Chapter One An Embarkment on Image Culture ThroughNarrative in Egan’s Early Fictions
“My fiction does not include my life, and I don’t write memoir,” (Firger, 38) Egan onceclaimed in an interview. Though never admitted, Egan’s early fictions The Invisible Circus(1995) and Look at Me (2001) both draw a lot upon her early experience in San Francisco andher travels in Europe. Born in Chicago in 1962, Egan was raised in San Francisco in the1970s. It was a period that the Sixties counterculture movement in America and Europe hadjust ended and its leftovers were haunting many people.1When Egan was two years old, herparents got divorced. Her mother subsequently married the hotelier Bill Kimpton and theymoved to San Francisco when she was seven. Living in Pacific Heights, Egan attendedLowell High School in 1970s and did part time job at a Haight Street candy shop which wasrun by gay boys. She has a brother and a sister who is a U.S. attorney. Her grandfather was acommander in the Chicago police force who had been the bodyguard of President RonaldWilson Reagan when the latter visited Chicago. This family involvement in the field of lawmay help explain Egan’s penchant for an investigative style in her fiction and nonfiction andalso her interests in the mysterious things.Besides her family background, Egan’s early experiences also help us understand howshe developed into a writer. Her mother always read to her when she was a child. Her fatheralso plays an important role for her future career. She reveals that “my father also had a ritualof telling me a story at bedtime the one night each week I spent with him.” (Johnson, 18) Shebegan to read by herself at age four and held a strong passion for imaginary games of playingdifferent characters of the books she read and even recreated the plots. There were neithercontent to take nor characters given to the stories, did Egan fall into the habit of telling herfather what exactly she wanted to happen. That is, it was from her early age and earlyexperience that she learned to take charge of narrative and had a keen interest in narratingstories.
A Brief Review of the Early Fictions
Inspired and encouraged by the success of her short stories, Egan decided to revise the socalled “failed novel” she had begun while studying at Cambridge University. Originally titled“Inland Soul”, a phrase from the first line of Emily Dickinson’s poem “Exultation is Going”:“Exultation is going of an inland soul to sea...”, The Invisible Circus mainly portrays thepost-Boomer generation’s nostalgia for the 1960s they just missed out. Opening in 1978, itconcerns an eighteen-year-old girl Phoebe O’Connor, who has always been haunted by themysterious death of her hippie teenage sister Faith in Italy seven years ago. Newly graduatedfrom high school, Phoebe is restless at home in San Francisco after discovering her widowedmother is romantically involved with her boss. She is further horrified when her motherinsists that her father, a would-be painter whose day job was being an IBM executive, had notalent in art at all but only “invented that myth to comfort himself”. (IC, 92) With the help ofprecious postcards from Faith that she has preserved for years, Phoebe leaves San Franciscofor Europe, determined to retrace her sister’s journey and find out the truth of her sister’ssuicide.
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Chapter Two A Side View of Image Culture Through Narrativein The Keep
If Egan sets out to examine the impact of image culture on human identity in her earlyfictions The Invisible Circus and Look at Me, she comes to even greater realization of herphilosophical query on this issue in her 2006 fiction, The Keep, which is “the perfectantidote” to Look at Me. And, as evidenced by her new book, it is something that shecontinues to regard as a risk-taking endeavor. This book radically departs from the terrain ofEgan’s earlier fictions. The traditional Gothic genre, in its depiction of the fears, fantasies andtaboos of the Anglo-American culture, offers a critique of the capitalist society. For Egan,who views the exploration of genre as an integral part of her growth as a novelist, it is theperfect form of her experimentation.
A Brief Review of The Keep
Inspired by a trip she took to the castle of Godfrey de Bouillon, a leader of the FirstCrusade in Belgium, with her husband and their eight-week old son Emmanuel, Egan createsa fiction The Keep, a spooky Gothic-inspired castle fiction built from multiple levels ofstorytelling and fictionality. She states the genesis of the fiction in an interview:We drove to a ruin of a castle in Belgium, one that belonged to a leader of the First Crusade, and I hada gigantic, physical reaction to being there. It affected me in a deep way, although I was not sure whatto do with that excitement. I finally realized that the place made me feel a particular kind of nostalgia,with the moodiness of the setting and the imaginary things it made me think of — “The Fall of theHouse of Usher” and “The Turn of the Screw.” It made me want to live in the literary Gothiclandscape for a while. So I started with a castle, and out of that came the characters and the story.(Marshall,https://www.seatlepi.com/ae/books/article/A-castle-inspired-Egan-s-The-Keep-1216361.php)Initially she thought she might set the story of the book in the medieval period as most Gothicwriters did, but as a writer full of creativity and innovation, Egan wanted something cheesierthan that. So she eventually puts the Gothic genre in the modern world of telecommunicationand tries to explore the question of “how reality as a concept might have changed — or needsto change — in light of all the new states of being and new experiences that communicationstechnology has created.”(Reilly, 443)
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Gothic Narrative in The Keep
An enormous, decrepit heap somewhere in Eastern Europe is both the physical settingand the metaphorical heart of The Keep. With its underground passageways, silted-up pooland ancient torture chambers, the castle is an emblem of the shadowy realms in which pastand present mingle, and modern technology meets the ancient way of life. The Keep is one ofthe good examples to show the ways that the Gothic survives and evolves into our presenttime. In this book, Egan successfully and movingly works the theme of “renovation” onseveral aspects simultaneously.“Gothic” originally refers to the (pseudo)-medieval buildings in which many of thesestories take place. This extreme form of Romanticism was very popular in England andGermany. Gothic fiction, a genre that combines fiction, horror and Romanticism, is originallyattributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 fiction The Castle of Otranto,subtitled “A Gothic Story”, which contains almost all the elements that constitute the genre.Walpole’s fiction is imitated, not only in the eighteenth century and not only in the fictionform, but also has influenced the short story, poetry, film making and many other art formsthereafter. According to Walpole and other scholars, there are ten essential elements thatconstitute the Gothic genre, which generally consist of setting in a castle; an atmosphere ofmystery and suspense; an ancient prophecy; omens, portents, visions; supernatural orotherwise inexplicable events; high and even overwrought emotion; women in distress’women threatened by a powerful, impulsive, tyrannical male; the metonymy of gloom andhorror; the vocabulary of the Gothic and so on. (Harris, http: //www.virtualsalt.com/gothic.htm)
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Chapter Three A Deep Probe into Image Culture Through Narrative in A Visit Fromthe Goon Squad ....... 101
A Brief Review of Goon Squad.......... 101
Multi-lineared Polyphonic Narrative, Anachrony, Parody and Black Humor in Goon Squad... 109
Kaleidoscopic and Closely-Connected Characters in Goon Squad .......... 127
PowerPoint Narrative in Goon Squad ........... 135
Chapter Four A Direct Exploration of Image Culture Through Narrative in Black Box... 145
A Brief Review of Black Box ............. 145
Twitter as a New Media Narrative in Black Box ...... 148
Second-person Narrative in Black Box.......... 163
Chapter Four A Direct Exploration of Image Culture ThroughNarrative in Black Box
If The Invisible Circus begins to look at some of the issues around image culture, Look atMe explores image culture front and center, The Keep takes a side view of the image culture,Goon Squad probes into the issue of the image culture directly and thoroughly, then Egan’s2012’s fiction Black Box experiments the mew media narrative form by means of tweeter andthe second-person narrative.
A Brief Review of Black Box
First released in an unusual serialized format on the New Yorker’s Twitter account,Egan’s science fiction Black Box was published as a series of 606 tweets releases at the rate ofone tweet per minute for an hour between eight to nine p.m. EST (Eastern Standard Time) onnine consecutive evenings from May 24 to June 2, 2012. There are 140 words for each tweetand totally 8500 words. Because of the disjointed sentences, the story reads more like a prosepoem than a short story. You can read the story — tweet by tweet — below or head over toThe New Yorker for a more traditional reading experience.The story of Black Box is in the form of “mental dispatches” from a spy living in theMediterranean area (south of France) in the near future (perhaps in the 2030s). After trainedas a spy and being planted high-tech equipment in the body by the American NationalSecurity Department, a woman was sent to the Mediterranean area to steal highly secretinformation from some powerful men, who were thought to be terrorists to threaten theAmerican security. As she goes undercoverly among such suspected terrorists by deployingbadger game, she keeps a mental log of events in her body and her physical person is the “Black Box”.Though unnamed, the protagonist in the story can be inferred within the text as Lulu, acharacter in Goon Squad, where she appeared first as the nine-year-old daughter of thedisgraced Public Relations Executive Dolly and later as a student working for the recordproducer Bennie Salazar. Lulu’s date of birth can be calculated about year 2000, and BlackBox can be dated to the early 2030s. The particular character Lulu really interests Eganbecause in Goon Squad “she is introduced in a chapter that is not very naturalistic”. (Treisman,https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-jennifer-egan) In GoonSquad, Lulu is sort of an odd kid, who is very powerful and persuasive in her own way. Thenwe see when she is grown up she is still powerful and persuasive. Egan explains: “So, thequestion in my mind was: What would be an extreme future for her? What might happen toher? I found myself preoccupied with her and early on I had a sense of her...near theMediterranean, doing some sort of espionage.”(Ibid.) Based on the same character, therefore,Egan creates the science fiction Black Box. Because of its close connection with Goon Squad,Black Box can be read as an offcut and sequel from the book, or, given the earlier work’smimicry of the format of a rock album, it is as akin to an unreleased track from a studiosession.#p#分页标题#e#
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Conclusion
“America created the twentieth century,” Gertrude Stein wrote in The Autobiography ofAlice B. Toklas. “And since all the other countries are now either living or commencing to beliving a twentieth century life, America having begun the creation of the twentieth century inthe sixties of the nineteenth century is now the oldest country in the world.” (Stein, 96) WhatStein meant, quite reasonably, is that America is the oldest country in the world because it wasthe first country to be modern. It seems as if it was a long time ago that America, transitingfrom industrial society to consumer capitalism, lurched into the age of postmodernism. Thebrisk destruction of old ways and the rapid process of modernizing, not only in social sciencesbut also in every aspect of American society, has become such an accepted fact that it is easyto forget what a large-scale rearranging of the human lives the American have experienced.Jennifer Egan is among American generations of the 1960s who have witnessed theprocess of modernization and postmodernization. She belongs to the few writers who are ableto register incredulity and suspicion of this process. Yet she is such a refreshinglyunclassifiable writer. At first glance, it can be difficult to identify exactly what it is that Egan’sfiction brings to the postmodern table that we have not seen before, how she builds upon thetradition of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, as well as other authors regularly included inthe postmodern field. Her fiction has been critically overlooked for many years, but fewamong the contemporary American writers, such as Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, andDavid Foster Wallace in late period and so on, have more directly addressed the task ofresponding to postmodernism and postmodernity than she does. And yet, ironically, it may bethat the very directness of her engagement with postmodern themes has contributed to theoverlooking of her work. Creative and venturesome, Egan has taken different narrative approaches in each of her fictional works, and all her fictions are shaped by beautiful lyricism,precise psychology, uncanny insights into cultural trends, and keen satire on the society. Shehas attempted to ponder on the issues in and around image culture through various narrativestrategies in all her fictions.
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References (abbreviated)
