STEVE TOMASULA

December 2, 2004

Steve Tomasula's short fiction has appeared widely and most recently in McSweeney's, Fiction International, and The Iowa Review where he received the Iowa Prize for the most distinguished work published in any genre. His essays on body art and culture appear in Leonardo (M.I.T. Press) and other magazines both here and in Europe. He is the author of the novels IN & OZ (Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2003) and VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Station Hill, 2003/ University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Introduction

The dedication of Edwin Abbot’s 1884 science-fiction allegory Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions seems to begin auspiciously: "To The Inhabitants of SPACE IN GENERAL And H. C. IN PARTICULAR (he writes) This Work is Dedicated By a Humble Native of Flatland In the Hope that Even as he was Initiated into the Mysteries Of THREE Dimensions Having been previously conversant With ONLY TWO So the Citizens of that Celestial Region May aspire yet higher and higher To the Secrets of FOUR FIVE OR EVEN SIX Dimensions Thereby contributing To the Enlargement of THE IMAGINATION And the possible Development Of that most rare and excellent Gift of MODESTY Among the Superior Races Of SOLID HUMANITY." Clearly in 1884, Abbot was hopeful about the ways we might begin to explore a chunkier (multi-dimensional) universe, in contrast to the planar "flatland" he populated with characters such as polygon armies, priestly circles, and of course, a mathematician square who gets in trouble with the authorities for scandalously proposing that a 3rd dimension might exist. And yet times haven’t changed all that much it seems. If we reexamine the "flatland" in which we find ourselves today—how its armies, priests, and scientists continue to relate to one another—we might find that we’re still fighting it seems over space.

In fact, as Tomasula notes, if modernism can be characterized by its efforts to control space—in particularly the space of the body— postmodernism might be said to rearrange it. And in his novel Vas: an Opera in Flatland—a looking glass version of Abbot’s text (complete with musical scores, anatomical illustrations, and science experiments)—Tomasula has, by virtue of his elegant staging of text and image on every page, presented us with a new flatland characterized by a culture which rejects nuances, elegant subtleties, and the troubling distinctions about who and what we are, where we’ve come from, and what we might evolve into (a culture, one might say, that is startlingly reminiscent of our own), which puts his protagonist Square in a quandary over whether or not (aha! the plot) he ought to curtail his own reproductive possibilities and get a vasectomy.

In this equation, language literally matters: has matter. It is both "the material and the message"—the genetic code that articulates the body, inasmuch as our thoughts. After all, we inherit our bodies just like ideas, "our pedigree etymologies." And, these days, with the advancement of genetic manipulation and cloning, we can now imagine rewriting our bodies it seems in ever more complicated ways. "How odd to realize that your mother-in-law is a cyborg," his protagonist Square wonders after a surgeon installs a "synthetic port" for blood transfusions on her shoulder, nostalgically missing his own "old body," the one he still has but which he suddenly realizes has become outdated, an older model that soon may not be recognized.

Vas, it might said, is not just an opera—it’s also a meditation on a very old question of Being. As Emerson reminds us, "Every word once was an animal." Tomasula chimes in: Then what kind of word animal is DNA?