Review of David Alworth, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form

Rachele Dini

Review of David Alworth, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form

Rachele Dini

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This is a draft of a review of David Alworth's 'Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (Princeton University Press 2016). The review will be published in June 2018 by the Journal of American Studies.

David Alworth, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016, £32.95/$39.50, pp. 224 [24 and 200]. ISBN: 9781400873807). What might the supermarket, the landfill, the highway, the ruin, and the insane asylum as they have been imagined by postwar American writers, visual artists, and theorists tell us about the relationship between literature and sociality, and about the ways in which these specific sites reconfigure social life? David Alworth’s Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form proposes exciting answers to this question. Through a series of interrelated readings (each thematically-themed chapter connects in myriad ways to the next), Alworth reveals the pullulating networks of human and nonhuman actors embedded in some of the most contentious sites of postwar western culture. A graduate of the University of Chicago who studied under “thing theorist” Bill Brown, Alworth is sophisticated for so young a scholar—and he sets out a highly ambitious project. For what he proposes in this scholarly debut is not a cultural history of American geography in postmodernity, a study of the encoding of spatial politics in American literature, or an outright critique of these places. Rather, this ‘experiment in literary criticism’ (as he calls it), departs from much of the scholarship to have emerged from the so-called thingly and spatial turns in literary studies to provocatively ask ‘how literature imagines sociality as such’ (22, emphasis added). ‘The critical gambit of Site Reading’, he states, ‘is to take [the] assemblage [of humans and nonhumans] as a primary unit of analysis and to examine how it manifests in and through a site that is especially important to a given story’ (18). Such a methodology: might offer a fresh way of seeing a cultural past, something like a new method of data visualization for literary and cultural historians. If how we visualise the past constitutes a way of knowing it, a lesson that is continually reinforced by scholars in the digital present, then site reading asks what happens when we look closely at sites, when we see them as both social and cultural actants (23). As the above description might suggest, Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory looms large throughout the book, providing a framework for Alworth to develop a new mode of reading that understands ‘sites as actants in two senses: as determinants of sociality that invite sustained attention from novelists and as material environments that give rise to constellations of cultural artefacts’ (20). One of the book’s many strengths is the narrative it weaves out of textual artefacts and theoretical texts that for all their affinities have never been read in tandem. The last chapter on asylums is particularly fascinating in this regard, revealing the fruitful resonances between Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952), his 1964 essay, ‘Harlem is Nowhere’ (in which Ellis delineated the LaFargue Psychiatric Clinic he helped establish in 1946 to both treat and provide refuge to African Americans suffering the psychological effects of segregation), and sociologist Erving Goffman’s 1961 book, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients. Alworth shows how the two figures’ thinking ‘converges at the asylum’, and he uses this overlap to ‘develop a new sense of Ellison’s sociological imagination’ (123) and its attentiveness to the ways in which spaces produce subjects (126). In a beautiful twist, Alworth moves from an examination of insane asylums to the asylum that Ellison’s narrator finds, at the end of The Invisible Man, in his underground room—a place that Alworth argues both isolates him and, through his theft of electricity, allows him to remain connected to others and thus to participate, however obliquely, in the Latourean social (148). Equally fascinating is Alworth’s juxtaposition, in Chapter Three, of Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays (1970) and her essays on driving with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). Here Alworth focuses on the role of nonhuman actors—the road and the car—in mediating homosociality (in Kerouac’s text) and in taking the place of a lover, friend, or interlocutor (in Didion’s). Much has been written of course on the phenomenology of driving, the inherent eroticism of automobility (what Cotten Seiler termed the apparatus of ‘commodities, bodies of knowledge, laws, techniques, institutions, environments, nodes of capital, sensibilities, and modes of perception’ that has coalesced around ‘the act of driving’1), and the figuration of the car crash as a perverse pleasure or affirmation of life. Alworth’s readings depart from these approaches however in their meticulous attention to the car as a vibrant actant. The car is at once a vessel for getting from A to B, a counter to the ‘etherealisation of America at the dawn of the computer age’ (88), an assemblage of metal parts, and a participant in a ‘redemptive relay between human and nonhuman’ (90) that offsets the alienation of 1960s LA. In turn, Alworth reveals the road ‘in the era of automobility’ to be ‘a movement of bodies and machines’, an ‘example of social interaction as an ever-shifting assemblage of humans and nonhumans, a network whose “flows of translation” are constantly remaking the site’ (95). The book’s other chapters are no less impressive. Chapter One, ‘Supermarket Sociology’, reads Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1986) as ‘a sociological endeavour in its own right, a profound attempt to explore the nature of sociality itself’ (27). The site of interaction between humans, commodities, disembodied voices emanating from electronic loudspeakers, and a pulsating, ever-present buzzing sound (27), DeLillo’s supermarket serves as a model of a new kind of sociality. Reading the DeLillo’s supermarket scenes alongside the famous cataloguing of groceries in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, the history of supermarket retailing and its debt to sociology, and, of course, the ideas of Latour, Alworth seeks to bring ‘otherwise concealed affiliations among literature, art, and mass culture into clear resolution’ (27). The readings of White Noise that follow are, in my opinion, among the best analyses of the novel to date, relating the DeLillean supermarket not only to the complex interplay of entertainment, performance, and mass consumption that make up the retail concept’s history, but to its relationship to the supermarket’s conceptualisation in visual art, which has itself (through Pop Art), fuelled its mythologisation. Alworth’s contention that the DeLillean supermarket reveals ‘the presence of what could be called a semiautonomous nonhuman sphere’ involving ‘actions that involve but do not exactly include human beings’ 1 Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), 5-6. Qtd. In Alworth, 74. (34) is compelling, as is his assertion that the text repeatedly ‘blur[s] the distinction between human and nonhuman by calling attention to their mutual entanglement’ (34). Chapter Two, ‘Dumps’, takes the reader from the space in which commodities are first showcased to the place where they go to die. In his analysis of the literary sociology of landfills, Alworth reads William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) as paradigmatic of Latourian ‘translation’—whereby subjects and objects ‘congeal into […] ontological hybrids that only Burroughs could have invented’ (53). The text itself appears to imitate the accretion and disintegration of landfill matter at the level of form, staging ‘several dramas of unformation, including that of the commodity becoming waste’ (61). Alworth’s reading of Burroughs’s frequent mention of used Kotex is particularly astute here (and indicative of his approach more generally), for he traces the connections between the branded product’s resonance as a symbol of a disquieting female corporeality, its status as a used commodity, and its significance within retail history (as one of the first self-service items). The bloody Kotex, he shows, expresses a fundamental fear that the disposable products produced by Kimberly-Clark (the manufacturer of Kotex), were ‘making America into a dump’ (61). It is at moments such as this that Alworth is at his best—and there are many of these. The standalone oddity in this chapter is his rather literal application of William Rathje and Cullen Murphy’s distinctions between different waste forms (‘slops’, ‘fines’, ‘rubbish’). At one point in fact he bases a reading of Burroughs’s description of ‘junk quarters’ on Rathje and Murphy’s definition of junk as ‘waste with the potential to be reclaimed’ (Alworth, 59)— a distinction that many a discards scholar would dispute. Not only does such a reading assume other forms of waste to not be reclaimable (which the rest of Alworth’s chapter in fact shows to be untrue). It also implies, or assumes, that Burroughs himself would have made this distinction between junk and other waste forms, a retroactive attribution that somewhat jars. This is, however, a minor detraction in what is otherwise a brilliant work of scholarship that covers impressive (physical and metaphorical) ground, and that is a genuine pleasure to read. The applications of the methodology Alworth proposes are many—and the book’s Afterword, which turns to the question of ‘non-sites’ such as the dystopian terrain of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), and to the ‘the increasingly complex challenges of collective life on a fragile site’ (156), is highly pertinent to current debates among scholars of ecocriticism. Site Reading is thus both a valuable contribution to the sociology of literature and to American studies and literary criticism more broadly. —Rachele Dini, Lecturer in English Literature, University of Roehampton (UK)

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