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  • The Overtone over Robert Ashley's Opera Novel Quicksand
  • Sydney Boyd (bio)

Quicksand bewilders. Robert Ashley published it as an opera libretto "written in the form of a novel" in 2011,1 and it premiered in 2016 as an "opera-novel."2 Described by Ashley as "plot-driven," Quicksand follows an aging composer's last adventure as an undercover spy who helps overthrow a South Asian dictatorship with his unsuspecting wife and her yoga group in tow (8). The story, told erratically and inconsistently by its narrator, is muddled, and a larger ambiguity looms over the work, unsettling conceptions of whatever puzzling story its narrator is telling, which is, at its root: what is Quicksand? Simultaneously a novel and an opera, Quicksand has a plot, like all narratives, that undergirds a telling and produces the sense of a first-person narrator. At the same time, it has a score with libretto (musically speaking) in an opera where the role of narrator is performed. Because in performance there are several media operating simultaneously, contradictory temporalities wrap through the story. While multiple media operate in all opera performances, Quicksand uses conceptions of narrative to turn time distinctively into a [End Page 460] duelling mechanism between duration, or measured time, and metric experience, or the feeling of passing time. In Quicksand, the multiple experiences of temporalities accord with how one conceives of each contributing medium, making it impossible to comprehend the work as a whole and thus rendering it unintelligible. "I'm beginning to have fun," the narrator says to himself, "But something is wrong. It's supposed to happen and it hasn't happened" (33). Something does feel wrong, but only because the range of disparate temporalities that grounds Ashley's work is unfamiliar and uncharted.

As a novel, Quicksand confuses. When multiple temporalities are at work, the role of narrator organizes sequences of events, but in Quicksand, the narrator insists on deferral, making the story difficult to follow. The narrator repeatedly obfuscates and generally flummoxes conceptions of what happens and when: "Whatever is going to happen should happen pretty soon" (17); "I've forgotten how we started" (49); "Something is going on here. Or something just went on" (57). The narrator's corrections and interjections further blunt the anticipation of events that are "supposed" to happen—"Where was I? Oh yeah" (24); "The first time was earlier and we were in a different part of the country" (45). Without any sense of plot sequence, the story forgoes linearity to form strange new shapes as the reader, clinging to sequential veneers, tries to piece events together. Of course, many novels operate narratives without conventional linearity—such as Martin Amis's 1991 novel Time's Arrow, which tells its story in reverse chronology—but unlike Quicksand, those novels are not also and at once operas.

When Quicksand premiered as an opera, it became even more perplexing. Each performance element interfered to some degree with another—movement with plot,3 set with sound—so that without the vocabulary to conceive of an element as independent and part of a network of other elements simultaneously, the work seemed illegible. In the performance, the cast consisted of only two performers, Jurij Konjar and Maura Gahan, who followed choreographed movements but never spoke. The orchestral score, composed by Tom [End Page 461] Hamilton, comprises overtones and electronic sounds as well as a recording of Ashley reading the text verbatim from the novel that made Konjar and Gahan appear as the narrator's physical surrogates, although their actions often had little to do with what was read.4 One performer sat at a typewriter in some scenes, emulating both the narrator and Ashley, while the other stood behind them, unmoving with their arms wrapped around their neck. Other times, both crept beneath an expansive patchwork quilt (which also acted as a backdrop for most of the opera), appearing only as oblique cloth-covered shapes until one emerged alone, stood, and shook their body vigorously. A web of multicolored spotlights intersected around them in a haze that lit the set.

The bewilderment that is Quicksand registered in initial critical responses to the performance, which negotiated the proliferation of media...

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