Making Literature Now (Post*45) by Amy Hungerford

Author:Amy Hungerford [Hungerford, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2016-08-02T22:00:00+00:00

Figures 4.3 and 4.4 Stills from The Silent History’s trailer showing decaying warehouses and proliferating circles design. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–2013 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

Government power, then—the power to archive, and later in the story the power to make and enforce public health laws, the power that steps in where the market fails—remains the driver of The Silent History despite the silents’ alternative forms of culture making, and the novel imagines that state power as faceless. We do encounter the mayor of a small town in California, where the silent commune called Face to Face is located; we see him at first protecting and then sacrificing the commune to federal enforcers as public sentiment about silent people shifts across time. And we come to know some doctors who treat silents, particularly Dr. Theodore Greene, who pioneers the implantation device and is father to the silent Flora. We come to understand the device as a misguided product of his longing for connection with his daughter. What we don’t see is the political movement to mandate implants for silent children; we never know who advocated for this idea or why, or how its proponents persuaded the public to go along. We are left with the feeling that the law was inevitable, an expression of the double hegemony of language and the American “normal.” The mandatory implantation program is the dark complement to the regime of knowledge that the Archives represent, and the implantation program is itself implicitly represented as a collective initiative powered by a hive of persons even more anonymous, and less differentiated, than those responsible for the Archives. In other words, government steps in to reinforce culture structured by a shared language, acting as the regulating institution in a region where the market can’t function—because the silents are not effective consumers—and where money can’t be made.

Quinn and Horowitz together have created an institutional narrator that acts as the counterpart to this governmental function: the app’s algorithm, which parses and controls the information we read, which places the story on the map, organizes the narrative, and orients us to our physical and imaginative location within it. Like the archives within the novel, the app’s design is a faceless narrator, a narrator created not by that recognizable literary personage, an “author,” but by the quiet technical “developer” and the bureaucratic “editor”—the sort of actors who, as I argue throughout this book, remain like the silent culture-makers within the story, culturally invisible within the production networks of the contemporary novel.

• • •

Given the comprehensive institutional frame of the story itself, it comes as a surprise, in the third section of the front matter called “The Prologue,” to see a report from “Hugh Purcell, Executive Director, Washington, DC,” dated 2044, which departs strikingly from the institutional decorum of the other two segments of the novel’s framing introduction. The distinct voice of

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