VAS: An Opera in Flatland is a novel by the American author Steve Tomasula with design by Stephen Farrell. It was first published in hardback in 2002, and reissued in paperback in 2004. A special “Cyborg” edition, with an audio CD was published in 2009. The novel adapts several characters and settings from Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, first published in 1884.Gibbons, Alison. (2012). Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis. pp. 86-87. . Set at the start of the 21st century when technologies like cloning, transplants, and other body modifications were becoming common, VAS employs a wide range of historical representations of the body from family trees and eugenic charts to visual representations of genetic sequencing.Pérez, Emily. (2008). Between the Looking Glasses: Self-Representation and the Represented Self. American Letters & Commentary, (19), 136–141. Bound in a cover that resembles human skin, the novel is printed in two colors, one that resembles flesh and one that resembles blood.Vanderborg, Susan. (2008). “Of ‘men and mutations’: The Art of Reproductions in Flatland’‘. The Journal of Artists’ Books, 24 (Fall), 4–11. It explores how definitions of the body and the self both emerge from differing narratives, and tells the story of people searching for a sense of identity in a dawning post-biological future.Sammarcelli, Françoise (2015). ‘‘Encoding the Body, Questioning Legacy: Reflections on Intersemiotic Experiments in Steve Tomasula’s ‘‘VAS: An Opera in Flatland.’‘ In Banash, David (ed.). Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction. (p. 82-83). Bloomsbury. . doi: https://doi.org/doi:10.5040/9781501304811.ch-004
Main characters Square New arrival to Flatland, and househusband to Circle who has begun a new job. Square is writing a novel, which may be the novel that the reader is reading.
Circle Square’s lawyer spouse and breadwinner of the family. She has already undergone at least one abortion and another miscarriage.
Oval The daughter of Square and Circle.
Mother Circle’s mother, mother-in-law to Square. Unaware of the complications Circle had while conceiving, she herself has a completely natural body until a port is installed in her shoulder, allowing her to be connected to IV machines.
Plot The main plot of VAS: An Opera in Flatland involves the domestic tensions that arise within the family as the character Square contemplates a request by his spouse, Circle, to undergo a medical procedure that will render him sterile.Kley, Antje (2019). "US Print Culture, Literary Narrative, and Slow Reading in the Age of Big Data: Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland. "In Schaefer, Heike; Starre, Alexander (eds.). The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor. Palgrave Macmillan. (p. 55). . Like Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Square, Circle, and their daughter Oval, live in a world that is populated by two-dimensional beings, but who have many of the day-to-day concerns of contemporary life, here, those of present-day Midwestern America where the novel is set (the Flatland of the title, which also refers to the flat pages of the book in which the characters reside).Banash, David (2022). ‘‘Tomasula, Steve”. The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980–2020, Volume 2 (223), 2. In this sense, the plot is a domestic drama in which the characters contend with the realities of everyday life: love, marriage, work, the politics of the day, the education of their daughter Oval, caring for Circle’s aging mother, and other common concerns.Pham-Thanh, Gilbert (2020) “The Importance of Being Earnest in Flatland.” In Tabbi, J. (ed.). Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates from Electronic Book Review. New York: Bloomsbury. (pp. 203-206). . During a previous pregnancy, an exam required for insurance purposes revealed that Circle may be carrying a fetus with a possible birth defect. On the basis of this information, Circle opted to terminate the pregnancy. Neither Square nor Circle regrets the decision, but neither wants to make a choice like that again. They also dread having to make similar weighty decisions about Circle’s aging mother.Kley, Antje (2019). “US Print Culture, Literary Narrative, and Slow Reading in the Age of Big Data: Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland.” In Schaefer, Heike; Starre, Alexander (eds.). The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor. Palgrave Macmillan. (p. 58). . As the novel unfolds, Circle puts increasing pressure on Square to undergo a vasectomy. Simultaneously, her mother encourages both of them to go to the opera, convinced as she is that the romance of the opera will help them conceive a second child to be a brother or sister to Oval.Sammarcelli, Françoise (2015). “Encoding the Body, Questioning Legacy: Reflections on Intersemiotic Experiments in Steve Tomasula’s ‘’VAS: An Opera in Flatland’’.” In Banash, David (ed.). Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction. (p. 77). Bloomsbury. . doi: https://doi.org/doi:10.5040/9781501304811.ch-004
A number of subplots intertwine with this main action, especially historical trends and cultural developments that have led to the present of the novel. These include: the evolution of biological forces; the history of genetic policing from the early days of eugenics to contemporary genetic counseling; the close tracking between family trees and the etymologies of family names; the history of life science’s understanding of the body and its disconnect with the language used to describe it.Kley, Antje (2019). “US Print Culture, Literary Narrative, and Slow Reading in the Age of Big Data: Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland." In Schaefer, Heike; Starre, Alexander (eds.). The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor. Palgrave Macmillan. (pp. 55-56). . As Square and Circle grapple with decisions that people in the past did not have to confront, the body emerges as the meeting place of culture and nature. The human body is increasingly seen as both material and information against a background of the history of body manipulation up to the present of genetically engineered plants and animals.Banash, David, & Spain, Andrea (2015). "Composition, Emergence, Sensation: Science and New Media in the Novels of Steve Tomasula." In Banash, David (ed.). Steve Tomasula: The art and science of new media fiction (pp. 3-11). Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/doi:10.5040/9781501304811.ch-001 In this sense, some critics describe the novel as being organized less by a linear plot of cause and effect, than by collage which requires readers to combine fragments to see even larger patterns.Drag, Wojciech (2021) "When We Were Human: Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland and The Book of Portraiture.” In Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English (p. 139). Routledge. . Other critics describe Tomasula’s fiction by using the principle of emergence whereby many small actions create patterns that combine with other patterns to create even larger patterns, cumulating in the culture of a time and place.Ghosal, Torsa (2021). Out of mind: Mode, mediation, and cognition in twenty-first-century narration (pp. 72, 94). Ohio State Press. . In either case, the plots and subplots of VAS weave in and out of each other to create a dramatization of one ordinary family living at a time when culture at large is transitioning from that of the human to that of the posthuman, and ordinary life is shown to be enmeshed with vast forces of history and evolution.Banash, David, & Spain, Andrea (2015). “Composition, Emergence, Sensation: Science and New Media in the Novels of Steve Tomasula.” In Banash, David (ed.). Steve Tomasula: The art and science of new media fiction (pp. 3-23). Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/doi:10.5040/9781501304811.ch-001
In the penultimate scene, Square and Circle go to an opera whose climax is the staging of the nonfictional experimental surgery in which Dr. Robert J. White transplanted the head of one ape onto the body of another. The novel ends with Square in an operating theater, lying down on an operating table for the procedure.Maziarczyk, G. (2013). The novel as book: Textual materiality in contemporary fiction in English. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL. (p. 245). .
Main themes Encyclopedic in scope, VAS insists that the reality of everyday life is composed of a collage of evolving stories based on facts that continually change as the assumptions of sciences, technologies, economies, politics, belief systems and other frames of reference changeHolland, Mary. K. (2020). The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism. (p. 91). Bloomsbury. . https://doi.org/doi:10.5040/9781501362651