The Strife Between Presence and Reading: Heidegger on Tools and Technology in Steve Tomsula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland

This thesis explores how to read the American experimental novel VAS: An Opera inFlatland, a collaboration between Steve Tomasula and graphic designer Stephen Farrell. VAS demonstrates how twenty-first-century tools and technology can construct a narrative that resembles the human experience shaped by contemporary tools and technology. VAS includes not only a conventional story line but also narrative elements outside the story line, such as collage material and a multimodality, all of which contribute to the novel’s emerging, posthuman narrative. The reading experience of the conventional novel is immersive; experiments with the novel disrupt the immersion of reading, and this disruption produces a presence: the reader becomes conscious of reading, of narrative structure, of the broken conventions, and even of the novel itself. Martin Heidegger’s analyses of tools and technology can elucidate how novels produce presence by breaking conventions, for conventions are like tools, and broken tools, such as a broken hammer, become present to the user that was a moment ago immersed in their use. The reading of VAS that results is two-fold: (1) a stylistic comparison of VAS and This Is Not a Novel by David Markson, two experimental novels that differ in the technology used and represented and, ultimately, the presence made, and (2) a reading of VAS that considers how the novel makes present its narrative dimensions, out of which emerges the novel’s narrative.