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2 / Laura Mullen’s Murmur: Crime Fiction, Cruel Optimism, and a Hybrid Poetics of Affect “I think that a thought is an old feeling, and a feeling is just a young thought. I don’t think they’re different . . . they’re the same, just at different stages . . . of course it’s going to be a subject in my work.” —laura mullen, interview, 2012 If Stein’s bloodless Blood on the Dining-Room Floor turns on the subversive potential but also the palpable absence of lesbian sexuality within patriarchal /capitalist systems of familial and economic control, Laura Mullen’s hybrid novel/poem Murmur (Futurepoem 2007), which nods frequently to Stein—perhaps most provocatively with her inclusion of Stein’s comment “There is no such thing as being good to your wife.”1 —floridly displays multiple images of the mutilated female body as evidence of the lasting impact of patriarchal values in a commodity culture. Even as both formally transgressive texts work against the scripted conventions of the traditional detective story with the aim of exposing the workings of power manifest in patriarchal culture’s most popular genre, the interventions are in a sense diametrically opposed: Stein’s post-Victorian text performs its work at the boundary separating scripted narrative convention from lived life, using the tropes of the gothic mystery together with the affective aura of tabloid gossip to massage an ultimately fetishized private secret, whereas Mullen’s postmodern work posits the schema of mass-market fiction as revelatory of the very structure of capitalist American culture, a culture within which there is constant consumer demand for female corpses. If for Stein the modernist, the protean popular murder genre serves to highlight an unspeakable—yet discoverable—private interior, for Mullen, who came into her own when theorization of postmodernism dominated the critical conversation surrounding literature and culture, mass-market/pulp fiction is legible in semiotic terms as a telling symptom of contemporary existence for the socially-marked subject. laura mullen’s murmur / 45 In a recent interview, Mullen distinguishes her view of hybrid poetics from the dominant lyric-meets-Language model that the avant-garde community historically has disavowed, saying that in her own work hybridity entails a kinetic mixing of high and low and visual and textual forms in a constant state of awareness surrounding the class implications of her art. Describing her childhood experience of being poor and on food stamps while visiting the home of her grandmother, a wealthy art collector and dealer, Mullen says that the point where poverty meets high art and visual culture informs the space in which she works, at the same time that she draws upon her rich experience of avid reading to “write into” other texts, including the popular and salacious genres of horror, mystery, and romance that she consumed as an adolescent. In the same interview, Mullen has said that “[t]he hybrid isn’t a movement for me: it’s a breakdown of boundaries between forms and genres, fact and fiction, criticism and creativity . . . and it’s physical.”2 In light of this complex of artistic influence, genre crossing, and subject position, one way of reading Mullen’s hybrid texts is as a set of reenactments of the physically embodied, marginal subject’s mediation by the discourses of high art, theory, and mass culture all at once, the gaps, disruptions, and lacunae pervading her hybrid texts marking transitional spaces in which the subject and reader share an affective experience of irresolvable tensions among discourses that historically have been considered in isolation. Mullen describes the mixing of forms within her work as the creation of opportunities for cultural critique, saying, “The thing about hybridity, about crossing the work with a low genre, is that it opened the lyric up to something that was not biographical , and the lens widens to include the cultural and historical.” For Mullen , it is in the crossing of genres—the emphasis being on the moment of encounter—that the form of the lyric is made public, even as her textual collisions make palpable a shared sensation of the subject’s hypermediation by competing discourses in charged environments that are at once linguistic and material, high and low. I develop in what follows a reading of the ways in which Murmur, the middle book of Mullen’s planned trilogy of pulp novel/poetic hybrids, produces a series of what Mullen herself has called “activated spaces,” moments of surprise and contingency that occur when a stock plot swerves...

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