Nomadic Fiction

At first, the reader concludes that the nomadics most at stake in Michael Joyce's Was: annales nomadique/a novel of internet is the endlessly repeated trek by the reader from armchair to Google (or Babelfish). How else to figure out what the hell is going on? The cause of the expeditions will vary from reader to reader; for us, seeking lexical meaning, it was necessary to look up Bloemfontein, which turns out to be (perhaps you, a different reader embarking on a different trek, know this) the capital of Free State in South Africa; it is known as "the city of roses." That journey turns out to be productive for our meaning-making, since the bus that crashes there (of which more later) leaves a girl "no longer rose powdered in a satin lined box." Joyce has already established, in this echo chamber, some comfort with the region: "he mused, already feeling foolish, vaguely longing to see Frida who studied now in South Africa." In our case, we feel lucky to recall that Frida Kahlo was left in life-long pain by a bus crash, although not, apparently, this one. But tongues, places, clash: Teresa of Avila meets PFC Angela Louise Paolucci; "'the scum cunt of the world'" meets "è il gremco della terra" meets "wabi, tabi, shibui, koko, yugen and seijaku." Nomads of information, we play Joyce's game—do the (re)search—because we are determined to find resolution in a text that works so hard to convince us that there is no coherence: "it doesn't add up (do not get it)." (N.b.: Is that last an imperative?)

But finally, this work is more (much) than an aggregate of our journeys to the Web. Joyce keeps us at a distance from story, yet we are seduced by an aesthetic that tethers us to recurrent images, anchors that connect us from one nonsequitive mini-narrative-poem to the next. For example, we want the bus on page twenty-eight to be the same as seventeen-year-old sweetJennie's bus revisited on page one hundred and fifteen. On the other hand, perhaps this fateful motorcoach earlier harbored an indecisive mercenary, who, in his neurosis, boards and abandons a series of buses. Are these instances of plummeting buses referencing the same catastrophe, or are these bus accidents disparate fictional (or nonfictional) tragedies that merely happened to happen?

The earlier bus skids "off the road margin on a high pass, tumbling end on end, et in saecula saeculorum (no longer operant)," and provides little hint of who rides the bus, who survives the accident, who does not (the bus accident described later in the text offers significantly more details). Upon translating the Latin (capital-C Catholic) saecula saeculorum as forever and ever, we want this to explain the replication of this image later in the novel. Just as the bus appears to "[tumble] end on end" forever and ever, so our desire for semantic stability persists while the text tumbles, and we return to this eternal image of a plummeting bus not as a second occurrence, but as a re-emergence of a recognizable component of the larger problem of the novel. We begin to latch onto something—plot, theme, reference—until a new scene emerges, and we start the journey again. As Dave Ciccoricco writes in his review, "[I]t seems that Was is a work that aspires to bring us to all the places the WWW cannot, yet with all the same speed, discontinuity, and happenstance."

This glorious mash-up of references, found texts, allusions, mixed voices—plus characters, situations, travels, and travails—operate, as Hélène Cixous says about Joyce's Moral Tales and Meditations (2001), "[a]s if writing were recording the sparks that fly as different states of consciousness strike against each other. And the reading in turn is set ablaze." Our vast networks of information and exchange constitute the flint against which these consciousnesses strike. In Joyce's world, we may comprehend...