Reading the Writing "I": Intertextual Subjectivity and Textual Intersubjectivity in Laura Moriarty's Ultravioleta

Abstract

Ultravioleta names two complex objects made of paper. One is an impossible vessel composed of texts that both facilitate and undermine the voyage/narrative it attempts. The other is the novel that envisions and only partially contains that ship and other open structures in the universe that unfolds across its pages. The novel navigates multiple discursive phase spaces between its signifying principles and the categories of its alignments. This essay will consider three of those affiliations: science fiction, a genre; atonalism, a speculative poetics; and New Narrative, a literary movement beginning in the late 1970s that generated experiments subsequently counter-canonized into a variably accessible legacy (Bellamy and Killian ii–vii). This reading of the novel will concern itself with the ways in which the subject is affected by each of these three alignments as well as Moriarty’s deployment of intertextuality. It is at once ironic and fitting that New Narrative, a movement that insisted on story, has become a story immensely worth revisiting. Robert Glück describes the beginnings of New Narrative in terms of his friendship with Bruce Boone, their response to the Language Poets, and the writing that emerged from their workshops (“Long Note” 13–15). Glück emphasizes that, in spite of the tensions, the New Narrative writers were “fellow travelers of Language poetry,” as well as of “the innovative feminist poetry of that time,” and that they “are still fellow travelers of the po-