1 Introduction

In understanding seriality today, we might draw closely upon Josiah Royce’s definition of “a series”. In an essay published in 1913, called “Principles of Logic”, the objective idealist and pragmatist Royce defined a series as “Any row, array, rank, order of precedence, numerical or quantitative set of values, any straight line, any geometrical figure employing straight lines, and yes, all space and all time” (1913: 111). We might find a more recent, less encompassing definition of a series more productive. In Briony Fer’s view, for instance, a series consists “of a number of connected elements with a common strand linking them together, often repetitively, often in succession [. . . but which] rarely exist singly and are usually mutually interwoven” (2004: 3). We might, otherwise, subscribe to the simple-yet-complex Deleuzian notion, according to which seriality rests on repetition with difference, involving innovation, process, and practice.^[1] In any case, what these perspectives – old or new, logical, philosophical, or literary – seem to have in common is that seriality can be both an intrinsic logic of a text, an object, a quality, or a condition and the methodology by which said logic is enacted before it reaches the audiences (be they viewers, listeners, readers, or all at once).

Reliant on an ordering obsession that both interrogates old and emerging power structures and reenacts the chaos of late modernity, we live in an age that celebrates having roots (rhizomatic and untidy as they are) in a serial “order”. Behind this obsession with order-making lies a methodology that is described, rather accurately, by a serial “attitude” (Bochner 1967: 22). Underwriting all series and all forms of seriality, ‘the serial attitude’ is often found distributed across several objects, texts, or orders. As methodology, the serial attitude is central to the way machine guns orchestrate genocide; it is key to the ways gentrification schemes ‘upcycle’ and uproot; and it defines the very manner in which erasure poetics layers texts, images, and soundscapes on top of one another. The serial attitude (including narrative, numerical, grammatical, organizational, and compositional attitudes [Bochner 1967: 22–25]) features both intrinsic logics and extrinsic manifestations and functions – together authorizing repetitions, marking cuts and continuities, pacing intervals, and eventually determining the nature of differences. Consequent to this, the serial attitude can help unpack modes of production and reception that put on display processes of repetition and variation. Indeed, if we consider all instances and practices of repetition with difference as serial, then the serial attitude becomes spacious enough to encompass culture in general, thus turning seriality into an overarching, possibly ubiquitous or universal, quality of all cultural practice. To wonder, together with Frank Kelleter: “What is culture if not a realm of repetition and variation?” (2017: 7). Moreover, the serial attitude can be a productive tool in explaining the episodic, fragmented, or otherwise lengthened nature of media and art (series, sequels, and franchises) – with the caveat, of course that the existence of an attitude may or may not lead to the production of neat, unfragmented series. And above all, especially for the purposes of the present discussion, while unfolding across units and orders, the serial attitude presents itself as intrinsic to an individual work or a single object. In effect, as highly complex or poly-layered orders and objects (such as works of erasure that I study in the present article) suggest, serial attitudes of varying degrees and varieties can very well co-exist in one-and-the-same order or object, cooperating or clashing against each other.

2 Erasure and the Serial Attitude

An offspring of a resolute serial attitude to literary and artistic production, erasure is repetitive action that involves doctoring the original (the pre-text, [i. e., text-that-is-already-there]) through serial layering – where each layer is there exactly because, while in a close tactile relationship with the other textual (or visual) layers, it differs from the previous and the subsequent layers in the semantic labor it is meant to perform and also in the form it takes. And in many, if not all, works of erasure, this serial layering is a restorative act of overwriting upon the body of the original. In close conversation with such an understanding, this article presents a table-sharing experience between erasure and the Bochnerian serial attitude that is integral to erasure art and literature, launching an inquiry into the possible, perhaps peculiar, serial attitudes that works of erasure (art and literature) are founded on and the ways in which erasure runs on a particular draft of seriality as both logic and methodology. This inquiry proceeds as a probing of erasure as a meticulous (inter-)textual architecture both in one-and-the-same textual spaces as well as unfolding across (and creating a unifying, encasing time and space for) various editions and media in what I understand as ‘serial universes’. The two such universes I briefly explore in this article are A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel by Tom Philips and Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Pursued in experimental twentieth- and especially twenty-first-century writerly practices, erasure as an experimental, conceptual art-form has been frequently likened to pentimento and especially to palimpsest. It has also been dismissed as an example of writing sans originality, as text-generation despite and past the writer’s block, and as writerly labor sans integrity – an obsession with and yet a mockery of the idea of the ‘original’. Whether manifesting itself as black-out, white-out, or strike-through of the ‘pre-text’, and precisely because it bridges and separates an ‘original’ (however we may define and understand the original) to and from the subsequent texts (that is, editions or versions of the original) that are erased out of it by the same or subsequent authors, erasure has also always been a productive, albeit less obvious, textual exercise that is founded on a complexly multiplicative serial attitude: on the one hand, stands a subtractive serial attitude (i. e., taking out and away from the original), which, on the other hand, is also inevitably extractive (i. e., extracting fresh meanings, combinations, sounds and images out of the original). If erasure is informed by such a double-edged serial attitude, then, to study it necessitates a journey into the labyrinthine complexities of criticism toward a conceptual practice that is erected, evolved, and folded several times over onto itself. Adapting but also depending on this generative (because it is both subtractive and extractive) serial attitude, erasure others and yet holds ‘original’, first editions by turning them, right on the spot, into second or third editions – erasing but never fully scraping them.

3 The Serial Attitude and the Labor of “Loyal” Readership and “Layered” Authorship

Frank Kelleter centers the cluster of consumptive cultural practices (be it fiction or television) that qualify as seriality on audiences and their unique position at the “[r]epeated temporal overlap between ongoing publication and ongoing reception” (2017: 13). In effect, historically speaking, seriality has often been discussed in terms of compulsive repetitiveness and, subsequently, in terms of the “loyal readership” it demands as interlinked factors that keep seriality alive.^[6] In the present discussion on erasure and seriality, it is significant, I propose, to center seriality on the neighboring question of loyal authorship. An author, artist, or creator who visits the same “original” textual canvas again and again (even if in Goldfarb’s “wide margin” of the original) is nothing short of devoted. It may be a mischievous, even frivolous act they conduct (such as in Tom Phillips’ project in which he turns Victorian decorum on its head through his erasures), yet it remains loyal to the idea of the original and lives on never fully free from (in fact it is haunted by) it as an ever-present prototype they want to work on, with, and through. In a 2012 interview with Andrew David King for The Kenyon Review, Phillips maintained that A Humument is his way of “collaborating with the interesting dead” (King and Phillips 2012). Commenting on his act of incoherently, partially, but continually versioning/editioning A Human Document, he continued in the same interview, to explore his relationship to both A Human Document and W. H. Mallock: “I know I mangle him or misrepresent his thought, yet under his immaculate if starchy prose such things as these things do sometimes throb, it seems, to me, and I release them” (King and Phillips 2012). Mary Ann Caws terms this “extraordinary fidelity” (2001: 22). It is in fact evident that, at least by the time A Humument’s 2016 edition was published, Tom Phillips had eventually found a space in this work to acknowledge this loyal readerly and writerly relationship. The 2016 edition ends with “TO THE SOLE AND ONLY BEGETTER OF THIS VOLUME”, followed by three rivers that appear on top of a photo of Mallock’s grave, taken by Patrick Wildgust:

by whose/bones my bones/my best/perpetuate // your/grave/in/mine/fused. // page/for/page // (Phillips 2016 a: 367)

While A Humument does not always remain loyal (or at least respectful) to A Human Document, not only in terms of form and phraseology but also in the ways Phillips mocks Mallock’s person (a Roman Catholic who opposed socialism, promoted homophobia, and harbored anti-Jewish sentiments in writing and life) and his sense of decorum,^[7] loyal authorship suggests itself in Tree of Codes as stern, reverent, and commemorative. Foer’s project is at once an extension and juxtaposition of the notion of “loyal readership” (by Foer the reader of The Street of Crocodiles) with “loyal-therefore-also layered authorship” (by Foer the author of Tree of Codes). As Foer remarks himself on his dual, not entirely oppositional readerly-writerly bond with Bruno Schulz and the position he finds himself occupying between The Street of Crocodiles and Tree of Codes: “Every choice I made was dependent on a choice Schulz had made. [...] I’ve never read another book so intensely or so many times. I’ve never memorized so many phrases or, as the act of carving progressed, forgotten so many phrases” (Heller 2010). Considering this, upon opening Tree of Codes as a work that is in a deferential serial relationship to The Street of Crocodiles, one encounters a story that is intensely aware of its confoundingly serial, monumentalizing layeredness, the historical and textual persistence of The Street of Crocodiles, and the dizzying architecture of Tree of Codes. As Matt Rager posits, The Street of Crocodiles was a unique choice for Foer exactly because the short story collection

stages reading not as an unmediated portal to a narrative that transcends time and place, but rather as a complex convergence of the imagined world of the narrative, the author’s historical context, our present, and the unspooled history that lies between. It is this history – the unknown future of the author as he/she wrote, the unalterable past of readers – that cannot help but loom over any reading of Schulz’s work. (2012: 4)

It is therefore little surprise that no satisfactory summary of its storyline exists anywhere – for it is hardly possible to summarize Tree of Codes if one does not know where to start what to read and in which order; if one does not figure out first (and it is nigh impossible to do so) how to read what is on the page if what is on the page is not enough to read it; if one cannot escape the encroachment of the words that belong to the following pages which, in Tree of Codes, have turned into a series of haunting “nexts”. In Tree of Codes, reading and understanding a priori seems to be dependent on the inevitably, if not thoroughly legible, yet stubbornly present posteriori. In effect, similar to (but also slightly different from) A Humument, reading Tree of Codes presents us with a ‘perennial’ serial attitude, not only subtractive-extractive but also dizzyingly incremental and inexorably porous, where the words from various pages seem to be neighboring one another in a variety of at-times compromising, always imbricated positions, partly and inadvertently covering and revealing (at times even un-wording) one another.

Not entirely different in the manner in which it demands a loyal or at least patient reading from its audiences, A Humument commands a mode of reading that is always mixed with its doubles, i. e., spectating and speculating. It asks its readers to decide (and often fail to know) where to begin, how to move the eyes and in what direction all are transmogrified into puzzle-work. “Rivers” of words appear drooping downward on each page, and each river is surrounded by lush paint- or collage-work. And, even though called rivers, A Humument’s strings of words appear more as de-forestation or rude intrusions of textual shards (that are the original words by Mallock) into Phillips’ meticulous paint- and collage-work.^[8] Regardless of the edition one pages through, it is rather puzzling to determine where to fix one’s eyes; figure out the starting and the ending point of a textual river one can trace with the eye or the fingertip; or, to decide which river should be read before the next. To read A Humument is, in sum, an at once pleasurable and demanding form of readerly labor.

Similarly, in Tree of Codes, the act of reading each page unfolds, inevitably, as a speculative, fragile, labor in reading/spectating that both depends on the pages that follow and is disrupted by their very existence. Once you open the book, what you do turns out to be a form of inescapable, jumbled, cumbersome, spatially deepening “binge reading” where words from the following pages intrude, not only lengthening the text on the page one is “at”, but also spoiling the order and the meaning of the sentences and phrases on the page in question. In this book-length short story (or poem), the disrupted seriality of words on the page (what we otherwise take for granted in how written texts consist of strings of words, spaces, and punctuation marks) results not only in what Starre identifies as “an exercise in reduction” (2015: 246) but also, in my reading, as a lengthening and an act of deferral. And it is this simultaneous reduction and lengthening that calls for an affective, gasped, eye-straining reading mode during which one has to move the eyes, touch the book, and page through with extreme care as to where across or between the pages one’s palms and fingers lay.

Here is an example of this reading mode from the optically testing experience of trying to read page 27 of Tree of Codes:

the room grew enormous / filled with / whispers, / a conspiracy of / winking / eyes / opening up among the flowers on the wall / . (Foer 2010: 27)

The same page, if one looks through the cuttings, would read entirely differently:

Then / anger, choking / the room grew enormous / he would fall / into / , filled with / whispers / transformed / beyond / his thoughts / a conspiracy of / a storm of sobs / grown unfamiliar winking / He would /eyes / his breath and listen / opening up / among the flowers on the wall / . (Foer 2010: 27)

Each page delivers the same experience, which, as Rager argues, generates “a pathos that provokes rather than assuages” (2012: 3). And this might make us wonder, perhaps vainly, and together with ophthalmologists: “is reading bad for the eyes?”

4 Conclusion

“Serial engagement”, write Daniel Stein and Lisanna Wiele, “feeds on a tension between the new and the familiar, between reliability and surprise, or repetition and variation, imitation and innovation, in a narrative process that oscillates between a conservative and a progressive role” (2019: 4). Building on this generative understanding of seriality as the interdigitation of the new (or at least the promise of the new) and the familiar (or at least the ghost of it), or, what Frank Kelleter in “Five Ways of Looking” understands as the commerce between “the satisfaction of conclusion” and “the appeal of renewal” (2017: 9), I register the import of “serial engagement” on yet another level: that is, the notion of temporal (but also spatial) dispersal (of episodes, installments, sequences, editions) in commonly labeled serial forms against which stands erasure’s reliance on countering the temporal and the narrative lag that the serial form inheres through an attempt at the re-organization of the multitudinous recurrences through acts of “concurrence” and “collection”. Whereas seriality usually denotes proliferation and a sequential multitudinality of orders, narratives, or spaces, the serial attitude that erasure hinges on consists mostly of the immediate organization of the original and its copies as they are stacked next to, crosscut by, or else layered on top of one another in the same textual co-location – tactile, giving and receiving in unequal degrees. Works of erasure are serially peculiar and particularly concentrated in their seriality, therefore, as they are already collections with a temporal lag (between when the original first appeared and when its erasures were produced) but that present little spatial dispersal (as series usually do). In effect, more than multiplying in serial form, works of erasure contain seriality.

As I have argued in this article, while both A Humument and Tree of Codes are heavily indebted to a subtractive-extractive serial attitude that makes them (from their titles to their very last pages) textually possible, they are the outcome of bringing slightly different serial attitudes to reading the original. And in each case, erasure seems to be both serially underwritten throughout the layers of the texts of which they consist and, at the same time, anti-serial as it disrupts the taken-for-granted flow of texts, passages, sentences, lines, resulting instead (not only in ocular confusion, but also) in the creation of a gasping sonic landscape on the page where breaths are disrupted at the sight of each painted-over, wiped-out, or outright cut-out string of words. As I have further proposed, the commerce between erasure and the double subtractive-extractive serial attitude that I read into it requires probing one of the many neighbors of seriality, that is, layering and editioning, where “the original” is posited not only against its second, third, ... umpteenth edition but also against its various copies through acts of layering, an investigation that raises a number of further questions: Can erasure exist in the absence of a serial attitude? Are works of erasure pivotal, epicentric, or coaxial with the originals they rise from? What affective-textual bonds interlink but also sever the ties between “the original” and its editions? And, even though outside the scope of the present discussion, what are we to do with those aspects of erasure works of art and literature that shun or outright negate seriality?