread, ekphrasis was a logical way to spread the word and make art more public than its narrow bourgeois audience.

However, Ruskin used ekphrasis more creatively than just spreading the social themes of a work through text. Ruskin was the first author to use ekphrasis in a way that persuaded readers into believing in his imaginative understanding of a work of art. In his 1843 book Modern Painters, Ruskin defends Turner’s depiction of “truth” in his paintings against Neoclassical art critics who decried the paintings’ mimetic inaccuracies. In his lengthy defenses of Turner in Modern Painters, which would become a five-volume book completed in 1860, Ruskin used ekphrasis in order to elevate art criticism out of the Neoclassical age, aligning public opinion with contemporary Romantic painting by shifting viewer concern from the general truth to particular truth, a key component of Romantic thought. 

Ruskin describes Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On, also known as The Slave Ship (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) with rich imagery influenced by the descriptive writing of Sir Walter Scott, the blank verse of William Wordsworth, parallels with the King James Bible, and references to Shakespeare that enrich the narrative of the painting in a way that serves the literary reader more than the physical viewer of the painting. In his passages, Ruskin constructs a narrative beyond Turner’s painting, giving us a dramatic image charged full of emotion that is only experienced because of a reader’s full engagement in living through the text. In viewing a work of visual art, there is no equal to the aesthetic literary event.

This is because, unlike the text, a work of visual art exists without viewer’s necessary participation in order for it to become art. Rosenblatt writes that “the reader of a text…is, above all, a performer…the performer’s attention is absorbed in what he is producing as he plays. Once he stops playing, we are left only with the black and white score” (29), which shows that unlike a work of visual art, literature and poetry are can only be evoked by a reader; unlike a work of visual art, their aestheticism lies in the abstract construction of a mental image by a reader’s translation of the words, which ends as soon as a reader ceases the literary event. The aestheticism of a visual work of art lies in color, composition, and an artist’s masterful handling of formal elements; the aestheticism of a text does not exist until a reader translates an author’s attempt at formal composition. Rosenblatt writes that a reader of the literary work of art should aspire to “a complete absorption in the process of evoking a work from the text, a sensing, clarifying, structuring, savoring, of an experience as it unfolds” (29). The literary work of art has the unique ability to make a reader live through an entire sensual experience as if it were truly experienced, while the visual work of art cannot achieve this alone.

This is what Ruskin and others achieve through ekphrasis: while it is certainly useful as a device through which to share the message of visual art with the masses, ekphrasis has the ability to give readers an experience of living through the narrative of a work of visual art. Ekphrasis enriches a reader’s relationship with a work of visual art by giving him a “total lived-through experience” (29) that engages with all of the senses and gives him a psychological and emotional connection through his own construction of the work, which is impossible by appealing to the visual sense alone. 

On Interdisciplinary Art: Methods & Media

This is a travel sketch I wrote about my time living in Seville, as an assignment for a travel writing class.

This is a collection of Kodachrome still slides from the Parque María Luísa. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. This is a box of old film, intaglio prints, and little blocks of linoleum, those that are carved smoothly with a knife and pressed in ink to render an image. When I press my ear close, I can hear running water, rushing from the background (allá) and chirping parrots imported from Argentina.

This one is a shadow of a single date palm branch. It seems almost too graphic to be a photograph, but at its course edges the tips begin to simmer into the foreground. We can see no part of the tree but three millimeters of sweeping palm frond pushing itself into the extreme background. It’s a sudden beat of rigid parallels; like a Kandinsky painting, the palm frond shadow gives itself to the rigid sweeping motion of a rectangular reflecting pool. The palm shadow is the counter piece. I can’t tell if it’s a print or a photograph. 

Here’s one of a blooming hibiscus bush and an antique orange Fiat with a sunroof. This one is original yet familiar. It has precedents, with bougainvillea bushes, old cars, and blue doors. This one lacks a clear sense of grandeur; the wheels are cut out of the frame, it was taken quickly. It lends it a sense of action, and the image shudders with shivering motion. 

Three palm trees on this panel. Their stair-step level heads tell us they’re in perspective, but they’re ungrounded, and could continue downward forever. It’s tricolor, almost a four color composition—either a Kodachrome or a reduction print, mounted the same so I can’t tell—but so tricolor that I almost feel them melting into a black and white silhouette. Navy blue, almost black; the whisper of an edgy, dusty green; orange; a breathless blue, almost white. The colors are labels of light, reflections of the sun out of frame on which everything depends. The orange is the slender fingers of the palm fronds, the navy constructing the heavy trunks and abstract shadows of the actual palm of the leaf. I read them like hands: navy is the palm, Rorschach ink blots that cloud life and heart lines. The green, the fingers. Slender orange finger trips disappear into the sun-drenched sky.

Lots of these unplaceable prints/Kodachrome stills in the box. Shoebox. Ibercaja. That’s the name of a bank; it means “Iberian box.” A shot from the middle of a crosswalk peeks down an alleyway to an out-of-place apartment complex, a Sarasota Modern outlier. It’s all angles and lattice, marked by a date palm, hiding early winter sun behind its upper floors. 

A stationary moped man, in red that matches his moped.

A woman in a hot pink hijab blooms like a camellia, waiting at the bus stop. 

In this box there’s a persisting continuity—all detached, no clear sense of up or down. The view upon which we look is skewed; our perspective not just shifted but completely disregarded.

Here’s another, the corner of a white house with yellow shutters at high contrast with silhouettes and lanky shadows of two Chilean wine palms hiding the sun.

Or how about this one: the flat face of a white building with yellow trim, two yellow spires piercing a tranquil manganese sky. One window is draped with a turquoise awning. Across the frame the seed pods of a Chinese persimmon are lanky downward-pointing fingers that suggest frozen fingertips in the winter sun.

___________________________________________

Marching up the street past a Starbucks, El Archivo de Indias, and hordes of tourists, I can see the Cathedral, and as I’m perpendicular to it, it is flat, its Gothic spires two-dimensional as paper snowflakes cut out of the gray sky. It reminds me of Roman city planning, and though it is beautiful, it probably takes away from the full effect of its glory that it appears as flat as a piece of cardboard as you approach.

Today is one of the few gray days we’ve had here in Seville, a depressing alternative to its usual brilliant fauve landscapes. I cannot stop seeing this city in two contexts: an artistic one, and a religious one. Hay aquí mucho catolicismo, y nada de religión, goes that Ezra Pound poem; here there is much catholicism, and no religion. I think of him staring at the stars through the hole in his tent, imprisoned outside in the Colosseum in Rome after supporting Mussolini. I find it harder to not be religious when basking in this great and glorious beauty. 

Aquinas says that one’s existence as a part of a whole, substantiating itself, is intrinsic to existence as a corrupted being. Summa Theologica says “…everything, by its natural appetite and love, loves its own proper good because of the common good of the whole universe, which is God.” (Aquinas, 984). “God leads everything to the love of Himself.” Even our desire to pursue and love God is tainted by the corrosive motive of self-interest. What to make of that?

It goes on, but that part reminded me so much of my Seville bible study. Summa Theologica references to original sin, laying the foundation for the need for modern salvation. The fault in my Christianity is my Methodist impulse to rationalize, and there are so many logical inconsistencies that caused me to drift in and out of belief for several years. I joined a bilingual Bible study in Seville for the community; little did I realize I’d rediscover religion in the faded out blue room of Iglesia Dios es Amor, a little church I rode the metro to on Wednesdays and Sundays. 

We’d covered paradox in the study before (la paradoja), but now the question our pastor, a young, fit guy fresh out of seminary named Kyle, posed was “Can a person rationally believe in paradoxical doctrine?” We debated in small groups, occasionally standing to grab bread and sweet, ripe tomatoes Kyle's wife had brought for the group. We tossed around phrases like “divine incomprehensibility” and discussed the divine sources of Christian doctrines; on the whole it was brilliantly inconclusive and productively frustrating. Finally, Kyle ended us with a question to mull over for next week: “If divine incomprehensibility gives us reason to think that some of our theorizing might be enduringly paradoxical, doesn’t that suggest that the paradoxes at the heart of the Trinity and the incarnation might be real?” 

I theorize too hard on the metro back to the city center, and by the time we’re sipping icy glasses of tinto de verano, my sweet American friend stops me. “Is it not enough to just have faith sometimes?” I hadn’t thought about it that way, had never let myself be consoled by the thought of endless grace. Thinking back on it now with  Aquinas in mind, I am relieved; I would rather be broken contributing to the greater good of the universe than hovering indifferently above, perfect and uncorrupted. This is the human spirit, to strive to glorify God, and if that makes us corrupted beings, then I’ve found peace with that. I long to be a part of this whole of corruption striving for glorification. 

I’m now standing in El Archivo de Indias after my last exam on my final day in this beautiful place. I’ve just created a life here, made some friends, grown some roots. The exhibit is in honor of the 500th anniversary of the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan, the craziest of all the conquistadors, the one that sailed around the entire world. The end of the exhibit has one unattributed quotation: The passage of this ship was the most novel occurrence since God created man. What is it about being here, at the very beginning of it all? Standing where he stood, where he kicked them off the stone bulkhead, headed to explore the frontier? The very last paradigmal shift?

In search of a trade route…our AP history teachers drilled into our heads: In search of God, gold, and glory. 

I live in gold. 

I find God. 

Despite the corruption of my being, I am glorious.