The Hybrid and the Helix: A Journey into the Body/Text of VAS

Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell, VAS: An Opera in Flatland. University of Chicago Press, 2002. Paper, 367 pp., $18.

Review by Emily Pérez

Bound in a cover made to look like human flesh with branching veins beneath its surface, VAS: An Opera in Flatland, a collaboration by Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell, visually conflates the body with text at the moment of first encounter. Though called "a novel" on the front cover and "fiction/design" on the back, the book interweaves myriad forms: novel, short story, poetry, comic book, history, science, reference, libretto, musical score, epigraph, science fiction, meta-text, and genetic code. From the copyright page inward, the book plays with form, slowly introducing different formal experiments charged with both visual and textual meaning. In this way, VAS successfully teaches its readers to understand it, so that when the book reaches a chaotic information climax, the reader is prepared to absorb the polyphony, yet certain that it will yield more on a subsequent read. VAS declares itself an opera, and its disparate parts are like players on a stage, soliloquizing, harmonizing, and clashing to the point of obfuscation. Together they investigate anxieties of reproduction and manipulation, all along keeping the question of how a text is like a human body at the forefront. The result is a project so stunningly ambitious its occasional shortcomings are easily forgiven, and the only true disappointment is that it has to end.

To oversimplify, VAS is the story of Circle and Square, a married couple with fertility problems. After a miscarriage, a birth via C-section of their child Oval, and an abortion, Circle tires of sex's strain on her body. She asks that Square get a vasectomy. "She knew what he was thinking, of course. And the contraction of corrugator muscles that furrowed her brow said what she was thinking: that it was 'His Turn.'" VAS is born from Square's meditation on this upcoming manipulation of his body, but it often slips out of his point of view into an unmoored omniscience. Caveat lector: those looking for a novel's development of plot and character will be frustrated. As their names indicate, Circle and Square are more emblematic than realistic, and their story is merely a springboard for vast, yet fascinating, digressions.

VAS artfully connects the body to the text—through its flesh and blood cover, its conflation of the letters of the genetic code that comprise the body, GATC, with the letters that comprise the text, and through its homage to Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 science fiction text Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, in which characters are shapes and exist in the two dimensional space on the page. As such, VAS explores issues of editing and manipulation of text as versions of editing and manipulation of the body. In brilliant juxtaposition, pull-out charts of genealogies exist alongside pull-out charts of etymologies, and human evolution is held next to linguistic evolution. Fittingly, Square is a writer, making both of these concerns primary.

But VAS does not stop at the conflation of text and body. The book investigates the history of eugenics and forced sterilizations in the US and Europe, comparing them to the genetic boutiques of the near future. It questions the difference between genetic variation and genetic mutation through juxtapositions of facts about mollusks and men. With both humor and gravitas it examines the gender politics of reproduction. In epigraphs quoting individuals and institutions from Hitler to Churchill, MENSA to the California State Commission on Sterilization of People with Mental Disabilities, it chronicles the desired "purification" of society through sterilization of the "unfit." And by cataloguing hormonal responses and muscular movements during interactions between Circle and Square "…her muscles contracted, fists clenching, her abdomen contracting to protect inner organs…" the book ultimately questions where the body as machine ends, and where the body as inimitable begins. Certainly other texts have asked these questions, but the formal inventiveness of VAS confronts the reader as if for the first time.

VAS's broad scope and surprising juxtapositions are both its strength and weakness. It educates and challenges a reader both with its content and its form. However, the downside to covering such a broad spectrum of issues is that VAS cannot hold them all on the page at once. For example, after sixty pages on the death of languages, "almost 300 a year," the theme is dropped for good. And occasionally VAS expresses doubt that its reader has kept up with the point and it resorts to hitting her over the head. For example, as part of its comparison of mollusks and man it spells out, "the difference being that differences in mollusks were seen as variation not deformity." And in tiny print during the collision of forms at the climax of the book it explains, "Anyone who thinks this is about the Nazis or other uncommon situations is missing the point." However, these instances are rare, and it may be comforting to some readers to have a few moments of absolute stability.

Readers of VAS must enjoy puzzling through the marriage of form and function, being presented with information but not its interpretation. As in an opera its arias are played out once in great depth, while its motifs surface and resurface. At times, its changes feel abrupt. But mostly, its music is so exquisitely rendered and provocative that you wish to hear it played again.

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Emily Pérez is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at the University of Houston. She received her BA in English with an emphasis in creative writing at Stanford University. Her poetry is forthcoming in the Kennesaw Review, Touchstone, and Many Mountains Moving.