Playing with Codes. Steve Tomasula's "Vas, an Opera in Flatland"

Steve Tomasula's Vas delivers an effective critique of humanism from the vantage point of literature by exposing the inconsistencies and assumptions that narratively restrictive definitions of humanity rely on. The main rhetorical strategy the novel employs is appropriative and deconstructive: it retrieves discourses and figurations generated by myths, historical records, statistics, genetic charts, and advertisements for transgenic manipulations, and then reactivates them, turning this material into a literary and artistic medium. The novel incorporates themes and structures from genetics and genomics and exposes their instrumental role in transgenic business as well as their impact on the redefinition of the body and the self. It does so in order to enlist readers in its larger political project aimed at rethinking the human beyond its humanist containment. In its attempt to bind technical innovations in artistic and communication media to the critique of the institution of art and literature, and in its tendency to extend such a critique to larger social practices, the novel self-consciously recuperates the critical impulse shared by all avant-garde aesthetics, regardless of the singularity of each project and of its specific targets and objects.1