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Jonathan Lethem 1st Edition James Peacock Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): James Peacock
ISBN(s): 9781847794659, 1847794653
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.10 MB
Year: 2012
Language: english
Jonathan Lethem
Contemporary American and Canadian Writers
Series editors
Nahem Yousaf and Sharon Monteith

Also available
Mark Z. Danielewski Edited by Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons
Louise Erdrich David Stirrup
Passing into the present: contemporary American fiction of
racial and gender passing Sinéad Moynihan
Paul Auster Mark Brown
Douglas Coupland Andrew Tate
Philip Roth David Brauner
Jonathan Lethem

James Peacock

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York
distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © James Peacock 2012
The right of James Peacock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK
and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Distributed in the United States exclusively by

Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010, USA

Distributed in Canada exclusively by

UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 07190 8267 2 hardback

First published 2012

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any
external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee
that any content on such websites is, or will remain, ­accurate or appropriate.

Edited and typeset

by Frances Hackeson Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall, Lancs
Printed in Great Britain
by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
For my mother
Contents

    Series editors’ foreword page viii

    Acknowledgements x
    Introduction: Genre collisions and mutations 1
1   Private dicks: science fiction meets detection in 18
    Gun, With Occasional Music
2   The nightmare of the local: apocalypse on the road 37
    in Amnesia Moon
3   Alice in the academy: As She Climbed Across the Table 58
4   Far away, so close: Brooklyn goes to space in Girl in 75
    Landscape
5   ‘We learned to tell our story walking’: Tourette’s and 95
    urban space in Motherless Brooklyn
6   Mixed media: graffiti, writing and coming-of-age in 115
    The Fortress of Solitude
7   ‘Hiding in plain sight’: reality and secrecy in You 136
    Don’t Love Me Yet and Chronic City
    Conclusion 158
    Bibliography 171
    Index 183
Series editors’ foreword

This innovative series reflects the breadth and diversity of writing

over the last thirty years, and provides critical evaluations of estab-
lished, emerging and critically neglected writers – mixing the canoni-
cal with the unexpected. It explores notions of the contemporary and
analyses current and developing modes of representation with a focus
on individual writers and their work. The series seeks to reflect both
the growing body of academic research in the field, and the increas-
ing prevalence of contemporary American and Canadian fiction on
programmes of study in institutions of higher education around the
world. Central to the series is a concern that each book should argue
a stimulating thesis, rather than provide an introductory survey, and
that each contemporary writer will be examined across the trajectory
of their literary production. A variety of critical tools and literary and
interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged to illuminate the ways in
which a particular writer contributes to, and helps readers rethink, the
North American literary and cultural landscape in a global context.
Central to debates about the field of contemporary fiction is its role
in interrogating ideas of national exceptionalism and transnational-
ism. This series matches the multivocality of contemporary writing
with wide-ranging and detailed analysis. Contributors examine the
drama of the nation from the perspectives of writers who are mem-
bers of established and new immigrant groups, writers who consider
themselves on the nation’s margins as well as those who chronicle
middle America. National labels are the subject of vociferous debate
and including American and Canadian writers in the same series is
not to flatten the differences between them but to acknowledge that
literary traditions and tensions are cross-cultural and that North
American writers often explore and expose precisely these tensions.
Series editors’ foreword ix

The series recognises that situating a writer in a cultural context in-

volves a multiplicity of influences, social and geo-political, artistic and
theoretical, and that contemporary fiction defies easy categorisation.
For example, it examines writers who invigorate the genres in which
they have made their mark alongside writers whose aesthetic goal is
to subvert the idea of genre altogether. The challenge of defining the
roles of writers and assessing their reception by reading communities
is central to the aims of the series.
Overall, Contemporary American and Canadian Writers aims to
begin to represent something of the diversity of contemporary writ-
ing and seeks to engage students and scholars in stimulating debates
about the contemporary and about fiction.
Nahem Yousaf
Sharon Monteith
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of this series, Sharon Monteith and
Nahem Yousaf, for their astute reading and for their critical but kind
comments. Thanks are also due to Matthew Frost and Kim Walker at
Manchester University Press for patient advice on all the administra-
tive and contractual things that I am no good at.
Thanks are certainly due to friends and colleagues who have sup-
ported me during the writing of this book, read and given feedback on
various sections and indulged my desire to talk about Lethem all the
time. Special thanks to Oliver Harris and Tim Lustig at Keele Univer-
sity and to Joe Brooker at Birkbeck. Thanks also to those members of
the Research Institute for the Humanities at Keele who granted me
Research Fellowship time to complete the manuscript. I would like to
thank Adam Gearney, whose excellent paper on As She Climbed at the
Lethem symposium (10 July 2010 at Birkbeck, London) showed me
the relevance of Nietzsche’s work to the novel.
As usual, Sheena, Bonnie and Ruby deserve the highest love and
respect simply for putting up with me. And, of course, I would like to
thank Jonathan Lethem for granting me an interview, for his encour-
aging comments and for his walking tour of the neighbourhoods that
inspired Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce in
altered form portions of ‘Jonathan Lethem’s Genre Evolutions’ pub-
lished in Journal of American Studies 43.3 (December 2009) and por-
tions of ‘“New York and yet not New York”: Reading the Region in
Contemporary Brooklyn Fictions’ published in European Journal of
American Studies 2008.2. The full interview I conducted with Lethem
is cited as ‘Personal Interview, 2009’ in order to distinguish it from
the version published in The Adirondack Review and cited as ‘Peacock,
2009’.
Introduction: genre collisions and
mutations

‘Of course it’s weird,’ said Don. ‘That’s why we love it, right Paul?
It’s from another dimension, it’s fucking weird, it’s science fiction.’
(Lethem, 2002: 94)

What do you get if you cross detection and science fiction? What hap-
pens when you stage a sci-fi picaresque inside an animal’s body? And
what happens when a kangaroo develops the power of speech and
starts wielding a gun? The punchlines are all to be found in Jonathan
Lethem’s writing, and they are only partially comic. This book proceeds
from the broad and frequently rehearsed observation that Jonathan
Lethem’s novels and short stories subvert established fictional gen-
res in some way, and that the frequent intermingling and clashing
of genres is reflected in the bizarre characteristics displayed by many
of the characters. For example, ‘Light and the Sufferer’ (1996), from
which the prefatory quotation is taken, is a gritty urban drama of fra-
ternal bonding, drug addiction and robbery which just happens to
feature mysterious aliens tracking the main characters. The Fortress of
Solitude (2003) disrupts a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age nar-
rative by investing some of the neighbourhood Brooklyn kids with
superheroic powers. As She Climbed Across the Table (1997) is billed as
‘campus comedy’, yet allows science fiction to infiltrate and eventually
colonise its witty satire on academic life. Girl in Landscape (1998a) is a
coming-of-age Western set in space and introduces American frontier
loners to alien races.
Given some of Lethem’s early key influences, writers such as Philip
K. Dick and Charles Willeford who ‘had embattled careers because
of genre prejudice’, it is unsurprising that Lethem is vocal about his
antipathy toward ‘bankrupt categories’ (Gaffney, 1998: 51, 50). If he
feels, touchingly, that ‘Philip K. Dick died for my sins’ (Gaffney, 1998:
 Jonathan Lethem

51), it is because Dick’s posthumous recognition as someone able to

fashion the generic stuff of pulp science fiction into profoundly liter-
ary meditations on reality, religious thought and the alienating po-
tential of technology paved the way for a writer like Lethem who is
similarly resistant to labels like ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘canonical’ and ‘mar-
ginal’. (Indeed, it was partly the Library of America’s publication in
2007 of his Four Novels of the 1960s, edited by Lethem, that helped sal-
vage Dick’s reputation, and welcomed him, somewhat ironically, into
the American canon.)1 For Lethem, argues Andrew Hoberek, there
is no meaningful distinction to be made between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or
between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘popular fiction’. Rather than indulging
in a postmodern ‘appropriation of popular genres’ by more ‘literary’
forms, he treats genres as serious literature in themselves (Hoborek,
2007: 238). In truth, Lethem’s engagement with genre is much more
serious than some other contemporary ‘postmodern’ writers, notably
Paul Auster, who are also known for subverting genres. Auster is sim-
ilarly self-conscious about his employment of genre conventions, but
ultimately sees little value in them at all. His starting point in a text
such as City of Glass is the assumed redundancy of the detective genre
and its disassociation from reality, whereas Lethem, for all his talk of
‘bankrupt categories’, does appreciate their value in the first instance,
recognising that they have more of a connection with the ways we
structure reality than a writer like Auster might care to acknowledge.
So throughout the theoretical sections of this introduction and the
chapters that follow, this is the underlying assumption: genres reflect
and frequently dramatise the human need to shape and make sense
of a complex and shifting world. They help us organise and under-
stand reality but, it should be stressed, are not themselves reality: as
John Frow says, they ‘create effects of reality and truth’ (Frow, 2006:
2). Neither are they reducible merely to sets of stylistic devices or
tropes, however. In mediating between the lived experience of social
situations and their textual representations, genres become central to
‘human meaning-making and to the social struggle over meanings’
(Frow, 2006: 10). Genres are not just useful, according to Frow, they
occupy a ‘privileged’ (Frow, 2006: 12) position within cultural analy-
sis precisely because they always assume that meaning is inseparable
from formal considerations, as well as questions of enunciation – that
is, the position from which one speaks – and social, political and his-
torical context. Moreover, genres participate in and help to establish
particular discourse communities by assuming schematic knowledge
Introduction 

on the part of readers. Whether this knowledge is intertextual, that is,

gleaned from previous similar examples, or real-world, it is necessary
in order to decipher the textual clues which would proclaim a text as
generic and thus confirm the expectations readers inevitably bring to
any text they encounter. It is in this sense that genres create and per-
form ‘worlds’ or, in Alfred Schutz’s evocative phrase ‘finite provinces
of meaning’ (Schutz, 1970: 252).
What is important about these worlds or provinces is that they
are shared, and that they therefore presuppose and contribute to the
formation of communities of readers, critics and writers. Although
other aspects of genre theory are examined in subsequent chapters
(its historical connection to taxonomic evolutionary theory in Chapter
1, for instance), it is the community-building aspect of genre upon
which I focus in this introduction, because it is the most pertinent to
Lethem’s real-world preoccupation with subcultural identity as well
as, of course, his attitude to literary and popular cultural genres. Rick
Altman’s work in Film/Genre (1999) is especially useful for this argu-
ment, because it persuasively navigates a path between what Thomas
Pavel dubs the ‘two temptations’ of genre theory: the desire to ‘freeze
generic features, reducing them to immutable formulas’ and the de-
sire, exemplified by Maurice Blanchot (1959), ‘to deny genres any
conceptual stability’ whatsoever (Pavel, 2003: 201). In the following
analysis of Altman’s work, as well as the references to Dick Hebdige’s
classic work Subculture: the Meaning of Style (1979) which accompany
it, the distinctively ethical implications of Lethem’s genre treatments
emerge.
While there is a common assumption that ‘[g]enres have clear,
stable identities and borders’, Altman argues, such an assumption
invariably masks ideological or political views. The maintenance of
clearly delineated genres helps shore up critical or disciplinary po-
sitions. Thus, and Lethem’s satirical take on critical genres such as
deconstruction and social anthropology in As She Climbed Across the
Table clearly illustrates this, ‘genres are never entirely neutral catego-
ries. They – and their critics and theorists – always participate and
further the work of various institutions’ (Altman, 1999: 6, 12). Alt-
man also rejects the idea that genres are ‘transhistorical’, that they
can ‘be lifted out of time and placed in a timeless holding area as if
they were all contemporaries’ (Altman, 1999: 19). Once again, such
an idea stems from a desire to make a historically defined theoretical
or critical perspective appear universal and definitive. Yet ‘there is no
 Jonathan Lethem

place outside of history from which purely “theoretical” definitions of

genre might be made’ (Altman, 1999: 9). Genres evolve and mutate,
and their critical reception is historically determined. The consumer
of genre fiction sees genres interacting and changing over time in the
process of reading, and is forced to consider the historical, cultural
and political circumstances contributing to these changes.
For Altman there is a ‘constant category-splitting/category creating
dialectic that constitutes the history of types and terminology’ (Alt-
man, 1999: 65–6) in which critics, producers and fans all participate.
Producers, for example (and although Altman’s focus is cinema, it is
not difficult to imagine a parallel process occurring in the publishing
industry), are engaged in a critical process ‘that actually precedes the
act of production’ (Altman, 1999: 44) in that they assay past prod-
ucts and cherry-pick successful elements for future products which
in turn might form recognisable new genre types. Although such an
assaying impulse is clearly tied to the ‘capitalist need for product dif-
ferentiation’ (Altman, 1999: 64), it just as clearly contributes to the
inconsistency and fluidity of genre definitions and to Altman’s funda-
mental conception of genre-as-process.
All of which is not to suggest that Altman advocates an anarchic view
of genre or that he indulges in a romantic fetishisation of the text as
ineluctably unique object. He would surely concur with Catherine Schry-
er’s contention that despite the relatively unstable relation between texts
and genres, it is at any given moment ‘stabilised-enough’ to facilitate for-
mal identification (Schryer, 1994: 107). Hayden White’s reflexive view
of ‘periodization’, through which ‘a synchronous moment is marked
out for examination’ and which infers genres of ‘historical reality’ it-
self (White, 2003: 605), also presupposes this ­stability.
It is in the concept of ‘constellated communities’ (Altman, 1999: 161)
that instances of stability can best be located in Altman’s work; in-
deed, his emphasis on the role of the spectator or reader of genre texts
is his most important contribution to genre theory. Although genre
consumers occasionally participate in actual groups, the sci-fi comic
convention in The Fortress of Solitude being a good example, Altman
argues that ‘genre spectatorship more often involves constructing an
image of such a group out of fragments gleaned from every possible
field’, including ‘industry discourse … critical language, passing com-
ments and chance encounters’ (Altman, 1999: 161). With an obvious
reference to Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’, Altman
dubs these groups ‘constellated communities’ because ‘like a group
Introduction 

of stars their members cohere only through repeated acts of imagina-

tion’ (Altman, 1999: 161). Simply to view a movie or to read a novel
is to engage in ‘lateral communication’ (Altman, 1999: 162), to speak
symbolically with like-minded consumers; acts of spectatorship and
acts of reading reinforce the feeling of community and thus the sense
of stability. Altman goes on to call the relationship between one spec-
tator and another (or for my purposes one reader and another) ‘sec-
ondary discursivity’ (Altman, 1999: 172).
Evidently genres and constellated communities have a symbiotic
relationship: the existence of genre texts creates communities in re-
peated acts of reading and secondary discursivity but, importantly,
it is that very discursivity which keeps genres splitting and evolving.
For Altman, the inevitable inconsistency of genre definitions between
members of a community is ‘a basic component of genre reception’
(Altman, 1999: 175). Each member of a group characterises and de-
fines each text or genre differently and, as Altman explains: ‘Only
through inconsistencies of this type can a genre be redefined through
one of its subsets, thus giving rise to a new genre. It is precisely be-
cause there are no master systems but only diverse system-building
paths that new generic categories remain constantly possible’ (Alt-
man, 1999: 176). Gary K. Wolfe puts it another way: ‘a healthy genre,
a healthy literature, is one at risk, whose boundaries grow uncertain
and whose foundations grow wobbly’ (Wolfe, 2002: 27). Moreover,
this same subjectivity and diversity applies to community participa-
tion itself. Even though stability is perceived or imagined in the shared
enjoyment of genre texts, it is also the case that participants are far
from ‘limited to a single generic community. The same individual
may, at different times, be part of a screwball comedy community, a
musical community, an exploitation community and a gay porn com-
munity’ (Altman, 1999: 161).
Here one arrives at a crucial intersection of generic behaviour
– ‘not the real world, but a game we play with moves and players
borrowed from the real world’ (Altman, 1999: 157) – and real-world
behaviour in Lethem’s writing. To participate in genre communities
is effectively to join subcultural or counter-cultural groupings. Pre-
cisely because a genre text can temporarily suspend normative so-
cietal rules and offer ‘a break with social standards’ in the form of
outlandish or transgressive behaviours, ‘it also creates an implicit tie
among those who find pleasure in breaking this particular cultural
norm in this particular manner’ (Altman, 1999: 158). This view of
 Jonathan Lethem

generic ­ community as countercultural impulse is consistent with

Dick Hebdige’s famous articulation of youth subcultures’ challenge
to hegemony as rooted in the interruption of the ‘process of normali-
zation’, the repudiation of that which is taken for granted (Hebdige,
1996: 18). What is key on both generic and real-world planes is that a
particular subcultural identity emerges and is only viable through ac-
knowledgement of other groupings with which it comes into contact.
Hebdige’s complex analysis of punk’s deliberately constructed ‘frozen
dialectic’ with black forms of expression such as reggae persuasively
makes this point (Hebdige, 1996: 69). John Frow, alluding to Rosalie
Colie’s conception of genres as ‘tiny subcultures’ (Colie, 1973: 116),
says something very similar: ‘Genres frame the world as a certain
kind of thing, and we notice this framing only at its intersection with
other subcultures of meaning’ (Frow, 2006: 93).
We are now in a position to explain precisely why Lethem’s use
of genre is primarily ethical. First and foremost, it is intrinsic to his
thematic preoccupation with ‘the fragility, beauty, and importance of
subcultural life’ (Personal Interview, 2009). Most explicitly in The
Fortress of Solitude, with its graffiti writers, sci-fi enthusiasts and soul
fans, but also in the rock and roll novel You Don’t Love Me Yet and,
more obliquely, in As She Climbed Across the Table, which satirises
academic and theoretical discourses, Lethem’s fascination with sub-
cultures is an enduring element of his work. Attendant upon this fas-
cination there are always underlying questions of an anthropological
kind, which Lethem articulates in this way: ‘can you make a meaning-
ful zone of operation and declare it sufficient unto itself?’ (Peacock,
2009) and ‘what’s the right size of group to set up your little utopia
with?’ (Personal Interview, 2009). Examples of such little utopias
would include the eccentric family unit formed at the close of Am-
nesia Moon (2009), the rock band in You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007a)
and the group of pot-smoking chaldron enthusiasts at the centre of
Chronic City (2009a).
William Deresiewicz, in his somewhat scathing review of the latter
novel, uses the phrase ‘self-enclosed adjacencies’ to describe these
groupings (Deresiewicz, 2009: 49), and his formulation perhaps
gets closer to revealing what is ultimately most important about them
– their contiguity with other groupings. For if subcultural utopias are
contiguous with others, then presumably they will occasionally over-
lap. In fact, this overlapping, the occasional intervention or ­intrusion
of one zone of operation into another, is essential for Lethem: it
Introduction 

f­ orces members of a subculture to consider alterity, to understand

that regardless of how possessively committed one is to one’s own idi-
osyncratic cultural curation and identity, there are other people with
widely disparate interests nonetheless just as committed to theirs, no
matter how outlandish they may appear to non-adherents. So when
science fiction intervenes in hard-boiled detection as it does in Gun,
with Occasional Music (1994), or when it enters the bildungsroman, as
it does in Girl in Landscape, the surprising intervention makes a state-
ment about the flexibility of generic categories and simultaneously
‘becomes a parallel interrogation into the question of what happens
to a human existence when fantastic elements intrude’ (Kelleghan,
1998: 228). It is representative of Lethem’s self-professed fondness
for ‘writing metafictionally about genre’ (Kelleghan, 1998: 227), for
self-consciously interrogating the genres in which his writing partici-
pates, but it also asks a fundamentally human question about how the
individual behaves when confronted with what is perceived as exotic
or out of context and with the realisation that one is connected to oth-
ers whether one likes it or not.
To bring genres into collision is thus, to reprise Dick Hebdige’s
idea, to challenge the processes of normalisation but it is also to resist
what Lethem repeatedly refers to as ‘amnesia’. Perkus Tooth’s attack
on Chase Insteadman in Chronic City succinctly captures Lethem’s
somewhat idiosyncratic use of the term: ‘You’re like the ultimate am-
nesiac American, Chase. You can never imagine anything actually
happened before you wandered along’ (Lethem, 2009a: 217). ‘Am-
nesia’ denotes willed ignorance, a kind of solipsism resulting from
a refusal to acknowledge the diverse alternative lives of others. Al-
though this study does not primarily approach it from a trauma theo-
ry perspective (ably covered by theorists such as Cathy Caruth (1996)
and Dominick LaCapra (2001)), it is worth observing that amnesia in
Lethem’s work frequently does have traumatic causes. As subsequent
chapters elucidate, the death of Lethem’s mother when he was four-
teen has informed the fundamental lack at the heart of all his writing.
In ‘The Beards’, the author offers his most honest admission of this:
‘Each of my novels, antic as they may sometimes be, is fueled by loss.
I find myself speaking about my mother’s death everywhere I go in
this world’ (Lethem, 2005: 149). While the death of Judith Lethem
can hardly be avoided, especially when discussing Girl in Landscape,
there is little to be gained, given their fabulous ­qualities, from treating
Lethem stories as romans à clef; it is much more fruitful to explore
 Jonathan Lethem

the ways in which a national or global feeling of bereavement and

lack can be extrapolated from personal loss. Chapter 2, for example,
explores the larger traumatic consequences of the unspecified cata-
clysmic event in Amnesia Moon. The analysis of one of Lethem’s re-
cent short stories, ‘Procedure in Plain Air’, which closes this introduc-
tion, distils the generic and ethical questions touched on so far and
reveals the lack in this instance to be, materially and metaphorically,
the holes in New York made by the attacks on the Twin Towers. In-
clined throughout his writing toward the concretisation of metaphor,
Lethem in ‘Procedure’ makes manifest LaCapra’s idea that trauma
‘creates holes in existence’ (LaCapra, 2001: 41).
What links these two examples and many others is their depiction
of a retreat into increasingly localised concerns as an amnesiac re-
action to traumatic events. Psychologically, as I have suggested, this
takes the form of a solipsistic denial of others’ experiences and a stub-
born adherence to familiar, repeated patterns (genres) of behaviour.
However, what Lethem describes as ‘the ethical treacherousness of
local preserves’ (Personal Interview, 2009) is also enacted spatially in
his novels, particularly those such as Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and
The Fortress of Solitude set in his home borough of Brooklyn. Describ-
ing the gentrification drive of the 1970s which is so central to Fortress,
Lethem says: ‘These neighborhoods were attempts to divide middle
class brownstones from the surrounding poverty, and that attempt
was full of ethical disasters. The only way to sustain those assertions
was through amnesia, blindness, blinkers, a kind of exaggerated, dis-
torted perceptual field’ (Personal Interview, 2009). Without wishing
to be too schematic, I would argue that this geographical specificity,
coupled with the microscopic attention to urban regional detail and
its attendant danger of regional amnesia, is one of the features that
distinguishes Lethem’s New York novels from the earlier stories writ-
ten when he was still living in California (having left Bennington Col-
lege without finishing his degree). Set either in a surrealised Califor-
nia, or in ‘a sort of cartoon desert, a Nowheresville’ (Schiff, 2006:
126), the first three novels have in common ostentatious collisions of
genre in which a narcotic kind of science fiction tends to rise to prom-
inence. From Girl in Landscape (which is classed as a New York novel
for reasons made clear in chapter four), the emphasis is on genres
arguably more amenable to explorations of community, subcultures
and questions of regional identity – detective fiction, coming-of-age,
­fictionalised biography.
Introduction 

Perhaps, then, there is some inherent characteristic of Brooklyn

which facilitates a more humanistic and realistic regionalism; perhaps,
also, the ironic distancing of the author’s early science fiction is partly
a side effect of the West Coast exile from his birthplace. Certainly,
upon first reading Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude one
might be inclined to agree with their author that they are novels much
more preoccupied than their predecessors with ‘real stuff – sandwich-
es, sidewalks, the subway’ (Schiff, 2006: 126) and less overtly built
upon an intertextual ‘“exoskeleton” of plot or concept’ (Weich, 2003)
such as the playful clashing of Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick.
However, it is precisely in the obsessive curation of geographical and
cultural minutiae in the Brooklyn novels (later affectionately satirised
in the figure of Perkus Tooth) that Lethem runs the risk of succumb-
ing to the same localism he warns against. As Chapters 5 and 6 sug-
gest, there is an irony inherent in the mining of childhood Brooklyn
experience: the more one remembers, the more one attempts to focus
on and make sense of the tiny details of local culture and architecture,
the more one is tempted toward atomisation, fetishisation, nostalgia
and, indeed, amnesia.
Nonetheless, Lethem’s entire career so far can be read as an elabo-
rate exercise in amnesia avoidance. The diversity and prolificacy of his
output attests to the ‘frantic compensation’ for parental loss creative
activity affords (Lethem, 2005: 148) and also enacts at the level of
cultural production the same category-crossing and rupture of formal
and generic boundaries seen in individual texts. A brief list of some
of Lethem’s projects reveals an almost pathological need for cross-fer-
tilisation between text types. Lethem regularly contributes liner notes
and commentaries to the Criterion Collection’s reissues of classic
movies such as The Killers and Bigger than Life; he has edited the Li-
brary of America’s Philip K. Dick anthologies, the Da Capo Best Music
Writing 2002, as well as, appropriately enough, The Vintage Book of
Amnesia (2000); he has collaborated with Walter Salas-Humara, lead
singer of The Silos, to create the ‘floating workshop or lab for making
music’ known as I’m Not Jim (www.imnotjim.com); he has ventured
into graphic novels with Omega the Unknown (2008); and he has set
up the ‘Promiscuous Materials’ project which allows writers, musi-
cians and filmmakers freely to take his work for adaptation. All of
which excursions testify to a sincere desire to see cultural forms and
genres bleed into, enrich and transmogrify each other in a constant
evolutionary process.
10 Jonathan Lethem

Such a desire is also reflected in Lethem’s frequent employment in

recent works of ekphrasis, which he defines as ‘the novel’s capacity for
extensive descriptions of other art forms’ (Lethem, 2005b: 55). Given
that ekphrasis in texts such as The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic
City often instantiates a remediation of childhood or traumatic ex-
perience, however, it is tempting to view it as both a treatment for
and a symptom of amnesia: as both an attempt to recognise alterity
(specifically, alternatives to novelistic discourse) and a reaffirmation
and fetishisation of the novelist’s rhetorical power and hence of his
supreme ability to capture, in various modes, the myriad fragments of
pre-traumatic experience.
Another of my contentions about Lethem’s more recent writing
in this book is this: though it is still indebted to genre and imbued
with a pulpish sensibility even as the author ceases to be an ‘outsid-
er’ and becomes ‘a middle-aged novelist writing bloated, ambitious
books’ (Barber, 2009), it is less likely than older works such as Gun,
with Occasional Music to bring genres so violently, fantastically and
ostentatiously into collision. Early stories repeatedly question the ef-
fects of sudden fantastic events and deploy diverse genre tropes in the
service of that question. Examples of such fantastic elements would
include the grotesque concretised metaphor of the recidivists literally
built into the structure of the prison in ‘Hardened Criminals’ (1996)
and, on a global level, the catastrophe which precipitates the action of
Amnesia Moon. Later works have been less inclined to ask the same
question. Indeed, they frequently seem to ask instead, ‘what hap-
pens when the fantastic becomes ordinary?’ One finds in a novel like
Chronic City the demotic and the fantastic held in precarious balance,
and consequently a subtle recalibration of the very notion of the fan-
tastic. In a Manhattan occasionally suffused with a ‘weird pervasive
chocolate smell’ (Lethem, 2009a: 158) and at the mercy, possibly, of
a giant escaped tiger, a city as much a ‘fragile … projection’ as a mate-
rial place (Lethem, 2009a: 309), the fantastic becomes the texture of
the everyday.
Against this background, the story of Janice Trumbell, the as-
tronaut girlfriend of narrator Chase Insteadman who finds herself
‘trapped in orbit with the Russians’ (Lethem, 2009a: 10), represents
not an incursion of the fantastic, the sci-fi into the normal run of
things, but rather a factitious element of cosmic tragedy delivered in
manageable chunks. Rather than jolting citizens out of complacency
and forcing them to reassess their lives, it exists as ‘daily newspaper
Introduction 11

fodder’ (Lethem, 2009a: 10) and as ‘soap opera’ (Lethem, 2009a: 68)
to provide reassurance and familiarity. Janice’s plight, whether or not
it is real, functions as a mass ‘entertainment’ (Lethem, 2009a: 308),
a collective spectacle which nonetheless symbolises and testifies to
each individual’s entrapment in increasingly localised roles. Science
fiction it might be, but here the term ‘generic’ clearly assumes some
of its common pejorative senses: sci-fi in this context becomes ordi-
nary, anodyne, banal.
This is not to say that Lethem’s own treatments of genre have re-
cently ceased to be engaging or fun, only that the relative subtlety
of their integration allows for nuanced examinations of Lethem’s
recurring preoccupations: alienation, responsibility to others, the vi-
ability of ‘little utopias’ and the dangers of retreat into local condi-
tions. Though still meta-generic, recent stories have swapped bold
and self-conscious stagings of genre clashes for explorations of the
ways in which human instincts, if left unexamined or untested, can
bring about a descent into easy conventionality, familiarity or tribal-
ism and the stolid rejection of difference from one’s little world. So
a story such as ‘Procedure in Plain Air’, published in The New Yorker
in 2009, worries about the ease with which genre can become stale
but does so allegorically, by means of a disquieting tale about hu-
man behaviour, and specifically about the dangers of compliance. The
reading of the story which closes this introduction provides a more
detailed example of the ways Lethem merges generic and real-world
concerns and of the ways his writing shrewdly responds to historical
circumstances.
The title is a variation on ‘hiding in plain sight’, another of Lethem’s
recurrent ideas; it neatly captures the mood of a story concerning the
dispassionate performance of mundane tasks in full public view,
tasks which nonetheless lead to sinister ends and are made all the
more sinister for their apparent oblivious openness. An unemployed
man referred to only by his surname, Stevick, watches from the
bench outside a typically ‘fancy’ and pretentious Manhattan coffee
shop (Lethem, 2009b: 79) as two men in matching jumpsuits park an
‘unmarked’ truck in front of a fire hydrant on the opposite side of the
street and proceed to dig, first with tools ‘notably quiet and efficient’
and secondly with jackhammers (Lethem, 2009b: 79), a small hole in
the road next to the kerb. Strangely ‘enthralled by the activities that
had commenced with the truck’s arrival’ (Lethem, 2009b: 79), Ste-
vick wanders over to inspect the hole after the men have left. What he
12 Jonathan Lethem

sees is an excavation ‘steep and accurate … an inverted phone booth of

emptied dirt and rubble’ with three ‘fitted planks … stacked beside the
hole’ awaiting the fulfilment of their role (Lethem, 2009b: 79).
Holes in the middle of New York City have become a preoccupation
for the author. Clearly, Stevick’s hole is a decocted version of Laird
Noteless’s monumental Fjord in Chronic City (Lethem, 2009a: 109),
and equally clearly both are indebted to the cartoonist Saul Steinberg,
who is, according to Lethem, ‘always drawing skyscrapers that are in-
verted, that are holes in the ground’ (Peacock, 2009). Yet it is the
echoes of September 11 2001 that reverberate most powerfully. For
Lethem, the Ground Zero site functions as a symbolic reminder of
the losses incurred during the attacks, and therefore joins the long
list of ‘lacks’ at the heart of his novels and short stories.2 But ‘the
gigantic hole at the bottom of Manhattan now, where those build-
ings were effectively reversed’ (Peacock, 2009) has a material power
which goes largely unacknowledged; this is precisely why Stevick’s
close inspection of the hole itself is significant. Lethem continues:
‘We all live a stone’s throw from this chasm which just has this hor-
rible authority and also invisibility. It’s deeply meaningful but we’re
always just thinking, “What are they going to put there?” or “I can’t
believe they haven’t put something there yet.” You know, we don’t
grant any reality to the hole in the ground, even though it’s been with
us for pushing toward a decade’ (Peacock, 2009). Symptomatic of
the neurotic drive for newness characteristic of Manhattan in novels
such as Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, the giant hole
is robbed of its historical and physical impact in being regarded as, in
Lethem’s phrase, ‘only a delayed plan’ (Peacock, 2009).
When the plan for Stevick’s hole is finally enacted, ‘Procedure’
ceases to be a realist, lightly comic tale of inertia and the dull lives
of ordinary New Yorkers, and rapidly turns into a mini-dystopia, a
Kafkaesque parable of inscrutable authority and bovine complicity.
The two men return in the truck, open it up and drag out a third
man, gagged and bound, whom they proceed to place standing in the
hole. Suddenly the function of the boards becomes clear: ‘the captive
nestled just underneath the three fat boards when these were fitted
over his head’ (Lethem, 2009b: 80). The hole is a bespoke prison,
then, yet it is the ‘narrow specialization of their tasks’ which makes
the two men impervious to the prisoner’s suffering. As the clean-
shaven one puts it when questioned by Stevick, ‘We’re on installa-
tion and delivery … Pick-up’s another department’ (Lethem, 2009b:
Introduction 13

80). Excessive localisation is one of Lethem’s chief preoccupations,

as subsequent chapters make clear, and here it reveals itself in the
purely perfunctory carrying out of small tasks with no understanding
of the complete punishment and incarceration process, or most im-
portantly, its ethical consequences. In passing, it is worth noting that
this is a concern shared by other contemporary authors. In Chuck Pal-
ahniuk’s Fight Club (1997), for example, the narrator’s job as ‘recall
campaign co-­ordinator’ (Palahniuk, 1997: 31) for a car manufacturer
reduces people to statistics and elements within a larger process that
they and he cannot perceive or understand. In a novel obsessed with
complete processes – film projection, making explosives – the break-
ing down of a process into its constituent parts becomes alienating
and dissociative in a way which mirrors the narrator’s neurological
condition. Tyler Durden’s proud claim that in Project Mayhem ‘each
guy is trained to do one simple job perfectly’ ignores the fact that each
guy thereby becomes a drone with no conception of the political or
ethical implications of his micro-task (Palahniuk, 1997: 130).
‘Procedure’, like Fight Club, suggests that the compartmentali-
sation of one’s activities leads to a breakdown in human relations.
Moreover, the dispassionate, businesslike way in which the men go
about their allotted tasks serves to anaesthetise the strangeness of the
incident. Whereas the characters in ‘Light and the Sufferer’ readily
acknowledge that the presence of aliens is ‘fucking weird’, here there
is no sense of a sudden intrusion of the surreal or fantastic, only the
apparent continuation of a banal reality which goes unchallenged by
all but Stevick. If people wished to demonstrate some ethical aware-
ness, they would surely consider these events weird. Even Stevick’s
questions, rather than, as one might expect, proceeding along the
lines of ‘What the hell are you doing?’, focus on mundane, practical
matters: ‘How long are you going to leave him in there?’, he asks. Any
feeling of civic or ethical responsibility on Stevick’s part is shown to
be vague, already diminished, something merely residual; he presses
the men on the question out of ‘some faint civic courage, a notion
that he’d absorbed certain duties as a local witness to the open-air
procedure’ (Lethem, 2009b: 80). His question, he recognises, ‘was
perhaps a feeble one, but, for anyone observing, the fact that he’d
stood up from the bench and begun some stalling interrogation could
be seen as crucial, either in a deeper intervention to be conducted by
more effective and informed members of the community or in some
later accounting of Stevick’s comportment and behavior’ (Lethem,
14 Jonathan Lethem

2009b: 80). Such provisional and pusillanimous thoughts serve only

to make the reader wonder if anyone is observing and, if they are, do
they care? In fact there is no evidence in the story that ‘more effective
and informed’ citizens or an appreciable ‘community’ even exist. Ste-
vick finds himself standing above the hole, and when he turns to look
back at the café, ‘no one in fact [is] regarding him from the window’
(Lethem, 2009b: 80).
As I have said, the hole in the ground is unmistakably an image
inspired by 9/11; the fact that there is now a prisoner inside, ‘knees
wedged in dirt’ (Lethem, 2009b: 80) and dressed in a jumpsuit, only
serves as further confirmation. With its visual echoes of the notorious
yet iconic Guantánamo Bay uniforms, ‘Procedure’ offers a disturbing
vision of public indifference to punishment, cruelty and, above all,
the demonisation of difference. The attack on the Twin Towers, it
implies, constituted the sudden interruption of the fantastic into real-
ity; what follows the unimaginable event is inevitable division and the
banality of everyday cruelty.
My contention, of course, is that such ethical concerns are invari-
ably approached via genre concerns in Lethem’s writing, and ‘Proce-
dure’ is one of the most subtle recent examples. Central to the rela-
tionship between ethics and genre in the story are the jumpsuits, and
Stevick’s observations upon first seeing the captive are particularly
revealing:
The man was dressed in the same uniform, as though recently demoted
from their company. But his skin, Stevick noted wearily, as if this fact
beckoned to outrage he ought to feel rising within him but didn’t, was
darker than theirs. His head shaved, where their hair was intact; his two-
or-three day beard rough, where theirs were, in one case, trimmed into
a goatee and, in the other, shaved clean. So the jumpsuits, rather than
suggesting equivalence between the three, framed difference. (Lethem,
2009b: 79–80)

Yet again, Stevick gestures toward a feeling of moral disgust that has
already been thoroughly dessicated. Whether or not the colour of the
victim’s skin is the principal reason for his rejection from the un-
specified ‘company’, however, Stevick’s observations reveal a number
of crucial aspects of what can be regarded as generic behaviour. In
treating the man this way, the two ‘operatives’ (Lethem, 2009b: 80)
are enacting a theory of strict genre definition and function which
regards any minor deviation from accepted norms as a dangerous and
Introduction 15

punishable transgression of categories. They are, in a sense, behav-

ing like those critical and academic institutions which, Rick Altman
observes, try and eradicate contradictions and inconsistencies in the
development of genre communities (Altman, 1999: 175). In so doing
they remind us that genre is always bound up in questions of power,
and, as Jacques Derrida famously maintains, of ‘law’ (Derrida, 1980:
56).
What the operatives fail to realise (or most likely choose to ignore
in their eagerness to fulfil their assigned roles) is that the jumpsuits,
rather than simply marking the undesirable difference of the third
man, necessarily and invariably frame the difference, the variety in-
trinsic to all categories. As Derrida insists, if genre presupposes laws,
limits, ‘norms and interdictions’ (Derrida, 1980: 56), it must also pre-
suppose ‘a law of impurity or a principle of contamination’ (Derrida,
1980: 57). This is because any element of a genre can be lifted and
placed in a different generic context (what Derrida dubs ‘citation’)
and because the mark or label applied to a genre (for example ‘novel’
or ‘science fiction’) exists both ‘outside’ the genre ‘without belong-
ing’ to it (Derrida, 1980: 59) and sometimes within it, as an idea that
can be remarked upon reflexively by a text within the genre set. (An
example of this paradox, what Derrida calls ‘invagination’, would be
the knowing reference to ‘science fiction’ in ‘Light and the Sufferer’.)
With a typically deconstructive flourish, Derrida goes on to insist that
‘[t]here is no madness without the law. Madness cannot be conceived
before its relation to law’ (Derrida, 1980: 81). Thus the imposition of
boundaries presupposes madness, unruliness, contamination.
This madness can be attributed in large part to readership and per-
ception. As Altman emphasises, the inconsistency of genre definitions
between readers and fans is productive of new genre labels. Genre is
a process of citation, constantly evolving and mutating along differ-
ent paths. As Stevick takes up his position above the hole, this cru-
cial question of perception and reception is dramatised and given an
ethical inflection in the interpretations of the various spectators who
wander up and talk to him. First the counterman leaves the café for a
cigarette and says to Stevick, ‘So you’re in charge now, huh?’ (Lethem,
2009b: 80). Evidently he reads Stevick’s function as guard or warden,
someone complicit with the jumpsuited operatives. Clinging on to his
vestigial sense of moral responsibility, Stevick replies ‘I didn’t want
to leave him completely alone’ (Lethem, 2009b: 80), before tacitly
acknowledging his own status as cipher, or indeed as metaphorical
16 Jonathan Lethem

hole, by adding, ‘I’m something of a stopgap or placeholder, really’

(Lethem, 2009b: 80). Later in the afternoon a café customer armed
with a briefcase and an umbrella aggressively offers another reading
of Stevick’s vigil: ‘You artists need to grow up and learn the differ-
ence between an installation piece and a hole in the ground’ (Lethem,
2009b: 82). What is up for debate here, then, is the genre of the situ-
ation: is it an act of policing, of sympathy, or of conceptual art?
Stevick’s anaclisis means that he is constantly troubled by the ques-
tion of whether ‘his relation to the man beneath the boards qualified
as a human transaction’ (Lethem, 2009b: 80). It becomes ‘a kind of
personal situation’ for him because of the ‘gravity and authenticity’
he ascribes to the man and the hole and his craving for ‘a shared
undertaking’ (Lethem, 2009b: 82), or a relationship stronger than
the ‘passing connections’ embodied in the figures of the counterman
and Stevick’s ex-wife (Lethem, 2009b: 83). Yet his desire to establish
what Altman would call a ‘constellated community’ is always under
pressure from disparate, externally imposed readings of his situation.
Despite his best intentions, his function appears to alter over time.
When the mysterious ‘inspector’ arrives with a clipboard and gives
him a sandwich, Stevick falls further toward collusion with the opera-
tives. In the duffelbag left by the inspector, Stevick eventually finds a
set of jumpsuits, identical to the ones worn by the operatives and the
captive. His ex-wife, Charlotte, who has stopped to talk to Stevick with
her customary ironic tone, gleefully proclaims, ‘You’re hired! … You’ve
been promoted from a temp position to staff’ (Lethem, 2009b: 83).
It is a beautifully ambiguous conclusion to the story. Faced initially
with what appears to be a dilemma – whether to don a jumpsuit and
finally accept his role in the punishment process, or whether to try and
maintain his sense of human connection – Stevick suddenly comes to
understand that ‘[t]he beauty of the uniform was that it settled noth-
ing’ (Lethem, 2009b: 83). Framing difference as much as similarity,
the jumpsuit serves as a symbolic reminder of Derrida’s axiom, ‘par-
ticipation never amounts to belonging’ (Derrida, 1980: 65). Depend-
ent on one’s perspective, Stevick’s vigil remains either an act of banal
cruelty (after all, he never thinks to let the man out of the hole) or a
show of solidarity. The final lines therefore become deliciously tense:
‘Success in an endeavor like this one lay in the details. Stevick was
certain he was going to do a good job’ (Lethem, 2009b: 83).
‘Procedure’ takes Lethem’s ongoing concerns with genre categories
and re-contextualises them with renewed urgency in a post-9/11 tale
Introduction 17

of fading community. Whilst not advocating a kind of moral relativ-

ism – incarcerating people in holes is shown to be at least unpleasant
– it nonetheless indicates the extent to which human behaviour, like
generic behaviour, is largely a matter of perception. Yet it also consti-
tutes a warning, to pick up on one of Lethem’s favourite ideas once
more, against amnesia, the wilful forgetting or ignorance of other
people’s experiences. Let us not forget that the jumpsuits mark both
difference and similarity; they are a reminder that however much we
try and isolate ourselves in ever smaller sub-groupings, there are con-
tiguous or overlapping groupings which, no matter how different they
might at first appear, are likely experiencing similar emotions and dif-
ficulties. It is only recognition of this fact that allows communities
to evolve in positive, empathetic ways and to embrace difference. Fi-
nally, as the next two chapters show, Lethem’s interest in ‘Procedure’
in the way individual roles and communities evolve recalls the more
hyperbolic treatments of evolution in the early novels.

Notes
1    Lejla Kucukalic dubs Philip K. Dick a ‘canonical writer of the digital age’
(Kucukalic, 2009: 23) in light of his prescience in describing the onto-
logical uncertainties engendered by human interaction with machines,
for example. Yet she still acknowledges the fact that contemporary critics
all too often display a bias against his work and science fiction in general
(2009: xi).
2    Lethem tends to conflate the ideas of ‘loss’ and ‘lack’, postulating the
former in the latter; that is, suggesting that the felt need implies some-
thing that was once there. As Dominick LaCapra stresses, the two terms
are frequently used interchangeably, though strictly speaking a lack may
refer to something that was never there in the first place (LaCapra, 2001:
53).
1

Private dicks: science fiction meets

detection in Gun, With Occasional
Music

The paratextual features of Lethem’s debut novel, Gun, With Occa-

sional Music (1994) enact their own ambiguous evolutions, and this
chapter begins by unpacking sets of significances from these features
that will then be applied to the novel as a whole. Patterned with cross-
hairs, the cover of the most recent Faber edition unashamedly de-
clares the hard-boiled, noir credentials of the narrative within. Indeed
the cover design, visually indebted to the famous shot in John Hus-
ton’s film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon in which Sam Spade’s part-
ner Miles is murdered, can be regarded as a distillation of noir into
some of its most iconographic elements: a dame, a shadow, a gun.
Nino Frank’s description of noir as offering an ‘impression of real life,
of lived experience and – why not? – of certain disagreeable realities
that do in truth exist’ (Frank, 1996: 23, italics added) is revealing: if
the gun, eponymous hero of Lethem’s novel, is the hard, material sig-
nifier of those disagreeable realities, it is also, as in this cover image,
stylised to such a degree that one can no longer ascribe much reality
to it, only, perhaps, the reality effects discussed in the introduction.
In conjunction with the words ‘a novel’ inserted just above the title,
the cover picture expresses nothing if not knowing self-consciousness
about the interplay of reality and representation inherent in any ge-
neric acts, and about the novel’s status as representation.
Further evidence for reflexivity is provided by the back cover blurb.
However, in calling Gun, With Occasional Music ‘part dystopian sci-
fi, part noir detective story – a dark and funny postmodern romp’
the blurb raises more questions than our protagonist Conrad Met-
calf might have licence to ask without forfeiting all his karma points
and finding himself in suspended animation (‘the freeze’), questions
that this chapter nevertheless sets out to answer. Is it simply the
collision of sci-fi and noir that warrants the label ‘postmodern’? Do
Gun, With Occasional Music 19

­ ostmodern genres exist (to borrow a question from Ralph Cohen),

p
and what might a postmodern analysis of genres, or more accurately
in this case, an analysis of depictions of established genres put under
pressure in postmodern environments, entail? If, as Brian McHale
proposes, detective fiction is the ‘epistemological genre par excellence’
and science fiction its ontological counterpart (McHale, 1987: 16),
does the modification of the former by the latter in Lethem’s novel
represent some kind of evolution of the detective genre, equipping
it to navigate its way through and speak more eloquently to a world
characterised by hybridity, fluidity, uncertainty, simulation and mul-
tiple subjectivities? This is a world, as Adam Roberts observes (Rob-
erts, 2006: 28), increasingly colonised by science fiction ideas that are
no longer prophetic as such, but have become ‘a mode of awareness
about the world’ in its present condition (Csicsery-Ronay, 1991: 308).
Brian Attebery goes further and argues that theorists of the postmod-
ern such as Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and Donna Harraway
frequently couch their ideas ‘in science fictional terms’ (Attebery,
2002: 91): the postmodern, therefore, is the world made sci-fi.
Central to any discussion of Gun’s Dickian, dystopian sci-fi tropes
and its preoccupation with evolution must be, as will become evi-
dent, the malevolent marsupial who steals several scenes in the novel.
Lethem’s fondness for talking animals can initially be located in what
he dubs his ‘ground zero’ reading experience – Alice in Wonderland
(Sussler, 2008) – but the epigraph to Gun specifies another influence,
one dense in evolutionary connotations:
There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always
is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.

These are the opening lines of Chapter 2 of Raymond Chandler’s final

Philip Marlowe novel Playback (1958) and the most obvious thing to
say about them is that they constitute explicit acknowledgement of
the author’s debt to the hardboiled tradition and more particularly
to Chandler, who endeavoured throughout his career, like Lethem,
to imbue generic narrative conventions with stylistic innovation and
literary aspiration.
Playback nonetheless seems a curious choice on first inspection. Not
only does its title refer obliquely to the fact that the novel was reworked
from a rejected screenplay, and thus is itself a kind of re-­playing or
faulty transmission, it also tacitly admits to its own ­tiredness, the way
the novel regurgitates tough-guy clichés within a far more simplistic
20 Jonathan Lethem

narrative than its predecessors, particularly The Long Goodbye (1953).

As its title suggests, The Long Goodbye played out a protracted, senti-
mental farewell to a detective fiction genre no longer able to sustain
a romantic humanistic myth of the good man in the midst of a post-
war society unrelentingly fixated on commodities, surfaces, fakes and
simulations. In this sense, it postulated a proto-Jamesonian critique
of the depthlessness of late capitalist American society. Playback does
none of this, and the reintroduction of Marlowe’s old flame, Linda
Loring, at the conclusion should be seen less as an example of post-
modern retour de personnages than as a nostalgic attachment to the
earlier, superior work and an affirmation of Roger Wade’s cynical as-
sertion that a writer is ‘washed up’ when he starts trawling through
his own writing for inspiration (Chandler, 2005: 285).
Lethem’s epigraphic citation, then, intervenes at the point of play-
back, of empty repetition, and makes that one of the themes of his
text. Partly this is jokingly revealed by the tinny music emerging from
inanimate objects (including guns, hence the title) toward the end of
the novel, a hollow playback which attempts to distance people further
from the material reality of their oppression. But most significantly it
is revealed in the way he takes a rhetorical figure of resemblance, the
simile ‘as easy to spot as a kangaroo in dinner jacket’, and turns it
into another specific kind of metaphor; that is, a literary character.
To some extent this is an extension of the author’s penchant for tak-
ing idiomatic metaphors and concretising them, seen in short stories
such as ‘The Hardened Criminals’. Yet in this context it proclaims
much more. By taking a typically Chandleresque hardboiled wise-
crack and prematurely evolving it (in the manner of many of Gun’s
characters) into a walking, talking embodiment of all that is skewed
and ethically dubious about the futuristic environment of Gun, With
Occasional Music, Lethem manages to tie together the ideas crucial
to the argument of this chapter – chiefly genre mappings and evo-
lution – while signalling his awareness that literary influence is an
‘example of evolutionary change’ in itself (Hopkins, 2004: 35). The
kangaroo in the dinner jacket pays homage to its literary ancestor,
then, while circumscribing it and recognising the possible limitations
of his ancestor’s vision in the contemporary world. Moreover, the
quantum leap from one form of metaphor to another suggests that
any playback, transmission or citation in a new context is necessarily
a ­misrepresentation, whether wilful or otherwise, and hence a kind of
misrembering or amnesia.
Gun, With Occasional Music 21

Lethem’s openness about influence – an openness taken to en-

tertaining extremes in his now-notorious ‘The Ecstasy of Influence:
A Plagiarism’ (2007b), which extols the virtues of creative stealing
from other artists and is composed almost entirely from a series of
cunningly assembled plagiarisms – allows us insight into the self-
conscious manner in which he conceives and constructs his earliest
novels in particular:
I sometimes use the word ‘exoskeleton’ of plot or concept. With the
first couple books, there was always an exoskeleton of concept, which I
then filled with all sorts of ephemera, emotions, autobiographical feel-
ing, jokes, and so forth. But there was always that exoskeleton of plot or
concept: Let’s put Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler together, or Let’s
put Don DeLillo and Italo Calvino together. (Weich, 2003)

The stylistic and conceptual influences of Chandler have already

been outlined; Gun’s debt to Philip K. Dick, briefly, is disclosed in
the pervasive dystopian atmosphere which serves partly as critique of
hegemonic power structures, and in the minutely imagined details
of that dystopian world: the use of cryogenic incarceration (derived
from Ubik (1969)) and the centrality of animals, whether real or ge-
netically altered (derived in part from Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? (1968)).
This uncovering of the exoskeleton is amusing enough. Yet what is,
arguably, more interesting about Lethem’s idiosyncratic treatment of
genre, notably in Gun, With Occasional Music and later in Motherless
Brooklyn, is that the author’s evident self-consciousness is frequently
shared by the characters. Specifically, this means that genre functions
for protagonist (and, of course, reader) as a form of cognitive map-
ping, to employ an evolutionary term returned to presently. In pro-
viding templates or simulation models for human behaviour, genre
becomes a means of orienting oneself in geographical, ethical and
literary space. Quite simply, one knows roughly how to behave when
the generic boundaries, allowing for the original elements that indi-
vidualise a text, are clear. The problem for character and reader is that
in Lethem the boundaries are almost never clear.
As a result, hints of self-consciousness about generic conventions
(and the disruption of those conventions) can be found throughout
Lethem’s work. It is as if, in fact, the characters know full well they are
participating in genre narratives and feel genuine anxiety when ex-
pected conventions are rudely overturned. For example, at one point
22 Jonathan Lethem

during Gun, With Occasional Music, the narrator reflects on ‘the actu-
ality of the violence’ which erupts through the smart-aleck dialogue:
‘[v]iolence isn’t part of the ping-pong game of wisecrack and snappy
comeback’, he says; ‘it puts an end to all that and leaves you wishing
you’d stayed in or under the bed that morning’ (Lethem, 1994: 57).
The disorientation the reader may feel at Lethem’s generic mixing
therefore mirrors the characters’ experiences as their personal sche-
mata become obsolete in what one might call ‘postmodern’ environ-
ments. (These are environments which are, for the sake of argument,
media-saturated, driven by technology and the market, commodify-
ing, heterogeneous and fragmentary.) As Joseph Carroll argues, ‘[t]he
desire to construct reliable cognitive maps assumes unmistakable
prominence in a period of serious cultural disorientation’ (Carroll,
1995: 387). But as I shall argue, Lethem is much more afraid of sci-
entific, taxonomic impulses such as those exemplified by the literary
critic and rabid anti-poststructuralist Carroll, than he is the potential
chaos of dismantled categories.
Secondly, and relatedly, there is a close connection between genre
stylistics and the narrative preoccupations of Lethem’s first two nov-
els. In this chapter and the next, it is argued that the way genres inter-
mingle and evolve in his work, ultimately achieving a kind of unstable
hybridity, is consistent with the author’s interest in evolution itself
as a scientific, ethical and political standpoint. These chapters focus
on three key interlinked themes: evolution, amnesia and, in Chapter
2’s discussion of Amnesia Moon (1995), regionalism, demonstrating
that Lethem tends to approach evolution as an adaptive process ironi-
cally, and that evolution is therefore not viewed as progressive, but
frequently as a retreat into deliberate amnesia or denial of history,
coupled with an increasingly atomised and parochial world view.
In both Gun and Amnesia Moon, it is the ascendance of science
fiction tropes that heralds the radical forgetfulness and narrowing
of perspectives suffered by the characters. Therefore, science fiction
occupies a contradictory position: it is the common endpoint of an
evolutionary trajectory of genre that simultaneously reveals its own
ethical and literary inadequacies. It should be stressed once again that
Lethem’s attitude toward genre is in no way rigid or hierarchical: his
concern is precisely that when hierarchies are constructed for political
ends, when for example a sci-fi obsession with advanced ­technologies
and scientific progress begins to take precedence within society,
seemingly old-fashioned concepts like ‘community’ and ‘freedom’ are
Gun, With Occasional Music 23

fatally compromised.
Ostensibly, Lethem might appear to set up a classic (and naive) op-
position between the literary – that which is ambiguous, contested,
questioning – and the scientific – that which delimits, avoids equivo-
cality, seeks answers. However, even these categories eventually be-
come destabilised, especially, as Chapter 3 demonstrates, in his third
novel As She Climbed Across the Table (1997). In fact, Lethem is at
pains to present the complex relationship between science and lit-
erature in a far more nuanced way than a theorist such as Joseph
Carroll in his mammoth polemic Evolution and Literary Theory (1995).
Carroll’s book belongs to a venerable critical tradition, a pivotal con-
tributor being Ferdinand Brunetière with his L’Evolution des Genres
(1890–94), which draws on Linnaean and Darwinian classificatory
models to label and fix the boundaries of genre. As Rick Altman says,
such work aims to prove that genres ‘operate systematically, that their
internal functioning can be observed and systematically described,
and that they evolve according to a fixed and identifiable trajectory’
(Altman, 1999: 6). It also represents an attempt to make a historically
determined scientific viewpoint seem universal and timeless. Moreo-
ver, such work maintains a naive distinction between the scientific
and the literary precisely by its need to circumvent ambiguity and its
faith in science’s ability to do so.
For Lethem, science and literature are not mutually exclusive dis-
courses. Evolution is a story unfolding in unpredictable ways; science
creates space for literary interpretation or storytelling and is itself a
form of literature. Therefore, it cannot pretend to objective ‘truth’.
Joseph Carroll, impatient with rhetoricians who ‘insist that the laws
of discourse take precedence over the laws of science’, at least recog-
nises that literature itself constitutes, just as science does, a form of
knowledge (Carroll, 1995: 31). However, he fails to acknowledge that
the reverse is also true: science deals in narrative speculation as well
as knowledge. More damagingly, he chooses to ignore the ideological
undercurrents of evolutionary theory and its more nefarious ramifica-
tions (notably eugenics)1, and then proceeds to incorporate all litera-
ture into an evolutionary paradigm that reduces literary knowledge to
a series of taxonomies. For instance:
Protagonists can be motivated by any combination of the following pur-
poses: the need (1) to define, develop, or integrate the self (psychodrama,
Bildungsroman); (2) to find or fulfill sexual romance (love stories; quan-
titatively by far the largest category); (3) to protect or nurture a family
24 Jonathan Lethem

or to establish a right relation of family functions (domestic dramas,

for which Oedipus Rex is a classic prototype); (4) to found or reform a
society or to protect or establish the protagonist’s position within a given
social structure (political drama, novel of society); (5) to define some
peculiarly human ideal (heroic quests, cultural romance); (6) to live and
thrive, to survive or come to terms with death (naturalist fiction; any
work in which the author concentrates on man’s animal nature); and
(7) to achieve a religious vision or sense of cosmic order (religious and
philosophical dramas). (Carroll, 1995: 250–1)

To rehearse the ideas discussed in the introduction: if Lethem’s

work illustrates anything, it is that human life is not readily amenable
to the imposition of generic boundaries, and that even if genres do
indeed offer a form of cognitive mapping, the vicissitudes of experi-
ence will eventually, and necessarily, re-draft those maps. Although
Carroll acknowledges the complex interrelations between the genres
listed above, there is surely the risk of placing even more emphasis
on forms of discourse than those critics he savages for denying a real-
ity beyond the text. Literature does indeed reflect human experience,
but such categorising risks an inadvertent inversion: human expe-
rience can best be described through textual species. Carroll merits
close attention, if only for his unblushing adherence to what he calls
the ‘truth’ of science (Carroll, 1995: 5); for his bludgeoning collective
dismissal of thinkers as diverse as Fredric Jameson, Richard Rorty,
Terry Eagleton and Jacques Derrida; and for his remarkable equation
of queer theory with a postmodernist conspiracy to rob the world of
material reality and replace it with autogenous text (Carroll, 1995:
166). In the words of Philip Engstrand, the narrator of As She Climbed
Across the Table, he truly has ‘[p]aradigm eyes’ (Lethem, 1997: 80).
The following analysis demonstrates that Lethem’s texts at least ap-
proach evolution, as a scientific, ethical and literary concept and as
a way of reflecting on Lethem’s own development as an artist, with
somewhat more maturity and inclusiveness than this.

A brief synopsis of Gun, With Occasional Music, appears to bear out,

at least in diegetic terms, the blurb’s assertion that the novel is a scin-
tillating marriage of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian visions and Raymond
Chandler’s literary detective fiction. The protagonist, Conrad Metcalf,
is unmistakably a gumshoe wisecracker in the Marlowe mould:
By this time we’d gotten the attention of Mr. Suit. He put down his
magazine and stood up, rubbing his jaw with his big beefy hand as if
Gun, With Occasional Music 25

considering the possible juxtaposition of jaw and hand; mine and his,
specifically. (Lethem, 1994: 14)

In a fictionalised Bay Area in the early twenty-first century, Metcalf

is investigating the death of a former client, a doctor called Maynard
Stanhunt, on behalf of the chief suspect Orton Angwine. Angwine,
whose karma has reached zero and is merely hours from his time in
‘the freeze’, believes he is being framed. The maelstrom of corruption,
violence and sexual intrigue which ensues involves a deeply unpleas-
ant crimelord called Danny Phoneblum as well as the ‘Inquisitors’, a
futuristic police force intent on controlling the state. Ironically, given
their collective name, one of the ways they seek control is through
restrictions on the asking of questions. Metcalf has a brief affair with
one of the inquisitors, Catherine Teleprompter, whose name and as-
cension to power at the close of the novel imply the irresistible force
of technology.
There is nothing especially unconventional in this outline, apart
from the names. Yet right from the beginning, generic expectations
are challenged. Our hardboiled narrator, traditionally the epitome of
masculinity, admits ‘I wasn’t a man anymore’ (Lethem, 1994: 15). Af-
ter ‘one of those theoretically temporary operations where they switch
your nerve endings around with someone else, so you can see what
it feels like to be a man if you’re a woman, a woman if you’re a man’
(Lethem, 1994: 15), his girlfriend Delia Limetree disappeared without
trace, leaving Metcalf emasculated and angry. In one sense, Metcalf’s
stated desire to recover his ‘personalized nerve endings’ (Lethem,
1994: 15) and thus to reinstate his masculine feelings serves to rein-
force normative heterosexual roles, and it also necessitates the isola-
tionism that has traditionally characterised detectives from Auguste
Dupin to John Rebus. Yet the sex role-reversal element, popularised
in science fiction stories such as A. M. Lightner’s Day of the Drones
(1969) at least proffers the possibility of destabilised and defamiliar-
ised genders and sexualities, even as it warns of the dangers of empa-
thy in a society increasingly antipathetic toward it.
In addition to this radical modification of the protagonist, the
­narrative throws up characters one would not normally expect to
find in a detective narrative. Chief amongst these are Joey Castle, the
talking, gun-wielding kangaroo assassin, and Barry the ‘babyhead’,
whose paternity is one of Metcalf’s main avenues of investigation.
How these two outlandish individuals have come to be, and how they
might disrupt the trajectory of the detective narrative, are ­central to
26 Jonathan Lethem

­ nderstanding the text’s ethical orientation. With another nod to

u
generic self-consciousness, Conrad reveals Barry and Joey’s prov-
enance:
The streets were a bit too quiet for my taste; I would have liked it better
to see kids playing in front, running, shouting, even asking each other
innocent questions and giving innocent answers back. That’s the way it
was before the babyheads, before the scientists decided it took too long
to grow a kid and started working on ways to speed up the process. Dr.
Twostrand’s evolution therapy was the solution they hit on; the same
process they’d used to make all the animals stand upright and talk. They
turned it on the kids, and the babyheads were the happy result. An-
other triumph for modern science, and nice quiet streets in the bargain.
(Lethem, 1994: 18)

One consequence of the mysterious Dr Twostrand’s therapy is that

for the detective, the streets no longer seem mean enough; they have,
in fact, ceased to feel alive at all. His natural environment has been
stripped of the idle talk that so often provides him with answers.
If any one character has stayed mean, it is Joey the kangaroo. It
is illuminating to treat Metcalf and Joey’s relationship as the central
agon of the text. Not only does the kangaroo’s participation in several
murderous episodes drive the narrative forward, leading to the even-
tual showdown between detective and marsupial baddie, but it is also
made clear that these antagonists embody two contrasting epistemo-
logical standpoints that are crucial to Lethem’s ethical concerns. The
following exchange, taken from the first meeting between Metcalf
and Joey, illustrates the key differences:
‘Don’t play human with me, Joey. I’ve got the same privilege with you as
anybody has with a kangaroo. Who sent you?’
In case I forgot about the gun, he stuck it in my gut. Like so many
of the evolved, he didn’t like being reminded of his lineage. (Lethem,
1994: 56)

Initially, it should be noted that Joey’s attempts to ‘play human’ reveal

a tenacious misconception about evolution itself. As Chris Colby con-
tends, ‘[o]ne common mistake is believing that species can be arranged
on an evolutionary ladder from bacteria through “lower” animals,
“higher” animals and, finally, up to man’ (Colby, 2006). As Darwin’s
extended ‘tree of life’ metaphor illustrates (Darwin, 2003: 484), fit-
ness is connected to changing environments, not to innate perfectibil-
ity in species; it is contextual rather than inherently ­progressive. (This
Gun, With Occasional Music 27

is true for genres just as much as for the natural world, of course, as
the work of Rick Altman forcefully demonstrates.) In fact, there are
significant passages in On the Origin of Species, notably one in which
he alludes to ‘our ignorance of the precise cause of the slight analo-
gous difference between species’, where Darwin is happy to compare
‘differences between the races of man’ with, for example, the pro-
pensity of certain colour cattle to be pestered by flies (Darwin, 2003:
219). In The Descent of Man he is famously more explicit: ‘there is no
fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in
their mental faculties’ (Darwin, 1981: I.35).
Lethem/Metcalf’s tendency to employ animal similes – at one point
Orton Angwine has ‘the look of a rabbit frightened into fierceness’
(Lethem, 1994: 46) – is designed to highlight this proximity. Likewise
premature evolution results in a closeness between man and animal
which supports Darwin’s thinking and threatens certain comforting
perceived hierarchies that reinforce man’s superiority. For Dulcie the
sheep, tragically, this leads to her brutal murder (Lethem, 1994: 96)
precisely because (and here is a typical Lethemite joke with a seri-
ous intent) she ‘knew things that could have broken the case open’
(Lethem, 1994: 236).
Apart from wrongly privileging man in essence, rather than simply
as an organism adept at adapting to and imposing upon its environ-
ment, the belief in the ‘evolutionary ladder’ is implicated in the mel-
ancholic tendencies Joey in particular exemplifies. Attendant upon
his aspiration to be human is the desire, which Metcalf recognises, to
deny lineage, to erase history. When Metcalf discovers that the kan-
garoo has promoted himself from thuggish hit-marsupial to kingpin
toward the close of the narrative (Lethem, 1994: 257), the evolution in
status he has undergone is laden with irony. His ascent to the top of
the ladder, as it were, shows him to be perfectly suited to survival in
this twisted, inhumane environment but therefore, rather than prov-
ing him ‘more human’, it further distances him from human(e) be-
haviour and societal connections.
Evolution here is a form of willed forgetting, combined with a de-
sire to bring the future forward more quickly, and it is epitomised
by the sci-fi ingredients of the story. It betrays a melancholic fixation
on the futuristic present, despite the ghostly physical evidence of the
‘past’ animal body. Another example would be the babyheads Metcalf
encounters in the bar later in the novel, drinking themselves to death
‘to counteract the unpleasant side effects of the evolution ­ therapy’
28 Jonathan Lethem

(Lethem, 1994: 145), trying to forget themselves even as they are

dressed absurdly in toddlers’ clothes and smoking cigarettes. Most
importantly, this forgetting stands in direct contrast to the avowed
aim of the detective. Throughout the narrative, Metcalf is referred to,
seldom admiringly, as ‘[a] question asker’ (Lethem, 1994: 147). Ques-
tions have of course always been the primary weapon in the detective’s
armoury, but in this increasingly sci-fi-inflected environment, condu-
cive to individual and collective forgetting, the need to uncover past
connections through interrogation, to re-establish a sense of commu-
nity in the face of increasing isolationism, becomes essential.
Then again, Metcalf’s own attitude toward questions is marked by
the same suspicion and ambiguity common to others involved in the
Stanhunt case: ‘I’m willing to break the taboo against asking ques-
tions – in fact it’s my job – but I’m pretty much like the next guy
when it comes to answering them. I don’t like it. That’s just how it
is’ (Lethem, 1994: 4). Embedded in this cynicism are issues of philo-
sophical import. At the simplest level, one can state that a question
demands a response, and thus some form of human interaction. Even
in Metcalf’s increasingly atomised and divisive world, this need not
constitute a significant threat so long as one regards an answer merely
as the dissolution of a question, as a problem thereby solved. If, how-
ever, one postulates a dialectical relationship between questions and
answers, such that a question initiates an ongoing dialogue which
does not inevitably lead to any definitive answer, then more power
must necessarily be imputed to the question. In this Socratic model
of interrogation, assumed power is challenged through the asking of
questions, and thus the question assumes a problematising function
within society. As Michel Meyer says in Of Problematology: ‘Socrates
asks questions. He calls his interlocutors to account to show them
that they do not know what they claim to know. As Socrates knows
that he knows nothing, the question that begins a dialogue will re-
main unresolved at its end. It is in these aporetic dialogues that we
can most clearly see his antiestablishment attitude’ (Meyer, 1995: 67–
8). It was partly the antiestablishment drive of the dialectical question
that saw it relegated, so Meyer argues, to the realms of rhetoric rather
than science, which in turn became, post-Socrates, the province of the
philosophical proposition and syllogism (Meyer, 1995: 66).
Metcalf is no Socrates, but he does understand the problematic power
of the question. And in a neat inversion of Joey’s ­anthropomorphism,
Metcalf’s honest appraisal of himself as ‘the creature who asked
Gun, With Occasional Music 29

­ uestions, the lowest creature of them all’ (Lethem, 1994: 130), reveals
q
the dread and antipathy the population has developed towards the
problematising detective. The detective, as someone who carries ‘the
weight of the past like ballast, something only [he is] stupid enough to
keep carrying’ (Lethem, 1994: 234), strives for a sense of connection,
ethical responsibility and collective narrative in the face of atomisa-
tion. Appalled by the ‘disconnected creatures pass[ing] through the
blackness, towards solitary destinations’, Metcalf is ‘stupid enough
to think there was something wrong with the silence that had fallen
like a gloved hand onto the bare throat of the city’ (Lethem, 1994:
130).2 His addiction to question-asking speaks of his need to break
the silence.
Obviously, it is not at all unusual for science fiction to offer dystopi-
an visions. What is interesting here is that the detective tries to main-
tain, through the asking of questions, classic, romantic hard-boiled
genre values in the face of the sci-fi elements which resist his efforts
– artificially evolved animals, anti-gravity pens, the state-sanctioned
accounting and docking of citizens’ ‘karma’ (Lethem, 1994: 33). Ul-
timately, the unravelling of the case hinges on another such element
– the drug called (making the point explicitly) Forgettol. The novel’s
twist hinges on the discovery that the victim, Maynard Stanhunt, actu-
ally ‘hired his own hit’ (Lethem, 1994: 251). His excessive consump-
tion of Forgettol, an attempt ‘to carve his life up like a Thanksgiving
turkey’ (Lethem, 1994: 5), has caused a radical bifurcation of his per-
sonality, such that his professional self cannot even remember that
his private self is enjoying an illicit affair with his estranged wife Ce-
leste in a seedy motel. Tragically, the professional self takes out a suc-
cessful contract on the private self, with Joey the kangaroo as hitman.
Not only does this scenario represent a narcotically enhanced up-
date of the Calvinist split self, it also points to an underlying paradox
operative both narratively and meta-narratively; namely, that despite
the detective’s old-fashioned craving for the recollection of facts and
thus for communal culpability for past events, it is the radical act of
forgetting which creates the very narrative in which Conrad Metcalf is
involved. Indeed, Forgettol, if the chemist’s analysis is to be believed,
can potentially be used as a narrative drug:
‘Anytime you try to regulate Forgettol, it’s a delicate balancing act. Some-
day they’ll work it out, but they haven’t yet.’ He smiled a funny smile.
‘If he’s doing it right, he can eradicate whole portions of his ­experience
30 Jonathan Lethem

with the make, then sew up the gap for a sense of continuity’. (Lethem,
1994: 106)

As he says, ‘a sense of continuity’ can be achieved if the correct bal-

ance between amnesia and memory is found. Discomfiting elements
can be strategically rejected in favour of the comforts of concatena-
tion. It appears, then, that narrative is a combination of remembering
and forgetting, and that the assumed purity of the detective’s drive
for recollection is no more palatable than the denial practised by the
artificially evolved.
Though this occupies a short scene in the novel, it raises potentially
crucial questions about Lethem’s treatments of amnesia throughout
his career. Clearly, widespread amnesia is an insidious phenomenon,
and the extreme consequences of it are symbolised by another illicit
drug favoured by some of the characters – ‘Blanketrol’, a substance
that almost completely empties the user of consciousness and hu-
manity. Equally clearly, however, a preoccupation with and an insist-
ence on total recollection, as well as being impossible, has ethical im-
plications of its own. To a certain extent, amnesia has a function, in
that gaps in memory require contributions from others to fill them
in. Continuous narrative is a combination of remembering and for-
getting, and there are implications for Lethem’s own prose practice,
notably in Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, of obsessive
remembering. Immersion in tiny memorial details can trigger a kind
of blindness, excessive localism or amnesia. Metcalf’s desire to return
to ‘the case’, his case, even after six years of enforced respite in the
freeze, is symptomatic of such blindness and pays less attention than
it should to indicators of the more generalised destruction of civil lib-
erties occurring all around him.
Yet the biggest problem in Gun, with Occasional Music, as the chem-
ist at least recognises, is that forgetting cannot and should not be
­externally controlled. Moreover, Lethem has created a fictional world
where it is the state that increasingly attempts to control it through
manipulation of technology, in order effectively to relax society’s criti-
cal faculties and disable resistance or free thinking. Evolution therapy
is one aspect of this. Mass-produced Forgettol is another. Undoubt-
edly the most egregious examples are ‘the slave boxes’, devices im-
planted in the heads of girls taken out of the freeze, giving them a sem-
blance of consciousness and activity so that Phoneblum, with the help of
the inquisitors, can use them for prostitution (Lethem, 1994: 175).
Gun, With Occasional Music 31

These innovations are just the tip of the iceberg. Leaving the freeze
after six years (Lethem, 1994: 211), Metcalf finds a world more satu-
rated with the qualities of science fiction than ever before. The drug
‘makery’ has become completely mechanised (Lethem, 1994: 239)
and the time-release version of the drug, which completely obliterates
memory, is now the most commonly used (Lethem, 1994: 216). Most
telling of all are the little boxes everyone seems to own which have
supplanted recollection. Metcalf attempts to interview again several
of the people involved in the case, only to find them stripped of inte-
gral memory, obliged instead to consult the electronic box for their
‘memories’. Memory itself has become abstracted, ‘externalized, and
rigorously edited’ (Lethem, 1994: 224). Thus the population is con-
demned to the numbing drudgery of an eternal present, free to listen
to the muzak ‘which was sure to be coming out of the nearest water
fountain or cigarette machine’ (Lethem, 1994: 224) and divested of
the potentially unsettling cognitive maps memory might supply in
order to inspire resistance. The ending of the novel is resigned and
pessimistic: once the case has been ‘cracked’, Metcalf, who has effec-
tively been ‘cut loose, so to speak’ by his repeated zero karma status
(Lethem, 1994: 262) finds himself in a kind of atemporal limbo even
without the aid of the drug he steadfastly refuses to take – time-­release
Forgettol. The freeze is no longer much of a punishment, he admits:
instead it enables his own temporal discontinuity; it frees him from
history and produces a profound, carefree isolation and amnesia in a
series of perpetual presents.
Gun, With Occasional Music begins as a noir detective novel with
elements of science fiction, and rapidly evolves into a dystopian sci-
fi text, which has rendered the ethical and literary aspirations of the
detective obsolete. Consequently, the narrative trajectory describes a
retreat into atemporality and solipsism. Evolution is depicted not as a
process whereby living organisms adapt their physical and cognitive
faculties to suit their environments, but as one of many techniques,
along with the administration of drugs and the seductions of con-
sumerism, for detaching the individual completely from his or her
environment and a sense of collective responsibility. An overly en-
thusiastic acceptance of Darwin’s optimistic evolutionary prediction,
that ‘all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress to-
wards perfection’ (Darwin, 2003: 397) results in its antithesis – social
­breakdown and withdrawal into a numb individualism. In Lethem’s
terms, the individual’s drive to perfectibility, based largely on ‘tech-
32 Jonathan Lethem

nological opportunities’, suggests ‘a search for zipless transcendence

which [is] usually a mistake’ (Kelleghan, 1998: 228).
It is time to return to the questions posed at the beginning of this
chapter in light of the novel’s supposed postmodernism. What has
been summarised in the last few paragraphs is a fictional scenario
that can accurately be described as ‘Jamesonian’, given that so many
of its characteristics correspond with Fredric Jameson’s concerns over
the cultural and political manifestations of late capitalism in an era
commonly labelled ‘postmodern’. Metcalf’s world is distinctly schizo-
phrenic, in Jameson’s (previously Jacques Lacan’s) specific sense
of ‘a breakdown in the signifying chain’ (Jameson, 1991: 25) which
Jameson makes homologous with the breakdown in temporality so
destructive in Gun:
The connection between this kind of linguistic malfunction and the psy-
che of the schizophrenic may then be grasped by way of a twofold propo-
sition: first, that personal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal
unification of past and future with one’s present: and, second, that such
active temporal unification is itself a function of language, or better still
of the sentence, as it moves along its hermeneutic circle through time.
If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence,
then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our
own biographical experience or psychic life. With the breakdown of the
signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experi-
ence of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and
unrelated presents in time. (Jameson, 1991: 25–6)
Schizophrenia is a loss of reference, and it is powerfully symbolised
in Lethem’s novel by the memory boxes mentioned earlier. Jameson
famously extrapolates from this state of schizophrenia, symptomatic
of a pervasive crisis in historicity, modes of cultural production that
privilege ‘the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the alea-
tory’ (Jameson, 1991: 25).
An example of such cultural production from Lethem’s debut would
be ‘the musical interpretation of the news’ (Lethem, 1994: 3) that has
replaced the spoken-word news in order to anaesthetise the populace
and relax their capacity to engage with historical events; what peo-
ple receive instead are vague, abstracted and unrelated fragments.
Elsewhere, the ‘anti-grav’ pen (Lethem, 1994: 33) epitomises a drive
for technological and stylistic innovation at odds with ­functionality.
As Metcalf observes: ‘It seems like the biggest innovations always
­announce themselves in the tackiest ways … It’s never a very good
Gun, With Occasional Music 33

pen, either. You use it for a week, and it runs dry’ (Lethem, 1994: 33).
Therefore its breaking free from gravity also symbolises its breaking
free from time by virtue of its built-in obsolescence and its negligible
use-value. By the time Metcalf emerges from the freeze for the first
time, it has already become a kind of pastiche, a quaint antique ‘collec-
tor’s item’ for which one of the Inquisitors is prepared to pay Metcalf
good money (Lethem, 1994: 211). What unites these examples, and
other dystopian marvels such as Forgettol and evolution therapy, is
their reliance on a technology which is ‘mesmerizing and fascinating
not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privi-
leged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and
control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp:
the whole new de-centered global network of the third stage of capital
itself’ (Jameson, 1991: 37). And that power is revealed most eloquently
and most frighteningly in mass amnesia, the severing of connections
between past, present and future.
In the light of this analysis of Gun, With Occasional Music one
might wish to modify Jameson’s contention that sci-fi exists in a dia-
lectical relationship with the historical novel (Jameson, 1991: 284). It
is clear that it corresponds to the ‘waning or the blockage of that his-
toricity’ (Jameson, 1991: 284) but here the second term of the dialectic
is surely the detective novel, a genre that Lethem sees as concerning
itself with the past, with history, with collective culpability, with the
potential for change through recognition of that culpability. As I have
suggested, it is the dialectical interplay between the two genres that
produces the narrative and serves as critique of both: it is not the case
that detection stands alone as a model of ethical responsibility. As it
too becomes dislocated in time and fades into a kind of empty play-
back or pastiche, detection’s own limitations, notably the very tempta-
tions to nostalgia it affords, are disclosed.
Recent work on the ‘dystopian turn’ in Anglo-American cultures at
the close of the twentieth century has identified ‘critical dystopia’ as a
genre which, among other things, blends genres the way Lethem does
in Gun. Indeed, critical dystopia ‘is the ideal site for generic blends’
because in any case ‘[t]he borders of utopia and dystopia are not rigid,
but permeable’ (Donawerth, 2003: 29). Thus so-called ‘conservative’
forms ‘are transformed by merging with dystopia, a merge that forces
political reconsideration, and traditionally conservative forms ­ can
progressively transform the dystopian genre so that its pessimism
shifts from being resigned to being militant’ (Donawerth, 2003: 29).
34 Jonathan Lethem

Both utopian, in the sense of possessing an emancipatory drive, and

dystopian, in the sense of revealing pessimism about ‘the dystopian
elements of postmodern culture’ (Miller, 1998: 337), critical dystopias
differ from traditional utopias by virtue of particular formal strategies.
They open ‘in media res within the nightmarish society’ (Baccolini and
Moylan, 2003: 5) rather than bringing a travelling protagonist to a
new world; they place, in a manner consistent with postmodernism’s
emphasis on textuality and signification, a heavy emphasis on the role
of language in facilitating resistance to an oppressive society (Met-
calf’s insistence on asking questions would be one example); and they
display a tendency to leave endings open so that, whether or not hope
is evident within the texts’ narratives, hope may be available ‘outside
their pages … if we consider dystopia as a warning that we as read-
ers can hope to escape its pessimistic future’ (Baccolini and Moylan,
2003: 7).3
Clearly, Gun, With Occasional Music (and its successor, Amnesia
Moon) appears to fit quite comfortably within what is itself a hybrid
genre – the critical dystopia. Equally clearly, it employs genre blend-
ing dialectically in order to paint a bleak, Jamesonian picture of a con-
temporary society in thrall to technology, intent on depthlessness and
increasingly ahistorical. But do these factors make it postmodern?
And, to call on Ralph Cohen once more, do postmodern genres ex-
ist? Are these questions ultimately even worth asking? If texts have
always mixed, satirised and undermined genres (Cohen’s primary ex-
ample is Tristram Shandy, but one could go further back and cite Don
Quixote or any number of other examples), then the critical dystopia
does nothing new but merely reinvigorates genre blending in order to
comment on the social and cultural realities of its time. Once again,
genre texts have long done this, and such observations return us to
the points made in the introduction about the role of the historically
situated reader and the various constellated communities in which he
or she participates at any given moment.
If Brian McHale can state that there is no cultural dominant, only
multiple dominants emerging from a text ‘depending upon which
questions we ask’ of it (McHale, 1987: 6), then he is surely not argu-
ing for unchanging genres perceived in different ways, but for genres
transformed in the very process of perception. In other words, to re-
visit a term which links the evolutionary theory this chapter has drawn
upon and Fredric Jameson’s thinking on postmodernism, ­genres in
any era help us cognitively map ourselves within social and cultural
Exploring the Variety of Random
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Spirit
Slate Writing and Kindred Phenomena
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Title: Spirit Slate Writing and Kindred Phenomena

Author: Chung Ling Soo

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPIRIT SLATE

WRITING AND KINDRED PHENOMENA ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
“The Spiritualistic Séance.”
SPIR IT SLATE W R ITIN G

AND

KIN DR ED PH EN OM EN A

BY

WILLIAM E. ROBINSON
Assistant to the late Herrmann

S I X TY-S I X ILLUSTRATIONS

MUNN & COMPANY

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN OFFICE
New York City

1898
Copyrighted, 1898, by Munn & Company.

All rights reserved.

 P R E FA C E .

The author of the present volume is not an opponent of

spiritualism—on the contrary, he was brought up from childhood in
this belief; and though, at the present writing, he does not
acknowledge the truth of its teachings, nevertheless he respects the
feelings of those who are honest in their convictions. At the same
time he confidently believes that all rational persons, spiritualists as
well as others, will heartily indorse this endeavor to explain the
methods of those who, under the mask of mediumship, and
possessing all the artifices of the charlatan, victimize those seeking
knowledge of their loved ones who have passed away. As a great
New York lawyer once said, it was not spiritualism he was fighting,
but fraud under the guise of spiritualism.
Owing to the fact that the author has for many years been
engaged in the practice of the profession of magic, both as a
prestidigitateur and designer of stage illusions for the late Alexander
Herrmann, and has also been associated with Prof. Kellar, he feels
that he is fitted to treat of clever tricks used by mediums. He has
attended hundreds of séances both at home and abroad, and the
present volume is the fruit of his studies.
Some of the means of working these slate tests may appear
simple and impossible of deceiving, but in the hands of the medium
they are entirely successful. It should be remembered it is not so
much the apparatus employed as it is the shrewd, cunning, ever-
observing sharper using it. The devices and methods employed by
slate writing frauds seem innumerable. No sooner are they caught
and exposed while employing one system than they immediately set
their wits to work and evolve an entirely different idea. It is almost
impossible at the first sitting with a slate writing medium to know
what method he will employ, and should you, after the sitting, go
away with the idea that you have discovered his method of
operation and come a second time ready to expose him, you may be
sadly disappointed, for the medium will undoubtedly lead you to
believe he is going to use his former method, and so mislead you.
He accomplishes his test by another method, while you are on the
lookout for something entirely different. The great success of the
medium is in disarming the suspicions of the skeptic, and at that
very moment the trick is done. Slate writing is of course the great
standby of mediums, but there are many other tricks which they
employ which are described in the present volume.
The publishers have added a chapter on “Miscellaneous Tricks”
which may serve as a supplement to their “Magic: Stage Illusions
and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography,” which has
already obtained an enviable position in the literature of magic, and
has been even translated into Swedish. These tricks are by Mr. W. B.
Caulk and the author.

New York, November, 1898.

 TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S .

Chapter I.
PAGE

The Single Slate 3

Chapter II.
The Double Slate 32

Chapter III.
Miscellaneous Slate Tests 41

Chapter IV.
Mind Reading and Kindred Phenomena 51

Chapter V.
Table Lifting and Spirit Rapping 71

Chapter VI.
Spiritualistic Ties 82

Chapter VII.
Post Tests, Handcuffs, Spirit Collars, etc. 93

Chapter VIII.
Séances and Miscellaneous Spirit Tricks 101
 Chapter IX.
Miscellaneous Tricks 115
SPIRIT SLATE WRITING
AND

KINDRED PHENOMENA.
 CHAPTER I.
T he S ingle S late .
There has probably been nothing that has made more converts to
spiritualism than the much talked of “Slate Writing Test,” and if we
are to believe some of the stories told of the writings mysteriously
obtained on slates, under what is known as “severe test conditions,”
that preclude, beyond any possible doubt, any form of deception or
trickery, one would think that the day of miracles had certainly
returned; but we must not believe half we hear nor all that we see,
for the chances are that just as you are about to attribute some
unaccountable spirit phenomena to an unseen power, something
turns up to show that you have been tricked by a clever device
which is absurd in its simplicity.
There are a large number of methods of producing slate writing,
but the writer will describe a few which will be sufficient to give an
idea of the working of slate tests in general. First we have the
ordinary one in which the writing is placed on the slate beforehand,
and then hidden from view by a flap or loose piece of slate. (Fig. 1.)
After both sides of the slate have been cleaned, the false flap is
dropped on the table, the side which is then uppermost being
covered with cloth similar to the table top, where it will remain
unnoticed, or the flap is allowed to fall into a second slate with
which the first is covered. In the latter case no cloth is pasted on the
flap. Sometimes the flap is covered with a piece of newspaper and is
allowed to drop into a newspaper lying on the table, then the
newspaper containing the flap is carelessly removed, thus doing
away with any trace of trickery.
 Fig. 1.—Ordinary Slate with Flap.

Another way of utilizing the false flap is as follows: The writing is

not placed beforehand on the slate, but on the flap, which, as
before, is covered with the same material as the table top. This is
lying on the table writing downward. The slate is handed around for
inspection, and, on being returned to the performer, he stands at the
table and cleans the slate on one side, then turns it over and cleans
the other. As he does so he lifts the flap into the slate. The flap is
held in firmly by an edging of thin pure sheet rubber cemented on
the flap between the slate and the cloth covering of the slate. This
grips the wooden sides of the frame hard enough to prevent the
false piece from tumbling out accidentally.
We now come to another style, wherein a slate is cleaned on both
sides, and, while held in the hand facing the audience, becomes
suddenly covered with writing, and the slate is immediately given for
inspection. The writing is on the slate previous to the cleaning, and
is hidden from view by a flap of slate colored silk, held firmly in place
by a pellet of wax in each of the corners of the silk. Attached to this
silk flap or covering (at the end that is nearest to the performer’s
sleeve) is a stout cord or string, which is also made fast to a strap
around the wrist of the hand opposite to that holding the slate. If
the arms are now extended their full length, the piece of silk
covering will leave the slate and pass rapidly up the sleeve out of the
way, and thus leave the writing exposed to view. (Fig. 2.) The slate
is found to be still a little damp from the cleaning with the sponge
and water it had been given previously. This is easily accounted for.
The water from the sponge penetrates just enough through the cloth
to dampen the slate.
 Fig. 2.—Removing the Silk from the Face of the Slate.

There is still another slate on which we can make the writing

appear suddenly. It is composed of a wooden frame, such as all
wooden-edged slates have, but the slate itself is a sham. It is a
piece of cloth painted with a kind of paint known as liquid, or silicate
slating, which, when dry and hard, is similar to the real article. This
cloth is twice the length of the slate and just the exact width. The
two ends of the cloth are united with cement, so as to make an
endless piece or loop. There is a small rod or roller in both the top
and bottom pieces of the frame, the ends being made hollow to
receive them. Over these rollers runs the cloth, stretched firmly and
tightly. Just where the cloth is joined or cemented is a little black
button, or stud of hard rubber or leather. This allows the cloth to be
pushed up and down, bringing the back to the front; and by doing
so quickly, the writing which is written on the cloth at the rear of the
frame is made to come to the front in plain view. (Fig. 3.)
Still another idea in a single slate is as
follows: An ordinary looking slate is given
out for examination, and, on its being
returned to the medium, he takes his
handkerchief and cleans or brushes both
sides of the slate with it; and, upon again
showing that side of the slate first cleaned,
it is found covered with writing apparently
done with chalk. The following is the simple
explanation of it: Take a small camel’s hair
brush and dip it in urine or onion juice, and
with it write or trace on the slate whatever
you desire, and when it becomes dry, or
nearly so, the slate can be given for
examination without fear of detection. The Fig. 3.—The Endless Band
handkerchief the performer uses to clean Silicate Trick Slate.
the slate with is lightly sprinkled with
powdered chalk. He makes believe to clean the one side devoid of
preparation, but the side containing the invisible writing is gently
rubbed with the handkerchief, not too hard just enough to let the
powdered chalk fall on the urine or onion juice, where it leaves a
mark not unlike a chalk mark.
It will not be out of place to describe a trick by which writing is
produced upon an ordinary china plate by a somewhat similar
means. The plate is examined and cleaned with a borrowed
handkerchief, and then the performer requests the loan of a pinch of
snuff, or uses a little sand or dust, which he places on the plate. He
now commences to move the plate around in circles, and while
doing so the snuff or sand is seen to gradually form itself into
writing. The explanation is simple—whatever writing you desire to
appear on the plate is placed beforehand on it. It is done with a
camel’s hair brush dipped in the white of an egg and allowed to
become dry before being handed around for inspection. As the
performer cleans the plate he breathes on both sides of it, as if to
give it moisture enough to help take off any dirt that might be
thereon when rubbed with the handkerchief. In breathing on the
front of the plate containing the writing done with the white of the
egg, he moistens the writing enough to make the snuff or sand, as
the case may be, adhere to it. Of course, in cleaning the front of the
plate, care must be taken not to brush or disturb the invisible
writing.
It may not be amiss to also mention another method of producing
writing, employed by mediums to obtain a message on a blank piece
of paper which has been placed between two slates, which are held
by the medium in his hand, high above his head, and, on afterwards
taking the slate apart, the paper is covered with writing. This again
calls into use the extra or false flap. (Fig. 1.) A piece of paper with
writing on it is placed face downward on one of the slates and
covered with the false flap. It then looks like an ordinary slate. On
this is placed the plain piece of paper, and over this is laid the
second slate. The slates are now held up in plain view of the
audience, and on being lowered to the table they are turned over,
thus bringing the blank piece of paper under the false flap and the
one with the writing on it on the top of the flap, which has fallen
from the slate, which is now the top, but originally the bottom one,
on or into the under one, and, of course, on the removal of the
present top slate, the writing is found on what is supposed to be the
original blank paper.
Fig. 4.—False Table for Developing Communications Written with Sympathetic Ink.

If the paper is to have a private mark put on it by an observer, so

as to prove the writing really does appear on that identical piece of
paper, the operation is varied as follows: The false flap is done away
with, and the paper, which is furnished by the medium, has written
on it the desired communication with ink, which is made visible and
brought out black by means of heat. For the invisible ink you can use
sulphuric acid, very much diluted, so as not to destroy the paper.
The necessary heat is obtained in the following manner: The table
(Fig. 4) on which the slates are resting is hollow, and has concealed
in it a spirit lamp filled with alcohol. This lamp sits directly under a
trap in the table top, which is covered underneath for safety with
sheet iron, so it will not catch fire. When the slates are placed on the
table they are laid over the little trap door, which, in conjuring
parlance, is known as a “trap.” This is now opened, and the slates
allowed to become well heated and the trap then closed, and the
prepared paper, upon coming in contact with the hot slate, is thus
covered with writing.
Another medium employed a somewhat
similar method, only the paper in this case
was placed in a glass vial (Fig. 5) which had
been lying on the iron trap door. The
medium’s hand covered the vial, which was
corked and sealed, while the writing was
making its appearance. You can also
produce writing on the paper in the vial
without resorting to the use of heat by using
a vial that has been washed out with Fig. 5.—The Development
ammonia and kept well corked, and writing of Spirit Writing.
on the paper with a weak solution of copper
sulphate, which is invisible until the paper is placed in the vial, when
the two chemicals produce writing in blue. Still another message is
produced as follows: The writing is done with iron sulphate on blank
cards. Of course this is invisible. These cards are placed in envelopes
and sealed up. Upon opening the envelopes shortly afterward the
cards are covered with the writing which was before invisible, but is
brought out by a solution of nut galls with which the inside of the
envelopes had been slightly moistened.
The subject of sympathetic inks is such an interesting one that we
give thirty-seven formulas, which include all those which are liable to
be used by the medium.
The solutions used should be so nearly colorless that the writing
cannot be seen till the agent is applied to render it visible.
Sympathetic inks are of three general classes.

Inks that Appear through Heat.

1. Write with a concentrated solution of caustic potash. The
writing will appear when the paper is submitted to strong heat.
 2. Write with a solution of ammonium hydrochlorate, in the
proportion of 15 parts to 100. The writing will appear when the
paper is heated by holding it over a stove or by passing a hot
smoothing iron over it.
3. A weak solution of copper nitrate gives an invisible writing,
which becomes red through heat.
4. A very dilute solution of copper perchloride gives invisible
characters that become yellow through heat.
5. A slightly alcoholic solution of copper bromide gives perfectly
invisible characters which are made apparent by a gentle heat, and
which disappear again through cold.
6. Write upon rose colored paper with a solution of cobalt chloride.
The invisible writing will become blue through heat, and will
disappear on cooling.
7. Write with a solution of sulphuric acid. The characters will
appear in black through heat. This ink has the disadvantage of
destroying the paper. (See the caution given on page 9.)
8. Write with lemon, onion, leek, cabbage or artichoke juice.
Characters written with these juices become very visible when the
paper is heated.
9. Digest 1 oz. of zaffre, or cobalt oxide, at a gentle heat, with 4
oz. of nitro-muriatic acid till no more is dissolved, then add 1 oz.
common salt and 16 oz. of water. If this be written with and the
paper held to the fire, the writing becomes green, unless the cobalt
should be quite pure, in which case it will be blue. The addition of a
little iron nitrate will then impart the property of becoming green. It
is used in chemical landscapes for the foliage.
10. Put in a vial ½ oz. of distilled water, 1 drm. of potassium
bromide and 1 drm. of pure copper sulphate. The solution is nearly
colorless, but becomes brown when heated.
11. Nickel nitrate and nickel chloride in weak solution form an
invisible ink, which becomes green by heating when the salt contains
traces of cobalt, which usually is the case; when pure, it becomes
yellow.
12. When the solution of acetate of protoxide of cobalt contains
nickel or iron, the writing made by it will become green when
heated; when it is pure and free from these metals, it becomes blue.
13. Milk makes a good invisible ink, and buttermilk answers the
purpose better. It will not show if written with a clean new pen, and
ironing with a hot flat iron is the best way of showing it up. All
invisible inks will show on glazed paper; therefore unglazed paper
should be used.
14. Burn flax so that it may be rather smoldered than burned to
ashes, then grind it with a muller on a stone, putting a little alcohol
to it, then mix it with a little gum water, and what you write, though
it seem clear, may be rubbed or washed out.
15. Boil cobalt oxide in acetic acid. If a little common salt be
added, the writing becomes green when heated, but with potassium
nitrate it becomes a pale rose color.
16. A weak solution of mercury nitrate becomes black by heat.

Inks that Appear under the Influence of Light.

17. Gold chloride serves for forming characters that appear only as
long as the paper is exposed to daylight, say for an hour at least.
18. Write with a solution made by dissolving one part of silver
nitrate in 1,000 parts of distilled water. When submitted to daylight,
the writing appears of a slate color or tawny brown.

Inks Appearing through Reagents.

19. If writing be done with a solution of lead acetate in distilled
water, the characters will appear in black upon passing a solution of
an alkaline sulphide over the paper.
20. Characters written with a very weak solution of gold chloride
will become dark brown upon passing a solution of tin perchloride
over them.
21. Characters written with a solution of gallic acid in water will
become black through a solution of iron sulphate and brown through
the alkalies.
22. Upon writing on paper that contains but little sizing with a very
clear solution of starch, and submitting the dry characters to the
vapor of iodine, or passing over them a weak solution of potassium
iodide, the writing becomes blue, and disappears under the action of
a solution of sodium hyposulphite in the proportions of 1 to 1,000.
23. Characters written with a 10 per cent. solution of nitrate of
protoxide of mercury become black when the paper is moistened
with liquid ammonia, and gray through heat.
24. Characters written with a weak solution of the soluble
platinum or iridium chloride become black when the paper is
submitted to mercurial vapor. This ink may be used for marking
linen. It is indelible.
25. C. Widemann communicates a new method of making an
invisible ink to Die Natur. To make the writing or the drawing appear
which has been made upon paper with the ink, it is sufficient to dip
it into water. On drying, the traces disappear again, and reappear by
each succeeding immersion. The ink is made by intimately mixing
linseed oil, 1 part; water of ammonia, 20 parts; water, 100 parts.
The mixture must be agitated each time before the pen is dipped
into it, as a little of the oil may separate and float on top, which
would, of course, leave an oily stain upon the paper.
26. Write with a solution of potassium ferro-cyanide, develop by
pressing over the dry, invisible characters a piece of blotting paper
moistened with a solution of copper sulphate or of iron sulphate.
27. Write with pure dilute tincture of iron; develop with a blotter
moistened with strong tea.
28. Writing with potassium iodide and starch becomes blue by the
least trace of acid vapors in the atmosphere or by the presence of
ozone. To make it, boil starch, and add a small quantity of potassium
iodide in solution.
29. Copper sulphate in very dilute solution will produce an invisible
writing, which will turn light blue by vapors of ammonia.
30. Soluble compounds of antimony will become red by hydrogen
sulphide vapor.
31. Soluble compounds of arsenic and of tin peroxide will become
yellow by the same vapor.
32. An acid solution of iron chloride is diluted till the writing is
invisible when dry. This writing has the remarkable property of
becoming red by sulphocyanide vapors (arising from the action of
sulphuric acid on potassium sulphocyanide in a long necked flask),
and it disappears by ammonia, and may alternately be made to
appear and disappear by these two vapors.
33. Writing executed with rice water is visible when dry, but the
characters become blue by the application of iodine. This ink was
much employed during the Indian mutiny.
34. Write with a solution of paraffin in benzol. When the solvent
has evaporated, the paraffin is invisible, but becomes visible on
being dusted with lampblack or powdered graphite, or smoking over
a candle flame.
35. To Write Black Characters with Water.—Mix 10 parts nutgalls,
2½ parts calcined iron sulphate. Dry thoroughly, and reduce to fine
powder. Rub this powder over the surface of the paper, and force
into the pores by powerful pressure, brush off the loose powder. A
pen dipped in water will write black on paper thus treated.
36. To Write Blue Characters with Water.—Mix iron sesquisulphate
and potassium ferrocyanide. Prepare the paper in the same manner
as for writing black characters with water. Write with water, and the
characters will appear blue.
37. To Produce Brown Writing with Water.—Mix copper sulphate
and potassium ferrocyanide. Prepare the paper in the same manner
as before. The characters written with water will be reddish brown.
Here is another trick calling for the use of sympathetic ink. A
medium suggests a number of questions to write on a paper, one of
which you select and write on a slip of paper furnished by the
medium. Writing is done with pen and ink. You are requested to dry
it with a blotter, and not to remove the blotter for a time, the
medium says, so as to keep the paper in the dark, thus giving the
“spirits” better conditions under which to work. After a while the
blotter is removed, and an answer to the question is found on the
same paper. The questions suggested were all of such a character
that one answer would nearly do for any one. The paper the
question was written on had this answer written with invisible ink
brought out by a reagent on the blotter, with which it was saturated,
and thus another mystery is easily dispelled.
We will now take up a few slate tests, in which the slates are
brought or furnished by the spectator or investigator. The tests in
which the slates are brought by skeptics and tied and sealed by
them, and still writing is obtained upon them, are the ones that are
the most convincing and most talked about, and they are offered to
the unbeliever as proof absolute of spirit power.

Fig. 6.—Writing on the Slate with the Pencil Thimble.

First we will begin with the single slate which has just been
handed to the medium, after being thoroughly cleaned by the
person bringing it. The skeptic holds one end of the slate in one
hand and the medium the opposite end in one of his hands, and
both persons clasp their disengaged hands. In a short time the slate
is turned over and a few words written in a scrawling style are
found. I must acknowledge that when I first witnessed this test it
somewhat staggered me, but afterward, on seeing it the second
time, I was enabled to fathom its mystery. It is patterned somewhat
after the style claimed to have been used by Slade, wherein he used
a piece of slate pencil fastened to a thimble, and with apparatus
attached to his forefinger of the same hand holding the slate he did
the writing. The thimble (Fig. 6) was fastened to an elastic which
pulled the thimble out of sight up the sleeve or under the coat when
it was done with. But it always required a little scheming and
maneuvering both to use and conceal the device and get rid of it,
and there was always the fear of being detected with this bit of
machinery about the person; so someone of an ingenious turn of
mind hit upon another method. There are some slate pencils made
the same as lead pencils, that is, a very small piece of slate pencil,
about the size of a match, is enclosed in the wood after the manner
of lead pencils. A tiny piece of this pencil is placed at the tip of the
forefinger and over it is placed a piece of flesh-colored court plaster
well fastened to the finger (Fig. 7) and well blended in with aniline
dye with the finger, so both are exactly the same color. After
everything becomes dry and hard a little hole is made in the court
plaster, so as to allow the point of the piece of pencil to come
through enough to mark on the slate. The finger thus prepared is
what does the writing. The message or name must be written
backward, so that when the slate is reversed it will appear in its
correct position. To learn to do this quickly, stand in front of a
looking-glass with the slate in your hand and watch your writing in
the glass as you go along. You do not need to hold the slate
underneath the table in this test; hold it in the air with a
handkerchief over it, so as to disguise the movement of the finger.
The message must necessarily be short, on account of the radius
through which the medium’s finger can travel.
 Fig. 7.—The Prepared Finger.

We now come to another method of using the single slate. The

medium takes the slate and places it on the table and requests the
spectator to write a question on a piece of paper. He, the medium,
gains knowledge of the contents of the paper in various ways; one is
by using a pad of paper which contains underneath the second or
third layer of paper a carbon sheet made of wax and lampblack.
Whatever is written on the first sheet of paper will be transferred or
copied by means of the carbon paper to the sheet underneath it.
Another way is by requesting a person to fold the paper and hold it
against his head, and, under the pretense of showing the person
how to hold it, exchange it for a paper of his own folded in like
manner. This exchanged paper is then opened and read by the
medium while his hand is below the level of the table top, and while
he is holding a conversation with the auditor. After it is read, the
paper is again folded and kept in the performer’s lap until needed.
As he now knows the contents of the paper, he can frame in his
mind a suitable answer. He remarks: “I will ask the spirits first to
give you a decided answer, through me as an independent trance
slate writing medium, whether they will answer your question during
this sitting.” So the medium takes a pencil in hand and writes on one
side of the slate, apparently under spirit control, and then on the
other side. The message is read, and it says the conditions are very
favorable, and no doubt, if the skeptic will place the utmost
confidence in the medium, there will be satisfactory results. After the
slate has been shown with both sides covered with writing, it is
thoroughly cleaned and placed on the table. The medium now picks
up the original paper from his lap and asks the person to give him
the paper he is holding. This the medium apparently places under
the slate; however, he really holds this one back and introduces the
one he has had in his hand, which is the one originally written upon.
He has now his own paper in his hand, and the one with the
question is under the slate. On the slate being turned over in a short
time, it is covered with writing, forming a sensible reply to the
question on the paper, which is now opened and read to compare it
with the answer. All that remains to be explained is how the writing
on the slate appeared there. The false flap is again used, but in a
directly opposite manner to which it has been employed heretofore.
One side of this flap is covered with a portion of the writing that the
medium first wrote under spirit control. Let us say the first half
supposed to have been written on the one side of the slate, and
which he afterward reads off in connection with that written on the
last or second side of the slate. What he really wrote on the first half
of the slate was a correct answer to the question, and after he turns
the slate over to write on the opposite side he slips the false flap
over the answer on the slate. Of course it is what is on this false flap
and on the other side of the slate that the spectator really reads,
and when the slate is cleaned it is this flap and the opposite side of
the slate. The writing, covered by the flap, which is the answer to
the question, is never seen or touched until after the flap is allowed
to drop into the medium’s lap. The slate can be examined; and, of
course, no trickery can be found in connection with it. The method
described above, in the hands of a calm and cool person, is a
convincing one, and never fails to satisfy the most exacting of
skeptics.
I wish to remark that, if any person tells you he took two slates of
his own to a medium, thoroughly well tied or sealed, and that the
slates never left his (the skeptic’s) hands, and that there was writing
obtained upon the interior surface of the slates under those
conditions, he was sadly mistaken, and has failed to keep track of
everything that actually took place at the time of the sitting.
Suppose two slates tied together are brought to the medium. Both